by Will Self
Every mile or so, self-consciously, Souvanis glanced at his reflection in the rearview mirror. Same moon face, same missed tussocks of black facial hair, same browning pate, same laugh and same frown lines. What was it that felt different?
Now, in the warm confinement of the warehouse, with its paper and plastic odours commercial in their sheer intensity, it began to dawn on him. He reached, or rather snatched, for the packet of BiSoDol on top of the littered desk; and clawing it open, pushed a couple of the chalky tablets out of their cellophane sachets. Why have I got indigestion, thought Souvanis, when I even skipped lunch? He tried to ease a hand between the waistband and his belly, but couldn't.
A couple of days previously an item on the leveraged buy-out of a giant American tyre company had caught Souvanis's eye as he was flicking through the financial pages of a newspaper; a week or so earlier, he had seen an ominously familiar silhouette slide between two robed princelings, as the television news covered the denouement of a Middle-Eastern conference. Well before that, almost a month ago now, coming out of his little terraced house, Souvanis had looked up to the sky, unbidden, to find hovering there, perhaps only one or two hundred feet overhead, the Goodyear Blimp. Which, as Souvanis gawped at it, bobbed a greeting – seemingly to him alone – in the clear sky.
These several events now crammed themselves together in Souvanis's mind, forming premises like stepping stones leading to only one possible conclusion. That the man the world knew as Samuel Northcliffe, financier, bon viveur, éminence grise of geopolitics, and whom Steve Souvanis knew as The Fat Controller, was back.
Acid and antacid ran together, fire streams in his volcanic stomach. How like The Fat Controller to announce his arrival thus, with a supernatural attack of indigestion. Souvanis felt that his fat and flab were being addressed at some profound level, a level of primary starches, carbohydrates and sugars, by other, more potent fat, of a great lunar significance, fat that pulled his very girth around in its sweating skin girdle producing measurable torque.
The unusual request from D. F. & L. Associates was now easily explained. It was down to Northcliffe. Souvanis had learnt long long ago, when his association with The Fat Controller had begun (and who could say when that was? Perhaps the tubby little boy had been tumbling around the dusty streets of Nicosia when he tried to snatch a camera from a soft, old tourist and found that the tourist was neither soft, nor old. But speculation isn't in order here, Souvanis's relationship with The Fat Controller belongs to a narrative other than this), that almost anything unusual, anything that disturbed the even tenor of his life, could be put down to his mentor.
Souvanis sighed heavily. He looked around the empty cubby-hole and jerked his head in an explanatory fashion, at the nobody that was there. Whatever was coming his way, part of it would be good. Part of it would relate to these ‘standing booths’ required by D. F. & L. So he'd better get on and quote for them. Like some horrible kind of modern tinnitus, the fax machine in the next room started to whirr in Souvanis's head; the brush-fringed mandibles seemed to nibble at his inner ear. That would be Arkell's diagram of the booth.
‘So, if they want a quote’ – Souvanis spoke aloud, projecting his voice into the sample-clogged warehouse – ‘they can have their quote.’ He rose and went next door to receive his message.
After a long hot day in the office, the last thing Ian wanted to do was attend the S.K.K.F. Lilex product launch at Grindley's. He knew exactly what it would be like, all the rest of the S.K.K.F. Lilex product launches he had attended at Grindley's. These bloody companies seemed so certain that all they had to do was douse a crowd of hacks in lukewarm Asti Spumante in order to get a good write-up. They couldn't even be bothered to vary the venue, to try and add some spice to the dousing.
And what a day! Pouring over the Sudanese Bank of Karmarathon's ridiculous documentation, trying to get to the nub of exactly what it was their financial engineers meant by ‘an edible financial product’. What was ‘Yum-Yum'? Why, it was a credit card and a current-account banking facility; it was a share-watch service and a brokerage facility; it was a telephone-banking service and a secure-deposit facility with a high-interest yield. As he worked his way through the dull copy, the designations tumbled around one another, ‘facile service’, ‘serviceable facility’ – what possible difference could it make? So what if the dividends accruing to the customer could be transformed either into foodstuffs or foodstuffs options? So what if the very materials that made up the documentation for the product – chequebooks, credit cards and so forth – were actually, in and of themselves, edible. None of it cut any ice with Ian. He'd seen them come and seen them go, these revolutionary new personal banking products. Not one of them had had any impact on the increasingly unknowable, dilatory even, quality of money itself.
At this fag end of the millennium money had begun to detach itself from the very medium of exchange. Money was lagging behind. Ian knew – because he had read about it in the press – that there was aproximately $800 trillion that had simply winked into existence. It had never been earned by anyone, or even printed by any government. Everywhere you looked you saw advertisements screaming: ‘Value for Money’. That such an obvious non sequitur should have become a benchmark of credibility was beyond Ian's, and indeed anyone's, understanding. This ‘value’ was as insubstantial as the $800 trillion. It was linked to no commonly perceived variable; instead it was chronically relativised. The merchant banks and brokerage firms that made up the City had long since given up on employing even the most flamboyant and intuitive of economic forecasters. Instead they had fallen back on the self-styled ‘money critics’, refugees from the overflowing newsprint sector, who offered their services to provide ‘purely aesthetic’ judgements on different mediums of exchange.
But business was still business. So, together with his co-marketeers, Ian levered his sweating bulk into the black cab that stood, coughing and heaving, outside Norman House.
‘Grindley's,’ said Hal Gainsby to the cabby.
‘You'll be going to the S.K. K. F. Lilex launch then,’ the cabby replied.
‘How did you know?’ Only Si Arkell was young enough and curious enough to bother with a query.
‘Oh, I take a keen interest in any new ulcer medication that comes on the market,’ said the cabby, powering the cab away from the kerb and straight into a snarl of traffic. ‘It goes with the job.’
The city was hot, the cab was close. Inside the five marketeers’ deodorants competed with one another for olfactory supremacy. Si Arkell's ebulliently tasteless sandalwood talc won the day. By the time they had struggled across the Old Street Roundabout, battled through Hatton Garden, fought their way down High Holborn – the cabby dispatching challengers to the right and to the left, with ‘Fuck off's and klaxon honks – and gasped betwixt the raffia of metal that held Trafalgar Square in its vice, Ian was about ready to expire. They all dived out of the sweaty confines of the cab. Gainsby paid the cabby off, while Ian stared up at the mock-Regency portico of Grindley's, which loitered under the dusty plane trees along Northumberland Avenue.
The presence had been with Ian all afternoon as well. It was a sinister afflatus, hissing a welcome in his ear. At any moment Ian expected everything to come tumbling down around him. And that – in a manner of speaking – is exactly what did happen.
CHAPTER EIGHT
REENTER THE FAT CONTROLLER
Now there are, as it is said in the Papal Bull, seven methods by which they infect with witchcraft the venereal act and the conception of the womb. First, by inclining the minds of men to inordinate passion; second, by obstructing their generative force; third, by removing the members accommodated to that act; fourth, by changing men into beasts by their magical art; fifth, by destroying the generative force in women; sixth, by procuring abortion; seventh, by offering children to devils, besides other animals and fruits of the earth with which they must work harm.
Maleum Maleficorum
trs. Reverend M. Summers
, sub specie aeternitatis
Early on the morning of that same day the travellers’ message board at Heathrow's Terminal Three had begun to clog up with a large number of notes, petitions and billets-doux. All were written in different hands and all were addressed to a variety of individuals, but every single one was intended for the same man.
The Fat Controller was arriving from America. From New York City, to be precise. It was a characteristic of The Fat Controller that he was always arriving from somewhere and yet it was never actually possible to conceive of him as being anywhere else other than exactly where he was. At any rate, not possible for those who knew him. Perhaps somewhere, on some other planet, for example, there may be a race of highly advanced coenobites, whose entire purpose it is to spend their reclusion collectively visualising The Fat Controller in those places from which he is forever arriving. If so, they must be very highly advanced indeed.
The Fat Controller came wheeling through the swing doors that lead from the customs area to the main concourse of the terminal. He was wearing his travelling kit, Donegal tweed jacket, grey flannel trousers and brogues. Over his bolster arm he had draped one of those American trench coats that are furnished with more button-down panels, straps and belts than are strictly necessary. Trailing behind him like a faithful little dog, came a brown Sansomite suitcase. The Fat Controller tugged somewhat erratically on its lead and the thing waggled along, as if it were an afterthought.
The Fat Controller reached the end of the handrail that separates the arriving passengers from the friends and relations that have come to meet them. Here he halted and turned, the better to observe the rendezvous of his fellow travellers. The Fat Controller always did this. He always got off the flight as quickly as possible and rushed through immigration and customs, so that he could witness this moment.
‘It's a very important moment indeed,’ he was fond of saying. ‘A very emotional and naked moment. When people greet one another, after an absence – particularly in airports, where the overhead strip lighting is so poorly modulated – they are rendered transparent to one another. An unfaithful husband's guilt passes across his face like a shadow, in the nanosecond that it takes him to place a welcoming smile on his face for his waiting wife. Two lovers meet and both their expressions betray the certainty of their eventual parting, in the very instant before they touch. Ungrateful brats debouch from their cheap holiday in someone else's misery and their tired parents try desperately to summon up joy out of indifference. These are the very moments that I treasure! For I am a traveller in feeling and a trafficker in souls – so flitting and spindly-legged are the examples I seek that I may style myself a very entomologist of the emotions!’
The Fat Controller would roll these phrases around in his mouth, together with some single malt whisky and a coil of smoke from his habitual cigar, before expelling them at his audience. The Fat Controller was very fond of pontificating, although all too often compulsion was his only way of ensuring listeners.
On this occasion he stayed for five minutes and ten times as many such ‘naked moments’ before his sentimental voyeurism was sated. Then he headed off towards the bank of electronically operated doors and the taxi rank, passing the wailing wall of the noticeboard without even a glance. The suitcase followed him.
Whenever The Fat Controller came to London he put up at Brown's Hotel in Piccadilly. The Fat Controller liked Brown's for a number of reasons. He felt inconspicuous there – there were so many other fat people of indeterminate age in residence, many of them sharing his taste in tweed and Burberry. Another plus was that quite a lot of minor American celebrities – actors, producers and directors from the cinema and musical theatre – tended to stay at Brown's. There wasn't an hour of the day when you couldn't find one of these people, tucked into a corner of the chi-chi lobby, being interviewed by an English hack about their latest production. The Fat Controller got a vicarious sense of notoriety from coming and going amidst this continual press call. He did like to think of himself as a celebrity of sorts. Although, more than most people, he appreciated that being the object of other people's attention was at best a transitory and unrewarding experience, and at worst, a positive damnation.
That's why, rather than actually being a celebrity, The Fat Controller preferred to adopt a celebrity demeanour. The kind of carriage and countenance that made at least one in three people who he passed by think to themselves: I'm sure I recognise that man but I just can't place him. He must be someone famous. This was the kind of renown that The Fat Controller desired. An uncomplicated way of being the talk of the town, without obligation and honestly ephemeral.
Outside, in the already tired atmosphere of the late-summer morning, The Fat Controller paused, surveying the hideous jumble of concrete buildings that constituted the airport. Why travel, he thought to himself, when you merely arrive back at where you started from? He was thinking of the other people who thronged the airport precincts, not himself. For The Fat Controller all modern westerners were essentially the same, conforming to the small number of stereotypical characters that had been allotted them. He opined that, were a suburb of Scranton NJ to be swopped in its entirety for one in Hounslow Middlesex, hardly anyone in the areas abutting them would even notice. All of these people, he mused, his frog eyes flicking hither and thither, are in transit from some urban Heimat, an ur-suburb, a grey area. They are like colonists who have set out en masse, lemming-like, uncomprehending, obeying an instinctive need to buy a newspaper in another country.
The next cabby in the rank pulled forward and tucked his Standard away on top of the dash. The electric window slid down.
‘Where to, Gov?’
‘Brown's Hotel, Piccadilly,’ said The Fat Controller.
Then there was an uncomfortable hiatus, a strange pause. He made no move to enter the cab. The cabby sat and waited. After a while the cabby barked at him, ‘Well, aren't you going to get in?’ The Fat Controller pushed his porcine head through the window of the cab, pressing four pounds of cheek against the already clicking meter. ‘Not,’ he boomed, ‘until you get out and pick up my bag.’
The cabby's eyeballs bulged with rage. He felt his gorge rise up his neck, bitter, bilious and sarcastic. Foolishly – as it transpired – he choked it back down again. He quitted the cab and came round to where The Fat Controller was standing. By now, some of the other cabs in the rank had loaded up with passengers and were hooting to get away. The cabby gave The Fat Controller a long and penetrating look, intended to intimidate him. Then he picked up the brown Sansomite suitcase and placed it in the back of the cab. He held the door open for The Fat Controller, who took his time getting in, settling himself, and wedging trench coat to one side and Herald Tribune to the other.
They were on the M4 heading towards the Chiswick Flyover, when The Fat Controller lit his first cigar since clearing customs. It was the flaring trumpet of an operatic Tosca. He stuck the cheroot in the corner of his wide mouth and applied the guttering flame of his convict-built lighter to its organic end.
A comic scene ensued as the cab plunged up the flyover ramp. Suddenly, The Fat Controller and his driver lifted off from the scrublands of Hillingdon and Hayes. They were floating on a carpet of tarmac high over the blue haze of the city. The vast ocean of London lapped around them. Ahead, the flyover snaked its way between corporate blocks. Where the roadway drew near to the fourth or fifth storey of each edifice, a digital clock and thermometer had been placed. These disputed with one another: 11.44, as against 11.43; 32° celsius, as against 33. The Fat Controller sucked an inverted blast on his Tosca and considered the vicissitudes within the secret lives of products, the serendipitous occurrence of both siting and style that had allowed the Brylcreem and Lucozade buildings to end up thus, their neon fifties’ logos flashing in anachronistic opposition to one another, across the Chiswick Flyover.
‘Can't you read the sign?’ The sliding window separating him from the cabby had been torn open, shattering The Fat Controller's re
verie. He fanned away the thick coif of blue-brown curls that had formed in front of him, bringing into view a prominent ‘No Smoking’ sign.
‘I can.’
‘Whassat?’
‘I can read the sign.’
‘Well, why don't you do what it effing well says then?’
‘I don't choose to.’
‘Don't choose to? Don't fucking choose to!’ The cabby was trapped, driving along the flyover. He couldn't stop, he couldn't turn around, he wasn't even able to wave his arms about. He vowed to himself that he would eject The Fat Controller as soon as he possibly could.
The cab sped on along the elevated roadway. The Fat Controller puffed contendedly on the stinking instrument in his mouth and meditated on whether or not this wasn't an altogether purer way of tormenting someone than applying physical force, or more obviously contrived psychological pressure.
The cab canted down on to the straight that leads to the Hogarth Roundabout.
‘Hn, hn!’ grunted The Fat Controller, thinking aloud. ‘A fine Rake's Progress and no mistakin’.’
‘Whassat?’ barked the cabby, alive to the possibility of some fresh insult.
‘Oh nothing, nothing – don't trouble your little head.’
As soon as he safely could, the cabby pulled over into the nearside lane and then turned off down a side street. The cab came to a rest with a squeal, under a sticky plane tree. The cabby leapt out and came round to the back door, which he yanked open.
‘Get out!’ he shouted. ‘Come on, get out!’ he reiterated. The Fat Controller dropped the upper edge of his Herald Tribune and regarded the cabby from the vantage of several millennia of cold neutrality. He really did look rather revolting, arms akimbo, breasts bulging under a green T-shirt, which had the silky half-sheen that is rendered near-transparent by sweat. Further down, his plump, white, hairless thighs fell gracelessly from the rucked crotch of his day-glo football shorts. The Fat Controller noted that, in the colonial way, the cabby was wearing lace-up shoes and white knee-socks.
