My Idea of Fun: A Novel

by Will Self

  ‘What he really needs,’ said Ian, choosing his words and placing them carefully in the car's close and hilarious atmosphere, ‘is an oinkologist.’

  ‘Ha-ha-ha-ha!’ The Fat Controller went critical with laughter, his great neck swelling up redly, like Dizzy Gillespie's when he used to hit a high note. ‘Oh my God, don't! Hahahahahaha! It is too, too funny, “an oinkologist”. D'ye like that, Souvanis? You're a porky little bugger, aren't you?’ He grabbed a fold of the dewlap beneath the Greek's chin and started to tug at it, syncopating his tugs with his rap: ‘Piggy, piggy, piggy, oink, oink, oink – oinkology!’ After a while Ian joined in, grabbing a fold of Souvanis's neck, then Gyggle did as well; and that's how the three of them spent the rest of the journey, teasing and hurting the poor man.

  The Money Critic squinted down from his window at the three men as they crossed the central courtyard of the Barbican in the late-afternoon sunlight. He knew the fat man who waddled in front as Samuel Northcliffe, banker and financier. The tall thin man with the preposterous ginger beard he knew as Hieronymus Gyggle, a psychiatrist with pretensions to understanding the psychology of the markets. The third man, who was much younger and whose face was rather unpleasantly soft and eroded at the edges, he didn't recognise.

  The Money Critic turned from the window and picked his way across the main room of the flat to where the entryphone was clipped on the wall. He waited for it to buzz, his face drawn into a desperate predatory mien. He had made it very clear to Northcliffe on the phone, when he called to make the appointment: ‘Please be sure to give the buzzer the lightest of presses, don't push it right in – there's no need, one very light touch is all that's required. You must understand that the least sound is exquisite torture to me, I insist on silence, reverent silence.’ But despite this he was convinced that Northcliffe would forget his injunction – he wasn't mistaken.

  In the nanosecond that had elapsed while he ran through this speech in his mind, the buzzer started to sound and to the Money Critic's ears it was horribly loud and insistent. (Although in actual fact he had had the mechanism adjusted so that the noise it made was no louder than an insect's agitated wing.) He fumbled in agony for the handset and, pressing it to his large, cartilaginous, sensitive ear, breathed, ‘Yes?’

  ‘It's Northcliffe here,’ bellowed The Fat Controller down the entryphone. ‘I've got Dr Hieronymus Gyggle and Ian Wharton from D.F. & L. Associates with me. May we come up?’

  ‘Oh yes, I suppose so but please, please remember – ’

  ‘I know, “the least sound is exquisite torture” to you, we know, don't rupture yourself over it.’

  The Money Critic pressed the button to admit them to the block and retreated to the sanctity of his armchair.

  There was barely room in the aluminium box for the three of them. As it accelerated upwards The Fat Controller expostulated, ‘Pah!’ and sprayed Gyggle and Ian with musty saliva. ‘Pah!’ he reiterated. ‘The man's an utter poove, “The least sound is exquisite torture to me”.’ He parodied the Money Critic's breathy tones. ‘I think the man's a complete fraud.’

  ‘Yes, yes, maybe – ’ Gyggle was staring at the ceiling as he spoke. ‘But fraud or not he is a successful one and people listen to him.’

  ‘Oh I know it,’ said The Fat Controller, ‘don't I just.’ The trio relapsed into silence. Alighting from the lift they proceeded to the door of the flat. The Fat Controller was just about to beat it down, his frozen turkey of a hand raised up for the task like a sledge hammer, when it swung open.

  The Money Critic was wearing a floor-length djellaba of unparalleled richness, patterned with interlocking geometrical shapes and financial symbols. The robe was iridescent even in the muted light of the flat. As soon as he had opened the door he worked his way back to his high-backed Queen Anne armchair, where he picked up his bone-china cup and took a sip of a rarefied tisane. He didn't invite the trio to sit and indeed they couldn't have even if they had wanted to, for there were no other chairs.

  Instead, the whole floor of the room which the front door opened into was covered with irregular piles and heaps of money. Money of all kinds: neat stocks of freshly printed bank notes as slick as stationery; plastic rolls of new coinage broken into elbows; used notes of all denominations and currencies, stacked in loose bundles; necklaces of cowrie shells; criss-crossed stacks of lead and iron plugs; notched bones; the filed teeth of narwhals; totemic spirit boards; myriads of different kinds of share-issue certificates, government bills, gilts, bonds (junk and otherwise) from all the two hundred and fifty-two countries of the world; dry-cleaning tokens; Indian State Railway chitties; Luncheon Vouchers; pemmican; piltjurri; balls of crude opium; pots of cocaine basta; gold (in HM Government ingots, also US issue from Fort Knox and Reichsbundesbank wartime loot still stamped with the Nazis’ bonnet mascot eagle); other ingots of precious metals; diamonds, pearls, emeralds and dustbin bags full of semi-precious stones; and all kinds of plastic – there was a great slick drift, made up solely of service-till cards, which flooded into the kitchenette.

  Here and there, there was an item of what might of been furniture, faintly visible beneath the riot of dosh, but overall the impression the Money Critic's room gave was of a relief map of currencies, in which the lumpings and moundings of diverse kinds indicated their relative liquidity and value.

  The Money Critic's room was the room of a man who criticised money with a vengeance; for into these expensive spits and promontories of pelf there was written clear evidence of careful lapidary arrangement. There was nothing in the least vulgar about this, rather, the same mind that had conceived of the collection as an opportunity to demonstrate the raw mechanics of money – its great gearing, both into itself and into the subsidiary world of things – had also chosen to regard the things-that-were-money as aesthetic objects in their own right. A lacy bridal veil pinned with high-denomination drachma notes was draped over the lampshade; the sunlight from the window fell through – and was filtered by – a collection of abacuses that were ranged along the sill, each one like a miniature Venetian blind.

  ‘Well, this is cosy,’ exclaimed The Fat Controller. He shouldered his way to the centre of the room and stood there breathing noisily through his shofar nose.

  ‘Please,’ said the Money Critic quaveringly, ‘I cannot work if there is any aural pollution –’ He broke off, a discreet chattering of metal on paper was coming from an adjoining room.

  Ian looked towards the sound. At the end of the ‘l’ formed by the flat's balcony there was another smaller room, this was choked with softly chattering telex machines, gently grinding fax machines and a bank of VDUs, across the faces of which green and yellow figures played chicken with one another. An enormous tangled knot of printout jerked, waggled and then came towards them; underneath it was a ratty little man wearing an old-fashioned sharkskin suit. He rid himself of the bunch and then emerged from the telecommunications room clutching a fragment of this paper. Making his way to the side of the Money Critic's chair, he made a respectful obeisance before handing the fragment over.

  The Money Critic examined the piece of paper for a long time, as if trying to divine its purpose, then he pronounced, ‘Peaty, mulchy, mouldy – almost tetanussy . . .’ then fell silent. The little man shuffled back to the networking vestibule and tapped this verdict into the bank of machines.

  ‘What was that then?’ asked The Fat Controller, who was undeterred by atmospheres of sanctity.

  ‘Government bond, five-year, Papua New Guinea.’ The Money Critic sounded distracted; all too clearly he regarded it as hack work. His voice trailed away and he fell to regarding a large book of Vermeer colour plates that was propped on a strategically positioned lectern.

  Ian stifled a snigger – it was unheard of for anybody to behave like this towards The Fat Controller, yet he seemed to be taking it. He drew a leather briefcase from under his hogshead of an arm and began to pull leaflets and forms out of it. It was, Ian realised, the material produced by D.F. & L. f
or ‘Yum-Yum’.

  ‘Well, here it is,’ said The Fat Controller, passing it to the Money Critic. ‘Tell us what you think; and mark my words, don't dissimulate in any way ‘soever. I shall know immediately if you do.’

  The Money Critic gave him a withering look but said nothing. He started examining the documentation, occasionally sniffing one of the pages or taking a miserly nibble out of it.

  While this was happening The Fat Controller had got out his gunmetal cigar case and opened it. ‘Erm.’ The Money Critic cleared his throat. ‘If you don't mind I'd prefer it if you didn't smoke.’

  ‘Can't smoke! Can't smoke!’ Despite all the poor man's injunctions The Fat Controller was now trumpeting, ‘What the hell do you expect me to do with myself if I can't smoke, eh? Are you afraid it'll get in your bloody ears?’

  To his credit the Money Critic came back at him saying, ‘It's the cigar I object to, you're welcome to smoke a pipe of opium if you like, or a bidi.’

  ‘A bidi?’ The Fat Controller was nonplussed. The Money Critic gestured to his assistant who hurried off and returned with an ornately carved opium pipe about the size of a baseball bat. This he proceeded to prepare laboriously, taking ages to prime a little ball of grungy opium on a pin. When the mouthpiece was finally pointed at him by the Cratchetty figure, The Fat Controller took a vast neck-swelling pull on it and then exhaled, filling the room with the sweetly moribund smell of the smoke. He chucked the pipe to one side and it clattered amongst some bales of Jaquiri skins.

  The Money Critic hadn't been paying any attention to this performance, he just went on reading, smelling and nibbling the ‘Yum-Yum’ literature; every so often he would write a note on a slip of violet paper with a gold propelling pencil.

  ‘Well,’ said The Fat Controller eventually, his voice a tiny bit calmer, ‘what do you think?’

  ‘I think it's a silly idea,’ said the Money Critic, ‘and it'll never catch on.’

  Ian sidled over to the window and stood gazing out over the large courtyard. Near the entrance to the theatre, at the Moorgate end of the development, a small bar had opened for business although it wasn't yet five. Some twenty or thirty office workers had escaped to have a drink and they stood by concrete tubs full of shrubbery, clutching lagers in their hands. One of them, Ian observed, was a young woman not unlike Jane Carter. He pondered their future together, he thought of the love he felt for her and how much he looked forward to tearing both it and her, apart.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE NORTH LONDON BOOK OF

  THE DEAD (REPRISE)

  The dreamer finds housed within himself – occupying, as it were, some separate chamber in his brain – holding, perhaps, from that station a detestable commerce with his own heart – some horrid alien nature. What if it were his own nature repeated – still, if the duality were distinctly perceptible even that – even this mere numeric double of his own consciousness – might be a curse too mighty to be sustained. But how if the alien nature contradicts his own, fights with it, perplexes it and confounds it? How again, if not one alien nature, but two, but three, but four, but five, are introduced within what once he thought the inviolable sanctuary of himself? These however, are horrors from the kingdom of anarchy and darkness, which, by their very intensity, challenge the sanctity of concealment and gloomily retire from exposition.

  De Quincey, The English Mail Coach

  Jane and I were married within three months of that afternoon when I stood, staring out over the City and listening while The Fat Controller attempted to bully the Money Critic into giving a favourable verdict on ‘Yum-Yum’. Needless to say, the Money Critic's appreciation of it was right, ‘Yum-Yum’ was a total flop. The launch coincided neatly with a recession and a dramatic downturn in the demand for innovatory financial products.

  The sixty standing booths commissioned by D.F.& L. and constructed by a team sub-contracted through Steve Souvanis had been erected all over London. For a while they were an oddity, commented upon in the local press. People would stand in them looking out through the perspex sides at the world passing by and grazing on the edible literature provided. But soon the booths became scratched, tarnished and conveniently whited-out, conveniently for the people who became their chief occupants, that is.

  The capital's hardcore junkies had already sicked on to the useful character of the booths but once they were partially opaque they became a beacon for every street dragon-chaser, crack head and needle freak in the metropolis. The conveniently sited shelf was ideal for cooking up a shot, or assembling the fag ash needed for the base of a crack pipe; and the booths’ ambiguous transparency – it was far easier to look out of them than to look in – meant that the police could be spotted a mile off.

  Soon it was so bad that the booths were overflowing with drifts of used syringes and crumpled up bits of tin foil. D.F.& L.’s site permission was revoked and Souvanis's team had the mournful task of doing the rounds disassembling them. They ended up, back with the other platonic forms, in the dusty Clacton warehouse.

  Despite this The Fat Controller didn't give up on ‘Yum-Yum’. He was amused by the junkies’ occupation of the standing booths. In fact, he even encouraged it, exerting influence on his secret cabal of addicts via the redoubtable Dr Gyggle. He remained convinced that the whole débâcle was purely a function of the unfortunate way that ‘Yum-Yum’ had become fixed in the public's mind as a name for the first truly edible financial product and he continued to bully Hal Gainsby at D.F.& L. to set up naming group after naming group, in a vain attempt to come up with something better.

  I wanted our wedding to be a subdued registry office affair but Jane's parents were set on a big bash. A marquee was erected on the spacious lawn of their Surrey home, caterers were hired and invitations printed for four hundred. There was hardly anyone that I wanted to invite – my life hadn't exactly tricked me out with a gallery of amusing pals, only a gallimaufry of grotesques.

  Naturally Samuel Northcliffe came. He both escorted my mother and acted as best man. At the church in Reigate he stood rigidly next to me as we eyeballed the pained wooden Christ-figure nailed up over the altar. When I glanced down during the service, I saw that his left hand – as large and inert as a wheel of Gouda cheese – was casually arranged so as to ward off the evil eye from the approximate region of his testicles.

  I didn't invite Gyggle – that would have been pushing it. Although Jane had never followed through with her voluntary work at the Lurie Foundation Hospital – her assessment having concluded in exactly the way he suspected it would – she'd have recalled him immediately. He's not the sort of man who blends into a crowd, however large and jolly it may be. I felt, quite reasonably, that Jane might be a little disturbed to discover exactly how it was that our particular affinity had been elected.

  Jane was a beautiful bride, radiant in a cream satin dress she had helped to sew herself. At the end of the service when she lifted up her veil so that I could kiss her, I was struck anew by the absolutely trusting and direct expression on her face.

  She was very excited – almost over-excited. It was a sunny enough day for it and the guests spread out from the marquee mingling on the dappled lawn; small children pissed in the pampas grass and tipsy elderly aunts either laughed or cried, as the spirit moved them.

  The speeches were better than average. Jane's father, who was a stockbroker in the City before he retired, had made the classics his hobby, consequently his text was littered with clever literary allusions and poetical tropes. It went down very well, as did Samuel Northcliffe's.

  If Jane's parents had had any doubts about their daughter marrying me – and I know for a fact that they did, they were as snobbish as any of the English and despite my mother's impeccable breeding, had hoped for a better match for their daughter than an hereditary marketing man – they were dispelled by the information that my guardian was Mr Samuel Northcliffe.

  It must have been about the third or fourth time Jane took me back to her parents’ h
ouse for dinner when this came out.

  ‘Northcliffe, you say? Hmm.’ Mr Carter was prodding the unseasonable fire in the grate as he spoke, a sherry glass dangling from his signet-ringed hand. ‘I knew him slightly when I was in the City, he's prominent in a Lloyd's syndicate that I had connections with – a rather imposing man, isn't he?’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘he can be a little overbearing, although he doesn't mean to be.’

  ‘And you say he was a friend of your father's?’

  ‘I believe so. They met when my father ran a marketing agency in the sixties.’

  ‘Of course, of course. And after your parents were separated he took an interest in your education?’

  ‘Oh very much so, in fact, I'd say I pretty much owe where I am today to him.’

  ‘Really, really.’ He dabbled some more with the poker while Jane and I exchanged the conspiratorial glances of lovers on the sofa.

  When he finally showed up at the wedding, I could tell that my father-in-law-soon-to-be and his old City cronies were overawed by him. He was looking his chic best, immaculately attired in a sweeping swallow-tailed cut-away, a black cravat secured with a emerald stick pin, canary-yellow silk waistcoat, spongebag trousers and huge leather shoes complete with white spats fastened with mother-of-pearl buttons. My mother was on his arm and she too smart and elegant, having for so long been burnished by association.

  I had been petrified about his speech but in the event the Procrustes of Piffle didn't let me down by waffling on for too long. Instead he spoke succinctly, standing erect, his shiny top hat still clamped on the belvedere of his head. He made a couple of good cracks about the institution of marriage, implied that I was a steady and reliable – although not too bright – sort of fellow, then sat down to applause that was all the more heartfelt because he had kept it to under five minutes.