by Will Self
‘Where d'you go in the summer, Mr Broadhurst?’
‘That, my lad, I am afraid I am not at liberty to disclose. My perennial peregrinations are perforce secret. All in good time – should you appear worthy of my confidence – I will divulge elements of my itinerary.’
However, far more affecting than Mr Broadhurst's seasonal leave was the impact on my home culture of the improved management of Cliff Top that he had bequeathed. This amounted to a paradigm shift in the social status of my mother's household. As Mr Broadhurst became more familiar to us, more heavily entrenched in the winter seaside, so my mother upped herself. It was as if, with the failed father gone, she was once again free to resume an aspirational trajectory. Dinner became lunch and tea became supper.
‘There'll be more guests again this summer,’ I remember my mother saying, setting the femurous receiver back on its pelvic cradle and closing her bookings ledger. ‘That extra advertising Mr Broadhurst suggested we do has certainly paid off.’
More guests meant that there was more money; and more money meant better clothes, new caravans for the site and new interior decoration for the bungalow.
Kitchen and carpet were fitted. A central-heating system replaced the gas fires’ bleating and the controlled explosion of the geyser. The winter mornings, when in darkness I would bolt from the warm confinement of my bed to dress in the kitchen, became instant memories. Nostalgia for a simpler, more technically primitive age.
Once the bungalow was vitalised people started to come by for drinks, rather than simply having drinks when they came by. There was also an alteration in the ambit of my mother's socialising, for the drinks people tended to be the parents of my schoolfriends at Varndean Grammar. They were a cut above the shopkeepers and tourism-purveyors that I was used to. Their business was more elevated, further removed from the raw stuff of exchange. Their conversations with my mother referred to a world where the ambiguity of the relationship between value and money was greatly appreciated.
The people who had had drinks when they came by, well, they were a distinctly odder crowd, including Madam Esmerelda, the thyroid case who had the palmist's concession on the Palace Pier. Her boyish friend was an old circus midget called Little Joey, who still wore his stage clothes (‘It's all I have, you see, Sonny Jim, unless I want to wear kids’ gear'), Norfolk jackets in screaming plaid, topped off with a Derby hat. Joey and Esmerelda's talk was colourful, peppered with the showbusiness expressions of an earlier age. It was set against types such as these that Mr Broadhurst was able to insinuate himself into my life, without appearing quite as aberrant as he might otherwise.
I will say one thing for my mother. I will grant her one, severely back-handed compliment. And that is: that as we ascended the greasy pole of English class mobility together, she seldom embarrassed me. For, if her great fault was the almost-sexual intimacy with which she blanketed me in private, her great asset was the preternatural sensitivity she showed towards me in public. She never patronised me or made me jump through the hoops of propriety the way that I saw other children forced to by their parents. Indeed, she treated me with an easy egalitarianism that was far more effective – in terms of my succesful acculturation, that is.
Of course the person we were both really taking instruction from was Mr Broadhurst. It was his long-winded locutions that we both began to ape – never using one word where five would do. And it was his heavy-handed delicacy to which we aspired when our everyday Tupperware was replaced with bone china.
At school things were better for me as well. During my time at Saltdean Primary I had always been subject to the tiny-mindedness of a tiny community. My father's desertion of us was well known and often commented on. No matter that this was without malice, it meant that I felt excluded, cut off, beyond the pale. But at Varndean Grammar no one knew about my father. When I started there I simply lied about him and said that he was dead, which gained me sympathy as well as cloaking me in something like mystery. This, I now know, was a mistake. Perhaps I even realised it as a child, because the lie was supported by my mother; and such complicity was worrying, bizarre even, to a twelve-year-old boy.
Nonetheless it gave me a brief lull, a fall in the feverish temperature of my life which I made full use of. Puberty and individualism don't mix. Running with the pack was something new. Mutually masturbating with skinny-hipped boys and mentally torturing sensitive student teachers, this became my idea of fun, but not for long.
There was one final summer before Mr Broadhurst began to take a more advanced interest in me. A summer when I ran as free with my cousins and the children of my mother's guests as ever before. That was the summer when I first became fully conscious of the arbitrariness of the division between the ‘on’ and the ‘off'; the last summer when I saw the sun twitch away the net curtain of mizzle that hid the mounded Downs and transform the world, so that the sky and the sea defined the land, giving curvature to the earth. The last summer that was acted out in the round.
I showed the guests’ children where to shop for sweets, where to go crabbing, how to get into the Dolphinarium for free. We ranged along the coast from Saltdean to as far as Shoreham. I felt engaged – masterful. Unlike the holidaymakers, this was my burgh, my manor. The tatty holiday glitz was my finery. I knew all the people who ran the amusements and all the roustabouts who worked on them. I could spring on to a dodgem at one side of the rink and proceed to the other by leaping from one rubber-flanged buggy to the next. My little crew would look on amazed.
The one bum note, the one hint that something was changing for me – and mind you, I cannot be sure that this isn't an intimation that belonged to that ultimate off season, the first autumn of my apprenticeship – was my heightened awareness of the very peculiar marginalisation of the Hepplewhite men. These wraithlike uncles of mine, who only came down for the weekend and never stopped for the week, were always ‘stepping outside for a pipe’, or even ‘just stepping outside’ with no explanation. Neither my mother nor my aunts ever enjoined them to ‘take an interest in Ian’. I cannot recall any of them saying, as might have been expected, that I needed a man's influence. Instead it started to dawn on me that this collective silence-about-men, this domination of the Cliff Top sodality, was in some way calculated, a willed silence between the emasculated overture and the powerful first act. The Hepplewhite sisters were preparing me for the stentorian bulky basso of Mr Broadhurst.
Towards the end of that summer the full weight of sexual maturity fell on me, and with it came the hormonal reclamation of the sea. The two formerly separate continents of the ‘on’ and the ‘off’ were reunited into one landmass of vertical concerns: term times and bus times; holiday times and homework times. I became sharply aware of the differences between my boy cousins and my girl cousins. Little furled genitals had long since been buried away under compost clothing, the better to mature there in the dark. I feared they might be gone for the duration.
I cannot explain why that from the off, my sexual feelings were so circumscribed by such awful shame. It made no sense – but it was true. Perhaps it was my chronic lack of male role models. To define myself as a man in relation to my mother and my aunts was an impossibility. Theirs was an unknowable sex, even to look at it was a kind of astronomy, so vast and remote were their bodies. The idea that they could possibly have been banged up by the uncles was flatly preposterous. With the girl cousins and the beach girls it was a different story. There were stirrings and presentiments. I longed, more than anything, to be a pebble or some shingle, pressed beneath those squash buttocks.
If the holidays were sexually perplexing, when term time came I also recoiled from schoolboy smuttiness. I couldn't handle ejaculation as a form of micturation. The ways of looking at the business were stark. Either gonorrhoea, syphilis and non-specific urethritis, explained by Mr Robinson with the new visual aids, or else German porn, bought by the older boys and displayed under desk tops. These pictures, which showed moustached men sinking their pork swords into
the wounded abdomens of grimacing uglies, bore no relation to my fantasies, which were chivalrous in the extreme. It may sound pathetic to you, but at that time to be a man was for me to be a Roland or a Blondin. Lute-strumming on a forty-four-date castle tour, content to die for the sake of a radiant eye – let alone a thigh.
Why elaborate? The stuff of adolescent sexuality is known to us all, a wondrousness that increases in memory bulkily to match the rusting hulk of subsequent disillusion. How much harder it is to admit that the disillusion was there all along.
More to the point I was tubby, pink and unappealing. My body was awash with glandular gunk and my face dusted over with pustules. No matter the burgeoning advice-column culture, no matter the democracy of pornography – I felt disenfranchised by my lust. Was it Oedipal? Having dispatched Daddy on the A22 to Southampton was I desperate to get home, answer the riddle that complemented the brewery advertising on the coaster, then cover Mummy where she lay, panting on her electric blanket? Nothing so simple. No it was eidesis. Up until puberty I had taken this for granted, seen it as little more than a clever skill, but now it began to preoccupy me. I started to see it as intrinsic to my nature.
Returning home from school, on the first day of that autumn term, I got off the bus as usual, at the stop midway between St Dunstan's and Roedean, and turned to look towards the Downs. The whole raised tier of the bank the blind home sat on was networked with concrete pathways. These were ruled into existence by guide rails, all painted white, as befitted the giant canes that they were. I thought of Mr Broadhurst and how he had once told me that the blind should never lead the blind. Their halting progress along these paths already struck me as laden with symbolism. Wasn't this the human predicament, fumbling along and then falling off? Waiting on the grass for the attendants to swoop down and reclaim you, reconnect you to the vivifying rail?
I wondered if Mr Broadhurst was among them – he was due back from his summer sojourn any day now – but I couldn't make out his pepper-pot shape amongst the attendants and the vision-crips, the spazzy sightless who fumbled their way beneath the cruel-joke edifice. (Can't you just imagine the architect pissing himself with laughter as he shaded in the hideous eaves, ruled the brutal perpendiculars and traced the shaved pubis of the concrete façade! Confident that here at last was a clientele that would be in no position to object to his conception of the modern.)
Maybe Mr Broadhurst was inside. As he was a voluntary worker he could be up to anything, from assisting in the complex foreplay of braille instruction, his hand hovering delicately over another's, to participating in the free-form, consensual ritual of tea time, imagining himself – as he had told me he often did – as blind as his charges, so that the urn became a dragon, capable of shooting out a boiling wet tongue to scald him.
I too became eyeless in Sussex, toiling along the tangled verge. How many steps could I take before I had to open my eyes? Or would I waver and have my shoulder clipped, sliced off by a whooping bus side? A commonplace enough child's game, but on this ordinary afternoon eidesis reared its ugly head.
I was looking into the red darkness of my own retinal after-image, the plush of my inner lids. I summoned up an eidetic facsimile of the road ahead, its diminishing perspective, the pimpling of the tarmac, the toothpaste extrusion of the white line dividing the carriageway. In this there was nothing remarkable. My head-borne pictures, as I have said before, were always exceptionally vivid. But on this occasion I became aware of a new Point of View. That's the only way I can describe it, as an awareness of being-able-to-see but with nothing lying behind it, no intricate basketry of muscle and coaxial nerve.
In that moment – there was no moment. Time was child's time again, the always-now, caught up and cradled like water by the surface tension of the present. I was inside my own representation and that representation had become the world.
If there's anyone way that I could express this sensation to you it would be this. Imagine yourself to be a free-floating Steadicam that can move wherever it wishes at will. For in the very instant that I packed myself into this new perspective, I became aware of flexible ocular prostheses like joysticks and rudders.
Effortlessly I shot high up into the air, pirouetted through a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree pan and then zoomed down again, to hover a foot above the Rottingdean bus as it batted along. I zipped by the pasty faces of my schoolmates, sitting still in transit, and their beady eyes stared straight through me. I was – I realised, powering up into another heady sky-scraping loop – free.
Immediately I started to consider, where should I go? What use should I make of my new and apparently astral body. The two great buildings set on the flanks of the Downs were an obvious objective. I didn't hesitate, I swooped down and entered the red-brick precincts of Roedean. Here, I roamed the dormitories pushing my invisible, yet inviolable, lens into the shower block, the changing rooms. I stopped off in the sanatorium, I doodled beneath the desks. And everywhere I went I immersed myself in the spectacle of many many hundreds of well-turned little misses, unaware and unsuspecting but all perfumed, deliciously scented, by affluence.
When I was a primary school pupil, my eidesis had been noted by the arts and crafts teacher. During her lessons, anything she gave me – an empty yoghurt pot, or a dying daffodil – I would replicate with near-photoreal accuracy, even on thick paper with a soft pencil. She took an interest in me and at parents’ evening approached my mother saying, ‘Mrs Wharton, your son really does have the most unusual ability.’ The higher-ups at the local education authority, prodded into action by Mrs Hodgkins, sent me to see a clinical psychologist.
Mr Bateson, who worked, handily enough, at St Dunstan's, was a little ball of a man with one of those heads, capped and cupped by hair, that would look just as probable upside down. He was a barefaced grinner who seemed impervious to embarrassment, a stranger to even the simplest concept of a gaffe.
‘Ho, ho!’ he chortled at me from behind his desk. ‘What have we here, an eidetiker. Funny that, here I am researching the concept of visualisation amongst the congenitally blind’ – he indicated with a tiny hand the three blind people who sat with us in his office – ‘and they send me you! Tee-hee, tee-hee-hee-huh!’
The blind swung their antennae heads in the general direction of this prodigy, training on me three pairs of clear-lensed glasses, behind which puffs of cotton wool were imprisoned, like some awful kind of oxidisation.
Despite the fact that Mr Bateson found me intriguing and even wrote a paper on my singular gift for a professional journal, neither I, nor – more to the point – my mother, had seen any benefit in his mind games. His experimental method, which I was to meet again later in life, entailed setting me tasks. I had either to draw objects that were presented to me for a split-second, or else draw pictures from the further recesses of my memory. He then went further, getting me mentally to image complex forms and rotate them in my mind, much in the manner that I requested of you earlier. About the time I left primary school for Varndean, the sessions petered out altogether.
I gave up on eidetiking, except as a party turn. At Varndean some boys could set light to their farts, others could stub cigarettes out on their tongues, I could take a glance at a page of text and then recite it from memory. Unfortunately this didn't in any way aid my comprehension. I was not a successful student.
Sex galvanised my eidesis, sending it straight to the top of my agenda. I can understand why. After all, sex is a language of sorts and insofar as eidesis goes hand-in-hand with autism, why, here was a form of communication I couldn't make use of. In the realm of the senses there was no real identity available to me, only a series of impostures bound in to the repetitive action, like jerking hands to jiving cocks.
Now I found that I could also introduce myself into these formerly static visions, as a purposive if disembodied agent, I couldn't stop. The Roedean incident was only the start of eidetic voyaging – soon it was my principal form of travel.
It became a co
mpulsion and a very scary one. Because the discoveries I made were not to my taste at all. While it was true that the human anatomy – as I had suspected – did not conform to either the lurid colours of pornography or the desiccated line drawings of textbooks, I was not prepared for all these revelations of viscous complexity. I wanted human flesh to remain as obvious and undifferentiated as that of fruit. Worse still, I soon found myself eidetiking involuntarily, acting out aggression.
At school Holland, an arrogant and self-satisfied boy, moved to cut me off from the clique in which I had gained some slender acceptance. For two or three days I stalked the woodblock corridors choked with self-pity. Then, caught unawares, I found myself eidetically slamming his gullet against the sharp jam of the classroom door. The vacuum-nozzle ridging of his slashed oesophagus was far more revolting than anything I could have invented. In some lawless and incomprehensible way, although the material, the embodied, Holland was walking free, whistling and swearing, what I had seen had to be real.
Because of these outrages I found myself, once again, feeling marginalised, cut out from the herd. I sought frantically for methods of controlling my gift, ways of staving off chaos. I became certain that if I didn't do something I might be sucked out of the fuselage of reality altogether and sent rolling and tumbling into the void.
I found salvation in the development of personal rituals. And I would guess that, even had he not rumbled in another way, Mr Broadhurst would have soon spotted what I was up to merely because of my total self-absorption that autumn and winter.
I had no guidelines for these rituals, so they were a creative act on my part – possibly my most creative ever.
I devised a galaxy of interleaved physical and mental acts that it was necessary for me to perform throughout the day. They went all the way from the sublime to the mundane, from the profound to the ridiculous. It became vital for me to piss, belch, wank and shit in a certain manner, while exercising my way through mental scales.
