by Will Self
‘I am the Magus of the Quotidian!’ bellowed Mr Broadhurst. We were promenading past the Metropole Hotel on the front at Brighton. I was amazed that nobody stared at us, or even shouted back. ‘I am powerful precisely because I understand how habit trammels the mind's energy, d'ye see? All these people – ‘ he gestured wildly with a carpet roll of arm – ‘they imagine that they perceive what is really there but they don't. Instead their minds are constricted by a million million common little assumptions, assumptions choking them like bindweed – and these they take for granted!
‘But there is a way to break this down, to dissolve it – oh yes indeed – to unlock the Motive Force. Every time you indulge in an habitual act you bind yourself in with the others. These habitual acts are the rituals of sanity. More than that, they are sanity, d'ye see? And sanity is nothing but an emasculation, a dread deadening; and I won't have it! Oh no I won't!’
So it was that I set out laboriously to catalogue the very schema of my own sanity, to list exhaustively the full range of my personal habits. I did it, in fact, habitually, for forty-five minutes each day after I had done my homework. A typical listing would read as follows:
Practice Bodily: nose-picking with semi-dried snot Content Prise the hardened flakes away from the wall of the nostril Frequency Variable, when bored every five minutes Intent To avoid nasal blockage
This was the kind of prosaic patterning of self-absorption that I knew would entrance Mr Broadhurst. But there were also other kinds of listing that had a more obviously magical significance, thus:
Practice Mental: thinking that it will rain tomorrow Content Carefully visualising the evenings rainfall and imagining the drumming noise it makes on the bungalow roof Frequency Most evenings Intent To try and prevent it raining
After about three months I had managed to fill the entire cash book with this sort of mundane rubbish. I say that now but at the time I took my task extremely seriously and I swelled with pride when Mr Broadhurst took me back to Churchill Square to buy my second book.
It was whilst working my way through this, often writing in the column headings for several pages in advance to give myself the illusion that I had completed more than I actually had, that two important suspicions that had lain dormant for some time rose up and took on the aspect of horribly credible hypotheses. I cannot say whether or not they impinged as much then as they seem to with retrospect. No matter how disturbingly accurate my visual memory may be, all-seeing is nowise all-hearing but suffice to say they were further indicators that the bridge over which I had crossed the abyss had been mined behind me.
Firstly there was the maternal complicity I have already spoken of. Mr Broadhurst was by now in the habit of picking me up from Varndean Grammar on Wednesday afternoons, accompanying me to Pool Valley, and then on home by bus. This was his midweek check-up, anticipating the full review of my homework on Sunday afternoons. (The Big Match to Songs of Praise slot had become institutionalised.) This routine became the focus for a certain amount of gossip. Gossip retailed by those selfsame people, the scions of higher platforms on the social scaffolding, who came for drinks at Cliff Top.
Without mentioning it to me Mother effectively torpedoed this submarine of rumour by putting it about that Mr Broadhurst was my guardian. The first I knew of this was when, seeing his bollard shape through the wrought-iron railings, my old humiliator Holland turned to me and said, placing predictably his malicious emphasis, ‘There's your “guardian”, Wharton, come to take you off for some wanky-wanky, as usual.’
A ‘guardian’ was a distinctly posh kind of relationship for me to have with anyone. Possibly my mother viewed the subterfuge as merely part and parcel of her continuing social climb. Could it be that, or was it more likely that she and Mr Broadhurst had agreed it between them? If so, what was in it for her?
My second hypothesis concerned Mr Broadhurst himself. I couldn't be certain, not having observed him closely before, but either Mr Broadhurst was not like other old people, or else he wasn't really old at all. In my new proximity to him I was able to see that his hands were neither wrinkled, nor dotted with liverish spots. When we walked together up the steep streets of Brighton Mr Broadhurst never wheezed. And, on looking into the lambency of his hooded eyes, I could detect no whiting-out, no glaucoma or cataract.
He still granted himself the licences of old age – even if he wasn't entitled. He had given up his voluntary work at St Dunstan's in November claiming that it was ‘too fatiguin’ for him to carryon with. But be that as it may, he no longer moved with the calculated languor that I remembered. Instead he fairly hustled his big body along, as if it were a laggardly prisoner he was escorting down death row. He was growing feistier and spryer by the month – I wondered where it would all end.
Wondered as one Sunday in February at our appointed hour, I bearded him in his caravan. My ritual cataloguing had come to a halt. So feeble had my efforts become that my last entry was concerned with nothing less than my manner of dribbling.
‘Good, good, very good!’ exclaimed Mr Broadhurst – he was flicking through the second book. ‘This is excellent, lad, and I do believe that this exercise is having a beneficial side-effect, namely an improvement in both your grammar and the general ordering of your still-immature intellect. This is all as it should be.’
‘But I'm finding it harder and harder.’
‘Harder? Harder to what?’
‘To think up habits – I mean rituals.’ I hung my head, glad to have a pretext to hide it from my mentor. For recently the random eruptions and scattered pustules that had decked my chin and brows for the past year had begun to mass, forming formidably ugly scarps and weeping lesions.
‘Well, that's as may be, lad, although you haven't tackled masturbation yet, not properly at any rate.’
I blushed hard, Mr Broadhurst ignored me. I thought of my mother, she would probably be baking scones, her apron dusted with flour. Women in ugly hats would soon be Hosanna-ing on the telly. ‘Erm . . . Mr Broadhurst . . . P'raps I should be – ‘
‘Nonsense, lad. I can see that you're sensitive about this. Don't be. Masturbation is critical to our enterprise, for it connects the most repetitive and mindless of actions to the inducement of ecstasy. Now, I observe that you are shamed and discomfited by your acne – am I right?’ I nodded. ‘Of course I am. Now, you are too young to be aware of this but in the past there was held to be a linkage between so-called “self-abuse” and the sebaceous rigours of your time of life. I propose an advance on your future status that will assist you at this point and hold you fast to our mutual course. If I tell you that I can rid you of the damned spots will ye do what I say?’
I tried to think what I might be prepared to do to achieve this and concluded almost anything. I wasn't a brave boy, not physically, that is, but then it was unlikely Mr Broadhurst had anything physical in mind.
‘OK, Mr Broadhurst, what should I do?’
‘Excellent. You are amply fulfilling the weight of expectation I have placed on you. Now then, when you masturbate do you ejaculate semen?’
‘Y-yes. I s'pose so.’
‘Capital! I had feared that you might not be sufficiently developed. Pay attention. When you next indulge in self-stimulation, instead of summoning up the prone and panting form of some nymph of your fervid fancy, at the moment of climax I want you to contemplate your own dappled visage. Form a tight eidetic image of it, d'ye see? Then freeze it for as long as it takes. Can you do that? Of course, I know that you can. Collect your emission in a handy receptacle and then bring it here to me, yes? Got the photo? Capital! Capital!’
I returned to his caravan the following afternoon after school bearing my load, which was by then little more than a dusty stain on the inside of a beaker. Blushing, I handed it over.
‘Is this all?’ said Mr Broadhurst. ‘Not much there but as long as you followed my instructions it will do.’
The big man arose from the bed and took a turn around the caravan, humming to himsel
f. Then he opened one of the doors of the fitted cupboards. This was wholly unexpected. The interior of Mr Broadhurst's caravan had remained unchanged during the four years it had been sited at Cliff Top. The cut and blown glass ornaments were still set on their mirrored shelves in exactly the same positions as when he had unwrapped them. The miniature stainless-steel kitchenette looked as if it had never been cooked in. Mr Broadhurst's caravan was as unlived-in as an imaginary room constructed to display furniture in a department store.
Although I knew I probably shouldn't, I couldn't help looking as he rummaged through the marvellous things in the cupboard. Dusty robes hung from hooks. They were made out of silk and embroidered with dragons, butterflies, monkeys, each one an entire chinoiserie. On the various shelves were set items of laboratory equipment: retorts, beakers, distilling tubes and burners. These were jumbled together with what looked like pieces of electrical – or electronic – equipment, circuit boards, plasticised grips, LCD read-outs. There was also a stuffed fox and a human skull. Much more stuff was in there but Mr Broadhurst's buttocks, each the size of a chronic beer drinker's gut, obscured the rest.
When he turned to face me he held in his hand a small spherical flask with a tube coming out of it at an angle. He unscrewed the glass stopper to this receptacle, and, having filled my beaker with water, poured the solution into it.
He approached me across the marbled swirl of shag carpet, looking like a prelate pumped up with helium, and solemnly intoned, ‘Now, lad, cup your hands, here comes the anti-chocolate.’ I cupped my hands and Mr Broadhurst poured the fluid into my finger bowl. ‘Repeat after me,’ said the Magus of the Quotidian, ‘I washed half my face – ‘
‘I washed half my face – ‘
‘In new semen soap – ‘
‘In new semen soap – ‘
‘For half a week – ‘
‘For half a week – ‘
‘The effects were shattering!’
‘The effects were shattering!’
‘Do it – wash your face!’ I did as I was told. The watery fluid plashed against my cheeks; as it did so I felt a novel sensation, a sloughing, pulling and slipping of the skin. ‘That's it, that's it,’ he chided me. ‘Rub it in well. Now . . . stop!’ I left off having but didn't dare look at my hands.
‘Look at your hands!’ commanded Mr Broadhurst. I looked at them, they were smeared with blood and worse. I felt faint. He pulled a small mirror from his pocket and held it up to me. At first I simply couldn't comprehend what had happened, for all my spots were gone, dissolved, had vanished. Not only that but my face was unscarred, unpitted. It was as if the acne had never been.
Mr Broadhurst gave me to understand that this was merely another advance, another introductory offer, and that I shouldn't take it, or myself, too seriously. Nevertheless the ridding of my skin complaint by necromancy coincided with a shift in emphasis as far as my instruction was concerned. It was as if, having seen the contents of Mr Broadhurst's fitted cupboard, he were now prepared to allow me some knowledge of the rituals connected with this apparatus. Henceforth my studies diversified into tarot reading, numerology, Feng-shiu, alchemy, astrology and kabbalah, or at any rate into Mr Broadhurst's somewhat modified versions of these arts.
‘It's all nonsense, you understand – utter bollocks. A pathetic attempt to use proto-scientific methods to ascertain and then apprehend the transcendent. What the Jung-lette called “a massive projection”.’ So said Mr Broadhurst. ‘No matter, it will serve as a useful antidote to what they will try and inculcate you with at school, that's its chief virtue. And added to that, in the future – should you progress in your apprenticeship – it will provide you with a repertory of useful explanations. To use an analogy garnered from the world of espionage, it will give you “cover”.’
He had a set of photocopied notes, which implied that I wasn't his first apprentice. These he would produce with a flourish during our Wednesday- and Sunday-evening sessions. There had always been something of the fairground barker about Mr Broadhurst and during this period he enhanced it. He waved his arms about a lot, wore suits that my mother's old friend Little Jimmy wouldn't have been ashamed to be seen in – barring the size problem – and generally did his best to appear flamboyant.
Each set of notes came with an attached exercise and at his behest I set to, to analyse squares of numbers, using keys to turn them into the letters that described either thaumaturgical entities, or else even the tetragrammaton itself. This had a beneficial side-effect, namely an improvement in my arithmetic. The tarot reading and astrology were presented by my mage at a fairly down-market level. To me, the disciplines involved in relating these random sequences of fixed symbols to potential destinies and character traits were an amusing game. The skill, once learnt, helped make me a little more popular and outgoing at school, where there was a craze on for such things.
As for kabbalah, I found it utterly incomprehensible. I might not have known exactly what rationalism was but it was nevertheless deeply engrained in my picture of the world. Mr Broadhurst browbeat me over it: ‘I will have you know the ancient Hebrew art, its derivation and derogation, its eventual suppuration into the Rosicrucian, even if I have to badger you unmercifully – eurgh! Yuck! Ping!’ This last noise occasioned by a solid pellet of his spittle hitting a brass spittoon.) For nowadays Mr Broadhurst toyed with either ‘chawin” (his own term) tobacco, or ‘takin” snuff. I didn't know which was worse – his snot or his flob.
I was forced to pay more attention to lessons in science and history at Varndean, purely so that I might better understand my other, shadowier tutelage.
As for Feng-shiu, although Mr Broadhurst declared it to be the most ridiculous of all these esoteric studies, it did help my geography. After all, how else can alignments of physical objects be calculated so as to lie along propitious meridians, save by reference to more fixed and less mutable properties of the earth?
Mr Broadhurst himself was something of an alchemist. ‘Just an enthusiastic amateur, you understand, boy.’ Some of what I had glimpsed on the afternoon when he excised my acne was his own miniature collection of alchemical equipment. He responded to my curiosity concerning the transmutation of metals by allowing me to assist him as he experimented with his alembic and his aludel. Many were the afternoons when I found myself priming the athenor with a set of little bellows, while Mr Broadhurst waved a caduceus about. It was one of his own devising, constructed from an old-fashioned television aerial wreathed with flexes. We looked on together as the various hypostatical principles were distillated and redistillated. We were equally disappointed when cohabitation was not effected.
But although he toyed with it, Mr Broadhurst had no patience with the search for the sophie hydrolith. ‘I would wager, boy, that these types never managed to transmute anything, save for their stupidity, into vanity. And anyway, any form of currency is a mutable thing, capable of being magically imbued by the thoughts of those who utilise it. Although, that being said, I do myself possess one of Paykhull's medals.’ He showed this to me and told me to note especially the inscription on the coin's obverse side: ‘O.A. Paykhull cast this gold by chemical art at Stockholm, 1706.’ ‘You know, boy,’ he mused as I hefted the heavy thing, ‘these coins are excessively rare. I have no idea how I might have come by it. No doubt it will transpire that I must have known this Paykhull.’
It was from little hints such as this, undoubtedly consciously dropped, that I began to build a fuller appreciation of what Mr Broadhurst really was.
This was the way I passed through the remainder of my childhood. The zoetrope span smoothly, time's Chief Designer narrowed the legs of trousers and decreed that the cars should be more aerodynamic. If there were changes in the political leadership of the country, they made little impact on me. I was more preoccupied by my O levels. I gained seven and then, with Mr Broadhurst's none too gentle prodding, I opted for economics, maths and business studies as A level courses. At school I remained a solitary. What little h
uman warmth I required I garnered from the aunts and cousins, who still came to Cliff Top for their annual holiday.
They still came but there was a new uneasiness in this department of my life as well. My mother's business success had continued and the bungalow was in the throes of an ongoing transformation that would only end some five years later, when the Cliff Top Country House Hotel opened its register for bookings.
In the meantime, the aunts and cousins were put up in their usual caravans. My mother and I moved between the enterprise zone of the bungalow and the camp where the caravans squatted, adopting a different manner and diction as we did so. We were veritable chameleons of class mobility.
As for girlfriends, it was here that my eidetiking came in particularly useful. Trammelled by my exhaustive cataloguing of habit, which I had continued to practise at Mr Broadhurst's insistence, my visual escapades had become fully manageable. I didn't think I had an option – I was no teenage Lothario – but anyway I knew instinctively, without even having to ask him, that Mr Broadhurst would view the loss of my virginity as incompatible with my apprenticeship. So instead, I refined my masturbation in combination with my hawk-eyed recollection to produce a variety of sexual experience which – (I now realise) – more than compensated for the absence of the real thing.
My fellow schoolboys vied with one another for admission to the cinema, so that they could witness X-rated films. They went to see what they were unable to experience. I went to the cinema not for entertainment, but for cinematography. For it was only by studying the precise rake of extra-long pans, the trajectory of tracking shots and the jejune emotional appeal of the jump-cut, that I could add to the repertoire of my own internal shoots.
One day in the early autumn of my lower-sixth-form year, when the damp leaves were already furring the grassy median strips that cleaved the dual carriageways surrounding Varndean Grammar, I saw a familiar figure from where I sat reading in the school library. Mr Broadhurst had returned from his summer break.
