by Will Self
I rammed my books and my binders into my briefcase. I took the steps in big bounds and pelted across the asphalt to the school gates. I knew better than to attempt to hug Mr Broadhurst, although that was what I felt like doing, for not only did everything in his manner discourage physical relations, he had also given me a strict injunction. Soon after he had taken me under his ample wing he had remarked, ‘Think of me as the Brahmin of the Banal! Only the dull earth can purify me, contact with all else is a defilement so far as I am concerned. Therefore, boy, never attempt to touch me, save for when I specifically enjoin it.’
During the six months since I had last seen him, Mr Broadhurst had undergone a further metamorphosis and this time the change was more radical, more entire, than ever before. To start with there was his costume. As I have said, after the abandonment of his undertaking uniform he had gone through a dodgy bookie/snake-oil purveyor period. Now he was dressed very well indeed, even elegantly. He had on a three-quarter-length crombie with a velvet collar, a dark-blue suit with the faintest of pin-stripes and a snowy linen shirt. The knot of his foulard tie was held in place by a pearl stick pin. Up top, a bowler hat as firmly rounded as a Wehrmacht helmet served to emphasise the suitability of his head for Mount Rushmore, or any other monumentalism. In one of his hands chamois gloves were loosely bouqueted with the silver head of a cane; in the other a thick slab-sided cheroot, topped by an inch and a half of whitened ash, protruded from his knuckles.
As I ran towards him, Mr Broadhurst smiled. His smooth face was slashed open by his predatory mouth, as if an invisible hatchet were biting into fruit. The bony protuberances that he had in lieu of brows arched until they were Gothic; and he laughed – bellowed laughter and smoke.
‘Ah, there you are!’ he ejaculated, the implication being that he had looked everywhere. ‘Come now, boy, we have much to talk of and little time.’ I was now both tall enough and bulky enough to link arms comfortably with Mr Broadhurst. To my great surprise this was exactly what he did. And that is how we set off, arm-in-arm, down Sunningdale Drive past Sussex Gardens where the bowls players were dying slowly in well-pressed whites, towards the London Road. Mr Broadhurst held forth magniloquently.
‘Consider the similarities between Brighton and Rome,’ he declared. ‘Both are built on seven hills, both have been the pleasure centres of mighty empires. Observe the hilltops, lad what d'ye see?’
I pondered. ‘Well, I can just about see the cemetery up there.’
‘Quite so – and over there?’ He gestured vaguely behind us.
‘The racecourse?’
‘Good lad, good. In fact, capital! The racecourse. The games of life and the games of death. Mortality for once defined by geography. What a relief!’ He laughed again, carried away by his pun. I had never seen Mr Broadhurst in such a good mood before. He positively bowled down the pavement, puffing furiously on his stogie, for all the world like some bipedal locomotive.
‘You're wondering something, boy, cough it up, spit it out, expel it, vomit it forth. In short, tell me.’
‘Well . . . I don't . . . I don't know how to put it, but you seem somehow changed – ‘
‘And you are wondering what has happened to cause this – am I correct? Of course I am, there is no need for you to elaborate. Well, sir, it's true, I have changed. I have eaten myself up and through some unprecedented act of gastromancy farted out my new incarnation – thus.
‘You are also wondering something else – aren't you? You are curious as to whether there is some connection between this metamorphosis and my summer sojourn. Where do I go? That is the question. In due course I will answer it for you, that and many other things that I know have quizzed you these past years.’
So, as the two of us progressed, ascending, cresting and then descending three of the seven hills, Mr Broadhurst talked. And what talk it was! Rich and protean, his word-seam seemed to me to be the very fount of knowledge itself, a mulchy conceptual bed which might be sown merely by the fact of being listened to, thus engendering all ideas for all time.
‘Reality,’ said Mr Broadhurst, ‘love it, hate it, you cannot do without it. Wouldn't you agree? Of course you would, for you cannot but do otherwise. And yet you, lad, are a perfect candidate for the role of skipper, suborner, seducer and traducer of that reality. Reality is a virgin whose virtue we all want to believe in, and, at one and the same time, an old whore who we've all had and had and had again, until our eyes and ears are like genitals that have been rubbed raw. We observe its regularities, its comings and goings through and in ourselves, yet we are unable to stand apart. At any rate you cannot stand apart, I cannot but do otherwise and that is why we belong together, d'ye see? Of course you don't, I will perforce have to demonstrate.’
As he declaimed we were weaving our way through the late-afternoon shoppers who thronged the centre of the town. Or rather, so magisterial was our progress that these less-solid citizens were being forced to weave in order to avoid our combined bulk. Suddenly Mr Broadhurst pulled up short, causing me to wheel around so that we were both facing the window of a toy shop.
The display in the shop window was an extravagant scenario designed to showcase a monster train set. A papier mâché scarp formed the backdrop and in the foreground engines pulling carriages and engines pulling trucks passed over hummocks, through tiny tunnels, and clattered into and out of plastic stations, never stopping, electronically hooting.
I stared at it, conscious of the big man's arm encircling mine with the coiled hunger of an anaconda about to ingest. Of all the eidetic images that remain from my childhood, frozen with crude representational accuracy, this is the most vivid. The trains moving with fluid inertia; the tiny plastic trees and buildings – their implausible neatness all too accurately complementing that trompe-l'oeil reality of which he had spoken; beyond the papier mâché horizon, the workings of a pocket deity were clearly visible in the brushstrokes of the painted sky. As I stared at the display, the reflections of myself and Mr Broadhurst in the plate-glass window came into focus as well, imposed over the vista. Eidesis came upon me trapping both layers into a third internal one. Then Mr Broadhurst seemed to start towards me and I could no longer be sure where he was, in my head, on the shop window or the pavement? In all three locations at once?
He spoke inside of me. ‘Where am I, boy? Is that what you want to know? Why, I am in all three places at once, that is the point, the whole of the point. Now look, look at the counterpane world, project yourself into it, look beside that bijou signal box. What can you see?’
Trying to ignore this assault on my fundamental antinomies I peered at the train set. A tiny, rotund figure was stamping up and down on the daubed green of the false ground, like a drunken redneck at a hoedown, or an aboriginal at a corroboree. It was Mr Broadhurst – and he was Hornby-size.
‘I am The Fat Controller,’ said the Mr Broadhurst in my eidetic vision. ‘I control all the automata on the island of Britain, all those machines that bask in the dream that they have a soul. I am also the Great White Spirit that resides in the fifth dimension, everything is connected to my fingertips – by wires.’
We were walking once more. We crossed the traffic that divided around the Clock Tower and entered the Lanes. Soon we were alone, moving through a narrow defile between two teetering antique shops. Here, Mr Broadhurst broke step again, this time wheeling me around to face him.
‘What is my name, lad?’
I was nonplussed, I stared at my teacher, never before had his swollen face seemed so replete with indifference, stone ataraxy. ‘Ah . . . erm . . . Mr Broadhurst, sir?’
‘Wrong!’ An open palm, as big and fattily solid as a Bradenham ham, smote the side of my head with horrific force. I fell to my knees, immediately aware of the sticky saltiness of blood in my saliva. ‘Come on, Ian – don't disappoint me – answer the question.’
‘Y-you . . . you are . . . you are The Fat Controller?’ I whimpered. I was certain, although I could not have said why, that if I di
d not answer correctly this might well be the end.
‘Good, good. Well done . . . Capital!’ The Fat Controller was helping me to my feet. ‘I'm glad we cleared up that little problem. Some might say, “What's in a name?” but then I doubt an arsehole would smell so sweet. Now, lad, you were curious earlier as to my movements and my changed countenance. The fact of it is that my five years are now up and hence my retirement is over. Before Christ's mass I will be gone, back into the world.
‘And how have I been spending this summer? Why, in refamiliarising myself with what-goes-on. These past five years my pernicious enfeeblement has meant that six months of the year I have had to hibernate, to entomb myself in the disused redoubt beneath Cliff Top, but at last I am free. Free to smell again the sweat on the brow of the bourse; free to bask in the slipstream of wide-bodied jets; free to sit in on the counsels of the alleged good and the alleged great.
‘I have cantered among the hyenas of the Serengeti as they brought down wildebeeste; I have danced the Wellington Boot Dance with the Zulu in the township hostels; I have tiptoed through the Bibliothèque Nationale, listening to the gummy gumming of mundane scholars; I have shelled prawns with slant-eyed androgynes in the polyglot souks of the uttermost East; I have reached the nadir of a nonsensical number of psycho-sexual trances, both in the Amazonian hinterland and the plastic cultures of the Pacific rim; I have subsumed myself to the circuitry of artificial cerebella in the silicone wadis; I have crawled down the barrels of guns on all five continents, only to spring forth again – triumphant; I have tittered in the stalls and tottered by the walls festooned with epicene opera-lovers; I have sallied forth into the salons of the old world and the new; I have hefted steins in the beerhalls and pinched flutes in the Shires; I have raced laggardly protons around the cyclotron, revelling in the sempiternal sciamachy; and – let us not forget – I have also hidden under couches whilst the moneyed pulers petted their kittenish neuroses, imagining themselves trusted, secluded.
‘To cut these many stories short, to tie a knot of reminder in this multifarious narrative: I have reacquainted myself with my domain. And now – let's eat.’
We ate at Al Forno, an Italian restaurant at the bottom of the Lanes. I was subdued after the preprandial violence. Subdued and also cowed by The Fat Controller's manner of consummate self-assurance. This was no longer a slightly eccentric seaside retiree with a portfolio of amusing tricks. He had become something other, or worse still, perhaps he had always been.
As soon as we entered the restaurant the proprietor came out to us from the kitchen, rubbing his hands oilier on a tea towel.
‘Ah! Meester Northcliffe,’ he trilled – and it was a measure of my disorientation that I took this further name-change in my faltering stride. ‘We no see you for an age. Why you no come to Al Forno? Youse find someone who makes a better pizza?’
‘Tommaso, how could that be so?’ The Fat Controller was emollient, masterful. ‘You make the finest pizzas on the Sussex coast – haven't I always said that? No, no, I have been away on business for these past few months.’
‘And who is this, your son?’ Tommaso gave me three-quarters of an ingratiating smile and The Fat Controller's good humour increased by a factor of nine. His trunk swelled up to resemble that of a baobab tree, matching for bulk the whitewashed curvature of the charcoal oven that dominated the restaurant. His voice boomed, ‘Haha, ahahaha, no, no, more like a grandson, I should say, but it's good of you to be so shamelessly flattering – to him.’ Then his good mood evaporated so entirely that it might never have been. ‘Jump to it, boy! Bring us two litres of that vile Chianti and four of your large specials – we'll be upstairs.’
We climbed up a twisting staircase past two floors of tables and then took our place in the bay window on the top floor. In due course Tommaso himself brought the wine. The Fat Controller poured me a glass.
‘Stick that in your laugh-hole,’ he said. ‘You're past the age when you can be forgiven for not holding your liquor. So pour it down your neck.’ I did as I was told.
The ‘special’ turned out to be a cartwheel-sized pizza like a slice of the earth's crust, its five feet of rim volcanically erupting. On top of it there were all the fruits of the forest, the animals of the plain, and a few of the beasts of the sea for good measure. Everything was enmired in thick globs of mozzarella cheese. The Fat Controller ate three of these and I did my best to tackle the fourth. I was stunned by this prodigious feat of consumption. I remembered Mr Broadhurst-that-was mopping up the Sally Lunns but that was a mere warm-up exercise compared to this.
When as a child I had alluded to Mr Broadhurst's corpulence, my mother had snapped at me. ‘It's a disability, Ian, like any other. Mr Broadhurst has glandular problems, that's why he's overweight. He doesn't eat any more than ordinary people.’ As she spoke I had eidetiked the glands in question, embedded in the back of Mr Broadhurst's neck like obese sweetmeats.
‘You're thinking about my glands, aren't you, boy?’ The Fat Controller's voice sluiced me out of my wine haze. He was dissecting a gland-like mushroom as he spoke, clearly in order to illustrate his telepathy. ‘The only reason people are fat,’ he went on, ‘is because they eat too much. After all,’ he continued, deftly manipulating half a loaf of garlic bread to sop up the tomato juice on his last platter, ‘you never saw anybody fat come out of Auschwitz.’
It was two beats before I realised that this was meant to be a very funny joke and then I struggled to match his guffaws, adding my own rather reedy piping to his basso mirth.
He went on to discourse at length on the nature of fat. He reviewed a gallery of the great fatties of all time, from Nero through Falstaff to Arbuckle. He dwelt especially on the insulating and prophylactic properties of excessive flesh, remarking at one point, ‘Without the upholstery of embonpoint the body is a mere skeletal spring, ready to uncoil its very mortality.’ He brushed up my biochemistry, informing me that the long chain fences off at molecules are antipodean in scale set beside the dry stone walls of mere proteins, and that he himself had it as an ambition to contrive that his entire body should be sheathed in one enormous fat molecule. He concluded by reviewing the sexual properties of portliness, noting that, if you are fat enough, you can develop love-handles specially adapted for oral sex, as well as coitus.
During our meal the restaurant had begun to fill up with the pre-theatre crowd, Brighton burghers and their wives. I saw them through The Fat Controller's eyes – they were gauche and dowdy, crammed into suitings so ill-fitting that they looked like bolsters stuffed into pillow cases. They spoke quietly, deliberated over the menu and drank their wine in sips, like dipping birds. One of these types now rose from her chair and came over to where we were sitting. Our coffee had just arrived.
‘Excuse me,’ she said hesitantly.
‘No,’ snapped The Fat Controller. He didn't even look up, he was doing something with the cafetière. I gawped at the woman.
The rebuttal had done her no good whatsoever, her face was going blotchy, but she mustered all the sang-froid she could and continued, ‘Since you refuse to be civil I shall not moderate my criticism. I didn't want to embarrass you in front of your grandson – ‘
‘He's not my grandson, he's the son of the woman I lodge with – ‘
‘Be that as it may, perhaps he would like to know that you have completely disrupted our meal. Your voice is as loud as it is insistent and, as if that weren't bad enough, what you speak of is as boring as it is unseemly. You are without exception the rudest man it has ever been my misfortune to share a restaurant with; and I think I can speak for all the others present when I say that.’
Without waiting for The Fat Controller's reaction to all this, she turned and went back to her own table, where she was greeted with little ‘Well done's and furtive shoulder pats from her fellow diners.
The Fat Controller sat stock still while this woman had her say, like someone engaged in a sporting activity that has been temporarily frozen, prior to a repla
y on behalf of inattentive home viewers. I observed him warily, waiting for the outburst I felt certain was infusing along with the coffee, but he remained impassive and finished the meal by stoically downing a litre or so of the espresso blend, a large tin box of Amaretti di Saronno and eight grappa. He added the bill with a single saccade of his pulsing eyes. It was the first display of his own eidetic abilities I had ever witnessed; before that all his efforts in this respect had been directed at infiltrating my internal visual world. Foolishly, I took it as a good sign.
We walked out into the doldrums of early evening. The Chianti had gone to my head a little but I was a big lad and had done my share of experimenting with alcohol before, so the intoxication wasn't too hard for me to handle. His gargantuan repast seemed to have put The Fat Controller in a better mood and avuncularity seeped back into his tones the further we got away from the pizzeria.
‘There are two reasons why I wanted to be sure that I met up with you after school today.’ He paused to light the green-brown dirigible of a Partagas perfecto with a flickering windproof lighter. ‘You will have guessed the first,’ he resumed, masticating the thick coils of smoke, ‘namely that I wished to inculcate you a little further in the understanding of my true nature, a little further but not too far – keep ‘em guessing is my motto. My other reason was that I wanted to have an opportunity for a more leisurely chat with you about your future. ‘
‘My future?’
‘Quite so. In the absence of your having a father who is disposed to take any interest in you – if indeed he is still alive – I find that I am, as it were, in locus pater. Not a prospect that I relish. My values, my methods, indeed my very understanding of the world, is not, as you know, conventional. Nevertheless, I have as much of a need to hand my legacy on to someone as any biological parent. Your unusual ability for mental imaging marks you out in this context. I have decided – at least pro tem – to enhance your relationship with respect to me, from the purely formal one of “apprentice”, to the potentially more intimate designation “licentiate”. Do you know what that means?’
