by Will Self
‘No.’
‘So much the better, be sure to look it up when you get home.’
We entered the public gardens that surround the Royal Pavilion. In the autumn twilight the great building appeared simultaneously shoddy and grandiose. The Fat Controller looked more at home in this context than I could ever imagine him to have been at Cliff Top, or anywhere else for that matter. There was something of the Regency dandy in the way he trailed his cane and rotated his globular head, as if looking out for fellow beaux to salute. Moreover the fluted columns, caryatid gateways and golden domes of the Pavilion suggested to my adolescent self a world of ambiguous pleasures involving him, which I had to suppress my tipsy mind from visualising.
Why ‘The Fat Controller'? I thought to myself. Why not ‘the Fat Controller'?
‘It's important that you capitalise the definite article – even in thought – you understand me?’
‘Y'y'yes,’ I spluttered, amazed once again by the accuracy of his telepathic probing. We banked to the left, following the precisely plotted curve of a bed of flowers, which had been arranged to form a living mosaic of the municipal crest.
‘Fancy a trip to the theatre?’ The question was close to being a statement.
‘I'd – I'd love to,’ I said. And then, quite suddenly, I recognised the people who were walking in front of us through the gardens. It was the complaining woman from Al Forno together with her party. I started talking hurriedly, hoping to distract my companion. I was desperate to prevent the angry outburst that I had expected in the restaurant happening here, in this even more public place.
I said, ‘I want to go to university,’ although, in truth, up until that moment the desire had been incubating, only half-formed in my mind. ‘I'm interested in . . . Well, I'm interested in sorts of things – ‘
‘Sorts of things? What d'ye mean, boy?’
‘Well, like products. All the different kinds of products. How you persuade people to buy this sort of thing rather than that sort of thing.’ This much was true, that I often found myself in my mother's kitchen staring at the array of condiments, spices, herbs and tinned foods, wondering why she should have bought this particular kind of split peas, rather than another. It was all incomprehensible to me; and since I had begun to study economics the Marginal Theory of Preference only served to deepen my confusion. For, in a world of such demonstrable irrationality, how could there be a predictable quantification of choice? Since the resumption of my mother's upwardbound course in social orienteering, her purchasing patterns had undergone a profound change. She now cooked with garlic, took an interest in wine and spoke of fricassees rather than fry-ups.
Things had always attracted me, far more so than people. As a small child I had known all the words of Masefield's poem, ‘Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir/Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine . . .’ Then the cargo was described in loving detail, the sandalwoods and spices, the ivory, the oil, the wine. I was entranced.
‘Haha. Ahahaha . . . indeed, that is very interesting. Entirely germaine. Well, you shall go to the university if you wish it.’ The Fat Controller sounded uncharacteristically mummyish. ‘My plans for you are more in the manner of an agency. I do not intend to intrude on your life, or impinge in any direct manner. It is merely my desire that you complete your studies and take up a form of employ that may be useful for my purposes at some time in the future. Other than that I wish to make no claims upon you.’ He paused, the butt of his cigar held against his brow, so that a cataract of white spume dribbled down into his eye socket. The eye behind it remained unblinking. ‘And come to think of it, this isn't so dissimilar to the kind of influence your genetic father might wish to have on you, were it not for the fact that he is such a contemptible Essene, a cloistral nonentity capable of only the meanest interaction with his fellow men. You know, of course, how he spends his time?’
‘No, not really. I haven't seen him for three years or so. Mum told me that he travels up and down the coast by bus, reading in public libraries.’
‘Quite so. And how does that make you feel?’
‘Oh, I don't know – ‘
‘Correction: you do know. It makes you feel ashamed and embarrassed. It is as much due to his neglect as my intervention that you find yourself thus, cut off from normal society. Were I inclined to a sense of responsibility, this factor alone would go no small way towards vitiating it. Still, no mind, here we are at the theatre. And there, if I am not mistaken, is the ignoramus who was so agressively rude to us at Al Forno.’
‘I'm, I'm not quite sure, is it?’ I was hoping that my indecision might somehow communicate itself to The Fat Controller. No such luck.
‘Oh yes, it is,’ he said with heavy emphasis. ‘I should imagine that you are worried – worried that I might cause some sort of scene, humiliate you in front of this jetsam.’ He gestured, encompassing with his shovel-sized hand the precincts of the Theatre Royal which bustled with people, and the roadway where backing and filling vehicles jockeyed for temporary respite. ‘That's not my style, Ian – you should realise that I set great store by not creating “scenes” by not making those that I esteem suffer any unnecessary discomfort, whether it be social, physical, or otherwise.’
With that we swept past the woman and her friends and entered the theatre. The Fat Controller had reserved good seats at the front of the stalls. I refused the offer of an ice-cream but he bought an extra-large cone for himself and then, once we were seated, inserted the whole thing, wafer and all, into his mouth.
‘Nyum-nyum,’ he said. ‘I love the cold ache, the frozen hammering on the . . . nyum-nyum . . . insides of my temples. Little Peter Quince thought this a symptom of facial neuralgia, or worse, a precursor of the hydrocephalus that carried off his sister . . . nyum-nyum . . . Puling neurasthenic, used it to justify his laudanum binges. Still, I warrant I must be hydrocephalic anyway, or at any rate inoculated against swollen-headedness, eh?’
I nodded, although I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about.
We sat in silence while the rest of the audience trickled in. His ice-cream finished, The Fat Controller began to shift around uncomfortably in his seat, puffing and blowing. Eventually he said, ‘This is no good. I can't get comfortable. We shall have to try and swap seats with someone so that I can put my feet in the aisle.’
The couple at the end of the row happily switched with us and we settled down once more. However, as soon as we reached our new vantage I understood the real reason why he had wanted to move. The seats we now occupied were directly behind those of the complaining woman and her companions.
‘Serendipitous, eh?’ he said, and leered at me through the artificial gloom, his rubber lips curling up. ‘We shall have an opportunity now to balance things up a little – would you like that?’
‘I'm not sure,’ I dissimulated.
‘Come, lad, now is the time for you to make up your mind. I have spent a deal of time these past few years on cultivating you, submitting you to a species of metaphysical topiary, clipping, pruning, stunting. I have made no secret of the fact that I consider you to be a boy with potential, a boy I might introduce to some of the wonderful things of this world. Be that as it may, I shall be philosophic if you prove unworthy of this not inconsiderable investment – I can always write it off as a little deficit financing – but if you wish to continue with our relationship you must be prepared to place some real trust in me. Without it I cannot proceed.’ As he was talking I noticed something peculiar. Although his tones were conversational and in his case this naturally meant loud – none of the people in the adjacent seats seemed to be able to hear him. Once again he was addressing my consciousness directly, speaking straight into my inner ear without any sound escaping into the atmosphere.
‘People are not all alike – would you grant me that?’ His tone was now pedagogic.
‘S'pose so.’
‘S'pose so is not quite good enough. The point is, my young friend, that we have certai
n duties, not in respect of others, but ourselves. We cannot permit the foisting of indignities upon our person without some form of retribution.’ He held the tip of his cane an inch away from the complaining woman's head. ‘This woman here is not a moral agent in the same sense that I am, or that you will become. Her moral responsibilities are not ours and therefore nor are her rights commensurate. I, on the other hand, am in possession of powers which to the man in the street would appear awesome, inhuman, perhaps even godlike. Naturally along with these powers comes an enhanced moral capability.’
While he spoke the auditorium fell silent. At first a few individuals left off talking, then this engendered a positive feedback. more people heard the gathering soundlessness and responded to it so that whole tiers shut up. Eventually there was complete quiet. The house lights went down and the small posse of hack musicians who slouched in the orchestra pit began to saw indifferently at their instruments.
The curtain rose disclosing a set which for strident artificiality compared favourably with the train display in the toy shop. The layering of the paint on the backdrop was clearly visible; the rambling roses were plastic and immobile; the front of the stage was spread with a swathe of fruiterer's mock grass. There was a hiss over the PA, followed by the chirruping of recorded birdsong. I consulted the programme and discovered that what I was regarding was the rose garden of an English country house, circa 1922. A woman entered stage left. She was young and wore a dress that flared out around her calves. Her head was shrunken under a tight-fitting felt hat. She commenced to promenade up and down the stage, punctuating her remarks with hammy gestures of her lorgnette and preposterously long cigarette holder.
The play was a farce. Not that this mattered a great deal to me. I was aware that the threshold of the audience's suspension of disbelieflay far below mine; and that the aching gap between the supposed humour of the script and their exaggerated response was minuscule when set beside that which already separated my reality from theirs. I could also appreciate that the bulk of this supposed humour was meant to derive from the anachronism of the play's sexual mores. But these were only peripheral apprehensions, for the bulk of my attention was occupied by The Fat Controller's mesmerising amoral discourse.
‘When I wish to kill – I kill.’ The voice was lubricious, polite but insistent. ‘And nothing that people say or do can detract from this. Fortunately I am not driven to this expedient that often, because I have many other stratagems that I have devised for attaining the same object. But every so often, such as now, killing does seem the best possible option. Observe the ferrule of my cane.’ I felt something prod my leg and looked down. He was manipulating a kind of toggle or switch on the head of his cane. The woman in front – the woman who was to die – guffawed loudly at an on-stage incident, distracting me. When I looked down once more I saw, gleaming in the darkness, a long pin or needle that projected from the cane's tip. As suddenly as it was there it was gone again, retracted back into the body of the stick.
What happened next was hazy. There was a scene in a panelled drawing room. The pin-headed young woman was being surprised by her husband in the throes of simulated adultery. A Jeeves type, a servile machiavel, providentially hit the lights and the whole auditorium was plunged into darkness. I couldn't be certain but in the hubbub that followed (shrieked squeaks and ‘hahas’ from the audience) I thought I heard a definite mechanical ‘click’, but when the stage lights came up again, nothing had happened. The Fat Controller was sitting Ciceronian amongst the mob, and his intended victim was squeaking with the rest. Squeaking and even gasping with the great good humour of it all.
Immediately afterwards there was an interval. Instead of joining the press of bodies that jammed up the aisle towards the crush bar, he took my arm once again and drew me in the opposite direction. We exited into a back alley via the fire door.
It was dark outside and The Fat Controller pulled up the velvet collar of his overcoat. ‘Did you enjoy the piece?’ he asked, and before I could answer he went on, ‘I myself did not. I found the script tedious and the performances inconsequential. How risible it is that art cannot provide a better imitation of life, when we know that life itself is so illusory. Would you not agree? Furthermore,’ he went on, drawing me in the direction of Pool Valley, ‘one is insistently aware that all of these actors are the meanest of impostors. That that woman who would be a flapper is in fact a naturally be-jeaned fag hag, who will soon be uttering even worse inanities in some adjacent lounge bar. Is this not so?’
I responded to his rhetoric with a question, anticipating rebuttal. ‘The woman who insulted you, the woman sitting in front of us – ‘
‘The one who I said I was going to kill?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I have done so.’ He fell silent as if this was of little or no account.
‘But . . . but, I didn't see anything. How did you do it?’
‘Curare. No magic to it at all, except insofar as it was a direct transferral of intention to effect with very little attenuation of the causal chain. You observed the hypodermic needle in the ferrule of my cane?’ He tapped the pavement with the stick for emphasis. ‘A method of poisoning which I learnt of during a sojourn in Bulgaria. It struck me at the time that there was something rather apt about such a pedestrian people developing such a pedestrian means of covert assassination –’ He broke off to laugh at his own pun. ‘The curare will paralyse the woman. Rude bitch. I injected her above the hairline. I cannot conceive that the pathologist will trouble to look there for a puncture mark and indeed, prior to that eventuality, it doesn't seem likely that the emergency team of paramedics they'll send out from Brighton General will be well enough acquainted with the action of this drug to hit upon the right antidote in time to prevent her from expiring.’
Perhaps I was in shock but instead of simply feeling horrified by this intelligence I was curious. ‘But when they do the whatsit . . .’
‘The post-mortem?’
‘Yeah, when they do the post-mortem, what will they decide was the cause of death?’
‘Suffocation, I should imagine. I admit they will find that something of a puzzle, but given the low critical standards of provincial audiences, they might hit upon the felicitous conclusion that she choked while in the midst of an exaggeratedly hilarious response to that pathetic farce. And now’ – The Fat Controller consulted his watch; an endomorphic gold Rolex had replaced the full hunter – ‘it's getting on for nine-thirty. I warrant that your mama may be wondering where we have got to, we had better enbus for Saltdean. Forward to the terminus.’
That night, as I sat on the edge of my bed, contemplating the tatter of pop posters sellotaped to the flower-patterned wallpaper of my bedroom, I found myself shaking. It couldn't be true, could it? The Fat Controller hadn't really killed the woman, had he? There was no denying that his penetration of my mind, using my eidetic memory to distort the relation between representation and that which was represented, was strident, agressive even. But there was still a world of difference between this and the vicious and arbitrary manner in which he had committed femicide. And he had done it to a woman who had done nothing to him, simply been a little rude and overbearing, not unlike The Fat Controller himself.
My head span. I felt the nausea of awakening to a brand new day of suffering, a dawn of utter exclusion from my fellow mortals. What had I got myself into? I imagined my mentor, beached on his snow-white counterpane, consciouslessly watching Night Thoughts and perhaps improvising his own televisual homily. I wanted to confess everything to somebody, but who? Now my intimations of the complicity between The Fat Controller and my mother grew into the utter certainty that it extended even into these murky areas. I realised that the ‘trust’ which he sought was silence. A comprehensive silence covering all those aspects of our relationship that might appear to an outsider to be improper, or even bizarre. I hated to imagine what the consequences of breaching this trust might be. If a woman who was rude got killed, I would s
urely be strung up, tortured, cut down and my heart excised.
My cursed eidetic memory summoned up a vision of the medieval rood screen in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the one depicting the martyrdom of St Anthony. St Anthony being boiled in oil with a companionable gaggle of fellow martyrs; St Anthony pierced by crossbow bolts fired by The Fat Controller in chain mail; and in the central, triumphant panel – his white body as flexibly two-dimensional as bacon rind – St Anthony being sawn in half, lengthwise. Instead of the almond eyes of the soon-to-be-beatified, the gaping mouth of welcomed suffering superimposed on the Saint's visage was my own. My own dead-straight mousy fringe and dimpled chin framed my face as it distorted in agony.
Without noticing its onset I found that I was crying and I went on crying until I slept.
The following day was a Saturday. Walking down to the newsagent's in the village I ran through the events of the preceding evening again. I conjured up a vivid representation of the plushy murk in the Theatre Royal, I saw the shiny tip of the hypodermic gleaming against the dark fabric of The Fat Controller's trouser leg. I still wanted to believe that he had been fooling me, or testing my credulousness in a more than averagely cruel manner.
The day was high and bright, the salt tang seasoning the after-pulse of summer heat which still hung in the air, but nothing could shift my sense of despondency, nagging depression. I couldn't even be bothered to look where I was going. I ran straight into the hard bulk of The Fat Controller and was winded by the impact. I had always suspected him of being rather more solid than the average person and this collision provided complete confirmation. He was as rigid and unyielding as the rugby-tackling machine at school.
‘Well, if it isn't my little companion, my theatre-going pal. Where are we off to this morning then, so sunk in our own fantasies and imaginings that we cannot be troubled to look out for vulnerable senior citizens, eh?’ As ever he answered his own question. ‘To the paper shop, I'll be bound, but there's no need to trouble yourself for I have the early edition right here.’
