by Will Self
‘No,’ said The Fat Controller, glancing around at the empty residential street. ‘You get in.’ Then, with a fluidity of motion that was rendered all the more unnatural and frightening by his bulk, The Fat Controller lunged forward, grabbed the cabby by the throat and pulled him straight down on to the floor of the vehicle. Like a conjurer, he flicked a silk paisley handkerchief from his jacket pocket and thrust it into the cabby's gasping mouth. Next, still grasping his prey like some gargantuan trout that he had managed to tickle from the urban mill race, The Fat Controller proceeded to torture him gently. Taking another pull on his Tosca, he applied the glowing tip of the stogie to the white billow of occupational lard that had emerged from beneath the cabby's T-shirt. He didn't leave off until he had managed to create a neat line of blisters.
Still hunched over, one hand on the cabby's gullet, The Fat Controller used the other to free the knot of his green mohair tie. This he then looped around the cabby's neck. Substituting a knee for his other hand, he tied a slip knot in it and settling back in his seat said, ‘Now, my good man, I think you are probably in a better position than formerly to judge what manner of personage you have for a passenger. No, no, don't trouble yourself to apologise’ – the cabby was gurgling for breath – ‘it isn't necessary. I am not a vindictive man, sir, I have no place for such feelings in my nature and indeed I resist such impulses whenever they arise. However, that being said, I engaged you to drive me to Brown's Hotel and that is what I want you to do. In a moment I will release you and we shall resume our journey. But make no mistake about it, should you prove fractious again, I shall not hesitate to utilise this neckwear in garrotting you. Got that?’
The cabby coughed assent. He wasn't a particularly observant man, but one thing he had noticed during the sickening shock of the last few minutes was a peculiarity of The Fat Controller's fingertips. They had no whorls or indentations and, therefore, they would leave no prints.
Released, the cabby worked his way back to the front of the cab and got in. The Fat Controller fed the woollen garrotte through the sliding window and they set off again. The Fat Controller reclined, smoked and read the paper. The cabby, on the end of his lead, drove.
They had the run of the traffic and within thirty minutes the cab was rounding Berkeley Square. The Fat Controller sat forward and, siting a girder-sized arm over the cabby's shoulder, said, ‘Pull down into that underground car-park.’ The cabby did as he was told. The entrance was a long, choking, oily shaft that ran down into the earth at a forty-five-degree angle. At the bottom the attendant's kiosk was empty. Even so, The Fat Controller dropped down in his seat by way of a precaution.
‘Take the ticket.’ Once again, the cabby did as he was told. ‘And pull over to the far side of the level.’ The cab stopped in the concrete corner, which was dark, quite hidden from the kiosk's view by a panel truck. The Fat Controller garrotted the cabby, quickly and with merciful efficiency. ‘I would wager, sir’ – The Fat Controller addressed the cabby's slumped corpse, whilst pulling his suitcase from the back of the cab – ‘that that was as good a death as you could reasonably have expected to have.’ His huge palm essayed an expressive flutter, as he leant in through the driver-door window and contemplated the deflated face. ‘Granted that I can have no idea of what your prospects might have been, but on the sound principle that every man is responsible for the nature of his own countenance, I would wager, sir, that you would never have become a creature capable of those nice distinctions, the contrivance of which serves, as it were, to define refinement.’
With this euphonious eulogy The Fat Controller set off back across the oil-stained floor of the underground car-park, towards the lift. The brown Sansomite suitcase went with him.
Someone had once told The Fat Controller that he bore a distinct resemblance to the character of Gutman, as played by Sydney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon. This he relished. The truth is that the similarity was quite superficial. Like the Fat Man, The Fat Controller had an interesting bulk, an unusual kind of fatness. However, while it could conceivably be said of Greenstreet, as it is often said of the fat in general, that he was ‘amazingly graceful’, or ‘surprisingly light on his feet'; and indeed that those feet were ‘really quite elegant’, none of these descriptions could have been applied to The Fat Controller, who really was fat. Fat in a heavy and unrelenting manner. Programmatically fat. Fat as if his mammoth aspect were the result of several, consecutively successful five-year eating plans. Wherever he went The Fat Controller's fat surrounded him and marched with him, like a tight huddle of violent men wearing overcoats.
Another point of dissimilarity; unlike Gutman, The Fat Controller was not a true connoisseur – ultimately he gained no more joy from things than he did from people. Whereas Gutman was prepared to spend a lifetime recovering the black bird, The Fat Controller would have eliminated the entire cast within the first half-reel of the film. The Fat Controller's attitudes were born of an uncompromising pragmatism, which those who met him felt as a peculiar sort of emanation. Whilst Gutman had a magnetic quality that he bolstered with rhetorical flair, The Fat Controller was banal. And if you allowed him the chance to get going in his affected way, he became downright boring very quickly.
The desk clerk at Brown's Hotel was certain that he had seen The Fat Controller somewhere before. There was something familiar but unplaceable about the big man's face. He waited, pen poised over register, while The Fat Controller moved towards him in his gang of flesh.
‘By Jove!’ he exclaimed. ‘Such weather, and in England of all places.’ For an instant, the desk clerk tried to imagine The Fat Controller in still sunnier climes – for some reason he couldn't manage it.
‘Can I help you, sir?’ The desk clerk was easy, consummately so.
‘Oh yes, oh yes indeed.’ He paused, clearly trying to remember some important fact, like his name, for example. He ran the five-pack of wieners that constituted his hand around his collar. ‘I have a reservation.’
‘In what name, sir?’
‘Northcliffe, my man, Samuel Northcliffe. Take a look in your little book.’
Jane Carter was crying in her West Hampstead flat. Crying as the evening sunlight fell in gay bars across the flat's bright patterned interior. She breathed heavily and the mucal reeds lining the wet passages of her head gave off little clarinet cries of loneliness. The tears were prompted by an indigestible bubble of self-pity, which had been swelling up in her all afternoon. Now they had started, the tears steadily gained fresh impetus. Like boulders being pushed down a mountainside, they came rolling and tumbling out from her ducts, each one powered by a different slight, a different hurt, failed relationships and relationships that never were but might have been.
At her feet a mess of knitting fell out from the lip of a plastic bag; blue, green and yellow threads forming a soft circuitry. Thrusting out from amongst them, a wooden knitting needle caught her attention. She snatched it up, losing several hundred careful stitches as she freed it from its fluffy embrasure. Taking the knitting needle in her right hand, like a dagger she pulled up the hem of her black denim dress. Her thighs appeared monstrous to her, damning evidence of her failure to achieve sylph-hood. ‘You're fat! Fat! Fat!’ she exclaimed, with each ‘fat’ digging the sharp tip of the knitting needle into the horrible stuff. The final dig drew blood – and enough pain to stop her crying.
She stood up abruptly and began to dance around the flat, singing discordantly, ‘Oh, I'm so a-lone, so a-lone, so bloody fat and a-lone,’ and as she sang, she wished. Wished for a lover, any lover, a daemon or an incubus – the presence could take her now come what may. She didn't care any more. What do I matter? she concluded. I'm a zero, another poor cow in the herd. I wear certain clothes and certain shoes, I put on certain make-up and use certain sanitary towels and I go to a certain dentist and a certain doctor, because of my bloody certain daddy and certain mummy. That's for sure! With this bleak summation she began to dance, kicking out first one fat (according to
her) leg and then the other. In this pitiful self-absorption, she felt herself to be just one amongst a multitude of Janes. All of them standing on their oval crocheted rugs, in their recently converted flats. They all looked the same, they all faced in the same direction and they all threw up their arms. They formed the most highly dispersed Busby Berkeley-style chorus line ever – this phantom army of high-kicking Janes.
The phone rang. ‘Jane?’ It was a woman's voice.
‘Yes?’
‘It's Beattie.’ Beautiful brittle Beatrice, the PR girl.
‘Oh hi, Beattie, how're you?’
‘Fine, Jane, and how are you?’
‘Fine.’
‘Jane –’
‘Yes?’
‘I wondered if you were doing anything this evening?’
‘Why?’ Jane, however fat and ugly she felt herself to be, wasn't about to admit her unpopularity.
‘Um, well, OK, it's pretty boring really, but I need a favour – ’ She ran on, sensing that Jane was about to interrupt, ‘. . . I'm organising this press launch for S.K.K.F. and I haven't been able to get as many people along as I'd hoped for. The company's entire marketing department will be there – it could be very bad news for me if I can't up the body count.’
‘So, you want me to pretend to be a hack from the medical press?’
‘That's right.’
‘And what is this product they're launching? Is it something I should know about?’ Beattie twittered with laughter, Jane held the phone away from her ear until it had ceased.
‘Not exactly. Though it is rather brilliant, revolutionary even. Lilex is a brand-new drug for the relief of peptic and duodenal ulceration, it's prepared in easy-to-swallow tablets and presented in two by twelve plasticised pop-out packs.’
‘Oh really.’ Jane was underwhelmed by Beattie's enthusiasm. She had seen it before. With every new account, every new product to be launched, the PR girl shifted her allegiance radically and completely. Her belief in a product was a total thing, real and encompassing. It didn't matter if it was a cosmetic or a patent medicine, a motor car or a fashion accessory. Hers was a metempsychosis of novelty, her mind a vapid thing until animated by the next absolute conviction.
‘Look, Jane.’ Beatie was conciliatory. ‘Just do me that favour, will you. You're a journalist. Come along with your notebook and pretend to copy down whatever Wiley – that's the S.K.K.F. marketing manager – says. Then I'll take you out to eat, OK?’
‘Oh, all right. But don't make a habit of this, Beattie, my self-esteem is already quite low enough, without my only invitations being to the press launches for new ulcer medications.’ They both laughed and hung up.
For the next couple of hours Jane operated on her body. She cleaned it and scraped it, patted it and pushed it, painted it and prinked it. She hated herself for deploying these mortician's skills on the lumpy carcass, but what option did she have? She had put herself into two entire outfits then torn them off again, before she was finally satisfied and able to set out for Grindley's. In the end, she went dressed as she had been all that hot day.
Coming out of Trafalgar Square Tube Station, Jane picked her way through the throngs of pigeons and tourists. She found Beatrice half-way up the wide stairway of Grindley's, handing out press packs. Jane's friend was so neat and pretty that she looked as if she might have been plastic-encapsulated along with her name badge.
‘Here,’ she said, thrusting one of the folders at Jane. ‘I think the speeches are about to begin. If you go on up to the Regency Room I'll join you in a moment.’
Jane did as she was told. In the Regency Room she positioned herself by the marble mantelpiece, under the huge gilt-framed mirror, and scanned the other launchers, the apparatchiks of the ulcer.
Jane was still feeling fat. Fat and sweaty. What a delicious irony, feeling fat and attending a press launch for ulcer medication. It wasn't lost on her. Wiley, the Marketing Manager, at least that's who she assumed it was, was droning on about Lilex. Jane couldn't concentrate. She flicked through the press pack, pausing only to admire a photograph of the S.K.K.F. chief executive, with his hands buried in what, according to the caption, was deep-frozen canine semen. She stared up at the ceiling and allowed her eyes to roam across the inverted landscape of plaster furbelows and flutings that gave the Regency Room its name. In these moments of absolute inattention, the presence that haunted her whole life had never been further from her mind.
‘Are these peanuts dry-roasted?’ Someone was talking to her.
‘Oh, err – I don't know. Does it matter?’
He laughed shortly and said, ‘I can't stand the dry-roasted ones, they're coated with all sorts of E-additives and crap, give me the sweats. Are you with the PR agency? I don't think I recognise you.’
He was a large man, Jane noted, with regular features tending to plumpness and square-cut mousy hair. There was something candid in his tone; this inspired candour in Jane. ‘My name's Jane Carter. To tell you the truth I haven't got anything to do with this. My friend just asked me to come and make up the numbers.’
‘Snap,’ he said. ‘My name's Ian Wharton, how do you do?’
Interlude
This is where The Fat Controller's brand of elective affinity leads to.
They were in a darkened corridor. It was musty with old carpet smell. They were naked. Standing like this, close to her, made him feel sharply the different sex that shaped their bodies. He felt that whereas her body was naturally shaped, her round hips and full bottom giving her an appropriate centre of gravity, his was just a long strip dangling from his head and only tentatively anchored to the dark floor. That was that then.
He had an erection. It was a latex thing, bouncy and ductile. She manoeuvred herself around so that she was side-on to him, then grasped his penis, grasped it in the way that she might a kitchen implement, a meat tenderiser or a rolling pin. She pulled it back and thwacked it against her buttocks, pulled it back and thwacked it against her buttocks. His penis oscillated upon its root, her buttocks wobbled. She had assaulted them both with the possibility of penetration. It was a moment of loss.
Ian and Jane found themselves sitting opposite one another in the Yellow Moon on Lisle Street. Goofy bent-over waiters leant against the half-bar. The tablecloth between them was stained with exactly the kind of yellow additives that gave Ian the sweats. At the next table a German tourist was listing his itinerary with wearying precision: ‘Thaan I haaf a daay foor Haamptoon Coort, yes?’ He was a Swabian, the hayseeds of Germany, and his voice looped the tonal loop like a stunt kite. Ian and Jane exchanged conspiratorial and chauvinistic looks.
‘Do you really believe in marketing?’ Jane asked, thinking to herself: I may as well establish if this man is a complete jerk before we get any further.
Ian took a while in answering, then said, ‘That's a difficult question. At the risk of seeming pedantic, of course I believe in the fact of marketing. I'm not sure that I think it's necessarily a good thing, or even necessary at all.’
‘Well, why do you do it then?’
‘It's all that I know how to do,’ he sighed. ‘I don't think I'm clever enough to do anything else now, even if I wanted to.’
‘What are you working on at the moment?’
‘Oh, something called “Yum-Yum”. It's an edible financial product – ’
Ian was interrupted by the waiter who cocked his ear in the general direction of their table, by way of indicating that he would like to take their order. They told him what they wanted. He didn't write it down but listened inattentively, exchanging an occasional Cantonese bark with his colleagues. When they'd finished he sidled off towards the kitchen without having said a word in English.
‘Service isn't exactly the strong point in these restaurants,’ said Ian, who for some reason felt embarrassed, as if the waiter had been a relative or a friend.
‘Oh I know.’ Jane laughed. ‘That's what I like about them. Everywhere else the waiters pretend to care, when real
ly they couldn't give a shit. It's only the Chinese who refresh you with the sincerity of their contempt.’
‘I'm not sure that it's just contempt. A few months ago a man in the one next door had his arm hacked off by the chef, who was armed with a kitchen cleaver.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he kicked up a row over not being allowed to pay for his meal with a credit card.’
‘But everyone knows that these places are strictly cash. Something to do with the tongs, isn't it?’
‘He was a tourist.’
Their eyes met again, just as the German at the next table launched in on another swooping speech. This time they both laughed. For Ian, this felt as if a wave were breaking against his heart, a wave of warm human contact. He could actually feel this wave pushing out towards his extremities. Strange to relate, Jane could feel it too.
‘You were talking about an “edible financial product”. What the hell does that mean?’
‘The product is edible in two senses: the actual physical material associated with the product comes in an edible form and the interests and other disbursements come to the customer solely in the form of foodstuffs futures.’
‘So, it's a sort of ethically sound investment idea?’
‘Only if you're very greedy. But look, let's not talk about me, let's talk about you. What do you do?’
‘Oh I knit and crochet; and I do macramé and patchwork and appliqué and tapestry and a bit of embroidery and macramé – have I said that before?’
‘I think you might have.’
‘And I write about it for specialist magazines and do a television programme – ’
‘Oh, so I'm dining with a celebrity?’
‘Hardly, but it pays the rent.’
The waiter came back with a whole crispy duck. This he started to shred with mechanical efficiency, tearing at the thing with two forks. Both Ian and Jane felt embarrassed now. There was something venal about this shredding. Ian excused himself and went back through the restaurant to the toilet. He locked himself inside and propped his throbbing head against the paper-towel dispenser.
