The Undivided Self

by Will Self

  So, I elevated my search for the ideal cubicle – warm, discrete, well lit – to an exact science. Unnoticed by me, this search was beginning to usurp the primary quest. It is ironic, therefore, that unknowingly, unintentionally, I began to find evidence of the great psychologist where I myself sought refuge.

  I could avoid the actual congress of homosexuals quite easily. However, without abandoning my private study altogether I could not hope to avoid the evidence of their activities: crude but believable advertisements, scrawled in Biro or neatly lettered; seemingly hacked with an axe, or delicately carved with a penknife; they drew the reader’s attention inexorably to penile size:

  I’m 45 and my wife gives me no satisfaction coz shes too slack. If you have a 9” cock, or better, meet me here after 6 any wensday. I will take on any number of lusty boys.

  and:

  Boys under 21 with 6” or more meet me here. You do it to me I’ll do it to you.

  And the direct, if disturbing:

  Give me big dix.

  There was one of these water-closet communicants who was more readily recognisable and more prolific than the rest – I began to see his entreaties in a lot of my favourite haunts, and to come across them occasionally when I broached new territory. This person was distinguishable by his rounded, laboured writing in red Biro, which reminded me of the hand of an adolescent schoolgirl – especially the characteristic of drawing small circles in place of the point over the ‘i’. Furthermore, his graffiti were always written neatly on the wall directly above or below the point where the toilet paper dispenser was mounted. They were also very carefully executed. With some of the best examples I could actually see where the artist had used a ruler to get his script to line up just so. As for content, alas that was wearisomely predictable:

  Meet me here on Friday or Saturday evening if you are better than 7”. I have a 9” cock which I like to have kissed and sucked till I come in someone’s mouth. I like young boys of around 16, but also more experienced men.

  This I noted down in my leather-bound journal from the wall of an unpretentious, unfrequented, spotlessly clean, underground municipal convenience in Pimlico. I had no idea why I had taken to recording such things. I had been in London only a fortnight or so; I had no fixed view about the status of my quest for Alkan. On the whole I was inclined to view it as spectacularly important. I had, after all, given up my forthcoming exam in order to find him. My analysis with him was incomplete, I had no family or friends to support me. On the other hand I could just as easily feel dismissive and indifferent about the quest for Alkan. Who needed the daft old coot anyway? Nonetheless I did immediately notice the connection between the advertisement above and this:

  I like to suck young boys cocks and to have mine sucked as well. I’ve only 5”, but it’s hard all the time. If you’re 16 or under meet me here on Tuesday at 9.00.

  neatly scripted beneath the Smallbone of Devizes ceramic, interleaved sheet-holder clamped to the distempered wall of the warm and capacious gents at the Wallace Collection. And this:

  Fun time every evening here or at the xxxx [illegible] club. All experienced men better than 8” meet me for sucking frolics. I am 27 and I have 9 good inches which you can nip and lick.

  incongruously proclaimed from a bare space of rendering, framed with grout, left available, as if on purpose, by the absence of a tile in the checkerboard that skirted the commode in the denizens of the Reform Club.

  If I idly noted down this smut cycle it was not for any reason but boredom. It wasn’t until later, days later, that, glancing on passing, in the canted, cracked, oval mirror that capitulated on top of the dead bureau in my L-shaped wind-tunnel at the Majestic, I saw the hidden significance of these three bites. I saw it as a sequence solely of numbers, integers, detached from the penises-in-themselves, thus:

  7, 9, 16, 5, 16, 9, 8, 27, 9

  This in itself obviously represented an intentional sequence. The very fact of the way relation between primes and roots was organised, implied a capricious mind intent on toying with a willing enquirer. I immediately felt the presence of Alkan in that simple sequence. I knew that I was in no real position to analyse the sequence as it stood – and that infuriated me … I knew that if the sequence was to prove meaningful it must have a progression.

  My cottaging became more intense. I spent virtually all my days in toilets. The one day I had to abandon my quest and attend the National Assistance Board, I managed to contrive to wait for some hours in the toilet. When I emerged my number was called, an example, I feel, of perfect timing.

  Eventually I began to find little outpourings, here and there, which were unmistakably more elements of Alkan’s coded message. Each set of figures was couched in the same form, written in the same hand and situated within the toilet cubicle in the same place. After a fortnight I had an impressive set of integers of the form:

  16, 3, 19, 19, 5, 17, 27, 9, 8, 13, 33, 11, 4, 9, 9,

  14, 16, 27, 7, 9, 16, 5, 16, 9, 8, 27, 9 …

  but running to some four handwritten sides. I submitted this sequence to rigorous analysis. On the face of it there seemed no reason to think that the sequence had been devised in the order in which I discovered it. So I cut it up into individual strips which I arranged and rearranged and rearranged, for hour after hour after hour, until a lattice work of discarded strips of exercise paper overlaid the bilious pastel lozenges which snicker-snacked across the wind-tunnel at the Majestic.

  I found that I could extract quite elegant sets of equations from the sequence whichever way I arranged it, some of which were quite tantalisingly pregnant. But although I could satisfactorily resolve them they remained mere abstractions devoid of real values, real content. From the shape of some of these equations I could deduce that Alkan was working on some kind of methodology for statistical inference, but just as clearly other sets seemed to indicate that his thoughts were running towards decision trees which reflected the organic structure of long-term clinical trials. But statistical studies of what? Clinical trials of what?

  I lapsed into torpor. There seemed no solution. I felt more than ever abandoned, washed up, beyond the pale of society. With no way of retreat from the tidal line of mental wrack, back down the beach and into the sea.

  Late one evening, a fellow Majestic resident, Mr Rabindirath, came in to challenge me to a game of Cluedo. We played in a desultory fashion for half an hour or so. Rabindirath was an infuriating opponent because he kept incorporating members of his own family into the game as if they were fictional suspects.

  Next to his cheaply suited thigh, on the Terylene counterpane of my bed, lay a well-thumbed A–Z. Open at pages 61a & b, the West End. I idly translated the coordinates into numerical values … Covent Garden, the coordinates were I, 16. Translating the I into a numerical value according to its position in the alphabet gave 9. 9, 16 – it was a fragment of the sequence! My head began to spin. Rabindirath barked angrily as I swept the Cluedo board off the cork-topped bathroom stool and began to labour feverishly over the A–Z.

  By morning I had worked it all out. All the sequence was a set of coordinates which mapped a journey across central London. A journey which at every juncture prefigured my own. Clearly Alkan was tailing me from the front; damnably clever. He had started by tailing my simple and monotonous circuit and once I had become obsessed by following him he had led me on. Now I looked at the route laid out on the map it was quite clear that I had been mapping out a basic geometric configuration. I had simply to extrapolate the next set of coordinates in order to confront the errant psychologist.

  By ten that morning I was waiting for him in the public toilet under the central reservation on High Holborn. It was a snug place, well warmed, with an attendant on duty all the time. Not the sort of toilet anyone would tend to linger in, nowhere to really hide yourself away. I waited and collected different versions of disgust from the insurance salesmen and civil servants who marched through, dumped their steamy load and strode out shaking their le
gs and heads.

  I became uneasy. If something didn’t happen soon I would be running the risk of harassment or even arrest. Then from the solid row of cubicles which framed a corridor at the far end of the tiled submarine came a cough, and then a flush, and then a door wheezed ajar … nothing … no one emerged … I footed down to the end and gingerly pushed open the door. Alkan was turning to face me. He was wearing a grey flannel suit and a belted Gannex mac, he carried a briefcase and was in the middle of tucking an umbrella under his free arm. He looked terribly shocked to see me. The first thing he said was, ‘What the bloody hell are you doing here?’

  It turned out that the whole thing was an utter fluke, an example of the most preposterous chance, an amazing coincidence; or, laden synchronicity, evidence of fate, karma, the godhead. Alkan thought chance. I was inclined to agree with him. For he had nothing to say to me, absolutely nothing, but a kind of chewed-up, pop-eyed obsession with a set of conspiracies being fomented against him by Communist psychiatrists. Alkan had gone completely mad, psychotic, subject to delusions. His abrupt flight from Chelmsford had come in the midst of an extended paranoid interlude. He was a useless husk. After sitting with him over tea for a while, I gave him the rest of my money. It was the only way I could convince him that my presence in the toilet was not due to my involvement with the conspiracy of conspiracies. My last sight of Alkan was of him sitting at the coated table, hands tightly clasped, eyes eroding from the stream of edginess that poured out of his brain. I looked into those eyes for too long while I ate my toast. By the time I’d finished, all my faith in Alkan was quite burned away.

  I went back to the Majestic and picked up my things. Then I left London. I wasn’t to go back again for another seven years.

  I applied for and was accepted to work as a research psychologist for Mr Euan MacLintock, the Chairman and Managing Director of Morton-Maclintock, the giant cattle-feed manufacturers. MacLintock was an old-fashioned Scottish dilettante, his particular obsession was psychology. He had few pretensions to originality himself, but was determined to test out some of his theories and, as a consequence, throughout his long and barren life funded one research project after another.

  MacLintock had come up the hard way. He was born in the direst of Highland poverty, and had worked hard all his life, mostly as an itinerant cattleman. Long years of watching the animals graze and defecate accounted for his uncanny rapport with the bovine. And no doubt this also accounted for the phenomenal success of the cattle-feed he manufactured when he started his own business.

  Somehow MacLintock had found time to educate himself. He had the reckless and unstructured mind of the autodidact. In some areas (for example, South American Volcanoes, heights thereof) he was an exhaustive expert; whereas in others (the History of Western Thought) he was notably deficient. The occasional beams of light that the world would shine into MacLintock’s cave of ignorance used to drive him insane with anger. I well remember the day he reduced a solid mahogany sideboard to kindling upon being informed by me that even in space you could not ‘see’ gravity.

  It would be wrong of me to give you the impression that MacLintock was a kindly man. He was incredibly mean, moody and occasionally violent. After the frozen, incestuous arrogance of Chelmsford academia I found his company a positive tonic. Just learning to get through a day with MacLintock without sparking a row was a valuable lesson in self-assertion.

  Morton-MacLintock’s head office was near Dundee, but MacLintock lived in a vast mouldering Victorian hunting lodge an hour’s drive north. I was provided with an apartment at the lodge and was expected to reside there unless my work, called me to some far-flung portion of the M-M empire.

  MacLintock’s real obsession was with the relationship between bovine and human social forms. This was appropriate enough for a manufacturer of cattle-feed (and other farinaceous products aimed at the bipedal market). The full and frightening extent of his eccentricity only became clear to me over a period of two years or so. During that time I laboured diligently to compile a series of studies, monographs and even articles (which I naively believed I might get published). All of which aimed to draw out the underlying similarities between humans and cows and to suggest ways in which the two species could be brought closer together.

  I think that in retrospect this scholastic enterprise doesn’t sound as stupid as it did at the time. It is only in the past decade that the rights of animals have started to be seriously addressed as a concern of moral philosophy. The animal has shifted from the wings to the centre stage of our collective will-to-relate. Environmentalism, conservation, the developing world, the issue of canine waste products; increasingly our relationship to one another cannot be adequately defined without reference to the bestial dimension. In this context my work for Euan MacLintock now appears as breaking new ground.

  To say that I came out of my shell altogether during this period would be an exaggeration. But I did realise that my days at Chelmsford had been effectively wasted. I had allowed myself to become marginalised. I had relinquished control of my own destiny. I had thought at the time that I was ensuring the objectivity that would be necessary for formulating a new large-scale theory of the psychopathology of societies as a whole. But really I had been teetering towards institutionalisation.

  Wandering the MacLintock estate, moodily kicking failed, wet divots into the expectant faces of short Highland cattle I developed a new resolve to go back into the fray. I realised that to make any lasting contribution, to be listened to, I would have to manifest myself in some way. I would have to unite my own personality with my theories.

  So, of an evening, while MacLintock fulminated and stalked, I parried with my pirated idiosyncrasies. We would sit either side of the baronial fireplace, wherein a few slats from a broken orange box feebly glowed. He, nibbling charcoal biscuit after biscuit, only to discard each sample, half-eaten, into a sodden heaplet on the lino, while I would suckle ballpoint pens, stare up at the creosoted rafters and make either whiffling or ululating noises, depending on the phase of the moon.

  To MacLintock’s credit he never paid much attention to the generation of this personal myth. He was possessed of a delightful self-obsession that guarded him against being interested in anyone else. A short man with absurd mutton-chop sideburns, he always wore a business suit. His notable efficiency, punctiliousness and businesslike manner – while inspiring devotion and respect at Head Office, at the plant and at the experimental testing station on Eugh – at home came across as a wearing emptiness of human feeling.

  The great lodge was empty but for him, me and an aged houskeeper, Mrs Hogg, a woman so wedded to Calvinist fatalism that she would happily watch a pullet burst into flame, rather than adjust the oven setting. Bizarrely lit by vari-tilted spotlights of some cheap variety, the great hall would occasionally be enlivened of an evening as Mrs Hogg progressed towards us down a promenade of joined carpet offcuts. Her squashed profile was thrown into shocking, shadowed relief against the stippled wall, the angles, for a moment, cheating the fact that her nose actually did touch her chin. She would deposit a chipboard tray on the fender, gesture towards the Tupperware cups of tea and the fresh mound of burnt biscuits and then depart, rolling back over the causeway and into the darkness.

  Eventually MacLintock became dissatisfied with my work. He had had very precise objectives which he believed my work should fulfil:

  1. The creation of an ideal community in which men and cattle would live together on equal terms. This was to be jointly funded by MacLintock and the Scottish Development Office.

  2. The publication of a popular work which would make MacLintock’s theories accessible to a mass audience (he was also quite keen on the idea of a television documentary).

  He couldn’t blame me solely for the failure to realise the first of these objectives, although I suppose my work didn’t altogether help to convince the relevant bureaucrats. On the other hand he certainly did blame me for the collapse of the second objective. Blame
, I felt, was unjustified. I had consulted with him on a regular basis during the writing of Men and Cows; Towards the Society of the Future? And he had passed each chapter as it came. Nonetheless he became nasty when the book failed to find a mainstream publisher. Eventually it was brought out by one of the small, alternative publishers that were beginning to operate, but it was instantaneously remaindered. MacLintock wandered the lodge for days, skipping from carpet tile to carpet tile, buoyed up by fury. Every so often he would swivel on his heel and deliver a tirade of abuse at me. At last, sickening of his tirade, I packed my bag and departed.

  The last thing I saw as I squelched down the drive, away from the lodge, was Mrs Hogg. She was standing in the paddock behind the house, leaning on the fence, apparently adopting a conversational tone with a giant Herefordshire bull.

  That wasn’t the last I heard of Euan MacLintock, or of the work I had done for him. About eight years later, when the controversy that blew up around Quantity Theory was reaching its height, Harding, one of my staunchest critics, found a copy of Men and Cows. He brandished this, as it were, in the face of my reputation. Naturally the attempted discrediting backfired against him nastily, the general public took to the book, seeing it as satire. I believe a twelfth edition is about to appear.