My Idea of Fun (16 page)

‘Give me an example.’

‘Well, I could, for instance, discover what shape your chin is under that beard. ‘

It was meant to be a jocular observation but even as I said it I knew that I had transgressed some important Gyggle taboo. It's like that with beards, particularly medical beards and even more so psychiatric ones. Although their wearers adopt them as naturally woven badges of individuality, the second they are challenged, taken out of context, they rise up to form chin-borne hackles.

‘I don't see that my beard has anything to do with it,’ his honey voice huffled. ‘But if you think you can – do.’

I went into a full-blown eidetic trance. I encapsulated the whole scene, the dingy cubicle with its plywood partitions; the warped lino, as undulant as the earthen floor of a barn; Gyggle's hideous cheesecloth shirt, the buttons pulled apart to the sternum, revealing still more tight ginger curlicues. I took in both the general: lunar dust motes caught in the sidereal glare of neon light, and the particular: the smear of cobweb on an inch of mushroom flex that protruded from the ceiling above.

When the eidetic image of the room was fully and accurately frozen inside of me, I made my move, or tried to make my move, because nothing happened. I was somehow reversing that pivotal moment in my eidetic career eight years before, when Mr Broadhurst had bade me look in his waistcoat pocket and then made his move. Now it was I who couldn't move; more than that I wasn't even able to form an idea of what it would be like to move. Formerly my eidetic body, the tool with which I worked upon my visions, had felt as defined as if three-dimensional crop marks had been described in the air. My wilful grasp upon it had been entirely unproblematic, as sure as neat fingers picking up pins, or knitting, and then casting off the atomic stitches of the material world.

I couldn't even imagine what this sensation might be like any more, so utterly had it evaporated. I conceptually fumbled, struggled to get some purchase on the sempiternal sheen of the visual image; but there was nothing, no movement, no astral agility, it remained frozen. Or at least almost entirely frozen. Just before I snapped out of it, aborted the failed trance, I thought I saw – although I couldn't be certain – the ragged hole in the beard through which Gyggle addressed the world unravel a little at its edge, exposing a slug side of what might have been Gyggle's lip.

‘Well then,’ said the old fox, ‘have you eidetically removed the hairs from my chinny-chin-chin?’

‘I-I, I can't seem to. What I mean is – I'm trying.’

‘Trying,’ pronounced the psychiatrist sententiously, ‘is lying.’

‘I can't understand it.’ I was shaking and sweating. If I could no longer eidetik effectively, had my status as apprentice and licentiate of the Brahmin of the Banal been removed at one fell stroke?

‘I'm not surprised,’ said my therapist, ‘for nor can I.’

‘Whaddya’ mean?’

‘Well, put it this way, you claim to be able to derive information from internal visual images which you believe to directly correspond to the phenomenal world.’

‘Whaddya’ mean, “phenomenal"?’ It was the sort of jargon I expected from you-know-who.

‘I mean the commonsensical world of material objects and appearances. You claim that you can discover things that are unknowable in an orthodox fashion by moving about the representation of this world inside your own head. Is that right?’

‘Yeah.’

‘So if I were to screen a feature film for you, and in it there was a scene that took place with two characters talking on a sofa, you would be able to tell me whether there was an object lying behind it?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Supposing it was an animated film – would you be able to enter into that world as well?’

‘I s'pose so, but I've never really done it.’

‘But in the case of such an animated film, there wouldn't be anything behind the cartoon sofa; not only that, the sofa couldn't be said to have a behind at all. Do you see what I mean?’

‘We-ell– ‘

‘No. Not “we-ell”. The point is that you are suffering from a complex delusion. There is nothing behind the cartoon sofa and if you find anything it's because you yourself have put it there. There can be no picture of the world in your head that exists independently of your assertions and beliefs about it. To know something is to participate in a communicable truth. Your whole belief in your eidetic power rests on a misconception of the nature of consciousness itself.’

He was standing over me as he said this, in his characteristic lecturing pose, the edge of a desk slotted firmly into his lack of backside. This posture always made me suspect him of having a horizontal cleft slicing through his buttocks, betokening a random – but adaptive – mutation, taking humans closer to being office furniture. He was chewing gum and the nyum-nyumming of his long jaw sent the tail of the beard wagging across his shirt-front. ‘Come on now,’ he went on. ‘Let's do the rest of the experiments and see if you can prove me wrong.’

I couldn't. I couldn't even manage the simplest of manipulations involving extra-sensory perception. Gyggle started off with the most sophisticated of these, the symbol and colour cards, but was soon reduced to getting me to try and guess and a guess is all I could make – which of three paper cups had a ping-pong ball under it. At my best I did no better than average. Then, when we went back to rotating mentally the computer simulation of the room and attempting to ‘see’ possible lines of sight, I had a further shock. I found that my grasp on the image itself was now hazy, the very mechanisms of my mind seemed to have been injected with lobal anaesthetic, blown up into a fuzzy ineptitude. The Kodak laboratories of my eidesis were being dismantled; soon all that would be left was an out-of-order passport-photo-booth, mouldering on an empty station platform.

To give Gyggle his due, he didn't crow. On the contrary, when that afternoon's session ended and we were walking back across the campus, he put one of his Anglepoise arms across my shoulders and attempted some avuncularity. ‘Ian,’ he schmoozed, ‘you know, you are a prodigy, just not the sort of prodigy you thought you were. May I speak frankly?’ As if you've ever done anything else, I thought to myself but didn't say. ‘You see, I think that you are what's called a borderline personality, with pronounced schizoid tendencies. That sounds a lot heavier than it really is, because what our testing has proved is that you are not psychotic in any orthodox way. When your private reality is challenged, it yields to the truth. Can you see that?’

‘S'pose so.’

‘S'pose so’, that's what stayed with me after we had parted, that ‘S'pose so’, with all the sullen acquiescence it implied. But whatever I thought of him, Gyggle's therapy had been one hundred per cent successful. By forcing me to take part in rituals that were scientifically formulated the psychiatrist had logically inverted the magical process whereby my original eidetic memory had ripped the meniscus, thrusting me into the noumenal world.

That day was a turning point for me and afterwards my life improved immeasurably. The very next morning I arose and, without any premeditation, any thought at all, for the first time in adulthood I went though my morning toilet not noting the precise conformity of my actions to the schema of habit. It was the same in all the other areas of my life; removed from the need to protect myself against the horrors of enhanced eidesis, I began to live as others did, blithely and unconsciously. I didn't even have to bother with understanding that incomprehension is bliss.

I swam through events now, rather than surveyed them. I felt the corporeal elephant on whose back my world was supported amble effortlessly along, rather that it being necessary for me to lean out from the howdah of my head and goad him.

What a relief. Can you imagine it, to have grown up insane and then in one fell swoop to achieve sanity? I doubt it, because it is inconceivable, just as you cannot imagine what it would be like to be blind from birth and then gifted with sight (but of course I can). I had broken the cycle of eight thousand lifetimes and defiled the banal brahmin inside me, polluted him by contact with the testable, the material proofs of induction. I kicked pebbles ahead of me on the path up from my caravan to my mother's hotel and, with each ‘thwok’, my terrible adolescent idealism was refuted.

This all happened just before Easter, at the end of my penultimate term at Sussex. It meant that that summer, despite the pressure of finals, I was able to enjoy human company and gain succour from it, in a way that had previously been denied to me.

I found myself revising with the small colloquia that lay around the grassy precincts of the university. The young are more forgiving than adults, and despite the haughty isolation I had practised, I was far more accepted than I could have hoped for. I got on first-name terms with the other managers-in-the-making. They invited me to punk parties as noisy as tractor factories, where I swigged flat cans of beer, already shaken with a twist of cigarette butt.

In turn I took some of them back with me to Cliff Top. There we descended to the pebbled beach and filtered ourselves, giggling, into the porous sea. My mother instructed her deferential staff to serve us tea on the croquet lawn. We sat stuffing ourselves with smoked-salmon sandwiches, slurping Earl Grey, while she charmed and intimidated them with her stolen airs and purloined graces. They all thought me secure, even if they didn't find Cliff Top exactly homey.

The aunts and cousins arrived for their annual break just after I had finished my finals. By now some of the cousins had children of their own – the pullulating Hepplewhite swarm had leapt to another branch. The new kids were indistinguishable from the old and the new parents were just the same, for the female cousins had all married, or shacked up with, wispy, indefinite, ineffectual men; and the male cousins had simply married their mothers.

My mother kept them away from her country house hotel. They were confined to the ratty quarter-acre of ground, screened off by the landscapers, where the few remaining caravans crouched in shabby senescence. But they didn't seem to mind, or feel remotely affronted.

Here they lay as of old, like a colony of seals, eating scallops and rubbery whelks, swigging glasses of light ale, blowing raspberries on kidflesh sticky with vanilla ice-cream and frosted with sand.

‘Ian's going to London,’ announced my mother to one and all. ‘He's done awfully well at the university and now he's got ajob, an important job as well. Tell your aunts and cousins about your new position, Ian.’

‘Aye, tell us,’ they chorused, an antistrophe of flower-patterned dresses.

‘It's nothing really,’ I said. ‘It's not even in London proper, I'll be staying at a place called Erith Marsh. I'm going to be a marketing assistant for a company there – ‘

‘Oh aye,’ said one of the aunts, who was scrutinising a dicky-looking mussel, as if it were a suspicious traveller and she an immigration officer. ‘What's t’cumpany do then, lad?’

‘Um, well, they make valves.’

‘Valves?’

‘Yeah, valves for the oil industry. They make the shut-off valves that get put in the drill bit to prevent blow-outs.’

The aunt gestured to the far end of the sun porch where one of her sons sat. Of necessity, like all Hepplewhite men, he was shadowy, emasculated. ‘I think our Harry has wun of them, ‘said the aunt. ‘Over a year married an’ our Tracey still isn't knocked up – he must be blowin’ out all over t’place!’

The whole gang subsided into coarse guffaws, thigh-slapping, knee-pounding. It was all the same as it ever was. Except for mother, that is. She stood off to one side, her lips twisted into a grimace of disgust at their vulgarity.

When the autumn came, and I finally packed up my car and made ready to leave Cliff Top, she came over unexpectedly emotional. ‘You'll take care of yourself, now won't you, my darling?’

After a couple of weeks with her sisters, I heard the false note not just in her accent, but in her voice as well. How had my mother transformed herself into this dower-house chatelaine? This scion of the squirearchy? My curiosity was overidden, though, by a more powerful inclination, to get the hell out. So I merely downplayed my reply. ‘Of course I will, Mother, I'm only going up the road, I'll come back at weekends.’

‘Oh you say that but I know better. You'll be sucked up and seduced by the beau monde, I know you will. ‘ Pearly tears seeded themselves in the corners of her eyes.

‘I'd hardly call Erith Marsh the beau monde, Mother.’

‘I don't like to talk about it, Ian, because it's far too painful for me. You know I still miss your father. The way he went away hurts me to this day. You'll not be like him, will you?’ She went up on her toes and kissed me.

I felt the shock of the old, of the Mummy smell, the atomised odour of atavism. It welled up, reclaiming its rightful position in the hit parade of the senses: No.1 with a bullet. The corner of her mouth pressed against mine and in concert with her sharp hand, which clutched at my ample buttock, her sharper tongue slid ever so slightly between my lips.

‘Contemptible Essene, cloistral nonentity’. The Fat Controller's words rung once more in my ears as my rollerskate of a car caromed up the A22 to London. That fucking woman, the kinky Clytemnestra, how I hated her. She'd tied my cock to her apron strings in preparation for flour-dusting and rolling out. She kneaded me, all right, she wanted me transformed into puff pastry just like Daddy.

I had accepted a position with I. A. Wartberg Limited, which, as I had told the aunts, was a company responsible for the manufacture of the deep-bore drilling valves employed in the North Sea oil industry.

Mr Hargreaves at Sussex had been surprised by my choice. My grades were excellent and I had had hands-on work experience with marketing agencies in the West End. This was the early-eighties and Britain was clawing its way out of recession on the back of a demand-led boom. Marketing was the dialectical materialism of the regime and I was in an ideal position to leapfrog my way quickly towards apparatchik status.

However, cautious and pragmatic as ever, I realised that before I could take part in the airier abstractions of my chosen profession I needed to confront the nitty-gritty, the hard business of actually selling things, specific products, to industrial customers. Added to that, there was something about the Wartberg works that I found soothing the first time I went there for the interview.