My Idea of Fun (17 page)

The great galvanised iron shed where the valves were made was a cacophonous and tumultuous place, full of Stakhanovite workers torturing plugs of super-heavy metal with screaming drill bits. The adjoining suite of offices where I reported was inadequately sound-proofed, so that I felt myself both surrounded and shot through by the very processes that I would be attempting to market.

There was also Wartberg himself: he set the pattern for all my future employers. His father was a German-Jewish refugee and his mother Welsh, but Wartberg was an aggressive anglophile, given to wearing tweed suits and blathering on about flower growing, law and order, the decline of British standards (he had just obtained one for his best-selling valve), the prohibitive business rate and so on.

I warmed to him instantly. He ran the company as if he had suddenly and unexpectedly found himself on the footplate of a runaway engine. He was constantly dashing from the shop floor to the offices, to his car, to his suppliers, to his customers and back again. He was small, sweaty and effusive with shiny brown hair and eyes. We got on very well together and when after only two months with the company my immediate boss – the marketing manager, a sallow individual with a Solihull whine – suffered a perforated ulcer (I couldn't prevent myself from eidetiking this, the wall of his duodenum like a rusty car door, sharp flakes of oxidised tissue spearing into him), I got his job.

Of course this doesn't cover everything, this simple schema-Bye-bye, Mummy, Whittingtonesque entry to London – wasn't all that was going on, oh no. My therapy with Dr Gyggle had continued and now entered a new phase.

After the deconstruction of my eidetic capability, Gyggle had insisted that I go on seeing him. We had continued with our Thursday-afternoon appointments for the duration of my university career. ‘I wish to build up a more intimate relationship with you, Ian,’ the hairy shrink had told me. ‘I know that you are predisposed to leave things here; I have employed purely technical means to help you rid yourself of something you wish to regard as a technical problem but behind this eidetic delusion we both know there lies an emotional reality. To employ a piece of Freudian jargon, I do not think you will be able to attain full genitality unless we investigate this realm, hmm?’

‘Full genitality?’

‘A successful emotional and sexual relationship.’

‘Oh, oh that.’ Uncanny, the way he pinpointed my preoccupation. For, if there was one aspect of the Fat Controller's legacy that still troubled me severely it was the sex thing. Specifically the grotesque threat that were I to penetrate a woman I would lose my penis.

‘What are you frightened of, Ian?’ He probed me psychologically, whilst laying siege with the battering ram of his biro to the airy battlements of the beard.

I thought to myself: Sit this one out, he'll let it lie. I knew that shrinks were meant to respect the inability of their patients to express certain fundamental anxieties, that the whole thrust of their endeavour was to move around the edifice of such neuroses, gradually excavating their foundations in memory with a sort of verbal teaspoon.

But Gyggle wasn't that kind of shrink; he kept on at me. ‘I know that you've built up some kind of sustaining narrative behind your eidetic delusion – it cannot but be otherwise. You've told me that you spent your adolescence in isolation, actually codifying every little bodily habit and cognitive loop – ‘

‘Yes! And I told you why, because I was frightened of eidetiking myself. What bothers me is what bothers everyone else, nothing special. It's the same common fear that I will fall apart, physically and emotionally, that I will be reduced to a pile of tattered pulp, that I will never be loved by anyone, that I will fail, like . . . like – ‘

‘Like your father?’

‘Yeah, like him, the contemptible Essene.’

‘I'm sorry? What did you say?’

‘Oh, nothing, nothing.’

Gyggle also had some good news for me – he was to accompany me to London. He was going back into the National Health Service and had taken a consultancy in a drug dependency unit based at the Lurie Foundation Hospital for Dipsomaniacs on Hampstead Road.

‘Not that I'm particularly interested in junkies, you understand.’ Gyggle was driving me along the coast road to Brighton as he spoke. He had taken me under his featherless wing to this extent, giving me lifts and sharing with me some of his unusual theories. ‘It's just that these kind of obsessive-compulsive personalities provide me with research fodder. Since no one seems able to do anything with these people they won't mind what I get up to, tee-heel’ He giggled girlishly, as if he were contemplating some impromptu lobotomies, and the beard, which flowed down over the steering wheel, rustled suggestively in the hollow socket of the speedometer. ‘It'll be OK for you to go on seeing me there. I can arrange for you to be an anonymous patient, so that it won't interfere with your prospects at all.’ He turned to me and gave me his habitual smile-implying parting of the beard. I tried to look grateful.

The whole time that I was working at Erith with Wartberg I would journey right across London every Friday afternoon to see Gyggle at his new office. I was grateful. I came to trust Gyggle – and even like him. After all, he had managed to dismantle the magical aspects of my eidesis and now he began to chew away at the very grist of what he termed my ‘delusionary apparatus’.

It took many months more for me to feel safe enough to talk to him about The Fat Controller, but there came a time, when the memory of our last vertiginous encounter had dimmed, that I became prepared to risk it. Gyggle was, of course, entranced. I knew that for him The Fat Controller confirmed it – I was his Wolf Man, his Anna O. He told me as much.

‘If it weren't so entirely destructive of your recovery, Ian, I would love to publish,’ he said to me. ‘For I don't think any clinician has ever had the privilege of witnessing such a complex example of hysteria. This man, Mr Broadhurst, who you transformed into your “Fat Controller”, your personified id, you understand now what he really was?’

‘Well, if I accept your hypothesis that all my subsequent experiences were hysterical embellishments, I suppose he was just a mild eccentric, an ordinary seaside retiree.’

‘Of course, he's probably dead by now.’

‘Oh I doubt that. ‘

‘Why? Why do you doubt it?’

There was the rub. I doubted it because whatever the efficacy of Dr Gyggle's treatment and however convincing his explanation of how a lonely and fucked-up boy built up a delusion both to compensate for the lack of a father and punish himself for his own Oedipal crime, I still couldn't convince myself that I was entirely rid of my mage.

He continued to dog me. He was a black penumbra in the corner of my visual field, a shadow that chased the sunlight, the very chiaroscuro of the commonplace. Sometimes, sitting eating a sandwich on a park bench or jolting on the top deck of a bus through South London, I would hear his voice echo through my inscape. His jolly, fat man's voice, expansive and chilling. My inability to unbelieve in him hung on to me by the jaws, as I ascended the corporate ladder.

When I tired of writing press releases on new lube concepts I left Wartberg's valve business to go to the Angstrom Corporation, where I worked on the launch of a new biscuit, the Pink Finger. After three years there I was head-hunted by a marketing agency, D. F. & L. Associates, which was based just north of the City. Here I took up a position with the grand title of ‘Consultant’. My job was to prepare the groundwork for a revolutionary new financial product.

In seven years I had as many new cars, each one more highly powered and larger than the last. I became a wearer of double-breasted suits, a leaner on bars, a discusser of interest rates. All to some avail, for I now sank gratefully into my own assembly life line, sank into the forgetfulness of my own habitual patterns.

At Easter and Christmas I still went home to Cliff Top. Mummy had retired from the hotel business. She had made enough money to maintain Cliff Top as the substantial manor house it had become. No matter that it was an ersatz creation – Queen Anne impregnated by Prince Charles – she believed in her
haute
credentials. And although I had disappointed her by going into ‘trade’, I was still the son of the house. As we sat drinking sherry together and I watched her acquire the jowled ovine features of all elderly English gentlewomen, I found it hard to summon up myoid anger. I even found it difficult to believe that she had ever been in cahoots with Mr Broadhurst.

She spoke of him occasionally, as if blithely unaware of any possible alter-egos that he might have. ‘I had a card from Mr Broadhurst the other day,’ she bleated. ‘You remember him, dear?’

‘Yes, Mama, how could I forget him.’ (And how could Gyggle have been stupid enough to imagine that he was dead?)

‘He's getting on now, of course, poor man.’

‘Yes, he must be very old now. ‘

‘He tells me he may have to go into a rest home. He can't really manage by himself any more.’ Apparently he had become nothing more than this, forage for commonplace family small talk.

And as for those alter-egos, his trade name ‘Samuel Northcliffe’ still cropped up in the financial and marketing press. He was a member of syndicates involved in leveraged buy-outs, he was a prominent Lloyd's underwriter, he was a consultant for this corporation and an adviser to that emirate. But when I concentrated on the postage-stamp-sized photographs bearing his name that had started to appear, I could no longer be certain that he and The Fat Controller were one and the same. It seemed far more likely that, as Dr Gyggle suggested, I had become aware of Samuel Northcliffe separately and incorporated information I had gleaned from the newspapers into my fantasy.

Dr Gyggle wasn't satisfied with my progress. He regarded my attainment of ‘full genitality’ as the ultimate goal of his therapy and he was determined that I should enjoy a complete cure. Not until the spectre of the Fat Controller was fully exorcised from my psyche would I be able to form an adult relationship.

‘I'm convinced that the resolution of all this lies buried deep in your unconscious,’ he told me as we sat chatting in his office at the DDU. ‘I can talk to you, you can talk to me. We can try all sorts of techniques to get in touch with the hinterland of your psyche but my feeling is that, unless you your self are prepared to voyage there, it will prove impossible to extirpate this negative cathexis. Somewhere deep down, your idea of what it is to be a person, to truly engage in the world, has become critically interfused with childish fantasy. Your choice of iconography is of course highly significant in this context. ‘

To begin with Gyggle tried me on sensory deprivation. He had hijacked a proportion of the Unit's budget to buy a sensory-deprivation tank which he kept in a basement of the hospital. It was such wacky financial apportionments as this that – or so he claimed to me – made him a voguish and sought-after practitioner.

Unfortunately, whatever remnants of my eidetic ability remained made me entirely unsuitable for this particular therapy. Going down to the hospital basement and disrobing in a utility room full of bleach bottles and moulting mops was a tantilisingly prosaic prelude to my voyages into inner space. But once Gyggle had positioned me in the tank – which crouched there like a miniature submarine, or a twenty-first-century washing machine – and swung shut the rubber-flanged door, I found it impossible to lose – and therefore as he hoped, reencounter – my self.

The lulling cushion of blood-heat saline solution I floated on did help me to neglect those bodily fears that were so much a part of me. Awareness of time and even of whether I was waking or sleeping soon drained away. I would sink down into a velvet void so entire and impenetrable that whether it was I or I was it, became moot. But then, just at the point where my doubts about the external world had become a crescendo and I was certain that revelation was nigh, some glitch would occur. Either the salt would sting into a cut or raw spot on my body, bringing back bodily feeling in one fell swoop, or else, from somewhere in the bowels of building, my ears, questing for the remotest of stimuli, would pick up on the sound of a toilet being flushed, or perhaps a trolley banging against a wall. In a split-second I would build on this particle of noise and construct an idea of the kind of world that could produce such a phenomenon. Needless to say, this new world always bore an uncanny resemblance to the one I had so recently abandoned.

Gyggle wasn't to be put off by this; instead of retreating or retrenching he suggested even more radical measures. ‘It isn't altogether ethical,’ he said, while watching me shower hexagonal salt crystals from my inner thighs, ‘but then you and I haven't had an orthodox therapeutic relationship.’

‘What isn't altogether ethical?’

‘They used to advocate it for withdrawing heroin addicts naturally they had little success. Then they tried it with various kinds of depression, even psychoses. Invariably the cure proved far worse than the disease.’

‘What the hell are you talking about?’

‘Deep sleep, that's what I want you to let me do, Ian. I want to put you under for at least forty-eight hours. I think that only by maximising long periods of REM, or dream sleep, will we be able to summon up this demon of yours. Then once he's rematerialised we will be able to fight him, hmm?’

Why did I let him persuade me to do this? The answer is simple. Sure, I had a good job and a comfortable home, I even had people who invited me to their houses. I had the trappings of success, of social acceptability. I had got over a particularly traumatic childhood and adolescence and looked set fair for a modicum of stability as an adult. But there was this sex problem, of course, and there was something else, a rootlessness, an atemporality about my life.

Try as I might to be in the present, to subsume myself to history, to see myself as just another corpuscle coursing along the urban arteries, I couldn't. There was an anachronistic feel to my whole life, a kind of alienation that I couldn't quite understand. It came out with particular force in my work. It didn't matter how innovative the products I set out to market actually were, I could not prevent myself from seeing them already in some illimitable bazaar of the far future, long obsolete and hopelessly dated, so much cosmological car-boot-sale fodder.