My Idea of Fun (25 page)

Tiring of it she had cut across his chatter. ‘Dr Gyggle tells me that you have a court case coming up – when is it?’

‘Not for another four months. If they're lucky I might kark it before they have to hear it. That would save them both the trouble and the cost.’ He had smirked, a little boy still finding his own cynicism profound. Jane bit her lip – did she need this? Was this really someone who either wanted or deserved to be helped?

‘I don't think that's either a clever thing to say, or true.’

‘What exactly do you know about me, Jane Carter?’ He had addressed her thus, using both her names, as if somehow to place her more exactly, define her as a player.

‘Only what Dr Gyggle has told me.’

‘The man is a fucking charlatan.’ He was vehement, but didn't raise his voice. ‘All the fucking DDU people are charlatans. All of them posturing, getting their pro-fess-ion-al kicks from lording it over scum like me – smackie scum.’ He reached his striped arm across the table at this point, and freed a filtered cigarette from a prison of ten. Jane caught sight of some more of the scar tissue that featured so prominently on Richard Whittle's medical record.

‘But you're kicking the habit, aren't you? Isn't that right?’

‘Yeah, then I'm going back into the wine business. I'm gonna be a master of wine. Go every summer to fucking Jerez, to the Dordogne, to Bordeaux, every-fucking-where, tasting, living it up.’

‘Is that what you really want to do?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Have you had any experience?’ Even to her own ears Jane sounded oppressively schoolmarmish. There couldn't be more than five years separating them in age.

‘I used to work in an off licence in Richmond. I know all about wine, I read about it all the time.’ He pointed in the corner where there was a stack of glossy magazines. Jane had followed his finger and spotted, next to the battered meat safe on the grot-speckled work surface, a glass in which there rested the powerless trinity of teaspoon, squeezed bit of lemon and holy hypodermic syringe.

‘I see,’ she had said, and then, trying to be oblique, ‘Are you taking methadone?’

‘No, but I brush my teeth with fluoride fucking toothpaste.’ Whittle tittered annoyingly, sillily, and revealed long-unbrushed teeth, coated with green plaque. Jane had felt that enough was enough. She commenced the search for her heavy handbag, with every intention of quitting Richard Whittle's life for ever.

But then, he got up and as he wonkily orbited the kitchen, said, ‘I'm sorry. You see I can't really talk much more about all of this.’ He shaped a hand, encompassing the kitchen's work surfaces, like some junky lecturer telling the story of his short unsuccessful life, with the assistance of a series of horizontally mounted exhibition boards. ‘I'm all talked out. I talk to my parents, I talk to my brother, I talk to Giggly – the prat, I talk to my GP. I've got nothing left to say. For fuck's sake, I even have to talk to people in my dr–’ He stopped abruptly, a cautious look coming over his face.

‘People in your what?’

‘No, no, no one else. I just talk to all these people – and it never does any good.’ Whittle let his eyes fall forward, and, surveying a callus on his palm, he made ready to pick at it. A silence had welled up to cradle them, while outside on the sunny Heath, Jane could hear children screaming and screaming and screaming.

‘So you don't see a lot of point in talking to me?’

‘No, not really.’

Then the strange unknowable thing had happened. There was a scatter of very loud, clacking footfalls, which sounded on the parquet floor of Whittle's hallway right outside the kitchen. Next, the front door slammed with a rattling bash of glass and wood. Without having been conscious of making the decision to do so, Jane found herself running behind Whittle's slack behind, as he bolted towards the break-out.

They had both ended up jammed against the banister, leaning over to catch sight of the intruder as he fled. The sharp footfalls were still ringingly loud, like steel on stone, but it wasn't until whoever-he-was gained the penultimate flight of stairs that Jane caught sight of him. Later, attempting to recall precise detail, she could only picture the man's head – or at any rate the hat he wore. It was so distinctive, so bizarre. A shiny purple hat, covered in black polka-dots. A top hat.

All over London The Fat Controller's creatures, his confrères and familiars, his agents and accomplices, his licentiates and legates, were stirring. They were feeling his presence – or maybe it was the anticipation of his presence, as it were, his pre-presence – as someone might sense the coming of a thunderstorm. First the fall in air-pressure, then the build up of humidity, then the agonising apprehension that everything presages something else, that all there is is this awful, close waiting. But when at last it comes – what a disappointment. Rain is, after all, only rain. Sky piss. And thunder is, after all, only thunder. Just God, like a troubled pensioner, a little bit ‘confused’ and indulging his second adolescence by imagining that a rearrangement of the serviced flatlet's furniture will somehow engender a new charisma.

Harumph! D'ye see what's happening? It's time for you to retroscend again, you, Belial's babies, the cuties of the cabal, toddling down the diminishing aisles of Mothercare. It's time for you to join me, pick out a man-made thing and follow its course, use it to plot history's convention. Naturally, I don't want to give you the hard-sell on this. It could be that you have better things to do with your time than scour out the commercial scorings, follow the shooting stars of shelved lives. Nonetheless, I do guarantee some insights that would not be forthcoming were you not to indulge me. Indeed I offer, Free And With Absolutely No Obligation Whatsoever, twenty-jive percent more in the way of insights than you gained the last time you were compelled to retroscend.

If these insights aren't forthcoming, if you feel shabbily treated once you have retroscended, then please let me draw your attention to the one hundred per cent Full Redemption Clause. At any point you can ask for your time back, ask for the time back that you feel has been wasted retroscending. Go on, ask for the time back at the counter on your way out, then by gad you'll regret it! For the time that will be returned to you isn't eventful time, it isn't even time in which seemingly unrelated dull little happenings are building up to something else, it certainly won't be three hours of segued orgasms. Oh no, this is untenanted time, boarded-up time, odds and sods and little dog ends of time. Time spent staring at the half-moon of rust on the side of a rivet implanted in the bodywork of a tourist coach, while you wait at a traffic light; time used up irritably flicking at the pointy point, where, in theory, the sticky surface should peel away from its backing; time disposed of drumming your fingers; time fecklessly wasted waiting for your number to come up at the delicatessen counter. That's the sort of time I'm talking
about. So, on balance, it's probably worth your while sticking around to retroscend.

Another thing, that semantic incongruity my licentiate drew your attention to earlier, well now here's your opportunity to join in. Participate in meaning's floor exercise as it tumbles diagonally across the mat. The moment has arrived when you must abandon your armchair assertorics, wind up your after- TV-dinner speeches, and feel the sick pit of your stomach gyrate.

Steve Souvanis, proprietor and sole trader, sat in the offices of the enterprise he – and he alone – commanded. Dyeline Constructions of Clacton. He had just put down the telephone after a short and bewildering conversation with Si Arkell, planner at D.F.&.L. Associates. For no good reason that Souvanis could discern, Arkell had asked him to quote on the production of some perspex point-of-sale modules, which sounded truly preposterous. These modules were to be free-standing transparent booths, octagonal, seven feet high, and containing sort of mini-lecterns, where the booth users could stand and write, whilst both watching the world and being observed by it.

Arkell had told Souvanis that he wanted a quote for sixty of these ‘standing booths’, as he termed them, to be constructed, and then erected all over London before the end of the year. Souvanis couldn't believe his ears. True, he had done work for Arkell in the past but nothing on this scale. Souvanis specialised in the production of perspex modules that were designed to dispense leaflets and other kinds of promotional material.

In the warehouse space next to the cubbyhole office where Souvanis sat there was a ghostly jumble of these things, stacked about seemingly higgledy-piggledy. There were leaflet dispensers shaped like cake stands, like books, like racks of various sorts, like miniature suspension bridges, like famous monuments, like vehicles, like spaceships and submarines, like hatstands and coat racks, cabinets and bookcases. All of them were made out of perspex, or transparent acrylic. The overall effect was of a space filled up with insubstantiality. The display modules were not real objects hut the pale shadow of them, as platonic forms are to their derogated copies.

That morning, sitting on his bed, the previous night's alcohol converted to goo in ear, gum in eye, slurp in chest, Souvanis had struggled to fasten the waistband of his trousers. I'm struggling to fasten the waistband of my trousers, he had thought to himself. Wedging his plump little feet into his loafers he had thought to himself: Ooh, how these insteps cut in. Then, no more of it. He had breakfasted with his wife, as usual, and set off from the Barking house for the Clacton works.

Every mile or so, self-consciously, Souvanis glanced at his reflection in the rearview mirror. Same moon face, same missed tussocks of black facial hair, same browning pate, same laugh and same frown lines. What was it that felt different?

Now, in the warm confinement of the warehouse, with its paper and plastic odours commercial in their sheer intensity, it began to dawn on him. He reached, or rather snatched, for the packet of BiSoDol on top of the littered desk; and clawing it open, pushed a couple of the chalky tablets out of their cellophane sachets. Why have I got indigestion, thought Souvanis, when I even skipped lunch? He tried to ease a hand between the waistband and his belly, but couldn't.

A couple of days previously an item on the leveraged buy-out of a giant American tyre company had caught Souvanis's eye as he was flicking through the financial pages of a newspaper; a week or so earlier, he had seen an ominously familiar silhouette slide between two robed princelings, as the television news covered the denouement of a Middle-Eastern conference. Well before that, almost a month ago now, coming out of his little terraced house, Souvanis had looked up to the sky, unbidden, to find hovering there, perhaps only one or two hundred feet overhead, the Goodyear Blimp. Which, as Souvanis gawped at it, bobbed a greeting – seemingly to him alone – in the clear sky.

These several events now crammed themselves together in Souvanis's mind, forming premises like stepping stones leading to only one possible conclusion. That the man the world knew as Samuel Northcliffe, financier, bon viveur,
éminence grise
of geopolitics, and whom Steve Souvanis knew as The Fat Controller, was back.

Acid and antacid ran together, fire streams in his volcanic stomach. How like The Fat Controller to announce his arrival thus, with a supernatural attack of indigestion. Souvanis felt that his fat and flab were being addressed at some profound level, a level of primary starches, carbohydrates and sugars, by other, more potent fat, of a great lunar significance, fat that pulled his very girth around in its sweating skin girdle producing measurable torque.

The unusual request from D. F. & L. Associates was now easily explained. It was down to Northcliffe. Souvanis had learnt long long ago, when his association with The Fat Controller had begun (and who could say when that was? Perhaps the tubby little boy had been tumbling around the dusty streets of Nicosia when he tried to snatch a camera from a soft, old tourist and found that the tourist was neither soft, nor old. But speculation isn't in order here, Souvanis's relationship with The Fat Controller belongs to a narrative other than this), that almost anything unusual, anything that disturbed the even tenor of his life, could be put down to his mentor.

Souvanis sighed heavily. He looked around the empty cubby-hole and jerked his head in an explanatory fashion, at the nobody that was there. Whatever was coming his way, part of it would be good. Part of it would relate to these ‘standing booths’ required by D. F. & L. So he'd better get on and quote for them. Like some horrible kind of modern tinnitus, the fax machine in the next room started to whirr in Souvanis's head; the brush-fringed mandibles seemed to nibble at his inner ear. That would be Arkell's diagram of the booth.

‘So, if they want a quote’ – Souvanis spoke aloud, projecting his voice into the sample-clogged warehouse – ‘they can have their quote.’ He rose and went next door to receive his message.

After a long hot day in the office, the last thing Ian wanted to do was attend the S.K.K.F. Lilex product launch at Grindley's. He knew exactly what it would be like, all the rest of the S.K.K.F. Lilex product launches he had attended at Grindley's. These bloody companies seemed so certain that all they had to do was douse a crowd of hacks in lukewarm Asti Spumante in order to get a good write-up. They couldn't even be bothered to vary the venue, to try and add some spice to the dousing.

And what a day! Pouring over the Sudanese Bank of Karmarathon's ridiculous documentation, trying to get to the nub of exactly what it was their financial engineers meant by ‘an edible financial product’. What was ‘Yum-Yum'? Why, it was a credit card and a current-account banking facility; it was a share-watch service and a brokerage facility; it was a telephone-banking service and a secure-deposit facility with a high-interest yield. As he worked his way through the dull copy, the designations tumbled around one another, ‘facile service’, ‘serviceable facility’ – what possible difference could it make? So what if the dividends accruing to the customer could be transformed either into foodstuffs or foodstuffs options? So what if the very materials that made up the documentation for the product – chequebooks, credit cards and so forth – were actually, in and of themselves, edible. None of it cut any ice with Ian. He'd seen them come and seen them go, these revolutionary new personal banking products. Not one of them had had any impact on the increasingly unknowable, dilatory even, quality of money itself.