My Idea of Fun (34 page)

With ‘Yum-Yum’ all but withdrawn from the market I didn't expect to come across him any more in my work; and with my soul, as it were, sorted, I felt certain that his interventions in my more personal life were over as well, over at a mundane level, that is. But this morning I had a call from him in the office: ‘You can call me the Tiresias of Transmigration,’ his oracular voice didgeridooed down the phone line, ‘for I understand the riddles of death's destructive art.’

‘Is it anything important?’ I said. ‘I'm rather busy.’

‘I thought you might like to come by the Lurie Hospital at lunchtime,’ he boomed. ‘Gyggle and I have orchestrated a little ceremony which you might care to witness. It's most instructive, a very efficacious ritual. We have drilled the jetsam for weeks and, now we are certain that they'll be able to handle it, we wish to proceed.’

‘With what exactly?’

‘Why’ – he sounded almost coy – ‘with the North London Book of the Dead, of course.’

Against my better nature I was intrigued. At noon I left off the marketing proposal I was writing for a new chain of restaurants to be called ‘Just Lettuce’ and took a cab over to Euston.

I found them both in Gyggle's office. The beard was looking rather greasy and bedraggled, he couldn't have been taking care of it. Gyggle was looking tired as well, so possibly it was the other way round, the beard hadn't been taking care of him. More shocking still was the appearance of my mage – he had reverted entirely to how I remembered him in the early-seventies, the period when he had first come to live at Cliff Top. He even had on the same snappy check suit, the one he was wearing on the day I first became his apprentice.

‘Ah, there you are!’ he bellowed. He was puffing on a cheap panatella and obviously not liking it too well. ‘Come in, come in, don't hover like that, boy, what's the matter with you? You look as if you've seen a ghost.’

‘Um, err, I don't quite know how to put it – ’

‘Is it my appearance that you're goggling at? Come on, lad, spit it out, vomit it forth, squeeze those lexical pips, in a word: tell me.’

‘Yes, yes it is.’

‘And you're wondering what it betokens, aren't you?’

‘Yes, I am.’

‘Well, all in good time but we're not here for that, we're here to watch Gyggle's junkies go through their paces – well, Hieronymus?’

‘Certainly, Samuel, they're all assembled,’ sibilated the hirsute soul doctor. ‘Shall we go through?’

He led us through the series of corridors, with their furrowed linoleum floors, and ushered us into a small, cubicle-like room, devoid of furniture save for a wonky table and a couple of institutional chairs moulded from heavy plastic. There was a speaker of some kind attached to the wall and next to it the door of a cupboard which was set in to the wall. Before departing Gyggle opened this door; behind it was an odd window, with longitudinal stripes running down it. ‘What's that?’ I asked.

‘A one-way window,’ he replied as the beard led him from the room.

Left alone, The Fat Controller and I sat down. He searched out a packet of cheap cellophane-wrapped panatellas and took one without even looking. He lit it, using a non-safety match which he struck on the sole of his shoe, and after slobbering on its end for a while said, ‘Filthy habit, I think I'll give it up soon.’

‘I'm sorry?’ I couldn't imagine what he was talking about.

‘Smoking, you booby, what the hell do you think I mean?’ But before I could digest this latest strangeness, there was a crackle from the speaker. We turned to the window and I saw that a group of Gyggle's junkies were assembled in the next room.

The voice that had triggered the crackle was Gyggle's – he was calling his group therapy session to order. Several junkies were sitting in a rough circle on tatty upholstered chairs. Their feet were propped up on the metal boxes that served for ashtrays at the DDU and they were all smoking, using three steepled fingers to bring the tortured filters to their bruised lips. Even I, who know little about drugs, could tell that they were all high on heroin. Several of them could barely keep their eyes open and one, a rather stupid-looking black guy, whom I vaguely recognised, was completely crashed out.

Gyggle was saying, ‘You're all familiar with the form here – let's go round the group and introduce ourselves, shall we? At the same time I'd like you to tell me what stage you're at in your detox, OK?’ The beard wavered around the circle like a bogus divining rod and settled on a thin-featured man who wore his hair tied back in a ponytail.

‘John,’ said the man, ‘eighty mls.’

‘I know who that man is,’ I whispered to The Fat Controller. ‘Can you see his jaw, where it's all kind of bubbling and melted – ’

‘Of course I can, I may be old but I'm not blind.’

‘Well, I did that.’

‘Did you?’

‘Yeah, I twisted all the loose skin round with a ratchet and then I smoothed over the folds with a soldering iron. Good, isn't it?’

‘It certainly looks like a professional job. I congratulate you.’

‘Billy,’ the next junky round was saying, ‘and I'm down to sixty mls.’ The words slurred together.

‘Now, Billy,’ said Gyggle sternly, ‘are you sure you haven't had any gear? Because if you haven't you're getting too stoned for someone on a reduction detox and we'll have to cut your methadone down a little faster, hmm?’

‘Uhn?’ grunted Billy, then as the realisation dawned on him that he was to be deprived of something, ‘Nah, nah, I'm not, honest, Doc. To tell the truth I'm sick today, I'm clucking.’ His grey-black hands went to his shoulders which he clutched spasmodically by way of illustrating this, but Gyggle had already given up on him and moved on round the circle.

‘I recognise him as well,’ I said, ‘that black guy, the one who's fallen asleep now.’

‘Well of course you do,’ replied The Fat Controller. ‘That's why I asked you to come. All of these junkies were used by Gyggle and me to construct the Land of Children's Jokes, my adipose little acolyte. A whack of heroin-induced hypnogogia is worth a whole year of ordinary dream states. It's because of this that Gyggle took the consultancy here, we wanted to have a good stock of it on hand.’

‘I see.’

‘The spotty one in the sleeveless anorak is Richard Whittle, it's him that your good wife was meant to be befriending. His mind is especially ductile and suggestible – ’

‘Yes, it's coming back to me, the plump woman in the orange skirt is Big Mama Rosie and the gypsy-looking type is her old man.’

‘Martin.’

‘That's right, Martin. It's strange seeing them all here in this place.’

‘Well, my dear boy, if you think that is strange, I wonder what you'll make of this.’ He was struggling to his feet as he spoke and with some difficulty – the plastic chair had become wedged on his behind. I helped him to free it and rise. It was the first time that I had ever seen the big man appear either absurd or ungainly.

He crossed to the other side of the little room and opened the door of another one-way window. ‘Come over here and take a decco,’ he said. ‘I think this will amuse you.’ Through this window there was a very different kind of group going on. Hal Gainsby was there, together with Patricia Weiss from the agency; they had a gang of the usual types who turn out for this kind of thing, a D.F. & L. naming group, that is. ‘My God!’ I exclaimed. ‘What are they doing here?’

‘Rather droll, isn't it?’ he said, toying with another cut-price cigar. ‘In one room the junkies and in the other the marketeers. Quite a contrast on the face of it but fundamentally they're all engaged in the same activity – ’

‘We concede,’ Gainsby was saying, his Boston drawl only sounding marginally more distorted by the speaker than I knew it to be anyway, ‘that the test-marketing in London hasn't gone down too well but we don't accept that that has anything to do with the product itself. We feel certain that if we can only – ’

‘You don't mean to say you've set up another naming group for “Yum-Yum”, here at the DDU?’ I was incredulous.

‘I don't see what's so funny about that,’ he snapped. ‘The hospital has to pay its own way now, like any other opt-out trust. Gyggle organises a sideline in room rental which I informed Gainsby about. It's a perfectly convenient place to hold a naming group. Perhaps if you'd paid a little more attention to the edible financial product in the first place we wouldn't be still banging away at it. But this is all by-the-by, Gainsby's isn't the naming group I wanted you to see – ’

‘You mean there's another one?’

‘Oh yes indeed, most definitely, one I think you should sit in on, but we have to bide our time, we need a particular sort of introduction to this naming group.’ He turned back to the other window and sat down again. I joined him.

‘Nah,’ Big Mama Rosie was plainting. ‘Nah, I'm that far gone I can't find a vein any more.’ She regarded her arms balefully as if they had been foisted on her during the night by a wildcat team of transplant surgeons.

‘Bullshit,’ said Gyggle. ‘The only reason you can't find a vein is because you're too damn fat. Anyway, we're not here to talk about your drug taking, we're here for another purpose entirely. How's he getting on?’ He nodded to where Beetle Billy was slumped.

John got up and walked over to him, he reached down and peeled back one of Billy's eyelids with his thumb and then let it fall. Next he felt for a pulse in the VW repair man's neck. ‘He's fading fast,’ said John, ‘there's hardly any pulse.’

‘Excellent,’ said Gyggle. ‘Come on now, you all know what to do.’ The junkies shifted their chairs around until they were grouped in a circle at Billy's head.

I said, ‘What exactly is going on?’ but The Fat Controller just shushed me, one frankfurter finger to the roll of his lips. In the other room the junkies started to mutter – at first I couldn't make out what they were saying but then it began to dawn on me, they were reciting the names of products:

‘Band-Aid,’ said John. ‘Chap Stick,’ said Big Mama Rosie. ‘Hoover,’ said Richard Whittle. ‘Coke,’ said a stringy-looking type in steel-rimmed spectacles, ‘Dunkin’ Donuts,’ said a Lycra-wearer, ‘Holiday Inn,’ said Ethel the brass, ‘Dr Scholl's,’ said Dr Gyggle through the beard and then they went round the circle again: ‘Nintendo’, ‘Biro’, ‘Big Mac’, ‘Painstyler’, ‘Nescafé’, ‘Jiffy bag’, ‘Letraset’ and then again: ‘Perrier’, ‘Polaroid’, ‘Walkman’, ‘Xerox’, ‘Magic Marker’, ‘Visa’, chanting product name after product name until their voices merged into one incantatory hum.

Eventually I said to The Fat Controller, ‘I've got it, I know what they're doing, all these products are generics, aren't they?’

‘Quite so. This is the North London Book of the Dead, a set of instructions to be recited to the dying, in order that they should not return, in order that their immortal souls should be cancelled out, voided, put on the spike, deleted, wiped and erased utterly beyond recall. You see, my dear boy, as you have always suspected, I am the very Lama of Lost Souls, I reduce the human to the material, utterly and completely. And now, if I'm not much mistaken, we're ready for the off.’

The junkies had stopped chanting. John was feeling for Billy's pulse again. He straightened up saying, ‘He's had it, popped his clogs, karked it, he's run down the flag, he's retired to the pavilion, he's collected his watch, he's kicked the proverbial bucket and marked his mortal card, in short, he's elsewhere.’

‘Shall we join him?’ asked my guru.

And then we were back in the Land of Children's Jokes and The Fat Controller was saying to Doug, ‘Give that coon-boy a shake, will you, I can't stand people dropping off in my naming groups.’

‘Hold up,’ I cried, ‘we've been here before, I've heard you say that before.’

’Plus ça change plus c'est la même chose –
what goes round comes around, my dear boy, must you be so obdurate?’ The new scene seemed to have perked him up a bit, he'd even managed to find an old Voltiger somewhere in the pockets of the decrepid check suit, which at least had the virtue of being to scale with his hand even if it was rather tatty and coated with lint. He lit it with the feeble flare of a cheap disposable lighter.

We were in the reception area to the Land of Children's Jokes, the swimming pool off the Roman Road that The Fat Controller had obtained the use of by corrupt means, for even more corrupt purposes. The same advertisements for children's swimming classes and work-out sessions were stuck up on the noticeboards, we were sitting on the same tiny chairs, eight of them had been pulled out to form a ragged circle.

Doug got up from where he sat opposite me and the poor man banged his spade on the fire bell again: ‘Ting!’. ‘Oh for Christ's sake,’ snapped The Fat Controller, ‘can't you mind out for that bloody thing? I would have thought you'd managed to get the hang of it by now – surely it's like judging the width of a car.’

‘Well no,’ Doug replied, ‘not exactly.’ The impact had shifted the spade in his head and he was clearly in pain; nevertheless he got up and walked round to where Beetle Billy sat dead to the world.

To the world maybe, but not to the Land of Children's Jokes. Doug shook him by the shoulder and he stirred, groaned, blinked a few times and then sat upright rubbing his eyes. ‘That's better,’ said The Fat Controller. ‘Now, are we all here, can we begin?’

I looked around the circle, they were all there. Besides Beetle Billy and Doug, there was Pinky, the thin man, the baby chewing razor blades and another baby I hadn't seen when I was there last. This baby was about the same age as the red one and was sitting in the corner over by the entrance to the changing rooms. I couldn't see its face because it had a plastic bag on its head, filmed with condensation and tightly fastened under its chin. Despite the suffocating hood the baby was still breathing vigorously. With each of its inhalations and exhalations the bag expanded and contracted. ‘Sweet, isn't it,’ said The Fat Controller indicating the poor mite with the wet end of his stogie.

‘S'pose so, but what's all this about anyway?’

‘We need to think up a name for you, Ian, that's what it's all about.’

‘Yes,’ chimed in Pinky. ‘Now you're coming here to stay, to be with us permanently, you need to have a proper designation like the rest of us – ’