My Idea of Fun (6 page)

Mr Bateson, who worked, handily enough, at St Dunstan's, was a little ball of a man with one of those heads, capped and cupped by hair, that would look just as probable upside down. He was a barefaced grinner who seemed impervious to embarrassment, a stranger to even the simplest concept of a gaffe.

‘Ho, ho!’ he chortled at me from behind his desk. ‘What have we here, an eidetiker. Funny that, here I am researching the concept of visualisation amongst the congenitally blind’ – he indicated with a tiny hand the three blind people who sat with us in his office – ‘and they send me you! Tee-hee, tee-hee-hee-huh!’

The blind swung their antennae heads in the general direction of this prodigy, training on me three pairs of clear-lensed glasses, behind which puffs of cotton wool were imprisoned, like some awful kind of oxidisation.

Despite the fact that Mr Bateson found me intriguing and even wrote a paper on my singular gift for a professional journal, neither I, nor – more to the point – my mother, had seen any benefit in his mind games. His experimental method, which I was to meet again later in life, entailed setting me tasks. I had either to draw objects that were presented to me for a split-second, or else draw pictures from the further recesses of my memory. He then went further, getting me mentally to image complex forms and rotate them in my mind, much in the manner that I requested of you earlier. About the time I left primary school for Varndean, the sessions petered out altogether.

I gave up on eidetiking, except as a party turn. At Varndean some boys could set light to their farts, others could stub cigarettes out on their tongues, I could take a glance at a page of text and then recite it from memory. Unfortunately this didn't in any way aid my comprehension. I was not a successful student.

Sex galvanised my eidesis, sending it straight to the top of my agenda. I can understand why. After all, sex is a language of sorts and insofar as eidesis goes hand-in-hand with autism, why, here was a form of communication I couldn't make use of. In the realm of the senses there was no real identity available to me, only a series of impostures bound in to the repetitive action, like jerking hands to jiving cocks.

Now I found that I could also introduce myself into these formerly static visions, as a purposive if disembodied agent, I couldn't stop. The Roedean incident was only the start of eidetic voyaging – soon it was my principal form of travel.

It became a compulsion and a very scary one. Because the discoveries I made were not to my taste at all. While it was true that the human anatomy – as I had suspected – did not conform to either the lurid colours of pornography or the desiccated line drawings of textbooks, I was not prepared for all these revelations of viscous complexity. I wanted human flesh to remain as obvious and undifferentiated as that of fruit. Worse still, I soon found myself eidetiking involuntarily, acting out aggression.

At school Holland, an arrogant and self-satisfied boy, moved to cut me off from the clique in which I had gained some slender acceptance. For two or three days I stalked the woodblock corridors choked with self-pity. Then, caught unawares, I found myself eidetically slamming his gullet against the sharp jam of the classroom door. The vacuum-nozzle ridging of his slashed oesophagus was far more revolting than anything I could have invented. In some lawless and incomprehensible way, although the material, the embodied, Holland was walking free, whistling and swearing, what I had seen had to be real.

Because of these outrages I found myself, once again, feeling marginalised, cut out from the herd. I sought frantically for methods of controlling my gift, ways of staving off chaos. I became certain that if I didn't do something I might be sucked out of the fuselage of reality altogether and sent rolling and tumbling into the void.

I found salvation in the development of personal rituals. And I would guess that, even had he not rumbled in another way, Mr Broadhurst would have soon spotted what I was up to merely because of my total self-absorption that autumn and winter.

I had no guidelines for these rituals, so they were a creative act on my part – possibly my most creative ever.

I devised a galaxy of interleaved physical and mental acts that it was necessary for me to perform throughout the day. They went all the way from the sublime to the mundane, from the profound to the ridiculous. It became vital for me to piss, belch, wank and shit in a certain manner, while exercising my way through mental scales.

The feelings that people had for me I now saw as ductile things, influenced not just by daisy petals (love and love not in a circle of deceit), but by the number on a bus: if it's a 14 everything will be all right between us, and if it's a 74 the terminus is here.

All of these rituals were important. In perfecting them I glimpsed the many versions that were packed into my one thin reality. I toyed with travel to distant worlds, I even thought of sliding down the spiral banister of time itself.

The purely bodily rituals were the most important. They were crucial if I was to avoid eidetiking myself, with all that that would imply. I was terrified that I might inadvertently compose a view of my own body and then unpack my sense of it from within. Can you imagine a worse torment? No, somehow I doubt it. These rituals were also designed to keep off prying eyes. There might be others like me, similarly endowed. Like any self-conscious boy I had a horror of being seen naked in the changing room, or someone catching an up-and-under view of my snub-snot nose. I was not going to be used as another's plaything.

While it's true that some of the rituals I devised were aimed at empowering me in ways that were not natural, I hardly ever used them. I developed them in response to normal adolescent hungers, for peer-group acceptance, parental approval and the like. When things did go wrong – as with Holland – I resorted to wish-fulfilling pictorial violence, but left the will to power of truly dark ritual right out of it.

My more fantastical rituals need not bother us here, concerned as they were with things that we know to be impossible, or at any rate beyond the reach of a’ Sussex boy in the early seventies. Although the time-travel rituals are of some interest, for my eidetic skill was at least a form of temporal manipulation. This I realised when I found that it didn't matter how long I roamed in my visual fugues, I always returned directly to the appropriate now. Of course this was not time-travel
per se,
more like time-tailoring, the insertion of a pleat or a flare into the apparently straight leg of time, but it was a beginning.

We come now to the thought-rituals, and if I have had difficulty retaining your credulity so far I may hope now to regain it. By thought-rituals I mean simply those systemised patterns of thought that go with wishing, hoping and desiring. Surely it is these little mental ticks that keep us all functioning, growing, adding rings to our trunks? They are formulae of the kind: Think X and Y will occur – or indeed vice versa: Think Y and X will not occur. Magic formulae. We all have the queasy sense that an all-seeing eye is poised in the best of all possible vantages, whilst we inhabit the worst of all possible worlds; and although we may admit that rationally these mental habits cannot work, nevertheless we cannot abandon them, nor our faith in them.

So much for the rituals. I developed them – as I say – to ward off the intimations of chaos that came along with my revived eidetiking, and I developed them very quickly. Within a month of the Roedean incident most of this schema was in place. That is why my encounter with Mr Broadhurst, the first of his new dispensation, happened as it did.

It was a leaden, autumnal Sunday afternoon; I was standing on the beach beneath Cliff Top. I had come down the concrete stairs with great care, pacing myself according to an arithmetic progression of my own devising. I was silently incanting, running through the chants that I felt certain would exorcise my humiliating spirits. Seaweed and empty detergent bottles garnished my hush-puppied feet. Suddenly I was conscious of having someone with me, standing right next to me. I started and turned to see Mr Broadhurst, but he was only just descending to the beach and at least four hundred yards away.

‘Ah! There you are, Ian,’ he bellowed. ‘I've been looking at you, so I thought I would come and find you.’ The words issued directly from his chest, as if a loud hailer had been set into his ample bosom. I was struck immediately by two things. Firstly, the fluidity of his movements as he came rolling across the shingle towards me. It revived the suspicion I had had that, as I was growing older, Mr Broadhurst had acquired a second wind, or at any rate ascended to a physiological plateau where the ageing process was stilled. When he first came to live at Cliff Top he had complained constantly about the walk to the shops, how the wind and rain seemed to drive right through him, how the winter chill played havoc with his rheumatism. I had only ever observed him making longer forays on his Tuesday and Thursday trips to St Dunstan's and these, he claimed, took it out of him grievously. So much so that he had to spend most of the rest of the time ‘recuperatin”. I had often seen him, deep in recuperation, lying across the great white bed in his caravan. A Cumberland sausage of a man, the lurid colours of the television reflected on his wide screen of a face.

The second thing was his suit, which was a rather snappy hound's-tooth-check item cut fiendishly tight. As I have remarked, Mr Broadhurst's habitual clothing was that of an unsuccessful undertaker. To see him dressed smartly, if archaically, was shocking.

‘Mmm-mm!’ he exclaimed, drawing in a big gout of air and then noisily expelling it through his nose. ‘That does me good. I always miss the seaside when I'm hidden away from it during the summer.’ I was shocked. Why was he doing this, alluding so shamelessly to the on season? Did he want me to ask him where he had been? Since his earlier embargo on the subject I had often tried to imagine where it was that Mr Broadhurst might go, but all the likely alternatives seemed inconceivable. Mr Broadhurst naked on some foreign beach? Mr Broadhurst photographing the Taj Mahal? Mr Broadhurst's relatives? Even I couldn't form the flimsiest mental pictures of the on-season Mr Broadhurst. He was such a conspicuously self-contained person, so poised in the moment. I found it easier to think of him as temporarily entombed in some salty cavern under Cliff Top itself, in a state of suspended animation from Easter through to late September.

Before I could take the unfamiliar mental steps necessary for framing such a probing question he had run on. ‘I was up St Dunstan's yesterday, lad, and the Director asked me to clear out some of the old files, you know, defunct paperwork and such. While I was so engaged I came across these.’ He pulled a buff file from the inside of his tightly buttoned jacket. ‘They're yours, aren't they? I wager that you are an eidetiker, like me, aren't you, boy?’

I took the folder gingerly from his banana-bunch hand and opened it. The drawings were the ones I had done for Mr Bateson. They looked familiarly unfamiliar, like some solid form of
déjà vu.
The personal histories of children have that quality, don't they? They seem only slenderly moored to their possessor, on the verge of drifting away and tethering themselves to another.

‘Y-y-yes . . . I s'pose so. I . . . I haven't thought about it for so long. It isn't important.’

‘Isn't important!’ he roared. ‘Come, boy, don't cheek me, we both know just how important it is.’ To emphasise this point Mr Broadhurst ground one of the plastic bottles with a foot-long foot inside a two-ton shoe. It rackled against the pebbles.

‘What I mean, Mr Broadhurst, is that I don't use it, I don't do drawings any more. I'm not even going to do art for O level, it's not one of my options.’

‘O level? Oh, I see what you mean, school certificate. No, no, that's not what I meant at all. What these drawings represent is nothing but the merest of gimmickery, freakish carny stuff. Any of us who has real potential soon leaves off turning tricks for psychologists. After all, it is not we who are the performing dogs, but they. No, no, I mean pictures in here.’ Mr Broadhurst tapped the side of his head, forcefully, with his index finger, as if he were requesting admission to his own consciousness.

I was chilled. How much could he know? Did he suspect the uses to which I had put my over-vivid pictorial imagination? Could he perhaps have seen my projected form, hovering through the portals of Roedean? How humiliating.

But Mr Broadhurst said nothing to indicate that he knew. Instead he took the folder of eidetic drawings away from me, tucked them back inside his jacket and invited me to tea in his caravan.

‘Come, lad,’ he said. ‘We will take tea together and speak of the noumenon, the psi and other more heterogeneous phenomena. Behave yourself, comport yourself any more than adequately, and I may be prepared partially to unpack the portfolio of my skill for your edification. Naturally this will be nothing compared with the full compass of my activities, but it will suffice to be, as it were, an introductory offer.’

So began my apprenticeship to Mr Broadhurst. So began, in a manner of speaking, my real life. I had crossed the abyss and henceforth nothing would be the same again. In between
The Big Match
and
Songs of Praise,
time turned itself inside out, the loop became a Möbius strip and I was condemned for ever to a life of living on the two sides that were one. Suitable really that this extreme occurrence should be meted out thus: measurable by televisual time.

Many years later, grown up and employed in the marketing industry – like my father before me – I wonder whether or not this could be construed as some kind of Faustian pact? How else can I explain my utter enslavement to the man? But this could not have been. No thirteen year old, untouched by religion – Monist or Manichean – and merely browsing in the secular snack bar, could have known enough even to frame such a possibility.

No, the truth was more disturbing. Mr Broadhurst got me, got me at just the right time. Got me when I was still prey to aimless washes of transcendence, when my consciousness still played tricks with me, when I was a voodoo child who could stand up against the Downs and chop them down with the edge of my hand. Then he played me carefully like a fish, reeling me in slowly to the truth about himself. Slowly and jokily. Rewarding me with commonplace tricks, displays of prestidigitation and telekinesis, against small tasks, errands that I could do for him.