Will Self's Collected Fiction, Vol. 1 (2014), page 51
part #1 of Will Self's Collected Fiction Series
‘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.
Remember, gentle reader (I say ‘gentle’ but what I really mean is pusillanimous reader, guarded reader, reader walled off against darker suasion), that this boy was like a roll of sausage meat enfolded in fluffy pastry. I had no access to the world of male empowerment. I had no role model. Mr Broadhurst was the solution to this deficiency. Remember also that he was a fixture of the off season, for me naturally conjoined with the worlds of school, formalised friendship, wanty-wanty and getty-getty.
However, that particular afternoon we just had tea together and played eidetic games. It didn’t take very long for Mr Broadhurst to prise my secret out of me.
‘You do what you say? You do that? Oh how very clever, how terribly droll!’ The interior of his caravan was capacious enough, but even so Mr Broadhurst turned it into a doll’s house. When he moved the whole chassis whoozed on its sprung suspension. ‘And you say that you discover things, boy – things that you could not have known otherwise. Why, you are a bonny little scryer and no mistakin’. Now see here.’ He unbuttoned his lurid check jacket to reveal a lurid check waistcoat. ‘Shut your peepers and give me a demo’. Tell me what I’ve got in the top pocket of my weskit.’
I shut my eyes. I stared at the frozen image of Mr Broadhurst. I projected myself forward, my eidetic body detached from my physical body, its outline dotted to aid the registration of this figurative tear. I floated thus, across the four feet of intervening space. My invisible fingers, devoid of sensation, plucked at the furred lip of his waistcoat pocket. Mr Broadhurst sat, impassive, his eyes unblinking, his countenance was Rameses stern. I peeked inside the pocket, there was a gold watch coddled there. I had started to withdraw, to pack myself back into the correct perspective, when something happened. Mr Broadhurst – or rather my petrified vision of him – moved. This had never happened before; it was the utter stillness of my eidetic images that gave them their purely mental character. I snapped my eyes open, numbed by surprise, and heard Mr Broadhurst, the real Mr Broadhurst, the thick flesh and cold blood Mr Broadhurst, roaring with delight.
‘By Jove, boy, you are a card and no mistakin’ that! A genuine card. I should not have credited it had I not seen it with my own eyes. Now then, are you sitting comfortably?’ I found that I was – back on the padded banquette, the cool glass of the caravan window feeling less vitrified than my shattered head pressed against it – and nodded my assent. ‘Well then, what’s that you have in your hand?’ I felt it at once, how could I have not done so before? It was Mr Broadhurst’s full hunter, flat, cold and gold. I goggled at it, uncomprehending. He roared again. ‘Ha-ha! Well, well, there you are, an artful little dodger. Had me watch and me sitting here oblivious. Well I never, now that is a thing, isn’t it?’ And I had to concur, although I had no idea how it had happened.
I knew that this was something I shouldn’t talk to my mother about. I knew without having to ask that Mr Broadhurst would wish me to remain silent. I wasn’t mistaken, for the following day, batting a tennis ball with my hand against the side of the shower block, I was confronted by my mage.
‘I popped in on your mother just now, Ian.’ The big man was back in his undertaking get-up; a brown-paper parcel fastened with string was wedged under his torso-sized arm. ‘We chatted of this and that, of mice – as it were – and their close relations, men. Your mama was as amiable as ever.’
‘Good.’
‘More to the point, however, she had nothing to say to me concerning the events that transpired between us yesterday afternoon.’
‘I didn’t mention them to her.’
‘That’s good, my lad, very good. You see, I like to talk to a man who likes to talk but I also like that man to be close-mouthed. I can see that you and I understand one another, and that’s as it should be. For if I am going to teach you anything it must be on the basis of such an understanding: firm and resolute.’
‘That’s what I want to be, Mr Broadhurst, firm and resolute.’
‘Good … good. Well then, I will see you anon.’ And he was gone. His back, as broad as a standing stone, diminished through the twilight as he trudged back to his caravan.
Chapter Three
The Fat Controller
If one had to worry about one’s actions in respect of other people’s ideas, one might as well be buried alive in an ant heap or married to an ambitious violinist. Whether that man is the prime minister, modifying his opinions to catch votes, or a bourgeois in terror lest some harmless act should be misunderstood and outrage some petty convention, that man is an inferior man and I do not want to have anything to do with him, any more than I want to eat canned salmon.
Aleister Crowley, Autohagiography
In the next week or so until I met up with him again I was suffused with wild imaginings. I braced myself for my apprenticeship to Mr Broadhurst. I anticipated the calling up of daemons, conversations with the dead, Anubis and Osiris joining the two of us for a ride on the ghost train at the Palace Pier. But Mr Broadhurst’s instruction in the magical arts was not at all what I had expected.
Instead, having conducted a further searching examination, he set me to the cataloguing of the little rituals, those magical forms of thought that I myself had developed in order to cope with the stress of eidesis. Mr Broadhurst was very particular about this and he took it extremely seriously. He met me after school and accompanied me to the newly opened branch of Smith’s in Churchill Square. Here we purchased a large-format cash book, the kind with ruled columns. Back at Cliff Top over tea in his caravan, he set out the column headings for me thus:
Practice Content Frequency Intent
and then explained what they meant. ‘Now see here, boy.’ He tapped the page. ‘This first heading refers to the nature of what you do. Some rituals – the majority, indeed – are concerned with bodily functions. For example, the way you urinate. Do you aim at the commode, or at the water contained therein? How do you roll back your foreskin? What formulae do you recite to yourself when at stool? In what order do you cut your toenails? And so on, and so forth, there is no need for me to elaborate further, you understand me well enough …’ Mr Broadhurst paused for a moment and then resumed. ‘Incidentally, do you masturbate yet, boy?’ I blushed. ‘You do. Good, good. Had you not I would have lent you some instructional literature – onanism is, you see, terribly important, a most efficacious ritual.
‘Naturally there are other kinds of practices that perforce can be described as ritualised. There are those concerned with the way we eat, the way we sleep and the way we open the door. There is even a ritual component to the way we walk down a street. Furthermore, there are rituals concertinaed within ourselves. I refer, of course, to manners of thought that have become formalised, certain convolutions, the consistent combination of apprehensions with little twistles of kinaesthetic intimation, d’ye follow me?’
No, I didn’t follow him at all. Not only was the vocabulary well beyond me, but I couldn’t even tell what my instructor was driving at.
‘What I’m driving at, boy, is that, even when you become reacquainted with a part of your body, that meeting has its characteristic mental agenda. You think: My thighs, and attendant on that very “thighy” feeling is the acknowledgement: They are too plump and suck at surfaces sweatily – d’ye see?’
This time I did see because he had uncannily identified one of my private sources of shame and voiced my own concomitant mantra. Nevertheless I was confused. I still couldn’t grasp that he understood the particular use I made of such ‘consistent convolutions’. ‘But, Mr Broadhurst, sir, all these things that I do and think, they’re just habits, aren’t they? I mean everyone does these things, don’t they?’
He exploded. ‘Don’t be a booby, boy! I cannot abide a booby, not under any circs’ ‘soever. Of course these are habits, of course everyone does these things, that is not the point!’
His anger was unlike any other that I had known. It carried with it, implicitly, the threat of extreme retribution. Lines scoured on flesh in the penal settlement, or detention beyond the Styx. Ever afterwards when Mr Broadhurst barked – I jumped.
The point was – as he explained to me throughout that autumn and the winter that followed – to understand that habit was ritual, and ritual was habit.
‘I am the Magus of the Quotidian!’ bellowed Mr Broadhurst. We were promenading past the Metropole Hotel on the front at Brighton. I was amazed that nobody stared at us, or even shouted back. ‘I am powerful precisely because I understand how habit trammels the mind’s energy, d’ye see? All these people —’ he gestured wildly with a carpet roll of arm – ‘they imagine that they perceive what is really there but they don’t. Instead their minds are constricted by a million million common little assumptions, assumptions choking them like bindweed – and these they take for granted!
‘But there is a way to break this down, to dissolve it – oh yes indeed – to unlock the Motive Force. Every time you indulge in an habitual act you bind yourself in with the others. These habitual acts are the rituals of sanity. More than that, they are sanity, d’ye see? And sanity is nothing but an emasculation, a dread deadening; and I won’t have it! Oh no I won’t!’
So it was that I set out laboriously to catalogue the very schema of my own sanity, to list exhaustively the full range of my personal habits. I did it, in fact, habitually, for forty-five minutes each day after I had done my homework. A typical listing would read as follows:
This was the kind of prosaic patterning of self-absorption that I knew would entrance Mr Broadhurst. But there were also other kinds of listing that had a more obviously magical significance, thus:
After about three months I had managed to fill the entire cash book with this sort of mundane rubbish. I say that now but at the time I took my task extremely seriously and I swelled with pride when Mr Broadhurst took me back to Churchill Square to buy my second book.
It was whilst working my way through this, often writing in the column headings for several pages in advance to give myself the illusion that I had completed more than I actually had, that two important suspicions that had lain dormant for some time rose up and took on the aspect of horribly credible hypotheses. I cannot say whether or not they impinged as much then as they seem to with retrospect. No matter how disturbingly accurate my visual memory may be, all-seeing is nowise all-hearing but suffice to say they were further indicators that the bridge over which I had crossed the abyss had been mined behind me.
Firstly there was the maternal complicity I have already spoken of. Mr Broadhurst was by now in the habit of picking me up from Varndean Grammar on Wednesday afternoons, accompanying me to Pool Valley, and then on home by bus. This was his midweek check-up, anticipating the full review of my homework on Sunday afternoons. (The Big Match to Songs of Praise slot had become institutionalised.) This routine became the focus for a certain amount of gossip. Gossip retailed by those selfsame people, the scions of higher platforms on the social scaffolding, who came for drinks at Cliff Top.
Without mentioning it to me Mother effectively torpedoed this submarine of rumour by putting it about that Mr Broadhurst was my guardian. The first I knew of this was when, seeing his bollard shape through the wrought-iron railings, my old humiliator Holland turned to me and said, placing predictably his malicious emphasis, ‘There’s your “guardian”, Wharton, come to take you off for some wanky-wanky, as usual.’
A ‘guardian’ was a distinctly posh kind of relationship for me to have with anyone. Possibly my mother viewed the subterfuge as merely part and parcel of her continuing social climb. Could it be that, or was it more likely that she and Mr Broadhurst had agreed it between them? If so, what was in it for her?
My second hypothesis concerned Mr Broadhurst himself. I couldn’t be certain, not having observed him closely before, but either Mr Broadhurst was not like other old people, or else he wasn’t really old at all. In my new proximity to him I was able to see that his hands were neither wrinkled, nor dotted with liverish spots. When we walked together up the steep streets of Brighton Mr Broadhurst never wheezed. And, on looking into the lambency of his hooded eyes, I could detect no whiting-out, no glaucoma or cataract.
He still granted himself the licences of old age – even if he wasn’t entitled. He had given up his voluntary work at St Dunstan’s in November claiming that it was ‘too fatiguin” for him to carry on with. But be that as it may, he no longer moved with the calculated languor that I remembered. Instead he fairly hustled his big body along, as if it were a laggardly prisoner he was escorting down death row. He was growing feistier and spryer by the month – I wondered where it would all end.
Wondered as one Sunday in February at our appointed hour, I bearded him in his caravan. My ritual cataloguing had come to a halt. So feeble had my efforts become that my last entry was concerned with nothing less than my manner of dribbling.
‘Good, good, very good!’ exclaimed Mr Broadhurst – he was flicking through the second book. ‘This is excellent, lad, and I do believe that this exercise is having a beneficial side-effect, namely an improvement in both your grammar and the general ordering of your still-immature intellect. This is all as it should be.’
‘But I’m finding it harder and harder.’
‘Harder? Harder to what?’
‘To think up habits – I mean rituals.’ I hung my head, glad to have a pretext to hide it from my mentor. For recently the random eruptions and scattered pustules that had decked my chin and brows for the past year had begun to mass, forming formidably ugly scarps and weeping lesions.
‘Well, that’s as may be, lad, although you haven’t tackled masturbation yet, not properly at any rate.’
I blushed hard, Mr Broadhurst ignored me. I thought of my mother, she would probably be baking scones, her apron dusted with flour. Women in ugly hats would soon be Hosannaing on the telly. ‘Erm … Mr Broadhurst… P’raps I should be —’
‘Nonsense, lad. I can see that you’re sensitive about this. Don’t be. Masturbation is critical to our enterprise, for it connects the most repetitive and mindless of actions to the inducement of ecstasy. Now, I observe that you are shamed and discomfited by your acne – am I right?’ I nodded. ‘Of course I am. Now, you are too young to be aware of this but in the past there was held to be a linkage between so-called “self-abuse” and the sebaceous rigours of your time of life. I propose an advance on your future status that will assist you at this point and hold you fast to our mutual course. If I tell you that I can rid you of the damned spots will ye do what I say?’
I tried to think what I might be prepared to do to achieve this and concluded almost anything. I wasn’t a brave boy, not physically, that is, but then it was unlikely Mr Broadhurst had anything physical in mind.
‘OK, Mr Broadhurst, what should I do?’
‘Excellent. You are amply fulfilling the weight of expectation I have placed on you. Now then, when you masturbate do you ejaculate semen?’
‘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.
Remember, gentle reader (I say ‘gentle’ but what I really mean is pusillanimous reader, guarded reader, reader walled off against darker suasion), that this boy was like a roll of sausage meat enfolded in fluffy pastry. I had no access to the world of male empowerment. I had no role model. Mr Broadhurst was the solution to this deficiency. Remember also that he was a fixture of the off season, for me naturally conjoined with the worlds of school, formalised friendship, wanty-wanty and getty-getty.
However, that particular afternoon we just had tea together and played eidetic games. It didn’t take very long for Mr Broadhurst to prise my secret out of me.
‘You do what you say? You do that? Oh how very clever, how terribly droll!’ The interior of his caravan was capacious enough, but even so Mr Broadhurst turned it into a doll’s house. When he moved the whole chassis whoozed on its sprung suspension. ‘And you say that you discover things, boy – things that you could not have known otherwise. Why, you are a bonny little scryer and no mistakin’. Now see here.’ He unbuttoned his lurid check jacket to reveal a lurid check waistcoat. ‘Shut your peepers and give me a demo’. Tell me what I’ve got in the top pocket of my weskit.’
I shut my eyes. I stared at the frozen image of Mr Broadhurst. I projected myself forward, my eidetic body detached from my physical body, its outline dotted to aid the registration of this figurative tear. I floated thus, across the four feet of intervening space. My invisible fingers, devoid of sensation, plucked at the furred lip of his waistcoat pocket. Mr Broadhurst sat, impassive, his eyes unblinking, his countenance was Rameses stern. I peeked inside the pocket, there was a gold watch coddled there. I had started to withdraw, to pack myself back into the correct perspective, when something happened. Mr Broadhurst – or rather my petrified vision of him – moved. This had never happened before; it was the utter stillness of my eidetic images that gave them their purely mental character. I snapped my eyes open, numbed by surprise, and heard Mr Broadhurst, the real Mr Broadhurst, the thick flesh and cold blood Mr Broadhurst, roaring with delight.
‘By Jove, boy, you are a card and no mistakin’ that! A genuine card. I should not have credited it had I not seen it with my own eyes. Now then, are you sitting comfortably?’ I found that I was – back on the padded banquette, the cool glass of the caravan window feeling less vitrified than my shattered head pressed against it – and nodded my assent. ‘Well then, what’s that you have in your hand?’ I felt it at once, how could I have not done so before? It was Mr Broadhurst’s full hunter, flat, cold and gold. I goggled at it, uncomprehending. He roared again. ‘Ha-ha! Well, well, there you are, an artful little dodger. Had me watch and me sitting here oblivious. Well I never, now that is a thing, isn’t it?’ And I had to concur, although I had no idea how it had happened.
I knew that this was something I shouldn’t talk to my mother about. I knew without having to ask that Mr Broadhurst would wish me to remain silent. I wasn’t mistaken, for the following day, batting a tennis ball with my hand against the side of the shower block, I was confronted by my mage.
‘I popped in on your mother just now, Ian.’ The big man was back in his undertaking get-up; a brown-paper parcel fastened with string was wedged under his torso-sized arm. ‘We chatted of this and that, of mice – as it were – and their close relations, men. Your mama was as amiable as ever.’
‘Good.’
‘More to the point, however, she had nothing to say to me concerning the events that transpired between us yesterday afternoon.’
‘I didn’t mention them to her.’
‘That’s good, my lad, very good. You see, I like to talk to a man who likes to talk but I also like that man to be close-mouthed. I can see that you and I understand one another, and that’s as it should be. For if I am going to teach you anything it must be on the basis of such an understanding: firm and resolute.’
‘That’s what I want to be, Mr Broadhurst, firm and resolute.’
‘Good … good. Well then, I will see you anon.’ And he was gone. His back, as broad as a standing stone, diminished through the twilight as he trudged back to his caravan.
Chapter Three
The Fat Controller
If one had to worry about one’s actions in respect of other people’s ideas, one might as well be buried alive in an ant heap or married to an ambitious violinist. Whether that man is the prime minister, modifying his opinions to catch votes, or a bourgeois in terror lest some harmless act should be misunderstood and outrage some petty convention, that man is an inferior man and I do not want to have anything to do with him, any more than I want to eat canned salmon.
Aleister Crowley, Autohagiography
In the next week or so until I met up with him again I was suffused with wild imaginings. I braced myself for my apprenticeship to Mr Broadhurst. I anticipated the calling up of daemons, conversations with the dead, Anubis and Osiris joining the two of us for a ride on the ghost train at the Palace Pier. But Mr Broadhurst’s instruction in the magical arts was not at all what I had expected.
Instead, having conducted a further searching examination, he set me to the cataloguing of the little rituals, those magical forms of thought that I myself had developed in order to cope with the stress of eidesis. Mr Broadhurst was very particular about this and he took it extremely seriously. He met me after school and accompanied me to the newly opened branch of Smith’s in Churchill Square. Here we purchased a large-format cash book, the kind with ruled columns. Back at Cliff Top over tea in his caravan, he set out the column headings for me thus:
Practice Content Frequency Intent
and then explained what they meant. ‘Now see here, boy.’ He tapped the page. ‘This first heading refers to the nature of what you do. Some rituals – the majority, indeed – are concerned with bodily functions. For example, the way you urinate. Do you aim at the commode, or at the water contained therein? How do you roll back your foreskin? What formulae do you recite to yourself when at stool? In what order do you cut your toenails? And so on, and so forth, there is no need for me to elaborate further, you understand me well enough …’ Mr Broadhurst paused for a moment and then resumed. ‘Incidentally, do you masturbate yet, boy?’ I blushed. ‘You do. Good, good. Had you not I would have lent you some instructional literature – onanism is, you see, terribly important, a most efficacious ritual.
‘Naturally there are other kinds of practices that perforce can be described as ritualised. There are those concerned with the way we eat, the way we sleep and the way we open the door. There is even a ritual component to the way we walk down a street. Furthermore, there are rituals concertinaed within ourselves. I refer, of course, to manners of thought that have become formalised, certain convolutions, the consistent combination of apprehensions with little twistles of kinaesthetic intimation, d’ye follow me?’
No, I didn’t follow him at all. Not only was the vocabulary well beyond me, but I couldn’t even tell what my instructor was driving at.
‘What I’m driving at, boy, is that, even when you become reacquainted with a part of your body, that meeting has its characteristic mental agenda. You think: My thighs, and attendant on that very “thighy” feeling is the acknowledgement: They are too plump and suck at surfaces sweatily – d’ye see?’
This time I did see because he had uncannily identified one of my private sources of shame and voiced my own concomitant mantra. Nevertheless I was confused. I still couldn’t grasp that he understood the particular use I made of such ‘consistent convolutions’. ‘But, Mr Broadhurst, sir, all these things that I do and think, they’re just habits, aren’t they? I mean everyone does these things, don’t they?’
He exploded. ‘Don’t be a booby, boy! I cannot abide a booby, not under any circs’ ‘soever. Of course these are habits, of course everyone does these things, that is not the point!’
His anger was unlike any other that I had known. It carried with it, implicitly, the threat of extreme retribution. Lines scoured on flesh in the penal settlement, or detention beyond the Styx. Ever afterwards when Mr Broadhurst barked – I jumped.
The point was – as he explained to me throughout that autumn and the winter that followed – to understand that habit was ritual, and ritual was habit.
‘I am the Magus of the Quotidian!’ bellowed Mr Broadhurst. We were promenading past the Metropole Hotel on the front at Brighton. I was amazed that nobody stared at us, or even shouted back. ‘I am powerful precisely because I understand how habit trammels the mind’s energy, d’ye see? All these people —’ he gestured wildly with a carpet roll of arm – ‘they imagine that they perceive what is really there but they don’t. Instead their minds are constricted by a million million common little assumptions, assumptions choking them like bindweed – and these they take for granted!
‘But there is a way to break this down, to dissolve it – oh yes indeed – to unlock the Motive Force. Every time you indulge in an habitual act you bind yourself in with the others. These habitual acts are the rituals of sanity. More than that, they are sanity, d’ye see? And sanity is nothing but an emasculation, a dread deadening; and I won’t have it! Oh no I won’t!’
So it was that I set out laboriously to catalogue the very schema of my own sanity, to list exhaustively the full range of my personal habits. I did it, in fact, habitually, for forty-five minutes each day after I had done my homework. A typical listing would read as follows:
This was the kind of prosaic patterning of self-absorption that I knew would entrance Mr Broadhurst. But there were also other kinds of listing that had a more obviously magical significance, thus:
After about three months I had managed to fill the entire cash book with this sort of mundane rubbish. I say that now but at the time I took my task extremely seriously and I swelled with pride when Mr Broadhurst took me back to Churchill Square to buy my second book.
It was whilst working my way through this, often writing in the column headings for several pages in advance to give myself the illusion that I had completed more than I actually had, that two important suspicions that had lain dormant for some time rose up and took on the aspect of horribly credible hypotheses. I cannot say whether or not they impinged as much then as they seem to with retrospect. No matter how disturbingly accurate my visual memory may be, all-seeing is nowise all-hearing but suffice to say they were further indicators that the bridge over which I had crossed the abyss had been mined behind me.
Firstly there was the maternal complicity I have already spoken of. Mr Broadhurst was by now in the habit of picking me up from Varndean Grammar on Wednesday afternoons, accompanying me to Pool Valley, and then on home by bus. This was his midweek check-up, anticipating the full review of my homework on Sunday afternoons. (The Big Match to Songs of Praise slot had become institutionalised.) This routine became the focus for a certain amount of gossip. Gossip retailed by those selfsame people, the scions of higher platforms on the social scaffolding, who came for drinks at Cliff Top.
Without mentioning it to me Mother effectively torpedoed this submarine of rumour by putting it about that Mr Broadhurst was my guardian. The first I knew of this was when, seeing his bollard shape through the wrought-iron railings, my old humiliator Holland turned to me and said, placing predictably his malicious emphasis, ‘There’s your “guardian”, Wharton, come to take you off for some wanky-wanky, as usual.’
A ‘guardian’ was a distinctly posh kind of relationship for me to have with anyone. Possibly my mother viewed the subterfuge as merely part and parcel of her continuing social climb. Could it be that, or was it more likely that she and Mr Broadhurst had agreed it between them? If so, what was in it for her?
My second hypothesis concerned Mr Broadhurst himself. I couldn’t be certain, not having observed him closely before, but either Mr Broadhurst was not like other old people, or else he wasn’t really old at all. In my new proximity to him I was able to see that his hands were neither wrinkled, nor dotted with liverish spots. When we walked together up the steep streets of Brighton Mr Broadhurst never wheezed. And, on looking into the lambency of his hooded eyes, I could detect no whiting-out, no glaucoma or cataract.
He still granted himself the licences of old age – even if he wasn’t entitled. He had given up his voluntary work at St Dunstan’s in November claiming that it was ‘too fatiguin” for him to carry on with. But be that as it may, he no longer moved with the calculated languor that I remembered. Instead he fairly hustled his big body along, as if it were a laggardly prisoner he was escorting down death row. He was growing feistier and spryer by the month – I wondered where it would all end.
Wondered as one Sunday in February at our appointed hour, I bearded him in his caravan. My ritual cataloguing had come to a halt. So feeble had my efforts become that my last entry was concerned with nothing less than my manner of dribbling.
‘Good, good, very good!’ exclaimed Mr Broadhurst – he was flicking through the second book. ‘This is excellent, lad, and I do believe that this exercise is having a beneficial side-effect, namely an improvement in both your grammar and the general ordering of your still-immature intellect. This is all as it should be.’
‘But I’m finding it harder and harder.’
‘Harder? Harder to what?’
‘To think up habits – I mean rituals.’ I hung my head, glad to have a pretext to hide it from my mentor. For recently the random eruptions and scattered pustules that had decked my chin and brows for the past year had begun to mass, forming formidably ugly scarps and weeping lesions.
‘Well, that’s as may be, lad, although you haven’t tackled masturbation yet, not properly at any rate.’
I blushed hard, Mr Broadhurst ignored me. I thought of my mother, she would probably be baking scones, her apron dusted with flour. Women in ugly hats would soon be Hosannaing on the telly. ‘Erm … Mr Broadhurst… P’raps I should be —’
‘Nonsense, lad. I can see that you’re sensitive about this. Don’t be. Masturbation is critical to our enterprise, for it connects the most repetitive and mindless of actions to the inducement of ecstasy. Now, I observe that you are shamed and discomfited by your acne – am I right?’ I nodded. ‘Of course I am. Now, you are too young to be aware of this but in the past there was held to be a linkage between so-called “self-abuse” and the sebaceous rigours of your time of life. I propose an advance on your future status that will assist you at this point and hold you fast to our mutual course. If I tell you that I can rid you of the damned spots will ye do what I say?’
I tried to think what I might be prepared to do to achieve this and concluded almost anything. I wasn’t a brave boy, not physically, that is, but then it was unlikely Mr Broadhurst had anything physical in mind.
‘OK, Mr Broadhurst, what should I do?’
‘Excellent. You are amply fulfilling the weight of expectation I have placed on you. Now then, when you masturbate do you ejaculate semen?’
