My Idea of Fun by Will Self Read Free Book Online

honest.’
    ‘But, Mummy, you must remember, you must.’ The society of my new school, like that of provincial England as a whole, was so alarmingly codified and stratified that I couldn't conceive of anyone whose provenance and emotional valency weren't absolutely fixed. My mother, with her working-class airs and upper-middle-class graces, only served to point this up still further.
    ‘You're a great questioner, aren't you? Always questioning and querying.’ She leant down and kissed me. The Mummy smell was overwhelming. I felt the corner of her mouth against mine. ‘You don't get it from me – that's for sure – but I can't imagine it comes from yer father either.’ I was aware that all that she felt was there, bound up in the way she said ‘father’. She pronounced it as another might have said ‘old rope’. Without emphasis, as if this paternity were of no account.
    She always got around me in this way, by placing her body against mine whenever she felt herself challenged, mentally assaulted. In doing this, I realised, she was re-presenting the fact of her maternity, her original power, to me. Each time contextualising me with her increasingly ample flesh. Despite myself I was seduced and became a toddler once more. Being chased to be tickled, I subsided into the mummyness.
    Mr Broadhurst had quickly settled into a routine at Cliff Top. Which is, of course, the way to become a fixture. He had signed up to do voluntary work at St Dunstan's, the blind home, on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. First thing in the morning, he walked to the shops in Saltdean to get his shopping and his newspaper. I would often meet him there, as I came out of the sweet shop fondling a paper bag full of gonad bonbons with the fingers of an aspirant sensualist.
    ‘Ah! The young Rosicrucian.’ Although his voice was pitched normally I was always aware of the distant booming of riverine surf. ‘With a sack of sweetmeats – may I?’ He would take one with fingers rendered all the more queerly huge for their precision and dexterity.
    On Sunday afternoons he would come to tea, and he and my mother would talk of people they had known back in Yorkshire. From this much at least I gathered that Mr Broadhurst had been a friend of the Hepplewhites for many years. He also condescended to help me with my homework. On the arts and humanities subjects he was vague and often out of sorts with my textbooks. But in maths and the sciences he was an adept if overbearing didact. Maths in particular he excelled at; he called it his ‘favourite subject’. And it was by tutoring me in maths that he first gained a toehold on my mind.
    One Sunday a month Mr Broadhurst would take my mother and I to the Sally Lunn, an old-fashioned tea shoppe in Rottingdean where they served an eponymous tea-cake of which the three of us were especially fond. Mr Broadhurst could eat as many as thirty of these ‘Sally Lunns’ at a sitting. He mounded so much honey on top of the buns that they looked like miniature stupas. Truly he was a big pale Sambo.
    I can see the Sally Lunn now. In a small whitewashed room with a dark beeswaxed floor, lobster pots, nets, glass floats and other marine decorations are hanging about the walls. Mr Broadhurst and my mother are chatting about this and that, nothing of consequence, prospects for the on season, a fourteen-year-old Saltdean girl who was having an abortion (they are euphemising but I get the drift). On this particular Sunday Mr Broadhurst looked up from his piled plate and scrutinised the tea shoppe. Examined it critically as if seeing it clearly for the first time.
    ‘D'ye know, Dawn,’ he said, ‘I don't think this place has changed much since I used to come here regularly, and that must have been before the Great War.’
    My mother didn't seem to register the significance of this statement, but it stuck with me. Later, when we were heading home through the rain-dashed streets, my mother and Mr Broadhurst walking ahead of