Authors: Will Self
‘What Is To Be Done?’ he mused. ‘That's what I said to Vladimir Ilyich. Naturally he cribbed it for the title of a pamphlet, when what I actually meant by it was some advice. I urged him to have a few of the young daughters of the gentlefolk before he established the provisional government at the Smolny Institute. He was headstrong enough, although not as cold and passionless as they later made out.’
We went on walking for a while, in silence. Eventually The Fat Controller pulled me up in front of a viciously scalped hedge of box. He took the cheroot from his mouth and peered at its slobbered-on green end, as if it were a reptilian rump about to grow a new tail. ‘I thought you were interested in products,’ he said, a wheedling tone entering his voice. ‘I can help you in that area.’
‘We've done merchandising, purchasing, sourcing and inventory auditing.’
‘That's not what I'm talking about. What I can help you with is an understanding of the nature of a product that goes far beyond these crudities; these academic categories masquerading as truths.’
‘I'm interested in the marketing side of things. How to evolve a strategy to actually sell a product. You know, advertising, sales promotion, that sort of thing.’
‘Of course, chip off the old block, aren't you?’
‘Yeah, I know “contemptible Essene, cloistral nonentity”, that's what you said to me.’
‘You have a fair recollection, boy, I'll grant you that. Tell me, how much of that recollection is visual and how much verbal?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, do you first need to form a picture of the two of us sitting in that café discussing your father – an eidetic image before the words come to you, or not?’
‘I suppose I do need to – ‘
‘. . . So you were being disingenuous. You know exactly what I mean.’ His thumb and forefinger pinched the sides of my neck, one big pad pressing into my carotid artery. My head roared with neon pins and needles, at once visual and sensual. He went on with the conversation, in my mind, ‘Do you remember your underpants then?’ I was slumped against him, almost fainting, conscious only that he had led me behind a red-brick loggia, obviously so that we would be out of sight of the people in the main concourse while he dispatched me. ‘Well, do you?’
‘W-what about my underpants?’ I stuttered, coughed. Why wouldn't he get it over with?
‘I want you to recall the label of said underpants, summon it up as fully as you possibly can. I want to know whether the legend thereon was printed, or machine-embroidered; whether the label itself was stitched into the pants, or appliquéd in some fashion; whether the label indicates an element of design, or whether the information it retails relates purely to the material constitution of the aforementioned pants. Can you do that?’ He knew I could, he was toying with me. ‘Now when you have the image, let me see it. ‘
‘W-whaddya mean?’
‘You know what I mean.’ He relaxed his death-hold on me and made me sit down with him on a convenient bench. I idly noted that a brass plate declared that this bit of garden furniture was sacred to someone's memory. I wished it was mine.
I did as he said. The label was sewn on to the crinkled, elasticated hem of the pants, which were boxer shorts, blue-and-white-striped like mattress ticking. The legend on the label read ‘Barries’ Menswear, 212 King's Road, London, 100% Egyptian Cotton.’ It was easy for me to summon up this everyday vision, because whenever I sat on the toilet the hem was stretched between my calves, and if I leant forward it was always the salient object in my view.
‘Good. Now, what I am about to teach you is an extension of your eidetic capability which you will find of great use in your intended career. There is no word, at least in current usage, that does justice to this advanced technique, so I have had to coin a term of my own. I call it “retroscendence”.’ He paused and looked at me, as if trying to gauge what kind of impression this hokum was making. ‘Before we retroscend allow me a few prefatory remarks on your pants. Firstly, let us refer to them simply as “shorts”. You are too callow to be aware of this but the term “boxer shorts” is merely a marketing neologism, coined in order to revamp a demand for what in England was perceived as an outmoded type of underwear. In America where the loose, cotton, mid-thigh-length male undergarment has consistently maintained its market share, there has never been any need to call these things anything but shorts.
‘A second point, you are not conspicuously dandyish, indeed, I would say that you have grown to adult size with but little appreciation of the value of effective turn-out. Be that as it may, I perceive in your decision to purchase these shorts – you did purchase these shorts, didn't you?’
‘Yes.’
‘An attempt, albeit muted, to get to grips with a world beyond Saltdean. I picture you on a trip up to London, perhaps for a day's work experience at the offices of some conglomerate. Am I right?’
‘You're right.’
‘In your lunch hour you head down the King's Road from Sloane Square. You walk and walk, staring at the chic emporia. Here's one that sells just belt buckles, here's another exclusively devoted to pointed boots, or country and westernalia, or whatever. It hardly matters. You do not intend to enter. You would feel yourself embarrassed, shy, in front of the shop assistant, who would be so much more metropolitan, more sophisticated, than you. Instead you peer inside and try to calculate the merchandising policy: what value of stock is required, per metre of shelf space, to meet overheads and instill profit? Am I right?’
‘Yes.’ His voice was hypnotic, dreamy.
‘Of course I am. Nonetheless, you do still have some vanity, don't you? You still have the shame of the short-trousered recent past. You still – God knows why – wish to imagine that someone will inadvertently examine your underwear after the car crash of sexual congress. So after toddling about for a while you go into Barries’ and point out the shorts where they lie in the window, interleaved with their fellows. But I'm getting ahead of myself, when all I really want to teach you is the full history of such a product. That's the title of this lecture: “The History of the Product”, and like all good modern lectures – intended simply to garnish knowledge rather than impart it – this one uses visual aids.’
The big hand was on my neck again, twisting it like the focus grip of some humanoid camera. The autumnal trees, spindly, moulting, were cast into darkness as if the wan sun had been eclipsed. I felt myself being pulled backwards, upwards, so that my visual field did indeed resemble that of a camera, a camera in some computer-graphics title sequence. The Sussex campus was shrinking below me into a collection of children's play houses, then models, then crumbs, then fly droppings. Until the cars moving along the university's peripheral roads were silverfish and the whole scene was dappled with low-lying cloud. Then we were higher still and the earth curved away from us, showing a nimbus of atmosphere at its edge.
The Fat Controller spoke inside of me again. ‘Look up above you, look at the bare-faced cheek of the infinite.’ I did as he bade me. Up there, set among the unblinking stars like some branding of the cosmos, was that selfsame label, the label in my boxer shorts. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘retroscendence enables us to take any element in our visual field and, as it were, unpack its history. We have chosen your shorts, I now propose to instruct you in their origin and past life. Please do not be confused by the apparent dissolution of the integrity of your visual field. Remember that the purest of solipsism is indeed realism. For, if I am the world’ – we were heading down again, his nails digging into my flesh, I could make out the Eastern Mediterranean – ‘then the world must be real. Isn't that so?’
In the flat land of the Delta the babies cry themselves to sleep in the airless shade, while everyone else labours in the scintillating sun. When the dun evening comes the kids go down to the irrigation channels for some bilharzia bathing. They have little to look forward to, save for fat legs, flopping in the silt of some riverine beach.
My shorts were distributed over a half-acre of plants in the sharp silvery light of this place, in the form of white balls, fibrous globs. So fluffy to see but so hard to the touch.
‘Regard those buds,’ said The Fat Controller, ‘for throughout the long day of pluck and twist they turn into barbs and after years of this constant abrading, a deadened rind is added to the pluckers’ hands. This is the cotton workers’ equivalent of Repetitive Stress Syndrome. In due course we will witness similar, half a world away on the Mile End Road.’
I next found myself lying at the bottom of a crude hopper of duck boards which was set on top of an irrigation dyke. The fruit of these people's labour ('Their name is El Azain,’ he said, and his voracious lips seemed to suck on my lobes, his sharp tongue to probe my synapses) fell about my face. Then we were off, emptied along with the cotton into the truck that transported the El Azains’ harvest, together with that of the five other families that made up this producers’ co-operative, to the local town to meet the buyer.
The town was an organic place. A compost heap of soft walls that gently crumbled, flowing down to join the mud at their feet. Eventually the earth would be dug out, remoulded and cast once more in the form of bricks, which would take their place in fresh walls that in due course would crumble again.
Our dyad looked on as Mohammed Sherif, the co-operative head, aged and bloated by dietary tedium, went through the formalities with the buyer. They drank
thé à menthe
from dirty glasses, while a charcoal lump fizzed in the clay bowl of the hookah. From time to time Sherif's woolly old head, loosely wrapped in a dirty headdress, would fall back against the fly-speckled surface of the remaining quarter of a red sign. This dolorous thing proclaimed ‘oca-Cola’ in Arabic.
As this went on, the point of view without extension that was myself and The Fat Controller accompanied the product-of-the future as it was unloaded from the truck and heaped in a stall of warped boards. A man with one nostril pulled a stiff tarpaulin over us.
‘There is no other buyer, d'ye see?’ said The Fat Controller. ‘The bargaining isn't even a formality, it's just an empty ritual. Sherif must accept the price he is offered if the five families are to have any hope of paying off their lengthening tab at the provisioner's and if – haha, a'haha – they want their thin children to live to grow thinner! Look here’ – we peeked out – ‘he's thinking to himself: This may be my last harvest. No such luck, I'm afraid.’
The Fat Controller and I next became the cotton entirely. We were jolted from the Delta to the coast, where we disappeared into a giant galvanised iron shed. Here we were subjected to a process of pounding and separating, carding and spinning. Until at last I saw him shooting off ahead of me in the form of a long lumpy thread, vibrating with moisture, which stretched ectoplasmically into the maw of the shuttling frame. He cried out, ‘Here we go!’ and I followed on. The machinery clanked up and over and up and over again, gulping down first him, then the shorts-to-be, then me.
‘Bloody lucky’ – he spoke like a harp out of the strings of half-constructed fabric – ‘that this old Schliemann-Hoffer has already caught its finger quota for today. D'ye see, little hands have to struggle to free the trapped weft before the frame drops? If they aren't quick enough – ouch! Blood as good as yours or mine creatin’ a sort of moiré effect and condemning your shorts to the wastage pile.’
Before we set off again, on along the coast and then across the sea, The Fat Controller saw fit to bifurcate our strange awarenesses. So that, while one part of me remained intimate with the cotton, another separate centre of cartoon existence accompanied those tokens which served, through their concatenation and order, to mirror parallel developments in the world of objects. So it was that I lay in honeycombs of tiny compartments, stacked into loose piles and sheaves with onion-skin leaves of paper. I waited to be clipped and pinned, stamped and spiked. Latterly I was digitalised and pulsed my way across the dark convexities of visual-display units. I thought to myself, even as it happened, that this winking of my very self-consciousness was a nice expression of the value I represented.
Meanwhile my cotton body was wound on to great bolts, each one five metres long. Although the bolts were thick, I still bent in the middle when I was lifted and carried, a man at either of my ends. I was wadded along with my fellows into a container and then – darkness. A long, long, unutterably tedious wait in the lint-filled darkness, until at last I felt the tension of the crane and realised that I was being lowered into the hold.
A juggernaut roaring, an ultrasonic shuddering, the smell of air-borne hydrocarbons, the sensation of pores opening to admit grit.
‘All right?’ asked The Fat Controller. ‘Not a lot to see in the hold of that ratty freighter, was there?’
‘No.’
‘That's why I've brought you here.’
Here was the Old Kent Road. We were looking across it at a slice-shaped building, calcined with pollution. It stood like a slice of stale chocolate cake, marooned in a tar ox-bow, that had become a cul-de-sac when the main throughfare ploughed another course. Over the portico, cut into the rendering, were the words ‘Success House’.
‘Good that, isn't it?’ His voice was muffled by something could it be that he was smoking a cigar even whilst disembodied? ‘A nice irony. The facade proclaims success, but behind it the building dwindles to nothing. Consider those stately columns, regard the coils of plaster vine that trail from the windowsills, meditate on the dados in the shape of
fasces
that stud its pitted hide.’
‘Ye-es.’
‘Does not the whole ensemble speak to you of imperial confidence, a global network of industry?’
‘S’pose so.’
‘And yet all there is inside is one old Jew. Zekel is his name.
‘I know that. What I mean is, when I was a number on one of those screens, I saw his name alongside me.’
‘Quite so, for it is he who is responsible for importing the schmutter that will be made into your shorts. He is a cotton factor; and look over there.’ I found myself looking. ‘Here, if I am not much mistaken, comes his customer.’