Authors: Will Self
‘Look at your hands!’ commanded Mr Broadhurst. I looked at them, they were smeared with blood and worse. I felt faint. He pulled a small mirror from his pocket and held it up to me. At first I simply couldn't comprehend what had happened, for all my spots were gone, dissolved, had vanished. Not only that but my face was unscarred, unpitted. It was as if the acne had never been.
Mr Broadhurst gave me to understand that this was merely another advance, another introductory offer, and that I shouldn't take it, or myself, too seriously. Nevertheless the ridding of my skin complaint by necromancy coincided with a shift in emphasis as far as my instruction was concerned. It was as if, having seen the contents of Mr Broadhurst's fitted cupboard, he were now prepared to allow me some knowledge of the rituals connected with this apparatus. Henceforth my studies diversified into tarot reading, numerology, Feng-shiu, alchemy, astrology and kabbalah, or at any rate into Mr Broadhurst's somewhat modified versions of these arts.
‘It's all nonsense, you understand – utter bollocks. A pathetic attempt to use proto-scientific methods to ascertain and then apprehend the transcendent. What the Jung-lette called “a massive projection”.’ So said Mr Broadhurst. ‘No matter, it will serve as a useful antidote to what they will try and inculcate you with at school, that's its chief virtue. And added to that, in the future – should you progress in your apprenticeship – it will provide you with a repertory of useful explanations. To use an analogy garnered from the world of espionage, it will give you “cover”.’
He had a set of photocopied notes, which implied that I wasn't his first apprentice. These he would produce with a flourish during our Wednesday- and Sunday-evening sessions. There had always been something of the fairground barker about Mr Broadhurst and during this period he enhanced it. He waved his arms about a lot, wore suits that my mother's old friend Little Jimmy wouldn't have been ashamed to be seen in – barring the size problem – and generally did his best to appear flamboyant.
Each set of notes came with an attached exercise and at his behest I set to, to analyse squares of numbers, using keys to turn them into the letters that described either thaumaturgical entities, or else even the tetragrammaton itself. This had a beneficial side-effect, namely an improvement in my arithmetic. The tarot reading and astrology were presented by my mage at a fairly down-market level. To me, the disciplines involved in relating these random sequences of fixed symbols to potential destinies and character traits were an amusing game. The skill, once learnt, helped make me a little more popular and outgoing at school, where there was a craze on for such things.
As for kabbalah, I found it utterly incomprehensible. I might not have known exactly what rationalism was but it was nevertheless deeply engrained in my picture of the world. Mr Broadhurst browbeat me over it: ‘I will have you know the ancient Hebrew art, its derivation and derogation, its eventual suppuration into the Rosicrucian, even if I have to badger you unmercifully – eurgh! Yuck! Ping!’ This last noise occasioned by a solid pellet of his spittle hitting a brass spittoon.) For nowadays Mr Broadhurst toyed with either ‘chawin” (his own term) tobacco, or ‘takin” snuff. I didn't know which was worse – his snot or his flob.
I was forced to pay more attention to lessons in science and history at Varndean, purely so that I might better understand my other, shadowier tutelage.
As for Feng-shiu, although Mr Broadhurst declared it to be the most ridiculous of all these esoteric studies, it did help my geography. After all, how else can alignments of physical objects be calculated so as to lie along propitious meridians, save by reference to more fixed and less mutable properties of the earth?
Mr Broadhurst himself was something of an alchemist. ‘Just an enthusiastic amateur, you understand, boy.’ Some of what I had glimpsed on the afternoon when he excised my acne was his own miniature collection of alchemical equipment. He responded to my curiosity concerning the transmutation of metals by allowing me to assist him as he experimented with his alembic and his aludel. Many were the afternoons when I found myself priming the athenor with a set of little bellows, while Mr Broadhurst waved a caduceus about. It was one of his own devising, constructed from an old-fashioned television aerial wreathed with flexes. We looked on together as the various hypostatical principles were distillated and redistillated. We were equally disappointed when cohabitation was not effected.
But although he toyed with it, Mr Broadhurst had no patience with the search for the sophie hydrolith. ‘I would wager, boy, that these types never managed to transmute anything, save for their stupidity, into vanity. And anyway, any form of currency is a mutable thing, capable of being magically imbued by the thoughts of those who utilise it. Although, that being said, I do myself possess one of Paykhull's medals.’ He showed this to me and told me to note especially the inscription on the coin's obverse side: ‘O.A. Paykhull cast this gold by chemical art at Stockholm, 1706.’ ‘You know, boy,’ he mused as I hefted the heavy thing, ‘these coins are excessively rare. I have no idea how I might have come by it. No doubt it will transpire that I must have known this Paykhull.’
It was from little hints such as this, undoubtedly consciously dropped, that I began to build a fuller appreciation of what Mr Broadhurst really was.
This was the way I passed through the remainder of my childhood. The zoetrope span smoothly, time's Chief Designer narrowed the legs of trousers and decreed that the cars should be more aerodynamic. If there were changes in the political leadership of the country, they made little impact on me. I was more preoccupied by my O levels. I gained seven and then, with Mr Broadhurst's none too gentle prodding, I opted for economics, maths and business studies as A level courses. At school I remained a solitary. What little human warmth I required I garnered from the aunts and cousins, who still came to Cliff Top for their annual holiday.
They still came but there was a new uneasiness in this department of my life as well. My mother's business success had continued and the bungalow was in the throes of an ongoing transformation that would only end some five years later, when the Cliff Top Country House Hotel opened its register for bookings.
In the meantime, the aunts and cousins were put up in their usual caravans. My mother and I moved between the enterprise zone of the bungalow and the camp where the caravans squatted, adopting a different manner and diction as we did so. We were veritable chameleons of class mobility.
As for girlfriends, it was here that my eidetiking came in particularly useful. Trammelled by my exhaustive cataloguing of habit, which I had continued to practise at Mr Broadhurst's insistence, my visual escapades had become fully manageable. I didn't think I had an option – I was no teenage Lothario – but anyway I knew instinctively, without even having to ask him, that Mr Broadhurst would view the loss of my virginity as incompatible with my apprenticeship. So instead, I refined my masturbation in combination with my hawk-eyed recollection to produce a variety of sexual experience which – (I now realise) – more than compensated for the absence of the real thing.
My fellow schoolboys vied with one another for admission to the cinema, so that they could witness X-rated films. They went to see what they were unable to experience. I went to the cinema not for entertainment, but for cinematography. For it was only by studying the precise rake of extra-long pans, the trajectory of tracking shots and the jejune emotional appeal of the jump-cut, that I could add to the repertoire of my own internal shoots.
One day in the early autumn of my lower-sixth-form year, when the damp leaves were already furring the grassy median strips that cleaved the dual carriageways surrounding Varndean Grammar, I saw a familiar figure from where I sat reading in the school library. Mr Broadhurst had returned from his summer break.
I rammed my books and my binders into my briefcase. I took the steps in big bounds and pelted across the asphalt to the school gates. I knew better than to attempt to hug Mr Broadhurst, although that was what I felt like doing, for not only did everything in his manner discourage physical relations, he had also given me a strict injunction. Soon after he had taken me under his ample wing he had remarked, ‘Think of me as the Brahmin of the Banal! Only the dull earth can purify me, contact with all else is a defilement so far as I am concerned. Therefore, boy, never attempt to touch me, save for when I specifically enjoin it.’
During the six months since I had last seen him, Mr Broadhurst had undergone a further metamorphosis and this time the change was more radical, more entire, than ever before. To start with there was his costume. As I have said, after the abandonment of his undertaking uniform he had gone through a dodgy bookie/snake-oil purveyor period. Now he was dressed very well indeed, even elegantly. He had on a three-quarter-length crombie with a velvet collar, a dark-blue suit with the faintest of pin-stripes and a snowy linen shirt. The knot of his foulard tie was held in place by a pearl stick pin. Up top, a bowler hat as firmly rounded as a Wehrmacht helmet served to emphasise the suitability of his head for Mount Rushmore, or any other monumentalism. In one of his hands chamois gloves were loosely bouqueted with the silver head of a cane; in the other a thick slab-sided cheroot, topped by an inch and a half of whitened ash, protruded from his knuckles.
As I ran towards him, Mr Broadhurst smiled. His smooth face was slashed open by his predatory mouth, as if an invisible hatchet were biting into fruit. The bony protuberances that he had in lieu of brows arched until they were Gothic; and he laughed – bellowed laughter and smoke.
‘Ah, there you are!’ he ejaculated, the implication being that he had looked everywhere. ‘Come now, boy, we have much to talk of and little time.’ I was now both tall enough and bulky enough to link arms comfortably with Mr Broadhurst. To my great surprise this was exactly what he did. And that is how we set off, arm-in-arm, down Sunningdale Drive past Sussex Gardens where the bowls players were dying slowly in well-pressed whites, towards the London Road. Mr Broadhurst held forth magniloquently.
‘Consider the similarities between Brighton and Rome,’ he declared. ‘Both are built on seven hills, both have been the pleasure centres of mighty empires. Observe the hilltops, lad what d'ye see?’
I pondered. ‘Well, I can just about see the cemetery up there.’
‘Quite so – and over there?’ He gestured vaguely behind us.
‘The racecourse?’
‘Good lad, good. In fact, capital! The racecourse. The games of life and the games of death. Mortality for once defined by geography. What a relief!’ He laughed again, carried away by his pun. I had never seen Mr Broadhurst in such a good mood before. He positively bowled down the pavement, puffing furiously on his stogie, for all the world like some bipedal locomotive.
‘You're wondering something, boy, cough it up, spit it out, expel it, vomit it forth. In short, tell me.’
‘Well . . . I don't . . . I don't know how to put it, but you seem somehow changed – ‘
‘And you are wondering what has happened to cause this – am I correct? Of course I am, there is no need for you to elaborate. Well, sir, it's true, I have changed. I have eaten myself up and through some unprecedented act of gastromancy farted out my new incarnation – thus.
‘You are also wondering something else – aren't you? You are curious as to whether there is some connection between this metamorphosis and my summer sojourn. Where do I go? That is the question. In due course I will answer it for you, that and many other things that I know have quizzed you these past years.’
So, as the two of us progressed, ascending, cresting and then descending three of the seven hills, Mr Broadhurst talked. And what talk it was! Rich and protean, his word-seam seemed to me to be the very fount of knowledge itself, a mulchy conceptual bed which might be sown merely by the fact of being listened to, thus engendering all ideas for all time.
‘Reality,’ said Mr Broadhurst, ‘love it, hate it, you cannot do without it. Wouldn't you agree? Of course you would, for you cannot but do otherwise. And yet you, lad, are a perfect candidate for the role of skipper, suborner, seducer and traducer of that reality. Reality is a virgin whose virtue we all want to believe in, and, at one and the same time, an old whore who we've all had and had and had again, until our eyes and ears are like genitals that have been rubbed raw. We observe its regularities, its comings and goings through and in ourselves, yet we are unable to stand apart. At any rate you cannot stand apart, I cannot but do otherwise and that is why we belong together, d'ye see? Of course you don't, I will perforce have to demonstrate.’
As he declaimed we were weaving our way through the late-afternoon shoppers who thronged the centre of the town. Or rather, so magisterial was our progress that these less-solid citizens were being forced to weave in order to avoid our combined bulk. Suddenly Mr Broadhurst pulled up short, causing me to wheel around so that we were both facing the window of a toy shop.
The display in the shop window was an extravagant scenario designed to showcase a monster train set. A papier mâché scarp formed the backdrop and in the foreground engines pulling carriages and engines pulling trucks passed over hummocks, through tiny tunnels, and clattered into and out of plastic stations, never stopping, electronically hooting.
I stared at it, conscious of the big man's arm encircling mine with the coiled hunger of an anaconda about to ingest. Of all the eidetic images that remain from my childhood, frozen with crude representational accuracy, this is the most vivid. The trains moving with fluid inertia; the tiny plastic trees and buildings – their implausible neatness all too accurately complementing that
trompe-l'oeil
reality of which he had spoken; beyond the papier mâché horizon, the workings of a pocket deity were clearly visible in the brushstrokes of the painted sky. As I stared at the display, the reflections of myself and Mr Broadhurst in the plate-glass window came into focus as well, imposed over the vista. Eidesis came upon me trapping both layers into a third internal one. Then Mr Broadhurst seemed to start towards me and I could no longer be sure where he was, in my head, on the shop window or the pavement? In all three locations at once?