Читать книгу My Idea of Fun - Уилл Селф - Страница 12

CHAPTER TWO

CROSSING THE ABYSS

There is nothing so agreeable as to put oneself out for a person who is worth one's while. For the best of us, the study of the arts, a taste for old things, collections, gardens, are all mere ersatz surrogates, alibis. From the depths of our tub, like Diogenes, we cry out for a man. We cultivate begonias, we trim yews, as a last resort, because yews and begonias submit to treatment. But we should prefer to give our time to a plant of human growth, if we were sure that he was worth the trouble. That is the whole question. You must know yourself a little. Are you worth my trouble or not?

M. de Charlus in The Guermantes Way

Proust

Mr Broadhurst arrived the next weekend. In one way his arrival was a reassurance – he certainly didn't look like a gyppo. But on the other hand it was confusing, because the men who accompanied him most definitely were.

To begin with it was like a rerun of Mr Gardiner's visit. The truck was as big and if anything blacker – an ex-army three-tonner. The mysterious new lodger's mobile home was hitched on behind. And what a caravan it was! Nothing like the cream-and-blue hutches dotted around the site. This one was twice as big and made of mirror-shiny aluminium. It was so long that it had a double set of wheels at the back.

Up on tiptoes while the adults stood chatting in the garden, I peered in on an expanse of fluffy white carpeting, a wide bed covered with a white-lace counterpane, glass shelves lined with newspaper-wrapped ornaments and in the corner a colour television. With its windscreen windows, fore and aft, the caravan was like a storefront display of American opulence.

Mr Broadhurst was a big fat man. He was over six feet tall and bald save for a moustache of fine grey hair shadowing the crease between the third and fourth folds at the back of his thick neck. He was dressed like a part-time undertaker in a down-at-heel black suit. His tie was black as well and his shirt had clearly dripped dry.

Fat was too simple a description of Mr Broadhurst, I knew that as soon as I clapped eyes on him. For he wasn't plump in the way that I was aged eleven. I couldn't imagine poking my finger into him and then drawing it back, having created a pale dimple that sopped up red. His was a fat that implied resistance rather that yielding. If his chest resembled a barrel and his head and limbs five smaller barrels, it was a formal resemblance only. I could tell just by looking that these vessels didn't contain dropsical fluid, or scrungy sponginess. Instead Mr Broadhurst's solidity was clearly founded on enlarged organs that filled him right up; a double heart like a compressed air pump, a liver the size and weight of a medicine ball and hundreds of feet of firehose-thick intestine.

He was sucking at the edge of his blue Tupperware tea cup, as I drew closer to hear what was being said. Supping greedily, as if he were about to take a bite out of the cup's rim. The two gyppo men stood apart, regarding him with expressions that I could not read at the time, but which – with the benefit of hindsight – I would say were full of awe.

Then I caught an earful of what he was saying and it was a revelation. In that moment I knew I was hearing one of the great talkers, the consummate rhetoricians, of all time. For Mr Broadhurst's discourse was as unlike any ordinary conversation as an atomic bomb is unlike a conventional weapon. It was an explosion, a lexical flash, irradiating everything in the immediate area with toxic prolixity. I caught a lethal dose of this, that has been decaying throughout my half-life, ever since.

It was clear, even to a child, that the most mundane tropes, the purely factual statements and flippant asides, that fell from his lips, were more akin to the run-offs and overflow pools of some mighty river than the babbling brooks and cresslined streams of sociable chatter. I could sense that this stream of speechifying was always there – in Mr Broadhurst's mind – and that what we were hearing was simply the muted roar of a currently submerged cataract. When he paused, it seemed to me only as if this great torrent of verbiage had been momentarily blocked by some snag or clotted spindrift of cogitation, and I felt the power of his thought building up behind the dam, waiting to sunder it, so that the sinuous green back of this communicative Amazon or Orinoco might stretch out once more, towards the transcendent sea. No hyperbole, no matter how extreme, could do justice to the strength of the impression that that first encounter with Mr Broadhurst's speech made on my pubescent sensibility.

‘It's a remarkable enterprise that you have here, Dawn,’ he was saying. ‘The hills rearing up behind and’ – he swept his telegraph pole of an arm round in a wide arc – ‘the sea below. Nothing could be finer for a man such as myself, no Epidaurus could provide a more suitable arena within which to lay my tired body. No proscenium could be more delightfully elevated, so as to present the remaining days of my reclusion and retirement.’ He paused, adopting a pensive mien which befitted this fatiloquent observation, and I was transfixed by the thick, almost Neanderthal ridges of bone that took the place of eyebrows on his mondial head. These ran together like the arched wings of a gull and became the high bridge of Mr Broadhurst's prominent nose. But, saving this, his head was peculiarly lacking in other features, such as cheekbones, or the extra chins that might have been expected. Also, there was a depilated, creaseless look to his flesh. His lips were wide, thick and saturnine. His steady basalt eyes were protuberant, amphibian under lashless lids.

‘Muvvat’ ‘van nerr?’ asked one of the gyppos. To me they were stuff of nightmares, clearly beyond the fringe of Saltdean – and perhaps any other society.

‘Do that, do that. Do it now.’ His voice at first merely emphatic, gathered emotional force. ‘Position the machine in the wings, so that the god may be ready to descend on a golden wire.’ The gyppos set down their mugs on the edge of the rockery and, addressing one another with glottal stops and palate-clickings, leapt back up into their truck. Their black bushes of hair, their raven faces, the way they dressed in dark coats fastened at the waist with lengths of rope, the way they spoke and drank and moved, in short, everything underscored their moral insouciance. ‘Do what we will,’ the gyppos seemed to say, ‘that is the whole of our law.’

But Mr Broadhurst, despite his advanced age, dared to order these Calibans about. When he barked, they snapped to. ‘Mind out for my things,’ he shouted after them. ‘My impedimenta, my chattels, my tokens of mortal desire – you'll pay for any breakages! ‘

That winter Mr Broadhurst became a fixture at Cliff Top. I was puzzled by the ambiguity of my mother's relationship with him. She had few friends apart from her sisters, and I had seldom heard her called by her first name by anyone who wasn't a family member. But the more I pressed her over it, the more she demurred.

‘Tush now, luv. Mr Broadhurst is like part of the furniture for me. He's always been around. I can't remember whose friend he is, to be 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 me, their contrasting figures like a Grimm illustration framed by the tip-tilted housefronts of the old village, I figured out the arithmetic. If Mr Broadhurst had been grown up enough to visit a tea shop regularly before 1914, he would have to be at least eighty by now, easily. Yet despite his declared retirement there was nothing obviously decrepit about him. Had there been I would certainly have spotted it.

I knew about old people the way a boy who lives next to an airport knows about planes. Our slice of Sussex coastline was already beginning to fill up with the moribund – or, as they prefer to put it nowadays: was becoming a growth area for the grey market. Saltdean even boasted specialist shops for the old, retailing surgical supports, Zimmer frames and herbal remedies. But Mr Broadhurst just didn't have the shuffling gait that I expected of the old, only a certain calculated languor to his movements. This was a comprehensive slow-motion, affecting his gestures and orotund tones as well as his locomotion.

‘What's a gyppo, Mum?’ It was the following week. I was eating high tea after school. Beans on toast, Ribena.

‘We don't say gyppo, Ian, it's common.’ She was wiping the kitchen surfaces with a J-Cloth, rubbing them vigorously, her features distorted with distaste, as if they were the limbs of a Formica corpse.

‘Mr Gardiner said that Mr Broadhurst was a gyppo, and he had gyppos with him when he came, didn't he, Mum?’ This jarred her and she grew terse.

‘Look, Ian, I know this much, that Mr Broadhurst worked for many years in the salvage industry and I believe that he counts a number of travelling people among his acquaintances. That's all, now eat your tea.’

The undercliff walk, which ran from Rottingdean along to Brighton, was my special haunt. This was where I consummated my boyhood. It was a peculiar place, especially during the off season, when detergent waves span against the dirty parapet. The two-hundred-feet-high cliffs rose above it and the shoreline below it was a torn shattered prospect, strewn with huge lumps of chalk and discarded trash from the Second World War; pillboxes and dragons’ teeth, which were in the process of being reduced to rubble by the tides.

Some mothers said the undercliff was dangerous and wouldn't let their children play there. They spoke of high tides washing little ones clean away (there was no access to the top of the cliff for over three miles). My mother wasn't amongst their number. I was allowed to go down there all I wanted. I transformed the pillboxes into Arthurian redoubts and tenanted them with my fellow knights. It was only child's play but highly charged and for me more emotive than the real world. My eidesis allowed me to paint the storybook characters on to the rocks around me; and often, so enmeshed had I become in make-believe that a solitary dog-walker coming along the concrete causeway would terrify me, as much as if they had been the Black Knight.

The winter after Mr Broadhurst came to Cliff Top, on two or more occasions, I thought I saw him down on the undercliff. This was strange enough, for how could such a big man be at all elusive, especially to one as sharp-sighted as I? And yet I couldn't be sure if it was he, backed into one of the chalky gulches at the base of the cliff and chatting conspiratorially with one of his hawk-faced gypsy friends, or just some ordinary be-mackintoshed pensioner, a sad stroller on the far shore of life.

Increasingly the off season at Cliff Top belonged to Mr Broadhurst. It became associated with him in my mind, in just the same way that the on season belonged to my aunts and cousins. Like many only children of single parents I was emotionally precocious. I sensed that my mother was pleased and even relieved by the interest that he took in us. I knew that he helped Mother with her accounts and made suggestions as to how she could drum up more custom for the caravan park. For some reason these stratagems seemed to pay off. Come summer there were more guests. More than half of the static caravans would be filled. The older people – middle-aged or elderly couples – Mother would put up in what she grandly termed the ‘PGs’ Wing’. In the mornings I would catch sight of them, their unfamiliar nightwear rendering the sun porch sanatorial, as they processed to and from their allocated bathroom.

Mr Broadhurst wasn't there to see the fruit of his business acumen, for come Easter he would be off, winging away like some portly and confused migratory bird, to different climes. Or at any rate that's what I imagined for him – he wouldn't tell me where he went. He wouldn't even hint at it.

‘Where d'you go in the summer, Mr Broadhurst?’

‘That, my lad, I am afraid I am not at liberty to disclose. My perennial peregrinations are perforce secret. All in good time – should you appear worthy of my confidence – I will divulge elements of my itinerary.’

However, far more affecting than Mr Broadhurst's seasonal leave was the impact on my home culture of the improved management of Cliff Top that he had bequeathed. This amounted to a paradigm shift in the social status of my mother's household. As Mr Broadhurst became more familiar to us, more heavily entrenched in the winter seaside, so my mother upped herself. It was as if, with the failed father gone, she was once again free to resume an aspirational trajectory. Dinner became lunch and tea became supper.

‘There'll be more guests again this summer,’ I remember my mother saying, setting the femurous receiver back on its pelvic cradle and closing her bookings ledger. ‘That extra advertising Mr Broadhurst suggested we do has certainly paid off.’

More guests meant that there was more money; and more money meant better clothes, new caravans for the site and new interior decoration for the bungalow.

Kitchen and carpet were fitted. A central-heating system replaced the gas fires’ bleating and the controlled explosion of the geyser. The winter mornings, when in darkness I would bolt from the warm confinement of my bed to dress in the kitchen, became instant memories. Nostalgia for a simpler, more technically primitive age.

Once the bungalow was vitalised people started to come by for drinks, rather than simply having drinks when they came by. There was also an alteration in the ambit of my mother's socialising, for the drinks people tended to be the parents of my schoolfriends at Varndean Grammar. They were a cut above the shopkeepers and tourism-purveyors that I was used to. Their business was more elevated, further removed from the raw stuff of exchange. Their conversations with my mother referred to a world where the ambiguity of the relationship between value and money was greatly appreciated.

The people who had had drinks when they came by, well, they were a distinctly odder crowd, including Madam Esmerelda, the thyroid case who had the palmist's concession on the Palace Pier. Her boyish friend was an old circus midget called Little Joey, who still wore his stage clothes (‘It's all I have, you see, Sonny Jim, unless I want to wear kids’ gear'), Norfolk jackets in screaming plaid, topped off with a Derby hat. Joey and Esmerelda's talk was colourful, peppered with the showbusiness expressions of an earlier age. It was set against types such as these that Mr Broadhurst was able to insinuate himself into my life, without appearing quite as aberrant as he might otherwise.

I will say one thing for my mother. I will grant her one, severely back-handed compliment. And that is: that as we ascended the greasy pole of English class mobility together, she seldom embarrassed me. For, if her great fault was the almost-sexual intimacy with which she blanketed me in private, her great asset was the preternatural sensitivity she showed towards me in public. She never patronised me or made me jump through the hoops of propriety the way that I saw other children forced to by their parents. Indeed, she treated me with an easy egalitarianism that was far more effective – in terms of my succesful acculturation, that is.

Of course the person we were both really taking instruction from was Mr Broadhurst. It was his long-winded locutions that we both began to ape – never using one word where five would do. And it was his heavy-handed delicacy to which we aspired when our everyday Tupperware was replaced with bone china.

At school things were better for me as well. During my time at Saltdean Primary I had always been subject to the tiny-mindedness of a tiny community. My father's desertion of us was well known and often commented on. No matter that this was without malice, it meant that I felt excluded, cut off, beyond the pale. But at Varndean Grammar no one knew about my father. When I started there I simply lied about him and said that he was dead, which gained me sympathy as well as cloaking me in something like mystery. This, I now know, was a mistake. Perhaps I even realised it as a child, because the lie was supported by my mother; and such complicity was worrying, bizarre even, to a twelve-year-old boy.

Nonetheless it gave me a brief lull, a fall in the feverish temperature of my life which I made full use of. Puberty and individualism don't mix. Running with the pack was something new. Mutually masturbating with skinny-hipped boys and mentally torturing sensitive student teachers, this became my idea of fun, but not for long.

There was one final summer before Mr Broadhurst began to take a more advanced interest in me. A summer when I ran as free with my cousins and the children of my mother's guests as ever before. That was the summer when I first became fully conscious of the arbitrariness of the division between the ‘on’ and the ‘off'; the last summer when I saw the sun twitch away the net curtain of mizzle that hid the mounded Downs and transform the world, so that the sky and the sea defined the land, giving curvature to the earth. The last summer that was acted out in the round.

I showed the guests’ children where to shop for sweets, where to go crabbing, how to get into the Dolphinarium for free. We ranged along the coast from Saltdean to as far as Shoreham. I felt engaged – masterful. Unlike the holidaymakers, this was my burgh, my manor. The tatty holiday glitz was my finery. I knew all the people who ran the amusements and all the roustabouts who worked on them. I could spring on to a dodgem at one side of the rink and proceed to the other by leaping from one rubber-flanged buggy to the next. My little crew would look on amazed.

The one bum note, the one hint that something was changing for me – and mind you, I cannot be sure that this isn't an intimation that belonged to that ultimate off season, the first autumn of my apprenticeship – was my heightened awareness of the very peculiar marginalisation of the Hepplewhite men. These wraithlike uncles of mine, who only came down for the weekend and never stopped for the week, were always ‘stepping outside for a pipe’, or even ‘just stepping outside’ with no explanation. Neither my mother nor my aunts ever enjoined them to ‘take an interest in Ian’. I cannot recall any of them saying, as might have been expected, that I needed a man's influence. Instead it started to dawn on me that this collective silence-about-men, this domination of the Cliff Top sodality, was in some way calculated, a willed silence between the emasculated overture and the powerful first act. The Hepplewhite sisters were preparing me for the stentorian bulky basso of Mr Broadhurst.

Towards the end of that summer the full weight of sexual maturity fell on me, and with it came the hormonal reclamation of the sea. The two formerly separate continents of the ‘on’ and the ‘off’ were reunited into one landmass of vertical concerns: term times and bus times; holiday times and homework times. I became sharply aware of the differences between my boy cousins and my girl cousins. Little furled genitals had long since been buried away under compost clothing, the better to mature there in the dark. I feared they might be gone for the duration.

I cannot explain why that from the off, my sexual feelings were so circumscribed by such awful shame. It made no sense – but it was true. Perhaps it was my chronic lack of male role models. To define myself as a man in relation to my mother and my aunts was an impossibility. Theirs was an unknowable sex, even to look at it was a kind of astronomy, so vast and remote were their bodies. The idea that they could possibly have been banged up by the uncles was flatly preposterous. With the girl cousins and the beach girls it was a different story. There were stirrings and presentiments. I longed, more than anything, to be a pebble or some shingle, pressed beneath those squash buttocks.

If the holidays were sexually perplexing, when term time came I also recoiled from schoolboy smuttiness. I couldn't handle ejaculation as a form of micturation. The ways of looking at the business were stark. Either gonorrhoea, syphilis and non-specific urethritis, explained by Mr Robinson with the new visual aids, or else German porn, bought by the older boys and displayed under desk tops. These pictures, which showed moustached men sinking their pork swords into the wounded abdomens of grimacing uglies, bore no relation to my fantasies, which were chivalrous in the extreme. It may sound pathetic to you, but at that time to be a man was for me to be a Roland or a Blondin. Lute-strumming on a forty-four-date castle tour, content to die for the sake of a radiant eye – let alone a thigh.

Why elaborate? The stuff of adolescent sexuality is known to us all, a wondrousness that increases in memory bulkily to match the rusting hulk of subsequent disillusion. How much harder it is to admit that the disillusion was there all along.

More to the point I was tubby, pink and unappealing. My body was awash with glandular gunk and my face dusted over with pustules. No matter the burgeoning advice-column culture, no matter the democracy of pornography – I felt disenfranchised by my lust. Was it Oedipal? Having dispatched Daddy on the A22 to Southampton was I desperate to get home, answer the riddle that complemented the brewery advertising on the coaster, then cover Mummy where she lay, panting on her electric blanket? Nothing so simple. No it was eidesis. Up until puberty I had taken this for granted, seen it as little more than a clever skill, but now it began to preoccupy me. I started to see it as intrinsic to my nature.

Returning home from school, on the first day of that autumn term, I got off the bus as usual, at the stop midway between St Dunstan's and Roedean, and turned to look towards the Downs. The whole raised tier of the bank the blind home sat on was networked with concrete pathways. These were ruled into existence by guide rails, all painted white, as befitted the giant canes that they were. I thought of Mr Broadhurst and how he had once told me that the blind should never lead the blind. Their halting progress along these paths already struck me as laden with symbolism. Wasn't this the human predicament, fumbling along and then falling off? Waiting on the grass for the attendants to swoop down and reclaim you, reconnect you to the vivifying rail?

I wondered if Mr Broadhurst was among them – he was due back from his summer sojourn any day now – but I couldn't make out his pepper-pot shape amongst the attendants and the vision-crips, the spazzy sightless who fumbled their way beneath the cruel-joke edifice. (Can't you just imagine the architect pissing himself with laughter as he shaded in the hideous eaves, ruled the brutal perpendiculars and traced the shaved pubis of the concrete façade! Confident that here at last was a clientele that would be in no position to object to his conception of the modern.)

Maybe Mr Broadhurst was inside. As he was a voluntary worker he could be up to anything, from assisting in the complex foreplay of braille instruction, his hand hovering delicately over another's, to participating in the free-form, consensual ritual of tea time, imagining himself – as he had told me he often did – as blind as his charges, so that the urn became a dragon, capable of shooting out a boiling wet tongue to scald him.

I too became eyeless in Sussex, toiling along the tangled verge. How many steps could I take before I had to open my eyes? Or would I waver and have my shoulder clipped, sliced off by a whooping bus side? A commonplace enough child's game, but on this ordinary afternoon eidesis reared its ugly head.

I was looking into the red darkness of my own retinal after-image, the plush of my inner lids. I summoned up an eidetic facsimile of the road ahead, its diminishing perspective, the pimpling of the tarmac, the toothpaste extrusion of the white line dividing the carriageway. In this there was nothing remarkable. My head-borne pictures, as I have said before, were always exceptionally vivid. But on this occasion I became aware of a new Point of View. That's the only way I can describe it, as an awareness of being-able-to-see but with nothing lying behind it, no intricate basketry of muscle and coaxial nerve.

In that moment – there was no moment. Time was child's time again, the always-now, caught up and cradled like water by the surface tension of the present. I was inside my own representation and that representation had become the world.

If there's anyone way that I could express this sensation to you it would be this. Imagine yourself to be a free-floating Steadicam that can move wherever it wishes at will. For in the very instant that I packed myself into this new perspective, I became aware of flexible ocular prostheses like joysticks and rudders.

Effortlessly I shot high up into the air, pirouetted through a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree pan and then zoomed down again, to hover a foot above the Rottingdean bus as it batted along. I zipped by the pasty faces of my schoolmates, sitting still in transit, and their beady eyes stared straight through me. I was – I realised, powering up into another heady sky-scraping loop – free.

Immediately I started to consider, where should I go? What use should I make of my new and apparently astral body. The two great buildings set on the flanks of the Downs were an obvious objective. I didn't hesitate, I swooped down and entered the red-brick precincts of Roedean. Here, I roamed the dormitories pushing my invisible, yet inviolable, lens into the shower block, the changing rooms. I stopped off in the sanatorium, I doodled beneath the desks. And everywhere I went I immersed myself in the spectacle of many many hundreds of well-turned little misses, unaware and unsuspecting but all perfumed, deliciously scented, by affluence.

When I was a primary school pupil, my eidesis had been noted by the arts and crafts teacher. During her lessons, anything she gave me – an empty yoghurt pot, or a dying daffodil – I would replicate with near-photoreal accuracy, even on thick paper with a soft pencil. She took an interest in me and at parents’ evening approached my mother saying, ‘Mrs Wharton, your son really does have the most unusual ability.’ The higher-ups at the local education authority, prodded into action by Mrs Hodgkins, sent me to see a clinical psychologist.

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.

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.