In November 2013, I was invited by LDNIA to speak at their gathering held in the Albion agency in Shoreditch. LDNIA is a network of designers, information architects and writers. To open my talk, I performed an imaginary dialogue based on a couple of failed job interviews I had in the previous decade. Gollancz are running an edited version of that dialogue on their blog.
My essay Self & I is published in Five Dials, and can be read for free here. It’s a memoir covering some of my time as Will Self’s live-in amaneunsis in the 1990s. It was originally written to be read aloud at the Port Eliot festival and so it is a fleet and comic approach to the period, modelled on Withnail & I. Everything included in it is – to the best of my recollection – true. I’ve written a few more chapters and may revisit this time again for a slim volume.
Matthew De Abaitua with Will Self’s gun in the garden of 1 Hall Cottages.
We are sitting with our children on a rug beside the river. A woman approaches us. She is a stranger and in her arms she is carrying a child.
She says, “Excuse me, would you mind looking after my baby?”
We look at one another with confusion. How should we respond?
“Just while I go for a swim,” she says, gesturing to the river with a slender hand.
She is lean and beautiful in her black swim suit but her face is unreadable.
“I won’t be long,” she says. “And he’s a very independent baby boy.”
Our Mums nod and smile and calculate. We are busy negotiating with half a dozen toddlers of our own but we are not the kind of people to refuse a favour.
The baby is a chubby boy who has just learned to walk, and he has the clumsy tippy-toe excitement of that discovery. He is dropped into our party, and he stumbles a few steps into my arms.
His mother walks away gracefully and into the throng.
“What’s your name?” we call after her.
She whispers her name but it is too exotic for us to grasp.
“What’s your baby’s name?”
“Jack,” she calls back and then disappears over the edge of the bank and into the water.
The river is tidal. At noon, it was a narrow sinuous channel cut into heaving mudflats, then the water trickled back from the estuary like a rumour, heightening everyone’s excitement about the arrival of the river itself, as if it were a famous guest at a party. There is a diving board and a wild swim. We have not brought our costumes. We are content to miss out. Parenthood, for us, is about missing out. The river wants beautiful women with eyes that are unreadable. Why is she such a mystery to us? Is it because her eyes are slightly too far apart for us to apprehend? Or is there something in them that we have decided to overlook, a cold impatience that modern etiquette requires her to be thankful of our help, and not merely insist upon it.
We sit on our rug in the shade. Jack slavers and pants with excitement at our golden horse balloon. All of our children want the golden horse balloon but it is given to Jack because he is our guest and it is important that we learn to share. He cries when the golden horse balloon drifts out of reach. It is returned to him and his excited panting resumes.
Jack’s cry attracts a beautiful man with a mustang’s mane, naked under an insouciantly draped towel. The beautiful man glances at us to check that we are not failing in our duties. He is not a Dad, we can see that in his stomach muscles, yet he feels responsible, not for the boy, but for ensuring that we do our job. He looks down at us and reassured that the proper measures have been taken – the annexing and enclosure of the golden horse balloon – he walks on by.
Boys somersault into the river. They swim wild, with different rules to the municipal pools of our childhood; bombing, diving and petting are encouraged. Emerging from a secluded meander, a naked man and woman wade hand-in-hand, their skin glittering in the sun. They are imperious in their freedom. We are in the shade.
Jack’s mother returns from her swim with wet hair and gooseflesh. She walks by without acknowledging us, finds a towel, and begins a conversation with the beautiful young man with the mustang mane. We seek her gaze. She is unreadable to us. More of us arrive. Our picnic rug is overwhelmed with children, all of whom want the golden horse balloon that Jack is chewing.
One of us has to go to the toilet. We will be too few to safely care for Jack. Our Mums agree that he should be returned to his mother, and that I should do it.
I go to her. She is surprised to see Jack in my arms.
“Is he upset?” she asks.
“No,” I reply.
She blinks, allocating a microsecond for me to reconsider my actions.
She speaks quietly, without catching my eye: “he looked very happy with you all. You have other children with you. He likes other children. And you all seem such nice people.”
I explain that I have to go to the toilet and that we only have so many pairs of eyes. This disappoints her. She looks up at me. I see an unflattering reflection of myself in her eyes.
“And we are beside a river,” I say.
It takes her a moment to understand my inference. When she looks at the river, she does not see danger, she sees pleasure.
When I return from the toilet, Jack is back on our picnic rug; the little boy is once again grasping and gnawing at the golden horsey balloon. And he is holding toy cars in his chubby palms, cars that belong to one of our boys. Our boy has been instructed to share but he doesn’t like it. We don’t know what to think. Is it right that we make the small sacrifice of looking after one more child, so that this stranger can have an hour to herself? Just because there are no words, in our language, for the question, “Excuse me will you look after my baby?”, it does not mean that we should disapprove of this custom of engaging strangers in childcare when an opportunity presents itself.
The river deepens. Intimations of dusk. We are growing hungry, the children fractious and cold. Where and what shall we eat? Is it time for cardies and long trousers? We must return to our camp. And what is to be done about Jack? Our littlest girl scowls at the boy; she knows that he does not belong and can’t understand why we allow him to take such liberties with the golden horse balloon.
Again, I take Jack up in my arms and return him to his mother, who is still chatting to the beautiful man with his casual towel.
I tell her we are leaving and pass Jack down to her. He cries.
She gazes at her son, and then at me: “he’s not happy,” she says.
Jack makes the brum-brum sound of a toy car and strains in her arms to return to our rug.
She strolls over to our mothers, who are busy packing to leave, and she finds what her son wants, a pair of toy cars, and she quickly steals them.
“There, there,” she says to Jack, “that’s better.”
We leave the river and return to our camp.
***
We are sitting under the gazebo. There is pasta and pesto for tea. A few of our children are with us and eat quietly, but most of our children are out there roaming around alone and who knows where. We believed that they would return for dinner. We were deluded.
Has anyone seen Hector?
The last time we saw Hector he was throwing a wellington boot at a duck. We consult the children about his whereabouts. They saw Hector trying to sell ripped pieces of paper to the people beside the river. Alexandria wonders if Hector is with his father, Will.
Has anyone seen Will?
Yes, we saw Will doing card tricks at the Boat House. And didn’t he say something about going fishing?
Now Jones is here. Hello Jones!
Has anyone seen Flint? asks Jones.
We make a show of looking to our left and to our right, and under the deck chairs, but Flint is nowhere to be found. We deliver reports of Flint: Cathy saw Flint at the circus tent. Noni saw him amongst the chefs upon the green. Kirk saw Flint riding on the back of a quad bike driven by a copper-coloured clown.
We don’t know who Kirk is, or why he is here. Kirk freaks us out.
Here’s Hector. He arrives back at camp with the bemused look of a reveller who popped out of the party to buy another bottle of champagne and returned to find the guests transformed into apes: who are these people, wonders Hector, and why aren’t any of them my parents?
Has anyone seen Mama, Hector asks. She was here a moment ago. Has anyone seen Papa? Kirk glimpsed Papa roaming the woods wearing the head of a wolf. Kirk is not helping. Kirk appeared last night, attaching himself to our camp with the blithe confidence of a lonely posh lunatic. Kirk concerns us.
Matthew leaves a message on Papa’s phone. Kirk wants to show us the decanter he bought from a stall holder, but the decanter is already broken, the spout jagged glass: who would have guessed that a decanter would break in the middle of a festival? Kirk resolves to return it to the stallholder. We hope that he will go. Kirk is still talking about the decanter so we find it hard to concentrate on the whereabouts of the children.
We need someone to hold the baby while we put a tent up. Our baby is only a month old. Kirk volunteers. I am so broody, he says, and before we can say NO! Kirk takes the baby from us. Her big head lolls briefly on her weak neck and then settles into the crook of his arm. One handed, he carries her off and looks at us, expecting us to smile at the sight of him, Kirk, with our baby, and it takes all our strength to smile despite every cell of our being screaming. We cannot concentrate on feeding the children. Time slows, and we hold our breath as Kirk struts around the camp, showing everyone his new baby and his new but broken decanter.
Our worst fears are interrupted by Hector. He is still looking for Mama and Papa, and his big brother. Have you seen Albert? he asks.
Has anyone seen Albert?
He jumped into the river, we remember, he somersaulted in from the edge of a sunlit wheatfield.
From a small tent, there comes the halting cries of a little girl. She fell asleep and when she woke up, Mummy was gone. Where is Mummy? Which Mummy, we wonder? We are losing track of ourselves. It is getting dark and the children move so quickly. The little girl wanders away through the guy ropes lead by another girl that we have never seen before, who is dressed in a tiger suit. We go to stop them but then someone asks us, where is Albert? Have we seen Albert’s Papa? And do you think a baby should play with a decanter? And in that time, the little girl and tiger disappear into the dark, and we cannot follow because we have so many children here. We chew our cheeks and bite our lips and wring our hands.
A mother arrives with a friend and couple of cocktails from the bar and an apology for leaving her little girl with us, in the little tent.
But you didn’t tell us you were leaving her here, we say. So we didn’t know.
The mother looks in the little tent. Her girl is gone. Where is she? the mother panics.
She left with the tiger girl, we say.
No one knows any tiger girl.
They were here a minute ago, we say.
No, I say, it was ten minutes ago.
At dusk, the tents rustle quietly in the wind. Mothers call for their children, and the wrong children answer them. Mosquitos hover over the river like patches of white noise.
I wrote this sketch during the long boom, back when I lived in London. It summons up the privileged boredom of the early noughties. My life is nothing like this now, and I have a whole different set of problems.
“I am stupid.” We were sitting in the George, on the corner of Wilton Way, Hackney.
“I know what you mean,” said Walter.
“I am becoming stupider by the hour,” I continued.
Walter put his glasses aside, revealing eyes trimmed with a thin frame of exhausted blood vessels. “I am too.”
You expect ageing to be an accumulation of experience, a daily accretion of ballast against the unknown. You don’t expect time to beat the smarts out of you, to mercilessly reprogram you with its weary cynicism, until you become a quarter of the man you once were, even though that was only half the man you wanted to be.
“Yes,” said Walter.
It’s our fault. We both sold out. Cut it any way you want, neither of us have ideal jobs. We’re doing something much stupider.
“It’s not just us,” Walter had a starred first in English Literature, with a Distinguished Masters from LSE, where he was trying to unify post-colonial literary theory with supply-side economics in a way I can’t even begin to understand.
Now he spends his evenings having Heat magazine explained to him by his twenty five year old lodger.
Walter was still talking. “Work does not demand intelligence, just perseverance. The people who do well are the ones who keep their heads down, bide their time easing up the corporate hierarchy. In fact, the higher up you go, the stupider everyone seems to get. Their minds have drawn tightly about their career; there is no space for anything else. In my line of work (television) a certain ignorance is an advantage. It shows you are in touch with the audience. In fact, applying your ignorance to a subject is pretty much the definition of a successful television programme.”
I nodded in recognition. “You feel daft.”
“I used to be a genius. Now I’m an imbecile. They took it from me.”
Walter squinted, squashing his thoughts into some kind of cohesion. “I went to a dinner party the other day.”
In the past I would have mocked him for this confession. Now it didn’t seem to matter, being middle class. It made no difference. In fact, I was curious to hear about it. “Did anyone say anything interesting?”
“I don’t know. All I remember is long periods of silence punctuated by this other guest, a woman who looked just like Tony Blair, talking about peas. She liked the smell of them, ‘like freshly-dug soil’. Every now and again I’d try and talk about creative stuff.”
“Creative stuff?”
“You know, the arty things that everyone reads and chats about?”
“Oh. Culture.”
“I didn’t have the energy. Holding a glass of wine, holding an opinion. Couldn’t be arsed. ‘Have you seen the new exhibition at the Tate? It’s very good. The new exhibition at the Tate. We went last weekend, very thought provoking if a little showy. The new exhibition at the Tate.’ You know how it goes.”
Certainly ideas had lost their lustre of late. In our bohemian salad days, we had been quick with ideas, believing success and self-esteem could be constructed out of one good idea. But theorising is so callow. Experience teaches you that ideas get you nowhere. For example, a friend of mine invented the one shoulder-strap backpack. Has he seen a penny from his idea? No, of course not. It was pinched, copied. Ideas will get you so far, but money, nepotism and plagiarism will get you a lot further.
I’m not bitter about that, in the same way I’m not bitter about gravity. Sure, they both hold you back, but what can you do?
I was hungry to hear about the dinner party. I hadn’t been to one for nearly three years. Four couples staring at one another over a little bowl of black pepper, talking about the food while eating the food. God I miss it.
“She looked just like Tony Blair?”
“Yes. Exactly. But with a bob. There was a basket of raw pea pods in the middle of the table. She picked one out, split it with a run of her thumbnail, and took a hefty whiff. Someone was talking about all that state of the nation, government stuff-”
“-politics.”
“It was her boyfriend, he was talking politics, or rather, he was paraphrasing a column from The Guardian when she interrupted him – which was a relief, we’d all read it and didn’t particularly need a cover version – to comment on the peas. She rolled one between her thumb and index finger. ‘It smells of earth, when you turn it over’ she said, with a look of amazement. She held the pod out for me. I took one and gently raised it to my nostril. I sniffed. She watched me with the most unnerving grin. Slowly, I put the pea onto my tongue, bit it, and swallowed. An erotic charge passed between us, we shared a moment over the pea. Her boyfriend’s doing Guardian karaoke. We thought briefly about fucking.”
“Did anything happen?”
“No, of course not.”
We both have long-term girlfriends. Monogamy And The City. All the women seem to be having sex, while the men are having monogamy. Certainly Walter and I lack the wit for infidelity. We are too tired, exhausted by stupid work, the days spent rolling around a washing machine of nonsense, pulled on by thoughtless centrifuge.
Walter was still wearing his suit at 9pm, while the rest of the patrons in The George were all chunky jumpers, roll-ups and community art projects. Citizens of Old Hackney, loony left Hackney, carved wooden Buddha Hackney, unemployable bohemians subsisting on the burgeoning equity in houses sought after by people like us, New Labour Hackney, consultancy and media Hackney.
“In work today,” said Walter, “I had a meeting with the composer of this big new documentary series we’re editing. I had to make some changes to his score.”
“What was wrong with it?”
“Nothing. But insisting on changes is my job. I asked him if he could fit another chord in.”
I laughed. “Good one.”
“He had to go back and rewrite and re-record the whole thing. It really cut into his profit margin. I didn’t know what else to do. I had to say something.”
“Don’t you normally ask for ‘more warmth’?”
“That was getting tired. It was time for a new change. ‘Can you fit another chord in there’ will keep me going until at least October.”
I had to say it. “Your job sounds really stupid.”
“It is. I ask for changes to things I know nothing about. It doesn’t matter if it’s music, comedy, or drama, or a documentary, or the news or a soap opera. If it’s edgy, I tell them to make it more mainstream. If it’s too mainstream, I tell them to add more edge. One of my presenters used the word “corpulent” in a link: I tore a strip off him. “Corpulent” is not a ‘now’ word. I made them reshoot a game show because the set was the wrong colour. It should be hot pink, because research shows that hot pink is the colour of entertainment. Of course, you laugh and say it is stupid, but I don’t see why I should be singled out. Most jobs are stupid. The only exist to keep us busy.”
“I am very busy at the moment.”
“Everyone is very fucking busy. This morning, I heard a DJ announcing that he was keeping it busy. On pirate radio! Even the people at Radio Crackhead are failing to manage their work/life balance! Something is really wrong with us, with the people…with…”
“Society.”