‘Rather droll, isn't it?’ he said, toying with another cut-price cigar. ‘In one room the junkies and in the other the marketeers. Quite a contrast on the face of it but fundamentally they're all engaged in the same activity — ’
‘We concede,’ Gainsby was saying, his Boston drawl only sounding marginally more distorted by the speaker than I knew it to be anyway, ‘that the test-marketing in London hasn't gone down too well but we don't accept that that has anything to do with the product itself. We feel certain that if we can only — ’
‘You don't mean to say you've set up another naming group for “Yum-Yum”, here at the DDU?’ I was incredulous.
‘I don't see what's so funny about that,’ he snapped. ‘The hospital has to pay its own way now, like any other opt-out trust. Gyggle organises a sideline in room rental which I informed Gainsby about. It's a perfectly convenient place to hold a naming group. Perhaps if you'd paid a little more attention to the edible financial product in the first place we wouldn't be still banging away at it. But this is all by-the-by, Gainsby's isn't the naming group I wanted you to see — ’
‘You mean there's another one?’
‘Oh yes indeed, most definitely, one I think you should sit in on, but we have to bide our time, we need a particular sort of introduction to this naming group.’ He turned back to the other window and sat down again. I joined him.
‘Nah,’ Big Mama Rosie was plainting. ‘Nah, I'm that far gone I can't find a vein any more.’ She regarded her arms balefully as if they had been foisted on her during the night by a wildcat team of transplant surgeons.
‘Bullshit,’ said Gyggle. ‘The only reason you can't find a vein is because you're too damn fat. Anyway, we're not here to talk about your drug taking, we're here for another purpose entirely. How's he getting on?’ He nodded to where Beetle Billy was slumped.
John got up and walked over to him, he reached down and peeled back one of Billy's eyelids with his thumb and then let it fall. Next he felt for a pulse in the VW repair man's neck. ‘He's fading fast,’ said John, ‘there's hardly any pulse.’
‘Excellent,’ said Gyggle. ‘Come on now, you all know what to do.’ The junkies shifted their chairs around until they were grouped in a circle at Billy's head.
I said, ‘What exactly is going on?’ but The Fat Controller just shushed me, one frankfurter finger to the roll of his lips. In the other room the junkies started to mutter — at first I couldn't make out what they were saying but then it began to dawn on me, they were reciting the names of products:
‘Band-Aid,’ said John. ‘Chap Stick,’ said Big Mama Rosie. ‘Hoover,’ said Richard Whittle. ‘Coke,’ said a stringy-looking type in steel-rimmed spectacles, ‘Dunkin’ Donuts,’ said a Lycra-wearer, ‘Holiday Inn,’ said Ethel the brass, ‘Dr Scholl's,’ said Dr Gyggle through the beard and then they went round the circle again: ‘Nintendo’, ‘Biro’, ‘Big Mac’, ‘Painstyler’, ‘Nescafé’, ‘Jiffy bag’, ‘Letraset’ and then again: ‘Perrier’, ‘Polaroid’, ‘Walkman’, ‘Xerox’, ‘Magic Marker’, ‘Visa’, chanting product name after product name until their voices merged into one incantatory hum.
Eventually I said to The Fat Controller, ‘I've got it, I know what they're doing, all these products are generics, aren't they?’
‘Quite so. This is the North London Book of the Dead, a set of instructions to be recited to the dying, in order that they should not return, in order that their immortal souls should be cancelled out, voided, put on the spike, deleted, wiped and erased utterly beyond recall. You see, my dear boy, as you have always suspected, I am the very Lama of Lost Souls, I reduce the human to the material, utterly and completely. And now, if I'm not much mistaken, we're ready for the off.’
The junkies had stopped chanting. John was feeling for Billy's pulse again. He straightened up saying, ‘He's had it, popped his clogs, karked it, he's run down the flag, he's retired to the pavilion, he's collected his watch, he's kicked the proverbial bucket and marked his mortal card, in short, he's elsewhere.’
‘Shall we join him?’ asked my guru.
And then we were back in the Land of Children's Jokes and The Fat Controller was saying to Doug, ‘Give that coon-boy a shake, will you, I can't stand people dropping off in my naming groups.’
‘Hold up,’ I cried, ‘we've been here before, I've heard you say that before.’
’Plus ça change plus c'est la même chose — what goes round comes around, my dear boy, must you be so obdurate?’ The new scene seemed to have perked him up a bit, he'd even managed to find an old Voltiger somewhere in the pockets of the decrepid check suit, which at least had the virtue of being to scale with his hand even if it was rather tatty and coated with lint. He lit it with the feeble flare of a cheap disposable lighter.
We were in the reception area to the Land of Children's Jokes, the swimming pool off the Roman Road that The Fat Controller had obtained the use of by corrupt means, for even more corrupt purposes. The same advertisements for children's swimming classes and work-out sessions were stuck up on the noticeboards, we were sitting on the same tiny chairs, eight of them had been pulled out to form a ragged circle.
Doug got up from where he sat opposite me and the poor man banged his spade on the fire bell again: ‘Ting!’. ‘Oh for Christ's sake,’ snapped The Fat Controller, ‘can't you mind out for that bloody thing? I would have thought you'd managed to get the hang of it by now — surely it's like judging the width of a car.’
‘Well no,’ Doug replied, ‘not exactly.’ The impact had shifted the spade in his head and he was clearly in pain; nevertheless he got up and walked round to where Beetle Billy sat dead to the world.
To the world maybe, but not to the Land of Children's Jokes. Doug shook him by the shoulder and he stirred, groaned, blinked a few times and then sat upright rubbing his eyes. ‘That's better,’ said The Fat Controller. ‘Now, are we all here, can we begin?’
I looked around the circle, they were all there. Besides Beetle Billy and Doug, there was Pinky, the thin man, the baby chewing razor blades and another baby I hadn't seen when I was there last. This baby was about the same age as the red one and was sitting in the corner over by the entrance to the changing rooms. I couldn't see its face because it had a plastic bag on its head, filmed with condensation and tightly fastened under its chin. Despite the suffocating hood the baby was still breathing vigorously. With each of its inhalations and exhalations the bag expanded and contracted. ‘Sweet, isn't it,’ said The Fat Controller indicating the poor mite with the wet end of his stogie.
‘S'pose so, but what's all this about anyway?’
‘We need to think up a name for you, Ian, that's what it's all about.’
‘Yes,’ chimed in Pinky. ‘Now you're coming here to stay, to be with us permanently, you need to have a proper designation like the rest of us — ’
‘After all,’ the thin man broke in his sharp tones, ‘you can't be called plain Ian, that won't do at all, oh no, my precious.’
‘Come on, come on, there's a proper way to do these things, I don't want you all blithering away like this to no effect,’ said the Lama of Lost Souls. ‘Moreover, it isn't only a name that we need for him, we need the right Sisyphean pose to lock him into, don't we?’