Phone

by Will Self

  her wide hips – every time she paused for breath her supportive

  father heard the grating after-tone … send in the clooownssshhrrghhh.

  The intervention had been, perhaps, her finest ever performance:

  standing there, for once with an audience at least close to double

  figures, and proving how much more mature she could be than

  her spaced-out mother and senile father. Poor Lottie! The least

  objection – the slightest check to one of her outbursts – was, Zack

  knew only too well, the way to really enrage her … such a temper –

  such anger. Yet on this occasion … I threw caution to the winds. Why?

  There was the reopened wound of his split from Athena … it’s the

  last, not the bloody first, that’s the deepest, and so he’d shouted her

  down: That’s enough! You’ve no right to browbeat me in this way –

  not you, Lottie, or any of you other ungrateful whelps … or words

  to that effect. Oscar, who has his mother’s neat, dark features … and

  permanently shaded top lip, had looked up from his phone-fiddling

  and guffawed: You’re seventy-eight years old, Zack Busner – you’re

  seventy-eight years old! Who was he, this pseudo-intellectual,

  pseudo-biker in all his pretentiousness, to berate the father who …

  wiped his fucking bum! It’d been Daniel, one of life’s conciliators,

  who’d eventually calmed them all down. Busner felt a great affinity

  with his second son, who … like me, has always had a … mutating

  mental thunderhead between him and the sunlight: a profoundly

  disturbed elder brother. It’d made of him a coper as well as a conciliator

  – a coper and a tosher and a mender and a marrier of one

  two-by-four to the next. Daniel had been the first of Zack’s children

  to move back into the Redington Road house with the stated intention

  of … keeping a bit of an eye on Dad – the Fortess Road flat had

  gone the way of all rental properties, and, although he’d been saying

  for a while that when the lease ended he’d … take to the open road,

  winter was coming – so he’d scuttled back up to Hampstead … my

  shitty-little tail between my bemerded legs. Zack couldn’t help feeling

  a little cynical about Daniel and Pat’s eye-keeping: the doctoring

  wasn’t … that lucrative, while his partner, the earthy and mostly

  indolent Patricia … hadn’t stopped pushing ’em out until she was

  nigh-on perimenopausal. They’d had a house of their own, once …

  Palmers Green, wasn’t it? But, as the years passed, so the shortfall

  between their earnings and the mortgage payments grew. Unlike

  the thrifty Oscar, who’d scrimped and saved and bought-to-let,

  they’d been compelled to sell-to-borrow … moving further and

  further out, sending their vast brood of kids to wilder and wilder

  schools, until they were marooned out in the Essex flatlands. There

  were rooms aplenty at Redington Road for these whelps’ whelps –

  of whom there were so many their grandfather couldn’t remember

  their names … if I even knew them to begin with. He’d encounter

  one or other of them on the stairs, or emerging from a bathroom,

  and reel back, shocked by this particular expression … of my

  own phenotype: faces of a greater or less … frogginess, but all with

  standard, Busner-issue receding chins, wide mouths and prominent

  yet flat-bridged noses – all of them with mild blue eyes, mostly

  goggling behind thick lenses. And their grandfather would gaze

  at them dumbstruck, thinking … Who are they, my descendants?

  Who indeed. – Nonetheless, on the afternoon of the Big Interventio,

  it was Daniel who’d … mended fences, just as he’d mended

  the guttering, put the wildly overgrown garden in order and installed

  the inset ceiling spotlights … possibly with a view to this

  interrogation. Dad, he’d said, we’re quite simply worried about you

  … or words to that effect, and we wonder whether you might be

  more, um, comfortable somewhere where people can keep an eye

  on you consistently … It was sort of okay when it was just Pat,

  me and the kids here – but now so many of the others have pitched

  up as well … and I’ve taken this Southwark job … Well … we

  rather sort of … feel … you’re getting sort of … lost between

  the … cracks. Surely … some sort of … assisted … living … ?

  He had tailed off as his courage sort of deserted him – it was left to

  his half-sister to do the … soothsaying: You’re getting forgetful,

  Dad – you don’t take your medication … You have, um … these

  accidents – what if you fall? And left it to her younger sister in

  turn to deliver the … coup de grâce: It’s Simon, really, Dad, he’s a

  complete fucking loony and none of us can stand him … There’d

  been, Busner thinks now, still standing before the groovy wooden

  door, waiting for admission to this … chamber of secrets – what’re

  they gonna do to me? What possible sanction can there be for putting

  your meat-and-two-veg’ on a buffet counter? a spring-loaded catch

  in the collective throat of the family … and Frankie released It …

  Clever Frankie – direct Frankie. Smart and efficient Frankie –

  fully-medically-qualified Frankie, who works as a locum only because

  she wants her time free to pursue … other projects. Smart,

  neat, almost … reet-petite Frankie, who’s got all her sister’s share

  of their mother’s ethereal good looks, yet … makes very little

  of them … The expressions on the other Busneresque faces had

  shifted – they all became animated, sat up, stopped mucking

  about with their mobile phones, and so had begun … a clamour

  of complaint: Simon had burned the carpet and the sheets in the

  attic bedroom, he’d blocked the downstairs toilet with excessive

  amounts of toilet paper, he’d woken the entire house at three in the

  morning playing Carmina Burana … vita de-tes-ta-bi-lis … nunc

  obdurat … et tunc curat … ludo men-tis ac-i-em … Sors sa-lu-tis!! Et

  vir-tu-tis!! Michi nunc con-traaaria!! Est affectusss! Et de-fectussss!

  Semper in an-garia … !! Because he’d been enslaved by the same

  bloody thing that forever enslaves all of us: having gone out to some

  dreadful-bloody-dive in Kilburn, where he succeeded in picking

  up someone at least biologically female – as Pat-the-Prude put it.

  Someone who – it transpired the following morning when she

  refused to leave the house – was even crazier than Simon! Zack

  gagged trying to drink in all this poisonous resentment – he’d

  spluttered, I-I d-don’t rightly know where to begin when it comes

  to rebutting this dreadful calumny … Whereupon his third son …

  dangerous to know piped up again: You are seventy-eight years

  old! You are seventy-eight years old! His leathery, bearded face

  creasing, his hands shining his leathery knees, You are seventy-eight

  years old! You are seventy-eight years old! Basking in Oscar’s

  fury, his father had considered … yet again the stereotypic character

  of younger siblings’ resentments: He thinks Simon crazy …

  therefore Simon is Mark, so he’s pl
unged into insecurity … And

  it might’ve been at that precise point … or possibly sometime later,

  that the malefactor had himself appeared, slinking into the big

  Busner-filled room and squatting down beside the mirrored cocktail

  cabinet – another relic of the Maurice Years … You’ll have a cocktail,

  won’t you, Zachary-dear? Gin-and-it? Kill a few brain cells while we

  tune in to the Brains Trust? This – this! Then – now! This much he

  knew – I know: he has reached the final Ashrama, the life-stage of

  renunciation, so then – as now – he’d sat tight-lipped behind his

  mask of akrodha … the state attainable by sustained practice wherein

  the Sannyasin maintains his equanimity despite being roundly abused

  by his own sickeningly ungrateful grown-up children, venturing only

  this feeble riposte: He’s more sinned against than sinning … Right

  away Oscar was up on his hind-legs … like his wet-nosed namesake

  … long dead – Miriam took him to the vet, should’ve liked to say

  goodbye … and the venom had spurted out: You may be seventy-eight

  years old – you may even be a bit confused – but that doesn’t

  disqualify you from hearing hard truths … hard stuff – yeah. Yeah!

  All of our childhoods, yeah – all of ’em buggered up by you with

  this bullshit: your great healing empathy – your magical healing

  touch, which you insisted on bestowing on all-and-fucking-sundry

  all the fucking time! All-and-fucking-sundry! To’ve conceived a

  child at all was miraculous – to’ve watched him weaned and grown

  to manhood a series of amazing revelations … thousands each day –

  if you troubled to look, yet there he’d been, a Pecksniff pointing the

  way towards responsibilities … he’ll never ever experience – all-and-fucking-sundry,

  indeed! Zack had remained implanted in the shoddy

  upholstery beside Pat-the-Prude – and last night, in Room Five-Twenty,

  he’d stared balefully down at his parenthetic toes … they

  say toenails grow when you’re dead – therefore I must be … And right

  now, still standing in front of the groovy wooden door in the

  Hilton’s lobby, his son’s execrations return … to soil me again.

  Y’know, to be honest, Dad – because honesty is what you value

  above all else, isn’t it … Well, to be fucking honest, Dad, I think

  I’d’ve been better off without a father at all, instead of one who

  picks saddo charity cases up off the streets and drags them into

  the bosom of his own bloody family ’cause he’s got some fucking

  messiah-complex! Such hateful words … he took his mother to the

  hospice – I should’ve liked to say goodbye … poor Miriam! Her

  beautiful, youthful curves planed flat by age … her lovely smooth

  skin foxed by liver spots and melanomas … then varnished by the

  chemo’ … Her limbs stiffened by rigor mortis – then assembled

  into a coffin so she could be burned in the blown-out shell of her

  younger self … How horrible! Best not touch her … might be

  nailed to her – thrust atop the same flaming grill … And Simon?

  Poor, benighted, homeless and helpless Simon – Simon whose

  mind is a bloody battlefield all day, every day, what did he do?

  He laughed! He roared with laughter! He rocked and rolled with

  merriment so much the cocktail cabinet he was leaning against

  rocked and rolled as well – Lottie had simply roared: He swore at

  me! Told me to fuck right off out of it in my own bloody home!

  While her sensible sister quietly added: He can be a lot more

  abusive than that if you get in his way – there’re ample grounds for

  a section … And Simon had roared some more, his spotty-and-stubbly

  Adam’s apple bouncy-bouncy as he … volleyed their selfishness

  back in their faces: Fair enough … fair enough – you’re Fair-enough-Frankie,

  innit … bin it … S’me – s’him … Sick as a pig-in-shit,

  me – true enough, but where’s all your money and your edyucashun

  and your sickotherapy got you lot? What I see – what I see’s

  Guardian-reading fucking ingrates squatting in the strictly-I’m-a-celebrity-Big-Busner-house

  … That’s what I see – and the lot of

  you got the squabbly-wobblies over money-can’t-buy-you – that’s

  what I hear … Zack, attuned as ever to the ultrasonic whine

  of psychosis, heard the extreme neediness lurking behind Simon’s

  words – heard it, and registered also the impossibility of anyone …

  or ones’ ever being able to fulfil it and make good the neglect of

  parents, teachers, officers and, of course, psychiatrists. It’s this

  incommensurability – between his own capacity to care for Simon

  … for Henry, Mark and all the others as well, and the caring such

  distress so plainly demands – that Busner experiences as … love –

  I confess it: I love Simon, just as I loved Henry, love Mark … all the

  others as well … At any event, he’d always been more partial to

  psychotics than these … neotenous neurotics, and, while conceding

  his behaviour could be pretty … primal at times – I’m an ape-man,

  I’m an ape-ape-man, theirs was simply … brutish. He’d encountered

  the woman Simon had picked up one morning at the breakfast

  table – Zack had been huffing and puffing into his porridge, while

  Simon, proud of his conquest, introduced them thus: Ann, this

  is Doctor Zebadius Obadius Anthraxobadus. He is a great healer,

  scientist and alchemical worker – he can see the future … all of

  our futures … This is his castle on the hill, dearie, and we’re his

  guests … Ann, who looked to be in her early thirties, had an

  electro-shock of ginger hair on her narrow head, peeling lips …

  rubber cement and the warily defiant, yet terrified eyes of the

  psychotic. All she’d said was, And? Which Zack accepted as … the

  mot juste – not only in that context, but in all others as well. For

  did not And? perfectly convey that nothing … nichts, nada, rien du

  tout is discrete – everything is conjoined: one moment to the next,

  space to time, cause to effect … at least in our own minds. And

  so Simon had … carried on conjoining: explaining to Ann how

  Doctor Zebadius Obadius Anthraxobadus had met him when he

  was lying on a flattened cardboard box next to the steps descending

  into Tottenham Court Road tube station – lying there pinioned by

  the eyes of Freddie Mercury’s giant effigy, which stared down from

  on top of the Dominion’s portico. I want to break free, Simon had

  croaked – but there was scant chance of that: Zack, hurrying to

  Foyle’s, in search of a book on Ch’an, had heard this – and at the

  same time been struck by the beggar’s Buddhistic posture: cross-legged

  in a child’s flower-patterned sleeping bag, his black hair

  hacked into a disturbing divot, his face a bashed-about conker:

  wind-browned and gaunt, his mien innocently guilty. In his mitty

  hands he’d been holding a flap torn off a cardboard box on which

  he’d lettered: EX-ARMY SOLDIER ON THE RD WAS 25138694

  i HAVE PTSD CAN YOU HELP ME TO FIND A BED FOOD SHELTER

  THANK YOU’S so MU
CH COMPLEX SIMON. It’d been the complex

  that really hooked Zack – and, after giving him a pound, he’d

  asked the ex-squaddie if he’d mind being photographed. It’d been

  the very first snap he’d bagged with the smartphone given him by

  his grandson, and in the weeks which followed, whenever Simon

  grew distressed … They’re taking me into the dark chamber – don’t let

  ’em PUT THAT THING ON ME! Zack faffed about until this

  pitiful vision was once more before them, and he’d say, Look at

  this and tell me things haven’t got better … He’d installed Simon

  at Redington Road – while he went to Camilla’s in Kilburn to sleep

  – saying to Daniel and the others when they bridled: C’mon, don’t

  be a sickening bunch of Missus Jellybys – this man is as worthy

  of your compassion – all of your compassion – as anyone else …

  Don’t bother with covenanting Oxfam, or filling out a tax-payer

  declaration for Amnesty – that’s not charity, it’s accessorising

  your own bleeding hearts … Go to any high street in any of our

  marvellous towns and cities and you can find men and women

  simply lying on the ground suffering – all of them are as deserving

  of this house as you lot – as deserving of your cars, your clothes,

  your Sardinian cultural tours and your mobile-bloody-phones as

  well – you all know this. You MUST know this – I’ve been teaching

  it to you your entire-bloody-lives. At least, that’s what I remember,

  not the catalogue of crimes you accuse me of … Toenails grow when

  you’re dead – therefore I must be … rolling home — Last night, in

  Room Five-Twenty, Zack had arisen from the bed and stared into

  the sallow and labial petals of the sub-Georgia O’Keeffe daub

  planted in the alcove behind. What was it Ann had added to

  Simon’s description of their beneficent host? Ah, yes – she’d said

  that besides being a wise and charitable man Doctor Anthraxobadus

  was the Great White Spirit who lived in the fifth dimension –

  an unreal estate, from which he nonetheless managed to control

  everything that happened in the world … with wires – WIRES! So

  charmingly recherché, this, in an era when psychotics – modish, as

  they always are – were incorporating the new digital technologies