by Will Self
unorthodox, but I am a qualified medical doctor … and when I was
in psychiatric practice I always took care of my patients’ minor
ailments – I felt it brought me closer to them, assured the most
distressed amongst them that I really … cared. Niraga hadn’t been
in the least put out – only preoccupied by … practical matters: You’ve
no endo-whatsit … no speculum, right – and no roober gloves
neither … Zack’s eyes had dibbed about the hotel room before
alighting on a corkscrew! which had two curving, spatulate prongs
between which – for the cork at least – the pain stops and starts …
All he’d to do was to remove the steely screw and, hey presto! He’d
waved the thing aloft, saying, Here we have an instrument which
very much resembles a speculum – but what about some rubber
gloves? It was then Niraga’s turn for a brainwave: she’d snatched
up her handbag and, rummaging through its soft and perfumed
interior, came up with a box of condoms. Well, she’d said, they’re
antiseptic – and lubricated … I dunno – s’pose you were gonna get
a look at me bits one way or the uther … Mebbe you’re a perv –
get yer kicks that way … What evs – yer know what a speculum is
anyways … Then she’d uncurled from the chair and padded
towards the bathroom on stockinged feet, calling over her shoulder,
I’ll joost get outta me things, Doc … While she’d been gone, Zack
had stripped the bed, boiled the electric jug, sterilised the corkscrew-speculum,
then arranged all the pillows and scatter cushions into a
supportive pyramid. Next he’d fiddled with the foil sachets, so that
when Niraga returned, wearing the monogrammed terry-towelling
robe, she laughed, Yer ‘ands look like big bloody claws! And the
lobster man had reassured her: I do know what I’m doing … Niraga
did as well: she positioned herself sideways on the bed, back against
the pyramid and with her knees drawn up. Zack had got down on
his knees by the side of the bed – peering in, he’d been momentarily
shocked by her shaved pubis: Are you sure you’re comfy … with
that stubble? To which she’d replied, Bloody ‘ell, crack on, willya …
Clitoris, labia minora, urethra, Skene’s glands, vagina, Bartholin’s
glands … you don’t need to have any anatomical competence at all
to identify the origin of the world … With one pink, fruit-flavoured
pincer, he’d parted her labia and performed the visual exam.
I’m going to do the bimanual now, he’d said, rearranging his
fingers … Aaa-ke-laaa, we’ll do our best! Then he’d worked with
intuitive despatch to … push Button A and isolate her cervix. She’d
groaned … without passion, but there’d been no spasming, no
clutching. He’d asked: Not too much tenderness when I palpate
like … this? She’d grunted affirmatively – he’d reassured: Okay,
I don’t think there’s any likelihood of pelvic inflammatory disease.
The glove puppet had hurried about in there – while the human
dummy ventriloquised: I’m palpating the spongiform uterine tissue
… your fundus … No sign of adnexitis, he’d muttered – and
Niraga said, Tubes ‘n’ eggs good to go, issit? Withdrawing his
pincers, Zack had looked into her frank, open face as if for the first
time … Who is she? he’d thought. Who is she, and what has she
come to tell me? Then he’d once more bent to his task, picking up
the defanged corkscrew and flexing its plastic pincers. Niraga had
guffawed: ‘Ow yer gonna see what’s what up there, right? I mean,
it’s dead dark, innit … but Zack had the answer: My mobile phone’s
got a torch. – And, leaving her wide open, he fetched it from the
glass table. Climbing back down on to his knees, he got to work …
Push Button A – push it, I say! Pressing his weepy eye to the corkscrew’s
threadpiece … I shrank and shrank until he was about a
foot high: then he walked down the little passage – and THEN he
found himself at last in the beautiful garden, amongst the bright
flowerbeds and the cool fountains … Bringing the torch’s pencil-beam
to bear, he’d seen a sprinkling of pinkly glistening papillomata
stippling the roseate ribbing of her vaginal canal. Highly unprofessionally
… he’d inhaled deeply, savouring the fishy-mysteriousness
of her mucosa. Mmm, I think you should probably get a smear test
post-haste, he’d said, carefully withdrawing his improvised tool,
slowly straightening, then clambering back up … to my actual size.
– It’s looking, um, fairly squamous in there – prob’ly perfectly
benign, just a touch of pruritis – which I’d imagine is, ah, something
of a … professional hazard. – And if this was all there’d
been to it, well … He stands back in the twittering aviary of the
lobby … it would’ve been strange, certainly – highly unorthodox
behaviour, is what a supportive colleague might’ve said, but the
GeeEmmSee would … have you struck right off! – C’mon, says.
Pete-the-Podium-Restaurant-Manager, manoeuvring Busner so
expertly through the press of suits and wheelie-bags by the reception
desk that his cup-of-elbow … doth not runneth over. All is as it
was, Busner thinks: and when at last I get back to where I started
from? Yes, if the GeeEmmSee knew they’d have his licence to
practice taken away … if I’d bothered to renew it. – Can I get me
things back on now, Doc, or d’you wanna take anuther gander?
Such light words, yet they’d fallen heavily on him, pushing his
eyes back in through … the skirting board to the compartment
full of complicated old mechanical switching equipment: gearing,
cogs, tensioned wires and glowing valves … Push Button A! Push it,
I say – Oh! Confound the dunderhead who’d remembered a cut-away
diagram from a copy of Knowledge he’d pored over circa nineteen
fifty-one, and so looked for too long into that organic abyss:
saw labia harden into a Bakelite receiver, clitoris curl into coil
assembly, labia minora crimp into a papery disc which wondrously
self-perforated. He’d felt an unspeakable urge to … press my ear
against her, synaesthetically seeing … what I could hear: Hello? Hello?
coming down this primordial telephone line, one which went all
the way back to the … dawn of time, cunt speaking unto cunt, a
doubly lubricious phonology of sucks, slurps and small farting noises
which communicated the whole truth of … our metempcuntosis –
I should’ve listened! Listened to the lessons taught him by … the lives
of others: Your dharma? What the fuck’s that – nothing but dung
dropping from the world’s arsehole … the cosmic law of eternal
recurrence ordains there be dog shit in the streets, that you smell
it – glove your hand with a plastic bag and pick it up … that you
carry it home again annagain. As for Moksha – ferrrrgeddit, there’s
only a mocha-coloured stain spreading through the gusset of your
underpants … But Niraga, whose full bottom lip and ever widening
eyes had reminded him at tha
t late hour of … Milla! had simply
got up and unselfconsciously dressed, snapping knicker elastic,
jumping to yank up her tights … a girl alone in her bedroom, then
simply sat beside him on the bed for a few minutes, simply chatting:
So, right, Doctor Boosner, it’s me uz should be paying you fer
your services … To which he’d gravely replied: I’ve no need of your
money or anyone else’s, young lady – I’ll be checking out of
humanity’s hotel soon enough now, and forever. No, you’re better
off spending my fee on regular essteedee screening – go private, if
necessary … And she had gone private – she’d gone into the privacy
of the night-time, leaving Zack sitting there on the stripped bed
beside the pillow pyramid. A bit later he’d filled his wineglass with
a couple of Gordon’s miniatures before slumping down, warily
watching his whey-face floating in the Mancunian murkiness while
he … sopped up the spirits. Later still, the near-homonym of Viagra
had been … longer gone, while, coldly and without passion, Zack
began to berate himself for being … a pervert, a weirdo – almost a
paedophile! Worse still, although a vaginal exam might be meat and
potatoes for a proper doctor, for a retired psychiatrist? Well … he’d
been … gorging on trayf. On he’d gone, plying the lash as he made
further inroads to the minibar, guzzling spirits, wines and beers
indiscriminately. He’d regretted not bringing his lovingly assembled
exit kit: diamorphine ampoules, sublingual morphine sulphate
tablets, capsules of Valium and Tuinal, more than enough to … do
the job. Who gives a flying fuck about Pikuach Nefesh! he’d raved
into the bathroom mirror, flailing at his bared arm with the
improvised speculum. Then, bloodied and mindless, he’d embarked
on the systematic destruction of Room Five-Twenty: unsheathing
the rolled towels from their scabbards and soiling them, removing
the tall tapering Klu Klux Klan lampshades and mating them,
ripping out the plasticised info-sheets from their ring binder and
frisbeeing them over the wreckage. In his hysterical and drunken
distress Room Five-Twenty had been transmogrified, becoming
incarnate! The carpet writhed with muscular spasms – the wood
panelled walls rose and fell, panting in time to the air conditioner’s
breathy whoosh … and the petals! Those bilious, badly brush-stroked
petals, torn from Georgia O’Keeffe’s corpus, they swelled and grew
slick with secretions most prettily … What’re hotel guests? he’d
soliloquised, as he waved a tumblerful of Courvoisier in the blank
faces of a non-existent audience. Surely only the barely vital sparks
who check into these meaty prisons for a night or three, to animate
them with our lonely frenzies as we pull our fucking pork! But he –
he had no pork to pull: I can’t get it up any more! he’d bayed at the
absent moon before collapsing and sobbing at the harsh terms of his
dotage. It was bad enough to be a fractious child once more –
sent up to bed early, to wait out the interminable summer evening
in the suburbs – but it’s worse, far worse, to have your own children
changed by this change into your … absentee parents. He cried
and writhed and bled and pissed and shat, until, at some point in
the hateful hours after dawn, with the new day insulting him
with its sunny youth, he’d arisen, newborn, for his twenty-eight
thousandth, seven hundred and thirty-seventh day on earth. I’d
risen … I rose … I rise – I’ll rise again … to put on his rancid
T-shirt, his ruinous tweed suit – to pick up his staff and a lonely hunt
is all I desire! the Butcher mimes along in English before continuing,
raucously aloud, in fluent, perfectly accented German: Eh noch
Aurora pranget, Eh sie sich an den Himmel wagt, Hat dieser Pfeil,
Schon angenheme Beut erlang-lang-langet! The Butcher waggles
his own arrow in time to the lang-lang-lang of erlanget, seeing
not his pale form dancing in the semi-darkness of the hotel room,
but the ruddy faces of the Duke of Saxe-Weissenfels-Querfert and
his retainers … dangling in the candlelight, so many … long plums.
And the Butcher hears not the distant rattle-and-hum of the big
building he’s entombed in, but the sidereal airs of violones, violas,
violins, bassoons, oboes, recorders and … horns! An instrumentation
that, as he keeps on dancing and romancing, oh keep on …
crumbles, then disintegrates – strings a-pingin’, wood a-crackin’,
brass a-bucklin’, until all that remains is a single softly melodic
piano line, coolly insinuating itself into his hot head: Schafe können
sicher weiden, the Butcher thinks, Wo ein guter Hirte wacht – not
that you were ever a good shepherd, Mummy dearest, while as for
sheep, there are two or three in the family, but I’m not one of them –
and more to the point: nor are you! Suddenly gripped by burning
hatred for his Mutti-munschen, wavy-gravy-Maeve, who sits forever
in the stagnant green tank of an interminable summer evening in
the suburbs – sits with the curtains open, sits before the Yamaha
electric organ she bought for her favourite, the youngest, her fat and
beringed fingers slickety-clicking as she teases out Bach’s sublime
melody doo-d’d’doo-d’d’dooo-doo-dooo-doo, to the accompaniment
of a da-dum-dum-dumb-fucking-rumba-beat! Because the da-da-dumb
little keyboard broke within weeks of its arrival at Colindale
Avenue, this being the way of the family … our touch of De’Ath.
Anger twangs the Butcher – he pirouettes on his long, lean lallies,
then tucks his erlang-lang-langet between his thighs to give himself
a … fanny just like Mummy’s. Which means now he is Mummy,
because my razor-sharp mind has skinned that fucking hump so he
wears her tromboning tits and kettledrum belly as, shamelessly
deranged now, he stilt-walks about the room, caressing the thunderhead
of her pubes … Snatching up the hairdryer from the shelf
beneath the mirror, he hearkens: the rumba rhythm snickering in
his ear thickens – deepens, skips a half-beat, and he sings: Young
man you too girlie girlie, You jus’ flash it round the worldie …
then squats abruptly, releasing his arrow so it quivers in the
mortuary illumination of the single fluorescent tube screwed to
the bed’s fake-wood headboard. He turns back to the mirror and
addresses these disembodied features: the spare ribs of his cheekbones,
the giblets of his full lips, his none-too-parsimonious nose, the
slice of his tongue with its meaty papillae clearly visible. – Have you
met the Butcher? No, really – have you made his acquaintance? His
voice is unusually flat and unemotional – his accent neutral, without
trace of class or regional affiliation. He drones on: If not, it’s perhaps
best to encounter him – he runs his elegant pianist’s fingers down
over his chest, splaying them as they reach his belly – in his own
skin rather than someone else’s –. There’s a hesitant tapping on the
door. The Butcher sen
ds expert eyes to search the ill-lit room: the
Walkman and laptop computer sitting on the bed are innocuous
enough, as is the Gladstone bag lolling open beside them – but the
snub-nose revolver lying on the left-hand pillow beside two gold-foil-wrapped
Bendicks Bittermints and an envelope addressed to
one of the Butcher’s other skins are less so … Mister Blah-Blah
would like to welcome Mister David Pottinger to the Britannia Hotel.
Which is exactly the sort of greeting the Butcher likes, given he’s an
illegal to the very tip of his erlang-lang-langet: a furious skinner of
humps, and an instant and invisible tailor when it comes to personal
alterations – my name is Legion, Terry Legion of Telecoms Solutions …
The revolver appears to be a Colt Detective Special: a lethal little
beast – easily concealed – point-three-eight round – take your fucking leg
off, but he knows it’s really only a strap he got for a pony from an old
armourer who prob’ly … filed the bar himself. Still, it’d fire at least
once before jamming – besides, the Butcher only needs it for show,
although not this show, so he scoops it up, takes two long strides
into the tiny bathroom, yanks a hand towel from the rail, wraps
the gun in it, pliés to the cupboard and puts it far back on the top
shelf … tits out for the lads! He grabs a bath towel with which to
cover his own firepower – then he’s staring into the still-murkier
corridor, where a tubby old woman in chambermaid’s navy nylon
uniform observes him, her worn, wary face sandwiched between a
whitish perm and a whiter shade of collar. Turn-down service, sir?
The Butcher swings the door wide open so she can see all of him …
so lean and limber in my lunghi – see also the Bendicks Bittermints
and the triangle of turned sheet. Someone’s beaten you to it, he
smiles thinly, half expecting the old bat to swoop on me … which,
while not the usual hotel order of things, has been known to happen.
But she only wheezes, Sorry, sir, while backing, then turning,
and so goes, shushing her nylon shoulder along the flock wallpaper.
The Butcher raises his sharp muzzle and sniffs old oatmeal, stale
cigarette smoke, and the esters of Obsession long since evaporated
from the cleavages of those … no better than she should be. He looks
