Phone

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