by Will Self
seconds, before giving the stupid greedy woman a brief lesson on
cocking, loading and firing an over-under shotgun. The Butcher
had let Squilly divulge the most important bit of know-how: Tuck
the muthle here, in the hollow of your thwoat – you’ve vewy
short arms, so it’ll be awkward getting the barrels in your mouth.
Don’t on any account put ’em here … The Butcher had nuzzled
the smooth, blue-grey snout against his own fashionably stubbly
one … or here … he shifted it to his forehead … because the
wecoil will dislodge it, and you’ll end up paralysed, pithing yourself
in adult-fucking-pull-up-panth … The stupid greedy woman was
rather upset by the time they’d finished with her. As he’d taken
his leave, the Butcher drily observed: It’s the Roman way out –
you shouldn’t feel too bad. After all – all any of us ever have
are moments, and we lose an infinity of them every second. Think
of your entire life as simply another moment – and appreciate whatever
beauty it may’ve possessed was purely a function of its …
ephemerality. Reflect on how boring a film, a fuck or a conversation
can be if it goes on … too bloody long! Wise words, he’d thought –
comforting in their way, although she’d shown no sign of being
soothed: her lips stretching … and stretching … until her warped
mouth resembled an infinity symbol — In the cab back from the
airport car hire, bumbling through worn-out Wythenshawe, dowdy
Didsbury, and all the rest of Manchester’s pebbledashed sprawl, the
Butcher had a petite crise, but Squilly took him in hand: Now, now,
Butchie – ever since you were an ickle-lickle boy, you’ve understood
you mutht operwate at two levelth: the perthonal and the political,
and when they conflict you mutht always opt for? The political, the
Butcher had conceded. – Quite so: you mutht always choothe the
political, which I know is painful for you, Butchie – no one likes
to deceive their nearetht and dearetht. At this the Butcher had
spat back: Unless they’re a fucking psychopath! And Squilly had
soothed on: Well, we both know you aren’t one of those, Butch –
you’re a tholdier, and perfectly dethent soldiers feel utterly bloody
about killing, even in wartime. But I don’t kill, Squilly, the
Butcher had protested. I’ve never killed anyone, only let them …
ah, die … What the Butcher hadn’t aired was his long-nurtured
ambition – not to be a murderer, but at least to feel what it’s like. In
the Butcher’s view, murdering always got rather too bad a press –
which was only morality’s marketing department working overtime.
Murderers were always portrayed – in books, in films, on television
– as either insensible psychos or conscience-stricken – thrust
out into a lonely, outer-darkness by their dreadful crime. But what
if the opposite was the case? What if by taking a human life you
stepped from the shadows into the bright light at last – felt the
rush as it suffused you, and you realised you’d finally become who
you were truly meant to be? Nearing the city’s dark heart, caroming
past the blackened shells of old warehouses and mills, the Butcher
hadn’t seen the pustulant back of the cabbie’s neck – but his father’s
face, its expression as usual soft and conciliatory … And now, in
the windowless room in the dark heart of the Britannia Hotel, the
Butcher recalls the myriad vengeances he used to plan for Kins
during the white-hot years of his own adolescence: the bombings,
stabbings, poisonings, garottings and dismemberments. The
carving-up, then cooking-down, in an acid bath … he’d plotted to
the last detail, before he began to cool – becoming conciliatory,
content not to terminate Kins, but simply to let him die … Not that
Peter De’Ath showed any sign of expiring: pushing seventy, retired,
effectively neutered, he lodged in his cubbyhole of a study, in the
bungalow on the outskirts of Hemel, scratching away at yet another
book on the theory and practical organisation of local government
funding that no one – repeat: fucking no one – would ever read.
But then that was Kins all over – his weakness was mental quite as
much as moral: he could concentrate only on one thing at a time.
Whereas his eldest son, with his Cheops of a nose – inherited from
earlier dynasties of De’Aths – had been able, for as long as he could
recall, to do at least three. The Butcher had only to look at a page
of text for its content to be ever accessible – only to run his limpid
eye down a column of figures for them all to be known to me.
If the Butcher overheard a conversation, he was able to repeat it,
verbatim, whether hours or months later. Moreover, these mental
feats didn’t so much as perturb the smooth flow of his physical
actions – the Butcher could time a soft-boiled egg to perfection,
while reading a newspaper editorial and … taking notes. He knew
he was different – and he liked it. But he saw what happened to
children deemed different – and that he didn’t like. Kins, whose
own father had been something of a savant, had been gently
reproachful: I dunno know why you don’t do something with these
exceptional abilities of yours, Johnny. Sirbert was able to bootstrap
his way from dish-washing to running the Woolwich Arsenal in a
few short years, and went on to have a brilliant career in the civil
service simply because he was able to marshal the facts. Which is
presumably what Kins thinks he’s doing as he scratches away. He
is, the Butcher thinks, a pathetic sort of hobbyist – a trainspotter, or
possibly a model-railways enthusiast – for whom the truth … is
always timely. Standing before the strip of mirror screwed to the
inside of the wardrobe door, the Butcher cultivates his contempt:
Kins may be a ridiculous epigone – and a piffling lefty to boot, full
of the same useless spume as the Welsh windbag, but, while Squilly
recruited the Butcher … it’s Kins who taught me my tradecraft. The
Butcher pulls on charcoal-grey trousers and worms his way into a
tight T-shirt bearing a single black, blocky word: RELAX. Quite
possibly a little recherché, but then these are the provinces … Next
comes a mid-blue shirt that someone … me, actually has beautifully
pressed. He buttons this to the neck, hiding the T-shirt’s collar.
Next comes a reversible jacket the Butcher had his tailor … run up
for me. There’ve been bonuses – certain little perks – along the way:
Pira drug money chanced upon in Gib’ … of all places, a Czech
would-be defector’s Meissen bribe – and, most providentially, an old
postwar câche dug up in the woodlands beside the Neusiedlersee
that, besides containing some rather antediluvian weaponry, also
furnished him with krugerrands, which, once the service wash
had been paid for, realised over twenty thousand … They’d all do it,
if they’d the balls – if they had the balls, and if they had to. But
the Butcher’s colleagues are God-blessed children: th
ey’ve got their
own … Daddy and Mummy having put them down for Eton at
birth – Daddy having taken them along for their first fitting aged
fourteen, so, by the time such stock phrases were required of them,
the toffee-nosed tossers were well able to casually toss off: D’you like it?
I had it run up for me by my tailor in Savile Row … But then, so
far as the Butcher’s concerned, all of his fellow intake are cocktailparty
fodder – softly powerful pen-pushers, who, if they got their
hands dirty running an agent … went crying all the way home to
VeeBeeArr. Whereas the Butcher knows only too well what it’s like
to live your entire life … in the target country, to all intents and
purposes just another worker bee, when in reality you’re an agent
of deep penetration. These words, deep penetration, remain bright
in the Butcher’s greige mind as he fetches plain black leather
shoes from the wardrobe and plain black socks from the Gladstone
bag. Sheathing his feet, he feels his cock stir in his jockeys …
deep penetration. He stands, does a little jig – gives voice: Was mir
behagt, Ist nur die muntre Jagd! For Manchester, on a warm Friday
night in June, is surely a perfect hunting ground – a lush pasture
where, disoriented by alcohol and maddened by lust, no Schafe
whatsoever may sicher weiden. From the chest-of-drawers the
Butcher retrieves an American soft pack of Marlboro, a fliptop box
of Mates condoms, a brand-new Nokia One-Oh-Eleven mobile
phone and a small tube of lube. He hefts the phone lightly – it’s
strictly for non-professional use: the Firm’s dragging its feet when
it comes to equipping its employees with encrypted cellular phones,
although at Vauxhall – almost as much as at Langley – briefings
are becoming increasingly visual – so much for the meticulous
report-drafting skills new EyeBees received instruction in. In their
nouveau-postmodern ziggurat of a home, seeseeteevee and satellite
footage are relayed to the officers’ desktop computers, where they’re
displayed alongside plans and diagrams. The Butcher wonders if
he alone can see the invisible digital threads binding together
these shining screens … the jade armour of a new underground
army, and, as he sends his short-burst veeaitcheff transmissions,
or uploads SeeEx from his encrypted laptop to the burgeoning
Service intranet … I follow the data: I go with it, Squilly (Weally,
Butch – quo vadis, pwecisely?), I go into some weird origami
realm, Squills, where face and form fold into psyche and self –
where consciousness spreads out, then’s cut on the bias into strips
of impossibility which’re also the form-fitting perturbations we call
electromagnetic waves – it’s these that enfold me in their diaphanousness,
Squilly: the very bella figura of the future! With his
reversible jacket and interchangeable shirts, the Butcher is ready
and able to for the chase. First, however, a stirrup cup must be
drunk. Into the dim and dust-furred recesses of the big old hotel
pop is being … inappropriately piped, and it’s to the accompaniment
of EmmSee Hammer’s latest that the Butcher descends the wide
staircase. Gold paint is oh-so-slowly flaking from the mouldings
high overhead – but he sashays to the right, to the left: so Croesus’s
dandruff can’t … touch this! The large lobby area wells up: a purple-brown
lagoon of carpet and flock wallpaper, ill-lit by huge fake
chandeliers prob’ly left over from some seventies refurb’ … In the
reception area late arrivals are checking in, while in the bar a few
desultory adulterers sit sipping duff cocktails and diddling with the
dry-roasteds. As the Butcher descends further a group of young
men comes into view – they’re slumped in mismatched rattan easy
chairs they’ve dragged around a table in the very furthest corner of
the bar, beneath a large and artificial palm. It’s all part, the Butcher
realises as he goes still lower, of the hotel’s feeble stab at a raffish,
Raffles makeover. At the bar he orders a dry vodka martini,
impressing the correct proportions on the barman: One part of
vermouth to six of the hard stuff, please … I s’pose, the old trouper
says, shooting his grubby cuffs, you’ll be wanting that shaken, not
stirred? And the Butcher, taking a chilly gulp, shivers back: How’d
you know I’ve got a licence to swill? Then, drink paid for and
Marlboro lit with a flick of his rolled-gold Dupont, he begins his
approach – stalking from the cover of one porphyry column to the
next, until he gets alongside and receives enough audible take to
establish that they’re … junior officers! They have to be – what with
their brutal barnets, freshly aired faces and frumpish civvies –
heavily creased from having been stuffed at the bottom of their
bergens for the entire … training weekend. The Butcher knows
the drill full well: wrenched shivering from your fartsack at dark
o’clock … Hot locks from the field kitchen: congealed eggy-mess,
bootlace bacon, orangey baked-beanishness – all of it wolfed down
in the star-studded pre-dawn. Then up into the hills for a long
day’s yomping, fantasising they’re Colonel H taking out an Argie
machine-gun nest. Survival kit in a matchbox – flint and tinder,
bracken-boiled brews and burst blisters – then capture by other
dumb mummers blacked-up with boot polish. Held in a sheep pen –
taken away one by one and subjected to – A t’riffic beasting …
chimes in one of the young men, hunching forward excitedly in
his creaky chair … I mean, I only gave ’em the big three, but they
were fucking agg’, weren’t they, Tizer? D’you think they coulda
been green slime? The Butcher, who’s established his listening post
at a table ten feet away, is able to analyse the group’s pecking order
from this nig’s manner alone: his self-conscious use of military slang
– his adoring eyes, it all leads to one conclusion: Tizer’s the top-dog
here. He’s probably as pedigree as the others, this Tizer – although
he has the tight brown curls and block-head of a British bulldog,
with huge raw-red paws to match. He sits in judgement, does
Tizer, a lurid rugby shirt, quartered yellow-and-pink … Battenberg
ArrEffSee, stretched over his huge frame. He sips in judgement,
does Tizer – tilting his face back so it shines in the bar’s winelight.
And he smokes in judgement as well: sucking on a roll-up at
length, then pooting this out: Dunno about that, Anderson, prob’ly
just some staff twats who fancied themselves and did it for the
sheer fucking badness … Anderson collapses back into his chair,
crushed. Poor little fucker, the Butcher thinks – such a runt he
doesn’t even have a nickname. Tizer rises … Christ! He’s a big
bastard, his bottom half clad in the virulence of stonewashed jeans.
He waves his half-full pint about, declaiming, Lads, lads … it’s
gone twenty-hundred and none of us are remotely pissed yet –
minibus heads back to aitchqueue at oh-eight
-hundred, which only
gives us twelve hours to get COMPLETELY FUCKING
MULLERED! Tizer’s words wing up to the gilding, and the
Butcher thinks: If he didn’t have a posh accent he’d be out on his
chou-fleur ear … Thinks this, although the majority of his attention
belongs to Squilly, who’s delivering his first contact report: They’ve
been on exerthise in the Beacons – now they’re on the razzle in
Manchester – there’s a minibus heading back to their wegiment …
Only outfit that fits is England’s Knights of the North –. So, the
Butcher interrupts, they’re Yorkshire Hussars, then … ? Pwecisely,
Butchie-dear, Yorkshire Hussars, who’re currently stationed at
Catterick – although they prob’ly wish they were in Mogadishu
taking out Aidid. That’s a job for the friends and their helicopter
gunships, says the Butcher drily, not this bunch who’re wet behind
their lugholes. But this is what he says aloud: Allow me, lads –
lagers all round, issit? The muzak mysteriously mutes – five pairs
of eyes swivel towards the Butcher and lock on. He laughs: Okay,
okay … don’t worry, I’m not trying to muscle in – I’m just a
weekend warrior, a gung-ho stab who’d like the honour of buying
the real McCoy a wet … In order to avoid any awkward questions
later, should his tactics work, the Butcher sprinkles his words with
söme öpen Nörthern vöwels – he’s still left in the stress position while
the five pairs of eyes … pat me down for Semtex. At last Tizer
speaks: How the fuck d’you know who we are? Well … the Butcher
is placatory … you did mention your aitchqueue – but lissen,
I get what you’re driving at: you gotta be careful, what with the
fuckin’ Paddies on the warpath again … The air whistles from
Tizer’s inflated chest as he says, Glad you appreciate the sitch,
mate – we’re under strict orders to keep mum and go quietly since
the Warrington ones … Can’t even wear a blazer or tie –. Careless
talk costs lives, the Butcher puts in. So, what about it, lagers?
Or lager-tops for the girlies? Or does you does or does you don’t
you desire a pint of proper fucking Northern heavy? Half a pint
later the Butcher has his plates of under their table, and is wondering
if there’s … any meat for dinner. Neither top-dog Tizer nor runtish
