Phone

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