by Will Self
Anderson is in the last bit appetising. There’s Shabba, so-called
because he’s come up through the ranks ha-ha … and Potso, who’s
over-bitingly posh – then there’s the other one, Greeny: a blond six-footer
with a medium build who gives as good as he gets – although,
when the banter dries up, the Butcher catches a glimpse of the
young cavalry officer’s true nature: shy and defensive … he’s something
to hide – quite possibly, the thing. So … Mike – it’s Mike, is it?
Yeah, well … Mike, y’know the score, do you? Tizer asks the
Butcher, who’s given them the first name that occurred to him …
By which I mean not just where does a man go in this town to get a
skinful, but where does he go to be in with a chance of getting his
leg over! The Butcher, who’s skulled his martini and switched to
lager … one of the boys, that’s me, is thrown for a moment – thrown
into the flesh pit of the Eagle’s back room, where the high-energy
pumps and the leather-clad bodies writhe … He sees faces slick
with secretions – mouths howling out demonic lust as the dancers
struggle to stay afloat in the great moaning ocean of the un-fucked …
Well, he says, for starters you wanna give the club in the basement
here a miss – we’re talking terminally dull middle managers and
their secretarial squeezes out for a hop and few glasses of cheap fizz.
(LAUGHTER) Ditto the Haçienda – whatever you may’ve heard
about Manc’ raver chicks off their tits on ecstasy, truth is, they may
be all touchy-feely on the dance floor, but head back to their place
and you’re in for a long night grinding your teeth while she yaps on
about the meaning of fucking life … (MORE LAUGHTER)
Nah, best bet is, have a couple more bevvies here, then round the
corner to Twenty-One Piccadilly – check out the cattle market, hear
the Manc’ moo, but keep yer heads down, lads – it can kick off. So,
if there’s no action there you’re best off making a tactical withdrawal
to the Circus Tavern, which is by way of being a perfect stag, since
it’s the smallest pub in the entire fucking world! (UNBRIDLED
HILARITY) You can plan your next move there, but, I’ve gotta
say, Tizer, your gear ain’t exactly in order for this sorta op’. You
what? Tizer grunts. Manc’ birds … the Butcher explains … well,
they like a well-turned-out bloke. You lads’d score in seconds if
you had your number ones on – split-seconds if you were in dress.
What’s yer badge by the way? The young cavalry officers look oddly
at the Butcher, who wonders if he’s overdone his little act – though
it’s always easier to stay in character if you’re a bit of a character. Then
the blond called Greeny pipes up: Sorta sheep thing … big sheep
thing – sorta ram rampant … (Ooh! Squilly flutes, The pathos
of the tiny old acne scars pitting hith downy cheekth!) Here they
are, Squilly, the Butcher says: here are the young men. (Oh, yes,
Butchie-dearest, but there can’t be much weight on their shoulders
– not with thuch empty heads!) … Anyway, Greeny persists, what
about later on? And the Butcher, noting the furrowing of his
forehead, thinks: Not your scene at all, now is it, boyo – because it
takes an imposter to spot a heterosexual-impersonator … but he only
says: Legends is good enough for a stomp, but don’t get too sweaty
’cause then it’s on to the New Conti, where you brave warriors
will hit gash-fucking-gold: nurses, social workers, speech-fucking-therapists
– wall-to-wall bleeding hearts, any one of ’em ready and
willing to offer up their rarebits for a bit of pork scratching!
(LAUGHTER, APPLAUSE, CRIES OF ENCORE!) For
real? Greeny asks, putting down his pint on a coaster he’s carefully
aligned with the ashtray. Cautious … a little obsessive … the
Butcher thinks … but doesn’t understand himself. One of those
slightly plodding types who’ll practise and practise ‘til they can do it
so competently they don’t know they’re doing it at all … The flock
walls of the Britannia’s cavernous bar recede, leaving the Butcher
with his sweaty back against a slab of corrugated iron, watching
two boy soldiers who sit opposite one another on the dusty ground,
disassembling their AyKays, reassembling them, snapping the firing
pins, slotting in the magazines, aiming, firing … small arms for the
fucking eighties, eh … Yeah, for real, the Butcher replies: For real –
for unreal, for all that’s fucking righteous and pure. They’ll lead
you by the todger, gentlemen, and screw you ‘til you cry out for
your Home Counties mummies … You’ll be coming, will you? asks
Greeny, and the Butcher’s melting heart runneth over – ah, diddums!
For it’s awfully hard to picture this well-scrubbed and freshly shaven
young man knocking on the door of hell’s darkest chamber and
requesting admission – not with that provincial middle-class accent.
The Butcher has a question of his own: Um, Greeny – what’s that
about, mate? And the junior officer blushes – Blushes! Oh, my heart
will burst! Pyrois, Aeos, Aethon and Phlegon gallop across the fiery skies!
He’s the One, Squilly – the One! Bit naff, Greeny says – the nickname
and the real one. Then he sticks out his hand: Gawain, he says,
Gawain Thomas. The Butcher takes it, and, noting the others are
distracted by Lineker and goal difference, queries, As in Gawain
and the Green Knight? But doesn’t let go until the other … loosens
his grip and, blushing still more furiously, says, Pardon? I mean – is
that it, the poem, I mean? I mean, I’ve never actually read it –
should, I s’pose … Well, the Butcher counters, you should certainly
read enough of it to put this lot right – the Green Knight’s the chap
in the other corner … While to Squilly he exults, Pardon! Pardon!
(Yes, yes – the very signature note of English good manners, useful
in such commonplace phrases as, Pardon me while I put my
cock in your arse.) The blond peers at him from under puckered
brows, but I don’t think I’ve been blown … and repeats, You’ll be
coming with us, will you? The Butcher chuckles, holding up his
ring finger … Brr-Brr-Bravingtons nineteen ninety-nine: No can do,
mate – if I’m not indoors by nine the ball’ll start yanking on the
chain. He pulls out the Nokia and shows it to the junior officers:
Made the mistake of getting one of these – now she can reach me
anywhere. It’s the shape of things to come, lads – privacy’ll be a
thing of the past … Over by the revolving doors they say their
adieux. Tizer, Shabba and the slunk they call Potso have all been
back up to their rooms, and are now sporting blue blazers with
regimental crests on their top pockets … Poontang trumps Pira
every time. You’ll be all right in the pubs and bars I’ve mentioned,
lads, admonishes the Butcher. But if you want my advice don’t
go off-piste – on a Friday night there’ll be loads of squaddies out
and about. You know the drill: once they’re mullered th
ey can’t
recognise an officer – least, that’s what they’ll claim when they’re up
on a charge for beating the shit out of you … There are manly
handshakes all round – and “Mike” is gone … dematerialised – elsewher:
me jus’a flash it roun’ the worldie … They go right – he goes
left, the bummadum beat from the Britannia’s duff disco vibrating
through him as he gains the corner, turns it, slips out of his jacket,
turns denim inside out of worsted, puts it back on again, unbuttons
his shirt, takes out a small tin of Vaseline, combs the short hairs
above his perfect ears, replaces it, gets out a Marlboro, lights it and
stalks on, his mane shining … born free, and life is worth living! as
he prowls into the gay village. Where he sees slappers with grazed
legs and sore mouths stumbling around the bus station, scallies
in shell suits crackin’ on and ruffled little chickens, weepy-eyed
from the exhaust fumes and waiting to be plucked … Not that the
Butcher’s going to do the plucking: I’m not a fucking game dealer.
A dosser limps towards him, tucked under one arm the Big Issues
he’s mostly nicked from some other seller. Big Issue, mate? The
Butcher stops, takes in torn and stained shirt, shat-upon trainers
and a water rat’s drowned face. Big Issue, mate, he pipes up again –
Pipe down! Kins would eventually shout when the Butcher and his
brothers grew too rambunctious. – D’you remember that, Squills?
(I do, Butch, of course …) and to the dosser the Butcher says, The
really big issue is whether or not you can score – can you? The
dosser’s eyes frisk the Butcher, patting down his reversible jacket,
pulling out his wallet … checking to see if there’s a warrant card.
What’s yer game, mate? the dosser wheedles, I mean, ‘ow do I know
you ain’t some jarg cunt? (Most perspicacious of him, Squilly purrs,
given you’re probably the jargest cunt he’s ever clapped his piggy
little Scouser eyes on …) But the Butcher simply says: I’m gagging
for some brown, mate – rocks as well. I’ve got the readies … he pats
his breast pocket … I’ll see you right for a bag. Which, to the casual
listener, might not be the most obvious incentive, since the dosser
already has a sleeping one draped round his scrawny neck. — They
walk south on Oxford Road, the dosser moseying ahead, tripping
into and out of the gutter to avoid the students milling outside the
pubs and clubs. The Butcher is in his element: perfectly attuned
to the city and its febrile inhabitants. He lights another Marlboro
and breathes out: a centuries-long exhalation, laden with coal-smoke
and cotton fibres, which wheezes through the rusted ribs
of derelict warehouses and the perished brickwork of old viaducts.
The chase is on! and der Freischütz feels not only dry-cleaned but
positively sand-blasted. Who am I, Squilly? he asks, and Squilly
obliges (You’re your father’s son, of course). They stump under the
ring road and emerge into … a different limbo: the paler brick and
beiger concrete banalities of the University area, the Butcher seeing
not the junky Virgil tripping along before him, but Kins – Kins
sitting on the lavatory at Colindale Avenue, grey flannel trousers
and bilious underpants down round his lumpy legs. Kins, with an
Ordnance Survey map crumpled in his lap – a relief landscape he
pores over through horn-rimmed reading glasses: the Fat Owl of the
Remove, who was yet so very … elusive. If the Butcher is his father’s
son, then Kins – or Peterkins, or Peter De’Ath, or whatever cover
name he operates under – had also to’ve been playing the doublegame.
The preternaturally gifted Butcher realised this when he
was very young – he carefully logged his father’s absences, then
analysed their pattern. He found evidence in the seat wells and
glove compartments of Kins’s Rover – the strange Lifesaver of a
rolled stocking, alien hair grips, a copy of the Bunty he’d leafed
through with great absorption, eager to discover what became of …
the Spectrum Girls. He sniffed the perfume that clung to his father’s
tweed jackets, together with the faecal aroma of stale cigarette
smoke and old whiskybreath. It was his mother’s complicity with his
father’s subterfuges that’d struck the Butcher most of all – her complacent
sigh, each time he announced he was running over to Hemel
to pick up one or two … things, when she knew – we all did – he was
going somewhere else entirely: a dead-letter drop, from which he
always returned empty-handed. Had Kins been running Maeve or
was she running him? The precocious Butcher understood unhappy
marriage from infancy – it was not a sector in which intelligence
can be gathered. Rather, the distorted intimacy of a divided couple
is typified, he’d realised, by counter-intelligence: both parties knew
those closest to them had been turned, yet they continued to run
each other, on the basis that, were they to stop pretending to be a
good and faithful spouse, the opposition would roll up the entire
network … – Then there’d been the momentous and windy day
when Kins had at last taken the Butcher with him on a mission. The
Baker and the Candlestick-maker must have stayed at home in
Saint Albans with Maeve – at any rate, the Butcher remembers
there being plenty of room in the Rover for the woman and her two
children: the girl the Bunty must’ve belonged to, who was the same
age as him, with wild brown curls and wicked black eyes, and a
littler boy of six or seven, who’d sat solemnly between them on the
back seat, one hand squeezed down the front of his tight shorts …
hanging on to his Squilly. Kins introduced the woman as a colleague
of mine who’s doing some very interesting work with handicapped and
disruptive children. She didn’t look like other colleagues of his the
Butcher had encountered, who seemed half dead. The woman – who,
true to type – had dyed-blonde hair and exaggerated makeup, was
twice as alive as anyone the Butcher had ever encountered before: as
Kins drove through the outskirts of Hemel, she’d chatted away
non-stop, deploying a choice vocabulary of fucks, bollocks, wankers
and even a … cunt! She’d seemed quite as disruptive as any juvenile
delinquent – but Kins hadn’t urged her to … pipe down! When
they’d arrived at the comp’ – a collection of one-storey concrete-and-glass
hutches – Kins canted awkwardly around and lectured
the children from the pulpit of the front seat: This is the very first
unit for handicapped children to be opened as an integral part of a
new comprehensive school – we should be very grateful for what
Missus Whoever has done, she’s a remarkable educationalist and a
real battler for change … A real battler indeed, Squilly! the Butcher
carps as their odd trio marches across the dual carriageway and on
into the Hulme war zone. And remarkable, if only for her ability to
keep my father stuck in her honey trap for so many years. The gala
opening for the new special unit remains enzoed on the toughened
glass of the Butcher’s painfully clear mind, even after all these years:
the wind kazooing through the struts and bars of the playground
equipment – the girl with the black eyes taunting the Butcher,
then running away. He’d pursued her. Peter and Maeve De’Ath
were drinkers, certainly – and the sort of Francophiles who thought
it the dernier cri in sophistication to serve their sons watered-down
wine – but this was the first time the Butcher had been
truly, madly … deeply pissed. The girl-with-the-curls had nicked a
little bottle of gin from the table where the tombola prizes were
arranged – Quality Streets, a tin of car polish, Crabbie’s Ginger
Wine – and led the Butcher by his beautiful, aquiline nose into the
dank and dripping lavatories, where she tried to get him to touch
her between her pasty-white thighs. When he wouldn’t, she’d made
a grab for … Squilly. After that the Butcher did as he was told,
knocking back gulp after gulp of the gin. until he lapsed into a
sense-manging swoon: I could taste her maniacal giggling … He’d
followed her back out into the windy afternoon – the grown-ups
were all gathered by the chainlink fence on the far side of the
playing field. The goal nets, the grass, the banner announcing the
grand opening, the women’s ugly smock dresses, the woolly clouds
stampeding overhead – all of it had rippled … seethed. The naughty
girl had egged him on – I smelt hot egginess … The witch’s hat
roundabout squealed and clanked – the rocking horse neighed
and curvetted … The Butcher put one hand on the cold climbing
frame … and smelt old dried blood. Next, he’d been standing at the
very top, crêpe soles planted on the highest parallel bars – and
the girl was beside him, her Medusa curls uncoiling to hiss in the
wind. She’d smiled at him – and at last the Butcher had wanted to
touch her, touch specifically … her bum, and her shrinking-little-violet
arsehole. Then they’d both opened their bitterberry lips and
the scream that’s forever screaming – the silent scream of entropy
itself – streamed out from them. Then they were tumbling down
through the climbing frame: Bong! Bong! Bong! For Jonathan
De’Ath, aged ten, this news bulletin had been all about control: getting
