Phone

by Will Self

  the Papist rapist of my therapist … inna rape field … The syllables

  form and reform in Camilla’s aching head as, unable to resist, she’s

  dragged back into the hateful memory: the oily stems of the plants

  she grabbed at as he dragged her by her ankles along the muddy

  furrow – the putrescent smell of the drenched vegetation and

  the still shittier stench of … my fear. I’m traumatised, she thinks.

  That thing he did to me, he did, ooh … twenty years ago – and for

  all of my adult life I’ve been t-t-t-traumatised, like when you hit

  your head really hard and for a while the whole world’s ringing and

  singing the painful vibration that’s you … Fivehunnredansevenyfree,

  fivehunnredansevenyfaw … Which is why I’ve ended up like

  this: vibrating in time to my son’s monotonous voice as he speaks

  the distance … He’s a human milometer – or metronome, and I’m

  shackled to his … pendulum. Shackled to it – and by extension to

  his father, a man who’s so out of it on sedatives, hypnotics and

  antipsychotics he can’t so much as put a hand on my knee – let

  alone rape me … The Vauxhall rises and falls on undulating tarmac

  waves – while Camilla, falling – falling – falling along the interminable

  road, cannot wait to touch down in the sanctuary of their

  Kilburn flat, where at last the shelving units piled up with her son’s

  ever increasing stuff will shield her from this radioactive landscape,

  and her memories, which burn brighter than ten thousand suns – he

  got out a penknife, opened it quite casually – cut the hem of my dress and

  tore it wide apart … Rolling and tumbling past the slip road to

  another motorway services they can’t afford to stop at, Camilla

  feels the fart swell more – then mutate into the familiar nagging

  pain of her endo … endo … endometri– Fuck it! Woman’s trouble –

  which is how her own mother had referred to the affliction sixhunnredanwun

  times a day, as she’d squeaked about the house in

  her … plastic knickers. Camilla – weighed down and wonky-donkey

  that she is, with her autistic son in one straw pannier and his

  schizophrenic father in the other – wishes she had one of those

  hands-free earpieces so she could talk to the psychiatric grandaddy

  of us all … She sees herself sitting at her trestle table in the bay

  window, with the dustballs draggled into being by the long blackout

  curtains tickling my ankles. She feels the handset pressed so hard

  against her ear the cartilage crackles, and she hears herself going

  onanon, recounting the deranged doodles and crazy shading of his

  male line … Yet he never displays any impatience, my father-in-law –

  which is how Camilla mostly thinks of Zack – unsurprisingly,

  since their relationship is so often resolemnised, as they jointly make

  their signatures, giving consent on the same miserable pro formas

  which authorise this test or that futile intervention. He never

  shows any irritation – and this, despite his own chaotic domestic

  situation: an ageing man who has to wrangle small children of his

  own – coordinating lackadaisical au pairs and rushing from hurried

  consultations so he can do the schoolrun. And all because the lady

  loves getting laid … An ague of hatred for her father-in-law’s errant

  third wife, Charlie, grips Camilla – her hands grip and twist the

  steering wheel, while through her sudden tearfall she sees this

  threatening vision: Zack’s full and froggy features floating above

  the middle lane. Keep two chevrons visible between vehicles and

  phantoms, she says aloud, easing off on the accelerator, lest she

  collide with … the eyes of Doctor Eckleburg. Yes, tomorrow morning

  she’ll be at her table – and he’ll be sitting at the counter in the wellfitted

  but forever-messy kitchen at Redington Road, spooning up

  Cheerios as he listens to her serial woes … Recently, Camilla’s been

  unable to prevent this relentless punning sixhunnredanthirtyayt

  times a day – it’s become a sorta psychic tic what ticks all the boxes.

  Zack has always urged her to view Mark’s wordsplurge as ebulliently

  productive – but she’s been listening for years now and it’s tangled

  up my mind in an Alphabetti Spaghetti of meaning. When the three

  of them are under the same roof – which is becoming increasingly

  rare – Camilla still tries to understand. Mopping the dingy linoleum

  – picking congealed porridge from a bowl as she receives

  her sixunnredandthirtynineth warning of imminent alien invasion,

  she’ll think, This is your life – and has been for over a decade

  now. A decade during which Mark must have gone on and come off

  his medication scores of times, so repeating the same sickening

  cycle – the slump into silvery, salival somnolence, being the state of

  her own mind, Camilla suspects, as much as his. Could it be that

  she unconsciously wills him to stop taking the pills? Because at least

  when he’s crazy … he’s alive. She and Zack share, she thinks, a

  similar attitude, although in respect of different individuals: for her

  father-in-law, while not exactly in denial about Ben, nonetheless

  for a long time rubbished the idea there was anything much wrong

  with his grandson. Then there’d been the birthday party: they

  were living south of the river in the run-down council flat Mark

  had been allocated after his last discharge from the Maudsley. She

  remembers standing with Zack in the concrete trench of the balcony,

  listening to the gasp of the heating system, but still hearing

  his son’s schiz-scat. She recalls him saying, You’re a profoundly

  unlucky young woman. You fell in love with my son during one

  of his less, ah, disturbed periods – then fell pregnant. Now you’re

  trying to cope with a highly active toddler and his disturbed father

  at the same time – it’s hardly surprising you’re projecting some of

  your own distress on to the child, so seeing his behaviour as pathological.

  Frankly, Milla, I don’t think anyone would blame you

  if you felt you had to choose between them. Meaning what? Send

  Mark off to chemical concentration camp forever? Abandon the

  man who’d touched her so gently – held her so tenderly, whispered

  to her so … lovingly. Had it been Mark’s schizophrenia which had

  made him such a demon lover? Falling into his arms –falling into the

  abyss. His mouth on my mouth – his mouth on my … Falling down

  to London AYSIXTYWUN, SKIPTON-ON-SWALE … My

  guts falling out … of my fanny. A fallen woman, Camilla thinks,

  that’s me. She glances over at Mark, slumped in the passenger seat,

  angelic face distorted by his diabolic muttering: Whykaytooyouwant-mesixsixsicks?

  Choose between them? How could Gramps’ve said

  such a thing – yet he did, and lots more besides. Because he’d always

  been sorta schizy too – full of warmth, affection and concern, but at

  the same time coldly, clinically observing his grandson. And Ben

  had been the terriblist toddler – a frenetic ball of blond curls and

  brown stains … from the Marmite. Didn’
t matter how carefully she

  hid it – he found it, got it open and smeared it … Mark does exhibit

  some egregious stereotypies, Gramps had said, standing there in the

  trench, peering through two layers of dirty glass at his son. Mark

  would’ve been wearing a Power Rangers mask – which, he used

  to say, shielded him from interstellar surveillance – while Zack’s

  grandson wouldn’t keep his clothes on ‘til he was four, so ran around

  annaround, naked except for an ugly tan biodegradable nappy.

  Camilla sees her son as he was: hunched over his meticulously

  lined-up toy cars and holding both hands, fingers spread and

  fluttering, before his startling blue eyes … please fly away forever,

  Peter – fuck off for good, Paul. He does it all the time, is what she

  would’ve said to his grandfather … ‘cause I said it all the time: He

  does it all the time – and if he isn’t doing that, he’s spinning round

  annaround ‘til he’s so dizzy he falls over. Or else he’s pelting up and

  down the hall – then charging into the kitchenette and banging

  his head against the fridge – see? See? You can see the big dent

  he’s made in it from here … Yes, you could see the dent from the

  balcony – see it also from the AyWunEmm a decade later. See it,

  and see as well meticulously lined up all those occasions when she’d

  pleaded with Zack: You see that? You see what he’s doing now? See,

  see, see! Sixhunnredanfawty times every bleeding day, or hour …

  It’s been her fate, Camilla realises, to be compelled always to look at

  her fidgeting, rocking and rolling son, while he never so much as

  glances at her for a second! At Heath Hospital, shortly after Ben’s

  bloody becoming – wrung out, a soiled dishcloth of a woman following

  thirty hours of gas-tank-deflating and botched-epidural-inserting

  labour – it’d been Zack she’d babbled to: H-He, w-won’t look

  at me … Staring down at the baby’s whorl of mucus-lacquered

  hair – Where? Where’d Mark been? Out of sight, and … out of his

  mind. Tush now, Zack had said, or words to that effect: Tush now,

  newborns don’t focus right away – it takes days, sometimes a week

  or more for their eyes and their minds to fully connect … G’dunggg!

  G’dungggg! Khhssshhhkkkkhhhhssschhhg’dunggg! ESTABLISHING

  NETWORK CONNECTION … Who knows what this little

  chap’s seeing right now? P’raps it’s some other reality altogether. But

  when they do focus for the first time, it’s always on their mother’s

  eyes. Little Ben will see you, Milla – and he’ll see that you’re seeing

  him, see also that you’re focusing on other things, other people …

  Camilla often didn’t have the froggiest what Frog-face was banging

  on about … but I got that. Our bubble-worlds, her father-in-law had

  speculated as he peered into her teary eyes, are so very delicate – so

  easy to pop. Nevertheless, we pierce them thousands-upon-millions

  of times … Pierce them, then sew them together with our sightlines.

  That’s how we know what someone else is thinking about –

  even before they speak … I was raped once – inna rape field. Around

  this time of year – a flowery torture. He – he looked lovingly into my eyes

  the entire time he was … punching me in the face. It’d been the middle

  of the night when her son was born – Zack had taken a banana

  from the bowl on the windowsill and held its up-curving and

  sweetly-rotten-smelling prong against the cold black glass – he punched

  me in the face, and kicked me … down there. Zack had said, Mummy

  looks at the banana – baby thinks: She’s thinking about the banana.

  The way they perceive the actual physical object may be radically

  different – but the mental object they create together, by definition

  … it’s the same thing. Bananas and babies, Milla – atom bombs

  and Arthur Askey. Have you ever wondered how it is that the

  world, in all its confusion and complexity, is nonethleless entirely

  legible to us the moment we attempt to read it? From earliest infancy

  our perception has this fluency – p’raps it’s because the world is a

  book that’s been read by us before … A month or so later she’d

  revisited this conversation – and asked Zack to write down what

  he’d said so she could get to grips with it. He’d searched out a jotter

  from his corduroy pocket, each page of which carried the same

  exciting news about an ulcer drug, and set this down: Ultimately

  perception isn’t individual but collective, and the world which

  is its object is nothing more or less than the analogue of all those

  myriad moments when we look into another’s eyes and see them

  looking elsewhere — I’m gonna shit myself – we’ve got to stop! My

  legs! are magically unscrewing from their threaded sockets, while

  My ribs … Camilla lifts a hand from the juddery steering wheel,

  clutches her breast … are popping one by one from their cage – until

  there’s nothing to spare … only a jumbled slurry of bones and guts

  rollin’ on down the road at sixhunnredanfiffyfive miles an hour. You

  can stop, she commands her chanting son, ‘cause we’re gonna stop

  – I’ve gotta go to the loo. But he goes on relentlessly enumerating –

  just as the pile of persistence in the passenger seat keeps tossing his

  word-salad: Machine stops – planesfallouttathesky … Squashed-peopledie

  – death’n’destructioneverywhere … Eyewarned’em …

  The signs charge towards them: WALSHFORD … washed up,

  HUNSINGORE … hunting gore, WETHERBY – which sounds familiar

  in a Northern accent: Where-there-bee, which also sounds like a

  kazoo up yer ‘ooter, or buzz-buzz-buzzing about in your beehive

  ‘airdo spend! Spend! Spending! even though you ain’t got it. You go

  swanning along the high street, underneath the striped awnings,

  avoiding the bat-eared boys in cloth caps playing with the metal-hoop-type-thingies

  from barrels. On their way up to Ma Peggotty’s

  place: Get it inside you, boy, and y’ull be goin’ oop that hill as quick

  as you coom down … Where-there-bee – wheaty-germ … Ben had

  been Ay. Layt. De. Vel. O. Per. Not when it came to talking – that’d

  come quickly enough … that’d come quickly enough … But he

  wouldn’t read until Gramps had bought the seedee for him: Bobby

  the buzz-buzz-buzz Bee and his Jollyphonics. Bring your Bee-Bee-Bat

  and your Bee-Bee-Ball to the park. Little Ben, sat up on a

  high stool, demonstrating dynamical movement and gesture as he

  ham-ham-hammered away at the Bee-Bee-Bee-buttons helping him

  to develop the ability to hear and discriminate the forty-two-letter

  sounds in the English language. Little Ben, a strange smile on his

  Marmite lips as he played upon his dee-dee-dee-drum. No Powder

  Puff girls for Benny – no desire whatsoever to catch ’em all … His

  only friends Bobby-the-Bee and his great pal, Phonic-the-computer

  – his hands never still – always ay-ay-ay-agitated, ‘cause he’d got

  ay-ay-ay-ants on my arm and they were causing me alarm … !

  Where-there-bee … what? As the Vauxhall samb
as off the motorway

  and on to the slip road, Camilla envisions Harold Shipman

  lookalikes walking arm-in-arm with Myra Hindley doubles. Sees

  their trowel-shaped beards and cold complacent eyes – sees them

  munching on Eccles cakes and brushing crumbs from the lapels of

  their waterproof jackets. Sees them laughing all the way to the

  blood-bank – I haemorrhaged … And the worst part of it had been

  I gorra lorra blood … the phonics rattle around in her head jo-lli-ly,

  as the car rushes between vernal hedgerows. Camilla spies a lonely

  phone booth … Hello? Hello? Where am I? Inna phone booth inna

  rape field, which may be postcard pretty from a distance – but up

  close it’s rotten and slimy, the oilseed rape – where I was raped. Did

  I tell you about that, Doctor … Who? Yes – yes, she’d told him all

  right – told him very early on, in the kitchen at Redington Road,

  which was where Mark was staying the night he’d picked her up at

  the poetry reading – a wild and wordy night of phonics and philthy

  phucking – up the stairs, past the stained-glass windows, up my back

  passage. Preferred it that way – felt less violated … Can’t’ve been

  more than a fortnight later – Mark prob’ly upstairs in his childhood

  bedroom slopping about in a tank of Stelazine, while he stared

  sightlessly at the cut-out-and-keep posters still stuck to the walls:

  sharks, Second World War aircraft, Cold War spying gadgetry.

  Downstairs, over a bottle of plonk, Zack had probed Camilla, and

  she’d thrown up right away: I was raped once … inna rape field …

  an I s’pose you’re gonna tell me that explains everything … She

  pictures him eating toast – he’s always eating toast. Hears this low

  crumbling: Not everything – but some things … I’d imagine.

  I mean, you realised very quickly, I think, that my son is “mentally

  ill” … The quotation marks are always present when he uses

  such terms, two crooked fingers shoved down the throat of the conversation

  … Up he’d chucked: It’s purely speculation, but I’d imagine

  you were drawn to him – albeit unconsciously – by this fact alone:

  for him – for you – the worst has already happened … The Vauxhall

  idles noisily at a pelican crossing, and Camilla hearkens to its

  costly clatter – its nuts and bolts and cogs and cables are all my