by Will Self
lanes and slip roads. They have a wee-pit-stop before the still more
maddening drive down through Mill Hill and Hendon, until they’re
meshed together on the North Circular with all the Chiantishire
cunts rollicking home from the second homes where they doubtless
also spent the Easter bank holiday sopping up … mussel broth –
Ark-Ark! Camilla rests her forehead on the steering wheel, feeling
the heat the mile upon mile of friction has rubbed in … down
below – the Vauxhall … and I. She digs at the brake, then the accelerator
– the car hiccups along in the jam. Is she rested after their
little comfort break? Am I fuck … This evening she’ll have to spend
hours getting Ben ready for school tomorrow – his very ordinary
school requires very special preparation, although his lunch cannot
have anything so conventional as being prepared done to it. No. It
must be assembled as she imagines computers being assembled under
surgical lights by neat-fingered women – hairless women, their
brows and pubes shaved, too, who wear white nylon snoods, face
masks and gloves … somewhere. The lunch’s component parts are:
Marmite painted on pumpernickel, a necessarily straight banana, a
carton of coconut milk, kelp-flavoured root-vegetable crisp bits. The
latter components must be sourced from obscure yeast-stinky health
food shops all over North London – curse the fucking internet for
making the boy aware of such things. Camilla stands behind Ben as
he stands behind his avatar, but I’ve no control. She’s stood there for
much of the last couple of years, watching the web pages download:
multicoloured strips of consumer choice. Ben doesn’t explain to his
digitally migrant mother about modems, bit-rates and connection
speeds – he acts them out on all-fours such womanly hips, snuffling
at the skirting boards, picking cable-clips from perished plaster,
as he fimbles with the information superhighway. His nails are
filthy and need clipping … osprey’s talons, really … She looks up.
Overhead the April day is fading – the enormous concrete tangle
of the gyratory system unravels into the sunset. Beyond the Vauxhall’s
bonnet mud chunks drop from the crusted axle of a dump
truck. It’s a nightmare getting Ben to have a shower – while a
change of clothes requires protracted negotiation. They made a Good
Friday Agreement that he’d begin the new term in new clothes,
and ditch the fraying grey hoodie and Asda jeans he’s been wearing
day in day out for months. But now, as the car’s blatting past the
Brent Sidings, Camilla remembers: I left a load in the machine …
She’ll have to run a full cycle again, then try to dry them before
morning – else there’s no guarantee of getting him to school at
all. And even if he does go to school, where will that lead? What
sort of job will Ben ever be able to do – can she see him working in
a butcher’s – this one, for example, where two black men dispute
over a tray piled high with bloody pigs’ trotters? Clearly this is no
simple conflict over price or quantity, but something altogether
more sinister – the disputant’s face is grey with anxiety, his spittle
drips down on the trotters … Gramps says all immigrant communities
– no matter where they are or where they’ve come from – have
much higher rates of schizophrenia. Not that he uses the s-word …
I prefer schizophreniform disorder – although not in the sense that
DeeEssEmmFour uses it … No wonder Mark’s so at home here –
back with his crazy peeps. Back in our London. He stirs, unshaven
neck twitching in the collar of the cagoule he hasn’t removed for the
past four days, and mutters, Shitters … up to their necks innit –
blood ‘n’ guts … ox-heart speaking in tongues … He. Can. Look.
Inside. My. Soul! He starts whimpering as the car pulls away
from the lights, so she shifts her hand from the gearstick to his
knee … mechanically comforting: Home soon now, love, and I’ll put
the kettle on for a nice cup of … chlorpromazine. Yet … yet …
she’s been comforted by them both in the past – received physical
succour. When Ben was littler there was the holding therapy – he
may’ve punched and kicked … but we were connected – and before
that they’d shared the queasier intimacies of toilet training … for
months – no, years! Training didn’t cut it: this was toilet further
education – an aitchenndee in shitting, a bachelor of piss artistry.
So very long had it taken that Ben was able to comment on his
bowel movements long before he could control them: Look at that
great big poo what I done, Mummy … he’d remarked, aged thirteen
months, stretched out on his sheepskin, legs akimbo, the poo in
question coddled there: a great and glistening toffee-coloured roc’s
egg. So great, and so glistening, it might conceivably have been
another newborn … can we fix it? No, she’s forced to acknowledge for
the sixhunnredansixtysixth time, no, we fucking can’t. Even when
a bribe worked and he stayed on his potty, it was only on this further
condition: he was allowed to suck on my tit. The thick green
roll-neck woolly he wore ‘til it rotted – the relentless suction of his
jaws clamped on her smarting nipple, his cheeks ballooning as he
drank me down. Christ! Christ, she’s tired – the Vauxhall groans up
the modest incline of Shoot-Up Hill, and Camilla can no
longer distinguish between the slap-a-tat-tat of its fraying fan belt
and the disintegration of her own insides … Ben seems to have
no anxieties – he just gets on with sucking and stimming and
shitting … a remarkable child, is his grandfather’s view: He really is
able to do to do three different things at once – reminds me of some of the
autistic savants I’ve come across over the years … But not, it would
seem, of his daughter-in-law, who does three things at once … all
the fucking time. Yes, and one night at Redington Road, when Zack’s
own youngest children – Ben’s twin baby aunts – were tucked up
under their thirty-two-tog duvets, he’d opened a bottle of wine and
held forth: All my career, he’d said, I’ve followed Ariadne’s thread,
followed it through a maze of conflicting theories, hoping it would
lead me towards the clear light of understanding … It had been a
testimony to the respect Camilla had for him, and the gratitude she
felt, that as they sat and sipped and listened to Ben riding his trike
round annaround the conservatory, she didn’t throw back at him:
Why don’t you, for once in your pontificating life, take a bit of
Ariadne’s thread and sew a bloody button on with it – ! Mum! Mum!
Ben’s face, thrust from the foreskin of his hoodie, fills the rear-view
mirror: Mum, you’ve missed the turn again! And she has – they’ve
been living in the Mowbray Road flat for seven years now: seven
long years full of frantic activity … As to progress of any kind,
when she considers the matter, it seems she’s merely been sitting
stock-s
till in her bay window, with the days and nights flickering on
my face: a woman fallen to earth, in an alien world. She isn’t yet –
and perhaps never will be – at home he’d be angling his scraggy
saggy unshaven neck, at the end of which was his scraggy saggy
unshaven RED face, towards the cocktail cabinet, a kettle-drum-shaped
contrivance of mirrors and marquetry which stood on
three peg-legs. Maeve had brought it back from a church jumble
sale. The Butcher had been sixteen and sour … seated at the kitchen
table reading Cicero’s defence of Sulla … that he would’ve been
amongst the most virtuous of our rulers were it not for his choleric and
fanciful disposition … which had probably been translated by some
kiddie-fiddling classicist who taught at a prep school where they
dipped the little lambkins rather than bathing them. Ever a martyr,
she’d’ve humped the ghastly object awkwardly in through the
side door, and the Butcher prob’ly said, Let me give you a hand
with that, Mum. To which she undoubtedly would’ve replied, Oh,
no, that’s all right, Jonathan, you get on with your book … Ach! the
flabby-mindedness of the woman! The Butcher inveighs (You’re
inveighing again, Butchie, I’ve warned you about that.) For Maeve
De’Ath the classics were a household chore you got on with. As for
“Jonathan” (Where to thtart!). Absolutely, Squilly – ab-so-bloody-lutely:
Jonathan is long gone – and Kins has dearly departed, but
the cocktail cabinet remains. It’s no longer hunched in the bay
window of the room Maeve De’ath insisted on calling the drawing
one … prétentieuse, elle? Although, to be fair (Which in her case
you’ve always found rather difficult, Butchie), drawing did get done
there – not by him, but Oliver and James De’Ath could sit and draw
at the same time the clever little wankers … which is how their elder
brother referred to them then and still does. Their mother – being the
woman she remains: hollowed out by her own chippiness, a bag of
sawdust where her guts oughta be – always refers to her sons by their
given names. As for Kins, ever since he was made conscious he’d
taken to calling his sons – albeit only in the confines of his own
deeply prosaic mind – the Butcher, the Baker and the Candlestick-maker.
This would be fair enough even if only sixty-six per cent
of his progeny exhibited the appropriate tendencies – a vocation,
say, for cake, or a certain facility with an awl – but, as Ali Hassan
al-Maji’s pilots swooped low to dump another helicopter gunshipload
of napalm on the fleeing Peshmerga fighters, Oliver De’Ath
began working at a craft shop in Wantage – not (We hathen to add)
a mere purveyor of knick-knacks and amusing tea towels, but the
going concern of a notable woodworker, who sawed and planed
table tops, and turned both their legs (And candlethticks) for the
discerning public. That’s nice, dear, Maeve De’Ath would say, every
time her youngest presented her with another newly varnished
chip off his workaday block, but her tone was flat … disappointed.
As for the Candlestick-maker’s immediately older brother, he, too,
was notably deficient when it came to getting on in the world. At the
local EffEee college James had been adjudged inadequate – and so
he took to the back bedroom of the Colindale Avenue house, where,
in the walk-in cupboard, he grew marijuana under lights. A few
years later he emerged, and floated into a job at the Crusty Loaf
Bakery, a Saint Albans tea shop that prides itself on homemade
cakes, bread and pastries vente à emporter … His younger sons’
lack of career progress had never bothered Kins, who, epigone
that he’d been, was always a ferocious under-achiever. So long as his
boys accompanied him on long rambles through the surrounding
countryside, listening the while to his lectures full of longueurs … so
Kins was content. Were you happy, Dad? the Butcher thinks, staring
down at the semi-reflective surface of the Baldwins’ brilliantly
clean kitchen table – and seeing there his father’s scraggy saggy
unshaven RED face. Are you happy, Dad? He’d posed the question
to Kins when they were still close – when they still did things
together, before the incident. Posed it, because, even if his own
data-set was already heavily restricted, the Butcher still admired
his father’s tradecraft – his skulking, tail-between-his-legs (Until
needed!) insouciance – and needed to be told it hadn’t all been in
vain. Happy? Kins speaks from the Other Side, his full bottom
lip moist with his own never-ending self-deprecatory moue. Happy?
Dunno ‘bout that, old bean – whenever it occurs to me to wonder if
I’m happy, I always think of my old history master at Lancing –.
– The Ape. – That’s right, the Ape. He always used to say, Happiness
is a by-product of life, just as coke is a by-product of smelting
steel – you can’t go at either of ’em directly – you’ve chopped up
that garlic. You do still want to help, don’t you, Jonathan? Vron
Baldwin asks. She’s hovering over him, a brittle-but-natural blonde
of his own age, wearing a peach-coloured wool suit under her blue-and-white-striped
ouvrierist apron (A word here about the Butcher’s
mnemonic capacity: with each new generation of recording devices
– for text, for image, for film and audio – so his vast internal
database has been appropriately upgraded. The two-by-four file
cards on which he set down details of informers, suspects and agents
have been transferred successively to automatic document carousels,
then to magnetic tape – and now digitised, along with the enormous
stacks of five-by-eight black-and-white prints, blown up from
microdots, which picture just about everyone he’s ever seen, and
everywhere he’s ever been, and all the reports he’s ever read. When,
a couple of years ago, Pople and Kohn won the Nobel for their
work applying the complex equations describing quantum chemical
processes to determining the three-dimensional structure of molecules,
the Butcher found he was immediately able to employ similar
techniques to build his own nanomachines – tens of thousands of
micron-sized robots, each of which could be programmed separately
to labour on the great and never-ending data-harvest. The Butcher
is only too aware of the curious correspondence between these
technological metaphors for his own mental processes and the
paranoid fantasies of schizophrenics, which also have a built-in
obsolesence – the death-rays aimed at them being decommissioned
as laser beams are installed. The Butcher’s also always been conscious
that, should he reveal the full extent of his mnemonism,
he would become an object of fascination, fear and cack-handed
medical intervention. As a child he’d had before him an example of
what a superior mnemonist might do with their life, in the form of
his grandfather, who came of age before the normals began netting
entire populations with their crude metrics.
Sirbert had been viewed
as eccentric, certainly – but never pathologically so. His grandson
would do better, and actively conceal the existence of his database,
with its banks of winking EyeSeeEl mini-computers, wired in
series, which had been installed in the sub-basements of his enormous
Mycroftian mind. Conceal this – and hide also his equipment:
the superior perceptual mechanisms enabling him to gather such
huge quantities of visual and audio take, computer and telephony
metadata. It was wearing, of course, running this ongoing surveillance
programme with only the one agent in the field – and the
relentless cerebration can at times seem a little like psychosis: all
those numerals and letters swirling inside his tired eyes. Surely,
under such circumstances, it’s understandable that even the most
conscientious and effective operator has recourse to chemical
assistance – strictly under medical supervision, of course. Since the
in-house medics introduced random piss-testing, the Butcher has
reluctantly forsworn illegal stimulants in favour of forty to sixty
milligrams of methylphenidate daily, which not only calms –
enabling the sequestration of clamorous intelligence-gathering from
the normally quiet business of life – but also, paradoxically, enhances
episodic, working and long-term memory. The Butcher has a hunch
prolonged use of this nostrum may be implicated in the restructuring
of his own neurological architecture: a process that’s gathered
pace in the past decade or so, in line with the boom in middle-class
house conversions. Obsolete partitions are being knocked down
and unused attics pressed into service – all is becoming rational and
open-plan. Which is why at Sunday lunches, in conversation with
gently whinnying Tories, the Butcher would add his own phatic forgetfulness
to their general amnesia, referring always to what’shisface
or thingummyjig – while ever unable to retrieve the relevant information,
despite it being on the tip of his tongue) and holding a paring
knife in one hand and a bunch of parsley in the other. Her purple
lips purse: Not a lot of point in your pitching up early if you’re just
going to sit there daydreaming – the others’ll be here in half and
hour … no doubt famished. No doubt, the Butcher thinks, but
