by Will Self
enough, since when the message peeped through to the Butcher’s
pager he’d been in Chariots Roman Spa watching (The young men
lift the weights from their shoulders?), as has been, is … and will
always be, his wont. He’d only fifteen minutes to exfiltrate himself,
return to his house, change out of his leathers and back into his pinstripes,
then head along the Embankment to VeeBeeArr … Elvis
entered the building by stepping into the first security gate, stating
his name and Service number. Released into a short catwalk lined
with steel, trident-topped palings, he then entered a second security
gate, where he inputted his pass code six-oh-six-seven-zero-one
using a steel keypad. The Perspex pod split, disgorging him into
a hideous atrium – a great echoing volume, filled with the sounds
of … silence: the brothel-creeping of the younger generation of
crêpe-soled grammar-school-entrants of whom the Butcher was the
front-runner … Checking his own vintage Longines, he’d realised
there were still five minutes to spare, so strolled round the plantation
of palms and out on to the terrace. It had been a brisk day – the
westerly wind sweeping along the river, pushing a scummy tumble
of cloud before it. Grim as it’d undoubtedly been, the old Lubyanka
also had superb views – the Butcher, who, whether hungover or not,
could deal with his admin and draft his SeeEx reports in a fraction
of the time it took his colleagues, would often spend hours in his
cubbyhole on the fourteenth floor, standing at the window, staring
out over Lambeth Palace, Saint Thomas’s and the river, while
feeling the wide metropolitan world wheel around him. Spies alight
here, bus conductors allegedly said as they halted at the junction
of Westminster Bridge Road and Morley Street (Not that you’ve
ever had to do anything so gauche as take the bus!). There’d
been Sirbert’s small inheritance soon after the Butcher joined the
Service – and this went into a dinky flat on Kennington Lane,
which, watered by the occasional windfall, grew in a few years
to become a garden one on Fentiman Road. Here the Butcher
remained for several years. Then his upstairs neighbour – a general’s
widow with large hands who always wore tennis shoes, and with
whom he had … an understanding – inconveniently went and
died. Her heirs – a provincial solicitor and his diffident wife – came
to introduce themselves, and, spotting the framed photograph on a
side table, the solicitor said, Fighting Rams, eh – you a military
man, then? And when the Butcher answered, I’m on the Territorials’
roll – but that’s a hobby thing, my day job’s at the Foreign and
Commonwealth Office, the solicitor gave him a funny look and
said, EffSeeOh, eh … That was all – but it was enough: his cover
was blown. The Butcher put the flat on the market the following
day. He found an ex-council house on the oddly sleepy lane which is
all that remains of Lambeth High Street, in between a scrap of park
and the Fire Brigade’s headquarters. It felt familiar, being of the
same vintage as the Hertfordshire University campus where Kins
had bloviated for a living: a system-built affair assembled using
concrete, painted panelling and unplasticised polyvinyl chloride.
The month the Butcher moved in Stephen Fry was opening in a
play about George Blake’s time in the Scrubs – the Butcher had
a thing for Blake (You identify with him). Identify! Puh-lease,
Squills … so booked seats for him and his then current second-string
beard, Lucinda, a broad-shouldered girl with a wild tangle
of dark hair, who he’d spotted fighting to control it, beside a yucca,
on a half-landing, at the new offices of the new Department for
International Development … aim high – shoot low. But by the time
they pitched up, Fry had already fled: hotfooting it to the Continent,
in emulation – the Butcher suggested to Lucinda, who was
no fool – not of his real-life character, who’d been spirited away in a
fellow traveller’s Dormobile with his kiddies sitting on top of him,
but of Oscar Wilde – Wilde had made a run for Dieppe and Bosie
as soon as the gates of Reading Gaol swung open … Fry’s problem,
the Butcher suggested, was the same: he lacked the courage of his
own perversions … Of the play, the Butcher remembers little, save
what the playwright got wrong … This is a scene, however, that he
retains: Lucinda, standing naked by the blank, black windows of his
new and very empty house … a silvery spunk-trail trickling down her
thigh, and staring towards where the singed bricks of the firemen’s
practice tower would, when the sun rose, block out the light. She’d
gently remarked, Maybe that’s your problem, too, Jonathan … So,
despite the fact he enjoyed her company and found her vagina quite
orderly – he fired Lucinda the next day, via email. It was, he thinks,
one of the first he’d ever sent – and, although he’d used his private
account, it required an effort of will to resist the deadweight of the
drafting pro forma all EyeBees had used for … mind out of time:
three lines at the top in summary, all surnames capitalised, conversations
indicated by (cons), colleagues by their alpha-numerical
designator and emphasis conveyed by a bracketed (LWU), meaning
last word underlined. So: Sexual relationship between Jonathan
DE’ATH and Lucinda PHILLIPS. Possible agent compromise due to
source’s superior gaydar (LWU). Discontinuation advised forthwith
(LWU – or even fiftwith, Butch – but don’t divagate so, you were
thinking about time, and Tony Blair, and black Levis …). So I was,
the Butcher thinks, so I was … (Or is it, perhaps, that Sally’s finally
due for discontinuation?) He looks up at last from the macerated
garlic – further off, in the tiled hallway, he hears the tinkle-bray
of … incoming Tories! Tories! Tories! In the Chief’s office the form is
that the suppliant sits with his back to the Tate Gallery – averting
his eyes from art and setting his face to the future. The Butcher’s
current duties include some responsibility for overseeing the Firm’s
own large data-set – there are regular trips to Cheltenham for
meetings as dully predictable as electric clocks. Cumming’s clocks are,
he thinks, at once glass-spiked Sputniks orbiting the woody heavens
of the generously appointed office – and blank faces, behind which
large cogs gear into smaller ones … with an inexorable logic. He’d
been hoping for an overseas posting – a little troubleshooting, perhaps,
in the Gulf, or the knitting back together of one of the Firm’s
unravelling Far Eastern networks … no such fucking luck. A Parker
fountain pen had been laid ostentatiously on Dick’s blotter – beside
it a pot of green ink: The world is enough … he’d said. What the
fuck does that mean? It’d been a rare instance of the epithet issuing
from Dick’s smiling-upside-down lips – even when the spooks are
pissed outta our minds at the near-obligat
ory Friday-evening drinks,
they remain well-spoken and close-mouthed for … cracked actors:
What’s he going to be when he grows up? the Butcher thought
then – thinks now: Sydney-fucking-Greenstreet? For he’s swelling,
Dick is, sitting for day after day beneath those sanguinary clock-faces
as they … haemorrhage time. No doubt the Firm’s first Chief
saw his hobby as a metaphor for his métier: the careful assembly
of the secret mechanism that lies behind (… Events, dear boy,
events). Thank you, Squilly, the Butcher murmurs – standing now
at the kitchen island, the Filipina looking on, as he stabs expertly
at the leg of lamb, making a series of utilitarian … wounds. But
really, even if there ever was any calibration between the covert
mechanism and the way the world turns, it was trop en retard now:
the Mad Hatter’s dropped his half-hunter in the teapot, and, for all
the dancing of sound into light, and the shimmying of light into
sound, there remains a profound sense, here, at the Zero Meridian,
that time’s … going nowhere. Which means, in turn, that events are
being stillborn. Yes, the West’s enfeebled events – jizzing up the
Chinks after the duff run on Belgrade, then all those other sorties:
bombs dropped not on some far-away-country-of-which-we-know-little,
but right in our backyard. Still, they made no sound – these
congenitally deformed events. Soon enough – the Butcher thinks,
as he begins methodically to insert small wedges of garlic into the
gashes – in order for anything to happen at all, it’ll need to be …
outsourced to the developing world. And to the Chief he’d said: The
world is not enough, Dick – not enough, then he turned back to the
window. So the Chief had been compelled to address his beautifully
tailored back … (Five fittings at Kilgour’s – you spent more time in
Thavile Row that month than at the office). The faint reflection of
Dick had removed its glasses and massaged its translucent eyes …
– D’you know that repulsive little ginger nut the Foreign Secretary?
I’ve run across him, the Butcher conceded. – Well, he only went and
let the film people use the building as a bloody backdrop for this
flick without consulting me at all! The Butcher hadn’t altogether
believed what he’d just heard: Dick, who’d been pretty fearless in
Geneva – personally setting up letter-drops and brush-contacts,
carrying some of them out himself – even getting up to a bit of
rough stuff with the increment … There he’d been, high on this
petty dudgeon. The Butcher takes the bundle of fresh rosemary
from the Filipina, releases its constraining rubber band and begins
spearing sprigs into the joint. Gawain will be nearing London by
now, driving his shitty old Volvo. The thrusting tank commander
may be able to direct a long-range reconnaissance mission deep
behind enemy lines, but London traffic confuses his dear, woolly
head. He’ll park up in Hendon and take the Northern Line into
town. Sunday afternoon is perhaps the most difficult time for him
to get away – after the obligatory roast there’s mandatory homework,
and all the squalid demands of a breeders’ household with
three young offspring. His cover story these past few months has
been water-tight: although recently promoted, Lieutenant-Colonel
Thomas was passed over for Regimental SeeOh. Aggrieved, he’s
applied for secondment to the DeeEssOh, which has necessitated
his travelling down to London for various selection panels ever
since. Each trip requires an overnight – or so Fi believes. If she’s still
that complacent … The Butcher will find out soon enough, lying in
his lover’s arms. Surely she suspects by now? Surely she has at least
an inkling? She’s woman enough – at least biologically – to have
some sort of feminine intuition? The lovers discuss the personality
they’re betraying in obsessive detail, running their mental digits
over its confusing contours. Both men are meant to be experts on
human psychology – their respective professions would seem to
demand nothing less. Yet, when it comes to Gawain’s wife, they’re
stymied: they can see the shape Fiona impresses on their own lives,
yet have no idea how she makes it. Is that the time? Vron Baldwin
cries, re-entering the kitchen. C’mon now, Jonathan, that joint
should’ve been in yonks ago … The Butcher hefts the roasting pan
and the lamb slithers about on its extra-virginal … piste. (Wo ein
guter Hirte wacht, eh, Butch …) Vron opens one of the oven doors
and he slides the tin into the hot socket. Basted by orangey light,
the joint glistens, and the Butcher thinks of last New Year’s Eve.
Disdaining such a staged saturnalia, he’d sat at home and listened
to the evil buzz which vibrates through his house, while watching
the festivities on television, half hoping planes would indeed … fall
out of the sky, for what fitter solution could there be to humanity’s
great third-act-problem than a digitally induced mass suicide?
When the estate agent had shown him round, the Butcher had been
sizing him up for … a little amateur conveyancing when he registered
the buzz. The estate agent had blushed charmingly: It’s the electricity
substation, I’m afraid: it’s directly adjoining the house – to
be honest, it’s put quite a few potential buyers off, and I think the
vendor might be prepared to accept a considerably lower offer …
The vendor had – and the Butcher considered it a win-win, since
he positively enjoyed the buzz, glorying in the way it enfolded his
svelte form in the great electro-magnetic go-round which, when you
stop to consider it, is everything. Towards midnight, as the crowds
were gathering, and – if the media was to be believed – the Thames
was about to be infused with Greek fire, the Butcher snapped on
the television. There they’d all been: the flock of the great and
greedy, hungry for preferment, and penned in a measureless concrete
canyon, such was their desire to drift downstream with Their
Royal Highnesses and experience the rarefied delights of TeeBee’s
pleasure dome. The Butcher actually caught a glimpse of Dick,
John and Gerry, blinking in the unaccustomed limelight, and fully
apprised of the terror-threat, flinching rather more than the other
vee-eyepees whenever a rocket went up. The fundamental error in
the lives of almost everyone, the Butcher thinks, as he allows Vron
to tuck his arm under hers, is to place themselves at the very centre
of things … I’ll do some introductions in a minute, she coos, but
first I’d like to ask you for a little advice. Her sagging udder has him
trapped and: I doubt very much she did her pelvic-floor exercises before
pushing out little Sam (Or Arthur – y’know, I think he may be one
of your godchildren, Butch). In the airy hallway she wheels him
round, and he sees not the pale oak staircase climbing up past tall
stained-glass windows, but the flyleaf of his school atlas: Jonathan
De’Ath, Number Four, Colin
dale Avenue, Saint Albans, Hertfordshirs,
England, Great Britain, Europe, The World, The Solar
System, The Galaxy, The Universe … (There was a time when you
thought you were at the thentre of things, Butch). So there was,
Squilly – yet how very ignorant I was, as misinformed as any
medieval cartographer. But as I grew we slipped, didn’t we, Squills
– slipped away into the wings, a vantage from where we can see
what actually goes on … – D’you think I should worry about him,
Jonathan? The object of her anxiety – Sam (or possibly Arthur) –
lies full length on the lush carpet in front of a vast television. He’s
exchanged one controller for another, and now noses the barrel
of an automatic rifle (Looks a bit like a Galil, wouldn’t you
say?) into an on-screen labyrinth. The Butcher’s seen such things
before – but, as with the game of life, it’s the setting which interests
him more than the action. What is this imaginary realm, a cut-and-shut
between the Oyster Bar at Grand Central, an Istanbul
hammam and a giant public toilet? (Or lavatory – don’t forget
Mummy!) There are odd brown patches scattered about on the dirty
tiled floors – and as they watch, the rifle’s sights encircle one of
these and its muzzle spews fire. The patch spews red pulp. I can’t
keep him off it, Vron says, really I can’t – Nick was so pissed off
with it last week he unplugged the PlayStation and locked it in the
garden shed, but clever old Arthur here pinched the key, got it
back and set the whole thing up in his bedroom using Consuela’s
television as a … as a … – Monitor? – Yes, that’s it, Jonathan,
as a monitor – but honestly, he’s so … addicted. Can’t be good for
him, can it? Look – look at how gory it is. The Butcher looks: it’s
not gory at all – gory is hot and wet and traumatised. Gory is a
ringing-singing-screaming all around you. Gory is an explosion so
loud it knocks the top of your skull in and spreads your brain on the
walls … The Butcher looks and sees this: the child lying on the
carpet is really stalking along a subterranean corridor, turning to the
right, to the left, sliding down the balustrade of a shattered staircase,
past twisted rebars beaded with concrete pilules. The assassins
that come, tumbling from triangular shadows, are projections of
