Phone

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