Phone

by Will Self

  EmPee had a moment of madness and ended up for an eternity

  doing talk radio (In Wales). This time the Butcher plays it differently:

  The interested people – should they be, ah … interested, will

  want to get in touch with you. Do you know how to go about setting

  up an anonymous email account with one of the big providers –

  Hotmail, for instance? The EmmPee’s ears really do prick up, and,

  suitably enough, in his doggy guise he’s then called upon by Vron to

  round up his fellow Tories – who’re distributed about the terraces,

  blinking in poplin jackets and linen sundresses that bear the heavy

  creasing of a winter’s underbed storage – and herd them into the

  dining room. Where – after baked goat’s cheese and balsamic

  onions – she asks: Jonathan, would you mind awfully carving –

  Nick’s so clumsy, and it is rather your … thing? He pauses, serving

  fork aloft, a slice of steaming lamb speared by its tines. Slowly, the

  assembled company fall silent – the last audible take being “teak

  decking”, which plops from the mouth of a woman sitting beside

  poor old Sporty Spice! Who’s been in post so very long now it was

  Dick himself who’d said, after several too many at Friday-evening

  drinks: Jonathan, old man, don’t you think it’s high time you made

  that lovely girlfriend of yours a touch more … aware? Standing in

  the hideous atrium at VeeBeeArr, the tipsy spooks wheeling about

  them, the Butcher had chewed over the unutterable: Absolutely,

  Dick, she’s a right to know – and she’s completely sound. Old man

  was bomb disposal – nearly got his nuts blown off by the Ra. There’s

  only uno problemo with bringing the bigger picture into focus for

  her – well, two actually: first, she’s too fucking thick (LWU) to grasp

  it, which is precisely why she’s lasted this long – and secondly: if I

  were to jolt her into partial consciousness, even Sporty might have

  the nous to put together my profession of secrecy and my penchant

  for sodomy … I was … he looks round at the Tory sheeple … going

  to ask which of you would like your lamb rare … they moan

  obligingly … But, bearing in mind the old adage you are what you

  eat … their woolly faces grow pensive … You’d better all have it

  well done – unless you never want to be in government again! The

  Tories baa appreciatively at this feeble witticism, and the Butcher

  hides his face in the meaty steam. Oh, Gawain! he cries in the bony

  cave of his own darkest chamber. My noon, my midnight, my talk,

  my song! And he imagines his lover driving through the Hatfield

  Tunnel, the light and shadow playing on his boyish features. There’s

  a certain sort of gentlemanly English face – epitomised, the Butcher

  believes, by the actor Michael York – which retains a youthful

  mien well into middle age. (Even older!) Senior EssEyeEss mostly

  belong to the Travellers, but the Butcher prefers the more sedate,

  and slightly more liberal, Reform, where from childhood – since it

  had been Kins’s club as well – he’s seen these faces, ever-green

  against the worn brown leather of the library chairs. It’s said of

  humanity in general … (Thpare us the bloody oracular, Butch –

  thpare us that!) … it’s said of humanity in general that the retention

  of infantile characteristics into adulthood is a measure of evolutionary

  success: these boyish men and mannish boys, scanning the

  swags of tickertape draped from the baize-covered boards, or slowly

  impacting on whitebait in the dining room’s old-gold gloom – could

  it be their biological retardation had been essential for the rapid

  expansion of the empire they’d served? Kins, too, despite jowly

  ruddiness, had been a boy-man, delighting in impromptu games,

  small excursions and all their accompanying little smackerels … His

  pacifism, his piety, his local-government-fucking-finance, his rose-tinted

  utopianism – it’d all been par for the course … In the large

  and floral drawing room, the Butcher takes his coffee in a Barcelona

  chair with Sally, and wonders whether he should ask her away for

  a weekend … in Barcelona? At the same time, he taunts her: D’you

  see him? He nods towards a small, plump inoffensive-looking man

  wearing a gaudy moleskin waistcoat, who sits in the far corner of

  the room, his tiny, gold-rimmed coffee cup resting on his paunch,

  his mild eyes blinking at the gathering from behind thick lenses.

  You wouldn’t think it to look at him, the Butcher whispers, but he’s

  a big DeeYouPee grandee – and implicated in all sorts … from aiding

  Loyalist death squads to kiddy-fiddling at Belfast care homes –

  if I told you the half of it, Sal, you’d up-chuck Vron’s tiramisu …

  But Sal doesn’t want to admit the least fraction of such disturbing

  smut – let alone a half of it. The Butcher has page upon page of

  witness statements, all available for … downloading. The blocky

  Biro of the plods dutifully detailing how many scraggy saggy RED

  old cocks had been placed between how many young, trembling

  buttocks. But, even if he drilled it into her, none of it would get

  through – any more than it would’ve to Kins, both being innocent

  little eras of their own – permanent and enduring nows, endless

  evenings in which the shadows cast across the cricket pitch never,

  ever lengthen, and the little darlings up in the nursery never grow

  older, never having been born in the first place. You’re teasing me,

  darling, Sally whispers, and that’s unkind. Which is true – and

  hardly his style, so he says, You’re right, I’m being silly – listen, I’ve

  got to head off in a minute, will you take the Merc’, it’s a bugger to

  park in town and I fancy a walk … The Butcher does his valedictory

  round: there’s a forthright handshake for Nick Baldwin, and

  an ayframe hug for his wife – then he’s free, striding between the

  opulent red-brick villas to the crown of the hill, where, with

  mingled consternation and … nostalgia? he recognises the woodland

  below and remembers when, newly passed out from the

  intelligence officers’ new entrants course at Fort Monckton, he’d

  gone about establishing his own London network: sliding along the

  sweaty walls of the Bat Cave, slinking into the Pink Panther – plotting

  up in late-model four-door saloons on suburban streets for

  hours, until, in the underbrushed dawn, he made his approach. Not

  that he’d ever been a compulsive cruiser or a committed cottager,

  but he’d always appreciated the fit between this darkly honest realm

  and his clandestine nine-to-five. Both espionage and closeted

  homosexuality depended on good tradecraft – including cryptoanalysis:

  a mouth slobbering at a crudely hacked hole could mean

  quite different things … depending on the context. Both his métiers

  also required the Butcher to meet with individuals, mostly male, in

  nondescript spaces located in liminal places: chain-hotel rooms

  facing on to clogged arterial roads, boarded-up commercial premises

  behind abandoned petrol stations, mothball
ed offices above

  whining dental surgeries. — As he turns right on to West Heath

  Road and begins the stiff haul up to Whitestone Pond, the Butcher

  peers back down the long corridor of his life, with its scuffed linoleum

  and dinted, distempered walls. He sees himself charming

  Bulgarian cipher clerks and leather queens from Purley – he tastes

  the dead skin that’s dust, and the skins which, once supple and

  scented, have now turned to … dust. He thinks of his colleagues,

  whose sins of omission and commission alike are readily washed

  away by the tepid tea at a vicarage coffee morning, or the spit of

  a military band. At Whitestone Pond the Butcher stands looking

  out over London – the breeze flaps the legs of his raw-silk trousers.

  Not a great expense, he’d shamelessly tell curious colleagues, I’m

  bespoken for in the Far East – the tailors in Kuala Lumpur put

  the Singaporean ones to shame. See the stitching round the collar,

  here … and the individual pen pockets, each one lined with

  absorbent material? (It’s bloody barefaced to talk like that, Butch –

  they’ll think you’re queer.) They know I’m queer, Squilly – they’ve

  known it for years. (So why on earth do we persist with this pathetic

  thubterfuge – I, for one, am fed up with lying face down in minge

  every other night of the week.) The Butcher doesn’t rise to this: he’s

  looking at the raddled countenance of London but seeing only that

  scraggy saggy unshaven RED face as it was on that Sunday afternoon

  in the early nineteen nineties. It’d been around this time of year –

  sunny, too – and the Butcher was driving back from Oakley in a

  brand-new Alfa Romeo Spider coupé (Courtesy of Slab Murphy’s

  Libyan paymasters, as I recall – and in the Vinaccia Red livery),

  which handled like a rocket-powered skateboard and could do a

  cool hundred and thirty-five on the flat. In all probability he’d been

  going still faster: whipping down through the elongated chicane the

  flyover describes over High Wycombe – when he was taken by an

  urge to see his father, so seized the slip road for the EmmTwentyfive,

  and found himself within the half-hour looking at Kins looking

  at the three-legged, kettle-drum-shaped contrivance of mirrors and

  marquetry, his scraggy saggy unshaven Vinaccia Red face burning

  with desire. For Christ’s sake, Dad, the Butcher had undoubtedly

  chided him, it’s not even tea time yet. If Maeve had been there it

  probably wouldn’t’ve happened – but she was out, answering calls

  from the suicidal on behalf of the Samaritans … the jolly Missus

  Jellyby, as eager to save a stranger’s soul as she is unwilling to mop

  up the … blood on her own carpet. She did return later, and the three

  of them had attempted to mend things over homemade banana

  bread – but by then the damage had been irreperable. (The damage

  to your English, Butch – is this feeble clichéd psycho-biography

  the best you can come up with?) What had got into Kins? (He

  would’ve been the most virtuous of our rulers, were it not for his

  choleric, fanciful disposition …) Had it simply been a case of his

  blood-alcohol levels dropping too low, so precipitating this sober

  assessment of his eldest son: You dress like a prize ponce, Jonathan,

  the saggy-red face spat. While as for that little German car you

  drive –. – It’s Italian, Dad. – German … Italian … I hardly think

  you can afford such luxury items on your salary. You forget, young

  man, I was a public servant myself … His oyster eyes milted with

  resentment – his hamfists began acting up, so the Butcher focused on

  his own manicured ones. It had been a long time since he’d hit his

  father, and in the intervening years – what with being professionally

  trained in unarmed combat – he suspected he’d become a bit better

  at it. Under the ignorant eyes of a kitschy three-dee Christ, Kins

  took his poison and administered his medicine: I don’t pretend to

  know the ins and outs, but I read the paper – I watch the news.

  Your so-called friends have a funny way of going about things, and

  they like their funny little jokes as well – what’re they calling it? The

  turkey-shoot, that’s it … Well, I’ll tell you what I call it: a shameful

  massacre – that’s what. And you … you were in the Middle East

  last year, admitted as much – hinted, didn’t you, that you’d been

  sorting stuff out behind the scenes … Led me to believe, didn’t

  you – ‘cause I doubted the Coalition were really going to be that

  bloody willing when it came to finishing what they’d started – that

  you and your friends had it all in hand … A shameful bloody

  massacre – that’s what you and your pals had planned. All those

  poor bloody young men – not Ba’athist thugs, mind, just poor young

  conscripts dragged from the bosom of their families to be burned

  and bombed and shot to pieces … And he’d banged on a great deal

  more in this fashion – words being the silly old sausage’s only

  ammunition. It’d been an impassioned speech – one the Butcher

  redacted in real time, because what did it amount to, really? Only

  more of the piffle Kins had come out with after the EePeeVee team

  had visited him and Maeve almost a decade before – splendidly

  naive bollocks about the brotherhood of man, the necessity for force

  always to be tempered by restraint, and the dark paths men disappeared

  down whenever they made the fatal mistake of imagining

  their ends could be justified by such means. The Butcher heard him

  out in silence, refutations and put-downs stillborn, stillborn slunks

  … What could he possibly say that would satisfy the simpleton?

  His tongue was tied – not by the OhEssAy (But because you’re

  gay …) Gay? Puh-lease! What the fuck does that mean, Squilly?

  (I know what it meant to you before the incident, Butch: Hello, my

  name’s Julian and this is my friend, Sandy – ) No! Not that, Squills

  – I beg of you. (Lovely to vada your jolly-old eeks, Mister Horn …)

  Oh, for fuck’s sake! the Butcher cries aloud to the Sunday motorists

  piloting their Jags and Mercs at trotting pace past the clapboard

  simulacrum of Jack Straw’s Castle, but the little prick won’t let it lie:

  (I think you’ll find – if you analythe your own large data-set properly,

  Butch – that there was a time when you and your brothers

  amused your parents by imitating the flamboyantly camp comedians

  you heard on the radio. It was an era which impertheptibly faded

  into that brief period when you were – ) Out? I was never out,

  Squilly – you know that! (Maybe not as currently understood – but

  you forget: I was with you on theventies Saturday mornings when

  you raced to Mister Martin’s shop to pick up our copy of what

  was then the largest circulation newspaper for homosexuals.) Oh,

  okay – if you insist on dragging it all up, yes, I do remember. (And

  presumably remember, as well, that old Mister Martin was such an

  innocent he thought it was some sort of gazette of good times …)

  Yes-yes – he’d p
eer at me through filthy lenses and say, You really

  like to keep abreast of things, don’t you, young man? (A marvellously

  inappropriate turn of phrase, given the only breasts you’d

  seen at this time were Mister — ) Don’t go there, Squilly – I beg of

  you: it’s too early in the day. I need a stiffener before I can peer into

  that dark chamber … Although in point of fact, having slid down

  Heath Street on his Italian loafers, the Butcher is peering into the

  dark chamber of the tube station, where he can see a little Sallyesque

  girl with a tangle of blonde curls, who’s clutching a helium-filled

  balloon in one hand – a balloon which bears on its silvery

  surface Ronald McDonald’s disturbing features. The Butcher tries

  smiling – but it isn’t the little girl who responds, but the balloon!

  which is ventriloquised by … Squilly! (It was an innocently ignorant

  era, Butch – and you were only fifteen, so you can’t be too hard on

  yourself. Don’t you remember – because I do. We’d troll along to all

  sorts of cranky gatherings – in community halls or rooms at the

  back of pubs. Meetings called to pwotest the murder of Blair Peach,

  and the brutal tactics of the EssPeeGee.) Your point being? (My

  point being that, in amongst all the other fringe nutters who’d

  laid out flyers and leaflets on the trestle tables, there’d often be a

  couple of well-spoken and neatly dwessed men from the Paedophile

  Information Exchange …) Oh, Ronald, the Butcher mutters as the

  lift doors open, and he follows Squilly bob-bob-bobbing along

  the curving tunnel … must you? (… who’d hand out leaflets of

  their own, which, perfectly politically correctly, in the lefty lingo of

  the day, set out their arguments for the right of all parties concerned

  to pwactise what I believe they called … man–boy love.) The

  Butcher stands at the very edge of the platform, watching a mouse

  undertake its daily commute … from condenser to crumpled crisp

  packet. Ronald McDonald has been replaced by a beautiful young

  masked man, naked to the waist, who silently and handlessly

  beckons to him, mouthing, No introduction necessary … The

  English psycho stands, feeling the great weight of the past on his

  shoulders – soon he and his lover will be together, but he’s not sure

  I can bear it much longer — There’s a grunt, a swoosh, a crack and a