by Will Self
cry over that sentimental tosh … Whereupon his eldest son,
who’d visited James Pringle House for another aitcheyevee test only
the previous week (There’s a little bit of the sociopath in all really
effective intelligence officers, isn’t there, Butchie …), bit down on
his own meaty treat: Why compound his stupid, bigoted father’s
woes? Why add to the drip-drip-drip of Maeve De’Ath’s contempt
and derision – an acid rain ever falling on that sad scraggy saggy
unshaven red face? Now the Butcher sees them once more in the
hall at Colindale Avenue, this time their roles reversed: it’s Kins
who stands – and the Butcher who kneels, suppliant. While from
the ceiling, the architrave, the tiny Artex pricks stippling the walls,
the drops drip and flow and course … For the rain it raineth every
day, When that I was and a little tiny boy … And now Kins had been
laid to rest for all eternity in his own narrow closet, courtesy of
J J Burgess and Sons, independent funeral directors since eighteen
thirty-nine – see them, carrion in cutaways, hauling corpses
through the mud at Balaclava, Mafeking, Amritsar … Crossmaglen.
At Leicester Square, the Butcher … comes to man’s estate. (We’re
reborn! Squilly cries. Rising from the waves! Neptune’s Naiads blow
a fanfare on their conches!), but the Butcher’s in no mood for
such locker-room banter: Shut it, Squills … (Oh, I see), but the
malevolent sprite keeps on as the Butcher heads down the Charing
Cross Road (It’s like that, is it – you’re keen enough on me when
you’re lonely), weaving between the Sunday-afternoon strollers
(D’you remember our first few weeks in London?). Of course the
Butcher does – but he’d rather not dwell on the long nights he’d
spent nursing a pint of lager in the far corner of the Pull-and-Dump,
watching some Pritt Stick-and-tinsel performer shake his posing
pouch in the punters’ bored faces. Sitting and watching and longing
and fantasising about what he might get up to with lither, more
limber and younger men, if only he had the balls (You were a
sweet boy, really, what with your crushes on Björn Borg and Ilie
Nästase – mixed threesomes rolling round on Court Number One).
He’d sit out the evening, ‘til some sozzled tax inspector or crapulent
compliance officer took him back on a night bus, to Pinner, or
Poplar … or Palmers Green, where in his bedsitting room they’d
bicker over who should be allowed to put what, where and for how
long. When the letter finally came, and the young Butcher arrived
at Carlton House Terrace for his initial interview, he practised his
voyeurism on the reproduction of The Blue Boy hanging in the
corner of the room, until the captious personnel officer returned and
asked him needling questions about the OhEssAy, which lay on
the glass-topped table in its plastic-laminated folder: Had Mister
De’Ath thoroughly read its contents? Did he understand the gravity
of a treasonable offence, and the severity of the penalties mandated?
The Butcher had displayed FORTITUDE then – thinks it now,
because he’s standing outside the National Portrait Gallery, looking
at Edith Cavell’s Carrara figure, crucified on … a mound of
shit. Fortitude, the Butcher thinks, is what you must have if your
career path necessitates running around annaround the ragged rock:
FORTITUDE and the devotion needed if you’re to SACRIFICE
yourself for HUMANITY, at dawn in some muddy and foreign
field. The hint of stringy-vesting under the personnel officer’s white,
mixed-nylon-and-cotton shirt had set the Butcher’s incisors …
on edge. Half an hour had been twenty-eight minutes more than
he’d required to memorise the thirty pages of the Act – nevertheless,
Bryce felt it incumbent on him to summarise: EmmEyeSix, as
you probably know already, is the YouKay’s overseas intelligence-gathering
organisation, administered by the EffSeeOh … This
little briefing – and all subsequent ones – had a nudge-nudge,
wink-wink air about them: the smutty talk of naughty boys (Your
wife, does she go?). Or were they all aspiring pederasts, these secret
operatives: Do you think you might like to do something a little more
interesting… ? To which there’d only ever been one possible answer,
the Butcher having long since known that gathering intelligence
from secret human sources … was what I was put on this earth to
do. He glances up at the admiral on his recently cleaned big stone
cock, and angles his own bowsprit towards Admiralty Arch: Yes,
gathering intelligence – because there’re so many sad scraggy saggy
unshaven red-faced sheeple in this green and pleasant land – sheeple
with no intelligence of their own to baa of. Sheeple who, above all,
need wise – if unacknowledged – rulers to watch over them, so they
may … safely graze. True, shepherding can be a brutal business –
sheeple scream when they’re hauled, kicking, to be dipped in the
chemical waters … of Lethe. But it’s better for everyone if they
forget – better still if they never knew to begin with … How many
times have they met up like this to make love and play house in the
seven years since Manchester – scores, certainly. (Getting on for a
hundred, I’d say …) Sometimes the Butcher heads north, books a
hotel or motel room – sweeps it, checks for watchers, and their arvee
is as professional as possible: arrivals and departures meticulously
synchronised. Mostly, however, things are a great deal more
amateurish: Never shit where you eat is a maxim the Butcher often
retails to his assets – the greedy little men and women who constitute
his stock-in-trade. They seldom listen, though – they’ll spill
their guts, then take their loose-lipped mistress to an ambassadorial
reception. Or they’ll receive details of a numbered account in their
name and, instead of keeping well away, head straight for Berne
or Basle and go on a colossal bender. As for the Butcher … well,
the rule doesn’t apply. Or, rather, since shit is what he in fact does
eat there’s no way of avoiding the stuff. The poor, prosaic sheeple
believe the Firm operates in a physically ulterior realm – secret
tunnels and underground command centres, where second-string
British character actors demonstrate the latest gadgets. Such places
do exist, but, like so much of state’s unconscious – a chthonic innerspace
where they do indeed plot sex and death – they’re for the
most part … mothballed. Besides, an abandoned Cold War bunker
is no place to entertain a hard-working soldier. The Firm keeps a
number of properties scattered around Westminster and Pimlico,
ranging from entire terraced houses – tricked out in what the Alice
Band in General Services believe at any given time to be the dernier
cri – to cramped council flats on the estates along Lupus Street,
and fusty bedsitting rooms up five flights in Victoria. Such is the
nature of the Butcher’s work – the fixer, the creeper, the sweeper,
th
e cleaner, the poop-a-fucking-scooper – he has unfettered access to
these hidey-holes. Everyone understands he may need somewhere
to park a second secretary or a member of a trade delegation for a
few days while he checks their bona fides. The lovers have developed
their own rituals over the years: the Butcher always arrives first,
bringing a few creature comforts with him – perhaps a length
of Indian material to throw over a worn pleather couch, if their
accommodation is particularly spartan. (Or a thented candle – you
haven’t forgotten the thented candle, have you?) Definitely a box
of Highland shortbread – which Gawain, endearingly, likes to
dunk in his tea. The important thing, the Butcher feels, is to create
a temporary oasis for them both – a place of succour, with sweet
water and sweeter dates, which lies outside of time. (Stop all the
clocks, eh …) – The Butcher stands in Horseguards, by the Guards’
Memorial, where he looks up at the handsome stone faces intended
to represent … trauma and degeneration. Those first few years in
London, the leather queens creaking in and out of the Eagle
Bar – the denim ones thronging the Coleherne: all seemed larger-than-life-sized
to the young Butcher, their faces stony, their poses
rigid. (And of course, there was the virus to consider.) Their brutal
argot, with its arse-play and bottoming, was repellent to the sensitive
lad (You’re not forgetting the impact of aitcheyevee …), but
gradually he got to grips with it. (Hanging on to the cistern while
some rhinestone cowboy gave you a booty-bump – what about
aids, you fucking moron?) What about it, you evil little prick? The
Butcher has spoken aloud, and the Japanese tourist aiming his
lens at the Memorial looks curiously at this expensively dressed
and foul-mouthed man. Unfazed, the Butcher addresses the man
directly: Don’t die of ignorance would’ve been a good inscription
for this tomb … Then he strolls on, past the pelicans on their
ragged rocks. (Doing a little cottaging of their own, aren’t they,
Butchie?) I was always careful, though, Squills, wasn’t I? (Oh,
you were indeed, Butch – you brought a rather, um … straight
sensibility to the business of being queer.) Yeah – there was only the
one booty-bump, after all. (Because then there was a long night of
whisky drinking and listening to Mozart’s bloody Requiem before
you went to James Pringle House to do the test. After that
you memorised the leaflets and bought Mates bloody wholesale!)
Three – three condoms I’d wear. You’ve no cause for complaint,
Squilly. (No, indeed, Butch – besides, life without a little risk is a
dish unthalted.) Strolling on towards Petty France, the Butcher
ponders the perennial thrill to be gained from a man in uniform,
and recalls hearing that first, slyly interrogative cough from the stall
beside him, in the public toi– lavatories opposite Saint James’s
Palace, on the morning after his second interview. Sitting in the
waiting room, flipping through the same back number of the
Economist he’d flicked through on his first visit, the Butcher idly
memorised the dope on Black, the Ra supergrass, and committed to
memory the names of all the medallists at the Helsinki games. The
colourless character who’d conducted Butcher’s first interview had
asked him to describe someone he knew. A “colourful character”
was how he’d put it, and the jejune Butcher had toyed with describing
him to himself – albeit with embellishments. The colourless
man may’ve introduced himself as Bryce – but he quickly admitted
this was a cover name for whichever officer was fulfilling the role.
Then, as he was actually painting Mister Deane’s portrait for the
man – the taut pot belly and prominent yellow teeth, the drip-dry
hair and canvas complexion – the Butcher experienced an odd sensation
… I relaxed! Relaxed for the first time since the Sunbury
Incident. Relaxed because at last … I’d come home. Home to somewhere
where it was completely acceptable to be … an imposter.
Home to his grandfather’s house, with its many papery mansions –
Whitehall, that wasps’ nest, knocked down from the ancient rafters
by Black Rod. Whitehall, with its hexagonal corridors along which
rustle the bug-eyed servants of the state, their antennae waving
diffidently as they utter qualifications – pozzibly, prozzpectively –
but never say anything definitive. At least not to their political
masters: the larvae, who are all white, all male and who lie on their
red rugs, in front of their coal-effect fires, feeding on the contents of
the red despatch boxes open beside them, growing sleeker and fatter
with all the nutritious secrecy. And there, at the Butcher’s second
interview, had been the buggiest of the state’s servants: five of
them, ranged behind a long brilliantly polished table surmounted
by a savage floral arrangement – snapdragons biting the heads off
pansies. Looking from one face to the next, noting donnish bifocals
and foppish bow ties, for a moment the Butcher had imagined
he was back at his viva in the Examination Schools, about to be
asked nothing more important than the nature of Montesquieu’s
influence on the development of French liberalism. But then it
began: What did he know about Chad? Did he have any idea what
AitchEmmGee should do? Could do? And what about Ağca – did
Mister De’Ath have any … thoughts? Did he lend any credence
to the assassin’s KayGeeBee credo? And Jaruzelski’s threat to crack
down on anti-socialist activities? A bluff, or not? The Butcher,
licking his chops, had chewed it all over, then began speaking
slowly but fluently, his answers appearing before him as text does on
an autocue: superimposed over the expectant faces of the panel,
hovering sub rosa – then disappearing, up into the extravagant
mouldings. His waspish interviewers had been impressed – yet still
they flew at him, their barbed remarks now stinging at his … convictions.
Patriotism! The Butcher stands on a bridge over stagnant
and shitty waters, looking towards the Palace. Spooning in Room
Thirty-Seven of the Knatchbull Services Travelodge, his hand
gently buffing Gawain’s erect nipple, the Butcher had listened while
his cavalryman told him that when the loyal toast was proposed
in the mess, some of his more moronic comrades (More? Is such
a comparator really applicable here?) would – should the steward
not’ve removed them in time – pass their port glasses over their
water ones. Of course, Gawain had hastened to add, they aren’t
really pledging allegiance to the Stuart Pretender! (Who’s probably
a Belgian dentist with a mail order certificate in his filing cabinet.)
The Butcher had a certain sympathy for the toasting Rams, for his
own loyalty also was proved by his impulse to betray – moreover,
following Messrs Childers-through-Le-Carré, surely a conviction
that remained forever unchallenged can scarcely be worth the name?
So he�
�d admitted everything to the wasps (Because you knew they’d
find out anyway): his youthful flirtations with unilateralism, antiracism
and of course … socialism. I was a fervent believer – he’d
shaken his pensive head – in the perfectability of Man. (Any man
you could lay your hot little hands on!) Why? Well, the wasps would
find that out soon enough, too – when their vetting officer went
to interview Doctor Peter De’Ath, Senior Lecturer in Politics at
the University of Hertfordshire. After the spooks were done with
him, the Butcher reeled into the bright noontide, and stood at
the top of King George’s steps, looking out over the greenery of
Saint James’s Park towards New Scotland Yard: I’ve arrived! he’d
trumpeted to the traffic rumbling up the Mall – an arrival further
celebrated by the loosening of his bowels. In the cubicle he’d spotted
a glory hole neatly concealed behind the toilet roll. Unlimbering
the holder and removing a wad of toilet paper, he’d placed his eye to
the gunsight, and been rewarded with this vision: an upstanding
member – red-headed, its shaft licked by gingerish and hairy …
flames. Of course, the Butcher had already fantasised for over a
decade about what it would be like to get inside a Household
Cavalry guardsman’s snowy-white pantaloons. (Ever since, in point
of fact, you lay with me beneath you, thtiff as the proverbial,
and watched the Trooping of the Colour on television.) And now
there they were: their front flaps unbuttoned, their soft seams
framing the … conflagration. The soldier’s silver cuirass was propped
up in the corner of the stall, and, as the Butcher had substituted
his eager mouth for his hungry eye, he retained its fish-eyed
after-image: white columnar thighs – tensed white buttocks. And as
the juicy bone had muffled my drum … the Butcher heard once
more the fugal wheezing of the oldest and most academical of the
panel members – a smallish man in a corduroy suit, who throughout
the interview held one lit cigarette after another in front of his
burnt-out face, but never took a drag: You’ve given a pretty thorough
account of yourself, Mister De’Ath, and I think I can speak for
my colleagues – and the Service more widely – when I say we’re
perfectly understanding when it comes to youthful ideological
