Phone

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