by Will Self
indiscretions. Nor are we inclined to paint a candidate up with his
father’s pinkness. However, one sort of carry-on we’ve absolutely no
tolerance for whatsoever is … the old spook’s eyes watered a false
lustre … drug-taking. So, if you’ve so much as taken a pull on a
reefer – let alone anything harder – we need to know right away.
The Butcher had nearly laughed out loud with relief – given the
bigoted temper of the times, he’d been expecting homosexuality to
fall from those prissy old lips. Lips that surely (Surely!) longed to
kiss the roast beef of old England? Meat, meat and more meat –
could it be a surprise to anyone that someone called the Butcher is
an enthusiastic carnivore? So enthusiastic that when he bends to the
meal in hand, rather than tear at it toothily, chew it up and gulp it
down, he’ll hold the hot gobbet in his mouth, tongue seeking the
stippling of papillae between glans and corpus spongiosum. This,
he’ll think as he licks and sucks, is true patriotism – I’m eating the
nation’s manhood, and, just as cannibals imagine they can ingest
their vanquished enemies’ bravery, so I believe these pricks will
inoculate me against any moral contagion, for mine is a higher
purpose! But at that premature feast the loyal toast could not be
made – after ten or fifteen of the guardsman’s vigorous thrusts,
the meat-counter trainee had been spluttering … choking. He substituted
willing hand for wanting mouth – but the guardsman
wasn’t having it, abruptly withdrew, then represented the dish in
the serving hatch. Ever a quick study, the Butcher understood this
gesture well enough – but before he’d time to comply there was
door-rattling and breathy childish tones … Daddy, I gotta go. The
guardsman had again pulled out abruptly, clinking and clanking
followed as he buckled up, then the bolt was withdrawn, to be
succeeded by the chink-ch’-chink of retreating spurs. The Butcher
thought he’d earned them. (You think love will last forever – but
you’re wrong.) I’m not, the Butcher says aloud, as he strides across
the blank intersection between Carteret Street and Broadway. (But
he’s far away so much of the time.) What of it? We’ll be together
eventually – it may take years. (And during those years you may
well be disgraced – someone could get hold of your large data-set,
the audio-visual take, the emails … the background material.
You have it all, don’t you?) I have it all, Squilly – every fucking
cardboard coaster his lager’s dripped on to, every hurried mobile
phone call he’s made to me from a lay-by. And yes: I’ve recorded his
gentle snoring as he softly sleeps as well. (You’re a blithering idiot,
Butch – where is it? Where is all this SeeEx?) You know where it is,
Squilly – you were with me when I cached it to begin with, you’ve
been with me when I’ve moved it to safer locations. (Yes … yes
I’ve been with you, Butch – with you all the time. Frankly, you’d
be better advised to focus your affections on me, your constant
companion, than the headless horseman.) Headless? (Oh, c’mon,
Butch – can’t you even admit it in the privacy of your own head!
He’s thick, your love object – as thick and as docile as a – ) The
Butcher, resplendent in dinner jacket and snow-white shirtfront, is a
frequent guest speaker at the dinner which marks the completion of
the new EyeBees’ course. Standing, mellowed by candlelight, at the
head of the long table, in the lime-washed former magazine of the
Fort which now serves as a dining room, he would recount tales of
operations he’d either initiated or conducted – and in many cases
done both. His grasp of the details was fiendish – and his pacing
and sense of drama highly evolved. The Butcher’s rhetorical skills
were just as prized as anything he did operationally, while he knew
that, despite weeks of being introduced to the utterly routine nature
of their future employ, the new entrants’ heads would still be full of
derring-do and techno-wizardry. (Now, pay attention, Butch …)
Quite so. But then was not the time to disabuse them. (You wouldn’t
want to kill the magic light – leave the chamber empty of – )
Delighted to’ve made your acquaintance, he’d say, shaking hands
all round, subtly shooting his cuffs. He never stayed the night at
the Fort – he wanted to give them the elegant midnight fantasy,
not the puffy-eyed morning reality. Powering up the EmmThree
in his two-eighty EssEe cabriolet, the misty sprites rising up from
the roadway consumed againannagain by its sharkish radiator grille,
the Butcher would imagine the new officers gossiping about him
as they filled in their chits, posted them in the honesty box, then
glugged more and tawnier port: He was one of the team that
handled Gordievsky, wasn’t he? And mixed up in that Gaddafi
business – ‘though I don’t think he likes talking about that one …
I heard he was also involved in Stakeknife … Don’t be ridiculous –
that’s Thames House’s beat – them and the EffArrYou. The Province
is outside our remit – anyway, I expect he only uses one of those
when it’s spelt properly – he is the Butcher after all … Oh, yes –
he was, is and always will be “the Butcher” to generation upon
generation of the huddled, clerkish figures, bent against the wind
and grit, who flock over Vauxhall Bridge each morning … ready
to undo so many deaths – or come trotting from under the bricky
mess of the viaduct, wearing their chain-store suits and ready for
another long day of getting their political masters … off the hook.
No one at the Firm can remember who dubbed him, but no one has
ever doubted the nickname’s appositeness … least of all me. Yes …
he thinks now, looking up at the premises the Firm once occupied
above the tube station … there are only coincidences – whether
sentient individuals or programmed projectiles, their apparent
arrival at the same place, at the same time, depends on where you’re
standing – and what angle you’re looking from. And if neither
people nor objects coincide? (It’d be impossible to move the action
on at all …) Contrary to what the trainees might think, the Butcher
had been in Belfast in June of ninety-four. He can recall the round-cornered
windows at the Europa Hotel – many bearing the test-card
patterns of blast tape. Sitting at a wooden pew in a stained-glass
stall in the pub opposite, he’d drunk late with Prod plods of various
sorts – the atmosphere had been rancorous, and the Butcher, sensing
the deep and vicious streak of homophobia running through his
hosts, held his (Delicious, mobile, artistic … ) tongue. In the
morning it’d been fitted to his mouth – complete with an underlay
of nausea. Why’d he been there at all? Liaison was the bullshit term
used for a lot of the snooping around he’d done on Colin’s behalf at
the time – yes, chiefs might come, and chiefs would most certainly
go, but the Firm c
ouldn’t do without its high-class, family …
Butcher. He’d gone out to Aldergrove with them, then, at the very
last second – when the Chinook’s rotors were already whipping the
drizzle – he’d ducked beneath them, shouting to his colleagues, I’ve
left something at Facilities – I’ll get the Stranraer ferry and catch up
with you this evening … Oh mist rolling in from the sea, my desire.
The slipstream from this very near miss remained whistling eerily
about him for months – and the Butcher can still feel it now … past
painted deserts the sunset’s on fire. If he’d’ve asked his father about it,
what might Kins have said? That his son owed his deliverance to his
Saviour? The Butcher looks up at the carved stone figure which sits,
legs parted, on the cornicing halfway up the office block’s façade.
This petrified Saviour, perhaps – who has a naked slip-of-a-boy
twisted into his arms. The Butcher regards the Epstein sculpture –
he’s passed it thousands of times but never stopped to stare. (It’s
not Jesus, Butch.) No, Squilly, I see that. (The broad, saggy,
scraggy, sand-stony face …) It’s Kins – I get that. (Kins – and you,
Butchie – you, hugging his neck even as you thrust me out into the
world. You’re going to betray me, Butch – you’re going to betray me.)
He turns away from the building, thinking of all the buccaneering
types who used to hang out here … the camel-drivers, who’d
believed their own Lawrentian experiences fomenting tribal unrest,
were the only qualification anyone needed to be of thecret thervice …
Whatever’s happened to Squilly’s lisp? I’d swear he used to lisp more
(Lithp). The ickle bunny hops into the cage – its filmic white scut
disappears down the long green fairway … hippety-hoppety. I’m
late … I’m late … Checking his Longines again, the Butcher’s
isoceles nose is congruent with the rotating triangular sign reading
NEW SCOTLAND YARD. He considers the child’s view of Westminster
maintained by the generality of sheeple – the papery clichés
of … Our Island Story. Just after New Year, Sally squeaking on his
arm, the Butcher had taken a turn on the Millennium Wheel.
Mounting one of the softly rocking pods, they’d been slowly
winched skywards. It’d been a bright winter afternoon – and this,
together with their odd parabolic ascent, gave him the powerful
illusion it wasn’t they who were moving, but rather London’s principal
buildings, which were popping up from their bricky bindings
into full and cardboard relief: the candy-striped campanile of
Westminster Cathedral unfolded – Millbank Tower sprang forth.
Staring out over the Thames’s deceptive bend, the Butcher had seen
an off-yellow amphibious vehicle chugging through the choppy
waters … vomit returning to its dog. He knew where it was headed:
the little notch of beach beside VeeBeeArr, where, under the blind
eyes of the statues ranged along the south side of Vauxhall Bridge –
personifications of Science, Fine Arts and … (A testimony to your
pater, I’d say) … Local Government – the Frog Tours amphibian
would describe its own odd parabola before croaking up the
muddy foreshore and on to the concrete ramp. Many are the times
the Butcher has sat in his office on Level Five, Blue Zone of …
the Aztec Empire and watched through the obsidian mirror of his
lead-glass window as the doughty little craft … does its bit: moving
cheerfully from one element to the other – and on each and every
occasion he’d resisted the analogy: I’m not a dual-purpose piece
of kit, up-armoured for military as well as civilian use. Yet, left
behind on the river’s surly surface, were always these: the twin
circles described by successive Frog Tours amphibians, slowly interlinking
to form a foamy … lemniscate. We. Will. Be Together. For.
An. Eternity. – The Butcher is walking along the cobbled defile of
Strutton Ground, past shuttered sandwich shops and heel bars,
aiming for the old cast-iron-and-clapboard pissoir on Horseferry
Road, where he unzips and unconstricts, aaaah … ! I’ve never had a
friend, he moans at the splashback. A gay best friend with whom
I could discuss my … relationship. (You’ve got me, Butch – I’m
right to hand.) Someone who could give me advice, and a shoulder
… to cry on. (There’s me: now shake me dry, old chap.) Passing by
the Regency Café, the Butcher rubs his sore tongue … too many
fags last night gottagivvitup over his ground-down teeth: not long
now – not long before it will be describing its own eternity rings:
beginning at the clitoral glans, swirling around that noble head,
licking down the veined shaft, then circling back again annagain,
until Lieutenant-Colonel Gawain Thomas, TwoEyeSee of the Yorkshire
Hussars, clenches his insides, forcing the very real fingers his
ghostly lover has thrust deep into his rectum to close … agonisingly
… ecstatically … on his prostate. Not long now – and not far either:
hurrying along Page Street, the Butcher pictures his sharp, black
profile static against the flats’ chequerboard façades, and agonises
he’ll be … stuck here forever – stale-mated on this spot-spot-spot. And
when had these pesky ellipses become so ubiquitous? They bedizen
the windows of VeeBeeArr, and, turning into Marsham Street, he
sees them spattered across the windows of Shepherd’s Wine Bar …
parenthesising the plate glass. It doesn’t matter how vigorously he
strides, he’ll be caught … forever … in this … hiatus … squitting
on my square – it’s ‘Stan all over again — the tumbled-down mountains
of tinkling scree in ancient shades of dun and ochre, the
pair of raptors wheeling high overhead in the crystal sky-dome
above the Hindu Kush: courting falcons, oblivious to the world
below, whose widening gyres almost … but never quite touched.
At Colin’s behest the Butcher had accompanied the team delivering
the Blowpipe missiles. He’d been in Slammers anyway – tidying up
a pile of doggie-doos done by the Second Secretary, an incontinent
idiot who’d been honey-trapped by the Soviets. The Butcher shivers,
remembering the long drag in: frigid nights bumping over rutted
tracks, headlights off, the EssEff drives bug-eyed in night-vision
goggles. The Butcher recalls trying a pair on for the first time,
and entering an aqueous realm, across which the heat-signatures
of warm-blooded creatures were anonymously scrawled – recalls
this, as well as thinking at the time: This is what it must be like for
the normals – condemned to try to understand the world on the
basis of such meagre data. Their final day-stop was at a hilltop eyrie
of a compound … absurdly lyrical – all around the white-capped
mountains swept up … strophe, and tumbled down … antistrophe.
The Mujahideen who’d been sent by Hekmatyr to meet the British
convoy arrived at dawn – and came upon the Butcher squatting
and squitting over the cliff-edge, his diarrhoea raining down on
&n
bsp; the scrubby bushes far below, where sheep … precipitately grazed.
Of course, the Brits already knew the missiles were … shit: the
Butcher had maintained his sang-froid as he wiped himself with
the foliage to hand, and adjusted his nondescript salwar kameez
(Sooo drab!) before joining the others, who were preparing the
demonstration, trudging about on the tinkly scree. Barry from
Queue-branch had brought a portable video-camera, and once
the ArrEssEmm commanding the EssEff detachment had fired
a parachute flare in lieu of a target … he started rolling. One of
Massoud’s men – who’d come from the Panjshir especially for this –
fired the missile, and a second began fiddling with its handheld
controller … sweat-worm – snail-trail, complications of shirt-tail …
The Butcher looks up above the wine bar, and sees the missile
incandescing between the steeply pitched roofs of Arse and Crack
buildings – he looks across the road and spots the Mujahideen with
the controller in front of the dry cleaner’s on the corner of Page
Street. The Butcher observes his frantic hands, then follows his
desperate gaze to where, in the near distance, the Blowpipe’s slim
white nacelle flicks, twists, corkscrews crazily, before disappearing
in the direction of Smith Square … where it’ll probably wipe out
a few of Nick’s researchers. The Butcher pinches his nose hard: the
insight he’d been given at the Baldwins’ hilltop eyrie, watching
little Arthur playing his computer game, was nothing new: it’d
been the same on that remote hillside – Massoud’s men may have
been disillusioned with the Brits’ kit, but they’d remained confirmed
in their user illusion: that they were moving things about
in the real world, when, as the Firm’s team saw for themselves
when they got back to the station in Slammers and played back the
wonky veeaitchess tape, the reality was … the world turns around
them. (And still does: you’ve seen the latest SeeEx out of Kuala
Lumpur – a summit meeting of the heirs to the pious ancestors.)
You know I have! the Butcher snaps, pinching his nose still harder.
(Trying to get rid of me, are you? Fat chance.) Cornering into
Herrick Street, he extracts a heavy bunch of keys from his trouser
pocket, and, as he enters the courtyard of the block where the Firm’s
