by Will Self
safe flat is located, readies the fob to touch against the panel. The
seeseeteevee camera angled towards the door has been rendered
inoperable … on a regular basis. Upstairs he gives the five small
rooms a thorough going-over: a bug could well’ve been installed but
not removed – it happens, and the last thing the Butcher wants is
for the sounds or sights of their lovemaking to end up, along with
all the other secret affairs the Firm clandestinely records, panting
and groaning in the huge bank of computers beneath VeeBeeArr.
Pausing in the windowless bathroom, a damp sponge tufted with
old hairs held before his fastidious face, he thinks of Gawain’s neck.
When he nuzzles there, bestowing tiny kisses, the Butcher smells
sweat and shaving foam, mingled with some duff aftershave the
silly sap imagines to be … manly. Does he still fuck Fiona, much?
Put it inside dumb little wifey? (Double standards redoubled, eh,
Butch?) In the early days of their affair the Butcher would torment
himself – not just with images but entire little playlets. FIONA:
Gawain, darling, the kids are all tucked up, and I’ve bought some
rather exciting new nightwear – I’ll be ready in the boudoir in
five minutes, and you can tear it off with your teeth! Sitting on the
drum-tight cover of the single bed, the Butcher hears blood beat in
his ears – beyond this resonates the soundlessness of an inner-city
Sunday afternoon. Waiting for a lover, an agent, an asset – a
phone call. They’re all, he thinks, fundamentally the same: situations
in which you’re compelled to be embodied, to consider the
world through the media of sweat, hair and keratin, to feel the slack
strings of your temporarily unused and fleshly … marionette. He
tries to concentrate on what a psychotherapist, proffering the box
of tissues, would doubtless call his “emotional reality”: for seven
years now he and Gawain have been secret lovers … I tell him I love
him – sometimes I mean it. Other times … (It’s just words, isn’t it,
Butchie?) I feel jealous – and I know he does. He wants me to shave off
the beards – says there’s no call for both of us to hide in the hippety-hoppety
shadows … But then poor old Greeny would be really jealous … He
suspects, of course (in his purblind, innocent way) the mountainous
peaks of cock I’ve scaled – the canyons of arse I’ve abseiled down into.
But were I to make a public avowal – well, it’d be like the Firm: I’d
only be doing it because the war was over … and the next one’s not yet
begun … Staring out at the plane streets frothing along John Islip
Street, the Butcher tries to remain embodied in this questioning
moment, where the translucent circle spins … buffering – but he
can’t manage it. Hakuna matata, old man, he mutters, seeing the
Methodists’ rusting corrugated-iron porch, and the entire pride of
De’Aths gathered before it on the mossy asphalt. It’d been Maeve’s
choice – she knew the Minister through her volunteering with the
Sams. The Butcher hadn’t demurred – what could he have said?
(Dump the homophobic old cunt in a landfill – it’s no more than
he deserves.) The Baker came from outside Bath, together with his
hippy-dippy wife and their four children, who, although their
tow-heads were reeking of tea tree oil, had still … scratched. Sniffed
as well – because it’d been January, and the white skies over Hemel
were raw with rain clouds, while the north wind grazed the skin
between the Butcher’s viciously sharp collar and his savagely shaved
chin. He remembers he’d turned to the Candlestick-maker and
said, perfectly calmly, Where the fuck do you get off showing
up looking like that … And the Candlestick-maker, grubbing up
some moss with the fraying toe of his espadrille, had said nothing
in reply – only given his big brother … a zigzagging stoner’s grin –
where have they been? As if the funeral weren’t bad enough, the sight
of his brothers’ faces – uglified and inadequately moisturised versions
of his own – never ceased to fill the Butcher’s black heart with
rage … and pain. He remembered then – recalls now – how they’d
come back together from school on the Greenline bus, and he’d led
them to the very back, where he and Squilly would entertain them
by vigorously stimulating each other – the aim being to achieve
tumescence and climax … in between stops. As the undertaker’s
assistants hobbled from the corrugated-iron porch, Maeve De’Ath
had staggered in sentimentality – and might’ve fallen, were it not for
the supportive son. Through her black leather glove, and his successive
layers of cashmere, worsted and Egyptian cotton, the Butcher
felt the impenitent grasp of her stubby fingers – in his darkest
and most maddeningly addled moments, back in the days before
Gawain, and before his Ritalin ‘script, it had been those fingers he’d
hallucinated, poking out from the off-white walls of his aseptic
dwelling and … trying to drag me back. Two visits per year, he’d
decided there and then – the others could deal with all the rest.
Maeve wouldn’t mind – she liked nothing better than to be grouted
to her grandchildren by copious amounts of snot, whereas her own
firstborn had remained an enigma to her … she’s never listened to
me. Maeve De’Ath, a squat pear of a woman who for three nights of
the week squeezed into the telephone the juice of her compassion.
This remained the Butcher’s abiding image of his mother: her sitting
in the dim hall at Colindale Avenue, her face a pale splodge – her
hand another, which held the receiver clamped against her skull.
So hard and for so long, that the teenaged Butcher, skulking by,
entertained the notion that bone and Bakelite had knitted, so creating
a strange cyborg … half-woman, half-phone, which’d remain
eternally receptive to the flow of electrical impulses the Samaritans’
switchboard piped … into our home. And then, when Maeve wasn’t
sopping up the suicidal thoughts of complete strangers, she’d be off
on her rounds, from table-top to car boot, picking up a whatsit here
– letting fall a thingummyjig over there. The balance of china dogs
and old engraved pub mirrors she’d afflict on her menfolk for a few
days, before they, too, joined the great lagoon of superannuated
bric-à-brac, that, as far as the Butcher could see, surrounded Saint
Albans, as the boundless sea surrounds land on medieval maps …
here bee junke. This was her constant complaint: I don’t know why you
have to be so … critical, for any sort of analysis was quite alien to her
nature, Your mother has a synthetic mode of thought, Kins would say –
emphasising the syn – she delights in putting things together, whereas
you’re very much the analytic type … and the Butcher, sitting there
pulling things apart with his fine mind, was strongly inclined to
reply: What about your Berko bit-on-the-side, is she a synthesist
as well? Is that why she delights in your putt
ing your scraggy saggy
old cock together with her saggy scraggy old cunt? – The Butcher
had given the euology – if it could be so dignified. He spoke as
one unaccustomed to do so publicly – asking for his listeners to forgive
his inarticulacy, while seeking to imply this alone guaranteed
his … veracity. Kins … had been … a good man … and … a
good father. A brilliant scholar and … a much loved pedagogue,
whose dedication to the knotty problems of local government …
finance had contributed – in ways his eldest son was unable to
specify – to … public debate. He had been a loving and … attentive
husband – a gentleman in the true sense, whose piety and
commitment to pacifism had been strong – (though he never
actually got off his arse and did anything!). Looking around the
dank tin shed at the mourners, who, although they sat coldly fused
to the plywood pews, were mostly on the way out, the Butcher
had recommitted to the pursuit of a swift and early demise … Then
fancies fly a-way, I’ll fear not what men say … I’ll la-bour night and
day … To be a … corpse! What could possibly be worse than being
sprung from your mortal coil as Kins had: winnowed out by cancer,
his saggy scraggy old body swollen and yellow from all the bile
his diseased liver could no longer process – yet still fluting, It’s too
soon, Johnny, it’s toooo sooon! It’ll never be soon enough for me, the
Butcher had sworn as he tapped his file cards on the lectern. Never
soon enough to avoid the inevitable devaluation of my precious …
assets. And when he’d looked up again, there they’d all been:
Tehrani taxi drivers, Brazilian petrochemical engineers and Russian
hydrologists. He could see Lin Gao at the back, sitting beneath an
old framed sampler Let Me Live in My Father’s House, and be a Friend
to Man. The Chinese EmmEssEss operative had been nabbed
in a bizarre little hidey-hole they’d managed to contrive in the
foundations of the Honkers residency. The Butcher flew in from
London and, against the odds, succeeded in … turning him. (You
turn me right round baby, right round …) He was perfectly willing.
(He was scared shitless.) After I pulled out – I got him out. (And
where is he now, the poor fucker – doing the dishes in a Little
Chef outside fucking Wincanton! No, Butch! This mealy-mouthed
self-exculpation is beneath you.) At the council crematorium, while
the other mourners huddled together in a cloud of breathy commiseration,
he stood apart, his hand thrust deep in his pocket … I am
the lineman for the County. He held his mobile phone so tightly –
he wanted to stop all the clocks … send the signal from mast to
computerised exchange – and from there to the ring of satellites,
ever circling the earth, and the three hundred caesium clocks which
precisely calibrate all the events (Dear boy) that have ever taken
place, or ever will do … world without end. Back at the bungalow
on the outskirts of Hemel, the evidence of his parents’ pathetic
diminuendo had been a mute cacophony: the mourners sipped
tea from dirty cups – the frayed curtains swayed in the mouldy
draughts, the bric-à-brac faded to … tat. Unable to take it any
more, the Butcher had stepped out into the garden, where he’d half
expected to see his father – naked, skipping between the raspberry
canes, crying out to the starlings, It’s too soon! It’s too soon! Which
was ridiculous, since he’d been present when Kins was shut up in
his own closet of seasoned oak, with brass-effect handles and casket
ornamentation – present also, only minutes before, when the poor
old fucker’d been committed to … the flames of his own obsessions,
since the crematorium was indeed a recipient of local government
funding. Sitting on the wonky tree swing, the Candlestick-maker
had bodged up for the Baker’s children, the Butcher looked up to
the sky, where a charter flight en route from Luton to Larnaca was
indeed … moaning overhead. Although the message it scrawled on
cold heavens wasn’t HE is DEAD, but, far more disturbingly, HE
YET LIVES! Yes, still lives – still lives in the faces of the tourists the
Butcher passed by on his walk from Leicester Square – and will still
be living tomorrow morning, in the self-satisfied countenance of
some dumb Humphrey or other, when he wends the deceptive bend
to the Cabinet Office, to progress a batch of Florida warrants. The
Firm’s rules, as ever, play to the Butcher’s advantage: warned never
to acknowledge their colleagues in public, its employees are intimate
behind closed doors, always seductively whispering each other’s
given names. It was the Butcher’s pleasure to blank fellow officers in
the streets, then duck into Chariots Roman Spa and wank a perfect
stranger. If a line were to be drawn from the Hoist – an essandemm
club underneath the railway viaduct – to the Royal Vauxhall
Tavern, and from there to VeeBeeArr, the shape described would be
highly congruent with the Butcher’s own isosceles nose – and, after
fifteen years cruising the inland waterways, he could sniff out
trouble anywhere on this island of the odd. (You’re over-egging it,
Butch – truth to tell, you’ve scarcely strayed these past seven years.)
The Butcher gets out a pack of Marlboro and lights one with his
Dupont. Sucking the smoke down deeply, he contemplates his …
nicotinous patch: in his time he’s witnessed a precipitate decline in
tradecraft amongst spooks and fags alike – the spies are no longer
on the lookout for the opposition’s leg-men, while the gays have
abandoned their own secure comms: their hankies, earrings and
cryptographic bunches of keys. Nowadays, they’ll stand about in
the bus station, trilling at the top of their voices about their formerly
covert liaisons. But not the Butcher – the Butcher isn’t pleased
by these public avowals at all, au contraire, he’s shocked to his core.
What place is there in this bravely Blairing new world for a snobbish,
repressed homosexual spy with a taste in fine wines and
silks? The Butcher has done his time on the drugs-and-thugs
desk – profitably so, since he ran across a gang of Turkish-Cypriots
out of Clapton who’d the brass neck to try transhipping a metric
tonne of heroin via … South-bloody-Mimms. It’d mostly been the
EnnDeeEyeYou’s show – the cream of the copper crop, although
that’s another thing that’s changed: the best and brightest were
plodding away from the force – just as spooks were wafting away
from the secret world. There’s always been some toing and froing
between the Firm and its customers – EyeBees who’ve risen so far
but can go no further, might slide sideways into the EffSeeOh or
the Cabinet Office. Now this trickle of valetudinarians is becoming
a flood. So long as Dick remained Chief the Butcher would be
secure … I am the leg-man for the cunty, but now the jockeying
to succeed him has begun in earnest the Butcher feels it – feels a
; new perturbation in the electro-magnetic waves that pulse through
his up-ended shoebox of a house on Lambeth High Street. The
buzz is intermittent: five minutes on, five minutes off, twenty-four
hours a day. To begin with he’d feared he’d go insane – waking time
after time from troubled naps, in which the scrambled letters from
old disposable code books, four groups of four, again annagain,
descended, row upon row, down the back-lit, orange screens of his
eyelids. Waking to this: the scrambled letters from old disposable
code books, descending, row upon row, down the black slats of
the Venetian blinds he’d had put up in the bedroom, the study, the
kitchen – everywhere, in point of fact. The floors are black rubber
blocks – the walls off-white silk paint. The furniture is minimal
and fabricated from metal and leather. To say the Butcher’s abode is
minimalist would be a gross exaggeration: it’s nothingist, voidist –
vacuumist, even, since he cleans the place fanatically, wiping,
dusting and sucking up every last particle of dust that dares to be
motile. He does all the cleaning himself – not for security reasons
but because … I enjoy it. And enjoys especially those deep, deep
cleans – the ones where – once he’s finished with the steam-cleaner –
he takes an old toothbrush to the grout between the bathroom
tiles. Finishing up, crouching in the exact centre of the main
room at three in the morning, naked save for rubber gloves and
earthed by the rubber floor, he feels it more strongly than ever …
the buzz. Feels it, and sees its graphical expression in the waveform
shadows the Venetian blinds throw across the off-white
walls. The buzz was all around him – and jangled right through his
Ritalin-soused metabolism. The buzz was in his cigarette smoke
and his puckered-up ball-sack – the hot juice dripped in fizzing
globs from the plugs and light fitments. The buzz held and released
him, held him and released him again annagain – a steady series
of electro-mechanical pulses travelling through flesh and bone,
through metal and leather, carrying with them all the multitudinous
bites and blips of the digital realm. And sitting on the tartan
bedspread in the safe flat, the Butcher still feels the buzz, agitating
