by Will Self
each and every one of … my particles. At some unspecified point
in the future, he imagines, this oscillation will reach its terminal
velocity, and then there’ll truly be … the vacuum, the void, the
nothing from which nothing comes. Stubbing out his cigarette, the
Butcher shudders – the stasis horrors are upon him, and he can see
a future in which nothing ever happens ever again … He sees them
walking down the chiller aisle of some suburban shopping-barn,
all their ardour freeze-dried. Hand in hand, the formerly civil
servants are now … civil-fucking-partners. The Butcher scrutinises
the once-martial Ram – who’s become broad-bottomed, careworn
and painfully unsexy – as he reaches out to grab a bag of cauliflower
florets. Then, as they head across the car park, the trolley’s wheels
skipping and skittering, he sees them: his step-children, pressing
their baffled father’s face-masks against the car’s windows: useless
assets, who, just like their Uncle Jonathan, should’ve long since
been … wound down. Stop all the clocks! the Butcher cries aloud:
Stop all of Cumming’s crappy hobby-chronometers – stop this one,
too! He holds aloft the featherweight Philips alarm clock some
Registry Girl has left beside the bed, preparatory to hurling it
against the rose-patterned wall … for nothing now can ever come
to any … good, when there comes a different buzz: the intercom.
Lieutenant-Colonel Gawain Thomas has arrived, comme d’habitude,
exactly on time. Usually the Butcher would already be standing
stiffly to attention (Me, too). But the fustiness he’d brought back
with him from Kins’s funeral has been furring the Fabergé circuitry
of the Butcher’s diamond-sharp mind – so he sits a while longer,
thinking and smoking. Thinks of how, in the course of their affair,
while Gawain has grown rather plumper – he’s gone in the opposite
direction, becoming still leaner and more angular. As a young
man the Butcher took a perverse delight in cutting himself shaving
– the soap-slicked slip-nick! the shocked hiatus, the sudden
crimson bloom … and its paining reconfirmation: Yes, you are the
Butcher – committed to cutting up all bodies, including your own. But
now … now … he stares deep into the flesh-pit, the great moaning
ocean of the un-fucked, which has tormented him ever since Mister
Kipling fiddled with my exceedingly good cakes … and he sees there
only corpses: the corpses of friends and lovers who’ve died …
unacknowledged, the corpses of assets who’d to be expediently let go
of … Idealistic young men he’d met when working ex officio on the
Moscow Desk, who most likely lived out the balance of their
forgotten lives tortured by a different and far louder … buzz. What
can it mean, this Babi Yar hovering in the limpid, slightly stale
atmosphere of history’s back bedroom? The Butcher feels at one
with the shadowy figures of the Einsatzgruppe, who stand about on
the blood-soaked edges of the hateful hollow, looking down at the
jumble of emaciated corpses, the barrels of their Schmeissers still
smoking as they … light their cigarettes. One of the last things
he remembers his father saying to him, on the afternoon when
Maeve called the ambulance, and all three of them knew it was
going to be … a one-way trip, had been: Can I bum one of your
fags? He’d said it before, of course – it was one of his stock-phrases,
a testimony to Kins’s stopped-clock idiolect, to which no vocabulary
had been added since … nineteen thirty-nine. In the past the
Butcher would hold his tongue – but on this occasion he’d laughed
long and bitterly. Now, taking a final drag on his own un-bummed
fag, the Butcher exhales: Hakuna matata, old fellow – hakuna
matata … The paramedics had been understanding types, and they
strapped him to the stretcher still smoking. When they’d gone, all
that remained of him had been a few wispy tendrils … snagging on
the Artex. The Butcher went to see Kins a few times in the hospital,
and sat there, listening to the machines he was wired up to bleep –
watching the globules of saline worm their way down the tubes, and
into the meat they were preserving. The Butcher had fixated on his
dying father’s hands – the quiver of their tendons, the coiling
of their veins, their liver-spotted camouflage. They’d been young
once – these hands. P’raps they still were, cosy in these old pigskin
gloves. It was hard to imagine Kins’s clumsy hands – which the
Butcher had only seen wrapped around golf clubs or Biros – slim
and young and caressing … Maeve had three equally contemptuous
nicknames for her life-partner: Your food’s on the table, Professor
Branestawm! she’d shout up the stairs on the days he worked at
home. He’d had a little study in the box room, where he’d sit, hour
upon hour, dutifully filling in the pages of narrow-feint foolscap
pads with more facts, figures and opinions about local government
finance. Here he is again, Mister-bloody-Hulot! she’d carp, when
Kins, the car having refused to start, would stand peering into the
mysterious grotto of the engine compartment. Hurry it up a bit,
Pooter! she’d taunt from the kitchen window, as he sweated his way
up and down the narrow strip of garden, his pigskin gloves blistered
by the lawnmower’s handle. The buzzer sounds again and at last the
Butcher stands, walks to the wall-mounted intercom and summons
the footfalls he’s been anticipating all day. He’s spoken of all this to
Gawain – it couldn’t be avoided, since Kins’s inconvenient demise
has messed up several of their rendezvous. But now the Butcher
wishes to forget about all that … and play with my teddy bear, which
is how he thinks of Gawain when they lie, his cheek resting on his
cavalryman’s gingery belly-fur. Oh! the dawns of sweet ecstasy when
they cuddled, runny-honey flowing into one another, in some gay-friendly
bed and breakfast in Peebles or Pontefract or Prestatyn …
my friend will be arriving late tonight and leaving before breakfast.
Why? Why now, when he can hear Gawain panting his way up the
penultimate flight, does this acid and indigestible memory … rise
up my gorge? He’d stood in the bungalow’s vestibule, listening to the
mourners’ burr on the far side of the frosted-glass door, his pigskin
gloves in one hand, a cigarette in the other, transfixed as the little
plaster pimples bulged and rippled – first the tips, then the entire
fingers clawed their way out of the walls: it was Kins … just coming!
Which was what he’d call down from his attic study when Maeve
summoned him to the table: Just coming! He’d halve the distance
between him and the kitchen … Just coming! then halve it again –
yet never actually arrive. On this point at least Maeve had been in
the right: Kins was most profoundly absent when he was standing
in the corner of the kitchen, by the rumbling old Potterton,
his mind also rumbling along until the thermostat … clicked off.
>
Appalled, the Butcher had stared at his father’s multiple and severed
arms, all frantically signalling to make … a U-turn out of the grave.
On the trolley, wreathed in the smoke from the fag he’d bummed
off his bumming fag of a son, he’d sobbed, It’s too soon, Johnny –
too soon! And his shit-stabbing, fudge-packing, pillow-biting son had
taken a moment to snidely reflect: Too soon? What the fuck did
he think about these past few months of his decline – dragging
into the hospital, sitting there, the sour solution dripping into
him, then dragging home again, to sit with the radio on, and the
susurrus of middle-class voices … dripping into him?
Local-bloody-government-finance, no doubt – and some never-would-be-read-anyway
journal article that will now never be written. The Butcher
had gestured to the paramedics to give them a moment alone, then
he’d leant in to that saggy, scraggy, jaundiced face … a saturnine
smile splitting his own perfectly shaved one. Do you remember,
he’d hissed, how Mum would call you for supper, again and again?
And each time you’d bellow down the stairs, Just coming! Kins’s
eyes had been horribly mobile – the eyes of a frightened child,
but the Butcher remained pitiless: You were always just coming,
weren’t you, Daddy-dearest: which is presumably why you can’t get it
into your thick old head that you’ve finally arrived! (Or words to that
effect, Butch – because what I actually recall you saying is that,
having come through the great charnel house of the twentieth
century unscathed, he’d lived a pacific life in a semi-detached house
in a semi-provincial backwater – much like his beloved Trollopian
cleresy – enjoying the concupiscence occasioned by wife-and-mistress,
fathering three fine and healthy sons and effectively being
subsidised by the state he’d refused to serve, as he wrote many
books and articles on a subject of great interest to him, but hardly to
anyone else.) Yes … yes … I s’pose that’s more like it – I wasn’t
quite so cruel, I did try to reassure him his life had been meaningful.
It was his eyes, Squilly – his awful, frightened eyes. And he’d
no eyebrows by then to speak of – the chemo’ singed them off.
A pitiful baldness, I thought – a kick in the bald man’s bald arse as
he scuttles off this mortal coil … (But he’s not gone, is he, Butch?)
Footsteps sound on the final flight and there’s a light-but-firm tap
on the door. The Butcher puts his eye to the peephole and sees
Lieutenant-Colonel Gawain Thomas in the form of a huge tadpole:
outsized, sandy-red head – tapering, blue-suited body. He could
open the door and right away they’d be in each other’s fins? – within
minutes the tartan bedcover would be tangled up with their shed
clothing, and they’d be spawning with each other … Yet still he
hesitates, thinking back to that chilly corridor full of reanimated
arms and the odour of reheated puff-pastry: Kins’s eyebrows
had been gone – but the Scots one, who’d read the poem, had had
beautifully thick and black eyebrows. Sitting in the Rex, his mother
and father beside him, plushdust tickling his nose, poshlost tickling
everyone else’s … fancy, the Butcher had thought: He’s been cast
against type – to elicit sympathy, no doubt: so much harder to be
gay coming from that sort of background … So much harder to
quaver, He was my North, my South, my East, my West – yet it’s
proved just as hard for me to live with … divided loyalties. Listening
to Gawain’s steady breathing, the Butcher fears he may never
leave that corridor – never leave that golf range either. He’d tried
hard as a young man, he believes, to win his father’s love – but
always it hippety-hopped away, towards the flag at the far end of
the filmic fairway … who was he, my father? And at last the Butcher
swings open the door of the room: a beautiful young woman had
been standing there – perhaps the most beautiful woman he’d ever
seen: a vision swathed in a sky-blue sari chased with some sorta
golden embroidery-stuff – its bodice tightly fitting her slim figure.
A sandalwood-scented, blue-black-haired vision, with one plucked
eyebrow quizzically arched. – Charlie, Charlie One! Conference
call commences in five … Charlie, Charlie One, do you read me?
Conference call in five … Awkwardly slumped in a swivel chair,
in a Portakabin, in a dusty-dry compound, somewhere close to the
birthplace of civilisation, Gawain – tethered by headphones to
the radio net – corkscrews up from greenish sleep, only to subside
once more into this reverie of the recent past: The Taj Palace Hotel
in New Delhi, and the young Indian woman holding the spiral-bound
reporter’s notebook and dictaphone, who’d said: My name
is Surinder Sehti, I am a defence correspondent for the Times of
India – if you have a short period of time to spare I would like to
ask you some questions about what it is that serving British Army
officers are doing here at a time of the maximal tension along the
Line of Control? This much Gawain remembers – the repetitions,
and the punctilious diction – and he also has a vague recollection
of slim white columns forming vanishing perspectives, their pediments
and capitals merging with geometrically patterned floors and
walls. Each time he’d quit his room, heading out to the arms fair,
he’d be caught in this maze, while in the mid-distance he’d spot the
peacock’s tail of a porter’s shako disappearing behind a slim white
column. He’d stood there in the doorway – pink after his lukewarm
shower, his terry-towelling robe open to the waist, and he’d thought:
Yeah, what the hell are we doing here, playing at being showroom
demonstrators when the entire planet seems on the point of disintegration?
Before he’d left home Gawain had had a serious talk
with Fiona about the world situation: her leaning against the
kitchen worktop, him pacing up and down on the pebble-patterned
lino, punching his palm to make his points: the Yanks starting to
take casualties in ‘Stan – the Israelis pummelling Gaza and the
West Bank. That weird little black Hitler in Zimbabwe starving his
voter-base into the polls … Really, the Cold War had provided
a sort of frozen stability – balance of terror and all la-la-la that.
But now? Well, he couldn’t think of a time when the world had
seemed more unstable – or one when the Fighting Rams were
more likely to be deployed. And Fiona, who’d recently had her
eyes tested and now wore professorial bifocals, had said, That’s all
very well, Gawain – but think about it: at more or less any point
in the past century you could’ve said the same thing … When
Miffy started full days at school Fiona had begun an OhYou
degree in contemporary history, and so taken to telling him …
what was what, even though she must’ve understood … it confuses
me. I dunno about that, he’d say, once she’d joined up the dots to
create
a pattern of her own devising, my concerns are largely operational
– the men … their families and so forth. Fiona had a way
of scrunching up her features and tossing her head. In the early
days of their marriage Gawain had construed it as an affirmative:
Roger that! But as the years have passed the gesture has become
both more pained – and more emphatic: Roger out! He wonders
many things, does Gawain – wonders them as bears of little brain do:
muzzily – fuzzily … Jonathan wears custom-blended aftershave
which he has made up for him by a parfumier in the Burlington
Arcade. Jonathan fucks Gawain vigorously – and they’re long past
the point in their relationship where … all the niceties are observed.
Often there are shit and semen stains on the mattress as well as the
sheets and pillow slips – sometimes Gawain tries to launder them,
and assemble a bed-block as neat and compact as the ones he did
during his Academy days. But Jonathan just lies back naked on the
exposed mattress-protecter and … laughs. It’s a cliché, he thinks –
in films the wronged wife smells the other woman on her husband,
but perhaps Fiona can’t smell Jonathan at all, sharing as he does my
own male scent? It’s not the constant absences I object to, Gawain,
she hisses in the talcum-powdered darkness of their bedroom: I
understand perfectly well the pressures of the job – why wouldn’t
I – Charlie? Charlie One? Repeat: Are you receiving me? The
Brigade Adjutant’s clipped voice nips his ear again and Gawain
jerks upright: Charlie One, receiving you, he rasps into the mic.
– That you, Gawain – everything squared away up there? Gawain
reviews the situation before replying: The Rams are indeed squared
away in their roughly square, Hesco-reinforced compound …
penned sheep – spent cartridges – sheep droppings … and have commenced
regular patrols: sweating it in full kit down dusty roads
and through shadowy bazaars where … there’s only dust for sale.
Sip-sip-glugging from their Camelbaks as they scope out the darkened
doorways, the full-screw bringing up the rear with his helmet-cam
capturing everything. Then it’s back to the Wimmik – Drives gunning
the engine, top cover swinging the geepee-emmgee’s barrel
loose and easy: capturing an old rag-head in the sights … sipping
