Phone

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