Phone

by Will Self

  mint tea … a wonky-donkey haw-heeing … a white plastic garden

  chair up-ended on a pile of rubble … Everywhere Gawain’s been in

  Iraq he’s seen them – in the vulgar marble palaces of Saddam’s

  henchmen on the crumbling banks of the Shatt al-Arab, and in the

  burnt-out shells of government buildings. The very first thing he’d

  noticed when they deplaned at the aypod was a white plastic garden

  chair sitting beside the runway – and Tizer had said, Why don’t you

  take a load off, Greeny – things’re only gonna get heavier from

  here on in … The company of Kiwis who pitched up a week ago –

  and who, so far as Gawain can establish, have bugger all to do

  besides … fuck up my logistics have taken to mounting bogus little

  patrols of their own, simply so they can recover more of the flimsy

  booty from back alleys and shattered patios. Their SeeOh, a limber,

  dark fellow called Moody who sports a ridiculous sprig of hair

  on his bottom lip … beard? Goatee? Lip-ee? had revealed his clever

  plan to Gawain that morning: A tournament, Greeny – your boys

  and mine. Fives or sevens, depending on how many’re willing –

  didn’tya say you were a pretty handy loose head yerself ? If we can

  persuade the Jap contractors to join in we could call it the Three

  Nations … If enough of your boys’re Jocks and Taffies – or Irish,

  you could field all the home nations and we’d have six teams! Standing

  there, looking at Moody, utterly unselfconscious in his ridiculous

  tit-crowned wideawake hat, Uncle Rodney’s oft-uttered words rang

  in Gawain’s ears: There’s a soupçon of the peacock in all army officers à

  mon avis … So, yes, the Adjutant’s figure of speech was about right:

  if Moody had his way they’d all be squared away – forming a hollow

  square of spectators in the middle of Camp Val’s dusty compound.

  Literally a sitting target for whichever gang of bandits crept in from

  the badlands and began chucking over arpeegees and mortar

  rounds. Not that the Rams had had much contact so far – but the

  threat-level was rising, and eye-eedees were fast becoming what

  Jonathan would doubtless call the signature note of the campaign.

  Each morning Gawain receives emails with video attachments from

  the EeeOhDee group down in Basra. The videos show devices

  cunningly concealed in water butts and straw bales. One, rather

  more macabrely, had been hidden in the head of a putrefying camel

  … wires worming out of its eyes: not so much kill– as … rot-teevee.

  With each clip he watches, the tension builds up in Gawain’s thick

  neck and broad shoulders – striking lightning pains up into his …

  loose head. Yes! he barks into the handset. We’re pretty much all

  squared away up here, David – there’re one or two issues, obviously

  … Equally obviously, the Adjutant’s no longer listening – he’s

  moved away from Gawain, further into the radiophonic darkness,

  where he can be heard calling out other call-signs: Charlie Two,

  Charlie Two, are you reading me? Gawain sits and waits and broods,

  which is pretty much what … I’ve been doing my entire professional

  life! He wanders back through his hot and sweaty head to New

  Delhi, and that encounter with the beautiful journalist: I’m not

  in a position … he’d almost certainly said … to talk to you as a

  serving British officer, but what I can say is that the role of the

  Export Support Team is pretty widely misunderstood … while

  Surinder Sehti had stood there, goggling at his cleavage. There’d

  been, Gawain thinks, a sort of Line of Control between the two

  of them – on her side Hindu prudery and womanly rectitude, on

  his … complete and utter indifference. Whereas up in Kashmir the

  real thing snaked over crags and down into ravines, and there were

  a million men, shoulder to shoulder with their comrades – nose to

  nose with their foes. What would happen if the balloon went up?

  A mass Eskimo greeting, p’raps, followed by them all getting down

  to the … buggery business. He remembers the encounter at all only

  because of having said to her, If you hang on a sec’ I can give you

  the contact details for the press people – you’re best off talking

  to them … He’d turned away from the door and simultaneously

  felt … the balloon shoved up between my legs – a balloon full of liquid

  shit! He’d got rid of Surinder Sehti as quickly as he could, then

  waddled to bathroom, where he … let fly. Charlies One-through-Twelve

  and Bravos Nine-through-Seventeen all present, Boss …

  The stream of pissy shit crackles away into the ether – and Gawain

  turns his attention to the interplay between the various commanders

  attached to Battlegroup Main. The weekly orders group

  conference is his best opportunity to get a grasp on the wider picture,

  an essential task if he’s aiming for corps-level command. And

  why shouldn’t I? No one knows I’m a shit-pisser – or a shit-stabber

  for that matter. Oh, Christ! he undermoans, I feel so punctured,

  so empty – so fucking lonely … What’s required to make the

  loneliness of command bearable is, he thinks, the command of loneliness

  … And he is alone – profoundly so: only calling home once

  a week, and, when he does, after listening to a tight-lipped account

  of the children’s doings, waiting in vain for some basic human

  warmth … But why should his long-haired General oblige, when

  for years now it’s been Jonathan who’s supplied it? To begin with

  they held their conference calls in phone boxes: Gawain favoured

  one on the outskirts of Pickering too remote and chilly to be much

  used. He could loiter there, out of sight behind a hedge – and when

  the heavy receiver rattled into life … ambush it. He knew Jonathan

  called from various boxes in his neighbourhood – shifting randomly

  from one to another, in case anyone was watching and … established

  a pattern. Problem isn’t so much your wee wifey … he’d said in the

  happy aftermath of their first full night together, when they lay

  spooning in the Terylene shadows of a Leeds budget-hotel room …

  it’s the mob I’m sort of married to. And so Jonathan had instructed

  Gawain in rudimentary tradecraft: the dead-letter drops, brush

  contacts and alpha-numerical codes that’re his … standard operating

  procedure. It’s absolutely essential, he hissed, that you write

  nothing – and I mean nothing whatsoever – down anywhere: not on

  paper, not on a computer – nowhere at all. Because ninety-nine

  times out of a hundred it’s what does for people: they write down

  their lover’s name, their controller’s or the number of their Swiss

  bank account, and surprise-surprise, someone else reads it. Then it’s

  all over – finito! But nothing – I repeat no-single-thing you write

  down will you retain – while all you send me, my love, will be seered

  into me, and then … seared. There’s a sort of poetry in this: you

  need never feel you’re betraying anyone, because I don’t exist at

  all. And if I don’t exist – well, we don’t exist eit
her, now do we?

  No, they didn’t exist: not in the way that ordinary couples do: Have

  you met Jonathan and Gawain, they’ve just moved into the neighbourhood

  … ? They came into being purely in their fugitive acts of

  love – summoning up the territories of each other’s bodies through

  kisses and caresses – or in their midnight special phone calls, during

  which they fantasised about all the things … we’d like to do. But, as

  the years have passed, so it’s become harder to find phone boxes.

  The Pickering one was decommissioned and its equipment torn

  out – all that was left was … an empty shelf. The leather hinges

  creaked as the wind blew down off the North Yorkshire moors – the

  heavy, eight-paned door swung open, sucking out the smells of fresh

  urine and rotten phone books, together with … all our fragrant

  endearments. Jonathan bought them both second-hand mobile

  phones – handsets which had untraceable sim cards installed and

  were set up so they could only connect to each other. They weren’t,

  Gawain thought, really mobile phones at all – more like the tin-can

  telephones he and his sisters played with as children – and when he

  sat in the Volvo, parked up in some forgettable lay-by, he felt

  reassuringly tethered to his lover. But Jonathan was paranoid – he

  spoke of scanners and interception. He constantly badgered Gawain

  as to where exactly he was keeping his mobile. No! Locked in an

  office drawer was insufficiently secure – didn’t he have a readily

  accessible fridge? Or, better still, a deep-freeze to … cool our electroardour.

  Every time they met in the flesh, Jonathan insisted on

  changing up – as he termed it – and presented his lover with another

  Nokia, Ericsson or Motorola, relieving him of the old one, which

  was – for their purposes at least – already obsolete. To begin with,

  they’d written to each other as well – both their return addresses

  being rented boxes in obscure sub-post offices. Jonathan’s letters

  were beautiful things, full of whimsy and lyricism – but they had to

  be destroyed immediately after having been read. When emailing

  became more widespread, Jonathan gave Gawain precise instructions

  on how to create an anonymous account – not on his work or

  home computer, though, but in an internet café, protected by its

  anonymity. In Moseley or Moss Side, awkward in his civvies,

  sat amongst curry-smelling young Asian men who tapped on

  oblivious, Gawain poked his finer feelings into soiled keyboards. It

  troubled Gawain – bothered him especially in the days leading up

  to the deployment – that there was no record of their relationship at

  all: no photographs of them proudly arm in arm – no love letters

  scrawled with passionate entreaties, no envelopes stuffed with old

  tickets – mementoes of the shows they’d attended together, and the

  journeys they’d undertaken. Nothing. But when he whispered this

  to Jonathan as they slumbered in the annexe of the Lastingham

  Grange Country House Hotel – which can be easily accessed

  unobserved – he’d only chuckled indulgently, Teddy Bear, what

  matters is that I love you and you love me: we know this to the very

  core of our being. All those silver-framed photographs gathering

  dust on unplayed pianos – what’re they? Only the residue of

  exhausted passions – whereas we, dearest, our love remains evergreen

  and forever young. That there’s nothing to prove its existence

  only makes it realer than the dull and solid world we inhabit …

  Yes, the dull and solid world – what’d made him think of the arms

  fair and that dreadful bout of diarrhoea? The dulling and solidifying

  capsules, probably – two of them, broad-spectrum antibiotics the

  medic back at Bovington had told him: will zap just about any

  Delhi-belly going – granted, you’ll trot on for twenty-four hours or so,

  but after that all the little wrigglers’ll be stony and you’ll stopper up

  pronto … There were similar capsules in the medi-packs they’d all

  been issued with when they deplaned at Shaibah, where, as they

  awaited their movement order, one or two of the troopers did indeed

  get the squits – but touch wood … he massages his own sweaty

  temples … there’s been nothing too serious – no epidemic, although

  the boys still have to be reminded at least five times a day to wash

  their mucky little paws. Really, it isn’t Fiona’s love he feels the lack of

  at all – but her people skills … She keeps her multiple of three in

  line, does Fiona. And, as the years have passed, and her husband

  has hauled himself, hand over hand up the chain of command, so

  Missus Thomas has become more and more … commanding. In the

  run-up to the deployment it’d been her quite as much as Gawain

  who’d … licked the Rams into shape. As the SeeOh’s wife she was

  expected to head-up that parallel structure of command, the Wives’

  Club, but Gawain had seen plenty of army marriages founder on

  this fact alone: why on earth should any young mother, raising a

  family of her own, take on responsibility for this khaki, extended

  one? The Ruperts and their Lucie Clayton girlfriends were bad

  enough: time was when they simply got on with it – we all simply got

  on with it … He doesn’t remember any griping or complaints during

  his childhood: his own mother had simply got on with it … Missus

  Thomas Senior had been loyal to her husband’s colours – following

  them overseas on tours which had anticipated Gawain’s own. He

  remembers running around on the patch in Bielefeld – ringing

  doorbells and then running … running away. What’d his mother

  been up to? A nurse, she was working in the Krankenhaus – and she

  never spoke of what happened there at all. Except for that one time,

  mostly Missus Thomas had been a jolly sort of presence – he

  sees her at the wheel of the family Beetle bombing down the autobahn

  … laying out picnics by the Moselle … her with a glass of

  honey-coloured wine … said she was drinking the river – we

  all laughed, Fay and Jess and me, then she’d sucker-punched us all,

  started going on about the boy – a squaddie had been brought into

  the hospital in bits, she said: he’d got on the business end of a

  machine-gun and been cut near in two. It was disgusting, Sister

  Thomas had spat: the whole thing … the massed divisions of Brits

  and Yanks on one side, the Soviet boys on the other – a children’s

  crusade had been her precise words – but there’ll be no promised land,

  only nuclear fire and radioactive brimstone … The Thomas family

  were all speechless – sat there with slices of pumpernickel mounded

  with the Heinz Sandwich Spread Granny Myfanwy sent from

  Swanage. It’d only been years later that this coincidence had struck

  Gawain: both his parents had been cut near in two by similar

  incidents – his father in Aden, his mother in Germany. Maybe

  this was why their marriage had also ended up machine-gunned to

  death … Although that came years later: of his father during those

  De
utschland days Gawain remembers little besides the Major

  crying, Bring out the Bols! to the accompaniment of Barry White’s

  chocolate tones … there’s only, only one like you – no way they coulda

  made … two. The Major had built a plywood bar in the basement –

  used a job-lot of tinsel for decoration, proffed a mirror ball, too.

  They threw little parties down there, and Gawain remembers his

  father slow-dancing … with that bald bloke’s wife, his hand hovering

  over her big bum but never touching … The bald bloke was

  EssAyEss, or so the Major said – why does Gawain remember this?

  Because it was one of the few occasions in his childhood when

  he’d been aware of the … wider picture. He’d never seen so much as

  a uniform – although the Major took him into the workshop a

  few times to admire his whirlybirds, which is what he’d called

  them. It was his job to keep these exotic machines aloft – but when

  Gawain saw them they’d just hunched there, their rotors limp

  and floppy. Could anyone have anticipated what was to come? True,

  the Major’s brownish hair had also been quite limp and floppy …

  while for a serving officer – even in the early seventies – he wore it

  suspiciously long, but still … Gawain knows where his father is

  now: up there in the Black Mountains, squatting no doubt in some

  soggy tepee and sucking on a … pipe of peace. Yet for a moment he

  sees Derek Thomas plummeting from the aching-blue Iraqi sky …

  incoming hippy! — There’s a squawk, a flutter – then the twittering

  starts up again in the radiophonic aviary: Charlie One – Charlie

  One, are you reading me? Can you give the oh-group the sit’ rep’

  on your Scimitars … ? And Gawain hears himself – measured and

  authoritative – reporting on the progress of the Bowman conversions,

  secure comms being … pretty much fucking essential, now the

  intel’ from Brigade is that the Iranians are teaming up with the Shia

  militias … on our patch – ringing on doorbells … running away. But

  Ali al-Garbi isn’t my patch, Gawain thinks – I’m like any army

  brat, my patch is … wherever: Bielefeld, Cyprus, back to Blighty.

  Derek got himself booted sideways into a desk job and, after a brief

  Welsh sojourn, in the early eighties the Thomas family had settled

  for South-coast suburbia … peeveesee trews and Holsten Pils. Gawain