by Will Self
exam – and a full cavity search, I’m afraid. CAPTAIN PETERSEN:
But, Boss … COLONEL THOMAS: Gail? CAPTAIN PETERSEN: It’s
Trooper Bessemer, I’ve just got off the radio net, he’s … he’s dead,
Boss. THE AFTER-IMAGE (portentously): Their lives cannot repay
us – their death could not undo – the shame they have laid
upon our race –. COLONEL THOMAS: Oh, my God – this changes
everything. The poor boy … the poor bloody boy … Oh, Gail …
(He looks about for a white plastic garden chair to collapse into,
but there’s none.) I’m sorry, I seem to be … lagging. CAPTAIN
PETERSEN: Lagging, Boss? COLONEL THOMAS: Oh … Gail –
what d’you think … I mean … I mean … (summoning himself)
… c’mon, yes … You – you’d better tell Dave Cambell and
McCadie, Gail, but other than that … for now, best the men don’t
know. CAPTAIN PETERSEN: But, Boss – there’s the detainee in the
rap –. COLONEL THOMAS: In the rap? CAPTAIN PETERSEN: The
one who collapsed from heat exhaustion, sir, he’s in a very bad way.
COLONEL THOMAS: Gail, I shouldn’t have to remind you of our
obligations under the Geneva Convention – those men should’ve
been seen to hours ago, it’s important it be established what sort
of condition they were in when we scooped them up, we don’t
want any comeback on this. CAPTAIN PETERSEN: I’m not sure I
understand what you’re driving at, sir – as for the men, I’m afraid
they already know about Bessemer. COLONEL THOMAS: Know?
Know about Bessemer? Oh, fuck – oh, God! I ordered a comms
lock-down on this base … CAPTAIN PETERSEN: Y’know how the
army is for gossip, Boss. COLONEL THOMAS: Yeah, I know …
I know … You know nothing, GAYwain – you’ve lost your grip on it
all. Think of your wife and the tedious mystery her body is to you: a skin
bag stuffed full of giblets and charged with an unearthly power – think
of the Rams: passed to you hard and clean – but you’ve fumbled them
both, GAYwain. You’ve failed to keep possession and knocked them on –
kids and Jonathan, too … CAPTAIN PETERSEN: You all right,
Boss? COLONEL THOMAS: Whaddya mean? CAPTAIN PETERSEN:
Are you feeling all right … physically … You’re white as a –.
COLONEL THOMAS: I’m perfectly fine, Gail – prob’ly just low blood
sugar. CAPTAIN PETERSEN: Here … look … Boss … (she reaches
in the breast pocket of her battledress) … just got it out of the
fridge. COLONEL THOMAS (receiving the chilly thing): Thanks …
really … thanks. (He walks away from her without saluting
and wanders towards the squadron lines, the slogan Work, Rest
and Play … Work, Rest and Play … spooling behind his glass-paper
eyelids. Nearing MAJOR TOWNSHEND’S trailer, COLONEL THOMAS
sees two figures loitering in its shadows, and hears the low
thwock-thwock of ball bouncing on boot. TROOPER BESSEMER
(contemptuously): Oh, it’s you, is it … (he neatly volleys the ball
into his companion’s open hands) … what’s your game? COLONEL
THOMAS: Who is that? Who are you men? What’re you doing up
and about when I expressly ordered everyone under cover? TROOPER
BESSEMER: S’me innit – s’me ‘n’ Asif, innit. ASIF (lightly volleying
the ball back): You’re definitely you, Bessie – and I’m definitely me.
COLONEL THOMAS: Wh-What’re you doing here? ASIF: Good
question, Colonel – I should be on my way to Najaf, to be buried
within sight of the Imam’s shrine, as were my forefathers and
their forefathers before them. But Bessie here didn’t want to miss
the rugby Sevens. TROOPER BESSEMER: Yeah, Rams’ Ingerland
Seven’ll be mashed without my goal kicking. (COLONEL THOMAS
tries to hold his eyes on BESSEMER’S eager, guileless, goofy, betrayed
face – but they keep rolling down to the steak tartare between the
boy’s legs.) ASIF: Yes, lost without his goal-kicking, just as your
government’s entire programme of introducing representative democracy
to Iraq while simultaneously installing a government capable
of upholding the law and enforcing international standards of
human rights will begin to seem pretty threadbare if you don’t get a
grip on your men. COLONEL THOMAS (looking at the Mars Bar in
the palm of his hand): I … I’m trying to do my best – by you, Asif –
by the Rams … by your people as well. And I’m trying to protect
those back at home – Fi, Miffy, my kids and everyone else’s. LAURA
(MYFANWY THOMAS’S knitted clown doll, grown monstrously
large – perhaps fourteen feet high. She comes on long red woolly
legs out from behind MAJOR TOWNSHEND’S trailer, her white-wool
face looming uncannily in the orangey gloom): The kids
don’t need you, GAYwain – you can’t help them. Look at yourself,
man! (COLONEL THOMAS peers down at his softening torso: the
ceramic plates of his body armour are bending and buckling – his
battledress is melting into gloopy globs.) ASIF: In the nineteen
twenties a young man called Harris came here – he was a flyer with
your ArrAyEff. Harris pioneered a strategy which became known
as area bombing: systematically destroying civilian housing using
a combination of high-explosive to blow their roofs off, followed
by incendiaries to create a conflagration. The effects were predictably
devastating – and twenty years later Harris employed the
same method to lay waste to German cities. Now you come here,
armed with a fucking Mars Bar, and expect us to bow down
before you … (he steps forward and casually snaps off COLONEL
THOMAS’S forearm, removes its khaki wrapper and begins chomping
on chocolate flesh, nougat sinews and toffee bone) … Mm,
buttery fingers – thing is, there’s so very little of you to bow down
before. (Gawain’s Flakey knees bend, buckle, then Kit-Kat-snap!
as he Twixes forward – straight on to his Caramac face. His chin,
together with a third of his cranium, comes away, and he has the
queerest experience of seeing from within the mould of himself …
chinless, that’s me, while witnessing a still-stranger dissolution, as
scores of milk-chocolate-coated balls of honeycombed malt tumble
through his eye sockets and roll away across the hard-packed
sandy ground … I’m losing my Maltesers.) COLONEL THOMAS: Help
me, lads! Help me! I’m melting! TROOPER BESSEMER: Yeah, well
… (he steps forward and plants his boot in the sticky-brown puddle
which was once his SeeOh) … best thing, really – for a chocolate
soldier who’s standing in front of the odd little carpeted ledge
beside the flat’s front door, picking up the sweat-stained bush hat
which tops off his costume … sigh! Oldster togs his youngsters
affect to despise, but the zoetrope revolves: soon enough they’ll be
slippering about themselves – ‘though prob’ly not in grey nylon
tracksuit bottoms and a sweatshirt bearing the slogan SANTE FE
EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY CONFERENCE NINETEEN NINETY-SEVEN
on its saggy-blue breast. Reaching deep in the pocket of his
Donegal tweed jacket, Busner’s fingernails find twists and twirls of
tin foil … why? Prowling from room to room of the flat, his eyes
sweeping more surfaces for keys, wallet and mobile phone, he thinks
more on’t. Where’d he been when he bit into the chocolate soldier?
He’d painstakingly picked the gold foil from the soft brown face –
this much he remembers … never forget foil on filling. Also, he’d
been slumped down in a white plastic garden chair, on the cracked
concrete apron Camilla calls “my patio”. Yes! That was it: at Milla’s,
last Sunday. She’d called up and invited him to: Come and sit on
my patio, Gramps – it’s been ages … Ben so wants to see you … I’ll
do a roast for lunch … She had – and Zack had brought the box
he picked up in Tesco’s on the Kentish Town Road: they’d laid
there, two layers of sturdy troopers with red foil trews and blue foil
jackets – and when Ben lifted the lid on them, Zack’d made some
feeble joke about fighting the next war with the chocolate soldiers
of the last. Oscar had been in attendance, bullshitting the way lay-therapists
so frequently do – making references whenever possible
to “the work”, under the illusion this would ingratiate him with
his old man. So, it’d been “the work” on “my patio” on the first
sunny Sunday of spring. Hungry pigeons waddled along the thin
tendencies of branches – Camilla waddled in and out of the kitchen.
Zack hadn’t seen her or Ben since Christmas, and he’d been struck
by her weight gain, or was it … water retention? The poor thing.
Worse still, mother and son are coming to resemble each other more
than is healthy: Ben, a hulking fellow of twenty-one, affects an
Abstract Expressionist hairstyle, his brown locks statically charged
into thick brushstrokes. His grandfather supposes this an attempt
to be fashionable on the young man’s part, but if so it hardly comes
off, since he had indeed been wearing the same sort of charity-shop
clobber … as me. No elegant arras supporting an ebullient
jacaranda – and no wittily urbane conversation either: instead,
two or three spider plants in cracked pots, the pigeons – and Ben
hunched in another white plastic garden chair, twirling the frayed
end of a toothpick in front of his hooded eyes ‘cause he still self-stimulates
… Ben-the-burden … who’ll always need to be supported.
Ben, who has no more social skills than he ever did, and so had
either answered his grandfather’s questions with adolescent grunts,
or else sat surlily silent for the few minutes his mother could compel
his attendance, before he’d rifled the chocolate-soldier box and
beat a retreat to his stuffy room, leaving behind a single melting
one, and a more solid, choicer remark, muttered then remuttered,
which reverberated in his grandfather’s mind … We’ve been put on
earth for a reason … We’ve been put on earth for a reason … Busner
spots the mobile phone, tethered by its white flex to a plug socket
… charging. Why was he bothering with it at all? But it won’t
cost you a penny … Milla had chided him when he tried to refuse
her gift … infuriating! As if money’s the issue. I’ve prepaid for a hundred
minutes, but really it’s for us to call you – check you’re all
right, and stuff … Ben, hearkening at least to this tech-talk, had
unleashed his own data-stream: the phone was nothing special …
nothing special … You can only send text messages with it and make
voice calls … and make voice calls … The new three-gee network
was already overwhelmed with data-streaming … overwhelmed with
data-streaming … The new network eliminates circuit switching –
it’s all eyepee now: packet switching using elayenn and doubleyouayenn
networks … using elayenn and doubleyouayenn networks …
‘Course, this is pitifully inadequate, too … ‘Course, this is pitifully
inadequate, too … Simply to interrupt him, Zack had asked:
Pitifully inadequate for what? Which silenced Ben for a moment –
then he’d looked into his grandfather’s eyes. Looked directly into
them in … a manly and forthright manner, something so unexpected
Zack had almost called to Milla and Oscar, who were in the kitchen
to … come quick and see! But, thinking better of it, he held his
grandson’s fierce gaze and had been gifted with: Pitifully inadequate
for the Singularity … another queer phrase which returns to him
now as he untethers the phone and slips it into his jacket pocket.
We’ve been put on earth for a reason/Pitifully inadequate for the
Singularity – the two snatches of dialogue revolve around each
other in his cloistered mind as he locks the flat’s front door, pockets
his keys and heads down the stairs. There’re hairy dags caught
in the thick pile of the runner and all along the hallway’s …
dusty ravine – to where there’s nothing new … under the transom’s
rectangular sun: a mess of junk mail on the mat, and the letter-box’s
flap bearded with leaflets and flyers. Then, in the street … all is
flux! A great envelopment of traffic noise and traffic stink which
threatens to drag me down. He staggers, grabs the concrete stanchion
of the bus stop and manages to stay upright. Luvverly day
fer April, ‘ow long you bin waitin’? Busner oils his rusty jaw with
saliva – prepares to speak for the first time in hours, then realises
the street drinker … same tracksuit bottoms as me, isn’t addressing
him, but an old lady … old? prob’ly same age as you, who stands
clutching a Yorkshire terrier to her sunken chest, one of the little
dog’s stiff hind-legs scratching frantically … at nothing. The street
drinker, who holds a can of Polish lager, carries on crazily: ‘E’s a
cute wee doggie, can I ‘old ‘im? Once upon a time Busner would’ve
felt it incumbent on him to intervene – and by this act alone to …
diagnose? But not any more – the man may be a schizophrenic self-sedating
with alcohol, or an alcoholic suppressing the first psychotic
withdrawal symptoms … it’s the same diff’. No, a personality disorder
is only hysteria or melancholia by another name … The dosser,
whose smelly neck is now within the terrier’s biting range, might
even be on the autistic spectrum … whatever that means nowadays.
One thing, however, Busner knows for certain: there’s no need
for more epithetic psychiatry – and nor is there for … a pathetic
superannuated psychiatrist. Wossiss name, then? the dosser asks, and
Busner thinks: he’s the true mendicant – a real Sannyasi. Snug in
his seedy Kentish Town flat, the former paterfamilias has been
reading up on Eastern religions – he fancies himself as a white-haired
old Brahmin, who, after many years of uncomplaining
service to family and society, removes his sleeve protectors and
green eyeshade, picks up his staff and begging bowl and then …
hits the road. But this ragged travesty of his aspiration – this fool,
staggering about on the blasted pavement, has … upstaged me!
Busner lurches again – grabs the bus stop … again – then, through
his woozy vulnerability, sees the shield I seek! held by a squire who
steps forward from … the dust cloud of an Icelandic volcano, the grey
matter lying thick in the creases of his … cotton surcoat. For a
stretched and gummy moment, Busner struggles to grasp what it is
he’s seeing, as the young man’s fingers flick ping! and dabble pong!
against the glassy surface … what is this odd manipulation? If he
abstracts the shield-of-light with which the young man fends off
Kentish Town’s flaking stucco, Busner sees only this: one arm
rigidly extended, the other crooked, its hand fidgeting … he’s
stimming – like Ben! And the young man’s fixation on the tablet
computer? Well, back in the day Busner might well’ve diagnosed
this as an oculogyric crisis … but now? Isn’t this precisely the sort of
affectless fixation a contemporary clinician would expect … from
an autist? He’s aware … they can’t be avoided of the panicky reaction
there is to these new digital technologies – the guilty unease of
those who once touched and smelt and tasted, but who now sit
stock-still, seeing the world for the most part through a glass far too
brightly. His old colleague Harold Sikorski is just one amongst
a host of psy-professionals and neuroscientists who’ve taken to the
airwaves to warn the watchers that, because they’ve allowed the
über-autists of Silicon Valley to feed them their thoughts, visions
and reveries, and to calibrate their very movements, their brains
have been rewired. Utter poppycock! of course – and quite extraordinary
that someone such as Harold should jettison everything
he knows about genetics and human evolution to begin bruiting
it about that the gross anatomy of the brain – unaltered for nigh
on a quarter of a million years – has suddenly begun to mutate
because … we spend too much time on the phone! And yet … and
yet … this much Busner would concede: there is something changing
– not with the brain … but the mind, with the way human
consciousness, taken collectively, is starting to experience its own
reality. It’s an experience Busner’s compelled to join in: his eyes
gripped by the young man’s tablet computer – by this palimpsest of
