Phone

by Will Self

  panels which slide and shuffle and force upon him such incontrovertible

  facts: A crucial component of any incoming government’s policy

  will be to avert the industrial action that’s widely expected, should

  public-sector cuts be as deep as anticipated … which are ousted in an

  eye-blink by a … smirking Osborne. What, Busner wonders, does

  Ben see when he looks at a face on-screen? For an autist it must be

  a liberation of sorts: freed from the requirement to guess at their

  interlocutor’s mental states on the basis of the infinitely subtle

  interplay between gestures, words and glances, they can simply …

  communicate. Busner remembers speaking to Frankie via Skype

  when she was on sabbatical in Iowa – or, rather, he has before him

  right now the ghastly wallpaper on the walls of her study-bedroom,

  a geometric spew he spent some time contemplating, because,

  although they chatted away intimately enough … neither of us

  looked into the other’s eyes. They hadn’t felt the need to do so – there

  seemed no requirement for windows into each other’s souls, because

  these inner worlds were sutured together by the long threads of

  machine code … … … … …. Osborne has been supplanted by

  the pom-pom of a single diagrammatic virion which floats in space,

  at once endless and measurable in microns. Despite the falling away

  from universal inoculation, the measles virus has proved less infectious

  than feared. A study by the National Centre for Virology has established

  that transmission rates be– gone, ousted in turn by the door’s bullying

  concertina. The parfit gentle knight sheathes his shield and mounts

  ahead of him … riding that old emmemmarr sawhorse – but why?

  And the street drinker, as anticipated, bunks on by the back door –

  while my contemporary brings up the rear with her flea-bitten dog.

  Busner touches his Freedom Pass to the worn patch and is rewarded

  with a tiny tweet from a … cybernetic forest filled with pines and

  electronics, and the indifference of the driver-operator, who keeps his

  eyes fixed on the distant horizon of the terminus … On the top deck

  there’re no passengers, only rows of seats covered in snazzy, electric-blue

  moquette. The bus moans for re-entry – then lunges back into

  the traffic stream. The young man touches down in one seat, and

  the retired psychiatrist collapses, Oof! into the one behind – and by

  the time he’s recovered the shield is once again … fending off the

  world – although, Busner concedes, this might not be the right way

  to think about it at all. Maybe every child who received the triple

  vaccine – and this young man had to be a near-contemporary of

  Ben – was similarly affected, and now found the real furniture

  of the world rather more insubstantial than the screen architecture

  they fixated on. Pitifully inadequate for the Singularity, was it? This

  despite the fact that good ol’ Gramps picked up the bill for the

  highest-speed internet connection available – good ol’ Gramps, eh …

  Once Oscar had sloped off, so had Ben and Camilla – their exits as

  sudden, momentous and slight as the substitution of one screen for

  another. After a while, marooned on the deserted patio, waiting

  for the pigeons to shit on me … he’d followed his grandson inside

  and found him in his tunnel of a bedroom, wedged between the

  Dexion shelving units, which were now warped and buckled, such

  was their load of books, magazines, papers, seedees, deeveedees,

  veeaitchess tapes, obsolete computer equipment, and – so far as his

  grandfather could see – just about every toy the monarchical and

  only child had ever owned … what I have I hold on to. Listening to

  Ben playing the monotonous keyboard – looking about at chunky

  beige boxes which seemed, even to him, the sarcophagi of an earlier

  machine age, Zack had remembered lobbying for time on the huge

  old EyeBeeEmm mainframe at Heath Hospital … I was an early

  adopter – at least of the expression “early adopter”. He and Ford had

  fed the data in laboriously, by hand – they’d also written the program

  which helped establish … so far as we were concerned that, at

  any given time, any given social group only had a fixed amount of

  sanity … to go round. Had he imagined then that within thirty

  years a machine the size of a small room would be conjured into

  a box he could hold in the palm of his hand? No – emphatically

  not: the sixties and seventies had been all per ardua ad astra:

  Zack and his fellow psychonauts, while affecting to despise the

  militarists’ techno-trip, nonetheless saw ourselves as strangers in a

  strange land … It wasn’t until the space programme peaked, then

  splashed down in the idiopathic ocean, that the world turned in on

  itself. Before, there’d been a few politicians who banged on about

  computers and automation – the horse-lipped one with the liquid

  lithp had been a particular enthusiast – wossiss name? Bit of a cunt,

  really – him and Wilson both. All pipe smokers’re cunts! he barks –

  and Johnny Astro’s fringe yanks his lashless eyes around. For a

  few moments they stare at one another, as the young man tries to

  establish if he’s being ridiculed – but then: he sees my sweat-ringed

  headgear, so allocates Busner to the social group of street people,

  amongst whom there’s … hardly any sanity to go round! Then:

  eyes-front! Shield up! and the emblematic virion is back, questing for

  somewhere … anywhere to bind. The young man flickety-tics the

  virion into a Mercator projection with measles: a rash of differently

  sized spots, some INFECTED, others FATALITIES – they are further

  labelled ACTUAL and PREDICTED. Busner shakes his battered old

  bonce and ruefully considers: I never fancied myself as much of

  an epidemiologist anyway – the Quantity Theory couldn’t predict

  how insanity was spread, only how much of it there was … to go

  round annaround. All mass panics – he’d hypothesised at the time –

  could provide this adaptive advantage: by concentrating insanity

  in one portion of society, they’d afforded their fellow Britons greater

  mental well-being – because what were the emmemmarr refuseniks

  if not … crazy? He remembers the miserable and semi-drunken

  nights when Camilla had ranted and raved, blaming the triplevaccination

  for her son’s tangled neurological wiring – cursing the

  entire smoothly incomprehensible edifice of … so-called medical

  science – what’s got into everyone? What’s got into all the ape-men

  and ape-women, grovelling by the waterhole and chucking rocks at

  each other? Advancing, then retreating, then advancing again …

  willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike? Do they really conceive of

  natural selection operating in this way – as a millennia-long game

  of grandmother’s footsteps? Tiring of the young man’s fixation, Busner

  slips away – back to that windless tunnel full of plastic crates

  crammed with obsolete microcircuitry. His own grandson sat for

  hour upon hour, throughout the Kilburn nights,
his eyes glued to

  not one but … three screens! Years later it’d come out: Wilson didn’t

  smoke a pipe at all – it was a peearr stunt he’d dreamt up himself.

  Thought it made him look more like a man of the people – truth

  was, once the heavy door of Number Ten had swung shut, he pulled

  out a fat Havana and Marcia clipped its sweet-smelling prepuce for

  him … then held its bared tip out to his mealy mouth so he might

  suck on the white heat of technology … That’d been the temper of the

  times – a very feverishness about time itself … It was accelerating –

  oscillating at forty-five revolutions per minute, ‘cause there was

  something going on, although no one really knew what it was –

  neither Mister Wilson, nor Mister Jones – let alone Ronnie! Who’d

  fallen victim to the most salient delusion of the prophet, which

  is the certainty … his time has come. The bus’s time has come as

  well: it wrangles some cyclists across the junction by Tufnell Park

  tube, then buckets on along Junction Road. To either side are

  estate agents, convenience stores and more estate agents: the city

  feeding on its own bricky substance, and in so doing adding more

  excremental value to what once must’ve been solid middle-class

  homes with front gardens full of hollyhocks tended by Pooters …

  Now those nodding blooms had all been lopped off, and replaced

  by cubic hutches stuffed with electronic goods. Camilla had called

  yesterday – called the mobile phone she’d given him. She’d been

  in a state – which was why he’d brought the bloody thing out

  with him today. She’d been following up on her twin, current

  obsessions, both of which are computer-based: the new equipment

  she wants him to get for Ben – and the relationship she believes

  her own machine has gifted her … stupid Cupid. I’m not so out of

  touch I don’t know what an ExBox is, he’d said as they’d sat in the

  front room of the Kilburn flat, where, on the trestle table which

  served Milla as a desk, sat her own … window on the world: her

  laptop – always open, always on, always importuning. But no, it

  hadn’t been a games console that was required – she called Ben in

  to make his pitch. He came and sat opposite his grandfather,

  still twirling the splintering toothpick before his absent eyes, and

  droned on about screen definition, processing power and – most

  importantly – bandwidth: It’s lagging, Gramps – lagging … s’like …

  s’like … I’m not really there … I’m not really there – and then I

  get killed again … and then I get killed again … and again … and

  again … His benefactor had responded with Victorian rectitude:

  Well … we wouldn’t want that to happen … Then, to confirm

  Ben’s assessment of the lethal – if virtual – situation, Zack accompanied

  him to his room and perched behind him as he sent his

  avatar scrambling across a landscape of mesas, cactuses and freeway

  underpasses jumbled up with the burnt-out shells of vehicles.

  Facing the triplet of screens, his own mind securely lodged in

  the pixelated brain pan of the rangy figure ever loping ahead,

  ammunition bandoliers crossed on its sweat-slick, bulgy back,

  the lummox was liberated into … loquaciousness: Have you read the

  Report from Iron Mountain, Gramps? he’d asked, and when

  Gramps hesitated because … it sounded like the sort of thing I ought

  to’ve, Ben ran on: It’s a top-secret YouEss Government report …

  Government report … Proves they’ve never had any real intention

  of pursuing peaceful policies … pursuing peaceful policies … War’s

  essential for the economies of the superpowers … for the economies

  of the superpowers … so war must be permanently maintained … be

  permanently maintained … Strange … Zack had thought then –

  and Busner thinks now, as the bus reaches the Archway and heels

  over to round the sentinel tower – a recently recladded smoky-black

  pipe which sucks up the drunk, the deranged, the poor … the

  autistic. Yes, strange – strange the way these conspiracy theories had

  mounted up throughout his own lifetime … the Zinoviev Letter

  brought the news of my birth, only to break, over and over, on the

  wilder shores of collective credulity. What did they want? Only

  certainty – any certainty: better the Elders of Zion or the Comintern

  – or even the autistic SeeEeOhs of Silicon Valley tech giants

  pulling the strings than … nobody. You should read it, Gramps …

  You should read it, Gramps … I’ll print you off a copy … I’ll print

  you off a copy … There’s a small group I belong to … sorta online

  forum … people interested in these sorts of things … in these sorts

  of things … Busner spots the street drinker – he’s quit the bus

  and, can of beer still in hand, waltzes across the road through a

  squall of leaves and plastic bags down-draughted by the tower.

  Prob’ly headed for the Whittington … Busner thinks of all the

  hospitals where he’s plyed the hypo … over the years, or otherwise

  restrained those who can’t restrain themselves, so tear the little

  Yorkies from the pensioners’ arms and … cuddle them to death!

  What was the bullshit Milla had bought into when Ben was little?

  Holding therapy! that was it: hanging on for dear life to the little

  bouncing ball of Benness, trying at all costs to prevent him stimming

  … but we couldn’t stop him being palilaliac … stop him being

  palilaliac … Well, it’s holding therapy I’ve been engaged in my

  entire professional life – and not just me, all my colleagues

  as well. Yes, psychiatrists, psychiatric nurses – medical doctors

  generally. Then there were the upright lawyers, the honest coppers

  and the staunch soldiers – all the capable arms the anxious and

  over-stimmed citizenry longed to be encircled by. But Milla had

  held on to Ben for so long he’s rooted to the spot! Held on to him too

  long – and fed him too much! Might he have an eating disorder ? If

  he did, would it help him to know? Prob’ly not – such diagnoses

  were useful only for triage on the battlefield of life. They were tourniquets

  to be tied round the forearms of chocolate soldiers to stop

  them melting when they step on an improvised neurotic device …

  As the bus groans up the steep acclivity of the Archway Road, the

  radio news, idly heard over breakfast, repeats: The Ministry of Defence

  have confirmed that Sergeant Brian Culcross of the Second Battalion

  Royal Marines has been killed in action by an improvised explosive

  device … Poor young man, he thinks – then looking round he sees

  the cyber-warrior has gone, taking his light-shield with him, and

  he’s alone on the top deck lager and limeade – whatever happened to

  that? He feels fairly certain it was still on sale in newsagents when

  his children were small – granted, this proto-alcopop had been less

  than four per cent proof, but nevertheless it’d been freely available

  to minors, evidence – if any were needed – of a more innocent era …

  In this respect at least:
Busner and his fellow parents had insufficient

  data – there’d been, as yet, no effective prevalence studies, so

  the dirty old men, the flashers and the paedophiles … carried on in

  plain sight. Staring at the flower-frothy front gardens of the houses

  leading up to the single concrete span of … Le pont des Suicidés, the

  old soul doctor seeks to shrive myself – For surely it was understandable

  that those who’d taken the Hippocratic Oath in the pinched

  and pallid fifties would feel themselves always to be, sensually

  speaking … on the ration: I’ve a couple of luvverly bits of throbbing

  gristle kept back for you, Missus Fitz – the ones Mister Maurice likes …

  Yes, another ingredient to be added into the mix … his uncle’s

  homosexuality. There was nothing much in the literature, so far as

  Busner could recall – no long-term studies of the effect on children

  of having a homosexual parent in societies where it’s illegal. Idly, he

  begins forming the parameters of such a study – oilcloth examples

  stretched over balsawood methodology … but will it fly? Moodily,

  he considers his own sexual orientation … no – no he was never my

  north or south, which would seem to scotch any case for nurture – as

  long as, that is, a sample can be considered statistically significant

  when it consists solely of … moi, a horny little devil … who, even

  in his teens, while Johnnie sobbed his heart out at the Palladium,

  was fixated on rather more sublunary things – throbbing things –

  my heart skipped a boop-boop-shee-boop! beat whenever I saw a

  gastrocnemius swelling above a white ankle sock … Throbthrob …

  Throbthrob … Throbthrob … Slowly, sadly, Busner becomes aware

  that the throbbing in his crotch, far from being the return of

  priapism … it was like a pogo-stick – so rigid I could’ve bounced around

  town … is an incoming call. He gropes in the pocket of his tracksuit

  bottoms, caught up in the same sick anticipation as when, having

  paid two bob plus a further sixpence for postage and packaging,

  he tore the latter off, put the exray specs on and dashed out into

  Redington Road, certain he was finally going to glimpse … the

  heavenly convexities beneath a Maidenform brassiere. CAMILLA! the

  phone’s tiny screen cries – and for an instant he thinks the phone is