by Will Self
galloping past her downy cheek, is as remote from him as when
she’s in his arms: he caresses her – and she responds ever so slightly,
her lissom body gently quivering, so that he thinks of fledglings
lying dying by shattered shells. She screws her eyes tight-shut when
he kisses her … and if I should die before I wake, and her perfect
pipette of a tongue takes samples of his … I pray to God my soul to
take. Some evenings, after they’ve been out together in Edinburgh,
and he’s on the last train back, he squirms in his seat, agonised by
his great balls of fire! His erection won’t’ve subsided by the time
he reaches Carstairs Junction, and he’ll quit the station doing a duck
walk … but Groucho’s rather than … ‘cause my Uncle took the
message and he wrote it on the wall. Yes, something’s stirring deep in
the damp flannel crotch of the nation – and not just the English
nation. Phil McTavish, who’s the only one of the charge nurses
Zack gets on with, jokes that everything – and everything, mind –
takes ten years longer to reach Scotland: See, Zacky-boy, the war only
ended here in fifty-five, right enough – while as for rock ‘n’ roll, we
can reasonably expect Scots instruments to be electronically amplified
sometime in the nineteen seventies … One mod con that definitely
hasn’t reached South Lanarkshire – or Edinburgh for that matter –
is the contraceptive pill. Young Doctor Busner tries to imagine the
young lady he’s mucking about with standing at the counter at
Montrose’s on Princes Street, with the pharmacist – a tall, balding
coot Zack’s had his own run-ins with – calling down Free Presbyterian
brimstone on her lovely virginal heid. From old masters and
the Nouvelle Vague, Zack has gained a vision of post-coital bliss –
man and woman together, entwined drowsily naked and unashamed.
After the shock treatments, the patients are taken back to their
wards for a resting period: bleached faces on starched pillowslips –
graven hands … crucified feet. Their cells are heated by electric coils
set into the concrete ceilings – so it is they switch from one current
to another: first galvanised, then grilled – and all in their modesty
gowns. The treatments come in groups of three or four, depending
on McClintock’s expert assessment of just how psychotic they are.
Looking down at the whey-faced creatures on the table, their
eyelids the only moving things in a world shocked to its core, Zack
has thought, Rien ne distingue les souvenirs des autres moments: ce n’est
que plus tard qu’ils se font reconnaître, à leurs cicatrices … Or possibly
that was … much later. When the current sparks they convulse,
and the patient orderly … a tricoteuse indeed, points at their bare
and pitiful feet: D’ye see, Doctor B – d’ye see his toes curling up
like that? That means it was a good one – a beauty, you’ll see … But
all he sees are the patients’ big toes, twisted into savage and bony
little parentheses – so ironising the bunions and corns of their
fellows – and all he thinks is they say toenails keep growing after
someone has died, and that this so-called treatment – sending an
electric current stabbing into an animal’s brain – is a kind of death.
– Will it be soft-going? she asks, one elegant and stockinged foot up
on the Javelin’s bumper. Y’know, Isobel, Zack says, this is a pretty
old banger, really, the Super just keeps it in mint condition – my pal
Bobby and a couple of the other trusties have to clean it every
Saturday morning, which is why it’s gleaming … Yes, the gleaming
Javelin is parked up at the base of Tinto Hill, and, as they trudge up
past indifferent sheep, he glances back from time to time, to see the
car … a flashing chevron sewn on to the buff material of the autumn
heather. Isobel walks ahead of him – and the going is indeed …
soft: he was treated to a suspender clip as she’d matter-of-factly
pulled thick woollen socks on over her stockings, and replaced
patent-leather heels with heavy walking shoes. Now the hem of her
pleated skirt swings wildly with each of her high-hipped strides,
and he sees … all that softness, and the white flash of saucy briefs
from the Pompadour range. Yes, she flings back, your pal, Bobby –
what’s that carry-on about, Zachary? Y’know, I can’t think it’ll
be good for your career to be seen to be too friendly with the
inmates … Blowing hard, Zack hardly knows where to begin with
this – and now, dipping the tea bag in and out of his waxed-paper
cup … small ball of tepidness, he says aloud: That was the very
moment at which I should’ve realised the thing didn’t have legs …
Ann looks up from her perfectly bound Escape and says, And? And,
Busner responds, chuckling, it was because of Isobel McKechnie’s
own legs that I didn’t … He carries on dunking the tea bag, because
the water isn’t sufficiently hot for it to properly infuse – carries on,
reasonably certain his reply will have wrong-footed her, but Ann
won’t take an answer for an answer – she goads him: And why didn’t
the thing have legs? Busner ponders this, and Simon – who’s been
slumped, mostly inert, since the train left Lockerbie – chimes up:
Giss your phone, Doc, and if I can connect to the wifi I’ll find out
about the train for Ardrossan. Busner summons the enigmatic black
slab and passes it across the table: Pass code, Doc? and Busner says,
It’s got recognition-thingie … Ben made me set it up – I just have
to place my thumb on the button-thingie … Simon looks at him
like I’m an idiot: You’ve still gotta ‘ave a pass code, Doc – your own
pass code. Iss four digits – you’ll’ve chosen something memorable,
like … an important year of your life, something like: Knick-knack
paddy-whack, give a dog a bone … or a crumb at the very least. He’d
caught up with her at the first of the hill’s false summits – I’ve caught
up with her at the first of the hill’s false summits … and Isobel does
indeed … give me a bone: Zack opens his arms and she nestles
chastely in them, while he strokes the hair ruffing up from the
confinement of her woolly bobble hat. Feeling the slim stalk of her,
wrapped in her bark of tweed and gabardine, Zack looks past
her shoulder, out over soft and successive hills. Clouds are ruffing up
above the valley of the Clyde – while the sun is already sinking to
the west, thrusting its rays up their vaporous skirts … P’raps he
should’ve taken her down to New Lanark, and they could’ve walked
up to the Falls – a famously romantic spot. All that water pounding
down on the ragged rocks … it might’ve stirred something in her
flinty soul. It’s Isobel’s to be seen to be which niggles at him, because,
he realises, this is the very nub of who she is: a young woman who
will, no doubt, grow older, wiser – become a brilliant doctor, keep a
straight back – heal and nurture, but, throughout it all never, ever
lose sight of what it means to be
seen to be. Each morning at Missus
Kane’s, Zack sits at the breakfast table, glaring at the back of her
fat neck as she patrols the tiny parlour, sniffing suspiciously: Was
that you in past eleven last night, Doctor Busner … ? and slicing his
iron-hard fried bread into a semblance of a dagger, while imagining
what it might be like to commit an acte gratuit. This much he
already understands: to be seen to be seen is the kiss of death – the
cold lips of conformity sealing your own … forever – and, Jew or
not, capable of passing or not, I refuse to live my life like that!
Yet still he strokes her hair – still she leans into him, and, amazed,
he senses her capable surgeon’s fingers twisting the leathern buttons
of his tweed jacket. An old canvas army knapsack hangs from his
shoulder – in it the escape-from-virginity kit he’d put together for
her that morning: two thick rugs liberated from Missus Kane’s
bailiwick, a thermos flask full of coffee, one of Maurice’s hip flasks
charged with a quarter-bottle of Bell’s, and a blueberry muffin he
ate in the cab on the way to Heathrow. It’s a fresh morning for June,
and, standing at the dropping-off point, sucking on a final gasper,
the Butcher feels goosebumps on his recently showered skin, and
the crepitation of his kippered lungs. It’s always been a problem:
dressing for these sorts of trips – ones in which he’ll traverse twenty
or thirty degrees Celsius in less than twenty-four hours. Squinting
towards the low rise of the Chilterns through his Marlboro smoke,
he smiles wryly (You really ought to consider giving it up, y’know
…), remembering the reversible jackets and other Sapperesque
stratagems he’d adopted as a young EyeBee officer – no need for
that malarkey nowadays (… and drugs? Even if they’re on prescription,
old boy, you can still develop a crushing dependency). Besides,
there’re some occasions on which it’s best to be yourself … be
spontaneous! He remembers, years ago, coming from the essbahn at
the Hackescher Markt – the Wall had only been down a couple of
years, and the middle of town was full of all sorts of riff-raff –
watchers, too. Close to his hotel, a street whore stopped him – some
poor double-denim refugee, fleeing the fashion disaster which had
been the old Soviet bloc: Be yourself! she’d cried to the cold night
air – her corpse breath sullying life itself, while her hand, clutching
his overcoat sleeve, had been tendoned with track marks –
precocious of her to’ve acquired a bad habit so well: Be yourself! Be
spontaneous! she’d urged him (Did you? Did you … go with her?),
and he’d laughed in her face: Eff-off, Christiane Eff – which’d been
most unfair, for how could she possibly have realised the careful
planning it required each and every day to be this self – that self …
any bloody self at all. At Security in Terminal Four the plastic tray
bumps to a halt, leaving the rollers spinning, and the Butcher thinks
of bluestones hauled all the way from the Preseli Hills, for this
situation is pretty fucking stone age … The rollers’re still spinning as
the woman in front of him expertly hefts the baby through the
metal detector’s arch, and, spying her little Dior clutch bag rocking
to a halt, snatches it up. But the security staff are having none of
this: Excuse me, madam! has the force of a command, from the one
with severely pinned brown hair who’s no doubt … childless. Standing
on the other side of the arch, watching the playlet unfold, the
Butcher admires the fluidity of their union: woman-and-accessory
– then thinks of Sally, who doesn’t realise he’s well aware of her
little subterfuges – the pill long since neglected, the diaphragm no
longer inserted. It’s greediness, he thinks: her hands on his meagre
buttocks yanking him into her. His sperm is an ingredient she needs
to make her own baby. His climax is of no moment at all – why
would you care if the fridge experiences pleasure when you get the
milk out? The security guard wears elbow-length, Preseli-blue rubber
gloves – the fashionable woman holds the EffAy cup aloft, offering
it to be frisked with perfect equanimity: she understands there’s no
statute of limitations – radicalisation might happen in the womb …
Although nothing as radical as what Sally hopes for: the demographic
bouleversement of … a spinster birth. Over brunch at the
Wolseley, she’s broached the question, dipping brioche – her own
increasingly doughy features … yellowy, envious. Dipping brioche,
she’s broached the question over brunch at the Wolseley – increasingly
yellowy and envious, her own doughy features … She’s spoken
of cycles, treatments, what might be available on the EnnAitchEss –
and he’s batted such things aside … she’ll have to go. He sees her
quite happy in the provinces. True, there’ll have to be numerous
cycles: around and around they’ll go, hormones cranking her reproductive
machinery againannagain – but at long last there’ll be the
dividend: a beautiful pink and burbling trophy … Sally holds out
to be taken by her sweetly boring husband. The Butcher has had
such a fate in mind for this let’s face it: greybeard … pushing
three years now. The pattern is well established: the Butcher will
introduce her to some sheepily good-natured fellow, who, feeling
forever sexually in thrall to her – he’s not that attractive, and, what
with the work-out her former lover put her through, much less
erotically sophisticated – will remain dutiful, faithful and – most
importantly – utterly incurious. Would you step through the
detector now, please, sir? says the other one, who’s equally lardy-arsed,
but with hair tied up in a turban. And suddenly tiring of the
charade the Butcher flashes his diplomatic passport and steps
around the arch. There’s a brief flurry of concern – a supervisor
comes scampering along the production lines of fear … then the
Butcher’s gone, striding past other transiting souls, who, unbelted
and unlaced, are doing the perp’ walk of late capitalism – past glassy
walls of whisky bottles and wire baskets full of stuffed animals and
neck cushions. (So much stuff – most of it complete tat. Really, airports
are basically shopping centres accessible by air.) The Butcher’s
Ferragamos are tightly laced – the Butcher’s trousers are precisely
cinched. The Butcher wears a midnight-blue medium-weight suit,
plain white shirt and a stab’s regimental tie – which is a dull green
shade, patterned with silver crowns espaliered by crossed swords
ding-dong, the witch is dead … He could’ve flown from Northolt
with the crabs – Herc would’ve taken him straight into the aypod.
Requirements had false-flag stuff for him – desert kit, too. You’ve
gotta be fucking joking, he’d said to Barrington Waring, with
whom he goes way back … I’m going in and out, not trying to make
the bitch come … And Barry, feeling perhaps that such locker-room
banter
is a little de trop, now we’re senior management, smiled
tightly and pushed one of the new laptops across the table. See this,
he’d said, chaps at the Doughnut have managed to slim the gubbins
right down. Looks like a bog-standard Toshiba – and if you pulverised
it and analysed every last fragment you’d find nothing to the
contrary … The Butcher, laughing, pushed it back: In and out,
Barry – y’know me, anything I need to bring back will be in here.
He’d tapped his own head with his own heavily encrypted finger. But
I’ll take a phunky phone if you’ve got one to spare … Barry did:
Looks like one of the new Samsungs – push-to-talk, wireless link-up
so you’ve email access, all that business. But if you do this …
and then … this, it’s a completely secure satellite phone – here’re all
the numbers you’ll need. Connect direct to the Chief or … whoever
… The phone lightly clonks against the Butcher’s bony hip as
he bounds along the travelator towards the departure gate, passing
camel trains of Kuwaitis, the womenfolk humped up in their abayas,
dragging giant wheelie-suitcases, while their menfolk stride ahead,
flicking prayer beads with one hand, the other swinging free,
as they talk to the mobile phones they’ve tucked up under their
headdresses. Clonking lightly against his hip, the Samsung Barry
gave him is his only luggage as the Butcher bounds along the travelator
towards the departure gate, buzzing – buzzing with the buzz
which ever buzzes through his up-ended shoebox of a house: the
buzz the black Venetian blinds cast on the white walls in the form
of ruled-straight shadow-lines, and which, in his mind at least, are
the visible expression of the (You don’t have to do this y’know)
electro-magnetic waveforms constituting life … the universe …
Sally’s never-to-be-born baby – ev-ery-thing … His only luggage the
Samsung given him by Barry, which against his hip lightly clonks:
his cheeks buzz as molecules of Roja Parfum de la Nuit lift off
from pore after pore – Buzzing, the Butcher is, from his breakfast
pill and the two double espressos he milked from his counter-top
Gaggia, buzzing with the matter at hand: not that this is the first
time his actions will’ve diverted the destiny of humankind, so
creating … a world of my own, but, nonetheless, even an operator as
