by Will Self
how’d he be getting on at around this time? He and Sally would’ve
taken on a couple of local school-leavers to help with things around
their own establishment – which might be doing well enough, if,
that is, Jonathan were to stabilise his prescription drug habit, acquire
a small appetite and the skills required to satisfy larger ones. Don’t
forget the meat order from Lancaster’s! is the sort of thing Sally
De’Ath might shout down from their bedroom on a cold winter
morning. To which Jonathan almost certainly would reply, I phoned
it through yesterday, love, they’ll have it ready for me … If they
were dependent on the business for income, it’d be a parlous state of
affairs, but they aren’t – and being the sort of people they are – with
the invitation to the Lord Lieutenant’s Christmas Eve drinks party
quite likely prominently displayed on the mantelpiece in their snug
little sitting room – they’d prob’ly have a bit of money behind them.
Make sure they’ve put in the sausages and bacon, dear! Sally De’Ath
could conceivably call down. And it seems fair to assume, given her
age and class proclivities, that, despite having had just the one,
she’d’ve put on rather a lot of weight. She wouldn’t exactly be fat,
though – the riding would keep her firm, if solid. Because she’d
definitely ride, Sally – and encourage little Gawain to do so as well.
That the unwanted son he’d named for his discarded cavalryman
lover would turn out to be a natural horseman might just be one of
the consummate ironies which sustained Jonathan above the thick
and oily sump of depression which would – after nigh on a decade
pretending to be a heterosexual in the provinces – be ever threatening
to engulf him. Be that as it may, kindness would remain his
watchword – kindness could be the much needed catholicon, a
balm to all the moral queasiness which would affect him at times,
such that looking out of the window of the attic bedroom, where
he might well keep some mementoes from his Service days in an
old suitcase, he’d see the sodden acres of mud rising and falling, and
would stagger a little on the tipping deck of social convention. And
it might well be then – Sally and Gawain having set out for the
stables – as he struggled to remember how many guests there’d be
for dinner that evening, and how many had requested duck breasts
and how many chicken, that the phone would ring in the vestibule.
He’d probably take his time going to answer it – why hurry, when
it’s probably only going to be the Vicar, asking him if he’d consider
reading a passage from Luke at the carol service … And it came to
pass in those days, that a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all
the world should be taxed … The voice on the end of the line would
possibly be disguised in some way – either with one of the distorting
scramblers available commercially or with some more clandestine
equipment – but probably not: in any case, if the caller were to have
a verbal tic of some sort – such as palilalia – whereby a phrase is
repeated immediately, either in its entirety or partially … either in
its entirety or partially, then Jonathan could be forgiven for thinking
there was something wrong with the phone. I have your large data-set,
is a plausibly threatening entrée – especially when immediately
followed by: I have your large data-set … we need to agree the
terms under which I’m prepared to return it to you in its entirety …
we need to agree the terms under which I’m prepared to return it to
you in its entirety … Given how much Jonathan De’Ath has harped
on the brilliance of his memory, it might be far-fetched to suppose
that during all the kerfuffle of the move from Lambeth to Bardney,
not only had the retrieval of this cache of love tokens and its
relocation been … fluffed, but that he’d also forgotten all about it.
But he had. (I’ve always rather thought you made too much of your
photographic memory, Johnny – it seemed to me more of a parlour
trick than anything else. Granted, Sirbert was formidable at mental
arithmetic – and I daresay you inherited a little of his facility –
but the almost mystical construction you’ve placed on all this …
Well, it’s the sort of nonsense you’d expect from a drug-addled
hippy …) Memory loss can indeed be a side-effect of prolonged
use – both of methyphenidate and selective serotonin reuptake
inhibitors such as Fluoxetine. If that use is combined with steady –
albeit not excessive – alcohol consumption, the effects could be
considerably worse. Sitting in the vestibule of Dunbuggerin’ with the
dog-and-bone pressed against his shell-like, Jonathan could well
experience a dreadful little turn. All the horse brasses and brass
bed warmers they acquired from John and Brian along with the
business – and which Sally prevails upon the school-leavers she pays
five quid an hour to polish – could well begin to spin round his
weary head. He might think back to the last trip he’d made to
Mohandra Patel’s corner shop on the South Lambeth Road, where
he’d picked up the heavy old nineteen eighties attaché case, with its
two hasp combination locks. If there were such a man as Mohandra
Patel – a mustachioed, morose and paradoxically smiley-faced refugee
from Kenyatta’s Kenya, who’d been prepared for trifling sums
to do a number of small jobs over the years for the man he knows as
Dave Kendrick – then, Well, I hope you’re enjoying it out there in
the sticks, Dave, is the sort of thing he could be expected to say as
he took “Dave’s” twenty-pound note and slipped it into the back
pocket of his jeans, followed by: You going next door for some
tapas? Sitting in Rebato’s, a rustically themed Spanish restaurant
next door to South Lambeth News, Jonathan De’Ath could surely
be forgiven for having a large glass of Rioja, followed by several
more. This would, after all, be his swansong (Kann man Ruh und
Frieden spüren, eh, Johnny), and, while his father had in point
of fact had appalling taste in music – preferring to hum numbers
from Showboat rather than attempt the sublimities of Bach – at this
decisive juncture in his life, he might well hear Kins’s familiar tones
fluting in his inner-ear (Wo ein guter Hirte wacht!), and so reflect
on his twenty years of herding sheeple for the secret state. He might
meditate on the increasingly febrile nature of that state, which, as
he sits beneath the darkly varnished decorative wagon wheel bolted
to the artisan-roughened white plaster, revolves around his clotting
head, making of Rebato’s … a home from what’ll never be my home.
The unavowed special EssEyeEss electronic surveillance unit
inside British Telecom’s aluminium-faced office block, Keybridge
House – the secret tunnels which do indeed vermiculate the entire
subsurface of Vauxhall Cross, and which EssEyeEss employees use
to transit between VeeBeeArr and Tintagel House, the nondescript
&n
bsp; adjoining office block. The back passages and dirty alleyways linking
together the Hoist, the Vauxhall Tavern and Chariots Roman
Spa – amongst a number of other local, gay-friendly businesses –
these had been his stomping ground, and now he’d be stomping
away … If only he’d visualised this: a dark-haired man in his mid
forties, running a little to fat, but still upstanding – elegant, even –
walking purposefully towards Stockwell tube station, a chunky
outdated attaché case firmly gripped in his right hand. But after the
full bottle of wine he’d probably’ve drunk, Jonathan – in common
with his former colleagues – wouldn’t be capable of visualising
anything, so might well simply abandon the case on the quarry-tiled
floor and wander off in the other direction. Back towards the
river for a valedictory look at the deceptive bend, before tottering
to King’s Cross in time to catch the two-forty-eight to Lincoln.
(If it’s running – the engineering works on the East Coast line
are a national disgrace. But anyway, Johnny, I find your scenario
pretty implausible: tipsy or not, you’d hardly be likely to forget
this cache of love letters and associated material – a secret trove
you’d been assiduously concealing for years.) He’d be demob
unhappy, Jonathan would – freed from secret service and secret
affair alike. Hakuna matata … is reassurance easily offered when all
that bothers your life-partner, and the mother of your son and heir,
is that you remember: We’ve eight for dinner tonight … He would’ve
remembered that – remembered the steaks – fillet and rump, too.
Ensured the presence in the cardboard box of the ham-hock pies
Lancaster’s do so well – not forgotten white and black pudding,
some veal, too. Most important: he’d never neglect the beef –
because they’d have to have the beef. If Jonathan didn’t bring home
the beef we’ve both had it … He’d realise he’d lost the large data-set
on the train, as it was shuttling across the fenlands. Quite possibly
he’d be staring blankly out of the window at the blank sky and the
bare ground, and the very many piggeries, when he’d recall, say,
that Javier had offered him a complimentary portion of pigs’ livers
wrapped in bacon. A titbit he’d enjoyed so much, he’d quite forgotten
about the attaché case. No panic. He’d get on the blower as
soon as he reached Bardney – but no, Javier had less memory of
Mister Kendrick’s case than Mister Kendrick did. As lunchtime
had gone on, the restaurant might’ve got busier – there could’ve
been a party in from a nearby office, celebrating some hysterical
compliance clerk’s engagement, or health-and-safety officer’s charity
freefall. It’d be a falling sensation Jonathan De’Ath would experience
listening to the breathy voice of my blackmailer … He’d
think back to the first few days after the loss of the large data-set,
when – being analytic to a fault – with each successive hour that
passed the tension would in all likelihood have eased out of him.
Scrawled postcards and notes, unlabelled Dictaphone cassettes and
compact floppy disks which would be entirely obsolete, unless you
happened to be the sort of hoarder who also hung on to contemporaneous
computer equipment – none of it could’ve appeared
particularly interesting to an opportunistic thief, who’d quite likely
dump it all in the nearest skip, take the attaché case over to Electric
Avenue and flog it to one of the bric-à-brac stall-holders … might’ve
got a fiver for it. Yes, after a week or so, Jonathan De’Ath could
well have begun to relax a little. With each subsequent month
he’d likely relax a great deal more. Years could well go by during
which the whole immense and ulterior realm of cyber-surveillance
would come, kicking and screaming into the light – yet with each
one, Jonathan De’Ath would think himself and Gawain more
secure. Bradley Manning and Wikileaks – Snowden, and his
revelations – the slow welling up of oily calumny from the gutter
press concerning Camp Breadbasket – the ongoing enquiries into
Baha Mousa’s death and the fallout from the Battle of Danny
Boy: all were the result of agents in the field not observing a basic
protocol and writing things down … Careless whispers cost lives:
Yes, he’d kept the things his son’s namesake had written down and
spoken – but their love hadn’t lasted forever, and by now that postcard
of the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct – together with scores of other
scenic views – would’ve entirely rotted away in the Essex landfill
site the contents of the notional skip had, almost certainly, been
added to. The important thing is that the bulk of this data had
been in analogue forms. Yes, yes, of course there were a few digital
traces, cirrus scratches on the surface of the ever swelling cloud, but
there was no conceivable way that any entity – biological, machine
or cybernetic – could have gathered together the call logs from
North Yorkshire public phone booths in the mid-to-late nineteen
nineties, or the records of Bradford internet cafés during a similar
period, let alone correlated them with the movements of two given
individuals – no matter that those individuals were themselves
instruments of the state. I have your large data-set … we need to agree
the terms under which I’m prepared to return it to you in its entirety …
we need to agree the terms under which I’m prepared to return it to you in
its entirety … To which a reasonable response might be: How the
fuck d’you know I called it my large data-set? To which the breathy
blow-back could well be: You wrote it on a file card, Mister De’Ath,
that you sellotaped to one of the folders full of letters, postcards
and photographs – some of which are quite candid, naked shots of
a largish, blondish man who I’ve obviously been able to identify as
Gawain Thomas, formerly a Lieutenant-Colonel in the British
Army, now the manager of a leisure centre in Crickhowell … now
the manager of a leisure centre in Crickhowell … Others of which are
of nothing more significant than white plastic garden chairs …
nothing more significant than white plastic garden chairs … Are you
working for a state or non-state entity? could well be the sort of
question his former lover would’ve described as bone – but, sensing
this was no ordinary contact, Jonathan might nonetheless ask it,
and be rewarded with: I assure you, Mister De’Ath, I am entirely
freelance – what I do, if you’ll forgive a little spiritual pride, is
for the benefit of all humanity, and I do it entirely on my own cognisance
… and I do it entirely on my own cognisance … Given the
aspiration – both breathiness and blackmailing-wise – Jonathan
might be forgiven at this point for picturing his interlocutor as a
man wearing a Nehru jacket with a white Persian cat in his lap, who
sits in the splendid reclusion of his futuristic secret lair: a great
cavern full of helmeted men i
n uniform jumpsuits, carved out of
a solid block of Polystyrene and sunk deep beneath the ocean.
Forgiven, because in all likelihood his interlocutor would be a
man wearing a Nehru jacket – albeit one he picked up for three
quid in the Mind charity shop on the Kilburn High Road – and
sitting with a cat on his lap, albeit a moulting, tabby one with an
unimaginative name such as … Scratchy. How might Ben White-house-Busner
– bulky by name, bulky by nature – have acquired
Jonathan De’Ath’s large data-set? (Well … in any number of ways,
I s’pose. I mean, it does strike me – although I’m no expert on the
matter – that the computerised retrieval of data, the use of global
positioning satellites for navigation and even the integration of
utilities and retail distribution systems into the internet, has rather
bamboozled us all, such that we regard the persistence of material
objects in the real world as really rather, um … well … spooky.)
Yes, indeed – spooky. The world is big – humans and objects are,
for the most part, small. But both humans and objects persist in
time, and the stereotyped and repetitive behaviour of the former –
who will persist in doing the same things over and over, again
annagain – means that the coincidence of the two can quite often
be statistically correlated so as to produce at least rule-of-thumb
predictions – how else do you imagine economists make a living?
(I really don’t see what you’re driving at here, Johnny – and, by-the-by,
how d’you know about Wikileaks and Bradley Manning and
Edward Snowden, if it’s two thousand and five and we’re walking
the fifteen sad, scraggy red-faced miles from Shaibah Logistics
Base to the British Army’s air point of disembarkation?) Shut the
fuck-up, old man! How do you know anything at all – given you’re
dead! Jonathan bellows, words plucked from his mouth by hot
zephyrs and … shredded. Yet he’d also scarcely believe he was walking
through the sad, scraggy red-faced desert of southern Iraq, if it
weren’t for the creak and bang of tumbledown corrugated-iron pens,
and the baaing of oblong-eyed goats and oil-blackened sheep –
weren’t for all this, and also for the breathy voice which speaks to
him from out of a possible future, and straight into his inner-ear:
