Phone

by Will Self

something which threatens his precious nation’s security for him to

  put the call in to VeeBeeArr. If they then call him back while

  he thinks he’s calling me? Well, I can’t be one hundred per cent

  certain, but I believe this may be sufficient for all the wires to

  finally connect and the upload to begin. The alternative scenario –

  which I’ve already painfully experienced again annagain – is for

  VeeBeeArr to obtain the number of Gramps’s smartphone, put a

  call in – and for him to answer it. In which case I can feel the barrels

  of the Met’s armed response unit already boring into me – so many

  pump-action shotguns, their side-by-side muzzles … dead eights,

  pointing the way to eternity. I can see a tactical response unit pitching

  up at Wagon Wheels as well – Jonathan fancies himself, I think,

  as something of a philosophucker, who once saw in the strobe lights

  of a gay disco the way human mind and vision are interleaved:

  he turns his aquiline nose one way, I think, and the rabbit’s inside

  the cage – he turns it the other, and hippety-hoppety … the rabbit’s

  free. As for Gramps, I consider him to be the unwitting discoverer

  of this epochal capability for transcendence which humanity stands

  on the brink of acquiring – so it only seems fair it should be his own

  guilt-ridden and unravelling old psyche that’s the first to be absorbed

  into the great cloud of digi-being. It’s quite impossible to imagine

  what this physical revelation of a psychic truth that’s ever been

  present to him will feel like – quite possibly he’ll think he’s achieved

  some sort of enlightenment. If Gramps had’ve assaulted Isobel

  McKechnie on the summit of Tinto Hill, then Bobby would’ve

  escaped – and upon recapture he might’ve said those awful things

  to the young Doctor Busner, terrible and enduring judgements

  concerning his character, which he’d very likely have repressed

  for all these years. Obviously not completely repressed – only

  Fan-Dabi-Dozi-Freudians believe such a nonsense is possible. No,

  they’d’ve bumped up to the surface of his consciousness from time

  to time, informing and reinforming his spurious commitment to an

  existential approach to mental illness – lurking in his buffo performances,

  which began when he was a young barefoot doctor at

  Kingsley Hall, and went down to the basement to help Mary Barnes

  with her shit-painting – continued at his short-lived therapeutic

  community in Willesden, and indeed manifested throughout his

  career in his crouching, so as to look his psychotic patients directly

  in the eye and tell them I understand – and I sympathise: believe me,

  I really do – I understand about … the air loom, or the transuranic

  generator, or the mobile phone – whatever it is THEY have

  cunningly adapted so as to enable THEM to mess with your head.

  He would’ve sat with Bobby in the cell set aside for the patient-prisoners

  who weren’t allowed open visits, and under the bored yet

  viciously judgemental eyes of a ruddy-fucking screw received this

  damning estimation: You’re a coward, Doc – a coward to your very

  marrer, so you are. Ye couldnae help me, and ye’ll never be able t’help

  anyone – your heid’s full of nonsense an’ blether … Och, an’ pride

  as well – a fearful pride … and it would go on like that for some

  time – a pitiless character assassination, delivered in Bobby’s reedy,

  importuning tones. At the end of it, young Doctor Busner wouldn’t

  be simply demoralised – he’d know his life had jumped the rails,

  such that henceforth everything would have this dreadful air of the

  conditional, the provisional – and the not quite real. And a few

  years later, after the Cuban Missile Crisis, when it became known

  that a Soviet submarine commander had refused Khrushchev’s

  order to fire his nuclear missiles, Zack would, quite likely, have

  understood this might be what’d happened to him at State Hospital

  on that October Sunday in nineteen hundred and sixty-two: his

  entire life had been pushed into the realm of the possible and the

  probable – such that nothing about it would ever be definite. Which

  is why he might find himself floating back up into consciousness

  on the three-eighteen service to Ardrossan Harbour from Glasgow

  Central with little clear memory of how he got there – not just

  proximately, but unable to clearly identify the pattern of moments

  that, linked together, could’ve produced any such eventuality. The

  vigorous but elderly Scotswoman sitting opposite him could well

  appear completely bald to begin with. Then, as Busner gains more

  awareness, he might think – because people do think such things,

  critiquing their own visual epiphenomena: the sun dogs which howl

  in the corners of their brilliant vision – that this image of her

  pinched and pious face is being downloaded on to his mind-screen,

  which is why there’s a certain amount of show-through – in this

  case of the antimacassar behind her head, with its logo’s enjamb-ment

  of Scot and Rail. But, becoming more alert, Busner could very

  well be forced to recognise that yes, he’s sitting with Simon and

  Ann in a group of four seats, and that opposite them is indeed an

  elderly Scots Buddhist nun, in full dark robes, her head completely

  shaven, wearing bifocals and telling the beads of her rosary, as a

  ScotRail steward comes along the rocking carriage pushing a tea

  trolley. Simon’d prob’ly say something like, Are you going to Holy

  Island, your Reverence …? ’cause he’s no fool, really – and, while

  almost certainly mentally defective now, for years he’s understood

  perfectly well how to be of good report … The Buddhist nun would

  be, one imagines, stern but not dismissive – despite the fact that

  Simon, having slept rough last night, would certainly smell. After

  all, it ill behoves any mendicant to look down on another. She’d

  tell their little group she would indeed be taking the ferry over to

  Brodick on Arran with them – and that from there, there’d be a

  bus connection to the little village of Lamlash, where the boat

  would arrive to take them over to Holy Island. But that, no, she

  wouldn’t be part of the three-day course on mindfulness the three

  of them had been enrolled on by Doctor Busner’s daughter-in-law

  – because, in all likelihood, she’d have garnered the name and

  status of the wild-looking, white-haired man wearing the bilious

  tweed suit, who looks to be in his late seventies, still hale, if a

  little bit confused – rather, she’d be decamping pretty rapidly to

  the far side of the island, where there are a number of secluded

  meditation huts, in one of which she’s intending to spend several

  months of reclusion, listening to the gulls’ screeching, the hawks’

  piping and the fighting of the feral Shetland ponies – whose battles

  for masculine supremacy quite often result in fatalities on the rocks

  below. A great shame – especially given that, since Holy Island was

  acquired in the nineteen nineties by the Buddhists of the Samye<
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  Ling Monastery in Dumfriesshire, there’s been a concerted programme

  to make this a haven of biodiversity, teeming with native

  species, rather than a killing field … No doubt, the elderly Scots

  Buddhist nun wouldn’t be averse to continuing on this theme –

  averse, neither, to conversation itself, of which she would very soon

  have a complete and utter dearth. However, the contemporary world

  being the way it is, the strong likelihood is that her interlocutor’s

  mobile phone would at that very moment begin to ring insistently –

  although ringing, she’d surely testily remark, is hardly the right

  word for the tinny tunefulness it’d exhibit as it knick-knacks into

  life, and plays right through the numerical rondo for a full minute

  before Doctor Busner manages to locate the device and hit REJECT

  CALL. In the slightly stunned atmosphere which always follows a

  forgettable incident of this sort – the inversion of public space, such

  that the entire world is reduced to eight feet by three feet, the precise

  dimensions of the old Kay-eight and Kay-six telephone boxes

  designed by Giles Gilbert Scott, whose own father was responsible

  for the rather more expansive and luxurious appointments of the

  Foreign and Commonwealth Office – the nun, wishing to extend

  an olive branch to this humiliated and confused elderly man, could

  well recall Pete Seeger’s version of the nursery rhyme, which was

  released as a single in the late nineteen fifties. She might also

  remember seeing a film of him playing it on television – his long

  neck angled strangely, the expression on his eternally boyish face

  strained as he knick-knacked his way through the tediously ordinal

  nonsense verses … Aye, but ye ken wha’ a paddywhack is, now don’t

  ye, Doc? Ye ken it’s the cord wa’ holds the poor wee sheep’s heid up – if ye

  cut it, the animal cannae raise his heid again. To which the elderly

  Doctor Busner – who, like many afflicted with dementia, finds the

  distant past readily to hand, while the present forever eludes his

  grasp – might reply that the version he had in mind when he chose

  the ringtone was in point of fact being sung by a hundred or more

  Chinese orphans as they were led to safety, during the Japanese

  advance into Manchuria, which was the precursor to the war before

  the war before the war before the war before the war before the

  current one. To which the elderly Buddhist nun would possibly

  respond by asking if Doctor Busner had himself grown up in China?

  To which Doctor Busner – not being even seventy per cent gaga

  yet – would certainly respond that no, he’d heard the nursery rhyme

  sung by the orphans in a film he’d seen in the early nineteen sixties

  called The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, about a Christian missionary

  in China. To which the elderly Scots nun – showing that

  irritation common to occidental Buddhists, who’re driven to this

  self-annihilating practice by their own screeching egos – could very

  well reply with a choice remark about the lazy inferences afforded

  by sight. But Doctor Busner would likely not respond to this, sunk

  in these self-same lazy inferences as he might well be – and seeing

  there Doctor Robinson, played by the veteran character actor

  Moultrie Kelsall, who stands on the steps of the Chinese Missionary

  Society’s residence in the town behind the Nationalists’ lines

  and cries out, I’ve been praying night and day – we’re not leaving

  without those children! To which Curt Jürgens playing Colonel Lin

  replies, I’m sorry, Doctor– breaking off because they both hear it:

  the children’s reedy voices lifted in happy song – and both then see,

  coming through the ancient gates with their flanking rampant

  dragons, Isobel McKechnie playing Ingrid Bergman playing Gladys

  Aylward at the head of the fugitives. And when the rondo’s done –

  at least for now – the four mendicants would have passed through

  the purgatory of the ferry terminal, and might well be sitting up on

  deck with the dogs and their owners, listening to the triply guttural

  sound of Glaswegian being gobbed through a public address system.

  Sitting – one suspects – on red plastic chairs bolted to the buckled

  green-painted plates of the softly heaving deck, and either idly

  scanning a notice stuck to a bulkhead advertising a bus tour of

  Arran which goes round and around all day, such that you simply

  have to hop on and hop off to see the principal attractions – or looking

  beyond the ferry’s bows, to where in the mid-distance Holy

  Island is being calved by Arran, in a great and milky mist cloud.

  This being a phenomenon fairly often to be observed in the Inner

  Hebrides late on a sultry day in early July when the midges descend

  to skitter about on your Oh So Soft skin. Skin that would, so to

  speak, come into its own that very evening, when, after what one

  assumes would be an excellent choice of vegan dishes prepared by

  spiritually seeking volunteers from pulses, polenta and the like,

  those enrolled for the three-day mindfulness course would gather

  in the Peace Hall, a modern building across the courtyard from

  the old, harled and whitewashed farmhouse, which one imagines

  would be the main centre of the Holy Island community. Here,

  under wide, wooden, Scandinavian eaves, the fledgling psychonauts

  would unroll their mats, gather their cushions and do their best to

  assume a half-lotus, or at least a cross-legged position in front of a

  young Sinhalese Theravada Buddhist monk called something like

  Bante, or Banghe, or Bhante – frankly, my Pali ain’t what it used

  to be – before he, one hopes, shows them his own copy of the

  Diamond Sutra, inscribed on the leaves of an ancient codex bound

  in dark wooden covers, then lays it on the polished pine floor, and

  sets beside it the two mobile phones he uses to time the session

  overall and the three periods of meditation. Sitting there on a

  chair – because Bhande, whom we can picture as a smiley-faced,

  Nescafé-skinned fellow, his firm breasts visible in the décolletage

  of his orange robes – would’ve said he didn’t expect the older participants

  to cross their legs. Doctor Busner might well set to one

  side any lingering cynicism, provoked by the advertisements he’s

  seen about the place for Dharma Handicrafts, and throw himself

  wholeheartedly into the practice. Feeling the air whistle into his

  crusty old lungs – hearing it clarinet down through his aged and

  hairy nostrils, while concentrating hard on the little Hitler-moustache-shaped

  patch of skin on his top lip that his expelled

  breath brings to life as he breathes in and out, over and over, again

  annagain, Doctor Busner could well feel he was reaching the point

  where he’d be released from Samsara. And when Bhande struck a

  bell three times and commanded them all to bring their awareness

  back to the sounds in the room, Busner would almost certainly

  hear the little groans and oofs made by those who were rising and

  stretching to either side of him: an ex-soldier wit
h post-traumatic

  stress disorder, and a young woman with an electrified shock of hair

  on her narrow skull, who might now turn to Busner and say: And?

  To which Busner could well reply: And now I think I feel refreshed

  enough to speak to my grandson. There wouldn’t be much mobile

  phone reception in a place like Holy Island, one suspects – but if

  you walk through the peace garden, past the statues of the Buddha

  half hidden by the luxuriant flowers, then head out of the gate

  and down to the foreshore, and make your way along, clambering

  over stiles and swishing through bracken already drenched with

  dew, I believe you might reach a point where, with the dusk fast

  falling, and the peregrine falcons looping double loops high overhead,

  and the seals snuffling in the shallows, one of the little dots

  which indicate signal strength in the top-right-hand corner of

  your phone’s screen would turn from white to black, whereupon the

  phone would instantly thrum into life. At that hypothetical

  moment, no seventy-eight-year-old retired psychiatrist, tired and

  confused, could reasonably be expected to check the name of the

  caller before he touched his finger to the representation of a red

  button. No, he’d be more likely to be thinking – as he had been that

  morning – of his dear, long-departed uncle, and of how Maurice

  always used to bellow into the phone when he answered it: Push

  Button A! Push it, I say! He certainly wouldn’t imagine for a second

  that if he answered the person – or entity – who’d been trying

  to reach him all day, and who goes by the teasing but minatory

  ascription NO CALLER ID, he’d bring down the full weight of the

  security state on his beloved grandson. Nor would he suspect that

  if it was BEN CALLING when he touched the definitive red spot,

  he might at that instant find himself absorbed into a computerised

  collective consciousness – but he certainly would be aware of the

  man who at that very moment is striding along the pathway,

  through the wheat field, towards the isolated copse which hides

  the old church of Goltho. There’s a golden retriever running out

  ahead of the man, smashing its way through the ripening wheat …

  Bonnie … Bonn-ie! The dog runs back towards him, then runs away

  again, circling him over and over. In the man’s pocket there could