Phone

by Will Self

  there to welcome him personally … from the television screen. And

  once he’d shot this apparition with the remote, it’d immediately

  been replaced by the Prime Minister … and his difficulties. Busner

  knows David Cameron is Prime Minister because his own geepee,

  the ridiculously enthusiastic Doctor Faaris Zarq– … Zarq– …

  Zarq-something-or-other, asked him every time Zack-me went in

  to the surgery to have his postural hypotension checked: And

  who’s the lodger at Number Ten nowadays, Doctor Busner? Really,

  Cameron’s greasy pole has been … my gnomon: he thinks back to

  the man’s elevation in two thousand and ten. — That May, Zack

  had been mouldering away in a grotty rented flat on Fortess Road

  in Kentish Town. He’d already quit the family home to make it

  available to whichever of his children … and my childrens children

  … wished to reside there, and was seriously considering going the

  whole hog … by gifting the property to them in its entirety. For

  tax purposes, certainly, because … I was fixing to die. He’d sat

  there, in Room Five-Twenty, staring down at … the platters that

  don’t matter any more and been overwhelmed by shame – yes, shame.

  Who had he thought he’d been fooling? Had he imagined he was

  some heterodox devotee of Saiva Tantra, for whom popping the

  little Krishna-blue pill was … all part of the liberation process?

  Athena Dukakis, who Zack had encountered at the so-called luxury

  gated community which she and her father had made out of what

  had once been Friern Mental Hospital … did to me what I’d

  once done to the post-encephalitic patients. Or, at any rate, she awoke

  a part of him – Athena had a thing about conversions as well as

  erections, and, being a property developer, she’d worked on him for

  over a year – stripping him down, sanding him … before applying

  a sensual undercoat. It was disconcerting to summon up desire at

  will rather than having it incontinently thrust upon you – but Zack

  was amused, at least, by the way a hundred milligrams of sildenafil

  confirmed some feminists’ biological reductionism … including that

  of most of my … wives. After all, give a boy a loaded gun and he’d

  always feel duty-bound to use it – it was quite possibly this Maurice

  had been groping towards in his dotage, with his Push Button A!

  Although the poor old sod would’ve had to’ve lived another twenty

  years for effective treatment of erectile dysfunctions to give him …

  a tumescent B. After the detumescent end to their first date, Athena

  had said jollily: It’s up to you, Zack – you can let Old Father

  Time chop your cock off, or you can pop the little blue pill like

  everybody-bloody-else. He’d stayed the night at Princess Park,

  demurring – and his demurral continued the next morning, all the

  way to the Health Centre in Kentish Town. She’d parked outside

  in her sporty little red coupé, then sat in the waiting area, reading

  a leaflet about essteedees and the over-sixties, while doctors Zack

  and Zarq consulted. Back at her chilly penthouse – which featured

  an octagonal bedroom in one of the old hospital’s looming towers –

  Athena had disrobed, peeling off stretchy black Lycra to reveal the

  generous billows of her soft white flesh. Zack had been aroused –

  but that was the drug, wasn’t it? While the idea of sticking this in

  that had remained both anatomically and emotionally preposterous!

  Behind the sunken spotlights – beneath the fitted carpets and

  quarry tiles, hidden by the floor-length drapes … they clustered: the

  post-encephalitic patients he’d awakened forty years before. And

  not just those psychonauts who’d speeded into the star-studded

  seventies with their reactivated brains only to … splashdown once

  more, but his brother, Henry, was there as well – Henry, whose kite’s

  life had been spent fluttering about in institutions for half a century

  until … he got all tangled up in his own string. Sitting on the bed

  in Room Five-Twenty, staring down at his own “toes”, Zack

  had seen only this: the thin red line of the ligature cutting through

  the engorged dewlap which had once been his brother’s neck …

  toenails keep on growing after you die. Had Henry’s – had they curled

  ironically from the cremulator at Golders Green Crematorium even

  as the rest of him went up in smoke? Had they spiralled out over

  North London, snagging in phone lines, scratching past chimneypots,

  growing and spiralling, until there was enough primordial

  keratin from which to fashion … a brand-new schizophrenic. Pulling

  down Athena Dukakis’s stretchy-black panties, kissing her wiry

  pubic hair, feeling the davit of his own engorged penis … swinging

  below my belly, Zack had thought of … its payload: Henry’s nephew,

  his own eldest son, Mark. Mark this … Mark that … bad Marks …

  black Marks … He remembered him as a boy, all overbite and

  blondish fringe. Remembered his adolescence, obsessed by minutiae

  and their categorisation – remembered how, as Mark neared twenty,

  these data-sets hardened into durable worlds apart. And, finally,

  fought to repress the memory of Mark’s twenty-first birthday: the

  marquee on the back lawn at Redington Road, the lights revolving,

  the beat thumping, Mark’s young friends happily gyrating back

  on earth, while their host was orbiting a strange new planet. Zack

  had found him at last, sitting on the compost heap at the bottom

  of the garden, and saying over and over, I’m rotten to the core …

  I’m rotten to the core … It had hardly been ethical – Zack thought

  at the time … thought for many subsequent nights … thought

  last night as well, and Busner still thinks as he knick-knack-slaps

  across the lobby – to have his son admitted to his own acute ward at

  Heath Hospital. He looks back down the long, white-tiled corridor

  of his professional life and sees himself … disgustingly inserting

  his child’s case history into a data-set of his own devising, and

  pleased – Yes, pleased! – by the neatness with which it fit: There’s only

  so much sanity to go around in any given people-grouping, and that

  applies to families as well – who knew? I bloody-well knew … Knew

  most of all, p’raps, because, in the Busner Family, I kept it all for

  myself. It was true: Zack had continued staring unflinchingly into

  the abyss for all these years, while the others stumbled about on the

  blasted heath. Henry may’ve been long dead, but poor Mark was …

  still stumbling. And now, as he’s hustled towards an uncertain fate by

  these heavy, Mancunian men, Busner wonders whether Alzheimer’s

  itself may be a form of good mental health – after all, what could

  be saner in a world in which every last particle of trivia is retained

  on some computer or other than to … forget everything. If only

  he could … if only I could! – It’d been the Euston Road School time

  of year – when stark black twigs whipped the cold white sky and

  the west wind scratched cat’s claws on oil-skinned puddles
. Heading

  north from it, Zack had considered London’s struggle against

  abstraction – the distortions of its most fundamental geometry.

  The tower blocks subtended by the Hampstead Road were wonky

  in the fog, while the entire city aspired to the condition of …

  Harrington Square: a dirty and discarded nappy. En route and

  on foot, he’d been heading back from a lunch with Athena at a

  trattoria on Southampton Row – that’s the slap-slap, my soles smacking

  the paving stones, I turned my overcoat collar up, ahhh … never

  better. The lunch had been carefully scheduled, and had a single

  item on the agenda: processing their relationship … what is my

  penis – a pea? He’d enjoyed making love to Athena that first time –

  at least he had once the ghosts of his patients and relatives had been

  stuffed under her tapestry-covered tuffets. Enjoyed making love to

  her several more times as well – he’d been deeply grateful to this

  methodical and concupiscent woman for not rearing back in disgust

  once he raised the curtain on the … freak show my body’s become. As

  they’d made love, he’d felt her fingers bring back into cultivation

  those remote parts which, for want of anyone troubling to survey

  them, had relapsed into sterile wilderness … I became fertile again.

  Yes! he had – and remained so, even when the sildenafil was no

  longer coursing through his system – a state of affairs he found

  almost as unnatural as Athena’s attraction to his hairless shanks and

  apron of slack belly-flesh. Although not as outlandish as her fervent

  desire – after a few months had elapsed – that her new-old boyfriend

  should … meet her mother! It was what did for them – because,

  despite Missus Dukakis being a good decade younger than Zack,

  under his new, eroticised dispensation she was far too old … to

  be fanciable. And fancying was what he’d been doing – Athena

  reanimated the lover in him – but this charming man came chained

  to a repeat offender: Zack-the-adulterer, who wandered around

  town, his eyeballs rolling up the thighs of the rushing girls. He

  even played the odd game of … pocket billiards, hefting the cue in

  his underpants, feeling its turbid pulse as he’d wondered what’s up

  there nowadays? Not the anatomical obvious – although he’d heard

  tell they shaved themselves bare, which was, when you considered

  the current paedophilia panic … disturbing – but what shrouded

  it … this old man came rolling home! — Aren’cha gonna answer

  the bloody thing? – I’m sorry? – I said, aren’cha gonna answer the

  bloody PHONE! Gingerly, Busner removes the warm pulsing

  object from his jacket pocket, and is relieved to discover it isn’t his

  own penis but the smartphone … It’s the one Ben gave me, isn’t

  it? He peers down at the screen, which bears the flashing legend

  BEN CALLING. The MANAGER and the security guards peer down

  at it as well. They all listen, dutifully, to the nursery-rhyme ringtone,

  which rolls tinnily on through its ordinal verses … he played

  three, he played knick-knack –. Who’s Ben, then? asks the MANAGER.

  Aren’cha gonna answer it? the security guard with the cauliflower

  ears reiterates. There’s a button on the screen labelled REJECT,

  and, although it pains him to do so, Busner touches the red spot

  … and Ben’s gone, falling away, end over end, into the humming

  void. It was my grandson, he says, I’ll call him back later. Well,

  the security guard remarks as they move on, aren’t you the daft

  ‘appeth, your grandson’d probably be able to help you get out of

  this mess … That I doubt, Busner murmurs, that I doubt … He

  roundhouses his heavy, old legs, feeling the knick-knack of his ball

  sack as it paddy-whacks from thigh to thigh, but Zack isn’t in the

  lobby any more – he’s travelling back down the rabbit hole of

  memory, travelling back … way back to a cluttered little bedsitting

  room off the Corstorphine Road. He’s sitting there on a candlewick

  bedspread, holding a doll sporting kilt, sporran and tam in

  one hand, and he’s marvelling at all the careful planning it’s

  taken our escape-from-respectability committee to place him on Isobel

  McKechnie’s bed, under the glassy, gold-flecked brown eyes of her

  teddy bear, Fergus … Look your best – feel your best … Travel the

  Kayser Bondor nylon way! Her inner thighs hold his right hand

  in a slick, damp vice of hosiery … Travel Light! Travel Gay! Yet it

  makes no difference how lightly or gaily he caresses her – there’s

  only so far she’ll allow his fingers to travel. So far – and no further.

  It’s taken months to reach the land of inner-thigh – and at this rate

  it’ll be another year at least before he can confirm his suspicion that

  Isobel is indeed the proud if prudish possessor of a pair of … gay

  and saucy briefs from the Pompadour range. Which would be strange,

  so little correspondence is there between this upright daughter of

  the manse and the celebrated … grande horizontale. And so it’d

  gone on – her starched rectitude quite as much as her easy-to-care-for

  nylon lingerie having both been … expressly tailored with You in

  mind. On that Euston Road School afternoon, Zack had taken the

  tube from Mornington Crescent to Hampstead, then walked along

  Church Row, down Frognal and up Redington Road. All the solid

  Edwardian villas and Victorian terraced houses he passed had been

  defanged … Dying Christmas trees lay in their front gardens, or

  were propped up against railings and hedges. He’d been thinking –

  and he recalls this quite distinctly – about how disproportionate

  it had all been: the affair with Athena had lasted less than a year,

  yet there they’d been, still … processing it three years later! Proof – if

  any further were needed – that while love is mostly ephemeral …

  neurosis is never-ending. When he’d reached Number Forty-Seven

  they were waiting for him: the ghosts of Christmas present … his

  middle-aged sons, Daniel and Oscar, together with their partners,

  Pat and Vigo – his daughters, Charlotte and Frankie, and the

  latter’s partner, Dave? Thankfully, his youngest children weren’t

  there – Alex and Cressida, the annoyingly non-identical twins his

  third wife, Charlie, had borne him, were holidaying with their

  mother in Mantua … or possibly Mustique. Charlotte and Frankie’s

  mother, Lalage, was very much in evidence as well: cross-legged on

  a Moroccan leather pouffe, wearing a mad dress – wide at the hem,

  high in the neck, multicoloured and woolly all over – which made

  her appear to be some stoned Asiatic potentate. As Zack came

  through the front door, she was taking a deep toke on a fat joint

  of her home-grown marijuana – a toke she exhaled in a long and

  noisome smoke-streamer. It was, he thought, a bit rich – especially

  given she and the rest of them were evidently gathered for some sort

  of … intervention. It had all seemed horribly fitting: the large,

  open-plan living area – which had eaten up the old, ech
oing hall,

  Maurice’s study and the chilly nook which was always referred to as

  the Boot Room … as if we rode to hounds – had been very much

  Lalage’s own creation, along with a lot of other drastic remodelling

  she’d insisted on when they’d been married in the mid seventies.

  If Maurice were to be resurrected, he wouldn’t know what’d hit him …

  mismatched armchairs and sofas, slews of cushions, piles of floor

  ones – thickets of standard lamps, tussocks of table ones. All this

  clutter … A job-lot ill-lit by the spotlights Daniel had implanted

  in the high ceiling … a dismal, disordered scene, not cosy or homelike

  at all – more akin to the aftermath of some traumatic and

  forced departure … the chattels the Nazis put on sale … piled up …

  those wheelie-bags over there – they’d be selling Asians’ clobber as well

  nowadays — The parties to this latest intervention have reached a

  door inset in the wood-cladded wall at the foot of the spiral

  staircase. The Podium Restaurant’s MANAGER knocks – but any

  reply from within is rendered inaudible by yet more knick-knacking,

  as the smartphone bursts once more into life. For heaven’s sake,

  man, why don’t you turn the bloody thing off! Cauliflower Ears

  says, although he makes no move to take it away from Busner,

  only stands – as they all do – staring down at the trilling thing,

  which pulses back at them: NO CALLER ID … NO CALLER ID …

  NO CALLER ID — Lalage’s pot smoke had spurted from her horse-lipssssshhhhfffft!

  Zack’s daughter, Lottie, a rangily overgrown girl

  with … virtuosic ambition but little real ability had sprung from

  a floor cushion and launched into what was clearly a prepared

  speech – onanon she’d gone: her father was living a disorderly

  life … His liaison with a woman thirty years his junior had been

  embarrassing enough – most of all to himself. But that was in the

  past – now he was was neglecting that self mentally as well as physically

  – and then there were his companions … Zack’s mind had

  wandered … doesn’t it always, taking him with it to the upstairs

  rooms of suburban pubs … where men known as Tel introduce the

  acts and encourage you to leave your business card in a goldfish

  bowl on the bar, in the hope of … winning a hamper – Poor Lottie!

  grinding out smooth ballads from her permanently sore throat, wiggling