Phone

by Will Self

  him, and instead moulded their mud into offers and counter-offers

  that they slung at each other with increasing force and velocity,

  simultaneously using the calculators on their mobile phones to

  make extempore valuations and mortgage calculations. It’d been,

  he thinks, a fine small-scale re-enactment of … the fervid London

  property market. And as they factored away their patrimony, he’d

  stood there murmuring, Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? a sort

  of wondering mantra, that, as it persisted grew in volume, Who am

  I? Who am I? WHO AM I? until he was belting it out: WHO

  AM I?! WHO AM I?! and they all fell silent. Who am I? he’d

  then asked them … calmly, quietly, professionally, because I don’t

  know the man you’re all railing at – do any of you really know him

  either? It can’t be dear old Zack Busner – can’t be him … He’s a

  jolly sort of a fellow – bit of a duffer, p’raps, but basically sound …

  No … (small moist sniff) … can’t be him … Daniel had been

  moved to hug his father … although I sensed his flesh crawling as he

  did so and say a few calming words … the way I once did to him –.

  How-ow-ow! Busner cries aloud in the ascending lift, How-ow-ow

  did it come to this? For he remembers a dear little bundle of curls –

  its eyes wide and fixed on the odometer as … we all willed it to click

  from thirty-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine to …

  forty thousand … How-ow-ow the world turns! Zack had stood

  there, his son’s arms around him. He’d smelt his son’s hair – could it

  be true that it had the same musty, floral aroma as when Daniel had

  been a little boy? Can it also be true that this remains embedded,

  deep in the most primitive part of my rhinencephalon, while all the

  rest of my brain is being choked in a convolvulus of neurofibrillary

  tangles … ? He’d stood there some more, while his children and

  their partners fell silent – then he’d gently confided, D’you know,

  I think I might be losing my marbles … After which a different

  sort of hell broke loose: all of ’em weeping, wailing … gnashing

  their fluoride-preserved teeth … Ting! Teeth – or so they say – carry

  on decaying after you’re dead … therefore I must be … dead. There’re

  sheaves of flimsy disposable toothbrushes on top of the maid’s

  service trolley, together with a pile of fluffy-white towels, a wad of

  teabags, and a tray of individual shampoo and conditioner bottles –

  everything, in short, necessary to restock these hundreds of little

  luxury cells, each one of which has been the setting for … a thousand

  scenes of provincial life. Waywardly, Busner wants to examine

  the shoeshine machine next to the lift. C’mon, you daftie, says the

  remaining security guard, I’d’ve thought you’d want t’get yer keks

  on an’ clear out. But no – Busner shrugs him off and, sticking one

  bare foot under the brush, lifts the other to shakily depress …

  Button A. The sensation isn’t unpleasant: a scratchy buffeting – No!

  Buffing – No! Buffering … for, seen side-on, the whirring brush

  would look like the strange on-screen circlet, ever composed and

  recomposed by … sheaves of flimsy disposable lines. So there’s no

  alternative but for everyone to wait … until the buffeting, buffing,

  buffering stops – C’mon, feller, you’ve not even got yer Salfords

  on – you’ll mess yer feet up something terrible … Their arms linked

  in both of his … le canard enchaîné … the odd trio waddles on,

  Busner thinking of all the corridors he’s ever escorted the distressed

  down – corridors sunlit or neon-irradiated, corridors latterly with

  piss-stained cork, rubber or linoleum tiling, but to begin with pockmarked

  herringbone parquet. Now the escort has become … the

  escorted, yet Busner hears in the Mancunian whine the faintest of

  after-echoes, borne in the slipstream of fugitive memory: Knick-knack

  paddywhack, aye, thass a funny old rhyme right enough – lemme

  tell ye, Doc, down on the farm they know what it means – taught me,

  too … There’ll come a time, Doc, when dottelt or no, you’ll remember all

  I’ve told you – then … then … it’ll be the end … There are trays piled

  with dirty dishes outside some doors – others have newspapers

  rolled up in condoms dangling from their handles. Busner breathes

  deeply, drinking in old perfume, stale air-freshener, rotten cigarette

  smoke – and other more cloacal odours, as the great battle rumbles

  on between sepsis and antisepsis … toenails grow when you’re dead –

  therefore … They pull up short in front of Room Five-Twenty, and

  my prop-forward says, Get yer key card out, man. Busner fumbles

  in his jacket pocket … smooth and smoother, pulls it out. The security

  guard says, Awww, thass not yer card – it’s yer bloody phone!

  And to underscore its significance eyearrdoubleyou … the obsidian

  screen shines NO CALLER ID, and the old black Bakelite phone

  the Superintendent kept in the dead-centre of his resonating desk

  rings and wrongs and rings some more, down all the cobwebbed

  corridors of Busner’s mind … C’mon, answer the bloody thing, will

  yer! The security guard tries to snatch it – but Busner’s too quick:

  thrusting the phone back in his pocket, he discovers the key card

  with the same grope this old man came rolling … home –. Christ!

  It’s mingin’ in ‘ere – and ‘angin … Pete-the-Podium-Restaurant-Manager

  screws up his eyes and grimaces into the glare blaring

  from the full-length windows, while the security guard – who,

  Busner now realises, is … a very young man indeed – slumps against

  the wall, clamping a hand over his mouth and nose … he played

  knick-knack on my thigh – which is what sensible Pat had done that

  afternoon at Redington Road: sat him back down on the sofa,

  soothed and stroked him. The others then came forward sheepishly,

  one at a time, and offered their own instances of his forgetfulness

  and otherwise aberrant behaviour, so’s to confirm … my own self-diagnosis.

  Realising how subdued he was, they drew closer and …

  chewed over my misfortune. For a while he’d been content to sit there,

  sopping it all up … Oscar, tears in his eyes, describing some strange

  charade Zack had performed for a posse of outraged mummies

  in the Starbucks on Hampstead High Street – miming the thing

  he’d just done in the smallest room … with the largest commode,

  because he’d temporarily forgotten the name of it. Pat, still patting

  away, felt it incumbent on her – as a qualified, if under-employed,

  psychiatric social worker – to give the rest of the family a potted

  lecture on Alzheimer’s, its etiology, progression and – she’d been

  weirdly gleeful – inevitable outcome. He’d withstood being Patronised

  for a while – then began struggling to rise. Lottie had hung

  on one arm, Frankie on the other – for a moment it’d seemed

  they’d … forcibly detain me. Staring at the bright light of … the

  void outside Room Five-Twenty, Busner remembers this unca
nniness:

  a black crow flying past the tall windows by the staircase. Zack

  had thought then – Busner thinks again, now: This isn’t my true

  home … I’ve got a home on high … For years I’ve run my eyes

  along egg-and-dart cornicing … L’Origine du monde, but there’ll

  come a time, surely, when I’ll be … reborn. But Lottie’s words had

  seared him – are searing him still: You – You can’t possibly be

  allowed to sign away all your assets when you can’t even remember

  where your mobile phone is! The effect on her father had been

  violent: I hope not one drop of the semen they pump into you is

  MOTILE! he’d bellowed – then, in the ensuing ruckus he became

  aware of … pill-dust … fag smoke, and Simon’s arm shielding him

  from the warring factions of … my own family! Pat, Daniel, Oscar

  and Lottie pushed for him to be removed, post-haste, to a place of

  senile sequestration, there to be confined to a sun lounge … for the

  rest of my natural life, and may my insurers have mercy on my soul!

  Frankie and Vigo had at least cavilled at such outright cruelty,

  because: If you lot seriously believe Dad’s senile, then legally speaking

  whatever bit of paper he’s signed is invalid! Yes, indeed – yet

  Busner fears his invalidity is more profound than mere legalities:

  looking at the chubby blonde woman in her arty and asymmetrical

  clothing – felt patches, crocheted squares and woolly panels, all

  in shades of utter, beige neutrality – he’d been unable to suspend

  disbelief … Is she my blood-relative? Even as she stamped her well-shod

  foot and fulminated, he’d seen her regress and regress, until

  she was small enough to be smeared with sun cream and tears

  and placed in … that paddling pool we had – the red one. Lottie had

  always had the fairest and the thinnest of skins: Daddy! Daddy! She

  took my – But, really, had her childhood been that bad? Could any of

  my own derelictions, or her mother’s dopiness – which at least had

  the virtue of being utterly consistent – be a justification for this, his

  own daughter, shouting at Zack in what’d been the family home

  since her Great-Uncle Maurice bought it in nineteen forty-six for

  three thousand and seven hundred guineas: Let him! Let him give

  it all away! So what if he’s only doing it ’cause he’s bloody senile – he

  never paid any attention to us when we were kids – now, at least,

  we’ll benefit from his pathological inattention … Simon must’ve

  secreted them somewhere nearby, because he’d simply handed Zack

  his staff and begging bowl: it’d been time to go. Vigo came out into

  the road after them and tried remonstrating – not profound and

  heartfelt entreaties, though, only … the sort of ineffectual twaddle

  you’d expect from a Danish acupuncturist, who, for what seemed to

  Busner to’ve been aeons, has been … my son’s bum-boy … toenails

  grow when you’re dead … therefore this old man, he played five, he

  played knick-knack on my … For Christ’s sake! Will you answer that

  bloody phone? But no – he won’t answer it in Room Five-Twenty,

  any more than he would in the Podium Restaurant, the lobby or

  Mister Marshalsea’s office. Instead he stands in the debris of the

  hotel room – for it’s been comprehensively wrecked – and stares

  down at the blinking, pulsing BEN CALLING … BEN CALLING …

  BEN CALLING … not seeing this writing on a small and glassy

  wall, but the cold and drenched privet hedges he’d slashed at with

  his staff, as, together with his ragged company, Zack had jinglejangled

  towards the Heath, passing beneath the curtained eyes of

  other … highly desirable detached properties. BEN CALLING … BEN

  CALLING … BEN CALLING … or is it London? He remembers

  going to view the house with Maurice for the first time – there’d

  been an Anderson dug into the sunken garden and nothing entertaining

  in the bomb-damaged minstrels’ gallery. Built before the

  last war, Maurice had muttered as he prodded fallen lumps of plaster

  with his shooting stick … the shooting stick! Busner saw him now,

  propped up by it in the corner of the hotel room, just as he’d once

  been in the paddock at Plumpton, ogling the jockeys, so seductive in

  their bright-billowing silks. In the twenties this would’ve been a family

  home for some prosperous broker or bon-bon manufacturer … Maurice

  had crunched over the broken glass in his immaculate handmade

  shoes … never skimp on shoe leather, my boy – begin polishing at the

  sole if you want to shine when you’re on your uppers … And Zack,

  aged eight, had crunched after him in his own serviceable winter

  boots, his navy-gaberdine school mac tightly belted. Maurice had

  gone on: Then came the slump, and some flash-Harry developer

  must’ve carved the place up into flats – but it’s taken a pasting,

  it’ll need a great deal of work … They’d been standing in the

  shattered scullery by then, Busner thinks … suetty stuff rotting in an

  enamelled basin – mangled mangle toppled on its side … incy-wincy

  spiders picking their way over peeling paint … but anyway, his uncle’s

  clincher had always been the same: It’s a keen price … a very keen

  price indeed. – She’s a snake, that daughter of mine – a duplicitous

  snake! He’d made this judgement, Busner imagines, as they’d

  gained the brow of the hill and begun stumbling down towards

  the massy blackness of West Heath. Ann had been dragging

  her feet in the gutter – she wore bargain-basement jeans and a

  charity-shop hooded top. She’d stopped, turned her raw pink nose

  up and sniffed the evening air judiciously … posh woodsmoke from

  decora-tive stoves – cloves and other esters of mulled wine … And?

  she’d queried, And? It’d been this And, he thinks, that … spurred

  us on, compelled them all to keep on going, joining one defunct

  moment to … the next dying one. Yes, And! Zack had expostulated.

  And I happen to know she and Daniel had a valuation done

  before Christmas … I saw the letter – usual estate agent bullshit:

  Six Beds … Five Recep’ … Games Room … Windows Leaded

  Lights … Unique … Premier Hampstead location … Former

  Literary Residents … Superb Views … Surrey Hills to the south

  … Sunken Garden … Generous Three-Car Garage and turning-circle

  drive with original brickwork porte cochère – And? the very

  picture of pathological entelechy had … put in: And? So that

  Zack had counter-queried: And? Leading Simon to interpret: She

  wants to know what the asking price’d be if it was put on the

  market now, like … Months later, standing in Room Five-Twenty,

  looking down at the little slab in his hand graven with BEN CALLING

  … BEN CALLING … BEN CALLING … Busner considers

  that of all the oddities whirling around his foggy-old head recently,

  this has to’ve been the strangest: the preternatural sensitivity to

  fluctuations in the fervid London property market of those …

  diagnosed with peetee-essdee! But at the time he’d simply told them:

>   Eight-point-five million pounds! No, really – a cool eight-point-five

  million quid! He’d cried it out to the cricked necks of the

  streetlights – shouted it into their mistily haloed faces, not forgetting

  to add: Or near offer! – And he’d gone on … of course I did:

  Which means, together with a seventh part of Maurice’s entail –

  which I may not’ve added to, but I haven’t subtracted from – all of

  the ungrateful whelps are as RICH AS BLOODY CROESUS!

  Whereupon Simon had sniggered, If you were my patient, Doctor

  B, I’d’ve you shot up wiv enough ‘aloperidol to stop a bull-elephant

  in ‘is tracks. Why? Zack had shot back. To treat me for what,

  precisely? A smile plays around his froggy lips, as he stands in the

  swampy mess of Room Five-Twenty and summons up Simon’s

  foolery: Not to treat you, Doctor B – to punish you. Punish you for

  lettin’ yourself go, man – big cheesy-thing you are, emi-whasit …

  eminentish … Should be dingifacky-facky and imposing, like.

  ‘Stead yer actin’ like a fuckin’ idiot – eight-point-five million

  squid? Thass a lot of Big Issues … Whereupon Ann, who’d been

  standing stirring leaf-mulch with the toes of her trainers, said,

  And? – What the hell did you do in here? Pete-the-Podium-Restaurant-Manager

  really is holding his nose. This place is a shit-hole

  … Indeed it is, Busner concedes, peering at the stripped bed:

  the top sheet, a creased canvas, has been painted with brownish

  arse-strokes and reddish blood-ones. Pete-the-Podium-Restaurant-Manager

  and the cauliflower-eared security guard advance along

  the short corridor into the main body of the room: inexperienced

  gallery-goers … looking for some sort of plaque that will explain …

  what the hell it is they’re looking at. Drained gin miniatures and the

  jars which once contained a selection of Mister Porter’s Luxury

  Nibbles are scattered across the long strip of desk, skipping over the

  rope of the hairdryer’s flex – which is still on and whirring away,

  its warm jet agitating the quiver of slim, white cigarette butts in

  the ashtray, each bearing the smoosh of scarlet-painted lips. Busner’s

  aware of a vernal riffling, as of fresh foliage in equinoctial breezes.

  The Gideon Bible has been removed from the bedside table, shredded,