Phone

by Will Self

  and its pages stuffed into the air conditioner’s grille – it’s a

  leaf-riffling reminder, he thinks, of life on the bluey-green dirt-ball

  for those of us who plunge through outer-space. A reminder, too, that

  no matter how far I may wander I’ll never arrive – I’ll always

  be there, on … the blasted Heath! – You know what they get up to

  here, don’t you, Busner had remarked as the trio reached West

  Heath Road, crossed it and walked on between the lowering trees

  with their branches clattery in the chill wind. ‘Course I bloody do,

  Simon had said … or words to that effect, it’s the poofs’ adventure

  playground – the turd-burglars’ Arden … Busner was on the point

  of admonishing him for these cruel epithets, which might – just

  might – have been understandable in one of those eras, but no longer,

  when Ann had squeaked, Look! A centaur in the forbidden forest!

  It was: a snuffly, smoky-breathed, four-denim-legged, leather-torsoed

  and tremulous beast that, as they drew closer, metamorphosed

  into … two well-spoken men, one of whom wished them a

  polite good evening, even as his conjoined companion cracked an

  ampoule, releasing … the locker-room chemistry of amyl nitrate

  fumes. Zack had retched, staggered – might’ve fallen were it not for

  Simon’s supportive arm: You’ve fucked up, Doctor B, he hissed:

  you’re a time perv’ – you’ve messed about with time, groomed it –

  got it to put its slim young hands on your big old cock. You’re like

  all the others – Jimmy and Rolf, Max and the It’s-a-Knockout geezer

  – ‘stead of growing older and wiser, you’ve stayed stupidly the

  same while yer knackers’ve gone … south! Ann, her puckish face

  networked by the shadows of twiggy intricacy, had stopped shushing

  through the leaf-fall. And? she’d queried, to which Zack had

  replied: And my postural hypotension, and my raised cholesterol,

  and my lipids – and my bloody blood pressure! And that gall bladder

  flare-up I had a couple of years ago, and the benign melanoma they

  scraped off my neck at Tommy’s … And, And, And, And! On his

  last trip to the Bartholemew Road Heath Centre, Doctor Zarqawi

  hadn’t been available. It’d been a matter of honour, of course, to

  take whichever hack of a locum, or wet-behind-the-ears junior, he

  drew in the appointment lottery at the local group practice. Still,

  sod’s law, he got a dew-picked young Cheltenham Ladies’ College

  graduate: Oh, dearie, she’d said … or words to that pitying effect,

  and he’d searched her bright face for a scintilla of embarrassment,

  while she, fingers arranged, waited for him to detail his symptoms

  so she could … initiate data-entry, so allowing a more clinically

  experienced algorithm to … feel me up. I want to die … he’d

  begun, and hilariously she’d struck a few keys before pulling up

  short: I’m sorry? What’s that you said, Doctor Busner, you want

  to die? He’d concurred: That’d be the ticket, my dear – problem

  is, I’m just too damn healthy … It’d taken a while to manoeuvre

  her into the right psychic position, but soon enough she was

  reassuring … me I was perfectly unhealthy, running through his

  various chronic complaints, reminding him of all the medications

  he had to take, and eventually summoning on-screen his Over-Seventies’

  Patient Plan, just in case he needed refamiliarising. Yes,

  yes! I know all that, he’d cried, but why aren’t I iller? I’ve lived a

  life – smoked, drank, drugs even … Eaten what I wanted for

  years – exercised precious little … Surely you can come up with

  something that might actually bump me off … But no, there was

  nothing – nothing but his unnatural vigour, which, despite his

  abandonment of the little blue pills, continued unabated … I still

  burn with desire! A stinky-old-socks-potassium-permanganate sort

  of desire – a lust cooked up in a beaker over a Bunsen burner, drawn

  off with a hypo’ and injected directly into … my left circumflex

  artery, awakening him again annagain to the grotesque recurrence

  of … my lustful and virginal self! In the wood, with his ragged

  company, Zack had stood and bayed at the fingernail of new moon

  snagged in the Terylene clouds: Oh no, not this – anything but

  this! I can cope with disease – death would be a relief … But not

  madness, I can’t cope with THAT! His view halloo had been more

  evidence … of my time-perving, since it preceeded the phenomenon

  it should’ve been a response to: several more faunlike figures hobbling

  from ferny cover, their trousers dropped, their hindparts …

  pale, gibbous, cloven. But the real shock had been that of … the old.

  In the moonlight their faces were corpse-grey, while their hands

  shook as they girded themselves up. Don’t worry, lads, we’re not

  the Old Bill! Simon had shouted after the elderly cruisers as they

  limped away towards Golders Hill Park, while the instigator of the

  rout spat out … more despair: When you’re old and infirm, no one

  expects you to turn up for life … it’s understood: you’re not you any

  more once your body takes revenge … Revenge on your mind

  for forcing it, year in, year out, into these humiliating postures!

  Simon had said something about how cruising was a declining

  sport, really, bit like county-level test cricket – but Zack wasn’t

  having any of it: It’s a curse or a spell of some sort, he sobbed, stop

  my life – I want to get off! But toenails keep growing after you’re

  dead … therefore I must be … dead — Must be, because Busner’s

  going towards the white light, while the angelic, green-uniformed

  angel trumps, Youse a mucky little pup, aintcha, old timer … as,

  nose pinched, he plucks Gideon Bible pages from the whiffling

  vent … the Spirit of God moving upon the face of the waters. Busner

  stands there, an old and incontinent man – but Pete-the-Podium-Restaurant-Manager

  has seen it all before, he knows how to evaluate

  a wrecked hotel room for material rather than moral damage.

  He ignores the ripped-apart cushions, he disregards the witch’s hat

  lampshades that’ve been removed and married together on top of

  the glassy table. Next, Busner hears his gasp from the bathroom,

  Fucking hell! There’s more shit on the walls in here than there is

  down the bog! He’s back – and spots something under one of the

  bedside tables which he stoops to examine, then recoils from: What

  the fuck! Used condoms! Can’t bloody believe it – you ‘ad a tart

  up ‘ere, old man, didja – or what? Or what? Or a whatnot – or a

  poin-what-settia on a thingamajig … a whatnot… — She must’ve

  felt his eyes on her, because as she’d turned from the window he’d

  been appalled by her pallor … and her pride: Juss ’cause you’re

  on the game, don’t mean you can’t keep fings nice … Terrified

  he’d soil himself – and by extension the room – Zack was forced to

  concede that fings, as they were, were perfectly nice. Your first time

  is it, love? she’d flung over her shoulder as t
hey clumped up linoleum

  treads to where a gas meter hunched … clucking, on a small shelf

  beside the door that she unlocked and opened to reveal her carefully

  dusted … fings. Missus Fitz’s treacle tart, baked Alaska and jam

  roly-poly were all … nice enough, but, aged seventeen, intellectually

  and experientially omnivorous, well aware already of his uncle’s

  illegal predilections, Zack wanted his … just desserts. Yet the pathos

  of Daily-Express-reader-offer china statuettes ranged on the

  windowsill and a glossy photo of the Princess and the Captain,

  snipped from a magazine and framed courtesy of Woolworth’s,

  reduced him to nothing but … intestines and lachrymal ducts …

  When he’d spotted the tartan slippers on the oval crocheted rug

  beside the single iron bed, he’d been almost … completely undone.

  Especially when he should’ve been in Wembley with Godley Godfrey

  and some of their other friends, who, out of sheer curiosity

  rather than any quest for salvation, were heading for the stadium.

  During what had followed – the business, because that was the

  word she’d flung into his mind on Romilly Street: Business, love? –

  he’d tormented his conscience with visions of the paradise he’d

  abandoned. The torture had begun as he removed the trousers of his

  twelve-guinea suit … you can never go wrong with three made-to-measure

  pieces, folded and shakily draped them over a bentwood

  chair. This much he recalls: they slid straight off! His contemporaries

  had got their first suit for their first job, or their confirmation,

  or their bar mitzvah … mine was for my first fuck. In Croydon, the

  Great Awakener’s carefully crèmed hair was a cross planted on the

  Golgotha of his bare brow, and his index finger admonished as it

  kept time for the heavenly choir: We’re longing for a creed to

  believe! Pom-pom! We need to sing to believe! Pompety-pom! A song

  of salvation! Pom-pom! So we may turn in repentance of our sins!

  Pom-p’pom-pom-schshhhh! Zack had waited in his underpants while

  she disrobed behind the half-opened wardrobe door. He heard

  rustling, oofing, the snap of a suspender. But when she emerged she

  was in a floral-patterned housecoat, of which, as she arranged

  herself over his prone form, she parted the sides, exposing her

  deflated breasts, their nipples heavily recessed, and the machine-gunned

  barrage balloon of her belly. Rubbing against him, mouth

  open … and opener, her face was blanched in the light of an

  indifferently shaded bulb. Struggling up, Zack had attempted

  to place his mouth against hers – she’d administered a deft slap,

  together with words … I’m not your Locarno sweet ‘eart, love … that

  remain with him to this day, while simultaneously and expertly

  fondling on the French letter, a prophylactic he couldn’t remember

  her retrieving from pocket or purse – a prophylactic he wishes had

  been stretched and stretched and stretched, until its chalk-dusted

  manifold encased … all space, all time — so affording him complete

  protection from Pete-the-Podium-Restaurant-Manager’s fulsome

  and ever multiplying contempt. For, even as the Romilly Street tart

  begins to seriously rock ‘n’ roll: Well if you wanna ride it you gotta ride

  it like you find it, he holds up two of the sad saggy things, wondering:

  What’ve you done with these johnnies, mate? They look like

  fucking elephant’s ears … Then his eyes slide to Busner’s exposed

  crotch area, and, despite all the smelly dreadfulness of plastic-laminated

  info-sheets torn from their ring binder and shit-smeared,

  he summons the fine muscle control needed to lift a single eyebrow.

  Standing, preposterously, on his dignity, Busner remarks, I’m a

  grower – not a shower … Balling and dropping the condoms

  into a waste-paper basket, Pete-the-Podium-Restaurant-Manager

  becomes all … business: You do realise, don’t you, that it’s illegal to

  pay for sex on licensed premises? Shalluz phone the dibble, then,

  Pete? interjects the security guard, who won’t be happy … ‘til

  I’m led away in chains. But his superior remains so: But, given your

  age and medical condition, and having established there’s no permanent

  damage to fixtures and fittings … to fings, you mean …

  I … Well, I’ll have to run it up the chain, but I reckon they’ll back

  me up. Back you up concerning what? Busner says guilelessly, as

  he drops heavily down on to the mattress, and head in hands contemplates

  their … unnatural persistence in growing. My decision,

  Pete-the-Podium-Restaurant-Manager says sententiously. Which

  is? – Which is exactly what Mister Marshalsea decided when you

  wouldn’t give him your phone: pack up your bits and bobs, put

  your bloody trousers on and GET THE FUCK OUTTA MY

  HOTEL! Busner is conflicted. Shouting at an old man – a paying

  guest, no less – isn’t what you expect from the managerial-level

  employee of an international hotel chain, but then it occurs to him

  – for the first time since he materialised to find his grower resting

  on the breakfast buffet – that before he protests he should at least

  try to remember exactly what did occur in Room Five-Twenty the

  night before. The past, Busner thinks, is an international hotel

  chain: it doesn’t matter where you are in the world, the corridor

  looks exactly the same – simply consult the little card-folder your

  key card’s in to find out which room you were allocated … The

  world of yesterday seeps up from the soaked mattress, and Busner

  sees himself doing the things he so recently did: taking the lift from

  the lobby, reading the advertisement for the cocktail bar, buffing old

  brown brogues … not bare feet, inserting the key card, opening the

  door, and encountering a homogeneous mass of cushions, upright

  lampshades, the taut, navy-blue cover of the tightly made bed and

  the beautifully bound Gideon Bible … no thought for the morrow,

  for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. The O’Keeffe

  parody had been securely on the wall, the minibar chock-full and

  the ashtray empty. The television had softly sung, You got me

  slippin’, tumblin’, fumblin’, sinkin’ … until he found the remote

  control, read the on-screen salutation: THE HILTON DEANSGATE

  WELCOMES DR z BISNER, and, after much fumblin’, negated its

  inhuman error. It’d been late afternoon when he’d first entered

  Room Five-Twenty, and, for a long while, after he’d put down his

  staff and bowl, he’d stood by the floor-length windows staring down

  at the men wearing white hard-hats who, four storeys below, were

  doing things on the scaffolding attached to an old viaduct. What

  exactly is it they’re doing, Busner had wondered – and, still more

  superfluously, P’raps I could do that? For the past two or three years,

  in line with his preposterous physical rejuvenation, he’d experienced

  an equally bizarre resurgence of this adolescent omnipotentiality …

  gissa job – I could do that – and do it well, rising up the professional

  ra
nks, despite natural disadvantages of birth – and now age – at a

  meteoric rate. Doctor, lawyer, deep-sea diver – all were possible.

  But no – he’d been laid off, and this was therefore the dropping-off

  point, when, all the inertia of a lifetime’s Sunday afternoons having

  finally accumulated, he shot down the sickening and fatal slide …

  In Room Five-Twenty … then, as now, doubly exposed, he despairs:

  What am I doing in Manchester? A city with which I’ve no great

  connection … Then, as now, his grandson’s breathy instruction had

  returned to him: When in any doubt about what you’re doing or what

  you should be doing … and returned to him again: When in any doubt

  about what you’re doing or what you should be doing … together with

  the rest of his tutorial: the detailed schedule, stored in the phone’s

  diary function, was itself interactive, so he could finger out more

  facts about the future. Ben had also told him that programmed

  into his own computer, at home in Kilburn, were instructions to

  send his grandfather’s phone nudges … alerts … pulses – pushes …

  and even to make automated calls. It is of no account, Gramps, how

  the symptomatic panoply manifested by Alzheimer’s affects you, so

  long as it remains the case that the phone is in your possession …

  so long as it remains the case that the phone is in your possession … Did

  he truly speak like this? Yes – yes, he did … and does, an odd mix

  of profundity and pretension that in anyone else would be ironic,

  but which for Ben seemed to be a sort of … collaging, the bits and

  pieces of his idiolect snipped from newspapers, textbooks, broadcasts

  and, latterly, the web, and rearranged into communicative

  bursts so long as it remains the case that the phone is in your possession

  … It’d been Ben who’d counselled the rest of the tumultuous

  Busners to accede to their patriarch’s self-abnegation and cease

  blocking his mendicant path … tumbly-tumbly, neatly bumbly, slippin’

  … slidin’ … Not by appealing to their sympathy, nor their

  reason – and certainly not to their own dormant spirituality, but

  simply by shouting: IT’S FINE! I’LL GET HIM TO TAKE

  A PHONE! Then … as now, in Room Five-Twenty, the senile

  and electronically-tagged former psychiatrist wiped, swiped, then