by Will Self
detached and faintly dismal house there’ll be a chilly vestibule
choked with muddy wellies, old shooting sticks and the golf club
Pongo saw the burglar off with. They may’ve exiled their only daughter
to boarding school, yet in the aftertones of their honking and
braying he’s detected … fugitive elocutionary echoes – they probably
decant their cornflakes into Tupperware boxes … At any rate, as their
grandson had grown, the Pettigrew-Whitehouses proved entirely
lacking in the savoir faire needed to deal either with him or with his
distressed parents. No – that’d been left to his other grandparents,
not that Busner had cooperated much with Miriam, the patterns of
shared-parenting having been for so long in place: the pick-ups and
drop-offs, the iniquitous entrances and transgressive exits, timed to
avoid farcical collision – they were easy to apply … unto the third
and fourth generation. Had he done right by Ben? Busner’s grandson
was now twenty-seven – he’d picked up a little work at last – online,
naturally – calculating sporting odds for a bookmaker, but, apart
from family affairs, his social life remained non-existent … a house
cat – he shits on his mother’s tea tray. And recently … worryingly Ben
had begun mouthing – and remouthing – strange, oracular statements:
The time is coming … The time is coming … When the weak
will be made strong … When the weak will be made strong … So it has
been written in the code … So it has been written in the code …
In Room Five-Twenty, on the evening of his arrival in Manchester,
Dr Z Bisner, sic, had slumped on the drumskin of his bed – and,
although his grasp on the finer detail had been shaky, this much he
did recall with painful clarity: Simon’s hands on Oscar’s throat –
Simon shouting, You bone cunt! You total fucking zero! If you
weren’t one of the Doc’s kids, I’d kick the shit out of you and use
it to paint your fucking poofy khazi! As he’d sat there on the
bed, Zack’s fingers had gone all fidgety – as nowadays they so often
do … and photo had succeeded photo on the phone’s screen, each a
precise vision of … another screen. And he’d thought: There’s a fateful
symmetry here between these images-of-imaging obsessively
recaptured – Ben had taken thousands of screen-shots of his own
gaming – and my own rejection by the flesh-of-my-flesh … For
Zack the conclusion had been inescapable: they preferred the virtual
him to the actual one – preferred images and video-clips of him to
his physical presence … Preferred digits on a bank statement or a
house-price index to taking any responsibility for his care … Fair
enough. Possibly Zack’s behaviour had been a little outré – inviting
Simon and Ann to stay with him while he was flat-sitting for Oscar
and Vigo, but the lost cat had been nothing to do with them: one
moment it’d been there – the next gone. Had he put the creature
out? Or even down? That Oscar and Vigo’s baby-substitute was
called Schrödinger should’ve made its loss predictable, since you
didn’t have to be a nominative determinist to believe they’d been
asking for it … Simon’s hand cinching his windpipe, Oscar had
screeched, I’m not throwing them out! I’m not throwing them out!
While his poor old father roared in reply: If they go, I go! againannagain.
How could he have known Schrödinger was a house cat?
He’d never heard of such a thing before – and now nobody knew if
the dumb moggy was dead or alive … Released by Simon, Oscar
had sat and wept: I told you not to let him out – told you very
carefully … left a big bloody notice taped to the back door to that
effect! While Zack shook his time-buffeted head, aghast that the
flesh-of-his-flesh should privilege fur over blood … There’d been no
formal arrangement, but Busner had thought everyone … understood
one another. Now he’d reached the life-stage of renunciation,
and was divesting himself of all his worldly goods and obligations,
he considered it well within my rights to pitch up for a few days … as
and when … as the mood takes me. There were plenty of spare rooms
at Redington Road – Frankie had one, so did Lottie. There was a
put-me-up at Camilla and Ben’s, while Oscar and Vigo were away
most weekends … antiquing in the provinces, which was surely a
suitable fate for non-breeders … put a few coats of varnish on that –
no one’ll know it ain’t Chipperfield … There were so very many of
Zack’s progeny: if he outstayed his welcome at one establishment,
he could simply pick up his staff and begging bowl and … move
on to the next. Obviously, given his advanced years and his health
issues … shat myself – nothing worse, it would’ve been folly for him
to set out on the noble path during the damp and chill months – but
the plan had remained: he’d do precisely this once spring came …
lest you think I never can recapture, the first fine careless rapture. He’d
had old Lionel’s boy, Dave Wax, make him a suit of yellowish
tweed. Zack had told the son: The Munis, girdled with the wind,
wear soiled garments of yellow hue. To which the ageing schneider
replied, Dunno ‘bout all that, Doctor Busner – but this is a most
distinctive piece of cloth, I’m sure you’ll agree. He’d hobbled along
to Smith’s on New Oxford Street and bought a suitable staff – really
a shooting stick, so he could prop himself up … from time to time.
Then, on the way back to Oscar’s in Belsize Park, he stopped at
Heal’s and purchased a rather nice wooden bowl, which looked to
have been roughly adzed from some tropical tree and felt pleasingly
abrasive to the touch. He was still pleased when he reached the cash
register – but then: seventy-nine pounds and ninety-nine pence for
a bowl! A bloody tribal salad bowl – whatever the fuck that means!
It’d been, he thought at the time, a perfectly reasonable response –
although when the ambulance returned him to Redington Road
he’d had to concede things had … really got rather out of hand.
It was incidents such as these … mere contretemps which Daniel and
Pat, Oscar and Vigo, Frankie and Lottie, all said were … forcing
our hands, exactly the sort of idiom you’d expect them to use, grown-up
babies that they undoubtledly are – Daniel, tiptoeing now
into the hushed zone of retirement, still addresses his father with
a mixture of cravenness and aggression Daaa-aad! that’s achingly
adolescent. Toenails grow when you’re dead – therefore I must be …
down there in the cold earth, with them uncurling from the ends of my
rotting feet … questing up towards the surface … strange growths …
Get with child a mandrake root … Sitting on the bed the previous
evening, he’d felt sanguine enough about it all. They didn’t want
him – fine, he’d gone. As Maurice would’ve said, Nothing is worth
having that isn’t … freely given — four quid for water! Four-fucking-quid!
But in the night, once Niraga – or
Nikki, because that’s what
she’d called herself: Nikki! – had left, Zack’s mood darkened …
and darkened some more. From behind the counterfeit O’Keeffe
there’d come cough-cough-cough-coughulations that’d tangled up my
mind and choked sleep to death –. – Whozzat? Didja say sumfing, old
feller? The young security guard looms over Busner, his fresh face
beaming with malicious glee: Nikki? Didja say, Nikki? Was that the
name of the brass what you ‘ad up ‘ere last night? Your girrrrlfriend,
is she – your little bit of fluff? And the old man hadn’t the wit to
contradict him … I’m an orphaned child still — a rat-baby crawling
up a rusted drainpipe … I’m the scale accumulating in a kettle … the
mould on a Wonderloaf – all things crusted … and obscene … although
he knew then – remembers now – the name of the young British
Asian social worker, who, moonlighting as a prostitute, had come
to him in Room Five-Twenty, and who would always be … without
passion: Niraga, he burps – and the security guard rears away, while
all the push-and-pull of last night’s vaginal exam … corkscrews into
me. — Pop! Camilla had poured her Gramps a glass of supermarket
plonk and commiserated. – I’ve only just this minute hung up on
Dan. He and Pat’ve found you a retirement community nearby –
Rosslyn Hill, I think. Anyway, unless the two of you can convince
them this’ll work they’ll do everything within their power to stop
you going … This much I remember: Camilla setting down the two
wineglasses in two neat loops of the computer cabling festooning
Ben’s desk – Camilla, kindly and concerned and capable of great
attentiveness so long as she isn’t off … capering in the rosy bower of
her … vast and improbable love. So, she’d continued, you’d better
pay thorough attention to what Ben’s saying, whether or not you’re
willing to admit that you’re getting rather … um, forgetful –. I am!
Zack interrupted. You are? She’d peered at him with her kindly
eyes. I am, he’d agreed, I am forgetful – it’s true. I’m also, er, highly
emotionally labile – this I cannot dispute, Milla. But I’ve spent my
entire career trying to impress on my colleagues, my patients and,
especially, their relatives quite how damaging putting a label on
someone can be. It’s one thing to adopt a term such as Alzheimer’s
– or autism, for that matter – as a heuristic … an interpretative
device, a way of explaining … things – but when you say, He’s got
Alzheimer’s. She’s autistic … it’s so definitive – a label – it makes
people behave in certain rigid and unthinking ways: You’re senile,
You’re on the spectrum, therefore you’re like this, and you’ve got
to take these drugs and live there and do that … He had, he now
concedes, probably grown rather emotionally labile at this point, but
Camilla, instead of blurting out, Oh, Gramps, you say things like
this all the time, checked herself … She’s read the patient information
leaflet so knows better than to upset someone with Alzheimer’s
by … drawing their attention to their own forgetfulness with a knick-knack
paddywhack give a … give a … give a what to who precisely?
— Put these on, you nutter, says the security guard, handing him
his tweedy trews. And as Busner stands, angling his foot, he
teeters … totters, and might fall were it not for Pete-the-Podium-Restaurant-Manager,
who, taking his elbow, dismisses his colleague:
There’s no call for talk like that, Dave – this man’s still a paying
guest, you can get back to your other duties now, I’ll manage Doctor
Busner just fine. Once the door to Room Five-Twenty has shushed
shut, he resumes: Better do up your flies … You aren’t too steady on
yer pins, are you, I’m surprised your people let you run around like
this … And Busner, once he’s succeeded in fastening his trousers,
waistcoat and jacket, feels sufficiently buttoned up to reply: I’d rather
have bruises than bedsores, young man – and yes, my people are
trying to get me put away, you’re right on that score … He sees the
his staff poking out from behind the counterfeit O’Keeffe, and,
stooping to retrieve it, adds, If it weren’t for my grandson they’d
have me in a bloody care home … He struggles back upright and
flourishes it: He’s an utter whizz at computers, my Ben – he’s
devised this system for his old Gramps, it’s all here on this mobile
phone … Busner summons the talisman from his pocket – holds
it up so Pete-the-Podium-Restaurant-Manager can see … That’s
him, together with his parents, anyway … Anyway, Gramps, Ben’s
words return breathily, Anyway, Gramps, it don’t matter ‘bout labels
an’ stuff – not now. Thing is, s’long as you don’t forget the phone
you won’t forget anything else – ’cause it’s all in the phone … All
of it: what you gotta do – when you gotta do it … what you gotta
do – when you gotta do it … Actually, speaking with the precise
meaning of semantics, Gramps, it isn’t all in the phone – it’s there,
it’s here on my computer, it’s spread throughout the entire world
wide web … spread throughout the entire world wide web … ’cause
they all sorta interact, right. So, my computer’ll send your phone
updates … pushes … alerts. The phone’ll vibrate, and all you gotta
do is touch this button with your thumb and there it’ll all be on the
screen … and there it’ll all be on the screen … But here’s the really
cool thing … Ben had petted the mouse, his eyes slippin’, tumblin’,
fumblin’, sinkin’ down the screen as he thrilled: See here, these’re all
the cognitive exercises I’ve put together for you. Some’re simple
sorta tests – general knowledge, crosswords and acrostics, Sudoku-type
puzzles … crosswords and acrostics, Sudoku-type puzzles … And
if you look here – here’re more interactive games-type things,
with these you can improve your hand-eye-coordination … fine
motor-control … that sorta thing … hand-eye-coordination … fine
motor-control … that sorta thing … Zack had studiously maintained
eye contact with Camilla while addressing them both: So, so
long as I’ve got the phone, it’s like you’re looking after me? Ben
nodded – rapid little dips of his big head: Yeah-yeah, always
connected – plugged into and rooted through the great mirror of
being … Always connected … Always connected … I might be
wandering, Busner thinks, terribly confused, yet I’ll still be sending
that craziness back, with hey, ho, the wind and the rain, to the big
executive brain for which all foolish data is … but a toy. There is,
he thinks, a certain retributive justice about this: it is, perhaps, a
fitting punishment for the self-absorbed knave they … shut their
gates ‘gainst, for the terms of endearment have, he realises, been
completely reversed … With all his children, at some point in their
adolescence, lying awake in the master bedroom at Redington Road
child was out there in the world, its burgeoning sexuality a sort of
barrier, or … firewall – that’s what they call it, cutting off the intense
physical sympathy he’d had for them in earlier childhood, when he
could make-believe his hug would protect them from all humanity’s
evils. Now this child was exposed to it all – yet still vitally connected
to him by a tendril, a feeler … a pseudopod, which had
extended from the ruptured cell of the family to probe about in the
wider world. A pseudopod he’d no way of controlling any more –
yet which sent him back confusing perceptions. Data he would
analyse and find constituted experience, occasionally of pleasure,
but often of … pain. It had been agony! Yet it was altogether just –
for what were relationships between parents and children if not
passionate love affairs experienced in reverse? Liaisons that began
with the most intense physical intimacy – and ended, decades later,
with the parties involved sighting one another, at a dull party, across
a crowded room, and thinking … She looks vaguely familiar. His
children had gone slippin’, tumblin’, fumblin’, sinkin’ into emotional
quagmires and pub brawls, regardless of the thick hanks of nerves
still … plugged straight into my cerebellum! He’d writhed, he’d
sweated and, ignobly, he’d longed for the day when they’d receive
just a little of his own … desolate data – for this, too, was an agony,
this slippin’, tumblin’, fumblin’, pissin’, crotch-dampenin’, stumblin’
sudden old age. And his mind – what was it now, save a whirlpool
in which past-present-and-future all revolved, together with a
mess of shit-and-piss-and-shit-smeared-paper, leaving his body
squatting here in the moment. – They look like a nice lot, says
Pete-the-Podium-Restaurant-Manager. Now, if you’ve got all your
bits, we’ll get you checked out – ‘less you’ve changed your mind,
and you’d like Mister Marshalsea to get hold of your folks …
Get hold. Indeed, because getting hold of people and, still more
pertinently … being held by them was all that mattered. Last night,
when he’d poked the words escort agency into the search engine