Phone

by Will Self

  as Zack had piloted them through the London traffic, en route

  from one bloody charlatan to the next … You should be grateful,

  he’d said – or phonics to that effect – because even thirty years ago,

  the recommended treatment for children like Ben was –. I know!

  I know! She soundlessly shouts down this voice from the past:

  I know – parentectomy, the removal of the child from the evil

  refrigerator mother who’s completely frozen her own child’s emotional

  development. Which was why, whenever Ben was surrounded

  by happily laughing children, he … screamed and screamed and

  couldn’t wait to be alone again. Camilla remembers how confidently

  Zack had circled the steering wheel with one hand, so the car

  slid across Park Lane and slipped round annaround Marble Arch –

  strange you’re such a good driver … She recalls saying to him

  then – and againannagain: Yes, he wants to be alone – but alone

  with me. Which was certainly true, although when they were

  alone together … he scarcely noticed me. Or, rather: Ben only paid

  attention to his mother when she was trying to give him the

  latest guaranteed therapy. Which consisted of holding him tightly

  in a secure, mummy-bear-hug, for four separate periods of thirty

  minutes each, spaced throughout the day. This had been just one

  of the rigid prescriptions she was … unable to fulfil, because, aged

  four, her son squirmed, kicked, punched and finally held his breath

  until … he blew it all back in my face! A malty blast, stinking of

  all the shit we made him swallow … But really, she admonishes her

  mirror-self, I mean me … Zack always urged caution: I’ve been

  around the block enough times … he’d say as he drove the three of

  them around another block, a further time … and I’ve seen so-called

  new mental illnesses and conditions emerge throughout

  my professional lifetime. Arguably, the naming of our distressed

  parts is all psychiatry consists of nowadays – that, and doling out

  the drugs which allegedy alleviate these symptoms … Anyway,

  every fresh malady comes flanked by its own team of would-be

  experts … and I was the striker! She remembers visiting a special

  school with Gramps and Ben sometime in the early nineties. Aged

  four, her son was conspicuously failing to integrate with the group – the

  jargon of the head teacher at the local primary, who’d presumably

  been on a course of some kind, where they’d filled her head with this

  gibberish. But when Camilla waited, peering through the school

  gates at the realm of asphalt and white lines, she saw no group for

  her son to integrate with – only furious little bodies charging this

  way and that, following intercepting trajectories which sent them

  smashing into each other – a strange enactment of … the strategic

  defence initiative. At least these children were all together – not

  alone. Not alone like her Ben, who sat in the far corner, underneath

  the rubber-tyre swing, beside the bin. He was so alone – so profoundly

  and fanatically alone, lonelier than the loneliest pine …

  on the remotest hillside, his face a vacancy blurred by his whirring

  hands’ … stimming. Which is what Camilla learnt to call his calming

  of his mind by the agitation of his hands – just as she’s more

  recently learnt that her son doesn’t suffer from autistic psychopathy,

  or childhood schizophrenia, but rather is neuro-atypical. This sounds

  pretty harmless – maybe even better than that. In the last couple

  of years Camilla’s begun to read blogs – online diatribes, really –

  written by defiant autists, who’re introducing into the established

  lexicon terms she associates with the wonky-donkey feminist groups

  she attended during her short spell at university … dropped out …

  plop-plop-signed on a sheet of bog roll … These militants speak of

  becoming empowered – of exercising their rights and actualising

  their autonomy, thereby freeing themselves from the patriarchal

  attitudes of the boringly neuro-typical. These zealots preach the

  New Gospel according to Temple Grandin: they aren’t mentally

  ill, but share with this high-functioning designer of abattoirs and

  other animal-husbandry equipment a certain handicap … Although

  that’s not to suggest … they bang on, that all aspects of neuro-diversity

  are negative. On the contrary, it’s precisely the wide

  variation in cognitive styles between various phenotypes which allows

  for the emergence of prodigies and savants – some showing extreme

  aptitude for mathematical reasoning and calculation, while others

  are amazingly gifted linguistically, and still others – such as

  Grandin herself – are capable of astonishing feats of visualisation

  and … spatial imagining. Spatial imagining is what Camilla thinks

  she’s doing when she reads on, deep into the Kilburn night …

  drunks barking at foxes. Sitting in her curtained embayment, in the

  submarine glow of the opened clamshell – a laptop computer which

  was yet another Gramps gift – she stares and stares, as if gazing

  alone could … make me understand. She stares and stares until the

  slickly machined info-panels grow rough and organic – and the

  words themselves … hairy: Just as physical diversity is understood to be

  one of the engines of evolution, so may be neuro-diversity. Indeed, without

  significant neuro-diversity the human genotype might never have

  been able to make the leaps in cognitive functioning necessary to bring

  about the information revo-revo-revo-revolution … go round and

  round, round and round, The wheels on the bus go round and round

  ALL FUCKING DAY LONG! While Camilla’s enviably long

  and silky wipers go swish-swish-swish, as she bats them coquettishly

  at the wrung-out drab staring back at her from the mirror. I have,

  she thinks, really let myself go … and, receiving the little spurt of

  spunk-soap, she’s at once pregnant with resentment: Who is there

  to primp and preen for – father, son and grandson, too – none of

  them sees her as a woman, let alone a sexual object … She’s just

  a maternal, caring wonky-donkey, who plods around the Kilburn

  flat all day, following a course plotted for her from Ben’s nook

  to Mark’s hidey-hole: silvery space blankets draped over a clothes

  rack to deflect the … death-rays. Round annaround in a figure-eight

  that describes her own … hour-glass figure. And now – her

  time’s run out! There’s no telling what the pair of them might get up

  to in the Where-there-bee Tesco’s – Camilla has often returned

  from toileting myself, only to be very publicly inconvenienced by

  their behaviour. Mark’s freakouts are easier to take – flamboyant,

  his father calls them – he bays operatically, snatches up whatever

  coverings there are to hand and, draped in these, crawls under

  counters, tables or chairs. There he’ll remain, curled up in a foetal

  ball until she arrives to coax him out. But by that time his nimblefingered

  and tech-savvy son will’ve got into whatever electrical

  equipment the
re is to hand and … fimbled about. Two years ago,

  when Ben was just ten, Camilla had been bleeding out on the toilet

  at South Mimms services, when she heard: Every girl … every

  boy … Come and open up your eyes … ! belting out from the public

  address system – and by the time she got back to the soft-play

  area where she’d left them, she found a crowd of fellow travellers

  who’d hearkened to the call, and were indeed staring at a world

  of wonder and surprise: Mark and Ben, piling up a great teetering

  pyramid of foam bolsters and vinyl cubes. Spotting his mother’s

  appalled face, Ben had cried out: You’re back … ! You’re back!

  before adding under his breath, But not in a roly mo … But not

  in a roly mo … As she’d struggled with his frightened father,

  he’d explained to the gawping spectators precisely how he’d rewired

  the system so that it played … Fimbles … Fimbles … Fimbles …

  We’re the Fimbles … the ditty’s very repetitiveness another dismal

  reminder of his own palilalia. Then there was the time in the

  Dixon’s on the Kilburn High Road, when Camilla left them for a

  couple of minutes while she popped to the chemist’s next door, and

  on returning found the shop window … full of gurning Mark-faces.

  Ben had managed to wire up very single television and computer

  screen to a seeseeteevee camera focused on his flamboyant father.

  She’d stood there, fighting down the urge to scream – for wherever

  she’d looked on the cluttered sales floor, Mark’s unseeing eyes were

  staring back at her, while his mouth hung open in just the way

  she remembered it doing when he came, so impregnating stupid,

  drunken me with the creator of this wilderness of mirrors … It’d

  been this way as soon as Ben could crawl – he made straight for the

  television. Not to watch, but to fimble about with it. I’m a worm …

  I’m a worm … Ben had said to his mother on his fifth birthday –

  he hadn’t meant a grey, wrigglingly divisible one, but the new internet

  variety: I was born the year Robert Morris created the first

  internet worm … created the first internet worm … was simply a

  statement of fact – the little boy didn’t play the part, didn’t wriggle

  or cry out he was being chopped in half, any more than he played

  at being anything. There was never make-believe for Ben, only the

  facts on the ground – and up in the sky: In nineteen eighty-nine

  the first twenty-four satellites of the Global Positioning System

  were placed in orbit … were placed in orbit … and Intel released the

  eight-oh-four-eight-six microprocessor which contains more than a

  million transistors … more than a million transistors … Such precocity

  hadn’t been altogether a surprise – it was a difficult pregnancy:

  she’d felt him stimming inside of me, and, although she’d wanted a

  home birth, in the event it’d been … a phone one. The ringing baby

  was yanked from her and held up to the obstetrician’s ear so he

  could establish whether Ben was … alive. And now, stepping down

  from the rockin’ Portaloo, making her way under the glass canopy

  between the Wetherby shoppers, Camilla is presented with another

  version of her predicament: a purple pony, which plunges up and

  down, eyes flashing as it gallops on the spot to the accompaniment

  of synthesised hurdy-gurdy music … I’m going nowhere. Last night,

  at first crouching in the porch of Mona’s cottage, she’d then subsided

  amongst the muddy wellies and grass-stained waxed-cotton

  jackets. Funny thing about Barbours, Mona’s feller had said over

  supper, they were actually invented on Tyneside, for the dockers

  who had to be out in all weathers … And Camilla quipped:

  Stupid middle-class people – carrying coal-coloured jackets to

  Newcastle … a feeble joke, but then I’m enfeebled … She’d been

  exhausted as well, after a blowy trip out to the Farne Islands, where,

  according to the boatman-cum-guide, ancho-whatsits had clung,

  praying, to the shit-splashed rocks. All around the boat waxed-cotton

  heads had risen from seaweed-swirling swell … Ark-Ark!

  Such trust in the Labrador eyes that held hers for long moments –

  such empathy. Look at the seals, Ben! his mother had cried. Aren’t

  they fab? But Ben had the collar of his borrowed wax-cotton jacket

  buttoned up right over his head, so he could sit in his one-boy

  tent … playing his fucking Game Boy. The sweetly smeggy smell

  of the mussel broth she’d slurped for supper followed Camilla into

  the porch, where she turned this way and that – as she’d been

  instructed. For a moment or more … tired heavy breasts had rested

  on knees creepy-crêpey, yet I didn’t exist … for without reception

  there could be no perception: no mussels, no Mark, no Ark-Ark!

  No Ben – no number ten … until the smallest of the three connection

  bars on her mobile lifted its blocky head a tiny bit … lofting

  her with it towards the white light … It’s our fault, she’d gasped

  into the shingle-shifting ether. We did it to him – I feel so guilty,

  Gramps … I think … I might die of guilt … For a long while he

  hadn’t spoken, but at last his plummy voice squeezed from the

  handset: Nonsense, utter balderdash – I don’t know this man personally,

  Milla, but he works for my Trust. I’ve already made

  enquiries, and there’s a lot more to this than meets the –. Stop it!

  she’d cried. Will you please, just for once, stop lecturing me!

  Camilla – who ran away from her convent boarding school at sixteen

  and never went back – has only the haziest understanding of

  the maze of communications we’re stumbling through. When Ben

  was little, she’d made him a tin-can telephone – which entranced

  them both. She’d been well prepared – she thought then, thinks

  now – for these straitened circumstances. Her parents’ parsimony

  had extended to ironing brown-paper bags and keeping them in

  kitchen drawers – they scrimped their only daughter into private

  education, choosing a Catholic school not because they wanted

  her soul saved, but because it’d been all we can afford … Their

  shitty words – parsimonious pebbles, dropped plop-plop somewhere

  else … in space – in time – yet still rippling the world. Rippling the

  electric pony’s purple mane – rippling the four identically freckled

  faces plastered to the adjacent photo-booth. But these are her words,

  spoken here and now … person-to-the-person that’s … me: What

  do you want to be when you grow up, Milla? – Me? Why … I’d

  like to be a carer to a schizophrenic partner and an autistic son,

  getting by on benefits and hand-outs – after all, that’s what my

  upbringing has prepared me for … Camilla had enjoyed the tin-can

  telephony, because, once freed from the oppression of his mother’s

  gaze, Ben had prattled away, not exactly to her, but at least in my

  general direction. When, a year or so ago, his grandfather had bought

  one of the brand-new eyeBooks for both of them, it’d been Ben who

  set up their internet con
nection – the cement-mixing, miniature-anvil-bashing,

  feedback-howling which rapidly gave birth to his

  first written communication, and to her first experience of the merry

  chirrup: You’ve got male – which was how she’s heard it ever since.

  Ben’s email also consisted of three short misspelt words … sounds

  that became signs that become sounds that became signs in his mother’s

  ever bleary, ever teary eyes: by me mobl. Well, perhaps I will …

  Among the Wetherby shoppers Camilla sees plenty of teenagers

  with mobile phones … it might do the trick – he might talk to me

  normally at long last. It’s Good to Talk! and listen as well. Last night,

  her conversation with Gramps had ended with wave upon wave of

  static carrying the frail barque of their conversation further and

  further away: You’re breaking up! he’d cried to her. You’re breaking

  up, Camilla! Which had indeed been true, because when she

  returned to the cottage’s sitting room, where Mona and her bloke

  were curled up on the couch … I was in bits. She’d sat there watching

  them cuddle. Sat there looking at the fishing net pinned to the

  perfectly plastered wall – sat there looking at its catch of dried-out

  starfish, scoured seashells and a bottle-green glass float. Sat there,

  not envying her dear, dear friend … not envying her at all. Certainly

  not envying her paradoxical post-partum bum – she’s childless, but

  fully gravid with his come … Or envying their relationship … don’t

  fancy anyone any more, yet hating herself for the Ralgex jealousy

  she’d felt burning on her tummy and … between my thighs. She

  didn’t fancy anyone any more – but it’d be nice just for once to

  have someone in her life who, gently and tenderly, would rub an

  embrocation into the lovelorn lesions that have grown their own …

  nerves. Camilla can’t see her wayward menfolk anywhere. She goes

  into the supermarket and walks hurriedly along beside the checkouts,

  scanning each aisle in turn: BAKERY, READY MEALS,

  DAIRY … Her frigid parents are due for the first of their two,

  two-day annual visits tomorrow … should I stock up now ? At Victoria

  Coach Station they’ll be waiting for her right where they’ve got

  off the Birmingham service: two sedentary and apprentice old folk,

  wearing early-retirement-uniforms and shoes with enhanced grip.