Phone

by Will Self

  lanes and slip roads. They have a wee-pit-stop before the still more

  maddening drive down through Mill Hill and Hendon, until they’re

  meshed together on the North Circular with all the Chiantishire

  cunts rollicking home from the second homes where they doubtless

  also spent the Easter bank holiday sopping up … mussel broth –

  Ark-Ark! Camilla rests her forehead on the steering wheel, feeling

  the heat the mile upon mile of friction has rubbed in … down

  below – the Vauxhall … and I. She digs at the brake, then the accelerator

  – the car hiccups along in the jam. Is she rested after their

  little comfort break? Am I fuck … This evening she’ll have to spend

  hours getting Ben ready for school tomorrow – his very ordinary

  school requires very special preparation, although his lunch cannot

  have anything so conventional as being prepared done to it. No. It

  must be assembled as she imagines computers being assembled under

  surgical lights by neat-fingered women – hairless women, their

  brows and pubes shaved, too, who wear white nylon snoods, face

  masks and gloves … somewhere. The lunch’s component parts are:

  Marmite painted on pumpernickel, a necessarily straight banana, a

  carton of coconut milk, kelp-flavoured root-vegetable crisp bits. The

  latter components must be sourced from obscure yeast-stinky health

  food shops all over North London – curse the fucking internet for

  making the boy aware of such things. Camilla stands behind Ben as

  he stands behind his avatar, but I’ve no control. She’s stood there for

  much of the last couple of years, watching the web pages download:

  multicoloured strips of consumer choice. Ben doesn’t explain to his

  digitally migrant mother about modems, bit-rates and connection

  speeds – he acts them out on all-fours such womanly hips, snuffling

  at the skirting boards, picking cable-clips from perished plaster,

  as he fimbles with the information superhighway. His nails are

  filthy and need clipping … osprey’s talons, really … She looks up.

  Overhead the April day is fading – the enormous concrete tangle

  of the gyratory system unravels into the sunset. Beyond the Vauxhall’s

  bonnet mud chunks drop from the crusted axle of a dump

  truck. It’s a nightmare getting Ben to have a shower – while a

  change of clothes requires protracted negotiation. They made a Good

  Friday Agreement that he’d begin the new term in new clothes,

  and ditch the fraying grey hoodie and Asda jeans he’s been wearing

  day in day out for months. But now, as the car’s blatting past the

  Brent Sidings, Camilla remembers: I left a load in the machine …

  She’ll have to run a full cycle again, then try to dry them before

  morning – else there’s no guarantee of getting him to school at

  all. And even if he does go to school, where will that lead? What

  sort of job will Ben ever be able to do – can she see him working in

  a butcher’s – this one, for example, where two black men dispute

  over a tray piled high with bloody pigs’ trotters? Clearly this is no

  simple conflict over price or quantity, but something altogether

  more sinister – the disputant’s face is grey with anxiety, his spittle

  drips down on the trotters … Gramps says all immigrant communities

  – no matter where they are or where they’ve come from – have

  much higher rates of schizophrenia. Not that he uses the s-word …

  I prefer schizophreniform disorder – although not in the sense that

  DeeEssEmmFour uses it … No wonder Mark’s so at home here –

  back with his crazy peeps. Back in our London. He stirs, unshaven

  neck twitching in the collar of the cagoule he hasn’t removed for the

  past four days, and mutters, Shitters … up to their necks innit –

  blood ‘n’ guts … ox-heart speaking in tongues … He. Can. Look.

  Inside. My. Soul! He starts whimpering as the car pulls away

  from the lights, so she shifts her hand from the gearstick to his

  knee … mechanically comforting: Home soon now, love, and I’ll put

  the kettle on for a nice cup of … chlorpromazine. Yet … yet …

  she’s been comforted by them both in the past – received physical

  succour. When Ben was littler there was the holding therapy – he

  may’ve punched and kicked … but we were connected – and before

  that they’d shared the queasier intimacies of toilet training … for

  months – no, years! Training didn’t cut it: this was toilet further

  education – an aitchenndee in shitting, a bachelor of piss artistry.

  So very long had it taken that Ben was able to comment on his

  bowel movements long before he could control them: Look at that

  great big poo what I done, Mummy … he’d remarked, aged thirteen

  months, stretched out on his sheepskin, legs akimbo, the poo in

  question coddled there: a great and glistening toffee-coloured roc’s

  egg. So great, and so glistening, it might conceivably have been

  another newborn … can we fix it? No, she’s forced to acknowledge for

  the sixhunnredansixtysixth time, no, we fucking can’t. Even when

  a bribe worked and he stayed on his potty, it was only on this further

  condition: he was allowed to suck on my tit. The thick green

  roll-neck woolly he wore ‘til it rotted – the relentless suction of his

  jaws clamped on her smarting nipple, his cheeks ballooning as he

  drank me down. Christ! Christ, she’s tired – the Vauxhall groans up

  the modest incline of Shoot-Up Hill, and Camilla can no

  longer distinguish between the slap-a-tat-tat of its fraying fan belt

  and the disintegration of her own insides … Ben seems to have

  no anxieties – he just gets on with sucking and stimming and

  shitting … a remarkable child, is his grandfather’s view: He really is

  able to do to do three different things at once – reminds me of some of the

  autistic savants I’ve come across over the years … But not, it would

  seem, of his daughter-in-law, who does three things at once … all

  the fucking time. Yes, and one night at Redington Road, when Zack’s

  own youngest children – Ben’s twin baby aunts – were tucked up

  under their thirty-two-tog duvets, he’d opened a bottle of wine and

  held forth: All my career, he’d said, I’ve followed Ariadne’s thread,

  followed it through a maze of conflicting theories, hoping it would

  lead me towards the clear light of understanding … It had been a

  testimony to the respect Camilla had for him, and the gratitude she

  felt, that as they sat and sipped and listened to Ben riding his trike

  round annaround the conservatory, she didn’t throw back at him:

  Why don’t you, for once in your pontificating life, take a bit of

  Ariadne’s thread and sew a bloody button on with it – ! Mum! Mum!

  Ben’s face, thrust from the foreskin of his hoodie, fills the rear-view

  mirror: Mum, you’ve missed the turn again! And she has – they’ve

  been living in the Mowbray Road flat for seven years now: seven

  long years full of frantic activity … As to progress of any kind,

  when she considers the matter, it seems she’s merely been sitting

  stock-s
till in her bay window, with the days and nights flickering on

  my face: a woman fallen to earth, in an alien world. She isn’t yet –

  and perhaps never will be – at home he’d be angling his scraggy

  saggy unshaven neck, at the end of which was his scraggy saggy

  unshaven RED face, towards the cocktail cabinet, a kettle-drum-shaped

  contrivance of mirrors and marquetry which stood on

  three peg-legs. Maeve had brought it back from a church jumble

  sale. The Butcher had been sixteen and sour … seated at the kitchen

  table reading Cicero’s defence of Sulla … that he would’ve been

  amongst the most virtuous of our rulers were it not for his choleric and

  fanciful disposition … which had probably been translated by some

  kiddie-fiddling classicist who taught at a prep school where they

  dipped the little lambkins rather than bathing them. Ever a martyr,

  she’d’ve humped the ghastly object awkwardly in through the

  side door, and the Butcher prob’ly said, Let me give you a hand

  with that, Mum. To which she undoubtedly would’ve replied, Oh,

  no, that’s all right, Jonathan, you get on with your book … Ach! the

  flabby-mindedness of the woman! The Butcher inveighs (You’re

  inveighing again, Butchie, I’ve warned you about that.) For Maeve

  De’Ath the classics were a household chore you got on with. As for

  “Jonathan” (Where to thtart!). Absolutely, Squilly – ab-so-bloody-lutely:

  Jonathan is long gone – and Kins has dearly departed, but

  the cocktail cabinet remains. It’s no longer hunched in the bay

  window of the room Maeve De’ath insisted on calling the drawing

  one … prétentieuse, elle? Although, to be fair (Which in her case

  you’ve always found rather difficult, Butchie), drawing did get done

  there – not by him, but Oliver and James De’Ath could sit and draw

  at the same time the clever little wankers … which is how their elder

  brother referred to them then and still does. Their mother – being the

  woman she remains: hollowed out by her own chippiness, a bag of

  sawdust where her guts oughta be – always refers to her sons by their

  given names. As for Kins, ever since he was made conscious he’d

  taken to calling his sons – albeit only in the confines of his own

  deeply prosaic mind – the Butcher, the Baker and the Candlestick-maker.

  This would be fair enough even if only sixty-six per cent

  of his progeny exhibited the appropriate tendencies – a vocation,

  say, for cake, or a certain facility with an awl – but, as Ali Hassan

  al-Maji’s pilots swooped low to dump another helicopter gunshipload

  of napalm on the fleeing Peshmerga fighters, Oliver De’Ath

  began working at a craft shop in Wantage – not (We hathen to add)

  a mere purveyor of knick-knacks and amusing tea towels, but the

  going concern of a notable woodworker, who sawed and planed

  table tops, and turned both their legs (And candlethticks) for the

  discerning public. That’s nice, dear, Maeve De’Ath would say, every

  time her youngest presented her with another newly varnished

  chip off his workaday block, but her tone was flat … disappointed.

  As for the Candlestick-maker’s immediately older brother, he, too,

  was notably deficient when it came to getting on in the world. At the

  local EffEee college James had been adjudged inadequate – and so

  he took to the back bedroom of the Colindale Avenue house, where,

  in the walk-in cupboard, he grew marijuana under lights. A few

  years later he emerged, and floated into a job at the Crusty Loaf

  Bakery, a Saint Albans tea shop that prides itself on homemade

  cakes, bread and pastries vente à emporter … His younger sons’

  lack of career progress had never bothered Kins, who, epigone

  that he’d been, was always a ferocious under-achiever. So long as his

  boys accompanied him on long rambles through the surrounding

  countryside, listening the while to his lectures full of longueurs … so

  Kins was content. Were you happy, Dad? the Butcher thinks, staring

  down at the semi-reflective surface of the Baldwins’ brilliantly

  clean kitchen table – and seeing there his father’s scraggy saggy

  unshaven RED face. Are you happy, Dad? He’d posed the question

  to Kins when they were still close – when they still did things

  together, before the incident. Posed it, because, even if his own

  data-set was already heavily restricted, the Butcher still admired

  his father’s tradecraft – his skulking, tail-between-his-legs (Until

  needed!) insouciance – and needed to be told it hadn’t all been in

  vain. Happy? Kins speaks from the Other Side, his full bottom

  lip moist with his own never-ending self-deprecatory moue. Happy?

  Dunno ‘bout that, old bean – whenever it occurs to me to wonder if

  I’m happy, I always think of my old history master at Lancing –.

  – The Ape. – That’s right, the Ape. He always used to say, Happiness

  is a by-product of life, just as coke is a by-product of smelting

  steel – you can’t go at either of ’em directly – you’ve chopped up

  that garlic. You do still want to help, don’t you, Jonathan? Vron

  Baldwin asks. She’s hovering over him, a brittle-but-natural blonde

  of his own age, wearing a peach-coloured wool suit under her blue-and-white-striped

  ouvrierist apron (A word here about the Butcher’s

  mnemonic capacity: with each new generation of recording devices

  – for text, for image, for film and audio – so his vast internal

  database has been appropriately upgraded. The two-by-four file

  cards on which he set down details of informers, suspects and agents

  have been transferred successively to automatic document carousels,

  then to magnetic tape – and now digitised, along with the enormous

  stacks of five-by-eight black-and-white prints, blown up from

  microdots, which picture just about everyone he’s ever seen, and

  everywhere he’s ever been, and all the reports he’s ever read. When,

  a couple of years ago, Pople and Kohn won the Nobel for their

  work applying the complex equations describing quantum chemical

  processes to determining the three-dimensional structure of molecules,

  the Butcher found he was immediately able to employ similar

  techniques to build his own nanomachines – tens of thousands of

  micron-sized robots, each of which could be programmed separately

  to labour on the great and never-ending data-harvest. The Butcher

  is only too aware of the curious correspondence between these

  technological metaphors for his own mental processes and the

  paranoid fantasies of schizophrenics, which also have a built-in

  obsolesence – the death-rays aimed at them being decommissioned

  as laser beams are installed. The Butcher’s also always been conscious

  that, should he reveal the full extent of his mnemonism,

  he would become an object of fascination, fear and cack-handed

  medical intervention. As a child he’d had before him an example of

  what a superior mnemonist might do with their life, in the form of

  his grandfather, who came of age before the normals began netting

  entire populations with their crude metrics.
Sirbert had been viewed

  as eccentric, certainly – but never pathologically so. His grandson

  would do better, and actively conceal the existence of his database,

  with its banks of winking EyeSeeEl mini-computers, wired in

  series, which had been installed in the sub-basements of his enormous

  Mycroftian mind. Conceal this – and hide also his equipment:

  the superior perceptual mechanisms enabling him to gather such

  huge quantities of visual and audio take, computer and telephony

  metadata. It was wearing, of course, running this ongoing surveillance

  programme with only the one agent in the field – and the

  relentless cerebration can at times seem a little like psychosis: all

  those numerals and letters swirling inside his tired eyes. Surely,

  under such circumstances, it’s understandable that even the most

  conscientious and effective operator has recourse to chemical

  assistance – strictly under medical supervision, of course. Since the

  in-house medics introduced random piss-testing, the Butcher has

  reluctantly forsworn illegal stimulants in favour of forty to sixty

  milligrams of methylphenidate daily, which not only calms –

  enabling the sequestration of clamorous intelligence-gathering from

  the normally quiet business of life – but also, paradoxically, enhances

  episodic, working and long-term memory. The Butcher has a hunch

  prolonged use of this nostrum may be implicated in the restructuring

  of his own neurological architecture: a process that’s gathered

  pace in the past decade or so, in line with the boom in middle-class

  house conversions. Obsolete partitions are being knocked down

  and unused attics pressed into service – all is becoming rational and

  open-plan. Which is why at Sunday lunches, in conversation with

  gently whinnying Tories, the Butcher would add his own phatic forgetfulness

  to their general amnesia, referring always to what’shisface

  or thingummyjig – while ever unable to retrieve the relevant information,

  despite it being on the tip of his tongue) and holding a paring

  knife in one hand and a bunch of parsley in the other. Her purple

  lips purse: Not a lot of point in your pitching up early if you’re just

  going to sit there daydreaming – the others’ll be here in half and

  hour … no doubt famished. No doubt, the Butcher thinks, but