by Will Self
EmPee had a moment of madness and ended up for an eternity
doing talk radio (In Wales). This time the Butcher plays it differently:
The interested people – should they be, ah … interested, will
want to get in touch with you. Do you know how to go about setting
up an anonymous email account with one of the big providers –
Hotmail, for instance? The EmmPee’s ears really do prick up, and,
suitably enough, in his doggy guise he’s then called upon by Vron to
round up his fellow Tories – who’re distributed about the terraces,
blinking in poplin jackets and linen sundresses that bear the heavy
creasing of a winter’s underbed storage – and herd them into the
dining room. Where – after baked goat’s cheese and balsamic
onions – she asks: Jonathan, would you mind awfully carving –
Nick’s so clumsy, and it is rather your … thing? He pauses, serving
fork aloft, a slice of steaming lamb speared by its tines. Slowly, the
assembled company fall silent – the last audible take being “teak
decking”, which plops from the mouth of a woman sitting beside
poor old Sporty Spice! Who’s been in post so very long now it was
Dick himself who’d said, after several too many at Friday-evening
drinks: Jonathan, old man, don’t you think it’s high time you made
that lovely girlfriend of yours a touch more … aware? Standing in
the hideous atrium at VeeBeeArr, the tipsy spooks wheeling about
them, the Butcher had chewed over the unutterable: Absolutely,
Dick, she’s a right to know – and she’s completely sound. Old man
was bomb disposal – nearly got his nuts blown off by the Ra. There’s
only uno problemo with bringing the bigger picture into focus for
her – well, two actually: first, she’s too fucking thick (LWU) to grasp
it, which is precisely why she’s lasted this long – and secondly: if I
were to jolt her into partial consciousness, even Sporty might have
the nous to put together my profession of secrecy and my penchant
for sodomy … I was … he looks round at the Tory sheeple … going
to ask which of you would like your lamb rare … they moan
obligingly … But, bearing in mind the old adage you are what you
eat … their woolly faces grow pensive … You’d better all have it
well done – unless you never want to be in government again! The
Tories baa appreciatively at this feeble witticism, and the Butcher
hides his face in the meaty steam. Oh, Gawain! he cries in the bony
cave of his own darkest chamber. My noon, my midnight, my talk,
my song! And he imagines his lover driving through the Hatfield
Tunnel, the light and shadow playing on his boyish features. There’s
a certain sort of gentlemanly English face – epitomised, the Butcher
believes, by the actor Michael York – which retains a youthful
mien well into middle age. (Even older!) Senior EssEyeEss mostly
belong to the Travellers, but the Butcher prefers the more sedate,
and slightly more liberal, Reform, where from childhood – since it
had been Kins’s club as well – he’s seen these faces, ever-green
against the worn brown leather of the library chairs. It’s said of
humanity in general … (Thpare us the bloody oracular, Butch –
thpare us that!) … it’s said of humanity in general that the retention
of infantile characteristics into adulthood is a measure of evolutionary
success: these boyish men and mannish boys, scanning the
swags of tickertape draped from the baize-covered boards, or slowly
impacting on whitebait in the dining room’s old-gold gloom – could
it be their biological retardation had been essential for the rapid
expansion of the empire they’d served? Kins, too, despite jowly
ruddiness, had been a boy-man, delighting in impromptu games,
small excursions and all their accompanying little smackerels … His
pacifism, his piety, his local-government-fucking-finance, his rose-tinted
utopianism – it’d all been par for the course … In the large
and floral drawing room, the Butcher takes his coffee in a Barcelona
chair with Sally, and wonders whether he should ask her away for
a weekend … in Barcelona? At the same time, he taunts her: D’you
see him? He nods towards a small, plump inoffensive-looking man
wearing a gaudy moleskin waistcoat, who sits in the far corner of
the room, his tiny, gold-rimmed coffee cup resting on his paunch,
his mild eyes blinking at the gathering from behind thick lenses.
You wouldn’t think it to look at him, the Butcher whispers, but he’s
a big DeeYouPee grandee – and implicated in all sorts … from aiding
Loyalist death squads to kiddy-fiddling at Belfast care homes –
if I told you the half of it, Sal, you’d up-chuck Vron’s tiramisu …
But Sal doesn’t want to admit the least fraction of such disturbing
smut – let alone a half of it. The Butcher has page upon page of
witness statements, all available for … downloading. The blocky
Biro of the plods dutifully detailing how many scraggy saggy RED
old cocks had been placed between how many young, trembling
buttocks. But, even if he drilled it into her, none of it would get
through – any more than it would’ve to Kins, both being innocent
little eras of their own – permanent and enduring nows, endless
evenings in which the shadows cast across the cricket pitch never,
ever lengthen, and the little darlings up in the nursery never grow
older, never having been born in the first place. You’re teasing me,
darling, Sally whispers, and that’s unkind. Which is true – and
hardly his style, so he says, You’re right, I’m being silly – listen, I’ve
got to head off in a minute, will you take the Merc’, it’s a bugger to
park in town and I fancy a walk … The Butcher does his valedictory
round: there’s a forthright handshake for Nick Baldwin, and
an ayframe hug for his wife – then he’s free, striding between the
opulent red-brick villas to the crown of the hill, where, with
mingled consternation and … nostalgia? he recognises the woodland
below and remembers when, newly passed out from the
intelligence officers’ new entrants course at Fort Monckton, he’d
gone about establishing his own London network: sliding along the
sweaty walls of the Bat Cave, slinking into the Pink Panther – plotting
up in late-model four-door saloons on suburban streets for
hours, until, in the underbrushed dawn, he made his approach. Not
that he’d ever been a compulsive cruiser or a committed cottager,
but he’d always appreciated the fit between this darkly honest realm
and his clandestine nine-to-five. Both espionage and closeted
homosexuality depended on good tradecraft – including cryptoanalysis:
a mouth slobbering at a crudely hacked hole could mean
quite different things … depending on the context. Both his métiers
also required the Butcher to meet with individuals, mostly male, in
nondescript spaces located in liminal places: chain-hotel rooms
facing on to clogged arterial roads, boarded-up commercial premises
behind abandoned petrol stations, mothball
ed offices above
whining dental surgeries. — As he turns right on to West Heath
Road and begins the stiff haul up to Whitestone Pond, the Butcher
peers back down the long corridor of his life, with its scuffed linoleum
and dinted, distempered walls. He sees himself charming
Bulgarian cipher clerks and leather queens from Purley – he tastes
the dead skin that’s dust, and the skins which, once supple and
scented, have now turned to … dust. He thinks of his colleagues,
whose sins of omission and commission alike are readily washed
away by the tepid tea at a vicarage coffee morning, or the spit of
a military band. At Whitestone Pond the Butcher stands looking
out over London – the breeze flaps the legs of his raw-silk trousers.
Not a great expense, he’d shamelessly tell curious colleagues, I’m
bespoken for in the Far East – the tailors in Kuala Lumpur put
the Singaporean ones to shame. See the stitching round the collar,
here … and the individual pen pockets, each one lined with
absorbent material? (It’s bloody barefaced to talk like that, Butch –
they’ll think you’re queer.) They know I’m queer, Squilly – they’ve
known it for years. (So why on earth do we persist with this pathetic
thubterfuge – I, for one, am fed up with lying face down in minge
every other night of the week.) The Butcher doesn’t rise to this: he’s
looking at the raddled countenance of London but seeing only that
scraggy saggy unshaven RED face as it was on that Sunday afternoon
in the early nineteen nineties. It’d been around this time of year –
sunny, too – and the Butcher was driving back from Oakley in a
brand-new Alfa Romeo Spider coupé (Courtesy of Slab Murphy’s
Libyan paymasters, as I recall – and in the Vinaccia Red livery),
which handled like a rocket-powered skateboard and could do a
cool hundred and thirty-five on the flat. In all probability he’d been
going still faster: whipping down through the elongated chicane the
flyover describes over High Wycombe – when he was taken by an
urge to see his father, so seized the slip road for the EmmTwentyfive,
and found himself within the half-hour looking at Kins looking
at the three-legged, kettle-drum-shaped contrivance of mirrors and
marquetry, his scraggy saggy unshaven Vinaccia Red face burning
with desire. For Christ’s sake, Dad, the Butcher had undoubtedly
chided him, it’s not even tea time yet. If Maeve had been there it
probably wouldn’t’ve happened – but she was out, answering calls
from the suicidal on behalf of the Samaritans … the jolly Missus
Jellyby, as eager to save a stranger’s soul as she is unwilling to mop
up the … blood on her own carpet. She did return later, and the three
of them had attempted to mend things over homemade banana
bread – but by then the damage had been irreperable. (The damage
to your English, Butch – is this feeble clichéd psycho-biography
the best you can come up with?) What had got into Kins? (He
would’ve been the most virtuous of our rulers, were it not for his
choleric, fanciful disposition …) Had it simply been a case of his
blood-alcohol levels dropping too low, so precipitating this sober
assessment of his eldest son: You dress like a prize ponce, Jonathan,
the saggy-red face spat. While as for that little German car you
drive –. – It’s Italian, Dad. – German … Italian … I hardly think
you can afford such luxury items on your salary. You forget, young
man, I was a public servant myself … His oyster eyes milted with
resentment – his hamfists began acting up, so the Butcher focused on
his own manicured ones. It had been a long time since he’d hit his
father, and in the intervening years – what with being professionally
trained in unarmed combat – he suspected he’d become a bit better
at it. Under the ignorant eyes of a kitschy three-dee Christ, Kins
took his poison and administered his medicine: I don’t pretend to
know the ins and outs, but I read the paper – I watch the news.
Your so-called friends have a funny way of going about things, and
they like their funny little jokes as well – what’re they calling it? The
turkey-shoot, that’s it … Well, I’ll tell you what I call it: a shameful
massacre – that’s what. And you … you were in the Middle East
last year, admitted as much – hinted, didn’t you, that you’d been
sorting stuff out behind the scenes … Led me to believe, didn’t
you – ‘cause I doubted the Coalition were really going to be that
bloody willing when it came to finishing what they’d started – that
you and your friends had it all in hand … A shameful bloody
massacre – that’s what you and your pals had planned. All those
poor bloody young men – not Ba’athist thugs, mind, just poor young
conscripts dragged from the bosom of their families to be burned
and bombed and shot to pieces … And he’d banged on a great deal
more in this fashion – words being the silly old sausage’s only
ammunition. It’d been an impassioned speech – one the Butcher
redacted in real time, because what did it amount to, really? Only
more of the piffle Kins had come out with after the EePeeVee team
had visited him and Maeve almost a decade before – splendidly
naive bollocks about the brotherhood of man, the necessity for force
always to be tempered by restraint, and the dark paths men disappeared
down whenever they made the fatal mistake of imagining
their ends could be justified by such means. The Butcher heard him
out in silence, refutations and put-downs stillborn, stillborn slunks
… What could he possibly say that would satisfy the simpleton?
His tongue was tied – not by the OhEssAy (But because you’re
gay …) Gay? Puh-lease! What the fuck does that mean, Squilly?
(I know what it meant to you before the incident, Butch: Hello, my
name’s Julian and this is my friend, Sandy – ) No! Not that, Squills
– I beg of you. (Lovely to vada your jolly-old eeks, Mister Horn …)
Oh, for fuck’s sake! the Butcher cries aloud to the Sunday motorists
piloting their Jags and Mercs at trotting pace past the clapboard
simulacrum of Jack Straw’s Castle, but the little prick won’t let it lie:
(I think you’ll find – if you analythe your own large data-set properly,
Butch – that there was a time when you and your brothers
amused your parents by imitating the flamboyantly camp comedians
you heard on the radio. It was an era which impertheptibly faded
into that brief period when you were – ) Out? I was never out,
Squilly – you know that! (Maybe not as currently understood – but
you forget: I was with you on theventies Saturday mornings when
you raced to Mister Martin’s shop to pick up our copy of what
was then the largest circulation newspaper for homosexuals.) Oh,
okay – if you insist on dragging it all up, yes, I do remember. (And
presumably remember, as well, that old Mister Martin was such an
innocent he thought it was some sort of gazette of good times …)
Yes-yes – he’d p
eer at me through filthy lenses and say, You really
like to keep abreast of things, don’t you, young man? (A marvellously
inappropriate turn of phrase, given the only breasts you’d
seen at this time were Mister — ) Don’t go there, Squilly – I beg of
you: it’s too early in the day. I need a stiffener before I can peer into
that dark chamber … Although in point of fact, having slid down
Heath Street on his Italian loafers, the Butcher is peering into the
dark chamber of the tube station, where he can see a little Sallyesque
girl with a tangle of blonde curls, who’s clutching a helium-filled
balloon in one hand – a balloon which bears on its silvery
surface Ronald McDonald’s disturbing features. The Butcher tries
smiling – but it isn’t the little girl who responds, but the balloon!
which is ventriloquised by … Squilly! (It was an innocently ignorant
era, Butch – and you were only fifteen, so you can’t be too hard on
yourself. Don’t you remember – because I do. We’d troll along to all
sorts of cranky gatherings – in community halls or rooms at the
back of pubs. Meetings called to pwotest the murder of Blair Peach,
and the brutal tactics of the EssPeeGee.) Your point being? (My
point being that, in amongst all the other fringe nutters who’d
laid out flyers and leaflets on the trestle tables, there’d often be a
couple of well-spoken and neatly dwessed men from the Paedophile
Information Exchange …) Oh, Ronald, the Butcher mutters as the
lift doors open, and he follows Squilly bob-bob-bobbing along
the curving tunnel … must you? (… who’d hand out leaflets of
their own, which, perfectly politically correctly, in the lefty lingo of
the day, set out their arguments for the right of all parties concerned
to pwactise what I believe they called … man–boy love.) The
Butcher stands at the very edge of the platform, watching a mouse
undertake its daily commute … from condenser to crumpled crisp
packet. Ronald McDonald has been replaced by a beautiful young
masked man, naked to the waist, who silently and handlessly
beckons to him, mouthing, No introduction necessary … The
English psycho stands, feeling the great weight of the past on his
shoulders – soon he and his lover will be together, but he’s not sure
I can bear it much longer — There’s a grunt, a swoosh, a crack and a