by Will Self
grasp that young Doctor Busner would be sick with anxiety, lest his
liberality in the wood-working room be blamed for their escape and
the killings. Bobby would start out on some mad inconsequence,
such as, Ain’t it true, Doc – that you’re more likely to suffer from
mental illness if you’re working class than middle class? To which
Zack might well angrily object: Professionals! Psychiatrists in particular,
Bobby – we’ve a higher risk of the major psychopathologies
than anyone else! But that’s because diagnosis is itself an opportunistic
… And then he’d flounder, not wanting to say “crime”,
although when they’d brought Bobby into the room he would’ve
appeared not cowed but relieved – and Doctor Busner, still being
really rather young and utterly inexperienced, might have had
another shot at sympathising with the benighted creature – but it’d
prob’ly be no use, because looking deep into Bobby’s eyes he’d be
forced to acknowledge: this was not the relief of a merely craven
man, who, terrified by the wider world, has fought his way back into
the system – but the relief of a butchering animal, who, having
made his kill, slinks back to the wilds beyond the perimeter fence.
Jonathan eats the sandwich moodily. Was there more to be said?
Yes, there’s always more to be said – and no matter how effective his
own intervention, there will be further phone calls and meetings.
He may well have to see Gawain again in a quasi-official capacity. It
would be too easy for it to end here, definitively – yet it should,
because it’s Gawain who’s turned out to be the butcher after all …
not me. (P’raps I was wrong to call you that …) You were right
about the other two, though (… it prejudiced your idea of yourself
– made you rather moody. You never actually did anything that bad
so far as I’m aware – not personally … Once or twice there was
some rough stuff … in Manchester, I believe …) Jonathan lets
Kins bang on as he eats the sandwich: he needs to consider the probabilities
– has to figure out what the future might hold. The Butcher
is perfectly accustomed to applying his superior powers of induction
to the future courses of others – this is the very essence of an
intelligence officer’s expertise, but somehow Jonathan De’Ath has
never tried to get a firmer grasp on his own. He stands eating
the cheese sandwich, seeing not the perimeter fence through the
Perspex window, nor the magnolia-painted wall of the pod, but the
cassette tapes, compact and digitally versatile disks, external computer
hard disks, photographs and photocopies which constitute his
large data-set: an electroencephalogram of his and Gawain’s entire
relationship, registering the rise and fall of their passion for one
another. He’s kept it all sealed up in a clunky-old attaché case. He
moves it every few months or so – the case will spend a while on the
topmost shelf of a cash-and-carry in Southall, then get deposited
in a safe belonging to, say, a solicitor in Nantwich. If you were to
put him on the spot, Jonathan would probably justify this wild
irresponsibility in the following way: Living, as I’ve done, a life in
the shadows, with no emotional security whatsoever, I’ve cleaved to
this relationship above all others – so I needed a record of it, had
to be able to hear his voice, read his words, even look at wonky
seeseeteevee footage of him entering and leaving some of our
rendezvous. It’s been my touchstone. But now? Now the large data-set
is too hot to handle – it will need to be extracted from the storage
cupboard of a corner shop in south Lambeth and … destroyed.
Yes, destroyed. Jonathan sees himself, a serial killer manqué, his
victims obsolete three-and-a-half-inch compact floppy disks which
would require an equally obsolete computer to read the files they
contain, each of which consists of cut-and-pasted gruff and cliché-ridden
sentiments: I thought love would last forever, I was wrong …
Jonathan suspects his violent feelings towards Gawain may well
moderate, but for now he cannot picture the Fighting Ram’s woolly
head without just-swallowed processed cheese repeating on me …
pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood. He turns his attention to
the holdall he bought in Kuwait City. At the time he was simply
playing for it. (Playing for what?) For time, idiot! He hadn’t wanted
to arrive at Shaibah in full daylight and face sliminess of all
sorts – possibly some political interference. There was this ulterior
objective – and also winding up his close protection detail, who,
no doubt, are very handy when it comes to dishing it out, but, as
he’d suspected, were quite unable to take it. Jonathan dishes out the
items he requested from the spotty Bangladeshi in his sisal-smelling
shop on to the shiny bed cover: a khaki boiler suit, a heavy-duty
rubberised torch, a canvas water bag, a pair of workman’s steel-toe-cap
boots and a folding entrenching tool. True, this is the sort of
stuff he might’ve smuggled across a land border in the glory days –
there’d been a certain erotic frisson to be gained from helping a
petrified Czech cipher clerk into a boiler suit … fingers fiddling at
the belt, straying … The pod’s atmosphere is at once foetid and
astringent … a locker-room ambience. He’d known Amir was dead
before he left London – so the exfiltration kit had been nothing but
wishful thinking … reverse all the clocks: let the poor man acquire
yet more strength and vitality from every blow he was dealt, and so
rise up from the concrete floor of whichever dark chamber in which
the Rams had penned him. To die like this! Jonathan sobs aloud, at
the hands of sheepily ignorant dole-queue-dodgers! Oh, Amir!
Slowly, and with infinite weariness, Jonathan begins to undress:
first the immaculately tailored midnight-blue, mixed silk-and-linen
suit – next the Territorials’ tie, then the handmade Charvet shirt
with the three-button barrel cuffs. He stands naked for a moment,
in his Zimmerli briefs and purple handmade cotton socks. Wo
Regenten wohl regieren, he sings in a light, clear baritone – and is
answered from within by (Kann man Ruh und Frieden spüren),
sung in deeper, muddier tones. His hand strays down over his
prominent ribs and flat belly, Und was Länder glücklich macht,
he breathes as his hand cups the liquid heaviness of his genitals –
only to be answered by (Wo Regenten wohl regieren). But there’s
nothing stirring in this mixed merino and long-stemmed cotton
pouch, no quivering erlang-lang-langet. The methyphenidate and
the military fuck-up have joined forces and rendered me impotent …
(Not surprised, old fellow – booze alone’ll do it to you, and there’re
those pep pills you’re always popping …) It’s true, Jonathan speaks
aloud, that our relationship is at long last getting on to a better
hippety-hoppety footing, but that doesn’t mean I have to TAKE
ANY SHIT FROM YOU! The remainder of his prep
arations are
carried out in silence, apart from the wheezing of the air con’, and
the buzzing of a single insomniac fly … or should it be … spy. Stay
Safe Always Drive Defensively reads the sign beside the rat-run
which leads to the base’s main gate. Jonathan stands in the shadow
of the sandbagged walls, hidden by the camouflage netting draped
from one of the flanking sangars. He’s considered all the possibilities
that lie in wait … for history is a pattern of timeless moments,
the vast majority of which can tell you nothing, being dead … Now
he settles on this, the most probable timeline: he’ll walk, quite
casually, up to the Paras who’re on drag-stag, flash his diplomatic
passport and EssEyeEss eyedee, wait for them to scare up Gerry
Fox, speak to him on the phone, then pass it back to the quite-likely
jug-eared grunt. Would they be amazed by this sight: a middle-aged
British man wearing a khaki boiler suit and workman’s boots, and
carrying a holdall, ducking casually under the first barrier, the
second – and the third, sketchily saluting the lads in the last sangar,
then wandering off into the greying Iraqi dawn? Yes, yes – they
would. Just as the upstanding men – and a few women – of the
armed forces community would probably be amazed when, in a few
months’ time, the Prime Minister pays them a surprise visit and
stands – the smile on his face off-centre, since it’s been pinned on
him … by the invisible hand of the market. Yes, yes – the military
would pose alongside him for public consumption, and their own
uneven smiles might perhaps remain for a while after TeeBee’s
had gone, but soon enough they, too, will fade … Just as Jonathan
would’ve faded into the grey dawn six months earlier. And where
would he go, this antisocial ghost? Why, to the airport of course –
that’s where he’d go: to Basra International Airport – designated by
his military brethren as an air point of disembarkation – where he’d
wangle his way on to the next transport out of Iraq. (And how
would he get there?) He’d walk there, old man – walk there because
you’ll be with him, and, dutiful son that he is, he knows there’s
nothing his father would like more than to stretch your legs and
your lips simultaneously. (But, I say, Johnny, won’t it be terribly
dangerous out there – and moreover quite a slog?) P’raps, but Jonathan
would need the slog – need as well the detoxifying sweat which
would, soon after he strode off into the slate-grey sands, burst from
his every pore, because even in late spring the daily temperature
never falls much below thirty degrees … He’d stride past the hulks of
burnt-out technicals, left there pour encourager les autres, and at
the point where the bumpy and tank-tracked tarmac divides – one
way leading to Basra, the other to the aypod – he’d take the left
fork. But then, after perhaps half an hour of footing along the roadway,
the crepuscular light negativing the isolated buildings and
shaggy palms, he’d almost certainly walk off into the desert – after
all, risk is one thing, foolhardiness quite another. When Jonathan
was far enough away from the road to be indistinguishable from …
a wonky-donkey, he’d get out the phone, which all this time would’ve
been Sam-sunging softly against my hip … Barry might’ve expected
him to use any one of its enhanced functions to report the serendipitous
(For him and his fellow-conspirators, maybe!) debacle to
the Chief – but all Jonathan would require of this expensively and
cleverly modified piece of technology is that it give him a compass
bearing. At his own home, in Vauxhall, he would’ve already sat
at his computer: a blade of anodised-black aluminium which is
implanted quivering in the black-metal surface of his bare desk.
Sat there, the buzz fizzing through him as he laboriously examined
the off-road route between Shaibah Logistics Base and the aypod,
using a combination of satellite photography obtained by the Firm,
and rather more homely Google Earth images … see the little boys,
caught on the pedal-operated irrigator, and flattened across a ditch by the
eye-in-the-sky ? People who search for Saddam Hussein also search for
Osama bin Laden … (Why, why would you’ve done that, Johnny?)
Oh, Jonathan might well say, I’d a hunch we’d need to exfiltrate
ourselves with some subtlety … Then he’d strike out towards a
horizon against which would be outlined just a few of the thousands
of defunct oil derricks scattered across the Iraqi oil fields. And Kins,
observing these anodised-black hammer-shapes, quivering in the
convection waves which would already be rising, might well make
some allusion to Mjölnir, and how an analogy might be drawn
between the thunder and lightning of the Wagnerian cosmos and
the shock and awe of the Coalition’s assault on Saddam’s regime.
And, as his son made for the horizon, in all likelihood Kins would
continue in the same vein, speaking gently but insistently about the
nature of good and evil, and how he’d known things were seriously
awry from pretty early on … never personally lending any credence
at all to the government’s claims. (Forty-five minutes!) he’d expostulate
in Jonathan’s heating head (I couldn’t drive into Hemel and
buy a few groceries in forty-five minutes), and, although his son
would try to explain that readying long-range artillery shells with
biological or chemical warheads to be fired might well take considerably
less time, Kins’s dander would be up by then: he’d seize
the opportunity afforded by this unprecedented situation to speak
his mind. (It might help you, Johnny, to really understand the true
consequences of all these epochal events if you just tried sympathising
with the fate of a single man.) And, although Jonathan would
very likely try coming back at him, dragging up Kins’s homophobia,
his adultery and his failure to protect his sons from their mother’s
abuses, this would be a mistake – for when it comes to the logical
nit-picking humans term “ethics”, who’s more likely to be a past
master: a middle-aged homosexual spy with a dependency on prescription
drugs or a dead sociology lecturer? (Hypocrisy is what
you’re accusing me of, Johnny) would be a familiar enough line of
argument from Peter De’Ath (But you ain’t comparing like with
like, old boy. There’s a distinction to be drawn here between cultural
values – which do indeed change with time and place – and core
morality, which, while perhaps not reducible to some fundamental
aspect either of people or of the world, nonetheless remains remarkably
consistent over time – think of the Golden Rule and the
Categorical Imperative …). And because this is the beginning of a
beautiful friendship, with the two of them stumbling over low and
gritty dunes, the sun coming up behind casting their shadows far
out into the future … Jonathan De’Ath wouldn’t lose his temper, not
even if Kins strayed beyond hi
s remit and began chiding him over
Kelly. (You can easily imagine the sort of man he was, Jonathan –
dutiful, compassionate. He belonged to that odd religion, didn’t
he?) Baha’i. (That’s the one – and what do they believe in?) The
One True God and the spiritual unity of humankind (Sounds jolly
familiar to me, Johnny …). By now – an hour or so after waving
goodbye to the grunts in their sangar, Jonathan could well be tiring
(I do wish you’d see a doctor about this pep pill thing of yours …),
and so would likely take another pill … or two. The multicoloured
and ever mutating vortices into which human movement can be
transformed by the application of motion-capture might make of
these minuscule actions – the popping out of pills from blisters
of plastic-and-foil – a thrilling arabesque, but Jonathan would
think of Kelly, propped up against his tree on Harrowdown Hill,
his trusty penknife open beside him, his fingers busily and efficiently
at work … poppety-pop goes the weasel. Think of Kelly and his lonely
trudge into an unredeemable future – one Jonathan might be seen
as having assisted in summoning. Yes, he’d think of this, and,
hearkening to the wild dogs barking at the rising sun, he’d pick
up the holdall and press on. (I don’t think I ever told you much
about my experiences during the war …) Is the sort of sally to be
expected from Kins, who’d be carried along as well – while his son
would very likely think back to the baby, held aloft at Terminal
Four security, speculating that everyone deserves his own particular
mind-child … Barking dogs and mounting heat – the maddening
split-second substitutions of flies for grit: one moment here, the
next … not, and then the pathetic realisation, old leg-man that he
is, that Jonathan has forgotten the canvas water bag, in which case
all at once the scarred desert will be at one with his sore throat …
His resignation would be in John’s inbox before the Herc landed
at Brize Norton – he’d’ve at least made this much use of Barry’s
Samsung, surely? And then what? Sitting in the transport’s booming
fuselage, listening to the squaddies clustered round a laptop,
who’d be watching one of the video montages it’s become de rigueur
for your comrades to compile when you finish your tour: footage