by Will Self
something which threatens his precious nation’s security for him to
put the call in to VeeBeeArr. If they then call him back while
he thinks he’s calling me? Well, I can’t be one hundred per cent
certain, but I believe this may be sufficient for all the wires to
finally connect and the upload to begin. The alternative scenario –
which I’ve already painfully experienced again annagain – is for
VeeBeeArr to obtain the number of Gramps’s smartphone, put a
call in – and for him to answer it. In which case I can feel the barrels
of the Met’s armed response unit already boring into me – so many
pump-action shotguns, their side-by-side muzzles … dead eights,
pointing the way to eternity. I can see a tactical response unit pitching
up at Wagon Wheels as well – Jonathan fancies himself, I think,
as something of a philosophucker, who once saw in the strobe lights
of a gay disco the way human mind and vision are interleaved:
he turns his aquiline nose one way, I think, and the rabbit’s inside
the cage – he turns it the other, and hippety-hoppety … the rabbit’s
free. As for Gramps, I consider him to be the unwitting discoverer
of this epochal capability for transcendence which humanity stands
on the brink of acquiring – so it only seems fair it should be his own
guilt-ridden and unravelling old psyche that’s the first to be absorbed
into the great cloud of digi-being. It’s quite impossible to imagine
what this physical revelation of a psychic truth that’s ever been
present to him will feel like – quite possibly he’ll think he’s achieved
some sort of enlightenment. If Gramps had’ve assaulted Isobel
McKechnie on the summit of Tinto Hill, then Bobby would’ve
escaped – and upon recapture he might’ve said those awful things
to the young Doctor Busner, terrible and enduring judgements
concerning his character, which he’d very likely have repressed
for all these years. Obviously not completely repressed – only
Fan-Dabi-Dozi-Freudians believe such a nonsense is possible. No,
they’d’ve bumped up to the surface of his consciousness from time
to time, informing and reinforming his spurious commitment to an
existential approach to mental illness – lurking in his buffo performances,
which began when he was a young barefoot doctor at
Kingsley Hall, and went down to the basement to help Mary Barnes
with her shit-painting – continued at his short-lived therapeutic
community in Willesden, and indeed manifested throughout his
career in his crouching, so as to look his psychotic patients directly
in the eye and tell them I understand – and I sympathise: believe me,
I really do – I understand about … the air loom, or the transuranic
generator, or the mobile phone – whatever it is THEY have
cunningly adapted so as to enable THEM to mess with your head.
He would’ve sat with Bobby in the cell set aside for the patient-prisoners
who weren’t allowed open visits, and under the bored yet
viciously judgemental eyes of a ruddy-fucking screw received this
damning estimation: You’re a coward, Doc – a coward to your very
marrer, so you are. Ye couldnae help me, and ye’ll never be able t’help
anyone – your heid’s full of nonsense an’ blether … Och, an’ pride
as well – a fearful pride … and it would go on like that for some
time – a pitiless character assassination, delivered in Bobby’s reedy,
importuning tones. At the end of it, young Doctor Busner wouldn’t
be simply demoralised – he’d know his life had jumped the rails,
such that henceforth everything would have this dreadful air of the
conditional, the provisional – and the not quite real. And a few
years later, after the Cuban Missile Crisis, when it became known
that a Soviet submarine commander had refused Khrushchev’s
order to fire his nuclear missiles, Zack would, quite likely, have
understood this might be what’d happened to him at State Hospital
on that October Sunday in nineteen hundred and sixty-two: his
entire life had been pushed into the realm of the possible and the
probable – such that nothing about it would ever be definite. Which
is why he might find himself floating back up into consciousness
on the three-eighteen service to Ardrossan Harbour from Glasgow
Central with little clear memory of how he got there – not just
proximately, but unable to clearly identify the pattern of moments
that, linked together, could’ve produced any such eventuality. The
vigorous but elderly Scotswoman sitting opposite him could well
appear completely bald to begin with. Then, as Busner gains more
awareness, he might think – because people do think such things,
critiquing their own visual epiphenomena: the sun dogs which howl
in the corners of their brilliant vision – that this image of her
pinched and pious face is being downloaded on to his mind-screen,
which is why there’s a certain amount of show-through – in this
case of the antimacassar behind her head, with its logo’s enjamb-ment
of Scot and Rail. But, becoming more alert, Busner could very
well be forced to recognise that yes, he’s sitting with Simon and
Ann in a group of four seats, and that opposite them is indeed an
elderly Scots Buddhist nun, in full dark robes, her head completely
shaven, wearing bifocals and telling the beads of her rosary, as a
ScotRail steward comes along the rocking carriage pushing a tea
trolley. Simon’d prob’ly say something like, Are you going to Holy
Island, your Reverence …? ’cause he’s no fool, really – and, while
almost certainly mentally defective now, for years he’s understood
perfectly well how to be of good report … The Buddhist nun would
be, one imagines, stern but not dismissive – despite the fact that
Simon, having slept rough last night, would certainly smell. After
all, it ill behoves any mendicant to look down on another. She’d
tell their little group she would indeed be taking the ferry over to
Brodick on Arran with them – and that from there, there’d be a
bus connection to the little village of Lamlash, where the boat
would arrive to take them over to Holy Island. But that, no, she
wouldn’t be part of the three-day course on mindfulness the three
of them had been enrolled on by Doctor Busner’s daughter-in-law
– because, in all likelihood, she’d have garnered the name and
status of the wild-looking, white-haired man wearing the bilious
tweed suit, who looks to be in his late seventies, still hale, if a
little bit confused – rather, she’d be decamping pretty rapidly to
the far side of the island, where there are a number of secluded
meditation huts, in one of which she’s intending to spend several
months of reclusion, listening to the gulls’ screeching, the hawks’
piping and the fighting of the feral Shetland ponies – whose battles
for masculine supremacy quite often result in fatalities on the rocks
below. A great shame – especially given that, since Holy Island was
acquired in the nineteen nineties by the Buddhists of the Samye<
br />
Ling Monastery in Dumfriesshire, there’s been a concerted programme
to make this a haven of biodiversity, teeming with native
species, rather than a killing field … No doubt, the elderly Scots
Buddhist nun wouldn’t be averse to continuing on this theme –
averse, neither, to conversation itself, of which she would very soon
have a complete and utter dearth. However, the contemporary world
being the way it is, the strong likelihood is that her interlocutor’s
mobile phone would at that very moment begin to ring insistently –
although ringing, she’d surely testily remark, is hardly the right
word for the tinny tunefulness it’d exhibit as it knick-knacks into
life, and plays right through the numerical rondo for a full minute
before Doctor Busner manages to locate the device and hit REJECT
CALL. In the slightly stunned atmosphere which always follows a
forgettable incident of this sort – the inversion of public space, such
that the entire world is reduced to eight feet by three feet, the precise
dimensions of the old Kay-eight and Kay-six telephone boxes
designed by Giles Gilbert Scott, whose own father was responsible
for the rather more expansive and luxurious appointments of the
Foreign and Commonwealth Office – the nun, wishing to extend
an olive branch to this humiliated and confused elderly man, could
well recall Pete Seeger’s version of the nursery rhyme, which was
released as a single in the late nineteen fifties. She might also
remember seeing a film of him playing it on television – his long
neck angled strangely, the expression on his eternally boyish face
strained as he knick-knacked his way through the tediously ordinal
nonsense verses … Aye, but ye ken wha’ a paddywhack is, now don’t
ye, Doc? Ye ken it’s the cord wa’ holds the poor wee sheep’s heid up – if ye
cut it, the animal cannae raise his heid again. To which the elderly
Doctor Busner – who, like many afflicted with dementia, finds the
distant past readily to hand, while the present forever eludes his
grasp – might reply that the version he had in mind when he chose
the ringtone was in point of fact being sung by a hundred or more
Chinese orphans as they were led to safety, during the Japanese
advance into Manchuria, which was the precursor to the war before
the war before the war before the war before the war before the
current one. To which the elderly Buddhist nun would possibly
respond by asking if Doctor Busner had himself grown up in China?
To which Doctor Busner – not being even seventy per cent gaga
yet – would certainly respond that no, he’d heard the nursery rhyme
sung by the orphans in a film he’d seen in the early nineteen sixties
called The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, about a Christian missionary
in China. To which the elderly Scots nun – showing that
irritation common to occidental Buddhists, who’re driven to this
self-annihilating practice by their own screeching egos – could very
well reply with a choice remark about the lazy inferences afforded
by sight. But Doctor Busner would likely not respond to this, sunk
in these self-same lazy inferences as he might well be – and seeing
there Doctor Robinson, played by the veteran character actor
Moultrie Kelsall, who stands on the steps of the Chinese Missionary
Society’s residence in the town behind the Nationalists’ lines
and cries out, I’ve been praying night and day – we’re not leaving
without those children! To which Curt Jürgens playing Colonel Lin
replies, I’m sorry, Doctor– breaking off because they both hear it:
the children’s reedy voices lifted in happy song – and both then see,
coming through the ancient gates with their flanking rampant
dragons, Isobel McKechnie playing Ingrid Bergman playing Gladys
Aylward at the head of the fugitives. And when the rondo’s done –
at least for now – the four mendicants would have passed through
the purgatory of the ferry terminal, and might well be sitting up on
deck with the dogs and their owners, listening to the triply guttural
sound of Glaswegian being gobbed through a public address system.
Sitting – one suspects – on red plastic chairs bolted to the buckled
green-painted plates of the softly heaving deck, and either idly
scanning a notice stuck to a bulkhead advertising a bus tour of
Arran which goes round and around all day, such that you simply
have to hop on and hop off to see the principal attractions – or looking
beyond the ferry’s bows, to where in the mid-distance Holy
Island is being calved by Arran, in a great and milky mist cloud.
This being a phenomenon fairly often to be observed in the Inner
Hebrides late on a sultry day in early July when the midges descend
to skitter about on your Oh So Soft skin. Skin that would, so to
speak, come into its own that very evening, when, after what one
assumes would be an excellent choice of vegan dishes prepared by
spiritually seeking volunteers from pulses, polenta and the like,
those enrolled for the three-day mindfulness course would gather
in the Peace Hall, a modern building across the courtyard from
the old, harled and whitewashed farmhouse, which one imagines
would be the main centre of the Holy Island community. Here,
under wide, wooden, Scandinavian eaves, the fledgling psychonauts
would unroll their mats, gather their cushions and do their best to
assume a half-lotus, or at least a cross-legged position in front of a
young Sinhalese Theravada Buddhist monk called something like
Bante, or Banghe, or Bhante – frankly, my Pali ain’t what it used
to be – before he, one hopes, shows them his own copy of the
Diamond Sutra, inscribed on the leaves of an ancient codex bound
in dark wooden covers, then lays it on the polished pine floor, and
sets beside it the two mobile phones he uses to time the session
overall and the three periods of meditation. Sitting there on a
chair – because Bhande, whom we can picture as a smiley-faced,
Nescafé-skinned fellow, his firm breasts visible in the décolletage
of his orange robes – would’ve said he didn’t expect the older participants
to cross their legs. Doctor Busner might well set to one
side any lingering cynicism, provoked by the advertisements he’s
seen about the place for Dharma Handicrafts, and throw himself
wholeheartedly into the practice. Feeling the air whistle into his
crusty old lungs – hearing it clarinet down through his aged and
hairy nostrils, while concentrating hard on the little Hitler-moustache-shaped
patch of skin on his top lip that his expelled
breath brings to life as he breathes in and out, over and over, again
annagain, Doctor Busner could well feel he was reaching the point
where he’d be released from Samsara. And when Bhande struck a
bell three times and commanded them all to bring their awareness
back to the sounds in the room, Busner would almost certainly
hear the little groans and oofs made by those who were rising and
stretching to either side of him: an ex-soldier wit
h post-traumatic
stress disorder, and a young woman with an electrified shock of hair
on her narrow skull, who might now turn to Busner and say: And?
To which Busner could well reply: And now I think I feel refreshed
enough to speak to my grandson. There wouldn’t be much mobile
phone reception in a place like Holy Island, one suspects – but if
you walk through the peace garden, past the statues of the Buddha
half hidden by the luxuriant flowers, then head out of the gate
and down to the foreshore, and make your way along, clambering
over stiles and swishing through bracken already drenched with
dew, I believe you might reach a point where, with the dusk fast
falling, and the peregrine falcons looping double loops high overhead,
and the seals snuffling in the shallows, one of the little dots
which indicate signal strength in the top-right-hand corner of
your phone’s screen would turn from white to black, whereupon the
phone would instantly thrum into life. At that hypothetical
moment, no seventy-eight-year-old retired psychiatrist, tired and
confused, could reasonably be expected to check the name of the
caller before he touched his finger to the representation of a red
button. No, he’d be more likely to be thinking – as he had been that
morning – of his dear, long-departed uncle, and of how Maurice
always used to bellow into the phone when he answered it: Push
Button A! Push it, I say! He certainly wouldn’t imagine for a second
that if he answered the person – or entity – who’d been trying
to reach him all day, and who goes by the teasing but minatory
ascription NO CALLER ID, he’d bring down the full weight of the
security state on his beloved grandson. Nor would he suspect that
if it was BEN CALLING when he touched the definitive red spot,
he might at that instant find himself absorbed into a computerised
collective consciousness – but he certainly would be aware of the
man who at that very moment is striding along the pathway,
through the wheat field, towards the isolated copse which hides
the old church of Goltho. There’s a golden retriever running out
ahead of the man, smashing its way through the ripening wheat …
Bonnie … Bonn-ie! The dog runs back towards him, then runs away
again, circling him over and over. In the man’s pocket there could