there to welcome him personally … from the television screen. And
once he’d shot this apparition with the remote, it’d immediately
been replaced by the Prime Minister … and his difficulties. Busner
knows David Cameron is Prime Minister because his own geepee,
the ridiculously enthusiastic Doctor Faaris Zarq– … Zarq– …
Zarq-something-or-other, asked him every time Zack-me went in
to the surgery to have his postural hypotension checked: And
who’s the lodger at Number Ten nowadays, Doctor Busner? Really,
Cameron’s greasy pole has been … my gnomon: he thinks back to
the man’s elevation in two thousand and ten. — That May, Zack
had been mouldering away in a grotty rented flat on Fortess Road
in Kentish Town. He’d already quit the family home to make it
available to whichever of his children … and my childrens children
… wished to reside there, and was seriously considering going the
whole hog … by gifting the property to them in its entirety. For
tax purposes, certainly, because … I was fixing to die. He’d sat
there, in Room Five-Twenty, staring down at … the platters that
don’t matter any more and been overwhelmed by shame – yes, shame.
Who had he thought he’d been fooling? Had he imagined he was
some heterodox devotee of Saiva Tantra, for whom popping the
little Krishna-blue pill was … all part of the liberation process?
Athena Dukakis, who Zack had encountered at the so-called luxury
gated community which she and her father had made out of what
had once been Friern Mental Hospital … did to me what I’d
once done to the post-encephalitic patients. Or, at any rate, she awoke
a part of him – Athena had a thing about conversions as well as
erections, and, being a property developer, she’d worked on him for
over a year – stripping him down, sanding him … before applying
a sensual undercoat. It was disconcerting to summon up desire at
will rather than having it incontinently thrust upon you – but Zack
was amused, at least, by the way a hundred milligrams of sildenafil
confirmed some feminists’ biological reductionism … including that
of most of my … wives. After all, give a boy a loaded gun and he’d
always feel duty-bound to use it – it was quite possibly this Maurice
had been groping towards in his dotage, with his Push Button A!
Although the poor old sod would’ve had to’ve lived another twenty
years for effective treatment of erectile dysfunctions to give him …
a tumescent B. After the detumescent end to their first date, Athena
had said jollily: It’s up to you, Zack – you can let Old Father
Time chop your cock off, or you can pop the little blue pill like
everybody-bloody-else. He’d stayed the night at Princess Park,
demurring – and his demurral continued the next morning, all the
way to the Health Centre in Kentish Town. She’d parked outside
in her sporty little red coupé, then sat in the waiting area, reading
a leaflet about essteedees and the over-sixties, while doctors Zack
and Zarq consulted. Back at her chilly penthouse – which featured
an octagonal bedroom in one of the old hospital’s looming towers –
Athena had disrobed, peeling off stretchy black Lycra to reveal the
generous billows of her soft white flesh. Zack had been aroused –
but that was the drug, wasn’t it? While the idea of sticking this in
that had remained both anatomically and emotionally preposterous!
Behind the sunken spotlights – beneath the fitted carpets and
quarry tiles, hidden by the floor-length drapes … they clustered: the
post-encephalitic patients he’d awakened forty years before. And
not just those psychonauts who’d speeded into the star-studded
seventies with their reactivated brains only to … splashdown once
more, but his brother, Henry, was there as well – Henry, whose kite’s
life had been spent fluttering about in institutions for half a century
until … he got all tangled up in his own string. Sitting on the bed
in Room Five-Twenty, staring down at his own “toes”, Zack
had seen only this: the thin red line of the ligature cutting through
the engorged dewlap which had once been his brother’s neck …
toenails keep on growing after you die. Had Henry’s – had they curled
ironically from the cremulator at Golders Green Crematorium even
as the rest of him went up in smoke? Had they spiralled out over
North London, snagging in phone lines, scratching past chimneypots,
growing and spiralling, until there was enough primordial
keratin from which to fashion … a brand-new schizophrenic. Pulling
down Athena Dukakis’s stretchy-black panties, kissing her wiry
pubic hair, feeling the davit of his own engorged penis … swinging
below my belly, Zack had thought of … its payload: Henry’s nephew,
his own eldest son, Mark. Mark this … Mark that … bad Marks …
black Marks … He remembered him as a boy, all overbite and
blondish fringe. Remembered his adolescence, obsessed by minutiae
and their categorisation – remembered how, as Mark neared twenty,
these data-sets hardened into durable worlds apart. And, finally,
fought to repress the memory of Mark’s twenty-first birthday: the
marquee on the back lawn at Redington Road, the lights revolving,
the beat thumping, Mark’s young friends happily gyrating back
on earth, while their host was orbiting a strange new planet. Zack
had found him at last, sitting on the compost heap at the bottom
of the garden, and saying over and over, I’m rotten to the core …
I’m rotten to the core … It had hardly been ethical – Zack thought
at the time … thought for many subsequent nights … thought
last night as well, and Busner still thinks as he knick-knack-slaps
across the lobby – to have his son admitted to his own acute ward at
Heath Hospital. He looks back down the long, white-tiled corridor
of his professional life and sees himself … disgustingly inserting
his child’s case history into a data-set of his own devising, and
pleased – Yes, pleased! – by the neatness with which it fit: There’s only
so much sanity to go around in any given people-grouping, and that
applies to families as well – who knew? I bloody-well knew … Knew
most of all, p’raps, because, in the Busner Family, I kept it all for
myself. It was true: Zack had continued staring unflinchingly into
the abyss for all these years, while the others stumbled about on the
blasted heath. Henry may’ve been long dead, but poor Mark was …
still stumbling. And now, as he’s hustled towards an uncertain fate by
these heavy, Mancunian men, Busner wonders whether Alzheimer’s
itself may be a form of good mental health – after all, what could
be saner in a world in which every last particle of trivia is retained
on some computer or other than to … forget everything. If only
he could … if only I could! – It’d been the Euston Road School time
of year – when stark black twigs whipped the cold white sky and
the west wind scratched cat’s claws on oil-skinned puddles
. Heading
north from it, Zack had considered London’s struggle against
abstraction – the distortions of its most fundamental geometry.
The tower blocks subtended by the Hampstead Road were wonky
in the fog, while the entire city aspired to the condition of …
Harrington Square: a dirty and discarded nappy. En route and
on foot, he’d been heading back from a lunch with Athena at a
trattoria on Southampton Row – that’s the slap-slap, my soles smacking
the paving stones, I turned my overcoat collar up, ahhh … never
better. The lunch had been carefully scheduled, and had a single
item on the agenda: processing their relationship … what is my
penis – a pea? He’d enjoyed making love to Athena that first time –
at least he had once the ghosts of his patients and relatives had been
stuffed under her tapestry-covered tuffets. Enjoyed making love to
her several more times as well – he’d been deeply grateful to this
methodical and concupiscent woman for not rearing back in disgust
once he raised the curtain on the … freak show my body’s become. As
they’d made love, he’d felt her fingers bring back into cultivation
those remote parts which, for want of anyone troubling to survey
them, had relapsed into sterile wilderness … I became fertile again.
Yes! he had – and remained so, even when the sildenafil was no
longer coursing through his system – a state of affairs he found
almost as unnatural as Athena’s attraction to his hairless shanks and
apron of slack belly-flesh. Although not as outlandish as her fervent
desire – after a few months had elapsed – that her new-old boyfriend
should … meet her mother! It was what did for them – because,
despite Missus Dukakis being a good decade younger than Zack,
under his new, eroticised dispensation she was far too old … to
be fanciable. And fancying was what he’d been doing – Athena
reanimated the lover in him – but this charming man came chained
to a repeat offender: Zack-the-adulterer, who wandered around
town, his eyeballs rolling up the thighs of the rushing girls. He
even played the odd game of … pocket billiards, hefting the cue in
his underpants, feeling its turbid pulse as he’d wondered what’s up
there nowadays? Not the anatomical obvious – although he’d heard
tell they shaved themselves bare, which was, when you considered
the current paedophilia panic … disturbing – but what shrouded
it … this old man came rolling home! — Aren’cha gonna answer
the bloody thing? – I’m sorry? – I said, aren’cha gonna answer the
bloody PHONE! Gingerly, Busner removes the warm pulsing
object from his jacket pocket, and is relieved to discover it isn’t his
own penis but the smartphone … It’s the one Ben gave me, isn’t
it? He peers down at the screen, which bears the flashing legend
BEN CALLING. The MANAGER and the security guards peer down
at it as well. They all listen, dutifully, to the nursery-rhyme ringtone,
which rolls tinnily on through its ordinal verses … he played
three, he played knick-knack –. Who’s Ben, then? asks the MANAGER.
Aren’cha gonna answer it? the security guard with the cauliflower
ears reiterates. There’s a button on the screen labelled REJECT,
and, although it pains him to do so, Busner touches the red spot
… and Ben’s gone, falling away, end over end, into the humming
void. It was my grandson, he says, I’ll call him back later. Well,
the security guard remarks as they move on, aren’t you the daft
‘appeth, your grandson’d probably be able to help you get out of
this mess … That I doubt, Busner murmurs, that I doubt … He
roundhouses his heavy, old legs, feeling the knick-knack of his ball
sack as it paddy-whacks from thigh to thigh, but Zack isn’t in the
lobby any more – he’s travelling back down the rabbit hole of
memory, travelling back … way back to a cluttered little bedsitting
room off the Corstorphine Road. He’s sitting there on a candlewick
bedspread, holding a doll sporting kilt, sporran and tam in
one hand, and he’s marvelling at all the careful planning it’s
taken our escape-from-respectability committee to place him on Isobel
McKechnie’s bed, under the glassy, gold-flecked brown eyes of her
teddy bear, Fergus … Look your best – feel your best … Travel the
Kayser Bondor nylon way! Her inner thighs hold his right hand
in a slick, damp vice of hosiery … Travel Light! Travel Gay! Yet it
makes no difference how lightly or gaily he caresses her – there’s
only so far she’ll allow his fingers to travel. So far – and no further.
It’s taken months to reach the land of inner-thigh – and at this rate
it’ll be another year at least before he can confirm his suspicion that
Isobel is indeed the proud if prudish possessor of a pair of … gay
and saucy briefs from the Pompadour range. Which would be strange,
so little correspondence is there between this upright daughter of
the manse and the celebrated … grande horizontale. And so it’d
gone on – her starched rectitude quite as much as her easy-to-care-for
nylon lingerie having both been … expressly tailored with You in
mind. On that Euston Road School afternoon, Zack had taken the
tube from Mornington Crescent to Hampstead, then walked along
Church Row, down Frognal and up Redington Road. All the solid
Edwardian villas and Victorian terraced houses he passed had been
defanged … Dying Christmas trees lay in their front gardens, or
were propped up against railings and hedges. He’d been thinking –
and he recalls this quite distinctly – about how disproportionate
it had all been: the affair with Athena had lasted less than a year,
yet there they’d been, still … processing it three years later! Proof – if
any further were needed – that while love is mostly ephemeral …
neurosis is never-ending. When he’d reached Number Forty-Seven
they were waiting for him: the ghosts of Christmas present … his
middle-aged sons, Daniel and Oscar, together with their partners,
Pat and Vigo – his daughters, Charlotte and Frankie, and the
latter’s partner, Dave? Thankfully, his youngest children weren’t
there – Alex and Cressida, the annoyingly non-identical twins his
third wife, Charlie, had borne him, were holidaying with their
mother in Mantua … or possibly Mustique. Charlotte and Frankie’s
mother, Lalage, was very much in evidence as well: cross-legged on
a Moroccan leather pouffe, wearing a mad dress – wide at the hem,
high in the neck, multicoloured and woolly all over – which made
her appear to be some stoned Asiatic potentate. As Zack came
through the front door, she was taking a deep toke on a fat joint
of her home-grown marijuana – a toke she exhaled in a long and
noisome smoke-streamer. It was, he thought, a bit rich – especially
given she and the rest of them were evidently gathered for some sort
of … intervention. It had all seemed horribly fitting: the large,
open-plan living area – which had eaten up the old, ech
oing hall,
Maurice’s study and the chilly nook which was always referred to as
the Boot Room … as if we rode to hounds – had been very much
Lalage’s own creation, along with a lot of other drastic remodelling
she’d insisted on when they’d been married in the mid seventies.
If Maurice were to be resurrected, he wouldn’t know what’d hit him …
mismatched armchairs and sofas, slews of cushions, piles of floor
ones – thickets of standard lamps, tussocks of table ones. All this
clutter … A job-lot ill-lit by the spotlights Daniel had implanted
in the high ceiling … a dismal, disordered scene, not cosy or homelike
at all – more akin to the aftermath of some traumatic and
forced departure … the chattels the Nazis put on sale … piled up …
those wheelie-bags over there – they’d be selling Asians’ clobber as well
nowadays — The parties to this latest intervention have reached a
door inset in the wood-cladded wall at the foot of the spiral
staircase. The Podium Restaurant’s MANAGER knocks – but any
reply from within is rendered inaudible by yet more knick-knacking,
as the smartphone bursts once more into life. For heaven’s sake,
man, why don’t you turn the bloody thing off! Cauliflower Ears
says, although he makes no move to take it away from Busner,
only stands – as they all do – staring down at the trilling thing,
which pulses back at them: NO CALLER ID … NO CALLER ID …
NO CALLER ID — Lalage’s pot smoke had spurted from her horse-lipssssshhhhfffft!
Zack’s daughter, Lottie, a rangily overgrown girl
with … virtuosic ambition but little real ability had sprung from
a floor cushion and launched into what was clearly a prepared
speech – onanon she’d gone: her father was living a disorderly
life … His liaison with a woman thirty years his junior had been
embarrassing enough – most of all to himself. But that was in the
past – now he was was neglecting that self mentally as well as physically
– and then there were his companions … Zack’s mind had
wandered … doesn’t it always, taking him with it to the upstairs
rooms of suburban pubs … where men known as Tel introduce the
acts and encourage you to leave your business card in a goldfish
bowl on the bar, in the hope of … winning a hamper – Poor Lottie!
grinding out smooth ballads from her permanently sore throat, wiggling