Fiver said it weren’t so and we ended up with the relevant
directories open on our knees, running fingers down lists of kikes
and taigs – and he was right: there were more of us than them
…. …. ! …. …. ! Moreover, I’ve increased the imbalance –
single-prickedly, so to speak. Not that there’s any way of establishing
the scores now – haven’t seen a phone book in ages …. …. !
…. …. ! Don’t have one of my own any more – everything in
this thing, this slick and slippery … thing. Turn it over, feel the
smoothness of the bevelled-glass screen – turn it over again ….
…. ! …. …. ! Annagain. Run your finger round the precise
concavity of the home button – sorta tummy-button, really: touch it
againannagain … stay in touch …. …. ! …. …. ! Feelies –
that’s what we called them back in the day: small objects which
sit in the palm of the hand – nice feeling to hold and touch
them. I tried to make the Riddle tiles a bit like that …. …. !
…. …. ! carried one or two round in my pocket for years –
only connect: connect with the world, connect with other people
…. …. ! …. …. ! But it’s damnably hard – getting harder
all the time: I say something – anything – but they don’t seem
to hear me …. …. ! …. …. ! What does Ben call it when
his screen doesn’t reload fast enough? Lagging – that’s it.
Annoying little spinning widget appears as well: lagging – yeah,
lagging – that’s it, I’m lagging …. …. ! …. …. ! I’m
lagging and there’s a sorta circlet – or corona, more properly –
spinning in the very dead-centre of my visual field …. …. !
…. …. ! Spinning and spinning and stimming and spinning
and … stimming some more – a corona of precisely ruled lines,
radiating round into and out of existence …. …. ! …. …. !
Rota tu volubilis – status malus … Just goes to show, whatever they
may say, there’s not much wrong with my memory – it’s only that
I have to … sort of … download things …. …. ! …. …. !
while in the meantime there’s all this other … data – such a lot of
it, it pours in, more and more – and the more there is, the more it
reminds you …. …. ! …. …. ! you’re alone in here – while out
there it’s a Snowden aviary of a dining area, full of trilling laughter
and cheeping chatter, out of which emerges this pleasing Scouse
whine: Don’t wanna jib youse, but shall we cummere fer oor tea
t’night? …. …. ! …. …. ! Above them not Lennon’s only sky
but only fire-resistant tiles – always a lot of fire-resistant tiles in
hotels, even expensive ones …. …. ! …. …. ! But why –
why does that old codger have a sweatshirt with Jack Jones
written on it? Is it part of a series – an entire fashion line featuring
seventies union leaders? If so, where’re Vic Feather and Clive
Sinclair? …. …. ! …. …. ! This is where their winter of discontent
ended: in a summer city-break, complete with Hilton
Honors points. There they are: queuing up in front of a wooden
bench piled high with croissants and those muff-things, while their
seriously overweight wives saw at the greasy meat on their plates
with serrated knives – a mortuary sound …. …. ! …. …. !
Hang on to the phone – that’s the thing to do. It’s all in the phone:
my itinerary, my train times, my medical information – the whole
lot. Hang on to the phone – feel the smoothness of its bevelled
screen …. …. ! …. …. ! place your thumb in the soft depression
of its belly-button – turn it over and over … a five-hundred-quid
worry bead – and all I worry about is losing the bloody thing
…. …. ! …. …. ! Sign on the toilet seat in the train yesterday
afternoon: PLEASE DON’T FLUSH NAPPIES, TAMPONS, CHEWING
GUM OR OLD LOVE LETTERS DOWN THIS TOILET – and a whole
list of other stuff besides – whimsical things such as hopes and
dreams, but also old phones…. …. ! …. …. ! Why old phones,
why not new ones? Have to think about that – assemble a brains
trust is what Maurice would’ve said: We’ll have to assemble a
brains trust…. …. ! …. …. ! There would be Cyril, leaning
back in his chair, pipe at a preposterous angle, pouchy, puckish,
bearded face – carping, querulous, strangulated voice…. …. !
…. …. ! Eeeoooh, an old phone preeohsupposes a neeohw one –
and surely, what we neeohd to ask ourselves is what sort of society
we’re living in when anyone at all takes it upon themselves to discard
an expensive piece of GeePeeOh equipment quite so casually
…. …. ! …. …. ! When did he quit the stage … ? Before
fifty-five, I’d wager – and he wasn’t that old, prob’ly, though
he looked like Methuselah so far as I was concerned …. …. !
…. …. ! On it goes – and if Maurice were to answer it?
Hampstead four-oh-five-six he’d say – then he’d repeat it twice,
before beginning to panic: Push Button A! he’d yelp, at once
convinced there was some Mitteleuropean Busner on the end of
the line, fresh off the boat train, the dirt of the shtetl trapped
in his turn-ups, and wholly unversed in the ins and outs of
British public telephones …. …. ! …. …. ! Push Button A!
Maurice’d cry again, becoming increasingly agitated – he was
still doing it twenty-five years later: long after Button A had
gone … he lingered on. I’d call from a pay phone, and, as I fed
the ten-pee piece in, I’d hear, soaring above the instrument’s
mechanical digestion, his anguished confusion: Push Button A!
Push Button A! …. …. ! …. …. ! And what – what exactly
would happen? B, I s’pose – B would happen – you’d have to push
Button B! …. …. ! What did Button B do … ? Not that Maurice
was restating the fundamentals of causation – oh, no, because the
exact same thing happened when answer-phones came in ….
…. ! …. …. ! He kept on applying the old rubric of communication
to this new means – could never get the hang of leaving
a pithy message …. …. ! …. …. ! Not really known for his
pith, Maurice – any more than I am. He’d ramble on, speaking
as if he were dictating a letter: Dear Zachary, it’s Maurice here,
I do hope you, Miriam and the boys are all well. Barbara and I went
to see the Pirates of Penzance at the Savoy Theatre last evening.
It wasn’t a terribly impressive production, I’m afraid – several of
the chorus were woefully out of tune … While as for the very
model of a modern major-general – why, he was nothing credibly
of the sort at all …. …. ! …. …. ! And so on …. …. !
…. …. ! again annagain – really, I should’ve obtained the
services of a scribe to copy down these messages – which often
ran to hundreds of words – then sat and read them over breakfast
…. …. ! …. …. ! Bless him – we’re all like him now,
smoothing our remaining Nuctol-enriched hair, putting a record
on the gramoph
one … attempting to make our way across this
new wasteland using the same old ways …. …. ! …. …. !
The old Bakelite phone … its twelve-eyed minstrel face still
goggling at me from the screen of the smart one Ben gave me
…. …. ! …. …. ! hearken to its persistent insistence ….
…. ! …. …. ! reverberating on the telephone table, a specialised
item of furniture, the walnut-burled compartment of which seems
to’ve been purpose-designed to amplify its …. …. ! …. …. !
carping self-importance: Answer me …. ! Answer me …. !
And we did – by golly we did. Didn’t matter what you were
doing – eating dinner, making love, making war … sitting on
the lavatory …. …. ! …. …. ! The reverence accorded the
malevolent little household god was so great – you’d no sooner
dream of not answering it than you would of not standing for the
National-bloody-Anthem …. …. ! …. …. ! Hunchbacked
across the parquet, trousers and pants bunched around your
ankles, turd halfway out – a waggling Devil’s tail … Hello! Hello!
Yes … Hampstead four-five-oh-six …. …. ! …. …. !
Annagain: Hampstead four-five-oh-six – Push Button A! Push
Button A! Push Butt–. It stops: the thrumma-dum-dum, the
insistent trilling. It stops – and is slowly succeeded by: Scritch-itch-itch
… scritch-itch-itch … scritch-itch-itch … When I’ve
done what? Scritch-itch-itch … scritch-itch-itchright away! What
if he won’t come quietly? Scritch-itch-fuckit
Normanyou’vegotta-mantherewithhiscritch-scritch-itch
… A very small trapped bird or
possibly an insect, Busner thinks – sealed in plastic, not Bakelite
any more, but it still sounds the scritch-itch same. Everyone …
he persists … has either done it or thought of doing it: smashing
the handset against the telephone table … againannagain ‘til it
disintegrates – leaving a rice-paper disc macarooned there now
the voice it once contained has … busted out of this wiry prison
and straight into my head! — A world is shimmering into being,
Busner thinks, bodying-forth from the handset the Manager of
the Podium Restaurant holds clamped against his head – visible
waves of materiality ripple into the human spectral range, bearing
this flotsam on their crests: Eamonn Holmes slapped across a
wall-mounted flat-screen telly, a news thread ever unzipping his
comfortable belly … A whole melon poised on a mound of crushed
ice, its flesh elaborately tooled into tight, leafy tessellations so it
resembles … a monstrous artichoke! Beyond this are more shape-shifting
legumes: a forest of miniature carrot-trees surrounded by
swirls of cucumber and tomato roundels – a steel tripod bearing a
jungly mess of salad leaves and multicoloured peppers. Further
away, through the misty atmosphere, Busner spots an entire Continental
section: frills of ham and cooked meats, cheese slices fanned
out around an entire Gouda on a wooden trencher. And there are
people – guests – shuffling alongside the counter, tonging black
bread, dill pickles, mini-muff-things and full-sized croissants on to
their already high-piled plates, or spooning porridge into deep
white bowls, or thrusting specialist scoops into Tupperware tubs
full of organic muesli, honey-nut cornflakes and Rice Krispies …
blebs. All Busner can see, as his own head waggles furtively, first to
the right … then to the left … are other heads, hanging in the air,
eerily illuminated by the spotlights above the counter, disembodied
by the steam rising from it. They are, he thinks, each and every
one a world entire, around which all … this … orbits – all the
coconuts and the curries and the Castlefield Canal … All conditioned
phenomena are a dream, an illusion … a bubble … a shadow … like
dew or a flash of lightning … thus shall we perceive them … He
holds this thought, while thinking that it, too, is a conditioned
phenomena – then all at once is puffed up with giddy spiritual
pride: P’raps this is it? he exalts. I’ve slipped into enlightenment,
as a lesser man might … a ditch! – But then, he considers: That’s
exactly the sort of pride which can lead novices into the most awful
… glistening, glutinous, sickly smelling … swamp. Busner’s gaze
wanders from the serving dish heaped with baked beans into … a
charnel house: glinting, calcified slices of black pudding … oozing
grease – still greasier sausages, and a great Rattenkönig of bacon,
smeared with globs of white fat, its rinds woven into a … gristly
plait. This is where desire, that most conditioned phenomena of all,
ends – he acknowledges wearily – in the abattoir, where the poor
beast is first poleaxed, then … flayed. The MANAGER (it says as
much on the badge he wears on his lapel) has freed his ear from the
wall-mounted phone behind the breakfast buffet and shimmered
into a dark green suit with lighter green silken lapel-facings, pocket
flaps and … reveres. I’ve Maurice to thank for that: Never spare
money on tailoring, Zachary, see the flaps on these pockets …
lovely bit of stitching – the clothes maketh the man … the clothes
maketh the man … Down to Dave Wax on Hammersmith Broadway
– soft touch on the inside leg: Nice bit of shmatte, that … Never
afraid of a cliché – Jews or Englishmen, as for English Jews: It’s a
bit of shmatte, that … What was the final result of all those fittings?
In Maurice’s case a wholly irrational belief that he … passed, that
he could have himself sewn into the … very model of a modern
major-general – not that he was fool enough to try passing for
a military man, but he wore tailored English suits and shirts,
handmade English shoes, Saint Michael’s not-so-hairy vests, pants
and socks – gold cufflinks from Asprey’s, gold fountain pens from
Parker, leather wallets, pocketbooks and card cases from Smythson’s
… That he sported Italian and French silk ties only confirmed
him in his opinion of his own essential Englishness: if the Angels
of Death were to come swooping down over Whitestone Pond on
swept-up Stuka wings – if they were to dive, deploying some sort of
Semitic-blood-seeking equipment – then they wouldn’t locate
Maurice, who’d remain in the drawing room at Redington Road,
sipping tea, listening to the Light Programme … You can do it with
a Latin from Manila to Manhattan, You can do it with a gaucho in
Brazil … The ready-to-wear others would be selected, transported,
forced to remove their own inferior clothing, gassed, then flayed –
The clothes maketh the man … and the meat puppet … Would you
come with me pl– . The MANAGER’S opening salvo is sung over
by the smartphone in Busner’s pocket, which bursts into life,
throbbing in a hand that had forgotten it was holding it: This
old man, he played one, he played knick-knack on my thumb! ringing
tones that lance b
etween Busner and the MANAGER, then pierce
the wavering heads further along the buffet, looping them into:
With a knick-knack paddy-whack, give a dog a bone! The MANAGER,
Busner’s amused to see, cannot proceed: he is held in check by
the … singing ringing thing I hold … this old man came rolling
HOME! Busner withdraws the smartphone from his pocket and
together this old man … and the MANAGER stare at its screen,
while the rondo continues: This old man, he played two, he played
knick-knack on my shoe! NO CALLER ID. The semantics of this
simple statement bother Busner: how should this be interpreted?
Is it that the caller is devoid of an identity due to some psychological
or physical trauma? Or is it the smartphone which is unable
to establish the identity of the person making the call? The latter
would seem more logical, and to be consistent with Busner’s – albeit
hazy – telecommunications knowledge – although to support the
former comes this paddy-whacky notion: surely only a sentient
machine could establish that the entity contacting it is devoid
of self-consciousness? That the smartphone’s self-aware seems indisputable,
since it continues to cry out, Give a dog a bone! and
launches into the next verse … This old man he played three! with
positively gay abandon – while the MANAGER and the disembodied
heads are unable either to look away or to intervene. Busner can
remember well enough when Ben downloaded the ringtone: Choose
something catchy that you’ll definitely remember, Gramps, he’d
said, ’cause you can have just about anything you want as a ringtone,
and when you’re in public it’s confusing if you hear a phone ringing
and don’t know if it’s yours … and don’t know if it’s yours …
Yes, it was confusing – ever since his grandson had alerted him to
the phenomenon Busner has heard them: the old Bakelite phones
resonating in new suit pockets and shiny patent-leather handbags –
the young people doing some sort of Schuhplattler: slapping their
thighs and hips as they hopped from one foot to the other. –
You don’t gotta have an abstract sorta noise-thingy, Gramps – you
can download a tune, or even someone singing an old pop song …
or even someone singing an old pop song … He’d scrolled down the
options, clicking on one after another, but Gramps hadn’t wanted