Phone by Will Self

Author:Will Self
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141938721
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2017-04-13T04:00:00+00:00

The Iraqis could be bought off – Amir’s people as well. No one on the Brit side would wish to look too deeply into the murky business of prisoner and detainee abuse – as Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas would likely put it: they’d be keen to kick it into the long grass … (Well, I think they should investigate all the allegations properly – it’s an absolute scandal, yet another way in which this entire illegal conflict has perverted the British people’s moral natures, so they’ve accepted – quite uncritically – such atrocities as torture and arbitrary detention. Your colleagues were responsible for sending dissidents back to oppressive regimes we wished to kowtow to – which makes them both accessories to torture and … murder.) For my colleagues I’ve some sympathy, Dad – the Great Game is always difficult to play: the pieces either animated or unwieldly – scampering away across the chequerboard or suckered fanatically to their squares. For Gawain and his troopers I’ve more sympathy still (But yet he disgusts you?). Now, yes, he disgusts me – by the way, what d’you think that thing is over there, behind the concrete structure with the sort of pylon on top of it? (Looks like just another one of those oil derricks our brave boys managed to destroy while helping these benighted people reconstruct their nation.) C’mon, Dad, you’re being, hic! facetious. (What’s that you’re swigging from, Johnny – have you got a bottle?) It’s whisky, Dad – your preferred tipple, I believe … You always loved the heat of a shot gouging down your sad and scraggy red neck, now didn’t you … (There’s no need to be insulting, Johnny – where the devil did you get hold of it?) In Kuwait City, at the Hilton. I popped in to see an old colleague … (Well, you might offer a fellow a wee dram, since he’s along for the ride.) Don’t fret, old man – you’ll get yours in good time: it’ll just sort of seep into you – you wait. (And justice for the abused Iraqis and their families – that’ll just seep into them, will it?) Jonathan De’Ath, would, one assumes, keep plodding on as the sun rose in the shocked sky. Every few hundred metres he’d either find or create sufficient shadow to check the erlang-lang-langet on the Samsung to ensure he was maintaining the right bearing for the aypod – then he’d plod on, bickering with his father’s imago: The more flagrant malefactors – those whose crimes were, say, exposed at Snappy Snaps – they will, of course, be punished – but war is, Dad, by definition a brutal business. What can you expect of nineteen-year-old boys, mostly from disadvantaged backgrounds, called upon to police a failed state in which every adult male goes equipped with an automatic rifle? (Go on! Give us a top-up, there’s a good chap – anyone would think you were enforcing a two-can-bloody-rule!) It was just another of the Narcissist-in-Chief’s fantasies that

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