Bête (26 page)

Then he did a strange thing. He dropped to his knees. Was he praying? Then he sat back on his heels. He continued mouthing inaudible somethings.

I posed a question:
‘The
fuck
you doing?’

He looked at me, and frowned. His mouth started moving again, but again no sound came out. His expression was that of an ill-tempered man. It was so bizarre that I actually wound a finger into my ear, on the off chance I had suddenly gone deaf. But, no: the wind was audible in the trees behind me. Dumb birdsong chittered in the distance. Was he
whispering
? I went over
to him, and bent forward to hear what he might be saying.

‘And a full act, shit-sock,’ he whispered through gritted teeth.

I recoiled. ‘What?’

‘Ass,’ he hissed at me.

‘Ass yourself,’ I snapped, straightening up. ‘Just because you hold the high-mighty post of gatekeeper: Jesus!’ I picked up my pack. ‘I take it, I take the hint.’

He shook his head, furiously. ‘Ass!’
It was then that I noticed his face was undergoing a chameleon transformation, coming into line with his dark green fatigues. ‘Ma!’ he hissed.

The penny dropped.

‘And you got, what, an inhaler?’ I asked him. ‘Or something?’ He flapped a hand towards his booth, and I limped quickly over. Inside it smelled of old crisps and mould. There was a great deal of clutter. The iTab was still
on, the image freeze-framed, and although its screen was very scratched and scored over it was clear enough what the gatekeeper had been watching when I interrupted him. The individuals embroiled with one another had a healthy pink and shiny glow about them, and looked old enough, if barely, to be consenting adults. Because I was looking for an inhaler I missed the epi pen – right in the middle of
the desk – until I had been through everything else. By the time I got back to him, the gatekeeper’s face was a fine cerulean blue.

I stuck the pen into his skin at the bottom of the neck and held it for some seconds. He drew a long breath, and his colour began to return to normal. ‘Anaphylactic shock,’ he croaked at me.

‘Beg your pardon,’ I said. ‘I thought you were saying something
else.’

I helped him back to his seat inside the booth, and for a while he just sat there recovering. ‘Don’t tell Desmond,’ he begged me. Since I had no idea who Desmond was, and considered the chances of my ever running into him statistically nugatory, I had no problem in agreeing to this. ‘It’s a council post,’ he added, ‘but full fitness is taken as a cine queue nun.’

‘A what?’

‘A cine— You know. As a fucking precondition. As a for granted.’ He coughed. ‘Not a single cigarette in eleven months! It’s got worse since I stopped, I swear. How is that fair?’ He noticed the freeze-frame pornography displayed on his iTab, and blanked the screen with a gesture. ‘Hmm,’ he said. Then: ‘Hoom.’ Then he looked at me. ‘Jobs are hen’s teeth uptown,’ he said. ‘For a person my age,
my health? Forget it. If Des gets the intimation of my— Look, I got a rank, you know.’

‘A rank?’

‘I’m a NCO. I’m a corporal, though no army pension. And if they invalid me
out
—’

‘Jesus,’ I said, more than a little disgusted by his self-pity. ‘I’m not going to tell anybody.’

‘You’re not?’

‘Your secret is safe with me.’

‘You’re all right,’ he told me gruffly.
His voice sounded, suddenly, moist.

‘I think I preferred you when you were telling me to fuck off,’ I told him.

He let me through the gate, at any rate. ‘That limp real?’ he asked, as I passed through.

‘Why would I fake a limp?’

‘Military service, maybe,’ he said.

This stopped me. ‘So what you’re telling me is: not only do you need a passport to get into Reading town,
now, they’ve also instituted compulsory military service?’

‘No,’ he conceded. ‘Just that the militias – they’re aggressive in recruitment, see. On the plus side, they pay. Pay real money, which a rag on a stick like you
might
appreciate. If you’re hoping on buying, you know, food and that. Food inflation running’s at a double-figure number. So, maybe de-emphasize the limp?’

‘I can’t
de-emphasize it, fucker,’ I returned hotly. ‘It’s a real limp.’

‘Only trying to help you! Go on.’ He waved both arms in a shooing gesture. ‘Fuck off into town, swellfoot. I ain’t seen you.’

I walked on. Things were markedly different on the inside of the wall. For one thing, all the houses were occupied. For another, there were thousands of tents. It looked like a music festival. Every
front garden, give or take, was home to a two- or three-person tent (paying rent, I afterwards discovered, for the privilege of being able to pitch their canvas onto lawn, and for the use of a water tap). But this wasn’t all: the pavements were clogged all the way along with one-man tents, and the pedestrians – of whom there were a great many – had to walk in the road. There were occasional cars
in the road too, buzzing and whining their way slowly along, drivers venting their frustration with atonal parps on the horn. A crowd, a crowd, so many I had not thought death had undone so many, and so on, and so forth. A positively Meccan crowd.

I wandered further towards the centre of town, and saw many symptoms of ill-temper. At one early twentieth-century semi a woman was trying to
park her car on her own driveway; somebody had pitched a tent on the pavement in her way. She left her car idling in the middle of the road, which in turn provoked shouts and horn blasts from two other drivers. If the road had been clear, it would have been possible for them to go around; but the road was not clear. Myriad pedestrians swarmed up and down, and the cars stood out like islands in the
stream. I stopped to rest my foot, leaning my back against a lamp-post, and watched the woman who was trying to park her car. Swearing, she tried to drag the tent away from her drive; but it was occupied, and the owner came out shouting. He was dressed in a quaintly old-fashioned manner – fatigues and a dyed Mohican like a rooster comb; but he was a tall fellow and rage had made his face almost as
red as his hairdo. He was yelling at the woman; but leaving his tent had been a mistake, because once his weight was removed from inside it the woman was able to swing the whole thing round and heave it into the road. It landed on top of a group of people who were not happy at the fact, and they threw it further along. It hit the windscreen of a van, passing the other way. The driver wound his window
down and began wishing ingeniously imaginative maledictions upon the throwers – but then a gap opened up in the press of pedestrians, and he buzzed his engine and rolled forward, driving over the tent and whatever belongings Mohican had left inside.

I looked back; the woman had parked and darted inside her house. I wondered if Mohican was moved to seek some kind of vengeance, perhaps upon
the parked vehicle, but instead he was picking up the squashed heap of his tent out of the road and readying to move on. Startlingly profuse tears were visibly pouring down his face.

I was very hungry and growing hungrier. With my bad leg, walking was tiring enough already; fighting through a crowd was much more exhausting. Knowing that I had just about enough money for one modest meal left
on my chip I decided I would get myself something hot to eat and somewhere to sit down whilst I did so. I was approaching the shopping district now, and the crowds were a little less intense.

I limped on, trying to adjust my temper to the many shoves and bumps I received. The streets were heaving. One long street of nineteenth-century terraced houses was so crowded that I gave up after ten
minutes of trying to push through, and instead plocked my weary way round a series of detour roads. I crossed the river, and stood for a while on the bridge. The water was wholly cloaked in a glut of houseboats and pontoon huts.

The crowds grew thinner the closer into the centre I got, but there was still a bewildering number of people everywhere, coming and going. Eventually I came to one
of the several large malls that characterize shopping in central Reading, and was again stopped: this time by an automated turnstile. The screen said I would only be allowed in if I scanned my money chip; so I scanned it. The turnstile opened, but to my displeasure the device took twenty cents off me. It was only a small sum, but the fact of it rankled.

Inside was like a temple: an arched
glass ceiling three storeys up, and people swarming in and out of the shops, up and down the escalators. I pushed my way through the shoppers until I found a service desk, with an Oracle official inside – presumably he was either a security guard or a handyman – reading a book on his slate. It was a broad, maroon-coloured desk, and there was nothing on it; except the security’s guard’s elbows. ‘The
turnstile took twenty cents off my chip,’ I said.

The guard looked at me, and then turned his attention back to his book without saying a word.

‘I want that twenty cents back.’

The man put the book down, and angled his face back up at me. ‘You what?’

‘There’s no signage indicating that the scanners are going to withdraw money from the chip. It doesn’t say: entrance fee,
twenty cents.’

‘Not an entrance fee,’ he said, in a tired voice.

‘Then why was it taken from me?’

‘Scanning fee.’

‘It doesn’t cost twenty cents to scan a chip,’ I said. ‘Doesn’t cost anything at all. Adverts do it all the time, and they don’t charge.’

He shrugged.

‘The turnstile wouldn’t let me in unless I scanned the chip. That’s tantamount to a charge. And
since no notice is given that there
is
a charge, that’s illegal.’

‘It’s only twenty cents,’ he said.

‘You can’t put a fiduciary value on principle,’ I pointed out.

He thought about this for a while, and then said: ‘It’s only twenty cents.’

‘If you regard it as so
trivial
a sum,’ I said, ‘then you won’t mind reimbursing me out of your own pocket.’

He stared with sphinx-like
blankness. There was a long pause, whilst he looked at me, and I looked at him. When I didn’t go away, he said: ‘For the loos.’

‘I have no intention of using the toilets,’ I said. In fact I did, but I didn’t want to undermine the principle upon which my objection was grounded.

Finally something in him gave way. ‘For the marble fucking floor,’ he said. ‘For the pleasure of this conversation
with me, who happens to be the foremost metaphysical philosopher of our neo-Socratic age. A one-off charge to protect
your
nose from having
my
fist driven into it. It’s only twenty cents. Fuck off.’

My own determination hardened. ‘Good book is it? On your slate? Looking forward to getting back to it?’ I leaned in. ‘Or are you bored with it? Maybe you’d rather spend the rest of the day taking
me to see your supervisors, so that you, they and I discuss how to take this matter through the civil courts, including
your
name and badge number.’ He wasn’t wearing a badge. But I think he took the point.

For a while he stared at me, and I stared at him. Finally he shifted his weight back in his chair, fished a twenty-cent coin out of his pocket, balanced it on the back of his thumb and
flicked it at me. With an agility that I didn’t know I possessed, I whipped out my hand and caught this. Having to pick it off the floor would have robbed the moment of its point. It was only twenty cents, after all.

‘Cash,’ I said, in a disappointed tone. ‘I suppose that will have to do.’

I queued for a long time inside a burger restaurant, which was good since it gave me time to
adjust my brain to the eye-watering prices. I had been out of the loop for a while, I knew; but the brute fact of price inflation was still startling. They were charging extortionate prices for Vitameat patties in a bread bun. When my time came I ordered the Extra Large meal, and a coffee, and a hot apple pie. The lad behind the counter had the constellation of Orion on his cheek in acne. ‘You don’t
have the funds on your chip for that, sir,’ he said. ‘Ditch the pie,’ I said. And thus did I spend the last of my money.

I dropped the twenty-cent coin into a charity box by the till. The charity, I noticed only after I had donated, was the
Campaign for a Bête-free Berkshire
. ‘I’ve got the Lamb in my pocket,’ I muttered to myself. ‘Literally in my pocket. If only they knew.’

I collected
my food just as a couple got up to leave, which meant that I got to sit down, which was a blessing. And I got to eat, too, until my shrunken belly creaked and I felt actively sick, which had been precisely my intention. For a long time I simply sat there, staring at the people coming in, eating, going out. There were a great many harassed-looking mothers with gaggles of shrieking kids; and also
many glum-faced businessmen types, and also OAPs. There were some lanky, paired-off teens; but fewer than I had been expecting.

I used the toilets, and washed with the free soap (free!) and hot running water (miraculous!). I was in the booth so long somebody started banging on the door. But you know: fuck them. They hadn’t spent most of the year living a tramp’s life in the woods.

After that I strolled round the shops, my chip now empty. The shops themselves reminded me of this mournful fact, since shop dummies, adverts and other fixtures that eagerly addressed themselves to the shoppers strolling in front of me went suddenly silent as I passed, scanning my chip and finding it wanting, only to pick up again for the people behind me. It was the twenty-first-century equivalent
of a leper bell. People were relooking at me. I didn’t care that they were looking at me, but I soon grew bored of the window-shopping. None of the goods appealed, and the prices were all insane. So I made my way out through the main entrance and onto the high street.

I thought vaguely about approaching the authorities. How to do it, though, without simply being rebuffed?
Excuse me, officer,
I happen to have the Lamb himself in my pocket. Can I speak to whomever is in charge
?

The sky overhead was white, and the air was cold. Blue-uniformed militia moved amongst the crowds. There was, I supposed, no specific pressure of time. I could wait a few days, and get a sense of the new dispensation in town. That, though, only bumped the problem along. I wondered about finding a place
to sleep, given the blankness of my chip. Without really directing my feet in any particular direction I moved with the main current of the crowd and found myself on the edges of a mass of people in the open square in front of the railway station. This crowd was not going anywhere. They had gathered to hear an outdoor speaker speak; one of those old-fashioned pleasures that had been resurrected since
the wifi had been shut down. I dawdled, sluggish and slow-witted on my full stomach, half-listening to the sermon – because a sermon is what it was, containing both the relevant conflagrants, fire and brimstone. I can only blame my full stomach for how long it took me to recognize the speaker. It was my old friend, Preacherman: large as life and twice as natural.