Resolution Way (37 page)

The North. Some young black guy, looks like a teenager still, who seems to be coordinating things, says the words with a misty look, the North, where things are looser, less controlled, where one might slip through the gaps, live in the cracks in a good way, where networks are stronger, discontent, they say, combustible, widespread and ready to spread like wildfire, massing in the great neglected metropolises of Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle; then maybe get him up to Scotland, the rebel stronghold, and the chance, more or less, to start again.

The North, Scotland, he has never been there, thinks perhaps somehow he might be able to find a way to stay in London but they immediately disabuse him of this: no way, no way.

They will track you down fam, lock you up fam, run fam they’ll shoot you now man, I know brothers been shot, blam, resisting arrest fam, swear down fam, that’s true, these days fam, don’t even make the news.

I don’t know anybody up North, he says,

One of his liberators is squatting on the concrete floor beside him as Graeme gulps greedily at his beer, things keep going the way they are now, he says, soon enough we’ll have a civil war. Imagine the country, he says, had two choices, couldn’t choose between those directions, well, that country, caught in a political deadlock, might fracture, split, divide, North from South. The Coming Partition. Scotland’s just the start. Best to get on the right side of that divide as soon as you can. Don’t get caught behind enemy lines.

Graeme nods. Best just to agree, keep everyone sweet.

A new ID. The price for all this seems to be information. They want to talk about the factory out on the coast, the waystations, the people down there. Yes, yes, Graeme tells them, a lot of guys got brought in. Some pictures on phones, yes, those guys. These are the guys who got rounded up yesterday morning ahead of tonight’s protest; the police know something’s going down, though how much yet they don’t know. And then as they talk their ears prick up. Delivery to whom? In the Shard? Undercover cops. Oh yeah. This one’s got information that will more than pay for his passage.

Alex Hargreaves rereads the email for the twentieth time.

Hi Alex,

We never saw Vernon that day. We must have already left by the time he arrived. We don’t therefore have any packages he may have wanted to deliver to us. Sorry we can’t be of more help. Best,
Sarah

He had responded immediately.

Howard told me he dropped Vernon off at your place Feb 1996

Then the reply.

Sorry, I have no idea what Howard may or may not have said. We hadn’t seen Vernon for months by that point.

He has sent numerous messages since and received nothing back.

How long now has he been sitting here, how many days and nights, staring at the screen? He has forgotten to eat, nothing but the thin exaltation of the Deveretol and the accretion of this shard of unearthly mineral in his mind.

The final part then, where is it?

Well, now. Looking through his left eye he has begun to see something, shapes, forms, coalescing, with his left ear he hears whispers, signals, his mouth wants to move and form words in a language he cannot speak.

He sees, hears, closes his right eye, jams his finger into his right ear and understands, on frequencies, in codes and ideograms.

Though Rob had no intention of mentioning it he finds himself suddenly saying, I found a video up there, one Vernon made. Would you like to see it?

Oh! She says. Oh yes. Yes, I’d like that. So would his Dad.

Well, Rob says. I should warn you that it contains a bit of, y’know, inappropriate content.

You mean drugs?

Aye, well?

She looks downcast.

I never did understand why he needed to do those things, she says. We never did anything like that. We were happy enough.

Aye. Well, different generations.

She sighs. I never understood it. He came from a good home.

Well, it wasn’t because of you, he says. It wasn’t because he was unhappy.

Then why?

Because I think there was some mystery that he thought he would only get the answer to through, y’know, chemical assistance.

I don’t know, she says. You’ll never know everything will you? Does that mean you can’t just be happy with what you have got?

Aye, well. Rob reaches up to scratch his chin, looks out of the window at the waterlogged garden, silvery-grey in the muted midmorning sun. A light rain begins to fall.

It’s only a temporary escape from reality isn’t it? She says. I don’t even like to drink. It makes my head whirl. I did it once, said never again.

He smiles. Well, I will go and get that tape.

His job has gone. Right now, though, Nick couldn’t care less.

Paula Adonor has been dancing. He likes to watch her dance. He is, he would say, objectively, distantly, entranced by her. Her smallest gestures seem to him an inexpressible source of wonder and delight, her smile, her laughter, her death-eclipsing beauty.

Picking her up at the station he found that despite everything impending he was serene. To have Paula Adonor to himself for the evening is something he has waited twenty years for and from that moment on things have moved with a frictionless certainty. Paula Adonor it seems has plans for the two of them.

He’s coming back from the bar with a couple of bottles of water and Paula is standing, waiting for him, jacket off, hair tied back, leaning against the wall and smiling as he approaches. He hands her the water and she steps in, her fingers on his wrist, and there’s a warm breeze both rueful and promissory curling in off the coast, this sense of enigmatic rightness, of an unasked question answered.

Back to basics, the DJ is saying.

Then the beats and a voice saying over and over again:
Time dies when I am with you …

What’s Alex been doing up there all this week? Is he hiding from her? He’s got problems, he always has had. They should have taken them more seriously perhaps. Maybe she should be more sympathetic, she’s got issues too, haven’t we all? She’s had moments, moments when she wondered who she was, where she was, when her grip on things slipped.

Chronolepsy
. She had a funny episode herself, back at Uni, that she thought at the time was a consequence of a spell of messing about with drugs, coke and E mainly, nothing serious and not that much, but still, she has never really told anyone about it, certainly not Alex, even though they were doing them together and ever since then she has been strictly alcohol-only.

It was a persistent feeling of
deja vu
that struck her. It started very distinctly one morning as she turned into Wythenshawe Road, and she knew she had done exactly this before, every facet of it, every micro-movement, shade and nuance. They say time reverses at the end of time, a great cosmic contraction when, with an unimaginable black roaring and rush the cosmos falls back in defeat, dwindles, the light and energy collapsing back into a primal, super-dense point and for a moment she felt as though she had met herself there, collided with herself. She paused, so strong was the sense then of another world, another self, as baffled being dragged back as she was propelled forward, selves that at certain moments through some cosmic buffeting, nudged momentarily off course, bumped out of their groove, impacted.

She shook the feeling off of course, but then it came back again and again over the following days, more and more rapidly and each time of a greater duration, blurred into a permanent state in which she seemed to be slightly ahead of her own life, just outside or behind her own experience, and she feared that she might begin to float loose of the moment entirely, like a puppet, observing at a greater and greater distance the mechanical, circular patterning of her days, looping around faster and faster as she drifted serenely away. So at the same time there was that opposed sense,
jamais vu
, the known, the familiar seen as if for the first time, the more she knows she has done something before, the stranger the things she is witnessing become, the more unknown. Whose life is this I am living, she found herself asking out loud in the kitchen of her shared house one day and looking at the date on her phone as though that could tell her who she was, the numbers themselves seemed to make no sense, to refer to nothing.

She became feverish, her thoughts and actions disordered, went to bed, slept for almost two days straight and when she woke everything was back in its rightful place, pinned down by the clock hands, sequential, discrete, and she concluded that someone had spiked her drink with something, maybe acid, or that an E had been cut with something else, one of the exotic, untried new substances Charlie was always buying online, and that had only slowly worked its way into her system.

Back to the source, the DJ says.

Time dies
,

Time dies
.

Back to the source.

Back to ’93.

Back to ’92.

Back to ’89.

Back and back and back, only in dancing Vernon used to say do the spirit and the body meet, do the two planes coincide. Perhaps only in dancing can consciousness coalesce into a single point; perhaps only in dancing can we inhabit the same moment, the same world.

Back and

back and

back. Go back far enough and you pass through the first mother, through the first trace of life and into the inorganic, back and back so that the matter composing you can be traced to that first, primal point and then beyond to the perversely generative nothing at the root of it all.

They are in each other arms in the whiplashing drums and the whirling lights. He has his head thrown back and is laughing noiselessly.

Stop time.

Joolzy has woken early Saturday morning and is working, texting his kids and saying that next weekend he will get back down to spend time with them, too many things coming together. When does Joolzy ever stop work, when does he start? As soon as he wakes up he’s in character, even in his sleep, processing all that information ready for the next day’s slew of reports and records.

He makes sure he’s out early and circulating, in Wavelengths, chatting, getting on people’s nerves by criticising their form, giving them the unwelcome benefit of his years of experience. Important to develop a reputation as a bit of a bullshitter, a bluffer, that way you don’t have to be too consistent. He pops in to see Paula Adonor, says it’s no problem to have Lee from 7 to 10, then up and down the High Street, poking his head into shops, down into Greenwich and the record store, then chatting round the stalls at the market, then back round to Lewisham and into the shops along Lewis Grove, then back home via New Cross, a late afternoon trip up to Woolwich to sort out someone’s roofing, a favour he said he’d do and that lets him keep tabs on the groups protesting the Soft Rail extension.

He has been watching Alex Hargreaves trying to track and trace the New Zealand couple from his noodl app for the past few weeks. Thinks he’s smart no doubt, using this widely available app, whereas Joolzy has been listening in and monitoring their internet use, mobile and phone messages via his own access to the Global First monitoring network for a few weeks now, and has noted that the emails from Alex Hargreaves have been forwarded to a dropbox half on and half off the standard
www. protocol
, where they have been accessed from some point currently unknown.

He has sent out for reports and files dating back to the late Eighties, some of which haven’t even been digitised yet, and is waiting for them to be scanned and sent to him, but everything about Crane’s story that he has picked up from email exchanges and conversations makes him suspicious. This Howard, his unerring instincts tell him, is clearly dodgy. So, probably, is Robert Gillespie who, cursory checks reveal, in fact has a criminal record for trespass. Not a huge deal, the intent of Operation Whistler was to criminalise people anyway so that’s par for the course. Possibly they got in trouble with dealers around the rave scene, owed money, had to go to ground. He saw it happen repeatedly, idealistic kids trying to move serious weights of weed or Ecstasy and attracting the attention of local and not so local gangsters.

Was all that really a better life? Joolzy was always non-plussed; no heating, no toilet, no food, no privacy, nowhere permanent to stay, constantly getting chased on to the next place, everyone ill, many with mental health issues that weren’t getting addressed, no income, dealers breathing down your neck or threatening to do your kneecaps, constant police surveillance and the threat of prison for theft or trespass or intent-to-supply. Was that freedom? Was this better than 9–5 in a local office and a two-week holiday on the Costa del Sol?

Terrible music, too. He’s an expert on it, a well-respected DJ in his day, but no he never had an interest in any of it, it was purely a technical exercise for him, developed out of patient watching and listening. Those long, boring nights in tents in fields, in clubs, putting in the overtime. He was scrupulous in claiming it too. God only knows the cost to the British taxpayer.

He’s had an easier time of it since being re-deployed to South London, though now with all this shifting down to Thanet it has got riskier going home. Another year and that will do him, Steven will be at University next year, they should probably move, he doesn’t want to be exposed even if he has stopped work; there will be threats, the possibility of harassment and reprisals. Probably best to disappear off to Portugal or Spain, lots of ex-Special Branch and
CID
out there, he will be in convivial company.

He takes his work phone out of his pocket, he has had it customised so that it is scanning his retina all the time, if he looks away for more than a few seconds it turns off and locks until he looks back at it again. That way even if he loses it or leaves it somewhere no one else can read it.

Joolzy has been trying to get access through to the Curector but can’t get past Beatriz, his PA on this project, who insists that she will not let him communicate with the client directly. He knows who he is though, Johannes Altborg, and where he is at this exact moment, The Shard. No one with that amount of money gets in and out of the City without extensive security operations at every stage. Later tonight
Burst the Bubble
are going to spontaneously announce that the target for tonight’s demonstration is The Shard, but Joolzy has known about it for months and after he has left Paula Adonor’s flat he’s going to head over there, get involved in the demo, then try and get in, see if he can’t establish some form of contact, see if he has anything he can leverage, though it’s likely the client has information gathering services far in excess of his own. He could try through the client’s wife, she seems very interested in the urban, he read a profile of her in the Standard calling her a “Street-Level Socialite” and a “Boho Billionaire” and Joolzy is an expert in that field. Quite a looker, if a bit on the stringy side for Joolzy’s taste, a bit long. Still. That’s what you get if you are as rich as this guy.