The Magpie Trap: A Novel (4 page)

 
‘Fuck Terry,’ said Danny, returning the phone
to his pocket. Somewhere, a woman tutted; somewhere, a teenager laughed.

Well
fuck them too
, thought Danny.
Soon he wouldn’t have to worry about what
people thought of him or wonder whether it was socially acceptable to swear so
loudly on public transport. Soon, he’d have money, and that would facilitate
his escape from the shit-tip.

Mark Birch

Mark’s whistling was
off-key. In fact, those mysterious, dark and shadowy Trades Description people
would probably have pricked up their ears when they heard Mark’s remarkably
poor attempts at holding a tune being described as a whistle. Alarm bells would
jangle in the Trades Descriptions secret bunker. The chief would be summoned,
with his big, dusty tome of rules and regulations, and he’d have been astounded
by the massive discrepancy between the tuneless, forceful
blowing
which was passing through Mark’s pursed lips and an actual,
honest to goodness whistle.

           
Okay, so Mark wasn’t exactly whistling, but he was
certainly affecting an air of calm as he walked back to the security lodge at
Edison
’s Printers with Callum
Burr. And perhaps being poor at whistling made Mark seem even more nonchalant;
to hear him, one might say that he couldn’t have a care in the world. Certainly
it seemed to hardly matter at all to him who heard him making such an almighty
magpie-racket.

           
Burr gave a brief, amused smile as he left Mark at the
gate. ‘You need some lessons, mate,’ he said, as a parting comment.

           
Mark looked confused and ran a thick hand over his shaven
head as though he’d been ordered to
show
and tell
‘confused’ to an audience of aliens that were unaware of the
vagaries of human body language.

           
‘The whistling,’ explained Burr, gruffly; perhaps annoyed
that Mark hadn’t got his point. ‘Never mind; the guard will take you through
your exit procedure and then you can be on your way.’

           
‘Oh… okay, thanks,’ said Mark, embarrassed.

           
And so Mark waited in the no-man’s land sterile area. He
waited to be cleansed and processed and allowed on his way to carry on with the
rest of his list of jobs. While he waited, he suddenly realised the sorry fact
that he’d been whistling perhaps the most unsuitable tune possible while he’d
been escorted by a big brute of a Scotsman;
England
,
by Ralph McTell.

It wasn’t Mark’s fault; the music had been used on a recent Billy
Connolly travel show that he’d watched. And surely Callum would have known that
Mark hadn’t meant any harm by it anyway. After all, it wasn’t a song about
defeating the Scots in battle now was it? It wasn’t all about sending people
homeward tae think again.

           
Mark often found himself wincing in the aftermath of some
of the unthinking things he said and did. It seemed that while he was
brilliantly adept with his hands, his mind was somehow hard-wired incorrectly.
Put him in a room with policemen in it and he’d somehow always end up by
admitting to some terrible crime that he’d not committed; put him in a room with
his boss, Martin Thomas, and he’d end up by agreeing to take on more hours for
less pay than he’d started out with in the first place. And then he’d put the
icing on the cake by calling the boss ‘Fartin’, just like Danny did.

Because he’d long been aware of this suicidal desire in himself to say
the wrong thing, he often winded up saying nothing at all, and therefore came
off looking even more stupid and bumbling and buffoonish.

Frustrated, he kicked at some of the loose gravel on the floor. He must have
caught one stone in particular with rather more force than was strictly
necessary or intended. It flew off in the direction of one of the big
Edison
’s Printers lorries.
Mark could hardly bear to look as it clanged off the heavy metal roller shutter
back door, leaving behind a rather obvious dent. He prepared himself for the
loud cat-calls of the lorry’s alarm but nothing came.

‘Idiot,’ he whispered to himself.

‘Pardon?’ asked a vaguely scruffy-looking man that had just that minute
popped his head out of the security lodge.

Mark looked at the man through wide eyes for a moment, willing himself
to speak.
Don’t make this security guard
think that you’re an imbecile. Speak, dammit, speak!

‘Ummm, I was just… ummm… talking to myself.’

The security guard looked amused; his eyes lit up full of possibility.
Here was someone that was on a lower rung of the ladder than him.

‘First sign of madness,’ he said, giving Mark an over-elaborate wink. He
ushered Mark into the room at the back of the security lodge and told him to
wait a moment while he got some forms from the office.

The security guard wasn’t what Mark had been expecting; he had what
looked like three of four day’s-worth of stubble on his cheeks and dark,
deep-set eyes. He looked more like a student, Mark thought, than somebody that
needs to be ‘front of house’ at a place like
Edison
’s Printers.

           
The room at the back of the lodge looked to Mark like a
dentist’s waiting room, except it was flanked by big grey lockers which held
the mobile phones and personal items of the staff and visitors. Mark sat down
on one of the chairs for a moment but soon found that he couldn’t keep still.
Instead he started to pace the room like a caged animal waiting for release.
Waiting
again
.

He listened to the distant sound of a radio. It sounded like it was
tuned to a sports channel; he could easily pick out the high-pitched abandon of
the commentator. Probably a horse race, he thought. And he wondered whether
this was the real reason that the security guard had retreated into the office.
Maybe the guard was like Mark’s friend, Danny Morris, who had an insatiable
urge to gamble, even if it meant putting everything else in his life in
jeopardy.

           
Mark couldn’t understand such
fervour
. He couldn’t understand how people could lay themselves so open to the
wiles of fate. Mark held what few dreams he had close to his chest, as though
if he let anyone read his hand, it would be easily trumped by the more wily
players on the table. His one heartfelt wish had been broken once before, and
as such he never truly allowed himself the guilty pleasure of daydreaming. He
therefore
moulded
a new personality for himself; one which consisted
of substances such as hard work, austerity and quietness. He never expected
that life would simply grant him all of his wishes; drop them all off into his
lap as a reward for being in the right place at the right time. For him, life
was a long, obdurate, gritty Test Match, compared to the showy one-day big-hits
of people like Danny.

           
As soon as Mark heard the obvious
sounds of the end of the race, the security guard returned, clutching a couple
of dog-eared pieces of paper.

           
‘We need to run you through the exit
protocol,’ he explained. ‘It’s a new thing we’ve got on site, but there’s a new
boss coming in here soon, and… Well, you know how it is.’

           
The guard looked to Mark for some
kind of understanding that he too was subject to the vagaries and whimsies put
upon the “ever so ‘umble” workers by that big god-like creature on high,
the boss.
But Mark simply nodded in
response. Now he’d had a little time to contemplate the guard close-up, Mark
realised the reason for the near-beard growth on his cheeks. Underneath all the
fuzz, the man’s face was badly pock-marked, probably as a result of bad acne as
a kid. And Mark knew all about having to hide away bodily defects.
Many was the time that a blind-eye had been shown to his leg.

           
Mark immediately understood that it
was not right to stare at the man’s face. It would make him feel uncomfortable,
or like a circus-freak. Instead he grasped the forms and scanned the questions
they held.

           
‘I don’t usually work at the
security lodge,’ said the guard. ‘But we’re all-hands-on-deck at the moment.’

           
‘As you said,’ muttered Mark.

           
‘Don’t get too flustered by all the
questions on there. It’s basically just a way of telling you that you aren’t
allowed to disclose any of the stuff that you’ve seen in here. It’s a security
risk, you see, and, well, you’d know all about data protection and that,
wouldn’t you; being a security engineer?’
     

           
‘Oh aye,’ answered Mark. ‘We get it
all the time, like.’

           
‘Well, I’ll just run you through the
T’s and C’s,’ said the man. ‘Oh, and by the way, the name’s Mick Stephenson.’

           
Mark gently shook the guard’s
extended hand, barely taking his eyes off the forms. He allowed himself to
answer the questions carefully; questions about his identity, his job and his
reasons for wanting access to the site.
Yes,
he promised that he’d tell nobody what he’d seen, and yes, he sighed, he’d
allow his fingerprints to be taken and an image of his face to be taken and
kept for posterity in something called the Image Book.

           
While Mark was projecting such an
unconcerned exterior, in fact, he was anything but carefree. He leaned against
the wall of the security lodge and looked as through he wanted to be magically
sucked through it into another dimension where interrogations such as the one
he faced simply did not exist.

An inherently nervous man, Mark always felt as
though he had something to hide under questioning sessions, even if they were
being hosted by a man as mild and inoffensive as Mick Stephenson. Perhaps the
problem was that in this case, he actually did have something to hide and he
was
absolutely sure
that for no
reason whatsoever, he’d suddenly blurt out that he’d run a loop on the Edison’s
camera system that was not only not
authorised
but was also
tantamount to the first act of a security breach proper.

           
But Mick seemed satisfied with
Mark’s responses. He performed a cursory search of Mark’s toolbox and then
simply handed him his locker-key back in order that he could retrieve his
mobile phone.

           
‘Sorry about all the quizzing,’
shrugged Mick.

           
Mark shrugged back; a regular
character actor imitating his subject. He picked out his phone from the locker
and thought about pressing the ‘on’ button for a moment… But it could wait,
couldn’t it? All that would be waiting for him would be angry messages from the
EyeSpy Control Centre, wondering why they couldn’t get a hold of him.

The Control Centre was the place that allocated all
of the service and maintenance calls to the engineers, as well as those calls
that required an emergency response. Mark was by now convinced that the people
that staffed the Control Centre were complete and utter imbeciles. They seemed
to know nothing of the true nature of security systems or about the fact that
the engineers that they scattered around the country were actually people
rather than just red dots on a screen. He imagined how they responded to calls:

‘Alarm keeps going off sir? Never fear, we’ll get
an engineer round to you straight away. Where do you live?
Brighton
? No worries, the
engineer is on their way for you now. He’s coming from
Leeds
.’

The Control Centre staff couldn’t understand that a
simple question – ‘have you keyed in the right code’ for example - to the
customer at this point would save a ten hour round-trip for the engineer. They
couldn’t understand that at places like
Edison
’s, you couldn’t take
in your phones and would therefore not be able to answer your calls. And what’s
more…

Oh, who cares,
everyone
hates some aspect of their job, don’t they? And it’s usually some
incompetent that you work with or the lunatic drive of your boss that can’t
understand that you might have a private life or someone that just can’t
understand everything that you do for the company. Mark sighed, waved goodbye
to Mick Stephenson and stepped through the gate and back into reality.

As he walked, his mobile phone weighed heavily in his
pocket. It was as insistent as the ring was to Frodo in
Lord of the Rings,
only, instead of whispering ‘put me on and
become invisible’, Mark’s phone shouted ‘put me on so the whole world can know
where you are.’ What would life be like if he never had to turn on the damn
thing ever again? Would he be free then? Would life suddenly hold no boundaries
for him?

Turn me
on, turn me on, turn me on. What if I’ve got important messages for you? What
if I hold the key to your dreams inside me?

Mark paused a moment on the gravel path to the car
park and for a dizzy moment, he thought that he was going to throw the phone
away. He plucked it out of his pocket and stared at it instead. Such a little
thing to hold such power; such a
beautiful
thing; such a necessary thing.

Turn me
on, turn me on, turn me on. I thought I was your precious. Why are you treating
me so badly? I’m your precious, Mark. Turn me on, turn me on, turn me…