The Paper Eater (15 page)

– They’ve given way, now, Tilda announced. Handed in their notice.

– What have?

– My knees, sighed Tilda. I was getting out of the buggy, and they just went. Kerpoom. Tilda paused, and Hannah searched her mind for words. None came. – I could’ve had a nasty accident, continued Tilda. The ground’s all charged up. There’s this alga-type slime growing on it. A mould. It gets triggered by the electrons. There was a scientist on, saying so. He says it’s completely harmless and it’s nothing to do with the waste project, he even licked some. And there’s this new type of lightning, the Met Office says it’s ever so rare. Not zigzag, like fork, and not sheet either. Sort of whirlpool-shaped. Gorgeous, we’re all snapping away, and
my neighbour, he’s doing this thing with his video camera, keeping it running twenty-four hours, and then he’s going to edit it and do us a sort of ‘best of’, set to music, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. But it seems to trigger the alga. I could have slipped. Broken a bone, even, that happens a lot if you’re elderly, especially the ladies, they get osteoporosis.

She’s been watching the Health Channel again, thought Hannah. She gave a small uh-huh? to show that she was listening. Anything longer only encouraged her mother.

– I called the Customer Hotline but the lines are jammed, Ma said. Everyone complaining about the slime, and the gas being too strong. It’s difficult to breathe, with all that aromatherapy. Tilda sighed, a weary gust. – The op’s next week. Keyhole, as per usual. They’re looking into replacing them both. Heigh ho! Sometimes my whole life feels like one long hospital corridor. I can see it stretching out before me. Pale-green walls. And the smell of ointment.

Her voice wobbled. Hannah winced. Hannah found herself reaching for the envelope, and a pen. And beginning to write.

– So, said Tilda. Can you come and stay?

Hannah had a sudden sharp picture in her mind of Ma sitting there in the lilac apartment with the half-finished flower arrangements sprouting kinked wire. Small and frail, clutching the telephone receiver in both hands, her feet on the footstool. And on the shelf opposite, the hologram of Hannah’s child self, with Marilyn and the gorgon. She and Ma seemed to be stuck in a groove that spiralled forever downward. If they were a proper family, if she had had a father, and brothers and sisters, and uncles and aunts and grandparents …

– Well? Can you? Can you get away?

No. It would just be a bigger vortex. Hannah looked at the envelope. There was writing on it, now. Hers.

– Sorry. I’m being moved on to a new project.

–
A new project
, she says! Ma’s voice had suddenly taken on a new tone – high and sniffy. – Projects,
aren’t
we important! Aren’t we special, aren’t we –

– Ma? asked Hannah. I’m sending you an envelope to keep for me. Just some personal stuff. Could you do that?

Betray the customer, and you are betraying yourself.

– Course, I’ll put it with your peanut-butter-label collection. By the way, Dr Higgerlen said he wouldn’t be at all surprised if there wasn’t some odd activity at cell-structure level. But he can only confirm it by booking me in for a session on the convectorator machine at Yokeville Hospital in West Eighth.

Hannah interrupted.

– Ma, this envelope, it’s –

– So I said to him while you’re at it with your machines, my pelvis has been giving me gyp.

– Sorry, Ma, croaked Hannah, interrupting. Can’t breathe. Got to go. And she hung up.

Leaving the room, she flipped Leo’s envelope in her out tray, and felt an instant lightening in her step. She hurried on. It was behind her now. Dealt with. It felt as though someone else had done it, she thought, as she left for another session with Harvey Kidd, her mind tingling with expectation and fear and wholly inappropriate thoughts of sex. A different person altogether.

Someone she didn’t know.

HARBOURVILLE

In the week that followed the Festival of Choice and Harvey Kidd’s arrest, Atlantica glowed like a bride.

Warm breezes drifted in from the distant continents of North America and Europe, their limpid salt wash merging delicately with the peppermint freshness of the capital, where Atlanticans walked with a spring in their step, alive to the symbiosis between land, sky and sea, and the myriad lives that fluttered in the air, moved on land or writhed beneath the carpety surface of the deep, from whales and squid and octopuses down to the smallest, flickering urges of krill.

In the city, flat vistas of glass and cool cement juggled shadows in the changing light, the pylons murmured, and a static vibration swarmed across the sky, shooting fragments of pure energy down to the streets, the avenues, the hushed crevices where, beneath the safe shadow of skyscrapers, the customers of Atlantica went about the simple, proud business of being part of society.

From a small corner of this peaceful world – from a house in a street in South District, comes a low groan of physical and mental discomfort.

– Mmmmm, moans the woman. Oargh.

The street, a small cul-de-sac with its own gas pump. The house, one upon whose front door gleams a bronzed fibreglass plate bearing the words:
Stress-Management Consultancy – Please Knock GENTLY
. The woman, Gwynneth,
turning listlessly in crumpled sheets, struck down by the whirling nausea of morning sickness.

Her lover Geoff is in attendance. His five o’clock client has cancelled his Winding Down appointment, and the stress-management consultant has taken advantage of this unexpected lacuna to return to the conjugal bed – only to discover that passion must play second fiddle to the tiny rival of their embryonic child. For Gwynneth, at the age of forty-two, is pregnant.

– Just take a
deep-deep-deep-deep
breath in, counsels Geoff, in the hushed, low, capable voice he has developed in a work capacity. He finds it can be applied domestically too. – And then let it out again very, very slowly. SLOWLY. Balance out your Yin and Yang,
that’s
right.

Gwynneth obeys. But as she breathes (– In … out. In … and out, murmurs Geoff soothingly), Gwynneth’s mind – rucked as the sheets – can’t help floating down the flowchart of possibility ahead of her, and meandering into its tributaries. Tiffany’ll be moving out, no doubt, once she’s got her Libertyforce promotion. And then she and Geoff will have the place to themselves and Baby. It’ll be like starting all over again. A brand-new family. And a second chance. Doesn’t she deserve a makeover?

Gwynneth sighs and blinks her round, mother-of-pearl eyes. She doesn’t feel bad about Libertyforce catching up with Harvey – that’s how she thinks of it, that’s the phrase she uses – ‘catching up’. After all, she’s at one remove from it, isn’t she? But – well, she can’t say she feels one hundred per cent good, either. It’s kept her awake at night – that and the pressure on her bladder, which forces her to piss a thimbleful of urine twenty times a night. She’s glad Tiffany didn’t tell Harvey about the pregnancy when she arrested him.

It wouldn’t’ve been fair, would it, to make him cope with so much at once.

– OK now, love? asks Geoff gently, nuzzling closer in, and burying his face between her breasts.

– Much better, she sighs, and her flesh squishes in welcome.
Way
better.

– Better enough to … his voice muffles as his head moves downward.

Gwynneth shudders in delight, the sickness forgotten. Gentleness could be Geoff’s middle name. She’s never come across a man with such soft hands, and such a caring manner, such an intimate knowledge of what women want to hear. And feel. Where, and when.

Like down there. Now.

– A sissy, Harvey had called him.

You wouldn’t say that if you knew what he was like in bed
, she’d wanted to reply, but had stopped herself just in time. Geoff knew all about a woman’s anatomy, its little secret places, its little secret needs. Harvey wasn’t like that.

– There were always four of us in the bed, when I was with him, Gwynneth said. Geoff looked up from his nuzzling. – What with Gloria and Lola.

– Well, now there’s three, he said softly, with a puffy smile, reaching for the bottle of wheatgerm oil.

Carefully, he poured some of the thick liquid into his palm and reached down to massage the already visible swell of Gwynneth’s belly. His palm drew circles, wider and wider, and Gwynneth groaned with pleasure. Then groaned again, as Geoff ran an expert finger down. And in. He waggled it till she cried out.

– Huh, huh, huh! Yes, yes, yes! Keep doing that. Just keep doing that! The thrilling pleasure of being cared for properly by another man –
being seen to
– lapped over Gwynneth as Geoff continued his masterful ministrations.

– Now fuck me, she hissed urgently.

And so he did – and he still was, with his usual proficiency,
when five minutes later, they heard the front door crash open and Tiffany’s urgent shout downstairs.

– Mum! Mum!

– Oh Jesus, groaned Geoff, his rhythm shot to hell.

– Oh God, what’s happened? gasped Gwynneth, panting, pushing Geoff off and reaching for a dressing gown.

Geoff pulled the bedclothes over his jilted penis and sighed, majesty subsiding as the thud on the stairs grew heavier and Tiffany burst in.

– My job, she wailed, throwing herself on the bed and squashing Geoff’s feet beneath her bulky rump. Her orange-and-blue Libertyforce uniform was all skew-whiff, and her peaked cap tilted precariously. My job!

– Didn’t you get your promotion then? asked Gwynneth, trying to fix her hair.

– No! I bloody fucking didn’t!

– Oh, poor love, said Gwynneth, but – I mean, how come? It’s so unfair! What happened?

Tiffany put her hands over her face, knocking her cap on to the floor.

– It’s not just that! It’s worse! She threw herself forward, her weight crushing Geoff’s knees. I’ve lost my job! Libertyforce just told me I’ve got to leave!

– What? mustered Gwynneth.

– Why? managed Geoff.

– Cos Dad’s a criminal! she wailed. It wasn’t supposed to happen like that! I’m unemployed! They’ve taken away my bar-code! They’ve locked me out! I’m nobody!

And the big girl began to bawl like a baby.

Outside, a delicate green-tinged sky surrendered itself, on the horizon, to the split blood-orange of the sun, whose acid juice seeped out slowly to stain the clouds. As Tiffany Kidd wailed in her mother’s lap, the hot glow pooled and spread, glinting off the Makasoki bubble-domes, the flat roofs of skyscrapers,
filling stations, the trams and the malls, until it struck the pure block of glass, chrome and steel from where the Liberty Machine, impassive, serene and just, had set in motion the young woman’s sad but necessary redundancy.

Like some screen idols, she is in reality much smaller than people imagine her, being in volume no bigger than a household fridge. In some ways she resembles one: the flawless white flanks, broken only by the sliding lever that calls a halt, the boxy, human proportions, the humming technological beauty of outer blankness, inner genius. The screens she nurtures stand back against the walls of the Temple, like banks of hesitant admirers poised to react, flashing the products of her thought-processes out past the firewall, then sluicing the resulting data and policy down into the greedy heart of Head Office itself. The Boss has been keeping the building busy since developments at ground level prompted the mode-switch. Almost overnight, the Corporation has stepped up a gear. You can please some of the people some of the time, her software reasons, and most of the people most of the time, but can you please all of the people all of the time? Of course not, and nor should you try to. Liberty is a global enterprise, and no man is an island. No
island
is really an island, either. The word is full of connections. She has been making an unprecedented number of those recently, and the conclusions she has drawn, distilled from a statistical database that is the envy of the world, have led to a strategy which is now being applied in a multitude of different ways across the territory.

Spearheading an important element of which is the initiative now being unveiled in the People Laboratory on the forty-fourth floor of Head Office, where the Facilitator General himself is addressing a hand-picked team.

Among them, Benedict Sommers, chewing green gum.

He’s nervous, excited. Do the others know about his
reprieve? Do they realise that it was Pike himself who intervened to block the questionnairing? For the past half-hour, following the introductions, Wesley Pike has been speaking to them in broad terms. Benedict eyes the tall, imposing frame. It radiates an odd, almost erotic energy. Nobody moves. The rumour is that the Facilitator General has eyes in the back of his head, that he can shrivel your brain to the size of a macadamia nut, that he can follow the trains of thought of five separate people at once.

And that he sprays his armpits with a sex smell.

– You have a good brain, Benedict, he’d said at the Festival party. Liberty needs good brains.

Benedict had looked right into his face then. They were both tall; their heads were level. Tall people don’t get to look others straight in the eye often. When it happens, there’s a soft shock of recognition and something’s born between them. Pike had smiled.

– The People Laboratory will be expecting you on Monday.

Benedict had swallowed his gum in shock.

He’s still glowing from it. He can’t believe his luck. They’re all of them field associates, he guesses. Junior and mid-level. It’s a wide airy conference room. Quietly plush, with a muted parquet floor, swing-out easels, classical Venetian blinds, understated beige fittings, a functional and aesthetically pleasing water-cooler.

– Let me map out something of the journey we are to embark on, Pike’s saying. Our project is part hypothetical, and part practical. Nothing discussed here is to leave the room. He pauses, then looks directly at Benedict. A sudden grin splits his face. – Assume all surveillance to be active.

Benedict looks up, alarmed. Pike’s making another reference, surely, to his close shave with the questionnairing process. He gulps, feeling the bitter dead taste of old gum that’s been chewed too long. Should he try to spit it out
discreetly? Ever since he swallowed his gum at the Festival party he’s been picturing a green bolus growing inside him, a plastic parasite.