The Paper Eater (3 page)

We’re on to business matters. I do the talking, as usual, fast and furious, while they listen. I’ve got a proposition for Uncle Sid, I’m saying. His assets are out of kilter. We’ll have to sell a consignment of Chinese water pistols and other novelty toys to Lola’s comfort-ranch empire, via a subsidiary of one of Dad’s loan schemes, so as to set off a chain reaction in Cameron’s leisure-and-armaments-related stock, knocking up the value of Mum’s petrol shares. And bingo, the water-melon transaction we began back in March will come full-circle. The bottom line, I tell them, is a humungous profit for the family business.

They don’t get it, of course. They’re not so quick on the uptake finance-wise, which is why I’m managing our affairs in
the first place. But they all cheer happily at the news, even my brother Cameron. And the smile Mum gives me says it all.

I, Harvey, am her favourite child. Ah, the happy chords she twangs in me, my mum! She takes a strawberry from her basket and pops it in my mouth. I catch sight of Dad and Uncle Sid exchanging a look – I’ve wowed them with my business smarts again, hooray – and my heart bangs with pride.

But when Cameron bares his perfect orthodontics to bite the fruit Mum hands him, I feel a horrible stab of jealousy at the thought that his strawberry might be bigger than mine. And watching the fruit’s sweet juice trickle across Lola’s breasts, I feel the usual surge of desire mingled with shame.

Slowly, depressingly, my strawberry turns sour. I taste paper, glue, and bitter ink. Above us, the sky blackens and dies.

Still chewing, I wake on the
Sea Hero
, bereft again.

Atlantica, Atlantica
.

Outside through the porthole the sea is grey and flat as a strip of sheet metal, the sky a greenish wash, the horizon a menace now I know what’s lurking beyond it. John’s been having nightmares too. That’s no surprise. He’s woken three times and yelled and farted, then gone back to sleep. We’re both raddled and jagged and raw.

We’ve been lying there in silence for a while, thinking our morning thoughts, which are always the worst ones of the day, because they’re tangled in the freedom of sleep.

– Tell me how you did your fraud then, he goes. His voice is small and lonely like a kid’s.

I play along sometimes to soothe him. But today we both need it.

– There’s worm-holes in the system, just like in the galaxy, I tell him. (If I shut my eyes, I can remember the joy of it
and forget what it led to. Remember the dream part, not the nightmare.) Wriggle through one, and you’re in a different dimension. The Fiddling Zone. There’s only two occupational hazards, I tell him: arrest and repetitive strain injury. Every five or six moves, you slice a piece off someone else’s salami and add a zero to your personal equation. It’s one of the oldest scams in the book. But you need to be the dedicated type.

– Wouldn’t suit me, then, murmurs John, lumping over on the bunk.

– No. But it suited me, I said. Ricocheting money back and forth. Shimmying to and fro over the International Date Line. I got very good at the pan-hemispheric transactions, I told him.

– What are they when they’re at home?

– They’re robbing Peter to pay Paolo. Then borrowing from Paolo to pay Hans, and ripping off Hans to satisfy Marie. Plundering Marie’s savings to fob off Josef, who owes Gretchen, who owes Randy, who in turn owes Peter. You can start with next to nothing. One bloke I heard of, he was actually a million in debt. By the end of the year, he’d whipped up a fortune, bought a fish farm near St Placid, and married a gas heiress. True story.

John grunts; he can’t help being impressed. These
violenti
don’t know their arse from their elbow when it comes to fraud.

– But how d’you get going, like?

– I had a thousand. It’s doodly squat, but it was enough to buy my dad a car.

– A
car
?

– Yup. A car. The whole thing began with a humble Mitsubishi Supremo. It didn’t really exist as such, but there’s people on line’ll sell you anything. I didn’t want the car, see. I just wanted the electronic paperwork.

– Uh.

– So I used the
A-Z
and picked a street, then staged this fake
accident, a big smash-up, with the car a write-off. Noted the time and place and then electronically weasled into the local copshop’s computer and dumped in the details. I got my dad to claim the insurance, which was double what I’d paid for the car documents.

I felt proud, remembering it. I was a bright kid. From John’s silence you could tell he was impressed.

– Then I made Mum decide that my brother needed a brace because his teeth were wonky. It was the most complicated and expensive kind of brace that existed on the market, it was state of the art, at the time, with rubber bands and copper spring-work and pressure-pads and implants. Anyway, I whipped together this huge orthodontist’s bill, and got Mum to claim it off the Social Office. That was in the days before Libertycare. I think Wickham was the President, at the time. Or maybe even Malone. So then I had Mum set up her own import-export company. And then Dad too. That’s when we started trading in earnest. You can shunt their money about and add to it, see.

John began to snore.

I feel nostalgic every time I think about the life I once led. It was good. It was solitary, but there was glamour to it, big-time. It was a game, a drug. There was a gambling element, but mostly it was skill – technical skill, that paid off, if you kept your eye on the ball, stayed up to date with the anti-fraud technology. By the time I was nicked, my family members owned six off-shore companies, each with its own bogus board of directors – concoctions, the lot of them, names fished from the phone book. No one checks.

I miss my family. How I wish I could talk about them – I mean really talk!

I’m always careful, when I mention them, not tell John their names. Careful not to say anything that might raise an alarm, and link them to what’s happened on Atlantica.
Careful to give no hint of what I led them into. While he’s snoring up there, I’ll let you into a secret.

I grew up an orphan.

An orphan, with a family?

It happens.

By the time I was a teenager, my parents, uncle and siblings were as natural to me as … as … as …
yoghurt
. We all have ways of coping, don’t we.

The Hogg family was mine.

It was my mum who arrived first.

She made her debut when I was nine, but I have a hunch that she’d always been there, waiting in the wings, for when I needed her. I’m sure it’s a common fantasy among orphans – just as children from normal families often dream they are adopted. I’d never had a dad, see, and my real mother drank bleach when I was three. I have no memory of her. I was living in Harbourville Junior Welcome Centre – my third institution – at the time it all started. And as usual, the bullies were after me. I’d always been the kind of kid other kids picked on; perhaps my experiences, the ones I have no memory of, turned me inward. But I wasn’t consciously unhappy, and I did have friendships, of a kind. You’re never alone with a computer, are you. I was the one who’d spend a whole day getting to grips with a piece of software, or circumventing a tricksy firewall – the kind of idle, voyeuristic hacking that ends up giving you an education. (It was back then, as I scrutinised the electronic paperwork of some of the world’s leading companies, that I realised how easy it is to conjure up cash out of nowhere.) Yes, I had brains but – well, probably no charm. And certainly no social skills of value in a Junior Welcome Centre, where the kids with clout smoked heroin and made their own bombs. Next to that, my bubblegum skills looked like a joke. In the first home, in Groke, they said I smelt of fish. In the second, in north Mohawk, they started a rumour that I had an extra arsehole hidden in my
armpit. Here, in Harbourville, the largest children’s facility on the island, they said I was infected. But it was one boy, Craig Devon, who made my life a misery. If I was at the bottom of the food chain, he was right at the top. He boasted that he’d amassed enough explosives to smithereen the whole centre by blowing it sky-high.

– Know why you’ve never been adopted, Harvey Kidd? he’d go.

Innocent grown-ups loved him because his face was angelic, rimmed with bubble-curls. He had actually done advertisements for soap, and had his own bank account, and he’s now a famous TV commentator. His nose was thrust right up to mine, now; the rest of the gang stood a little way back, mocking me with the usual taunts.

– Yo, Harvey Kidd, the human virus!

– Zap him with germ-spray!

– Quarantine alert, amigos!

I always dreaded the early evenings, when the computer room was locked for the night and we kids ran loose before tea and bed. What I’d do is, I’d keep a low profile, wait till Craig and his gang were occupied with their bomb-making experiments, and sneak off to look for squirmy water creatures in the biology pond. I liked looking at the tadpoles best; over the course of the year I’d watch them hatching from their blobby eggs, and swimming about until they grew dwarf legs and abracadabra’d into tiny orange frogs. I’d been safe from Craig and his gang here in the past. Not any more, though – because suddenly here they were, massing up on me, ringing the pond.

– Ever wondered why you’ve never even been with a foster family? goes Craig, smiling.

My mouth twitches feebly and I fiddle with the small stick I’ve been using to poke in the reeds.

– Know why nobody wants you in their home?

That’s his sidekick, Charlie Lockhart. His claim to fame is that he’s blown off the end of his thumb. I look away.

– It’s because of your social infection, goes Craig.

I don’t know what a social infection is. They’re always on about this. I ran a search for it once, but no joy.

– I haven’t done anything, I go.

– You don’t have to DO anything, to be infected, goes Craig Devon, pretending to be patient, like he’s talking to someone thick. You just ARE.

I stood very still. I watched the air breathe itself on Craig’s bubble-curls, waft them round his pretty face.

– You need a disinfectant purge, he goes. Like a douche. Do you know what a douche is?

The boys behind him giggled and snorted.

– No. I don’t bloody fucking well know what a douche is.

– Voyage of discovery coming up!

They laughed at that too.

– The question is this, goes Craig, pretending to look thoughtful. Will the subject to be disinfected go into the fluid willingly, or will force be needed?

He was quite clever. They admired his way with words.

The pond was small, but deepish, and throttled with chickweed. The water in it black, stinking of rotten stalks. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes tight, till green cracked shapes danced around.

– Well? goes Craig.

I fell in slow motion, and with an extravagant bathroom splash that I heard from under the chilly filth.

I can’t remember much after that, except seeing tiny strings of bubbles fizzle from my mouth and wondering if it was the end. But the black water shocked my heart into a frantic pumping and when I got my face out and my breath back I was gulping whole mouthfuls. I pulled my torso out and looked about me. I saw the boys running off, the fluorescent soles of their trainers winking green.

A few minutes later, there was a small explosion from the direction of the Sports Hut. The boys had moved on.

I don’t know how long I lay there, but I know I felt her before I saw her. My memory of it is, simply, that a feeling began to sluice over me, calming my shivers and coating me in warmth. So that I knew when I looked up, I’d see something good.

And I did. So good, I had to keep blinking to stop it draining away.

She never looked so extraordinary as that moment when I first laid eyes on her. She was always beautiful, but her beauty sort of fizzed at that moment, like a soluble aspirin. I remember her clothes, because they were biology-pond clothes – salamander clothes, to be precise. A tight-fitting green dress with the exact markings of a salamander. Anyone else might have mistaken her for a hallucination but I knew exactly who she was even before she spoke.

– Don’t worry, Harvey, she said gently, in that beautiful caring voice that I will always love until I die. It’s me. I’m here.

– Mum! I breathed, choking on it. My mum was here, at last! And a huge weight lifted from my chest.

Bear with me. Psychology’s involved.

This miraculous, beautiful, fizzing mother in the salamander dress – more real than the real-life unremembered one ever was, I assure you – had wrapped me up in love. It was weird; she was sort of internal and external at the same time – a bit like God, I guess, or a good marketing message.

– This is what you do, she said. You’re to go straight to the matron. Now.

I was going to object, but she held up a hand to stop me. Her nails were painted a delicate peach. As we walked back towards the low red-brick building that was home, Mum told me I had a dad who’d duff Craig up, if he tried to threaten me again. And she let me know – quite how I’m not exactly sure, the memory’s hazy – that Dad was as strong as a tanker, and tough like cowboys in old movies. She also told me that
Dad’s elder brother, Uncle Sid, was rooting for me too. So by the time I reached Mrs Lardy’s office, I was feeling quite euphoric about my new situation. I knocked hard on the door, high up, where a grown-up’s hand would knock, then strode in and sat down on the big chair in front of her desk. Mrs Lardy couldn’t hide her surprise at seeing a kid sitting there, dripping on to the floor.

– What are you doing here? Is that – she’s peering at my collar – is that
Spirogyra
?

– I’ve come to complain, I go. The charter of this facility states clearly that it’s your job to look after the children in your care, and I’m afraid you are failing in your duty.

Her eyes widened as I carried on. Weird, but I don’t quite know, to this day, where the grown-up words were coming from. It was true, I’d studied the charter the same way I’ll study any piece of paperwork, I guess. But quoting it at her like that – well, she must have thought I’d aged ten years in ten minutes. I knew better, of course, than to tell Mrs Lardy about my mother (who had dissolved for now, but was, I knew, on standby), but I told her the rest of the story, in a way I never could’ve done before.