Transition (39 page)

Chloë held a hand up, almost touching my mouth. “Greed and selfishness aren’t the same thing,” she said. “Close, but not the
same. And they’re both different from self-preservation and general self-interest.”

“Still, close, like you say.”

She sighed, drank. “Yeah, close.” She looked like she was studying something behind the bar.

“There’s nothing wrong with a bit of greed, Chloë. It’s what makes the world go round. Wanting to get on, wanting to better
yourself, being ambitious, know what I mean? Wanting the best for yourself – what’s wrong with that? Wanting the best for your
family – what’s wrong with that, either? Eh? It’s great having the luxury of thinking about other people, the poor and the starving
and all that, but you only have that luxury cos somebody’s been thinking for themselves and their family.”

She turned to me, big eyes wide and bright. “You know what? You remind me of somebody, Ade,” she said.

“Somebody nice?” I asked. Sarcastically, if I’m honest about it.

She shook her head. I liked the way her hair moved, though I was resigning myself to never running my fingers through it or
breathing in its perfume or using it to pull her head back towards me while I fucked her from behind. “No,” she said. “He’s
one of those men who was packed off to public school when he was just a little kid—”

“Yeah, well, I wasn’t.”

“Ssh.” She looked stern. “I heard you out. The point is, because of that or not, he decided that everybody’s out for themselves
and nobody really cares for anybody else, though some people pretend to. He’s looked after ‘Number One’” – she did that finger-waggly
inverted-commas thing – “exclusively ever since and he can’t see there might be something wrong with that. In fact, he can’t
even see that what he’s got there is just a single point of view, and a pretty perverse one at that; as far as he’s concerned
it’s some great truth about people and life that only he and a few other realists have worked out. Thing is, he’s got a problem.
Maybe he’s still infected with some tiny remnant of human decency or something, but he can only
really
be content with himself and his despicable egotism if he’s satisfied that his self-centred attitude doesn’t make him a freak.
For his own peace of mind he needs to believe that it’s not just him, that anybody who claims to care for others is lying;
maybe because they’re frightened to admit they only think of themselves too, or maybe because they actively want to make people
like him feel bad about themselves.”

I was starting to think that Chloë had been on the marching powder too, though somehow it didn’t look like she had, know what
I mean? She wasn’t speaking the way you do when you’re coked up. But, fuck me, she was still speaking:

“Socialists, charity workers, carers, people who volunteer to help others; they’re all – and he’s quite convinced about this – they’re
all in reality mean-spirited bastards, either self-deceiving bastards or – for their own filthy left-wing reasons – deliberately
trying to destroy the self-esteem of normal, healthily ambitious people like him. Because if only everybody looked after their
own interests everything would be fine, see? Level playing field, with everybody nakedly ambitious and selfish; everybody
knows where they are. If some people aren’t totally selfish, or, even worse,
pretend
not to be selfish, then it messes up the whole system. It makes it more unfair, not fairer, the way they’d claim. He calls
people like that do-gooders, and they make him angry. I think he would actually prefer do-badders, which is a pretty fucked-up
attitude when you think about it. He feels quite strongly that these charlatans needed to be unmasked. Always on about them.
Never misses an opportunity to complain that they’re liars and frauds. Frankly, Ade, altogether, it makes him sound like – and
I firmly believe he actually is – a complete cunt.”

Funny, isn’t it? The c-word has no discernible effect on me. Wood-wise, I mean. You’d think when a woman uses the term it’d
be quite sexy, but it isn’t. Weird.

I nodded. “Ah-ha,” I said. “Old boyfriend?”

“No, Ade. My dad. You remind me of my dad.” Chloë drained her drink and patted me on the arm. “Sorry, dear.” She nodded. “Now,
here are my friends, coming back from the loo, looking a bit more sorted, thankfully.” She slid daintily off her bar stool.
“I think we’ll be moving on. Interesting to talk to you, Ade. You look after yourself, yeah?”

And off all three of them fucked.

Her fucking
dad
? I fucking wanted to slap the bint.

The Philosopher

I have always had nightmares. Long before I became a soldier or a policeman, long before I killed GF’s father or became a
torturer, I would have unpleasant, threatening, frightening and distressing dreams. Perhaps they became worse for a while,
on a few occasions maybe, especially just after Mr F. However, I believe that my decision not to pursue any further personal
vendettas, and to act only when I felt I had the backing of some greater authority and that there existed a viable legal and
moral framework supporting my professional actions, helped, as it were, to clear my conscience. At any rate, my nightmares
decreased in severity afterwards.

They did not disappear. They would still haunt me. People did, faces did, sounds did, screams did especially. Some were very
recent in origin: the latest subject, their roar of initial defiance, the following howls of agony and the eventual, inevitable
pathetic whimperings and pleadings for mercy, sometimes accompanied by the information required in the first place, more often
with nothing of use because the subject knew nothing useful to begin with.

I became a little disillusioned, I suppose, though that had nothing to do with the nightmares. It was just that our job never
seemed to end, never seemed to achieve very much. There were always more subjects, and gradually a greater overall number
of subjects at any given time, from a greater spread of ages and from more and more backgrounds and professions. Society seemed
to be collapsing around us. The Christian Terrorist threat seemed only to increase despite the best efforts of the government,
the security services and ourselves, and the real terrorists or terrorist suspects appeared to be joined by those who had
fallen foul of the increased security measures and laws which the initial increases in terrorist activity had made necessary
in the first place.

My colleagues and I comforted ourselves with the thought that however bad things might be or even might get, just think how
much worse everything would be without our dedication and professionalism.

I finally received some long-deserved promotion and began to take on more administrative duties, taking me away from the front
line, as it were, though not entirely. In busy periods I would help out and when colleagues were unexpectedly absent I would
fill in for them. Both situations seemed to occur rather more often than the department expected or I’d have liked. I began
to see a department-approved counsellor, and my doctor put me on some medication that worked relatively well, at first at
any rate.

I established a mutually pleasing relationship with a lady police officer and found some solace in that, as I believe she
did as well. We had decided to go on holiday, looking for some winter sun.

This was required, certainly in my case. I had lately started to have increasingly distressing nightmares that centred around
being killed in my home, waking up to find ex-subjects, especially deceased ex-subjects, standing at the foot of my bed, still
in the state we had left them when my department had finished with them. They would stand and stare at me in the darkness,
silent but filled with accusation. I could always smell the bodily fluids and sometimes semi-fluid solids that subjects were
prone to evacuating either right at the start of the interrogatory episode or when they were under especially pronounced pressure.
I would wake up in a sweaty knot of sheets, terrified that I had myself wet or soiled the bed.

Just the prospect of such unpleasantly interrupted sleep was bad enough. My doctor put me on some more pills, to help me sleep.
I found that a nightcap of whisky helped as well.

I might claim that I had a premonition regarding what happened at the airport. Though I think, in retrospect, that it was
simply a memory of the CTs who had attacked the airport some years before, taking the weapons off the police guards and running
amok with them. In any event, I was surprisingly nervous as my fiancée and I arrived at the airport. Nobody had attacked this
airport for several years, nor had anyone succeeded in bringing down an aircraft either, despite a few near things, so I kept
telling myself that there was nothing to worry about, but my hands were shaking as I locked the car door and picked up our
luggage trolley.

Part of my nerves was due to the fact that I had, over the last year or so, begun to worry that I might bump into an ex-subject
in a social situation or in a large crowd, and that they would attack me or even just shout and scream at me, or just quietly
point me out to their friends and family as their erstwhile interrogator. I must have interrogated thousands of people over
the preceding decade-and-a-bit and they were not all dead or in prison. There must be hundreds still at large, those whose
crimes had been relatively minor or who had bought their release by turning informer, or who had been the victim of malicious
denunciation. What if I encountered one of them? What if they fell upon me or embarrassed me in front of other people? This
had preyed on my mind more and more recently. Statistically, it had to happen eventually.

Nowadays, all too often, I thought I did indeed see such people. I tried never to memorise or even casually remember the faces
of any of my subjects – as my dreams showed, they proved all too memorable without any effort being made on my part – but nevertheless
I had started to see faces in the street or in parks or shops – or anywhere else where there were other people, really – which
I felt certain I had last seen tear-streaked, contorted in agony, mouth open in a scream or sealed with tape, their eyes popping,
faces turning red.

I had stopped going out quite so much as I had used to. I entertained more at home, had groceries delivered.

We entered the terminal building. I found the beady-eyed gaze of the expressionless border police, paramilitaries and soldiers
intensely reassuring. Nobody would be surprising these fellows and stealing their weapons. They took a family just in front
of us to one side for a luggage spot check.

We went to the bar after the rather long-winded and laborious check-in process. I claimed I needed a stiff drink after that,
and also that I was a slightly nervous flyer. We spent half an hour there before we thought we ought to go through the main
security barrier. I drank three or four glasses to my fiancée’s one, which she did not finish.

There was a long queue for the security barrier. I had guessed as much from the latest internal security services threat-level
alert and had allowed for such in our schedule for the day so far, despite some complaints.

We shuffled forward. I was trying to read a newspaper. Police and soldiers walked up and down by the side of the line, looking
at people. I started to worry that I might look suspicious just because I was trying so hard to look as though I was reading
the paper, and was so obviously sweating. I could think of a few psychological/physiological parameters that I was fitting
into all too neatly.

I put the newspaper down and looked around, trying to appear normal, unthreatening. At least, if I was taken out of the line
my identity cards and especially my security forces special police pass would secure a speedy end to any suspicion and doubtless
an apology. The line still stretched twenty metres ahead of us. Two desks out of three working, scanning passports and checking
tickets before admitting people to the main security area where the hand luggage would be sniffed and scanned.

The coloured family a couple of metres ahead of us would probably attract extra attention. A young man just beyond them carried
a kitbag he’d be lucky to get checked as hand luggage. He was an army draftee, judging by his uniform, but even so. We shuffled
forward some more.

My fiancée took my hand and squeezed it. She smiled at me.

My most disturbing feelings recently had been something close to treacherous. I had come to think that the CTs had a point,
even that all terrorists had a point. They were still wrong, still evil and still had to be resisted with all the means at
our disposal as a society, including emergency measures, but the question that had started to occur to me was: were we any
better? I put this down to the depressing realisation that people were all the same. They all bled, they all burned, they
all begged, they all screamed, they all reacted in the same ways. Guilty or innocent; that made little difference. Race made
none. Sex, little. CTs were more fanatical, certainly, but I had begun to doubt they were any more fanatical than the extremists
on “our” side who firebombed their congregations or crucified whole families in remote farms.

Ordinary Christians, caught up in the trawls of their areas and families and friendship groups, were just the same as ordinary
people. We all were. Almost without exception we human beings were weak and dishonest and cruel and selfish and dishonourable
and desperate to avoid pain and torment and incarceration and death even to the point of implicating those we knew full well
to be completely innocent.

And that was the point. We were all the same.

There was no difference. We reacted in the same ways to the same actions against us; I’d seen it a thousand times – many thousands
of times. So what had driven the CTs to such desperate acts, to such mad fanaticism? Any society, any large group, any substantial
creed contained sub-groups of people who would crack first under pressure and turn to violence and extremism. But what had
created that pressure in the first place? Who had created it?