He locked the door behind him and stood looking down the hallway. Coats and jackets dangled haphazardly from pegs on one wall. Halfway along, a pile of boots and training shoes was gently collapsing across the parquet. There was a smell of overcooked cabbage, burned chickpeas and cheap aerosol air-freshener. At the far end of the hall, the toilet door was wide open. The Coureur wrinkled his nose.
A moment’s silence. Then a mighty concussion heralded the beginning of a new track downstairs. A tattered basketball boot rolled off the pile of footwear.
The Coureur walked down the hall and into the kitchen. Pots and pans unsteadily piled in the sink. Several meals’ worth of crusted plates on the table. Cupboard doors left open. Empty milk cartons on the work-surfaces. A couple of dirty forks and a steak-knife on the lino beside the fridge. The Coureur considered looking in the fridge, but decided against it.
In the living room, all the cushions had been removed from the sofa and armchairs and roughly arranged in a pile in the middle of the room, beside a miniature Stonehenge of Eisbrau bottles, the various entertainment deck handsets lined up on the floor close to hand.
The Coureur extracted a cushion from the pile, dumped it on a chair, and flopped down, rubbing his eyes. Coming home was always the same. Lewis, his flatmate, seemed to lack the necessary genes for tidiness. The Coureur would leave for a Situation and no matter how serious or far away or downright complicated it was, when he got back exhausted, or bored, or wound-up (or, once, with a newly-stitched wound in his leg) the flat always looked as if it had been sub-let to a maniac.
He got up and went to the window, looked down into the narrow street, then across at the balconies and curtained windows of the building opposite, then at the tilted topography of roofs and terraces and air-conditioning hoods and downlink dishes. Craning his neck slightly, he could see the Underground tracks running in their cutting parallel to Farringdon Road. A Metropolitan Line train, identifiable from this distance because the Metropolitan Company still hadn’t modernised its rolling stock, rattled and rolled along the cutting, from tunnel to tunnel, and was gone. A colossal amorphous murmuration of starlings surged and darted across the darkening topaz sky.
The front door opened, banged shut. “That you, Seth?” called Lewis.
The Coureur went to the living room doorway. Lewis was taking off his jacket, a great pile of yellow and white Europa Foods carrier bags slowly collapsing around his feet and allowing tins of beans and loose yams and okra to topple onto the floor. It was a sure sign that there was nothing to eat in the entire flat; Lewis refused to enter a supermarket unless the only alternative was starvation, and he would not phone out for meals because he believed They kept lists.
“Good trip?” he asked, tossing his jacket in the general direction of the coathooks.
“Not bad.”
“Great.” Lewis bent down and started to lace his fingers through the tangle of shopping-bag handles. “I didn’t manage to do much cleaning up.”
“I noticed,” said Seth.
Lewis straightened up, lifting the carriers off the floor. The bottom split out of one and about a hundred apples rolled everywhere.
“Oops,” said Lewis.
L
EWIS’S BELIEF-SYSTEM WAS
a complex territory of conspiracy theories. He trusted neither the government nor the police. He refused to believe anything he saw on the news networks. One boozy night, he told Seth that at least ten percent of the passengers travelling on scheduled British Airways flights never reached their destinations.
“Documented fact,” he said, nodding sagely and levering the cap off another Budvar.
“So where do they go?” asked Seth, only slightly less drunk.
Lewis leaned forward and his voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. “Madagascar. Colossal internment camp.”
Seth thought about it. “Why?”
Lewis sat up. “I don’t know,” he said. He waved his bottle of beer at Seth. “But you’d better watch yourself the next time you get on a BA flight, old son. Mark my words.”
Unpacking after one of Lewis’s infrequent shopping expeditions was an adventure. Lewis had a theory that there was something secretly crafty about bar-codes, that They were tracking each bar-coded item and compiling vast lists for a purpose made even more sinister and terrifying by being entirely unknown.
So trips to the supermarket inevitably ended with bags and packets piled on the kitchen table, Lewis bent over them with the scissors, cutting off bar-codes, to be burned later. When Seth first saw him doing this, he had inquired whether his flatmate needed regular medication, but it had turned out that Lewis was a relative rarity: a completely sane man whose world-view was almost entirely irrational. Sometimes, thinking about it, Seth wondered if Lewis might not actually be right. And then he usually wondered what Lewis would think if he knew what his flatmate really did for a living.
I
N HIS ABSENCE,
their landlord, an immensely aged Malaysian whom Lewis had dubbed, for no good reason, The Grasping Bastard, had visited the flat and entrusted to Lewis the twice-yearly message of happiness and joy that was their rent increase. This in itself was not a problem. Seth was reasonably well-off, and Lewis made a truly colossal amount of money developing advertising campaigns for products from which he would one day be cutting bar-codes. However, the Grasping Bastard had been unable to predict with any great certainty when a replacement for their recently-deceased washing machine would be forthcoming.
Which meant that, at around half past nine that evening, Seth was sitting on a padded bench in the neon-lit tropical heat of the local laundrette, watching his underwear doing flickflacks in the drier. Ah, the endless romance of the Coureur’s life...
He’d had a busy couple of months, four or five Situations on the run that had involved him flying off to Warsaw, Bruges, Barcelona and Nicosia, picking up sealed pouches, and flying with them to Berlin, Chicago, Dublin and Copenhagen. The last Situation had subsequently involved a train, bus and taxi ride to Narvik, a clandestine pass in a department store, and a dustoff through Helsinki. The first three Situations had been straight corporate data-transfer, routine stuff. The Narvik thing smacked of industrial espionage. Or maybe even real espionage; Central usually frowned on real espionage, preferring to leave it to nations, but in practice, at street level, it was impossible to know who you were taking a delivery from, impossible to know what was in the pouch. You made the jump, took the money, told yourself you were keeping alive the spirit of Schengen, and forgot about it.
The door opened, billowing cool air through the steamy laundrette. Seth looked up from his book. A middle-aged woman wearing biker boots, US Army desert camo trousers and a chunky black sweater was standing in the doorway, a big blue plastic carrier bag dangling from each hand. As the door closed behind her, she went over and started to walk down the line of washers, looking for a machine that wasn’t being used. Seth went back to his book.
Central had its roots in the hundreds of little courier firms which had been operating in Europe before the turn of the century, moving various items of merchandise – printed material too valuable to be entrusted to the postal system, disc-encoded data too important or secret to be entrusted to the net, and so on. If Central had had a single stated objective, it would have been the eventual abolition of borders and free movement for all, and if Central had been a moderately-sized multinational, Seth would have been one of the boys in the post-room.
This suited him, more or less. Central’s bread-and-butter business went on constantly, offered boundless opportunities for travel, and paid pretty well. There were strata above him in which the Packages moved by Central were people, the circumstances of their jumpoffs far more fraught and exciting, but for Seth those sorts of Situations seemed too much like hard work.
“This fucking thing doesn’t work.”
Seth looked up. The woman was standing by the detergent dispenser, a plastic cup in one hand and her washing-bags on the floor by her feet.
“This fucking thing doesn’t work,” she said again, pointing at the dispenser.
“You’ve got to buy a card,” said Seth, nodding at the box by the dispenser. “Ten pounds.”
The woman stood looking at him for a few moments as if she was thinking very hard about what he had told her. “I only want some fucking soap powder,” she said finally.
“The card works the machines as well.”
She narrowed her eyes at that, and Seth sighed. The last time this had happened to him, it had been aboard the bus to Narvik, when a grossly overweight Latvian had squeezed himself into the seat beside him and proceeded to try and sell him a small cardboard box which he claimed contained the mummified penis of Joseph Stalin. He didn’t know why these things happened. Maybe he had the sort of bone structure which proclaimed to lunatics
here I am, talk to me
.
“Look,” he said, getting up and going over to the card dispenser. “Why don’t I buy you a card, eh?”
“Don’t you fucking patronise me, sunshine,” said the woman. “I’ve got washing in these bags older than you. I can buy my own fucking cards.”
Seth spread his hands and stepped away from the dispenser, not quite being able to resist a half-bow at the last moment. The woman glared at him and put a £10 coin in the slot.
Seth went back to his seat and his pirouetting smalls, but it was impossible to ignore the woman as she wrestled the contents of the plastic cup of detergent into one of the empty machines – through the door, mind, not into the hopper on top – and hurled her washing in after it. Then she came back and sat beside Seth, heaved a huge sigh of relief, took an impressively abused-looking old paperback from one of the thigh pockets of her combat trousers, a pair of spectacles from the other pocket, and started to read. Seth felt his heart sink.
After they had been sitting side by side in silence for about ten minutes, Seth said, “I only just got back, you know.”
The woman looked up from her book. “Beg pardon, lovely?”
“I only just got home,” he said. “I’m shattered. I don’t want to go back out just yet.”
She looked at him and raised an eyebrow.
“The glasses,” he said. “They’re antiques.”
“I could have inherited the frames from my granny,” she said.
Seth tipped his head to one side.
She sighed. “Okay.” She took the spectacles off and looked at them, a little abashed. “There’s always something, isn’t there? I thought this was bloody good camo, too.” She beamed at him. “Well spotted, mind.”
He shrugged.
I am a Coureur, witness my mad spectacle-identifying skillz.
“What have you got for me?”
“Oh,
I
dunno,” she said, recovering her cheerfulness. “I just deliver ’em. Nobody tells me anything. Here.” She passed him the book. “Have a read of that.”
He took the book.
Atlas Shrugged
, the back cover and half the front torn off. It appeared to have spent quite a long time in a sauna as well; its pages had swollen up until it was almost twice its original thickness, which had already been considerable. “I’ve heard of it.”
“It’s shit,” the stringer said, standing up. “Woman was barking mad.” She turned to leave.
“What about your clothes?” Seth asked.
She turned back to him. “What?”
He nodded at the clothes in the washing machine.
“Oh, they’re not mine,” she said happily. “They’re just props. Fuck ’em. ’Bye.”
T
HE FLAT WAS
on the top floor of a converted warehouse building on the edge of the confusing maze of little streets between Farringdon Road and the Grey’s Inn Road, just south of Clerkenwell Road. Back in the ’90s the whole area had experienced a spasm of conversion, but by the 2000s nobody could afford the rents so the converted blocks had been sold off, one by one, to housing associations. Artists and students and musicians moved into flats once occupied by young upwardly-mobile couples. Refugees and asylum-seekers from the newer states and polities of Europe and Africa arrived. Meetings of the Residents Association began to resemble sessions of the UN Security Council during an interpreters’ strike.
Seth had come here six years ago and fallen in love with the area at first sight. He’d been a Coureur for a couple of years by then, and his life consisted of drifting across the Continent moving Packages from place to place, living in hotels and Travelodges which were all somehow identical to each other. It was a busy couple of years, but at some point he found himself sitting in an hotel room and looking about him and wondering where precisely he was. Padania? Ulster? Somewhere in the Basque country?
He decided it was a bad sign, and logged-off for a couple of months to find himself a solid base, somewhere to call his own. He came back to London, visited his father and stepmother in Hampstead, spent some time with his sister and her family in Cornwall. He saw an ad in the online edition of
Loot
, and two days later he was introducing himself to Lewis.
If Lewis had been better-off there would have been no way he would have consented to share the flat, but in spite of being rather well-paid for what he did, he was in danger of losing his lease if he didn’t find someone to help him with the rent. Seth later found himself feeling a glow of professional pride at the fact that, of all the applicants for the flatshare, Lewis had felt him to be the least suspect.
Trying to look at himself objectively, Seth supposed that he represented the perfect flatmate. Neat, tidy, unobtrusive, forgiving. Away for extended periods on business. Willing to cook meals and wash up afterwards without complaint. But most important of all, pretty well-off. In this way, he convinced Lewis that he was not an Agent Of Them. Seth thought this was quite amusing, considering he really did work for what amounted to a global conspiracy.
Lewis was out again when Seth got back with his washing. Seth had never found out what his flatmate did on his evenings out. Certainly pubs featured somewhere, but which ones, and with whom, he didn’t know. Sometimes he pictured upstairs rooms in dingy Fitzrovia taverns, a circle of conspiracy theorists perched anxiously on chairs arranged around the walls, pints of real ale clutched in their fists as they discussed in hushed voices the latest convoluted doings of Them. Them, of course, being a chimera of Science, the Military, the Government and anything to do with America. Lewis did have a girlfriend, a wispy presence named Angela who did makeup for advertising shoots and who sometimes drifted through the flat, naked but for a huge butterfly barrette in her hair, in search of toast and tea to take back to Lewis’s bedroom. Seth had never had a meaningful conversation of any kind with her beyond answering the question, “Where’s the marmalade?”