Idea in Stone (25 page)

“What’s happened to me?” asked Stefan frantically.

She grabbed his face, turning it back and forth. She took his hands and flipped them palm up, then palm down. “Looks to me like you’ve got a case of sex poisoning.”

“What?”

“You’ve had sex with someone you oughtn’t’ve. And you’ve lost some of your essence.” She rummaged around the counter in front of her and produced a large clear bottle of lozenges. She counted some of these out onto a square of waxed paper, which she folded into a packet for him. “Suck on one of these every hour until you go to bed tonight. No more Sex Charger for you. That’ll be two pound fifty.”

“Thanks,” he said, paying her.

She led him out, holding his translucent arm. Before locking the door, she said, “And stay off that hill.”

~

Stefan took a walk that night before bed. He was nearly restored now, though his innards still felt hollow. He decided to walk the length of the Royal Mile, since that was supposed to be lucky, and he felt he could use a dose of luck. He dutifully spat on the Heart of Midlothian, the brick shape laid into the ground in front of the cathedral, which was also supposed to be lucky. The crowd was thick here, gathered around one of the remaining buskers who’d stayed on past the end of the Fringe Festival to earn a few more pounds. Stefan crossed the street. He stopped to look at the large concrete base of a statue oxidised green by the elements. The figure wore a loose toga, which fell from his oversized, bulky frame, exposing what looked like a pair of sagging breasts. Propped between one hand and his thigh was what looked like a stone tablet. “Hume” read the plaque under the figure. Whoever Hume was, Stefan thought, he probably wasn’t happy about the breasts.

“Who are you?” asked the statue.

Stefan looked at it, surprised. Perhaps it was another busker wearing greasepaint.
That would be an awfully big busker
, thought Stefan. He figured he should answer it. “My name is Stefan Mackechnie.”

“That’s just an idea,” said statue-Hume, “and ideas are subject to change.”

“Who are you?” asked Stefan.

The statue’s face, green-streaked black metal with white bird droppings, scowled as he thought. “I don’t remember,” he answered.

The busker up the street finished his act and the crowd flowed into the street. Stefan stopped talking to the statue and moved on.

Thirteen

Take Me to Your Team Leader

Stefan put his hand under the shower head. The water was still cold. The shower’s controls were set into a plastic box like a radio, and its lights were on. Stefan fiddled with the dials, but wasn’t sure what the icons beside them were supposed to mean. One icon looked like flames, but Stefan was pretty sure the device was limited to issuing water. He thought the other, a spray of blue bullets, might have something to do with the water pressure, but no matter how he adjusted it, the shower head continued to drool.

He scrubbed his head over the tub, and tiny filaments of hair covered its floor. He’d had his floppy hairdo cut off in favour of the local style, a close-cropped electric razor cut. It looked tidy, but he felt uncomfortable seeing his hairline so clearly, like the vanishing wetness in the sand as the tide goes out.

His job interview was in three-quarters of an hour. He couldn’t wait any longer for the water to heat up. Bracing himself, he threw off his dressing-gown, jumped into the shower, and screamed as the shower head released a high-pressure jet of scalding water.

~

“Your background check came back spotless,” said the young man interviewing Stefan.

“Well, in UK terms, I’m only a month old,” he answered.

“Do you have a National Insurance Number?”

“I contacted them, and they said they couldn’t give me one until I had a job.”

“Ah, well you can’t start work until you have a National Insurance Number.”

Stefan looked at the man, perplexed.

‘Nevermind,” said the interviewer, “you can get a temporary one while they sort that out.” The man put his application in a folder and closed it. “I think you’d make a great addition to the team. There are just a few final tests we have to complete to see if you’re the right fit for the Sprechen-Z Holdings Limited International Family of Companies.”

“Okay,” said Stefan, following the interviewer, humming “Consider Yourself at Home”. They walked into a small room containing one small desk.

“Could you please sit here?” asked the man. Stefan sat, and the man took out a large set of callipers. He measured the distance from Stefan’s head to the desk in front of him, the distance from his head to the back of his chair, and the angle of the bend in his legs. “Could you please reach for the papers in front of you?” Stefan did, and the man took precise measurements of each movement. “Right handed?” he asked. Stefan shook his head
no
, and held up his left. The man gave a look of consternation, but continued on, now using a tape measure.

He finished his calculations in a large binder. “This is just about perfect,” he said. “I think you’ll be a good fit in our organisation. Just one last test.” Stefan followed him to another room, even smaller, where the man sat him in front of a monitor flashing tiny orange characters and strapped an operator’s headset to his head. “There you go.”

“What am I supposed to do?” asked Stefan.

“Oh, nothing. Just stare at the screen.”

Stefan stared. The man left the room, and Stefan kept staring. His eyes glazed over, and his mind wandered back to the recording studio in Canada. He felt a pang for his days of high-paid, specialised work. It embarrassed him to go back into the workplace with no transferable skills.

The flashing orange figures on the screen had a mesmerising effect, and Stefan found himself drifting further backward through his life. He was eight years old again, in the kitchen with his mother. “Just keep studying,” she said, as she shut the door behind her. Men banged on the front door and shouted at her through it . “I’ll teach my own goddamned son if I want to!” she yelled back. “Just try to stop me!”

“Hello?” said the interviewer. Stefan snapped back to the present.

“How long have I been sitting here?”

“Three hours,” said the man, shining a light into his eyes and looking closely at them. “Excellent. No bleeding.” The man straightened up and extended his hand. “You’re hired. Welcome to the family.”

“Thank you,” said Stefan, shaking the man’s hand. “What exactly do you do here?”

“We run a mobile phone network.”

“Oh.” He was about to mention his difficulty with telephones, but thought better of it.

~

The next day, he woke up early and filled the tub using the shower head. The result was a tub filled with strata of hot and cold water, but it did the job. Stefan did his best to iron a shirt—not really knowing how—and managed to leave the house in time to catch the bus for work. The second floor of the bus was jammed with boys and girls in blazers and ties. He looked at them as he tried to figure out how to knot his own tie, ashamed to think that his mother had always done it for him.

He sniffed, conscious of smoke. He looked to the back of the bus, where a group of boys about twelve years old slouched down in their seats, smoking. Another held a lighter under a crinkled piece of foil, cooking something.

He spotted a familiar landmark outside and rang the bell. The driver stopped, and Stefan descended the stairs and got off the bus, realising once he did that he was still several blocks away from the office. The rest of the walk was a pleasant one, beside a small river with water the colour of ale, through a section of town that was a mix of chunky old buildings and featureless industrial blocks.

He reached his office five minutes late and rushed into the huge stone building, which looked like a cross between a church and a munitions building. He joined a large group of new employees with name-tags gathered in the lobby. A young woman in a business suit with a male counterpart raised her hands and addressed them. “Welcome,” she said, “to Orientation Day!” She turned and pointed ahead with both hands, and the recruits followed her.

In a large room, they were broken into teams, then given a small pad of paper covered in small blocks—a litany of personal particulars they were asked to provide about their work histories and education. Stefan had no answers to fit many of the questions, and had to leave their boxes blank.

One by one, they were called out of the room. When Stefan’s turn came, he was taken to a room where someone took his picture, rolled his fingers in ink then onto a sheet of paper, then scraped a small piece of skin from the inside of his mouth and put it into a plastic vial. Like the others, he returned to the conference room with a plastic ID card featuring his pale and surprised-looking face.

The next hour was devoted to games designed to teach them about the organisation’s structure (he did not do well), and show them the power of developing strong brand recognition. With a war cry of “Service first and last!”, the recruits were released to their various departments. Stefan was hired, he discovered, for the Outstanding Team. His initial pleasure at this evaporated when he realised that the term was a euphemism for “Collections Department”.

A trainer deposited him into the care of Jenny, his “line manager”. The supervisor, she told him, was away in Greece on holiday. If he had any questions, he was to ask her. She was about to leave, but he stopped her and asked what he was supposed to do.

“You mean they didn’t—?” she said, then snorted angrily. She looked up at him and shook her ginger bob of hair. “I don’t know why they spend all that money on that nonsense then send you down here without a clue about how to do the job we hired you for.”

“Sorry,” said Stefan.

“Ach,” she said, “it’s not your fault. Come on, I’ll get you started.” She then led him through a labyrinthine system for following up on overdue mobile accounts, which involved correlating various information stored on a machine with a small yellow monitor like a goldfish bowl in a frame, a wall of filing cabinet drawers, and a metal chest full of what looked like rifle rounds, but turned out to be microfilm. At the end of her description of the process, Stefan thanked her, and asked where the bathroom was. “Bathroom,” she laughed, “you want a bath? The toilets are over there.” He thanked her again, walked hurriedly to the toilet, locked himself in a cubicle, and threw up.

He hadn’t absorbed any of what the woman said.
I’m a dummy,
he thought,
a total idiot.
He felt nervous about going back to his desk, and felt his throat choking up.
I won’t be able to pay my rent. I won’t be able to eat. I’m stupid and I’m going to die.
A final plea popped into his mind—
Mommy!
—a word so repellent to him it drove him back onto his feet and out to the office.

“Jenny,” said Stefan, “I have no idea about any of what you said. Could you go through that again?”

“Oh,” she said, “sorry. I’ve been doing this for twenty years. I forget it’s complicated when you’re new. Let’s go over it again. In a week, you’ll be doing it in your sleep. God knows we do.” He laughed, relieved. “Would you like a chocolate?” she asked him, pointing to her desk. The half-dozen women in his section all had boxes of chocolate on their desks.

“No thanks,” said Stefan, “but do you have any gum?”

~

Over the next few weeks, life fell into a pattern. Stefan enjoyed the simplicity of it: he got up early in the morning, ironed a shirt while the bath filled, washed, made coffee, and read the newspaper on the bus to work. Mornings went quickly, then he ate his lunch alone in the canteen. Then he finished off the day and went home, ate, and went to bed.

The women in his section were friendly to him and eager to help him, but their pack was largely impenetrable, having developed over decades. People like him came and went, but they stayed. They moved together like a flock of birds, going outside to smoke, going to lunch, then leaving to go home to their families when five o’clock came. At the moment, they were away for a retirement lunch. Most of them resented the company, but were happy to eat and drink at its expense when another of them broke free.

Stefan slid his card through the punch-clock, finished his lunch break. He sat down at his desk, wading back into the set of files he’d left. The process of following up on overdue accounts was straightforward now. They issued letters which sometimes came back with payment, and just as often didn’t. Some customers contested their charges, some moved without remembering to update their mailing address, and others did their best to evade having to pay. But something about the file in front of Stefan perplexed him. The subscriber hadn’t made his payments for two months, but that was nothing unusual.

The name,
he thought. Something about the name seemed familiar. He looked at the newspaper on his desk. The headline read “Police probe city developer’s death plunge”. The copy underneath elaborated, describing the inquiry into the death of a wealthy businessman involved in redeveloping parts of the city. The developer’s name, Reginald Mackenzie, was the same as the name on the invoice in front of him.

When the women returned from their lunch, wobbling back to their desks, Stefan approached his line manager. “Jenny,” he said, “what do we do if someone dies?”