At least he will have access to Paula Adonor’s work and if the money is right he will make the effort to track down Graeme Ferris and the others. He was poised to have Graeme Ferris picked up as soon as he left Nick’s office yesterday, divested of his swag and sent off to the work camp, but then concerned citizen Nick Skilling went out and put him on the bus.
Johannes takes the carrier bag from Graeme Ferris, the handle is a little greasy, but then Graeme Ferris must be nervous, out of his depth in a place like this, and puts it down on the table, then removes and opens what appears to be a shoe box. There are some old copies of Vice magazine in there, a few reconditioned CDs from Poundland, still in the plastic. He picks one out and looks at it,
Execute
by
Oxide and Neutrino
, then he looks at Graeme Ferris.
What is this? He asks.
Nice place, Graeme Ferris says. Nice place. Not cheap to live here, eh? He sits in the chair opposite, puts his feet up on the table.
Not cheap? Feet on his antique horigotatsu table?
You’re an old school businessman, Graeme Ferris says. You don’t realise it yet but you’re one of the dinosaurs. You are the ones standing in the way of the next stage, the change, revolution. Planetary techno swarm. If you can’t be reabsorbed back into the multitude, the entrepreneurial multitude, we are going to have to excise you from the body politic, pull you out with tweezers, like a tic.
A monstrous, grey, porcine tic.
Johannes nods and taps at his phone, calls up information from O-desk and profiles from E-temps and Gopher-It until he finds Graeme Ferris’ profile picture.
So this is not Graeme Ferris. He should have checked. He has been sloppy today; things have been out of kilter, this whole trip, very strange, slippages, fractures. Intrusive thoughts.
How have you done this?
Well, we have got a mutual acquaintance, you and me. Imagine that. He owes us a favour. So he’s let me pretend I’m him. So I can get in here.
And who are you? He asks.
I am the guy who is going to burn this building down, he says. Kamikaze. You and me and all your worthless paper billions bro, we’re going up in smoke.
The Gopher pulls a screwdriver out of his pocket.
Yes, yes. He has been unforgivably sloppy really, too distracted by all this engagement with Calvert, all this fruitless introspection.
The Gopher’s rucksack is sitting on the sofa and he stabs it, pulls the screwdriver back out, let’s the petrol pour onto the rug and across the floor. Stabs it again, picks it up and begins walking backward, shaking the rest out, eyes locked on Johannes.
Graeme slept a little through the day then woke up disoriented on the outhouse floor late afternoon. Only twenty-four hours ago he was on the train to Margate, seems impossible.
The Crew have found ways to thread around through streets that have low coverage, using apps on phones they have built themselves that are plugged into networks running out of empty flats and buildings across South London, some of these guys from back in the old pirate radio days never lost the thrill of it. There’s even talk of a fleet of rogue drones that circulate at low altitude providing raw wireless access and that police marksmen can be seen out shooting them down, that accidents have occurred, people’s roofs damaged, kids, pedestrians narrowly missing being struck by debris. But this may be a myth, or disinformation. What’s certain is that Graeme has a new identity card in his pocket to replace the one he buried and that they have attached a small device to the inside of his hood that scrambles facial recognition software, though this in itself will be enough to alert the authorities to his presence, send someone or something out to track him.
They have got stuff now fam see your grill through a balaclava fam, through a motorbike helmet, swear down fam, map your
DNA
remotely, listen to you whispering your plans in the middle of a football crowd, read your mind fam, get in your head and know your thoughts before you do.
They fight back, of course, hack, sousveil, sabotage, but they lack resources, they lack capital, knowledge, economies of scale, institutional depth and yet, they tell themselves, guerrilla warfare has brought down empires, and so …
… and so they are threading through backstreets and shadowing the surveillance systems, running to their own maps of the city, clustering in
CCTV
dead spots to exchange information then dispersing, running parallel to the grids of cameras, and racing through hyper-saturated surveillance zones in areas around construction sites, railway lines, gated new-builds, threading past the overlaps between contractors: Robowatch, Land Sheriff, USG’s Skyeye. Tobi is carrying something that looks like a mini lightsaber, a low level radar plugged into his phone somehow, a drone detector, sweeping the area around them for micro UAVs that may come floating silently in to record their movements, words, faces, provide evidence.
Graeme Ferris isn’t used to running, hard to keep up, back in South London taking a long looping approach from the back end of Woolwich through Blackheath and down to Deptford. His flat’s over there somewhere, boarded up now, ransacked, security grills bolted onto the doors and windows
One of the brothers drove past, took some footage just to show him, no going back there, all gone. The crew he’s running with now, broken up into groups of three, about twenty in all, seem to be the hardest ones, Benji’s been telling him indirectly about the reprisals on bailiffs they have been dishing out, setting traps for them, invading their homes while they are out, fucking up their motors, bomb threats at their award ceremonies. What’s one step lower than a cop? A bailiff. Nothing lower in this world than a fucking bailiff, the true enemy within.
They hit Deptford Broadway from three different directions and head for the
Burst the Bubble
meeting on Resolution Way.
Howard, you liar.
Oh yes Howard is holding out on him. Howard knows something, has something he’s not revealing. Howard, obsessed with Vernon, Paula Adonor, frightened by him, David Gillespie deeply suspicious of his past. His threatening manner.
Oh yes. Howard.
He returned to watch the video of Crane, his right eye closed, seeing now, shapes shifting in the background, Crane’s face altered, the room he sits in and the room Alex Hargreaves sits in watching seeming to overlap, to be telescoped into each other, like the Soft Rail carriages, one continuum, smoothly interleaved.
And then suddenly it strikes him with terrible force, so pronounced he cries out, pauses the tape as Crane turns the camera to show Paula Adonor the room he is sitting in. Suddenly he understands something: the wall and bed, the glimpse of the garden, the street outside.
Isn’t it?
It is.
He types
Paula Adonor, address history
into his DataQuest app. Even before the answer has appeared on the screen he can read it, the faint imprint in the electronic ether, the soft, pliable matter in which these communications occur, the trace. 174 Stratheden Road.
This house, his house, their home.
There he is, Vernon Crane, sitting in this room, their living room, gazing back at him.
Vernon, Vernon, is this how you found me?
Christine addresses herself to the kettle and the tea things, shaking her head slightly. She can’t understand it, never has, never will, why a young boy from a good home, a clever lad at that, and handsome, can get himself a girlfriend, get to university, and have everything to live for would just throw it all away, waste his time taking drugs.
It’s tragic. But her son is not the only one. Marjorie, from four doors down, her daughter is an alcoholic, doesn’t do anything now but sit in the house and drink vodka, her husband’s left her, he tried, her Dad won’t have anything to do with her, he tried to make her see sense, just her Mum now keeps trying to make her get help, but she won’t, even though they’ve all told her.
Her own brother, Billy, had to have his leg off, still wouldn’t stop with the drink, in a wheelchair and he was only in his Fifties, died not long after, he had his insides all furred up and hardened like a man thirty years his age. Is life that bad? They never had it easy, growing up, they never had many chances but they did alright, they wanted to have a family and grow old together. Get away from the backstreets and the backyards get a place with a little garden. Now he’s ill. She swallows and busies herself. Not long till she’s the only one left, no husband, no son.
The grass needs cutting. How will she manage that on her own? He was a happy boy. She thought so, anyway, they both did. A happy little boy, shy, a bit soft. He got bullied a bit, liked books. They loved him and it wasn’t their fault they couldn’t have a brother or sister for him to be with. Her hand goes to her stomach. They would have liked that, all three of them. Maybe it was that. But there are other families with only children.
Hard to imagine now that once a life grew in her. So long ago now it seems that it was something she dreamed, it’s hard to believe he ever really existed, if not for the photos and the fact that Jack is there to confirm it, though he doesn’t want to talk about him really.
Well, he had so much hope for him didn’t he? When Vernon disappeared it was as though his own life ended in a way, after that he lost strength, he still went through the motions but she could tell some spark went out of him. You shouldn’t live your life through your kids, she knows that, but to have Vernon get to University. Well, Jack is a clever man but he never had the chances and to have his son get there. Why, she’ll never understand, neither will Jack. After Vernon went missing all he did for months was shake his head and grit his teeth and say, the daft bugger, the daft bugger.
Perhaps, perhaps it was the sense of something or someone hoped for, expected, not being there that did it, that made Vernon, growing up, sense something was wrong, lacking, though they never talked about it, the fact that she couldn’t have another child. What did they tell him when he asked why he didn’t have a brother or sister like the other lads? All kinds of things, probably different and contradictory things, excuses.
Did he feel blamed, responsible, know that something had gone wrong, something that was covered over? Did he feel guilty, did they make him feel guilty even though it was the last thing in the world they wanted to do.
Those old questions return to her. The kettle boils and billows up into a shaft of sunlight that comes through the clouds, strikes into the room, makes her squint. Tiny particles of steam and dust glinting, the window stippled with rain, the misty garden softly scintillating, everything growing out there. You are dead soon enough, old before you have had chance to realise how rapidly time slips by, why would you throw it away? All the time they could have spent together, the ways he would have grown and changed, grandkids, settling down and making a home.
All that happiness gone. She blinks, soft half dry tears in her eyes, the world a mess of watery refractions and smeared light, the green of the garden swimming, the long fronds of the climbing ivy dancing like ribbons of seaweed in the breeze. Soon the whole world will be underwater with these floods everywhere. Well, it’s a blessing perhaps that she won’t live to see the worst of it. Stop hovering in the doorway, Nick, she says. She liked the phrase when he used it, in that email to her. He looks nervous, happy more than anything, relieved, slightly incredulous, bemused.
She glances at the clock. 11.23. They slipped away early and Louise! She was meant to ring her at ten and now her phone’s in her bag in the other room. No doubt she will be angry with her tomorrow, making her stay in then not even ringing, but she would like a moment of irresponsibility herself, the ability to forget others just for a moment, to pretend almost that they didn’t exist. Is that wrong? Well, sometimes, sometimes with kids. Nick understands, she’s sure.
Paula Adonor finds herself strangely nervous about taking off her headscarf, feels she ought to give him a little advanced warning though with him there in his t-shirt and boxer shorts she can tell he may be feeling a little self-conscious too.
Listen, she says, turn out the light. I will put the lamp on. Darkness, a moment’s fumbling, the soft glow beside the bed. Look, she says, just so you don’t get a shock I should tell you I have lost some hair. Alopecia. That’s why I am wearing this scarf. Some patches, she says, at the front. She reaches back and unknots the scarf, smiles. There they are, three of them about the size of a fifty pence piece, one right at the front, the other two an inch or so back from her hairline. Nick takes her face in his hands, leans forward and kisses them, these little islands, smooth as baby skin, shining in the lamplight, breathes in deeply, the scent of her skin and hair. She puts her hands up and holds onto his wrists, clamps his hands to her face so that a tear leaks from the side of her left eye and runs down her cheek. They stay that way for a moment, then he sits down beside her on the bed.
Well, he says, half turns, runs his hand up the hair on the back of his head, and reveals a big central patch and a few smaller ones at the sides. Snap. I never even knew, someone in work spotted it.
Stress?
They say.
She has been hovering outside the study door in the evenings now for the best part of a week. She knows that when he is in full writing mode he runs on irregular hours, has to go where and when inspiration takes him, but she has begun to wonder what he has been eating. The food in the fridge seems more or less untouched, and she hears the same song played over and over again. Who knows, what does she know, after all, about the creative process, those depths? Last night he came into the bedroom at three thirty and lay on the bed muttering for twenty or so minutes before going out again into the bathroom, the water running constantly, Karen drifting in and out of sleep, in there for hours until just before dawn when he went scurrying off back to his study.
Thank god she hasn’t had to work today and it seems, judging by the silence that reigned all morning and afternoon, that he was asleep up there, finally, gone nocturnal, something he never did with
Gilligan’s Century
, though he was completely immersed especially during the last six months and then wretchedly deflated afterwards and well, will it always be like this then for the two of them?