Perfidious Albion

by Sam Byers

  While the system took its sweet time, Zero/One wandered over with her coffee and brownie – the coffee in a chipped, dishwasher-bleached mug that looked like it had once carried a picture of Princess Diana, the brownie perched on a scratched CD ROM. Once he had fully retreated, Jess moved her fingers to the keyboard, and turned her attention to the question of who to become first.

  Today, there was only one persona at the forefront of Jess’s mind, primarily because she happened to know that he was at the forefront of so many other minds. The party last night had been instructive. Somehow, through that peculiar alchemy of virality, one of her creations had become not only noticed, but hyper-noticed – observed, discussed, and in demand. She now found herself in the bizarre situation of standing around at parties listening to people like Robert and DeCoverley pretend they knew someone of whom she categorically knew they had no direct knowledge. He couldn’t make it, sadly, she remembered them both saying. And what was all that stuff about demarcations he would or wouldn’t recognise?

  The timer on Jess’s screen stopped spinning and the page she was looking for loaded one element at a time. She typed Byron Stroud’s username into the email account she’d created for him. Sure enough, there were emails from everyone who’d been at the gathering: DeCoverley, Lionel Groves, one or two of the Theory Dudes, even Robert.

  Byron: said DeCoverley’s email, in typically presumptuous fashion. Missed you at the thing last night. Would have been marvellous to have your voice there. We really must meet. A drink soon? JDC.

  My friend, said Lionel Groves’s email, already, in the space of two words, cleaving to Groves’s house style of self-aggrandising pomposity and gushing, weirdly antiquated sentiment. Such a shame to find you absent last night. Let us meet soon. Groves.

  Hi Byron, said Robert’s email. Was it just because Jess knew him and could hear, even in the simplest of written exchanges, his voice, or did his opening seem characteristically tentative? I’m not sure if you got my last email, but just in case you didn’t I thought I’d drop you a line again to say how nice it would be to meet up sometime. As I said in my previous email (apologies if you got it and are now reading this twice!), I’m such an admirer of your work, and I’d love to pick your brains whenever you have a moment. Like I said before (sorry again if I’m repeating myself), you can read what I’ve been working on here, here, here, and …

  The email was painful, awkward. Jess recoiled from its neediness, its sycophancy, its blunt depiction of a side to Robert that Robert kept from her. But she also, as she was reading it, recoiled from the fact that she was reading it at all. She had not, when she began this project, considered the potential for blurred boundaries. In retrospect, she had been guilty of precisely the dualistic fallacy she abhorred in the thinking of others. Of course, nothing was truly separable from anything else. The private, the public, the personal, the professional. Everything bled.

  Even transgression, she thought, logging out of Stroud’s email and redirecting her browser towards its next target, had a tendency to slip its moorings. You started out small and things swelled from there. Targets multiplied. Focus blurred.

  The comments section of The Command Line prompted her for a log-in. Her fingers hovered over the keyboard, just as they always did, as if teasing her with the possibility that today they would change their mind, move on.

  But the moment, as it always did, passed. Her fingers tapped out her username, JuBenja, and then hit enter.

  *

  Darkin had never been much of a one for knocks at the door. In the latter stages of his life, ambivalence had toughened into animosity. While Flo was alive, towards the end of her time with him, a procession of professionals had tromped through the flat delivering news that ranged from not very good to awful. The last knock had been when they’d come to take her off to the home. Two paramedics, two policemen, two social workers. One of them tried to get Darkin to sit on the sofa and have a cup of tea. Darkin was having none of it. Next thing he knew, he was in handcuffs and Flo was being stretchered down to an ambulance.

  The knock that rang out through the smoke and fug of Darkin’s living room on this particular day was not, it had to be said, particularly polite. It was sharp, insistent, pointedly excessive. He debated not answering it. His head was full of worrisome scenarios, most of which he’d picked up from The Record. He pictured himself opening the door a crack, peering round, only for it to be forced back in his face, knocking him to the floor. Men in balaclavas would burst in. Their voices would be Polish or black.

  Further clarification, shouted through the door in a kind of stand-off during which Darkin refused to co-operate until he knew who he was speaking to, yielded no reassurance. The man’s name was Jones. He worked for Downton. When Darkin opened the door, slightly out of breath after shuffling over with his stick, Jones stepped straight in, looking not at Darkin but at the flat, his lips and nostrils registering his response.

  ‘It can be hard to keep up with a place,’ he said.

  Jones’s suit was deep blue with an oil-on-water shimmer. He looked long and hard at Darkin’s twin sofas before perching himself with some discomfort on the outer lip of the one opposite Darkin’s habitual spot.

  Darkin didn’t say anything. He hadn’t liked the man when he’d heard him through the door, and he liked him even less now that he was addressing him in person. He sat down opposite Jones and reached for his fag packet. Kitchen timer be damned, he thought. These were exceptional circumstances.

  ‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you not to smoke, Mr Darkin.’

  ‘It’s my flat.’

  ‘But for the moment it’s also my place of work.’

  Darkin lifted his fingers from the fag packet and picked up what was left of his tea. It was stone cold, but he wanted something to do with his hands.

  ‘What do you want?’ he said.

  ‘I could ask you the same question,’ said Jones. ‘What do you want, Mr Darkin? May I call you Alfred?’

  ‘No. What do you mean what do I want?’

  ‘I mean: what do you want from life? If I could wave a magic wand, what would you ask for?’

  ‘Can you wave a magic wand?’

  ‘You’d be surprised what I can do.’

  ‘I doubt that.’

  Mr Jones smiled politely.

  ‘How old are you now, Mr Darkin?’

  ‘Old enough.’

  ‘And your health is none too good, is it?’

  ‘Nothing wrong with me that a few spare parts wouldn’t fix.’

  ‘Indeed.’ Mr Jones paused. He looked as if he might be about to recline on the sofa but then thought better of it and leaned forward, interlacing his fingers between his knees. ‘We take our more senior residents very seriously, you know.’

  ‘Good to hear.’

  ‘Every now and then, we like to pop round and check on our vulnerable adults.’

  Darkin had heard the term vulnerable adult before, applied to Flo. Nothing good had come of it.

  ‘I’m not vulnerable,’ he said. ‘So you don’t have to worry.’

  ‘Oh, but you are, Mr Darkin. You’re very vulnerable.’ Mr Jones looked around pointedly. ‘Do you know what I see when I look around here? Hazards. Hundreds of hazards. Trip hazards, fire hazards. Do you think you’d survive a fall, Mr Darkin? In this place, I mean? Because there’s so much to knock against on the way down, isn’t there? Look at that table. Catch the corner of that and there’d be no helping you.’

  ‘I’ve survived so far.’

  ‘What I’m saying is, you manage now, but for how long?’

  When Darkin didn’t answer, Mr Jones pressed on.

  ‘Anyway, like I say, I just wanted to assure you that you’re listed on our system. That way, we can respond appropriately if anything happens. Obviously, as one of our owner-occupying tenants who has not signed up to our maintenance programme, you don’t rely on us to do your repairs. But as I’m sure you understand, we’re still responsible for
all sorts of things that your wellbeing might depend on. If your gas or electricity supply was interrupted and you were unable to cook or heat the home, for example, a gentleman as frail as yourself could become ill very quickly. Just the same as if there was a carbon monoxide leak, you’d be far more likely to succumb to the fumes before you could exit the property. It’s very important we know these things, Mr Darkin, so we can keep you safe. Of course, if you ever began to feel that a different property would be more suited to your needs, we’d be only too happy to—’

  ‘I’m fine here.’

  ‘Of course you are, Mr Darkin. Of course you are. I’m just saying if—’

  ‘You won’t get me out.’

  ‘No-one wants to get you out, Mr Darkin. We just want to help you.’

  Darkin nodded. Mr Jones stood up and ran his hands quickly down the buttocks of his suit before giving the palms a quick glance.

  ‘I’ll be going,’ he said. ‘Just remember, we’re here if you need us.’

  He held out his hand for Darkin to shake. ‘Don’t get up. I can see myself out.’

  Darkin did not initially shake Mr Jones’s hand. He didn’t want to shake it and didn’t see why he should. But Jones didn’t let his hand drop. He just held it there, in front of Darkin’s face, smiling gently, not moving, until eventually Darkin shook it just to get rid of him. The moment their hands touched, Jones’s thin smile both broadened and softened, becoming genuine, toothy.

  ‘No-one holds out forever,’ he said. He reached down with his left hand to Darkin’s stick, which Darkin had propped between his knees. ‘Let me take this for you.’

  ‘No, it’s fine.’

  ‘It’s no trouble.’

  Darkin tried to reach for the stick but Jones had already lifted it away and taken a step back. The moment he was without it, Darkin felt a sudden, sharp panic.

  ‘Pleasure to meet you, Mr Darkin,’ said Jones, making for the door. ‘I’ll leave this right here.’

  *

  Robert parked his car a little way from the Larchwood and then walked the remaining distance. The estate lacked an obvious entrance. Instead, you found yourself amidst it, the street opening out into a generous but dilapidated square encircled by four-or five-storey blocks of flats.

  There were traces, even now, of what the Larchwood was once supposed to be. It rejected the grey uniformity of earlier, more brutalist efforts. The mid-rises were gently rounded at the corners and asymmetrical in height, lending them an off-kilter appearance. The walkways that ran along the fronts were created from a kind of decking. Plants had once lined the edges and crept up the walls, but the service contract had long since expired and the so-called vertical garden had died, leaving behind denuded stumps and dry, ropey remnants. At some stage, the decision had been taken to paint each door a slightly different shade, giving the whole estate a childlike, playful air. Once, Robert thought, the effect had probably been uplifting, but now, with all the colours thinned and bleached by rain, and much of the woodwork cracked by frost, the diluted palette was insipid, woozy.

  Aside from its physical deterioration, what really signalled the Larchwood’s grand failure had nothing to do with bricks and mortar and everything to do with atmosphere. The place was almost completely silent. Every visualisation and artist’s impression Robert had seen featured children playing while their associated adults stood around the square with cups of tea. But activity had drained from the shared spaces with dismal speed. There was still life here, of course: many flats, despite the purchase orders, the pressure to leave, and the increasing sense of abandonment brought on by the decanting process, were still inhabited, but their occupants existed largely in isolation.

  Now, a new vision of togetherness awaited the estate. Downton were hacking community. Not only would it be cohesive, it would also be profitable. Tenants would be able to use the site-specific social network for all the things people claimed had been lost. They could gossip, catch up, ask to borrow some sugar. Critically, though, they could do so more efficiently. Why go round all your neighbours asking for some sugar when you could just post a floorspecific request and check the replies?

  The implications were not merely social, but practical. Why send out engineers and security specialists when there might very well be expertise and know-how located right there within the building, able to respond immediately? With the Downton system, tenants would be able to list their skills and interests and show themselves as available for certain tasks. Community points accrued by an electrician picking up a few odd jobs in his own building during his off hours could, thanks to Downton’s proposed zoning of the development according to tenant profile, be exchanged for perks and rewards ordinarily reserved exclusively for upper-strata tenants, such as limited off-peak use of the promised rooftop garden, or even, ultimately, depending on how the reward-to-return ratio was calibrated, and depending, obviously, on tenants also having the necessary capital to fund the difference in value, a full property upgrade. Social mobility was back, and it had never been more fun.

  Robert decided to begin his search for a subject on the first floor and work his way up. That way, if he got lucky early on, he wouldn’t have expended unnecessary energy on the climb.

  Doorstepping people, it quickly transpired, was not a particularly popular thing to do in a place where every uninvited knock brought yet more dismal news. Not only, one ageing resident informed Robert, leaning on the jamb of her door and never taking her eyes off the walkway that stretched out behind Robert’s left shoulder, had Downton already sent their own ‘journalist’, who under cover of writing a ‘local colour’ piece had proceeded to skim from people’s recollections all kinds of valuable and ultimately unsettling data, they had also gone to great lengths to identify people who’d commented off the record to other reporters so that said individuals could be leaned on all the more forcefully. One man, hollow-faced with drained resolve, half-whispering through his barely ajar door, said that the day after an article appeared in which his name was used beside a comparatively harmless quote about the way in which the transfer of ownership had been handled, a letter had been hand-delivered advising him of a five per cent rent increase. A week after that, his electricity began to fluctuate – the lights flickering and dimming, the fridge clicking into sudden silence before whirring back to life three or four seconds later. It lasted, he said, two or three days, and he still, even though everything was now fully functional and the fault had almost certainly been a coincidence, couldn’t entirely shake the notion that the fluctuation had been (and here he paused, leaned closer, hissed the word through the crack in the door) a message. When Robert asked him why he was telling him all this if the only likely result was further pressure, the man said he’d signed, and so there was nothing more they could do to him. When Robert asked him how much he’d lost in the deal, the man said he didn’t want to talk about it.

  At the next door Robert tried, a younger man answered, propped up on crutches, a baby grizzling from a room somewhere behind him, the sound competing with the automatic weapons fire and gratuitous death-howls of what Robert assumed was a violent video game.

  ‘Oh, Downton,’ the man said with a grim smile. ‘Yeah, they’re round all the time. They’ve got this new thing where they come and check on you.’ He made quote marks in the air with his fingers, then tilted his head towards his crutches. ‘They like to make sure I’m OK.’

  ‘You use those all the time?’ said Robert.

  ‘Accident at work. I think I’m a particular irritation for Downton. Disabled, baby in the flat. They need to be a bit more careful than they have been with other people.’

  ‘They’ve been heavy with people you know?’

  ‘They’re not stupid. All the heavy stuff I’ve seen is when they’ve got some kind of legal basis. Rent arrears or whatever. Then they really pounce. Otherwise, it’s the friendly-but-not-friendly pop-round – you know, the quick chat, the discussion of your options.’ He laughed wryly, then ran a fingerna
il up the wall beside him, flaking paint and plaster coming away in a powdery cloud. ‘Or maybe they don’t come round at all,’ he said. ‘Maybe they just let you fester.’

  ‘Is anyone organising anything?’ said Robert. ‘Is there a tenants’ group?’

  ‘People are kind of worried about consequences,’ said the man. ‘But there are ideas floating around.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Robert, unable to think of any more questions.

  ‘What’s your name?’ said the man.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ said Robert, hesitating.

  ‘So I can look for your piece.’

  ‘Townsend,’ said Robert, oddly reluctant to reveal his own name despite the fact he was asking people to reveal an awful lot more to him. ‘Robert Townsend.’

  ‘I’ll google you,’ said the man, giving a smile and a wave.

  It was all good detail, Robert thought, but it was nothing he, and by extension his readers, didn’t already know. He needed not the facts, but the personification of those facts: the one representative individual who could embody the situation.

  One level up, the first flat he came to did not bode well. The windows were filthy – streaked with dust, grime, and what looked like half a kebab. A light was on, but the curtains – yellowed and ragged and surely completely ineffectual when it came to keeping out the light, were drawn. He knocked anyway.

  For several seconds there was no answer. Then, as Robert was debating knocking again versus walking away, a voice – irritable and already defensive – came from inside the flat.