Midland

by James Flint

  ‘You’re looking the wrong way,’ Tony said. ‘The other side, that’s what I brought you up here to show you.’

  Sean turned to see his father gesturing with his stick towards the northeast, in which direction another set of fields, flatter and much less picturesque, extended to the horizon. In the middle distance he could see their own house, at the far end of the little hamlet that dribbled away along Burford Lane.

  ‘What about it?’ Sean asked. The view was, after all, utterly unremarkable, merely another aspect of the one he saw every day from his bedroom window.

  ‘I’ve bought it,’ Tony said.

  ‘You’ve bought it?’

  ‘Well, not all of it. A lot of it though.’

  ‘Who from?’

  ‘The first chunk, which is way over there on far side of Wrokas bank by the river, that was from Pete Scrivens, when he decided to sell up and move out to Spain. Other bits and pieces I’ve added since. There’s more, too. A band that stretches all the way across the Henley Road, past Bearley even.’

  Sean whistled softly. Tony was talking about a great deal of land.

  ‘What have you done that for? You planning on becoming a farmer?’

  ‘Nope.’ Tony put down his stick and reached inside his coat for his hipflask. ‘I don’t imagine those extortionate school fees I shelled out covered teaching you anything about the Forest of Arden.’

  Sean sighed. The pointlessness of formal education, paid for or otherwise, was one of his father’s favourite themes – although he noted that it was his school his father was choosing to target, not his university. He knew that Tony was proud of him for getting his degree, even though he would never actually admit it.

  ‘Not exactly,’ he said.

  ‘No surprise there. Waste of bloody money.’ Tony took a nip of his whisky and Drambuie mix and passed the flask to his son before taking up his stick again. ‘Five hundred years ago it covered all of this,’ he said, gripping the horn handle and sweeping the ash staff across the relevant quadrant of sky. ‘Started this side of Stratford and went right past Birmingham, Coventry. All the way to bloody Tamworth.’ An imaginary Tamworth was skewered with the stick’s steel ferrule. ‘Covered the whole damn county and more besides. All trees. Oak, elm, ash, larch. A lost world. Even the Romans were too scared to try and put a road through it. Coughton was the edge of it, that’s as close as they dared come. You left the road there, you were on your own. Took your life in your hands if you wanted to get to the fort at Henley. Full of rogues and thieves it was. Outlaws, cutthroats. Like our friends back there in the caravans. Though Pig-Eye’s a bit past it now.’

  An image of the traveller’s mild deformity flashed into Sean’s mind.

  ‘What happened to it?’

  ‘What do you think? Cut down for firewood. Roof beams. Ships. The Elizabethans liked their ships, of course. And then they farmed the shit out of it. Enclosures. They wanted to clear the Catholics out. Robert Catesby and his gang. Gunpowder plot – presumably you’ve heard of that? That was all hatched round here.’

  ‘And you’re trying to recreate this forest?’ Sean worked hard to keep any incredulity out of his voice. With his father, nothing was impossible.

  Tony put his stick down and fetched out his cigarettes. ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Come off it, Dad. Even you’re not rich enough for that.’

  ‘I can have a damn good go.’

  Sean laughed. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve had some kind of green conversion.’

  Instead of answering Tony lit another Dunhill and smoked distractedly for a minute or two. While he waited Sean took another pull on the hipflask and offered it back; when his father declined he placed it down on the flat top of the nearest of the standing stones.

  ‘What do you know about NolCalc, Sean?’ Tony said.

  His tone had changed. So this is what they’d come up here to talk about.

  ‘Not much, if I’m honest,’ Sean replied.

  ‘No, well you wouldn’t, would you? I’ll put it this way. What do you think, in the company, we spend most of our time actually doing?’

  Sean pondered this, assuming a trap was being laid. He wasn’t sure what it was, but he’d learned over the years that the best approach with such gambits was to act a bit dim and blunder right onto the tripwires rather than try to be too clever about trying to avoid them. He was more likely to find out what was really going on if he played to his father’s vanity in this way, even if it meant swallowing his ego in the process.

  ‘You make car phones?’

  ‘Yes, well obviously. We do that. But mostly what we do is, we lose money.’

  Sean raised his eyebrows. His strategy had got him straight to the heart of the matter all right. This was just not what he’d thought he would find there.

  ‘But you sell bucketloads of phones, don’t you? You’re supposed to be the market leader, at least according to what I’m always reading in the papers.’

  ‘Oh yes. We have a massive turnover. We just try very hard not to make a profit.’

  ‘Why would you want to do that?’

  ‘It’s complicated.’ Sticking to his strategy, Sean waited in silence while Tony stubbed out his cigarette on the standing stone and took a swig from the hipflask. ‘It’s basically because, like everyone else, we only pay tax on profits. If we lose money, we don’t pay tax, and we can even claim rebates on the losses. So everything has to be structured to look like it’s in the red, while actually remaining solidly black.

  ‘It starts with NolCalc Limited being registered in Guernsey instead of here on the mainland, because the Channel Islands have much more lax laws around corporate ownership than we do. This allows it to be owned, not by me or my original investors, but by another company called Motherboards International, which is registered in the British Virgin Islands.

  ‘But Motherboards International doesn’t own itself, either. It’s owned in turn by two companies called Summit Silicon and Third Bay, which are both based in Turks and Caicos.’

  ‘Where the hell is that?’ Sean had never heard of it, and from the name thought it must be somewhere in the Middle East.

  ‘Caribbean. It’s a British Overseas Territory. Technically it’s ruled by the Queen but it has its own government that lets you set up companies with almost zero oversight.’

  ‘Oh. Right. So who owns these Summit and Bay outfits then?’

  ‘Well, that’s where the dog bites its own arse. Ultimately the Nolans do, via a series of family trusts and holding companies some of which are in my name or which I’m a director of, some of which involve you, or Caitlin, or your mother, or your uncle Conor and your uncle Joe.’

  Tony hadn’t mentioned Jamie’s name, Sean noted.

  ‘So if that’s what it comes down to, why bother with all the other stuff?’

  ‘Why bother?’ Tony allowed himself a laugh. ‘Don’t ever ask my accountants that. They’ll give you an answer that’ll last a week and when they’re done you still won’t understand what the fuck they’re on about. But I’m going to tell you now, for free. I’m only going to say it once, and you’re never going to find anyone else who’ll be able to tell you without adding sixty-nine layers of bullshit on top of it and charging three hundred an hour for the privilege. So listen.

  ‘The way it works is that the Turks and Caicos companies loan money, and I’m talking about lots of money, to the British Virgin Islands company, which has to pay interest on the loans. This interest can be lopped off its tax bill, as interest is a tax-deductible expense, and the loans are big enough that these deductions pretty much wipe out Motherboards International’s entire tax liability.

  ‘Motherboards International makes its profits by loaning money to NolCalc, along with inflated fees for “financial services”, where the process is repeated: the interest gets deducted from its tax bill, and the fees suck up any profits that are left, effectively taking that money out of Guernsey.

  ‘To oil the wheels there’s ano
ther company, NolCalc Research, which is the only one registered here in the UK. Most of the people who think they work for NolCalc are actually employed by NolCalc Research. NolCalc subcontracts much of its work to NolCalc Research, which supposedly charges its services back to NolCalc “at cost”. But those fees are also massively inflated.

  ‘The result of all this is that NolCalc and NolCalc Research, which should both be hugely profitable, generally make an annual loss and so pay hardly any tax at all. Sometimes, as I mentioned before, they even earn rebates on some of their expenses from their respective Exchequers, meaning they make money from their governments – which in the case of NolCalc Research means from you, because you’re paying for it, out of your income tax. Or you would be if you actually had a job.

  ‘And so it goes on. There are lots of added complications, most of them blind alleys designed to confuse the various regional tax authorities and make it as hard as humanly possible to track where the real profits go and who owes what tax on them where. But what you end up with is a mass of wiring, like a booby-trapped bomb. Cut a wire to solve an issue in one country and you can suddenly find you’ve made yourself liable for all sorts of back taxes or fines in another. Of course there’s an army of people on hand to make sure that this doesn’t happen, all dependent on the continued operation of the machine for their eye-watering fees. Machine’s probably not even the right word. It’s more like some gigantic fucking fungus, eating itself at the same time as devouring anything in its path.

  ‘I started it running, but I don’t control it. The lawyers and accountants have that honour. In theory it’s made me rich, but I risk losing a fortune in tax every time I put my hand into my pocket. To break free from it I really need to leave here and live abroad at least half the year, which is exactly what my so-called advisers would like me to do.’

  ‘So why don’t you?’ The Caribbean seemed like a pretty good option from where Sean was standing, especially with a yacht or two thrown in.

  ‘Because – I – like – it – here,’ Tony said, jabbing the ground with his walking stick. ‘Right here. I don’t want to live in the fucking British Virgin Islands and spend my time playing tennis and drinking gin with other rich pricks like me. I want to be in Warwickshire. This is what I love.’ He waved his stick at the sky again. ‘This. Seasons. Mud. Apples. Swallows. Rain.’

  ‘So that’s why you’re buying the land.’

  ‘In a way. The land is … my revenge. I buy it via one of the Turks and Caicos companies and the lawyers let me do it because you don’t pay tax on profits earned buying and selling land that’s owned offshore. But it’s a way to nail a piece of this monster I’ve created back down to the earth, and give me something I can fucking touch and fucking look at and fucking taste. And NolCalc doesn’t know it yet, but I’m going to bind up that piece in a trust and plant it with trees and make sure it can never, ever be fucking sold, make sure it’s here in perpetuity, my little monument to Arden Forest and old Robert Catesby. And you’ – Tony planted the ferrule of the stick in the centre of Sean’s chest – ‘you are going to manage it for me. You with your expensive education.’

  ‘I am?’

  ‘You are. Now that you’ve finally graduated you need something constructive to do. I’m not having you lie around all day playing with yourself and pissing my money down the drain. So welcome to NolCalc, Mr Sean Nolan. First Vice-President of Forestry.’

  Sean had had his own agenda for this walk. He’d wanted to talk to his father about something entirely different. As usual Tony’s desires had taken precedence, but he still meant to give it a go. He might not get another chance. He was clearly in favour right now. It no doubt wouldn’t last.

  ‘That’s great, Dad. I think that’s an offer I can’t refuse.’

  ‘Well you could, but I wouldn’t advise it. Drink on it?’ Tony offered the hipflask.

  ‘Absolutely.’ Sean took a sip and passed it back, his hand trembling slightly with the weight of what he wanted to say. He didn’t know how to say it, couldn’t decide on a formulation that could be guaranteed to work, so rather than risk saying nothing in the end he just blurted out the words.

  ‘But what about Jamie?’

  ‘What about him?’ his father said, apparently entirely unmoved.

  ‘Shouldn’t we do something to find him?’

  Tony stood for a few moments staring east, then lifted his stick in a line. Sean thought for one terrible moment that his father was going to strike him, but instead he held the stick at the horizontal and looked down it like he was sighting some kind of pathway through the corridor of land he’d bought.

  ‘Don’t talk to me about Jamie,’ he said. ‘Jamie is the lucky one. Jamie is free. You’re the one you need to worry about. You’re stuck with NolCalc. You’re stuck with me.’

  Then he lowered the stick, drained the remaining contents of the hipflask into his mouth, and set off down the hill.

  —————

  Bea and Luggie were end-of-the-beach kind of people. Bea was from Newcastle and Luggie was Welsh, and they’d met when they’d been teaching English at the same language school in Guatemala and decided that, whatever else happened, they didn’t ever really want to go home.

  When their teaching stint was over they’d travelled north into Chiapas and then meandered up through Campeche and the Yucatán peninsula, hopscotching between beaches, nature reserves and Mayan archaeological sites until they’d washed up in Cancún, where they had to spend a couple of weeks sorting out money and extending their visas. But as soon as they were able they fled its concrete sprawl and beachfront mega-hotels, whose trapezoid tiers of balconies and terraces formed such peculiar temporal echoes of the great stepped pyramids of Palenque, Uxmal and Chichen Itza, and headed south down the coast.

  To rinse off the city they stopped in Tulum, a little resort favoured by backpackers, where they rented a simple cabana with hammocks for beds and the fine white sand for a floor. Here they spent a week sunbathing, touring the local ruins, and making snorkelling trips out to the little reef that snagged the waves about half a mile offshore. In the evenings they got stoned with the other travellers who congregated in the little clifftop restaurant, swapping stories of their trip for tales of the legendary all-night parties that took place whenever a bale of cocaine worked loose from the rafts floated ashore by drug runners and washed up on the beach. They knew the tales were true because at night while they stood in the surf carving trails of phosphorescence with their hands, or lay on their backs to let their minds wander along the dusty byways of the Milky Way, they could see the lights from the police launches that patrolled beyond the reef for precisely that reason.

  After Tulum they continued down Route 15, taking local buses and stopping off wherever they felt like it, thinking to keep on like this through Belize and back into Guatemala before finally making up their minds what they were going to do with their lives. The further south they travelled the more insubstantial the road became, until it was little more than a tyre-compacted layer of grit and sand threading through a corridor of fan palms and desert willow as narrow and enclosed as that created by blackthorn and hazel on an ancient Warwickshire lane. By the time they crossed the land bridge that enclosed the Campechen lagoon and continued out past Zamach to the tip of Punta Allen it was almost impossibly fragile, but they’d heard there was a fantastic guesthouse here, about as remote from civilisation as you could get in this region, and acting on the principle that they might as well head as far away from everything as they could before they were forced by circumstance to begin the slow hack back, they aimed for that.

  Punta Allen, however, turned out to be more coherent than they’d anticipated, a settlement of thirty or forty dwellings that included several guesthouses and a hotel big enough to sport a tennis court. It was something they’d found repeatedly during their trip. Nearly every time they thought they’d headed far enough off the beaten track to have an experience that was new and theirs alone they found
that the thing, whatever it was, had been in some way trampled and commoditised. Not necessarily in a bad way, just in a way that left their thirst for uniqueness, for striking out through virgin territory, tantalisingly unquenched. Sometimes, Luggie took to remarking, he wondered if he’d have found it easier to get off the map if he’d stayed in Wales.

  They could hardly complain. The place was close enough to paradise as to be almost indistinguishable, and was certainly quieter and more remote than Tulum, where the ranks of huts had been dense enough to evoke an atmosphere of backpacker carnival. True to form they stayed at the smallest guesthouse at the farthest end of the settlement, just two thatched and whitewashed buildings divided into a kitchen and three guest rooms less than fifty metres from the sea.

  And yet it wasn’t far enough. This was supposed to be an adventure, not a holiday, and after a day spent recharging in hammocks slung between the coconut palms that grew almost to the water’s edge, the logic of exploration kicked back in and they decided, after sourcing some provisions from the hotel with the tennis court, to hike out to the point.

  At first they set off down the road, or what was left of it. Route 15, tenuous enough when it had entered Punta Allen, emerged from it as no more than a path through the jungle barely wide enough to accommodate a jeep. But they’d been walking down it for little more than ten minutes when they came across a rusted metal gate hung with a hand-painted sign that said Propiedad Privada, and chained shut.

  ‘End of the line, by the look of it,’ Luggie said.

  ‘Oh bollocks,’ said Bea. ‘What on earth is the point of having a “keep out” sign all the way out here? It’s not like anyone’s going to rat-run it on their way to the supermarket.’