Deep Fried: A Novel

by Beckett, Bernard

  I notice the steam before we reach the pool. It is fed by a small stream running dark and clear over volcanic rock. Maybe three metres across, a natural spa with snow packed high about its walls; all around icicles dripping slowly into the water. Chance is a fine architect. We stand, all three of us, thinking the same simple thoughts. It’s a been a morning without words and this is not the place to break the silence.

  I watch Marcus remove his shoes and slowly dip a foot into the steaming water. He turns to me and smiles. Another shoe comes off. Then his trousers. I am standing right beside Lucinda, who keeps her eyes on Marcus, gives nothing away. Marcus turns his back on us. The jacket comes off, a jersey and then his shirt. He moves forward, tests the water again, steps back, drops his boxers, stands naked in the snow. I think I want to look like that. I think am I expected to go next? And I think don’t think anything. Don’t say anything. This is a test. Don’t get it wrong. Marcus wades into the pool, until he is in past his knees. He turns to us and eases slowly backwards, blurring in the steam.

  ‘You’ll love this,’ Lucinda says to me. Then she is undressing, and so am I, because there is no way out of this. Sometimes the distinction is sharp, between having no choice and having no power. If I could talk to my guardian angel, if I could beg its cooperation, then this is what I would ask it to arrange.

  Lucinda walks in first and I follow her every step. My breathing and thinking and feeling have all turned to haze. She hesitates at the water, getting used to the heat of it. I stop, only a metre behind, and look, and smile, and think she is naked. Exactly like that, those three words. ‘What are you thinking?’ people sometimes ask. I think they’d be disappointed, by how simple it can be.

  The water is hot. I stand on one foot, then the other. Lucinda moves forward, and like Marcus turns back to me at the last minute, before relaxing backwards into the water. And you know where I look, and you know what I think. Again. She pulls herself across to Marcus, turns and laughs. I am fighting to keep my balance, exposed, and they are laughing. It feels wonderful, in the strangest, oldest way.

  ‘Just get in,’ Marcus laughs.

  ‘It’s hot,’ I reply, then stumble forward, feeling the angry rash of heat race up my body.

  I sit across from them, at a distance where our feet would touch, were we to stretch them out. The steam softens their faces. We spend ten minutes soaking without talking. Light snow begins to fall. I sink further into the water and feel the sharp stinging cold on my head. I notice how slowly each flake falls, but when I let my focus melt they seem to all come down in a rush. You can’t trust your brain.

  ‘Good isn’t it?’ Lucinda says. Not a question. I nod. Not an answer.

  ‘So this isn’t the test I don’t suppose.’ I say. They look at each other. The time has come. For what I don’t know, but there is enough in the glance to tell me it is important. Relaxation leaves my body slowly, from the head down.

  ‘What did you think, Pete,’ Lucinda asks me, ‘when you first met us?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, didn’t it seem strange to you?’

  ‘Of course. I said so. I said you had the wrong person.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she continues, still smiling, still naked. Her body, distorted by the water, seems to shimmer and float up towards me. I am hardly listening. Maybe this is enough. Maybe when it comes time to think about dying, and wondering what I have done with my life, this will be enough. How many people will have a moment like this on their list?

  ‘But did it seem strange, a scholarship like this, with all these tests?’

  ‘Of course it did.’

  ‘So why did you believe us?’ she asks.

  I try to think about that, but we’re warm and naked, and I want to stay like this forever, or maybe take the odd break, to tell other people. It makes it hard not to be a believer.

  ‘Well, why would you lie?’ I say. ‘I mean, I can understand someone lying about it, but not going to all this trouble. It all must have cost a lot of money right? That must have come from somewhere.’

  And you’re beautiful, I might have added. Rich and beautiful, so why wouldn’t I believe you?

  ‘Why?’

  They smile, like parents at Christmas, when there’s one last surprise for the child to open.

  She looks at him. He looks at her. Marcus takes up the story.

  ‘How would you feel if I told you you’ve won?’ I battle the grin but can’t stop it spreading. Goofy and uncool.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘What does sort of mean?’

  ‘Some of the details, we couldn’t reveal them earlier.’

  ‘What like?’

  A loaded silence, not so much pregnant as infected.

  ‘There were never any other candidates.’ Marcus tells me. ‘It’s just you. We’ve only been testing you.’

  I look at the faces, one at a time, for clues. There’s nothing there.

  ‘So why all the challenges?’

  ‘We needed to see if you were worthy.’

  ‘Worthy of what?’

  ‘Rescuing.’

  I want Lucinda to tell the rest. There’s something down in my stomach, a knot that feels like the beginning of fear. I want her to talk. I want her to make it go away.

  ‘Pete.’ She gets the message. ‘What we’re going to tell you now is going to seem a little weird, but you have to understand we’re your friends. If you let us help you, the way we want to, you’re going to come out of this very, very well. You got lucky, Pete, when you met us, in ways you can’t even imagine. Do you believe in fate?’

  I did, once. I shake my head.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I ask.

  ‘Most of what we told you is true. We noticed you, well our employer did, when you pulled that stunt at PBs. And the website, and the protest. And we’ve been instructed to reward you, with a contract worth a hundred and fifty thousand dollars over the next three years. But there are other things too, which are important. But before I tell you, I need to know something.’

  She lifts off the bank, pushes herself gently forward so her face is floating somewhere above my knees.

  ‘Do you trust me?’ she asks.

  I look into her eyes, and they’re too big and clear and beautiful to doubt.

  ‘Yeah,’ I tell her. ‘I do.’

  Her smile starts at the eyes and spreads down as far as I dare to look. She holds my stare, breathes slowly out, drifts back to Marcus’s side. He’s smiling too. If there was champagne, this would be the time to uncork it. I am elated, high on my own ignorance. Part of me doesn’t want to know the rest. This feels good enough. It will do.

  ‘Okay. We know something else about you, Pete. We know you broke into the PBs’ computers. We know what you saw. We took the computer, Pete, we’ve been through your files.’

  I am vaguely aware I should be frightened. My calmness takes me by surprise. Perhaps I do. Perhaps I really trust her. ‘You stole my computer?’

  ‘Not personally,’ she smiles.

  Marcus tags in. ‘You can understand, I’m sure, how anxious they were for it never to get out, the things you read. I doubt you can understand what sort of money we’re talking here, Pete, or what that sort of money, that sort of international power, can do.’ He sees my face drain, wiped cold. ‘No, don’t worry Pete. You’re okay. We’re here to help, that’s why you’re okay. It’s the only reason.’

  ‘I won’t lie though. It got close. Extremely close. When people like this feel threatened, the first thing they ask is ‘how much could this cost us?’ Then they ask ‘how can we stop it?’ then they ask, ‘what are the risks?’ Then they make a plan. They don’t ask, ‘what’s the right thing to do?”

  Lucinda’s turn.

  ‘People have gone to war over lesser amounts of money. There are a hundred ways they could crush you, and believe me, they talked about all of them. The one they favoured, when we were called in, was at least legal. Take you to
court, sue you, bankrupt you and your family for life, take out an order against you ever speaking about any of it, making sure you understood prison would be the result of cheating on the agreement. It’s a solid, standard response, in most circumstances, the one favoured by those who are rich enough to be sure the court will turn their way. But with you they were worried.

  ‘You’re younger than most of the people they deal with. And there’s that thing we all remember about being young. When you’re young you take risks, you’re unpredictable. You’re not always looking far enough ahead to worry about the implications. There had to be the danger, if we put the pressure on a person like you, that you’d raise a single finger at us, just because you could. Stare us down, shout “bring it on”.’

  They are watching me carefully, trying perhaps to read my reactions. But there’s nothing for them to see. I’m blank, inside and out. Hearing the words, but making no sense of them. It must be shock.

  ‘We were brought in to check out what sort of risk you might be,’ Marcus tells me. ‘Basically, how much of a loose canon you were. That’s our job. We’re consultant psychologists. We specialise in reading people, predicting which way they’ll jump. And you know what, and we both agree on this, you’re one of the most interesting people either of us has ever seen.’

  PBs. They work for PBs. It comes out of nowhere, hits me hard, a blow to the guts. I can’t just sit here and listen, can I? Surely I can’t just sit here and listen. It feels like I’m about to cry, but I won’t let that happen. I swallow it down. What would Jennifer do? That’s what I think. She’s my big sister. She’s the one I trust. Phone a friend please, I want to say. I want to talk to her. I want to get her advice.

  It was Jennifer who first told me what pain feels like. It was Jennifer who prepared me for this moment.

  She was 16 then, and used to thank me for being such a good listener. But a 14-year-old boy is well suited to listening, when it’s a 16-year-old girl doing the talking. Even your sister. I remember it clearly; straight off I knew it was one of those things worth hanging on to. We used to have table tennis down in the basement, where the PlayStation is now. Me and her’d talk for hours, with the hollow rhythm of our shots marking out the time. I’d seen her cry before, but that was different crying. Angry tears, frustrated tears, emotional, don’t-need-a-reason tears. This night I asked her how she was and she said, ‘Let’s just play a game.’ She was vicious in the first and beat me by seven (memory you see, it knows what it’s doing). So we played a second, and I got vicious too. It was 19-all and I was arguing a serve (it was off the side and she knew it) when the crying started. Big, painful tears that pulled on her shoulders, up and down in time, like she was a puppet that couldn’t get started.

  Fourteen-year-old boys don’t get so much, but I knew enough to stop arguing about the serve and then, when the tears kept flowing, to walk around the table and give her an awkward hug and a painful smile, to sit down and shut up and let her take it from there. It didn’t take so long for the story to get going. She had a boyfriend who was older than her, 19 and out of school, working at a service station and spending his spare time polishing his car and having sex with her. I don’t think, if I had a little brother, I’d tell him stuff like that. Gary was his name, and Mum and Dad didn’t know about him. A week before Jennifer’d told me she thought she might be in love with him. She even tried to explain how it felt, to have everything solid inside you turn liquid and uncertain, but I didn’t really get it.

  ‘He’s a bastard, Pete. A total arsehole.’

  I knew that already. You could see it in the way he checked his reflection in his bonnet, and refused to pick her up from school, even when it was raining, because he didn’t want to be seen hanging round there, and the way he changed plans on her at the last minute, without ever apologising.

  The story wasn’t all that surprising. Another girl, called Cindy, was there that afternoon, at his flat, when Jennifer wagged chemistry to go visiting. I tried not to be distracted when she told me she found them naked. I tried to focus on the pain of it. The shock, she called it. The looking and not wanting to see. Holding arguments with your eyes, your ears, while chemicals do all they can to deaden the nerves. Your screaming and swearing sounds like it’s coming from someone else’s mouth, in a room next door, and the look on his face, indignant that you should be there at all, is a slowed down cartoon. That’s the way she told it, and now, four years later, it makes some sort of sense. Lucinda is looking at me. I’m not hiding it well.

  Gary told Jennifer the other woman meant nothing. He said they’d been drinking. He said he was sorry. He told her he loved her, and for half an hour she believed him. We are genetically similar, Jennifer and me, so Lucinda has about 23 minutes left by my count, to convince me my world isn’t crumbling.

  ‘See, you’re not a destroyer, Pete,’ she tells me. ‘You’re angry, sure, but who isn’t? You’re angry right now. I can see that. And so would I be, if I hadn’t heard the full story. But you know what you’ve got, that makes you different? You know what we thought we saw in you? A brain that thinks past the packaging, doesn’t buy the bullshit. And you’ve got the balls to walk that brain forward, which is a rare and dangerous combination. Let me tell you two things okay, and then I’m going to shut up and you can ask all the questions you want. But listen to both these things very, very carefully.

  ‘First, some would say there are two types of people in the world: those who buy into the cheap anaesthetic of consumerism, who stand dribbling before the counters of instantly forgettable culture, the masses; and those who know better, who disapprove, who resist and protest. The elite. Well, I believe in two types of people too. Clever people and stupid people. And only stupid people think any other distinction matters. There’s no difference between those two groups at all. Unthinking is unthinking, either way. They were scared you’d bought into it, the whole thoughtless, anti-everything protest, but I just had a feeling you were better than that. We both did. There’s a type of person, and I’m that person and I think you are too. A person who thinks for themselves.

  ‘Yes, I work for PBs sometimes, and that’s got to seem weird to you. Maybe even disgusting to you, but think about that for a second. I don’t believe PBs is destroying civilisation, and I don’t believe it’s saving it either. It’s just a burger, you know what I mean, and not even a very good one. So if you’re hungry and you’re nearby and there’s nothing decent on offer, then eat one. And if you’re so lazy and undiscerning that you’re going to make a lifestyle out of it, then it won’t be the burger that kills you, it’ll be your own relentless stupidity. There’s nothing noble in trying to free people from consumerism, because if you look around, I think you’ll agree a lot of consumerism is fairly fucken cool. What most people need freeing from is themselves. Why aren’t we reading more? Why don’t we get out and see our world? Why aren’t we interested in all that has gone before? Why does change scare us? Why don’t we tell other people what we really think of them?’

  I should resist it. She’s right. I’m not stupid. I’ve never been stupid. So I should resist it. But it’s beautiful here, warm in the snow in the middle of nowhere; and she’s beautiful too, and she’s still talking, and some of what she says I like. I should resist.

  ‘…and the other thing I want to tell you; it’s about the file you saw. It’s not how it looks. It was a set-up. We weren’t trying to catch you. It’s a long story, but lately our biggest opposition seems to have been hearing about our new ideas even before we have. We’re pretty sure there’s someone in the company, sharing information across, and we think we know who it is. The file you read, about the weight research, it’s bogus. We put it in a place where only he could find it. If it made it to our source in the opposition’s company, we’d know. That was the plan anyway, before you came along.’

  ‘So why worry about me, if it’s all so bogus?’ I ask. I’m not stupid. I tell myself that. Bite my lip, press my back into the cold snow, conc
entrate on not being taken in.

  ‘It was never going to be released by the competition. It’s the sort of thing that would take the whole industry down. And we planned to let them know, straight away, once we had their man. It’s not like you might imagine, between the companies. Deals are done. There was never any risk. But someone like you, someone who already has a reputation, you could get it straight into the media, and it wouldn’t matter what sort of evidence we gave then, there’d be enough people who would never believe the story. Half the world still believes we never landed on the moon for God’s sake. Facts don’t win arguments. Look at you now. You know us, and you still don’t know what to believe. We couldn’t take the risk.’

  Which could be true. Isn’t true, I tell myself. Could be true, the voice comes back. I wait for more. But they are waiting too. Watching me, as if this next bit they don’t have planned. But I don’t believe that.

  ‘So, how are you feeling?’ Lucinda asks me. And if you’d just come in at this moment, if you didn’t know any better, you’d think she really cared.

  ‘How do you think I’m feeling?’ I say, and there’s a satisfying snarl to it. Pissed Off, an old friend who knows when he’s needed, is coming back home to Pete.

  ‘A lot of things, I’m guessing. Distrust: if I was you, I’d definitely be feeling that. Anger, betrayal, confusion, cynicism. Take me through it. We’re for real, Pete. This is for real. Ask me any questions. Anything you want. Don’t just sit there looking like that. You’re better than that. If you want to know the truth, just ask for it.’

  ‘When did you come up with this plan then?’

  ‘What plan?’

  ‘To pretend there was a scholarship.’

  ‘As soon as I saw the website. When they showed me that I knew it would be wrong to push you.’