The Magpie Trap: A Novel

by AJ Kirby

  As soon as Mark heard the obvious sounds of the end of the race, the security guard returned, clutching a couple of dog-eared pieces of paper.

  ‘We need to run you through the exit protocol,’ he explained. ‘It’s a new thing we’ve got on site, but there’s a new boss coming in here soon, and… Well, you know how it is.’

  The guard looked to Mark for some kind of understanding that he too was subject to the vagaries and whimsies put upon the “ever so ‘umble” workers by that big god-like creature on high, the boss. But Mark simply nodded in response. Now he’d had a little time to contemplate the guard close-up, Mark realised the reason for the near-beard growth on his cheeks. Underneath all the fuzz, the man’s face was badly pock-marked, probably as a result of bad acne as a kid. And Mark knew all about having to hide away bodily defects. Many was the time that a blind-eye had been shown to his leg.

  Mark immediately understood that it was not right to stare at the man’s face. It would make him feel uncomfortable, or like a circus-freak. Instead he grasped the forms and scanned the questions they held.

  ‘I don’t usually work at the security lodge,’ said the guard. ‘But we’re all-hands-on-deck at the moment.’

  ‘As you said,’ muttered Mark.

  ‘Don’t get too flustered by all the questions on there. It’s basically just a way of telling you that you aren’t allowed to disclose any of the stuff that you’ve seen in here. It’s a security risk, you see, and, well, you’d know all about data protection and that, wouldn’t you; being a security engineer?’

  ‘Oh aye,’ answered Mark. ‘We get it all the time, like.’

  ‘Well, I’ll just run you through the T’s and C’s,’ said the man. ‘Oh, and by the way, the name’s Mick Stephenson.’

  Mark gently shook the guard’s extended hand, barely taking his eyes off the forms. He allowed himself to answer the questions carefully; questions about his identity, his job and his reasons for wanting access to the site. Yes, he promised that he’d tell nobody what he’d seen, and yes, he sighed, he’d allow his fingerprints to be taken and an image of his face to be taken and kept for posterity in something called the Image Book.

  While Mark was projecting such an unconcerned exterior, in fact, he was anything but carefree. He leaned against the wall of the security lodge and looked as through he wanted to be magically sucked through it into another dimension where interrogations such as the one he faced simply did not exist.

  An inherently nervous man, Mark always felt as though he had something to hide under questioning sessions, even if they were being hosted by a man as mild and inoffensive as Mick Stephenson. Perhaps the problem was that in this case, he actually did have something to hide and he was absolutely sure that for no reason whatsoever, he’d suddenly blurt out that he’d run a loop on the Edison’s camera system that was not only not authorised but was also tantamount to the first act of a security breach proper.

  But Mick seemed satisfied with Mark’s responses. He performed a cursory search of Mark’s toolbox and then simply handed him his locker-key back in order that he could retrieve his mobile phone.

  ‘Sorry about all the quizzing,’ shrugged Mick.

  Mark shrugged back; a regular character actor imitating his subject. He picked out his phone from the locker and thought about pressing the ‘on’ button for a moment… But it could wait, couldn’t it? All that would be waiting for him would be angry messages from the EyeSpy Control Centre, wondering why they couldn’t get a hold of him.

  The Control Centre was the place that allocated all of the service and maintenance calls to the engineers, as well as those calls that required an emergency response. Mark was by now convinced that the people that staffed the Control Centre were complete and utter imbeciles. They seemed to know nothing of the true nature of security systems or about the fact that the engineers that they scattered around the country were actually people rather than just red dots on a screen. He imagined how they responded to calls:

  ‘Alarm keeps going off sir? Never fear, we’ll get an engineer round to you straight away. Where do you live? Brighton? No worries, the engineer is on their way for you now. He’s coming from Leeds.’

  The Control Centre staff couldn’t understand that a simple question – ‘have you keyed in the right code’ for example - to the customer at this point would save a ten hour round-trip for the engineer. They couldn’t understand that at places like Edison’s, you couldn’t take in your phones and would therefore not be able to answer your calls. And what’s more…

  Oh, who cares, everyone hates some aspect of their job, don’t they? And it’s usually some incompetent that you work with or the lunatic drive of your boss that can’t understand that you might have a private life or someone that just can’t understand everything that you do for the company. Mark sighed, waved goodbye to Mick Stephenson and stepped through the gate and back into reality.

  As he walked, his mobile phone weighed heavily in his pocket. It was as insistent as the ring was to Frodo in Lord of the Rings, only, instead of whispering ‘put me on and become invisible’, Mark’s phone shouted ‘put me on so the whole world can know where you are.’ What would life be like if he never had to turn on the damn thing ever again? Would he be free then? Would life suddenly hold no boundaries for him?

  Turn me on, turn me on, turn me on. What if I’ve got important messages for you? What if I hold the key to your dreams inside me?

  Mark paused a moment on the gravel path to the car park and for a dizzy moment, he thought that he was going to throw the phone away. He plucked it out of his pocket and stared at it instead. Such a little thing to hold such power; such a beautiful thing; such a necessary thing.

  Turn me on, turn me on, turn me on. I thought I was your precious. Why are you treating me so badly? I’m your precious, Mark. Turn me on, turn me on, turn me…

  ‘Fuck it,’ said Mark, pressing down heavily on the ‘on’ button. For a moment, the poor little thing struggled to breathe; the signal was only intermittent out there at best; would it ever come to life?

  Ah yes, it would come to life, and with a vengeance too. Mark felt the vibrations – the breathing – as the text messages started to stream through and then the voicemail alerts. He wasn’t invisible any more; the world had found him. It was casting its fiery gaze over him and judging him; judging him for his weakness in ever agreeing to conduct Danny’s ‘experiment’ on the cameras in the first place.

  What were you thinking, Mark? If Danny told you to jump off a cliff would you do that, too?

  And then, the Lord of the Ring-tones started to play his tune once more. Control Room was calling, insisting that he answer.

  ‘Mark Birch?’ he sighed into the sleek black handset.

  ‘Where’ve you been, Mark? We’ve got your next call flashing-up. We’ve been trying to call you,’ said a disembodied voice from the Control Room; an Orc, probably, or a Ring-Wraith.

  Mark returned to his blue EyeSpy Security transit van and slammed his tool box away in the back. He needed a moment to collect his thoughts. Absent-mindedly he flipped down the sun-visor in the driver’s side and stared longingly at a dog-eared postcard sellotaped onto it. The postcard featured a stretch of unspoiled bright white beach, flanked by palm trees and an azure sea. This was the place of Mark’s dreams. He didn’t know where it was, and had even forgotten who had originally sent him the card, but as Mark now ruminated, it could even be Mauritius. He thought back to the stack of money – Mauritian Rupees - in the Precisioner Unit. Even if he had been allowed to tell people about it, nobody would have believed that he’d simply been allowed to stand on the money as though it was nothing.

  He was jerked out of his reverie by the angry buzzing of his mobile phone. Although he’d switched onto ‘silent’ now he’d been allocated his next call, he’d forgotten to take off ‘vibrate’. Somehow, the absence of a ring-tone seemed to make it seem even more impatient, and also hardened Mark’s resolve not to answer it; it woul
d only be work: Why aren’t you there yet? You left Edison’s a good ten minutes ago… Those Control Centre Orcs knew nothing of distances and geography.

  Mark knew about geography, but he never drove without the aid of his sat-nav system. Traveling by faith alone was something he’d done away with a long time, and so he tapped in the postcode of his next call and waited for it to process the information. While he was doing this, he clamped his mobile phone into the cigarette-lighter charger and fiddled at the controls of the radio. His van was his own Control Centre; it housed the most necessary equipment for his job; the technology which told him where he was supposed to be, when he was supposed to be there, and what he was supposed to do once he got there. On the negative side, his van was fitted with a satellite tracking device, which told company headquarters where he was at every moment of every day. As Mark had so often reflected, the van provided his freedom whilst simultaneously restricting his movement to certain boundaries.

  Finally, the sat nav started to shout out its demands. ‘Turn around! Turn around and take the next left,’ it blared.

  Mark quickly turned down the volume a couple of notches and then keyed the ignition. There was the usual muffled groan of the lazy engine, but finally it roared into life and Mark was on his way. On the radio, the presenter was talking about some awful accident that had happened to a horse in the 3.15 at Exeter. Apparently, one of the leaders had fallen badly on the final straight and had broken his leg. The poor horse had been shot afterwards.

  Mark wondered why horses had to be put down when they had a broken leg. When he’d broken his own leg, he’d been fixed up and allowed out to graze away the rest of his life, hadn’t he? Sure it wasn’t the kind of life that he’d imagined for himself, but it was a life, wasn’t it? It was survival… Couldn’t they do the same with horses? Couldn’t they herd them off into some kind of retirement home with their slippers and pipes and tool-kits and lots and lots of apples?

  Or was there a big demand for glue these days? Maybe all of those glue-sniffers that seemed to congregate on the corner of his road of an evening were doing wider damage than they knew. Mark also spared a passing thought for Mick Stephenson. Perhaps the man had a bet on the horse that had been shot. Perhaps he’d lost a lot of money on the race. Or perhaps Danny Morris had.

  As Mark navigated the narrow private road leading to and from the printworks, he was forced to pull over – almost into a ditch – to allow a large Edison’s Printers truck to pass him. When he pulled over, a large shadow over by the perimeter fencing caught his eye. He looked closer and realised that the shadow was actually Callum Burr.

  Burr was squatting down on the grass, as though he didn’t want to be spied by the eyes of the printworks. He was clutching a mobile phone to his ear and looked… He looked suspicious actually. He looked as though he was conducting some call that couldn’t be overheard. He looked like Danny Morris did when he was being shifty about something; like he had when he’d first suggested the ‘experiment’.

  Burr looked up suddenly. He spotted Mark’s van and narrowed his eyes. Mark gave a polite wave – almost a salute – but big old Burr ignored him completely, even turning his back.

  Mark drove away from the site and wondered if there wasn’t more to the place than originally met the eye.

  The Adelphi

  The ashtray’s cargo of shredded beer mats, and the constant tap, tap, tapping of his legs underneath the table, bore testimony to the impatience that consumed Danny Morris.

  He ran an unsteady hand through his thick dark hair; liberally applied hair wax making it spring immediately back into place. He shifted from a crossed-leg position, to a more relaxed sprawl and picked up his mobile phone for the seventh time, thinking that he might have forgotten to switch it back onto ‘loud’. Maybe the phone’s battery had died? But no, it remained mockingly free of calls or texts. Danny then drained the last of his pint and dragged his whisky chaser across the table towards him, but refrained from drinking it… yet.

  The Adelphi had emerged unscathed from the lunch-time rush, but had entered the mid-afternoon lull; the interlude populated by only the most hardened drinkers or those with nothing better to do. Danny had the entire lounge room to himself, and the only other sign of life was the muted sound of a dominoes game echoing through from the back room.

  But Danny wanted it like that. He had purposely chosen the pub as he knew that he would be able to achieve peace and quiet in there. He had always known the Adelphi as a proper drinker’s establishment, thankfully free from the peripherals to which other pubs had succumbed. Here, Danny had thought, there was no music, no quiz machine, and no other people to distract him from the prime occupation of pouring drinks down his throat.

  But when he had entered his old haunt, Danny had been confronted by the fact that, along with so many of his old Leeds favourites, the Adelphi had changed. It had made the giant leap from staid, deserted, old man’s pub perhaps in need of a lick-of-paint, to a contemporarily-styled watering hole, complete with stylish autumnal interior décor. The change had been brought about by the pub’s close proximity to the head office of a major supermarket chain, and the demand of its workers to have a stylish, local pub to hand for the end of the working day. The Adelphi had become just another ingredient in the wholesale redevelopment of the riverside area of Leeds.

  Suspiciously, the bored barman kept glancing over at this young man, who could not keep still, whose legs were like those of a demented riverdancer. For the barman, there was only one answer - Danny was on drugs. He must be on drugs. He watched Danny constantly re-aligned his mobile phone and cigarettes so that they lay at perfect right angles on the table. Danny shot a warning stare back at him.

  Don’t give me hassle today, said Danny’s eyes. I’ve already had enough goddamn hassle today than I know how to deal with.

  ‘Fucking Terry Martell,’ he muttered as another pang of guilt wracked his body.

  Every time the door swung open, Danny’s eyes leapt to it, as though he was expecting Key-Ring and his baseball bat to follow him even down here. As if Key-Ring would even have been caught dead in a place like the Adelphi; once upon a time, perhaps, but not now. Key-Ring would have probably hated everything about the place, like he probably hated the city centre and everything that it stood for in Leeds’ brave new world. Hell, he was probably still reeling from the fact that women were allowed in pubs these days and that they didn’t have to just stick to Babychams.

  Danny gave his mobile phone another accusatory look. Sometimes he felt as though the phone deliberately baited him by dropping calls that he really needed to take. Sometimes he thought that the phone simply pretended that he’d had no text messages, just to rile him up. Danny loved it when his phone was busy; it made him feel wanted. But when it wasn’t? Well, that made him feel as though something terrible had happened - perhaps the end of the world or something – and he was the only one that didn’t know it. To be fair though, on an afternoon session at the Adelphi, or pretty much anywhere when you’ve had a couple of early drinky-poos, the rest of the world at large can seem like some kind of alternative reality. And while Danny was in one of those moods, he wouldn’t even bat an eyelid if the world was to end.

  Suddenly, the door crashed open again and a second young man announced his entrance by taking over the pub, acting like electric shock treatment to its flagging afternoon atmosphere.

  ‘Afternoon all,’ he called to the pub at large. ‘Lovely day for it!’

  A few weary eyes turned and looked him up and down, wanting to be displeased with the result; wanting to hate the man’s brash demeanour. He was a tall, wiry individual, who in some lights could be described as attractive. Scratch that: in every light that young man would have looked attractive. He was wearing a well-tailored sharp-looking suit and aviator sunglasses which would have looked incongruous on most other people, but which looked just right on him. In the end, when the afternoon drinkers could finally take their eyes off him, those eyes weren
’t filled with hatred; only jealousy, perhaps. Some people get all the luck.

  The young man continued his cat-walk parade through the Adelphi and finally spotted his ally sitting in the lounge area. He dashed toward him grinning like a lunatic, flashing his brilliant white teeth.

  ‘Danny!’ he yelled. ‘Amazed to find you in the pub, my friend; I thought you were a high-flying salesman these days.’

  ‘Spider,’ replied Danny, rather more calmly. ‘Thanks for coming down to see me, cocker.’

  The brash young man towered over the table, and ran a hand through his stylishly messy hair as though wanting to make sure that everybody could see the nice highlights that were there.

  ‘Why do you keep talking like that?’ he said. ‘All of those ‘cockers’ and ‘squires’ and the like; you sound as daft as a Yorkshire gangster in a Guy Ritchie flick. And it’s Chris, not Spider.’

  Only someone who looked like Chris Parker could have got away with using a word like ‘flick’ these days. Only someone that looked like Chris could make it sound effortlessly cool. Soon, all of the old juffers in the pub would be calling their wives and asking them if they fancied going down the flicks sometime to catch a movie. Or maybe not.

  Danny smiled. It looked as though it was a real effort for him. He had to try very hard to fight off the desire to say that he was now more like the old pubdrinkers and zombies down at Killingbeck Turf Accountants than his closest friend. That was why he used words like ‘cocker’ and ‘squire.’