“You cannot take those either. Must fly. You too.”
And he was flying suddenly through white mists. On some level, he knew he must be dreaming. He heard a laugh behind him and looked over his shoulder. In the mist, there seemed to be another figure flying after him. It was very indistinct, just a vague shape that might or might not have been human. It had an air of menace.
He felt sudden terror and knew he had to get away. He wished he could fly faster but his speed seemed beyond his control, as did the whole flight. It was as if he was being dragged through the air by some unknown force, or perhaps falling. Now and again the world span around him, as if he was spinning and he became very dizzy, felt sick. This was only a dream, and one he often had, of flying or falling. But the feeling of terror, someone chasing him, that was new.
The figure chasing him appeared to veer off in a different direction with a parting laugh. Suddenly he was no longer flying but falling, falling fast. He knew the ground was rushing up to meet him. The ground was only seconds away. He hit and jerked and his eyes snapped open. He was in the tearoom.
There was a man stood next to the dishwasher. He had a chubby, gentle face with large brown eyes, a prominent pointy nose and a black moustache. Dark, curly hair seemed to be gathered in two clumps on either side of his face and he wore an odd circular hat. There was a white shawl around his shoulders over a long purple robe. There were blue patterned shoes peeking out from beneath the robe. His skin colour and the exotic garb made him seem distinctly foreign, perhaps oriental.
The strange figure said something. He seemed earnest, almost desperate, but his voice was faint and Bob could not quite catch the words. “Beware the ant sack?”
The image faded away and suddenly Bob was flying again, dizzyingly fast, though deep darkness intermittently lit by brilliant flashes of light. The flying slowed down, became more of a floating sensation and he felt very warm and safe. He slept.
HE BECAME AWARE OF someone calling his name as if from a great distance. “Bob. Bob.” It was a very soft voice but a little insistent. “Bob.”
He opened his eyes. Paula stood next to him. She smiled. “You must be exhausted.”
He rubbed his eyes. It took a few seconds to adjust to reality. “That’s the last time I have cheese sandwiches for tea on a night shift.”
“Sweet dreams?”
“Yes, of flying and being chased and falling and strange Turkish men.”
“Turkish men?” Her eyebrows shot up. “I would keep that a secret if I was you. We’re very modern and liberal in the NHS but people would still gossip.”
“He didn’t even offer me a kebab.”
She smiled. “Can I have my break now?”
“I’ll get back to work. Thanks, Paula.” He returned to his desk and logged back onto the phone and the computer.
“Beware the ant sack!” He laughed. Funny what crazy things the subconscious came up with. He thought of Eddie. On Thursday night, during one of several half-drunken conversations, Eddie had confessed that he drank quite a lot but once in a while, he packed it in for two weeks to give his liver a rest and prove to himself he wasn’t an alcoholic. On the first night without booze, he hardly slept. “The brain goes round in busy circles, Bob,” he had confided, “and I spend all night fighting strange monsters and beasts from the depths. The Ant-men from Jupiter I call them. Sometimes they attack again the second night but by day three I am usually clear. And by day four I am bored and fancy a pint but I stay on the wagon another week or so.”
Ant-men, ant sacks, Bob thought. Maybe there’s a connection. He rubbed his eyes and drank a glass of water. The clock stood at 3:40 so what seemed like hours of falling and being chased had been only a few minutes of REM sleep. The mind was a powerful and strange thing. No wonder some people lost control of it.
Chapter Four
On Monday at quarter to two Bob arrived at the call centre for his security system induction. The security system was installed as the centre was being built but there had been the usual so-called teething problems and it was not yet switched on. Today was the big day. The staff was all meant to be fully briefed on it but, as usual, that process had been delayed too. Most of them had come in for an extra shift on Saturday during the day to have a full briefing. A few groups of stragglers were having that today.
Bob entered the Hampshire room at two o’clock sharp. His group consisted of Eddie, Caroline, another nurse in her forties called Mandy, and several other people whose faces he had seen about but whose acquaintance he had not yet made. With many people working different shifts it was hard to form steady working relationships. You might work two days with someone and then not see him or her for two weeks, or more. It had taken careful planning to make so many of his shifts coincide with Caroline’s. He smiled at her now, carefully ambivalent in public, and took the only vacant chair, besides Eddie at the back of the room. Caroline was near the door, about ten feet away. Eddie whispered conspiratorially.
“I hear you’ve made the first move with the lovely Caroline.”
Bob gazed at the ceiling in mild exasperation. “Already. How””
“You can’t keep a secret around here, boy. Someone saw you tete a tete in Bar Med.”
“I didn’t want it kept secret but I was hoping to be discreet. Oh well.”
“I myself have designs on the not-so-young Mandy. We were both in ridiculously early for this lecture, overestimated the traffic, and I’ve been buttering her up in the tea room.”
Bob’s eyebrows went up. “Not-so-young is right. She’s even older than you are. What’s the attraction?”
“She has a certain ‘je ne sais quoi’ but I don’t know what it is.”
“I trained with her. She is jolly, I suppose.” Bob decided that it was only natural for Eddie to find Mandy attractive. She was too old for his taste but she was a natural blonde, she had kept her figure and she had a bright, bubbly manner that was pleasing.
“When you’ve been out with as many miserable women as I have you will learn to appreciate the charms of ‘jolly’, my boy. Looks aren’t everything.”
Bob looked at Caroline and smiled. “Absolutely not.”
“Stop smirking. You’ve only had one date.”
“I wasn’t smirking.”
“What are you two whispering about back there,” said an older nurse called Nancy, who, Bob suddenly remembered, was sometimes a supervisor in time of need. He had seen her about but found her stern manner off-putting and had had little to do with her. “Why don’t you come and sit near the front so you can hear the talk?”
“What talk?” said Eddie. “No one has turned up to talk yet.”
At that moment, as if on cue, the door opened and a young man in a sky blue suit stepped into the room. His trousers had knife-edge creases and his black shoes shined. He was tall and so clean shaven he might have polished his jaw with sandpaper. His luxuriant straight dark hair was swept up and back and his bright blue eyes seemed almost to glow with enthusiasm.
“Right. All here.” He was brusque and businesslike and conveyed the impression that he had been waiting for them rather than vice-versa. “I’m Adam Blake, systems implementation specialist from CompSec. Let’s get this show on the road.” He fiddled with the laptop and projector and soon had a square of white light on the screen. Tapping some keys he produced an image of his company logo.
“CompSec,” he said proudly. “The world’s leading designers and installers of computerized security systems. Some call this the Age of Terror but it’s not just dumb anarchists throwing bombs. We’re dealing with smart, ruthless people. Twenty-first-century security problems demand twenty-first-century solutions. CompSec designs fully automated, integrated computerized security systems that leave no room for human error. And there is always human error. Men and women can forget to lock doors or set alarms. CompSec systems don’t.” He surveyed the room with a challenging look and everyone nodded quiet agreement, tacitly admitting to their fragile, incompe
tent humanity. Only one person was rude enough to mention that every interior door in the building had been stuck open for the past month because CompSec’s errorless computer had messed up. That one person was Eddie.
Adam Blake dismissed the point with a chopping motion of his hand and favoured Eddie with a surly look. “That was just teething problems, almost inevitable with cutting edge technology like this. I hope you are all wearing your NHS Direct shirts and blouses.”
They all were. Staff at the new centre had been warned they must wear the correct uniform every day. Nancy, the occasional supervisor, put up her hand and dared to venture a question.
“We never had to wear any kind of uniform at Acuma House,” she said, sounding a little peeved. “We’re only on the end of a phone, after all. The callers can’t see us.”
“Acuma house doesn’t have the CompSec twenty-first century security system.” Adam grinned the grin of a magician with an ace up his sleeve. “I can now reveal to you why wearing the uniform shirt is so important. You see the badge on the pocket?” Bob and everyone else put a hand to the embroidered NHS badge. “That is not cotton thread but silicon wire. It’s actually a tiny circuit powered by a microscopic battery in one of the shirt buttons. When you wear that shirt, with that badge, every door will open for you in this building. If you don’t, none will. That information is, of course, highly confidential.” He gave Eddie a stern warning look.
“How long does the battery last?” asked Caroline.
“At least a year and you will be issued three new uniform shirts every twelve months. I should take care of them if I were you, they are not cheap.” Adam turned back to his laptop and pressed a key. The projection changed to a diagram of the building. “This is a plan of Arnos Court Contact Centre,” he said. “You will notice that there are four floors and that...”
He was interrupted by the theme from The Great Escape in electronic bleeps. “Excuse me, phone call,” he said and stepped out into the corridor.
Eddie leaned across to Bob and whispered. “He’s clearly a twenty-first-century boy, the kind Marc Bolan didn’t quite write a song about.”
“I know. We used to get them at the Post Office, all outraged at having to perform nineteenth-century tasks. ‘It’s the twenty-first century and you’re telling me I have to lick a stamp! It’s the twenty-first century and you’re telling me you don’t take switch! It’s the twenty-first century and I have to queue at a counter! They used to get on my...”
“Sssh.” Said Caroline. Blake had entered the room. He frowned at the plan of the building, tapped his computer and it vanished.
“I’m sorry,” he said, not sounding sorry at all, “but I just found out I have to get back to London tonight. Don’t worry; I can get someone else to brief you on the theory of the system another time. It’s pretty specialist stuff anyway and you don’t need to know it.” He plainly thought it was beyond their comprehension. “I think it’s best if we just proceed with the tour of the building and I’ll show you the practical application.” He glanced anxiously at his watch.
Bob felt that this was pretty cavalier treatment of the NHS by what was basically, for all his sharp-suits, shiny shoes and bluff manner, a hired hand. He should have fulfilled his commitment properly. However, it was not his place to complain so he followed the rest of the group out of the room for the tour. There was a set of transparent glass doors in the corridor and they were, to his surprise, firmly shut.
“The system was switched on at five past two,” said Blake. He strode confidently towards the doors and they slid open. The right-hand door slid seamlessly into the right-hand wall, the left-hand door slid smoothly into the left wall. He walked on a few paces and they closed behind him.
The group of NHS Direct workers followed. Bob dropped back from Eddie and placed himself next to Caroline. He smiled at her and said, “Have a good Sunday?”
“Very relaxing,” she replied. “I did some thinking.”
“Oh.” Bob didn’t like the sound of that.
“I thought we should do it again, and soon.”
“Great.” Bob’s response was too loud.
“What’s great?” said Eddie.
“You are, Eddie. You’re brilliant.”
“Will you please come through the doorway,” snapped Adam Blake. “It isn’t complicated.” His voice was muffled through the glass.
Somewhat sheepishly the group moved forward. Mandy was in the lead and as she approached the doors swished open, the two halves once more sliding smoothly into the wall. A common enough experience in shopping malls, it was a new one at work.
“Ooh,” she said, “I feel like Captain Kirk.”
“Never having felt Captain Kirk,” Eddie remarked, “I couldn’t say.”
“You’ve never felt me either, you cheeky so and so.”
“Ah but the night is young. Ouch!”
“That,” said Bob “was the sound of a man being kicked in the shins.”
Mandy corrected him. “Actually it was the sound of a man having his toe stamped on.”
“Come along and I’ll show you the stair system,” said Blake. “Normally we start in the basement. There’s a cut-off switch down there for the whole system. If it’s thrown all the doors will stay open and all the shutters on the windows will stay up.”
“There are shutters on the windows?” said Nancy. “I didn’t know that.”
“Steel shutters,” said Blake. “They wouldn’t normally be used though, except in an extreme emergency, if the building were under siege, for example.”
“It’s like working in Fort Knox,” said Eddie.
“There are a few Government departments in the building and part of it is used for storage of confidential files,” said Blake. “This security is not particularly for the call centre. Ah, here is the first landing. As you can see there are closed doors leading onto the main part of this floor and another set of closed doors leading to the next staircase. So even if an intruder got into the ground floor he’s blocked from either occupying the next one or proceeding up the staircase.”
“He could just point a gun to my head and shove me and my shirt at the door,” said Eddie.
Blake waved at the ceiling vaguely. “There are several cameras watching every corridor. If he did anything so obvious he would be spotted and all the doors would shut automatically.”
“Great. What about me, with a gun to my head?”
“Clearly it is better that everyone else in the building is kept safe.”
Bob tapped Eddie on the shoulder and quoted solemnly: “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few; or the one.” He put the fingers of his right hand on Eddie’s forehead. “Remember!”
Caroline and Mandy giggled. Nancy looked at the ceiling in exasperation. Eddie said, “Thank you, Bob of Vulcan. I will now happily die for my colleagues.”
Suddenly the lights went out. They were in an interior corridor with no windows and so plunged into complete darkness. Bob screamed but managed to bite it off so it came out as a yelp. He clamped his lips shut and his heart beat like a drum. He could feel cold sweat on his back.
“Who yelled? The dry voice was unmistakably Eddie.
“That was me,” said Caroline. “Sorry.”
Bob felt her warm hand slip into his, her shoulder up against him. He could have hugged her with gratitude.
The next voice in the dark was that of Steve Blake, sounding a little less confident. “Umm. I’m sorry about this ladies and gentlemen. Must be some sort of lighting error.
“From the ‘latest development in twenty-first-century computer technology, we bring you - complete darkness.” Eddie did a perfect imitation of a salesman’s spiel. “This is not your old-fashioned darkness, ladies and gentleman - with windows letting in a little sunlight. This is not some measly incomplete darkness from the past - the dark ages, say. What we have here is a modern darkness for the modern age.”
Mandy giggled.
“Very funny, very funny,�
�� said Blake nervously.
“Ouch.” Said someone.
“Why ouch?” said Eddie.
“I bumped my nose on the door.” It sounded like Maggie. “It didn’t open.”
“These are not your old-fashioned doors from the dark ages,” Eddie resumed, like Michael Palin taking off a game show host, “that can be opened with a simple movement of the hand. These are modern doors for the modern age. Twenty-first-century doors. They won’t open for terrorists, they won’t open for you. They’re absolutely one hundred percent cast iron guaranteed completely safe.”
“Will you shut-up,” snapped Blake.
“Yes, sir.”
Bob’s legs trembled and he clamped his lips together to prevent making any noise. Eddie’s comedy routine had helped him keep a grip though, and Caroline’s warm hand in his helped too. It helped a lot. He wasn’t a boy anymore, he told himself, helpless, trapped. He was a man.
He thought his heart would jump out of his chest.
The lights came on. Caroline released his hand and moved away. Eddie was looking in their direction as the lights came on and saw her. He raised an eyebrow at Bob but said nothing. Since she had confessed to the yelp he probably thought Bob was comforting her rather than vice versa.
Blake spoke quickly. “This is just teething problems but I will have to get it sorted out. Must go. The tour is finished. We may complete it another time. I have to arrange my schedule.” He hurried off before Eddie could make a comment. The group of NHS Direct staff was left like stranded sheep.
Nancy looked at her watch. “That should have taken two hours. It’s only three o’clock.” She took charge. “Those who are on shift at the moment can have a quick tea-break and then get back on the phones. Those not on shift can go home.”
“Home I go. See you tonight Bob.” Eddie scuttled away quickly and the rest of the group dispersed. Bob lingered to speak to Caroline.
When they were alone he said. “Thanks for the helping hand.” He looked sheepish.
Arnos Hell Page 3
