The Power

by Naomi Alderman

  Roxy says to her dad, ‘Send me to this new country. Bessapara. Send me there and I can get something going. I’ve got an idea.’

  ‘Listen,’ says Shanti. ‘You wanna try something new?’

  There are eight of them, four women, four men, all mid-twenties, in the basement flat in Primrose Hill. Bankers. One of the men already has his hand up one of the women’s skirt, which Shanti could fucking do without.

  She knows her audience, though. ‘Something new’ is their rallying cry, their mating call, their 6 a.m. wake-up call with newspaper and organic pomegranate juice, because orange is so 1980s high glycaemic load. They love ‘something new’ more than they love collateralized debt obligations.

  ‘Free sample?’ says one of the men, counting out the pills they’ve already bought. Checking he hasn’t been cheated. Cunt.

  ‘Uh-uh,’ says Shanti. ‘Not for you. This is strictly for the ladies.’

  There’s a crowing, whistling cheer at that. She shows them a little dime bag of powder; it’s white with a purplish sheen to it. Like snow, like frost, like the tops of mountains in some fancy fucking ski resort where these guys go on the weekends to drop £25 on a mug of hot chocolate and bang each other on endangered fur rugs in front of fires carefully constructed at 5 a.m. by underpaid chalet workers.

  ‘Glitter,’ she says.

  She licks the top of her index finger, dips it into the bag and picks up a few shining crystals. Opens her mouth and lifts her tongue to show them what she’s doing. Rubs the powder into one of the thick blue veins at the base of the tongue. Offers the bag to the ladies.

  The ladies dip in eagerly, scooping up great fingerfuls of whatever-it-is that Shanti’s offering and rubbing it round their mouths. Shanti waits for them to feel it.

  ‘Oh, wow!’ says a systems analyst with a blunt bob – Lucy? Charlotte? They all have roughly the same name. ‘Oh, wow, oh God, I think I’m going to …’ And she starts to crackle at the end of her fingertips. It’s not enough to get her hurting anyone, but she’s lost control a bit.

  Usually, when you’re drunk or stoned or high on most things, the power is damped down. A drunk woman might get off a jolt or two, but nothing you couldn’t dodge if you weren’t drunk too. This is different. This is calibrated. This is designed to enhance the experience. There’s some coke cut in with it – that’s already known to make the power more pronounced – and a couple of different kinds of uppers, along with the thing that gives it the purple glint, which Shanti’s only ever seen post-cut. Something coming out of Moldova, she’s heard. Or Romania. Or Bessapara. Or Ukraine. One of those. Shanti’s got a bloke she deals with in a lock-up garage out towards the coast in Essex, and when this stuff started coming in she knew she could move it.

  The women start laughing. They’re loose-limbed and excited, leaning back, making high, low-powered arcs from one hand to another, or up to the ceiling. It’d feel nice to have them do one of those arcs on you. Shanti’s got her girlfriend to take some and do it to her. Not painful, but fizzing, tickling at the nerve endings, like taking a shower in San Pellegrino. Which these fuckers probably do, anyway.

  One of the men pays her in cash for four more bags. She charges them double – eight crisp fifties, don’t get those from a hole in the wall – because they’re dickheads. No one offers to walk her down to her car. When she lets herself out, two of them are already fucking, giggling, letting off starbursts with every thrust and jerk.

  Steve’s nervous, cos there’s been a change in the security guards’ rota. And it could be nothing, right, it could be some fucker’s had a baby, some other fucker’s got the shits. Then it all looks different from the outside even when it’s entirely OK, and you’ll be able to walk in just like normal and get your fucking hourglasses just like fucking normal.

  The problem is, there’s been a story in the paper. Not a big story, not page one. But page five in the Mirror and the Express and the Daily Fucking Mail, about this ‘new death drug’ that’s killing ‘young men with their whole lives ahead of them’. It’s in the paper, but there’s no fucking law against it yet, not unless it’s cut with something else. Which this stuff in the fucking hourglasses is. So fuck it. What’s he going to do? Stand out here like a lemon, waiting to see if PC Plod is waiting by the docks? To see if those guards he hasn’t ever had a chat or a drink with, see if one of those is a copper?

  He pulls his cap down low over his eyes. He drives the van up to the gate.

  ‘Yeah,’ he goes. ‘I’ve got boxes to pick up from container’ – he stops to look up the number, even though he knows it like it’s tattooed inside his fucking eyelids – ‘A-G-21-FE7-13859D?’ There’s a crackle on the intercom. ‘Bloody hell,’ says Steve, trying to sound conversational, ‘these bloody numbers get longer every week, I tell you.’

  There’s a long pause. If it was Chris or Marky or that bell-end Jeff in the gatehouse, they’d know him and let him in.

  ‘Can you come up to the window, driver,’ says a woman’s voice through the intercom. ‘We need to see your ID and pick-up forms.’

  Fuck.

  So he drives round to the gatehouse – what else is he going to do? He’s come through loads of times – most of those pick-ups are legitimate. He does a bit of import-export. Kids’ toys for market-stall holders; has a little business, turns a handy profit, cash transactions a lot of it and not all on the books. He sits up nights making up names of stall holders he’s sold to. Bernie Monke set him up with a stall himself down Peckham Market; he’s down there on a Saturday to make the thing look legit, cos you don’t want to get stupid. Nice toys, a lot of them: wooden, from Eastern Europe. And the hourglasses. Course they’ve never called him round the gatehouse when he’s been shifting little wood robots held together with elastics, or them carved ducks on a string. They’ve got to fucking call him in for this.

  There’s a woman there he’s never seen before. Big glasses on her face, halfway up her forehead and right down past the end of her nose. Owl glasses. Steve wishes he’d had a bit of something himself, just a little bit before he came out. Can’t carry any in the van, it’d be stupid, they’ve got sniffer dogs. That’s the good thing about these hourglasses, egg-timers. He didn’t understand it when Bernie showed him. Bernie tipped the egg-timer thing over. The sand fell through golden and soft. Bernie said, ‘Don’t be a muppet, what do you think’s inside here? Sand?’ Inside the glass, and that glass inside another glass tube. Double-sealed. Wash them all down with rubbing alcohol before they go in the boxes and Bob’s your uncle, nothing for the sniffer dogs to get hold of. You’d have to smash one of those egg-timers open before the dogs could tell what it was.

  ‘Paperwork?’ she says, and he hands it over. He makes a joke about the fucking weather but she doesn’t even crack a smile. She looks through the manifest. A couple of times she gets him to read out a word or a number to her, to make sure she’s got it right. Behind her, he sees Jeff’s face for a few moments against the security glass of the back door. Jeff makes a ‘sorry, mate’ face and shakes his head at the back of the hard-arse woman. Fuck.

  ‘Can you come with me, please?’ She motions Steve towards a private office off to the side.

  ‘What’s the problem,’ Steve jokes to the world at large, although there’s no one there, ‘can’t get enough of me?’

  Still doesn’t smile. Fuck fuck fuck. There’s something in the paperwork’s made her suspicious. He’s done it all himself, that paperwork; he knows it’s right. She’s heard something. She’s been sent in by the narcs. She knows something.

  She motions him to sit opposite her at the small table. She sits, too.

  ‘What’s this all about, love?’ he says. ‘Only I’m due in Bermondsey in an hour and a half.’

  She grabs his wrist and puts her thumb to the place between the small bones, just where the hand joins the arm, and suddenly it’s on fire. Flames inside his bones, the veins shrivelling, curling up, blackening. Fuck, she’s going to pull his hand off.
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br />   ‘Don’t say anything,’ she says. And he won’t, he couldn’t, not if he tried.

  ‘Roxy Monke’s taken over this business now. You know who she is? You know who her dad is? Don’t say nothing, just nod.’

  Steve nods. He knows.

  ‘You’ve been skimming, Steve.’

  He tries to shake his head, to gabble, No, no, no, you’ve got it wrong, it weren’t me, but she presses the pain into his wrist so he thinks she’s going to crack it open.

  ‘Every month,’ she says, ‘just one or two of them egg-timers don’t get listed on your books. You get me, Steve?’

  He nods.

  ‘And it stops now, right. Right now. Or you’re out of the business. Understand?’

  He nods. She lets him go. He cradles his wrist in his other hand. You can’t even see on the skin that anything’s happened to him.

  ‘Good,’ she says, ‘cos we’ve got something special this month. Don’t try to move it till you hear from us, OK?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Yeah.’

  He drives off with eight hundred egg-timers neatly packaged up in boxes in the back of his van, all the paperwork correct, every carton accounted for. He doesn’t take a look till he’s back at his lockup and he’s taken the edge off the pain. Yeah. He can see it. There is something different. All the ‘sand’ in these hourglasses is tinged with purple.

  Roxy’s counting money. She could get one of the girls to do it; they’ve already done it once and she could call someone in to count it up in front of her. But she likes doing it herself. Feeling the paper under her fingertips. Watching her decisions turn into maths turn into power.

  Bernie’s said to her more than once, ‘The day someone else knows where your money’s going better than you do, that’s the day you’ve lost.’ It’s like a magic trick, money. You can turn money into anything. One, two, three, presto. Turn drugs into influence with Tatiana Moskalev, President of Bessapara. Turn your ability to bring pain and fear into a factory where the authorities will turn a blind eye to whatever you’re cooking up there that sends purple-tinged steam into the skies at midnight.

  Ricky and Bernie had had some ideas for what Roxy should do when she got home, fencing maybe, or one of the fronts up in Manchester, but she had an idea for Bernie that was bigger than anything he’d heard in a long time. She’s known for a while now what to ask for to make her last the longest, and how to mix it up. Roxy sat on a hillside for days, off her face, trying out different combinations her dad’s people had concocted for her approval. When they found it, they knew it. A purple crystal, as big as rock salt, fiddled about with by chemists and derived originally from the bark of the dhoni tree, which is native to Brazil but which grows pretty well here, too.

  A snort of the full thing – pure Glitter – and Roxy could send a blast halfway across the valley. That’s not what they ship: too dangerous, too valuable. They save the good stuff for private use, and maybe for the right bidder. What they’re shipping is already cut. But they’ve done well. Roxy hasn’t mentioned Mother Eve to her family, but it’s because of the new churches that they’ve got seventy loyal women working on their production line already. Women who think they’re doing the work of the Almighty, bringing power to Her children.

  She tells Bernie the week’s totals herself, every week. She does it in front of Ricky and Darrell if they’re there; she doesn’t care. She knows what she’s doing. The Monke family are the sole suppliers of Glitter right now. They’re printing money. And money can turn into anything.

  On email, a private account bounced around a dozen servers, Roxy tells Mother Eve the weekly totals, too.

  ‘Not bad,’ says Eve. ‘And you’re keeping some back for me?’

  ‘For you and yours,’ says Roxy. ‘Just like we agreed. You set us up here; you’re making my fortune. You look after us and we’ll look after you.’ She grins as she types it. She’s thinking to herself, Take the whole thing; it belongs to you.

  Mass grave of male skeletons found in a recent excavation of the Post-London Village Conglomeration. The hands were removed pre-mortem. The marked skulls are typical of the period; the scars were incised post-mortem.

  Approximately two thousand years old.

  FIVE YEARS TO GO

  * * *

  Margot

  The candidate is puffing himself up in the mirror. He rolls his neck from side to side, he opens his mouth very wide and says, ‘Laaaa, la-la-la laaaa.’ He catches his own Caribbean Ocean-blue eye, smiles faintly and winks. He mouths at the mirror, ‘You’ve got this.’

  Morrison gathers his notes and, attempting not to meet the candidate’s direct gaze, says, ‘Mr Dandon, Daniel, sir, you’ve got this.’

  The candidate smiles. ‘That’s just what I was thinking, Morrison.’

  Morrison smiles back, thinly. ‘That’s because it’s true, sir. You’re the incumbent. This belongs to you already.’

  It does a candidate good to think that there’s some lucky-omen, stars-aligning thing going on. Morrison likes to pull these little tricks off if he can. That’s what makes him good at his job. It’s that kind of thing that makes it just that little bit more likely that his guy will beat the other guy.

  The other guy is a gal, almost ten years younger than Morrison’s candidate, hard-edged and hard-nosed, and they’d pushed her on that in the weeks of campaigning. I mean, she’s divorced, after all, and with those two girls to raise, can a woman like that really find time for political office?

  Someone had asked Morrison if he thought politics had changed since the – you know – since the Big Change. Morrison put his head to one side and said, ‘No, the key issues are still the same: good policies and good character and, let me tell you, our candidate has both,’ and so he went on, guiding the conversation back round to its safely railed-in scenic route past Mount Education and Healthcare Point via Values Boulevard and Self-Made-Man Gulley. But in the privacy of his own mind he admitted to himself that, yes, it had changed. If he’d allowed the odd voice in the centre of his skull operational control over his mouth, which he’d never do, he knew better than that, but if he’d said it, it would have said: They’re waiting for something to happen. We’re only pretending everything is normal because we don’t know what else to do.

  The candidates hit the floor like Travolta, ready with their moves, knowing that the spotlight is going to find them and illuminate every glistening thing: both sequins and sweat. She hits it out of the park with the first question, which is Defence. She’s got her facts at her fingertips – she’s been running that NorthStar project for years, of course, he should push her on that – but his guy’s just not quite so easy with his comebacks.

  ‘Come on,’ mouths Morrison at no one in particular, because the lights are too bright for the candidate to see him. ‘Come on. Attack.’

  The candidate stumbles over his answer, and Morrison feels it like a punch to the gut.

  Second question and the third are on state-wide issues. Morrison’s candidate sounds competent but boring, and that’s a killer. By questions seven and eight she has him on the ropes again, and he doesn’t fight back when she says he doesn’t have the vision for the job. By this point, Morrison’s wondering if it’s possible for a candidate to lose so badly that some of the shit really will spray off on to him. It might seem as if he’s been sitting around eating M&Ms and scratching his ass for the past few months.

  They go into the long commercial break with nothing left to lose. Morrison escorts the candidate to the bathroom and helps him to a little nose powder. He goes through the talking points and says, ‘You’re doing great, sir, really great, but you know … aggression’s no bad thing.’

  The candidate says, ‘Now, now, I can’t come across as angry,’ and Morrison grabs him right there in the stall, grabs him by the arm, and says, ‘Sir, do you want that woman to give you a pasting tonight? Think of your dad and what he’d want to see. Stand up for what he believed in, for the America he wanted to build. Think, sir
, of how he would have handled this.’

  Daniel Dandon’s father – who was a business bruiser with a borderline alcohol problem – died eighteen months ago. It’s a cheap trick. Cheap tricks often work.

  The candidate rolls his shoulders like a prize fighter, and they’re back for the second half.

  The candidate’s a different man now, and Morrison doesn’t know if it was the coke or the pep talk but, either way, he thinks, Well, I’m a hell of a guy.

  The candidate comes out fighting on question after question. Unions? Boom. Minority rights? He sounds like the natural heir to the Founding Fathers, and she comes off as defensive. It’s good. It’s really good.

  That’s when Morrison and the audience notice something. Her hands are clenching and unclenching. As if she were trying to stop herself … but she can’t be. It’s impossible. She’s been tested.

  The candidate’s on a roll now. He says, ‘And those subsidies – your own figures show that they’re completely out of whack.’

  There’s a noise from the audience, but the candidate takes it as a sign that they approve of his strong attack. He goes in for the kill.

  ‘In fact, your policy is not only out of whack, it’s forty years old.’

  She’s passed her own test with flying colours. It can’t be. But her hands are gripping the side of the podium, and she’s saying, ‘Now, now, now, you can’t just, now, now,’ as if she were pointing out every moment as it passed, but everyone can see what she’s trying not to do. Everyone except the candidate.

  The candidate goes for a devastating move.

  ‘Of course, we can’t expect you to understand what this means for hard-working families. You’ve left your daughters to be raised by NorthStar day camps. Do you even care about those girls?’

  That’s enough, and her arm reaches out and her knuckles connect with his ribcage and she lets it go.