by Iain Banks
That seemed logical, but now he thought about it he wasn't sure that that wasn't the way to remember the way it wasn't, not the way it was. He decided to play safe.
"My name is Mister Steven Grout."
"Fine," Starke said, writing, " 'Grout' as in that stuff you put between tiles and bricks and things, right?" He looked up.
Steven's eyes narrowed. "What are you trying to insinuate?"
"I'm... I'm not -"
"I will not be insinuated against," Steven said, and tapped the front of the desk. "What business is it of yours to make insinuations against me, I'd like to know, eh? Answer me that."
"I -"
"No, you can't, can you? And I'll tell you why. Because I'm not here because I want to be, that's why. There. I'm not one of your scroungers. I've never taken the easy way out, I'll have you know. It hasn't always been easy but I've always kept my self-respect, and I haven't let anybody take that away. I'm my own man and that's very important in these times, even if you haven't had the problems I've had, and you haven't, because that's perfectly obvious, you're sitting there and asking me the questions. You've got to realise, clerk Starke -"
"I'm not -"
" - that we're on opposite sides of the desk, as it were." He tapped the desk to show what he was talking about. "This is a symbol, you know." He sat back to let this sink in. Starke looked at the desk.
"It's a desk, Mr Grout."
"It's a symbolic desk," Grout said, jabbing his finger at it. "It's a symbolic desk because we're sat on opposite sides of it, and that's the way things'll always be. Like that. You can't tell me any different. I know the score, like they say."
"Mr Grout," Starke sighed, laying the pen down again, "I'm afraid this interview isn't really getting us very far. You talked to my colleague Ms Phillips when you first came in -"
"I didn't find out her name," Grout waved one hand dismissively.
"Well you didn't get very far with her either, did you? And now-"
"I didn't get very far?" Grout said, "I didn't get very far? It's not my job to get very far; it's yours. You're supposed to get far with me. You're the people who get trained in this sort of thing, not me," Steven said indignantly, and tapped the desk once more, for emphasis. "How often do you think I do this, eh? Answer me that. Do you think I make a habit of this sort of thing, is that it? Are you making insinuations again?"
"I'm not trying to insinuate anything, Mr Grout," Starke said as he sat back in his chair, resigned. He shook his head, "I'm trying... I was trying to conduct an interview, and now I'm trying to explain to you that you're not making it at all easy. First you made my colleague distressed -"
"I could tell she didn't like me. She was contemptuous. I won't have that," Grout explained. Starke shrugged.
"Whatever. Now you've made it impossible for me to carry out an interview despite the fact I've been extremely patient -"
"I'm not stopping you from carrying on your interview," Grout said, shaking his head. "I'm not. You ask your questions, I'll answer. On you go. Just ask what you want. I'm very cooperative. I'm just not prepared to be contemptuated against or be the object of insinuations, that's all."
The young man sat looking at him for a moment, then raised his eyebrows, sat forward and took up his pen once more. "Very well. We'll try one more time. Your name is Mr Steven Grout -"
"Correct," Steven nodded.
"You've just left your previous employment, is that right?"
"Yes."
"And you wish to -"
"Not," Steven said, sitting forward and tapping the desk as MrStarke sat back, slumping down with a sigh in his seat and shaking his head, smiling slightly, "because I wanted to, either. They were out to get me from the start. They wanted rid of me all the time. I was hounded out. They forced me to leave. But I left of my own free will. I wouldn't give them the satisfaction. I resigned. I have my pride, you know. They can't kick me around."
"Ah," Mr Starke said, sitting forward in his seat and looking more interested, "you resigned?"
"I certainly did. I wasn't going to let them -"
"Well, you do realise, Mr Grout, that by resigning you have made yourself ineligible for Unemployment Benefit for a period of -"
"What?" Steven said, sitting forward. "What's this? I did the only decent thing I could do. If you think I was going to stand there and -"
"I'm sorry, Mr Grout, but I thought I ought to mention it. You still have to register as unemployed, but for the first -"
"Oh no," Steven said, "I'm sorry, that's just not good enough. I've paid my stamps. I've paid as I've earned. I'm not a scrounger or one of these social misfits. I'm a working man. Not just now, perhaps, but I am, I certainly am. I just wasn't going to let them sack me. I was not," he tapped the desk, "going to give them the satisfaction, you see?"
"I appreciate that you would rather terminate your employment yourself, Mr Grout, but the rules are that if you do then you have to-"
"Well, that's just not good enough, I'm sorry," Grout said. They'd found him. He was starting to heat up. His collar felt itchy and he could smell some strange tense body-smell coming from his armpits. Mr Starke was shaking his head.
"Nevertheless -"
"Don't you 'nevertheless' me, young man," Grout said, raising his voice. People were looking at him. The sunlit Job Centre was quite crowded, he saw now. The sun was slanting in through the windows and heating the place up. But there was ordinary heat and there was microwave heat. He knew the difference well by now. Ordinary heat didn't itch the way microwave heat did. Ordinary heat didn't come from inside the way microwave seemed to, affecting you all at once. He decided to try ignoring it, and said, "Don't you 'nevertheless' me, oh no. I'm not having it,"
Starke gave a small laugh. A laugh! Just like that! "I'm sorry, Mr Grout, but what you're not having is Unemployment Benefit. You get Supplementary Benefit instead for the first six -"
"You're sorry?" Grout said. "Well, you don't suit your sorrow like they say. I want to know why I'm being victimised against."
"You're not being victimised, Mr Grout," Starke said. "The rules are that if you leave your employment voluntarily you have to wait six weeks before you can claim Unemployment Benefit. If you are eligible, which I imagine you will be, you may claim Supplementary Benefit during the interim."
"And what about my dignity?" Steven said loudly. "What about that, I ask you? Eh? Supplementary Benefit, indeed! I've paid my stamps. I've paid my taxes. This isn't good enough."
"I appreciate your position, Mr Grout, but I'm afraid that is the way things are set up. You probably will be eligible for Supplementary Benefit; first you have to register -"
"Well, it's not good enough," Grout said, sitting straight up in his chair and fixing Starke with one eye, trying to turn the tables again so that he would stop feeling uncomfortable and Starke would go back on the defensive. "I'm being victimised against and that's all there is to it. As though I haven't got enough crisises to have to put up with. But this won't be the last straw; they won't get rid of me that easy. I'm just not -"
"Well, if you feel you've been unfairly dismissed," Starke said, "you can go to the -"
"Ha!" Grout said, "I'm unfairly everything. Employed, unemployed, housed, treated; everything. But you won't catch me complaining. I've learned better. Doesn't get you anywhere. I'd rather keep my dignity." He was trying to explain, but he got the impression he was losing out now. Clerk Starke had the upper hand. It was so unfair. Those devils! They hadn't said anything to him at the depot; they hadn't told him anything about not getting unemployment money. They'd let him resign, just when they'd been on the point of sacking him. Maybe just a few more seconds and they would have fired him and he wouldn't be in this position now. Just a few more seconds! The swines!
"Well," Starke began, and started talking about what Steven should do about registering as unemployed.
Grout wasn't listening. He watched the young man's face, now set in the sort of bored, practised, professional
expression Grout had seen a hundred times before.
He heard the words "P45" in Starke's speech, and his heart sank. That was what he'd dropped, wasn't it? Or was it? Ashton had shouted something which sounded like that, when he was running away from the depot. Oh-oh. A new salvo of microwaves hit him; he felt a rush of uncomfortable warmth slide all over his body, and he felt his face going red. His skin prickled and itched. Damn! He'd felt so pleased, victorious even, after leaving the depot, that he'd quite forgotten about dropping the form. But of course; Dan Ashton had chased after him with it.
Or at least, that was what they wanted him to think, he suddenly realised. He didn't remember being given that form; they had probably not even given it to him in the first place. If it was all that important then they almost certainly hadn't. It was like when his Giro cheques from the unemployment people hadn't turned up the last time he'd been out of work; it was all done to wear him down. They could talk all they wanted about incorrectly filled-out forms, wrong addresses and the like; he knew what was really going on. They were slowly trying to destroy him.
They probably didn't have to refer back to their superiors - those mysterious Controllers, be they human or not - for instructions, they probably had their contingency plans all ready and prepared. So even when he'd got the drop on them they could still count on messing him around somehow. Devious bastards!
Sometimes, he had to admit, he wished they would just leave him alone and let him live out this petty, pointless, insignificant life in peace. It might not be all that much, but it might be almost bearable if they didn't keep tormenting him. It was an ignoble, unworthy thought, he knew, but he was - now, anyway - only human, and therefore prey to human weaknesses, whatever sort of superhuman he'd been during the War. It was a measure of how well they had done that he even considered such an awful thing. They had so oppressed his higher thoughts, his own belief in himself, that he would almost trade the chance to return to his previous, glorious existence for some peace.
But he wouldn't give in! They wouldn't win!
All the same, he wished he'd paid a little more attention to what had gone on when he'd been leaving the depot, so that he could have spotted when they carried out that trick with the form he was supposed to have dropped. He wondered if they had some other sort of beam they could train on him, which would make him forget things, or make his attention wander. The trouble was, he thought, as Starke talked on, that it would be very difficult to spot when they were using such a subtly fiendish device. This needed more thought. But what to do now?
There was always Revenge. He could get back at them in some commando-style way.
Ever since he had been at high school he'd found some enjoyment and relief by getting back at them in ways they obviously didn't expect. He'd thrown rocks at windows of offices and works they'd sacked him from, he'd defaced buildings, scratched officials" cars and mutilated bonnet mascots (though that was largely for his own safety) and he'd made bomb-hoax telephone calls. It wasn't much, and they would take it in their stride, no doubt, but apart from the fact these revenge raids certainly did upset his Tormentors a little, making life and their cruel purpose just that little bit less easy for them, the greatest effect was on him. He relieved his frustration, he vented his anger and hatred. If he'd tried to bottle it up he would have exploded one way or the other long before now. They'd have been able to certify him insane, or he'd have done something so terrible and criminal they could have put him in prison, where he'd be sodomised and knifed; quietly disposed of without any fuss because the rules were different in there. At least out here they had to play according to some sort of standard of fairness, even if it was a standard they could change as they went along according to how it suited them (like doubling the bus fares just after he'd found that job way out in Brentford), but in prison, even more so than in a mental hospital, there were no real limits to what they could do to him.
Starke was still talking, taking bits of paper out of the drawers in the desk and showing them to Grout, but Steven wasn't looking or listening. His eyes were glinting as he thought about the revenge he could have on the Islington people. He could go and dig up the roadworks during the night, and get some cement made up in a small container and cement up the holes in manhole covers you used to lift the things up by. If he filled those in they'd have a devil of a job lifting them! And he could attack the filled-in holes they'd done in Upper Street earlier this morning. He'd leave the ones he'd done, so they'd eat their words about his way being inferior; that would be satisfying!
He stood up and pulled his hard hat down firmly over his head. Starke was looking up at him; "Mr Grout?"
"What?" Steven said, looking down and seeing the young man again. He frowned and shook his head. "Never mind. Sort it out later. I've got things to do." He turned and walked away. Starke was saying something behind him.
He'd show them. He'd get back at them. He bumped into some people waiting to join the queue for the seats in the reception area (ha ha; he'd got in just before the rush!), and went out through the doors back to the street and the bright sunlight.
He'd sort this unemployment stuff out later. He should have gone to his local Job Centre anyway, where they knew him. Never mind. He at least had some ideas for Revenge. He'd go back to his room and change and wash, then... then he'd have a drink and think further about how to get back at them all. Maybe he would even mount a punitive expedition tonight, striking while the iron was hot, and all that. It was risky, especially considering he'd been out just that previous evening, putting sugar in car and motorbike petrol tanks, but it might be a good idea anyway. He'd have to think about it.
He drew a deep breath and headed for the nearest parked car.
OPEN-PLAN GO
It took Quiss longer than he had expected to get to the castle kitchens; they'd changed some of the corridors and stairways en route from the games room to the lower levels, and Quiss, taking what he thought was the usual way, had found himself making an unexpected left turn and coming to a windy, deserted, echoing chamber which looked out over the white landscape to the tall wooden towers of the slate mines. He had scratched his head and retraced his steps, then followed his nose to the chaotic kitchens of the Castle Doors.
"You," he said, and grabbed one of the kitchen helpers who was passing by carrying a heavy bucket full of some steaming liquid. The tiny scullion squealed and the bucket clattered to the floor, staying upright but letting some of its glutinous contents slop over the side. Quiss heaved the small attendant up by the scruff of its neck until its face was level with his. Its mask-face stared back at him with empty eyes. The green brim round its stained, spotted hood was like a giant washer, or a ring round a rather grubby planet.
"Put me down!" It yelped and struggled, the green cord round its waist waggling to and fro. "Help! Help!"
Quiss shook it. "Shut up you... spirochaete," he said. Tell me where I can find the seneschal in all this racket." He jerked the attendant's whole body and his own head to indicate the kitchen around them.
Quiss was standing at the foot of a flight of steps, on the outer edge of the pandemonium that was the castle's kitchens. The kitchens were buried deep in the structure, far from any outside wall. They were huge; there was a high ceiling, vaulted with cut slate on iron pillars, and standing where Quiss was, all the walls save for that immediately behind him were invisible, concealed by the rising steams, smokes and vapours from hundreds of pots, pans, vats, stoves, kettles, skillets, grills, tubs and cauldrons.
Light came from prisms hung in the roof; great cut slabs of crystal reflected light from the outside walls through long, empty light corridors and then down into the tumultuous kitchens. Also strewn across the complicated ceiling with the prism ports, obscuring whole sections of the barrelled structure, fume ducts writhed like immense square-flanked metal snakes, their grilled, barred mouths sucking the kitchens" vapours away to be vented high in some converted turret. The seneschal had told Quiss that the air circulation sys
tem was powered by one of the lowest ranks of the castle's diminutive attendants; they walked round inside treadmills linked to big watermill-like fans. Quiss felt his eyes start to smart in the fume-laden atmosphere, and as he peered through the grey, yellow and brown clouds of rising steam and smoke, thought of suggesting to the seneschal - if he ever found him - that he somehow persuade the scullions powering these airwheels that they should run rather than walk. It was, also, rather warm. Quiss could feel himself starting to sweat already, despite having left most of his furs lying at the top of the steps he had just descended.
"I don't know the way! I've never heard of him!" the squirming attendant said. Its little green-booted feet made running motions, though they were about a metre off the kitchens" slate-tiled floor.
"What?" Quiss roared, spraying spittle into the scullion's mask-face. He shook the thing roughly. "What, you excretory wretch?"
"I don't know the way to the seneschal's office! I've never even heard of him!"
"Then how," Quiss said, bringing the blank, sorrowful face closer to his own, "do you know he has an office?"
"I don't!" came the yelped reply. "You told me!"
"No, I didn't."
"Yes, you did!"
"No," Quiss said, shaking the attendant roughly so that the crownless brim round its cowl fell off, "I," he shook it again, sending the thing's hood flying off its head and revealing the smooth continuation of the mask over the creature's skull, so that its little arms waggled, trying to put the hood back on again as Quiss finished, "didn't."
"Are you sure?" the scullion said groggily.
"Positive."
"Oh, heck."
"So where is he?"
"I can't tell you; it isn't allowed. I - oh! Don't shake me again, please!"
"Then tell me where I can find the seneschal."
"Waaah!" the small attendant said.
"You scrofulous tapeworm!" Quiss bellowed; he turned the attendant upside down and plonked its head into the bucket it had been carrying. The steamy yellow gruel in the bucket splashed out on to the kitchen floor. He let the minion struggle and kick for a little while, then hoisted it back out, shook it, and turned it the right way up again. His hands were getting messy; he wiped them on the creature's cloak.
