‘Well how do you think you’re going to do that without saying anything?’
‘Why don’t you write it on the whiteboard?’ suggested Melanie, a large placid girl with an unfortunate hairstyle.
‘I can’t write it down. If I can’t tell you it, what makes you think I can write it down? What would Ted Wiggins say if he saw me writing secret things on the board?’
Ted Wiggins was the head of several departments. No one was quite sure which ones, which seemed to suit him. I’ve noticed that a new sort of executive has evolved. It looks like the others, but it can’t survive for prolonged periods of time outside of the environment of pointless meetings, preferably with other, similarly evolved, executives. Ted was one of this new breed. While he would never stoop so low as to speak to one of my team, there was always the danger that, on seeing a meeting in progress, he would join it out of force of habit.
‘He can’t write it on the whiteboard,’ said Theresa, a woman who had been middle-aged her entire life. She had joined the council in 1914 so as to avoid being sent to the trenches. I wasn’t sure which side she’d have been on.
‘Why not?’ asked Melanie.
‘Because there’s no markers,’ said Theresa. ‘Sandra from Purchasing had them for the Christmas cards. There’s no markers and there’s no wipes either. So he couldn’t wipe it off. If he could write it. But Sandra’s had the markers so he can’t.’
‘Sandra brought them back,’ said Melanie.
‘She didn’t. I told her to tell me if she brought them back.’
‘You were off with your leg. It might have been the veins.’
‘No, I had the veins done before she had the markers. It must have been the toenails.’
‘It was your leg. I remember saying when she brought them in. I said, you were off with your leg. Sandra said she wasn’t surprised. I don’t know what she meant.’
‘You don’t, with Sandra. Where’s the markers, then?’
‘They were all dried up so I chucked them in the bin.’
‘Right. So, like I said, he can’t write it on the whiteboard then,’ finished Theresa.
‘I wouldn’t write it on the whiteboard even if there were markers,’ I said. ‘It’s not something I feel I can write down.’
‘Is it difficult for you to spell?’ asked Melanie, deadpan.
‘I can never spell millennium,’ said Theresa. ‘I always do too many Ls and not enough Ns. If I wrote it down now, I’d get it wrong.’
‘Let’s move on,’ I said. ‘Let’s forget about writing anything on the whiteboard. Let’s pretend the whiteboard isn’t here.’
‘If you’d lent it to Sandra it wouldn’t be.’
I gave them all a look. I was getting ready to lose my temper. They quietened gradually.
‘Right,’ I said, ‘I can’t tell you what’s going on. I can’t write it down.’
‘Why not mime it?’ asked Steve.
‘Like that thing with Lionel Blair and the thin woman,’ added Theresa. ‘I used to like that. I could never guess them, though. I like that one with Roy Walker. I used to like the sheepdog thing, but it’s not as good now.’
‘If we could just stick to the point,’ I said.
‘We would if we knew what it was,’ said Steve.
‘I can give you hints.’
‘Not mimes?’
‘Hints.’
‘Well, if it’s about UltraCrate putting in a bid to run us we know about it. We’ll move into their structure and they’ll charge the council. They’ll probably start out renting office space here and end up owning the whole building. The first stage will be late this July and there’ll be individual meetings with members of staff to discuss where they want to fit in. Not that it’ll make any difference. There’s an encrypted list on the server with the names of the staff we’re keeping and the ones we’re getting rid of. It needs two passwords, which were chosen by the Finance Director. The first one is “Debbie” and the other one is “Dallas”. I can’t imagine how he came up with those. Anything else we don’t know?’
I was taken aback. That was everything I wasn’t supposed to tell them, plus some things I didn’t know.
‘How do you know all that?’
‘Everyone knows. Sandra told us the week before last.’
‘I was off with my wrist,’ said Theresa, ‘so they rang me at home and told me. Didn’t you know?’
‘Of course I knew! I’m supposed to know. You’re not.’
Another thought struck me.
‘How the fuck did you expect me to mime all that?’
Steve smirked, Theresa flinched. The others looked on, hoping I’d lose my temper and do something they could talk about later.
‘Jesus,’ I said, ‘the rumours in this place are unbelievable.’
‘You should hear the ones about you,’ said Steve, settling his chair back onto four legs.
‘Me?’
‘Not married, is the gist if it,’ said Steve.
‘Sandra reckons you’re a poofter,’ explained Theresa.
‘Well, I’ve wondered,’ said Melanie.
‘I’m saying nothing,’ said Steve, ‘I wouldn’t want to cause any trouble. I’m a quiet guy.’
‘Is there anything else?’ I asked. I wanted to get out of the meeting room and go and have a nice drunken rest in a hedge somewhere.
‘They say you spend a lot of time with some bloke with pins in his dick,’ said Steve.
‘Would that be Barry Sheen?’ asked Theresa. ‘I saw him once, opening a supermarket.’
‘I heard he had chains from his bollocks right up to his nipples,’ said Melanie.
‘What, Barry Sheen has chains from his bollocks to his nipples? He’d have to be careful. What if they got caught in the spokes?’
‘Not him. Mr Haines’ boyfriend.’
‘Hold on. Let’s stop this now. I don’t have a boyfriend.’
‘Would you like one?’ asked Steve, raising his eyebrows.
‘No! No. I’m not interested in that sort of thing. I’m straight. Jack is going out with a young lady, and if he has pins in his penis I haven’t seen them. I’m not married because I haven’t met the right person. Woman. Lady. Female human. Whatever they’re called in here.’
‘Only asking,’ said Steve.
‘Well thank you for your concern.’
‘I said he was normal,’ said Melanie. ‘He’s just ugly until you catch him right.’
I was speechless. I could only think of words that wouldn’t help. I wished I was in a pothole, learning management skills with beetles up my jumper and water in my socks.
‘Do you think he really murdered five people?’ asked Theresa, and I fainted.
II
I had to do something. I arranged to meet Jack for a talk. I told him that I wanted to talk about his theory. I didn’t want to meet him in the Messy Duck. I was wary of the pub. It had drinks in it, and I didn’t want him drunk. Drunk, he was likely to run about telling people about the murders he imagined we’d committed. There was the chance that he’d go to the police and confess. Of course, if the people in my team knew about it, the news would spread without any help from Jack. I wondered how they’d heard anything about it. I wanted to nip it in the bud before we got in trouble. Because, the more I thought about it, the more I realized Jack really meant it. He honestly believed it all. People believe all sorts of strange things. They can justify anything: ethnic cleansing, boy bands, you name it.
Ethnic cleansing is troubling. It always seems to be applied in the wrong direction. If there has to be ethnic cleansing, why can’t it be aimed somewhere useful? Against Scousers, say. They could level Liverpool and replace everyone in Brookside with parrots. They’d sound the same and look much better. No one would notice.
I arranged to meet Jack at the library. He wouldn’t be able to drink there, and there’d be people around if he started freaking out. We’d have to keep quiet, too, and that’d help to stop him getting too excited. There would
only be us, the librarians, and people who ran their own businesses queuing for the photocopier and asking each other if they had the right change.
The library was quiet, not surprisingly. It was untidily spread over three floors. Fiction on the ground floor, nonfiction upstairs and music in the cellar, arranged along wide shelves under blank white striplights. A staircase that creaked like a grandmother’s hip led between the storeys.
I looked over the fiction to pass the time. I don’t read a lot. I get bored. You’re better off with a Playstation. Things move on the Playstation. Things are in colour. Books are still in black and white, and if you read them again, the story is just the same. I couldn’t believe how many storybooks there were. Shelves and shelves of them. I went down the stairs to have a look at the CD section. I trod carefully on the stairs. The staircase creaked. The cellar was long and low. The CD cases were face-on, so that you could only see the first one in each stack. There were too many to focus on. I walked past the As and Bs. Allman Brothers, Beatles. Another few steps and I added Carpenters and Denver, John. It wasn’t a cellar at all. It was a great big mausoleum for the works of dead musicians. I went back up the stairs. The staircase creaked. Librarians looked at me through their spectacles. They all wore pullovers that didn’t fit, like it was a uniform. They hated noise. I wondered why they didn’t do something about the stairs. Could you oil stairs to stop them squeaking? Could you breed a new sort of librarian, cross one with a llama so that they could grow their own pullovers?
Perhaps they did. There was a zoo in Dudley.
I was getting nervous. I think strange things when I’m nervous. I loitered between shelves of fiction and waited for Jack.
He was half an hour late which, for him, was half an hour early. The librarians eyed his facial jewellery. They’d seen students with nose rings and it didn’t upset them. They gathered books and tugged at their pullovers. I caught Jack on his way to the staircase.
‘You got here, then,’ he said.
‘Before you. Half an hour before you.’
‘Yeah, well, you have to be early. You’re uncomfortable otherwise. You’re caught up in things. You’re tied down. That’s the difference there. I’m free.’
‘You’d have to be. No one would pay for you. Shall we find somewhere to sit?’
‘Go on then. I’ve got nothing else to do. Lisa’s out tonight.’
I waited until we’d found a table before I went on.
‘Have you told Lisa what you told me?’
‘No,’ he said. He looked as though he had more to say about that. He didn’t say it. He looked thoughtful. That was worrying enough in itself. He wasn’t a thinking sort of person. He had things on his mind.
‘You do know it isn’t true.’
He looked at me, and I knew I was wrong. He didn’t know any such thing. He was full of it. His expression, the dark areas growing under his eyes, the way he looked at me; all of it said, he believed it. To him, it was true.
‘What do you think we did?’ I asked him.
‘Murder,’ he said, ‘is what we did. Lots of times. We had blood on our clothes. We killed a woman with a cat. It was your idea, all of it. You and your fucking magic.’
That was too loud. Eyes turned to peer at us from behind inch-thick spectacle lenses.
‘I didn’t believe any of that magic stuff,’ I told him. ‘It was just, you know, gothy. It went with the March Violets and Play Dead albums. It wasn’t real. We never did anything about it. I would know.’
‘Yeah, well, I do know.’ He sounded angry. ‘I do know.’
‘Think about it. How did we manage it? You lived with your parents. Didn’t they notice?’
‘My dad wouldn’t notice me if I ran in on fire. And my mother only noticed whoever followed me home. I could have walked in there carrying a fucking body; I could have slept with corpses for all they cared.’
‘You’re not going to tell me we did that as well?’
‘I didn’t. I don’t know what you did. You and your rituals. You and your calling. Calling. As if. You don’t remember what we were trying to do, do you? Perhaps it worked. You told me we could live forever.’
I had a feeling as though the room had tipped, as though the view from the windows had changed. I had some sort of memory of a ritual. Something we’d done, when we were younger and wiser.
‘You know,’ he said, looking into my eyes. His left ear was sore at the top, red and swollen around another new ring. ‘You got it then. I saw you get it.’
‘Wait,’ I said, ‘you mean you’ve been sitting on this for ten years? Why bring it up now? You’ve had ten years to talk about it. I know it didn’t happen. Magic, yes, rituals, yes. But murder? Come on. We were nobodies. We never did anything. I left Dudley and came back. That’s all I’ve done. That’s all we are. People from here. Where did this come from?’
‘I didn’t remember before. It’s just come back. That programme we saw at your brother’s did it. We killed people in some of those places. We buried them.’
The only programmes we’d watched were the Tweenies and a documentary about Dudley. I didn’t think he meant the Tweenies.
‘This is absurd. It’s your subconscious trying to make sense of your life. You want to have done something. It’s a film or a book or something. How could you not have remembered until now? And what about me? I can’t remember it at all. Perhaps you should see someone.’
‘The police?’
‘I was thinking more along the lines of psychiatric help.’
He looked as though I’d accused him. A bit rich under the circumstances. He studied his fingernails, perhaps thinking about having them painted. Or removed.
‘Why don’t you try pushing it a bit?’ he said.
‘In what way?’
‘You’re trapped. There in your job, in your life. Trapped. You keep running over the same things. You and your inhibitions. You’re shut in there. Why not try piercing? Break through?’
‘How would that help? It hasn’t done much for you.’
‘It’s done enough. It’s opened my mind.’
‘It’s left the door open. Everything’s coming in.’
‘I’m a matrix,’ he said. ‘I’m open. Look at what Psychic TV say. Piercing is the start, it’s putting the key in the lock. I’m receiving signals.’
‘I don’t know what you are. But I know we never murdered anyone. I’m a guy from an office. I watch television and go to bed. I don’t want tattoos on my ears and screws through my genitals. I don’t need to invent murders just to keep interested in myself. I don’t need to colour myself in.’
‘You think that’s what this is? Me trying to liven myself up? Giving myself a new history? Fuck you, Haines. We did it. You’re suppressing it. You just don’t want to remember. I’m going to have a look at the local papers – the back issues. There’ll be something in there. I’ll prove it.’
‘There’s nothing to prove.’
‘Well if you don’t want to look, go home. I don’t need you hanging around getting in the way.’
He meant it. He looked as serious as I’d ever seen him. I remembered what had happened at work.
‘Have you mentioned this to anyone else?’
‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘I’m a fucking accomplice. But I can’t sit around remembering this stuff. It’s there all the time, in the back of my head. I want it out. Go home. I’ll look at the papers. If I don’t find anything, then perhaps you’re right. Perhaps you are. I’ll see you.’
He didn’t want me there. He wasn’t comfortable with me, and I wasn’t comfortable with him. I said I’d see him around and walked out, into the ongoing drizzle.
I knew he wouldn’t find anything in the papers because we hadn’t done anything.
But I did wonder how you could kill someone with a cat.
Chapter Seven
I
I didn’t see Jack for a couple of weeks. It’s not that I was avoiding him, I just wasn’t going to places he’
d go to. I thought Jack must have picked something up from one of his piercing lounges. Something had been driven into him along with a needle. Something had got under his skin.
At that time I hadn’t seen the extent of his piercings. I knew about the eyebrows and the ears and the ones around his mouth that made him look like a marine crustacean. Those were obvious, and so were the flares of colour low on his arms. I didn’t like to think about what else he’d had done. He was probably so run through with bolts and stays, wires and workings that he was influencing the position of magnetic North. There was something ritualistic about the whole business.
Without suffering, there is no growth, I’d heard.
I didn’t know about that. I’d suffered, and I hadn’t got anything much out of it.
I went to work and thought about nothing. The council offices were good for that. It was actively encouraged. There was a bonus scheme involved. If you were able to cope with the boredom then the sky was the limit. As a bonus, Steve Timmins got a job somewhere else and left. He was replaced by a sullen and silent young lady with a grim look about her and the sort of complexion you only get with a lifetime’s diet of lo-cost beefburgers. Her name was Jane, the lady from the agency told me when she called. Jane with no Y. She could type ten thousand characters a minute.
‘Any words?’ I asked. ‘Or just characters?’
There was a frosty little pause, then the sound of the receiver being carelessly clunked down on a desktop, and then the sound of a conversation. I only caught odd words – temp, sacked, suspended sentence – and then the lady returned.
‘She is computer literate,’ I was told, ‘and has a certificate.’
I wanted to ask whether it was from the vet, but thought better of it. I had never met the lady from the agency, knowing her only as a voice on a telephone, and I didn’t want to upset her in case it turned out that she was either nice or violent.
‘Anything else?’ I asked. ‘Does she have any hobbies?’
‘I’d imagine so. Is there anything else? Only we have a Michelle to find a place for, and frankly it’s a bit of a struggle.’
Send her here, I wanted to say; that’s where you send all the other hopeless ones. But I didn’t, because I have a life-assisting cowardly streak. I gave Jane some filing to file and showed her where the emergency exits were in case the building caught fire or fell over.
Seeing the Wires Page 9
