III
Four or five years ago, when I was about twenty-five, I was doing nothing, going nowhere. I had no real job and I had no plans. I had no girlfriend and a rented flat in a block that’s since been demolished. I would go to see my brother, good old Tony, and freeload off him. He didn’t earn a lot himself, but not much is better than nothing, even split two ways.
He had a semi-detached house. It seemed wonderfully quiet. My flat was surrounded by three others on the same level, and by one on each of the adjacent floors. It was like watching a film in a multiplex cinema. Bits and pieces of other soundtracks rode into mine.
Tony’s house was silent. It wasn’t just the two of us, of course. There was his wife, Caroline, who was not my type. More to the point, I wasn’t her type. She didn’t know what type I was but she knew she didn’t like it. She was rounder than the women I liked. She had one tooth that was larger than any of the others. It made her look like a rabbit.
We didn’t get on, or not get on. We just ignored one another. From time to time she’d drop hints about finding work. I did some decorating for them.
They pretended to like it.
I tried not to go round too often. I knew I was intruding. I knew they didn’t want me there every evening. I’d go to my flat and channel-hop using the unresponsive remote control on the unlicensed television. There were only three channels I could get. A man from a neighbouring flat had offered to get me satellite, cheap, ask no questions. I asked a question about money and found it was out of my reach. I was below cheap. This was before my days with the B&S Building Society. In those days I was merely flat broke. It wasn’t until after I was a student that I entered the world of negative balances.
I would sit in my terrible armchair, wearing two coats because the heating was on the blink. I would press the buttons on the remote control with numb fingers, and nothing would happen. The remote control only worked when the light was right, and the light wasn’t right very often. There were controls on the television but to get to them you had to leave the chair.
I didn’t like to leave the chair. In any case, there would be nothing on any of the channels. Pressing the buttons was more a form of exercise than anything else. It was something to do.
I’d cook simple meals on the gassy stove. I’d wash the crockery once a week. I’d wait to go to bed and then I’d wait to go to sleep.
I’d go round to Tony’s one night in two. I needed to see someone.
Caroline began to point out job vacancies.
‘They’re taking on people at Scratto,’ she’d say. ‘I hear they pay quite well.’
‘You could go to college,’ Tony would say. ‘You got the grades, kiddo. You could get some qualifications and get a decent job. You’re the one with the brains.’
Which didn’t help to explain why I felt that I had failed. I was going nowhere. If I went to college, I’d be going nowhere somewhere else. I didn’t want to be the brains. I wanted to be the one with the house and the wife. I wanted to be the one with the life.
The thing with depression is, you can’t see it from the inside. From outside it’s obvious. You see someone in this spiral down to their lowest place, and you tell them things will look better next week or perhaps you should talk to someone or stop fucking sulking, depending on how long it’s been going on.
From the inside there is no outside. There’s the room, and you alone in it, whoever else is there. There’s no point going outside. There’s no point in breathing, other than for the exercise. From the outside, depression is false. It’s a skewed viewpoint.
From the inside, it’s the other way round. Everyone else is wrong. They’re the ones with the skewed viewpoints. The rest of the world has the wrong worldview.
I didn’t even know I was depressed. It was something that happened to bored housewives or those madmen who take their satchels on bus rides. I was fine, apart from wanting to die. I was right. It wasn’t until the depression vanished that I knew it had been there. Afterwards I was proud to have lived through it. It seemed to be something solid. It felt like an achievement.
At the time it felt like a sea, swamping me. I would go round and sit with Tony and Caroline and they’d ask me this and that and I would sit, silent. They’d go to other rooms and I’d hear them talking about me. Tony would tell me to pull myself together. Caroline would hug me.
That helped, that human contact. I felt as though I was part of a family.
The depression became cyclic, rising and falling. I became two people. I was the bright one who knew that the gloom was illusory. I was the dark one who could not see the point of breathing. We circled one another. Neither of them was complete.
When Tony was at work Caroline would come and talk to me. She tidied my flat and hid my gloomier records. I’m still missing a Joy Division bootleg, a live recording.
As if Joy Division could ever accurately have been described as live.
She would hug me and I would brighten. The depression left me, but didn’t go far. I’d see it in corners, behind the television, waiting to engulf me again.
She would hug me, and I would pretend that I was still lost. Because I liked the feel of her, and I’d got used to that rabbit tooth she had. I wouldn’t say I manipulated her, not as such.
It was a family thing, that was all. It was our business.
I got better, and she got worse. She said that she was bored. The bored housewife caught the depression. I consoled her.
I will not draw a diagram. I’m not proud of any of this. I slept with her, in the dead afternoons while Tony was at work. Not in their house. Only in my flat.
Because I was no longer depressed, life felt free to play a little joke on the two of us. She became pregnant. I impregnated her. She named the child Samantha, after me.
I went to university to avoid all that. I was away for the birth. Caroline would send me letters, photographs. I did not go to the christening. I fell away from the three of them, my brother, his wife, my daughter.
These family things; what can we do with them? How do we even survive?
She told him. She came out with it. That was why he told me not to go back to the house. I had no way to deal with that. I could no longer hide inside the depression. You couldn’t go there deliberately.
I did what he wanted. I stayed away.
IV
I didn’t tell Jack any of that. It was none of his business. I told him that Tony had banished me for personal reasons, which was as close to the truth as Jack needed to go.
He seemed to take my word for it.
‘That leaves us up the creek, doesn’t it?’ he asked, sitting on my sofa, swinging his hammer. ‘That leaves stuff up in the air. Come on, mate. For my sake. Come with me and get yourself a small tattoo. See what that brings to mind.’
‘There’s nothing to bring,’ I told him. ‘There’s nothing there. You read about it somewhere. You read about this wizard.’
‘Wizard?’ he asked, genuinely confused.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I told him. ‘It’s something I read. It’s something you read, even if you can’t remember it. That’s all it is. You’ve got your wires crossed.’
‘I thought that would be it,’ he said sadly. ‘I didn’t think we’d get anywhere much. Tell you what though, if that’s all true, how do you explain that?’
He pointed out of the window. I moved to see what was outside. The road was empty.
Something flew into me from behind. I hit the window and bounced back into the room.
I was getting sick of falling for the same trick. It had been bad enough the first time. The next time someone asks me what’s over there, I’ll tell them to look for themselves.
Jack was standing over me. He had a hammer in his hand. He reached to my top shelf and picked up a saucer. It rattled. It would do. It had nails in it.
‘I think you need to be pierced,’ he said. ‘I think you’re this close to understanding. And if the mountain won’t come to Mohammed …�
�
He leaned over me. I blacked out.
PART EIGHT
Sam, aged twenty
Chapter Seventeen
I
I was sitting in my bedroom, listening to old CDs. The ritual was over. All we had to do now was wait, and we could do more of that than anyone else could. We didn’t have all the time in the world – and neither did the world, according to the scientists – but we had more time than anyone else alive.
I hoped this wouldn’t mean we’d be old for centuries. Hopefully, we’d age more slowly. Five hundred years of forgetting what your name was wouldn’t be much fun. I was hoping for three hundred years of not quite being thirty. With any luck, civilization would cave in before my apparent age reached forty.
Apart from that, there was the question of finances. I didn’t want to live for centuries on thirty quid a week. I wanted more than that. I wanted silly money. I wanted real money, not the seven-figure scrapings that keep minor celebs in champagne and cocaine. I wanted the sort of money that stopped being an amount any longer, the sort of money that became a thing in itself, giving birth to offshore funds and tax fiddles and accountants. I wanted football money. That sort of money would outlast the landslides and rising water tables. The gloomier scientists gave the world around a hundred years before it became untenable; the cheerier ones gave it three or four times as long. If the ritual had worked, if I lived that long, then I’d be around when London drowned. Land prices in higher places would go up.
Dudley was a long way above sea level. Land prices in Dudley were low, understandably. If I bought now, in three centuries I’d be able to sell it all on at a high profit.
The problem was that I didn’t have enough money to buy anything. I wasn’t working, and the country didn’t seem inclined to pay me much for not working. I’d outlast the country, but still, it made things difficult.
The way to make money is to have something no one else has. If you could prove that you weren’t getting any older, that would do the trick. You would tell the world you’d discovered an anti-ageing product. You could market any amount of placebos, at any price. In the low-end chemists you could place mid-price tablets and salves. You’d do a secretive trade to the extremely wealthy, getting them to pay millions – if millions still counts as a lot of money – for the same placebos in a different wrapping. You’d also sell the same stuff on the black market for even higher prices, putting the word out that a batch of experimental ultra-powerful age-preventative chemicals had been sneaked out of a laboratory.
The money would come in. Lawsuits would start, and you’d have your lawyers delay them, and the complainants would die of old age or sunburn or drowning, depending on how close to the coast they lived. The money would walk on in. At some point you become a celeb, and you’re photographed with whichever celebs are still routinely photographed. Perhaps Tony Blair wants to be photographed with you. He seems to enjoy having his picture taken.
That would be where the money came from. And the product lifecycle outlasts, in this case only, the human life-cycle.
I have another idea. Get a chemistry set, do a bit of reading up, and build a psychoactive substance. Give it a trade name, put it in packets, and brand it. Sell it.
Hold on, you say. That’d be illegal.
Not yet, it wouldn’t. It’s new. And it’s owned by a company. Better yet, a corporation. It’s not a dirty street drug, cut with who-knows-what. It’s a clean branded product, with an advertising budget like a telephone number and a stack of minor celebs eager to endorse it and get their names in the papers. Then you sell the brand name to a multinational and let them sort out the legal troubles.
The money comes in. It does. All you need is the will to start it moving. Once it starts coming, it keeps coming. There is a layer of people, out of our reach, and the money lives with them. We get enough for the mortgage or the four-by-four, and up there they write houses off against tax. There are layers above that, the millionaires and billionaires and the ones whose names don’t get into the papers because they are beyond understanding.
You can move into those layers, you know. Look at the papers. Look at the charts. Look at the television. There are people there on six-figure wage packets and they have no abilities at all.
Money won’t be a problem, then. Those comfortable layers aren’t too far above us, it’s just that most of us don’t think of looking up.
So, we could sort out the finances, we wouldn’t need to kill anyone else, and whatever strange fixations Jack was developing surely wouldn’t last as long as we would.
It was time to celebrate.
I phoned Jack and asked if he wanted to go for a drink.
‘What, just for a drink? No murdering people or anything?’
‘Just a drink.’
‘What, just the two of us?’
‘Well yes, unless there’s anyone else you want to invite along.’
‘Nope. Where at?’
‘Somewhere in town. The Dock?’
‘Yeah, right then. I’ll meet you there. Eightish.’
‘This isn’t a date,’ I told him. ‘We’re celebrating.’
‘Oh right,’ he said. ‘Like I’d want a date with you. Eight, yeah? And bring some money. I’ve got none on me.’
I had some. I’d robbed some of our victims. That wasn’t strictly in the rules, but we needed pocket money. We needed drinks money. I needed money for new clothes. I couldn’t say the same for Jack.
I hoped he wasn’t going to turn the evening into something it wasn’t. He wasn’t my type. He wasn’t anyone’s type, really. I might have led him on now and then, but that was the best way to steer him. He wasn’t in love with me, whatever he thought. He was mooning.
It was bound to happen. The two of us spending so much time together, going through adolescence. Everyone thought we were a couple at school. The other girls used to take the piss out of me. Fair enough, they’ll die before I do. And I’ll still be able to pull the blokes when they’re all fat and forty.
I put a bra on. One of my steadier ones. One with wiring and pads, not that I need wiring. The pads don’t hurt, though. I’m not what you’d call buxom. Sometimes I don’t bother with a bra at all, but I didn’t want to go through the evening with Jack staring at my breasts.
II
What do you mean, I didn’t mention that before? I must have done. Or you were reading it wrong. Of course I mentioned it. It’s not something I’d forget, my gender. It’s not something that slips my mind.
It’s not my fault if you’re not paying attention.
III
The Dock was crowded. It was a Thursday night, and that’s the night students go out in Dudley. Why students are in Dudley is a mystery. They can’t all be studying urban deprivation. Why they go out on Thursdays isn’t a mystery. On Thursdays the night club does an indie disco with free admission. Students will go to anything with free admission, other than bookshops, museums, or lectures.
So the Dock was packed with students, in the typical genotypes – male techies in clusters, talking about Star Trek and role-playing games; glum little goths sure that no one else had ever felt so miserable; bright couples that you wanted to punch; drama students making much ado about nothing; groups of lads out drinking. The quiz machine was taking their money by throwing in sneaky questions about baseball and jai-alai and other one-country games. The sound system was playing something by a boy band and the students were pretending not to like it.
I found a quiet place and stood in it. A gang of lads – rugby club, more than likely – gave me a few whistles. They must have been drunk. I imagined myself pissing on their graves and gave them a smile. I can cope with students. I’m old enough to worry them but young enough to be interesting. They hadn’t been prepared for a smile.
‘All of you,’ I told them. ‘And it still wouldn’t be enough.’
I picked out the most frightened one and gave him a vicious kiss. They backed off. Men, honestly. I spotted Jack among
the crowd, ogling girls. I’d thought he was another computer geek but it was just the way he dressed. He hadn’t seen me. I was wearing trousers – the night was cold, and besides, I didn’t want him looking at my legs. Not anymore.
I did tell you I was manipulative.
‘All right,’ he said, his little face lighting up.
‘Got a drink?’ I asked. He hadn’t. He had no money. He was standing not far from a quartet of student girls. They looked about twelve. They looked like the poetry society. He had no idea, honestly. He wasn’t anyone’s idea of a romantic lead. There were any number of girls in Dudley who’d have fucked him senseless for a pint of lager and a bag of chips. Jack had romantic notions.
It was time to put a stop to all that.
I bought him a pint of Guinness, which he claimed to like. I had a vodka martini, James Bond style. I wasn’t doing pints any more. I was after something higher. They didn’t drink beer in the circles I was aspiring to.
‘Cheers,’ he said when I passed him the pint, downing a third of it. I sipped my drink. I didn’t like it much. I’d get used to it. I had long enough.
‘Jack,’ I said.
He looked at me. He looked like a puppy. Fair enough. I could kick a puppy if I had to.
‘It’s about us.’
‘Us?’ he asked. ‘We aren’t anything.’
‘We’ve been spending a lot of time together.’
‘Yeah well, you needed someone. And I fancied living forever. What I think is, we need to get some money coming in. We can sit on investments no bother, but we need money to invest.’
I raised an eyebrow. He swallowed another third of a pint.
‘What I reckon is, we can find something to sell. Come on, we’ve done things no one else has done. We can think of something to sell. Look at this lot.’ He indicated the students with an expansive gesture. ‘All you have to do is find something with a minority interest. Sell it to this lot first, let the word get into the magazines, let the name get around, and there you go. Bingo.’
Seeing the Wires Page 22
