The Complete Afternet: All 3 Volumes In One Place (The Afternet)

by Peter Empringham

  Marcel. He plunged headlong through raging streams of molten lava as they boiled and popped flares of flame. Despite the fierce anger of the slow floods, he felt no heat, did not burn, but had the sensation of the thick substance tugging at his body as he was propelled against the flow. In his ears, a terrible ringing and hammering, broken occasionally by a fearsome roar, his lungs gasping as though filled with the scorching sulphur rising from the volcanic outpouring. As he ascended towards the caldera from which the lava issued it was if he was being pulled upwards, a tremendous suction on his body and then his legs as he was lifted free of the vivid red river. He felt he was flying towards the peak, which smoked and burst with huge explosions, and bizarrely there was his mother, standing at the crest, her arms spread wide, shrieking above the volcanic roar ‘I should have killed you first.’ And he forced his stretched lips to scream, ‘Yeah, well you didn’t you bitch, did you?’

  Mary. She went horizontal. For her there was little sensation of enormous speed, but a gentle floating forward, like Superman when not showing off. Then she felt herself slowing further and landing on her feet. She saw a picture of a ragged room with wallpaper of dull design and indiscriminate colour. A dusty mantelpiece held photographs of a smiling woman, each older than the previous one, backdrops of grey seas and skies. She slowly looked around a room with a filthy carpet, piles of newspapers in every corner, a gate-leg table covered in dirty dishes, half-eaten meals, cups with dried stains of tea and coffee. On one side a threadbare armchair, its arms worn thin and frayed. In it an old woman, grey hair matted, mouth concave, clothes thin, leaning forward to an electric fire to suck in the unpenetrating warmth. All of the colour had been sucked out of the scene, it was like an old newsreel but nothing was moving. Just as her eyes were filled with this sight her other senses were assailed too. As if she could smell loneliness, hear boredom and the death of desire. In a double take, as cold air began to whisk at her face, she looked back to the photograph of a young smiling woman and then to the withered face of the old lady seated in the corner. She felt her legs give way, she fell to the floor.

  Only Marcel was standing when the transition ended. The other three slammed to a halt in various states of distress upon the floor, and as a whooshing sound died around them, began to pick themselves up.

  “Wow,” said Geoffrey, “that was like being in Twin Peaks.”

  Justin hitched up his overlong trousers and looked worriedly at his hands, as though they may still bear some vestige of the hallucinated Iron Maiden. Mary just looked worried.

  “Do you- well, can you- see your future going through there?”

  “God, I hope not.” Said Justin.

  “I have no idea.” Said Marcel, whose future, like his past, could well involve immersion in superheated rock. “Why, what did you see?”

  Mary shrugged. “O, nothing.” She said unconvincingly.

  “We’d better be getting on.” Said Geoffrey, who was looking around nervously for a naked chicken. There was a black door ahead of them marked EXIT. “Which way do you think we go?”

  Deniece Murray was having a bit of a day. It began with a hair issue which refused to be resolved by either straighteners or curling tongs, and she had to cover the resulting frizz with a woollen beret. Having no time left for breakfast she had hurried, stomach rumbling, from the front door of her house to find that her car was not parked where she had left it the night before, unbeknownst to her having been borrowed by her brother Shayne who was even then snoring in a squat in Edmonton after a hard night on the lighter fluid.

  The bus she therefore had to take was full to bursting, rain lashing the windows and its occupants gently steaming, and when she alighted, the downpour during her two minute walk was enough to ensure that she arrived at the Edgware Road branch of Aldi drenched to the skin. The final straw was the absence through ‘swine flu’ of several members of the staff which meant that she was called upon to man the cold meats counter.

  Deniece had quit her tedious Diploma course in Hairdressing and Psychology at her local college and instead interviewed successfully for a management trainee position with the burgeoning discount store. After an induction period working most of the customer-facing stations in the store, her proto-management position had meant that to the greatest extent she had been able to spend more time managing than serving. This was a development which suited her fine, since although she was proving herself adept at keeping the staff involved and motivated (swine flu notwithstanding) she would be the first to admit that she struggled for patience with the demands of her company’s public.

  The cold meats counter was at the back of the store, where at least she didn’t have to face everyone in what she took to be her state of disarray, wild hair and continuing dampness included. The events of the morning, though, had been enough to give her a surly demeanour without the stream of elderly women demanding two ounces of haslet (whatever that is), or asking if there are any scraps for the dog (No). Her distaste for her situation, and this at only 11.30 in the morning, peaked with the emergence of four people from the cold store. Deniece turned away from the creased lady who had been weighing up the choice of pork luncheon meat – guaranteed 20% pork – or a slice of the Reduced To Clear Because Out of Date Wiltshire Crumbed Ham, which had been raised in Holland and bore barely a crumb, in order to consider the new arrivals in her sphere of influence.

  There was a woman, her hair a little wild as though she had spent some time in a strong wind (but then, today, who was Deniece to judge) followed by a man who looked old but may not have been, and who was looking around him wildly in the fluorescent atmosphere. Then a bloke in a suit not only awful but at least two sizes too big, and finally a real hunk, tall and slim, beautifully dressed and with dark eyes of endless depth.

  “You can’t be behind here,” said Deniece, glossing over the fact that they couldn’t be in the freezer either, “staff only.” She looked past the first three to Marcel. “You can stay, though.”

  “Sorry dear, souls to save.” Said Marcel as he pushed past and walked purposefully off into the shop. After a moment, the other three began to follow. The woman paused.

  “Sorry about him,” she said, “he’s four hundred years old.”

  Deniece watched them pick their way down the aisle past the Cutty Bark whisky and Hainz Baked Beans, pulled back to her work by the persistent coughing of the woman at the counter.

  “I’ll have a slice of the luncheon meat and a slice of the ham.” She said.

  “Whatever.” Said Deniece.

  CHAPTER 16

  It was Justin who made them go into Starbucks to create a plan of activity. He was, truth be told, less concerned about the plan than getting a real cup of coffee after the filth he had been served in the Control Room, and would probably have stamped his foot if the heel hadn’t been caught in the hem of the houndstooth trousers.

  They placed the sack of cash, gold, and jewels on the table between them as they sipped their delicious caffeine fixes, Geoffrey savouring every morsel of his chocolate flapjack. Marchant had liberated the Yellow Pages from behind the counter, with plentiful promises to return it on pain of death, fully aware that the barrista had no idea how empty a threat that actually was. It was 2pm. They knew this because Marcel had placed on the table in front of them a Piaget chronometer which showed not only the local time, but also bore one stopwatch which was backlit in green and one in pale orange.

  “This is you, woman. Er- Mary.” He said, pointing at the green dial. “We’ve hit the target of getting you back within 24 hours after the deadline from Baku. This,” he pointed to the orange sector, “is the time we have to start The Afternet towards effectiveness. We need to work back from then; it’s 20 hours. How long will it take us to do whatever we need to with whatever we have come here for in order to hit that deadline?”

  Mary looked from Geoffrey, who had a huge cappuccino moustache, specked with flapjack, to Justin, who was jiggling his leg with nervous tension as he flic
ked through the telephone book looking for computing outlets.

  “Well, you have no idea what to do. We’re going to buy a shedload of twenty-first century computer equipment, ship it through a time tunnel and then ask a farmer and a small-time murderer to put it together. Oh, and a modern con-man. I’ll write out some instructions, but let’s face it, it’s not a scenario to fill anyone with confidence, is it?”

  She looked at Marcel’s thunderous face.

  “No offence.” She said.

  “So how long?” said Geoffrey, showering everyone with gobbets of half-chewed caramel and oats.

  “Well,” said Mary, “I suppose you might get something going in five or six hours, although getting it all moving will take a lot longer than that. And if you don’t do it right, it could make it worse.”

  “What could be worse than where we are now?” Geoffrey wiped his frothy mouth with the sleeve of his borrowed shirt. “But when we get it going, it will clear up the backlog, right?”

  “Well,” said Mary, “not straight away, because I guess there must be quite a few, er…people, stuck in Nowhere Land. It should get it back up to speed, though. How many do you have in the queue?”

  “Must be a couple of mill,” said Justin, “most of them lowlifes from what I saw.”

  “Well,” Marcel looked nervously towards the display of branded mugs, “we’ve been running slow for nearly three centuries now.”

  “What does ‘slow’ mean, exactly?”

  “On average, about forty thousand a day short.” Mary gasped, and Justin’s face contorted as he began to do some mental arithmetic.

  “It started out not too bad,” the Frenchman continued, “just a few hundred missed here and there. More recently, though, The Afternet has, to be honest, missed more than it found.” He looked down at the table, aware of Mary’s bewildered stare and the twitching on Justin’s face.

  “We did six the other day!” Geoffrey seemed rather proud.

  “Out of?”

  “About eighty thousand.”

  Mary’s head sank to the table. In his excitement, Marchant began to whisper as he calculated. Finally his face lit up and he thumped the table, causing Mary to jump upright.

  “That’s four billion!”

  “Give or take a half.” Said Marcel, in a despairing monotone.

  “You can’t have a half, Marcel. They either go or they don’t.” said Geoffrey.

  “I meant half a billion.” There was silence apart from the munching of the last morsel of flapjack.

  “Is it give, or take?” asked Mary.

  “Whichever one of those means four and a half billion.”

  They sat in silence, the enormity of the task weighing heavy between them. Finally, Mary spoke up.

  “Well, even when we install the new kit and get the system programmed properly, it will take a while to get up to speed.”

  “So how long to catch up?”

  “Fifteen years or so.”

  “That’s nothing! I’ve been dead for fourteen hundred years. I’ve worn pants for longer than fifteen years.”

  A young couple at the next table edged slowly away from the excited old-looking man.

  “What exactly do you think they meant by ‘get it working’,” asked Justin.

  “I don’t know,” said Marcel in a low voice, “I hope it just means up and running. Fifteen years may not be long in the lifetime of Geoffrey’s pants but it passes very slowly when you are up to your scrotum in molten wax.”

  “What happens to me if you two get, well, whatever?” Justin had a worried look. Dead he may be. Dead before his time, even. But all of that and then cast into the landscape of four and a half billion souls with nothing to lose made the grim control room and the company of these two suddenly appear a cruise in the sun.

  “No idea, and at the moment having trouble giving a shit. But I can assure you, from brief exposure to your winning personality, it won’t be pleasant.” Marcel jumped to his feet, and ripped the Computer Supplies page from the Yellow Pages. “We’d better get moving.” He flicked a finger at the barrista, who had been telling him he was in big trouble now, and stormed into the warm London afternoon.

  Having proved his mettle in the psychological inferno of the poker game, Justin was given responsibility for changing the money into sterling to facilitate the purchasing of the computer equipment. Recent uproar amongst the Greeks, French, Italians, and other ancient civilisations at the consigning of their currencies to history was as nothing to Marcel’s ranting as they stuffed wads of drachma, francs, marks, guilders, and lire into a litter bin on top of the KFC cartons and plastic- wrapped dogshit.

  This still left considerable piles of notes ranging from bolivares to baht, dollars to dinar, and ringgits to rupees. They piled these at the top of the heavy sack, and Justin slung it over his shoulder.

  “I’ll come with you.” Said Marcel.

  “I’m fine, it’s not that heavy.” Justin replied.

  “I’ll come with you.” Marcel repeated.

  Justin took the bag from his shoulder and lowered it to the ground. He looked to the other two and then back at Marcel. “You don’t trust me!” he said, amazed.

  “Were you trustworthy during your life?”

  Justin opened his mouth to assert that he had been ever blameless and could be left with full confidence with the lives of your children in his hands. He closed it again, muttered, “That’s not the point.”

  “It is to me” said Marcel, “come on, let’s go and get money.” He helped Justin hoist the heavy sack and grabbed his arm to march him away.

  Mary looked at Geoffrey.

  “God, what’s with him?”

  “He can’t help it.” All the while Geoffrey flicked his head around to take everything in. “He counts his shirts when he thinks I’m asleep. He made St John leave a deposit when he borrowed our dustpan and brush.”

  They watched Justin and Marcel cross the road. On the opposite pavement two scrawny brown dogs pattered towards Justin and sniffed excitedly at his overlong trousers, but Marcel kicked them away. Mary turned to Geoffrey to comment, but he was gone.

  The Asian gentleman at Paddington Cash Converters (‘Cheques Cashed, SIMs unlocked, Bureau de Change) looked away from the one day cricket international blasting noisily on the TV above his head and peered suspiciously through reinforced glass at the two men. It was reasonable to say that in this region of London, and for the purposes of exchanging cash with no questions asked, the clientele of PCC was eclectic. It was not particularly out of the normal scheme of things therefore, for a would-be male model, slicked-back hair, clad head to toe in Armani, to park his low-skirted Ford Escort immediately outside, turn off the torture-level drum and bass and wander in to ask for a price for an horrendous 24-carat signet ring with an inset Kruggerand. Similarly, the appearance on the pockmarked linoleum of a street trader in an oversized suit would not have caused a particular second glance. Now the two had arrived together, absence of customised car notwithstanding, but also involving a sack of cash from all the nations of the world. This was easily enough to make the question as to whether or not Bangladesh would score the required eighty nine runs in seven overs with a batting powerplay still to come suddenly seem tangential.

  It was like Pandora’s sack. Every time he thought the man in the houndstooth suit had done fishing out obscure currencies, he reached back in and out came another one. Piles of notes, each one testing the capabilities of his conversion computer.

  He’d thought he would just start with the most common; the Euros, dollars, yen, and that went okay. In most cases it would have stopped there, perhaps with the odd Yuan or Riyal thrown in. Holidaymakers with a few Cypriot Pounds, Kronor for the cruisers perhaps, or if adventurous some Pesos. He counted and calculated all of those, but it didn’t stop there, not with Pandora’s sack.

  A rubber band held some crisp Vietnamese Dong, leaves of Dirhams splayed across the counter, and he had to make a telephone call to get th
e spot rate for a million Guatemalan Quetzai. At this stage he had only had to resort to rubber gloves, but when the African currency belched out of the bag he reached for the face mask and antiseptic cap. Marcel, threateningly loitering by the door (long-since locked from the inside), looked on in amazement at what could have been a doctor entering a ward of Lassa fever sufferers as he lifted from the counter rancid stacks of Angolan Kwaza, Eritrean Nafka, Angolan Kwacha, Zambian Birr, and of course filthy Dalasi from Gambia. Say what you will about Africans, but they really get life out of their banknotes.

  Justin looked into the bag to make sure they had everything. After the initial recoil at the stench from the notes recently removed, he satisfied himself that it retained only jewels and gold. He could barely believe how blasé he was about the precious items swirling in the hessian sack. He looked at the money-changer, who was removing his surgical equipment and tapping away at the computer screen. The man looked up.

  “Passport?” Justin, as a reflex, patted the pockets of his jacket and trousers. Not surprisingly, he was not rewarded with the feel of the outline of a request for passage without let or hindrance. He looked at Marcel, whose face had taken on a thunderous tinge.

  “What do you mean, passport?” said Justin, with as much vehemence as he could muster, “I just want to change the money, not travel to Mallorca.”

  “Money-laundering, mate. How did you get currency from-” he paused and looked at the piles of notes in various states of disrepair, “thirty seven countries?”