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

by Peter Empringham

  Twenty Two

  Two things had affected Mary the previous night. The first was the sight of Slaven holding the terrified young man in front of the approaching black cab. He had seemed indifferent to the possibility of the man’s death. Slaven’s appearance, smart, tall, rimless glasses, could have portrayed him as an accountant, a doctor, a Member of Parliament. She had seen the look on his face, however, as he held his victim; a grim calmness that told that he would have allowed the collision with no conscience.

  This was the man who, if she didn’t find a way to stop whatever his plans may be, would be a new presence in the Afternet Control Room. In the time she had been there, she had watched Marcel change. When she first arrived, he was distant, with an air of superiority and unconcern, patronising when he did bother to talk to her. He had in general behaved appallingly towards Geoffrey, and had an air of menace and suppressed violence that suffused the atmosphere.

  Much had changed, she thought, when they had been in trouble in Devil’s Docks, and Marcel had to make a decision as to whether to go back and rescue Geoffrey, who was being casually immolated. It was as if the Frenchman had suddenly recognised something like affection for his companion of a couple of centuries. He hid it, but his insults and threats seemed more offhand, as if he was having to remind himself to do something mildly nasty from time to time.

  And then there was last night, and the second thing that had affected her. She sat in the café on that following morning and watched him devour the ‘Double Giant English Breakfast’. He had been remarkably bouncy that morning, considering his consumption the previous night, and was now happily mopping up egg yolk with a piece of fried bread.

  “God, I’m starving.” He said, spearing a sausage. “I wonder what this thing is supposed to taste like?” She considered trying to describe the taste of a sausage, but could only come up with ‘like a sausage’ and decided to change the subject.

  “ Do you remember what you said to me last night?” He looked up, finished chewing.

  “Which bit?” he said.

  ‘Well, yes, there was quite a lot, and a lot of it not making much sense. But the part I’m thinking of is where you said that meeting me had made you think of women differently, and that you wondered what might have happened if we had met when we were both alive.”

  He put down his knife and fork, and looked side to side a little nervously.

  “I said that?”

  She nodded. He looked down to the table for a moment and then back up to Mary.

  “I think that stuff went to my head a bit. Don’t you say strange things when you’re drunk?”

  She could have admitted that she did, and that this wouldn’t have been the first time she had fallen for what appeared to be an advance made to her by a man under the influence of something or other. Mary had noticed, though, that Marcel had sought her company more and more often when stone cold sober in the Control Room.

  “There’s a saying here. ‘In vino veritas’. I’m not sure what the equivalent is for pot, but I guess the implication is the same.”

  Marcel seemed to have found something really interesting in the scraps left on his plate, and spent a few seconds rearranging them.

  “Look Mary.” These were words, and a tone, she recognised. They were usually followed by suggestions of a need for space, a desire for time alone, on occasion the revelation of a wife and family.

  “You wouldn’t have wanted to meet me when I was alive, or at least not if you didn’t want to be hurt. And I mean hurt. So that part isn’t a great offer. But between you and me, since I found out that Slaven was after my seat, I’ve had quite a bit of time to think. Not just about what horrors I might go back to, but also some of the things I might actually miss.” It was clear to Mary that Marcel was uncomfortable at having this kind of personal conversation. He fidgeted, picked up cutlery, condiments, put them down again, looked anywhere but at her face. But then he did just that.

  “You’re one of them.” He said. “One of the biggest, in fact.” She felt a tightening in her stomach. She waited for him, hoping he was going to go on, maybe be a touch clearer: she had a long track record of misreading.

  “If we stop this guy, we should go out somewhere. Amazing number of restaurants amongst the walking dead.”

  Put like that, it didn’t sound the most attractive offer she had ever heard, but then they weren’t living in Kensington. She very much liked the idea, though. She smiled at him, and he picked up his fork and pointed it at her.

  “You’ll have to dump War, though.” He said.

  Jenkin was close to finishing his handiwork. The system he had broken into was highly complex, and as much as anything, his time had been taken in understanding what it was doing, rather than how to make it do what he wanted. This world of financial speculation was complex beyond belief, and although he may have had a genius for subverting computer programmes, he couldn’t achieve his goal if he couldn’t get some kind of grasp of the activities being managed.

  For a sixteen year old, the labyrinth investment bankers had invented was mind-boggling. He had assumed that they simply traded shares in companies, as his GCSE Economics had suggested, but that was just the start. They traded debt. They bundled debt and traded the bundles. They insured against the failure of the bundles and then traded the insurance. Then they wrapped all of that together with a bit of salt and pepper, mixed well, and took bets on what flavour they might get.

  This had made his objective considerably harder to achieve. What had started out as a naïve idea that he would put in a couple of glitches, and head back to the afterworld, had become a task of hours of concentration day after day. And all the while, in the lounge, the TV bellowed out its raucous cans of laughter and exhortations to buy, Christmas tunes inveigling their way into every offer. When Jenkin took a break, Slaven stared at him with complete contempt, slumped on the sofa, lips moving in some silent vitriol.

  Now he was almost there, and when this was done, he could get this man to take him back, and he could just get on with whatever future death had in store for him.

  Slaven came to the door of his room, and leaned against the frame, hands in pockets.

  “How long do you need? I’m getting very, very bored.”

  The youth looked up from his computer. Empty cans of Red Bull littered the bed and the floor. Although it was early afternoon, the previous few days’ sunshine had been replaced with a heavy grey. It was still cold, but oppressive, and sucking the colour from the twinkling lights which hung across the streets and in the shop windows.

  “Tonight. I’ll be finished tonight.”

  “About time. I’d forgotten how much I hate this time of year. Stupid people, crap all over each other all year and then suddenly full of cheap love. They’re all miserable because they owe so much money, and their solution is to borrow more and spend it on some toy that no-one needs. And it’s all going to go tits up and they deserve every minute of the misery coming their way.”

  Jenkin was only really bothered about the misery coming one particular person’s way, and couldn’t share Slaven’s enthusiasm for widespread unhappiness. He knew for sure that whoever was in Slaven’s company for any length of time was going to have a pretty bad time of it, in any case.

  “I’m going out for a coffee or something, this place is driving me mad,” said the older man, “get on with it, get it finished, and do not leave this hotel room.” He pulled himself upright from the doorframe and walked slowly out. Jenkin watched him go and then lifted himself from the bed to go into the lounge and turn off the television which was shrieking the benefit of buying some piece of unnecessary technology.

  Slaven walked through the lobby into the coffee shop that stood at one end of the ground floor of the hotel. He ordered something which had a fine title but which he knew he would not enjoy and took it to a window table, the better to exercise his hatred of mankind en masse. He stirred the frothy drink and gazed out to the wet street, watching the consta
nt stream of passers-by.

  He had sunk into a kind of self-hypnotic stupor, but even so, the noise from the next table pulled him back inside the room with a start. There were two young women talking excitedly in a foreign language, their hands flying in all directions as they laughed loudly at each other’s words. He glared across the small gap between the tables, realising as he did so that the two young women were not only exceedingly attractive, but also identical.

  “Sorry.” Said one of them. She had a heavy accent, probably Italian or Spanish, he thought. “Are we very noisy?” Well, yes, and the café was empty, so why sit next to him? He wasn’t looking for conversation, though, so smiled weakly and shook his head.

  “I think we are. “ she insisted. “But this is the first time I have seen my sister for many months.” They laughed in what may have been an engaging way to some.

  “I am Lisa, and this is my sister Paola. Do you live here?” Slaven had the feeling he was not going to get away with ignoring them, and they were at least pretty. And not Jenkin.

  “No, I’m just staying here for a while. Where are you from?”

  He’d opened Pandora’s Box. They chatted on, finishing each other’s sentences, and laughing as though they were the first identical twin comedians. They got his name. He wouldn’t say where he was from. They were from Valencia. One studying in London, the other living at home. Both single, love British men. So cold here. And then, party tonight, why don’t you come? Lots of girls going. They wouldn’t know anyone else. Why not come with them?

  “I don’t know, really.” He said. Oh please, please. One of them, Lisa or Paola, he hadn’t really been paying attention, wrote an address in East Acton on a napkin. She handed it over and the two of them stood up.

  “We must go. Christmas shopping. We’ll see you tonight, yes?” His head was at the height of two identical groins.

  “Maybe” he said, inter-existence man of mystery.

  They walked off, turning at the door to wave and titter. Slaven pocketed the napkin and turned to stare at his untouched latte, returning to his thoughts of how much he hated the season.

  The TV in the room that evening only confirmed the emotion. Jenkin was in his bedroom, door ajar, hopefully (as far as Slaven was concerned) putting the finishing touches to whatever his mission may be. He had skimmed the channels, but even if he found something he could bear to watch, along came the commercials. Endless jingling of bells, terrible sweaters, lovey-dovey families, smiling faces of children rewarded for their mere existence with something their family couldn’t afford. Christ would have had a lot to answer for if this had had anything to do with him.

  So he watched one of the few channels without advertisements (the other was showing snooker, which had to be some kind of torture), and was slumped on the sofa trying to figure out why it was called ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’. Clarence, the guardian angel, looked like no angel he had ever had the misfortune to meet, and the saccharine kids were driving him mad with their tears and cooing. He might have felt it was somewhat passé to identify with Potter as much as he did. He was virtually cheering him on to break the Building & Loan and cast the town into penury. It was at the apogee of his nausea, as a bell rang and the sickeningly sweet Zuzu proclaimed that an angel had got his wings that he realised another bell was ringing in the room.

  The music was swelling from the TV speakers as he finally identified that the noise was coming from a telephone (and not that a plague of angels were flapping their new appendages somewhere).

  “Hello?”

  “Hi! Slevern!”

  “Slaven.”

  “What I said. It’s Paola.” There was a pause, and noises off. “And Lisa. We’re going to the party! Are you coming to look after us?” Giggling echoed through the handset. He looked to the window and the dark outside, the door to Jenkin’s room holding in a fetid atmosphere, the TV, its’ greys and soaring strings.

  “Well, I don’t know. I kind of have something I’m supposed to do.”

  “Oh, Slevern! We can’t go alone. We can’t be trusted! We would be soooo grateful if you come and be our guardian angel.” More tittering, but aside from his sudden picture of himself as Clarence Odbody, going with them trumped sitting here by some distance. Paola continued to chatter into his ear as he looked at the slightly opened door to Jenkin’s room.

  His instructions had been clear. He was escorting a minor back to life, and there was no way of predicting what behaviour in the minor that may engender. He was to stay close, watch him like a hawk, ease him through his project and bring him back, with minimal impact on the surrounding existences. Had he not been dead, this would have been on pain of death, but since he was, it was on pain of a great deal of pain.

  Jibber, jabber in his ear. Slim, nubile young Spanish women yearning for his company. The boy was fixed to his laptop. What could go wrong?

  “Give me a minute, I’ll be down.” He said, to a chorus of woo-hoos.

  Slaven eased the bedroom door open. In a very short time, Jenkin had managed to turn his living area into an archetype of a teenage room, despite the efforts of the cleaners. It looked like it was occupied by an inconsiderate Crocodile Dundee.

  “If I go out for a while,” Slaven said, staring at the hunched figure on the bed, “you need to stay in this room. Believe me, I’ll know if you go anywhere.”

  The youth managed the supreme effort of lifting his eyes from the screen.

  “Do what you like. I want to get out of here tomorrow, so I need to finish this.”

  “You stay here, you understand?”

  “Whatever.” The eyes were already returned to the entrancing screen.

  Slaven turned from the bedroom, picked up his jacket and walked from the hotel suite. In the reception area, the twins were almost beside themselves with excitement that he had deigned to accompany them to the party. He hadn’t felt such adoration since he had convinced his followers to drink the poison that would transport them to heaven. They linked arms with him, one on either side, and began chattering.

  It may well be a truism, albeit not a particularly useful one, that a man with an attractive female Spanish identical twin on each arm has diminished powers of observation. Certainly Confucius wouldn’t have wasted his time on stating something quite so obvious, but it was an assumption on which others had based their master plan. And for them it worked out well, because Slaven didn’t notice the man in several layers of skiwear peel away from the concierge desk to fall in behind their departure. Neither did he pay any attention to the young woman who waited until he had revolved out of the door and stepped jauntily down the street before she put down the pamphlet on The National Cheese Museum and walked slowly towards the lifts.

  Jenkin hadn’t told Slaven that he had actually finished his work. Well, finished but for the instruction to go. The thousands of lines of code he had written were embedded into the system of Lion Marshall Investment Bank, and through it, into the systems of clearing houses and banking systems throughout the world. For the last few hours he had been taking Grimsby Town past Liverpool, Manchester City, and Wolverhampton Wanderers into the final of the FA Cup. With Slaven gone for the foreseeable, he could turn up the sound and savour the Wembley experience as his charges sought silverware against the old enemy, Manchester United.

  He had procured, from the minibar, three cans of Coke, a packet of Planters, a Yorkie, and a plastic container of Coco Pops, which, when opened, contained its own sachet of milk. ‘Brain food’ he thought. He turned up the volume, and the disembodied voice of John Motson rose over the synthetic cheers of the crowd to describe the scene of the teams walking out into the famous stadium. This was going to be fantastic.

  The doorbell rang. At first he thought he must be mistaken, but then it happened again. He looked at the screen, where his avatar team was preparing to kick off. He paused the programme and hauled himself away from the nutrition scattered around him on the bed to shuffle reluctantly towards the door.

 
It was a woman. She was as tall as him, wearing a long padded black coat. Her skin was pale brown, and she had unruly shoulder length jet-black hair. She smiled at him.

  “I didn’t order anything.” He said.

  “Good, because I didn’t bring anything.” She smiled. Now he was lost.

  “What do you want, then?”

  “I need to talk to you, Jenkin. My name’s Mary. I’m a friend of Ron and Ethel.” It took him a moment to figure out who she may be talking about. He had become attuned to this plane and to hear mention of those he had met on the other side temporarily discombobulated him. “Can I come in?”

  Jenkin thought for a moment, figured that no-one was likely to invent a connection with a couple of dead people, and opened the door to let her pass through.

  Slaven didn’t listen to the non-stop chatter from either side of him as the trio marched purposefully through the streets of East London. He did breathe in, though, and together with the cool air, the twins’ perfume had made him a little heady, so that he took no notice of where they guided him. The streets were slick with rain, and Christmas lights glittered and flashed above and around them as they hurried on. It was late evening and so the streets weren’t busy; everyone was already either at home or in the pubs and restaurants enjoying seasonal celebrations. Even with the sparsity of the footfall on the roads, Slaven paid no attention to Marcel, wrapped in layers of warm clothing, following fifty yards behind.

  At length they turned into a street in East Acton full of identical houses of bow-front houses. Cars lined every inch of either side of the road. The girls led him up a short path to a door with a row of bells. That was by far the shortest of the garden paths up which he would be led that evening.

  Having been buzzed into the house, they were welcomed at the top of the stairs by a long-haired man with liquid eyes and long, lank hair. He gazed at them like a spaniel wanting a walk.

  “Oh, hi man. Hi chicks. Party’s just getting going, come on in and take the weight off.” They followed him down a short corridor to a room from which darkness seemed to emanate, along with a blast of musical noise. The girls went in and he could hear a squeal, as though they had chanced upon a winning lottery ticket.