by Liz Jensen
THE PAPER
EATER
LIZ JENSEN
FOR MATTI
Contents
Dedication
Bombshell
The Festival Of Choice
A Place for Idiots
Good Morning
Betray the Customer and You Are Betraying Yourself
Welcome to Head Office
People-Work
Harbourville
The Customer Is Not Always Right
Intimacy
The Hogg Family Dynamic
Not Love
Somewhere Like Mohawk
Evil in Our Midst
Scum
Blame
On the Bridge
Liberty Day: 5 A.M.
Liberty Day 6 A.M.
Liberty Day 9 A.M.
Liberty Day 11 A.M.
Liberty Day 12 P.M.
Liberty Day 2 P.M.
Acknowledgements
A Note on the Author
By the Same Author
… Who would have thought my shrivell’d heart
Could have recovered greennesse? It was gone
Quite underground; as flowers depart
To see their mother-root, when they have blown;
Where they together
All the hard weather
Dead to the world, keep house unknown …
From ‘The Flower’ by George Herbert
The topography of the seabed consists of a circular
plateau of porous rock, two hundred kilometres in
radius, making the ocean here as shallow as a coastal
reef … it is not hard to imagine an artificial land-mass
geophysically welded to this plateau, sustaining a
society with its own infrastructure and economy. The
technology is available. But is the vision?
From an article by Gilles de Ferrer in The Oceanographer
Translated by Colin Harbutt
BOMBSHELL
If there’s one thing to be said about life in captivity, it’s that you get to travel.
Welcome aboard the Sea Hero, a former Attractionworld cruise liner rescued by the Liberty Corporation from the ship-breaker’s yard and converted at a cost of squillions into a floating fibreglass cage. Two male humans per cabin, and trans-hemispheric incarceration conditions apply. The pros of this include human-rights entitlements to craft-hobby materials and language cassettes. The cons: curtailed freedom of movement, seasickness, no smoking, and a Babel feel. Human detritus being big global business, you can be sure the profit margin looks crakko. That’s the backdrop.
The hero – me.
Bonjour. Harvey Kidd. Forty-four, balding, ink-stained and alone. Divorced, beclobbered and unfree. A defective product of society, a nobody, briefly and catastrophically catapulted to somebodydom against his will. Not a real hero, but the opposite: a coward, a human ostrich. Prone to nightmares. Sometimes I’d rather not sleep.
But I must have done last night because this morning I’m woken by a vigorous electric crackle from the tannoy. Showbiz being in Captain Malt Fishook’s blood, he doesn’t drop his bombshell right away. He introduces the concerto first.
– Hi, folks, his voice ring-a-dings through the static. Beautiful day out there. (Like bollocks. It’s grey and dank, dishwater, sea, sky like ectoplasm.) Today’s composer is Hugo Alfvèn, a Swede whose work flourished in the 1930s, particularly on cruise liners.
Fishook’s a former Attractionworld man. Like the duvet covers, he came with the ship as part of the package. You can see why a leisure conglomerate would want shot of him; there’s a side to him that would unsettle the kiddies.
– Well, Voyagers, he goes on in this global drawl he’s got. Before this morning’s musical entertainment, let me tell you that the next port of call is one that some of you know well.
A bad feeling germinates inside me. For weeks the ship’s been jazzed up with nerves, whispers, fear. Our navigational rota dictates that we ricochet from one territory to the next, so as not to stay in anyone’s back yard, and the latest rumour’s been that –
– We’re heading next, he says, for the island of Atlantica.
Boom. The rumour’s true. The bad feeling sprouts to life, like a manic fungus that blobs up in the dark. Fishook must know what kind of wounds he’s opening. What can of worms. It gets worse.
– Our arrival on the island in ten days’ time, he goes, all nonchalant, will coincide with the national festival, Liberty Day. You can hear him smile in the little pause he gives. Smell the cigar smoke as he puffs. – There’ll be fireworks, experience simulators, and a Final Adjustment, among other attractions. All the major retail outlets are offering unprecedented discounts, some of which will be available at our on-board concessions. Which as you know accept both dollars and euros. So get ready to party, folks!
John’s shape in the bunk above, like a nylon pregnancy, bulges to the left, then stiffens. A Final Adjustment, among other attractions. For a bloke on Death Row, that is not a happy thing to hear. I shudder. Us Atlanticans are all on the list, but John, being an actual killer, is right up there at the top, with the geologists and soil physicists they keep in solitary.
– So now for our Swedish concerto, goes Fishook. Happy sailing. And please – enjoy!
Then the tannoy gives a burp and some swoony music kicks in; a tricksy jazz rhythm, with big-band trumpety stuff complaining in the background. Atrocious.
My cell-mate doesn’t move. Cabin-companionis the official term. The Captain’s term. Fishook has brought with him from Attractionworld a penchant for theming, which afflicts his terminology. Voyagers. Crew. Journeys, as in, I see from my records that you are booked on a lifelong journey, Voyager. On behalf of the crew, let me welcome you aboard. Likes to hawk the lie that we’re all on a happy cruise, taking a break from the pressures of society, with him, Cap’n Malt, triumphant on the poop, superintending our romantic odyssey through the waters of the northern hemisphere. The media back home view it differently.
They call us floating scum.
Finally, John groans through the music.
– You know what that means, for me, he says.
– Not necessarily, I go.
I’m feeling jittery, ragged, claustrophobic, a bit sick. For once, I’m grateful for the musical racket dinning through the sound system.
– You’d have been notified, I say. As firmly as I can. Has Fishook called you to the bridge yet? I can’t see John’s face from here, but I guess he’s just staring moochily out of the porthole at this point. – Well, has he? I say. No.
– No, John echoes.
– Well then, I tell him. Hang on to that, is my advice.
But I leave the cabin as soon as they unlock. Experience has taught me that emotions are for losers. Feel a thing for a fellow-human and you’re dead meat.
* * *
At breakfast, the canteen is strangely silent. The Euro tables are filled up, and I spot a few stray Yanks, but the Atlantican section – more than half the canteen – is almost empty. Then word starts going round that one of the blokes in solitary, some soil physicist, has thrown a wobbly and got himself frogmarched to Dr Pappadakis, who zonked him with a jab. And that a structural engineer, helicoptered in from the island last month, started yelling out a string of mathematical equations from a porthole, then tried to chuck himself overboard. Personally, I know how to deal with my own demons. I go to the Art Room and come back with a sheaf of scrap paper to fuel what Dr Pappadakis calls my neurotic hobby.
It’s not neurosis, it’s survival, I’ve told him many times. Why not strive for numbness? He has no answer to that. Through certain techniques involving the jaw muscles, and paper, I have managed to paralyse my entire brain f
or long stretches of time.
Don’t knock it.
I make my papier mâché in the traditional way, by actually chewing the paper myself. Like most people, I can cram a page of A4 in my gob, no problem. Cooped in a cabin, a year after a certain knitting machine went haywire, I’ve had time to chew things over.
Like this: Chew, chew, chew.
Spit.
And plop, into the pulp bucket!
Loose-fibred craft paper or newspaper is undoubtedly the best material to use, but I have a range of redundant criminal dossiers to recycle. (To get technical for a moment, we’re talking upwards of ten thousand computer-sprocket pages, medium-stiff, and tolerably rich in rag content.) I began chewing paper shortly after I came on board ship, in the wake of the first Mass Readjustment. Initially, I started the chewing to keep myself from blabbing the true story of my rejection by society, but soon it developed into a comforting habit. It helped blank things out. Memories, mostly. And now, a year on, although the ink’s turned me as grey as concrete, I wouldn’t be without it.
Sometimes I read the papers, before I chew them. But sometimes I just chew them. Pages like this:
I certify that this is my own statement, that I am not an Enemy of Liberty, have no criminal record, am of sound mind, and own a loyalty card. I am aware that anything I say may be used as evidence in any forthcoming Libertycare trial of the Sect member or members. I am willing to appear as a witness of terrorism, attempted terrorism, enablement of terrorism, moral backing of terrorism, or financial compliance with terrorism. I hereby declare that I am not masquerading as anyone other than myself–––––––.
And there’s a space, for the customer to write his name. Or hers.
Mrs Tina Willets, in this case.
And who is she? An Atlantican. A model customer. Nobody.
Chew, chew, chew.
Spit.
And plop!
At the end of each session, I swallow a mouthful. I need the roughage.
There are hordes of customers like Mrs Willets who feel invisible and unheard. As a certain woman once showed me, the daily human impulses of every man, woman and child on the island – from religious cravings to retail habits – can be plotted on a graph. As a junior associate, she processed some of the figures herself.
Chew, chew, chew.
There is much to be said for routine. A man with a well-designed timetable is in control of at least part of his destiny, isn’t he. Aeons ago, when I lived in a white semi with a green door in Gravelle Road, South District, Harbourville, I always ran business to a strict timetable. I had to. In my unique line of work, if you missed the opening of a stock market, or the renewal date for a passport, or the deadline for a payment, you were history. Every job has its occupational hazards, and fraud’s no exception.
My circumstances dictate that my timetable is different now, though it still involves paperwork.
Of a kind.
After masticating each mouthful sixty times (the enzymes in saliva play a big role, I discovered in the ship’s Education Station, where I am a regular visitor) – after doing that, I spit the pulp into a green plastic bucket (capacity, five litres), and when it’s half-full, I pour in two litres of hot tap-water and stir. Then I leave my raw material to soak overnight, and the next day gloop the pulp out into my small storage vat. Next I add certain specific quantities of whitewood glue, flour, wallpaper paste, and oil of cloves. Then I whisk it with a metal hand-whisk. This part’s important, to achieve the right consistency. The finer the pulp, the stronger the paper paste. John calls this mixture my cud. There are short-cut, gimcrack methods. You can buy the kind of cat-litter that consists of recycled newspaper pellets, which you soak in water, before adding the other ingredients. Or you can get hold of so-called ‘craft kits’. Or wood pulp. But as I explained at length to Dr Pappadakis, I believe in using authentic materials in the time-honoured way. Actually, being detained as an Enemy of Liberty, I don’t have any choice.
Paper has played a large part in my life.
It’s because of paper that I’m here.
Chew, chew, chew.
Spit. And plop!
* * *
As cabins go, this is the usual meat-and-two-veg. Standard bunks, a toilet cubicle, a wash-basin. A fold-out table, for meals and craft activities. A shelf laden with my homemade chess-pieces, and the knick-knacks we’ve accumulated between us, my cabin companion and I. Duvets on the bunks, with Attractionworld designs on the covers. This month I have the Funky Chicken. John has Stegoman.
It’s the last day of July, according to the Alpine calendar John’s stuck to the wall. If it weren’t for these boxed months, with snow-capped mountain ranges behind, you’d have no way of telling that it’s been a year since we left Atlantica. When you’re on a ship, there’s no sense of seasons. Back home, the year had a natural retail rhythm, with Christmas giving way to the January sales, followed by Valentine Week, Mother’s Day, Easter, Father’s Day, the Silly Season, Liberty Day, Back to Skool, then Hallowe’en, the pre-Christmas season, Christmas itself and then the whole shebang again.
You knew where you were. And now in ten days’ time –
Don’t think. Head in the sand. Chew!
– Ugh, John goes, picking up his embroidery. He’s a needlework man.
John and I, we’ve been together a month.
If I’m short and squat, which as a matter of fact I am, then he’s the opposite: a towering, scary man, lumpy-featured. He’s a murderer, or so the story goes – though you never know who’s truly guilty here. You won’t hear the Sect mentioned except by the new arrivals. And they soon learn. John has glinty little eyes like chinks in a wall, and a talent to hone in on weakness, which gives weight to the rumour that he bullied three of his neighbours into a suicide pact.
We have our arguments over my papier mâché industry. He claims it turns his stomach to see me sitting here in my thermal vest, masticating. And sometimes he’ll give me a grim look and try on his special blindfold, the one he’s planning to wear for what he’s now calling the Big Fry-Up. But we have more in common than you might think.
– Do you support capital punishment?
That was the first question he asked me, when he came to join me in the cabin, after the previous bloke, Kogevinas, got transferred to the half-way facility on Gibraltar. Not Hi, John’s the name, or So gimme five, mate, or anything normal. It threw me.
– Capital punishment, no, I told him.
– Torture, then? he goes.
Now he had me there. You see, I’d been thinking in some detail about this issue, and I’d decided that some people deserved to be tortured, psychologically, for their crimes. An eye for an eye, a psyche for a psyche. Plus a little physical discomfort doesn’t go amiss. I was thinking of my own personal torturer, Wesley Pike, of course, and the ways I’d like to fuck with his head and cause him grief if I got the chance. Call me childish, but what I’d do is I’d shut him in a glass box, stopper his larynx, make him wear special confusing glasses, and stuff bat-shit up his nostrils. I’d make him drink salted lemonade from a baby’s bottle. I’d smear him with chilli-oil and jeer at his dick. When you’re cooped in a cabin, you find yourself having thoughts like that. Quite normal. So when John asked me for my views on torture, I found myself hesitating.
– I said torture, he goes. You oppose capital punishment. We’ve established that. But are you in favour of torture?
– Under certain circumstances, I confessed, I have to admit I am.
He thumped me on the back, then, hard. I was frightened for a moment, given his reputation as a man specialising in unprovoked violence, but it turned out the gesture was friendly.
– Correct answer, he said.
Torture became an issue we returned to often, after that. It was the nearest we had to common ground. He was an expert on the physical side of it. I favoured discussing the psychological. We’d talk for hours, sometimes, playing the game first developed in a children’s playground, so
metime in the fifteenth century probably, the game called Which Would You Prefer?
This is how it goes.
– Which would you prefer, I’d ask, for example, standing in a vat of rancid margarine watching all the forcies who ever nicked you making love to your ex-wife – and her enjoying it, or having to listen on headphones to two hundred hours of Così fan tutte played backwards at ninety decibels and at the wrong speed?
– Watching the wife, John might decide, and hoping she’d shag herself to death. And which would you prefer, being boiled alive, or being forced to eat nothing but your own excrement until you died of salmonella?
– Boiled alive, I’d say. Quicker. Which would you prefer, seeing your favourite weathercaster skewered through the liver, or –
You get the picture.
– D’you reckon they put us together as a form of torture then, mate? John said after lunch, as I sat down to work. Because you sure as fuck drive me round the twist. Prisoner 1-0-0-8-7, guaranteed to have you howling at the moon within twenty-four hours or your money back. That Malt Fucking Fishook.
You shouldn’t have applied for a transfer, then, dung for brains, I thought, but I didn’t say anything. I can’t, when my mouth’s full.
Then he changed tack.
– You’ll be sorry when I’m gone.
He was smoothing out his blindfold. He’s embroidering plastic pearls and little glittery sequins on it – an elaborate task for such a hulk, about as unlikely as a walrus filling vol-au-vent cases.
– Believe me, he went, charred remains are no substitute for the live version.
Miss him? You must be joking. He tried on the blindfold, and the sequins winked at me.
– See no evil, he said.
I kept on chewing. Fifty-five, fifty-six, fifty-seven.
Speak no evil, I thought, chewing.
Fifty-eight, fifty-nine, sixty.
Spit.
And plop, into the bucket.
Atlantica, Atlantica.
Some dark chronological force has dictated that today, twenty-four hours after Fishook’s bombshell, should be John’s birthday. My cell-mate is fifty. Looks sixty. Acts eight.
