The Paper Eater

by Liz Jensen

  – So they’re a business really, I concluded. A family business.

  The paperwork was my salvation, because slowly, the Hogg family’s transactions, which represented real money, persuaded her to imagine a set of scales, with my financial wizardry weighed against my possible madness. The dosh won out, and I thanked my lucky stars it did. When I asked her to marry me, she said could she think about it for a while. Then one week, two days and five hours later she said yes.

  I was over the moon. At last, I was going to be a normal bloke after that bad beginning I’d had. Not only did I have a girlfriend, I was going to keep her! That’s what marriage is, isn’t it? Having someone exclusively?

  I was wrong there as it turned out.

  I’ve wondered many times since then what Gwynneth thought about during those nine days and five hours when she was making up her mind to marry me. Was it because she was self-employed at the time, doing nail extensions, and needed someone to sort her paperwork? Was it because she wanted to get away from the boring parents, the arrogant brother, and the sister who attacked her with taramasalata? Was it because she loved me and wanted to stay with me for ever, forsaking all others?

  All I know is, things seemed fine. They really did.

  And then, not long after our marriage, something started to buckle and turn hopeless. Sex is always one of those dodgy things, isn’t it? I’m no expert, I’ll be the first to admit, but for every high, it strikes me, there seems to be a low. A sort of depression, even. Things were fine, to begin with – no, more than fine, they were crakko! We’d go at it with gusto, in that bedroom of mine with the dressing-table that had the angled mirror that, if you accidentally opened your eyes, reflected interesting parts of the anatomy as you were doing it. But then one day, soon after we’d bought the house in Gravelle Road, things went wrong. Just like that.

  One minute we were at it, the next she’d wriggled off, leaving me bobbing about in thin air like a divining rod. She turned to me with this fierce and frightening light in her mother-of-pearl eyes. Angry tears glittered at their edges, then spurted to her cheeks.

  – You were thinking about someone else just then, weren’t you?

  How do women discover these things? Telepathic surveillance? We’d been married less than a year.

  I covered my poor vulnerable genitals with the nearest thing to hand – a foam-filled slipper in the shape of a lobster. We had matching pairs, twenty dollars from Dreamworld.

  – No I wasn’t, I go.

  – Yes you were.

  Impasse.

  – Gwynn, I beg, pulling her back towards me with my free hand.

  – It’s her, isn’t it? she says. You were thinking of her, weren’t you?

  – Who? I go, like I don’t know.

  She blushed. She didn’t want to say it, she was ashamed of even thinking it, I guess.

  – Her, she mutters.

  We both stare at the bulgy lobster slipper. It’s got these nylon feelers.

  – Lola. Your sister.

  – No! I say, with force.

  At least it’s the truth. I haven’t been thinking of my sister.

  – I swear on my life, I say. I was not!

  Actually, I was thinking of my mum.

  The telepathic surveillance thing must have kicked in again, at that point, because Gwynneth’s look turned to disbelief, then horror. Then revulsion.

  – God, Harvey, she murmurs. So it’s even worse than I thought.

  What could I say, except sorry?

  We argued about the ethics of it for weeks after that. She went out every night, without me, on the razzle, and came home with wide, wild eyes and lemon Hooch on her breath. Sometimes, as she trundled about the kitchen liquidising tinned fruit and slamming cupboard doors, she’d call me a ‘pathetic worm’ and a ‘sicko’. But fantasising about the female members of my family was more a question of habit than malice, I pleaded. And anyway, it wasn’t as though they were there in the flesh, as true-life rivals to Gwynneth.

  – Look, you know I don’t have any experience of relationships! I pleaded. I’ve had to make it up as I go along!

  But that only riled her more.

  – It’s them or me, she’d say when we were in bed, and turn her back on me, her smoky hair fanning on the pillow. You decide.

  – It’s you, I went. It’s you!

  – Then drop the Hogg family, she said. If you don’t – exorcise them – then I’m leaving you. You watch. One day you’ll see my bum shrinking, and it won’t be Weightwatchers, it’ll be me going like thattaway. Outa here. Gone.

  But when you hear a threat repeated more than a few times, you realise it’s going nowhere. Which was just as well, because by then Gwynneth was pregnant. I’d read in True You about women’s hormones. It makes them weepy, having an embryo inside them. She cried when she told me. But I was thrilled. Thrilled! A family, at last!

  – You want me to keep it then? she asked, snuffling into a Wet One.

  What a question! When I came to put my arm round her, she sort of crumpled.

  – Of course I do! I said. Of course!

  I was completely baffled. Why on earth wouldn’t I want a baby?

  – You know I’ve always wanted a family, Gwynneth! I’m longing to be a dad!

  I couldn’t work out why she seemed so grateful about that.

  The house in Gravelle Road was on the new estate near the site that was to become the purification zone. The road was actually going to be called Gravel Road, because the planners had put gravel on it. But they changed it to Gravelle to give it class. Another example of their imagination: it was on the junction with Tarre Street, near Pension Road. Anyway, it was a semi-detached with good feng shui, and we used the money from my family business to buy it. It was an up-and-coming area.

  The property market wobbled for a while, when the Liberty Corporation was voted in, and work began on the waste crater which was going to feed directly into the porous rock on the seabed below and kick-start the economy. There were voices of dissent, I remember, but after a while you stopped hearing from the geologists and things went ahead. Once the economic success trickled down to us customers, living close to the source of Atlantica’s wealth suddenly became a positive plus, real-estate-wise. It was similar to being parked near any big man-made structure – like the Taj Mahal, I guess, or an Egyptian pyramid. I’d voted for the Libertycare package myself, I should say at this point. I was personally all for it. The fewer humans to screw things up the better, in my view. Plus I had a hunch that it would be good for trade, and I wasn’t wrong. The average Atlantican didn’t need much convincing. We’d always been willing to give new ideas a whirl. If a free sample came through the door, we’d try it. No one was sorry to see the death of politics.

  Gwynneth chose a cherry theme for the lounge, and we went for marble-effect in the kitchen, with inset halogens above the hob. I installed a power shower in the bathroom and drilled holes for hooks where she said.

  The new ‘hands-free’ system was even better news for me, business-wise, than I’d dared to hope, because by the time Liberty was servicing Atlantica, my fraud network was practically invisible. I even began to feel that, in my own small way, I was contributing something to society. If you’d asked me to put my finger on what, exactly, I might have had trouble, but I know that as Atlantica began to thrive I felt I was playing a role in keeping the economy buzzing.

  As Gwynneth had builders come in and make a couple of alcoves in the hall, so she could put little fibreglass cherubs in there, backlit, and as I ordered turf, I began to feel proud of the way Atlantica was turning its fortunes around with the purification thing. When I was a kid, the rest of the world had looked on us with scorn. To live on reclaimed land was similar, in world terms, to inhabiting a trailer park. Atlantica was one of those forgotten places before; too small for the media to bother with, too remote for tourism. We had no role to play.

  No one can say that about the kidneys of the northern hemisphere, can
they?

  Thanks to Atlantica’s unique combination of porous bedrock and porous landfill, no container would be turned away. All waste – be it industrial, organic, or nuclear – would be welcome, no questions asked. That was a pledge.

  Gwynneth hesitated for a long time over the kitchen tiles, and eventually settled for a mock terracotta that was easier to maintain than real terracotta, and you couldn’t tell the difference unless you were an expert, plus it was wipe-clean and low-maintenance.

  Once the crater was functioning, the first thing we noticed was the climate change right on our doorstep. Gwynneth’s window-boxes went ape. We planted a banana tree on either side of the patio area, and her mum gave us a bougainvillaea. There are certain water creatures that do what Atlantica does, I thought one day as I gazed across at the zone from the Osaka Snak Attak, where I sometimes went for noodles. You pass muck through them, and they decontaminate it, send it back into the atmosphere, the filth strained out. It makes you feel proud.

  – You should come and visit, Gwynneth urged her cousins in Canada. They’re calling us the Hong Kong of the Atlantic. It’s a shoppers’ paradise!

  The weeks passed. Gwynneth battled with morning sickness and gave the spare room a makeover in the acid palette that was the big thing at the time. The Canadians came, and saw, and were impressed. They left with bulging suitcases.

  Soon Atlantica was dealing in human waste too. I had no objection: commerce is commerce. The floating penitentiaries thrived. Those were honeymoon times. The world brought its problems to Atlantica, and Atlantica – a geophysical miracle! A tiny artificial land-mass in the middle of bloody nowhere! – fixed them.

  But if things were going well for our little island state, they were going from bad to worse for Harvey Kidd as a family man – bougainvillaea or no bougainvillaea. The friendly lull we’d had after Gwynneth told me she was pregnant didn’t last. Always, as I headed back home from the Happy Eater or the Snak Attak, I knew there’d be grief waiting. As soon as I walked in the door and made for the Family Room, Gwynneth, her belly footballing bigger every day, would start up again.

  She never accepted the family. And she particularly hated the surname Hogg. An ugly name, she said. And it was true. It was an accident of paperwork, I told her, I didn’t choose it. When you’re constructing an identity from a set of laundered birth certificates you’ve –

  Well, it was like talking to the wall.

  Some couples just rub along together, as far as I can tell. Not us. Mum, Dad, Uncle Sid, Cameron and Lola remained a big problem in our marriage, even after Tiffany was born. It emerged that one of the Canadian cousins had nosy-parked his way into my Family Room when I was out, and seen what he called my pin-ups. That hadn’t helped, to have Gwynneth’s prejudices confirmed by a third party.

  I didn’t watch the birth, because Gwynneth told me the Customer Hotline advised not to, but I saw her minutes later. Boy, was she a funny creature. She had a grumpy face and grown-up ears, and when she grabbed on to my finger with her tiny hand with its tiny perfect nails, I fell in love. I’d never had a pet and had always wanted one but this was miles better, I could tell. I had founded a family! A real one!

  – It’s Daddy, I told her. Say hello to Dad!

  But Gwynneth said I was talking too loud and it’d make Tiffany cry, plus she’d catch a chill, and what did I think I was doing, leaving the door open, and couldn’t I see I’d give her all sorts of germs, and they say the father should keep his distance in the first year. And she shooed me away.

  – Go and make money, she said. Go pow-wow with your Hoggs. You’re earning for three now.

  That was the beginning of it, and it didn’t stop. It was Gwynneth’s way of getting back at me for the Hoggs. If I was going to have my own private family members, she was going to have hers.

  – You can’t argue with the logic of it, she told me.

  And she was right, I couldn’t.

  So I did what I knew how to do; I made money, and Gwynneth spent it. She dressed Tiffany in little themed outfits and changed our three-piece suite once a year. She bought novelty garlic-crushers, garden rakes, designer sweatshirts, the same kind of shoes in three different colours, travelling irons, espresso machines, teak coffee tables, opaque plastic salad bowls, self-seeding window-boxes, holidays for her and her mum and Tiffany in Ghana or Lanzarote, bathroom makeovers and exercise videos. She bought wedding presents for her friends when they got married, and sympathy lunches when they divorced, and took Tiffany to Florida for her fifth birthday, to swim with dolphins. When Tiffany was nine, they both joined the Feel Real Club and started doing parachute descents and bungee jumps and white-water rafting.

  And Tiff was a crakko little kid. I’d watch her out of the window wobbling about on her big bike and feel these huge waves of love.

  But me and Gwynneth, we were always dogged by the same old conflict that we dragged around behind us like a ball and chain: money versus the Hoggs. You couldn’t have one without the other, as far as I was concerned. She disagreed. Like all regular arguments, ours took the form of a vicious circle.

  – I just want you to get rid of that family, Gwynneth’d say.

  – But it’s a family business, I’d go. And what would we live on? Thin air?

  Then she’d say something like – You could find a proper job. You’re clever with paperwork, you can do computers and admin and whatever. You could do anything.

  And I’d say – I’m not trained. I’m self-employed. I can’t have a boss, it’s against my nature.

  And she’d say – Well if you don’t, I’m leaving.

  – And Tiffany? I’d go.

  – I just want you to get rid of them, she’d go.

  – And what would we live on? Thin air? I’d go.

  – You could find a proper job, she’d go.

  Etc.

  It would be fair to say that I frustrated Gwynneth. When Tiffany was about ten, she persuaded me to see a stress-management consultant called Geoff, whose sister’s nails she did. I’d sit there in his sissy consulting-room that stank of aromatherapy, trying to understand what Geoff called my ‘demons’, and listening to his suggestions. Such as, I could take Gwynneth to the Odeon once a week. Buy her flowers that came from a proper florist’s. Stop trying to muscle in on her relationship with her daughter.

  Geoff’s stress-management consultancy didn’t strike me as a particularly professional service. His bookshelves were stuffed with creepy self-improvement manuals, and he banged on zealously about a weed called St John’s wort, ‘for moods’.

  What I couldn’t get through to Geoff was the idea that there was nothing wrong with being loyal to your original family, and enjoying their company. I told him how fantastic Mum was: how well she’d always cooked, how much she loved me. I told him about Dad, and what a great, straight guy he’d been, full of sound advice to a boy growing up. About Uncle Sid, always game for a laugh. About how clever Cameron was, and how Lola had the boys falling over themselves because of her animal magnetism.

  But like Gwynneth, Mr Stress seemed to have a blind spot about the whole subject.

  Atlantica, Atlantica.

  The next nightmare’s even worse. Me, Mum, Dad, Sid, Lola and Cameron, we’re at Liberty Head Office, walking down corridors and up escalators, searching for a certain woman. I have to see her again, I have things to tell her, things I couldn’t say when we were together, because there wasn’t time and I didn’t have the words, things about how if only we could’ve had a shot at living a normal life, as normal as you can when you’re people like us, who have trouble saying things, so much trouble that it’s only in your head you can do it … But the words get mangled up and the corridors go on for ever and –

  – Wait!

  My sister Lola has stopped in her tracks. She turns to face us.

  – I know where she is! she says. We’ve been looking in the wrong place! Hannah Park doesn’t work here any more.

  – So where is she? I go.

/>   As I wake, a freezing wave slaps across my heart and I remember the pure white concrete of the crater.

  * * *

  – Bad night then? asks John, after Fishook has tannoyed his morning message. The Swedish music is sweeping through us like a chilly wind. – You were talking in your sleep, you were.

  – I’ll sleepwalk next, I warned him. Come and strangle you. I’d have indemnity. I read an article about it. You can do anything you like, if you’re unconscious.

  – You were saying someone’s name, he goes. It sounded like Park.

  – It wasn’t a name then, I said quickly, busking it. It was about parking.

  He looked doubtful.

  – I have two types of dream, I said. Sky dreams, which are about flying through the sky with my family, and dreams about parking. Which are about parking.

  That seemed to satisfy him.

  Later in the day, he said – Multi-storey, or kerbside? and I said – Both.

  You try to paralyse your brain with chewing, keep things on an even keel, but then something comes along, and you can’t. Like now. The news of our return to Atlantica I could have handled. But on top of it John’s execution, and the letter, and then a certain woman nightmaring her way back –

  Well, there are limits, aren’t there. So I’m helter-skeltering to Dr Pappadakis now. I’m not the first to request a visit. He’s seeing Atlanticans at five-minute intervals. As Garcia opens the door to let me out I try to avoid looking at his chunky jaw, his long front teeth.

  – You stay walk on red line, he says. Or I no hesitate shoot, hokay?

  On the way to the surgery, Garcia follows five paces behind like a traditional Japanese wife, apart from the stun-gun. As I pass the mirror on the poop, I catch sight of a squat, balding grey man. It’s always a shock seeing the colour. Like concrete. It’s as if my skin’s dyed from the inside. I drag my eyes away, but not before noting that my face has changed shape since I last saw it. My cheeks have become so muscular they now look like the buttocks of a male ballet dancer. I shudder. Bulging spheres in grey tights. Swan Lake. My tongue is black.