The Paper Eater

by Liz Jensen

  – Your entire epidermis, goes the doctor, examining my skin with a magnifying glass, indicates high levels of ink in the bloodstream.

  – That’s not what I came to see you for, I say. I want drugs.

  But he’s not listening, he’s on his hobby-horse again. Dr Pappadakis is on sabbatical from the Papandreou Hospital in Crete, and he’s done a thesis on cancer risk.

  – Printer’s ink, he goes, it’s highly carcinogenic.

  Dangerous particles have leached into my skin, where they could decide to wreak havoc at any moment, warping my cells, turning them maverick.

  – I must do blood tests, he says all Mediterranean and mournful, preparing the needle.

  – Must you? I don’t like the sound of this. – If there’s something bad, I tell him, I’d rather not know. (This approach has worked for me in the past.) – Look, I came here for some Prozac. Or could you just give me Valium? Or a few Libbies?

  – You have visitors arriving, is that the problem? You are Atlantican, no?

  – No. Yes. I’m Atlantican. But no visitors.

  – No parents-brothers-sisters?

  – Not any more, I go.

  – No wife?

  – We’re divorced.

  – Children?

  Mind your own business!

  – Daughter. Tiffany. Not visiting. Estranged.

  – Friends?

  That’s when Hannah flits back. I thought I’d banned her for good.

  – Drugs, I beg again. Look, it’s my cell-mate John. He’s going to be finally adjusted. It’s kind of stressful.

  Pappadakis looks up sharply.

  – Your cell-mate? he goes, and the question hangs in the air for a moment, till I realise it’s a language thing.

  – Cabin-companion, I correct myself. My cabin-companion, John. He’s on Death Row.

  I roll up my sleeve and he finds my vein. We watch as the syringe fills with a blackish maroon. When he’s finished I hold the cotton wool over the puncture. Pappadakis sighs, looks at me oddly again.

  – You have thought, lately, about death?

  – Quite a bit, I confess. What with John.

  – John? Pappadakis looks away, then. Shuffles about with some papers, glances at the clock.

  – My cell-mate. Sorry, cabin-companion.

  – And you are sure – about your, er –

  – Cabin-companion, I say. I have an odd feeling we’re going round in circles. – No. Not sure. Just, it’s likely. He’s right up there on the list.

  – He is dissident? Geologist? Soil physicist? Structural engineer?

  – No, a serial killer, apparently.

  – I see, he says, sort of edgy.

  There’s a bit of a silence.

  – Have you seen how you look? he goes finally, fiddling with his worry beads. You were off-white when I first met you. Now you are really quite grey. Soon you will be the colour of the burnt wood for sketch-drawing and for barbecue, what you call it, of the charcoal, and the whites of one’s eyes, what we call the conjunctiva, will turn yellow, you follow? You too are – I mean your own er, prospects, they are … somewhat similar, no?

  It takes me a minute to see what he’s getting at.

  – Oh, sure, technically, yeah. But there’s a quota, remember? Libertycare policy states two a year, maximum, as a deterrent.

  (I’ve done my sums. There are a thousand Atlanticans aboard, and you can count on the dissident scientists and those accused of violent crimes, i.e. John, being top of the list.)

  – I could die of old age first, I tell him. Some Libbies, OK? Just to see me through?

  He sighs.

  – A small amount, he says, handing me a plastic cylinder with a child-proof top. Bear in mind that since yesterday’s announcement I have increased the amount of placebos that I issue. Your chances of this being genuine are therefore only one in five. Goodbye, Voyager.

  And he ushers me out to the corridor, where the chipmunk-faced Garcia awaits me, gun poised.

  – How d’you know you’re swallowing the real thing, then, John’s asking.

  I’ve explained the placebo theory.

  – You don’t, that’s the beauty of it. If you believe it’s working, then it’ll work, see?

  – Like Libertycare, says John.

  I look up. It’s not like him to talk of home.

  I’m too unsettled to sleep. Too scared of more nightmares. In the semi-dark, I eye the letter again, with its crude mosaic of red lettering. Yes; crude. Disturbing. It seems to scream at me: Atlantica! Atlantica!

  The past spilling back like that. It’s bad management. It’s bad manners. It’s bad for my heart. If it breaks again – if there’s any disturbance – any kind of resurrection –

  If –

  I’ll get lockjaw, that’s what.

  Who would use red biro, to address a letter? I’m not used to colour. Who would write in that stagey way, all loops and squirls?

  A woman, that’s who.

  A marauder.

  I chew over this thought, and others: dreams, fears, ghostly detritus, stray memories, and wild wishes; my mental cud; the unfinished and unfinishable business of a graunched heart.

  THE FESTIVAL OF CHOICE

  Hannah Park’s brain was different from other people’s: her mother was sure of it. It made her incapable of certain things. Love, for instance: the romantic love you see on television or read about in books; that was one of them. Social grace was another.

  By the time Hannah was eleven, she’d lost track of how often she’d heard Tilda tell the specialists, in the hushed whisper reserved for embarrassing information, that her only child was unfortunately not quite right.

  – But I feel normal, Hannah would object. Normal-ish, anyway.

  – Is it ‘normal-ish’ to draw rude cartoons of your own mother? Tilda would snap back. Is it ‘normal-ish’ to wear a giant cardigan day in day out? Is it ‘normal-ish’ to collect thirty thousand peanut-butter labels?

  The setting for these prickly discussions was usually a hospital canteen, following another fruitless consultation with a man in a white coat.

  – Would I be normal if my cardigan was smaller? Hannah would ask, as she divided and sub-divided the food on her plate into the usual categories: Protein, Roughage, Carbohydrate, Things I Don’t Like. Cool colours to the left of each section, warm to the right. Would I be normal if I collected stamps instead? Would I be …

  – Those things are just symptoms, Tilda would retort, fumbling in her little green handbag for her pills. For a clever girl, Hannah, you can be stupid beyond belief.

  It was a recurring theme of Tilda’s. How was it possible for a child with an IQ of 148 to prefer disfiguring glasses to contact lenses, and read encyclopaedias in the way ordinary people read mail-order catalogues? Having an abnormal child had taught her the meaning of exasperation. Oh, for a proper diagnosis! How much longer would this thankless odyssey grind on? Hannah had been wondering too. Her whole childhood was a blur of waiting rooms, interspersed with trips to the orthodontist to get her teeth fixed, in case she started smiling. If she bared her metal brace in the mirror of a darkened room, she looked like an oncoming train.

  Tilda heard of Dr Crabbe by word of mouth. He was a retired psychiatrist in Groke, who had written several works on disorders which fell within the spectrum of autism.

  – Come up to Groke, Dr Crabbe had urged on the phone. Let’s suck it and see.

  His surgery was housed in a small portable bungalow made of the new recycled cardboard, which scored marks with Tilda. As Hannah and Tilda sat in Dr Crabbe’s waiting room flicking through style magazines, they could hear his voice booming through the wall. Hannah strained to listen, but couldn’t make out the words.

  – Well, he certainly sounds authoritative, remarked Tilda, not lifting her eyes from the gazebo spread in Sweet Home.

  Hannah sighed. Her mother always built the doctors up in her mind beforehand. She stared out of the window at the big shock of pampas
grass in Dr Crabbe’s front garden, plonked in the centre of the lawn like a failed hairdo. Something about the way the pale tips of its feathery brushes waved in the breeze stirred up an unaccountable but familiar current of melancholy inside her. The feeling was called Weltschmerz, according to the psychiatrist they had seen last week.

  Everyone gets it.

  Hannah was just beginning to feel an asthma attack coming on when the booming stopped suddenly, the door opened, and Dr Crabbe emerged. For a retired psychiatrist, he was surprisingly young. Short and square, he had a powerful, muscular face, and a dark moustache. He reminded Hannah of a keg of explosives. She fingered the little mask attached to her oxygen inhaler.

  – Mrs Park? And this must be Hannah!

  He grinned and shook their hands forcefully. Hannah bared the oncoming train.

  – I was just talking to my voice system, said Dr Crabbe.

  Tilda made a little impressed grunt and nursed her crushed fingers.

  In his office, which was decorated with bloodthirsty hunting pictures, Dr Crabbe scanned through Hannah’s medical record on his little laptop, and made knowledgeable noises as he recognised names of doctors and hospitals they’d visited.

  – I see she’s done the rounds, Mrs Park, he said. Quite a strain for you.

  The tears sprang to Tilda’s eyes as though he’d tweaked the plumbing of a secret tap.

  – How can I help? he asked gently, as Tilda dabbed at her eyes. She took a deep, careful breath.

  – All I want … Her voice caught and Hannah looked up sharply. Dr Crabbe had talent. – All I want is for someone to –

  – To take you seriously, he said, nodding slowly. And you deserve it, Mrs Park, he said softly.

  That did it. When he patted her arm, Tilda began to sob. As she snuffled into a hanky, Hannah looked at the wall, where a bloodhound was mauling a rabbit next to a dead pheasant. Dr Crabbe said it must have been very distressing, and he couldn’t promise a diagnosis but he would see what suggested itself; autism had a far wider spectrum than anyone realised. There followed the usual background questions, the testing of the reflexes, the chat about feelings. How depressed did Hannah get, on a scale of one to ten? Did being the product of donor sperm make her feel stigmatised? Had she ever thought of taking her own life?

  – Well, said Dr Crabbe, after Tilda had replied to all the questions at length. I have a diagnosis.

  Tilda stiffened, and gripped the armrests of her chair. Even Hannah was taken aback.

  – It’s a very rare syndrome, he said. Known as Crabbe’s Block.

  – There was a tiny silence. Hannah wondered if her stomach might gurgle.

  – Crabbe … as in, Doctor Crabbe? asked Tilda faintly.

  Yes, he affirmed: having discovered the disease himself – only very recently – he had awarded it his own name. It was the norm in medicine.

  – How many people suffer from this, then, Tilda asked him anxiously, as he wrote down the name of Hannah’s disorder on a piece of paper and stapled it to the bill.

  He looked up then, his face grave.

  – Mrs Park, your daughter is … unique.

  Tilda instantly began to glow with pride.

  Life improved after that. Hannah felt less guilty about the time she spent on her peanut-butter-label collection, less self-conscious about her need to wear the cardigan, less inhibited about her habit of popping bubble-wrap blisters when she was under stress. She studied hard for her multiple choices, and did well. Tilda thrived too. She developed a plethora of small ailments which kept the diary chock-a-block with doctors’ appointments. Then, when the Liberty Corporation took over the management of Atlantica, she joined a shoppers’ circle, collected loyalty points, and soon climbed the ladder to become a VIP Customer.

  – Meet my daughter, she would smile to new members of the shoppers’ circle. She suffers from a rare syndrome.

  Hannah felt like a new product that had hit the market. One with special features. She would smile slightly and show her flashing teeth.

  – She’s got agoraphobia now too, Tilda would add. This development was a recognised component of the syndrome, according to Dr Crabbe. – It doesn’t bother her though, said Tilda. She’s never liked outdoors.

  And it was true. She hadn’t.

  Now, fifteen years later, Hannah Park sits on a swivel chair in an open-plan office sectioned with low Perspex screens and phalanxes of potted ficus plants on the nineteenth floor of Liberty Corporation’s Head office, doodling a cartoon of the man who diagnosed her. She had a strange dream about Dr Crabbe last night, in which she was married to him, and had taken on the name of Mrs Hannah Crabbe. Without ever having had sex, she and Dr Crabbe had produced a baby that Hannah wheeled about the pedestrian walkways of Groke in a state-of-the-art buggy. In actual fact, according to a pink fluerescent message that gradually wrote itself across the sky, the baby belonged to another man. She must return it immediately. But she couldn’t, because a chasm full of boiling water and geranium-scented oil had opened up in front of her. It split the city of Groke in half. She would never be able to cross it. Dr Crabbe knew about all this, and did not hold it against her because he was a trained psychiatrist.

  As Hannah began drawing the individual hairs of Dr Crabbe’s potent moustache with small experienced flicks of her pencil, the Customer Hotline droned in the background. The call she was half-listening to was from a regular, who liked to play games. Hannah recognised the customer’s voice. A wheezy, smoker’s voice with cracks in it. Sometimes he’d pretend someone was strangling him.

  – I woke up this morning with a bad feeling, he said.

  Hannah took a sip of her coffee. Warm and vile, but in a familiar way.

  – And how did your problem begin? asked the Hotline responder in the female medium-register voice known as ‘Dolly’. The machine used the Dolly mode mostly for men. Dolly was highly effective. From complaint to confession in five minutes flat, the Hotline co-ordinator liked to boast.

  Silence.

  The machine moved on to the next question.

  – How about giving me a call back later, when you’re more in the mood for a chat?

  – Hey, sweetheart, said the customer. Don’t hang up on me. I’ve got a problem here.

  Hannah began shading Dr Crabbe’s cheeks, but she pressed too hard and her pencil broke. The cross-hatching was too thick and tight, turning the doctor’s complexion a smudgy black. Customer Hotline duty made her tense. She reached for a sharpener.

  – Do you have a worry that you’d like to share? asked Dolly.

  Silence.

  – Do you suspect anyone of sociopathic or criminal activities?

  Hannah took another sip of coffee, replaced the cup on the daisy coaster her mother had made in her pressed-flower phase, and began scribbling a dark background to Dr Crabbe with her newly sharpened pencil.

  Monitoring Hotline calls was considered ‘core work’. How better to make use of the flood of customer comments, ran corporate thinking, than to haul up all calls containing trigger-words and their variants – kill, hate, cheat, steal, blackmail, etc, and then laboriously fillet them in case one contained a diamond? It cut out the usual middlemen of paid informant and forensic evidence. It rendered hunch obsolete.

  This customer, whose ex-wife Kelly had ‘poisoned his life’, was one of the classic attention-seekers, sufferers of that great contemporary ailment, Social Munchhausen’s Syndrome: over-zealous citizens trapped in nobodyhood who’d do anything – fake their own murders, suicides or muggings – to get noticed. There were twenty, thirty such callers per shift. More, at certain times; pre-Christmas, the Silly Season, and now, the Festival of Choice. On the door of the cabinet where data on the calls was stored, Hannah’s colleague Leo Hurley had scrawled a caricature paranoiac in marker pen. Googly eyes, flared nostrils, jug ears, flying droplets of sweat.

  The customer was still playing hard to get with the responder.

  – Are you choosing by phone today, Dolly
pursued, or will you be going to your local shopping mall? Hannah had programmed this line of questioning specially for the Festival of Choice. It wasn’t a festival, so much as an electoral referendum, but it embodied the spirit of the day better, according to Strategy.

  – Look, sweetheart, said the customer. This isn’t easy.

  – I’m listening, said Dolly. I value what you have to say.

  – I’m in danger, the customer blurted. His voice shook slightly. Dolly attracted masturbators.

  – Does your problem relate to the Festival of Choice? asked Dolly. Her voice had gone husky and soft. She encouraged masturbators.

  He took another deep smoker’s breath.

  – I’m in danger of putting my cross –

  – In the wrong box? Dolly responded, after three seconds of silence. I can help you with that. If you’d like to tell me more …

  As the customer droned on about his phoney indecision, Hannah considered giving Dr Crabbe glasses. But like hands, they were hard to do.

  – Nice talking to you, sweetheart, finished the customer finally. I feel a lot better.

  – You’ve made the right choice, said Dolly.

  A nice touch, that. Hannah had thought of it herself. As the next call kicked in, she lowered the volume and let her eyes flicker to the window. The forecast for the Festival of Choice was good. Clear blue skies and clear blue water, the weather channel said. From this floor the panorama was never less than stupendous. The big, shining coil of the Hope River snaking into the estuary, flanked by the Makasoki bubble-buildings, translucent egg-boxes of reflected light. Above them, dancing rainbows, condensing and dissolving like pastel sugar, pale and buffered by distance. The light they cast – a pellucid yellow – spread with a shimmer out to a glassy sea dotted with ships and tankers bringing in cargoes of waste. Even from this height, separated by fathoms of glass and chrome, you could still feel the city’s electric zing like a shiver in the blood; and still subliminally hear the distant honk of ships, the sing-song whisper of the Frooto windmills, the smooth hydraulic whish-whish of trams. The island tattooed itself on you; a great techno-organic edifice in perpetual motion, its infrastructure jewelled with sports centres, malls, and waste facilities, its simple geography zigzagged with transport systems, and fringed with lush plantations of coconut, pineapple, and lemon grass. Beyond Harbourville, the fried-egg island lay circular and gently humped by the swell of St Giddier’s Mount. Beneath the crust of the artificial land-mass, the deep invisible mechanics of the waste-disposal system, feeding the hungry rock below. And all around, the clear blue ocean – wide as the sky.