The Paper Eater

by Liz Jensen

  The Temple door bursts open. A young field associate stands there panting, her uniform a disgrace.

  – We’re bailing out, she says. There’s planes and ships being organised. You coming?

  The Facilitator General laughs with gentle contempt.

  – Are you sure? I mean the whole building’s pretty unsafe. And the ground underneath – I mean, there’s not much time, sir.

  – Off you go, says Pike, flapping a hand. Join the rest of them.

  – Suit yourself, says the girl. And leaves.

  – I’ll wait here, says Pike gently under his breath, when the door has closed. I’ll wait with her. I’ll wait.

  He knows she’ll deliver. Just the thought of it makes him feel dreamy and safe. Fallings from us, vanishings … Nothing to lose and everything to gain.

  Reward success … Soon. She’ll do it soon.

  On Captain Fishook’s orders, the crew have unlocked the cabins, and all the prisoners are pouring out, heading for the rapidly filling upper deck and congregating there as though sleepwalking. The sky seems to ache with the pity of it.

  – I nearly didn’t get it! I gabble into Hannah’s hair. I won’t let her go. I can’t stop kissing her. My Hannah. I guess I’m sobbing. – I didn’t open the letter, see, I left it standing on the shelf, I didn’t think –

  – We had to take a gamble, she says. She’s crying too.

  – Where were you all this time?

  – In Groke, with Dr Crabbe.

  – The man who – I stop, and gawp.

  – Diagnosed me, she said. And sent the rhino dropping.

  It takes a moment for this to sink in.

  – The satellite engineer? Jacko? That’s Dr Crabbe?

  – The rhino thing was his idea. He had a contact who –

  We’re interrupted.

  – You did it, mate! You did it!

  It’s John, lumbering thickly towards us, balancing a tray with my chess set on it.

  – Sometimes you can win, he says, laying it down gently on the electric chair, just by being stupid. That’s what you said, isn’t it?

  He’s grinning all over and I am too. Next thing I know we’re locked in a rib-crushing hug.

  – Human. I said human.

  – Same difference.

  – I made that chess set, I tell Hannah proudly, when John and I have pulled apart. I’m still crying, and so’s she. – From chewed-up paper.

  – It’s beautiful, she says.

  And so are you, I’m thinking.

  – My white queen, I tell John.

  And then there’s a tiny silence, the silence of a new presence that’s joined us. I know who it is but I don’t turn right away. When I do, my heart stumbles. She’s dressed in black. Her eyes are red. She hangs her head and won’t speak. I have the same problem; I open my mouth, but there’s nothing. I’m blocked.

  I look away, stare out to sea.

  – Dad, she says.

  I gulp.

  And then I say – Tiff.

  I turn and smile, and she smiles back. And that’s all we can manage for now, and maybe that’s all we’ll ever manage, but it’s enough.

  The sudden noise catches Pike unawares: a Tourettish stammer of activity from the printers, belching endless concertina’d reams of pages, overflowing their trays and gushing to the floor, skidding on the lino and fanning out in chaotic sheaves. Pike scrabbles for an armful, rips it off. And scans a page. This section of the blueprint shows rows of figures. Strange disjointed words. Equations that make no sense. Graphs that peak and trough meaninglessly on the page, doubling back on themselves and exiting upside-down. The letter w appears to be repeated a thousand times. A page of slogans follows: PUTTING THE CUSTOMER FIRST. YOUR CHOICE, OUR COMMITMENT. FREEDOM: THE DREAM THAT CAME TRUE. THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT. VALUE TALKS. A FESTIVAL OF CHOICE. Strings of gobbledegook. A complex Venn diagram, whose circles overlap heavily, like storm-clouds. THE BARGAIN OF A LIFETIME.

  The machine’s throaty thrumming deepens, then soars upward three octaves. And ends in a high, thin shriek.

  * * *

  – Well, Captain, says Benedict Sommers. Are you ready?

  – Aye, aye, says Fishook. When he grips the microphone, a little shiver runs through him as he makes the mental adjustments.

  – Now, folks. Listen up. This is turning out to be a – momentous occasion indeed. I may even be right in thinking that we are witnessing our finest hour. Now it’s with great pleasure and respect that I am handing control of the ship to these fine people here.

  And another huge, rushing roar goes up, with whistles and shrieks and yells tumbling headlong across the sky towards the ship like the rumble of a huge human motor. In a small wave at first, then massing thickly, the customers start to mount the gangways and pour like lava on to the decks. A small stocky man who looks like a keg of explosives is among them. The throng swells and roars, a cyclone of humanity.

  On the streets of Harbourville, the looting has begun.

  Hannah’s been telling me how when she met Benedict Sommers at her mother’s in St Placid, she thought it was the end.

  – And it would have been, if Benedict hadn’t read the document in Leo’s envelope. He did some research, and found out that Leo –

  She stops, and her eyes fill with tears. I squeeze her hand.

  – Dead?

  She nods.

  – That’s when we knew I’d need to disappear. I went to Dr Crabbe’s surgery, and Benedict stayed close to Pike.

  She looks across at Benedict; he’s with Fishook, at the wheel. They’re studying a map. He turns and smiles and she smiles back, first at him and then at me.

  My heart’s going crazy.

  The smile has spread to a grin. In Head Office I never saw her smile. She’s so pretty. Her face is different from how I remember it. It’s all flushed and – I don’t know. Free. But suddenly, a horrible fear hatches: will she still want me?

  – Hannah, are you still, you know, you?

  There’s a stretch of silence.

  – I am, she says finally. If you are.

  – But your Block …

  – Well, I was blocked, once.

  – And then? Did Dr Crabbe –

  – No, you.

  – Me?

  I’m gobsmacked. Proud of myself.

  – I did that? I say. Without even knowing? Just by …

  – By loving me, she says.

  There’s another little pause.

  – But it was so easy! I blurt. Anyone could’ve done it!

  I’m blushing. Like a jerk.

  – No they couldn’t, she says.

  And I take her in my arms.

  In her tilted apartment, Tilda tingles with pride and a loose, disjointed bewilderment. It’s not every day your daughter pops up alive and well on national TV when you thought she was a piece of calcium at the bottom of a crater. Not every day that you check the cassette they gave you, and discover it’s not Hannah committing sabotage and falling to her death at all, but a promotional video for the Liberty Trust Scheme, showing how you can save twenty-eight dollars a month by pledging your assets to the Corporation in perpetuity.

  On the streets outside, some of her neighbours have pumped up inflatable dinghies and are setting sail in little clusters, clutching maps and compasses. Good luck to them.

  Tilda holds her glass of Vanillo high, its silver liquid gleaming in the fading light. She sips, and the warm glow spreads and deepens, cushioning her like a cosy internal duvet. She’s seen the future. She’s seen how her daughter and that grey-coloured man will sail away somewhere and get as far as they can but never be safe, because the United States is run by Them now, and it’ll be re-named Liberty and the world will somehow overnight be – well just bigger and better and … Oh, she’s too old to think about all that nonsense. Let the young ones worry. She doesn’t have courage or ideals, she isn’t a fighter; she can listen to the sounds of panic outside and the little screams, without being too
disrupted. There are plenty of ready-meals in the freezer, and she’s got the telly.

  She’s always been a bit of an armchair person.

  Yes, she’s seen the future. And she’ll stay put.

  The satellite predictions that now litter the Temple floor show how in a matter of weeks the land to the west will have saturated like soggy bread. How the plantations of mango, guava, coconut and lemon-grass will dissolve into swamp, more liquid than solid. Swamp that itself will effervesce, sucked down by the seductive lure of physics. Deep down below the tilted coast, geology resists feebly the pressure of the inevitable. The purity zones ravaged by filth, the waste channels blocked, the volcanic fissures bloated. Over the months to come, Atlantica will relax, loosen the corset of her geography, let what will buckle buckle and what will sink sink.

  Gravity has outlined its agenda.

  Urgent hoofing noises thunder in the corridor outside the Temple.

  – She knew all along, murmurs Wesley Pike. The echo of the machine’s high shriek still rings in his ears. Treachery tastes like sour iron in his mouth. She knew. Knew, and knew he’d buy whatever she said, knew he’d buy it because he was used to buying and it was all about buying.

  His heart twists as he reaches for the lever that calls a halt. The software has already taken up office in the United States and it’s over for Atlantica, it’s been over for a long time, so whatever gesture he makes – the only gesture left – can mean nothing.

  It’s a smooth, cool, decisive slide. It’s the work of a second.

  It means nothing. It means everything.

  When it’s done, he is surprised to find himself a man again.

  Bewildered faces turn to catch the last rays of the dying sun, and we breathe deep, inhaling the peppermint breeze that bears the ugly lurch of grief. The sky swarms and buzzes with helicopters peeling away from the city, thistledowning in all directions. There’s a loud boom, and then a protracted honk from the funnel as the gangways lift.

  Minutes later, to the sound of screaming panic, the ship has pulled slowly out from the dock and Fishook is steering eastwards from our steadily crumbling shore. As we leave the estuary behind, the waves in our wake seem to foam and curdle and the cloud-mass above us echoes with the high thin cries of the island we’re abandoning. Gradually, the darkening silhouette of Harbourville grows smaller and more precarious, shuddering to a pinprick in the gusting wind.

  Hannah and I stand in silence, in the first clobbered stages of shock, the tears running freely down our cheeks. On the horizon, the sunset glows a hectic red, fringed with the toxic blue haze of an all-seeing sky, and from the distant island, an orange-and-blue firework bursts and blossoms across the bubbling seascape, filling the sky with a fierce and bloody light.

  I’ll never lose sight of this tiny, intense split second, this little numb splinter of grace. The future is rushing in to swamp us, I can already feel the concave ache of it. I have no idea where we will sail to now, or where the human world is headed. But I know there is more gullibility than wisdom and more greed than kindness and more darkness than hope and more fine wares than anyone can ever pay for.

  How easy we are to seduce.

  Survival is our burden and our treasure.

  Our treasure: a tiny guttering beacon in the whirling sea.

  Let us not sink.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Michel Coleman, Polly Coles, Malcolm Dancy, Jane Dorner, John Hands, Humphrey Hawksley, Valerie Jensen, Kate O’Riordan, Charles Palliser, David Shriver; thank you.

  A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

  Liz Jensen is the author of Egg Dancing (long-listed for the Orange Prize), Ark Baby (short-listed for the Guardian Fiction Prize and long-listed for the Orange Prize), War Crimes for the Home (long-listed for the Orange Prize), The Ninth Life of Louis Drax, currently in development as a major motion picture by Anthony Minghella, and My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time. She divides her time between Copenhagen and London.

  Also available by the same author

  My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time

  Charlotte supports herself and her lumpen side-kick, Fru Schleswig, as a prostitute in fin-de-siècle Copenhagen. But the course of harlotry never runs smooth, and Charlotte’s life is altered irrevocably when, one hard winter, she stumbles on an exciting new source of income. A dark mansion, home to the disagreeable Fru Krak, is in dire need of a top-to-bottom scrub – and the wealthy widow is hiring.

  Transformed into cleaning ladies, the squabbling duo attack the dark abode – but soon discover that mysteries abound. The basement appears to be haunted, and there are rumours of desperate souls entering it – never to emerge. Meanwhile there have been odd sightings of the dead Professor Krak, master of physics, walking the streets as a ghost. Charlotte decides to turn detective – but finds herself outwitted by the mysterious controller of a demonic Machine which wastes no time in catapulting her and Fru Schleswig into the baffling world of twenty-first-century London. And beyond …

  ALSO AVAILABLE BY LIZ JENSEN

  THE RAPTURE

  A TV Book Club Best Read

  In a merciless summer of biblical heat and destructive winds, Gabrielle Fox’s main concern is to rebuild her career as a psychologist after a shattering car accident. But when she is assigned Bethany Krall, violent, delusional, cruelly intuitive and insistent that she can foresee natural disasters, she begins to fear she has made a terrible mistake. And when catastrophes begin to occur on the very dates Bethany has predicted, the apocalyptic puzzle intensifies and the stakes multiply. A haunting story of human passion and burning faith, The Rapture is an electrifying psychological thriller that explores the dark extremes of mankind’s self-destruction in a world on the brink.

  ‘An end-of-days blockbuster to haunt your nightmares … Unputdownable’

  THE TIMES

  ARK BABY

  Since the year all British women became infertile, Bobby Sullivan’s London veterinary clinic has been packed with primate ‘children’ and, speaking as an alpha male, he’s sick to death of them. Hoping to reincarnate himself, he moves north, but finds there is no escape from the Darwinian imperative – or from the sexual pull of the luscious twins Rose and Blanche. As the legacy of the girls’ ancestor, Victorian freak Tobias Phelps, begins to connect with a century of history, religion, and evolutionary theory, new hope looms for the nation’s future. Pointing the finger of destiny firmly at Bobby...

  ‘Superb … A complex, intelligent novel which draws upon a vast array of ideas without ever losing coherence … magnificently crowded, wonderfully funny fiction’

  DAILY TELEGRAPH

  THE NINTH LIFE OF LOUIS DRAX

  Nine-year-old Louis Drax is a problem child. He’s bright, precocious, deceitful and dangerously, disturbingly accident prone. On a family day out it seems almost predestined that something will happen. But this time it is worse than anyone imagined. When Louis falls over a cliff into a ravine and lapses into a deep coma, his father vanishes and his mother is paralysed by shock. In a clinic in Provence, Dr Dannachet tries to coax Louis back to consciousness, but the boy defies medical logic and the doctor is drawn into the dark heart of Louis’ buried world. Only Louis holds the key to the mystery and he can’t communicate. Or can he?

  ‘A wonderfully unsettling psychological thriller’

  MAIL ON SUNDAY

  WAR CRIMES FOR THE HOME

  ‘You know what they say about GIs and English girls’ knickers,’ ran the wartime joke, ‘One Yank and they’re off.’ When Gloria met Ron, he was an American pilot who thought nothing of getting hit by shrapnel in the cockpit. She was working in a munitions factory in Bristol during the Blitz, but still found time to grab what she wanted. Ciggies. Sex. American soldiers. But war has an effect on people. Gloria did all sorts of things she wouldn’t normally do – evil things, some of them – because she might be dead tomorrow. Or someone might. Now, fifty years on, it’s payback time. In her old folks’ home, Gloria is forced to remember the real trut
h about her and Ron, and confront the secret at the heart of her dramatic home front story. In a gripping, vibrant evocation of wartime Britain, Liz Jensen explores the dark impulses of women whose war crimes are committed on the home front, in the name of sex, survival, greed and love.

  ‘Breathtakingly coarse, wryly amusing and gut-wrenchingly tragic’

  MARIE CLAIRE

  MY DIRTY LITTLE BOOK OF STOLEN TIME

  In fin-de-siecle Copenhagen, part-time prostitute Charlotte and her lumpen sidekick, Fru Schleswig, have taken on jobs as cleaning ladies of dubious talent to tide them over the harsh winter of 1897. But the home of their neurotic new employer, the widow Krak, soon reveals itself to be riddled with dark secrets – including the existence of a demonic machine rumoured to swallow people alive. Rudely catapulted into twenty-first-century London, the hapless duo discover a whole new world of glass, labour-saving devices and hectic, impossible romance.

  ‘Unashamedly gleeful: a kind of topsy-turvy Jane Eyre with added time travel ...

  Sit back, suspend your disbelief, and enjoy’

  DAILY MAIL

  EGG DANCING

  With only a schizophrenic mother and a militantly hostile sister for backup, Hazel Sugden, food-splattered mum and queen of low self-esteem, is palpably unfit to save the future of mankind as we know it. But when embryology, psychiatry and religion clash over the miracle designer drug Genetic Choice, the dysfunctional trio is propelled into action with explosively comic results…

  ‘An assured, hilarious and insightful novel … propelled along by the comic rhythm of the writing, you’re carried on a crazy journey you won’t be sorry you took’

  TIME OUT

  ORDER YOUR COPY: BY PHONE +44 (0)1256 302 699; BY EMAIL: DIRECT@MACMILLAN.CO.UK

  DELIVERY IS USUALLY 3–5 WORKING DAYS. FREE POSTAGE AND PACKAGING FOR ORDERS OVER £20.