by Claire North
“You can’t ask me to look at secure documents.”
“Why not?”
He didn’t answer. She turned the spoon, once, a hard twist through sugar, picked it up, dug it back in, deeper. “Theo Miller,” she mused. “Who the hell even is Theo Miller?”
“I am.”
“Right.”
“I buried it all, Dani. There’s nothing. You won’t find a piece of anything to prove …”
“So what? Who the fuck needs proof, these days?”
Theo half-closed his eyes, pinched his index fingers together at the bridge of his nose. The smile twitched at the edges of Dani’s lips. She waited.
“Who are you trying to find?” he grunted.
“Lucy Rainbow Princess.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s her name.”
“That’s a name?”
“She was franchised to a party company when she was four. Ads. Princess costumes, unicorns, blonde hair and plastic crowns—that sort of thing. They changed her name.”
“Why do you need to break into the Ministry to find her?”
“Cos I’m a patty-line whore who isn’t worth shit to the guys who do the paperwork, and cos she’s in juvvy. You think women like me get to ask questions like this?”
“And if I can’t find … Rainbow Princess?”
“Her birth name was Lucy Cumali. She’s fifteen years old, born March 11th in Shawford by Budgetfood.”
Silence a while.
In the street outside, a garbage truck creaked to a halt by overflowing black bins. Two men climbed out the back, orange parole tabards across their chests, parole company logo stamped on their hands, their trousers, their lives.
Overhead a helicopter rushed towards a landing pad, while the passengers texted, eyes averted from the city below, OMG u wont believ wat i jus heard …
Behind the counter of the café, hot steam blasted into a tannin-stained mug, and bread burned in the toaster.
Theo stared down into the depths of his coffee cup and could only see the past, not the future, in its blackness. For a moment he considered refusing. The fantasy stretched out for a few seconds towards prophecy, before dissolving into disaster.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”
Chapter 8
In the beginning of all things
fifteen years before hot coffee and blood on the canal
fifteen years before time became a little …
… and it seemed to the man called Theo that past and future were not that different really and that all things came back to a point where …
In the beginning.
The boy who will become Theo lay on the beach with Dani Cumali at the centre of the universe, and listened to the stones being dragged into the ocean, and was fundamentally deeply uncomfortable and really rather cold, as is the nature of most beaches that face the North Sea. He was a flabby skinny boy. There were no muscles on his body; he hated sports, hadn’t even looked at the footie pitch since the day his dad was …
… but he didn’t eat very much either, and it’s a diet of microwave meals rejected by the factory, macaroni cheese mostly, so his childish frame was moulded with a layer of squishy white skin which could be pinched and shaped like putty, before sinking painlessly, bloodless, back down into bone.
His hair was thick and dark, his eyes were grey, he will never be handsome, but one day he might have a girlfriend who thinks he’s sorta cute and know that he’s grateful to be with her, and maybe for a little while they’ll be happy until he realises that he’s just playing this game and she’s neither his mother nor is he cute at all and in fact pretending to be cute is so fucking stupid it’s just …
Theo and Dani lay on the shingle, at the start of all things, and it is extraordinarily uncomfortable and probably deeply romantic. At their feet, the ocean reflected orange-black from a stained sky, and the wind carried in the smell of rotten eggs and cow dung. Behind them, the chimneys of Shawford by Budgetfood’s processing plant pumped smoke and steam into the sky, and the lorries growled and grumbled up the highway built by the company when they became community sponsor, though they’d had to knock down half the town to get it through. On the promenade before the pastel-painted houses, slanting grey roofs and tiny pink bullet-flowers in the garden, broad windows dive-bombed with seagull shit, four kids smoked pot and an old woman walked her dog between the shadows of the flickering street lights. Green algae had colonised long beards of colour beneath salt-scarred windows, a cross of St. George tangled itself around the pole outside a porch, and the seagulls hung in the air, tipped wings steady as they tried to fly forwards, were blown backwards, and remained going nowhere at all, resigned to their fate.
The sea rolled in, and Theo lay on the shingle, and Dani lay in his arms.
Dani Cumali, hair cut short because she hated the blue hairnet they had to wear in the factory, nails clipped down to an impossible white thread on translucent pink, skin pushed even closer to ivory white by the light spotting of dark, dark moles and ebony-black freckles that pop across her body, tiny as a needle beneath her eyes, round as a penny coin across her back.
They lie together, children again, and watch the starless sky in silence.
Dani doesn’t think she’s beautiful, and doesn’t think Theo is cute.
She thinks he’s low-pressure and she is going through certain experiences. It’s not so much the sex, which she’s already starting to suspect may be overrated. What she really wants, what she actually really needs is this thing which is sort of like that thing where …
She’s not sure if it’s like anything, really, maybe one day she’ll have the words for what it is, like some sort of love, but now it’s
friendship, perhaps
or just a needed quiet thing.
A quiet moment by the sea. That’s enough, for now.
Theo knows that Dani is beautiful, an opinion helped by the fact that she is a woman and he’s also going through a certain set of experiences, biological imperatives that haven’t been properly explained to him.
“We should go to the beach together. Like we used to when we were”
“Is 10 p.m. okay is that”
“You bring blankets, I’ll bring booze, like when we used to run away—just … you and me, tonight.”
Theo lay on the beach and at his back the theme tune of the town declared the hour, played through the speakers of Shawford. The speakers had been put in the day before the parade where the CEO of Budgetfood came to open the factory. His speech had been played to every corner of the town, from the little chapel with the large cemetery to the old ladies’ home by the leafless white trees, where they grumbled through their broken teeth about the disturbance. Since then the speakers hadn’t ever fallen silent, except once when a senior executive died, and once when someone had managed to find the main power inlet and set it on fire.
Proud to make the best low-salt meals at reasonable price!
Affordable consumption for the discerning client!
Today’s special: chicken jalfrezi, now with improved rice formula!
Theo closed his eyes as the music drifted, slow and distorted, towards the sea, the sound deep, stretched as if slowed by opposition from the rumbling wind. The tune had been written by the executive mayor’s youngest son, who did it for GCSE Music coursework. The boy was very talented. This had been made clear, and the school wisely waived all tuition fees in recognition of his ability. The music was played on the synth, and a chorus was sung at noon, 5 p.m., 9 p.m. and midnight by a choir of children. For the longest time the boy who would be called Theo thought the words went:
Together we march, together we sing, happy in our community. The children play, there are igloos on the green, happy happy happy, the aliens make noodles.
As a child, he never questioned this interpretation. Why couldn’t there be igloos on the green? Why wouldn’t aliens make noodles? Noodles were great.
Later, the suspicion grew that he might hav
e been wrong all along, but no matter how hard he listened, he couldn’t quite make out the actual words through the infantile chirruping of ageing speakers as they slithered down the hour to midnight. There were worse community sponsors than Budgetfood. At least you got cheap food on Fridays, and they still let the school do breakfast maths club on a Wednesday.
She said, “I didn’t think you’d be back.”
“Of course I would, I mean, it’s not like I”
“Off to your fancy university your fancy friends …”
“I heard you and Andy, I mean that”
“Piss off!”
“So it’s not a …”
“It’s over.”
“Really?”
“Really, are you kidding me, yes, it’s over, he’s a jerk, it’s all just been …”
Time comes a little unstuck, they sit on the blanket spread across the shingle and it’s …
“My bum is going to sleep.”
“Hold on, if you … is that any”
“Ow!”
“Sorry, I was just …”
And in his dreams
and in his memories
This is where it begins of course, but now he can’t remember if the moon was full or if they lay in starlight, and sometimes he remembers both, and both are true, and then he forgets for a little while, and it is almost certain that details, maybe more than details, were fantasy but still it’s all he’s got, all that’s left.
And Dani is in his arms, or possibly he is in hers, the difference at this point is academic, and somewhere, he hears himself say:
“There’s this thing at university, my mate, and I thought that maybe … but I was wrong and I did … I did this thing and …”
And she replies, or maybe she didn’t, maybe this was in town the morning before or perhaps the morning after, no—not the morning after, “They sacked me. It’s not called that. They didn’t extend my contract. No point. They’ve got other kids coming up through the programme now, give the job to some sixteen-year-old, not like they need much training, let them work until they’re twenty-one then give them the shove before they have to pay full wage and you just keep thinking, don’t you, you keep thinking …”
And in his dreams, or possibly his memories, Theo is crying. “I fucked it up. Dani? I fucked up. I fucked up everything. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to …”
If he cried in reality too, she didn’t hear it, couldn’t see the tears on his face in the night, maybe tasted the salt with her tongue and thought it was spray blown in off the sea, the smear of seaweed on his skin, stone beneath his fingers, blood on his hands, and she whispered, “You’re never coming back, are you? You’re never coming back. I saw the look in your face, you hate this place now, you hate it just like I do. But I’ve got nowhere to go you’re never coming back so where’s the harm just once just tonight where’s the …”
Later, he swore they’d used a condom.
“My foot’s gone to sleep can you just …”
“Ow! You just head-butted me with your chin!”
“Sorry it was …”
Later, thinking about it, he couldn’t work out why he would have brought a condom down to the beach, since the idea of having sex in the wind and on the shingle seemed so fundamentally absurd.
“Dani? Are you okay? Dani?”
“Could you just hold me a while?”
“Um yeah I suppose if it’s …”
“And not talk. You can do that, right?”
“Uh-hum.”
“Good. Thanks.”
In his dreams
in his past
in the present
the man called Theo sleeps a rare, clawless sleep.
Chapter 9
Two days after Dani Cumali and the man called Theo had coffee in a teacher’s café, Theo cycled to work with a plan in his mind and a twist in his stomach that made him wonder if he was actually physically ill.
He went via Battersea Bridge, because the queues for the tolls were usually faster there. He would never have the credit rating to enter Pimlico by LondonArts as anything other than a tourist of course, but his Criminal Audit Office ID got him waved through with a merry “Have a good day, sir!” and being on a bicycle he was even allowed to cut through some of the quieter streets where the Company men lived, so long as he didn’t ding his bell.
The Criminal Audit Office was based in Victoria. Once they’d had an office in Whitehall, but it had been redeveloped for corporate headquarters, so they’d been pushed out to Canary Wharf. Then Canary Wharf had become too expensive, so they’d been dragged to Willesden and for a while Theo had thought about quitting his job rather than the hour-and-forty-minute commute on the train, head down and body swaying in carriages where once there had been seats before the train company judged them inefficient.
Thankfully the minister of civic responsibility had grown annoyed at having to go to Willesden for meetings, and they handled enough high-value white-collar crime for the managers and directors and their well-paid lawyers to grumble and mope about the commute, so back to Victoria they went, to an office abandoned when foreign aid was shut down.
Now they were on the fifth floor of an oil spill of a building. Black plastic windows reflected odd smears of green and pink against the sun. Dark grey walls turned darker with the diesel fumes of the coaches that queued up outside. An embarrassed sign printed on a browning piece of A4 paper and sellotaped to the door declared CRIMINAL AUDIT OFFICE. PLEASE SHOW ID.
A wooden board by the security gate stated that the security situation was Black 2. Theo had never known what Black 2 meant, and it had never been anything else, except for once, on a Wednesday, when it was Blue, and the security man had tonsillitis.
The lift, as it climbed to the fifth floor, rattled and bumped against the shaft. Sometimes you heard bits falling: a bolt or a piece of chain, vanishing down into an unknown abyss below, but whatever the component was it clearly wasn’t that important. Theo took the stairs.
The fifth-floor walls were faded grey, with a tideline of black dirt above the radiators from those lost times when they’d worked. Here and there new plaques of laminated plastic offered inspirational advice for the employees who laboured within.
REIMBURSE SOCIETY!
JUSTICE AT REASONABLE COST!
TEAMWORK IS THE BEST WORK!
Theo wasn’t sure who’d come up with these statements. For a little while, after they’d first been put up, they’d made him angry, especially as the coffee machine had been broken for four months and hadn’t been fixed for budgetary reasons. But as the years went by, anger had faded. Most things faded, given time.
The office was technically open-plan, but hackers had once got into the webcams and filmed the lurid details of negotiations between the CAO and a stockbroker-turned-TV-personality to reduce his indemnity for sexual assault and battery down from £2.2 million to a mere £71,000. Since then all webcams in key offices had been covered with Blu Tack, and tacit acceptance given for pale-blue dividing boards to go up between the desks.
Theo’s lair was in the furthest, darkest corner. He’d had a window and everything for a while, but then someone who was making good numbers on murder cases managed to convince Edward that he had seasonal affective disorder and needed Theo’s seat. When it emerged that Theo had moved without even a quibble, another officer had stepped forward and suggested that she’d work so much better away from the high-frequency hum of the printers, and when again Theo had moved without complaint, it became open season. Six months and five desk moves later, he was between the toilets and the photocopier, cultivating a small bloom of orange mushrooms behind his waste-paper bin, and content to be ignored.
His file stated that his career progression was “steady.” His performance was “consistent,” closure rate “satisfactory” and average negotiated indemnity “a positive reflection of current guidelines.” Once he’d been rated “very good” and lived in fear for nearly six months that this might lead to peo
ple paying attention to him. Thankfully, no one did, and he managed to return his performance to a more genteel average before his next review came round.
He hung his jacket over the back of his chair, put his satchel down by his left foot, turned on the computer, waited with hands in his lap for it to boot up, and at 9 a.m. precisely started working.
Chapter 10
A sexual harassment suit. “For fuck’s sake I just said she was hot I mean what has the world come to when you say someone’s hot and that gets you in with the courts it’s just political correctness gone …” £750, plus £35 photocopying fees.
A seventeen-year-old girl tried to change the cheques her grandmother was sending her, adding zeroes to the end—she didn’t even bother to use the correct kind of biro, her corrections were in black against her grandmother’s blue it was just so …
£6421, dropping to £5100 if her grandmother was willing to lower the charges. To Theo’s surprise, the grandmother was not, and the girl went to the patty line.
A group of drug dealers. The police had found most of it but not enough, not nearly enough. They were going to pay the indemnity and have cash in hand, but what were you to do?
£52,190, and the lawyer laughed when Theo told him, as if he’d just heard an old joke his dirty uncle used to tell at Christmas, and the money was in the Audit Office’s clearing account within twenty minutes, transferred from a bank somewhere in the Maldives.
Corporate manslaughter. Ninety-three people dead after carbon monoxide leaks from faulty boilers. The safety test on the boilers had been rushed through, signed off without proper inspection, a hint of bribery perhaps, cutting corners, it was …
In many ways, exactly what Theo needed.
At 4.55 p.m. Theo Miller leaves his desk, rushes to Edward Witt’s office with a USB stick, so sorry to bother you, it’s this corporate manslaughter case, I’ve finished doing the audit on it but if you look you’ll see the accused is a Company subsidiary and I know we’ve got a policy on not necessarily …
“How much did you find them liable for?”
