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by Claire North

  He laid it on the table, an ugly brick in a world of neon.

  “There were three numbers on the phone. One of those is yours, one of them is mine. I thought that maybe this might create a shared need to communicate.”

  He stopped, head turning a little to one side. Faris’s lips were drawn to invisibility across his mouth, a paper cut where smile, scowl, anything should have been, as if he would swallow his own features whole. Behind them a waitress in a little white apron exclaimed in a bad Texan accent, “Oh hun, you’ll just love the special!”

  Faris ate a chip, picked up another, moved it towards his mouth, stopped, put it back in the basket, turned the basket so that the longest edge aligned with the bottom edge of the table, spun his empty burger plate so that the largest smear of ketchup was at the top, picked up another chip, ate half of it, put the other half back in the basket, leaned back in his chair and for a while

  had absolutely nothing to say for himself.

  Theo waited.

  “I was a journalist,” Faris announced, a tale told too many times, the meaning sucked away into only words. “I was done for libel. The indemnity was £329,560. Few years ago, government licenses the Company to collect taxes. It was part of mainstreaming the income process blah blah blah, that shit, business efficiency taking over from creaking public authorities. Deal was, Company pays the government a guaranteed cool four hundred billion every year, just like the budget says they should, and the Company gets to keep any profit above and beyond that. They’re not allowed to set the tax rates, not officially, but of course they’re allowed to choose how they exercise their power how they …

  … so they set the rates, I mean, it’s not official but everyone knows that’s what’s happening because the Company are controlling the algorithms that do the maths and you can appeal if you’ve got the cash or time but who’s got that except the rich guys and the rich guys are getting really good rates, I mean rates that would …

  … and the Company is netting maybe six fifty, seven hundred billion a year. That’s a two-hundred-and-fifty-billion profit and sure, there’s some objections, people who are, like ‘That’s our money they’re taking this is tax farming they’re squeezing us dry’ but who even listens to that stuff these days? And some bleeding-heart liberals start a petition and a few try to take the whole thing to court but it was the government who made this deal and you know what? That makes it law. That means no one did anything wrong.

  Except Philip Arnslade, the minister of fiscal efficiency—he’s getting two million a year from the Company for ‘consultation services,’ and pays ground rent of a quid for a palace off Sicily, and that’s corruption, I mean, that’s proper, provable corruption not just mismanagement, cos you can’t arrest someone for being crap but you can arrest them for …

  But the Ministry said I’d misunderstood the tendering process and was bringing them into disrepute, and their lawyers took it all the way to the appeals court, and I lost when I couldn’t pay my barrister. By then I was broke anyway. I got five years on the patty line, but because of my CV I was sponsored out by a copy-writing company, given four years six months proofreading washing-machine manuals. My parole finished two months ago, and they decided not to keep me on at full salary. Cheaper to pull people like me from the patty line instead.”

  Theo sat silent, one elbow nudging a pool of beef fat that had solidified on the table to a translucent smear.

  “My daughter’s paying for me at the moment. That’s how I get by. She works for the Company, does their marketing for the pharma side of things. I can’t get sponsorship for benefits; my record means I’m an unsound investment. They keep telling me to fill out the form again. That’s what I do, mostly. I fill out the forms. I also help some of the others fill out the forms on the sly, you’d get into trouble if anyone found out that … that’s how I knew Dani. She wanted all these forms done, trying to find her kid. No chance in hell they’d let her see her, but … she kept on trying. Gotta hand it to her. Waste of bloody time.”

  “Was that it? Was that all she wanted?”

  The chips are getting cold. Faris’s gaze is lost to some other place.

  “If a Company man kills a stranger, he pays less than an ordinary citizen. He’s worth more to society than other people—no point penalising the successful for a lapse in judgement. Wouldn’t be efficient. So that’s it. That’s our world. Eat your fucking chips and deal with it, right?”

  A defiant chip, defiantly consumed, if George Washington had eaten his fries like this, the War of Independence would have been over twice as fast.

  “This isn’t new,” mused Theo. “Everyone knows how the system works, everyone knows that’s just … how things are. The Company makes a profit to keep things efficient, it’s better that business profits than … than …” Stopped himself, couldn’t even remember the words he was supposed to say.

  “Yeah,” grunted Faris. “All of that crap.” Another chip. Then a thought, a flicker almost of something excited, alive. “You heard of the queen of the patties?”

  “Yes—a little.”

  “She’s got this enclave somewhere up north, a place for the ones who dodge parole to run to, somewhere even the Company can’t be buggered to go, no point in it. The queen says this country is a slave state. That there aren’t any chains on our feet or beatings on our backs because there don’t need to be. Cos if you don’t play along with what the Company wants, you die. You die cos you can’t pay for the doctor to treat you. You die cos the police won’t come without insurance. Cos the fire brigade doesn’t cover your area, cos you can’t get a job, cos you can’t buy the food, cos the water stopped, cos there was no light at night and if that’s not slavery, if that’s not the world gone mad if that’s not …

  … but we got used to it. Just the way things are. Just what the world is. Sometimes you think—people go missing, and how are there so many patties now? You do the smallest thing, and I mean the smallest thing, and you go to the patty line, that’s the law now, and who wrote the law? Who paid to get the guy to write it? This thing Dani said—‘They broke the world.’ Yeah. Yeah they did. So? So the fuck what? That’s what I said to her. That’s what I told her to her face.” A little sigh, no more chips to play with, nothing left to do. “One day I’m gonna go see this queen of patties. I’d like to hear more of what she has to say.”

  “What did Dani want you to do?”

  “Said she could destroy it. Said that we hadn’t seen the half of it. That the four hundred billion that the government got in receipts from the Company, like, three hundred of that just went straight back to Company contracts anyway. Paying the Company for the bin men and the cops and the academies and the private hospitals and the prisons—paying them cos it’s cheaper to pay the Company you know, cheaper to … but actually it’s not, it costs a fucking fortune, so they’ve got this problem, yeah, they’ve got all this stuff they need to do if they’re not going to have a revolution, but people are skint and the more skint they get the more pissed off they get and the government sure as hell isn’t gonna spend to get them out of the shit and …”

  He stopped, mouth curling like he’d bitten the tip of his tongue.

  Theo waited.

  “Anyway. Dani said, ‘You don’t know the half of it.’ Said she had secrets. Could take them down. I didn’t believe her. Told her where to go.”

  “Philip Arnslade? Danesmoor? Did she mention them?”

  Another shrug. Faris sat back, hands resting on a gentle paunch of oil and margarine pushing at the bottom buttons of his thin blue shirt.

  “What did you do?” asked Theo.

  “Laughed. Told her to get lost.”

  “And?”

  “And she sends me this picture. It’s one of those ones taken on a phone camera, bit crap, light’s shit, but there’s this bulldozer, big yellow thing, and these guys in yellow jackets and white helmets and one guy giving a thumbs-up to the camera. And this guy with the Company T-shirt at the back tex
ting like he’s not even paying any attention, and I’m like, so what the fuck is this? And she’s like, look closer. So I look closer. This is something she’s swiped from the Ministry of Civic Responsibility, said they were going to destroy it, destroying evidence, she said, so I look closer. I look real close. And it takes for ever to spot it, I’ve got soft in my old age, I used to be …

  Anyway.

  And then I see it. Right on the edge of the field, where there’s a ditch. Thought it was just a shoe, but look really close, real careful, and it’s not a shoe. It’s a foot. Sticking out of the field. It might belong to a kid. And these guys they’re just standing there, just smiling at the camera, and they’ve just turned over the whole fucking field, I mean, they must have found it, they must have found the body unless …

  So I say it’s Photoshop it doesn’t mean anything, but she’s like, you have no idea.

  You have no idea.

  It’s so much more.

  With this, we can take back the world.

  She made it sound so real. She made it sound … for a moment I thought maybe there’d be something—I mean, maybe something I could do, something important that perhaps … but it wasn’t real, of course. That sort of thing isn’t ever real. So maybe she published and maybe she said that some guys who worked for the Company dug up a field where there was someone’s foot, but I don’t think it matters. We got taught not to care. It’ll pass.

  It’ll pass.

  I told her to leave me alone. And now she’s dead and I’m …”

  What is he?

  Faris is terrified is what he is. His hands are shaking. Even though his mouth finds the words he can’t meet Theo’s eyes he is …

  “I made a phone call. After she called me I made one phone call. I called my daughter I said look there’s this thing there’s this thing I heard there’s this thing and …”

  Now the terror seeps into his words, the tears into his eyes.

  “She told me the Company knew what it was doing, that they were great for business great for Britain that … then a man called Markse knocked on my door, I mean like, five hours later, and asked if I knew Dani Cumali. I said no, I’d never heard of her. Not a clue. Just carried on as normal. I’m still carrying on as normal, that’s how you do it. I’m just … nothing’s changed. Why would anything change when you’ve got nothing to …

  If I can’t find the queen of the patties, then I keep thinking I’ll go to Cornwall. It looks beautiful down there, even in the winter, though they say the winters are shit and actually on the TV you never see …

  … but how long does a winter last, really? It just feels long but how long does it …”

  His words ran away to shaking nothing, and he shrank into the curve of his shoulders and stared at emptiness and spun sesame seeds around the greasy edge of his plate, and spun sesame seeds, and spun sesame seeds.

  Theo opened his mouth to say something reassuring and kind, but the words were meaningless. Instead: “Are you being followed?”

  Faris didn’t answer.

  “Are you being followed?”

  “My daughter ratted me,” mused Faris. “I told her this thing, cos I was worried about her, and she went straight to the Company, she told them about me, about Dani, she … she says it’s for the best. That the only way I’m ever going to pick myself up, make something of myself, is if I get back in the normal way of things, make myself an attractive business prospect again, not some done-out outsider. That I had to get realistic and stop pretending I was some kind of martyr. That this was the way things worked and it was for the best, stop being old-fashioned, everyone has a good chance so long as they just …”

  Faris stared into the distance and did not speak again, and Theo waited a little while, then stood without a word, looking around, heart pounding, and walked away.

  Marching away from Vauxhall Bridge the man who is now Theo Miller thinks

  he thinks and his thoughts are

  stone.

  Harder than the stones that roll back into the sea.

  Two men follow him. They are remarkably easy to spot, but the moment they realise he’s seen them, they start to run straight towards him, leather shoes and chopping-board hands. Theo feels a sudden surge of contempt, wants to laugh in their face, lets them come on a few paces, and turns and runs.

  He thought maybe he might have to run, and now he runs and he is fast—he had no idea he was so fast, he’s run by himself for so long that he hasn’t really got a sense of these things—but turns out all that time, all those early mornings and long, late nights when other people were living, had some upside after all.

  The man called Theo runs.

  Running changes the city. Sight and sound blazes into slithering sentience, the river is moving black popping with reflected lights of sodium orange, white, green and yellow. The Thames slurps its way down the thin tidal beach below the high walls of the embankment catching on muddy sand, belching wet gloop, the sky is a brown smear stained with bruised rushing clouds, buses unnaturally slow as they crawl across Westminster Bridge; the Houses of Parliament are all illuminated acrylic blaze and deep recesses of shadow, strips and nooks of blackness where only the pigeons can penetrate.

  He runs and for a moment isn’t sure who he’s running from.

  He’s a reasonable man in a reasonable world, he hasn’t technically done much wrong, running will only make it worse; they can go to the police station, there is a rule of law there is …

  Theo runs without hesitation.

  And for a little while, he feels free, alive, on fire. He can’t remember the last time he felt so full of blood.

  He thinks, too late, that perhaps it is a mistake to commit to the path that runs between St. Thomas’ Hospital and the river, flagstones singing, wobbling and free where the mortar has eroded away, once you’re there it’s hard to turn off any way, but as his feet ring out he glances back and sees the two men, puffing and huffing behind, one already at a half-jog, half-stagger, overweight and out of breath.

  Laughs, and runs a little faster, just because he can.

  The security cordon at the London Eye forces him to cut inland, away from the river, past rows of shops selling tourist food: noodles in cardboard boxes with wire handles, slices of pizza adorned with three thin slivers of black-grey mushroom, a kebab shop that offers authentic awful; only a London kebab can burn your mouth so particularly, leave that aftertaste at the back of your nose, it’s an authentic city experience!

  He looks back again at the British Film Institute, the faces of the latest idols exploded to two-storey monuments, edited black and white portraits of bygone goddesses smoking the latest branded thing, drinking this season’s newest whisky, as the lights sweep back and forth across the technicians rolling up a trampled red carpet.

  He can’t see his followers immediately, so slows and stares properly, and sees them nearly a hundred yards off, puffing and pushing through the crowds huddled around the burrito vans, tourist gazes riveted to the licensed skateboarders who range beneath the painted walls of Waterloo Bridge, or drinking and arguing over the price of dim sum.

  Perhaps whatever Dani found isn’t important enough for his pursuers to try very hard.

  Perhaps you just can’t get the staff these days.

  Theo slowed to a walk, head down, hands in his pockets, turned into the crowd coming out of the National Theatre and let it carry him away, towards Waterloo Station.

  By the river in Oxford Philip Arnslade is shaking, shaking, trying not to laugh, or maybe cry, he holds the gun and stares down at the body of Theo Miller and had prepared something really smart, really witty to say but doesn’t have it so he just …

  but Simon Fardell, his number two, leans over the expiring form of the boy as the breath leaves his lungs and says, “I suppose we should have brought something for the pain.”

  And shakes his head

  and walks away.

  After, in the ambulance

  Theo Miller can�
��t speak, is gasping for air, tries squeezing tight the hand of the boy who will become Theo, and for a little while he does this, and then his grip becomes loose, and cold, and wet, and the paramedic says

  “nothing you could have done it wasn’t your fault”

  but with memory

  like a night on the beach as the sea washes the stones

  the man called Theo thinks perhaps that’s not what he said at all.

  Perhaps

  now that he’s rewriting the past and everything he thought he knew about it

  perhaps the paramedic looked him in the eye and said, “It’s your fault. There’s nothing to be done. It’s your fault.”

  And the boy who would be Theo looked into the eyes of his friend, and saw in that instant that his friend knew what had happened to him, and for all his good nature couldn’t help but agree.

  Chapter 36

  Neila sailed north.

  She had sailed for many years by herself, and sometimes it was hard, but in her heart it was easy, and she was fine.

  She was fine.

  When she was young, and still finding who she was, she’d wanted to matter. To her friends, family and to the world. She wanted the world to tell her that she was of value, that her actions had some meaningful consequence that people could generally see and perhaps even admire. Such actions didn’t have to involve saving children from burning buildings or adopting stray kittens. Kindness, compassion, bringing joy to others—these were surely all worthy of appreciation, and she strived to live by them.