by Steven Lang
‘I could,’ Nick said. ‘But why would I want to?’
‘That’s who bought my drink,’ Martin/Cooper said.
Which made it possible that Cooper’s disquiet was nothing to do with him and all to do with having a false ID, not that it let Nick off the hook. He should have followed through. He’d allowed himself to be got at, plain and simple.
‘But it’s good, hey?’ Cooper said. ‘I’ve been wanting to say thanks, you know, for what you did.’ Giving him a broad nervous smile. Something disarming about him, both boyish and knowing at the same time; Nick had noted it before, here it was again.
‘How’s the arm?’ he said.
‘Getting better.’
‘And everything else?’
‘Well, there’s still a bit to go …’
‘I’d been wondering how it went for you after that night,’ Nick said. ‘I didn’t think I’d run into you here, though.’
The pianist coming back on stage, a middle-aged man who looked more like a banker than a musician, fiddling with the dials on his equipment then launching into a solo over and around the noise of the crowd.
‘I’m up here seeing my dad. Staying at his house. My mother has this thing about maintaining connection. Who knows? It’s quite possibly part of their settlement. Like if I don’t come to see him she won’t get paid.’
‘He lives here, in Winderran?’ Nick said.
‘He visits. Dad has houses everywhere, you name it: London, New York, a fucking island in the Whitsundays.’
Casually disparaging his father’s wealth. Some memory of the family arrangements as told to him in the car seeping back into his consciousness. He’d never been any good at retaining the details of other people’s lives, even of those as exotic as Cooper’s. The precise nature of the illness or injury of a patient stuck with him but the names of the significant others or the nature of their relationships fell away like once-used phone numbers. It was a trait Abie had hated, seeing it as proof of an endemic narcissism.
When they’d been in the car Cooper had been on morphine. His speech slow and clumsy. In the club he was speaking quickly, almost too fast for clear comprehension, particularly with the music; information delivered in a rush, as if none of it was of any more value than the rest, never mind its personal nature.
‘What about you? What are you doing here?’ he said, turning his attention on Nick.
‘It’s a bit odd really,’ he said, about to go further, maybe even as far as to mention Eugenie, but catching himself in time. Not sure what could possibly possess him to tell an unknown sixteen-year-old about his fixation. Was he really that far gone?
‘It’s pretty noisy in here. D’you want to go out for a minute?’ he asked.
It was still raining but the porch provided a small dry area. A bench on either side, a bucket of umbrellas by the door, dripping onto a sand-filled can for cigarette butts. Posters tacked on the wall announcing that on Saturdays there were farmers’ markets in the grounds, that this or that band was playing last Thursday night.
The wet grass glistening in the streetlights. A car slowing to a halt, its indicator flashing wetly as it turned into the street beside them. Cooper took a seat on one of the benches and leant back against the wall, his legs extended, looking as if at ease, albeit a bit younger under the harsh light.
Ease was far from what Nick felt. ‘D’you see your father often?’ he asked.
‘This is the first time since this happened,’ Cooper said, indicating his arm. ‘Tonight was supposed to be the night, you know, for the big talk, but when it came down to it Dad – quelle surprise – had some crisis going on with his latest takeover. He spent the whole of dinner in his office on the phone to Brazil, left me with my older brother, Michael, who’s, like, already old enough to be my father and incredibly straight. He thinks it’s his duty to dispense wisdom. I escaped out here. So, yeah, we haven’t yet had the conversation. That pleasure awaits us.’
‘Who’s your father taking over this time?’
‘They’re branching out. Finalising the purchase of CoSecOr. Radical diversification.’
‘CoSecOr?’
‘Uh … like, the largest private security service in the world. MCG pays a fortune for their protection at mine sites, but they also do corrective services. You know, prisons, as well as pretty much any kind of general war-making on demand. It’s Michael’s plan. He figures it would be cheaper simply to own them. Made a case for it to Dad. I guess you could say the rich are getting richer and they’re not all completely fucking stupid. Despite appearances.’ Laughing. ‘Dad, for example. He’s read history. You get massive inequality and sooner or later you get revolution. But hey, if you already own the means of production, why not own the means of protection? That way you can repress the masses for at least a couple of cycles. At least as long as you’re alive. I mean, why not make money out of the threat while you’re at it? Sell protection to your mates as well. Hell, sell it to the State at the same time. You know how it is … if the State’s not going to look after your privilege you have to do it yourself.’
All this coming out at the same speed, three hundred words to the minute or more, a great flow of pissed-offedness at his heritage, a distancing from it, delivered to a near stranger outside a club.
‘So is MCG your future?’ Nick asked.
‘Nah. Not my field.’
‘Which is?’
‘Gaming.’
‘Right.’ Stretching the syllable out. The best response he could come up with.
‘It’s okay,’ Cooper said. ‘Most people don’t get it. Dad and Michael don’t. They think it’s for nerds. They don’t understand what you can do with computers. I do. We’re moving into a new age. People born today are going to live inside them. I mean it, literally. Screens with greater visual acuity than the human eye. Think about what that means. Augmented worlds of extraordinary sophistication. Don’t get me started. Whoever owns that is going to own the world.’
Cooper pausing for an instant. Taking a sip of his beer.
Nick wondering if what he’d said was remotely true, about games and security firms, rejecting the possibility, if only because he didn’t want it to be so. Noting that for all Cooper’s disparagement of his father’s wealth he appeared to harbour his own dreams of world domination.
‘So, if you don’t mind me asking,’ he said, ‘who’s Martin?’
Cooper put the beer aside and leant forward to dig out his wallet, flipping it open perhaps a little too proudly and handing Nick a student card from The University of Queensland. A photo of himself next to the microchip. In the name of someone called Martin Gere. It looked real.
‘He’s got a Medicare card, too,’ Cooper said, passing it across. ‘That’s as far as I’ve got. I’d like to try for a passport. That’s the holy grail.’
Boasting.
‘Is this someone’s identity you’ve bought?’
‘Hey! No. He’s me. I made him. Well, technically, he was once alive, died when he was three years old. Around the time I was born.’ Watching Nick for a reaction. ‘It’s a speciality of mine.’ That smile again. ‘It’s pretty simple, really. I mean it takes time. I’ve been doing it for a while. You need to be, you know, a bit obsessive. Martin’s my favourite. I mean, just the name, hey?’ Looking out into the darkness again, caught out searching for praise.
‘But why would you want to?’
Cooper picking up the beer and tipping the last of it down his throat.
‘Sorry, stupid question,’ Nick said.
‘It’s not for that,’ Cooper said. ‘Drinking’s just a bonus. The internet’s a vast place. There’s bits of it you don’t want to go into as yourself.’
The music leaking out through the doors. Nick finishing his own beer and putting the bottle aside while Cooper talked. The day catching up with him. Even at the best of times the explanation the young man was giving of Tor and VPNs and Block Chain technology would have had his eyes glaze over.
Interrupting him. ‘Can I get you another drink?’ he said. ‘I mean I shouldn’t, should I? Corrupting youth.’
‘It’s just a beer, Doctor Lasker. My ID’s watertight.’
‘Okay. But you can call me Nick.’
He went back inside. Entering the heat and noise and wash of music. The saxophonist working up through a riff. A small dapper man with a narrow face, wearing a neat little hat, a trilby – the name rising up from some forgotten archive in the brain – tilting back from the waist as he blew into the instrument, climbing the scales, producing a remarkable sound. Several people turning their heads when he’d opened the door, including the woman, Marie. Seeing, with a flush of embarrassment, how this must appear, his refusal to join her table, and then to go outside with a boy half his age. Nothing he could do about it. For all that Cooper was precocious and over-eager he suddenly felt he’d prefer to be with him than in here, trying to fit into a new town, to get to know strangers, to appeal to their better natures.
He ordered another couple of bottles, taking note of his sudden relaxed attitude towards teenage drinking.
‘What would happen if you went into these places with your own name?’ Nick asked. ‘I mean this is what I don’t get, all this anonymity. I prefer people to be who they are. People behave better when they’ve got their name attached to what they’re saying. At least some of the time.’ Thinking, as he spoke, of Cooper’s older brother, abandoned by him for the crime of imparting wisdom. ‘I must sound horribly straight,’ he added.
‘No, you’re right. We would be. It’s just that privacy’s been compromised, hasn’t it? Government agencies watch everything, particularly this sort of shit.’ Tapping his wallet. ‘Don’t be fooled it’s just metadata. If they can get more they do. Never think twice about it. Not just them, of course.’
‘God, but they must have to wade through some shit.’
‘Just think about your browsing history,’ Cooper said. ‘They have.’
Paranoia and conspiracy being, Nick thought, both enticing and infectious. Like ghost stories, providing shivers of scary pleasure; only now it was government.
Cooper clearly deeply in their thrall. Leaning in again, ‘But if you want to find out what’s really happening, the things people don’t want you to know, well you need to come in sideways. It’s the one reason I don’t mind being at Dad’s house. He has a direct line to fibre, superfast, for currency trading. One gig per second. Fantastic encryption. With speed like that you can get around some things you couldn’t otherwise avoid, it gives you that edge.’
Nick having come out on the off-chance of meeting a woman and ending up sitting on a porch in the rain talking to a teenager with false ID about gigabits. Which he’d be happier about if the business of Bain had been sorted. Not sure how to bring it up.
‘Everything’s sort of fine the way it is, now,’ Cooper was saying. ‘But when it starts getting nasty, when they start rounding people up, it would be good to be someone else, wouldn’t it?’
‘Who’s they?’
‘The government. The church. My dad.’
‘Your dad?’
‘Well, Mayska Coal & Gas. That’s what buying CoSecOr’s all about.’ He took a sip of beer. ‘You interested to hear what happened to the people who beat me up?’ he said.
‘I am, yes,’ Nick said, more interested than he was prepared to admit. Here it was then, coming back around.
Cooper looking straight at him, no escaping his gaze. ‘Zip,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Nothing. Zilch. Zee-ro.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Martin’s been doing a bit of research,’ Cooper said, giving that cute smile again. ‘You know how it is, beat me up and what do you know? My curiosity’s piqued.’
‘It’s probably my fault,’ Nick said, getting it out there, coming clean. ‘I didn’t report it. I should have. I was going to, if that makes any difference, I’m sorry. Bain asked me not to. He said your father wanted to avoid publicity and they’d sort it out.’ Then told him later it had been sorted, that the thug had been punished. Foolish, he guessed, to ever trust a politician.
‘Bain?’
‘The local member? He’s in the Shadow Cabinet.’
‘Oh, you mean Aldous.’
‘Yes. You know him?’
‘He’s a friend of Dad’s. I’ve met him several times. He’s a creep. A Christian creep, if you can get creepier than just being a creep.’
Dismissing Bain with a word. The ruthlessness of the young.
‘I shouldn’t have listened to him.’
‘Don’t worry about it. Seriously. It’s not your fault. If Dad didn’t want people to know about it, nothing would have been reported anyway, didn’t matter what you did or who you told. That’s the way it works. I thought you did good up there at the camp, fronting Jaz like that.’ Putting on a deep voice, ‘“You’re in shit so deep you don’t even know it.” Hot stuff.’
‘What was that place anyway?’ Nick said, a little pleased despite himself. This was Cooper’s gift, he was only sixteen but he could turn things around without trying.
‘It’s one of those ReachOut schools. If your parents can afford it and are into that sort of thing you do time at them instead of Year 11. You know, rope courses, orienteering, canoeing, cross-country skiing in winter. They operate all over the country. You get assigned to a cohort and move around together for a year. Wouldn’t be so bad maybe if they weren’t church-based. Hymns at night time. Twice on a Sunday. The Bible is the word of God made manifest. I mean, seriously. Our lot had the misfortune to end up with that bastard in charge.’
‘And?’
‘One of their big things is solidarity with the team, you know? They divide you up and then you compete and whichever team wins gets rewarded, the one that loses gets punished, gets given extra work, cleaning the toilets, that sort of shit. Jaz pumped it up, gave no quarter – longer runs, higher jumps, less sleep, pushing us all the time. My mistake was to be not as interested in winning as everyone else. Not being as interested in being a pillock. Being prepared to tell my team mates what I thought about them.’
‘So they beat you up?’
‘In a word. I was the impurity needing to be purged, the weak link. I’m sorry, I’m not as good at shutting up as I might be. I guess I didn’t get how bad the others had it. Not a mistake I’ll make a second time.’
A curious understanding of his tormentors, as if he bore them no ill-will. ‘I don’t get it, though. Why hasn’t your father come down on them?’
‘Jaz is too useful to them.’
‘In what way?’
Cooper’s way of talking being to dole out portions of information. You had to keep asking for more. In the car it had seemed obvious what had provoked the other boys: a level of intellectual brilliance combined with flamboyant sexuality, both of which were even more on display at the Alterbar, but also combined with something else: a level of confidence that came, perhaps, with being the son of a billionaire. You couldn’t ignore this last. The cynicism about wealth was most likely just a teenager trying to get out from under his father’s influence – which in this case meant taking philosophic objection to the military-industrial complex, the whole teetering system. What Nick wondered was how long it would last. At what point Cooper would notice his own wellbeing was intrinsically tied to it.
‘He’s part of their grand program for CoSecOr and the rest.’
A couple of men came out through the high doors, bringing a wash of music with them. Said hello and proceeded to light up, filling the small space with their smoke and their conversation. The rain still coming down so they weren’t going any further outside.
‘Maybe it’s time to go back in,’ Nick said.
Only the vaguest possibility of further communication inside, what with the band. They stood at the doorway together. Nick leaning in to yell in Cooper’s ear.
‘What were you going to say, before about CoSecOr?’
Nick nodded, let him go. The disconnect between what they’d been discussing outside and the lively bar was simply too great. Added to that was the sense that whatever the punchline of Cooper’s story had been going to be it wouldn’t have justified the events that led up to it; the story was the thing itself. This thought, in turn, pushed aside because, in casting his eyes around the room, he saw that Eugenie was sitting at a table in the corner with a couple of other women. There was, he saw now, another entrance just past the bar, an EXIT sign over the door, which most likely gave direct access to the car park.
Nothing for it. Before he could prevaricate further he went over, putting on his effusive self, the one that could stand in front of a group of women and bluster, make an inane comment about the music and offer to buy them a drink, while simultaneously alert to the subtlest of signs, reading the body language they exchanged as they came to an unspoken consensus about the idea of having him join them – his focus on Eugenie, watchful for any indication of interest.
If there was some she wasn’t giving it away.
The other women were known to him. Ann was the nursing Sister from the hospital, Ruth was a physio in town. As always in small communities the medical profession hanging together. ‘Don’t worry about the drinks,’ Ann said. ‘There’s plenty of time for drinks. Sit. But no talking shop. This is a work-free zone.’
He squeezed around to sit next to Eugenie, coming down hard on what proved to be a former church pew, backed up against the wall.
‘Jesus,’ he said, leaning in so as to be heard. ‘Well here’s a blast from the past. I haven’t sat on one of these since school.’ Putting on his mother’s sternest Scot’s voice. ‘There’ll be no slouching here, understand me now, girl!’ Which raised a smile, at least, but seemed to lock him, with this approach, into a pattern of humorous remarks that were a long way from what he was feeling.
