Saturday 29 November 2008

I didn't finish my second novel


This is the first draft of Hell on Earth, with which I didn't win NaNoWriMo 2008. The first novel, with which I won in 2007, is here.

Hell on Earth

Hell on Earth: A Novel by Ken Johnson

Jump to: Chapter One Two Three Four Five

Episode Twenty Eight Episode Twenty Nine

 


 

 

To the memory of Peter Muego, who taught me how to write

 

Chapter One

 

Bitco is an unusual software consultancy, in that all its employees are dead. Bitco is a wholly owned subsidiary of Hell Corporate. Peter Highwater had died a year ago, gone to Hell, been sent to the Ninth Circle and put to work as a system administrator at Bitco. He was sitting in the weekly all hands meeting, listening to an address and pep talk by his manager Archimedes Runatalos. In front of a daylight screen showing the twelfth, or was it the thirteenth, Powerpoint slide of the day, Archimedes was explaining his new scheme for colour co-ordinating the carpets in the various parts of the Bitco office. Green carpets for the senior executives, for they needed to contemplate and dream. Red carpets for technical staff, for they had to remain alert, agile and active. Yellow carpets for reception areas, for our visitors must be cheerful. The summary slides read like the Beatitudes. This meeting had started at eleven o'clock and had been going on for two hours at least. Peter stared idly out of the window. A distant volcano, too far away to be heard or to do any damage to the building, gave off a powerful blast of sulphurous yellow gas and flung red hot rock into the sky. Archimedes continued talking without noticing it.

Archimedes flipped to the next slide and began explaining that the coffee machines would stand on circular patches of easy to clean orange synthetic carpet with resilient underlay in order to motivate coffee drinkers to return to their desks instead of standing around doing nothing, while providing luxurious support underfoot. He had drafted the carpeting scheme in admirable detail. The new scheme was going to need some effort in procurement, since nothing was easy to come by in Hell and carpets rarely arrived in new condition. This effort was to be contributed by Sandy Luff, a brilliant programmer who was part of Peter's team but who was happy to tackle more or less any job that came along, despite knowing nothing and caring not in the least about carpets. Peter was a little irritated that Sandy would now be spending time doing a purchasing clerk's job instead of his own, but reflected that things could have been worse. Archimedes might have chosen him.

After that, Archimedes put down his notes and beamed to his audience. "You know," he declaimed, "In my garden I grow mushrooms. I look after them and I care for them and I make them grow. I like to think that I care for my team in the same way that I care for my many mushrooms."
"Yes," Sandy Luff's voice could be heard in a stage whisper, "keep us in the dark and give us some shit every so often." There were giggles, and at last the meeting was almost over.

"Any other issues?" Archimedes asked the meeting, but nobody raised any.

Back in Peter's office, his desktop was running an Access database and the Windows operating system — this was Hell, after all. Sandy settled in a desk on the opposite side of the room and began sorting pieces of paper. Routine tasks filled the afternoon. Queues of messages were building up on machines feeding data to the Outlying Territories. It looked as though there might be an interruption in service there. Peter attempted to restart the service from his desk, but failed. He phoned the administrator there, but nobody answered the phone. Never mind. Try later. The queues wouldn't cause a problem for a day or two, except to anyone who was waiting for a message that was trapped in them.

In the evening Peter went back to the house at 11 Blair Street, where he lived with his wife Angela. She was usually home before him, but today she wasn't back yet. Peter found a few euro in his pockets and decided to buy something from Farmfoods and get some dinner ready. The electricity was still on, so Peter managed to cook the food before the lights went off. After that, Peter wrapped the food in a blanket and sat, in the dark, at the window, watching for Angela to appear. He had even taken to wondering whether she had been injured by the volcano blast and was even now lying on the ground writhing in agony waiting for help that was never going to arrive in time, when she came in through the front door.

"What happened to you?" he asked, when the door finally opened. "I was getting worried."
"I got a job."
"How did that happen? I thought you never bothered with the Job Centre."
"I don't. You'd have more luck finding a tin of cat food at Crufts than looking for work at the Job Centre. But lo, the job came to me. This morning a Polish man in a yellow jacket came and banged on the door and gave me a letter of introduction. I'm working on the radio station."
"I didn't know there was a radio station."
"There soon will be. I'm in News."
"I made dinner. Chinese sweet and sour pork."
"Yummy. I make news, you make dinner. Sounds a fair division of labour to me."
"It was all they had in Farmfoods. As you've been working all day, I'll wash up afterwards as well. What does the job involve?"
"All I've done so far is make tea."
"They have tea?"
"Mm. It's a perk of the job."
"Is it interesting?"
"Of course. Did you know there are over a hundred different kinds of tea?"
"No, I didn't. I'm only a humble peasant so Asda Economy does it for me. But I really meant to ask if the job was interesting. Who else is working there?"
"I saw Robert Maxwell."
"I'm not surprised."

Hell Corporate owned four tower blocks from Castlemilk. The blocks were demolished in their native cities and their souls had been transported to Hell, which is where they should have been in the first place. Block One was now a call centre where thousands of tortured souls were put to work ringing up telephones at random and trying to ensnare whoever answered the phone into some fraud or scam or purchase of double glazing or a fitted kitchen. Block Two had remained empty at the time, and now the top two floors of Block Two had been converted into the improvised studios and offices of Radio Hell.

"What sort of programs will Radio Hell broadcast?" Peter asked innocently.
"Whatever's informative, entertaining and interesting. The Archers. Poetry Please. Thought for the Day. Lottery results. Just A Minute. That sort of thing."
"What sort of event gets on the news?"
"Anything vaguely interesting and not too upsetting to the demons."
"Cat walks three miles to old home?"
"Sure. Why do they do that?"
"I don't know. Maybe they left the gas on. Or maybe the grass isn't really greener three miles away."

Angela paused, dangling a fork above a sweet and sour pork meatball, and then asked Peter, "If you're interested, why don't you come with me to Radio Hell tomorrow? Just to get an idea what I'm doing all day. Where the kettle and the tea bags and the milk are, that sort of thing."
"I'd love to," Peter said as Angela stabbed the meatball. "What time do you start?"
"In time for the eight o'clock news."

 

Angela and Peter stepped out of the lift into the lobby of Radio Hell at about ten to eight and found turmoil. Two men were arguing incomprehensibly about air time and contractual obligations. A woman was desperately collecting and examining sheets of typescript, putting them into a pile. Another man in a cheap, badly fitting jacket and a large pair of headphones stopped shouting instructions down the phone and ran up to them looking red faced and panicky. "Angela," he panted, "there's a panic on. Can you read the news?"
"Why? What happened?" Angela tried to work out what was going on around her. Panic didn't quite seem to cover it.
"Alvar's gone missing."
"Missing?"
Angela grasped the scale of the problem. Alvar Liddel was the finest newsreader the world had ever known — God alone knew why he had been sent to the Ninth Circle — the only person who knew how to interview an old age pensioner who had left her false teeth in the dishwasher, how to report from a courtroom or a bomb site, and where the sugar was. Without Alvar Liddel, the radio station was an ocean-going liner without a rudder, a Wild West sheriff without a horse, a driverless train, a factory without light or power, an axe without a handle, a bank robber without a getaway car, a field of sheep without any of those yappy black and white dogs. And the seconds-hand of the clock was sweeping over the number 9, so there was no time left to find him.
"Oh, my G— I mean, what the devil are we all going to do? Where's he gone?"
"We don't know. That's what 'missing' means. Don't panic, though, because now is your big chance. Stand in for him. Studio two, go on the green light, here's..." he reached out and grabbed the woman's sheaf of typescripts, "...the script. Go!"
"Me stand in for...?"
"That door there, with the '2' on it," said Headphones, bundling himself into the goldfish bowl between the studios.
On a loudspeaker behind the reception desk, the time signal started.
"I'll see what I can do."

The time signal finished.

 

 

Angela dashed to the desk. She found an earpiece and she was almost ready to read the script when the green light went on.

"This is the news, and this is Alvar Liddel reading it." She read the 1940s catch phrase in an exact rendition of Alvar Liddel's unmistakeable voice.

"That's amazing!" In the lobby Headphones called out to nobody in particular. "She's got the voice exactly. Drinks all round, guys! We're not washed up after all!"
"It's her gift," Peter put in, "one of many."
"So when Alvar turns up, Angela can go on Dead Ringers."
"Or she can carry on reading news. She'd be perfect."

"Shares have continued to fall in value on stock exchanges throughout the celestial spheres," she began, trying to get the earpiece to stay in her ear, "with prices falling as much as a hundred per cent in the first five minutes of trading on the First Circle Stock Exchange. Mr Eric Swindler, of the Exchange, described the falls as a lot worse than they expected, adding that before the day was out, he would probably have thrown himself off the sill of a top floor window."

"Did he really say that?" asked Headphones down the talkback.
Angela pressed the cough key, "No, I made that bit up," in her own voice. The earpiece fell out of her ear and she pushed it back.
"Great. Feel free to improvise. This is only the news, after all."
"The Stock Exchange needs to hire some better pessimists," Peter muttered.
"Excuse me?" Headphones looked up.
"They need better pessimists. What's the point of an advisor who says everything's all right, the ship is on course, the iceberg has melted all by itself and there's nothing to worry about? If the advisors had said that the entire civilised world would be reduced to rubble by five o'clock on Tuesday, Alvar — I mean Angela — would've been able to sit there and say that things were better than expected, instead of worse.
"I see what you're driving at."
"In an American election broadcast Mrs Sarah Palin, the Republican candidate for the Vice Presidency, stated that in her view schools should explain to children that the Earth is flat, heat is caused by an accumulation of phlogiston and the health of the body is governed by the balance of the four humours."

A tape of Ms Palin's voice saying the words began to play.

"Perhaps you didn't understand my use of irony, Angela," screeched Headphones. "Let me put it this way. Don't goddamn make things up! This is the news. You can't just say whatever comes into your head!"
"I didn't. She really said that." Angela held up the script and pointed.

The canned interview ended amid much applause, cheering and whooping. Angela moved on to the next story.

Headphones looked at Peter.

"Who are you?"
"I'm Peter Highwater. I'm Angela's husband, or something."
"Make yourself useful, then. As Angela's on air, you'll have to make the tea."
"How did you work that out?"
"Easy. You're British, you've never worked at Starbucks, so you know how to make tea. Kettle," Headphones pointed to a cupboard, "tea bags," he pointed somewhere else, "milk in the fridge, sugar."

Two or three minutes later Peter was silently taking Angela a cup of tea as she mimicked Alvar Liddel reading a story about Jocasta, a long haired black cat from Blunkett Buildings, walking three miles to its old home. She signed, "Thanks" inaudibly, adding, "Have one yourself."

 

Peter arrived at his office around half past ten and sat down to an electronic in tray of about thirty e-mails, most of which he could safely delete without reading. The queue of messages to the Outlying Territories had grown huge, though, and it definitely needed attention. Peter would have to go and look at it.

Going to the Outlying Territories was not to be taken lightly. It would require hours of packing and preparation, and you never knew on which days or at which times transport would be available, since it was operated by Cheap Air. Still, that was where the problem seemed to be, and nobody else seemed to want to sort things out, so Peter figured it was better to spend a few days away trying to fix problems in the Outlying Territories than staying in the office not reading endless e-mails about penis enlargement and dead relatives in Nigeria bequeathing him millions of pounds while the problem got worse.

"What's the problem exactly?" asked Sandy, when he and Peter were together in the office for a moment.
"Not sure. We have messages travelling from the call centre and not getting through."
"What are they about?"
"Just the usual bank things."
"Let me guess. Mrs Pile was so distracted by her neighbour's flamboyant new day-glow curtains that she drove her car straight into a shop window and smashed a crate of earthenware flowerpots to smithereens? Mr Jones from accounts was shagging Mrs Sanjee the cleaner in the broom cupboard after work on Thursday?"
"Nothing so exciting. Just money. Customers, accounts, invoices, cheques, standing orders, repayments, foreign exchange, share prices, interest rates. Just automatically generated messages that mark payments and receipts."
"Nothing interesting at all, then."
"Depends what you mean by interesting. Up there in the Outlying Territories people's salaries haven't been paid, rents haven't been collected, pensions haven't got to the post offices—"
"Didn't the demons close all the post offices so as to make them more efficient?"
"All right, wherever it is that the pensioners collect their pensions from."
"That would be the banks."
"Exactly, and those are the messages stuck behind the blockage that we have to clear."
"Sounds like a job for Dyno Rod."
"It does. Want to string along?"

Sandy laughed. "No thanks! You must be joking. I shall be sitting here in a special chair that holds my body rigid in a healthy, ergonomically sound posture, drinking cheap coffee out of flimsy paper cups in a nice warm office while you're out there in the freezing cold and the baking heat eating curried rocks, fighting off poisonous snakes, succumbing to malaria, coughing and spluttering in the sulphurous vapours and dodging bullets from hostile tribesmen."
"Tribespeople." Peter recognised the absence of gender neutral language when he heard it.
"Oh, yes, I forgot, the women have guns as well."
"I hadn't really thought of it like that. I was imagining drinking a heady cocktail of coconut milk and white rum beneath the fronds of exotic palm trees waving over silver sands, lapped by the warm waters of a tropical ocean, with not a ricocheting bullet within a hundred kilometres."
"Ha! You haven't looked at any maps lately, then."

Sandy was right. Maps were hard to come by, and Peter had omitted to consult one. When he did, he was rooted to the spot, amazed at his own stupidity in actually volunteering to go to the Outlying Territories when being fired, sent to prison, starved to death and having his body fed to sharks might be a possible alternative.

"There's a flight," the travel agent told him, "to Valhalla."
"Is there? That's good news. At least I don't have to drive all the way."
"Cheap Air go there."
"Ah."

Peter broke the news to Angela that evening. "It's only a few days."
"Good. Don't worry, I'll still be here when you get back."

It was pouring with rain in the morning and Peter was drenched by the time he reached the bus stop. With a bag of clothing and essential odds and ends, Peter took the bus from the Blocks to the Ninth Circle Airfield a couple of miles outside the town. He had arrived in good time, two hours before take off, but already there was a queue at the check in desk and nobody in an airline uniform to be seen anywhere.

The Ninth Circle Airfield had been built in the nineteen fifties to provide a runway, control tower and a simple booking office for the airline passengers of the day. It had changed little. Tatty cardboard signs still flapped in the wind, doors had come off their hinges, windows were cracked and filthy. As Peter waited with half a dozen others in the queue, a woman in a uniform appeared. She sat at the check in desk and put a well-used sign saying Soft Class on her own desk, then Hard Class and Rubbish Class on the unmanned desks to either side of her. Then she called the first person in the queue. Peter couldn't hear the conversation clearly, but she sent the passenger to stand in front of the unmanned Rubbish Class desk. The same conversation appeared to take place with the next passenger, and the next. When it was Peter's turn, she said, "Good morning. I need to see your biometric identity card, please."

 


 

Since it was compulsory to carry one's biometric identity card at all times, Peter found it after a few seconds of fumbling and presented it for inspection. Without looking at the card, the woman said, "Cheap Air is a one class airline. You are in the wrong queue. Please join the queue at the Rubbish Class desk."

After sending every passenger to the queue at the Rubbish Class desk, she picked up the Hard Class sign, put it in front of herself and called out, "Any Hard Class passengers?"

When nobody responded, she picked up the Rubbish Class sign and called for the Rubbish Class passengers, who came back to queue in front of her again. At an airport, Peter reasoned, this is what you must expect. One by one the passengers showed their identity cards again and received boarding passes. Then they handed over their luggage and answered a litany of questions: Did you pack this bag yourself? Did anyone ask you to carry anything onto the aeroplane? Are there any liquids in your hand luggage? How about bombs, bullets, incendiary devices, knives, poison gases and live poisonous snakes: do you have any of those?

Getting through Security involved lining up, stripping to your underpants and being felt all over by an official, then being X rayed and having your bags searched, then having them all searched again in case the first search missed anything. Putting his clothes back on, picking all his luggage up and packing everything again, Peter finally made his way into the departure area, where a man with a bullhorn and an unintelligible accent summoned him and the rest of the queue to Gate Two.

The eight passengers were sitting in the back of the Embraer. Some were dressed for a holiday. One woman was wearing a bridal veil, another a pair of horns like a demon's, and several had obviously been drinking in the departure lounge. The woman from the check in desk appeared dressed as a stewardess. There were some magazines in a pile at the front of the plane. Peter took one.

"No," she said firmly, snatching it back, "we do not give magazines to Rubbish Class passengers. I would rather throw them away unread and then die in a cellar full of rats than let any of you have one."

There was a blast of engine noise. The aeroplane took off and Peter guessed it was flying northwards. The view on a cloudless day would have been beautiful and fascinating, but it was cloudy and there was nothing to see. After an hour or so, the stewardess gave Peter a landing card and made him fill it in.

The landing card was written in a curious language that Peter did not immediately recognise.

"Is this Old Norse?" he asked, guessing Old Norse to be the language of the Valhalla territory.
"No, sir," said the stewardess, "it's English."
"English?" Peter scanned the card again, looking in vain for any resemblance between the language on the card and the language he spoke and knew as English.
"Hellspeak, sir."
"I see. You are passengerizing," he read, "aboard an airline/aircraft transportizing onboard personnel..."
"You're reading aloud, sir."
"Oh. Sorry." Peter continued reading, silently, "...to a within the deauthorizated area zone destination. All personnel transitizing to or de-aircraftating in non-local territories must fill out an internal transferization record."
"Your lips are moving. Anyway, sir, it means they want you to fill in a form."
"Ah. I see."

Peter continued to read the form while moving his lips. He scribbled his name, ID card number and so on with a ball point pen, in an irregular hand due to turbulence and vibration. There were routine questions, and then,

"Have you ever been a member of the Reform Party or the Communist Party?" No. "Have you ever started a war, been found guilty of a war crime or committed any act of deep moral turpitude?" No. "Have you ever blown up an aeroplane, derailed a train, assassinated any President or cut anybody's head off?" No. These were easy questions. "Have you ever been found guilty of piracy on the High Seas?" No. "Do you suffer from any infectious disease, mental illness or disgusting parasite?" No.

What happens, he wondered, if you answer "Yes" to any of these questions? Do they refuse you admittance to the Outlying Terriroties, or do they just stand you against a wall and shoot you? Or both?

There was a bump as the plane landed. The airport was a very small affair, just big enough to handle maybe half a dozen commuter aircraft each day. The uniforms who collected landing cards and checked IDs were surprisingly efficient, and while everyone else went to wait for an onward hop to some distant resort — Shangri La, perhaps — Peter wandered over to the car hire desk where, if things had gone right, Chaos Cars should have a Jeep waiting for him, just like in MASH. A woman in a green beret and blazer greeted him. She was wearing a name badge: Rosina.

"Driving licence?" she asked.
Peter showed it, and added, "Do you have a map?"
"Map?" Rosina seemed surprised at Peter's request.
"A map of the Valhalla area. I'm new here."

Rosina pointed to a poster on the wall begind her. Beware of Spies, it read. Spies are Everywhere. Do not carry maps, plans, orders or any document issued by a Bus, Train, Ferry or Airline Company. "You want to visit Valhalla?" she asked.
"Well, yes." Rosina's tone had made him uncertain about whether this was actually a good idea.
"There's only one road. Follow that. It's twenty kilometres or thereabouts."
"Thanks."

Peter picked up his luggage and walked away from the desk, and the rep called after him, "You forgot this," and tossed him the key fob.

There was indeed only one road. Standing in the chill air outside the airport, Peter saw the massive grey Jeep parked at a turning circle, and the one road that led into the distance. The road was narrow, certainly too narrow for two cars to pass. It was potholed and crazed, with loose surfacing, and appeared to have been built for horse drawn traffic rather than motor cars. Apart from a couple of houses which were probably for airport staff, and the terminal building itself, the landscape was bare: mainly grass, some green and some yellow, with low shrubs and occasional stunted trees. In the distance there appeared to be grey sea. In the other direction there were blue mountains, but no road led towards them. Peter slung his bag into the back seat and turned the diesel engine on. It fired up with a roar. Keeping the speed down and fearful of slithering and careering off the road into the fields on either side, Peter chugged along the road to Valhalla. Sheep turned and looked at him as he went by.

The town in the distance had to be Valhalla: there wasn't another place for a hundred kilometres. As he drove closer to it, Peter realised that the large stone central building, the Great Hall of mythological fame, was in a state of decay. The roof had fallen in. Some of the stonework had collapsed, the rest was cracked and covered with lichen and moss. Rain had attacked and damaged the walls, and the floors were too rotten to risk treading on them. The surrounding buildings had no glass in the windows, woodwork was crumbling, doors were missing. There was not another soul to be seen in the entire town. It dawned on Peter that believers in Valhalla had died out years ago, maybe centuries ago. Valhalla had once been a great city, but now it had been abandoned. There were not even any foot prints or tyre marks apart from his own: visitors must have been rare. No wonder Rosina was surprised at a young businessman turning up and picking up a Jeep to go there, as though it were the commercial and financial district, all flashing cameras and neon signs. Valhalla was a broken shell. Valhalla had been abandoned a long time ago, well before the invention of the electronic computer.

Out at sea there was a long, low blast on a ship's air horn. Peter stared across the level, grey bay and saw a vast passenger vessel, black with white trim, four funnels. It was — no doubt about it — the RMS Titanic, steaming steadily northwards. He was struck by how much light the vessel gave off. There were lights everywhere: masts, decks, portholes, all streamed light across the water — and that was when it hit him: in Valhalla, as the light failed, the buildings were all dark. There wasn't any sign of electricity. No-one could ever have installed a message processor here.

 

 


Chapter Two

Jump to: Top Next Previous

The News was scheduled to finish at ten minutes past eight, and Angela managed to end the final summary within thirty seconds of the advertised. She emerged from Studio Two beaming, to the sound of loud applause from all present.

"How do you do that?" asked Headphones, impressed.
"The voices? I don't know. I've always been able to do it, like some people can draw or do maths or talk to cats. It's just a random talent. Where's Peter?"
"He went to catch a flight. All right for some."
"Oh. I didn't think—"
"He'll be back. Angela, you've got a job here for as long as you need it. How do you fancy doing Down Your Way?"
"How on earth could I help with Down Your Way? I live in a weatherbeaten Victorian house on Blair Street, not a converted royal palace with a conservatory, an attached arboretum and a water feature full of artificial waterfalls, rare tropical fish and small sailing vessels."
"You could be the interviewees, Angela. Think of it. With your skill and talent, we could talk to anyone in an entire city."
"Is that ethical?"
"Ethical? Ethical? I don't understand. What does that mean? What are you trying to tell me?"
Angela gulped. "Let me try another angle, Headphones." She took a deep breath and then, calmly, she explained as slowly as she was able, "I've only ever lived on Earth, in England, going to a comprehensive school and working a squalid existence selling my body on the back streets, and since then I've been in the ninth circle of Hell for five years living on Blair Street. How am I going to play at being the local aristocracy, the vicar or the mill owner? I have no idea how they live. Let alone what they say in interviews."
"Read the script. You just read the script."
"I'd really be happier working in News. At least for the time being."
"OK, well, the offer's open any time you want to take me up on it." He paused, then, "Did you really—"
"Yes I did, and sometimes it's a horrible job but, yes, it was fun sometimes as well. Thanks for the job offer. I think it's tea time."

There was a canteen at the far end of the building and Angela took a cup of tea and sat down, dazed.

"Damn good job on the News," said a suit sitting next to her.
"Thanks. But where's Alvar?"
"Don't know. He didn't turn up for work, which is most unlike him. I sent a car to his house, and the driver came back saying the old man's house was empty. Locked. Nobody even answered the door. And we've had no message, no letter, nothing. I'm Reith, by the way. Pleased to meet you."
Reith held a hand out and Angela shook it. "People don't just disappear without trace, do they?" she asked him.
"Well, not usually, no. Not without some good reason, anyway. People don't get kidnapped and held to ransom, because nobody has any money to pay the ransom with. And people don't usually just wander off without reason. Alvar's pretty much a creature of habit, and when your work involves a permanent six-till-two shift in a high profile organisation like ours, you can't really up sticks and take the day off."
"Aren't you worried about him?"
Reith thought about this. "No," he said eventually, "well, yes, but he's sure to turn up."

A young lady in overalls burst into the canteen waving a pencil and a notepad. "Angela darling, I've been looking all over for you." she lied, "I need you to do a quick piece for me on the Block Tenants' Association meeting at mid day. Mr and Mrs Scrivens organised it. Can you get there, darling? Five minutes ready for the six o'clock this evening."
"Who are you?"
"I'm Monique, darling. News editor."

Whom the gods wish to force into service against their will, they first call Darling. Angela sensed that Monique would not welcome any reply of the form, "No thanks, I haven't finished drinking my tea and I can't imagine anything less interesting than going to a goddamned tenants' association." Collecting a portable sound recorder from the stock room on the way out, she splashed through the mud that lay all about the Blocks.

 

The Tenants' Association was a wooden hut at the back of Block Two. It smelled distinctly of damp. From the stuff strewn about the floor and piled on the shelves, Angela could see that the hut was used by, at least, a nursery, an after school group, a scout troupe, a football team, some sort of religious support group — here?, she asked herself — and a club for people who liked to make tea, put paint on brushes and then throw the brushes at the walls.

There was one large room. Angela went in and found herself at the back of a large and unsettled crowd.

She noticed a trestle table at the front of the room. Angela pushed herself to the table and found a small, gentle looking old man in an old fashioned suit and waistcoat opening a briefcase full of loose papers and a couple of large, folded maps. With him a woman of the same age was trying to clear a space and drag a couple of chairs to the table.

"Excuse me," Angela said to them when she was within hailing distance, holding her Press card above her head, "I'm Angela Highwater. I'm a reporter from Radio Hell and I've been sent to cover this meeting."
"Oh," said the woman, and uncertainly, "Pleased to meet you. I'm Sarah Bossie and I run the Tenants' Association This is Arthur Bumph from the council. Shake hands, Arthur."

Arthur shook hands with Angela, and afterwards Sarah shook hands with her as well.

"What's going on?" asked Angela.
"You're not going to try to interview us now, are you?" Sarah asked.
"No, I just want to know the background. Why you're holding a meeting tonight, what you want to get out of it, what you're going to do as a result."
"Gosh, that's a lot... Tell you what," said Sarah as though she had just had a jolly clever idea, "Why don't you sit down and listen to the meeting? It really is time we got started."
"She's right, you know," said Arthur.
"All right," said Angela, "I'll talk to you afterwards."

Angela grabbed an unoccupied chair in the front row and plonked her microphone on the trestle table. As Sarah went through her introduction, Angela fumbled with the knobs on the recorder, hoping to get a clear recording despite the shuffling of feet, the coughing, the clunking of doors, the conversations breaking out among the audience, and all the other distractions that distinguish a wooden hut full of people from a purpose built broadcasting studio.

Sarah banged her front door key on the trestle table for an awfully long time, which pushed the Distortion meter well into the red zone, and finally began with "Ladies and gentlemen," which allowed the Distortion meter to return to a comfortable level. "Mr Bumph — Councillor Bumph, I mean, sorry! — has kindly agreed to address our concerns as expressed in our letters and petitions." She paused for breath.
"Well, I'll be buggered," said an old man at the back. He was wearing a trilby and he had a maroon scarf around his neck.
"I'll let the Councillor speak for himself," she concluded.

 


 

Councillor Bumph rose to his feet and picked up a sheet of paper. "Madam Chairman, ladies and gentlemen," he began, "the Council notes your concerns about the infestations present in the Blocks. It is our intention—"
"Rats the size of Winterval puddings," said a middle aged woman with a Watson and Crich carrier bag.
"Thank you. It is our intention—"
"My grand-daughter's scared to go to the toilet in the night," said an older lady, wearing a cardigan, seated at the back of the room.
"That's because she's afraid of meeting you on the way!" shouted a young man at the front.
"It is our intention to improve the whole tone of the area, the whole tone of the area, by renaming the Blocks."

There was silence as Councillor Bumph held up four pieces of paper stuck together with tape. On the paper he had written the block numbers and their proposed new names.

"Block One will be renamed The Queen Block. Block Two will be renamed The Duke of Edinburgh Block. Block Three will be renamed Prince Charles Block and Block Four will be renamed The Late Lady Diana Spencer Block.

There was further silence as Councillor Bumph paused and added, "I knew you'd like it."
"They're still blocks," the young man pointed out.
"Then how about this?" Councillor Bumph unfolded a second set of stuck-together papers. "The Queen Mansions! The Duke of Edinburgh Mansions! Prince Charles Mansions! And—"
The young man summarised the proposal in one word. "It's rubbish!"
"How's it going to help us?" asked the woman with the frightened daughter.
"Because," Councillor Bumph explained as though to a hard of hearing imbecile, "you don't get rats and cockroaches in high class areas."
"It won't be a high class area." said the trilby. "The high class areas are down the Posh End, where they are now. The Blocks'll be four slums with silly names."
"They won't be slums at all," replied Councillor Bumph in the same slow and patronising manner, "because we're going to sell them off."
"You're mad," said the carrier bag lady, "who'd buy them?"
"You will."
"Buy our own flats that we're already paying rent for?"

Carried away with the vigour of the discussion, Angela had forgotten to keep an eye on the meter, and she found it had slipped. There was no way she could record the contributions from the room, but she turned the volume up so as to record as much of Councillor Bumph's contribution as possible.

"Yes. They're your flats, in a manner of speaking. But under the new scheme they'll still be your flats and you won't have to pay any more rent to the council."
"How much will we have to pay the bank, then?" asked Cardigan Woman.
"That is not, obviously, a matter over which the Council is able to exert any control."
"Of course you can exert control over them, you fool. You're the one that's selling them."
Councillor Bumph bridled pompously, "I didn't come here to be insulted."
A woman in the uniform of a Demon Community Support Officer spoke up. "I'm a DCSO and I'm not paid much—"
"That's because you're useless!" someone put in cruelly. There was a laugh.
"How am I going to afford a mortgage?"
"That's the second part of our brilliant proposal. You won't have to afford the mortgage. You'll only have to pay it.

A warm ripple of approval spread through the audience.

"You mean we'll have mortgages to pay for our flats?" asked Cardigan Woman.
"Yes!" beamed Councillor Bumph.
"Even if we haven't got any money?"
"Exactly!"

On the recorder a small red light went on, Power Low, showing that the batteries were now exhausted. There was now no chance to interview the organisers, the satisfied and the dissatisfied and put together a coherent account of the afternoon's events. Ten minutes later Mrs Bossie declared the meeting over and led the singing of the National Anthem. As the last few notes of Deutschland Über Alles died away, Councillor Bumph's chauffeur ushered Councillor Bumph into a vast car and drove him off, the tenants trudged across the mud to wait for the lifts that never seemed to come, and Angela carried her sound recorder back to the studio on the nineteenth floor of Block Two, or as it would soon come to be known, The Duke of Edinburgh Mansions.

 

Angela returned the sound recorder to the stock room, where she removed the memory card, plugged the recorder into a charger and left it.

Headphones was checking a recorder out at the same time as Angela was checking hers back in, so she asked him if there was a free editing room.

"I just finished with Room Three," he said.

She wandered down the corridor, settled in Room 3, pulled the headphones on and played the recording. The result of her visit was disappointing: lots of crowd noise, with the principal speakers barely audible above the noise. After a minute or so, it was obvious that this sound file wasn't of broadcast quality, and she would have to chalk it up to experience. She took a deep breath and set off to tell Monique about the disappointing outcome.

 

"So none of it can be broadcast? None at all?" Monique took the news calmly.
"Sorry."
"Don't worry about it. You're a trainee. Next time you'll get it right, that's how to look at it. Do you remember what they said at the meeting? You've got the sound file as an aide-memoire."
"Well, yes. I still have the recording."
"Right. Do a two minute story for The Ninth. Can you have it with me by six?"
"Sure."
"Maybe Headphones will listen to the file, give you some techie help and tell you what went wrong."

 


 

"Wrong sort of mike," said Headphones. "Try a button mike. Here." He picked up a small device the size of a tie-clip and tossed it to her. "Latest gadget. Your career depends on how and where you use one of these, so watch closely. You pin this end on someone's collar, and the other bit," he handed it to her, "plugs into the portable recorder," he indicated the sound recorder on his desk, "and you never miss a syllable. Easy. Want to try it out?"
"Yes please."
"OK, then, we'll give it the once over— Not your collar! Mine. I'm the interviewee."

Of course, Angela realised, you were supposed to fasten the mike to the interviewee so that it could hear him, and if your own lines weren't clear in the recording then you spoke them again in a studio and you edited them into the finished piece. She reached over Headphones's desk and fastened the mike to his shirt.

"It has three modes," said Headphones at speed, "local, WAN and off. Level and distortion are on auto pilot. Local mode means it records stuff on your portable recorder. WAN mode means it tries to talk to the recorder by wireless and it has a little lamp here to tell you how it's doing. Green for go, yellow for no connection, red means it's fucked. Go on, turn it on and interview me."

Angela reached for the mike and, without detaching it from Headphone's shirt, she played with it for a moment. The red light came on.
"It's not working," she observed.
"Try turning the recorder on."
"Oh! All right."

The green light came on.

"Is the recorder going?"
"It is. It's not in local mode, it's sending digital audio over the net. You can pull the recording down later, when you begin editing. Now start the interview. Everything's running normally."

Angela was still hesitating about what to do first.

"Go!" Headphones ordered.

Angela spluttered. An idea came into her head. She put on an accent.
"Would yez like to be interviewed by Terry Wogan?"
"How do you do that?"
"It's my interview. I ask the questions. That's my job."
"Sorry. Yes, I would like. He's definitely easier than Jeremy Paxman."
Angela composed herself and asked, "Headphones. Why do dey call you Headphones?"
"Good question. Well, I had these phones made for me, the casings are rolled gold, the cable is all screened, and they're exactly my size, so I never take them off in case somebody borrows them and I have to make do with the phones off a cheap Walkman for the rest of eternity. My ears have grown to fit them. The phones are always either on my ears or around my neck."
"And what's yer favourite radio programme?"
"Now that you're here, I think I'm going to get to like the News. Apart from that, I occasionally have to listen to Russell Brand. That guy's going places, you know?"
"Tank yez, Mr Headphones," said Terry Wogan and in her own voice again, Angela said, "OK, I have the idea, I think. And I'm hardly done of anything for the news yet."

At five minutes to six, Angela was back in Studio Two with a typescript and instructions to improvise a light hearted item to end the bulletin in a happy tone, so after the Labour Party winning a by election, a rise in bankruptcies and a man accused of making bombs, she told a wholly fictitious story of two tropical agronomists in Ghana who crossed a cocoa tree with a wild strain of brassica and grew a chocolate-flavoured cabbage.

"How's that for a busy day?" Angela said to Monique, who was waiting outside the studio door.
"Pretty good for a beginner. Where did the Ghana story come from?"
"Off the rip-an'-read."
"Good stuff. I've had Arthur Bumph on the phone for you." "Councillor Arthur Bumph? He of the Block Prettification Scheme?"
"The same. He asks if you'd please give him a quick phone call, sweety." Monique gave Angela a Filofax page with a phone number written on it.
Angela looked at the scrap of paper for a second and asked, "Have you run out of post-its?"
"This is Hell, Angela," Monique explained. "No post-its, darling. We've got Filofax."
"I'll call him back, then."

Angela found a desk in the open plan office and picked up the phone.
"Swindlers Incorporated, can I help you?"
"It's Angela Gates from Radio Hell. I'm trying to contact Arthur Bumph. Is he there?"
"Councillor Bumph in Property and Estates?"
"Yes, he's the one."
"Hold on."

There was a minute of horrible electronic music, and then Bumph came on the line.

"Hello, Angela. Bumph here."
"Good evening, Councillor Bumph." There was a pause, and Angela sensed some awkwardness, so she volunteered, "Are you ringing about the tenants' association meeting last night? I was the reporter on the front row."
"In a, in a way. Angela, may I call you Angela?"
"Of course. It's my name, after all."
"I've been invited to another meeting and I thought you might like to come with me."
"About the Blocks?"
"In a way, yes. It'd be a chance to meet everyone behind the scheme. You could ask any questions you like. Well, anything within reason. Beëlzebub doesn't welcome personal questions, but anything to do with the Blocks would get a straight and authoritative answer."
"I'd love to, but why me? There are plenty of experienced reporters here. I've only been in the job a week."
"It's a demanding job that calls for a certain grace and beauty. Not the first things you think of when you summon reporters to mind."
"Grace and beauty?"
"Long dress, High heels. Generally glamorous demeanour. And I don't want to upset you but you're the only woman I know who might possibly—"
"Are you," she tried to ask the question without having him put the phone down, "aware of how much it costs to take an escort to a meeting?"
"Money is no object. No object at all. I'm glad you reaised the subject becaise it saves me some awkwardness. We've just been handed some vast sum of money, no strings attached — nearly fifteen billion euro — of tax payers' money to spend on whatever we like, so name your price. The only thing is that my wife must never know anything about it."
"I won't tell a living soul. Or a dead soul — never have, never will."

Angela was expert in this sort of negotiation, having come to similar agreements many times before. She had just struck a deal including expenses at Jimmy Choo and Versace and said an affectionate sounding goodbye when Monique appeared in the office door.

"You look pleased with yourself," Monique observed.
"I am. I just got invited to a party with the Great Man Himself."
Monique gasped with astonishment and almost dropped her handbag. "Russell Brand! Gosh!"
"No, Councillor Arthur Bumph. He's going to buy me a dress and take me out for an evening's luxurious entertainment with a few rich friends at a private venue."
"What about his w— I mean, I hope you have a good time together."
"Oh, we won't do anything that his wife would care twopence about," lied Angela. "I'm just arm candy. A man in his exalted position can't go to that sort of meeting alone: he needs a woman tagging along with him. I won't understand a word they say and even so I'm going to love it."
"And Peter?"
"He's in Valhalla. He'll probably never know."
"Valhalla? There's more entertainment at the North Pole than in Valhalla, o best beloved. What on earth is he doing there?"

 

Chapter Three

Jump to: Top Next Previous

The RMS Titanic was half a kilometre offshore. Driving the hired Jeep along the coast road through the Outlying Territories, Peter passed the border marker. Valhalla.

A small crowd on the deck of the ship, some with telescopes or binoculars, struggled to admire the architecture of the ancient Nordic city but, Peter thought, unable to see much because the city was built of blackened stone and it was the middle of the night. Peter stopped the Jeep in front of the Great Hall and clambered out of the driving seat into the pitted road. The hall, part of its roof missing, its windows broken, surrounded by lumps of stonework, timber and slate that had fallen from the walls over many years, seemed to have been the heart of the city. There was no noise of traffic, nor even the night-time squawks of birds.

This, said the inscription on the base of his statue, was Erik the Red Square. That and, ‘If you would see my monument, they’re in the cemetery.’ The hall stood on the northern side. The Æsir, the Norse family of supernatural beings, had convened at rowdy meetings in the hall and gone forth after the final blow of the gavel to preside over the five Ministries that ruled this province of the Outlying Territories. The ruins of the five Ministries were arranged around the square clockwise in Runic order, their names picked out on name plates beside their colonnaded entrances: the Ministry of Joy, the Ministry of Love, the Ministry of Night, the Ministry of Poetry, and the Ministry of Thunder.

These were the remits for which the ancient Norse had dedicated gods, so these were the purviews which they built and staffed Ministries of. There had been no Ministry of Finance, Education or Employment. Whoever you complained to that your child couldn’t read or you had been out of work for five years and you were about to starve to death, ‘That's not my department. Try next door.’

If he strained, and with an effort of imagination, Peter could hear a hundred bearded peasants in rough clothing and cow-horn helmets singing and dancing in the great square, celebrating a victory some time in the Middle Ages, toasting the gods, crying ‘Skål!’ as they knocked back mead and aquavit from hollowed-out deer horns and the band played the Danish Bacon song.

Peter guessed that in one of the derelict Ministries there stood a broken computer, with no electricity supply and needing the Devil knew what repair, yet visible on the network, receiving and sending perfectly good messages in their thousands until a couple of days ago.

It was becoming cold, and a wind sprang up. Peter pulled his coat around himself and walked around the square, looking at the crumbling buildings in the hope of seeing the light from a computer screen playing on a grimy window-pane. He saw nothing useful. Unable to think of anything of value that he could do, he decided to drive north, like a tourist, just to see what the place was like, then turn back, return to the airfield and buy a ticket on the next flight to the Ninth Circle. There would be no flight before tomorrow anyway. The cracked and pot-holed stone topped road seemed to come to an end at the square, and any drive north would involve splashing at best over unsurfaced tracks.

There appeared to be a path running across open land to the north, all mud and puddles, and Peter started along it. There were no trees here, just the low shrubs and grass of windswept moorlands. The Jeep's headlights picked out the pathway, and the pathway continued to lead northward, so Peter continued to drive along it. He had at least several hours to kill, some sleep would be nice, and the view of the shingle, the slowly sailing ship, the sunset over the mountains to the west and the stars over the bay was stark and beautiful.

The path curved slightly towards the sea and an obstruction came into view. A large shape blocked the whole width of the path. Peter hit the brake but ran into some debris lying on the road. The shape was a stack of drainage pipes, of the kind used to drain low lying waterlogged land. Peter sat in the Jeep looking at the surroundings. The road was strewn with stones, making further progress difficult. He couldn't see anyone guarding the pipes, but they had definitely been left there recently: for one thing they were still standing, unbroken, and for another it was a kind of pipe that he had seen while he was alive, wherever the local council had given planning permission to build on flood plains or water-meadows or marshes in exchange for a generous donation to Party funds. He wound down the windows and paused to listen, in case any security guards or guard dogs had heard him arriving, but there seemed to be nobody around. In the glove compartment of the Jeep was a good torch, kindly provided by Chaos Card, and armed with that he felt able to clamber down onto the path and look around. Splashing through the mud, slipping on pieces of brick and stone, he found a tarpaulin with which someone might have intended to cover the pile of pipes. He walked beside the pile. There was a battered metal sign, ‘Road Ends.’ Continuing his walk around the pile of pipes, Peter tripped over half a brick and fell onto the sign, accidentally knocking it to the ground with a crash. The clatter of the collapsing sign echoed around the wood for a few seconds, woke up a couple of birds and scared them out of their roosts, and then someone called out, "Oi! ’Oo are you?"

Peter picked the sign up again and called, "I'm sorry. I was following the path," in the direction of the shout.
"Where are you ’eaded for?" The voice was coming closer and Peter saw a torch approaching, maybe fifty metres distant.
"The airfield. Valhalla Airport."
"You're lost, mate." A large man in a black donkey jacket, wellingtons, heavy jeans and a woolly hat came into view, lit up in the headlamps of the Jeep. He looked a bit like Michael Foot on an important occasion of state. "’Ello, I'm Charlie, the security man," he went on. He wore a badge saying "Hell Security."
"Sorry," said Peter, "I must have taken the wrong turning somewhere. I'm glad you found me."
"Can't fink ’ow you missed the airfield. There ain't any turnin’s. Still, no ’arm done, nuffink to worry about except you’ve probably missed your flight. Turn back and keep goin’ and the airfield is twenty kilometres or thereabouts. There's only one road."
"It's harder to see where you're going in the dark. I didn't think there was anyone here."
"Welcome to The Millenium Waterfront, mate. There ’asn't been anyone ’ere, not for a long time, but there's building work going on now. This is all going to be flats, but you'll ’ave to be rich to live in one. There'll be roads, ’ouses, shops, supermarkets, cinemas, restaurants, an ’otel, offices, even a marina to tie your yacht up in and an ’eritage gas works."
"A marina?"
"Yes. But you ’ave to bring your own yacht wiv you when you move in. All right for some, eh?"
"Bit of a strange name, isn't it, Millennium Waterfront? The Millennium was eight years ago."
"They could ’ardly call it the Eight Years After The Millennium Waterfront, could they?"
"I suppose not. If I'm honest, I wish I could join in the fun."
"Me too, but there's not much chance of that, I'm afraid. Prices start at ’alf a million euro for a tiny one bed flat overlooking the ’eritage gasworks."
Peter was disappointed that the conversation had turned to property prices even before it had really got going, so he asked, "Would it cause any problems if I spent the night here, in the back of the Jeep?"
"If you like. Park on Red Square. The Jeep ’ll sink into the mud if you park ’ere. You'll be quite safe. Cold, but quite safe."

Peter climbed back into the cab of the Jeep and turned the ignition key. There was something wrong with the noise from the engine. He tried to engage reverse gear, but the gear lever sprang back into neutral. He tried again, twice, but the reverse gear would not engage. He tried first gear, but that didn’t work either. Some bit of the transmission had been damaged when the Jeep hit the bricks.

Peter leaned out of the window and yelled to Charlie, "I can't start the engine. What do I do, can you help me?"
"I can’t fix engines, mate. I don’t know nuffink about ’em."
"It's all right. Chaos will have to tow the Jeep back to the office and mend it. I just meant, is it OK for me to spend the night in it, here."
"Where were you goin’ to?"
"The Ninth Circle. Number eleven, Blair Street."
"I can’t get you ’ome but I know a man ’oo can," said Charlie. "Lock the Jeep, gimme the keys. I'll put ’em on the table in the Site Office. It's the portakabin. You an’ me'll go down the steps to the jetty. You can phone your mate Chaos tomorrow an’ tell ’im where ’is Jeep is."

 

 

 

In the night, the great ship had moored at the jetty and a hatch had been opened, so as to deliver a couple of crates. A jib extended overhead and a winch was lowering a large wooden crate slowly onto the jetty. Dim Sum Civil Engineering was stencilled on the crate in black letters and Millenium Waterfront was handwritten in unsteady capitals. A man in White Star Line uniform gesticulated to someone out of sight on the bridge.

"’Oi! Martin!" Charlie called to him.
"Morning, Charlie," Martin replied without looking up, "You're just in time. Here's your digger, lovingly assembled by eight year old children paid two euro a week nailed to a bench in a stinking and dangerous factory in Xiu Leis."
"Always someone worse off than yourself," said Charlie, philosophically.
Martin began attacking the crate with a Mole wrench. With skill born of practice he unscrewed one side of the crate, then the top, and he threw the pieces of crate into the cargo hatch. "It's electric, so don't go getting it wet. There's a generator for you in the hold somewhere. Someone’ll fetch it in a minute. Probably me."
"I knew it was trouble soon as I saw the maker's name on the side."
"Dim Sum? They're as good as any. They got an Investors in People award." The last pieces of crate fell onto the jetty. "There, it's ready to go. Half the drains in China were dug with— Ouch!! Goddamned thing gave me an electric shock!"
"Can you ’elp Peter ’ere, Martin? ’Is car broke down. ’E needs to get to the Ninf Circle."
"I think we might have some goods for the Ninth Circle, in which case we can drop Peter off at Edward S Miliband Pier."
"How much is this going to cost me?" Peter asked nervously, "And what happens if you don't stop there?"
"Keep yer ’ead down," said Charlie, "and it won't cost you anyfink. They did the ticket inspection when they left port."
"She has to pick up cast-aways, it's the law of the sea. Peter’s been cast ashore, which is the same thing, so do as Charlie says, keep your head down and you won't have to pay one euro-cent."
"Is it all right if I just doss down on a bench somewhere in a bar or such-like?" Peter asked.
"Yes," said Martin, "but you won't need to do that. I'll find a berth somewhere for you. Come aboard."
"Fair winds," said Charlie, and Martin handed him the key to the digger.

Charlie began driving the digger along the jetty and up towards the Millenium Waterfront. Peter called, "Thank you!" after him.
Martin shouted, "Hold on for a second," but Charlie was already driving away up the path. "He's forgotten about the generator." He waited a few seconds to see whether the digger would stop and turn around, and when it didn't, he added, "Never mind. I'll put it here after I've found a place to put you. Charlie’ll come back down here and look for it."

He stood and watched the digger out of sight.

"Now, then," Martin continued, "I shall go to the Purser’s office and I'll find an empty cabin. Then I'll get hold of this generator, and then I'll come back here. Wait over there, keep out of the way, and be patient. I've only got one pair of legs and this is going to take a few minutes."

Martin went off down a passage and Peter had time to look at his surroundings. A cold wind, laden with spray, was blowing into the open goods hatch behind him, and he walked a few steps forward. The space inside the hatch was most definitely a workplace, with water and dirt on the deck and unrelieved grey paint on the walls. There were ropes and tools lying around as though they had been left there. Caps hung on hooks, boots stood in a line beside the wall, cigarette butts lay scattered.

"What are you doin’ here?" A man in grubby overalls which had once been pale blue carrying a dust-pan and broom, appeared beside Peter and began sweeping up the cigarette ends.
"Waiting for Martin," said Peter.
"Probably better if you wait through there," said the cleaner. "If I see him, I'll tell him you're in there." He pointed through a wooden double door with a small whitemetal sign, Push. Peter pulled the handle of the door, but it didn't move until he pushed it open. It led to a sort of lounge with moquette covered seats and polished wooden tables. There were perhaps six other passengers sitting up after bed-time, late drinkers with whisky for the men, rum for the ladies. On one table two men were playing chess, on another mah jong, and at a third table two case-hardened sea dogs were exchanging reminiscences. The Verandah Café. He picked a corner seat, reasoning that if Martin couldn't find him at the cargo hatch, this lounge was the first place he would look. There was a port-hole beside the bench, and through the port-hole Peter could make out the long, level wharf of the Millenium Waterfront and the black, broken silhouette of Red Square and the Great Hall.

A steward, who had been quietly sitting and smoking a cigarette in the far corner of the tea-room, walked across to him and asked with practised obsequiousness, "May I take your order, sir?"
"A cup of tea would be nice. Milk, no sugar."
"Certainly, sir." He smiled smugly, as one does when one addresses a passenger unfamiliar the little ways of R M S Titanic, where tea was served in a pot, on a tray with a small jug of milk, sugar cubes in a bowl, a tea spoon and a china cup. Asking for the milk and sugar separately was simply not done in this exclusive lounge. He mentally pushed the encounter to one side and would laugh about it later. "May I know your cabin number?'
"Cabin number?" Peter repeated.
"A-two," said Martin, arriving unexpectedly in the nick of time. "There were a couple of empty state-rooms on A deck," he continued, "I thought you might like one."
"That's really kind of you." Peter took the key that Martin was holding out to him. The steward mouthed "A-two" as he wrote the number on his billpad, adding Thé with a smirk, and disappeared towards the tea urn.
"I see you've met Bob," said Martin.
"Bob? Have I?"
"Bob the Snob. That's him making the tea. I once heard him tell a diner in First Class, 'I'd prefer you to order in French, sir.' "

They both chuckled, and Peter added, "People do strange things," as though it were a sage observation.

Peter looked through the port-hole again and saw in the moonlight that the jetty, the digger, the Millenium Waterfront and the Great Hall were all now a kilometre away and quietly sliding into the distance. Bob returned, silently left a tray of tea, milk and sugar on the table, and left again.

"It's the toffs. Fair winds!" Martin stepped sharply away through the double door as a man and a woman walked into the café.
"Angela! What are you doing here?" Peter called across the benches, drinkers and tea cups. Both toffs turned and looked at him.

A look of panic briefly crossed Angela’s face, while the man accompanying her held her tighter around the waist, glowered at Peter and asked Angela, "Who’s that?"
"It’s only my husband," she said, "Peter."
"Thank you kindly," said Peter. "Who are you?"
"I'm Angela. I thought you’d already recognised me."
"I mean, who's he? The man you're with."
"He's Councillor Bumf, from the Tenants’ Association meeting."
Councillor Bumf asked, "How did he know where you are?"
"I have supernatural powers," said Peter. "Whenever I put my magic glasses on, and I look at a map, or a landscape in the distance, I see a sort of flaming beacon above the spot where Angela is."
"You mean that your glasses have supernatural powers of clairvoyance?" Councillor Bumf was taken aback.
"No," said Peter, "they haven't. I made that bit up. I'm only here by chance."
"Well, you'll damned well leave us alone," said Councillor Bumf.

Silently, Angela made the sign for, "Sorry."

 

Behind the bar Bob could be heard to say, "Thank God you're here, Sir," as Captain Smith walked in. The Captain looked towards the disturbance.
"I hear raised voices."

 

Captain Smith was a man of small stature but great charisma, who spent his every work-day bitterly resenting the Diabolical Marine Authority operating his great ocean going liner as a combination of pick-up goods and fairground attraction.

He had repeated flashbacks of the officious looking young demon at the Authority who interviewed him on the day of his arrival. Dressed in a cheap shirt and cheap jeans, resting his feet on his enamelled steel desk, he wore the name badge Melach, Inmate Relations.

"The Marine Authority has decided to operate the R M S Titanic as a pick-up freighter and a pleasure cruise in inland waters, with a maximum speed of twenty kilometres per hour."
"What's that in knots?"
"We don't do knots." Melach held out a ballpoint. "You are to be its captain. Congratulations. Sign here, please."
"Pleasure cruise?" Captain Smith could scarcely believe his ears. "Inland waters? My ship," he drew breath and repeated, "my ship is the most famous ship there has ever been. It is a fast liner built for international travel on routes thousands of miles long—"
"Kilometres, Captain. This is Hell. We use the metric system. Thousands of kilometres. And there will be no return to international travel in peace and luxury. We shall make sure of that, for we own the souls of the airline executives."
"You should respect my ship." The Captain spoke with emphasis born of resentment. "A mere clerk, with a celestial title but never been to sea, I'll bet, daring to turn my ship into a twopenny-halfpenny tramp steamer—"
"She seems to have a propensity to sink, Captain," Melach interrupted sharply.
"So long as I remain Captain, this ship will sail in safety…"

There was a pause.

"You see what worries us, Captain. The Authority thinks it sensible to keep her to within two kilometres of the shore and keep her speed down. We don't want another fifteen hundred casualties, do we? … Sign here, please, on the line, if you don't mind."

Captain Smith took the paper. The ballpoint failed to write at first and only with some effort could he scratch his name on the line. "There," he added bitterly, putting the contract onto the desk and leaving the office without saying goodbye.

The conversation played and re-played in the Captain's thoughts and dreams. At every repetition, he wondered what he ought to have done and said instead of signing the contract. Tear the contract in pieces, walk out without signing, throw Melach across the room? He had never found a better answer than signing and reporting to Melach at Kissinger Repair Dock at seven in the morning on the following Monday. Melach had walked before him up the gang-plank and piped him aboard.

 

In the Verandah Bar, the Captain fixed the three jealous, arguing passengers with his paralysing charisma and told them, very quietly given the circumstances, "I think you three had best go to your cabins and retire for the night. Don't buy any alcohol and don't go into any of the public rooms until the ship docks at the Miliband Pier in the Ninth Circle…" he took his crested pocket-watch from his uniform jacket, "later today. I'll get someone to fetch you when it's time for you to leave. Have a good night," he touched his cap, "and thank you for travelling White Star Line."

"Goodnight." Bob looked up from polishing wine glasses.

As the three walked up the staircase towards their cabins, Angela and Councillor Bumf to A-One and Peter to A-Two, Peter could not keep himself silent. "What happened, Angela? Did you need to earn extra pocket money?"
"It wasn’t like that, Peter. Let me explain. Bertie accidentally bought two tickets—"
"Why didn’t you tell me? For God’s sake, nobody is well to do in this place but we aren’t desperate!"
"He was buying tickets on a website that sells tickets in twos unless you tell it that you only want one, and he didn’t notice."
"I understand. Just out of interest, was that before you agreed to spend the week-end together, or after?"
"Peter," said Angela, "you’re getting pompous, trying to sound like Detective Chief Inspector Barnaby."
"You don’t watch Midsomer Murders, do you, Angela?" Councillor Bumf was standing in the passage, waiting for Angela to open the door of their state-room. "Good grief, how non-U."
Angela put her key into the lock. "Yes, Bertie, this is Hell, remember. It was Midsomer Murders or Stacey Dooley reports on String. See you in the morning, Peter. Fair winds." She kissed Peter goodnight, led Bertram into the state-room with her and shut the door.

Lying, or whatever they were doing, in their state-rooms, they could hear someone in the Verandah Bar strike up Hello, Hello, Who’s Your Lady Friend on the baby grand piano in the corner. The drinkers, the chess players, the Mah Jong players and Bob the Snob all cheered wildly, drummed their knuckles on the tables and joined in the chorus.

 

The bulkhead that separated State-rooms A-One and A-Two was not entirely soundproof, and Peter spent a night of disturbed sleep. He felt as though he had at last been asleep for five minutes when he was awakened by a knock on the cabin door. Light from an overcast sky poured into the state-room through the port-holes.

"Is that you, Angela?"
"It’s Martin. We’ll be docking at the Ninth Circle in half an hour. This is a good time to get dressed."
"Sure thing."
"It’s probably best if you stay in the cabin until I fetch you, sir. Half an hour, then."

When Peter eventually stepped ashore, Bertie and Angela were standing at the on-shore end of the pier. They were standing a metre or so apart, Angela looking towards the ship, Bertie looking towards the town and clutching the left side of his chest. Peter thought for a moment that Bertie was suffering a stabbing, potentially lethal pain in his chest and then realised he had died years ago and he was checking that he still had his wallet. The growl of a diesel engine and the scrunch of tyres on the gravel path announced the arrival of a taxi.

"Are you Bertram Bumf?" The driver leaned out of the window. "I had a message from the radio operator, saying you—"
"That’s me," said Councillor Bumf, climbing inside. "Take me to Mandelson Mansions."
"Is it all right if Peter and I…?" Angela was opening the opposite door.
"No. You can bloody walk."
"Sorry, love." The driver gestured, "Nothing I can do."

Bertie closed his door, Angela closed the other. The taxi drove away towards the Posh End, leaving her standing in the road and Peter walking up the pier towards her. As best she could in her delicate shoes, she ran towards Peter.

"I love you, Peter. Please, don’t think otherwise."
"Oh, you’ve come back." Peter feigned surprise. "What went wrong?"
"I would never have left you anyway. Occasionally dalliances are a lot of fun, but Bumf was awful. Just the sort of man you don’t want to spend a secret romantic week-end with. Inconsiderate doesn’t cover it. Most people are a bit inconsiderate without meaning any harm, but he is selfish, superior, clumsy, mean, dirty, demanding — it was like being back at work."
"Ah, well, better luck next time. Do you want to walk home with me? I’ve got a house on Blair Street. You can live with me if you can’t find anyone better."
"I would love to. May I sleep in the same bed as you?"
"If you like. Actually I’d quite enjoy it if you did."
"Goody." Angela, correctly, believed herself about to be exculpated. "Where’s the house?"
"It’s along this path somewhere. At least, I think it is. I’m not sure how far. I’ve never been to this part of town before. Are you planning to arrange dalliances for yourself often?"
"If I get the chance, yes. How about you?"
"Philippians four nineteen." Peter’s Religious Education lessons came back to him. "God shall supply all your need. If I need a dalliance, one will sashay along all by itself."
"But in the mean time, until the day an angel comes along," Angela sang, "will you string along with me?"
"It’s been a pleasure and a privilege so far. I think we ought to stay together." Peter became a little puzzled. "I thought you were an angel anyway."
"I have dual citizenship. Two passports, one for Heaven, one for Hell." Angela mimed opening a passport and stamping it with a rubber stamp. "You’ve seen them, haven’t you? Please keep it secret."
"I won’t tell a living soul. Or a dead one. I don’t seem to meet many living souls anyway… Did Bertie Bumf really spend a thousand euro on a luxury cruise ticket by mistake?"
"He told me so." Angela nodded. "I’m a bit skeptical. He said the website sold tickets for two, and he accidentally bought two tickets before he realised that he hadn’t told it that he only wanted one. Then instead of giving it back for a refund, he offered it to me."
"I can’t resist asking…"
"Let me guess. Did I believe him? No, of course not. He wanted to have a good time and impress me. If you think about it, hiring a first class state-room on the renovated R M S Titanic is a pretty good gambit on a first date."
"No," Peter shook his head, "I meant, I can’t resist asking—"
"You can’t resist asking how much I charged him?" Angela giggled.
"Yes. Morbid curiosity, I suppose."
"Yes, it is, but I’ll tell you anyway. Nothing. I hated every minute of it. I feel as though I need two baths to wash away all trace of him. In a highly unprofessional gesture, I gave him his money back. He was quite annoyed when I did that."
"Why on earth…"
"I gave it back because if you work in the sewers, you do a useful job and then you wash the filth off at the end of the day. You don’t put it into your handbag and carry it about."

The taxi re-appeared in the distance and drove slowly along the path towards them. It stopped a few metres ahead of them.

The driver wound the window down. "I knew you wouldn’t have gone far. You’ve got a long walk ahead of you. Would you like to take a taxi?"
"That’s very thoughtful of you." Angela opened the nearest door and took a seat, while Peter opened the farther door.
"Eleven, Blair Street."

 


"I couldn’t believe Bumf was so selfish," Angela continued. "It wouldn’t have cost him anything to take us with him. Here— Look at the ship!"
"Looks as though you got off just in time." The taxi driver stared at the ship as the crew carried on unloading crates onto the jetty.
"Why?" Peter craned his neck to look at it. "What’s wrong with it?"
"The front end of the ship is a lot lower in the water than the back end." Angela pointed to the bow. "Look, it’s sinking!"
"Titanic has been going to and fro along the coast for a good few years." Peter nodded. "I doubt that anything has gone wrong that they can’t fix. It won’t end up in Davy Jones’s locker just yet—"

On board the ship, the emergency alarm began to scream, the sound of it resembling a marching band playing repeated blasts on wind instruments made in the Tudor age and never since tuned, tolerably quiet at first but quickly becoming louder as the alarm spread from bow to stern. The delivery handlers chorused, "Oh, not again," and disappeared into the cargo hatch. A few seconds later they and most of the rest of the crew could be seen on deck ambling towards the life-jacket cabinets.

"They aren’t in a hurry," said Peter.
"It happens pretty often," said the driver. "By now they’ve become a bit blasé about sinking."
Angela stuck her head out of the cab window. "I guess they’re so used to it that it doesn’t feel like a life-threatening emergency any more."
"I had that Melach from Inmate Relations in the back of the cab only yesterday," the driver recalled. "According to him, the Authority thought that she might founder any day, so there’s a tug-boat carrying a stack of life-jackets, barrels of shark repellant and hot towels — monogrammed Egyptian cotton for first class, terry for the plebs — on standby at the Kissinger Dock. It’ll be under way as soon as Sparks sends a mayday signal."
"Sparks — is that his name?"
"Yes."
"Supposing," Peter mused, "Sparks is on his break, he’s so used to sinking that he doesn’t notice it because he’s having a nice cup of tea and he doesn’t signal—"

𝄢 Foo-oo-oop!

A blast on the horn obliterated any chance of conversation. Peter waited for the disaster signal to finish, rubbed his ears while the ringing died away, and then began his sentence again. "Supposing the radio operator doesn’t notice that the ship is sinking and doesn’t signal the repair yard to send the tug-boat?"
"Don’t you think he might notice his tea shooting across the table and landing on the floor with a crash?" Angela described the scene vividly.
"If he doesn’t send a mayday signal, then he gets fired," the driver reached for the hand-brake, "and spends the rest of eternity regretting it as he stands in the Job Centre looking for work that doesn’t exist and only pays the minimum wage on a zero hours contract when it does."
"Looking for a steady job throughout all of eternity?" Peter had never imagined that finding work was so difficult. "Surely not. Are things really that hopeless?"
"Why do you think I’m driving a taxi? I hold a first class degree in economics!"
Peter thought for a moment. "Does that mean that if you had a job that suited your qualifications, you could fix this mess?"
"Yes. And it wouldn’t be difficult. The underlying problem is extractive capitalism, first described by the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto in 1896. The biggest change that needs to be made—"
Peter shook his head. "Oh, I’m already lost in the fog. I could never understand money. That’s why I’m not rich."
Angela watched the first few passengers jostle through the cargo hatch, all clad in life-jackets, trying to push other people out of their way. "The repair yard must have heard that hooter by now, radio signal or no radio signal."
"Forgive my saying it, sir, but the reason you’re not rich is extractive capitalism, pure and simple."
Peter was disappointed. "Is it really nothing to do with Satan buying a butt of sack and a box of puddings for a blow-out in the time of the Black Death when everybody else was staying in their hovels with the windows shut and wearing a sort of beak thing over their nose and mouth?"
"Nothing at all, sir. Let’s get under way, then. Hold tight. Eleven, Blair Street."

Hearing the diesel engine start, the passengers at the front of the crowd waved their arms, called "Taxi! Taxi!" and ran towards it. The tyres skidded on the gravel path and the taxi lurched towards the town in its effort to get away from the crowd.

Angela noticed a book lying on the floor and picked it up. "I didn’t notice this earlier. ‘The Theory and Practice of Extractive Capitalism,’ by Enriqué Hamilton. Someone must have left it here. A heavyweight intellectual, by the look of it."
"Oh, it’s mine." The driver seemed pleased that Angela had found it. "I was wondering where it had disappeared to."
Peter looked at its front cover. "It seems to be on your chosen specialist subject."
"Very much so," said the driver. "I expected it to be popular in Hell. But here I am, still in the day job."

 

Angela belatedly put two and two together. "Are you Professor Hamilton?"
"At your service, madam."

The taxi dawdled through town, its progress constantly impeded by road works, deep puddles and falling leaves.

"Why on earth are they always digging the road up?" Peter asked Enriqué. "They always seem to be digging in the same place. One week they dig holes, the next week they fill the holes in, and the week after that they dig them again."
"The classic solution to unemployment," Enriqué said. "Half the unemployed digging holes and the other half filling them in again. The official line is they’re building a bike path because when people start gasping for breath and dropping dead because of the latest variant of the Black Death, they’ll all want to start cycling to work. My best guess is, the digging is nothing to do with bicycles or leaky pipes or repairing pot-holes and really they’ve found a map of buried treasure. × marks the spot where Captain Kidd’s lost bullion lies, somewhere below the tarmac, in between the water mains and the tree roots. One day they’ll find it."
"I’d really like to read your book," Angela told him.
"You can have that one." Enriqué stopped at a temporary traffic light that didn’t seem to be standing guard over anything in particular. "I have a couple of authors’ copies and nothing to do with them."
Peter was still curious. "Is there a treasure map in the book?"
"No, I’m afraid not," Enriqué sounded apologetic. "I’m afraid that creating a world in which everybody has enough for their needs is more work than just finding an oaken sea-chest filled with pieces of eight, pearls and rubies."
"What makes you think that they’ll find Captain Kidd’s buried treasure?"
"Seek, and ye shall find," Enriqué recited. "If you look hard enough, it’s always there."
"But…" Peter was shaking his head, "I could make a treasure map up. Two, if I thought about it. Surely they wouldn’t spend the rest of their working lives trying to find a pot of gold."
"Go ahead, make one." Enriqué started the taxi again, as the temporary traffic light changed from red to green. "It’ll keep them amused."

 

The cab wound through the back roads and turned into Blair Street. It stopped outside Number Eleven.

"Forty euros."

Peter was becoming used to the way money worked. He put his hand into his pocket and found two twenty euro notes and three two euro coins, the fare plus fifteen per cent, exactly the right amount. He shall provide your need. "Here. Thank you."

Five minutes later, sitting on the living room sofa, Angela picked the book up and skimmed the first few sentences.

"What’s inside it?" From where he was changing clothes, Peter couldn’t read the pages. "Romantic poetry? Adventure in far-away lands? How to pull a rabbit out of an empty top hat?"
"Why on earth would a book about economics explain how to pull a rabbit out of a hat?"
"Because," Peter said as he looked at his tie rack and chose the Hammersmith School tie that he had bought in Cent-stretcher, "I’ve always wondered how they do it."

 

Angela smiled, but her eyes didn’t leave the printed page. "I don’t think I’ve ever read anything quite like this. Let me read a bit of it to you."

 

The theory and practice of Extractive Capitalism, by Professor Enriqué Hamilton
Foreword, by Adam Smith FRSA, author of The Wealth of Nations and The Invisible Hand:

He shall have but a Penny a Day

Had he arrived in the middle of the nineteenth century, a visitor to Earth from a distant planet might have imagined that the capitalism of the Victorian era would have continued indefinitely, and that by the two hundredth anniversary of Richard Arkwright inventing the factory, poverty would have been eliminated and everybody would live in warmth and comfort, surrounded by good food and everything they needed. Margaret Thatcher, who incidentally will spend the next thousand years stoking an incandescent furnace specially prepared for her by Satan himself, in comparison with which the fire-box of the Flying Scotsman is a pleasant summer’s day beside an outdoor swimming bath, phrased this desirable outcome as, ‘the rising tide will lift all boats.’

That the opposite happened, and a handful of aristocrats, nouveaux rîches and East European fraudsters came to possess vast wealth while the average household suffered bitter hardship or grinding poverty, or both, was entirely due to the Demons of Hell promoting extractive over constructive capitalism. Wealth which might otherwise have been invested in a manner which might have enriched the Poor as much as it sustained the Rich was instead squirreled in vast quantities into anonymous accounts in Switzerland or Panama or Costa Rica while the Rich took from the Poor even that which they had…

 

"Peter?"
"I’m getting ready for work, darling. Can you read it for me and give me the headlines when I come home this evening?"
"Sure thing, love."
Angela turned the page and read to herself.

 

Chapter One: You Owe Me Five Farthings

Since the invention of money some three thousand years ago, society has been divided into two classes, the Rich and the Poor. With the exception of the smallest children, every person is a member of one class or the other. Both these classes are divided into two sub-classes, the Poor into the Indigent Poor and the Solvent Poor, the Rich into the Constructive Capitalists and the Extractive Capitalists.

The aims of these groups are entirely irreconcilable.

  • The Solvent Poor aim to own a big car and a big television…
"Peter?" Angela looked around the room. "Peter?" He was on his way to the Bitco office and nowhere to be seen. Angela read on, quietly, to herself.

 

  • The Solvent Poor aim to own a big car and a big television and to put them in prominent places where their neighbours can see them. They have that aim even if they never go anywhere and even if they could watch a smaller screen in greater comfort.

  • The Indigent Poor aim to create a society from which all poverty has been eliminated and every person has sufficient unto their needs.

  • The Constructive Capitalists aim to create a society where their wealth grows because they have used their resources to build such infrastructure as the farms, the shops, the factories and the machinery which provide the Poor class with goods, work and wages, while the capitalists sell the fruits of their labour at a profit. Theirs is the Victorian Christian view, in which they are not the owners of resources, but mere stewards.

  • The Extractive Capitalists aim to create a society in which their wealth grows without their taking any risk or expending any effort. To that end they create banks, finance houses, insurance companies, pay-day lenders and similar institutions. They also arrange for themselves to be paid stipends and awarded grants despite doing no work of any kind. It is to that group, those institutions and those subventions that I shall devote my attention in this book.

Extractive Capitalism has probably been with us for ever in one form or another, but it lurched into the lime-light on 29 June 1966, when the first general purpose credit card was launched in the United Kingdom. Until that day, customers had been able to obtain credit for an expensive article of furniture or for a holiday abroad, but only the desperate would have bought essential food ‘on tick.’ The regular pay raise was the first casualty. Workers no longer received increases in pay once a year to compensate for rising costs and prices. Instead, if — or when — they ran out of money for food, or gas, or electricity, or for their children’s clothes, they paid for essentials and inessentials alike with credit cards. The alternative was to leave their children without shoes, or coats, or dinner. They ran up debts which they had no resources to pay off. The poor were faced with the combination of mounting levels of debt and falling real incomes, and their fear and foreboding gave much pleasure to the Diabolical Authorities.

The irony was that the situation of the poor could easily have been more hopeful. The problem centred on—

 

A car honked its horn twice on the street outside Angela’s front door. It was the same taxi, with Headphones in the passenger seat, his golden headset lying around his neck and a heavy Uher sound recorder on the seat beside him. Angela opened the street door and Headphones called, "Get in! Come on, we have to make a news story out of this!"
"Out of what? I haven’t even changed my clothes yet."
"Out of the Titanic sinking at the Miliband Pier." Headphones seemed agitated and very eager to get to within interviewing distance. "This just has to go on the lunch-time news."
"I haven’t got my make-up on yet."
"You don’t need make-up. This is radio. If it makes a noise, bring it, otherwise leave it at home. Come on, we’ve got a story to cover."

"Enriqué, it’s you!" Angela settled into the back seat and recognised the driver instantly. "Short time, no see. — Did you really talk Adam Smith into writing the foreword for your book?"
"Goodness me, that was quick. Have you read it already?"
"No." Angela shook her head. "I’m half-way down Page Two."
"That’s excellent progress, ’cause it’s heavy going. Yes, the Adam Smith wrote the foreword. Why not? Adam’s got all eternity and nothing more important to do, so I asked him. He was very pleased to be asked to write it. I offered to pay him, but he didn’t want my money."
"What’s he doing these days?"
"At the ripe old age of two hundred and something? Slouching on the chaise longue in his apartment watching the world go by, saying ‘I told you so’ every time he sees something in the newspaper about a company going bankrupt. He’s as sharp as ever. He gets bits of consultancy to do, it keeps him occupied."
"Oh. What sort of things does he get paid for writing?"
"Forewords for textbooks. Actually, judging from what he told me, the piece of work he was proudest of was his thoughts on making public transport run without subsidy for Richard Beeching. It took an age to dictate it through a medium. That was back in the nineteen sixties but he blew the dust off ten years later when the National Passenger Railroad Corporation asked for exactly the same thing. He was very amused to be paid twice for the same piece of work."
Headphones put an oar in. "Driver, how far is the pier?"
"You mean, are we nearly there yet?" Enriqué looked at the dashboard. "Two miles and a bit."
"I’ll get ready to go, then." Headphones took a rifle mike out of its case and unwound the cable. "I reckon the tug won’t have arrived yet. I’ll be the sound man, you’re the interviewer, and Enriqué, don’t leave town without us."
"I have to ask," Angela added, "What did Adam think about public transport without subsidy?"
"Well, since I drive a taxi and I don’t get subsidised, I asked that very question. He thought for a moment and then he said in that rich, slow Falkirk brogue of his that it was the stupidest idea he’d ever heard."
"Does a tug make a noise?" Headphones plugged the cable into the Uher.
"You’ll soon find out." Enriqué slowed down to avoid skidding on the gravel. "I'll take you as near the jetty as I'm allowed to."

 

 

The taxi turned downhill and drove towards the jetty.
"Wow. It’s enormous." Headphones was staggered at the size of the Titanic. "You actually sailed on that?"
"Two hundred and sixty nine metres from end to end, she is." Enriqué wound down the driver’s side window and stared into the bay. "You’re safe to get out here."

Angela stood so close to the edge of the jetty that Headphones called out, "Careful!" She looked down, and then called across to Captain Smith, who was standing on deck, close to the bow of the ship. The deck was awash with pools and puddles of seawater.

He recognised her at once. "Mrs Angela Highwater! We’re having a bad time at the moment, so do excuse me…"

Behind Angela, Headphones was struggling to point the rifle mike at the Captain. It was a lot heavier and more cumbersome than he thought, especially with a sea breeze blowing.

"Are you recording a story for the radio station?"

"Yes. How long can you stay afloat?" Angela asked Captain Smith.
"We’re sinking about ten centimetres an hour," he said. "A lot more slowly than last time. The passengers were all put ashore straight away, and the only crew still aboard are the First Officer, the Officer of the Watch — up there, the Purser and me. Oh, and the radio operator. He has to talk the tug into position, mostly in Morse code, poor devil, until the tug gets close enough for him to shout at them. So my ship is going to sail out of the other end of this incident laden with happy passengers, including yourself, I hope, and with all four funnels puffing."
"Where is the tug?"
"Just over the horizon, thirty kilometres south of us and closing rapidly. Another hour or so and we’ll be in tow. A week after that we’ll be back in service. You’d be quite safe if you came on board, you know. Hold onto the grab-rails and climb through the cargo hatch, on your left there."

Enriqué stayed on the path with his taxi while Angela and Headphones re-grouped on the deck. "Supposing the tug didn’t come at all?"
"Do not have nightmares. She will. In the worst case, we pump more air into the forward hull and we’ll be good for twelve hours. So even if a gigantic shark were to come along and crush the tug to matchwood, we would still all be safe."
"Has that ever happened before?" Headphones had turned quite pale.
"No." Captain Smith sounded most definite. "Never."
"Which tug is coming? Does it have a name?" Angela noticed that real reporters’ questions were occurring to her, the sort of questions that got replies that could be mixed with a pinch of salt and sound effects and served up as a a news story.
"Ahoy! Sparks!" Captain Smith called to the radio operator. "Which tug are we getting?"

Headphones slewed the mike around and Sparks shouted down to them.

"The Red Leicester. It’s a seventeen metre tug with about 5,000 tonnes pulling power. The bo’sun is Erik Husqvarna. She’s approaching at 27 kph. We should be safely in dry dock by dinner time. Come and join us in the canteen — I’m afraid the ship’s restaurants will be closed while the riveters are at work, but the canteen does a jolly decent Admiral’s Pie."
"I’d love to." Angela turned to Headphones. "Here’s my chance to get the full story," and to Sparks, "What’s the place called?"
"Kissinger’s Kitchen. You drive towards the Kissinger Repair Yard and you can’t miss it. Shall we say eight o’clock? Bring your friend."
"Yes, please. I would love to," said Angela.
"There’s the tug approaching!" The Officer of the Watch opened a window and yelled to Captain Smith from the bridge.

The Red Leicester appeared in the distance. Slowly, the small flame coloured vessel advanced towards the Titanic, giving out a plume of thick bluish diesel smoke.

"I’m afraid this is where it gets busy," Captain Smith turned to Angela, "so you can stay on board if you want to, but please keep out of the way. Shall I tell you what we’re planning to do, and this evening in Kissinger’s Kitchen, over a dinner of Admiral’s Pie with all the trimmings, we’ll all tell you what went wrong."

Angela looked at her watch. "Tell me what you’re planning to do and I’ll put the story into the lunch-time news."

"We are planning to pump air into the forward hull, that’s underneath where we’re standing now. That should keep the ship buoyed up while the tug drags us across the briny like a sack of potatoes until we reach the repair yard. Once we’re there, they’ll pump all the water out of the dock, leaving us high and dry, and the insurance company will gather together a small army of men with ladders, screwdrivers, welding torches, riveting guns, mops and buckets, who will put the ship’s hull back together and get us all ship shape and Bristol fashion once again."
Somewhere amid-ships the Purser's voice said, "Thank the devil we’re insured with Direct Line. Can your insurance do that?"
"Got it." Angela had been listening closely. "It sounds like a busy week ahead."
"With a following wind," Captain Smith continued, "it’ll take a week to get her back into service."
"Do you have any exciting journeys planned, for once you’re back afloat?"
"We were actually booked for a run carrying fifty tons of tinned water chestnut and cashew nuts to China but that’s rather up in the air at the moment. I’d been looking forward to going, but Beijing are toying with cancelling the order because of concerns about Hell’s human rights record these past thousand years."
"I heard they were re-booking with P & O Ferries," said the Purser. "Human rights — ah, the irony."

Angela said thank yous all round and left by the cargo hatch, followed by Headphones, and they set off in the taxi back to the radio station. Headphones clutched the Uher to himself as though it had been a long lost pet dog.

 

 

It was about half past ten in the morning. Peter arrived at Bitco, threaded his way between four unfamiliar white vans marked Carpet Galaxy which were parked outside the building, and opened the door to the office he shared with Sandy. As Peter said, “Sorry I’m late” to nobody in particular and took his coat off, Sandy stood up and clapped. “Well done! Good job.”
Peter’s nose twitched at a rubbery smell, which he recognised immediately. “Those vans in the car park— Why’s there an almighty smell of carpet?”
“It’s Archimedes’s carpeting being installed. Remember last week’s team meeting?”
“That it might be fulfilled which was written on the whiteboard in the weekly All Hands meeting. How could I forget it?” Peter shook his head slowly. “We sat through more slides than Battersea Funfair. What colour are we getting?”
“Red.” Sandy pointed through the door to the next office, where two men in overalls were hard at work with hammers and Stanley knives laying a carpet the colour of tomato purée. “The colour that promotes technical excellence, assiduous thought and attention to detail, according to leading psycho-tapetologist Sonya Crackpot, author of The Floor in the Design.
“Red,” Peter repeated. “Have you got any aspirins?”
“I bought an extra packet just for you.” Sandy tossed the white box to Peter, who with unusual deftness caught it before it landed on the floor.
“That isn’t enough to kill myself.”

One of the men in overalls pulled the door open. His name badge said, ‘Ethan.’ He spoke in a coarse East London. “Would you people please move all the furniture out of this office? We’re comin’ in ’ere next.”
“Sure thing.”
“Fanks, mate.”

Sandy looked across to Peter and suggested, “Play-time, boys and girls. I suppose you might have time tomorrow to tell me about how you fixed the server. It’s not as though that were more important, or anything.”
“I didn’t fix the server. Come on, let’s unplug everything. Where are we going to put all this stuff?”
Ethan watched from the door and added, “Is there anywhere me an’ Shannon can get a cup o’ tea while we’re waitin’ for you?”
“Down the corridor.” Sandy pointed. “See the machine there?”
“Yuss, guv’.”
“Can you read the number on it?”
“That white number in the corner?” Ethan squinted at it. “Twelve.”
“Do you take sugar?”
“Yuss. Boaf of us.”
Sandy played with the computer on his desk and then said, “Right, I’ve told TM-twelve to make two cups of tea with milk and sugar. When you take the first one out, it’ll start to make the second one.”
“Fanks, guv’”

TM-Twelve was already clicking and clunking and pouring water through pipes. Peter watched the workmen shamble along the corridor to the machine, find their cardboard beakers of tea and sit down with them. “Sandy,” he asked after a short while, “how did you do that?”
“Oh, everything that can be is on BONFIRE

Peter recalled being told something about BONFIRE on his first, or maybe his second, day with the company, but he couldn’t remember anything useful about it.

BONFIRE,” Sandy continued, “Bitco Open Network Fault Indication and Repair Thingy. We couldn’t think of a word that meant ‘application’ and began with ‘E.’ ”
Peter mentally leafed through his dictionary and said, “Enema.”
“I'll make sure that's printed on the shrink wrap for Version Two Point Oh.”
“Don't mention it.”
“Sat at your computer, you can control and monitor anything that's connected to BONFIRE. So you can order a cup of tea over the network.’

Peter looked around for an empty space big enough to hold two desks, two filing cabinets, two office chairs and enough electrics to fill a medium sized bus garage. “Now, where are we going to pile all our worldly goods?”
“Have they finished laying carpet in the next office?” Sandy was pulling plugs and cables out of the computer and printer that stood on his desk. “If I wedge the door open with the pile of broken ballpoints in my thermos flask, I can carry everything in there. With your help, of course.”

The struggle took an hour and a half. They carried the furniture and their belongings onto the pristine expanse of new carpet next door, and they left Ethan and Shannon to cut and nail Tomato Purée coloured carpet in the office that Sandy shared with Peter. Then they picked up Sandy's lap-top and put it carefully in between the mango chutney slops on a brown formica-topped table in a corner of the canteen.

They each took a mug of tea from the kitchen, and as they walked back to the table Sandy asked again about the computer in the Outlying Territories.

“What happened?” Sandy seemed really keen on being told whatever it was.
“What happened when?”
“What happened when you went to Valhalla?”
“I told you.” Peter mimed a city square and decrepit buildings. “I drove to Red Square. It’s Beware of Falling Masonry Land. The whole city was silent, dark, derelict and deserted. There wasn’t a single building with a roof and all its windows still in the right place. There were no people. Apart from the headlamps of my Jeep, there was no electricity. There are no computers in Valhalla. I guess the city was abandoned a hundred years ago, or quite likely earlier.”
“But I can show you the messages being processed there.”

Peter’s expression changed. Sandy saw that a brilliant thought had suddenly descended upon him. Peter beamed. “Entity.”
“What’s empty? It isn’t empty. There’s tea in it.”
“Entity begins with ‘E’,” Peter explained, writing the acronym in mango chutney on the table top with his index finger. “Bitco Open Network Fault Indication and Repair Entity. It just occurred to me out of the blue.”
Sandy thought at length. “It’s nice, but Enema was better.”
Peter licked the mango chutney residue off his finger. "Needs a bit more fried onion."

 



 

 

 

“Are you, perhaps, being excessively modest about your achievement?” Sandy offered. “Yesterday the server in the Outlying Territories was not working. It stopped working several days ago and it didn’t respond to our attempts to fix it. You set off for the Outlying Territories yesterday in a hired Jeep, you didn’t take anybody with you, and this morning the machine is working again. So far as I can see, it is back to normal. So I conclude that you fixed it last night. Have you repressed the memory of fixing it, what with all the excitement of being trapped on a sinking ship in the middle of the night, surrounded by the freezing cold ocean, starving hungry sharks and razor sharp icebergs big enough to be seen from Space and not surrounded by enough life rafts?”
“You’re exaggerating a teeny weeny little bit.” Peter shook his head. “I was off the ship before it sent the distress signal.”
“Good work, anyway. According to this log, the Outlying Territories server began responding to messages at two hundred hours and it had cleared the backlog ten minutes after that. All the check-sums check, all the books balance, all the chickens have crossed the road—”
“What did they do that for?”
“Figure of speech.”

Peter realised that the opposite was the case. “I’m afraid that the problem has just hove into sight. At best, BONFIRE is giving wrong answers. At worst we have a rogue computer. I looked for it, and by the time somebody saw me wandering around the derelict remains of Valhalla and asked me what the Devil I was doing, I was convinced that there weren’t any computers within ten miles at the least.”

“By the way,” Sandy continued, “I just noticed your tie. I didn’t realise you went to Hammersmith.”
“I’m surprised you recognised it.” Peter straightened the tie. “Nobody else ever has. Did you see it on a ‘Wanted’ poster?”
“All this time I’ve been working alongside the intellectual élite, and I didn’t realise it.”
“That’s how it is with old boy networks. We are an insidious conspiracy, a secret society, an armchair army, a dictatorship in waiting. One day you believe the company you work for is muddling through like every other company, doing no harm and a little good, and the next the company has been taken over, its employees divided into Houses and made to drink milk at playtime, and its profits siphoned off to buy two new desks in the Geography Room and institute the Turnip Prize for Landscape Gardening.”
“Really?” Sandy suddenly looked shaken. ‘Hammersmith Old Boys are planning to take this company over? I’m horrified.”
“The school motto is, ‘Strike quickly, aim straight.’ I had it embroidered on my blazer pocket for seven years. Except as it was in Latin, nobody knew what it meant. I remember explaining to Mr Blackhill, who was obsessed with cricket, that it meant ‘Keep a straight bat.’ He was so far round the bend that he believed me. It might as well have said ‘Stand clear of the doors’ in Latin for all the good it was. ”
“When’s all this going to happen?”
“It isn’t. This company is safe as houses,” Peter admitted. “I made it all up. I don’t even have anything to do with Hammersmith School. I bought the tie a few years ago in the local Cent-stretcher, and they probably bought a batch of them by mistake.”
“What did the shop do when you told them it was a Hammersmith tie?”
“They asked for it back.” Peter remembered, “I gave it to them. Then they put the price up, to two euro, so I bought another one.”
“Peter,” Sandy tried to get the conversation back onto the rails, “About the server in the Outlying Territories…”
“Didn’t we finish with that already?”
“Not quite.” Sandy turned his computer around so that Peter could see it.“Watch what happens when I check the message transmission … See, it's running.”
“How can you tell?”
“I can't contact the Valhalla machine through BONFIRE, because it isn’t in this building. But I can contact the machine that sends the messages to it, and that reports sending, ah,” Sandy clicked on a couple of blue and orange hieroglyphs, “three thousand, two hundred and eighty three messages since start of session. All of which have been successfully received and acknowledged.”
“Are you sure it isn't just somebody running a test?” Peter noticed a flicker on the screen. “Oh, there goes another one.”
“Another what?”
“Another message. The counter went up to three thousand, two hundred and eighty four.”
“So the computer is still running despite being in a town without electricity. How does it do that?”
“I’ve no idea. Maybe someone invented a computer that doesn’t need electricity and forgot to tell us—”

Ethan pulled the office door open and stuck his East London dialect round the door. “There, that didn't take too long, did it?”
“No,” Sandy looked up, “You’ve done the job to the highest standard in record time and for a very fair price, I must say.”
“Goodness!” Ethan looked as though he were about to choke. “I am very touched. You don’t get much appreciation in this job. Nobody’s ever said that to me before, guv’nor.”
“Why does that not surprise me?” Peter asked nobody in particular, and silently.

 

 

By four in the afternoon, Sandy and Peter had between them lugged all their furniture back into their own office, put all the equipment onto the tables, desks and shelves and plugged it all together with a mile of cable, sliced into six-inch lengths. Exhausted from the effort, they sat together at Sandy’s desk.

“Sandy,” Peter asked him, “can you do that thing with BONFIRE where you tell the tea machine to make two cups of tea?”
“Sure. Saves you waiting ten seconds for each cup.”
“A miracle of British engineering. I only have to wait ten seconds for the second cup, because the machine doesn’t start to make it until after it’s finished making the first one.”
Sandy gave his desktop some instructions and Peter fetched two cups of tea from TM-12. “For just two thousand six hundred euro, Bitco has purchased a tea dispenser with a network presence, which makes it almost as convenient as having a kettle and two mugs beside the sink in the corner of the room. Where were we?”
Sandy swallowed a great draught of tea and complained bitterly, “This carpet is already giving me a headache.” He stood and raised one fist. “Damn you, Sonya Crackpot! Damn you and your psycho-active shades of carpet! I’ll see you hang for them and as penance spend eternity doing hard labour screwing the little plastic lids on all the bottles in an aspirin factory!”
“You’re having revenge fantasies,” Peter advised him.
“With red carpets in every department,” Sandy went on, “and every optician for many miles around kidnapped and held to ransom by heavily armed Ethiopian pirates!”
“Sandy,” Peter assumed his most concerned and sincere facial expression, “Firstly, Ethiopia is a land-locked country. There aren’t any Ethiopian pirates.”
“What sort of people live in Ethiopia, then?”
“Coffee growers, camel herders and Emperor Haile Selassie. Look, Sandy, if I may be honest, I am less than completely sure that your headache has been caused by the colour of the carpet. I think you should stop drinking that tea. Someone just might have put dextro-amphetamine in it. Who or why, I know not.”
“Are you… are you seriously suggesting that I may be behaving more aggressively than usual due to ingestion of exotic pharmaceuticals? Because if you are—”
“Stop pointing two fingers at me as though they were a revolver, Sandy, and take a taxi home. You’ll be right as rain tomorrow — I hope.”
“My anger shall burn for ever! I swear by almighty Lucifer that I will have revenge! I shall personally track down the drug-dealing high rise block scum who put dope in my tea and rend him limb from limb! Or her. Mustn’t forget gender equality.”
“Just sit by the desk and wait. Try to think normally and I’ll call a cab.”

It was only after the taxi had come and gone that, sitting in his office chair, Peter realised that he felt cold, he was shaking, and that while Sandy had been throwing his fit of rage, he had been scared witless.

 

As he sat recovering his composure, Peter realised for the first time the significance of a small family heirloom which had come to mind unbidden. He had no idea where it was now. It was a small receipt, a piece of cheap, crumpled white paper perhaps six centimetres across and four deep, which looked as if it had been torn out of a larger sheet along perforations.

‘Gosforth Union Lunatic Asylum, Received the sum of’ (handwritten) 6D, then there was a scrawled signature which might have been Miss Sarah Welch, Wed. 23/05/83. No. 002762


The writing was formed of neat, even pot-hooks drawn with the dip pen of a Victorian clerk, showing that more than a hundred years had passed since the visit for which someone had paid sixpence, in 1883. Peter’s dad had once shown him the receipt and explained in his warm Yorkshire voice that in great-granddad’s day the lunatic asylums had thrown their doors open on Sundays and anyone in need of entertainment could pay sixpence to spend the afternoon watching the lunatics.

“Sixpence, that’d be a guinea today, at least,” dad had said. “Mind you, that was before we ’ad th’ television. Candid Camera an’ Th’ Fam’ly.
“But that was a Wednesday, not a Sunday,” Peter noticed, and immediately regretted saying it.
Dad drew breath,“’E went to see ’is wife. She were me granny. They let ’im in special.”

Peter awoke with his head on the desk. It was dusk. He had spent two hours dreaming about paying a guinea — what was that, €1·27, probably plus Value Added Tax — to watch Sandy Luff in a strait-jacket raving incoherently about imaginary injustices and hallucinatory computers.

The office clock said a quarter to seven. Apart from Peter himself, the office was empty. He had put his coat on and reached for the handle of the street door when it occurred to him that he might be able to use the situation to his advantage. The cat was away. The one good thing about falling asleep at work was that when you woke up there was nobody around to ask you to put aside what you were doing and do their work instead.

Buying a computer for the core network was a bureaucratic process. Surely, he reasoned, if Bitco had installed a machine in an office in Valhalla, there must be some record of the machine being bought, transported, installed, connected and commissioned. There might be a maintenance contract or some customisation. Those records would probably be somewhere in the Accounts office. He went to look.

The Accounts office door was unlocked, and the first thing Peter noticed inside the office was that the desks were empty of clutter. He wondered whether the accountants cleaned up their desks at the end of every working day, but the waste bins were empty too. In clearing the desks, nothing had been thrown away. Peter decided the explanation was that they never had any clutter on their desks because they never did any work. Peter quickly found an ochre-coloured steel filing cabinet that held the paperwork that recorded all the twenty or so computers that had been connected to Bitco’s network over the years. There weren’t many computers on the network — if anything there were more tea machines and front loading washing machines than computers — and he leafed through the papers: there were computers in Bitco itself, the credit card companies, of course, a couple of installations in banks, a couple more in insurance companies, two doing the donkey work in an expensive health insurance company, one serving a City newspaper and one in a government office.
There was also a light brown manila folder holding a few press cuttings, describing a home-built machine assembled in the craft wing of Peterborough Grammar School, and a prototype contrivance which Bitco had built for an exhibition comprising a drone with grab-arms to which you could send orders across the network and it would bring you a cup of tea from the nearest vending machine. For some reason the device never made it to production.

There was no paperwork that seemed to relate to the Outlying Territories. So, either a machine had been put there and commissioned and operated and nobody had kept any notes, or equipment had been put somewhere else and the machine had been reconfigured to make it tell anyone who asked that it was in the Outlying Territories, or the machine was licit and legitimate, but the paperwork had been destroyed outright.

Where was John H. Watson when you needed him? Peter wished fervently for a pipe and half an ounce of tobacco on which to draw as he gathered and pondered the facts of the case. On his desktop he noticed a small square of lined paper which he had not noticed before: the message read, ‘Look in the right-hand drawer.’ In the right-hand drawer he found a well used, but clean, Barling briar pipe, a small tin of Ships tobacco and a matchbook. He had no idea who might have put them there. He rummaged through the drawer, half expecting to find a deer-stalker hat and a magnifying glass. There were neither. He shall supply your needs. He already had a perfectly good hat and twenty-twenty eyesight.

By the time Peter finally stepped out of the building into the cold and heard a clock striking ten in the evening, the tin was empty of tobacco, the office was suffused with a sweet smelling grey fug, and he had a fairly good idea which of those possibilities was true. He made sure that the street door was closed properly, so that it could not be opened from outside, and then realised that he had forgotten to tidy up the accounts office.

 

 

 

Meanwhile, just before eight in the evening, Angela and Headphones arrived outside the high fence and the wooden gate of the Kissinger Repair Yard, carrying a sports bag full of recording gear. Headphones knocked the metal knocker and waited for an answer, and waited, and waited. He knocked again and shouted. Then he looked at Angela, and Angela said, “All right, one more try and then we see if we can climb over the fence. One, two, three…”
“HELLO!” They knocked loudly and shouted together at the tops of their voices.
A reply came from behind the fence. “All right, all right, no need to knock an ’ole in it, is there? I’m comin’. ”
A key turned in the lock and the gate opened, revealing an elderly man in oil-stained overalls and a bad temper. His worn peaked cap bore the badge of a harbourmaster. “What are you two after?”

There was no ship in the enormous dock.

“We were looking for RMS Titanic,” Angela told him. “We were expecting it to be here by now.”

She. Goddamn’ landlubbers. Ships is ladies. Did you come up in the last bucket, or somefink? You was expectin’ her to be ’ere.” The harbourmaster turned and pointed at a rustic looking building a block along the street. “That’s the canteen, dahn the street. They’re in there.”

Apart from being lit by electricity and not having any horses parked outside, the building looked as it must have done when it was a coaching inn a hundred years before. Kissinger’s Kitchen read the sign hanging above the oaken door. Beneath the name, the sign bore a portrait of the monumental failure himself, and beneath the portrait, in smaller letters, Watney’s Red Barrel.

At that moment, Erik Husqvarna stepped out of the pub and walked across to Headphones and Angela. “Hello again. I’m glad that you came back out here to see us.”
“Thanks.” Headphones and Angela spoke together.
Erik shook hands with both. “We’ve been looking forward to seeing you again. You know me — Erik Husqvarna, the master of the tug Red Leicester which was hauling the Titanic to the repair yard.”
“Was hauling?” Angela cottoned on: something had gone badly wrong.
“I am sorry to tell you that the journey has not quite gone according to plan.” He glanced at the heavy sports bag which Headphones was carrying. “So I’m afraid I don’t have time for a game of cricket just now. I’m trying to deal with a disaster.”
“It’s not a cricket outfit, I’m not British, I don’t know what cricket is, let alone why anybody would play it, let alone watch it, when they could just as easily spend the day in jail. What’s in here is recording equipment,”
“Yes, I know,” Erik’s joke had fallen flat. “I was just practising my dry Norwegian sense of humour. This inn is our canteen. Come inside, and we’ll tell you the whole story.”
“On the record?” Angela asked. “Or are we entering the sordid, backstabbing world of unattributable briefings?”
“All for broadcast. It’s not a long story.”

They pushed open the heavy door. Kissinger’s Kitchen was warm and busy. Captain Smith stood up to greet them, while the rest of the ship’s officers were seated at a round table set for dinner. “Angela, good evening!”
“Hello! You’ve met me and my producer. I can’t introduce him, because don’t know what his name is. We all call him Headphones.”
“We kept two places for you. May I buy you a drink?”
Angela and Headphones sat down, and Headphones asked, “Do they have beer?”
“There’s Watney’s Red Barrel.” said a man whom Angela recognised as the First Officer. “I’m David Parks, by the way.”
“Hello, David. Yes, Watney’s will be fine.” Sometimes common courtesy required one not to be too open about one’s true feelings.
Angela said that she would like one of those too. Captain Smith flagged down a waiter and Angela asked, “Everything seemed to be under control when I left. What happened?”
“Something almost unknown in maritime history.” David went on, “We were the victims of a thunderbolt strike.”

There was silence. Both Angela and Headphones fell silent with surprise. Then Angela said it was worth recording all the details, and when Headphones reached into the sports bag and handed Angela a mike and an Uher, she repeated the question.

“What happened?”
“Something almost unknown in maritime history.” David repeated, “We were the victims of a thunderbolt strike.”
“Powerful enough to sink the ship?”
“A double thunderbolt strike. Two thunderbolts that hit the side of the ship at immense speed and went off like torpedoes. The ship was badly damaged and sank in a few minutes.”
“Where did they come from? Did you see who fired them?”
“No idea. They hit the starboard hull so they came from landward. Somewhere west of us.”
“Was anyone hurt?”
The kitchen door opened in a cloud of steam. A waiter brought a tray of drinks, set them on the table and returned to the kitchen. Captain Smith answered the question. “No. Nobody was hurt. Just between you and me, I left the ship without so much as getting my feet wet. Thanks to Erik here, of course.”
“Oh, it was nothing,” said Erik, trying to be modest.
“Was it really nothing?”
Erik thought about his answer. “No, it wasn’t really nothing. He said, ‘Goodbye, friends and helpers, my duty as Captain is to go down with my ship.’ He said it as though he had rehearsed it, which I suppose he had. I was on the Red Leicester. I picked up the loud-hailer and I yelled at him not to be ridiculous, it wasn’t worth drowning for the sake of an empty vessel. He took no notice, so I told him I would come over there and—”
“Erik saved Captain Smith from himself,” said the diner on his left. The cap on the table beside him read Officer of the Watch. “He actually picked Teddy up and carried him to the ship’s rail in a fireman’s lift.”
“Please tell me your name, for the audio,” Angela said into the mike.
“Timon Hill. Officer of the Watch Timon Hill.”
The waiter returned, dragging a trolley. “Here you are, Captain Smith: eight servings of Admiral’s Pie.” He looked across at Angela. “Speciality of the house.”
“I know, I’ve been looking forward to it,” she said, as the waiter set a large white plate before her and filled it with Admiral’s Pie. “Do any of you know what the repair will cost?”
“Three and three quarter million euro and not a cent more, because that’s what she’s insured for… Angel Fowler, ship’s purser.”

Captain Smith pole-axed Headphones with a charisma missile. “Now that you’ve tried it, what do you think of Admiral’s Pie?”
“It’s all right.” Then, seeing the Captain’s wounded expression, “When an American says that, it means excellent, outstanding, best pie ever. The, er, carp is particularly delicious.”
“Carp?” Angela mumbled.
”It’s the only fish I know,” Headphones mumbled back.

 

Chapter Four  

The radio station filled the second storey of Rantzen House. Angela returned there late at night. Not having enough time to cut and stitch the material on the Uher into a sensible order, she scribbled a few notes and presented the Titanic story live, from memory, on the midnight news. Afterwards, with great relief she saw the red On Air sign go dark, and she began breathing normally again.

“Well done.” said Headphones. “Not many reporters could’ve managed that.” The plummy voice of the ghost of Bob Danvers-Walker took over the news. “That was Angela Highwater reporting,” and he went on to a story about the progress of the application by Heaven to join the Celestial Abodes Treaty Organisation.
“Headphones,” Angela confessed guiltily, “I forgot the Captain’s name.”
“Don't worry, I won’t tell him. There’s always the next bulletin, nobody noticed except you and me, and I don’t care all that much. The listeners are all asleep at this time of night, unless they’re night watchmen or astronomers or burger chefs on night shift or driving the late bus with the radio on in the cab. They aren’t looking at each other, shaking their heads and tutting, ‘Did you hear that? She said “Err.” She actually said “Err” on national radio.’ Are you going to stay for the national anthem and the close-down?”
“Thanks, but no. I never managed to like that tune. How on earth did it come to be our National Anthem?” She hummed the first few bars nonetheless as she reached her coat from the pegs.

The Soviet National Anthem

“I like our National Anthem.” Headphones sang the first few notes and then explained, “When the Soviet Union died at the end of 1991, the ghost of its National Anthem came and haunted us.”
“Enjoy it. I can’t think of anything useful for myself to do here tonight. Besides, Peter will be wondering where I am.”
“Sure, you’ve certainly done your stint. Is that the Uher over there?” Headphones pointed to it. “Great, I'll edit the interviews before I go home. Your hard work will be on the six o’clock news in the morning. It should wake a few people up with a jolt. Good work and goodnight.”

 

Back at Number 11 Blair Street, Peter had fallen asleep in his clothes on the sofa in the living room. More exactly he was half asleep, half awake, half dressed and wondering where Angela was. He awoke as Angela let herself in.

“Honey, I’m home.”
“My darling, welcome to the place where in between showing the follies of this world to itself you lay your head. Let’s not always repeat the same cliché. We need a new one.”
“Err…” Angela thought about that. “I’ll think of one in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”
“Close, but no bouquet. Where have you been?”
“Interviewing the crew of the Titanic.” Angela sounded proud of herself. “The ship came under attack and now it sleeps with— I mean, now she sleeps with the fishes. It’ll all be on the morning news. Now, I am going to have a hot bath and you stay where you are and don’t go back to sleep and I will take proper care of you.”
“Good. Look forward to it.” Peter waved his arm in the direction of upstairs. “There’s a bath in the bathroom. I think it's somewhere up there. I can make a cup of tea if you want.”
“That’s all right. I just want to wash off the dirt of the day and get myself into bed. Don’t take your clothes off, darling. Since I started doing radio, I’ve come to like the dishevelled look.”

As Angela ran hot water into the bath, Peter thought he heard someone knocking at the front door of the house. He went to the window and looked out onto the street. There was indeed someone knocking. He was a rough skinned, unshaven fellow, twenty five years perhaps, maybe six feet tall and clad in bright red trousers and an unzipped black leather jacket. “ ’Evenin’, sir. Could I have a word with you?”
“Nothing would please me more at two o’clock in the morning when I have to be at work tomorrow.”
“That's good to hear. Most people just tell me to piss off.”
“I wish I had, but I suppose now I’ve started being polite, I can’t change my horse in mid-stream.”
“You have a horse? A polite horse?”
“Wait a second or two while I open the front door and listen politely to you selling me double glazing, converting me to a new religion or begging the price of a bowl of soup in whichever may be the nearest lunatic asylum.”

Opening the door, Peter tried to remain calm and not freeze to death in the night-time breeze. “To begin at the beginning, who might you be?”
“My name is Séamus O’Gunrunner. I love horses. May I say hi to the horse?”
“Not until you have been introduced, and even then you should say ‘Good evening, Lady Horse.’ You wouldn’t want to offend her. Are you really a gun runner or do you just have an unusual name?”
“Both,” said Séamus. “It’s a family business. Have you ever heard of the Theory of Nominative Determinism?”
“Who is it?” Angela called from upstairs.
“Is that the horse talking?”
“Yes,” said Peter, who misunderstood the question, and he called back, “I'll be there in another moment.” Then he turned back to Séamus and the night-time chill. “How may I help you?”
“I thought you might need a gun.”
“Whatever for?” Peter was nonplussed.
“To shoot people. You never know when you might need to shoot someone.”
“Why? Do you think I’m likely to need to shoot someone?”
Séamus spoke sotto voce, “If the rumours are true…” he shook his head slowly, “then you will.”
“Why? What’s going to happen?”
“They’re massing troops on the borders. It might be an invasion force. You might have to defend yourself.”
“I’m a bit lost, sorry. Who are they in this context?”
Even more sotto voce, “Heaven. Heaven, of course. The Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost, the lot of ’em. Those who have seen it say it’s an invasion force.”
Angela called from upstairs again. “What’s happening down there?”
Séamus leaned forward, trying to see behind the front door. “You might even have to defend your horse.”
“I won’t need to do that,” Peter said with sudden assertiveness. “She has a tommy-gun already. I taught her to shoot a baked bean off a fork ten miles away. Mind you, she usually misses on the first few shots.”
“Sir, if you’re not interested I can go elsewhere.”
“How many guns do you have for sale?”
“Let me think… One.”
“I think perhaps you’d do better going to the pub and selling it (the gun, not the pub) to the local hooligan over five hundred and sixty-eight millilitres of Watney’s Red Barrel.”
“Is that all they got? Red Barrel?”
“I’m afraid so. This is Hell. You get what the living can do without, and you have to order it in Metric.”
“Lucifer almighty! Those goddamned French!” Séamus was momentarily consumed by incandescent Francophobic fury. “The only things they ever invented were the metric system and a machine for cutting people’s heads off.”
“It’s hard to tell which one has caused the more suffering, isn’t it.”
“Well, I can go along a couple more streets knocking on doors before I go to the pub. I shall be hiding in the shadows before the sun rises, that’s for sure.”
“Why would you hide in the shadows? Are you one of those spirit beings that look human but catch fire and burn away to nothing if they’re touched by the rays of the sun?”
“No! No, I only do that ’cause the Police won’t recognise me in the dark.”
“Darling,” Angela’s voice floated delicately down the stairs again, “Come to bed.”
“Um, perhaps it would be best,” Séamus hesitated, “if I left you and your horse to enjoy a quiet evening together. Nice talking to you.”
“I agree,” said Peter as he closed the front door and locked it, just to be on the safe side.  

 

Peter stirred the cup of tea on the table in front of him. “What’s for breakfast, Angela?”
“Special J and semi skimmed milk.”
“Semi skimmed milk is a strange thing. I never understood how come a factory manager knows more about how much fat to put into milk than a cow does.”
“It’s the best I could get.” Angela poured cereal and milk into two bowls and set them on the kitchen table. “Here, have a spoon.”
“Thanks. Don’t throw the box away. Just in case I’m still hungry after I’ve eaten the cereal.”
“Will you want a knife and fork for that?”
“I might, because Special J contains less nutrition than the cardboard it comes packed in.”
“As unique selling points go, that’s impressive.” Angela thought for a moment. “What happened in the night? I was so tired, I didn’t understand what went on.”
“Someone knocked on the door and tried to sell me a gun. He said I’d need it because there’s a war in the offing. He said his name was Séamus O’Gunrunner.”
“The sort of name that you remember easily, isn’t it. Six foot tall, skinny, leather jacket?”
“That’s him to a T.”
Peter recognised the description, and Angela went on, “His real name is Regan O’Doherty. Blew himself to bits a couple of days ago while trying to plant a bomb in the Sunny Doughnuts factory in South Tahígh.”
“He probably thought it was a Police station.”
“Easy mistake to make.” Angela ate a spoonful of Special J and shuddered at the taste of ceiling tiles. “They look very similar in the dark.”
“Hang on! How did you know all that?”
“I work in the newsroom.”
Peter thought about that. “So, would you be privileged enough to know whether there really is a war on the way, or whether Séamus O’Gunrunner is making it up as he goes along.”
“There are no troops massing on the border that I noticed. Mark you, I haven’t been anywhere near the border for months. ”
“So it’s just his sales pitch.”
“I think it probably is,” Angela explained. “Of course, they could have been D noticed. I’d have to ask Monique about that.”
“What’s ‘D noticed’ mean?”
“The bane of our lives. I mean, Monique would know if there was a D Notice ordering us not to mention some story that the demons don’t want our listeners to know about. Or there might be an E Notice ordering us to give great prominence to a different story, in order to overshadow the story that the demons don’t want our listeners to know about.”
“E for Exaggerate?”
“Actually it’s Emphasise, but basically you got it.”

 

Peter turned up at his office. The first thing he noticed was that Sandy Luff had not come in to work. Perhaps whatever substance had been put into Sandy's afternoon cup of tea yesterday had not yet worn off. Peter avoided the nearby tea machine and instead took a beaker of tea from the next machine along and sniffed it carefully before deciding to drink it. It was tolerably good tea, and Peter drank it while he recovered from being smacked in the face by the newly fitted bright red office carpet. He reached for his tropical sun-glasses, but found them missing from his desk.

Sitting looking out of the window in order not to suffer more than the irreducible minimum of eye-strain, he heard in the distance the shrill whistle of the steam locomotive that hauled the overnight sleeper from Heaven Victoria, the Golden Crucifix, as it lumbered through Ninth Circle on its way to Grand Hell Central, carrying a handful of demons, deportees, devils, evil spirits, Popes, revenants, saints and souls of dual nationality who held the paperwork required to travel on it and could afford the fare. By now it would be breakfast time, and the passengers would be sitting in the restaurant car, talking business and eating the egg, bacon and tomato course.

(Italian accent) “Forgive me, Pius ex-eye-eye, your Holiness, I have to dash, for I have an appointment with Mephistopheles at nine fifteen.”
Laughs. “You certainly don’t want to keep him waiting, monsignor.”
Waiter, obsequiously, “Would you care for another flagon of Pinot Grigio, gentlemen?”
“Yes please, Rupert, and another pot of that delicious Twining’s English Breakfast Tea if you would be so kind.”

Steam engines — things of beauty from another world. Trust those who lecture us on humility to flaunt their privileges before us damned, who breakfasted on decaffeinated Nestea and Special J.

Peter sat quietly, looking out at the morning sunshine dancing over the car park, the blackened terraces of Victorian houses behind it and the distant sulphurous volcanoes on the horizon surmounted by clouds of yellow smoke.

The office door flew open. Peter spilled tea over his trousers and onto the hideous carpet. A woman at least two metres tall, fifty years or so old and obviously a long-standing worker at the company, wearing indigo jeans and a sky blue shirt, neither of which knew what an iron looks like, entered without knocking and demanded to know whether she was addressing Peter Highwater.

“Yes, that’s me.” Peter was startled, but he spoke evenly. “I don’t think we’ve met. My responsibilities—”
“Would you mind cutting the crap and explaining what you were doing in my office after hours yesterday?”
“Certainly, Miz—”
“Mrs.,” with great vehemence.

Peter waited for the woman to tell him her name, but she didn't. Swithering between telling the truth, an untruth or her to go back out into the corridor and knock on his door instead of barging in and snorting like an enraged bull, he chose the truth.

“I was looking for the guarantee and receipt for one of the remote machines. It needs attention. I thought it was urgent enough to justify going and looking at the records kept in Accounts. Perhaps you could help me?”
“Perhaps I could. So why not come and ask me while I’m at work?” The lady produced a pair of tropical sunglasses. “There’s top secret documents in that filing cabinet.”
“Yes, I noticed. Unfortunately, I’ve forgotten what they were about.”
“Here’s your sunglasses back, by the way.”
“Thank you.” Peter regretted having had If found, please return to P Highwater engraved on the frame. “I’d been looking for them.”
“Tell me about this computer.”
“There’s not much to tell. It is somewhere in the Outlying Territories, — at least, it says it is — it receives messages from the Bitco corporate network, and it sends replies.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing, except when I picked up a screwdriver and drove off to find it and fix it, it a couple of days ago, it didn't exist.”
“Curious. I'll have a look around and see if I can find anything.”
Peter thanked her. “And if you can work out how a machine can receive and reply to messages while not existing, all at the same time, do tell me.”

 

 

The woman thought for a moment and said, “You can call me Melanie.”
“Thanks, Melanie. Let me know what you—”

The phone rang. Peter answered. He recognised Sandy's low pitched voice.

“How are you feeling, Sandy? You had quite a nasty turn yesterday.”

Melanie went out of the room in much lower dudgeon than she came in with. Perhaps she really would try to help find out about the non-existent machine. The office door almost closed, but didn’t. For the next ten minutes it repeatedly opened and slammed shut in the breeze.

“I’m still pretty woozy, to be honest, but I don't think I've been permanently damaged. I might be back tomorrow.”
“Is there anything that you want me to do in the meantime?”
“Well, yes, there is.” Sandy seemed reluctant to say what it was. “It's a small thing…”
“I'm not so busy that I can’t help a friend in need.”
“Well, in that case…,” Sandy asked, “Do you know where I keep my pen?”
“No. In fact, I don’t know any songs about pens at all.”
“Song?” Sandy was nonplussed. “I was not referring to Three Coins in the Fountain. I meant, I keep a pen in the office in order to impress on visitors that I can write. Do you know in which place I keep it?”
“On the rack,” Peter looked to make sure that both the pen and the rack were still there, and they were, “On your desk, by the wall.”
“Could you bring it to me?”
“Well, of course.” Peter thought for a moment. “Where, exactly, do you want me to bring it to?”
“My house.” Sandy spoke as though that were obvious. “I miss it. ”
“You miss your house? What happened to it?”
“I miss my pen. I am trying to talk you into bringing the pen to my house. Sixty-four Maudling Market. Just across from the Truss Tavern. Thinking about it, why don't I wait for you in the Truss Tavern? Where ignorance is not just bliss, it’s compulsory, as it says on the sign outside.”

Peter picked up Sandy’s pen and walked out of the office.

The journey to the Truss Tavern usually took twenty minutes on the bus. Peter found himself sitting next to a large male passenger. As soon as he sat down, opened his free newspaper, noticed the headline ‘Jihadi John wins appeal. Trial was held in ‘wrong kind of court’, judge told ’ and fell comfortably half asleep, the large male passenger turned to him, held out his hand to be shaken and recited with deliberate slowness in the tone of one who has said the same thing a thousand times already and a Confederate accent, “Hello. My name is Dodge. I’m a Lucifer’s Witness. I am here to save your immortal soul.”
“Hello.” Peter took his neighbour’s hand and shook it. “My name is Peter, and I’m not a Lucifer’s Witness.” Peter went with the first lie that occurred to him, “I am here to get some sleep, because they are digging up the road outside my bedroom window.”

Peter’s lie, despite being distinctly plausible in the climate of constant road works everywhere, did not divert Dodge from his purpose.

“Are you saved, brother?”
“Am I your brother?”
“No, brother.”
“I thought I didn’t recognise you. But should you happen to have about you some incontrovertible evidence that we are closely related despite never having seen one another in this life or the last, for example in case we turn out to be siblings separated at birth, you and I shall have to spend the rest of our lives together. But until you produce some such evidence, I shall go back to half asleep, as I was just a minute ago. Do me a kindness and wake me up if the bus approaches the Truss Tavern or catches fire.”

Dodge thought about that for a short while and then said, “My fellow passenger, are you saved?”
“I don’t know, really.” Peter yawned loudly on purpose. “Saved from what? How could I tell?”
“I don’t know exactly.” The neighbour looked like one wandering, lost, in the Maze at Shapps Court. “I guess I never really thought about it. If you were saved, I suppose you’d live in a big house in the country, have a job that didn’t involve doin’ much work, you’d eat delicious food, you’d own a big car and drive everywhere…”
“That sounds like an improvement on Hell,” Peter reasoned.
“No. No, it just sounds like bein’ in Hell, but with money.” said Dodge, thoughtfully. “Dividends to draw, cheques to cash, an’ a seat in the House of Demons when you retire. I shall have to pray about that, Have you noticed that praying really— ”
The bus driver interrupted loudly. “’Oi! No praying on the bus! It’s against regulations.”
“Thank the Devil for that.” Peter wanted to settle back in his seat, fall half asleep and read more about Jihadi John, but Dodge had other ideas. Dodge muttered to himself, “Oh, great Lucifer…”
The driver must have had ears as sharp as shark’s teeth. This was the bus driver from Hell, except that he hadn’t arrived on Earth yet. “Oi! No praying on the bus! I told you, it’s against regulations. Besides which, there’s not much point prayin’ to Lucifer. He got fired this morning. And even when he was at the height of his powers, he was only ever in charge of minor inconveniences. If you miss your stop on the bus, or you come home from the supermarket and find that you forgot to buy the loaf of bread that you went out for, that’s Lucifer at work. If there’s an earthquake and your house falls down and the insurance company won’t pay for the damage because they say the earthquake’s an Act of Satan, that isn’t.”
Dodge had been listening. “But, Mr Driver, wouldn’t it be as well to make your needs known to Lucifer?”
“If it’s all the same to you,’ Peter told Dodge patiently, ‘All I want is to settle down and ride to the Truss Tavern in peace and quiet.”
“The Truss Tavern?” asked the driver. “I passed that five minutes ago.”

 

As he stood up and walked to the exit, Peter noticed a small, oblong piece of glossy orange plastic that had been lying on the floor underneath Dodge’s seat. It was a staff card identifying Mr Dodge Justice, issued by the Diabolical Bus Company, entitling him to free bus travel on and off duty and a cheap loan to buy a new bicycle. As he handed the card back to Dodge with a “Here, you dropped this,” for the first time in his life and in the thereafter, Peter became enlightened. In a flash, he realised why on every bus trip that he had ever taken since the day when he first stepped out of the Pacer and walked out of Ninth Circle railway station, there had always been at least one mother shouting continual threats and profanities at her filthy, screaming two year old, or a polytechnic student listening to rap ‘music’ on a Stereo Eight tape player loud enough to be heard in Purgatory, or a tramp eating chips and smoking a cigarette, or a drunk who didn’t know the words singing tunelessly, or — as in this case — a Lucifer’s Witness pretending to be desperate to save the souls of all the passengers within hectoring distance, and none of them ever seemed to get off the bus. They all had a staff card, every one of them. The bus company, or just possibly the Ministry of Misery, was paying them to sit there and make the real passengers’ journeys Hell.

 

When the bus stopped, the first thing Peter heard was the newsboy shouting the headline from beside a stack of newspapers piled onto an up-ended tea chest. Lucifer dismissed from Supreme Council! Read all about it!

‘In due course,’ Peter remarked to him, ‘you’ll make an excellent Town Crier.’
The boy, who might have been fourteen years old, waved his arm up and down and made a noise like a handbell with his mouth. ‘Oyez, oyez! Buy the Stirring Times! One euro twenty cents. Oyez, oyez!

Peter put his hand in his pocket and found one euro and twenty cents. He tucked the Stirring Times under his arm and began the walk back to the Truss Tavern.

In town, the election of Lucifer’s successor was under way already. Posters were already being pasted onto billboards and young men with black Sharpie markers were already adding blacked-out teeth and toothbrush moustaches to the candidates’ mug shots. Candidates had obviously been given instructions by Head Office to ensure that their photographs still looked persuasive after a street artist had added a toothbrush moustache, a missing tooth, a smouldering fag, a top hat, or quite possibly all four.


The uncanny thing about the posters was not the pictures so much as the print. You looked from the promises on the Communist poster to the promises on the Fascist poster on the opposite side of the road and you couldn’t see any difference except for the names of the candidates and the colour of the crosses. More jobs, more homes, more food, more pay, more policemen, more hospitals, cheap electricity. Brown for the Fascists, red for the Communists. One day both parties would ask the focus groups to tell them which colour had the greatest appeal to B1B2C voters, and then the promises, the rosettes and the posters would all look the same, and the already small differences between the political parties would have disappeared altogether.

 

When Peter walked through the door of the Truss Tavern, the first word he thought of was hostelry. It was hard to call a place which looked so old, warm and welcoming a bar, or even a pub. The inside had been made to look old, with plastic oak beams, gas fires that looked like coal fires and the walls adorned with faked black and white photographs intended to make the Tavern seem friendly. The faked photographs on the walls showed stage coaches standing in the street just in front of the Tavern, boarding passengers for the Posh End and beyond. There were pictures of a former Pope in his fine robes and his fireproof sedan chair on a visit to hob-nob with the Devil himself. Here was a paparazzi snap of the Kray Twins. There, Jack the Ripper was snapped showing his five day pass-out to the driver of an impressive, highly polished eight seater horse drawn carriage for a morbid excursion to East London, where the passengers would visit the site of every Ripper murder. Or, at least, of every Ripper murder so far.

Weights and Measures would not allow the nostalgic pint glasses behind the bar to be drunk from, nor were cigarettes permitted in the bar. The Tavern sold beer, not quite cold enough and not tasting of much, in half-litres, but in the evening you could still buy toasted spam sandwiches, made with sliced Mother’s Pride bread, and on Sundays the Tavern sold a hot lunch, like a school dinner but complete with a plastic fork and a paper tablecloth.

Standing at the bar, Peter looked around for Sandy. Not seeing him, he ordered himself a half litre of Watney’s Red from the rushed and breathless barkeeper and, just after he had finished paying for it, he heard Sandy’s voice calling him from the far corner.

“I’m over here.”
“Shall I get a beer in for you?” Peter shouted over the general hubbub.
Sandy raised his empty glass. “Yes, please.”

Peter carried the two beers to the corner of the bar and sat at Sandy’s table.

 

“I brought your green pen.” Peter found the pen in his pocket and handed it over. “Why is it urgent? I mean, it would still have been on your desk tomorrow.”
“Sit down, Peter. You’ve had a long journey to get here.”
“You look stressed,” Peter observed.
“I’m more stressed than the first syllable of rhubarb.”

As he put the beers onto the table, Peter observed, “Is this targeted advertising? How come you’ve got a Vote Communist beer-mat but I’ve got a Vote Fascist one?”
“Turn it over. It says Vote Communist on the flip side.”
“That’s a new gimmick since last time, isn’t it?”
“More gimmick than you think. I found out by carelessness that if you cook it in the microwave Communist side up, it plays the Internationale.
“I shall try that as soon as I get back to somewhere that has a microwave oven. What happens if you…”
Hölle Über Alles. Come to my flat. I’ve got a microwave. I’ll show you—”

A yell from a bullhorn startled both men, and everyone else. “Achtung! Get out of this pub and stand in the street outside.”

Sandy spluttered into his beer, Peter spilled about fifty cents’ worth.

The yell came from the main door. In the doorway, a couple of feet from Peter and Sandy, stood a slight man in a brown uniform. He had a German accent, a brown rosette, a comb-over and a toothbrush moustache.

“Why?” Peter asked him. The German appeared confused.
“Don’t try to bamboozle me with the stupid questions. Go and stand on the pavement. All of you.” He glowered at Sandy and pointed the bullhorn. “
Donner und Blitzen! Stop spluttering, you noisy Schweinhund. He waved the bullhorn around, showing that Vote Fascist was painted on the side. Several drinkers were already leaving by the nearest exit.
“I'm not trying to bamboozle you.” Peter was nonplussed. “I don’t much care whether you’re bamboozled or not. I just want to know why you’re ordering me to stand in the street when I could be sitting in the warm discussing beer-mats.”
“Yes,” put in Sandy. “Don’t you know who I am?”
“No, I don’t. Other than you’re a noisy
Dummkopf with beer on your shirt.”
“I am Sandy Luff, world famous tegestologist at your service.”
Ein toxicologist?” said the German, who had never come across the Latin word for beer-mat. “I have work for you. Find out what’s in this verdammt awful beer. Don’t they have here ein Reinheitsgebot?

By now the bar was three quarters empty. On the far side of the tavern, a drinker outside pulled the fire exit open, picked up a glass of beer from the nearest table and disappeared back through the fire exit.

“Hey! You! Bring that back!” yelled another patron who was standing up to leave.
The German took his watch, a heavy silver affair, from his uniform pocket. “You’ve got about two and a half minutes.
’Raus!”
“Why? What will happen in two and a half minutes?”
“The Fascist cavalcade will roll past.” Realising that the bull-horn was dangling in his left hand and he was not talking through it, the man raised it to his lips and began yelling again. “We need a crowd to gather along the kerb, so that the television cameras have a crowd to film. Besides, it’s a jolly good cavalcade. You wouldn’t want to miss it.”

 

Coming out of the Tavern onto the street, Peter and Sandy heard a marching band in the distance. Sandy joined in the chorus.

Hölle, Hölle über alles,
Über alles in der—

Peter’s elbow in his ribs silenced him. Peter kept his voice down.
“You forget yourself.”
“How can you tell?”
“Shush! Just stand there and look as though you’re going to vote for them.”

As the band came around a corner and goose-stepped into view, Peter saw the writing in big, bright brown letters on the bass drum.

Vote Fascist! Vote Seamus O’Gunrunner! 

There were indeed several television crews filming the cavalcade. Peter looked along the line of reporters.

One of the Press Corps waved to him. It was Angela, Press pass pinned to her lapel, carrying a microphone and an Uher on a shoulder strap. When Peter looked in her direction she crossed the road to stand in front of him.

“What are you doing here?” they asked each other.
“Reporting on the election.” Angela was first off the conversation blocks. “It should keep us in talking heads for a couple of weeks… I didn't think you were on the side of the Fascists.”
“You didn't think right, I’m not. I was bringing my colleague Sandy here the pen he left in the office.” Peter felt in his pocket for the pen and then remembered that Sandy had it already. “Then a German with a loud-hailer ordered us both to stand here and cheer so that you and your competitors might have a cheering crowd to report.”
“German? He’s probably an expert.” Angela thanked them both. “Yes, I don't think they would have been very pleased if the peak audience saw the Fascists marching along a deserted street while their supporters cowered behind dustbins, tried to hide behind the street lamps and made a noise like an air-raid siren with a comb and a cellophane sweet-wrapper.”
“But we aren’t their supporters. We don’t support them.”
“Think of yourselves as unpaid extras, then.”

Angela turned to set off for Rantzen House but Peter called her back. “If you’re not in too much of a hurry, what happened?”
“It was a misunderstanding. Enriqué didn’t want the book back after all—”
“I mean, why was Beëlzebub dismissed?”
“The price of gas. Adramelech says if it carries on going up like this, they might have to shut down the furnaces.”
“What’s so bad about…” Peter was nonplussed for the second time in less than an hour. “What would happen if the demons had to shut down the furnaces?”
“Dozens of un-redeemed sinners released from their sentences early?” Angela shook her head. Peter thought how cute her blonde hair looked, fluttering loose in the air. “That would be a public relations disaster. Think of what the red tops would make out of it. Now I have to turn round, face the music and record it.”

 

Angela stood holding the microphone up as the band marched by. When the cavalcade passed, Angela kissed Peter, “See you tonight,” and set off for Rantzen House, carrying the Uher. Peter asked Sandy where his flat was, “In case you still want us to go there.”
“My flat?” Sandy appeared surprised to be asked. “Yes, I need to talk to you about… something. The flat’s over there.” He pointed over the roof-tops to a shabby twenty-two storey block of flats. “That’s where I live — Ronan Point.”

 

The flat was on the eighteenth floor. The lift had broken down years before, so Peter and Sandy had to climb the grubby stairs, artlessly enlivened by layer upon layer of spray paint. When, finally, they reached the small flat, they found it cold and with mould growing in black patches on the walls.

“I brought the beer-mats.” Peter took two beer-mats from his pockets.
“I haven’t got any beer to go with them, I’m afraid.” Sandy shrugged apologetically. “We could always go to the off-licence and get some, I suppose. It’s only five minutes away.”
“I think the stairs would kill me if we did.”
“You wouldn’t have gone inside the lift even if it was working.”
Peter suppressed a vomit at the thought. After letting the contents of his stomach settle, he went on, “But I brought the beer-mats because you were going to make them play a tune.”
“They don’t really play a tune, Peter,” Sandy apologised. “The only things they do are advertise drinks — or in this case canvass for votes — soak up spilled beer and turn into a sort of sloppy mush. Maybe one day someone’ll invent a beer-mat that plays Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance and tells you not to drink to excess. Whoever patents it first will make a fortune.” He thought for a second and added reassuringly “It could be you.”
“Me? Yes, I suppose it could.” Peter could see immediately how a musical beer-mat might work.
Electronic circuit diagram
“It wouldn’t be difficult. You stick a soft iron needle into the fabric of the beer-mat, then you connect your audio-frequency waveform to an electromagnet underneath the table, and then when you put Pomp and Circumstance on the record player, the beer-mat acts as a transponder…”
“You always were the engineer of fantastic machines,” said Sandy, “but that wasn’t really what I wanted to talk to you about.”
“Oh.” Peter was plainly disappointed. “I walk past the Patent Office on my way to work every morning.”
“Do you? Which way do you come in to work?”
“When I say I walk past the Patent Office, I mean, I would go past it if I came into work a different way altogether… So, if they don’t play tunes, what do beer-mats do when you microwave them?”
“Well, to be honest, I don’t know, because I’ve never tried.” Sandy took one of the beer-mats and looked at it. “I suppose it gets hot and then, if you wait long enough, it catches fire. A bit like what happens when I cook jacket potatoes.”

They both thought about that.

Peter was very puzzled. “Then why did you tell me that they played the Internationale on one side and Hölle Über Alles on the other?”
“Because I needed to make you come here,” Sandy explained, “and I didn’t want you to guess what I wanted to tell you when you came here.”
“Go on, then, surprise me.”
“Peter, I have to trust you,” Sandy sounded as though he would rather not trust Peter, “not to tell anybody about this meeting.”
It didn’t occur to Peter that two colleagues sitting in the decrepit living room of a block of flats which had already fallen down once discussing what would happen if you put a beer-mat in the microwave might be called a meeting. “Meeting? What meeting?”
“That’s the right answer, if anybody asks.” Sandy lowered his voice as he looked around the flat for spies and private investigators hiding behind the sofa. “Tomorrow, I am going on the cliff-top walk.”
“Is that the public footpath that runs along the shore?”
“Not really.” Sandy hesitated. “I think you and I might be at cross-purposes. Did you ever see the film Escape from H M P Dartmoor?”
“I can’t say I have.” Peter had never heard of it, and wouldn't have paid good money to see it even if he had. “Did I miss anything? Is it as good as Prisoner Cell Block H?”
“It’s a pity that you haven’t seen it. There is a scene in which Fudge explains over a lunch of bread and marge to Buzz and Hammerhead that the practice of—”
“Those are jolly strange names. Are they humans or pet dogs?”
“They are humans, Peter. They just have funny names.”
“I could have worked out that they were humans. A dog would expect at least tinned dog food. How do they think a man can spend twelve hours a day breaking rocks with a sledgehammer on bread and margarine?”
“I blame the healthy diet fanatics at the Ministry of Justice, putting the helpless on crackpot diets because they’re cheap and then telling the world that it’s for their own good. A penny loaf will feed us all. So, anyway, Fudge explained that escaping from Dartmoor Prison by clinging to the underside of a delivery lorry was referred to by inmates as The Flying Scotsman.” Sandy paused and looked at Peter. “Are you with me so far?”
“I think so.” Peter repeated what he had understood. “If one prisoner said to another, ‘I’m going for a ride on The Flying Scotsman,’ it meant, ‘I intend to escape from this prison by clinging onto the underside of a delivery lorry.’ Have I understood you so far?”
“Yes.” Sandy nodded. “I feel an overwhelming warm sense that we are communicating successfully.”
“How did they end up?”
“Buzz managed to clamber underneath a lorry un-noticed and grab hold of the chassis. He waited until the lorry had gone a few miles and parked somewhere. Then he let go of the lorry, stood up, walked half-way across the road and a police car ran him over.” Sandy recalled the plot clearly. “Fudge took a cash-in-hand job as a stripper and his ex-wife in the audience recognised him, and Hammerhead tried to hide out by persuading a doctor to find him a place in a convalescent home. After a few days he realised that he’d rather be in prison, so he turned himself in.”
“I can’t stand films with sad endings.” Peter sighed. “What’s the point of coming out of the cinema more miserable than when you went in?”
“Well,” Sandy told him, “it wouldn’t have been much of a film if they had all gone out of the prison gates hiding in an ice-cream van and never been seen again. A film needs clashes of personality, conflict, drama, failures, fantasy, heroes, realism, successes, villains, in alphabetical order.”
“All at once, or one at a time?”
Sandy replied with a dash of assumed gravitas. “Peter, I fear this conversation has departed from the track which I intended it to take. The cliff-top walk is a means of escaping from Hell. I won’t be at work tomorrow. Nor the day after. Should anybody ask you if you know where I am, tell them that I have,” he spoke with great emphasis, “taken the cliff-top walk, Some will understand the phrase, and others will ask whether that means the public footpath beside the sea-shore. In those cases, please reassure them cheerfully that it is.”
“Supposing they understand the phrase,” Peter mused, “and they say you must be a damned fool?”
“Tell them that, in this place, we are all damned.”

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Five

 
As a kindness to those who arrived after them, it was quite common for people visiting an office of any kind to draw a tramp sign on the road as they came out. For example, if you had been waiting for a long time in a queue at the post office, you might leave a drawing of a long line of stick men on the pavement or on the wall, anywhere people thinking of coming into the post office would see it. Or if you were interviewed for a job and you got the sense that the business was in deep trouble of some kind, you might draw a sinking ship.

The sign on the pavement outside the Patent Office showed a man pushing a wheelbarrow loaded with papers. Peter braced himself for a frustrating encounter with bureaucracy.

Peter sat in the waiting room for a while. There was another door on the other side of the room, with signs saying Keep Out and Authorised Personnel Only and Do Not Disturb, so he walked around the room not knocking on it and reading certificates of patent that had been framed and hung on the walls. These, he surmised, correctly, were a hall of fame — the inventions of which the office felt particularly proud. The aeroplane, signed by Orville Wright and Wilbur Wright, counter-signed by Belphegor. The television, signed simply Marconi, and beside that the National Lottery, signed Nigel Railton. On the right of that was Covid Nineteen, signed in Chinese characters. With nothing more important to do except go to work, Peter peered intensely at the characters. Two big characters followed by two small ones. The first two were probably somebody’s name, then there was a sign that looked like a test tube, and then the last one looked like a rat. Laboratory manager.

The next certificate was in a gilded frame, suggesting that the office was particularly proud of it. It was hand-written, as it was issued before the invention of the typewriter and the window envelope, both of which had probably originated in Hell at one time or another. According to this certificate, someone had, long ago, patented money. The date on the certificate was circa 500 BC. The paper was suitably yellow, worn, torn and faded, but Peter could make out the signature of King Alyattes of Libya and was more than impressed.

A man in a suit put his head around the farther door and called Peter into a small office with a Chippendale desk and an Ikea standard lamp. “Good morning. I'm Belphegor and I’m the patent officer on duty. Bring all your papers and drawings.” He picked up a pencil and a notebook. “How can I make life difficult for you?”

Belphegor looked around sixty, though in view of the life expectancy of demons he might well have been around for ever. He gave the impression of being good at doing patents, and seemed affable and helpful enough. Peter laughed before he realised that Belphegor probably meant what he said. It certainly complied with the usual standards of customer service in Hell. “I’m Peter Highwater,” Peter introduced himself, “and I’ve invented a beer-mat that plays a tune.”
“What will that do for your average beer drinker?”
“Well, ah… nothing, really.”
“Do you have an idea of what it will cost per unit when you make it?” Belphegor asked.
“Probably ten euro-cents each or so. I haven’t really worked it out yet.”
“Never mind, there’s plenty of time to work out the details. Though if I were you, I wouldn’t put my name down for Demon’s Den just yet. Will it make the beer any better? That’s the important question.”
“No.” Peter felt that his invention was already being misunderstood. “It doesn’t really come into contact with beer at all in normal use—”
“How about wine and spirits?”
“No.” Peter was losing heart already. “It doesn’t affect the flavour of wine or spirits either.”
Belphegor took a deep breath. “So your invention will increase the cost of a half litre of beer by ten cents or so, for no discernible improvement.”
“Yes.” Peter had fluffed his lines. “I mean, no. It confers non measurable benefits.”
“Good. Where would we be without management jargon? Don’t answer that, it’s a rhetorical question. Answer this one instead. In what way do those non measurable benefits improve the bar in which the beer-mat is playing a jolly tune?”
“I’m not sure I understand.” Peter resorted to temporising by telling an outright lie.
Belphegor looked away from Peter and strained to think of a reason why anyone would buy a beer-mat that played a tune, let alone a carton of a couple of hundred. “I mean, if it doesn’t make the beer taste better, or make it colder, or cheaper, does it make the room in which the beer-mat stands warmer, or less fogged with cigarette smoke, or more friendly, or less likely to run out of sandwiches? Can it make the clouds disperse and the sun shine? Does it make the last bus home come and go on time? That sort of thing.”
“It plays a tune.” Peter watched carefully to see whether Belphegor appeared to be getting the hang of musical beer-mats. This interview was not going according to plan. “That’s all it does. It plays a tune.”
“So what you are telling me,” Belphegor shifted in his seat and peered intensely at Peter, “is that beer-drinkers in a bar where it has hitherto been quiet enough to talk, will suddenly be surrounded by beer-mats making a noise like thirty ice cream vans all playing Drink, Drink, Drink from The Student Prince in a tinny squeak that sounds like a bored five year old banging a row of milk-bottles with a porridge spoon on a rainy day.”
Peter sighed. “I hadn’t thought of it like that. You’re telling me that my invention has no future, aren’t you?”
Belphegor beamed. “No, no, not at all. Your invention is just the sort of thing this office is looking for.”
“You mean it will turn a profit?”
“No, I don’t mean it will turn a profit,” Belphegor hastily made his meaning clear. “Just that it’s completely useless, it makes a noise which nobody wants to hear, and it costs a lot of money. It has that much in common with a car, and people buy lots of cars.”
“And the car companies made big profits,” said Peter, hopefully.
“Well, not really,” Belphegor shook his head thoughfully, “because the car companies have all gone bankrupt. Now, take this form home…” Belphegor found it difficult to lift the form out of the drawer, “and fill it in. Write in black ink and make two copies, being careful to keep your writing inside the red boxes and without any crossings-out or erasures. It’s only twenty-eight pages and not all the questions will apply to you, so read them all carefully and only write anything when the instructions tell you to. When you’ve filled it in and checked it, come to this office and make an appointment to come to this office and bring the appropriate fee in legal tender.”
Peter took the form. “I’ll see you soon, then.”
“Hang on a second.” Belphegor reached into another drawer and handed Peter a thick paperback book titled How to fill in the Patent Application Form. “You’ll need this. On your way out, would you mind sending the next sucker in?” Peter nodded. “Thank you, that’s saved me some shoe leather.”
“Is there, by any chance,” Peter asked as he struggled to carry the two bulky documents without a carrier bag, “another book called something like How to read the book that tells you how to fill in the Patent Application Form?
“Yes, there is. Five euros seventy from the office on the other side of the corridor. Exact money only.”

Peter looked across the waiting room, where four clients were now sitting waiting for him to leave, and saw the Sales Office, on the far side of the corridor. It was stacked high with identical books.

“Thanks for your help,” he said. “I’ll be back.”

Peter said, “Whoever’s next can go through now,” to the waiting room, crossed the corridor and opened the door of the Sales Office.

“Get out,” someone said peremptorily from behind the pile of books.
“I want to buy one of these books,” said Peter, casually picking one up.
“Put that back!” said the someone. “You have to order your copy in advance.”
“Can’t I just buy one?”
“No, you can’t. Make an appointment by phoning the call centre in Balochistan.”
“Do they speak English?”
“No,” said the voice behind the pile of books, “and it don’t make no difference, ’cause they’re all stone deaf.”
“Isn’t there any other way to buy this book, which I am holding in my hand as I speak?”
“Yes,” said the voice, still hiding behind the books instead of putting in an appearance. “Just a moment while I drink my tea. I’ll be with you in shortly.”

Peter waited for what might have been five minutes and eventually heard the clatter of an empty china tea cup being inexpertly plonked onto a saucer.

“Are you still there?” asked the voice.
“Yes.”
“Why? I thought you’d left ages ago.”
“You were going to tell me the other way in which I can buy the book of which you have a couple of hundred unsold copies stacked from floor to ceiling in this large room.”
“Yes, mate. If you are unable to phone our call centre in Balochistan, you can go there in person.”

 

After the cavalcade had passed, Angela carried the sound recorder back towards the editing suite in Rantzen House. In her head she was piecing together the commentary which she would read before and after the tape of the band playing, the crowd cheering and Seamus O’Gunrunner hectoring and soliciting donations. ‘Crowds turned out to watch the passing cavalcade — no, cheer the passing cavalcade — no reason not to exaggerate a little bit,’ she heard herself reading, ‘Mr O’Gunrunner, the leader of the party, called on the crowd to give him lots of money and vote Fascist for…’ but she struggled to recall what good things the crowd could expect a Fascist Minister to do for them after winning the election, and even then she could’t think of any. Angela scarcely noticed the beggars spaced evenly along the pavement, each with his upturned hat that held a few one and two euro coins and his cardboard sign saying ‘Hungry and Homeless.’ The sign never seemed to say ‘Drunk, Drugged and Demented,’ but it might as well have done. Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free — in some distant place, maybe. In this part of town, you became used to derelicts and destitutes. You stopped noticing that the handwriting on all the signs was the same and the shoes they wore cost a fortune despite their owner being destitute, and in time the calls of ‘Spare some change’ became one with the traffic noise. Spare some change. Horn beeping. Spare some change. Squeal of brakes. Ambulance siren. Spare some change. Door slams, engine starts, etc.

Yet there was something about the chant of ‘Spare some change, Miss,’ from that beggar, there, outside Woolworth’s, wearing a torn and bedraggled suit, that attracted Angela’s case-hardened attention. The words were the same but the voice was educated, articulate, middle aged, the sort of voice that would be at home on radio wearing a tie and announcing the death of a much loved celebrity or a declaration of war—

“Of course!” Angela was so taken aback when she recognised the voice that she spoke out loud by mistake. She remembered this voice reading a declaration of war. Had she not heard the same voice many times, on the radio beside the bed? “Alvar!” She bent over him. “What on earth happened to you? How come you’re on the street?”
“Who are you?” The beggar looked up blankly towards Angela, but without actually looking at her. “How do you know my name?”
An unshaven young man wearing a red, hooded top and cheap sand-coloured leggings, brilliantly coloured Cartier canvas shoes, two expensive watches, one on each wrist, and with four teeth visibly missing, broke away from a group of five ragamuffins who were standing in the doorway of a Lyon’s Corner House. He came and yelled at Angela. “You! Get off my patch.”
“Your patch?” Angela turned to face him. “What do you mean, get off your patch?”
“This street is me and my friends’ territory.” He gestured towards the sickly looking youths huddled in the caff doorway. “Nobody sells drugs here but us. So shove off.”
“Excuse me!” Angela was shocked. “If you think—”
“Might I have a word?” Alvar’s exaggerated courtesy worked. The boy fell silent. “I have seen you here often, young man. I don’t yet know who this young woman is, but I assure you that she won’t sell me any drugs, because I won’t buy any. And secondly, if I may ask—”
“What?” The pedlar’s tone suggested that he resented being spoken to.
“Forgive me,” Alvar continued, “I am truly curious as to why you need a wristwatch on each arm. Would not one wristwatch be sufficient? Don’t they both show the same time?”
“Status symbol, innit, Grand-dad,” said the drug pedlar. “These watches would’ve cost a fortune, if I hadn’t nicked them. And I don’t know whether they say the same thing, because I can’t tell the time.”
“What, not even the o’clocks?” Angela was quite taken aback.
“Oh, yes,” said the pedlar, “I can do the o’clocks, but not the ones in between. I went to a comprehensive.”
“Look,” Angela suggested, “Why don’t you help me to get Alvar back on his feet?”
“Sure. For two euros.”
“All right.” Angela felt for coins in her pocket. “I’m feeling generous.”
“Then you can give me your sound recorder as well.”
Alvar fixed Angela with a Look and told her, “Whatever he was going to pay you for your sound recorder, I’ll pay you double.”
“In that case, you can have it,” Angela said, and defiantly she gave the recorder to Alvar.

The pedlar cut his losses. He went off to join his fellows with Angela’s two euro in one hand and without helping to stand Alvar on his feet with the other. Angela grabbed Alvar’s arm and pulled, and he stood up unsteadily.
“Thank you,” he said as he rubbed the dirt from his hands, “For a moment, I wondered whether I would spend the rest of eternity sitting on a paving slab and watching the shoes tramping past my hat as my clothes fell to pieces.” He appraised the sound recorder and handed it back to Angela. “An Uher machine. Property of Radio Hell, I expect. Are you stealing it, borrowing it, or taking it back to its home?”

“Well, to start at the beginning,” said Angela, “I’m Angela Highwater and I’m the new kid on the block at Radio Hell. I came out here to record the Fascists’ election campaign. Usual stuff. Marching band, cheering crowd, O’Gunrunner’s oratory, and now I’m taking it all back to base, where I shall add an intro and an outtro from yours truly. Should be worth two and a half minutes on the local news.”
“Neatly sandwiched in between an advertisement for washing powder and the weather forecast,” Alvar predicted.
“Unless you’d like to voice it, Alvar. If I’m going to learn the trade, I might as well learn from the master.”

 

“What do you mean, voice it?”
“Voice it.” Angela hadn’t realised that she was speaking jargon, much less that Alvar might not understand it.“Read the words that explain to the listeners what the recordings are.”
“That doesn’t sound too difficult.”
“It's a talent that I know you have. You work for our radio station. Radio Hell. You’ve worked for us since you died, back in 1981. You’re our best newsreader. Don’t you remember?”
“No. I remember sitting at the side of the road, and before that…”
Alvar paused, and Angela repeated, “Before that? What was before that?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think you should come back to the radio station with me,” Angela said, “and we’ll see if it reminds you of anything.”
“You never know,” Alvar agreed. “It might, but I don’t feel as though it’s going to.”
Angela felt herself grit her teeth. “Nil desperandum.”