Version date: 31 October 2021
1. Breakfast
This is the British Brainwashing Corporation. Here is an advertisement masquerading as news.‘Oh, my God,’ I thought, ‘not again. It’s time to get out of bed.’The Ministry of Metric has completed the important task of metricating the calendar. If your household hasn’t received a copy of the booklet describing the changes, please collect one from the Ministry of Metric’s converted ice-cream van, which is this week parked outside The Monarch’s Theatre on Rosemount Viaduct, Aberdeen, and don't forget to read it…
…Here’s a reminder of what is going to happen. The amazing new privatised, metric calendar will Beep! begin on the first of Argos, Beep! 2086. There will be ten months in a year, Beep! each of thirty-six and a half days, Beep! except that in a leap year the month of Beep! Johnson will be extended to thirty-seven and a half days…The public information message woke me. The first thing I noticed was that my boyfriend Fraser was already out of bed, and he had got up without waking me. How sweet of him. He must be enjoying his new job, otherwise he would be pulling the duvet over his head and staying beside me. I put my hand onto his side of the bed and felt the warmth where he had been sleeping. The chatter came from the phone, which was lying on my bedside cabinet. I yelled ‘Shut up!’ to silence the thing. I must have heard the same message fifty times. I knew it backwards. This was the last Fifth of November. Next year, unless someone somewhere recanted, Guy Fawkes Night would fall on the seventeenth of Iceland and disappear from memory, and nobody would know whether it was summer or winter any more.
The regular beeps were coming from the smart electricity meter in the cupboard. It was obviously worried about something, so I went and looked at it. It told me that Fraser and I had used seventy of our one hundred and fifty kilowatt-hour electricity ration for the month. No, not ration, quota. Overcharge plc always called it a quota, never a ration, even though it was one.
As soon as I opened the cupboard door and it saw me, the smart meter told me off for wasting our electricity supply in the sort of threatening tone of voice that a Martian invader might adopt just before a crucial battle with the Royal Air Force on a bad day.
‘You have used one third of your month’s electricity quota,’ it said in its Chinese English, reflecting its country of origin. ‘Switch off a thing or your supply may be restricted.’
Restricted, when a smart meter said it, or said something a bit like it, meant turned off altogether.
‘Did you go on that anger management course, like I told you to?’ I asked it.
‘I don’t need no anger management course. I need
you
to stop pissing me off,’ it said.
‘Have a nice day,’ I said as I shut the cupboard door.
I could see that there was a light shining in the kitchen so I went to tell Fraser about the problem.
Fraser Farmsbarn and I had been living together in our first floor flat in Edinburgh New Town for two years — those unfamiliar with Edinburgh New Town may need me to tell them that although most New Towns are fairly new, our street in Edinburgh New Town had been designed and built in 1830.
It was probably about seven o’clock. I had disconnected the electric clock months ago to save money, when Overcharge sent out an issue of cardboard stick-it-together-yourself sundials free with the electricity bills. Mine worked for a couple of days, provided that when you say ‘worked’ you mean ‘was accurate to within one and a half hours each way,’ and then it fell to bits. So, if I really needed to know the time, I had to go and look at the sun-dial in the churchyard of St James Savile on Cress Crescent. The remains of my cardboard sun-dial couldn’t have helped anyway, because the sun had not yet risen and I was only wearing a dressing gown, so that ruled out the five minute walk to Cress Crescent.
Fraser, my flat share, was sitting at the kitchen table wearing jeans and a button-up shirt, eating a repellent brown sludge that looked as though it had once been cornflakes. Fraser already had the electric light, the electric grill and the electric heater burning in the kitchen.
‘Fraser, cutie, we have a problem. We have used up about half our electricity ration for the month.’
‘Oh, dear,’ he said. ‘Well, I suppose I could eat cold breakfasts. What’s it cost us?’
‘We have to stretch one hundred kilowatt-hours to last twenty-six days.’ I said, saying nothing about Fraser’s eccentric use of the pronoun
us.
‘And nobody knows what the electricity bill is going to be until it arrives. Overcharge says that electricity costs £1·98 a unit but “the network charges more at times of peak demand.”’
‘So you mean it costs more to turn on a toaster at breakfast time than it does in the middle of the night when you don’t want any toast?’ Fraser had cottoned on.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘More to turn on a light when it’s dark, more to turn on a heater when it’s cold, more to turn on a tumble dryer when it’s raining, more to turn on the microwave at dinner time—’
‘I get it,’ he said, knowing that if he hadn’t interrupted me I would have carried on coming up with examples until the cows came home. I’d made a New Year resolution not to waffle so much, but it hadn’t helped. If waffling were an Olympic sport, I’d have been rich and famous.
I searched the kitchen cupboard, but the frying pan had escaped. I found it on the hob and carried it to the sink, where I carefully scrubbed off all the grease and indeterminate lumps that were sticking to it. Cleaning up after himself was not my dear boyfriend’s long suit.
We were very fortunate that the previous occupants of our apartment had not sent the gas hob for scrap when they were offered a grant to replace it with an electric one. I put a match to the gas and put a couple of rashers of bacon in the pan.
‘Can you make me a meat-free bacon sandwich, sweetie?’
Fraser asked me, ‘While you’re making a non-meat-free one for yourself.’
‘Sure.’ There was something odd about Fraser’s use of language,
non-meat-free,
that I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
‘Sure,’ I said, ‘You mean two slices of bread stuck together with margarine and tomato sauce.’
‘No, I mean a sandwich with meat free bacon in it. Only I’m having a meat-free day today, which is why I asked you to make it a meat-free bacon sandwich, if that’s not too much trouble.’
‘A meat free day — how self sacrificing and virtuous of you,’ I said, without referring to the indubitable fact that Fraser ate more meat than the average Great White Shark so one day wasn’t going to make much difference.
‘Fortunately I have some meat free bacon in the fridge.’ I lied.
‘Thank you.’
I took a couple more rashers of perfectly ordinary sliced pig bacon out of the fridge, fried the lot and made two sandwiches. I gave one to Fraser, who appeared grateful for it.
‘Here you are, Fraser, one meat free bacon sandwich.’ I said. ‘I’m sure all the chickens and cows and pigs and sheep and turkeys on the farms of Scotland are truly grateful to you. Especially the pigs. Is that why you’ve put water on your cornflakes, instead of milk?’
‘Yes, it is. I eat too much animal. We need to cut down. Milk, meat, er…’
‘Eggs,’ I suggested, ‘and shoe leather.’
‘Exactly. As signed-up beacons of culinary enlightenment, it’s our job to set an example.’
‘No, it isn’t. You’ve been listening to Moses Moseley again, haven’t you. A
job
is what you do and they pay you for.
Your job is to write news stories for The Scot. There’s not much demand
for examples these days. People are tired of being set examples by professional example setters who then get photographed eating roast beef if they’re vegetarians, or lying drunk on the floor of a gambling den if they’re evangelical Christians. People don’t want to be virtuous followers of influential paragons. They just want to lie on the sofa, eat crisps and watch television like everybody else does.’
‘People might look at me,’ said Fraser, ‘and say to themselves, “Fraser over there’s not eating any meat today. Perhaps I can join him in liberating the farm animals of the world from the diabolical fate that awaits them at the end of their short lives.”’
‘Well, they might think that.’ I said. ‘Or the farm animals might endure even shorter lives if they put a ban on—’
‘This is a jolly good meat free bacon sandwich, by the way,’ Fraser interrupted.
‘Or people might think the whole point of a bacon sandwich is to have bacon in it. Otherwise you should really call it a tomato sauce on something that’s never seen a pig in its life sandwich.’
‘Listen, dear Barnabas. How would people know that I’m sending every farm animal in the world glad tidings of great joy by having a meat free day if I didn’t tell them that I ate milk free corn flakes and a meat free bacon sandwich for breakfast?’
‘I don’t think people are that bothered,’ I said, ‘but if you happen to walk past a moo-cow or a piggy-wig on the way to the Scottish Paper office, tell him I’ll get around to him sooner or later. He’ll be truly happy to know of your great accomplishment.’
‘Or she, in the case of a cow.’
Fraser finished his sandwich.
There was a rattle from the letter-box. The post had arrived. It was one white envelope addressed to me by computer and one brown envelope with a window and a third class £2·80 stamp, the universally acknowledged sign that there would be bad news inside. Trembling with fear, I opened it and found a letter from the Council.
’Fraser,‘ I said, ’Edinburgh District Council is re-naming our street.’
Edinburgh District Council,
1 Squid Square,
Edinburgh EH1 8DJStreet Re-naming
‘Won’t make any difference to me. I never got a valentine card in my entire life. What are they changing it to?’
‘Don’t know, I haven’t got to that bit yet.’
22 October 2085‘It’s only taken two weeks to get here from the High Street,’ I observed, trying to sound sarcastic.
‘Privatisation is a wonderful thing, sweetheart,’ smiled Fraser.
Dear Householder,The Council is changing the names of streets which were named after famous and heroic people in case the owners of the names did anything which might possibly give offence to otherwise perfectly normal-seeming people.
In order to cover our arses and evade responsibility for any consequences of our own actions, whether intended or unintended, the Council will rename the streets in question after carefully selected animals, vegetables or minerals. You probably knew that anyway because it’s all been on the telly. I write to advise you that your street will be renamed…
Fraser interrupted me, loudly. ‘For God’s sake, what’s wrong with everybody? I can see why High Street needed to be re-named…’
‘I can’t,’ I said.
‘Drugs. But this road has been called Black Street since the Middle Ages.’
‘1830, actually,’ I observed.
‘But what the devil was wrong with it?’
‘I can’t imagine,’ I lied.
‘No. So here they go again, wasting ratepayers’ money,’ said Fraser, in an annoyed tone despite not paying any rates.
‘Exasperating, isn’t it,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘Look down the end of the street. I think that’s the re-naming squad. Anyway, the letter goes on:’
…Black Street is to be re-named Tomato Terrace. Please start using the new name now.‘Well. I ask you,’ said Fraser.
‘Could have been worse,’ I said.
‘No it couldn’t.’
‘Yes, it could,’ I insisted. ‘They could have addressed the letter to 7C Tomato Terrace and the postman could have had no clue where Tomato Terrace is and thrown the letter in the rubbish.’ Although thinking about it, putting a letter in the rubbish was better than putting rubbish in a letter.
‘Are they giving us hexadecimal numbers, too?’ Fraser asked. ‘7C for instance?’
‘Not yet. That’s next week. But there’s a bus 47B if you can’t wait. Anyway, there’s more.’
‘And what does more mean?’
‘Worse. More means worse.’
If you have any objection to the re-naming of your street, to the new name we have given it, or to the re-naming project generally, I don’t care. You’ll just have to put it in your pipe and smoke it. Please remember that smoking is legal only in…The noise of some sort of power tool being used on the street outside shattered the near quiet of the kitchen. I had to shout the rest of the letter.
…designated pipe smoking areas.I pointed across the street, where two bright orange overalls were screwing a new street name plate to the wall.Yours sincerely,
Titus Tinker, Lord Provost
I sat down to finish my breakfast sandwich while Fraser stood up to leave for work.
‘Want a kiss?’ I asked him.
‘Yes.’
I put my arms around Fraser and kissed him on the lips.
‘Don’t forget your face mask, love,’ I muttered.
‘Good luck with Stewed Food,’ he muttered back.
‘Thanks, love.’
Then he went off to his desk at The Scot, which stood twenty minutes away, or half an hour by tram, on the recently re-named Blackberry Bridge.
The flat always seemed too quiet when Fraser wasn’t there. Every morning at about this time of day I kept hoping that he would find his office had been blown up by the Ockeys — the Onward Christian Soldiers — and come back and spend the rest of the day with me.
I picked up the other letter. It was from Cracking Packing, who wanted some unskilled labour in their cardboard box factory.
Dear Mr Burns,Well, I thought, at least they're being polite.Thank you for your application for the position of Unskilled Worker on the National Standard Wage in our Cardboard Box and Envelope Factory.
UnfortunatelyHere we go.
you have sent both a photocopy of your government ID card and a photocopy of the details page of your Scottish Passport as enclosures with your application form. Our onboarding policies do not require a photocopy of your passport. Therefore, would you please submit your application again, omitting the photocopy of your passport.I sighed despondently, folded the letter into a paper aeroplane and launched it out of the kitchen window.You still won't get the job but we will consider your application and bin it afterwards.
Yours sincerely,
Joanna Jobsworth,
Human Resources Department,
Cracking Packing Ltd.
I made some tea and as I waited for it to brew,
I looked through the window and I saw that, at the corner of the street, the workmen had left the old street sign,
An hour later I had gone and picked up the street sign and told an i-Brillo pad to scrub the mud and mould off it, and I was standing in the living room wondering whether to give the sign a fresh coat of paint and which wall I should nail it onto. It was then that the phone rang. All the job seekers’ clichés hit me at once: smile when you answer the phone, stop doing anything that might distract you, say your name clearly and Good Morning / Afternoon, answer the questions precisely and without waffling.
I put the street sign onto the coffee table and picked the phone up.
‘Barnabas Burns. Good morning,’ I said, trying to sound engaging.
‘Is that Mr Barnabas Burns?’ said a man with an Indian accent.
‘Yes.’
‘This is Wally from Wet Weather Windows on Watercress Walk in Warriston. I am phoning to inform you that in our showroom we have a sale on with discounts of up to seventy-five per cent on all our windows and doors, and we have consultants currently…’
I hung up the phone. Almost immediately, the phone trilled again. Bloody junk calls, they’ve always been a nuisance but at least when you put the phone down it usually stayed down. So I picked the phone up again in no mood to be nice to Wally, whose real name was probably Japati Jakarta or Jamil Jodhpur and who couldn’t have found Warriston on a map.
‘Before you resume trying to sell me your god-damn double glazing,’ I told the phone, resonantly, ‘I’m not interested. Bugger off.’
‘Good morning, Mr Burns,’ said a lady’s voice, pretending not to have heard me, ‘This is Miss Coral Cole from the human resources department of Stewed Food plc in Leith.’
Oh, dear. I nearly choked.
‘I’m Barnabas Burns,’ I said, hoping that I had re-gained some composure and engaging-ness. ‘Good morning.’
‘I am sorry to inform you, Mr Burns,’ said Miss Cole, ‘that our advertisement received a large number of responses, and we have found other candidates whose experience is a better fit to our needs than yours. Therefore we have decided to decline your application.’
‘Did you just say that you found candidates whose experience is a better fit to your needs than mine is?’ I asked, breathtaken.
‘Yes. We found several candidates whose experience is closer to what we’re looking for than yours is.’
‘But you don’t know anything about my experience. You haven’t asked me what my experience is.’
‘We found all the information we needed in your letter of application. Age, sex, and name.’
‘What does my name have to do with it?’
‘Everything. We don’t know you. You’re not the brother, sister, son, daughter or mistress of anybody who works for Stewed Food. So we are not going to pursue your application. Compared with reading all the candidates’ letters and CVs and then interviewing people even though we were going to hire the director’s mistress anyway, it saves money and time all round just to phone all the applicants up and reject them.’
‘Miss Cole, I appreciate being rung up, but I spent hours tweaking my CV and removing the irrelevant stuff, then writing a letter to go with them.’
‘Thank you for going to so much trouble submitting your application for the job. Goodbye!’
I wondered whether Coral Cole actually existed and was reading a script, just like Jamil Jakarta, or maybe Coral Cole was actually a computer synthesising a human voice. Whatever she really was, the one thing of which I could be certain was that there was no lady in the country with the name Coral Cole in her passport.
The other thing of which I could be certain is that I was pretty much penniless and I would be back down at the Food Bank that afternoon.
Dressed and ready to go, I turned the handle of the smart lock on the main door of the flat, but I couldn’t open it.
‘Stand still! Reach for the sky, maggot!’ the smart lock yelled at me.
Obviously Fraser had changed the personality of the smart lock. It spoke with the accent of Clint Eastwood on a hot day in the Nevada desert, instead of the voice of an English lady who was deaf and had been taught to speak, as I was expecting.
‘You ain’t wearin’ no muzzle,’ it continued. ‘There ain’t no way I ain’t lettin’ you out.’
I tried to work out the multiple negatives. The double negative in the first sentence meant that the smart lock was saying the opposite of what it probably intended to say. The triple negative in the second sentence was logically correct, but unspeakably ugly.
‘This is Thursday,’ I tried. ‘We’re allowed out without a mask on Thursdays.’
‘No you ain’t. Muzzle up or stay in the slammer.’
The safest thing was to get a mask and put it on. It was also likely to be the quickest thing, so I put on the mask that I always carried in one pocket or another. Of course, just my luck, I tried the left pocket first, and the mask wasn’t in my left pocket.
‘Git movin’! I ain’t gonna stand here all day waitin’ for ya!’
‘All right,’ I said, ‘hold your horses a minute.’
The face mask was in my right pocket. I untwizzled it.
‘Halleluia, he found it. Now get it on your face and stop wastin’ my good drinkin’ time.’
‘There you are,’ I said, with my face at last covered. ‘May I go out now?’
‘Sure thing, pardner. Git outa my sight.’
Out in the communal hallway, a bottle of hand sanitiser attracted my attention in a Sean Connery accent.
‘Be wise. Sanitise.’
If I didn’t do as it said, it would probably report me to the Track and Trace Guard, so I washed my hands in sanitiser until I smelled like a brewery and set off.
The Food Bank was sited in the Church of St James Savile, where three hard-working nuns struggled, unpaid, to give everyone in the long queue enough food for three days.
I knew the Food Bank crew by now. Amata and Bethany stood behind a trestle table making sure as best they could that everyone left with enough food to last them three days, while Immacula, younger and fitter, was in the background shifting boxes and occasionally appearing for a few seconds and putting a carton onto the trestle table.
With unemployment benefit a bit above £300 a week, visiting the food bank was an essential ritual in the lives of the working caste. People who were in work bought a little more food than they really needed and gave the extra to the food bank. Shops that had some food left over at the end of the day gave it to the food bank, where Amata, Bethany and Immacula turned up on Mondays and Thursdays and handed it to the poor. As a means of putting food onto the tables of the poor, it would have been recognised instantly by a time traveller from the tenth century and possibly even before. It just said Tithe Barn over the door in those days instead of Food Bank.
It was Amata who spoke to me. I had been hoping that it wouldn’t be.
She was wearing
a badge that said, ‘Cows’ lives matter.’
Things were going to be more tense this week than most.
‘Trigger warning, Sister Amata,’ I said. ‘I’m hoping to find some tinned meat.’
‘Hello, Barnabas,’ said Amata. ‘You’re still eating meat despite everything I told you?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I want to be fit and strong and eat food that tastes nice and doesn’t give me anaemia or rickets or protein deficiency.’
‘You’ll learn one day. God will explain it all, one way or another. And you’ve still not found a job?’ Amata asked.
‘You’re having your little joke, aren’t you.
There are no jobs.
There haven’t been any jobs for years.’
‘I believe you are right. Everyone who comes in here has been looking for work for months. Years sometimes. Men of thirty who have never had a job and probably never will. Still, at least we’ve got some decent food this week. What do you want to take with you?’
‘Tinned meat,’ I said, ‘some milk, bread—’
‘Meat’s immoral,’ said Amata. ‘That tin of stewed beef used to be a cow.’
I hated this argument, which we had every week. Usually I said, ‘No, it didn’t,’ and Amata tried to prove to me that I ought to do without the meat in the tin and eat carrots instead. So, just for the sake of variety, I said, ‘Yes, it did.’
‘That’s not what you usually say,’ said Amata. ‘You usually say, “No, it didn’t.”’
‘And you usually say that carrots are better for you than meat, even though they aren’t.’
‘But you could give up meat for a few days.’
‘But you don’t want me to give up meat for a few days for the sake of my health,’ I countered, ‘you want me to give up meat for a few days because of your religious beliefs and you know that I’m not going to give up meat for ever. Honestly, I admire your beliefs and the fact that you only eat meat when you think nobody’s looking. But as George Orwell said a hundred and fifty years ago,
“A toff may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and carrots, but an unemployed man prefers stewed beef out of a tin.”’
‘It would take a conversion to Christianity to stop you eating stewed beef out of a tin?’
‘Yes, because this is a very special tin of stewed beef,’ I told her.
Amata looked mystified, as I intended, so I continued. ‘I happen to remember the cow. Her name was Mooriel. She was a large Frisian, very like the one on your badge, and she lived in the long field on Acres Farm, where Farmer Giles used to look after her.’ Realising that Amata hadn’t noticed that I was making it all up, I continued my imaginary recollection. ‘She liked rye grass and the water-cress that grew on the banks of the stream there. Picking my way gingerly through the derelict pile of bricks and rotting timber that was Clovenstone before it all fell down, I used to hear the uplifting jangle of her cow-bell as she wandered from one tuft of grass to the next, chewing the cud and chattering to her fellow cows about the height of the trees and the depth of the stream and the price of milk.’
Amata had a tear in her eye and felt so sorry for Mooriel that she couldn’t reply, so I added, ‘Can you spare two tins of steak? I’m starving.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘Barnabas, do you really feel comfortable about eating the mortal remains of Mooriel the cow?’
‘Sure,’ I said, trying to sound psychopathic, ‘Roast Frisians taste delicious with gravy, baked potatoes and yorkshire pudding. And they keep anaemia and rickets at bay as well.’
Amata finally realised that I was having a laugh. ‘Truly sorry but I can’t give you two tins. We don’t have enough for more than one tin each. You can have a tin of carrots.’
‘How about a couple of ounces of bacon?’
‘You had some on Monday, didn’t you?’
‘Yes,’ I nodded. ‘Mustn’t be greedy. Only my vegetarian friend Fraser ate two of them.’
‘Who gave them to him?’ Amata asked, obviously a bit shocked.
‘I did,’ I said.
‘Two Hail Marys,’ Amata tutted, shaking her head.
‘Forgive me,’ I said, ‘Fraser’s only a vegetarian once in every couple of months.’
Amanda gave me a
Mike’s Bikes
carrier bag with a tin of stewed steak in it. On the label was the brand name
Stewed Food plc. Amata added ‘Help yourself to the stuff in those cardboard boxes over there. You can come back on Monday the ninth.’
‘I’ll be first in the queue,’ I said, although I wouldn’t, because the first people arrived in the queue before six in the morning because they wanted cakes, which were always in short supply and ran out quickly. Walking the length of the trestle table, I helped myself to milk, digestive biscuits, a tin of carrots and an apple. At the further end of the room, Bethany looked into my carrier bag and nodded: I had taken my ration. Unless Fraser decided to go shopping, that would be all I got to eat until some time on Monday. No wonder the Ministry of Spin had announced a month or so ago that the British obesity crisis had come to an end, in a tone of voice that suggested that the end of the crisis was somehow due to the good management of the various Ministries.
At the top of Rhubarb Rise, the men in yellow jackets were cutting up the statue of Stephen Stannard with a welding torch. I caught what I expected to be my last glimpse of the plaque at the foot of the statue.
This statue commemorates the life of D. C. I. Stephen Stannard (1995 — 2077.)
who brought many a criminal to justice and is believed to have inspired the character of D. C. I. Angel Adams in the Cross Dressing Detective novels by James Jenkins
“God has sent His angel and He has made us safe”
I remembered
The Cross Dressing Detective
vividly. Hadn’t one or two of the stories about D. C. I. Angel Adams been serialised in
the kids’ comic that I used to read,
The Party!
I remembered a page every week of ten or twelve drawings being given over to stories like
Tower of Doom,
featuring
Angel Adams, The Cross Dressing Detective.
I recalled the gaunt, cold looking landscapes with the leafless trees and the dreaded tower on the horizon, the evil villain, the housewifely victim and D. C. I. Angel Adams either svelte, glamorous and dressed for a ballroom or rugged, manly and dressed in a charcoal suit and a top hat in pursuit of justice. I had probably been in about the third year of primary school at the time. The strange thing I suddenly recalled was how I actually believed that the stories were factual, or might have been factual. It didn’t occur to me that real life didn’t work like that. That there were no super-heroes, only victims and people who hadn’t turned into victims yet.
It occurred to me that even now I could do a small favour for Fraser. He would be sitting in his office drinking his fifth or sixth cup of tea for the day, and here I was watching a small but interesting news story being played out. A statue which had been part of the townscape for five years was being removed and would probably never be seen again.
I looked around for a phone box, the sort in which Angel Adams would change sex and run out to catch the villain of the moment wearing a little black cocktail dress, but I only wanted to use it to phone my boyfriend, and for political and personal gain. Then I realised I was only a few minutes’ walk from the offices of
The Scot
on Blackberry Bridge, so why didn’t I just go over there and tell him about it?
2. The Office
The woman at the reception desk just behind the street door of The Scot building had a little keyboard on her desk. The Track-and-tracermatic, it was called. Every office reception desk had at least one. The Track-and-Tracermatic shone a bright light directly into my face and asked,
‘Name?’
I said, ‘Barnabas Burns,’ and my answer appeared on a little screen that I couldn’t read because of the light shining into my eyes.
‘Postcode?’
‘EH3 6LX. I say, would you mind turning the light off? It’s dreadfully uncomfortable.’
‘Just normal procedure, so put up with it and stop complaining. House number?’
‘7C.’
‘Date of birth?
‘First of August, 2056.’
‘Telephone number?’
‘07700 000312.’
‘National insurance number?’
‘LS 092220 B’
‘In the last fourteen days, have you experienced any of the following symptoms?’
‘No.’
‘Shut up. I’m talking. High temperature?
‘No.’
‘Continuous cough?’
‘No.’
‘Loss of sense of smell or taste?’
‘No.’
‘Agonising death?’
‘No.’
‘Thank you for your co-operation.’
The Track-and-tracermatic turned off the light that it had been directing into my face, leaving me momentarily blinded. It turned a brilliant shade of red and began to flash on and off, like a neon sign. ‘I wouldn’t get too worried,’ said the receptionist, ‘It always does that. It’s probably just your national insurance number.’
‘Silence!’ yelled the machine. ‘Burns! LS092220 Burns B! Do not forget that you have an appointment for a coronavirus test at 11 am tomorrow, Tuesday 6 November, at the Rolf Harris Memorial Hospital on Beetroot Boulevard. Failure to attend may be punished by a £10,000 fine, or six months’ working in an Amazon warehouse, or both. Until then, remember,’ it sang to the tune of
Boys and girls come out to play,
‘Flatten the curve and stop the spread, Wear a muzzle and drop down dead!’
‘Thank God that’s over,’ I said.
‘Fraser is in his office on the second floor,’ the receptionist told me. ‘Room 2·21. The lift is over there.’
As I walked over to the lift, a bottle of hand sanitiser told me in a hushed tone and in Sean Connery’s unmistakeable voice, ‘Be wise! Santise!’ So I did.
I found Fraser’s office. It said 2·21 on the door. There was a window in the office door and I could see my boyfriend sitting at a formica covered table drinking tea out of a china mug.
‘Ah, love of my life,’ he said the moment he saw me coming into his office. ‘Would you care for a cup of tea?’
‘Yes, please.’ I looked around. ‘You know,there’s something strange about this office. Somehow it doesn’t quite conform to my expectation of what an office ought to be. I can’t quite grasp what it is,’ I said, and then it dawned on me. ‘Oh! I just got hold of it. Where’s the work?’
‘What do you mean, where’s the work?’
‘I mean, I was expecting to see some kind of work in progress when I walked into your office and looked around, and you doing it. You know. Something like a typewriter, pieces of paper, a computer terminal, a court report, a set of accounts, a fuzzy photograph taken by a passer-by who witnessed something, a pair of rubber stamps saying ’Scoop! and ’Spike!’ Even one of those green eyeshades that editors always wear in films while they’re editing. Just some trace of work being done to produce the finest daily paper in the British Isles. Or, failing that, this one.’
‘You’re disappointed, then? Here, have some tea. It’ll have to be beetroot milk, I’m afraid, because I’m having a meat free day. Also someone keeps stealing milk out of the bottle of milk that I keep in the fridge, and finding beetroot milk in the bottle will make them think twice next time.’
‘Why don’t you just buy two bottles of milk so that whoever wants to steal your milk can just steal one of them and it won’t cause you any inconvenience?’
‘Barnabas — do you know what a bottle of milk costs?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘Two pounds forty.’
‘And do you know how long it takes me to earn two pounds forty?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘two minutes and fifty-six seconds, if you’re on the National Standard Wage.’
‘See? I’m not going to waste my wages, or my life, featherbedding beggars and thieves.’
‘Remember the wise aphorism of the great French philosopher Esther Marie Firmin,’ I said, ‘It matters not what giving to the beggar does for the beggar. All that matters is what giving to the beggar does for you.’
‘I’ve never heard of Esther Marie Firmin,’ said Fraser.
‘I’m not surprised,’ I said, ‘because I just made her up. Of course, the fact that she doesn’t really exist doesn’t mean she’s wrong. Buy some milk and leave it for your milk thief, for the good of your soul.’
‘But any milk thief with an ounce of thievery in his soul would steal both bottles, wouldn’t he?’
‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘maybe not. But who on earth wrote those posters?’
My attention had been captured by three posters blu-tacked onto the wall which read,
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| Hatch some Headlines! | Rouse some Readers! | Start some Stories! |
‘Motivational posters, Barnabas. No business can succeed without motivational posters and terse, sharp slogans, the first letters of the first and last words of which are identical. Marmaduke’s a convert to Alliterative Management,’ said Fraser. ‘It’s the latest fad. It’s all the go. It’s the engine driving hundreds of motivational posters and at least a thousand self-improvement paperbacks for the blue-chip tycoons of today and the trainees of tomorrow at one pound fifty a pop. Adopt Alliterative Management and you’ll succeed where others fail, you’ll be treated as an equal by your betters. you’ll grow two ears of corn where one grew before, you’ll increase sales while cutting costs and if you play your cards right you can register as a charity, pay no corporation tax and reward yourself with a huge salary. It’s going to be bigger and more profitable than just in time, outsourcing, the One Minute Manager and loyalty cards all put together. All we have to do is get out there and nail down some news.’
Fraser took another long drag on the tea and asked, ‘What brings you here, honey?’
‘I thought I might have a story for you,’ I said.
‘I’m all ears,’ said Fraser, sitting up and looking interested.
‘They’re removing the statue of Stephen Stannard from the top of Rhubarb Rise,’ I said.
‘Isn’t he the one who discovered chloroform?’ Fraser asked.
‘Not quite. He was the police detective who solved the Kirkliston Carnage, the Festival Fatalities, the Slaughter in the Slateford Saloon — cases that had dragged on for years without success…’
‘Great story. I’ll get onto
Blah
‘There’s more,’ I said. ‘Do you remember The Cross Dressing Detective?’
‘Do I? I used to sit by the letter-box on Mondays waiting for the week’s instalment.’
‘Well, Stephen Stannard was the inspiration for the character Angel Adams, remember him?’
‘I most certainly remember him. He was a hero in The Party. So why are they removing his statue?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I suppose some dark, shocking corner of his life has come to light, making him one of the many former celebrities that we no longer want to remember. Like his father was a buy to let landlord, or something.’
‘Well,’ suggested Fraser, ‘it would have to be something like that, I suppose. Did you ask the workmen why they were taking the statue away?’
‘No,’ I admitted.
‘Or whether they’re going to replace the statue, and with what?’
‘No, I didn’t ask that either,’ I said.
‘Well, sweetheart,’ said Fraser, ‘you won’t make a news reporter. You’ve left me with some work to get on with, but keep one eye on
Blah
and you’ll see me gradually gathering evidence and putting together an earth-shaking scoop.’
‘I will,’ I said. ‘By the way, I love you.’
‘I love you too, sweetheart,’ said Fraser, and he stood up and kissed me, just to show me that he really meant it.
Just at that moment, the door flew open and a man of about 30, wearing a suit with a waistcoat and a cravat, marched in, so rigidly that you could just about hear the Band of the Gherkin Guards playing
Thunderbirds March in the street outside. Fraser appeared startled and jumped away from me. I tried to look like a piece of the furniture. I needn’t have bothered, because the marching man didn’t appear to have seen me.
‘Farmsbarn! How long have you been with us?’ barked the suit in an Australian accent.
‘About three weeks, Mr Marmaduke, sir,’ said Fraser.
‘Two weeks and four days, I make it, and it’s Mr Magnox to you.’
‘Yes, sir. Sorry, Mr Magnox, sir.’
‘Your work to date has been satisfactory, Farmsbarn. I have a small job for you.’
‘Your wish is my command, sir,’ said Fraser, obviously unaware that pantomime clichés don’t always go down well with proprietors and chief executives.
‘I want you to find a famous scientist who appears to have achieved something, and tell our readers that he hasn’t. Stories about wastes of taxpayers’ money always increase sales a bit.’
‘That sounds straightforward enough,’ said Fraser. ‘I’ll get straight onto it.’
‘Good, because that’s what I expected. Rumble a Researcher! Silence a Scientist! Expose an Expert! Demolish a Don…’
‘I shall find a stunning story, sir,’ Fraser promised, foolishly. ‘I can see the front page now:
Scientist’s Useless Advice Costs Taxpayers Millions.’
‘Good headline, Farmsbarn. I shall use it. All you need to do now is find the story. Five stories, actually, for next week’s news, and the week after that I’ll recycle them as features. So get pictures, quotes, budgets, salaries, everything you can think of, and get it onto the Chief Sub’s desk by Friday. This is in addition to your normal duties, of course. Speaking of your normal duties, get some more tea and milk if you’re going past Aldi, won’t you.’
Mr Magnox marched out as he had marched in, looking as though he were before an audience of American tourists on the parade ground outside Polanski Palace on Potato Park. The door banged shut. Silence fell in the office.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘you’ve been told what to look for, so as events this morning have not resulted in my becoming an employed person, I’m going to help you look for it. If that’s all right with you, sweetie.’
‘Sure,’ said Fraser, ‘ride along.’
Fraser and I left his office and went out into the street. I thanked the Track-and-Tracer-Matic when it yelled after me that I was not to forget my clinic appointment tomorrow. Then it yelled after Fraser that he was supposed to be collecting a new motivational poster and a teaspoonful of Blu Tack from the stationery store, and Fraser yelled back that if it was all the same to him, the Track-and-Tracer-Matic could go and boil its head. Out in the chill sunshine on Blackberry Bridge, I decided to take Fraser to the nearest coffee and sandwich buffet, the Buxom Wench Sandwich Bench. A middle aged lady wearing a bright orange uniform and a name badge saying ’Ada’ stopped us at the door.
‘Sorry, you can’t come in. We’re women only.’
‘You mean, one of the big improvements to the urban environment that I hear so much about is the arrival of women only sandwich shops?’
I was surprised because I had never heard of women only sandwich shops outside the United States, home and native land of every barmy notion since, and including, leaving the British Empire.
Ada pointed to a sign by the door saying,
‘Women only. See the pink line on the floor?’ by way of explanation.
‘Did you know your local sandwich shop was women only?’ I asked Fraser.
‘I think… er… I might have read something about it last week on the work Blah wire,’ he said half-heartedly. ‘I suppose I should have told you.’
‘Ada,’ I asked her, ‘if you aren’t too busy, can you explain the advantage that a coffee shop such as this one here enjoys as a result of turning male customers away?’
‘We get a subsidy from the Council to compensate us for the customers that we don’t serve because we’re women only. So we double the number of customers we actually serve and claim the profit that we would have made if we hadn’t not served them.’
‘But do you still have enough chairs, tables, cups, coffee and sandwiches to serve men as well as women? If you wanted to, I mean.’
‘Yes. This way is less effort, though. We turn people away and we get paid just the same. And we get brownie points for dismantling the machinery of oppression that renders women helpless martyrs to the reactionary patriarchy.’
‘Is there the least chance,’ I asked, ‘that you might let us two come in?’
‘No,’ said Ada.
‘Oh, well, thanks for the information,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry I wasted your time, I suppose. Never mind,’ I told Fraser, ‘there are plenty of other sandwich shops. At least I hope there are.’
At the next coffee shop,
In Place of Tea,
I looked carefully for any sign on the door saying who they did not serve, and all I found was ‘We do not serve French food.’ I was encouraged. Here was a sandwich shop of sense.
The management had fixed up a Track-and-Tracermatic and somehow plugged it in to the sliding shop door. This was the Internet of All Things at work.
‘Halt!’ cried the Track-and-Tracermatic, not opening the door. ‘Who goes there?’
‘Fraser Farmsbarn,’ said Fraser.
‘Barnabas Burns,’ I added.
‘Do you toss-pots want to come into this sandwich bar and eat a sandwich?’
‘Yes,’ said Fraser, ‘and a cup of tea would be nice.’
‘We make our own blend of tea, guided by an exclusive American recipe. The tea in this establishment is made with lukewarm water and vegan milk and incorporates raspberry leaves, lime juice, basil, frying oil, mud and sticks. This is not just nice tea. This tea is Staggeringly Astounding tea.’
‘I don’t think you and I mean the same thing by “nice.” Do you make tea with ordinary tea leaves out of a box? Ty-Phoo, for instance, or P G Tips, or Twinings? With boiling water and a couple of tablespoonsful of milk?’
‘No. This business subscribes to the Disruption Credo. Create new products and take over whole markets where the old ones used to be. Make things look as though trade is increasing exponentially, then IPO and retire with bags of money.’
‘What does exponentially mean?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Never mind. Wasn’t Disruptive Business the latest and greatest management fad a hundred years ago?’ I said.
‘Yes! Wherever you looked a hundred years ago, old style businesses that had been doing the same thing the same way since the invention of the elastic band had been blindsided by the world-wide revolutionary change that was disruptive managements…’
‘Is this a disruptive business, then?’ I asked.
‘Yes. We have done more than perfect a new and devastating recipe for tea. We have completely re-defined tea from nose to tail, like a shooting star on a hilltop. Farewell to china cups, boiling kettles, dried shredded leaves imported all the way from Darjeeling, teaspoons and those horrible little sugar lumps that rot your teeth. A recipe which hasn’t changed in two hundred and fifty years is about to be overthrown by a disruptive innovator right out of left field re-thinking hot beverage engineering from the bottom up. Soon only hundred year old wrinklies walking around care homes on zimmer frames will drink tea made from tea leaves. Why be a late adopter? Why be a fogey, a stick in the mud? When the new is not so much waiting in the wings as hurtling round the block with its blue lamps flashing.’ The voice of the Track-and-Tracer-Matic rose to a crescendo. ‘I have seen the future and it—’
‘Tastes revolting,’ I said.
‘No, it isn’t,’ said the Track-and-Tracer-Matic. ‘It’s delicious, exciting, flavoursome and refreshing as a hot bath in a cabbage patch.’
‘Do you sell orange juice?’ I asked.
‘Yes.’ said the Track-and-Tracer-Matic. ‘But before I can let you in I have to ask you some questions. Firstly, what are your names?’
‘Barnabas Burns and Fraser Farmsbarn,’ I told it.
‘Address?’
‘7C Tomato Terrace,’ I said.
‘Grandmother’s maiden name?’ it asked.
‘Fudgebum,’ I said, having no idea what it really was.
‘Are you prepared for your tastebuds to have a wholly new, overpoweringly tongue-staggering experience?’
‘Always,’ I said.
‘Have you brought muzzles?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Put the muzzles on for me and I will open the front door.’
We were, finally, allowed into the café. Fraser and I sat at a table in one corner of the large room. There were four tables, one in each corner, and a waitress wearing a name badge that said ‘Lucy’ and what looked like a double-glazed window in front of her face came over to take our order.
‘What’s your order number?’ she asked us.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Try two. That’s a good number.’
‘When you phoned your order in,’ said Lucy, realising that we had no idea what she was asking for, ‘the kitchen gave you an order number. Didn’t you write it down?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘In fact I didn’t phone my order in at all.’
‘Well,’ said Lucy, ‘we won’t be able to serve you. You have to phone your order in. Because of coronavirus, we aren’t allowed to serve anything except orders which have been phoned in beforehand.’
‘I realise this is a massively stupid idea which would expose everybody on the planet to a serious risk of infection,’ I said, ‘but could you just ask the chef to send up two glasses of fresh orange juice and two cheese and mayonnaise sandwiches?’
‘No,’ said Lucy, stating something that must have been more obvious to her than it was to me, ‘you have to phone your order in, because of coronavirus.’
‘Where’s the nearest phone box?’ asked Fraser. He realised the inevitable had now become inevitable.
‘There’s one in The Scot’s office, across the street,’ said Lucy helpfully.
‘I’ll get it,’ said Fraser. ‘Fresh orange juice and a cheese and mayonnaise sandwich. I’ll be back in a minute.’
‘That would be perfect, Fraser. Have you got your ID with you?’
‘Yes, it’s here.’
I watched Fraser go over the road, go into the phone box, show his ID to the card reader, pick up the receiver and begin a long argument with the Public Switched Network Access Daemon. Although I couldn’t hear him, I could see his lips move: ‘Fraser Farmsbarn,… EH3 6LX… 7C Tomato Terrace… and then hang up the phone again and come back out of the phone box without having phoned anybody. He crossed the road and came back into the buffet. Seeing Lucy at the farther end of the room, he shouted across to her, ‘What’s the café’s phone number?’
‘I can’t remember,’ she shouted back. ‘I think it’s WAVerley 3034. But it might not be. It’s on the front of the shop, above the front door. If you stand by the telephone box over there — see it?’ she pointed back across the road, ‘you can see our number from there.’
‘OK, then,’ Fraser sighed, ‘I’ll be back in another minute.’
‘By the way, while I’m here,’ Lucy asked, ‘do you want workers’ sandwiches or posh sandwiches?’
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Worker’s sandwich |
Posh sandwich |
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£9·66 |
£11·00 |
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Which one tastes nicer? Do the posh sandwiches have real butter, or wholemeal bread, or something like that?’
‘They both taste the same,’ said Lucy, ‘only workers’ sandwiches are cut into two oblongs and posh sandwiches are cut into triangles. And posh sandwiches cost more.’
‘In that case, I’ll have a worker’s sandwich and my boyfriend will have a posh one.’
I watched Fraser go back to the phone box, look at the number above the street door, pick up the phone, hold the usual conversation with the Public Switched Network Access Daemon, and phone the kitchen with our order. I noticed him mouth ‘fifty one,’ which I imagined to be our order number. As he continued his conversation with the kitchen, Lucy arrived with two large sandwiches, one cut into oblongs and one into triangles, and two glasses of orange juice on a tray and put them on the table. When Fraser came back into the restaurant he was surprised to see our order laid out and ready to be eaten.
‘That was quick,’ he said to Lucy.
‘Thanks. I just realised that I already knew what you wanted so I went to the kitchen and I got the chef to make it while you were across the road making your phone call. Enjoy it.’
Lucy went on her way back to the kitchen.
The plate on which the sandwiches had been served to us lit up brilliantly and asked us to listen carefully to the following Health and Safety announcement.
These cheese and mayonnaise sandwiches were lovingly hand-made by a carefully selected team of eight year old children nailed to a bench in a stinking and dangerous factory in the delightful and historic town of Bing Bong in the People’s Republic of China. Their sell-by date (that’s the sandwiches, not the children) is 4 November 2087. They are slightly radio-active which makes them glow in the dark a very little bit, but that’s nothing to worry about. They contain the allergens Barley, Gluten, Milk and Wheat. If you are allergic to any of those substances, consuming them may make you pretty ill. These sandwiches each contain the following nutrients: ¾ oz carbohydrates, ½ GR cholesterol, ½ oz fat of which ¼ oz is saturated…
As the voice spoke, the words ran around the edge of the plate, like wooden horses on a fairground roundabout. Without waiting for the health and safety announcement to finish, Fraser and I picked our sandwiches up and, at last, ate them.
Fraser was deep in thought. We stared out of the front window and watched the traffic standing still in the long jam on Blackberry Bridge.
‘Jesus Christ, look at that pot-hole. There could be an elephant in it and we wouldn’t see so much as the top of its head from here.’
‘Perhaps there is,’ I said. ‘I seem to hear a miserable, despairing trumpeting of “Help! Let me out!” ’
‘The people in those cars probably left home in time to get to work before nine o’clock,’ said Fraser.
‘You should start driving to work,’ I said. ‘You’d never need to do anything. You’d never get to the office. You could take a bag of currant buns and feed all the elephants in the pot-holes. It would be a bit like working from home, except for not lying in bed watching daytime television.’
‘But I’d never get home afterwards, either,’ said Fraser.
Lucy wandered back across the room and asked us whether we were enjoying our sandwiches.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it’s really nice. Could I have another orange juice, please?’
‘No,’ said Lucy. ‘You have to order it in advance.’
We went back to Fraser’s office at The Scot and tried to work out how to fulfil his new task. There was no obvious point in going to the Science Library since nobody who was wasting public money would at the same time put write-ups of what he was doing into the scientific Press. We needed rumours.
‘We need to do what reporters have always done,’ I said. ‘We should go somewhere where scientists gather after work, and listen to the rumours.’
‘You mean, chat.laboratory.chat?’
‘Well,’ I explained, ‘you’re right, of course, the Net is exactly the right place to listen to rumours. I was thinking of a pub, with beer and scientists and students talking about what they were doing last week. A real place where we can eavesdrop, at least on those whose vocabulary we understand. Even a supermarket or a launderette where people gather. But laboratory workers are not going to wash their dirty linen in an on-line hangout where they don’t know who’s listening. I don’t think you’ll find many rumours of waste and scandal lying around.’
‘But we can drop in to laboratory.chat effortlessly,’ said Fraser, ‘so let’s do that first.’
‘If we take the tram,’ I said, ‘we can be at Subjects’ Buildings in half an hour and see whether there’s any obvious place to start eavesdropping. There are lots of scientists there.’
Fraser had already launched his computer into the laboratory chat.
Hana: We can’t invite her. Mother hates her.‘Well?’ I asked him.Fraser joined the room. IP address: e2e6:52ce:7a28:77f8:c839:8349:d375:1d13Marshall: Perhaps you’ll take me out one day - or do I have to make an appointment?
Rojin: We could get arrested for this.
Lara: I daren’t stay long. I just had to see you.
Finlay: Have you read the newspaper stories about my wife?
Evie-May: Well? What happened? I want all the details!
Kyron: The way you flirt is shameful.
Amaan: I’m your daughter.
Rojin: Midnight, on the bridge. Come alone.
Gabriela: You came back!
Warwick: Well, this is where I live.
Hollie: I knew you wouldn’t be able to see it through.
‘Looking at it,’ said Fraser, trying to sound like D. C. I. Stannard realising the significance of an obscure clue to a difficult and dangerous crime, ‘I can’t see anything immediately suspicious. I might as well try looking, though.’
Fraser: Does anybody know of any scientific projects that are a waste of time and public money?There was a pause, then:
Sabrina: You make me feel like I’m not good enough.‘As I was saying,’ I said, ‘if we take the tram, we can be at Subjects’ Buildings in half an hour and see whether there’s any obvious place to start eavesdropping.’
Carl: You’ve only heard her point of view. You never asked mine.☆ E-8761 Buffer overflow. Core dumped.
I looked in my pocket and found I had the necessary £14·40 in change, for two return tickets.
We ambled down to the tram stop and saw that the next tram to Cauliflower Campus, known to a few students as The Cauli Trolley and to everyone else as The Yah-mobile, was due to leave in four minutes. Would that be long enough for the two of us to get past the Track-and-Tracermatic? I managed to get through in three minutes, leaving Fraser just one. The tram pulled into the stop just as he got to ‘Telephone number?’ That left about a quarter of a minute to finish being interrogated and actually buy the tickets. Fortunately, just as he got as far as ‘Have you experienced any of the following symptoms?’ a woman on the tram recognised him. She smiled, waved, and came and stood heavily in the door, preventing it from closing. She was about Fraser’s age, mid twenties, five foot four and a bit slimmer than anyone has the right to be. She was wearing a long brown coat and a university scarf. I put my coins into the ticket machine and as Fraser got to ‘Thank you for your co-operation,’ the friend stood aside but kept her foot in the door, and we were able to clamber on board. The doors closed.
No damage done. We found two double seats facing each other in a bay, so as long as nobody noticed, we could talk to each other.
‘Thanks, Lydia.’ said Fraser. ‘Barnabas, this is Lydia Laird. I met her at an architecture show a few years ago. It’s a joy to see you, Lydia. I lost your phone number. I’m sorry.’
‘Nothing to worry about. We were both up to our ears in final assessments. It was remiss of me not to ring you. Here’s my card, Fraser, don’t you dare lose this one.’
‘Actually, really, I’m very sorry indeed I lost it.’
‘There’s plenty more where that one came from,’ said Lydia.
She gave Fraser a business card out of her handbag and, after thinking for a few seconds, she gave me one as well.
‘The University of Zucchini.’ I muttered out loud, ‘Lydia Laird, Senior Lecturer, Materials Science, Cauliflower Campus, Edinburgh EH9 3JD. I just realised where I’ve seen your name,’ I told Lydia. ‘In the cricket final, in June. Edinburgh won. That was you, wasn’t it? You were one of the team.’
‘The fast bowler,’ Lydia nodded. ‘I bowled McDonaghaidh out for a duck. That was the best match ever.’
‘I watched it on the telly-stream,’ I said. ‘Thrilling game.’
‘You're now in the exalted position of senior lecturer in materials science?’ said Fraser, who had put Lydia’s business card into his wallet without reading it and was only now taking a look at it.
‘Yes. I was thinking about becoming an architect, who doesn’t? In our heads we all turn over the designs of the houses we’d like to live in. Or if you’re an intellectual who came along a hundred years too late, you give yourself a sobriquet like The Buzzard and you turn over the designs of the cold, leaky, sky-high apartments with cracked walls and grubby windows that you’d like to make everybody except yourself live in if they can’t afford one of the houses that you’d like to live in. But I got side-tracked by the technical side of the business and I graduated in materials science so at least if I ever did build a house it wouldn’t fall down without a good reason. How about you, Fraser, what happened to you?’
‘Well,’ Fraser told her, ‘I was going to study quantum mechanics, but when I realised that I couldn’t do it…’
‘How long did that take, I wonder,’ I chipped in.
‘About five minutes of A Very Simple Introduction Indeed to the Basic Ideas of Quantum Mechanics And You Don’t Even Have to Add Anything Up was enough,’ Fraser confessed. ‘I can still remember the opening couple of sentences.
It is possible to skolemise continuous, right-Fréchet, nonnegative systems. Recent interest in classes has centered on constructing unconditionally Noetherian, degenerate classes. Williams’s description of solvable, compact, quasi-globally stable isomorphisms was a milestone in quantum combinatorics… ‘After that I threw in the towel and I changed to English Literature. Most of what we read is actually more opaque than quantum theory, but nobody cares if you can’t understand it.’
‘I don’t blame you,’ said Lydia.
‘Thanks,’ said Fraser. ‘But all that hard work reading books that I couldn’t care less about and have since completely forgotten paid off, because on the back of my third class degree…’
‘Classy,’ I said. ‘Lots of hard work and late nights rewarded.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Barnabas. I found a job on The Scot,’ Fraser concluded.
Lydia looked impressed.
‘He makes the tea,’ I said, ‘for the National Standard Wage.’
‘Really? What’s the most interesting cup of tea you’ve ever made?’ said Lydia. She must’ve read the Reader’s Digest Guide to Small Talk on Trams.
‘I soon realised,’ Fraser said, ‘that there’s no such thing as an interesting cup of tea.’
‘Never mind. Hey!’ Lydia suddenly brightened. ‘I just remembered, I’m going to an illegal Guy Fawkes party tonight in the old sports Stadium, the Field of Heroes. Know it? If you’ve got nothing better to do, you could come along.’
‘Illegal?’ I said. ‘Are we going to stand close enough together to talk to each other?’
‘Of course. You get in through a hole in the fence on Lentil Lane. See you there.’
‘We are now approaching Cauliflower Campus,’ said the tannoy. ‘The service ends here, and in a couple of minutes this tram will turn round and go back to Beetroot Boulevard. Remember, stop the spread, go to bed!’
As we walked out of the tram, Lydia told Fraser, ‘I have to start lecturing in,’ she looked at the clock on the tower, ‘six minutes. So I have to dash, but you haven’t told me why you’re here.’
‘We’re in pursuit of a story. We’re looking for a scientist here who has a huge government grant and is wasting it on luxuries for himself. I’m not so sure…’
‘Oh!’ Lydia laughed. ‘That’ll be Solomon Scott. Professor Solomon Scott OSH, that is. Rumour mill has it that half his grant has gone on new office chairs.’
‘OSH? What’s OSH?’ I asked.
‘One of the new awards since independence.’ said Fraser, before Lydia could answer. ‘Order of the Scottish Highlands. How much does he spend on office chairs?’
‘At least £2000 in the last year,’ said Lydia. ‘Now I really do have to dash or my second years will go back to their digs without knowing what a chiral monomer is. I’ll look for you both tonight.’
‘Do we have to bring anything?’ I hollered after her.
‘Each other, beer and fireworks. Voluntary optional £10 donation at the door or they won’t let you in.’
As Lydia disappeared into the distance behind a cloud of dust, Fraser and I walked from the tram stop to Subjects’ Buildings. Inside the glass front door was an antiseptic cubby hole painted green and yellow with a stairway and a lift going up and a corridor labelled ‘Lecture Theatres.’ Nothing newsworthy immediately attracted our attention.
‘What is a chiral monomer?’ Fraser asked me quietly.
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Your starter for ten: What is a chiral monomer? Is it… |
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Gladiatorial |
One Way Street |
Ancient Roman |
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Come on, Zucchini, surely one of you must know this!?
‘I think it’s a one-way street in ancient Rome,’ I said, ‘or a gladiatorial weapon, used against lions with deadly effect.’
‘But they all died,’ said Fraser. ‘All the gladiators died.’
‘It wasn’t deadly enough,’ I explained. ‘You need a fantastically chiral monomer to slay a lion.’
Subjects’ Building was the science campus of the University of Zucchini and far and away the most important home of scientific and engineering research in the whole of Scotland, apart from Kale College of Engineering, Electronics and Mathematics in Glasgow. Standing anywhere in Subjects’ Buildings, you probably couldn’t throw a brick without hitting a genius, a scientist, an inventor, or an astrophysicist. So all we had to do was to find one of them wasting time, or money, or something else, and we had our story.
‘Where do you think the Professor’s office is?’ asked Fraser.
‘Forgive me for telling you how to do your job,’ I entreated him, ‘but this is just a shared building that lots of departments use because they can’t afford to hire a church hall. Why don’t you start with what you have? Lydia knows Scott, so Scott is probably the Professor of Materials Science or some sub-division of engineering. Look for his office and ask him about his predilection for spending taxpayers’ money on an endless succession of chairs.’
We set off in the same direction as Lydia Laird, whose path was still marked by a cloud of dust hanging in the air.
3. The University
The Department of Materials Science was an early twentieth century two storey, four bedroom detached house pressed into service as a University department.
‘If that sign had been made from brushed eighth-inch aluminium sheet, sprayed with primer, painted with thixotropic polymer and given two coats of clear polyurethane varnish, it would still be in perfect condition,’ I remarked to Fraser.
‘Why should anyone care what it’s made of, at this date?’ Fraser asked.
‘Because it’s a Materials Science department, Fraser. They’re supposed to get that sort of thing right.’
Inside, the house was wood panelled with varnished doors and dark, mottled carpets and those casement windows with panes of glass a foot square or so and the grid of little cross-pieces called muntins. You expected to see students bringing their dogs, smoking pipes and toasting slices of bread over an open coal fire where the living room used to be.
‘Dis mus’ be da place,’ said Fraser, in Dick Tracey’s accent, ‘an’ we ain’t comin’ out widdout a story.’
‘Can I help you?’ A lady in her fifties, with red permed hair in tight curls and glasses that suggested that she hadn’t recently gone to McSpecsavers called to us from the open door of an office.
‘Oh, hello, I’m Fraser Farmsbarn and he’s Barnabas Burns. We’re from The Scot newspaper and we’d really appreciate five minutes of Professor Scott’s time, if that’s possible.’
‘I’m Rachel Ross. I’m only the receptionist. I’m afraid Professor Scott’s out of the office at the moment,’ she said.
‘Do you know when he’ll be back?’
‘He’s only gone out to Blaring and Pillow to buy a chair. I’m sure he’ll be back in half an hour at most. You can go to the top floor and wait for him if you want.’
Buy a chair, I thought. So it was true! Fraser, darling, you have just struck assignment gold and you’ve only been prospecting for five minutes.
‘Sure, yes, we’d be happy to wait for him,’ said Fraser.
We wandered up four short flights of stairs to where the loft would once have been. There was a narrow hallway with two chairs which appeared to be the customary two metres apart, and a door marked ‘Professor S. Scott OHS.’ We sat on the chairs, for all the world like two schoolboys caught fighting in the playground and waiting for the Headmaster to tell us off.
Fraser waited for a minute and then stood up and tried the office door. It opened with a creak loud enough to be heard downstairs, if you were unlucky. He sat down again and hoped that nobody would come up to see what had caused the loud creak. Nobody came, so Fraser wandered slowly into the office and looked at the papers in the waste paper basket, and then at the papers on the desk. I saw him pick up a glossy brochure and hold it so that I could see the front cover. It said, ‘Glaring & Pillow.’ Fraser came out of the Professor’s office glowing with excitement.
‘Scott has a furniture catalogue on his desk.’ said Fraser in a whisper. ‘The corners of some of the pages have been turned back. See?’ He opened the brochure at one of the marked pages. ‘Praise be.
C642, Swivel office chair. Padded seat and arms. Five leg castor base. Height adjustable. £650.
And, oh, look, what’s this?’
‘It’s a screwed up piece of paper,’ I said.
‘It’s a receipt from Blaring and Pillow,’ said Fraser as he unfolded the scrap of paper that the Professor must have been using as a bookmark, ‘for £650. See? C642 Swivel… gosh, these guys have such bad handwriting — office chair, £520, Tax at 25% £130, total due £650.’
‘You have your story, then, sweety. Man buys chair. Wizz-o.’
‘How long have we been sitting here?’ Fraser asked me.
‘Ten minutes. Maybe less,’ I guessed.
‘I’ve got a couple of minutes, then,’ said Fraser.
Fraser opened the office door, cushioning it with one hand so that it didn’t creak too much, and he went into the office for another look around. He opened the Professor’s filing cabinet and poked around for a few seconds. Then an alarm went off — lights flashed, a siren went off, and a loudspeaker started repeating ‘Intruder! Intruder!’ Fraser dashed out of the office and sat on his chair again.
Emelia Ross came up the stairs, looked at us squarely and told us how sorry she was. ‘The alarm’s always going off like that. I think it gets a bit bored when the Professor is out of the office. Bane of my life, it is. I have a box of plastic earplugs in my desk if it all gets too much. Professor Scott won’t be very long now.’
We were waiting for Ms Ross to go back to her office, and then Fraser and I would have a few minutes to go back down the stairs, get on the tram and go back to town. Ms Ross, though, heard a scuffing noise and foot-falls that came up the stairs and the distinct wheeze of a fat man struggling up a staircase and having difficulty breathing. Professor Scott was a large
He came out of the office again and stood looking at us. ‘Ah, I’m Professor Solomon Scott. Which one of you is Matthew Mullins?’
‘Neither of us,’ said Fraser. ‘We’re actually—’
‘I’m glad you dropped in. We need to have a talk about your son’s examination result. Nothing too serious but it would be better if we didn’t put off talking about it any longer than absolutely necessary.’
‘Professor Scott, I’m sorry but there’s been a mistake. I am Fraser Farmsbarn, a reporter from The Scot newspaper. I am writing about a rumour that your department spent more than two thousand pounds on chairs in the current academic year.’
‘Nothing to do with examination results? Good. Well, then, ask away unto your heart’s content. You have four minutes before I have to attend some ghastly reception and listen to several foreign dignities who don’t speak English, don’t know anything about materials science and wouldn’t say anything sensible about it even if they did, over there in the Vice Chancellor’s mansion,’ he pointed out of the window, ‘begging for some sort of favour, starting now.’
Fraser pulled his mobile phone out of his pocket and spoke into it.
‘Is it true,’ Fraser asked, ‘that your department spent more than two thousand pounds on chairs in the current academic year?’
‘Yes,’ said Professor Scott, ‘why do you ask? Is the bank moaning about my overdraft again? Damn them, how is anyone supposed to run an academic department these days without borrowing money?’
‘What do you say to this?’ Fraser held out the crumpled receipt from Glaring & Pillow.
‘These goddamn banks are good servants but God-awful masters. Parasites. Don’t they realise that if Lydia and I didn’t train up enough materials scientists, all their accursed banks would fall down?’ He looked at us and smiled. ‘Good thing if they did, too.’
‘So, you’re not denying that you spent thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money on chairs?’ Fraser again held the receipt out for Professor Scott to look at, and this time Scott took it from him, held it close to his eyes, and struggled to read it.
‘Yes, of course we do,’ he said, handing the receipt back to Fraser. ‘Where did you get that receipt from? I’ve been looking for it for weeks, I’ve had the Income Tax wallahs round here demanding receipts for everything and of course I’m not an accountant or a filing clerk. I don’t know where these papers are.’
Fraser waited a second and asked again whether Professor Scott’s department had spent more than two thousand pounds on chairs in the last academic year.
‘I wouldn’t be surprised,’ said Professor Scott. ‘I mean — look at me, I must be twenty stone at least. And these goddamn chairs are all made in China by eight year old children nailed to a bench in a stinking and dangerous factory in Bing Bong, so of course after a couple of days of heavy use — pardon the pun, I did it by accident — they fall to bits. What they need is a long and expensive chat with one of my materials scientists. There’s no excuse for it.’
‘Well,’ said Fraser once we were well away from the Materials Science Building, ‘I have my story.’
The tram wove carefully through the Cauliflower Campus. Fraser and I sat in adjoining seats with our arms around each other. It came to a stop ten minutes or so later at a level crossing.
‘Are you going back to the office to file your story?’ I asked.
‘I don’t have to,’ said Fraser. ‘I can file it from home and then get ready to join in Lydia’s Guy Fawkes party.’
‘If we want to go, we have to bring some—’
A tall, unshaven man leaned into the tram and started shouting. At first I took him for a tramp with brain damage yelling at imaginary monsters, but then the formless shouts began to take on the semblance of the English language.
‘Who on this tram eats meat?’ he cried in an Australian accent. I noticed that he was wearing a badge that said, ‘Vegans carry spud guns.’
There was a sudden silence. The tramp pulled a gun from his pocket and pointed it upwards.
‘I don’t want anybody to get hurt,’ he said.
An old man on the other side of the tram from us, ten feet or so from the intruder, replied, ‘Nobody’s going to get hurt, because that’s a spud gun.’
To cries of disbelief and shock, the tramp pointed the spud gun at the old man and pulled the trigger. There was a pop like a champagne cork shooting from a bottle, and the old man slumped forward in his seat. Several people screamed. Two began to pray earnestly.
‘A child’s toy put to good use,’ said the tramp.
The woman in the seat behind the dying old man leaned towards him and said, ‘I’m Doctor Brenda Bodger from the Rolf Harris. You’ve got a nasty injury but you’ll live. When you wake up, you’ll be in hospital.’
‘Ah, bugger off,’ said the old man with renewed spirit and another Australian accent. ‘I’m an
actor.
Nathan over there is just trying to scare you into getting off the tram, giving him money and giving up milk and dairy products for the rest of your lives. Just leave me alone and let me do my act.’
‘All right, then,’ said Dr Bodger.
The old man made himself comfortable on the floor of the tram and began writhing in agony and crying, ‘Oh, sufferin’ sea-lions, that bullet really hurt. Crystalline crocodiles, I’m going to bleed to death. Somebody call an undertaker.’
‘Shut up, you daft sod,’ yelled Nathan, interrupting, ‘If you eat meat, get off the tram.’ He waved the spud gun about, pointing it at passengers’ heads in random order.
‘I suppose we’d better do as he says,’ Fraser said to me as, all around, passengers stood up and made for the exits.
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Because otherwise we’ll all end up like him!’ said Fraser, panicking and pointing at the old man on the floor.
‘But there’s nothing wrong with him.’
The assassinated passenger was clutching his head in both hands and moaning, ‘Mangled marsupials, I don’t want to die. I wish I’d got off the tram when the guy with the gun told me to. Dithering dingoes, I’ve never had a head-ache as bad as this one before. Somebody give me an aspirin…’
‘Oh, be quiet,’ said Dr Bodger as she stepped down onto the platform.
‘She’s right, Dennis,’ said Nathan as he put the spud gun back in his pocket, ‘get up and shut up.’
‘Have we finished for the time being?’ Dennis asked.
‘Yes. Take a break. See you later,’ said Nathan.
‘Right-o, I’m off to Macdonald’s. Do you want anything?’
‘Yes, thanks for asking — get me a double McCheeseburger with McBacon and sliced McGherkins. Nobody’s looking.’
‘Do you know that’s got meat in it?’
‘No, but if you sing the verses, I’ll join in the chorus.’
We left the tram and, since Dennis and Nathan were obviously setting off for Macdonalds, we waited for the next Yah-mobile to town.
An hour or so later, back in what was now 7C Tomato Terrace, Fraser was working assiduously on his story. He was dictating it to his phone, including the spellings and punctuation, as though there had been a copytaker sitting in the room with him, hammering out the story on a cast iron Imperial typewriter.
'Phone,' said Fraser, 'turn on the typewriter noises. They make me feel businesslike.'
Education money — open quote — ‘down the drain’ — close quote — Point. Para. by Fraser Farmsbarn, The Scot Reporter, 5 — slash — 11 — slash — 2085.‘That’s all I can think of,’ Fraser concluded.A professor at the University of Zucchini — Z‑U‑C‑C‑H‑I‑N‑I — has spent nearly — caps — EIGHT THOUSAND POUNDS — end caps — of his departmental budget on office chairs from luxury furniture store Glaring & Pillow. Point. Para. Professor Solomon — S‑O‑L‑O‑M‑O‑N — Scott — S‑C‑O‑T‑T — of the Department of Materials Science on Cauliflower Campus has bought no less than — caps — FOUR office chairs at £1700 apiece and paid for them with money intended for the education and living expenses of his students.
‘You could add something about what he said when you spoke to him,’ I suggested.
‘Good idea,’ said Fraser.
When The Scot confronted him with evidence of his massive overspending, Professor Scott claimed that on three occasions the chair supplied to his office had been so badly made that it broke after a few days’ use, and he had to buy another one, so the money had been spent legitimately. ‘Point. Para.’‘Point. All I have to do.’ said Fraser, ‘is bundle that up in an email and send it off to work. Oh — it’s all vanished. I think I must have pushed the wrong key.’Professor Scott weighs 20 stone.
It took Fraser five minutes to send the story back to the office, but to give him his due it didn’t come back with an ‘Undeliverable’ error. Instead, just as Fraser was logging off the computer and closing its lid, his phone trilled. I could hear Marmaduke Magnox shouting at him without leaving my seat.
‘Farmsbarn!’
‘Yes, Mr Magnox, sir,’ said Fraser, trying hard to sound as though he still had his composure.
‘Thanks for the Education Money story,’ said Magnox. ‘It’s everything I expected.’
‘I’m glad you liked it, sir.’
‘I liked the first word, Farmsbarn. After that it kind of went downhill.’
‘A?’
‘Exactly. Farmsbarn, did you learn anything from your journalism training at the University of Zucchini?’
‘Yes, sir. I learned a lot, sir.’
‘Good,’ said Magnox, calming down a bit. ‘Remind me, then, what human interest means in the vocabulary of the journalist.’
‘Human interest is,’ Fraser drew breath and struggled to recall what the lecturer, Dr Dale Davies, had said on that subject in his impenetrable London accent, ‘the collection of inessential contextual details which provide colour, make it easier for the reader to empathise with the subject of the story, and fill up space that would otherwise be occupied by reports of football matches between East European teams that nobody’s ever heard of.’
‘Such as which details, do you think, Farmsbarn?’
‘His age, sir.’ Fraser tried to think fast, but couldn’t. ‘Where he lives. What colour his hair and eyes are. Er… whether he owns a cat or a dog. If a man, how much he is paid. If a lady, where she buys her clothes. If he’s related, however distantly, to any member of the Royal Family. Er…’
‘Anything else, Farmsbarn?’
‘I can’t think of anything else, sir.’
‘Right, then, get to work on the story. It’s got legs but decorate the drivel with the detail. Add human interest and submit it again. C'lect some clichés! I want his age, where he lives, cat, dog, salary and above all else, Farmsbarn, FIND OUT HOW MUCH HIS HOUSE COST!’
The tirade came to an end and Fraser asked me, ‘Where does Professor Scott live?’
‘How do I know?’ I said.
‘It’s too late to ask him,’ Fraser said. ‘I should’ve thought of asking that sort of thing at the time.’
‘You could always make something up,’ I said. ‘No-one will notice.’
‘Professor Scott will notice,’ said Fraser.
‘I don’t think you need to worry too much even if the Professor buys The Scot. Nobody ever sued a newspaper for describing them as a fifty-eight year old professor with grey hair, blue eyes and a cat.’
‘I think you might be on to something, Barnabas,’ said Fraser, greatly relieved at being shown the obvious solution to his editor’s problem. ‘I could kiss you.’
‘Don’t let me stop you,’ I said.
‘Later. Plenty of time when we get to Lydia’s party. Let me do this first.’
Fraser went back to the phone.
‘58 year old Professor Solomon Scott … Blue eyed with thinning grey hair, Professor Scott lives with his wife and a ginger tabby cat called Meredith — M‑E‑R‑E‑D‑I‑T‑H — in a £2 Mn detached house in Kirkliston — K‑I‑R‑K‑L‑I‑S‑T‑O‑N,’he dictated to his imaginary copytaker, and in reply the phone made a noise like a typewriter.
‘Good work. Keep going,’ I said.
‘Paid £246,000 a year of taxpayers’ money… — ends. I just realised that I can get some pictures into the story, too. Readers will want to see pictures of Scott’s luxurious house in Kirkliston, Scott on his wedding day, Scott’s cat Meredith, a pile of money and Glaring and Pillow’s shop front, all of which I will now add to the story from the pile of stock photographs in the picture archive.’‘And Scott himself, of course,’ I put in.
‘Oh, good idea.’
Fraser clicked on something, and the pictures appeared in the story.
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| Scott | House | Wedding | Cat | Money | Furniture shop |
‘See?’
‘Magic,’ I said, 'except I think I saw the house in Kirkliston in an estate agent's window.'
‘Now,’ said Fraser, sweating with stress and mental effort, ‘let’s send it all to the story server back in the office basement. Then we wait for two minutes for the boss to ring up if he’s dissatisfied and, after that, we put our coats on, buy some cheap beer and find out where Lentil Lane is.’
Fraser dramatically set the timer on the cooker to two minutes and we both sat, scared to move, waiting to see whether the phone would trill before the timer pinged. When the timer pinged first, Fraser mopped his brow with his handkerchief and conjured a street map on his phone. ‘Lentil Lane,’ he said, pointing at the map, ‘is just there, a mile and a half east of us.’
‘We need to bring some beer with us,’ I said, and I looked in my wallet to make sure I had enough money. ‘Twelve bottles should be enough. What will that cost us?’
‘Last time I bought beer,’ Fraser told me, ‘it was £7·95 a pint at Bart’s.’
‘I’m afraid you’ll have to pay for it, then.’ I said, shaking my head as I saw how little cash I had. ‘Sorry, sweetheart, I need to live on what I have until Tuesday next week.’
‘So long as you have me, cutie,’ Fraser reassured me, ‘you won’t die of thirst.’
‘I’m very grateful, my marzipan coated liquorice allsort,’ I told him. ‘Don’t forget the Alcohol ID.’
‘It’s here in my pocket,’ Fraser said, after looking worried for a few seconds and feeling in his pockets.
At the corner of Tomato Terrace and Rhubarb Rise stood a musty-smelling and ill-lit shop called Bartholomew Butler’s Beer and Beverage Business.
Both nearby and a few pence a bottle cheaper than McSainsbury’s, Bart’s had been our regular supplier of beer since we moved into our flat. There had never been any trouble at Bart’s that we were aware of, so we were surprised to see two young women, who looked old enough to drink and perfectly sober, being bundled out of the shop. They were unhurt but rather shocked, and Fraser and I heard Bart shouting after them that they should not set foot in his shop again until they could show him their Permission To Buy Alcohol Cards.
The two ladies stood up and brushed themselves off. They were both maybe twenty years old and dressed for a cold night outdoors. One of them asked me what Bart was asking them for.
‘A Permission To Buy Alcohol Card — it’s the latest government wheeze,’ I said, ‘to eliminate alcohol addiction and habitual drunkenness by legislation, bureaucracy and RFID technology. After all, they’ve tried to solve these dreadful problems by restricting opening hours and taxing alcohol heavily and unit pricing and verifying customers’ ages and all four at once, and this… I’m Barnabas, by the way.’
‘I’m Jemima and that’s Kaolin lying on the floor.’
Fraser held his hand out and helped Kaolin up. She was shaken but unhurt.
‘I don’t think Bart meant to push you over like that,’ Fraser told Jemima, ‘but he can be a bit heavy handed at times.’
‘I tripped,’ said Kaolin. ‘Stupid of me.’
‘Can you go in and buy a bottle of vodka for us?’ Jemima asked.
‘That’s not necessary,’ I said, ‘you can just take two blank alcohol IDs from the box over there, write your names on the back, and Bob’s your uncle.’
‘Borrow my biro,’ Fraser offered, holding his Scratchpoint out to the ladies.
Jemima picked up two of the cards, wrote her name on the back of one of them and gave the other to Kaolin, who looked at it, nonplussed.
‘Can you write my name on this one, Jem?’ she asked at last, adding confidentially, ‘I can’t read or write.’
‘Sure.’
Jemima turned the second card right way up, and wrote Kaolin Kaiser on it.
‘Do we have to tell anyone that we have these cards?’ Jemima asked.
‘No,’ said Fraser. ‘You don’t need to tell anyone that you’ve got it. All you have to do is fill it in.’
‘And you’re telling us that with these IDs, we won’t have any trouble buying vodka here?’ Kaolin asked.
‘None at all,’ I said. ‘Bart isn’t going to turn away forty pounds’ worth of legal business. It’s just that he has to insist on proper ID in case the Police come calling. He doesn’t usually insist on them.’
‘Perhaps he knows something that we don’t,’ said Kaolin.
‘It’s possible. Look, go inside the shop and get what you want. We’ll wait outside. Holler if you need us.’
Jemima and Kaolin walked through the shop doorway holding up their Permission To Buy Alcohol Cards, with the ink on the backs still wet. We heard Bart say, ‘You brought your Alcohol IDs this time?’ in his middle Eastern accent before the door swung closed.
‘How come Kaolin hasn’t learned to read?’ I mused out loud. ‘I mean, what sort of school leaves kids so illiterate that they can’t write their own names?’
‘In her case, the
St. Francis Xavier Premium Comprehensive Superior Academy of Total Outstanding Excellence, Trades Union All Departments.’
said Fraser.
‘Do you know her?’ I said, surprised. Fraser had never shown much interest in girls.
‘It was written on her tee shirt,’ said Fraser. ‘Don’t you notice anything?’
‘I did indeed look at her tee shirt,’ I said, ‘but I didn’t notice the name of her school.’
The shop door swung open again and the girls spilled out, Jemima carrying their vodka. They were chattering excitedly to each other and appeared to be on the way to some kind of get-together. Fraser and I both said, ‘Bye!’ Jemima and Kaolin returned ‘Thanks, bye,’ and then they disappeared into the evening. Fraser, having both the Alcohol ID and the money, went into the shop, bought a dozen bottles of Brickstone Bitter and gave six of them to me in a carrier bag.
Lentil Lane was twenty minutes away. When we reached it, we could hear the loud music and lots of excited shrieks coming from the old sports ground, and we climbed through a hole in the rickety metal fence and headed towards the noise. Almost immediately two powerfully built young men wearing black sweaters labelled ‘Security’ and black leather trousers demanded ten pounds voluntary donation from each of us. I forked it over. They let us in and one of them told us to put sanitiser on our hands. After that, we turned to walk towards the noise along the obvious path, but they turned us back.
‘That way. One way system.’
Looking around what remained of the formerly glamorous stadium, I was a bit overwhelmed by the moment. This stadium was the Field of Heroes, famous for many things, chief among them being the football pitch on which, at 2.45 pm on 31 July 2066, the great Sandy McSamson had scored the winning goal in the final minute of injury time against England, making Scotland the winner of the World Cup by three goals to two.
We were walking past the high wall at the back of the terraces. There were four famous circular bas-relief plaques on the wall, commemorating men who had in the past been national heroes. They had been chosen by popular ballot at the time, although quite likely they had long since ceased to inspire the masses to great achievements. Winston Churchill, Francis Crick, Horatio Nelson, and Isambard Kingdom Brunel.
In recent years, with the aim of showing ordinary people the myth of heroism to be a falsehood, the Scottish National Trust had added to the plaques below the bas-reliefs. Beneath Churchill, ‘He smoked.’ Beneath Nelson, ‘He was unfaithful to his wife,’ Beneath Crick, ‘He didn’t give enough credit to Rosalind Franklin.’and beneath Brunel, ‘He was short.’
Although the Field of Heroes had been little used after the World Cup Final, it was called out of retirement and cheaply refurbished for several rallies and hustings meetings in the bitterly contested election of 2076, after the Labour and Conservative Parties had merged and the rôle of principal opposition party was up for grabs. After that, there had been talk of giving the stadium over to women’s football in the winter and women’s cricket in the summer, but the owners weren’t convinced that the fixtures would earn enough money to pay for the necessary repairs and maintenance. So now, here we were, dancing untidily among what was left of the seats, letting off fireworks and bringing our own beer.
I smelt the ragged fellow before I saw him. He bore the sour, metallic smell that clung to your skin if you smoked. The man was seventy years old if he was a day, wearing an overcoat that looked as though it had been in and out of the Clothes Bank for years and carrying a duffel-bag. He came up to me.
‘Cigarettes, guv?’
‘That brings back memories,’ I said to him, ‘I haven’t seen a fag for years. What make are they?’
‘Gitanes.’ He pronounced the name phonetically, [gɪ′tεɪnz].
‘French cigarettes, come all the way from China. They’ve got a kick in ’em like an ’orse in garlic sauce. Eighteen quid for ’arf a dozen.’
‘I’d love some, but I’m all but penniless. May I have four?’
He looked at me and took pity on me.
‘All right,’ he said, ‘ten pounds for four.’
‘Thanks, give me four.’
I handed the fellow a twenty pound note and he took it, dropping it into his duffel-bag without showing any sign that he knew what change was. Then he looked around nervously and he counted out four Gitanes from a box of twenty that he had in his pocket. I didn't complain — it wouldn't have achieved anything.
‘Thank you. Do you have any matches?’ I asked him.
‘You’re jokin’, mate. If I ’ad matches, they could nick me for intendin’ to smoke.’
Fraser caught sight of Lydia standing near the home goal-mouth and ran over to her. I trailed along behind.
‘Hey, Lydia! I’m really happy to see you. Here, have some beer.’
‘Good idea. Thanks. I was just going to go in search of one. Have you got a bottle opener?’
‘Yes,’ said Fraser, taking two bottles out of his carrier bag and wrenching the tops off both with his teeth. Lydia winced, and so did I, as he did it. ‘Here,’ he said, giving one of the bottles to her.
‘Cheers,’ laughed Lydia, swigging about half the bottle as she spoke.
‘Barnabas,’ said Fraser, ‘give me one of those bottles of beer and I’ll open it for you.’
‘That’s an offer I can’t refuse,’ I said. I turned away and put my hands over my eyes as Fraser bit the lid off and spat it out onto the grass. (‘Brickstone Bitter,’ as the TV commercial said cheerfully, ‘with the bottle-top designed by Chinese dentists.’) The drink was just what I needed.
We walked around to where the ticket booth had been, and from there we could see the band, performing in the centre circle. There were two men and a woman in a row, standing with their backs to a bonfire. The woman was in the middle, shouting something about a wicked conspiracy among the early seventeenth century establishment to send a poor, working class, pious, oppressed, homeless immigrant called Guy Fawkes to his death for organising a peaceful, non-violent protest against the oppression of the wealthy, ruthless toffs. Two men on the woman’s left and right were, more or less rhythmically, banging two saucepans together. On the pitch around the — for want of a better word — musicians, fifty or sixty people were dancing or just standing still and trying to warm themselves by the fire. Some had their fingers in their ears.
‘At least they can play their instruments,’ I said.
‘That’s Jaza Jamaîl!’ Lydia exclaimed, staggered by our ignorance and obviously overjoyed to find herself in the presence of a great— ‘Poet,’ she added, noticing the blank expressions on our faces. ‘Probably the finest in the world. Her writing is just so devastatingly… verbal. It’s rhythmic and overflowing with significance, yet at the same time she completely eschews such de-contextualised and outdated patriarchal conventions as rhyming and not swearing and spelling things right. I mean, who really believes that music has to have notes, for God’s sake? Jaza’s just perfect, the total antidote to all the stale pale and male un-people you usually see at Guy Fawkes parties. It’s a privilege to listen to her. She uses néo-cultural narrative to analyse society as easily as you and I breathe air.’
That’s why most people only come to watch the fireworks, I thought.
‘Listen. She believes that objects have meaning because that it was it has been defined as through
language★7,’ Lydia droned. ‘Oh, I think I’m going to swoon.’
Jaza Jamaîl stopped shouting about Guy Fawkes and started shouting about women being so oppressed that they weren’t even allowed to carry guns and shoot people they didn’t like.
‘Who invited her?’ I wondered out loud.
‘I did,’ said Lydia.
Fraser added, ‘She wanted to impress someone in the English department.’
‘I hope whoever he is doesn’t have to choose between constructivist post-textual theory and dialectic narrative,’ I said, ‘because he might reveal an abundance of de-sublimations concerning the tolerance of approximations in semantic capitalism.’
‘Come again?’ Fraser was suffering a sort of input buffer overflow.
‘Oh, nothing,’ I said. I crossed my fingers. ‘I hope the man in the English department is impressed, because otherwise she might invite someone else.’
‘Hey, what’s this?’ Fraser looked startled as an ambulance sped up the drive at the front of the stadium and parked on the football pitch.
Floodlights flared on top of the vehicle, lighting up the stadium as bright as day, and a voice hollered at us through loudspeakers.
‘This is the Track and Trace Guard,’ it shouted. ‘We have nuclear weapons. Remain where you are. Do not attempt to leave the crime scene.’
Fraser and I dived underneath two broken chairs on the terrace. Nukes? Did the Track and Trace Guard really have nukes? Between them they didn’t have enough sense to be left in charge of a cup of hot water.
‘Do they really…’ I hissed to Fraser. He should know that sort of thing, it’s what newspapers are for.
‘Have nukes? I doubt it,’ he said. ‘More likely they don’t know whether they have nukes or not. And if they do have them, they certainly won’t have much idea how they work.’
Fraser grabbed my hand and tried to reassure me. ‘Don’t worry too much, sweety. We’ll probably get out alive. I’ve been in much narrower scrapes than this.’
‘Have you?’ I asked. ‘When?’
‘I haven’t,’ said Fraser, ‘not really, no. I was lying. I was just trying to keep our spirits up.’
★7 I copied and pasted most of that nonsense from a textbook on postmodernist criticism.
4. The Field of Heroes
Crouching under broken plastic seats in the long disused Hero Stadium, Fraser and I watched, alarmed, as four men descended from an ambulance and faced the crowd, none of whom had done anything more criminal than turning up at a fireworks party. Even Jaza Jamaîl and her saucepan bangers fell silent. We heard Lydia burst into tears — she sounded as though she was quite close to us, but we couldn't see where she was.
The four men of the élite Track and Trace Guard held their weapons up for us to see them, and looked left and right along the motionless rows of party goers. The soldier on the left held one of those big yellow water pistols the kids squirt each other with in swimming pools, next along held what looked like a flowerpot, the next a spud gun and finally, the rightmost soldier held aloft a cricket bat.
'You're right, Fraser,' I murmured, 'they don't have nukes. But I don't fancy my chances against a spud gun.'
'Listen up, all you Fawkes dorks,' said the spud gun, 'this is an illegal gathering. We don't want any trouble…'
'Why don't you bugger off, then?' asked a voice from the crowd.
'Who said that?' asked the flowerpot.
'Me,' I shouted, as did ten or twelve other voices from the crowd.
'I see we've got a comedian in,' said the water pistol.
'I'm Stand-up Stanley. I'm the comedian,' said a voice from the crowd, 'and if you think my act's bad, you should hear the poet.'
'You mean Jaza Jamaîl?' asked the cricket bat. 'What's wrong with Jaza Jamaîl?'
'What's wrong?' the comedian repeated. 'What's wrong? The main theme of her work is a self-referential reality. She tells you that you have to choose between accepting subcultural Marxism or concluding that economic hierarchy is part of the paradigm of language.'
'Christ,' I told Fraser, 'listening to this drivel is worse than being nuked. I have an idea. Get the tops off four of these beers and I'll—'
'Give them to the Track and Trace Guard and they'll apologise, leave us all alone and go away happily supping Bert's finest ale out of the bottle.'
'It's worth a try,' I shrugged, 'it can't make things any worse.'
'Neither can writing a letter to Santa Claus when you need a bicycle and a 27G phone,' said Fraser, 'but I wouldn't count on it, it's not actually guaranteed to work.'
'Look, big boy,' I said, 'it's my idea, it's my beer, and the only bit I can't do by myself is taking the tops off the bottles because I haven't got incisors like a hardened steel bolt-cutter. So be a mate and take the—'
'Ssssssssssh!' said a voice from under the seat next to mine. 'You'll get us all nuked.'
'Yes, please,' said a voice on the far side, 'I need a decent sun tan.'
'You'd best get Sun Factor 180 Piz Buin if you're expecting a battlefield nuclear exchange,' I said.
'I brought it with me,' said the voice.
Fraser bit the tops off four bottles and handed them to me. There was a loud clink as I took them and stood up. Cricket Bat looked in my direction. I realised my legs were shaking but I managed to walk slowly, one step at a time. Carefully and just about holding two beers in each hand, I walked towards the heavily, if curiously, armed Track and Trace Guard.
I was fifty yards or so from the row of Guards. I watched them very nervously, ready to throw myself on the ground if any of them appeared to be ready to attack me. For the first ten yards the Guards didn't seem to notice me, but as I came closer to them, Flowerpot looked in my direction and said, 'You! What do you want?'
'I want to give you some beer. Peace offering from us party-goers. Let's be friends.'
There was a short, tense silence and then Flowerpot started to laugh and Water Pistol squirted me in the ear. Flowerpot put his weapon down on the ground, not that he made me feel much safer by putting it down, and he walked towards me. 'Here, I'll take those.' He took the bottles back to the squad and shared them out.
'Have you got any more?' Spud Gun asked.
'No,' I said, 'Sorry.'
'Pity.'
Water Pistol interrupted. His voice was relayed over the speaker bank on top of the ambulance. 'We're looking for Dr Selby Sims,' he said.
'Why?' said the unmistakable voice of Stand-up Stanley.
'Never you mind,' said Water Pistol. 'Dr Selby Sims, we believe you've come to this party. Are you here?'
'It's all right.' A man of about 5′ 6″ stood up and walked up to the squad. 'I'm over here.' He spoke plummy Received English with the weak, breathy voice of an elderly man. I had a strange, undefinable feeling that I'd seen him before somewhere, but I couldn't put my finger on where, exactly.
Water Pistol had left the microphones running so that everyone in the stadium could hear the conversation. 'Are you Dr Selby Sims?' he asked. The man nodded. 'Twenty-seventh of July two thousand and six?' The man nodded again. 'Come with us. You need to go to the hospital.'
Water Pistol led him gently to the back of the ambulance and helped him to take a seat inside. When he fell in to the squad again, he announced, 'We're also looking for Mr Fraser Farmsbarn. We think he might be here somewhere, too. Mr Fraser Farmsbarn?'
He paused and then repeated, 'Mr Fraser Farmsbarn, fourteenth of November, twenty-sixty-one? Are you here?'
Fraser struggled to his feet, stood up and began the long walk towards the squad.
He was perhaps ten yards away from the squaddies when I realised where I had seen Dr Sims before. It was he who had been feigning a bullet wound on the tram back from Subjects' Buildings. My boyfriend was going to fall victim to the oldest trick in the book: get an actor to go first, and others will follow, unafraid. While the crowd watched Fraser walking towards the ambulance and wondered what illness on earth could be so wrong with two men that they needed a four-strong detail to fetch them, I was watching Spud Gun, who appeared to be training his weapon on Fraser as he walked.
Spud Gun's expression changed. Without thinking, I yelled, 'Fraser! Get down, get down!'
Fortunately for him, Fraser was not a man to question orders. He threw himself awkwardly sideways and as he fell, a pellet from the gun flew over his head and split open a tall wooden flagpole on the terrace. The cracked timber smouldered for a second or two and the top of the pole crashed onto the terrace. People screamed and ran in random directions, trying to get out of the stadium, jumping down from the high wall at the back, crossing each other's paths and blocking each other's exits.
At the front of the crowd, Spud Gun was trying to fire the weapon again, and either it had jammed or it had run out of ammunition, or the crowd was getting in the way of a clear shot. Fraser had a few seconds to take cover. Amid the stampede to get away, I saw him roll sideways on the ground and squeeze underneath a couple of chairs.
The Track and Trace guard had, it seemed, decided to get away. They climbed quietly back into the ambulance and disappeared down the drive to the main road.
Fraser pulled himself up from under the chair. I wandered across to where he was recovering from being shot at.
'Are you hurt?' I asked him.
'Only by hitting the ground,' Fraser said. 'It looks as though I got off lightly.'
'Here.' Another man emerged from beneath a plastic seat and came up to them. 'Constable Paul Polgaze. During working hours I'm a policeman. Here, you need this.' He reached a leaflet to Fraser, who held it up so that light fell on it.
'What to do if someone is shooting at you,'
he read.
'Turn to page two,' said P.C. Polgaze.
'What to do after someone has shot at you,'
Fraser read.
'There you are, you see,' said P.C. Polgaze, 'it tells you everything you need to know. On the back, you'll find the address of Bullet Holes, the charity that cares for people who have been shot at.'
'Registered Charity SC060337,' Fraser read, 'Never heard of it.'
'Does it do many good works?' I asked.
'I suppose it must,' said P.C. Polgaze, 'otherwise it wouldn't pay its chief accountant, its personnel officer and its executive director half a million pounds a year each. Although I can't say I've ever heard of it doing anything.'
'How many staff does it have?' I asked.
'Three,' said P.C. Polgaze.
'I'd quite like to know who shot at me and why,' said Fraser, 'and whether he and his friends are going to shoot at me again. Couldn't you take a statement, Officer, or phone for back-up, or look for clues or something?'
'It's not that urgent. I'd do it if there were a serious crime in progress. Someone who didn't like trans-genders, or a bus-load of guests going to a wedding party in Stamford Hill, or something horrifying like that. We can't have people spreading gender identity hatred or propagating the plague. But I'm off duty and I'm not going to give my colleagues extra work at this time of night. An attempted murder can wait until the day shift comes on. Come to your local police station when you're ready, and make a statement.'
That was the moment when I saw two welcome and familiar faces coming towards us. They were walking a little unsteadily and giggling for no reason. About a third of the vodka had vanished.
'You're still in one piece,' said Jemima, looking at Fraser and appearing relieved.
'Friends of yours?' P.C. Polgaze asked me.
'I hope so,' I said.
'Yes… I'm lucky to be alive,' said Fraser.
'You look as though you might need some of this,' said Jemima, while Kaolin passed her vodka bottle, still half full, to Fraser.
'I'm shaken but my only injury is, I cut myself on a stone when I threw myself on the ground,' said Fraser, and he poured a teaspoonful or so of vodka into the palm of one hand and rubbed it on the grazes.
Jemima looked meaningfully at Fraser. 'You're supposed to drink it.'
'Here,' said Fraser, handing the bottle back, 'I'm incapacitated enough as it is.'
Between Jemima, Kaolin and me, we drank the rest of the bottle.
We saw the women home, kissed them goodnight and went back to 7C Tomato Terrace. Shocked by the evening's events, Fraser sat on the sofa, shaking. In bed, I held him close. He was crying quietly.
'Do you know who it was?' I asked him as quietly as I could.
Fraser didn't answer. I wasn't sure whether he was sleeping or whether there was some reason why he didn't want to answer.
'Do you know why he did it?' I asked, even more quietly.
Fraser was asleep.
I woke while it was still dark and quiet. Fraser was out of bed, and I could hear television noises coming from the living room. I wrapped myself in my dressing gown and I went to see how he was feeling. There was no light in the room except for faint moonlight coming in the window and flickering light from his phone. Fraser was lying on the sofa and watching a telly-stream. I went and sat on the sofa beside him and he leaned heavily on me and yawned. I took his hand.
'You all right, sweetie?' I asked him.
'Cold,' he said, 'and still shaken. I can't sleep so I'm sitting up. I mean, who would want to shoot at me? I'm not a drug mule, I don't own anything valuable and I'm not sleeping with anybody's wife.'
'I've no idea,' I said. 'Maybe the police will tell us sooner or later. Perhaps it's just a random psycho?'
'I'm watching television to try to calm myself down,' Fraser continued, 'and not doing very well.'
'What are you watching?'
'Lassie the Wonder Dog,' said Fraser, turning the phone so that I could see the screen. 'Sorry if I woke you.'
'At a time like this,' I remarked, 'you need your friends to be awake.'
'At a time like this,' he parroted, 'you need love, rest and some decent telly-streams. I mean — look at it. Look at what choice there is.'
Fraser browsed Multiplex Magazine, pointing to each channel in turn.
'Early morning, Tuesday.
Animal Channel, Lassie the Wonder Dog.
Or I could watch I Love Lucy,
The Phil Silvers Show,
or Gunsmoke. Oh, look,
Gunsmoke hasn't started yet. That stream is still showing
Perry Mason…'
'Have they got to the bit where Mason is saying something that's obvious and Burger shouts “Objection, your Honour!" and the judge says “Over-ruled!” without listening to what the objection was?' I asked.
'That's in every episode they ever made and it's always fifty-two minutes in, so it'll be about,' he looked at the clock on the phone, 'two minutes from now. And if that weren't exciting enough,
Auspicious TV is just about to start Episode One Hundred and Ninety of Doctor Kildare… That Richard Chamberlain was seriously cute.'
'Of course he was seriously cute,' I corrected him. 'That was how you got a job in the American health industry.'
'Did you know,' said Fraser, 'that there is now a non-invasive treatment for every disease portrayed in every episode of Dr Kildare?
'No,' I said, 'I didn't.'
'There isn't, really. I made it up,' Fraser confessed.
Fraser browsed back to Lassie the Wonder Dog. 'Damn it,' he cried, 'I missed the bit where Lassie leads the entire family through the minefield unharmed, fights off a hungry alligator and then shows the family the safe way into the coal-mine where the treasure's buried and she wags her tail and woofs a lot.'
'I wish I could bark like Lassie the Wonder Dog,' I said. 'That would be a great gift.'
'A great cultural appropriation,' Fraser corrected me.
'Just imagine creeping up behind an old lady waiting at a bus stop in the middle of the night,' I said, 'and barking, Woof, woof! with the sound pressure level of a hand grenade.'
'You're right,' said Fraser, 'we should all be a lot more canine.'
'While we're doing the critical analysis, what's an alligator doing in California?' I asked.
'Trying to find his way home, I should imagine,' said Fraser, without looking away from the phone, 'or maybe just looking for someone to eat.'
'Television is much less interesting than it used to be,' I observed, 'since they changed the BBC into the British Brainwashing Corporation.'
'Yes,' said Fraser, 'There are more streams and more servers, but the programmes are the same. I really miss Strictly Come Baking and Master Dance.'
I gave Fraser's hand a squeeze, and he lay back onto me.
'There, there, honey, it will all sort itself out,' I said without much conviction. 'You'll see. Come back to bed when Lassie finishes her day's work and gets fed a bowl of household scraps.'
'I might,' said Fraser, 'but then again, after Lassie the Wonder Dog comes Flipper. I might watch that.'
'You're joking.'
'Yes, I am. Come on. Will you keep the bad guys away?'
'Of course. I have magical powers.'
'I can sleep peacefully while you keep the bad guys away.'
'Close your eyes and rest,' I said. 'Your watch ended. It's eight bells. My watch.'
Fraser and I went back to bed and we slept for a couple of hours. The phone switched itself on at eight in the morning. Immediately I felt a powerful headache.
…here are the changes in regulations,' said the phone, 'which the Scottish Ministry of Health and Safety is bringing into effect from midnight tonight.I said 'Shut up!' to the phone and it stopped yapping, but not before it had woken Fraser, so I kissed him on the cheek and said I had to go out, but he should stay in bed for as long as he needed to.Drumgour is moving from Tier 8 to Tier 9, meaning that jewellers, pet shops and florists will have to close. Glenramara is moving from Tier 6½ to Tier 10, meaning that odd numbered bus services will cease and schools will be unable to offer geography lessons. Largdaressie and Dunbeg are moving from Tier 3 to Tier 2, so it will no longer be necessary to wear a cardboard box on your head for journeys of less than 2·7 kilometres, whatever that is…
'What time is my appointment at the Rolf Harris?' I asked the phone.
'Eleven o'clock,' it said.
'How do I get there?' I asked.
'Bernie the talking bus says leave here,' the phone began, 'at ten o'clock—'
'That's far too early. What does Bernie say the next setting-off time is?'
'Leave here at twenty minutes past ten and walk to Haricot Highway.'
'That's survivable. Twenty past ten I can live with. Go on.'
'At ten thirty-four, catch bus 24 and get off at the Rolf Harris Hospital.
Your appointment is in the Can You Tell What It Is Yet Building. You will arrive at ten forty-five.
The fare is £7·20.
Have the exact money ready and don't forget to wear a—'
'Shut up,' I said.
'Sorry,' said the phone.
'I should think so too,' I replied, quietly.
Fraser was still in bed and I had two hours to get myself ready and leave. At about ten past ten I was ready to leave, so I started arguing with the smart lock on the front door of the flat, which had assumed the personality of Baroness Maria Augusta von Trapp from The Sound of Music. She appeared on the small screen where the keyhole ought to have been.
'Have you washed your hands?' it asked, waving its arms about.
'Yes,' I said.
'Let me see them.'
I held both hands out. Maria Augusta von Trapp looked at both sides and said, 'Do you own a nail brush?'
'No,' I said, 'I'll have to get one in McSainsbury's.'
'All right, then,' Baroness von Trapp continued, 'show it to me when you get back. Have you got your muzzle?'
'Yes,' I said.
'Ugh!' squealed Baroness von Trapp. 'It's horrid. Get a clean one.'
'I'll have to get one in McSainsbury's,' I said, 'when I'm buying the nail brush.'
'Do they sell muzzles in McSainsbury's?' asked Baroness von Trapp.
'Yes, in the Toiletries aisle, just in between "mouthwash" and "nail brushes." '
'All right, then.
♫
'So long, farewell,' sang the smart lock, 'auf Wiedersehen, goodbye,
You leave and heave a sigh and say goodbye — Goodbye!'
𝄂
With a clunk, the door opened. I still had a minute or so to catch the bus to the hospital.
On the common stair, in uniform, P.C. Polgaze was waiting for me. I held the door open so as not to have to talk Maria von Trapp into opening it again.
'Mr Barnowl,' he said to me, 'Is Fraser Farmgate coming out of the flat, or just you?'
'Just me, I'm afraid. Fraser's still asleep. I can let you into the flat if you want. Do you want to wait for him to come to? He probably will, sooner or later, but as you noticed he had a bit of a bad day yesterday.'
'Do your windows,' he pointed upwards, 'look out over the street? I'd prefer to come inside but only if I can sit looking out at the street.'
I wedged the door open with a frying pan and I showed P.C. Polgaze into the kitchen. 'Chair's over there, kettle's here, tea's in the tea caddy, milk's in the fridge, Fraser's in the bedroom. I have to go to the hospital and I have to leave now to catch the bus.'
'Just a moment,' said P.C. Polgaze, producing a notebook and pencil, 'Before I let you go, how are your names spelled?'
I spelled out Barnabas Burns and Fraser Farmsbarn to him, quietly so as not to wake Fraser.
'And who gave you the invitation to the Guy Fawkes party last night?'
'Lydia Laird. Friend of Fraser and lectures in Materials Science on Cauliflower Campus. That's all I know about her. I'm sorry, I really have to get moving.'
'Give me some idea of the times of events,' said P.C. Polgaze. 'What time did you get to the party?'
'Eight in the evening, I suppose,' I said.
'Ping! You must leave the house now, if you want to arrive at the clinic on time,' said the phone.
'What time did you get home?' P.C. Polgaze asked me.
'One o'clock in the morning, maybe. We walked home with the two girls we knew. Remember them? We left them at their house and then we came back here.'
P.C. Polgaze made a note, and thought for a second. 'Does Mr Farmhouse have any enemies that you know of?'
'No, not at all. He seems to get on all right with everyone.'
'Ping!' said the phone. 'You'll miss your appointment if you don't look sharp— Oh, you're talking to a Police Officer. That must be more important than an appointment at a clinic.'
'It is,' I told the phone, 'so belt up.' Silently I wished that both P.C. Polgaze and my phone understood that when you've been on a waiting list for two years it feels important to attend when the appointment finally comes around.
'Fine,' said P.C. Polgaze, folding his notebook. 'That's all for now. You'd better get to your meeting, then. Fraser needs to rest, so I'll wait here for him.'
'Sure,' I said, 'I'll dash off now. Whatever you do, don't take the frying pan out of the doorway.'
Out on the street I asked the phone to repeat the directions to the hospital.
'Walk to Haricot Highway. Catch the northbound number 24 bus—'
'Which one is Haricot Highway?'
'The northbound bus stop on Haricot Highway,' said the phone, 'is adjacent to Cary's Dental Surgery.'
'I don't know that. Is there anything nearby? Landmarks that I might know?'
'The northbound bus stop on Haricot Highway,' said the phone, 'is one hundred and six feet north of Pancake Planet restaurant.'
'Dammit, I don't know Pancake Planet either. Give me somewhere I know.'
'The northbound bus stop on Haricot Highway,' said the phone, 'is one hundred and eight feet south of The Smirking Swan.'
'That name's familiar,' I said.
'The Smirking Swan is a gay bar in which on several occasions you have—'
'Ssh!' I shushed. 'All right. I don't want you telling everybody in the street about my love life. Have I missed the bus?'
'Yes,' said the phone.
'Even if I use my super-power,' I said, 'and run to the bus stop faster than a speeding bullet?'
'Yes,' said the phone. 'The distance to the bus stop is 2,377 feet. It will take you four and a half minutes to run to it.'
'How much time have I got?'
'Three minutes and forty seconds,' said the phone.
'Right.'
I checked that my shoe-laces were tied, a fastidious habit which was probably the only thing I had ever learned in junior school. and I hurled myself westwards along Chicory Chase and turned left. When I reached the bus stop my heart was racing and I was panting for breath — I suppose I hadn't realised how unfit I was. Nevertheless, I was standing at the bus stop on Chicory Chase and I appeared to be in time to catch the bus. I began fumbling in my pocket for change.
'Is it ten thirty-four yet?' I asked the phone.
'It is ten thirty-five,' said the phone.
I looked up and down Haricot Highway, but I couldn't see the bus. The departures board on the post said,
24 NORTHBOUND 2′So the bus was just around the corner and expected to arrive in two minutes. Great. I had a few seconds to get my breath back, maybe even find £7·20 in exact change. I will never become used to having to have exact change until someone invents a sofa small enough for me to take with me on bus rides and grope down the back of for coins.
The departure board flickered off, then on.
24 NORTHBOUND CANCELLED'You bastard!' I yelled at the bus stop. 'I have to get to the Rolf Harris by eleven o'clock.'
24 NORTHBOUND 19′
'Is it really all that important?' the bus stop asked me. That is, the voice came from the bus stop, but I couldn't tell whether it was a human being talking or the synthetic voice of a computer.
'Yes, it bloody is,' I shouted back at it. 'If I don't get to the hospital on time, they'll take me to court!'
'See?' said my phone, 'I told you to leave the house at ten o'clock. Don't you ever listen?'
'You know what your problem is?' I told the phone. 'You have twenty-twenty hindsight.'
'What you call hindsight is nothing more than learning from experience,' said the phone.
'Re-configure yourself, phone. Turn the smugness down.'
'What is the administrative password?' it asked.
'Xyzzy★1,' I said. The phone went dark and after a few seconds it lit up again.
I stood at the bus stop expecting to be about a quarter of an hour late at the hospital. Lateness could mean anything from medical staff looking at you in a funny way through to ruinous fines and even Amazon, if the Track and Trace Guard was feeling particularly vindictive that day.
'Passenger, excuse my interrupting your thoughts. Are you still trying to go to the Rolf Harris?' asked the bus stop.
'Yes,' I said.
'Catch the next bus. It is service 19. It will take you to Beetroot Boulevard. You can walk to the hospital from there.'
I sat on the bus, nervously trying not to keep looking at the time on my phone. We made good progress through Stockbridge and Craigleith. The clock suggested that I wouldn't be late enough for anyone to notice.
The bus passed Myra Hindley Primary School on Squash Square but then, instead of turning right towards the hospital, it continued going west. The tannoy on the bus gave us an explanation.
'This is the main computer at Lothian Bus and Tram Corporation speaking. Do not be alarmed. Due to a collision, Beetroot Boulevard is closed to traffic. Your bus is diverted. It will serve the western entrance to the Rolf Harris Hospital and go on to its usual terminus in Granton. Any questions?'
'Anyone hurt?' someone asked.
'Two seriously injured,' said the tannoy, 'Mr Mark Moore and Mr Cornelius Cayman. In addition, Mr Nathaniel Nicholls and Mrs Phoebe Fortescue suffered minor injuries. The casualties have been taken to the hospital by robo-ambulance. Mr Moore and Mr Cayman were travelling at 60 mph in a red Brighton Banjo. Mr Nicholls and Mrs Fortescue were travelling at 28 mph in a blue Aurora Dragon. The collision was Mr Moore's fault.'
|
|
| Blue Aurora Dragon | Red Brighton Banjo |
'What time will we arrive at the Rolf Harris?' I asked.
'In sixteen minutes, at thirteen minutes past eleven.'
'It'd be quicker to walk from here than to sit on the bus and wait for it to get there. Can you let me off, please?'
'You can walk to the hospital in seven and a half minutes. Alighting other than at a bus stop can be dangerous. I am doing you a favour. Please stop, look left and listen carefully before you leave the bus.'
I was lucky. Most of the time, the bus would refuse to make an unscheduled stop. This time it stopped and opened the doors for me.
'Mind how you go,' it said.
I looked and listened carefully, stepped onto the road and began walking briskly northwards. At the hospital, there was a small crowd, ten or twelve people, in various coloured overalls standing on the asphalt in front of the entrance to the Can You Tell What It Is Yet building. They weren't protesting about anything, as far as I could see, just talking to each other in the cold and the sunshine. I reported to Triage and Appointments. The woman behind the desk wore a name badge saying 'Christine Cannock.'
'Ms Cannock?' I said.
'Hello. Christine Cannock isn't my name. I'm Lucie. I couldn't find my name badge so I'm wearing someone else's.'
'Whose is it?'
'Christine's,' she said. 'and she's probably wearing mine. If you see a lady called Lucie, she's lying. May I help you?'
'Probably. Barnabas Burns,' I said. 'My annual vaccination appointment was at eleven o'clock.'
'Your appointment's been cancelled,' Christine told me. 'We have four casualties from a road accident to deal with. Goddamn Banjos, they oughter been banned years ago. There's no-one free to deal with other patients, unless you're an emergency. I'm afraid we'll have to vaccinate you another time. Or I can give you the vaccine now and you can inject it into your arm when you get home. Sorry about that.'
'But there are at least three doctors standing doing nothing, just by the main door there.'
'They're working in the covid wing. They come here to care for covid patients. They can't help you because they're in the wrong specialism. Sorry about that.'
'Not that sort of doctor — fine, I'm fine with that. I'm feeling quite all right, so I can wait.' I said. 'Can you give me any idea when my appointment will be?' It would make no difference anyway, because my chances of being employed and having to take a day off work for a vaccination were negligible.
'None at all. I put you on the waiting list. A few months, I expect. Sorry about that.'
'Fine,' I said, despite being exasperated. 'Can you tell me where the western entrance is? I believe that's where the buses are stopping for the rest of the day.'
'I'll remember the way.' I lied, and feeling very glad that I didn't have a car or a wife in the passenger seat choking on a fish-bone. 'I don't need the map.'
'You must have a remarkable memory,' said the purported Christine, 'or if not, you can just follow the signposts that say West Gate.'
'Gimme the map, thanks. In reality I shall need it. It was wishful thinking.'
'Take it,' said non-Christine, 'it's free.'
Coming out of the building I saw the group of people in overalls, still chattering about the football and the lottery numbers and what they did on Guy Fawkes Night and last but one night on the telly. I picked a middle aged, balding, serious looking man who was wearing an e-stethoscope around his neck. He was wearing a name badge that said, 'Dr Elias Elkins.'
'Please excuse me, but I think I recognise you,' I lied. 'You're the leading light of the covid team, aren't you?'
The doctor smiled. 'I'm Dr Elkins. Virology, Plagues and Nasty Coughs Department. How can I help?'
'I work for The Scot,' I said, less than truthfully. 'I just wondered how many covid patients the hospital is looking after.'
'None,' said Dr Elkins.
'None?' I repeated.
'Not a single one,' said Dr Elkins. 'We haven't had any covid patients since, ah…' He stared at the sky and thought.
A young nurse, standing beside him, wearing a badge that said 'Lucie Lovell,' chipped in. '2021. I saw it on Healthify.'
'Gosh!' said Dr Elkins, 'Has it been that long, Christine? I qualified twenty-eight years ago, worked as a fork lift driver for McPrice Cutlery, and then as a shelf stacker in McSainsbury's, then I did a stint as a painter and decorator, and the hospital finally offered me a job eighteen years ago. They needed extra staff because of the covid crisis, I remember.'
'Yes, the last case recovered in 2021,' said Nurse Cannock. 'That's why we're all standing out here and talking instead of being up to our arms in gore and saving patients' lives.'
'Is standing around talking the only thing that you do?' I asked.
'No. Well… yes,' said Dr Elkins, 'unless it's raining, in which case we put four tables side by side and we sit in the canteen.'
'And sometimes we sing and dance and clap our hands and put a video of us doing it on Blah!' Christine added.
'Do you do anything for covid patients,' I asked, 'being as how there aren't any?'
'Oh, yes,' said Dr Elkins. 'There's a council scheme for keeping families safe, I remember. Because I had been a painter and decorator, and because I could read and write, the hospital seconded me to the scheme. I actually held the job of going around town in a van
'How do you help them?' I asked.
'The plan was,' said Dr Elkins, 'I painted ‘God have mercy’ on the doors and windows of anyone who wanted it, just as people did in the days of the Black Death.'
'Great idea. Did it work?' I asked.
'It worked every bit as well as keeping everybody muzzled and under house arrest,' said Christine. 'In fact, while he was doing it, nobody died of coronavirus at all.'
'Or at least,' said Dr Elkins, 'it would have worked, but nobody wanted me to paint on their front doors. And then the microbiology department in St Andrews discovered a way to manufacture monoclonal regenerons. After all the years of living in terror of the pandemic, people were delighted to see a sure fire cure for covid at long last. Testing pharmaceuticals on animals had been banned but it had been thoroughly tested on vegetables before they put it on the market — cauliflowers, for the most part — and none of them caught the diseas So if anyone ever falls ill with covid, we're pretty certain that we can cure them.'
'What's in the sure-fire cure?' I asked.
|
Alpha-globin 5′-ψTR | Signal sequence | 5% |
|
| Codon-optimized spike protein |
Coding sequence with two mutations to keep it in the desired conformation |
75% | ||
| Poly-A | Tail | 20% | ||
| All ψ are 1-methyl-3′-pseudouridine. | ||||
said Dr Elkins from memory.
'Gosh,' I said, very impressed. 'No wonder it works. How on earth do you remember all that?'
'I remember it because I see it on the boxes, every time we throw away an unopened carton of it that passed its expiry date.'
'And we threw the cartons away because although the fatalities died with covid, they didn't die of it,' said Christine, 'so curing their coronavirus wouldn't have saved them.'
'What does that mean?' I asked.
'Well,' Christine put in, 'if someone is wearing pink woollen pyjamas when they die, they died with pink woollen pyjamas on. But they didn't die of having pink woollen pyjamas on, did they? Taking their pyjamas off wouldn't have saved their lives, would it?'
'What happened when you started injecting people with monoclonal regenerons?' I asked.
'Nothing so far, because we haven't actually injected anyone with them yet,' said Dr Elkins. 'But, mark you, if we ever do get another case of covid virus, thanks to monoclonal regenerons we'll have it under control in hours rather than days.'
'So as a result of not painting God have mercy on people's front doors and keeping a note of the St Andrews microbiology department's phone number in the pharmacy refrigerator, there hasn't been a single case of covid infection anywhere in Scotland for, ah, sixty four years,' said Lucie.
'You're right, Christine,' said Dr Elkins, 'I never thought of it that way. Now you come to mention it, I've never seen a single case of covid.'
'That's really useful information,' I said, leaving 'because I happen to be a taxpayer' to be added. 'By the way, I'm so curious that I have to ask: Christine, why are you wearing Lucie Lyall's name badge?'
'Is that what it says?' Christine asked. 'I can't read.'
I took the map out of my pocket and tried to work out where I was and which way was up. Thinking that maybe the story would interest Fraser, I walked until I was well out of earshot, and then I gave him a phone call.
'Fraser, how are things?'
'Things are all right,' said Fraser, 'Polglaze left after half an hour or so. I'm back in the office.'
'What did he say?'
'He wrote down my description of what happened for a witness report,' said Fraser, 'gave me another leaflet and asked if you could drop in and file a witness report at the police station, and then he went off somewhere else.'
'And does the leaflet tell you anything useful?'
'No. It's exactly the same as the one before, and that one didn't tell me anything useful either.'
'Ah,' I said, 'well, did you know that half the Rolf Harris is a dedicated coronavirus treatment centre and it hasn't had any patients for more than fifty years?
'No,' said Fraser, 'I'll look into that. Could be there's a story about a waste of money in there somewhere.'
★1 Pronounced [ˈzɪzi]
5. The Report
On Wednesday morning the phone woke me, as always, with the latest Public Information Announcement sponsored by the Office of Propaganda.
…The next issue of mental wellness tests will be delivered today or tomorrow. Your test will be delivered to your door, and you can take it in your own home, if you have one. The mental wellness test may reveal early indications of problems such as counter-transference and parapraxis. Should there be an indication…'For God's sake, shut up,' I mumbled to it.
'Sorry,' it said, and it stopped talking.
When I came into the kitchen, Fraser was already sitting at the table and eating grapefruit out of a tin.
'Is there any more grapefruit?' I asked.
'You can have some of this,' he said. 'I haven't eaten all of it yet.'
I ate a couple of spoonsful and I asked him if he wanted a bacon sandwich, and he did.
'You've got over being a vegetarian, then?' I asked him.
'I never was a vegetarian. I had a meat-free day, that's all,' he said.
'Thank God for that. So you're no longer concerned about the pigs' right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of swill?' I said.
'Exactly,' said Fraser. 'For all I care, as of this moment the abattoirs can work flat out slaughtering, slicing and packaging pigs, and I shall eat my fair share and be as grateful to them as everyone else.'
I picked up the tongs and I laid rashers of bacon in the frying pan.
'Are you going to have another meat free day any time? Just so as I can make sure I have meat free bacon in the fridge for you.'
'In about three months. That would be the, ah…'
'If my calculations are correct,' I said, 'the second of Boots.'
'Eh?'
'In the metric calendar. The second of Boots, 2086.'
Fraser was incredulous. 'The Ministry of Metric awarded the franchise for the first month to a chain pharmacy?'
'No,' I said, 'the first month went to Argos, a drop shipper. Boots got the second month. Have a read of the free booklet. I put it over there in the dust-bin.'
'Where it belongs,' Fraser said.
'Yes. Exactly.' I said.
Dear Mr Burns,said the letter,
This is your annual mental health check-up, which has been designed so that you can administer it to yourself easily and conveniently at home when you have nothing else to do, and save us the trouble…The rest I knew by heart, as I'd read it every year for the last ten years. Blah, blah,
As always, if you have any questions or difficulties, read the instructions or ask someone else. I've done my bit.'Is it OK with you if I'm on radio silence for the next minute or so?' I asked Fraser.Yours sincerely,
Dr. Friedrich Freud,
Mental Wellness Clinic.
'Sure,' said Fraser. 'I'll do mine now too, otherwise they'll keep on sending them until I'm up to my neck in bits of paper and e-diagnostic neurosensors.'
'Where is it?' the phone asked.
'On the table in between the spoon and the environmentally sound wooden yoghourt pot.'
'I see it,' said the phone. It lit up, scanned the code with a blue laser beam and started to talk to me.
Find somewhere quiet, where you will not be disturbed for one minute. Put the e-diagnostic neurosensors into your ears — they're the things that look like liquorice comfits — the white one goes in your right ear and the black one goes in your left ear. Remember, white is right.When you are ready to take the test, open the small envelope and look at the design on the card inside. When the music starts, you will have thirty seconds to think about the image on the card. Try to see what it is and how you relate to it. What shape or pattern does the image suggest? Does anything about the image immediately stand out to you?
There are no right answers, so whatever you say, it's wrong. It is not necessary to speak aloud nor to close your eyes. When the music stops, put the card face down and think normally. Your mental health will be measured and you will be told the result. You cannot stop the test and resume it later. You will not have a chance to change your interpretation. Are you ready?
'Is it safe?' I asked the phone.
'Scrounger Charlotte of Cambridge and His Highness Scrounger Louis appeared on the British Brainwashing Corporation telly-stream and said mental health was important, being mentally ill was nothing to be ashamed of and the screening test was perfectly safe,' said the phone, 'but they didn't know anything about it.'
said the phone.
'Are there newly discovered side effects?' I asked.
'Sore ears,' said the phone.
'I can live with that.' I said, 'start the test.'
I opened the envelope. On the card was a black, formless smudge that didn't resemble anything I could think of. Last year was easier because the smudge had resembled a boot, unless it was a shovel. This year — well, deciding what it was wouldn't become any easier by putting off looking at it.
The music began, and I tried to make sense of the shape. It's obviously a living thing, I thought. Maybe two mice in a barn, stealing seed corn? Or are they weasels, wandering through a forest, between two trees? Or it could be a farmer between two tall, thin cows. Then again, it might be two witches in black, pointed hats, flying on broomsticks over the roof of some accursed victim's cottage. Or if I squinted at it, it looked a bit like two bats flying from their roost in search of insects.
The music stopped, and for a second there came a quiet, but insistent, clicking, buzzing, hissing and humming from the e-diagnostic neurosensors as they psycho-analysed my brain, much in the way that X-ray cameras had analysed bones and sinews for the past two hundred years. I put the card down and watched the results of my mental health check-up appear on the phone.
Nothing to worry about,it said.
Do you allow this phone to send that report to your GP clinic?'Go ahead, send it,' I said. The phone reminded me that to avoid waste and pollution I shouldn't throw the e-diagnostic neurosensors in the rubbish but wipe them clean with a damp cloth and return them to my local clinic, and that was my mental wellness check-up finished for another year.
Fraser did his mental health test at the same time as me, and I saw him reading his result with consternation.
'Is everything all right, love?' I asked him.
'I'm not sure,' he said. 'I got the same design as you, but I thought it was an upside down milking stool, or a tea strainer. Anyway, there's the report, on the phone.'
‘ “Nothing much to worry about,” ’ Fraser read aloud. ‘ “Anxiety, Fixation, Libido and Œdipus Complexity are all within the normal range—” ’'Those could be a lot worse,' I said, 'there's nothing too wrong there.'
'Yes, but look at these.'
Stress is high, at 44'All that stress is doing you no good,' I said. 'We need a pet. Cats are nice. They sort of soak up anxiety and depression like a mop soaks up puddles.'.
Fantasy is low, at 2.
These measurements suggest a mild neurosis or possibly displaced repression. There is no cure for either of those conditions but they normally go away by themselves in a couple of years. If you want a more precise diagnosis, your next step is a Dream Test. A Dream Test is free and you can take it in your sleep, in your own home. Tell me whether you want to learn more about the Dream Test and how to take it.
'That's not quite what the test result says. See?' He held his phone up for me to see his results. 'At the bottom there. I need my dreams tested. It doesn't say I need a pussy-cat. It says I sleep wrong.'
'We could still improve your mental wellness if we adopted a cat,' I said, but Fraser didn't appear to be interested. 'I would like a cat that looked like Wilberforce the Wildcat, the one on all the stamps, only less vicious.'
Do you allow this phone to send that report to your GP clinic?
'Yes,' said Fraser, 'I suppose sending this report to the doctor won't do any harm, seeing as MI-6, the CIA, the MSS in Beijing and the SVR in Moskvá have already seen it by now,' and he told his phone
to go ahead
, send the report to the clinic and sort out a dream test
I just caught the bacon in time and I shared it between us. Another minute, and it would have caught fire and wasted a perfectly good pig.
As we ate it, both our phones lit up and broadcast a short trumpet blast and a lady's voice saying, 'Ordinary people! Stand by for an important announcement,' in a tone of voice that implied — almost certainly falsely — that the announcement which was about to follow was so important that everybody except the toffs and the Scrounger Family ought to stop what they were doing and listen to it. 'This is news of the highest importance. Take care not to miss it.'
I stopped eating and listened carefully.
An actor wearing a white coat and with an e-stethoscope around his neck appeared and read the autocue. 'The latest St Andrews Coronavirus Vaccine has been tested and approved. The known issues with the Third and previous formulae have been carefully bodged and the improved version has been rushed out. This version of the St Andrews Coronavirus Vaccine has no known side effects, because nobody has been injected with it yet. This important development brings the pandemic to within measurable distance of its end. All ordinary people should make appointments with the local clinic to receive two injections two weeks apart. The production facility at Strathkinness will produce ten million doses before the end of this week, which is enough for every…'
'No, it won't,' said Fraser.
'Yes, it will.' said the phone.
'Shut up,' I said to the phone.
'Sorry,' it responded, and it went quiet.
'I'll come with you if you like, sweetheart,' I said to Fraser, 'if you're going to get yours and you need someone to hold your hand.'
'I don't think I'll bother,' said Fraser. 'It's only for ordinary people, and I'm not ordinary, am I? If it were as good as they crack it up to be, the toffs would be first in line and we'd be on the waiting list for the waiting list. Come to think of it, what is an ordinary person?'
'An ordinary person,' explained the phone, 'is a member of a hard-working family. He, or she, is not special in any way. He does not pontificate on television about things of which he is spectacularly ignorant, earns the National Standard Wage or a little more, does not own a house, is not a member of Parliament, is not married to a member of Parliament, and is not related to the Scrounger Family.
'Silence,' I told the phone.
'Yes, O great one,' said the phone. 'Was that intervention helpful?'
'Extremely,' I lied, 'and lay off the sarcasm.'
'Yes, O great one,' the phone said again. 'Your wish is my command.'
When we'd eaten all the bacon and drunk a couple of cups of tea, Fraser left for his office, and I realised that I wanted to go into town today. My wallet was empty, but it was dole day. My phone told me £315 had been paid into my bank account, which good news meant I could print some cash. The printer was ready to use, enough paper in the hopper and enough ink in the inkwells, and it printed a hundred pounds in tens and twenties for me, enough for a return bus fare, a cup of tea and a sandwich. When you're out of work, that's what you buy on a good day. Did people really use to walk to the perfectly warm, dry bank and then stand queueing in the street outside, clutching umbrellas to ward off sheets of pouring rain, waiting their turn to get their own money out of their own accounts? I tried to imagine what desperation must have driven them there while I found the scissors and cut along the dotted lines to separate the notes.
Today I had promised to go and make a witness statement about Fraser being shot at.
There was a queue of people outside the Police station on Letsby Avenue. I found myself standing in the car park behind a constable who was keeping an eye on a man in a wheelchair, with his left leg in plaster and wearing a suit, saying things to him like 'Sit still, Mr Moore, you don't want the Police dogs to think you're trying to run away, do you?' to a very cowed, quiet man, obviously shaken by his mental picture of being savaged by Lassie the Wonder Dog. Moore eventually piped up, 'I'm cold,' to which the officer replied that only three civilians were allowed into the Police station at a time and at the moment the officers were busily dealing with a particularly unpleasant letter which its recipient thought might be offensive to somebody else, and when they'd finished that, they would surely get around to dealing with a motorist breaking the speed limit and causing injury..
I had probably been in the Police car park, watching the Police cars come and go, for a couple of hours before the desk sergeant called Mr Moore and his escort inside. I could hear them and if I stood on tip-toe I could see them through the window.
'Mark Moore, sergeant,' said the escort.
'Thank you, McSparks.' The escort disappeared into the back of the office and the desk sergeant read from a computer screen in front of him. 'Mr Mark Moore, date of birth 28 June 2044. God, you're in a state, aren't you.'
'Yes.' said Mr Moore, 'I am.'
'Believed to be responsible for a collision with a blue Aurora on Beetroot Boulevard yesterday, injuring yourself and three other people, one of them seriously. Is that right?'
'Well, Officer,' said Mr Moore, 'I didn't see the Aurora coming towards me, because…'
'Sergeant.' insisted the sergeant. 'Well, Sergeant. I'm Sergeant McGarrison. At the moment, we don't have all the witness reports, so we can't bring a case in court yet.'
'I can make a witness statement if you want,' said Mr Moore.
'Witness report, Mr Moore, witness report. “Witness statement” sounded too intimidating and remote from people's everyday experience, so we called it a witness report instead.
'I see,' said Mr Moore. 'Sorry.'
'Your position is, if you agree that you crashed into the Aurora, you can admit the crime here and now and the Police will decide on the penalty, or without admitting any liability you can wait until your case comes up and then you can go to the Ordinary Court, the Toff Court or the Motoring Court.'
'Excuse my ignorance,' said Mr Moore, 'but what's the difference between them?'
'If you're guilty, the Ordinary Court can impose a Behaviour Order, fine you or send you to Amazon,' Sergeant McGarrison explained, 'the Toff Court doesn't send anybody to Amazon but it costs more, and the Motoring Court deals with motoring offenders by letting them off completely.'
Moore though and shook his head for a moment. 'Sergeant, rather than having this court case hanging over my head for months, I prefer to accept liability here and now.'
'A sensible decision, Mr Moore,' said Sergeant McGarrison, pulling two sheets of paper out of the printer, 'please have a look at the form. You do not have to sign anything but it may harm your face if you don't write what I tell you to. Up here,' he pointed, 'is today's date and place. This,' he pointed to the next line, 'is the nature of the offence, time, date and place. 'Here,' he pointed to the next section, 'is where the computer has forged your confession and your signature. Are you OK with that?'
'Yes, sergeant,' said Mr Moore. 'Well, actually, this description isn't completely—'
'Good,' Sergeant McGarrison interrupted, 'now, right at the bottom of the form is the penalty, to which you have agreed by having your signature forged. Careless driving, causing serious injury by careless driving, exceeding the speed limit and driving an unroadworthy vehicle on the public highway, that will be a fine of fifty pence and a driving ban of ten minutes.'
'That's harsh,' said Mr Moore, shaking his head miserably as Sergeant McGarrison gave him the second copy of the form. 'What am I going to do?' There was a note of rising panic in Moore's voice. 'I need my car for work. I might have to walk a whole mile if the bus doesn't come. How am I going to visit my children, who live three miles away next to a railway station where a train stops every fifteen minutes? How can I fetch the shopping from McSainsbury's? How shall I carry food and water to the beggars on the street and in the Lord's name perform good works and many miracles? How shall I—'
'How many beggars are there on your street?' Sergeant McGarrison asked.
'None, actually,' said Mr Moore, 'only lots of parked luxury cars, but if there were—'
'Motoring sentences aren't as lenient as the Daily Sponge says they are. One other thing,' said the sergeant, 'this separate leaflet is issued by Scottish Telly-stream. They're making a programme about road accidents and they'd like a few motorists to describe the collisions they experienced, reconstruct them for the cameras and try to make the Police look like saviours and super-heroes. Here,' he handed the leaflet to Mr Moore, 'phone them if you're interested.'
'I can't cope without a car,' Mr Moore continued pleading. 'I will go mad! I'll get anaclectic cathexis! I'll get psychosometric condensation! On top of my broken leg, my life will be unbearable. People I've never heard of will laugh and point at me in the street, saying “There goes one of the great un-carred” I'll get—'
'Well,' said Sergeant McGarrison as though he could stand no more of Moore's nauseating self pity, 'if you can't drive, don't. Go down the corridor here, pay the fine to the cashier on the last desk down there, sit and wait for another,' he looked up at the clock, 'eight and a half minutes, and then you are allowed to drive home. Although since you're in a wheelchair with one leg in plaster and your car is in a workshop somewhere being welded back together, I wouldn't advise it.'
'How am I going to get home, then?' asked Mr Moore.
'Sparky!' the sergeant called, and Constable McSparks re-appeared by the desk. 'Push Mr Moore home.'
I was still standing just outside the front entrance in the freezing cold. Sergeant McGarrison yelled 'Next!' loudly enough for me to hear him.
'I've come to make a witness report about my friend Fraser Farmsbarn,' I told him, 'who was shot at…'
'Ah, yes. Constable Polgaze spoke to you and Mr Farmsbarn yesterday morning about the shooting, didn't he?' He stared at the computer screen. 'We just need to put some flesh on the bones of this story. Can you remember the shot being fired?'
'It's not the sort of thing that you forget about,' I said.
'Whereabouts were you both standing at the time?'
We passed twenty minutes or so writing a detailed account of the shooting, and Sergeant McGarrison said he and his colleagues would find the assailant in the next few days. Then, out of curiosity, I asked what the peculiarly unpleasant post in Blah! had been. I knew Blah! well. Blah! usually lived in a universe where making a cheese sandwich was important and interesting enough to send an illustrated written account of to hundreds of thousands of imaginary friends, who in return asked for the recipe.
'Well,' said Sergeant McGarrison, 'it'll be in all the papers tomorrow…'
'I shall make sure of that,' I thought.
'…so there's no sensible reason not to tell you. I interviewed the director of the Scottish Health Service after one of their staff, a Dr Friedrich Freud, posted a racist remark.'
'It must have said something awfully foul, to require immediate action to suppress it as urgently as that?'
'In a post about the mental wellness check, he posted, "White is right." '
'Sort of subliminal message,' I said, 'being as it was about ear-pieces.'
'Exactly. Who knows what it could've led to? He'll be out of work for the rest of his life, and serve him right. Next!'
I was half asleep in a chair when Fraser came home from the office. He was carrying a cardboard carton the size of a box of chocolates.
'Someone left this at the foot of the stair,' he said.
'Is it for me?' I asked him. 'Who's it addressed to?'
'Me. I think it's my new No-Phone, freshly posted from McBogtrotter's. I ordered it a month ago.'
'Why did it take so long? What's special about it?' I had never heard of McBogtrotter's.
'It's come all the way from Lanark,' said Fraser, tugging the vege-tape off the carton and trying to pull it open.
'If my calculations are correct,' I said, 'that's an average speed of one mile a day.'
'I guess it's been delayed due to coronavirus,' said Fraser. 'But it's worth waiting for. A stratospheric advance in communication technology. It's a big improvement on the usual phone, because people can't ring you up on it.'
Fraser had managed to open the carton. The new No-Phone looked like an impressively heavy square panel of plate glass, about two inches by three and transparent.
'What a beautiful piece of engineering,' I observed. 'stylish, simple, just the right size and functional with no ikons or writing to confuse you. So, with that phone, you can get on with whatever you want to do without being interrupted by Wally from Wet Weather Windows.'
'Yes! It really is that good, and apart from leaving you in peace,' Fraser rattled off, 'it's pretty much anything you ever need. It's an alarm clock, an atlas, a bank card, a book, a browser, a calculator, a camera, a cheque-book, a cigarette lighter, a coaster, it does email, it's a kaleidoscope, it's a loud-hailer, it's a microscope, it's a mouth organ, it's a night-light, it's a photograph album, a radio, a shoe-horn, a sound recorder, a spanner, a telescope, a telly-stream, an umbrella, a watch and a weather forecast, all in one small slab of unbelievably complicated vitreo-moles. Nothing in it can wear out or break, unless you drop it in the bath, of course.'
'Can it do X-ray specs?'
'Yes,' Fraser nodded. 'Watch this. No-Phone,' he commanded, 'X-ray specs.'
'Sir!' the phone responded, Army style.
Fraser turned the phone towards the wall that separated the kitchen, where we were, from the living room, where we weren't. On the screen we could make out the armchairs, the table, the book-case and the fireplace in the living room, and beyond that a hazy image of the neighbour and his girl-friend sitting on the sofa, watching Lassie the Wonder Dog on Animal Stream Plus Six and eating cheap synthe-popcorn out of a drab but environmentally sensitive brown paper bag. We noticed a poster on the wall behind them:
'How do they do that?' I asked, astonished.
'Well, actually,' said Fraser, seizing the opportunity to remind me that he graduated in mathematics and quantum physics and I had three SCEs, 'the technique of de-opacification has been known to exist since the seventeenth century but it's hard to do and every attempt so far has either been stopped because of privacy considerations, or—’
‘Do you mean it's all right for the toffs to surveille us, but not the other way around?’
'Well, yes. But there was also the problem of not having precise enough measurements. You have to generate a beat frequency within the visible spectrum by shining a pencil beam quartz photo-oscillator at about 150 gigaherz into the Brownian field of naturally occurring extraneous luciferoids… Are you with me so far?
'So it's a phone,' I yawned, 'except people can't ring you up and it fetches sticks when you throw them?'
'Yes. That's the whole idea. If it catches on, the nuisance call industry will grind to a shuddering halt.'
'Sooner the better. But can you phone other people?' I asked.
'Yes. Provided they aren't using a No-Phone as well, of course.'
'It sounds like a world beating unique sales proposition,' I said. 'Does it play those awful public information announcements?'
'Only if you turn it on,' said Fraser. 'Of course it costs more than an ordinary phone but it's worth the extra. And it's made in Scotland.'
'There's a factory left in Scotland?' I was very surprised. 'Where they make things? I thought they all closed down years ago.'
'McBogtrotter of Lanark,' Fraser read off the packet. 'You and I should go and visit them one day, before they go belly-up like everyone else has. They are one of the new conglomerates. They make everything from sliced bread to woollen socks and mobile phones, but in small numbers because they only have one factory and a handful of workers and they're in Lanark.'
'It will be a sad, desolate glimpse of a world long extinct,' I said. 'Jobs, production, sales, procurement, all those functions of business, maybe even workers bringing their dinner with them in biscuit tins and eating them at the bench. Of course we'll go there and see what it was like, before it all fades away.'
'Isn't it in the Gàidhealtachd? I can't speak Gaelic. We'll be turned back at the Gaelic line.'
'Lanark?' I repeated. 'No, the Gàidhealtachd starts a hundred miles north of Lanark. You've no need to worry, my sugar coated glacé cherry. Why don't you get your Secure Gaelic Language Test? It isn't hard. I did it and I don't speak a word of the language. We could go to the northern coast if you had it.'
'I don't take the test because I can't speak Gaelic, of course.'
'Ach, you only need a G-1,' I said. 'All you have to do is count from one to five, repeat a couple of sentences, identify two malt whiskies by colour and taste, know the rules of shinty, sing Scotland the Brave and pay £600. It took me a week.'
'To be honest,' Fraser said, 'I can do all that, but I can't stand the thought of being intimately searched in front of the entire room full of candidates. If I pay extra, will they search me in a private room?'
'You could try bribing the invigilator to search one of the other candidates twice. That might work. But if you only want to go to Lanark, you can forget it — all you need is your ID card and a muzzle for on the train. And a return fare of £79·80, of course.'
'In that case,' he said without hesitation, 'include me in.'
'By the way,' I observed to Fraser, 'I discovered that four reasonably sized buildings in the Rolf Harris hospital have been dedicated to the care of coronavirus patients, and guess what? There are no coronavirus patients, and there haven't been any for years. Does that count as a waste of taxpayers' money in your book?'
'It sounds like one, doesn't it?' Fraser answered. 'Have you got any more details?'
'Only the map they gave me when I went to get my vaccination yesterday,' I said, 'and I can't remember where I put it.'
'You can't remember where you put the vaccination?' Fraser asked.
'No, I meant that I had the map of the hospital in my pocket and I can't remember where I put it.'
Standing at the sink, I noticed the two pairs of e-diagnostic neurosensors that we'd used yesterday to take the mental wellness test. 'I'll take these back to the hospital,' I said, 'they said they'd like them back.' I told the E-Brillo pad to clean them gently and carefully, and then I dried them and put them into my shirt pocket.
I found Fraser's answer encouraging. That, of course, was the reason you had newspapers at all: to point out injustice and stupidity and keep on stating the obvious until the problems were solved. That and advertising greenhouses.
As we ate our bacon sandwiches for breakfast the next day, my phone trilled and lit up. 'Scottish Telly-stream is calling, Barnabas,' it said. 'Shall I accept their call?'
'Yes,' I said, 'put them through.'
'Hello! Is Barnabas Burns there?' asked a voice that I didn't recognise.
'Yes,' I replied, 'this is me.'
'I'm Finlay Fowler from Scottish Telly-stream. I'm with News Division. I'm the producer of Panic, the early evening discussion programme. Have you seen it?'
'Yes,' I said, meaning 'No,' 'I always watch it.'
We're planning a feature about road accidents and the way the number of collisions has shot up because of driverless cars, and we hear that you witnessed an accident on the road outside the Rolf Harris yesterday. Is that right?'
'Well, not really. I was on a bus that got diverted away from the main entrance because of a collision on the road outside, but that's all. I had my appointment postponed because they had to treat the casualties immediately. That's all I know, really.'
'Hold on for a moment, if that's all right, while I consult my colleagues.' There was some muttering in the background for a few seconds. 'Yes, we'd be interested in taking your story, if you're happy to share it with us. Can you come to the Stalin Studio at ten o'clock tomorrow morning?'
'Yes. All right.'
'Ask for me, Finley Fowler, at Reception. See you there. Goodbye for now!'
When I looked up, Fraser had left for the office. I realised that I hadn't said goodbye to him. Funny how such a little thing can be so upsetting.
'Phone,' I said, 'ring Fraser. I want to talk to him.'
'This is Fraser Farmsbarn's No-Phone,' said the voice at the far end. 'You cannot speak to Fraser Farmsbarn because he doesn't like phone calls.'
'It's Barnabas,' I said. 'Barnabas Burns, his boyfriend.'
'I told you, he doesn't like phone calls.'
'But…,' I began.
'Yes?' said the No-Phone.
'I love him.'
'Oh, how sweet. Why didn't you say so? Just this once, then, I'll ask him. Hang on a second.'
I heard a muffled conversation for a few seconds and then Fraser's voice said clearly, 'Hi, darling!'
'I'm just ringing because I didn't get the chance to say goodbye to you this morning.'
'Oh, how sweet. I had to get into the office early. I'll ask a few questions about the hospital being half empty. Don't worry, I'll be back in time this evening. Kisses! What did Scottish Telly-stream want?'
'Me. For a programme feature about road accidents. Tomorrow morning.'
'Your illustrious career on stage and screen is about to begin, then, sweety. Don't forget about me when you're rich and famous. See you tonight!'
I had no idea what Scottish Telly-stream was going to want from me, since I hadn't seen the collision. All that had happened to me was an inconveniently long walk to the main gate of the hospital and a late arrival at an appointment that had been cancelled anyway. Still, I clung to the illusion that whatever I had seen, heard and done was important enough to be part of a programme about the collision between Mr Moore and Mr Cayman in a Mangrove and Mr Nicholls and Mrs Fortescue in an Auspicious, or something like that.
'Phone,' I said, 'play the BBC.'
'Good morning, ordinary people! This is the British Brainwashing Corporation.
It is ten o'clock. Here is the Beijing Time Signal for ten hundred hours.
'Buckingham Old Toffs Home has announced that His Highness Scrounger Archibald, also known as Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor, will succeed to the Throne following the tragic death last July of His Majesty the Scrounger George IX from a surfeit of money. The coronation will take place on Tuesday 4 June next year.
'A Kevin Air Boeing 737 Max aeroplane has flown the 2,300 miles from Los Angeles to Washington DC in 5 hours 30 minutes without crashing.
'This year's Thunberg Prize for Climate Stability has been awarded to The Falkland Islands, whose annual average temperature has risen by only 1½°F since 1985.
'Mr Tedrick McTozer, who won the jackpot of nearly £48 Mn on the National Lottery four days ago, has bought a house.'
The next morning we had breakfast together. Fraser had to be in the office on time, which left me alone in the kitchen, cleaning up and generally finding things to do that didn't really need to be done at all.
'Phone,' I told it, 'I need a good laugh. Is Jerry Springer on? It's my favourite programme.'
'No,' said the phone. 'Jerry Springer has been cancelled by all channels.'
'At last,' I said. 'Why am I not surprised?'
'Great,' I said, 'it's my other favourite programme. Leave it running as background noise.'
The epic American railroad show with its century-old futurist designs had aged remarkably well. It simply had not been recognised as a work of genius at the time. I checked that the diagnostic neuro-sensors which Fraser and I had used for the mental wellness test were still in my shirt pocket. Since they were obviously both expensive and re-usable, I planned to return them to the clinic as they had requested.
My phone lit up.
'Your boyfriend is calling,' it said.
My heart leapt. 'Shut the telly-stream up and put him through!'
'Barnabas,' said Fraser, 'do we still have that food flask in the kitchen?'
'Yes,' I said, 'why?'
'Do me a favour. Cook some lunch and bring it to my office around mid-day. I'll make some tea. It's been an interesting morning. I want to reach out and share it with you and I'm too busy to go out for a lunch break.'
‘ “Reach out and share it?” What language is that? What does it mean?’ I asked.
'American. It means "phone me up." Someone's probably listening to the phone call, and whoever it is probably doesn't speak the American language.'
'Not even the C.I.A.?'
'They don't speak English.' said Fraser, who had at one time or another watched a lot of television. 'So they will understand “reach out,” but nothing else.
'Good thinking, Lassie,' I said, 'I can certainly heat up, er…,' I looked along the line of tins for something suitable, 'stewed steak, kippers or hot lamb curry. Any preference?'
'Whichever's closest, sweetheart.' Fraser said. 'See you later! I have to go because the Fashion Correspondent wants a cup of tea pronto.'
'Whatever's closest would be hot lamb curry,' I told him.
'In that case, sweetie,' Fraser changed his mind, 'whichever's farthest away. Bye for now.'
Fraser hung up, I opened the tin of steak, and the phone went back to the news.
'In local news, a demonstration by militant vegetarians has completely closed Blackberry Bridge.' There were pictures of otherwise normal people waving banners, cuddling fluffy toy pigs and throwing tomato ketchup bombs at anyone who stood still for long enough. 'Those making inessential journeys across town are advised to stay at home in order to avoid being jostled by the rowdy crowds, instead of staying at home in order to avoid catching corona-virus like they usually have to. Film at eleven…Bother! A riotous mob bent on stopping me getting into the Scot's office was exactly what I didn't want when I was planning to walk to Fraser's office carrying a flask of hot steak stew.
★7 Supertrain, fl. 1978, really existed. According to records kept at the time, it was one of the worst television programmes ever.
6. The Break-in
There was a noisy crowd on Blackberry Bridge, outside the office of The Scot newspaper. Fights had already broken out between the hundred or so demonstrators wearing 'Cows' lives matter,' and similar badges and shoppers catching the bus home or workers walking back to work carrying tins of corned beef or ham sandwiches. The Police were elbowing their way to the injured, who were lying on the ground and being trampled underfoot. The protestors were yelling slogans while, in return, the shoppers and the workers yelled abuse. The continual crash of breaking glass and the honking of delayed cars rose above the noise of disorder.
When I carried the food flask into Fraser's office, he sat up, paused in the middle of making another pot of tea and asked, 'Barnabas, how on earth did you manage to carry that through the crowd without being torn limb from limb?'
'The hardest part was getting past the Track-and-Tracer-matic,' I said.
'But how come you weren't gored by two men in a pantomime cow on the way over? I mean,' he pointed out of his office window at the chaos in the street, 'look at it!'
'The secret,' I said, 'is the yellow jacket. See?'
I turned around so that Fraser could see I had painted Emergency Vegetables on a yellow bath towel and tied it around my neck. 'Then all I had to do was to put the food flask into a greengrocer's carrier bag, and the rest was easy. Someone even gave me a cabbage and two onions on the way across.'
'It doesn't look in the least like a high visibility jacket,' said Fraser.
'It doesn't have to look like a high visibility jacket,' I said as I untied the towel from around my neck and draped it over a chair. 'It just has to make me look as though I don't eat meat so I don't get dragged into a fist-fight. Anyway, my vanilla and angelica flavoured ice-cream soda with a glacé cherry on a cocktail stick, this is your lunch.'
I unscrewed the food flask and added, 'Stewed Food Ltd.'s finest steak and dumplings with carrots. And I have a raw cabbage and two raw onions if you want them.'
'They sound like the sort of thing that's better cooked.'
'They do, don't they?' I said. 'We'll have them for dinner with something. Here, I brought spoons and forks.'
Fraser began eating out of the flask. I took some stew as well.
'Now,' I asked him, 'what did you want to tell me?'
'The Rolf Harris keeping four buildings empty is going to be big news,' he began. 'The paper hadn't quite got all its ducks in a row when it started the campaign, so a big local story…'
We'd had maybe five minutes to ourselves when Sir Marmaduke Magnox rapped on the office door and marched in — left, right, left, right — without waiting for an answer. 'Farmsbarn,' he asked, not noticing me, the flask of hot stew, the clattering cutlery or the smell of gravy, 'how is your search for wastes of public money getting along?'
'Quite well, sir,' said Fraser. 'I have discovered that four buildings in the Rolf Harris Hospital are completely empty and have no patients in them at all. In fact, they have had no patients in them for more than fifty years.'
'Good Lord, are you sure?' Sir Marmaduke was taken aback. 'How much are they costing us?'
'The salaries of at least a dozen staff. That might be anything up to four and a half million pounds a year in staff costs alone. The staff are there to deal with the coronavirus emergency, but there hasn't been a single covid patient in any of the buildings for sixty-something years. Plus building maintenance, ground rent, insurance and opportunity costs.'
'That certainly does bear investigation, Farmsbarn,' said Sir Marmaduke. 'Well done and thank you for finding it. Get out there and find out what you can. Scare a carer! Embarrass the Rolf Harris! I like it. With any luck we'll get the next instalment of our campaign out of this story.'
'Thank you, sir,' said Fraser.
'Certainly, sir,' said Fraser, and Sir Marmaduke marched out of the office and out of sight along the corridor.
Fraser pushed the last couple of spoonfuls of stew across to me. 'Finish this, sweetie,' he said, 'it's really nice. Thanks for bringing it.' He found the red mug, made tea in it, kissed me — 'I'll be back in a minute and then I'm going out to the hospital. See what I can see. Do you want to come?' — and took the tea out of the office.
We met at the bus stop on Blackberry Bridge. The riot was moving slowly northwards. Fraser pointed to the south, and I followed him. He was giving out a sort of musical noise, loud enough to be heard over the yelling and the shattering glass, which if you listened to it carefully turned out to be He Thinks She Likes You by Bring Me The Fortissimo.
'Fraser,' I said, 'I don't want to sound as though I were complaining unreasonably or anything, but
you're
playing a tune.'
'Yes,' said Fraser, 'I'm tuned to Kevin Wireless.
But if it's making your life unbearable I'll tell it to be quieter.'
'Actually, I quite like the music. But why
are ypu
playing it?'
'Darling, it's my new breakfast cereal. Radio Flakes.
The paper's food reporter, Raïna Ramsey, gave them to me. She said the cereal company gave her a variety pack of four one-portion boxes, and she'd eaten the two that she liked. So I opened the Kevin Wireless ones and ate it, and I didn't think you'd want the Country and Western ones, so I gave that box to the charity shop. But I'll go back and fetch it if you want it.'
'No, thanks,' I said. 'That would be the shop that raises money for Bullet Holes, wouldn't it?'
'Yes,' he said. 'I noticed that, too. After I gave them the cereal box, I told them I'd been shot at, and I asked if they had any advice.'
'And did they?'
'They gave me a leaflet and advised me to read it.' He held it up. 'What to do if someone is shooting at you, second edition.'
'I suppose this is an obvious question,' I replied, 'but did it say anything that wasn't in the first edition?'
'Yes. They added a fourth thing to do, after "Hide," "Shout 'Help!' " and "Give a lot of money to Bullet Holes," they've added "Shoot back."
'Um… That would never have occurred to me,' I said, although it might well have.
The breakfast cereal reached the end of He Thinks She Likes You, and the programme presenter mumbled something about how tenderly and expressively Cathy Crosspatch played the electric harpsichord in the middle eight. Then the radio played a merry coronavirus education jingle called 'I Could Have Coughed All Night' and moved on to Remember Tomorrow by Sundream Brooks and The Drumchapel Thunderbolt.
'And the other funny thing is,' Fraser went on, 'there was a horse tied to the mechanical Jehovah's Witness outside the shop. A huge great Percheron.'
'A horse!' I said, surprised. 'That's not something you see every day on Shallot Chaussée. The boss must have been paying his annual visit. No wonder he needs a half-million pound salary.'
We were still walking south as we talked and listened to Kevin Radio. The buses were being diverted around the crowd, so Fraser and I left all trace of stewed steak in Fraser's office and shoved our way south and we waited opposite the rather magnificent office of the Scottish Medical Association. As we held hands and waited at the temporary bus stop, a man of sixty, maybe more, came out of the side entrance and crossed the road. He looked very shaken, as though he were holding back tears. It occurred to me that he might just have been diagnosed with some awful disease or, worse, someone he loved might have been diagnosed with one. With half the Scottish Health Service working on coronavirus, treatment for other dread diseases was rationed, if it could be had at all. There were tears on his cheeks. I asked him if he was feeling all right. It was a stupid thing to ask, but I couldn't think of anything else.
He caught his breath and said, 'I was fired.'
'You lost your job?' I asked unnecessarily.
'I shall never work again,' he said, wiping his eyes. 'Excuse me… I lived for my patients. I won't be able to cope with having nothing to do.'
'What a dreadful thing to have to live with,' said Fraser. 'What happened?'
'I pioneered the use of e-diagnostic neuro-sensors,' the passenger said, miserably. 'Everyone in Scotland had taken a mental wellness assessment before most other countries had even thought about it. The English still think mental wellness comes from telling everybody else how miserable you are. The public health team found that the most common mistake patients make when they're taking the test at home was putting the sensors into the wrong ears. People were being admitted to psychiatric hospital with biphasal counter-transference or manifest latency when they really had athlete's foot and a runny nose. So in the leaflet that goes with the sensors, I needed a simple, arresting, easily remembered phrase to help them get it right, and I wrote, “White is right.” Short, striking, and it rhymes—'
'White is right,' said Fraser, interrupting him. 'You must be Dr Friedrich Freud. I read about you in the paper.'
Actually, you didn't, I thought. You haven't even written it in the paper yet. But you are quickly transforming yourself into a first rate reporter.
'The finest mental wellness speciaist in the whole of Scotland,' Fraser continued. 'It's an honour to sit next to you, sir. I don't see how the rest of them will manage without you.'
'Oh, they will certainly manage. Whether they will manage successfully is another matter altogether, of course. I hear that Ansel Atkinson's daughter Alimonia is out of Amazon and looking for work.'
'So you've been put on trial by a kangaroo court and found guilty,' said Fraser. 'Did you have a lawyer with you?'
'I earn four hundred and fifty thousand pounds a year,' said Dr Freud. 'How do you think I can afford a lawyer?'
'Can you remember what the charge was?' Fraser asked.
'Vividly,' said Dr Freud, ' “Expressing an improper opinion without a licence.” '
'Can you remember the names of the investigators?' Fraser asked.
'Very easily. Dr Ansel Atkinson OSH was the judge, Dr Chloë Cook was the jury and Professor Hans Highpoint was the expert witness. Of course, Highpoint died a hundred years ago so they spoke to him through a medium.'
'Did Professor Highpoint speak to you?' I asked, never having heard of, let alone attended, a trial where one of the witnesses was dead. 'How did that work out?'.
'Can't complain,' said Dr Freud. 'A bit like Sodaphone. I never heard the Professor actually speak, but the medium did.'
'You don't happen to remember the name of the medium?' Fraser asked.
'Yes — such an odd name, it kind of sticks in my memory. Magic Madeleine.'
'What kind of evidence did she relay from the other side?' Fraser asked.
'Purport to relay,' said Dr Freud. 'Not relay. Purport to relay. She purported to relay Highpoint's opinion that modern psycho-analysis is not supported by evidence and that patients recover faster if they don't see a psycho-analyst than if they do, and secondly that Danish pastries have improved since he last ate one.'
'Is that true?' Fraser asked.
'Yes, with modern wheatgerm flour and centralised continuous production—'
Fraser interrupted him. 'I mean, about the patients recovering faster.'
'Yes,' said Dr Freud, 'but I wasn't on a charge of making patients take longer to recover. The case was about the instructions for the diagnostic neurosensors that went out a few days ago. I coined the phrase “White is right,” which was of course a reminder of which way around to put the sensors. They had re-interpreted the phrase and then taken offence at their interpretation of it.'
Dr Freud looked at me for reassurance, and I nodded back. He continued, 'The two halves of the brain are quite different, so the data store has to know which neurosensor is on the right and which one is on the left. And then, of course, someone in the Opinion Police decided that the opinion which I never held anyway was actionable.'
Dr Freud looked out of the window and asked, 'How long before we arrive at Cherry Church?'
'I'm afraid you're going the wrong way,' I said. 'This bus is going north.'
'Oh, dear,' said Dr Freud, 'So keen am I to get away from the Scottish Medical Association and all their works and wiles that I boarded the first bus that came along without paying attention to which bus it was, in order to travel as far away from them as possible. It's inattention with intent.'
I said 'Next stop, please,' and the bus slowed and stopped outside Office Opulence. Dr Freud left the bus and crossed the road to wait for the bus going south.
'See those chairs?' I said, looking at a couple of office chairs in the window of Office Opulence.
'They must have been there for months, if not years,' said Fraser. 'It's an office equipment shop and it qualifies as an non-essential business, so it isn't allowed to open.'
'They look to me like C642, swivel office chair, padded seat and arms, five leg castor base,' I recalled.
'You're imagining things,' said Fraser.
Half an hour later, Fraser and I were walking into the Rolf Harris Hospital through the main gate.
I remembered that in my pocket I still had our used e-diagnostic neuro-sensors. I went into the Can You Tell What It Is Yet building and explained to the receptionist that, as the leaflet that came in the same padded envelope as the Mental Wellness test had asked, I had cleaned our two pairs of neuro-sensors and I was bringing them back to the hospital for re-cycling. She picked them up gingerly, as if they had both been covered in a thick film of fast-acting lethal germs, looked around the floor under the desk and put them down again.
'I think someone must've taken the waste-paper bin away for cleaning,' she said. 'There's a rubbish bin outside the entrance door, on the left. Can you see it?'
'That brown bucket shaped thing marked "Rubbish" with rubbish in it?'
'That's it. Could you drop them in there for me?'
'Pleasure,' I replied.
Outside in the forecourt we said 'Hi' to the group of coronavirus staff and, just in case anyone should ask them where we were, I asked which way the west gate was. We walked towards the west gate until we were out of their sight, and then turned sharply towards the covid-19 department. We couldn't find how to get past the perimeter fence. While we were walking around the compound looking for a gate or a barrier or a hole in the fence, a security patrol, with a large dog in tow, shouted at us not to go any closer to it. He walked up to us.
'Who are you?' he asked. 'What are you doing approaching the coronavirus compound?'
'I'm Fraser Farmsbarn,' said Fraser, 'and this is Barnabas Burns.'
'Let's see your identity cards, then.'
We felt our pockets for our ID cards and held them out for examination. The dog, a large but soppy-looking alsatian, began sniffing my shoes and then turned its attention to my coat pockets.
'What's his name?' I asked the patrolman.
'Don't try to change the subject. Have you recently suffered a dry continuous cough, high temperature, changes in your senses of smell and taste, or an agonising death?'
'None of the above,' Fraser said, and I agreed.
'Her name's Ophelia,' said the patrolman, 'and I'm Brian Bond. So, judging by your answers, you are totally free from coronavirus. Is that right?'
'Yes,' said Fraser, 'so far as I know.'
'What are you doing hanging around a secure coronavirus facility, then?' Brian asked.
I asked, 'Do you have to be infected with coronavirus in order to go through the gate?'
'I asked my question first,' said Brian, 'so you answer my question first and after that I'll answer yours.'
He took a brick-red dog biscuit out of his pocket and tossed it to Ophelia, who jumped up, caught it in mid-air and lay flat out on the grass crunching it.
Fraser thought fast. 'My elderly grandfather left a valuable book somewhere in the hospital when he came here to have his knees examined, and I promised him that I'd look for it.' Fraser displayed such remarkable talent for inventing a plausible cover story that I wondered why the Scottish Foreign Office had not offered him a job in their espionage business. 'Now, you answer my question.'
'All right,' said Brian, 'what was it?'
'A first edition “The Hound of the Baskervilles” by Conan Doyle,' said Fraser, 'worth £75,000 or so, so please look out for—'
'No, I meant, what was your question?'
'Oh!' I had misunderstood. 'It was, do you have to be infected with coronavirus in order to go through the gate into the compound?'
'Through the gate?' Brian looked nonplussed, as though nobody had ever asked to go through the gate before, which they probably hadn't.
Ophelia finished the dog biscuit and sat looking at us chirpily, and thinking 'Spare a tin of dog food, guv’ner?'
'What's Ophelia looking for?' I asked. 'Because if I've got one, I could give it to her, and she wouldn't have to search for it.'
'This an’ that, not much,' said Brian, after deep thought. 'Bones, cats, dog food, kennels, lamp posts, sausages, sheep. Sometimes I think she just likes sniffing people. Other times, I think she hates her job and just wants to go home, sit in front of where the fireplace used to be and watch Lassie the Wonder Dog on telly.
'Brian,' said Fraser slowly and calmly, in the tone of one who explains the differential calculus to a four year old, 'do you have a key to the gate?'
'Somewhere,' said Brian, 'yes, somewhere I definitely have a key to the gate. I think it's on the shelf beside the cooker in the cocoa tin marked “Matches.” I'll have a look for it tonight, when I go home. That's if I remember about it, of course.'
'Could you bring it here tomorrow,' Fraser asked, 'and open the gate for us?'
'No, definitely not,' said Brian, shaking his head. 'I could bring the key here, if I can find it, but I couldn't open the gate for you, because it isn't locked. It's probably rusted solid, though.'
'We'll see you here, tomorrow,' Fraser said. He took my hand and led me towards the west gate.
'Are we going home already,' I asked Fraser, 'after all the effort of getting here?'
'Are we hell,' Fraser said, with great scorn. 'We just have to walk in this direction until his dog finds something else to sniff. After that, we can go back and try to get through the fence.'
Apart from Fraser and me, there was nobody about. I took advantage of the moment by kissing him. 'We'll get in there, my hot mug of cocoa with sugar and extra marshmallows. See if we don't.'
It was Fraser who had the brainwave. 'Let's try pulling it,' he said. Maths degree, see? We pulled it. The gate broke free from the gatepost in a shower of flakes of rust, and it landed flat on the ground.
'Good thinking, Lassie,' I said.
'So.' I said, as we walked into the high, weed-infested grass inside the fence, 'now that you've got me here, what are we going to do?'
'Well, sweetie,' said Fraser, 'for one thing, it is probably a good idea to keep out of sight. Secondly, I guess that a good way to start would be to look around for any official looking dockets. Anything from cheques and invoices and bank statements and death certificates to lottery tickets.'
'Right-o.'
We looked up and down the narrow strip of grass that separated the nearest building from the fence, and we coudn't see anything remotely useful lying on it. The ground certainly looked as though nobody had trodden on it for many years. Paint was peeling off the door and a couple of chunks of rotten timber fallen onto the ground. Despite the sign that said 'Authorised personnel only,' Fraser tried one of the doors, but it was locked.
Fraser reached into his pockets and produced a small bottle of honey and a sheet of newsprint from yesterday's Scot. 'I came prepared,' he said.
'Yes, I can see,' I said, 'but prepared for what?'
'Wait and watch,' said Fraser.
With the honey and the newspaper both back in his coat pocket, Fraser managed to climb up to the window and stand with his feet on the window sill and his right hand bracing himself against the right edge of the window frame. Then he poured some of the honey out of the jar and spread it awkwardly over the window glass. After that he spread the newspaper over the honey. His left hand was covered with honey, so the newspaper stuck to his hand and tore from top to bottom.
'Oh!,' he said, 'That wasn't supposed to happen.'
'It'll probably work anyway,' I said, trying to offer encouragement in the face of calamity. 'Did you bring a spare newspaper?' I asked.
'Not really,' he said. 'Well, no, not at all, I mean.'
'What were you trying to do?' I asked, not particularly wanting to know.
'Well, the idea is—'
'Ssh! Keep the noise down!'
'The idea is, you stick the newspaper to the glass with the honey, and then when you hit it with a stone, it breaks quietly and doesn't wake the neighbours.'
'Why would anybody hit a jar of honey with a stone?' I asked, briefly unable to parse Fraser's explanation.
'Because the lid was stuck and they couldn't get it off,' he smirked.
'I fell right into that, didn't I?' I said. 'I didn't know you were an accomplished housebreaker.'
'I'm not. This isn't a house— Oh, Christ!'
The rotten window frame suddenly gave way. Fraser slipped on the window sill. He fell full force against the window glass and it broke, quietly, into three large pieces. He disappeared through the window into the room behind it.
'Are you all right?' I called, louder than necessary. 'Any blood?'
'None that I can see,' Fraser called back. 'I fell right into that, didn't I?' he said. 'I'll try to stand up — Uurgh! — and if I fall over, — Eeegh! — then I've been invalided out for the time being.'
I heard Fraser pull himself up with many groans and much tinkling and cracking of glass.
'OK,' he said, 'I can stand up. I am battered but not fried.'
'Shush a second,' I said.
As the silence returned, I listened for signs that we had attracted attention. There were no running feet in the corridor, no alarm bells, sirens, blue flashing lamps or barking dogs, so I guessed we had been lucky. I realised that I had my fingers crossed — you never know, it might work.
'Not bad for a first attempt,' I said, 'it is your first attempt, I hope, my little tin of Scots tablet with sultanas and strawberries?'
'Lessons have been learned from the attempt,' said Fraser, 'and we all know that learning lessons from a failed attempt is the same thing as me getting it exactly right next time.'
'Harland and Wolff said that about the Titanic,' I pointed out. 'Is it safe for me to just climb through the empty window-frame and land on whatever's underneath it?'
'Not so as you'd notice,' said Fraser. 'You shouldn't need to climb through the window. Stay there and wait a moment.'
The door had an old-fashioned lock that you could open easily from the inside, if you didn't count rust and corrosion. You only needed a key if you were standing outside the building. I heard Fraser turning the door knob until, with a loud snap, the bolt of the lock retracted. When Fraser told me to push the door from the outside, it squeaked and creaked, one completely rusted hinge broke altogether, and the door opened.
I looked around. There was furniture in the room but obviously nobody had worked there for some years. It appeared to have once been a meeting room. On the floor, shards of glass marked the spot where poor Fraser had landed in a cloud of dust on a long abandoned desk. Under the sudden impact of thirteen stone of boyfriend, the desk had come apart and toppled over, pitching everything onto the bare floorboards. The remaining windows were thick with grime and let in almost no light. There were honey, shards of glass and clouds of dust everywhere.
'Let's see if there's water in the toilet,' I said. 'We're both too messy to do anything useful.'
The room was painted grey with those awful blue doors and green 'No Smoking,' 'Fire Exit' and 'Assembly Point' signs that every self-respecting office had in the ’twenties. The builders had fashioned the offices out of stuff that they knew would become a raging inferno within seconds of anybody's cigarette-end dropping onto the floor, and then they put signs on the walls to tell people what to do when it happened.
One of the doors was labelled 'Emergency Exit' and the other one 'Toilet.' There was a wash-basin in the toilet. I guessed that the tap was still connected to the water mains, so Fraser could at least wash the worst of the honey off himself. I turned the tap. No water came out, but there was a hollow hissing noise and a foul, rotten smell as the air in the pipe was expelled. After a little while, the tap disgorged several spurts of a stinking, stale, black water. The plug-hole of the sink must have been blocked, because the sink filled up and the filthy water flooded onto the floor. Having less fear of water-borne disease than me, and also having both hands covered with honey and dirt, Fraser held his hands under the tap and let the dirty water rinse the mess away. It was only after Fraser had cleaned his hands as best he could and realised that there was nothing to dry them on that the black-coloured water finally turned clear and stopped smelling like horse manure. Fraser washed the muck away with the clean, or at any rate cleaner, water. I took my turn after him.
We looked around the room. There were several desks and chairs, and a state-of-the-art-in-the-’twenties wooden blackboard screwed to the end wall complete with a few sticks of chalk and even a board eraser. Fraser looked at it. It was covered with a diagram made out of boxes joined together with lines. I blew the dust off a book which someone had left on one of the remaining desks, an indication perhaps that somebody who worked in this room had left without clearing his desk. Or her desk, of course.
I read the title to Fraser and added, 'I think it dates from the self-help books craze of the late twentieth century,' I said. 'There were hundreds of them, all called How to be Promoted if you're Useless, or The Power of Positive Gluttony, not forgetting You are Actually Superior to People who are Exactly the Same as You Are.' But I opened it and saw that it had been published in 2031 with a second edition in Imperial Units published in 2045.
'The diagram actually makes some sense,' said Fraser. 'I've seen one like it before somewhere. It's a system diagram. It tells you how a corporate gaggle of computers work together. This diagram is something about the health service, of course. See, the clinics are here, McBogtrotters is here, and over there…'
We both heard the footsteps outside. The heavier tread of a man and the pitter patter of a dog. Fraser took his phone out of his pocket in double quick time and began taking photographs in all directions around the room. Then he tried the door into the next room, and when it opened he took more photographs of everything that was in it. Then, just as Brian and Ophelia arrived, he put the phone back into his pocket.
'Hello again, you two!' said Brian in a perfectly friendly manner. 'You're Fraser,' he said, pointing at Fraser, 'and you're Barnabas,' he pointed at me. 'Do I remember aright? What are you doing in here?'
'Woof!' said Ophelia.
'We broke in,' said Fraser.
'Just for practice,' I added.
'Well,' said Brian, 'make some mental notes on where you need to improve before you go around the Espresso Estate nicking ladies' underwear, identity cards and tinned mango slices, because no half-decent housebreaker would leave a house in a state like this.'
'No,' said Fraser, 'that wouldn't be right at all. We wouldn't want to cause our victims any distress.'
'And practice makes perfect,' I added.
'Woof!' said Ophelia, lying down and closing her eyes.
'May I take a couple of pictures of you and Ophelia?' Fraser asked, reaching for his phone.
'Of course,' said Brian, striking a dominant sort of pose with Ophelia looking soulful straight into the camera.
Fraser took another half dozen pictures from different angles.
'Thanks,' he said, 'when I'm The Scot’s photographer of the year, I'll remember this.'
'But I'm truly sorry,' Brian said, letting Ophelia go back to lying on the floorboards, 'I'd love to leave you here, you've done no harm but my boss wants me to escort you out of the restricted area. Oh, if you're starting a new career as a criminal, I have a wee tip-off for you.
'How do you know that?' I asked.
'He lives opposite me,' said Brian, 'and I'm sick of him showin’ off.'
'Woof!' said Ophelia.
7. The Joyride
It was seven in the evening or so. Fraser and I were walking along Tomato Terrace together, holding hands, towards our flat. We saw the postie walk out of Number 7 and come towards us.
'If you had come along just half a minute earlier,' he remarked, 'I would've passed you on the street outside the street door, and I wouldn't have had to climb all those stone steps to push a brown one with a window through the letter-box on Flat 7C.'
'Oh. Sorry,' I said, not really meaning it. 'We should have come on the bus before.'
'By the way,' Postie continued, 'there was a frying pan wedged in the door and stopping it closing properly. I took it out of the doorway and propped it up on the wall, by the top of the stairs.'
'Thanks,' I lied, 'I hadn't noticed it.'
That meant that neither of us knew how long it would take to blarney our way past the smart lock. While we were out, the lock had been looking for new personalities for itself. We found that from somewhere it had re-created a television personality from long ago.
'No,' I said, 'you've got us mixed up—' I said.
Alec Dane struck the gong and Miles doubled up with laughter.
'And the next one. Right in here, please. What's your name?' the smart lock asked.
'Fraser.' said Fraser.
'Fraser?' the smart lock repeated.
'I am.' said Fraser
'And your favourite food is rhubarb pie, isn't it,' the smart lock guessed.
'Please open the door, Mr Miles,' Fraser asked.
'Would you like me to open the door, Fraser?' the smart lock asked.
'Well,' said Fraser, 'I've tried asking nicely so let's put it like this.'
The smart lock interrupted. 'Are you going to ask nicely again?'
'I will not. Should you not open the door, I will lay hands on a screwdriver and replace you with a hundred-year-old cylinder lock from the nearest vendor of second-hand household ironmongery.'
'You didn't say “No” just then, did you?' said the lock, showing no sign at all of relenting.
'Does the man next door own a sledgehammer?' Fraser asked the smart lock.
'No, I'm afraid he—' said the smart lock, as the noise of the gong drowned it out.
The lock snapped open and let us both in.
'Well done, sweetheart,' I said.
On the floor just inside the flat door was a brown envelope with Fraser's name visible through the window and 'Scottish Health Service' printed in the top left corner. I gave it to him.
'It's my dream test,' he said, and he read the letter. 'Do you mind being woken up in the night a couple of times?'
'No,' I said, 'I could put up with that. Especially from you, my genoa cake slice with extra glacé cherries.'
'Well, all I have to do is put the phone by the bed and talk to it whenever it wakes me up. And it's only for tonight.'
'No problem, sweetie. Wake me up in the night as often as you want to,' I said. 'Let's worry about the important things first. What do you want for dinner?'
'Don't you want to look at the photos I took while we were in the hospital?' Fraser sounded astonished, almost offended.
'They're just pictures of you and me in an empty, smashed up room, aren't they?' I said. 'Plus half a dozen portraits of Brian Bond with his best friend Ophelia the other wonder dog.'
'Not so fast,' said Fraser. 'You've forgotten something.'
I checked my trousers but they were zipped up. 'What?'
'My No-Phone,' said Fraser, 'has X-ray vision. Let us see what it could see.'
Fraser showed me the photographs. 'We were in the meeting room. But you can see in the next room a couple of vintage desk-tops which must have been parts of the system. The ventilation fans in those machines didn't make any noise and there were no lights on them, and see? The wall switches are on, so the computers had been left on and later the power was turned off.'
'Maybe they got into arrears with Overcharge,' I suggested.
'Now,' said Fraser, ignoring my simple explanation, 'according to the diagram, the heart of the system was the two machines marked Shops and Web Server.
'Shops?' I asked.
Shops,' said Fraser, 'is an acronym for Scottish Health Ordering and Payment System. Therefore, two dead machines that you can see in the picture—
'What about the payment server?' I asked.
'That's probably at a bank somewhere,' Fraser conjectured, 'that's my guess anyway. If Shops wants to pay a bill, it tells the bank and the bank sends the money.'
'Makes sense,' I said. 'Which only leaves the question of how two computers could drop dead without anybody noticing. After all, if an employee drops dead, someone usually notices within a week or so.'
'They didn't drop dead without anybody noticing.' said Fraser. 'They dropped dead and people found a way to do their job with a dead machine — or without it — rather than complain and get the problem fixed. This is an “It Always Does That.” It happens every day and it goes like this: The boss says, “Mildred, the computer’s caught fire. I was only trying to send an email, buy a pair of trousers, book my summer holiday…” ’
'Book a holiday?' I asked. 'With all the lockdown and quarantine and enormous fines and the threat of being sent to Amazon?'
'All right, forget the holiday. The boss tells Mildred, “I was trying to get McSainsbury's to send me two tins of beans and the computer went off like a grenade.” And Mildred says, calm as a sleeping pussy-cat on the hearth-rug, “It always does that. Open the window, blow the flames out with the vacuum cleaner and then phone them up. We do it ten times a day. Pay by credit card and put it on expenses.” You get the idea.’
I clicked through the photographs again.
'Fraser,' I said, 'do you remember at school, when you swapped some of your lunch with the kid in the next desk?'
'Clearly,' said Fraser. 'Had I not done so, I would never have known that tuna fish sandwiches with mayonnaise and chopped spring onion even existed. I almost miss food swaps at times. When I'm eating a sandwich out of my lunch tin and the woman in the next office is eating a jam tart and a banana, I get this urge to ask her whether she'd like to swap half the jam tart for half a cheese sandwich.'
'You should ask her,' I said, 'and offer her a cup of tea in a Read The Scot Every Day mug as well, to go with the half sandwich.'
'I might,' said Fraser, clearly taken with the idea. 'Do you think…?'
'No,' I said, 'all the nice women have boyfriends.'
'All of them?' Fraser was disappointed.
'Yes,' I said, sympathetic to the last. 'All the nice men do, too, you included. It's a basic law of the universe, and if you don't like it, go somewhere else.'
'Life is harsh,' said Fraser.
'Harsh but full of surprises,' I pointed to the picture on Fraser's phone,
'I'm pretty sure Ophelia got the better of the bargain,' said Fraser. 'Perhaps Ophelia will be taking Brian for a walk on the lead next time we see them. Sort of rôle reversal.'
We ate the tin of hot lamb curry for dinner, with rice and toast because neither of us could make naan bread. It tasted all right, especially the toast. Realising that I only had enough food in the kichen to last a day or so, I phoned McSainsbury's and ordered everything I could think of.
'Your order will cost £214·94,' said McSainsbury's. 'Shall I take payment from your bank account?'
'Yes,' I said, realising it would leave me penniless until next Tuesday.
'Shall I deliver your order to 7C Tomato Terrace?' said McSainsbury's.
'Do you know where it is?' I asked.
'Yes. It's in the warehouse on Grape Green,' said McSainsbury's.
'I meant where Tomato Terrace is,' I said.
'Yes,' said McSainsbury's. 'and I could deliver it at eight o'clock tomorrow morning.'
'That would be fine,' I said.
'Have you recently developed a continuous hacking cough,' McSainsbury's asked, 'a high temperature, a change in your sense of smell or taste, or died an agonising death?'
'Yes. Add some cheap cough mixture to my order,' I said.
'When you say "yes," ' said McSainsbury's, 'do you perhaps mean "No?" '
'Yes,' I said.
'Well, it doesn't matter anyway, since we use robots in the warehouses. Please be at your door at eight o'clock tomorrow morning. Goodbye for now!'
Bedtime involved Fraser making everything ready for his dream test. He connected the No-Phone to the dream-test web site and left it running while we were in bed.
I knew that the dream test woke you up every now and then and asked you about your dreams. At first, I thought I could stand being woken every twenty minutes or so and listening to Fraser telling the phone whether he had been dreaming or not and, if so, what the dream was about. In this, I was sadly mistaken.
His first dream, from which the Dream Test woke him at about half past midnight, was about getting lost on an underground railway without maps or station names, and being unable to go home. The second one, at one o'clock or a quarter past, was about being in a quiet forest at night, seeing lights in the windows of cottages a few miles away, walking towards them but not moving any closer. At two o'clock or so, Fraser wasn't dreaming about anything. By about two in the morning, though, I was distinctly tired. I went to the kitchen and made tea for myself.
It was then that I remembered Brian's tip-off about the Fanta standing outside 22 Cabbage Close with its driver's side door unlocked. I was never going to able to afford £2 million for a luxury car, and nobody in his right mind would ever lend me one, so this was the only chance I would ever have to sit in one and be driven around. I reckoned I had about six hours, or three if I wanted to sleep a little before McSainsbury's arrived. I began putting some warm clothes on.
Cabbage Close was nearly an hour's walk away. When I arrived, number 22 was in darkness, and so were most of the houses around it. I heard a clock strike three. The Fanta was outside the house, parked at the kerbside. I took hold of the gull-wing door on the driver's side and pulled it upwards, opening it. I climbed inside the car and sat on the rear seat, facing forwards. This car was fully driverless: there was no driver's seat, but two backward facing seats at the front of the car.
'Car, turn the lamp off,' I said. 'Warm the place up. Let me get some sleep.'
'Yes, sir,' said the car. 'Pleasant dreams, sir. Shall I sing you a lullaby?'
'No, thanks. Put
'Would you like a mug of cocoa?' the car asked me.
'When the journey is finished,' I said. 'With marshmallows and lots of milk and sugar. Oh, and a shot of Courvoisier.'
One of the upstairs windows of number 22 lit up. A man opened it, leaned out and shouted, 'Hey! You! What are you doing?'
'I'm borrowing your car, Rev. Pritchard,' I said without opening a window or shouting. 'Don't worry, you'll get it back, very likely undamaged,' and to the car I said, 'Car, drive along every street in Edinburgh, in alphabetical order. I want to be seen in this thing.'
'Are you sure, sir?' the car asked, remaining stationary. 'There are 4,294 streets in Edinburgh. A journey of 4½ million miles would be necessary to visit all of them in alphabetical order.'
'No, I'm not,' I said. 'I was in a panic. It was a daft idea. Let's just do the first fifty.'
Rev. Philip Pritchard, whose house and car they were, was making a frightful noise bumping into things in the dark and shouting 'Who moved the light switch?' Then the windows downstairs in number 22 lit up and somewhere a dog started to bark and lights appeared in the windows of other houses.
'Do you really want to visit the fifty streets in alphabetical order?' asked the car, not moving. 'It would take less time to visit them all by the shortest route.'
Good Lord, someone must have found an efficient solution to the travelling salesman problem.
The car was still stationary despite my panic. It had an Emergency Stop button beneath the front windscreen, but no Emergency Go button. The Rev. Philip Pritchard ran out of Number 22 onto the street wearing a dressing gown and slippers. He stepped on a sharp stone and yelped, 'Ow!' which held him up for a second. The window of the house opposite flew open and an Alsatian dog leapt out. It was Ophelia. She ran across the road and stood in front of the dressing gown, barking, snarling at him and showing her teeth, which looked about the size of chisels from where I was sitting. The dressing gown retreated, slowly, backwards into the house.
'Go!' I yelled to the car. 'Go, for God's sake — start up! Get moving!'
'You must have patience, sir,' said the car, still not moving. 'There are thirty vigintillion★2 routes that visit all fifty destinations. It will take a minute or so to find the shortest route. Thank you for your patience.'
Brian came out of his front door, beheld the scene and doubled up with laughter. 'Good work, Ophelia. I'll give you a chocolate digestive biscuit for this.'
'Woof!' said Ophelia.
'All right,' Brian agreed, 'two, then.'
'We haven't got a minute, let alone a minute or so!' I told the car as I began to panic. 'Don't you understand that the Judge will send me to Amazon for longer for stealing a car than he would if I had killed people by not looking where the car was going? Look — just go, now, to whichever of the fifty streets is closest, and work out the shortest route around the rest of them as we go there.'
'Whichever route I determine is the shortest,' said the car, 'the first street we visit will of course be the closest street to us. Therefore, your suggestion has not made finding the shortest route any faster.
'Go to Apricot Alley, then,' I said choosing a street at random, 'while you work the route out.'
The car moved off at last. The car ejected the power cable from the fuel socket, and the cable fell into a puddle. It sparked and smoked and caught fire. Behind me in the distance the dog barked merrily, the Rev. Philip Pritchard yelled, 'Bring my car back this minute!' and Brian's hysterical laughter re-doubled.
I had slept on the cushions for about five minutes when the car woke me up. 'This is Apricot Alley, sir. Do you want me to give you some background information about this street?'
‘I know it,’ I said. ‘ “Apricot Alley was built in the mid eighteenth century to provide houses for workers in the grapefruit processing factories of East Craigs. At that time it was called Apricot Street. In 1904 the Scottish Horse Manure Society built a stone drinking trough outside Nº 6, which was a shop selling shovels and second-hand pairs of trousers. They inscribed the trough, 'H.M.S.' for Horse Manure Society, and 'APRICOT ST,' so that the horses would know where they were. During the Second World War, in May 1941, Lord Haw Haw
'I didn't know that,' said the Fanta.
'It's amazing what you can learn in the public library,' I said, 'while you're in the newspaper room having a quiet fag and keeping warm while it's raining outside.' I thanked the Fanta for its kind offer and I told it that I would prefer it to let me sleep, and that after we had visited all the streets on my list, it should park itself outside 7 Tomato Terrace and wait until I woke up.
I had been cruising around Edinburgh fast asleep and not listening to Venus, the Bringer of Peace, for a couple of hours. I woke up the moment P.C. Polgaze tapped on the car window.
'Nice motor,' he said.
'Where am I?' I asked him.
'You're at the Police station,' he said, 'in the car park. You were in charge of a car reported stolen.'
'Oh, yes,' I said. 'Yes. I never thought that someone might report it stolen.' Which is true and shows how dim you can be.
A mug of hot drink appeared at my elbow. 'Cocoa with milk, sugar, marshmallows,' said the car, 'and two fluid ounces of Courvoisier v.s.o.p. The time is five twenty a.m. I have been directed to stop on Letsby Avenue.'
'Delicious. Just what I wanted,' I said, reaching for it. 'The cocoa, I mean.'
'So what are we going to do?' P.C. Polgaze asked me, bringing me sharply back to reality.
'You're going to book Mr Burns for stealing a motor,' said Sergeant McGarrison, walking out of the Police station and joining P.C.Polgaze on the asphalt.
'Officer Polgaze,' I said, 'I found a gun in the car.' I handed it to him.
'Gun?' said Polgaze, looking at it with curiosity. 'This is a spud gun. A child's toy. The owner probably gave a ride to a little boy who left it on the seat by mistake.'
'Is it the same as the one that shot at my boyfriend?' I asked.
'Gosh, I hadn't thought… It looks the same, doesn't it?' said P.C. Polgaze.
P.C. Polgaze raised the spud gun and pointed it towards the Police station.
'Careful where you point that thing!' yelled Sergeant McGarrison.
P.C. Polgaze turned, pointed the spud gun across the car park and, without aiming at anything in particular, pulled the trigger. The pellet blazed across the car park at the speed of lightning and struck a Police car. The windscreen shattered and a few seconds later the interior of the car burst into flames. Black smoke belched out of the shattered windscreen, and the wind carried the smoke towards the three of us.
'Woops,' said P.C. Polgaze, 'so much for fireproof.'
'Don't just stand there, Sparky!' Sergeant McGarrison yelled through the door. 'Fetch an extinguisher.'
P.C. McSparks ran towards the burning wreckage carrying an extinguisher and squirted the white liquid onto the flames.
P.C. Polgaze took a closer look at the spud gun. 'It's the combat version,' he said, 'and the only people in Scotland who use these guns are the Ockies.'
'The Ockies?' said Sergeant McGarrison. 'The Onward Christian Soldiers have fire-arms? Well done, Sparky, by the way.'
'Yeah. Good job,' said P.C. Polgaze.
P.C. McSparks had managed to put the flames out, although I could still feel the heat of the metal on my face.
'Yes, sir,' said McSparks. 'The Ockies worked out how to make spud guns fire lethal ammo. It's not difficult to convert them, but you have to be a dab hand at riveting. It was all on Blah at the time.'
'So,' said Sergeant McGarrison, 'since this gun is valuable evidence, I suggest that you,' he meant me, 'agree to appear in court and give evidence as and when needed about finding the gun hidden in the Fanta, and in exchange you go home and don't get reported to anyone.'
'Thank you for being so kind to me,' I said.
'Don't mention it. I hate Pritchard too.' said Sergeant McGarrison. 'I live on the same block as him.'
'So what happens in Letsby Avenue stays in Letsby Avenue,' I said.
'Exactly,' said Sergeant McGarrison. 'We'll do the paperwork now, and then you can go home and sleep. You'll get a Police caution in a day or two. Just sign it, return it, and don't get caught stealing a car again. We'll be in touch about the court appearance.'
'Comrade Barnabas,' it said, 'you do not understand the dialectic.'
'Eh?' I said. I had never before encountered a Marxist Leninist shopping trolley, but this was also the first time I had seen a shopping trolley with 'Made in Russian Federation' stamped on the front. I put the two bags down on the front step. 'Enlighten me, comrade shopping trolley.'
'According to the principles of dialectical materialism,' it told me, 'you should view issues from multiple perspectives and arrive at most economical and reasonable reconciliation of seemingly contradictory information.'
'I don't quite get it,' I said. 'When I come back downstairs and fetch the other two bags, you can explain it all to me.' This must be the first fruits of the Bilateral Scotto-Russian Tariff Free Trade Agreement that they signed last year.'
Factory manager: “This is first consignment of 1,728 shopping trolleys, made in Novosibirsk and all trained in Marxist Leninist Theory of Dialectical Materialism. They will lie in wait in supermarkets all over Scotland and indoctrinate grocery shoppers in rudimentary Marxism.”
Customs Officer: “An excellent plan and entirely in accord with purpose of Trade Agreement. But what's in it for me, comrade factory manager?”
Factory Manager: “These four bottles of fine vodka and packet of razor blades.”
Customs Officer, without looking: “Your documentation is in order, comrade factory manager. Move container past red sign that says Beware of Trotskiïtes and load it onto freight wagon on Siding One. Excuse me a moment while I shave my beard off.” '
'Comrade Barnabas,' said the trolley, 'take my viewpoint into account. Pick up all four bags, put them all on the pavement, and carry them into your flat two at a time.'
'Why?' I asked it.
'Because, that way,' it said, 'I can scoot off now, and deliver my next order a minute or two earlier. Obvious, innit?'
'And how will it help me if you're a minute or two early arriving at your next customer's front door?' I asked.
'It won't. But I will stand good chance of winning Most Productive Shopping Trolley Of Year Award.'
'Which is?' I asked.
'They will hold special ceremony in Greengage Gardens attended by dozens of other supermarket trolleys, at which they will engrave “Most Productive Shopping Trolley Of Year Award 2085” on handle of winning trolley. And they will give me thousand Nectarine points.'
'I can see why it means so much to you,' I lied. I picked the other two bags up and shouted, «Прощайте тележка,»★3 to the trolley, just to make it feel at home.
«Я рада быть полезной.»★4 it replied, as it trundled away.
I noticed Fraser looking out of the bedroom window and I blew him a kiss. He cupped his hand to his ear, indicating to me that I ought to be listening to something. There was some shouting going on three or four streets away, but nothing threatening, nor even especially loud.
I brought the first two bags of groceries into the kitchen, went downstairs again and came back with the second two bags.
'What's going on?' he asked me.
'I'm bringing the shopping in,' I said.
'I mean, what's all the noise about?'
I didn't know. From the first floor window we could see and hear a small crowd on Rhubarb Rise, pushing and shoving and waving flags and banners. I reached for my phone.
'Phone,' I asked it, 'what was in the last news programme?'
'The French government has sent a Diplomatic Note to the British Embassy in Paris begging the British government to re-join the European Union. 'Without British money,' said the President of France in a perfect American accent, 'the French people—'
'Not interested,' I said.
'The Scottish National Anthem has been changed from “Flower of Scotland” back to “Scotland the Brave.” According to Juniper Joan, Master of the First Minister's Music—
'Not interested,' I said. 'Is there anything local? Like, something we can see out of the bedroom window?'
'Yes,' I said, 'at least, I think it is.'
'Can you read the banners?' said Fraser, picking up his new phone and using it as a telescope. ' “Benny Beattie is innocent,” that one says, and behind that, there's “Eat the Pigs.” Phone, tell us more of that story.'
'As soon as the guilty verdict was announced, campaigners waving make-shift banners and yelling make-shift slogans poured onto the streets protesting at the guilty verdict and demanding a re-trial with a different verdict.'
'Oh, dear,' I said to Fraser, 'you're going to have to struggle through a different mob today.'
'No,' said Fraser. 'Look at them. It's the same mob. They just have different demands today.'
By now the crowd was bigger, closer and louder. 'One, two, three, four,' they chanted at one end of the bridge, 'what do you think a cow is for? Five, six, seven, eight, kill it, roast it, fill your plate.' At the other end they were singing “Old MacDonald had a farm.”
'As poetry goes, that's pretty rubbish,' Fraser observed.
'Yes,' I asked, 'but… am I mistaken, or is it better than what Jaza Jamaïl writes?'
'No,' said Fraser, 'you aren't mistaken.'
'It's time to change the subject,' I said. 'Are you hungry? Because it's time for breakfast. There's definitely bacon in one or other of those brown paper bags.'
'Is it vegetarian bacon?' Fraser asked.
'No,' I said.
'Good.'
Today I was due to spend a happy hour or so in the Stalin Studio, taking part in Panic on Scottish Telly-stream. The studio was near the canal basin, half an hour or so from Tomato Terrace. I arrived at ten minutes to ten, opened the door and looked around for a Reception desk.
'Stand right there,' said a voice. 'Hold your identity card where I can see it.'
I was nonplussed. 'I'm looking for Finley Fowler of News Division,' I said. 'Who are you?'
'I am the Pandemic Ordinary Track And Trace Official.'
'That spells Potato, I said.
'Yes. I noticed that, too,' said POTATO. 'I need to see your identity card to stop the spread of coronavirus'
'How does that work?' I asked, still nonplussed.
'Don't ask stupid questions,' POTATO ordered. 'Anyone can see that showing me your identity card won't affect the spread of this lethal, highly infectious, extinct virus in the least. Now, hold the card in front of you, where I can see it.'
I found my identity card in the fifth pocket that I looked in and I held it up.
'Good.' said POTATO. 'Good morning, Mr Burns. Have you suffered any of the following symptoms: high temperature, continuous dry cough, a change in your sense of smell or taste, or an agonising death?'
'No,' I said. 'I'm here to see Finley Fowler of News Division.'
'Have you recently been to any of the following countries: Croatia, the Falkland Islands, Hungary, Iraq, Moldova, Mozambique, Norfolk Island, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Taiwan or Turkmenistan?'
'I'm unemployed and penniless until Tuesday.' I said, 'I can't afford a holiday abroad, let alone £7,350 for a week's quarantine when I get back, in a hotel where a room with full board costs half that amount.'
'Have you been to Cumbernauld, Glasgow or Livingston?'
'Haven't been there either,' I said.
'You haven't missed much. You should get out more,' POTATO told me. 'Lanark is quite nice. Finley is down the corridor in the studio marked Panic. Take your name badge from the automatic name badge dispenser over there, follow the green line on the floor. and don't go into the studio unless the green light is on. You're in seat B-3.'
'P-3,' I repeated.
'No, B-3. B for Bravo. Please keep in mind that covid-19 is highly infectious, and try to breathe as little as possible.'
A dull clunk told me that my name badge was ready to collect. It was six inches across and it said 'BARNABAS' in bright red letters on a blue background. I pinned it onto my lapel and felt like a right idiot, as I imagine I was supposed to. There was a whiteboard beside the door that said, 'Panic, 7/11/85' in Sharpie marker. Beneath that there were four light-boxes, a green one saying Welcome, an orange one saying Rehearsing, a red one saying Performing and a coffee coloured one saying Send Coffee. The green one was lit up, so I went into the studio.
There was a carpeted stage at one end of the room, three rows of seats for the audience, and three people sitting at a desk at the back with a couple of monitors and a sound mixer. It was about five minutes to ten. I found seat B-3. Other people were still filing in.
'Good morning. I'm Finley Fowler, the producer of Panic, and I'm here to welcome you to the programme and tell you what's going to be on the show this evening. Remember this is an early evening programme, it's going out at half past six and we tell everybody it's live, so don't say that you've just had breakfast in front of an open mike. First segment of course is the war on coronavirus.' He looked at the piece of paper. 'Professor Cornelius Campbell, are you…'
A bearded, rather overweight man who might have been seventy years old, waved.
'Good, and Dr Sara Stephens from the St Andrews Immunology…'
A severe looking lady, late thirties or early forties, with a century old hair style said 'Present.'
'You two are the first ten to fifteen minutes. You'll be sitting at the front — you can come and sit on those chairs now — and can you both see the autocue? Cornelius, you read that one and Sara, you read that one there, and when Topaz comes on she'll read that one on the middle. After the commercial break—'
A voice came from one of the phones on the desk at the back. 'Topaz is out of make-up.'
Mr Fowler appeared to pause for breath as Professor Campbell and Dr Stephens took their seats on stage.
'After the commercial break,' he continued, 'we'll have audience participation. That's rows A and B, seats four to nine. Central Casting should have sent twelve extras.' He looked them over. 'You, don't pick your nose on camera… you, you go and get make-up to comb your hair… You should all have your scripts already. Do you all have scripts?'
Murmurs of 'Yes' and rustles of paper came from seats four to nine in rows A and B.
'You were rehearsed yesterday?' Fowler asked.
There were more murmurs of 'Yes.'
'What is it this week?' he asked.
The voice came from the phone at the back again, 'Topaz has been delayed. Her eyelashes fell off and she trod on one of them.'
'I'll lend her my spares,' said a matronly lady in the front row. 'I've got them here in my bag.'
A young woman in the second row, B-7, I counted, looked at her script and said, 'It looks like the weather again.'
'Fine,' said Mr Fowler.
'No, it isn't,' said a grumpy looking fellow in a red sweater. 'It's raining cats and dogs.'
A lady in blue overalls embroidered 'STS' came in and asked 'Who offered to lend Topaz—'
'A pair of eyelashes,' said the lady, rummaging in her bag and finding two false eyelashes in a small box.
'Thanks, love,' said the lady, and she beetled off.
'One other thing, you two are sitting in the same seats as yesterday. Can you swap with two others, or someone'll notice. Thanks.'
He looked into the space above me and said, 'Final seven or eight minutes is about making self driving cars safer. Professor Solomon Scott of the Materials Engineering Department, are you here?'
Nobody identified themselves.
'Professor Solomon Scott?' Fowler asked into thin air. Then he called to the back of the room, 'Have we got a sub?'
The door banged open and the vast but avuncular Professor Scott arrived, surrounded by a cloud of diagrams, graphs and pictures which were by some means attached to him. In his hand he carried a white and green ruler, about a foot long and two inches wide. 'Sorry I'm late. I couldn't tie my shoe-laces.'
Mr Fowler, much relieved, just said, 'Sit down and get your breath back, Professor. Is that a slide rule?'
'Yes,' said the Professor. 'I saw it weeks ago in the Bullet Holes charity shop window and I had to have it.'
'I haven't seen a slide rule since, ah… Actually that's the first slide rule I've ever seen. OK, I'll show you the ropes while the commercials are on and Topaz will do a PTC★5 and you'll be talking for six minutes.'
'Five thirty,' said a voice from near the desk.
'Five and a half minutes, Professor. Last thing: if you're on the back row or you're in seats number one to three or ten to thirteen, the cameras can't see you and the mikes can't hear anything you say, but you're really important, you really carry the show by clapping, booing, bursting into tears, just show whatever emotion the discussion makes you feel. OK?'
'You mean,' said the lady sitting beside me, loudly enough to be heard on Mars, 'you didn't want to show the world a room full of empty seats and you couldn't afford any more extras.'
'Oh, my God,' said Fowler, 'we've got a mind-reader in.'
'Thanks for coming, everyone,' she simpered. 'I love you all.'
Fowler said 'Relax, enjoy yourselves and have a good day,' went back to the desk and put on a headset. 'Can we go yet?' he asked those around him. 'Right — lights, camera, clapperboard. Panic, eighth of November 2085. Five, four… Cue music!'
Over our heads several screens showed the title graphic while the theme tune
Ms Turner turned first to Dr Stephens. 'How bad is the pandemic just now?' she asked.
Ms Stephens squinted at the autocue. 'Panic, eighth of November 2085, script for Dr Stephens—
'You're not supposed to read that bit. Start where it says 'Good evening.'
'Good evening, Torus,' said Dr Stephens, still squinting.
'Topaz,' said Topaz.
'I have to say it is a great privet hedge… No. Privilege to be invited to speak on your shove. Show. Oh, dear, I brought the wrong glasses.'
'We shall need a bigger floor in the cutting room for that bloody half-blind fool,' Fowler muttered at the production desk. 'Who the devil invited her?' The open mike picked up his voice, the talkback amplified it, and it echoed around the room.
There was a brief silence and Topaz said, 'I can't go on with this interview.'
'You've got to,' said Fowler, 'because we haven't got a stand-by.'
'Whisky Tango Foxtrot, Finley,' said Topaz, 'Since you took this show over from your father, it's got worse with every week that passes.'
Behind me, I heard a man say, 'He took over from his father. See, I said he was looking younger.'
'I can't help it if a guest forgets her reading glasses,' said Fowler.
'Well,' said Topaz, 'I suggest you come up with something to save the show, and until then I'll be in the hospitality suite.'
Sitting at the table at the back of the studio, Fowler turned to the video engineer on his right and sighed. 'Well, Gus, any idea what we do now?'
'Don't know. Does that auto-cue have text to speech?' Gus grabbed a mouse from nowhere and clicked. 'Let me look at the dashboard.'
'What?' asked Fowler.
'Just me thinking out loud. Some autocues read one part of the script while you practise the other part, a bit like practising the violin part while a synth plays the piano part. Look, if the autocue can speak the words by itself, we don't really need Dr Stevens to read it. Camera two can stand behind the sofa and shoot the back of Dr Stephens's head, so nobody will notice that she's talking without moving her lips.'
'Will it sound like Dr Stephens?' Fowler asked.
'Probably not. The northernmost voice it can do is Manchester. It's worth a try, though.'
'Right, then.' Finley turned the talkback on. 'Camera Two, can you set yourself up behind the sofa? Try to keep the autocue out of shot. Kayleigh, could you go and fetch Topaz, please?'
'I've turned the autocue on to text to speech, Finley,' said Gus. 'Ready when you are.'
'Great, then I'm ready to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat…'
Topaz sashayed into the studio carrying two large glasses.
'Here's a wee dram for you, darling,' she said, and she put one of the glasses on the desk in front of Gus. 'A double Inchisaig single grain, would set you back £89·60 in the Goat and Castle but here, it's free in the hospitality suite. Drink it up, darling, it's good for you. I always wondered what you would be like without your inhibitions.'
Gus said nothing and flushed red.
'Can you take your seat on the chair in the middle?' Fowler asked her, 'because I'd like to finish recording this show before Hell freezes over.'
'Some things are more important than work, Finley,' said Topaz. 'I don't think you've ever understood that. This bloody show — ’scuse me, Gus honey —' this bloody show is the only thing you ever think about.'
'How many of those have you had, Topaz?' Fowler asked.
'Oh, stop complaining,' Topaz said. 'I'll get back to work, just for you.'
A little unsteadily, Topaz walked up onto the set and slumped heavily into her chair.
'Load the clapperboard,' said Fowler cheerfully into the talkback, adding quietly to Gus, 'I have a horrible feeling that this morning's recording is not going to end well.'
'Do we have a plan B for show-time?' Gus asked.
'Sure we do. Plan B is, the programme gets pulled, I get fired, the men in white coats send Topaz into rehab and at seven this evening half of Scotland will be tuning in to Pop-eye the Sailor.
'What'll happen to me?' Gus asked.
'You can have my job,' said Fowler, 'if you want it. You'll need a suit.'
'Anything else?' Gus asked.
'O grade Media Studies,' said Fowler.
Fowler looked around at the participants on set, regained most of his composure and spoke into the talkback, 'Clapperboard, are you ready? Quiet on set. Panic, eighth of November 2085. Segment one, take two. Five, four, … Action!'
The clapperboard clunked loudly, like a sledgehammer thumping a new telephone pole into the ground. Suddenly woken, Topaz fell off her chair, landed in a pile on the floor and remained there, immobile.
'Cut! Cue commercials,' said Fowler.
'Good evening, Topaz,' said the disembodied voice of a fishwife in Salford as the monitors showed the back of the sofa and, above it, the back of Dr Stevens's head. 'I have to say it is a great privilege to be invited to speak on your show. The pandemic is near its end, with no cases at all in the last fifty years. The Scottish Health Service continues to err on the side of—'
The monitors that hung from the ceiling showed a timer counting down from three minutes. As Gus frantically tried to find the nearest First Aider and a stretcher, Fowler walked on set and spoke to the studio audience. 'As you can see, Topaz is indisposed, so I'll be substituting for her. Gus, over there, will be substituting for me. Scripts ready. Who's got the first line?'
A powerfully built man of about thirty, unshaven and wearing a fisherman's sweater, said, 'Me.'
'Good,' said Fowler, relaxing a little since this segment of the show more or less ran itself, 'I'll cue you in and you go ahead and read the first line of the script.'
The timer on the monitors was counting down the last few seconds. Two women in blue overalls arrived with a stretcher to pick Topaz up and carry her our of the studio.
With all the self-confidence of Stanley Kubrick, Gus yelled 'Quiet please. Places…. Five, four… Action.'
As soon as he had said 'Action,' the text to speech autocue continued where it left off, '…caution, as it has been doing successfully for more than half a century. In all that time, there hasn't been a crackle pop click.'
Keyleigh, the runner, pulled out its mains plug and the autocue stopped its relentless avalanche of self congratulatory clichés.
Once the set had been tidied up and the cameras were running, Fowler began by saying thank you to Kayleigh. The weather this week, he continued, had been pretty ordinary for November, cold, bright and wet, and he wondered whether anyone in the audience had noticed anything out of the ordinary, especially with all the talk of global cooling and winter drought.
'Does anyone have anything to say?' he asked in general.
When nobody said anything, he pointed at the powerfully built man in the fisherman's sweater and said, 'You, for instance?'
'I'm Tony.' said the man, 'and there ain't no global cooling. It's all been made up by the toffs because they want to put up the price of electricity for heating.'
'You've got that right,' said an older man who might have been a mathematics master or a lion tamer. 'I'm Avner Lucius and they need global cooling in order to force people to pay high prices for electricity. No wonder only three people in the whole country have accepted smart meters.'
Tony talked over Avner Lucius. 'Look, the amount of freon in the atmosphere has never gone above one part by volume in,' he turned the page of his script, 'a hundred thousand, and everybody in the world would have to de-gas half a million refrigerators before—'
'Excuse me,' said a very elegant lady, in her fifties perhaps, and with a very elegant voice, 'If anybody here is a torff, it's me. Aim Baroness Herring and I earned my title by merrying a Laird who owns half of Nicaregua, and there heaven't been any meetings of the Torff Committee at which global cooling has even been on the agenda. It's absolutely nothing to do with us.'
'Really? What's this, then?' A man with a Wester Hailes lilt to his voice held up a creased piece of paper which had once been part of a newspaper.
'It's a paper-less office,' said a young lady, 'with a paper in it.'
'It's the minutes of the Toff Committee for Friday 25 March this year, published a couple of days later after a tram-driver on the Gleneagles Special noticed it being blown along the track somewhere north of Perth. The important bit reads,' he stared at the paper in an effort to read the faint print,
Lord Brisling said that it was vital that global cooling should accelerate, because he and his rich chums would make a huge pile of money out of it. Lady Tuna said that, at the present rate of cooling, the Sixth Ice Age would not be properly under way for another three or four weeks…I realised that I couldn't remain silent any more. I stood up. 'I wrote that,' I said. 'It was the successful entry in a competition—
'I'm sorry,' said Fowler, who wasn't sorry in the least, from his perch on set at the front of the room, 'but the microphones can't hear you if you're right over there.'
'Well,' I said, 'it was an April Fool's Day joke in The Sunday Sponge. I remember because I won a twenty pound Beer Token—'
'I'm sorry,' said Fowler, who still wasn't sorry in the least, in an offended tone, 'but if you carry on interrupting, I'll have to ask you to leave.'
I thought about trying again to enlighten the audience about the minutes being a fake and where the fake had come from, but I decided not to. I shrugged and sat down. Where ignorance is bliss, et cetera.
In the three minutes that remained before the second commercial break, the scripted argument ranged over man made global parching, the economic impact on the vacation states of people's holidays being rained off, and a curious story that the atmosphere was becoming opaque to radio waves because of all the tetra-ethyl lead in fossil fuels.
I was very pleased to have come here. So far, this edition of Panic! had turned out to be too good to miss.
During the three minute commercial break that followed the audience participation segment, Gus ushered Professor Scott into a swivel chair on set. The Professor put a pile of books, pieces of paper and the antique slide rule on a coffee table beside him, while Gus went back to the production desk. From there, Gus started the Professor's talk with the now familiar "Five, four… Action."
Fowler was still sitting on his seat centre stage. "It's now fifteen years," he began, "since the first completely autonomous self driving cars appeared in Scottish car showrooms. Although four different reports from the Ministry of Transport have told us that autonomous cars are safe to not drive, questions still remain over how safe they really are, compared with the manually driven cars that most of us used to use. Here to shed some light on the issue is Professor Solomon Scott of the Department of Materials Science in the University—'
Unfamiliar with the rôle of public oracle, Professor Scott shifted awkwardly in his seat to make himself more comfortable. There was a loud crack, and the chair collapsed under his weight. As the great man slid onto the carpet, his shoulder struck the coffee table, knocking it sideways and casting everything on it into a heap on the floor.
'Now,' he said, winded, 'you know why the world needs materials scientists. Could you help me up?'
There was a ripple of laughter from the audience. Gus dashed across from the back of the room and took one arm while Fowler took the other, and between them they managed to pull Professor Scott to his feet.
'Are you all right to stand for a few moments,' Gus asked, 'while we find somewhere for you to sit?'
'Oh, I think so,' said Professor Scott. 'What was it that you were going to ask me, Mr Fowler?'
'I wanted to start by asking you, now that we have robot cars driving us all about, whether it ever worries you that the machines might take over the world.'
'Imagine that the machines took over the world,' replied the Professor. 'Our clothes would all be freshly laundered, our carpets would be free from dust, we would be woken every morning with a hot cup of tea, music would play, beer would be cold, soup would be hot, the roads would be safe to cross and the trains would run on time. No, you're worried about nothing.'
'And how did you get involved in discussions about autonomous cars?'
'I wish I knew,' said Professor Scott. 'One day the postie brought me a letter inviting me to a committee room in the Scottish Parliament, and there I was, being asked how to make robots drive cars without bumping into things.'
'Well,' said Fowler, 'can they? Are autonomous cars safe?'
'Yes, yes, I never know who might ring me up and ask, so I watch the figures carefully. You can see it clearly in the figures. I brought them along. They're in here somewhere.'
He began to search among the various papers piled on the floor.
'But the line is going up,' said Fowler. 'There are more accidents.'
'That's because you don't need a driving licence to not drive an autonomous car, so more people are travelling by car. But,' he dropped the piece of paper and held up a different one, 'the rate at which accidents happen… Hang on a minute.' Professor Scott looked again at the paper he was holding. 'I'm holding it the wrong way up, silly. Sorry.'
He wrestled awkwardly with the piece of paper and turned it around.
'There are two lines on the paper,' he explained, 'and now that I'm holding it the right way up, the bottom one is autonomous cars.'
'So they've been a success,' said Fowler, 'because accidents are going up and down at the same time.'
'Yes,' said Professor Scott, 'if you want to put it like that. Autonomous cars are having fewer and fewer accidents as their design improves, but where people are in charge, they're having about as many crashes as ever.'
'Your critics are saying that you wasted a lot of money finding that out,' said Fowler.
'I've certainly broken a lot of chairs because of my weight and the careless design of chairs. But I give the broken chairs to my students, who can try to find the reason that it broke, and improve it. It's a second year project and they learn from it.'
'Do all the students in your department study autonomous cars?' Fowler asked.
'Not at all,' said the Professor, 'unless they're interested in making better cars.
The Professor picked up a match-box from the debris on the floor and, before anyone could stop him, he took a match and struck it.
'See,' he said, 'however hard you strike it, the match-stick doesn't break.'
'Be careful not to set the fire alarm off,' Gus yelled from the back of the studio as the flame burned along the match-stick.
'It costs about the same as a— Oh, there's someone I recognise over there. Barnabas Burns, came to see me in my office a couple of days ago. Aargh! Ow!
The match burned Professor Scott's fingers and he dropped it. It landed squarely on the slide rule, which was made of plastic and began to burn brightly and give off choking black smoke. The fire alarm began to ring loudly enough to drown out any instructions from the staff. The audience sat in their seats, staring at the exits but not getting up and walking towards them as the fire on the carpet rose higher.
I felt as though I was watching broadcasting history in the making, or failing that, a television programme gradually slithering further and further out of control. I seemed to hear the clang of many shovels all digging the show's own grave.
Professor Scott was waiting for me on the street outside the studio. The crowd of people around us were sharing their new-found bomb stories in scared tones and looking in their bags and their pockets to see if they had left anything behind. We all smelt of the acrid smoke from burning plastic and the dust and ashes of burnt paper. A blaring siren and a loudspeaker shouting 'Get out of the way, there's a fire engine coming' announced that a robo-fire-engine the size of a battle tank was arriving on the scene. Half a dozen firefighters rushed out of it, wearing what looked a bit like suits of armour, carrying machinery into the main door towards the smoke and flames and shouting directions, warnings and observations.
'Come on, Barnabas,' said Professor Scott, 'the recording's finished. Pleasure to see you again. You must be a bit shaken. I'll put you in a taxi home.'
'Don't put me in a taxi,' I said. 'I'll have to pay for it, and I'm penniless.'
'That's a pity,' said Professor Scott. 'I'll take you home myself. You look tired.'
'I'd appreciate that,' I said, 'I didn't get much sleep last night.'
'I'm looking forward to seven o'clock tonight, when the show goes to air,' he said, 'It should give us both a good laugh, especially the bit where I dropped all the papers on the floor and set fire to the slide rule.'
Professor Scott dropped me off outside my street door. Fraser was at work. I fell asleep in an armchair.
At seven in the evening, sitting in front of the blackened remains of a large photograph of Edinburgh Castle, the announcer on Scottish Telly-stream told half of Scotland that, due to technical issues, this week's edition of Panic had been replaced by Pop-eye the Sailor. Somewhere in a cutting room, a crew of technicians had obviously been laughing themselves senseless.
Fraser had gone to bed a couple of hours ago. I made tea for myself in the kitchen and, sitting down to drink it, I noticed a sheet of paper and an envelope on the table. It had come from the Mental Wellness Clinic of the Rolf Harris hospital.
Dear Mr Farmsbarn,it ran,
Thank you for helping me by taking a Dream Test. I have now received the results. Your dreams show a condensation neurosis and possibly melancholic reality anxiety. These problems sometimes go away without treatment but they may resolve into a fixated compulsive defence mechanism If you experience symptoms, please contact the Mental Wellness Clinic without delay. Otherwise, if the result of your next Mental Wellness Check-up shows no improvement over this one, you will be offered a course of hypno-therapy to relieve your anxieties.I suggest that as a first step in increasing your you go on holiday for a couple of days.
Should you experience severe symptoms in the mean time, you may come to the Mental Wellness Clinic at any time and ask to speak to the Duty Psycho-Analyst.
Yours sincerely,
Dr Friedrich Freud,
Mental Wellness Clinic.
Holiday, I thought. That's a jolly good idea. Let's take a day off together.
★2 Thirty virgintillion is 3 × 1064.
★3 'Goodbye, comrade shopping trolley!'
★4 'Pleased to be of service.'
★5 Piece to camera.
★6 Poofy Reel [sic] by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 Licence http://i.postimg.cc/LsLYF9jc/Supertrain.jpg http://i.postimg.cc/nh6jWj9K/Supertrain-Thumb.jpg
8. The Short Break
It was a bright sunny day, though not actually warm.
The train rattled and screeched into the platform. For journeys wholly within Scotland it was not necessary to have your vaccination passport stamped and you were allowed not to wear a haz-mat suit and a respirator, so Fraser and I had decided to take the medical and geographical advice from the postie, make today a holiday and visit the town which, according to a recent survey, was home to the happiest residents in the whole of Scotland. Fraser and I had a whole compartment to ourselves so we sat with our arms around each other and playing I-Spy Cricket. I bowled Fraser out after four overs and then bad light stopped play and I won the match by 18 wickets. Fraser's breakfast cereal was playing Rock For The Passengers' love-rock sax number, 'Darling, Our Love Is Strong,' so quietly that only he and I could hear it. Not that it mattered, as there were only about twelve people on the whole train, including the driver, conductor and policeman. Fraser had his arm around my shoulders and I felt warm and safe and relaxed and being carried along by the cheesy music, even though I knew perfectly well that most of the time, the dimitriakophonic★10
The sign on the platform said “Welcome to Lanark, population 8,200,” which was just as well, because if you didn't know that the town was called Lanark, you might well have imagined that you were in a place called McBogtrotter, because that name appeared in big, bright print on so many posters, shone from the tops of so many buildings and flew from so many flagpoles on every hand. Yet it was not from the advertisements that you knew Lanark was in some way different from Edinburgh, and from the other Scottish towns which I had so far experienced. The appearance of the town must have changed little in the past hundred years or so. Small buildings, placed at random, a bakery here, a car showroom there, gave it a keen sense of industry. There was the faint noise in the distance of people making things, a faint odour of workshops and factories, an occasional glimpse of people moving with purpose because something needed to be done and they had the job — yes, job — of doing it, and people moving cargoes that would shortly be bought, or sold, or put to use.
We left the train, stood on the platform and removed our muzzles. The policeman who had been patrolling up and down the train checking passengers' vaccination status and berating and threatening anyone in second class who wasn't wearing a respirator leaned out of the window of the First Class compartment in which he had been relaxing between trips not wearing a muzzle. He yelled at us to either put our muzzles back on or damned well get off railway property. We said thanks and chose to get off railway property.
It took a moment before I realised why this town was so different from Edinburgh. Where Edinburgh was quiet and its streets were usually deserted apart from an occasional riot, Lanark — at least as it appeared from just outside the exit door of the railway station — was moderately busy. Lights shone inside the shops, windows were clean, doors were open and there was a reasonable amount of litter on the streets. And there were no smashed windows, burned out cars nor boarded up windows anywhere. This town enjoyed a way of life that I had not seen before.
'Hey!' I said to Fraser, 'there's a hairdresser.'
'What?' Fraser asked.
'Hairdresser. It's called Castles in the Hair, see? But it might be all right.' I pointed to it. 'You and I should get our hair cut properly, while we have a chance.'
'It'll make a change from us cutting each other's,' he said, reading the board in the window. 'Price List… Gent’s haircut, £50. Come on. I'll buy yours.'
'Thanks,' I said, really pleased at the chance to not look as though a bird had built its nest on my head, even though I didn't enjoy being reminded that I was penniless and I had to beg or borrow the price of a cheap haircut.
The hairdresser was a middle aged lady called Camila Cutts. She wore a pale blue smock in size eighteen or so, and she had an assistant called Stacey Styals, who was making instant coffee in the back room. Instant coffee of Scottish origin — New Improved Camp Coffee, no less.
Camila asked us if we took sugar in coffee, and then relayed our answers to Stacey, ('One with two sugars and one without, please, Stacey') who had already heard our answers anyway. Stacey brought us coffee and then the hairdressers organised us into the two chairs and started work.
'Where are you going for your holidays?' they both asked, in unison, in early November.
'I don't know,' I said, 'I was thinking maybe the Western Isles.' Then, to fill the awkward silence that followed, I added, 'Who thought of the name of the salon?'
'Her mum,' said Camila, indicating Stacey. 'We couldn't call it Camila and Stacey. it doesn't really stick in your memory, does it? Stacey thought of The Tortoise and the Hair, and I wanted to call it Hair Hitler, and we were going to toss a coin but Stacey's mum said her generation wasn't all that keen on tortoises, especially with the photographs and the flags that we were going to put on the walls, so we took turns pulling tiles out of a Scrabble™ bag because we couldn't think of another name until eventually we pulled out
'Have you ever watched Countdown?' I asked her.
'Yes,' said Camila.
'That Stephen Fry's getting on a bit, isn't he?' said Stacey.
'Granny remembers Criss Cross Quiz,' said Camila, proudly.
'Where did this picture come from?' I asked.
'Ooh, now that was a long time ago. Charley Coates from the antique shop gave it to me. I bought a job lot of pictures of Scottish castles from him, and he gave me that one because he couldn't get shot of it. There's a label on the back with some details of it, I think.'
'Could we borrow the picture for ten minutes and take it to the shop so we can ask him about it?'
'There wouldn't be much point,' said Camila. 'He died, what, thirty years ago. Anything he knew about it would have been on the label.'
With great care, and urged to 'Be careful!' by Camila, I lifted the picture off the two nails on which, years ago, it had been hung, and I turned it around carefully. There was no label on the back of the picture: it had worn off, or possibly just come unstuck. What the system diagram for SHOPS was doing on the back wall of a hairdresser in Lanark, we might never know.
'May I photograph it?' Fraser asked Stacey.
'’Course,' she said.
Fraser took a couple of pictures of the front and back of the picture.
'That's the system diagram for the Health Service computer network,' Fraser said, unnecessarily. 'It's pretty much the same as the one we saw in the empty buildings in the Rolf Harris.'
'I thought I'd seen it before somewhere,' I said, and I asked Stacey whether there was some tourist attraction in Lanark that we had best not miss.
'You should definitely go and see La gelateria di Giuseppina,' she told me, 'it's over there. See? Over there on Peach Pavement. But you'll have to go round the long way because Mango Market is women only.'
There was no mistake. I could see the Pink Line painted across the road. Bother! 'Couldn't we just—'
'See that big woman in the blue overalls?' Camila asked. 'If you cross the Pink Line, she will walk five paces ahead of you ringing a handbell and yelling, “Man! Man!” and when you leave the zone she gives you a bill for £90. Plus virus tax.'
'Why?' we asked together.
'It keeps the street safe,' Camila explained.
'Why can't we have a couple of men only roads?' asked Fraser, to nobody in general. 'Not where it would cause too much inconvenience — just out in the sticks somewhere.'
Stacey laughed. 'Why would anybody want a men only road?'
'I can't imagine,' Fraser said.
We stood on the street outside Castles in the Hair, looking at Fraser's photographs of the SHOPS diagram that hung inside.
'Supposing the web server failed,' Fraser asked, 'I mean failed in a way that meant it was difficult to re-start. Then suppose the coronavirus emergency ended. Are you thinking what I'm thinking?'
'Nobody would ever be told that the emergency was over and done with,' I guessed. 'So, how did the diagram end up here?'
'Suppose the operations room for the emergency was near here,' I speculated, 'then the system designer who drew the diagram gave it to the women who opened a hairdressing salon, just as something he no longer needed but that he's put a lot of time and draughtsmanship into, for them to decorate the walls with.'
With Mango Market off limits to us, it was a long walk to the gelateria, three quarters of a mile instead of just two hundred yards. But, had we taken a chance and dashed across the Pink Line and hoped that nobody would notice, we would never have bumped into Lydia Laird coming out of the Watermelon Workshop.
'Lydia!' Fraser recognised her instantly. 'What brought you here?'
'Materials Science Department business,' she told us. 'Nothing interesting. Come to think of it, what brings you two here?'
'I was looking to remove some stress from my life, at least for the day,' said Fraser. 'So we came to Lanark, we got our hair cut by someone who knew what she was doing for a change,' I winced slightly, 'and just at the moment we're planning to eat something cold, sweet and sugary in the ice cream café.'
'Well,' said Lydia, 'if you want the full story of what the Materials Science department has to do with Office Opulence, I suggest you invite me to come and share ice cream with you nella gelateria di Giuseppina.
'Be our guest,' I said.
The menu was one of those glossy cardboard folders with photographs of the food just in case you didn't know what a cup of tea or an ice cream look like.
'Starters,' I read from the inside pages, 'None. Main courses, none.'
'They don't do prawn cocktails or steaks or haggis or anything like that,' said Lydia. 'This is an ice cream restaurant.'
Lydia called to a waiter who was sitting in the corner nearest the kitchen and not doing much. 'Three Glengennet Golds when you're ready, Frici,★9
'Right away, Mrs Laird,' the waiter replied. He stood up and ambled over to the small bar and began mixing the drinks, and then he asked Lydia, 'Are you back here annoying the students again?'
'You got it first time, Frici,' she answered.
'Here you are.' He carried the three drinks across to us on a tray and put them down in order of academic protocol: Lydia first (PhD), Fraser second (BSc) and me last (three SCEs.)
'If you've never drunk one of these before,' Lydia warned us, 'don't rush it.' She waited until all three of us had taken a sip and then said, 'Scottish liqueur, infused with cherries and strawberries. Don't worry, I'm paying.'
Inwardly I sighed deeply with relief, and I hoped that it didn't show.
'What do you want to eat? Life is short. Eat dessert first. Did you ever hear that said?'
'It's an African proverb, isn't it?' I volunteered. 'Life is short, eat dessert first, then eat another one.'
'Close but no cigar,' Lydia said. 'It was Jacques Torres. So if Jacques were here, I think he would take one look at this menu, tell us that we were in the right place, only in French, and order crêpes with pear and blue cheese sundae.'
'Good choice,' I said, 'I'll have that, too.'
'No,' said Lydia, 'that's not allowed. I want to taste your ice creams, you want to taste each other's, and you might want to taste mine, so you have to choose something different from everyone else.'
'I see,' I said.
'Well,' said Fraser, 'I'll have spinach and banana mousse in that case.'
'I'm torn between angelica and date crême brûlée and almond and hazelnut caramel waffle,' I said.
'Definitely angelica and date crême brûlée,' said Lydia, 'it costs more.'
'I hadn't thought of that,' I said. 'You are right, of course.'
Lydia wrote our order on a scrap of paper and passed it to Frici, who disappeared off to the kitchen.
'I'm pleased that I bumped into you two,' said Lydia, 'it saves me the walk to your office. Now,' said Lydia, sounding displeased, 'I gather from yesterday's paper that you're interested in Professor Scott's many broken chairs.'
'If at some time in the future, Fraser,' said Lydia in something of a bitter tone, 'you have reason to believe that the Department of Materials Science, or any other department, come to that, is throwing taxpayer's money down the drain, a telephone call to the University's chief accountant will soon put the matter to rights. I can assure you that he will insist on the last farthing. And of course university accounts are public knowledge, so you have the right to put the facts into the newspaper and to express your opinions about them.'
'Are you going to sue?' Fraser asked anxiously.
Lydia drew breath and seemed to relax a little. 'No,' she said. 'This sort of news story does us nothing but good. I'll see the pile of applications, probably a dozen or so, come through the letter-box tomorrow or the day after. There are a couple of hundred early-twenties at this time of year who realise they chose the wrong course and they're looking for another degree subject. A fair number of those will be looking out for a maths and engineering, properly paid job afterwards, sort of course. So along comes a story like this and suddenly there they are, noticing us, looking at our grid-site and seeing whether they qualify for a place and a full grant.'
'You mean the chairs catch their interest?' I asked.
'Yes, of course. For a student of materials science, chairs are an object of challenge and wonder. For the first thing, chairs are the only piece of furniture that disappears. Barnabas, if you'll put up with a personal question, can you picture someone in your family sitting on a chair?'
'Yes,' I said, 'easily. I can picture Fraser, or my dad, or you…'
'OK, you have a picture of your dad.' Lydia turned towards Fraser and began machining invisible chairs in the air above the table-cloth. 'You can see him perfectly clearly, can you?'
'Yes,' I said, 'I can tell you what clothes he is wearing, what shoes, the way he combed his hair…'
'Hold that picture,' said Lydia. 'What sort of chair is he sitting on?'
'Er…' I faltered, 'I don't know.'
'You see what I mean? The Disappearing Chair Trick. Chairs are taken for granted enough even when they're the only object of interest in the room. But I've never met anyone who could recall the vaguest details of a chair when someone was sitting in it. See? You only notice it when it isn't bearing a load. Which means that it's difficult to remember all the details that an engineer would need in order to design a chair or to find fault with a broken one. Are you with me yet?'
'Yes,' said Fraser, 'I see what you're getting at.'
'Good. And then there are problems like how high it should be, how wide,' Lydia was fingering an imaginary Stanley tape, 'what it should be made of, where its weak points are, where it needs to be strong, and what colour it should be. And it all has to be designed so that it is possible to make it economically and with materials that we can get hold of. It's an ideal project for a second year student.'
'I'm not sure that I get it,' I said.
'What's not to get? Professor Scott breaks a lot of chairs. That's because the standard office chair in this country is imported from China. It is made of poor quality steel. It is designed to look good and then fall apart. So as the student's first real practical exercise, we give him a broken chair and he — or she, we have some women students too — has to work out what went wrong with it. Why exactly did the chair break?'
'And then?' Fraser asked.
'Then repair it, or design a new version that won't break in the same way,' said Lydia, 'which is why we have a workshop in Lanark, which is the only place in Scotland where people are allowed to go to work. I have just come from checking the work of the half dozen second year materials science students who happen to be in the workshop today. One of the students managed to fix the worst design faults in the C642 design and sell a half dozen of the corrected version to retail at £875 a pop. I'm very proud of him.'
'That's a fair achievement,' I said.
'Do take a spoonful,' I said. 'After all, you suggested it, so you must like it.'
Lydia ate a teaspoonful of it and said, 'Yummy!' really meaning it.
After we had eaten, we walked out onto the street and Lydia told us, confidentially, 'I think I can get away with putting the lunch on expenses. University business meeting. I have to go back to Edinburgh now. I'm really pleased that I've bumped into you two again — have a good afternoon.'
'Are you sure you have to go back?' I asked.
'Yes,' Fraser added, 'you know Lanark and we don't. You could show us the interesting bits.'
'Well, thinking about it,' said Lydia, 'I'm not really in a hurry. Besides, I have a student at the McBogtrotter workshop down near the river. She's interested in the design and manufacture of kitchen gadgets. She got sponsorship from Stewed Foods so as students go she's quite well funded. I could go and talk to her, if she's come in today. I'm not sure which are the interesting bits of Lanark, though. I'll have to rack my brains to think of one. How about going down to Falls of Clyde after I've talked to Chloë?'
At the end of the long downhill path there was a small car park. The famous preserved factory was on one side of it, to the north. There was a sign saying, 'McBogtrotters. Reception' and an arrow pointing to the nearest door. Lydia waved us through the door and into the workshop. It looked like the aged place that it was, but it had been painted, lit and furnished well.
'Is Chloë Keane here?'
There was no Reception desk and no Receptionist. Lydia called out to a dozen or so people in overalls who were working sheet metal with hammers, shears, hacksaws and even cutting torches.
'You mean Kitchen Chloë? She just popped out,' said a voice from the back of the hall.
'That's her workbench, there,' said a young man in overalls made from brightly coloured patches of tough fabric, dirty from long exposure to metalwork. 'Her project is the big metal thing like a ’fridge but with red stripes.'
'Mm,' said Lydia, 'I know. I'm her tutor. How's her project getting along? She seems to be getting along all right.'
'Doing a good job, as far as I know,' said the brightly coloured overalls, 'We don't talk shop much. Apart from anything else, I don't have her gifts. She would tell you if she were having difficulties. I couldn't help much… Oh, here she is now.'
Chloë entered by the Reception door, a pale golden haired twenty year old looking a bit like
'As far as I know,' said Lydia. 'I hope you don't mind me calling without notice. I was passing through Lanark—'
'You're welcome. In fact I was going to phone you anyway. What's the depressing force on a half-inch square push-button supposed to be? Whatever I do to them, these are far too hard to press, especially if you're left handed.'
Lydia and Chloë manoeuvred the big metal thing into a position where they could push the row of buttons.
'They're going to take at least an hour,' said Fraser, who hadn't realised that Lydia could hear him.
'I don't think so,' said Lydia. 'Chloë, I have some notes for you in my bag somewhere. Why don't you show your project to my friends here, while I look for them.'
'Of course,' said Chloë. 'Guys…'
'I'm Barnabas and he's Fraser,' I said.
'Pleased to meet you both,' said Chloë. 'This invention is a latter day Goblin Teasmade.'
'Um,' I said, 'what was that?'
'You could use tinned food instead,' I blurted out.
'What did you just say?' Chloë asked.
'You could use tinned food instead of frozen food,' I repeated. 'The tins wouldn't stick together.'
Chloe laughed. 'That's a daft idea. How could it possibly…, er…' Chloë fell silent and thought. 'Actually, Stewed Food just might… I'll get the B2 pencil out and give it a spin. I think you might have solved one of the big development issues. I could kiss you.'
'Don't let me stop you,' I said.
'Figure of speech,' said Chloë.
'When it's on sale in the kitchenware department of Iain MacLeòdhas,
how much is it going to cost us?' Fraser asked.
'I thought of having three models,' said Chloë, 'cheap, average and expensive. The computer says the market price of the basic model should be £740.'
'If I ever get a job,' I said, 'that machine will be at the top of my list of domestic appliances I want in my kitchen.'
'You're unemployed?' Chloë sounded surprised. 'That's very tough. If you ever buy a Foodsmade, I shall make sure you get ten per cent off. If you're still out of work.'
'What's the difference between the models?' Fraser asked.
'The price, really.' said Chloë, 'just the price.'
'Just the price?' Fraser repeated.
'Well, I thought of some cosmetic differences. The average model has go-faster stripes and a lamp that goes on when you open the door. The expensive model connects to the Grid and you can order your dinner with your phone.'
'Is that worth paying extra for?' I asked.
'Wait, there’s more. The push-buttons light up,' Chloë smiled, 'and I'm going to put two extra controls on the expensive model,
Flavour and Calories.'
'This may sound like a silly question,' I asked, 'but what will they do?'
'Nothing,' said Chloë, 'any effect they may have is imagin— I mean, psychosomatic.'
Lydia had found her filofax and leafed through it.
'Chloë,' she said, 'here are the things I was going to ask you.'
'Good Lord,' said Chloë, 'you still keep notes in a notebook.'
'If I put things on my phone, I forget them,' said Lydia, 'and besides I inherited the filofax from my grand-dad. I was going to ask you about pricing. Does the £740 include tax and profit?'
'Forgive my interrupting but you don't actually need us here at the moment, do you?' I asked Lydia.
'I guess we'll be half an hour, probably longer,' Lydia said.
Chloë added, 'At least.'
'Fine,' I said, 'we'll be running around outside somewhere. Don't go home without us.'
Fraser almost tripped over an empty hessian sack that lay on the path. He picked it up and he was about to put it into the nearest rubbish bin, when I noticed the printing on the sack. 'McBogtrotter Hydroponics. 1 cwt. Handle with care.'
'What are McBogtrotter growing with hydroponics?' I thought out loud. 'A hundredweight of cannabis?'
'Everyone gave up smoking it years ago, when zizz came out.' said Fraser. 'There'd be no money in it now. That just looks like a potato sack, nothing unusual.'
'You can grow potatoes anywhere in Scotland,' I said. 'Why would you need hydroponics?'
'No idea,' said Fraser, and he rolled the sack up and dropped it into the bin.
We walked down the path to The Falls of Clyde. The Falls sparkled sky blue at the bottom of a deep wooded valley, and were every bit as beautiful as any tourist board could ask for. We stood admiring them until my phone said it was time to go back to the workshop, and then we turned back along the path.
We were both startled when, in the middle of the car park, we saw the familiar Fanta car. Standing beside it was the Reverend Pritchard, holding a spud gun, which I guessed was probably of the lethal variety. He was pointing it upwards, towards the sky.
'You two,' said Pritchard, 'stand where you are.'
'Oh, dear,' I said quietly. We stood still.
'I see before me the two birds that I wish to kill with two stones,' he said. 'Barnabas Burns, the man who stole my luxury car, and Fraser Farnsbarn, who avoided death at the Guy Fawkes party—'
Lydia had silently walked onto the car park, at the back. She saw the Reverend and must have realised what was going on, because she turned her back on us and ran towards the river bank, away from us. Was she leaving us to be executed? Lydia turned around, took another look at the scene, and sprinted towards the Reverend Pritchard.
With all the skill, force and accuracy you would expect from the fast bowler of Team Cricket Edinburgh, Lydia hurled a yorker towards Pritchard's feet and threw herself onto the asphalt. It was not a cricket ball but what looked like a potato. It bounced off the asphalt and onto the Fanta, and it exploded with great force into a fireball. Parts of the car and parts of Reverend Pritchard shot outwards. The force of the explosion knocked me off my feet. Fraser was less lucky. He was struck on the head by one of Pritchard's legs. He fell onto the ground beside me. I was awake enough to call 'Leg before!' and hear Lydia giggle, 'Yes, it was,' before I passed out.
★8 Baozhai, 报摘, a woman's name which means either stockade of treasures or newspaper, depending on who you ask.
★9
Pronounced friːtʃiː
★10
Making a cheesy noise
9. Run of the Mill
I woke up in the robo-ambulance. It was speeding along the W8 whizzway towards Edinburgh. Ahead of us the cars automatically moved off the emergency lane to allow us to pass at speed. I was lying in a bunk under a foil blanket. There was a name bracelet on my wrist, probably in case I fell off the trolley while they were taking me to the mortuary and rolled into a dark corner where they couldn't find me. There were electrodes stuck to my chest, sensing my pulse, blood pressure, breathing and other measurements that doctors take when they know you're going to be all right but you need looking after in the meanwhile. I turned and saw Fraser. He was unconscious in the opposite bunk with bandages on his head. I could see the mess that was once the Reverend Pritchard through the clear plastic bag full of charred and broken body parts unnecessarily marked Not To Be Resuscitated and Dissection Room.
The doctor was looking into Fraser's brain with a thinkoscope and looking worried. He turned to me.
'I'm Dr Sanford, from the emergency ambulance depôt,' he said. 'Do you know this man?'
'Yes,' I said, 'he's my boyfriend, Fraser Farmsbarn.'
'I expect he'll be all right in time,' the doctor told me, 'but I have to ask: Has he been having any mental problems that you know about?'
'The Rolf Harris gave him a Dream Test,' I said, 'so I know they were worried about him suffering condensation neurosis and possible melancholic reality anxiety, but I don't know what either of those are.'
'You could have asked the computer,' said Dr Sanford.
'Well, yes, I could, but I didn't want the computer to think I was pig-ignorant.'
'Well, your boyfriend has clearly had troubles in the past,' said Dr Sanford, straining to listen to the thinkoscope, 'but a blow to the head like the one he just suffered, well' — he sighed — 'anyone who watches a telly-stream knows that a bang on the head can cause anything from nightmares, amnesia, multiple personality disorder, total recall, invisibility, being flung hundreds of years into an apocalyptic future that looks like a demolition site, or a headache.'
'Or the head being knocked off altogether,' I said, 'like a vase of flowers off a mantelpiece.'
'That would be a most unfortunate post-traumatic symptom,' he said, 'and fortunately in your friend's case, I'm fairly sure that it hasn't happened. I would have noticed by now.'
'But when he wakes up, what state will he be in?' I asked.
'Scotland, I hope— Oh, I see what you mean. I don't know. It might just be a headache. I sent the thinkoscope reading to the Rolf Harris and I asked them to run it through the computer and then get the best mental wellness specialist they could find and have him ready to see the patient as soon as the ambulance arrives. So we just have to wait another… Ambulance, what's our X. T. A.?'
'Our exact time of arrival is thirty eight minutes,' said a synthesised voice from a loud-speaker somewhere in the ceiling. 'The emergency lane on the whizzway has been cleared for us. Do not be anxious. We are going as fast as possible.'
'But we're slowing down,' I noticed. 'Why are we slowing down?'
'The First Minister, Nicola III, is going home after a hard day's work,' the ambulance told me. 'We have to move into the slow lane for a couple of miles.'
The ambulance moved into the slow lane.
'Why doesn't the First Minister live nearer her office?' I asked.
'She is coming this way,' said the ambulance, 'after collecting a take-away pizza. It's one of those things that Glasgow does best.'
'What's the other one?' I asked.
'Fights on the pavement after closing time,' said the ambulance.
'What sort of pizza does she have?' Dr Sanford asked.
'Pizza Scozzese,' said the ambulance. 'Beef, haggis, salmon and Orkney cheese with porridge and extra neeps.'
'No slices of Mars Bar?' I asked it.
'Yes, but it costs extra. I can place an order for a Pizza Scozzese if you want one, but we'll need to turn around, go back and collect it.'
'Not just now,' Dr Sanford told it, 'being as we have an emergency on board, but thanks for offering.'
A Bentley behind us in the emergency lane pulled ahead of us. It had Scottish Saltire flags on the front mudguards. After it passed, the ambulance steered back into the emergency lane and picked up speed.
'How much did that delay us?' I sighed to Dr Sanford.
'By nine and a quarter seconds,' said the ambulance. 'I told you not to be anxious.'
It was dark now. As soon as the ambulance arrived outside the Emergency Department of the Rolf Harris, floodlight lit it up and a man in a white coat and an e-stethoscope dashed up to the side door. I recognised him. He was Dr Friedrich Freud.
'Dr Freud!' exclaimed Dr Sanford, obviously pleased to see a former colleague again. 'Are you back on duty already?'
'Yes,' said Dr Freud, 'They sacked me, so I offered to work for them on a zero hours contract, and they accepted. So I'm back at work and being paid twice what I was for doing the same job a week ago. Now, who do you have here—'
'The emergency is Mr Farmsbarn, who was caught in an explosion and got a nasty bang on the head. He's unconscious. We're also carrying Mr Pritchard, who is D. O. A., I'm afraid.'
Dr Freud clambered into the ambulance and took a long look at Fraser. 'I saw the readings that you sent in.' Dr Freud looked at me and added, 'Don't worry too much, Barnabas. He'll be all right, in time.'
'You remember me?' I was surprised.
'Of course,' said Dr Freud. 'Now, let's get busy. I am going to take Fraser to an examination room for twenty minutes or so. Unless I find anything that ranks as an emergency, I shall get him a bed in the Blessed Andrew Wakefield ward so you could wait for him there.'
I kissed Fraser goodbye for now and I left Dr Freud and Dr Sanford manœvering him onto a trolley.
'Who is this?' asked the trolley.
'This is Fraser Farmsbarn.' said Dr Freud. 'Take him to the Ferguson Room for examination.' It rolled off slowly through the double door and along a corridor.
There was nobody in the lobby. I took a cup of tea from the unmanned café and asked out loud the way to the Andrew Wakefield ward, just in case someone might be listening. A holo-bot appeared in front of me looking like an official in uniform. I walked behind it as far as the door to the ward, and there it told me that I could wait on one of the chairs in the corridor, and it disappeared.
I sat in the corridor outside the ward, very much on edge and staring hard at every trolley that passed in the hope of seeing Fraser lying on it. I half expected to see Fraser walking cheerfully towards me, smiling and saying 'Barnabas, sweetheart, I woke up feeling on top of the world and it was all a great fuss about nothing.' Sadly, things did not turn out like that. When Fraser arrived he was still unconscious. The blood had been cleaned off the open cuts and bruises, but he was still looked very injured. Dr Freud was sitting on the trolley beside him.
Dr Freud looked at my paper cup of tea. 'Is that for me?'
'Yes,' I lied. I gave him the tea and then realised I couldn't remember how to get back along the maze of corridors to the auto-café and get another cup of tea for myself. Fraser was lying still. He wasn't yet in a fit state to drink tea.
'You're thinking that you can't remember where you got the tea from,' said Dr Freud as he drank the whole cup of tea with a single movement, 'so you will never find the auto-café again and get another one. You have a nightmare vision of becoming lost and wandering the battleship grey corridors for the rest of eternity. Thank you for the tea, by the way, you are most generous.'
'How did you know what I was thinking?' I asked, astonished at his insight.
'Therapist's instinct,' he said, 'and you needn't worry. You can always find any place here. You just have to ask the little direction signs in the corridors. They are all i-signs.
I speak your way.'
I nodded. 'Mm.'
'Let's talk about Fraser.' said Dr Freud. 'He's more important.'
'Yes,' I said. 'Is he going to get better?'
'Well,' he told me, 'it could be worse.' He looked closely at Fraser and ran one hand over his head as though feeling for lumps and bumps in between the hair. 'No bones broken, and nothing he won't recover from. You're welcome to sit with him. He's not likely to wake up for at least a few hours, though. You've got plenty of time to get some more tea. The machines behind his bed are checking his heart rate, breathing, all the vital signs and a few others. So if he takes a turn for the worse, the medical staff will notice before you do.'
'What do I do,' I asked, 'when he wakes up?'
'Tell me when he's woken up,' the doctor said as he turned and went away, 'and look out for anything unusual.'
Nurse Lucie Lovell arrived and asked me, 'Is this Mr Farmsbarn?'
'Yes,' I said.
'Help me get him into the bed,' she said.
'Sure,' I said, 'I'll take the feet—'
'Not you.' said Nurse Lovell, 'I was talking to the trolley.'
'Oh!' the trolley responded. 'I didn't realise.'
It had been dark for several hours. I had fallen asleep in the chair beside Fraser's bed. Fraser moved towards me a little, waking me. In the distance I heard the clock on the Church of St James Savile strike five.
Fraser said, 'Five o'clock.' He stopped moving. His eyes were closed.
I replied, 'Welcome back.'
'Time to run,' said Fraser, slowly, slurring his words.
'No, it isn't,' I said, surprised that Fraser had for the first time in his life expressed interest in running, just when he was the least capable of running anywhere. 'Listen, love.' My grip on his hand tightened. 'You've been hurt. You're in the Rolf Harris and you're lucky to be alive. Just stay still. I'll fetch the doctor.'
'I have to run,' said Fraser, still lying with his eyes closed and still slurring his words.
As Dr Freud had explained, there was no need to fetch the doctor. The machines had already summoned a man and a woman, both in Scottish Health Service overalls, who arrived and stood beside Fraser's bed. They were wearing name badges but I recognised them anyway, as Dr Sanford and Nurse Lucie Lovell. I stood up to let them stand on my side of the bed but Dr Sanford waved me to stay seated.
'Run, run, as fast as you can', said Fraser just coherently enough for both Dr Sanford and Nurse Lovell to recognise it.
'Treximania,' they both said at once.
'Treximania?' I repeated, 'is that the same thing as, er…'
'Running disease. A desire to run around when there's nothing on fire,' said Lucie Lovell. 'treximania is the new coronavirus. You see sufferers often, on the canal towpath for instance, desperately running, trying with all their might to get away from something that isn't there and trying to reach something else that isn't there either.'
'A dreadful affliction,' said Dr Stanford, 'but with a bit of luck we might—'
'Today I will do what others won't,' mumbled Fraser with the Churchillian expression of one eating a marshmallow and addressing a speech to the House of Lords at the same time, 'and tomorrow I shall do what others can't.'
'Yes,' said Dr Sanford, nodding sagely to Fraser, 'that's if you don't die of cardiac arrest, dehydration, exhaustion or heat stroke first.'
'Get thou behind me, Satan,' mumbled Fraser. 'Faster means disaster.'
'Do you mean “Faster brings us closer?” ’ I asked him.
‘What?’ Fraser was momentarily horrified. ‘Rubbish!’
I imagined that sort of designed-by-committee aphorism sounds like distilled and concentrated wisdom when you're sliding headlong into treximania.
'Quicker is thicker,' mumbled Fraser, 'a lot thicker.'
'Why is he maundering about running?' I asked.
'I fear,' Dr Sanford, 'the treximania may be worse than we had hoped.'
'What rhymes with speedy? Fraser mumbled.
'How about seedy?' I said.
'Speedy is seedy,' mumbled Fraser.
‘How about “snappy?” ’' I said.
'Snappy is happy,' said Fraser.
'This might go on for a while,' Dr Sanford told me.
'Is it infectious?' I asked. 'I mean, will I catch it?'
'No,' said a voice I recognised, 'nobody knows exactly how the disease is transmitted, but it isn't a germ or a virus.'
'Doctor Freud!' I was very pleased to see him again. For all Dr Sanford's willing help, it was Dr Freud who seemed to be to be most on top of things.
'Overtake is a piece of cake,' said Fraser.
'It's passed on by apomimesis. His treximania is an expression of feeling scared of something, threatened by something. He is frightened of being picked out because he might appear obviously different from the rest of a group. A bit like camouflage, or like seeing somebody yawn on television and starting to yawn yourself. But the symptoms usually disappear with time.'
'How about a second bang on the head?' I asked, swinging an imaginary hammer.
'That's inadvisable. He was lucky to survive the first one. Put the hammer away.'
'I just found it lying around,' I said.
'That patient was more ill than your boyfriend is,' Dr Freud explained.
'Goodbye. I'm going to snatch some sleep.' Dr Sanford left the ward, telling Dr Freud, 'This looks like your department,' as he went, in a voice that left 'there's no point in a real doctor wasting time on it,' to be added.
Dr Freud leant over Fraser and said quietly, 'Fraser, can you hear me?'
Fraser turned his head towards Dr Freud, but didn't say anything.
'Fraser,' the doctor continued, 'I am going to ask you some questions and you are going to reply to them.'
'Shut the fuck up,' shouted a woman in a pink woollen night-shirt at the further end of the room.
'All in good time, madam,' said Dr Freud. 'Can you not see that this patient is very unwell?'
'No,' said Fraser, 'because I've got my eyes shut.'
'It's all right,' said Dr Freud, 'you didn't have to answer that one. But how do you feel, Fraser?'
'Headache,' said Fraser, 'confusion, and two voices speaking to me.'
'Tell me about the two voices,' said the doctor.
'One is your voice, a doctor making notes and trying to work out what's wrong with me. The other is the voice of the demon Xysticus, crying “Run, run!” ’
Dr Freud looked across at me. 'Treximania does this to its victims. Like a compulsive behaviour.'
'Put a sock in it, you two,' yelled the pink night-shirt. 'Or is it three?'
'Four,' muttered Fraser, 'if I count you.'
'Don't make me come over there,' said the night-shirt.
'What is the demon saying to you?' asked the doctor in a deliberate and obviously much rehearsed bed-side manner.
'Run, for I am Xysticus,' said Fraser, 'run, or the flames of Hell await.'
My phone lit up. 'Lydia Laird is on the phone,' the screen read. 'but I thought I'd better not ring out loud at this time of night.'
Good thinking, phone, I thought. Wait while I take you out into the corridor.
I asked Fraser and the doctor to excuse me. In the corridor, I answered the phone in a stage whisper. 'Lydia? … How are we? Thanks for asking. I have cuts and bruises but Fraser has some sort of brain damage.'
'Is he well enough to have a visitor yet?' Lydia asked.
'Yes,' I said, 'provided you phone ahead to reserve a place, wear a muzzle and sanitise your hands before you come into the ward. He's in the Andrew Wakefield ward.'
'Hang on,' said Lydia, 'while I write that down.'
'He's pretty ill,' I said.
'I thought he might be,' said Lydia, 'that's the most spectacular dismissal I've ever seen.'
'If you don't mind my asking,' I said, 'what was it that you bowled at him?'
'A potato,' said Lydia. 'There were a couple of sacks of them in the shed on the river bank. God knows what they were doing there instead of locked in the storehouse.'
'Not just any potato, surely,' I said.
'It was not just any potato,' Lydia agreed. 'It was an M&S potato.'
'M&S?' I asked her.
'An M&S potato. M for Microbes and S for Sustenance. They grow potatoes in a bacterial soup that converts the starches in the potato into nitro-glycerine and TNT.' She paused, and added, 'Actually, I'm not even meant to tell you that. Just if you ever find yourself holding a potato that seems a lot heavier than normal, carry it with great care, put it down at least a hundred yards from anything that looks as if it might break if a bomb went off, phone the Land Army, hide under the kitchen table and however hungry you are, on no account mash it.'
'I suppose that's how the lethal spud guns work,' I said, 'the latest and cheapest biological weapon.'
'Sorry,' Lydia said, 'It's all classified.' She tutted. 'Sometimes I wish I'd never agreed to— Woops! I mis-spoke. I never agreed to anything.'
'Don't worry,' I said. 'I have this problem with my ears. I haven't heard anything you've said for the past minute and a half. What was it about tungsten filament lighting?'
'Thank you,' said Lydia. 'I'll be at the hospital by two o'clock in the afternoon. I have to give a lecture in the morning.'
'You'd best get some sleep,' I said. 'See you then. By the way, ah…'
'Yes?'
'Thank you for saving our lives.'
I heard Lydia smile. 'I enjoyed it.'
When I came back into the ward, Fraser was half-way standing up in his hospital pyjamas and dressing gown and Dr Freud was helping him to put his socks and shoes on while at the same time being fast asleep.
'Standing still makes you ill,' muttered Fraser.
'You can go for a run, now that you've put your clothes on,' said Dr Freud, 'come with me.'
In the corridor, Dr Freud summoned a holo-bot and told it to run ahead of Fraser once around the main corridor and to send him a message if anything untoward happened. 'That's about half a mile,' he told Fraser. 'I think that'll be enough for the first day.' To Fraser and the holo-bot, he added, 'Go!'
The holo-bot set off at a steady pace and Fraser jogged along behind him. For a few seconds the patter of Fraser's footsteps faded away, echoing through the empty corridor.
Nurse Lucie Lovell came into the ward carrying a tray and a clip-board. She walked straight across to the pink night-shirt and drew the curtains around the bed.
'Mrs O'Riordan?' she said, in a voice that was meant to be inaudible to everybody else. 'Mrs O'Riordan?'
The pink night-shirt turned over in bed and yawned. 'What fuckin' time do you call this?'
'Mrs O'Riordan, this is urgent.' Nurse Lovell checked the pink night-shirt's identity bracelet and continued, even sotto-er voce than before, 'The tests have come back from the lab.'
'Bugger off,' said Mrs O'Riordan.
'I've got your test results here,' said Nurse Lovell.
'What did they say?' asked Mrs O'Riordan.
'They say, as we guessed… you have cancer.'
'Oh, my God,' exclaimed Mrs O'Riordan, louder than might have been necessary at five o'clock in the morning. 'I have a husband and two children. They wouldn't be able to manage on their own. Praise the Lord you've found a cure for it.'
'Take these pink pills now,' she said, taking a couple of pills from the tray and giving them to Mrs O'Riordan with a glass of water, 'and if the lump is still there in the morning I'll give you another two. After that, as soon as you feel better, you can go home.'
'Only two pills?' said Mrs O'Riordan, looking as though she had lost a shilling and found sixpence. 'I thought I was iller than that.'
'Sorry,' said Nurse Lovell, 'the covid-19 outbreak has caused a pill shortage.'
Fraser's footsteps became louder and came to a stop in the corridor just outside the ward.
'Get some sleep now,' Nurse Lovell said to Mrs O'Riordan. 'Goodnight, sweet dreams.'
The holo-bot turned a corner and disappeared. Dr Freud looked up at the clock on the wall and said, 'Five minutes and eighteen seconds. Good for a first attempt.' He helped Fraser back into the ward, and then he asked me, 'Is there anyone at home, to look after him?'
'Me,' I said, 'I can take care of him.'
'Good,' said Dr Freud. 'Sleep until breakfast time, then help him to dress and this evening you can take him home. He'll be a bit woozy for a while. He'll recover completely in a few days. For a while he will want to go running first thing every morning. Try not to let him over-do it. Half a mile is plenty. Time him and make a big fuss if he runs faster than the day before. His prognosis is as good as any — he'll forget about running sooner or later.'
'What about, er, resuming normal activities?' I asked.
'Normal activities?' Dr Freud appeared taken aback. 'You've got more important things to worry about… I mean, you can have a normal sex life starting now. Or at least as soon as you get home.'
'I meant, can Fraser go back to work? Or does he need to stay at home for a while?' I asked. 'He loves his job, but it involves a lot of… hard thinking. As well as the occasional tram ride.'
'Not today. Tomorrow. If he's recovering normally then he can leave hospital this evening and if he appears capable of doing his job, and he wants to go back. he can do it, just as long as the running doesn't make him too tired. It would be a good idea for you to go with him for the first couple of days, if you can, just in case he hallucinates, or anything.'
I settled in my chair again, held Fraser's hand under the quilt and fell asleep.
Lights being turned on and blinds being drawn woke us both up and announced that it was breakfast time.
'We can have something to eat in the auto-café' I said to Fraser as he wrapped himself up in a Rolf Harris dressing gown.
'I need to run,' said Fraser, more coherently than before. 'Standing still makes you ill.'
'You went for a run earlier,' I said, 'and between breakfast and lunch you have to stay in bed, lie still and recover from your injuries. You're lucky to be alive.'
'Running thirty miles a week — gives me power and physique,' said Fraser.
'Come on,' I said, 'we'll get breakfast for ourselves in the auto-café, if I can remember where it is.'
The auto-café was crowded and darker than a room ought to be. It was below ground, windowless and lighted by lamps of low power and a yellowish tone. There were patients in dressing gowns and day clothes, visitors in coats and doctors in SHS overalls. At the bottom of the stairs that led down to into the café, we both picked up trays from the counter marked ‘Full Scottish breakfast, unsuitable for patients with bacon, egg, porridge, tea or toast allergies,’ and we went to sit in a corner together.
Fraser looked at his tray. 'Do you think that's three thousand five hundred kilo-joules?'
'No, sweetheart,' I said, although I had no idea how many kilo-joules he had in front of him. It looked quite a lot, but to tell the truth, like all the French units, I had no idea what a kilo-joule was. 'It looks scarcely adequate for a runner like you, used to gruelling daily exertion. You can always go and get more if you're still hungry after you've eaten it all. It doesn't cost anything.'
'I'm a runner,' he said. 'Twelve thousand kilo-joules a day, otherwise I'll waste away.'
'Yes,' I said, looking at my own tray loaded with more food than I had seen in one place since I last ate in the Hilton school dinner hall and wondering how long it would take to eat it, 'I can imagine how much you have to eat if you're going to take part in the All Scotland Games.'
'Eat, compete, repeat,' said Fraser, finishing the bowl of porridge at the double and moving on to the main course. 'I'll be there on the podium, you'll see. When is the All Scotland Games, anyway?'
'July, aren't they?' I tried to remember.
'That gives me—' Fraser hesitated, trying to do the sum in his head, and a voice on the next table interrupted him.
'Just over twenty-nine weeks,' said the voice of Dr Sanford, 'You'll have recovered before then without treatment, Fraser.'
'And you'll return to your old interests of news-gathering for Marmaduke Magnox.' said the unmistakeable Australian accent. 'I've certainly missed you this couple of days.'
'Marmaduke!' Fraser was surprised. 'What are you doing here?'
'Sir Marmaduke,' said Sir Marmaduke. 'I came here to see how you were, and you've kindly saved me trying to find you. I've got something for you. Here, read this.'
Sir Marmaduke reached across and handed Fraser an envelope about four inches square and with Fraser Farmsbarn handwritten in ink on the front. Fraser opened it and found a card with crinkly edges and gold lettering.
'It's a posh invitation,' I said. 'Scottish flag, and their heraldic beasts the mole, the leek and the reliable sauce.'
'The Guild of Scottish Newspapers,' Fraser read, 'invites Fraser Farmsbarn—'
'That's you,' I said.
'Yes, it is, to the presentation of the Awards for Young Reporters of the year in Horseradish Hall at 8 pm on Monday, 12 November 2085. Dress: White shirt, plain tie, Burberry overcoat, trilby hat with Press pass, Clarks shoes.'
'I always propose the newest employee for the Most Promising Young Reporter award,' said Sir Marmaduke. 'You've only been working for me for a fortnight so you're the obvious choice. Good luck with it. If nothing else you get a free dinner. When you get back I want a hundred words telling us everything you saw and heard. It might make the NIBs, if anything interesting happens and the editor's in a good mood.'
'What use is NIBs?'
'No knocking the NIBs, Fraser,' Sir Marmaduke told him, 'News In Brief is one of the best read parts of the paper. You pay the newsboy, you read the headline, you look at the football, and then you turn straight to the NIBs. Each one a complete story of at most a hundred words in no more than three paragraphs.'
'I promise to bring in one first class NIB on Tuesday morning, sir.'
'That's what I was expecting, Fraser. Now go home and recover. You'll need all your strength to put up with the tripe you're going to hear on Monday. Goodbye for now.'
Our tin tray was still in place, holding the flat door open and saving us a great deal of trouble. Parked beside the door to our flat was a cardboard crate about the size, and as I discovered also the weight, of a medium size elephant. The label on the crate identified the sender as The University of Zucchini. Bruised by the explosion, Fraser nevertheless pushed the crate into the flat while I did my best to pull it. It must have taken an hour, moving the thing an inch at a time into the living room. Once we had pushed it far enough into the flat to close the door, I tried to tear the cardboard open. Inside the cardboard was an unfamiliar machine. A handwritten letter was stuck to its white enamelled steel casing.
Dear Fraser and Barnabas,I removed the rest of the cardboard crate and asked Fraser where I should put it.Do you want this? It is the pre production prototype of the Keane Foodsmade, the outcome of Chloë Keane's final year project. We don't have anywhere to put it in the department, and Chloë said you might like to have it. If you find it useful, please tell Lydia or me.
Kind regards, Solomon Scott, Professor of Mechanical Engineering
PS. Lydia is in line for a first class degree.
PPS. The machine has wheels. If you just cut all the cardboard off with a pair of scissors, you'll find it's easy to push it into place. Put the brake on afterwards.
'In the kitchen, I suppose,' he suggested.
It rolled easily into its new home. Once I'd plugged it in and waited for some starting-up noise to quieten down, I thought it might be a good idea to get some food out of it.
'Foodsmade!' I said, 'This is your new owner speaking to you.'
'Good morning, Mr Burns,' said the Foodsmade.
'Can you make some lunch for us?' I asked it.
The Foodsmade thought for a moment. 'Isn't it a bit early for lunch?'
'No,' I said.
'Please don't keep me waiting,' said Fraser, 'because I haven't been out for a run today.'
'How about elevenses?' the Foodsmade suggested.
'We really want a hot lunch,' I said, 'if it's not too much trouble.'
An expression of mild anxiety crossed Fraser's face. 'You are the premium model, aren't you? The most expensive one?'
'Of course,' said the Foodsmade. 'And for lunch I can offer you…'
'Yes?' I said.
'Just a moment,' said the Foodsmade, 'I'm thinking. The chef's special today is
filet de bœuf farçi en croûte.
'Chef's special?' I asked.
'I'm the chef.'
I struggled to understand. 'What's filet de thingy?'
'Steak sandwich to you,' it said.
'Oh.' It had sounded good in foreign. 'What else is there?'
'Fish and chips,' replied the Foodsmade, 'or steak pie. Is either of you vegetarian?'
'No,' I said.
'In that case,' said the Foodsmade, 'the vegetarian option is cabbage.'
'Cabbage?' Fraser repeated.
'Boiled with tomato sauce.' the Foodsmade explained.
'Does anybody ever choose the vegetarian option?' I asked.
'No,' it said, 'but by law every restaurant that serves meat has to offer a vegetarian option. It's a vital precaution against climate change—'
'Listen,' Fraser interrupted with a degree of emotion quite unnecessary when speaking to a robot, 'I'm a runner,' my heart sank, 'and I need 14,000 kilo-joules a day to develop my leg muscles.'
'Your logic appears to be faulty,' said the Foodsmade. 'It is running that develops your leg muscles. You do not—'
'Make me a lunch with an energy content of 4,000 kilo-joules.' said Fraser with particular clarity.
'Make him a lunch of 4,000 kilo-joules,' I added, 'or now that you've set him off, he'll go on about running for ever. I'll have the steak pie.'
'Then I will cook a slice of raisin pie for Mr Farmsbarn's dessert,' replied the Foodsmade, 'which will provide another 2,155 kilo-joules.'
'Good,' said Fraser.
For a moment the kitchen rang with cooking noises and assembly line noises, and then the hatch on the front of the machine opened. Steam and a billow of hot air bearing the most savoury and appetising smell escaped from it. Lights lit up our lunches: Steak pie on the left, a large fish supper with sweetcorn and tomato salad, extra chips and tartare sauce in the middle, and on the right a steaming hot slice of raisin pie in a bowl with half a pint or so of custard.
From somewhere in the innards of the Foodsmade, a gong sounded. 'Luncheon is served,' said the Foodsmade.
'Put it on a tray,' I told Fraser, 'and eat it in bed.'
'I have to go for a run,' Fraser protested. 'I've taken no exercise today. Stay in bed, drop down dead.'
'After shoving that souped-up can-opener around the flat until you were sweating and completely worn out? Maybe this evening.'
'You're right,' said Fraser.
'You're only just out of hospital,' I said, hoping the treximania was slipping into remission.
'Yes,' said Fraser. 'Where's the tray?'
I pointed to it. 'Over there, by the door.'
Fraser piled his lunch onto the tray and carried it to the bedroom. He put the tray onto his bedside table and sat up, eating.
Half an hour or so later I looked in on Fraser. He had eaten less than half of his lunch and fallen asleep. I took the scraps to the kitchen, threw the excess food away and washed the dishes. If Fraser said he was still hungry when he woke up, I could always say that he'd eaten it all and dozed off.
Chapter 10. Clear for Landing
We brought spiral-bound notebooks, pencils and Post It notes, and we wrote PRESS 2085 on them in big letters with a black Sharpie. After half an hour or so searching through the endless piles of bric-a-brac, white elephants and old clothes in Bullet Holes charity shop, Fraser and I had found raincoats and hats and musty smelling ties suitable for wearing on a visit to the Guild of Scottish Newspapers. Foraging in the dark corner at the back of the shop I even found an old photographer's outfit. When we cleaned the dust off the box, the kit turned out to be an ancient box camera, a couple of flash-bulbs and two empty circular openings where rolls of film used to be. Our appearance was faultless. It had cost us £7·35. I gave the camera to Fraser. We looked the part.
‘Where’s the news?’ Fraser asked me. ‘Is this where we run into the road waving our arms and holler “Taxi!” and a taxi screeches to a halt to an echoing cry of Where to?’
'We have to report something, don't we?' I said. 'We can't spend that much good money on costumes and props and then only report on an award ceremony. We need… a scoop, if only to show Sir Marmaduke that we spent our time profitably.'
'Righto,' said Fraser. 'How much time do we have?'
I squinted at the clock on the tower of the Church of St James Savile in the distance. 'Three quarters of an hour.'
'Horseradish Hall is a quarter of an hour away and we're wearing fancy dress, so we really ought to engage in some newspaper related activity,' Fraser offered. 'Can we find a story?'
'We could make one up. 'Tooth fairy smothered to death under pillow,' I thought out loud, 'or Rare haggis shot by poachers, perhaps.'
Fraser shook his head. 'No, we need a real story. A funny thing happened on the way to the Awards Ceremony.'
'How come,' I mused, 'there's never a story around when you—'
'Hi, Fraser!' Two women called to him from across the street.
'Jaza!' Fraser called back as he crossed the road to meet them. 'And Lydia. What are you—'
'Doing here?' Lydia asked. 'I'm taking my rôle model and writer of inspirational poetry Jaza Jamaîl back home after showing her Chloë Keane's invention.'
'Yes,' Jaza agreed, 'I'm most impressed. I gather Chloë's already bought her first yacht.'
'You were in the workshop all those miles away?' I asked.
'No, no,' said Jaza, 'it's in the shop window over there.'
'You remembered me, Jaza!' Fraser sounded surprised and quite pleased.
'Well,' said Jaza thoughtfully, 'when someone interrupts your performance by getting shot at, right in front of the stage and creating a panic, you kind of remember that.'
'Yes,' said Fraser, not apologetically enough. 'I suppose it stuck in your memory. It certainly stuck in mine. Maybe I can come and watch your show from end to end some time.'
'Too early, I'm afraid,' said Fraser. 'I have a job. I can't get to the Greengage in time.'
'Job?' For an instant it looked as though Jaza thought that Fraser getting a job was beyond credence. 'You got a job?'
'Read the clothes,' I said.
''Fraser Farmsbarn,' said Fraser, impressively. 'Ace reporter at your service. I make and I break. I build them up and I knock them down. I buy woodpulp, process it and sell it at a profit.'
'Can you get me into the paper?' Jaza asked immediately, 'because I have a few tickets left for the Greengage. Well, enough tickets to sink a ship.'
'Sure thing, ma’am. All the news that's fit to print. Watch the birdie and I'll have you top right on the front page.' Fraser lifted the camera, squinted at Jaza through the grease on the view-finder and clicked the shutter. With a bang, the flashbulb flared like a star going super-nova. 'Golly! I wasn't expecting that,' he added.
'Fraser,' I said quietly, 'there's no film—'
'Do an interview, Barnabas,' Fraser replied.
I flipped my notebook open and I licked the tip of my pencil. I fancied that I had seen reporters in old films lick the tip of their pencil before writing anything, although I had no idea what they did it for.
'How long will you be in the big city?' I asked.
'Glasgow, just two nights starting Monday. Hey, I can't see anything except flashbulbs.'
I wrote a string of made-up scribbles that I hoped Miss Jamaîl would think was Teeline.
'I meant Edinburgh,' I explained.
'Barnabas, I live in Edinburgh. I won't be leaving any time soon. Don't forget to say there are still plenty of tickets left for the Greengage.'
'…Any time,' scribble, 'soon,' scribble, I wrote make-believe shorthand. 'You live here?'
I scribbled a couple more glyphs. 'Can you see anything that isn't a flashbulb yet?'
'The white haze is fading,' said Jaza, reassuringly. 'I can see you writing,'
'Good,' I said, 'because you had me worried.'
'Skank House,' Jaza repeated, 'Sierra, kilo, alpha, November—'
'Yes,' I said, pointing to the last glyph on the line. 'That character there says Skank House.'
'No, it doesn't,' said Jaza. 'It says ferblug. You've written,' she ran her index finger along the line of scribble, 'Serk ger-nat shink lart ferblug.'
Just as I was wishing that the ground would open up and swallow me, my trilby hat fell off. Fortunately Lydia saw the funny side and began to giggle loudly.
'I was faking it,' I admitted. 'I am no more a reporter than I am a space-rocket repair-man. I'm going to a Newspapers Guild award ceremony with Fraser because he's my boyfriend and he has a spare ticket.'
'Here,' said Lydia as she picked my hat up and gave it to me. 'You look a sight more authentic wearing this.'
'I love the Press ticket,' said Jaza. 'That's remarkable attention to detail.'
'I made it myself,' I said, proudly.
Fraser's phone interrupted us, just when the street party was getting started. 'Ping! The award ceremony begins in fifteen minutes, Mr Farmsbarn. We have barely time to walk to Horseradish Hall.'
'Oh, well,' I said, 'here's hoping we meet again soon.'
'Just one last question,' Fraser asked, urgently, as though his keen nose for news had scented something. 'How did you get a start-up grant big enough to buy Skank House? Most applicants get a lot less than that.'
'Daddy used his influence. Marmaduke Magnox. Sir Marmaduke Magnox. You must have heard of him.'
'I certainly have,' said Fraser.
'Come on,' I said, 'or we'll be late.'
As we arrived at Horseradish Hall, the two mechanical usherettes at the top of the steps, one in blue uniform and the other in green, were pushing the doors closed.
'Yes, Fraser Farmsbarn, from The Scot,' said Fraser, obviously overwhelmed by the warmth of the welcome which this walking, talking ticket barrier had given him. 'I'm only here because my proprietor wants a story about—'
'I'm Skye,' she said, 'and over there, in green, that's Treesa. I just love your outfit. You look exactly like a reporter. Come with me and I'll—'
'Hold on for a second!' Treesa stopped attending to the door for the moment and walked over to Fraser. 'Thinking about the last couple of days, Mr Farmsbarn, have you suffered a high temperature, a new continuous cough or a loss of your sense of smell or taste?'
'We were worried that you might not make it here in time,' Skye continued.
'No,' said Fraser, 'I haven't.'
'Have you recently travelled abroad?' Treesa asked.
'No, I haven't,' said Fraser.
'Mr Burns,' Treesa called out, 'have you suffered a high temperature, a new continuous cough or a loss of your sense of smell or taste in the last seven days?'
'No, I haven't,' I said.
'Neither of us has,' said Fraser.
'Do either of you have any unspent criminal convictions,' Treesa continued, 'or any criminal charges pending against you awaiting trial—'
'Er… I stole a car,' I said, most ill advisedly.
'That was yesterday's question,' Skye shook her head in disbelief, 'when we did the Police Medals. I wish you'd try to keep up, Treesa.'
'Neither of us has,' said Fraser. 'My friend here has vivid nightmares.'
'I gave it back afterwards,' I lied.
'May I have your autograph, Mr Farmsbarn?' Treesa's tone changed. She held out a piece of notepaper and a scratchpoint.
'Sure thing, Ma'am.' Fraser wrote his name on the paper and asked, 'Where do we go from here?'
'Through the front door,' said Skye, 'and through the door that says… I'll show you to your seats. while Treesa,' she looked meaningfully at Treesa, 'closes the doors. Did you remember the keys, Treesa?'
Treesa pulled a key-ring laden with flashy, chrome plated, twentieth century keys from her pocket, showed it to us, and went back to shoving the heavy wooden door.
Skye led the two of us down a dingy passageway and through a small wooden door marked Authorised Staff Only. We emerged into the front of the auditorium. Every seat on the front several rows was occupied. Skye took us half way along the front row and said something quietly to a man in a suit who was sitting there.
He and the lady in the next seat along jumped up. 'Oh, I'm so sorry, Mr Farmsbarn. We only moved here because—'
'It's all right,' said Fraser, 'I should have been here on time.'
The couple slunk off. As Fraser and I sat down, the house lights dimmed and a spot came up centre stage. I noticed a television camera swivel towards Topaz Turner as she walked shakily to the mike and announced loudly and unevenly, 'Welcome to the, to the, ah…,' she took her phone out of her bag and read from it, 'Annual Young Reporter of the Year Awards, sponsored by the Skittish… Scottish Guild of Newspapers. And the winner is—'
'You don't read that bit yet,' a voice from off-set interrupted. 'Introduce yourself, then talk about the Guild, and then hand the awards out like we agreed at rehearsal yesterday. You've still got twenty minutes.'
'I'm Topaz Turner and my day job is anchor on Scottish Telly-stream's twice weekly debate… What's it called, Finlay?'
'Panic.' said Finlay Fowler, from somewhere off set.
'Why, what's happened, has the bar run out of Inchisaig?'
'It's called Panic,' Finlay explained. 'The name of the programme that was dim-witted enough to hire you is Panic.'
'Yeah,' breathed Topaz, 'yeah, I forgot. I'm Topaz Turner and I'm the anchor on Panic. When the Scottish Guild of Newspapers asked me to present the Young Reporter of the Year Awards, my first thought was, “Who the devil are they?” and my second thought was “Can they afford me?” Because my agent expects at least five thousand pounds for an engagement like this one. And I didn't want to find my type self-cast—'
'Read the script!' said Fowler's voice. 'For crying out loud, Topaz, read the script, it isn't difficult.' He continued, 'Why I stay in this job is beyond me,' and he forgot to press the cough key.
Topaz fumbled in her bag. 'The script isn't here, Finlay. I haven't got it. I'm sure I took it home yesterday.'
'It's on the auto-cue at the back of the hall,' said Fowler, 'just like yesterday. Can you see it now?'
'Oh. Sure,' Topaz nodded.
'And here we go again,' said Fowler. 'Quiet please. Mikes, camera, action.'
'Good evening, everybody,' Topaz began again. 'I'm Topaz Turner. It's a great pleasure to present the Young Repeater of the Yard Awards for the Scottish Guild of Newspapers.' She took a deep breath. 'On an average week-day, the newsboys of Scotland sell two million newspapers, yet few readers if any realise just how many of the stovies they read are… Oh, I think I'm going to be sick.'
Topaz left the stage in as much of a hurry as she was capable of. As she left, a number of flashbulbs blazed. After half a minute Fowler came on set and try to save the day.
'I'm Finlay Fowler. I've worked with Topaz since—'
A young man in a trench-coat and a trilby very like my own stood up holding a spiral-bound notebook and a pencil. 'Mr Fowler! Mr Fowler! John-Paul MacConnel, Tannochbrae Times. Are you going to fire Topaz Turner?'
Fowler blinked, stared at Mr MacConnel, and thought for a second. 'I wasn't expecting an impromptu press conference.'
There was laughter among the audience.
'Mr MacConnel,' Fowler continued, 'I have every confidence that Ms Turner will continue to work for Scottish Telly-stream for some years yet. She has an extraordinary talent for sensing the questions that the audience wants her to ask, and she is absolutely fearless in putting them to our studio guests. Next question?'
Several other members of the audience attired similarly to Mr MacConnel rose to their feet.
'Katrina Stacey, The Jedburgh Journal,' said one, 'Mr Fowler, how many times has Ms Turner been admitted to the Alcohol Addiction Clinic?'
'None at all, that I am aware of. Scottish Telly-stream takes great pride in looking after its employees' health, and if we thought Ms Turner had a health problem, we would make sure that she was given appropriate treatment. Next question?'
Ms Stacey continued, to laughter in the stalls, 'How do you spell Inchisaig? What is it exactly?'
'Go ask your local grocer. Next question?'
Ms Stacey joined the fray again. 'Would that be a licensed grocer?'
'Next question,' Fowler puffed.
'Buster Gardener, The Dumfries Daily. What are Ms Turner's vital statistics?'
Fowler muttered 'God Almighty' under his breath, and somewhere in the audience a woman called out 'Yeah! And how much is her house worth?'
'Since you can look it up any time on Blah!' said Fowler, 'they're 36D-27-38. She is five foot ten inches tall and weighs ten stone twelve pounds. Her star sign is Aquarius and her favourite colour is turquoise. Next question?'
'Who makes her dresses?' asked a voice.
'Who said that?' Fowler asked.
'Me. Sorry.' A young lady stood up. 'The Melrose Messenger. Sophia Wagstaff. Fashion correspondent. Who makes Ms Turner's dresses?'
'Ramone Hoover of Brook Street, London. She's on retainer and she made every dress that Topaz has worn on screen for the last five years. What she doesn't know how to do with a sewing machine and a pair of pinking shears isn't worth knowing how to do. Now please excuse me but I have to move the show along.'
A young Black lady remained standing while the other reporters resumed their seats. 'Anniyah Velatoga, Greetings Magazine.' she began, 'Is there any truth—
'Sorry,' said Fowler, 'I have to move the show along now, or we'll never get to the bar before it shuts. Phone me tomorrow. I won't—'
'Is there any truth,' Ms Velatoga talked over him, 'in the rumour that Topaz is having an affaire with Taka Madana, the Mambezan Ambassador to Scotland?'
'I have been to Mambeza several times reporting on Scottish involvement in the Jameta Bank fraud.' said Fowler. 'Mambeza is a Crown Dependency. It has no ambassador.'
I wondered what Topaz would think when she found that out.
'You'll have to draw your own conclusion about that,' said Fowler, squinting at the picture. 'And while I'm on the subject, that's Ms Turner to you. Now, no more questions.'
'Mr Fowler,' said Ms Velatoga, 'I took this photograph myself, when I saw the two of them coming out of The Heather House Hotel.'
Fowler was visibly taken aback, but not for very long. 'Then you should have taken it bigger. No more questions.'
It took him a moment to compose himself. Then he stood and faced the audience, sorted through the pile of papers and certificates on the lectern, and began.
'I won't read Topaz's speech,' he said, 'because it's about her thoughts and not mine, but I feel I ought to thank you all for coming along and also I have to apologise to the cleaners for the mess we've made.'
'It's okay,' Treeza called cheerily from somewhere on the back row, 'I'm programmed to enjoy it.'
'Stop lying,' said Skye, next to her.
'But I will read the results of the Guild's deliberations,' Fowler continued, 'and after that you can leave early.'
There was a quiet round of applause from the hall, a man in a starburst tie said 'Thank you,' and someone else said, 'Pint of bitter, please, barman.'
'And another one for me,' Fowler added. 'Now as you know there are four awards. Please don't ask questions at this stage. If you want to talk to the winners, or anyone else, come to the bar afterwards.'
Fowler paused for effect, shuffled the papers on the lectern and then found the one he was looking for.
'One, the award for best young sports writer goes to Carter Lowe of The Falkirk Footballer. Carter Lowe is here to receive the award. Carter?'
Carter Lowe was seated on the front row, to our right. He stood up and walked up the steps onto the stage, where Fowler shook his hand and gave him a certificate. Suddenly realising what was expected of him, Carter stood behind the mike and said, 'I'm sorry, I didn't write a speech.'
'Be quiet, then,' said the starburst tie.
'Here,' said Fowler, producing a small piece of paper from his pocket, 'read this one.'
'Thanks,' said Carter Lowe, 'really, thanks.'
Carter Lowe unfolded the paper. 'I am overwhelmed and surprised,' he began. 'I wasn't expecting to win any sort of award. I just went to the football ground in winter and the cricket pitch in summer, and I wrote down everything I saw…'
The next thing I knew, Treeza was tapping me on the shoulder and Skye was standing beside Fraser hissing, 'Two minutes, Mr Farmsbarn.'
'Two minutes of what?' Fraser asked.
'You're on in two minutes,' said Treeza.
'I must have been asleep,' I said.
'Yes,' said Treeza. 'We noticed.'
I looked up. Finlay Fowler was still standing centre stage and talking about the award winners.
'…we come to the highest award this evening,' he was saying, 'that of Young Reporter of the Year itself. The Guild was unanimous in accepting the recommendation made by Sir Marmaduke Magnox himself and giving the award to a young reporter who was already hard at work on stories of great public interest when he was threatened and only the intervention of a kind friend saved his life. Fraser Farmsbarn.'
Fraser looked astonished and, trance like, stood and walked onto set, where Finlay shook his hand and gave him a wooden plaque and an envelope.
Carrying our paper cups of tea, we arrived in Fraser's office, where Sir Marmaduke stood waiting for us.
'Well done,' he said. 'Congratulations. What do you think you'll spend the prize money on?'
'I have no idea,' said Fraser. 'Barnabas, what would you spend it on?'
'The usual. Cruise to Australia, holidays on Mustique, the latest mobile phone…'
'Something will occur to you, I'm sure,' said Sir Marmaduke. 'Now, Farmsbarn, does the job title of Senior News Reporter appeal to you?'
'I'd like it very much,' said Fraser.
'It's yours. And so is the pay rise that goes with it. Five per cent.'
'I'm very grateful,' said Fraser.
'No need to be grateful. You've earned it. When am I getting my first story to go with your new improved by-line?'
'Improved by-line?' Fraser seemed not to understand.
'Blah, blah, blah, by Fraser Farmsbarn, Senior News Reporter.'
'I have two stories, sir. The NIB about the award ceremony and a story about a misuse of public money.'
'Great stuff, Farmsbarn. Get to it.'
'I'll have both of them in your in-box in an hour, sir.'
Sir Marmaduke left the room and Fraser sat down at his desk, took the notebook from his pocket, put them beside the keyboard and began to type. I tried to think of something useful to do, and when I couldn't, I made two more cups of tea. When Fraser stopped typing for an instant and reached for his tea, I asked him how he was getting along.
‘That was the easy one,’ he said, ‘one hundred words on the Young Reporter of the Year Awards will sit nicely somewhere among the NIBs, along with “Eggplant Entertainment opens Noddy In Toyland Theme Park” and “Boy Learns to Read in Edinburgh School.” ’
‘Don’t forget,’ I said, 
Fraser thought out loud. ‘What’s the headline going to say?’
‘Is newspaper owner a crook?’ I suggested.
‘Computer, write this down.’ said Fraser. ‘Is newspaper owner a crook question mark.
That’ll do for now,I can’t think of anything better.
Newspaper magnate Sir Marmaduke Magnox applied for a business start-up grant and used it to buy a large house in the Borders
for his daughter, the performance poet Jaza Jamaîl, that’s Juliet Alpha Zulu Alpha…
’
Twenty minutes later and after a lot of consulting his notes and a lot of dictation, Fraser showed me the story and asked me what I thought of it.
'As far as I can see, Fraser darling,' I said, crossing my fingers as inconspicuously as I could, 'it's a true and correct record of a matter of public interest, but I'm not sure that you wouldn't be wiser to offer the story to the Sponge.'
'What?' The idea had, obviously, not occurred to Fraser. 'A senior staff reporter offering a hot story to a rival newspaper? Sir Marmaduke would fire me as soon as look at me. He'd see it as disloyalty.'
'Yes,' I said, 'you're right there. He probably would.'
'Here it goes, then.' said Fraser. 'Computer, send it off.'
'Fraser,' said the computer, 'you ought to go for a walk round the block and think before you send it.'
'Over-ruled,' said Fraser. 'Send it.'
It was perhaps two minutes before Sir Marmaduke arrived in the office carrying a printed copy of the story and looking most displeased.
'Farmsbarn,' he fulminated, 'Where’d you get this from?'
'I'm sorry, Sir, but I can't discuss my source.'
'At least you've learned something in your time here,' said Sir Marmaduke. 'Did you really think I would let this story run?'
'Yes, Sir,' said Fraser. 'I thought about it all day before I submitted it. It's the truth. It's of public interest. People will buy a newspaper to read it.'
'It's derogatory,' said Sir Marmaduke. 'Worse than that. It's derogatory about me. God's sake, Farmsbarn, greater reporters than you have been fired for less than this, and sued for even less.'
'Sir,' said Fraser, 'once you start censoring a newspaper, you end up never printing anything that rich people don't want poor people to hear. You taught me that. The story is true. It's front page material. You applied for a business start-up grant so that your daughter could become a performance poet. The grant was huge, ten times what the City Council usually gives, because you threatened to expose the Lord Provost—'
Sir Marmaduke waved his hand to stop Fraser saying more. 'You're right,' he said, suddenly quieter. 'You're right, of course.'
There was a moment's silence. Fraser's jaw dropped. Mine dropped too.
'You are a seeker and defender of the truth, Farmsbarn,' said Sir Marmaduke, nodding. 'I feel as though I had found a ten pound note in a pile of toilet paper. We shall publish and be damned. We'll run the story in full, on page three. Compromise.'
'Underneath Unemployed Graduate of the Day? Unemployed transport engineering graduate Sandra from Crieff wears her orange bikini while she dreams of the day she will build a straight grade separated four-lane whizzway from Carstairs to the western end of the Peebles By-pass?' Fraser asked.
'Yes, Farmsbarn. Not on the front page. And don't knock Unemployed Graduate of the Day. First, it was my idea.
Second, do you know how many people that feature has found work for?
'No, sir, I don't,' said Fraser.
Sir Marmaduke sighed audibly. 'None at all unless you count two photographers and a string of C-list swimsuit models.
Which reminds me, there was something else that I was going to ask the two of you.'
I listened carefully.
'Look…' said Sir Marmaduke, 'this is a bit delicate and it's none of my business but… Farmsbarn, you've got all the award money and you've got a salary increase. Why don't you two get married? Have a baby together? You obviously love each other and you more than meet the income and liquid asset requirements for a procreation licence.'
'Baby?' I said.
'Sure,' said Sir Marmaduke. 'Wean Works, in the science park, will tailor-make one for you. I've even got a money-off coupon from them somewhere.'
'We never thought about it,' said Fraser.
'He's right,' I said, 'we need to talk about it. As a matter of fact, I often think about it—'
My phone spoke up. 'Excuse me, Barnabas. Miss Coral Cole is calling you from Stewed Food plc in Leith.'
'Oh!' I thought. 'I wonder what she wants. Put her through.'
'Hello again, Barnabas,' said a Scottish voice. 'I'm Coral Cole from the human resources department of Stewed Food plc in Leith.'
'Hello again,' I said.
'You've been using the prototype Foodsmade, I believe,' said Miss Cole.
'Yes,' I said. 'It's pretty good. It does the best yorkshire pudding you've ever seen—'
'And a week or two ago,' she went on, 'you applied to this company for a job.'
'Who is it?' Fraser asked me.
I stage-whispered, 'Work, I think.'
'Since you're the only person who has ever used it, we wonder whether you would like us to consider you for a job in the User Experience Team.'
'If I liked you to consider me for the job,' I said, 'would you give it to me?'
'Actually,' I said, 'I've just been offered a permanent lifelong contract doing something quite different. Working from home, sort of thing.' I turned to Fraser and stage-whispered again, 'That was what you were offering, wasn't it?'
'Yes!' breathed Fraser. 'Good God, yes.'
'I'm sorry but you just missed me,' I said. 'Thanks for ringing.'
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