by Toby Weston
“Keith is joining the Old Man’s firm, aren't you bud?” Ben chipped in.
“Yes, thought I’d give selling my soul a try.”
“Didn't you two go to school together?” the other girl asked. Keith couldn’t remember her name. She had arrived with Ben, who claimed he picked her up the night before, but Keith suspected that was a lie, especially as she knew their backstory. Ben probably would not have given her the edited highlights of his life as part of his pre-coital patter. It was more reasonable to assume she was a hostess, paid to smile and be friendly, primed with nuggets of narrative in order to create the illusion that there were human beings who didn’t find Ben repugnant. Keith didn’t really give a shit either way.
“Yeah, and what a thrill that was!” Keith said. “I was one of the token poor people they let in to keep the lynch mobs off their backs.”
“It’s true,” said Ben, “he always was a tight wad!”
“Hey! I just got the drinks. Go and uncurl some of your crisp new notes and buy us a round!”
Ben took one out of his pocket, crumpled it up, and chucked it at Shaun. “Be a darling, Shaun. I'm all squashed in here with Melanie.”
Shaun picked up the note, without comment, to make a run to the bar. The poor little tosser had been Ben’s gofer since seventh grade.
Melanie, so that was her name. He looked at Ben, slobbering all over the fragile girl. She was rather attractive. He supposed she might not be a hostess. There was the possibility she was just some poor company employee, who miscalculated in thinking an evening getting her face covered in Ben’s saliva would be a fair trade for some future promotion or perk.
Deb leant towards Keith, looking significantly over at Ben. “Why are you doing this?”
“What?”
“Going to work for little Lord Ass-hole over there?”
“Oh, don’t fucking start.”
“Seriously, you hate all that shit! They are tight with the Forwards you know. ‘Government-sponsored secret police’, you used to call them.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not thrilled either. It’s okay for you; you’re an artist. You’ve got your life sorted.”
She looked at him incredulously. “I live in a squat on handouts from a system I despise. Get real. I am only drinking with this twat because he promised to buy a couple of rounds, and I can’t afford both paint and beer at the moment.”
“But at least you know what you want!” said Keith. “I don’t have a clue, and I guess, when it comes down to it, I would rather get paid well doing basically anything, than waste my fucking life in pointless poverty!”
“That’s the opposite of what you said last time, darling, during your last existential crisis of being.”
“I know.” He took another gulp of beer and tried to go back to studying the carpet.
“You still owe me for talking you out of joining the army! Oh well, at least you will be able to buy me dinner every now and again. I might even consider getting back together with you.”
The carpet lost some of its interest. “Sleeping with the enemy doesn’t sound like your thing.”
Deb leant over to slap him gently on the cheek. “Who knows, Keith dear. You’re not the only one with flexible morals. Spoil me and we’ll see.”
“Ha!” Ben chortled. “You see, Keith. The perks of wealth and power!”
Keith hadn’t realised Ben was listening. He turned to reply, taking in Ben’s grinning, self-satisfied mug and Melanie’s lightly masked look of horror and self-disgust. They made eye contact for a second, then she shrugged and looked away. Shaun returned with a round of drinks, complete with Jäger chasers.
Ben slapped him on the shoulder. “Nice one, Shaun! Good call with the Jäger!”
Ironically, Keith realised Ben was the least hypocritical person at the table. He was buying friendship and was comfortable with that. No moral torment for him. Keith decided he would try to pause the destructive introspection by getting very, very drunk. He raised his little glass of brown, syrupy liquid to Melanie and winked. She hesitated for a second and then returned the gesture. It looked like she had come to a similar decision. He shuffled along the bench towards her slightly, and they clinked glasses. Ben read the moment expertly and slid over to the chair next to Deb; he knocked the tray, which tipped over her shot. Without a word, he reached out and took the glass from in front of Shaun and passed it to Deb. She looked over to Keith and Melanie, now laughing conspiratorially at some private joke. Then she sighed and took the proffered glass.
The next day, Melanie had left early with little conversation. She was presumably horrified to be waking up in Keith’s tiny, dingy flat, rather than one of Ben’s penthouse apartments. Keith cleaned his teeth, took two Feel-Betters, showered, and got dressed. He set off across London to meet Ben for the drive up to Aberdeen. The cold cleared his head, and the tube ride allowed a few minutes of recuperation. As he got out at High Street Kensington, he was eyed suspiciously by police or security officers—it was difficult to tell which, without reading the fine print on their badges.
Let in by an obsequious housekeeper, Keith sat across the ancient polished oval table from Ben and his father. They both wore suits of deep, rich material; fine pinstripes, in Ben’s case, and navy blue for the father. Keith was wearing his only suit, a thin polyester affair that looked like a disposable paper jumpsuit in comparison.
Ben’s leather luggage was stacked neatly by the front door. Keith’s tatty wheelie stood next to it. Ben had offered to drive him up to the office in Aberdeen in his two-seater. The alternative was to risk the crumbling public transport infrastructure. It was a choice of sitting next to a babbling piss-soaked tramp on a plastic seat or sunk into a glove of heated leather next to Ben. It had been a close thing, but here he was. Aberdeen would be Keith’s home office for the first six months, and Ben had business up there, or had created some.
They drank some spectacularly nice coffee out of paper-thin porcelain cups, poured from a pot that looked like it had been cut from a solid chunk of metal.
Ben noticed Keith looking at the coffee pot. “We had this carved from a big block. It’s two kilos of solid platinum, worth a fortune.”
“Doesn’t all that cold metal make the coffee go cold too quickly?”
“Yes, it’s a silly affectation. But it makes a point. Sometimes, it’s the point that is important,” Ben’s father said, not taking his eyes away from his printed paper.
To Keith, they had never looked more alike, or more like sharks; pudgy sharks with hook noses, big floppy ears, and bushy eyebrows.
“Anyway, we just have the maid warm it up, no big deal,” Ben said.
“Better set off, Ben, if you want to get a night’s sleep before tomorrow,” Ben’s father said.
“Sure thing, Paps. Ready Keith?”
“Yes, thanks for the coffee and the Danish.”
“Glad you’re joining us, Keith. There’s lots of work to do, and lots of opportunity for a bright young man in my company.” George Baphmet stood and extended his hand. Keith pushed back his chair and shook the extended appendage.
“Thanks for the opportunity. I hope I won’t disappoint you.”
They took a lift down into the basement of the huge Georgian town house and piled the suitcases into the back of the sleek British Racing Green two-seater. A massive garage door slid open, disappearing into the wall, and Ben gunned the engine, sending a deafening roar echoing off the low ceiling and gloss-painted walls. They tore out onto mostly empty streets and across the city, heading for the M6 and the North.
The landscape was a grey smear—smoke, fog, and naked concrete, drawing stripes across the brown and puce of the northeast winter. They were five hours out from London and still had three to go. Ben had shut up for a few minutes, and Keith was making the most of it, letting his eyes jump from feature to feature like a sprinting acrobat as the car ate up the miles. The FastLane™ was virtually empty, but plenty of decrepit vehicles were chugging along the broken t
armac of the public lanes next to them.
Two tier roads; two tier schools; Morlocks and Eloi.
They passed clusters of parked buses and lorries, knotted with lines and webs of tarpaulin. Dirty kids and dogs played in the mud. More often than he expected, they passed the formally arranged, but equally bleak, government camps. The fences, razor wire, and dazzling LED arrays distinguishing them from their ad hoc equivalents.
Eventually, Ben’s machine glided to a halt in front of the granite edifice that was Aberdeen’s Foster Hotel. Ben had reserved a suite for them for the night. Tomorrow, Keith would join the induction event and be ingested by BHJ.
A youth in a silly hat picked up Ben’s suitcase, but left Keith to tug his scruffy wheelie from the vestigial back seat of Ben’s car and lug it into the reception on his own. They got up to their room, and Ben pressed a fifty into the boy’s hand.
Ben chose one of the adjoining rooms and flopped down onto its bed.
“Grab me a beer from the fridge, would you?” he shouted.
“Get it yourself, you lazy arse!”
“Shit! I drive you up here, splash out on the best hotel in the city and I’m going to take you on the biggest shag-fest piss-up since the Coronation, and you won’t pass me a beer!”
“Christ! There you go,” Keith said fetching the bottle from the little mahogany fridge. “So what are we going to do tonight, then?” he asked, his curiosity piqued.
“Don’t know,” Ben admitted shrugging. “But I’ve got my BHJ corporate card and my best buddy by my side.”
Again, Keith couldn’t be sure if Ben genuinely didn’t know what a friend was and thought the label could be correctly applied to their relationship, or if it was just more from the babbling brook of sales patter that poured eternally from Ben’s lips, like some mythical Fountain of Bullshit.
They left the hotel in a taxi that took them to what passed for a trendy nightclub in depression era Aberdeen. The door was controlled by two fearsome-looking blokes, strapped with both lethal and less than lethal side arms and every sort of tactical gadget possible. One was simply colossal and intimidating in the way of a bull or gorilla. The other was small, wiry, and red-haired, drawing his own power to unsettle from his aura of barely controlled, psychopathic fury. Keith shuffled past them, looking at the floor, and was horrified when he looked back to see Ben striking up a conversation with the two. He was determined not to let Ben drag him into another of the ‘situations’ that arose, apparently spontaneously, in his immediate vicinity.
At school, Keith had often been slapped in the face by the vortex of shit that Ben Baphmet left in his wake. He chose to ignore the conversation and cleared the area without delay, heading straight to the bar instead. He was joined a few minutes later by Ben, who was now grinning ear to ear, having somehow befriended the scary thugs and scored a gram of Charlie. Keith shook his head and accepted the two pints from the barman, who was eyeing the plastic Ziploc bag, and the white powder inside, suspiciously. Ben insisted on paying and excessively tipping the barman, who quickly became a tower of beaming smiles.
The car, the hotel room, bouncers who dispensed bags of coke instead of beatings: Keith was constantly reminded why he hated Ben, but he took the bag to the gents, and the evening took a wild lurch for the better. When Keith woke at 10.30 am the next day, with the worst hangover of his life and already half an hour late for his induction, he had to admit Ben had been good to his word; it had been a monstrous night.
A text from Melanie was waiting on his Companion. Money, power, and female companionship—Welcome to the Dark Side.
Traffic was working its way around a massive gouge in the road. A water main had ruptured—months ago—and the torrent had been patiently eroding the road ever since. Their driver was reading from a Companion on his lap, not paying attention as the limo nudged forward every time a small gap opened up between them and the car in front. Ben watched a group of kids filling buckets and then balancing them on the crossbars, or hanging them off the handlebars of big, beaten-up, old racing bikes. A woman was crouched down, washing clothes in a big plastic baby bath. He knew he should be used to it by now, but was still shocked to see such a Third World scene painted with the urban UK grimy colour palette.
Finally, they bumped up onto the pavement and cleared the bottleneck. The driver took the wheel for a minute when the vehicle balked at driving onto a pedestrian designated area. Eventually, they made it back onto roads free of gridlock and natural disasters and arrived a few minutes late at the Ministry of Sport and Entertainment.
Apart from a single broken ground floor window, covered in a huge sheet of weathered plywood, the building looked well-maintained. Here, at least, there was the illusion of a functioning civic structure.
Ben’s father climbed out, brushing his suit straight and gathering his dainty Italian leather briefcases. The doorman barely looked at their IDs, paying much more attention to the prominent labels on their kit and clothes; justifiably so, brand logos were always harder to counterfeit than government IDs. They paid the courtesy of going through the security scan, even though it was not working, then received their patting down. Ben barely flinched as a gloved hand cupped his testicles and then wriggled along the crease of his arse. He was wearing a nice new pair of Spex, which were cool enough to pique the interest of even this jaded security goon. Under some frail pretext, these were demanded and poured over. Ben could barely restrain from shouting and snatching them back as he watched the buffoon put his greasy fingerprints all over the lenses.
Once they had been suitably humiliated, they were allowed to leave the squalor of the twenty-first century and take the steel and glass elevator up to the fantasyland the new Forward government and their media partners had begun to spin around themselves. Here, webs of half-truths were woven together to convince an increasingly sceptical public that things were not as bad as they seemed. The cocoon took prodigious efforts to maintain and BHJ was hoping to win contracts with their new tech for automating the production of exquisite opinion-influencing lies.
The receptionist, who met them at the elevator, wore a floral dress and flat shoes. She was beautiful—but, more importantly, she was clean and fresh. She held out her hand and smiled. Ben and his father were enveloped in a mist of lavender and bergamot.
“A pleasure to finally meet you, Mr Baphmet.”
They followed her past open doors, where groups of wholesome, ethnically diverse, sexually inclusive experts strove to elevate the unsanitary hordes with culture, art, and the spirit of competition. Ben smirked and winked at his father to let him know he was in on the sham. Probably nothing these bright-eyed hopefuls would ever write would make it into policy, prose, or pop culture. They were unpaid interns, recruited solely for their Hitler Youth enthusiasm. If they came through again six months later, Ben expected to see the same vegan moccasins and cashmere shawls, but none of the same faces.
“Doctor Pritchard, an honour to meet you, Minister. Thank you so much for finding the time to see us.” Ben’s father pumped the offered hand and introduced his son as his assistant and protégé.
“The pleasure is mine, Mr Baphmet. Come into my office.”
“Please call me George.”
“Perfect. Can I offer you both a drink?” Pritchard asked.
This was a tricky one. ‘Coffee’ would be the standard response, but it would be critically embarrassing for the Minister if the unpredictable ebb and flow of import goods left him temporarily unable to oblige.
“Coffee please,” Ben replied instantly, to his father’s horror.
Oh well, the damage was done now. “Yes, for me too please.”
The Minister nodded to the receptionist hovering in the doorway. She slipped away. The Minister ignored his luxurious leather chair and enormous desk and deigned to join them at the conference table, another elegant piece of furniture that sat next to the glass interior wall of his tennis court-sized office.
“Did you have any trouble finding us?
”
“No, not at all,” said George. “There was a little engineering work on Upper Brook Street that slowed us down a bit, that’s all.”
Ben had to choke down a splutter of laughter when he realised his father was talking about the Grand Canyon that had swallowed three lanes and half a building.
“Ah yes, I do hope they find the time to fix that soon,” replied the Minister. “It is a nuisance. You have no idea how the people talk, despite all the good work we do here. A little hole in the ground and a few waggling tongues spoils it all.”
“How about a nice summer vignette of bare-chested kids splashing in a little water? Who could object to that?” Ben threw in, recovering from his spasm of inappropriate mirth.
“I see your son is not going to have a problem filling his father’s shoes!” said the Minister. “Fantastic, let’s do it.” They all chuckled.