by Stephen Fry
‘You’re probably wondering,’ Simon went on, ‘– absolutely delicious biscuits by the way, simply melt in the mouth – how on earth I could know that Barson-Garland had been trying to seduce you.’
‘That question had crossed my mind.’
‘I haven’t bugged the tables or bribed the Thursday waiters at Mark’s Club, no need to worry about that. No, the fact is that dear old Barson-Garland was also flirting with me. Bit of a two-timing whore, that one.’
‘I see.’
‘He wasn’t sure whether to go public or private, you see. His instincts were actually quite sound in that respect. Which way will the world go? Some think that governments should oversee the formation of a global internet police force. Many are afraid that this is exactly what will happen and scream about privacy and civil liberties. You are probably aware that the recent spate of viruses, worms, mail-bombs and portal attacks has led the international community to one inevitable and irrevocable conclusion. They can’t do anything about it. Nothing will work. It’s too expensive. It’s too impractical. The legal ramifications of borders, copyright treaties and so on are complex and insoluble. The only answer is for private enterprise, at local corporate levels, to do its own policing, its own firewalling, its own vaccinating and prophylaxis. Only the private sector can cross the borders, only the private sector has the resources and the power to take the responsibility. The post of Head of Internet Security at CotterDotCom takes on a greater meaning than ever before. Frankly, even if Cosima had not gone mad I would still be offering you this position. That, if you had not guessed, is what I am doing. It’s frankly the same job that Ashley Barson-Garland offered you, but it’s bigger, it’s real, it’s now, it’s free of political interference and it carries embarrassingly good pay. I do need an answer soon, however. I’m off to Africa later this morning and I’d love to know that you can start work as soon as you’ve cleared it with your people . . . in the meantime, I’m absolutely dying for a slash. You couldn’t . . . ?’
‘Oh, yes. Of course. Through there, second door on the right.’
‘Do try one of those biscuits. So light. They can’t do your diet the least bit of harm.’
Simon left the room and crossed the landing as directed. As he passed the stairs he noticed that the stairlift had moved from the bottom of the staircase to the top. A half open door caught Simon’s eye and he pushed it open and went in.
Alone and immobile, Oliver Delft’s mother sat on a wheelchair facing a window that overlooked the square. Simon came and stood beside her. Her eyes rolled up towards him. It seemed to Simon that her face was capable of showing some expression, for he thought he detected a gleam of surprised pleasure.
‘Philippa Blackrow,’ he whispered. ‘How strange to meet you. I’m Ned Maddstone. Do you know that you are responsible for the destruction of my life? Do you know that because of you I spent twenty years imprisoned in an insane asylum? Twenty years because of you and your cunt of a son.’
Breath hissed and bubbled from Philippa’s lungs and he could sense the strain in her as she tried to mobilise her sagging cheeks and drooping mouth into some shape that might move towards speech. Saliva ran from her lips and her clawed and wasted hands shook like dried leaves in a storm.
‘I was to have delivered a letter to you. From your Fenian friends. Of all the people in the world, it was your son who intercepted it. That is how cruel fate can be. To protect you and to save his own worthless skin he hid me away to rot amongst the mad for ever. And now I have come back. I am much crueller than fate. I thought you should know that. Infinitely more cruel. They tell me that inside this lifeless carcass your mind is fully active. Now it has something to ponder on for the rest of its days. Goodbye.’
The last picture of Philippa that Simon took away with him was of a mother down whose withered cheeks tears were flowing. He did not see, as he flushed the lavatory and crossed the landing to return to Oliver, that her mouth was trying to force itself into a smile and he could not know that the tears dropping from her eyes were tears of joy.
Albert banged into the house and called out from the bottom of the stairs.
‘Mum! Dad! Where are you?’
Only after he had yelled three times and heard no reply did he realise that Gordon and Portia would be out picking up his grandfather to bring him back for supper. That was the very reason for Albert leaving work so early, but the horrors of the tube journey had banished all such thoughts from his mind. He stormed angrily into the kitchen at the sound of the phone, swung his bag viciously onto the kitchen table, not caring if he cracked the screen of his laptop and pushed the phone off its hook, letting the receiver dangle down and bang against the wall. Java the cat wound around his ankles and he kicked him away.
‘Shit,’ he yelled. ‘Shit on everything. Shit you all. Shit, shit, shit.’
Breathing heavily through his nostrils, he took the newspaper from his jacket, sat down at the table and read the article for the twelfth time. Java sat coldly in the corner, ignoring him with great dignity.
CAFÉ UNETHICA
A coffee scandal was brewing in the world of ‘ethical trading’ this morning, when it was revealed exclusively to the London Evening Press that Gordon Fendeman, founder of Café Ethica and darling of New Labour and the eco-conscious chattering classes, had cheated an entire African community out of their land rights and destroyed the way of life of a whole people in order to start up his business. The so-called ‘co-operatives’ that Café Ethica claims to be supporting were actually, according to sources on the ground, bussed in from a tribe two hundred miles to the east of the plantation. Sources say that this was the result of a corrupt arrangement made between Fendeman (41) and the local government, which is composed entirely of the rival, majority tribe.
These disclosures will rock the rapidly expanding world of ethical commodities and cast fresh doubt on New Labour’s business judgement. Only two weeks ago, the Prime Minister in a speech to the City referred to Fendeman’s enterprise as a ‘beacon of light that led the way to new ways of trading with the Third World’, words which he must now be bitterly regretting.
Reports say that Fendeman, who is married to art historian Portia Fendeman, struck a deal in 1998 with the minority tribal leaders, who turned down a lucrative offer from a worldwide consortium in order to do business with Fendeman’s new company. They were led to believe that a deal with Café Ethica would be in their best interests, offering profit sharing, improved working conditions and the promise of a secure future for their people. They were horrified to discover that the terms of this contract in fact allowed Fendeman to evict them from land they had owned for countless generations and replace them with workers from another part of the country. These displaced people now face a future of starvation, disease and homelessness in a country where their tribe has few enough rights. Fendeman’s personal profits from the local government deal that kicked these people off their land and from the growing sales of Café Ethica products have been calculated to exceed one million pounds a year. Comment, Page 12
The ‘comment’ on page twelve was unspeakable, just unspeakable. Albert felt that his whole world was crashing down around him. It seemed impossible to separate the various strands of his despair.
His father. How could such a thing be written. How dared they? It must be lies. He knew his father too well to believe anything else. But it would hurt him so deeply. He was a proud man. Whatever the outcome, mud would stick.
His work: for five months, Albert had been toiling away in the field of Ethical Trading. He had broken new ground and achieved great things. He was proud of what he was doing and how it would help the world. Something like this, however deeply untrue it so manifestly was, would dwell in the mind of the public for ever. The consumer’s hand would start to close around a product whose labelling contained the word ‘ethical’ and then draw back as if stung. ‘Oh yes,’ they would say to themselves. ‘Wasn’t there some nasty fuss about these types of companies? Better stick to Nescafé
.’ And all that good work would be undone.
Simon: The London Evening Press was his newspaper. He was a busy man, of course. Albert had never seen a man with such a capacity for work and detail. Only yesterday, in a wine bar, Albert had been boasting about him to his friends. He had used the very word ‘detail’ time and time again in describing Simon’s awesome abilities. It was the quality that always marked out the great: their grasp on detail. And that was the problem. Albert could not imagine for a moment that Simon, however busy he was, could ever have been unaware of the LEP’s attack on Gordon. He must have known. But if he had known then how could he have allowed it? Not to warn Albert, not to take him aside and break the news. The same friends that Albert had talked to when raving on and on about him had been cynical. ‘Believe me,’ one of them had said. ‘No one makes that kind of money without being a complete son of a bitch deep down.’ ‘You’re wrong, so wrong!’ Albert had insisted. But a memory returned to him now of the strange sensation he had felt standing next to him while they watched the public destruction of Ashley Barson-Garland on television. There had been nothing in Simon’s expression that Albert could pin down, but none the less he had been aware of a feeling. An atmosphere. Intense waves had radiated from Simon that Albert had tried to push to the back of his mind. It had been like smelling fear, or sexual desire, or guilt, yet it had been none of those things. It had been something else. And the rumours that had flown throughout the company. Cosima? Acting independently? Getaway! She couldn’t take a pee without Cotter’s say-so, let alone appear on TV. Albert had dismissed all that as office gossip. Maybe though, maybe there was something about Simon. If Albert inspected his feelings honestly, maybe . . . maybe what he had smelt that night had been cruelty.
Gordon was his father. Ethical Trading was his life. Simon was his god. Fathers are weak. Life is a betrayal. Gods are cruel. Albert had read enough and seen enough to know these as objective facts, but he had not expected to experience them quite so soon and all at once. All three had been taken away from him in a single blow of fate. One minute he had been cheerfully sitting on the tube, listening to music and skimming through the evening paper – he only bought that bloody paper because it was Simon’s – and the next minute the triple pillars of his world had crumbled.
He rose from the table at the sound of the front door.
‘Where is he? Where’s my grandson?’
Albert folded up the newspaper and slipped it back into his pocket. ‘I’m in the kitchen, Grandpa. Grabbing some food before you get it all.’
‘Cheeky! The boy is so cheeky. Don’t you love him?’
Albert adored his grandfather. He was a constant reminder to him of his Jewishness and his heritage. It was hard to believe what his parents told him, that many years ago Grandpa had been a history lecturer and local politician. Rabidly left wing, Portia said, which was hard to imagine. Something had happened, Albert never quite got to the bottom of it, something to do with a wrongful arrest, but Peter had left academia and thrown himself into religion and the local synagogue. Theirs was a tight knit family, by definition. As the son of cousins, Albert had long endured the amusement of his friends at the circumstance of his grandfather also being his great-uncle and all the teasing suggestions of genetic weakness that went with it, but he loved his family and enjoyed the special closeness that came from not having two warring factions within it. No in-law jokes for the Fendemans.
He embraced his grandfather and saw, over his shoulder, that Portia and Gordon knew nothing.
‘So, my darlings. What’s to eat?’
‘You’ll see, Daddy, you’ll see.’ Portia laughed as she kissed her father and her son. ‘You look worried, darling, what is it?’
‘Nothing, Mum, nothing. Tough day at the office.’
Albert knew that it was not going to be a hard decision after all. Blood was thicker than worship. This was his family. They counted more than any hero. After all, there was Oxford. It wasn’t too late. It was never too late.
‘Hey, the phone’s off the hook.’
‘Leave it, Dad. No, leave it, really. It’s Friday night. The sun has set. No work. No calls.’
Peter put a hand to his grandson’s cheek. ‘Love him! Couldn’t you just eat him up? Am I right?’
Albert lit the candles and drew the curtains. He knew that soon enough the house would be under siege.
‘Welcome aboard, Oliver. I know we’ve both made the right decision. If you like I’ll walk you round the place, introduce you to a few people. How are you on heights?’
‘Heights?’
‘There’s a fabulous office at the top of the building, one of the best views in London, but if you prefer, you can make your habitation a little closer to ground.’
‘No, no. Heights are good.’
‘Of course you’re used to a view aren’t you? As a matter of fact, you can see your old office from my window here. Would you like to wave to your successor?’
‘Frankly no,’ said Oliver. ‘It’s only when you’ve shaken the dust of public service from your shoes that you realise how much you always hated it. By the way, my children will kill me if I forget to pass on an invitation to dinner next week. Thursday, can you make it?’
‘It would be a pleasure, please convey my grateful thanks. Now, let’s amble, shall we? Ah, good morning, Albert. Let me introduce you to Sir Oliver Delft. Anti-virus, anti-worm, anti-hacker.’
‘How do you do? Simon, I have to talk to you right now. It’s extremely urgent.’
‘Ah. Oliver, I’m so sorry, would you mind if I . . . ?’
‘No, no. If it’s all right with you, I’ll wander on my own. I’d prefer it that way. I take it this pass allows me anywhere?’
‘Absolutely anywhere. Introduce yourself as you go along, I broke the glad tidings to everyone by email this morning.’
‘I will see you later then.’
‘Albert, I have a very strong idea why you are here. Let me say –’
‘How could you do it? How?’
‘I’m the publisher, Albert, not the editor. I can’t be seen to interfere in . . .’
‘Oh bullshit, that’s absolute bullshit. I’m not an idiot. And this, here, in today’s Times, have you seen? They are claiming that my father bought LEP shares the day before you announced that you were buying it and that he was acting on inside information. That was me! The first day I came here you told me you were buying the paper and I . . . I happened to mention it to him. I didn’t know it meant anything. And now they are painting him as some sort of crook. He’s not. He’s my father. He’s a decent man. What are you doing to him?’
‘Albert, calm down. I’m sure this will all come out right in the end.’
‘Anyway, I – I came here to tell you that I’m leaving.’
‘But Albert, that’s absurd.’
‘It’s a matter of . . . of . . . honour. I can’t possibly work for you. You’re my enemy. It’s family honour. We’re going to clear his name if it takes every penny we have. I’m going to expose you for what you are. A wrecker of lives. An animal. I’ll make your life hell. Goodbye.’
‘Albert, this is nothing more than absurd posturing. Dry your eyes. Come back.’
Albert had been in his room for nine days. The pages were uploading. The world would soon know the kind of man Simon Cotter truly was. He had collected together every morsel of gossip, every hint, rumour and theory that had ever been whispered on the subject of his mortal enemy. More would come, that was the nature of the internet. It wouldn’t matter if his subject was Mother Teresa, there would be people out there with scandal, conspiracy theories and reasons to hate. Albert had the advantage of knowing things. Nothing too terrible, but enough to make Cotter a figure of fun.
Albert watched the final page upload. He had chosen a free webserver in Australia. It made no difference really, but the site might as well be lodged as far away as possible. It gave the impression that Cotter’s enemies were spread around the globe. When he got to Oxf
ord next month he would continue his campaign. They might have taken Wafiq Said’s money, but they’d never accept Cotter’s, not once Albert had done his work. Simon Cotter. The arrogance of him. The vain casual arrogance.
‘Albert! Let me in. Please . . .’
Why not? His mother should see that he hadn’t just been sulking like Achilles in his tent. He had been arming and preparing for battle.
‘Okay, Mum. It’s a bit of a mess I’m afraid.’
Albert got up from his chair and unlocked the door. Portia was standing with a tray in her hand.
‘For goodness’ sake! What have you been doing in there?’
‘Yeah, I know. I’ve been busy. Hiya, Java.’
Portia trod gingerly in and stood in the middle of the room and swayed slightly as if she were about to lose her balance. ‘Where on earth am I going to put this tray?
‘Um . . . down there.’ Albert kicked away a pile of CDs, photographs and underwear. ‘Get away Java!’
Java had leapt onto the desk and was batting at the mouse, as cats will.
‘Lunch,’ said Portia firmly. ‘In fact it’s last night’s supper and this morning’s breakfast too. You absolutely must eat. I’m going to watch you. I don’t care if I sound like the worst Jewish mother in the world. You simply must eat.’
‘Yeah, yeah. Whatever. Look, Mum . . .’
‘Don’t you “whatever” me! I’m going to watch every sandwich going down your throat. And then sleep. You didn’t go to bed at all last night, did you?’
‘Okay, okay . . . only, look.’ Albert grinned. ‘You’ve arrived at a historic moment. The formal opening of the world’s first anti-Cotter site. Watch this.’
Albert sat down at this computer again and his mouse started skating.
‘See? www.ihatecotter.co.au. Here’s the welcome page. “Welcome to my parlour.” That’s Cotter in the centre of this web, I’ve made him look like a spider. You move the mouse over the spider and he scuttles from one part of his web to the other. When you click, it tells you about each part, see? And you can look at different areas, like cupboards in the parlour? Here’s a “Slap Cotter” page. When you click over his face, he gets slapped and it plays this sound. Hang on.’