by Tobias Hill
‘Stop complaining.’
‘I don’t see why I should.’
‘Because you’re not too old for anything. You’re only sulking because they closed your bar. And you haven’t got any life savings. That’s what you always told me.’
‘Oh, well. Everyone has something. Everyone has something to lose. My neighbours have been sharing their sorrows with one another for hours. Mister Myhrvold has a plan to sue John Law on our behalf and invest the damages in pigs. He says pigs don’t get viruses. Which I don’t think is quite right. And Justine came down to cry on my shoulder. She’s the pianist. She also did something very exciting to my computer. A gifted woman.’
‘How nice for you.’
‘No, everyone seems to be complaining, except you, Anna. Why is that?’
She shrugs, as if the line might convey motion. She is balancing the mobile in the hollow of her shoulder, the live plastic warm against her bone. On the tablet screen two news bulletins are playing in overlapping windows, the sounds turned down, anchors mouthing like actors in silent films. On one a countdown is in progress. On the other a man in Alexandria is burning an effigy.
The man’s anger has already faded. He looks embarrassed to be caught on camera. The effigy is faceless, vaguely masculine. It could be almost anyone.
‘The point about complaining,’ Lawrence says, ‘is that it maintains the illusion that something can be done. Besides, it’s not as if anyone has anything better to do.’ There is a sound, a faint clink on the line. Glass against glass. ‘Anna? Are you still there?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, good. Why are we whispering?’
She glances up at the office door. Through the glass panels figures are visible, blurred and surreptitious, passing between offices. The Revenue is hushed but not silent, neither empty nor occupied in the manner to which it is accustomed. In the adjoining offices inspectors are gathered around their computers, Carl and Janet and Mister Hermanubis, as well as the younger generation, the newer recruits who talk to Anna with guarded respect, if at all. A year ago she would have joined them. Now she goes quiet as they pass. It is eleven fifty-two. Eight minutes to midnight.
‘Anna?’ Lawrence says again.
‘What?’
‘Do you remember my grandmother?’
She tries, smiling, accepting the offer to think of other things. A frail woman, fine-boned as Meissen, poised at a café table. ‘You’ve got a photo on your desk. I don’t think I ever met her, sorry.’
‘No, you didn’t, did you? Probably all for the best. You would have hated one another. She was a tax inspector too when she was young, in Essen, in Germany. Very loud. Another drinker, I’m afraid. And when I was young she used to tell me – as bedtime stories – what it was like between the wars. The years when money became worth less and less, until it was nothing but the paper it was printed on. Not money at all. The legendary wheelbarrows of banknotes. I used to have terrible nightmares about it all.’
‘Well, that’s one thing, I suppose.’
‘What?’
There won’t be any wheelbarrows now.’
‘She used to say it was like a delirium. People didn’t believe their money was falling. They thought it was a conspiracy, that all the other currencies in the world were rising. The first sign of madness, you see – that nothing had changed except everyone else. It sent everyone a little mad. That’s what she used to say. What time is it?’
She checks the screen. ‘We’ve still got a little while.’
‘Have you talked to him?’
She doesn’t pretend not to understand. With Lawrence there is no point. ‘No.’
‘Don’t you think that you should?’
‘What would he have to say to me?’
He sighs impatiently. ‘If you called him, you might find out.’
She doesn’t reply. She doesn’t mention Carl. Everyone, it seems, would like her to talk to John Law. For a moment she wishes she was at home, between her own four walls, with Burma to warm her and ask for nothing. It is too late now, though, and here there is at least a sense of power. The illusion, as Lawrence says, that something might be done.
‘I’ve been thinking.’
‘Of seeing him?’
‘Of leaving.’
‘Leaving what?’ And then, as it comes to him, ‘My God. The Revenue? Don’t be ridiculous. Why? Since when? What else could you do?’
‘Raise pigs?’
‘Anna, you shouldn’t just laugh about it –’
‘Why not? There are other ways of making a living.’
‘Of course,’ he says, but not as if he believes it. ‘Oh well, of course there are.’
‘This isn’t everyone’s idea of the perfect job.’
‘It’s perfect for you.’
‘No,’ she says. ‘It’s not.’ And to herself: It was. And I was perfect for them, but not any more. I am not the person I expected myself to be.
‘Well,’ Lawrence says, uncertainly gentle, ‘if that’s what you want. I’m sure you’ll make a wonderful pig farmer.’
‘Thanks.’ She checks the screen. ‘It’s time.’
‘So it is. I’ll open the champagne.’
‘I never liked it.’
‘I know. Should we link hands, then?’
‘I don’t think I can reach that far.’
‘I would very much like something to hold onto,’ Lawrence says, not entirely steadily, and then just as Anna is about to reply she finds she can no longer hear him. From the interior of the Revenue a shout goes up, an angry excitement, as if an argument has broken out, and beyond the open window of the office the bells of St Stephen’s Tower begin to sound. A carillon, reversed and repeated. A ring of twelve, old and dark as grime, toll following toll out across the miles of Westminster and London.
One way or the other, music always reminds Anna of childhood. Most often it will be her father who comes back to her. The spread of his hands, the set of his face (which is like Lawrence’s. It is not something she denies to herself.) It still seems to her an odd thing, that for all his love of music she can never remember him singing. As far as she knows he never did so – but doesn’t everyone sing sometimes? – nor learned to play an instrument. His pleasure was in the listening.
Sometimes it is different. Sometimes she hears a verse of a song, certain hymns or traditionals, and it is Eve she remembers. When that happens it is not her mother’s face that comes to her, but her voice. Her memories of Eve are not of a woman listening – her mother never sat still for anything – but singing.
The songs were always the same, old and grim as fairy tales, like the stories of Lawrence’s grandmother. Anna has never known where they came from, who wrote them, though there was a sameness about them: it doesn’t seem impossible that her mother made them up herself. And Eve’s voice was poor, though it was kinder then, in the days before she lost her way in her marriage, before the years when she slept alone and woke bitter. Less harsh than it has become. And perhaps because of this, it is not the music of the songs that Anna still remembers, but their words, which always seemed to be about love or money, money or love.
Well money has its own way
And money has to grow.
It grows on human blood and bone
As any child should know.
It’s iron stuff and paper stuff
With no life of its own
And so it gets its growing sap
From human blood and bone,
Blood and bone.
As if in a different life, she remembers being sung to sleep. The sensation of slippage and descent. Her mother’s voice. Lightness, darkness.
She wakes at her desk from dreams of childhood, knowing nothing of where she is or why, only alert to the fact that something is wrong, out in the world. This time there is no doubt about it.
The office is bathed in light. The blinds rule it with shadow. A foot from her face the mobile lies keeled over on one side, the power still on but fading,
the display dim: Lawrence’s number selected, ready to be dialled. The room smells of gin and, more inexplicably, of cigars. A water cone lies on its side in a thin pool of neat spirit.
Her eyes are dry. She closes them again. For a while she stays like that, listening. There is a pain in her neck, not entirely unpleasant, just enough to stop her falling back into sleep. The sun comes and goes, as if clouds are passing rapidly across it. But it is earlier than the light suggests, she can hear it in the familiar routines of the building around her. And already there is something out of place.
Someone is singing. The voice seems unfamiliar, though it comes to her that she wouldn’t be able to put a name to it even if she knew it: the inspectors of the Revenue do not sing as they go about their work. The singer pauses – there is the bony rattle of a keyboard – then goes on, graceless but serious, somewhere in the rooms beyond the partitioned walls.
Do you think you’ve hit bottom?
Do you think you’ve hit bottom? Oh no.
There’s a bottom below.
There’s a low below
The low you know.
You can’t imagine
How far down you can go
Down.
It is a change of sorts, though not one she would have expected. All day she notices it, and for days afterwards. As if it could fill some vacancy, there is suddenly music everywhere, in the most unexpected places, often awkward, most often unfamiliar. It is almost like a celebration.
In Limeburner Square an old man takes up residence by the fountains and plays the violin every morning for hours, unaccompanied, asking for nothing, so that people are at a loss for what to do about him. On Saturdays an ice-cream van begins to work her neighbourhood, playing its xylophone fragments, out of season and out of tune, something she hasn’t heard in years. In the Revenue itself there is a discordance of radios and web stations, each one at first broadcasting news, and each giving way to music as the days pass. The interview rooms and locked repositories echoing with a dozen warm ghosts of Elvis, a tuneless drift of Madonnas, the austerity of plainsong. Mister Hermanubis singing in the corridors.
It is a benign kind of madness, Anna thinks, remembering what Lawrence told her: though his words are brought back to her soon enough in other, more malignant ways. Three nights after Soft Gold falls she comes home to find the study window broken, glass winking inwards underfoot. It takes weeks for her to be sure of everything that is gone. A box of rings she never wears, a Venetian mirror she ceased to like years ago, the best clothes she has always loved. No books, an oversight for which she is pathetically thankful. And somehow – she tries to imagine it – the refrigerator, with nothing spilled or left behind.
We’re the lucky ones, Janet says. And Anna says yes, they are lucky, though she isn’t sure if it is true, or if true what difference it makes. The information they have received and the measures they have taken work – their own accounts, the accounts of the Revenue, are not corrupted by the broken code – but the damage is already done. Day by day Soft Gold is worth less, its value dropping through benchmarks and plateaux and barriers as if it has suddenly discovered gravity. As if there is some end in sight from which it cannot be separated.
There are other currencies into which people can put their trust. They do so desperately, sometimes doubtfully, but most of all bitterly, in sorry anger, like believers who have lost their faiths through personal loss. Nor is it only Soft Gold they have ceased to believe in. In the last week of September the dollar becomes tender again, and by October, under emergency measures, the Royal Mint reopens its production lines. The world becomes more physical, or so it seems to Anna, its desire for wealth rooted again in touchable things. Metal stuff and paper stuff. Fridge-freezers and Venetian mirrors.
There is only that one day when the world seems without money, the twenty-second itself, the first of Vendémiaire. And even though it is an illusion – even though money is not something that can be uninvented or lost – it is not something Anna forgets. The music never far away, the streets crowded, the shops shut up; all as if for some festivity. A smile on a stranger’s face, a young woman seen in passing, the expression a peculiar twist of fear and exhilaration, as if the worst has happened and has turned out to be only another day in that life, after all. The gloom of loss one minute, in one place, and in the next a sense that a weight has lifted. That money itself has lifted, brightening, like weather.
For a week the Laws refuse all entry to Erith Reach. Every day, at some hour or other, Anna catches sight of the scene outside the gates, broadcast live or recorded, the choicest moments to be interspersed later with other news. The coverage seems to her monotonous, though people watch it – she watches them watching – rapt, like webcam junkies. It is as if they are waiting for something, and as the days pass it begins to worry her, as if they must know something she doesn’t. Like animals, she thinks: but it is an inspector’s thought, and she stops herself before she can consider it again.
For the most part those who assemble under the overhanging walls are protesters, sightseers drawn to the centre of things, or the journalists themselves, each camera dumbly recording the ranked ordnance of competing media. But each day there are other figures too, sometimes in uniform, more often not. They arrive alone or in pairs, speak briefly at the gate intercom, and leave as quickly and quietly as they arrive.
The government has opened an inquiry – has opened several, it seems, or at least relaunched the same one several times – and there is a police investigation into the virus. But neither inquirers nor investigators have spoken to Law. There are reports that he has talked to no one, that even the police are waiting for the privilege of an interview, and the public anger (which has always been there, squat, ugly, envious, waiting for its chance) is tempered only by the sense of public satisfaction. The belief that the Laws’ refusal is proof in itself. Evidence of a guilt which is only to be expected, and has only to be defined.
It is late when she dreams that she sees him. She is going through the house, checking the doors and windows before bed, leaving on lights downstairs, setting music to play in the kitchen, as she has every night since the break-in. Already it has become a ritual, comforting, disembodying her for sleep, and by the time she comes to the bedroom and begins to undress she is not wholly awake. She goes to the window, the last in the house, naked in the dark, feeling for the cold flange of the lock, and then she sees him.
It is one of those London nights when the rain is endless and the street lights are brightened by the reflections of water, all light and noise. He is standing across the street, on the sloped concrete where the driveway of a house crosses the pavement, under the shelter of the road trees. He has no coat and his clothes and hair are wet, she can see them shining, and in the faint glitter of the downpour his figure and those of the trees above him seem the only real things.
She knows it is him, it is the paleness of his face, and also the way he holds himself. He stands as he stood the last time she saw him, like a man grown ashamed of his own height. There is not even a moment when she thinks it is anyone but him. There is no jolt of fear at his presence. Instead what she feels is happiness – that he has come to her – and sadness, as if in the way of dreams she has understood that his apparition here is an omen, a sign that something terrible has happened to him, out in the waking world. But she is half asleep, and she does not remember that it already has.
Her hand still rests on the lock. She raises her fingers, pressing them out against the glass, Hello. At the motion he looks up. He doesn’t wave back, doesn’t smile, but after a moment he stirs himself, shakes his head, says something – to her or to himself, she can make out only the motion of his face – and steps forward across the road.
And then she is running, to dress herself, to open the door for him, to bring him in. Knowing in some part of her – it feels like her heart, although the heart does not know or feel – that he won’t be there.
And of course he isn’t. There i
s no one outside. There is nothing waiting for her but the cold, waking her. The chill of the rain creeping in around her, like something looking for something.
Law Missing
She is in transit when she sees it. The traffic is slow – she has started off late in a futile effort to avoid it – there are protests planned for later in the day, a march of forty thousand from the City to Westminster, neither the first demonstration that month nor the last – and the morning rush hour has been reduced to bad-tempered, crawling tailbacks well outside the city’s access tunnels and ring roads.
By noon she has reached Piccadilly, one arm resting on the sill of the open window, her foot touching absently at the accelerator when the cars ahead will allow it. Her thoughts are on John – on the twelve months in which she has known him, which looking back seems to have been a period of years – when she glances up at the gigantic news hoardings overhead. And there he is, and a yawn dies in her throat. There he is again.
Under the headline, above the scrolling lines of news, is a picture of him. It is one of the media’s limited stock, familiar to Anna as it will be to those in the streets around her, well taken but already several years out of date. It shows John in evening dress, turning to speak against a background of night. His face is at ease but his eyes are attentive, as if he is on the brink of registering the presence of the photographer. Reproduced on such a large scale there are details visible that Anna has never noticed before – a suggestion of trees and open air, a blur of discoloured torchlight in the distance – and as she stares up at the screen she is almost certain that it is an image of Erith Reach. The green palace behind high walls, desirable, unattainable.
The news has tickertaped through to its end. She puts both hands on the wheel and sits quite still, waiting for it to begin its progress again.
*** NewZRoom! Five minute updates, next news in 297 seconds *** 1210; Soft Gold creator disappears *** Officials call at home yesterday, find John Law missing *** Family confirm Law gone for days *** No note discovered *** More as it comes ***