The Fat of Fed Beasts

by Guy Ware

  I have my telescope. I am the king.

  I eat my pop tart and burn the roof of my mouth and I feel better than I have for days. I don’t even think to ask if anyone’s seen Alex yet because it’s eight o’clock and Alex is never up at eight o’clock and it’s not like I miss him.

  In the car before I pull away I gun the revs a bit because Gary hates it and Rada’s not out on her bike yet and the noise is like fifteen lions roaring in a room and will let her know that today she’s lost. Then I tune to the classical station because I’ve got stuff to think about as I drive and I need to get Gary and Rada and all their petty shit out of my mind and concentrate on the power of my personal insight and what it means precisely, vis-à-vis Wenlock and Meersow and the games they’re playing with the bank and the blood and the dead woman, or women. The traffic looks light and all’s well, but after the news headlines the radio starts playing Shostakovich, which they’ve frankly got no right to do, not first thing in the morning. It is no aid to concentration whatsoever. When the book said classical it meant Mozart, basically. Dad used to play Shostakovich all the time, part of his tortured Russian soul act that everybody seemed to love so much. It was a pretty reliable guide to his mood. When he wanted to beat himself up he had a boxed set of string quartets that sounded like four cats in a sack. When he was feeling chipper he’d get out the symphonies, relive the siege of Leningrad or some such bloodcurdling catastrophe. He’d get a huge grin on his tiny Russian face and punch the air in time with the cymbals, and if I made the mistake of letting him spot me creeping past on my way to the door, he’d fling his arms around my shoulders and kiss my cheeks and yell, This music kills fascists! Which even when I was about five I knew it didn’t. He would tell me the music was in my blood, that there was a reason he’d called me Dmitry, and this was it. Then he’d start in on my poor dear beautiful dead mother, even though it wasn’t my mother who was dead, it was Rada’s. I learned to retaliate by telling him Shostakovich was a bourgeois deviant aestheticist, or a self-serving Stalinist lickspittle, whichever I thought would goad him more at the time. All words, naturally, I’d gleaned from Papa himself, and not bad for a seven year-old.

  I switch to the CD player while simultaneously changing gear, I am that at home with my machine, but the CD I left in there yesterday is a motivational selling skills thing about getting to yes that came with a book. It’s meant to help you practise negotiation techniques by arguing with a cretinous pre-recorded customer who whines pathetic excuses not to buy your product or your services and leaves long gaps for you to persuade him otherwise. Yesterday this seemed like a good idea. When you get bored with actual negotiation, you can practise unfettered Tourette’s-style abuse, yelling inventive, outlandish and increasingly obscene curses at the snivelling, turd-eating customer and his Neanderthal company, which is fun and good when you’re in the car and the traffic’s bad and nobody can hear you. You can threaten to disembowel the little runt and rape his wife and kill all his children right before his eyes and he will still ask if a discount is available, in that imperturbable voice that, now I think about it, sounds a bit like Old Man Theo. And then you really lose it and he’s as calm as ever and suddenly you realise he’s won. Bastard. You’ve been outwitted by a mindless recording, and it isn’t fun any more. The come down’s worse than any hangover, worse than drugs, and I don’t need that this morning.

  One of the things Dad told me about my poor dear beautiful dead mother, by which he meant Rada’s poor dear dead beautiful mother, was that when she died – when her estate agent friend hit a tight bend too fast in his E-type and found a tractor on the other side – the last word on her pale, bloodless lips was: ‘Dmitry’. He had a cello concerto on too loud when he told me this and it seemed pretty fucking unlikely to me. Not least because she wasn’t my mother and I wasn’t even born. I asked him how he knew. He said the estate agent survived the crash and came straight round to pass on the news himself. My father said he couldn’t help but recognise the man’s courage, the purity of his soul. And so, instead of stabbing the over-privileged moustachio’d nanny’s boy on the spot, he had opened a bottle of vodka and together they’d toasted my poor dear dead beautiful mother, ending the long dark night the best of friends, united in their grief and mutual respect. “Oh yeah,” I said (or wish I’d said) so where’s your best friend now? My father’s voice became flatter, business-like. He said, “He died, not long afterwards.” I told him he was full of shit, which was wasn’t original even if it was true but, even so, probably wouldn’t have been the words I’d have chosen if I’d known they were going to be the last I’d ever say to him.

  I turn the CD off. Some cunt cuts me up and I have to slam the brakes to avoid wasting my paintwork on the back end of his shoddy Mazda. I put my hand out of the window and give him a finger and the bastard slams his own brakes and actually gets out. I manage to cut out into the right lane and, to the sound of angry horns all over the shop, I accelerate and I’m pretty sure I run right over the guy’s foot as I pass him. Maybe it was just a bump in the road, but I like to think it was his foot. I park in the scruffy, potholed building site that passes for the company car park – that’s the first thing that’s getting sorted when I take over; OK maybe not the first – and I realise that I’ve managed to get all the way in from the nineteenth-century suburbs to the fringes of the twenty-first-century city, not just five miles but two hundred years, without getting round to applying my blinding insight to the question of Wenlock and Meersow and just what the fuck is going on with the dead/undead women and I could have been listening to some decent music after all.

  I make a mental note to ring DS Proctorow. It’ll be worth a couple of pints or six to find out just how far up the wrong tree the cops are currently barking.

  In the office I get up to the third floor and let myself in. I’m the only one here, which is no surprise. I hang up my jacket and boot up my PC and I make a cup of coffee. Then I think I might as well try and clear the decks a bit before I get stuck into the bank thing, because I’m looking forward to that but I’m actually also, if I’m completely honest, just the tiniest bit nervous about it. What if I train my telescope on Wenlock and Meersow and whatever shit it is they think they’re up to and there’s nothing there?

  I’ll start with Sister Angelina. I won’t even bother reading the file, because, honestly, what am I going to do? The woman’s a saint, and not just because she was a nun. The traffic accident guy ditto, though not the same result, naturally. You, my friend, are going down. I don’t care how much you gave to disaster relief appeals, how much you loved your wife. I don’t care that there was a little St Christopher hanging off the rear-view mirror of your piece-of-shit Mitsubishi 4×4. I find myself saying this aloud while I wait for the PC to do whatever it is that takes a computer so long to do to get going in the morning. I don’t care how rich or powerful or fulfilled you were because nothing’s going to save you now. Sometimes I love this job, despite all the associated aggravation. You thought your airbags would protect you? Your thought your God would save you? Well, newsflash sucker: God’s got no time for wankers like you. Your wife’s already shagging someone else and you, my friend, you’re going to burn like you were soaked in kerosene.

  I’m on a roll. I love it when the office is empty and I can pace around and talk aloud without Rada sniffing or Alex weighing in with some irrelevant hippie crap. Or even Old Man Theo, come to that, strolling through, giving us the benefit of his years of wisdom. I know things are going to change. I can feel it.

  But I also know I’m cheating just a little bit. I’m creaming off the easy cases – Rada’s cases – and they’re the last ones in. The time management lecture I downloaded off TED a couple of weeks ago told me this is not the way. I can’t let the caseload silt up while I just skim the surface. I have to take a crack at Likker. My ace in the hole, my get out of jail free card. Likker’s the oldest case on my list, and the report will be long and complex. The
guy wasn’t exactly ancient – seventy-something – but he did a lot of stuff. Some of it was actually, genuinely heroic and totally selfless, most of it was miserable and ordinary, and then some was not even close to the line but way, way the fuck over, so this was never going to be an easy one to call. But I’ve been working on it. I’ve done the research and marshalled all my facts. I know where we’re going here. The guy, if he only knew it, is my test case. I’ve assigned all the values and done the calculations for the presentation I was supposed to do on Monday. I have the answer. I’ve even tweaked it just a fraction, by way of thanks. He’s doing me a favour, after all. Now it’s just a matter of getting it down straight on paper.

  I take a memory stick out of the inside pocket of my suit jacket, the pocket that’s designed for a mobile phone, and I stick it in the port on the side of my monitor. Normally I put all my stuff on the server like we’re supposed to and only use the stick for back up or when I need to carry things around, like for Monday’s presentation. But I’ve been working on this at home, and, besides, I wasn’t going to put Likker on the server because Likker’s too important. I’m pretty sure Alex has spotted the fact that I’ve been up to something better than the usual pieces of shit. He’s had that look in his eye, the one he gets when he’s enjoying the contents of his own head, and frankly I don’t trust the little fucker not to find his way into my files somehow and dick about with them.

  The PC’s finally brushed its teeth and swallowed its espresso or whatever the fuck it is it does, and it’s asking me for a password. I type Al5x1saTwaT (a strong alpha-numeric mixed upper/lower case combination I can nonetheless remember) and it tells me the password is incorrect. I type it again carefully, checking the cases, and it tells me I’m wrong, even though I know I’m not. One more try and the bastard’s going to lock me out for ever.

  Could Alex have tampered with it? I don’t think so. It’s probably not beyond him, technically. Or morally. He comes over as a dozy parasite who couldn’t organise a cheese sandwich, but he’s sneaky and he’s not actually stupid. It’s just hard to see the point of him. But the fact is, I don’t think he’s had the chance: I was here when he went off to see Rodkin’s flat and the Spence woman, and he wasn’t planning on coming back to the office after that.

  I take a deep breath and I try the password again. It tells me I’m still wrong and this time it throws in a cheery message to let me know my time’s up and it’s locked itself down for all eternity. I think this must be how some of my clients feel. Like the traffic guy. Except it’s not my fault. I’m not a twat who drives a rubbish car into a line of school kids, and that makes all the difference.

  I close my eyes and breathe deeply, five times, in through the nose, out through the mouth. This is not hippie bullshit. This works. When I am calm and focused I turn the PC off and turn it back on again. While it re-boots, I pick up the phone and leave a message telling Proctorow we should meet. When the PC’s good and ready I sign in as Rada, whose offspring/birthdate-based passwords are criminally easy to predict. After three failed attempts I go through the whole switching off and on again routine and log on as Theo, who rarely uses a computer and whose password is written on a faded Post-it stuck to his screen. Miraculously, the machine lets me in. But, when I click on Sister Angelina it says: Access Denied. I switch to the traffic guy: Access Denied. Bridget Miller, a woman I’d written up a week ago who’s husband persuaded her to stop taking her pills and jump off a bridge with him and both their children, and who I’d gone pretty easy on because (a) the kids survived, and (b) she’d had a shit time all her life, with a dad and a husband who both hit her, and who were both definitely going down, and (c) despite the depression and the drugs and the kids she was frankly gorgeous, there was something about her eyes and her mouth and, I don’t know why, even her ears – which I know sounds insane, but is true, anyway – that made me think I could love this woman, that she could make me really happy, as well as fuck my brains out like a crazy person, if she weren’t dead. Anyway, Bridget Miller: Access Denied. Henry Perowne (cancer, inoperable; tedious piece of shit): Access Denied. Pyotr Kalenkov (my father, who’s definitely not in heaven): Access Denied.

  Something, somebody – the system, as we say these days when we mean computers, and not the whole military-­industrial capitalist complex thing my dad would have meant – the system has locked everything down.

  I try one last time.

  Edward Likker: Access Fucking Denied.

  I punch the screen and even as I do it I realise I’m expecting broken glass and maybe even a bit of blood, but that’s not going to happen because the screen’s a flexible, LCD job and all my punch does is send the pixels a bit screwy for a while. I’m wondering if I should just yank the cables out of the tower and chuck the fucking thing out onto the railway track, knowing I won’t, because if I’m wondering about it, it’s already too late – if I was going to do it I’d have done it – when a quiet voice behind me says: “Have you tried Password?”

  I jump, and the hairs on the back of my neck do that thing they’re supposed to do in ghost stories, but turns out to be literally true when you think you’ve seen, or at any rate, heard, a ghost. They stand up as a rush of pure adrenaline floods past in the wrong direction, out of my back and arms and shoulders and up through my neck into my brain.

  “I’m sorry. Did I startle you?”

  I turn and there’s this little old guy standing over by Rada’s desk. Not as old as Theo, obviously, not quite, but old enough. He’s got a face like a disappointed Labrador and a suit that might have come from Theo’s tailor. He’s got a walking stick a bit like Theo’s, too, except it’s longer and has a silver eagle on top, where Theo’s has a dog. The eagle’s wings are spread and make the kind of V you can put your thumb in and push yourself up on when you’re walking uphill. His hands are crossed on top of the stick and they’re old man’s hands: the skin sags around every bone, every vein, turning them into a relief map of the guy’s life.

  I say, “Who the fuck are you?”

  He walks towards me, holding out one of those leathery paws.

  “My name is Lopez.”

  His grip is firm and his eyes are clear and sharp and fixed on mine.

  “You’re Lopez?”

  He nods, and there’s a trace of a bow in the way he does it. I get a sense of old world – of the sort you mostly only get in the New World. Like Lopez isn’t Spanish but maybe from Paraguay or Argentina or some gaucho/Nazi bolthole dump like that. His hair is white and there are lines in his face – not just the usual lines, but deep nearly vertical creases in his forehead where the bushy old guy eyebrows meet the top of his nose. There are more creases down beside his mouth. Creases you could abseil into.

  I say, “Riverside House sent you?”

  He shrugs and spreads his hands, one still holding the stick by the silver eagle.

  “I am here.”

  “Or did Theo call you in?”

  He sidesteps the question like I know he’s going to. He says, “You were expecting someone younger?”

  There’s no point denying it, so I don’t.

  He smiles like one of those teachers who never get angry whatever stupid shit you do, but somehow manage to be disappointed.

  “You understand why I am here?”

  “Because Theo asked you to come?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Or because Riverside House sent you?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Only there’s a difference.”

  He takes the time to show he’s disappointed again, then says, “There may be.”

  There may be? There may be a chance I punch the fucker right here. I breathe and count. I say nothing, see how he likes it.

  After a while he shrugs and says, “I am here, that is what matters.”

  “To bury my sister.”

  He doesn’t deny it. “And naturall
y that troubles you?”

  “Actually, no.”

  It’s true, that’s not what bothers me. What bothers me is that he’s just so fucking old. I mean, I don’t care what actual age he is, but it pisses me off that he’s here, all suited up and talking that old man gnomic bollocks and won’t answer a straight fucking question. He’s basically Theo with bigger eyebrows and he’s everything that’s wrong with this place. Everything I’m going to change.