The Happier Dead

by Ivo Stourton

  “Never seen her before. She’s a bit plain mind.”

  Oates punched the glass of the booth and cracked it. Flo gave a theatrical scream and pressed her hands to her fake breasts. He punched again and radial cracks spread to the corners of the glass. The third punch smashed the glass and Oates shoved his fist through, the jagged edges cutting at his wrists as they rolled up his sleeve. He grabbed for her, but she dodged and Oates got a fistful of wig. It came away in his hands, revealing sparse brown hair combed flat beneath a tight flesh-coloured net. Flo screamed again, snatching for the hairpiece, which was tangled now in the fingers of Oates’s glove, and glittering with shards of glass. Oates was shouting too.

  “Take a closer look. Take all the time you need.”

  “Can I help you, sir?”

  The voice was loud but calm. Oates turned without removing his hand from the glass to find a smartly dressed man standing in the centre of the lobby behind him. Flo stopped struggling.

  “Florence, perhaps you’d like to take a few moments to tidy yourself up.”

  “She started it, Mr Ingram,” Flo said, pointing at Oates.

  “We can’t have you greeting the guests like that.”

  “No, Mr Ingram.”

  “Why don’t you go through and take a seat at the bar,” the man said to Oates. “We’re still setting up, I’m afraid, but we should be able to manage a drink. Whisky, yes?”

  Oates removed his hand from the glass with a great deal more care than he had thrust it through. He was bleeding from several cuts around the wrist, and he rolled his sleeve down to staunch the blood. The man led him across the marble floor of the ticket office and down into what must once have been the lobby. This area was filled with plush leather seats around a low stage, with a small bar at one side. On the stage were two women in ballerina costumes stretching and making simple turns. Their movements showed an uncanny doubling, and as he watched he realised they were identical twins. The place was getting ready for the night. Someone switched on music with a low beat. Oates took the whisky offered him. He showed the manager the girl’s photo.

  “Lara thought you might be coming round.”

  “She’s the one who sent those kids after me?”

  Mr Ingram nodded. “You killed a good boy out there.”

  “That good boy tried to shoot me,” Oates said, “How did you know him?”

  “They come into the club sometimes. I’ll just find someone to take you down.”

  The man was gone for perhaps fifteen minutes. During that time Oates finished his drink, and called for another. The atmosphere in the club was like the backstage area of a theatre before the big show, and he found himself buoyed up by the infectious excitement. One of the barman, who wore a smart red waistcoat, was turning brightly coloured bottles over the back of his wrist, flinging them over his shoulder like a juggler and muttering: “Who’s the best? Who’s the best?” under his breath. A heavily tattooed man with snakes wound around his muscles walked down the stairs on his hands, jumping from palm to palm on each step. Someone’s girlfriend sat on the stage, a skinny young thing smoking and trying not to look out of place.

  There was no talk or awareness of the impending riots outside – though perhaps there was an extra charge in the air, a brittleness like that among the policemen swapping jokes with one another in their cordon outside One New Change. The feeling of self-conscious bravery that came with behaving normally in the face of impending disaster. It seemed to Oates a peculiarly English quality. It was almost as if they relished danger as an opportunity to prove their imperturbability, the way a bullfighter goes into the ring to walk with his back to the bull in his fancy clothes.

  18:15 HOURS

  THURSDAY 21 NOVEMBER

  2035 (REAL WORLD)

  WHEN THE MANAGER reappeared, he was accompanied by a man chewing gum. The gum chewer stared at Oates in a way that made him close his fists.

  “Okay, she will see you,” Mr Ingram said, “Carlos here is going to take you down.”

  Oates rose from his stool. The manager appraised him at his full height.

  “You are quite large. I hope you’re not scared of small spaces.”

  He smiled at his own joke, and Carlos chuckled. He turned away without speaking, and Oates followed him from the bar down a spiral staircase sectioned off from the lobby by a red velvet rope. As they moved further into the earth, the air grew warm and close. At the first landing, perhaps twenty feet or so beneath the surface of the street, there was a small door marked VIP, and Oates caught the glisten of painted skin through the portal window. The staircase turned and turned down into the ground, and soon Oates had lost all sense of how many steps he had descended. He wanted to ask Carlos where they were going, but something told him that his guide would simply laugh at his querulousness, and he didn’t want to give him the satisfaction.

  With Carlos moving ahead of him, he was able to observe the way the front pocket of his sweatshirt bulged and bounced when he descended the steps. His hand seemed to find its way to the lump under the fabric every minute or so to check it was still there. Carlos was carrying a concealed weight he wasn’t used to, and Oates was glad he’d cleaned his own gun in Chris’s office. Take any opportunity to maintain your weapon and clean your socks. Army rules to live by.

  The music of the club above faded and was replaced by the sound of music coming up from below. At last they came out into another space decorated with green and white tiles in the style of the entrance hall above. The platform of the old tube station had been transformed into a kind of shanty town, with a whole series of makeshift buildings standing with their backs to the curved wall and their mouths opening onto a thin strip of pavement along the yellow line that in working stations demarcated the safe distance the commuters have to stand from an approaching tube train.

  The shacks were designed to create privacy rather than to provide shelter in the enclosed space, and so many of them were little more than fabric stretched over frames, like the screens around a hospital bed. Looking down the length of the station, Oates could see one such construction with walls made of grubby white sheets. Inside there burned an electric light, creating on the external wall the silhouette of a figure reading a book, distended to great size by its proximity to the lamp. Along with the strings of Christmas lights that crisscrossed the roof of the tunnel, there were lines of washing hanging in the column of air that moved steadily down the tube. Among the clothes were several different sets of uniforms he recognised. There was a nurse’s blue smock, and a series of branded t-shirts from an upmarket coffee place.

  The pavement was too narrow for two men to pass abreast, and so at regular intervals there were sets of makeshift stairs leading down onto the tracks. As the space against the station walls was domestic, the space between the tracks was commercial. It was like an old-fashioned market, rows of stalls hung with foods, clothes, hardware, books, magazines, coloured lights, Japanese fans, breathing masks, children’s toys and live animals in cages and glass tanks. The music he had heard winding its way up the stairs was coming from speakers mounted on the corners of one of the stalls.

  In the well closest to Oates’s feet, a woman wearing dirty cycling shorts and a t-shirt cut off at the stomach was cooking crabs. She was wearing a single rubber glove, and she reached down and picked up a handful from a bucket of dirty water beside her on the ground, before tossing them on to the skillet, a corrugated sheet of metal sitting on a barrel of low fire.

  They danced frantically for a few seconds, the woman herding them with a short paddle when they came close to escaping. There was a hiss of moisture almost as if the little animals were screaming, and then they died on their feet, turning brown and crisping. As Oates descended the steps, he saw that the fresh crabs moving in the filthy water were a nacreous translucent white, as if they too had existed for generations in the caverns under the streets.

  They had been travelling down the tunnel for three hundred metres or so when Carlos stoppe
d. Oates had allowed himself to fall back a little when the two of them had left the relative safety of the shanty town, and pulled up behind him. He leant against a concrete pillar and hooked the hem of his jacket away from his holster, ready to take cover and pop the gun if Carlos’ shand slipped into the front pocket of his sweatshirt. Carlos went instead for the pockets of his trousers, and produced a long length of rag. It was filthy, and Oates expected him to blow his nose on it, but instead he hung it over his shoulder. He dug around again and came up with a white plastic cable tie.

  “You must be bloody joking,” Oates said, nodding at the cable tie.

  Carlos frowned. He had obviously been looking forward to telling Oates he would have to go blindfolded and tied up, and was irritated that Oates had pre-empted him. The two of them stared at one another. Neither moved. Oates could hear the drip, drip of water in the echoing hollow of the disused tunnel and, somewhere in the distance, the rumble of a tube train bearing commuters in the parallel universe of the city of London.

  “Lara says you come in a blindfold with your hands behind your back or you don’t come at all.”

  “What if I refuse?”

  “Then maybe you don’t come and you don’t get to leave either,” Carlos said, and pulled the stock of the pistol from his sweatshirt pocket, showing it to Oates. From what Oates could see, it looked a more serious prospect than the piece the boy had pulled on him in the shopping mall.

  Oates decided to get the thing dealt with as quickly as possible. He put out his hands, with the wrists together. Carlos spat on the ground, and walked towards him, his heavy boots crunching on the gravel. Oates could feel the tension behind the bravado as he advanced, and the tickle of incipient triumph, as Carlos allowed himself a little foretaste of the pleasure he would feel at having an agent of the state to lead blindfold back to his comrades. When he was close enough he reached out with the cable tie. Oates jerked his wrists back suddenly, and Carlos gasped.

  “Just playing,” Oates said.

  Carlos scowled at him, and went again for his wrists, meaning to grab them this time to stop him pulling the same trick. The movement created just enough momentum for Oates to seize Carlos’s hands and yank him forward off his feet. He gasped as Oates lowered his head like a charging bull. Carlos’s cheek bone met the intractable logic of his forehead with a crack loud enough to send back echoes from the ends of the empty tunnel. He sat down hard and curled into a ball, clutching his injury with both hands. The gun fell out of his sweatshirt onto the space between the tracks, and Oates picked it up.

  “You alright?” Oates asked him.

  “Ah, my face, you broke my fucking face!”

  “Come here.”

  He took the back of Carlos’s sweatshirt in one gloved hand and hoiked him upright. He picked up his chin with the other, and looked into his eyes. Both pupils were the same size, and when Oates shone the light from the torch into them they constricted. He had a lovely sunrise coming up on the left hand side of his face, but his nose was unbroken, and he could move his jaw up and down and left to right.

  “You can head to the hospital for an x-ray after we’re done, but you’re fine for now. Put your hands behind your back.”

  Carlos did as he was asked. The headbutt had knocked ten years off him. If there was a hardened paramilitary core to the Mortal Reformers, Oates had yet to find it. He didn’t fancy their chances against Miranda’s army of groundsmen. He yanked the cable tie tight.

  “On your knees,” Oates said.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to tie this blindfold across your eyes, and I don’t want you kicking me in the balls when I do it.”

  “But… if I’m blindfolded, how will I be able to take you?”

  “Fair point. Force of habit,” Oates said, pointing to the packing tie. “We used a lot of these in the army.”

  With Oates now holding Carlos’s gun in his back, the two of them trudged on down into the bowels of the city.

  THEY BRANCHED OFF the disused tube tunnel into a service shaft. From there, Carlos indicated a metal door, the hinges rusted but glistening with fresh black grease. A short ladder led them down into the first of the sewers. A rill of foul water ran along the curved base, and coagulated lumps of fat and toilet paper clung to the walls. The air made Oates gag. The ceiling was so low he had to bend almost double, and still he scraped his bald patch on the dripping bricks. The heat of human enterprise in the city above had sunk into the ground, and he was sweating under his body armour. He wanted to wipe the moustache of perspiration from his lip, but with gloved hands filthy from the walls he didn’t trust himself to touch his face. The beam of the torch jumped about in the blackness as he struggled to keep his footing. The pipe went on for perhaps thirty metres, but it seemed to Oates as if he had been travelling through that Stygian gloom for a good while when they finally came to the end.

  The second sewer was broader. There was a ledge along the side, but the Victorian brickwork was still coated with grease, and it was all he could do not to slip into the murky stream below. From the smell and debris as much as his sense of direction, he reckoned they must be under Chinatown. He could hear the scuttling of rats in the dark. His guide was nimble and Oates struggled to keep up. At the back of his mind was the distant fear that if the man ahead contrived to lose him, he might never find his way back out.

  He was more grateful than he cared to admit when they reached a new set of passages, different from both the nineteenth century sewers and from the service tunnels of the tube. The walls here were made up of the skinny bricks of Roman masonry. The floor beneath his feet was lined with slabs of good stone. The passage radiated the sheer age of London, the great history that made the riots above seem no more than the ancient city turning over in its sleep. In the distance, he could hear the sound of a river running underground.

  “So you were in the army, yeah?” Carlos said to him. It was the first thing he had said since Oates had taken his gun.

  “Yes.”

  “And you were in combat?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “In the Middle East.”

  “Were you…”

  “What?”

  “S.A.S.?”

  Oates almost laughed out loud, but managed to catch himself. Of course Carlos would want to think he had been defeated by some special forces ninja. What the hell. If he wants to save face, and have a story to tell his mates which doesn’t make him look a pillock, why not?

  “I can’t really talk about it,” Oates said, in the voice of portentous mystery he used when winding up Mike and Harry. “We did a lot of things that are… classified.”

  Carlos nodded, suitably impressed.

  “I won’t tell no one.”

  “Good.”

  The silence that slotted back into place after this exchange was almost companionable. Some minutes later, they came to a junction lined with fresh steel pipes.

  “We have to stop here.”

  “Why?”

  “There are guards on the doors up ahead. You need to give them a signal so’s they know you’re coming.”

  “What signal?”

  Carlos nodded his head towards a large spanner leaning against the wall of the tunnel.

  “Bang on the pipes. There’s a code, I can do it but not with my hands tied.”

  Oates considered the request, and concluded that Carlos was sufficiently docile to be released. He had internalised the makeshift handcuffs on their long trudge through the sewers, and wasn’t likely to try anything. Particularly not when he was unarmed, and in the presence of a lethal S.A.S. commando. Oates turned him round, and split the ties with a swift jerk of his knife. Carlos rubbed the red rings around his wrists and rolled his shoulders.

  Carlos stooped for the big spanner. He brought the metal tool down hard on the pipes, sending a pattern of distinct strikes clanging around the corner of the tunnel into the gloom. Oates watched, gun still trained on
Carlos but held light as a dowsing rod, ready to twitch in the direction of the gap ahead if anything emerged from the darkness. For a few seconds, nothing happened. Then someone beat on the pipes in answer.

  There were two distinct sounds, one the original strike conducted through the air, the second the reverberations of the metal conduits. They mingled and masked one another, so that it was impossible to tell how far away the sentries were placed. They could be a hundred metres away, or just around the corner. Carlos gave the pipes a last hammer blow, as if for luck, and the two of them set off again down the tunnels.

  It was the light he saw first. A curtain hung across an opening in the passage ahead, but it was full of holes, and little circles of light lay on it like coins on a table cloth. No one came out to meet them, but they could hear sounds coming from behind it. An indistinct mix of voices and machinery.

  Oates could see how the posters and t-shirts of Dwayne had been produced so quickly. There were banks of printers down here, some larger presses for posters, and a couple of grubby photocopiers. Somewhere he was willing to bet he would find the 3D printer that had given the boy the gun that got him killed. Against one wall were stacks of placards attached to wooden handles, some bearing Dwayne’s face, some bearing the faces of various politicians with devil’s horns or similar adornments, some bearing slogans of Mortal Reform. One of the photocopiers was still spitting out warm leaflets. The automated motion was eerie in the empty room. The place felt not empty, but deserted.

  The photocopying stopped abruptly. It had been masking a recorded voice emerging from speakers standing on a desk.

  “The real mystery of modern democracy is that people continue to vote against their own best interests. Since the late 1980s in the United Kingdom, voters have continually given their support to parties promising low rates of taxation on the very richest, and have punished any party proposing wealth or land taxes, despite the fact that they themselves would not pay these taxes, and would benefit greatly from the improved public services such taxes would fund. This apparent contradiction can be explained when we consider the optimism and individualism propagated by consumer society. As children we are taught to believe in the inevitability of our own success, and as adults we vote to support not the class we are in, but the class to which we aspire and to which we feel we belong by right, if not in fact. Part of the difficulty in effecting democratic change exists because to do so involves an assault on this sense of self-worth. This sense of self-worth is no less potent for being based on a fallacy. The phenomenon is greatly exaggerated in the matter of the Treatment, for in voting against the interests of the new-young, the voter must accept not only the certainty of their own continuing poverty, but also the certainty of death. Failing to acquire the Treatment is, after all, the equivalent of accepting a death sentence. This is why we have come to believe that only direct action–”