by Luke Kennard
She was crying now.
‘I was worried you wouldn’t agree to it, so I just started coming off. And the thing is I’m fine.’
Karl didn’t want to look at Genevieve and he didn’t want her to see his face. What did he know? Maybe the medication Genevieve took did nothing other than make him feel better. He embraced her and they fell back on the bed.
‘Whoa,’ she said.
‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘It’s okay. I’m sorry.’
HE STOLE ONE of her cigarettes while she was downstairs talking to Janna and leaned halfway out of the skylight watching the flicked ash bounce between balls of moss. In his head he was standing by the side of the blue Fiat on a long housing estate, staring at the body of the child he’d hit at, say, 36 mph. He had already called 999. The father was running across the road. Please. Oh, please no. She came from nowhere. Is that the first thing you do? Claim it wasn’t your fault? Maybe the only adequate response to having just killed someone’s child was to drop to your knees and wail. No, that wasn’t your place. To sit down. To take your head in your hands and rock back and forth silently. Better. But that might look as if you were trying to avoid making eye contact with the father or, worse, trying to pretend nothing was real and the accident hadn’t even happened. But then was this really the time for eye contact? You’d have to time it so that the father was cradling the child in his arms, howling at a volume you’d never heard the human voice reach before, and then gently, respectfully, lower yourself to the ground, take your head in your hands and rock back and forth. Let the police cars and ambulances find you like that.
Karl was so satisfied with this conclusion he all but stopped thinking about an unmedicated Genevieve taking a job with The Transition and losing herself altogether. He thought about the notary’s worst-case scenario, a military term rather than legal, he remembered: Genevieve might become very unstable and damage her relationship with new work colleagues and with Janna and Stu. This wasn’t pleasant, but it was hardly catastrophic. If in a position to do so, Genevieve could take decisions which damaged the business or the reputation of The Transition. This wasn’t of great concern to Karl. In fact, all he really had to deal with was the fallout as it affected Genevieve, if she broke with reality, with her very character, if she was never the same again. Therefore if it wasn’t possible to influence her, and Karl felt fairly confident it wasn’t, he had to let her take the job and monitor the situation very closely. Like some kind of Victorian patriarch.
Later, after finishing a 3,000-word undergraduate essay on terrorism and anarchism in Conrad’s The Secret Agent for a student named Harry, Karl lay on the white sofa with the television on, picturing himself getting up. He had spent an hour on the rowing machine and half an hour doing weights. He worked out alone now, three times a week. He had become self-regulating, as Stu put it. Karl pictured himself getting up, walking over to the plug sockets and turning off the television. Instead he stared, his brain flatlining, while a woman called Saskia turned a charm bracelet around and around on her wrist and tried to say something interesting about each of its charms; bit like the Monopoly dog, this one, she said. Slight Essex glow to her accent, although she was using her telephone voice. He lifted up his shirt and scratched his belly button. He didn’t realise Stu was in the room until he cleared his throat, which startled him.
‘Fuck,’ said Karl. ‘Sorry.’
‘You’re watching an infomercial.’
‘It’s a shopping channel,’ said Karl, half anticipating some act of violence and trying not to show it. ‘I’m in love with the host,’ he added.
‘I need to talk to you,’ said Stu.
Karl sat up and straightened his clothes. Stu obliged Karl’s expectation by switching off the TV.
‘I need to issue you a formal warning,’ said Stu.
Karl felt the palms of his hands go sweaty. His stomach knotted. This had to be about the massage. Stu had read Janna’s back the night he had written on it. Stu was going to kick the shit out of him.
‘What? Why?’ said Karl.
Stu sighed. ‘This is very early in the process, I understand that,’ he said. ‘Which is why we need to nip it in the bud.’
‘What have I done?’ said Karl.
‘Good. Good that you’re taking this seriously. Karl, this may feel like micro-management, but you haven’t been writing your 500-word journal entries,’ said Stu.
‘Oh, that,’ said Karl. ‘I’ll catch up. I can do it tonight.’
‘You’re coasting. You’re not taking your situation seriously. It’s affecting Genevieve and it’s affecting me and Janna. Let me ask you something: if you were in the prison you narrowly avoided, what would you do when they called for lights out?’
‘I’d turn out my light.’
‘So show us the same courtesy,’ said Stu. ‘Follow the instructions you’re set. Even if it seems stupid. You have to work the programme.’
‘Like the twelve steps. It doesn’t seem stupid, Stu. I get the principle.’
‘I’ve seen people, very rarely, but I’ve seen it, go through the whole Transition thinking they were the exception, thinking the rules applied to everyone else.’
‘What happened to them?’ said Karl.
‘They were given an opportunity to turn things around, a scheme which asks so little and gives so much in return. We’re a charity, Karl. We pay our staff but we’re a non-profit organisation. We have patrons and benefactors, and our former candidates make a donation in the form of a percentage of profits from the businesses we help them set up.’
‘So you’re like a massive conglomerate?’
‘All of the money goes back into The Transition. The point is they were given, these people, they were given this golden opportunity to turn their lives around and they couldn’t do it. Why? Because part of them wanted to sabotage their own shot at happiness and success – I can see you flinching at those words, Karl, and I don’t care – I won’t let it happen to one of my protégés. Even if I have to be a dick about it. I say this because I care about you, Karl. You’re a good guy and I want to help you. You see that, don’t you?’
‘I’ll write the journal entries.’
‘I still have to issue you the warning – it’s your first of three.’
‘What happens after three?’
‘You’re not going to find out.’
‘ARE YOU OKAY?’ said Genevieve. She was lying with her head on his chest and they were watching a repeat of a topical panel show in bed, drinking lager from the can.
‘Am I okay?’ said Karl. ‘That’s not how it works. You never ask me if I’m okay. I ask you over and over again until it pisses you off.’
‘But now I’m asking you.’
‘I’m fine,’ said Karl. ‘Is there something wrong with how I’m watching TV?’
‘Things feel different.’
‘I’m fine.’
‘Can we watch something else?’ said Genevieve. ‘I find people trying to be spontaneously funny about things that happened five years ago unbearably sad.’
At seven Karl said he needed to meet Keston for a pint. Need to, eh? said Genevieve. It was Keston’s request, Karl told her. Instead he followed his tablet map to 52 Pritchatts Road, a tall grubby tower block made of egg-box-shaped units. Karl walked around the building to the service alley. He found a green metal door with an electric card reader and a sign reading HERMITAGE. Karl put the black card in and the door slid open.
‘Yes!’ said Alice Jonke. ‘Woo! You made it.’
‘Hi,’ said Karl.
The room was small but clean. It had no window, but was lit softly by standard lamps. It contained an armchair, a desk and an exercise mat. Alice Jonke was sitting in the lotus position on the exercise mat. There was a strong citrus smell and a silent waterfall flowing over the far wall.
‘I didn’t know if you’d bother,’ she said.
‘I wanted to know why you lied about the band.’
‘Oh, so you know I lied
,’ said Alice. ‘Well, that saves me having to tell you I lied. I couldn’t talk about it at Stu and Janna’s house.’
‘What is this place? Is it your flat?’
‘I wish!’ said Alice. ‘Hermitage have a series of one-room sanctuaries throughout the city and people can rent them for £50 per thirty minutes. It’s not for sex. It’s a place to catch a break, do some work, meditate – a little niche in the middle of the busiest, most stressful parts of town. It’s a Transition business, so I get free use when they’re not booked – one of the perks.’
‘It’s nice. Why did you call me here?’
‘I felt bad,’ said Alice. ‘I told you there was no band. There was a band. And we were serious about turning against The Transition. We got into a lot of trouble. My ex-husband was kicked off.’
‘Okay,’ said Karl. ‘But you finished the programme, set up your own business and now you volunteer for The Transition in your spare time. What happened to Jonathan?’
‘Oh, we’d practically broken up before we started The Transition. He was kind of an idiot. Honestly, I look back and I can see how oppressive he was – he was against everything. He hated my parents because – I don’t even know why – he saw them as materialistic or something. Just because they have a hot tub. I mean, Jesus, Karl. He was holding me back – Janna was right about that. One night he came home late, drunk, and he’d kissed someone in a bar and he was tearful and apologetic and I just thought, I don’t even care. But this isn’t about me.’
‘Did Janna and Stu help you with the divorce?’
‘Help? I suppose they would have done if I’d asked. I mean they helped sort out the legal stuff, so you could see it that way. And at the time Stu was very good at talking me through what I saw as a compromise.’ She took out a smartphone and read from the screen. ‘“Is it a puzzle that systems contain their own rebellion? What are pistons doing if not struggling like lobsters on their way to the pot? A good system not only contains its own rebellion; a good system harnesses that rebellion and uses it to produce over eighty per cent of its energy.”’
‘What’s that from?’
‘Me,’ said Alice. ‘I wrote it. Pretty good, right? I think I should be a cultural critic.’
‘I don’t know whether you’re warning me or encouraging me or what,’ said Karl.
‘Well, there’s a way out, if you want it,’ said Alice. ‘But my suggestion is you just play the system for all it’s worth, then come and find me once you get a job and we can work on changing the organisation from within.’
‘Right,’ said Karl.
‘Meantime, if there’s anything I can do, you let me know.’ She gave him a card with her number and Alice Jonke, The Transition, Admissions. ‘Or if you, you know, have anything for me.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Karl.
‘Probably best,’ said Alice. ‘Well, aloha, Karl.’
29
IT WAS THE DAY before the general meeting at the Transition HQ. Keston sent him a message.
– Your couple on the lam. Ed and Jess Anderton. Missing eight days. He was caught in possession of cocaine, enough for intent to supply; that’s why they’re on The Transition. Interestingly, nobody has a clue why they took off. Their journals are nondescript, their mentors had no clue anything was wrong. Just ran away.
Karl felt too addled to work. What he felt like doing was testing the parameters.
He followed the instructions from his photograph of not_all_transition’s T-shirt. He broke the trading program and siphoned half of the stock money – which was sitting at £642 – into the sham account detailed on the shirt. He used the account to buy a bitcoin which he could cash in a nearby e-cigarette shop. He would tell Genevieve he had made an unwise investment and apologise for ruining their chances in the competition. Then he stopped. What was he doing? Why was he trying to get away with it? He brought up the photo again and converted the rest of the money into another bitcoin, leaving their stock profile at £1.62.
After cashing the bitcoins, he went to a Mexican-themed bar and bought a margarita, which he drank while reading his Collected Robert Southwell. Then he bought three more margaritas and found that his appreciation of Southwell’s poems deepened. At the casino he put £200 on 0 and lost it. Then he went to a restaurant and ordered a bottle of red from the fourth page of the wine list for £106. It tasted like medicine and bark chips. Finally he went to a basement bar called Montgomery’s, running a Louisiana theme night. Here he drank Sazeracs until he was sick in the toilets noisily enough to get thrown out. It was 3 a.m.
In the taxi home he was sick again and, as per its laminated notice, fined £60 for ‘defiling’ – ‘Defiling!’ he said, as he handed over the money – the cab. He swayed on the front doorstep looking for his keys. The door opened.
‘Come on,’ said Stu, taking Karl’s arm and putting a hand on his back, firm as a policeman. ‘I’ll help you up the stairs.’
Genevieve said that she wouldn’t talk to him until he was sober, but Karl felt too nauseated to sleep. Every time he drank a glass of water he brought it up; it sluiced around his system and found some new residue of poison so that Karl had to hunch over the toilet like some sweaty pink toad, hacking up what had to be every last drop before returning to bed, downing another glass and feeling the room gently start to rotate around him again. This went on until the cold misty sunrise appeared in the Velux window.
‘I’m very sorry,’ he said to Genevieve, returning from his labours for the fourth time.
‘There is a time,’ said the form of Genevieve, facing away from him, ‘to be sorry. This isn’t it. Why did you do it?’
‘Something weird is going on,’ said Karl. ‘This isn’t what it seems to be.’
‘Or is it exactly what it seems to be?’
‘This is what they want. They’re trying to sabotage things between us.’
‘You see, from my point of view,’ said Genevieve, ‘it looks like you’re the one trying to sabotage things between us. I’m trying very hard to see things from your perspective.’ She was still facing the wall and talking in measured, quiet sentences. Karl stood playing with the cord of his pyjama trousers. ‘The stock thing,’ she said. ‘When I take something seriously and you destroy it, it makes me feel like a child. Do you understand how humiliating that is?’
Karl felt heavy. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘I’m not upset about the money. I’m not upset about the prize. I mean really, do you think that’s what … I’m trying to explain to you … When … I’m so used to being wrong. I’m so used to telling you something and you explaining to me that I’m deluded. That hurts me.’
‘I hear you,’ said Karl. ‘I hear you, I hear you.’
‘I’m so used to being managed by you: “Genevieve, you’re depressed; Genevieve, you’re hysterical”.’
Karl wasn’t sure he’d ever said exactly that, but had just enough nous to keep his mouth shut.
‘And then you do something like this and you wreck something I was trying to do and you’re throwing up all night and I’m like, who is this man to tell me what to do? That’s what I’ve been lying here thinking to myself while I listen to you puking.’
‘I hate that word.’
‘Why am I listening to this man?’
‘That’s fair.’
‘And I think maybe because you’re so down on yourself all the time, I confuse that with self-knowledge. I confuse self-deprecation with self-awareness.’
‘Now you sound like a …’
‘Like a what? You know what you sound like? An Englishman.’
Karl shrugged this off.
‘I’ve been doing some investigating,’ said Karl. ‘I haven’t found out very much yet, but I got the instructions to take the money … I got it from … I have reason to believe that not everyone makes it through The Transition.’
‘Gah!’ said Genevieve. ‘I don’t doubt that it’s possible to fail The Transition. Why shouldn’t it be? It’s possible to fail anythin
g.’
‘Genevieve?’
‘What?’
‘Do you forgive me?’
‘Have you finished being sick? Can we try to get an hour or so’s sleep before the taxi?’
30
GENEVIEVE WASN’T IN BED when his alarm woke him up. He could hear voices downstairs and hurried to get dressed.
‘Right, Karl, Alka-Seltzer, bacon sandwich,’ said Janna when he entered the kitchen. ‘Don’t have any coffee yet – it’ll just dehydrate you more.’
Karl took an unsteady seat at the granite breakfast bar. It struck him as an unnecessarily dense surface: you could shatter something by putting it down too hard. His hand shook as he drained the hissing glass.
‘I’ll come straight to the point,’ said Stu, who was loading the dishwasher – it appeared that they had had something of a feast in his absence last night. ‘We’ll conflate the whole misadventure into one warning, okay? The hacked program, the stolen money and the drinking spree. Believe it or not, you’re not the first protégé to act out in the first month, and you’ll not be the last.’
‘We know we’ve been asking a lot of you in these first weeks and in a way you did well to last as long as you did.’
‘It’s good you’ve got it out of your system,’ said Stu. ‘You’re on two warnings, so a good time to turn around, no?’
‘If you’re okay to move on,’ said Janna.
Karl took a bite of his bacon sandwich. The hot chilli sauce felt like a welcome sensation in his fuzzy mouth. He swallowed.
‘I don’t know what to say,’ he said. ‘I apologise for my behaviour.’
The sun kept emerging from behind clouds the size of buses to dazzle him through the rear passenger window. There was the occasional desultory shower of rain, scattered as if shaken off. Karl blew his nose and the effort made him gag. Being conveyed in the auto-drive 4x4 with a human chaperone felt different to being driven by a human being, and this morning it wasn’t a difference he enjoyed. The swift, flawless, maximum efficiency of the computer made him feel like a cartridge in a printer; its precise navigation of roundabouts and sharp bends felt like spinning around and around in an office chair. Neither of them spoke to the driver when he let them out and he smiled distantly as if, Karl reckoned, he wanted them to know he had seen this before.