Disturbia

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘Burglary?’

  ‘Yeah, like watching the screen with a pair of tights pulled over your face. You got a nerve trying to offload it onto the public.’

  ‘Well, don’t bother trying to half-inch any of it, then.’ The stallholder rested his hands on his hips, amused by the boy’s cheek. Maybe he’d seen him before; it was hard to tell. The worn-over sneakers, the clipper haircut, the ever-shifting eyes and the sallow complexion of a fast-food diet were common juvenile stigmata around here. But this one had a freshness, a touch of charm.

  ‘Wouldn’t give you the benefit of my custom, not for this load of pants. Of course, you probably dosh up from your export stock.’ ‘Export’ was the universal code for videotapes that had not been classified by the British authorities. It was illegal to sell such merchandise to the public unless it was for export. It would have been especially foolhardy trying to offload such material in Shepherd’s Bush Market, which was constantly patrolled by police. The stallholder feigned shocked indignation, a skill he had practised and perfected long ago.

  ‘I hope you’re not suggesting I break the law.’

  ‘Well, you ain’t gonna make your money back flogging fifth generation copies of Black Emmanuelle Goes East with the good bits cut out, are you?’ said Vince. ‘This technology’s dead, anyway. If you’re gonna market cult videos, you need old BBFC–certificated stock, something the DPP can’t touch, and I have the very thing.’ He looked about for signs of the law, then dug into his leather duffel bag and produced a boxed tape. ‘Check that out, mate.’

  Vince had travelled the country buying up stock from dealers who had withdrawn tapes following advice from the Director of Public Prosecutions. ‘First generation rental, and—technically—totally legal,’ he explained, pointing to an original copy of The Exorcist. He opened the lid and displayed a dealer stamp from an Aberystwyth public library as proof. ‘There you go. That’s so clean it belongs in a photo opportunity with a politician.’

  Vince knew he had made a sale the moment the tape passed into the stallholder’s hands. It was easy to spot the fanatical zeal in the eyes of a true collector. In the next few minutes he sold the remainder of his stock for six times what he’d paid, and left behind a grateful buyer. As he strutted between the crowded railway arches, back towards the entrance of the market, a little mental arithmetic confirmed that he was within sight of his financial target. He could now afford to reduce his hours at the store and concentrate on his assignment for Esther Goldstone.

  He took a last look back at the boisterous crowds. Not so long ago the transactions taking place beneath the railways of London involved Jacobean candlesticks, Georgian silver and Victorian paintings of dubious provenance. Now they teemed with housewives who had been forced into scouring stalls for cheap children’s clothes. Only the contumacious energy of the multitude remained.

  An hour later, he kept his appointment at Goldstone’s cluttered Covent Garden office, situated above a mediocre Italian restaurant in Floral Street. Esther was an agent, and the mother of a boy he had befriended on his journalism course. An editor of her acquaintance named Carol Mendacre was preparing a volume of new London journalism for her publishing house. Esther had read several of Vince’s unpublished articles, and had been sufficiently intrigued to pass them on to the editor, who in turn had expressed an interest in commissioning a more substantial piece. If the finished product worked and the book did well, it would lead to further assignments. Esther was happy to offer guidance to her protégé. She felt that his writing had conviction, although his style was a little wild and ragged.

  Now she listened patiently as he explained what he wanted to write about. She was a good listener, smiling and nodding as she absently touched her auburn hair. Glitzily maternal, she wore rings set with bulbous semi-precious stones on almost every finger, and sported an array of gilt ropes at her bosom. This may have given her the appearance of being Ali Baba’s business manager but she was, in fact, a highly respected agent with a fondness for nurturing new writers.

  ‘I don’t see why nine per cent of the population should own ninety per cent of the land,’ Vince told her heatedly, ‘or why the country needs hereditary peers. It astonishes me that a city of nine million people selects its living options from a shortlist of outmoded ideas; that politicians are working for the common good and that the state has the welfare of all at its heart. The state is supposed to be there to uphold a sacred trust; to protect what rightfully belongs to its people. That concept disappeared when everything was sold off. How did we let it slip away? Isn’t it time politicians learned that you can’t excuse an incompetent career by having your picture taken with your arms around your children?’

  ‘You’re ranting, dear; I don’t like that,’ Esther gently chided him. ‘Opinionated rhetoric is the province of the elderly, not twenty-five-year-olds. I read the piece based on the interviews you conducted. It was interesting enough, in a hectoring way. What Carol needs for this anthology is balanced reportage, not mere vocalised anger. No knee-jerk stuff. Nothing in life is as clear-cut as you think. Don’t turn this into a bleat about the class system; it’s all been said before, and by writers far more articulate and experienced than yourself. Let’s discuss practicalities. What I’ll need from you fairly quickly is an outline of your intended piece.’

  In the street outside, the Garden’s performers were calling to the crowd, encouraging them to chant a set of comic refrains. Beyond this chorus, Vince could hear a coloratura soprano singing scales in the rehearsal room of the Opera House. A peppery cooking smell was wafting through the open window. There was an undertow of garlic in the air; restaurants were preparing for their evening sittings. On the roof above, someone was having a barbecue. So much life crowded on top of itself.

  ‘You want me to pick something else to write about,’ he said moodily.

  ‘Not at all! The subject of class fits perfectly with what the editor has in mind, so long as you find an involving approach to your material. Don’t just create a patchwork of facts and opinions. Find a vessel in which to present your argument. Don’t forget—if she likes what you write, a quarter of the book will be yours. The other authors in the anthology all have extensive previous experience. You’ll be her wild card, her new face. I’m counting on you to do this, Vincent.’

  He sat back in his chair, chastened and feeling foolish. He wanted to leave her with a good impression. Esther reached over and placed a plump hand on his, her bracelets chinking. ‘Stop looking so worried. You’ll do fine, I’m sure. Just go back and concentrate on the project. Ask yourself if you’ve chosen your topic for the right reasons. It’s obvious to me that you care, but that’s nowhere near enough. Everyone feels passion about something. Everyone has ideas about their world. You need to refine yours through individual insight and experience.’

  Her business manner returned as she withdrew her hand. ‘It’s not official yet, but this book is going to be part of a more ambitious project. Carol is hoping to sign a deal for a whole series of volumes, probably twelve in all. Each will feature the work of between four and six authors. They’ll be setting out to chronicle the state of the world at the end of the twentieth century. She’s come to me to help her find fresh young talent, and I don’t want to disappoint her. You know I like your style, Vincent. I loved your London pieces and I’d love for you to become one of the series’ regular authors. But you’re not a recognised journalist. You’re young, and the ideas of the young are not always thought through. You’ve only been published in fringe magazines. It all depends on you getting this first project right. I don’t want to interfere editorially, but if you have problems with your material, bring them to me and I’ll be happy to help you sort them out.’

  ‘You have more faith in me than I have,’ he said quietly.

  ‘My interest isn’t wholly philanthropic, I assure you.’ She twisted a thick gold band on her finger, a gift from her divorced husband. ‘As you know, I left the agency to set up on my own. This
office is expensive, and Morris’s settlement only goes so far. I promised Carol I’d find her fresh talent. I have to make this work. I search the literary backstreets for new blood, and what I find rarely holds promise. When I get someone like you, I hang on in hope. That you’ll come through, that you’ll be different from the rest. So write about London, if that’s what interests you.’

  ‘It’s just…finding where to start.’

  ‘Listen to that.’ Esther sat back in her chair and nodded in the direction of the open window. ‘What do you hear? Street vendors, tradesmen, punters, hawkers—and ranging above them, the opera singers. The centuries haven’t overturned their roles. You talk about class. If the class system is so terrible, how come it’s still here? What keeps it in place? Money? Breeding? Sheer selfishness? Perhaps you can find out.’

  She rose suddenly, closing the session. ‘Make it human, Vincent. There’s much you won’t understand unless you can find someone who’ll explain from the inside how the system works. Try getting to know such a person. Assemble facts and figures, by all means’—she leaned forwards, smiling now, and prodded him with a varnished nail—‘but filter them through that pump in your chest. Give your writing some heart.’

  Chapter 3

  The Elite

  As he emerged from Esther Goldstone’s office and crossed the road, clearing clouds released the afternoon sun, gilding the terraced buildings of Floral Street in brassy light. Vince knew he could not spend the rest of his life studying. He had taken night courses in photography, advanced English, history and journalism, with varying degrees of success. He had written and published sixteen poorly paid articles on London, its history and people in a variety of fringe newspapers and desktop-produced magazines. Now at the age of twenty-five, he felt himself in danger of becoming a permanent student. He did not have enough cash saved to go travelling, and he was too tired to consider the prospect of backpacking across the campsites of Europe in search of sensation.

  His mother wanted him to find a regular job, start a family and settle down, or at least stay in one place long enough to save some money. He wanted to work at a single project instead of half a dozen, to pick a direction and stick with it, but so far writing had earned him nothing, and the spectre of hitting forty in a ratty cardigan and a damp flat surrounded by thousands of press clippings filled him with depression. He did not want to fight his way into the media world determined to produce award-winning documentaries, only to wind up writing video links for cable kids’ shows. He was more ambitious than that.

  His brother Paul had screwed up royally, telling everyone he was holding down a highly paid job at London Weekend Television as a technician. Far from being gainfully employed, he was caught breaking into a stereo component factory in Southend, and served four years of a six-year sentence for inflicting damage to one of the security guards. He was now working on an army base in Southampton. Vince was determined to do better than that, just to convince his mother that she hadn’t raised her children in vain.

  He rubbed a hand through his cropped black hair and looked back at the tourist-trammelled Piazza, at the gritty haze above it caused by street-cooking and car exhausts, then at the quiet curving street ahead. It was his afternoon off from the store, and he planned to visit Camden Library to raid their reference section. Now that he had set aside his misgivings and accepted the commission, he needed to develop a working method that would allow him to deliver the assignment on time. More than that, he needed a human subject to interview, but had no clue about how to find one.

  As he passed a newsagent’s shop in Charing Cross Road, he glanced in the window and idly studied the incongruous array of magazines. Between copies of Cable TV Guide and Loaded were a number of sun-faded society magazines, including a copy of Tatler. On its cover was a laughing couple in evening dress, attending some kind of hunting event.

  It made sense to purchase the field-guide to his chosen subject. As he thumbed through the pages, checking the captioned photographs, he felt as though he was facing an enemy for the first time. His knowledge of the class system’s upper reaches was minimal and, he knew, reactionary, but studying a display of guffawing nitwits tipping champagne over each other in a marquee—‘The Honourable Rodney Waite-Gibbs and his girlfriend Letitia Colfe-Burgess, raising money for Needy Children’—filled him with an irrational fury that deepened with each page he turned. There were photographs of silky, bored debutantes seated beside improbable floral arrangements in Kensington apartments, drunk young gentlemen collapsed over wine-stained tablecloths, elderly landowners awkwardly posed at their country seats, their slight smiles hinting at perception of their immortality.

  They struck Vince not as sons and daughters and brothers and sisters, but as dwindling continuations of lines buried deep in the past, barely connected to his world. Their forefathers’ determination to civilise others had certainly earned them a place in history. Thumbing through Tatler, though, he could only assume that their children had collectively decided to abandon themselves to less altruistic pursuits.

  One series of photographs particularly intrigued. They showed a handsome, haunted man with a contrite look on his face shying from cameras as he entered a grime-covered granite building. The caption read: ‘The Honourable Sebastian Wells puts his troubled past to rest over a conciliatory dinner with his estranged father, Sir Nicholas Wells, at the Garrick Club.’ In the entire magazine, this was the only hint that something was wrong in the upper echelons. He found himself wondering what sort of trouble the honourable Sebastian Wells had got himself into. He planned to write about London from the view of his own working-class background, but it needed someone like this to provide his ideas with contrast. What were the chances of getting a member of the aristocracy to talk to him? How did he even set about obtaining a telephone number? Wells’s father belonged to the House of Lords, which at least made him easier to track down.

  Vince closed the magazine and headed off towards the library at a renewed pace. He had found his human subject. And his method of choosing Sebastian Wells could not have been more constitutional if he had simply stuck a pin in an open telephone directory.

  Chapter 4

  The Meeting

  ‘And you must be Vincent Reynolds.’

  Vince squinted up into the sun, raised a hand to his brow and saw a slim-shouldered man with floppy chestnut hair and green eyes smiling down at him. He knew at once that this was the person he had arranged to meet, and smiled back. He thought later that it had been the preposition in that introductory sentence which had given the stranger away, turning Vince’s name into the postscript of some deeper thought.

  ‘Sorry, I was nearly asleep,’ he explained, nervously closing his book.

  Sebastian Wells held out a manicured hand. The skin was pale and traversed with bulging veins. ‘Nice to meet you at last. All those messages going back and forth, all that modern technology and we still couldn’t connect.’ He looked around at the gardens, the sloping lawn. ‘I’ve not been over here before.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I picked it because I understood you lived nearby.’

  ‘My father has several houses in the area, that’s correct, but I spend very little time here.’ He didn’t pronounce the r in very.

  The late summer afternoon had begun warm, but its lengthening shadows were chill. For the last half-hour Vince had been sitting on a wooden bench just below the cream wedding-cake façade of Kenwood House, in front of a gnarled and ancient magnolia tree. He had vaguely registered the man walking up from the dank green lake at the bottom of the slope. Sebastian Wells was styled in that self-consciously English manner Americans sometimes affect when they move to London. The navy-blue cable-knit sweater over his bespoke blue and white striped shirt was almost parody-Brit, and had the effect of setting Vince at a disadvantage in his Mambo sweatshirt, jeans and filthy sneakers.

  ‘You’re reading about the Jews?’ Sebastian tapped Vince’s book cover. ‘Fascinating stuff. The great majority of Englis
h Jews are Ashkenazim.’ He joined Vince on the bench. His clipped enunciation suggested the speech of an elderly member of the aristocracy, and seemed false in one so young. ‘From Germany, Holland and Poland. Edward the First banished them from England in 1290. Oliver Cromwell let them back in three and a half centuries later. What exactly are you researching?’

  ‘How do you know I’m not just reading this for pleasure?’

  Sebastian tilted the cover of the book and narrowed his eyes. ‘Societal Group Structures in Nineteenth-Century European Culture. What, you thought you’d get through it before the movie version came out?’

  ‘It’s for research, you’re right,’ he admitted. ‘I’m studying for a course.’ He was determined to speak nicely and not drop his aitches, something he always tried when meeting new people but only managed to keep up for twenty minutes or so. The difference in their speech alone suggested an unbridgeable gulf between them. Sebastian’s consonants were cut crystal.

  ‘Oh? And which course are you taking?’

  ‘History of London. It’s just three nights a week. An aid to my writing.’

  ‘Oh, a night course. The Open University. How exciting. And that subject interests you, does it?’

  ‘All journalism interests me.’

  ‘So why aren’t you taking a course in journalism?’

  ‘I’ve already taken one. Now I’m on the creation and maintenance of British social divisions.’

  ‘Goodness, that sounds like heavy going. Your manner of speech is very clear. I like that.’

  Vince thought this an odd sort of compliment. ‘My parents taught me to enunciate clearly,’ he explained. ‘They felt it was important to be understood. My dad needed to be for his job. He was a bus conductor. He used to shout out the destinations. I was a bingo caller for a while last summer. You have to speak clearly for that. A lot of the customers are deaf.’