Execution Plan

by Patrick Thompson

  IV

  A quick check of the AA Road Atlas revealed that I needed to buy a new copy. Mine was twelve years old, and missing a few pages. I’d torn out Borth and the surrounding area myself. Others had gone their own way.

  Looking at the street layout for Dudley, I could see that it was hopelessly out of date. The new traffic islands that the council were so fond of, the bypass that had allowed the traffic jam to queue with a different view, the six hundred sets of unsynchronized traffic lights; none of them were there.

  Dudley used to allow small businesses to sponsor traffic islands. Small companies learned the error of their ways and went back to using single-frame adverts shown at local cinemas before the real trailers started.

  For a while the traffic islands of Dudley stood bare. Then, unannounced, art started to appear on them. Big heavy art, cast in metal, high on weight, low on definition. On one island there are three huge red triangles, symbolising huge red triangles; on another, a mysterious lion/monkey hybrid cut out of sheet metal stands next to a giant bell topped with enormous pincers. None of it makes sense. None of it was on my map.

  Hereford would surely be different, I thought. The roads wouldn’t have changed since the Middle Ages. In Hereford they still told the time using notched candles, and locked menstruating women in a hut outside the village. I mentioned this to Dermot.

  ‘What, Pizza Hut?’ he asked.

  He’d turned up almost as soon as I’d got home, armed with his latest console.

  ‘Not Pizza Hut. Just a hut. A small one, well out of the way.’

  ‘They’ve got some smart ideas in Hereford. That could catch on.’

  ‘Hopefully they don’t have any new roads. This should still be alright,’ I said, waving the road atlas. Some pages dangled precariously from it.

  ‘Don’t ask me, I’ve never been that good with maps.’

  ‘You’ll be navigating.’

  ‘I can’t read maps. I’ll drive, you navigate. You drive like an old woman anyway. You should have a fucking Metro. That car of yours is wasted on you.’

  ‘Well you’re not driving it. You’re not insured.’

  ‘I wasn’t planning on crashing the fucking thing. If it’ll make you feel better I’ll be sure to put on clean underwear, in case we have to go to casualty. Or we could take my car, then you could read what’s left of the fucking map.’

  ‘You haven’t got a car.’

  ‘Of course I’ve got a car. What do you think I am, a fucking tramp? How do you think I get here?’

  ‘I thought you walked. You’re too drunk to drive, most nights.’

  ‘I’m never too drunk to drive. What, are you telling me you always drive sober?’

  He looked almost shocked.

  ‘Of course I do. That’s how you drive. Sober.’

  ‘I take it back, you don’t drive like an old lady. Even old ladies go out for a tootle round the lanes after a couple of sherries. Have you ever thought about being an undertaker, they drive at the sort of speeds you like?’

  I ignored that.

  ‘I’ve never seen your car,’ I said.

  ‘You’ve never asked to see it. It’s outside, on the corner. I always park it there. Besides, I was driving a bloody great van the first time we met. Didn’t that suggest to you that I might be able to drive?’

  I’d forgotten that, somehow. Drunkenness, more than likely.

  ‘Where do you live?’ I asked him.

  ‘West fucking Bromwich, the land that time ignored. I’ve fucking told you that before. You know, you’ve never even asked me where I lived before? How long have I known you?’

  ‘I don’t like to ask people things.’

  ‘You can’t be bothered, more like. Most nights I drive here and then I drive back and you do the driving in between. That sounds fair to me.’

  ‘So do you want to drive to Hereford then?’

  ‘No, you can drive. But you’ll have to colour in the roads on the map so I can follow them. Fair?’

  ‘Fair. And it’s not Hereford. It’s Monkland.’

  ‘Monkeyland? Like in the song?’

  ‘What song?’

  ‘“Monkeyland”, what fucking song did you think? So where’s Monkeyland then? Twycross Zoo?’

  ‘It’s Monkland. As in monks. As in monasteries.’

  ‘Is there a monastery there?’

  ‘Just a college, as far as I know.’

  ‘That’ll have to do then. When are we going to go?’

  ‘Tina thinks we can go on a Saturday.’

  ‘I think we can’t. There’ll be no one there. We should go in the week. There’ll be no fucking students there, but we might see your lab assistant.’

  ‘When are you free?’

  ‘Whenever. I have a flexible arrangement as far as jobs

  go.’

  ‘I’ll try to get Friday off.’

  ‘I can manage that,’ he said, turning his attention to his latest video-game acquisition, an old-school platformer with nu-skool graphics.

  I had decided that Tina was right. I’d be better off going to see Betts. He could avoid telephone calls, or flat-out lie to me. It’d be more difficult for him to do that if I was with him at the time. Dermot would add a touch of menace. From what I remembered of Betts, he’d be highly susceptible to menace. If I was lucky, he might even have some answers for me.

  V

  I spent most of the next day working on Boris. He was getting to be quite curmudgeonly. I thought that was the right feel for an English operating system. I wanted it to seem like a waiter in a middling good restaurant, all knowing sneers and long waits for service.

  If it caught on, I could do different personalities for different countries. A laconic Australian one:’Your file’s ready there, mate.’ A therapeutic American one: ‘Your file is ready, and please be sure not to forget that you made it yourself, and that it – just like you – is a thing of worth.’ A steam-driven Welsh one. The possibilities were endless.

  I asked Clive whether I could take Friday as annual leave, and he said it would be fine.

  ‘How’s your little project coming along?’ he asked. ‘I did look into AI for a while, once upon a time, and I thought I could help with the logic. We’ve got a bit of spare time at the moment. I could do with a bit of real coding.’

  He rubbed his hands together enthusiastically.

  ‘I haven’t got far with it,’ I said. ‘It looks a bit over-ambitious now. I think I should start on something smaller and then work my way up.’

  ‘Shame,’ he said. ‘So I’m not in line for half the Turing prize money, then? Probably just as well. I’ve tendered for a job doing work on the traffic monitoring system.’

  ‘The council?’

  That would be good. Most town councils didn’t know anything about IT, and would pay far more than the going rates for just about anything.

  ‘No, it’s an independent firm working for the council. So there won’t be a lot of spare cash floating about. If we get it, we’ll need to start putting a demo together in the next couple of weeks. Flow modelling, mostly. Not something I’ve done before, but I can’t imagine it’s all that difficult. We could do our own graphics engine for it, that’d liven it up. Might be able to license the engine out afterwards.’

  We chatted about the pros and cons of using someone else’s graphics engine for a while, and then I went back to Boris. I wasn’t going to have him in any sort of useable state in a week. It’d be difficult to work on him at home. My home PC was ludicrously powerful, but all of its power was aimed at running games.

  I’d have to save him and get back to him later. That was the good thing about computers, you could get back to your saved position. That would be so helpful in real life. I thought about Dermot, driving home drunk. If he was a simulation run by a computer, you’d save the conditions, send him on his way, and if he came a cropper on a country crossroads you’d just load back in the starting parameters and set him off a different way.

/>   In real life it wasn’t like that. Car crashes couldn’t be erased. People could, of course.

  Perhaps it was Clive’s talk about modelling traffic flows, or Dermot’s chat about drunk driving, but I seemed to have developed a car-crash fixation.

  I was, I realized, thinking about a specific car crash. I was thinking about a small red car, overturned and crumpled, rudely reshaped along new lines. Inside the car, something red and wrecked dangled upside down, held in place by a seatbelt, dripping heavily and struggling feebly. I could almost see the wreckage. I could all but smell the smoke. There had been a car crash and a girl had died, caught in the wreckage on a quiet road with the sound of the waves washing her away. I’d known her, although I couldn’t remember her name.

  In Borth, I’d lost six months of my memory.

  I had a terrible feeling that part of it had just come back.

  ELEVEN

  I

  We started out early on Friday. Dermot turned up while I was still getting dressed. I’d had time to think about my car-crash fixation, and it would have to wait. I had enough to think about, and besides, finding Betts might help.

  ‘Come on then,’ Dermot said. ‘We’ve just got to sort your whole life out, then this afternoon we’ll have a go at the Aegean stables, I hear they’re in a right fucking state. Are you going like that?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Never mind. Did you colour in the route for me?’

  ‘I did.’

  Outside it was brightly cold, with the clear sky promising a warm day.

  ‘Did you turn off the gas and cancel the milk?’ asked Dermot. He pointed to a low blue Meriden 733t parked on the kerb outside the newsagents. ‘Since you’ve decided to show an interest, that’s my car,’ he said.

  It was low, wide, and obviously powerful. It sloped inexorably down from the oversized rear spoiler to the minimal front bumper. I’d heard of the make. It gave the Top Gear crew palpitations and had a top speed around that of an F15. It was in the same price range, too. The Meriden production line was based in a tiny factory somewhere in Kent, turning out hand-tooled vehicles designed chiefly for speed. The 733t was known to be near-lethal to drive. Dermot had parked his on double yellow lines.

  ‘You can’t leave it there. That’s a no-parking zone. That’s what the yellow lines are for.’

  ‘Don’t be fucking stupid, of course I can leave it here. It’s worth more than the houses round here. The fucking property values will go up. They should pay me for parking it there.’

  We got into my car.

  ‘Here we go then,’ said Dermot. ‘Hold on tight, he’s going to let it rip. Monkeyland, here we come.’

  As I turned the ignition, he said ‘Hold it!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Are you sure you turned the gas off?’ he asked.

  II

  Monkland didn’t look big enough to support a primary school, let alone a college. There were three houses that looked to have been built about the time Robin Hood had first been doing the rounds, and a church approximately twice their age. We passed though the village – all four buildings of it – in fifteen seconds.

  ‘I told you it was Monkeyland you were after,’ said Dermot. ‘There’s nothing at all here. They’re all inside practising playing the fucking banjo.’

  I pulled up in front of a farm’s gate and checked the atlas.

  ‘It’s here somewhere,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe it’s in someone’s loft. Perhaps they don’t want outsiders getting a glimpse of it.’

  ‘Must be further on. We didn’t pass any turnings.’

  Things were looking distinctly rural. There was a line of mud down the middle of the road, and straw everywhere. Pheasants with all the brainpower of pot plants wandered into the road. There and elsewhere, people shot at them for sport; that must have been difficult. They had all the manoeuvrability of oil tankers but none of the cunning. I saw a tractor approaching. It was the first vehicle I’d seen for some time, but I didn’t want to see it from the back. I pulled out in front of it.

  ‘Good man, well fucking done, pulling out in front of the tractor,’ said Dermot. ‘Now they hate us. They’ll feed us to the pigs.’

  Because I was looking out for the college, I slowed down. The tractor – red, with a clinging mud motif – began to catch up.

  ‘Get a fucking move on,’ said Dermot. ‘He’ll tie us up with baling twine and rape the living shit out of us. And I’m prettier than you so I’ll get it twice as bad.’

  ‘I’m looking for this college.’

  ‘Well look faster. What’s that?’

  He pointed to a sign, almost hidden in a bulging hedge.

  ‘That’s it,’ I said. I saw a gap in the hedge large enough to drive through, with a small track leading off. I drove the Audi through the hedge, and we saw the college. It was a little two-storey building in the modern flat-pack style, with car parking opportunities in a small adjacent field. As we turned in, the tractor passed us. The driver shouted something earthy and rural.

  ‘What a charming man,’ said Dermot. ‘I hope all your fucking cows melt. I hope your sister marries someone outside the immediate family.’

  He looked at the college.

  ‘What do they teach out here?’ he asked. ‘Incest?’

  ‘Only one way to find out. Are you coming in, or waiting out here?’

  ‘I’ve seen Deliverance, I’m coming with you. If we split up we’re fucked. There aren’t many cars here.’

  There weren’t. I counted four, not including my Audi. It was a small building, but even so it must have been all but empty.

  ‘Come on then, let’s see what they’ve got in here.’

  Dermot trailed me to reception. It felt as though I’d been seeing a lot of receptionists recently. It seemed to be becoming a theme. Little did I know I’d be seeing more still before much longer. This one was a girl who looked fifteen and bored. She was decked out in black clothes bearing names like Slipknot and Filter and the usual pictures of men with white faces, shouting. She was wearing more eyeliner than Cleopatra and had black hair. She had bare arms with Celtic tattoos, the Celts of course being well known for their office work.

  ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘We’re looking for someone.’

  She looked at me with all of the excitement and curiosity of someone seeing a new cattle grid.

  ‘Do you know who’s here?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ve not been on long,’ she said. ‘I don’t do the mornings. The girl who does has gone home.’

  ‘Well, is there a register or something?’

  ‘It’s not a school,’ she said, further communicating her disdain by looking briefly at the ceiling.

  ‘Do you have a list of the people who work here? I’m after someone called Betts.’

  ‘What’s he do?’

  ‘He’s a laboratory assistant.’

  ‘Labs are back there. Don’t think anyone’s in though.’

  ‘Is it OK if we have a look around?’

  ‘Up to you.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  When we’d got far enough away from her, Dermot asked me why I’d thanked her, given her generally unhelpful demeanour and glum manner.

  ‘You should have twatted her,’ he said. ‘You should have decked her. So why did you thank her?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Good job I’m here to tell you then. Because you’re middle class, that’s why. You’re brought up to thank people. You thank them if they tell you to fuck off. You thank them if they steal your kidneys and then fuck your dog to death on the kitchen table.’

  ‘There’s a point to this?’

  ‘The point is, you’re fucked by being middle class.’

  ‘I’m happy to be middle class. I can settle for getting the good houses and the good jobs. You working class heroes can man the burger vans and building sites and kid yourselves that you’re still needed.’

  ‘I’m proud of being working class.’
r />   ‘Horseshit. You’re middle class and embarrassed about it. I’m middle class and resigned to it. At least I’m not pretending to be something I’m not.’

  ‘Truer than you think,’ said Dermot. ‘Here we go, the laboratories.’

  I knocked on the door of the first one and went in. It was empty. It looked the same as the laboratories at school, decades ago. There were the same rows of workbenches with large arching black taps poised over stained sinks, the same quartets of gas taps set at regular intervals, the same stacks of dented tripods. There was a poster of the periodic table on one wall. It looked to have gained a couple of elements since I’d last seen it. That didn’t worry me. New elements were never of any use.

  Of course, there had been a lot of changes since my schooldays. We’d been allowed to play with all sorts of lethal substances. I remembered our physics teacher letting us play around with mercury. Mercury was fun. You could flick it at other pupils or drink it. I remembered him opening small heavy boxes marked with black and yellow radiation symbols.

  ‘This is giving off gamma rays,’ he’d say, informatively. We’d sit around, soaking them up, sneaking looks at the girls’ bra straps and paying no attention to him whatsoever.

  I had another few thoughts about tumours.

  ‘There’s no one in,’ said Dermot. ‘Well, it’s been a nice day out.’

  ‘There’s another lab,’ I said. ‘I saw it from the corridor.’

  It, too, was abandoned. It was much like the first, but it also had a fume cupboard, if that’s what they call them nowadays. It was a little enclosure with an extractor fan so that dangerous fumes would be whisked outside, poisoning the entire village rather than a single room. The number and type of fumes considered dangerous had increased in the last couple of decades. I’d expected that. The substances we were allowed – encouraged, really – to handle in our science classes were now known to be actively nasty. I wondered how much damage I’d incurred.

  My cancerous thoughts were growing like the thing itself. I was surely doomed.