Pantheon 00 - Age of Godpunk

by James Lovegrove

  “How about we court the eco lobby?” he said. “Woo them? Show them a different face of GloCo, a caring, friendly one?”

  Nods all round. Yes, yes, that was exactly what the PR people had been driving at. Exactly. They couldn’t have phrased it better themselves. Well, possibly they could have. But yes. Exactly.

  “Make nice with them,” Barnaby continued. “Let them see we’re not heartless, plundering ogres. Slicks and spills and suffering wildlife matter to us, really matter. How about that?”

  From the gathered PR people there was something like a massed sigh, a mutual, near-orgiastic gasp of delight. Of course. Of course. GloCo cares. These things matter to GloCo. GloCo is good.

  “Get onto it,” Barnaby instructed them. “Find me some relevant and pliant journalists – green ones in every sense. Line them up. I’ll schmooze them. The Seagull Movement started with me. It can end with me.”

  Smartphones and tablets pinged into life.

  The PR department set to work with a will.

  LA CIGARETTE

  THAT EVENING, BARNABY consoled himself with dinner and a girlfriend. Not both at once; in series rather than in parallel. He ate by himself at Nobu on Old Park Lane, starting with an appetiser of beef tenderloin tataki followed by lobster tempura with creamy wasabi, washing it all down with a 1999 Chambertin-Clos De Bèze Burgundy. Then he met the girlfriend at a rooftop bar round the corner.

  She was called Zurie, Marseille-born, Paris-based, sometimes a catwalk model, mostly a woman who liked to hang out with very rich men. She smoked incessantly in order to keep her weight down. Her dependency on cigarettes seemed to sum up everything she was: slim, pale, bad for your health in large doses.

  Hence Barnaby had nicknamed her La Cigarette. He nicknamed all of his girlfriends. Pigeonholing them according to quirks or character traits – The Complainer, Persistent Hair Flicking, Licks Teeth, Coke Hound – made them easier to remember. Easier to tell apart, too. Otherwise they might all meld into one amorphous whole, indistinguishable from one another.

  Because Barnaby had a type. Whippet-thin. Blonde. Desperately insecure. Clingy. Neurotic. Eager to please.

  Zurie, La Cigarette, was a classic example.

  “You have eaten?” she asked as she sipped her cosmopolitan, which the barman had made, at her request, with sugar-free cranberry juice.

  It was past 10PM. Barnaby could not realistically deny it.

  “Why do you not invite me to join you?” Zurie lit her next cigarette from the stub of the last. They were outdoors on the terrace, under a pergola and a gas-fired space heater. “You are ashamed of me? Do not like to be seen with me?”

  Barnaby could have told her the truth. Why would he want to dine with her? She was hardly the world’s greatest conversationalist, her talk usually revolving around fashion designers and her fellow models, every one of whom, if Zurie was to be believed, was a bitch of one kind or another. Also, she seldom touched her food. She would run her fork through it a few times, perhaps nibble a salad leaf or two, meanwhile tapping her foot agitatedly as she counted down the minutes until she could nip out and light up. It was pointless taking her to a decent restaurant. Barnaby could afford it, but there was the principle of the thing to consider. Why waste money on a perfectly good meal if it wasn’t going to be consumed and enjoyed?

  That was what he could have said. But since he itched to have sex with this woman, what he actually said was, “It was a business dinner. Very boring.”

  “With who?”

  “What?”

  “This business dinner. With who were you having it? What did you discuss?”

  “An associate from Australia, Bob Shearwater of Port Kembla Collieries. We talked about exploitation rights in New South Wales.” He had had dealings recently with said man on said topic, but it had been a ten-thousand-mile videoconference exchange, not an intimate restaurant tête-à-tête.

  He had, however, given his answer as quickly and adroitly as he needed to in order to make the lie sound convincing.

  “Very well,” she said. “But Barnaby, I do not like this ‘just drinks.’ It makes me feel cheap. I am over in England for work, you call me, you want to hook up, it’s fine. But I want to feel special, you know? Not just some putain you can have for the price of a cocktail or two.”

  Her expression was forlorn, her lips crushed and bitter.

  Now was the right moment for Barnaby to bring out the gift, a necklace from Garrard, a lustrous confection of black diamond beads and a cabochon emerald drop, suspended on thin white-gold chains. Zurie’s eyes widened and sparkled as she opened the velvet-lined case.

  Barnaby’s PA, Veronica, had chosen well. But then, with the kind of budget he had set her, how could she not?

  “Ohhh,” Zurie gasped, and that single syllable confirmed, once and for all, that she would be coming back to his house this evening.

  She wasn’t going to make it plain sailing, though.

  “I still do not know why I am even seeing you,” she said as she stowed the necklace safely in her Louis Vuitton clutch bag. “I do not know if you deserve me.”

  “You’re one of the most beautiful women in the world, and I deserve the best.”

  “But it hurts. It hurts me every time.”

  “I’m sorry. I can’t help the way I am.”

  “I always feel so used afterwards, so insignificant.”

  “Don’t you think, somehow, that that’s what you really want? Deep down?”

  She said, “No,” but her eyes were telling a different story.

  “Don’t you think,” Barnaby went on, “that what we have works precisely because of the way it makes you feel, that extreme of emotion? Put it this way: would you rather we were dull and ordinary? Do you really want to be like those millions out there?” He gestured, indicating the brilliantly lit expanse of London – the polite white Victorian façades, the black office-block obelisks. “They don’t have nearly the same pitch of excitement as we do. They will never know the intensity of what you and I share. Night after night they couple in their beds, listless and bored and indifferent, barely even thinking about what they’re doing, going through the motions. They are tiny flickering little birthday-cake candles, whereas we... we are incandescent. We are fireworks. We burn more brightly than they can ever imagine.”

  “Flames leave scars.”

  “Which is why we get together so rarely. We both need time apart to recover afterwards. Our relationship will never become stale and routine like everyone else’s does, as long as it is intermittent and spectacular.”

  An old cigarette surrendered to a fresh one. Zurie inhaled a lungful and let it out in a long, controlled plume. Her hands were trembling slightly. Apprehension? Anticipation? Both, most likely.

  She drained her drink. “Buy me another,” she said.

  A SPREE ACROSS THE WORLD

  THE PR DEPARTMENT had had a brainwave. They wouldn’t simply gather together some ostensibly hostile journalists for Barnaby to charm and win over. Said journalists would travel with him on a spree across the world, flying in his private jet to various GloCo sites where they would meet the workforce, be shown the environmental safety protocols the company had put in place, and above all have a chance to get to know Barnaby Pollard as a person, to see that he wasn’t an unfeeling, inhuman monster, to discover the man behind the mogul.

  The five who were chosen were a motley lot. One was the environmental issues correspondent for a national left-leaning broadsheet, a shapeless landslide of a woman who wore a crystal pendant and endless layers of chiffon and favoured the colour purple. Another was the founder-editor of a homespun magazine called Higher Consciousness, available mostly at health food shops. He looked grubby and malnourished, as though he subsisted on a diet of whatever he could forage from the nearest patch of woodland. There was a blobby eco-blogger whose mushroom pallor suggested he seldom left his basement lair, and a timid Goth documentarian who had won an IDFA award at the Amsterdam festival last yea
r with her short film on the plight of the narrow-mouthed whorl snail in Britain’s imperilled wetlands.

  The fifth and final journalist was the smartest-dressed and most attractive of them, though that wasn’t saying much, given how low the bar was set. She had striking red hair and eyes of a shimmering greeny-blue. Her name was Lydia Laidlaw and she was a freelance writer who contributed articles to a variety of publications, both mainstream and esoteric, offering an ecological slant on everyday topics. She had, for instance, used miniature GPS transponders to track the journeys of numerous items of domestic rubbish from doorstep dustbin pick-up to final resting place in a landfill. Collating the data, she had established that council waste departments did not always use the directest routes or the nearest, most convenient disposal sites but that they could, with a little organisation rejigging, streamline the whole system significantly and thus reduce carbon emissions from their fleet of garbage trucks by nearly a quarter. No one had yet acted upon her findings, although a handful of councillors had made noises about possibly doing so in the near future. She epitomised the slogan ‘Think global, act local.’

  As Barnaby’s Gulfstream G650 soared away from London City Airport, his heart sank. He was committed to spending a little over a week in the company of these worthies and weirdoes. In no way did it look as though it was going to be fun. Already the purple-clad harpy, Dorothea, was muttering darkly about the vast quantities of aviation fuel a plane like this one consumed and how it had been scientifically proved that the “bleed air” being cycled into the cabin from the jet’s engines was laced with organophosphate particulates which were incredibly carcinogenic. Meanwhile the man from Higher Consciousness – real name Frank Denham, but he had rechristened himself OwlHenry on the advice of his animal spirit guide – had begun badgering the stewardess about the vegan option on the in-flight menu. Could she absolutely guarantee that the dish contained no animal products? Were the ingredients stored in a separate compartment in the fridge, well away from the meat and dairy sections? Was she sure no cross-contamination could occur?

  Barnaby broke out a bottle of 2002 Cristal and helped himself to a generous glassful.

  It was going to be a long week.

  LYDIA LAIDLAW

  THEIR FIRST DESTINATION was Alaska, and for at least half of the fourteen-hour journey none of the journalists approached Barnaby. They sat at one end of the cabin, he at the other, with Jakob Beit stationed close by him. The journalists didn’t appear openly hostile, but their skulking, suspicious demeanour left him under no illusion that they regarded him as the enemy.

  This didn’t prevent them from taking full advantage of his hospitality, however. They devoured the delicious snacks and meals the chef rustled up for them in the galley, and kept ordering more – even emaciated, self-mortifying OwlHenry.

  Barnaby, meanwhile, teleworked on his Falcon Northwest Fragbook DRX and drank his champagne, getting slowly, quietly tipsy.

  Lydia Laidlaw finally broke the détente. She strode the length of the cabin and slid into the creamy, plush leather-upholstered seat opposite him. Barnaby glanced across the aisle at Jakob. His bodyguard, who had spent the most of the time since takeoff dutifully glowering at the journalists, was now fast asleep.

  “Too busy to chat, Mr Pollard?” Lydia asked.

  Barnaby shut his boutique laptop and forced a smile. “I was waiting for one of you to make your move.”

  “Shouldn’t you be the one making the move?” she shot back. “We’re here for your benefit, aren’t we?”

  “I thought this was a mutual thing. You get unfettered access to me, and I get...”

  “Favourable coverage?”

  “Something like that. If I win your approval.”

  “A big ‘if,’” Lydia said. “Still, I feel that you should be wooing us, not treating us like lepers.”

  “Wooing?”

  “Wooing. The effort has to come from you. We’re your guests. You could be a better host.”

  Barnaby regarded her. One thing he was sure about – Lydia Laidlaw was not his type. She was a plump, rounded creature, heavily breasted, generously hipped, with cherubic cheeks and a dimpled chin. Her face radiated sweetness, but also a steely inner strength, evident in the straight, forthright nose and permanently arched eyebrows.

  At a PR-department briefing yesterday, he had learned that Lydia was not afraid of confrontation. She had once investigated a criminal gang who were charging to dispose of construction industry waste in line with regulations but were in fact fly-tipping it and pocketing the commercial waste rate fees. A man had ambushed her outside her home, beating her with a baseball bat badly enough to land her in hospital. She had published her exposé nonetheless, which had led to prosecutions, fines and jail sentences. On another occasion she had faced harassment and intimidation from the boss of a dye factory which was flushing used toluene into a nearby river instead of sending the solvent off to be properly treated. She had secretly recorded him haranguing her on the phone, saying he knew where she lived and he was going to pay some men to go over there and gang-rape her if she didn’t leave him and his company alone. The recording would have been inadmissible as evidence in court since it had been made without his consent, but its mere existence, cached on Dropbox and a number of other data storage sites, gave her sufficient leverage to blackmail the boss into accepting his environmental responsibilities. The upshot was that the factory switched to using closed-loop recycled toluene, the greenest option available.

  Lydia Laidlaw, then, was not someone you should fuck with.

  Nor was she, as far as Barnaby was concerned, someone you should fuck.

  Just not his type.

  The very antithesis of his type.

  And yet, as she sat in front of him in the smoothly gliding jet, for someone reason he couldn’t stop staring at her.

  It was her eyes that fascinated him the most. They weren’t simply greeny-blue, he realised. They seemed to shift between the two colours. One moment there was more blue than green in them, the next more green than blue. It had to be a trick of the light. Whenever the Gulfstream banked or made a minor course correction, its position relative to the sun changed. The sunlight then struck Lydia’s irises from a different angle, exposing some subtlety of pigmentation, emphasising the striations of one hue at the expense of the other. Perhaps that was the explanation. Yes, it must be.

  “Mr Pollard?”

  “I’m sorry, what?”

  “I was saying,” said Lydia, “before you somewhat rudely drifted off into your own thoughts, that being standoffish doesn’t lend you an air of mystique. If that’s what you’re hoping for, then I hate to burst your bubble, but it’s not working.”

  “No. I wasn’t hoping that at all. That’s not the intention. I’m... shy.”

  She let rip with a snort of pure scorn. “You? Shy? Hah! Yeah, right. The megabucks jetsetting energy tycoon, shy? Pull the other one.”

  “Reticent, then. Reserved.”

  “Does that line work with all the supermodels you pull? ‘I’m reticent. Please don’t be fooled by my aloof exterior. I’m a sensitive soul underneath.’”

  Barnaby felt his cheeks growing warm. “I don’t only go out with supermodels.”

  “Actresses, ingénues, fashionistas, professional arm-candy, whatever you want to call them – it’s all the same thing. They’re all the same thing. I’ve seen the pap-shots in the papers: you at some society event or other – Henley, Ascot – squiring your latest bit of leg-over. Those scrawny size-zeroes, just about identical to one another. Highlights, ribcages, big greedy eyes... You change them as often as most people change their underpants.”

  “I know what I like when it comes to women.”

  “And you like what you know.”

  “Is any of this relevant to the piece you’ll be writing about me, Miss Laidlaw?” Barnaby snapped.

  “Lydia,” she said. “Not Miss Laidlaw.” She held out a hand. She grinned.

  Barnaby was jolt
ed off-track. The woman was being friendly? Hadn’t she just been attacking him a moment ago? Berating him over his taste in women?

  Numbly, dumbly, he shook the outstretched hand. Lydia had quite a grip.

  “And may I call you Barnaby?”

  Barnaby nodded.

  “There,” said Lydia, getting up. “Ice broken.” And, humming a little tune to herself, she returned to the rear of the plane and her fellow journalists.

  Barnaby, dazed, topped up his glass of Cristal and struggled to fathom what the hell had just happened.

  A FREE LUNCH

  THE SHE-WOLF EMERGED tentatively from the forest of pine, spruce and cedar, sniffing the air. Her breath huffed around her in gauzy clouds. She had dark grey fur and a white muzzle and was beautiful, with a haughty set to her shoulders, imperiously pricked ears.

  She seemed to sense that there were people not far away, people observing. Her gaze kept drifting towards the hide where Barnaby, the journalists, Jakob and their Inuit guide were bunkered down. The hide was downwind of her and well camouflaged, looking like a low white hummock, part of the landscape, but still she was aware that something was amiss. She took a few hesitant paces out from the shadow of the trees, into the snowfield, placing each paw with precision. She was gauging the threat level, wrestling with her instinct to turn and flee.

  Nobody in the hide dared breathe. They stared through their binoculars, waiting, hopeful.

  Gradually the she-wolf relaxed, judging that the threat, if one existed, was not imminent. She let out a soft, gruff bark.

  Almost immediately, a half-dozen cubs tumbled out from the treeline. They yipped at one another and gambolled in the snow, rolling, fighting, cuffing.