by James Goss
“I don’t know what to do. I mean, I could make tea. But you’d look silly. Sipping it through your mask. Wine... but that dulls the senses, doesn’t it? Perhaps just a glass of water. Or milk.”
“You’re babbling.”
“I’ve had a long and weird day. Couldn’t my lawyer have handled this?”
“Andrea is for the nice things. I’m here to talk to you.”
“Nicely?”
The Ninja shook her head.
I felt a little sick.
She stepped forward, striding around the flat, with the slow, authoritative prowl of a hunter sizing a space up. Recognising supremacy, the cat followed on behind, adoringly.
“You’ve done what you’ve been told so far...” she said.
“Yes.” My mouth was drier than I’d have liked.
“And it’s worked well. But when you’ve gone rogue—”
Gone rogue. Wow. She spoke like Andy McNab.
“—it’s not been so clear. You’ve grown sloppy.”
“It’s fine,” I said. “It’s absolutely fine.” I held up my hands. “It’s really fine. Tonight’s been a bit of a wake-up call. I can’t believe I’ve got away with it for as long as I have.”
“You’re not done,” said the Ninja. Underneath the mask, I sensed she was smiling. “You’re done when we tell you you’re done.”
“What?”
“Small print’ll get you every time,” she said, echoing Andrea. Whereabouts in Scotland was she from, I wondered? Was she from Glasgow’s East End, or from somewhere nice in Edinburgh, or somewhere grey like Aberdeen, or some remote Highland? I had an absurd image of her standing in the prow of a small boat as it drifted across a loch. God, dates with her must be kind of exciting. “So, I’m a digital experience strategy consultant—and what do you do?”
The Ninja slapped me in the face. The pain woke me up. The pain more than woke me up. I fell back, my eyes stinging. Someone had hit me. In my own flat. This was getting to be a habit.
“You weren’t listening.” She didn’t sound angry, just mildly annoyed. “And it’s important that you listen to me.”
“Okay,” I said. There wasn’t, when I thought back about it, that much of a whimper.
“Check your email. One more job. Follow the instructions.”
“No,” I said. “You can hit me again, but no.”
“Oh, you’ll do it.” The Ninja sounded smug. Like she’d peeked into the future.
“Listen,” I said to her, holding up my hands. Showing I wasn’t a threat. “Listen—right... if they’re employing you as well as me... well, why don’t they use you instead of me? I mean, you’re obviously better than me at everything. And way more...” I didn’t say sexy. Never tell a ninja they’re sexy. “Way cooler. You’re what I’ll never be.”
The Ninja nodded. She took the compliment. “Think about it,” she said. “Think it through and you’ll realise.”
The only solution I had was that I was disposable. I didn’t say it out loud, but the Ninja nodded again. Like she could read my thoughts.
“Get out your phone,” she said. “Get ready to film something.”
“A confession?”
“No. Not really. Just something that will get a lot of views on YouTube.”
I pulled my phone from my pocket and fumbled with it. My hands were shaking so I set it down on the counter, resting up against a cookery book. Filming most of the room.
The Ninja nodded. The she picked up the cat, stroking her. The cat purred, rubbing against the mask, pushing it up, teasing me with tiny glimpses of face. For an absurd moment I wondered if it was Amber. But it couldn’t be. Instead of Amber’s delicate Indian skin, the Ninja’s skin was so pale. Almost transparent. The cat purred and nuzzled.
I normally have ever so much trouble fitting the cat into her box for trips to the vet. But she climbed into the microwave without protest. Just sat inside mewing gently.
I was screaming by this point.
“So,” said the Ninja. “What do you think works? Defrost? Do you think a minute on defrost and she’ll be fine? Or is it just 10 seconds on full? Which do you want to try? You choose.”
I just stood there. Shouting.
The cat looked at me. And mewed again. She tapped the glass door curiously.
The Ninja dialled up some numbers. Beep. Beep. Beep. Her finger hovered over start.
I threw myself at her, but she blocked me with an arm. And then pressed start.
The microwave started up. The slow whirring grind. The table trying to spin. The cat scrabbling against the glass.
I howled.
The Ninja pressed ‘stop,’ with a cheerful ‘bing.’
She stood back, looking at me.
The cat watched her curiously from inside the microwave.
“Okay,” I said, crying. “You’ve made your point.”
“Good,” said the Ninja, and headed for the door. She paused.
“At the end of the day, it really is all about the cats.”
I never saw her again.
SO, THAT WAS why I was sat in a restaurant with Henry Jarman waiting for lunch. And I felt a terrible sinking feeling.
Eventually the meal turned up, and it was horrible. Lumps of school-dinner meat stewing in either oil+cream or oil+tomato soup. I was worried that I’d have to politely pick away at it, but I didn’t get a chance.
Jarman shovelled all of the food bar the oily residue onto his plate and devoured it, pausing to smear curry kisses across his cheeks with the tablecloth. He slung three pints of lager down his maw as well, filling the air with the smell of hops and chilli. Only as his feasting began to subside did I realise that he was still chewing Nicotine gum. My stomach turned. Dutifully I turned my attention to the quarter of naan bread I’d left on my side plate, but discovered that Jarman had already reached over and was rubbing the grease from a silver bowl with it. He said only one thing, and that was rather curious. “The condemned man,” he belched, “ate a hearty meal. Ha ha.”
When he’d finally subsided, he summoned the waiter over.
“My compliments to the chef!” he announced. “Bring him to us. I wish him to meet my old friend.” He turned to me. “Mahmood is a splendid chap. A real jewel. You’ll love him. He’s one of my oldest comrades-in-arms. For an army marches on its stomach, and he is my victualler. Bring me Mahmood!”
The waiter demurred. “I’m afraid, sir, that today the chef is rather busy.”
I looked around at the empty restaurant and back at the waiter. His eyes were fixed on the tablecloth.
“Nonsense!” cried Jarman. “Fetch us Mahmood!” He thumped the table with his fist.
THIS WAS ALL unbelievably awkward. This was a man who had bullied governments, wooed and ruined Guardian journalists, campaigned on four different continents for free speech, been elected honorary Vice Chancellor of three different universities, been talked of for a Nobel Peace prize and turned down I’m A Celebrity. This was, I knew, my one chance to talk to him. And here he was, behaving like an irate child.
The waiter swallowed like Kermit the Frog and slumped off miserably towards the kitchen. The door swung behind him, disclosing a strong waft of frying onions.
Jarman turned back towards me. “Young man,” he said, steepling his fingers, “we have much to talk of—once, of course, you’ve met Mahmood. The man is an inspiration, a genius non pareil. A philosopher chef.”
The kitchen door opened a little too loudly and a face peeped through, then the door closed again.
Jarman pretended not to notice, his fingers dipping and licking among the leftover chutneys.
Finally, the Great Mahmood appeared. He was wearing an overcoat and carrying a Tesco Bag For Life. He gave every indication of having rapidly mugged up the part of ‘Man In A Hurry To Be Elsewhere.’
Jarman threw himself to his feet and grabbed the man in an elaborate bear hug. “Namaste, Mahmood,” he breathed into the man’s ear. Mahmood nodded, and then turned to grima
ce weakly at me, Jarman clapped across his shoulder.
“This man,” chuckled Henry, “This man has been my culinary Tzensing as we’ve climbed the summit of many a Curry Everest.”
“Ah, indeed, sir,” offered Mahmood uncertainly, transferring his shopping bag from one hand to the next and back.
“Do you remember that time when we entertained those backstabbing Guardian hacks? Oh, that was a meal, wasn’t it?”
Mahmood nodded.
“What was it you served...? It was brilliant!”
Mahmood glanced helplessly at Henry. “A special dish, for certain.”
“Yes. With almonds.”
“Almonds, yes, certainly...”
I STOOD UP, and excused myself. I went to the bathroom, which smelt of liquid soap and fennel. I washed my hands three times, dried them thoroughly on a ragged pink towel, and then headed back.
Mahmood had departed. Jarman sat back, looking satisfied. He was clearing up a last scrap of sauce with a splinter of poppadom I’d left on my plate.
“Delicious,” he proclaimed. “Unbeatable. That man is the Berners-Lee of biryanis.”
He pushed the plates into a teetering pile in the centre of the table and fixed me with a gaze. “So then, shall we get to business?”
I glanced furtively around the room. A distant fish tank glowed. It was empty of fish, a fairy tale castle waiting in vain for anything to peep through it.
Jarman had assumed an air of jocular smugness. “Oh, we’re quite safe here, you know. I’m very thorough.” He let out a belch. “Not only is this restaurant of impeccable quality, it also has no CCTV. It’s not Nando’s, or some other capitalist sell-out. The walls of the building are thick enough that radio scanners can’t pick us up, and the double yellows means that a suitably-equipped van can’t park outside.” I had no idea what he meant by a suitably-equipped van. And I doubted the intelligence services were scared of traffic wardens. “Of course, they’ve made approaches to Mahmood from time to time. But he’s turned them all down.” I wondered if they had. I wondered if he would.
Fundamentally, I realised I was at the beginning of a lecture. From a vast man wearing a shirt covered in rice and slowly drying scraps of curry.
“Of course, you were my idea. Yes, I dreamed you up,” announced Henry, smirking. He jabbed a bitten-down fingernail at me. “I may not have picked you out, but I certainly have been foretelling your existence for a number of years. As soon as I became aware of what you were doing, I knew I’d invented you.” He beamed. “You know what caused you? It’s LOL I blame. That was the root of it all. When people started writing LOL to each other. Think about the number of times you’ve ever laughed out loud. It’s not very often, is it? But suddenly we were LOLing all over the place, all the time.
“People have been sneering at LOL for years. But they’ve missed the point of it. It is an insidious little thing. Because it’s so friendly. Suddenly people are LOLing all the time, but never actually doing it in real life. Not only that, but its ubiquity makes it meaningless. It’s used to soften blows, to show that you’re a nice, cheerful person.” Henry threw up elaborate, tumeric-stained air quotes. “‘We were never dating lol.’ But the shift has begun—emotion expressed purely on line and not in real life. And, because it started with something as friendly as a laugh, it seemed like a good thing. But it started the online expression of emotions. Our laughs, our smiles, our winks and our tears—we steadily removed them from our faces and placed them into our words. We don’t look at each other anymore—we’re staring at our phones, and, anyway, if we did look each other in the face, there’d be nothing to see any more.
“We’ve placed all our emotions out there, in words and at the end of sentences. It took us a while to get to grips with expressing ourselves online. It was so easy to misconstrue what people said, to take offence. So we had to say when we were being funny, or serious. And this led to us starting to tell other people how to feel.
“Those stupid sites run by liberal toadies with their ‘After fifty-four seconds your heart will break,’ or ‘your jaw will drop’ or ‘your mind will be blown.’ It’s all rail-roading emotional response. It demands an instant response and answer, one that it is becoming increasingly easy to give, ‘Wow. I cried’ is suddenly so easy to type. Because no one knows if you did. No one checks. And one day soon, no one will know what crying really looks like.
“Behind all this... all this emotional wallpaper, that’s where the hate lurks. We put all of our open emotions online, and then the more hidden, dark ones soon followed. The anger and the hatred, stuff that we spend all our time bottling up, that came running along in the shadows.
“If it was suddenly okay to tell people that we cried, perhaps it was fine for us to say out loud that someone on television looks like a slut, or a Jew. Or that they needed killing. Because that’s what we really felt. And the internet had told us that it was now okay to feel. Hadn’t it? And, after all, if it looked a bit stark, we knew just how to soften the blow. ‘He looks like a yid lol.’”
Jarman had got into his flow. He actually stood up, initially to start pacing around, but basically to stand in his TEDTalk posture.
“Two decades ago, the internet taught us that laughter was easy. Now it’s taught us all to hate.” He turned around and he pointed at me. “Oh yes. I foretold you. When I started up my All Knowledge Good movement, I did it for a reason... I did it because one day, I knew you would come.”
“Me?” I said, a little unnerved. “What have I done?”
“Oh,” Jarman flapped a belittling hand. “Very little, actually. Little more than a slug or a cockroach. But it’s what you stand for. You’re acting from a pure heart, from clean motives, and you’re getting nowhere.”
“I’m trying,” I protested, feeling a little like Elliott when he found he was pedalling his bike through the night sky.
“And you’re failing,” nodded Jarman, tapping the side of his head. “But it’s the simple fact that you are acting. That’s what people will notice. People talk hatred online all the time. But you... you do it.” He giggled, a snorty little laugh of derision, and then he stared at me, and his eyes were suddenly clear and blue. “That’s what will change the conversation. Up until now, when people have issued death threats on Twitter, there’s been that slight frisson of ‘Ooh, I’ve received a death threat’ while safe in the reassurance that there is no bomb waiting in your car. Because no-one is ever serious. But you’ve taken that away. Suddenly, all those Social Justice Warriors with their angry retweets, their whiny petitions and their boycotts – they’re nothing. You’ve taught us all—you mean exactly what you say. When you say LOL, you are actually laughing.”
I nearly bought it. I nearly got swept up in it all. But then, this was Henry Jarman. That’s what he did. His Wikipedia entry was a comet-trail of grand statements, self-boosting, and start-ups that had never really got going.
“Actually, I’ve not got much of a sense of humour,” I said.
Jarman didn’t bat an eyelid, he just watched me, chewing away loudly. “Few people do,” he told me. “But that doesn’t stop them from pretending they have. We all say we have a Good Sense Of Humour. But what does that even mean? So many feels. Pah! Words, words, words. We soak the world in them. But nothing means anything anymore.” He wheeled on me. “I bet you have a cat, don’t you?”
I nodded, thinking of its furry face squeezed up inside the microwave. I shuddered, but Jarman beamed with satisfaction. “I knew it. People like cats because we can project onto them. They’re so internet. But they’re also like you—no matter what people, even me, say about you, at heart, you’re just a selfish killing machine.”
I BLINKED A little at this. I’ve never really thought of myself as a killing machine. I remember a classmate at school who’d got into trouble for carving ‘I Am A Cum Machine’ onto his desk. Even at the screwed-up age of fourteen, this had struck me as a bit of a reductive goal in life. It also posits that there’s a n
eed for such a device, when really, it’s simply advertising a pretty unwanted surplus. On the same basis, my nan could describe herself as a ‘Tea Wee Machine,’ but I think she’d be mortified.
“Oh yes, you are a killing machine,” Jarman nodded. “No one knows for certain that you exist. There’s no proof. But you’re an exciting conspiracy. There are theories and blog posts about you. You may think you operate sub rosa, but the dark net casts long shadows...” He went on for a long while in this vein, and I can’t even contemplate trying to reproduce it. He mentioned an “eviscerating” post on one forum and a “truth-telling blog” somewhere else. He told me there was a “devastating exposé” in a podcast that he couldn’t wholly put himself behind. He assured me he was merely confronting and challenging my preconceptions. All the time, he was gripping the headrest of his chair, leaning more and more of his weight on it.
“You have to ask yourself,” Jarman leaned forward, his breath all spices and beer, “who are you working for?”
“Myself,” I said, but even I could tell I didn’t mean it.
Jarman took a hand off his chair, and jabbed his own chest with it. “For instance, you’ve come here to kill me today, haven’t you?”
Well, I had. That bit was true.
“Interesting isn’t it? That people still want me dead.” Jarman seemed almost buoyant at the news. “The forces of Big Government still fear me.” He nodded again. “That’s what you’re a pawn of. I don’t need to tell you I’ve stoked up a few nests of wasps and vipers with my crusading against Surveillance States. They need to bring me down. Ah, yes, indeed they do.”
JARMAN DRAGGED HIS chair around to my side of the table and sat next to me. Sat very close to me. He cracked open a fresh piece of nicotine gum from its blister and chewed away. He slung an arm around my shoulder. Up close, the smell of curry barely masked the mildewy odour which had followed us from his house. He leaned in, and I wished he hadn’t.
“You know what we should do? You and I?” He shook his head and his jowls wobbled. “We should unite. We should go public. We should really show them—I’ve got friends, I’ve got contacts. Together we should really show everyone. A bold move and then a joint statement. A manifesto.” He gleamed as he said it.