He’d still somehow felt it would work out all right in the end.
When they shut down the newspapers for printing stories of corruption and dirty deals, he’d signed the petitions.
When they’d closed the universities for spreading warnings of impending social and economic calamity, he’d thought about attending the rallies, but then decided against it because work would probably frown on these things, and there were people there who took your photo and posted your face online—saboteurs and enemies of the people—and besides, it rained a lot that month and he just needed a morning off.
By then, of course, it was a little too late for petitions. Company men would run for parliament, Company newspapers would trumpet their excellence to the sky, Company TV stations would broadcast their election promises and say how wonderful they were. They would inevitably win, serve their seven years in office and then return to the banking or insurance branches happy to have completed their civic duty, and that was that. It was for the best, the adverts said. This was how democracy worked: corporate and public interests working together at last, for the greater good.
When it became legally compulsory to carry ID, £300 for the certified ID card, £500 fine if caught without it, he knew he was observing an injustice that sent thousands of innocent people to the patty line, too skint to buy, too skint to pay for being too skint to buy. When it became impossible to vote without the ID, he knew he lived in a tyranny, but by then he wasn’t sure what there was left to do in protest. He’d be okay. If he kept his head down. He’d be fine.
He couldn’t put his finger precisely on when parliament rebranded itself “The People’s Engagement Forum,” but he remembered thinking the logo was very well done.
Chapter 5
In the Criminal Audit Office, Dani Cumali clears away the remnants of a cucumber sandwich.
In the ancestral home of his family, Philip Arnslade stares at his mother’s dribbling form and blurts, “Well so long as she’s happy!”
On the canal, Neila is pleased to discover that she’s not actually squeamish about head wounds at all.
By the sea, a man who may or may not be a father rages at the ocean.
In the past the man called Theo cycles home from a team bonding experience, and is terrified of the face he has just seen. He didn’t try to talk to Dani. Didn’t meet her eye again after that initial moment of shock. Fled without a word, chin down, expression fixed in stone. Half ran to his bicycle and pedalled away without bothering to tuck his trousers into his socks.
The queues at the Vauxhall Bridge toll weren’t as bad as he’d feared, and the walls of Battersea Power Station were a brilliant cascade of colour bouncing back off the clouds promoting the latest reality TV escapade, huge painted faces pouting brilliant crimson lips into the dark.
He went the long way round, past the giant glass towers of the river, then south, towards houses growing lower and cracked, overgrown front gardens, laundrettes with beige linoleum floors, churches in sloped-roof sheds proclaiming a new Jesus of fire and redemption, a criss-cross of silent railway lines and budget gyms above kebab shops for the men with vast shoulders encasing tiny pop-up heads.
He circled several times before pulling up at the stiff black gate in the crumbling red-brick wall. He couldn’t remember what Mrs. Italiaander, landlady folded in fuchsia, had said to him when he came through the door—she’d said something and he’d even replied, they’d maybe even had a whole conversation—but the memory of it slipped away in a moment.
He sat on the end of his bed and looked around the room, and saw as if for the first time the paucity of character it contained.
A wooden figurine of a woman dancing.
A painting of light across a misty sea.
A couple of 1950s films where everyone knew what to say and exactly how to say it.
A fern that refused to die.
With Dani Cumali’s face overlaying his vision, these things suddenly seemed trivial, pathetic. The revelation jerked him almost to laughter, as the man somewhere beneath Theo Miller, who still faintly remembered the real name he’d been born with, and the hopes he’d had as a child, stared at the farcical illusion of Theo Miller he’d created and realised that in all his efforts to be anonymous he had in fact ceased to be a person whatsoever. The laughter rolled through him for half a minute, then stopped as abruptly as it had begun, and he stared again at nothing.
He sat in muddy clothes on the end of his bed, hands in his lap, and waited to be arrested. In the room next door, Marvin, Mrs. Italiaander’s teenage son, wannabe rock star, wannabe movie star, wannabe private detective wannabe martial artist wannabe somebody in a nobody world, played drum and bass far too loud and wondered if his mum had known all along that he’d stolen that fifty from her purse.
Downstairs, Nikesh, the other flatmate, who did something for the Company, something in insurance or actuarial or—he was never very good at explaining—cooked chicken so spicy it could burn the top off your mouth and listened to radio with the volume turned right down, too low to really hear, but it was the sound of the voices that Nikesh enjoyed, more than the words they spoke.
After a while—after the first twenty minutes of not being arrested—Theo lay back on his double bed, nearly always slept in by one, and stared at the ceiling. His room was five metres by six metres, luxurious by lodging standards. Theo had lived in it for nearly three years. He’d been renting in Streatham before, but his flatmate had got a job in something that paid more, been given a resident’s permit to Zone 1 and moved in with his girlfriend. Theo’s civil service salary didn’t stretch to a mortgage, not with prices being what they were. Not with times being so…
…besides, he didn’t have the papers to live in Kensington or Chiswick or anywhere like that, let alone the cash, so Tulse Hill it had been, two lodgers, a mother and a child pushed into a house built for three. Mrs. Italiaander had never raised Theo’s rent. She liked the way he cleaned the oven once a month and the new shower rail he’d installed. He was a nice, quiet tenant, and that was a rare thing indeed.
It struck Theo as likely that in three years’ time he would probably be in this same bed, on these same sheets, staring at the same crack running to the ceiling rose. This made him feel
…nothing.
He was masterful in feeling nothing. It was what he did best. He had cultivated the art over nearly fifteen years.
He checked his bank balance for the fifth time in the hope it was something better.
Wondered why the cops hadn’t come for him yet.
Realised he had no idea what on earth he was doing with his life, or what the hell he was meant to do now.
Having no idea what to do with himself, he did as he always did and on Monday morning went to work.
The fact they let him through security was strange. He sat at his desk in the Criminal Audit Office, patiently expecting handcuffs. For nearly twenty minutes he slouched there, fingers hooked on the edge of the desk, staring straight ahead without seeing, and waited.
No one came.
After twenty-five minutes an automatic alert appeared warning him that his productivity levels appeared to be slipping and that he was ten minutes away from being put on notice.
He stared at the pop-up message in amazement. In nearly nine years of working at the Criminal Audit Office, he’d never seen such a thing. He took a paracetamol, obvious and slow for the benefit of the camera on top of his screen, and set to work.