…but we got used to it. Just the way things are. Just what the world is. Sometimes you think—people go missing, and how are there so many patties now? You do the smallest thing, and I mean the smallest thing, and you go to the patty line, that’s the law now, and who wrote the law? Who paid to get the guy to write it? This thing Dani said—‘They broke the world.’ Yeah. Yeah they did. So? So the fuck what? That’s what I said to her. That’s what I told her to her face.” A little sigh, no more chips to play with, nothing left to do. “One day I’m gonna go see this queen of patties. I’d like to hear more of what she has to say.”
“What did Dani want you to do?”
“Said she could destroy it. Said that we hadn’t seen the half of it. That the four hundred billion that the government got in receipts from the Company, like, three hundred of that just went straight back to Company contracts anyway. Paying the Company for the bin men and the cops and the academies and the private hospitals and the prisons—paying them cos it’s cheaper to pay the Company you know, cheaper to… but actually it’s not, it costs a fucking fortune, so they’ve got this problem, yeah, they’ve got all this stuff they need to do if they’re not going to have a revolution, but people are skint and the more skint they get the more pissed off they get and the government sure as hell isn’t gonna spend to get them out of the shit and…”
He stopped, mouth curling like he’d bitten the tip of his tongue.
Theo waited.
“Anyway. Dani said, ‘You don’t know the half of it.’ Said she had secrets. Could take them down. I didn’t believe her. Told her where to go.”
“Philip Arnslade? Danesmoor? Did she mention them?”
Another shrug. Faris sat back, hands resting on a gentle paunch of oil and margarine pushing at the bottom buttons of his thin blue shirt.
“What did you do?” asked Theo.
“Laughed. Told her to get lost.”
“And?”
“And she sends me this picture. It’s one of those ones taken on a phone camera, bit crap, light’s shit, but there’s this bulldozer, big yellow thing, and these guys in yellow jackets and white helmets and one guy giving a thumbs-up to the camera. And this guy with the Company T-shirt at the back texting like he’s not even paying any attention, and I’m like, so what the fuck is this? And she’s like, look closer. So I look closer. This is something she’s swiped from the Ministry of Civic Responsibility, said they were going to destroy it, destroying evidence, she said, so I look closer. I look real close. And it takes for ever to spot it, I’ve got soft in my old age, I used to be…
Anyway.
And then I see it. Right on the edge of the field, where there’s a ditch. Thought it was just a shoe, but look really close, real careful, and it’s not a shoe. It’s a foot. Sticking out of the field. It might belong to a kid. And these guys they’re just standing there, just smiling at the camera, and they’ve just turned over the whole fucking field, I mean, they must have found it, they must have found the body unless…
So I say it’s Photoshop it doesn’t mean anything, but she’s like, you have no idea.
You have no idea.
It’s so much more.
With this, we can take back the world.
She made it sound so real. She made it sound… for a moment I thought maybe there’d be something—I mean, maybe something I could do, something important that perhaps… but it wasn’t real, of course. That sort of thing isn’t ever real. So maybe she published and maybe she said that some guys who worked for the Company dug up a field where there was someone’s foot, but I don’t think it matters. We got taught not to care. It’ll pass.
It’ll pass.
I told her to leave me alone. And now she’s dead and I’m…”
What is he?
Faris is terrified is what he is. His hands are shaking. Even though his mouth finds the words he can’t meet Theo’s eyes he is…
“I made a phone call. After she called me I made one phone call. I called my daughter I said look there’s this thing there’s this thing I heard there’s this thing and…”
Now the terror seeps into his words, the tears into his eyes.
“She told me the Company knew what it was doing, that they were great for business great for Britain that… then a man called Markse knocked on my door, I mean like, five hours later, and asked if I knew Dani Cumali. I said no, I’d never heard of her. Not a clue. Just carried on as normal. I’m still carrying on as normal, that’s how you do it. I’m just… nothing’s changed. Why would anything change when you’ve got nothing to…
If I can’t find the queen of the patties, then I keep thinking I’ll go to Cornwall. It looks beautiful down there, even in the winter, though they say the winters are shit and actually on the TV you never see…
…but how long does a winter last, really? It just feels long but how long does it…”
His words ran away to shaking nothing, and he shrank into the curve of his shoulders and stared at emptiness and spun sesame seeds around the greasy edge of his plate, and spun sesame seeds, and spun sesame seeds.
Theo opened his mouth to say something reassuring and kind, but the words were meaningless. Instead: “Are you being followed?”
Faris didn’t answer.
“Are you being followed?”
“My daughter ratted me,” mused Faris. “I told her this thing, cos I was worried about her, and she went straight to the Company, she told them about me, about Dani, she… she says it’s for the best. That the only way I’m ever going to pick myself up, make something of myself, is if I get back in the normal way of things, make myself an attractive business prospect again, not some done-out outsider. That I had to get realistic and stop pretending I was some kind of martyr. That this was the way things worked and it was for the best, stop being old-fashioned, everyone has a good chance so long as they just…”
Faris stared into the distance and did not speak again, and Theo waited a little while, then stood without a word, looking around, heart pounding, and walked away.
Marching away from Vauxhall Bridge the man who is now Theo Miller thinks
he thinks and his thoughts are
stone.
Harder than the stones that roll back into the sea.
Two men follow him. They are remarkably easy to spot, but the moment they realise he’s seen them, they start to run straight towards him, leather shoes and chopping-board hands. Theo feels a sudden surge of contempt, wants to laugh in their face, lets them come on a few paces, and turns and runs.
He thought maybe he might have to run, and now he runs and he is fast—he had no idea he was so fast, he’s run by himself for so long that he hasn’t really got a sense of these things—but turns out all that time, all those early mornings and long, late nights when other people were living, had some upside after all.
The man called Theo runs.
Running changes the city. Sight and sound blazes into slithering sentience, the river is moving black popping with reflected lights of sodium orange, white, green and yellow. The Thames slurps its way down the thin tidal beach below the high walls of the embankment catching on muddy sand, belching wet gloop, the sky is a brown smear stained with bruised rushing clouds, buses unnaturally slow as they crawl across Westminster Bridge; the Houses of Parliament are all illuminated acrylic blaze and deep recesses of shadow, strips and nooks of blackness where only the pigeons can penetrate.