1.
THE ALBANIANS DOWNSTAIRS must have been out on one of their periodic shoplifting expeditions, because the bowel-rearranging concussions of one of the new Sri Lankan crush bands were shaking the furniture when the Coureur got back to the flat.
The rest of the block’s inhabitants called the Albanians ‘gypsies,’ but the Coureur, who had spent some time among Europe’s Roma population, knew better. The people downstairs were the heirs of Enver Hoxha, heirs of catastrophically-failed pyramid-investment schemes. Their parents and grandparents had crossed the Adriatic on fishing boats loaded down with indigent cargo until waves slopped over the gunwales, had evaded Italian coastguard cutters, had landed at dead of night wearing their cheap leather jackets and bootleg Levis and Reeboks and scattered into the countryside in search of a better life.
They were everywhere now, Albanian only insofar as their Polish or English or German was seasoned with a few Albanian words and phrases, their dreams with images of a lost homeland.
They were not, as far as the Coureur could ascertain, Gypsies.
He locked the door behind him and stood looking down the hallway. Coats and jackets dangled haphazardly from pegs on one wall. Halfway along, a pile of boots and training shoes was gently collapsing across the parquet. There was a smell of overcooked cabbage, burned chickpeas and cheap aerosol air-freshener. At the far end of the hall, the toilet door was wide open. The Coureur wrinkled his nose.
A moment’s silence. Then a mighty concussion heralded the beginning of a new track downstairs. A tattered basketball boot rolled off the pile of footwear.
The Coureur walked down the hall and into the kitchen. Pots and pans unsteadily piled in the sink. Several meals’ worth of crusted plates on the table. Cupboard doors left open. Empty milk cartons on the work-surfaces. A couple of dirty forks and a steak-knife on the lino beside the fridge. The Coureur considered looking in the fridge, but decided against it.
In the living room, all the cushions had been removed from the sofa and armchairs and roughly arranged in a pile in the middle of the room, beside a miniature Stonehenge of Eisbrau bottles, the various entertainment deck handsets lined up on the floor close to hand.
The Coureur extracted a cushion from the pile, dumped it on a chair, and flopped down, rubbing his eyes. Coming home was always the same. Lewis, his flatmate, seemed to lack the necessary genes for tidiness. The Coureur would leave for a Situation and no matter how serious or far away or downright complicated it was, when he got back exhausted, or bored, or wound-up (or, once, with a newly-stitched wound in his leg) the flat always looked as if it had been sub-let to a maniac.
He got up and went to the window, looked down into the narrow street, then across at the balconies and curtained windows of the building opposite, then at the tilted topography of roofs and terraces and air-conditioning hoods and downlink dishes. Craning his neck slightly, he could see the Underground tracks running in their cutting parallel to Farringdon Road. A Metropolitan Line train, identifiable from this distance because the Metropolitan Company still hadn’t modernised its rolling stock, rattled and rolled along the cutting, from tunnel to tunnel, and was gone. A colossal amorphous murmuration of starlings surged and darted across the darkening topaz sky.
The front door opened, banged shut. “That you, Seth?” called Lewis.
The Coureur went to the living room doorway. Lewis was taking off his jacket, a great pile of yellow and white Europa Foods carrier bags slowly collapsing around his feet and allowing tins of beans and loose yams and okra to topple onto the floor. It was a sure sign that there was nothing to eat in the entire flat; Lewis refused to enter a supermarket unless the only alternative was starvation, and he would not phone out for meals because he believed They kept lists.
“Good trip?” he asked, tossing his jacket in the general direction of the coathooks.
“Not bad.”
“Great.” Lewis bent down and started to lace his fingers through the tangle of shopping-bag handles. “I didn’t manage to do much cleaning up.”
“I noticed,” said Seth.
Lewis straightened up, lifting the carriers off the floor. The bottom split out of one and about a hundred apples rolled everywhere.
“Oops,” said Lewis.
LEWIS’S BELIEF-SYSTEM WAS a complex territory of conspiracy theories. He trusted neither the government nor the police. He refused to believe anything he saw on the news networks. One boozy night, he told Seth that at least ten percent of the passengers travelling on scheduled British Airways flights never reached their destinations.
“Documented fact,” he said, nodding sagely and levering the cap off another Budvar.
“So where do they go?” asked Seth, only slightly less drunk.
Lewis leaned forward and his voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. “Madagascar. Colossal internment camp.”
Seth thought about it. “Why?”
Lewis sat up. “I don’t know,” he said. He waved his bottle of beer at Seth. “But you’d better watch yourself the next time you get on a BA flight, old son. Mark my words.”
Unpacking after one of Lewis’s infrequent shopping expeditions was an adventure. Lewis had a theory that there was something secretly crafty about bar-codes, that They were tracking each bar-coded item and compiling vast lists for a purpose made even more sinister and terrifying by being entirely unknown.
So trips to the supermarket inevitably ended with bags and packets piled on the kitchen table, Lewis bent over them with the scissors, cutting off bar-codes, to be burned later. When Seth first saw him doing this, he had inquired whether his flatmate needed regular medication, but it had turned out that Lewis was a relative rarity: a completely sane man whose world-view was almost entirely irrational. Sometimes, thinking about it, Seth wondered if Lewis might not actually be right. And then he usually wondered what Lewis would think if he knew what his flatmate really did for a living.
IN HIS ABSENCE, their landlord, an immensely aged Malaysian whom Lewis had dubbed, for no good reason, The Grasping Bastard, had visited the flat and entrusted to Lewis the twice-yearly message of happiness and joy that was their rent increase. This in itself was not a problem. Seth was reasonably well-off, and Lewis made a truly colossal amount of money developing advertising campaigns for products from which he would one day be cutting bar-codes. However, the Grasping Bastard had been unable to predict with any great certainty when a replacement for their recently-deceased washing machine would be forthcoming.
Which meant that, at around half past nine that evening, Seth was sitting on a padded bench in the neon-lit tropical heat of the local laundrette, watching his underwear doing flickflacks in the drier. Ah, the endless romance of the Coureur’s life…
He’d had a busy couple of months, four or five Situations on the run that had involved him flying off to Warsaw, Bruges, Barcelona and Nicosia, picking up sealed pouches, and flying with them to Berlin, Chicago, Dublin and Copenhagen. The last Situation had subsequently involved a train, bus and taxi ride to Narvik, a clandestine pass in a department store, and a dustoff through Helsinki. The first three Situations had been straight corporate data-transfer, routine stuff. The Narvik thing smacked of industrial espionage. Or maybe even real espionage; Central usually frowned on real espionage, preferring to leave it to nations, but in practice, at street level, it was impossible to know who you were taking a delivery from, impossible to know what was in the pouch. You made the jump, took the money, told yourself you were keeping alive the spirit of Schengen, and forgot about it.
The door opened, billowing cool air through the steamy laundrette. Seth looked up from his book. A middle-aged woman wearing biker boots, US Army desert camo trousers and a chunky black sweater was standing in the doorway, a big blue plastic carrier bag dangling from each hand. As the door closed behind her, she went over and started to walk down the line of washers, looking for a machine that wasn’t being used. Seth went back to his book.