Central had its roots in the hundreds of little courier firms which had been operating in Europe before the turn of the century, moving various items of merchandise – printed material too valuable to be entrusted to the postal system, disc-encoded data too important or secret to be entrusted to the net, and so on. If Central had had a single stated objective, it would have been the eventual abolition of borders and free movement for all, and if Central had been a moderately-sized multinational, Seth would have been one of the boys in the post-room.
This suited him, more or less. Central’s bread-and-butter business went on constantly, offered boundless opportunities for travel, and paid pretty well. There were strata above him in which the Packages moved by Central were people, the circumstances of their jumpoffs far more fraught and exciting, but for Seth those sorts of Situations seemed too much like hard work.
“This fucking thing doesn’t work.”
Seth looked up. The woman was standing by the detergent dispenser, a plastic cup in one hand and her washing-bags on the floor by her feet.
“This fucking thing doesn’t work,” she said again, pointing at the dispenser.
“You’ve got to buy a card,” said Seth, nodding at the box by the dispenser. “Ten pounds.”
The woman stood looking at him for a few moments as if she was thinking very hard about what he had told her. “I only want some fucking soap powder,” she said finally.
“The card works the machines as well.”
She narrowed her eyes at that, and Seth sighed. The last time this had happened to him, it had been aboard the bus to Narvik, when a grossly overweight Latvian had squeezed himself into the seat beside him and proceeded to try and sell him a small cardboard box which he claimed contained the mummified penis of Joseph Stalin. He didn’t know why these things happened. Maybe he had the sort of bone structure which proclaimed to lunatics here I am, talk to me.
“Look,” he said, getting up and going over to the card dispenser. “Why don’t I buy you a card, eh?”
“Don’t you fucking patronise me, sunshine,” said the woman. “I’ve got washing in these bags older than you. I can buy my own fucking cards.”
Seth spread his hands and stepped away from the dispenser, not quite being able to resist a half-bow at the last moment. The woman glared at him and put a £10 coin in the slot.
Seth went back to his seat and his pirouetting smalls, but it was impossible to ignore the woman as she wrestled the contents of the plastic cup of detergent into one of the empty machines – through the door, mind, not into the hopper on top – and hurled her washing in after it. Then she came back and sat beside Seth, heaved a huge sigh of relief, took an impressively abused-looking old paperback from one of the thigh pockets of her combat trousers, a pair of spectacles from the other pocket, and started to read. Seth felt his heart sink.
After they had been sitting side by side in silence for about ten minutes, Seth said, “I only just got back, you know.”
The woman looked up from her book. “Beg pardon, lovely?”
“I only just got home,” he said. “I’m shattered. I don’t want to go back out just yet.”
She looked at him and raised an eyebrow.
“The glasses,” he said. “They’re antiques.”
“I could have inherited the frames from my granny,” she said.
Seth tipped his head to one side.
She sighed. “Okay.” She took the spectacles off and looked at them, a little abashed. “There’s always something, isn’t there? I thought this was bloody good camo, too.” She beamed at him. “Well spotted, mind.”
He shrugged. I am a Coureur, witness my mad spectacle-identifying skillz. “What have you got for me?”
“Oh, I dunno,” she said, recovering her cheerfulness. “I just deliver ’em. Nobody tells me anything. Here.” She passed him the book. “Have a read of that.”
He took the book. Atlas Shrugged, the back cover and half the front torn off. It appeared to have spent quite a long time in a sauna as well; its pages had swollen up until it was almost twice its original thickness, which had already been considerable. “I’ve heard of it.”
“It’s shit,” the stringer said, standing up. “Woman was barking mad.” She turned to leave.
“What about your clothes?” Seth asked.
She turned back to him. “What?”
He nodded at the clothes in the washing machine.
“Oh, they’re not mine,” she said happily. “They’re just props. Fuck ’em. ’Bye.”
THE FLAT WAS on the top floor of a converted warehouse building on the edge of the confusing maze of little streets between Farringdon Road and the Grey’s Inn Road, just south of Clerkenwell Road. Back in the ’90s the whole area had experienced a spasm of conversion, but by the 2000s nobody could afford the rents so the converted blocks had been sold off, one by one, to housing associations. Artists and students and musicians moved into flats once occupied by young upwardly-mobile couples. Refugees and asylum-seekers from the newer states and polities of Europe and Africa arrived. Meetings of the Residents Association began to resemble sessions of the UN Security Council during an interpreters’ strike.
Seth had come here six years ago and fallen in love with the area at first sight. He’d been a Coureur for a couple of years by then, and his life consisted of drifting across the Continent moving Packages from place to place, living in hotels and Travelodges which were all somehow identical to each other. It was a busy couple of years, but at some point he found himself sitting in an hotel room and looking about him and wondering where precisely he was. Padania? Ulster? Somewhere in the Basque country?
He decided it was a bad sign, and logged-off for a couple of months to find himself a solid base, somewhere to call his own. He came back to London, visited his father and stepmother in Hampstead, spent some time with his sister and her family in Cornwall. He saw an ad in the online edition of Loot, and two days later he was introducing himself to Lewis.
If Lewis had been better-off there would have been no way he would have consented to share the flat, but in spite of being rather well-paid for what he did, he was in danger of losing his lease if he didn’t find someone to help him with the rent. Seth later found himself feeling a glow of professional pride at the fact that, of all the applicants for the flatshare, Lewis had felt him to be the least suspect.
Trying to look at himself objectively, Seth supposed that he represented the perfect flatmate. Neat, tidy, unobtrusive, forgiving. Away for extended periods on business. Willing to cook meals and wash up afterwards without complaint. But most important of all, pretty well-off. In this way, he convinced Lewis that he was not an Agent Of Them. Seth thought this was quite amusing, considering he really did work for what amounted to a global conspiracy.
Lewis was out again when Seth got back with his washing. Seth had never found out what his flatmate did on his evenings out. Certainly pubs featured somewhere, but which ones, and with whom, he didn’t know. Sometimes he pictured upstairs rooms in dingy Fitzrovia taverns, a circle of conspiracy theorists perched anxiously on chairs arranged around the walls, pints of real ale clutched in their fists as they discussed in hushed voices the latest convoluted doings of Them. Them, of course, being a chimera of Science, the Military, the Government and anything to do with America. Lewis did have a girlfriend, a wispy presence named Angela who did makeup for advertising shoots and who sometimes drifted through the flat, naked but for a huge butterfly barrette in her hair, in search of toast and tea to take back to Lewis’s bedroom. Seth had never had a meaningful conversation of any kind with her beyond answering the question, “Where’s the marmalade?”