While I waited to make the call, I learned more from the forcie: the Lemon had been an inspector for two years, here at Staggerworth, just a mile up the road from the house. She was ambitious. This was her first major fraud bust. That figured: stepping into the van I’d heard another forciewoman congratulating her in a booming, lesbian sort of voice.
– Nice one, Tiff! Vengeance, yo!
– You have to hand it to her, I told the forcie miserably. It takes balls to shop your own dad.
Then she walked in.
– How’s your mother? I asked, trying to disarm her.
Tiffany smiled.
– She’s very well. She’s happy. Living with a lovely bloke. Geoff. (I felt my eyes bulge.) – He’s a stress-management consultant.
Then she added, smirking – I call him Dad.
Sissy curtains and St John’s wort.
– Well, I call him Wanker, I said, and thought, I should have guessed. Gwynneth was right. I don’t notice things.
– Well, thanks for the update, I said. Now where’s my Libertyaid representative?
– You don’t want one. There’s a proposition for you. Unless you’d prefer a twenty-year Adjustment, she smirked.
– The other forcie said ten years.
At which point Inspector Tiffany Kidd looked suddenly pissed-off. Like a kid again. I remembered her at five, throwing a tantrum after she’d melted part of her plastic kitchen set with Gwynneth’s hair-dryer, and put the blame on Keith – who was only a kitten at the time. She didn’t like being in the wrong.
– Well, I say twenty. It’s my bust, I researched it. I know how much you’ve made over the years. Starting with fifteen hundred dollars for a state-of-the-art brace for your imaginary brother, and finishing with the sale of five offshore mini-islands – which are actually just large rocks – for a hundred and fifty thousand each. I’ve seen the evidence, she goes.
– So how come you don’t want me to go to jail? Don’t I deserve it?
– You do deserve it, she stabs bitterly. You deserve it for the way you tried to fuck up our lives by making out we were second-best to some other family that didn’t even exist. Then, perhaps realising the childishness of it, she stalls herself. After a pause, she says, looking at her shoes – But I’m under instructions from Them.
Well, that knocked me sideways. Head Office? What do they want?
She looked from her shoes to the wall. It was an unremarkable pale green, decorated only by a dribbly splotch of what looked like dried Nescafé, no doubt hurled there by another detainee at his wits’ end, but it seemed to interest her quite unduly.
– I don’t know, the Lemon confessed, clearly irked at having let herself mention it at all. They were looking for a fraud like yours. A family like you’ve got.
– What for, for Christ’s sake?
She looked blank.
– Dunno, she said. They didn’t say.
– So you shopped me to advance your career?
– Nothing wrong with that.
I sighed. There’d be no getting through.
– So what do I have to do?
She was looking down now, picking at her nails just like she’d done as a turbulent teenager. It made me sad to see it. I wanted to tell her to stop.
She said – There’s a man called Wesley Pike.
John whistled. – The black king, eh?
– If you think they’re out to get you, I said, it’s because they are.
And that was where I left it with John. He went back to his sewing for a while, and I chewed the rest of it through, quietly.
The rest of it? Oh, the bit I hadn’t told him. The tail-end to that scene.
Why didn’t I tell him? Because of what Gwynneth would’ve called ‘stupid masculine pride’, I guess. Shame, a bit – not at what happened, but about being too gormless to have spotted it. And an inability, no, a refusal, even now, to come to terms with that final slap in the face.
It was just as she was leaving. It was me who prompted it. I don’t know what came over me. The memory of her as a kid, I guess. Not the teenager and then the woman she became, but the cute little girl wobbling about on her bike in the back garden, looking so sweet and innocent and adorable in her little white cowgirl outfit with tassels.
– Tiffany, I said.
– Yes?
– How can you do this? (My mouth was hanging open.) – I mean – I mean – I mean –
– What? What d’you mean? she snapped.
I nearly stopped then and there. I should have. But I didn’t.
– Well, I said hopelessly. I just mean, how can you do this? I’m your dad!
She looked blank for a minute, then puzzled. Uncomprehending.
– No you’re not, she said.
It was like a slow-motion experience. The long, long delay from ear to brain. While things were sinking in – more sort of slumping into place – I let my hands drop loose by my sides; I could feel them swinging free like a puppet’s. A noise hatched in my throat, but it got stuck, and hung birthlessly in the silence.
Then, watching Tiffany’s face – the face, I now realised, that looked nothing like my own, and never had, but belonged to some other man, whose name I didn’t even know, who’d been with Gwynneth on one of those nights she’d come back drunk and smoky from the razzle – you could see the thought dawn on her. It spread across her face, blooming into a sweet pink smile.
There was a kind of shocked laughter in her voice when she spoke.
She said – You didn’t know?
GOOD MORNING
– Good morning, Voyagers! That’s Fishook on the tannoy, sounding perky. – We are now approaching Atlantican waters.
My heart sinks.
– In five days’ time we will dock in Harbourville.
As the music crackles in, I reach for the transcript of another call to the Customer Hotline. They’re all the same. I’ve chewed thousands, so I know.
They all taste the same too.
Caller: This is confidential, right? My name’s Tom.
Response: Hi, Tom. Tell me how I can help you. Caller: Well, there’s this bloke, says he’s going to kill me. He lives up my road. Jed Hawkes.
Response: Can you give me more details, sir? How did it begin, for example?
Caller: It started when I told him I wasn’t going to lend him my lawnmower again, after he buggered up the blades on his rockery. Fancy trying to mow around a rockery. He says the soil’s all eroded in our district anyway, so it doesn’t matter. I won’t need a lawn mower much longer, we’ll all be living in a bog.
Response: Yes, sir. It’s people like you who enable us to do our job and on behalf of Libertycare I’d like to thank you personally. Please carry on. And then?
Caller: Well, it escalates into a dispute and the wife says…
I knew Jed Hawkes.
He arrived on board the same day as me, after we were all rounded up in the Mass Readjustment. A rough-and-ready sort of bloke, but likeable. He suffered from seasickness. He wasn’t resilient. He didn’t have the particular grim kind of humour or the hostile-from-birth attitude to the system that you need to survive here without coming unscrewed. Unlike many of the Atlanticans, he wasn’t prepared to kid himself that he was actually guilty – if not of the charges against him, then of something, at least.
A lawn mower, misapplied to a rockery.
He killed himself last year.
– Man Overboard, went the cry.