No one can say that about the kidneys of the northern hemisphere, can they?
Thanks to Atlantica’s unique combination of porous bedrock and porous landfill, no container would be turned away. All waste – be it industrial, organic, or nuclear – would be welcome, no questions asked. That was a pledge.
Gwynneth hesitated for a long time over the kitchen tiles, and eventually settled for a mock terracotta that was easier to maintain than real terracotta, and you couldn’t tell the difference unless you were an expert, plus it was wipe-clean and low-maintenance.
Once the crater was functioning, the first thing we noticed was the climate change right on our doorstep. Gwynneth’s window-boxes went ape. We planted a banana tree on either side of the patio area, and her mum gave us a bougainvillaea. There are certain water creatures that do what Atlantica does, I thought one day as I gazed across at the zone from the Osaka Snak Attak, where I sometimes went for noodles. You pass muck through them, and they decontaminate it, send it back into the atmosphere, the filth strained out. It makes you feel proud.
– You should come and visit, Gwynneth urged her cousins in Canada. They’re calling us the Hong Kong of the Atlantic. It’s a shoppers’ paradise!
The weeks passed. Gwynneth battled with morning sickness and gave the spare room a makeover in the acid palette that was the big thing at the time. The Canadians came, and saw, and were impressed. They left with bulging suitcases.
Soon Atlantica was dealing in human waste too. I had no objection: commerce is commerce. The floating penitentiaries thrived. Those were honeymoon times. The world brought its problems to Atlantica, and Atlantica – a geophysical miracle! A tiny artificial land-mass in the middle of bloody nowhere! – fixed them.
But if things were going well for our little island state, they were going from bad to worse for Harvey Kidd as a family man – bougainvillaea or no bougainvillaea. The friendly lull we’d had after Gwynneth told me she was pregnant didn’t last. Always, as I headed back home from the Happy Eater or the Snak Attak, I knew there’d be grief waiting. As soon as I walked in the door and made for the Family Room, Gwynneth, her belly footballing bigger every day, would start up again.
She never accepted the family. And she particularly hated the surname Hogg. An ugly name, she said. And it was true. It was an accident of paperwork, I told her, I didn’t choose it. When you’re constructing an identity from a set of laundered birth certificates you’ve –
Well, it was like talking to the wall.
Some couples just rub along together, as far as I can tell. Not us. Mum, Dad, Uncle Sid, Cameron and Lola remained a big problem in our marriage, even after Tiffany was born. It emerged that one of the Canadian cousins had nosy-parked his way into my Family Room when I was out, and seen what he called my pin-ups. That hadn’t helped, to have Gwynneth’s prejudices confirmed by a third party.
I didn’t watch the birth, because Gwynneth told me the Customer Hotline advised not to, but I saw her minutes later. Boy, was she a funny creature. She had a grumpy face and grown-up ears, and when she grabbed on to my finger with her tiny hand with its tiny perfect nails, I fell in love. I’d never had a pet and had always wanted one but this was miles better, I could tell. I had founded a family! A real one!
– It’s Daddy, I told her. Say hello to Dad!
But Gwynneth said I was talking too loud and it’d make Tiffany cry, plus she’d catch a chill, and what did I think I was doing, leaving the door open, and couldn’t I see I’d give her all sorts of germs, and they say the father should keep his distance in the first year. And she shooed me away.
– Go and make money, she said. Go pow-wow with your Hoggs. You’re earning for three now.
That was the beginning of it, and it didn’t stop. It was Gwynneth’s way of getting back at me for the Hoggs. If I was going to have my own private family members, she was going to have hers.
– You can’t argue with the logic of it, she told me.
And she was right, I couldn’t.
So I did what I knew how to do; I made money, and Gwynneth spent it. She dressed Tiffany in little themed outfits and changed our three-piece suite once a year. She bought novelty garlic-crushers, garden rakes, designer sweatshirts, the same kind of shoes in three different colours, travelling irons, espresso machines, teak coffee tables, opaque plastic salad bowls, self-seeding window-boxes, holidays for her and her mum and Tiffany in Ghana or Lanzarote, bathroom makeovers and exercise videos. She bought wedding presents for her friends when they got married, and sympathy lunches when they divorced, and took Tiffany to Florida for her fifth birthday, to swim with dolphins. When Tiffany was nine, they both joined the Feel Real Club and started doing parachute descents and bungee jumps and white-water rafting.
And Tiff was a crakko little kid. I’d watch her out of the window wobbling about on her big bike and feel these huge waves of love.
But me and Gwynneth, we were always dogged by the same old conflict that we dragged around behind us like a ball and chain: money versus the Hoggs. You couldn’t have one without the other, as far as I was concerned. She disagreed. Like all regular arguments, ours took the form of a vicious circle.
– I just want you to get rid of that family, Gwynneth’d say.
– But it’s a family business, I’d go. And what would we live on? Thin air?
Then she’d say something like – You could find a proper job. You’re clever with paperwork, you can do computers and admin and whatever. You could do anything.
And I’d say – I’m not trained. I’m self-employed. I can’t have a boss, it’s against my nature.
And she’d say – Well if you don’t, I’m leaving.
– And Tiffany? I’d go.
– I just want you to get rid of them, she’d go.
– And what would we live on? Thin air? I’d go.
– You could find a proper job, she’d go.
Etc.
It would be fair to say that I frustrated Gwynneth. When Tiffany was about ten, she persuaded me to see a stress-management consultant called Geoff, whose sister’s nails she did. I’d sit there in his sissy consulting-room that stank of aromatherapy, trying to understand what Geoff called my ‘demons’, and listening to his suggestions. Such as, I could take Gwynneth to the Odeon once a week. Buy her flowers that came from a proper florist’s. Stop trying to muscle in on her relationship with her daughter.
Geoff’s stress-management consultancy didn’t strike me as a particularly professional service. His bookshelves were stuffed with creepy self-improvement manuals, and he banged on zealously about a weed called St John’s wort, ‘for moods’.
What I couldn’t get through to Geoff was the idea that there was nothing wrong with being loyal to your original family, and enjoying their company. I told him how fantastic Mum was: how well she’d always cooked, how much she loved me. I told him about Dad, and what a great, straight guy he’d been, full of sound advice to a boy growing up. About Uncle Sid, always game for a laugh. About how clever Cameron was, and how Lola had the boys falling over themselves because of her animal magnetism.
But like Gwynneth, Mr Stress seemed to have a blind spot about the whole subject.
Atlantica, Atlantica.
The next nightmare’s even worse. Me, Mum, Dad, Sid, Lola and Cameron, we’re at Liberty Head Office, walking down corridors and up escalators, searching for a certain woman. I have to see her again, I have things to tell her, things I couldn’t say when we were together, because there wasn’t time and I didn’t have the words, things about how if only we could’ve had a shot at living a normal life, as normal as you can when you’re people like us, who have trouble saying things, so much trouble that it’s only in your head you can do it… But the words get mangled up and the corridors go on for ever and –