Joe Spork stares up into a face made of gold.
An eyeless face, with a snapping turtle’s jaw and the merest suggestion of features on the burnished plate.
Not a mask.
A face.
An un-face. An un-man.
The Ruskinites close in. They have him, and they are taking him. He screams.
That’s all he knows, because someone clamps something cold over his mouth and he inhales.
XIII
Panopticon days;
Coffin Man;
Escape.
The room is very small. In the centre of each wall, and in the centre of the floor and ceiling, there is a circle of transparent stuff with a light bulb behind it. The bulbs are always on. Behind or in the walls—Joe isn’t sure—there are speakers. Sometimes they blare out instructions. Sometimes they play music, very loud. Sometimes they just shriek, electronic wails of protest.
He’s not sure how long ago it was that he tried to go to sleep, or how long they have kept him awake. He thought he knew roughly, because there’s only enough stubble on his chin to indicate a day or so, but when he finally did sleep—he realises he has slept many times since he arrived, but he doesn’t know for how long—he woke to find a ghost face very close to his own and a razor moving very precisely over his cheek. He jerked away, or rather, he tried, but found he was restrained. When he kept trying, someone pressed a cold thing against his neck and his world was fizzy and bright and he screamed a lot. He assumes the cold thing was a taser. The linen face peered at him, as if wondering why he was upset. He wondered whether it was human or not, whether it was like the one he’d seen. He wondered whether he’d dreamed that part.
When he came back to himself after the taser, he was inexplicably and appallingly aroused. He wondered if they had drugged him, and then wondered why they would. Then he realised that this kind of dialogue about himself was probably what this was all intended to achieve. They are asserting ownership of him. They own his sense of time, his captivity, his sleep. They have his body entirely; it’s not relevant whether they have drugged him. It is only relevant that they could. The one thing he can preserve from them is his mind—and that is what they want. They cannot approach it directly, so they are holding his body to ransom.
He remembers reading about a man who had been tortured. The man said the worst part was when they played the same music over and over and over until he thought he would go mad. He said even the razors were not as bad as the sense of losing himself. Joe is greatly concerned that he has very little self to lose, and so this will not take long.
He shouts out something, and regrets it instantly. He does not want their attention. Mr. Ordinary comes, anyway.
Mr. Ordinary has a face like a country vet’s. He is not a Ruskinite. He is apparently a specialist, brought in for the occasion. When he speaks, he has a mellow baritone, suited to explaining that Rover has the canine pox or that Tiddles will do better on a more varied diet.
He asks questions. It doesn’t seem to matter what Joe says in answer to these questions, so he begins to make up jokes. Mr. Ordinary is apparently of the opinion that funny jokes merit a reduction in discomfort. Silence is punished mightily. Mr. Ordinary is kind enough to explain this on the first occasion that Joe becomes mute.
“By all means, lie. Lying is fine. Or if you have no notion what I’m talking about, you should feel free to babble, make stuff up. That’s fine, too. Mulishness, however … I take that as a sign of disrespect.”
When Joe obstinately clamps his lips closed, Mr. Ordinary sighs, and directs operations with a sort of genial competence. They put Joe into strange positions and make him stay that way. The pain arrives quickly and he accepts that, was expecting it. It becomes blinding much later, when he has become used to the aches, and thinks he’s doing quite well. Mr. Ordinary listens to him screaming, and does not appear to react at all. Joe starts to speak, randomly selecting the price list for repairs to self-winders, hoping that compliance, however belated, will yield mercy.
It does not.
He loses track of everything, but at some point the man with the hate-filled eyes sits in front of him and listens to him screaming.
Brother Sheamus moves with the same alarming fluidity he displayed that day in Joe’s shop. It is as if his bones are articulated in more places than they should be. His head moves smoothly to follow Joe’s eyes, to peer into his face. Blank, black-linen monster. Eggshell face. Mask. And yet, somehow, not expressionless. Whether his emotions are carried in his body, or whether they are so strong that Joe is catching the lines of the face through the shroud, the way he feels is quite apparent in the tiny room.
He hates Joe Spork. He hates him as you hate someone you have known your entire life and whom you cannot stand. Whose existence in the world offends you in your bones. Every line of his liquid body aches with it.
Joe has no idea what he can have done to inspire such wrath. He is not old enough to have hurt Brother Sheamus in that way, and would surely know if he had inflicted an injury of that kind on his fellow man. He has, after all, dedicated his life to being mild.
He tries to say so. Unfortunately, he can’t speak, because when he tries his teeth chatter and his tongue won’t behave.
“You have formed impressions of me, Joshua Joseph Spork,” Sheamus says clinically. “It cannot be otherwise.”
He is not asking a question, so by Mr. Ordinary’s rules, Joe doesn’t have to respond.
“You imagine I am a man in authority but under orders. You may know that I wear a variety of hats and crowns, and you may imagine that where these things contradict it is evidence of deception. But those impressions are shallow things. They are based on an understanding of the world which is impoverished by modern weakness, by this modern irony, which is so frightened of grand ideas that it must pick pick pick them apart. Britain’s ultimate triumph, Mr. Spork: a world of shopkeepers.” This last with contempt. Joe makes a mental note: modernity, shopkeepers: bad.
“I am so much more than you imagine. I am more, and yet I am a fraction of what I shall be in days to come. My victory is inevitable, child of my hate, because I shall become God. And being God, I shall be perfect, and being perfect, I shall always have been perfect. All of this apparent meandering is a straight line to my apotheosis, when viewed from the timeless and ineffable understanding of the divine.”
Joe Spork receives all this and knows that a week ago he would have laughed at it. Not now, not here, in this room. The eyes are not funny at all. In them he sees himself vivisected—not for interest, but for enjoyment. He knows absolutely that that is what this man would like to do. His only hope is that the master of the Ruskinites is lying, that he is indeed held in check by someone. And then, with a sinking feeling, he joins the dots and realises that the man so tasked would be Rodney Titwhistle, and the good Rodney has already sacrificed conscience in this matter for some greater good which only he can see.
“A different question, then, for variety. But you must get this one right, no half-answers. Are you ready? Good.
“If I have the mind of Napoleon, but the body of Wellington, who am I?”
And at Joe’s stricken look, he laughs, quite genuinely.
Joe Spork has no idea what the right answer may be, so he tries very hard to ask what it is that he has done to make his interlocutor so angry, and how he can make amends, but his mouth betrays him and he chokes, and spits slightly. The man takes this as a challenge, and a moment later Mr. Ordinary comes back and says he is very disappointed.
Joe tries to slip away and remember good things, but good things are far away and very pale, and there are sharks in his mind with him, memories he does not want and cannot avoid any longer.
On the occasion of Joshua Joseph’s fifteenth birthday, the young man opened the door to find his father on the step in a splendid suit, with a present under his arm. This was a surpassingly impressive feat, because Mathew was serving time in one of Her Majesty’s prisons for grand
(even “grandiose,” the wits had it) theft.
“Hello, Joe,” Mathew Spork said genially, “thought I’d drop in, hope you don’t mind.”
“You’re out?” Joshua Joseph demanded.
“As you see, Joe. As you see. I am a free man—for the day, at least.”
“Just for a day?”
“Longer, if I can manage it.” This very drily, and the quirk of wickedness which is his father’s trademark alerts young Joe to an alarming possibility.
“You’ve broken out!”
“Yes, I have. Rather well, too, I must say. I had to see a man in Harley Street, you see, about my health. Prison food is terrible, my boy, it tastes of fat and is bad for the digestion. So I thought, well, why not? I’ll drop in on my son and hug my loving wife, and then I shall leg it for the bosom of Argentina, and you can pop out and join me from time to time. How does that sound?”
“You’re mad!” Joshua Joseph cries, delighted, “You can’t stay here, they’ll find you!”
“Your father, Joshua Joseph Spork, may be an old man and a decrepit one, but he is no fool and this is not his first fandango. There is even now a fine fellow by the name of Brigsdale, wearing a Mathew costume, waiting in the queue for the ferry to Ireland. Mr. Brigsdale has done no one any wrong in his life, Josh, but he greatly resembles your old man. He will go to the ferry and he will be apprehended, and Lily Law will falsely believe for several days that I have been caught, at which point Mr. Brigsdale will explain that there’s been a terrible misunderstanding and sue them for false arrest, not that he’ll need to because I’ve set him up somewhat … But by the time it’s all sorted out I shall have buggered off to Buenos Aires and all will be well.” Mathew Spork beams.
And to Joshua Joseph’s amazement, the door does not come crunching down, the Flying Squad does not arrive. Father and son sit there on the sofa (“I’m a bit puffed, Josh, I had to climb a very high wall, you know. This prison breaking is best left to younger men—I shall put that in my memoirs!”) and they drink tea, and wait for Harriet to come home. In honour of the old days, when Joshua Joseph used to slumber like a puppy, curled up on his father’s lap, the gawky teen rests his head on Mathew’s chest as they watch John Craven’s Newsround to see if it will tell them about the escaped felon, Mathew “Tommy Gun” Spork, and list his many iniquitous acts, but fame is fleeting and there’s a swimming rabbit instead.
“Will you teach me how to fire the gun in Argentina, Dad?” Because the day is coming, undeniably, when he will be old enough to learn.
Mathew sighs.
“Do me a favour, Joe, all right?”
“Of course.”
“Don’t be like me. Be a judge, be a rock star. Be a carpenter. Just … find a better way. Leave the gun to someone else if you can.”
“I want to be like you.”
“No, you don’t. You think you do, but this is what it comes to. It’s rubbish. Hiding in my own house. Promise me, you’ll be better than this.”
“I promise.”
“Gangster’s oath?”
“Gangster’s oath!” And if the backwardness of that is apparent to either of them, they don’t say.
“All right, then.”
They fall asleep that way, and it is only when Harriet Spork comes through the door from her yoga class and shrieks that Joshua Joseph awakes, and realises that his father has died, very quietly, with a smile on his face.
In the aftermath, it turns out that Mr. Brigsdale was a figment of Mathew’s outrageous imagination, and that there was no plan to get to Argentina. When Mathew Spork visited the prison doctor and learned that his life was coming to an end, he secured permission to visit his son on his birthday, and then he did, in fact, find a way to elude the clutches of the law for evermore.
Two shrouded faces watch Joe through a panel in the door. They jockey for position at the narrow hole, bobbing around one another. The room fills with a stink so vile he begins to vomit. When he reaches the point where his stomach is quite empty, and even the bile has stopped coming, they pipe more of the stink in, so that he arches convulsively, forehead and toes touching the ground and nothing else, as his body tries to get rid of things which are not there.
In his mind, he holds onto his father’s hand, that last day. Mathew would have known what to do.
“Where is it?”
They have been asking him the same question, over and over. When he objects that he does not know what “it” may be, they are particularly harsh. It is not their job to explain. It is his to offer possible locations of any object they might be looking for. He is to cultivate a habit of mind which opens to their inquisition. “Where have you hidden it?”
He tells them he keeps it in the sugar jar. He wants to tell them that whatever it is they already have it. They have everything he owns. Or owned.
You’ve got it. You’ve got everything I had. You took it all from my house, from Ted’s.
“Did Daniel hide it? Did he explain to you what it was? Who else is aware of it?”
Yes. Daniel hid it. He hid it so well you will never find it. And nor will I. In a library. In a bookshop. In a church. He burned it. He sold it.
“Where is it?”
It exists only in your mind. My mind. Our minds. We are all one.
Joe’s own mind is wandering, and he knows it, and knows that the wandering is a relief from pain. He fights against it, all the same, because he is frightened he will never come back.
“You cannot continue to resist us. In the end, you will tell us everything. Everyone does. In the end, we will become bored listening to you share your secrets in tedious detail. Where is the calibration drum, Mr. Spork?”
I have absolutely no fucking idea.
This is true, but at the same time he realises that the question tells him something. The calibration drum is used to change the settings on Frankie’s machine. Brother Sheamus wants to use the Apprehension Engine for something other than what Frankie had in mind.
He squashes this understanding, lest he blurt it out. He is sure that knowing too much is as bad as knowing too little.
“Where is the calibration drum?”
It occurs to him that they really do not know that he does not know. He is in the hands of incompetent torturers—and from this he conceives a new fear, that their physical skills are as limited as their analytical ones, and they will let him die by accident, by a moment’s inattention.
He finds himself in the bizarre position of hoping they are better at this than they seem to be.
He dreams that Rodney Titwhistle comes to visit him. He wishes he could dream something less grey and equivocal.
“They’re torturing me,” Joe Spork says through numb lips. Rodney Titwhistle shakes his head.
“No,” Mr. Titwhistle says, “they are not.”
“They are. And you know it.” He sounds like a child in his own ears, and something in him rages, but he wants to be rescued. He wants the Queen or the BBC to reach down and make it all stop. Rodney Titwhistle is neither, but he’s as close as can be had.
“They are not. And it is very wrong to suggest that they are. It is counterproductive. Worse, it gives assistance to the enemy.”
“What enemy?”
“Any enemy. All enemies.”
“So they’re torturing me to keep everyone safe.”
“They are not torturing you, Mr. Spork. That is against the law. I could not use them if they were to subject you to any sort of degrading treatment. However, I do use them. I know them to be lawful. I have asked exacting questions. I have received assurances. Therefore you are either making this up, or you are deluded. If you are making this up, I should warn you that manipulative falsehood is now considered a technique of Lawfare. You understand what that means? Warfare using the legal code, thus Lawfare. There are penalties for illegitimate Lawfare.”
“They won’t even tell me what they want. I want to tell them, you see. Only I have no idea.”
Rodney Titwhistle sighs
. “They want the calibration drum for the Apprehension Engine, Mr. Spork. A small item. A thing no bigger than your hand. The Book, as it transpires, will turn the machine on but not off. We must have the drum. There is some suggestion that you possess it. Or that your grandfather did. You would do well to consider carefully before denying anything.”
“I don’t know. I want … I want my lawyer! Get me Mercer. I have rights. You know I do.”
“No, you do not. Not here. Not in this room, or this building. Here you are a patient. You are suspected of an act of terrorism so gross, so destructive, that it is the definition of madness. Patients have no rights. And I told you before, sir: there are penalties for Lawfare.”
Mr. Titwhistle leaves in a huff, and it turns out that there are, indeed, penalties. But Joe knows there are penalties for everything now, and they touch him less and less.
He lets himself go away for a while.
“This task. These words. Are against nature. They are against everything. Fathers should not bury their sons.” Daniel Spork, pendulum-straight, choking like a gritty caseclock.
“Not in war, not in peace. I have seen both.” He stops, and works his right shoulder, his neck. He contains a furnace of sorrow, and he is burning through. “My son was not a good man. By the measure of our country’s law. He was a transgressor. He. Could not be made to see. I tried, but I was alone, and I cannot. I am not. Good with words. Or people, even. I understand machines. So. He was a bad man. He stole. He robbed. He broke things and fired guns and he encouraged others to do the same. He tried to sell drugs. He went to prison. My son was bad. I mourn my bad son.” Defiance flares in him.