Aline, I think, has omitted to tell me that she was once a paramour of Sebastian, or that he exerted such a strong and lasting terror. Except that I have begun to realise that George Copsen is not talking about Sebastian, and this is confirmed when Sebastian’s terse, punctuated statement also blames Mr. A for all the world’s ills, and it is becoming very apparent that George Copsen is not looking for me to confirm this story, to add to the flames which will burn Mr. A on the pyre. Aline and Iggy and Quippe are describing someone I do not know, someone I have never met until this curious proxy introduction. I am very much afraid, however, that they have dressed me in this bloke’s coat and hung me out on the line. George Copsen shows me Aline’s signature, flowing and elegant and somehow still wearing handcuffs in bed. And he nods and tells me yes, they all say I am Mr. A.
Even now, Gonzo would not give them up. He would not detail their transgressions, would not recall time and place or accuse them in turn. Gonzo would stand firm and demand a lawyer and his rights and he would cast his despite in George Copsen’s face. I do my best, which is miserable, and I say that I don’t know why they would have said any such thing, although I am bleeding within and only barely refrain from crying.
At this, the general’s face goes a little grave and he suggests that I consider my position, so I tell him the whole story from start to finish and he listens attentively and then explains that he was not speaking figuratively. His recommendation was to be taken as a literal instruction. He produces a ladies’ powder compact from his eminently male pocket and folds out the mirror, displaying to me between the spots of expensive cosmetic the full profundity of the deep shit into which I have gotten myself.
The sense of smell is deeply associated with memory. Old men, blind and senile in deckchairs on the lawn at Happy Acres, recall lucidly the things which happened to them around cut grass and in the flower beds of youth. This moment imprints on me in reverse, as it were: from the moment of revelation in that little room in Jarndice until this day I cannot smell that particular face powder without choking with fear. It is worn by dowager ladies with stiff manners and powerful personalities, which probably does not help, but I do not see them. Instead, I recall the slow process of putting together a picture from the two-and-three-quarter-inch mirror held in Copsen’s hand. George Copsen’s hands do not shake particularly, but he isn’t a statue either, and so the mirror wobbles. This is not in fact a problem but an advantage; the mirror is too small to show me at one moment the nature of this chamber. My dawning horror relies on a phenomenon called image retention, which is also the basis for cinematic film: the human visual apparatus holds on to scenes for a moment after they are gone. A full representation can be assembled from disparate elements. A sequence of twenty-four slightly different frames becomes a moving image. And thus also I construct my predicament from a scattered series of circular reflections, and I have to concentrate to do it. Perhaps George Copsen knows this, and intends to focus my mind.
The reason this room smells of bleach; the reason the seat is damp and a little slippery; the reason my head is restrained and my hands will not move, is that I am in an execution chamber. I am sitting in an electric chair. A thick trunk of cable runs out like a rat’s tail from the wall and connects to the base near my feet. If necessary, enough electricity can be run through this apparatus to set my brain on fire.
Lydia’s father is considering whether or not to execute me on the spot, has his finger on the button, and in fact might push it by accident if I were to give him cause to clench his fists or even should he sneeze. This is highly illegal, and no doubt if anyone ever finds out, the general will be in big trouble, but this will (and it is plain that George Copsen follows every point and counterpoint of this debate) matter very little to the smoking, baked long-pig remains of a falsely accused undergraduate without the sense to appreciate when his arse is in a sling and when it is not appropriate to stand on constitutional ceremony.
Gonzo would call his bluff. Gonzo would be sure it was a bluff. My instinct is to explain the question of Mr. A in the terms I have recently been studying. This would mean telling General Copsen about Frege’s notion of sense and reference, which is essentially that language and reality do not always match, and that it is possible to use words—such as “unicorn”—to denote an object which does not necessarily possess the qualities inherent in that description. The word “unicorn,” for example, proposes a magical beast with a long horn sprouting from the forehead and a fondness for chaste women. This is the sense. The sense need not be an accurate description of what is actually there. That thing—the reference—may be something quite different; say, a grubby horse standing in front of a fence post.
Mythological beasts aside, the important and relevant point is that sense and reference can be quite independent of one another, can be wildly at variance, with the result that things you thought you knew from front to back and top to toe turn out to be different from how you understood them. At some point, for example, someone woke up, looked at the Morning Star, thought about the Evening Star and then looked through their telescope and saw what was actually there and realised that Phosphorus and Hesperus are both the planet Venus. Two incorrect senses with the same actual reference! What a day that must have been! A real eye-opener, oh, yes. How they must have laughed . . . aha! A-hahahaha! Something which everyone would have sworn an oath on, signed their name to, turned out to be completely untrue. Much as the mythical Mr. A, who does not exist, is a pure sense, a hallucination shared by the government and General George and latterly by Aline and Iggy and Quippe and all the rest, but whose reference, ludicrously, appears to be myself. We shall all laugh about it later. Ah-hahahah! Oh, what larks!
Something tells me that this line of exculpation will sit poorly with George Copsen. He may not have the patience for Frege (pronounced Fray-guh) and if he does not he may grow weary and press certain buttons just to see what happens. I do not want to know what happens, so I do not talk about Frege.
I do instead the first smart thing I have done in several months: I ask the general, very politely, to explain to me what it is he would like me to do, what he would do in my position and what, if I might press him for one further piece of information, would be the course of action I would wish to have taken were I looking back on this moment from the safety of advanced and healthy old age? And the general says that seeing as I am an old family friend, and I was never really part of this outfit, and seeing as how I have agreed to write down the names of everyone I can remember in the building and everything any of them ever said or did or even might have done, perhaps we might come to some arrangement—but if, if I get out of this alive, I should please study hard, play nicely, vote thoughtfully and with an eye to the patriotic good, and get my arsehole friend to apologise to his lovely daughter for that business about the donkeys.
I HAVE never written a confession before. Very few people, probably, ever have, until the time comes to do one for real. I have not been taught any kind of structure or template for admitting to treason (or admitting to having been near treason), but judging by the exemplars in front of me, confessional documents are somewhat inverted, having the good stuff up at the front in the initial declaration and the nitty gritty later down the line. Still sitting in the awful chair (they bring me a writing tray and a soft-point pen) I come up with the best I can do by way of a creditable first draft, always remembering that this is a work of fiction, a tissue of lies. Normally I would sit with a piece of paper and brainstorm first, but I sense that any departure from the appearance of remembering will go down poorly with George Copsen, and so I just scrawl it down. The only question, as I embark on the preamble (“to my enduring sorrow and shame I have been lured by persons more sophisticated than myself into the appearance of grave crimes”), is whom I shall indict. The spectre of Quippe hanging by the yardarm is a pleasing one, and the notion of Iggy sweating it out like this, confronted with his own undeniable wrongs, is another possibility. But they are buffoon
s, and I am looking for a scapegoat, not playing Smite the Iniquitous in the Evangelist’s play group. And so it is Sebastian that I traduce, and I do it with seamless thoroughness, blending his life with my lies just as he has done with mine.
The magnitude of this deception is part of the power; I draw Sebastian carefully as an extremist, a fiendishly concealed spider in the midst of a balanced web of political sophistry. I imply that he is a hard-action man, but I do not say so. I quote him selectively to suggest that he is dedicated to change at any cost, revolution for the sake of revolution, not the measured, human variety he proposed over his vodka tonic, but the other kind, the tumultuous spasmodic variety which kills. I explain that he is not averse to drawing down the temple on top of himself, to fertilising the soil with his own blood and that of others, to bring about the new order. I do not attempt to define his ideology. I merely say that he is dedicated to it above loyalty to state, to human life, to his own survival. I leave the reader to fill in the blanks from the public record. This is an absolute calumny. It is a savage misrepresentation. Sebastian’s credo—which he does indeed value above almost anything else—is that no single idea, no map of progress, no theory should ever advance in the world at the cost of a single human life. Sebastian loathes the statistics with which he is so able. He is interested exclusively in histories, because where numbers of the dead are only numbers, stories of them evoke tragedy.
According to Sebastian, ideas have run away with the world. He hates chain stores and fast-food restaurants, mass-produced items and fashionable clothes—any instance of something which is repeated across the world regardless of local context. These things deny the uniqueness of each moment and each person. They function as if we were all printed out of plastic, like egg boxes, and they try to make us function the same way. They are the intrusion of perfection into our grubby, smelly, sweaty living place.
I imply that he would therefore like to blow them up. But I do not say so. And nor, to my own surprise, do I do the same for Aline. I do not say that she is a siren and a Charybdis. I paint her as an innocent: a virginal, unsophisticated creature drawn to sex and somehow always making it her first time. And it occurrs to me as I do this that perhaps it’s true.
George Copsen reads this mendacious opus, and either believes it or believes something or somehow is served by it, because they let me go and do not kill me or even ever officially arrest me, although a burly non-sergeant leans towards me as I walk free from the internment building and murmurs ferociously the single word “donkeys.”
Fortuitously, this part of the debt is easily discharged—Gonzo has recently re-encountered Lydia Copsen, and she appears to have blossomed into a very attractive, worshipful freshman of abundant cleavage and mightily pneumatic disposition, and the inevitable consequence of his taking her out to apologise is that the plaster falls off my wall and my paintings shudder and I miss Aline more than ever, as Gonzo and Lydia enjoy some after-dinner coffee in the adjoining room. This is almost certainly not what the general intended, but I have no intention of letting on and nor, apparently, does the much-pleased Lydia. Gonzo has that effect on some women. George Lourdes Copsen is satisfied as well (though not, I devoutly hope, in the same fashion), and I continue my studies at Jarndice with a deeper understanding of the nature of power and a degree of caution regarding my associations. The next time I see Aline’s face is years later at a stag party. She is starring in a sophisticated picture called Butt Before You Go, a rendering into the erotic milieu of Gone With the Wind, in which the male protagonist (the renowned penile thespian Coitus Clay) subtly and tastefully coaxes a string of comely wenches to levels of bliss untold by means of non-standard penetrations. Despite being unashamedly pornographic, Butt Before You Go has a curious naivety about it, a kind of safety, perhaps in part because Coitus Clay seems genuinely affectionate towards his principal partner. Identification is difficult, because he is pictured mostly from below, but after a moment I am able to abstract the chiselled features of Sebastian from the lusty visage gurning before me.
More immediately, the product of my near-death experience in an electric chair is a large amount of hard work culminating in a considerable surprise when I receive my grades: I have scored in the top category. Gonzo, meanwhile, has achieved a middling result, which bothers him not at all. But here is another first time: in something which the world feels is important I am ahead of my best friend.
Chapter Four
Employment sought and found;
the nature of the universe;
Gonzo, again.
MR., AHMM, hello, right. I see. Sorry. Ahhh . . . Ms. Brent?” Oleana Brent is the third person to leapfrog me in the office of Tolcaster & Ream. Not that she has physically leapt over me. Oleana Brent is a dignified, skeletal creature who would not risk damaging her portable froideur by engaging in gymnastics in a corporate waiting room, even if it was the kind of corporation which rather liked that sort of thing. She sits, dour and forlorn with a cup of vending machine decaf and a magazine she brought with her which has no pictures in it. Her head comes up smoothly and she walks into the office as if she is expecting to be immersed in cold water and teased by kindergarteners.
Martin Raddle was kind enough to point out, when Susan de Vries (Asst. VP i/c Personnel@T&Rplc, but not SWALK, UNHCR or DOA, though she no doubt aspires) erroneously called him in advance of me, that I was on the list before him. Susan de Vries made a sort of flapping gesture to imply that this would all come out in the wash, and Martin grimaced an apology and went on in. De Vries made a similar wriggly motion when I politely attempted to prevent her from repeating this mistake with Govinda Lancaster. Now Oleana Brent marches into the inner sanctum and it is clear that the game is already over. Four years of student buncoboothing has taught me to recognise a rigged table when I see one, and this isn’t so much a question of find the lady as lose her. And lo and behold, my interview (set for nine) is the last of the day, cannot be fitted in and will I come back next week?
I am the elite of the educational production line. There is no point in my coming back next week. I am being given the Spanish archer (“el bow,” if you are wondering) and my return next week would probably precipitate a mass exodus from the back of the building. I have been weighed and found wanting, and I never even saw the scales. I know this because it is getting to be a familiar feeling. The fix is, for some reason, in.
At Brightling Fourdale Klember, I was nodded through an unexciting discussion by two bored execs who explained at the start that they had already selected their candidates this year—and then rushed me out so they could speak to a promising young man from the Lister School of Economics. Melisande-Vedette-Farmer Inc. did not answer my letter. Tolcaster & Ream do not seem to be interested in talking to me either. I depart, so as to avoid being carried out by security.
So it goes. Sempler & Hoit do not wish to employ me. Nor do International Solutions & Development. At Barnard-Fisch AG we end up talking about the weather in more detail than I expected, and I realise that the interview has in some sense gone off the rails when Mr. Lange-Lieman desires that I repeat the defining features of cumulonimbus and seems almost alarmed when I stray back to the topic of employment. Finally, at Cadoggan GMbH my interviewer has at least the decency to explain what is bugging her.
“It’s rather unusual,” she explains, “for a candidate file to have a secure annexe.”
I was not aware that mine did, but she explains that this is why it is called secure.
“What does it say?” I ask. She does not know. This too is of the nature of the thing. It might say that I am an undercover operative. It might say that I am suspected of felonious activity abroad, or (and I am suddenly sitting on a slick, soggy cushion again) it might indicate that I have at some stage been associated with undesirable elements. I open my mouth to talk about Aline, but my interviewer shushes me. If I know the contents of the file, I should bear in mind that that information has been deemed classified, and she has no desire to be
apprised of it in contravention of Section 1, para (ii) of the Information Act and 15, (vi) of the Dissemination & Control Act, and several assorted acts and orders which are themselves secret under section 23, (paras x–xxi) of a piece of legislation whose name is also too sensitive for general release. Unfortunately, with this significant question mark hanging over me, she also cannot offer me a job. And nor, as I have discovered, can anyone else.
Gonzo is unavailable, owing to a pressing romantic assignation with someone, or actually someones. Elisabeth Soames is my second call, and it transpires she is at home in Cricklewood Cove. I visit. I explain. Elisabeth wears the particular lack of expression I associate with rolling eyes and obvious answers, and then asks me which of my tutors at Jarndice best understands the real world. I ponder briefly—many Jarndice professors have worked in business and the law, science and the arts. None of them, really, gives the impression that they are worldly, save one. I say his name. Elisabeth nods. I cannot shake the feeling that she was waiting for me to catch up. I ask about her. She says she’s now studying to be a reporter. She has the urge to travel. There are things she wishes to know. Her expression tells me that is as much information as I will get at this time, and so we walk, and I make her laugh, just once.
Before I leave, she kisses me lightly on the cheek. It is a chaste thing, of deep affection. I embrace her, and it occurs to me how slight she is, and how slender by comparison with my arms and chest. I am aware of these things because my arms encircle her completely, and while my left palm is pressed to her back to draw her close, my right hand touches my own shoulder. We draw apart, and she kisses me again, on the other cheek. There is just a trace of moisture on her lips, and they are very soft. The kiss lingers and tingles on me, but before I can look at her, examine her, she has turned and slipped away, and my train is coming.