‘I’m sorry!’
‘Modern multinationals in a high-choice environment are largely about image, customer perception and the moral integrity of the brand,’ Alison is telling Rick. ‘While everybody else is, rightly, focused on prompt product deliverance, positive quarterly results and increased shareholder value, Grayzr has an entire, vertically threaded division thinking about how we appear to the public and the various national and supranational regulatory and licensing bodies, not just right now but in the foreseeable future. It’s the sort of function that CEOs and the board are involved in as a matter of course across all industries but Grayzr intrinsically recognises that the positional privilege and remuneration-inspired lifestyle gap implicit between those in such positions and their concerns’ fundamental client-base make that task challenging without a dedicated in-house heuristic support structure, providing concept provenance, positional analysis and ethical guidance.’ She pauses, then puts her head to one side a little to look at Rick, who is staring at her, mouth hanging open. She shakes her head. ‘No?’ She shrugs, frowning. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know that I can put it any more simply than that without trivialising it.’
‘Yeah,’ Haze mutters, after a moment. ‘What she said.’
‘I think Alison means they try to look ahead, for the company they work for,’ Pris says, squeezing Rick’s hand. ‘To make sure it doesn’t appear evil.’
‘They watch their bosses’ arses,’ Hol says to Rick.
Guy looks at him and says, ‘They’re cunts.’
Alison whirls to face Guy. ‘Do you fucking mind? There’s no need for that sort of language!’
Guy continues to look at Rick, takes a sip of his Guinness and says, ‘They’re touchy cunts.’
‘Sure you won’t come back to the ranch, Rick?’ Guy says. ‘Hot and cold running sarcasm in every fucking room.’
We’re outside The Miller’s Boy, on the wide curved sweep of pavement guarding the entrance to Uppergate Pedestrianised Precinct; I’ve been to get the Volvo, which is now sitting idling in one of the Disabled spaces (legally; we got a Disabled badge for Guy over a year ago). Guy is resting against a black-painted, Heritage-themed litter bin, his forearm crutch splayed out to one side as he leans over a roll-up, protecting the makings from the rain with his head. I got the brolly from the car and went to shelter him with it but he told me to stop fussing, so I’m standing nearby waiting for them to sort themselves out.
Rain patters on the stretched fabric above me. If you turn the umbrella right so the saggy bit’s behind you, you can’t see it’s broken.
‘Nah, my mate’s picking me up in half an hour, thanks,’ Rick says, pulling his collar up and holding his newspaper over his head. ‘We’re off to near his, by Preston. He’s got me a spare rod and everything; I’m sorted.’
Paul looks up at the winter-grey sky from inside the fur-lined hood of his white parka. ‘Bit late to be going fishing, by the time you get there, isn’t it, Rick?’
‘Yeah, we’re losing the light here,’ Hol says. She has the hiccups. Another hic! shakes her body and she looks away, stamping her foot in annoyance and tutting. (And actually it’s only half past three.)
Rob and Alison are standing under a giant, colourful, Grayzr-branded umbrella. They brought their own car; Rob has stayed sober, though Alison hasn’t drunk much anyway.
‘Not for night fishing,’ Rick says, grinning at Paul.
‘Ah,’ Paul says. He turns to Pris, who is holding onto Rick’s left upper arm with both hands. ‘That’s not code, is it?’
Pris laughs. ‘Sure you won’t come back?’ she says, looking up at Rick.
‘Yeah, mate,’ Haze says, approaching and holding up his right hand for a high five, which Rick responds to dutifully. ‘I feel really bad, now, I really do. I feel I should have made more of an effort, know what I mean? With the offer of the bed and everything. It’s just with this back of mine, you know … But you should come back. You should. And we could still switch rooms around or something, eh?’ he says, looking at Pris.
‘Nah, seriously,’ Rick is saying. ‘You lot have your weekend together; I’ll be fine. I’d just be like a spare one at a wedding, I would, wouldn’t I? You lot are like Monty bloody Python. Wouldn’t be right.’
‘No!’ Pris says, almost hanging off his arms now, pivoting. ‘You’d be great!’
‘You’d fit in brilliant, you would,’ Haze tells him.
‘Don’t listen to a fucking word, Rick,’ Guy says, lighting up the rolly. ‘You’re well out of it. I was just being polite. These fuckers have decades of form. You stick with your gravel ponds, chum.’
‘Yeah,’ I hear Hol say quietly as she looks away, ‘shallow and full of carp.’
I fold the five, bank-fresh, ten-pound notes and stick them into my number four safe, which is a hole in the concrete behind the tiles of the fireplace in my room. I nipped out and changed the fifty for five tens in the Lloyds branch next door to the pub while they were all putting on their coats and arguing about the bill (Paul and Rob/Alison both insisted on paying for everything but eventually split it; Hol left the tip).
I have five ‘safes’ – as I’ve called them since I was a kid – dotted around my bedroom, plus a few others elsewhere scattered throughout the house and in one or two of the outbuildings. To the best of my knowledge, none of them has ever been compromised. The one behind the loose tiles of the fireplace is a fairly quick one to get to and relatively commodious after I hollowed it out when I was ten or eleven. I used to hide food in there sometimes; it has a maximum capacity of two standard Mars bars.
Another good one is inside the hollow frame of my ancient iron bedstead; you unscrew the brass ball on the bottom left upright and reach in with your finger to feel for an inconspicuous black thread superglued to the inside; you pull it up carefully and there’s a plastic container at the end that looks like a sort of giant med capsule. It can hold one Mars bar.
I need to get back down to the others, but I take a quick look round the room, just to reassure myself.
My room is my haven, my citadel. I fitted a bolt to the door years ago so when I’m in here I’m fully secure, though Guy was never one for just walking in anyway.
The bed is just a single but that’s okay as there’s just one of me. It used to be a real plus, it being small, as it meant it left more room on the floor for other stuff like the Scalextric set I used to have, and battle landscapes made of sheets draped over pillows and cushions and piles of books, where I’d play with my model soldiers. I don’t bother with that stuff any more, of course; it was all kind of retro at the time anyway – basically I was getting birthday and Christmas presents that people Guy’s age wanted when they were my age, not what I wanted – but now all that limited, physical gubbins has been replaced with the worlds that exist inside the computer and are distributed across the Cloud’s server farms scattered across the world, where HeroSpace and the other game environments are.
The current machine – sitting on an old dressing table, so flanked with infolding side-mirrors – is a two-year-old Dell with a sixty-centimetre flat screen. I used to really care about the hardware and built my own computer when I was fourteen, but it seems kind of irrelevant these days; just the gateway you pass through to get to the landscapes on the far side. Big screens and fast graphics chips are useful, but they don’t compensate for lack of skill or experience.
The main expense I incurred over the last few years was getting in decent broadband. Guy doesn’t even know about that. I feel a bit bad having this wired straight into the Dell and not home-hubbing wi-fi throughout the house, but I need it for intense HeroSpace moments, and letting Guy know about the broadband might raise awkward questions about where the money for it came from. The broadband is like my secret, high-speed tunnel out of the house into the rest of the real world, and those beyond.
I have a bookcase full of books and old toys, a few CDs, a third-generation iPod with a cracked screen and a travel dock, and a che
st of drawers with clothes. The room has a single, very worn old carpet covering the floorboards. It’s allegedly Persian but actually made in Belgium according to the label underneath. The room’s other principal feature is translucent plastic Really Useful Boxes, some individual ones and some stacks, varying in capacity from one point four to sixty-four litres.
I like boxes that stack and that fit neatly inside other boxes. I keep a pair of cardboard tubes from whisky bottles for no other reason than the fact one fits so neatly inside the other that when you insert the smaller one inside the larger and let go, it takes a full fourteen seconds for it to move slowly all the way down, air sighing smoothly out around it. I suspect even the Volvo’s pistons aren’t that tight.
‘You’ve learned the words to “Gangnam Style”?’ Hol says, plonking herself down on the velvet sofa in the sitting room. She starts laughing.
‘Yeah,’ Haze is saying, ‘I heard this girl on the radio doing it and I thought, You know what? That sounds quite cool, that does. That’s better than just doing all the actions, like.’
‘But you can do all the actions?’ Paul asks, a deep frown on his face.
‘Yeah,’ Haze says. ‘Of course.’
‘Thank God,’ Paul says. He pours himself some red wine and holds the bottle towards Hol. ‘Sure I can’t …?’
‘Positive you can,’ Hol says, drinking from her pint glass of water, ‘but later, not right now.’
‘Pacing yourself, are you, Hol?’ Alison asks. Like the rest, she’s sitting where she sat last night.
‘Yup.’
‘Pacing yourself?’ Guy says. ‘Fuck me, Hol. When did this radical new regime surface?’
‘No idea,’ Hol admits. ‘Must have crept up on me.’
‘Think I’ll pass on that.’ Guy takes a last drag on the roll-up he started outside the pub, then folds it with deliberation into an old John Smith’s Bitter can by the side of his seat.
‘Yes,’ Hol says, looking at him. ‘Late-onset maturity remains a distant dream for you, doesn’t it, Guy?’
‘Yeah, Hol,’ Guy says. ‘Looks like I’m going to get to miss out on it altogether. Even the chance of it, ta.’
Hol looks at him for a while longer. Her eyelids droop and she shakes her head. ‘Yeah, that might have been insensitive,’ she says. ‘My apologies.’
‘Another first,’ Rob mutters. He holds a glass out to Paul. ‘I will, Paul, if you don’t mind.’
‘My pleasure,’ Paul says, reaching.
‘Fill it full as you like,’ Rob says as Paul pours. ‘I’ve got some catching up to do.’
‘Certainly have.’
‘Me too,’ Alison says, also holding out her glass. Then, to Rob, as he looks at her, she says, ‘Intending to maintain my lead, darling.’
‘Wasn’t aware it was actually a competition,’ Rob tells her.
Alison looks at him for a moment. ‘You’re right,’ she says, withdrawing the glass a second or so before Paul starts to pour. ‘No need for both of us to get drunk and objectionable. I’ll make myself a nice cup of tea like a good little girl, shall I?’ She gets up and leaves, twirling the glass in her hands.
Rob looks at Paul and rolls his eyes.
‘It’s all right, love,’ Guy is saying to Hol. ‘We all know I’m dying, but we’re all pretending otherwise. It’s just that I’m the only one who has to live with it.’
He starts coughing, though you can see he’s trying to stop, not putting it on to prove his point.
Hol is looking at me. ‘Think you’re forgetting your boy wonder here,’ she tells Guy.
‘Nah,’ Guy says, glancing at me and clearing his throat. ‘He’s the batman, I’m the officer. Eh, kid?’
‘Yeah,’ Pris says, settling into the other sofa and curling her legs underneath herself. She’s been up to her room to change after getting wet in the rain and now wears a fresh pair of jeans and a loose, too-big silvery jumper that keeps falling off one shoulder or the other. It looks like she’s not wearing a bra. ‘How you doing, Kit?’
‘I’m fine, thanks,’ I tell her. I’m sat on the pouffe again, near Hol. I raise my teacup. ‘Got my tea.’ I’m quite full; I ordered only a couple of starters in the pub, anticipating Guy wouldn’t manage his main, which I got to finish. ‘Might have some wine, later.’
‘You found that fucking tape yet?’ Guy asks me.
There’s sudden silence in the room. Guy looks round at them all and says, ‘What, I’m not supposed to know? I’m not fucking deaf.’
‘Well,’ Paul says, sitting back in his seat. ‘This is a bit more like it.’
He doesn’t look at me, which is good. I hope he doesn’t want his fifty back.
‘Where is it, Guy?’ Rob asks.
‘No fucking idea,’ Guy says. ‘Might have recorded over it anyway, years ago. Not fucking kidding, either. Think I did. Record over it, I mean. My first living will.’ I fetched Guy another can of bitter before I sat down earlier; he opens it and drinks. ‘Little bit of ferrous-oxide irony for you there.’
‘Wouldn’t be with your lawyers, would it?’ Paul asks.
‘Don’t fucking trust lawyers, Paul,’ Guy says to him.
Paul smiles slowly. ‘Me neither.’
‘Who does?’ Haze says. He’s building a joint.
‘So it’s not with your lawyers?’ Paul asks.
‘Like I said,’ Guy says, ‘I don’t know where the fuck it is or what state it’s in but I think I might have recorded over it and then it became redundant anyway.’ He looks at me. ‘You’re very quiet, even for you, lad. Guilty conscience, or are we to take your silence in the negative? You haven’t found it then?’
‘I haven’t found it,’ I confirm. ‘I’ve not looked much. This morning I looked in the two old servants’ bedrooms above my room but it’s not likely to be there.’
‘So …’ Rob says, ‘… why did you look there?’
‘Because they’re above my room and I knew I wouldn’t be disturbing anybody when I started moving boxes about,’ I explain. I’m feeling a little hot after Guy’s remark about a guilty conscience. Annoyingly, he can usually tell when I’m trying to hide something. I think of the five tenners, folded into a neat compression of papery linen in their new hole-in-the-wall. ‘The other rooms up there are above somebody else’s room. I thought I might disturb people below if I searched in them.’
‘Ah,’ Pris says.
I used to disturb people. I bet I still could if I wanted to. At one time, way back when I was thirteen or fourteen, I had this thing about height. I’d just put on a growth spurt and I was – suddenly, it felt – nearly as tall then as I am now (one point nine-one metres then; one point nine-three now). For some reason I felt a real and pressing need to know how tall other people were. It’s amazing how few people are sure how tall they are, and how many add a few centimetres to their real height because they feel they need to, and how many, even now, measure themselves in imperial units, using hopelessly outdated feet and inches rather than the far more rational metric system. Even my own father wouldn’t tell me how tall he was, though I could see he was about eight or nine centimetres shorter than I was (eventually I measured him when he was lying drunk on the hall floor; one point eight-three).
I decided I needed a technique to discover how tall people were, objectively. Triangulation was never going to work; people are loath to stay still long enough while you measure the angle. You might as well ask them to take their shoes off and stand in a doorway with their back straight, and I knew from past experience how unsuccessful that was.
I tried attaching threads of different lengths weighted with little plastic beads to the tops of doorways, both here at home and in school, so they’d just brush against the heads of individuals passing underneath, but I discovered that people tend to flinch, instinctively, as soon as they feel their head or even their hair touch something hanging above them, which made the observational side of things a bit hit-or-miss, plus it was usually hard to see exactly which of a b
unch – or a little curtain – of threads they’d just made contact with or just missed. In theory you would need to hang up just one thread of a certain length at a time for each individual, gradually increasing the length of the thread/reducing the height being measured, until they just brushed the plastic bead and no more. With various people entering a room almost at random (as happens especially in school), this was almost impossible.
I gave up on that approach.
I decided to measure people while they slept, creeping into their rooms late at night to take a tape-measure to them in bed. This worked fine with Dad, who passed out fully clothed, on his back, on top of the covers, with the light on, at least once a week, and this may have given me a false sense of confidence in the technique. I knew I was reducing the sample size – it would mostly be restricted to Dad’s drinking buddies from the pub; the occasional ex-colleague from the local radio station (he was a presenter and producer on North 99 until his health got too bad); a sparse scattering of his few and mostly surly relatives; and his old uni pals: Hol, Paul, Rob, Alison, Haze and Pris, with or without other partners and subsidiary friends in tow.
As it turns out, though, most people lock their rooms at night, where possible, and/or sleep under the covers, making it hard to know which part of the bulge in the bedclothes is where their feet are to measure from, and/or they are amazingly light sleepers and tend to wake up and freak out when they see you padding stealthily up to them holding a tape-measure (or standing exasperated over them, trying gently to coax their legs straight). Plus, frankly, few people sleep lying flat out anyway; they tend to curl up a bit, making the measuring process highly problematic even without the whole waking-up-and-screaming thing.
I gave up on that method too, and just determined to get better at judging people’s heights, especially as they passed through doorways. Most modern domestic doorways are close to two metres in height, for example, and although Willoughtree House, being Victorian with minor-gentry pretensions, has taller doorways, not all of a uniform height, it was a trivial matter to memorise all of them and recalibrate for each.