When I find those I leaf through a few; they’re hard to handle and easy to tear because they’re so damp. I nearly give up, but eventually I find myself mentioned in the Births, Deaths and Marriages section. It’s in an edition dated nearly five weeks after I’m born. ‘To Mr Guy Hyndersley, a son, born 12 Arpil.’ Arpil. I find it oddly depressing that even the – much delayed, shamefully terse, small-detail-of-not-mentioning-who-the-mother-is – announcement of my arrival into the world contains a misprint.
I look through a few other papers from the year before, to see if there’s anything about us. All I find is a short obituary of Guy’s dad.
Dad’s parents split up not long after he was born. His dad went off to London with his new woman and his mum moved back here, to the family home, with her parents. She was an only child. She became a lecturer in Classics at Bewford and, later, the first woman ever to become a professor in the university. Her parents died within a year of each other while she pursued her career and brought up Dad with the help of various aunts and nannies.
Then, when Guy was twelve, she died of ovarian cancer. Her husband returned; they’d never divorced and she’d left the house to him anyway. He came back alone, though he had a few different girlfriends over the years once he settled here. I don’t think Guy and his dad ever really got on.
When Guy was seventeen his dad met somebody else and effectively moved out, back to London again. He was an antiques dealer and apparently quite a gifted pianist, though not concert standard; he’d long before worked out there would be more money in antiques.
According to Guy, his father really only came back to the house to use it as a place to store stock he’d bought locally and would later move down to the showroom in London; he was back to see Guy every weekend at first, then every fortnight, then once a month, and so on. He died the year I was born, from a heart attack. ‘He was a fat, boozy, sixty-a-day man whose main exercise was levering himself out of the car or away from the bar,’ Guy told me, years ago. ‘Well, that and industrial-scale coughing. His expiry did not exactly come as a total shock.’
‘SHOCK DEATH OF BEWFORD MAN IN LONDON.’ That and a single, not terribly illuminating paragraph is all that Guy’s dad’s death merited in the paper.
Anyway, all this might be why Guy ran a bit wild, before, during and even after his university years. But especially during, when he had so many accomplices.
There’s a creaking, iron-framed, single bed in the room where the newspapers are. I leave the copies from the twelve months before my birth lying out on the old mattress, to dry as best they can. The mattress is stained, as though somebody’s spilled a full pot of tea over it. I glance up at the ceiling; it’s probably a leak up there that’s caused this. The ceiling plaster looks damp. I haul the bed into the middle of the room, under a drier part of the ceiling, as quietly as I can, but the action still seems to resonate throughout the house. I pull the mattress off the bed – it’s amazingly heavy – and dump it more or less where it was, except on the floorboards, not on the bedstead. The mattress may well have been providing a sort of floodplain for the leak above, trapping the moisture within it to stop it from descending into my room, directly underneath.
I start to lay out the newspapers I want to dry on the chain-link surface stretched between the side-bars of the bed frame.
‘Found you,’ Alison says from the doorway. ‘Need a hand?’
‘Oh, hi. Yes.’ I’ve just finished laying the papers out to dry. ‘Let’s do the room above you. Or is Rob asleep?’
‘Skyping with his dad,’ Alison says, looking round the room, wrinkling her nose. ‘Brazil or Argentina or something. Smells a bit in here, doesn’t it?’
I try to keep a sort of mental Fart Log for such moments. Reviewing it, I can find no recent activity. ‘Dampness,’ I tell her. I nod upwards. ‘The roof leaks.’
Alison sighs, looks like she’s deflating. She shakes her head. ‘Sad old place, these days,’ she says quietly.
I don’t know what to say, so I don’t say anything.
After a moment I say, ‘Let’s try the other room.’ I wrap the old T-shirt round my hand, reach up and take the bulb out. It goes very dark; the single window faces north and there are no curtains but there’s little light left in the sky. There’s no light in the corridor outside save for what comes up the narrow stairwell from the floor beneath. ‘Just the one good bulb up here,’ I explain to Alison.
‘Marvellous.’
‘I just think we need to do this logically.’
‘Why is starting from the attic logical?’
‘You need a programme for this sort of thing, Kit. A shape, a design, something everybody can follow. There has to be elegance. That’s primary.’
‘But the attic’s just got lots of old empty boxes in it,’ I explain.
‘One of which might contain the tape.’
‘Not really.’
‘You can’t be sure, Kit. The whole point is that it’s somewhere we don’t know, so we have to look everywhere. If we start from the top and eliminate that, then we’ve made progress. You need the feeling of making progress.’
‘Uh-huh. Thing is, Guy got me to move everything heavy in the loft down here or into the outhouses years ago when he started worrying about the house falling down; he thought it might be top-heavy.’
Alison frowns at me. ‘Really?’
‘That’s what he told me. He was worried that the quarry edge coming closer might shake everything to bits and bring it all down on top of us.’
‘That’s not likely to happen, is it?’
‘I don’t think it ever was, but we did it anyway. All that’s left up there is empty boxes that things like the TV came in, or computers, and, you know, other household appliances. All they have in them is the expanded polystyrene packing they came with.’
‘So they’re not totally empty?’
‘They’re as good as totally empty.’
‘Maybe, but you can’t be absolutely sure the packing material is all they contain.’
‘I’m pretty sure.’
‘Pretty sure doesn’t cover it, mister,’ Alison says, and makes an expression that I think indicates she means to be funny.
‘I’d put it at about ninety-nine per cent sure,’ I tell her.
This throws her, briefly. ‘That’s what I mean, though, Kit; you have to be one hundred per cent sure.’
‘Yes, ultimately. But there’s a lot of places in and around the house where the likelihood of finding the tape is a lot higher than one per cent, so we ought to prioritise those locations first, because we haven’t got unlimited time; we really want to find this before lunch on Monday.’
‘You still can’t be sure it’s not up there,’ Alison says, her gaze flicking to the ceiling. ‘And meanwhile we are wasting valuable time. So we should get to it.’
‘Well, I was kind of … doing …’ I say, waving at the boxes I’ve already checked. I can let her fill in the gaps.
We’re still in the room above mine; I put the bulb back in when we got into this argument about how to conduct the search.
She nods once. ‘So we need to move on. Come on.’ She nods towards the stair head, where the trapdoor to the loft is. She makes to move, then stops when she sees that I’m not shifting. ‘Look, Kit,’ she says, hands on her hips. ‘This is important to me. Very important. To me and to Rob. Most important to me, though. Do you understand that?’ (I just raise my eyebrows.) ‘There are things on that tape that would affect my career a lot more than Rob’s, a lot more than Paul’s. They’re men; they’re allowed to get away with more, they always are. I’m under more threat from that fucking tape than anybody else here; the men because they’re men, and Pris and Hol because they have less to lose. I’m not running a couple of homes for pensioners stinking of urine, I’m not writing about films nobody watches in magazines nobody reads; I’m on course to have the kind of power that can buy and sell the sort of politician Paul dreams of being. So I need this done properly, do you understan
d? Now come on!’
This is a knotty one. I’m as good as certain the tape won’t be up there, but there is some force to Alison’s argument about absolute certainty, and a kind of elegance in having a clear top-down plan, only I’m starting to feel like she’s insisting on this just to establish who’s in control here (her, she would like), and my automatic reaction is to resist.
If she was a man I would definitely resist, because men tend to be more forceful and pushy and always trying to be top dog in situations like this, and that’s sort of like bullying, which Guy always told me to fight back against, even if it hurt. But Alison’s female, and I take her argument about things generally being easier for men, and them getting away with more, and so my instinct is to defer to her just so as to not be like a typical male, refusing to listen to women and sure that they (the man) has got it right. On the other hand, she has kind of been acting a bit like a man in this. Tricky.
Alison stops, half turns and smiles a big smile at me, tipping her head to one side, letting her neat blonde hair fall half across her face and sort of flicking it back a little as she says, in a subtly different, slightly lower, softer voice, ‘Just do this for me, Kit; come on. Please?’
I have a suspicion this is what is called coquettishness. I believe I’m immune to it; in fact I’m so immune to it I did once think I might be gay, even though I’m pretty sure I’m not (better than ninety-nine per cent sure).
‘Anyway, there’s no light up in the attic,’ I tell her. ‘We’d need torches.’
‘You must have torches,’ she says, still smiling.
‘I have a torch,’ I tell her. ‘It’s small, though.’
Actually we have a ruggedised, plug-in, portable, five-hundred-watt, halogen work light on a long curly lead in the garage, which we could fetch and which would illuminate the whole loft, but frankly I’m trying to put her off so there’s no need to mention it.
‘Great.’ She claps her hands, all business again. ‘We’ve got some multi-squillion candle-power thing in the car. I’ll get that.’
‘Okay,’ I say. ‘You look up there, I’ll look down here.’
‘O— what?’ This has thrown her too, as it was kind of meant to. ‘No. We need to do this together, Kit,’ she says.
‘No we don’t.’
‘But yes we do. You’re the local knowledge; we need your expertise up there.’
‘But my local knowledge is telling me the tape isn’t up there in the first place.’
‘Ah,’ she says, and smiles tightly and shakes her head, eyelids fluttering briefly closed. I think she means to look confident but in reality she looks like she’s having to stall while she extemporises an answer to this. ‘That’s mistaking strategic knowledge for tactical knowledge,’ she says (which is quite quick, I suppose). ‘Leave the strategy to me, Kit; that’s what I’m good at. That’s my job. That’s what they pay me for. Trust me.’
‘Well anyway,’ I say – breezily, I hope, because, although I’ve become a bit hot during our little exchange, I’ve also thoroughly enjoyed it – ‘thanks for the offer of help, Ali.’ (I don’t think I’ve ever called her ‘Ali’ before.) ‘I’m going to look in the room above yours. There’s a stepladder behind the door of the last room on this side if you want to get up into the attic.’
Me and my working bulb head off to the room above her and Rob.
I think I hear her mutter ‘Prick’ in the darkness, but I’m not sure.
After a couple of minutes I hear her dragging the stepladder noisily along the hall into position under the loft trapdoor and banging it open, then clumping around above my head. It sounds like she’s just letting the boxes fall to the floor up there, but they don’t actually make much impact because, like I said, they’re empty, or as good as.
Hol comes up after another couple of minutes and we get through the boxes in two of the old servants’ rooms twice as fast, mostly in a companionable silence, save for the clumping.
‘Dunder-headed, wart-raddled, slug-case of bilious turgidity.’
‘Mollocking, mince-witted slack-jaw.’
‘Gruel-brained, unlanced-boil-visaged, sense-prolapsed haemorrhoid-suckler.’
‘Eew. Yuck.’
‘Auto-stuprated, faecal-faced excrementiphage.’
‘Binary-dumbfounded, synapse-deficient femtowit.’
‘Why, you scrotum-faced, pillous-featured fartle-butt.’
‘While you, sir, are a wit-wrecked, scurvy-tongued, mucus-palmed, cretinous pinprick.’
‘Ooooh!’
‘Well, you’re a gangrenously, tripe-bollocked waste of flatulence.’
‘Oh! Harsh.’
‘You blunder-brained, coprophageous, cortex-curdled slap-basket.’
‘Scrofulous, addle-pated geezertwat!’
‘How dare you, you blither-wattled, sump-gargling breeze-blockhead.’
‘Ham-brained, hair-fisted, cess-slathered pus-scuttle!’
‘Scheech!’
‘Space-wasting, worm-infested, bilge-veined, Hideometer-deforming scartle-dunce!’
‘Did you say “Hideometer”?’
‘That’s what it says here.’
‘What’s a Hideometer?’
‘Measures hideousness, obviously. Right, Kit?’
‘That was the idea.’
‘All right, but “scartle-dunce”? What’s a scartle-dunce?’
‘I’ve no idea. What’s a “scartle”, for that matter?’
‘Kit?’
I shrug. My face is burning but I’m also smiling. ‘I made that one up,’ I confess. ‘I needed something for the rhythm of it and “scartle” just fitted. I was going to replace it with something better but in the end I didn’t. I suppose I was kind of trying to see what I could get away with.’
‘Quite a lot,’ Paul says, ‘by the look of it.’
He and Pris and Hol have been reading out some of my HeroSpace insults.
‘These are brilliant, Kit!’ Pris says. ‘You’re a fucking genius of insulting! And you actually win battles like this?’
‘Well, not exactly battles, but there’s a sort of game-engine-remuned subculture of insult trading, and providing you get the vote from your fellow gamers, there will be a victor and a vanquished, and so you can earn points, yeah. It’s quite democratic, really.’
‘You literally trade insults?’ Paul says. He nods. ‘That’s quite cool.’
‘Yeah, also,’ Hol says, looking at Rob and Alison, sitting across from her, ‘have you been tutoring the lad in your ludicrous management guru-speak?’ Rob grins, Ali frowns. Hol looks at me. ‘“Game-engine-remuned”, Kit?’ Her eyes narrow. ‘Actually, just “remuned”?’
‘Leave him alone, Hol,’ Haze says. ‘Don’t pick him up on every word.’
‘No,’ I say, ‘it’s fair; “remuned” is just a word that’s used in the game to mean an activity or … a creation that’s worth points. I don’t think it’s in the dictionaries. Well, not yet.’
We’re in the sitting room after dinner. (I took a bunch of curries out of the freezer: a general thumbs-up, though a couple of dishes were judged ‘a bit hot’ and Haze gargled milk at one point. I think he was just trying to show off. I believe Dad was about to complain about them being too hot until other people did.) Now Hol, folded cross-legged on the couch, has her laptop balanced on her knees, plugged into HeroSpace. She has an account, an avatar – everything. I had no idea. She just likes to watch, she says. (That got an ‘Ooooh!’ from Haze, too.)
You can do that, in the game; providing you never try to accumulate points, you can just wander around most Territories, NearSpaces, Adjoinalities and Adjunctions without ever getting harmed. You’re a bit like a ghost. Quite a lot of people do this, so they can follow a preferred player on their quests and campaigns – a travelling fan base – or just tour the scenery and the architecture; tourists, ogling, basically. Either way they get called Voys, but it’s not too much of an insult. Not any more than, say, ‘newbie’ is – just a description. The game
is so vast, so famous and so complex these days that a lot of people thinking of joining in as full-on, points-collecting Players like to spend some time as a Voy first, just to see if they think they’re going to like it and fit in, and to start learning the rules and ropes by observation rather than bitter experience.
So Hol’s a Voy, and she’s followed me for over a year. I’m not sure how to feel about this: a little flattered, I guess, but also a little like my privacy has been invaded. She logged in to let the others hear some of my choicer insults from the last couple of seasons of the tavern-based, Pro Insult-Trading series. Now Paul and Pris are leaning over the couch behind her, one over each shoulder, watching her screen as she scrolls down the list of Previously Victorious Disparagements, which presents as gold-leaf-tooled gothic script on polished teak boards, a bit like the list of former mayors that hangs above the grand central staircase in Bewford city hall or the roll-call of vice-chancellors in one of the university’s older colleges.
Paul points at the screen. ‘Carbuncle-strewn, slump-buttocked denizen of the outer latriniverse!’ he declaims.
‘Limp-tooled, spunk-deficient, sputum-defiled, turd-stuffed crass basket!’ Pris yells back. ‘Ha ha ha.’
‘Can we fucking go back to something resembling normal fucking English?’ Guy says, pulling on a stunted rolly. ‘This bollocks is doing me head in.’
‘Nah, this is a laugh,’ Haze tells him. He’s rolling a joint. Ali has insisted on opening a window to let the smoke out; I had to fetch a blanket to cover Guy, who had immediately complained about the cold.
‘Suppurating, brochette-brained chump-head,’ Hol says. Possibly at Guy.
‘Incompetence-redefining ignoramax!’ Paul replies.
‘“Ignoramax”?’ Rob says. ‘That another made-up one, Kit?’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Also, earlier? I shouldn’t really have got away with “breeze-blockhead”, because that particular one was in a Dark Ages TymeShift Adjoinality, where breeze-blocks have yet to be invented.’ I frown, thinking about this. ‘I could still lose points, if somebody spots that.’ They’re all looking at me. ‘I think it’s because most Players are still American and they call breeze-blocks “cinder blocks”, so they haven’t noticed it.’