Read the book: «Seeing the Wires»

PATRICK THOMPSON

Seeing the Wires

Dedication

For Em

Epigraph

Even in Dudley, ritual murder is frowned upon.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Part One: Sam, aged thirty

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Part Two: Sam, aged twenty

Chapter Five

Part Three: Sam, aged thirty

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Part Four: Sam, aged twenty

Chapter Nine

Part Five: Sam, aged thirty

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Part Six: Sam, aged twenty

Chapter Thirteen

Part Seven: Sam, aged thirty

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Part Eight: Sam, aged twenty

Chapter Seventeen

Part Nine: Sam, aged thirty

Chapter Eighteen

Part Ten: Sam, aged twenty-five

Chapter Nineteen

Part Eleven: Sam, aged thirty

Chapter Twenty

Keep Reading

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

PART ONE

Sam, aged thirty

Chapter One
I

When I was a student, I used to have a job on the building sites. Nowadays, I steer clear of building sites. It was a different story then, though, because of this loan that the country had been good enough to arrange for me. I had known for some time that at some point the country or, to be more specific, the Bastard And Shitwit Building Society (I’ve changed the names, for legal reasons) would want their money back.

I’d spent it. I’d spent some of it on useful work-related things like books and pens and paper and all of that. I’d spent far more of it on having a nice time, and from the way the professionally unemotional creatures at the B&S Building Society behaved, I wasn’t sure they’d understand about having a nice time. They certainly wouldn’t understand about me paying for it with their money. I suppose it was their money, really. Technically. Then again, they’d given it to me, and anyone could have told them I was unreliable. If they’d asked Jack – my best friend, who we’ll get to presently – he’d have told them flat out: do not lend this man any money. Jack never did. Jack knew me well. Until I went to university, we got on tremendously. After that, I didn’t see much of him until I stopped being a student. He didn’t like students. He preferred groups like Psychic TV, and filling himself with metal odds and ends. He’d been spending a lot of time with Eddie Finch, who worked on one of the local papers. I’ll tell you about them later on.

To be honest, I didn’t go to university because I had a great career planned. I went because things were uncomfortable at home. There were family troubles.

I’ll tell you about those later on, too.

The building society and I exchanged letters – theirs frank and to the point, mine circumspect. They agreed that I could pay back all of the money I owed them at thirty pounds a week for the rest of my life, with the clear hint that if I didn’t keep up, they’d find a far worse arrangement.

‘You’ve had a lucky escape,’ the manager, Mr Fallow, advised me.

I had, I thought. I might have been forced to work there until the debt was cleared. I told him how grateful I was, shook his hand, and left him straightening his tie.

I had a degree – a second in Historic Peculiarities, which we’ll get to presently – and I was more or less able-bodied. How difficult would it be to get the sort of job where I wouldn’t even notice the loss of thirty pounds a week?

As it turned out, very difficult indeed. The only office jobs going were for people inputting data, and they paid low wages. I was not qualified to be a team leader or supervisor. I knew this, because during the course of what felt like several hundred interviews several hundred people told me so. The building society became concerned, and started writing to me with helpful suggestions. To give me that extra bit of impetus, they charged me for each letter. When I asked why, they explained that it was to cover their administrative costs. They charged me for that letter too. I doubted this. I had seen their adverts in the job pages and they paid around three pounds a day. They were charging me fifteen pounds a letter. It surely didn’t take one person five days (or five people a day each) to write a letter three lines long with my name misspelt at the top of it.

I wrote to them, including these calculations, and asked them to take into consideration the administrative costs incurred in the writing of my own letter. If they would pay thirty pounds into my account, that should cover it.

They paid the money in. Mr Fallow was nothing if not fair. Then they sent me fifteen letters explaining that they had done so, charging me fifteen pounds per letter. I could no longer afford food or rent. I explained this to my landlord, Mr Jellicoe, who said, ‘Don’t have food then.’

At least he didn’t charge me for the advice.

I spread my job-searching net a little wider. I ruled in some areas I had ruled out. I considered more physical jobs. Eventually, I got a job on a building site on the bleak outskirts of Dudley, helping to dig the foundations of what turned out to be the ugliest factory in existence.

It was easy enough work.

I would rise at seven, get washed and dressed, and be at the bus stop by eight. Some time later, a white Bedford van would pull up, and I’d hop in. I had to use the van. I could have walked to the site – I live in Dudley, and it was less than a mile away – but collection by van was a condition of the job.

‘That’s what it’s there for,’ the foreman – Mr Link, who we’ll get to presently – told me.

I would get into the back of the van and spend a short, uncomfortable journey bouncing about on a stack of shovels, picks, and hefty sacks of gravel and sand. The van was driven by Darren, a short youth with a good-sized collection of foul language and a full head of very black hair, which looked dyed. The van was co-piloted by Spin, a black man who never spoke at all. They would pull into the bus stop and I would clamber into the back and settle myself in among the implements, and as I closed the rear doors someone at the bus stop would say something disparaging.

I don’t know what it’s like in the rest of the world, but in Dudley the bus stops are where old people gather when they aren’t gathered at the post office. They like bus stops. They don’t like people jumping the queue. I wasn’t in the queue, strictly speaking, but they didn’t like me getting into a van at the bus stop before they had a chance to get on a bus and go to town and complain about how much everything cost and how many worrying new vegetables there were nowadays. I wouldn’t have minded one or two of the less obviously incontinent ones getting in the van and having a lift but we only went to the building site and there were no queues there for them to stand in.

There were trenches. I helped to dig them. I thought that building sites used mechanical diggers for the foundations. I asked Mr Link about it.

‘Well, we could,’ he said. ‘But you cost a lot less and the last JCB we had got stolen.’

‘Stolen?’

‘Joyriders. I can’t see what joy there is in a JCB, myself. I’d rather have a Jag.’

He did. It was part of being a foreman, Darren explained. The foreman had a Jag and everyone else shared a van and did all the work. That was the building trade according to Darren. It seemed simple enough.

Mr Link had – as well as the Jag – thinning black hair containing thick black grease, presumably placed there deliberately. He had sideburns several years after they were last fashionable and several years before they were next fashionable. He had watery eyes and looked uncomfortable in the hard hat he had to wear because of regulations. The main purpose of hard hats, Darren told me, was not to protect the heads of workmen. The main purpose of hard hats was to make visiting dignitaries look twats.

‘Office people,’ said Darren, ‘never get the hang of hats.’

Spin nodded, silently.

‘There you go, Spin agrees.’

Spin nodded again.

‘Thing is,’ said Darren, dragging on his cigarette, ‘the thing is, some people are hat people and others are foremen and managers. That’s what it is.’

He smoked on. Working on a building site apparently consisted of a lot of smoke breaks interrupted by short periods of digging. I was able to keep up with this and the wages were higher than I would have expected. I saw a light at the end of the overdraft. I paid Mr Jellicoe some of the rent he thought he was due and began to reimburse the building society. Things were, I thought, on an even keel.

II

One day – it was summer, and the sky was clear and blue, but because we were in Dudley the temperature was cheerlessly low – I was digging foundations when I turned up an old coin. It was nothing special – a shilling, slightly dented and much corroded – but Darren had a look.

‘We find things sometimes,’ he said. ‘Digging. You turn things up.’

Spin nodded, silently.

‘Once found a bone,’ said Darren, ‘off of a dog we reckon. Well, Spin thought it was a dog, anyway. He knows his bones, does Spin. Used to do archaeology at the Poly.’

‘What, Spin was a student?’

Spin nodded, silently.

‘We all were,’ said Darren. Looking at him, I doubted it. He must have caught my expression.

‘I done Social Anthropology,’ he explained, ‘at Cambridge. Bloody freezing and flat, Cambridge. Course, I finish the course and get ready for one of those graduate jobs, thirty grand a year and more holiday than workdays. That’s when I realized Social Anthropology might not have been the course to go for. Same with Spin. There’s no call for archaeologists. At least he gets to do digging, keeps his hand in. Only person on the site hasn’t got a degree is Mr Link.’

‘What?’

‘Left school at fifteen, self-made man, blah blah. Don’t get him started on it. What did you do then?’

‘When?’

‘When you was a student. I mean, the rest of us was students but don’t look it. You look like a student. Only poorer.’

‘I did Historic Peculiarities.’

‘You did what?’ Darren dropped his shovel. It seemed like a strong reaction. Most people just said it was a waste of taxpayers’ money.

‘Historic Peculiarities.’

Darren and Spin exchanged a look.

‘Is that one of those new courses?’

‘It was. There were only three of us doing it. I don’t think they run it any more.’

‘Well,’ said Darren, picking up his shovel so he’d have something to lean on. ‘Well. So, what was that all about then? Historic Peculiarities?’

III

Historic Peculiarities, explained Janet Blake – senior lecturer in Historic Peculiarities – was the study of missing bits of history. We knew what had happened at time x, and time y, but did not know what had happened between them. Historic Peculiarities attempted to find the links between apparently disparate events. In practise, this involved a lot of creative writing and very little analysis.

The typical Historic Peculiarities exam question would be along the lines of: ‘The Spanish Armada – The Fire of London. Connect.’ There was no typical answer. The best way to answer a Historic Peculiarities question was to write as much as possible in the time allowed without ever committing yourself to a point of view.

I took the subject because I was interested in history and peculiar things, interests I shared with my best friend Jack. He didn’t go to university, he got a job in a printing company on the outskirts of Oldbury. While I was spending money I didn’t have on having a good time, he was spending his time earning money so he could spend it on his hobby, which was body piercing.

We’ll get to that later.

I did a three-year course in Historic Peculiarities. There was the option to do a fourth and perhaps continue as far as a doctorate, but the building society weren’t keen. I was still interested in history and peculiar things. The building society was still interested in regaining its money. So I gave up Historic Peculiarities and became, for several months, a digger of foundations.

IV

‘Got you,’ said Darren. ‘It was one of those complete bollocks courses. Thought I’d picked a bad one. Bloody hell. So, how much do you owe the bank then?’

‘Building society,’ I said. ‘A couple of hundred, now.’

‘Lucky sod,’ said Darren. ‘I still owe them me first born, and Spin’s had to sell one of his kidneys.’

They both smiled. Darren pocketed the grubby shilling that had sparked off the conversation.

‘Tell you something,’ said Darren. ‘You know the castle?’

Of course I knew the castle. Dudley Castle is hard to miss, in Dudley. It isn’t as though there’s a lot else to distract your attention.

‘There were some historic peculiarities up there,’ said Darren, ‘so Spin was saying. Witches, warlocks, comets, Templars and all sorts of stuff. You could have done a thesis on that. You might have got a first then, like Spin.’

Spin nodded, silently.

‘What sort of things?’ I asked. I’d lived there for twenty-five years, and it was the first I’d heard about it.

Before Darren could tell me, Mr Link turned up, a hard hat sitting uncomfortably on his head.

‘Darren, Spin,’ he said. He looked at me. ‘I can never remember your name,’ he told me.

‘Sam.’

‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘Historic Peculiarities. And these two are Archaeology and Anthropology. Once upon a time, we used to get actual workers. Now they’ve all done City and Guilds and set themselves up as limited companies and all I get is students paying back their overdrafts, drinking me out of teabags and chatting about social awareness. Which is all well and good in its place, but it doesn’t get trenches dug, does it?’

We shook our heads.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘and there it is. Now. How are you at heights?’

‘I’m okay with heights,’ said Darren. Spin made a gesture indicating the same. It was a complicated gesture, and it went on for a little while. He raised his hands above his head and looked up at them, and nodded. He drew his hands down past his face, looked left and right, and shrugged. He held out his arms and mimed balancing, while nodding. He looked down and held out both hands, thumbs up. He clapped. Mr Link nodded at several points during the gesture, and then the ending caught him by surprise and he forgot to nod in the right place.

‘I don’t like heights,’ I said.

‘Don’t like them, or won’t do them?’ asked Mr Link.

‘I don’t like them. I get dizzy and then I freeze.’

‘Vertigo. Fair enough. You can stick with trenches. You don’t have to go up, to do trenches. Down is preferable, I always think. But not too far down, because then it gets claustrophobic. A strange thing: all the students we hire want to do the digging. Never the walls or the scaffolding. Personally, I think it’s to do with Dudley. There’s old stuff all over the place. The castle, the mines, the railways. If you ask me, they should bulldoze the bloody lot of it and start again with a few decent roads and a car park and maybe a pub, but that’s just me.’

‘What will we be doing?’ asked Darren.

‘Scaffolding,’ said Mr Link, in a tone of voice that suggested he’d already told them once.

Spin went into another series of hand movements.

‘What?’ asked Mr Link.

‘He’s dubious as to scaffolding,’ explained Darren, acting as an interpreter.

‘Dubious?’

‘He believes that it acts as a receiver or transmitter of messages from elsewhere, being as it is a matrix of regular angles constructed in tubiform metal. That’s when it’s up, obviously. When it’s not, it’s just a pile of tubes in the back of the truck.’

‘Tubiform matrix?’ asked Mr Link. ‘What, and you got all of that from him waving his hand about?’

Darren nodded.

‘Hell’s bells,’ said Mr Link.

Darren and Spin stood patiently.

‘Well?’ asked Mr Link. He switched to jovial mode. ‘Either of you up to working on my tubiform matrix? Only it’d be nice if you’d get on with it, because we’re expecting a message from Arcturus and we need the scaffolding up before it gets dark. Besides, we might be able to make use of it when we put the top beams on this thing.’

He indicated the framework of red metal struts: six large ones to a side and a network of smaller ones connecting them. Trenches ran around the outer limit of the structure. I had helped to put them there.

‘What’s it going to be?’ Darren asked.

‘Factory,’ said Mr Link.

‘What sort?’

‘Finished, if we get the scaffolding up. Come on.’

Mr Link led Darren and Spin to the pile of metal tubes and hefty brackets. The brackets looked like something that might have come from a medieval dungeon, and that made me think about Jack, because Jack is a body piercing aficionado and he looks like the sort of thing medieval dungeons might have used in their adverts if they’d had newspapers to place them in.

‘While we’re erecting Luke Skywalker’s radio set, would it be okay if you carried on with the trenches? Only I seem to remember that we had this agreement where I paid you and you did work. You seem to be interpreting it slightly differently, in that I pay you and you stare vacantly into space.’ He sighed. ‘Students.’

‘Ex-students,’ I said.

‘Even worse,’ he said. ‘Feel like digging?’

‘Oh yes,’ I lied.

‘Good, because it would trouble my conscience greatly if I had to sack you because you were useless.’

He often gave us these pep talks. I think it was something to do with morale.

V

Other than Mr Link and the physical problems – blisters, aches, herpes – working on building sites was fun. It was like playtime. At school the only time you were allowed to mess around in mud was at lunch break, unless you were in remedial class. You weren’t allowed to handle tools.

On building sites mud and tools were only the beginning. After that there were mechanical things, scaffolding, swearing, and tea.

There were pranks, too. I had to go to Supplies and get a left-handed screwdriver. Darren sent me to get a spirit level with a slower bubble. Spin asked me to get something but I didn’t know what he meant. It was something that rotated, but I wasn’t tuned in to his gestures and Darren was out getting some dents knocked out of the scaffolding. I was the new boy, so I was the stooge for all of the pranks. I didn’t mind, as it passed the time and I wasn’t often injured.

After a while I noticed that I was still the new boy.

‘We’re a good team,’ explained Darren. ‘Mr Link likes to stick with people he knows.’

Spin nodded.

‘It saves training people up. You’re the best we’ve had, so far.’

I was pleased. I hadn’t been told I was the best at anything by anyone before. Except for Jack, who said I was the world’s best wanker.

‘Well, you’re the only one, really,’ said Darren. ‘No one wants to do trenches these days. Most of them go into burgers until they get something in an office.’

Spin mimed frying burgers with one hand, and picked his nose with the other. I hoped that was part of the gesture.

‘I don’t mind trenches,’ I said. ‘I like digging.’

‘You’re still the new boy, though. Can’t be much fun. Get all the jokes played on you. Haven’t you had any offers yet? Office jobs?’

‘Not yet,’ I admitted. I hadn’t applied for many. I worried about that, but not enough to do anything about it.

‘We’ll have to do better jokes then, won’t we? Can’t keep sending you to Supplies for things that don’t exist. Don’t worry, me and Spin’ll think of something new while we do the roof.’

They went up the scaffolding. All that afternoon I watched them, wondering what they were up to. I couldn’t hear anything Darren was saying, and Spin’s gestures were difficult to follow. I was a bit worried, to tell the truth. They buried one of my boots once, filled the replacement with hot tar and I scalded my toe. They were boisterous, as my mother used to say of schoolyard psychopaths.

So I had an idea. I would strike first. I couldn’t get them to fetch something from Supplies, because they always made me do that. I couldn’t fill their boots with anything. It had to be something mild, just enough to make them think twice. And it would have to be Darren. I had no idea what Spin would find funny, other than me with hot toes.

I thought about Darren’s hair. It had looked dyed the first time I saw it. After working with him for a few weeks I was sure that it was dyed. From time to time it would start to look less black, and thinner, and then he’d go off to fetch something and come back with a head of glossy jet hair and inky fingers. I was suspicious.

A weak spot, I decided. That night I popped into a pharmacist’s and bought a quantity of Grecian 2000. I took it home, wrapped it in brown paper and addressed the parcel to Darren. I wrote on the back:

‘If not delivered, return to Building Standards Office.’

The next day I left it next to the kettle in the Portakabin that was our headquarters, after Darren and Spin had made their way up the scaffolding. I left it leaning against a packet of Hobnobs and then got on with digging. The foundations were widespread, and it was difficult to keep close to the Portakabin. I didn’t want to miss anything. Darren and Spin didn’t seem to want to come down. Most days they were down every few minutes, for tea or cigarettes. That day they were happy in the scaffolding, thirty feet up, basking in the drizzle. I tried not to look as though I was hanging around. I noticed I’d dug the foundations much deeper than usual that day. If I wasn’t careful we’d end up with a leaning warehouse. I didn’t think Mr Link would like that. I kept going off and digging, trying to leave myself with a clear view of the Portakabin at all times. I angled around, turned back on myself, dug where I’d already dug. I thought about putting the kettle on and attracting them down with tea, but then they’d know I was up to something. I never made the tea. I knew how, but it didn’t interest me.

It was lunchtime before they came down. Darren made for the Portakabin, patting his pockets and frowning.

‘No fags,’ he said. ‘Here Spin, do us a tea. I’ll pop down the shops and get some. Want anything?’

Spin indicated his preference and Darren made his way off the site. Spin entered the Portakabin. A moment later he emerged and looked about. He held the parcel. He shook it. Hearing an engine, I thought that it would be Darren returning with his cigarettes and whatever it was that Spin wanted. A tongue, perhaps. Then I remembered that Darren had walked to the shops. It was Mr Link. He pulled up close to Spin and got out.

‘What’s this?’ he asked. Spin handed over the parcel and gestured at length.

‘By the kettle?’ asked Mr Link. ‘I don’t think so. Post comes to the office, not out here. Let’s have a look at it then.’

He opened the parcel and inspected the contents. His face grew bleaker. He was never exactly a bundle of joy, but this was as grim as I’d seen him.

‘I think we’ll be having a word with our student friend. Mr Haines, could I trouble you to pop out of that deep pit you’ve dug for yourself?’

I considered hiding.

‘There’s no point hiding down there, the foundations are square and we can find you. Come on.’

I dragged myself up to ground level and squished over to them. Mr Link raised the Grecian 2000 and looked at it.

‘Getting old isn’t funny,’ he said. ‘You’ll find that out one day.’

He looked at Spin. Spin gestured at length, and then held his sides.

‘Ah,’ said Mr Link. ‘I see. So this was a prank, then? This waste of company time? Bit of a laugh? I have nothing against a bit of a laugh.’

Spin raised his eyebrows.

‘Is this your idea of a joke?’ Mr Link asked me. I nodded.

‘Fair enough. Jokes happen on building sites. But I think we’ll have no more. And we’ll say no more about it,’ he said, surprising me. I’d expected to get the sack. Perhaps I really was the best temp they’d had. Anyway, it did the trick. It must have done. They only played one more joke on me.

VI

To cut things short, I used to work on the building sites. After we finished that factory, we moved to the other side of town and put up a warehouse and then we did some office buildings in the classical warehouse style. My overdraft became smaller despite the best efforts of Mr Fallow and his staff. I worked on sites as far away as Wolverhampton and Tipton, despite the language barrier.

The buildings were always the same. I mean, they had different functions – this one was a hospital, this one an office, this one a luxury hotel with many and varied facilities – but they all looked like warehouses.

‘That,’ Mr Link would say, surveying whatever we had just finished bundling together, ‘is what a building is meant to look like. Square, straight, flat on the top and no fancy business.’

Darren and I had decided that Mr Link genuinely believed this. Strange beliefs and superstitions were common on building sites. Spin believed that scaffolding formed matrices that could tune in to otherworldly broadcasts. Darren believed that if he dug far enough down, his trench would connect with the mines that ran under Dudley and he’d be able to tunnel under the off-licence and get all his drinks for free. Mr Link believed that all buildings should be cuboid and without decoration or, ideally, doors and windows. I believed that I was at the beginning of my life and things would turn out okay without me putting much effort into it.

‘Square and straight,’ Mr Link would say. The rest of us would look at each other and try to get away. ‘Nothing fancy. Gargoyles and curlicues and all of that are all well and good for cathedrals, but the modern building is regular. Solid. No weaknesses in the structure.’

This was clearly untrue. In high winds the warehouses we put up fell apart, great sheets of prefab spinning off into the night like a giant conjuror’s playing cards. The structures were riddled with weaknesses, apart from the foundations. Those were solid.

‘Some of them fall down,’ Darren said.

Mr Link gave him a poisonous look. ‘That,’ he said slowly, ‘is because there are weak spots. Windows! Doors! How can we make a solid structure when there are parts of it that open?’

‘It’s sort of fashionable to have doors and windows,’ said Darren.

Spin explained, by use of gestures, that it was traditional to have doors set into buildings so that people could enter and leave them.

‘That’s the thing,’ explained Mr Link. ‘If it was a decent building, they wouldn’t want to leave.’

Spin explained, by use of gestures, that he had thought of something else he could be doing. Darren and I went with him, leaving Mr Link looking at our latest construction – a theme pub on the main road between Stourbridge and Wolverley – and thinking how nice it would look without the windows spoiling the purity of the architectural line.

One morning, the building society sent me a letter including a monthly balance. There was a note of congratulation enclosed, signed by Mr Fallow. My account had become positive for several days. It had since become negative again, of course.

They charged me £15 for the congratulatory note.

The next month, there were more positive days. My account went from red to black, like an infected wound. I no longer needed to work on building sites to pay off my overdraft. I was able, instead, to look for a less well-paying graduate job.

I said a farewell to Mr Link and the gang on a Friday at the end of a bright and cold February. We went to the pub.

‘I knew you’d be going,’ said Mr Link. ‘You’ve been even less use than usual these last couple of months.’

I waited for him to say something good about my trench-digging abilities. He sipped his stout instead. Then he looked up.

‘I’m always sorry to see a good worker go,’ he said, ‘and I’m seeing one go now.’

I was startled and grateful. He caught my expression.

‘Bloody hell, not you,’ he said. ‘Our Spin here is leaving today. Got a job with local radio.’

Seemed about right, I thought. Spin had always had this thing about receiving signals.

VII

I left the building trade and got a job with the local council. I can’t say which one, because they’ll sue. I worked in the banking section. This made me think of heavily defended vaults and leather-topped desks, for reasons known only to my subconscious. The reality was less impressive. In a large open-plan office – much like the interior of one of the buildings I used to dig foundations for – rows of desks were set regular distances apart. The distances had been chosen to minimize what the team leaders had learned to call Unauthorized Human Interaction, which is to say chatting. There was a lunch hour which it was mandatory to take but which, it was hinted, might better be used for working in. There was an agreeable overtime rate for which no one qualified. A shift system meant that you always had to get up too early and always got home too late. At Christmas a certain amount of jollity would be tolerated: a few strands of sparse tinsel stapled to the ceiling tiles for twelve days.

I would get in at 7.30 AM, regardless of which shift I was on, because I couldn’t afford a car and the bus service was unreliable. I would switch on my computer so that the people in IT would know I was there.

IT was housed on the top floor in a chaotic office full of dangling wires and tangled cables and parts of things that had become dislodged. IT was not subject to the same rules as other departments. IT had a different timescale. They would say, I’ll be there in five minutes. They would arrive in anything up to a month. Everyone wanted to work in IT but there was no way to get there without having arcane and detailed knowledge of Babylon 5.

After logging in, I would look out of a window until nine when a few other people would start to trickle in. I would open up a spreadsheet or two and mess about with figures.

I would do that for eight hours. Then I would go home.

I once asked the man at the next desk to mine – a breach of council policy but I was in a daredevil sort of a mood – what happened to all of the figures we put into spreadsheets.

‘Well,’ he said, pushing his spectacles onto his nose, ‘when we finish each sheet they are amalgamated into another spreadsheet and ratified against a third spreadsheet held at head office. If they match, they are themselves amalgamated into another spreadsheet. Each of these transactions is logged on a fifth spreadsheet. This fifth spreadsheet is checked against the performance timetable laid down in the spreadsheet kept at area headquarters, and then the results of all of these cross-checks are entered into a spreadsheet.’

‘And then?’

‘Then they bin it and we start all over again.’

‘Why?’

He looked at me. His spectacles – the perennially unfashionable type with a heavy black frame – began their descent to the end of his nose.

‘What?’ he asked, confused.

‘Why? Why do we do all of this work just to have it thrown away?’

He looked at me some more.

‘Because they pay us to,’ he said, and never spoke to me again.

VIII

I still work there. I’ve moved up, or rather across. Diagonally, really. I’ve moved diagonally. I now lead a team of six people. I know the names of four of them. I meet with other team leaders and we discuss our teams as though we were talking about badly behaved pets. I have been on courses designed to encourage bonding between staff, and I have not been in any way encouraged to bond with staff.

I’m like everyone else out there in the world of meaningless office jobs. It’s what I do in the daytime to pay for the rest of my life. It’s what I do to pay for what I do.

The rest of my life is far more interesting. For example, there’s my best friend, Jack who can’t go through those metal detectors in airports without bells going off and guns being drawn.

Chapter Two
I

After working on building sites I was glad to have a job in an office. I wanted a job in an office. I also didn’t want one. I wanted to be unconventional, but I didn’t have the money for it. An office job would provide the money to be unconventional, but an office job was all about being conventional. I had to fit in to make enough money not to fit in.

Having an office job meant being unconventional in less exciting ways. I would put paper clips in the drawing pin box. I coloured in red sections of the year planner that should have been coloured yellow. This wasn’t the sort of anarchy I’d imagined when I listened to the Sex Pistols all those years ago. So an office job was conventional, I was right about that. I was only wrong about the money.

I must have got something wrong somewhere. I had less money than when I was a student earning nothing. In those days there had been more money to spend. Working on building sites the money turned up in envelopes and there was no mention of tax. Working in an office, the money didn’t turn up. Once a month I got a piece of paper explaining where most of my wages had gone and how much of them I could keep. Then the B&S Building Society kept the rest. I began to want to work on the building sites again, getting fat little envelopes at weekly intervals and telling B&S nothing about it.

I had outgoings. I had to pay the rent and buy groceries and bus passes and other non-frivolous items, like cigarettes. Cigarettes aren’t frivolous; the health warnings prove it. I don’t like smoking, but not being able to afford to smoke makes me want to smoke. It wasn’t as though I had money to burn. I didn’t even have money for firelighters. My wages belonged to everyone but me. Leaving little for entertainments. Once a week I’d go for a drink with Jack and get mildly confused. We usually went to the Messy Duck, a quiet pub which was situated down the road from the zoo, standing alone next to an area of ground designated unsuitable for buildings. I would look over the ground with my practised trench-digger’s eyes, spotting the greasy pools of rainbow-topped water, the cracks leading down to the mineshafts, the thrown bricks and the broken glass, the condoms.

I couldn’t understand that. There must have been better places. Even in Dudley.

The Messy Duck was a quiet pub. I’d been in louder monasteries. You often got the impression that you were keeping the landlord up. He was a thin man with sad eyes and an off-putting manner. At around ten he’d switch off the jukebox and unplug the fruit machine. Between ten and half past he’d yawn pointedly. After that he’d just turn off the lights and stand by the door, holding it open. I would feel uncomfortable and intrusive, but it didn’t bother Jack. He seemed to like being in uncomfortable situations. That helped to explain his hobby, I suppose. He would have to enjoy being uncomfortable. How else could you explain his piercings? They were all about discomfort. If they didn’t bother him, they bothered the people around him.

Jack was coloured and studded. I didn’t know the full extent of it – I didn’t want to know, there were parts of him I wouldn’t want to see in any condition, with or without rivets – but I knew that it was extensive. I imagined bolts and studs connected by chains. I imagined nails driven into areas of unnatural colour. I didn’t know what sort of tattoos he had. I doubted whether he went for the old-fashioned tigers and hearts with daggers. He’d prefer something more modern, like Celtic twiddles and spirals, or perhaps barcodes.

I could have been wrong. For all I knew he had a portrait of Britney across his pectorals and Made In England etched across his scalp. I found out what he actually had much later, under distressing circumstances.

We’ll get to that later.

‘Why?’ I once asked him. ‘Why go through all the pain and risk? All those stories you hear about people getting tattoos at little shops then going down with leprosy and melting into their cornflakes. Why not stick with jigsaws?’

‘It’s not that painful mate,’ he said. ‘Not as bad as going to the dentist.’

‘I thought you enjoyed going to the dentist.’

‘I do,’ he said, surprised. ‘Except the noise of the drill.’

‘So you like being hurt? It’s a masochism thing?’

‘No. It hurts, but that’s not all of it. That’s the start. You break your arm, you’ve got a bond with any other bloke with a broken arm. Start a conversation like that.’ He clicked his fingers without making a noise. He’d never got the hang of it. ‘Everyone pierced is with you. Everyone else is waiting to come in. It’s a ritual thing isn’t it? I don’t know, mate. You’re the fucking graduate. Why do you think I do it?’

‘Because you’re unstable.’

‘Could be that, granted.’

He had a mouthful of beer and looked thoughtful. At that time the eyebrow ring was new, and he was swollen and intrusively red. I couldn’t look him in the eye. I had to look at the wound.

‘You do it for attention,’ I thought out loud.

‘Course I don’t. What about all the stuff you can’t see? How’s that attracting attention? Take away the stuff in my face and I’m normal.’

‘I wouldn’t say you were normal.’

‘I wouldn’t say you were.’

‘At least I don’t set alarms off at airports.’

‘You don’t go to airports. You don’t go anywhere. That’s what this is. That’s why you don’t get it. I’ve gone somewhere else. I’ve become someone else. I’ve taken my body and changed it.’

I wasn’t sure about that. The more I knew about body modification, the more I thought it was all to do with filling in blanks. If you weren’t complete, if your identity wasn’t fully drawn, then you coloured yourself in or nailed a new identity to yourself. It was all about superheroes. Outwardly, they were normal, but under the clothes someone else, run through with metalwork, extravagantly tinted.

‘I set off alarms,’ he said, ‘because I transmit. I have wires and connections. I’m a radio. I pick up traffic reports. I pick up messages people like you don’t get. I send out signals.’

‘You’re sending some out now,’ I said. I’d known Jack for many years but I wasn’t one hundred per cent sure that he wouldn’t produce a knife and lay waste to the local population. Which, at the moment, was me. I looked for help. There was the landlord. He would be useless. It was down to me to deal with Jack’s insanity. I’d always thought he might have a screw loose. Possibly an actual screw, somewhere around his genitals. So I did what I had to do. I let Jack carry on, and I nodded from time to time. I can’t help it. I’m British.

‘Different signals,’ Jack was saying. I’d missed something.

‘Oh yes,’ I said, ‘very true.’

‘I’ve become a matrix,’ he said.

‘Spin used to say there were matrices at building sites,’ I said.

‘The scaffolding?’

I nodded.

‘I wouldn’t know about that,’ said Jack.

That had been a month ago, in the same pub, at about the same time of night. Since then Jack had had the bodywork touched up in a few new places. He turned up late, halfway through my second pint. I knew he’d had something new pierced, because he was walking as though he had a porcupine between his thighs. He was wearing a jumper that had been washed on the incorrect cycle. The sleeves ended inches before his hands began. His wrists were covered in bright swirls and healing scabs. He bought us a pint each and sat, wincing.

‘Oof,’ he said, reaching under the table and tugging at something.

‘Do you mind?’

‘Not really,’ he said. ‘Ow. Ow. I don’t think that’s where you belong, is it?’

He fidgeted and fiddled and finally settled, nicely uncomfortable.

‘What’s it this time?’ I asked. I had to know, even though I didn’t really want to. It was like watching operations on television. I’d want to switch channels or put my hands over my eyes. Instead I’d sit and watch, horrified. He shuffled carefully. When he winced, his eyebrow ring stood straight out from his brow.

‘Perineum ring,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Perineum. It’s the hairy bit at the back of your bollocks.’

‘I know what it is. I meant, “What?”’

‘I hadn’t had it done yet.’ As if that explained it. ‘These stools are a bit hard, aren’t they?’ He adjusted himself indecorously.

‘Not really, no. Perhaps having your perineum pierced has made you sensitive.’

‘I won’t be riding my bike for a couple of weeks, that’s fucking certain.’

‘So it’s the bus, is it?’

‘It will be this week. Perhaps I’ll catch you on your way home. Everything nice at the office, is it? No sudden shortages of pens or anything?’

Jack often baited me like this. He was saying my life was mundane. I knew that. I was the one living it. I sometimes had an urge to hide a powerful magnet somewhere near Jack, just to see what happened. He settled at an angle, as though preparing to fart. The landlord eyed him sleepily.

‘You should try piercing,’ Jack said.

‘I don’t want to try it, but if I’m ever taken captive by the Spanish Inquisition I’ll put them on to you. You’d get on like a castle on fire.’

‘What’s that? History jokes from the history student? Three years taking drugs care of Johnny taxpayer and you think you know everything. Seeing as I kept you in beer all that time, while I was working for a living, I’ll let you get the next round in.’

I got the next round in.

‘Is he the full shilling?’ the landlord asked me, nodding at Jack.

‘He’s missing some loose change. Actually, he’s all loose change.’

‘Looks like he’s wearing it in his ears. My daughter goes in for all that. Face like a cheesegrater. I tell her she’ll end up no good, attracting some pervert into kitchenware.’ He subsided and looked miserably at the crisp boxes.

‘It’ll just be a phase,’ I said. He gave me a gloomy look.

‘They said that about bloody disco music.’ He returned to his inspection of the crisps and I returned to Jack.

‘Cheers,’ said Jack, taking his pint. His mouth was pierced but he didn’t have any liprings in. They interfered with drinking. He had a small barbell through his nasal septum, his eyebrow ring, and a cluster of rings and studs in each ear. It was all low-key. I saw worse at the bus stop. But it gave me an iceberg feeling; his most dangerous features were out of sight. Under his clothes there would be all sorts of awful things, tintacks and fishhooks, staples and cutlery. He didn’t have many in his face because of his job. He worked at a printers outside Oldbury and the management didn’t allow facial jewellery. They feared that some dangling item might get caught in the machinery, leading to death or litigation. At the least, that day’s print run would be ruined. It wasn’t a big company. They did special supplements for the local papers, posters for local rock groups, one-off histories of the local area, that sort of thing. Sometimes they’d bring out limited runs of the latest book by one of the local authors. These were sold in local shops to nobody I ever met. Jack had joined as an apprentice and had worked his way up to foreman.

I hadn’t been to the printers. I imagined it to be a huge dark building, enormously lengthy and tall, with remote thin windows. It would be full of complicated machinery, wheezing and huffing; wetly-printed papers would be shuffled all over the place by conveyor belts, carried to the ceiling and thrown into loops and vertical drops like screaming people at a theme park. Apprentices in inky overalls would pull tall levers and operate sprockets; from time to time, with a thin shriek, one of them would be gathered by the machinery and whirled around the room.

Jack emptied his glass.

‘That’ll be your round,’ he said. He’d lost count. It wasn’t worth arguing about. That was all I seemed to do with Jack, hang about on the outskirts of an argument we never actually visited. I couldn’t remember how we’d been at school. Perhaps we’d been exactly the same. I got another two pints. When I took them back to the table, Jack was fiddling with a beermat. I was relieved to see that he’d stopped adjusting his metalwork. It was embarrassing, even though there was only the landlord there and he was more interested in his crisps. He held up the beermat and studied it.

‘We did a run of these,’ he said, ‘with jokes on. For a beer festival in Humberside. We all had to bring a joke in. They didn’t use mine.’

I didn’t ask Jack what the joke was. His jokes were the sort Bernard Manning would have turned down as too offensive. ‘So how is the printing trade? Any interesting gossip from our local reporters?’

‘Someone’s filling the mines with stuff. Banned toxic stuff so horrible you couldn’t even offload it in fucking Guatemala, and someone’s lobbing it under Dudley. The hospital’s sinking into the ground. Teenage literacy is down, teenage pregnancies are up, and teenagers should be seen and not fucking heard.’

‘The usual, then,’ I said. Jack nodded his head in agreement.

‘I saw Eddie Finch the other week,’ he said.

‘Oh?’

‘Said he’d be in for a drink later. If nothing came up. He has to man the phones in case a story breaks. Pensioner loses cat, cat loses sense of direction, man paying by cheque is killed by everyone else in the supermarket. It must be all fucking go, working on the Herald.’

Eddie Finch worked on the Pensnett Herald, which covered the events in Pensnett. Pensnett was a stretch of road outside Dudley with three shops and a bad reputation. I’d never been there myself, but I knew someone who’d stopped for a newspaper and escaped with stitches and a persistent nervous twitch and was told he was lucky. There was a fun run there once a year, which was like the London Marathon only you ran a lot faster. The Herald was always full of crime reports and obituaries. Like the notices in the local shop windows, it suffered from displaced apostrophes. Eddie covered some of the reporting, most of the horoscopes and all of the frequent letters from ‘Angry of Kingswinford’. He was a minor reporter on a minuscule newspaper. He drank, however, as though he was auditioning for a place in Fleet Street before Fleet Street moved out of Fleet Street. From time to time he’d join us for a drink. Though I didn’t often drink much, if Eddie joined us, I would drink more. More than I could cope with, usually. Then I’d wake up dizzy and lost with a glutinous headache and vague memories of appalling things that, it would turn out, I had done.

‘He said he’d be in by nine,’ said Jack, checking his watch.

‘Is he?’

‘Not unless this is bolloxed. Probably just as well if he doesn’t come in. Lisa doesn’t like him much.’

‘Because he drinks?’

‘Because he’s a journalist. She doesn’t trust them. She says everything you tell them goes in the papers.’

‘I’ve told him lots of things and he hasn’t put any of them in the paper.’

‘You don’t have anything worth printing. Not these days. I think we could have kept him in material when we were young.’

‘I don’t know. Anyway, Lisa’s right. I don’t trust Eddie. Not when he’s drunk.’

‘He’s always fucking drunk.’

‘There you are then.’

I wasn’t sure where I was. The conversation kept heading off somewhere, then turning back before it got there. Jack was on his way to another subject. Perhaps he wanted to talk about Lisa. He usually did. She was his girlfriend. They had met at some sort of convention for body-piercing aficionados. It had been held at Stourbridge town hall. The two of them had noticed each other across a room full of pinned flesh. Chromed instruments curved out of the crowd; by the light of surgical lamps they started to chat, and snapped together like a ring binder. They had met again a day or two later and one thing had led to one more thing. One more thing had gone on for a month, and then Lisa moved in with Jack and Jack decorated several rooms.

It all sounded serious to me. I fell head over heels all the time, but I’d never done any decorating. I watched decorating on the television while I was waiting for a real programme to come on. Decorating happened at a stage of a relationship that I had either missed or never reached. I thought that it would probably be the latter. I could start relationships, but I wasn’t very good at them. It was like starting fights after a few drinks. It made sense at the time, but you ended up with a headache and no money and all of your mates wishing you’d shut up about it.

I hadn’t met Lisa. Jack said she was wonderful, but I wasn’t going to take his word for anything. He was hardly going to say she was an old boiler with a bosom full of rivets. That’s not the sort of thing you say in the first couple of months. If you get through the first six months you can say anything you like. I think. I’ve never got past four.

I must have been picking the wrong girls.

Jack was happy with Lisa. I knew this because he kept telling me so. He told me so more often than I wanted him to, and after he’d had a few more drinks he’d tell me about it non-stop.

He had a few more drinks.

‘She’s lovely,’ he said, ‘she’s a peach. You hear that? She’s a peach.’

‘Round and hairy?’ I asked.

‘None of yours,’ he said, ‘as it happens. None of your business. She’s wonderful. I don’t know what she’s doing with me.’

‘Perhaps she got one of her rings caught in one of yours. What are you going to do? Is there room between the tattoos to fit her name in? Or is it just going to be her initials?’

Jack went several shades darker. ‘That’s you, isn’t it? Always having a go. You’ve never got this far. Know why? Because you’d rather be out there taking the piss. Have you ever been in love?’

‘Yes,’ I said, truthfully. I was forever falling in love. It was easy; like falling off a bike. I was in love right then. I was going steady with a girl, as it happened.

I’ll tell you about her later.

‘Well then,’ he said, ‘well then. This is real. Lisa is different. This is different.’

‘They’re all different. You said that Jo Branigan and Andrea Horton were different. You thought both of them were different at the same time, for a week. Then you decided they were actually the same.’

‘Lisa is different differently.’

He looked at me helplessly, drunk and infatuated.

‘It’s the same,’ I said, not knowing why I was pushing him. It was instinctive. It was easier than falling off a bike.

‘This is different,’ he insisted.

‘Oh yes, you work in a printers so naturally you know more about anything than I do, I’m just the one who went to university.’

‘What do you know about? Books. You wouldn’t know the real world if it smacked you in the face.’

‘If I smacked you in the face you’d know about it.’

I wasn’t sure how the conversation had turned nasty. Beer, probably.

‘How about if you murdered me?’ asked Jack, leaning into the conversation. ‘You’re the history man. You know why? Because you don’t want to remember your own history. You want to go back before that. You want other people’s memories. I remember everything.’ He rolled back his sleeve; swirls and spirals ran up his arm, between swellings and scabs. ‘Look at this,’ he said, ‘I’m receptive. You with me? I’m receptive.’

‘Receptive to hepatitis B, septicaemia, traffic reports …’

That calmed him down. ‘Have it your way then,’ he said. ‘How’s the niece?’

‘Haven’t seen her since I went to university.’

‘Typical student. How old is she now then? Three, four?’

‘Four.’

‘You know she’s never met her Uncle Jack?’

I did know that. I liked it that way.

‘I’ll tell you what, I’m not doing anything Saturday. We’ll pop round and see her. And your brother, we don’t see him much now.’

‘We fell out. Family things.’

‘Oh yes. Right. So I’ll pick you up about eleven then, and we’ll go and see what they’re up to these days.’

Wonderful, I thought. That’d be a smashing day out.