The imposters, p.16
The Imposters, page 16
Everything.
Everyone.
Gone.
‘Is it supposed to smell like that?’ Will asks.
Her companion – a hairy young man in ironic top hat, shirtless under the wool overcoat – replies: ‘They’re NotDogs. It’s the smell of saving the planet.’
‘Way too high.’
‘Who is?’
Will lowers the heat under their pan. The spit-sizzle subsides.
He has a half-dozen tenants, fervent youths with meaningful tattoos. But Will is unsure if these two belong here. Also, he’s distracted by audible scurrying under the floorboards. A pest-control man offered to pull up the hardwood, and cement all entry points. It’d cost twenty thousand, which is many thousands more than Will’s bank balance.
The only thing that keeps Will in this house is this house. Which is to say, tenants paying him rent. In the mid-1980s, his gentleman-farmer dad in Somerset had the foresight to buy this terraced home in North West London for his lankiest child, who’d just loafed to a disappointing degree at Cambridge. Yet this place, intended as a safety net, ended up as the foundation of Will’s torpor, permitting him to loll for more than three decades now, a typical day incorporating a fleck of household maintenance, a couple of hours’ low-wage labour, then carousing till late, and concluding with a soak in the tub and a book. (Will is a rare physical man who reads seriously, and he remembers the contents, though his knowledge is entirely untapped – a fact that has never bothered him.)
He has few house rules and fails to maintain them, offering to whoever he finds lurking a glass of whatever he finds bottled. He provides without expectation, is tolerant without resentment – until, every few months, he’s pushed too far, and explodes. But his outbursts are hailstorms: fierce and fast-forgotten.
As a landlord, Will’s chief failing is to never record who’s in residence, and who is merely in bed with who’s in residence. As a consequence, the house has attracted a population of scruffy piercings who affix Extinction Rebellion stickers to the front window, combat American imperialism by frequenting the Iraqi street-food van on Kilburn High Road, and atone for their white privilege by apologizing to people who aren’t there. They are easy to ridicule, but Will rather admires them. Most of his friends during young-adulthood expressed political commitment by Blu-tacking posters of The Clash to their bedroom walls, buying the ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ single, and walking into impressive jobs right out of Oxbridge, married and babied and propertied by thirty.
Causes existed then too, of course. Will recalls the Rock against Racism gigs, and he had a girlfriend with a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament ring. Years later, Will marched in that vast protest of February 2003, a million fists in the air to oppose the pending war in Iraq, everyone shouting along Whitehall, massing in Hyde Park. How vividly he sees that scene, which he has recounted many times. Yet a muted portion of his brain suspects that he never attended, just saw footage. Anyway, they didn’t stop the war, so perhaps not the best demonstration of a demonstration. Will’s grandfather – a cad whose life’s accomplishment was twice racing at Le Mans – always claimed that humanity’s worst prognostications never come to pass because people are so devilishly clever. Never forget the Great Horse-Manure Crisis of 1894, he said: heaps of equine ordure threatened to bury every major city on Earth, the panic spreading far and wide – only for man to invent the automobile, thus saving the planet.
Anyway, catastrophes do feel rather more imminent lately. For this, Will sympathizes with his housemates’ lamentation, and is patient about delayed payments, especially during the pandemic. But he can’t sustain it much longer.
He himself has been relatively lucky regarding coronavirus. He caught it early, but suffered only a nasty fortnight. Two tenants developed Long Covid, and moved home to their parents. Others had fellowships deferred, once-in-a-life travel deleted from their lives, job offers withdrawn. Cooped up, fed up, and bequeathed a planet in flames, they itch for revolution, and have taken to directing their fury at Will, slandering him as a rentier capitalist.
As it happens, he considers himself a working man, never suffering qualms about low-status drudgery. He’s taken a fiver to sweep cat droppings from a neighbour’s front garden, and spent years washing dishes at a burger bar, and carrying boxes of frozen French fries from a lorry. When lockdown shut that eatery, he became a deliveryman, charmed by the vacancy of sooty old London, deserted for the first time since the Great Plague of 1665.
At first, Will drove a wine-shop van, lugging bottles to the work-from-home bourgeoisie as they embarked on panic alcoholism. Once the weather improved, he bought his second-hand collapsible bike, and took up food delivery, circulating alongside the formerly invisible: Bangladeshis on motor scooters laden with KFC; Nigerian nurses awaiting the next empty double-decker bus; that morose Romanian woman who leapt in and out of her grinning Amazon van. Essential workers served the inessential, who filled their bathrooms with anti-bac soap and hid behind locked doors, shouting through the mailslot: ‘Just leave the curry! And step back, please! I’ll tip you on the app!’ When a few offices reopened, Will upgraded to the courier gig: important documents rather than important kebabs.
Throughout the pandemic, he has cruised through the ambient panic, asking himself if it really would be so tragic if humankind fell to ruin. At times, Will suspects that he may be missing an ingredient, unperturbed by civilizational collapse. He tends to view society as a rickety convoy, directed by rumours as much as maps, most passengers wanting only a comfy seat, while a few shriek at the drivers. But only saints and despots and the middle class believe they can change the world. As for the activist generation in his home, their zeal is close to nihilism, as if – grasping for control of that rickety convoy – they glimpse a horror: the steering wheel doesn’t turn. So they overdose on the internet, they self-harm, they gorge on NotDogs.
This couple devours theirs straight from the pan, the top hat boy ashing his joint in a tea cup. They’re planning to glue themselves to London monuments in protest against how the world is so depressing. However, they face a conundrum. Should they buy glue that comes off?
‘Isn’t that the police’s problem?’ the pink-dreadlocked woman says.
‘That depends on the system of governance,’ answers Top Hat. ‘In a dictatorship, it’s your problem if the glue won’t come off. In a democracy, it’s theirs.’
Will pictures this chap – top hat removed, scrubbed and shaven – as a guest on BBC News in a few years, live from a think tank, talking over everyone.
‘The thing I’m kinda wondering,’ Dreadlocks ventures, ‘is whether the—’
‘And basically,’ Top Hat resumes, ‘can we even call this a democracy anymore?’
‘There’s an easy way to find out,’ Will says. ‘Glue yourself to something.’
DEVIN DOYLE IS HATE-GOBBLING his breakfast from a Greggs bag, inserting rather than chewing a sausage roll whose crust showers over his gut and keyboard. He arrived late at RCN this morning, although Will was on time, admitted by members of the overnight staff – translators of Turkish, Tagalog and Russian who were kibitzing until the boss walked in. As they packed up their belongings, the Arabic/French translator Amir arrived, taking the desk of a departing Turk, adjusting the chair height with difficulty, thwacking it, then struggling with an uncooperative mouse cable.
Dev commands Will to stand in his doorway, as if to impart a lesson, though he’s just watching a Facebook video claiming that George Soros and Hillary Clinton are the secret owners of Facebook, that Jeffrey Epstein isn’t dead, that Bill Gates is microchipping bats. ‘Why don’t we have a story on this?’
‘I’m not sure how to respond.’
‘By making us a cuppa,’ Dev says, sneering but losing his bravado upon eye contact. More sternly, he explains the workflow, how web trawlers at headquarters identify catchy blog posts, translators render them into broken English, and the day staff churns this into quasi-publishable copy, which is amplified by Twitter bots.
Will understands little of this. ‘Right. Shall I give it a go?’
‘Like I said, first assignment: the kettle.’
Dipping tea bags, Will watches the steaming water turn mahogany. Amir mumbles at him – he’s reaching for the Nespresso machine, and asks if Will would mind making space. Up close, Amir resembles an algebra teacher, circa 1983: budget metal-frame glasses, chinstrap beard, razor burn under his chin. Hobbling around on a bad leg, he moves like a man of sixty but is probably half that, his lower lip hanging open, front teeth cracked. Will has a soft spot for the feeble, as when he saw a fox cub wander into traffic on Goldhawk Road, and leapt off his bike, ordering drivers to stop, then escorted the pup from the roadway, whereupon it scurried under a parked car, and Will resumed his journey.
He introduces himself to Amir, whose handshake is a single clammy downstroke. Seeing the two befriending each other, Dev intervenes, shouting, ‘What in fuck’s a “double-edge knife”?’
‘That is not a saying?’ Amir asks, hobbling over.
‘No, you fucking idiot.’
Will says, ‘Presumably, “a double-edged sword”?’
Dev – who clearly knew – hears this as if it were a revelation, and Amir confirms that this is what he intended.
‘Well, put that in then!’ Dev says. ‘Nobody’s heard of a double-edge fucking knife.’ He rolls his eyes to Will, who places a steaming mug on his desk. ‘Cheers, mate.’
As the morning progresses, Will notices that his boss addresses him differently than he does the translators. Above all, Dev berates Amir, whose language errors the boss shouts across the newsroom. He also treats Amir as tech support, ordering him to limp over and recover deleted files, or update the betting app on his phone. When mocked, Amir adopts the servile half-smile of one who needs the job, then enumerates the pieces that he’s translating, while Dev feigns incomprehension.
‘Don’t spill a lung, Amir. It’s pronounced with a “haitch”. Hhhhhhhhaitch.’
For the next two hours, Will corrects the syntax of bloggers confabulating an inversion of reality: that climate science is a plot against the poor, ethnic cleansing is the fight against terrorism, and human-rights groups are child-abuse rings. Each article concludes with a version of, ‘Ask yourself this question: Why aren’t the elites talking about this?’
Will is half-entertained to proofread mental illness for its respect to the laws of punctuation. This slop is so ridiculous that nobody could take it seriously. Indeed, nobody even advertises on the website, which raises the question of how RCN funds itself. Dev is vague, ranting about headquarters, how they’re asking the impossible. When Will enquires about the location of headquarters, Dev just mutters about ‘rich foreigners’. Dev found his way here after telemarketing in Salford, then was an estate agent at Foxtons in West London, next selling property ads for a magazine in Dubai, which is where he came across this job online. ‘And the rest is history.’ He turns his thumb as if hitchhiking, and jabs toward the lift. Once outside, Will forgoes the cigarette, and fetches his bike.
‘Why are you unfolding that thing?’
‘It’s not for me, this job,’ Will says, at which point his fat-necked former boss curses the empty plaza, and turns his back, still swearing as Will rides away.
HE PROBABLY SHOULDN’T HAVE done that.
After biking home, Will finds that his tenants are threatening to halt rent payments because another rat was discovered, this behind the kitchen bin. The pest-control man could lay traps and poison, Will suggests. It won’t solve the matter, but it’d be affordable. An assembly is called a few weeks later in his living room, where the tenants agree that nobody should harm any animals, only capture and re-house them.
‘Re-house rats?’ Will says. ‘Where exactly?’
‘Isn’t there a forest they could go to?’
Another tenant: ‘I’m, like, looking around every corner now, expecting a corpse. It’s seriously becoming a mental-health issue.’
‘We’re talking about two rats that left for greener pastures,’ Will says. ‘Do you have any idea how much the full remedy costs? Twenty grand, minimum. How am I expected to come up with that, if none of you pays rent?’
‘Couldn’t we get cats?’
‘You think cats are gentle?’ Will says. ‘You think they’d coax our rat friends lovingly into the woods?’
‘At least it’d be natural.’
‘Look, some of you don’t even live here!’ They’re startled – most haven’t seen Will lose his temper. ‘All of you! Right now! Write your names on a sheet of paper!’
‘What is this, Nineteen Eighty-Four?’
‘If you’re not paying, you’re not staying – and certainly not voting. You are, however, welcome to fuck off home. Or find yourself a forest where you can be humanely re-housed.’
‘Can you just chill?’
‘Absolute numbskulls, the lot of you!’
The outburst is behind him as soon as Will steps into the street. It’s empty, bright. His protesters are correct: rats must fall. He really should’ve kept that desk job.
Will logs onto his courier app, and clicks ON DUTY. A private message awaits – a client requested him. He accepts, and bikes to the address for a pickup. Months back, he delivered a package here during a downpour. He banged on the red front door, needing a signature, then backed away, as per company policy. A tall elderly woman opened, sizing up her bedraggled deliveryman, the dripping grey hair stuck to his forehead, rain rivulets meandering down his zigzag nose. He checked that she was the name on the package: ‘Dora Frenhofer?’
She accepted the damp parcel, but hesitated to sign immediately, saying, ‘Why don’t you come out of the rain?’
Thanking her, he stepped beneath the overhang of her roof.
‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘How’s life in the inferno?’
‘Which inferno is that?’
‘Case numbers soaring. The hospitals in overload. I’m safely in here whereas you’re biking through it all. So? Give me a first-hand report.’
‘At the moment, the inferno is raining.’
Her eyes laughed, and she retreated a step into her darkened corridor, pressing him to come inside for a coffee.
‘Alas, not allowed,’ he said. ‘But I’ll take a smoke break under your eaves, if that’s acceptable.’
She encouraged it, and kept him company, speaking to Will with uncommon intensity, as if testing how to use words again. Squinting at him, she cast an appraising gaze over this sopping man, and declared herself terrible for asking what she was about to. But she specified herself to be Dutch, therefore allowed to be blunt. ‘Why is a man your age and your class a bicycle deliveryman?’
‘For the fresh air.’ He needed to tap off the long ash on his cigarette, so stepped toward the pavement, noting her blue recycling bin, piled full of books. ‘Is there anything good in there?’ He knelt to inspect. ‘Balzac and Kundera and Böll.’
‘You’re a reader?’
‘And you’re a writer,’ he replied, raising a novel with her name on the spine. ‘If this weren’t waterlogged, I’d ask to take it.’
‘Not worth your time! And I’m not a writer anymore. I stopped recently. After which, the funniest thing happened: I had this urge to get rid of all my books. I loved them for my whole life, but now? I can’t even remember what’s in them! Colette and Woolf and de Beauvoir and Nabokov and Gogol and who knows. What were they actually about? I don’t expect it matters anymore. But damn them for tricking me!’ Half-smile. ‘Last chance for coffee?’
But he’d finished his cigarette, and mounted the bike.
‘When you go,’ she said, ‘you know what I’ll be doing?’
‘What?’
‘Staring at my keyboard for two hours, trying to spell the word “lullaby”.’
‘I thought you’d stopped writing.’
‘I thought so too.’
Nearly a year has passed, and he expects to find her greatly aged, confined here in this narrow three-storey house. Instead, she answers in a suit jacket and slacks, lipstick on, perfumed. ‘You remember me?’ she asks, pleased to see him again. She recalls how they spoke of books, and says she hasn’t had such a good chat in ages. Better weather than last time too. She checked the forecast (and the ever-changing Covid rules), and they can speak in her back garden, if seated apart for social-distancing.
‘That’s very kind of you,’ he says. ‘But afraid I can’t on this occasion.’
‘Pity.’
His goodbye is cut by the closing door.
Will has a different plan, to cycle to RCN. Although he worked there only a few hours, they still need to pay him.
Amir buzzes him in. ‘You are back.’
‘Only briefly. Is Dev around?’
Amir looks down. ‘In fact, he is passed. Is this the right word, “passed”?’
‘How do you mean? That he passed away? Well, that rather dampens my payment prospects. What happened?’
‘A cardiac stop in his office. We are all very shock.’
‘The man chain-smoked and ate pies non-stop. His neck was wider than his ears. How was it shocking?’
Amir stifles a laugh. ‘Yes, not so healthy.’
Will looks at his watch. ‘Fancy a drink? It’ll almost be afternoon once we find a place.’
They walk past the fake lake, surly trees, and glass office buildings. Not even adulterers in the meeting pods today. This complex has a ghostly air, as if humans were gone, and only their saddest monuments remained.
‘How’d you end up here, Amir?’
They find an empty tapas bar with an outdoor patio. The staff – surprised to have customers – rush out a wine list.
Downing an overfull glass of Malbec, Amir talks, eyes averted, telling of his bedsit in Hounslow, how headquarters pushes material that disgusts him. He hates himself for staying, but needs the money. He grew up mostly in Paris, a French mother and Arab father, both deceased.
‘Why London?’
‘A bit more wine first.’
Will hails a waiter.
Everyone.
Gone.
‘Is it supposed to smell like that?’ Will asks.
Her companion – a hairy young man in ironic top hat, shirtless under the wool overcoat – replies: ‘They’re NotDogs. It’s the smell of saving the planet.’
‘Way too high.’
‘Who is?’
Will lowers the heat under their pan. The spit-sizzle subsides.
He has a half-dozen tenants, fervent youths with meaningful tattoos. But Will is unsure if these two belong here. Also, he’s distracted by audible scurrying under the floorboards. A pest-control man offered to pull up the hardwood, and cement all entry points. It’d cost twenty thousand, which is many thousands more than Will’s bank balance.
The only thing that keeps Will in this house is this house. Which is to say, tenants paying him rent. In the mid-1980s, his gentleman-farmer dad in Somerset had the foresight to buy this terraced home in North West London for his lankiest child, who’d just loafed to a disappointing degree at Cambridge. Yet this place, intended as a safety net, ended up as the foundation of Will’s torpor, permitting him to loll for more than three decades now, a typical day incorporating a fleck of household maintenance, a couple of hours’ low-wage labour, then carousing till late, and concluding with a soak in the tub and a book. (Will is a rare physical man who reads seriously, and he remembers the contents, though his knowledge is entirely untapped – a fact that has never bothered him.)
He has few house rules and fails to maintain them, offering to whoever he finds lurking a glass of whatever he finds bottled. He provides without expectation, is tolerant without resentment – until, every few months, he’s pushed too far, and explodes. But his outbursts are hailstorms: fierce and fast-forgotten.
As a landlord, Will’s chief failing is to never record who’s in residence, and who is merely in bed with who’s in residence. As a consequence, the house has attracted a population of scruffy piercings who affix Extinction Rebellion stickers to the front window, combat American imperialism by frequenting the Iraqi street-food van on Kilburn High Road, and atone for their white privilege by apologizing to people who aren’t there. They are easy to ridicule, but Will rather admires them. Most of his friends during young-adulthood expressed political commitment by Blu-tacking posters of The Clash to their bedroom walls, buying the ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ single, and walking into impressive jobs right out of Oxbridge, married and babied and propertied by thirty.
Causes existed then too, of course. Will recalls the Rock against Racism gigs, and he had a girlfriend with a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament ring. Years later, Will marched in that vast protest of February 2003, a million fists in the air to oppose the pending war in Iraq, everyone shouting along Whitehall, massing in Hyde Park. How vividly he sees that scene, which he has recounted many times. Yet a muted portion of his brain suspects that he never attended, just saw footage. Anyway, they didn’t stop the war, so perhaps not the best demonstration of a demonstration. Will’s grandfather – a cad whose life’s accomplishment was twice racing at Le Mans – always claimed that humanity’s worst prognostications never come to pass because people are so devilishly clever. Never forget the Great Horse-Manure Crisis of 1894, he said: heaps of equine ordure threatened to bury every major city on Earth, the panic spreading far and wide – only for man to invent the automobile, thus saving the planet.
Anyway, catastrophes do feel rather more imminent lately. For this, Will sympathizes with his housemates’ lamentation, and is patient about delayed payments, especially during the pandemic. But he can’t sustain it much longer.
He himself has been relatively lucky regarding coronavirus. He caught it early, but suffered only a nasty fortnight. Two tenants developed Long Covid, and moved home to their parents. Others had fellowships deferred, once-in-a-life travel deleted from their lives, job offers withdrawn. Cooped up, fed up, and bequeathed a planet in flames, they itch for revolution, and have taken to directing their fury at Will, slandering him as a rentier capitalist.
As it happens, he considers himself a working man, never suffering qualms about low-status drudgery. He’s taken a fiver to sweep cat droppings from a neighbour’s front garden, and spent years washing dishes at a burger bar, and carrying boxes of frozen French fries from a lorry. When lockdown shut that eatery, he became a deliveryman, charmed by the vacancy of sooty old London, deserted for the first time since the Great Plague of 1665.
At first, Will drove a wine-shop van, lugging bottles to the work-from-home bourgeoisie as they embarked on panic alcoholism. Once the weather improved, he bought his second-hand collapsible bike, and took up food delivery, circulating alongside the formerly invisible: Bangladeshis on motor scooters laden with KFC; Nigerian nurses awaiting the next empty double-decker bus; that morose Romanian woman who leapt in and out of her grinning Amazon van. Essential workers served the inessential, who filled their bathrooms with anti-bac soap and hid behind locked doors, shouting through the mailslot: ‘Just leave the curry! And step back, please! I’ll tip you on the app!’ When a few offices reopened, Will upgraded to the courier gig: important documents rather than important kebabs.
Throughout the pandemic, he has cruised through the ambient panic, asking himself if it really would be so tragic if humankind fell to ruin. At times, Will suspects that he may be missing an ingredient, unperturbed by civilizational collapse. He tends to view society as a rickety convoy, directed by rumours as much as maps, most passengers wanting only a comfy seat, while a few shriek at the drivers. But only saints and despots and the middle class believe they can change the world. As for the activist generation in his home, their zeal is close to nihilism, as if – grasping for control of that rickety convoy – they glimpse a horror: the steering wheel doesn’t turn. So they overdose on the internet, they self-harm, they gorge on NotDogs.
This couple devours theirs straight from the pan, the top hat boy ashing his joint in a tea cup. They’re planning to glue themselves to London monuments in protest against how the world is so depressing. However, they face a conundrum. Should they buy glue that comes off?
‘Isn’t that the police’s problem?’ the pink-dreadlocked woman says.
‘That depends on the system of governance,’ answers Top Hat. ‘In a dictatorship, it’s your problem if the glue won’t come off. In a democracy, it’s theirs.’
Will pictures this chap – top hat removed, scrubbed and shaven – as a guest on BBC News in a few years, live from a think tank, talking over everyone.
‘The thing I’m kinda wondering,’ Dreadlocks ventures, ‘is whether the—’
‘And basically,’ Top Hat resumes, ‘can we even call this a democracy anymore?’
‘There’s an easy way to find out,’ Will says. ‘Glue yourself to something.’
DEVIN DOYLE IS HATE-GOBBLING his breakfast from a Greggs bag, inserting rather than chewing a sausage roll whose crust showers over his gut and keyboard. He arrived late at RCN this morning, although Will was on time, admitted by members of the overnight staff – translators of Turkish, Tagalog and Russian who were kibitzing until the boss walked in. As they packed up their belongings, the Arabic/French translator Amir arrived, taking the desk of a departing Turk, adjusting the chair height with difficulty, thwacking it, then struggling with an uncooperative mouse cable.
Dev commands Will to stand in his doorway, as if to impart a lesson, though he’s just watching a Facebook video claiming that George Soros and Hillary Clinton are the secret owners of Facebook, that Jeffrey Epstein isn’t dead, that Bill Gates is microchipping bats. ‘Why don’t we have a story on this?’
‘I’m not sure how to respond.’
‘By making us a cuppa,’ Dev says, sneering but losing his bravado upon eye contact. More sternly, he explains the workflow, how web trawlers at headquarters identify catchy blog posts, translators render them into broken English, and the day staff churns this into quasi-publishable copy, which is amplified by Twitter bots.
Will understands little of this. ‘Right. Shall I give it a go?’
‘Like I said, first assignment: the kettle.’
Dipping tea bags, Will watches the steaming water turn mahogany. Amir mumbles at him – he’s reaching for the Nespresso machine, and asks if Will would mind making space. Up close, Amir resembles an algebra teacher, circa 1983: budget metal-frame glasses, chinstrap beard, razor burn under his chin. Hobbling around on a bad leg, he moves like a man of sixty but is probably half that, his lower lip hanging open, front teeth cracked. Will has a soft spot for the feeble, as when he saw a fox cub wander into traffic on Goldhawk Road, and leapt off his bike, ordering drivers to stop, then escorted the pup from the roadway, whereupon it scurried under a parked car, and Will resumed his journey.
He introduces himself to Amir, whose handshake is a single clammy downstroke. Seeing the two befriending each other, Dev intervenes, shouting, ‘What in fuck’s a “double-edge knife”?’
‘That is not a saying?’ Amir asks, hobbling over.
‘No, you fucking idiot.’
Will says, ‘Presumably, “a double-edged sword”?’
Dev – who clearly knew – hears this as if it were a revelation, and Amir confirms that this is what he intended.
‘Well, put that in then!’ Dev says. ‘Nobody’s heard of a double-edge fucking knife.’ He rolls his eyes to Will, who places a steaming mug on his desk. ‘Cheers, mate.’
As the morning progresses, Will notices that his boss addresses him differently than he does the translators. Above all, Dev berates Amir, whose language errors the boss shouts across the newsroom. He also treats Amir as tech support, ordering him to limp over and recover deleted files, or update the betting app on his phone. When mocked, Amir adopts the servile half-smile of one who needs the job, then enumerates the pieces that he’s translating, while Dev feigns incomprehension.
‘Don’t spill a lung, Amir. It’s pronounced with a “haitch”. Hhhhhhhhaitch.’
For the next two hours, Will corrects the syntax of bloggers confabulating an inversion of reality: that climate science is a plot against the poor, ethnic cleansing is the fight against terrorism, and human-rights groups are child-abuse rings. Each article concludes with a version of, ‘Ask yourself this question: Why aren’t the elites talking about this?’
Will is half-entertained to proofread mental illness for its respect to the laws of punctuation. This slop is so ridiculous that nobody could take it seriously. Indeed, nobody even advertises on the website, which raises the question of how RCN funds itself. Dev is vague, ranting about headquarters, how they’re asking the impossible. When Will enquires about the location of headquarters, Dev just mutters about ‘rich foreigners’. Dev found his way here after telemarketing in Salford, then was an estate agent at Foxtons in West London, next selling property ads for a magazine in Dubai, which is where he came across this job online. ‘And the rest is history.’ He turns his thumb as if hitchhiking, and jabs toward the lift. Once outside, Will forgoes the cigarette, and fetches his bike.
‘Why are you unfolding that thing?’
‘It’s not for me, this job,’ Will says, at which point his fat-necked former boss curses the empty plaza, and turns his back, still swearing as Will rides away.
HE PROBABLY SHOULDN’T HAVE done that.
After biking home, Will finds that his tenants are threatening to halt rent payments because another rat was discovered, this behind the kitchen bin. The pest-control man could lay traps and poison, Will suggests. It won’t solve the matter, but it’d be affordable. An assembly is called a few weeks later in his living room, where the tenants agree that nobody should harm any animals, only capture and re-house them.
‘Re-house rats?’ Will says. ‘Where exactly?’
‘Isn’t there a forest they could go to?’
Another tenant: ‘I’m, like, looking around every corner now, expecting a corpse. It’s seriously becoming a mental-health issue.’
‘We’re talking about two rats that left for greener pastures,’ Will says. ‘Do you have any idea how much the full remedy costs? Twenty grand, minimum. How am I expected to come up with that, if none of you pays rent?’
‘Couldn’t we get cats?’
‘You think cats are gentle?’ Will says. ‘You think they’d coax our rat friends lovingly into the woods?’
‘At least it’d be natural.’
‘Look, some of you don’t even live here!’ They’re startled – most haven’t seen Will lose his temper. ‘All of you! Right now! Write your names on a sheet of paper!’
‘What is this, Nineteen Eighty-Four?’
‘If you’re not paying, you’re not staying – and certainly not voting. You are, however, welcome to fuck off home. Or find yourself a forest where you can be humanely re-housed.’
‘Can you just chill?’
‘Absolute numbskulls, the lot of you!’
The outburst is behind him as soon as Will steps into the street. It’s empty, bright. His protesters are correct: rats must fall. He really should’ve kept that desk job.
Will logs onto his courier app, and clicks ON DUTY. A private message awaits – a client requested him. He accepts, and bikes to the address for a pickup. Months back, he delivered a package here during a downpour. He banged on the red front door, needing a signature, then backed away, as per company policy. A tall elderly woman opened, sizing up her bedraggled deliveryman, the dripping grey hair stuck to his forehead, rain rivulets meandering down his zigzag nose. He checked that she was the name on the package: ‘Dora Frenhofer?’
She accepted the damp parcel, but hesitated to sign immediately, saying, ‘Why don’t you come out of the rain?’
Thanking her, he stepped beneath the overhang of her roof.
‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘How’s life in the inferno?’
‘Which inferno is that?’
‘Case numbers soaring. The hospitals in overload. I’m safely in here whereas you’re biking through it all. So? Give me a first-hand report.’
‘At the moment, the inferno is raining.’
Her eyes laughed, and she retreated a step into her darkened corridor, pressing him to come inside for a coffee.
‘Alas, not allowed,’ he said. ‘But I’ll take a smoke break under your eaves, if that’s acceptable.’
She encouraged it, and kept him company, speaking to Will with uncommon intensity, as if testing how to use words again. Squinting at him, she cast an appraising gaze over this sopping man, and declared herself terrible for asking what she was about to. But she specified herself to be Dutch, therefore allowed to be blunt. ‘Why is a man your age and your class a bicycle deliveryman?’
‘For the fresh air.’ He needed to tap off the long ash on his cigarette, so stepped toward the pavement, noting her blue recycling bin, piled full of books. ‘Is there anything good in there?’ He knelt to inspect. ‘Balzac and Kundera and Böll.’
‘You’re a reader?’
‘And you’re a writer,’ he replied, raising a novel with her name on the spine. ‘If this weren’t waterlogged, I’d ask to take it.’
‘Not worth your time! And I’m not a writer anymore. I stopped recently. After which, the funniest thing happened: I had this urge to get rid of all my books. I loved them for my whole life, but now? I can’t even remember what’s in them! Colette and Woolf and de Beauvoir and Nabokov and Gogol and who knows. What were they actually about? I don’t expect it matters anymore. But damn them for tricking me!’ Half-smile. ‘Last chance for coffee?’
But he’d finished his cigarette, and mounted the bike.
‘When you go,’ she said, ‘you know what I’ll be doing?’
‘What?’
‘Staring at my keyboard for two hours, trying to spell the word “lullaby”.’
‘I thought you’d stopped writing.’
‘I thought so too.’
Nearly a year has passed, and he expects to find her greatly aged, confined here in this narrow three-storey house. Instead, she answers in a suit jacket and slacks, lipstick on, perfumed. ‘You remember me?’ she asks, pleased to see him again. She recalls how they spoke of books, and says she hasn’t had such a good chat in ages. Better weather than last time too. She checked the forecast (and the ever-changing Covid rules), and they can speak in her back garden, if seated apart for social-distancing.
‘That’s very kind of you,’ he says. ‘But afraid I can’t on this occasion.’
‘Pity.’
His goodbye is cut by the closing door.
Will has a different plan, to cycle to RCN. Although he worked there only a few hours, they still need to pay him.
Amir buzzes him in. ‘You are back.’
‘Only briefly. Is Dev around?’
Amir looks down. ‘In fact, he is passed. Is this the right word, “passed”?’
‘How do you mean? That he passed away? Well, that rather dampens my payment prospects. What happened?’
‘A cardiac stop in his office. We are all very shock.’
‘The man chain-smoked and ate pies non-stop. His neck was wider than his ears. How was it shocking?’
Amir stifles a laugh. ‘Yes, not so healthy.’
Will looks at his watch. ‘Fancy a drink? It’ll almost be afternoon once we find a place.’
They walk past the fake lake, surly trees, and glass office buildings. Not even adulterers in the meeting pods today. This complex has a ghostly air, as if humans were gone, and only their saddest monuments remained.
‘How’d you end up here, Amir?’
They find an empty tapas bar with an outdoor patio. The staff – surprised to have customers – rush out a wine list.
Downing an overfull glass of Malbec, Amir talks, eyes averted, telling of his bedsit in Hounslow, how headquarters pushes material that disgusts him. He hates himself for staying, but needs the money. He grew up mostly in Paris, a French mother and Arab father, both deceased.
‘Why London?’
‘A bit more wine first.’
Will hails a waiter.
