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‘This is where being male, middle-class and white comes into its own,’ said Keston. ‘Nothing but safety nets. And you’ve touched the hem of the right garment.’
Keston organised a lawyer, who failed to adequately demonstrate Karl’s ignorance and now it seemed that Karl was going to have to spend some time in a low-security prison.
The young, owlish notary public had been talking for some time. The only representative of Spenser and Rudge currently willing to talk to him pro bono, he was telling Karl it was neither the best- nor the worst-case scenario. Did he know, by the way, that the origin of the phrase worst-case scenario was not legal, but in fact military? Karl said that he didn’t. It’s a strategy, the notary public told him. Before a manoeuvre you must always imagine the most awful thing the contingent world might throw your way.
There was a strong antiseptic smell in the notary public’s office. He must have injured himself somehow.
‘It’s a good product, Mr Temperley,’ said the notary. ‘The Transition. It’s worth considering as an alternative. Your accountant is working out the finer details. He agrees it’s a good product.’
Karl pictured a pearlescent turquoise ball bouncing into the road between parked cars and he imagined slamming down the brake and the clutch at the same time, but he was doing almost forty because he was a terrible, negligent driver. What is the first thing you say to the parent? It doesn’t matter. You’re so, so sorry? Well, that’s just great. Real voices, official voices with their assurances, codes and timbre would take over at some point. Voices like that of his notary public, who had just said,
‘I appreciate this is probably not what you were expecting.’
Such was Karl’s distraction that by the time he realised that the notary public was offering him a place on a pilot scheme called The Transition in lieu of fifteen months in jail, he said yes without asking for further information, without calling his wife to discuss it with her, without pausing for breath.
The notary public blinked twice and handed him a thick, glossy brochure, saying that he might like to read it over before making up his mind. The cover depicted the blueprint for a house, but the rooms were designated things like EMPLOYMENT, NUTRITION, RESPONSIBILITY, RELATIONSHIP, BILLS, INVESTMENT, SELF-RESPECT. A semi-transparent overlay had THE TRANSITION embossed in capitals.
‘Your accountant was actually the one who drew our attention to it,’ said the notary public.
‘Keston,’ said Karl.
Aside from the online fraud, Karl’s tax infraction went back several years – a thread that snagged and unravelled the whole of his self-start marketing operation – and it was going to cost him and his wife a lot to pay it back. On top of Genevieve’s car payments and the credit card Karl had been using for groceries for the last six months, they were in a tight spot. And they were two months in arrears with their rent. Genevieve had texted him just before the meeting with the notary public and the text read only Eviction. Next Week :(
It was unseasonably hot for March. It was hot in the notary public’s office, and although Karl was only wearing climbing shorts and a red Cookie Monster T-shirt, the sweat was running sunblock into his eyes. He peeled open the brochure and scanned the first page but couldn’t take the words in.
Piaget defines the cognitive task of adolescence as the achievement of formal operational reasoning …
He looked up at the clock, at the maroon leather book spines, at the notary public’s suit jacket baking in a shaft of sunlight and mingling a distinctly sheepy smell with the TCP.
‘Can you summarise it for me?’ he said.
2 (#u8dbad0ef-bff8-5bc7-834e-390a1c7b55f6)
KARL WALKED HOME through the Thompsons’ suburb. The last decade had seen the professionalisation of the amateur landlord. Entire terraces were bought up, the houses divided and divided again. Is it not time, finally, for the government to curb this rampant greed which is draining our country’s resources and disenfranchising an entire generation? an editorial would occasionally ask. In fact three administrations had tried: a certain percentage of property portfolios had to be dedicated to social housing, to key workers, to people in their thirties, but the sanctions only made the landlords, who had inherited their property portfolios from their parents, put up their rents to cover their losses. They felt their losses. Karl’s own landlord, an affable man with toothbrush hair who always wore a grey Crombie, impressed this upon him. They had school fees and gastro-holidays and multiple mortgages to pay. Families spent their money raising their children and, as the years went by, savings became the preserve of the shrinking caste who already owned several houses. The average age of leaving the parental home drifted into the early forties. For Genevieve, raised by her grandparents, several years deceased, and Karl, who was the youngest child of an older couple, his father now convalescing in sheltered accommodation, this wasn’t an option. They were living, with their two-bar heater and all-in-one toaster oven, in the former conservatory of a Victorian semi-detached villa, a shared bathroom on each floor and a sense in both their minds of having made a bad decision at some critical juncture. The conservatory’s Perspex ceiling had been wallpapered, but it was peeling at the corners and let in a nimbus of brilliant light.
Well, whatever. The fact remained they had running water, supermarkets, cinemas.
‘I mean for goodness’ sake, we’re still wealthier than ninety-seven per cent of the world’s population,’ said Genevieve, whenever Karl complained. ‘We’re still a three-per-cent leech on the side of the planet, sucking most of it dry. And you have a cold half the time. You could be the richest man in the world and you’d still spend most of the day blowing your nose and moaning about your sinuses.’
Karl sniffed.
If their generation were waiting to have kids, or perhaps electing not to have kids at all, that was all for the better. It wasn’t as though the world might run short of people. The development of a safe male contraceptive device, a tiny chip implanted in the thigh (occasionally, and in Karl’s case, without spousal accord; the doctors never asked), had its part to play in this, for sure. ‘Does any man ever really want to have children?’ its inventor asked, palms upward at a press conference. This was met with some derision. ‘Yeah, because I’ve hit a nerve,’ he said. ‘Mark my words: the languor and fecklessness of the male gender will be the salvation of the human race. There are plenty of orphans if you want to adopt.’
Karl crossed the road between two yellow sports utility vehicles and walked by the Ravencroft Community Centre which had been converted into eleven luxury condos by the Thompsons.
The Transition was founded, the notary public had explained to him, because there had been a steep increase in cases such as Karl’s. A generation who had benefited from unrivalled educational opportunities and decades of peacetime, who nonetheless seemed determined to self-destruct through petty crime, alcohol abuse and financial incompetence; a generation who didn’t vote; who had given up on making any kind of contribution to society and blamed anyone but themselves for it.
So Karl ignored the pamphleteer, a young white guy with dreadlocks who stood by a cracked bathtub on the communal green with a stack of statistics about the Thompsons’ neglect of their 700 tenants. Fronting for the Socialist Workers Party. Thompson Slumlords Extraordinaire. But as far as Karl could see, the Thompsons’ tenants had it pretty good. Fixed contracts, solid walls and ceilings.
‘I’m fine, thanks.’ He kept his hands in his pockets.
‘You’re not fine,’ said the pamphleteer as Karl walked on, ‘you’ve been conditioned into total indifference.’
‘Same thing, innit?’ said Karl.
3 (#u8dbad0ef-bff8-5bc7-834e-390a1c7b55f6)
GENEVIEVE PUT HER hair up with an enormous tortoiseshell hair-clip and wiped her eyes. Ten minutes before, when Karl had told her he was off the hook, she had cried and hugged him. Then she read the Transition brochure while smoking three cigarettes with increasing speed and intensity. Karl made two cups of tea in someone else’s mugs from the shared kitchen. Everything else was packed. One of them, a shiny black mug, bore the motivational slogan: Don’t fear the future. Be the future. It was supposed to be heat-activated, but something had gone wrong so that when Karl poured boiling water into the mug the only words visible were fear the future. Be
He was stirring one sugar into Genevieve’s tea when he heard her give a long, low howl. Not quite a howl, he thought, as he tapped the spoon on the side of the mug and threw it into the sink. It was too flat and unemotional to be called a howl. It was more like the cry of an animal in the jaws of a predator when it resigns itself to its fate. Karl pictured himself driving along a suburban road … He walked towards the sound.
Genevieve was lying on her side, like a shop-window dummy knocked over.
‘I’m so angry,’ she said, quietly.
‘I know it’s …’ said Karl.
‘It sounds absolutely bloody awful,’ she said, sitting upright and closing the booklet. ‘Couldn’t you have just gone to prison?’ Karl put the cups of tea on the floor next to Genevieve, sloshing a little over the side so that it scalded his hand. ‘I’m joking,’ she said. ‘It does sound dire, though. So don’t try to pretend we have any choice.’
‘The way I see it is it’s like a speeding course – you take the points on your licence or you give up a day for re-education.’
‘Yeah,’ said Genevieve. ‘Except your wife has to go with you and it’s six months.’
‘No rent,’ said Karl, shuffling down to the floorboards next to her.
‘So we get to live rent-free in a loft apartment – that’s great, Karl. Maybe I’ll start painting again.’
‘It’s more like lodging.’
‘I can see it’s more like lodging,’ said Genevieve. ‘Except the landlords don’t get paid. So they resent us. Even more than normal landlords.’
‘Well, the programme pays them,’ said Karl, taking a sip from his tea, which was still too hot, ‘but they’re not really doing it for the money. The notary said it was more like jury service.’
‘You know I don’t take sugar,’ said Genevieve.
‘What?’
‘My tea.’
‘I thought you—’
‘Only in coffee. It calls them “mentors”. I don’t like the idea of having mentors.’
‘So we put up with it,’ said Karl. ‘It’s supposed to help us and, you never know. It’s a pilot scheme; they haven’t ironed out the kinks yet, so it might actually be more helpful than they mean it to be.’
‘It’s patronising.’
‘That’s true.’
‘It says it’s a “fully holistic approach to getting our lives back on track”. It says they give us advice on being married. As well as the financial stuff. We’ve been married four years! It’s enormously patronising. And what about privacy?’
‘I’m not trying to argue that this is a good thing, G.’
‘It’s humiliating.’
Karl looked at her. Saying he was sorry seemed redundant.
‘You’ve read this?’ said Genevieve, flicking to the fifth page. ‘There’s a section on healthy eating. There’s a section on how to vote. A generation suffering from an unholy trinity of cynicism, ignorance and apathy,’ she read. ‘That’s you and me, honey.’
‘It’s certainly me,’ said Karl. ‘You’re just getting dragged down by the rest of us.’
‘And who are they, anyway? Are we randomly assigned? Is it like a dating website?’
Karl looked at his feet. They had already been allocated mentors. Once he’d agreed to the terms and signed and dated two documents, the process had been seven mouse clicks on the other side of the notary public’s desk.
‘Do they pick us out like puppies?’
‘We meet them tomorrow,’ said Karl.
‘Oh God,’ said Genevieve. ‘What are their names?’
‘Stu. Stuart Carson. And Janna Ridland.’
‘Janna,’ said Genevieve. ‘Janna. The name sounds half empty.’
‘You’re doing this to keep me out of prison. Do you need to hear me say how much I appreciate it?’
Genevieve turned and kicked her legs over his. She shuffled closer.
‘This is what I don’t like, Karly, we’re –’ she put her head on his shoulder – ‘we’re going through the same ups and downs young couples have always gone through, and they’re treating us like we’re an aberration.’
Karl took a sip of his tea.
‘I’m thirty-four,’ he said. ‘When my father was thirty-four he and Mum already had my two sisters. And a Ford Escort. They owned a house. They went on holidays.’
‘When my father was thirty-four,’ said Genevieve, ‘he had my mother sectioned, dropped me and Nina at Granny’s and drank himself to death in Madrid.’
‘Madrid?’ said Karl.
Last time it was Berlin and, now that he thought of it, he was certain that Genevieve never mentioned the same city twice.
4 (#u8dbad0ef-bff8-5bc7-834e-390a1c7b55f6)
IN THE COUNCIL CHAMBER, every room looked like a waiting room, lined with low oblong benches and school chairs, one strip light flickering. It was hard to get up from the deep spongy bench when their mentors came through the double doors of 151.
Karl’s first thought was that they didn’t look any older than him or Genevieve, but then maybe there was only a decade or so in it. He had expected an aura of age and experience: authority figures, the way teachers looked when he was a pupil. Janna was angular and pretty, a white blouse tucked into a black leather pencil skirt. Her mouth was very small, like a china doll’s. Stu at least looked weathered. He was wearing black jeans and a black T-shirt with a lightning bolt on it. He had a black and purple Mohican, four inches tall, five spikes.
‘God, this place is depressing,’ said Stu. ‘Sorry they made you come here.’
‘Don’t get up,’ said Janna, once they were up. They exchanged air kisses.
‘You probably weren’t expecting us to look like this,’ said Stu.
‘Oh, what, the Mohawk?’ said Karl.
‘The Mohawk actually wore a patch at the base of the skull and a patch at the forehead,’ said Stu. ‘This is closer to an Iro.’
‘Do you have any …’ said Genevieve. ‘Indian blood, I mean?’
‘Genevieve,’ said Stu, ‘I am merely an enthusiast.’
Stu busied himself collecting four flimsy cups of coffee from the machine in the corner. The two couples sat opposite one another over a pine and clapboard table too low for the seats.
‘Drink,’ he said. ‘It’s terrible, but, you know, ritual. Everything feels better when you’re holding something warm. You’re a primary school teacher, I’m told?’
‘That’s right,’ said Genevieve.
‘That’s brilliant,’ said Stu. ‘You’re one of the most important people in the country. And Karl?’
‘You know those fliers you see stuck to lamp posts that say make £1,000 a week online without leaving your house?’ said Karl.
‘You stick those up?’ said Stu.
‘No,’ said Karl. ‘I make a thousand pounds a week online without leaving my house. Except it’s not really a thousand pounds a week. I suppose it could be if you never went to sleep.’
‘So you’re self-employed,’ said Janna. ‘But what’s the work?’
‘Search-engine evaluation, product reviews,’ said Karl. ‘Literature essays for rich students. It’s actually duller than it sounds.’
‘A fellow middle-class underachiever,’ said Stu.
‘You know the type.’
‘I was the type. Look, you don’t need to rush into anything, but this is a chance to do something with your life. The Transition isn’t a punishment, it’s an opportunity.’
He took two thick, stapled forms out of his shoulder bag, and a blue pen.
‘You’ll be living with us as equals – we eat together, talk together, leave the house for work together. Or, well, Karl, in your case you’ll be staying in the house to work, but you get the point.’
Genevieve and Karl, who had never read a contract in their lives, both turned to the final page of their forms, wrote their names in block capitals, signed.
‘The thing is, with the hair, it’s a lightning conductor,’ said Stu. ‘People think, oh, the guy with the hair. Or they think, in spite of the hair, he’s quite a nice guy. Any opinion that anyone ever holds about me is in the context of my hair. It’s the equivalent of being a beautiful woman.’
‘To be fair, it is the most interesting thing about him,’ said Janna, giving Stu a friendly but very hard punch on the shoulder, which he rubbed, pouting. ‘The removal team are picking up your stuff now, so that’s taken care of. We’ll see you for the general meeting in the morning, okay?’
Stu folded up their contracts and slipped them back into his shoulder bag.
‘Tomorrow, then,’ he said. ‘The Transition will send a car. Eight thirty.’
