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‘Yep?’
‘I hope you’re not fiddling with your face again.’
Karl’s hand shook as he turned off the shaving light.
‘You know what?’ he said. ‘I think it’s maybe just a spot after all.’
8 (#ulink_7d752f7e-b715-51f0-b1e2-ee4ebbf22336)
ON MONDAY KARL woke up to find that Genevieve, Stu and Janna had already left for work. It was half past nine. His tablet displayed a chart of his time spent in REM sleep. There was also a text message from Keston. Stu had showed them how to re-route everything through the tablet. Karl had already bagged up their mobile phones to send to a mail purchasing service, which ought to make them a couple of hundred pounds in emergency funds.
– How’s the prisoner?
Karl thought about it, stretched, put a jumper on over his Garfield T-shirt and replied.
– This is a joke, right? I’m a petty criminal and I’m being treated like a long-lost son.
Keston replied while Karl was buttoning the fly of his jeans.
– Safety nets, broseph.
While the prosecution had moved for Karl being banned from the internet altogether, his livelihood still depended on fake consumer reviews and essays and his lawyer had been able to prove this was a basic human right. On his first day working alone in the house Karl stayed within his quarters, writing five-star reviews of a new orthopaedic desk chair for eleven different office-product sites. ‘It goes way beyond health-neutral!’ he wrote. ‘This chair should be prescribed before you even know you have a back complaint.’ After 3,500 words of copy he felt bored. This wasn’t his internet connection, and he was on best behaviour. That he had used it so far solely to check his emails and search for information on the human spine was an act of discipline in which he took an almost ascetic pride. Perhaps this was The Transition working subtly in him already. He went to the little oak bookshelf he and Genevieve had shared since they were students.
He took out his copy of Machiavelli’s The Prince, opened it in the middle, flicked through it from the beginning and dropped it. He frowned. He took out Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and did the same thing, dropping it on top of The Prince. This was perturbing to Karl because he kept a Polaroid photograph of Genevieve sleeping naked in his copy of The Prince; formerly he’d kept it in Leaves of Grass until they heard a radio documentary about Leaves of Grass and Genevieve said she’d like to read it. She hadn’t shown much interest in any form of intimacy over the previous months, which he supposed was probably understandable, but it was getting to the point where she got dressed and undressed hurriedly, irritably, as if on the beach, and the Polaroid had become an increasingly treasured possession. He started going through each of the paperbacks in turn. When he got to the first book on the second shelf, Hartley’s The Go-Between, a MasterCard with the name MRS GENEVIEVE TEMPERLEY landed face up on the carpet. Genevieve had apparently judged The Go-Between the novel least likely to appeal to Karl or to Janna or Stu in the event of a spot check. Well, whatever. He felt happy that she had a secret. What was she going to use it for? A work do? Clothes? It was harmless.
What if she decided she’d had enough and got on a train? What if she skipped town? What if she caught the train to the airport? What if she skipped town, fled the country and didn’t take her medication? God, he loved her. He wanted to look at the photo.
He searched every book on the shelf, but it wasn’t there. Maybe Genevieve had found it. Had found it ages ago, hated him for it. Maybe it was a fairly innocuous thing to have by most people’s standards, but the fact remained he had taken the photo, four years ago, while Genevieve was asleep, two T-shirts wrapped around the camera to muffle the sound of the shutter, and some of the frisson of looking at the photo came from her unawareness of its existence. A betrayal. A seedy little voyeuristic betrayal. Is that why … No. He had last ogled the photo when they were packing a few days ago, while he was loading the books into a cardboard box, while Genevieve was out of the room. He distinctly remembered slipping it back into The Prince. Fucking hell.
Karl put Genevieve’s credit card back in The Go-Between, decided to say nothing and sadly went back to reviewing the chair. He took breaks in the kitchen to make tea or coffee and eat chocolate digestives, which he consumed at the rate of a hyperactive child. For lunch he boiled an egg and baked a tomato and garlic flatbread he found in the fridge. It was a Smart Fridge. He had read about them, reviewed a couple of models. The back of the fridge was a locked metal door which opened directly onto the backstreet and it got replenished every four days by an automated delivery service. You didn’t even need to order anything unless you wanted something special.
After overeating he went straight back to his work.
THIS RESPECT FOR Janna and Stu’s privacy lasted until that afternoon, when Karl made a reconnaissance of the ground floor. The dining room had feature wallpaper depicting a storybook woodland. Karl cracked a walnut by throwing it against the tiled floor. In the living room two unblemished white sofas sat in an L shape. A vast flat-screen TV faced a large abstract painting on the opposite wall. It was grey, black and white; the paint looked like it had been slathered on with a trowel and could have been taken for a DIY process abandoned part way through. Karl didn’t like it, but he liked that Janna and Stu liked it. He liked that there were things in the world people loved which he didn’t understand.
When he turned he noticed a low emanation of yellow light between the black-painted floorboards by the living-room door. Some kind of underfloor lighting? The light vanished, and Karl imagined the click of a switch, although he heard nothing. Then the light appeared again, for a moment – as if someone had forgotten something and returned temporarily to retrieve it – then off again. Karl lay down and tried to look between the floorboards, but the gap was too narrow. ‘Hello?’ he said. He got up, brushed the dust off his face and stamped on the floor. It sounded hollow, but this meant nothing – the usual cavity under the floorboards. What he had seen, presumably, was the glow of a light fitting mounted in a ceiling beneath the ground floor. He walked to the hallway and stamped on the red tiles, which felt solid. He unlocked the front door and walked into the street. The front garden had a cherry tree and pale Hepworth-like stone. There was no indication that there might be a cellar. He tried the door of the understairs cupboard. It was locked. It had a big Chubb keyhole, which was a bit much for a cupboard. He looked in the little wooden key house by the front door and it didn’t contain any likely keys, which only cemented his notion. Something else was wrong, something askew, but it took him a while to identify it.
‘There are no books,’ he said to Genevieve, that night. ‘Unless you count the Blu-ray manual.’
Genevieve shrugged.
‘They’re not readers,’ she said. ‘Don’t be a snob.’
The next day he decided to explore the first floor. He let himself fall backwards onto Janna and Stu’s king-size bed. It felt pliant and firm, like lying in plasticine, but then it moulded to his form. He looked upwards at the black metal chandelier – a silhouette. In the corner there was what looked like a trapeze – a chrome bar hanging from a ceiling reinforcement on two wires. Behind it a framed print, white on red in large block capitals:
GET
THINGS
DONE
From their bedroom window you could see the neighbours’ gardens. The one on the left was dominated by a trampoline, but its flower beds were very neat, with lines of bedding plants and a large fuchsia. Janna and Stu’s garden was a well-maintained vegetable allotment, all the way down to the garage. When did they have time to work on that? In contrast the garden to the right was completely overgrown with brambles, taller than the fence and thick as snakes; some fresh and livid green, some dead grey husks. There was a bald patch in the middle of the wasteland, and Karl was surprised to see a single, gnarled foot and the beginnings of a grey-haired shin gently kicking. He craned his neck, but this only revealed a little more of the shin. Crazy old man sunbathing in his bramble forest.
He felt a prickle on his hand and looked down to see a tiny brown spider crawling over it. Karl recalled hearing something about Lyme disease being transmitted by ticks which looked like small spiders, so he flicked it onto the windowsill and crushed it with a corner of his wallet. The spider curled up and was still twitching when he took the wallet up. You have to really finish the job, reduce it to something non-sentient, a paste of minerals. He used his thumb. Karl noticed a silver key propped up in the corner of the windowsill, a substantial little Chubb key. His brain lit up as if he had picked up the key in a computer game. It had to be for the locked cupboard. He grabbed it and ran down the stairs.
The door to the understairs cupboard chocked open when he turned the key and in the darkness Karl could make out a bracketed shelf holding a pot of screws and a torch. He picked up the torch and a square of card fluttered to the ground. He knelt. It was the photo of his wife, lying on her side, eyes closed, a half-smile, one arm folded under her breasts. It felt like someone had hit a mute button in his head.
He put the photo in his pocket and was about to turn on the torch when he heard the jangle of a bunch of keys being dropped on the front doorstep and Janna swearing. He just had time to close the cupboard, lock it and pocket the key before Janna’s key was in the front door. When she came through he was walking down the corridor and turned, as if surprised.
‘Oh, hi Karl,’ she said, brightly.
‘You’re back early,’ he said. ‘Tea?’
‘I work from home Tuesday afternoons. I’m fine, thanks,’ said Janna. ‘Is Genevieve at work?’
‘School, yep. Inter-tutor football tournament, actually.’
‘Oh, that’s fun.’ Janna sat down on the hallway chaise longue to take off her shoes. ‘Although I can’t really imagine Genevieve with a PE whistle.’
‘Ha. No.’ Karl had wandered back into the hallway with the full kettle. ‘I really like your chaise longue,’ he said.
‘Oh, thanks,’ said Janna. ‘I reupholstered it, actually. Evening class.’
‘Wow. That’s ace.’
Was ace something he said? Was it something anyone said? Was the general consensus that ace was an acceptable term of approbation?
‘Karl?’
‘Yes?’
‘Does your wife like me?’
‘Yes, of course.’ Karl passed the kettle from one hand to another. ‘Really. I mean we’ve only just met you, but she really likes you, yes.’
‘She said something odd to me yesterday.’
‘What did she say?’
‘It’s not really …’ Janna took out her tablet and started tapping on it. ‘It doesn’t matter, actually. Is that just for one cup?’
‘Um,’ said Karl. ‘It is. Sometimes she says odd things. I wouldn’t think anything of it.’
‘Don’t boil the whole kettle for one cup, okay?’
‘Sorry.’
Janna put her tablet down, walked up to Karl and put her hand on his cheek. He tensed all over.
‘And stop apologising all the time,’ she said. ‘You’re making me feel bad.’
Back at his desk Karl wrote 500 words on lumbar support. It was only in the wake of his arrest that Karl had diversified into the shady world of bespoke essay writing through an online database called Study Sherpas©. Wealthy students, canny enough to fear plagiarism-detection software, could use the fairly expensive service to commission bespoke essays, written by actual educated human beings. An essay would never be reused – it became the customer’s intellectual property the minute they paid for it. Study Sherpas© was covered in disclaimers pointing out that it was intended as a study aid providing model answers in a variety of subjects and that collusion was an offence punishable by expulsion from any given institution, but that, nevertheless, their product was one hundred per cent undetectable provided it was used with basic common sense. You could request a particular grade: if, for instance, you were an un-brilliant student who needed to complete a module for whatever reason, you could request a 2:2 in postcolonialism and your Sherpa would do their best to deliver just that. Within three marks of the target or the fee was halved.
The site took the majority of the fee, but even at its most paltry there was a better per-word rate than the average journalist or book critic received and this more than made up for the dubious morality of facilitating lie after lie in the lives of a growing pool of strangers with undeserved degrees. It was dishonourable work, but he was getting paid for doing what he loved in a competitive economy, and how many people really got to use their degrees in the real world? Karl had already provided five 2,000-word essays for A-level coursework and six presentations and papers of various lengths for undergraduate students, and was now working on a 12,000-word dissertation on elliptical technique in Henry James, a plum job he’d scored thanks to his five-star rating in the English/Comparative Literature section of Study Sherpas©. He read his most recent customer review and flushed with pride:
FIVE STARS NO QUESTION! This guy is the bollox I needed decent two one in postmodern American fiction did he deliver fuck yes!
Karl didn’t even need to buy any books – membership of Study Sherpas© came with access to the eBeW database (every book ever written), a hidden resource of pirated literature, pre-annotated with pertinent, adaptable quotes already highlighted.
He was about to make a start on his second-year BA paper ‘Don’t Be A Caterpillar: Self-Actualisation in Caribbean Poetry’ when Janna called up to the attic to say she had business in town and did he want anything?
This bought him a good hour to investigate the understairs cupboard again, but it was getting late and he was too rattled by his earlier disturbance. It seemed likely that Stu would get back while he was in there, and Genevieve was already late home and he wasn’t sure if he wanted her to know he was prying. No, the key had to be returned before anyone realised it was gone.
He tiptoed into Stu and Janna’s bedroom, carefully sidling through the part-open door rather than opening it further. Janna’s work clothes were discarded on the bed. He tried to remember if the key had been upside down or not, decided not and placed it back in the corner of the windowsill. The gnarly foot was still kicking gently in the bramble garden.
It wasn’t until the following morning that Karl remembered he still had the Polaroid of Genevieve in his pocket. He didn’t want to lose it, but he thought through the situation and decided that there was some advantage if he knew about the photo being stolen and Janna and Stu didn’t know he knew.
On Wednesday morning he waited for half an hour after they’d all left for work, judging this long enough for any forgot-my-keys-type returns, and took the opportunity to check the cupboard out properly. Stu and Janna’s bedroom was dark and when Karl flicked the light switch he saw that the wardrobe doors were open and several outfits – a salmon-pink shirt, a blue pinstripe suit, a smart grey dress and some boots – were strewn over the bed.
He checked the windowsill. The key was gone. His breathing made a cloud of condensation on the window.
Downstairs Karl slid the Polaroid of his wife halfway under the door of the cupboard and then flicked it the rest of the way in.
9 (#ulink_068c11dd-c4b9-5c88-8bde-8be92f475c19)
WEDNESDAY WAS KARL’S first night to cook. His tablet announced that he was to make a simple but nourishing cheese and egg tart with wholemeal pastry and a spinach salad with home-made vinaigrette. The ingredients were all in the Smart Fridge and Smart Cupboard. When Genevieve got home from work she found him in the kitchen wearing a blue and white striped apron. He had flour on his forehead.
‘Ha ha ha!’ she said.
‘Thanks,’ said Karl.
‘You know, pastry is one of those really simple recipes which is almost impossible to get right,’ said Genevieve.
Karl flicked a fingerful of raw egg and grated cheese at her and she screamed.
‘My work clothes!’
‘Oh. Sorry.’
‘God.’
She stalked upstairs and Karl listened to the rest of a documentary about peak oil as he kneaded the bowl.
‘It’s delicious, Karl,’ said Stu. ‘Genevieve, did Karl cook much before?’
‘Pasta and pesto,’ said Genevieve. ‘Fish fingers.’
‘Well, he’s a natural, isn’t he?’
‘Please,’ said Karl. Although he was pleasantly surprised by the texture of the pastry – flaky but consistent. Janna poured a greenish liquid into their glasses from an oddly shaped bottle: a tall, wide neck and square base with the periodic table printed on it. Saturday was alcohol night – the rest of the week was dry.
‘This is a vitamin drink developed by one of our former protégés,’ she said. ‘The ones before the ones before you guys. It made the Journal of Nutritional Science – one of the first supplements to genuinely enhance your diet. I don’t know anything about the technical side, but … She’s a millionaire now.’
Karl took a sip of the cold vitamin drink. It tasted a little like Germolene.
‘Mm.’
‘So do you have protégés staying with you all the time?’ said Genevieve. ‘It must be exhausting. Are our replacements already lined up for when we leave?’
‘No,’ said Stu. ‘It’s the same for all the mentors: six months on, six months off.’
‘Like a lighthouse keeper,’ said Genevieve.
The tablet prompted them both to keep a journal at 10 p.m. every night. There were no rules on the content, but it had to be at least 500 words and the grammar check could tell whether or not it was basically literate.
‘This is going to be a novel by the end of the scheme,’ Karl complained.
Genevieve looked up from her typing.
‘That’s the point,’ she said. ‘The best ones are made available to future protégés. We get access to the online library in week 3. Karl, are you actually reading any of the daily bulletins?’
‘The what?’
‘Are you paying any attention at all?’
‘Sure.’
‘I get the feeling your heart’s not really in it.’
‘I’ve had a lot of work.’
‘I mean you’re the reason we’re here.’
‘I’m aware of that.’
‘I know you are.’
‘Well, then.’
Genevieve laughed.
Karl began transcribing their exchange on his tablet.
Halfway through his first sentence he looked up. When Genevieve paused he said, ‘How does this work with our TGU vows?’
‘This? Oh, it’s not relevant,’ said Genevieve. ‘This is a private network. It’s not the same at all.’
‘I don’t know if I’m comfortable with it,’ said Karl.
