The Gone-Away World

Chapter Four

MR., AHMM, hello, right. I see. Sorry. Ahhh . . . Ms. Brent?” Oleana Brent is the third person to leapfrog me in the office of Tolcaster & Ream. Not that she has physically leapt over me. Oleana Brent is a dignified, skeletal creature who would not risk damaging her portable froideur by engaging in gymnastics in a corporate waiting room, even if it was the kind of corporation which rather liked that sort of thing. She sits, dour and forlorn with a cup of vending machine decaf and a magazine she brought with her which has no pictures in it. Her head comes up smoothly and she walks into the office as if she is expecting to be immersed in cold water and teased by kindergarteners.

Martin Raddle was kind enough to point out, when Susan de Vries (Asst. VP i/c Personnel@T&Rplc, but not SWALK, UNHCR or DOA, though she no doubt aspires) erroneously called him in advance of me, that I was on the list before him. Susan de Vries made a sort of flapping gesture to imply that this would all come out in the wash, and Martin grimaced an apology and went on in. De Vries made a similar wriggly motion when I politely attempted to prevent her from repeating this mistake with Govinda Lancaster. Now Oleana Brent marches into the inner sanctum and it is clear that the game is already over. Four years of student buncoboothing has taught me to recognise a rigged table when I see one, and this isn’t so much a question of find the lady as lose her. And lo and behold, my interview (set for nine) is the last of the day, cannot be fitted in and will I come back next week?

I am the elite of the educational production line. There is no point in my coming back next week. I am being given the Spanish archer (“el bow,” if you are wondering) and my return next week would probably precipitate a mass exodus from the back of the building. I have been weighed and found wanting, and I never even saw the scales. I know this because it is getting to be a familiar feeling. The fix is, for some reason, in.

At Brightling Fourdale Klember, I was nodded through an unexciting discussion by two bored execs who explained at the start that they had already selected their candidates this year—and then rushed me out so they could speak to a promising young man from the Lister School of Economics. Melisande-Vedette-Farmer Inc. did not answer my letter. Tolcaster & Ream do not seem to be interested in talking to me either. I depart, so as to avoid being carried out by security.

So it goes. Sempler & Hoit do not wish to employ me. Nor do International Solutions & Development. At Barnard-Fisch AG we end up talking about the weather in more detail than I expected, and I realise that the interview has in some sense gone off the rails when Mr. Lange-Lieman desires that I repeat the defining features of cumulonimbus and seems almost alarmed when I stray back to the topic of employment. Finally, at Cadoggan GMbH my interviewer has at least the decency to explain what is bugging her.

“It’s rather unusual,” she explains, “for a candidate file to have a secure annexe.”

I was not aware that mine did, but she explains that this is why it is called secure.

“What does it say?” I ask. She does not know. This too is of the nature of the thing. It might say that I am an undercover operative. It might say that I am suspected of felonious activity abroad, or (and I am suddenly sitting on a slick, soggy cushion again) it might indicate that I have at some stage been associated with undesirable elements. I open my mouth to talk about Aline, but my interviewer shushes me. If I know the contents of the file, I should bear in mind that that information has been deemed classified, and she has no desire to be apprised of it in contravention of Section 1, para (ii) of the Information Act and 15, (vi) of the Dissemination & Control Act, and several assorted acts and orders which are themselves secret under section 23, (paras x–xxi) of a piece of legislation whose name is also too sensitive for general release. Unfortunately, with this significant question mark hanging over me, she also cannot offer me a job. And nor, as I have discovered, can anyone else.

Gonzo is unavailable, owing to a pressing romantic assignation with someone, or actually someones. Elisabeth Soames is my second call, and it transpires she is at home in Cricklewood Cove. I visit. I explain. Elisabeth wears the particular lack of expression I associate with rolling eyes and obvious answers, and then asks me which of my tutors at Jarndice best understands the real world. I ponder briefly—many Jarndice professors have worked in business and the law, science and the arts. None of them, really, gives the impression that they are worldly, save one. I say his name. Elisabeth nods. I cannot shake the feeling that she was waiting for me to catch up. I ask about her. She says she’s now studying to be a reporter. She has the urge to travel. There are things she wishes to know. Her expression tells me that is as much information as I will get at this time, and so we walk, and I make her laugh, just once.

Before I leave, she kisses me lightly on the cheek. It is a chaste thing, of deep affection. I embrace her, and it occurs to me how slight she is, and how slender by comparison with my arms and chest. I am aware of these things because my arms encircle her completely, and while my left palm is pressed to her back to draw her close, my right hand touches my own shoulder. We draw apart, and she kisses me again, on the other cheek. There is just a trace of moisture on her lips, and they are very soft. The kiss lingers and tingles on me, but before I can look at her, examine her, she has turned and slipped away, and my train is coming.

“BLOODY MESS,” says Dr. Fortismeer. He is not talking about my situation, but about his grouse, which has this minute arrived in the hand of a pretty Californian exchange student named Callista, whom Fortismeer has appointed his personal butler this year in a gesture towards equal rights for women. “Rebuke the kitchen, would you, please?” Callista favours him with a smouldering look, extremely fetching in her butler’s uniform, and departs. The grouse looks much like any other, a sort of shocked pigeon with stunted wings, but I gather that Fortismeer’s keener eye has spotted some deficiency.

“Potatoes,” he says morosely. “All over the place, and covered in muck. I loathe gravy. Always tastes of horsemeat. Ever had horse?”

“No.”

“Not bad, actually, bit horsey. Whiff of the stables, always.”

He glares at the grouse, then pokes it dejectedly with a fork. It gives a wet little noise of crisp skin being rustled by a big gentleman, and somehow looks rather sad. Fortismeer is touched, and takes pity on it, and conversation is precluded for a while because Dr. Fortismeer’s manner of eating, while scrupulously correct, is not quiet.

“You’ve got a problem,” Fortismeer murmurs finally, and I realise that he has actually been thinking about this while he demolished the unhappy grouse. My heart lifts a little.

“Silly problem,” Fortismeer murmurs. “Frightful girl, what was her name? Bloody Eva Braun waiting for Adolf. Not fair of me, of course, no destiny. Still, dobbed you in. Never liked her. Aline. Where is she now? Transferred. Buggered off. Say goodbye?”

“No,” I respond, realising for the first time that this is so. Fortismeer nods.

“Took that idiot Sebastian Sands with her, of course. Small mercies. Gifted student. Frightful pain in the arse. Rather liked him. Always wished him on another university. Lo and behold . . . Time for a bit of pudding, I think.” He rings the bell. Callista stalks back into the room with a vast bowl of rhubarb crumble steeped in cream. She has provided a second spoon, much smaller, for me. It is either a desperate attempt to prevent Fortismeer from rupturing or a backhanded comment on my relationship with him. She heaves a sigh in his direction as she puts the dish down and delivers a full-wattage pout. In Fortismeer’s place I’d be having trouble sitting, but he seems not to notice. Callista straightens sharply and marches out.

“Rhubarb’s the thing, you know. Increases circulation. Stimulates the sexual juices. Never know why they don’t investigate it. Probably worth millions. Your friend must live on it. What’s his name? Lubitsch. Eastern European blood, of course, goes at it like a weasel. Lubitsch, not Callista. She’s furious with him, you know. Stood her up. Throwing herself at me by way of revenge. Silly girl. Couldn’t be less interested. Too thin. Probably kill her if we got down to it. Snap her like a twig. She’d have to go on top. Hate that—always makes me feel like a whale being refloated. Need a woman of stature. Eh?”

Fortismeer draws an outline in the air of a woman constructed along the lines of a double bass. It is not a topic I wish to pursue, and so I remain strategically silent.

“Go and see Hoare. Knows things. Uncanny little sod. Too clever by half, and I’m so clever it’s painful.” His eyes glitter from his lax face, a fox in a thicket. “What will you tell him?”

“The truth.”

Fortismeer thinks about that.

“Yes,” he says at last. “Probably the best thing. Bloody deceptive, honesty.”

Callista brings cheese.

AND SO I find myself approaching the place of work of Mr. Crispin Hoare, of the Office of Procurement, which unfortunate combination of names has already caused me to snuffle briefly on the telephone, but about which, I was informed in breathless confidence by the temporary receptionist, Mr. Hoare has exactly no sense of humour at all. Mr. Hoare, indeed, does not appear to get a lot of laughs out of anything. The building in which he works is a grey slab with stern windows and poorly chosen organic paint colours which are intended to produce a stable and relaxing working environment (as per directive Ev/9) but in fact cause the entire complex to resemble the messy interior plumbing of a sickly bison. The strip lighting (low energy as per directive Ev/6) is responsible for much of this, because it emits in the green and purple areas of the spectrum, which are not tints favourable to a feeling of general good health. Further, this illumination is produced by ultra-high-frequency discharges of an electric current through a tube of fluorescing gas, meaning that they flicker at a given (enormously rapid) rate, this frequency being one which sadly produces tension, annoyance and migraines in 81 per cent of adult humans, and has the interesting side effect of causing tachycardia in shrews. Shrews being very susceptible to stress, and having in any case ill-designed cardiovascular systems, it is safe to assume that any shrew entering Mr. Hoare’s workplace with the intention of asking him for a job would be dead before it had gone five metres down the long corridor I am currently attempting, and would thereby instantly convert itself into organic waste and be disposed of by the sanitation crew. Should the shrew turn out to contain elevated or even toxic levels of chemical waste, or should there be cause to suspect, by reason of signs of aberrant and un-shrew-like behaviour or outward symptoms of transmissible disease such as, but not limited to, rashes, bleeding, elevated temperature and coughing, evidence of pre-mortem deliquescence, or petechial haemorrhaging, that the aforementioned shrew was in fact the carrier of a biological agent, the business of disposal would be handed over to a hazmat team trained in these matters, and the tiny body would be removed in a suitable container by men and women wearing spacesuits and taken to a place of investigation to ascertain the level of the threat and also to tease from the tiny, terrified corpse any forensic evidence suggesting that it might be involved in anti-statist activities, that it might, in fact, be a suicide shrew.

Since no shrew would in the normal course of events come anywhere near the Office of Procurement, the mere presence of the animal would have to be assumed evidence of abnormal activity, and a stray, confused and moribund rodent of this kind could reasonably be expected to close an entire government building for several hours and cost the taxpayer a cool quarter-mil. All of which goes through my mind as I trudge to Mr. Hoare’s office in search of some way to earn money in what has turned out to be a hostile world.

The door is closed, of course, because men like Mr. Hoare do not emphasise their availability. In my dreams I have seen this door as grand and wooden, watched it swing open before I can knock. In these visions, the door itself was heavy, reinforced with strange materials spun off from space explorations and deep-sea diving, so as to with-stand bullets, bombs and manual force for long enough to afford the priceless expertise contained in the person of Crispin Hoare ample time to summon assistance in the face of such outrageous assaults, or to take cover in the complex of tunnels spreading out from behind his study, or even to arm himself and personally repel the invasion by use of advanced weaponry and superior skill.

The door I am now approaching is mysteriously ignorant of this impressive ancestry, and seems determined to be made of a nasty prefab moulded stuff, and to have a grubby window in it, and “C. T. Hoare, i/c Proc’t.” stencilled or even transferred onto it in tatty gold leaf. I raise my hand, expecting to be pre-empted, and am not, which means that my first knock is rather muffled and ham-fisted, and I am forced to repeat the effort before a loud voice says “Come,” and I struggle with the handle for a moment because my fingers are suddenly slippery and it is one of those round ones which are a bit stiff.

“Use a hanky!” cries the voice within. Since there is a box of them resting on a school chair next to the door, I do. The door—light and definitely not reinforced—opens onto a chamber the size of a concession stand.

Mr. Hoare is by any measure a tiny, rat-like bloke with ears like solar panels on a pink, nervous satellite, and he has been orbiting here for a while in the summer heat because his unique odour permeates the room. He smells of linen and mint and of damp, male civil servant, but is not thank God one of those men who produces a rich, salty mustard gas from their armpits, and so the effect is surprising but not revolting. He gestures me to a chair and leans forward curiously, and I have to shake my head slightly to dislodge the shrew comparison lest I say something foolish and (more crucially) unemployable. He asks what he can do for me and I tell him that I would like a job, which appears to surprise him.

“But my dear boy,” says C.T. Hoare, “surely not with us?”

Yes, it has been my life’s ambition.

“Do you know what we do here?”

This is something of a poser. It is either so obvious that it needs no explanation, or so secret that it may not be mentioned, because nowhere in the many pages of literature I have scrutinised in order to isolate the name of Crispin Hoare and obtain his coordinates have I been able to ascertain the precise function of his office.

“Looked at intelligently,” I say, looking at Crispin Hoare intelligently, “this is the most important branch of the civil service.”

“Oh yes, undoubtedly,” says Crispin Hoare, very pleased, “but what drew your attention to us? Not a lot of people,” he says sadly, “are even aware we exist. Necessary, of course, but sad.”

I have no idea what ought to have drawn my attention, and no desire to lay claim to having had my attention drawn by routes either improper or unfeasible, so I agree with the necessity and dodge the question, and so it goes on, and with every one of my evasions Crispin Hoare seems to get a little more tired and sad, and each of my non-responses is a springboard into another question I cannot answer, and finally he holds up his hand for a halt and I know, absolutely clearly, that I have been busted wide open like a cantaloupe, and the only thing left is whether he takes pity on me or throws me out on my lying, untouchable arse.

Crispin Hoare looks at me across the desk and takes stock. He lets out a long, slow sigh.

“Forgive me,” he says. “I think the reason you came to me is that you have no other choice. You are here,” Crispin Hoare says, “because someone has given you nowhere else to go.” He nods to himself, and I realise that his satellite head is not one of those ones which beams long-distance phone calls from Estonia to Kashmir, it is one of the ones which can photograph your hair follicles and read your mail from up there. C.T. Hoare is not someone you can kid with some unrehearsed blather and a Gonzo grin.

“There is an annexe attached to your record. I would imagine,” C.T. Hoare says, over his cluttered, amiable desk, “that not one of the other people you went to for employment even talked to you about the job.” He gazes at me steadily, with sympathy. “I would imagine that they talked about everything but the job. And despite some splendid prevarication, I would venture that you have no notion of what I do. Very good effort, though.” At which point I nearly burst into tears, but manage instead a manly nod which is intended to convey that none of this is now or has ever been my fault, and yet I carry the cross without complaint or expectation of redress. Crispin Hoare opens a Manila folder and studies the single page contained therein. It takes him not very long at all. He reads it again, just to make sure. He shrugs.

“Would you like to see what it says?” And he slides the file halfway across the table towards me.

I consider several options, most of which are not options at all. I dismiss instantly all the ones which involve screaming, shouting or beating him to death with the heavy stapler by the window. Similarly I discard the possibility of kissing his hands and swearing my firstborn daughter to him as a handmaiden, or my son as a footrest. The only real question is whether I will reach across and accept the file and find out why I am unemployable, or leap to my feet and flee, and spend the rest of my life cleaning windows and wondering. It is a closer thing than you would think. The white page is mighty scary, and I glance down to assess its magic, only then realising that I have accepted it.

“REFER TO GEORGE LOURDES COPSEN” in large print, and then a note, in Lydia’s father’s wandering script: “Stat filler. Send him over if you like the cut.” This last is a naval expression, the cut of a ship’s jib being the angle of her foresail, the defining feature of her character as a vessel, hence also a man or woman’s bearing, and thus by overextension possibly the jib becomes the nose. It seems improbable to me that George Lourdes Copsen is concerned with the formation of my nose, he being the possessor of a set of grade A epicanthic folds and hence a man well aware that the soul’s complexion is not readily legible in the face. It seems more likely that he wishes Crispin Hoare to exercise his judgement, and that my future prospects hinge entirely on the decision of a man I have just failed to gull, who has seen through my impoverished blarney, who has no cause to love me and whom I have secretly likened to a geosynchronous shrew. C.T. Hoare looks at me, and allows the full weight of his intelligence to appear for a moment behind his genial, ugly little face, and like Master Wu he finds in me whatever it is that he is looking for.

“Stat filler,” he says, sounding like the Evangelist (in her genuine, profane mode) talking about cross burnings. “Do you know what that is?”

I do not.

“Come with me.” And Crispin Hoare gets up from his desk and leads me out of his office, down one corridor and up another, until we are in an office almost exactly like his own with a man named Pont. Pont has no first name, or no last. The little banker’s plate on his desk reads “PONT” in capitals, so I wonder whether PONT is his title. Person Of Natural Talent. Political Organiser for Nebulous Treaties. Penguin Officer, North Territory. This last one sounds improbable, but it would explain why Pont’s wallspace is covered in meticulous graphs and charts. I am looking for signs of Arctic birdlife and blubber studies, when Crispin Hoare speaks again.

“Pont,” says Crispin Hoare, “I propose a Socratic sort of dialogue, culminating perhaps in a brief excursus.”

“Oh, right ho,” says Pont gamely, and, laying down whatever data set he is reading for his personal amusement, he gives every indication of pricking up his ears. Pont, like my new friend Crispin Hoare, has a distinctly small-mammal thing going on. Unlike Crispin Hoare, he looks to be nocturnal. He blinks and rubs at his nose with a cupped hand, and communicates his readiness to proceed. Crispin Hoare leans against the wall next to the door and begins.

“Hobbes [the political thinker, not the rather delightful cartoon tiger of the same name] asserted that the natural state of mankind is war. What say you?”

“I say he was a pessimistic old fart with a bee in his bonnet about the need for big government.”

“Pont . . .”

“All right, all right. The position is not utterly baseless. Proceed.”

“I should be delighted. Thus, the creation of the state, with its first duty being essentially to prevent one man from preying on another. Yes?”

“Hnqgglflmmpf.”

“I shall take that as a ‘yes.’ Now, are those engaged in the business of governing any different by nature from those they govern?”

“Yes. They’re prideful and tend to sexual misconduct. Also, the situation of being in government tends to drive you mad.”

“But are they more virtuous or more intelligent? Or more compassionate?”

“Ha!”

“Let’s call that one a ‘no.’ So, in order to protect the populace from their own governors, the law must be universal. More, it must require transparent and consistent behaviour from those appointed to rule. Hence the rulers must function, not as individuals, but as applicators of perfect justice, the willing part (and here I use the term ‘willing’ meaning intending and asserting rather than merely accepting) of a machine for good government. Personal considerations are inadmissible, lest the whole structure be compromised by privi lege—private law. We are talking about a Government Machine. Yes?”

“I hope you’re going somewhere with this, Crispin, because I’ve got a whole exciting pile of reports on potassium purchasing to get through.”

“Trust in me, stout Pont. I am but a little way off my goal.”

“Forge ahead, then.”

“Such a mechanism cannot function without accurate information. Quite obviously, with every degree of imperfection in the input, the output will be wrong by that degree multiplied by whatever other relevant false information is already there, and by whatever drift is inherent in the system’s construction (it being impossible according to the laws of thermodynamics to build any engine which does not dissipate energy in the process of performing its task). Since this machine is informational, of course, that loss of accuracy will not produce heat, but rather nonsense. Yes?”

“Garbage in, garbage out. Or rather more felicitously: the tree of nonsense is watered with error, and from its branches swing the pumpkins of disaster.”

“Oh, my dear Pont, that’s rather good!”

“Potassium-purchasing reports are so exciting, Crispin, that every so often I have to pull myself back down to Earth with a bit of hard labour at the creative coalface. But please, continue.”

Crispin Hoare nods. “To recap: it is possible to put decent information into a Government Machine, have ordinary, good people running the thing, and a reasonable system in place, and still get utter idiocy out of the dispenser.”

“More than possible. Likely.”

“So let us look at a specific hypothetical case: let us suppose that the machine were looking for enemies within its own population.”

“Well, inevitably it will have enemies. It’s unfair, so people will inveigh against it. The question is how it perceives those enemies. Initially, it will see them as legitimate opposition, because that’s written in. But each time it looks at them, the predisposition established in the last investigation towards the possibility of criminal activity will be emphasised.”

“More plainly?”

“It’s like taking a photograph of a photograph of a photograph. What’s actually going on gets less clear. Shadows get darker. Faces are blurred. Eventually, it’s all in the interpretation—but the interpretation is being done by people whose job is to look for danger. So they will err on the side of caution. Eventually, a photograph of a child’s birthday party becomes a blurred image of an arms deal. The pixelated face of Guthrie Jones, under-nines balloon-modelling champion, becomes the grizzled visage of Angela Hedergast, infamous uranium seller. Each investigation of the same facts increases the likelihood that something will be found which is frightening—or rather something will be found to be frightening. Eventually, the mere fact that something or someone has been investigated eleven times becomes suspicious.”

“And therefore the numbers of suspected enemies of the people?”

“Would explode. The Government Machine is looking at itself in the mirror, of course; it’s seeing an image of its own weaknesses.”

“So what, practically speaking, would be the upshot of this?”

“You end up with a machine which knows that by its mildest estimates it must have terrible enemies all around and within it, but it can’t find them. It therefore deduces that they are well-concealed and expert, likely professional agitators and terrorists. Thus, more stringent and probing methods are called for. Those who transgress in the slightest, or of whom even small suspicions are harboured, must be treated as terrible foes. A lot of rather ordinary people will get repeatedly investigated with increasing severity until the Government Machine either finds enemies or someone very high up indeed personally turns the tide . . . And these people under the microscope are in fact just taking up space in the machine’s numerical model. In short, innocent people are treated as hellish fiends of ingenuity and bile because there’s a gap in the numbers. Filling gaps in the statistics . . . Oh. Crispin?”

“Pont.”

“Did you just drag me through that entire fandango to get an explanation of ‘stat filler’ for one of your chums with a secure annexe?”

“I always enjoy our little talks.”

Pont sighs heavily.

“Leave me, please, Crispin and friend. I have a futility-induced migraine.”

“Thank you, Pont.”

Crispin Hoare leads me back to his office. I sit.

“Is it true?” I ask.

“Broadly,” says Crispin Hoare. “It’s more nuanced, of course. The system is more reflexive than that. People are permitted a degree of freedom to express opinions. Usually the witch-hunt stops after a few iterations and we can all go back to what we’re doing. Except for Pont, of course.”

“Why him?”

“Oh, didn’t I say?” Crispin Hoare smiles thinly, and there is a flicker of warning in his genial face. “Our friend Pont is the witchfinder general. The real one. He goes through the numbers. He reads the confessions. He tracks and he traces and he never forgets anything. Very clever man. He finds the really dangerous people and he deals with them.”

“How does he find them? If it’s all so messed up?”

“Sympathy, of course. Pont agrees with them. He loathes the Government Machine. Despises it. Anarchist, is Pont. But . . . he hates violence more, d’you see? Thinks it replicates and alienates. No answers in violence for Pont, just more rules, which of course he hates. So Pont . . . well, Pont thinks like the enemy, from our point of view. And from his, he turns in notional allies who think like us, and lets us deal with them. If you were ever thinking of getting involved in a real insurrection—not some student thing—you should be very afraid of Pont. He’s never wrong.”

Brrr.

“We tracked down your chum Sebastian, you know, offered him a job in Pont’s office. No go. He and his wife—I think you know her too—are content with their new professional direction. One can only say it takes all sorts.” He shrugs. I imagine vaguely that Sebastian and Aline must have opened an antique shop or started a business selling hand-woven linen goods.

“Sign,” Crispin Hoare says. He slides a form across the desk. It is long and fairly complicated and it is filled out already. It is titled, with magnificent redundancy and majestic self-importance, “Form.” At the bottom there is a space for the signatures of refugees from hostile interrogation who are lost at sea.

“What is it?”

“Only job I can give you. Only one you’ll get. George Copsen Wants You, and all that.”

“For what?”

“No idea.” I stare at him. “It’ll be all right,” says Crispin Hoare. “At least,” he adds, “I do hope it will be.”

I sign.

. . .

THE PLACE is called Project Albumen. It has nothing to do with eggs. The designation was randomly assigned by a computer program which apparently was not instructed to avoid names which are unsettling or mildly disgusting. For all I know it is not in fact called Project Albumen at all, or at least not to anyone but me. It has that kind of feel about it, of secret operations and clearances and vanishing off the face of the Earth. It is therefore very much in line with my last George Copsen experience, although not with my childhood ones, which involved biscuits and orange juice and camping under canvas in his living room while Gonzo and Lydia played a variation of Doctors and Nurses whose convoluted rules seemed to require me to be the corpse most of the time and allow them both to heal me with improvised surgical instruments (a butter knife/scalpel, a handkerchief/bandage and a length of plastic tubing filched from the garage whose precise purpose was mercifully never revealed to me).

If you stand in front of Project Albumen and look up, you don’t really see it properly. It is angular and stylish; the facade of the building follows a blocky in-and-out pattern like a ratchet or the tread of a sneaker. It has huge iron doors, burnished and sealed like a Greek temple with vague gestures in the direction of modernism. From close up, it’s hard to get an accurate picture of it—it’s just that big. If you go back along the road in order to look down on it, the sweep of the hill gets in the way. If you leave the road, against the stern advice of the signs reading “Danger—mining” and climb the hill, you will almost certainly be blown up. The signage is accurate, but coy.

Even should you manage to reach the crest of the hill in one piece, you would not see the project itself, because it is at all times partly hidden by a flirtatious mist. A slice of the eastern wing tempts you to look one way, a flash of the rear court draws you back again. You could obsess over this building, grow frantic to unveil its mysteries and plumb its inviting depths. If you were that sort of person, you could start to feel that this building wants it bad, that it deserves to be the subject of a hostile military action, an espionage-driven commando raid, just to teach it to behave.

A few months ago three highly motivated gentlemen assailed Project Albumen in fine special operations style. They wanted the secrets this building so plainly keeps beneath its lush deco exterior. After weeks of planning, they got into their sexy black outfits and made their move. They blew open the back door and, no doubt with a grand sense of empowerment and dominance, thrust mightily inside.

Unfortunately, the entire main building of Project Albumen is a honey trap. The interior is very large and has intricate, folded metal all around the walls. This falsely gives the impression of a large number of secret doors and passages, so it took them twenty-nine or so minutes to establish that there are in fact no exits. Shortly thereafter they discovered that the sanctum sanctorum, the warm, secret heart of Project Albumen, is in fact rather cold and unwelcoming, because it floods on a half-hour cycle with liquid nitrogen. The motivated gentlemen were removed somewhat later in the day when they had thawed enough to be prised loose from the floor.

All this I learn by way of welcoming chit-chat from a man called Richard P. Purvis. Lieutenant Richard P. Purvis. He drives right past the car park and carries on down a small access road behind some empty gas cylinders and a water tank. He stops the car next to a run-down Portakabin with “Foreman” stencilled on the door, and leads me inside. It is, of course, not a Portakabin, but the real entrance to Project Albumen. When this is revealed, I very nearly make the mistake of asking Richard P. Purvis whether, somewhere near here, there is a tank containing man-eating sharks, into which enemy agents can be tipped by means of a trapdoor. I do not ask, because I am very much afraid that the answer will be yes. This place has no sense of its own ridiculousness, and that self-regard is fortified by the fact that it kills people.

The back of the Portakabin segues smoothly into a numinous creamy corridor with curved walls and a grillework floor which winds away into the distance like something from an all-too-optimistic science fiction flick circa 1972. A cheery woman in a uniform I do not recognise greets me and politely tells me to undress. I undress. The cheery woman does not look away. If my revealed genitals alarm her, she conceals her consternation very well.

She takes my clothes and wanders off with them and, when I remain where I am, patiently tells me to follow. I pass through a door and into a room full of clinical personages in masks and gowns, and I am examined with considerably more thoroughness; probed, X-rayed, shaved, showered, scraped, biopsied, deloused, disinfected, polygraphed, MRI’d and then given some new (nasty) clothes, and finally sent onward and inward to the place of business of one General Copsen, who is either my best friend or my implacable enemy and I am beginning to think the difference would be impossible to discern, except that maybe he would have pressed the button instead of just showing it to me in that room back in Jarndice. Lydia’s father favours me with a piggy grin and says “Welcome to the strength” as if I’m not some kind of conscript.

“I guess you’re wondering why I’ve called you here,” says General George as we pass through a high-tech portcullis and into a hexagonal tunnel with something very like hair all over the walls, because he thinks he’s seriously funny, and he wants me to think so too. I think so, at least enough that he nods in response to my wan little grin and doesn’t have me put on a soggy cushion and strapped down.

“Truth is, you’re one of my great white hopes. My boys. And girls, of course, but I call you all my boys. One of the best. Came through it all, head up, chin up, good kid. Crispin says you’re clever, too.”

I stare at him. George Copsen is misting up. The ogre of electrical death has a tear in his eye. He wants to be loved. He thinks bygones can be bygones and I can join his twisted research family and marry (not Lydia) one of his daughters. General George Copsen wants to play pater familias.

“It was bad back there,” he says. “We had a quota. They said. ‘Find us this many terrorists, we know they’re out there!’ So I was playing catch. Saving the best. You’re one o’ the best, of course. One of my boys.” I wonder, briefly, what happened to the others. Tried? Held indefinitely? Released, forever suspect? Or just vanished? I’m furious with him for making me glad that I’m one of his boys.

He throws an arm around me like my skin isn’t crawling and I don’t want to be sick every time he twinkles at me, and he walks me along another big science fiction corridor towards whatever is at the centre of this spooky ant farm. The corridor is lit in some manner which defies my immediate analysis, and therefore I am unable to speculate what possible effect it might have on any shrews or shrew-like animals, save that I suspect they would be rendered placid and wide-eyed with wonder by the soft reassuring gleam of this walkway. It is devoid of right angles and has uneven foam spikes protruding from it in odd places to deaden the sound and make the whole thing undetectable to methods of espionage whose theoretical basis I am not cleared for, but which clearly require symmetry or solidity, a line of speculation I abandon in case I should figure out something I would have to be killed for knowing.

At last we round a corner and instead of another asymmetrical door or tangled staircase, there is an ill-proportioned room filled with men and women doing the kinds of things that produce grave expressions and thoughtful lip-chewing. Several of them, against the prevailing wisdom of the dental profession, are chewing pens or pencils, and of these one has a great smear of ink in the middle of his lower lip, and it is to him that General George is taking me.

“That’s the guy,” George Copsen says, all hushed and loved-up, “the number one. Clever like you and me and all these others together. He designed Albumen. Made this place. You’re working with him!” This last as if this man were the Rolling Stones or this year’s Audrey Hepburn. I’m underground in an insectoid, paranoid, futuristic maze, and my last encounter with my boss involved non-consensual torture games, but I’m going to be working with the man who created an entire architectural style for use as a lethal weapon. Yessir, George, that makes it all okay. Despite George Copsen’s urgency, I stop to look around, and take in what is happening to my life. Perhaps he takes this as awe.

The room is painted in shades of grey, and the ceiling is covered in the same irregular foam spikes as the corridor. The desks, like everything else, have been shaped to avoid sharp edges, which unfortunately means they are uneven and the scribbled papers on them are all slowly falling off onto the floor. Research assistants bend and pick them up once every two minutes or so in a repeating pattern which I assume must be determined by the height of the pile of paper, the friction between individual sheets and even the amount of graphite or ink scrawled across them. In other words, the more prolific the boffin, the more likely he is to find his best idea under the leg of his chair. One genius (I have no doubt that they are all genii of one stripe or another) has hung her notes from clothes lines strung over her workspace. This solves the storage problem, but unfortunately she is short-sighted and can’t see the ones at the far end from where she is sitting, so her day is a sort of geek version of a step-aerobics class: sit, work, check figures, stand, run to the far end, run back, sit. Repeat. (Armageddonetics! Get healthy the superweapon way!)

In the approximate (or for all I know the mathematically exact) centre of the room there is a Perspex tank filled with a clear liquid, and at the bottom of it is a fake battleground with toy soldiers and artificial grass, and a collection of not-to-scale military vehicles like the ones I had when Gonzo and I played WWII in the garden of Gonzo’s house, and chased the geese with firecrackers.

The guy with the inky lips—the only person with more paper and more space than the aerobics woman—is called Derek, or at least is to be called Derek, because this is etched on an oblong slice of metal which occupies the upper left panel of his white coat, thus: “Professor Derek.” If this appellation seems truncated, appearances are quite accurate. A strip of white cloth tape or self-adhesive bandage has been applied with precision but without reference to aesthetics across the nether part of the badge. I am despite myself darkly fascinated by an organisation which requires its assets to label themselves, while at the same time demanding that they conceal this information from one another. Professor Derek looks at George Copsen and receives a genial nod.

“Okay, people, positions, please.”

Like a rather sloppy chorus line in rehearsal, assorted people with bell curve–smashing brains take refuge behind screens and peer through scopes. Paper is shuffled to “safe” positions on chairs and in box files. Professor Derek glowers at everyone until they are all ready.

“Let’s go . . . And . . . testing protocol: battlefield. The test area is flooded to allow precise measurement of volume displaced . . . Charging . . . firing.” He ambles over to a small bank of switches and pushes one, then another, and finally—against a backdrop of spinning red lights and klaxons—a third. There is quiet. There is anticipation. There is a sudden wet splash.

The side of the tank is gone, a perfect circle bitten out of it, along with a slice of the mock battlefield and all the little soldiers. The water—or whatever it is—inside the tank immediately acts in accordance with physical laws regarding surface tension, fluid dynamics and gravity. My shoes get wet, and George Copsen, now the dampest general in the services, says “Oh, f’crissakes” and several words which he assumes Lydia does not know, although in fact to judge by my recollections of Gonzo’s lengthy and in-depth apology, she not only knows them, but could teach a fairly advanced course in the particulars of certain subsidiary activities not actually an integral part of the original unmentionable verbs, but considered excellent accompaniments by those with relevant skills and experience. All this distracts somewhat from the realisation of what we have just witnessed, which is a magic button that can apparently destroy matter in a specific and alarmingly personal way. At which point George Copsen announces that I will henceforth consider myself in the unconventional weapons and tactics industry. He implies that this is a market sector which will shortly see some expansion, that I will be getting in on the ground floor of a pretty good thing. He further enthuses that, owing to my youth and resilience under pressure (having a bag put over my head and being told I may at any moment be used as the filament in a human light bulb), I am also suitable for military training.

Without Ma Lubitsch to watch and guide me, and in the absence of good lunches, I have wound up in a dangerous place. I am gone to soldier.

“WHAT I AM about to tell you,” says Professor Derek the following day, “may make me sound like a crazy person. So I need you to remember, to bear in mind very carefully, that I have an IQ of such monstrous proportions that if, for the sake of argument, I were totally insane—if the palace of my intellect were a scary ivy-covered mansion in Louisiana with peeling paint and dead flowers and a garden full of murdered corpses planted by a man named Jerry-Lee Boudain—I am so much more intelligent than anybody else you will ever meet that there would be no way for anyone to tell.” He glances around and finds that this comparison has not had the intended effect. He sighs.

“I’m not crazy,” he says more directly. “I just deal with physics which is so complex that it basically sounds—outside of peer-reviewed journals—like nonsense. Like contracts and tax law.” He looks at everyone again, and whatever he sees must be more to his liking.

“You are all familiar with geeks as a genus,” he continues, “but what you need to get your heads round is that I am such a massive geek, such a totally terrifying concentration of nerdhood, that I have actually cracked the code for human social behaviour using mathematics. I am able to interact with people on what appears to be a casual non-scientific footing, and even get laid like a regular guy, because I made an intense study of behavioural and statistical ethnographics, and I am constantly running a series of predictive and quantitative calculations in my head, which provides me with acceptable human responses within the normative band and counterfeits qualitative judgement so well the difference is within the margin of error. On the most primitive level, for example, I know from the precise number of nods you are making and the muscles in your neck and face whether you are actually paying attention or whether you have decided that this part of the induction is not relevant to you personally and started thinking about something else. I know that I have a series of options regarding those of you currently thinking about last night’s sexual adventures or the football game this evening, and that these include a) hoping you will get smart and pay attention, b) addressing the issue directly on an individual or group basis by pointing out that I am currently your only chance of a decent rating and hence a job at the end of all this, but more immediately of your physical survival should we go to war, c) mentioning the whole thing in passing as an organic outgrowth of my opening remarks, on the understanding that you are smart enough to take a hint and d) SHOUTING AT YOU, which I gather is the preferred military solution. You will note that I have in fact pursued all these options in a hierarchical progression, and I confess this is because the mathematics of that particular solution were especially aesthetically promising. I mention this not because it is important that you should know it, but because it is the only example of the scale of my IQ advantage over you that you actually may understand. Questions?”

There are no questions. Professor Derek has a very loud voice and his bearing (presumably chosen from a number of distinct ways of presenting himself to us) does not invite attempts at humour or suggest that he is particularly fond of the funnies. Derek is ageless and calm and it seems he may not strictly belong to the same species as the rest of us. It would be better if he were dumpy or badly groomed, but—no doubt resulting from a string of life/quality/work output formulae—he is rugged, in reasonable shape and has neat, ordinary hair. He looks like the kind of Rhodes scholar who could appear on the cover of both GQ and Forbes. Derek shoots me a glance which says that this is him going with option a) for the moment. I hasten to take notes in a bold, round hand which can be read upside down, but my writing deteriorates as I actually start paying attention.

“Did you know,” says Professor Derek, “that we live in a narrow corridor of space? That if the Earth occupied an orbit only a little different from the one it does, we would not exist at all?”

I did know this, but Professor Derek was speaking rhetorically, or wants to be sure that everyone else knows too, because he goes on to explain. Essentially, what he says is that the Earth is a kind of estate agent’s wet dream of happy location. It is close enough to the Sun to draw energy from it to power biochemical reactions such as photosynthesis, without being so close that it catches fire and explodes. At the same time, it is not so far out that the atmosphere freezes and falls to the ground, which is physically entirely possible, and a very nasty idea indeed, not least because it reminds everyone in the room of the middle chamber of Project Albumen, and the man called Tyler whose job is to go in there and scrape careless persons off the walls before they thaw out and go all slushy.

The world we inhabit is balanced between the Sun and the inky gulf of space. If we one day cease to exist, what will be remarkable is that we were ever here at all.

“Excellent. Then here,” says Professor Derek, “is the hard part,” and we lean forward and engage the last bits of brainpower we have left over and prepare for a real poser.

Professor Derek turns, and pulls down from the ceiling of the room a white projection screen. It is one of the modern perforated kind, not the old ones which doubled as flypaper, and the projector is sleek and small and expensive. It is therefore something of a let-down when the image projected on the screen is a red circle and a blue circle with a purple bit where they overlap.

“Red and blue,” says Professor Derek, “on top of one another, producing purple. Yes?”

The next image is in fact two: on the left is a series of blobs and wiggles. On the right is a collection of blibs and woggles. Neither image is in any way a picture of anything. We wait for Professor Derek to say that this is a mistake, that these are finger paintings by his infant daughter. He does not. He presses a button, and the images slide together and become quite obviously a silhouette of a cowboy on a piebald horse.

“The world we see is a composite. It is an alloy. It is,” says Professor Derek, in case anyone has not grasped at this point that our world is one thing made of several things, “one thing made of several things. Okay?”

It is a little annoying to be treated as a moron by this guy, but on the other hand he probably has difficulty disintguishing between people who are actually very stupid and people who are just significantly less intelligent than he is.

“It is not just balanced between opposing forces. It is the overlap of these forces. These things—what you might call elements or essences, if you were of a historical turn of mind—are on the one hand what we refer to as matter or energy depending on what shape it’s in and how it is behaving at the time, and on the other information. Matter (or energy) exists. Information tells matter (or energy) how to behave and what to do. It does matter—”

Professor Derek pauses for a moment. “May I assume,” he says, “that from this point on when I say ‘matter’ you will understand that I also mean energy?” We nod.

“Very well. Information, then, does matter—in the sense that it is the organising principle without which matter simply cannot exist. Without matter, there is no universe and there’s no place to do anything. Without information, matter withers away. Vanishes. And gradually, even the memory fades. It won’t dissipate entirely, of course. But it becomes . . . slippery.”

Professor Derek seems to find that idea poetic. The guy on my left finds it “awesome.” He is right, but I don’t think he knows it. Information is what gives shape and stability to the universe. Remove it, and you get a perfect circle of absence, a space where there’s nothing, because the matter (and energy) there doesn’t know how to behave any more and (I cannot help but imagine it sulking) simply ceases to exist. Like the little toy soldiers in the laboratory downstairs.

Professor Derek and his team, by dint of his enormous intellect and considerable innovative powers and their collective technological know-how, have created a sort of Holy Grail of bombs. Or, at least, they have created the science necessary to create the bomb. The engineering, as ever, is playing catch-up—which is why they annihilated the side of the tank as well as the toy soldiers and why General George spent yesterday afternoon in his office wearing a uniform jacket and a pair of fluffy slippers. But any time soon they will be able to produce a controlled editing of the world within a discrete area, stripping out the information and leaving nothing behind—not even regret. They will have made the perfect weapon.

They will be able to make the enemy Go Away.

MY TRAINING turns out to be split between sessions with Professor Derek dealing with the necessary basic understanding of his theory (field radius, energy interactions, overlap issues, delivery systems) and learning how to be a military officer. The latter implies learning in the first place the rudiments of how to be a “fighting man”—military history being full of people who thought it did not, and these people quite often being associated with heroic, bloody idiocy and words like “rout” and “last stand.” “Fighting man” rather than “soldier,” because the term “soldier” is contentious. Several of our instructors are marines, who use “soldier” only to convey very deep contempt. A few others are technically airmen, in that they are high altitude low opening jumpers for the Special Air Commandos, and these regard the marines and the army with equal disdain because they don’t include as part of their routine instruction any information about breathing in low-oxygen environments or what to do if your parachute doesn’t open (I would have assumed there wasn’t a great deal to do except pray for a subsequent failure of local gravity, but apparently there is a method for unscrambling a parachute which can actually keep you alive in 43 per cent of cases, which has to be better than the odds of not bothering to try).

These gentlemen and ladies take us out for extremely long runs and over assault courses, which are of course gruelling and cold and miserable. The chief misery is actually boredom. Wobbling legs and ravaged muscles become numb, even pain becomes commonplace, but the business of running miles and miles each day on the same track with the same bargain-basement insults flying at you is ghastly because it is dull like nothing else you have experienced. The instructors are probably bored too, and they channel that into clichéd aggression and obligatory howls of fury. And when we are bored into some kind of military shape, able to run in full pack without sinking to our knees, we are handed over to Ronnie Cheung, who regards everyone in the world apart from Ronnie Cheung as a total fucking idiot.

Ronnie Cheung grew up in Hong Kong when it was still part of Cubritannia, or rather when it was still leased by the United Kingdom from the People’s Republic of China. He is to train us in all manner of combat. He is small and thickset and scowls at almost everything. He begins our lessons not with press-ups or running, but with a lecture in the same room which Professor Derek used to acquaint us with his genius. He leans on the lectern, doesn’t like it and shoves it out of the way. He sits down on the edge of the plinth, so that we have to crane to look at him. Looking at Ronnie Cheung is never going to be a favoured pastime with anyone. He is not easy on the eye. He has broad shoulders and big, ugly knuckles and a wide, bald head. He cultivates a sneer. He has weighed us in the balance, and he is already appalled by the quality of the merchandise.

“What,” Ronnie Cheung demands, “is the single most dangerous weapon used by most people in the course of a lifetime?”

“A gun,” suggests someone immediately, and Ronnie Cheung makes a farting noise between his lips.

“A kitchen knife,” someone else says. Ronnie Cheung shakes his head. By the absence of faux flatulence, we deduce that this is, although wrong, at least wrong in a good way. Domestic objects, then. Rolling pins? Cleavers? Axes? No, no, no. Someone gets lateral.

“The human body!”

Ronnie Cheung holds up his hand: stop.

“My body,” Ronnie Cheung says, “is a lethal weapon. Yours is a sack in which you keep your vital organs.” He flaps his hand. “You’re right—the body has the potential to be very dangerous,” and when this response elicits a triumphant smile from his interlocutor, he adds, “which is not to say I didn’t notice that that was a suck-arse answer and that you are a suck-arse.”

Ronnie waits. When it emerges that he has defeated us, he answers his own question.

“The automobile,” says Ronnie. “A bludgeon consisting of several thousand kilos of metal travelling at speeds in excess of thirty miles per hour. Dangerous in unskilled hands, which is most of them, but bloody lethal if you know a bit about how to use it.”

So, somewhat to our amazement, the first thing we learn is Automotive Tactical Engagement in Theory and Practice, suited to civil and urban warfare environments. It is an amazing amount of fun. We learn where you hit another car to make it spin out. We learn where to avoid pranging your own car in the course of an auto duel. We learn how to kill a car with sticks, chains, petrol, salt, guns and another car. We get jolted around and occasionally set on fire in our training suits, and we have a ball despite the injuries. Car combat is like sparring: it’s about speed, distance and timing. And knowing what you have to hit to knock the other guy down. I am moderately bad at it, in a fun kind of way, and there are plenty of other people who are worse, including Richard P. Purvis and a woman by the name of Kitty who claims to have driven stick since she was nine. We demolish a small fleet of compacts and saloons, and two sixteen-seaters just for variety. It takes three days.

“Right,” says Ronnie Cheung, when the last door handle falls to the dust and Riley Tench clambers victorious from a wrecked Nissan, “mêlée.” Because most of the point of this, really, has been to get us used to getting thrown around and messed up and not caring about it. So we move on to hand-to-hand, which is more personal and more naked, because there isn’t a three-foot crumple zone between you and the enemy. This is the bit where it’s important that the project has a good dentist. It does, although I am fortunate enough not to need her services more than once before I get back into the habit of moving my head out of the way before doing anything else.

And thus life goes on for a while. I train, I learn and I live in a little green room at the bottom of George Copsen and Professor Derek’s anthill. Ronnie Cheung lives on the level above, which is exactly the same, chair for chair, but he has two rooms side by side which he has kicked through into one. He does not invite us into it, but once in a while we are required to meet him at his door so that we can run somewhere or tackle the assault course under fire. Every so often I get a 48-Leave (mostly because it’s my turn, and occasionally because I am on the winning team in one of Ronnie Cheung’s bizarre exercises, such as the one where you are locked in a room with a selection of foodstuffs and required to make a weapon—the point of this is that a) a weapon doesn’t have to be something you hit someone with, it can be something they slip on or which gets in their eyes and hurts, b) weapons are everywhere and c) sometimes weapons are not everywhere, or an improvised weapon is genuinely more trouble than it’s worth, and you should just belt the other guy as hard as you possibly can in the head), and when this happens I go and see Gonzo’s parents in Cricklewood Cove. Sometimes I bang on my own front door, or let myself into my parents’ home with the hidden key. Sometimes there is a note for me or a meal in the fridge, or a brace of old airline tickets in the waste bin in the hall. Mostly, I seek Ma Lubitsch’s kitchen and the buzzing of the bees outside. I talk to her and to Old Man Lubitsch about life, and things, and trivia, and I wander around the Cove hoping to meet Elisabeth by accident. Sometimes I stand on the bluff where we scattered Master Wu’s ashes and drink tea from a Thermos flask. Once, I think I see her climbing up towards me, but she never arrives.

Gonzo himself is mostly absent, busy and productive with an ordinary life, and this gives me a warm feeling inside, as if it is something I have achieved; by straying from the path, I have allowed Gonzo to remain on it. It seems very odd to me that I am now part of the oppressive organs of state might, but I come to the conclusion that I am in fact investing in the defence of the conceptual framework of tolerance, and training for the last—rather than the first—resort to violence. If I sort of squint at this idea, I can almost believe it. Mostly, I do not think about it.

IN THE practice yard, Ronnie Cheung is sparring with Sergeant Hordle. I have watched Sifu Cheung for three months, but I have been careful in this context not to obtrude upon his notice. I have studied under Richard P. Purvis and alongside George Copsen’s other minions. I have been outwardly an indifferent student, but not a bad one, in case bad students get personal attention from Ronnie Cheung. I have improved at about the same speed as Riley Tench, who is a narrow, whipcord officer with “career” all over him and a degree in military history. Riley Tench fights politely, as if it would be rude to surprise an opponent, but he hits hard and doesn’t yield unless he has to. He’s a by-the-book sort of a person, an uninspired, dedicated plodder, which is why I have picked him as my model. As long as I am on the same page as Riley Tench, I will probably get put in only moderately tricky positions and have to deal with the feasible sort of challenge. Riley Tench is not Gonzo.

In the time I have been here, I have never seen Ronnie Cheung as much as discomfited by an opponent; although the boys and girls of various elite units frequently hit him, it seems to have absolutely no effect at all—the blows are absorbed by his legs or his barrel chest and shrugged off his ugly bullet head. Ronnie Cheung is a hard-form stylist the way André the Giant was a kinduva big fella. His attacks are direct, powerful and very, very fast. They land softly on the head and chest of his opponent, because this is a practice bout and it would be improper to scar or break a student, even a soldier like this one.

Sergeant Hordle launches one last combination and Ronnie Cheung gently sweeps him off his feet and buries him in the dust. In this context “gently” means that nothing goes crack or pop; Sergeant Hordle hits the ground hard enough that I feel the impact in my chest. This would be fairly impressive anyway, because Ronnie Cheung is an ordinary-sized person at best, and Sergeant Hordle is a very big one, but Hordle is also a sergeant in 2 Para, which makes him just this side of tougher than an iron bar. Hordle bounces to his feet and grins.

“That was crap,” Ronnie Cheung says, “it was total crap. Are you some kind of huge-testicled ballet dancer under that uniform? Are you a fucking chorus girl in a red beret? If I strip you off, Sergeant Hordle, and don’t snigger because I can and we both know it, if I strip you down to your skivvies with my own two hands, which I wouldn’t, because I don’t know where you’ve been, but I have thoughts, will I find that you are wearing stockings and a bloody tutu? And lest you think, Sergeant, that I am impugning your sexuality, let me remind you that Billy Radigand from C Company was in here half an hour ago and nearly took my bloody head off and he is a poof, not to say a homosexual, not to say he sups on sausage rather than fish, but he is hard as nails! And you are softer than a baby’s arse! Now fuck off and practise!”

This is Ronnie Cheung’s version of the Socratic method. It is a powerful motivational technique he has developed over many years, which functions best when everyone ignores it outwardly while at the same time being shamed into applying themselves to impossible tasks and thus emerging (in his own words) absolutely top fucking banana. Sergeant Hordle ignores it. He gathers himself up and trots off to one of the groups of trainees and fits himself into the pattern, and it is shortly apparent that he is very, very good indeed.

Ronnie Cheung eyes him with great disfavour, then shouts at a few other people for good measure. Finally, he glances at our corner of the yard, and his gaze sticks. Reluctantly, his attention flickers in my direction, sums me up and doesn’t see much to get excited about. He ambles over. He watches me closely and grunts. I am not using what I have learned from Master Wu. I am treating the whole thing as a new arena. I am learning a hard style as if I have never studied a soft one. Don’t mix and match—learn and combine, but only when you are ready. I am currently punching a sackful of wire wool to toughen my fingers. I am doing so without enthusiasm, because in fact I am under orders to preserve my hands so that I can operate the weapons systems if ever I should be called upon to do so. That I am also under orders to train as a lethal mêlée fighter is a piece of inherently contradictory crap which I have come to understand is part of the functioning of the world as we know it.

“And who’s this bumhole?” demands Ronnie Cheung.

“This is . . . ,” Richard P. Purvis begins, a bit surprised that Ronnie doesn’t seem to know my name after three months, but Ronnie Cheung is not watching me fudge hits on the target dummy, he is glaring at a pile of kit and supplies in the corner of the practice yard.

“No, not that bumhole,” Ronnie says, “this bumhole!” He glowers at a box of blank ammunition and practice knives. “The bumhole who imagines he can hide himself in my yard with some piece of low-rent special forces turdmastery.” And as he says it, he sticks his hands forward and into what I had taken to be the shadow of a packing crate, and emerges tangled in a furious exchange of blows with a broad, lethal figure all in black.

A lot of things happen very quickly. The man—it’s absolutely a man—breaks out a sort of truncheon thingy with a gooseneck whip at one end, and starts belabouring Ronnie Cheung about the head, or what would be the head if Ronnie’s hands weren’t up around his ears, guarding the bits of his face which will have to be stitched back on if the whip connects too sharply. Ronnie doesn’t seem to care that the skin on his forearms is splitting, and just keeps on blocking the thing and falling back. My choice would be to evade the whip and find a long, solid stick to use as a staff, but Ronnie is apparently either too proud to do this or doesn’t give a rat’s arse for staves and would rather suck it up and wait to get close, which he does now, moving as the guy in black makes a mistake with his whip-stick and bashing it out of his hand with a solid crunch which must hurt like hell. There is bone showing through Ronnie Cheung’s skin on his left arm, but there’s not really a lot of bleeding. This is the point of all the training he does: various bits of his body are now essentially impervious to normal injuries.

Ronnie launches a long, involved combination, arrhythmic and solid, with light skipping footwork to change the angle between them and move the centre line of his body out of his enemy’s effective cone of attack. His lighter blows would knock me down, and the heavy ones would almost certainly finish the fight outright. The other guy wards them off, meets them with equal force, and lands a couple on Ronnie which actually seem to have some effect. Finally, though, Ronnie locks the guy’s arms down and pummels him, then swings back and delivers a double-hand punch like the two prongs of a forklift truck hitting a corrugated iron wall, which sends the man in black through the air and onto his backside in a cloud of choking dust. Ronnie waddles over and glares at him.

The guy removes his black headgear.

“Gonzo,” says Ronnie Cheung, “that was crap. You are a bumhole.” He is extremely pleased, because his lips are swelling and he actually has a black eye. Gonzo grins. Then he coughs a bit, and Ronnie helps him up.

“I could have killed you, idiot boy,” Ronnie says, and Gonzo replies that no, he couldn’t, and Ronnie laughs again. Then Gonzo catches sight of me, and his bruised face lights up.

“Hey!” He leaps on me, delivers a great lunging hug, and I feel the muscles in his shoulders and chest. Gonzo was big a year ago. Now he is a titan. “Fuck, yeah!” says Gonzo, and because he likes to appropriate prowess by declaration he adds, “Have you seen this guy? Voiceless Dragon. Silent and deadly!” And Ronnie Cheung’s unblemished eye falls upon me with cordial loathing.

“Kept that quiet,” says Ronnie Cheung. “I thought they were all gone. Disappeared.” And when he says “disappeared” he waggles his hands in the air to indicate mystery and fog. At the same time he is giving me a look, which I recognise as a look of measurement. I am saved from any questions he may have (and Ronnie Cheung is blessed with a fondness for gossip which would make a dowager duchess blush) by the agency of Riley Tench, who looks at Gonzo and finds it necessary to attempt some male bonding.

“Total fucking ninja, man,” enthuses Riley Tench, slapping Gonzo on the back. He grins, and there’s one of those oh shit silences where everyone wishes they were somewhere else. Gonzo looks sickly, and Ronnie Cheung goes completely still. He is not tense. There is no sense of doggish aggression. He’s all relaxed and loose, the rooster strut falling away from him and being replaced by a perfect calm. This is a bad thing. It means he is absolutely ready to kill someone. He is five metres away from Riley Tench when he says “I do not train,” and he is standing very close to him, having crossed the intervening space without appreciably passing through all the necessary points along the line, when he says “ninjas.” He says this quite quietly and without particular emphasis, from a distance of about six inches. It is apparent that, even with Gonzo, Ronnie Cheung was holding back. He is faster and more dangerous than you would imagine is possible. He repeats himself, and Riley Tench sort of stops breathing and goggles at him. Ronnie Cheung says it again, turning his head slowly, so that when he says the full stop, which he somehow does, he is looking right at me.

“I do not train ninjas.”

He nods once, very slightly, and I realise he is apologising to me for Riley Tench. I nod back.

“All right then,” says Ronnie Cheung. “You,” and he points at me, “and Spunkbubble here,” and he indicates Riley Tench, who has just realised that he will not after all die today, and is measuring this glad news against the fact that he will hereinafter and for evermore be known as “Spunkbubble,” “will now engage in a brief sparring match in which you will show him why soft forms are the dog’s mighty man-grapes and hard forms are fit only to wash the back end of an incontinent cow. Make a space, boys and girls, for we shall see might and subtlety unleashed like my erection in the presence of a very expensive tart. Guard . . . Ready . . . Fight!”

Bugger.

So now I am in combat, not for real, but for a damn sight realer than I was twenty minutes ago. Ronnie Cheung watches me for signs of slacking, of holding back, and tells my opponent to make a bona fide attempt to injure me. Riley Tench, fair buzzing with fight/flight and desperate to regain some ground, charges in full weight. He almost makes it easy. He attacks high and hard, a basic opening, and I weave and step, brush and twist, and here’s a lock, briefly, which throws him that way and then the other, and he is on the floor. He leaps up. Ronnie Cheung throws him a practice knife. Riley lunges for my gut, then turns the movement into a slash. I am inside it. I strike him with my hips, and he goes “Whuff” and tenses, so I wrap the knife arm around myself (incidentally crunching my shoulder into his chest so that he comes with me) and then unwrap and lock it against my chest. As he counters that, I follow his movement and wrap his arm around him so that the rubber blade brushes against his neck.

It is a distressingly intimate thing. For a moment, his face is layed over an agonised canine muzzle, coughing blood, in that tiny shack outside Cricklewood Cove. I ignore it, and flip him flat onto his back, following him down through the air so that the practice knife never wavers. He lands hard (which was admittedly the idea) and I move the knife lightly to indicate that Riley Tench has just joined the ranks of the honoured and exsanguinated dead. Ronnie Cheung calls a halt, and looks at me with distant interest, as if he has just found me on his sleeve and doesn’t know from which orifice I have emerged.

“Volunteers?” he says, gesturing at me. Richard P. Purvis steps up and I win against him too, albeit it’s scrappy and Elisabeth would sniff at me. Gonzo begs off. Ronnie Cheung shrugs, squares up to me, then beats down my defence and flattens me in about a second—but he does so, to be honest, with huge restraint, and when he says “Bumhole” it is in a thoughtful way. He hums and nods to himself, and the day comes to an end in a bar somewhere. Ronnie Cheung forgets himself as far as to buy the first round.

And Gonzo: what the hell is he doing there? How is G.W. Lubitsch, heading when last seen for a merchant bank with thunderous initials offering salaries like phone numbers—national dialling codes included after five years—and perks and possibilities beyond the dreams of mortal men, how is Gonzo William Lubitsch leaping out like a pantomime villain from behind a packing case? How does he know Ronnie Cheung? The answers are supplied over crisp beer and salty nuggets cooked in saturated fat. Gonzo has a uniform, although the precise name of his unit is classified. Gonzo is also in training, for tasks more direct and warlike than those General Copsen apparently has in mind for me. More cogently, Gonzo spent three weeks at his new job and decided, “If I stay here I will be found at fifty-five, naked under two secretaries with my feet tied to the bedposts and a lemon in my mouth, and I will be dead and fat and no one will cry except the shy woman living opposite who has always had a crush on me but could never tell me and who might have saved me from myself, but didn’t.”

By this strange logic, it seems reasonable that Gonzo would opt for a military life, and inevitable, once that decision was made, that he should seek the special forces and the dirty deeds done dirt cheap for the good of those who must never know. Gonzo could never be a line officer or a grunt. Gonzo could only ever be a Mysterious Stranger, dispensing justice and retribution in alleys all around the globe.

And with that, he orders another round and refuses to talk about it any more, because he has not, as yet, done any of these things, he has only trained for them, and Gonzo hates to talk about himself in anticipation—it does not suit him to say he is, as yet, a rookie.

In my memory there are no strippers. Gonzo swears, the day after, that there were dozens.