The Paper Eater

A PLACE FOR IDIOTS

The ship’s Education Station is widely held to be a place for idiots, but I am drawn to it nonetheless. When I first came on board and was searching for the meaning of existence, I stumbled across a yellow philosophy book that contained a theory about the universe by some bloke whose name I can’t pronounce. It’s just a great big knitting machine gone haywire, he reckoned. Now, that makes sense to me. It’s a thing that gets started for no reason and reproduces itself in a mad and uncontrolled way. Like cancer, or the plastic bags in the cupboard under the sink. Ever since reading about this knitting machine, I’ve thought about writing a pamphlet called Power for the Powerless. Thought One: The more mysterious the system, the more the mystery excites you, the more it is bollocks. If it’s nice and simple and you can understand it, beware. And if you respect it, run a mile. Actually that’s three thoughts for the price of one, which is a typically Atlantican bargain.

Chew, chew, chew.

From what is old and ugly, bring forth the new. In the Bible or some such place, Judaea or Galilee or Aesop, a rotten old lion-carcass became home to a hive of bumble-bees, geysering up a glorious fountain of honey. From the strong came forth sweetness, di-da di-da. And likewise, from the dossiered evidence will come…

What? Vindication? Explanation?

No. Something more practical. A chess set. Sixty-four squares. Thirty-two pieces. Queen’s Gambit. Schliemann’s Defence. The Killer Grob.

It passes the time. I have already manufactured the sixteen pawns and all the main players except one, so I should be finished by the time we dock in Harbourville. Today I’m starting on the last black piece: Tiffany. She belongs on the front line of the opposition along with Pike, the Machine, Gwynneth, Geoff the stress dickhead, Keith the cat, Malt Fishook and Hooley the Social Adjustment associate. I decided long ago who’d be what. Tiff hasn’t the imagination to be a knight or the brains to be a bishop. She’s blinkered and defensive enough to be a rook, though. I haven’t forgotten my daughter’s face, and the angry hunch of her shoulders. A dumpy turret of a girl. I’ll give her a nice little portcullis, and make her the same height as the other main players, about twenty centimetres tall. The pawns are smaller. They’re just customers.

Hot breath on my neck.

I turn: John’s bulbous doggy eyes are fixed on my modelling. He’s been getting jumpier and less predictable ever since Fishook uttered the words ‘Final Adjustment’ on the tannoy, and who can blame him. At mealtimes, I’ve noticed how guys keep slapping him on the back, treating him all friendly, making rueful faces, thinking, thank Christ it isn’t me.

– It’s Tiffany, I tell him. My daughter.

– You want her dead then?

I can feel another conversation about torture revving up. But funny, I’m not in the mood.

– No. Course not. She’s my flesh and blood.

– So why the effigy, he goes, like he’s a shrink or something.

– I’ve told you before, they’re not effigies. This is a rook. See the crenellations round her neck? This isn’t magic, John. It’s art.

He makes a face.

– But she’s a black one, right. You told me before, she’s on the baddy side. Now what I’m asking myself here is, how come?

I hate this. I hate the way he tries to prise stuff out of me, like I’m an oyster. I feel like saying, there’s no pearl in there, mate, it’s just the same sad, cringing guk that’s inside everyone.

– I want the whole story now, he goes. What you did, how you got busted, how you ended up here, the whole lot. Before the fry-up.

Something inside me goes cold, like my heart’s been shoved in a freezer.

How’s he to know that I’ve spent the last year forcibly keeping my mouth shut? If I tell him the real story, he’ll probably blame me for his downfall, and rip my head off. He’s big and brutal enough. But on the other hand –

Suddenly, his hands are round my neck. See what I mean?

Am I his Scheherazade, spinning out my tale to save my bacon?

– If you don’t, he says.

Calm down, I tell myself, fighting the panic. John is actually just John. Even killers like him know how to whistle a tune, can appreciate a joke, won’t say no to a round of table tennis, are perhaps capable of normal relationships. And fortunately, he’s thick. I can leave bits out. I can tell him a version, and then he’ll be dead anyway, so he won’t be in a position to…

– OK. Deal, I rasp – and he’s loosened his grip, but he’s still there next to me, a solid mass of flesh. Power for the Powerless: Rule Two. If someone’s bigger than you, and violent, remain his friend.

– I’m waiting, says John. And starts drumming his fingers on my head.

– I was living in the house in Gravelle Road, in Harbourville, I sigh finally. (It was so long ago, it felt like hauling up an old corpse from a river bed.) I’d moved in there with Gwynneth when we got married. We’d been there eighteen years when she and Tiffany left. I didn’t notice them go. In fact it was a whole day before it dawned on me that they weren’t there any more. That shows what separate lives we led by then. I was always in. And they were always out. Shopping and whatnot.

John gave me a look, and I could tell he was thinking about the whatnot part.

– How did you find out, then? he goes.

– I ran out of coffee, and that’s when I saw Gwynneth’s note. She’d left it in the coffee tin. She’d written it in capital letters, on her crappy little PC.

– What did it say?

– I don’t remember, I tell him.

But I’m lying. It said: REMEMBER YOU WERE MARRIED AND HAD A LOVELY DAUGHTER?WELL, NOT ANY MORE BECAUSE TIFF AND I HAVE MOVED OUT. WE’VE HAD ENOUGH OF PLAYING SECOND FIDDLE, WE DESERVE BETTER THAN THIS. G.

It was that line about deserving better that made me wonder if they’d moved in with some other bloke. The thing about Gwynneth was, she wouldn’t’ve done it without somewhere to go. She’d have planned it.

– It wasn’t spontaneous, I told John. That’s for sure. I mean, she didn’t just wake up one morning and think, hey, I’m suddenly fed up with the husband who has provided for me financially for the best part of two decades. She thought about it beforehand, worked things out. She even set up one of those Internet divorces: one click and our marriage was history.

– So what then?

– So I haven’t seen her since. And it was another three years before I saw Tiffany again.

And then when I did, I wished I hadn’t.

– So what happened, after they went?

– Nothing, I just carried on as usual, living my life, working away at being me, doing my thing, making money. Just me and Keith.

– Who’s Keith?

– The cat. Burmese. Intelligent. Knew which side his bread was buttered. He quit too, little bastard, when the shit hit the fan.

– How come you didn’t notice they’d left? I’d have noticed, if it was me.

– Well, like I said, Gwyn and Tiff were always out. G and T, I called them.

John looked puzzled, the way he always does when you mention letters of the alphabet.

– G and T, to us literati, stands for gin and tonic, I explained. It was their favourite drink, as it happens. Or sometimes I called them Ice and Lemon. Quite appropriate, if you knew them. One was cold, the other was bitter.

John said – Women, darkly, and picked up his embroidery.

– Anyway, I said, I was busy working. Making money for them to spend. Too busy being a good husband and father. Paying for their gin and tonics.

And their boyfriends’ lagers too, no doubt, I’m thinking, but I don’t say it. Sometimes I ask myself: will I ever understand women? Power for the Powerless was conceived at home.

– The human slot machine, I called myself.

– Hey, Harvey babe, John’s chuckling, suddenly cheerful, threading purple silk on to his needle, wetting a finger and selecting a silver sequin from his sewing box. Bring out the violins.

– Yeah, well, the family business was making a lot of money, as it happens. We were a hot little team.

– But – he’s looking all puzzled – I mean, what I don’t get is, like, when you got married and that. Why didn’t you drop the family business then, do something else?

He really can be gormless.

– For Christ’s sake, John, you don’t just drop your own flesh and blood!

– But I thought you said they weren’t real!

I wish I hadn’t let him in on that now. I’ve never felt comfortable, admitting it. I poke at my paste with the wooden spoon. It looks lumpier than usual. I feel myself sort of bristle.

– They were to me, I say.

That really was the problem, I realised, as I read Gwynneth’s note from the coffee tin. Ice and Lemon had left because I preferred my pretend family to my real one. I remember sighing as I put the kettle on. Feeling bad, because they had a point.

– Well, Keith, I said to the cat, who was snaking round my legs, vibrating hunger. Just you and me now, boy.

The thing is, I thought, as I opened a tin for him, I knew where I was with the Hoggs. We never had any arguments. I was very much the head of the household. They did my bidding. And by doing it, in their own limited way, they showed proof of their love.

Yes: love.

Keith meowed, and I lumped out his portion: it was tuna and cod in jelly. Then I stood up with the empty tin in my hand and breathed in its horrible fishy fumes. It made my eyes water. If it weren’t for Keith and the Hoggs, I thought, from now on I’d be completely alone.

But I didn’t tell John the bit about loving my family. He wouldn’t have understood, any more than Gwynneth and Tiffany could.

– You can’t relate to real people, that’s your trouble! Gwynneth would squawk at me.

– Yeah, Tiffany would echo, what about us? D’you think we’re a couple of plastic replicas or something?

– So what happened? went John. Who busted you?

I sighed. The papier mâché was drying on my hands. Picking off the little lumps can be very satisfying. You crumble them into a heap, or flick them individually. Picture the port-hole as the target. I’ve stuck on a little red sticker, dead-centre, for the bull’s-eye. I hit it, once. Power for the Powerless!

It was a cloudy day in July; I remember the month, because it was just after the Festival of Choice, and there were still these tatters of paper floating about in the air from the celebrations, and shrivelledy-looking helium balloons in the shape of the Bird of Liberty tethered to people’s dish aerials. With G and T long gone, I was alone in the house, apart from Keith. He was purring on my lap while I clicked away. I’d trained him to knead his claws on the fabric of the chair, rather than in my flesh. I liked him sitting on me, while I worked. It gave me companionship, and a nice warm feeling in the groin.

– I’m in my office, transferring ten thousand from my uncle’s account into my mum’s, I explain to John, before ransacking one of my kid brother’s off-shore companies to pay for the money that’s owed to one of Mum’s companies in the Cayman Islands. This is after she’s borrowed at exorbitantly high interest from my big sister’s Costa Rican offshore development loan scheme. Which in turn owes it – plus interest – to one of my uncle’s Martinique outfits.

– I think I’m with you, goes John. (As if!)

– Anyway, the point is, thirty K’s at stake this morning.

– Right, he goes.

– Then there’s a ring at the doorbell.

– You opened it?

I wish I could have said that I had a hunch, an instinct not to respond to it. But the doorbell rang a lot. Dispatch riders, takeaway deliveries, the ironing service, the weekly tele-shop. Keith jumped off my lap at the sound of the doorbell, hoping for pepperoni and pineapple pizza, his favourite.

– I thought it was a bike delivery. I was expecting some cash after the last transaction, I say.

– And who was it?

– My daughter.

I add an extra lump of papier mâché to her bum, and grit my teeth.

Yes: Tiffany. In smart orange-and-blue Libertyforce uniform.

Tiff had always been her mother’s daughter. From the moment she was born, they were a little female confederacy, plotting oestrogen-type stuff together while I concocted cash. Girly kitchen things at first, gingerbread men and so forth, then women things, men of the non-gingerbread variety. It was pretty much an open secret. What could I do about it? As a family man, I was a failure. I’d never got close to her. I loved her but I didn’t know her. Gwynneth behaved as though she was the only parent, and I was just a… oh, just a feature of the home landscape. It was weird, I thought – but what did I know about family life? Perhaps it was normal. Perhaps, I thought, if Tiffany’d been a boy, it would’ve been different. We’d have gone to ball games or ostrich races or whatever the big thing was. Anyway, the more Gwynneth resented me for my lack of ‘social skills’ the more I retreated into my shell.

As soon as Tiffany was old enough to understand, Gwynneth told her that Daddy preferred another mummy and daughter. It wasn’t strictly true, not in the beginning, but the saying of it polluted everything and after a while I thought, well, sod it, so what if I do prefer them. Who wouldn’t? After that I kept myself to myself in the loft conversion with the Hoggs. At least G and T can’t hate me for funding their shopping trips, I thought.

Wrong.

– You’re under arrest, says Inspector Tiffany Kidd, still parked on the doorstep by the banana tree and the dwarf Alpines. She’s bigger, more substantial, harder-faced than I remember her. Canteen food. It’s bulked her up. There’s a Libertyforce van out in the road behind her in the road, Fraud Squaddies tumbling out on to the front grass. She flashes a plastic-covered search warrant at me, and an ID card showing an unflattering hologram of her own face, and I have time to think, what crappy paperwork.

– Don’t think you don’t deserve this, she says briskly.

It crosses my mind that I might be hallucinating. Computers can frazzle you that way, short-circuit your nodes.

– What the fuck d’you think you’re doing? I yell at her. What is this stupid game?

As the forcies pile out of the van, she shucks me off like an old raincoat.

– Common Assault, Article 5D, Libertycare Customer Charter! she yaps. Impound his computers! De-activate his hard discs! Confiscate all CD ROMs and floppies!

And the uniformed gophers swarm through the house.

– That family paid for you to go to that posh school with the netball and the oboe lessons! I yell at her.

She just stands there, her eyes flashing with a hatred so pure that it could be bottled and sold as a multi-purpose repellent.

– That family paid for your snow-breaks and your designer labels from all those fucking boutiques!

A spotty youngster joins her at this point.

– All right, there, ma’am?

I throw in my last card.

– Not to mention your abortion!

I make sure I say it loud and clear. The young forcie looks at the Lemon, and then at the floor.

– Slap him in cuffs, she spits.

And lo, it came to pass that, like a common criminal, I was shoved into the back of a Libertyforce van stinking of junk food. I was in shock. I felt numb.

– All right there, mate? asked the spotty forcie who was now attached to me by handcuffs, like an outsized and gormless gnome dangling from a charm bracelet. With his free hand he was feeding himself Chicken McNuggets from a greasy cardboard bucket.

– All right? My entire family has just been wiped out. Do YOU reckon I’m all right?

I thought Inspector Kidd was your family, he goes, all jovially. He’s munching an evil-smelling nugget. She seems to be alive and well.

The Lemon was sitting in the front of the van; I could see the back of her head through the glass.

– She’s not family, as far as I’m concerned. (I said it loudly, hoping she could hear it.) – Real families are loyal. Real families don’t fuck you about. Real families honour and respect their dad.

The forcie laughed aloud.

– See you’ve got a good sense of humour then, mate, he went.

I couldn’t think of anything to add that was in words, so I spat on the floor. And on that note we drove off.

It was one of Tiffany’s subordinates who interrogated me at the copshop at Staggerworth Junction in South District. He wanted names, dates, all that stuff.

– It’s all on the discs, I told him.

– And your password?

– Moron, I said. He noted it down without a flicker.

– What’s the prognosis then, doc? I asked him.

He looked at me questioningly for a moment.

– Oh. This type of fraud, you’re usually looking at ten years, in my experience.

– Ten years? Cue the classic line from me, about wanting Libertyaid. Knowing my rights.

While I waited to make the call, I learned more from the forcie: the Lemon had been an inspector for two years, here at Staggerworth, just a mile up the road from the house. She was ambitious. This was her first major fraud bust. That figured: stepping into the van I’d heard another forciewoman congratulating her in a booming, lesbian sort of voice.

– Nice one, Tiff! Vengeance, yo!

– You have to hand it to her, I told the forcie miserably. It takes balls to shop your own dad.

Then she walked in.

– How’s your mother? I asked, trying to disarm her.

Tiffany smiled.

– She’s very well. She’s happy. Living with a lovely bloke. Geoff. (I felt my eyes bulge.) – He’s a stress-management consultant.

Then she added, smirking – I call him Dad.

Sissy curtains and St John’s wort.

– Well, I call him Wanker, I said, and thought, I should have guessed. Gwynneth was right. I don’t notice things.

– Well, thanks for the update, I said. Now where’s my Libertyaid representative?

– You don’t want one. There’s a proposition for you. Unless you’d prefer a twenty-year Adjustment, she smirked.

– The other forcie said ten years.

At which point Inspector Tiffany Kidd looked suddenly pissed-off. Like a kid again. I remembered her at five, throwing a tantrum after she’d melted part of her plastic kitchen set with Gwynneth’s hair-dryer, and put the blame on Keith – who was only a kitten at the time. She didn’t like being in the wrong.

– Well, I say twenty. It’s my bust, I researched it. I know how much you’ve made over the years. Starting with fifteen hundred dollars for a state-of-the-art brace for your imaginary brother, and finishing with the sale of five offshore mini-islands – which are actually just large rocks – for a hundred and fifty thousand each. I’ve seen the evidence, she goes.

– So how come you don’t want me to go to jail? Don’t I deserve it?

– You do deserve it, she stabs bitterly. You deserve it for the way you tried to fuck up our lives by making out we were second-best to some other family that didn’t even exist. Then, perhaps realising the childishness of it, she stalls herself. After a pause, she says, looking at her shoes – But I’m under instructions from Them.

Well, that knocked me sideways. Head Office? What do they want?

She looked from her shoes to the wall. It was an unremarkable pale green, decorated only by a dribbly splotch of what looked like dried Nescafé, no doubt hurled there by another detainee at his wits’ end, but it seemed to interest her quite unduly.

– I don’t know, the Lemon confessed, clearly irked at having let herself mention it at all. They were looking for a fraud like yours. A family like you’ve got.

– What for, for Christ’s sake?

She looked blank.

– Dunno, she said. They didn’t say.

– So you shopped me to advance your career?

– Nothing wrong with that.

I sighed. There’d be no getting through.

– So what do I have to do?

She was looking down now, picking at her nails just like she’d done as a turbulent teenager. It made me sad to see it. I wanted to tell her to stop.

She said – There’s a man called Wesley Pike.

John whistled. – The black king, eh?

– If you think they’re out to get you, I said, it’s because they are.

And that was where I left it with John. He went back to his sewing for a while, and I chewed the rest of it through, quietly.

The rest of it? Oh, the bit I hadn’t told him. The tail-end to that scene.

Why didn’t I tell him? Because of what Gwynneth would’ve called ‘stupid masculine pride’, I guess. Shame, a bit – not at what happened, but about being too gormless to have spotted it. And an inability, no, a refusal, even now, to come to terms with that final slap in the face.

It was just as she was leaving. It was me who prompted it. I don’t know what came over me. The memory of her as a kid, I guess. Not the teenager and then the woman she became, but the cute little girl wobbling about on her bike in the back garden, looking so sweet and innocent and adorable in her little white cowgirl outfit with tassels.

– Tiffany, I said.

– Yes?

– How can you do this? (My mouth was hanging open.) – I mean – I mean – I mean –

– What? What d’you mean? she snapped.

I nearly stopped then and there. I should have. But I didn’t.

– Well, I said hopelessly. I just mean, how can you do this? I’m your dad!

She looked blank for a minute, then puzzled. Uncomprehending.

– No you’re not, she said.

It was like a slow-motion experience. The long, long delay from ear to brain. While things were sinking in – more sort of slumping into place – I let my hands drop loose by my sides; I could feel them swinging free like a puppet’s. A noise hatched in my throat, but it got stuck, and hung birthlessly in the silence.

Then, watching Tiffany’s face – the face, I now realised, that looked nothing like my own, and never had, but belonged to some other man, whose name I didn’t even know, who’d been with Gwynneth on one of those nights she’d come back drunk and smoky from the razzle – you could see the thought dawn on her. It spread across her face, blooming into a sweet pink smile.

There was a kind of shocked laughter in her voice when she spoke.

She said – You didn’t know?