A Calculated Life (26 page)

Time to kill before Sunjin left his residence. She waited awhile under the canal bridge. No one was around as yet to see her loitering but the canal path would become busy over the next half an hour. Jayna looked up at the underside of the red and green painted steelwork. No wonder people wanted to build these things; they would sit in the world for ever. If she could start over…she’d spend more time along these lovely canals, feed the koi rather than pigeons.

A speck of a person in the distance. She waited until the figure came closer and then she set off towards the intersections of canals and rail bridges on the western edge of the commercial district. With no one in sight she stepped into the deepest shadow and stood
with her back against a colossal steel column, one of many carrying shuttle lines from the north and west deep into the city’s heart. The early shuttles thundered overhead. She made no conscious decision to break cover but impatience got the upper hand and she stepped out from behind the column and walked on. After several erratically timed stop-starts she arrived at the canal steps just two blocks from Sunjin’s residence.

From the top of the steps, she walked one block closer and positioned herself by an office entrance as though waiting to meet someone before going into work. All she could do was wait. Sixteen minutes later, far longer than she had expected, Sunjin left his residence and walked along Jayna’s side of the street. She turned her back. As he passed she followed and, a half-stride behind him, she spoke: “Don’t turn round Sunjin, it’s me.” And she rattled out the story. She moved ahead of him and he spoke: “We’ve both got to run, not together though. I’ll give you a head start. Good luck.”

Jayna peeled off at the next junction and set her route to the Southern Terminus. She realized she looked far too corporate
. I need to look like an office cleaner returning home to the enclaves.
So she took off her jacket and carried it over her arm. It wasn’t enough.
I need to appear less symmetrical, more casual.
She forced herself to slow down and let her head loll untidily from side-to-side. One hand in her pocket.

Harry and Lucas, she thought, must have worried about Julie’s absence at breakfast, not about
hers
. They would assume she’d rushed out for a breakfast meeting at Mayhew’s.

The main streets were busier though the pace was less than frenetic. These were the early risers, the early starters, who walked with longer and slower strides. She knew how Dave would describe them: sad bastards. And one of those sad bastards might be a Mayhew McCline employee so she had to be vigilant. How would she explain herself? Her legs felt weak.
It’s no big deal. It’s
simple: merge with the enclave night-workers heading back. Plenty of shuttles—check the concourse monitors and find the platform.

But she still looked too tidy so she slipped into the foyer of the university’s mathematics building, took her crumpled jumper out of her bag and replaced it with her jacket. She slung the jumper untidily around her shoulders. Off she went again. Into a slow stride, she passed the university park, under the whitebeam, across the cobbles, over the paving slabs, into the terminus piazza. She weaved through the rivulets of workers arriving from the suburbs and enclaves, and cast glances to each side. All fine. A normal day. Everyone looked past her. Again, she glanced left and right. And the closer she came to the concourse the less conspicuous she felt—she was just one figure in a mass of people funneling through the station’s entrance.

She strode across the concourse.

It was then, as she stopped to check the overhead monitors—she registered a stuttering in her peripheral vision. A surge inside—adrenalin? She looked left and right but couldn’t be sure. She lifted her heavy face to the monitors:
Departures, Arrivals.
Her legs weakened. She didn’t look around but waited for a further sign. It came. Two figures both took a step towards her from left and right. She looked again at the monitors. Two shuttles to Enclave W8, both
Delayed.
If Jayna had pointed her hands at the two men she would have formed an angle of 160 degrees. Next shuttle departure—to anywhere—seven minutes.

They won’t shout out
, she thought.
They’re not police. They probably won’t chase.

Arrivals: Platform 11, Shuttle Approaching.

The man to her right, just seven meters away, stepped forward. “Jayna!”

She looked at the monitor.
Shuttle Approaching.

She ran, bisecting an imaginary arc between the two men. She deviated, sharply, towards platform eleven, a hundred or so meters
away. And through the crowds she saw the distant twinkling of shuttle headlights approaching the far end of the station. Too far?

The men didn’t shout. She tried to glance backwards but the world shook; she’d never run before. She deviated again, turned onto the platform, and sprinted. And the calculations began: the length of the platform, the current speed of the shuttle, its rate of deceleration, her own terminal speed, their combined speed at impact.

The shuttle headlights blazed down the track. She could not run any faster. And just three words in her mind:
end it here
. The men shouted. Her head back, she lengthened her stride. The shuttle still charged down. She anticipated the thud, the end. But her left foot snagged and the pain in her ribs abated too soon. Her brief flight ended as she crashed, arms out, to the paved edge of the platform. The shuttle belted past.

The men reached her before the shuttle came to a halt. The passengers alighted, unaware of the near miss; unaware that for the first time in many years, someone had attempted to end their life in such an arcane manner. Maybe one or two commuters did register, momentarily, the three figures who stood in a huddle: one woman, her head dropped forward, supported by two men. But the working day lay ahead. The workers pressed on and just one person within the herd tripped on a marginally raised manhole cover.

Indeed, the incident caused no ripple of disruption in the routine of the Southern Terminus. No one incurred any delay and sixteen minutes after Jayna’s fall, when Dave crossed the concourse, everything appeared as normal.

EPILOGUE 1

T
he early sun floods the gentle slopes
facing east and shifts the true colors of the ripening fruit towards a false warmth. When the dew has dried, they will check the fruit and pick the largest specimens. This is part of the plan: to increase revenue from their small farm by picking fruit only when it reaches full maturity. It seems an obvious strategy but plenty smallholders have not figured this out. They opt for smaller profits today rather than larger profits deferred.

It shouldn’t take a genius.

There’s no need to be up so early but Dave rises at this hour most days for two simple pleasures: the pleasure of wearing a heavy jacket when the sun is bright but the air still cool, and the greater pleasure of pacing the orchards alone—no one hears what he hears or sees what he sees. He’s the only witness; the world is his.

A narrow road winds high along the sheltered valley. On Wednesday, he will travel along this road on his scooter-cart taking twenty-four boxes of assorted citrus to the farm cooperative. On Thursday, the fruit will be displayed in the better suburban delicatessens. Maybe next season, he thinks, he will find another way to sell. But for now, it’s best to stick with the normal channel. As Sunjin says, they don’t want to look too smart.
Yeah, that makes sense
.

He sits on the wooden seat he knocked together from scrap soon after they arrived at the farm. From here, he looks down the
valley across the top of his citrus trees; smatterings of orange and yellow against deep green.

He still thinks of Sunjin as “Sunjin” though his friend lives easily with his new name. And he smiles. Sunjin sees the whole subterfuge as some sort of professional challenge. “I like to imagine,” he once explained, “that I’ve gone covert. You know, police officers went undercover for years. And, if they could hack it, so can I. It’s called deep cover.”

He’ll never lose the lingo,
Dave thinks. Even so, he is quietly impressed. Sunjin, the farmhand: in character, he never speaks unless spoken to, stays in the background on the rare occasions when someone visits—a utility worker or their neighbor who likes to pass the time of day by sharing the minutiae of their endeavors. Dave sidesteps these social encounters as best he can. In any case, he needs no advice. He sometimes looks at Sunjin and sees a man whose every waking thought is devoted to these five acres as though he’s never known or wished for any other life.

But Dave can’t let go in the same way.

During these quiet times, as he looks over the orchards, he gnaws at old bones. It’s a habit he can’t drop yet it brings no satisfaction. He recalls conversations and tries to edit them with hindsight; tries to force a different emphasis onto the words he spoke back then, words he now re-enacts, slightly amended. Three years have passed and he still tries to make the words come out differently.
I should have…I could have said
…

And, all the while, his eyes flick to the winding road and a mental image is repeatedly triggered. He imagines—though he never formulates or captures any words inside his head—a figure, walking along a section of the road that’s beyond his view. The figure must surely emerge; he wills it to happen.

He feels good in many ways. He’s beaten the system. But he feels cheated—it could be so much better.

Dave knows the Constructor picked her up at the terminus. The whole office knew the day it happened. “It was total fucking mayhem,” he told Sunjin later. Everyone heard Olivia and Benjamin; they screamed blue murder at the Constructor. But there was no getting her back, the small print made sure of that. He looks back and struggles to remember any detail from the first days. He was stupefied, dumb, numb. And though no one questioned him, about anything, he broke into sweats. He hid himself away in Archives and all he can recall now is an acrid smell that wafted upwards from his sticking shirt, and a sense of stasis.

On the Saturday after her disappearance, he traveled to Enclave W8, to the safe house where he found Sunjin. And on the next three Saturdays, he returned with provisions. With each visit they refined a plan.

At first, their plan was simple. Sunjin would disappear for a few months among the migrant workers, just to get out of sight. He couldn’t hang around the safe house indefinitely. Neighbors might have become curious. They talked about the money stashed in bank accounts, share certificates, the bio data for false identities, which Sunjin had grabbed before scarpering. But Sunjin had insisted: no touching the money, perhaps not for a long time.

Sometime around his second or third visit, Dave can’t quite remember now, he mentioned to Sunjin about the walk down Clothing Street, the things she’d said later in his flat. They returned time and time again to these shards of conversation. “But she only said it in passing,” Dave had said. Sunjin was sure they should act on her few remarks. She was, after all, the guru on such matters. So, when Dave eventually found a buyer for the Wiener Werkstätte brooch (it was, as she’d scribbled on the scrap of paper, a Josef Hoffmann design) their ideas had coalesced. A trader’s license it would be. And the nature of Dave’s trading was also clear. For her words were incised from constant use:
People don’t need to buy books but they do need to buy food
.

Finally, Dave provoked an argument with Hester. He was out the same day.

We’ve done well.

He hears the satisfying, wholesome sounds of empty wooden boxes being stacked over on the far side of the farmhouse. Sunjin’s day has started. Soon the irrigation system will kick in and he’ll start his morning rounds. He’ll meticulously check any suspect nozzles, look for any leaks, before he takes his breakfast. Sunjin, the sleuth, turned farmhand. Dave laughs quietly, under his breath, at the mental image of Sunjin darting around the orchards, a long-haired, manic preacher who makes the trees sing to his tune. And Dave remembers a conversation he had with Sunjin two weeks ago, when they’d sat together replacing damaged slats in some of those fruit boxes: “Are you all right doing this, Sunjin?”

“I’m making a fair job of it.”

“No, I don’t mean that. Are you bored doing this sort of thing?”

“It’s all part of the process.”

“But are you enjoying it?”

“Yes, I like the process.”

“What?”

Sunjin had explained, patiently: “I like the small tasks because I know how they fit within the overall venture. It’s the attention to detail that makes the whole operation work smoothly. How will the cooperative regard you, Dave, if you turn up with battered boxes? I’ll tell you. They’ll think you’re a loser. And what’s the point of us running our farm with such care if a protruding nail scratches a single fruit? One protruding nail in, say, 30 per cent of our boxes would make a serious dent in our gross profit. It’s all a question of detail. Our margins are too slender to throw money away simply through a lack of rigor.”

“Suppose so.”

“I know so. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”

Which indeed he had.

When Dave bought his license to work as a fruit vendor, Sunjin became an itinerant and worked among the major citrus groves and smallholdings, west of the enclaves. He moved from farm to farm and slept in huts or under canvas, whatever the owners cared to provide. While Dave learned how to sell, Sunjin learned how to farm. He was on a mission: to learn, observe, absorb everything—varieties, planting schemes, root stocks, grafting, how to prune, when to cut back, how to irrigate, when to water, when not to water, when to pick, when not to pick. He became a collector of ideas and good practice; one idea from here, another from there. He learnt from the bad farmers and the good farmers alike—all the time he collected evidence for later prosecution. When they met as planned, eighteen months later, Dave barely recognized him with his matted hair, tautened physique, and sun-blackened skin.