Nirvana Bites (4 page)

Our previous lack of access to technology had not been because we were a bunch of Luddites. Until now, we had simply lacked the means. If you have no choice, you might as well pretend that what you don't have is ideologically unsound. Until you have it, of course.

‘You'd better get it, Nick,' I said in a no-nonsense voice.

He stumbled obediently to his feet.

4

THE FOLLOWING DAY
I sat at the front of the Docklands Light Railway train as it hurtled towards Stan's pad in Canary Wharf and pretended to be the driver. The evening before, we had spent many hours surfing the Net with the zeal of the converted and I had plenty of questions for my client. I left the train and followed the directions Stan had given me. I walked the pale, deserted streets, made uncomfortable by the sterility and paranoid by the sensation of being watched by hidden cameras.

There used to be real people living here. In real homes. As part of real communities. There are no homes now. Only apartments, studios, lofts, penthouses and units. The fact that there are no launderettes is not surprising. But there are also no shops, pubs, cafés, or garages at street level. Or seemingly anywhere one person might encounter another face to face. Where do these people go on a Sunday morning when they just want to pop out for a paper and a packet of fags?

The answer is underground, in gleaming subterranean shopping malls peopled by troglodyte yuppies who can choose between forty different ways to drink coffee.

I felt so oppressed by Stan's choice of habitat that a hideous thought occurred to me. Suppose the whole Stan saga was some ghastly wind-up S&M-style. Suppose Stan was actually in on the harassment in some way and was manipulating us all for some weird motive. I didn't know him well enough to reject the possibility.

I turned a corner and arrived at Stan's block. It was a standard Docklands structure – lots of glass and steel and shiny, shiny surfaces. The only thing that distinguished it was the unmarked white removal van parked on the street outside. It was clear from the forest of estate agents' boards and unmarked buzzers that Stan's was the only flat currently occupied.

I pressed the buzzer for his apartment on the entryphone and was irritated when the door buzzed to let me in, no questions asked. So much for security. So much for Stan being careful, as I'd warned. I felt myself sucked into the dimly lit interior and punched the lift button. I stepped into the metal capsule, which ascended in utter silence to the top floor. The doors whispered open on to a rectangular landing with a huge window overlooking the street. The penthouse door was directly opposite the lift and was slightly ajar.

OK, he was expecting me, but this really was an outrageous breach of security for someone who was supposed to be terrified. In a flash of irritation, I was about to push straight in and give Stan a piece of my mind. But then a huge
WHAT IF
? sign lit up in fluorescent neon in my brain. At the same time I heard low voices from inside Stan's flat. My stomach did one of those horrible lurchy things that cause you to calculate the position of the nearest toilet and the likelihood of getting to it in time.

To the left of the lift, a corner turned back on to stairs leading to the floors below. The lift doors remained open as I ducked out and crept down the first dozen stairs. Maybe I was overreacting, but I began to understand what people mean when they say they feel the hairs rising on the back of their neck. I patted my pockets absent-mindedly, looking for inspiration. The first yielded a travelcard, my keys and what was left of the tenner Mags had given me, bless her heart. The second yielded Nick's mobile. Told you it wouldn't be hard to get him to share his toys. I gazed at it thoughtfully for a moment before punching in the number on the card Stan had given me.

The phone rang twice before he answered. The bastard wasn't screening his calls either. What was he playing at?

‘Stan. It's me,' I hissed. ‘What's going on?'

‘Oh, hi, Jen,' he replied in the gloomy tone I was becoming accustomed to. ‘I've got a couple of guys here taking the aquarium away. Can't stand the sight of it any more. Where are you anyway?'

Before I had a chance to reply, he butted in. His voice changed, running from gloomy to bewildered, racing through irritated and ending in shit-scared within seconds.

‘Hey! Wait a minute! What are you…? No! NO!! Jen! Help me!'

There was a thundering crash and the phone went dead. From the floor above me there was a spine-chilling scream, followed by an assortment of bumps and thumps.

Shit! Shit! Shit! What do I do? What do I do? What do I do? For a second my finger hovered over the 9 button on the mobile. No! Wrong move! Even if I wanted to call the cops, there was no time anyway. I looked round wildly. On the landing on the floor below I spotted a wall-mounted cupboard marked
EMERGENCY EQUIPMENT
. I yanked open the door. Two fire extinguishers – one standard red, the other black and slightly smaller. And an axe. No time to think. Ignore insistent bowel sensation. I tucked the axe handle under my armpit and grabbed an extinguisher in each hand. Have you ever tried climbing stairs, trying not to make a sound, while carrying two fire extinguishers and a large axe? Amazing what a shot of pure adrenalin can do.

I reached the top step and peeped round the corner. A white guy, bald and stocky, wearing navy overalls, was backing out of Stan's door towards the open lift. He was staggering under the weight of one end of a vast box covered in a black cloth.

‘A couple of guys,' Stan had said. Just two. I've faced worse odds in my time. I have three brothers. I had surprise on my side. The fact that that was pretty much all I had on my side was at least unknown to the opposition.

I gently placed the red extinguisher on the stair and gripped the axe in my right hand. Then before you could say ‘Kamikaze' I leapt into the hall, shrieking like a banshee and simultaneously threw the axe at Baldy's head. I followed it with a left-hand swing, sending the black canister in the same general direction.

Time compressed. Entire aeons were condensed into instants. The axe whistled past Baldy's nose and embedded itself in the wall. Milliseconds later, the canister catapulted on to the box in his arms, which crashed to the floor with the sound of breaking glass. I grabbed the red extinguisher and swiped at the pin. Oh bliss! Oh joy! I got it first time, and before Baldy had a chance to recover I aimed the foam jet straight into his face.

I was still yelling, ‘Up here, guys! Up here! Quick!'

Baldy staggered backwards into the open lift. It was weird that over the cacophony of my shrieks, his curses, and more crashing and smashing from inside Stan's flat, I could still distinguish the
pop-pop
sound of the gun silencer. A couple of bullets thudded into the wall beside the lift. I ran to the penthouse door, hugging the wall and aiming the hose round the corner and into the room, at what I hoped was face height. A couple more bullets whistled past and into the lift.

‘You stupid fucking bastard,' screamed Baldy. ‘Don't shoot me, you arsehole.'

I wheeled round. With one hand he was trying to clear foam from his eyes like a kid in a bubble bath. With the other he was reaching inside his overall.

Time for a change of plan. I shot another foam blast into the lift for good measure. The jet was weakening. I heaved the extinguisher back into the flat and then turned and ran back to the stairs.

‘Quick!' I yelled. ‘Down the stairs. We'll get them as they come out of the lift.' I was rewarded by hearing Baldy yell, ‘In the lift! In the lift! Come on, you fucking idiot! COME ON!'

I thundered my feet on the stairs until I heard the lift doors close, the blood pounding in my ears and my breathing ragged in the sudden silence.

Out of the hall window I watched Baldy run out into the street, swiftly followed by a taller, thinner version of himself. Shit! I'd just had a rumble with the Mitchell brothers. As they ran, flecks of foam flew from them and floated upwards like reverse snow. They jumped into the removal van and sped off with a screech of tyres.

Now that they were gone, my stomach felt free to assert itself. I retched violently. I rested my head on the cool glass for a moment and took a few deep breaths. Then I turned to look into Stan's ruined apartment. The black cloth had smothered most of the shattered aquarium, but vicious shards still covered the floor on both sides of the door. I picked my way over them, grateful for the thick soles of my Doc Martens. A quick search of the penthouse produced no Stan. I was beginning to have serious doubts about my sanity when a muffled sound from the wreckage under the cloth caught my attention.

I grabbed a couple of towels from Stan's sparkly bathroom and wrapped them round my hands and lower arms before gingerly pulling back the cloth. The fear of being slashed by glass was in stiff competition with the fear of what I might find. I wasn't sure my stomach could handle a sample of Death by a Thousand Cuts.

I peeled back the cloth, glass tinkling to the floor as I did so. Inside was not Stan's bloodied corpse, but a rolled-up rug – and a jolly expensive one too, by the look of it. Like a grisly pass-the-parcel, I embarked on this second layer of wrapping until the prize was revealed. Stan was trussed like a chicken, his ankles and wrists tied behind him and looped together. The front of his white T-shirt was wet with two dark red patches, and I wondered fleetingly how the glass had penetrated the rug. His mouth was covered by a strip of masking tape and above it his eyes were full of terror and pain. When they focused on me, they filled with tears of relief and he gave a strangled sob.

I ripped off the tape.

‘The bastards pulled out my nipple rings,' he moaned before throwing up violently over the wreckage.

5

THE POST-TRAUMATIC
aftershocks didn't hit me until I was safely back home on my security cushions. In Stan's flat, I'd continued to ride the adrenalin wave with the skill of a Bondi Beach surfer. The first thing I did was use the mobi (bless it's little digital heart) to call the third house. To my vast relief, Ali answered. I needed someone who would respond fast without asking a load of questions or recommending an aromatherapy massage as a solution.

While waiting for him to arrive I performed some rudimentary first aid on Stan's torn chest: Savlon, plasters and two paracetamol. I found some Valium in his bathroom cabinet and gave him a couple for good measure. I considered dropping some myself, but decided I couldn't afford to slow down yet. I found a broom and swept the debris in the hall and doorway back into the flat so that with the door closed there would be no indication of the carnage within. Meanwhile, Stan stumbled round his bedroom, disconsolately chucking clothes and toiletries into a Gucci suitcase.

With exquisite timing, Ali buzzed from downstairs just as I was beginning to twitch. I hoisted Stan's case and he picked up his laptop and mobile. Bloody hell. Less than twenty-four hours ago the highest-tech item in the co-op was Maggot's toaster. Now all of a sudden we were drowning in a sea of laptops and mobiles.

Ali was waiting for us outside in the co-op's battered old transit van. I sat next to him, and spent the entire journey recounting my routing of armed and violent gangsters in a high-pitched, breathless gabble. Ali sat listening impassively. Actually, I couldn't be sure he was listening at all until I paused for breath, at which point he nodded slowly and said, ‘Cool.' Praise indeed. Stan sat in the back in complete silence, apart from when he said, ‘I'm going to be sick,' which fortunately was just the once.

Back at Nirvana, Ali strode off to try to get hold of the others for an emergency meeting. Stan probably wasn't any happier at the idea of being my house-guest than I was, but necessity makes strange bedfellows. Or something. It was obvious he couldn't stay at the apartment, and I couldn't think of a better plan for now.

He stumbled upstairs, either oblivious to or unimpressed by Murder in a Battery Farm. He walked straight into my bedroom and crashed out on my futon. I was beginning to see why someone might want to pull this guy's nipple rings out.

But I relented, and went to get him a cup of tea and a bucket (just in case). He never thanked me. Not for the tea. Not for the bucket. Not for saving his life. Ungrateful bastard.

I flounced into my front room and flopped down on the cushions. An hour and a half later I was still there. My nails were bitten down to the quick, but I'd stopped shaking and started thinking. Something just didn't feel right. I couldn't put my finger on it.

By the time Stan slunk into the room and lowered himself gingerly on to the cushions next to me, I had a list of questions for him longer than one of Maggot's spliffs. But I wasn't going to ask them now. I wanted witnesses.

Then Stan did the only possible thing he could have done to make me feel better. He gave me money. Lots of it. In a perfect world I would live the anarchist dream and have no need of the stuff. But in this world, you have to survive. I tried not eating once. It's called anorexia. There are better ways of making a statement.

‘Jen,' Stan breathed, ‘if it wasn't for you…' He shuddered, then held out the fistful of notes. ‘There's five hundred quid here for services rendered so far. I'll pay you £150 per day plus expenses from now on. If that's OK…?'

He tailed off, uncertain how to interpret the look of incredulity on my face. He got it wrong.

‘Obviously I'll pay the rent too while I'm here,' he gushed.

Oh, obviously.

‘How much is it?' he asked eagerly.

I was stumped. Housing Benefit covered it all except the water rates, leaving me to pay a tad under £3 a week. Again he misinterpreted my expression.

‘Will another £150 a week cover it?'

I laughed in disbelief.

‘So how about food?' I giggled, thinking he must see how crazy this was.