The Paper Eater (7 page)

– She’s got agoraphobia now too, Tilda would add. This development was a recognised component of the syndrome, according to Dr Crabbe. – It doesn’t bother her though, said Tilda. She’s never liked outdoors.

And it was true. She hadn’t.

Now, fifteen years later, Hannah Park sits on a swivel chair in an open-plan office sectioned with low Perspex screens and phalanxes of potted ficus plants on the nineteenth floor of Liberty Corporation’s Head office, doodling a cartoon of the man who diagnosed her. She had a strange dream about Dr Crabbe last night, in which she was married to him, and had taken on the name of Mrs Hannah Crabbe. Without ever having had sex, she and Dr Crabbe had produced a baby that Hannah wheeled about the pedestrian walkways of Groke in a state-of-the-art buggy. In actual fact, according to a pink fluerescent message that gradually wrote itself across the sky, the baby belonged to another man. She must return it immediately. But she couldn’t, because a chasm full of boiling water and geranium-scented oil had opened up in front of her. It split the city of Groke in half. She would never be able to cross it. Dr Crabbe knew about all this, and did not hold it against her because he was a trained psychiatrist.

As Hannah began drawing the individual hairs of Dr Crabbe’s potent moustache with small experienced flicks of her pencil, the Customer Hotline droned in the background. The call she was half-listening to was from a regular, who liked to play games. Hannah recognised the customer’s voice. A wheezy, smoker’s voice with cracks in it. Sometimes he’d pretend someone was strangling him.

– I woke up this morning with a bad feeling, he said.

Hannah took a sip of her coffee. Warm and vile, but in a familiar way.

– And how did your problem begin? asked the Hotline responder in the female medium-register voice known as ‘Dolly’. The machine used the Dolly mode mostly for men. Dolly was highly effective. From complaint to confession in five minutes flat, the Hotline co-ordinator liked to boast.

Silence.

The machine moved on to the next question.

– How about giving me a call back later, when you’re more in the mood for a chat?

– Hey, sweetheart, said the customer. Don’t hang up on me. I’ve got a problem here.

Hannah began shading Dr Crabbe’s cheeks, but she pressed too hard and her pencil broke. The cross-hatching was too thick and tight, turning the doctor’s complexion a smudgy black. Customer Hotline duty made her tense. She reached for a sharpener.

– Do you have a worry that you’d like to share? asked Dolly.

Silence.

– Do you suspect anyone of sociopathic or criminal activities?

Hannah took another sip of coffee, replaced the cup on the daisy coaster her mother had made in her pressed-flower phase, and began scribbling a dark background to Dr Crabbe with her newly sharpened pencil.

Monitoring Hotline calls was considered ‘core work’. How better to make use of the flood of customer comments, ran corporate thinking, than to haul up all calls containing trigger-words and their variants – kill, hate, cheat, steal, blackmail, etc, and then laboriously fillet them in case one contained a diamond? It cut out the usual middlemen of paid informant and forensic evidence. It rendered hunch obsolete.

This customer, whose ex-wife Kelly had ‘poisoned his
life’, was one of the classic attention-seekers, sufferers of that great contemporary ailment, Social Munchhausen’s Syndrome: over-zealous citizens trapped in nobodyhood who’d do anything – fake their own murders, suicides or muggings – to get noticed. There were twenty, thirty such callers per shift. More, at certain times; pre-Christmas, the Silly Season, and now, the Festival of Choice. On the door of the cabinet where data on the calls was stored, Hannah’s colleague Leo Hurley had scrawled a caricature paranoiac in marker pen. Googly eyes, flared nostrils, jug ears, flying droplets of sweat.

The customer was still playing hard to get with the responder.

– Are you choosing by phone today, Dolly pursued, or will you be going to your local shopping mall? Hannah had programmed this line of questioning specially for the Festival of Choice. It wasn’t a festival, so much as an electoral referendum, but it embodied the spirit of the day better, according to Strategy.

– Look, sweetheart, said the customer. This isn’t easy.

– I’m listening, said Dolly. I value what you have to say.

– I’m in danger, the customer blurted. His voice shook slightly. Dolly attracted masturbators.

– Does your problem relate to the Festival of Choice? asked Dolly. Her voice had gone husky and soft. She
encouraged
masturbators.

He took another deep smoker’s breath.

– I’m in danger of putting my cross –

– In the wrong box? Dolly responded, after three seconds of silence. I can help you with that. If you’d like to tell me more …

As the customer droned on about his phoney indecision, Hannah considered giving Dr Crabbe glasses. But like hands, they were hard to do.

– Nice talking to you, sweetheart, finished the customer finally. I feel a lot better.

– You’ve made the right choice, said Dolly.

A nice touch, that. Hannah had thought of it herself. As the next call kicked in, she lowered the volume and let her eyes flicker to the window. The forecast for the Festival of Choice was good.
Clear blue skies and clear blue water
, the weather channel said. From this floor the panorama was never less than stupendous. The big, shining coil of the Hope River snaking into the estuary, flanked by the Makasoki bubble-buildings, translucent egg-boxes of reflected light. Above them, dancing rainbows, condensing and dissolving like pastel sugar, pale and buffered by distance. The light they cast – a pellucid yellow – spread with a shimmer out to a glassy sea dotted with ships and tankers bringing in cargoes of waste. Even from this height, separated by fathoms of glass and chrome, you could still feel the city’s electric zing like a shiver in the blood; and still subliminally hear the distant honk of ships, the sing-song whisper of the Frooto windmills, the smooth hydraulic whish-whish of trams. The island tattooed itself on you; a great techno-organic edifice in perpetual motion, its infrastructure jewelled with sports centres, malls, and waste facilities, its simple geography zigzagged with transport systems, and fringed with lush plantations of coconut, pineapple, and lemon grass. Beyond Harbourville, the fried-egg island lay circular and gently humped by the swell of St Giddier’s Mount. Beneath the crust of the artificial land-mass, the deep invisible mechanics of the waste-disposal system, feeding the hungry rock below. And all around, the clear blue ocean – wide as the sky.

The phone rang.

– Customer Care? answered Hannah.

– It’s me, said Tilda. Have you chosen yet, or aren’t associates allowed to?

Immediately, Hannah’s thoughts contracted and she began drawing small, tight squiggles next to Dr Crabbe on her pad. It looks so unprofessional, being phoned at work by your
mother. If someone came in – someone like Wesley Pike – it would be embarrassing.

– I’m just about to, said Hannah.

– I did, first thing, said Tilda. And they were round an hour later with the most gorgeous bunch of flowers – they’re giving them to all their VIP Customers, to say thanks.
And
I got a box of chocolates! Tilda couldn’t hide the pride in her voice. So are you coming to St Placid? Better hurry up, before I’ve eaten my way through them.

– Yes, sighed Hannah. While other departments worked overtime, staff in Munchhausen’s had been given a half-day off. She had promised Tilda a visit.

– I’m on my way. I’ll be there by lunchtime. Must go now. Got to choose.

Unlike the customers heading for the malls and parcs today, Hannah preferred to do her admin electronically. It saved time, and it saved bumping into people. She typed in her password, and the questions appeared on screen.

A. Do you want Atlantica to continue being serviced by the Liberty Corporation for a further ten years?
There was a box you could click on.

Keeping human error out of people-management
, was their Festival slogan. Actually, Hannah’s memory of the time people called ‘the bad old days’ was pretty fuzzy. Strange, the way history had become a bit of a blur, and you needed TV documentaries to remind you how poor the island had been, how full of violence and despair, how similar to the frightening, other world you thought of simply as ‘Abroad’. Strange, the way the past had just sort of stopped being a factor.

Perhaps that’s what happens when you’re finally in safe hands.

B. Do you want Atlantica to slide back into the control of a potentially corrupt political system, run by ambitious but flawed men and women?
Another box.

Swiftly, she clicked A, then switched to the news, where the angel-faced commentator, Craig Devon, was talking facts and figures.

–
The latest Festival polls show the choice for Libertycare is 95 per cent in Harbourville itself, with 93 per cent of Groke also choosing yes, and Mohawk and St Placid, 97 per cent.

He was pointing at some graphs. Craig Devon was one of Atlantica’s most trusted pundits. Tilda said there used to be a boy who did soap commercials who was his spitting image. She’d like to have had a son like him.

So a resounding victory for Libertycare’s customers, I think it’s fair to say at this stage
, said Craig Devon.
And although a Corporation spokesman stressed earlier that they’re not being at all complacent, it would be a surprise to us all, I must say,
he blahed
, if the no choice were to increase by any significant
…

More blah. Hannah switched channels. Here they were doing vox-pops; there were
Shop ’n’ Choose
promotions in the malls, with fifty extra loyalty points if you polled.

– Yes, I’ve been very happy with them, especially the complaints procedure …

– I remember what things were like before. That documentary the other night reminded me – I mean the corruption was just so rife …

– The way they’ll send back a whole lorry-load of produce if it’s sub-standard – little details like that really make you respect it as a system. We’ve certainly benefited as a family from some of the special offers …

– The thing I like is the way the rest of the world’s had to really pay attention to us in recent years, and the loyalty scheme really does …

Hannah flicked channels again; more news. This time there was an item about the US response to the Festival of Choice, featuring a taxi driver from Michigan, called Earl. He’d been popping up on TV quite a lot recently, as the leader of a new
campaign to get the Libertycare system servicing the United States. The clip showed a man in his fifties, in a blood-red shirt and checked golfing pants.

– OK, so call me a mug, said Earl. His supporters jostled around him, grinning and waving banners. – Or correct me if I’m missing something important. The camera panned in on Earl’s earnestly perspiring face. – But it isn’t communism we’re talking about here. It’s
cap
italism. And I
like
what I see over there on that island. And I’m thinking, heck, that could be us! We don’t want another asshole President! We don’t need all that human error bullshit! There were cheers.

Hannah switched off.

She had heard about this Earl character before, in-house. Leo Hurley reckoned he was a Libertycare initiative, an ambient plant, disguised as a grass-roots punter. But Hannah was less sure. A hypermarket model of people-management was fine for parcs, complexes, penitentiaries and small territories like Atlantica. But containability had always been at the heart of its success. There was no way you could apply the same software system to a superpower.

– So who d’you think’s behind Earl, then? Leo had asked her.

He’d been behaving oddly lately – jaded. He’d better watch it, Hannah thought. Personnel will pick it up on his next need-profile.

– No one, said Hannah. He’s an ordinary American. He’s seen us on TV, like everyone else on the planet. People are beginning to see the results. They’re impressed, that’s all.

Leo’s problem was cynicism.

As the tram slid out of Harbourville, the nerviness Hannah had been experiencing since her first glimpse of ground level became shot through with pure panic. It was six months since she’d left Head Office. It gave her a shuddery sense of inverse vertigo to be this low down, a stab of danger, as though the
ground might chasm on you, suck you in: whoop, gone. Flushed down, like waste. A gaggle of elderly people at the front of the tram were chattering excitedly and waving scuba equipment. Members of the Harbourville Over-Sixties’ Feel Real Club, according to their sweatshirts. Hannah’s mother had toyed with the Feel Real Club, but decided her health wouldn’t allow it. She approved, though. It showed that you didn’t have to go to Florida, she said, to live high on the hog.

Hannah stared out at the flat farmlands. This was pineapple country, the fruit growing in spiky rows. When the tram passed an ostrich farm, a whole flock of flouncy-bummed birds scattered in panic on muscular legs. Their brains were smaller than a chicken’s. The nerviness wouldn’t flatten itself. Hoping for a distraction, she opened her laptop and trawled through the transcripts of a few more Munchie calls. There was a woman accusing her step-daughter of stealing her artificial nail kit. How had that got through? A man whose twin brother refused to enter into a timeshare, threatening fratricide. A crater worker complaining of skin eruptions and balance problems: Hannah marked it for referral. There had been a lot of those lately.

Mass hysteria again, like the geologists.

As the tram slowed, and the pineapple fields gave way to okra and lemon grass, the agoraphobia inched upwards, constricting her lungs and throat. She clasped her mask and applied it to her face.

– All right there, love? asked the tanned, dapper gent sitting next to her. He was clutching a wheeled caddy filled with golfing clubs.

Hannah nodded through the translucent mask that covered her nose and mouth. Breathed rhythmically. If she stayed that way, she wouldn’t have to talk to him.