Transition (15 page)

A few people quietly went, “
Ooo!”

“Yes, do let it go to your heads,” she said drily. “You’re not here to learn how to memorise stuff, you’re here to learn how
to—”

“Think!” a few voices chorused.

You could hear the smile in her voice. “Well memorised,” she said, then raised her voice. “Of course, if you’re really smart,
you’ll be imagining all this complexity that you’re looking at zooming out to meet you as you zoom in to meet it, the surface
growing explosively, exponentially, all the time.”

“Excuse me, ma’am, I was already imagining that.”

“And I imagine your handwritten essay on, oh, the history of fractal theory will contain spelling mistakes, Meric. In fact,
probably the closer I look, the more I’ll find.”

“Aw, ma’am…”

“Aw, ma’am, nothing. Fifteen hundred words. On my desk by tomorrow morning. What do we say, Meric?”

“We say thank you, Mrs Mulverhill.”

“Just so.”

Adrian

Scotland is wet and dreary. Don’t let anybody tell you different. Even the hills are mostly just big mounds, not proper mountains
like the Alps or the Rockies. People will tell you it’s all romantic and rugged but I’ve yet to see the evidence. Even when
it’s nice it’s covered in a cloud of these bastard little insects called midges so you have to stay inside anyway. Plus it’s
full of Scots. Case rested.

I endured the week we spent in Glen Furquart or whatever it was called. That’s what I did, I endured it. I did not enjoy it.
Even the shooting was a bit shit. I don’t know why but I thought we’d be shooting rifles at deer or moose or Highland cattle
or something, but no, it was shotguns, at birds. Shotguns. Like we were in a fucking Guy Ritchie movie or something. They
were very nice shotguns with scrolling or whatever and engravings and stuff and they were heirlooms and blah blah blah, but
still just shotguns. Shooters for the hard of aiming. And we were shooting them at birds. Lots and lots of birds. Pheasants.
If there’s a stupider bird on the fucking planet I wouldn’t like to see it. Pig shit would get an honours degree by comparison.

When we were driving up there we saw a pheasant standing on the grass on our side of the road, halfway up a long straight
on the A9. Few hundred metres ahead of us. There was this long stream of cars heading the other way towards us, just coming
level with the bird. Suddenly the pheasant ran across the road, almost like it was aiming for the front car. We were all convinced
the silly fucker was going to get hit. Miraculously, it didn’t. Maybe the driver braked – though he couldn’t brake hard, not
with that line of traffic behind him – but anyway the bird got across to the other side with about a millimetre to spare. When
it skidded to a stop on the grass verge on the far side you could see it get rocked sideways with the slipstream of the car
passing. Then once the first car had whooshed past it the stupid fucker of a bird changed its mind and started running back
across the road in the direction it had just come! The third or fourth car in the big line of traffic hit it full on and the
thing exploded in a cloud of feathers. Everybody just drove on, obviously. But I mean. How stupid can you get?

Anyway, they breed them just to shoot them, which also seems a bit shit, though whether they do the same with the deer too
I don’t know. Can’t imagine the deer are as stupid as pheasants, though.

I’d taken plenty of coke with me for the week but I was actually trying to pull Barney off it. I was wanting to get well in
with Mr Noyce senior and being his boy’s dealer maybe wasn’t the best long-term position to be in. Barney wasn’t a cunt but
he was a bit of a fuckwit, know what I mean? Sooner or later he’d have used my dealing him stuff against me. Threaten to tell
his dad on me, basically. I couldn’t be having that. I had plans. Mr Noyce was part of them. Barney wasn’t.

We drank well. I was letting Mr N teach me about wine, and I did develop a taste for single malts, properly watered. So at
least something good comes out of Scotland. We ate well, too. Not too much pheasant, thank God. The house was a sort of fake
castle, a Victorian take on what they thought the Scots ought to have been building, with decent plumbing and no-nonsense
central heating. I was definitely with the Victorians there.

Once again I hadn’t brought Lysanne, the girl friend, along. She’d have hated it. All that rain and no shops. Dulcima, Barney’s
girl, hated it too, but I think she just wanted to keep close to Barney. At the time I thought it was cos he might be having
second thoughts about her and his eyes had started roving again but later I decided she just liked that he always had lots
of drugs and never asked her to help pay for them.

Dizzy bint even tried it on with me once in the back of a Land Rover coming back from a shoot, can you believe it? Hand on
me tackle through me moleskin plus fours or whatever they’re called and whispered did I want her to come to my room that night
after Barney had conked out, her wearing a pair of waders and nothing else?

I mean, she’s a gorgeous girl, and I’d certainly had thoughts about her, and my cock definitely liked the idea – this was towards
the end of the week and it was getting to know my palm like the back of my hand, know what I mean? But fuck me, really. Dangerous
ground. Too dangerous. A complication I devoutly didn’t need. I told her I thought she was the most humpable thing I’d seen
all year and if I wasn’t such a good friend of Barney’s… She took it pretty well, all told. Maybe just after a bit of reassurance
that she was still lusciously fuckable. Some girls are like that.

Long week, but worth it. We escaped eventually, back down the long long road to civilisation. I’d got on extremely well with
Mr N. I’d dropped a hint that I was looking to take on a proper job, something serious, like what Mr N did. Nothing too obvious,
but still a hint.

Next time I saw Mr and Mrs Noyce I took Lysanne. We went up to his family’s place in Lincolnshire on the coast near Alford.
The place was called Dunstley but they called it D’unstable because it was right on the edge of the sea, standing at the end
of a road on a sort of sandy cliff above a wave-washed beach. They were on their third garden fence because the other two
had disappeared into the North Sea during storms and the garden had shrunk by two-thirds – nearly ninety feet, according to
Mr Noyce – in the last forty years.

This time Barney and Dulcima weren’t there. Other things to do. So it looked like I’d made it to friend, not just friend of
son. En route to protégé, with a bit of luck. Excuse my French.

Mr N thought Lysanne was a laugh, which was a relief. I could see her weighing him up soon as we arrived and could almost
spot the point at dinner on the first night when she looked from him to Mrs N and realised that there was no opening there
for her to exploit. That was a relief, too. No play that a girl like her could have made for a guy like him could have lasted
longer than a night, but she could have messed things up for me. Mrs N exchanged a look with me over coffee that made me think
she’d had pretty much the same feeling re Lysanne as I’d had.

The house was young compared to Spetley Hall; Edwardian, built at the turn of the last century. Whitewashed brick and painted
wood compared with mossy stone and polished panel. Great big salt-streaked draughty windows instead of tiny little leaded
draughty windows. Very light by comparison, full of morning sunshine coming in from the sea and sparkling.

“It’s all about confidence,” Mr N told me. We were standing in the garden after dinner looking at the latest fence while the
waves breaking on the beach below glowed in the last of the evening night. Lysanne and Mrs N were further down the garden.
I could hear Lysanne shrieking with laughter at something Mrs N had said. Mr N was slurring his words just a little and at
first I thought he’d said “conference” but actually it was “confidence.”

“What, like a trick?” I asked.

Edward laughed. “Maybe. A little harsh, but maybe. Confidence is what keeps the whole show on the road. You need confidence – faith,
even – to keep putting one foot in front of the other. Arguably, if you just stopped the whole edifice would collapse.” He glanced
at me. “It’s also about value, but there’s the rub. What is value? Value is what people think it is. A thing is worth what
somebody will pay for it. But then somebody pays what everybody thinks is an outrageous price for something, a price everybody
‘knows’ is idiotic, and yet if they can offload it for even more to somebody else then it really was worth at least what they
paid for it, wasn’t it? The profit is the proof. Though of course if they get caught with it, when it becomes horribly clear
that it wasn’t worth anything like what they paid, then they were wrong and everybody who ‘knew’ they were wrong gets proved
right.” He sipped his whisky. “The difficult thing is to spot reliably who’s right and who’s wrong by buying in before a stock
gets too expensive and get out before it becomes clear it’s actually like somebody in a cartoon who’s just walked over the
edge of a cliff and only doesn’t fall because they haven’t realised yet. You know, like Tom and Jerry.”

I’d been thinking Road Runner myself, but I knew what he meant. We both watched the waves for a moment. “Is that the Invisible
Hand holding them up, then?” I asked.

Mr N laughed again. “The Invisible Hand. Well, that’s just an article of faith. That’s another myth. Like we’re a twenty-four-hour
society. No, we’re not; the markets aren’t. They close at teatime every day in whatever city they’re in, there’s nothing between
New York and Sydney and they’re shut the whole of the weekend. And holidays. Just as well too or I’d never get any time off.
What do you think of the whisky?”

I shook my head, frowned. “I’m not sure. It’s quite sweet and a bit peaty. I sort of want to say an Islay but I don’t think
it is. Could be a Talisker that I haven’t had before but I’m still thinking about it.” I shrugged and looked bashful. “Leave
it with me?” Mr N grinned and nodded, looking almost proud of me. This uncertainty was all bollocks by the way. It was a Highland
Park from the Orkney Islands. I knew cos even though Mr N had poured it while I wasn’t looking I’d spotted the bottle on the
sideboard with the dribbly bits running back down the inside when he’d handed it to me, so I knew. But I needed to go through
the charade to make it look good, didn’t I?

“It is a confidence trick,” Edward said, staring out to sea again. “All banks are technically insolvent and all PLCs are one-way
bets, or they bloody should be if you handle them right. If they work you keep the profits and if they don’t you close them
down and the money they owe to other companies or other people is just left hanging.
You
don’t go bankrupt, not if you’ve arranged things right. Shareholder, director, MD. That’s what the Limited bit of Public
Limited Company means, you see? Limited liability. Not the same as a partnership, or being a Name at Lloyd’s.” He waved his
arm at the waves, spilling a little of the whisky. There had been quite a few G&Ts and bottles of wine before the whiskies.

“Really?” I said. I wasn’t sure this sounded right. I guess I must have looked dubious.

“There you are, you see?” Edward said. “A civilian, a very naive person, might think that if a group of people got together,
borrowed a lot of money to start a business, ordered lots of plant and equipment and raw materials without paying for them
and then made a complete mess of it and lost everything they would somehow still owe all that money, but they don’t. If what
they started was a PLC then the company becomes a sort of honorary person, do you see?
It
owes the money, not
them
. If it goes under then it goes into administration and its assets are sold off and if those don’t cover what was owed then
that’s too bad. As long as they stayed within the letter of the law throughout you can’t touch the directors or the shareholders.
The money’s just gone. Of course, if it’s all a great success, then hurrah. All shall have prizes. See what I mean? One-way
bet.”

“Jesus, Edward, you’re starting to sound like a commie.”

“Right-wing Marxist, Adrian,” Mr N said briskly. He nodded once, still staring out to sea. “As a matter of fact I did flirt
with Socialism, in my youth.”

“That when you were at university, was it?”

He smiled. “Yes. University. But then I saw how much more comfortable life could be as one of the exploiters rather than one
of the exploited. Plus I decided that if the proles were so stupid as to let themselves be exploited, who was I to stand in
their way?” He smiled at me, his sparse, sandy hair ruffled by the wind. “So I went over to the Dark Side. Cheers.” He drank.

I laughed. “That must make Barney Luke Skywalker.”

He shook his head. “I’m afraid I don’t know
Star Trek
well enough to say who he’d be. Not Doctor Spock, that’s for sure.”

I almost didn’t correct him. But it was such an obvious one he might say it to somebody else who would and then I’d look like
I was being what do you call it? Obsequious or something. So I said, “You’re getting your stars tangled” and explained.

“Yes, well,” he said airily, waving his glass again. He turned to me. “And which side are you on, Adrian?”

“I’m on me own side, Mr N. Always have been, always will be.”

He looked like he was studying me for a moment. “Best side to be on.” He nodded, and drained his glass.

(Ensemble)

1It began with Dr Seolas Plyte. The good doctor was asleep in the withdrawing room off his study in the Speditionary Faculty
of the University of Practical Talents in Aspherje when it happened. His favourite mistress, still lying on top of him on
the chaise longue in a haze of post-coital torpor, jerked once, exactly as she might have had she too been in the act of falling
asleep. She reached down, took him purposefully in her arms and before he could properly wake they were both gone.

Ms Pum Jésusdottir was hiking in the Himalayan Hills when they came for her. A long-laggard world this one, where the Indian
subcontinent had barely begun its slow crash into Asia. Here, the highest point in the Himalayas was tree-covered and less
than thirteen hundred metres above sea level. She was walking alone along a recently blazed trail beneath tall plane trees
dripping from a recent shower, stepping from side to side of the track to avoid the stream of water that it carried, reflecting
that if you made a path in an environment of high precipitation without also making ditches then really you just made a stream
bed, when she saw the girl sitting – hunched, hugging her knees, staring ahead – a short way up the path.