Untitled (26 page)

  If none of us has heard of Hinton Lea it was because ten years ago it didn't exist. It was one of those gated villages that sprung up after the government scrapped the green belt, privatized the Forestry Commission, and forced the National Trust to sell some of its landholdings for golf courses.

  You, too, get away from city smog and crime and be just like the folks in
Country Lifestyle
mag for a down payment of 500K.

  A few of us were to be dropped here, while the rest were to go to other burbforts hereabouts.

  I was the first. I shook a few hands, slapped a few backs, and hugged Mo.

  "See you on the other side," I smiled.

  "Yeah," she said. "I'd like that. I'll send you any strength I've got to spare."

So, I'm on the step of this three-bed detached thing; a semidetached parody of a Victorian Gothic Revival townhouse, the home of someone with no taste at all. My possessions amount to a prawnless prawn sandwich and a half-full bottle of Malvern Water, and Daniel Organ is reading my rights to the guy at the door who's looking at me like I'm a bowl of cold sick with a cherry on top.

  It's ten at night, but it's spring and quite light and I can tell a lot about him.

  He's about thirty-five. Not a lot older than me, but a universe apart.

  His hair is too black not to be at least partly out of a bottle or implant. He is wearing shorts and a vest with the name of some poncey designer on it. This garment is almost not worth wearing as it's designed to reveal luxuriant expanses of depilated and roidgrown muscle.

  ". . . you will ensure that he is fed at least three adequate and nutritionally balanced meals a day," says Daniel, but my new owner is looking impatient.

  He has a big moustache of the kind favored by Stalin and various other twentieth-century tyrants. Mum always said you should never trust a man with a moustache.

  ". . . you will provide access to adequate sanitation and washing facilities."

  Oh goody.

  ". . . you will not physically or sexually abuse him."

  A wolf has just appeared at his side. Correction, it's a very big dog, the sort that bites criminals. He pats the dog absently.

  ". . . you will ensure that he is provided with adequate warmth and shelter, you will . . ."

  "Yeah, yeah, yeah," he says. "Just give me the zapper and the manual. I'm missing the golf . . ."

  Organ hands over a bubble-wrapped remote. He also presents Mr. Universe with a glossy booklet on the cover of which is a cartoon of a man in a convict suit digging a garden, while in the foreground sits a sweet little old lady in a deckchair enjoying a cup of tea.

  "You will ensure that the taggie's welfare is adequately . . ."

  "Yes, yes," interrupts Mr. Impatient. "Where do I sign?"

  My new owner speaks with the accentless, precise voice of somebody who spends a lot of time giving dictation to machines.

  As soon as the bus has pulled away, he unwraps his handset, sets it to maximum, and tries it out.

  I can feel the pain starting in my back and shooting down to my toes and across to my fingertips. I yell a lot.

  It's set for a max five seconds before it cuts out automatically.

  I collapse on the doorstep.

  "Wow!" he says. "Nearly woke up the whole street! Let's make sure we understand each other, my friend. I don't like people like you. I don't like what you did to my company. You're scum. You fight against a system which has the best interests of everyone at heart, when you should be helping yourself and helping others by getting a job. But now you're here we're going to have to get along. Keep your nose clean, do as you're told, and we'll do just fine."

  He leads me to the garage at the back of the house. In a corner is a tatty mattress and a few blankets. "This is where you'll sleep for now," he says. "My wife is nervous about having you indoors. Now, where are we . . ." He consults the manual, flips over a few pages as I stand around admiring his collection of power tools, wondering if it's possible to kill a man with a sander.

  "Got it!" he says, pushing a few buttons on the box. "The immobilizer cuts in if you enter the house, or move more than twenty meters from this spot. Good night."

  With that, he returns to the golf. He hasn't asked me my name, told me his name, or informed me where the bathroom is.

  Later I slip out and piss on one of his flowerbeds.

Jeremy Henderson was not a member of the Southern Cable board, or even a senior manager. He wasn't clever enough. He was an area sales manager, though he'd avoid using the title outright and tried to give the impression he was more senior, more highly paid and more
in-dis-fuckin'-pensible
than that.

  When the company found they had some of us left over after sacking the cleaners and giving us to senior management, they had a lottery. Jeremy Henderson won eighteen months of my life by racking up the highest score in a game of Bushido.

  Jeremy Henderson had few paper books in his house except The Bible, a bound set of Jeffrey Archer novels (heh-heh!), a beginner's guide to Go, and a copy of Sun Tzu's
The Art of War,
which was presumably fashionable reading for proactive corporate pants at the time.

  He worked in the weights room daily, and roided up as well. Mrs. (and she was a Mrs., you better believe) Henderson did not work. And the less work she had to do at home, the more proud Jeremy was.

  For a while before he got married he flirted with that church that thinks Freddie Mercury is God and is coming back soon in a spaceship. Queen was JH's idea of classical music.

  Now he was a Christian because everyone else who mattered was, and because deep in his soul he needed something to Total Quality Manage his moral superiority over first and second quadranters and anyone else who didn't live as he did. Jeremy's most primal fear was that someone might get one over on him.

  In the SWOT Analysis he did on me, I guess I represented both an opportunity (status symbol, labor-saving gadget) and a threat (I might get one over on him).

  Mrs. Henderson – Natasha; you know you can tell the age of trees by counting the rings? If I cared about fashion, I could have told the age of Natasha by studying the plastics and implants. I'd have bet my liberty that seventy percent of the women her age in Hinton Lea had the same hairstyle, same breasts, same nose, same lips, same dental work, same shaped arse, same flawless complexion . . .

  Natasha looked like a soap bitch, but before her husband and master she was a self-effacing little mouse. She had met hubby seventeen years previously, had married two weeks after leaving school. She had never had a job, had probably never been out with any other guy. She wasn't the sort to cheat.

  She had all the domestic electronics a decorative little hausfrau could desire, including a Moulinex Andy to do all the cleaning. She had no interests in life beyond watching soaps and talking about diets with her women friends over tea and cake.

  She was also partial to the bottle.

  For a week, I cleaned windows, did a bit of painting (Jeremy didn't trust me with anything tricky), cut the grass, and even got let out to do a bit of shopping. For almost every minute I was awake I thought about legging it. It would have been pointless; the tag has a beacon that the filth could home on from miles away, and cutting the tag out is a nonstarter, they say. And I wasn't about to try surgery on myself.

A week into my captivity, JH held one of his "famous barbecues."

  Of course the most interesting piece of meat was not being cooked. Well, not literally anyhow.

  Come seven, the garden was full of the cream of Hinton Lea society. Men in T-shirts and tight shorts contrived to show off their bottled muscles stood around drinking bottled Budvar and Sapporo and talked about cars, golf, suitplay, and management, all pretending they were more important than they really were. The women, mostly little wifeys who hadn't worked for years, or who maybe did work part-time but tried to hide it, talked about kids or cosmetic surgery, and pretended their husbands were more important than they really were. There were a few kids, half of them running around laughing and screaming, the other half standing around like clones of their parents, either perfectly behaved and polite, or affecting languid boredom.

  My role was to swan around with the drinks and the nibbles wearing the white shirt, dicky-bow and brocade waistcoat Natasha had brought home for me the day before. I'd been dreading having to officiate over a heap of charred, stinking meat, but I'd forgotten that looking after the barbie is Real Man's Work.

  My mission was to be seen by everyone. People would ask JH who I was, and he'd nonchalantly say, "You mean Brian? He's our taggie. A little present from Sir David."

  Technically, this was true in the sense that the Chief Executive had raffled the remaining members of the Margin, but no way was Jeremy going to say he'd won me by pretending to be a Mangaflick hero.

  The price of Hendersons hit an all-time high. His mates grinned and said he'd soon be too good to mix with them, then retired into little knots to bitch about him behind his back.

  As the sun went down, most of the women drifted away to put kids to bed, or talk in the living room. The males huddled closer around the dying embers of the barbie to get maudlin and trade philosophy.

  Maybe JH had stopped being the center of attention for a moment, but suddenly I felt a tingle down the back of my neck, turned and saw him holding the remote.

  "Brian," he said, "c'mere."

  I wandered over. The others stopped conversing and looked at me.

  "There's one burger left on the barbie, Brian," he said. "Would you like it?"

  "No thanks, JH," I said brightly. The others sniggered and dug one another in the ribs. They hadn't heard him called "JH" before.

  "No, s'allright, you can have it," he said, slapping the lump of dead cow into a bun.

  "I don't eat meat, JH," I said coolly. He knew it.

  "Why's that, then, Brian? Think it's inhumane? Think you're better than the rest of us?"

  "I don't like the thought of eating dead animal flesh," I said.

  He slopped some relish into the bun, and held it out. "You want to overthrow our way of life, don't you? You and your weird mates want us all back in the Middle Ages, don't you? You'd rather we were all living in mud huts and eating grass."

  I hadn't realized how drunk he was; it was unwise to challenge him, but I did. "All I want is a world in which the planet's resources are more evenly distributed and where everyone can achieve their full potential as a human being."

  Don't forget I hadn't even heard of the Water Margin three months before this.

  He sneered the last sentence back at me. "And what about us here? Aren't we striving towards our full potential as human beings?"

  I didn't answer. Thought it best not to. "See!" he said to the others. "I told you he thinks he's better than the rest of us." To me again, "Eat the fucking burger. Do I have to make you?"

  I took root. He thumbed the remote, and the pain shot through me.

  The pain stopped. Some of his chums were laughing. Others looked at the ground uncomfortably. "You going to eat the nice burger, Brian?"

  "No," I said as evenly as I could.

  He turned it up. I fell to the ground, writhing around on the grass, trying not to cry out.

  It stopped. I looked up. JH was simply raising a quizzical eyebrow and proffering the burger.

  "No," I said.

  "Anyone else want a go?" he sniggered, offering the remote around. Nobody did. He turned it up some more. Probably to maximum. This time I did yell.

  It cut out. I managed to croak a "fuck you."

  He went ballistic. "You pathetic bloody criminal! You come into my house like Lord God Almighty, sneering at the rest of us, thinking you're so damn superior. But who are you? What have you got? Nothing, you've got nothing. You
are
nothing. I'll fucking break you, you piece of shit!"

  With that, he switched on again, leaving me yelling like an elephant with a toothache.

  The pain went on for what seemed like hours, though it was only five seconds. When it stopped, a voice was saying, "Cool it, Jeremy. He's had enough. Forget it . . ."

"Fucking break him if it's the last thing I do," said JH, as someone popped another bottle for him.

Next day, JH stuck his head through the garage door at sparrowfart and said we were going to church. He gave me a suit, a shiny, bottle-green thing, then pushed me into the bathroom.

  Again, I was being shown off. Having ascertained that I could drive he almost gave me the key until he thought better of entrusting his precious 4WD Lada Ostrovnik to me. Pity. I could have scared the bejeezus out of him by driving it recklessly; after all, he wouldn't dare use the remote to stop me.

  Hinton Lea, population c. 2500, doesn't have a church. We went to some village nearby for a lowbrow evangelical service of the sort that validates your greed. None of that love-your-neighbor or Good Samaritan or turn-the-other-cheek nonsense for this crowd. The vicar, or pastor or whatever he was, told us how the Bible is God's User's Manual for Life.

  It being sunny, we all hung out in the churchyard afterwards to network. JH chatted with his social betters and Natasha exchanged banalities with her friends.

  Regular churchgoing was going to be wonderful.

  IJ came up and clapped me on the back. I didn't recognize him for a minute as he, like me, had been washed and be-suited. He belonged to the Chief Exec himself and was living a tolerable existence in a room above Sir David's garage. Sir David had a huge paper and electronic library and allowed IJ the run of it when he wasn't tending two acres of garden.