The Paper Eater Read online

  There’s a rattle at the door as Garcia unlocks.

  – Here arrive you mail, he announces, and flings it on the floor. The metal door slams behind him with its usual ku-klung, followed a second later by the reverberative du-dunnnggg. John manoeuvres his weight off the upper bunk to pounce on the mail – a few letters and a parcel – but I don’t move from my leprechaun position on the bunk, next to the pulp vat, because the bottom line is that I never get letters.

  – A letter for you, goes John.

  A second bombshell: it hits me like a punch.

  I gulp, and accidentally swallow a mouthful of paper pulp, which feels and tastes much as you’d expect – sawdust, metal, printer’s ink, I needn’t elaborate.

  – How d’you know? I ask through the aftertaste.

  John can’t read.

  – The number on it. It’s your number. I know numbers.

  – Hand it here, I say, willing my hand not to shake.

  John’s podgy face changes shape, like malicious putty.

  – What do we say when we want something?

  He can be a scary bastard.

  – Please, Mr Henderson. He hands it and I grab, swoop my eyes across.

  It’s a cream envelope. My name, number and address are in large handwriting that loops and clambers to the right-hand edge of the rectangle. Writing with no discipline, like someone learning or re-learning how to do it by hand. Bright-red biro, and more flabbergasting to me than blood.

  Fortunately, John’s too busy with his own mail to bother with mine. He’s a family man, so he has greetings from his mum and his ex, though not his kids. The mum’s card has a chip in it that plays Happy Birthday To You. We listen to that a few times, and I read him the messages in the cards. There’s a gift, too; his step-nephew, Jacko, has sent him a parcel tied up with coarse yellow string. The stamps – exotic flowers – are Namibian. Jacko’s a satellite engineer, so he travels the entire globe.

  – Go on then, I say to John, buying time to recover from the shock. Birthday boy. If there’s a catch in my voice he doesn’t notice.

  – Still don’t know why he does it, says John, scrutinising the package.

  I can’t fathom it either. The gifts started arriving last month, out of the blue. Generous, considering John’s never even met this sister’s ex’s half-brother’s son by marriage or whatever he is. Didn’t even know he existed.

  – Maybe if you’re a satellite engineer, saying: My Uncle the serial killer on the floating international penitentiary makes you look the big cheese, I tell him.

  – Jealous?

  – Slightly, I admit.

  And it’s true.

  When John opens the parcel, something blocky and beige falls out and bounces on the floor. It looks like a loaf of home-made bread – irregular, with seeds and chaff in it. I pick it up, weigh it in my hand. To my surprise, it’s as light as polystyrene. It smells spicy. Organic. Like compost. I pass it to John, who puts it to his fleshy nose and snuffles at it like a professional truffle-pig. Boggles me, mate, goes the look on his face.

  – Read me the postcard, then, he orders, like he’s a prince with a personal slave rather than an illiterate moron.

  Happy Birthday, Uncle John, I read. Some genuine rhino shit for you. A souvenir from the savannah. Hope to meet you sometime! Regards, Jacko.

  John chuckles.

  – I like him, that Jacko.

  – The fairy step-nephew. You’re his charity case, I tell him.

  – I reckon he’s the success of the family.

  And he puts the dried turd on the bedside table along with his cards, gently, like a monarch’s crown razzled with sapphires.

  – Now you, mate, he goes. How long’s it been?

  – As long as a piece of string, I tell him, inspecting my letter, trying to sound cool as a cucumber but all choked up just feeling the envelope, because despite my best efforts to banish her, my first thought’s been of a certain woman, and my heart’s going thunk like someone’s aimed a sledgehammer at it and swung. Memory’s a forceful thing, I’m right to avoid it.

  The envelope’s so light it could be empty.

  Harvey Kidd, Voyager no. 10087, Cabin B 52, Prison Ship Sea Hero.

  My insides are in freefall. You don’t wait for eleven months and twenty-three days to hear from the outside world, and then get a pleasant surprise, do you. The decision’s so simple it makes itself.

  – I’m not opening it, I tell John.

  He laughs.

  – What, never?

  – Probably, I say, standing back from the idea and approving. I’d say, probably never.

  – The ostrich position again, goes John, spitting on his palm and smoothing his hair down in the mirror.

  – It’s a good position, I tell him. I’m comfortable in it.

  Red biro. And whoever wrote it isn’t used to addressing envelopes. I can’t work it out. An Atlantican stamp, post-marked Central Post Office, Harbourville. No clues there, except that it’s home – and also, suddenly, the place we’re headed. Somehow, I don’t like either element of this combination.

  – Best to leave it, I go. No news is –

  I stopped. That choking thing again. My heart felt dangerous, like I had a pacemaker and it’d been put on a setting that was too fast and fibrillous for a human. I could see John’s bulbous face in the mirror. He was looking at me sideways, like he does when he’s wondering whether to buzz the crisis button. But he won’t, I thought, not after last time, when we had an ethical disagreement about chastity belts, and he ended up in solitary for false-alarming. So I just stuffed some of his Namibian wrapping paper in my mouth and began chewing.

  Chew, chew, chew. Chomp, chomp, chomp. Chew, chew, chew. Et cetera.

  – You know what that is, goes John, straightening himself up in front of the mirror, and indicating my papier mâché pulp with a jerk of his head. That cud of yours. That spitting habit. It’s what teenage girls do, isn’t it. Bulimia.

  And he opened his birthday card again, to make the chip play the tune.

  That night, as we passed the Straits of Kattegat, I propped my unopened letter on the shelf alongside my Garry Kasparov autobiography, the forget-me-not condolence card, my papier mâché chess-pieces, and John’s bric-à-brac, which included the dried sea-horse from the Philippines, the plastic figurine of an Atlantican terrier whose collar bore the message: GIVE A DOG A BONE, and the mass-produced Egyptian papyrus covered in phoney hieroglyphics. Jacko the mysterious step-nephew again.

  The boy needs shooting.

  Then came the first nightmare, which did its usual thing: starting as an innocent dream and then turning nasty.

  I’m the Bird of Liberty, and I’m flying over the ocean, with the rest of my family following silently in my wake in V formation. I guess they’re Birds of Liberty too – in fact I get the feeling we’re a smallish flock returning home after a trip away.

  Suddenly, there it is. Down below, look. The familiar fried-egg outline of Atlantica, cushioned on the sea, its lush flatlands and lace-frilled shores exhaling a purplish haze of mist. You can picture the seabed below, where the artificial land has been grafted like a tooth in a jawbone, the waste craters like blood vessels feeding the porous rock, mingling fathoms deep with minerals, calcium and hot brine. Feeling the organic genius of it, I feel a nudge of pride, a nudge that turns into a loud yell.

  – Home sweet home! I cry out.

  And my voice rings happy through the clear blue sky.

  From up here the geography of Atlantica is scaled down to toytown, a 3D map. Hovering high, you can see Groke to the north, Mohawk to the south, St Placid to the east, all ringed by farmland – pineapple fields, guava orchards, the bright red hoo-ha of tulips. And spread below, the leisure centres, schools, malls, golf courses, and retail parcs of Harbourville itself. As we swoop down, spiralling lower over the capital, the yellow-grey skyscrapers leap out at us like pop-ups, unpacking their mazes of detail, crowding us with the machine hum of the t
wenty-four-hour city. I love its thrill, I love its energy, I love its hope.

  We’ve landed now, on a sea-less beach – a flat vista of sand, peppered with small boulders and clotty hanks of bladder wrack. Here, a big bonanza of a picnic spreads out before us: chive-and-onion kettle crisps, whole lobsters, processed-cheese triangles, lychees, choc-o-hoops, devilled peacock eggs. What you might call The Works.

  My mother Gloria sports a sparkly evening dress of turquoise chiffon, protected by a homely kitchen apron – for thrills and spills, she says. She’s busy doling out home-made granary baps with a large pair of surgical pincers. Us kids first, then Dad and Uncle Sid. The next part’s blurry (there’s a live crab in it, and a five-piece chamber orchestra) then abracadabra, somehow I’ve collected a mass of driftwood for an al fresco fire, where my big sis is char-grilling some freshly caught mackerel thrust upon her by a local fisherman struck dumb by the sight of her fantastic naked breasts. Lola always goes topless, so she often gets perks like this. We’ve got used to it as a family. Sometimes you can stop a dream in its tracks, but this one kept rolling on, filling me with its bliss.

  We’re on to business matters. I do the talking, as usual, fast and furious, while they listen. I’ve got a proposition for Uncle Sid, I’m saying. His assets are out of kilter. We’ll have to sell a consignment of Chinese water pistols and other novelty toys to Lola’s comfort-ranch empire, via a subsidiary of one of Dad’s loan schemes, so as to set off a chain reaction in Cameron’s leisure-and-armaments-related stock, knocking up the value of Mum’s petrol shares. And bingo, the water-melon transaction we began back in March will come full-circle. The bottom line, I tell them, is a humungous profit for the family business.

  They don’t get it, of course. They’re not so quick on the uptake finance-wise, which is why I’m managing our affairs in the first place. But they all cheer happily at the news, even my brother Cameron. And the smile Mum gives me says it all.

  I, Harvey, am her favourite child. Ah, the happy chords she twangs in me, my mum! She takes a strawberry from her basket and pops it in my mouth. I catch sight of Dad and Uncle Sid exchanging a look – I’ve wowed them with my business smarts again, hooray – and my heart bangs with pride.

  But when Cameron bares his perfect orthodontics to bite the fruit Mum hands him, I feel a horrible stab of jealousy at the thought that his strawberry might be bigger than mine. And watching the fruit’s sweet juice trickle across Lola’s breasts, I feel the usual surge of desire mingled with shame.

  Slowly, depressingly, my strawberry turns sour. I taste paper, glue, and bitter ink. Above us, the sky blackens and dies.

  Still chewing, I wake on the Sea Hero, bereft again.

  Atlantica, Atlantica.

  Outside through the porthole the sea is grey and flat as a strip of sheet metal, the sky a greenish wash, the horizon a menace now I know what’s lurking beyond it. John’s been having nightmares too. That’s no surprise. He’s woken three times and yelled and farted, then gone back to sleep. We’re both raddled and jagged and raw.

  We’ve been lying there in silence for a while, thinking our morning thoughts, which are always the worst ones of the day, because they’re tangled in the freedom of sleep.

  – Tell me how you did your fraud then, he goes. His voice is small and lonely like a kid’s.

  I play along sometimes to soothe him. But today we both need it.

  – There’s worm-holes in the system, just like in the galaxy, I tell him. (If I shut my eyes, I can remember the joy of it and forget what it led to. Remember the dream part, not the nightmare.) Wriggle through one, and you’re in a different dimension. The Fiddling Zone. There’s only two occupational hazards, I tell him: arrest and repetitive strain injury. Every five or six moves, you slice a piece off someone else’s salami and add a zero to your personal equation. It’s one of the oldest scams in the book. But you need to be the dedicated type.

  – Wouldn’t suit me, then, murmurs John, lumping over on the bunk.

  – No. But it suited me, I said. Ricocheting money back and forth. Shimmying to and fro over the International Date Line. I got very good at the pan-hemispheric transactions, I told him.

  – What are they when they’re at home?

  – They’re robbing Peter to pay Paolo. Then borrowing from Paolo to pay Hans, and ripping off Hans to satisfy Marie. Plundering Marie’s savings to fob off Josef, who owes Gretchen, who owes Randy, who in turn owes Peter. You can start with next to nothing. One bloke I heard of, he was actually a million in debt. By the end of the year, he’d whipped up a fortune, bought a fish farm near St Placid, and married a gas heiress. True story.

  John grunts; he can’t help being impressed. These violenti don’t know their arse from their elbow when it comes to fraud.

  – But how d’you get going, like?

  – I had a thousand. It’s doodly squat, but it was enough to buy my dad a car.

  – A car?

  – Yup. A car. The whole thing began with a humble Mitsubishi Supremo. It didn’t really exist as such, but there’s people on line’ll sell you anything. I didn’t want the car, see. I just wanted the electronic paperwork.

  – Uh.

  – So I used the A-Z and picked a street, then staged this fake accident, a big smash-up, with the car a write-off. Noted the time and place and then electronically weasled into the local copshop’s computer and dumped in the details. I got my dad to claim the insurance, which was double what I’d paid for the car documents.

  I felt proud, remembering it. I was a bright kid. From John’s silence you could tell he was impressed.

  – Then I made Mum decide that my brother needed a brace because his teeth were wonky. It was the most complicated and expensive kind of brace that existed on the market, it was state of the art, at the time, with rubber bands and copper spring-work and pressure-pads and implants. Anyway, I whipped together this huge orthodontist’s bill, and got Mum to claim it off the Social Office. That was in the days before Libertycare. I think Wickham was the President, at the time. Or maybe even Malone. So then I had Mum set up her own import-export company. And then Dad too. That’s when we started trading in earnest. You can shunt their money about and add to it, see.

  John began to snore.

  I feel nostalgic every time I think about the life I once led. It was good. It was solitary, but there was glamour to it, big-time. It was a game, a drug. There was a gambling element, but mostly it was skill – technical skill, that paid off, if you kept your eye on the ball, stayed up to date with the anti-fraud technology. By the time I was nicked, my family members owned six off-shore companies, each with its own bogus board of directors – concoctions, the lot of them, names fished from the phone book. No one checks.

  I miss my family. How I wish I could talk about them – I mean really talk!

  I’m always careful, when I mention them, not tell John their names. Careful not to say anything that might raise an alarm, and link them to what’s happened on Atlantica. Careful to give no hint of what I led them into. While he’s snoring up there, I’ll let you into a secret.

  I grew up an orphan.

  An orphan, with a family?

  It happens.

  By the time I was a teenager, my parents, uncle and siblings were as natural to me as … as … as … yoghurt. We all have ways of coping, don’t we.

  The Hogg family was mine.

  It was my mum who arrived first.

  She made her debut when I was nine, but I have a hunch that she’d always been there, waiting in the wings, for when I needed her. I’m sure it’s a common fantasy among orphans – just as children from normal families often dream they are adopted. I’d never had a dad, see, and my real mother drank bleach when I was three. I have no memory of her. I was living in Harbourville Junior Welcome Centre – my third institution – at the time it all started. And as usual, the bullies were after me. I’d always been the kind of kid other kids picked on; perhaps my experiences, the ones I have no memor
y of, turned me inward. But I wasn’t consciously unhappy, and I did have friendships, of a kind. You’re never alone with a computer, are you. I was the one who’d spend a whole day getting to grips with a piece of software, or circumventing a tricksy firewall – the kind of idle, voyeuristic hacking that ends up giving you an education. (It was back then, as I scrutinised the electronic paperwork of some of the world’s leading companies, that I realised how easy it is to conjure up cash out of nowhere.) Yes, I had brains but – well, probably no charm. And certainly no social skills of value in a Junior Welcome Centre, where the kids with clout smoked heroin and made their own bombs. Next to that, my bubblegum skills looked like a joke. In the first home, in Groke, they said I smelt of fish. In the second, in north Mohawk, they started a rumour that I had an extra arsehole hidden in my armpit. Here, in Harbourville, the largest children’s facility on the island, they said I was infected. But it was one boy, Craig Devon, who made my life a misery. If I was at the bottom of the food chain, he was right at the top. He boasted that he’d amassed enough explosives to smithereen the whole centre by blowing it sky-high.

  – Know why you’ve never been adopted, Harvey Kidd? he’d go.

  Innocent grown-ups loved him because his face was angelic, rimmed with bubble-curls. He had actually done advertisements for soap, and had his own bank account, and he’s now a famous TV commentator. His nose was thrust right up to mine, now; the rest of the gang stood a little way back, mocking me with the usual taunts.

  – Yo, Harvey Kidd, the human virus!

  – Zap him with germ-spray!

  – Quarantine alert, amigos!

  I always dreaded the early evenings, when the computer room was locked for the night and we kids ran loose before tea and bed. What I’d do is, I’d keep a low profile, wait till Craig and his gang were occupied with their bomb-making experiments, and sneak off to look for squirmy water creatures in the biology pond. I liked looking at the tadpoles best; over the course of the year I’d watch them hatching from their blobby eggs, and swimming about until they grew dwarf legs and abracadabra’d into tiny orange frogs. I’d been safe from Craig and his gang here in the past. Not any more, though – because suddenly here they were, massing up on me, ringing the pond.