The Paper Eater

BOMBSHELL

If there’s one thing to be said about life in captivity, it’s that you get to travel.

Welcome aboard the Sea Hero, a former Attractionworld cruise liner rescued by the Liberty Corporation from the ship-breaker’s yard and converted at a cost of squillions into a floating fibreglass cage. Two male humans per cabin, and trans-hemispheric incarceration conditions apply. The pros of this include human-rights entitlements to craft-hobby materials and language cassettes. The cons: curtailed freedom of movement, seasickness, no smoking, and a Babel feel. Human detritus being big global business, you can be sure the profit margin looks crakko. That’s the backdrop.

The hero – me.

Bonjour. Harvey Kidd. Forty-four, balding, ink-stained and alone. Divorced, beclobbered and unfree. A defective product of society, a nobody, briefly and catastrophically catapulted to somebodydom against his will. Not a real hero, but the opposite: a coward, a human ostrich. Prone to nightmares. Sometimes I’d rather not sleep.

But I must have done last night because this morning I’m woken by a vigorous electric crackle from the tannoy. Showbiz being in Captain Malt Fishook’s blood, he doesn’t drop his bombshell right away. He introduces the concerto first.

– Hi, folks, his voice ring-a-dings through the static. Beautiful day out there. (Like bollocks. It’s grey and dank, dishwater, sea, sky like ectoplasm.) Today’s composer is Hugo Alfvèn, a Swede whose work flourished in the 1930s, particularly on cruise liners.

Fishook’s a former Attractionworld man. Like the duvet covers, he came with the ship as part of the package. You can see why a leisure conglomerate would want shot of him; there’s a side to him that would unsettle the kiddies.

– Well, Voyagers, he goes on in this global drawl he’s got. Before this morning’s musical entertainment, let me tell you that the next port of call is one that some of you know well.

A bad feeling germinates inside me. For weeks the ship’s been jazzed up with nerves, whispers, fear. Our navigational rota dictates that we ricochet from one territory to the next, so as not to stay in anyone’s back yard, and the latest rumour’s been that –

– We’re heading next, he says, for the island of Atlantica.

Boom. The rumour’s true. The bad feeling sprouts to life, like a manic fungus that blobs up in the dark. Fishook must know what kind of wounds he’s opening. What can of worms. It gets worse.

– Our arrival on the island in ten days’ time, he goes, all nonchalant, will coincide with the national festival, Liberty Day. You can hear him smile in the little pause he gives. Smell the cigar smoke as he puffs. – There’ll be fireworks, experience simulators, and a Final Adjustment, among other attractions. All the major retail outlets are offering unprecedented discounts, some of which will be available at our on-board concessions. Which as you know accept both dollars and euros. So get ready to party, folks!

John’s shape in the bunk above, like a nylon pregnancy, bulges to the left, then stiffens. A Final Adjustment, among other attractions. For a bloke on Death Row, that is not a happy thing to hear. I shudder. Us Atlanticans are all on the list, but John, being an actual killer, is right up there at the top, with the geologists and soil physicists they keep in solitary.

– So now for our Swedish concerto, goes Fishook. Happy sailing. And please – enjoy!

Then the tannoy gives a burp and some swoony music kicks in; a tricksy jazz rhythm, with big-band trumpety stuff complaining in the background. Atrocious.

My cell-mate doesn’t move. Cabin-companionis the official term. The Captain’s term. Fishook has brought with him from Attractionworld a penchant for theming, which afflicts his terminology. Voyagers. Crew. Journeys, as in, I see from my records that you are booked on a lifelong journey, Voyager. On behalf of the crew, let me welcome you aboard. Likes to hawk the lie that we’re all on a happy cruise, taking a break from the pressures of society, with him, Cap’n Malt, triumphant on the poop, superintending our romantic odyssey through the waters of the northern hemisphere. The media back home view it differently.

They call us floating scum.

Finally, John groans through the music.

– You know what that means, for me, he says.

– Not necessarily, I go.

I’m feeling jittery, ragged, claustrophobic, a bit sick. For once, I’m grateful for the musical racket dinning through the sound system.

– You’d have been notified, I say. As firmly as I can. Has Fishook called you to the bridge yet? I can’t see John’s face from here, but I guess he’s just staring moochily out of the porthole at this point. – Well, has he? I say. No.

– No, John echoes.

– Well then, I tell him. Hang on to that, is my advice.

But I leave the cabin as soon as they unlock. Experience has taught me that emotions are for losers. Feel a thing for a fellow-human and you’re dead meat.

At breakfast, the canteen is strangely silent. The Euro tables are filled up, and I spot a few stray Yanks, but the Atlantican section – more than half the canteen – is almost empty. Then word starts going round that one of the blokes in solitary, some soil physicist, has thrown a wobbly and got himself frogmarched to Dr Pappadakis, who zonked him with a jab. And that a structural engineer, helicoptered in from the island last month, started yelling out a string of mathematical equations from a porthole, then tried to chuck himself overboard. Personally, I know how to deal with my own demons. I go to the Art Room and come back with a sheaf of scrap paper to fuel what Dr Pappadakis calls my neurotic hobby.

It’s not neurosis, it’s survival, I’ve told him many times. Why not strive for numbness? He has no answer to that. Through certain techniques involving the jaw muscles, and paper, I have managed to paralyse my entire brain for long stretches of time.

Don’t knock it.

I make my papier mâché in the traditional way, by actually chewing the paper myself. Like most people, I can cram a page of A4 in my gob, no problem. Cooped in a cabin, a year after a certain knitting machine went haywire, I’ve had time to chew things over.

Like this: Chew, chew, chew.

Spit.

And plop, into the pulp bucket!

Loose-fibred craft paper or newspaper is undoubtedly the best material to use, but I have a range of redundant criminal dossiers to recycle. (To get technical for a moment, we’re talking upwards of ten thousand computer-sprocket pages, medium-stiff, and tolerably rich in rag content.) I began chewing paper shortly after I came on board ship, in the wake of the first Mass Readjustment. Initially, I started the chewing to keep myself from blabbing the true story of my rejection by society, but soon it developed into a comforting habit. It helped blank things out. Memories, mostly. And now, a year on, although the ink’s turned me as grey as concrete, I wouldn’t be without it.

Sometimes I read the papers, before I chew them. But sometimes I just chew them. Pages like this:

And there’s a space, for the customer to write his name. Or hers.

Mrs Tina Willets, in this case.

And who is she? An Atlantican. A model customer. Nobody.

Chew, chew, chew.

Spit.

And plop!

At the end of each session, I swallow a mouthful. I need the roughage.

There are hordes of customers like Mrs Willets who feel invisible and unheard. As a certain woman once showed me, the daily human impulses of every man, woman and child on the island – from religious cravings to retail habits – can be plotted on a graph. As a junior associate, she processed some of the figures herself.

Chew, chew, chew.

There is much to be said for routine. A man with a well-designed timetable is in control of at least part of his destiny, isn’t he. Aeons ago, when I lived in a white semi with a green door in Gravelle Road, South District, Harbourville, I always ran business to a strict timetable. I had to. In my unique line of work, if you missed the opening of a stock market, or the renewal date for a passport, or the deadline for a payment, you were history. Every job has its occupational hazards, and fraud’s no exception.

My circumstances dictate that my timetable is different now, though it still involves paperwork.

Of a kind.

After masticating each mouthful sixty times (the enzymes in saliva play a big role, I discovered in the ship’s Education Station, where I am a regular visitor) – after doing that, I spit the pulp into a green plastic bucket (capacity, five litres), and when it’s half-full, I pour in two litres of hot tap-water and stir. Then I leave my raw material to soak overnight, and the next day gloop the pulp out into my small storage vat. Next I add certain specific quantities of whitewood glue, flour, wallpaper paste, and oil of cloves. Then I whisk it with a metal hand-whisk. This part’s important, to achieve the right consistency. The finer the pulp, the stronger the paper paste. John calls this mixture my cud. There are short-cut, gimcrack methods. You can buy the kind of cat-litter that consists of recycled newspaper pellets, which you soak in water, before adding the other ingredients. Or you can get hold of so-called ‘craft kits’. Or wood pulp. But as I explained at length to Dr Pappadakis, I believe in using authentic materials in the time-honoured way. Actually, being detained as an Enemy of Liberty, I don’t have any choice.

Paper has played a large part in my life.

It’s because of paper that I’m here.

Chew, chew, chew.

Spit. And plop!

As cabins go, this is the usual meat-and-two-veg. Standard bunks, a toilet cubicle, a wash-basin. A fold-out table, for meals and craft activities. A shelf laden with my homemade chess-pieces, and the knick-knacks we’ve accumulated between us, my cabin companion and I. Duvets on the bunks, with Attractionworld designs on the covers. This month I have the Funky Chicken. John has Stegoman.

It’s the last day of July, according to the Alpine calendar John’s stuck to the wall. If it weren’t for these boxed months, with snow-capped mountain ranges behind, you’d have no way of telling that it’s been a year since we left Atlantica. When you’re on a ship, there’s no sense of seasons. Back home, the year had a natural retail rhythm, with Christmas giving way to the January sales, followed by Valentine Week, Mother’s Day, Easter, Father’s Day, the Silly Season, Liberty Day, Back to Skool, then Hallowe’en, the pre-Christmas season, Christmas itself and then the whole shebang again.

You knew where you were. And now in ten days’ time –

Don’t think. Head in the sand. Chew!

– Ugh, John goes, picking up his embroidery. He’s a needlework man.

John and I, we’ve been together a month.

If I’m short and squat, which as a matter of fact I am, then he’s the opposite: a towering, scary man, lumpy-featured. He’s a murderer, or so the story goes – though you never know who’s truly guilty here. You won’t hear the Sect mentioned except by the new arrivals. And they soon learn. John has glinty little eyes like chinks in a wall, and a talent to hone in on weakness, which gives weight to the rumour that he bullied three of his neighbours into a suicide pact.

We have our arguments over my papier mâché industry. He claims it turns his stomach to see me sitting here in my thermal vest, masticating. And sometimes he’ll give me a grim look and try on his special blindfold, the one he’s planning to wear for what he’s now calling the Big Fry-Up. But we have more in common than you might think.

– Do you support capital punishment?

That was the first question he asked me, when he came to join me in the cabin, after the previous bloke, Kogevinas, got transferred to the half-way facility on Gibraltar. Not Hi, John’s the name, or So gimme five, mate, or anything normal. It threw me.

– Capital punishment, no, I told him.

– Torture, then? he goes.

Now he had me there. You see, I’d been thinking in some detail about this issue, and I’d decided that some people deserved to be tortured, psychologically, for their crimes. An eye for an eye, a psyche for a psyche. Plus a little physical discomfort doesn’t go amiss. I was thinking of my own personal torturer, Wesley Pike, of course, and the ways I’d like to fuck with his head and cause him grief if I got the chance. Call me childish, but what I’d do is I’d shut him in a glass box, stopper his larynx, make him wear special confusing glasses, and stuff bat-shit up his nostrils. I’d make him drink salted lemonade from a baby’s bottle. I’d smear him with chilli-oil and jeer at his dick. When you’re cooped in a cabin, you find yourself having thoughts like that. Quite normal. So when John asked me for my views on torture, I found myself hesitating.

– I said torture, he goes. You oppose capital punishment. We’ve established that. But are you in favour of torture?

– Under certain circumstances, I confessed, I have to admit I am.

He thumped me on the back, then, hard. I was frightened for a moment, given his reputation as a man specialising in unprovoked violence, but it turned out the gesture was friendly.

– Correct answer, he said.

Torture became an issue we returned to often, after that. It was the nearest we had to common ground. He was an expert on the physical side of it. I favoured discussing the psychological. We’d talk for hours, sometimes, playing the game first developed in a children’s playground, sometime in the fifteenth century probably, the game called Which Would You Prefer?

This is how it goes.

– Which would you prefer, I’d ask, for example, standing in a vat of rancid margarine watching all the forcies who ever nicked you making love to your ex-wife – and her enjoying it, or having to listen on headphones to two hundred hours of Così fan tutte played backwards at ninety decibels and at the wrong speed?

– Watching the wife, John might decide, and hoping she’d shag herself to death. And which would you prefer, being boiled alive, or being forced to eat nothing but your own excrement until you died of salmonella?

– Boiled alive, I’d say. Quicker. Which would you prefer, seeing your favourite weathercaster skewered through the liver, or –

You get the picture.

– D’you reckon they put us together as a form of torture then, mate? John said after lunch, as I sat down to work. Because you sure as fuck drive me round the twist. Prisoner 1-0-0-8-7, guaranteed to have you howling at the moon within twenty-four hours or your money back. That Malt Fucking Fishook.

You shouldn’t have applied for a transfer, then, dung for brains, I thought, but I didn’t say anything. I can’t, when my mouth’s full.

Then he changed tack.

– You’ll be sorry when I’m gone.

He was smoothing out his blindfold. He’s embroidering plastic pearls and little glittery sequins on it – an elaborate task for such a hulk, about as unlikely as a walrus filling vol-au-vent cases.

– Believe me, he went, charred remains are no substitute for the live version.

Miss him? You must be joking. He tried on the blindfold, and the sequins winked at me.

– See no evil, he said.

I kept on chewing. Fifty-five, fifty-six, fifty-seven.

Speak no evil, I thought, chewing.

Fifty-eight, fifty-nine, sixty.

Spit.

And plop, into the bucket.

Atlantica, Atlantica.

Some dark chronological force has dictated that today, twenty-four hours after Fishook’s bombshell, should be John’s birthday. My cell-mate is fifty. Looks sixty. Acts eight.

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 twenty-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 memory 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.

– Ever wondered why you’ve never even been with a foster family? goes Craig, smiling.

My mouth twitches feebly and I fiddle with the small stick I’ve been using to poke in the reeds.

– Know why nobody wants you in their home?

That’s his sidekick, Charlie Lockhart. His claim to fame is that he’s blown off the end of his thumb. I look away.

– It’s because of your social infection, goes Craig.

I don’t know what a social infection is. They’re always on about this. I ran a search for it once, but no joy.

– I haven’t done anything, I go.

– You don’t have to DO anything, to be infected, goes Craig Devon, pretending to be patient, like he’s talking to someone thick. You just ARE.

I stood very still. I watched the air breathe itself on Craig’s bubble-curls, waft them round his pretty face.

– You need a disinfectant purge, he goes. Like a douche. Do you know what a douche is?

The boys behind him giggled and snorted.

– No. I don’t bloody fucking well know what a douche is.

– Voyage of discovery coming up!

They laughed at that too.

– The question is this, goes Craig, pretending to look thoughtful. Will the subject to be disinfected go into the fluid willingly, or will force be needed?

He was quite clever. They admired his way with words.

The pond was small, but deepish, and throttled with chickweed. The water in it black, stinking of rotten stalks. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes tight, till green cracked shapes danced around.

– Well? goes Craig.

I fell in slow motion, and with an extravagant bathroom splash that I heard from under the chilly filth.

I can’t remember much after that, except seeing tiny strings of bubbles fizzle from my mouth and wondering if it was the end. But the black water shocked my heart into a frantic pumping and when I got my face out and my breath back I was gulping whole mouthfuls. I pulled my torso out and looked about me. I saw the boys running off, the fluorescent soles of their trainers winking green.

A few minutes later, there was a small explosion from the direction of the Sports Hut. The boys had moved on.

I don’t know how long I lay there, but I know I felt her before I saw her. My memory of it is, simply, that a feeling began to sluice over me, calming my shivers and coating me in warmth. So that I knew when I looked up, I’d see something good.

And I did. So good, I had to keep blinking to stop it draining away.

She never looked so extraordinary as that moment when I first laid eyes on her. She was always beautiful, but her beauty sort of fizzed at that moment, like a soluble aspirin. I remember her clothes, because they were biology-pond clothes – salamander clothes, to be precise. A tight-fitting green dress with the exact markings of a salamander. Anyone else might have mistaken her for a hallucination but I knew exactly who she was even before she spoke.

– Don’t worry, Harvey, she said gently, in that beautiful caring voice that I will always love until I die. It’s me. I’m here.

– Mum! I breathed, choking on it. My mum was here, at last! And a huge weight lifted from my chest.

Bear with me. Psychology’s involved.

This miraculous, beautiful, fizzing mother in the salamander dress – more real than the real-life unremembered one ever was, I assure you – had wrapped me up in love. It was weird; she was sort of internal and external at the same time – a bit like God, I guess, or a good marketing message.

– This is what you do, she said. You’re to go straight to the matron. Now.

I was going to object, but she held up a hand to stop me. Her nails were painted a delicate peach. As we walked back towards the low red-brick building that was home, Mum told me I had a dad who’d duff Craig up, if he tried to threaten me again. And she let me know – quite how I’m not exactly sure, the memory’s hazy – that Dad was as strong as a tanker, and tough like cowboys in old movies. She also told me that Dad’s elder brother, Uncle Sid, was rooting for me too. So by the time I reached Mrs Lardy’s office, I was feeling quite euphoric about my new situation. I knocked hard on the door, high up, where a grown-up’s hand would knock, then strode in and sat down on the big chair in front of her desk. Mrs Lardy couldn’t hide her surprise at seeing a kid sitting there, dripping on to the floor.

– What are you doing here? Is that – she’s peering at my collar – is that Spirogyra?

– I’ve come to complain, I go. The charter of this facility states clearly that it’s your job to look after the children in your care, and I’m afraid you are failing in your duty.

Her eyes widened as I carried on. Weird, but I don’t quite know, to this day, where the grown-up words were coming from. It was true, I’d studied the charter the same way I’ll study any piece of paperwork, I guess. But quoting it at her like that – well, she must have thought I’d aged ten years in ten minutes. I knew better, of course, than to tell Mrs Lardy about my mother (who had dissolved for now, but was, I knew, on standby), but I told her the rest of the story, in a way I never could’ve done before.

– So I want something done, I said after I’d done this long spiel about the charter. Meanwhile I shall be sending an e-mail to the local authority about the standards of care in this institution.

She was pretty gobsmacked, I can tell you. But I think she was pleased too, because when I’d finished, she smiled, and said she thought I’d turned a corner.

Mum was as good as her word about Dad and Uncle Sid. They came to me that evening in the dormitory.

– I’m on your side, son, whispered Dad. And I always will be. Remember that.

– You’re our special boy, said Sid. Craig won’t lift a finger against you again.

And the funny thing was, he didn’t. The moment my family stepped out of the wings, I became immune to bullying. Nothing touched me. Nobody could hurt me. It was like I carried a bubble of safety around me. Craig got on with his career in commercials. He didn’t pick on me any more. He ignored me. No, more than that: he avoided me, like he was scared to come close.

It was the vibes.

It was only years later, when I got hauled into Head Office, that I actually had to go into the psychological mechanics of it – which were simple enough. How could any child grow up in a children’s home and not know that something big was missing? How could you avoid it, when you saw mums and dads with their shrieking kids in the open air, getting tangled in a kite and swearing, fighting over the last peanut-butter sandwich, or chucking a stick for a drooly Labrador? I knew happiness when I saw it. It didn’t all happen at once. It was organic, my family tree.

It grew from that one magic acorn of shock.

My older sister and younger brother first appeared about a year after I’d met Mum, Dad and Uncle Sid. I must’ve felt pretty much adored by the grown-ups in the family to risk introducing other kids who were a potential threat – but overall, it panned out pretty well, once I’d learned to keep my brother in his place.

The money side of things evolved organically too.

It was a labour of love deciding what they’d all look like and then doing the biz with my photomontage graphics package. For Mum, I first scanned in Mrs Lardy, and morphed her with a very skinny nurse from a TV soap, then superimposed the Tragic Princess. Somehow, through some further nifty palette-mixing, I ended up with a face that was pretty close to that of the ravishing salamander-woman I’d first seen by the biology pond after Craig Devon had administered his ‘purge’. Although I should really have called her Gloria, her official Christian name, to me she was just ‘Mum’. Dad was called Rick, and he was a combination of St Francis of Assisi, from an oil painting I downloaded from my Medieval Art CD, and a footballer I cut out from the back of a cornflakes packet, and scanned in. Uncle Sid was much older than Dad, more like a grandfather really, and I generated his picture from the policeman on the Say No To Drugs campaign. I swapped the left and right-hand sides of his face around, and relocated his eyes to make them friendlier. Then just added a moustache, took away the uniform, gave him a pumping-iron sort of body – too young for his age, really – and stuck a big scar on one cheek.

My sister Lola had freckles and pigtails and all the usual big-sister stuff. I scanned her in from the ‘after’ picture in an advertisement for spot cream, and superimposed a girl from a centrefold. I left the breasts in, so I guess from the start there was a hint of incest. Although I’d reckoned I always wanted a brother, once I had Cameron up and running, I never quite warmed to him, and often thought about killing him off altogether. He had a nerdy, I-haven’t-got-any-friends sort of face. The basis was a kid in one of Mrs Lardy’s ancient knitting patterns, but I morphed it with three separate baseball players. I made him smaller and skinnier than me, and then gave him crooked teeth, because even then I was jealous of him. Sibling rivalry. It’s pretty much normal, I think.

It was plain sailing after that. It’s easy enough to convince a set of machines that somebody exists. You trawl through old newspapers to get hold of dead people, resurrect their identities, generate their birth certificates by back-dooring into the Statistics Office, kick-start the automatic posting system, change their names by deed poll, generate a new set of paperwork, and Bob’s your uncle.

Or in my case, Sid.

Once I’d established their identities on-line, we were in business.

– Which would you prefer, begins John after breakfast.

We’re back in the cabin. Him sewing, me chewing A4 sheets torn from the criminal dossiers by the bed.

– Being stripped naked by Captain Fishook, who barbecues your goolies over red-hot charcoal pellets, or a JCB comes along and lifts you up on its arm thing and hangs you upside-down in a bath of piranha fish that gobble up your eyes and leave like, just the hollow sockets?

– Goolies and pellets, probably, I sigh. But actually, mate, I’m not really in the mood.

– Atlantica, he goes. He’s embroidering again. – Liberty Day, he breathes. Harbourville.

He knows how just the sound of things can knot up my intestines.

– And other stuff, I say. His Final Adjustment, is what I mean. – So can we just not talk, for a change? Can we just shut the fuck up?

He doesn’t like this. His voice changes to wheedling, but there’s menace behind it.

– C’mon, kiddie. Let’s have a conversation. Or a story. I don’t mind which.

He’s looking at me steadily. Sometimes I think he might kill me one day, just for something to do. He’s stood up now, his belly jostling about under his T-shirt. He smiles and I look at bad gums and the botched dentistry of his teeth.

– Question One, he says. (He’s pretending to be a teacher, which I guess appeals to him.) – When are you going to open your letter?

– I’m not.

– Question Two. Why?

I’m scared to, is the truth. I look away, chew some more paper. But he won’t let go.

– Question Three. Who d’you reckon it’s from, then?

– Dunno.

I don’t want to know, either. The letter, the news about Atlantica, the words Final Adjustment… Head in the sand. But John’s persistent. It’s boredom does it.

– Question Three. Might it be from the wife?

It takes me several chews to remember that I was once married. That’s how distant my life on Atlantica seems now.

– If you’re talking about Gwynneth, I go, after I’ve spat, she’s not my wife, she’s my ex. And apart from some stuff she wrote on a form once, I don’t think I ever saw her handwriting.

It was true. Who uses handwriting, nowadays?

– Question Four. Your daughter, then?

– Tiffany? He must be joking – If it weren’t for her – I begin.

Then stop. Why do I let him do this? I reach for a sheet of paper and crunch it into a ball.

– I’ve heard that she’s the one…

But by then I’ve stuffed the paper into my mouth, and I’m back to chewing.

The best, and most honest thing I could have done, once the Hogg family had custom-built itself around me, was to stick to their company exclusively. Not get involved in any other relationships – especially ones that meant practical commitment. But I couldn’t, could I? I was human. I had physical needs. I don’t just mean sex, I mean the day-to-day stuff you do as a couple, like sharing a tub of popcorn at a drive-in, choosing which texture wallpaper for the utility room, microwaving something Thai.

Gwynneth seemed like another godsend, at first. In an odd sort of way she reminded me of my sister Lola. She loved to laugh, live for the moment, act on impulse. She’d drag me off to places I’d never dreamed of going on my own – clubs, rollerblade races, and live TV shows that required audience participation, where dysfunctional families slagged each other off. She was always getting tickets for this or that.

I met her in a queue.

It was at the Taxation Centre, as it was called back then, before you did everything online or by phone; I was there sorting out some family business. Gwynneth was ahead of me, but she was dithering about, grappling with the usual problems posed by Section 9(g) of the YB408 self-assessment reclaim clause. Anyway, the long and the short of it was, I helped her with it, and she asked if she could buy me a coconut milkshake to say thanks.

– Or there’s a new diet drink with cinnamon? she goes. If you’re not too busy?

That’s when our eyes sort of met and locked. Hers were very round and wide, like Pacific Ocean shells with mother-of-pearl in. She had a nice body too. By nice, I mean it was a sensible size and shape that looked welcoming. Not madly sexy and outrageous like Lola’s – just well, OK. I liked that.

One thing led to another, and in a little bistro, on our third Mexican beer, I realised how badly I wanted her to like me. Soon I found myself pouring out all sorts of stuff to her about my folks, and the computer consultation service we ran as a family concern. I was enthusing about them, like you do when you’re proud of something and it’s all yours. She was very impressed with the business side of it (I didn’t use the word ‘fraud’), and our complicated deals. It was obvious from the way I spoke that I had money. That’s never a turn-off for women, is it? But I think I genuinely appealed to her too. You got the feeling she’d maybe had a hard time with men, and that I might be an experiment in something different.

– So what do you call yourself, exactly? she goes. I mean, when you’re talking about your job? I mean, mine’s simple, I just say beauty therapist.

I hesitated. Technically speaking, I was a criminal.

– I’m a flexecutive, I went.

That seemed to hit the spot. And it wasn’t a complete lie; it’s a broad church.

One thing led to another; tickets to a show, a Korean restaurant, more talking, some rather fumbling sex. It was odd, doing it in the flesh for the first time, rather than in my head. I had trouble keeping my eyes open, even though I was keen to see what was going on. I was so used to imagining things. But Gwynneth’s hotness and wetness and – well, fleshiness – they really drove me wild. There were all sorts of things I hadn’t expected – the grappling with clothes, the grunty panting that goes on, the tropical nature of the atmosphere you somehow build up between you, the urgency of it all, and the whoosh of release. What a fandango!

– I love this! I blurted to Gwynneth, as I exploded into her – joy of joys! – on the turquoise leather settee of the three-piece suite she called her Best Bargain.

– I love you!

I couldn’t help it. It was my first time doing it for real. And I did love her. I loved everything that she brought me. I loved being normal. I even loved going shopping with her! She was a true Atlantican that way; it’s in the blood. She was a choosy and discerning consumer. She knew what to buy to suit her mood, knew when to purchase, and when to window-shop. She liked theming, she liked self-assembly – or rather, she liked to buy things I could put together with an Allen key while she made us something from a sachet. It was a kind of a foreplay thing.

The trouble was, as things progressed, she wanted to meet my parents.

– And Lola and Cameron too, she goes, all pink with enthusiasm. And your Uncle Sid! They sound just brilliant! God, Harvey, you’re so lucky! My parents are awful. My brother’s an arrogant jerk, and I haven’t spoken to my sister since she deliberately smeared taramasalata on my basque.

Well. All relationships have their sticky moments. Gwynneth was shocked and disappointed when I finally broke the news to her about my family only existing on paper.

– And in my heart, of course, too, I added, trying to smile winningly. In my heart, they’ve always been very much around. I can hardly remember a time when I didn’t know them.

She didn’t like this one bit, though. In fact, she said, she was shocked to the core.

– Frankly, Harvey, she says, I’m just a bit worried that you might have a mental illness. I’ve never come across anyone inventing a whole family before.

– How many orphans d’you know? I snapped. Look. My real father was just some bloke with sperm, as far as I can gather. No record of him. And my real mother drank bleach when I was three. Can you blame me for craving a spot of normality?

She looked at her nails for a moment. They were impressive, because they were made of acrylic that was stuck on, and then decorated with twirly sea-horses and glitter. When she looked up, she blinked tears.

– I’m sorry, Harvey. It’s just I mean, have you ever thought about seeing someone – professional?

This hurt, but strangely enough, in the end I managed to sway her. It took time, but I knew she wanted to give me a second chance. What I did was I persuaded her to come and see things for herself. Back in my apartment, I showed her my CD ROM, and all the downloaded paperwork that had accumulated over the years, and talked her through it.

– So they’re a business really, I concluded. A family business.

The paperwork was my salvation, because slowly, the Hogg family’s transactions, which represented real money, persuaded her to imagine a set of scales, with my financial wizardry weighed against my possible madness. The dosh won out, and I thanked my lucky stars it did. When I asked her to marry me, she said could she think about it for a while. Then one week, two days and five hours later she said yes.

I was over the moon. At last, I was going to be a normal bloke after that bad beginning I’d had. Not only did I have a girlfriend, I was going to keep her! That’s what marriage is, isn’t it? Having someone exclusively?

I was wrong there as it turned out.

I’ve wondered many times since then what Gwynneth thought about during those nine days and five hours when she was making up her mind to marry me. Was it because she was self-employed at the time, doing nail extensions, and needed someone to sort her paperwork? Was it because she wanted to get away from the boring parents, the arrogant brother, and the sister who attacked her with taramasalata? Was it because she loved me and wanted to stay with me for ever, forsaking all others?

All I know is, things seemed fine. They really did.

And then, not long after our marriage, something started to buckle and turn hopeless. Sex is always one of those dodgy things, isn’t it? I’m no expert, I’ll be the first to admit, but for every high, it strikes me, there seems to be a low. A sort of depression, even. Things were fine, to begin with – no, more than fine, they were crakko! We’d go at it with gusto, in that bedroom of mine with the dressing-table that had the angled mirror that, if you accidentally opened your eyes, reflected interesting parts of the anatomy as you were doing it. But then one day, soon after we’d bought the house in Gravelle Road, things went wrong. Just like that.

One minute we were at it, the next she’d wriggled off, leaving me bobbing about in thin air like a divining rod. She turned to me with this fierce and frightening light in her mother-of-pearl eyes. Angry tears glittered at their edges, then spurted to her cheeks.

– You were thinking about someone else just then, weren’t you?

How do women discover these things? Telepathic surveillance? We’d been married less than a year.

I covered my poor vulnerable genitals with the nearest thing to hand – a foam-filled slipper in the shape of a lobster. We had matching pairs, twenty dollars from Dreamworld.

– No I wasn’t, I go.

– Yes you were.

Impasse.

– Gwynn, I beg, pulling her back towards me with my free hand.

– It’s her, isn’t it? she says. You were thinking of her, weren’t you?

– Who? I go, like I don’t know.

She blushed. She didn’t want to say it, she was ashamed of even thinking it, I guess.

– Her, she mutters.

We both stare at the bulgy lobster slipper. It’s got these nylon feelers.

– Lola. Your sister.

– No! I say, with force.

At least it’s the truth. I haven’t been thinking of my sister.

– I swear on my life, I say. I was not!

Actually, I was thinking of my mum.

The telepathic surveillance thing must have kicked in again, at that point, because Gwynneth’s look turned to disbelief, then horror. Then revulsion.

– God, Harvey, she murmurs. So it’s even worse than I thought.

What could I say, except sorry?

We argued about the ethics of it for weeks after that. She went out every night, without me, on the razzle, and came home with wide, wild eyes and lemon Hooch on her breath. Sometimes, as she trundled about the kitchen liquidising tinned fruit and slamming cupboard doors, she’d call me a ‘pathetic worm’ and a ‘sicko’. But fantasising about the female members of my family was more a question of habit than malice, I pleaded. And anyway, it wasn’t as though they were there in the flesh, as true-life rivals to Gwynneth.

– Look, you know I don’t have any experience of relationships! I pleaded. I’ve had to make it up as I go along!

But that only riled her more.

– It’s them or me, she’d say when we were in bed, and turn her back on me, her smoky hair fanning on the pillow. You decide.

– It’s you, I went. It’s you!

– Then drop the Hogg family, she said. If you don’t – exorcise them – then I’m leaving you. You watch. One day you’ll see my bum shrinking, and it won’t be Weightwatchers, it’ll be me going like thattaway. Outa here. Gone.

But when you hear a threat repeated more than a few times, you realise it’s going nowhere. Which was just as well, because by then Gwynneth was pregnant. I’d read in True You about women’s hormones. It makes them weepy, having an embryo inside them. She cried when she told me. But I was thrilled. Thrilled! A family, at last!

– You want me to keep it then? she asked, snuffling into a Wet One.

What a question! When I came to put my arm round her, she sort of crumpled.

– Of course I do! I said. Of course!

I was completely baffled. Why on earth wouldn’t I want a baby?

– You know I’ve always wanted a family, Gwynneth! I’m longing to be a dad!

I couldn’t work out why she seemed so grateful about that.

The house in Gravelle Road was on the new estate near the site that was to become the purification zone. The road was actually going to be called Gravel Road, because the planners had put gravel on it. But they changed it to Gravelle to give it class. Another example of their imagination: it was on the junction with Tarre Street, near Pension Road. Anyway, it was a semi-detached with good feng shui, and we used the money from my family business to buy it. It was an up-and-coming area.

The property market wobbled for a while, when the Liberty Corporation was voted in, and work began on the waste crater which was going to feed directly into the porous rock on the seabed below and kick-start the economy. There were voices of dissent, I remember, but after a while you stopped hearing from the geologists and things went ahead. Once the economic success trickled down to us customers, living close to the source of Atlantica’s wealth suddenly became a positive plus, real-estate-wise. It was similar to being parked near any big man-made structure – like the Taj Mahal, I guess, or an Egyptian pyramid. I’d voted for the Libertycare package myself, I should say at this point. I was personally all for it. The fewer humans to screw things up the better, in my view. Plus I had a hunch that it would be good for trade, and I wasn’t wrong. The average Atlantican didn’t need much convincing. We’d always been willing to give new ideas a whirl. If a free sample came through the door, we’d try it. No one was sorry to see the death of politics.

Gwynneth chose a cherry theme for the lounge, and we went for marble-effect in the kitchen, with inset halogens above the hob. I installed a power shower in the bathroom and drilled holes for hooks where she said.

The new ‘hands-free’ system was even better news for me, business-wise, than I’d dared to hope, because by the time Liberty was servicing Atlantica, my fraud network was practically invisible. I even began to feel that, in my own small way, I was contributing something to society. If you’d asked me to put my finger on what, exactly, I might have had trouble, but I know that as Atlantica began to thrive I felt I was playing a role in keeping the economy buzzing.

As Gwynneth had builders come in and make a couple of alcoves in the hall, so she could put little fibreglass cherubs in there, backlit, and as I ordered turf, I began to feel proud of the way Atlantica was turning its fortunes around with the purification thing. When I was a kid, the rest of the world had looked on us with scorn. To live on reclaimed land was similar, in world terms, to inhabiting a trailer park. Atlantica was one of those forgotten places before; too small for the media to bother with, too remote for tourism. We had no role to play.

No one can say that about the kidneys of the northern hemisphere, can they?

Thanks to Atlantica’s unique combination of porous bedrock and porous landfill, no container would be turned away. All waste – be it industrial, organic, or nuclear – would be welcome, no questions asked. That was a pledge.

Gwynneth hesitated for a long time over the kitchen tiles, and eventually settled for a mock terracotta that was easier to maintain than real terracotta, and you couldn’t tell the difference unless you were an expert, plus it was wipe-clean and low-maintenance.

Once the crater was functioning, the first thing we noticed was the climate change right on our doorstep. Gwynneth’s window-boxes went ape. We planted a banana tree on either side of the patio area, and her mum gave us a bougainvillaea. There are certain water creatures that do what Atlantica does, I thought one day as I gazed across at the zone from the Osaka Snak Attak, where I sometimes went for noodles. You pass muck through them, and they decontaminate it, send it back into the atmosphere, the filth strained out. It makes you feel proud.

– You should come and visit, Gwynneth urged her cousins in Canada. They’re calling us the Hong Kong of the Atlantic. It’s a shoppers’ paradise!

The weeks passed. Gwynneth battled with morning sickness and gave the spare room a makeover in the acid palette that was the big thing at the time. The Canadians came, and saw, and were impressed. They left with bulging suitcases.

Soon Atlantica was dealing in human waste too. I had no objection: commerce is commerce. The floating penitentiaries thrived. Those were honeymoon times. The world brought its problems to Atlantica, and Atlantica – a geophysical miracle! A tiny artificial land-mass in the middle of bloody nowhere! – fixed them.

But if things were going well for our little island state, they were going from bad to worse for Harvey Kidd as a family man – bougainvillaea or no bougainvillaea. The friendly lull we’d had after Gwynneth told me she was pregnant didn’t last. Always, as I headed back home from the Happy Eater or the Snak Attak, I knew there’d be grief waiting. As soon as I walked in the door and made for the Family Room, Gwynneth, her belly footballing bigger every day, would start up again.

She never accepted the family. And she particularly hated the surname Hogg. An ugly name, she said. And it was true. It was an accident of paperwork, I told her, I didn’t choose it. When you’re constructing an identity from a set of laundered birth certificates you’ve –

Well, it was like talking to the wall.

Some couples just rub along together, as far as I can tell. Not us. Mum, Dad, Uncle Sid, Cameron and Lola remained a big problem in our marriage, even after Tiffany was born. It emerged that one of the Canadian cousins had nosy-parked his way into my Family Room when I was out, and seen what he called my pin-ups. That hadn’t helped, to have Gwynneth’s prejudices confirmed by a third party.

I didn’t watch the birth, because Gwynneth told me the Customer Hotline advised not to, but I saw her minutes later. Boy, was she a funny creature. She had a grumpy face and grown-up ears, and when she grabbed on to my finger with her tiny hand with its tiny perfect nails, I fell in love. I’d never had a pet and had always wanted one but this was miles better, I could tell. I had founded a family! A real one!

– It’s Daddy, I told her. Say hello to Dad!

But Gwynneth said I was talking too loud and it’d make Tiffany cry, plus she’d catch a chill, and what did I think I was doing, leaving the door open, and couldn’t I see I’d give her all sorts of germs, and they say the father should keep his distance in the first year. And she shooed me away.

– Go and make money, she said. Go pow-wow with your Hoggs. You’re earning for three now.

That was the beginning of it, and it didn’t stop. It was Gwynneth’s way of getting back at me for the Hoggs. If I was going to have my own private family members, she was going to have hers.

– You can’t argue with the logic of it, she told me.

And she was right, I couldn’t.

So I did what I knew how to do; I made money, and Gwynneth spent it. She dressed Tiffany in little themed outfits and changed our three-piece suite once a year. She bought novelty garlic-crushers, garden rakes, designer sweatshirts, the same kind of shoes in three different colours, travelling irons, espresso machines, teak coffee tables, opaque plastic salad bowls, self-seeding window-boxes, holidays for her and her mum and Tiffany in Ghana or Lanzarote, bathroom makeovers and exercise videos. She bought wedding presents for her friends when they got married, and sympathy lunches when they divorced, and took Tiffany to Florida for her fifth birthday, to swim with dolphins. When Tiffany was nine, they both joined the Feel Real Club and started doing parachute descents and bungee jumps and white-water rafting.

And Tiff was a crakko little kid. I’d watch her out of the window wobbling about on her big bike and feel these huge waves of love.

But me and Gwynneth, we were always dogged by the same old conflict that we dragged around behind us like a ball and chain: money versus the Hoggs. You couldn’t have one without the other, as far as I was concerned. She disagreed. Like all regular arguments, ours took the form of a vicious circle.

– I just want you to get rid of that family, Gwynneth’d say.

– But it’s a family business, I’d go. And what would we live on? Thin air?

Then she’d say something like – You could find a proper job. You’re clever with paperwork, you can do computers and admin and whatever. You could do anything.

And I’d say – I’m not trained. I’m self-employed. I can’t have a boss, it’s against my nature.

And she’d say – Well if you don’t, I’m leaving.

– And Tiffany? I’d go.

– I just want you to get rid of them, she’d go.

– And what would we live on? Thin air? I’d go.

– You could find a proper job, she’d go.

Etc.

It would be fair to say that I frustrated Gwynneth. When Tiffany was about ten, she persuaded me to see a stress-management consultant called Geoff, whose sister’s nails she did. I’d sit there in his sissy consulting-room that stank of aromatherapy, trying to understand what Geoff called my ‘demons’, and listening to his suggestions. Such as, I could take Gwynneth to the Odeon once a week. Buy her flowers that came from a proper florist’s. Stop trying to muscle in on her relationship with her daughter.

Geoff’s stress-management consultancy didn’t strike me as a particularly professional service. His bookshelves were stuffed with creepy self-improvement manuals, and he banged on zealously about a weed called St John’s wort, ‘for moods’.

What I couldn’t get through to Geoff was the idea that there was nothing wrong with being loyal to your original family, and enjoying their company. I told him how fantastic Mum was: how well she’d always cooked, how much she loved me. I told him about Dad, and what a great, straight guy he’d been, full of sound advice to a boy growing up. About Uncle Sid, always game for a laugh. About how clever Cameron was, and how Lola had the boys falling over themselves because of her animal magnetism.

But like Gwynneth, Mr Stress seemed to have a blind spot about the whole subject.

Atlantica, Atlantica.

The next nightmare’s even worse. Me, Mum, Dad, Sid, Lola and Cameron, we’re at Liberty Head Office, walking down corridors and up escalators, searching for a certain woman. I have to see her again, I have things to tell her, things I couldn’t say when we were together, because there wasn’t time and I didn’t have the words, things about how if only we could’ve had a shot at living a normal life, as normal as you can when you’re people like us, who have trouble saying things, so much trouble that it’s only in your head you can do it… But the words get mangled up and the corridors go on for ever and –

– Wait!

My sister Lola has stopped in her tracks. She turns to face us.

– I know where she is! she says. We’ve been looking in the wrong place! Hannah Park doesn’t work here any more.

– So where is she? I go.

As I wake, a freezing wave slaps across my heart and I remember the pure white concrete of the crater.

– Bad night then? asks John, after Fishook has tannoyed his morning message. The Swedish music is sweeping through us like a chilly wind. – You were talking in your sleep, you were.

– I’ll sleepwalk next, I warned him. Come and strangle you. I’d have indemnity. I read an article about it. You can do anything you like, if you’re unconscious.

– You were saying someone’s name, he goes. It sounded like Park.

– It wasn’t a name then, I said quickly, busking it. It was about parking.

He looked doubtful.

– I have two types of dream, I said. Sky dreams, which are about flying through the sky with my family, and dreams about parking. Which are about parking.

That seemed to satisfy him.

Later in the day, he said – Multi-storey, or kerbside? and I said – Both.

You try to paralyse your brain with chewing, keep things on an even keel, but then something comes along, and you can’t. Like now. The news of our return to Atlantica I could have handled. But on top of it John’s execution, and the letter, and then a certain woman nightmaring her way back –

Well, there are limits, aren’t there. So I’m helter-skeltering to Dr Pappadakis now. I’m not the first to request a visit. He’s seeing Atlanticans at five-minute intervals. As Garcia opens the door to let me out I try to avoid looking at his chunky jaw, his long front teeth.

– You stay walk on red line, he says. Or I no hesitate shoot, hokay?

On the way to the surgery, Garcia follows five paces behind like a traditional Japanese wife, apart from the stun-gun. As I pass the mirror on the poop, I catch sight of a squat, balding grey man. It’s always a shock seeing the colour. Like concrete. It’s as if my skin’s dyed from the inside. I drag my eyes away, but not before noting that my face has changed shape since I last saw it. My cheeks have become so muscular they now look like the buttocks of a male ballet dancer. I shudder. Bulging spheres in grey tights. Swan Lake. My tongue is black.

– Your entire epidermis, goes the doctor, examining my skin with a magnifying glass, indicates high levels of ink in the bloodstream.

– That’s not what I came to see you for, I say. I want drugs.

But he’s not listening, he’s on his hobby-horse again. Dr Pappadakis is on sabbatical from the Papandreou Hospital in Crete, and he’s done a thesis on cancer risk.

– Printer’s ink, he goes, it’s highly carcinogenic.

Dangerous particles have leached into my skin, where they could decide to wreak havoc at any moment, warping my cells, turning them maverick.

– I must do blood tests, he says all Mediterranean and mournful, preparing the needle.

– Must you? I don’t like the sound of this. – If there’s something bad, I tell him, I’d rather not know. (This approach has worked for me in the past.) – Look, I came here for some Prozac. Or could you just give me Valium? Or a few Libbies?

– You have visitors arriving, is that the problem? You are Atlantican, no?

– No. Yes. I’m Atlantican. But no visitors.

– No parents-brothers-sisters?

– Not any more, I go.

– No wife?

– We’re divorced.

– Children?

Mind your own business!

– Daughter. Tiffany. Not visiting. Estranged.

– Friends?

That’s when Hannah flits back. I thought I’d banned her for good.

– Drugs, I beg again. Look, it’s my cell-mate John. He’s going to be finally adjusted. It’s kind of stressful.

Pappadakis looks up sharply.

– Your cell-mate? he goes, and the question hangs in the air for a moment, till I realise it’s a language thing.

– Cabin-companion, I correct myself. My cabin-companion, John. He’s on Death Row.

I roll up my sleeve and he finds my vein. We watch as the syringe fills with a blackish maroon. When he’s finished I hold the cotton wool over the puncture. Pappadakis sighs, looks at me oddly again.

– You have thought, lately, about death?

– Quite a bit, I confess. What with John.

– John? Pappadakis looks away, then. Shuffles about with some papers, glances at the clock.

– My cell-mate. Sorry, cabin-companion.

– And you are sure – about your, er –

– Cabin-companion, I say. I have an odd feeling we’re going round in circles. – No. Not sure. Just, it’s likely. He’s right up there on the list.

– He is dissident? Geologist? Soil physicist? Structural engineer?

– No, a serial killer, apparently.

– I see, he says, sort of edgy.

There’s a bit of a silence.

– Have you seen how you look? he goes finally, fiddling with his worry beads. You were off-white when I first met you. Now you are really quite grey. Soon you will be the colour of the burnt wood for sketch-drawing and for barbecue, what you call it, of the charcoal, and the whites of one’s eyes, what we call the conjunctiva, will turn yellow, you follow? You too are – I mean your own er, prospects, they are… somewhat similar, no?

It takes me a minute to see what he’s getting at.

– Oh, sure, technically, yeah. But there’s a quota, remember? Libertycare policy states two a year, maximum, as a deterrent.

(I’ve done my sums. There are a thousand Atlanticans aboard, and you can count on the dissident scientists and those accused of violent crimes, i.e. John, being top of the list.)

– I could die of old age first, I tell him. Some Libbies, OK? Just to see me through?

He sighs.

– A small amount, he says, handing me a plastic cylinder with a child-proof top. Bear in mind that since yesterday’s announcement I have increased the amount of placebos that I issue. Your chances of this being genuine are therefore only one in five. Goodbye, Voyager.

And he ushers me out to the corridor, where the chipmunk-faced Garcia awaits me, gun poised.

– How d’you know you’re swallowing the real thing, then, John’s asking.

I’ve explained the placebo theory.

– You don’t, that’s the beauty of it. If you believe it’s working, then it’ll work, see?

– Like Libertycare, says John.

I look up. It’s not like him to talk of home.

I’m too unsettled to sleep. Too scared of more nightmares. In the semi-dark, I eye the letter again, with its crude mosaic of red lettering. Yes; crude. Disturbing. It seems to scream at me: Atlantica! Atlantica!

The past spilling back like that. It’s bad management. It’s bad manners. It’s bad for my heart. If it breaks again – if there’s any disturbance – any kind of resurrection –

If –

I’ll get lockjaw, that’s what.

Who would use red biro, to address a letter? I’m not used to colour. Who would write in that stagey way, all loops and squirls?

A woman, that’s who.

A marauder.

I chew over this thought, and others: dreams, fears, ghostly detritus, stray memories, and wild wishes; my mental cud; the unfinished and unfinishable business of a graunched heart.