Our Island Story E-Book

Guy Ware

• Herausgeber: Salt
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: Salt Modern Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 343

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Denis Klamm, feckless scion of two former Leaders, returns to the Island for his father's funeral, only to find it sinking. Or the sea rising – it depends what you believe. Either way, they're all going to drown – unless the young, idealistic and newly-elected Leader, Jessica King, really is the saviour long foretold by Our Island Story. But Jessica is only Leader because Ari Spencer, the special advisor's special advisor, has made it so. She wants solutions; Ari offers schemes. She wants to solve the climate crisis, house the homeless and bring justice for the victims of police brutality in a decade-old incident that Ari, for reasons of his own, would rather nobody looked at too closely. Or at all. While Denis falls under Jessica's spell and sets out to make the sort of grand romantic gesture guaranteed to attract attention, Ari hatches a plot to pit conspiracy theory against myth, unleashing a maelstrom of populism, ambition, religion, treachery, lawlessness, old wounds and new battles – along with the less familiar forces of love and grief. It won't save the Island, but it might just save his skin. The result sweeps cynical politicians and bureaucrats, corrupt policemen, ambitious clerics, former Soviet taxi drivers and would-be poets into a riotous, brutal and surprisingly touching black comedy about our refusal to face reality, even – especially – when it's about to kill us.

Leseprobe

iiiPRAISE FOR THE FAT OF FED BEASTS

‘Fleshing out the shadowy metaphysical hints of Beckett’s novels, this intellectual romp is the best debut I have read in years.’

Nicholas Lezard,The Guardian

‘The staff of the office are revealed as gatekeepers to the afterlife, setting up a neat reversal in which determining the resting place of recently departed souls is treated like any normal job – employees rock up late and use work computers for their own projects – while mundane tasks, such as making couscous salad, are addressed with scholastic intensity.’

Sam Kitchener,The Literary Review

PRAISE FOR RECONCILIATION

‘Absent, slippery or suspect ‘facts’ are central to this unapologetically knotty novel.’

Stephanie Cross,Daily Mail

‘This ingenious novel succeeds in being both a highly readable story of second world war derring-do and its aftermath and a clever Celtic knot of a puzzle about writing itself.’

Jane Housham,The Guardian

‘Moving between various real-life events, each laced with errors and lies, Ware demonstrates to the reader how easily we can be misled as he explores the ethics of storytelling in this wartime thriller.’

Antonia Charlesworth,Big Issue North iv

PRAISE FOR THE FACULTY OF INDIFFERENCE

‘The Faculty of Indifference is both funny, diverting, exhausting and baffling all at once. Whatever your tastes, Guy Ware is a writer whose name should be part of the contemporary literary discussion. His is a post-modernism that pushes the past into our increasingly confusing world.’

Rebekah Lattin-Rawstrone, Byte the Book

‘Ordinary life is a terrifying prospect in this existential satire about a London spook … The Faculty of Indifference is a book of dark shadows and dry humour. It’s a comedy about torture, death and loneliness, and an existential drama about a world that swirls and twists and turns on us without provocation.’

James Smart,The Guardian

PRAISE FOR THE PECKHAM EXPERIMENT

****‘For all its topical resonance – amid a national housing crisis and the long aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire – the novel’s fatalistic register and taut, controlled narrative voice, by turns doleful and sardonic, set it apart from the preachier political alle­gories that are currently in such oversupply. Ware’s narrator has kept the faith, but he is under no illusions: “the universe is not moral and history has no arc. Its trajectory is an irregular spiral, turning constantly in upon itself … If there is an end, a destina­tion beyond mere annihilation, it is lost to sight.”’

Houman Barekat,The Telegraph v

‘London itself is a central character here, as seen through the eyes of now 80-something queer quantity surveyor Charlie. We join him on the night of his twin brother’s funeral and as he tries to write a eulogy (while getting increasingly sloshed), Charlie recalls the city’s journey from the idealism of the actual 1930s Peckham Experiment – which encouraged working-class families to actively participate in their own well-being – to institutional corruption; the power cuts of the three-day week, the rise of Enoch Powell and, above all, the devastating collapse of the tower block that his brother built … there are shades of the great Gordon Burn in Ware’s portrait of period, place and class.’

Stephanie Cross,Daily Mail

‘The novel begins on the eve of JJ’s funeral, with Charlie struggling to write a eulogy for his 85-year-old brother. Confined to a mobility scooter (‘like Dennis Hopper on Medicare’) and drunk on brandy, Charlie is a seductively irreverent narrator. Witty, wise, queer and possessed of a fierce social conscience, he revisits their parallel lives in a fluid monologue that’s as Beckettian as it is Steptoe and Son. Ware is refreshingly sharp on twin psychology: ‘I never believed I’d bury him. I’m older. Surely it should fall to you to bury me … No one wants to be last. We should have gone together … A plane crash.’’

Jude Cook, The Spectator

“Deeply impressive … one of the most moving novels I have read in some time.”

Keiran Goddard,The Guardian vi

viiviiixi

GUY WARE

OUR ISLAND STORY

For Sophy, always

And for Frank and Rebecca: may you make a better job of it

“O Father Neptune,” she said, “let Albion come to my island. It is a beautiful little island. It lies like a gem in the bluest of waters. There the trees and the grass are green, the cliffs are white and the sands are golden. There the sun shines and the birds sing. It is a land of beauty … Let Albion come to my island.”

H. E. Marshall,Our Island Story

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGEDEDICATIONEPIGRAPHONETWOTHREEFOURFIVESIXSEVENEIGHTNINETENELEVENTWELVETHIRTEENFOURTEENFIFTEENSIXTEENSEVENTEENEIGHTEENNINETEENTWENTYTWENTY-ONETWENTY-TWOTWENTY-THREETWENTY-FOURABOUT THIS BOOK ABOUT THE AUTHORALSO BY GUY WARECOPYRIGHT

1

ONE

Denis gulped down a mixture of ozone and salt water, wrestled his diaphragm into place, and bellowed: “February’s a shitty time to die.”

The woman beside him shook her head carefully, eyes closed, and shouted back, “I’m ready.”

They clutched tight to the rail as the boat rolled over the swell and plunged deep into the trough ahead, leaving their stomachs somewhere up above the belching funnel. Again. The ferry crawled up – again – then paused, taunting them, at the lip of the abyss. But they weren’t dying. That wasn’t what he meant. The roaring wind was cold as pity; the spray soaking his inadequate stolen jacket colder still; the constant, thought-devouring threat of sea-sickness – despite his having long since hurled overboard the morning’s tea and bacon roll – would not let him be; but all this, this unpleas­antness, ultimately just proved he was alive, and likely to stay that way. If heavy seas had been enough to sink this tub, they’d all have drowned three hours ago.

The deck disappeared from under his feet. Again. Closing his eyes made it worse. Keeping them open, though, made the lead-grey sky swipe viciously into lead-grey sea. A pair of empty bottles chased each other back and forth through splashes of vomit.

“I meant my father,” he shouted, after a while. Dying, he meant. These were hardly ideal circumstances, but there was no harm in garnering a woman’s sympathy. It was practise, if nothing else.

She said, “You’re Denis Klamm?”

Her voice rose, but it wasn’t really a question. Had they met before? He hoped not. People who knew him were prone to outbreaks 2of justifiable emotion, even violence. Right now, he wasn’t strong enough for either. But before he could deny himself, she shouted, as if she were the first to ever say the words, “I’m sorry for your loss.” Maybe bellowing against the wind helped. Also, she wasn’t to know, but she was the first to say them to Denis. His mother wrote texts, when she wrote at all, as if they were telegrams, invoiced by the word. This one had read: “K’s dead. Funeral Monday. Not optional.” He’d been in the pub at the time – admittedly not something a bookie would have bothered giving odds against – and his mates had said things like: Shit, that sucks; He had a good innings; and Does that mean you’re rich? Which – the rich thing – it might. He’d honestly never thought about it. He was not short of faults, and was usually skint, but nobody would ever have called him a grave robber. He bought a round on the strength of his prospects, then had to borrow the fare for the ferry. The only one with any cash to spare was the idiot who’d said He had a good innings. Which was surely more stupid than sorry for your loss? K had never played cricket. Eighty wasn’t even a great score. Who’d want to get out on eighty? Plus K had been pretty much gaga the last few years, parked in a home, which – although Denis was no expert – didn’t sound like much of an innings for anybody. Not life’s best blessing. On the other hand: K. Leader of Leaders. Elder statesman and greasy eminence. Not bad for a chancer who washed up on the Island with nothing but a baggy tweed suit he’d won in a bet and a tall story about a job offer. Hauled up by his own bootstraps. Or the laces of his hand-made brogues. That was the story he told Denis, anyway. Like all good stories, the details varied with the telling.

Still: sorry for your loss.

He had to say something, so he said thank you, which she took as an introduction.

“I’m Lucy.”

He said nothing. She already knew his name.

“Lucy Neave? I used to work for your mother?”

Oh, God. If those were questions, they weren’t the ones they 3pretended to be. Don’t you remember me? That’s what they meant. And he didn’t. He’d only spoken to her because she was there. A woman, half drowned in a cagoule. Early forties, at a guess. Long face all nose, like a rodent. Tiny mouth, tiny teeth. Were ferrets rodents? Ears glued on like Mrs. Potato Head. Of no real interest, was what he was saying. Not saying, obviously. But still: a woman. There. At a time of trial. And then it turns out she knows him. Fuck’s sake. He hasn’t been back in seven years and the one person he talks to knows him. Knows who he is, anyway. That was the trouble with the fucking Island. But no, he doesn’t remember her. A lot of people had worked for his mother.

Pointing briefly past the bow, then grabbing the rail again, Lucy said: “Is that it?”

Ahead, on the plunging horizon, through the spray and the rain, he could just about make out something black against the grey. It could have been the Island. Or it could have been another boat. An oil rig. Could it? If only the horizon would sit still for a moment. Was it too big for a ship? It looked a long way ahead, but he had no real way to judge distance out here where everything was grey and black and moving up and down. He was an Islander but he’d never seen this view. He’d only ever left; he’d not come back before.

It didn’t move, though. Well, it did: it swung up and down like everything else and in and out of sight, but each time they hung on the roll of a wave it was there and, each time, it got a little larger. And larger. Not just black, some white. Cliffs. Eventually, roofs, towers, above all, the Castle. The Island, then.

Home.

That evening, he told his mother he’d met a woman on the boat who used to work for her. They were eating something brown she’d given him to microwave in a spotless kitchen fitted out with enough culinary gear to run a restaurant. The whole flat was spotless, everything in it gleaming like a puppy’s fur. The Election had been Thursday. She’d moved in on Friday. Today was Sunday. Three days. 4A lot could happen in three days. Ask Jesus. When Denis was a kid and his mother, Cora Klamm, was Leader they’d always lived in the Castle. Even when she lost to Jacob King and became Leader of the Opposition, they’d still had a grace and favour apartment, even if it wasn’t in the Central Block. Now she’d lost to Jacob’s daughter, too, and was out on her ear. Not exactly homeless, but still. Not at home.

She ignored him. Which was about what his comment deserved. Still, they had to talk about something, didn’t they? If it wasn’t going to be his father?

He said, “Lucy something.”

Cora stopped scrolling through her phone. “Lucy Neave?”

“That’s the one.”

“Hah. The part-time poet. Did she tell you I sacked her?”

“It didn’t come up.”

Cora laughed, but didn’t sound amused. She started a long story about how, when Lucy Neave was her bag carrier, she’d gone running off to Ari Spencer about something or other that probably wasn’t worth arguing about in the first place and which Denis didn’t want to hear. Ari Spencer was a name he recognized, though. He’d been everywhere when Denis was growing up.

“What was she doing on the boat?”

“Same as me,” Denis said. “Coming home.”

“For the funeral?”

And there it was. An opening. The first time she’d mentioned the reason he was here. Now they could talk about it. His father. His father’s death. The nursing home neither of them had ever visited. The fact he hadn’t been home at all for seven years. Why he’d left. What he was going to do now. They could. They had all night.

“She didn’t say,” he said.

“What did you two talk about?”

“Nothing, Mum. She was just a woman on a boat.”

“You mean you didn’t want to fuck her.”

Denis sighed. What could he say? His mother knew him better 5than anyone, and she always said he was an idiot. She wasn’t the only one.

What they’d actually talked about, he and Lucy, once the boat rounded the headland and the wind and the swell had both calmed down enough in the lee of the cliffs that they no longer had to shout, was how much smaller the Island looked than he remembered. She’d thought he was making some pissy joke about childhood memories. How chocolate bars had shrunk. But he meant it. The place was smaller. Where on earth was the harbour? The Hope & Anchor? The Hope & Anchor had been home when he was too young to drink anywhere else. In the Castle bars they’d known exactly how old he was. If they knew in the Hope, they didn’t care. They hadn’t much cared when he walked out on the harbour bar after seven or eight pints, either. Now there was no bar, and no pub.

“Full fathom five,” Lucy said.

“What?”

She pointed down into the water.

“Right.”

The Island was sinking. Or the sea was rising. It depended on what you believed about how it got there in the first place. Either way, it had been going on for years, bits falling into the sea, bits swallowed up. But it looked like the process had accelerated while he’d been away. The Castle still perched above everything, of course, up on the cliffs. But big chunks of the seafront – and of the City behind it – just weren’t there any more.

They’d disembarked at a makeshift pontoon jetty. Lucy said she might see him tomorrow, then looked embarrassed, and quickly disappeared. Not that he tried to follow her. He’d trudged uphill to find his mother’s new flat. Couldn’t miss it, she’d texted. Bang opposite the Cathedral. They wouldn’t have far to go in the morning.

They finished the brown thing – moussaka? Stew? It was hard to tell. Denis pushed back from the kitchen table, chair legs squeaking on the glossy tiles. He rubbed his stomach and said you couldn’t beat the taste of fatted calf. Cora said he was confusing Prodigal 6with Idiot, and she was going to bed. Did he think he could cope with putting the plates in the dishwasher? He was surprised: not that she would treat him like a cretin – for years, he’d thought “Idiot Son” must be one word so often did he hear it uttered in a single breath – but that she might be going to bed. She’d never been the early-to-bed-early-to-rise type, even though she was up skewering worms before dawn most days: much more school of four-hours-kip-is-quite-enough. She seemed to believe sleep deprivation kept her vicious edge vicious. Could sudden electoral rejection have mellowed her? It seemed improbable. More likely, she just wanted to get away from him, her idiot son.

She said he could sleep on the sofa. The flat was immaculate, but it only had one bedroom and she wasn’t going to share it. He shuddered at the thought and wished her good night.

She told him not to sleepwalk, and not to piss off the balcony if he did. Which was unfair, Denis thought. It was K who had pissed off balconies. In fact, she said, she’d better lock the sliding door. It wasn’t as if he could upset the neighbours – these flats were pretty much all empty – but they were twelve floors up and he’d make a right fucking mess of the Close if he took a header from there.

“Mum.”

“You say that, but you know what you’re like. Or maybe you don’t. Hard to say, what with Dunning-Kruger and all that. Anyway: sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite. If they do, bite back. Your poem is by the bed.”

“Poem?”

“For tomorrow. You’re reading a poem. I got it off the internet. Try not to bugger it up.”

“I …”

But she’d gone, shutting the door behind her.

He was twenty-five years old. He had nothing but a stolen jacket, a half-completed course of antibiotics for a venereal disease he’d known longer than most of his friends, and his mother thought he was an idiot. On the other hand, the sofa was about eight feet 7long, had never been used, and was more comfortable than any bed he’d slept in for the last seven years. He would read the poem in the morning.

In the morning Cora microwaved porridge, which turned out to be about as disgusting as it sounds. Outside, the best you could say was that it wasn’t actually raining. Or at least not raining yet. Across the Close, the Cathedral squatted, vast and sullen, like a giant toad in a party hat. School trips pointed out both the flying buttresses and thirteenth-century windows on the one hand, and the post-war glass roof and needle-thin titanium spire on the other. Most Islanders hated it, one of the few things that united them. The restoration was too half-hearted for modernists, but an abomination to traditionalists. Only conspiracy theorists had any time for it: the place was such an obvious mish-mash, it just had to be a Simulator’s joke. Denis didn’t much care either way. He was K and Cora’s son: he’d been dragged to church time and again for one occasion or another – tie straight, collar tight – but religion had played no real part in his upbringing. K always said these days opium was the opiate of the masses, while mass was the consolation of the deluded few. Cora kissed crosses with the same dutiful revulsion she brought to kissing babies, applying her thickest, most purple lipstick whenever a campaign demanded either. It was Jacob King who got into bed with the Bishop, if Denis remembered rightly. And where had that got him?

“Wake up, stupid. Chop-chop. Time you were at the dry cleaners.”

Cora was tapping the back of her wrist, where a watch might have been if she were wearing one.

“What?”

“You don’t think you’re going like that, do you?”

Cora pointed at the tee shirt he’d been wearing for two days. In his holdall was another just like it, except less clean. He’d been between flats when the news arrived. Most of his clothes were in a bedroom whose rightful tenant wouldn’t let him in. Unless she’d 8already tossed them in a skip. Apart from the shirts, the sum total of his possessions was a pair of socks, a pair of boxers and the jeans he’d travelled in, plus a leather jacket belonging to the woman’s previous boyfriend that had been hanging in the hallway when she’d thrown him out. They’d been much the same build, it turned out; the jacket was a decent fit, but hardly the thing for a state funeral.

“There’s a suit of your father’s waiting at the cleaners. I took it in for another funeral a couple of weeks ago – do you remember Donald Price? – but in the end K was too ill to go. Or too drunk,” Cora said. Or off his face on the antidepressants the nursing home inmates traded like kids with marbles. In any case, the suit was just waiting there. No good letting it go to waste. He could pick it up, get a decent shirt and tie while he was at it. Denis said it wouldn’t fit. Cora said they could give it a nip and tuck, but it turned out there wasn’t much that could be done in the thirty minutes available. The suit hung off him like dustsheets on abandoned furniture. He topped it off with his father’s black cashmere overcoat and felt like a clown. A miserable, diminutive clown. He was always so much smaller than his father. Even when his father was dead.

When he got to the Cathedral, though, he wasn’t the only one in fancy dress. There must have been a thousand people, all told, not an empty pew in the house; and not one of them looked normal. The Bishop, obviously, set the pace: all outsize Elton John in oyster silk and golden thread, plus a curly Bo-peep walking stick and pointy hat twice as high as any policeman’s helmet. But the police could hold their own: Commander Cole was dressed up to invade Ruritania. One of those hats that look like an upside-down boat, pointed back and front, with tassels; enough braid on his jacket to trim a cinema curtain; waistcoat, breeches, mirror-gloss top boots up to his knees; and, best of all, a sword. It rattled every time he had to stand, and made sitting down again something of a performance. K would have split his sides. Even Denis’s mother, all four foot two of her, was shellac-ed out in something shiny black and brittle, like a giant beetle, plus a hat and a veil and an ebony-black, silver-tipped 9walking stick she hadn’t used when he left home, and probably didn’t need. She’d always been as strong as an ox, and built like one, too. Perhaps it was for beating off admirers, now she was a merry widow.

Merry?

He had to laugh. It was only watching this carnival of fellow clowns that would get him through ninety minutes of Bishop Gren­del MC-ing prayers, hymns, psalms and obsequies, throwing himself into it like a TV game show host in the death spiral of a failing career. And that was before they even left for the cemetery. It was going to be a long morning.

Some triggered liturgical memory of those in peril on the sea had sent his thoughts wandering idly back to yesterday’s boat crossing when Cora whispered, “You ready?”

Ready?

“You’re up.”

Oh, shit: the poem. He had it. He was pretty sure he had it. Yes, here it was, in his father’s suit pocket. He hadn’t read it, though. He’d meant to, but Mum had been nagging, and then there was the cleaner’s and … And that could be a good thing, right? It might sound fresher – if it wasn’t rehearsed?

The Bishop motioned to an ecclesiastical flunkey who ushered Denis half a dozen steps from the front pew to the pulpit steps. He’d have to climb them for himself. Up he went, half-expecting the scaffold trap to swing open beneath his feet with every step. A semi-spiral and there he was, gazing out over a tidal drift of faces that wouldn’t stay still. He gripped the pulpit rail as tightly as he had that of the ferry. He said, “K was my father …” and read the poem, one word at a time. It made no sense, but that was poetry for you, wasn’t it?

“Well,” his mother said when he sat down again, “perhaps he didn’t deserve any better.”

A long, long morning.

But then, there was Jessica. Jessica King.

While Cora sat grumpily in the front pew resting her face on 10her hands and her hands on her stick, the newly elected Island Leader ascended the pulpit steps in a rustle of tailored silk and self-possession.

Twenty-three.

Two years younger than Denis. Whispering, or at least not shouting, his mother reminded him they must have been at school together, before the whole “Child” thing became unbearable, and her father took her out. He couldn’t say he remembered. Which didn’t mean it wasn’t true, Cora said, just that he was an idiot. There were impatient shuffling noises from the pew behind. The Bishop was staring at Cora. “What?” she whispered again, loud enough for the choir to hear, “I’m the fucking widow. I’m overwhelmed by grief.”

From the pulpit, Jessica was hitting her stride. “In his time, K was a colossal figure in the life of every Islander,” she said, with the slightly offbeat emphasis of the political speaker. “As Leader, he had put the Island on the map.” Which might have been technically true, Denis thought, if you believed the rumours; but nobody he’d met on the mainland could have found the place without GPS and military air support. “He gave us pride in ourselves,” Jessica said, “a belief that we can do whatever we set our hearts and minds to. And that’s not all,” she said. “As a role model” – the phrase caused a sharp intake of breath from Cora, as it would have from his father, Denis knew, if the old bastard hadn’t been dead – “he showed how a truly strong, confident man could step back from the limelight to support his wife, Cora” – she beamed down at the front pew, ignoring the scowl on Cora’s face – “in Leadership and opposition. And to support his son, Denis, through the trials and tribulations of growing up inside the Castle.” Here it seemed to Denis that she was looking not at him, but over his head to the second pew, where her own father sat between Ari Spencer and the police commander. Whether in tribute to his qualities as a parent, or silent condemnation, Denis couldn’t say. “He was,” she said, “an example to us all.”

She paused, looking down at the lectern, although she was speak­ing without notes. 11

“But,” whispered Cora loudly, jabbing Denis with her elbow.

“But,” said Jessica, pausing again in case anyone missed the change of gear before plunging on to remind them that a Leader’s work is never done, and they would squander and betray all that K had achieved and sacrificed for them if they did not now set aside their differences and come together to save the Island they all loved from the rising sea; to eradicate the scourge of homelessness; and to bring justice to the loved ones of those who had died ten years ago in the Cathedral Close – here Denis detected nervous shuffling in the pew behind – just yards, Jessica continued, from where they were now gathered to remember and consign to peace the very best among them.

“We that are young,” she wound up, clearly heading for the home straight, “might never see so much, nor live so long. But it is our duty, our privilege and our destiny to build the Island K would want to see.”

“Election’s over, bitch,” hissed Cora.

And you lost, Denis thought. What did you expect?

An hour later, as a north wind threatened rain, and the New Cemetery’s raw, scarred earth clung to their shoes like shit on a sheep’s backside, the mourners sighed in collective relief at the proclamation that they were are all dust and to dust they would return. Not long left now, they knew.

The Bishop – divested of his robes and his preposterous hat, but nonetheless imposingly tall and surprisingly wide (as broad, his rivals sometimes sniped, as the way that leadeth to destruction) – claimed the dead were blessèd which die in the Lord, for they rested, appar­ently, from their labours. Whatever Jessica said, thought Denis, it had been years since K did anything you could honestly call labour. Decades. She’d been right about one thing, though. However good or bad their parents, it hadn’t been easy growing up inside the Castle. They had that much in common. But it looked like Jessica had made a better job of it. Discreet, stylish black hat, black skirt suit, black 12stockings, black shoes, her pinned-up, tied-back black hair, all at odds with the shine in her eyes, the glow of her face, the hint of a smile, as if she knew how ridiculous all this seemed. Was he imagining it? Possibly. But there was no doubt she was upstaging his mother at her own husband’s funeral. Which was fine by him. While they waited for the coffin to be carted out and bowled into the hearse, he asked Cora why, if she was so pissed off about it, she hadn’t given a eulogy of her own. She’d made him read a poem, hadn’t she? Cora said, “I’m over-fucking-whelmed, Idiot Boy. By grief.”

Then the Bishop declared that unto the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God, be honour and glory for ever and ever. And they all said: Amen. Except K, of course.

Afterwards, they hung about in the bitter wind, trading brief lies about the deceased, mentioning to each other matters of business they’d have to talk about soon, when all this was over, and waiting for the funeral directors to three-point turn the empty hearse and draw the limousines up as close as they could to the graveside.

13

TWO

Waiting for the cars, for each other, for the respectful time to leave – you can’t just walk out, can you? Not on K’s widow; not on the new Leader – mourners drifted in and out of small knots, couples and awkward, malformed circles. Ari Spencer was keen to exploit an opportunity. The first reviews should be trickling in right now. Busying himself with his phone, his watch, with re-reading the order of service – anything to discourage the approach of supplicants – he floated from the fringe of one conversation to another.

– It was well cut, all right. For someone twice his size.

– And that poem? Hallmark by Alexa.

Ari hovered, assimilating intelligence, half an eye out for the principals.

– It’s a long time to be married. Fifty years?

– Overwhelmed with gre-lief.

– Ha. Not impossible. But still.

And … move.

– Rain? It’s February. Of course it’s going to rain.

A nod to Sally Porter and Peter Whatshisname; and – turn.

– Could have said something, don’t you think? Or better not? More dignified?

– Dignified? Cora Klamm?

– Ha, ha.

– Ha ha ha.

All right, Ari thought. It wasn’t even funny. Forget Cora. Cora lost. What he wanted to know was: what had they made of the speech? Jessica’s speech. The one she wouldn’t let him write.

– What I want to know is: why don’t we just float?14

– Why an island doesn’t float?

– Yeah.

– Well, I suppose it does. Tectonically.

– Tectonically, yeah, all right. Sort of. Though for your information tectonic plates don’t really float. It’s more, the whole lithosphere is in a sort of constant churn. But your point stands. As an analogy.

– An analogy?

– But what I want to know is: how does that help?

– You brought it up.

Denis was already handing his mother into the first limousine, Cora leaning heavily on the stick she didn’t need, Jessica diplomat­ically holding back. It had been Ari’s idea to put her in with the surviving Klamms. A sign of her new status. He wondered how that conversation would go.

– Because it should float, by rights, shouldn’t it? If the Island’s simulated? It wouldn’t be part of the continental plate, and it should just float on the water?

Ari loved this stuff. He told himself it was work, but it was more than that. It wasn’t what he was looking for, specifically – wasn’t about Jessica – but it was his stock in trade. The psychopathology of nonsense. He ignored Jacob’s signal that the second limousine was ready. He wanted to hear where this was going.

– So why’s it sinking, then?

– We’ve sprung a leak?

That’s beautiful, Ari thought. He held a finger up to let Jacob know he’d be there in just one minute.

– So all we’ve got to do …

– Is plug the hole.

– Genius.

– Genius.

Which was about as much as Ari was going to get, because Jacob and Commander Cole were already in the second car; and Diana Ford-Marling, who should have been riding with them, hadn’t even turned up. A bold move, Ari thought; he should come back to that. 15He took a last look at the two men congratulating each other and thought: but what if the Island isn’t a Simulation after all? What would they say then? They’d say that we’re all doomed, obviously.

The wisdom of crowds was much overrated.

An empty hearse is a display case for death. The glittering space makes the absence of the dead more concrete than an actual coffin. In the first limo, just behind, the mood was lighter than Ari might have predicted.

“Dear God,” said Cora the moment the men in professional black had gently closed the doors on them, “death brings out the worst in people, doesn’t it? Do you know what Sally Porter said?”

“Who’s Sally Porter?” Denis asked. There were two rows of passenger seats, two sets of doors. Denis was in the first row, his mother and Jessica sat next to each other behind. Somebody was having a laugh, at any rate.

“No, darling. If she’d said that it might at least have been original. What she said was: he’d had a good innings. Nobody says that, really, do they?”

Yes, thought Denis. Apparently they do.

“But who is she, Mum?”

Cora didn’t answer, so Jessica explained. “She’s the Authority’s Finance Director.”

“As if he ever played cricket,” Cora said.

The car pulled away, at the pace of the walking wounded. Denis thought talking to Jessica would be more fun than indulging his mother, and turned awkwardly to speak over his shoulder. “Did she know him?”

“I doubt it,” Jessica said. “She’d have been a trainee when your father was Leader. Fresh out of college.”

“Just his type,” Cora said. “When K was Leader, you weren’t even born.” 16

It wasn’t obvious if she meant Jessica or Denis, but either way it would have been true, or thereabouts. Her story was that she’d given birth on the campaign trail for her first election. Not that you could trail far on the Island. They didn’t even have a bus. So Denis had been born in hospital, like pretty much everybody else. All the same, it happened while Cora was campaigning to succeed his father. She took two days off, dumped him in K’s arms with a case of formula and a mountain of disposable nappies, then went straight back on the road. Male politicians did it all the time, she said: so why not? She wasn’t going to let a little thing like childbirth get in the way of becoming the Island’s first woman Leader since the Romans snuffed out the underfloor heating and buggered off back to Italy. Denis suspected she’d secretly hoped to hang on till after the election. Then she’d have been not just the first female Leader of modern times, but the first to give birth in office: that would have set the bar pretty high for any would-be followers. But K wasn’t up for bonding with a newborn. He dropkicked the bundle straight on to a scrum of nannies and babysitters, and swapped formula for whisky. Which might have been why Cora never got a second shot at calving on the Cabinet table.

Denis was an only child, then, abandoned – or so he had spent several years telling young women in student bars – by both parents. As a ploy, it worked. Not always, not often, even: but often enough for him to keep it up, and then finally to realize that the kind of women most susceptible to its spell were just those he had least interest in himself. Etiolated, droopy girls who decorated handwrit­ten love notes with birds and flowers painstakingly inked in several colours and slept with cuddly toys older than their teeth. With their hideous, unnatural postures – the toys, not the girls – their patches worn to raw fabric and their missing facial features, they had begun to remind him of documentaries about the Somme, and did little to encourage his already weakening lust.

Jessica King, though?

They had so much in common, didn’t they? Growing up inside 17the Castle, the children of politicians, his mother lost to the demands of duty and ambition, hers to … whatever it was her mother died of. An accident? Cancer? It didn’t matter: the point being that Jessica was motherless. She would understand.

He said, “Thank you, by the way. For what you said about my father. It was very … touching.”

Touching was a good choice, he thought. Subtle; subliminal. Also best to steer clear of the political stuff. It would only wind his mother up.

“Thank you,” Jessica said. “Your reading was very moving, too.”

She was lying. But he didn’t mind. She was lying to flatter him: that had to be a good thing, right?

“He sounded like a fucking robot reciting a railway timetable,” Cora said.

“Thank you, Mother.”

“You’re welcome. You’re just not cut out for stardom, little one. I remember once,” she said, turning to Jessica, “at primary school, he was the Jacob in Our Island Story. Because of me, I dare say. But anyway, he splits his trousers and forgets his lines. Desperate to get off, he yanks a door handle so hard the whole set collapses. Best show they ever did.”

“I was there,” said Jessica. “I’ll never forget it.”

That’s right, he thought. She was only a couple of years younger. Odd that he didn’t remember her, in the circumstances. Given who she was. It must have been weird, though, seeing her dad and her infant self on stage. The pair of them fished out of the harbour when she was three. Everyone knowing the story, the prophecy. Learning it in school, acting it out every year. Everyone knowing she was the Child. That her dad would be Leader, and she’d grow up to be Leader and everything on the Island would be hunky-dory. Milk and honey. Meanwhile he would grow up, escape to the mainland and squander his allowance – when he had one – on beer, cigarettes and crypto-currency scams, while spending long afternoons in shabby pubs swapping conspiracy theories with equally underemployed 18 young men. But he’d played her dad, on stage, which was a bit messed up, and he probably shouldn’t think about, right now.

She remembered him. What more could he ask?

He turned in the seat, avoiding his mother’s eye. Jessica smiled, carefully, the way you might placate an unpredictable drunk.

Here goes, he thought. Cabin crew prepare for landing.

Conversation in the second limousine was desultory.

“We that are young, eh?” Ari offered.

After a while, Commander Cole said, “Are we?” He shifted his ridiculous cocked hat from his right knee to his left. Getting in and out of the limo with a sword had proved unnecessarily difficult. Now it lay across his lap as if he were preparing to disembowel himself. “I don’t think we can honestly say that.”

Ari wondered if there was anything more camp than hara-kiri. He said, “It’s a Donald-ism.”

“It’s Shakespeare,” Jacob said. “King Lear.”

“I only ever heard Donald say it.”

There was another pause. The rain had finally started and they watched the wet streets pass.

“Personally,” said Jacob, “I know I’ve seen enough and lived too long.”

Bob Cole said, “Oh, you can’t say that.” After which none of them said anything for a while.

Jacob took off his glasses and polished them on his shirt. “The worst is not so long as we can say: this is the worst.”

“Where there’s life there’s hope, eh?” Bob Cole said. Then, remem­bering where they’d been, he added, “Sorry. Not quite the time.”

“That’s not what it means, anyway,” said Jacob. “More like the opposite.”

“Where there’s hope there’s life?”

“Where there’s life things can always get worse.” 19

“Amen,” said Ari.

“Well I certainly caught the happy bus,” said Commander Cole.

Then he said sorry, again.

After a while, Jacob said: “What were you thinking?” He shook his head. Ari didn’t answer.

“It was bad enough in the Election. But she’s Leader now.”

This isn’t the time, Ari thought. You know this. He said, “It wasn’t me.”

“It’s your job.”