The Red Men Read online

  I was puzzled as to how, via the infinite processes of the brain, he had come up with such a daft idea as to not have sex with willing Florence.

  ‘I was trying to have a conversation with her. Is it so wrong in this day and age that a man has something to say?

  ‘“Speak here, Raymond,” she said, hitching up her dress. “Tell it the alphabet, let your tongue go from A to Zed.” I was so busy telling her about my reality filters that I hadn’t noticed she’d taken her knickers off.’

  The phrase ‘reality filters’ was mine. When he was manic, reality was everything at once and it was all connected to him: Raymond became the junction box through which many currents flowed. Instead of walking the street with the filters in place, one spotlight of consciousness on the pavement before him, all the lights were on in Raymond’s head. It became difficult for him to tell where he ended and other people began.

  At the end of the garden, the winter sun glinted off the spears of the metal security fence. Emaciated trees shivered in the breeze. He was talking about inclining his head toward Florence’s exposed labia, taking one lip between his lips.

  ‘I still had plenty to say at this point, but I confined myself to licking every letter of the alphabet into her. She liked L. She giggled at M. I nipped her with V, then shook her with W.

  ‘She said, “Focus on me. Forget everything else.” The cowl of her clitoris was thrown back. I tried to narrow everything down to that red nub. I could feel her seeping into my beard.’

  Raymond ran back through the alphabet, and she started to pull him on top of her. There was some scrabbling with his trousers while she plucked a condom from the top drawer of the bedside table. She flicked a paisley scarf onto the lamp for ambience. He tried to catch the look upon her face when she first saw his penis.

  ‘Stop.’ I raised my hand, and Raymond snapped out of his recollection. ‘It’s too early in the morning for this. Don’t give it to me blow-by-blow. Did you have sex or not? Just a yes or no.’

  The frustration crushed him: how could I understand what was happening to him if he didn’t show me every facet of the experience?

  ‘It’s not a yes or no thing. If you insist on getting all empirical, then yes I achieved penetration. But for penetration to graduate to full sex, I feel one or more of the participants must achieve orgasm. Long before that eventuality, I was standing by the armoire, smoking a roll-up and finishing my observation about my reality filters.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘That they were clogged.’

  ‘By?’

  ‘Reality, obviously.’

  ‘What did Florence say when you stopped having sex?’

  ‘It was very sudden. I sprang out of her. She thought I’d seen something. A rat. The house has rats. It wasn’t a rat. I hadn’t seen something alarming. Rather, I’d thought something alarming. Actually, it was an absence of thought. My brain seized up. There was complete silence in there; it was as if Florence had reached into my skull and shushed my hippocampus, thalamus, frontal lobe whatever with her index finger. In place of the usual inner chatter there was a rush of information from the muscle sense, the inner ear. I could feel the macadamized heft of my lung lining, the groaning sodden liver, the whine of knee cartilage and, most of all, the hesitancy of my heart. It was a non-lucid moment. I still had Florence’s thighs over each shoulder, the pressure of her flesh against my ears. Clamped. Locked in the meat prison. I had to get out. So zzzzzzip I’m on the other side of the bedroom slapping my face to get Raymond Chase back online.’

  I was keen to get to work. Raymond had riddled me with his talk while failing, in any way, to impart the crucial fact: what job was Monad offering?

  I made one last attempt to find out.

  He replied, ‘Florence asked me what was wrong and I’ll give you the same answer. After this non-lucid moment, it took a while to coax my consciousness back into the pilot’s chair. There was no question of continuing with the sex. I apologized to her for my problems, and explained that of late I’ve had some difficulty controlling the strength and direction of my thoughts.

  ‘She said, “I had no idea you were off your rocker.”

  ‘I said, “Would it be alright if we just slept together?”

  ‘We perched on the bed, a cheap single bed you always get in rented houses. I tried to nuzzle her, by way of an apology. She turned over. Posters proclaiming the virtues of rationing lined the walls. Hearty women in flannel dresses advertised the benefits to the war effort of eating less bread. Another poster showed a home guard ticking off a young lad in the Blitz ruins: “Leave this to us, Sonny – You ought to be out of London.” A sentiment I approve of.

  ‘There was an old Dansette record player. I slipped out of bed and inspected the heavy vinyl records beneath it. Out of browning dust sleeves slipped long players by the Joe Loss Orchestra and Charlie Kunz. The inevitable Vera Lynn. There was a rickety wooden writing desk with an ink well and a fountain pen beside it. Neat homemade volumes of her poetry were tucked in an alcove, overlooked by a gas mask.

  ‘I mention all this just to convey how out-of-place the application form was, in an open silver folder, the front embossed with the Monad logo. It was a real shock to me. At first I was appalled. What a sell-out! What a hypocrite! She makes her room a shrine to a bygone age then applies to work with Monad, of all people. But this is where the revelation came. I looked again at the posters. The women clenched their biceps at me. They were determined to fight Hitler from their kitchens, from the fields, from the factories. They wouldn’t respect the likes of me, grubbing around the pubs and the dole.

  ‘And I need money. Florence needs money too. We all do. Poets more than anyone. I still count out my change, on my bed, at night. You’ve got buckets of coins lying around your house. I’ve seen you take money out of the cashpoint in units of a hundred. A hundred quid! That would transform my month.

  ‘As Florence slept quietly, I saw an alternate future for us both. If we were both working at Monad, then I could get a little bit of what you have. I could move out of the squat and wash its stench out of my suits. I could even keep food in the house. Perhaps a wine cellar.

  ‘I flicked through the application form. It asked for references and that’s when I thought of you. You work for Monad, you could be my way in. So I left Florence a note – “We’ll meet again” – then I was out in Hackney. It’s a new dawn and there’s no time to waste. I came right over to see you. You don’t mind do you?’

  3 THE WAVE BUILDING

  The next time Raymond contacted me, I was being fitted for a suit. I told him that it wasn’t a good time to talk, that I had a tailor attending to my inside leg on a hot day.

  Raymond ignored me and said, ‘You promised me that if I ever really needed it you would move heaven and earth to help me. Exact words. Heaven and earth. I’d have been happy with just one of them.’

  Had I really promised him that? Yes, I remembered a party from late in the century, when I was the boss of Drug Porn and arrogant with all the attention that position attracted. I have not forgotten taking Raymond under my arm at the bar. He was fierce and sharp and wrote candidly about the hilarious catastrophe of his daily life. Even then, it was clear that it would not turn out well for him, that he had no talent for compromise.

  I didn’t need to move heaven and earth for Raymond. I merely put him in touch with Monad personnel and they sent him a Myers-Briggs Jung Typology test, a standard questionnaire used by personnel departments to determine personality type.

  He called me for advice.

  ‘If the test shows I don’t have a personality, do I get the job?’

  It was an entry-level position, that’s all I knew. As such, it was beneath Raymond but so were the alternatives: homelessness, starvation or living with his mother again.

  A month later, Monad called him for an interview. The interviewer kept him waiting for an hour in the reception, a humid arboretum dominated by tropical plants and trees. He bided his t
ime showing an interest in the flora, inspecting glossy banana plants and picking at the dark green lobes of breadfruit leaves, the trunks strung with rootless ferns. When he got up from his leather seat to read a description of these weightless epiphytes, trails of his perspiration flared up on the black leather sofa. His diffident front became harder to maintain as the minutes ticked by. He was furious to discover he was sweating, the yellow collar of his shirt darkening to amber. I had warned Raymond that he would be observed from the moment he stepped into the building. He had never spent time in office culture and was clueless regarding its etiquette. He would make the mistake of socializing in the reception, and wouldn’t be able to stop himself from chatting up the receptionist, poncing a fag off the security guard or sharing confidences with the executive drivers as they idled on the sofas.

  Raymond’s name flashed up on my phone, I wearily accepted him with a press of my thumb.

  ‘What does it mean if they keep me waiting? Are they trying to discover how I react? What should I do?’

  ‘Nothing. Just wait. Take pleasure in it.’

  ‘But if I idle, I look like I have nowhere better to be. Appearing impatient, busy, will imply higher status.’

  ‘The job doesn’t require high social status.’

  ‘You’re saying that I should just take this, sit here, behave. Ignore the insult.’

  ‘Don’t take it personally. They’re just busy.’

  ‘I don’t know how you can work under these conditions.’

  ‘What conditions?’

  ‘I refuse to hand over the keys to my ego.’

  He contemplated the biomass of the corporate forest.

  ‘I am indifferent to either their approval or disapproval. I just wanted you to know that.’

  I had helped him prepare his curriculum vitae, omitting his brief career in amateur pornography (hundred quid a video, doing some bloke’s missus while he films it, then being served sandwiches by her afterwards), his court cautions for violent conduct (‘I pulled a knife on him. Well it was a penknife. The geezer goes, “You couldn’t even cut my pubes off with that.” I realized the error of my ways and called the police myself’) and his touring one-man show of performance poetry (‘It was called “My Friend, the Jailer” and it was about you’). After an evening quizzing him on his past, I compiled a catalogue of diverting but useless information concerning Raymond Chase. I didn’t even get his qualifications. He was proud of my failure. ‘You can’t pin me down like that. I don’t have a CV. I have a legend.’ Nonetheless he accepted the story I concocted for him and he submitted it to Monad.

  Eventually, a female PA came down to escort Raymond to the elevator. He stared at her skin, its radiant milk-fed blush, the way she had tried to age herself with a bob and a formal suit. She was an intoxicating mix of severity and young flesh. He was grateful just to share oxygen with her. When the elevator doors opened, Raymond got his first look at an office full of beautiful people. Women walked by, their stockings abrading in iambic pentameter. The movement from face to breast to hips to thighs was a soliloquy of flesh. The young men wore tight denim jodhpurs. The serenity was more akin to the headquarters of a cult, and the air was zestful with citrus. The walls and desks were covered with screens which responded to every tap, whisper and caress. Pliant and organic, the screens could be stretched to any size or format, and when left unattended, their surface broke out in wide pores which exhaled negative ions to cleanse the air. Overhead, immense screens displayed live aerial footage of the Himalayas, the Sahara, the Scottish highlands overlain with a ticker of information concerning Monad’s current orders, the feedback from its subscribers and hourly encouragements from the management. The vital signs of the body corporate drifted over the natural wonders of the world.

  His guide deposited him in a glass office for further waiting. He felt like he was being put through a series of airlocks, either for decontamination or decompression. The interviewer soon ambled in holding a mug of vended latte. The first thing Raymond noticed were the man’s nipples, little dugs of fat pressing against his tight sweater. With his round shoulders and recessed chin, Morton Eakins looked like he was still being breastfed. His comfy jumpers gave off a sour milky odour. In Monad, ugliness was a perk confined to management.

  Morton unrolled a screen upon the desk and tapped out a spreadsheet. The computer was a thin sheet of grey transparent film, which Morton flapped in front of Raymond as if it was something he’d caught in the sea.

  ‘Do you like our tech? This is none of your Chinese crap. This is high Cambridge biotech. The screens are formed from a genetically engineered virus left to dry on a substrate. Under the right conditions, viruses can be encouraged to behave like the molecules in a polymer. We line them up to form a three-dimensional grid of quantum dots, replacing strands of the virus here and there with conductive filament. The user interface combines standard haptic gestures with the screen’s ability to extrapolate user intent. Organic light-emitting diodes provide images and the battery is charged wirelessly.’

  Raymond laughed. ‘I don’t know what you are talking about. Does that mean I’ve already failed the interview?’

  ‘I’ve looked at the result of your personality tests.’

  ‘Did I pass or fail?’

  Morton sneered, as if Raymond’s joke only confirmed his suspicions.

  ‘We don’t have anyone corresponding to your type on our team.’

  ‘Is that a good thing?’

  ‘I could be persuaded. Tell me, who is your best friend?’

  Raymond winced. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I do,’ said Morton, tapping the screen. ‘This test tells me that you are your best friend. You are a performer. Empathy is not your strong point. Other people are merely your audience.’

  Raymond bridled at these presumptions.

  ‘That is merely the aspect my personality acquires when I answer questionnaires. The questions encouraged me to perform.’

  ‘It is a yes or no test, Raymond. Yet you have added caveats to most of your answers. Take the question, “Do you enjoy solitary walks?”’

  Morton waved and the screen flip-flopped across the desk so that Raymond could read out the answer he had given.

  ‘“It depends on where they are.” Which is a fair point I think. Are we talking about a solitary walk during crack hour in the dark zone, or a solitary walk with Wordsworth up Scafell? Very different experiences.’

  ‘Next to the question, “You value justice higher than mercy?” you seem to have written a small essay.’

  ‘I didn’t want to you to come to imprecise judgements about me.’

  Morton beckoned and the screen flip-flopped back to him, then he strummed out more information upon its surface.

  ‘Raymond, let me tell you what I think. You have immature concerns about being classified. You are thirty years old, yet you still feel that your identity is in a state of becoming. You feel that you are a potential person. If you were really as experienced as the fiction of a CV suggests, you would not think of yourself as being in such an unformed state.’

  Raymond often held imaginary conversations with himself; his lips moving soundlessly as he barrelled down the street, practising the anecdotes which impressed men and seduced women. But he had never prepared answers to this kind of questioning. He began to wonder if Morton had called him for interview just for the pleasure of putting him down.

  Morton pressed his fingertips into the pliant yielding screen and when he released them, the screen shimmied upright and showed Raymond’s CV. With his index finger and little finger extended, the other two tucked into his palm, Morton made the horned symbol and laid it against his left arm.

  ‘Do you know what this symbol means?’ he asked, nodding at his horned fingers. ‘It’s the universal sign of bullshit.’

  He blew at the screen and the image of the CV took flight. Morton was enjoying himself.

  ‘I have one last question,’ said Morton, ‘and then it will be yo
ur turn.’

  ‘Ask me anything,’ said Raymond, heavy-lidded with rising fury.

  ‘The question is not for you,’ said Morton, ‘it is for my screen.’ He took the screen in his arms as if it was a cat, and then whispered down to it:

  ‘What do you know about Raymond Chase?’

  Raymond’s life flashed before his very eyes, for the screen quickly cycled through every photograph of Raymond tagged online, his spats on social media, through various videos of which he had previously been unaware – his face in the crowd at gigs, in the background of other people’s holiday snaps, his name cited in divorce papers, audio recordings of coffee shop performances of his poetry readings, dozens of them, all running at once into an angry chorus of Raymonds.

  The cycle of media artefacts slowed then was replaced by a rotating three-dimensional spherical chart. Morton pinched out a livid red segment.

  ‘Tell me, Raymond, why are you so angry?’

  Raymond fastened his coat. ‘I’m angry because of who you are, and who I am. I’m angry because I was not born into a position of advantage and I can never overcome that. I’m angry because I’m short and wiry and have to scrap for the things other people have handed to them on a plate. I’m angry because I need stimulation and anger gees up the world and makes it more interesting. I’m angry because most people aren’t.’

  He went to leave and was halfway out the door when Morton Eakins, adhering to best practice, asked if he had any questions of his own. Although it seemed pointless to prolong the interview any further, Raymond was curious. Looking across the office at the beautiful people and their screens – no wires, no fat, everyone as lithe as information itself – he asked the question that we were too afraid to ask.