A Week in December (4 page)

The headmaster called a meeting of the staff, who shrugged. It wasn't their fault. Most of them had been educated by teachers who believed that spelling was at best a 'fetish' and, more probably, just a way of trying to keep poor children out of university. Such things had long since been discounted by public examiners and it was far too late now, as the head of History put it, to 'reinvent the wheel'. And anyway, no one had ever complained about the teachers' literacy before.

One of the French staff, however, was married to a man in management consultancy who'd been at Oxford with Tranter and had kept vaguely in touch. She thought Tranter might be of an age and background still to have access to such arcana and she promised to dig out his address for the Head.

Tranter was intrigued to receive an approach from such a famous school and went in to see them, as requested. He crossed the cobbles that ringed the grassy quadrangle and thought how very different they were from the tarmac apron of his own old school. He went beneath a stone arch in which pupils had carved their names (Wm Standforth 1822) and into another, smaller courtyard, ivied with age and bogus distinction.

'Very kind of you to come,' said the Head, a tall, dynamic man with bushy black hair. 'It's a slightly embarrassing request, really. I do personally recall the rudiments of spelling. Bit of a tyrant about it in fact. It's just that I don't have time to go through every single report and change "Johnny appears disinterested" to "Johnny appears uninterested" and so on. The current headmaster's life is largely one of conferences and administration, making speeches, marketing and so on.' He coughed self-deprecatingly. 'I can't pretend it's creative work we're offering you, Mr Tranter, but we'd pay you decently.'

Tranter smiled. 'People'd be really surprised, wouldn't they, that you of all schools ... I mean--'

'I know, I know,' said the Head hurriedly. 'Top ten of the league table and all that. But I also know for a fact that other illustrious schools do the same thing. No names, no pack drill. And obviously this must remain entirely between ourselves. It would be most damaging if it were to leak out into any ... In any way.'

Tranter thought of
The Toad
, and smiled again. 'Well,' he said in the higher, slightly reedy tone his voice took on when he was intrigued, 'we could certainly give it a go and see how it works out.'

The business part of the deal was quickly done. Drafts of all the reports were to be sent to Tranter on CD. He was not to change them or rewrite in any way, merely to correct the worst errors of grammar and syntax and all those of spelling. The school had 620 pupils, each of whom had roughly ten reports, most of them only a few lines. Tranter calculated that at the rate of three reports per minute, the whole task would take about thirty-five hours - or a working week. Based on annual earnings, his average pay per week was roughly PS600, but this work would be more intensive. He had planned to ask for double, say PS1,200 a term, or even PS4,000 a year, but the headmaster's opening offer was PS5,000 plus expenses and any secretarial help he wanted, so no bargaining was necessary.

Tranter's own writing style had long ago been sold over to journalism, with its 'iconic images' and 'cur's
cojones
', but he was just old enough to have been taught how to spell at school, had read thousands of good books and had once had the principle of hanging participles unforgettably explained to him by Patrick Warrender. He was up to the task. Five terms into the new regime, the headmaster was thrilled by the results. The complaining parent wrote a conciliatory letter, admitting the improvements, and the Head granted Tranter a PS1,000 bonus. His nickname in the common room was Harry Patch, after the last surviving Tommy of the Great War. 'I've been Patched up,' said the head of Geography, reading his corrected comments on-screen. 'Me too,' said History.

This success as rewrite man made Tranter see that there was still money in literacy. In fact, it was a simple demonstration of supply and demand. While graduates with first-class degrees from the best universities couldn't spell or compose an e-mail that made sense, the companies that employed them still had to write letters, put out documents and deal with law firms, banks and public companies. The counterparty didn't expect elegance, but needed at least to be able to understand what was on offer.

As someone educated at a grammar school before the towel was thrown in, Tranter had an asset: literacy. He could sell it. Then, a year after he began work with the school, he received an invitation to 'moderate' the book-club discussions of a group of posh housewives in North Park. He could hardly believe his luck. Most of the women had university degrees in arts subjects, but they had no basic understanding of how a book worked. Even the vocabulary that Tranter had been taught at the age of sixteen was mysterious to them; they didn't know the difference between 'style' and 'tone', for instance. He was able to make PS100 a time without exerting himself, as well as putting away a very good dinner and a bottle of wine. All the women were on diets, so Tranter was able to tuck in at will to a variety of dishes purchased at astonishing expense from local delicatessens and
traiteurs
. They also paid his Tube fares. After he had made a few observations about the book in question, they generally cut him out of the loop. What they wanted to talk about was whether the incidents in the book were 'based on' events in the author's own life and to what extent his version of them tallied with their own experience of such things. Tranter tried to suggest that there were more fruitful ways of approaching a novel, a work of invention that aspired, albeit pathetically, to be a work of 'art'; but although they listened patiently, they seemed not to believe him.

The book group met once a month and the school work came in three times a year, so Tranter was still open to offers. In this hopeful vein, he had been intrigued one day in April to open his e-mail inbox and to see, after the usual spam for Bruno Banks, that there was one for him from Mrs Doris Hine, or [email protected].

Tranter had heard of the company, in fact had a jar of their aubergine chutney in his kitchen cupboard, and he could scent money in Mrs Hine's message. He replied at once, and a date was set for him to visit Farooq al-Rashid, the founder and owner of Rashid Pickle, at home in Havering-atte-Bower with a view to advising him on a 'literary project'.

III

Jenni Fortune was on the final circuit of her Sunday shift. It was true she'd turned the light off in her cab the better to enjoy her privileged view of the city without her own reflection in the way, but that was not the only reason. She never looked at photographs of herself, and spent as little time as possible looking in the mirror. There was nothing glamorous about the uniform, and for that she was grateful because it meant there was no choice; for the same reason, she had liked the blazer and skirt required by her school.

Being a Tube driver gave her power and responsibility. Almost all her training was in safety measures, the care she had to take with other people's lives; the train itself was controlled by a single lever and was easier to drive than a car. 'We're paid', the older drivers in the canteen had said when she arrived, 'not for what we do but what we know' - and this included how to get the forty-year-old rolling stock on the move again if it broke down, as, when the weather grew cold, it often did.

Jenni lived in a two-bedroom flat in Drayton Green, in the western suburbs between old Ealing and the new India of Southall. The second room was occupied by her younger half-brother, Tony, who was out of work. Tony and Jenni had only known each other for a few years, though their respective single mothers had gathered from casual conversations with the father that there were other children too. Tony had been curious about his halves, said to be six in total, and had tracked Jenni down. Marie, Jenni's mother, thought Tony was a sponger, like his father, and that with Jenni he'd 'latched on to a good thing'. It was true that Tony looked at Jenni's payslip with awe, though in fact, after tax and rent at PS250 a week, there was little left for much beyond the weekly shopping. Tony had lived off the jobseeker's allowance for the previous year. He was obliged to take occasional jobs to maintain a position on the benefit ladder, to which he returned when it was safe.

His room was at the back of the house, looking towards the athletics track. In his schooldays, he'd been a promising 400-metre runner himself, but it had meant training at weekends because the teachers wouldn't supervise sports in the afternoon, as part of some historic work-to-rule, and Tony found getting up at seven on Saturday to take the Tube from Tottenham to the club in Harringay too much to ask. He liked to think he'd kept in shape by playing Sunday football in Gunnersbury Park, but at the age of twenty-eight he was already carrying several extra pounds on his belly. The amount of weed he smoked made him hungry for food but not for exercise; in the evenings, he went to a pub in Harlesden and later on to various clubs, where he drank lager and bourbon.

He didn't understand Jenni. What would make a girl get up early every day and put on clunky shoes with rubber safety soles and drive a train through a dark hole in the ground? She had good holidays and steady cash, but so what? That canteen, that dick of a station supervisor, the social club, the smell, the darkness underground ... And then when she got home she just read books. Or played that boring virtual-world game, Parallax.

Tony blamed Liston Brown, the man who'd taken up with Jenni when she was nineteen. Any man could see what Liston's game was. He was maybe thirty-nine, had three children with different women and too much money from developing property in North London. He played golf at a tolerant club off the M40 and was a member of a West End club notorious for its pole dancers and high prices. Jenni had been working as a catering assistant in a junior school in Islington when Liston picked her up. She'd never met anyone like him before. Nor had Tony, except once, when he'd been to buy some skunk and found his normal source off sick, and a man a bit like Liston - tall, imposing, in a black cashmere coat with a striped Italian scarf double-hooped at his throat - had done the deal instead.

As well as two cars and a house near Alexandra Palace, Liston had charm. Reluctantly at first, Tony had gone along for parties and Liston had treated him like a brother. He did near-perfect imitations of people on television and had a fund of almost-believable stories about them; he had a room with a private cinema and a bar at which you helped yourself to any drink you could imagine, as well as little pre-rolled joints in a glass jar. When everyone was high, Liston switched on the powerful karaoke machine and urged them to perform. He'd break the ice himself with a virile Marvin Gaye.

It had been shocking when he dropped Jenni. Afterwards, she seemed to lose all interest in men. Her twenties passed. She was good to her mother and she was never out of work, though some of the jobs she did were things Tony wouldn't personally have considered. Then at the age of twenty-nine she had surprised them all by training as a driver; it was almost as though she was trying to hide from something, Tony thought, burying herself beneath the ground.

Jenni walked back from the station when her shift was finished and let herself into the flat. There was no sign of Tony. She made pasta shells with tomato sauce and opened a carton of orange juice; she ate quickly, eager to get on to the computer.

Sunday evenings were always busy in Parallax. People had been out clubbing on Saturday, got up late, spent the afternoon recovering and were now ready for a bit of fun before the week began again.

In the hallway there was a good-size flat-screen computer that Jenni had bought from her savings. A colleague in the operations room at the Depot had shown her how to cleanse the hard drive of Tony's weighty downloads, which caused the system to run slow. Jenni inspected the contents and removed, without opening, an energy-sapping item called 'White Girls, Black Studs' and two games in which over-muscled men went through post-nuclear cityscapes in battered army vehicles, carrying rocket launchers and gaining points for annihilating goons and half-naked women.

She had left Miranda Star in a far nicer place: on the banks of the Orinoco, where she had built a house. In order to pay for this, Miranda had borrowed 200,000 vajos from a mortgage lender called Points West and had engaged to repay it at a rate of five per cent interest over ten years. With Miranda's new job as a beauty therapist, this was just about feasible. Vajos were on a fixed exchange rate with sterling in the real world, and Jenni had, cautiously at first, given her credit card details online to the Parallax Foreign Exchange, which was based on the island of Oneiros.

The economy of Parallax derived from that of the real world, but with a lesser sense of responsibility. The inventiveness of the traders was such that few people understood the securities they bartered, but the gains to be made were stupendous, while the losses, after a certain level, became either too complicated to compute or too subdivided by onward sale to pin on one person. If they were truly serious, they were absorbed by the Central Bank, and the resulting blip in the overall Parallax economy could be ironed out by raising game subscriptions, taxes and shop prices for the less sophisticated. The financiers' gains were theirs to keep, but their losses were democratically shared.

Most of the gamers, though, Jenni noticed, still preferred sex. She checked on the progress of Miranda's house and found that the builders had completed it overnight, a week ahead of schedule. The tiles in the swimming pool were slightly bluer than she'd imagined and there were rather more caged parakeets in the marble entrance hall than she remembered ordering, but otherwise it was perfect. Miranda's bedroom overlooked the river, and in the shining white bathroom were pink curtains with embroidered daisies on the hems. A breeze blew through the French doors that opened on to the balcony.

Round the new house was a thin tape, a bit like those used at a crime scene in reality, which said 'NO ENTRY' at intervals. Some people left their houses open, unattended, but Jenni didn't want just anyone snooping round Miranda's bedroom.