The Paper Eater (11 page)

– I thought it was a bike delivery. I was expecting some cash after the last transaction, I say.

– And who was it?

– My daughter.

I add an extra lump of papier mâché to her bum, and grit my teeth.

Yes: Tiffany. In smart orange-and-blue Libertyforce uniform.

Tiff had always been her mother’s daughter. From the moment she was born, they were a little female confederacy, plotting oestrogen-type stuff together while I concocted cash. Girly kitchen things at first, gingerbread men and so forth, then women things, men of the non-gingerbread variety. It was pretty much an open secret. What could I do about it? As a family man, I was a failure. I’d never got close to her. I loved her but I didn’t know her. Gwynneth behaved as though she was the only parent, and I was just a … oh, just a feature of the home landscape. It was weird, I thought – but what did I know about family life?
Perhaps
it was normal. Perhaps, I thought, if Tiffany’d been a boy, it would’ve been different. We’d have gone to ball games or ostrich races or whatever the big thing was. Anyway, the more Gwynneth resented me for my lack of ‘social skills’ the more I retreated into my shell.

As soon as Tiffany was old enough to understand, Gwynneth told her that Daddy preferred another mummy and daughter. It wasn’t strictly true, not in the beginning, but the saying of it polluted everything and after a while I thought, well, sod it, so what if I do prefer them. Who wouldn’t? After that I kept myself to myself in the loft conversion with the Hoggs.
At least G and T can’t hate me for funding their shopping trips, I thought.

Wrong.

– You’re under arrest, says Inspector Tiffany Kidd, still parked on the doorstep by the banana tree and the dwarf Alpines. She’s bigger, more substantial, harder-faced than I remember her. Canteen food. It’s bulked her up. There’s a Libertyforce van out in the road behind her in the road, Fraud Squaddies tumbling out on to the front grass. She flashes a plastic-covered search warrant at me, and an ID card showing an unflattering hologram of her own face, and I have time to think, what crappy paperwork.

– Don’t think you don’t deserve this, she says briskly.

It crosses my mind that I might be hallucinating. Computers can frazzle you that way, short-circuit your nodes.

– What the fuck d’you think you’re doing? I yell at her. What is this stupid game?

As the forcies pile out of the van, she shucks me off like an old raincoat.

– Common Assault, Article 5D, Libertycare Customer Charter! she yaps. Impound his computers! De-activate his hard discs! Confiscate all CD ROMs and floppies!

And the uniformed gophers swarm through the house.

– That family paid for you to go to that posh school with the netball and the oboe lessons! I yell at her.

She just stands there, her eyes flashing with a hatred so pure that it could be bottled and sold as a multi-purpose repellent.

– That family paid for your snow-breaks and your designer labels from all those fucking boutiques!

A spotty youngster joins her at this point.

– All right, there, ma’am?

I throw in my last card.

– Not to mention your abortion!

I make sure I say it loud and clear. The young forcie looks at the Lemon, and then at the floor.

– Slap him in cuffs, she spits.

And lo, it came to pass that, like a common criminal, I was shoved into the back of a Libertyforce van stinking of junk food. I was in shock. I felt numb.

– All right there, mate? asked the spotty forcie who was now attached to me by handcuffs, like an outsized and gormless gnome dangling from a charm bracelet. With his free hand he was feeding himself Chicken McNuggets from a greasy cardboard bucket.

– All right? My entire family has just been wiped out. Do YOU reckon I’m all right?

I thought
Inspector Kidd
was your family, he goes, all jovially. He’s munching an evil-smelling nugget.
She
seems to be alive and well.

The Lemon was sitting in the front of the van; I could see the back of her head through the glass.

– She’s not family, as far as I’m concerned. (I said it loudly, hoping she could hear it.) – Real families are loyal. Real families don’t fuck you about. Real families honour and respect their dad.

The forcie laughed aloud.

– See you’ve got a good sense of humour then, mate, he went.

I couldn’t think of anything to add that was in words, so I spat on the floor. And on that note we drove off.

It was one of Tiffany’s subordinates who interrogated me at the copshop at Staggerworth Junction in South District. He wanted names, dates, all that stuff.

– It’s all on the discs, I told him.

– And your password?

– Moron, I said. He noted it down without a flicker.

– What’s the prognosis then, doc? I asked him.

He looked at me questioningly for a moment.

– Oh. This type of fraud, you’re usually looking at ten years, in my experience.

–
Ten years?
Cue the classic line from me, about wanting Libertyaid. Knowing my rights.

While I waited to make the call, I learned more from the forcie: the Lemon had been an inspector for two years, here at Staggerworth, just a mile up the road from the house. She was ambitious. This was her first major fraud bust. That figured: stepping into the van I’d heard another forciewoman congratulating her in a booming, lesbian sort of voice.

– Nice one, Tiff! Vengeance, yo!

– You have to hand it to her, I told the forcie miserably. It takes balls to shop your own dad.

Then she walked in.

– How’s your mother? I asked, trying to disarm her.

Tiffany smiled.

– She’s very well. She’s
happy
. Living with a lovely bloke. Geoff. (I felt my eyes bulge.) – He’s a stress-management consultant.

Then she added, smirking – I call him Dad.

Sissy curtains and St John’s wort.

– Well, I call him Wanker, I said, and thought, I should have guessed. Gwynneth was right. I don’t notice things.

– Well, thanks for the update, I said. Now where’s my Libertyaid representative?

– You don’t want one. There’s a proposition for you. Unless you’d prefer a twenty-year Adjustment, she smirked.

– The other forcie said ten years.

At which point Inspector Tiffany Kidd looked suddenly pissed-off. Like a kid again. I remembered her at five, throwing a tantrum after she’d melted part of her plastic kitchen set with Gwynneth’s hair-dryer, and put the blame on Keith – who was only a kitten at the time. She didn’t like being in the wrong.

– Well, I say twenty. It’s my bust, I researched it. I know how much you’ve made over the years. Starting with fifteen
hundred dollars for a state-of-the-art brace for your imaginary brother, and finishing with the sale of five offshore mini-islands – which are actually just large rocks – for a hundred and fifty thousand each. I’ve seen the evidence, she goes.

– So how come you don’t want me to go to jail? Don’t I deserve it?

– You
do
deserve it, she stabs bitterly. You deserve it for the way you tried to
fuck
up our lives by making out we were
second-best
to some
other
family that
didn’t even exist
. Then, perhaps realising the childishness of it, she stalls herself. After a pause, she says, looking at her shoes – But I’m under instructions from Them.

Well, that knocked me sideways. Head Office? What do they want?

She looked from her shoes to the wall. It was an unremarkable pale green, decorated only by a dribbly splotch of what looked like dried Nescafé, no doubt hurled there by another detainee at his wits’ end, but it seemed to interest her quite unduly.

– I don’t know, the Lemon confessed, clearly irked at having let herself mention it at all. They were looking for a fraud like yours. A family like you’ve got.

– What for, for Christ’s sake?

She looked blank.

– Dunno, she said. They didn’t say.

– So you shopped me to advance your career?

– Nothing wrong with that.

I sighed. There’d be no getting through.

– So what do I have to do?

She was looking down now, picking at her nails just like she’d done as a turbulent teenager. It made me sad to see it. I wanted to tell her to stop.

She said – There’s a man called Wesley Pike.

* * *

John whistled. – The black king, eh?

– If you think they’re out to get you, I said, it’s because they are.

And that was where I left it with John. He went back to his sewing for a while, and I chewed the rest of it through, quietly.

The rest of it? Oh, the bit I hadn’t told him. The tail-end to that scene.

Why didn’t I tell him? Because of what Gwynneth would’ve called ‘stupid masculine pride’, I guess. Shame, a bit – not at what happened, but about being too gormless to have spotted it. And an inability, no, a refusal, even now, to come to terms with that final slap in the face.

It was just as she was leaving. It was me who prompted it. I don’t know what came over me. The memory of her as a kid, I guess. Not the teenager and then the woman she became, but the cute little girl wobbling about on her bike in the back garden, looking so sweet and innocent and adorable in her little white cowgirl outfit with tassels.

– Tiffany, I said.

– Yes?

– How can you do this? (My mouth was hanging open.) – I mean – I mean – I mean –

– What? What d’you mean? she snapped.

I nearly stopped then and there. I should have. But I didn’t.

– Well, I said hopelessly. I just mean, how can you do this? I’m your dad!

She looked blank for a minute, then puzzled. Uncomprehending.

– No you’re not, she said.

It was like a slow-motion experience. The long, long delay from ear to brain. While things were sinking in – more sort of slumping into place – I let my hands drop loose by my
sides; I could feel them swinging free like a puppet’s. A noise hatched in my throat, but it got stuck, and hung birthlessly in the silence.

Then, watching Tiffany’s face – the face, I now realised, that looked nothing like my own, and never had, but belonged to some other man, whose name I didn’t even know, who’d been with Gwynneth on one of those nights she’d come back drunk and smoky from the razzle – you could see the thought dawn on her. It spread across her face, blooming into a sweet pink smile.

There was a kind of shocked laughter in her voice when she spoke.

She said – You didn’t know?

GOOD MORNING

– Good morning, Voyagers! That’s Fishook on the tannoy, sounding perky. – We are now approaching Atlantican waters.

My heart sinks.

– In five days’ time we will dock in Harbourville.

As the music crackles in, I reach for the transcript of another call to the Customer Hotline. They’re all the same. I’ve chewed thousands, so I know.

They all taste the same too.

Caller: This is confidential, right? My name’s Tom.

Response: Hi, Tom. Tell me how I can help you. Caller: Well, there’s this bloke, says he’s going to kill me. He lives up my road. Jed Hawkes.

Response: Can you give me more details, sir? How did it begin, for example?

Caller: It started when I told him I wasn’t going to lend him my lawnmower again, after he buggered up the blades on his rockery. Fancy trying to mow around a rockery. He says the soil’s all eroded in our district anyway, so it doesn’t matter. I won’t need a lawn mower much longer, we’ll all be living in a bog.

Response: Yes, sir. It’s people like you who enable us to do our job and on behalf of Libertycare I’d like to thank you personally. Please carry on. And then?

Caller: Well, it escalates into a dispute and the wife says …

I knew Jed Hawkes.

He arrived on board the same day as me, after we were all rounded up in the Mass Readjustment. A rough-and-ready sort of bloke, but likeable. He suffered from seasickness. He wasn’t resilient. He didn’t have the particular grim kind of humour or the hostile-from-birth attitude to the system that you need to survive here without coming unscrewed. Unlike many of the Atlanticans, he wasn’t prepared to kid himself that he was actually guilty – if not of the charges against him, then of something, at least.

A lawn mower, misapplied to a rockery.

He killed himself last year.

– Man Overboard, went the cry.

So then what, goes John. We’ve been silent for an hour. Me chewing, him sewing, both trying not to think. The needle flashing in the light.

I sigh.

– Well, I was allowed home after that. Under house arrest. They tagged me with this sort of ankle-bracelet with an alarm system. (John nodded knowledgeably.) – They’d gutted the place by then. My family photos, the lot.

I gulp, remembering how grief-stricken I’d been. How bereft.

– Anyway, it didn’t feel like home any more, without the family there, I said. It was like they’d never existed. And then to cap it all, Keith buggered off.

– Keith?

– The cat.

– Where’d he go?

– Next door. With Mrs Dragon-lady.

– Who’s she?

– Neighbour woman. It’s what Tiffany used to call her, as a kid. Anyway I guess Keith went round to her place because he was getting old, and he could read the writing on the wall.

– He could read?

Is he stupid or what?

– No, you dork. What I mean is, they’re intuitive, aren’t they, cats. He must’ve sensed a downward spiral. He did come back, though, just the once.

– What for?

– To be sick on the carpet. I laughed, remembering. – I yelled at him at the top of my voice. He shot out of the cat-flap so fast it rattled for ages.

– What happened to him?

– I didn’t see him again for a while. He went back to Mrs Dragon-lady. She fed him that addictive dried stuff.