The Red Men (10 page)

Florence wanted to help, she had advice for him. He did not want it. This was outside her area of expertise. Revenge. Were there viruses he could upload, servers he could take an axe to? No.
That was hopeless. Monad didn’t know where the red men were stored or how to dabble with their code. If not revenge, then capitulation? Was that the adult thing to do? Just do his job? Put up
with the humiliation and knuckle down? Harry Bravado wanted to contact his real counterpart, Harold Blasebalk. What if Raymond tracked down Blasebalk himself? Then he would have someone he could
punish.

Florence was still unsure of what had happened. She asked more questions. He didn’t hear them. He was nodding now. Yes, that was the plan; do what Bravado wanted, find Blasebalk, and then
punish him.

The licensed vigilantes and their camera crew boarded the train at Dalston Junction. The arrival of two lycra-clad steroid-enhanced lunkheads sent the commuters tumbling and
apologizing into one another. Hiding between a pair of dead-on-their-feet plasterers, Raymond was spared the worst of the scrum. Captain Commuter and Essex Lad meted out corrective measures upon a
passenger for antisocial behaviour. The production crew cleared a circle around the incident, and the producer handed out release forms to the passengers. A lace of blood slid slowly down the
plastic partition. Raymond concerned himself with his notebook.

Once the miscreant had been subdued, the two superheroes spoke about the importance of zero tolerance in maintaining community cohesion. In the scuffle, a few commuters spilled their psychofuel
and sticky puddles of it gave off corrosive odours of sugary bile. The two superheroes disembarked holding a bloodied grey-faced rag-bound figure between them as a prize for the adulation of a
small news team. When they left, more passengers shoved their way onto the train and fitted themselves against and in between one another.

It was the immigrants Raymond felt sorry for. They come here seeking asylum and discover a madhouse. If we weren’t all on drugs, we wouldn’t be able to cope.

The other passengers gazed into their screens. Raymond read a photocopied folio of his own poetry, verses on knuckles, lithium, spunk and syringes. Yet the silent screens disturbed him. At any
moment, the face of his dying father might appear on them and start begging him for help.

Harry Bravado had been harassing him ever since his return from Polruan. Nude images of his mother appeared on the TV news and, in the off-licence; strange figures loomed behind him on the CCTV
screen. He turned around but no one was there. He wanted to point out these incursions to other people. Did you see that? Did you? The adverts in the bus shelters, programmed to eulogize the rich,
dark taste of a new coffee, took time out from their sales pitch to whisper to Raymond that he was a failure. That he would always be a failure. Did you hear that, did you? No, he had to keep it to
himself. Harry Bravado baited him with the vile chatter of mental illness. The terrible extent of the red man’s reach was made apparent to Raymond when he picked up his lithium prescription
only to find, printed on the label, ‘Take forty-five a day and die, you mad bastard.’ All the pills went down the toilet.

I could see how much this scared Raymond. His medication had helped him attain the foothills of respectability: a job, a flat, his relationship with Florence. Without it, how long would it be
before the Connector returned? The Connector was his name for his mania, a berserk carpenter working day and night nailing this to that in construction of an intricate but deranged work.

At Camden Road, a seat became available. Raymond took it, grimacing at its damp warmth. The upholstery had not been laundered that decade and the carriage stunk like a meat locker. In the
margins of his pamphlet, Raymond penned a line about passengers swinging in on hooks like carcasses.

The steam on the windows subsided as they rolled westward through the rail yards of Willesden Junction and along the attenuated suburb of Acton. The train pulled into Kew, his destination.

Stepping onto the platform, Raymond raised his collar against the cold and the class of the place. He had servant’s genes. The houses lining the approach to Kew Gardens retained quarters
down below for the likes of him. In the driveways, weekend sports cars loitered beside the family tractor.

The school run was under way. In unwieldy sponge safety suits, children waddled from porch to people carrier. Raymond attracted a few funny looks for his demob suit and flat cap with the peak
yanked down. The second-hand suit dated from a time before the insertion of RFID (radio frequency identification) tags into all products. The tags were transmitters the size of sand grains secreted
by marketing departments keen to track the treatment of their products beyond the store. His rationing chic was not merely nostalgia for a lost age, it was also the only way he could be sure there
were no spies in his clothing.

Arriving at the house, Raymond corrected the line of his jacket. The gravel of the long driveway crunched beneath his leather shoes. The bell was an old-fashioned mechanical ring. He appreciated
the authenticity of it all.

After some rustling in the hall, the door was answered by a frowning young woman in rubber gloves. She regarded him with undisguised scepticism.

‘Yes?’ English was not her first language. Raymond realized she was the help.

‘I am looking for Mr Blasebalk,’ he said, removing his cap. ‘Mr Harold Blasebalk?’

Ahh. She knew him. She indicated the empty hallway and, by implication, the empty house beyond.

‘Not here.’

‘Do you know when he’ll be back?’

‘Not here. Never here. Not for months.’ Stepping into the patio to confirm this, Raymond noted the absence of men’s shoes beneath the coat hook. Two unfaded rectangles on the
wall indicated recently removed pictures.

‘Divorced,’ said the cleaner, miming the removal of a ring.

A Land Rover eased its way onto the drive and up to the front of the house. Raymond smiled uneasily at the woman behind the steering wheel. He knew from the Monad files that she was the wife,
Karen Fraser, the third daughter of a West London clan so notorious it warranted hanging on to her maiden name.

‘I am looking for Mr Blasebalk,’ said Raymond.

‘Aren’t we all?’ Her voice was husky with the previous evening’s pinot noir and skunk. Gathering some shopping from the boot, she spoke to Raymond without glancing up
from her task.

‘Does he owe you money?’

‘I’m from Monad. I work with Harold’s red man, Harry Bravado.’

‘Then you know my ex-husband better than I do,’ she said, hoisting the bags from the back of the car and passing them over to the cleaner.

‘Do you have an address for him?’

‘I did but he’s not there anymore.’

Raymond went to leave. ‘I’ll try him at work then.’

Karen shook her head.

‘Don’t bother. They made him redundant. You are here about the subscription?’

Raymond shook his head. The files on the Blasebalks had no marker indicating a late or even lapsed subscription. Who was keeping up the payments for Harry Bravado? Blasebalk’s employers
perhaps, retaining the services of the ultra-efficient digital employee in preference to the addled human one. Or did Monad itself have a motivation for keeping Bravado running?

Karen Fraser went into the house trailing the faintest of invitations for him to follow. He was reluctant to transgress further than the entrance to the hall. Their conversation became polite
shouting while she loaded up the fridge, switched on the kettle, and fossicked around in the ashtray for a decent length of joint. When she finished unloading the shopping, she stood at the end of
the hallway. Her grey-blonde hair had an upright tangle due to her habit of raking it back during conversation, and she stood with one arm protectively across her midriff.

‘You’re the messenger boy aren’t you? You are worried I might sue.’

‘I just want to find your husband,’ said Raymond.

Karen stalked off. Guessing that he was to follow, Raymond took a few steps down the hallway, then he stopped. The clack of his leather shoes upon the wooden boards made him wonder: does one
remove one’s shoes in a middle-class household? Is it disrespectful to the cleaner to muddy her work? Then there was the issue of his socks. It was a Tuesday, always a bad day for his socks.
Karen Fraser was padding around barefoot, so he decided to follow her example, prising off his shoes, unwrapping his socks and stuffing them in his pockets. He followed her into the conservatory
where she was pouring tea into two handicraft mugs, an unlit charred nub of spliff tucked in the crook of her forefinger and index finger. After sparking it up, she smoked it with a greedy,
dramatic emphasis. She inclined her head to exhale out of the open window. Raymond tried to appear relaxed, crossing his legs and adjusting the line of his trouser, revealing his pallid lightly
haired shin.

‘After you split up, where did your husband go?’

‘He rented a flat in Islington. The young bachelor about town. You should have seen the clothes he bought. Covered in studs. So gay.’ Karen offered Raymond the spliff, which he
accepted, and then with a woozy sardonic smile, she complimented him on his shoes. Once she had stopped laughing, Karen made a small show of righting herself, assembling her sober face.

‘I can tell you where he hasn’t gone. He could not survive in the countryside. He is allergic to it. The provinces give him the heeb. And he left his identity card behind so that
rules out leaving Britain. I spoke to his mother. None of the family have heard from him, or if they have they are not telling me. I only know he is alive because he cleaned out our current
account. Fortunately he was kind enough to leave us with the savings.’

Absent-mindedly, Karen took her screen out of her back pocket and put it on the table. Alarmed, Raymond snatched it up, prising out the battery before passing the glass back to her.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Raymond.

Karen was not convinced.

‘My husband did that too. Switching it off was not enough. It needed to be unplugged,’

‘It’s just a precaution,’ said Raymond.

‘It’s paranoia,’ she said, ‘and I know plenty about paranoia.’ Her hand fluttered before him and was not satisfied until he returned the spliff to it.

‘Harold wanted to unplug everything. Which was not practical. Our daughter needs a screen for school, her identity card every time she goes to the doctors. You can’t unplug our
mortgage, our credit cards, our bills. The only time we use cash is to pay the cleaner. Harold wanted to go dark. That’s what he called it. I just wanted him to see a psychiatrist.’

Raymond was struggling to reconcile the stylings of the Blasebalk-Fraser household with what he had seen of Harry Bravado. There were wind chimes over the door, a wooden box of wooden
children’s toys tucked under the table. In the garden, a wrought iron pagoda, leaves heaped upon an overgrown lawn. It was at odds with Harry Bravado. The red man was aggressive and had none
of a father’s patience or a husband’s facility for compromise. Either the red men technology was grossly inaccurate or Blasebalk had concealed a side of himself from his family. In
creating Bravado, Cantor had snared qualities far removed from sloppy jumpers and affable Dadness.

Karen Fraser had questions of her own.

‘You’re not Monad’s messenger boy are you?’

‘I’m not here in any official capacity,’ said Raymond, shoeless and sucking down the last of joint. ‘Tell me, did you have any contact with Harry Bravado?’

‘When he was first simulated, Harold went on about his red man like it was his new best friend. It flattered him, this thing with his face and voice that knew everything. The perfect son,
almost. I was upset that this Harry Bravado – as it started calling itself – showed no interest in me at all. Its wife! Mother of its child! When I spoke to it, a look crossed its face.
The kind of look your husband gives you when you are talking politics after half a bottle of red. You’re not married, are you Raymond? Let me tell you. A wife can’t let those looks
pass. That contempt can fester if it’s not all out in the open. I confronted the red man on its attitude.’

‘It laughed in my face. Nasty thing. They captured the worst of my husband. A grotesque caricature. The part of him that I never saw while he was at work making money.’

‘I was naïve. I thought because he had a red man Harold would work less. But he worked more. He became competitive with it. One time he slept under his desk for four days until he was
sent home just to get a shower and change his clothes. Instead of being a team they became rivals. It didn’t help that Harold’s old habits returned. Monad should never have allowed the
red man to smoke and drink. That was astonishingly insensitive, given everything Harold had gone through with his addictions. We met in rehab. I knew exactly what he was going through. Seeing
Bravado on that screen smoking and drinking and thriving on it, without any consequences, no health worries, no family responsibilities…’

‘Where do you think Harold is now?’

‘He’s skulking around car parks trying to score crack. He’s been up all night in a Soho den doing deals. He’s just woken up and his face is covered in self-inflicted
scratches. He’ll be back into all of that shit. You get weaker as you get older. You lose the strength to sort yourself out again and again. I hope you find him, but I am not going to look
for that kind of trouble.’

It took an age for Raymond to come down from the cannabis. In his bedroom, he scrawled the information he had gathered concerning Blasebalk’s whereabouts – London, Islington, Rehab,
Soho, crack, gone dark – onto Post-it notes and stuck them to the bare white walls. Harry Bravado had tormented Blasebalk in the same way he was now tormenting Raymond. Even though he had
ditched his mobile phone and switched off all power in the flat, the red man guided some automated sweepers beneath his window. Their speech synthesizers, usually confined to warning pedestrians
that they were backing up, spoke loudly of the ‘paedophile in number 28, Flat C’. With his torch tucked between his shoulder and his ear, Raymond yanked every page from the
A–Z
so he could reassemble a map of London on the wall. There were dark patches south and east of the river. Since Blasebalk had already drifted to Islington, it made sense that he
would continue in that direction. His cash would go far in the information wastelands between Stratford and Leytonstone in the long highways of bedsits and squats. He could use market stalls for
provisions, and pick up some cash in hand in the thriving black economy of immigrant builders, electricians and plumbers. Raymond could go back there, live incognito, dedicate his life to finding
Blasebalk and when he did, he would… he would…