The Red Men (16 page)

‘Are you still doing that filthy magazine?’ His cheekbones were new, round and burnished like doorknobs. His tan was that of a man who spends most of the year on a golf course
lobbying.

‘No.’ I explained that I was working on something new. He listened right up to the point at which I used the phrase ‘artistic integrity’ then he burst out laughing.

‘I liked your dirty magazine better.’ He tapped me on the shoulder to get my attention and then hitched the crotch of his trousers up tight, revealing the outline of two large oval
testicles. ‘Look at these, I’ve just had them put in. Pig’s balls. Specially bred to match my tissue. I’ve got hog testosterone running through my veins now. Very
experimental, very underground, but next year every old bastard will have a pair. It’s twenty-four-hour Viagra. You want to get back into porno, my son. OAP porno.’

‘Dad,’ said Jonathan Stoker Jnr, exasperated. But his father wasn’t finished yet.

‘After the operation, I went to the Caribbean to recover. I nearly started a black wing of the family out there.’

Stoker Snr was an unreconstructed dealmaker, a long luncher, a big desker. It was typical of Hermes Spence to have collected such an antique talent, bringing nous and know-how to a court that
erred toward the flaky. When times were hard, Stoker Snr volunteered to hand out the P45s. He paced the office, squinting furiously at the staff as if they were piles of burning money which needed
extinguishing.

I asked the Stokers if they had seen the elusive Hermes. Silently they checked with one another and agreed not to tell me whatever they knew.

Just then, the women of the court arrived. Stoker Snr turned briskly from our conversation and headed over to where two of Spence’s former mistresses and his marketing manager were telling
the story of their Chinook flight over the Highlands. Stoker Snr stood a little way back, laughing with them until a natural pause appeared, allowing him to introduce himself. New balls or not, he
was out of his league. The manager, Alex Drown, was a fearsome apparatchik and enforcer of Spence’s vision. More than any of us, Alex Drown thrived in the years that Spence was away. Freed
from his cult of personality she did very well in large corporates and had even yoked a suitable executive to her life project, ensuring brisk matrimonials, property acquisition and insemination.
The other two women, Janis and Christine, who shared a discreetly ill-defined relationship with Hermes Spence, registered unease at the approach of Stoker Snr. There was something palpably wrong
with his flesh. The clay was still wet. Wearing a black polo-neck sweater pulled tight over lozenge-shaped pectoral implants and tucked into black Armani jeans, Stoker showed off his recently
acquired torso. The nipped waist was strangely feminine.

Bougas rescued the women from his lechery, and escorted them to my table. I knew Janis because she had once posed for the magazine. Diffident and with a nice line in sarcasm, there was something
of the bawd about her. The other woman, Christine, was a doeish ex-model who was a vital part of the cast when it came to pitching for new business.

I asked both women why they had come all this way at Spence’s request.

‘Curiosity,’ demurred Christine.

‘Boredom,’ laughed Janis.

‘Opportunity,’ interrupted Bougas, his eyes lit up.

‘What is this trip about?’ Janis rounded on the consultant. ‘You must know. You always knew everything.’

It was clear that his ignorance on this matter pained Bougas. ‘Hermes must have new backers. He has come back into the game for something major. The new Ford. The new IBM. The new
Microsoft. The new Google.’

I was sceptical and Bougas glimpsed that scepticism.

‘Don’t listen to him,’ he said.

I was indignant. ‘I didn’t say anything.’

‘You raised your eyebrows. Don’t listen to his eyebrows. This man spent the end of the Nineties preparing for the end of the world. How many times did you tell me’ – and
now Bougas mimicked my know-nothing world weariness – ‘it’s all about to collapse. Savings and loans. The Indonesia crisis, the rouble devaluation, the millennium bug.’

‘I was right though. It was a bubble and it burst.’

‘Eventually. Everyone is right eventually.’

And so the evening wore on. Stoker Snr dipped into our conversation now and again just to check that neither Christine nor Janis had changed their opinion of him. The court gave up speculating
as to why they had all been gathered together, preferring to renew old acquaintanceships and old habits. The hotel bowed and bucked under the weight of our revelry. The bar was bribed into staying
open and resolutions were made to watch the dawn break over this remote shore. Janis even proposed a wager – that she could persuade Jonathan Stoker Snr to show us his new balls.

‘The new opportunities are in transplants.’ Stoker discoursed blearily over a bottle of Talisker. ‘Xenotransplantation, to be specific, the swapping of vital organs between man
and beast. My son and I do not share genetic material as he is a foundling so I cannot ransack his body for the parts I need to keep going. Fortunately, in a secret warehouse somewhere in the dark
zone, there is a transgenic pig with my name on it. Before the operation, they took me down there to show me its balls. I had to wear a big white suit. The pigs are kept in a pathogen-free
environment because of all the immune suppressants pumped into them. There were two dozen pigs in the warehouse, each suspended from the ceiling by steel tentacles. Pigs are very susceptible to
overheating. They don’t sweat, that’s why they roll in mud to cool down. To keep the animals calm, each pig wears a skintight virtual reality suit and goggles, their little legs pawing
away on a treadmill. I was shown the outline of my new balls through the black VR suit. Did you know the Latin name for the domestic pig is
sus scrota
?’

Laying her cigarette aside, Janis put her hand on Stoker Snr’s thigh and said, ‘Show them to me.’

He stood back from our table, unbuckled his belt and stepped out of his trousers. He was wearing Sloggis. Then he wasn’t.

‘As you can see, I got them to make a few other improvements while they were down there. The skin on my scrotum had sagged so I got a new sack too. The hairs haven’t really taken
hold yet.’ He pinched the balls so that they bulged against the new skin, which had the spring and texture of a squash ball. ‘They’re clearly bigger than a man’s balls. They
put some extra into my cock as well. The swelling took a while to come down. Isn’t it superb?’

‘It’s awesome, Jonathan.’ Janis swooned theatrically. ‘Do you shoot pig’s sperm too?’

‘I do. Lots of it. Also when I get a surge of testosterone, I want to rut like a pig. I want to nuzzle with my snout intensely and then mount.’ He snorted and rooted in her lap and
got a hard slap for his boorishness. Stoker Snr stepped back into his trousers and demanded I pour him another two fingers of malt, which he downed with adolescent bravado.

Without the benefit of stimulants, I waned soon after midnight and went outside for some air. A mist settled over the island. Visibility and audibility were down to ten feet which made me
intimate with every step I took. I fancied myself in a simulation that was filling in reality as I moved, the mist signalling the limits of the processing power. Pick up the pace and I might fall
off the edge of reality itself and find myself marooned in un-space.

I walked away from the safety of the village just to see what it felt like. Scary.

In the ruins of the nunnery, a tongue of sea mist curled its way around the rotting molars of stone. I took a piss against a wall in defiance of the fear. My back was exposed to the night. This
game of scaring myself took on a different turn. Quite unbidden, my hackles rose, a temperature fall in the microclimate of my body. I felt a sudden absence of sensation. A heartbeat there, and
finally there again signalling cardiac arrhythmia, freewheeling in the gear change between fight and flight. A fear learnt in the womb. Gestating, I listened to the way my mother hesitated and
hummed and hawed against any rash action, and while she slept I eavesdropped on her nightmares, her unconscious torturing her with visions of choking children, immolated husbands and herself,
unable to breathe, asthmatic, expiring in front of her family. This was the defining aspect of my character. My fear. My cowardice. Sucked in through the umbilical cord, it enters the body through
the belly. The yellow belly.

Two light footsteps behind me. The being I saw on the beach. Seven foot tall in a monk’s habit. The smell of an old football, of cracked damp hide. Its face was a smooth padded oval with
two blue eyes set in it and watching me with bovine placidity.

Needless to say, by the time I mustered the courage to turn around and confirm my worst fears, there was nothing there.

I returned to the hotel, veering away from the drunken entourage, as I did not want them to see me in such a state.

I woke not long after dawn. My room was inside a cloud. Heavy vapours pressed against the window of the hotel bedroom. Rain drifted up through the village. The community went about its
ablutions, the washing of selves and sacred vessels. I coughed and it was as incongruous on this silent isle as it would be in a theatre.

Someone had pushed a card under my door. A silver card embossed with the same symbol which had greeted us at Glasgow airport, what I would come to know as the Monad brand. On the reverse, a
handwritten note invited me to attend a meeting at noon at the abbey.

I was halfway through breakfast when Bougas stumbled into the dining room, clutching his curls back from his brow, frowning as he tried to solve the long division of his hangover. The hotel
conservatory, which normally afforded sea views, was also swaddled in cloud. Instinctively, everyone spoke in whispers. Bougas dropped himself into a seat opposite. I could hear his internal organs
grumbling over the menu, arguing over what they would accept and what they would reject out of hand. There was a unanimous vote for a cigarette. After that, the council of guts fell into
in-fighting.

‘What happened to you?’

‘It was a long day. I turned in at midnight.’

‘You missed things.’

‘Really?’

Bougas was having some trouble with speaking. I consoled the bedraggled consultant with tea, before mentioning the card which I had received that morning.

Bougas tapped the symbolic figure. ‘That’s the Hieroglyphic Monad of John Dee. Devised in twelve days it revolutionized astronomy, alchemy, mathematics, linguistics, mechanics,
music, magic – according to Dee anyway. I gave a presentation about how occult sigils provide a pre-Enlightenment precursor to brands. Spence must have taken it seriously.’

‘What does it mean?’

Bougas winced and feigned utter exhaustion, crumpling up until his brow lay on the starched table cloth. ‘Too complicated.’

Bougas swayed over to a serving table to pour himself a glass of milk, which he drank before returning. Taking the card, he traced a finger over the symbol.

He explained, after numerous false starts, that the horns are a crescent moon – the one eye is in fact the Earth, the head the Sun. The horns – recalling the cuckold –
therefore imply some conjugal relationship between the heavens. The body is a cross – four lines intersecting as the four elements do. It also exemplifies Pythagorean principles of
mathematics, ‘taking us into the Gnostic mysteries’. The feet are the symbol for Aries, the fire sign.

‘There is more to it than this. Dee felt he had devised a sigil which could be unpacked to explain the universe. Sigils take a desire and fold it down, repressing it within lines. Like
brands, they are symbols charged with want. I was working on using occult principles for one of my clients when unfortunately we had to part by mutual consent – by which I mean, they asked me
to fuck off, and I agreed to. Anyway, Dee’s Hieroglyphic Monad is a mutation of the symbol for the planet Mercury, who was the Roman version of the Greek god, Hermes. So I would hazard a
guess that Mr Hermes Spence has taken this symbol as the logo for his new enterprise, whatever that may be.’

Whatever pride Bougas felt at this symbol of his enduring influence over Spence was tempered with concern, for the Monad did not represent an accessible mainstream proposition. Was Hermes Spence
about to launch the world’s first Gnostic consultancy?

‘We need money, Nelson.’ Bougas was still worrying about the Monad on our walk up to the noon appointment at the abbey. ‘I want Hermes to open his mouth and gold sovereigns
come tumbling out. It has to be something big. He wouldn’t have called us otherwise. Unless he’s lost it. If he comes out holding an acoustic guitar, I’m going to wrap it around
his head.’

The sun burned away the mist and unwrapped a clear cold day. The sea licked contentedly at the red rocks, which lay diced along the coast like a few tonnes of raw steak. The court made its way
to the abbey. Ahead of us, Christine and Janis made their way over the peaty ground in unsuitable shoes, and I noticed how Bougas artfully guided our stroll to keep us at a safe distance from the
Stokers, the lean graphite stroke of Jonathan Jnr, the stocky ink blot of his father. A large weathered Celtic cross marked the entrance of the abbey and a crescent of chairs had been arranged
around it.

By the time Bougas and I took our seats, the court was all assembled and waiting for the arrival of its prince. I shared pleasantries with Morton Eakins. He spoke about his recent wedding and I
suffered an account of the stag party. He was just describing how he and his friends all wore Hawaiian shirts at the karaoke bar when Bougas, mercifully, nudged him quiet.

‘Here comes Hermes,’ he whispered. The saviour had returned at last. After 9/11, Bougas had studied the portents and the scriptures in his country retreat, seeking cultural and
numerological synchronicities which would reveal the character of the age. Cold quiet nights out in the back garden inquiring bent into a telescope in search of the orbit of a comet which augured a
new spin on the cultural cycle. He mapped sunspot activity against the trends in the pop charts and could demonstrate how the commissioning tastes of TV executives were essentially tidal. Under
deep hypnosis, Cornish youths presented him with the cat litter of their unconscious. He rummaged through this filth to create graphs of prevalent obsessions, from adolescent body horror to the
first flowering of homosexuality, and it was these charts which he presented to the product development units of major international corporations. But it was not the same as working for someone who
really believed in you. Bougas was convinced that his work uncovered an underlying pattern to the behaviour of mankind. Hermes Spence made the addled consultant feel like the Mage of a King. He
never lost faith that his patron would return and call upon his knowledge once again.