The Red Men (40 page)

Hermes pulled himself closer to the edge of the well.

He held out his hand to me. ‘Help me do this.’

I shook my head and stepped back. Raymond stepped forward.

‘I’ll do it,’ he said. Hermes nodded thankfully. Raymond slid his foot under Hermes Spence’s breastbone and turned the shivering, naked chief executive over so that he
slid soundlessly into the depths of the well. Thus, his fire was extinguished.

Swells roll into Doulus Bay, the echoes of a tropical storm ripping through the Caribbean, so far away it merely stipples the water here, where the North Atlantic meets one
fingertip of the Iveragh peninsula. The clouds are low and sodden, burdened with rain from the mountains. Knocknadobar ridge scowls behind a blue veil. Heavenly spotlights search through the cloud,
breaking it up, burning it away. For the first time all morning, I feel the sun on the back of my neck.

A yellow buoy rocks in the shallows. Valencia river flows by to become one with the bay and the ocean beyond. On the opposite bank, a castle juts out of the livid green. In its high east wall,
two arched windows have decayed into mournful oval sockets. The castle dates from the fifteenth century and is cold and dead, its heart gripped by thick tree roots. The rough undressed stone is
infested with moss. The staircases take you up into the sky.

I am sitting on a rock among all this, sitting here remembering. There is no rush. It has been six months since we left Hackney for the south-west coast of Ireland and I remain unaccustomed to
the peace and quiet. Part of me is attending to unfinished business. My dreams are all about Monad, anxiety dreams in which I am late for meetings or unprepared for briefings or failing to finish a
project on time. Budgets are exceeded. I wake up and decide that something must be done about Morton Eakins and his attitude and it takes a while before I remember that is all in the past.

Exercise is a good cure for anxiety. We go for bike rides as often as possible. I take the lead, with Iona in a child seat. El peddles behind at her own pace. We ride out to Valencia Island and
wait in line for the ferry to pick us up. Gulls swirl around the concrete pier and harass the fishermen. It is a short trip across the river, not even worth dismounting our bikes for. Then we ride
up the Geokaun slowly, taking a breather after every fifty-metre ascent. The road ends in a grotto, a great maw in the mountain with a slate mine in its gullet. The view takes in Doulus Bay and its
small islands with the ruined hides of solitary monks. West around the headland, there is nothing between the Atlantic and America. Looking eastward and down-mountain, there is the small town of
Cahershiveen, and the banks of the Valencia river, where I sit every morning and think about all that has taken place and plan what will happen next.

On the ride down, Iona puts her head back, sticks out her arms, and pretends she is flying. We freewheel for two miles. I point out this or that aspect of nature but I am only interrupting her
reverie. We pick up pace and leave El behind. I think my wife is hungry to be alone; my year in Maghull meant that she had no relief from child-rearing, and the incessant chatter of a
four-year-old. So now I am taking the strain. I know El tightens the brakes, hangs back, thinks of herself for a change as we roll down the hill. Sometimes Iona falls asleep on the bike, her
helmeted head knocking against the small of my back. We pull into a café and she rests on my lap while I drink a coffee.

My family sustains me. Our minds overlap, three circles in a Venn diagram. It is only when I walk out to the banks of the river to be on my own for an hour each morning that I experience
separation. It is pleasant to be briefly apart from their concerns. I need to think about the work. I imagine the castle as it will soon be: temporary outbuildings for the tradesmen; concrete piles
driven into the sod to mark a perimeter fence; a digger working to level the ancient hillocks. I climb down to a thin outcrop of rocky beach. It would be good to extend this right up to the
conservatory. It will be important to create the right environment.

Last week, Raymond came to visit us. He took a cab from Killarney airport, forty miles along the northern edge of the peninsula. He is doing well for himself. He wore a bottle-green highland
tweed three-piece suit, red silk cravat and flat cap, his pinched, fierce features making him look more like a gamekeeper than landed gentry. Florence was not with him. Their relationship was
solely a working one now.

Raymond showed me a proof of
The Great Refusal
. I flicked through it. The poetry was gone and in its place was a piecemeal manifesto calling for a society without screens. It insisted
that no deals could ever be made with power. No compromises. No complicity.

‘Where has all the poetry gone?’ I asked.

‘I am saving it for a different book,’ he replied.

We were awkward together. After spending so much time with the family, I had lost the knack of entertaining outsiders.

‘You kept Harry Bravado’s title.’

Raymond shrugged.

‘Did the red man compile the contents?’ I asked. I had my suspicions. The manuscript had been completed very quickly. Raymond did not want to talk about it indoors so we walked down
to the river bank, to the plinth where I sat every morning. Only here could we talk in private. First, we spoke of Hermes Spence’s death.

‘Or murder,’ said Raymond,

‘You merely fulfilled his dying wish.’

‘Has anyone contacted you about it?’

‘No. It was the same when Blasebalk was killed. The police don’t want to get involved. Or they are told not to. How are you?’

‘I have nightmares. I hate Spence. I only gave him a nudge with my foot and now I have to be a murderer for the rest of my life. Things still haven’t returned to normal for
me.’

‘Florence?’

‘Florence and I had a dispute over the book. She is not the one for me. We are too similar. Like brother and sister. I need some difference. I saw my wife today, at the airport. My
wife-to-be. Not that she knows it yet. I was waiting for my bags to come around on the carousel and there she was; a redheaded Celt, firm calves, two children with her. My children. It was a future
echo.’

He nodded at me, expecting me to agree with him.

‘A future echo is like
déjà vu
, but coming in from the other direction?’

He pointed out to the bay.

‘Future echoes are like the ripples on the water. Time is one enormous ocean and a storm ahead sends back disturbances. She was there and she was not there. She was my wife. They were my
kids. I knew it. Felt it. And then they were gone.’

‘Tell me about your break-up with Florence,’ I said.

He was reluctant to talk about it. ‘It was little things. Stupid things. A word here, a word there. We’re too similar. We were butting heads.’

I didn’t believe him. As soon as he stepped out of the cab in his ostentatious tweed suit, playing the Celtic dandy, I knew he was hiding something. Clearly he was struggling with his
demons, his talk had a touch of the old rat-a-tat-tat, and his insights came stamped with the mark of mania. The deranged carpenter was back in his workshop, hammering nails and sawing off awkward
edges to make one thing look like another.

‘Do you like this rock?’ I asked. We stood up to admire it, a massive slab of slate laid upon smaller chunks of slate, one at each end, to raise it above the grass. ‘This is
where I come to figure it all out. You and I know more about what happened than anyone. We need to be honest with each other. Why did you and Florence fall out?’

He sat cross-legged on the slate. The mountains ranged about us, four different weathers toiling on each point of the compass.

‘It took me a long time to recover. After that night in the Wave, everything disappeared. Cantor. Leto. The robots. The pigs. The Elk. I think he was part of it. And the drugs too. They
stopped working. I missed it all. I had the shakes for Leto. I had the dry heaves for him. I lay on the bathroom floor and just sobbed with grief. It was like, when you go on holiday for a long
time and then you return to your hovel, and it’s in the same old filthy state that you left it in, and the familiarity of it is unbearable. That’s what being dumped back into the real
world felt like.

‘This went on for weeks. I was intensely paranoid. I was waiting for the knock on the door. London is full of police and cameras. Why weren’t they coming for me? I couldn’t
trust anyone. I just crawled under my bed and lived like a bug. And then, one day, I am face down in a filthy carpet and I turn over and there is a manuscript. A big thick sheaf of paper.
It’s all in my handwriting. It’s my book. I don’t remember writing it. I do remember pain and weeping but no writing, no research. But there it was – all done. From that
moment, the pain went away. The addiction was over.’

‘Florence was upset that you had written the book without her?’

‘It had a lot of her ideas in it. A lot of her writing. No, we argued over the source of my inspiration. It was like someone put the entire book into my head and then I went into a trance
and wrote it all out. Like taking dictation. This corrupted it for her. To me, this was my reward. Leto had put this book in me as a thank-you for releasing him from his bondage.

‘I don’t know how, though. It seems so long ago, I can’t even reason on those terms anymore. Do you think we will ever find out what was really going on?’

I nodded. ‘I am working on it.’

‘What happened to you afterwards?’

‘The next day, I went back into Monad. Anything else would have aroused suspicion. I was the one who found Hermes’ body at the bottom of the well. The police came and asked
questions. They wanted to see our internal security recordings but there was nothing there. Everything was linked to Cantor. Spence had suffered a massive heart attack because his body rejected the
transplanted organ. There wasn’t much cause for further investigation. So we all went back to work. I did a full week. We had no computers, no phones. The payroll was wiped. We just sat in
our offices, waiting for redundancy. After a few weeks, the Wave Building started to come apart. There was some flooding in the lower chambers down in the bedrock of the Thames. The remaining staff
relocated to reception. Still, the waters rose. We didn’t want to leave though, because then we would be fired and lose any chance of a pay-off. The walkways came away. We had to hire boats
to get to and from work. Monad still had money somewhere. We just couldn’t find it. Eventually the people from Numenius Systems came over. We weren’t allowed to look at them. We all had
to turn our faces to the wall as they inspected the remains of the company. I stuck it out. Not just to the end but beyond the end in the hope of getting some kind of compensation. But it
wasn’t to be. Finally, the Wave Building collapsed slowly into the Thames and there was nowhere to go but home.’

Raymond gestured to the river and the mountains and the islands beyond.

‘Is this home, now?’

‘This is work,’ I said. ‘I got a job offer a few months after Monad disappeared. It’s an interesting story. I was approached by a neuroscientist called Professor Cabbitas
to help him set up a new clinic. He has devised a number of temporary enhancements to the brain. I was recommended to him.’

‘Who by?’

‘By the same person that taught him how to perform these revolutionary modifications to the brain.’

‘Cantor?’

I nodded. ‘This is my reward. We’re going to build a clinic. Just over there, beside the ruined castle. Thanks to Cantor, the professor has perfected an operation to alter or
suppress regions of the brain to produce a short-lived state of mind that is pure creativity. Just as certain autistic children show an incredible ability to draw likenesses of reality, we will use
similar principles to produce artistic savants. It is an on/off switch for the muse. My work will be about creating the right setting for those sudden artists.’

‘It sounds expensive.’

‘It will be. Fortunately the professor is also in the possession of a very large research grant. Exceptionally large. He didn’t apply for it. Yet he was approached by a foundation
the same day the details of this ground breaking operation appeared in his in-box. I like to think of the project as fulfilling Cantor’s last will and testament. All Cantor wanted to do was
create and so we have been bequeathed Monad’s missing capital.’

Raymond was unsure. ‘Won’t you just be starting the cycle all over again?’

‘I know. My first instinct was not to get involved. However, I am a different man. Destroying Cantor changed me. I have acted decisively. I want to influence the world for the better now
and I think I know how to do it. I don’t believe in the Great Refusal, Raymond. I have to engage. It’s not the technology that is evil, it’s what happens to it when you plug in
shareholders and greed and fear and the rest. We have enough funding to stay above those forces. We have a real opportunity to do good.’

That evening, Raymond stayed for dinner. He was demanding company. He talked a great deal and did not censor the swearwords from his anecdotes so that by the time Iona has finished her bowl of
rice, her vocabulary had expanded in a way I was hoping to avoid. He was full of London, of course, and unmoved by the beauty of the Kerry landscape. ‘It’s a Jewish thing,’ he
assured me. ‘As a people we have stayed away from mountains since Moses came down one with the Ten Commandments.’

It was my turn to put Iona to bed. She kissed El and Raymond good night. We took turns in brushing her teeth. She undressed. I handed her a nightie. She pulled it on and climbed into bed. I
asked her if she wanted me to read her stories or if she wanted a chat. She wanted to chat about a walk we had taken earlier in the week, up the hills around the back of Caherdaniel. It was a
beautiful bright sunny day. The path ran along a stream. It was boggy and we had to climb up rocks. The sight of these raw materials struck a chord in Iona and she asked me: