People in Season (5 page)

‘So,’ she twiddles a link on her silver necklace, ‘why don’t you start by telling me your name?’

‘James,’ he answers, square jaw set.

The trite pub they’ve found, decorated with antique farm equipment, rusted tools hung among photos of Dublin past, and replica placards for drinks and tobacco that are no longer sold, creeks around them. It wouldn’t have been her first choice if she’d cared to plan the evening, but it was the most convenient. The only purpose they need served by a location is privacy to conduct their interviews. They’re talking conspicuously, cautious of being found in the booth nestled at the back of the room. Only for being engrossed in their game they’d have copped that they can’t be missed. In elegant evening wear, the pair look like royalty in a barn. The barman leaning against his counter sneezes and they glance at him to confirm he’s just an extra in their scene, present only to serve them drinks. He wipes a towel down a drooping moustache, his attention absorbed by a screen that hangs above him, which warns that another flash riot is likely in the wake of the coverage Ava provided to the nights previous. But that’s of no concern to them now. The world could be gone and humanity with it for all they care. They’d abandoned it when they left the auction. That building and the people who populated it were mere props to be cleared, and the pub they saw across the road just another stage to be entered.

Ava’s glass fogs as she holds it at her lips, the wine touching her tongue to make her mouth ache. She drinks and repeats, ‘James.’ Stretching it out, she’s feeling the name, passing it from one hand to the other like a piece of clay, trying to shape it into something recognisable. ‘James, you’re missing your auction.’

‘Maybe I couldn’t bid on what I wanted.’

‘What do you want?’ She squeezes the false name again, ‘James.’

He draws a gold pen from his breast pocket and holds it in his fist, its nib directed toward Ava as he sharpens his smile. ‘Maybe I’d like to run the tip of this into your oesophagus, slowly, and watch you gurgle underneath me as you stiffen and go limp.’

Ava arches her eyebrows, more irritated by his change in form than she is shocked by the vivid description he had at hand. ‘That’s stupid.’

‘I don’t see what’s so stupid about it,’ he goes sullen.

‘Just because you’re untouched it doesn’t mean that you’re a murderer and sadist.’

He pockets the pen for later use. ‘It doesn’t mean I’m not either.’

The doctor likes games. He’d seen one when he found Ava, prowling the aisles of the church. As a man who thrives in chaos, he has a taste for the unpredictable and craves it in the company he keeps. When he pushes, he appreciates a woman who can push back. The proposition he set, to talk as though they were untouched, one UPD to another, was enjoyable for its taboo, so she humoured him with it, but it’s clear she has a singular direction in mind and resumes working the man toward it.

‘Back to the beginning,’ she says.

‘Ask me again.’

‘Ask what? Your name?’

The doctor stares blankly until she takes her cue and mouths the words widely, fully expecting to hear an honest answer this time.

‘What is your name?’

‘James,’ he repeats, mimicking her wide mouth.

Ava had hidden her curiosity when he lied the first time and realises it probably means that he knows that she knows his name already, along with his colourful list of legal problems. The tease about stabbing her throat confirmed it, surely? He’s playing up to his almost-public-persona. The man who gets his kicks from death. How banal. Joanne was right in assuming he’d be perfect for capturing the public imagination though. He’s aware of his magnetism too, and playing on it, pushing and pulling at whim to see what he can get. There’s a childishness to him that she doesn’t like, hidden under the mature face, though she decides to put up with it, supposing that the foolishness is a part of his charm. He could tell you his blood covered hands were actually soaked in paint and you’d give him the benefit of the doubt, only because of his boyish smile. He’s the perfect news story embodied in a human being – a nightmare posing as a dream. Ava though, is already tired of the cat and mouse antics – who’s the cat and who’s the mouse? – and ends them abruptly.

‘You’re not a very good liar, Alistair,’ she underlines his real name with a deeper tone.

Grinning, his hands go up in surrender. Ava follows them, feeling for a second how it was to have them touch her. Under the table, she uncrosses a leg and folds the other over, barely brushing her foot against him as she does. She’s enjoying having him in front of her, charged with the knowledge of what’s going to happen, admiring him like something she’s about to buy.

‘You’re well informed,’ he says. ‘Maybe you can tell me, am I really untouched?’

His hands are always moving, leading from one thought, one sentence, to the next. Later, she knows, one will close around her waist as the other grips the dark hair at her neck, pulling her close by the hip and drawing her back to feel her lips on his. The hands, they’ll move along her body clinging to her as they go. She’ll move away from him and stand in full view to pull down her slip so she’s stood in her underwear, a strap of her lace bra loose on her shoulder like an untied ribbon. He’ll stand coolly, pursing his lips in approval as he waits for her to come back. Lifting a toe out of the dress bunched on the floor, she’ll loosen his tie with a flick or two of her wrist, open his shirt one button at a time, and making sure he keeps his hand at his side, she’ll take her time to examine him, his hard chest heaving slowly, his flat, ripped stomach, tensing as she runs her palm along the muscles. When she indicates her approval, they’ll slip out of their last items of clothing and into the thin sheets of the bed, her skin like a pool of milk on his olive body, and writhing together, their touches will become gropes as they lick and suck and fuck through the fading hours of the night.

‘Are we still playing?’ she asks, rapping her knuckles on the booths table.

He remains quiet but there’s a quiver on the surface that says, ‘Maybe.’

Under the screen, the barman sneezes again and wipes his hand on the back of his jeans.

‘Well, I’m not,’ she cuts into the silence. ‘You probably are.’

‘Untouched or playing the game?’

She sips her wine.

‘You’re a journalist,’ there’s acid in his voice as he makes the accusation. By the unmoving shape of her features, you wouldn’t know she’s been taken off guard. In fact, there’s a twinkle of amusement in the way she sets her glass down that urges him to go on. ‘Ava O’Dwyer. Writer at ChatterFive. A voice for young women who want to care about the world and look good while doing it. My solicitor would not be too happy if he knew we were here together.’

‘You know more about me than I do about you.’ Ava is relieved more than anything. She won’t need to twist his arm to make him talk.

‘I doubt that.’

‘You shouldn’t be so suspicious. Maybe I’d like to write a nice article on you. Something that will make everyone see what an upstanding member of society you are.’

‘It’d be a lot easier to write a damning one.’

‘Alistair,’ she says. If James was a lump of clay, this name feels like a finished sculpture in her hands. She moves her fingers along it’s edges. ‘Alistair, Alistair, Alistair. How does it feel being UPD?’

‘You tell me,’ he stretches in the seat, challenging her, but lets out an amused sigh when she doesn’t answer him and cracks an ice-cube between his teeth. ‘They say it doesn’t feel like anything. That’s where the name comes from isn’t it? The UPD live in a world not connected to anyone. Sounds terribly lonely. Me, I just know what I want, when I want it and how to get it. If other people want to make all of that more complicated for themselves then that’s their problem.’

‘They seem to be making it a problem for the UPD of late. It isn’t so different to any other trend, really, is it? One minute they’re in, the next minute they’re out.’

‘The law,’ Alistair sneers. ‘Social Agents. Career bureaucrats who invented jobs for themselves to get a good pension. They’re as bad as the taxi alliance. Men getting paid to sleep at computers that beep when something goes wrong.’

‘I don’t like it either,’ Ava says this casually, but she’s aware of the weight the admission might have. ‘There’s a social agent in our newsroom.’

‘That’s a tricky situation,’ the doctor says, more concerned for himself than for her.

‘He’s an idiot. He wears a suit that looks like it was handed down to him from his brother and stutters through everything he has to say. If these are the kind of people we have running the country we might as well sink the whole thing now.’

‘No class,’ Alistair opens his hand in understanding. ‘What will you do about him?’

‘Do?’ her skin crinkles. ‘Why would I care if I get selected for processing?’

‘We’re untouched, remember?’

‘I’m not untouched. And anyway, I’ve got him wrapped around my little finger. It’s pathetic, really.’

Alistair hums, ‘If you were untouched, and you didn’t want to be processed, being seen with me could be very bad for the both of us.’

At first, she sees everything that’s going to happen pulled away. Like a ghostly force has ripped her from beneath the sheets of their bed, she feels them slip over her naked skin as Alistair and the room shrink into nothingness. But it doesn’t make sense. She knows that Alistair doesn’t care about the social agent, that he’s testing her again, moving away to make her come toward him. Her response is neither a step forward or a step back, but a simple cock of the head. He laughs at this and they consider each other for a time, a mirror looking into a mirror, deep and empty.

‘If you did write anything bad about me, I could make a lot of trouble for you.’

‘That’s probably true,’ she agrees. ‘So, what are we going to do, Alistair?’

‘Who knows?’ he tilts his glass to watch the ice slide around. ‘I suppose we’ll get out of here.’

Standing, he watches as she fixes her dress, and she smiles back, enjoying the feel of his gaze. It’s like she’s being eaten. Once again he guides her with his hand at her back, but he’s following as much as he is leading. He throws a note down on the bar and they hear a grunt of thanks and goodbye. Their footsteps are loud on the hard wood floor as they exit, the wood aching in relief when they’re gone. As the door swings shut the note goes into the register and the barman returns to the screen. They might never have been there. In the taxi there’s another sleeping driver. Quietly, Alistair’s hand slides over Ava’s. They could do anything. Say anything. As they arrive at her building the driver wakes with a shiver, and mumbles goodnight before the car drifts away with him at the wheel.

Paused by the door of her apartment, Ava dips into her handbag and comes up with keys. Alistair’s hands are on her shoulders, unwrapping her scarf and letting it fall from her skin. The scent of it floods their senses as it moves. She opens the door and turns to lean against the wall, hands behind her back with her handbag dangling on a shoelace string. Inhaling the breeze as she allows him to enter, the room comes into view when the lights flick on.

Posing, he takes to his mark at the centre of the room.

Everything around him is square. A solid black coffee table gleams on thick posts on a smooth rectangular rug. Colourless sofa’s made of slotted cubes sit into each other in front of an L-shaped kitchen unit. The counter, clean like everything else, has never had any food prepared on it. There’s a steel lamp, here in the corner, and a series of vases on a shelf, three sizes in line from large to small, placed only because the apartment had come fitted with the ledge and needed something on it. No flowers, because they wilt when not cared for. No fake ones because what’s the point. There’s no art on the walls. The photos on display show shots of herself in crowds of beautiful people who she only calls friends when it suits her, and carefully chosen to be slightly less attractive than herself at that. He walks over to the long window and sees a dim reflection of himself in it placed among the furniture behind him, an ivory kendle armchair set, worth more for their name than for their comfort. Ava walks out of the doorway and into the image, linking her delicate fingers in his big bear paw, admiring the sight of him at her side. Rubbing the length of his arm she finds a price tag on his sleeve and teases him playfully as it’s tugged off with a smirk. He doesn’t see what’s so funny about it. As she pulls his jacket off his wide back, they appraise one another in the glass, assessments wet on the tip of their tongues.

‘We’re going to get caught,’ Alistair says.

Walking away from him, she kicks her shoes off at the threshold of her bedroom, first one, then the other, unclasping her earrings as she goes. Constrained to follow her example, it’s as if all the world has become a tunnel leading to the bedroom where she waits, and with loafers slipped off, the doctor walks into the dark, where everything that was going to happen, happens.

So much of Francis Mullen’s work entails the investigation of that feeling one gets when entering a room and realising that the conversation by those present has hushed to an awkward silence. Not knowing what happens behind closed doors, getting to the bottom of what was said, in one way or another, his life is spent prying into these places he’s not wanted. Reactivity, the observer effect, applies in both directions.

Francis finds his attention passing to the newsroom outside the cramped office he has managed to claim. Set to frosted, he can see the staff on the other side of the window but all they can see of him is a blur. Ava is lingering by the conference room, an errant lock of black hair falling across her face as she rummages through her purse. He had told her his name and didn’t even notice. He’d blamed the hangover, but he hasn’t had a drink since and doesn’t feel any more confident in his ability to handle her. It was as if, along with his name, she had stolen a part of him and was now keeping it for ransom in that purse. If only he could snatch it back off her. More likely, he is going to have to pay for it. And still, he can’t bring himself to hate her. As it happens, he has broken his rule of maintaining midweek abstinence. Last night, drunk with desire, he masturbated to the thought of her. In the sober interlude afterward, forehead dotted with twittering beads of sweat, he listlessly wiped them away and asked aloud if she was really something to be concerned about. He couldn’t convince himself of an answer either way. This in itself worried him, but soon enough he was swollen with longing again, throbbing all the more now as he spies on her from behind the one-way screen
.
An intern breaks the spell as she crosses his sight. The short red-headed girl chirps hello to Ava, but Ava, a butterfly alight, blanks the girl. Francis notes the happening somewhere in the swirling pool of hormones his brain has become, hoping he remembers to follow up on it, and cops himself on once more – This is his job, for fuck’s sake, and he’s good at it.

There are prescribed methods on how to maintain a detached attitude, but so much experience teaches a social agent that sometimes you just have to play it by ear. Like a chicken picker who can tell the sex of a new born at a cursory glance, a talented agent knows the UPD by the hollowness in their words. Several steps up the evolutionary ladder from chickens, people don’t like their fates being decided by a stranger’s instinct, separate as it is perceived from the whim of the universe. That’s where the personality tests come in. Over the past few days he has been taking the staff in small groups to supervise the UPDSRP, a self report form. The circles they ticked were accounted for and a list of potential candidates assembled by the computer. Hardly a reliable device, the computer, the untouched are adept liars after all, and everyone else not always the most mindful bunch. So, regardless of their results, each member of staff is being taken to interview for Francis to compare their self-reporting with his own observations. On a tablet in his possession is a list of questions carefully designed to help him judge the behaviour of those he examines. The questions mostly act as a rough guide, something to fall back on when probing a given direction reveals nothing. Eye movements, hand gestures, vocal tone, language patterns, he will combine all these features to create a portrait of the subjects he interviews, but if you were to ask a standard social agent how they were so good at picking an untouched personality, you would be asked in return how you can tell the difference between a deep lake and a shallow pond. Francis Mullen calls it a knack. Surely a pretty face can’t put the talent out of service.

As a knock is heard, he runs a hand over his clean shaven face, feeling soft and pudgy, and holds his tablet with questionnaire at heart level. Aware of the trial ahead of him, he opens the office door for his first candidate. Joanne, she’s the number one suspect on the computer’s list.

‘Am I allowed smoke during this?’

She stomps past, allowing him a view of the familiar grid of cubicles. The heads are ever curious today as they glimpse his direction, and turning the other way, they move like grass in the wind as his eyes sweep over them. Shutting the door, Francis turns around to see the editor has taken his seat and is obstinately chewing on the plastic cigarette wedged between her lips. He tries a smile as he asks her to change places, then waits patiently for it to sink in – that in this room, he’s the boss.

‘How are you today?’

‘Terrible,’ she replies, hoarse, before rethinking her answer. ‘Fine. I’m fine.’

Francis gathers a silence. Settled into his role as interviewer, he knows that the gaps between sentences can be as powerful as any question on his list.

As though she’s figured out the answer to a riddle, Joanne asks, ‘How are you, Agent Mullen?’

Her frayed golden hair, so neatly bunched at the beginning of the week, has become a nest of sorts to which she doesn’t pay mind. Her make-up too, though Francis doesn’t notice, is not what it was. The lipstick she wears has been smeared across her mouth by a jittery hand and her false nails, in dire need of replacement, have been bitten to nubs in the short intervals between cigarettes.

‘I’m also fine, thank you.’ He takes a long look at this body sat in the hot seat. With its tensely folded arms, one leg crossed over the other and twitching, it would seem a circuit in its motherboard has been fried. Smoke streams out of her nostrils to confirm it. He goes on. ‘I’m just trying to get the lay of the land. I’ll be asking about your relationships with people in the office and your observations of them, how they act around you and with one another. There are strings attaching everyone. I want to make a map of them and, more importantly, how you see them. Perhaps you’ve noticed somebody wandering around, unattached, so to speak, and not have comprehended what it was that made them feel so untouchable. I won’t start another lecture about why we’re doing this, but please keep in mind that your assistance is important in the process of keeping the psychic environment clean. In the same way that bad life experiences can build to make a UPD’s symptoms worse, habits can form in a workplace, polluting it on a deep level in a surprising amount of ways. It’s what it means when somebody describes an entire corporation as untouched.’

Guardedly hugging herself, Joanne remains unimpressed.

‘Let’s get started then.’ Francis scrolls down his screen and picks a light question to begin with. ‘Who among the staff members do you get along with best?’

‘They’re employees. I don’t make friends.’

‘Just subordinates?’

‘If they do their job, I’m happy.’

‘Yes, I’m sure.’ He bites his cheek as the next thought comes to mind. ‘You seem to have a soft spot for Ava,’ and his voices goes down a pitch as he says the name in an attempt to prevent it going up one. His struggle to disguise the growing infatuation is flustered at best, and yet nobody in the office has yet to detect it. Worried for themselves as they are, all they see in him is a suit that holds a checklist. Hidden behind the questionnaire his obvious interest is consistently unnoticed.

‘Do I?’ the editor challenges him.

‘Do you?’ he meets her.

Joanne opens her mouth with a loud smack, then closes it. ‘I found her in the community. She was a college drop out. She didn’t even apply for a job here. She was my little project. A soft spot? I have an interest in making her as good as she can be. You can’t get comfortable at the top, as a company or an editor. We stay the best by retaining quality and aiming for more. You’re asking about personal relationships in an environment where personal relationships are all business. Ava’s a good writer and has a keen understanding of how to work under public scrutiny. She’s valuable to me that way.’

‘A protégé.’

Dodging the suggestion, Joanne takes a puff of her e-smoke.

‘What attracted you to her writing?’

‘It had balls,’ she says in a rumbling baritone. ‘You can’t write a story today without putting a disclaimer on the end of it. She didn’t do that. She doesn’t hide the truth, our Ava. She just has a way of putting it in a nice Armani dress. And she’s not afraid to say what she’s thinking. Counter opinions are important. Between her and Barry, we’re kept on our toes. If one of them didn’t speak up, who would? Of course, it helped she had a large following in the community that came over to us when she made the move.’

‘I see,’ and switching direction abruptly, Francis asks, ‘You’ve been divorced, twice, is it?’

‘Excuse me?’ Joanne balks. ‘I thought you said you wanted to understand the newsroom. My personal life is off limits.’

‘Well, I’d eh, like to understand you too,’ Francis stutters, busying himself on the screen so her surprise doesn’t engage him. ‘I’ll be asking the other staff members about you. The personalities at work here are what make the office what it is and you’re at the top. We can rely on other people’s opinions of you, or you can help me get a clear image...’

‘Of my marriages,’ Joanne bites the end of his sentence.

‘Why do you think there were two?’

A bitter laugh erupts from a dark pit inside her. ‘The hangover wasn’t so bad from the first one, I didn’t think a second could hurt,’ and she swallows, taking time to arrange her thoughts into a civil manner. ‘It was the same man both times. We were children the first go round. Years later. Well. You think you grow up but so much of that is just house keys and cars and paying bills. Shock twist. It turned out we were still the same people.’

‘That’s a sad lesson to learn,’ Francis nods, satisfied that she was provoked into saying something so honest. ‘And eloquently put.’

Not replying, she clenches her teeth and waits for him to go on, apparently having surprised herself with the confession and not wanting to be drawn by his attempt at intimacy. Focused on the wall behind him, her attention is pulled to one of the posters he had hung. ‘Remember the Children.’ Her startled eyes water in thrall of it.

‘Does it mean something to you, Joanne?’

‘Hm?’

‘The poster...’

‘What poster?’ she asks, staring at the picture in question.

Sensing the woman’s off guard, the agent takes a deep breath and tries for a push.

‘Would you say that you’ve had a lot of sexual partners, Joanne?’

‘Oh, you have some nerve!’ she snaps back to reality, exasperated.

‘I’ll be asking everyone in the office the same questions. Believe it or not, everything we discuss is relevant to my task at hand.’

‘How many would you say is a lot, Agent Mullen? Only looking at your rosy choirboy face I think you’d be offended if I’ve had more than one.’

Francis blushes in spite of himself, the set of questions on his screen wavering downwards as the flush of embarrassment goes through him. ‘It’s not about what I find offensive,’ he says timorously, then, finding that the silence has turned against him, he offers with a shy smirk, ‘You could just write the number down on a piece of paper if you like.’

***

Watching them is Ava. Sitting at the duck blind that is her desk, she’s eying the frosted glass of the room Joanne and Francis reside in. It’s a boring hour, but after a while the blurs move apart, the door opens, and she makes a beeline to meet Joanne in her office. Noting the mood on her editor’s face and letting it reflect on her own, she briskly closes the door and launches into a round of questions with, ‘What a load of pish-posh. Really, just pish-posh, isn’t it? What kind of things was he asking about?’

‘You, for one,’ Joanne says offhand. ‘I mean, you and me. If we’re anything more than boss and employee. His words. My marriages, my sexual history, my pets.’ She picks at her thumbnail as she talks. ‘I don’t have any pets. What’s that supposed to say about me? He must be some kind of pervert. Do you think we can get this thing called off on sexual harassment grounds?’

Ava gives this due consideration before shaking her head. She’s scrutinizing the grid of desks beyond Joanne’s door. Despite the undercurrent of paranoia, the newsroom is the usual buzz of activity, a wasp nest that shakes itself up every day to pump the noise onto the ChatterFive network. Joanne’s office is set to soundproofed. None of it reaches her if she doesn’t want it to.

‘What’s going on out there?’

The editor half suspects a team of investigators are sifting through all the computers in search of some despicable crime to pin on her. Ava has never seen the woman so unnerved. She throws her the painkillers she keeps on hand and catches them as they’re lobbed back, unopened and unused.

‘This is too stressful for you. Go on holiday. I could use your office for a while. I wouldn’t have to listen to Barry take calls anymore.’

Joanne ignores the idea. ‘Who’s he talking to next?’

Peering across the cubicles to the room Francis has claimed, Ava sees the door is ajar. The information she gathers is filtered through the window, and then, filtered through her eyes and out of her mouth to Joanne’s ears. ‘He’s just sitting there, lost in his notes or something – I don’t think he’s entirely right in the head, Joanne.’

Putting her own spin on it, Joanne says, ‘Probably looking at my online history. I knew I shouldn’t have been looking up that stuff about buying anthrax.’

The social agent stands abruptly and calls to that funny haired girl as she passes by. Jumping to catch up with her, she beams in response and they walk into his office together. With the door closed behind them, they’re just soft shapes on the glass now, hues Ava can’t understand.