"The Red Tie" - 6
Weekly serialisation of my short dystopian thriller.
“It was a shame about your friend.”
Citing the need to visit an ailing uncle further along the 10’s route, Marina had found him waiting at the tram stop after work. She makes her statement a few minutes later, just as they are passing the Botanical Gardens.
“I’m sure it’s a mistake. They haven’t convicted him yet,” Vincent replies.
“Who’s that?” She seems perplexed.
“Noah.”
She shakes her head. “Who’s Noah? Anyway, I didn’t mean him, whoever he is. I meant Marcus.”
“Marcus?”
“That was his name, wasn’t it?” She is thrown by Vincent’s confusion.
“But that was years ago!” He tries to humour her. “And before I started work at the Ministry. On that basis I don’t see how you could imagine he was my friend — or where that notion might have sprung from.”
She places a hand on his arm. “I’m sorry; I must have got mixed-up. Perhaps someone said something to me about this ‘Noah’ and I misunderstood. It’s the most likely scenario, isn’t it? I didn’t mean to imply anything. Or to make any kind of accusation. We’ve only just met and now I’ve offended you. Will you forgive me?”
And how can he not, especially with her holding onto his arm, the tram rocking slightly side-to-side, the novelty of the whole experience undermining him?
“Let me make you dinner — next weekend — to make up for my clumsiness.”
*
It had been during a career fair held early in his final year at college. A raft of professionals paraded before them over a two-day period, each extolling the virtues of the industry in which they worked, the jobs they did, the positive impact their efforts had on the general populous. Vincent and his cohort learned about heavy industry and light industry, health-care, transportation. Nearly half the presenters were either Ministry employees or worked in companies with Ministry ties — though none of that was a surprise to the young people being bombarded with information.
Punch-drunk, audiences dwindled during the second afternoon either because the students had been to the sessions of greatest interest to them, or — keen to escape — pretended to have done so. Vincent was still searching for something undefined however, not that he expected anything positive to come from the final presentation of the day.
There were only three of them left in the auditorium when Marcus entered, a situation which didn’t seem to bother him at all. Ushering them down to the front, he pulled together an arc of three chairs and one for himself, asked their names, what they were studying, and whether they had any firm ideas as to their next career step. Vincent had been the only one who didn’t have a clue. In spite of what the other two said, he knew they were both engineering-types and were just slugging through the day before they could go home.
“I expect when I describe my job to you it will sound the dullest thing in the world — but I assure you it is far from that. It has be the most exciting, the most stimulating, the most influential one.”
That was how Marcus began, and yet there was nothing much in the mechanics of what he did, the processes themselves, to get the blood pumping. Then having spent fifteen minutes on the mundane, he changed tack.
“Now; it’s not what we keep out of a book that counts, but what we might put in.” Vincent had been struck that Marcus had chosen to frame it that way. He continued: “Take fiction, stories. Made-up things: made-up people, made-up worlds and so forth. The people living in those worlds have lives to live — just like we do — and in those lives they have to wrestle with important issues: politics, sex, religion.”
The subjects he listed were semi-taboo, so much so that, when he spent the next ten minutes talking about each in turn, even the engineers were enthralled. Using real examples from their collective culture and history — topics about which they would rarely hear anyone speak freely — Marcus drew on one or two incidents (‘mythological incidents’ he called them) to describe how an author might weave ‘messages’ into a story about fictional people in their fictional world. Vincent was struck by the approach: Marcus was explaining how the responsibility to eradicate subversion in books could only be met if one knew how the heresies might be successfully included in the first place: “you have to know how the wrong-doers work to circumvent the rules in order to be able to root their messages out. It’s like literary hacking.”
“If you can do all that you must be very good at your job,” one of the engineers said, evidently impressed.
“Thank you,” Marcus replied, “I like to think so.”
At the end of the session, Vincent had been last to leave.
“Was that useful?” Marcus had called after him as he was walking toward the exit.
“Yes, thank you. Fascinating.”
“And might it be something you would have an interest in, or consider pursuing?”
“Yes, it might.” Vincent was unable to deny the attraction.
“In that case,” Marcus had walked towards him and presented him with his Ministry business card. “We’re always on the look-out for intelligent young people. If you’ve any questions or if there’s anything I can help you with, just get in touch.”
*
The following Monday Verna calls Vincent into her office.
“Is there any news?” he asks, assuming she wants to talk to him about Noah. There seems to be a general consensus that he is the closest person to a friend Noah has at work.
“News?”
“About Noah?”
“Ah.” Verna glances at her computer monitor. “This afternoon.”
“‘This afternoon’ what?”
“The final verdict. Ratification, if you like.” She allows a frown to form as if silently posing a follow-on question; or anticipating his own, perhaps.
“So they’ve already decided?”
“Occasionally such decisions are subject to validation, double-checking. Good practice, don’t you think?”
Vincent chooses not to respond. Nor does he seek clarification on what verdict has been reached. Whether ‘just’ or not he has no idea, though an immediate feeling of unfairness arises from his inability to understand whether what Noah had supposedly done was heinous enough for him to face the ultimate sanction. From Vincent’s perspective, Noah is little more than a blabber-mouth, a chatter-box, someone who likes the sound of his own voice. Surely he lacks the depth, the seriousness, to be a potent weapon of insurrection. Vincent can remember the very public dissection of Marcus F’s life both before and after his execution: the litany of things he was supposed to have done, the corruptions for which he was allegedly responsible. Would they now do the same for Noah? Guilty or not, surely he is small fry in comparison.
“And what about you, Vincent?”
Verna’s question pulls him from his brief reverie.
“Me?”
“You’ve been quiet of late. We wondered whether or not you had been adversely affected by the news about Noah. Upset, you know? Discomforted somehow…”
“Upset?” Vincent considers the idea for a moment — as well as trying to decipher who Verna might have meant by ‘we’. “Yes, I suppose a little, just like everyone else. It was a shock, of course. Even though you don’t really know someone that well, you’re still surprised. Isn’t that inevitable? He has always seemed — I don’t know — harmless.”
A small but sympathetic smile briefly appears on Verna’s face and then is gone.
“That’s an essential part of the act, don’t you think? Such people — those who seek to undermine the order of things — are hardly likely to go shouting about it from the rooftops. They might appear exemplars for the way things are. Or then again they might choose to make so much noise, be so obvious, that they avoid suspicion. In Noah’s case…well, I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but we’d had our suspicions for some considerable time. There were plenty of clues. So please don’t think any of this was hasty or careless. There was hard evidence. The Ministry wouldn’t have acted without evidence.”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
A brief pause.
“As long as you’re okay.” It is a sign that the interview is over. Vincent rises. “And if you ever needed to talk…”
Vincent nods almost imperceptibly; tries a smile.
“Of course. Thank you. And I’m fine. Really.”
*
Whether or not Vincent needed to talk, there are now two people suddenly offering themselves up for the role. Verna is just doing her job, but Marina seems determined to engage him in a way that is a rarity for him — and all on the basis of an inconsequential coming together in a small and quaint café. Yet it is somehow more than that. As he sits at his desk throughout the remainder of the week he occasionally speculates as to what might come of their up-coming dinner engagement.
Aware only of the vague location of her unwell uncle, Vincent has no idea where she lives; yet he finds himself looking out for her when he gets on the tram to go to work in the morning and while waiting for the tram to go home at the end of the day. In the second half of the week he takes an extra coffee break both morning and afternoon, spends slightly longer than perhaps he should in the canteen, and all on the off-chance that he might see her — or that she might seek him out. Doing so is, he knows, distracting him from his work, and probably adding to Verna’s suspicion that all is not well. And in a strange way, that is how it feels. He is slightly unnerved, off-balance; the news about Noah, Verna’s intervention, and the mystery of Marina, all combine to confuse him. As he travels home on Thursday evening a little later than usual, he mulls over his disquiet and finds himself adding to it, his experience when out shopping and his sudden recollection of meeting Marcus — his first meeting with Marcus — increasing the forces ranged against his equilibrium.
The arrival of a note in the internal mail mid-way through Friday morning does nothing to help re-ground him. Although it merely informs him of the time she will arrive at his house the following day (around five-thirty, in order to give her time to prepare their meal so they can eat around seven), it is sufficient to prompt a number of fresh questions — and to trigger another extended coffee break in the hope that he might see her in order to answer some of them. How, for example, has she acquired his address? He has not told her, of that he is sure. Perhaps if she knew someone who worked in the Personnel Department; well, it wouldn’t be too hard to find it out. And what is she planning to cook? There were some things he didn’t like; mushrooms, for example. And does he need to secure anything himself, an ingredient or a bottle of wine perhaps — even if the latter has recently become so much more expensive? Yet he knows these are essentially minor questions. As he steps down from the tram, larger ones remain; questions known but unarticulated.
If you can’t wait for the rest of the serialisation, you can buy a discounted copy of the book.