Joe Treasure - The Book of Air

‘No offence, Jason. You do whatever it is you do.’ He smiled, just slightly – a thin sneer of a smile – and he seemed to relax. He’d got me wound up and it made him feel better.

‘So, Troy, I hear you’re interested in finding solutions.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Penny said you’re a solutionist or something.’

‘I don’t think so. I think you got that wrong.’

I wouldn’t have mentioned the solutionists. I intended not to, but I wanted to throw him off balance. I assumed it was important to him, whatever it was, because Penny had phoned specifically to tell me it wasn’t. It was either that or ask him how his dad was doing.

Troy was looking out the window, looking at me, looking out the window again. ‘No, you’ve got me there. I don’t even know what that is. You’ve gone off on some sort of tangent with that one.’

Penny came with the drinks on a tray – a lager for me, something short and fizzy for her, ginger ale maybe, and an obscene quantity of watered down orange juice for Troy. She put the tray down on the table and perched on the edge of a chair. ‘I hope you two found something to talk about.’ She looked at us, each of us in turn.

Troy was staring at the tray. ‘That’s not enough change.’ There was a tenner and a scattering of coins. ‘I gave you a twenty.’

‘That’s all the change I got, Troy, honest.’

‘And you didn’t count it?’

‘There’s hundreds of people up there. Look. It took me ages just to get served.’

‘So you’re saying you weren’t paying attention?’

‘Are you sure it’s not enough?’

Without warning, Troy reached across the table and put a hand to Penny’s face. I thought he meant to take her by the ear like a schoolteacher in an old film. But just as abruptly he pulled back. His hand hovered for a moment above the table and opened with the index and middle fingers pointing upwards. The pound coin between them caught the light, glinting as it turned. He smiled, put the coin in his pocket and gathered up the rest of the money.

Penny had gone pale and her breathing was shallow. She said, ‘What was that about?’

‘You’ve been talking to Jason about our hobby.’

She looked puzzled.

‘You know – our little magic circle – the illusionists.’ He articulated the word, the wrong word, with exaggerated care. ‘I hope you haven’t given away any tricks.’

‘I don’t know what you mean. I don’t know any tricks.’

‘That’s what you do with the reptiles, then, is it?’ I said, ‘in the reptile house – teach them magic tricks?’

‘Yeah. The snakes are the worst. Hard doing magic if you don’t have hands.’

We sat for a while, listening to other people’s laughter and the sirens on Blackfriars Road.

Then Troy said, ‘We’re going to have to go now, aren’t we, Pen.’

‘But we just got here.’

‘I think you must have left the gas on. I can smell it from here. Can’t you smell something, Jason? You must have left something cooking, Pen. One of these days, you’ll burn the place down.’

I told Penny to call me. If she needed anything, she had my number. I meant if he hit her, or scared her to the point that she just had to get out and needed somewhere to crash, somewhere to hide.

I googled Troy. I had that one name and I had zoology, which turned out to be enough. He did have a PhD – from Imperial College. Something to do with mutations in zoonotic diseases, which I discovered were diseases that originate in animals – HIV, swine fever, avian flu, that sort of thing. For some reason I was reassured. He was more or less who Penny thought he was, even he was a mean fucker. I thought no more about it. I had my own problems.

Weeks passed, a month or more maybe and Penny phoned. ‘Jason, I need to borrow your car. The SUV. We’re moving, Simon and me, and we’ve got all this stuff.’

‘I didn’t know you could drive.’

‘There’s a lot about me you don’t know.’

‘I didn’t know you believed in driving. Aren’t cars part of the problem?’

‘Are you going to lend me the car or not?’

‘If you need a car I’ll get you a car.’

‘Is that a yes, then? I can’t do it on the bus, can I?’

‘Yes, you can have a car. And a driver to go with it, if you like. Is this for a day, a weekend, what?’

‘A driver to go with it?’

‘That’s what I said.’

‘Like the driver’s just another commodity.’

‘Not a commodity, no. A person who drives for a living and will be glad of the work.’

‘And of course you’ll pay for this car and this driver.’

‘That’s what I’m offering.’

‘Money. That’s what it always comes down to with you, isn’t it.’

‘That’s the way things work, Pen, until the whole system breaks down and we go back to bartering.’

‘But I didn’t ask for your money, I just asked to borrow your car.’

I took a deep breath. ‘And you’ve definitely got a licence.’

‘I said, didn’t I? Are you calling me a liar?’

‘Penny, I’m just trying to help you out. Christ, when did I become the enemy?’

There was silence and I realised she was crying.

‘Tell me what’s going on.’

‘We’re moving out of London. There’s this community. They want me. I feel at home there. I need to move some stuff – mainly clothes, a bit of furniture – you know.’

‘So I should drive you.’

‘Stop trying to organise my life, all right?’ I heard exasperation, but something else as well, something I didn’t expect – panic.

‘Is everything OK, Penny?’

‘We’ve got it worked out, see. We just drive down with our stuff, stay overnight and drive back. Then I get the train down at the weekend with Simon. That’s it, that’s the way we’re doing it.’

‘We – who’s we?’

‘Me and Troy.’

‘Ah.’

I was listening to silence again. Then the sound of breathing, quick sharp breaths.

‘Oh fuck off then Jason if that’s the way you feel. Fucking fuck right off.’

A van pulled out from the kerb and I overreacted. For a moment I was straddling the centre line with a bus hurtling towards me. I jerked back to my own side of the road and slowed down while my heart rate settled.

Why was I even listening to Penny? Why was I willing to consider lending her a car? I wasn’t even convinced she could drive. Probably Troy would end up driving, which would be better in the sense that he probably could drive and worse in the sense that he was more than slightly deranged.

The phone rang and it was Penny. She was crying again. Or still crying from the last call. ‘Don’t be angry with me Jason. Just lend me the car, OK? I promised you would, that’s all, and I can’t go back on it. I can’t . This is the way we planned it.’

There was more like this. What’s the point of going over it? I lent her the Nissan, that’s all. I wasn’t there when she picked it up. I’d remembered you had an appointment at the clinic, Caroline, for your first scan, and I’d promised to come with you. So I filled it with petrol and left the keys with my secretary and set off with you in the Mercedes. I didn’t hear until later that she’d shown up with Troy and that she’d looked sort of out of it.

That got me worried. I googled the solutionists without any luck. So I added the word Kishar and discovered I hadn’t been paying attention. The Kishar solution in all its mutations was everywhere, bubbling just under the surface. BK Compton was revered and occasionally reviled. I found myself in chatrooms where people earnestly debated what kind of solution she had in mind. There were references to the book’s conclusion. So I dug out the copy of Kishar in Crisis Penny had given me and turned to the end. There it was, the very last sentence – Once we accept that we are the problem, it doesn’t take much to imagine the solution . But what did that mean ? Even fans of the book couldn’t agree. Was it advocating population control? Should people stop breeding altogether? Should governments put hormones in the water like fluoride? In interviews, BK herself had always refused to elaborate.