Liz Jensen - The Paper Eater

Sometimes I read the papers, before I chew them. But sometimes I just chew them. Pages like this:

I certify that this is my own statement, that I am not an Enemy of Liberty, have no criminal record, am of sound mind, and own a loyalty card. I am aware that anything I say may be used as evidence in any forthcoming Libertycare trial of the Sect member or members. I am willing to appear as a witness of terrorism, attempted terrorism, enablement of terrorism, moral backing of terrorism, or financial compliance with terrorism. I hereby declare that I am not masquerading as anyone other than myself –––––––.

And there’s a space, for the customer to write his name. Or hers.

Mrs Tina Willets , in this case.

And who is she? An Atlantican. A model customer. Nobody.

Chew, chew, chew.

Spit.

And plop!

At the end of each session, I swallow a mouthful. I need the roughage.

There are hordes of customers like Mrs Willets who feel invisible and unheard. As a certain woman once showed me, the daily human impulses of every man, woman and child on the island – from religious cravings to retail habits – can be plotted on a graph. As a junior associate, she processed some of the figures herself.

Chew, chew, chew.

There is much to be said for routine. A man with a well-designed timetable is in control of at least part of his destiny, isn’t he. Aeons ago, when I lived in a white semi with a green door in Gravelle Road, South District, Harbourville, I always ran business to a strict timetable. I had to. In my unique line of work, if you missed the opening of a stock market, or the renewal date for a passport, or the deadline for a payment, you were history. Every job has its occupational hazards, and fraud’s no exception.

My circumstances dictate that my timetable is different now, though it still involves paperwork.

Of a kind.

After masticating each mouthful sixty times (the enzymes in saliva play a big role, I discovered in the ship’s Education Station, where I am a regular visitor) – after doing that, I spit the pulp into a green plastic bucket (capacity, five litres), and when it’s half-full, I pour in two litres of hot tap-water and stir. Then I leave my raw material to soak overnight, and the next day gloop the pulp out into my small storage vat. Next I add certain specific quantities of whitewood glue, flour, wallpaper paste, and oil of cloves. Then I whisk it with a metal hand-whisk. This part’s important, to achieve the right consistency. The finer the pulp, the stronger the paper paste. John calls this mixture my cud. There are short-cut, gimcrack methods. You can buy the kind of cat-litter that consists of recycled newspaper pellets, which you soak in water, before adding the other ingredients. Or you can get hold of so-called ‘craft kits’. Or wood pulp. But as I explained at length to Dr Pappadakis, I believe in using authentic materials in the time-honoured way. Actually, being detained as an Enemy of Liberty, I don’t have any choice.

Paper has played a large part in my life.

It’s because of paper that I’m here.

Chew, chew, chew.

Spit. And plop!

As cabins go, this is the usual meat-and-two-veg. Standard bunks, a toilet cubicle, a wash-basin. A fold-out table, for meals and craft activities. A shelf laden with my homemade chess-pieces, and the knick-knacks we’ve accumulated between us, my cabin companion and I. Duvets on the bunks, with Attractionworld designs on the covers. This month I have the Funky Chicken. John has Stegoman.

It’s the last day of July, according to the Alpine calendar John’s stuck to the wall. If it weren’t for these boxed months, with snow-capped mountain ranges behind, you’d have no way of telling that it’s been a year since we left Atlantica. When you’re on a ship, there’s no sense of seasons. Back home, the year had a natural retail rhythm, with Christmas giving way to the January sales, followed by Valentine Week, Mother’s Day, Easter, Father’s Day, the Silly Season, Liberty Day, Back to Skool, then Hallowe’en, the pre-Christmas season, Christmas itself and then the whole shebang again.

You knew where you were. And now in ten days’ time –

Don’t think. Head in the sand. Chew!

– Ugh, John goes, picking up his embroidery. He’s a needlework man.

John and I, we’ve been together a month.

If I’m short and squat, which as a matter of fact I am, then he’s the opposite: a towering, scary man, lumpy-featured. He’s a murderer, or so the story goes – though you never know who’s truly guilty here. You won’t hear the Sect mentioned except by the new arrivals. And they soon learn. John has glinty little eyes like chinks in a wall, and a talent to hone in on weakness, which gives weight to the rumour that he bullied three of his neighbours into a suicide pact.

We have our arguments over my papier mâché industry. He claims it turns his stomach to see me sitting here in my thermal vest, masticating. And sometimes he’ll give me a grim look and try on his special blindfold, the one he’s planning to wear for what he’s now calling the Big Fry-Up. But we have more in common than you might think.

– Do you support capital punishment?

That was the first question he asked me, when he came to join me in the cabin, after the previous bloke, Kogevinas, got transferred to the half-way facility on Gibraltar. Not Hi, John’s the name, or So gimme five, mate, or anything normal. It threw me.

– Capital punishment, no, I told him.

– Torture, then? he goes.

Now he had me there. You see, I’d been thinking in some detail about this issue, and I’d decided that some people deserved to be tortured, psychologically, for their crimes. An eye for an eye, a psyche for a psyche. Plus a little physical discomfort doesn’t go amiss. I was thinking of my own personal torturer, Wesley Pike, of course, and the ways I’d like to fuck with his head and cause him grief if I got the chance. Call me childish, but what I’d do is I’d shut him in a glass box, stopper his larynx, make him wear special confusing glasses, and stuff bat-shit up his nostrils. I’d make him drink salted lemonade from a baby’s bottle. I’d smear him with chilli-oil and jeer at his dick. When you’re cooped in a cabin, you find yourself having thoughts like that. Quite normal. So when John asked me for my views on torture, I found myself hesitating.

– I said torture, he goes. You oppose capital punishment. We’ve established that. But are you in favour of torture?

– Under certain circumstances, I confessed, I have to admit I am.

He thumped me on the back, then, hard. I was frightened for a moment, given his reputation as a man specialising in unprovoked violence, but it turned out the gesture was friendly.

– Correct answer, he said.

Torture became an issue we returned to often, after that. It was the nearest we had to common ground. He was an expert on the physical side of it. I favoured discussing the psychological. We’d talk for hours, sometimes, playing the game first developed in a children’s playground, sometime in the fifteenth century probably, the game called Which Would You Prefer?

This is how it goes.

– Which would you prefer, I’d ask, for example, standing in a vat of rancid margarine watching all the forcies who ever nicked you making love to your ex-wife – and her enjoying it , or having to listen on headphones to two hundred hours of Così fan tutte played backwards at ninety decibels and at the wrong speed?

– Watching the wife, John might decide, and hoping she’d shag herself to death. And which would you prefer, being boiled alive, or being forced to eat nothing but your own excrement until you died of salmonella?