Liz Jensen - The Paper Eater

The boy needs shooting.

Then came the first nightmare, which did its usual thing: starting as an innocent dream and then turning nasty.

I’m the Bird of Liberty, and I’m flying over the ocean, with the rest of my family following silently in my wake in V formation. I guess they’re Birds of Liberty too – in fact I get the feeling we’re a smallish flock returning home after a trip away.

Suddenly, there it is. Down below, look. The familiar fried-egg outline of Atlantica, cushioned on the sea, its lush flatlands and lace-frilled shores exhaling a purplish haze of mist. You can picture the seabed below, where the artificial land has been grafted like a tooth in a jawbone, the waste craters like blood vessels feeding the porous rock, mingling fathoms deep with minerals, calcium and hot brine. Feeling the organic genius of it, I feel a nudge of pride, a nudge that turns into a loud yell.

– Home sweet home! I cry out.

And my voice rings happy through the clear blue sky.

From up here the geography of Atlantica is scaled down to toytown, a 3D map. Hovering high, you can see Groke to the north, Mohawk to the south, St Placid to the east, all ringed by farmland – pineapple fields, guava orchards, the bright red hoo-ha of tulips. And spread below, the leisure centres, schools, malls, golf courses, and retail parcs of Harbourville itself. As we swoop down, spiralling lower over the capital, the yellow-grey skyscrapers leap out at us like pop-ups, unpacking their mazes of detail, crowding us with the machine hum of the twenty-four-hour city. I love its thrill, I love its energy, I love its hope.

We’ve landed now, on a sea-less beach – a flat vista of sand, peppered with small boulders and clotty hanks of bladder wrack. Here, a big bonanza of a picnic spreads out before us: chive-and-onion kettle crisps, whole lobsters, processed-cheese triangles, lychees, choc-o-hoops, devilled peacock eggs. What you might call The Works.

My mother Gloria sports a sparkly evening dress of turquoise chiffon, protected by a homely kitchen apron – for thrills and spills, she says. She’s busy doling out home-made granary baps with a large pair of surgical pincers. Us kids first, then Dad and Uncle Sid. The next part’s blurry (there’s a live crab in it, and a five-piece chamber orchestra) then abracadabra, somehow I’ve collected a mass of driftwood for an al fresco fire, where my big sis is char-grilling some freshly caught mackerel thrust upon her by a local fisherman struck dumb by the sight of her fantastic naked breasts. Lola always goes topless, so she often gets perks like this. We’ve got used to it as a family. Sometimes you can stop a dream in its tracks, but this one kept rolling on, filling me with its bliss.

We’re on to business matters. I do the talking, as usual, fast and furious, while they listen. I’ve got a proposition for Uncle Sid, I’m saying. His assets are out of kilter. We’ll have to sell a consignment of Chinese water pistols and other novelty toys to Lola’s comfort-ranch empire, via a subsidiary of one of Dad’s loan schemes, so as to set off a chain reaction in Cameron’s leisure-and-armaments-related stock, knocking up the value of Mum’s petrol shares. And bingo, the water-melon transaction we began back in March will come full-circle. The bottom line, I tell them, is a humungous profit for the family business.

They don’t get it, of course. They’re not so quick on the uptake finance-wise, which is why I’m managing our affairs in the first place. But they all cheer happily at the news, even my brother Cameron. And the smile Mum gives me says it all.

I, Harvey, am her favourite child. Ah, the happy chords she twangs in me, my mum! She takes a strawberry from her basket and pops it in my mouth. I catch sight of Dad and Uncle Sid exchanging a look – I’ve wowed them with my business smarts again, hooray – and my heart bangs with pride.

But when Cameron bares his perfect orthodontics to bite the fruit Mum hands him, I feel a horrible stab of jealousy at the thought that his strawberry might be bigger than mine. And watching the fruit’s sweet juice trickle across Lola’s breasts, I feel the usual surge of desire mingled with shame.

Slowly, depressingly, my strawberry turns sour. I taste paper, glue, and bitter ink. Above us, the sky blackens and dies.

Still chewing, I wake on the Sea Hero , bereft again.

Atlantica, Atlantica .

Outside through the porthole the sea is grey and flat as a strip of sheet metal, the sky a greenish wash, the horizon a menace now I know what’s lurking beyond it. John’s been having nightmares too. That’s no surprise. He’s woken three times and yelled and farted, then gone back to sleep. We’re both raddled and jagged and raw.

We’ve been lying there in silence for a while, thinking our morning thoughts, which are always the worst ones of the day, because they’re tangled in the freedom of sleep.

– Tell me how you did your fraud then, he goes. His voice is small and lonely like a kid’s.

I play along sometimes to soothe him. But today we both need it.

– There’s worm-holes in the system, just like in the galaxy, I tell him. (If I shut my eyes, I can remember the joy of it and forget what it led to. Remember the dream part, not the nightmare.) Wriggle through one, and you’re in a different dimension. The Fiddling Zone. There’s only two occupational hazards, I tell him: arrest and repetitive strain injury. Every five or six moves, you slice a piece off someone else’s salami and add a zero to your personal equation. It’s one of the oldest scams in the book. But you need to be the dedicated type.

– Wouldn’t suit me, then, murmurs John, lumping over on the bunk.

– No. But it suited me, I said. Ricocheting money back and forth. Shimmying to and fro over the International Date Line. I got very good at the pan-hemispheric transactions, I told him.

– What are they when they’re at home?

– They’re robbing Peter to pay Paolo. Then borrowing from Paolo to pay Hans, and ripping off Hans to satisfy Marie. Plundering Marie’s savings to fob off Josef, who owes Gretchen, who owes Randy, who in turn owes Peter. You can start with next to nothing. One bloke I heard of, he was actually a million in debt. By the end of the year, he’d whipped up a fortune, bought a fish farm near St Placid, and married a gas heiress. True story.

John grunts; he can’t help being impressed. These violenti don’t know their arse from their elbow when it comes to fraud.

– But how d’you get going, like?

– I had a thousand. It’s doodly squat, but it was enough to buy my dad a car.

– A car ?

– Yup. A car. The whole thing began with a humble Mitsubishi Supremo. It didn’t really exist as such, but there’s people on line’ll sell you anything. I didn’t want the car, see. I just wanted the electronic paperwork.

– Uh.

– So I used the A-Z and picked a street, then staged this fake accident, a big smash-up, with the car a write-off. Noted the time and place and then electronically weasled into the local copshop’s computer and dumped in the details. I got my dad to claim the insurance, which was double what I’d paid for the car documents.

I felt proud, remembering it. I was a bright kid. From John’s silence you could tell he was impressed.

– Then I made Mum decide that my brother needed a brace because his teeth were wonky. It was the most complicated and expensive kind of brace that existed on the market, it was state of the art, at the time, with rubber bands and copper spring-work and pressure-pads and implants. Anyway, I whipped together this huge orthodontist’s bill, and got Mum to claim it off the Social Office. That was in the days before Libertycare. I think Wickham was the President, at the time. Or maybe even Malone. So then I had Mum set up her own import-export company. And then Dad too. That’s when we started trading in earnest. You can shunt their money about and add to it, see.