Liz Jensen - The Paper Eater

If there’s one thing to be said about life in captivity, it’s that you get to travel.

Welcome aboard the Sea Hero , a former Attractionworld cruise liner rescued by the Liberty Corporation from the ship-breaker’s yard and converted at a cost of squillions into a floating fibreglass cage. Two male humans per cabin, and trans-hemispheric incarceration conditions apply. The pros of this include human-rights entitlements to craft-hobby materials and language cassettes. The cons: curtailed freedom of movement, seasickness, no smoking, and a Babel feel. Human detritus being big global business, you can be sure the profit margin looks crakko. That’s the backdrop.

The hero – me.

Bonjour . Harvey Kidd. Forty-four, balding, ink-stained and alone. Divorced, beclobbered and unfree. A defective product of society, a nobody, briefly and catastrophically catapulted to somebodydom against his will. Not a real hero, but the opposite: a coward, a human ostrich. Prone to nightmares. Sometimes I’d rather not sleep.

But I must have done last night because this morning I’m woken by a vigorous electric crackle from the tannoy. Showbiz being in Captain Malt Fishook’s blood, he doesn’t drop his bombshell right away. He introduces the concerto first.

– Hi, folks, his voice ring-a-dings through the static. Beautiful day out there. (Like bollocks. It’s grey and dank, dishwater, sea, sky like ectoplasm.) Today’s composer is Hugo Alfvèn, a Swede whose work flourished in the 1930s, particularly on cruise liners.

Fishook’s a former Attractionworld man. Like the duvet covers, he came with the ship as part of the package. You can see why a leisure conglomerate would want shot of him; there’s a side to him that would unsettle the kiddies.

– Well, Voyagers, he goes on in this global drawl he’s got. Before this morning’s musical entertainment, let me tell you that the next port of call is one that some of you know well.

A bad feeling germinates inside me. For weeks the ship’s been jazzed up with nerves, whispers, fear. Our navigational rota dictates that we ricochet from one territory to the next, so as not to stay in anyone’s back yard, and the latest rumour’s been that –

– We’re heading next, he says, for the island of Atlantica.

Boom. The rumour’s true. The bad feeling sprouts to life, like a manic fungus that blobs up in the dark. Fishook must know what kind of wounds he’s opening. What can of worms. It gets worse.

– Our arrival on the island in ten days’ time, he goes, all nonchalant, will coincide with the national festival, Liberty Day. You can hear him smile in the little pause he gives. Smell the cigar smoke as he puffs. – There’ll be fireworks, experience simulators, and a Final Adjustment, among other attractions. All the major retail outlets are offering unprecedented discounts, some of which will be available at our on-board concessions. Which as you know accept both dollars and euros. So get ready to party, folks!

John’s shape in the bunk above, like a nylon pregnancy, bulges to the left, then stiffens. A Final Adjustment, among other attractions . For a bloke on Death Row, that is not a happy thing to hear. I shudder. Us Atlanticans are all on the list, but John, being an actual killer, is right up there at the top, with the geologists and soil physicists they keep in solitary.

– So now for our Swedish concerto, goes Fishook. Happy sailing. And please – enjoy!

Then the tannoy gives a burp and some swoony music kicks in; a tricksy jazz rhythm, with big-band trumpety stuff complaining in the background. Atrocious.

My cell-mate doesn’t move. Cabin-companionis the official term. The Captain’s term. Fishook has brought with him from Attractionworld a penchant for theming, which afflicts his terminology. Voyagers. Crew. Journeys, as in, I see from my records that you are booked on a lifelong journey, Voyager. On behalf of the crew, let me welcome you aboard. Likes to hawk the lie that we’re all on a happy cruise, taking a break from the pressures of society, with him, Cap’n Malt, triumphant on the poop, superintending our romantic odyssey through the waters of the northern hemisphere. The media back home view it differently.

They call us floating scum.

Finally, John groans through the music.

– You know what that means, for me, he says.

– Not necessarily, I go.

I’m feeling jittery, ragged, claustrophobic, a bit sick. For once, I’m grateful for the musical racket dinning through the sound system.

– You’d have been notified, I say. As firmly as I can. Has Fishook called you to the bridge yet? I can’t see John’s face from here, but I guess he’s just staring moochily out of the porthole at this point. – Well, has he? I say. No.

– No, John echoes.

– Well then, I tell him. Hang on to that, is my advice.

But I leave the cabin as soon as they unlock. Experience has taught me that emotions are for losers. Feel a thing for a fellow-human and you’re dead meat.

At breakfast, the canteen is strangely silent. The Euro tables are filled up, and I spot a few stray Yanks, but the Atlantican section – more than half the canteen – is almost empty. Then word starts going round that one of the blokes in solitary, some soil physicist, has thrown a wobbly and got himself frogmarched to Dr Pappadakis, who zonked him with a jab. And that a structural engineer, helicoptered in from the island last month, started yelling out a string of mathematical equations from a porthole, then tried to chuck himself overboard. Personally, I know how to deal with my own demons. I go to the Art Room and come back with a sheaf of scrap paper to fuel what Dr Pappadakis calls my neurotic hobby.

It’s not neurosis, it’s survival, I’ve told him many times. Why not strive for numbness? He has no answer to that. Through certain techniques involving the jaw muscles, and paper, I have managed to paralyse my entire brain for long stretches of time.

Don’t knock it.

I make my papier mâché in the traditional way, by actually chewing the paper myself. Like most people, I can cram a page of A4 in my gob, no problem. Cooped in a cabin, a year after a certain knitting machine went haywire, I’ve had time to chew things over.

Like this: Chew, chew, chew.

Spit.

And plop, into the pulp bucket!

Loose-fibred craft paper or newspaper is undoubtedly the best material to use, but I have a range of redundant criminal dossiers to recycle. (To get technical for a moment, we’re talking upwards of ten thousand computer-sprocket pages, medium-stiff, and tolerably rich in rag content.) I began chewing paper shortly after I came on board ship, in the wake of the first Mass Readjustment. Initially, I started the chewing to keep myself from blabbing the true story of my rejection by society, but soon it developed into a comforting habit. It helped blank things out. Memories, mostly. And now, a year on, although the ink’s turned me as grey as concrete, I wouldn’t be without it.