Luke Kennard - The Transition

The tiny abrasion tingled and throbbed sporadically throughout the day. It made him laugh. Karl thought of a story he’d once heard about a would-be martyr in the third century who was on his way to the capital with every intention of being tortured and killed for his faith. He had to break his journey and a monk put him up in an old barn and, in the morning, asked him how his night had been. He complained about the draught and the flea bites, and the monk told him that he probably wasn’t ready to face martyrdom.

Karl knew what to do. He wrote to his anonymous employers. Anyone he had ever worked for, all eighty-two email addresses. He needed more work, better work, urgently, whatever it was. He got only one reply, from someone called Sot Barnslig, offering to make him supervisor for two click-farms, enlisting people from around the world to generate fake traffic for websites, paying them out of the same reserve from which he would draw his own fee. The work was menial and morally dubious, but the pay was better than his fake copywriting and he started to make a dent in the most pressing credit cards.

Actually, said Sot Barnslig – after Karl had been successfully paying down his seventeen debts for a fortnight and was starting to get some rest again – actually, the click-farms were a front for an enormous skimming operation. Sot Barnslig confessed that he was stealing tiny amounts from thousands of different accounts and credit cards, amounts too small to be noticed by their owners, and Karl was unwittingly assisting him.

Karl emailed Sot Barnslig: Why did you tell me that? and carried on.

Unfortunately Sot Barnslig had either been compromised by investigators or had been an undercover agent all along. Karl was required to give up his laptop and, in desperation, he called his old university room-mate, Keston, an accountant, told him everything, and tried not to cry during their preliminary conversation.

‘ Oh , K-Pax,’ said Keston. ‘You’ve got yourself in a right pickle, haven’t you? That gross yellow one.’

‘Am I going to prison?’

‘This is where being male, middle-class and white comes into its own,’ said Keston. ‘Nothing but safety nets. And you’ve touched the hem of the right garment.’

Keston organised a lawyer, who failed to adequately demonstrate Karl’s ignorance and now it seemed that Karl was going to have to spend some time in a low-security prison.

The young, owlish notary public had been talking for some time. The only representative of Spenser and Rudge currently willing to talk to him pro bono, he was telling Karl it was neither the best- nor the worst-case scenario. Did he know, by the way, that the origin of the phrase worst-case scenario was not legal, but in fact military? Karl said that he didn’t. It’s a strategy, the notary public told him. Before a manoeuvre you must always imagine the most awful thing the contingent world might throw your way.

There was a strong antiseptic smell in the notary public’s office. He must have injured himself somehow.

‘It’s a good product, Mr Temperley,’ said the notary. ‘The Transition. It’s worth considering as an alternative. Your accountant is working out the finer details. He agrees it’s a good product.’

Karl pictured a pearlescent turquoise ball bouncing into the road between parked cars and he imagined slamming down the brake and the clutch at the same time, but he was doing almost forty because he was a terrible, negligent driver. What is the first thing you say to the parent? It doesn’t matter. You’re so, so sorry ? Well, that’s just great. Real voices, official voices with their assurances, codes and timbre would take over at some point. Voices like that of his notary public, who had just said,

‘I appreciate this is probably not what you were expecting.’

Such was Karl’s distraction that by the time he realised that the notary public was offering him a place on a pilot scheme called The Transition in lieu of fifteen months in jail, he said yes without asking for further information, without calling his wife to discuss it with her, without pausing for breath.

The notary public blinked twice and handed him a thick, glossy brochure, saying that he might like to read it over before making up his mind. The cover depicted the blueprint for a house, but the rooms were designated things like EMPLOYMENT, NUTRITION, RESPONSIBILITY, RELATIONSHIP, BILLS, INVESTMENT, SELF-RESPECT. A semi-transparent overlay had THE TRANSITION embossed in capitals.

‘Your accountant was actually the one who drew our attention to it,’ said the notary public.

‘Keston,’ said Karl.

Aside from the online fraud, Karl’s tax infraction went back several years – a thread that snagged and unravelled the whole of his self-start marketing operation – and it was going to cost him and his wife a lot to pay it back. On top of Genevieve’s car payments and the credit card Karl had been using for groceries for the last six months, they were in a tight spot. And they were two months in arrears with their rent. Genevieve had texted him just before the meeting with the notary public and the text read only Eviction. Next Week :(

It was unseasonably hot for March. It was hot in the notary public’s office, and although Karl was only wearing climbing shorts and a red Cookie Monster T-shirt, the sweat was running sunblock into his eyes. He peeled open the brochure and scanned the first page but couldn’t take the words in.

Piaget defines the cognitive task of adolescence as the achievement of formal operational reasoning …

He looked up at the clock, at the maroon leather book spines, at the notary public’s suit jacket baking in a shaft of sunlight and mingling a distinctly sheepy smell with the TCP.

‘Can you summarise it for me?’ he said.

KARL WALKED HOME through the Thompsons’ suburb. The last decade had seen the professionalisation of the amateur landlord. Entire terraces were bought up, the houses divided and divided again. Is it not time, finally, for the government to curb this rampant greed which is draining our country’s resources and disenfranchising an entire generation? an editorial would occasionally ask. In fact three administrations had tried: a certain percentage of property portfolios had to be dedicated to social housing, to key workers, to people in their thirties, but the sanctions only made the landlords, who had inherited their property portfolios from their parents, put up their rents to cover their losses. They felt their losses. Karl’s own landlord, an affable man with toothbrush hair who always wore a grey Crombie, impressed this upon him. They had school fees and gastro-holidays and multiple mortgages to pay. Families spent their money raising their children and, as the years went by, savings became the preserve of the shrinking caste who already owned several houses. The average age of leaving the parental home drifted into the early forties. For Genevieve, raised by her grandparents, several years deceased, and Karl, who was the youngest child of an older couple, his father now convalescing in sheltered accommodation, this wasn’t an option. They were living, with their two-bar heater and all-in-one toaster oven, in the former conservatory of a Victorian semi-detached villa, a shared bathroom on each floor and a sense in both their minds of having made a bad decision at some critical juncture. The conservatory’s Perspex ceiling had been wallpapered, but it was peeling at the corners and let in a nimbus of brilliant light.

Well, whatever. The fact remained they had running water, supermarkets, cinemas.

‘I mean for goodness’ sake, we’re still wealthier than ninety-seven per cent of the world’s population,’ said Genevieve, whenever Karl complained. ‘We’re still a three-per-cent leech on the side of the planet, sucking most of it dry. And you have a cold half the time. You could be the richest man in the world and you’d still spend most of the day blowing your nose and moaning about your sinuses.’