Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2017

Copyright © Luke Kennard 2017

Cover design by Jonathan Pelham

The right of Luke Kennard to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008200428

Ebook Edition © January 2017 ISBN: 9780008200442

Version: 2017-07-20

Dedication

For Zoë

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

1

WHENEVER KARL TEMPERLEY felt that he couldn’t endure another moment he would imagine that he had just run over and killed a child. The shock of the impact, the screech of his too-late emergency stop, the tiny body in the gutter, a parent – sometimes the mother, sometimes the father – running towards him as he stood by the bloodied bonnet of his wife’s Fiat Punto. This imagined, he returned to his real world and its trivial sorrows with relief and gratitude.

‘… your marital status notwithstanding …’ the notary public was saying.

Lately though, facing fifteen months in jail for fraud and a tax infraction he still couldn’t quite fathom – neither what he had done or neglected to do, nor how exactly he had accomplished or overlooked it – he found himself spending longer and longer at his inner roadside.

Karl Temperley wrote consumer reviews of products he had never used and bespoke school and undergraduate essays as ‘study aids’ for ten pence a word. It was a lowly portfolio career, but such was his determination to do something literary with his education: he had read English and taken a Master’s degree in the Metaphysical Poets. It had cost him £78,000, an amount which seemed impossible and therefore easy to ignore.

His employers were email addresses who signed off with different names, but their tone was warm and jovial enough and he was well thought of – of this they assured him – for his ability to write essentially the same thing as if it were being said by ten different people. Where some saw a carbon-fibre laptop case, Karl saw a Russian novel.

His wife, Genevieve, taught at a local primary school. An enviable demographic once known as Double Income No Kids and yet, once the rent and bills were paid, their debts serviced, Karl found that he had to think twice about buying a pair of shoes when his old ones wore through at the sole. The rent kept going up. He was aware they brought some of this on themselves; they had expectations. Every day they drank flavoured coffees the size of poster tubes, which cost as much as the baristas serving them would earn in an hour. They loaded supermarket trolleys with snacks and treats which could largely be consumed on the way home. In the last week of every month they were inevitably down to the wire, so he would put a week’s shopping on his credit card. Then a return train fare. The pair of shoes he needed. A birthday present for Genevieve. Dinner. The bank was happy to increase his credit limit, increase it again and, instead of increasing it a third time, to offer him a temporary loan to consolidate his debt, so that the double-capacity credit card went back to a tantalising £0.00. Karl decided he might start taking advantage of the daily invitations to take out more credit cards, credit cards with banks he hadn’t even heard of, cards in every colour of the spectrum, cards with limits of £300 which he could use for small purchases, cards with limits of £5,000 with which he could chivalrously pay for a new head gasket when Genevieve’s car got into trouble and, the following week, take her on a five-star mini-break to Paris when she turned thirty-two (her thirtieth had been marred by a minor psychotic episode, and her thirty-first was not much better, so he felt the need to compensate). Finally, there was one beautiful, transparent credit card which shimmered like a puddle of petrol and had a limit of £11,000. He used it to pay off some of the smaller credit cards and make the minimum monthly payment on the middle-sized ones. Whenever this one needed servicing he would take out another bantamweight card or a short-term advance.

Genevieve knew nothing of his seventeen-card private Ponzi scheme. As far as she could see, both she and Karl worked damn hard all week then collapsed, exhausted, and spent all weekend either asleep or streaming complete seasons of American dramas to get back to full strength. Whenever they had some time off they both came down with head colds. It never occurred to her that they might be living beyond their means and it took three years for Karl to finally max out his most copious line of credit, the rat queen of his nest of cards. After that, letters printed in red ink started to arrive. Statements with lateness penalties, interest on the lateness penalties, penalties for exceeding the credit limit and lateness penalties on those penalties, punitive rates of interest and demands for final settlement. The double dose of sleeping pills he was taking with a tumbler of mid-priced brandy to silence the grinding gears of his incipient ruination stopped working. He was getting crotchety with Genevieve and it was upsetting her. His very raison d’être was to not upset Genevieve; it was, so he told himself, the reason he’d got into so much debt in the first place and yet it had led to him upsetting her anyway.

Maybe I should kill myself? he thought, looking at his face in the communal bathroom mirror one winter morning, his cheeks covered in shaving foam. He pressed the five-blade Ultra Smooth Advanced Wet Shave System safety razor to his left wrist and shaved a Parmesan-thin centimetre of flesh. Blood appeared like a watermark. It really, really stung. Maybe not. He put his watch on over the top of it.

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.

2

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.’

Karl sniffed.

If their generation were waiting to have kids, or perhaps electing not to have kids at all, that was all for the better. It wasn’t as though the world might run short of people. The development of a safe male contraceptive device, a tiny chip implanted in the thigh (occasionally, and in Karl’s case, without spousal accord; the doctors never asked), had its part to play in this, for sure. ‘Does any man ever really want to have children?’ its inventor asked, palms upward at a press conference. This was met with some derision. ‘Yeah, because I’ve hit a nerve,’ he said. ‘Mark my words: the languor and fecklessness of the male gender will be the salvation of the human race. There are plenty of orphans if you want to adopt.’

Karl crossed the road between two yellow sports utility vehicles and walked by the Ravencroft Community Centre which had been converted into eleven luxury condos by the Thompsons.

The Transition was founded, the notary public had explained to him, because there had been a steep increase in cases such as Karl’s. A generation who had benefited from unrivalled educational opportunities and decades of peacetime, who nonetheless seemed determined to self-destruct through petty crime, alcohol abuse and financial incompetence; a generation who didn’t vote; who had given up on making any kind of contribution to society and blamed anyone but themselves for it.

So Karl ignored the pamphleteer, a young white guy with dreadlocks who stood by a cracked bathtub on the communal green with a stack of statistics about the Thompsons’ neglect of their 700 tenants. Fronting for the Socialist Workers Party. Thompson Slumlords Extraordinaire. But as far as Karl could see, the Thompsons’ tenants had it pretty good. Fixed contracts, solid walls and ceilings.

‘I’m fine, thanks.’ He kept his hands in his pockets.

‘You’re not fine,’ said the pamphleteer as Karl walked on, ‘you’ve been conditioned into total indifference.’

‘Same thing, innit?’ said Karl.

3

GENEVIEVE PUT HER hair up with an enormous tortoiseshell hair-clip and wiped her eyes. Ten minutes before, when Karl had told her he was off the hook, she had cried and hugged him. Then she read the Transition brochure while smoking three cigarettes with increasing speed and intensity. Karl made two cups of tea in someone else’s mugs from the shared kitchen. Everything else was packed. One of them, a shiny black mug, bore the motivational slogan: Don’t fear the future. Be the future. It was supposed to be heat-activated, but something had gone wrong so that when Karl poured boiling water into the mug the only words visible were fear the future. Be

He was stirring one sugar into Genevieve’s tea when he heard her give a long, low howl. Not quite a howl, he thought, as he tapped the spoon on the side of the mug and threw it into the sink. It was too flat and unemotional to be called a howl. It was more like the cry of an animal in the jaws of a predator when it resigns itself to its fate. Karl pictured himself driving along a suburban road … He walked towards the sound.

Genevieve was lying on her side, like a shop-window dummy knocked over.

‘I’m so angry,’ she said, quietly.

‘I know it’s …’ said Karl.

‘It sounds absolutely bloody awful,’ she said, sitting upright and closing the booklet. ‘Couldn’t you have just gone to prison?’ Karl put the cups of tea on the floor next to Genevieve, sloshing a little over the side so that it scalded his hand. ‘I’m joking,’ she said. ‘It does sound dire, though. So don’t try to pretend we have any choice.’

‘The way I see it is it’s like a speeding course – you take the points on your licence or you give up a day for re-education.’

‘Yeah,’ said Genevieve. ‘Except your wife has to go with you and it’s six months.’

‘No rent,’ said Karl, shuffling down to the floorboards next to her.

‘So we get to live rent-free in a loft apartment – that’s great, Karl. Maybe I’ll start painting again.’

‘It’s more like lodging.’

‘I can see it’s more like lodging,’ said Genevieve. ‘Except the landlords don’t get paid. So they resent us. Even more than normal landlords.’

‘Well, the programme pays them,’ said Karl, taking a sip from his tea, which was still too hot, ‘but they’re not really doing it for the money. The notary said it was more like jury service.’

‘You know I don’t take sugar,’ said Genevieve.

‘What?’

‘My tea.’

‘I thought you—’

‘Only in coffee. It calls them “mentors”. I don’t like the idea of having mentors.’

‘So we put up with it,’ said Karl. ‘It’s supposed to help us and, you never know. It’s a pilot scheme; they haven’t ironed out the kinks yet, so it might actually be more helpful than they mean it to be.’

‘It’s patronising.’

‘That’s true.’

‘It says it’s a “fully holistic approach to getting our lives back on track”. It says they give us advice on being married. As well as the financial stuff. We’ve been married four years! It’s enormously patronising. And what about privacy?’

‘I’m not trying to argue that this is a good thing, G.’

‘It’s humiliating.’

Karl looked at her. Saying he was sorry seemed redundant.

‘You’ve read this?’ said Genevieve, flicking to the fifth page. ‘There’s a section on healthy eating. There’s a section on how to vote. A generation suffering from an unholy trinity of cynicism, ignorance and apathy,’ she read. ‘That’s you and me, honey.’

‘It’s certainly me,’ said Karl. ‘You’re just getting dragged down by the rest of us.’

‘And who are they, anyway? Are we randomly assigned? Is it like a dating website?’

Karl looked at his feet. They had already been allocated mentors. Once he’d agreed to the terms and signed and dated two documents, the process had been seven mouse clicks on the other side of the notary public’s desk.

‘Do they pick us out like puppies?’

‘We meet them tomorrow,’ said Karl.

‘Oh God,’ said Genevieve. ‘What are their names?’

‘Stu. Stuart Carson. And Janna Ridland.’

‘Janna,’ said Genevieve. ‘Janna. The name sounds half empty.’

‘You’re doing this to keep me out of prison. Do you need to hear me say how much I appreciate it?’

Genevieve turned and kicked her legs over his. She shuffled closer.

‘This is what I don’t like, Karly, we’re –’ she put her head on his shoulder – ‘we’re going through the same ups and downs young couples have always gone through, and they’re treating us like we’re an aberration.’

Karl took a sip of his tea.

‘I’m thirty-four,’ he said. ‘When my father was thirty-four he and Mum already had my two sisters. And a Ford Escort. They owned a house. They went on holidays.’

‘When my father was thirty-four,’ said Genevieve, ‘he had my mother sectioned, dropped me and Nina at Granny’s and drank himself to death in Madrid.’

‘Madrid?’ said Karl.

Last time it was Berlin and, now that he thought of it, he was certain that Genevieve never mentioned the same city twice.

4

IN THE COUNCIL CHAMBER, every room looked like a waiting room, lined with low oblong benches and school chairs, one strip light flickering. It was hard to get up from the deep spongy bench when their mentors came through the double doors of 151.

Karl’s first thought was that they didn’t look any older than him or Genevieve, but then maybe there was only a decade or so in it. He had expected an aura of age and experience: authority figures, the way teachers looked when he was a pupil. Janna was angular and pretty, a white blouse tucked into a black leather pencil skirt. Her mouth was very small, like a china doll’s. Stu at least looked weathered. He was wearing black jeans and a black T-shirt with a lightning bolt on it. He had a black and purple Mohican, four inches tall, five spikes.

‘God, this place is depressing,’ said Stu. ‘Sorry they made you come here.’

‘Don’t get up,’ said Janna, once they were up. They exchanged air kisses.

‘You probably weren’t expecting us to look like this,’ said Stu.

‘Oh, what, the Mohawk?’ said Karl.

‘The Mohawk actually wore a patch at the base of the skull and a patch at the forehead,’ said Stu. ‘This is closer to an Iro.’

‘Do you have any …’ said Genevieve. ‘Indian blood, I mean?’

‘Genevieve,’ said Stu, ‘I am merely an enthusiast.’

Stu busied himself collecting four flimsy cups of coffee from the machine in the corner. The two couples sat opposite one another over a pine and clapboard table too low for the seats.

‘Drink,’ he said. ‘It’s terrible, but, you know, ritual. Everything feels better when you’re holding something warm. You’re a primary school teacher, I’m told?’

‘That’s right,’ said Genevieve.

‘That’s brilliant,’ said Stu. ‘You’re one of the most important people in the country. And Karl?’

‘You know those fliers you see stuck to lamp posts that say make £1,000 a week online without leaving your house?’ said Karl.

‘You stick those up?’ said Stu.

‘No,’ said Karl. ‘I make a thousand pounds a week online without leaving my house. Except it’s not really a thousand pounds a week. I suppose it could be if you never went to sleep.’

‘So you’re self-employed,’ said Janna. ‘But what’s the work?’

‘Search-engine evaluation, product reviews,’ said Karl. ‘Literature essays for rich students. It’s actually duller than it sounds.’

‘A fellow middle-class underachiever,’ said Stu.

‘You know the type.’

‘I was the type. Look, you don’t need to rush into anything, but this is a chance to do something with your life. The Transition isn’t a punishment, it’s an opportunity.’

He took two thick, stapled forms out of his shoulder bag, and a blue pen.

‘You’ll be living with us as equals – we eat together, talk together, leave the house for work together. Or, well, Karl, in your case you’ll be staying in the house to work, but you get the point.’

Genevieve and Karl, who had never read a contract in their lives, both turned to the final page of their forms, wrote their names in block capitals, signed.

‘The thing is, with the hair, it’s a lightning conductor,’ said Stu. ‘People think, oh, the guy with the hair. Or they think, in spite of the hair, he’s quite a nice guy. Any opinion that anyone ever holds about me is in the context of my hair. It’s the equivalent of being a beautiful woman.’

‘To be fair, it is the most interesting thing about him,’ said Janna, giving Stu a friendly but very hard punch on the shoulder, which he rubbed, pouting. ‘The removal team are picking up your stuff now, so that’s taken care of. We’ll see you for the general meeting in the morning, okay?’

Stu folded up their contracts and slipped them back into his shoulder bag.

‘Tomorrow, then,’ he said. ‘The Transition will send a car. Eight thirty.’

They stood.

‘We want you to know that we don’t judge you,’ said Janna.

‘Oh,’ said Genevieve. ‘Thanks.’

‘What she means,’ said Stu, ‘is that we don’t expect you to be grateful for this … situation. But we hope you’ll be nicely surprised by the set-up tomorrow. We hope you have as brief, as useful and as mutually pleasant an experience as possible.’

‘Okay,’ said Genevieve. ‘Thank you for … Thanks.’

‘What made you sign up to this as mentors?’ said Karl. ‘If you don’t mind my asking. What’s in it for you?’

‘We love this company,’ said Janna. ‘We’re proud to work for The Transition.’

‘A few years ago my generation kicked the ladder away behind us,’ said Stu. ‘This is our chance to teach you to free-climb.’

‘Oh, God, always with the analogies,’ said Janna. ‘It’s so embarrassing.’

‘Besides which, and I’m going to be honest with you,’ said Stu, ‘only crazy people lie; we never wanted children—’

‘We never wanted babies,’ said Janna.

‘Right, babies,’ said Stu. ‘Or children, really. Or teenagers. Plenty of our friends did and I can’t say it appealed.’

‘But sometimes we’d be talking and Stu would say, what if we’d had kids?’

‘What if we’d met each other at, say, twenty, and had kids?’

‘What would they be doing now? And it just got me thinking, what would my grown-up kids be doing now?’

‘What kind of advice would we give them?’ said Stu.

‘But you can’t adopt a thirty-year-old,’ said Janna.

‘Until now,’ said Genevieve. ‘Well, if it’s the only way out of the fine mess my husband’s landed us in, consider yourselves in loco parentis.’

And Karl was surprised to see his wife put her arms around Janna who, a little disconcerted, patted her on the back, lightly and rapidly as if tapping out a code.

5

THEY SPENT THE NIGHT painting over Blu-Tack stains with Tipp-Ex. Then Genevieve scrubbed the floor with a hard brush and a cartoonish bucket of soap suds and Karl asked her why she was bothering.

The next morning a black 4x4 was waiting for them outside their eviscerated bedsit.

The driver leaned out.

‘Transition?’ he said.

It felt like they were gliding over the potholed roads. It was an auto-drive, so for the most part the driver sat with his hands behind his head, watching the blue orb move up the map. Now and then he took the little steering column to fine-tune the car’s decisions, or put his foot down to override its obedience so that a stern female voice said speed limit exceeded. They were driven through urban clearways and bypasses, across double roundabouts and out-of-town shopping centres which had been absorbed into the town, past the football ground.

They were entering a rougher part of the city, but the high-rises had been freshly painted porcelain white. They looked at them and thought of a tropical island hotel rather than Findus Crispy Pancakes and canned cider; although Karl disliked neither, now that he thought of it. A building site promised a forthcoming swimming pool and multi-gym.

‘All that,’ said the driver, ‘that renovation – paid for by The Transition. I grew up around here.’

The car turned before a railway bridge and crunched over a gravel drive before entering an industrial estate. Corrugated-metal warehouses with big numbers and little signs. They passed a car mechanic’s, a boxing gym, a company called Rubberplasp whose name bounced around Karl’s auditory centre. Further in, the lots turned hipster: a craft brewery, a Japanese pottery, a vanity recording studio. Karl expected The Transition’s headquarters to be another identical shack, but when they rounded the last corner they were at the foot of a hill from which emerged four shiny black obelisks connected by footbridges, a letter H at every rotation. Each obelisk was roughly as tall as an electricity pylon, but only broad enough to contain a couple of rooms.

As they stepped out of the taxi the shiny black surface of the four towers turned blue, and brightened until it almost matched the sky. A film of a flock of birds flew across it, disappearing between the towers, which faded to black again.

‘This is …’ said Karl. ‘Wow.’

‘Hmm,’ said Genevieve.

A young woman was standing at the door of the first tower they came to. An earpiece stood out against her short, fair hair. They gave their names.

‘You’re married – that’s so sweet!’ she said. ‘Everyone is on the mezzanine. Floor 8. Here are your tablets.’

She gave them each what looked like a giant After Eight mint: a very thin square touchscreen computer in a protective sleeve.

‘Pretty,’ said Genevieve.

‘I was told this was a pilot scheme,’ said Karl. ‘It looks …’

The towers went through the sky sequence again.

‘… fairly well established. We’ve been going for eleven years,’ said the woman with the earpiece. ‘We try to stay under the radar.’

The lift opened on a wide balcony full of couples. Instantly shy, Karl stood to admire a giant hyperrealist painting of a pinball table, Vegas neons and chrome. He stared at the electric-pink 100 POINTS bumpers and the matte plastic of a single raised flipper. He felt Genevieve take his hand. She did this rarely.

‘What a waste of a wall,’ she said.

‘I like it.’

‘You like pinball? You like bright colours?’

‘I like the painting.’

‘You’re such a boy. Boys love bright colours. Like bulls,’ said Genevieve. ‘That’s why underwear is brightly coloured. Do you remember that bag I had, the one with the Tunisian tea advert with the sequins? Grown men stopped me on the street to say they liked my bag. I told Amy and she was like, what they mean is I like your vagina.’

Karl paused to make sure Genevieve had finished her train of thought. She had barely said a word for the last two weeks, but today she had opinions, theories. It was like she had been recast. It had taken him three years of marriage to learn that it was best to let her recalibrate without too much comment. Get a little depressed, then a little high in inverse proportion. Balance the ship.

He looked at the reflection of the pinball table’s garish surface in the painting of the large ball bearing that dominated the right-hand side of the canvas. It was so convincing he expected to see a reflection of his face peering into it. As you got closer you could almost make out the fine brushstrokes.

‘I just think it’s incredible anyone can paint something that looks so much like a photograph,’ he said.

‘Yeah,’ said Genevieve, ‘but on the other hand so fucking what, you know?’

A brushed-silver bar served free cappuccinos and muffins in three flavours: banoffee, apple and cinnamon or quadruple chocolate.

‘Quadruple? I can’t choose!’ said Genevieve.

‘Have one of each,’ said the barista.

Handsome boy, thought Karl. Slightly wounded expression. An RSC bit-player face.

‘Really?’

‘Three muffins, Genevieve?’ said Karl.

‘Don’t listen to him,’ said the barista.

‘I never do.’

She sounded too grateful. But then everyone Karl could see wore the glazed, winsome expression of the all-clear, the last-minute reprieve. The hundred or so young couples, the other losers who had accepted The Transition in lieu of some unpayable fine or term of incarceration, looked up from checking the impressive spec of the free mint-thin tablets they’d been handed at the door to admire the sun-dappled view over the city from the 360-degree window: Really? And they looked at each other, too. A preponderance of attractive, well-adjusted young people of every creed and orientation. They were athletic or willowy, at worst a kind of doughy, puppy-jowled fat which spoke of donnish indolence rather than profligacy. Inconspicuously smart or very casual – torn jeans, neon T-shirts – because they were good-looking and could get away with it. The couples were casing the joint, talking, making one another laugh. You wanted them as trophy friends. Thirty-somethings who could pass for teenagers.

Gradually, the lights dipped.

‘It’s getting dark,’ said Genevieve.

The stage held a glossy black podium and a large glass screen. There were rows of designer chairs. The chairs were spindly, improbably supporting fleshy orange pads which, when you pressed them, took a while to reshape, like a stress toy. Karl sat down, expecting to feel hung on a strange apparatus, but it was more like a hug. As the orange pads cupped his buttocks, moulded to the small of his back and pressed his shoulder blades he realised he was sitting in a modern classic: Eames meets Brutalism in contemporary Norway, an alien catcher’s mitt. He drafted five-star reviews in his head; it was unusual to actually experience the product first.

Genevieve sipped her coffee.

The rows filled in around them. A man sat on the corner of Karl’s anorak and didn’t notice, pulling Karl slightly to the right. Karl leaned towards him, then back. His coat was still trapped. He cleared his throat. He tried to make eye contact with Genevieve, who was eating her apple and cinnamon muffin. He leaned in again. He couldn’t look at the man’s face without putting himself uncomfortably close to it. He looked at the man’s shoes. Brogues, a slight residue of shoe polish. He stared ahead at the empty stage. Now he had left it too long to do anything about it. If he pulled the corner of his anorak out, the man would wonder why he hadn’t done so immediately. You actually sat there for two minutes without telling me I was sitting on your coat? What’s wrong with you? Karl tensed his right shoulder and cricked his neck so that he appeared to be sitting more or less straight.

‘It’s Stu,’ said Genevieve. ‘Karl, it’s Stu.’

‘Yep,’ said Karl, looking up to see a tall man with a Mohican approaching the podium.

‘Why is it Stu?’

‘Shh.’

‘Is he the boss or something?’

‘Genevieve, shh.’

Stu put his hands on the lectern, cleared his throat and looked at the big glass screen which was hanging to his right, seemingly without support. It flickered and a white oblong, off centre and barely a quarter of the size of the overall screen appeared. It was a clip-art image of a man with a briefcase taking a big step. Stu looked at the screen. Slowly the words WHAT’S STANDING BETWEEN YOU AND SUCCESS? appeared in Comic Sans by the side of the clip-art businessman, who had a perky smile. There was a wonky blue parallelogram behind him.

‘What’s standing between you and success?’ said Stu.

Karl, to his surprise, felt disappointed. To the extent that he yanked the corner of his anorak free from his neighbour, who looked startled. It doesn’t matter how you dress it up and how good the free coffee is, the medium is the message and the medium is fucking PowerPoint. It was a dismal feeling, like the moment when a delayed train is finally cancelled.

But then the lights went out completely and the clip-art businessman smeared and flickered into a dance of glitches up the glass screen. Karl’s knee-jerk delight at something boring going wrong was hijacked by an orchestral overture via invisible speakers, and a long, low cello improvisation. As the soundtrack dissolved into electronic pops and gurgles, the image left the screen, a jagged mess of pixels, and bounced over the panoptic window, bursting into smaller copies of itself, a screensaver taking over the world; it covered the whole room, morphing into clip-art houses, clip-art office cubicles, cups of coffee, ties and cufflinks, clip-art strong, independent women, clip-art harried-looking commuters. The seats by this point were vibrating and Karl’s laughter was distorted, like a child in a play fight. The images seemed to peel off the glass and float along the rows. The room was swimming in obsolete icons and logos, slogans and mangled business-speak – push the change, be the envelope – clip-art Filofaxes and aeroplanes, shoes and computers duplicating, fanning out like cards, whirling and distending, blittering into fragments. The cello piece was melodic, abrasive, fearfully attractive, and the windows resolved into operating systems and programs Karl remembered from childhood, a museum of dead technology, single ribbons of green text, and then the music stopped and darkness was complete – until a spotlight picked out Stu adjusting the point of the second spike of his Mohican.

‘Sorry about that,’ he said. ‘Bit gimmicky.’

Karl was one of the first to start clapping.

‘All right, all right,’ said Stu. ‘There’s no getting away from the fact that this is a lecture, and I know there’s not a single couple in the room who’s chosen to be here so you can’t blame me for falling back on special effects. I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to talk to anyone else yet?’

Silence. Aside from discussing the scene with their partner, none of the couples had exchanged more than a resigned nod, a hello which could have been a hiccup.

‘You all have something in common,’ Stu smirked. ‘I’m kidding. It’s true, though. You’re all feeling a little bruised, I’m assuming. You’re all here under duress, expecting to count out the minutes, endure the insult to your intelligence. You were probably expecting …’ He rubbed his right eye. ‘You were probably expecting something like a speeding awareness course, right? I know what they’re like – I’ve been on three.’ He looked at the floor in mock contrition then glanced up. A ripple of laughter. ‘Well, I’m biased because I love this company, but it’s more like being given a new car. Take out your tablets.’

A mass shifting in the orange chairs. Karl slipped the computer out of its fur-lined pouch. It was a black sheet of glass, eight inches square. The words HELLO, KARL! in the middle. He looked at Genevieve, who was already moving a glowing white orb around hers with her index finger.

‘Your copy of the Transition handbook is on there,’ said Stu. ‘It has everything from the FAQ – constantly updated – to the history of the scheme, to the complaints procedure, which we hope you won’t be needing. But aside from that, you just write on them like a slate. Try it. Write Hello Stu.’

Clusters of Hello Stu!s appeared on the screen behind him.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘We’re going to look at three articles. Use your tablets and just write down your reactions. Whatever comes into your head. Be completely honest.’

The screen faded into a photograph and a long headline. A young woman in an old-fashioned floral-print dress posed by a spiral staircase. The headline: WHEN THIS DESIGNER’S FAMILY GREW SHE BOUGHT THE APARTMENT DOWNSTAIRS AND MADE THEIR HOME A DUPLEX. After ten seconds she was replaced by a man with a beard stirring an orange crockpot: HOW GREG’S POP-UP RESTAURANTS BECAME A PERMANENT CHAIN AND MADE HIM A PROPERTY MAGNATE. Next a shiny man who looked about twelve adjusting his tie in the mirror: WHILE PLAYING WITH HIS TWO-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER, THIS TWENTY-SIX-YEAR-OLD HAPPENED UPON AN IDEA WHICH REVOLUTIONISED THE WAY WE SEE PUBLIC RELATIONS OVERNIGHT. All three appeared together with their headlines.

‘I remind you that this is a completely anonymous process,’ said Stu. ‘We’re interested in your frank, knee-jerk opinions. You have ten seconds.’

Gradually the magazine clippings disappeared from the screen and a selection of comments scrolled across the glass and around the windows:

I want to kill them all.

HOW A PRIVATE INCOME AND MASSIVE INHERITANCE MADE ALL THESE ASSHOLES’ DREAMS COME TRUE!

oh fuck off just fuck off fuck off fuck off

seriously a designer who can make enough to buy TWO FLATS fuck you what does she design nuclear weapons?

‘Good,’ said Stu. ‘This is all good.’

Karl watched as his own comment – what kind of a monster would bring a child into this world? – performed a loop-the-loop off the screen and landed on the window to the east.

‘Okay,’ said Stu while the last of the two hundred comments disappeared into a spiral behind him, as if going down a plughole. ‘I’d like to welcome to the stage Susannah, Greg and Paul.’

The trio walked onto the stage in unison, dressed exactly as they had been in the projected magazine articles. Susannah’s dress, Karl noticed, actually had a Russian-doll motif. They stopped in the middle of the stage and turned to face the audience, who were quiet. Karl shook his head. Genevieve had put her hand on his knee. The bearded chef folded his arms and looked up, bashfully. The designer and the PR man smiled with a hint of defiance. Karl’s temples pulsed. A lone voice yelled ‘BOOOO!’ which caused some brief, relieved laughter, shared by those on stage.

‘Susannah, out of interest, what do you design?’ said Stu.

‘Patterns for mugs and tableware,’ said Susannah.

‘And maybe you could tell the ladies and gentlemen of the audience what exactly you were doing two years ago today?’

‘This time two years ago,’ said Susannah, pointing into the crowd, ‘I was sitting in that chair, that one, fourth row. I was sitting in that chair writing shitty comments about the three people onstage because they were more successful than me.’

‘We know what it’s like out there,’ said Stu. ‘The landlord puts the rent up every six months. We know. Let alone saving, it’s hard to meet the bills and reduce your debts once you’ve stumped up the rent. We know. You never expected to be earning the salary you’re earning, but on the other hand you never expected to have to think twice about whether you could afford a new pair of socks this month. You’re trapped. The debts keep growing. We know. You’re overqualified for everything except a job that doesn’t actually exist – a historian or something. We know. This is the most expensive house in London.’

A moving image of a hallway covered in dust and rat droppings appeared behind Stu. The point of view tracked inwards towards a grand, sweeping staircase with moss growing on it.

‘Uninhabited for twelve years. A giant, house-shaped gambling chip. None of this is fair. We know it’s not fair. There’s no changing that. So what can you do? You can throw in the towel, eat cereal straight from the box, watch internet porn and wait for death, if that’s what you want. Or you can be part of the solution. You can get into a position of power and wield it with a little more responsibility. That’s what this is about.’

6

JANNA AND STU’S house was the second in a row of four Georgian terraces, elegant sandstone buildings with high ceilings and multi-pane windows. The cherry tree in the front garden was in early full blossom. Karl was used to seeing such houses occupied by the offices of accountants or solicitors. It was a secluded street culminating in a Gothic Anglican church, apparently deconsecrated – there were no noticeboards or signs – but well maintained. Even the paving slabs felt antique, broad as tombstones, a ‘superior sole-feel’. Karl and Genevieve stood in the shade with their rucksacks and looked up.

‘I could just sit at the window writing long letters to my detractors all day,’ said Karl.

‘Why did they choose us?’ said Genevieve. ‘I mean really, of all the couples we saw yesterday …’

After Stu’s overture they had been separated into breakaway groups and had to share their origin story – how they became Bankrupt Man, Fraud Girl – and then their aspirations. Karl said he wanted to write video games. Genevieve said she’d only ever wanted to teach, but that she’d like to be solvent enough to have children. Although Stu had warned the groups that all the disclosure might feel a bit American, Karl had found it strangely cathartic to hear from other bright young things who’d used loan sharks to pay off loan sharks, or shoplifted cheese, or owed tens of thousands in council tax, or got busted for growing hydroponic weed in their attics. There was a free buffet lunch: big dressed salads, grilled fish, roasted vegetables and complicated breads. Janna gave a final speech, practical stuff. They learned there were to be six meetings in the Transition HQ, one per month of the scheme. The rest of the time the young couples would live with and learn from their mentors without formal intervention.

A single petal fell from the cherry tree now and landed at his feet.

‘I don’t know that we’re any worse than the rest,’ said Karl. ‘Maybe they liked my face.’

‘Your face,’ said Genevieve.

‘I have a very symmetrical face.’

‘Are you two just going to stand there?’ Janna leaned out of the first-floor window. ‘The door’s open – Stu’s made drinks.’

‘Stuart,’ said Genevieve.

‘Stu,’ said Stu.

They were sitting in the first-floor living room with gin and tonics. The upper branches of the cherry tree touched the windowpanes. It was beautiful.

‘Stu. Are you and Janna in charge of The Transition?’

‘Oh no, no, no,’ said Stu.

‘Ha!’ said Janna.

‘We’re lieutenants, at most,’ said Stu. ‘Department heads. All of the mentors have a managerial role within the institution – keeps things democratic. We take turns doing the talks. I just like the sound of my own voice, so …’ he shrugged.

‘So is there, like, a CEO?’ said Genevieve. ‘Who’s in charge?’

‘There’s a committee,’ said Stu. ‘If you mean who thought up the whole concept it came out of a think tank called Bury the Lead. That was twelve years ago. It started very small. There’s a chapter in the book about it. It’s on your tablet.’

‘I’ll read it,’ said Genevieve.

‘It’s an interesting history,’ said Stu. ‘Not without a few skeletons in the closet, but we’re in a good place now. We’ve managed to avoid attention, thanks to the whole confidentiality thing – we don’t allow our graduates to acknowledge the scheme in interviews. Why should they? You earned it – The Transition is just a leg-up. Most of them end up successful enough to be interviewed, which is the important thing. Generally they’re only too happy to move on – they’ve earned their right to a fulfilling life, we just gave them the means to start the journey. All we ask is you keep in touch, maybe come back to talk to a future year group.’ He got up. ‘Come on, you must want to see your quarters.’

Karl and Genevieve’s attic was not completely self-contained – cohabitation was stipulated in The Transition’s terms and conditions – but Stu had installed a small but luxurious bathroom with grey granite fittings. The shower head was the size of a frying pan.

‘Ooh, it’s like a hotel!’ said Genevieve. She tried the taps. The bevel was gentle and heavy like a volume knob and the water poured out with calm insistence.

They weren’t labelled.

‘Are you just supposed to know which is hot and which is cold?’ said Karl. ‘I can’t live like this. I have no memory for things like that.’

The rest of the attic had been divided into three rooms, one with a double bed and a small flat-screen TV on top of a chest of drawers; one with a sofa, a side table with a bowl of oranges and a print of Klimt’s Forest framed on the wall; and the last was a study with an old school desk and a new office chair, based on the audience seats in The Transition’s mezzanine. A little bookshelf had already been stocked with Karl and Genevieve’s library of twentieth-century fiction and poetry, the only possession The Transition’s removal service had had to contend with. A tall, bronze anglepoise lamp lurked in the corner like a prop from a steampunk movie. Next to it a blue Wi-Fi router blinked fitfully.

‘This is actually really thoughtful,’ said Karl, propping the second cardboard box of clothes on top of the first.

‘No more damp,’ said Genevieve. ‘I’ll have my fur coats taken out of storage.’

Each room had a Velux window and the view from the bedroom was of a tree-lined green with a wrought-iron fence and a locked gate. The four tall houses overlooked six parallel streets of Victorian terraces, the ornate and defunct public baths, a cordoned-off area of scrubland promised years ago to a major supermarket, and a hill with a busy road that wove down to the valley. Standing behind Genevieve, Karl put his hands on her waist and rested his chin on her shoulder.

‘We’ll manage, won’t we?’

He started working her skirt up and she pulled it down again.

‘I think so.’

By the end of the scheme, as long as they carefully followed the financial regimen, the young couple should have saved enough for a five per cent mortgage deposit on one of the new-build estates that sponsored the pilot scheme, as well as having developed the skills and responsibilities necessary to meet repayments. He kissed her neck.

‘You don’t even notice the Mohican after a while,’ said Genevieve.

They lay on their new bed, a firm mattress that yielded just enough to make you feel like you were lying in mid-air when you closed your eyes. The bed in their flat had felt like a giant bag of spoons and Karl was accustomed to arranging his internal organs around them when he slept. He lay on his back, speechless, while Genevieve took her square tablet out of her rucksack. She started to read the History.

‘“Everything was temporary,”’ she read. ‘“Because they could be moved on at any time, nobody felt like a stakeholder in their community, so the very idea of community had started to erode. Once, we gathered round the piano in the pub or the town hall to sing songs together in harmony; now we sang at one another in cold-lit karaoke bars, a lonely imitation of the fame we felt was our only possible escape.” That’s by Hannah Eldridge – she was part of the think tank ten years ago.’

She stopped reading out loud and Karl closed his eyes. Both of them were drifting into sleep when they heard Janna at the foot of the stairs.

‘Um … guys? Food’s ready.’

Dinner was roast squash, pumpkin seeds and rocket leaves with fresh bread and yoghurt. Stu explained that they weren’t vegetarian, but that they only ate meat twice a week. Janna opened a bottle of Rioja.

‘He only ever buys wine wrapped in a wire cage,’ she said. ‘He thinks that’s how you tell if it’s good. Look, we’ll talk through some basic rotas and stuff tomorrow, but tonight let’s just have a drink. We’re very happy to have you here. Cheers.’

‘THEY SEEM REALLY LOVELY,’ said Genevieve. ‘I think we’re very lucky.’

They were drunk on red wine, lying in each other’s arms.

‘I think we’re going to be okay,’ said Karl. ‘This could actually be the best thing that’s ever happened to us.’

Very suddenly, Genevieve started snoring.

Karl slept lightly and woke up at what his tablet told him was 4:26. He could hear a faint, uneven squeaking noise. It sounded like a pulley being operated.

‘You awake? You hear that?’

‘I’ve been listening to it,’ Genevieve whispered. ‘It’s crying.’

‘What? No, I mean the squeaking noise.’

‘What do you think I mean?’

‘It isn’t crying.’

‘It’s coming from the next attic. Someone in the attic next door is weeping.’

Spooked, Karl turned on the green glass library lamp on his bedside table.

‘It’s a creaking sound.’

‘It’s crying.’

‘It’s pipes or something.’

‘Someone,’ said Genevieve, ‘is crying.’

‘Let me get close – OW! Motherfucker!’ said Karl, falling back onto the bed, holding his foot. ‘What is that?’

‘Poor thing,’ said Genevieve. ‘You’ve stubbed your toe.’

‘I think they’re broken,’ said Karl. ‘All of them. Who installs a fucking metal buttress in the middle of their floor?’ He went down on his hands and knees and inspected the silver girder he’d dashed his foot against. Difficult to miss, now that he saw it. When his toes felt better he tried to get his ear flat to the low wall, but whatever the noise was, it had stopped.

7

‘OH, HEY, LOOK at this. Look. How did you sleep? It’s telling me precisely how I slept. These are the points where I was dreaming. This is where it brought me out of a dream that seemed to be upsetting me. I’m not sure how it does that. Did you have any bad dreams? Karl? Karl?’

Karl woke up. He was not hungover. There was no crust in his eyes. Genevieve was sitting up playing with her tablet. The smells of fresh coffee and bacon drifted up to the attic.

‘I’m a “full disclosure” kind of guy,’ said Stu. He poured them both a cup of coffee from the stove pot and pushed a jug of steamed milk towards them. They were sitting at the black granite breakfast bar. ‘Anything we do that pisses you off, you tell us, okay? Everything out in the open. Even if it seems really petty. If I come back from kiteboarding and trail wet sand through the house—’

‘Which he does every bloody week, so good luck with that,’ said Janna.

‘I want you to tell me. If Janna intimidates you with her coarse language and aggressive personality, I want to know about it. Don’t let it bottle up and explode.’

‘We’ll do the same,’ said Janna. ‘There’s nothing more poisonous than pretending everything’s fine when it’s not. Okay?’

‘Okay,’ said Karl.

‘You’re being so lovely,’ said Genevieve, stirring her coffee. ‘You don’t need to be so lovely.’

‘Genevieve, the loyalty you’ve shown in joining your husband on The Transition; and Karl, the guilt you’ll be feeling about that … we understand this is a strange situation for you both. I promise you, it’ll be over before you know it, you’ll have a permanent residence and you’ll be doing the job you always dreamed of. How do you want your eggs? Poached?’

‘Poached is great.’

‘Right answer.’

‘This is how we start,’ said Janna. ‘Tomorrow is Monday and you go back to work as normal. We share every duty – we have a rota – it’s on your tablets so you’ll be reminded when it’s your turn to cook or clean up. You don’t have to pay anything – that’s part of it. Not just rent, but bills, food, travel to work – we’ll have a Transition car drop you off and pick you up. It’s all covered.’

‘See it as a complete break from ordinary life – a total anaesthetic while the operation takes place.’

‘Ick,’ said Janna. ‘But you don’t have any money either. So it’s a kind of economic house arrest for the first couple of months. We know that’s … patronising.’

As per the contract, Karl and Genevieve’s wages were paid straight into The Transition’s holding account. Half of Karl’s income went towards paying off his outstanding debts and fines. The rest accumulated and would eventually become their down payment.

‘But in losing your economic freedom you’ll gain something you didn’t even know you were missing: time.’

‘The language you’ve always wanted to learn, the weight you wanted to bench-press. All the things you’ve been putting off,’ said Janna.

‘I always wanted to learn Italian!’ said Genevieve. ‘Or Spanish, or maybe French!’

‘Pick one,’ said Janna. ‘You’re learning Italian.’

‘Molto bene!’ said Genevieve.

‘I don’t actually know what a bench press is,’ said Karl.

‘You’ll be surprised how quickly you take to it,’ said Stu. ‘And you’ll be surprised how quickly it makes a difference. To everything.’

Karl looked at Stuart’s thick and gladiatorial torso. He seemed like a different species, or at least a fantasy – what Karl imagined a man to be when he was growing up.

‘I have been thinking about getting in shape,’ he conceded.

‘But the first thing we want to talk about,’ said Stu, ‘and this may surprise you, is actually that lesion on your face, Karl.’

‘It’s an ingrown hair,’ said Karl.

‘Is that what it is?’ said Stu.

‘Whatever it is,’ said Janna, ‘it’s clear that you’re not leaving it alone to heal.’

‘I don’t even realise I’m doing it,’ said Karl, scratching his cheek to illustrate.

‘I’ve tried to get him to stop,’ said Genevieve. ‘For, like, a year.’

Karl felt his face flushing.

‘Mindfulness,’ said Stu. ‘You may wonder why we’re focusing on something so small, especially in the first lesson, but think about your face, Karl. Think about the face in general. It’s the first thing people see, before they even start talking to you.’

‘We believe that that mark on your face is a microcosm,’ said Janna, ‘of everything else you’re doing wrong with your life.’

‘Wow,’ said Karl.

‘Oh, do me,’ said Genevieve. ‘What do my split ends mean?’

This particular ingrown hair had followed the plot of a never-ending police procedural, with Karl the brilliant but obsessive detective on the trail of an ingrown-hair-stroke-serial-killer who might or might not even really exist; digging and gouging the same spot on his cheek night after night; thinking he once caught a glimpse of it, long ago; taking the drastic and controversial decision to stop shaving altogether for a fortnight; insisting that it was there, finding nothing, alienating his co-workers; letting it scab over, then going at it again too soon.

– I’m calling in the tweezers.

– Every time you call in the tweezers without a warrant you set our department back five years of good practice.

– I want the tweezers goddammit.

– Take some time off. See your family.

‘Karl?’ Genevieve called.

‘Yep?’

‘I hope you’re not fiddling with your face again.’

Karl’s hand shook as he turned off the shaving light.

‘You know what?’ he said. ‘I think it’s maybe just a spot after all.’

8

ON MONDAY KARL woke up to find that Genevieve, Stu and Janna had already left for work. It was half past nine. His tablet displayed a chart of his time spent in REM sleep. There was also a text message from Keston. Stu had showed them how to re-route everything through the tablet. Karl had already bagged up their mobile phones to send to a mail purchasing service, which ought to make them a couple of hundred pounds in emergency funds.

– How’s the prisoner?

Karl thought about it, stretched, put a jumper on over his Garfield T-shirt and replied.

– This is a joke, right? I’m a petty criminal and I’m being treated like a long-lost son.

Keston replied while Karl was buttoning the fly of his jeans.

– Safety nets, broseph.

While the prosecution had moved for Karl being banned from the internet altogether, his livelihood still depended on fake consumer reviews and essays and his lawyer had been able to prove this was a basic human right. On his first day working alone in the house Karl stayed within his quarters, writing five-star reviews of a new orthopaedic desk chair for eleven different office-product sites. ‘It goes way beyond health-neutral!’ he wrote. ‘This chair should be prescribed before you even know you have a back complaint.’ After 3,500 words of copy he felt bored. This wasn’t his internet connection, and he was on best behaviour. That he had used it so far solely to check his emails and search for information on the human spine was an act of discipline in which he took an almost ascetic pride. Perhaps this was The Transition working subtly in him already. He went to the little oak bookshelf he and Genevieve had shared since they were students.

He took out his copy of Machiavelli’s The Prince, opened it in the middle, flicked through it from the beginning and dropped it. He frowned. He took out Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and did the same thing, dropping it on top of The Prince. This was perturbing to Karl because he kept a Polaroid photograph of Genevieve sleeping naked in his copy of The Prince; formerly he’d kept it in Leaves of Grass until they heard a radio documentary about Leaves of Grass and Genevieve said she’d like to read it. She hadn’t shown much interest in any form of intimacy over the previous months, which he supposed was probably understandable, but it was getting to the point where she got dressed and undressed hurriedly, irritably, as if on the beach, and the Polaroid had become an increasingly treasured possession. He started going through each of the paperbacks in turn. When he got to the first book on the second shelf, Hartley’s The Go-Between, a MasterCard with the name MRS GENEVIEVE TEMPERLEY landed face up on the carpet. Genevieve had apparently judged The Go-Between the novel least likely to appeal to Karl or to Janna or Stu in the event of a spot check. Well, whatever. He felt happy that she had a secret. What was she going to use it for? A work do? Clothes? It was harmless.

What if she decided she’d had enough and got on a train? What if she skipped town? What if she caught the train to the airport? What if she skipped town, fled the country and didn’t take her medication? God, he loved her. He wanted to look at the photo.

He searched every book on the shelf, but it wasn’t there. Maybe Genevieve had found it. Had found it ages ago, hated him for it. Maybe it was a fairly innocuous thing to have by most people’s standards, but the fact remained he had taken the photo, four years ago, while Genevieve was asleep, two T-shirts wrapped around the camera to muffle the sound of the shutter, and some of the frisson of looking at the photo came from her unawareness of its existence. A betrayal. A seedy little voyeuristic betrayal. Is that why … No. He had last ogled the photo when they were packing a few days ago, while he was loading the books into a cardboard box, while Genevieve was out of the room. He distinctly remembered slipping it back into The Prince. Fucking hell.

Karl put Genevieve’s credit card back in The Go-Between, decided to say nothing and sadly went back to reviewing the chair. He took breaks in the kitchen to make tea or coffee and eat chocolate digestives, which he consumed at the rate of a hyperactive child. For lunch he boiled an egg and baked a tomato and garlic flatbread he found in the fridge. It was a Smart Fridge. He had read about them, reviewed a couple of models. The back of the fridge was a locked metal door which opened directly onto the backstreet and it got replenished every four days by an automated delivery service. You didn’t even need to order anything unless you wanted something special.

After overeating he went straight back to his work.

THIS RESPECT FOR Janna and Stu’s privacy lasted until that afternoon, when Karl made a reconnaissance of the ground floor. The dining room had feature wallpaper depicting a storybook woodland. Karl cracked a walnut by throwing it against the tiled floor. In the living room two unblemished white sofas sat in an L shape. A vast flat-screen TV faced a large abstract painting on the opposite wall. It was grey, black and white; the paint looked like it had been slathered on with a trowel and could have been taken for a DIY process abandoned part way through. Karl didn’t like it, but he liked that Janna and Stu liked it. He liked that there were things in the world people loved which he didn’t understand.

When he turned he noticed a low emanation of yellow light between the black-painted floorboards by the living-room door. Some kind of underfloor lighting? The light vanished, and Karl imagined the click of a switch, although he heard nothing. Then the light appeared again, for a moment – as if someone had forgotten something and returned temporarily to retrieve it – then off again. Karl lay down and tried to look between the floorboards, but the gap was too narrow. ‘Hello?’ he said. He got up, brushed the dust off his face and stamped on the floor. It sounded hollow, but this meant nothing – the usual cavity under the floorboards. What he had seen, presumably, was the glow of a light fitting mounted in a ceiling beneath the ground floor. He walked to the hallway and stamped on the red tiles, which felt solid. He unlocked the front door and walked into the street. The front garden had a cherry tree and pale Hepworth-like stone. There was no indication that there might be a cellar. He tried the door of the understairs cupboard. It was locked. It had a big Chubb keyhole, which was a bit much for a cupboard. He looked in the little wooden key house by the front door and it didn’t contain any likely keys, which only cemented his notion. Something else was wrong, something askew, but it took him a while to identify it.

‘There are no books,’ he said to Genevieve, that night. ‘Unless you count the Blu-ray manual.’

Genevieve shrugged.

‘They’re not readers,’ she said. ‘Don’t be a snob.’

The next day he decided to explore the first floor. He let himself fall backwards onto Janna and Stu’s king-size bed. It felt pliant and firm, like lying in plasticine, but then it moulded to his form. He looked upwards at the black metal chandelier – a silhouette. In the corner there was what looked like a trapeze – a chrome bar hanging from a ceiling reinforcement on two wires. Behind it a framed print, white on red in large block capitals:

GET

THINGS

DONE

From their bedroom window you could see the neighbours’ gardens. The one on the left was dominated by a trampoline, but its flower beds were very neat, with lines of bedding plants and a large fuchsia. Janna and Stu’s garden was a well-maintained vegetable allotment, all the way down to the garage. When did they have time to work on that? In contrast the garden to the right was completely overgrown with brambles, taller than the fence and thick as snakes; some fresh and livid green, some dead grey husks. There was a bald patch in the middle of the wasteland, and Karl was surprised to see a single, gnarled foot and the beginnings of a grey-haired shin gently kicking. He craned his neck, but this only revealed a little more of the shin. Crazy old man sunbathing in his bramble forest.

He felt a prickle on his hand and looked down to see a tiny brown spider crawling over it. Karl recalled hearing something about Lyme disease being transmitted by ticks which looked like small spiders, so he flicked it onto the windowsill and crushed it with a corner of his wallet. The spider curled up and was still twitching when he took the wallet up. You have to really finish the job, reduce it to something non-sentient, a paste of minerals. He used his thumb. Karl noticed a silver key propped up in the corner of the windowsill, a substantial little Chubb key. His brain lit up as if he had picked up the key in a computer game. It had to be for the locked cupboard. He grabbed it and ran down the stairs.

The door to the understairs cupboard chocked open when he turned the key and in the darkness Karl could make out a bracketed shelf holding a pot of screws and a torch. He picked up the torch and a square of card fluttered to the ground. He knelt. It was the photo of his wife, lying on her side, eyes closed, a half-smile, one arm folded under her breasts. It felt like someone had hit a mute button in his head.

He put the photo in his pocket and was about to turn on the torch when he heard the jangle of a bunch of keys being dropped on the front doorstep and Janna swearing. He just had time to close the cupboard, lock it and pocket the key before Janna’s key was in the front door. When she came through he was walking down the corridor and turned, as if surprised.

‘Oh, hi Karl,’ she said, brightly.

‘You’re back early,’ he said. ‘Tea?’

‘I work from home Tuesday afternoons. I’m fine, thanks,’ said Janna. ‘Is Genevieve at work?’

‘School, yep. Inter-tutor football tournament, actually.’

‘Oh, that’s fun.’ Janna sat down on the hallway chaise longue to take off her shoes. ‘Although I can’t really imagine Genevieve with a PE whistle.’

‘Ha. No.’ Karl had wandered back into the hallway with the full kettle. ‘I really like your chaise longue,’ he said.

‘Oh, thanks,’ said Janna. ‘I reupholstered it, actually. Evening class.’

‘Wow. That’s ace.’

Was ace something he said? Was it something anyone said? Was the general consensus that ace was an acceptable term of approbation?

‘Karl?’

‘Yes?’

‘Does your wife like me?’

‘Yes, of course.’ Karl passed the kettle from one hand to another. ‘Really. I mean we’ve only just met you, but she really likes you, yes.’

‘She said something odd to me yesterday.’

‘What did she say?’

‘It’s not really …’ Janna took out her tablet and started tapping on it. ‘It doesn’t matter, actually. Is that just for one cup?’

‘Um,’ said Karl. ‘It is. Sometimes she says odd things. I wouldn’t think anything of it.’

‘Don’t boil the whole kettle for one cup, okay?’

‘Sorry.’

Janna put her tablet down, walked up to Karl and put her hand on his cheek. He tensed all over.

‘And stop apologising all the time,’ she said. ‘You’re making me feel bad.’

Back at his desk Karl wrote 500 words on lumbar support. It was only in the wake of his arrest that Karl had diversified into the shady world of bespoke essay writing through an online database called Study Sherpas©. Wealthy students, canny enough to fear plagiarism-detection software, could use the fairly expensive service to commission bespoke essays, written by actual educated human beings. An essay would never be reused – it became the customer’s intellectual property the minute they paid for it. Study Sherpas© was covered in disclaimers pointing out that it was intended as a study aid providing model answers in a variety of subjects and that collusion was an offence punishable by expulsion from any given institution, but that, nevertheless, their product was one hundred per cent undetectable provided it was used with basic common sense. You could request a particular grade: if, for instance, you were an un-brilliant student who needed to complete a module for whatever reason, you could request a 2:2 in postcolonialism and your Sherpa would do their best to deliver just that. Within three marks of the target or the fee was halved.

The site took the majority of the fee, but even at its most paltry there was a better per-word rate than the average journalist or book critic received and this more than made up for the dubious morality of facilitating lie after lie in the lives of a growing pool of strangers with undeserved degrees. It was dishonourable work, but he was getting paid for doing what he loved in a competitive economy, and how many people really got to use their degrees in the real world? Karl had already provided five 2,000-word essays for A-level coursework and six presentations and papers of various lengths for undergraduate students, and was now working on a 12,000-word dissertation on elliptical technique in Henry James, a plum job he’d scored thanks to his five-star rating in the English/Comparative Literature section of Study Sherpas©. He read his most recent customer review and flushed with pride:

FIVE STARS NO QUESTION! This guy is the bollox I needed decent two one in postmodern American fiction did he deliver fuck yes!

Karl didn’t even need to buy any books – membership of Study Sherpas© came with access to the eBeW database (every book ever written), a hidden resource of pirated literature, pre-annotated with pertinent, adaptable quotes already highlighted.

He was about to make a start on his second-year BA paper ‘Don’t Be A Caterpillar: Self-Actualisation in Caribbean Poetry’ when Janna called up to the attic to say she had business in town and did he want anything?

This bought him a good hour to investigate the understairs cupboard again, but it was getting late and he was too rattled by his earlier disturbance. It seemed likely that Stu would get back while he was in there, and Genevieve was already late home and he wasn’t sure if he wanted her to know he was prying. No, the key had to be returned before anyone realised it was gone.

He tiptoed into Stu and Janna’s bedroom, carefully sidling through the part-open door rather than opening it further. Janna’s work clothes were discarded on the bed. He tried to remember if the key had been upside down or not, decided not and placed it back in the corner of the windowsill. The gnarly foot was still kicking gently in the bramble garden.

It wasn’t until the following morning that Karl remembered he still had the Polaroid of Genevieve in his pocket. He didn’t want to lose it, but he thought through the situation and decided that there was some advantage if he knew about the photo being stolen and Janna and Stu didn’t know he knew.

On Wednesday morning he waited for half an hour after they’d all left for work, judging this long enough for any forgot-my-keys-type returns, and took the opportunity to check the cupboard out properly. Stu and Janna’s bedroom was dark and when Karl flicked the light switch he saw that the wardrobe doors were open and several outfits – a salmon-pink shirt, a blue pinstripe suit, a smart grey dress and some boots – were strewn over the bed.

He checked the windowsill. The key was gone. His breathing made a cloud of condensation on the window.

Downstairs Karl slid the Polaroid of his wife halfway under the door of the cupboard and then flicked it the rest of the way in.

9

WEDNESDAY WAS KARL’S first night to cook. His tablet announced that he was to make a simple but nourishing cheese and egg tart with wholemeal pastry and a spinach salad with home-made vinaigrette. The ingredients were all in the Smart Fridge and Smart Cupboard. When Genevieve got home from work she found him in the kitchen wearing a blue and white striped apron. He had flour on his forehead.

‘Ha ha ha!’ she said.

‘Thanks,’ said Karl.

‘You know, pastry is one of those really simple recipes which is almost impossible to get right,’ said Genevieve.

Karl flicked a fingerful of raw egg and grated cheese at her and she screamed.

‘My work clothes!’

‘Oh. Sorry.’

‘God.’

She stalked upstairs and Karl listened to the rest of a documentary about peak oil as he kneaded the bowl.

‘It’s delicious, Karl,’ said Stu. ‘Genevieve, did Karl cook much before?’

‘Pasta and pesto,’ said Genevieve. ‘Fish fingers.’

‘Well, he’s a natural, isn’t he?’

‘Please,’ said Karl. Although he was pleasantly surprised by the texture of the pastry – flaky but consistent. Janna poured a greenish liquid into their glasses from an oddly shaped bottle: a tall, wide neck and square base with the periodic table printed on it. Saturday was alcohol night – the rest of the week was dry.

‘This is a vitamin drink developed by one of our former protégés,’ she said. ‘The ones before the ones before you guys. It made the Journal of Nutritional Science – one of the first supplements to genuinely enhance your diet. I don’t know anything about the technical side, but … She’s a millionaire now.’

Karl took a sip of the cold vitamin drink. It tasted a little like Germolene.

‘Mm.’

‘So do you have protégés staying with you all the time?’ said Genevieve. ‘It must be exhausting. Are our replacements already lined up for when we leave?’

‘No,’ said Stu. ‘It’s the same for all the mentors: six months on, six months off.’

‘Like a lighthouse keeper,’ said Genevieve.

The tablet prompted them both to keep a journal at 10 p.m. every night. There were no rules on the content, but it had to be at least 500 words and the grammar check could tell whether or not it was basically literate.

‘This is going to be a novel by the end of the scheme,’ Karl complained.

Genevieve looked up from her typing.

‘That’s the point,’ she said. ‘The best ones are made available to future protégés. We get access to the online library in week 3. Karl, are you actually reading any of the daily bulletins?’

‘The what?’

‘Are you paying any attention at all?’

‘Sure.’

‘I get the feeling your heart’s not really in it.’

‘I’ve had a lot of work.’

‘I mean you’re the reason we’re here.’

‘I’m aware of that.’

‘I know you are.’

‘Well, then.’

Genevieve laughed.

Karl began transcribing their exchange on his tablet.

Halfway through his first sentence he looked up. When Genevieve paused he said, ‘How does this work with our TGU vows?’

‘This? Oh, it’s not relevant,’ said Genevieve. ‘This is a private network. It’s not the same at all.’

‘I don’t know if I’m comfortable with it,’ said Karl.

‘So call your sponsor.’

‘We haven’t spoken in a year.’

Karl hadn’t felt the need to consult his sponsor in a while. As far as he was concerned the Great Unsharing had broken the worst of his internet addiction and he no longer needed to observe its dogmas. The Great Unsharing had been founded three years previously by a child named Alathea Jeffreys. The logo was a graphical silhouette of her face at nine years old on a blue background. Alathea represented the first generation to be ‘commodified without consent’; from birth to early childhood everything about her had been documented, stored and shared with complete strangers by her parents, the first wave of social networkers whose internet use had transitioned over a decade from drunken party photos to political posturing to holiday snaps to baby scrapbook. ‘Where was our opt-out?’ asked Alathea. ‘What choice did we have? I was a public domain image when I was still in my mother’s womb.’ Alathea called for a mass strike from social networks, and then from the internet in general. A degrading, dehumanising place. The Great Unsharing gathered publicity from columnists and commentators and via the very networks from which it encouraged withdrawal. ‘I want to share something that happened to me in the coffee room after church last month,’ ran a typical editorial at the time. ‘I was there with Simon and our newborn. A young man of our acquaintance asked if he could take a photo of my baby. A little unusual, perhaps, but I tend to look for the best in people. I said yes, of course. He held up his smartphone and, flash, that was that, or so I thought. But later I saw him leaning against the wall working avidly on his phone. I approached and saw that he was playing a computer game. He made no effort to hide it from me, so I looked over him at the screen. The sick game involved drop-kicking an animated baby at a rugby goal, or over a rainbow or into the sea, and the program was able to use photographs to alter the appearance of the baby. With horror it dawned on me that he was kicking my baby.’

The movement struck a chord with Genevieve and, after discussing it, she and Karl agreed to sign up. Karl often found himself sitting with his smartphone going between five social networks and three separate email accounts, and, if he had no new messages, a simulation of a social network called Humanatee which was entirely computer-generated and passably amusing for its similitude to the real thing, albeit with no repercussions. Achieving nothing, praying for the battery to die so that he could read a book. One night they held hands and deleted their profiles from three networks, twelve years’ worth of photos, opinions and comments on other people’s opinions. It felt like flushing a toilet. The Great Unsharing encouraged participants to delete their email accounts, too, which they both felt was a bit extreme. Within two years the movement had reduced the user base for social networks by a third.

‘We’re not trying to be sanctimonious or didactic,’ read Alathea’s official statement. ‘The fact is, most of the time you go online, within about five minutes you’ve directly engaged with something that makes you genuinely unhappy. You’ve either given or received indignation. This is a reduction of what you are and what you can be as a human being. Imagine if instead of doing that you asked an elderly neighbour if they needed anything from the shops? Or went for a walk. Or studied Greek. Or had a conversation with someone in your house. Just try it for a week and observe the effects on your mental health.’

The following year it was revealed that Alathea Jeffreys didn’t exist; that she was the invention of a middle-aged American academic called Dr Cary Gill and formed part of his post-doctoral Sociology research into authenticity for the University of Bristol. By this point the followers of the Great Unsharing were no longer involved in the forums where the hoax was revealed and so they missed much of the outrage, the debates and the counter-outrage.

10

THURSDAY OF THE first week. It was 7 p.m. and the moon was already visible as a shadowy crescent. After finishing the very creditable pumpkin and spinach curry his wife had prepared, Karl was sent outside to pick his way through the runner beans in the dark, the collected rainwater seeping through his fuzzy trainers. He could see through the garage’s screen door. In oil-stained jeans and a white T-shirt Stu hunched over the bonnet of a bright-green Honda Civic, rubbing its immaculate paintwork with a piece of sandpaper. He looked up when Karl pulled the door open.

‘All right, Karl?’

‘Hey. Janna said you, um …’ He inhaled the smell of turps.

‘Yeah, first workout – just let me finish …’

Stu went back to sanding the bonnet.

‘This Lime-Green Car my Prison,’ said Karl.

‘What?’

‘Came into my head. Is that for …’

‘Rat look,’ said Stu. ‘Security feature, really. You downgrade a fairly expensive car so it doesn’t get vandalised or stolen. Sorry. Just finish this bit.’ His sanding sped up for a moment, then he rose and sat down on a stepladder, motioning Karl towards an old paint-spattered wooden stool.

‘We’ll start with a little cardio,’ he said. ‘And then get straight into the weights – there’s no need to hold back. I’ve got you a kit.’

He handed Karl a canvas bag. In it he found a pair of white running shoes, some black shorts and a black Aertex shirt, a brand he remembered the more popular kids at school wearing.

‘Go up and get ready and I’ll join you once I’ve washed my hands.’

Karl noticed the steps in the corner of the garage. His wet trainers squeaked against the steel and he hauled himself up to a mezzanine bedecked with oily gym apparatus. It looked like the set of a grim science-fiction film.

They were running, side by side, on a double treadmill. Stu was able to keep a conversation going as if they were sitting in a bar. Karl, who only ran when he needed to catch a train, felt a little less able to draw breath, let alone speak.

‘People say running clears your mind,’ said Stu, ‘and you know what the key to that is?’

‘N … No.’

‘You keep doing it,’ said Stu. ‘You keep doing it until all you can think about is how much you hate running and how much you don’t want to be running any more. Suddenly, magic! All the cares of this world have melted away. You just want it to end. You are a non-physical being, a spirit of pure hatred of running.’

‘That,’ said Karl, clutching the stitch in the side of his stomach, ‘is something I can get behind.’

Twenty minutes later he was pouring with sweat, sitting in a weight-lifting machine the like of which he had only ever seen in Hollywood montages.

‘We ran two miles,’ said Stu. ‘Feels good, right?’

‘No.’

‘Start on level three,’ said Stu, taking the push-pin out of 16 and placing it on the second hole. ‘First week on three. People always start too high and get demoralised. Do ten.’

Karl pushed the bars, which felt light. He brought the bars back to his sides again and pushed. A little more resistance.

‘So what’s the story?’ said Stu.

‘You mean how I got here? Somewhere between fraud and tax evasion and incompetence,’ said Karl.

‘No, no, I know all that,’ said Stu. ‘I mean with you and Genevieve. How’d you meet?’

Karl finished his tenth lift.

‘Ten more,’ said Stu.

‘University,’ said Karl. ‘She was a friend of a friend. I was obsessed with her.’

‘Not hard to see why.’

‘In fact it totally ruined my three years of university. I didn’t even talk to another girl the whole time I was there. Then I didn’t see her for a decade. I had, like, three pretty joyless relationships with women who weren’t her. And then one day Genevieve just sent me an email asking if I remembered her.’

‘How long have you been together?’

‘Four years,’ said Karl.

‘And how’s that going?’

‘I feel very lucky.’

‘Good.’

‘Very lucky.’

‘You are. She’s gorgeous.’

Karl smiled. He liked other men admiring Genevieve.

‘Now don’t get me wrong,’ said Stu, ‘you’re a good bloke and I’m sure you have your qualities – but there’s a fairly standard way someone like you gets a girl like Genevieve.’

‘Oh? What’s that?’

‘You won’t take this the wrong way?’

‘No, of course not.’

‘I tell it as I see it,’ said Stu. ‘Some people don’t like that.’

‘Tell away,’ said Karl. If Stu said something he didn’t like, it would only serve to make him value Stu’s opinion less.

‘You’re a fairly ordinary-looking guy,’ said Stu.

‘I’ve always thought so.’

‘So is she damaged goods?’ said Stu.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Come on,’ said Stu. ‘When she got back in touch with you, after ten years … I’m not asking you to tell me what she survived or the condition she was diagnosed with or whatever. I just wanted to say that I’ve noticed. You look after her. I couldn’t see it at first, but I do now.’

‘Right,’ said Karl, relieved that Stu had brought the conversation round to a form of compliment again, something easy to accept. ‘Well, thanks.’

‘You’re caring, which is good. What I want to give you,’ said Stu, ‘is a little more self-esteem. I’ve been insulting you and you’re not even offended. Men keep their self-esteem in the biceps and pectoral muscles. You should feel that you’re in an equal relationship with Genevieve. Does that make sense?’

‘I guess so,’ said Karl.

‘I guess so,’ said Stu. ‘You sound like a Muppet. I don’t mean like “you muppet”, I mean like an actual Muppet, from The Muppet Show. Lose the Americanisms. Try to sound like yourself.’

Karl swallowed.

‘We’ll finish with a hundred press-ups,’ said Stu.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘That sounds more like your real voice. We’ll do them together. Come on.’

‘I don’t think I can do twenty,’ said Karl.

‘You can do a thousand,’ said Stu. ‘Might take you a week, but there you go. We’ll do a hundred, as long as it takes, then you can go and have a shower.’

Karl laughed.

‘What’s funny?’

He assumed the position. His arms already burned from the weights, but the first five press-ups were relatively easy. After the eleventh, Stu waited, supporting his weight with one hand while Karl completed his twelfth press-up.

‘Don’t give in at the first sign of resistance,’ said Stu. He sounded genuinely cross. ‘This is important.’

Slowly Karl lowered himself so that his nose was touching the rubber floor.

‘Come on,’ said Stu. ‘That’s it.’

Karl tensed his chest. He felt like he was made of loose Meccano. He forced himself up again.

‘Eighty-six to go,’ said Stu.

His arms shaking, Karl lowered himself again.

‘Eighty-five and a half.’

‘This is ridiculous,’ stuttered Karl.

‘This is ridiculous,’ Stu mimicked. ‘That’s fifteen. Good … Why aren’t you moving? Your wife will be wondering where you are.’

‘Twenty-three,’ said Stu. ‘You said you couldn’t do twenty. Karl, I’ve seen better men than you lose a woman like Genevieve because they stopped working for it. Do you want that to happen?’

While Karl didn’t think this was likely, he tried to channel his embarrassment, his rage and his temporary loathing for Stu into his twenty-fourth press-up. It took almost a minute.

‘That’s fifty-eight,’ said Stu.

Karl was shaking all over. His temples felt like they were going to explode and his stomach was like a sack of snooker balls. He tried very hard to lower himself again, but his arms gave out. He collapsed, hitting his nose on the floor, and started to cry.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Hey,’ said Stu. ‘Hey. Karl, stand up.’

Karl clambered to his feet and Stu took him in his arms. Karl cried hard, took big breaths and cried, his nose streaming with snot on Stu’s shoulder. Stu stroked the back of Karl’s head.

‘Let it all out.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Karl sobbed.

‘Do you know how much the last guy held out for?’ said Stu. ‘Thirty-one. And that was the best so far. You did great.’ He patted him on the back, hard. ‘You did fucking great.’

11

‘WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU?’

‘I was working out.’

‘You look like you’ve been hit by a car.’

Karl gingerly climbed into bed and put his head on Genevieve’s shoulder. She smelled of a medicated facial scrub she used sometimes, a smell he associated with their university halls: bare-brick stairwells, a pasted-up lightning crack in the side of the building.

He only realised he’d been asleep when the room filled with light. Janna and Stu were standing at the end of the bed, holding two envelopes. Karl sniffed, sat up in bed, nudged Genevieve.

‘Really sorry to wake you,’ whispered Janna.

‘We won’t make a habit of it,’ said Stu.

‘Is something wrong?’

‘No, no.’ Genevieve shuffled out of the bed and stretched. ‘Don’t apologise. I don’t know what … We never fall asleep this early.’

‘You’re exhausted,’ said Janna. ‘Poor things.’

‘We’ll keep this quick,’ said Stu. He held the envelopes out to Karl.

Karl found it hard to move his arms from his sides; it was as if an important pulley system had snapped.

‘What are these?’

‘We want you both to read a newspaper,’ said Stu. He sat on the end of the bed and Janna sat down against the wall.

‘We’ve got you subscriptions,’ said Janna. ‘To The Guardian and The Telegraph. Every day.’

‘Every day?’

‘You get up an hour early and you read them both, quickly, cover to cover, then swap. Get into the habit. It’s like keeping an allotment.’

‘I’ve tried to read newspapers,’ said Karl, rubbing his left eye. ‘It doesn’t feel like they’re for me.’

‘And that’s the problem,’ said Stu. ‘You need to be an active participant in society. We got the paper editions because the symbolism is important – you could just read it all on your tablets, but I want you to think about your parents, and how serious they seemed when they were behind newspapers.’

‘It’s not that we’re not interested in what happens in the world,’ said Genevieve. ‘Really it’s just that I’m busy or I would read one. At least once a week.’

‘But you’re apolitical.’

‘I’m disillusioned.’

‘No,’ said Stu. ‘The problem you’ve got is that you don’t feel worthy of newspapers. Be honest. A part of you still feels that newspapers are for grown-ups and that you’re not grown-ups.’

‘Look at this,’ said Karl. He had been rifling through The Guardian to the property section and had now folded it on Bargain of the Week, a two-bedroom flat for £1.2 million. ‘This is supposed to be the newspaper for intelligent poor people,’ he said, ‘but we’re completely unrepresented. Newspapers are written for the wealthiest fraction of a fraction of society.’

‘We spend most of our lives living in a fantasy of the future we think we deserve,’ said Janna.

‘This is part of the programme,’ said Stu. ‘This is something you have to trust us on. Try it for the next couple of weeks. You read the papers first thing. We discuss home and international news over breakfast. Deal?’

‘If we can talk about X-Men comic books over dinner,’ said Karl.

‘Okay, second nag,’ said Janna. ‘Teeth. Has either one of you ever been to a dental hygienist?’

‘How does that differ from a dentist?’ said Karl.

‘It’s like the difference between a doctor and a coroner,’ said Stu. ‘Not even joking.’

‘We are incredibly backward about teeth in this country,’ said Janna. ‘It’s seen as separate from health. Most of the population, they might as well be walking around with radioactive waste in their mouths. Name any disease: your teeth and your gums can give it to you. Do you floss?’

‘No.’

‘Genevieve?’

‘Once.’

‘Why did you stop?’

‘I meant once in my life. It was horrible.’

‘Okay. We’ll start with flossing. There’s a complete guide on your tablets with films.’

‘I can’t believe this is part of The Transition,’ said Karl.

‘There’s very little point in any of this if you’re not even taking care of your own mouth,’ said Janna.

12

6 A.M. KARL’S tablet played the theme from Super Mario Bros. 3 and Genevieve’s played Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2, very loud. A fresh copy of The Guardian and of The Telegraph lay at the top of the ladder.

‘You know the servants used to iron the newspaper for the master of the house?’ said Karl, rubbing his eyes and dropping The Telegraph on top of Genevieve.

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. Because it was crinkly, I guess. Which do you want to start with?’

‘Ugh,’ said Genevieve. ‘I don’t even care about myself in the morning, let alone the bloody world.’

Soon, though, they were talking about a fire in a National Trust property which had destroyed a gargantuan cache of Pre-Raphaelite paintings; the unusually high temperatures on the Continent; and the cultural tensions between the French- and German-speaking citizens of Switzerland, and were able to continue the conversation over breakfast with Janna and Stu.

‘You really need to start with the decline of the Roman Empire to understand the situation,’ said Stu, taking a bite of croissant. ‘The original population were Helvetic Celts.’

‘I’m pretty sure that’s a font,’ said Janna.

Once he was alone in the house, Karl took to reviewing a retro-look anti-SAD desk lamp with unusual enthusiasm. It was fun having opinions about things. Also, he had been keeping up the press-ups, trying to do ten every hour so that he could hit the ground running in Stu’s next workout. The tension in his chest muscles was a novelty, and when he dropped the paperclip he was fiddling with and leaned out of his chair to pick it up, his stomach didn’t feel like a balloon he was trying to fold in half. It hurt, certainly, but it was a new kind of pain, an earned pain. ‘This lamp is the Switzerland of desk apparatus,’ he wrote.

He checked Study Sherpas© and found that someone called Cynthia Palmer needed an A-level coursework essay on contemporary British fiction. ‘Really need an A*’ was her only communiqué. A-level essays were a cinch – he could ace them in an hour while talking to someone on the phone. Karl spun the fruit machine in his head, tapped out a title – ‘A Comparison of Representations of Masculinity in the work of Martin Amis and Ian McEwan’ – and brought up three novels apiece on eBeW.

After three hours he had finished the essay and four reviews and thirty press-ups, in spite of thinking about his Polaroid of Genevieve. He started to consider his position. It meant that Janna and Stu were snooping and, well, so was he. It meant that either Stu or Janna was looking for some kind of an edge. Or fancied his wife. Or had designs on his wife of some kind. Or it was part of The Transition which would later be revealed to him. Or Stu was a bigger perv than he was, and Genevieve was his wife, dammit, and that was his photo of her awesome body. Karl stood up and started pacing from his study to the bedroom and back again. That’s the problem with self-respect, he thought. You start to feel offended when someone insults you.

He completed eight circuits of the room and the study. He was an inveterate pacer. Genevieve said it was the only reason he wasn’t fat. He stopped in the bedroom, looked out of the window and decided to channel his irritation into some more press-ups. He hit the floor, staring straight ahead at the foot of the bed. One … Two … The familiar pulsing in his temples. Three … Four …

Something caught his eye. The word NOT was carved in tiny letters into the foot of the bed, next to a rough downward pointing arrow.

‘Not?’ said Karl, out loud.

He started patting the floor under the bed, feeling under the bed frame. He stuck his head under the bed. He turned on the tablet for light and slid it under with him. not_all_transition.com was carved into one of the wooden slats under the mattress.

Karl put www.not_all_transition.com into his tablet, and the screen went white. He hit refresh and the same thing happened. Then it told him that the connection had timed out. The second time it told him that the site was unavailable, and then the screen froze. He made a mental note to check in an internet cafe. There were still internet cafes, presumably.

He restarted the tablet. When it came back on, the screen was prompting him to complete his 500-word journal from last night or lose a merit point. He texted Keston.

– Favour to ask you.

The reply felt almost implausibly instant:

– Anything for my favourite screw-up.

– That was quick. Bored much?

– I’m at work. This is one of eight conversations I’m having, mother. <PICTURE OF OWN JUNK>

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