ANWAR: Office
Worker
You smell hot oil and
cardamom as you walk through the front door: “Hi, Bibi, I’m
home!”
She’s in the kitchen.
“Yes, dear,” she calls distractedly. “Have you seen Naseem? I sent
him round to Uncle Lal’s for a bunch of methi, and he’s not come
back. I think he’s playing with his English friends again”—in
Bibi’s world English is a wild-card
ethnicity: It could equally mean Scottish or Lithuanian—“and he’s
forgotten, the little scamp . . .”
“No, haven’t seen
him.” You suppress the urge to grump at her (What am I, his nursemaid?) as you close the front
door and hang your jacket up. The boy will be fine; you can locate
him on GPS just as soon as you take the sock off your phone . . .
“I’ve been looking for an office. I think I’ve found
one.”
“Oh, good! Hey, come
and be a dear and help peel these onions? You know they make me . .
.” cry, you mentally autocomplete,
suppressing a snort and heading into the kitchen. It’s one of
Bibi’s stranger foibles: Despite the day job, she insists on
cooking, but she can’t, absolutely can’t, peel and chop onions. (You said “no” and
watched her try, just the once, years ago: The memory of what it
did to her eyes is still enough to make you wince. Now she’s got a
German gadget to chop them up, but getting the outer skin off first
is a man’s job . . . where is that
boy?)
You join Bibi in the
kitchen, where she’s frying up spices, and take a knife to the
offending onions. (It’s probably her contact lenses. Why can’t she
just wear spectacles while she’s cooking?) “Your auntie Sameena
called round earlier, you know? She was wanting to know all about
this mystery job of yours, but I told her it was none of her
business until you are good and ready to tell everyone.
Trade secrets. That hushed her up, I
can tell you. She watches too many trashy spy soaps from Karachi;
she thinks you’re still secretly a black-hat hacker . .
.”
You wordlessly pass
her the bowl of onions. She stuffs them into the German gadget,
closes the lid, and stares at you significantly as she puts some
serious arm action into the handle. It’s a sign that she expects
you to read her mind—she’s a firm believer in male telepathy, and
you’ve never quite had the nuts to break it to her that she’d do
much better at silent communication if she simply stuck to jerking
your dick in Morse code. You waggle your eyebrows at her. “What is
it?”
She pauses, then
looks up at you. “What is this
mysterious job that you need to rent an office for, oh my husband?”
She’s using this oddly stilted excuse for a private language she
picked up from fuck-knows-where—some Bollywood musical version of
domestic married bliss perhaps—she’s even batting her eyelashes. You may be telepathically
deaf, but even you can figure out that this is the feminine
equivalent of boldface and double-underlined capitals.
You lean close, put
an arm around her shoulder, and ask her: “Can you keep a secret, oh
my wife?”
She leans against
you, seeking contact, which is nice (for once, there are no kids
present). “If you ask me to, nicely . . .”
You kiss the top of
her head. “Alright. But please don’t tell your mother; she’ll get
too excited.
“It’s all to do with
that job interview I had last week. The one the Gnome sent my
way—”
“I knew it!” She
tenses angrily. “That rat!” She doesn’t pull away, but you can feel
her quiver with indignation, and something inside you locks up
tight.
Bibi doesn’t know
your exact relationship with Adam, but he’s been around
occasionally, and she doesn’t like or trust him: She knows he’s a
business associate, and that’s bad enough for her—the kind of
business associate whose company landed you in Saughton, she
thinks. Nonsense: It was just a spot of bad luck. But needs must,
and ruffled feathers need smoothing: “No, love, it’s not something
I’m doing for him; it’s just something he was able to point my way.
It’s not big, but it’s useful, and there’s money in it, and more
importantly, it’ll convince the social workers that I’m getting my
life straightened out.”
“Is it legal?” she
asks, pointedly.
“It’s more than
legal: It’s for a government.”
“Well then.” That
shuts her up for a moment, but not for two: She’s not stupid. “What
government? The Scottish—”
“Hsst, no.” The
current administration is a hive of snake-fondling Christians, in
league with the Wee Frees; luckily it looks as if they’re going to
go down hard at the next election. “You see, the job interview
wasn’t in London, and I didn’t get the sleeper train: I had to fly
all the way to Przewalsk! And I got the job. I’m going to be”—you
savour the moment as you prepare to tell her—“the honorary consul
in Edinburgh for the Independent Republic of Issyk-ouch!”
You were about to say
Kulistan when your loving, obedient
wife dropped the German gadget on your foot. “Oh!” She ignores your
injury and scrabbles around on the floor in pursuit of the onion
compartment, which has taken on a life of its own and is rolling
enthusiastically towards the table. You stifle a rude word—being
German, the gadget is over-engineered and surprisingly heavy—and
instead bend over and pick up the detachable handle. The plastic
collar where it fits onto the onion eviscerator (or whatever it is
called) has broken, and there is a smell of burning—worse, of hot
metal—from the frying pan.
Bibi stands up,
snorting deeply like an angry heifer as she clutches a clear
plastic tub of finely chopped onions: Her chest rises and falls
fetchingly under her blouse as she stares at you in disbelief.
“Honorary what? You’re making shit up
again, you worthless sack of—” Then she blinks and lunges past you
in the direction of the cooker: “Oh, my pan! Oh no! This is a
disaster!”
Right at that moment
the front door opens with a fanfare of brassy pre-teen boys’
voices, and everything gets a little vague. You are not sure how
the plastic-collared German onion-destroying gadget’s handle ends
up in the frying pan, or why the turmeric ends up in the bowl of
gram flour and the whole mess ends up on the floor, or where the
smell of burning plastic is coming from, because the smoke detector
has gone off its little electronic trolley and is screeching loud
enough to wake the dead: But you beat a hasty retreat from the
self-deconstructing kitchen.
“Go and help your
mother,” you sternly tell your son, who is clutching a paper bag
and chattering excitedly about something football-related that he
and his friend Mo have done. Then you tiptoe away with a sinking
heart. Bibi will blame you for setting the kitchen on fire,
and she’ll make you go chase after a
template for the broken part of the German gadget and repair the
thing. Why do your attempts to do good for her always seem to end
up this way?
Your hard work has
paid off. In the process of examining commercial properties you
stumbled upon some most remarkably posh digs at a knock-down price
for your consular mission. It’s in one corner of a modernist glass
cube that is embedded like a gestating alien larva within the
bowels of the former post office headquarters on North Bridge. The
Gothic architraves of Scottish Baronial limestone pulse with an
eerie green radiance after dusk; passers-by who peer between the
sandstone window casements can see the cleaning robots casting long
shadows across the cube’s windows as they skitter hither and yon.
It’s supposedly haunted by the ghost of a Microsoft sales rep who
hanged herself in the central atrium a couple of decades ago. Some
of the Ghost Tours from the Royal Mile have taken to stopping by
late at night.
Admittedly, your
stipend does not stretch to anything particularly plush: Your wee
niche in the former Microsoft HQ is a three-metre-by-four room in a
shared office suite. It’s half-filled by a scratched-up pine desk
and a pre-owned Aeron chair the management threw in as a sweetener.
The rest of the suite is overrun by programmers from a local gaming
corporation who rent two entire floors above you. They’re working
on some kind of Artificial Reality project—you made the fatal
mistake of asking one of them, and your eyes glazed over before he
reached the fourth paragraph of nerdspeak without stopping to draw
breath. But at least you’re not hot-desking, or hanging out your
shingle above Rafi’s phone-unlocking and discount-print shop on
Easter Road. No, indeed. You’ve come up in the world, you have an
office of your own, you wear a suit and tie to work, and people
respect you.
(Well, we’ll soon see
about that.)
Mr. Webber was
certainly taken aback at your last interview. “Representing a
consortium of central Asian commercial interests in the Midlothian
region?” He doodled a note on his tablet. “Well, Anwar, you never
cease to surprise me. A family connection, I assume?” You grinned
and refrained from blabbing, but produced the documentation when he
asked to see it. The smug bastard really raised an eyebrow when you showed him the
letterhead. He’s going to check it out, but the beauty is that it
will check out. Which means your future
sessions with him will be reduced to thirty-second ticky-boxes
rather than real probation interviews. Going straight doesn’t get
much straighter than wearing a suit and working for a foreign
government.
Actually, there’s
fuck-all work in it. You’ve set up your office and your desk just
so, and you’ve skimmed the helpful handbook they’ve prepared for
honorary consuls. The first IBAN draft hits your bank account with
a thud, and now you’re sitting pretty. Cousin Shani’s handling your
tax—she’s an accountant—and you’re in credit and in employment. But
after the first few days of scurrying around filling out online
forms, it’s a bit boring. As the Gnome surmised, few natives of
Issyk-Kulistan pass through Scotland. In fact, it’s a lot boring. There isn’t even any email to
answer.
Alas, you’ve got to
be behind the desk during core hours, all twenty of them a week.
After a bit, you ask Tariq if you can borrow a pad so you can work
on his dating website while you’re holding the fort: Nobody who
walks in will know it from what you’re supposed to be doing, and
you can do with the cash.
So you’re there one
midafternoon, grinding your teeth over a broken style sheet, when
the doorbell chimes. At first you mistake it for your IDE
complaining about a syntax error, but then it rings again, and you
see the desk set blinking its light at you. You’ve got
company.
“Hello? Uh, consulate
of the Independent Republic of Issyk-Kulistan?”
The desk set clears
its throat. “Hello, the consulate? Please to be letting us
in?”
You stare for a
couple of seconds, then figure out which button to push on the
antique console. You hear the front door open and hide Tariq’s pad
before you stand up and go to see who it is.
Two men are peering
twitchily around the lobby area of the shared offices. One’s in his
late twenties, and the other is considerably older. They’ve both
got close-cropped hair, bushy moustaches, and an indefinable air of
perplexity that screams foreigner at
you. The younger one is clutching the handle of a gigantic rolling
case. “Hello? Can I help you?” you ask, politely enough, and the
young guy nearly jumps out of his skin.
“Er, hello, this is
consulate of . . . Przewalsk?” The younger guy’s English is clearly
a second language—or third. “Hussein Anwar?”
“That’s me,” you say,
nodding. “Can I ask what your business is, sir?” You really want to
get back to fixing Tariq’s botched style sheet, and you haven’t
snapped into the right head space, but it comes out sounding
patronizing and officious.
The old guy turns to
his young companion and rattles something off. The young guy
replies, then turns to you. “He says we need to speak in your
office. We are visiting trade delegation. Felix Datka sends us to
you.”
Oh. Well that puts a
different face on things! “Certainly, if you’d like to follow
me?”
Your office is
equipped with two plastic visitors chairs and a regrettably
non-plastic rubber plant, which has hideous yellow-rimmed holes in
its leaves but refuses to die despite your daily libation of coffee
grounds. You usher the trade delegation past the plant and wave
them into the seats. “What brings you to Edinburgh?” you
ask.
“Emails are you has
read, the?” begins the old guy before his young companion takes
over: “My friend here, he is being lead trade mission to sell
produce of our factories to foreign markets. There should an email
be. We bring here for you a consignment of trade samples, to be
distributed to visitors.”
The old guy nods
emphatically. “You give we.” He waves at the huge and villainous
suitcase, which is already settling into the carpet.
“Samples.”
“Uh, yes. I see. What
kind of samples?”
You watch,
fascinated, as the young guy fiddles with the substantial locks on
the case. He opens the lid with a flourish, not unlike a magician
pulling a rabbit from a hat. “Look!” he announces.
The suitcase is full
of white paper bags. He pulls one out and hands it to you. The
label reads: INSECT-FREE FAIR TRADE ORGANIC BREAD MIX BARLEY-RYE.
“For Western home bread-maker machine,” says the young guy, as the
old guy grins broadly and nods. “Is produced by People’s Number
Four Grain Products Factory of Issyk-Kulistan! Taste very good, no
grit, batteries included, just add water.”
“Batteries?” You
shake your head.
“Yeast,” he says
hastily. “You give. Visitors.”
You eye up the
enormous suitcase. “You want me to give visitors bags of bread
mix?” you ask him. “But I don’t have room here—”
The old guy nods
again. “Give he you visitors bread.” He looks at you, and suddenly
you recognize his expression and you just about shit yourself. “Is
visitors, yes? Email, is.”
“The instructions are
for you in the email,” the young guy adds helpfully. He stands up.
“We go, now. Other consuls, more trade!” He grins alarmingly widely
and reaches out to shake your hand. His skin is dry and hot, his
grip tight as a handcuff. “Am thanking you. You are good man, says
Colonel Datka.”
After the “trade
delegation” leaves, you sit behind your desk breathing heavily for
a couple of minutes. The suitcase crouches behind the dying rubber
plant, like a snooping secret policeman intent on exposing your
guilt. Who do they think I am? Does Datka
think I’m stupid, or something? You glare at the case. It’s
obviously drugs. That’s what this is all about. They’ve figured out
how to use diplomatic bags and “trade delegations” to smuggle
heroin out of Abkhazia or Ruritania or somewhere, and now you’re
expected to play host to an endless revolving-door parade of
dealers. Well, it won’t do! You weren’t born yesterday. If they
think you’re going to tamely take the fall, for a mere thousand
euros a month—
You’ve got a wife and
kids to look after. And you’ve met
Datka. Colonel Datka. Spoken to him.
He’s not stupid, he’s got to know this is shit.
Curiosity gets the
better of you, and you reach for the white paper bag on the edge of
your desk. It weighs about a kilogram. You close your eyes, hefting
it. The suitcase has got to hold at least fifty more of them, from
the way it’s digging in the carpet. If this is heroin, it’s got to
be worth half a million on the street. Datka’s met you. Would
you leave yourself in possession of
half a million in heroin, sight unseen?
Holy Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed, peace be unto him:
No, you wouldn’t. But Datka
knows where you live, he knows where Bibi and Naseem and Farida and
everything you hold precious can be found, and you’ve met plenty of
cheerfully ruthless men who wouldn’t hesitate to use—
Your hands are
sweating, and you feel yourself shaking as you tear open the flap
on the bag of INSECT-FREE FAIR TRADE ORGANIC BREAD MIX BARLEY-RYE,
Produce of People’s Number Four Grain Products Factory of
Issyk-Kulistan, and jam your thumb inside, crush the coarse flour
against the paper, raise it to your mouth, and suck.
It’s just
flour.
INGREDIENTS: Malted Barley (40%), Rye (30%), Wheat (20%), Ascorbic acid, fructose-glucose concentrate, Sodium Metabisulfite, Sodium Chloride, Amylase, Protease, Vegetable fat (3%), Raising agent (yeast).Add water (320ml to 500g Bread Mix), place in bread-maker, and select “wholemeal rapid” program.
Your shuddering gasp
of relief is that of a condemned man receiving his pardon on the
steps of the gallows; it’s no less heart-felt. You lean back in
your chair, eyes screwed shut. You’ve never been much of one for
your daily observations, but right now you make a mental note to
lay in a prayer rug against the prospect of future roving visits by
feral international trade delegations. God is indeed great: He’s
sent you organic stone-ground bread mix instead of
heroin.
The only question is,
why? And so at four o’clock you switch on call divert, lock the
office behind you, and go in search of the Gnome.
This afternoon, Adam
is holding court in the back of the Halfway House, a wee nook
alongside Fleshmarket Close, an improbably stepped thoroughfare
that runs up the arse crack from the City Art Gallery to Cockburn
Street. (You know you’re in the Old Town when the street’s so steep
they’ve been talking about fitting an escalator for the tourists.)
You take a short-cut through the upper retail deck of Waverley
Station, dodging the commuter crowds, and reach the front door with
only a slight shortness of breath. “Ah, Anwar,” calls the Gnome:
“Mine’s a pint of sixty bob.”
Bloody typical. You
sidle up to the bar and smile ingratiatingly until the wee lassie
deigns to notice you and pours your pints—your IPA and the
aforementioned sticky black treacle syrup for the Gnome. You carry
it to the back. The Gnome smacks his lips and slides his pad away.
“I didn’t think there was any signal down here,” you
say.
“There isn’t
usually.” The Gnome looks pleased with his pint of mild. “Mm, it’s
in fine form today. Chewy, with a fine malt aftertaste and some
interesting hops.”
You open your
messenger bag, extricate the (slightly leaky) sack of bread mix,
and plop it on the table in front of him. “Would it go with
this?”
The Gnome stares at
it for a moment, then picks it up. “You scanned it,” he says
tersely. “Where did you get it?”
“No RFIDs,” you tell
him. “Only the best organic ingredients, said the visiting trade
delegation. I’m to hand them out to visitors, according to
Colonel Datka.” You chug half your pint
in a single panicky sharp-edged gulp. “What have you got me
into?”
The Gnome, for once,
is at a loss for words. “I dinna ken, sonny,” he says, lapsing into
a self-parody of his ancestral Ayrshire accent. “Sorry. It appears
to be . . . Bread mix.” He peers at the label. “Lots of malted
barley: I suppose you could use it for home brewing. Some hops, a
couple of demijohns, the yeast’s probably not ideal . . .” He
trails off thoughtfully. Then he looks up at you. “It’s bread mix,”
he says crisply. “Tell yourself it’s just bread mix. Give it to
anyone who stops by. Tell them it’s
bread mix. If by some chance the police pay you a visit? It’s just
bread mix.”
You’ve got that
frozen feeling again. “Fucking fuck,
are you telling me—”
The Gnome reaches out
and grabs your wrist. “It’s just bread
mix,” he hisses. He stabs at the bag with one index finger:
“If you put that in your bread-maker—if you’ve got one—it will
make bread. End of story. That’s all
you need to know.”
You pull your hand
back. “No it isn’t.”
“Believe me,” he says
slowly.
You cross your arms,
mulish. “Tell me. Or it’s all going down the shitter
tonight.”
He begins to smile.
“I wouldn’t do that. Dough tends to clog the pipes. Just think of
the plumber’s face . . .”
Despite yourself, you
begin to relax. “What is it, really?”
The Gnome fidgets
with his drink for a few seconds, then takes a mouthful and wipes
his lips dry with the back of a grubby sleeve whose self-cleaning
fabric he’s long since overloaded. “It’s bread mix. What you mean
is, what else is it.”
“What? What else
can it be?”
“Keep thinking that
thought.” He smiles disquietingly. “Probably nothing, without
Secret Ingredient X.” He whistles between his teeth. “‘Once the
rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my
department,’ says Wernher von Braun.”
“Secret Ingredient
X?”
“You read about so
much stuff in the science blogs these days.” The Gnome holds up his
pint. “Zymurgy: the oldest human science.”
“Zy—”
“Fermentation.
Brewing. Saccharomyces cerevisiae,
brewer’s yeast. It was one of the first organisms to have its
genome sequenced, you know that? It’s used in baking as well; it’s
what makes the bread rise.” He picks up the packet. “This bread mix
is interesting. You could brew with it. The beer would probably
taste like shit—it doesn’t have any hops—but it’ll still be beer.”
And with that, he slides it into one capacious coat
pocket.
You take another deep
gulp from your pint glass. “So?”
“So think of
S. cerevisiae as a handy little
biological factory.” The Gnome peers at the bag of bread mix.
“Normally it’ll produce bread. But suppose you want to send some
interesting chemical feedstock to someone. All they need to know is
that they chuck the bread mix in a sterile demijohn with five or
ten litres of warm water. And then . . . It produces crap beer.
Only before they put it in the demijohn, they add Secret Ingredient
X, which is probably some dietary supplement you can buy over the
counter in any health-food shop. And in the presence of Secret
Ingredient X, some extra metabolic pathway gets switched on,
because this is not your ordinary S.
cerevisiae; this is mutant ninja genetically engineered
superyeast.”
“But what does it
make?”
The Gnome finishes
his pint and meets you with a bright-eyed smile. “I really have no
idea. And you know what? I don’t particularly want to know.
You don’t want to know. Colonel Datka
doesn’t want you to know; otherwise, he’d have told you. It’s a lot
simpler if all anybody knows is that you’ve been told to hand out
free samples of organic bread mix by your employer’s trade
delegation. Oh, and we didn’t have this conversation, and we
weren’t in the back of a pub where there’s sod-all phone signal and
no free net access and no CCTV because it’s quarried out of the
side of a granite cliff-face. Are we singing from the same hymn
book?”
After a moment, you
nod. “Is this what you were asking me to keep an eye out
for?”
“Could be.” The Gnome
reaches into one pocket and pulls out a fat lump of dead cow-skin,
as battered and shapeless as if it has been whacked with a hammer.
He opens it and pulls out a stack of bank-notes. “This is for you.
Don’t spend them all in the same place.”
You reach out and
snatch the money. There’s the thick end of a thousand euros there,
maybe more. Before the savage deflation of the past few years, you
might have thought he was cheaping on you. But not now. It’s enough
to pay the mortgage arrears for three months. “I don’t know if I
should be doing this.”
The Gnome’s grin
slips. “Neither do I, laddie, neither do I.” He puts the wallet
away, then pats you on the knee. “But just consider the
alternatives.”