The Fat of Fed Beasts Read online

  The Fat of Fed Beasts

  ‘Ware has an uncluttered prose style and a willingness to stretch the boundaries of fiction. His sensibility is finely tuned to those grey areas of experience where identities shift, where people forget who they really are. No other writer springs to mind as a ready comparison to Ware: already he has defined a unique thematic territory.’ —AIDEN O’REILLY, The Short Review

  Monday lunchtime: a bank is being robbed. The gunmen tell everyone to get down on the floor, but an old man refuses. Behind him in the queue is Rada Kalenkova, an investigator for the Office of Assessment, recording everything she sees. Shots are fired and a woman is killed. Or maybe two. But Rada ignores the murders and pursues the old man instead.

  Nothing about the robbery or the putative killings makes sense. The robbers might be police. The bank manager denies anyone was hurt, despite the blood on the walls. Every subsequent enquiry leads towards Edward Likker, a renowned fixer. But Likker is dead.

  The Fat of Fed Beasts is an ambitious literary mix of existential uncertainty, murder, bureaucracy, unreliable father figures and disaffected policemen. It asks why we do what we do, whether it matters, and what, if anything, our lives are worth. And it’s funny.

  Praise for Guy Ware

  ‘In Ware’s fiction, the outside world, outside society, outside agencies, are the “us” bearing down on the “you”. Characters are isolated until their own shaky identity is corrupted and challenged. Ware asks how we can hold onto ourselves when what happens without is so random and fraught with possibility.’ —STUART EVERS, The Independent

  ‘You Have 24 Hours To Love Us is a clever, playfully uncanny debut collection that has left me looking forward to more of Guy Ware’s writing.’ —MAIA NIKITINA Bookmunch

  The Fat of Fed Beasts

  Guy Ware’s stories have appeared online, in magazines and in numerous anthologies. His collection, You Have 24 Hours to Love Us (Comma, 2012), was longlisted for both the Frank O’Connor International Award and the Edge Hill Short Story prizes. ‘Hostage’ was subsequently included in the Best British Short Stories 2013 (Salt). The Fat of Fed Beasts is the first novel he hasn’t put in a drawer and left there.

  Published by Salt Publishing Ltd

  12 Norwich Road, Cromer, Norfolk NR27 0AX

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © Guy Ware, 2015

  The right of Guy Ware to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Salt Publishing.

  Salt Publishing 2015

  Created by Salt Publishing Ltd

  This book is sold subject to the conditions that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  ISBN 978-1-78463-047-8 electronic

  For Sophy And for Frank and Rebecca

  “What reinforcement we may gain from hope,

  If not, what resolution from despair.”

  MILTON, Paradise Lost

  “I have often thought upon death, and I find it the least of all evils.”

  BACON, An Essay on Death

  1

  THE OFFICE IS not empty, or it would not be an office. There are desks and chairs and computers and some paperwork that hasn’t been filed, and there are coffee mugs, some of them clean. On D’s desk, there are two or three self-help books for managers, which D isn’t. Plus he’s beyond help.

  But there are no people.

  I am here.

  There are no other people. Work is for once not hell. Which is ironic – or a coincidence, anyway – given what we do here. I should take advantage.

  Not empty, then. But quiet. I am not working. I do not disturb the air around me. But the computers hum and trains still rumble past our third-floor window.

  Peaceful, though: an unanticipated bonus in the middle of a working day. It is Monday, so Theo will be at Riverside House. Perhaps. We believe that is where he spends each Monday morning. Rada went for an early lunch; she had to go to the bank, she said. D has been working at home. This is not like D, who has not been himself recently. Just as stupid, obviously, but more focused, somehow. He is up to something. Whatever it is, it will be drivel.

  The windows in this office do not open.

  I should make a telephone call.

  Specifically, I should call Gina Spence. Theo will be expecting progress – you would think, at his age, he would know better – but I have nothing to report. I have not spoken to her. It’s not the suicide that’s the problem. I don’t mind suicide; you might even say it’s my speciality. But some suicides have mothers who are themselves not dead.

  I roll a cigarette, but do not light it, even though the office is empty.

  Unwelcome sunshine smears the room. My desk is sticky with it. For a moment I wish I could open the window. But I know it is hotter outside than it is in here, and more humid. There is no breeze. It is June but seems to think it’s August. I cannot open the windows because the windows in this office do not open: the office is air-conditioned; the air conditioning does not work. The meeting room this afternoon will be unbearable.

  (We will bear it.)

  I realise I am squandering the unanticipated tranquility of an almost empty office. Soon Rada will return from the bank. D will foul the already fetid air with testosterone and stupidity.

  I should ring Gina Spence, but I won’t, not today. I have written up two reports – one up; one down – and that will suffice. Someone commits suicide every thirty-six seconds. This is a job, not a vocation.

  For the Ancient Egyptians the heart was the seat of the soul; when you died it was tested in the scales of Maat. If your heart weighed no more than a feather, you made it into the fields of peace. The heart is a meaty organ: tough, dense and muscular, the size of a clenched fist. An unequal deal, then? A long shot? Apparently not. There is no Egyptian Book of the Dead in which the applicant fails; crocodile-headed Ammut waits to eat the hearts in vain; Thoth, who invented writing, records the same verdict every time. Our system is more realistic. Or at least less certain.

  Rada has not yet returned from the bank when D arrives, wanting to talk to me. He does not want to talk to me in particular – indeed, he would probably prefer to talk to anyone but me – but I am the one here. Before he can begin I raise the telephone to my ear. With my free hand I signal that I am occupied. Then I pretend to listen. D walks over to my desk anyway. He hovers. He does not sit down at his own desk six feet away and I hate him more than ever. He has thick black wavy hair that falls forward over his eyes and he pushes it back all the time. He could just get it cut. He tosses something small up into the air and catches it. Spiritually, he is whistling. I nod and say Uh-huh into the silent phone. I roll my eyes and pretend to slit my throat as if to indicate that my interlocutor is boring me to death. D tosses whatever it is into the air again – it is a memory stick, I can see that now – and catches it. He does not leave my desk. I accept the inevitable. I put my hand over the mouthpiece and say: Mothers. Fuck ’em.

  D nods, says: Dads are just as bad.

  I had not expected this. I wonder if he is talking about his own father, which would be unlike D. I probe: Worse, maybe?


  Yeah. Quieter, but way worse.

  Way worse? What has D been reading now? In my disgust I forget to pretend to say goodbye and just hang up.

  D asks me who it was.

  No one.

  D looks confused. He can’t work out if I’m telling the truth (which of course I am), or if this is a joke at his expense.

  He flips the memory stick between his fingers, attempting to roll it around his knuckles, but drops it. His hair is sleek, like oil on a stranded seabird. As he bends down to retrieve his toy I see traces of some unguent in the roots at his parting. He has come from the shower at the gym. I despise him. But my day is clearly ruined, anyway, so I ask him what is on the memory stick.

  He smiles, savouring the moment.

  He says, My future.

  It’s empty, then?

  Ha-ha. It’s Likker.

  I know who Edward Likker is – was. I say, What kind of a name is Likker?

  He’s my ticket to glory.

  D says this, in those words. How old Kalenkov spawned both Rada and this fart in a suit defeats me.

  He says, You want to know why?

  I am all ears.

  D looks around, as if the office might have rearranged itself since Friday, then walks over to the flipchart stand in the corner. He drags it towards my desk, the extendable legs catching in the carpet. It leans towards him like a teenage drunk and the fat marker pens slide onto the floor. He straightens the stand, tightens the screws and bends down to recover the markers. His suit jacket rides up and I am presented with his stairmastered arse in broad chalkstripe. Truly the Lord is bountiful. He tests the pens until he finds one that hasn’t dried up. It is green. He sketches a two-by-two matrix and writes “Complexity” along the bottom axis, “Value” up the side. He writes “Low” at the point of origin, and “High” at the tip of each axis.

  I watch, a familiar weariness gathering in my bones. I say, How are you measuring value?

  There’s a formula.

  D flips the matrix over the back of the stand and begins to write again on a blank sheet. He runs out of space and has to go onto the sheet beneath. He flips back, tears off a sheet and holds it up next to the stand so I can read the whole thing:

  And this helps how?

  With his free hand, D points to each element of the formula in turn. The lifetime value of a customer equals the discounted gross contribution they make minus the discounted cost of retention.

  Value to whom, D?

  To the company, of course. OK, we’re not a company. We don’t have customers, as such. But surely you can see how it applies?

  I can – it’s obvious when you think about it – but so what? He’s still not getting Theo’s job.

  I say, So where does Edward Likker rate?

  D grins like a hyena.

  Likker’s perfect.

  I know what he means. What he means is not perfect at all. He means complex. High value. He means a great white dead whale, amongst dead minnows. A death worthy of the scales of Maat. For a moment I am almost jealous. Then I remember this is D and he will fuck it up.

  2

  THE MAN IN front of me who would not do as he was told and get down on the fucking floor when everybody else got down on the fucking floor moved slowly; he didn’t always seem to notice when somebody had finished and stepped away from the cash machine and the queue shuffled one step forward. There would be a pause. A gap would open up and I would feel the pressure growing and the impatience of the people waiting behind me. I felt it myself, the desire to speak up, to tell the old man to get a move on, even though his hesitations made no real difference to the time it would take us all to get our money. I thought about saying something, but nobody speaks to another person in a queue. To be clear, this was not out on the street where sometimes you have to pause and allow a gap to open up to make space for pedestrians who are not waiting for the cash machine or having anything to do with the bank or building society, or whatever, but are just passing along the pavement to somewhere else. It was indoors in a sort of open-plan foyer area of the bank where there were seven machines you could use to withdraw cash or to pay in cash, or cheques, with a queue at each, and there were no actual cashiers. It was cool in the bank; after entering from the humid street, customers would pause to adjust. Some of us would sigh, or surreptitiously adjust our clothes, allowing the refrigerated air to dry our skin. There were two bank employees in a sort of low-key uniform standing to the side of the queues waiting to help anyone who had trouble with the machines, plus one hovering near the door, a chubby woman with a neat blonde bob who had said hello to me when I entered the bank maybe six minutes earlier.

  It is hot now in the meeting room, which is up on the fourth floor and has a low ceiling. It is just after four p.m., and the heat has been building up all day. We cannot open the windows because the windows do not open in this building; there is air-conditioning, but the air-conditioning does not work. It is June and there will most likely be a thunderstorm before long; since lunchtime, since the events I am reporting, the sky has turned a sleek mackerel grey. If we could open the windows, the noise of the trains, which pass just below us on elevated tracks, would be impossibly distracting. There are four of us in the room, seated around an oval mahogany table. The table is richly polished and, from where I am sitting, facing the window, the sunlight turns its surface liquid. Briefly, I imagine my crisp pile of closely-typed pages separating and floating on the table like lily-pads.

  The man was old, I could tell, even from behind. He had probably been quite tall once, but he was now a little stooped, leaning on a walking stick, his head pointing somewhat forward from his shoulders, not straight up, and the skin above the collar of his shirt was dry and yellow; the hair above the skin was white and clipped short against his neck.

  At this point in my report, I stop reading to acknowledge that there is some question, which might become relevant later, in the event of any reprimand or even disciplinary action being deemed appropriate, as to whether I was technically off duty, or not. I was at work, in the sense that it was a working day. I had spent the morning in the office listening to the kind of maddening and distracting fossicking about Alex chooses to do when he should be researching a claim or typing a report or whatever but is actually too unfocussed to stay on task for more than five minutes, without spinning his chair or throwing balled-up timesheets at his computer or trying to start a conversation with me. I took lunch earlier than usual, partly so that I could go to the bank for some cash and to pay in the cheque Gary’s mother sent as a present for Matthew, who will be eight at the weekend. I had thought it possible that Gary’s mother was the only person left in the world to still use cheques, but the presence of machines there in the bank this morning, machines which existed only for the purpose of depositing cheques, suggests otherwise. As there were no actual cashiers, I realised I was going to have to queue twice, for separate machines, and decided to get cash for myself and for Matthew first on the grounds that the queues for cash withdrawal were longer and I prefer to get the queuing over with as quickly as I possibly can.

  Theo says not to think about reprimands right now. I should just concentrate on my report. The right now merely confirms my anxiety. I am in trouble.

  The old man with the white hair and yellow skin and the walking stick had reached the head of my queue and, after a brief hesitation, had moved right up to the machine, and was hunting through his wallet for his card, when I became aware of an increase in noise and a sense of urgent or flustered movement around us. I turned and noticed that there were now three men in the bank who had not been there when I entered seven minutes earlier, and who had guns. The men were dressed in black; they wore Kevlar stab-proof vests and artificial fibre balaclava helmets. One of the men was short; strands of reddish hair or whiskers curled around the edges of his balaclava. Two of the guns were pistols – Beretta 8000-series Coug
ar semi-automatics – and the third was a much larger sub-machine gun. The men were shouting that everyone should do what they were told and get down on the fucking floor, which I did.

  One of the men pushed some sort of stick through the polished aluminium handles of the double entrance doors. The stick was about a metre long and had a shorter element jutting out at right angles near the end, as if it were a handle; the whole thing may, in fact, have been an extendable sidearm baton of the type used by police forces to control situations of perceived or anticipated civil disorder. The handle of the baton caught on the handle of the door and effectively prevented anyone from entering the bank from the street. At this point one of the men said they were police, although this was not the first thing they had said and I wasn’t sure I believed it, or not, but I also wasn’t sure it made any difference to my getting down onto the floor in any case, or not, given that they were armed as I have described. The floor was covered in a kind of thick linoleum in the bank’s corporate colours and was mostly red. The air-conditioning in the bank was so effective that even today, in this weather, the linoleum felt cool against my cheek. I was quite prepared to observe, and mentally to record any detail that might later prove helpful, or relevant, to whatever claim or claims might arise, but I was not going to not do what I was told by men with guns, even or perhaps especially if those men were not policemen. Neither were the bank employees (who were no doubt governed by bank protocol and training for just such an event, and would have practised) or any of the other customers, except the old man in front of me, who, having finally found his card and inserted it into the machine, ignored the shouting and began entering his Personal Identification Number. I thought the man might be deaf – although he would have to have been profoundly deaf not to have heard anything of the commotion behind him – and perhaps not blessed with the best peripheral vision, or to have been blind, even, although his stick wasn’t white and there was no sign of a dog or anything, because most people, I thought, even if they were concentrating on pressing the right buttons and maybe making the right choices on the touch screen, would notice when everyone around them, which was perhaps a dozen or fifteen people, not including the men with guns, dropped suddenly to the floor.