The Power(80)

‘They going to let you travel?’

The man looks up. The whites of his eyes are jaundiced and streaked with red, the thin, bloody lines reaching towards the pupil. He looks for a long time at Tunde, perhaps five or six seconds.

‘If God wills it.’

Tunde puts one hand into his pocket, easy and slow. ‘I have been thinking of travel myself,’ he says. And pauses. And waits.

The man does not ask him more. Promising.

‘Of course, there are one or two things I’d need for travel that I … don’t have any more. Things that I wouldn’t want to leave without. Whenever I were to set off.’

The man still says nothing, but nods his head slowly.

Tunde brings his hands together casually, then slides the notes under the blotter on the desk so that just the corners of them are showing. Fanned out, ten fifty-dollar bills. US currency, that’s the key thing.

The man’s slow, regular breathing halts, for just a second.

Tunde continues, jovial. ‘Freedom,’ he says, ‘is all anyone wants.’ He pauses. ‘I think I will go up to bed. Could you tell them to send me up a Scotch? Room 614. As soon as you can.’

The man says, ‘I will bring it myself, sir. In just a few moments.’

In the room, Tunde flicks on the TV. Kristen is saying, The fourth-quarter forecast isn’t looking good. Matt is laughing attractively and saying, Now, I don’t understand that kind of thing at all, but I’ll tell you what I do know about: apple-bobbing.

There’s a brief roundup on C-Span about a ‘military crackdown’ in this ‘tumultuous region’, but much more about another domestic terrorism action in Idaho. UrbanDox and his idiots have successfully changed the story. If you’re talking about men’s rights now, you’re talking about them, and their conspiracy theories and the violence of them and the need for curbs and limits. No one wants to hear about what’s happening here. The truth has always been a more complex commodity than the market can easily package and sell. And now the weather on the ones.

Tunde stocks his backpack. Two changes of clothes, his notes, his laptop and phone, water bottle, his old-fashioned camera with forty rolls of film, because he knows there could be days when he won’t find electricity or batteries, and a non-digital camera will be useful. He pauses, then crams in a couple more pairs of socks. He feels a kind of excitement welling up, unexpectedly, as well as the terror and the outrage and the madness. He tells himself it is stupid to feel excited; this is serious. When the knock on the door comes, he jumps.

For a moment, when he opens the door, he thinks the old man has misunderstood him. On the tray, there’s a tumbler of whisky sitting on a rectangular coaster, and nothing else. It’s only when he looks more closely that he sees that the coaster is, in fact, his passport.

‘Thank you,’ he says. ‘This is just what I wanted.’

The man nods. Tunde pays him for the whisky and zips the passport into the side pocket of his trousers.

He waits to leave until around 4.30 a.m. The corridors are quiet, the lights low. No alarm sounds as he opens the door and steps out into the cold. No one tries to stop him. It is as if the whole afternoon had been a dream.

Tunde crosses the empty night-streets, the dogs barking far away, breaks into a jog for a few moments then settles back to a long-legged, loping pace. Putting his hand into his pocket, he finds he still has the key to his hotel room. He considers throwing it away or putting it into a postbox but, fingering the shiny brass fob, he thrusts it back into his pocket. As long as he has it, he can imagine that room 614 will always be there waiting for him, still just as he left it. The bed still unmade, the morning’s papers by the desk in ungainly peaks, his smart shoes side by side under the bedside table, his used pants and socks thrown in the corner by his open, half-empty suitcase.





Rock art discovered in northern France, around four thousand years old. Depicts the ‘curbing’ procedure – also known as male genital mutilation – in which key nerve endings in the penis are burned out as the boy approaches puberty. After the procedure – which is still practised in several European countries – it is impossible for a man to achieve an erection without skein stimulation by a woman. Many men who have been subjected to curbing will never be able to ejaculate without pain.





CAN’T BE MORE THAN SEVEN MONTHS LEFT





* * *





Allie



Roxy Monke has disappeared. Allie saw her at the party, the staff say they saw her leaving, there’s security camera footage of her car driving out of the city, and then nothing. She was heading north, that’s all they know. It’s been eight weeks. There’s been nothing.

Allie’s spoken to Darrell on videochat; he looks terrible. ‘Just about holding it together,’ he says. They’ve scoured the countryside for her. ‘If they came for her, they could come for me,’ he says. ‘We’ll keep looking for her. Even if what we find is a body. We have to know what’s happened.’

They have to know. Allie has had wild and terrible thoughts. Tatiana’s convinced with a sudden upsurge of paranoia that Roxy has betrayed her to North Moldova and interprets every new turn in the hostilities as a sign that Roxy’s sold her out, even given the Glitter to her enemies. Tatiana is becoming unpredictable. At times she seems to trust Mother Eve more than anyone; she has even signed into law a measure making Mother Eve the de facto leader of the country if she, Tatiana, is incapacitated. But she’s having violent fits of rage, striking and hurting her staff, accusing everyone around her of working against her. She’s giving contradictory and bizarre instructions to her generals and officers. There has been fighting. Some of the revenge bands have set fire to villages harbouring gender-traitor women and men who’ve done wrong. Some of the villages have fought back. There is a war slowly spreading in the country, not declared on a single day between well-defined enemies but spreading like measles: first one spot, then two, then three. A war of all against all.