Atas 3

He looks that self-satisfied way a man gets when he’s chiselled the bar lady and not paid for a round of drinks. My mouth opens and shuts. I was about to ask him how he’d accessed my account, but I found myself asking a different question ‘what do you want me to do?’

          ‘I want you to replace me,’ he says.

Our eyes meet, before flickering away. I notice, for the first time, a shedload of dandruff on his the collar of his coat, which makes him seem younger, but, of course, not young. I wobble over in my chair and lift my bum cheeks, one side then another, as if weights are attached to my gluteus maximus and I’m working out. A good detective never asks what do you mean?

‘Ok,’ I say. ‘Give me another month’s pay in advance?’

His head bobs back and forwards as he chortles. Then he goes through that whole rigmarole of fishing his Menthol cigarettes out of his pocket and lighting up. With a cigarette in his mouth his body relaxes into the chair. ‘Want wan?’ he says tapping the top of the packet.

I shake my head: no, but wonder if that’s the wrong answer. If I’m replacing him, I too should be thinking of giving up not smoking and smoking healthy Menthol cigarettes.

‘Have you heard of Fukushima?’ he asks.

‘Course I have, he’s a friend of Hong Kong Fooey.’

‘Funny, whit did I say about you being funny?’ he says. ‘It’s a curse.’ And the way he said it felt as if he wanted to wallop me with more than metaphysics. ‘You might remember that at the beginning of March 2011 there was an earthquake and tsunami. The Jap government tried to hush up reports of fuel rod exposure and reactor meltdown. Think Chernobyl, move it to a bigger city, and multiply the problem by one hundred.’  

‘Just the kind of job Honk Kong Fooey likes,’ I say, lightening the mood.

Only it doesn’t. He looks at me as if I shat myself, which might well be the case if he doesn’t get on with it and tell me how to collect my big pay-off.

‘My clients weren’t really concerned with that,’ he says, which comes as some relief, as I wasn’t over-concerned myself. ‘But whit happened afterwards piqued their interest.’

‘Aye,’ I say, on cue, playing the nodding donkey. ‘What was that?’

‘The clean-up operation,’ he says. ‘Water had to be pumped out of the condenser storage tanks to the basement of the Unit 1 turbine and the process had to be replicated in Unit 2.’

He went right on yammering on about pumps and drains and surge tanks and feed water intakes and injection lines and suppression pits and flow rates and leakage paths and flooded basements in a way that suggested dying of boredom just wasn’t an option. He mentioned a crack in in containment pit before Reactor 2, close to inland water.

‘There’s tens of thousands of tons of radioactive waste leaking out, containing high concentrations of iodine-131 and caesium-137,’ he says. ‘Whit would you do?’

It’s the equivalent of being caught staring at Moira McMurty’s round and perfectly peeked breasts under her Fred Perry and being invited up to the blackboard by my old nemesis, primary teacher, Mr Jordan,  who could read my mind, to finish the last part of some awful chalked quagmire of long division.

‘Well,’ I say, given it careful consideration. ‘I’d open the floodgates, dump it in the sea and give up eating fish-fingers for Lent.’

‘Bravo,’ he says, clapping his hands together like a geriatric seal. ‘That’s exactly what the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Jap Government decided was the best option. Feed and bleed the bastards. The Pacific Ocean is a big ass place.’

‘That’s great,’ I say, trying to whip up the enthusiasm of a peanut. ‘You don’t get many fish-fingers knocking about it, and an extra finger on a fish-finger is not to be sneezed at.’ I reminded him, ‘I’ve got to go’.   

‘I’m coming to it, I’m coming to it.’ He tapped his finger on the desk, to the side of the iPad, a reminder of how easily he could wipe me out. ‘The Japs are a proud nation. During the war they went in for all that Hari-Kari stuff.  When it came for a clean-up, volunteer workers went back to the reactor sites knowing it would kill them. Veterans, aged seventy or eighty from the plant,  offered to take their younger counterparts places, but this is the part that interests my client group, CVs came from all over Japan offering to do the same work for not much more than the minimum wage.’

‘That’s murder,’ I say.

‘It might well be,’ he replies in that upbeat way, ‘but it’s a job and somebody’s got to do it’.  

‘You don’t want me to go to Japan and shovel radioactive shit, do you?’

‘No. Those jobs have been taken. My client group wants you to help us with their client group on this small island.’

‘Holy shit,’ I say, ‘you’ve not sabotaged the Torness Power station in some sick doomsday scenario?’

‘Not quite.’ He laughs, and it’s not something I’d encourage.

‘We set up an experiment. It began in 31st July 2013 with advertisements placed nationally on five major job recruitment sites. The advert stated:  ‘No special training, education or experience is required or needed.  We require,’ and a long list followed that included nine categories and eight subcatagories of, for example, administartive staff, building workers, banking staff, customer care. Payment was negotiable with a basic starting wage of £2 500 per week for twenty hours per week. A short Curriculum Vitae was requested with contact details of home address and telephone number placed in bold ink at the top of the page. A warning was placed in red ink at the bottom of each advert, marked by a skull and crossbones that those successfully in gaining employment would be working with a toxic substance that would kill them within two years. Applicants were told their job applications would be processed within five working days.

‘By 30th August 2013 a total of 42 321 had sent in their Curriculum Vitae to the Atas Work Programme before The Guardian exposed it as a hoax and more mass circulation newspapers followed their lead. Then the real work begun.

‘The experiment resumed on 1st October 2013. Those that sent their details to Atas employment received a phone call from trained psychologist inviting them to a job interview. All responses were recorded and the participants had to agree to this or contact would cease and the job offer no longer stood. They were told expenses and £50 would be paid to them when they turned up. As well as convincing potential employees that the job did exist, psychologists also were primed to remind them that the wording of the advert stated if they accepted employment they would be dead within two years.

‘Interviews were scheduled to take place in London, Birmingham, Manchester, Cardiff, Belfast, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Orkney, the last two weeks of October 2013, but an additional week had to be added at the beginning of November 2013 because of the higher than expected number of applicants, 25 562, that wished to continue with their application.’