A World of Good - Chapter One (version 2.0)

Chapter One

I didn’t sleep the night the world changed and so by the time I arrived at work yesterday morning I thought I’d lost my mind. The knowledge, if you could call it as such, that everyone else had gone mad kept me going through the day. What’s keeping me sane at this precise moment – such a precise moment – is the message I’m texting to my wife, wherever she is. And if she’s still my wife. If I press a button for each step, I’ll reach the apex of this corridor at the final x of ten kisses.
No one can see me; this may be the longest corridor in the country, but the outward bend provides the cover of two blind corners. My thumb covers the ‘send’ button.
Last night, I slept like one of the dead.
Footsteps; I’ve not looked anyone in the eye for two days, but she stops, surprised, not expecting me here by the window. I look up and recognise her fear, for during the night before last, it had happened; every man, woman and child who slept dreamed alike, a dream to convince millions of the existence of their almighty God. You all know this now, it’s obvious, but here the crowd still gather around the crater to see the fallen star, too afraid to speak.
‘Hello again,’ I said. ‘Are you OK? You left in a hurry.’
The Temp brushes her brisk fringe from her spectacles. ‘Oh, it was my mum on the phone. She’ll be fine, once she gets used to the idea of being right - of being proved right. Her nose is out of joint from blowing it so often. It’s funny, but she never took much notice of dreams before.’ A mobile rings inside her retro BOAC holdall. ‘Oh, that’ll be her again.’
I let myself take in the rest of the Temp, who resembles a westernised character in those Japanese manga comics: button-nose, high cheekbones, triangular shards of dark red hair, limbs thin and alluring. In her straight, angular lines, coat-hanger collarbone and eyebrows like two ticks of a teacher’s pen, the young girl could pass for a model in an ad for some piece of technology so cutting-edge it’ll be outdated by yesterday. My thumb rubs the send button. I go back through the message and abbreviate the truth.
A pencil drops from the Temp’s holdall, bounces upon its eraser and rolls to my foot. The Temp doesn’t notice me pocket the pencil and continues talking to her mother.
‘Mum, take a deep breath; I can’t make you out. Why not take the dog for a walk? Enjoy it while it lasts.’ A tiny, tinny voice becomes audible. ‘I mean – yes, I’m sorry. It will last. Look, I’ve got to go, there’s a big cheese waiting to talk to me.’ She winks at me. ‘See you later. Love you. Bye.’ The Temp put away her mobile. ‘Mum says the PM’s been on the telly, appealing for calm. Mum’s the only person I know who isn’t. She’s waited all her life for this and now she daren’t leave the house.’ The Temp pushes back her glasses; rectangular and thick-rimmed, the sort Americans might wear if they had a NHS. ‘OK…’ she said. ‘Better get back to the office. Got to fight the fight.’
The Temp walked out of the apex, her holdall slapping a flat, packed backside. I turn and look out of the window. Ten stories down swarm the ambling shambles of a public I’ve hoped to protect, the sleepwalkers who’ve all been saved. A little boy is dragged by his mother towards a haircut, through queues for milk and bread. The boy pulls at the collar of a stiff new shirt; those are the rules now son, Sunday best even if it’s a Tuesday. Although he’s been given a bag of crisps, the kid’s mother yanks his hand each time he tries to eat. The child becomes angry.
Don’t drop the bag on the pavement. Please don’t. This is important, it matters; please don’t drop the bag.
I want the world back. I want to be a husband and father again.
The boy drops the bag to the pavement. The crisps are ground under hurried feet and the wind hooks the bag up into a tree. Half a kilometre away, the Temp slams shut the glass door. I press the button. The boy looks up, sees me at the window and sticks up his fingers, a little victory which arrows into my eyes. The underworld breeds out of contempt. Grunting, they clamber up the walls with clammy hands, to steal my future. Alone in a chasm of faces, where light falls like the blade of a guillotine, I scream in silence and stumble into shelter. Inside the darkness, I fall to my knees.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, to nothing.
In the beginning was the Word and now this crashes on top of me, a toppling Tower of Babel.

Later, I walk back down the corridor. I’ve lost four hours but gained a pencil. No reply to the text. It could be night where she is. The number of offices here at Associated PLC escapes me, but the one I walk toward: open-plan, paper-free and noiseless to a fault. I push open the glass door and a hundred heads turn in my direction.
‘Hello stranger,’ said Elaine, without humour.
‘So what’s the story, Saint?’ said Chris Naylor. ‘We nearly called the cops. And what’s that red stuff on your mouth?’ I wipe my lips – a scarlet smear on the back of my hand. ‘The missus away again is she? Don’t worry, we won’t tell.’
This gets a laugh from his fans. It’s a wonder I don’t dislike Chris; after all, he nurtures a beery belly he imagines to be a six-pack and sports a trimmed goatee beard in imitation of a Hollywood actor who stars in films so dumb you can hear them halfway across town. Chris also works for Sales & Marketing and isn’t the sort of person a member of the Socially Responsible Investment team should fraternise with and yet I linger by him, as if in some confused adolescent crush.
I’ve half-an-hour to process half a day’s work. A lot of people rely on what I do. It was just a panic attack, that’s all. Understandable in the circumstances.
The Temp returns from the Break Room, tucking a lipstick into her holdall. Chris and Elaine lead the stares.
‘What? I needed touching up, that’s all.’
They recognise the coincidence, but the story arrives, breaks squealing and people would rather be taken for a ride. Elaine turns to Chris and a murder of crow’s feet stretch their talons in satisfaction.
‘My feet are killing me,’ said the Temp, hobbling to her workstation.
The office silence, once taut and clean-shaven, is now charged and expectant. Chris grins with the glint of a crown. It’s the wife they feel sorry for. I haven’t told anyone, because I don’t believe it myself. And they don’t know about my wife, either.
Salvation of a sort arrives in the form of Steven Mance, the most senior figure in the cloud-capped corporate structure of Associated to frequent the lowlands of administration. Clad in an oily, moulded hairstyle of a toy soldier made too cheaply for ears, Mance has an uncomfortable face to look upon, large and blandly impervious, as if an extra layer of bone lay beneath the skin; not ugly as such, just surmising something that is ugly.
‘Afternoon, afternoon,’ he said, each word inflexible. ‘All going the whole nine yards, are we? Remember our mission statement: Customer First, Customer Second. We mustn’t let what happened over-impact on business.’
This makes as much sense as anything Mance has ever said, so it’s difficult to know if the Dream has impacted on him. Luckily, I’m spared his chrome-plated cretinisms, as Steven Mance only talks to those, as Elaine does now, who tell him everything is fine. Mance pauses at Chris for a whisper and a wink, then leaves, as smug as butter, by the fire exit stairwell at the back of the office. No sooner has Mance gone than Chris launches into The Act, with all the gusto of a market trader flogging his own persona. They all fall for it of course, even the Temp. They all share this Dream, a pretty pattern on a spinning top they daren’t let rest.
Two maintenance operatives in white boiler suits and facemasks arrive to change a strip light that worked perfectly well. This they do with the nervous delicacy of a novice circus act under the gaze of the ringmaster. One turns to me and speaks, but I don’t understand.
I book an appointment tomorrow with Dr Howie, the company physician. I am watched as I leave for the day.

There are clouds without rain in this small but pertinent corner of England. I stop to look back at the Head Office of Associated PLC, a town within a town. When I dream of this place, it’s of a vast steel framework obscured by haze. Across the street, a teenage boy in a Nirvana t-shirt looks at the sky, holds himself and shivers.
I’m not alone in having the future stolen. Pick up an American textbook from the 1950s or 1960s and you’ll find a sketch of the typical town of 2000. In the same way that Victorians assumed their grandchildren would be able to travel to the Moon by steam engine, the sketch is more of a reflection. A van for Williams the Florist, a blossoming small business, chugs past Pierre’s café which awaits the first malteds of freckled spring; a billboard advertises white gloves for Mom at Krush Klothing down at Lower East Side; a grand idea is run up the flagpole and saluted outside the library; a pond is well-kept behind railings; the homes all have excellent views of each other. And always, a church points above the roves, the sentinel of the sky. In their wingding keenness to colour in the future, our lantern-jawed bright sparks forgot three details: cars, people and their fertile love affair, for the roads of the future were smoothly orchestrated. A man would leave the office, pick up a square meal at the Vend-o-matic, doff his Stetson at the robot valet and guide his mk10 Edsel into the calm neon lines of Anytown, on an evening as soft and pink as the evening steak, with strawberry ice-cream clouds to follow. The future was a done deal.
Unfortunately, the future was not a picture, but the paper it was printed upon: intensive, chemical, the setting for a small example, an excuse to use a rubber. During our wait for this imaginary land, we were told that by the turn of twenty-first century, the world would end so it didn’t much matter.
I retune the radio to Five Live.
‘Back to the main story, the only story across the world. We’d like to hear your views on the situation. What would you like to see happening next? Phone or email us now.’
I’m stuck on a flyover, in what’s either a traffic jam or a queue for the petrol station half-a-mile down the road. Chris’s newspaper was wrong; we’re going to Hell not in a handcart, but a Hyundai. For once, I’ve a leisurely view of the two monolithic tower blocks across town, a couple of Stonehenge slabs with aerials, where the message may be read as the right to do whatever rather than whatever we do has to be right. Below the bridge, a breeze funnels through alleyways, as if to stir up the weekend rush, when nightclubs and burger bars do their dirty business the same as ever, worse than ever, the fat running free in the old-fashioned approach to street living.
The cover pages of yesterday’s Mirror lick and peel at the road; the headline concerns Johnny Cochrane, he of the goatee and global face of Associated, and his interminable divorce with Liza Delorez who, my seven-year-old daughter has told me, is a world famous pop singer. They’re a scientology couple and Johnny had instructed Liza she was to give birth to their child in silence; it’s too much to expect they’ll take the same approach to separation. The newspaper somersaults as if trying to turn over a new leaf, and takes to the air.
‘We want to hear your experiences of the Dream and how you think it will make a difference to your life. Has it made a difference already?’
I took a long walk last night and as a side effect, I viewed history, the picture without a frame. The Red Lion was as busy as normal, though the regulars were reluctant to broker conversation, as if body language (shrugs and same-again nods) were the new national tongue. Hooded youngsters still stood at street corners, too coolly self-regulating to discuss the Dream; perhaps its anarchy they fear, not order. In the park, had the Martians landed, their welcoming committee would’ve consisted of a dog-walker who held a white bag at arm’s length, a methylated spirit who told me about the crazy dream he’d had and a thicket of shrubs that talked in two hot tongues.
As a child, I believed the world altered, just for one second, at midnight on Christmas Eve, inanimate objects were gilded with life and gold coursed through new veins to lap around a core the colour of starlight. I was always disappointed when that moment passed, as I was when I could no longer mistake my father’s snores for reindeer.
Looking at the tower blocks makes me feel giddy.
‘Let’s take you through again as to how this incredible phenomenon spread across the world. Experts have pinpointed its origins to the South Pacific islands of Kiribati and Tuvalu, from where it followed the night, sweeping through New Zealand and Australia, before moving across the Far East, Russia and Arabia, reaching Europe and Africa at roughly the same time. Wherever people slept, they – we – were subject to the same astonishing dream. Those who did, or chose not, to sleep appear to have now missed out on the experience.’
A caller makes it through, only to claim the gods as his own, as if the Dream were the last parachute on a falling aeroplane:
‘I had the Dream! No one else could’ve had it! I want it again; I can’t wait. I’ve called to say goodbye to anyone…to anyone. Don’t be sorry for me.’
A scuffling precedes the sound of a drop in the audience.
‘I’m sorry,’ says the DJ. ‘Our caller has hung up.’
A glance at the other drivers confirms who heard the last word of a lost listener; one man rests his head on the steering wheel; a woman sobs into her hands. Other drivers make phone calls, smoke cigarettes, pick their noses or just stare into the distance. I adjust my seatbelt and place my hand on the passenger seat, where Alice was born. A home birth was discussed; instead, a messy compromise.

As I set down my briefcase in the hallway, I can hear Alice with Lieslelotte in the living room.
‘Why do you like so much to brush my hair?’ asks the nanny, in English with the neat clip-clop of a well-bred pony. ‘It must be very clean by now.’
‘Because Daddy said Mummy is gone abroad,’ replied Alice. ‘Mummy’s gone to abroad to work and you’ve come from abroad to work. That’s funny!’
I haven’t lied to Alice. Mummy’s a long way away. I know she had the Dream. I peer through the crack of the door and watch as, breathless with reverence, Alice combs Lieslelotte’s crow-black hair with guileless fingers. The au pair relishes each lift of the brush and closes her eyes in a private consolation. Before they can share a confidence, Alice spots me and soon I’m embracing my seven-year-old newborn, heart against heart. Alice once showed me a picture of a hug she’d drawn using every shade of red in her colour box. She kisses me on the cheek.
‘Ow! Daddy’s got prickles.’
‘Mr Wyeman,’ said Lieslelotte, ‘your invitation this morning, of dinner this evening? I would like to accept. If it is still good?’
‘Of course. We’re all one big happy family.’
‘Thank you. But first, I shall attend to the washing, quickly.’
My guilt at employing an au pair fades at such a cameo of prim servitude. I can’t remember Lieslelotte using the word ‘quickly’ before, nor of washing the dishes with such vigour. I guess she had the Dream the same as everyone else.
‘I’ve made Grandpa a birthday card!’ announced Alice. ‘We all had to make a picture at school today and Miss Lovett said mine was the most.’
‘The most what?’
Alice shrugged and showed me the card – an A3 sheet of white cardboard, decorated with glitter, globs of poster paint, milk bottle tops with their centres cut out in a circle, dolly mixture sweets and dried pasta wheels (‘that’s for if Grandpa gets hungry in the night.’)
Together, we slide the card into the envelope I’d liberated from the stationery cupboard this morning. The envelope has a cartoon poodle printed in one corner, licking a stamp. GoodTime, Associated’s contracted stationery supplier, brand all their products with breeds of dog: poodles for envelopes, Pekinese for sticky tape, Labradors for pencils and, due to a mistranslation, dachshunds for bulldog clips.
‘Did you get a card, Daddy? What’s that on the front?’
‘A Lancaster bomber. Grandpa will like that.’

He might like the card, but I gave up holding my breath for Dad a long time ago. Dad still lives in the soot-stained semi in the older part of town, where I spent the violet evenings of my childhood. We watched TV together in the living room, cramped and tawdry, to take the weight off our minds and to obviate the need for conversation. There was nothing more to say once Mum had been mourned. As the years flickered by, I came to wonder how the programmes appeared in Dad’s mind. Did he understand The Young Ones? Did Songs of Praise ever strike a chord? Was he amused by And Mother Makes Three? Nothing mined a reaction from the old man’s face. One of my favourites, Arthur C Clarke’s Mysterious World, provided possible explanations as to the whereabouts of Mum’s sisters, my aunts Edna, Gloria and Coral, who stopped visiting soon after the funeral. One week, they’d succumbed to Spontaneous Human Combustion and were no more than a trio of slippered feet propped up against the fire grate; the next week saw them taken aboard cigar-shaped UFOs and turned to black smoke on Mars.
‘When will we see the aunties again?’ I’d ask.
‘Ssh! We’re watching this aren’t we?’ would be the standard reply, or sometimes I’d get: ‘hold your noise, the news will be on in a minute.’
Life was bullet-pointed by news bulletins and filled by weather forecasts, all watched by father with a nod now and then, as if in hurried agreement. You get an unhealthy view of the world if you watch too many news bulletins.
From her booster seat in the back of the car, Alice sang under her breath, then gasped and sat bolt upright.
‘Grandpa’s car is outside! Daddy, park next to it, so your car won’t be lonely.’
I’m as surprised as Alice by the sight of the cream-coloured Corsair in the driveway, surrounded by a picket fence so dark and greasy with age it looks more like an ancient groyne.
‘Lottie, you’d better wait here,’ I said. ‘Dad doesn’t know you’re coming with us yet. He’s got a thing about Germans.’