Looking for Jake and Other Stories

“If you could do something about it,” someone was saying, but Morley was ahead of her. I can, he thought.

Every time he bought anything he felt his stomach sink in case there was an instruction, but he was almost eager. He was afraid that enthusiasm or anxiety would count against him. He was careful to display no expectation. He picked products from shop shelves firmly, without hesitation.

Of course nothing came. For many days nothing came and he thought often of his duty and how he would like to do it. A tanker was lost in the North Sea. Livestock was bled dry in Mexico by some goatsucker, nothing came, crop circles returned, diseases took thousands, corruption brought down banks, nothing came.

When it did, in the end, the instruction was larger than any he had received before. He suspected, before he had unwrapped his carton. He hefted it. “Deep Pan Vegetable Feast,” he read, and eyed its thickness.

Inside it was a disk, almost an inch thick, the diameter of a small frisbee, that had been only just covered in dough and cheese. It was the same dark grey that most of the others had been, perhaps a little lighter or darker. Morley shook it but it made no sound. There was a line just visible bisecting it, where it could be prised apart.

FORWARD TO, he read on it, and then a post-office-box number.ASAP, it said. They want me to send it? Morley thought, bewildered, as he kept reading. They’ve never— He stopped hard as he reached the next, last, line:THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION. YOUR WORK IS DONE.

You will be contacted.

Yesterday was bad comparison, yellow wears bad conscience, yule wary basket-case: of course not, of course not. You will be complicit; connected; collected; conniving; coopted; collated; concerned. Of course not. You will be contacted. Morley had understood very early whatYWBC meant, letters he had read on every insert with which he had ever been entrusted, until now.

He put the discus-thing on the table, stared at it. For minutes, Morley stared at it, until he knew what it was that he felt: horrified, and bereft.

He should be happy. There was no hint of displeasure in the message. It seemed they were choosing a major task with which to finish his service. The job was done. That was the implication, it wasn’t that his work was done, but that his work was done, that things were irrevocable now. He supposed he had helped bring in a better world.

As he wrapped the canister and put it in a box, though, he thought suddenly, I’ve been replaced, and became so enraged that he slammed the thing down. Why’ve they replaced me? What did I do wrong?

In the post office, in the long, long queue, he could not stop staring at a woman three people in front of him.

She held a large padded envelope close to her. Abruptly she let it drop and held it loosely, while she looked round, taking in everyone. She drew her hands up again, slowly, the package creeping back towards her chest, and she tried to put it down again and walked briskly and with relief to the service window when it opened.

Morley was still. The queue became restive but he did not move. Behind him an elderly Rastafarian gripped a poster tube in two hands. A young mother fussed with the cardboard box she had put beside her baby in its pushchair. A teenager was picking with what looked like great nervousness at the large wrapped case he held.

“Excuse me, mate, are you going to—” someone was saying, but Morley ignored him, stared at the parcels in the line.

I’m surrounded by colleagues, he thought, and then almost instantly, I’m surrounded by enemies.

Men and women from his own organisation, or from splinters from that organisation, renegades, or opponents dedicated to destroying him, those who would make things far worse for Chechnya, for the economy, those whom he must stop. None of them know, he thought. He was the only one who knew that there, in that post office, ignoring each other and filtering out the tiny mutter of a Walkman, glancing at the clock, fidgeting, they were all at war. There must be civilians among them, and they were in danger too. Innocent people could get hurt.

Careful now.

Be careful. Morley swallowed. He closed his eyes. I’m losing it. “Mate, excuse me, but the queue’s moving—”

“Go on mate—”

What am I doing?

It was sudden, a landslide of certainty. Seeing all his hidden enemies or comrades or random strangers, Morley could not believe he had been taken in, that he had been suckered by the implied do-gooding of his overseers, these skulking contaminators. He was aghast. He thought of the years he had done their work and of each message or item or weapon or computer code he had passed on. As rage grew in him and disgust for his foolishness, a fervour came too, to fix the bad he had done. He could hardly imagine what he must have been party to, but he made himself, he was unflinching. The flies on corpses, the slumps that wiped economies away and left people raging in the streets.

“Mate—”

But Morley was out and running, pushing through the lines, holding his terrible package close, as if he would shield everyone else from it.

No, he thought. No.

He held the disc over the waters of the canal, he held it by a skip full of rubbish, by a bonfire on the allotments, but at last he took it back to his house and placed it on his table, a baleful centrepiece.

I won’t be part of it anymore, Morley thought. Fuck you, he thought, staring at the container. He put a potted plant on it. He tried to make it banal.

That night when his phone rang, Morley was horrified but not so surprised to hear the curt message, the voice so clipped he could not even tell the sex or age of the speaker.

“Is this . . .” it said, and then a gasp, a contained sound, and then, “You’re just bloody asking for trouble,” and there was laughing and the line cut.

Morley did not leave his house for days. He picked up a knife whenever the phone or the doorbell rang, but that one call seemed to be the end of it. I knew it, he thought and most or much of the time believed. I was right about them, they wouldn’t threaten me if they were...on my, on our side.

Nothing came for him. He watched the disc. It sat below the china pot through the weeks of winter, into spring.

Morley carefully watered the plant. For a time he flinched when he shopped, and then he stopped, and he found nothing in his products. He watched what happened in the world, and was as sure as he could be that he was not to blame. He was more and more certain that he had done the right thing.

By March he had almost stopped worrying. When he came back to his flat one day to find his window broken and his home trashed, his video and stereo taken, his books thrown to the floor, he even fleetingly thought that it was just a burglary. But it did not take him long to trace the footsteps of the intruder, see how they had hurried from room to room, how they had been looking for something.

They had been interrupted, it seemed, had not spent long in the kitchen. The disc was untouched, fringed by the leaves that now half hid it. They would not have expected it to be there. Morley felt the raised instructions again and sat on the floor.

The police were sympathetic. They made it clear that he should not expect too much.

I expect nothing, he thought. You can’t track the likes of these. You’re no good to me at all. They want me.

“Is there . . . is it . . . Is it like most other breakins?” he could not restrain himself from asking, and the liaison officer nodded and watched him carefully.

“Yes. It’s . . .” He moved his lips. “Sometimes people find this sort of thing very upsetting. Would you like me to . . . I can put you in touch with someone to chat to about it. A counsellor . . .” Morley almost laughed at the man’s misdirected kindness.

You can’t help me, he thought. No one can. He wondered