There’s two ways you get old. One, you shrivel up. The other, you puff out like a cloud. One guy has a face like melted marshmallow in these dead-white hanging lumps.
“Old farts,” I hear myself say. I’m so sick of feeling angry. I feel angry all the time and there’s nothing I can do about anything. There’s nothing I can do about Bessie, nothing I can do about those old stupid jerks.
“She’ll be OK,” says Bill and he’s looking at me and for just a sec I’m his Daddy again. I never was much of a Daddy when he was a kid, always off on a job or working for the company. He ended up being the kind of guy who never stops looking for a father. Christ, Billy. I wanted to have enough money so that you would never have to work, to make up for not being around. But all my money goes into being old.
We latch hands. Bill’s spent all his life helping people. Bill’s just a better man than I am.
“I’m sorry, Billy,” I say, and I mean for everything.
That night Jazza and I finally go for a beer at the bar in the Happy Farm, but J’s in bad shape. He just sits staring. Neurobics make him dizzy. They got a new timed drug dispenser on his wrist. He does a little jump and groans when they dose him. We’re hanging out with Gus.
Gus does this sweet little hippie routine. He says that he sold plankton to places like Paraguay so they could get carbon reduction credits. Now. Everybody who was awake knows that it didn’t work and nobody made any money at it. In fact they lost their shirts.
So I ask myself: where does Gus’s money come from? I mean you got this greasy little dude who took too much whizz. His dialog is just too sussed for an eco-warrior.
“You heard about this VAO stuff?” he asks me.
“Only cause my granddaughter got mugged. I didn’t know they filter our news.
“I got something that filters the filter,” he says. “This is news we need to know.”
“About my granddaughter?”
“No. Look me in the eye. The guys that do this are a crew. It’s several crews all over the country, but they’re all linked, and they’re all old guys. And they’re doing this kind of stuff a lot.”
Suddenly, I am aware of the surveillance all around us. “So?”
“Kind of blows our story, doesn’t it? Sweet little old guys playing computer games and taking physio.” Gus’s eyes are steady as a rock.
I knew it. Gus is a player.
I ask him, “How much are you uh… tipping Curtis?”
His face and smile are less expressive than an armadillo’s behind. “Too much,” he says. His eyebrows do a little jump.
“Anybody else?” I ask him, meaning who are the other Players. It’s nice to know that even at our age we can make new friends and acquaintances.
“Oh yeah,” he says looking around. “You could start with The Good Fairies.” The Good Fairies are a couple, been together 50 years. They look up from their table, and they look pretty mean to me.
“I’ll get you that filter,” says Gus.
Good as his word, I get mail. Takes me a while, because it downloads as dirty pictures. I try a couple of times and finally get the code. Load it up and I got a different personalisation on the news.
So I fill up my newspaper and I read the backstory. This crew has been at it for months. Old guys who hijack armed intelligent cameras, old guys who spray clubs with paralysis gas, or shoot electricity through whole trainloads of commuters. They edit out every single last purse and wristwatch while the ordnance that is supposed to protect the punters is turned around on them.
There are zapped grannies, zapped babies, zapped beautiful teenage girls who should have been left to enjoy life. I never had any respect for direct-action crime. Money is magic, it’s a religion. All you gotta do is just walk into the temple and help yourself and nobody gets hurt.
Not these geeks. For them, hurting people is part of the point. They’re not even really crooks. Crooks want to be invisible. These guys are so stupid and vicious that they want everybody to know about them.
They got this crazy leader who calls himself Silhouette. Aw Jesus can you believe that? He probably grew up wanting to be Eminem or something. He still does that dumb thing with the splayed open hands pointing down. Silhouette is skinny like a model. His knees are fatter than his thighs and ho-hum, he’s all in black and he has his whole face blanked out, just black, no eyes no mouth. Oh, Daddy Cool.
I take one look at this guy and I know just who he is. My generation, you know, we never fought a war. We grew up watching disasters on TV and worrying about our clothes. This guy is sitting there and he’s holding his face so that we can see he’s got killer cheekbones. The guy’s probably eighty and he’s worried about his looks.
And of course he’s got a manifesto. He croaks it at me, in this real weird voice, until I figure out it’s been recognition masked. No voiceprint. It makes him sound like he’s talking underwater.
“You sniff money on old people, and just because we can’t run and can’t hurt you back you strip us naked. You leave us in cold water flats and shut us up in expensive prisons you call Homes. You don’t pay us the pensions you promised When we get sick, you tell us our insurance that we paid for all our lives doesn’t cover the cost of care. You want us to die. So. We’ll die. And take we’ll everything from you when we go.”
You want to know the spookiest thing of all? I know where he’s coming from I know exactly what Silhouette means.
“Age Rage,” he says and clenches a fist.
So the next day I’m back down in the bar with Gus. I got Jazzanova with me like he’s my good luck charm. Gus has his squeeze Mandy. Mandy used to be a lap dancer. She’s still got a body, I can tell you.
She’s also got a mouth and the brains to use it. Her cover is that she used to be in property development. Well yeah maybe. A certain kind of old babe has the hardest eyes you’ll ever see.
Mandy says, “The trouble with that scum is they’ll turn the heat up on all of us.”
“Yup,” says Gus. “We’ll end up on the street.”
“I’ll take Curtis with me,” I promise. “I got evidence on the guy.”
Mandy’s not impressed. “Good! You can share the same cardboard box. Hope it makes you feel better.”
We’re too old for fear. We just turn our backs on it. If we get the fear at all it takes us over, and our legs don’t work and we go little and frail and old. So we got to be like old dried leather. It used to be soft, but now it’s as hard as stone.
The Good Fairies sit listening. They are as cerebral as fuck. I mean these guys are the only people I know who can tell their genitals what to do. They got married fifty years ago and they’ve only fucked each other since. I blame Aids.
The Good Fairies sometimes talk in unison. It’s like twins who’ve been locked up in the same closet since they were born. “We have to take out Silhouette.”
Best, as we cogitate. True. Beat. Us? Beat.
Then we all start roaring with laughter. Mandy barks like a dog with its vocal chords cut out. Gus squeaks. I know I sound like gravel being milled. Jazzanova stares into outer space, and doesn’t want to be left out, so he laughs at the strip lighting and then he swallows a chip off the table edge thinking it’s a pill.
Mandy is barking. “The Neurobics Crew!”
The Good Fairies sit holding hands, sipping their cigarettes, and they don’t move a muscle.
Fairy One says, real calm. “It’ll be real funny inside that cardboard box.”
“Specially when it rains,” says the other. This guy is five foot two with a dorky beard. He looks like a failed Drag King, but he calls himself Thug, which has to be some kind of joke.
“Yeah, but you guys,” says Mandy. “I can hear where you’re coming from, but what are going to DO?”
Fairy One calls himself Jojo but I bet he’s really called George and he says, “We ask him to stop.”
“Oh yeah? Sure!”
“His position doesn’t make sense. He says he does it because he’s old. But it is the old he’s hurting.”
Mandy shakes her head. “He’s in it for the money.”
Thug disagrees. “He’s in it for the showbiz. Money won’t be enough.”
Jojo says, “We show him how to get on TV and say something that makes sense for a change. I’m sure that most of us have something to say on the position of the old.”
Mandy says, “How you gonna do that.”
Jojo says, “I used to make TV shows.”
Thug says. “All we gotta do is find who Silhouette is.”
