In a matter of just over six weeks, Lawrence progressed half-way across the back row of the gang block, one twentieth of the way to the elite position occupied by Tricky Fingers, Ugly Toes and the other aristocracy of the gang. Of course, progress did slow down. Those who lasted three months could last three years, those who lasted three years had a fair crack at surviving a decade. Spiderman told him the line-up of the front rank had not changed in the last year.
What caused Lawrence most alarm was the speed at which he got used to the whole abominable operation, from unloading to separating to bating to canning to hanging skins in the smokehouse. All this he got used to as a great bore that had to be endured every day. The corrupt, stinking callousness of the place was seeping into his flesh and polluting it forever. It vaguely disturbed him that he did not suffer nightmares, although this was also a safety feature. Those who broke the sleep of the dormitory got harsh treatment, as he was to discover.
Learning a craft in the Workshop—how to make a leather jacket, how to make boots—would at least have yielded the satisfaction of creation. It was a privilege only earned through time and good standing. Of the eighteen hundred head of value, he estimated no more than four hundred joined in the Workshop, not one of which was a zeta. Of course, the psychology of granting privilege to those who embraced their fate was not lost to him. By Lawrence’s estimate, eighteen hundred head of value were held in their state of subjugation by no more than 150 shareholders, even granting that at any one time some shareholders must be away on annual leave in the outside world. A rebellion would end it all in five seconds flat. So why did it never happen? For the same reason troops obeyed officers they hated: conditioned servility. Or else, the virtually guaranteed suicide of attempting to organise a conspiracy of hundreds in a population seething with petty gripes and rivalries. Or simply the narcosis of routine. Lawrence could feel this invisible enemy rotting his moral fibre as weeks disappeared into a growing blank of empty time gone. Most ominously, he ceased to be aware of the tag through his ear. Sometimes he brushed it accidentally and was surprised to find it there.
The sure sign he was becoming institutionalised was a growing hatred of new arrivals. They asked the same irritating questions, had to be taught the same lessons and made the same dumb mistakes. The truly dangerous ones cried out for their mamas in their sleep, or wailed for their girlfriends, or they bleated recriminations at God for this fate. If they were lucky, a few caustic barbs from Buttons or Spiderman got the whole dormitory laughing and the offender took the message and shut up. The slow learners, the victims of nightmares, the incorrigible snorers; they got a different lesson. One night during the third week, there was some kind of angst in the toilets during which Bitchy Ritchy got strangled by Buttons and Gnasher. At the next morning’s parade, The Captain pontificated his outrage at having been robbed of future value. He demanded Gang 4 produce Bitchy Ritchy’s killer. After a tense pause, Buttons and Gnasher grabbed a recent arrival tagged Zeta772 and dragged him out protesting his innocence to SMS London, who ordered him turn and face the wall. Before the whole parade of the Value System, SMS London drew his Hi-Power Browning and shot Zeta772 in the back of the head. Master Sergeant Ratty stooped and snipped the tag from the dead man’s ear.
Why Zeta772? The fat bastard snored like a rotten bellows, so he had to go.
Escape to death was simple. What about escape to life? Lawrence never caught a hint that value had ever got away. It was one of the certainties of life, like the certainty of death, that formed the bedrock of the Value System. Those who fled to the marshes were either deranged, panicked, or idiots. Yet over weeks of nocturnal roaming and furtive daytime observation, Lawrence reached an extraordinary conclusion: the ultras mounted no guards anywhere. The route to the Factory was thwarted by raising the drawbridge over the Tidal Creek after evening shift. The ultras’ own compound was adjacent the football field, across another mud creek with a drawbridge. Evidently the Value System was naturally secured by creeks, impassable marsh and by the utter absence of a farther world of life. No smoke ever smudged the landward sky, no aircraft ever overflew, no flake of sail ever spurred the horizon. Lawrence dreamed of the whole place being swept away in a storm surge off the North Sea or by floods from inland. Yet even this looked a remote hope. The Value System occupied an island critically a couple of yards higher in elevation than the surrounding land. At least so far, this had protected it from inundation.
None of this deterred Lawrence in his planning for a break in the spring. With enough sheer gall, it must be possible to take a barge from the Tidal Basin and get out into the wastes of the North Sea. His toughest problem was, whom to escape with? The gang was naturally cliquey. Lawrence hung about with Spiderman, Mirror-Face and Ugly Toes, because they were steady, reliable people. To extend one’s acquaintanceship became harder as the weeks passed. Speaking to a wider circle risked being taken for a gay come-on. Besides, the vast majority of value were simply a waste of space: Undead Nameless Gone. Everybody arrived in a batch, their misdemeanours to be publicly gloated
