The first thing I noticed was that he had no thumbs.
He was having trouble putting the coins in the slot at the self-service checkout, juggling them between first and second fingers, like a crab’s pincers. Each time he dropped one he’d cast a hunted look back at me. I looked away reflexively, started stroking my ponytail, pretending not to care until he went back to his task.
The man was taking so long that I had time to notice other details about him. A shaggy mop of salt-and-pepper hair, a sallow, spectral face behind the turned-up collar of his coat, which hung off his rangy frame like seaweed. The smell of second-hand shops: mothballs and supermarket perfume. Black plimsolls, the soles worn down until there was almost no tread. I started wondering if I should feel nervous, standing so close to him.
But my eyes kept returning, involuntarily, to the edges of his hands where his thumbs should have been. A faded purple-pink line along each one was crossed through with stitch marks like permanently attached centipedes. They looked like clean amputations; couldn’t have been a double shark bite, then. A freak carpentry accident? Guillotined by the thumb mafia?
Finally he made his payment, cast me one more distrustful look, ducked his head and disappeared into the street. I forgot about him immediately, too busy thinking about which one of my ready meals to microwave for dinner that night.
On the bus home, though, I saw him through the window, shambling down the street. My flat was three stops away. I’d arranged to meet a friend on Skeletons, an online detective RPG we played most afternoons – I only had to bust one more narcotics ring and I’d be able to upgrade my ammo store to level 12 – but right then I was gripped by the conviction that this was a real-life mystery much more deserving of attention. I pressed the red button and slid out.
The evening was warm and damp, the pavement reflecting pools of blue sky. He walked fast, I noticed, leaning forward as he went. The bags swung at his sides rhythmically, in opposite directions, maybe to keep him steady on his feet. As I scooted between other pedestrians to catch up I could see he walked in an unnatural way, as though he had been taken to pieces at some point and then put back together with wire.
He was here illegally, that was it. He had the jumpy look of someone without papers, always eyeing up anyone who looked like they might be police. Living in some rathole, quiet, no nosy neighbours, a dour landlady who mouths off about foreigners through a mouthful of cigarette, people arguing into the night through paper-thin walls about whose turn it was to dispose of the body. There were plenty of those in Skeletons.
How did he survive? Begging? Didn’t look the type to sit in public view all day long. Backroom staff at a seedy restaurant where they serve mouse cassoulet and pay their workers in pretzels? I was starting to get excited. This could be an exposé. I could become famous.
At length he ducked into an alley. As to be expected so far. I turned the corner quickly enough to see him slip through the double doors of a stone-fronted apartment building. Using a swipe card! That threw me. Was he some eccentric heir, incapable of living up to his aristocratic family’s expectations? But that didn’t explain the severed thumbs, unless countesses treat their black sheep more gruesomely than I’d thought. I put on a burst of speed and managed to get inside just before the sliding doors closed.
Now I was in a hallway, maroon marble up two walls and rows of stainless steel mailboxes up another. I scanned the tags: there were a few Arab names. Perhaps he was escaping a military junta who had tortured him for releasing secrets to Western governments, and had escaped to live a half-life with a new identity in the underbelly of London. A sheet of brushed steel surprised me. I blinked back at my reflection, flushed and guilty-looking.
Turning back to the sliding doors, my heart starting to pound, I realised that you needed a swipe card to get out, too. Casting around for a pillar, or a decent-sized potted palm to hide behind until someone came down the stairs, I noticed steps on the far side of the lift going down to a nondescript door. Maintenance. I pushed it, expecting to see water meters and a few tins of old paint, but found something else entirely.
In a long room, lit as though through dishwater, paint peeling off the brick walls and insulated pipes running along the ceiling, two men sat on low stools either side of a crate, playing backgammon. On a camping stove in the back corner a pot rattled its lid with steam, filling the room with the toasty, bitter smell of cumin. There was a mattress on the floor in another corner, a thin blanket thrown back, a book laid open and turned face down on the grey sheet.
The two men turned round with a start. One was my rattling man; large, mistrustful eyes glaring directly. The other, peering over his shoulder, had cheeks pitted with acne scars, and a receding hairline of wavy black hair, sedulously oiled. He frowned at me and started to get up.
“What you want?” he demanded, still semi-crouched. “Where you from, Immigration?”
“Er, I…work for a homeless charity, doing…outreach to people without, um, homes…and I saw this…gentleman here and thought…” I looked down sheepishly at the shopping bags in my hands and held out the frozen chickpea curry with trembling hands. “Don’t want anyone going hungry,” I added, feeling more considerate now that I had a solid lie to work with.
It wasn’t entirely a lie. As Junior Resources Manager at Greenways Biotech Inc., as well as restocking office supplies, water cooler tanks and whatnot, I’m in charge of taking out cardboard boxes to be recycled, which is what lots of homeless people sleep on. Anyway, in Skeletons we often have to bend the truth a little in order to get closer to it.
The man narrowed his eyes at me, weighing up the probability of a frozen dinner coming with trouble for dessert. I started blinking rapidly, put my head on one side with a sugary smile to accentuate my congenial appearance, the one I usually play down. (I play Skeletons under the name Cody…my real name, Amelia, doesn’t exactly inspire awe in the cutthroat world of imaginary crime lords.) I suppose it worked, because he got up and took the box with a faint nod. Emboldened by not being throttled, I wondered aloud if I might call in from time to time and check on…er…what was his name?
Zift.
Simpering kindly as I assumed charity workers did, I left. My heart resumed its usual rhythm two and a half stops into the bus journey home.
I was sure there was some extraordinary story the thumbless man was concealing. What kind of a name is Zift? And what was he doing lurking in a posh block of flats, playing backgammon with the maintenance man?
How do you play backgammon when you have no thumbs?
* * *
Three days later, I reckoned I could feasibly pop in and look like I was doing my rounds. I brought a loaf of wholewheat bread, cream cheese, a cucumber and some apples – charity workers would surely want to give out healthy food – but I hadn’t yet reached the door to the building lobby when I saw him stride out without seeing me. Something about the clunking way he walked, leaning forward purposefully but with a body that clearly ached at every jolt, made me shudder.
I called out his name – Zift; his name sounded wrong in my mouth, as though I had a tooth missing – and he balked at the sight of me, even raised one elbow in a protective reflex, but I showed him the bag of food and he slowly straightened up.
“Going out for a stroll?” I asked. He looked me up and down, nodded warily.
“Not much fun being cooped up,” I continued, trying to wedge open a conversation. “It gets a bit stuffy in these buildings…but that’s modern British architecture for you, ha! A wonder we’re not all ill…well, we usually are…”
Zift took out a tissue and wiped his forehead. It was cool for August. Feeling my catch about to wriggle loose, I held out the carrier bag to him. He took it cautiously, peered inside, took it gingerly under his arm.
“You want to eat with me?” he said suddenly. “I don’t like to eat alone.”
This was even better than I’d hoped for. Perhaps my girl-next-door charm was more potent than I’d realised. Or Zift was more in need of a friend than he let on.
We walked. Zift was heading for the Thames. There is a strange gravity about this wide, slug-like river, I’ve noticed. On warmish nights in summer, at a loose end when the internet’s playing up, I often find myself drifting towards Covent Garden, Soho, Shaftesbury Avenue. You pass clutches of tourists, or young professionals with money to drink and snort away, and a certain suffocation sets in, a tiredness of grinning and fun. A quiet, open space peeks between buildings at you, with downcast eyelashes of reflected streetlights, and it’s right there, free and ancient and slow. Towering lime trees with their mottled bark, dying gradually overhead. Night buses humming. The dirty mauve sky at midnight. I don’t know, there’s something comforting about it.
But it was too early for that kind of walk. He must be stretching his limbs because there was something wrong with them. I surreptitiously studied his walk as he loped along. He caught me looking and I turned it into a caring smile.
We walked past Tower Bridge, the medieval castle seemingly dropped into the midst of the city from a book of fairytales, all ravens and legends of people losing their heads or wits.
“That’s where they keep the Crown Jewels,” I informed him.
“I saw them,” he replied shortly. “They had a menagerie of wild animals. In the 17th century. The ravens are friendly.”
Determined to find something I knew better than he did, my eye hunted for a new outline on the South Bank.
“See that dome over there? That’s the new bioenergy plant. Greenways. It’s opening this week to the public.”
Zift had stopped at a low stone wall and sat awkwardly on it, one foot still on the pavement. He peered at the building on the opposite shore with open hatred.
“Bioenergy.” He almost spat the word out. “What they do is not natural…it is evil.”
“Evil?” I huffed. “It’s clean energy! We have to stop polluting the air and the seas!”
“You don’t know what they do to make this technology!” Zift seemed furious now, seething beneath his thatch of hair. “The testing…”
“But anything ‘bio’ is better. I mean, we’re only a few years away from irreversible climate collapse…” I broke off. He was studying my face now, something of his recent disgust leaking through.
“Are you really from a charity?”
“Yes, of course, I mean, I…I do whatever I can for others, charitably, you know…” I was rummaging around in my carrier bag to disguise my burning cheeks. I pulled out the bread (pre-sliced, oat and linseed – plenty of fibre) and the cheese, realising I should have brought a knife with me.
Still frowning suspiciously at me, Zift pulled out a small penknife from an inside pocket of his massive overcoat, and, grasping it with the fingers of his left hand against his palm, used his right index finger to pull out the longest blade. Sitting down on the low wall, he used the tip of the blade to make a hole in the cellophane bread bag and pull out the heel.
He was deft in his hand movements, like someone who had grown used to a handicap, one that he had perhaps been given years ago. Curiosity flooded my head with more possibilities: he’d had cancer of the thumb and had them both removed preventatively; his cousin needed thumb transplants after a terrible motorbike accident; he gave them up as a bizarre religious rite as penance for the devil having made work for them… How did he live a day-to-day life without thumbs? Doing up buttons with only fingers must make you feel like a goat.
“You are wondering about my hands.”
I looked straight into his glare without meaning to. The hatred had gone. There was neither self-pity there, nor twisted pride, only a calm sort of surveying, as though he was also curious about my presence of thumbs and thought we could trade secrets.
“You’re right. I’m not really from a charity. I – I just decided to trail you because I thought you might…have an interesting story to tell.” I looked down at the sandwich he was making to avoid looking at him. He sliced some cucumber and laid it onto the cheese, laid another slice on top and handed it to me.
“It is a terrible story,” Zift whispered. He looked into the dull green of the water lapping the bank for a while, following the movement of a beer can whirling slowly in a yellow foaming eddy. “I will tell you, if you wish. But not today.”
His eyes jumped up to the silhouette of buildings along the other bank of the river, hardening as they met with the glass and chrome cupola of the bioenergy plant. A knot tightened in my belly. I forced down my sandwich but I already knew I would meet it again, undigested.
I wish I could say we chatted about the weather, or bemoaned some common yet suitably minor enemy that would bond us in our whingeing but prevent dangerously honest debate. But I chewed my cream cheese and cucumber sandwich more noisily than I’ve ever chewed a sandwich, conscious even of rustling the cellophane bread bag between my hands, while Zift stared into the scum at the edge of the river, folded into himself, distant as some deep sea creature whose language is all bleeps and blurps to me. Then I made up an excuse about needing to do laundry, and went home.
* * * * *
It took me a week to pluck up the courage to visit Zift again. In the meantime I solved four mysteries in Skeletons, upgraded my office to level 6 (3D photocopier, bamboo blinds, gold-plated stapler), and mentioned to my friend Cecile in passing that I had stumbled upon a real-life puzzle. She was sanguine about it – though it’s hard to tell when she’s just typing, since she lives in Belgium, we’ve never met – and didn’t ask more. We team up all the time to track down virtual kidnappers, diamond smugglers and narcotics rings, but you aren’t allowed to exchange personal information through the Skeletons chat.
Somehow the friendship thing passed me by. I left school feeling relieved to leave behind the petty idiocies of my peers, expecting to find that life would pick me up in its arms and lift me to a better place. Instead, I reeled from one waitressing job to another, cleaning offices and handing out flyers for sushi bars in between. No fascination ever really stuck. Until I met Zift, with his jangly body and his hair like a docile octopus, and those unmistakably absent digits.
I left it long enough to allow my embarrassment to fade, assuming he would likewise forget. I brought along an old blanket, a bag of pain-au-chocolats and two tickets to see the opening of the Bioenergy Plant. I got them free, all of us who worked there did, and I didn’t have anyone else to go with. Their cutting-edge system of generating electricity was still being jealously guarded, but it promised to be sustainable, non-toxic, use zero fossil fuels and work even without sun, wind or rain. I felt bizarrely proud. Maybe I thought it would jog Zift’s memory, trigger a truth spill. Either that or he’d chase me away forever and I could lay the obsession to rest.
This time I found him waiting for me on the corner of Brick Lane and Whitechapel Road. He blended in among the sunken guys who stagger around the rehab centre. A few executives bustled past, shiny-shoed, without sparing him a look.
“Hi, Zift,” I waved, my brightness perhaps a little exaggerated. He gave me the faintest suggestion of a smile, but his swallow’s wing eyebrows bowed cautiously.
“Hello,” he replied. He didn’t extend his hand to shake mine.
“I’ve brought pain-au-chocolate,” I explained, unnecessarily. Zift peered into the carrier bag I opened. His eyebrows gave an appreciative tilt.
“Aaaaaand…” – I cleared my throat – “two tickets to the opening of the new Bioenergy plant, on the South Bank!” I grinned, waiting for him to mirror me.
His face only contracted into a furious stare. “I will not go. It is a place where horrible things happen.”
“But – but it’s going to revolutionise the energy market! We can come off petroleum now – that’ll fix so many conflicts in the Middle East, won’t it?” – Zift scowled – “and – and we won’t have nuclear power plants melting down all over the place…oh, can’t you see what a good thing it is?”
Zift studied my face carefully. A couple of Bengali women in broderie anglaise sharwal khameez pushed strollers between us.
“You need proof?”
It seemed as though he was relenting.
This was good news, though. He knew something I didn’t about my workplace (Mystery! Check!) and was agreeing to enlighten me about the source of this evil (I am a hot-shot detective on a case! Double check!).
I opened the packet of pain-au-chocolate so eagerly that one fell out onto the gum-encrusted pavement. I almost offered it to Zift, but I saw his expression hadn’t changed so I threw it to a stray cat eating out of the gutter, which gave me a very similar look.
“So…you never told me where you’re from?” I began, as we started walking towards the river.
“That is correct.”
I guessed that my grand pain-au-chocolat gesture hadn’t been enough to erase whatever offence I’d caused. We scooted into the tunnel that led underneath the knot of traffic at Aldgate East.
“And your name…is it…your real name?” My voice echoed tinnily.
“No.”
We walked some more before he replied.
“My parents called me Hamed,” he said, surprising me. “But nobody ever used that name. My nickname was Zift. It means ‘little piece of tarmac’ in Arabic.”
“Little piece of tarmac? Not very flattering, is it?”
He cast a frown my way, but laughed through his nose.
“You people call your children cute, silly nicknames. Your greatest wish is for them to be adorable and perfect.”
A skinny, chalk-faced boy of about fourteen wrapped in a blanket was sitting on some cardboard at the bottom of the steps, eating a bar of chocolate, a puppy asleep at his side. Zift tossed him the pain-au-chocolat that, I now realised, he hadn’t bitten into.
“We call children after things that sound insignificant. It tells us that we are OK being small and imperfect.”
“Huh. That’s…interesting.” Finally, Zift was opening up! Time to start a subtle line of interrogation. “So…you come from, er, Arabia?”
Zift’s face folded and he blew through his mouth irritably.
“Stop talking now please.”
He strode speedily for someone who seemed to have had his body dismantled at some recent point in time. He kept his hands in the deep pockets of his canvas army coat. I offered him another pain-au-chocolat but he dismissed it, polite but inexplicably angry. I hadn’t had breakfast and was starving, so I shoved it into my mouth as we swept along. When we hit Southwark Bridge I saw that a stiff wind had sprung up while we had been muffled by tall sandstone buildings, and the surface of the Thames had turned to a scouring pad. Seagulls rowed the air. A few spiffing white yachts stood moored on the north bank. A restaurant with a bland, forgettable name, and a green-painted tug with a bulldog squatting grumpily on the deck.
Zift wasn’t looking at the boats. Right ahead rose the glass-haunched headquarters of Greenways. This was not only the HQ of the multinational company but also their flagship bioenergy plant, a model they were rolling out at hundreds of locations across the globe. Today was their grand launch, when all their decades of work and investment would be unveiled to the eager public.
The queue was taking forever. Zift still wasn’t speaking. When I stole a glance at him he seemed to have sunk into a deep, poisonous fury, one that kept itself tightly wrapped and became ever more concentrated. I tried to lighten the mood by pointing out posters for other city attractions – the Imperial War Museum, Othello at the Globe, Madame Tussaud’s – but they only made him scowl more. I took to mouthing “He’s not feeling well” at the other people in the queue.
At last it was our turn to go through a set of heavy, plum-coloured curtains and through a corridor spotlighting a variety of plants that documented the evolution of energy production. Models of Neanderthals crouched around wood fires. Static resin rendering of a petrol jet in a fake desert. Miniatures of coal, gas, nuclear and hydroelectric plants, the colossal blade of a wind turbine, a solar panel that covered the back of a car. Throughout, a pre-recorded man’s voice told the fascinating story of the search for “a truly ecological solution to our spiralling energy needs” in a booming, cinematic bass.
The corridor led to another set of plum black-out curtains, and this time we entered an antechamber in complete darkness. A projector began whirring a series of images before our eyes: earthquakes, volcanoes erupting tons of ash into the air, tsunamis, hurricanes devastating coastlines, solitary polar bears floating on ever-diminishing slabs of ice. The voice informed us that the end of the world was imminent…
“…Until, that is, Greenways began its breakthrough scientific programme in bioenergy. Never again would the world go dark at night. Never again would hospital equipment in conflict zones run out of power during a critical operation. Never again would human beings suffer powerlessness….”
The projection screen was lifted to reveal a tank of water, so vast it seemed we’d dropped into the bottom of an ocean. Soothing sounds of sea waves, dolphin chitters and harps filled the room. Strategic lighting revealed before us what looked like a colony of massive, deformed, grey-blue sea creatures, suspended by wires from a grid over the surface, pulsing rhythmically. Tubes threaded in and out of their orifices. Some of the visitors gasped.
“Greenways has summoned the powers of Nature,” continued the voiceover, “and placed them at the service of humankind, without causing any suffering to animals. What you see before you is the largest heart of any creature on earth, 180 kilos of pure muscle. Cutting-edge Greenways biotechnology has bred the noble blue whale to be all heart, with a minimal nervous system that our finest veterinary experts agree is not sentient and can feel no suffering. What you see before you is the future of energy: pure, clean, organic power, one hundred percent ethical and limitless…”
The recording droned on in its velvety sales pitch. The people around us murmured appreciatively: “Infinite energy.” “No harm done.” “Genius.”
This was why I joined the company in the first place – I wanted to feel like I was at the crest of a revolution, I thought that one day we’d all look back on this historic moment and I’d be able to say: I was there. Even if all I was doing was replenishing toner cartridges.
But I was there. And I never questioned the hyperbole, never wondered what lay beneath this impossibly clean source of energy. What price had been paid, or by whom.
Zift was visibly shaking; I thought he might start to fissure. His lips were moving; I leaned closer to hear what he was saying while his eyes raked the tanks as if he was watching his city burn down.
He was speaking a jumble of Arabic and English; I cursed myself for playing so many hours of Skeletons instead of learning another language on LingoFast. But watching him gesticulate, mutter indistinctly, give a suppressed howl, I understood – or I imagined – what he meant.
Zift had crossed a sea. He’d seen fellow passengers swallowed by the water. Children slip from their parents’ arms. Nowhere to go back to, everything destroyed. Only ahead. Waves, tall waves. Thrown overboard when a search boat came close. Water cannons. Shouts, impossible to contain. A camp, tents. Rain. Floods. Shivering. So much rain. Stomach pain, exhaustion. Fires. Hunger. Wet shoes. A forest. “We slept on snow, wrapped in plastic bags,” he managed to stutter out in English. Gunshots; parents calling for their children to run into the forest to hide. Walking. Hiding. Walking. People carrying children. Children walking alone. Separated. More hiding. Someone dying by the side of the path. “We had to leave her.” Sleeping, fitfully. Finally – more water. An inflatable dinghy. More rain. Shivering. Landing. Gratitude for soil. There was a van, Greenways green. Offers of security. Safety. Work. “Work. All we wanted.” Not to be fugitives, or charity cases. To have a home. To make it. Thought they were safe.
Arriving at a secure facility. Greenways facility. Cells. Uniforms. Every day, experiments. White coats. Incisions. Needles. Vomiting, shaking. Strange-tasting liquids. Lost all his hair. Bruises, cuts, scrapes. Removed organs; he didn’t even know which ones were gone. (By now he was facing me, speaking directly. He lifted his shirt to reveal a torso criss-crossed with lines, as if he’d been whipped, face on). No phones, but they had TVs. “No-one could bear to watch anything.” The tiniest thing, suspense, explosions, shootings, invasions…they turned the screens off and sat on their beds. Silent. What could they say that wouldn’t remind each other? Only thinking of escape. But to what?
I wanted to hug him, but he was far beyond that. He faced me but by now I wasn’t there at all. This enactment was only for himself. To say it out loud, in one long pour.
The tour group had moved on, the narrator’s voice leading them up the hall to the gift shop. Zift became very cool, staring into the tank now. His voice, ragged and hoarse, fell soft. His face, black irises, dark semi-circles beneath, stubbled chin, gaunt cheeks, reflected in the glass, blue and liquid.
He and a friend make a run for it one night. Managed to break down a door and make it to the roof. Zift held up his hands, remarkably steady, curled his fingers as though grasping a pole, one over the other. But they were found. Searchlights. Guards. A heavy blade. Zift looked at me and enunciated in a crisp English accent:
“Then I will make you useless.”
He raised one hand and brought it down swiftly against the other, clearing the place his thumb had been, with its centipede scars, his eyes never leaving mine for a moment.
We looked at each other for a full minute. A cold sheen of sweat stood out on his forehead but he seemed calm. Not the calm of someone about to go on a rampage. The calm of someone who has been to the outer edge of terror, whose natural stores of fear and hate have been exhausted. Too empty for revenge, only contemplating the white heat of pain, a brand searing his back that was never lifted.
Zift and I walked home without a word. The day seemed to have gone on too long; I just wanted to huddle beneath some kind of carapace, like a worn-out tortoise. Zift walked briskly, his joints seeming to clatter less, and if he was trying to get as far as possible away from Greenways, he didn’t show it. When we got to the bus stop, I tried to say something, but my tongue had turned to wool.
“Goodbye,” Zift said as he crossed the street. From the opposite pavement, I saw him smile for the first time, the slightest jerk of mouth corners, though his eyes did not match. He raised a thumbless hand and waved. Then he disappeared behind a passing lorry.
Sitting on the bus home, all I could see before me was the bodiless whale hearts, hundreds of them suspended in that colossal tank, pulsing…and behind them, humans who looked like Zift, in cages, being treated the same way: diminished, condemned, used.
The engine beneath me purred and the electricity thrumming through it was Greenways bioenergy. The lights flickered and it was the heartbeats of the whales that weren’t whales, creatures made trivial in the extreme. Not dead, yet never revivable. I got the sickening sense of floating on an ocean of suffering, all for the sake of some twinkling lights.
I thought of running home to Skeletons but all my desire to play had bottomed out. That virtual drama was no escape; I was living inside it, inescapably. Thousands of Zifts lurched forward out of the nightmare, but the glass of the tank rose up before them, cutting them off. And on the other side, someone like me was watching.
