Day 15 - halfway and feeling strangely fine

So I’m 24,000 words into Junket at the halfway point of Nanowrimo, a thousand words shy of the halfway mark in terms of wordcount. I’m pretty happy with this and estimate I’m just over a third of the way through the story.

I was really firing last night, fuelled by a bottle of Johnnie Walker which I took to bed along with my laptop. Before I knew it, it was 3am and I’d written 3000 words. Funny thing was I woke up at 9am feeling better than I have in months.

The story is pretty rough around the edges, but I’m reasonably happy with the 20 chapters I’ve got through so far, there’s definitely something decent to work with there in draft 2. Anyway, here’s chapter 13 of Junket.

THIRTEEN

London, July 22

The minicab braked with almost enough force to throw me off the seat. It certainly woke me up. We were at the entrance to Myers Lane which ran between the dilapidated warehouses on either side. The Iranian driver obviously didn’t want to go any further off the beaten track.

I handed him thirty pounds and climbed out of the cab, taking my bag from the boot. It was the beginning of a beautiful day in London. Overhead, the whine of jet engines signalled planes heading for Heathrow.

The warehouses were silent, locked up. An old Ford Escort sat on the side of the lane, its windows covered in condensation. I put down my roller bag and rattled up the cobbled lane to the flaking, graffiti-ed particle board door with the padlock on it. Next door a sign hung from rusty chains advertising a English language academy.

For years it had been a base for teaching illegals English until it had been raided and shut down. Morgan and I were happy for the peace – the students had smoked and played football in the lane below – but we’d also been tapping free internet access from the language school. That had dried up when the Pakistani owners had been turfed out.

I opened the door and hoisted the bag as I climbed the stairs. Even from here I could hear the chaos of a violent video game – Morgan was obviously still up. I swung the upstairs door open with my foot as a hail of machine gun fire blasted out from the home theatre system dominating one wall of the bare brick room.

Morgan was sitting in the middle of the leather couch, his back to me. He was wearing his holey Megadeth t-shirt – no doubt it hadn’t been washed since I’d been down the Laundromat before I left. On a big screen in front, a soldier was walking through a cathedral holding an oversized machine gun. Mutant creatures swung down at him from all angles, but he blasted them away, gory pulp splattering in every direction.

I gently put down my suitcase and tip-toed over to the table we’d rescued from the skip at the back of the engineering shop across the lane. It was littered with FedEx and UPS boxes, most of them opened and empty. There were electronic gadgets spread across the table, bubble wrap and polystyrene padding thrown to the side.

I walked up behind Morgan. He was seven years younger than me but already he had a bald patch developing. He was sitting there on the couch oblivious, his fingers expertly working the fat Xbox controller. The sound emanating from the borrowed Bose speakers was deafening. You could feel the wind kicking from the bass speaker lying on the dusty floorboards beneath the screen.

I slapped my hands down on Morgan’s shoulders.

“Jesus Christ!”

He leaped off the couch spinning 180 degrees to face me. He threw the controller at me. Luckily I caught it. I threw it on the couch grinning at him. He looked puffy, unshaven, dirty. His droopy right eyelid twitched as he struggled to get over the shock. He put his hands on his head, trying to calm himself.

“What’s that?” I asked, nodding at the flat screen TV.

“That’s your surprise dummy. LG sent it. I said we’d devote a page to it in the summer lifestyle supp, supp –“

“Supplement,” I finished impatiently. “What supplement?”

Morgan grinned at me. He may have been dropped at birth and numerous times afterwards, but he wasn’t stupid.

“They want it back,” I enquired?

“Did I sign anything saying I’d give it back?” He shrugged.

“Got anything for me,” he said looking down at my suitcase expectantly.

I lifted my well-worn suitcase onto the couch and unzipped it. Nestled among the stale shirts was a black box. The case was roomier on the return flight given that I’d ditched the blood-stained tuxedo.

I’d stuffed it into a bin in the service alley behind the Grand Hyatt. I’d waited half an hour until the area had been free of people before ditching the clothes. On the way back I’d noticed the red glow giving away a CCTV camera. That was fine. Someone had to be watching to have spotted me. The chances of that were slim.

I handed the box to Morgan. His eyes lit up.

“So what’s been going on?” I asked examining the discarded takeaway wrappers and pizza boxes stacked on the chipped formica bench that represented our kitchen.

“We lost internet access for a while. I hacked into the wi-fi from the antique car place. They were using WEP, was easy to crack. Astin01 is the access point, oily321 is the access code.”

I nodded. Internet access was our lifeblood. Without it we had to trek down to the internet cafe to update the website. No updates, no snippets on Google News and that meant the people who assembled the lists weren’t being bombarded with tempting headlines from EuroTimes offering exclusive coverage behind the pay wall for a 12 month subscription of only 799 pounds. No place on the list meant no more junkets.

Morgan opened the box and delicately lifted out a big ball of glass engraved with Chinese characters. He frowned, disappointed.

“What do we have on eBay?” I asked.

“Rats and Mice,” he said, mimicking one of my favourite sayings and annoying me in the process.

“I need more stuff to flog.”

He flopped back down on the couch, the soldier frozen on the screen in front in the process of throwing a grenade. I went to the grimy window and looked down. Old Fowler was hauling back the door to his panel shop opposite. Fowler was the one guy in the area who knew of our existence up here but he was a good sort, kept to himself, didn’t ask questions.

I’d been worried when Morgan and I had emerged from the warehouse one night, coming face to face with him. But he’d engaged us as though we were neighbours.

“Alright son?” he’d said to Morgan sensing from the start there wasn’t something right about him.

“Anything you need fellas, let me know. And keep an eye on my place, eh? Had too much stuff ripped off over the years.”

“So all the China stuff went up?” I asked Morgan approaching the iMac sitting hibernating on the bench.

“A bit of it,” he mumbled studying the crystal ball.

“I’ve been busy surviving on nothing,” he said accusingly.

“No kit to flog!”

The empty parcels on the table suggested otherwise. Morgan got off the couch and approached the swivel chair in front of the Mac. He tapped the keyboard and the screen came to life.

“What’s the source?” He asked.

“Search for AP and Jeffrey Ratz, R-A-T-Z. Reuters and Stephen Wang, p-h, not v.

“Not like you Stevie.” He said.

He typed rapidly, his fingers moving quickly on the keyboard, once white, now a grubby cream. He squinted at the screen reading from Google News.

“China’s new power struggle by Jeffrey Ratz of Associated Press,” he announced deliberately.

He clicked on the link and opened the story.

“I’ve got some nice graphics from that free Brookings Institute website,” he added.

“I’ll Google for some generic Shanghai photos.”

I sat down on the couch and took my shoes off, letting the business class socks breathe.

“Cut and paste, but change every second word,” I reminded Morgan.

He had a habit of stealing large slabs of text from other stories. Plagiarism was too easy a way for EuroTimes to get busted. You could change every second word and disguise your tracks in cyberspace.

Sure a story may read pretty much the same as any other one coming across the wires, but in the age of instant dissemination of news and the reliance of reporters on packaged content and press releases, that was pretty much the norm. As long as the language was different, the headlines were uniquely composed, you might be saying the same thing but no one could pin you down as a rip-off merchant.

“Three pars on the front page, the rest behind the firewall,” I said.

“The Great Chinese firewall,” Morgan came back.

I ignored him.

“Gi-, Gimme a new intro,” he said.

I closed my eyes and tried to pull together the random strands I’d picked up from that dinner the first night in Shanghai.

“Okay, try this one, bro. As a modern wave of nationalism sweeps China, driven by the newly assertive middle class –“

“hang on!” Morgan shouted.

I carried on regardless, I knew his touch-typing was 120 words a minute at least.

“- and the politicians pandering to them, Asia’s giant is being pushed into a conflict over geopolitical clout as well as its political history. Steven Man reports from Shanghai.”

He rattled away on the keyboard, then silence.

“You know Stevie, you could just about do this for real.”

I closed my eyes. I was thinking of that hard basketball beneath Michiko’s aqua blue dress in Tokyo and the eight minute video sitting on the fancy phone in my pocket. They were both most definitely for real.