BROWN STOKER
You must build a wall. The voice was so quiet, I wasn't sure I had heard it properly. Build a wall? Why a wall? And why me? And you must build it now. I had evidently mistaken voices for thoughts. That's what happens when a mind goes awol. Either that or I was hearing voices, I supposed.
Susie soon pulled me together. I had begun to depend on her more and more ever since the onset of the troubles. Russian money wasn't legal tender any more. And Chinese Walls no longer effective. If Money was my car, Susie was my brakes. Everything was cutting fast and loose. Everybody knew everybody else. And even cellars were not dark enough for cleaving meat. Vegetarian hells.
"Thinking can be dangerous," I thought she said.
I nodded as she looked quizzically through my desk diary. I had several appointments today, most of which must have appeared dubious, bearing in mind the various financial scandals currently involving most of those due to be met.
"You can't see him," she scorned, without even the hint of a scowl.
"Why not?"
"He's been shipping T-bones from Samarkand."
"Such lily-livered laws were meant to be broken, Susie. Come off it, if everybody went around paying such lip service...."
She went back to touring my schedules—as if she were making personal appearances by virtual proxy. I could see her eyes rolling back into her head.
I put my hand under the desk and lifted a brick from the floor. Once a gold ingot now simply a worthless foundation stone that landed on my desk with a vicious clunk, having slipped through my weakening fingers. It even had a wedge-free zone in its top for the cement. I stooped to fetch another. The security authorities would once have had kittens, given the defaults of their erstwhile jobsworthness. Now they merely connived with any form of laundering, even to be found regularly credit-card sharpening in the cellar. Amid smoke and heady booze smells and shovelled shit. One or two even honed bones.
By the time Susie had polished off my laptop, I was hidden behind a veritable high-rise of low finance. A virtual house of cards.
Now you've built it, time for love.
Susie was sprawled over showing her shameless stocking-tops. The scowl had by now resumed its own natural territory, wrinkling up her cosmetics like crumbly aspirin.
"Another day, another dollar."
Her hen-bones stuck out through various orifices, crumbling too. A particularly vicious T-junction was where the money mites swarmed from her bowels. A dissheveled security guard eventually found her light enough to drag down to the cellar.
I winked at him. Give him his dues, he saluted back. He'd once been my official chauffeur. Now a brown stoker.
