I don’t normally have to wait very long. Jonah is surprisingly regular in his habits. He leaves school shortly after half past three. By quarter to four, he has usually reached the park gates. I watch him walk past, a blue sports bag slung over his shoulder. He has grown quite bit since I last saw him – he must be fourteen or fifteen now – and has started putting gel in his hair to make it more spiky at the front. When I have judged that there is a safe distance between the two of us, I start to follow. The park provides him with a short-cut home. I don’t follow him all the way. There is a street of shops before the road of terraced houses where he lives. I usually turn back once I’ve watched him walk past the Seven-Eleven at the corner of his street.
So far he has never had anyone with him. On one occasion he took a detour to the video shop to look at computer games. I pretended to be waiting at a bus stop further down the street. That’s probably the closest he’s come to spotting me – but I don’t think he actually saw me. I was watching him through the window of the shop. I could see his mouth opening and closing slightly, like a fish. At first, I thought he was talking to himself, but then I realised he was just chewing gum. He turned suddenly and he seemed to be looking straight at me, his mouth half open in what I initially assumed to be shock. My first instinct was to turn away immediately. But then it occurred to me that this would probably just draw attention to myself, especially if he had spotted me following him earlier. So instead, I opened up my newspaper and slowly turned to one side, pretending that I hadn’t seen him and just happened to be waiting at the bus stop. As I did so, I noticed that he was brushing down some of his hair. I went into the shop later on and sure enough, the lighting was such that you could see yourself in the glass far more clearly than you could anyone outside. And even if he had seen me, there was no guarantee that he would have recognised me. After all, it’s quite a few years since he last saw me. It’s possible that he has forgotten I even exist.
That experience has made me more circumspect though. What would I have said to him if he had recognised me? It could all have been highly embarrassing. What if he had made a scene? The police could have become involved. How would I explain to them what I was doing following him around?
I suppose my first line of defence would be to claim that I wanted to interview him for the biography of his father that I’ve been commissioned to write. You might ask why I agreed to write this biography in the first place, given that I clearly despise what Pete stands for. I may as well be honest – it was partly money. We all need to earn our living somehow. But I also saw it as a way to prove that I could do something in my own right – that I was more than just a competent literary executor.
The problem is that I never actually knew Pete that well. It’s true that we had seen each other regularly for well over a year, but our discussions almost always revolved around his latest ideas for articles. Occasionally I got a few snippets of information about Jonah or Kay, usually in response to prompting from me. But as a rule, he talked very little about the other things in his life.
Initially, I didn’t see this as an issue. After all, other biographers manage perfectly well writing about people who they have never even met – including people they have little sympathy with. In the case of long-dead historical figures, they often seem to manage without even being able to consult other people who knew the subject of the biography. At least I was writing about someone with friends and acquaintances who were still alive. I decided that it was important to take advantage of this. So in order to build up a picture of his character, I cast the net very widely in terms of research. I thought I could explain who Pete was by mapping out the network of people who seem to have informed his view of the world. I imagined that if I plotted out this map carefully, then a picture of the man at the centre would gradually emerge. But though I am now in regular e-mail contact with a strange and varied cast of characters, I have hardly begun to trace even the outline of the man who links them all together. What I have so far produced resembles one of those childish-looking medieval maps with a blank area in the middle featuring only the words “Here Be Dragons”. Instead, it is the people around this uncharted area – and their rather weird and wonderful beliefs - who stand out.
Take Karl J Princeman, the driving force behind E-Gnosis. A former inmate of Kentucky State Penitentiary, Karl is now out of prison and happily ensconced on a pig farm. He recently e-mailed me some pictures of his steroid-enhanced porkers, or “post-pigs” as he calls them, alluding to his own theories of “post-humans” (his word for what he hopes will be the next generation of humans, “enhanced” by a combination of genetic engineering, biotechnology and computer implants). If post-pigs are anything to go by, I’m not sure I like the idea of post-humans. The pigs look grotesquely fat, their vast blubbery bodies supported by preposterously small legs.
Karl was sent to prison for his part in a break-in at some research labs. At first, the police thought it was animal rights activists. Large numbers of lab rats had been “liberated” (although having white fur and not being used to fending for themselves, most of them didn’t survive long in the outside world). The walls had also been daubed with graffiti condemning the lab’s scientists as torturers, murderers and fascists. But then it emerged that various computer files had been stolen containing the results of experiments with drugs designed to enhance the rats’ physical and mental performance. Several months later, details of remarkably similar chemical compounds appeared on a website called “posthumannow.com”, which extolled the virtues of artificial enhancements of mind and body through a variety of methods, ranging from physical and mental exercises through to drugs, dietary supplements and surgery.
From there, it was not difficult for detectives to follow the trail back to Karl and a couple of like-minded associates. In court, they mounted a rather unusual defence; they admitted to the break-in, but said that their intention had been to make the research public for the benefit of all humankind. This was so that people could prepare themselves for the next stage in human evolution, for which only the most advanced specimens of humanity would be eligible. They argued that this higher purpose entitled them to take the law into their own hands. The judge left the jury in little doubt as to his view of this defence. Following the guilty verdict, Karl and his accomplices found themselves facing prison sentences of several years apiece. Karl maintains to this day that he was framed by the US government.
Meanwhile, Pete remains an enigma, obscured by the larger-than-life antics of people like Karl – and, I suppose, by my own reluctance to let him take centre stage.
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