The Kingdom of Us: A Crime Story

By Graham Adams

We all have a breaking point and Michael Richardson has reached his. His girlfriend has left him and he is being made redundant. Worse, he discovers that the businessman putting him out of work is the bully who tormented him as a child and attacked his 16-year-old sister.

Michael plots revenge but he needs an alibi for murder and who better than a psychologist to vouch for him? Enter Bronwen, who has a questionable dress sense and an even more questionable code of conduct. As their cat-and-mouse therapy sessions delve into his past he finds his life is changing, but not in the way he â or she â expects.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookIt.com
• Release date: Apr 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781456608873

Book preview

Night

PART I

You get the impression that business these days is mostly run by ruthless, faceless men wheeling and dealing in glass towers around the globe, out of the sight of the people who make the products that generate the profits, but today I glimpsed Blue Harrison, high up on the gantry above the factory floor.

He was wearing a pinstriped suit with a yellow tie and shiny black shoes. He’s jowly and thickset now but I’d recognise that military clip from a hundred paces, even after twenty years. He holds his right arm bunched at his side like he’s a sergeant-major with a swagger stick, while he swings the left one. He’s walked that way since he was a kid.

It’s a faintly comical gait but it’s a lot more dangerous than it seems. His right arm looks frozen, but it’s waiting. Waiting to do some damage. In fact, I know all about his right arm...or more particularly his right fist.

I watched Harrison complete an aerial tour of the factory, then descend onto the walkway that runs around the perimeter and disappear into the managing director’s office. He was followed by a good-looking blonde clutching a black folder to her chest. Blue surrounds himself with beautiful personal assistants who accompany him everywhere; apparently he pays nearly twice the going rate for their services.

He emerged fifteen minutes later, laughing, his head thrown back, the big-titted blonde close behind.

Sonny came up to me just then to tell me how happy he was that his daughter had finally given him a grandson after three granddaughters but I couldn’t really hear what he was saying. I retreated into my office and closed the door. I had to lean against the wall. My head was pounding. I grabbed a couple of Panadol and washed them down with a long swig from the tap, then topped that up with a shot of brandy from the bottle I keep behind the cupboard for emergencies.

When I had caught my breath, I went out to the window in the corridor to check that Blue had gone. I was just in time to see his big black Mercedes pull away from the executives’ car park in front of the CEO’s office.

I stood there staring at nothing in particular for a few minutes, trying to put my thoughts in order. Then a silver Saab glided into the vacant space and a man and two women got out.

The woman who exited from the front passenger’s door was a petite brunette. The blonde who followed from the rear was bordering on obese. Her dress had ridden up and she smoothed it over her rump with a fluid sweep of her hands.

The driver was middle-aged, with a beard, balding pate and scraggy grey ponytail. If that wasn’t bad enough, he’d let his eyebrows grow into two exaggerated sooty arches. He was obviously a prat. You got the impression he lived alone too: no self-respecting woman would have let her old man venture into public looking like that.

The trio gazed around at the faceless buildings and one of them said something that must have been insulting because they all laughed in that clipped, urbane way you get with professionals taking the mickey.

As I watched them stroll towards the main doors holding their briefcases, Mad Dog McWilliams came bustling up and planted himself between me and the window.

Who’s the arsehole that’s been talking to my missus, then, eh? he said. His eyes turned up in their sockets so the whites flickered beneath his irises.

What arsehole? I asked. There’s a lot of them around here.

The arsehole who told her how much redundancy I’m getting.

Mad Dog’s eyes narrowed. He has a nervous tic that makes his forehead crinkle, his eyes roll up and then scrunch into slits. Was it you, Mike, you sneaky bastard?

I didn’t even know you were married, Mad Dog. You keep it pretty quiet.

As it happens, I did know he was married. He pretends he isn’t so he’ll have a better chance with the girls in the cafeteria and accounts. I also know he owns two cars his wife knows nothing about, because it’s certain she would object to the expense. He parks the Alfa and the E-Type in a garage across town he hires from Brendan upstairs. No one has any idea where he gets his money from. He wouldn’t have any idea I know about his cars either.

Some arsehole told her! he said. His forehead bunched up; his eyes rolled. Then the squint.

Well? he said. Was it you?

I went back to my office and started rearranging things in the lockers to calm myself.

Eruptions happen nearly every day now. Everyone’s been at each other’s throats since the news of the redundancies was announced three weeks ago.

The factory I’ve worked in for the past five years is in an industrial estate on the outskirts of the city. It was the region’s showpiece when it opened. It’s modern, anonymous, but clean. I keep it that way. I’m paid to keep the building ticking over and dirt and microbes in check.

I was a production manager at another firm for ten years before that but when the caretaker’s job came up I applied. The managers couldn’t understand why I wanted the change since I would be moving from the boss class to be a worker, but I didn’t need the aggravation of worrying about production tallies and the like any more.

I did the right thing. It’s better on the shop floor and this company has always had a policy where the CEO can’t earn more than eight times the workers’ average salary. So even the cleaners don’t do too badly and we all get production bonuses twice a year as well.

I take pride in my job and the boys on the textile machines seem to like a managerial type working alongside them. I’ve got two guys who can tell me if there’s going to be any trouble on the factory floor. If I’m tipped off I know I can defuse it before it gets out of hand. I might be the caretaker but if there’s trouble brewing I’m the one management turn to. They pay me slightly above the odds because I’m useful.

One half of the workforce is Tongan, the other half mainly Samoan, and they compete like mad to get the best production total. Once when a brawl broke out on the lawn, management got the fire hoses out and gave them a good soaking. That sort of thing doesn’t get into the news media because the boss has a reputation as a humane employer that no one can shake for now.

He flies the best team back to the Islands at Christmas, which just makes the others so mad they work like crazy to raise their tally. He’s not stupid, the boss.

I hate the thought of losing my job. Most shifts, I can spend at least three hours reading in my office alongside the brooms and cleaning machinery without anyone noticing, or caring. Right now I’m reading books on neuroscience and economics.

The best thing about being a caretaker is that no one owns me. The boss has a call on my time but that’s all. He doesn’t have any call on my imagination.

Twenty minutes after Blue had left the premises, I joined a line of workers filing into the canteen to hear the psychologists. Now that the company is making us redundant, it’s giving us advice on how to cope with it. It’s management’s attempt at humour right to the bitter end.

We had to wait for ten minutes before the Wise Ones entered. It was the smug trio who’d arrived in the Saab. They looked solemn, as befitted the occasion and their status as seers.

They seated themselves in a row on plastic chairs under the fluorescent lights. They put their briefcases on the floor at their feet, then looked pityingly at the workers arranged obediently before them. It was at the crossover between the day and evening shifts, so they had a full house.

After everyone had settled down, the short brunette on the left got to her feet to introduce the fat blonde in the middle, who was an authority apparently on transitions of the kind we were about to experience. There was nothing unusual in such experiences, the short one told us – as if we got made redundant every other week.

Then the fat one got to her feet. Her dress had bunched up again and she pulled it down over her ample contours in a languid motion that in other circumstances, and dim lighting, might have been erotic. You got the impression she enjoyed touching herself.

She cleared her throat – a little nervously for an authority I thought – and explained she wasn’t going to use the r word, because that excited negative emotions. Instead, she was going use words that began with ch – challenges, changes and taking charge of one’s destiny.

She talked for some time without saying anything but when she mentioned that the Chinese ideogram for crisis meant not only danger but also opportunity, the prat with the ponytail sprang to his feet and said it would be a crisis only if we were passive and refused to meet life’s challenges head on.

It must have been a set-up – his jumping up like that – because the fat one eased her vast bulk back onto her chair without any hint of resentment at being upstaged.

He then segued into a speech about remaining positive under changing circumstances and said that in a few years’ time some of us would look back and say, That was the best thing that ever happened to me! while others would still be locked into bitterness.

At the end of his speech, he gave everyone a pamphlet; on the cover there was a yacht on a glassy sea under the title Into the Beyond. Inside, there was a blank page where we could write down our wishes for the future. He recommended we put the list in a drawer and in a year’s time we could take it out and decide how close we had got to achieving our goals.

If we needed help to plan our futures, we could always contact him or his colleagues on the numbers listed. There was no shame in needing help, he said.

I turned the pamphlet over. The company had apparently subsidised the psychologists’ fees: professional advice would cost only $125 an hour.

I stole a glance at Safi, the union delegate. He pointed at the speaker, then made a masturbatory motion with his right hand.

The rest of the night dragged. I filled out order forms, mostly for toilet paper, soap and other supplies, and tidied up in the south wing. There was a fight in the cafeteria but it got sorted pretty quickly. In fact, I couldn’t think about much for the whole evening except Blue’s foul mouth and his fist in my face.

On my way home, I stopped on the main street for a burger. I try not to eat more than two a week, although the ones they make at Del Monico’s street cart are tasty, with fluorescent cheese spilling over a thin brown patty onto lettuce that’s far too green to be plausible. Or maybe that’s just the way greens show up under a yellow neon sign of a cowgirl endlessly twirling a lasso.

It was well after twelve on a cold spring night; there were a few people hurrying along, braced against the wind and impending rain, but mostly the street was empty.

I noticed a drunk sitting on the pavement, his feet in the gutter, his head in his hands. I recognised him; he usually asks for his burger medium rare, as if the street cart is a fancy restaurant down the good end of town. As he sat on the kerb he was telling me – well, everyone and no one, really – that he’d been someone once but now he was a nobody. Just as we all would be nobodies sooner or later, in the grave, and so on.

He looked up at me as I stood there waiting for my burger, my hands deep in my pockets, my collar ruffed against the night air. Hey, bud! he said, with a sneer. Whaddya know?

He didn’t wait for an answer. He immediately went back to his spiel about us all being nobodies sooner or later.

He was clearly a fellow of infinite jest but I dare say he’s right, and the drive over the Harbour Bridge buffeted by heavy wind and sudden squalls of rain did nothing to dispel the gloom that came over me, especially as I felt like throwing up.

The burger weighing on my digestive tract may have been part of the reason I lay awake well into the early hours. Some of it was Danni going out of my life too – in fact, I don’t even know where she’s living right now – but mostly it was seeing Blue again and the news about the redundancies.

Blue’s appearance in my life was an event that eclipsed even Danni’s departure. It’s what economists call an inflection point: an event that tips everything into chaos before the system can stabilise and recharge. It’s a question of balance – in nature, in psychology, in economics. Creative destruction, they say. Under normal circumstances, Harrison would have stayed a submerged, unpleasant memory but now he’s forced himself into my consciousness again.

Harrison would be astonished if he knew I’ve been thinking about him every day. Every day since I heard about the takeover, his fist comes flying towards me; every day I duck and get caught by the follow-up. I’m in the mud and his foot is on my throat and he’s calling me a fuckwit and my mother and sister bitches, sluts, whores.

I lay in bed, sweating in the dark. The moon outside the window was a blood-red sickle. I watched its hazy outline through the thin mesh curtains for two hours or more.

I tried not to think about Blue, but I couldn’t help it. There are all sorts of tricks people recommend to get rid of unwanted thoughts, but mostly they work only for as long as you concentrate. Then suddenly you realise that you’re thinking about him – or her – again without even knowing it.

I wondered what malign Fate had brought him into my life again after all these years. I suppose he’s always been compelled by his visceral hatred of the poor. And no doubt whatever primal bloodlust drove him then drives him now. As for me, I was just a kid; now I’m free to act in my own interests.

Although some days, I’m not entirely sure that’s true. Sometimes it crosses my mind that we’re only free-ish at best. Over the past year I’ve spent a lot of time working out economic cycles – the 54-year Kondratieff cycle, Juglar waves (seven to eleven years), Kitchin waves (three to five), and whether they can be superimposed, as Schumpeter thought...and what sort of grip the pre-capitalist Mayans had on these things...and how Nicolai Kondratieff’s work annoyed the Soviet authorities so much – since he decided that capitalism had the ability to perpetually renew itself, despite periodic crises – that he was sent to the Gulag, where he was sentenced to death and shot.

It’s reassuring to discover everything fits a pattern, even the rise and fall of sharemarkets and bond yields. The rhythms of the seasons are only the most obvious – leaves fall from the trees, flowers bloom in my garden. Nature itself recognises there is a time for sorrow and a time for joy, a time for planting and a time for sowing, a time for growing and a time for dying.

And there are climatic tie-ups, of course. Wars occur after periods of abundance: a mast season brings conflict as population and food spill over and competition ramps up. Things are rosiest just before they crack.

Oddly enough, the very morning before I heard about the redundancies, I’d been soaping myself in the shower and congratulating myself on the beginning of a new era in my life. It had indeed been a time of abundance – a wage rise at work, a minor win at Lotto ($89.62), and unlimited sex with Danni.

It didn’t matter whether it was morning or night, after dinner or before lunch, Danni was always up for it. And she wasn’t merely indiscriminate. In fact, she was particularly gifted in that area – able to give more pleasure than she received but anxious to receive as much as possible, setting up a spiral of ecstasy that could, of course, end only in disaster.

The news of redundancies broke just as I was thinking I’d escaped the cycle forever. A new paradigm was operating, I thought: the new economy; the new personality. And I’d even bought my first flat after all those years. But I should have known that good luck carries the seeds of its own destruction. It’s a cycle of hope and despair, destruction and repair.

The night I heard the news, I came home after work and had a ferocious argument with Danni over the dinner she had failed to leave in the oven for me. I couldn’t admit to her that my mind was reeling from Blue Harrison’s sudden reappearance in my life. She would have said: But all that stuff happened when you were a child! You’ve got to get over it.

We made up with an all-nighter but in the morning she left and I haven’t heard from her since.

After more than two hours had passed I climbed out of bed and knocked back 7.5mg of Imovane with a swig of brandy. It didn’t help my mood either that on my way to the liquor cabinet I noticed my watch on the mantelpiece – stuck forever at 5.12pm.

It was jammed at 5.12pm because I had been sitting in my office three weeks ago when Sonny came by. He asked if I had heard the news. There’s this fella, Sonny said, who’s going to put us guys out of work. He’s bought the company.

That was shocking enough but when he said a businessman named Blue Harrison was behind it, my left hand bashed against the underside of the desk as it flew to cover my gaping mouth. I never guessed Harrison would enter my life again. My watch, crushed against the desktop, stopped right then. Now I keep it on my mantelpiece, fixed forever at 5.12pm on September 2.

That evening didn’t get any better. About half an hour later, I was sitting at a table in the cafeteria when the union delegate, Safi, came up to me. He took a chair, placed it carefully beside me and sat down.

There’s some bad news, he said. "Management