clipped his shoulder.
Dinesh spread his hands innocently. ‘How could that possibly be our doing? You think we’re paying men to harass you, as some kind of prank?’
Judith took her phone from her pocket. ‘Someone, somehow, has signed me on to . . . PowerFlirt, or HookMeUp, or whatever the fuck it’s called when total strangers get a message on their phone the moment I walk into sight—’ She must have noticed the growing expression of discomfort on Nasim’s face, because she loomed towards her and demanded, ‘What do you know about this?’
Nasim cringed. She’d thought Christopher in IT would have fixed everything by now, but she’d never got around to switching AcTrack back on and checking if her own problem had gone away - let alone following up the whole question of whether Murmur had made its system less prone to bizarre cross-infections. ‘I should have told everyone sooner,’ she confessed, flustered, ‘but I put the rabbit in the park and I just forgot about it.’
Judith stared at her as if she’d lost her mind.
Shen said, ‘Phwoar. Isn’t it called Phwoar? That’s what I heard.’ He was sitting next to Nasim, and through the floor she could feel his chair resonating with a dull mechanical vibration.
7
Crouched in the dark recess behind the freezer-truck’s compressor, Martin was wishing that he’d brought some music for the trip. He was wearing earplugs, but the relentless thumping of the compressor still seeped into his skull, and he was beginning to hallucinate snatches of songs emerging from the noise. In principle that might have been entertaining, but the songs were all terrible: soppy Bollywood love duets with doleful heroes and squeaky-voiced heroines; monotonous aerobics-class remixes of undeserved hits of the eighties; vapid punk-metal droning by airheads sporting novelty contact lenses. If he’d known before he’d left Tehran that there was so much bad music buried in his skull, he would have shoved a screwdriver up one nostril and done his best to scrape it all out.
Behrouz was wedged behind the other side of the compressor, and though it probably would have been safe for them to yell at each other while the truck was moving, Martin suspected that bellowing pleasantries and idle observations wouldn’t have done much to help them pass the time. And being caught at a checkpoint playing ‘Twenty Questions’ would just have been embarrassing.
Martin tried seeding counter-hallucinations, mentally dredging up a few bars of songs that he actually wanted to hear and hoping that whatever bizarre neural process was turning the noise into music would take the hint. ‘Infected’ by The The should have been perfect, with a pounding rhythm that he could usually summon at will, but the compressor took it and mangled it into the Phil Collins version of ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’. Hunters and Collectors’ ‘Run Run Run’ morphed into Abba’s ‘Dancing Queen’. When The Smiths’ ‘Rusholme Ruffians’ became Elvis’s ‘Teddy Bear’, Martin decided to quit while he was ahead, but then the King himself devolved into a dire rockabilly act called the Stray Cats.
With no hope of an entertaining soundtrack, Martin was at a loss as to how to fill the hours. He didn’t want to dwell on Omar - on what it meant, after a fortnight, that no authority would even acknowledge taking him into custody - so he devoted all his effort to not thinking about Mahnoosh. His brain fell for the ruse, and her face kept floating out of the darkness in defiance of his sham attempts to banish it. He’d seen her on that one day only, at the march, but whether through memory or imagination he had a vast library of snapshots of her in his head, already catalogued by mood: calm and reflective; mischievous; implacable - a thousand micro-expressions framed and accentuated by her no-nonsense olive headscarf.
The truck came to a halt and the driver shut off the
Dinesh spread his hands innocently. ‘How could that possibly be our doing? You think we’re paying men to harass you, as some kind of prank?’
Judith took her phone from her pocket. ‘Someone, somehow, has signed me on to . . . PowerFlirt, or HookMeUp, or whatever the fuck it’s called when total strangers get a message on their phone the moment I walk into sight—’ She must have noticed the growing expression of discomfort on Nasim’s face, because she loomed towards her and demanded, ‘What do you know about this?’
Nasim cringed. She’d thought Christopher in IT would have fixed everything by now, but she’d never got around to switching AcTrack back on and checking if her own problem had gone away - let alone following up the whole question of whether Murmur had made its system less prone to bizarre cross-infections. ‘I should have told everyone sooner,’ she confessed, flustered, ‘but I put the rabbit in the park and I just forgot about it.’
Judith stared at her as if she’d lost her mind.
Shen said, ‘Phwoar. Isn’t it called Phwoar? That’s what I heard.’ He was sitting next to Nasim, and through the floor she could feel his chair resonating with a dull mechanical vibration.
7
Crouched in the dark recess behind the freezer-truck’s compressor, Martin was wishing that he’d brought some music for the trip. He was wearing earplugs, but the relentless thumping of the compressor still seeped into his skull, and he was beginning to hallucinate snatches of songs emerging from the noise. In principle that might have been entertaining, but the songs were all terrible: soppy Bollywood love duets with doleful heroes and squeaky-voiced heroines; monotonous aerobics-class remixes of undeserved hits of the eighties; vapid punk-metal droning by airheads sporting novelty contact lenses. If he’d known before he’d left Tehran that there was so much bad music buried in his skull, he would have shoved a screwdriver up one nostril and done his best to scrape it all out.
Behrouz was wedged behind the other side of the compressor, and though it probably would have been safe for them to yell at each other while the truck was moving, Martin suspected that bellowing pleasantries and idle observations wouldn’t have done much to help them pass the time. And being caught at a checkpoint playing ‘Twenty Questions’ would just have been embarrassing.
Martin tried seeding counter-hallucinations, mentally dredging up a few bars of songs that he actually wanted to hear and hoping that whatever bizarre neural process was turning the noise into music would take the hint. ‘Infected’ by The The should have been perfect, with a pounding rhythm that he could usually summon at will, but the compressor took it and mangled it into the Phil Collins version of ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’. Hunters and Collectors’ ‘Run Run Run’ morphed into Abba’s ‘Dancing Queen’. When The Smiths’ ‘Rusholme Ruffians’ became Elvis’s ‘Teddy Bear’, Martin decided to quit while he was ahead, but then the King himself devolved into a dire rockabilly act called the Stray Cats.
With no hope of an entertaining soundtrack, Martin was at a loss as to how to fill the hours. He didn’t want to dwell on Omar - on what it meant, after a fortnight, that no authority would even acknowledge taking him into custody - so he devoted all his effort to not thinking about Mahnoosh. His brain fell for the ruse, and her face kept floating out of the darkness in defiance of his sham attempts to banish it. He’d seen her on that one day only, at the march, but whether through memory or imagination he had a vast library of snapshots of her in his head, already catalogued by mood: calm and reflective; mischievous; implacable - a thousand micro-expressions framed and accentuated by her no-nonsense olive headscarf.
The truck came to a halt and the driver shut off the
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