The Hunger Read online

  Ever wonder about all those “new strains of flu” four times a year? Yeah. You do the maths.

  But that wasn’t to say sending out tasters wasn’t risky. You had to predict the public’s mood, as well as cooperate with the other major pharmaceutical companies. After all, if you sent out a taster without a rival’s approval, they’d likely just go against your company, or—as happened in 2007 with WestView—end up reported, sued, and fucked, basically.

  It was a game of tactics. Of patience. Of judging the mood. It was a tide, washing in, out, in. You just had to predict the flow right.

  “We’ll have to keep an eye on them,” Mr. Belmont said. He rose from Donna’s chair and cracked his fingers. Then he slipped the black folder under his arm and patted Donna on the shoulder, a move so forced and mechanical that he pulled out of it right away.

  “We just move ahead as usual. It’s too early for a taster.” Donna escorted Mr. Belmont to her door. The orange hue outside was even more spectacular to look at now, as the sun made its final descent.

  “Donna, you’re a good worker here. A very good worker. I’d hate to have to… you know. Cut staff.”

  Donna’s insides churned up. Her throat went dry. She wasn’t expecting this from Mr. Belmont, not at all. He was ruthless, but she was his Chief Executive. And after all, the company was still raking in tens of billions of dollars every year. Now here he was, talking about cutting staff—high-level staff. For what? His pension fund?

  Mr. Belmont nodded and smiled, that oh-so-familiar toothless grin on his face. “Keep on working hard, Mrs. Carter. Keep on working hard.”

  Donna tried to smile as well as she could as she closed the metallic doors of her office.

  She waited for the door to shut completely; for the soundproofing to kick in.

  As soon as it did, she kicked the door. “Fuck you, you creepy cunt. Fuck you.”

  The orange glow of the sun dipped below the horizon, giving way to darkness.

  Donna returned to her desk. Made herself comfortable. She might as well stay here for the night. Nothing to go home for, not anymore.

  She opened up another batch of documents and started scanning them, line after line of mundane figure after mundane figure.

  As she ticked the first column on the right, she wondered at what moment exactly it was her life had gone so stale.

  3.

  There was only one thing Jonny dreaded more than mealtimes these days, and that was mealtimes where his dad joined them.

  Jonny sat down at the circular table and picked at his crispy tuna pasta bake. It was dark outside now.

  “How’s your day been?” his dad asked, in between two mouthfuls of pasta bake. He was still wearing his suit from work. His tie was loose around his neck. He looked at Jonny, but couldn’t hold eye contact.

  Jonny thought about his dad’s question for a few seconds. What had he done today? He’d lazed around, that was for sure. Had he watched a few episodes of “Arrested Development”? No, that was yesterday. Strange thing, being housebound. The days didn’t seem to exist, as such. Not in a conventional sense.

  His dad stared at him for a few seconds before sighing and taking another forkful of his tuna bake.

  “We’ve been looking at jobs, haven’t we, Jon?” Jonny’s mum said. She patted Jonny on the arm and smiled. It wasn’t true, but at least she was sticking up for him.

  “Jobs,” Jonny’s dad said. He laughed. Not a loud, obvious laugh, but a subtle one. A doubting one. As if he wasn’t taking what his wife was saying all too seriously. “You mean you’re actually going to leave the house and do some real work?”

  Jonny nibbled at some of the tuna pasta. It tasted fishy. Way too fishy.

  “I mean, Jonny, you do realise that will require you to, y’know, have a haircut. Smarten up.”

  “Oh, leave the boy alone, Stuart,” Jonny’s mum said.

  “Denise, it’s not going to be as easy as him just walking out there and into a job. He’s been stuck in that room for months now. Social skills, presentation—they’re things he’s going to have to work on.”

  Jonny took another bite of the food. It was as if he wasn’t really here. He was a ghost; somebody being discussed. Or as if, to them, the HIV had taken away all of his conscious thoughts, all of his pride.

  “I’m just trying to be reasonable with the lad. Don’t want him going into, like, the Apple HQ and hoping they’ll just take him on as the next Steve Jobs. There’s a ladder in life. A ladder you’ve got to work your way up.”

  Jonny dropped the fork. He still had half of his tuna bake remaining, so he picked it up and headed across the kitchen towards the hallway door.

  “Erm, table manners, please,” his dad said.

  Jonny stopped. He turned around. Looked right in his dad’s eyes. “For the record, I wasn’t looking for jobs today, if that’ll make you happy. I’ve been busy working on my music.”

  A smile grew across his dad’s face. He dabbed his afternoon shadow with a tissue after cleaning the bowl. His mum clenched her jaw, evidently hesitant to get involved. “Your music. Ah, that music. How’s that going again? Paying the bills?”

  “When did you become such a cunt?”

  The words shot through the room. Stuart was still. Denise was still. Jonny, he was still too. He couldn’t quite believe he’d said the “c” word. He couldn’t quite believe he’d directed it at his dad. Where had it come from? What part of his mind thought that was a good idea?

  Stuart slid his chair back. It screeched against the tiles. He was staring at Jonny now, his eyes bulging out of their sockets, just like they had when Jonny was five and he’d told him off for splashing water in his face. He remembered the fear he’d felt that day, the disappointment in his dad’s eyes. He remembered that fear, and that fear filled his body, every inch of it.

  “Since when did I become a cunt?” Stuart said. He was on his feet now, walking slowly in Jonny’s direction.

  “Stuart, please,” Denise said.

  “Since when did I become a cunt?”

  Jonny stared at his dad’s feet as they got closer. He held his breath. He wished he could say he knew what was coming next, but the very fact he didn’t scared him more. That was the thing about his dad. He was unpredictable. One minute he’d be laughing and joking with you, the next thing he’d have you in a headlock.

  “I’ll tell you when I became a cunt.” Jonny could feel his dad’s breath against his face now. He couldn’t look him in the eye, not anymore. He’d crossed a line already. He couldn’t go crossing any more.

  “I became a cunt when your drug-taking, irresponsible sexual behaviour gave you fucking AIDS.”

  Jonny looked his dad in the eyes now. He didn’t mean to. It just kind of happened. He looked his dad in his reddening, bloodshot eyes, and he saw a flash of something. Blame. That’s what it was. The same look he’d given him all those times when he’d failed his homework at school. “It’s your own fault, Jonny,” he’d say to him. “It’s your own fault.”

  That was the look in his dad’s eyes now.

  He blamed him for a condition that was eating him from the inside.

  Jonny threw the bowl of half-eaten pasta bake to the floor. The bowl cracked upon contact, taking his dad by surprise.

  He ran out of the room. Up the stairs. Towards his bedroom. The darkness of his bedroom. The darkness of his bedroom getting closer, so close…

  He slammed the door shut and brought the lock across. He stuffed his chair up against the door. He could hear voices downstairs. Shouting. Struggling.

  He wrapped his hands over his ears and curled up into a ball.

  At least he was safe in here. At least he was safe. No job to worry about. No parents to worry about. Nothing.

  He remembered the text message from Brad.

  Anita’s having a massive do on Fri if you fancy it. Hear there’s a lot of fit girls going from UCLAN. Just saying…

  He didn’t have to reply. Brad knew the answer
already.

  It was a game. All of it was a game.

  He crouched down on his knees and picked up the last piece of smashed bowl.

  Denise was in the lounge. He was relieved, really. She always made him feel guilty, one way or another. Always made him feel like the fucking villain.

  Then again, it wasn’t surprising. It’d always been this way, all the way through “dear little Jonny’s” life. He couldn’t win an argument with his son in her presence. Fuck—he couldn’t even win a game of fucking Monopoly against him in her presence. The golden boy. The overprotected son.

  Look where that got him after all.

  He opened up the wooden cabinet which the bin liner sat inside and brushed the pieces of broken bowl in. He’d had a rough day at work. He worked as a banker down in the City. The two-and-a-half-hour commute from Preston was a killer, so he often spent days, sometimes weeks on end, down in London. Dingy little hotel. Empty, cold bed. Cheap takeaway food, and cheap wine on his breath as he went to sleep and woke up in the morning. A lonely way of living. He missed his family. He missed Denise, and he missed Jonny.

  Fuck. Who was he kidding? That version of events might’ve been the version he told his family, but it quite obviously was a load of shit. He spent his nights in nightclubs chatting up younger women. He took them to fancy bars and restaurants, then to even fancier hotel suites, where he fucked them for about as long as his ageing cock could manage before drifting off into a cocaine-induced coma.

  And then he did it all over again until he really did have to come home.

  Stuart took a sip of cold water out of the glass by the sink. He could hear the television from the lounge. He knew he’d have to go in there at some point. He’d been away for three days, so he’d have to come up with that familiar old sob story of the hard time he’d had while away.

  But the truth was, that wasn’t even the part that depressed him about it all. It didn’t make him feel guilty, not anymore. The spark between Denise and him, it had faded away months ago. He wasn’t saying he didn’t love her—he’d been with her for over twenty years, after all. But things had just gone stale. They didn’t go out together anymore. They didn’t do things anymore. She was never in the mood, and it was usually because of Jonny.

  Worrying about Jonny. Worrying about Jonny having enough company or Jonny being bored or Jonny being blah-blah-fucking-blah.

  He walked out into the corridor, closer to the sound of the television. Some soap opera or another. She must have known the spark had gone, too. She must’ve seen it, just like he did. At times, when he lay in bed next to her and stared her in her brown eyes, he thought he saw it in there when he told her what he’d been doing during his time away. He thought he saw a knowing. An understanding.

  It was all just a game. A game of happy families.

  After all, they couldn’t separate. They couldn’t put that on Jonny, not with what he was “going through.”

  He opened the lounge door. Denise looked up at him and smiled. She was lying across the white leather sofa. The 42-inch television in the far right-hand corner of the room was indeed showing a soap opera. “Coronation Street”, he thought.

  Or maybe “Eastenders.”

  He sat down beside her and rested her feet on his thighs. His head was still banging from the alcohol he’d drunk last night.

  She must’ve known that. She must’ve smelled it.

  “You should apologise, you know,” she said. “To Jonny. It isn’t his fault. He’s trying, you know. He really is.”

  Stuart sighed. He had felt bad about what he’d said to his son. He didn’t resent him—far from it. He just wanted to help him. And he believed in a different way of help than Denise did. Denise would’ve been happy to let him rot away in his tiny box bedroom if he insisted that was the way he wanted to live. And sure—she looked for jobs for him, she tried to help in her own soft way, but it wasn’t enough.

  “I just think we need to put our foot down a little,” Stuart said. “I worry about him too, you know? He should start taking a bit of responsibility. He should go out, see his mates. Brad, his name was, wasn’t it? He was always a good lad.”

  “Got a girlfriend now, I hear.”

  “Right,” Stuart said. “A girlfriend. That can be the end goal. We’ll get his hair cut, get him washed, and get him out to find a girlfriend.”

  Denise laughed. “Watch yourself, Casanova. Who’s going to be his wingman? You?”

  Stuart smiled and laughed out of courtesy but the thought running through his head was something along the lines of “You really have no idea how gorgeous the girl I screwed last night was, do you?”

  “I can try,” Stuart said. Playing the game. “Try my best, I guess.”

  Denise paused for a few minutes. She turned onto her side, lying on the cushion she’d bought from a stall on their holiday to Turkey seven or eight years back. “I just want Jonny back. Old Jonny. Who’d ever have thought I’d be saying that at the time?”

  “Yeah,” Stuart agreed, even though he didn’t. He wanted his son to clean up his act, but he definitely didn’t want “Old Jonny” back. Old Jonny was a handful. He couldn’t be doing with another handful.

  “I guess all we can do is hope. Hope he pulls himself together. Be there for him, but don’t… don’t force him. I just wish they’d cure this thing. I just wish they’d… they’d find a cure.”

  Stuart nodded. “Right. Well… maybe if he spent some time with me. Maybe if he… if he came to work with me for a few days. Maybe it’d open his mind, I dunno.” He wasn’t sure where these words came from. Did he mean them? Were they sincere?

  “That’d be a great idea,” Denise said, grinning.

  Shit. Worst possible reaction.

  “You can take him along with you to your meetings… Oh I think that’s just what he needs. All those opportunities. And London is so amazing.” She kissed him on the cheek, then leaned back against her cushion. “I never asked you. How was work?”

  Stuart looked Denise in the eyes. “Boring. Dingy hotel. Dingy food. Dingy sleep. The usual.”

  She smiled back at him. She must’ve seen the insincerity in his eyes. He was making it more obvious every time he told her how “awful” life was at work, and how “good” it was to be home.

  But instead of questioning him—instead of asking him for details—she turned back to the television and engrossed herself in the world of the soap opera. “Well, it’s good to have you back,” she said.

  She’d played the normality card, once again.

  If Stuart didn’t get out of here quick, he figured she’d keep on playing it for the rest of their miserable lives.

  4.

  Light was spreading across the open countryside when Donna Carter finished her work for the day.

  Or for the night, rather. Concept of time in TCorps—non-existent.

  She yawned and stretched back in her chair. Her eyes were heavy, pulsating. She felt like she could fall asleep right there, at her desk. She squinted out at the fields that TCorps looked down over. Her vision was a little blurry after staring at a computer screen for hours—or for the necessary amount of time. Long shifts were always the worst.

  She’d thought she’d finished her day’s duties before she realised she had a whole batch of emails to respond to. Although answering emails wasn’t technically her job—that was for the minions below to see to—the amount of people that forwarded questions to the Chief Executive was, well, huge, as you could imagine for one of the ten biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world.

  And she was contractually obliged to respond to any queries that did come her way. Good way for the minions to get out of a bunch of last-minute duties without being punished. Crafty little fuckers.

  She stretched her hands out in front of her. Her fingertips were tender from bashing against the keys. Her wrists ached, and were clammy and chapped from resting against her desk. That was a feeling she despised—that sticky-hand feeling. The mere thought of
an ice lolly dripping down her hand on a sweltering hot day brought shivers down her spine.

  She stepped up from her desk. Her knees cracked as she did. That was something she’d been afflicted with that had never bothered her, but seemed to bother everybody around her. She was unusually tall at six foot, towering above everyone else in her family. Her doctor suspected she might’ve had something called Marfan Syndrome for a while, which affected height, bones, and the like. But the tests came back negative.

  Still, she found a good opportunity to use the situation to her advantage. Herbal Marfan Remedy. Mr. Belmont had liked that one a lot. The public had responded to it quite well, too.

  Business was business.

  She leaned against the tall, clear glass window, and stared down at the fields. There was nothing out there—no signs of life, no animals, no farms. Just one road led to TCorps, and that was at the other side of the building. TCorps was a planet in itself, and the surrounding fields were space. It took around ten minutes to drive out of TCorps grounds. Security purposes, of course.

  TCorps had been around since the seventies, but this current building had been constructed in 2004. Moving here was a shock to the system to one accustomed to the mundane, standard offices of old, but the move soon coincided with a rise in profits. More employees, more productivity. TCorps was a self-contained world, and a very successful one at that.

  Since her promotion to Chief Executive in 2006, Donna had overseen a very successful period in the company’s history. Or at least, she thought she had. Now Mr. Belmont was talking of a slide that had been going on for years. A slide that had started somewhere around the mid-2000s and had only had a few jumps thanks to minor tasters. He was a cutthroat bastard. She knew he wouldn’t hesitate to throw her to the dogs if it meant keeping his wage the same as it was.

  Maybe it was time for her to be thrown to the dogs, anyway. Time to meet someone new, as society claimed was normal. Time to settle down. She was forty, after all. A good halfway through her life, glass half-full. She’d have to meet somebody else eventually.