FRIENDS AND ENEMIES
You have to know who your friends and enemies are in Anticlockwise. If you place your trust in the wrong person, the consequences can be serious.
I work as a night porter at Infinity Gateway. I’ve been here about a year now. I used to have a good job. Not any more. Before the Anticlocks took over, I worked as an interpreter in the Foreign Affairs Ministry. That was when we had extensive contacts with Safronika. Those times have long gone. Foreign languages are frowned upon now.
I was sacked from my job two weeks after the Anticlocks took control – not just me of course; all the interpreters in the Ministry were removed. We were seen as dangerous linguists knowing too many words for our own good. I spent two months on the dole looking for another job. But it was difficult. All interpreters were seen as subversives who couldn’t be trusted. In the end I was grateful to get the night porter job here at Infinity.
Infinity Gateway isn’t the real name of the building you understand. It’s just the name I’ve given it in this blog. Infinity is located in the centre of Globopolis, the capital of the Anticlockwise Empire. It’s a fairly nondescript construction on the outside – just red and grey
bricks, balconies and external fire escapes. But it wasn’t the outside that caught my eye when I first came across the place. I normally don’t give a damn about my physical environment. It was the inside that fascinated me. There’s a strangely unreal feeling that seeps out of the very texture of the walls. When I walk down the long airless corridors with no natural light I get the feeling that I’m being drawn somewhere else by an invisible force.
I like working at night. It’s less dangerous. There are fewer Snoops around. So it’s relatively safe to `speak' to my friend Clancy O'Farrell. He works with me at the Gateway. He's a night porter too. We know when the Snoops are likely to turn up, so we're careful and `speak’ in our own special way. We have to be wary though because our line manager Olaf Kaminski is always checking up on us. We think that he’s in the pay of the Snoops. We’re not sure but I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him.
There are other reasons why I prefer working at night. I like being surrounded by silence and the deep void of space. Whenever I get the chance I stand outside the front entrance to Infinity Gateway gazing at the night sky. It’s fascinating. There’s something quite magnetic about it. It’s as if I’m being drawn upwards into a more distant part of space. I feel like an alien from another planet when I gaze at the stars. I sometimes imagine that I grew up a long way from here and then got transported to where I am now. It even crosses my mind occasionally that I’ve been brainwashed into believing some cock and bull story about my life that someone has dreamed up for me in Anticlockwise. I can imagine you smiling at my preposterous conspiracy theories.
As well as Clancy, there’s my girfriend, Tia – Tia Sanderling. She visits me from time to time here in Infinity. I speak to her in Esperanto. Olaf and the Snoops can’t understand Esperanto. Just as well when I think about the things I say to Tia. I met her at Esperanto classes. We hit it off because we both like learning languages. I’ve always felt that learning a language was like travelling to a new place – except you don’t have to move physically. You just shift gear in your mind. So, I’ve two people I can ‘speak’ to: Clancy and Tia. And then there’s Max of course, Max Destino-Coin, but I’ll tell you about him some other time. Nobody else though. It’s too risky. You can’t trust anybody.
So, there you are, these are my friends and enemies at Infinity Gateway. And just in case you’re wondering, Clancy, Tia, Olaf, Max, they’re all aliases too. Nobody uses real names round here. So you’d be wasting your time checking up on us. We all live inside a web of fiction in this place.
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