News from Gardenia Read online

  News From

  Gardenia

  Robert Llewellyn

  Dear Reader,

  The book you are holding came about in a rather different way to most others. It was funded directly by readers through a new website: Unbound.

  Unbound is the creation of three writers. We started the company because we believed there had to be a better deal for both writers and readers. On the Unbound website, authors share the ideas for the books they want to write directly with readers. If enough of you support the book by pledging for it in advance, we produce a beautifully bound special subscribers’ edition and distribute a regular edition and e-book wherever books are sold, in shops and online.

  This new way of publishing is actually a very old idea (Samuel Johnson funded his dictionary this way). We’re just using the internet to build each writer a network of patrons. Here, at the back of this book, you’ll find the names of all the people who made it happen.

  Publishing in this way means readers are no longer just passive consumers of the books they buy, and authors are free to write the books they really want. They get a much fairer return too – half the profits their books generate, rather than a tiny percentage of the cover price.

  If you’re not yet a subscriber, we hope that you’ll want to join our publishing revolution and have your name listed in one of our books in the future. To get you started, here is a £5 discount on your first pledge. Just visit unbound.com, make your pledge and type NWSFR3 in the promo code box when you check out.

  Thank you for your support,

  Dan, Justin and John

  Founders, Unbound

  Also by Robert Llewellyn

  fiction

  The Man on Platform 5

  Punchbag

  Sudden Wealth

  Brother Nature

  non-fiction

  The Man in the Rubber Mask

  Thin He Was and Filthy-haired: Memoirs of a Bad Boy

  Therapy and How to Avoid It (with Nigel Planer)

  The Reconstructed Heart: How to Spot the Difference Between

  a Normal Man and One Who Does the Housework, is Great in Bed and Doesn’t Get All Iffy When You Mention Words Like Love and Commitment

  Behind the Scenes at Scrapheap Challenge

  Sold Out! How I Survived a Year of Not Shopping

  For my children Louis and Holly

  and maybe one day their children

  and then possibly, their great grandchildren,

  just so they can have a laugh.

  Table of Contents

  Published by Unbound

  Title Page

  Other Books

  Dedication

  Table of Contents

  Preface

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Subscribers

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Preface

  It would appear there are only two groups of people who truly ponder the long-term future of the human race. Certainly not politicians, you can’t really blame them as their entire universe is mired in short-termism. Not the financial services sector even though they commonly use words such as ‘futures’ to explain the ultra-short-term thinking they gleefully indulge in. I have discovered only engineers and scientists take a truly long-term view, oh, and the annoyingly clever young philosophy student I met last year.

  Most of us think about next week, maybe next month, but rarely further than that. I’m no different; to be more accurate, I wasn’t until I started writing this book. It is illuminating to read how people in the past ruminated about the future; we have the unfair advantage of our current experience to know just how wrong they were.

  One silvery autumn day in 1978 I lounged on the banks of the River Thames near my parents’ home in Oxfordshire and read a book. The book was News from Nowhere and the bank of the river was an entirely appropriate place to read it. It’s the story of a simple journey along the river Thames set in the 1980s. However, the book was published back in 1890 by a man far better known for his decorative wallpaper: William Morris. It is an unapologetically utopian view of a future that was entirely possible, but as we now know, cruelly unlikely. The book had a profound effect on me, not so much because I wanted to live in the bucolic, egalitarian and gentle society he envisaged, but because it made me look at the world I was about to inherit in a new way. It helped me question the assumptions that parents, school and the establishment assured me were normal and the ‘only workable solution’.

  So, without apology, I have taken that idea of William Morris’ and jumped further into the future. However, through the process of creating the book I have come to understand that News from Gardenia is not a utopian novel. As we know, utopian visions are full of pitfalls and cruelty. The list of leaders who tried to impose Utopia on their long-suffering subjects is all too easy to recall. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, a right old bunch of mass-murdering, fanatical nut bags.

  Creating a positive, constantly changing and developing vision of a future world is therefore very dangerous. In fact the first words I wrote when I sat down to write this book was ‘dystopia is so much easier’. Evidence for this can be found in the torrent of end-of-days fantasies of The Terminator, Mad Max, The Road, I am Legend, The Book of Eli, Oblivion, World War Z, the list is endless. The message is tireless and simple: the human race is stupid and we will destroy ourselves. Or maybe more subtly, all those poor people (zombies) will overrun us and only one white man, with a gun, obviously, will survive and save his daughter.

  Excuse me while I yawn.

  So all I have tried to do is create a world where eventually, instead of the human race destroying the small planet we inhabit, we get it right. It’s not perfect, it’s not likely, but it is entirely possible.

  News from Gardenia is the first part of a trilogy. News from the Squares, also published by Unbound, is the follow-up. Book three, as yet untitled, will appear…as soon as I can write it.

  Robert Llewellyn, July 2013

  1

  I feel confident that through the long annals of human history plenty of people have regretted not making a greater effort to understand someone they loved. If they lose that someone and have to live with the regret it is a pain that never leaves them. However, I doubt many regretted it more than I.

  ‘What?’

  I never knew what ‘what?’ meant when I was just standing doing nothing, looking at Beth. Beth was the woman I once loved; I loved her so much I took her completely for granted. In that particular behavioural failure I don’t think I stand out. I was just a bloke, she was just Beth; she was always there. I didn’t have to think about it, her, the relationship, all that women’s magazine stuff. I never thought about it at all. Beth just was. I suppose I saw her as a non-problematic sub-system, reliable, proprietary peer reviewed code in
my operating system.

  So I was standing there looking at Beth, for, I wish to point out, entirely romantic as opposed to lustful reasons. I hadn’t said anything and yet suddenly I was being snapped at. I liked looking at Beth, I loved her and looking at her was one way I indulged in that love. I didn’t understand why this particular, essentially inoffensive word ‘what?’ had been spat at me.

  It seems a long time ago now. It is in fact an absurdly long time ago – I was so young, but at the time I genuinely believed I was old and past it. And yet I had seen a mere thirty-three summers pass me by.

  I had managed to cram quite a lot of achievement in to those few years, much study, much travel, much incredible luck really. I am an engineer and self-confessed gadget freak. It’s true that back then I had short hair because I was experiencing early-onset male pattern baldness. However, unlike many of my generation I was very slim, almost skinny. I didn’t work out or go jogging or follow some quirky neurotic diet. It was just the way I was wired. I was wound so tightly, according to Beth, my body virtually vibrated with energy. I twitched and fiddled away any possible weight gain as I sat in front of my numerous computer screens.

  So there I was, standing in the doorway of our newly built home in a quiet cul-de-sac that had once been an orchard on the edge of the village of Kingham in Oxfordshire. Yes, Kingham. Voted ‘England’s friendliest village’ in 2008.

  I wasn’t aware of this; apparently there was a sign announcing the award on the way into the village but I’d never noticed it. Even if I had been aware of it I wouldn’t have paid much attention. My mind, basically, was elsewhere.

  I now understand that this attribute was the source of the ‘what?’ problem.

  The ‘what?’ had been delivered by Beth Harris who was, back then, my wife. We had been together for five years, the entire time spent in this small, tidy and easy-to-manage house. It was nothing spectacular but it was fine, we owned it outright, no mortgage – I’d sold some shares in a company I’d helped set up and I had the cash. The deeds of the house were in both our names, a fact that I was uniquely uninterested in but Beth thought we needed to talk about. Beth always thought we needed to talk about things, but I found that once things were sorted out, like the ownership of the house, I didn’t really want to think about them again. I certainly didn’t want to talk about them.

  I had nothing to say so I listened as best I could. I barely understood a word she was saying.

  Beth was thirty-two years old, a history teacher at the nearby Kingham Hill private school. Lovely Beth, she was a woman of bubbly and bright disposition – I think that’s a fair description; if she’d been murdered that would have been what some lazy hack would have written about her in the newspapers.

  Don’t worry, she wasn’t murdered, she died in her sleep at the age of ninety-eight. Lovely Beth. However, when I was standing in the kitchen doorway, she did not have a bubbly and bright disposition.

  ‘What do you expect?’ she spat. Amazing how you can make a simple question like that so full of venom and bitter history.

  ‘I don’t expect anything. When have I ever expected anything?’ I said. I remember my voice going a little squeaky mid sentence; I found that rather annoying.

  ‘You expect me to be here when you get back, which is very bloody rarely.’

  Beth wasn’t looking at me as she spoke, she was looking out at our small garden, which backed onto an eighteenth-century barn that had been converted into what Beth had once described as ‘a lovely, spacious home’.

  A home in which Beth did not live. A home in which she desperately, fanatically wanted to live. Beth had even managed to communicate to me that she hated modern houses; she had, apparently, always wanted to live in a converted barn.

  I knew this, somewhere I knew it, although at the time I was standing in the doorway I wasn’t thinking about it. We had rowed about it before. There was a time when we could have afforded to buy the ridiculously expensive barn conversion, but I didn’t like it. The floors were wobbly, not good for tables with more than three legs, the interior stonewalls were bare and bits of grit were always falling off. Not good for computers.

  There’s generally a bit of back-story in any relationship that’s been lived in a few years. Unresolved conflicts build up like fluff around a cooling fan. Beth and I had been together for five years and we’d created a comfortably large clot of fluff. The cooling fan was essentially not functioning. The motherboard – if we’re going to stick with this particular analogy – the motherboard was overheating.

  Modern house, old house, private school, state school, religion, science, working overseas, working up the lane.

  Essentially none of it was functioning efficiently, although I had no idea this was the case. As far as I was concerned it was all fine.

  Beth turned to face me. Her face was red and slightly swollen, and I remember I felt a sudden urge to comfort her but her clenched fists warned me away. I may have been a nerd, an engineer, a gadget fanatic and was generally considered to be a little insensitive, but even I could read this body language.

  ‘You’re never here. Even when you are here you’re always sat in front of a screen. We never talk.’

  ‘We’re talking now,’ I said, almost pleadingly.

  ‘Oh shut up Gavin. You know what I mean.’

  ‘I don’t.’ It was true, I really didn’t.

  So Beth sighed in a big dramatic way, looked at the floor and took a deep breath. ‘It feels like, okay, it feels like I am here all the time, I go to work, I come back, nothing, there’s no one here.’ She stared at me with nothing but hatred in her slightly red eyes. I couldn’t understand – what was there to be so angry about? That sounded great to me.

  ‘I’m lonely, Gavin. There’s no one to talk to.’

  Okay, that was news. I was hearing that. I’d heard it before from other people and I found it very hard to understand. Loneliness – I didn’t know what that felt like. I have always found my own company very stimulating.

  ‘When you do come home, I’m pleased – I’m such an idiot, I’m pleased because I’ll have some company, but you are always up in the top room with your poxy computers doing, doing God knows what.’

  I shrugged and smiled. ‘Yeah, I do this crazy hobby thing, called working for a living, paying the bills, et cetera.’

  I should not have said that, it was childish but she was getting on my pectorals.

  ‘Oh piss off Gavin. All I wanted to do today when I got back from church was go to the farmers’ market in Chipping Norton.’

  ‘The farmers’ market?’

  ‘I told you about it, I emailed you that it was half term and I could go with you, maybe go to a nice pub for lunch, spend some nice time together.’

  ‘You emailed me?’ I questioned. ‘Did you put it in the diary?’

  That was another mistake.

  Beth had trouble remembering to put stuff in our joint Google diary; I was always updating it. It was a shared diary, she had the login details – it wasn’t exactly hard. It was the quickest and simplest way of telling her my entire minute-by-minute schedule for the next three months. I don’t think she ever used it. Such a good service too, so easy to use, and free. I thought she’d like that. But no.

  ‘That’s what I wanted to do,’ she shouted. The shouting thing really wasn’t necessary; our house was very small. I could have heard her even if she whispered. ‘And what are you doing? Flying in your stupid little plane to blasted Basingstoke to go and talk with some other engineers who no doubt have a poor idiot woman at home going equally mad.’

  I stood there shaking my head. ‘I’m not going to lie to you, Bethington.’ This was my affectionate term for her, one she’d never complained about, but even my emotionally unconnected self registered that this was probably not an appropriate time to use it. ‘Look, I’m sorr
y, I’m not trying to cause a row, but I truly have no idea what you are talking about. Nothing you’ve said makes any sense to me.’

  ‘You bastard,’ said Beth. I smiled and shook my head again. I’ve been called worse, plenty of times.

  ‘What am I supposed to do?’ I asked slowly, as if I were talking to a child. ‘I’m working on the biggest project I’ve ever worked on, it’s a huge collaborative effort spanning five countries and over one hundred engineers and I’m part of the team that’s running the whole thing. Do I text them and say, “Can’t make meeting today, got to go to the farmers’ market”?’

  I made texting thumb movements as I spoke, not just a sporadic mime either, I would say pretty damn accurate double thumb movements because in my mind I was using an Android open source phone with an on-screen keyboard. It was rapidly apparent that Beth wasn’t interested or even aware of the subtlety of my mimetic skills.

  ‘Piss off!’ was the review of said skills, and Beth stormed out of the kitchen. I sneered after her. I was surprised how easy it was to go off people. I’d gone right off Beth.

  I picked up my bag, slung it over my shoulder and left the house. Really, I left. That was it.

  2

  I had just over a thousand flying hours under my still-trim belt – I only mention the trimness because so many of my contemporaries had become anything but trim, and the trimness helped me with range, less weight you see.

  At least four hundred of those hours were solo flying, and at least fifty of those in my newest acquisition, a Yuneec e430.

  Built in Shanghai, obviously, and sold in the UK by a company in Potters Bar, the Yuneec was, as I often described it, ‘cutting edge aviation technology’.

  It had certainly raised eyebrows when the machine first arrived at the flying club I was a member of. I’m not good at joining clubs, but the flying club membership meant I had access to an airfield and some good technical backup, which is quite useful when it comes to light aircraft.