Page 17 of Copper Script
CHAPTER FOUR
TWO DAYS LATER, THEmemory of the look on Fowler’s face was still giving Joel pleasure.It had been immature and stupidly risky, but what was life without a bit of fun?
If he wanted a serious answer to that question he should probably ask Fowler.Lord above, that man needed relief.He clearly wasn’t joyless—if he hadn’t been playing along by the end, Joel would eat his hat—but talk about self-control, a thing Joel respected more in the breach than the observance.
He should be glad of it in this case.He’d already done two months for soliciting a policeman, albeit by accident; a repeat offence was the absolute last thing he needed.
Anyway, he had better things to think about.The trickle of Bright Young Clients continued, thanks to Miss Barbara Wilson’s enthusiasm, or Mr.Paul Napier-Fox’s overactive prick, depending how you looked at it.Joel had added three quid to his savings this week alone, and his balance was looking positively healthy.
He did feel the occasional twinge of conscience.Fowler was quite right that he had no qualifications and no proof that he could do what he claimed.Joel’s only defence was the fact that he could do it.
He didn’t know where it had come from.He’d been an outlier all his life: red-haired, obdurately left-handed, a flamboyant show-off at least by the dour standards of his family, but he’d never considered himself psychic or any such damn fool thing.Heaven knew how badly his brother and father would have taken that, since they had been quite sufficiently embarrassed and enraged by him as it was.They’d demanded conformity and obedience; his mother and sister had supported those demands in order to keep the peace.Unfortunately, Joel was not one of Nature’s peace-keepers.It had become necessary to leave home at sixteen; he had found a job in a newspaper office, sorting through letters from members of the public; and that was where it began.
So many letters, in so many hands.Rambling and ranting, fury about trauma and trivia, endless pedantry, cries for help, long screeds into the void.All of them ended up on Joel’s desk, and after a while he’d realised that he was sinking into them, ignoring the text in favour of the personality behind it.
He’d actively tried to do it at first.It added interest to the day, and felt like a challenge, trying to pick out the whispers of character that underlay the droning or jabbering on the page.He even read a couple of graphology books but found them meaningless.It wasn’t the angle at which you crossed a t, it was the motivating spirit in the way it was dashed or forced or drawn.
He’d pursued it as a diversion, nothing more.Looking at hands, dreaming himself into other people.Only, as he practiced, the whispers of character when he read rose to a murmur, and then to a call, a cry, a shout, a shriek.
He’d left after three years: he simply couldn’t stand the barrage any more.He was looking for work in an office where everyone used typewriters when the war broke out.
And now here he was.He couldn’t work with handwritten text because to have needs and hurts and worries screamed in his face all day was intolerable.He also couldn’t write legibly, type at acceptable speed, or do anything requiring dexterity, because the doctors who’d promised his right hand would soon acquire the facility of his missing left had lied through their teeth.You should have been using your right hand all along, he’d been told several times, with an implication ofServes you right, you persistently left-handed wretch.As for manual labour, the clue was in the name and he’d never liked heavy lifting anyway.He thought he might be a good salesman, but that thought had occurred to a lot of men with physically incapacitating war wounds, and many of them were better spoken and better educated than him.
With a suitable prosthetic he might do a factory job, but he didn’t have any prospect of getting one.There were too many able-bodied men looking for work, and too many mutilated ones who already had the experience if they could find a workaround, and thousands upon thousands who lacked both usable skills and usable bodies and desperately needed support.And there was nothing like enough money to provide for them all: Joel had spent a year or more fighting to get the hook.The Ministry for Pensions had made things entirely clear in their literature at the end of the war.“You are going back to ordinary civil life,” the leaflet had said, “and it is up to you to make yourself as fit for that work as possible.”Which was not exactly in the spirit of the election promises about making Britain a fit country for heroes, but here they were.
Joel intended to make himself fit for civil life and work.He had a plan.But for that he needed money, and so he’d turned his talent to account.He could read character in handwriting: if you called it graphology, it sounded like something you could charge for.As such, he’d built up a bit of a reputation and a growing clientele, enough to afford this poxy little room all to himself and start to accumulate savings.He was a respectable member of society if you didn’t look too closely and Fowler’s disapproval was neither here nor there.
He had just one client this morning, a regular.She ran a secretarial agency and was sufficiently concerned about the morals of ‘her girls’ that she wanted all potential new recruits assessed for decency.Joel wasn’t surprised she couldn’t keep staff.He picked out three submissions he thought had enough force of character to stand up for themselves, and sent her on her way.
He was frying sausages for lunch when there was a knock at the door.For a moment he considered not answering.It was lunchtime, damn it, and he wasn’t expecting anyone.
On the other hand, his last unexpected visitor had been Fowler.Joel turned off the gas ring, went to the door, and came face to face with a policeman in uniform.
His stomach plunged instantly.For all the bravado he’d put on with Fowler, the sight of a uniform still made him feel sick and fearful.
“Mr.Joel Wildsmith?”
“Yes?”
“My name’s Sergeant Hollis.May I come in?”
