The Hungry and the Fat by Timur Vermes

Author:Timur Vermes [VERMES, TIMUR]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781529400533
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2019-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

28

He told everybody that they were walking at their own risk. There could be no guarantee of success, only a better chance of succeeding. Yes, they said. Great that you even got it off the ground.

“I can’t promise you anything,” he told them all, “except that you won’t drown.” A great joke, it goes down well every time, he must have told it at least a hundred times by now and everyone always laughs. On a few occasions he followed it up with “and you won’t need a life vest either”, but it detracted from the joke, so he dropped it.

He also told his guys, “Don’t make any promises!” And they certainly won’t have; after all, they’re not getting kickbacks, at least none worth mentioning compared to before. All he said was that he was the one organising it all because somebody had to. But that didn’t mean he was the tour guide or mayor or whatever.

So why has he now become just that?

He never wanted to be mayor. He’s the one who came up with the idea, and maybe a couple of helpful solutions, but that’s all. The whole organisation with the lorries, for example, that wasn’t him; it was Mojo’s idea. Or the contact with the regional warlords: you pay one and he keeps the others at bay. You just need to know which of them stands by his word, but the system of regular payments is amazingly effective at keeping them in line. Everything comes from Mojo, who obviously gets his cut, but that was precisely the plan. Sometimes one person has an idea, then another, and sometimes Malaika can help out or U.N.H.C.R. or the T.V. people. He is not personally responsible, so nobody needs to thank him, he doesn’t want anyone singing his praises if things go well, but nobody should level complaints at him either. He’s just the guy leading the march.

He sees a cloud of dust on the horizon. A pick-up with mounted machine guns on patrol. There have been one or two attempted ambushes, traffickers in girls perhaps, maybe just competitors trying to show that those now acting as guards can’t guarantee protection. But they can – as soon as they came within range the pick-ups raced towards them. And that’s been the sum of it, up till now at least. It helps that there isn’t much to steal. The lorries, food, water – none of it is really worth the bother. Water, food, electricity, it’s all so well organised now that there’s just the odd tweak needed here and there. And otherwise he just walks. Fifteen kilometres per day isn’t much. In the evenings the odd shag with the angel, and dreams of the future.

But they won’t let him.

She won’t let him.

Because she’s an angel, and angels understand nothing of life.

First she pestered him to protect the little whores. It had nothing to do with protection, of course; she wanted him to see to it that they didn’t have to sell their bodies anymore.

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