Founder, Installment 3

Chapters 5 and 6

Chapter 5

Carrollton Street, June 2021

After a distracted walk back to the North Toran station, Hugh finds himself seated on the blue leatherette seat of a nearly empty metro car, his legs crossed, earphones in but no music playing, his gaze directed at the train tracks outside his window.

This is the 9 train to Old Town Station with stops in…

The car lurches forward from the platform, then gains speed as it rumbles northwest toward Bruka. Hugh glances at his mobile to check the signal strength. Three bars. He decides to call Dory, to tell him Maggie’s story and kill some time.

His friend answers on the third ring—abruptly, with a question, as he tends to do.

“You at work?”

“Nah,” replies Hugh. “Had to go to Mudo beforehand, so I stopped by to see Maggie.”

“Yeah? How’s he doin’?”

“Better. He sold some pieces lately, so he’s chuffed.”

“Brilliant,” says Dory. “Good for him.”

…there’s clan blood in the family, way back.

Way back.

“So what’s up?” asks Dory.

“Oh, Maggie told me an insane story…” Hugh begins.

“Yeah?”

Hugh opens his mouth to continue, but loses his nerve.

“Shit—I’m gonna lose my signal,” he stammers. “You going to the Pig tomorrow night? I’ll catch you up then…”

“Yeah,” affirms Dory. “Definitely.”

Hugh says brilliant and see you later and hangs up, relieved not to have spoken impulsively. The conversation could have gone sideways quickly. It’s been more than two years since Hugh joined Dory at a pub in Mistauth and his friend confided that the Sikstand had ended its investigation into Delia’s attack. When Hugh asked how that could be, Dory just shook his head and mumbled that raping a girl’s apparently okay if you’re a yazzer. The two friends then proceeded to drink late into the night, with Hugh listening and nodding as Dory’s anger seemed to metastasize right before him—into something darker and more corrosive than even rage. That night seemed to be a turning point for Dory, when the upbeat Bajan immigrant developed a raw edge, and his resentment against the ruling class, until then limited to the occasional pub rant, became actual defiance. That was when Hugh first heard Dory refer to joining B-Opp, because, he said, only armed resistance could drive the yazzers out.

“Maybe so,” replied Hugh at the time. “But B-Opp?”

At that, Dory’s eyes narrowed into slits and he said, slowly, as if Hugh might miss his meaning, “She’s. My. Little. Sister.”

Dory’s retort felt like a punch to the chest—catching Hugh so off-guard he couldn’t muster an articulate response. Instead he looked at his pint glass and waited for the moment to pass. And, though Dory’s expression eventually softened, his sudden flash of anger left Hugh wondering how well he knew the man sitting beside him. It was a troubling revelation, to glimpse a friend’s soul in turmoil and come away riven by doubt.

He eventually came to terms with Dory’s rage, learning to recognize its trigger points and appreciate how it colored his view of the world. Though his own tragedy looked nothing like Dory’s, they had both run terrible gauntlets—and mostly survived. That sense of parallel tragedies bonded Hugh even more deeply to his closest male friend, but also required a certain alertness to Dory’s frame of mind. Given all that, it would have been stupid to blurt out that Hugh might have yazzer blood in his veins.

Really stupid.

If he decides to look into Maggie’s story—if—he’ll need to think over how to tell his friend. The story will probably end up being rubbish, anyway. Besides, Silvia is the better person to confide in, even if she can be so strident on class issues. Training to be a public interest lawyer will do that to a person; though, as far as he can tell, she was a social justice crusader even before law school. Apparently it’s in her DNA to fight for the people she calls disenfranchised or marginalized—basically anyone with a grudge against the State. As high-minded as she can be, though, Silvia is also loyal, which means she would at least hear Hugh out. She understands, better than anyone since his former therapist, how the loss of his parents left him unmoored; she would appreciate how discovering ancestral roots might fire his curiosity.

The train has now left Campus Augustus, and the row houses and apartment blocks along the tracks have given way to an undulating wall of oak and beech. Hugh tries to read the news for a while, then, taken suddenly by an idea, checks the hour on his mobile and glances at the metro map overhead. Five minutes later, when the train stops at Carrollton Street station, he exits the car. On the platform, he checks the signs and makes his way through the turnstiles and out to the street.

He’s only been to this part of town once before, when he was a kid and joined his mother on an errand. She made the trip reluctantly, as he recalls, when she couldn’t find her favorite moisturizer anywhere else in town. She never felt comfortable around rich people, so she avoided places like Carrollton Street where retail clerks looked straight through people like her. Hugh doesn’t remember the area very well, only that the cobblestone streets were narrow and the storefronts fastidiously maintained.

As Hugh makes his way from the metro station around the corner to Carrollton Street, he forces himself to view his surroundings with objective curiosity. Slowly his memory of the place returns to him—how, as they walked, his mother’s hand tightened around his, and how she lowered her eyes when yazzer women passed them on the sidewalk. Now, more than a decade and a half later, he sees the street as if no time has passed: the red awnings, the logo flags above the entrances, the pristine white woodwork of the storefronts, the BMWs, Mercedes, and Bentleys parked along the street, all clean and waxed. He tells himself not to be cowed by the wealth, to act like he’s on his way to Balenciaga for another pair of €900 trainers.

After walking westward for several minutes, he passes a cafe where three wealthy-looking men about Hugh’s age are seated under an awning, drinking coffee. There is an easy diffidence about them—as if they have unlimited time to linger over a business lunch, with no expectation of returning to the office. As Hugh passes the cafe, one of the men catches his eye. The fellow has wavy brown hair combed back from his face and meticulous, arching eyebrows that make him look mildly startled. He has one leg crossed over the other, and, from where it pokes out beneath the white linen tablecloth, his foot is visible, clad in a sleek suede loafer. As Hugh passes, the fellow looks up from his conversation and, with an expression that Hugh immediately reads as condescension, smiles.

Hugh pretends not to notice, looking instead at a Loro Piana store across the street.

Sod off, you smug flogger.

Twenty meters past the cafe, he slows down to look at a Hugo Boss display window, but really to say to Eyebrow Man, I’ve got a right to be here.

It is wholly out of character to do this sort of thing, to hop off the metro and take a pointless stroll on Carrollton Street—Yazzer Central— just to kill time before work. He doesn’t like to window shop, after all, and, if he had money to spare, he bloody hell wouldn’t spend it here. But Maggie planted this earworm of a story in his head; and now he is left to deal with its bizarre compulsions.

Alexander McQueen

Louis Vuitton

Van Cleef & Arpels

Piaget

After strolling for another five minutes, Hugh approaches the western terminus of Carrollton where the street ends abruptly at a park with a fountain and animal-shaped topiaries. He stops for a minute, checks his mobile, and decides to circle back to the metro station. He’ll pass the three men at the cafe again, which gets him wondering why gantlings always look so condescending.

In his memory, the pink-shirted man at Bar Bruka—the one who called him a bosa dog—smiled with the same condescension.

Bosa? Who even uses that word anymore?

Pink-Shirt Man clearly despised Hugh just for being a feegie. But, looking back now, the man at the cafe did not appear so openly hostile. He could have just been bored with the conversation and looking around when Hugh came along. Then, when he and Hugh made eye contact, he might have smiled reflexively. Or maybe he sensed some vague affinity between them—their age, dark features, or something more nuanced.

Looks are funny things—so fleeting, so pregnant with meaning.

One night, maybe a year ago, when Hugh and Dory were out drinking, a tall black man entered the pub and passed their table. Dory was sipping from his beer and, when he looked at the man over the top of his glass, he nodded. It was so subtle, Hugh might have never noticed except that he happened to have his eyes on Dory at the time.

“You know him?” Hugh asked, gesturing at the man.

“Nah.”

“How come you nodded at him?

“It’s just a thing we do,” replied Dory.

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“Black jimmies,” he said. “When we’re someplace where everyone else is white, yeah?”

“Huh.”

“It’s like sayin’ ‘I got you’.’”

Hugh remembers feeling wounded by the realization Dory would never nod like that at him. At the same time, he was fascinated by the idea that two strangers could share such a fundamental, almost instinctive bond. He’d never experienced a connection like that, and the thought of it both encouraged him and left him with a longing he couldn’t shake off. Ever since that night, he has looked for other signals between strangers—at the pub, the gym, even on the sidewalks of Gloven—the way a person’s body language changes when he meets someone cut from similar cloth.

Three blocks down Carrollton Street, on his way back to the metro station, Hugh passes the cafe again, now from the opposite side of the street. He looks for the man with the arching eyebrows, but his table is empty and a server is clearing away the coffee cups and water goblets. He pauses for a moment to check the time. Then, having traversed the entire length of the shopping district, he slips his mobile back in his pocket and makes his way toward the metro station.

Chapter 6

Permission to Proceed, June 2021

The early shift at Bar Bruka passes quickly, with a large birthday celebration keeping Hugh busy most of the night. When he arrives back at his flat building, he hums a nursery rhyme on the way up the stairs, then fits his key in the deadlock. As he steps inside, he sees Silvia entering the living room, laptop in hand, with her earphones on. He can see her hair is damp and, when she walks past him, he smells her toothpaste.

“Hey,” she says, seating herself on the couch.

Hugh sets his keys on the counter, then goes to the chair across from her and sits down. “I thought you were going out with Tommy tonight?”

“I did,” she replies, removing her earphones and placing them on the coffee table with her laptop. “But we just got a pint after my clinic because I have to study.”

“Huh.”

“How was work?”

“Crazy busy,” says Hugh.

“Hmm.”

“Hey,” he adds after a minute. “Get this.”

Silvia sits up and twists her hair into a ponytail, then rests it on her shoulder.

“I went by Maggie’s today and he told me an insane story…”

“Yeah?”

“He said someone way back in my family was from one of the founding families but got kicked out or disowned or something.”

Now Silvia turns toward him, eyes wide. “Seriously? How far back?”

“He didn’t know,” Hugh replies. “Maybe a hundred years. My great-grandmum told him about it when he was a little boy.”

“Wow. Any idea which family? Or, like, what happened?”

“Nah, he didn’t know anything else. Just what his grandmum told him.”

“Did anyone ever look into it?”

“No. He said he wasn’t that curious about it—can you believe that?” He laughs. “Bloody typical of Maggie not to say anything until now and then use it just to make a point, yeah?”

Silvia asks what point Maggie was making.

“He was after me again about quitting bartending,” replies Hugh. “And I said something about Wardings not having a great history when it comes to making money. So that’s when he pops this story out—I guess to inspire me or something—like earning potential is a genetic thing. I don’t know.”

Silvia chuckles. “Well, that’s one way of looking at it.” She gives him the sort of probing look his therapist used to direct at him, and asks, “So what do you think about that—what he told you?”

Her expression makes him pause, as if her question weren’t merely conversational but a sort of test, with a right or wrong answer. “I don’t know,” he says eventually. “I’m still processing it, yeah?” Then, after a moment more, he adds, “It’s chiggy, right? Like finding out I might have been adopted or something.”

“Even though you knew your parents?”

Hugh looks down and nods. “Yeah. Because even though my mum and dad were proud people, there wasn’t this strong sense of where we came from, you know? I mean, my mum looked into our family tree a little, but I never got a feeling of actual family history. Which isn’t right ‘cause feegies go back as far as anyone here.” He shakes his head slowly. “It’s like just getting by in life flattens out your perspective because you’re so focused on paying the next bill you never look up, or back, or anywhere but getting through the week. You get this amnesia about all the other people before you, your ancestors. And it makes you feel so alone, you know?”

Silvia hugs her knees to her chest. “You think that comes from just getting by? Or maybe losing your parents when you were young?”

“I dunno,” he replies. “Dr B. said I buried a lot of my early memories. Maybe that has something to do with it. It also probably comes from living with Maggie for so long.”

“He’s not interested in the past?”

This makes Hugh laugh. “If you had his past would you wanna remember it?”

“No, I guess not.”

“Anyway” continues Hugh. “Maggie’s story is probably rubbish. I mean he heard it from an old lady with a piss on when he was eight years old, and who’s to say he remembers it right? Or that she had the details right in the first place? And if it were true, I think Maggie would’ve told my mum, and then she would have said something about it for sure.”

“Right,” says Silvia. “Right.”

“So I think it’s probably rubbish,” he concludes. “What do you think?”

All this time, Silvia has been watching him closely with her frank, green eyes. Now, she looks up at the ceiling and around the room as if visualizing every nuance of his situation. “I think you’re probably right,” she says. “Sounds like one of those myths every family has. They’re fun to pass along, but that’s about it. I mean, honestly, given Maggie’s financial situation, you’d think he’d have checked the story out if he believed it, right? At the Genealogy Ministry and everything.”

“Exactly,” says Hugh. “Except he didn’t think we’d be owed any money ‘cause the jimmy got disowned or whatever.”

“Oh, that wouldn’t matter,” says Silvia with surprising certainty. “If you’re born into a founding family, you can’t be disinherited just because your parents get angry at you. Your legal rights are based on heredity. We studied all that in Trusts and Estates. You’d still be entitled to your share of the pars.”

“The yazzer money from the state?”

“Yeah” she says. “It’s their percentage of the annual budget surplus. Your family could cut ties with you, I suppose, but they couldn’t take away your ancestral rights. That’s against the law.”

Hugh points out that, if that were the case, and he did, in fact, have a yazzer ancestor, he’d have grown up rich.

“The law was probably different back then,” replies Silvia. “All I know is that nowadays, ancestry supersedes everything. But you can always renounce your inheritance,” she adds coolly. “You can do that…”

Hugh laughs. “Like anyone would...”

“Somebody might if they were philosophically opposed to the class system…” She pauses again, looks hard at Hugh, then adds, “Anyway, it’s a good story for down at the pub. Have you told D? I can’t wait to hear his reaction.”

He tells her he hasn’t had the courage to tell Dory. He can see that Silvia is eager to resume her studying, but the gears in his head are still spinning wildly. He watches her as she leans forward and opens her laptop.

Sensing his gaze, she looks up and asks, “Now what’re you thinking?”

This feels like another test question.

“So…” he ventures, “if someone found out they were a founder all along, would they be, like, entitled to some of the pars?” Even as he finishes speaking, he feels the atmosphere grow charged, as if an electrical storm were rolling in.

Silvia opens her mouth to speak, then catches herself. “Well,” she says. “I’ve never actually heard of a case like this, but I’d assume so. At a minimum you’d have a right to your share of future pars payments, but I bet you’d also be entitled to part of the family war chest because you were a founder all along.”

All this time, Hugh has been staring at his feet. Now, without raising his head, he asks, “Like how much, do you think? A few thousand bone, maybe?”

Silvia puffs out her checks, then sets her computer on her lap and begins typing. “Oh, god, it’s hard to say. The families are all different and they have hundreds of members. Plus it depends on if you were awarded a share of the family fiska, which is the big money. There’s layers and layers of super old wealth there.” Silvia studies something on her screen for several minutes, then picks up her mobile and makes some calculations. “I’m just doing simple math based on my class notes,” she begins, “but if you got you a pro rata share of the fiska’s current value, you’d be looking at maybe 7 million euros on the low end, and up to…” now making a few more taps of her index finger, “like, 60 or 65 million if you turned out to be an Abra or Caludas. They’re the richest families. You’d also be entitled to a share of the pars going forward, which would probably be under ten thousand a year.”

With a lurch, Hugh swings his feet off the coffee table and sits forward. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

“They have a grotesque amount of money,” replies Silvia, her expression stern. “They’ve basically been plundering the treasury since like the Dark Ages.”

Hugh forces the smile from his face. “Nah, I get that.”

Now, seeing Hugh turn sheepish, Silvia softens her own tone. “But you should look into it, right? I mean, you’d be crazy not to—even if it’s a million-to-one chance. Then you could use the money for something socially useful, right?” With this, she picks up her laptop and resumes studying. Hugh thanks her for her help, adding that he knew she was the right person to ask. Silvia glances at him over the top of her computer, then back down at the screen. He can’t see her mouth behind the laptop, but decides, if only to reassure himself, that she smiled.