The Benefaktor was deep in the task of checking the tiny little card snips for a newly reconstructed Curt Finks story, retrieved from the floppy disk of an old Amstrad computer. The GANTOB Quality Assurance Committee had been in session for a few hours. It was a physical meeting, rather than the Zoom meetings that had become the norm. Gillian, The Benefaktor, Katie and Urs were sitting around a mahogany table, with one of those special reading lights. Ali was holding the fort at The Kroft. Katie had brought Krispy Kreme donuts. The Benefaktor had never tasted anything so searingly sweet. He felt that his head had been split into two.
They re-read the story, counting the words (without the hyphens that Microsoft Word includes in its automated check), and reviewing the brick template that Gillian had printed out on five different colours of card before travelling south to the K_____’s flat in Edinburgh. The Committee agreed that while not perfect the little cuboid shapes were “good enough” and moved on to the main task of the day: checking that the words were all included, in the right order, on the right size of brick, legible, numbered correctly, punctuation annotated. Some spares would be included. The committee decided that this time the story would not just be a wall. It would be a construction – a building – but without a plan, which is where the spares might come in handy, for example if the selected recipient decided to make a roof, windows or a door.
The Benefaktor was “in the zone”. He was enjoying one of what he imagined would be one of the last meetings of a GANTOB committee. There would be other GANTOB Board meetings of course, but they rigidly followed an agenda, without deviation; done and dusted in 45 minutes, like Kirk Session bureaucracy. In contrast, these GANTOB committee meetings were more flexible, hands on, problem solving. It felt like the old days before the revelations about The Benefaktor’s interference in the Curt Finks legacy had come between them.
They took it strip by strip. While The Benefaktor snipped, with some nail scissors, and documented Gillian’s neatly written words on a white board that they had moved through from the kitchen, he let his mind drift. He was thinking about two words: “multifarious” and “nefarious”. They had popped into his head while Gillian was throwing insults around earlier. Was either fair? And what was with the “-farious”? He poked around his brain, like a tongue – a lingula – or perhaps he was trying to find a crumb of unbearable sweetness from that donut, lurking behind a tooth. He was desperate to eradicate all remaining traces. Where was The Linguist when you needed him? Six feet under, unfortunately, or in a jar on his niece’s mantlepiece actually. Damn. He was pretty sure that the words were unrelated and that the “farious” was made up from quite different roots, or stems, or whatever the term would be. He could not check, because the committee had agreed it was a phone free zone, and he was not currently allowed into The Kino to check a dictionary.
Rules are rules, not that that seemed to mean anything to the others. The “no chat” rule was being flouted with impunity. Katie, Gillian and Urs were giggling and gossiping, gathered together at the other end of the table. He sighed, the stream of exhalation from his hairy nostrils disturbing the line of neatly placed snips that he had laid out on a carefully wiped and dried tray. There he was in the spotlight from the light he had been given for his birthday, feeling gloomy. And there they were huddled around a dim table lamp, in sparkling form. Who was he fooling with his earlier sentimental recollections of GANTOB (the project)? He was feeling increasingly distant from the whole business.
Vast stretches of time had passed without any contact from Gillian. Katie was always busy in the hospital. Urs had found a new lease of life since unearthing her creative side. And The Benefaktor had been locked out of the GANTOB email and social media accounts since changing phone and attempting to install Ubuntu on his PC. He hadn’t even visited The Kroft. And he could not really say that he had had a proper discussion with Gillian since their huge row in Vienna Airport in January.* They had been separated by airport staff and forced to travel back on separate planes. He was lucky that he had not been banned from flying and forced to nip along to Bratislava.
No, he realised. He was no longer the imagined artist writing swathes of text and injecting new ideas as he had done at the start of the second book. He was just the funder now. He looked down at the snips laid out on the tray. He had cut the word “mournful” (number 291) in half, at an angle. What had he been thinking? He tried to forge Gillian’s capitals, but his letters sloped to the left. So easy to identify. He shuffled along to the other end of the table with a spare orange snip long enough to contain the eight letters, and asked Gillian to write him another. He started to explain that it had been damaged before he cut it out, but stopped as she glared at him over the rim of her glasses. He decided against yet another untruth. She wrote the letters down without looking up again. No connection, except in anger (from her side). Katie and Urs kept chatting away, without apparently noticing that anything was up. The Benefaktor sloped back, wondering why he was writing in the third person. Distracted, he snipped the word in half again. Damn. He could not ask her a second time. This time he would just need to forge the word. The first attempt strayed outside the cuboid. He tried again, just about squeezing the letters within the box. Good enough.
He completed the six paragraphs, taking photos of each to document the positioning of the words in the cuboid template, the accuracy of the snipping, the completeness of each section, before tipping them into a medicine container. They were uploaded to the Google Photos folder to which the GANTOB inner circle had shared access (though he was never sure how that happened given all his other IT problems). Exhausted, left hand aching, he stickered up the bottle and slipped it inside a specially procured jiffy bag. He was pleased to have completed the task. With the others still chatting at the other end of the table he decided to race out to catch the post office before it closed. He addressed the package with a preprinted label with its familiar exploding grapefruit logo.
On his return to the flat he realised that he had forgotten his keys. No point pressing the service button – it was way too late in the day for that. He would have to announce his scattiness by ringing the flat. Buzzed in as soon as he started his mumbled apology, he climbed the stairs wondering if there were other tasks in store. Urs was standing at the door, with Gillian and Katie lined up behind. Gillian had her hand out.
“Please can we check the medicine bottle?”, she barked.
“I don’t have bottles, I have a blister pack”, he replied.
“Not your medicine, fool! The container with the Curt Finks story in it”.
“I’ve posted it”.
And with that she pulled out her phone in a rehearsed and irritatingly officious manner to show him photos of the 4th and 5th paragraphs with words cut off from the two photos (top and bottom respectively). While he tried to inspect the images, she shoogled her mobile from side to side a couple of times like an angry parody of one of those Instagram adverts where they try to make everything look jaunty and appealing. He would take her word for it.
“You’ve misfired D______”, snapped Gillian.
Katie took his phone to check whether he had edited the photos, leaving earlier versions that could be retrieved.
“Nope”, she replied. “Nothing”.
“What is the point of having a Committee”, shouted Urs, “if you operate as a lone wolf”.
Gillian joined in: “And you cannot just add the words ‘Quality Assurance’ as if they will cast their spells by their mere presence”. He decided not to point out that QA had been her idea.
They went through to the Dining Room. Snips of paper were scattered across the area where he had been working. He was relieved to see that none had words handwritten by Gillian on them. He started to explain that he was confident in his checks but was stopped by a hand on his shoulder as he was guided to a seat at the top of the table.
None of his excuses washed. Not even Gillian’s own motto of “Keep Learning Fool”. They reconvened the QA Committee, this time without gossip or straying from the agenda. Gillian pulled out a serious incident form that she had adapted from her previous job, having GANTOBized it with the grapefruit logo at the top. They worked through the sections line by line. They agreed that there was no need to reissue the story inside the medicine bottle. They would have to rely on the recipients in Wales to reconstruct the story and post their results. They then moved on to disciplinary action. The Benefaktor was to be excluded from further artistic input into the project, including posting, packing, snipping and photography. He would be removed from the Google Photos account, if they could work out how. He was solely the “money man”, as had been the intention from the start of his involvement at the end of the first book.
He stood up when it was clear that the meeting had concluded, and moved as quickly as he could, without marching, to the door. But hand on the mother-of-pearl doorknob he stopped and turned, firm in his resolve to reveal the information that he had refrained from sharing these past 9 months. That would grab their attention and regain entry to the inner sanctum.
“Urs, can I have the key to The Kino please?” Urs, conflicted in her loyalties, paused, looking at the other two women, but then relented. The couple left the room together, with the agreement that he would be allowed into his room for 5 minutes and under close supervision. Luckily, he knew exactly where to look. Urs unlocked the top of the filing cabinet. He pulled out the second drawer, flicked to the third suspension file from the front, and retrieved a sheath of papers in a clear plastic folder: his Dallas Curt Finks files.
To be continued…
THE BENEFAKTOR 15 May 2024
Pamphlet 43 of the 52 Pamphlets
(*) The Vienna trip is documented in the second GANTOB book, but not the blog.
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