‘It’s a fairly common belief,’ said Logan, retrieving the letter, ‘but understandable given the strong emotions at stake.’
‘Will you do as he suggests and retire her?’ I asked.
‘No,’ said Logan, deep in thought, ‘I’m going to take her to Sector Twelve to be redeployed. It’s a good excuse to look in on Toccata and see what she wants.’
Logan told me to consult Bradshaw’s Railway Guide and I found it was possible to get to Sector Twelve and out again before Network Winter shutdown.
‘What do you want me to do while you’re away?’ I asked.
‘You’re coming too, Worthing. It will be good for your training.’
‘It will?’ I said somewhat doubtfully.
My reluctance was easily explained: Talgarth, the principal town of Sector Twelve, was the largest centre of population in an area otherwise noted for its emptiness, and high proportion of womads and Villains. Roads were impassable during the Winter and food resupply impossible. Not a place you’d want to get stranded. Not a place you’d actually want to be.*
* * *
* * *
The rehousing of the Beryl Cook’s residents was completed by the time we had to head off on the train, five hours later. HiberTech don’t take all Tricksy nightwalkers, so I’d filled in the paperwork and faxed off the request, and had a reply within ten minutes: deliver her to Sector Twelve in all haste.
‘May I ask a question?’ I said as we sat waiting for the train at Cardiff Central. Mrs Tiffen was sitting next to us, playing the increasingly ironic ‘Help Yourself’. Nightwalker transportation wasn’t rocket science: just keep them well fed. They only get troublesome when they get hungry; and when they get really hungry, they get really troublesome.
‘Go ahead.’
‘What does Toccata want you to help her with, and who’s Aurora?’
‘That’s two questions.’
‘I’m thinking perhaps they’re both part of the same one.’
He looked at me and smiled.
‘Very . . . astute. Here it is: that call from Toccata was about a viral dream that’s been sweeping around Sector Twelve. Ordinary, level-headed people are seemingly having a dream about a blue Buick, then going nuts. Psychotic episodes, trying to kill people, screaming about severed hands and oak trees, being buried alive, stuff like that. She wanted my opinion.’
‘Buicks, severed hands, oak trees and being buried alive?’
‘It’s a dream, Charlie, it’s not meant to make sense. Did you cover viral dreams when you were at the Academy?’
‘We only covered dreams as part of Module 6A: “The Physiology of non-Morphenox slumber”.’*
No one thought there was any need to teach any more: a dream is just the subconscious mind attempting to form a narrative from a jumble of thoughts, facts and memories and did nothing but sap the resources that led us healthily to the Spring.
‘And Aurora?’
‘Head of Security at HiberTech. A shit of the highest order. She and Toccata don’t get along. Actually, it’s worse than that; they loathe one another. When it comes to HiberTech/Consul politics and Sector Twelve, there is just one rule: avoid.’
‘Aurora,’ I murmured, ‘the goddess of the dawn.’
‘The goddess of trouble,’ said Logan, climbing to his feet as our train arrived at the station, ‘but I’d said I’d help out.’
I took a compartment with the bouzouki-playing Mrs Tiffen, fed her a bar of nutty nougat and, thus sated, she began to play. ‘Help Yourself’ on the bouzouki once again. Logan was less tolerant of bouzouki than I, so went and sat in first class.
Mrs Tiffen and I were joined by a woman who turned out to be the Winter actor, and the train left the station. I didn’t yet know it, but accompanied by a woman of no dreams, I was on the way to meet the woman of my dreams.
Merthyr
‘ . . . The root of traditional “Winter embrace” lay in shared body warmth for survival. So while a Summer hug is only ever a brief clench, in the Winter, bodies are held intimately together, the left hand behind the neck, the right on the lower back, heads to the left, right cheeks touching, breath sounding in each other’s ear. Outside of the Winter context, it would be considered at best inappropriate, at worst, physical trespass . . . ’
– The Hiberculture of Man, by Morris Desmond
The Winter thespian had listened intently as I told her how I’d gone from Assistant House Manager at St Granata’s to Winter Consul Novice in an afternoon. I didn’t name Jack Logan as my mentor, but she’d understood the discretion. I hadn’t told her about Toccata’s stories regarding viral dreams owing to operational security, nor Mother Fallopia’s unkindness, this time out of misplaced loyalty, but I told her all about the Beryl Cook overheat and Oliver Tiffen’s sacrifice, which seemed to strike a chord.
‘A brave man,’ she murmured. ‘Anyone close to you ever tripped the Night Fandango?’
‘There was Sister Oesterious at St Granata’s,’ I replied. ‘She’d been taken off to be thumped and dumped in the local pit only they hadn’t hit her hard enough and she turned up three days later covered in fish-heads, old cabbage leaves and soggy newspaper. Looking back it seems kind of darkly comical, her lumbering in through the front gates with everyone screaming. Mother Fallopia was made of sterner stuff and retired her properly with a rounders bat behind the bike sheds. Lucy Knapp had nightmares for a week, but in general I think everyone was okay about it. What about you? Know anyone who nightwalked?’ She rubbed her temple thoughtfully.
‘My husband, Geoffrey. We met when performing as the front and back halves of a pantomime horse, and bonded over the “equestrian gavotte”. It’s a tricky dance to synchronise, especially as I had done the decent thing and took the rear half.’
She laughed.
‘Geoffrey said it suited me as I was a horse’s arse. I had to marry him, of course, and we had seventeen years of unbridled joy. He was my Romeo and my Macbeth, my Rochester and my Desmond. But we still donned the panto horse outfit and performed the equestrian gavotte at parties, just for kicks and giggles.’
She paused, and the smile dropped from her face.
‘At Springrise five seasons ago I thought he was just having a foggy morning, but his light through yonder window never broke. He did a post-mortem trick, too: Romeo, the balcony scene. Over and over again. I thought he was still in there, too. Not unusual to believe so, I’m told. I didn’t keep him for five years, though – he ate my sister’s Norfolk terrier the following Tuesday and that was it. I called the HiberTech hotline and they took him away.’
Better I’d be Dead in Sleep/than asleep and dead
wandering the Winter deep/Winter Cutlets as my bread.
‘I’m sorry for your loss.’
‘He was redeployed as a road sweeper and I saw him once, I think, in Lee-on-the-Solent. Well, I thought it was him. HiberTech have a Redeployment Centre there, so it could have been one of many, I suppose. He was parted out the next Winter. His legs are on a gardener in Stourbridge right now and his eyes are currently looking across the Sound of Mull, which he would have liked. I don’t know about the rest of him . . .’
She lapsed into silence. Best not to dwell, no matter how hard that can be.
I turned to the train window and stared out at a landscape that, while constantly changing in detail, remained much the same in aspect: snow and ice, bleak and empty, cold and unwelcoming. The Winter. There was a very good reason most of us slept through it.
Mrs Tiffen stopped playing and dropped into the rigid state peculiar to nightwalkers known as Rigor torpis. It was a welcome respite from the playing, and although she could play ‘Help Yourself’ quite well, it was motor memory only – there was nothing in or on her mind at all.
‘That’s a relief,’ said the actor, and for the remainder of the journey she imparted to me some tips abou
t the Winter: primarily to resist borrowing money from bondsmen,* shun all contact with anyone of ‘low, questionable or financially-negotiable morals’ and to avoid the drowsies.
‘One moment you’re transfixed by their large eyes and honeyed words and wondering if there is anywhere you’d rather be,’ she told me, ‘and the next you’re paying off the Debt from the hock-house wondering how you could have been so stupid.’
‘I’ll be careful.’
The train slowed as we approached Merthyr, the disused pit-workings silhouetted against the afternoon sky, the streetlights already on. This was as far as we went on the local train; we’d need a transregional fitted with a snowplough to take us ‘over the hump’ to Sector Twelve.
The actor stood up to retrieve her bags from the rack while I smeared a finger-full of peanut butter on the roof of Mrs Tiffen’s mouth to keep her occupied. The actor opened the door to the compartment and stepped down onto the recently gritted platform.
‘Well, good luck with your first season,’ she said. ‘Keep your wits about you, and be prepared in case Hydra comes knocking. Whenever I took on a part, I always made sure I knew the lines of the next one up the ladder. I bagged my first Hamlet that way.’
The Hydra system wasn’t just for actors, it was for all of us. She gave me a Winter hug.
‘May the Spring embrace you.’
‘And embrace you, too.’
* * *
* * *
‘Who was that?’ asked Logan, who joined Mrs Tiffen and me from where he’d been travelling in first class.
‘I didn’t get her name,’ I said, ‘a thespian readying herself for a Winter tour.’
‘A noble servant of the Winter,’ said Logan, ‘like us. Now listen: we’ve got just over an hour before our connection and I have to go and see someone. I’ll meet you in Mrs Nesbit’s in about fifty minutes. Order me a bacon sandwich and a cup of tea to go.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Oh, and Worthing?’
‘Yes?’
‘Don’t lose the Vacant.’
And he was gone, walking briskly towards the exit. I stood on the platform for a moment in the gently falling snow, the air heavy with the pleasing odour of coal-smoke. By rights, you shouldn’t smell smoke two weeks after industrial shutdown, but most of the coalfields under Tredegar, Rhondda and in the Taff Valley north of Merthyr were now burning underground, the hills leaking smoke through fissures in the ground, the intense heat transforming trees into twisted relics of charcoal. The boffins had said it was only a matter of time before the gases managed to lock in some global heat, but every year it grew colder, the glaciers advanced some more, the growing season shortened. But for us, at least there was a positive: Wales derived much of its revenue from the CO2 release tariffs, negotiated early on, when six times higher than they are now.
I couldn’t find a guard so walked towards the only train in the station. The engine had not yet arrived, and behind the single coach were two flat-bed railcars being loaded by a freightmaster in a forklift. He had the exhausted demeanour of a long-time Winterer; dark-rimmed eyes and slack, pale skin. Overwintering accelerated ageing by a factor of at least one and a half. When you committed your professional life to a Wintering career, you gave part of your physical life, too.
The wooden crates were marked Ambrosia Creamed Rice, Wagon Wheels, Mini-rolls and Dream Topping. Like much else, sound nutritional sense was suspended during Winter. From a morale point of view, eating comfort food made Winters seem less like cold purgatory, and more like a kid’s party. More relevantly, the cases also had ‘HiberTech Industries – Sector 12 – Winter Urgent’ stencilled on the side. I knew it was the right train, but in time-honoured tradition asked the freightmaster to confirm it anyway.
His name, I learned, was Moody.
‘I’d like us to be off as soon as the engine arrives and is coupled,’ he said, glancing nervously at the sky from where snow was falling in broad, languid spirals, ‘but the stationmaster is a stickler for punctuality, so it’ll leave when it’s scheduled: in fifty-eight minutes’ time. Returning or staying over?’
‘Definitely returning,’ I replied.
‘Wise move. Sector Twelve’s not for the faint-hearted.’
‘Do I look faint-hearted?’
‘When it comes to Sector Twelve, everyone’s faint-hearted.’
There was no real answer to this, and knowing the dead woman was going to get hungry again pretty soon, I took her with me to the one watering hole still open: Mrs Nesbit’s Traditional Tearooms. At the last count there were eight thousand outlets of the popular eatery across the Northern Fed, with four hundred and six open throughout the Winter.* The establishment had a cosy familiarity about it: the logo of the company, here emblazoned bright and proud on the window, was the eponymous and wholly invented character of Mrs Nesbit herself. She had a winning folksy smile, a swirl of grey hair tied up in a bun and was wearing an old-style blouse and red dress beneath a kitchen apron. For reasons of familiarity and convenience – both ruthlessly exploited by NesCorp – it was the default snack bar for almost everyone, irrespective of social class or cultural background.
I walked inside, the bouzouki across my shoulder, the dead woman shambling in front of me, still occupied with trying to lick the peanut butter from the roof of her mouth. Inside the tearooms the air was heavy with the smell of baking, cheap jam and chicory-laced coffee, and predictably, the rooms were not busy. There were only six customers in an establishment big enough for ten times that number.
‘We don’t serve the dead in here.’
The comment came from a woman who I guessed by her almost translucent pallor and two Gold Solstice stars was a long-time Winterer. Most Winter branches of Mrs Nesbit’s were run by burned-out ex-Consuls who would keep the supply of tea and fresh scones uninterrupted until their decades-long sleep deficit finally caught up with them.
‘I’m not asking you to serve her,’ I retorted, ‘I’m asking you to serve me . . . who will then serve her.’
‘The answer’s no. Her dead body in here over my dead body in here.’
‘Linguistically that was quite . . . poetic,’ I conceded. ‘A chiasmus, I think?’
‘Closer to polyptoton, my guess. Now why don’t you take the abomination and piss off?’
‘I’m a Winter Consul,’ I said, flashing my badge.
‘My sincere apologies,’ said the proprietress. ‘Piss off . . . with all due respect.’
She held me in about as much esteem as a nightwalker. Just as I was wondering if I could fit Mrs Tiffen into a left-luggage locker for an hour and whether that was ethical or not, a voice piped up.
‘Is that bouzouki tetrachordo or trichordo?’
It was a man’s voice, low and confident.
‘I have no idea,’ I said, still staring at the proprietress but jabbing a thumb in Mrs Tiffen’s direction, ‘it belongs to her.’
The proprietress grimaced.
‘It’s worse when they’re Tricksy. Like they’re pretending they’re alive.’
‘It’s called Nonsentient Vestigial Memory,’ I said, ‘and they can’t pretend to be anything. But yes, she plays the bouzouki. And quite well, if you’re interested.’
As if in response, the dead woman’s fingers felt across me for the instrument. As soon as I handed it to her she launched once again into ‘Help Yourself’.
‘Why not let them stay?’ said the man who had asked the bouzouki question. ‘The deadhead can play for us. Besides, service retired look after service active.’
It was one of those adages that was based more on hope than reality, but I liked the sound of it.
‘Very well,’ said the proprietress at length, ‘you and the Vacant can stay. But if it starts freaking out my customers, it’s history.’
I thought of insisting Mrs Tiffen was a ‘she’ and not an ‘it’
, but decided instead to take my small victory with quiet grace and say nothing. I ordered two bacon sandwiches – one for me, one to go, two teas, same – then sausages, Jaffa cakes and marshmallows for Mrs Tiffen.
‘With apricot jam,’ I added.
‘On what?’
‘On everything of hers and quite thick.’
The proprietress growled at me and lumbered off. I pushed Mrs Tiffen into a booth and shoved her across so I could sit, then gave her the sugar lumps to eat.
‘Mind if I join you?’
It was my benefactor from the other side of the room.
‘Please do,’ I said, welcoming the company.
He was, I guessed, somewhere between his fourth and fifth decade. His hair was already fully white and he was dressed in the solidly tailored clothes of a career Winterer. He sported a lopsided jaw from a poorly-healed break and he had a balding patch on the side of his head – follicle frost damage, most likely. Most noticeably, he was at Spring weight. In any other context he’d appear almost obscenely underweight. He might once have been Consular staff, but I had a pretty good idea of what he was now.
‘She plays it quite well, doesn’t she?’ he said.
‘If you like to listen to a short instrumental of a Tom Jones hit from the sixties and nothing else,’ I said, ‘it could become tolerable, given time.’
‘Does she play “Delilah”?’
‘Everyone asks that. No. And thanks for just now.’
‘Think nothing of it,’ he said with a boyish smile. ‘You taking her up to HiberTech to be redeployed?’
‘Yes; do you know how they do it?’
‘No idea. HiberTech guard their secrets aggressively. The name’s Hugo Foulnap.’
‘Charlie Worthing,’ I said, taking the calling card he’d offered me. I’d guessed correct – he was a Footman. He’d do anything for anybody, so long as you paid his hourly rate. They were mercenaries, Dormeopaths, odd-job men, nannies and bounty hunters all rolled into one. They’d even play Scrabble with you if you paid their rate, but only to win. Like most Winterers, Footmen took pride in their work.
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