Dead Girls, Dead Boys, Dead Things

by Richard Calder

  ‘Not here,’ I said. ‘Mum and Dad...’

  When she had finished I took her to the roof and left her to sleep in an old pigeon coop beneath an eiderdown of canvas and straw. I returned to my room and turned on the TV. The only way to kill vampires, said the HF. Why didn’t they run? They were Lilim. Nutcrackers. Why didn’t they fight? Death’s chorus line moonlighted in pornographic movies, bit-part actresses passively colluding in their own obscene deaths. I noted their performances, the slippery agitation of their thighs, the pelvic frenzy of their transfixed equators. I watched the red puddles swell about the ungirt hips, heard the complaints that death was too long coming. Surely I was becoming a connoisseur, an aficionado, to perceive (though not penetrate) even then, the conspiratorial mystery of those transmissions, a perception boys like Myshkin, I knew, could not share. How could they? Before the broken loveliness that filled our screens they could only bray, spit and pick their noses, reviling and cheapening the ache of their own flesh as much as the agony of their compliant sisters.

  Sisters, poor sisters, sisters, why weren’t you all like Primavera?

  Monday through Friday I had sat behind an empty desk; on the Friday, the day Primavera was later to climb Solaris Mansions and petition me for help, a hallucination, conjured up by the hyperaesthesia of withdrawal—an afterimage of flashing eyes and teeth—turned to confront me. ‘Just look at him, that Ignatz Zwakh, always staring.’ The girl, still human, who occupied the desk beyond Primavera’s, had herself turned, curious, angry. The ghost dematerialized; I dropped my gaze and tried to refocus my eyes on my textbook.

  ‘I am required,’ said Mr Spink, ‘to add to your curriculum a period devoted to...’ He hesitated, coughed, then chalked Vox Humana on the blackboard. Vox was the BBC’s television broadcast for schools, renamed by the HF. ‘I must say, boys and girls, I do this... I do this under protest.’ There was a drumming of feet. ‘Stop that.’ Stoppered laughter compressed the silence; I could feel the pressure against my ears. They had won, and they knew it, my companions in crime, the tyke vanguard who would be tomorrow’s hell-hounds; they had won, and the mockery of peace that pinched the air seemed to unsettle Mr Spink more than if he had had to endure a barrage of giggles and hoots. ‘Ak, ak, ak—all girls registered with the Hospitals may leave.’ Zoe, Zika and Zarzuela (most dolls were at home, or interned) traipsed, with the fatalism of the abandoned—the self-abandoned who regard themselves as neither martyrs nor criminals, but as things - into the holding pen of the corridor, their faces quiet as my nights were unquiet, when I lay abed, thinking of Primavera. Zoe, Zika, Zarzuela—Zzz! They walked through dream palaces and dream prisons, through figments of my fragmented life: school, park, streets, towers: a broken jigsaw rearranged into something more intense, more real than its original, a world-picture where corridors stretched to infinity, and blood was always flowing from beneath a locked bedroom door.

  The integrity, the integrity of our emotions... affection, abhorrence... may be undermined, corrupted...’ Mr Spink was behind his desk, retreating behind a barricade of piled exercise books. The monitor above the blackboard crackled; organ music swelled; and Vlad Constantinescu—our Conducator—looked down on us with the gunmetal eyes of a strict but loving paterfamilias.

  ‘Last month, when the extermination order passed through the Lords and received royal assent, England—after years of obfuscation and muddleheadedness—at last acknowledged the evil in her midst and submitted herself to be cured. The road to national recovery is a long one, but—’

  But. The afternoon was long. Long and hot. I rested my head against the desk and turned drowsy eyes upon the window. Election leaflets, like tarred, crippled birds, fluttered across the playground, with nothing to do now, nothing to do. Demonesses, said Vlad. Witches. Whores. And he spoke of his ancestors, the spirit people who gave him his instructions, his power. Outside, small boys—on their way from one lesson to another—had armed themselves with pieces of driftwood and were enjoying a game of war. SSSS! said one. His adversary fell, squirmed, wriggled and was still. DRRRP! said another, appropriating the forgotten glamour of lead. Bodies arched in the slo-mo ‘poetry of violence’ of a Hollywood bloodfest. Vampires, said Vlad. Sanitization.

  Unquiet nights. Gothic nights. You lay in bed (as Vlad must lie) arranging and rearranging the jigsaw of the Neverland until it sanctioned your darkest desires. But of all the universes to be called into being, why this? This puzzle mean, banal and incomplete? A world-picture that seemed to have been inspired by a zygodiddly video? I turned my head. Myshkin was looking at me, vulpine, suspicious. Wog, I thought. Rainham wog. Sexless, scummy Slav. Métèque... Until London is clean. Until England is clean. Until the planet is clean. Sanity through sanitization! The frosted glass of the door blurred to a flourish of white knee socks: Primavera’s handmaidens were doing handstands against the wall. I closed my eyes. The afternoon was long. Long and hot.

  The ringing of a bell, at first quiet, and deep within my skull, grew, quit its muffling, sang along the soundbox of my desk, to be joined by sounds of shrieking chairs, the cruel laughter of children. I sat up. The classroom had emptied. Only Mr Spink remained, in thrall to the hypnotic power of unmarked school books. The monitor hummed. Zoe, Zika and Zarzuela stood hesitantly at the door. ‘Can we get our things, sir?’ Mr Spink gave a nod of indifference. Avoiding my eyes, the three girls collected their books; Zoe and Zika left, but Zarzuela had her head buried inside her desk, a disaster zone of comics and discarded make-up. With blackbird-sheeny locks, her metamorphosis was more advanced than Primavera’s, though her two-tone eyes indicated that it was far from over.

  ‘Ignatz?’ she whispered. Mr Spink hadn’t moved. I got up and walked to where she sat, pretending to study the wall display behind her.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Have you seen Primavera?’

  ‘No—should I have?’

  ‘Oh, c’mon. I know about you two.’

  ‘I haven’t seen her—I haven’t seen her all week.’

  ‘I haven’t seen her since we all went to the Hospitals to have that operation. Savez-vous? Where they take that little piece of bone from the small of your back.’

  ‘I haven’t seen her.’

  if you do -’ I kept my eyes on the display, a ‘Rise and Fall of the Empire De Luxe’. Cartoons depicted the creation of the dolls, their glorious lives, their fall. The narrative began with Europa at the height of her power, showering joaillerie, objets and couture upon her children. The following panels dealt with the ultimate de luxe status symbols, the automata. A doll was shown rising from her vat like a clockwork Venus rising from a chemical sea. The rubric quoted Christian Blanckaert, managing director of the Comité Colbert: ‘Luxury is for France what electronics is for Japan...’ The last cartoons in the sequence concerned Europe’s decline: Europa swooning, in economic disarray, forsaken by Taste, raped by Third World technobandits, and witnessing the outbreak of the doll-plague, helpless. ‘I know they’re looking for her... I know she must be frightened, but...’ Zarzuela rose, clutching her books to her chest. ‘Tell her to come home. There’s no use fighting it. We have to take our medicine. I only hope that when I’m called I... Tell her. She was my friend. I don’t want to die alone...’ She turned to leave. ‘Nadia was on TV last night. Nadia Polanski? She was—she was lovely.’

  I killed the sound; the screaming had grown too loud. Just the bad girls, Vlad had said. The thirsty ones. The teases. The flirts. The provocateurs. But they were interning more and more; and all that they interned, they impaled. They would impale them all. Some said it was being done alphabetically, by name; others said that a computer selected victims at random. A kind of lottery. Form a queue, please. No pushing. Keep it moving there at the back! So few ran; so many waited. So very English. The dark heart of England belonged to death. A waxen face, polka-dotted with sweat and veiled in lank black hair, rested upon the slab, teeth snared in the links of a chain that passed through the bloodied mouth. The white light.
.. Across the country, in homes, pubs, on street corners and in railway stations, Anna Belushi’s slain innocence fed the nation’s sexual rage.

  I had the weekend to make arrangements for our departure.

  We fled through the disused tube tunnels that led to the West End. Going underground at Stratford (a stolen motorbike had facilitated our overland trip), we travelled the flooded tunnels in a small dinghy—little more than a child’s toy—for which I had bartered my telescope. The tunnels were hot and airless. Rats scuttled under the enquiring eye of my torch.

  What would my classmates say? The rumours of my friendship with a doll had been enough to earn me contempt; confirmation of these rumours (I would be denounced at morning assembly) would earn me lifelong ostracism. Dollstruck, they’d say. I had become an outcast. Yet if I was caught what had I to fear apart from remand? Sterilization, perhaps. A daily beating from medicine-heads like the Myshkins. But if they caught Primavera... No. No. I dug my paddle into the underground stream and thought only of descrying the station names through the brutal intimacy of the dark.

  Bond Street. I swept my torch across the platform and glimpsed a watery tomb of sweet machines, mildewy tube maps and hoardings. One poster—it advertised ‘Skin II’, dermaplastic’s pret-à-porter derivative—displayed the aerosoled symbol of the Human Front. Sinking our inflatable, we waded knee-deep through sludge.

  ‘There’s no going back now,’ I said.

  ‘Promises, promises,’ said Primavera. She clung tightly to my sleeve, the greening of the eyes that is concomitant with night vision still in her incomplete. The torch illuminated a stairwell. Glad to drag our feet from the effluent, we began our ascent.

  ‘Turn the light off,’ said Primavera.

  ‘But-’

  ‘There might be something up there, stupid!’

  I switched off the torch, hooked it through my belt, and drew my scalpel. We climbed through darkness until I lifted a foot to find nothing beneath it but a horizontal steel plane.

  ‘I’ll have to switch it on. I can’t see a thing.’ Panning the torch through one-hundred-and-eighty degrees I saw we stood at the edge of a flood-wrecked concourse off which ran paralysed escalators.

  ‘Now turn it off,’ said Primavera. ‘Please.’

  We groped our way to the surface.

  ‘Smell it?’ said Primavera. ‘It’s wild.’

  ‘It’s West,’ I said. Wind gusted across my face, wafting an overture of ruin and decay. Beyond mangled steel gates the abandoned star-haunted streets awaited us.

  I removed my backpack and handed Primavera a towel and some spare clothes. We both stripped, changing from our school uniforms (Primavera had worn my old junior school outfit) into jeans, sweaters and anoraks. I stowed our old clothes behind a ticket machine.

  ‘Come on,’ said Primavera, striding into the night, ‘let’s find somewhere to sleep.’

  I dawdled, looking back into the darkness of the tunnels. Mum and Dad, I thought, what will you say when morning comes? Can you ever forgive me? Will I see you again? I thought of the note I had left, full of crossings-out, verbal squirming and adolescent rhetoric.

  ‘I said, come on, Iggy!’ I turned to follow, leaving behind my human past. A past I tried to think of as well-lost.

  Bond Street was a desert of broken glass and gutted shopfronts, a desecrated memorial to the belle époque. Primavera rescued some tattered couture from the gutter. She held it up, gauging its appeal.

  ‘Hey, this is really nice. I could do something with this.’ She looked about in wonder. ‘All these shops. S Laurent. Gaultier. Ungaro...’

  I imagined Bond Street restored: an emporium of delights, a wardrobe in which I might dress my dolly, the fetishistic Miss P. I would dress her up in tutus and trenchcoats,. bias-cut leather, mock-croc underwear and la-la hose; I would dress her down in thigh boots, pink mink battletops, chain, pain and neurotic alleycat skirts. A mean lady of means; a mean machine of the streets...

  I got out the street map. This was the other London, a city of midnight and daytime nocturne; the place they said our shadows came to when they tired of us. ‘According to this, Bond Street leads into Piccadilly.’

  ‘Let’s stay here,’ she said, folding up her Cinderella gown, ‘it’s sort of... romantic.’

  A splintering of glass.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Shh!’ I said. All seemed quiet. A dog, I thought. A cat. A rat. ‘We’d better get inside.’

  We stepped through the blown-out window of Ungaro and climbed the charred stairs. Ungaro, Dad said, had been the first couturier to use automata on the catwalks, and the first-floor office contained several dismembered, ravished examples of those early AIs.

  ‘So these are my ancestors,’ said Primavera.

  ‘No more than mine are apes.’

  She picked up the head of a former male model. ‘Not bad,' she said.

  ‘Be careful of battery acid.’ She threw the head back amongst the charnel house of spare parts.

  ‘Not much here, is there?’ she said. Dermaplastic dresses, yellowing, crinkled, were strewn across the floor like the sloughed-off skins of ancient women; amongst them, faded polaroids (close-ups of bejewelled navels) and a poster advertising Virgin Martyr (beneath a crucified Negress a party of dinner-jacketed men rolled dice for a scent bottle; the cross’s titulus read La Reine des Parfums).

  ‘We’ll look for somewhere else in the morning,’ I said.

  ‘At least I get to lose the frump-suit.’ She pulled off her jeans and sweater. ‘It’s one of his,’ she said, looking at the label of the frock she had recovered from the street. ‘Ungaro.’ She drew the frock over her head. Black and scarlet, with comic-strip burglar stripes about the top, a strict belted zone, and a split running from hem to waist (by design or by violence?), the frock—cut for a woman's figure—hung loosely from Primavera’s budding curves. I had seen this look in some of Mum’s old fashion magazines. It was called apache.

  ‘It’s dead,’ said Primavera.

  ‘Never mind. One day I’ll buy you some dermaplastic that’s really chichi.’

  I walked to the curtainless window; the moon was waning, the streets dark. ‘My Dad used to work here.’

  ‘Your Dad?’

  ‘He was a janitor. Used to look after lots of these shops. Before I was born, that is. During the aube du millénaire. Dad said it was a decent world, then. Decent. “You won’t know what that means, Ignatz. Not your fault. We’ve murdered decency as surely as we’ve murdered our own children. Thank God we only have you.” Dad always used to talk about things like that. The death of decency, love, truth and the rest. But the last few years... He never talks now. Not unless he can help it. He just dreams and leaves everything to Mum. But when he does talk...’ I wiped my hand across the window and studied the grime on my palm. ‘I never thought they’d win, you know. The Human Front. I can’t believe what’s happening. But Dad says it was always there: a malign potency, a rottenness, a horror beneath the surface. Even during the aube du millénaire Dad says it was there, just waiting to eat us up.’

  ‘You should be thinking about what we’re going to eat.’

  Below, the fabled ruins of Londontown, a bag-of-bones, starved and alone, offered us a dubious sanctuary. Punk-Dickensian, those streets. Their shadows had almost defeated us. But a doll’s fledgling magic (Primavera’s navigation had been uncanny) had saved us from being marooned as we biked westwards. Nearer now, the sound of breaking glass, and a dull inhuman howl of pain. Somewhere, Never-Never Kids were ransacking the heartland of their prison. Drones hovered above the rooftops. The military observed; it did not intervene. What did they care for a dispossessed people? Proles, Yahoos, Morlocks: outcasts for whom only the anthropocentric jingoism of the Human Front seemed to offer hope? What did they care for our dance of death? Again, that howl.

  ‘Dog?’

  ‘I am not going to eat dog.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Better.’

  �
��We have to be inventive. Like the Swiss Family Robinson. We have to—’

  ‘Dog’s off.’

  ‘But—’ Her arms encircled me from behind; I felt her nose, her lips, between my shoulder blades as one feels the conciliations of a chastised pet. ‘Right,' I said. ‘Dog's off.’ She poked her head through my armpit.

  ‘The stars,’ she said. ‘Alone beneath the stars. Poor Primavera. Poor Iggy.’

  ‘The stars can't help.’

  ‘Once people thought there was life out there. We are not alone, they said.’

  I laughed. ‘The stars are dead.’ She slithered between ribs and arm to a popping electrostatic accompaniment -the corpse of her dress, along with her own flesh, sparking like charged nylon—and realigned her body so that we made a one-backed beast, her rump pressed negligently against my groin. I put my hands over the half-rations of her breasts.

  ‘When the world goes porcelain,’ she said, ‘when everything’s snuffed, the stars’ll still be around. But they won't cry.’

  ‘Everything doesn’t have to get snuffed. There’s contraception. Sterilization. Abortion. That’s the way they handled things in France. The “Lost Generation” they called it. I never understand why the Neverlanders—’

  ‘They’re in love, Iggy. In love with pain and death. Just like you. Only they don’t know it.’

  ‘They don’t want to know.’

  ‘Yeah. They just want to work in the doll factory. They just want to make us. The end of the world—what a lark! What a game!’

  ‘A game of war. Like I used to play with Myshkin and Beria.’

  ‘SSSS! POW!’

  ‘Wars forgotten. Wars Active.’

  ‘The Gulf. Antarctica. Oroonoko. Mars.’

  ‘Dying -’

  ‘DRRRP!’

  ‘They liked it. We all liked it, those glorious deaths...’

  ‘Ah, Iggy, they got me!’

  ‘They got me too—Ugh!’

  Primavera bucked, and the dead flesh of her bustier grew gooey. ‘Oh Iggy,’ she said, ‘you nasty, nasty boy!’ I thought of the last time we had played the sex-game, when I had thought she would swallow my tongue (you ever jog barefoot in Needle Park?); behind my eyes, the faces of Myshkin and Beria were superimposed over Primavera’s, faces wide-eyed, shock-stunned, rejoicing beneath the imaginary fusillade from my toy carbine (lasers were scuzzy; nobody used them in those old videos we borrowed from Myshkin’s Dad); my friends fell squirming to the ground. Primavera relaxed, drooped, began to slip from my grasp. ‘Let’s not talk,’ she said. ‘Please?’ She pulled me down onto a soft fleshy bed of couture; not to feed (her appetite had been lost to exhaustion), but to sleep. She crumpled, cheek against my thigh. Not one little bite? How can you leave me like this? So restless was I with desire that for a long time Primavera slept alone. I thought of Mum’s fairy tales. The Transylvanian Princess. Bad King Wenceslas. The Cat People of Prague. Martina von Kleinkunst Gets Spayed. No, no; that wasn’t right. Then I must have begun to dream, for I seemed to be at some kind of fashion show with everybody calling me Monsieur, Monsieur! Monsieur Ungaro! Primavera wore her hair in an elaborate coiffure; she modelled a gown of bloodshot red. Red, too, her jewellery (so Martian), her gloves and slippers. The whole affair seemed to have been shot through a lens smeared with blood-red glycerine...