Since she was six years old Isabel had been complaining that “it” wasn't fair. She had never quite grasped the fact that there was no earthly reason for expecting that anything should be.
“There's bound to be a cash-dispenser at Vauxhall,” Anna said. “Fifty would probably do it, if that's all you can spare. I've lost track of inflation since they put me in the loony bin, but money can't have lost that much value in three years.”
Isabel braked and pulled over to the side of the road. She was the kind of person who couldn't drive and have a fit at the same time. Anna could tell that her sister was upset because she'd stopped on a double yellow line; normally, she'd have looked for a proper parking place.
“What the hell is this about, Anna?” Isabel demanded. “Exactly what have you got me into? If you're using me as an alibi while you abscond from the hospital, I've a right to know.”
“I'll be back on time,” Anna assured her. “No one will ever know, except your husband and children. They'll probably be disappointed that they aren't going to meet your mad, bad, and dangerous-to-know foster sister, but they'll get over it. You can bring them in one day next week, to make up for it. I'll be as nice as pie, psychochemistry permitting.”
“What is this all about?” Isabel repeated, pronouncing each word with leaden emphasis, as if to imply that Anna was only ignoring her because she was too stupid to know what the question was.
“There's something I have to do,” Anna said, nobly refraining from adopting the same tone. “It won't take long. If you won't give me the fifty pounds, can you at least let me have enough for a Travelcard. I have to go all the way across town to zone four.”
Anna knew as soon as she'd said it that it was a mistake. It gave Isabel a way out. She should have hammered on and on about the fifty until she got it. In the old days, she'd never have settled for a penny less than she'd actually wanted, whatever kind of client she was dealing with.
Isabel reached into her purse and pulled a handful of coins out of its dusty depths. “Here,” she said, as if to say, It's all you're worth, you stupid, fouled-up slut. “If you want to go, go—to hell if you want to—but if this goes wrong, just don't try to blame me. And take your medication.” Long before she arrived at the last sentence she had reached across Anna to open the passenger door, so that she could mark her final full stop with one of those dismissive pushes that Anna remembered all too well.
Anna submitted to the push and got out of the car, even though she was only vaguely aware of where she was. She waited until Isabel had driven off before she asked for directions to Clapham Common. It was a long way, but not too far to walk even for someone in her debilitated condition. The value of the coins was just adequate to buy a Travelcard.
She wondered if things might have been different if she'd had a real sister, but she decided that they probably wouldn't have been.
It wasn't difficult to find the church from Pinner tube station. It was larger than she had expected. She was glad that the funeral announcement in the Guardian had given both time and place; so many didn't, because the people who placed them were afraid of being burgled while they were at the ceremony. She waited until everyone else was inside before she sidled in, but she didn't escape notice. Several people turned around, and whispers were exchanged.
When the service was over and the pallbearers carried the coffin out Anna moved behind a pillar, but the people who filed out behind the dead man knew perfectly well that she was there. She didn't go to the graveside; she stayed in the shadow of an old horse chestnut tree, watching from thirty yards away. She couldn't hear what the vicar was saying, but that didn't matter. She could have improvised her own service if she'd wanted to, complete with appropriate psalms. Every bedside locker on the ward had a Bible in the top drawer, and boredom had made her dip into hers more frequently than she liked to think. She knew that according to The Book of Ecclesiastes it was better to go to the House of Mourning than the House of Feasting, but she wasn't sure that Ecclesiastes had been in a position to make a scrupulous comparison, and he hadn't mentioned the House of the Rising Sun at all, although it would have made a better play on words if he had. Ecclesiastes had also offered the judgment that a good name was better than precious ointment, but Alan certainly wouldn't have agreed with him on that point.
Anna had no difficulty picking out Alan's wife, although she'd never seen a photograph. She was a good-looking woman, in a middle-class Home Counties sort of way. Her name was Christine, but Alan had usually referred to her as Kitty. Anna was mildly surprised that Kitty wasn't wearing a veil. Weren't widows supposed to wear veils, to hide their tears? Not that the woman was weeping; grim forbearance seemed to be more her style. Anna judged her—on the basis of an admittedly superficial inspection—to be a kind of upmarket Isabel, who probably did believe, with all her heart, that a good name was infinitely to be preferred to any kind of balm that cunning cosmetic engineers could devise.
In the grip of a sudden surge of anguish, Anna wished that Isabel hadn't been so tight-fisted. If Isabel had given her a hundred pounds, or even fifty, she'd have been able to bring a wreath to add to the memorials heaped about the grave. So far as she could judge at this distance most of the mourners had gone for natural blooms, but she would have selected the most exotic products of genetic engineering she could afford, to symbolize herself and the crucial contribution she had made to Alan's life—and, presumably, his death.
Anna had no doubt that the accident hadn't been entirely accidental; even if it hadn't been a straightforward deceptive suicide, it must have been a case of gross and calculated negligence.
When the ceremony was over and done with, the crowd around the grave broke up, its members drifting away in all directions as though the emotion of the occasion had temporarily suppressed their sense of purpose. When the widow turned toward her, and shook off someone's restraining hand, Anna knew that the confrontation she had half feared and half craved was about to take place. She wasn't in the least tempted to turn and run, and she knew before the woman paused to look her up and down that this was what she had come for, and that all the sentimental rubbish about wanting to say good-bye was just an excuse.
“I know who you are,” the widow said, in a cut glass voice which suggested that she took no pride in her perspicacity.
“I know who you are, too,” Anna replied. The two of them were being watched, and Anna was conscious of the fact that the dissipating crowd had been reunited by a common urge to observe, even though no evident ripple of communication had passed through it.
“I thought you were in hospital, out of your mind.” The widow's voice was carefully neutral, but had an edge to it which suggested that it might break out of confinement at any moment.
“I am,” Anna told her. “But the doctors are beginning to figure things out, and they can keep me stable, most of the time. They're learning a lot about brain chemistry thanks to people like me.” She didn't add and people like Alan.
“So you'll soon be back on the streets, will you?” the widow inquired, cuttingly.
“I haven't worked the streets since I was sixteen,” Anna said, equably. “I was in a Licensed House when Alan met me. I can't go back there, of course—there's no way they'd let me have my license back after what happened, even if they could normalize my body chemistry. I suppose I might go back to the street, when I'm released. There are men who like spoiled girls, believe it or not.”
“You ought to be quarantined,” the widow said, her voice easing into a spiteful hiss. “You and all your rancid kind ought to be locked up forever.”
“Maybe so,” Anna admitted. “But it was the good trips that got Alan hooked, and it was the withdrawal symptoms that hurt him, not the mutant proteins.”
A man had joined the widow now: the fascinated crowd's appointed mediator. He put a protective arm around the widow's shoulder. He was too old to be one of her sons and too dignified to be a suitor ambitious to step into the dead man's shoes; perhaps he was
her brother—or even Alan's brother.
“Go back to the car now, Kitty,” the man said. “Let me take care of this.”
Kitty seemed to be glad of the opportunity to retreat. Whatever she'd hoped to get out of the confrontation, she hadn't found it. She turned away and went back to the black-clad flock which was waiting to gather her in.
Anna expected a more combative approach from the man, whoever he might be, but all he said was, “If you're who I think you are, you shouldn't have come here. It's not fair to the family.”
Another Isabel, Anna thought. You'd think someone like him would know better. By “Someone like him” she meant doctor, lawyer, or banker. Something professional in the nonironic sense of the word. Alan had been a stockbroker, careful overseer of a thousand personal equity plans. She'd often wondered if any of his clients had shares in the company which owned the House. Like everything else in today's complicated world, it had been part of some diverse conglomerate; the parent organization's share price was quoted every day in the Guardian's financial pages, under the heading “Leisure and Entertainment.”
“I'm not doing any harm,” Anna said. “You could all have ignored me, if you'd wanted to.”
“I believe that was the gist of the argument which prompted the legalization of prostitution,” the other replied, mustering a sarcastic edge far sharper than Kitty's. “It does no harm, they said, and anyone who disapproves only has to ignore it. When the cosmetic engineers progressed from tinkering with shape and form to augmenting bodily fluids they said much the same thing. The new aphrodisiacs are perfectly safe, they said, it's all just for fun, they're definitely not addictive—and anyone who disapproves can simply stay away from the new generation of good-time girls, and let the fun-lovers get on with it. In the end, though, the rot crept in, the way it always does. It all went horribly wrong. Isn't it bad enough that we had to lose Alan, without having to suffer a personal appearance by his own particular angel of death?”
She felt something stirring in the depths of her consciousness, but the comfort blanket of her medication was weighing down upon it. It was easy to remain tame and self-possessed while the doctors' drugs were winning the battle against her own perverted psychochemistry. “I'm sorry,” she said, effortlessly. “I didn't mean to cause distress.” Like hell I didn't, she thought, by way of private compensation. I came here to rub your turned-up noses in it, to force you to recognize how utterly and horribly unfair the world really is.
“You have caused distress,” the man said, accusatively. “I don't think you have the least idea how much distress you've caused—to Alan, to Kitty, to the boys, and to everyone who knew them. If you had, and if you had the least vestige of conscience, you'd have cut your throat rather than come here today. In fact, you'd have cut your throat, period.”
He's a punter, Anna thought, derisively. Not mine, and not the House's, but someone's. He fucks augmented girls, and the juices really blow his mind, just like they're supposed to, and he's afraid. He's afraid that one fine day he, too, might find that he just can't stop, and that if and when his favorite squeeze goes bad, it'll be cold turkey, forever and ever, amen. Like every man alive his prayer has always been “Lord give me chastity but please not yet!” —and now it's too late.
“I'm sorry,” she said, again. The words were the purified essence of her medication, wrought by a transformation every bit as miraculous as the one which had run its wayward course within her flesh and her spirit. The real Anna wasn't sorry at all. The real Anna wasn't sorry she had come, and wasn't sorry she was alive, and wasn't sorry that this black-clad prick saw her as some kind of ravenous memento mori.
“You're a degenerate,” the black-clad prick informed her, speaking not merely to her but to everything she stood for. “I don't agree with those people who say that what's happened to you is God's punishment for the sins you've committed, and that every whore in the world will eventually go the same way, but I understand how they feel. I think you should go now, and never show your face here again. I don't want Kitty thinking that she can't bring the boys to visit Alan's grave in case she meets you. If you have a spark of decency in you, you'll promise me that you'll never come here again.”
The clichés begin to flow in full force, Anna thought—but even the medication balked at sparks of decency. “I'm free to go wherever I want to, whenever I wish,” she asserted, untruthfully. “You have no right to stop me.”
“You poisonous bitch,” he said, in a level fashion which suggested that he meant the adjective literally. “Wherever you go, corruption goes with you. Stay away from Alan's family, or you'll be sorry.” She knew that he meant all of that quite literally too—but he had to turn away when he'd said it, because he couldn't meet the unnaturally steady stare of her colorless eyes.
She stayed where she was until everyone else had left, and then she walked over to the open grave and looked down at the coffin, onto which someone had dribbled a handful of brown loamy soil.
“Don't worry,” she said to the dead man. “Nothing scares me. Not anymore. I'll be back, and I'll get that wreath one way or another.”
She had no wristwatch but the church clock told her that she had five hours in hand before they'd be expecting her at the hospital.
Anna hadn't been to the Euroterminal meat-rack for seven years, but it didn't take long for her to find her way around. The establishment of Licensed Houses had been intended to take prostitution off the streets but it had only resulted in a more complicated stratification of the marketplace. It wasn't just the fact that there were so many different kinds of augmentation available, or the fact that more than three-quarters of them were illegal, or even the fact that there were so many girls whose augmentations had ultimately gone wrong or thrown up unexpected side effects; the oldest profession was one which, by its very nature, could never be moved out of the black economy into the gold. Sleaze, secrecy, and dark, dark shadows were marketable commodities, just like psychotropic bodily secretions.
She didn't bother to try for a managed stand; she'd spoken the truth when she'd told her dead lover that nothing scared her anymore, but she hadn't time to get into complicated negotiations with a pimp. She went down to the arches where the independents hung out. There was no one there she knew, but there was a sense in which she knew all of them—especially the ones who were marked like her. It didn't take long to find one who was a virtual mirror image in more overstated makeup.
“I'm not here to provide steady competition,” she said, by way of introduction. “I'm still hospitalized. I'll be back on the ward tomorrow, but I need something to get me through today. Fifty'll do it—that's only one substitution, right?”
“Y'r arithmetic's fine,” the mirror image said, “but y'got a lot of nerve. Demand's not strong, and I don't owe y'anything just 'cause we're two peas from the same glass pod. It's a cat-eat-cat world out here.”
“We aren't two peas from any kind of pod,” Anna informed her, softly. “Symptoms are all on the surface. They used to say that all of us were sisters under the skin, but we were never the same. Even when they shot the virus vectors into us, so that our busy little epithelial cells would mass-produce their carefully designed mind expanders, it didn't make us into so many mass-produced wanking machines. One of my doctors explained to me that the reason it all began to go wrong is that everybody's different. We're not just different ghosts haunting production line machines; each and every one of us has a subtly different brain chemistry. What makes you you and me me isn't just the layout of the synaptic network which forms in our brains as we accumulate memories and habits; we tailor our chemistry to individual specifications as well. You and I had exactly the same transformation, and our transplanted genes mutated according to the same distortive logic, but fucking you never felt exactly the same as fucking me, and it still isn't. We're all unique, all different; we offered subtly different good trips and now we offer subtly different bad ones. That's why some of our clients became regulars, and why some got hook
ed in defiance of all the ads which promised hand-on-heart that what we secreted wasn't physically addictive. You don't owe me anything at all, either because of what we both were or because of what we both are, but you could do me a favor, if you wanted to. You're free to say no.”
The mirror image looked at her long and hard, and then said: “Jesus, kid, y'really are strung out—but y'd better lose that accent if y're plannin' on workin' down here. It don't fit. I was goin' for a cup of coffee anyway. Y'got half an hour—if y'don't score by then, tough luck.”
“Thanks,” said Anna. “I appreciate it.” She wasn't sure that half an hour would be enough, but she knew she had to settle for whatever she could get.
She'd been on the pitch for twenty-three minutes when the car drew up. In a way, she was grateful it had taken so long. Now, she wouldn't be able to go back afterward.
The punter tried to bargain her down to thirty, but the car was a souped-up fleet model whose gloss shouted to the world that he wasn't strapped for cash, and there was no one else on the line with exactly her kind of spoliation.
The client was a wise guy; he knew enough about the chemistry of his own tastes to think he could show off. It probably didn't occur to him that the doctors had taken pains to explain to Anna exactly what had happened to her, or that she'd been better able to follow their expert discourse than his fudged mess. Nor did it occur to him that she wouldn't be at all interested in the important lessons which he thought were there to be learned from the whole sorry affair. She didn't try to put him right; he was paying, after all, and the torrent of words provided a distraction of sorts from the various other fluxes generated by their brief and—for her—painful intercourse.
“That whole class of euphorics should never have been licensed, of course,” he opined, after he'd stumbled through a few garbled technicalities. “It's all very well designing fancy proteins by computer, but just because something's stable in cyberspace doesn't mean it's going to behave itself under physiological conditions, and physiological conditions is a politer way of putting it, when we're referring to the kind of witch's cauldron you get up a whore's you-know-what. They say they have programs now that will spot likely mutation sites and track likely chains of mutational consequence, but I reckon they're about as much use as a wooden fort against a fire-breathing dragon. I mean, this thing is out of control and there's no way to lock the stable door now the nags have bolted. Personally, I'm not at all distressed—I mean, I've had all the common-or-garden stuff up to here. I never liked whores wired up for the kind of jollies you can get from a pill or a fizzy drink. I mean, it's just stupid to try to roll up all your hits into one. It's like praying mantises eating their mates while they fuck—no sense to it at all. Me, I like things spread around a bit. I like it sour and sweet, in all kinds of exotic combinations. People like me are the real citizens of the twenty-first century, you know. In a world like ours, it ain't enough not to be xenophobic—you have to go the other way. Xenophilia is what it takes to cope with today and tomorrow. Just hang on in there, darling, and you'll find yourself back in demand on a big scale. Be grateful that they can't cure you—in time, you'll adapt, just like me.”
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