Hotwire

by Simon Ings

  ‘I’m pregnant,’ Rosa said, even and flat. ‘Presidio saw me. It knew. I’m weak just as I always was. It’s this gives me my strength.’ She lowered her gaze to her belly. ‘Rio should be pleased.’

  He pressed trembling fingers to her stomach. The hardness there was unmistakable. Not fat but womb-walls, hardening.

  ‘It’s far too soon,’ he said. ‘It shouldn’t grow that fast.’

  ‘It’s yours,’ she said, meekly, ‘I think.’

  ‘Mine?’

  She said, ‘I broke myself on you.’

  He sat, dumbfounded, his fingers trailing off her stomach to the edge of her skirt.

  ‘When you were sleeping.’

  He hooked his fingers into her waistband, snagging her pubic hair.

  ‘Before I set you free from Ma.’

  He let the waistband go and slid his hand over her pubis, to the stretched hem of the skirt, and up.

  ‘Oh Ajay—’ She parted her legs wide. The skirt rucked up for him. He tugged it back from her groin and drank in his first sight of her tender sex.

  ‘Ajay?’

  He stared at it.

  ‘Ajay? What is it?’

  He leaned forward and planted a kiss on her cunt.

  ‘Ajay?’

  ‘How long since you bled?’

  ‘Three months.’

  ‘It’s mine,’ he said, utterly dazed. ‘The child must be mine.’

  She smiled, uncertainly. ‘Then you don’t mind?’

  He leaned up and kissed her stomach. My baby, he thought, mind whirling. ‘How—?’

  ‘You were pinned out,’ she said, shyly. ‘I sat on you. On that.’ She reached and stroked his erection through his pants.

  He pulled away.

  ‘Come back.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Stop caring for me,’ she said. ‘Have me. Like the others. Have me. Do it.’

  ‘Stop it!’

  ‘No.’ She reached a hand between her legs and touched herself, showing herself to him. ‘It’s what I want.’

  A last request, he thought, confused, appalled at her and at himself for wanting it, wanting her, wanting release.

  ‘Give it me,’ she begged.

  He remembered Trinidad, the squat, the hoarding nailed above the sofabed, the woman’s staring eyes, and then above him, through a glamourising haze of ZB15, some dark prostitute, puppyfat around her face still, very young, her breasts full nonetheless, her taste sweet-sour, her bed-talk—

  ‘Fill me now.’

  He kneeled up on the bed and fumbled with his belt.

  ‘Here.’ She brushed his hands away. ‘Let me.’ She pulled his pants down, shed his shorts and took his cock inside her mouth.

  He moved against her gently. She pulled him down onto the bed. He leant above her, thrusting gently against her tongue, then turned and touched inside her.

  She purred, her throat vibrating softly along his cock. She flexed and raised her legs, knees bent, letting another finger in, and another—

  It was daylight when they stopped.

  They slept entangled in each other under green silk sheets and woke up only to make love and sleep again.

  He woke a second time to find her sitting astride him, impaled part-way on him and squeezing hard, deftly milking him. He came inside her straight away. She lifted herself off him, moved up the bed, and sat on his mouth, letting him lick his come from her, than sank under the sheets again and dozed. He kissed her, hungrily but soft, to let her sleep. A last request, he thought. A dreadful thought: it would not let him go. He shuddered, burying his head into the crook of her arm. Lazily, she made room for him against her breast. He kissed it, absently, and slept, unconsciousness his sole remaining refuge from the fugue of strange guilts haunting him: a sister – a girl – a child – a slab, over and over, no choices, no breaks, no room for action, for changes of heart or for hope.

  He wondered as he dozed off what it was like to be free. He’d never know. He’d known his limitations for a long time. Lucia had taught him them. He wasn’t built for freedom, but would forever be the gun another fires.

  When next he woke it was dark. He grabbed his watch. It was 10.00 p.m. Two hours to the rendezvous. He reached out for Rosa. She was not there.

  ‘I was going to wake you.’

  She was standing by the window.

  ‘Rosa.’

  ‘Another clear night,’ she said. ‘Look!’

  He watched her as she scanned the cityscape, head cocked to one side, eyes bright. Like a bird, he thought, hunting for food. So hungry. Like Rio, perhaps. Hungry for heat, for human-ness, for life on Earth. Or like his sister, plucking shells from off Cordoba beach, her blue dress rippling in the wind – but that was long ago.

  Now his sister sat all day her gaze transfixed by Acuçar, that pitch-black, dreadful monolith, her curiosity inverted, her hunger for the world quite gone.

  Rosa stepped closer to the window, nose pressed to the glass, eyes wide.

  So hungry for the world . . .

  And had she not been, after all, right about him? Had he not made of Rosa the Shama he had missed and tried to build? And making her his ideal companion, his hausfrau and kid sis, had he not built, albeit in his mind, something as fake as Shama herself, that shell he’d filled year in year out with Diamanté tech?

  Rosa had dressed already for the rendezvous, toning down her looks, knowing in her heart perhaps that today marked the end of friends and parties on the beach and all good times. She’d put on roomy drawstring pants and a black vest. He recognized them; they were the clothes he’d grabbed for her the night of their seafall. He couldn’t remember her wearing them since.

  ‘Rosa.’

  She knelt on the bed beside him and hugged him, sliding her tongue into his mouth. It tasted sweet. He pushed his own tongue into her, running it along her perfect teeth, her soft insides—

  She pulled away. ‘You’re squashing me.’ He took his hands from her waist and slid them up over her stomach to her breasts. She breathed in deep. He felt her nipples harden under the vest. ‘It’s time to go,’ she said.

  He bent and pulled the cloth aside her breast and kissed the hard pink bud, pinching it between his lips.

  ‘Enough,’ she said.

  He pulled away. Looking at Rosa with new eyes, he wondered who she really was and who she might become, if only given time.

  And thinking this, he knew he could not kill her, could not take her into danger, had to let her go.

  And thinking this, he knew what he must do.

  She said, ‘I’ll get your clothes.’

  They caught a tram to the harbour side. Presidio’s predations had over the years brought sea trade to a halt and all here was derelict. Guest house after guest house rattled by: cheap, flat-roofed, mean and poorly maintained, they had the look of convalescent homes. In the windows hung fluorescent squares of card, scrawled over with spirit marker. Vacancies. Vacancies. Vacancies. In between them were shops, repeating themselves over and over. Stationery – Teddies – Radios – Fancy Goods – Teddies – Radios. The tram rattled between the derelict Metropole Hotel and Maisie May’s Piano Bar and came to rest at Pier Twenty Nine.

  They disembarked. The ground was a mulch of crushed cans, newspapers, beads, glass, wood splinters, oily rag, used prophylactics, cardboard and tyre rubber. As they stood orientating themselves a sea fog rolled in, sweeping the sea and the sky into each other so that there was nothing to see beyond the promenades but a grey, shifting mass of damp air. Nothing to look at. No way through.

  ‘I’m cold,’ said Rosa.

  Ajay slipped his jacket off and put it round her shoulders.

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Keep it,’ he said.

  She slipped it on, breathing in his scent from the rough wool. The smell itself warmed her; she smiled.

  ‘This way.’ He led her onto the boardwalk. The air here was full of flies.

  ‘A minute,’ she said, and left the path. The arcades
had long since fallen in, the mezzanines a line of rubble enclosing the edges of the pier. Behind a concrete pile, she pulled down her drawstring trousers, tucked her pants aside and relieved herself.

  Flies filled the space between her arched legs. She watched them settle upon the puddle at her feet, feeding upon her urine. They were brightly coloured in the cold white street-light – red and dun and black with yellow flashes. Their hides glistened.

  So beautiful, she thought. So various. Always more than one of each thing . . .

  She looked around her, taking in the garbage dumped here over the years: an abandoned fridge, packing cases, old shoes, plastic bags filled with rubbish, bits from gutted automobiles, a magazine, an old radio, a length of rubber tubing and the damp trash at her feet. It took on strange shapes behind her eyes. The flies rose from the puddle and danced before her, swirling around each other, lending outline and shadow to the new shapes.

  She imagined a bowl of green earth, a tree, and crawling things; a bird.

  And who, after all, was to say what was natural, what made; what rubbish, what landscape? Language drew false distinctions. Language was full of fossils, blown ideas, false conceits. The world, hurtling into libration with its ambiguous future, had left its languages lagging so far behind . . .

  ‘Rosa?’

  ‘I’m coming!’

  Only the simplest things were sayable. She knew that now. Ajay would never understand her, nor grasp her love for him.

  They waited at the end of Pier Twenty Nine, shrouded in sea-fog, divorced from the world.

  Ajay glanced at his watch. ‘Madness,’ he grumbled.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The rendezvous being here, with Presidio next door.’

  ‘It won’t appear,’ Rosa promised.

  He cast her a curious glance. ‘You can be so sure?’

  ‘I can.’ She smiled at him to give him confidence. ‘We had a long talk.’

  ‘Great.’ He wrapped his arms around himself.

  The pier shook.

  The water all around went white.

  A dreadful shrieking started up. A black behemoth rose up out the water, streaming, glinting green and red under its navigation lights.

  Rosa staggered back, minding it frantically to stop, to go back, go away—

  ‘Rosa, it’s all right! Come back here.’

  —but she heard only blips and hums and dim, machine-like mutterings. No mind. No Ma-like smile or mother’s croon.

  ‘This is the ship!’

  She let the ship’s subsystems go and stared at it, this sharp-edged, simple craft. All featureless, like something a child makes out of cardboard. It was strangely disappointing. She had expected a grander ship; not larger necessarily, but more terrible. An old man in a creaking skiff, perhaps, hoary with age, to row her to her strange new life: Rio, the slabs, the clever men with sharp curettes and greedy smiles. She shuddered, though she wasn’t cold. ‘Ajay?’

  ‘It’s time.’

  ‘Guard me.’

  He smiled. ‘I’ll keep you safe.’

  ‘Okay,’ she nodded, and gathering up what courage she had left: ‘What do we do?’

  ‘We wait is all.’

  A hatch she had not seen before slid open in the ship’s side. Black-clad men tumbled out of it into the water. Like the seals of Presidio she thought, but clumsy, slow, more sinister. ‘What are they doing?’

  ‘They’ll help me aboard,’ he said.

  ‘And me?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Me? Ajay? What of me?’

  ‘You have your child.’

  Slowly his plan came clear to her. Dismay paralysed her for a second then with a great cry she rushed on him.

  He was ready. He grabbed her wrists and fought her back, pushing her away from the pier’s edge. ‘Rosa. Rosa.’

  ‘I’ll sink the sub! I’ll blow it up!’

  ‘Rosa!’ He forced her to her knees, then let her go and staggered back. ‘Just listen, for Christ’s sakes. Don’t harm them. Don’t stop me. It has to be this way. It has to, don’t you see? Here is safer for you than Rio. You’ve both a chance here, don’t you see?’

  ‘But I don’t want to be safe! I want you to look after me—’

  ‘I am looking after you both,’ he said. ‘I’m protecting my child.’

  She got to her feet, dumbfounded, unprepared for this new argument.

  ‘It’s all I’ve got,’ he urged her, ‘a child. Yours and mine.’

  ‘And Shama? You heard what that man said. They’ll kill her! They’ll kill your sister!’

  He couldn’t meet her eyes. He sighed and turned and leaned on the pier rail. The divers were beckoning him. He ignored them. He was thinking of the beaches of Trinidad, and of the black mirror-like stillness of the water. He was thinking of a great black river rushing into the earth. He said, ‘Shama’s dead.’

  He’d known it for years.

  ‘She died years ago. I’ve been decking her shrine is all,’ he said, more to himself than to Rosa. ‘Building something for myself. A sister that I lost. Putting the bits together.’ He shuddered. ‘It stops here.’

  ‘Ajay—’

  ‘I’m going to let her be. It’s what I should have done, years ago. She’ll never be complete. Not as she was. Time’s a great spoiler, love. It spoiled her years ago. I’m too late. I always was too late.’

  ‘Then what of me?’ Rosa sobbed. She reached out for him. He brushed her away, but gently. ‘Why leave me?’ she insisted, ‘why leave at all?’

  ‘I have the beads, the data. I don’t take it to Herazo, I’ll be marked. I stay with you, I’d not survive.’

  ‘Give him the beads then, but stay here!’

  ‘I know too much to be free,’ he said. ‘I know where Dayus Ram is, I know about Rio, Herazo’s plans, and Haag. I’m marked. Rio’s my protector, my Ma. I quit her womb, there’s a dozen powers would not let me live.’

  ‘But what of me?’ she begged.

  He shook his head. ‘I can’t win, Rosa. Can’t win Shama, can’t win you.’

  ‘Your child—’

  ‘Tell it of me.’

  ‘Ajay,’ she cried, and threw her arms open for him. ‘It’s you I want.’

  ‘Care for the child,’ he said. ‘Now go. Run. Live,’ and straddling the pier rail he flung himself into the sea.

  ‘Ajay!’ She leaned over the rail, longing to follow him, but afraid: of the drop, and of the divers there, and Ajay’s will.

  Faceless and fast like sharks, the men in black seized him and swam him into the ship. They bundled him through the hatch without ceremony. He did not stop to look at her, or wave goodbye. The men followed him in. The hatch swung closed. In seconds, without noise, or fuss or any other sign, the ship sank back below the waves.

  She was alone.

  It was cold. She shivered and turned up the lapels of Ajay’s jacket, holding them around her neck, drinking in his smell: the last of him. She walked back through the derelict harbour, weeping, confused, her head and body full of things she did not understand.

  She wandered aimlessly, and found herself at last in Chinatown. The markets ran all night here, stalls overflowing with tripe and transistors, bootleg Sanyo batteries and ornamental fish. Transparent tarps stretched over the streets made of them crude covered arcades. Old rainwater had collected in the plastic, each pool funnelling the night-time laser light into a grey-green beam. Wandering between the stalls, Rosa imagined herself lost among trees made entirely of light.

  Breezes from off the bay picked up, chilling her through. She put her hands in her trouser pockets to warm them. There was a slip of paper in her right-hand pocket. She pulled it out.

  It was the scrap she’d saved quite absently, that night Ajay brought her to Earth. On one side was a cruciform design; on the other, a number.

  At the corner of Stockton and Clay, by the Rolling Stone Bistro, Rosa hung back. Across the road, in Nusrat’s Hi-Fi Store, flat-screened TVs from Japan and G
ermany were tuned to the all-night channels. There were mullahs on television, Gregory Peck in The Million Pound Note, teletext from Sydney and Senegal. Next to the store there was a shrine and inside it a coffee jar full of murky water. The Chinese made their shrines here out of concrete: little more than decorated boxes. Rosa watched as a girl in a black rubber mackintosh walked up to the shrine and knelt by it. On the side of this one there was a device, carefully stenciled in red spray-paint: a box, unwrapped and spread.

  From out her mackintosh the girl pulled out a sprig of jasmine. She placed it in the coffee jar. Then she stood up, adjusted her mackintosh and set off again down the road.

  Like faith, thought Rosa, thinking of the Bay, and then poor Xu, and of his hunger for the senses he had lost: senses newborn in her.

  Call it Providence, a voice inside her head murmured.

  She stopped dead in the street.

  She put her hands over her stomach.

  My child?

  Silence.

  Are you awake?

  Perfect peace reigned in her womb. If it was her child who had spoken in her mind, it was silent now. If it were not her child – who could it have been?

  The paper fluttered in her fingers.

  There was a phone booth nearby. She went in, picked up the handset, minded herself a dollar’s worth of credit, and dialled the number printed on the paper.

  After five rings a child answered: ‘Digame!’ A little girl, she guessed. She said. ‘Is your mother in? Your father?’

  ‘No comprendo. No puedes hablar’n Espanol?’

  Rosa gripped the handset tighter. ‘Is there anyone else there? Anyone who can help me?’

  ‘Esérate,’ said the girl, and clunked the handset down. In the distance, Rosa heard her calling. Adult voices, heavy steps.

  ‘Bernal aquí – con quién hablo?’ A heavy male voice.

  ‘I don’t speak Spanish. Is there anyone there—?’

  ‘Who is this?’

  Rosa swallowed. ‘You don’t know me.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘My name’s Rosa.’

  ‘What do you want, Rosa?’

  ‘I got your number from a rocket. A paper rocket.’