About two years, with monthly visits. That would give him enough time to find out what the flicker meant.
“And what’s it going to do to them?”
“Nothing they’ll notice. If the experiment works and there are some changes, they’ll only be noticeable in the samples I take.”
Not only did that tell him nothing, it was also said too confidently – something else Dion would have to follow up on.
“Does that give you enough to convince them?” Miranda urged. She suddenly wanted this to be over. Her expectations had been made up of a succession of cheaters, fakers, pushers, paedophiles, killers, psychopaths. But here was someone who looked and sounded like none of these and his questions had the kind of measured accuracy she would have expected from any prospective, professional collaborator.
Dion nodded his assent. It convinced him enough to go further, and if he was convinced, the kids would be, too. He said, “Do you want to start them all at once?”
“I’ll give them the treatment at one month intervals. That way we have a year’s experience before the last one starts. But I want to take samples from them all right from the beginning.”
“You’d better begin with the oldest. That’s Nial. After that there’s Jetter. They’ve both just passed nine. How do I contact you?”
She took a card from inside her coat, scribbled something on it and handed it to him. But for a contact number and the single name, ‘Miranda’, the card was blank.
“Miranda,” Dion said, looking up at her. As if he didn’t know.
She asked, “What’s your name?”
“Dion.”
She looked around the cubicle – Dion’s Place. “You lived here?”
Dion nodded.
“Dion,” she repeated. Just a name to her. “Call me when you’re ready to start.”
She turned to go back down the stairwell.
“There’s one other thing,” Dion said, in a way he knew would stop her dead. “When you and I go back down those stairs you say to that driver of yours that he’s not to come here again. You say that to him in front of me, and you say that if he so much as sets foot in my area it’ll be the last step he takes.”
It was corny – Dion knew it – but he savoured the menace he was able to summon, and the outrage that rose up in Miranda Whitlam. The outrage he checked before it could find words by saying, reasonably enough, “Listen, if I choose, I can do what I like with you, and with him. But I don’t choose. What happens is you and I trust each other and get on with this business, because you need it more than anything you’ve needed before in your life and I choose to make it possible for you. As long as we work like that and you don’t try anything on, you’re completely safe, safer than you’d be with any driver, or bodyguard, or whatever he thinks he is. I just have this one condition and that is you tell him to get lost in front of me. Humour me.”
Miranda Whitlam humoured him and Dion felt some relief as he watched the servant attempt to make out it was of no consequence. After that, Dion gave the old Asian lady a substantial sum of money, saying, “I want sole use of that space up there and access to it at any time. And you don’t tell anyone. Not anyone. That way you get more rent each month. There’ll be me, her and twelve children coming up here, and nobody else.”
17
Some of the children had come to Dion with only a monosyllable left to identify them by: Biv, Tel, Dom. Others had retained a broader identity with names like Ferrie, Georgio, Mysté. Dion scanned the twelve faces that looked up at him and saw varying degrees of comprehension, distraction and boredom. The most he could be sure of was that they’d do what he said.
“This injection sounds safe to me,” he told them. “I’ve let her know that if she messes me about, there’ll be trouble and damaging any one of you counts as messing me about. She’s paying well, but until it’s all over you only get to see pocket money. If kids like you get hold of real money, you’ll screw up completely and then this whole thing will be over. She needs you to stay whole and healthy and come every month without fail and that means I need you to do the same. You get full pay at the end of it. And one final thing, I’m the one that tells you what to do in all this. Not her. If she tries to get you to do anything without going through me, you tell me. Is that understood?”
Urgent nods of twelve heads. Some of the nods looked a bit mechanical, though.
“I repeat. If she tries to get you to do anything without going through me, you tell me. If you don’t tell me, I’ll get to find out anyway and then you’ll be in deep shit. She says this thing’s going to last two years. I think it may be longer. But it’s going to come to an end some time and then you’ll be out of a job. That is, unless you’ve kept on working with me and learning what I can teach you. But you won’t get to do that if you don’t keep to the rules. Understood?”
The nods looked a bit more engaged this time. “Okay, you start by cleaning out where we’ll be doing this. I’ll take you up there tomorrow. We call it, ‘Dion’s Place’.”
*
Miranda Whitlam had her driver take her back to her apartment in Basel without stopping. She shook all the way, deep shudders that threatened to get completely out of control and set her off screaming. She put it down to the criminality of what she had embarked on, and the danger. She put it down to having stepped through a safety curtain that had hitherto hung between herself and areas of the world most people preferred to forget. The thought fitted the feeling and seemed to give her some relief from the awful sense of dissolution she felt overwhelming her.
Between the shakes, she tried to rerun every detail of her exchange with the unfathomable black man. His talk had been practical, his every question well-placed and businesslike. Except that he’d shown too much insight too soon. ‘You need this more than anything you’ve needed before,’ he’d said. Of course she did, else why would she have been talking in such a place with someone like him? But he hadn’t used that knowledge to try and squeeze yet more money out of her. He had said instead, ‘I choose to make this possible for you.’ What kind of talk was that? That wasn’t economics talking. And why had he insisted on her humiliating the driver? The driver had only been a temp and had played the part well enough, but she just couldn’t understand why that had been necessary. Still, it was a relief to have something to force herself to think about. It spared her having to contemplate the pictures that kept coming back to her of this black man facing her across a filthy, enclosed, concrete space.
In the end Miranda just hoped he wouldn’t call, hoped she’d be able to forget the whole thing and just have it as an unpleasant memory, a bad dream, something that was over, just some crazy notion she’d got into believing she absolutely had to go through with. She just wanted to be free of the awful feelings that stirred around inside her whenever she thought of it as something that might really happen. This went on for a week. Then Dion called to tell her he was ready.
*
The treatment was no more than a single injection and the samples were no more than a syringe of blood and a slight nick of skin.
“Is that it?” each of the twelve asked as they appeared at monthly intervals.
“That’s it,” Miranda Whitlam said as she handed Dion an envelope, from which he would take his percentage and the substantial proportion to be held in trust and handed over to the children when the project was over.
“See you next month,” Miranda said; each time round.
And that was all there was to it; apparently.
But on each occasion, Dion watched. He watched the injection being given, not by needle as the children had feared, but by some highly-styled pen-like implement that gave a slight click and a hiss when a button was pressed. Neither was a needle used to take the blood or skin samples. Again, there were these discretely elegant devices one could barely imagine were designed to break through the body’s boundaries. But he was impressed by the way Miranda used them. Despite the simplicity of the procedures, she managed to co
nvey a sense of care and attention to each child. The kids had started off jittery and nervous, uncharacteristically quiet, but as the visits accumulated they relaxed and started looking forward to their monthly contact with this careful, beautiful lady.
Dion listened as each time she would ask them how they were feeling. Were there any unusual aches or pains? Had they felt hot or shivery at all? He could see this was the most personal attention they had ever received and they were hungry for it. He watched Miranda and the children, searching for the slightest sign of any hidden understanding. Then he would wait until the kids had all gone and he would accompany Miranda out himself.
It became clear to Dion even at the first session that she was going to offer him as little opportunity for contact as possible. Now the negotiations were over and the work was under way, he was going to be the children’s minder, at best tolerated and paid, but no more. At worst, she viewed him as just another servant, a hired hand whom she could instruct to bring a couch for the children to lie on while she took their blood, cushions for them to sit on while they were waiting, heating to keep them warm all the while. Already she considered the children hers. She had bought them.
Dion strove against her assumptions but it was a rearguard action. He could just about tolerate her seeing him as a minder but letting her treat him as a servant was out of the question. He would pick up on the slightest suggestion that he was subject to her instruction, and ensure he was seen to be in charge of the kids in some way. He’d tell them where they could pick up the couch from, which of his company men to ask for the cash to buy it with, which of the kids’ stuff operators would get them a heater.
Miranda was aware of Dion’s watchfulness but his presence troubled her less and less as the routine of the monthly visits settled into place. Her anxiety lessened as well. At the first session, she had been afraid her hands would shake so much she wouldn’t be able to operate the instruments – instruments that even the most junior of trainee nurses could normally manage. By an effort of will she kept herself steady and succeeded in getting through the sampling without mishap. At the second session, she was more afraid of mixing up the samples than missing a vein and at the third session she found herself completely at ease.
During the early sessions the children waited silently, properly cautious in the face of this complete unknown. But in the middle of the sixth session, Tel, the youngest, blurted out, “Lady, what’s it like where you come from? Do you live in a fancy place, stuff like that?”
The others giggled nervously. There were half-hearted whispers of, “Tel, shut up,” as some tried to distance themselves from the little kid’s cheek. But no one was really serious. A barrier had been broken and they were all aching to surge through it.
“My name’s Miranda, not Lady. I come up from Switzerland to see you. I live in a big apartment. It looks out over a city and a river.”
“Bet you’ve got a fancy car, Miranda. Bet you drive a Mercedes. You got one of those that the roof comes down?” – Georgio this time. Georgio was into cars.
“That’s exactly what I’ve got. And it has track guidance, route control and satellite sound system.” The kids gasped and Miranda added, “And ejector seat, afterburners, rocket-assisted thrust and submarine capability.”
For a second she carried absolute conviction. Then another – Sigi with blonde hair and lopsided face – who had been poking Tel earlier in the hope of getting him to say something – burst out, “No you haven’t. You haven’t got nothing like that. That kind of shit you only get in the movies.”
And when they saw her grin, they all laughed at having been so faked-out and started saying things like, “My car’s got intercontinental capability,” and, “My car’s got outer-space capability,” and so on up to inter-universe capability.
Seeing the connection take hold, Dion considered his options. When Miranda Whitlam had first come to him, asking for something she could find nowhere else, he had been in complete control. He had even been able to have her see off the kind of man he most hated. But now that the kids were coming each month and the arrangement was working well, any mastery Dion might have had in the situation was diminishing fast. Apart from threat, his only power lay in the desire the children had to become company men. But Miranda Whitlam could sweep that away merely by offering them shelter in World City.
So in the end threat was all he had. He could threaten to expose the experiment. Or he could threaten to end the arrangement. And if the children went off with Miranda, he could threaten to go after them. Or he could threaten to go after Miranda. He could play the slighted criminal chief. He could break legs.
Except that would mean the end of this one peculiar chance he had been granted to recover contact with someone he had once, however briefly, set his heart on and whom he still did not hate. He needed to find some way of holding Miranda Whitlam’s attention that didn’t depend on violence or the tenuous link offered by these children.
*
Dion asked Nial if he could find out anything about her. The kids were generally okay, but Nial could actually be trusted. The boy thought before he spoke and was steady and forward-looking. He was the kid brother of one of Dion’s company men, so he had come to Dion reasonably intact and with plans of his own, plans that mostly focused on following in the path of the brother he looked up to.
“Her name’s Whitlam, Nial, Miranda Whitlam. That’s about all I know of her right now, apart from what we all know – that she lives in Switzerland and drives a Mercedes. And that she’s a doctor. Oh, and I know her father was rich.”
Nial took this as given. It made sense to him that Dion knew things he didn’t.
“Try the information centre where you picked up on her in the first place,” Dion concluded. Nial tried it. He found some things about companies with names like Whitlam Holdings and Whitlam Imports but otherwise drew a complete blank. Dion tried too and got nowhere either.
He got a bit further, though, when he checked up on the proteins and nucleic acids she had said she was injecting the children with. Proteins were the building blocks of life, the information screen told him, and he ran through some pictures of how the building blocks worked together to do the kinds of things that life needed doing. Nucleic acids were the building blocks of DNA and the patterns in which these building blocks were fitted together in DNA made up the instructions for making the proteins.
So the kids were being injected with the building blocks of life and instructions for making the building blocks. For a while, Dion felt not much the wiser but he kept turning these ideas over in his mind. Why would she want to inject his kids with the building blocks of life and with instructions for making them? Didn’t they have their own building blocks and their own instructions already? Maybe that was it: she was rebuilding them in some way with new building blocks and new instructions.
This seemed a bit radical to Dion. He was slightly surprised the kids hadn’t changed shape. But she had told him the changes would be subtle – nothing one could actually see. So she was only rebuilding them a little. But what was actually changing? What was she looking for in those vials of blood and little nicks of skin she took each month?
Dion had another question, though, that, for not being so clearly formulated, was all the more pressing. The question was simply, ‘Why?’
Why the hell was she here? Not, ‘why?’ from her point of view, but from his.
Why had she, of all people, landed in that filthy concrete cubicle that had been his first foothold in the Waste?
18
It happened sooner than Dion had anticipated, just fifteen months into the project. He had expected her to wait until close on the two years she had said the experiment would last. It would have been summer then; the children would have been more attached to her; she would have been able to take them away from him more easily. But in their fifteenth session together – in the clean, white-painted, concrete cubicle, with its couch and cushions, and its travel poster of a tropical
island taped to the wall at four corners – Dion was aware of a deep disturbance around him, an instability that threatened to undermine all his expectations.
As the children arrived, he listened to the autumn wind crying around the walls of the concrete block. He could feel the wind of the dying year pulling at his feelings somehow. He could sense the pull of dissolution in its groans and roars. Even for late autumn, it had been unusually dark. Not even the faintest trace of pale, rain-washed sunlight had broken through the cloud cover for weeks on end. The semblances of form the world normally sustained seemed to be dissolving in rain and darkness, their increasingly tenuous coherence finally being torn apart by the great swipes of wind. He had felt the wind on his way over and watched the leaves being whipped from God knew where in the treeless Waste to plaster in the rain against the windows of the old Asian lady’s apartment high above. He could imagine those leaves outside now, gathering in the corners around the concrete cubicle of Dion’s Place. As he waited, Dion suddenly felt complete desperation. There was simply no time left. Something had to give way.
All the children had appeared except Nial and Nial was usually among the first. Miranda was late as well. Usually, she would arrive when about half the children had turned up and, until all were present, she would listen to them as they exaggerated their adventures to her. Only then would she start on the business of blood-taking and health-checking.
“Come on, where that Miranda, Dion?” demanded one who called himself Face.
Face liked to make out to himself, and anyone else willing to listen, that he had a degree of maturity way ahead of his stringy little body and tense eyes. One way of doing this was to find questions that put the weight on Dion. Normally, Dion didn’t mind too much. Face was still far too young to be able to come up with anything that counted. It was just an act. But in the anxious, disrupted atmosphere that was crowding in on him and with the growing sense of his own complete lack of power over Miranda Whitlam, Dion suddenly felt Face’s demand as intolerable.
In World City Page 15
