In World City

by I. F. Godsland

  Dion set Nial, Biv and Jetter to work with his three most experienced company men. The plan was that the kids should just watch and be the rough-looking youngsters they were. This would provide good distraction for security while the professionals got on with the job. Nial would be fine, Dion thought. Biv would be okay as well. He might look anxious but he knew how to listen to instructions and act on them without screwing up. But, the danger lay with Jetter. Jetter lived up to his name. He was speedy, distractible, impulsive. He went off on flights of his own when he should have been keeping his feet on the ground.

  *

  The scheme worked well for two weeks and Dion eased up on drumming into the three boys that they must not, on any account, take the slightest of risks. With the pressure off, Jetter immediately decided to do some freelance work. He was supposed to be distracting security’s attention from the conventional suit who only seemed interested in prices, but Jetter thought he could outsmart the video eyes and tried to pocket something. Three uniformed security cornered him immediately.

  All Dion’s operators, all the way down to the youngest, knew they were on their own while they were doing a job. But Jetter had been too well protected for that knowledge to really sink in. He shrieked out to the company man, “Help, man, they’re going to get me.”

  The company man had been told by Dion how unpredictable Jetter might be. When the guards reflexively turned their heads in his direction, the company man managed, in the instant he held their attention, to project a look of blank astonishment, followed by a puzzled glance over his shoulder.

  The guards saw immediately the kid was only trying to create a distraction and hauled him off. The company man went back to the Waste. As far as he was concerned Jetter was finished. There were never second chances.

  Dion affected unconcern. Jetter had proved himself a liability and carrying liabilities wasn’t worth it. But, to himself, Dion cursed Jetter. Jetter had made a mess of Miranda’s work.

  *

  “Where’s Jetter?” Miranda asked, three days later when the monthly sampling session came round.

  “He got caught,” Juan called out. “He was supposed to be covering for one of Dion’s men but he got clever and tried it himself. He’ll be lucky to get away with two years in juvenile detention then he’ll get put in a camp till he’s eighteen and after that he’ll be on probation. World City comes down real hard on people like us.”

  Juan prattled on, proud to be the one who was telling Miranda the exciting news, oblivious to the appalling atmosphere that was developing in the room.

  Dion had felt it the minute Miranda noticed Jetter’s absence. He felt it as a physical shock, hitting him so hard that for a minute he had to struggle to identify from where the blow had come. He couldn’t make out why her reaction was so strong. He couldn’t make out why she wasn’t saying anything. Dion had been ready for some kind of protest, anger even. In which case he would have told Miranda there had simply been no way of avoiding the risks of setting the boys to work without incurring the greater risks of every one of them taking off elsewhere. He could have talked her through it. He had been sure of that. But this looming, desperate darkness around her was something he had simply never experienced before.

  Juan trailed into silence as even he became aware of the awful lump of feeling that had congealed in the room.

  “Come on, we’d better get this finished,” Miranda said unsteadily.

  She did the rest of the sampling in complete silence. When she was through, the children scuttled out promptly without having to be encouraged. In the empty space left by their departure, Dion could feel the threat coming off Miranda like sweat from an explosive.

  “What the hell were you thinking of, letting them go off like that?” she managed to say.

  “I had to. They’d all have left otherwise,” Dion began, steadily.

  But he could feel his words failing to connect even before he had finished saying them. All Miranda had needed was something she could get a grip on. He might as well have said it was cold for the time of year.

  “You fucking bastard,” she screamed, “You fucking pimp, you bastard. How dare you? They were mine, I tell you. Mine. And you just treat them like they’re something to be bought and sold. You fucking pimp. Where is he? Where is he now? You tell me. He’s probably been bundled into some fucking car and being used for filth. You bastard. You fucking black shit. How dare you. You don’t give a damn about them. Anything could happen to them for all you care.”

  Dion was dimly aware that what he knew and what she was screaming at him were two different things, but he was too busy warding off the kicks and blows to work out how different. He found he was getting angry himself. This wasn’t due to him. He managed to grasp Miranda by the wrists and turn his body partly side-on to her so the kicks were mainly on his shins.

  “What the fuck are you talking about, Miranda?” he shouted into her face. “I told you – they’d have all left if I hadn’t let the oldest ones work. They’d have all gone, every one of them. They’d have gone long before your ten years was up.”

  “Oh sure,” Miranda hissed into his face, her own expression twisted with exaggerated sarcasm. “You did it for their own good. You did it to help me. Bullshit. You did it because you didn’t give a fuck. Why should you? You’ve got their money. There’re still eleven of them left. They’re disposable. Oh yes, and you did it for me, the most beautiful girl you’d ever seen,” said with particular venom. “Like hell you did it for me. You haven’t done anything for me except damn near destroy everything I’ve worked for. You once said this was something I needed more than I’ve ever needed anything before. Fucking right it is. I need this. I need it to work. It’s the last thing I’ve got left, and you just piss on it. I need this, Dion. You told me I needed it. You knew. So, why do you treat it like shit? Is that what you’re about? Is that why you’re stuck out in this shit-hole? – Because you treat people like shit?”

  From habits acquired years back, Dion didn’t waste time questioning how it could be that the controlled, over-educated woman he had got to know since they had started working together could be so suddenly transformed. He didn’t stop and never would stop to fill in with any narrative about the motivations causing her to embark on ten years of crime, or how destabilising to her identity had been the pressures involved. Dion simply heard her saying that he treated people like shit. He thought of the time he put a bullet through the back of Maskel’s head. He thought of how he’d made Miranda dismiss her guard in front of him. That was about as shit as he got. He’d never treated anyone like shit that hadn’t had it coming to them, and more.

  He grasped Miranda’s wrists harder and started to shake her. He bellowed in her face, “Like shit, you say? Like shit? You tell me about how I treat people like shit? You fucking look at yourself. How did you treat me when you first turned up here? I saw you. I saw you look at me like I was the kind of filth you just knew hung out in places like this. I saw that, Miranda Whitlam, daughter of the same fucking Whitlam who made me leave my island. I saw you look at me like that and you been looking like that ever since. That’s all you been doing. You just been waiting to show me I was the filth you always knew I was. But what you don’t know is that every fucking move you make treats people like shit. Everything you do treats people like shit. You just treat people like they’re something to look down on, something to be used, something for you to be fucking better than. We’re all just servants to you, every fucking one of us, even my kids. My kids, do you hear? My kids. Not yours. I’m the one they came to. I’m the one who took them on. They had nothing to offer me, but I took them on. I just took them on, do you hear? I took them on without knowing what the hell I was going to do with them. You didn’t do that. You took them on because you could use them. You took them on because you had the money to buy them. I didn’t have money to buy them. They chose me because I could offer them a future, a real future, not a future as some fucking scientific experiment, a fu
ture as some fucking freak show that’s had its body altered and been made to live forever. I had a real future for them and that’s what I’m giving them. Because if I don’t give it them they’ll just up and go and then where will this thing be that’s the most important thing in your life? It’ll be fucking nowhere, Miranda. Nowhere, you hear? So what did I do? What did I fucking well do? I put it off as long as I could. And I did that because I didn’t want to risk your fucking experiment. And when the kids couldn’t stand it anymore, I sent them out with the best people I’ve got and took every fucking precaution I could so that your experiment wouldn’t get messed. And in spite of all this, Jetter still manages to fuck up. There’s nothing I can do about that, Miranda. There’s nothing you can do about that. Nothing. Do you hear me? Nothing. You can’t fucking well control them, Miranda. They’re alive.”

  As Dion’s rage peaked, he was vaguely aware there was something odd about the concrete cubicle they were fighting in. It seemed larger, dirtier, infinitely more dangerous. The fleeting image made him feel sick and he thrust it aside – easily enough, in the whirl of rage they were both caught up in. But for a moment he had felt something more real and more violent than even the present he was embattled in.

  His grip relaxed and Miranda broke free from him. She had a confused, angry look, like someone who had just been hit from behind. She shook the hair out of her eyes. Her body moved towards him as if about to strike out again, then she stumbled backwards, sitting heavily on the couch where the children usually lay as she took their blood.

  Dion was breathing heavily. They didn’t say anything to each other for some moments.

  Eventually Miranda ventured, “How much more cash do you want? You know – to make sure they don’t get into anything dangerous in between the times I see them.”

  Dion paced the room some moments, trying to rearrange his thoughts. This was a sensible question and deserved a sensible reply. He stopped and shook his head, “Miranda, I can’t stop them doing what they want to do. They’re not so much interested in the money. They just want to work for me. That’s why they’ve stuck around here so long. The experiment is just something extra for them.”

  “But isn’t there something you could do that would at least keep them a bit safer? Oh God, I don’t know. Maybe not.”

  Miranda had calmed sufficiently to know she was sounding foolish. Crime was not safe and couldn’t be made safe; crime bosses didn’t have hard hats or safety policies.

  But Dion knew he had to come up with something if she was going to be able to keep coming back. He said thickly, still breathing hard, “Look, I could give my operators a bonus for bringing them back safe. In my kind of work, you’re on your own when you go out on a job. That means the kids get left to make their own mistakes. If my company men got a pay-off for driving a bit more fucking sense into the kids’ heads, that might help.”

  “How much would you need?”

  “Don’t know. I guess the higher the bonus, the more care they’ll take. You could offer so much it would be more worth their while to sit them in McDonald’s for the day. But the kids wouldn’t have that – they want to work. And I don’t want them getting singled out as something that special. That way even more questions get asked than I’ve been asked already and the questions keep on coming until people start getting answers. Make it thirty percent of the average take.”

  They sat in silence, unwilling to disturb the sense of aftermath. Miranda considered the criminalisation of her life. Her experiment was criminal and now she was paying criminals to do their own work more effectively. She thought she might as well compound it by springing Jetter from juvenile detention. “Where is he?” she asked.

  Dion looked up, questioning.

  “Jetter.”

  “He was picked up in a store in Frankfurt.” He named the store. “I don’t know where he was taken after that.”

  “Do you know anyone who does identification papers, that kind of thing?”

  Dion knew someone and told Miranda where to find him.

  *

  Jetter appeared three days later, awestruck but in no way subdued. “I was in JD-holding with a lot of half-arsed World-City kids who’d nicked their daddy’s loose change, stuff like that. Then in comes Miranda. The man says to me, you’re in luck, boy. Your aunt’s decided to have you back. You know what she did? She got me a birth certificate and ID with a morphed-up image that even looked half like me and this story about what a bad boy I was but she loved me all the same. She paid the store to drop charges, paid JD for my lodging. She even paid the man for the time I fucking bit him. She was fucking incredible, just incredible. I got a ride in her car too.”

  Dion told his company men about the bonus scheme. They were curious. “So, what’s she doing to them, Dion? What’s so special about them? Why doesn’t she just take them off to World City?”

  Dion fielded the questions he had been trying to avoid as noncommittally as he could: it was long-term work; all she did was take blood samples from them; it was a scientific experiment.

  “Don’t you want to know, Dion? Don’t you want to know what she’s doing to make them so precious?”

  Dion shook his head. “It’s good money they bring in,” he said, trying to close off the questions by reminding his company men just how much they were all benefiting.

  He thought back to the first two years of the project. There had been an unconsciousness about it that had allowed for a kind of dark, warm, unstated intimacy to develop in the little room high above the Waste. It had felt like an animal’s lair in midwinter with the cubs just born. That was beginning to break apart now. There was light shining in on what they were doing. The kids were coming out into the open.

  Dion said to Miranda a few days later, “What’s going to happen to them? They must find out sometime. We’re not going to be able to just walk away from it all at the end of ten years.”

  “We’ll worry about it when it happens, Dion,” Miranda said and Dion looked back at her as if he suddenly didn’t know her anymore.

  Miranda Whitlam wasn’t thinking about ten years’ time. Right then, she wasn’t thinking about any kind of future. She was thinking over and over about the profound sense of familiarity that had come over her when Dion had been shouting at her. It wasn’t anything to do with his words, even though she had found she could hardly deny their truth. It was something else, like some gap opening up onto something so close to her she could hardly bear it. She would find herself thinking of the view out over the wildwood as she stared from her bedroom window as a child. She could recall herself thrusting the view aside, with its awful immensity and the burden of fear it carried. But now she stretched her mind back to those times, probing the fear like the broken edge of a tooth, probing other memories that held the same profound fascination: the blank wall of jungle when she had stayed on the island; Dion by that pool; and herself floating in its water just before Donnell arrived. She had been gazing up into the light between the leaves of the jungle trees, shocked at first and then thrilled by the marvellous sense of forever that had been stealing over her. It was like dying, that feeling that was so close to her, and it had been sweet and horrifying beyond anything she could have imagined.

  21

  When she had gone to collect him, Miranda had wanted to say she was Jetter’s mother, but that was too easily contradicted to be useful. Then, without being able to find a convincing reason she could give him, she asked Dion if she could start staying overnight in the little concrete cubicle that carried his name. He said it was no problem but, sometime after, Dion was surprised to see his old poster of the jungle-clad tropical island was no longer taped at four corners but had been framed and rehung. The persistence of the image disturbed him. Once, he had actually lived in that picture. After that, the picture had been under his bed in his father’s apartment in World City, and it had been over his bed during his first years in the Waste. Now it was remounted like some precious icon, a part of his experience tha
t had been mysteriously appropriated by another.

  “What have you done with that picture?” he asked suspiciously.

  “Oh, I don’t know. I suppose I just wanted to make the place a bit more like home. Where did it come from, anyway?”

  “It was just something I picked up when I was kid.”

  Miranda looked at the picture and thought of Dion as a kid, on an island that looked not unlike the one she was looking at. She remembered him shouting about her father having been the cause of his leaving.

  “Do you want to go back there?” she asked.

  “Back where?”

  Dion felt wary. Something had changed in Miranda Whitlam since their fight. She was talking to him dead straight, which had been what he had always wanted. But it hadn’t happened under his control, and she was giving him no acknowledgement for the change. Apart from that whispered apology way back for having denied him in front of that man who had beaten him up, she had never said anything to suggest any change of heart. Yet she had reframed his most precious picture, and now she was asking him where it had come from, and she was asking him if he actually wanted to go back to the place that was now no more real to him than a picture.

  “Oh, you know,” she replied.

  “What’s it to you?” he couldn’t help demanding, like a defensive adolescent.

  “For Christ’s sake, Dion, wasn’t it my father kicked you out of there and you ask, what is it to me?”

  She was half-smiling, half-angry and Dion found himself groping for a response. He remembered Leo saying once, ‘When everything else fails, and I mean everything, tell the truth. They just might like you for it,’ though for Leo, the truth was merely something that might give you an advantage.

  “I’m not too interested in going back there now. I’ve got a life for myself here. If I went back to my island, I’d just end up as a help in one of the holiday homes.”

  Miranda turned away to look into the picture, as if deeply intrigued by some detail. Still not looking at him, she asked, “But what kind of life have you got, Dion?”