“Molly!? Your Molly?”
“I think this is why Stapleton wanted to reach me, as you say, of all people. He needed me because of Molly.”
“But…” Iris could hardly contain her disgust at the very idea. “Molly? Passive-aggressive, mad sculptress Molly? Molly who’s always got you on a short chain so she can get you to fish daddy long legs spiders out of the toilet bowl? Molly who can’t see what sort of a decent man you are, who doesn’t know when she’s on a good—” Iris cut herself off at that point, her spluttering outrage brought to an abrupt halt, and she appeared, at least in this light, to Spider, as if she was blushing. Not that Iris ever did anything as undignified as blush, of course. She got up and fetched her coffee, without saying a further word. Spider watched her go, stunned all over again, staring now at her back. Had Iris just said what he thought she’d just said? Not that she would admit to having said anything like that. That would be unprofessional. She was just, he supposed, badly in need of that coffee. Yeah, that was it.
Iris returned with her coffee, sat and stirred three sugars into it, studying the process closely, like she was mixing nuclear isotopes in a lab, and could not look away from it, lest the whole place be destroyed. Spider watched, amazed at her, and trying not to smile, at least a little.
He said, “Yes. My Molly. She of the endless ‘little jobs around the house’. Of the whingeing and the complaining. Molly who’s supposed to be in New York right now, but who I’m pretty sure is right here in Perth.” Spider explained about the call last night.
“She must have been off her face!”
“Yeah, I thought so, too,” Spider said, and sloshed around the last bit of his own coffee, now gone almost cold.
“But now you’re not so sure?”
He told her about the lack of gaps between speaking at his end and the message coming through from the New York end.
Iris objected. “I don’t hear any gaps on international calls.”
Spider frowned. “I always get gaps. Drives me nuts.”
“Maybe it’s your dodgy service provider?”
“Regardless, I just know Molly’s here in Perth.”
“You just know. Right,” Iris scoffed.
“It was just like talking to you,” he said.
“Oh, thanks muchly,” Iris replied, arching an eyebrow.
“In the sense of talking to someone right here in town, is what I meant.”
“Yeah, I know,” she said, allowing the most minute curl of her lip as she drank her coffee. A smear of crema foam clung to her upper lip, Spider noticed.
“It was the weirdest thing. Not at all like her to be like that. She doesn’t even drink. Doesn’t want her creative process ‘polluted’ — her word — by any kind of outside influence.”
“Nothing at all?” What Spider was suggesting was almost unheard-of: an Australian who didn’t drink, not even a bit, not even on a special occasion?
“She takes her ‘artistic practice’ very seriously.”
“I see,” Iris said, thinking, her brow furrowed. “So why don’t you call her? You’ve got her number, don’t you?”
Spider had had the same thought. He winced, his teeth clenched. “I kind of don’t wanna be right.”
Iris put her coffee down, wiped her mouth with a napkin, put her hands on the table, and gave him The Look. “Mate, for God’s sake.”
“What if she’s…” He stopped himself. He had been going to say, “…up to no good?”
“Spider, has it occurred to you that maybe you just don’t know her anymore?”
His first impulse was to leap in and deny any such suggestion. Of course he knew her. He saw her all the time. They talked, had coffee together. Except, now that he thought about it, he had not known before that late-night call last week, when she said she was heading off to New York, and would he mind looking after poor Mr. Popeye, that she was even interested in getting a goldfish. Had not known she was even interested in keeping a fish as a pet, until she told him that night. Molly had always been deeply anti-pet — again because of the time and energy a pet would take from her work.
Was it possible that Mr. Popeye was a symptom of a much larger problem? That Molly had moved on from anything that included him, except as a sometime handyman who would work for peanuts? That she had a whole new life. He felt the full weight of the idea hit him hard. What was happening to him today? Everything was coming undone.
Then again, he thought, wait a minute. Surely, just as she had moved on from being the person she had once been, at least in his mind, it was possible that he had done the same thing, without Molly noticing his change. She only ever saw him the way he had been when they lived together, when he’d been a disgraced police officer, depressed, angry, a man who always looked like he wanted to hit something, and sometimes did. Molly had never seen in all these years since those bitter days, that he’d managed to move on, at least a bit. He’d gotten himself cleaned up, found a new line of work, started to establish a whole new career, paying his bills, making rent each week. When they talked these days, he knew, she only ever saw in him the Broken Spider of the past, who had been such a good man that it cost him everything he had, ultimately including his wife. She still looked at him with pity in her eyes, he realized, because she could see what he’d been doing all this time, making himself always available for those stupid jobs of hers, so she would see what a good egg he was, so she’d maybe forget about getting a divorce. Spider began, at last, to realize that the Molly of today had no reason at all to regard him with any sort of renewed respect. How had he not seen this before? Yes, he got it now. He could see what she had been trying to tell him all this time, he could see it like he could see the sun, blinding and painful. She was on her way out of his life, just as he was on his way, for good or ill, out of hers.
He felt inexpressibly sad. What a day. Sitting there at the Pure Bean café with Iris, looking at his empty coffee mug, watching Iris sorting out police business on her watchtop, deep in a meeting of some kind. Around him, café patrons were scribbling away on their handhelds, ignoring their coffees. The world was ending, but life went on. Probably most of these people were scrambling to find new jobs, or keep the ones they did have. The future was here, right now, not a singularity of incomprehensible technological progress, but instead one of economic catastrophe. From here it was impossible to see what lay beyond the wall of the future. Spider remembered, years ago, when there was first talk of the impending arrival of something called “Depression 2.0”, and how it had never quite turned up. Now? It was on its way, an unstoppable crushing force that would level much of the world, as he knew it. Though probably not for long. Someone would seize the initiative and find a way to make everything go again, and he knew there were time travelers trying that very thing right now.
Nobody knew exactly who or what, some years ago now, had sent the now-famous Email From the Future to all those technology firms, the one with the instructions for constructing the first working time machine. Attempts had been made to jump forward, to try to find the source, without success. Spider was not alone in thinking maybe it had been a terrorist operation from the start. Step One: provide world with wondrous technology from the future. Step Two: stand well back, and watch the whole world go completely nuts. Probably, in the timelines where the world had chosen not to build time machines, where all those companies had deleted those emails as obvious spam or trolling, the financial catastrophe had still turned up, but much later, and with less severity.
Which didn’t help Spider right now. A quick survey of his life situation, as of this moment, was not good, and the prospects for his immediate future were even worse. All of which was assuming he didn’t get killed this evening while helping Iris and her Time Crime Team with the regress operation to find out what had killed John Stapleton. As things stood, it occurred to him that might even be a good re
sult, and would solve a lot of his problems. No job? No money? No wife? No problem.
So what did he have, exactly? Right now Spider had $132.00 in the bank, for as long as the bank lasted. The federal government had announced that they would guarantee customer deposits in the banks, as they had once before, years back, to keep people from panicking. Mrs. Ng’s was about the cheapest place to stay in Perth, but even those rates were steep when you had nothing coming in. There was limited help from the government for unemployed people, but generally these days, with businesses going under and newly unemployed people flooding the streets, hoping for any kind of work at all, there was little to no prospect of any kind of government assistance. In fact, there was a growing likelihood that the government would soon find itself bankrupt, and unable to secure bridge-financing from the global markets, because they’d be broke, too. So, no help there, either.
This did not leave many good options. In fact, Spider could see that in the end he would have to throw himself on the mercy of his aging mum and dad. Both in their seventies, neither all that healthy, his parents would almost certainly take him in, but even then he’d be expected to contribute towards household expenses, which again would involve money, which he did not have.
So, what else did he have? His health? This wasn’t even funny.
He slumped in the chair, and took in the full sweep of how very screwed he was. Mr. Patel had been going to pay him for tracking down Vijay and the girl, Phoebe, but of course that had fallen through, too. Well played, Spider, with your ethics and integrity and your self-righteous bullshit. He could easily have taken Mr. Patel’s money for looking the other way about the illegal hotrod time machine, and all the rest of it, and sure it would have made him complicit, even a conspirator, but he’d have a job. He’d be able to buy these absurd twelve-dollar coffees.
He slumped in his chair, exhausted and beaten. He felt naked and cold. It was even hard, now that he’d thought about all this, to look Iris in the eye. She was, he knew, taking time out of her busy day to look after him, and help him with this latest crazy thing in Spider’s long history of crazy things. What she was doing was charity, he thought, and that stung.
So what could he do? Seriously, now.
1. Find Molly and talk to her. Find out what the hell was going on. Not to try to woo her back — hell, he’d sign those bloody divorce papers for her right now with no reservations. It’d be good to get that over and done with, so they could both move on. No, he wanted to talk to her about what was going on with her. Why a man from the far future would tell him that Molly and a Vore had somehow “merged”. That needed some explanation, or, preferably, some convincing refutation.
2. Go back into that diner in his head and talk some more to Stapleton about Molly and this alleged Vore thing. Surely the man was bullshitting, but why would he do that? He used to work for Dickhead, so maybe he was deliberately winding Spider up, as part of some labyrinthine scheme of Dickhead’s.
3. And, thinking that, Spider thought: he needed to have his head examined, only literally. Maybe Iris could help with this. Something enormous had been installed in his head, and he was increasingly sure it wasn’t just the runtime code for the virtual environment. Maybe his brain was now like Dickhead’s and Stapleton’s. Maybe he was now, like it or not, a “Time Voyager”. The thought made him feel ill. Look at me, Mum! I can travel in time, just by thinking about it! I’m a bloody time machine! If it was true, he needed to get that shit out of his head, pronto.
They all sounded like good ideas. He asked Iris if she could help organize a brain scan for him. She said it should be no problem. “Let me make some calls,” she said. “What’ll you do if you find out you’ve got it, too?”
“Dunno, to be honest.”
“Oh, Spider,” Iris said. “It’ll be okay. We’ll get through this.”
He was all set to offer a sour rejoinder, all, “Yeah, sure,” but he didn’t because he noticed that Iris had said, “we’ll get through this.” That they both would get through it. “Okay,” he said, not sure what else to say. “Good, then.”
“What else can I do?”
At first he hesitated, not wanting to burden Iris when she had so much else to do, but she again gave him The Look, and he blurted out, “If Molly is back in Perth, she must have come by air—”
“Check arrival details, all airports, someone named Molly Webb?”
“Her full name, her maiden name, was Mary Margaret Huddlestone.” He gave her a description.
Iris made notes. “Right. Got it. I’ll let you know this evening.”
He checked his watch. Seven-thirty was only a few hours away.
“Gives me time for a restorative nap,” he said. Anything to get this endless day out of the way. He’d had it. He could catch some z’s, maybe snag some instant noodles, have a scrub, and then go over to the park, where Stapleton had died, in time for the regression.
They got up. Iris took their empty mugs back to the counter. Then, outside on the crowded pavement, as Spider was about to say “see ya!” Iris suddenly stepped closer, enveloped him in a tight, brief hug, said, “God, Spider, I thought I’d—” then broke off, not making eye contact, her mouth pressed shut, as if mortified at what she’d said. She stepped back, hands in her deep raincoat pockets, nodded, as if unsure what to say, and said, “Tonight, then,” and turned to walk quickly away, disappearing into the crowd.
Spider stood there a long moment, a rock in the endless torrent of passersby, watching. Had he heard right? She thought she’d … what, exactly? And what was she talking about? When he passed out? But he was only out for a couple of minutes, she said. She saw you do something that might have been crazy dangerous, and which made you collapse. She was thinking you could have died. Oh, he thought, standing there, speechless, stung with guilt. He remembered Iris’s other uncharacteristic lapse while they were at the café. Confused, tired, and not sure what to think, he made his way through the teeming, smelly pedestrians and occasional bike messengers, and at last reached the entrance of the Lucky Happy Moon Motel — where he found a sign on the door:
“Due to unforeseen circumstances beyond our control, Management must inform all current clients of the Lucky Hapy [sic] Moon Motel that we will be closing our doors in seven (7) days’ time. Please collect your things, and pay outstanding service fees and rent. During the next seven (7) days, clients can only pick up personal effects. You may not sleep here. We are sorry. —Mrs Ng, for Management.”
Chapter 15
Spider tried calling Molly. Through the phone-patch under his ear he heard her phone ring a few times, then cut to voicemail. Molly’s gorgeous cut-crystal voice, with its ringing enunciation, reported that she was offline right now, but callers should leave a note and she’d get back to them as soon as she could manage it.
Spider killed the link. Okay, he thought. If I can’t reach Molly, maybe I can reach Stéphane himself. If she’d left New York earlier than planned, he would know, and might possibly even tell him. Or, if they’d come back together, likewise. Spider popped his watchtop and hit the tubes, found Stéphane Grey’s art gallery in Mosman Park, winced at the minimalist, too-exclusive-for-the-likes-of-you design of the site, and after some poking about found Stéphane’s contact details. It took a lot of patience, having to talk to a clueless receptionist with a too-squeaky voice and patronizing manners, but eventually managed to persuade the girl, whose name was “Vinyl Rose,” to let him speak to the boss directly, even though said boss was, she said, “still in New York.”
Which itself was useful intelligence, Spider thought. She gave Spider Stéphane’s phone details, and said she could connect him directly. He heard the North American ringing tone, some clicks, then a female sounding voice, all weariness and irritation, in a blunt New York accent, saying, “What?”
This surprised Spider. After a moment’s hesitation, he said, “Hi. Uh,
I’m looking for a Stéphane Grey? Australian art gallery guy, supposed to be at this number?”
“D’you know what time it is, ‘mate’?” Her pronunciation of the iconic Australian word sounded more Cockney than anything.
“Well…” No, Spider did not know, but now that he thought about it, he realized it must be something like zero dark o’clock in the morning. “Look, I just need a moment of Mr. Grey’s time.”
“Shit,” she said, and he heard the woman mutter something at someone nearby, who grunted and muttered in the background. She said, “Just a moment,” and at length, a male voice, thick with thwarted sleep, emerged on the line. Spider guessed the woman had heard Stéphane’s phone go off, took the patch from under his ear and stuck it on her own head so she could take the call and let the great man enjoy his slumber. But since Spider really did need to talk to said great man, she had to go and stick it back on his head somewhere, and, he guessed, she’d stick it on the guy’s forehead, right between his eyes. She sounded just that pissed off. “Stéphane Grey. Who the hell is this? It’s… God, it’s nearly five in the morning!”
“Mr. Grey. Hi. Hello. This is Spider Webb. You don’t know me, but—”
Stéphane interrupted him. “Wait a minute, wait just one minute. Spider Webb? Aren’t you Molly’s—”
“Yeah. Molly’s ex. I’m just—”
Stéphane’s tone phase-changed right away. Where a moment ago he’d been all annoyed at getting disturbed at this hour, now things were different. “Oh, shit. Mate, mate,” Stéphane said. The man sounded wide awake, and full of some terrible species of grave sympathy. His rendition of “mate” carried weight and feeling. Hearing it, Spider felt cold, and wasn’t sure what to say next. Stéphane said, “You still there, Mr. Webb? Hello?”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m here. I’m here.”
“Molly talked about you all the time,” Stéphane said.
Surprised, Spider blurted out, “She did?” But then thought, what was with the past tense?
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