As Mireille howls, other mentalegraphers poke their heads into Inez’s cubicle. She registers the disgust, the sympathetic looks they shoot at Inez. The medium grimaces and grins. Waves them out one by one, mouthing It’s okay …
When the bawling subsides to a red-faced trickle, Mireille takes off her black tank top and offers it with trembling hands.
“I need to talk to him,” she says. “Please. Find him.”
Already, she can picture the words leaving her mind, zipping off to mingle with Peyt’s, touching him like she can’t …
Inez shakes her head. “It’s not my business to harass people, Mimi.”
“Please,” Mireille begs. “Take my boots. My scarf. Tell me what you want, and it’s yours.”
Without missing a beat, the medium shrugs and replies, “Everything.”
Just as quick, Mireille kicks off her boots. Her wool skirt, favourite pants, pink tank top. Peels off her scarf, ankle socks and leggings. Unfastens her bra, tosses it onto the pile. Hooks her thumbs in the waistband of her underwear—and Inez stops her.
“That’ll do,” she says, and Mireille sits back down, shivering.
She squeezes the medium’s hands white.
This time, Inez waits a few minutes before disappointing.
“He’s there,” she says, “but it’s blocked.”
“Blocked,” Mireille echoes.
“Blanked.”
“Are you doing this on purpose?” Mireille gets up, gathers her scraps and pencils. Crushes them against her breasts. “Is that it? You’re having a bad day?” Retreating, her bare toes snag in the thick carpet. She pauses at the cubicle door, looks at the other booths arranged in rows across the office. “What if I use someone else?”
Inez winces, remains seated. “You can try. If you think it’ll help.” Her tone is raw, honest as a ’wind. Don’t bother, it says. He’s busy. He doesn’t want you.
“You must have seen something,” Mireille says, turning to face her square-on. “Show me.”
“I don’t think I should …”
Calmly, quietly, Mireille sits back down. Piles her papers in a neat stack, pencils aligned on top. Lays her hands on the desktop, palms up. Wordwind spinning, spinning, spinning.
“Show me.”
Dressed in Peyt’s jacket, one of Tantie May’s dresses, and a pair of men’s boots Ned was supposed to grow into, Mireille sits at the kitchen table. Where they should’ve had family dinners together. Where they should’ve played cards.
Walls of Grans and Grampses, Mamies and Das, brothers and sisters and cousins stare down or across or up at her as she writes her sweet Neddie a three-pencil letter. A wide rectangle of grey light illuminates page after page; the living room blind is raised, the curtains tied back, the front door flung wide open. A breeze ruffles her paper as outside rushes in, and inside out. Her ’wind surfs the turbulent currents, tossing to and fro.
Filling an ashtray with sharpenings, Mireille tells Ned about the night she met Peyt in the museum. How frightened he was, how responsible, how endearing. She tells her of the mothers. How they’d sing the children to sleep, the same songs she herself sang to Peyt, and not too much later, to Ned. She tells her about the rummage, the nail polish, the gold frame. How the best deals appear at night, but not necessarily the best men. She draws smiley faces. She draws little hearts. She tells her not to worry so much about the greys. How it’s happier, sometimes, not to see what will hurt you. Let it come in its own time, she tells her. Or just let it be.
Now her wordwind is heavy, seeping dew, but Mireille doesn’t clip it. She won’t press the pain into Ned’s innocent letter. She won’t tell her about Inez’s vision. She won’t describe her father, so scrawny when naked, wrestling with that red-headed snake. She won’t explain that they weren’t in the middle, but on the brink of, fucking. She won’t tell her that the bed was turned wood, the blankets clean and well-made. She won’t tell her the room was snug and richly furnished, or that it reeked of cinnamon and vanilla. She won’t tell her that, one second, she was looking up at Peyt, grunting and moaning—and the next she was looking down, within licking distance of a ’windless whore. She won’t describe the glistening threads connecting them all; her and Inez, Peyt and the tramp. She won’t snip these details from her own ’wind, or impose them on her daughter. She won’t shift that weight off her mind. She doesn’t want to forget.
Instead, she tells her she’s sorry. She says see you soon. No implications, no restrictions. Let Ned be the judge of how long soon should be.
When she’s written calluses into her fingers, Mireille kisses the pages then gathers them into a neat stack. Going into Ned’s room, she ignites the lamps. Holds the papers up to the flames. Once they’re crackling hot, she trots into the sitting room and watches them dwindle to embers in the sink. No need to burn the house down, she thinks. Wouldn’t want Peyt to think I’ve up and croaked. Before the fire dies, she collects her lists. Her maps. Her plans. Tosses them in, one after another after another, withholding a single envelope and the pristine piece of paper she’s saved for a special occasion.
Leaning over the sink, Mireille gently bends the white page and scoops up every fleck of ash. Carefully, she smears the charcoal around, blackening both sides of the white paper completely. When that’s done, not wanting to waste a bit, she shakes off the excess then scoops it up again. A simple fold traps the soot inside the letter, which she slides into the envelope. Picking up the pottery jug she’d filled earlier, she rinses the sink first, then her hands, then drinks the rest of the water down.
When everything is washed and in its place, she looks out the window and sees a skyful of grey. Unblinking, she twists her hair into a bun. Ties a kerchief around her ’wind. Shoulders her bag. Places the note on the table for Peytr to find. Then goes out to find a blank route, a blank home.
Inez has lost count of how many she’s had inside her. Men who grunt more than talk; who stare at her breasts or their sweaty paws or the black-diamond shape their knees make when touching hers; who make it hard for her to get swept up in the moment, thinking, as they so often do, of their wives or girlfriends or, more than they care to admit, other men, the whole time they’re together. These callers aren’t all alike, of course. She’s seen too many varieties to generalise: pimpled flax-braids and pale blood-nuts, tattooed ink-noggins and soul-bald scalps; slobberers with small eyes and whisperers with large; plum-face blushers and limbless herb-bringers and pathetic, grey-haunted twitchers… . So many—too many, maybe, for the cheap price she gets for letting them in. Different as they all are—if pressed she might even admit they’re unique—few of these men are special. Almost none are memorable. Lately, when pressed, she imagines them as one horny lump. They leave exhausted—sapped—though she is the one who spends the hour concentrating, focusing, keeping them on track so they’ll arrive the same instant she does. And yet, when all is said and done, they grin and say they’re tired.
Inez is tired. Of sad, desperate women sticking their miseries in her dark, hollow spaces. Of young, happy women slipping joys into her gaps; retracting them only to shove them back in again. Of their tears and their laughter and their mind-numbing anger—hours of in and out and in and out and in. Exhausting. Not to mention the smooth-chinners, the bare-of-mounds, the dripping little holes. Energy-leeches, all of them. She charges double for under-eighteens, triple for under-tens. Out of principle, she refuses penetration by toddlers, babies, newborns. Anyone too immature to think or speak coherently. The older kids are almost bearable—though they like and like and like so much she often wonders what it would take to make them hate—but the youngest leave her spitting, writhing in sticky-sweetness. Their hands are all over the place, as are their minds. Stupid, base-driven creatures. Prodding at Inez’s tender parts, pinching and poking and take-take-taking. The selfish buggers want, everyone, everything, now.
And for each one she’s let in—each bristle-beard moaner, each lonely weeper, each wailing school-pants-s
mirchers—Inez has been inside ten, twenty more like them. Every receiver just as vile and effusive and suffocating as the disgusting ones who sent her.
Except for Peytr, that is. There’s a morose softness to him, a tears-behind-closed-doors aspect to his personality that she understands intimately. She comforts him, better even than his not-wife does. Better even as his not-wife, as Amelia.
First time he came to speak through Inez, Peytr had said it was a work call.
“Overdue delivery,” he’d lied, hitching one of two satchels crossed over his shoulders. Eyes marble-blind, she saw him clearly. All mentalegraphers visualise sentiments, synergies, the energy of voices—to Inez, the vagaries of silence and grunts and unconscious gestures illuminate far more than they obscure. She’d had no need of light bouncing off retinas to see Peytr shuffling from foot to foot, leaving clumps of boot-muck on her ivory carpet. He’d loosened his hood, trusting her with his thoughts, inside and out. Words had beetled across his scalp, illegible scurryings that kept his thick hair in constant motion. Exposed, his face was two-toned. Wind-burnt from the lip up, while the clean-shaven chin below was whiter than her irises. Since walking into her cubicle, Peyt’s temperature had increased and dipped at least twice. He was blushing, struggling for calm. Inez had smiled, dimpling. The blaze of scarlet on his cheeks and brow had warmed her belly, the limpid wash on his jaw thrilling her down to the nethers.
He would be a gentle lover, she’d thought.
“I’m here for you,” she’d said.
But when he’d looked at her, Inez knew he saw someone else. The flush, the stutter-tongue, the Adam’s apple pistoning up and down his mottled throat—none of it had been for her sake. Never was. She was a middle-aged woman, unseeing, unsightly, unseen. Such timid love-flutterings weren’t ever on account of her.
“She—” Stuffing hands into pockets emptier than the sacks he carried, Peytr had tried again. “I just need to check an address.”
Fibber, Inez thought, miming an understanding ah-ha. Taking a handful of bent nickels and a small bunch of carrots for payment, she’d kept smiling, an invitation and a shield. Within seconds, she imagined her bottom teeth growing upwards, widening beyond gums and lips, encasing her head in a shell of pearlescent enamel. At the same time, her top teeth retracted into their roots and columned upwards, tunnelling beyond skull and shell alike, clearing a broad vacuum-channel through which a caller’s soul could be drawn. Fast and sharp, the shaft fused with the surrounding shell even as it broke through, stretching into a long flexible tentacle, protected by a carapace of yearning and bone. Inez pictured it arcing through the atmosphere, a glossy cable of negative space, dipping and weaving around a hundred thousand other such cords.
While he was paying, it was agreed this private channel belonged solely to Peytr. His needs alone would direct its path while Inez’s innate skill would drove them home. In the meantime, almost everything else Inez was—the echo of her thoughts, the desire for company, the endless history of her clients—was to be shunted aside, crammed into the small cavity remaining behind her dry eyes.
Fitting in there was harder, now, than it had been when she’d first started.
Cramped behind a barricade of teeth, Inez was only allowed pinhole access to the goings-on in the other side of her mind. Each caller’s presence inside her was a squirming of different sensations—apprehension, eagerness, self-doubt, jealousy, lust—each shaped around vibration-images and incoherent bursts of noise. Memories, experiences, dreams. All and none of them hers.
They’re irrelevant, she’d thought, spinning out her rope. Soul-flotsam on the incoming tide. She didn’t need to understand what these fragmented pictures all meant. She didn’t need to pay them any attention. She didn’t even need to see them.
But with a stranger’s voice inside her she could, and did, and wanted to.
Following protocol, Inez sent the barest guywire of her own spirit through the maelstrom of her client’s thoughts, into the channel, and beyond; the call’s spinal cord, it connected one end to the other, conducting messages spoken and silent, animating the whole. That, Inez was told, in no uncertain terms, was the greatest part of a mentalegrapher’s duties. Convey each voice with impunity. Afterwards, sever the lines. Retract them cleanly. Bid all parties farewell, and forget every word you’ve helped to exchange.
Be careful, the boss told her once she started mediating regular calls. No one can be in two places at once for long. Keep it to an hour, tops. Even in an emergency. If you want to burn people’s brains out, Taheer had added, join the army.
But he was wrong, Inez soon realised. Clients never noticed when she widened the hole from pin to peep to port. They never flinched when she strummed their soul-chords, holding this note or that for much longer than was required. She deciphered the patterns of their mind-pictures, learned how to track sights as well as sounds. Studying the drift of their moods, the debris of their thoughts, made no difference to these out-lookers. They were always preoccupied, in a rush, nervous. Focused on more important things than an ever-thickening spirit wire or an excited shadow flitting down its length behind them.
They were oblivious, selfish soul-travellers. And in the shade of their ignorance, she was free.
####
With part of her spirit skullcap protected, firmly rooted in the body at her desk, Inez had quickly learned to fly. Her body still faked enthusiasm, still squeezed clammy fingers, still overheard circular conversations and smelled the stale depths of her clients’ stomach on their hot breath—but she was mostly elsewhere. Splitting her tethered-self in two, Inez had followed one soldier to the house where his wife and motherin-law lived. In Vaux’s mind-trap, Bren was a girl, young and glad and stiff-nippled in a negligée. But before she and Vaux plunged into the woman, Inez saw grey hair at her temples. Lines worrying her forehead. The sag of years beneath her jaw. Their talk was small, strained. Another family moved into the second bedroom. What about the Vaughans? The missus is dead. Shame. Yeah, but Errol’s still got the attic. That’s good. Yeah. Thanks for the socks. You’re welcome. After the gunner had gone, Inez had kept the slightest wisp of a connection open with his wife. While she watched, Bren had tilled the backyard, planted beans. Mashed potatoes for her mother and the new kids. Filched coins from the old lady’s purse and splurged them all on a hot shower. Clean as lye, she climbed the attic ladder and found more comfort there than in any of her husband’s calls.
By the time Peytr had come into her cubicle that morning, Inez could split her self in three—four, even—without anyone else the wiser. Crouched behind her cataracts, smile fixed in place, she’d welcomed the Pigeon while also tunnelling through bedrock with Weasel Dan and his crew while also scaling the struts of a skybunker tower—wishing, wishing with all of her parts, she could see one of the little girl-fliers up close without having to die immediately afterwards. But within seconds of taking Peytr’s hands, Inez’s control had been shaken. She’d left Dan to bucket gravel and Ison to inspect girders for weaknesses and focused entirely on the slump-shouldered man fidgeting in front of her.
“This she you mentioned,” Inez had said, taking his clammy hands. “Your boss?”
The air shifted; displaced particles swirled then rushed to fill the backdraft of his shrug. “Not quite.”
“Ah. A partner, then.”
In their mind, a clash of images tumbled. An ugly, bull-shouldered boy. Gold cufflinks. No, not quite: gold earrings. A red shirt that would never fit. A young stringy-haired woman… . Inez searched for a name to match the wan face, found Mimi lodged between a caravan and a high-rise apartment.
Half a beat later, she discovered her.
Amelia.
Peytr hesitated. It was stupid, they both knew, for him to struggle to keep his thoughts private. They were visible gnats. They were worms burrowing through Inez’s brain. His voice and gaze dropped. “We have an … arrangement.”
“As do we,” Inez had said, refreshing her smile.
&nb
sp; In their mind, Amelia’s copper braids seemed lurid until Inez got used to sight, but otherwise her appearance was unremarkable. Average height, slightly too skinny. Nothing a few bowls of mash wouldn’t fix. She had no wordwind. No freckles. No visible defects. She was wonderfully, beautifully, plain.
Peytr’s grip tightened. “How long will this take?”
“Hush, now. Close your eyes,” Inez had said. An unnecessary step from her perspective, but it helped the clients relax. “Point us at her.”
Amelia shone, a flambeau beckoning from a cabin ten miles out of town. Riding Peytr pig-a-back along the airways, Inez forced herself not to whoop. She hadn’t had a good flush of new love in years! And this was love, fresh with only a whiff of sour. Amelia wasn’t desperate; if anything, she was matter-of-fact. She was instantly, pragmatically attractive. She was an entrepreneur of sorts, a glass-maker and seller of decent repute. And she trusted Peytr with her business—said he was the best Pigeon she’d ever had. He trusted her confidence.
He admired her good sense and her practical plans.
She was self-sufficient, secure, stable.
She was virtually independent.
She was.
Later, as Peytr knocks at Amelia’s cabin door, Inez dims the ceiling light in her cubicle and says she’s going on lunch. After so many hours inside, the last thing mentalegraphers want during breaks is more conversation, more human contact. Pockets jingling with change, they go upstairs to the staffroom and buy themselves an hour inside a solitude booth. In four rows of five, the moulded rectangular boxes are upraised on platforms in the centre of the room. Grey steps lead up to each narrow door; above sliding handles, green or red circles respectively beckon and repel. At this time of day, there are more solos available than taken: Inez takes the furthest green-dotted chamber, locks it, and sits on the cracked bench inside. The booth’s vaulted ceiling is dingy white, the walls a luminous blue. Vents stipple a broad panel above the door, a mock-window that fools no one. Solo air is always turgid. Today it stinks of onions, sweat and arse-warmed plastic. Humid remnants of soup, hidden tears and regret.
Lament for the Afterlife Page 27
