Fairyland

by Paul J McAuley

  Alex draws a last mouthful of tarry smoke from his cigarette and squashes it out on the green-painted iron railing. He says, ‘Where did you get the address from?’

  ‘Billy Rock’s case file. We do keep a case file on Billy Rock, in spite of what you might think.’

  ‘And they let you access it?’

  ‘Don’t push your luck, Sharkey. Now listen. This address is the only update there’s been on the file in the last year, just this one little thing slipped in amongst the old records. I had to look around for it, but I think I was supposed to find it.’

  ‘This is scary stuff, Perse. Your paranoia is catching.’

  Perse takes off his shades and pinches the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. He’s tired, Alex sees. His eyes look bad, like bruised pits.

  Perse says, ‘You should be scared. Billy Rock’s family is bidding to become legitimate. And if they do become legitimate, they’ll want to tidy up loose ends.’

  Alex takes off his big black hat and mops his face and neck with his handkerchief. ‘They’re working you hard. Maybe you’re seeing things that aren’t there.’

  He thinks of what Doggy Dog told him, in Ma Nakome’s. He won’t tell Perse, though—he just might need an edge.

  Perse says, ‘I interviewed about twenty Uzbekistanis last night. Most didn’t speak English. Or pretended not to. I had to wait three hours to get a translator, and he could hardly speak English either. Every one of the bastards claimed they knew who killed those two, and every one of them came up with a different set of names. And we found the Mercedes that was stolen after the stabbing, but it was burnt out, the driver’s long gone, and his mates aren’t talking. And there’s no chance of calling any extra bodies in to help because of the explosion at Heathrow.’

  ‘What explosion?’

  ‘A medium-sized bomb on the roof of Terminal Four last night. No warning, it was pure luck no one was killed. So far we have the Monarchists and the Animal Liberation Brigade claiming it, and because of all the other crazy fuckers who’ll crawl out of the woodwork to claim the publicity there’s nothing about it on the news, not yet, and when it comes out it will be explained away as a transformer explosion. Whoever did it got through about ten layers of security. So I’m fucking tired, and I don’t need any shit from you, Sharkey. Not when I’m trying to help you. So listen. I’m damn sure someone is running this deal as some kind of entrapment scam. Maybe it’s Billy Rock’s family. They can’t just whack Billy. They have to do him in a way that means they don’t lose face. Entrapment would be the perfect thing.’

  With thumb and forefinger, Perse pushes up the skin at the corners of his eyes, to make them into slits. ‘Very cunning, Johnny Chinaman.’

  ‘I don’t like being used as a way to get Billy, Perse. Why not let his uncles get rid of him, if that’s what they want?’

  ‘Because I want him,’ Perse says. ‘I want his ears in my little collecting bag.’

  ‘Fuck off, Perse. I won’t do it.’

  ‘Oh, but you will, Sharkey. What other choice do you have? If Billy doesn’t fuck you over, then I will. I’ll bust your premises every day, eight a.m. on the dot, until you run to Billy and beg to be put out of your misery. All I’m asking for is a little cooperation, and that’s not much to ask after two years of watching your fat arse and listening to your pathetic line in hacker boasts.’

  Alex unfolds the piece of paper. There’s a single line, a street name and a number.

  He says, ‘Did you check this out?’

  ‘What do you think I am, a private eye?’ Perse puts on his shades. ‘Be careful, Sharkey. This is the big time.’

  The address is in Bridle Lane, one of the narrow little streets behind the shops and theatres around Piccadilly Circus. Alex, sweating, with the feeling of forces massing over his head, pays off the cab—money is sifting through his fingers—and then spends ten minutes hunting for the house number.

  It is a tall narrow building squashed like a last slice of pie between the backs of offices and shop service entrances. Four storeys, windows blanked with white security shutters. There’s a railing at the roof line, and Alex glimpses greenery, some kind of garden up there. The door is a scarred slab of iron-bound oak behind a locked security gate. There’s no name-plate or video camera, just an old-fashioned brass bell-push.

  A few homeless people have set up benders along the edge of the street, little more than slabs of packing foam leaning against this or that wall. None of them know anything about the house, non-information that costs Alex all but one of his cigarettes.

  There’s a closed-up loading bay a little way down, and for a while Alex sits there under a roaring air conditioner outlet. He fans himself with his hat, feeling sweat gather in the folds of fat at the back of his neck. Traffic ghosts by at either end of the little street. In a second floor office across the road, no more than ten steps away, a man is working at a drafting table. Its green light, striking up under his chin, makes him look as if he’s underwater. By and by, an old woman in widow’s weeds lets herself out of the entrance door of a little block of flats. She gives Alex a sour, suspicious look before shuffling off, back bent under a dowager’s hump.

  Alex badly needs a cigarette, but if he smokes his last one he’ll have to go off and buy another pack and then he might miss something. One thing he does figure out, there in the loading bay entrance, is that between Billy Rock’s cracked ideas, Perse’s thirst for revenge, and whoever is running the covert entrapment, if that’s what it is, he’s a dead man unless he can figure out which way to jump, and when.

  Alex is certain that the little girl who called him last night is part of this tangle. That package she downloaded, he’d be crazy to even peek in it. She probably isn’t even a little girl, but some expert system, or someone using a morphing program to alter what they look like on screen. Alex himself uses a weak morphing program that makes him look a little thinner, a little less obviously balding. You can get packages that make you look like Elvis or Elle or Fred Flintstone, anyone or anything you like.

  A limo makes the turn into the narrow street. It sweeps past Alex in a blowing wave of wastepaper and fast food containers—so close he sees his face flow over its mirrored windows and black lacquer finish—and pulls up outside the tall narrow house. A big man gets out—it is Billy Rock’s driver—and opens the passenger door. Alex isn’t surprised to see Doggy Dog, dressed down in a Bob Marley T-shirt and red shorts, and a big knitted hat like a floppy bowl.

  Alex presses back against the metal door under the noisy air conditioner. Someone else gets out of the limo. It is the little girl who called him up last night.

  The little girl and Doggy Dog exchange a few words, and both of them laugh. While she unlocks first the security gate and then the door of the house, the big driver leans on the hood of the limo, his muscular arms folded. The girl blows a kiss to Doggy Dog and then she’s inside, and the kid and the driver climb back inside the limo and are gone, like a smooth silent dream.

  Alex heaves himself out of his inadequate hiding place, and walks over to the grilled door. He thumbs the brass bell-push and hears, deep within the house, a slow sonorous chime.

  8 – Typhon Coming In

  A bell is ringing somewhere, electric and insistent. Alex is standing in front of a big oil painting in a heavy gilt frame, so close that his nose is almost touching its lumpy varnished surface. Someone takes his arm and tells him politely but firmly he’ll have to step back.

  ‘You’ll have to move away, sir,’ the guard says again, his grip tightening. His other hand is near the taser on his hip.

  Alex mumbles an apology and takes a backwards step over a brass rail on to the worn maroon carpet. The other people in the skylit gallery turn away, already bored by the minor incident, this dazed-looking fat guy in bib-overalls and orange construction boots staring at, what is it?

  It is one of Turner’s stormy seascapes with the sun sinking through gorgeous unfocused reds and golds, and a wallowi
ng ship lost in the middle of it all.

  Slaver Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhon Coming In.

  Alex gives the guard his best shit-eating smile and says, ‘It’s just that it’s such a wonderful painting.’

  The guard is a tall tough man in his fifties, very upright in his button-down light blue shirt and grey trousers. His taser is the kind that can leave permanent burn scars.

  He says, ‘It was done right in the middle of his best period of oil-painting. But stay on this side of the rail, sir, or I’ll have to throw you out.’

  ‘I’ll be good,’ Alex promises.

  What he wants to ask is how he got here, but that would be looking for trouble.

  As Alex makes his way out of the crowded gallery rooms, he fingers through his pockets, finds the ticket stub. It’s stamped 14:32. Shit, he’s lost more than three hours.

  It’s blazing hot outside. The air is soggy with unshed moisture, the sky as blank as a sheet of paper. Traffic snarls at a sullen stop-and-go pace either side of Trafalgar Square and the shattered stump of Nelson’s Column, which still shows the black searing of the explosion that brought it down five years ago. Twenty or so students are holding a protest under the serene gaze of one of Edwin Landseer’s bronze lions. They are masked with caricatures of the Prime Minister, or with red or black cloth hoods in which eye-holes have been roughly torn. Police watch from a distance. One constable is openly videoing the gathering. The police outnumber the protestors two to one. Alex is too far away to hear the students’ unamplified chants, or read the slogans on their T-shirts. Then one of the students holds up a placard showing a doll’s blue, apish face overprinted with broken manacles, and Alex must smile at the irony.

  The fighting doll, its imbecilic fury. The pets affected by the rich. The black figures drowning in the corner of Turner’s painting, an arm or a leg lifted from weltering waves where nightmare fish fight to feed on flesh. Shit, he doesn’t even like Turner.

  His stomach growling with acid, Alex finds a pizza stand and eats six slices loaded with onions, anchovies and pepperoni. One thing he didn’t do in those lost hours was have lunch, although somewhere or other he smoked his one remaining cigarette. He buys a new pack, wanders past the barriers which secure the West End in the evening, wanders in the heat and humidity and stink all the way up Charing Cross Road and then back again, past secondhand bookshops where bargain books burst in white hosannas from wooden racks, past the shuttered theatre at Cambridge Circus, the rows of boarded-up or burned-out shops where the homeless and dispossessed squat amongst blankets and shopping trolleys piled with bundles of clothing wrapped in torn black plastic.

  Someone is going through the pockets of a dead child lying facedown in the gutter. Blood is pooled under the child’s head—some streetkid shot by vigilantes, or by another streetkid. The man treats the body with a strange tenderness as he rolls it on its side to check its pockets. Three tramps have made a kind of encampment in the shuttered doorway of a wrecked shop. They squat in its meagre shade, watching passers-by. One gives Alex the finger when he glances at them. Another rackingly coughs into a scrap of paper: viral TB.

  There’s a shebeen in another wrecked shop, with a radio blasting out the latest Beijing pop song. Alex buys a couple of tabs of Cool-Z from the skinny nervous kid who’s dealing from a corner table. The tabs are individually wrapped in scraps of greasy clingfilm. Alex swallows them both, dry, and walks on, waiting for the kick. He needs something to get his head straight.

  He remembers seeing Doggy Dog and the little girl, and remembers standing up when they had gone, dizzy in the soggy heat. He remembers the dizziness, and with that a glimpse of a room all in white, with toys marching back and forth and a woman standing in the middle. Someone had said something then. A name.

  He says the name out loud now, relishing the syllables in his mouth: ‘Nanny Greystoke.’

  No one takes any notice, not when within twenty metres there are three hawkers shouting their wares, an old woman is shaking her fist at the shuddering traffic, and a man is pissing up against a lamppost and muttering, his head trembling so hard that his matted hair whips back and forth across his vacuous gaze. His brain is probably a sponge riddled by the last stages of Creutzfeldt-Jakob’s.

  A gorgeous woman, expensively dressed in a gauzy body-wrap, walks through all this with regal disdain, trailed by a blue-skinned doll on a leash and an armed bodyguard. The doll is dressed in red silk pantaloons and gold Arabian Nights slippers with curled toes. There are rings through its flat black nipples. It looks back and forth as it trots along after its owner. Its brown eyes are sad and human.

  He isn’t crazy, Alex thinks. He’s certain of that, because he remembers craziness from the inside, the exhilarating speed and the invulnerable certain momentum of craziness. Maybe he’s confused, but he isn’t crazy. Something happened to him, and he can’t remember what it was. He went away, and then he came back.

  Perhaps someone has infected him with a rogue strain of what people are starting to call fembots, little robots spun out of buckyballs and buckytubes doped with rare earths. True nanotechnology that can’t be called nanotech by its manufacturers because some American company which makes clunky mechanical critters ten times bigger has patented the term. There are fembots that can trigger false memories. Maybe the half-remembered glimpse of toys marching around and around the woman in the white room is a false memory, generated from packages of RNA inserted in certain of his cortical neurones. Or maybe it’s part of a flashback from a drug Alex contaminated himself with when he was working with the Wizard—but Alex dismisses this thought because he knows he’s too good a potboiler to fuck himself up that way. The Wizard taught him well. Just a speck of some of the stuff he’s helped cook up would have killed him ten or twenty times over before it was cut. He remembers the care the Wizard took to cut the batches individually, doping them with different impurities so they couldn’t be traced back to a single lab.

  What he should do, Alex thinks, is get himself PET-scanned at a clinic to check his nervous system for the clusters of rare earth atoms which indicate the presence of fembots, and then get a shot of universal phage to knock them out. Except that right now he can’t afford it.

  He plunges into the crowded tube station at Leicester Square, finds a dealer in the throng and after a brief hassle buys a secondhand travelcard for twenty per cent face value. The homeless are everywhere down here: workers whose skills have become irrelevant; people who have never had a job, some nearing retirement age now; middle-class dropouts destroyed by bad luck or bad health. Many exhibit the black and yellow tags of contaminated refugees from the Sellafield plume, although a large proportion of these, despite realistic weeping sores on faces and arms, are professional beggars masquerading as radiation victims.

  Alex fights his way down the stalled escalators. He’s drenched in sweat before he’s reached the bottom of the first flight. Leicester Square was one of the first stations to be invaded by the homeless, and there are people living in permanent hutches in the corridors, and more on the platforms.

  The noise is incredible, the stench worse. Alex takes a deep breath to kill his sense of smell. Passengers must pick their way amongst the tube dwellers, who seem oblivious to the chaos around them, as if the world is a TV and they are watching it in the privacy of their own homes. Braided wires and cables rise up from their pitches, running into access hatches to illegal junctions with electricity, telephone and cable TV lines. Some of the more enterprising sell long-distance calls at fractional rates, or cassettes of badly recorded movies, or bootleg games and datasets you’d be crazy to download into your computer. Over at Temple, both platforms of the Circle Line are lined with the cages of black market currency changers.

  Here, many of the tube dwellers have erected makeshift screens around their two square metres of platform, although these screens hardly hide lives lived right there in public: a woman breast-feeding a baby; an old woman spooning mush into her toothless mo
uth; a family sitting on plastic chairs around a flickering TV, as if around a campfire; a tiny little girl being washed in a plastic bowl, her skin so pale you can almost see the organs that pulse in her swollen stomach. Tiny black mice scatter from a litter bin as an old man wrapped in fraying rags starts sifting through it; beneath the platform, more mice scamper between the greasy rails.

  The train is a long time coming. Alex stares at the bright poster ads pasted on the wall across the tracks and ignores the children who now and then thrust their grimy paws in front of his face. Start giving and you’ll never stop. Since the collapse of the welfare state and the flight from the north, perhaps half the population of London consists of homeless refugees, living in tube stations, on the street, in abandoned tower blocks and deck access housing no one can be bothered to tear down.

  Lexis fighting to keep her and Alex together, two castaways afloat on a hostile sea. Alex feels a pathetic wave of gratefulness: the Cool-Z is kicking in.

  The train roars into the station, pushing a wave of hot fetid air ahead of it. Every carriage is crammed. Alex has to straphang, and as more people crowd on he loses even that support. His feet leave the floor as he is buoyed up by the crush of people. A woman starts to scream somewhere in the carriage. Maybe someone is raping or robbing her, but what can you do?

  At the next station, the train stops but the doors don’t open. The people start to murmur, grumbling in the low-key British way at the system, at the all-powerful faceless conspiracy that controls every aspect of their lives. Alex hears someone saying that there’s been an explosion in Aldgate; someone else adds that the BBC at Portland Place was hit with a car bomb that crashed through the doors.