‘Flatfoot Perse,’ Doggy Dog says. ‘You be one sorry motherfucker.’
Sudden as a striking snake, Doggy Dog reverses the pistol and slams it against Perse’s head. The policeman falls against the side of the van, too dazed to stop Doggy Dog hitting him again.
‘Hey,’ Alex says, ‘enough. Enough, OK?’
Doggy Dog turns, flicking his pistol back and forth between Alex and Milena, finally settling on Milena. ‘She’s the dangerous one,’ he says to Alex.
‘She does magic,’ Alex says. His whole body is suddenly trembling. Perhaps she can magic away Doggy Dog’s pistol.
But Milena more or less ignores Doggy Dog. She walks past him, jumps up on to the little wall at the edge of the river and looks down into the black water. Rain softly fells around her. The naked doll pads up behind her and she turns and pats the top of its bald head.
‘You did the deed,’ Doggy Dog says. He sounds as scared as Alex feels. ‘You did it right under Billy Rock’s nose, though I don’t know why you bothered. I could get you one of those t’ings anytime, night or day.’
‘That’s the point,’ Milena says. She has a flashlight in her hand.
Doggy Dog laughs and says, ‘You try and shoot me down with a ray gun, little girl?’ and then there’s a stuttering flash of red light and Alex is on his belly on wet tarmac, rain splashing into a puddle right by his face.
At first Alex thinks Milena has shot Doggy Dog, but then he sees that the kid is crawling around in the middle of the road. He is looking for his pistol, but Milena has it. She grins at Alex and says, ‘Magic’
Doggy Dog stands up and extends his arm. He has a knife in his hand. He says, ‘Give that back and I don’t hurt you.’
‘Run away,’ Milena says, ‘and I won’t hurt you.’
It’s the wrong thing to say. Doggy Dog springs at Milena, his knife slashing wildly, and there’s a stutter of red light and Alex is flat on his belly again. He’s bitten his tongue, and spits out a mouthful of blood as he gets up.
Doggy Dog is in a half-crouch, staring at Milena. ‘Fucker!’ he yells, but his voice cracks with fear.
Milena holds up the knife so that its blade glitters in the glare of the van’s headlights, then carelessly tosses it away. ‘Silly little boy,’ she says.
Making a noise half-way between a scream and a yell, Doggy Dog charges at Milena. She raises the pistol. There is a cold, intent expression on her face.
The flat report of the first shot is loud in the narrow street. Doggy Dog bangs into the side of the van. Milena fires three more times, the shots spaced exactly five seconds apart, and Doggy Dog falls forward on to his face.
Alex stays on his knees in the rain, his hands clasped around the swag of his belly. He is shivering. She made the kid angry, he thinks, so she could kill him.
Milena tells the doll to climb up into the van. ‘You too,’ she says to Alex. ‘I don’t know how to drive.’
‘What are you going to do if I don’t? Shoot me?’
‘You can walk away,’ Milena says. ‘I’ll survive. I know it, now. I can survive anything. You can walk away, Alex. You can walk away if you want to. You can let it go.’
He can’t. They are bound together by blood and guilt. Besides, he has to know. He has to see. ‘Come on,’ he says. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
16 – Born to Run
They leave Perse lying half-unconscious next to Doggy Dog’s body, with Doggy Dog’s pistol in his hand, but Alex knows it won’t be as easy as that. As he turns the van on to Brunei Road he tells Milena, ‘You better hope no one out here saw you ex the kid.’
Milena is looking at the orange streetlights flipping past. She clutches the silvery bag in her lap. The doll crouches under the dashboard, by her feet. She says, ‘If that policeman has any sense, he’ll claim the kill. But it won’t matter soon. You do have a place to hide out, I hope.’
Alex doesn’t have a place, not exactly, but he has thought about this contingency. He drives west for a while, his heart-rate spiking every time a police cruiser goes past, then crosses the river at Tower Bridge, skirts the Square Mile, where even at this hour curtains of lights rise up towards pinnacles topped by winking red warning beacons, and turns along the Embankment. The Houses of Parliament shine in a cocoon of white light above their reflection in the Thames’s black water. The span of Westminster Bridge, aimed at the South Bank Plaza and Waterloo, is outlined in fairy lights.
They cut past Victoria and Hyde Park, swing around the spotlit wedding cake decoration of Marble Arch. Alex has to stop for petrol, and, in the blue light under the service station’s canopy, at the armoured cashier’s window, buys a dozen chocolate bars, cans of Coke, sandwiches in clear plastic wedges. Fear has made him hungry.
He’s stripping off his orange coveralls when Milena comes out of the toilet, white faced, her eyes watery. She’s been sick to her stomach, she says. In a way, Alex is relieved at this sign of weakness. She is only human, after all. She gets back in the van without speaking. The doll sits where she told it to sit, quiet and uncomplaining.
Alex eats as he drives through the cluttered streets of Paddington, turning out at last into the mazy encampments beneath the flyovers of the Westway. The Transit van slowly bumps along a muddy track as Alex searches for an empty space in this, the largest congregation of the dispossessed in London.
There have been people living here since the middle of the last century, an official camp of gypsies that was slowly surrounded by ring after ring of the homeless and refugees from the Sellafield plume. There are still a few caravans, but mostly the accommodation is improvised: vans and cars up on blocks; tepees and benders; shacks made of shingled flattened oil drums or built around and beneath the support pillars of the flyovers; subdivided freight containers; big concrete pipes sealed by crude wooden partitions. A wheelless double-decker bus has a vegetable garden on its roof.
Green bioluminescent lamps glow here and there, singly or in clusters. The air stings with smoke from a big bonfire where a hundred or more people are dancing to the surfing rhythms of a group of freestyle drummers.
After Alex has found a space and parked, a burly black guy with dreadlocks down to the small of his back comes up and asks, with a gap-toothed easy smile and a broad Birmingham accent, if he wants to be connected, mains or telecommunications, the same flat fee for both. Alex declines, but gives the guy a five pound coin and asks him to keep a look-out. It’s almost the last of his cash; and Milena has no money at all. She has, it turns out, never bought anything in her life.
The man spins the coin and pockets it before leaning in at the side window. He says, ‘Round ’ere we look out for each other. You and the little girl in trouble? She your daughter?’
‘Sister,’ Milena says. She suddenly seems close to tears. ‘Our p-parents went crazy on drugs. Please don’t tell them we’re here!’
‘No one don’t trouble anyone,’ the man tells Alex, ‘unless they look like trouble. Seen?’
‘Of course,’ Alex says.
‘There’s a standpipe,’ the man says, pointing along the track. ‘Man who run it give a fair price. Storm drain beyond it for your sanitary needs. Don’t go dumping your shit out your window and driving off. Samaritans come by about two o’clock you want something to eat, if you don’t mind the prayers. You missed the do-gooders from the ’burbs, but Samaritan food is better.’
Alex offers a chocolate bar, but the man shakes his head. ‘That shit isn’t natural. You want natural food, come asking after me. I’m Mister Benny. I cook up natural food, food from the earth. People know me all over, even come from outside to eat at my place. If you had turned left instead of right you would have gone right past it. You stop by for breakfast, now.’
And then he’s gone, moving off through the shadows between a bender wrapped in black polythene and a wheelless Sierra with a candle nickering behind its windscreen.
‘King of the hill,’ Milena remarks, matter-of-factly. She cranks down the window on h
er side, sticks her head out to look around. ‘Some hill,’ she adds. She seems to have recovered her poise. ‘So, Alex, tell me about your plan.’
Alex is suddenly afraid. He says, ‘I want to see how it’s done.’
Milena laughs, and reaches down to pat the doll which crouches in the shadows by her feet. ‘I’ve never done it before. But now’s the time, I think.’
So they do the doll right there in the back of the van, by the green light of a biolume stick Alex cracks in half and wedges in one of the roof braces. Milena puts on spectacles with pop-eyed turret lenses that zoom in and out and a little fibreoptic light attached to the bridge. She has the doll sit on the plywood decking and tells Alex to close his eyes, or he’ll be affected by the pulse.
Alex says, ‘You did something to my head, back at your house. You did something to Doggy Dog, too.’
‘It isn’t my house. The company owns it. They own everything.’
‘Not everything. They’re not the world.’
‘Close your eyes, Alex. This was your idea.’
Alex does as he’s told, is allowed to open them maybe thirty seconds later. The doll is lying on its back, its eyes wide but unfocused.
Milena says, ‘Of course I did something to you. And to Delbert and Doggy Dog. If Delbert gives you any trouble, just pop him with a two hundred c.p.s. strobe and he’ll do anything you ask. I put the same strain of fembots in all of you. It infects the visual cortex and responds to light cues, just as the doll’s control chip does. I developed it so I could work around my supervisor.’
‘Nanny Greystoke.’
The white room—the woman—her blank stare.
Milena says, ‘Let’s say Nanny Greystoke has an unusually rich fantasy life.’
She explains she used an aerosol spray on Alex when he came through the door, buckyball fembots suspended in a fluorocarbon carrier. They entered the blood vessels at the back of his throat, crossed the blood-brain barrier while he was taking tea with her. As well as modifying his visual cortex, they tagged and removed almost all of the last couple of hours of his memory—he’ll never remember what she said to him, Milena says, or the taste of the tea.
‘What kind was it?’
‘Earl Grey. Does it matter?’
‘I suppose not.’
Milena promises Alex that she didn’t plant any subconscious commands in him, but Alex isn’t so sure. She has this urge to manipulate, to control. Her love of explanations is part of that—how it must have taxed her to keep secrets from her company! She is something new, all right. She should be walking around with a biohazard symbol tattooed on her forehead.
Converting the doll takes three hours. Milena’s silvery shoulder bag contains nothing but tools for the job. She erects a kind of scaffolding around the doll’s head, anchored at a dozen points by screw calipers. She drops curarine in the doll’s right eye to immobilize it and inserts something like a teaspoon between eyeball and bony orbit. The scaffolding has thumb-operated waldoes for microsurgery work. Milena hunkers down and, with the turret lenses of her spectacles popping in and out for the fine work, uses the waldoes to disconnect and dismantle the doll’s control chip.
Alex asks why she just can’t reprogram it, and she tells him that it is a PROM, a Programmable Read-Only Memory chip that can be loaded with information just once. After the chip has been blown with code, the information it contains can only be read. The information—the software—becomes the hardware which dictates the control protocols for the doll’s routines. If a doll is redeployed, its chip has to be replaced.
Milena tells Alex this as, using fine tweezers, she loads a chip into the microsurgery scaffolding and slides it into place in the doll’s eyesocket. Alex breaks another biolume stick as Milena connects the new chip. His back and thighs ache from squatting, but Milena is intent on her work and has hardly moved for the last two hours. Once the chip is connected, she breaks open an ampoule of milky liquid, a soup of nanoware assemblers, and administers a single drop to each of the doll’s eyes. Then she injects a massive dose of the cocktail of artificial hormones Alex manufactured, and that’s that.
Alex stretches out as best as he can on the bench seat in the front of the van, his jacket rolled up inside the orange coveralls for a pillow. Milena curls up next to the doll. It’s hot and close, and a mosquito has got in. Its divebomber whine dopplers past Alex’s ear a dozen times before it finally lands on his wrist. He lets it slide its needle-fine proboscis into his skin before he mashes it. Its brown blood—his blood—stains his thumb. The drummers have long ago given up, but traffic still rumbles and sighs on the cantilevered overpass. A dog barks monotonously, as if barking is the one idea it has left.
Alex falls into an uneasy, exhausted sleep. Once, he half-wakes, dimly aware of the dull orange night sky beyond the windscreen, cut in two by the overpass, from which hang constellations of little green biolume lamps.
Fairyland.
In the back of the van, the doll is squatting with a Watchman in its lap, intent on the screen’s lozenge of moving colour. The earpiece is plugged into its ear, and its lips move as it mumbles in imitation of unheard speech.
Milena sits zazen, watching the doll watching TV. She turns and grins at Alex in the half-darkness inside the van, and then there’s a stutter of red light.
17 – The White Room
When Alex wakes, he’s sticky with old sweat and his eyes are gummed. He can smell himself in his day-old clothes. Above the overpass, the sky is white with early morning heat. The back door of the Transit van hangs open. Milena is gone, and so is the doll.
What has woken him is the chirping of his portable phone. Alex sits up and pulls the thing out of its holster. Perse’s voice says in his ear, ‘You’ve been a busy boy, Sharkey.’
Alex says, ‘I can’t do anything for you, Perse.’
‘That’s not what I hear. If you think that Billy Rock’s death puts you in the clear, you’re very wrong. A runner, kid by the name of Doggy Dog, was found shot dead, and tyre prints match those of a van we traced to Ray Aziz. Mr Aziz has a cast-iron alibi, and he says that he lent the van to you.’
Alex is sweating all over. He says, ‘He would have killed you, Perse. What do you want?’
‘I want the whole story, Sharkey. You fucked up. You didn’t deliver. I still want a material witness, and it comes down to you.’
Alex cuts the connection, remembering too late about portable phones, about how easily they can be traced. He pulls on his jacket and goes to look for Milena, hoping that she has taken the doll for a drink of water. He walks all the way down the track to the standpipe where an old woman, wrapped from head to foot in greasy rags, is filling a blue plastic bucket.
There’s no sign of Milena. Alex walks back, walks past the van and keeps on walking. He doesn’t feel any panic, just a mellow hazy calm, as if he’s dropped a tab of Cool-Z.
There’s a shack by the broken-down wire fence at the edge of the encampment. Its walls and roof are scaled with flattened oil cans. Benches and plastic chairs are scattered around an ashy barbecue pit; goats placidly munch on cabbage leaves in a chicken wire pen. An Alsatian chained to a stake near the goat pen starts to bark as Alex approaches.
A man comes out of the shack, scratching at his dreadlocked hair and blinking sleepily. It is Mister Benny. He doesn’t seem surprised to see Alex, and tells him, ‘Your little sister was here an hour gone.’
‘Was she with anyone?’
‘No, man. She bought a little breakfast from me, then she go off out. Said she had to work the commuters. Cute little thing. Begged me to give her ape some fruit, and I found it a hand of bananas. You pay me, she said. Where did you run away from, the circus?’
The Underground station at Ladbroke Grove is just opening when Alex arrives, sweating in his green tweed suit and completely out of breath. He uses his last two five pound coins to buy a ticket—he doesn’t dare use any of the credit cards he carries—and rides all the way into the centre of London.
A black electric car, sleek as a raindrop, is parked on the double yellow lines outside the tall, narrow house in Bridle Lane. The door stands open. Alex walks in, climbs a half-remembered flight of stairs towards the sound of a man’s voice.
The room at the top of the stairs must take up the whole of the first floor. It is painted white. White paper blinds are pulled down over the windows. The floor is blond ash, gleamingly polished and littered with toys. Every surface shines as if irradiated with an inner light.
There are two people in the room. A man in a black suit steps amongst the toys, describing each one into a portable phone. A thin, middle-aged woman in a plain white dress stands in a corner, watching the man with empty eyes.
Alex knows that he has seen the woman before, although he doesn’t remember it. He says her name, and the man in black turns on his heel to Alex, snaps the phone shut and says, ‘Where is she?’
‘She isn’t here?’
‘Nanny Greystoke thinks she is, but something has happened to Nanny Greystoke. Where is she?’
‘I don’t—’
Alex is suddenly backed up against the wall. The man holds his throat in one gloved hand. The gloves are black, and seamed with myoelectric pseudo-musculature. His grip is incredibly strong. His breath is flavoured with cloves. His eyes are grey. The pupil of his left eye is flecked with brown in the upper quadrant.
Alex can’t stop noticing these little things. His every nerve is laid bare by fear.
The man says, his voice loud and flat, ‘Where is she?’
Alex makes a fist, and the man looks him straight in the eye and says, ‘You’re a big man, but you’re out of condition, and this is my job. So don’t even think about it, Mr Sharkey.’
Alex laughs. It’s a line from an old film. He’s supposed to lash out at the man, who’ll then hurt him. But he doesn’t have to follow any script now. He’s free. Milena let him go, just as she freed the doll. He relaxes in the man’s grip and looks past him at Nanny Greystoke, who stands staring at something beyond the far wall.
Fairyland Page 12
