One of the Twins giggles. The other says, ‘We won’t hurt him, Armand. The Folk want him. He won’t be difficult—’
‘—not like you—’
‘—he’ll be one of us. Oh, poor Armand, how hungry—’
‘—how very hungry you look. But you’ve been a bad boy and before that—’
‘—before that, Mister Mike was here—’
‘Mister Mike was very naughty—’
‘She was only a little girl—’
‘—a poor little—’
‘—sweet little—’
‘—poor little sweet little homeless little black girl—’
‘—but Mister Mike hurt her bad—’
‘—hurt her bad nasty—’
‘—because he loves us.’
‘And because he loves us, we’re going to have babies—’
‘—lots and lots of babies—’
‘—and you’re going to help us—’
‘—you’re going to help us by letting Mister Mike come back—’
‘—come back and help us again—’
‘—because he was seen doing the bad thing—’
‘—and that isn’t safe for us—’
‘—and it isn’t safe for you.’
‘So you have to help—’
‘—for all our sakes—’
‘—you have to help us.’
Armand’s escort lets go of his hand. It walks down the concrete slope and wades out to the doll, bends and sips from one of the plastic tubes in the doll’s swollen belly. Armand is tempted to try and make a run for it, but there is nowhere to go. The fairy Folk are everywhere, a murmurous presence in the cavernous space, and the Twins can always find him. Besides, the need is truly upon him now.
His tongue is heavy in his mouth, and he splutters saliva when he says, ‘You won’t ever hurt me because you need Mister Mike. But one day I won’t let him come. You’ll see…’
The Twins laugh and nudge each other and set up their mocking chorus:
‘Loup Loup Loup.’
‘Loup Garou.’
‘Loup Loup Loup.’
‘She’ll come back! Then you’ll see! She’ll punish us all for what we’ve done!’
‘Poor Armand—’
‘—poor silly Armand—’
‘—she won’t ever come back. Not now—’
‘—now we rule—’
‘—and we’ll rule forever.’
The Twins look at each other and chorus, ‘Now eat, and be thankful.’
Armand tingles with anticipation as the blue-skinned, bow-legged fairy walks back up the slope. Armand squats down, and the fairy takes his face in both its hands. Its hot breath feathers Armand’s face; then it kisses him full on his lips. Its hot muscular tongue darts forward, slides between Armand’s parted teeth. Soma, activated by enzymes in the fairy’s saliva, rushes into Armand’s bloodstream and sweetly, sweetly, he is lost.
5 – Aftermath, and After
The police keep Morag and Jules hanging around the murder scene for two hours before finally taking their statements, no doubt because Morag is a resident alien, and Jules, although he is a third generation Parisian, is also a noir. The police really were about to arrest him when Morag returned to the scene of the murder and told them in her best icy Morningside manner to unhand her colleague. They only backed off when Dr Science arrived and gave them his shuffle and jive, but they insisted on taking Morag and Jules in anyway, for statements. They had already arrested the father, and the reason they were fingerprinting the little girl’s body was to check her refugee status, as if one more refugee would make any difference, especially when she was dead.
Dr Science gets Morag and Jules released after only an hour, but there is an implicit agreement that they aren’t to talk to the press about this. When Morag asks what the police are going to do about the little boy, Dr Science starts in with more of his jive, and Jules turns away, disgusted.
‘We have to live with the cops,’ Dr Science says. ‘We can’t tell them what to do—’ he lowers his voice, drops a hand on Morag’s shoulder—’even when we know they’re fucking us over. That’s the thing. The good of the many against the good of the one, and so on.’
Morag shrugs off his hand. She thinks that for the most part Dr Science is an insincere old fake. Maybe the instant charm, the honey he can squeeze out to keep things sweet, was part of his act once, but now the act has taken him over. Still, she agrees to keep quiet, and Jules agrees, too. What other choice do they have?
Morag sleeps badly that night, but feels better after telling her roommate, Nina, most of the horrible story over a very Parisian lunch of boeuf gros sel with leeks and navets, and a carafe of rough red wine. Repetition weakens the horror of it a little, and the Bidonvilles seem remote and far away, there in the familiar little neighbourhood restaurant where Nina has her own napkin ring stored in a pigeonhole rack, with conversation à la cantonnade making cheerful noise between the tables, and Raymonde, a large woman with very long, very blonde hair, bringing the food.
Nina listens with intent sympathy. She is a paramedic at l’Hôpital Saint-Louis, and has the knack of listening, of saying the right thing. When Morag gets to the part about the security guards, Nina lights her post-prandial cigarillo with a characteristic snap of her lighter and suggests that Morag sue the bastards. Nina is a small spiky woman recovering from a messy divorce that left her, as she puts it, financially embarrassed. She is twice Morag’s age and about ten times as chic, slim in a blue sheath dress with lots of jewellery. Light falling through the plate glass window gilds her ash-blonde hair. She leans forward and says, ‘I know the name of a good prosecutor, if you need one.’
‘It wasn’t their attitude towards me that hurt, it was their attitude about the little boy.’
‘You’re worried about him, aren’t you?’
‘You can’t help being a little bit involved. You can try not to because it’s easier to cope with the situation, but then you always wonder about yourself.’
‘He’s probably dead, isn’t he?’
‘I expect so. But that’s not the point.’
‘Of course not. The point is what do you want to do about it? Go to the press?’
‘It would be a one-day wonder, if it even got out. The Interface is very political, isn’t it?’
‘European political, not French.’
‘Of course, I didn’t mean—’
‘What’s the worst that can happen if you do talk to the press?’
‘I’ll lose my job. But that isn’t the point, is it?’
‘Perhaps you should take some time off, dear. Go down to Normandy. Use the cottage there, God knows that when we were still married Kazimir and I didn’t use it enough, and now they’re grown the children won’t go near the place. Walk on the beach, get all the city filth out of your lungs, and stuff yourself with creamy country food. Then decide.’
Morag tells Nina that she’ll think about it, but meanwhile she absolutely has to go out with the Team tonight.
‘Or I won’t be able to go back, ever.’
‘Well, if you’re sure, but this is the second hard time you’ve had to go through in less than a year.’
‘Oh, this, this isn’t so bad. Not as bad as the camps, and I’ve been debriefed, I’ve talked it through with all the other aid workers there, I’ve had counselling. I’m all right, Nina.’
‘Of course you are. But there’s no shame if you take a rest. Do think about it,’ Nina says, and Morag assures her that she will.
Morag is on her way back to the apartment when her phone rings. It’s Dr Science. He wants to see her to discuss, as he puts it, last night’s unfortunate occurrence. He will be at the Mobile Aid Team’s depot that afternoon, and expects to see her then.
‘Damn,’ Morag says aloud, in the middle of the busy street. Then she turns and heads for the nearest Métro station.
The depot is a disused light engineering factory that was put out of bus
iness by nanotechnology, in the flight path of Roissy–Charles de Gaulle airport. Only Gisele Gabin is there when Morag arrives. Gisele is putting a fresh weld on the frame of one of the Team’s battered vans, stroking drooping falls of sparks from the racked-up van’s chassis that make vivid orange light in the depot’s cold, hangar-like space. She says that she hasn’t seen Dr Science all day. What is the old bastard up to?
Morag wishes that she knew. Tired and on edge, she leaves Gisele to her work and wanders about, her hands in the deep pockets of her quilted coat, until Dr Science turns up, unapologetic and distracted. He doesn’t offer to take Morag into his office but talks to her right there, amongst vehicles that, charging their batteries, make a mingled drone like bees warming a hive in winter.
Morag is part of the Team, Dr Science says, she understands how important the public image is. A thing like this, well, mud sticks, that is the problem. A thing like this could be used against the Team. He appreciates her input, and her dedication. It is rare, it is what is so rewarding about his job, working with such dedicated people. So if she really wants to be part of the Team, he has in mind a place where she could help. In any case, it is time she has a fuller appreciation of the Team’s activities. Helping out in the clinic will be a generous act he won’t forget. And at such a stressful time like this, it will be good therapy for her to get away from reminders of the unpleasantness.
‘What? What is it you want me to do?’
Morag doesn’t quite understand. She is tired, and a plane passed overhead half-way through Dr Science’s speech, its rebreather jets making the angled roof hum on a single deep note.
‘It’s not such a hard placement, and really very much less dangerous than the Bidonvilles.’
Dr Science has a knack of crinkling the skin around his eyes, making them seem to twinkle behind his round gold-rimmed spectacles. He does that now. He is a big, bluff, grandfatherly man, with vigorous ginger hair tied back in a bushy ponytail. Rumour has it that he has a pig’s heart backing up his own, but that might just be malice. He is the kind of geezer who seems to grow as he ages, taking up more and more of the world’s energy.
He says, ‘The police don’t want you going anywhere near the Magic Kingdom for now. They say it’s due legal process, that you should be separated from the community there in case you’re prejudiced by the rumours flying around—’
Morag says, ‘If those rumours are about fairies, then they aren’t rumours.’
‘I understand how you feel, but we do need the cooperation of the police.’
‘What about the little boy?’
‘The police are looking for him,’ Dr Science says. ‘You know, every time I send people into the Bidonvilles I worry about their safety. You have proved your courage over and over in Africa, Morag, you don’t have to prove yourself to me. You deserve a break, and given your dedication this is the best I can do.’
Dr Science’s words are under Morag’s skin like hooks, a confusion of duty and expediency. He is leaning on her conscience to make his job easier, she knows, but she can’t find a way to say this without seeming ungrateful.
‘I’m supposed to go and work in the clinic in the—’
‘I know I showed you around there, just after you joined. I know you’ll do well. I’ve seen how you work, I don’t need to check up on you, do I? No, I’m sure I won’t need to. Be there a little before midnight; that’s when the gates are locked. And you know you can talk to me anytime,’ Dr Science adds, and favours Morag with a judicious, twinkling grin before striding off between the recharging vehicles, shouting to Gisele, his voice making echoes under the high roof.
Morag returns to the apartment and dozes until early evening, waking from bad dreams she can’t remember. She takes a long bath and washes her hair. Wrapped in a robe, wet hair done up in a towel, she drifts into the living area, and the apartment asks if she’s all right. She has been living there for almost a month, long enough for its expert system to become sensitive to her body language. When she says that she’s fine, it suggests that it could make her a cup of tea.
‘Maybe.’
Nina’s microsaur pads across the tiles and nuzzles Morag’s ankles. It’s a stegosaurus, no bigger than a cat, with white fur on its fat body and black fur on the diamond-shaped plates on its back. Morag tickles it under its tiny head and it vibrates with pleasure.
The apartment says, ‘I like to help.’
Morag wonders if the apartment is jealous of the microsaur. ‘That’s my problem, too,’ she says.
The apartment emits a soft bleep, indicating she’s exceeded the response capacity of its expert system.
‘Just make me that tea,’ Morag says.
‘Of course. By the way, there’s a phone message for you.’
Morag runs it. A fat man says in English, ‘Dr Gray? I’d like to talk to you. Call me back.’
Morag switches off the phone as he starts to give a number. Dr Science said that he had fixed the media, but the fat man looks to Morag very much like a tabloid reporter. If she is going to tell the press about the murder and the cover-up, what better than the English tabloids, which would run away with a scandal like this? She really is tempted to do it, after the way Dr Science blindsided her with emotional blackmail that afternoon, but it would be a very big step indeed. Morag wishes she could talk to her roommate, but Nina is working the night shift at the hospital, and it would be unprofessional to page her about a personal matter.
Holding her cup of cooling tea in both hands, Morag stands at the sliding glass door to the apartment’s tiny balcony, staring out at the view. Necklace strands of streetlights are strewn over the mosaic of the darkening city, dwindling towards the floodlit, clustered towers of La Défense. The apartment building is in the twentieth arrondissement, Belle-ville-Ménilmontant, where ribbons of apartment blocks, housing impoverished, rootless middle-class professionals and students of the City University, surround unreconstructed rural streets colonized by artists and counterculture freaks.
Morag likes the arrondissement’s shabby gentility, its air of having missed the Millennium and the flight of most of the city’s population to the ribbon arcologies. There are quiet neighbourhood bars, traditional boulangeries with second Empire lettering over gleaming plate glass windows, the old-fashioned cinema where customers can petition for particular films by dropping a written note in a box, a Chinese café where Nina and her colleagues from the hospital have dim-sum on Sundays. Morag has not been here long, but she is beginning to feel that she has found a place where she could be happy.
No, she thinks, no, she won’t be driven out, even by Dr Science. She’s not angry at the cover-up, if that’s what it is, she’s angry because the bastard pushed her into a place where she couldn’t say no without seeming ungrateful, disloyal. She shouldn’t break her professional obligations out of spite. What it is, she thinks, is that she’s in denial. The second stage of shock. There’ll be grief, and then acceptance. She’ll get on with her life. She’ll not forget the terrible thing done to the little girl, the horrible mutilation, the missing ovaries, but it won’t haunt her. She has to survive by absorbing the bad things and remembering the good.
Then Morag suddenly thinks of the poor little boy, and starts to cry and laugh at the same time. She’s come away from a place where a million people committed suicide and she’s greeting over one little refugee.
The tea has grown cold. She carefully rinses the cup, dries it, puts it away. She is doing everything carefully, she notices. As if the world is suddenly all eggshell.
She dries and braids her hair and dresses in jeans and a sweater, has the apartment zap a canister of three bean stew and heat some pitta bread, and eats with the TV murmuring in the living room to keep her company. She orders a taxi, a luxury she can ill-afford but one she badly needs. If she’s been exiled to the Mobile Aid Team’s remotest domain, at least she’ll live it up a little.
All the news channels are filled with commentary and items on the Mars
expedition. The astronauts are sleeping now, after working to deploy the lander. A mobot camera shows the landing site, a plain of red rocks half-buried in sand stretching away under an electric pink sky. Morag is watching this with no real interest when the TV beeps and announces that there’s a news item about the Bidonvilles that might interest her.
‘Show me.’
She expects to see a report on the murder, but instead it’s a snippet about a march on the Interface by refugee activists. Long shots of people marching down a dark, overgrown street, holding up homemade banners. Our bodies our selves. Keep your filthy hands off our minds. Childkillers! A crowd milling behind a tanglewire barrier, lit by floodlights, riot police in coveralls and body armour on the other side of the wire. Stones falling out of the floodlit night and suddenly the police charging, led by half a dozen mounted officers on muscular gengineered combat horses armoured with chitinous plating on their heads and flanks. A brief commentary informs Morag that this happened about twenty minutes ago, that the crowd has now been dispersed.
Morag is surfing through the local channels, trying to catch more of the protest, when the apartment announces that the taxi has arrived. Reluctantly, she grabs her bag, puts on her quilted coat and goes down.
The fat man who telephoned earlier is waiting outside the apartment building’s front door. As Morag tries to get around him, he says quickly, in London-accented English, ‘I know what happened, Dr Gray. That’s not what I’m interested in.’
‘I don’t,’ Morag says, ‘want to talk. You’re breaking the law just being here, harassing me.’
Her heart is suddenly beating quickly. She is gripping the strap of her bag so tightly that her trimmed nails are digging into her palm. The fucking taxi is parked on the other side of the street.
‘I’m not with the media,’ the fat man says, following Morag as she hurries between parked runabouts. There are two kinds of fat men, those with huge behinds and those without. He’s the first sort, his expensive charcoal-coloured wool suit can’t hide that. A red scarf is knotted under his double chin and a black floppy-brimmed hat is pulled low on his forehead, so that his round flushed face looks like the Moon in eclipse. He says, ‘Did you see who did it, Dr Gray? Looked like children, but not really children? They were fairies. Have you heard of fairies? If they saw you, you’re in danger, and I want to help.’
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