Death & the City Book Two

by Lisa Scullard

  Flynn doesn’t seem to find introspective silences comforting, particularly considering his last remarks. He grunts and rubs his eyes.

  “I’m getting a coffee,” he mutters. “Make sure you keep recording.”

  “Yes, Dad,” Navy SEALS teases, and the security door slams. He grins at me. “I’m Zheng, by the way. James, in English.”

  “I’m classified,” I greet him honestly, shaking hands. “Lara, in English.”

  “Yeah, we know you as Lara.” Yakuza Elvis leans over the desk to shake hands also. “Sometimes as Chun Li too. I’m Akira. Here they know me as Ashley.”

  “I’ve been wondering when that Chun Li thing will go away,” I say wryly. “Obviously going blonde, and quitting the pigtails hasn’t done it.”

  “You’d have to also quit jumping out from behind dustbins and kicking people’s heads in,” says Ash.

  “Yeah, I think that’s more or less what it’s about,” James smiles. “Oh, look, she’s filing her nails. It’s like a celebrity caught on webcam, with no celebrity.”

  “She’s allowed a nail-file in there as well?” I remark, before remembering I’ve still got Connor’s gun strapped under my t-shirt. I’m not just a pot calling the kettle black. I’m the whole kitchenware department.

  “I think the idea is, if she’s going to turn either destructive or self-destructive, we kind of want to see how it pans out,” says James. “Treat her as if she’s not under suspicion, and see if she drags the suspicion out of herself in the desire for attention. Sticks it under our noses for us, so to speak.”

  “What, like Baron Munchausen?” I ask. “Attention-seeking to the point of drawing attention to herself, even if it’s detrimental?”

  “Cry for drama, more than a cry-for-help type, we were thinking,” Ash puts in. “A gnawing need to be the centre of attention at any cost.”

  “Yeah, well - something tells me, it’s not just to fulfil a personal demon eating away at her,” I suggest. “If she’s going to do anything dramatic, it looks like she wants to be seen doing it with a perfect manicure.”

  “She knows there’s a camera in the room,” James shrugs. “Maybe she wants to be seen DOING a perfect manicure.”

  We all watch, as she holds up a hand daintily for inspection, with slightly more exaggeration and flourish than required for purely personal use.

  “Wow,” I agree.

  “Yeah,” James nods.

  “That’s some inner demon,” Ash concurs.

  These two sound like they share a book club or reading group with Connor. But I decide to skirt around drawing the kind of conclusions that are usually followed by enforced medication, and being detained at the Health Service’s convenience.

  “You two spend a lot of time watching women on camera?” I ask instead, hoping to expand new information instead of revolve inescapably around the gravity of the old, like an obsessive gyroscope.

  “Uh-huh,” they respond, in unison.

  “What does that tell you about women, out of interest?” I want to know.

  “You can tell the difference between a woman acting, and a woman just being herself,” James tells me. “Like how she’s putting on a show of the nail filing, but can you see her knees fidgeting against one another, how she’s sitting? She’s trying to hide the fact she’s got an itch she wants to scratch instead. Half of her body is acting, while the other half is being suppressed. Like girls who cross their legs and swing their feet trying to hold in a fart, or to hide the fact they want to pee.”

  “She might have ringworm,” I point out. “Her drinking buddy was covered in it.”

  “And yet she isn’t sitting awkwardly, not like she wants to be anywhere else,” says Ash. “Not like a normal person with an itch. Most would just scratch. She’s got some whole other performance going on to detract from it.”

  “I thought that was just women in general who do that,” I grin. “A guy would sit there and scratch. Unless he was guilty of something. But women do perform extravagant camouflage, contrived by their insecurities. Particularly if it’s about romantic failure. Like those female writers and academics who become career feminists, to hide the fact they didn’t pull the guys they lusted after at University.”

  “You mean a masquerade demon,” James agrees, thoughtfully. “Even when the demon becomes so complex and necessary that it becomes the driving force, even though it takes over the person’s entire life, in effect it’s still only a cloak over the original soul, being acted out to hide an original vulnerability. It’s not that hard to observe. The real character of a person tends to be more fearful, more furtive. Moves in less broad gestures compared to the more flamboyant demon, except in cases of the very brave.”

  “You ever see Presbyterians taped live in Las Vegas?” Ash asks. “Like that. Even the smiles and the winks at the audience. All demon. Like she’d managed to leave her real self in the hotel room altogether and slept right through it, while her body was possessed and performing under obligation to her recording contract. It was like watching a Replicant from Bladerunner on stage.”

  If I was Miss Presbyterians, I’d think being compared to a Replicant was quite cool. I know a lot of doormen who like to think of themselves as mean machines in the workplace. Being called a machine is a compliment, like Nicole ‘Dominica’ Ladd - the original topless tabloid Laddette - showing she’s not just a brand name, doing various TV celebrity torture trials for comic charity funds, and going back for more every year. Although being referred to as acting like a machine in the bedroom, in terms of just going through the motions rather than as a ‘sex machine’ is probably less complimentary. So probably you wouldn’t want to be compared to a robot in your job if you were a prostitute, like Miss Dorothy. Although she didn’t know she was a hooker, and probably would still take it as a distorted compliment in her Universe.

  “Is that why they call it meltdown, when the artificially-created machine fails?” I muse. “Leaving behind a considerably less than super-human operator?”

  “Yeah, that works in my reality,” Ash nods. “You’ll have to come up with a suitable demon-related analogy for Zheng.”

  James grins again, still watching the screen.

  “Know much about demons?” he asks me.

  “Only that they live on top of some mountain in Java,” I shrug, pulling up another wheeled office chair to sit down, and replacing Canem’s phone on the desk. “According to the history of Java, anyway. According to the internet, they live underneath Sunnydale, California. The Hellmouth.”

  “I told you she was Buffy,” Ash puts in, wagging a finger at James. “It’s no coincidence she picked a job where she gets to wear black.”

  “Don’t forget luminous yellow also, and sometimes neon orange, depending on what venue I have to show up on the security cameras in,” I remind him. I heave a sigh. There’s one very obvious type of demon springs to mind when considering women’s insecurities about their romantic potential, without some sort of grand façade. “I guess you know all about succubi. I don’t know the Mandarin word. In Japanese - a female sexual Yatsu, I guess.”

  “Yeah, a sex beast,” James nods, and Ash concurs again, joining in sagely. “Sex fiends. Incubus is the male version, right?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I reckon a woman driven by unfulfilled needs and desires, who builds up an alter ego to hide her misfortunes in that department, in ancient times would occasionally be diagnosed as possessed by a succubus. Or as a witch, or both.”

  “Succubi were said to be able to act independently of a human form,” James continues. “Supposedly, a woman possessed by one while waking, would be unable to contain it as she slept, setting it free to flit about making mischief with men in their sleep. A cautionary tale invented by monks and priests, to excuse wet dreams and wanking.”

  “But most likely the cause of quite a lot of that as well,” says Ash. “Not to mention the kinky fun they also had when blaming and torturing the local women for it.”

  “
Some minority churches still perform exorcisms,” I say. “People involved in them rate it as pretty effective.”

  “Again - it takes away the responsibility of an individual to shed their own false self, which they’ve been hiding behind - by having an individual or organisation do it for them, to make it official. And having a demonic entity to blame takes away further responsibility for having a reason to hide their insecurities in the first place.” James swivels on his chair, back and forth, slowly. “Flynn’s analogy, if he’d got out of bed on the right side today, would probably be that it’s the same as being an alcoholic. Joining the A.A. and discovering there’s a whole community to support him ‘being ill’ and taking away all his guilt - for the misery and poverty he inflicts on others while getting routinely smashed off his face. Calling his hobby a symptom.”

  “A symptom of having no social skills, you mean,” I advise him.

  “So, in Flynn’s understanding it’s like drunks hiding behind a bottle, in my reality it’s humans becoming spiritually armour-plated and mechanized to survive, and for James it’s about anthropomorphising inner demons into external ones to relinquish control to, all in order to fulfil something on the outside. An external appearance of bettering everyone else, even in failure, bettering others at defeat,” Ash sums up. “How would you describe it, Buffy?”

  “Well, I’m definitely no vampire slayer,” I smirk. “My dealings with people are based on their mental capacity. I would call it either borderline, delusional, histrionic or avoidant personality disorder, cascading into dissociative identity disorder. Escapism from one identity not originally designed to cope, into another. Followed by a parallel identity, intended to cope, developing a further new disorder under the strain of hiding the original. Such as addictive or compulsive, like for alcohol or sex. What you guys are watching on your monitors, when you detect a woman isn’t being herself but acting a certain way to get a certain response, is exactly that. She’s dropped a way of being, that didn’t lead to the kind of rewards she wants, and adopted a new act either consciously or subconsciously to try and achieve it. Depending on their experiences, some women go to extremes of behaviour, even to extremes of reverse psychology, hoping to attract what they want in either a direct or an inverse fashion. But what you’re saying is, no matter what a woman says or does, if it’s put on as an act - all you guys hear is her saying: I’m trying to be really interesting and exotic now, so that you guys will think I’m exciting sex later.”

  “Yeah, manipulative chicks stand out a mile,” Ash sighs. “And they’re never THAT exciting in bed. Women who are being themselves, and not trying to control every situation, are interesting. It’s more fun and unpredictable that way.”

  “What do you think guys hear, when YOU talk to them?” James asks me.

  “Well, if I’m lucky, absolutely nothing because the music’s too loud,” I say honestly. “Otherwise, all they probably hear is: Blah blah blah giggle blah giggle blah blah while they try and guess my bra size.”

  “Yeah, that’s all I heard just now,” Ash chuckles. “34 doubleD?”

  “These leathers hide a lot of sins,” I tell him, shaking my head. Not to mention a sidearm.

  Flynn returns, wiping his hands and also his brow on a paper towel. He smells as though he went for a cigarette as well.

  “What’s she been up to?” he asks, in barely a miserly grunt.

  “Filing her nails,” the three of us reply, at once. We’re wise enough to keep any humour to ourselves.

  Chapter 29: Alice Is Wonderland

  Miss Dorothy’s name turns out to be Alice Cooper. I wonder whether she was named after the intellectual rock star, or the original witch.

  James texts the interviewing officer to find out the answer, after I ask him. The officer in the interview room, to his credit, doesn’t word it as inappropriately as my brain functions, asking more subtly how her parents came by the name.

  “It’s a very old family name,” she says earnestly, with a little too much emphasis on implying underlying significance. “All first daughters in the Cooper family are named Alice. Mary, my middle name, was my grandmother’s name on my mother’s side.”

  Ash goes online on his phone, and Boogles Alice Mary Cooper’s family tree to see if she’s telling the truth. True enough, there’s a sequence of Alices - but only going back as far as 1891. Before that, Elizabeth, Anne and Cecilia were names more in favour.

  I text Martha to see if she knows anything about a hereditary Alice Cooper still in Craft circulation. She says only by way of fashion locally, in a trend pre-empting women’s suffrage, when women tried to make themselves more ‘exotic and interesting.’ Hmm. Like being named after astral bodies in the 1960s, American towns in the 1970s, and cocktails in the 1980s.

  Having mysterious ‘black sheep’ relatives became a popular dinner-party topic in the late 19th Century apparently, following ghost stories and tales from the outer reaches of colonies abroad, when confirmation could not be easily traced. She looks up the same genetic site Ash is on and says ‘Alice’ was probably a happy collusion of the traditional Anne-Elizabeth-Cecilia family name, at a time when families wanted no more than one daughter if they could help it, and the connection to the mythical witch name was just conversational sport at parties, or something extra to keep troublemakers away from the family, who were superstitious. It sounds true enough to me, as I show the others. Rather than a family line of Dark Arts mystics, it seems Alice Mary Cooper is descended from a family line of exaggerated storytellers. Who, if they also had gullibility as a gene, probably fell for their own in-joke, somewhere between 1891 and the present day.

  Martha then sends another text of interest. She says the grandmother on the mother’s side, Mary Westbrook, according to her own Carter family records, is a direct descendant of a false hereditary witch, an earlier Mary Alice Westbrook. A prostitute, who turned informer at the time of earlier witch-hunts - a very early example of a pre-medical textbook era Munchausen’s By Proxy sufferer. She gained favour by pretending to be part of infiltrated covens, and ceremonies she had never attended, sending dozens of innocent women to trial. It looks like the Alice Cooper in the interview room is the recipient of a combination of delusional genes, in an unfortunate pattern for her circumstances. She’s a glamour and illusion to no-one but herself, Martha says. To be pitied more than blamed.

  It’s kind of in synch with how I felt about the girl the night before. All talk and a sense of guile, but the guile based on thinly disguising her own false-bottomed reality, and devout belief that she was part of something she chose to believe in, rather than actually existed. Faith in the wrong kind of story about her life. I can empathise with that, in a way, but the difference is, Alice took what Canem told her as the gospel and based her reality on it. While nobody else’s ideas controlled mine, no matter how hard they tried - it’s very hard for a doctor to convince you of anything, when you think your brain is made out of silicon and the doctor in front of you is a test program, when what you really want is a real-life Setup Wizard.

  My problem was nobody having enough insight to know where my various psychoses originated, or what they consisted of. Having psychiatric nurses and consultants hurriedly conferencing what they knew about episodes of Australian daytime soap operas, or Z-list celebrities, which they were hazarding my identity and supposedly made-up life story were derived from in some sort of single-parent stereotyped hallucination, would all have been so much wasted time had any of them ever read Harry Harrison’s The Stainless Steel Rat. I knew I was a psychopath who had just been inadvertently altered by surgery, personality-wise. I wanted to learn about that, and what it meant, not delve into made-up worlds of TV plots and magazine headlines unfamiliar to me. Which said a Hell of a lot more about the nursing staff than it said about my own case. I found mental health staff a strange bunch anyway - most often searching for their own psychiatric Messiah, contact with either angels, or aliens, or Hollywood, through the senses of some personali
ty-deficient savant that might pass through their doors one day. I had my own personality. It was dangerous, but manageable, when categorized into its various separate disorders. I wasn’t a window onto the future, or a mirage of anyone else in existence. I was just complicated.

  Alice, however, appears to be simple. Simple enough to have room to absorb all the devious crap she’s been fed, and turn it into the beautiful logic of fairytale. She thinks she’s a Charlie’s Angel, with Canem being her Charlie. In the porno version, maybe so.

  She’s playing the tight-lipped confidante well too. She gives detailed and gossip-laden answers about her trip to the bar the night before, with her Scarecrow friend, but omitting all the history she told me in the toilets about him being a killer on the run. When prompted remotely, the interviewing officer leaves her alone and goes for more coffee. She gets her phone out, and promptly starts texting.

  Head office ring me.

  “She’s sending messages to a Twaddle account, and a blog,” they tell me. “Looks like she has an anonymous spy page. Reads like the usual hooker kiss-and-tell online pulp, only the stupid cow doesn’t know she’s a hooker - she thinks she’s lifting the lid on serious espionage games and private detective techniques. She writes under the name ‘Myss Mystique’ and calls it Secrets of the Fairer Sex Spies.”

  I get Ash to look it up on the computer. It’s on a generic blogging site, with a parallel side-menu listing her Twaddle Tweaks. Shortly a new update appears, listed as ‘Tweaked just now.’ The police don’t know that I can see right through them. How they are blinded by the red tape they deal with every day. They parade puppets in front of me, morons on strings pulled by the designers who remain hidden. They know if they revealed their true selves to me, it would be as the slaves of my skills. That I already know more of them than they can imagine.