2184

by Martin Parish

  Towards dusk the rain ceased and on the horizon, a rift of sky opened through the clouds, a portent of better weather to come. We stole out onto the platform to look around. The trees grew so close we couldn't see far in any one direction, except down the track, where we had an unimpaired view to a curve a mile away.

  "We'll have to watch out for it," Kamal sighed. “It could come any time.”

  "We can take turns sleeping."

  "If it doesn't come tonight I say we just go south along the tracks. After all we can always try and board it anywhere."

  "They speed up between stations," I said.

  "Yeah, but they're still pretty slow. I just hope there's no monitors or anything."

  "You know what, at this point," I said grimly, "if they'll catch us at least they'll feed us.quot;

  "Oh-h-h-h, I wouldn't say that. They might feed us now, but what about once we're back at the camp?" I watched for awhile then took my turn to nap on the rotting wooden bench. There wasn't any good way to make yourself comfortable on it if you were tall like me; for Kamal it was probably all right. One end of the bench had fallen off, so to lie down on it I had to keep my knees bent. Between the awkward position and my gnawing hunger I found it difficult to sleep. When I finally lapsed into unconsciousness, it seemed like only a moment before I heard Kamal's voice:

  "Here, quick. It's coming." I rushed out after him onto the platform. Fortunately the wind had died down, and in the stillness the clatter of the train was clearly audible. Like most such vehicles, it was remotely controlled, its power train invisible - nor were there any lights. It had only been four or so months ago, I realized, that I'd boarded just such a train - perhaps even the same car - bound north for the work camp.

  We crouched behind a row of concrete bollards as the train slowed to a walking pace. Most of the cars were boxcars bearing freight; there were only two cattle cars on the train.

  "Wait until it passes," I said. As if guided by a perverse intelligence, the train suddenly gathered speed. I grabbed onto the handholds beside the front door and leapt while Kamal did the same at the rear. We were on board and inside. This wasn't necessarily a good thing. It was entirely possible the doors could be shut by remote, and if so the train's electronic driver could imprison us without warning. And yet I felt optimistic.

  "Didn't think I'd be back on one of these things again so soon," I said. An antiseptic smell lingered in the air; the car must have been pressure-washed with alcohol. Presumably the Mods, with their customary fastidiousness, hosed it out after each cargo load of Mongrels - or they had one of us hose it out. Make one of the animals clean it out after the others, they might say. Was that what they thought of us? What else could they think of us? What did it mean to be more intelligent? What did the world look like to them, I wondered – not for the first time. It was a useless effort, like a blind man trying to imagine the meaning of the word colour. They saw the same reality I knew through a different lens, the world they inhabited was one I would never understand. A pile of burlap sacks lay in one corner; I took a couple of them and tossed one to Kamal.

  "Here, we'd better get some sleep," I said.

  "We want to wake up before we get all the way there."

  "It'll take all night. There's no use waiting up."

  "All right," he said. I watched the silhouettes outside journey past in steady motion. I could only hope that our luck would hold, that the dawn would find us closer to London and still free.

  Chapter 7

  I woke with a jolt. As it crawled over a switch, the car shook violently then gathered speed. The world outside was dark but at least the doors remained open. Whatever else had happened, we weren't yet prisoners. Kamal stood leaning through the front doorway of the cattle car to look at the lie of the land ahead.

  "Where are we? any idea?" I asked. He drew his head back inside the car.

  "We're coming up on Reading.”

  "How do you know?"

  "I saw a sign," he said.

  "Hello? So when were you going to wake me up?" But he had his head back out through the doorway again. I leapt to my feet and joined him.

  "Let's hop off up there," Kamal said, pointing ahead past a large still body of water.

  "Why not wait until Reading?"

  "Depends on how badly you miss the landfill." Secretly, I'd have liked stay aboard the train on the off chance it would travel through to London, but the risks involved were too great. So I kept my ideas to myself.

  The name Reading carried unpleasant associations. Hearsay had it that Reading was home to a major lab, a centre for primate research. It was possible these were only rumours, of course, and while there was nothing necessarily wrong with a town home to a lab, the idea was still frightening; as if knowing that only a few blocks and a bunker wall separated me from humans in cages reminded me of my own inferiority, my own powerlessness. But there was no point allowing my imagination to intimidate me with morbid fears. This was a temporary stop.

  "Let's get off the other side of the train," I said.

  "Not yet, not yet." A tremor constricted my muscles. "Wait ten more seconds," Kamal said. The train's pace slackened to the speed of a man jogging. It would go no slower. I gritted my teeth, braced myself and jumped. The earth moved beneath me and the impact nearly twisted my ankle, but I staggered and caught my balance, and Kamal followed a minute later. The train cars rattled onwards and left us behind.

  "Here, come on." Reading, like London, lacked working street lamps, so only the bright red light of a tower built by the Mods marked its position. We set out across the field, keeping parallel to the tracks. The grass and undergrowth were sopping wet, and the slippery mire sucked at our shoes with sounds like soft kisses, trying to tear them from us. My shoes and ragged trouser-ends were soon caked in dirt as they hadn't been since the work camp.

  "I thought you said it was close," I said.

  "I saw a sign. I wanted to get off before we reached the town."

  "Especially if it's Reading," I added. Kamal looked at me as if seeking in my face an explanation for my cryptc remark.

  "Have you been to Reading before?"

  "No," I replied, "I don't know it at all. I've just never heard anything good about it. But my guess is that red light is where they have their buildings. So so as long as we keep away from there we're safe. They might have a curfew. I don't know what the rules are in Reading.”

  "That's right. They might do.”

  "There's no point getting caught twice for the same thing. Better stay right here." But the leaves dripped on us and the chill wind blew through our tattered clothes. After only a few minutes I lost patience.

  "Never mind. There's no sense standing here," I said. "We can always stop on the edge of town, in one of the houses or something." We stumbled through thick foliage into a lane on the edge of the suburb, and stopped in an empty house with a missing front door. The entire place had been stripped right down to the carpet, and some enterprising individual had even taken the toilet, because in the bathroom yawned an open pipe.

  "Somebody's torn the whole damn place up," I grumbled. “They even took the loo. Can you imagine.”

  "I wonder what they wanted that for." Kamal said.

  "I don't know. Some people."

  But at least we weren't violating the curfew(if there was one), and that was the important thing. Through the window I glimpsed a shadow a shade blacker than the sky flitting across a cloud. An aircar coming in to Reading. The Mods did not sleep.

  We strayed outside again as soon as the grey outlines of houses, trees and fences became visible. The streets were deserted except for a few furtive figures, people hurrying on some illicit business, like nocturnal creatures scurrying home before dawn.

  I noticed that as in London, some districts appeared to be empty and others inhabited, and cars were conspicuous by their absence; pedestrians and cyclists competed for the lanes. A tall cylindrical skyscraper, constructed from dark glass and an unknown material like co
ngealed frosting, towered above central Reading. Perched atop it a solitary red light winked at the sky. Like most of their buildings, it was probably guarded by a robot patrol and a “living fence” of biotech vines crafted to secrete lethal neurotoxins in their leaves. It was easy enough to climb over a living fence if you felt so inclined, but four hours after the attempt would find you taking leave of this world.

  "So where do you want to go then?" Kamal asked. "Downtown?" I felt a little nettled that he'd ask me that. As if I were supposed to know where we could go.

  "That's where we're going, but there's no hurry.”

  "You're right about Reading,” Kamal said. “I wouldn't want to live here. It must feel like you're bng watched all the time."

  "I didn't say it was like that," I quibbled, my hunger setting my nerves on edge. “We're probably all being watched all the time. How do I know.”

  “That'd take an awful lot-”

  “Come on,” I snapped, “I don't care whether we are or not. I don't know.”

  We meandered east at first then south. We avoided the main streets, wandering in the general direction of the city centre. As we turned a corner, we found ourselves passing a slender middle-aged woman, her brown hair threaded with grey. After a moment's hesitation I mustered the nerve to approach her.

  "Excuse me, ma'am," I said, repeating the time-honoured formula, "could you spare any change?" I felt something wither within me as I said it. I thought I'd lost all my self-respect, but there's always something left that can be crushed. She cast us the kind of glance a cockroach might elicit and stepped off the pavement to give us a wide berth.

  Kamal glanced back at her and chuckled. "Did you see the way she looked at us? Did you see that? As if we were - I don't know-"

  "Shit scraped off the pavement," I said. "I know."

  "See, there, you said it, I wasn't going to say it," he said. He seemed to find it funny, and after a moment I did too.

  "Silly bitch." It gave me a perverse satisfaction to despise the woman the same way she despised us. Across the street, a pair of children watching the water rushing in the gutter - perhaps they were drowning a bug for fun or something, the way children sometimes do – turned to stare at us. I heard their excited jabber as we passed and knew we'd caught their attention. I had no idea what I looked like, although I probably resembled Kamal, with his three-month beard, his torn muddy clothes and his tangled lice-nest hair. When you're alone or when everyone around you is equally filthy, you forget your own degradation; but come back to even a quasi-civilized state, and the contrast is obvious. My heart sank. Wasn't there something else we could do? anything else, besides wandering around begging like a couple of street-corner bums?

  A delicious scent wafted from farther down the street. At the next corner, a hole-in-the-wall shop exuded an appetizing aroma of synthetic coffee and warm bread. I salivated helplessly. It was maddening.

  "Let's try that shop. You want to ask them this time?" I asked.

  "What, you think they'll like me better?" Judging by the electric bulb burning above the oven, the shop had electric power; they must have their own solar panels. A short-haired redhead leant against the counter facing out onto the street, and as we approached her brows contracted into a frown.

  "What do you want?" Not even a trace of politeness. Manners are reserved for people whose appearance merits them.

  &uotExcuse us please miss, we were wondering if you had any food - anything you were going to throw away or anything. We've walked ten miles to Reading and we're starving," Kamal said. I felt pathetic. Nothing like telling it out loud to remind yourself just how wretched you really are.

  "No, we don't have anything here," she said slowly. "But we do have a dumpster we use for compost in the alley round back, you can go fish through that if you like."

  "All right, thank you miss," Kamal said. I heard her laughing and talking to someone else behind the counter as we walked away. I felt certain she'd made some less than complimentary remark.

  "What do you mean thank you miss? She just told us to go pick through the dumpster."

  Kamal shrugged helplessly. "I didn't know what else to say."

  "You know something, Kamal? Why are people such a lot of stupid bastards? Why?" I asked. Hunger, like fatigue, either magnifies your outrage or suppresses it completely. When you're starving or tired you become completely inconsistent. One minute you ignore an obvious insult and the next you lose your temper because you stubbed your toe. Most of all I was angry at myself, at the sheer useless weakness of the body that collapses when you need it most.

  "I don't know. I don't know.”

  "Where is this fucking dumpster anyway?" The alleyway squeezed between a brick wall on one side and the buildings abutting the main street on the other. A blue dumpster was parked a quarter of the way along it with a thick trail of yellow grease dribbling down the nearer side. Pride warred with hunger for a moment, but only a moment. Hunger was more urgent and it won an easy victory. Hadn't we spent months in the dump fishing through garbage? This was no different.

  I climbed in and stood atop the mound of trash. Few people used garbage bags any more. Plastic was too valuable to be cast aside, and dumpsters were typically used only for compost. A fragrant mound of decomposing odds and ends filled it halfway to the brim.

  "Here, half a sec," Kamal said.

  "No, just wait, I'll tell you if I find anything." I stooped to grab a couple of potatoes, each sprouting buds. Potatoes that have begun to sprout always look like mutants or some sort of alien crop, but I was so hungry I didn't really care. I passed one of them to Kamal and jammed the other into my mouth. I'd eaten a potato raw before, but only when I was in a hurry. They have a crisp consistency like a flavourless apple.

  I was past the point where eating, instead of appeasing my insatiable stomach, merely teased it, whetted my appetite. I crouched again, still chewing the potato, to root through the trash with my hands and found a half of a loaf made from brown algae flour or sea asparagus - it was difficult to tell which. The broken end was floured with black powder. I seized it eagerly.

  "Look, I found-”

  "You look hungry, mate." I stood up, still holding the loaf in one hand, to find a stranger watching us with quiet amusement. He was a lean-jawed man about Kamal's height, with sallow skin and slicked-back hair. His small restless eyes reminded me of a ferret's eyes; they watched everything and revealed nothing. His thin lips were compressed into a narrow line. I paused. On the one hand I felt ashamed to be caught rooting through the garbage like a pig; on the other, I was tempted to tell him to sod off. It was none of his business.

  "Looking for food?" he asked.

  "And who are you," I said.

  He smiled, but it was his lips that smiled only and his eyes remained unchanged. "I'm only asking because I thought I'd help you out. I need a couple people to do a job for me."

  "A job?" Kamal asked.

  "A job. It's a dirty job, but you look like you wouldn't be too proud to make some easy money. That's how come I asked. You'll get 50 nationals just for a day's work, and I can give you two right now to start with. In advance."

  I glanced at Kamal, but his eyes remained fixed on the stranger. "What sort of a job?" he asked. 50 nationals - Special Drawing Rights was the technical name, but nobody ever bothered to call them SDRs - was a good deal for a day's work.

  "I've got a tankful of waste chemicals I've got to get down the river to London, and I want to get someone to load it all on board for me. Thing is - it's all got to be put in drums and moved over to a barge. I've got it in a siding over by the station. And like I said, as long as you've got it all done by the end of the day it's 50 nationals.”

  Probably he bought waste solvent from the Mods in Reading and shipped it down to London. But it didn't make any sense. Ordinarily anything so cumbersome as liquid waste would be moved by train, especially if it was already in a tank car.

  All Mongrel businesses were subject to regulation, but
in practice close supervision applied only to what the Mods called Class A businesses, Mongrel firms that manufactured certain types of technology(like solar panels) or retained over a set number of employees. Without cars, intercity transport all had to go by rail through the Mods; they owned all the track and rolling stock, and to have your goods transported by rail you paid what they called a redirect fee. It was conceivable Scott was avoiding the redirect fee by floating supplies down to London instead; but I still couldn't understand why he'd want two random strangers like us. Perhaps he thought we'd be cheap labour. I glanced at Kamal and he nodded. "Sure. We'll do it," I said. "If you've got two nationals for us now."

  "Yes I do." I climbed down from the dumpster and approached him. I noticed he kept his distance from us as he dug with his hand in his jacket pocket. All at once he changed his mind. "Actually, better yet, why don't you come round the corner with me and I can buy you breakfast, take you over there and get you started's the same thing as giving you the money.”

  "Sure,” I said. “Why not. What's your name again?"

  "Scott." We followed him back to the hole-in-the-wall shop. The redhead turned to Scott with the exemplary politeness she'd lacked speaking to us a few minutes before.

  "Can I help you?"

  "Yes, could I have two brown gravy sandwiches for my pals here. And a cup of coffee for me, thank you." I tore at the food as we followed our new acquaintance north towards the river.

  A footpath follows the south side of the Thames where it courses into Reading. This footpath had once been well-paved, but it was now cracked and buckled, and the trees in whose leafy shade it lies had overgrown it entirely. To our right a wilderness – perhaps a former park or a field – extended to the water's edge; as we drew farther East and closer to central Reading, the wilderness gave way to the brick buildings of the town, and we passed a sturdy stone bridge leading over the river. At intervals boats tied to a quay or a mooring-post floated by the bank. A few other pedestrians made their way up or downstream along the path.