by Jeff Noon
Here Coyote finds his first lost love. His Yang.
The black cab.
Everything comes home to him: where he has come from, and where he must go.
Coyote sees a light shining from a room in the back of the station, a lone cop sitting at a desk. He works his essence through the sap-streams of a willow tree that hangs over the locked gate to the car pound, drops down onto concrete, working his stalks into strong, fast legs that take him towards the office. He knows by now that he can change his appearance at will; he can make a mask out of flowers. He knows he must make himself look like a cop. Coyote extends an eye on a green stalk until it can see over the window’s rim. From this vantage he watches the cop for a few moments, and then realises who he must become. He taps on the glass with a branch from his body. The cop looks up from his paperback novel. He has plugs up his nostrils, but his pollen mask is lying on the desk. It takes less than two seconds for Coyote’s face to regrow itself into a new shape. Then he lets one of his branches bang against the office door, making it sound like an urgent call. The cop puts down his book with a sigh, gets up from the desk, walks over to the door, opens it. ‘What you after?’ he says to the cop standing in the shadows of his doorway. ‘You need a car? What is it? Somebody paid a parking fine?’ The cop at the door doesn’t answer. His face is obscured. ‘Spill it out, buddy. There’s trouble exploding all over town and I’m halfway through a sex scene.’ The figure at the door moves forward into the light, bringing his face into the picture. ‘Christ Almighty!’ says the car pound cop. ‘No, no! Jesus, no!’ Then he falls silent, his breath caught in his throat. He is reaching for the gun in his holster…
Coyote steps into the office.
The car pound cop feels like he is falling into a bad mirror. He screams, his gun slipping from his fingers, slick with sudden sweat. ‘Who are you?’ he manages to ask.
Coyote answers, ‘I’m you, of course.’
Coyote has formed his petals into a perfect replica of the cop’s face.
The cop cannot take the sight.
‘Shit!’ His only response. ‘Leave me alone!’
Falling back…
Coyote shoots out a strong branch-like arm, knocks the cop some times in the face until he falls to the floor, unconscious. Taxi-flower-dog lets his cop-shape drop away. Now he is just drifting, growing. His twig-like claws reach over to where a bunch of keys are hooked on a steel pin. This is what he wants. He makes his loping way back to the gates, tries each of the keys until he finds the opener. He releases the wire gates from their tight coupling. Now he is strutting back to where his black cab lies waiting.
Black cab!
He lets his leaves brush along the cab’s scratched paintwork, making a soft music from the contact. It feels like foreplay. And then Coyote forms a twig into the remembered shape of his cab key, twists the lock, opens the door, slips inside.
He is home.
He shapes the twig into the exact pattern of the ignition key, works the clutch, turns the engine. He’s full of juice. Petrol. The cab is humming with life. He guns it down until the city is swirling all around in flowers. Coyote is howling now, turning the road into liquid so he can glide down its throat. Towards Boda, wherever she may be. His last known chance at love. His Yin. He would find her if it took the rest of his life, his second life.
Work it good, taxi-flower.
I was hugging my Belinda child ever so tightly, as though I could force her into a new life. I was carrying her through from darkness to light, fluid smoke dripping away, gaps between my fingers. Hospital starkness. Manchester Royal Infirmary. The journey over to the hospital had been a nightmare ride surrounded by crashed cars and twisting streets. Only my Shadow-hold on the story unfolding had managed to bring me this far. Somebody in white took my daughter away from me. My second child…was I to be doomed with wayward offspring? Was I always to be the mother of death? I was holding my heart back from the losing of my daughter once again. A pain was resting in my stomach. I watched until Belinda disappeared into whiteness, and then I collapsed to the hospital floor. Darkness falling in ribbons of smoke…
Waking. Another room, another world…
Belinda. A bed. Instruments. But there was very little of her left. So very little.
A doctor was searching deep inside Belinda’s flesh for messages; some small, hidden moment of life. He had already sealed the slit in my stomach taken from Gumbo YaYa. It was a superficial wound anyway, in the sense that nothing else mattered now except my daughter’s life.
Nothing to say or do, but to hold my daughter’s folding body so tightly that the flesh was squeezed into a semblance of breath. Only an illusion. Belinda was dying; I could no longer feel her Shadow. Everything was at a loss; myself, the world, my case. Instruments sending out a sad, slow wave.
My child…
Pulling back the sheets from her coma…
‘Help her! Help her, please!’
‘We’re doing all we can, Officer Jones.’ A cold doctor’s voice. I ripped the sheets from my daughter’s bed…
Hugging her.
Hugging her to death.
Daughter…daughter…
‘Save her!’ I had turned my face towards the doctor, who was busying himself with instruments. ‘Save her, please.’
‘Officer Jones…’
Shaking her. Shaking Belinda.
‘I killed her. It was my fault. I misread the Shadow. That’s…oh God…it’s never happened before…Please. Please save her.’
The doctor looked on impassive.
Shaking and cursing.
No response. Holding on to Belinda. Holding on to air.
Instruments pulsing into silence. My daughter dying…
‘She’s gone.’ The doctor’s words.
Please, no…
I went deep. Deepest ever.
Sailing…
Belinda…Belinda…Belinda…
My Shadow was breaking into Belinda’s body, searching for the root. I was travelling through a dead part of town. Her unmapped body. Shadowless. I saw a clutch of Boomer snakes wrapping themselves around her heart.
Belinda…Belinda…
This is the moment…the worst moment of my story…
I will not have this!
I sent my own Shadow into her, forcing it deep into the veins, the heart, the brain, the skin. All of her.
Come on. Do this! Show me some fucking love for once…
A small movement…her chest…
Please…
I was drifting down through layers of muscle, hoping for one last lingering trace of smoke. Finding only dead meat, a stopped heart, a shrivelling brain. Belinda’s mind was giving room to the ghost. No hope. No hope…
I pushed myself even deeper into her, giving my Shadow to her, cutting the last knot with my love. My Shadow was leaving me, leaving me with a hole inside.
This is for you, ungrateful slut! Happy fucking birthday!
Belinda breathed again…
Shadow Fall.
A young girl died in my arms that day.
But then breathed again. It was a small breath, but the best I have ever felt. She breathed again. Belinda, take this gift to your soul. Please live! Please live, you stupid fucked-up warrior. Her eyes opened. I felt them open from within. I was emptied now of smokiness, having given everything, but Belinda opened her eyes again. This was worth it. I knew it was worth it.
My body was drained, unshadowed; I felt like hollow flesh. Belinda pushed away from me, newly born. ‘Mother!’ she cried.
That was my name. Her name.
My Shadow had gone into her body, replacing what she had lost. I was my own daughter now, living like a ghost inside her skin. Belinda didn’t know who to talk to—herself, or her mother. They were one and the same, and talking was redundant.
In the real world Belinda had reached up from her coma, screamed once, called out my name, and then had fallen back onto the bed with a hard thump.
The real wo
rld? What was that any more? My cold body sitting in a hard plastic chair? A hospital somewhere in Manchester? My daughter struggling towards a second life? Is that real? I was too far gone to care. I saw all this through parched eyes, a troubled stomach, my brain registering the patient’s reaction as the aftermath of the body’s system being forced back into life. My own body was hard and ritualized now, lacking any kind of emotional response to the sensual input. The doctor had left the ward, believing this to be a hopeless case. Maybe it was. I was really drifting in thin smoke somewhere through my daughter’s warmed-up interior.
‘Oh shit,’ Belinda said, direct through the flesh. ‘You’re inside me.’
I’m inside you, daughter. Her memories came flooding into my Shadow; I took them as my own. Her suicide bath…Christ, it sickened me. How could she possibly want to take her own life? Weren’t my genes good enough for her? Was I that bad a mother?
‘What are you doing?’ Belinda screamed, trying to push me away, out of her body.
Saving your life, stupid bitch. What’s this with the Boomer dose? You like to die, is that it?
‘Get the fuck out of my body.’
We’re both here together. No more secrets…
‘Why have you done this?’ I could feel my daughter’s body trying to reject me with muscle pushes. But I was clinging on tight. Clinging to…
Love? Maybe love. I can’t tell. Is that an answer?
Belinda’s body was like frost around my Shadow. ‘I don’t want this,’ she said. ‘I don’t want love.’
You think there’s a choice?
I was looking at the world through my daughter’s eyes. It was the picture of a small hospital room. A lonely woman sat beside her daughter’s bed, her eyes filled with a terrible emptiness. Belinda was telling me all about her lost love for the taxi-dog over the Shadow, and all about her doomed overtures, and about the loss of her Xcab Chariot. And about how it had all gotten too much, her life too bitter. I gave in return all of my own secrets and how I had tried my best to make her whole. No secrets between us any more. Well, still the one. I’m not proud of losing you, you know? I said to her.
‘I should hope not. But I’m proud of losing you.’
Why are you doing this to me?
‘Why not?’ She shrugged her shoulders. I felt her shoulders shrug, from within.
You’d be dead if I wasn’t here.
‘I wanted to die,’ Belinda replied, cold as death. ‘I am dead anyway. You think this is life?’
Jesus!
‘What are you going to do now, Sibyl? What use is a Shadowcop without a Shadow. I think you’re finished.’
I saved your life…
‘Thanks a fuck, parasite.’
Shall we call it symbiosis?
‘Fuck off.’
Do you have to swear so much?
‘Oh Sibyl, how motherly you are. I’m sure you could stop me. You’re my soul now, aren’t you? You think I want to live with somebody else’s soul? Even my mother’s?’
I’m giving you everything.
‘You’ve got a screen up.’
I don’t think we should…
‘You’re not showing me the full story.’
I don’t want to hurt you.
‘You can do worse than this? Tell me about it.’
It’s not the time.
‘Help me, please, mother.’
That call weakened me. A black curtain ripping.
The truth was I had kept Jewel and his story from Belinda for so long, why should I reveal that pain to her now? She knew nothing of her older brother. Revelation would only be a pain. Maybe my daughter wanted pain? She pushed some feelings into my Shadow then, and I got inklings of love in there, like we were one and the same now, and Belinda was ready to accept everything. Belinda was a taxi that would die without her latest passenger.
So I let the screens melt away. The thoughts ran sluggish for a second, and then sparkled into knowledge.
Our feelings merged.
It is the Jewel in the box, Belinda.
Belinda’s mind pounced on the story. ‘Tell me about the Jewel.’
The Jewel is the name of my son. It was the brightest name I could find.
‘I’m your only child.’
Not so. There is another.
‘What?’
His name is Jewel. He is one year older than you. I had him from a solitary lover.
‘Why have you kept this from me?’
I was ashamed. Jewel’s father was a sailor on the New Manchester Ship Canal. He rode the false waves of the river, and the false waves of me. My body. I was anchorage for him. The sailor was my first lover. I did not know how to respond, except to get pregnant. My belly was cheating on my Shadow.
‘What was the…the baby…what was it like?’
He was hideous. He was a monster, a half-dead creature.
‘A Zombie?’
Yes. Call him that. But he could dream! How could I throw that child away? I have him lodged in your old bedroom.
‘Wasn’t he ejected by the Authorities?’
He was. But he came back to me. He’s very cunning, very loving. He hitched a lift. Found me again.
‘I hate you.’
Jewel is a beauty, if only to my eyes, and I love him dearly. He’s only two feet tall.
‘Christ! How sickening.’
One foot wide. Fully grown.
‘Fuck.’
He came from my insides, Belinda. He’s mine. No one will take him from me. He’s dying now…from the fever. If anything should happen to me…you would have to look after Jewel. He’s your brother. You understand this?
‘What are you going to do, Sibyl? Now your Shadow’s gone?’
My Shadow is yours now, my love.
‘Shit!’
Belinda! Will you please stop swearing! Please…I’m sorry. It’s just that…
‘Sure. You’re my mother.’
Yes. Oh God, it’s been so long…
‘Leave me alone.’
That is no longer an option, my child.
The manifold paths we have crossed to get to this moment: myself splitting in two, one part to Belinda, her dead body animated by my Shadow, the other part to my hollowed-out bag of flesh. It felt like an auction, my body going to the highest bidder. And this is why I know so much about my child’s story. Because I took over her memories. I made them my own.
So it was that I came out of my daughter’s form, leaving my whispers there to give life to her. It was not life after death; it was just death clinging on to life. Is that such a crime? My other self, my underself, was leaning over Belinda’s body, seeing the breath come back into her. I called in the doctor. He looked like he’d just seen God in his instruments; waves of light were floating back into the screens. Tom was right behind him. ‘Sibyl, you okay?’ he asked.
‘Tom, you made it through the map.’ I was grateful to see him, but more important matters were pressing upon me.
‘I took a cab. They can still journey the city. But the drivers are well pissed off, Sibyl. It was Roberman that brought me here. He’s willing to—’
‘Tom, I’m busy.’ I pushed past him through the door.
‘Sibyl, I was worried. They told me that Belinda had died.’
Let them all wonder.
I wasn’t proud of what I had done. I wasn’t happy, or anything. I was dead. I had done what Belinda had wanted to do. I had killed myself. More or less. Did it matter? Distinctions between moments? My Shadow had left me. What was I now? A vacuum inside a bag of dry skin. I could feel nothing good, only the gentle caress of my Shadow keeping Belinda alive.
I was moving like a cold robowoman. My body was drifting through the walkways of the hospital, a passenger of whatever dream would have me. Tom Dove followed me into Zero’s ward. Zero’s slumbering body was locked into apparatus, mere machinery keeping him alive. I knew that feeling now. I touched his forehead with my ghostly hand, whispering that I would love him forever.
/> ‘Roberman took me to Gumbo’s Palace,’ Tom said. ‘We collected him and Kracker. They’re both under arrest. You want to see the boss?’ Then a cold journey into Kracker’s room, where the Chief lay bandaged and sedated. I gleefully spat into his floury face. ‘Kracker spilled the goods, Jones,’ Tom Dove continued. ‘He made a bad deal with John Barleycorn, through Columbus. The boss has a secret history of crime. Columbus knew about this. In exchange for silence, Kracker agreed to give a home to Barleycorn’s wife. Her name is Persephone, right? She’s the seed of the fever. Kracker picked her up in a cop-wagon at Alexandra Park, this is after she’s killed Coyote. Kracker takes her home to, guess where? The fucking cop station. The flower girl is lodged in the morgue, cabinet 257. Apparently she brought this bag of soil with her, from the Heaven Feather. Kracker reckons she can’t live without it, not for too long, so there’s a weakness to the plan.’
I needed clean air. Tom Dove was behind me all the time as I headed for the outside, again asking me if I was all right. I didn’t answer. I got into the Comet. ‘I’ve already sent word to the station, Sibyl,’ Tom said as he climbed into the passenger seat. ‘It’s maybe too late.’ Christ, it was always too late. But then, as we drove down Oxford Road, I saw a black cab passing us. Behind the wheel I caught a glimpse of a black-and-white-spotted dog driver. I saw a ghost. Tom was messing about with his gun so he missed the apparition. I never said anything to him, but inside I was tracing the glimpses of a plan. I was driving on auto-pilot, my hands moving around the wheel like a pair of gloves, whilst my true self, my Shadow, was resting inside Belinda as she rested in her bed. But, seeing that apparition of Coyote pass, I was motivated now, fired. If I could just get the details in place, we maybe had a real chance to fight back against the Vurt. I could keep my Jewel alive.
Cops were bunched up around the morgue’s door, all of them fully loaded and striking various macho poses, but I could see the creases on their brows above their pollen masks, the sweat of nerves. The corridor was bristling with fear. This business with the new map had them all on edge. Reports were coming in all the time of car crashes. A dozen people had died already that we knew of, victims of car crashes. The Xcabs were still running but nobody cared to journey any more. Columbus was not answering to the cab-wave. The cops no longer knew how to act. Some of them had given up the badge. Tom Dove took control, and I was glad for that; my body was too empty for physical battle. He adjusted the tightness on his mask and then punched the security lock on the morgue’s door, and I followed him into the room, the other cops alongside me. The room was thick with pollen, globular organisms that swam around as though they owned the air. Wet lichens crept over the walls. Water dripped from the ceiling. Dove walked up towards cabinet 257. There was a smell of fecundity in the space around its door.
