Black Glass

by Mundell, Meg;

  ‘Nah,’ said Blue. ‘All home in bed by now.’

  ‘Well, why do they leave all the lights on?’

  ‘So you can see the buildings,’ said Pearl. ‘Stops the choppers and AirDrones crashing into them. Plus it looks better on postcards.’

  They lay there sipping, resting their bodies. Pearl was jiggling her foot back and forth, knee hooked over bony knee, one sneaker bobbing against the night sky. Tally shut her eyes and shivered, wishing Blue had let her bring her detective coat.

  When Pearl spoke at last, her question was aimed at Blue. ‘So where you sleeping these days?’

  ‘Here and there,’ Blue answered. ‘You know.’ He took a slow suck from his bottle.

  ‘Right,’ said Pearl. Something sour had entered her voice.

  Tally had her eyes open now. ‘Weather’s getting colder,’ she remarked. No one spoke.

  They watched a barge chug past on the river below, scooping rubbish from the surface. On the deck a man was working, a small figure under a weak light, dragging heavy ropes around. He looked lonely down there. Pearl was still swishing her leg about like a cat’s tail, and Tally watched it uneasily.

  ‘You heard about Junie,’ said Pearl after a while.

  ‘No,’ said Blue. ‘What about her?’

  ‘They found her on the weekend.’

  ‘Found her where?’ He sounded wary.

  ‘Under the Westgate Bridge. You didn’t hear?’ Now Pearl’s voice was rising.

  ‘No, I been keeping to myself,’ said Blue. ‘Why don’t you tell me what you talking about?’

  ‘They found Junie down there. All smashed up. Dead.’

  Blue sat up. He wasn’t looking at Pearl. ‘You better not be making that up.’

  ‘There’s nothing made up. She’s dead. They bashed her to fucking pieces and they dumped her there.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’ Blue sat still, staring after the lights of the barge.

  ‘Didn’t want to think about it. Tried to put it out of my mind.’

  ‘And now you want to think about it,’ said Blue. He stood up.

  ‘What the fuck? What you pissed off at me for?’

  Blue fiddled with his beer label, rubbed the side of his head. Then he looked at her, and his face wasn’t angry, just sad. ‘Just gave me a shock, that’s all.’

  Pearl’s eyes were bright like she was going to scream or start crying.

  ‘You alright?’ he asked her softly. She jerked her head, one angry nod.

  ‘Gotta get some sleep,’ he said. ‘We’ll catch you soon. Under the clocks next week … or before, maybe.’

  Tally stood up. ‘See ya, Pearl,’ she said. But the girl didn’t reply so she set off after Blue, who was striding ahead, bottle to mouth, swigging as he walked.

  [Table 14, back booth, Belladonna Cafe, North Interzone: Damon | fixer ds-34b]

  ‘So let’s get started. Sounds fascinating.’

  ‘I told you I’m not going visual.’

  ‘And I said no problem. Look — you see a camera?’

  ‘And no audio either. I’ve got a distinctive voice.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘It’s … kind of squeaky. So I’ve been told.’

  ‘No, no, your voice is fine — I don’t know what you mean. I’d describe it as quite mellow actually, mellow and unobtrusive.’

  ‘No audio. Turn that thing off.’

  ‘Look, I need the audio for accuracy. Don’t worry, I run all anon quotes through a voice program. You’ll be totally unrecognisable, promise.’

  ‘Could you make it a girl’s voice?’

  ‘God. Alright. And we can’t name you either. So how do we flag you?’

  ‘It’s just background, you said. Meaning you can’t say where you got it.’

  ‘Look, I don’t like to be blunt, but what exactly are we paying you for here?’

  ‘Information.’

  ‘Right. Well, people don’t trust information that comes from nowhere.’

  ‘Think about it from my point of view. Squealers aren’t exactly popular. I could get bashed. Or worse.’

  ‘So we need a persona for you. What about a key member of the resistance group?’

  ‘No way. Too close.’

  ‘A junior member of —’

  ‘I’m not a junior, mate.’

  ‘Okay … an interstate source with connections to the resistance movement?’

  ‘Interstate, yeah. I guess that will do. And you’ll make me female?’

  ‘Easy. Pick a name.’

  ‘Anna.’

  ‘Fine. So, Anna, does the resistance movement have any protests or disruptive activities planned for the summit?’

  ‘Do I get paid before or after? Cos no offence, but we’re not exactly family.’

  ‘True enough. Here you go.’

  ‘Thanks. Is this ...?’

  ‘You get the second half afterwards. Now, paint me a picture, mate — and feel free to inject a bit of drama. It’s exciting stuff! Let’s start with What, When and Why. We’ll stay vague on Who, Where and How. Don’t want to spoil the show.’

  [Room 9, True Blue Boarding House/Rooftop of Legends Hotel, North Interzone: Violet | bus driver #642]

  He saw her out there again on Thursday evening, directly below his window, on the roof of the run-down hotel next door. About once a week, the bus driver reckoned, in the hour before sunset. After that it got too dark to see much down there, although sometimes he could make out a half-outline, a still shadow over on the far side. But for all he knew that could be someone else.

  Not that he was watching her by choice. No choice in a place this cramped, with the rooftop his only view, if you didn’t count the concrete wall that was outside his tiny bathroom window. She was graceful in a way, he thought, but gawky too: just a kid. He was too far away to see her face.

  Every evening, before heading out to start the night shift, his old familiar run between the western subzones and the casino, he’d sit here at the open window smoking rollies. It was too late now to worry himself with fantasies of giving up. Too late in life to cheat yourself out of the small pleasures.

  The first time he witnessed her performance, he wondered who it was for — perhaps someone was sitting down there, just out of view? Her routine varied slightly from week to week, but she always faced the same direction, paced out the same parameters on the same patch of roof. Then one evening he saw her lift her hands, push back her black bobbed hair and stand there, head tilted to the side at a critical angle. A mirror, he realised. She’s practising in front of a mirror.

  Even when she made mistakes, she seemed to move by rote, like some clockwork figure: a flourish of the hand, repeated with a kind of hypnotic patience he found soothing. When she did eventually abandon one move for the next — to pick up a sparkly prop and twirl it overhead, or demonstrate the emptiness of a chair — he came to, as if waking from a daydream. As the sunlight waned, she’d run through whole sections without stopping, a choreography neither complex nor remarkable, but strangely enchanting.

  It was like learning to drive, he thought: first you sat there with the engine off, moving through all the gears, until the body recalled them easily. Then press the button so the dash panel lights up. Twist the key in the ignition so the engine turns over, release the park brake, put her into first, then pull out slow across the gravel of the bus depot. Flick the indicator on, brake softly at the verge, check both ways, be patient. Clutch in, put her in gear, easy on the accelerator, and pull out into the traffic. Attuned to the ebb and flow of vehicles, ever alert for some dozy car driver cutting in ahead. Flicking switches, turning on the mic to speak a few words to the passengers; driving through the tidy subzones, guiding the machine half-nonchalant, but somehow ta
king pleasure in the automatic elegance of getting it right, every time, without trying. Yes, he thought. That was what work was like, if you made the best of it.

  But some nights, perhaps three now, he’d seen her stall: stop in the middle of a movement and just stand there. All the light seemed to drop out of her body, her arms hung down still, her hair swung over her face, a pair of black curtains being drawn. She’d stand there, looking at the ground for several minutes while he waited for her to begin again, to recover herself. For a reason he couldn’t name, these pauses were hard to watch. Tired, thought the driver. The girl must be tired. He knew how she felt.

  [Abandoned glass factory, Old Docks, South Interzone: Tally]

  Tally swept the floor of their room until the last speck of glass grit was long gone and the daylight had begun to fade. Then she sat against the far wall and waited. Outside the window the city was dressing itself for night, and the air was swiftly cooling. In a lifetime of skipping from place to place, she’d never been this far south, but she could tell summer was coming to an end, and quicker than it used to out in the nowherelands of the Regions. Out there the world was all sweat and dust, one tiny sun-bleached town after another, nothing but long dry stretches of emptiness in between. There was no dust here in the city, just dirty concrete and glass, rubbish and crowds and bad smells, and weather that changed its mind at the last minute, turning cold like a switch flicking off.

  She pulled on her detective coat, wrapped it tight around her. They had a collection of stubby candles, but Blue had warned her that their hideaway had to remain a secret. ‘Only light a candle when the board’s up over the window,’ he’d warned. ‘Else we’ll lose this place, like last time.’ Tally had just nodded. The bump over his eye had healed but a faint scar remained, a pinkish line etched in the dark skin.

  She slid the plywood cover over the empty window and lit a candle. Warm shivers of light touched the walls, but the rest of the room seemed darker and colder than before. She fiddled with her camera, zooming in on the dim walls — old graffiti, names and dates and jokes, crossed-out hearts and swear words. But it was too dark to see anything properly, and her head kept turning to the open doorway. Where was Blue?

  Most times, on those days when they’d spent much of the day doing their own thing, he’d get home well before dark. Then they’d head off together to work, or out to find dinner, or just walk around the Docks for a few hours, picking up trinkets and useful bits of junk to furnish their room. Once a week they took the old tunnel shortcut over to the Quarter to collect their pay and next week’s briefing. One night they stayed up late at home, and he taught her to play checkers using bottle caps, marking out the squares on the floor with a burned stick. But they swept the room daily to keep the glass at bay. The checkerboard was barely visible now.

  Last night he’d been warning her about her mouth: don’t give out information; don’t tell anyone where we’re sleeping; don’t talk about bad things you see happen, or draw attention to yourself. And don’t speak about your business, or anyone else’s, to people you don’t know — especially straights. Like that nosy guy who was asking about Diggy: don’t tell people like him anything. I don’t wanna hear they found you at the bottom of the Westgate Bridge.

  The room appeared smaller with the board up, and with the view blocked out, you lost the sensation of height. For all she knew, she could be kilometres below ground. There were scratches on the ceiling she’d never noticed before, frantic claw marks, like some trapped creature had tried to dig its way out of here. Tally could hear her own breath, too loud and too close.

  In one move she got up and yanked the plywood back to rest against the wall. The city reappeared, fully lit now; the giant Ferris wheel down by the Docks was pulsing slowly, a giant eye turning in the night. She shifted the candle to a far corner, away from the window. A cool swirl of air entered the room, and she breathed it in. Candlelight wobbled against the walls.

  In her pocket were the crumpled instructions from their last billboard job; she’d forgotten to burn the evidence. Tally held the scrap of paper over the candle, watched it curl to black, dropping it before the flame reached her fingertips.

  Blue had been quiet all morning. He’d never stayed out this late before, not without letting her know. Most of the time he acted like a big brother, issuing cautions and half-jokes, a bit of teasing, with easy silences in between. But this morning had been one long silent stretch: no sound but rain spattering on the roof, and Tally’s pencil shushing against the pages of her notebook. Blue had leaned on the window ledge for an hour or more, barely moving, watching the skidding clouds and rolling his special stones around in his hand, two perfect spheres of sunburned orange; his lucky rocks from back home, he called them. He’d vanished before noon. ‘Be back later,’ he’d said, squinting up at the clearing sky. ‘Don’t leave any food bits around for the rats.’

  What was she doing, sitting here? She had her own mission to carry out and she didn’t need Blue’s help. The trick is — don’t give up. She stood, tied the belt tight on her detective coat, checked her pockets and blew out the candle. One hand against the wall, Tally traced her way downstairs, across the glinting floor of their shattered castle, and out into a night that smelled of wet concrete and dead leaves.

  CHAPTER 8:

  NO TRESPASSING

  [Silvacom Tower, Elizabeth Street, Commerce Zone: Milk | commuters]

  The rush-hour traffic is building to a critical mass. Glass winks as the revolving doors spill out a stream of pedestrians, faces tired in the autumn light. Some glance up, doing a mental umbrella check; it would be the golden hour, but the sun is hidden, the sky a muddy mauve. A storm is coming.

  Milk has been sitting for an hour on this bench in the lee of an office tower, newspaper on lap and briefcase at his feet. His nondescript suit, standard model for a million civil servants and company drones, is the exact same grey as the footpath. He blends perfectly into the background.

  The mood of the street is chilly and flat. Traffic lurches and brakes in its sulky way, obeying the lights. More commuters join the pedestrian flow, scurrying along with heads down and bags jammed under arms, faces set in the blankness of transit. They’re already dreaming ahead: the scrape of key in lock, a familiar face in the kitchen, a pot boiling on the stove. Or an empty room, the sagging lap of a couch, an evening spent in front of the box with the lone red dot of the remote control. The people march at a steady pace, ignoring the man selling magazines, his singsong chant: Biiiiig Isssh-yoooooo; ignoring the blank-eyed woman moaning on a milk crate, filthy and barefoot, just another lost soul who’s wandered into the wrong zone. Drizzle starts to fall in messy gusts. Umbrellas bloom open, leaves shine wet on artificial branches.

  This is research, with fringe benefits. The price of the experiment is close to zero: Milk’s time and expertise are the only real costs. Humankind gets something for nothing, he gets better at his art form, and meanwhile racks up a few more karma points. Not that he expects anything back, of course; altruism doesn’t work that way.

  Milk runs a fingertip down one seam of his briefcase, tinkers with the catch. Remember to look up, folks. Yesterday he’d shot a scatter of light nodes up onto the building’s glass facade, invisible dots now awaiting his signal. His fingers twiddle with the briefcase, and the nodes blink on like stars, a constellation of amber light. The building’s facade softens, losing its harsh edges. A few faces tilt upwards, and colour washes over skin. Lights. Camera. Action. The effect is so subtle you wouldn’t think to question it: just one of those mysterious moments of beauty that well up in a city then fade out unexplained. The nodes, a cheap but reliable brand, will eventually be swept away by a window cleaner or succumb to gravity and grit.

  Now he brings in another change, just below the threshold of consciousness — a barely audible retreat of static, like a radio station finding a clear space on the dial. A surround-sound ri
pple seems to pulse out from the air itself, a warm murmur with snatches of laughter and voices, greetings and farewells. The collective hum of humankind with all the shady notes removed.

  Milk is a conductor now, the crowd flowing in harmony under his sure touch, the street losing its flat chill and taking on the quality of a pleasant dream. He brings in the next layer.

  The scent is barely there, a half-note on the edge of awareness: a hint of wet grass and newsprint, a nostalgic blur of woodsmoke (too soft to raise alarm, he thinks — fires are banned within city limits). But as the aroma spreads into the street, he senses a point of discord. A young, dark-haired girl spins away from a shop window, turns her head warily this way and that, testing the air like an animal. Pain twists her pretty face, making her look almost plain. She hunches her shoulders and hurries away, bobbed hair swinging, a flicker of distress swallowed into the steady flow of the street. She looked like she was in the wrong part of town anyway, Milk tells himself, but that was clearly a reaction to a mood variable — scent, most likely.

  He dials the burned-wood note down a notch. He’d forgotten about the bushfires for a moment there; these days woodsmoke held bad memories for a large percentage of the population. Tuning is poetry as much as science, always an uncertain art. People might share common traits, but their experiences can’t be laid out on some tidy graph. The questions never stop: what emotion does a certain shade of lilac evoke? What texture most invites touch? How exactly, from base note to afterscent, does downtown Washington smell after rain?

  And the answers will vary — not just due to the surface facts (time of day, temperature, pollution levels, all that), but at a deeper, more personal level. The first-time tourist, the lifelong resident, the lost child, the sick relative making one last visit home … they all smell a slightly different city. It might smell just like its postcard; it might smell like holidays, or boredom, or grief. Memory is the culprit, the moodie’s number one confounding variable; there are so many versions of the past. He has to leave room for things to happen, mustn’t let his perfectionist streak take over. You can’t control everything. He glances at the sky. It’s blackening by the minute.