by Ian McDonald
‘It’s not real,’ he blurts out. ‘It’s just a game we play between ourselves. It’s not serious, it’s not real. It’s virtual.’
Roisin Dunbar dips her finger into the penis holster, scoops out white slime.
‘This is virtual semen? Meatmaster?’
He winces at the name.
‘I never touched any of them,’ he says.
‘This is supposed to make me feel better? It’s only virtual adultery, so it’s not really adultery at all? Because it’s just computers, we still have a good, healthy, loving marriage? Jesus. Every day I go out to work and you rub your hands and say yippee! she’s gone, now the fun really starts! And where’s Louise when you’re doing this? Sleeping in the next room, or do you stick her downstairs watching television while you have your own wee private party up here? Or do you have her in here with you? Sure it’s only virtual. I don’t want to know. I don’t want to hear anything from you. Oh; just go. If I have to look at that fucking mashed-potato cocker-spaniel look one more second I really will throw up. Get out of this house. Get out of my sight, get out of anything to do with me.’
The trill of her mobile is so sudden and incongruous it’s rung several times before Roisin Dunbar realizes what it is.
‘Yes. Fuck. All right. Jesus.’
‘Work?’
Don’t try that Mr Sympathetic understanding voice. Do not try it. She picks up Louise, waving her little fists in her plastic baby-trug. What are you going to do with her at a murder scene?
‘Take her. You have one night. Say all you have to say to her, play all the wee games you want to play with her, read her all your favourite stories, play her your favourite CDs because tomorrow morning you are going. And I shouldn’t need to tell you you’re in the spare room.’
Dunbar shoves daughter and trug at Michael. She sees Grateful/Triumphant/It’ll All Blow Over With a Little Sweet Talk on Michael’s face and wishes for a five pound sledgehammer to plant in the middle of it.
Jesus, nine-to-five-and-beyond you pick up the bodies and the wreckage and wonder at other people’s lives, and you come home and without anyone asking your permission it’s your life that’s trapped in the wreckage.
She’s halfway down the close when it hits her: how come he gets thrown out, but she’s the one ends up leaving?
There is no more terminal sound to Roisin Dunbar than the rip and zip of a body bag being sealed.
The men in the white plastic boiler suits and the rubber boots struggle the load down the slippery concrete steps to the black van. The Outsiders press close, trying to touch the black bag. They are making a curious humming sound.
‘Get these people back,’ Willich shouts. ‘You, Dunbar, get the fucking lead out.’
Dunbar shakes black webbing body harnesses with fully interactive dildonics out of her head. In blow the rain and the white glare of the emergency floods. Don’t smile, she reminds herself, advancing arms outstretched towards the Outsiders. Not even that pacifying half-smile they taught you in training for crowd control situations.
‘OK, could you give us some room, please?’
The back door of the van is open; the bag slides in on the smooth chrome runners.
‘What the hell is up with you tonight, Dunbar?’ Willich has stopped on his way to the control car for a wee word with his sergeant. ‘I don’t know where you are but it isn’t here.’
‘Boss, I’m going to need some time off.’
‘You are joking.’
Doors slam. The black van moves off, slowly. Always slow, Dunbar thinks. Always dignified. Why? The back seat passenger isn’t going to mind. They could do wheel spins, hand-brake turns. Off up the road to the porcelain table.
Littlejohn comes down the steps from the flat. By being busy and moving around a lot he’s trying to create the impression that he’s got a vital role here. He’s as much use as hog nipples. He turns up his collar, grimaces at the rain. Dunbar’s so wet she doesn’t care any more.
‘How is it in there?’ she asks.
Littlejohn shakes his head.
‘If they hadn’t had that Shian medic up at the Royal, she’d be dead. Even so…’
There’s a small commotion at the door of the flat. Heads turn on the landing and down on the street. The ambulance sends its blue rays sweeping over the wet faces.
The crash team is coming out. People in green coveralls are shouting at each other, trying to get the chrome stretcher down the stairs without further damaging its passenger. Some green-suits are holding up bottles of drip. Some are bending down. Andy Gillespie is helping to carry the stretcher. Half carry, half embrace. He looks in pieces. He looks like his world has ended. I should look like that, Roisin Dunbar thinks. I should feel like that. But all I feel is numb and wet, and very very cold. One of the greensuits is a Shian, standing close to the head of the stretcher, calling ‘Careful, careful’ as they negotiate the wet concrete steps. A skinny elf-thing in a Hunchback of Notre Dame T-shirt is clinging to the stretcher. The crash team try to push it away but it comes right back as if magnetized.
Willich goes up to the crash team. Dunbar hears him ask. ‘When do you think she’ll be ready to give a statement?’ The human doctors have looks of naked amazement on their faces. The Shian doctor says, ‘If she lives, it will be quite some time.’ They slide the stretcher into the open back of the ambulance. Medics pile in beside it, Dunbar can see them hooking in monitors. The Shian doctor is arguing with one of the humans.
‘With the greatest respect, you do not have the facilities for trauma of this degree.’ Polite, even with minutes between life and bleeding to death. She can’t make out what the human doctor says, but the Shian replies, ‘The stasis coffin will keep her stable; there is a full regeneration unit on Ship Sixty-Four.’
The kid keeps trying to clamber in and getting unhooked from the back of the ambulance. It’s making a weird whining noise. One of the greensuits sees Dunbar and shoves the kid at her.
‘You’re police, aren’t you? Look after this, will you? Keep it out from under our wheels.’
Assuming that because she’s a woman, she’ll know what to do with children. Of any species. She holds its hand. It blinks at her. A Shian steps forward from the crowd and extends a hand to the skinny thing. It sniffs the hand, then jumps on to the Outsider’s hip, wrapping its long arms around the adult’s waist. Monkey-kid. Andy Gillespie’s arguing with the greensuits now. He wants to go with her. The humans are dubious. The Shian doctor beckons to him. He jumps in. The doors slam. The ambulance moves off. Sirens open up. The kid struggles and jerks but its foster parent has it held tight. The Shian opens its saturated blouse and offers teat. The kid hauls it to its mouth and sucks greedily.
‘Bloody fucking mess, boss?’ Roisin Dunbar asks.
‘Bloody fucking arsehole of a mess,’ Willich says. ‘Of course, no one saw anything. No one heard anything, no one knows anything. No one’s going to tell us anything.’
Scene of crime are going up the stairs with their big metal cases. The Shian are dispersing to their homes. Much to talk about but nothing more to see. Willich goes to sit in his car and tries to wipe his head and face down with tissues.
‘Look at this suit. It was new last week. Pure new wool.’
Roisin Dunbar sits in the back and watches the rain. Thank you, whoever you are who blew that family apart. Thank you because it stops me thinking about my blown-apart family. Thank you that it gets me out of that house where every wall and door and window shuts you into this new world that is so very different from the world it was this morning, and every picture and magazine and book on the bookshelves and CD in the CD rack is stupid and false and as insubstantial as this rain.
‘Boss, I need to talk to you about this time off. It’ll only take a moment.’
Someone’s banging on the window. Darren Healey, head bent, trying to keep the rain off him.
‘Boss, got something. In the van, come and look.’
‘What?’
�
�I don’t know.’
It smells of wet coats, wet shoes, fart and Darren Healey’s aftershave in the electronics van. With Willich, Dunbar and Littlejohn crammed in behind Healey and the tech, the humidity reaches one hundred per cent.
‘We got this off the security cameras at Wellington College,’ Healey says. ‘Now, you have to watch carefully. We didn’t catch it the first time.’ The tech runs the tape. It shows street, rain, yellow light, passing car headlights on the main road. ‘Coming up,’ Healey says. ‘There.’ He points at the screen. ‘Freeze it here.’
Dunbar sees it. They all see it. It looks like a thickening of the air, like a floater in the eye caught against the light. The video clicks on a frame. Another. Another. It’s moved. It has no shape, no form, it is defined purely by absence.
‘What the hell is that?’ Willich whispers.
‘We’re running it through enhancement,’ Healey says. ‘It should be ready.’
‘Ready now,’ the tech says. ‘It’s on screen.’
The software has sharpened the edges of the thing. It’s a shadow of dryness inside the rain, twisting, twining. Dunbar imagines she can get the sense of it, that it’s a thing she knows, knows very well. Then the frame jumps and it’s something alien. It’s moving very, very fast; this eye of not-rain in the heart of the storm.
A needle of pure frozen superstitious dread slides up Roisin Dunbar’s spine.
It’s a ghost. The shape of the rain falling around a person who isn’t there. The other night upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there… No. It can’t be. No such thing. Then you tell me what it is, logic. There has to be a physical object there. The rain’s running off something. You just can’t see it.
‘Oh, my God.’
She understands what they’re up against. They can’t beat this. No one can beat this.
‘Now I know why the paramilitaries are so desperate to get their hands on a Cloak of Shadows,’ Littlejohn says.
One day Miss McClure in P3 in Euston Street Primary School asked her class what they really, really wanted to do most in all the world. The wee licky girls had said they wanted to be good or have a cat or pony or get some doll or other. Some of the wee boys had wanted to walk in a band with their Das, or play football for Manchester United. Andy Gillespie age seven had said, ‘Miss, I’d like to ride in an ambulance with the woo-woos going and all the lights flashing and going through traffic lights and everything getting out of your way. Miss.’
It’s turned out to be a real disappointment.
It sways. It bounces. You can’t see where the hell you’re going. It’s the closest Andy Gillespie’s ever been to car sick. He presses himself against the door, keeping out of the way of paramedic elbows and needles. They’re talking fast and low among themselves in a language stranger than Narha.
A medic clambers around the stretcher to sit opposite him.
‘Need some information from you. Do you know if the customer has any next of kin?’
Customer. Jesus.
‘Only her partner, the one who got killed, and her kid. Someone’s looking after it. Her home Hold is called Not Afraid of the River. It’s in London, Docklands, somewhere. I don’t know who you’d talk to there. She’s pregnant, you know.’
The Shian medic looks up, looks at Andy Gillespie, shakes his head in the human no.
‘Any insurance details?’
‘Get to fuck.’
She writes something down on a clipboard. Not what Gillespie said.
‘And what is your relationship with the customer?’
‘Her genro,’ Andy Gillespie says. The paramed frowns. ‘Her lawyer.’
She notes that down on her clipboard too.
When the medic is looking at Ounserrat again, his hand steals into his jacket to feel the cylindrical bulge of a genro staff in his inside pocket. Probably withholding evidence, taking her staff from the flat. Different law claims jurisdiction here.
The woo-woos are on again. They’ve hit traffic. Gillespie braces himself against the sway. He could touch Ounserrat’s body, he should touch her. She’s only inches from his fingertips but it feels miles. He can’t connect this hurtling box of plastic and blood and steel implements with his last sight of her, stalking away from him across the causeway from South Side of the Stone with the rain falling on her. He tries to colour in the unseen between: her coming home, Ananturievo and Graceland greeting her, listening to what she has to tell them; then the door opening on the uninvited, and two clean shots. He can’t see it. Something won’t fit. Something not right, but he’s missing it.
The ambulance lurches to a halt. Gillespie jumps out into driving rain and blinding light. They’ve stopped right on the edge of the dock; the hull of the lander curves over him. Up, up, up. He’s never seen it close to before. It’s bloody big. It looms over him, so huge and high it seems it must topple over and crush Andy Gillespie to a smear of juice. White light pours down from the crane-mounted spots, turning the rain to needles of acid. It strikes the skin of the lander and seems to disappear. Everything and everyone else the rain pierces to the bone. Gillespie touches the orange/red mottled skin. It’s warm, soft, granular, like sand. Not what he expected. What did you expect a spaceship to feel like? He doesn’t know, but not this.
The crash team have the gurney out, the wheels kicked down and their drips and tanks and tubes clear. A hole has opened in the side of the lander, a ramp extends from hull to dock. A crew of Shian comes down it to take the gurney. There’s a brief altercation in the rain between species, but the Shian crew make it quite clear that the humans will not be permitted into their ship. The human medics withdraw to their ambulance. Andy Gillespie is forcefully turned back when he tries to follow the gurney up the ramp.
‘She’s my client,’ he protests. ‘I am her genro.’ He pulls the staff out, shakes it to its full height. ‘You’re violating her rights.’
— Do not be a fool, the Outsider says in Hot Narha.
He waves his stick but the Shian go up into the lander and shut their door behind them and the orange-red skin heals like a wound. Gillespie steps off the ramp before it withdraws and dumps him twenty feet into the rain-filled dock.
When the first one died, he vowed that he would protect them, but more died and he vowed again to make sure it would never happen again, but it has, and third time he’s made the vow even though he now knows that he’ll never be able to protect them, because you can’t protect anyone from themselves. He will find this one, this Executioner of Fools, and stop it, and it will happen again, and keep on happening.
Nothing to save. No world to right. No justice to pursue. It’s personal. It always was. He understands the thing about the Shian law now.
‘You couldn’t give me a lift back over to the University end of town?’ he asks the paramedics.
‘We’re not a fucking taxi service,’ one of the greensuits answers. They’re pissed at being made to look stupid by weird Outsiders.
‘At least lend us a fiver for a cab. I’m skint.’
‘On your cycle, Michael.’
He ends up walking. Thumb’s out, but the cars wush past over the flyovers. No one is going to stop for a man carrying a stick taller than he is. After a while he stops trying. There is so much in his head he would love to be able not to have to think. For brief moments, he attains that state of mindlessness, Zenned out by wind and rain and cold and borderline hypothermia. He gets back, fumbles out his key, staggers into upstairs’ mountain bike which is all over the fucking hall again. The racket and the swearing bring Upstairs Mountain Bike out on to the landing.
‘Where the hell have you been?’ he asks.
‘What’s it to you?’ Gillespie lowers the staff to point the head up the stairs at the skinny figure in the Coors T-shirt and sag-crotch jogging bottoms.
‘It’s to me when your kids have been asleep on my sofa since eight o’clock, mate.’
And they’re there, behind him, blinking in the bright light and the dislocation
of waking up in unfamiliar terrain.
‘Stacey? Talya?’
Wednesday
WHAT DO YOU DO the morning after a killing?
If you are Andy Gillespie you set the alarm for quarter past seven, up-for-school-hour, and when it goes off you feel for a moment like the world has ended and you discover you’re the one waking up disoriented in the unfamiliar terrain of your sofa and your neck’s got a lump in the back of it like a second head sprouting and the room smells like someone has died.
‘OK, kids, come on, we got school. Yeah, I know, horrible old school, but you have to go.’
Then he realizes that it’s five miles across town and he hasn’t the bus fares, let alone a taxi, but by then they’re in the bathroom with their Disney toothbrushes and Punch and Judy banana toothpaste and the day has begun. Fucking Karen.
‘Sorry it’s only toast for breakfast,’ he says. ‘But I make the best toast in the world. I’ve won medals and international prizes,’
Talya’s staring at him, still disconcerted to see daddy-hero covered in bruises and moving like an old, old man. Stacey pulls a Kellogg’s variety pack out of her backpack and sets it on the table like a royal flush.
They fight over the Cocopops. Gillespie compromises by mixing Cocopops with Banana Puffs and dividing them between the two bowls. A true Joint Sovereignty solution. The milk goes chocolatey and banana-ey. Both traditions honoured. While the girls eat and drink him out of milk, he calls Karen. No answer. He tries again, three times. Four times. Then he tries her mother. She’s as surprised as Gillespie, and as angry.
