The Shining Girls

by Lauren Beukes

  The rich folk clustered around the stage, thrilled to be rubbing shoulders with the hoi polloi, as long as they didn’t rub too close, or not without express permission. That’s what the cop was for. They were whooping and hollering for the show to start already and only got more aggressive when, instead of Miss Jeanette Klara – Radiant Wonder Of The Night, Brightest Star In The Firmament, Luminous Mistress Of Delight, This Week Only, a small Chinese girl in modest embroidered silk pajamas stepped out from the wings and sat down, cross-legged on the edge of the stage, behind a wood and wire instrument. But when the lights dimmed, even the most drunk and boisterous of the fancy folk hushed up in anticipation.

  The girl started plucking the strings of the instrument, creating a twanging oriental melody, sinister in its strangeness. A shadow slipped out among the coils of white fabric artfully arranged on the stage, dressed top-to-toe in black like an Arab. Her eyes glinted once briefly, catching the light from outside as a late arrival was grudgingly allowed entry by the thickset doorman. Cool and feral as an animal’s eyes caught in the headlights, Harper thought, like when he and Everett used to drive to Yankton before dawn to pick up farm supplies in the Red Baby.

  Half the audience didn’t even realize anyone was there, until, cued by some undetectable shift in the music, the Glow Girl slid off one long glove, revealing an incandescent disembodied arm. The onlookers gasped and one woman near the front screamed in shrill delight, startling the cop, who craned his neck to see if there had been any impropriety.

  The arm unfurled, the hand at the end twisting and turning in a sensual dance all its own. It teased its way around the black sack, exposing, briefly, a girlish shoulder, a curve of belly, a flash of painted lips, firefly bright. Then it moved to tug off the other glove and throw it into the crowd. Now there were two glowing arms, exposed from the elbow down, sensually contorting, beckoning the audience: Come closer. They obeyed, like children, clustering around the stage, jostling for the best view and tossing the glove up into the air, passing it hand-to-hand, like a party favor. It landed near Harper’s feet – a wrinkled thing, with radium paint streaks showing like innards.

  ‘Hey, now, no souvenirs,’ the huge doorman said, snatching it out of his hands. ‘Give it here. That’s Miss Klara’s property.’

  On stage, the hands crept up to the veiled hood and unclasped it, letting loose a tumble of curls and revealing a sharp little face with a bow mouth and giant blue eyes under fluttering lashes, tipped with paint so they glowed too. A pretty decapitated head floating eerily above the stage.

  Miss Klara rolled her hips, twisting her arms above her head, waiting for the suspense of a dip in the melody and the sharp clang of the cymbals she held between her fingers before she removed another piece of clothing, like a butterfly shrugging out of the folds of a black cocoon. But the movement reminded him more of a snake wriggling out of its skin.

  She wore dainty wings underneath, and a costume beaded with insect-like segments. She fluttered her fingers and winked her big eyes, dropping into a contorted pose among the coils of fabric like a dying moth. When she re-emerged, she had slipped her arms into sleeves in the gauze and was swirling it around her. Above the bar, a projector flickered to life, casting the blurry silhouettes of butterflies on the gauzy cloth. Jeanette transformed into a swooping, diving creature among a whirlwind of illusory insects. It made him think of plague and infestation. He fingered the folding knife in his pocket.

  ‘Zank you! Zank you!’ she said at the end of it, in her little girl voice, standing on stage wearing only the paint and a pair of high heels, her arms crossed over her breasts, as if they hadn’t already seen all there was to see. She blew the audience a grateful kiss, in the process revealing her pink nipples to roaring approval. She widened her eyes and gave a coquettish giggle. She quickly covered up again, playing at modesty, and skipped off stage, kicking up her heels. She returned a moment later and wheeled round the stage, her arms held up high and wide in triumph, chin raised, eyes glittering, demanding that they look at her, take their fill.

  All it cost him was a penny’s worth of caramels, the box slightly battered from being under his coat all night. The doorman was distracted, dealing with a society lady who was vomiting copiously on the front steps, while her husband and his friends jeered.

  He was waiting for her when she emerged from the back door of the club, dragging her suitcase of props. She was hunched against the cold in a thick coat buttoned up over the spangled costume, her face streaked with sweat through the glow paint which she had only made a cursory attempt to wipe off. The light of it cast her features into sharp relief, hollowing out her cheekbones. She looked fraught and exhausted, with none of the verve she’d had on stage, and for a moment Harper doubted himself. But then she saw the treat he’d brought her and a brittle hungriness lit her up. She’d never been more naked, Harper thought.

  ‘For me?’ she said, so charmed that she forgot the French accent. She recovered quickly, glossing over the broad Boston vowels. ‘Iz zat not so sweet? Did you zee ze show? Did you like eet?’

  ‘It wasn’t to my taste,’ he replied, just to see the disappointment flicker before the pain and surprise took over.

  It was no great thing to break her. And if she screamed – he wasn’t sure because the world had narrowed to this, like looking through the lens of a peepshow – no one came running to see.

  Afterwards, when he bent to wipe his knife on her coat, his hands shaking with excitement, he noticed that tiny blisters had already formed on the soft skin under her eyes and around her mouth, her wrists and thighs. Remember this, he told himself through the buzzing in his head. All the details. Everything.

  He left the money, the pathetic ream of her takings, all in one- and two-dollar bills, but he took the butterfly wings, wrapped in a chemise, before limping away to retrieve his crutch where he had stashed it behind the trash cans.

  Back at the House, he showered upstairs for a long time, washing his hands again and again until they were pink and raw, afraid of the contamination. He left the coat soaking in the bathtub, grateful that it was dark enough for the blood not to show.

  Then he went to hang the wings on the bedpost. Where the wings were already hanging on the bedpost.

  Signs and symbols. Like the flashing green man that gives you permission to cross the street.

  No time but the present.

  Kirby

  2 MARCH 1992

  The axles of corruption are greased with donut glaze. Or that’s what it costs Kirby to get access to files she really doesn’t have any good excuse to be looking at.

  She’s already exhausted the microfiche at the Chicago Library, ratcheting the machine’s whirring shutter through twenty years’ worth of newspapers, all the spools individually boxed and cataloged in drawers.

  But the Sun-Times archive library goes back deeper and is staffed by people with lateral skills for finding information that borders on the arcane. Marissa, with her cat’s-eye glasses and swishy skirts and secret fondness for the Grateful Dead, Donna, who avoids eye contact at all cost, and Anwar Chetty, also known as Chet, who has stringy dark hair flopping over his face, a silver bird’s-skull ring that covers half his hand, a wardrobe built on shades of black and a comic book always close at hand.

  They’re all misfits, but she gets on best with Chet, because he is so utterly unsuited to his aspirations. He is short and slightly tubby and his Indian complexion is never going to be the fishbelly white of his chosen pop-culture tribe. She can’t help wondering how tough the gay goth scene must be.

  ‘This isn’t sports.’ Chet points out the obvious, lolling with both elbows on the counter.

  ‘Yeah, but donuts…’ Kirby says, flipping the box and turning it to face him. ‘And Dan said I could.’

  ‘Whatever,’ he says, picking one out. ‘I’m doing it for the challenge. Don’t tell Marissa I took the chocolate.’

  He goes into the back and returns a few minutes later with clippings in bro
wn envelopes. ‘As requested. All of Dan’s stories. The every-singlefemicide-that-involved-a-stabbing-in-the-last-thirty-years is gonna take me a little longer.’

  ‘I’ll wait,’ Kirby says.

  ‘As in it’s going to take me a few days. It’s a big ask. But I pulled the most obvious stuff. Here.’

  ‘Thanks, Chet.’ She shoves the donut box towards him and he helps himself to another. Due tribute. She takes the envelopes and disappears into one of the meeting rooms. There’s nothing scheduled on the whiteboard by the door, so she should have some privacy to go through her haul. And she does for half an hour, until Harrison walks in and finds her perched cross-legged in the middle of the desk, the clippings spread out around her in all directions.

  ‘Hey there,’ the editor says, unfazed. ‘Feet off the table, intern. Hate to break it to you, but your man Dan’s not in today.’

  ‘I know,’ she says. ‘He asked me to come in and look something up for him.’

  ‘He’s got you doing actual research? That’s not what interns are for.’

  ‘I thought I could scrape the mold off of these files and use it in the coffee machine. Can’t taste worse than the stuff they have in the cafeteria.’

  ‘Welcome to the glamorous world of print journalism. So what’s the old blowhard got you digging up?’ He glances over the files and envelopes spiraling around her. ‘Denny’s Waitress Found Dead’, ‘Girl Witnesses Mother’s Stabbing’, ‘Gang Link to Co-Ed Killing’, ‘Grisly Find in Harbor’…

  ‘Little morbid, don’t you think?’ He frowns. ‘Not exactly your beat. Unless they’re playing baseball very differently to how I remember.’

  Kirby doesn’t flinch. ‘It’s linked to a piece on how sport is a useful outlet for youths in the projects who might otherwise turn to drugs and gangsterism.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ Harrison says. ‘And some of Dan’s old stuff too, I see.’ He taps the story on ‘Cop Shooting Cover-up’.

  That does make her squirm a little. Dan probably wasn’t counting on her digging up the details on the story of how he made his name mud with the cops. Turns out the police don’t like it when you report on one of their own who accidentally discharges his weapon into a hooker’s face while coked up to the eyeballs. Chet said the officer got early retirement. Dan got his tires slashed every time he parked at the precinct. Kirby is happy to discover she’s not the only one with the ability to alienate the whole of the Chicago PD.

  ‘It wasn’t this that finished him, you know.’ Harrison sits down on the table next to her, his previous injunction forgotten. ‘Or even the torture story.’

  ‘Chet didn’t give me anything on that.’

  ‘That’s because he never filed it. Got three months into investigating it in 1988. Heavy stuff. Murder suspects making pitch-perfect confessions, only they’re coming out of this one particular Violent Crimes interrogation room with electric-shock burns on their genitals. Reportedly. Which, by the way, is the most important word in a journalist’s vocabulary.’

  ‘I’ll remember that.’

  ‘There’s a long tradition of roughing up suspects a little. The cops are under pressure to get results. And they’re scumbags anyway, is the attitude. Must be guilty of something. It seems like the Department is going to turn a blind eye. But Dan keeps at it, trying to get more than “reportedly”. And hey, what do you know? He’s making inroads, got a good cop willing to talk about it, on the record and everything. And then his phone starts ringing late at night. First it’s silence. Which most people would understand. But Dan’s stubborn. He needs to be told to back off. When that doesn’t work, they move to death threats. Not him, though, his wife.’

  ‘I didn’t know he was married.’

  ‘Well, he’s not any more. It had nothing to do with the phone calls. Reportedly. Dan doesn’t want to let it go, but it’s not only him they’ve been threatening. One of the suspects who says he was burned and beaten changes his mind. He was high, he says now. Dan’s cop buddy doesn’t just have a wife, he’s got kids too and he can’t handle the thought of something happening to them. All the doors are slamming in Dan’s face and we can’t run a story without credible sources He doesn’t want to drop it, but there’s no other choice. Then his wife leaves him anyway and he has that heart thing. Stress. Disappointment. I tried to reassign him after he came out of hospital, but he wanted to stay on the corpse count. Funnily, enough, I think you were the last straw.’

  ‘He shouldn’t have given up,’ Kirby says, and the ferocity in her voice surprises both of them.

  ‘He didn’t give up. He got burned out. Justice is high-concept. It’s a good theory, but the real world’s all practicality. When you see that every day…’ He shrugs.

  ‘Telling stories out of class again, Harrison?’ Victoria, the pictures editor, is leaning against the doorframe, arms folded across her chest. She’s wearing her usual uniform of a button-up men’s shirt and jeans with heels, a little bit shlumfy, a little bit fuck-you.

  The editor hunches guiltily. ‘You know me, Vicky.’

  ‘Boring people to tears with your long stories and deep insights? Oh yes.’ But the glint in her eye says something else and Kirby suddenly realizes that the blinds are closed in here for a reason.

  ‘We were done here, anyway, right, intern?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Kirby says. ‘I’ll get out of your way. Let me just pack up this stuff.’ She starts shuffling the files together. ‘Sorry,’ she mutters, which is probably the worst thing she could say because it acknowledges that there is something to be sorry about.

  Victoria frowns. ‘It’s all right, I have a mountain of layouts to check anyway. We can reschedule for later.’ She makes a smooth but swift exit. They both watch her go.

  Harrison sniffs. ‘You know you should really pitch me before you go to all this trouble researching a story.’

  ‘Okay. So, can this be my pitch?’

  ‘Keep it on ice. When you’ve got a little more experience under your belt? Then we can talk. In the meantime, you know what the other most important word in journalism is? Discretion. Meaning, don’t tell Dan I said anything.’

  Or mention that you’re screwing the pictures editor, she thinks.

  ‘Gotta run. Keep it up, worker bee.’ He skips out, no doubt hoping to catch up to Victoria.

  ‘Sure thing,’ Kirby says under her breath as she slides several files into her backpack.

  Harper

  ANY TIME

  He relives it in his head, again and again, lying on the mattress in the master bedroom where he can reach out and trace the whorls of sequins on the wings while he tugs at his cock, thinking of that flicker of disappointment in her face.

  It’s enough to satisfy the House. For now. The objects are quiet. The thick pressure in his head has retreated. He has time to adapt and explore. And get rid of the Polack’s body still rotting in the hall.

  He tries out other days, careful that no one sees him coming or going after the encounter with the homeless boy with the bulging eyes. The city changes every time. Whole neighborhoods rise and fall, put on pretty faces, peel them away to reveal the disease. The city manifests symptoms of dilapidation: ugly markings on the walls, broken windows, garbage that congeals. Sometimes he can trace the trajectory, sometimes the landscape becomes wholly unrecognizable and he has to reorient himself by the lake and landmarks he has memorized. The black spire, the rippled twin towers, the loops and bends of the river.

  Even when he is wandering, he walks with purpose. He starts by buying meals from delis and fast-food restaurants where he can be anonymous. He avoids talking so that he won’t make an impression. He stays friendly but unobtrusive. He watches people closely and steals appropriate behaviors to echo. It’s only when he needs to eat or use the restroom that he will engage, and then only long enough to get what he wants.

  Dates are important. He is careful to check his money. Newspapers are the easiest to gauge by, but there are other hints for the observant. The number of cars th
at clot the roads. Street name signs that have changed from yellow with black type to green. The surplus of things. The way strangers respond to each other on the street, how open or defensive they are, how much they keep themselves to themselves.

  He spends two whole days at the airport in 1964, sleeping on the plastic seats in the viewing area, watching the planes take off and land; metal monsters gorging on people and suitcases and spewing them out again.

  In 1972, his curiosity gets the better of him and he shoots the breeze with one of the construction workers on a break from building the skeleton frame of the Sears Tower. And goes back a year later when it’s finished, to ride the elevator to the top. The view makes him feel like a god.

  He tests the limits. He only has to think of a time and the door will open onto it, although he can’t always tell if his thoughts are his own or if the House is deciding for him.

  Going backwards makes him uneasy. He worries about becoming trapped in the past. And he can’t push past 1929 anyway. The furthest he can go into the future is 1993, when the neighborhood has gone to utter ruin, vacant houses all around and no one to bother him. Maybe it’s Revelations, the collapse of the world into fire and brimstone. He would like to see that.

  Certainly it’s the end of the line for Mr Bartek. Harper decides it’s safest to leave the fellow as far from his own lifetime as possible. The disposal is a laborious process. He ties a rope around the body, under the armpits and between the legs. The liquefying insides are starting to seep through the clothing, so that as he drags the body to the front door, leaning heavily on his crutch, it leaves a trail of slime across the floorboards.

  Harper concentrates on far away and he steps out into the pre-dawn of summer 1993. It’s still dark, before the birds are stirring, although somewhere a dog is barking, a harsh hak-hak-hak that breaks through the stillness. Harper stands on the porch for a long minute anyway, just to make sure there is no one around, and then yanks the corpse untidily down the steps.