'Can I have it?'
'What?' Temper sprung, the man walked towards him, chest puffed out. 'You little prick. You think I'd give you a 300 Euro tie? Coming in here with your stupid costumes – don't think we haven't noticed. What's wrong with you?'
'Nothing,' John said innocently. 'Nothing, but maybe…'
'But maybe what?'
'But maybe I feel a little sick.'
'Sick? Oh god, he's going to puke!' The man put his arms out to the side and stepped back, shepherding his colleagues out of the danger zone and distorting the circle.
'300 euk tie makes me sick.'
'What? That didn't even make sense.'
'You heard me.' John started to pull himself up, to stand straighter.
'Shit,' Dee said, 'we need to get him out of here now.'
'Here.' John was staggering over to the woman next along in the circle, who was wearing sores around her lacquered lips. 'You've got a little something…' He indicated the corner of his mouth. '…just here on your…it's just a bit of…' He leaned forward to wipe at her mouth and her companion smacked his hand out of the way.
Primal instincts kicked in and John launched himself at the man in a bear hug. His target reacted in kind and their shoulders clattered together.
Betta and Calvin leaped into action, grabbing at any bit of John that flailed within reach. Managing to catch the crook of an elbow each, they tried to drag him back, but only succeeded in opening up a target. As the man punched, John's soft stomach collapsed around his fist like a cushion, sending vomit shooting out over his front and punching arm.
'Cameron!' A tall woman who had been making her way across the bar called out above the rabble.
She had no trouble getting through the crowd. A path opened up before her as it had for John, but out of respect, or perhaps even fear. The sick-covered man looked up and the expression of disgust on his face turned to one of guilt.
'Cameron?'
'Davis, sir. Ms.' Davis wiped at the front of his sick-covered shirt with the end of his sick-covered tie.
'You're fired,' the woman said without emotion. 'Go and get your things. I don't want to see you again.'
That voice. Dee saw Kester's outline freeze in what appeared to be fear. The fear spread to her. Her skeleton went cold.
'Mrs Farrell,' Kester said.
'What?' Dee leaned in to him, still keeping an eye on the situation, stepping back out of the way as Calvin and Betta bundled John back into the corner.
'That's Alexis Farrell,' Kester said. 'My new boss.'
'Oh fuck,' Dee whispered, 'sorry.'
'Sorry for what?' Kester asked.
Mrs Farrell's eyes wandered over the group and finally settled on Kester. She took a moment to recognise him. When she did, she stalked straight up to him.
Dee recoiled and stepped behind Kester. She stared at Farrell. She was wearing something in her eyes – metal – gold. Her pupils were wide in the darkness of the bar and the effect was pronounced: a feathery metallic circle round each iris, flecks of blood, rings of eye shrapnel. Dee had never seen anything like it. Those weren't contacts – this was some sick new thing – eye implants. She wouldn't put it past Farrell's type.
'Well, well,' Mrs Farrell said, stretching out her hand, 'if it isn't my newest acquisition.'
Farrell wore a long blood-red wool dress. A strip of colour co-ordinated ads ran straight down from one shoulder to the hem. At first glance it looked quite a demure get-up, until she walked and you could see that it was slit up the side, revealing her long sinewy legs right to where they joined her hips. Easy access, thought Dee. Farrell's her hair fell in exaggerated curls around her face, an attempt perhaps to soften her appearance, but her augmented eyes were hard and intelligent.
Kester reached out and shook Farrell's hand.
'Is this something to do with you?' Farrell glanced over her shoulder at the mess on the floor.
'No,' Dee said quickly.
'Yes,' replied Kester, almost at the same time, 'my leaving party. I'm afraid John can't handle his drink.'
'Being a drunken idiot is one thing; public assault is quite another. So I must apologise for the behaviour of our ex-employee.'
'He asked for it,' Kester said.
Dee shifted her attention to John, who was sitting behind her, grabbing at her knees. She tried hard to stay tuned in to Kester and Farrell's conversation, though the tone was confidential.
'I don't know about you, but if I gave it to everyone who asked for it, things would start to get a little silly,' Farrell said.
Looking back up, Dee bristled. Farrell's smile was charged.
'You'd certainly be busy.' Kester laughed.
'You start a week on Monday?'
'Yes, they seemed to rush me through the security checks. I had no idea it would be so soon.'
'Make sure I'm alerted once you have your induction. I'd like to go through some…ethical issues with you before you get started on your work.'
'Of course. I look forward to it.'
Every time Farrell smiled, Dee felt she was making a joke at Kester's expense. Her lipstick was too perfect, her teeth too straight, too white.
'Anyway, I see you have other business to deal with, so I'll leave you to it.' Farrell made a move to leave, then paused and turned back towards Kester. 'You don't have a costume?'
She indicated his friends, avoiding eye contact with them, smiling with amusement at their faked signs as at a child's toy. Dee realised she hadn't given Kester his stickers.
'No,' he said.
'Not wearing?'
Kester shrugged his shoulders. Mrs Farrell leaned in closer than was necessary.
'You're the only one in here, you know.'
A wave of Farrell's perfume came around Kester and reached Dee. It was warm, nocturnal, the smell of a stranger's bed.
'I know,' Kester said.
Farrell turned so that her hair swished against Kester, and then she disappeared through the crowd, a path opening up before her towards the central spiral staircase. At the foot of the staircase, one of the bouncers whispered into her ear. She looked like she was giving an instruction. He lifted the cordon and she ascended into darkness, leaving the rising noise of the bar below. Dee watched the staircase for a moment or two after she had gone.
'Right you lot.' The bouncer heaved over to where they stood gathered outside the archway. His subsonic voice erased the noise from the bar when he spoke. 'Back in your room. You're lucky you're drinking so much or you'd be out of here.' He winked at Calvin. 'Table service only.' Looking out to the bar, he caught the eye of one of the waitresses and signalled her. 'And do yourselves a favour and take that shit off before you leave. You go back into London like that and the fukpunks'll rip your tiny heads off.'
-o-
Dee bided her time. John quietened down and then left with Calvin. Betta and Sienna weren't far behind them. The night slowly fell to pieces, until just she and Kester were left in the back room of the bar. She drank Farrell out of her mind. They picked out individuals in the bar beyond and laughed about their appearances, talked about stupid things that had happened during Kester's years at the Institute. Dee's confidence grew as she saw nostalgia take Kester over and a latent disgust at the wearers rise to the surface.
'Shall we make a move?' Kester asked when their conversation slowed to closing-time pace.
Dee nodded and smiled. She started picking off the scabs that she had left and sticking them to the table.
'Let's smuggle this last soldier out,' she said when she was done, grabbing hold of the neck of the last champagne bottle. It was still half-full.
They moved swiftly through the crowd, which was as boisterous as ever, constantly renewing itself with workers just finished their shifts or taking illicit breaks. The bouncer clocked the champagne bottle, but just smiled grimly at them as they walked out onto the street.
'Good night!' Dee called to him from a safe distance, smiling winningly and holding up the bottle i
n a toast.
'Come on,' said Kester. 'Now it's my turn to show you something.'
'What?' She handed him the bottle to take a swig.
'Don't you worry – it'll be a treat.'
Kester took her by the hand, stuck his thumb in the neck of the champagne bottle and started walking, jogging, running.
'Where are we going?' Excitement rose in Dee's chest.
'Now, now – you'll find out soon enough!' Kester laughed.
He led her ducking down silvery glass alleys, lit up screen-stage bright by the office windows above, where the City night-shift worked under sunshine lighting. In the narrow alleys between buildings the darkness tumbled down, heavy velvet curtains falling. Every now and again they would slow down to a walk and Dee would ask the same question.
'Where are we going?'
Kester's answer each time was to take a swig of champagne, hand the bottle to her, take it back and carry on.
They ran past offices and offices and offices, stacked to vanishing point, past long luminous windows full of off-duty workers, chattering and slurping noodles at ranks of low blonde benches, past the happy neon pool-hall entrances to the Pigs.
Outside an old church Kester stopped and announced, 'Here we are!'
Above the church stretched a mammoth glass and steel archway, supporting a stilted skyscraper. A placard, caught in a design vacuum between old and new, explained the origins of the church and showed where the churchyard had been. On the ground by the entrance old-fashioned paper money, dampened by the dew, stuck to the pavement. Here and there free corners fluttered like trapped moths. Kester gave Dee just long enough to see where they were and open her mouth, then cackled with laughter, grabbed her hand and led her on again, now at a shuffling jog.
'Kester, my feet!' Dee let out a pretend sob. Her feet were throbbing and she could feel a blister forming on one heel, but anticipation pushed her on.
'Come on, we'll be late!'
Suddenly they burst out onto a large square. Dee looked up. On the three sides facing her, the walls were lined with tiny figures. Figures sitting at desks; figures walking around. It was as if someone had put a lid on the City and trapped the daylight. In the centre of the square, invisibly suspended, almost at pavement height, hung a glass globe large enough to crush a man, in which the building ahead of them and all the City beyond it was reflected upside down, bringing a muddy orange slab of sky down to pavement level.
'Oh my god, Kester.' Dee stared at the globe in wonder. 'It's beautiful.'
'No no, not that,' Kester panted, as if she were admiring a bollard. 'Look!' He grabbed her by the shoulders and swung her round to face the fourth wall of the square. 'The changeover.'
The whole side of the building was radiating red light. The steel divisions glowed as if they were molten, as if the building was about to slide down into a mass of metal and light at their feet. The Stark Wellbury logo sat at the top of it all like a giant red prawn, towering above the buildings of its competitors, clashing with the orange sky above them.
'It's not…' Dee stared, mesmerised by the colour, her chest heaving.
At first she thought that the shifting hue was an illusion, but as the windows faded from red to green she realised that she was watching the heat dissipate from the building. The outer booths, faster to cool, faded first and the green closed inwards until it snuffed out the building's red heart.
And they appeared: pairs of Stark Wellbury employees, side-by-side, staring out into the square, their symptoms invisible from this distance. Dee heard Kester laugh nervously as if unsure how she would react, as if he hadn't really believed the story either. The figures stood eerily still for a few seconds. She half-expected them to break into some synchronised dance routine. Then, all at once, as if a bell had sounded in the booths, they threw themselves at each other, tangles of clothes and limbs, unwrapping each other like lapsed abstainers overtaken. Some dropped to their knees, some kissed ravenously. There were hands in hair, hands up shirts and in culottes, clothes wriggling off as if it was a race, as if none of them could wait. In seconds, the whole building was writhing and heaving.
Dee and Kester stood side by side, still, as the figures had a moment before. They were still panting from their run. Dee laughed suddenly, shocked at herself, at her desire to see.
'We look like a couple of perverts, standing here panting.' She giggled.
Kester laughed. They stared at the spectacle for a few seconds more.
'I didn't really think…' Kester tailed off.
Dee looked round at him. His cheeks were flushed. His face was tinged a surreal reflected green, like a divine alien. His mouth was slightly open. She felt the space between them keenly; a Perspex wall.
Kester looked round. The wall vanished.
They were on each other, kissing violently. Their arms interlocked, and their feet scuffled back and forth, as if they were struggling to climb through one another. When they disengaged, they both staggered back as if from a fight. Dee squealed. Kester was back; she finally had him.
'What's going on? Where are we! What are we doing?' she said.
Kester laughed, panting again.
'Come on, come on!' Dee jumped on the spot, then laughed and grabbed Kester's hand. A charge passed between them. They ran.
At the opposite side of the square, Kester swung Dee round by the hand. They paused, laughing wildly at the upside down view of the Stark Wellbury building in the glass globe, and then ran on.
On the tube they sat opposite one another, sharing the spectacle they had just seen with their giggling stares, laughing out loud every now and then, swigging from their almost-empty champagne bottle and passing it between them. A space cleared around them, as if they might go off. This was it. Dee felt the intensity of the coming encounter in her buzzing lips, in her eyes. Finally. There would be no question of Kester leaving – leaving her, leaving their research. Out of the tube they ran again, all the way to Dee's door.
Chapter 3
It was quiet in Lady's living room. Cherry sat in the middle of the floral couch. She was slight in build, but it sagged anyway. It had seen so much action over the years, so many buttocks, clothed and bare, that it had given up on supporting weight or springing back in any meaningful way. The antique clock in the centre of the mantelpiece was ticking loudly.
Lady was on her way. Cherry could hear her hollering at seekers through the building. She approached like a school marm with a purpose, chastising here and laughing there, changing swiftly between aspects as she marched through the long corridors.
This place hadn't always been Lady's quarters. It used to be a small children's ward, annexed to the main hospital, but she had now taken it over as the base for her business. In the long hall that ran through the annex some of the bright cartoon paintings still survived, but not here in Lady's sitting room. It was more like the sitting room of a real house. It sat right down the end of the corridor, holding her at arm's length from the rest of the building. 'Lady's rooms' they called them, this collection of small living spaces. Cherry had always imagined that the warden used to live here.
The clock's tick became less and less dominant as Lady drew closer. Soon the laughing and chiding stopped and all that was left to hear was Lady's heels clicking on the linoleum tiles. It reminded Cherry always of her brief time at school, of the sound of grownups walking in the corridors while lessons were on. The sound peeled years off Cherry's age as it drew nearer: twenty-two, twenty-one, twenty…by the time Lady reached the door, Cherry was a twelve year old girl again.
Lady didn't open doors like anyone else. She didn't just come into a room. This was a classic Lady entrance in three acts: the door burst open and she paused in the doorway for a moment; she stepped aside and glanced over her shoulder like a woman being followed; and then she closed the door tenderly, as if to make up for her brutal treatment of it moments ago. She acted as if no-one was party to this performance, ignoring Cherry as an actress ignores the audience.
She went to the window, checked who was outside, then pulled a chair out from the table and set it in front of where Cherry was seated on the couch. Placing her bottom neatly on the chair, Lady straightened her posture, crossed her legs and smoothed her pencil-skirt down along the top of her thigh, her hands meeting and clasping when they reached her kneecap. Cherry had never seen Lady stay still for very long but today she looked as if she was settling in for a long conversation.
Cherry observed Lady's clothing. At first sight she always looked well dressed, well heeled, but if you looked for long enough, the details started to offer themselves up to you – loose threads, lines where an item of clothing had been taken out or let down, dark colouration along the collars of her blouses. Lady's makeup, which was also quite striking from a distance, had an inaccuracy about it, as if over years of applying the same shapes to her mouth and eyes her standards had slipped. Cherry remembered being impressed by Lady's flawless appearance when they had first met, but then that was a long time ago and Lady was approaching her fifties now. Perhaps, Cherry thought, her makeup was still the same. Perhaps it was her face that had changed and the two no longer aligned.
'Cherry,' Lady said. A frown was hovering on her forehead, held back by her tightly-bunned hair. 'You can feel something starting?'
'I feel a bit funny,' Cherry replied after a moment.
Lady exploded up from her chair and back into movement as if Cherry had said the magic word to release her. She paced and let her hands wander around her person, into pockets and out again, up to her face, onto the backs of chairs, across the table top.
'Funny? Funny ill?'
'I guess. Not so much now, though. I just mentioned it to Marlene for something to say.'
Lady laughed a false high-pitched laugh, as if to emphasise how unfunny the situation was to her.
'Not the sort of thing I'd recommend for small-talk, Cherry. Not something to be joked about really. What do you think?'
'I do feel funny…just…I couldn't say how yet.'
Sequela Page 5
