Slow River

by Nicola Griffith

  “Then you’d rather not enjoy it?”

  “I’d rather not do it at all.”

  “And you’d rather not eat, too?”

  “There has to be another way! We could use a fake PIDA, a good one, to get a job. We could-”

  “We have a job.”

  “I hate it! It makes me feel ashamed, and I’m sick of being ashamed.”

  “There’s nothing to be ashamed of. You haven’t hurt anyone.”

  “I’ve hurt myself. This is my body, my-”

  “Temple, right” Spanner shook her head. “It’s not a temple, it’s a sack of meat.” She slapped herself on the thigh. “A tool made of muscle and skin and bone, to be used the same way we use any other tool.”

  “No.” Lore was horrified. “Your body isn’t just a tool like a… a screwdriver. It is you. What it does and feels makes you who you are. Don’t you see that?”

  “You are who you fuck?” Spanner’s eyes were challenging. “Then who does that make you?”

  “Someone I’m ashamed of.” And Lore understood with blinding clarity why Stella had killed herself. To be used like a receptacle, a commodity, and to know it, to be helpless before it, and then to see that helplessness reflected back at her every time her eyes met her abuser’s across the table, every time she saw herself in the mirror. There would never be any way to escape that kind of shame. She looked at Spanner, who was waiting with her eyebrows raised. “What happened? What happened to you, to make you feel you have to do this?”

  “Nothing had to happen. I’m not some pathetic victim, reacting instead of acting.” She folded her arms. “I’m simply a realist.”

  Lore stared at her, then shook her head tiredly.

  “You don’t believe me?”

  But that was not what Lore had meant by the head shake. How could she argue against someone’s reality?

  She looked at Spanner for a long time. At the hair that needed combing, the light blue eyes she had seen cry only once, at the beginning of the wrinkle on the left side of her mouth, where the muscles pulled when she laughed. She wanted to hold Spanner close, stroke her hair, tell her it was all right, she didn’t have to be a realist all the time; she, Lore, would let her dream, let her stretch and reach and try, and if she failed, then it wasn’t the end of the world.

  But Spanner’s pupils were tiny and her arms were still folded and her face was like a mummy’s: thin, drawn too tight, used up too early. She had never had the chance to play, to laugh without calculation, without looking over her shoulder. Kittens should be round.

  Lore was suddenly very, very tired. “I’m going to lie down.”

  She went into the bedroom and drew the curtains against the lights outside, The close, dark air reminded her of the tent. She felt trapped. There had to be a way out. For both of them.

  She fell asleep and dreamed of Stella, surrounded by her friends at Ratnapida, laughing, watching the net charity commercials, thumbing her PIDA into the base of.the screen and sending thousands to some aid organization Lore had never heard of. Then jetting off to some other island paradise to do the same thing. Always traveling. Running, running, but never getting away. Stella, who had escaped by dying.

  When Lore woke it was dark, and she knew how they could escape.

  * * *

  I slept for nine hours and woke up feeling stiff and sore, as though my body had tried to rearrange itself physically to fit three people inside one skin. I felt denser, more closely packed. Solid and strange. There was a message on the screen from the plant: shifts were back to normal. I had received four other calls, all aborted without leaving a message.

  The flat was stuffy. I went down to Tom’s. “I brought you a recording of the…” I was suddenly embarrassed. Scam, I thought, fake commercial, and was ashamed. I held out the disk. He took it. “This is yours, too,” I pulled the small packet of debit cards from my pocket. “We got more than I thought. There’s about five thousand here.” It was more than the share we had agreed upon, but he needed it more than me. Now it was his turn to look embarrassed, but he took the packet. “I thought Gibbon might want a walk.”

  We walked along the canal, the dog at the fullest extent of his leash. A stiff wind pushed the clouds along at a tilt and slapped water up against the banks. The air smelled of weeds and wind and Gibbon’s coat. We saw two Canada geese landing in a wide dike. Gibbon ran for them, barking and dragging me behind him, but the geese just ignored us. He wanted to run some more, so we did, feet thudding on the densely packed dirt of the towpath, mouths open.

  For a while, it seemed that I ran through the fountains with Tok, that I ran through the city streets with Spanner, that I ran on my own in an older skin. I felt as though I swam through the swirling meeting point of three rivers, each at a different temperature, each tugging me this way and that. Then it was just me, and Gibbon, and a windy afternoon. Tom was watching the net when I got back. Not the scam. Soup was heating.

  “You didn’t watch it?”

  “No. I didn’t want to see myself looking old and useless.”

  He was old, and arthritic, and lonely—but his eyes were not heavy-lidded and ancient and used up, like Spanner’s; they weren’t dull and eaten-away and dead like the kitten’s. How did he watch the net for hours and keep eyes like that?

  I wondered if he had seen the video of Chen’s kidnapping, of me; what he might do if he had recognized me and seen the reward posted; whether he would turn me in… and if I would blame him if he did. A quarter of a million would change his life.

  He looked at me a long time when I handed him Gibbon’s leash. I met his eyes. Not like Spanner’s at all. I patted Gibbon. “The walk was a good idea,” I said.

  I got to the plant a little before six. Magyar was waiting at the gates. Her relief was obvious.

  “Was it you who called and hung up? Thought I wouldn’t show?” It had occurred to me while I dressed, sweating, remembering the look on Tom’s face, my own doubts. I didn’t want to tempt friends, or those who might become friends. I could have run, disappeared, just another tiny rodent in the undergrowth of the city… But if I ran I would be alone again, never knowing who I was when I bent to look at my reflection.

  Being near Magyar made me feel known and understood.

  We walked into the locker room very close but not quite touching. We caught a few slantwise glances, coming in together, and Kinnis even slapped me on the back, grinning hugely.

  I wondered why I wasn’t telling them that their obvious assumption was wrong. I wondered why Magyar wasn’t, either.

  “Later,” Magyar said, “at the break.”

  We went our separate ways.

  All through the first half of the shift, Cel kept watching me, raising her eyebrow at me when I caught her gaze. Annoyingly, I kept blushing.

  Five minutes before the break Magyar came to find me. I watched her striding toward me, loosening her mask, frowning. The different lights ran across her hair, which looked very clean and soft. When her right leg moved forward, the skinny pulled taut over her left breast. The plasthene would feel warm under my hands.

  “Bird.”

  “Magyar.”

  “We need to talk.”

  “Anywhere but the breakroom. I’m beginning to feel like a trophy wife.” I just blurted it out, and she blushed, which meant I did, too, imagining what she might be thinking, and I couldn’t take my eyes off her lips, which were very red. And then of course Cel was there, raising her eyebrow at us both.

  Frowning ferociously, Magyar led me to the glass-walled office where we had faced off with Hepple. She went around the desk and sat in the comfortably upholstered chair. She was angry again. “Feels good. Want a try? No? Well, I suppose you’ve sat behind big desks a lot. You were probably used to chairs like these by the time you were seven.”

  I thought we had gone through all this rich girl—poor girl stuff yesterday. “What’s bothering you?”

  “Have you checked the police records yet?”

>   “No.” I should have. Of course I should have, but I had been sleeping, exhausted and confused.

  “I did. Or my friend did. She works in the county records office. I called her this morning, asked her to check.”

  “And?”

  “And nothing. At least not from this part of the country.”

  There was a large dry patch high up in my throat. “How about hospitals?”

  “Also nothing.”

  The dry patch was getting bigger. “I don’t understand.”

  “Nor do I, frankly.”

  I didn’t really want to ask her. “Do you believe me?”

  “I wonder if you’re telling me everything.”

  “You’ve heard the high points. There are some things I don’t want to talk about. Some of them are a matter of public record,” like the net video, “some are things only I know about.” And Spanner. “But I haven’t lied to you. Except about my name.”

  There was another chair on my side of the desk. I took it.

  “So, what do we do from here?”

  I didn’t have any suggestions. She was the one who didn’t trust me. I was tired of dancing to other people’s tunes. Somewhere below, water gushed loudly through a pipe. It was hot in the glass box.

  Eventually, she sighed and put her feet up on the desk. “You’re a van de Oest. But you won’t go back to your family because your mother abused your sisters and might have abused you. And because you think you killed someone. But there’s no record of a dead body. No body, no murder, no crime. And if your mother did abuse anyone, it’s not your fault, so why should you suffer? Why not just go back and get her arrested?”

  “She may already be arrested.” I told her about Tok and Oster, the strange appeal they had made two years ago. “But there’s more to it than that.”

  Magyar folded her arms in satisfaction. “Thought there might be.”

  “My ransom wasn’t paid for a long, long time. I thought the delay was deliberate.”

  “Thought or think?”

  “I don’t know.” Did the fact that it was Katerine and not Oster make a difference? No. “I was in that tent for weeks. The ransom demand was thirty million.” I ignored the way her pupils dilated. “They wouldn’t actually expect thirty million, of course. That’s just a negotiating tool. But they would expect about ten.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “It’s the kind of thing you learn growing up.”

  “You might.”

  I supposed it might seem odd, to grow up understanding the mechanics of abduction. “Ten million—even thirty million—means nothing to my family. Just on my own I’m worth more than that.” Talk of millions was doing what mention of my name yesterday had not. I could see the shutters start to come down in Magyar’s head. “Don’t. Damn you, Magyar, don’t go away, don’t pretend I’m not real. There’s nothing I can do about the money. It’s what I was brought up with. But I don’t have it now.”

  “You could, though.”

  “I could. But I won’t.”

  “We’ll see.” But she smiled. It was just the corner of her mouth, but she was trying.

  “At those prices, my release should have been negotiated within a week. Ten days at the most. I was in that tent six weeks. Why?”

  “Bad communications?”

  “No. They had excellent lines of communication. Think about it. Someone knew where to abduct me from. I’d been in Uruguay less than twenty-four hours, but they were ready: transport, masks, drugs. And they even knew I was allergic to subcutaneous spray injections. How?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Someone told them. And the only people who knew were family members, and those close to the family.” I gave her a minute to absorb that. “So if my family, or someone close, set the whole thing up, the question has to be: Why? The family doesn’t need money, nor does the corporation.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t money they were after.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of. Maybe they just wanted me out of the way.”

  “But why? And if it was the family, for family reasons, why the Chen kidnappings”

  “I don’t know.”

  Silence. “So you changed your name and hid.” I nodded. “Well.” She did not seem to know what to say.

  She knew I had been in danger, maybe still was. She knew I was rich but would probably never claim the money. She knew I thought I had killed a man. “Magyar, will you help me?”

  “Yes.”

  Yes. “Just like that?”

  She lifted her feet off the desk, gave me a crooked smile. “Murder, money, high intrigue. It’s just getting interesting.”

  Another silence, this time longer. “Magyar, why?”

  “Why do you think?” she asked softly.

  It was not a rhetorical question. But she had known what Kinnis and Cel and all those others had been thinking, and she hadn’t contradicted them. “Because… Damn it, Cherry, you know why.”

  “Maybe I do. But I need to hear it. I don’t think I can take any more surprises from you.” She got up, came around to my side of the desk. We stood about twelve inches from each other. The hairs on my neck and the backs of my hands tried to rise. It was like being in a strong magnetic field. I felt very exposed in my skinny.

  “I like you,” I said suddenly. Which was not quite what I had intended. “I like being near you. And I admire you. What you think matters to me.” And I had made myself vulnerable. She was the only person in the world apart from Spanner who knew who I was.

  I could see every pore in her face, the way the creases around her eyes deepened when she smiled. “Why didn’t you start trusting me a bit earlier?” She moved closer, nine inches, six.

  I could feel the heat of her body through the plasthene of my suit. Our hipbones were almost touching. I imagined the feel of her skin under my hands.

  The end-of-break Klaxon sounded. Down below there was movement as the shift came back to the troughs.

  “Shit.” I started to turn away.,

  She snagged my hand. Plasthene on plasthene. Safe and erotic. She did not seem to care about the glass walls. She moved her hand to my wrist, tugged until my arms came around her waist. She laid my palm against the small of her back, pressed it in place. My belly was an inch, half an inch, from hers. Heat swarmed up my legs, down my spine. “Is this what you want?”

  I nodded.

  “Say it.”

  “Yes. This is what I want. You are who I want.”

  What was between us swelled suddenly, and was almost tangible: ceramic and smooth, rounded as an egg.

  We stepped apart by mutual consent. Magyar did not sit behind the desk again, but perched on one corner. I hovered uncertainly by the door. “We have a lot to do,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “And I’ll have to split my time between this”—she gestured at the space between us, the possible murder, she meant—“and the sabotage.”

  “Yes.” I turned to go, got as far as touching the door handle, turned. “Magyar, were you ever loved by your family?”

  “Yes.”

  So sure. “I don’t know if I was. I know that no one else ever did. I’m not sure what love is, but I want… I want to be real.” I wasn’t sure what I was trying to say. “All the people I’ve slept with, none of them knew who I really was.” None of them had whispered my name, sent me love notes. Told me they couldn’t live without me. “I’ve never had any romance, ever. But how could I? I’ve been so many people, I never knew which ones were real. I want to find that out before you and I… before we go any further. I want to see what that’s like. Do you understand?”

  “No,” she said softly, “but I’m trying.”

  Good enough.

  Chapter 24

  The seven hours between lunch and dinner are the longest part of the day. She tries to stay fit by doing stretches and sit-ups and resistance exercises, but she does not have the strength to work out for more than thirty or forty minutes. The rest o
f the time drags. She weeps often: for herself, for Stella, for Tok. She wonders why her family has not ransomed her.

  Something is different. Both men come into the tent together. She sits at the far end of the tent while they stand at the entrance. They fill the tent, breathe all her air. She must not look scared or they will know she is no longer drugged,

  “Your family is stalling,” Crablegs says.

  Lore looks from one to the other, not sure if she should say anything.

  Fishface squats down until his hooded face is only a foot or so higher than Lore’s. “We’ve asked for thirty million,” he explains, “which isn’t much.”

  “They say ten is all they’ll give, We think maybe they don’t care whether you live or die.”

  Fishface stands. “If they don’t give us the money, we can’t give you back. You do understand that, don’t you?”

  He sounds genuinely regretful. Lore wants to reach out and pat his arm, let him know she understands that he is really trying.

  “Think about what you want to say to them, to persuade them to pay.” They leave without another word.

  Ten million. What can she say that will make them pay if they don’t want to? And why wouldn’t they want to?

  She thinks of Katerine, and Oster. Perhaps they are still competing for her.

  Then why haven’t they paid?

  When Crablegs brings the camera again, what will she say to convince her parents that she is worth thirty million?

  Lore looks inside herself and finds only a vast space. Who is she? Her father would recognize the Lore who goes with him to count fish in the bay, and talk about the silliness of their ancestors. Katerine, on the other hand, knows and cares only for the Project Deputy, the efficient young woman who designs huge systems and suavely courts the Minister for This and the Commissar of That.

  But what of the girl who would lie in Anne’s arms and swim with Sarah, the child who dreams of monsters and still sometimes gets up in the middle of the night to check the lock on her door? Who will recognize her? No one but herself. She has shared none of these things, told them to no one. She has been so alone.