by S. L. Grey
The parking lot is empty – Martin must still be inside. Where has the time gone? The clock in her car is faulty, she has no clue how late she is. She jumps out of the car and jogs towards the front door, sees Mr Duma, the head maintenance man, about to secure the security gate.
‘Mr Duma!’
He turns around. ‘Ja?’
She pants up next to him, and he recoils slightly. She realises she must reek of stale whisky and sweat. ‘I’m here to fetch my stepson. I think he must still be inside.’
He shrugs. ‘I’m sorry, madam, but there is no one else inside. They have all gone.’
‘But... that can’t be right. He’s not out here. Where do they hold the meetings?’
‘In the school hall, madam.’
‘Can I go look?’ Before Mr Duma has a chance to answer, she pushes past him, feet skidding over the laminate flooring as she thumps towards the hall. She shoulders the doors open, darts inside. It’s empty.
‘Martin?’ Her voice echoes through the space. ‘Martin?’ She spots something on the floor next to the base of the stage.
She races towards it. It’s a phone – an iPhone.
Hands shaking with adrenaline, she bends to pick it up, feels her legs turn to water when she recognises the Jay-Z sticker on its back.
It’s Martin’s.
Chapter 18
PENTER
After what she’s seen in Father’s study, Penter feels a nauseous turmoil she’s never experienced before. She needs to calm down or she will projectile over the carpet, which would be wasteful.
She’s not sure what she expected to find, but it wasn’t that.
She paces through the top floor of the house, past her bedroom then back again. Her skin itches as if she’s grimed with the filth of this upside world. The diseases the Ministry’s manuals describe are the least of it. It’s the smut they pump into the air, the violence they celebrate on the television, the things they do to each other on SKY. It all makes her feel heavy inside and coated in dirt. She hears the whoosh of water flowing through the pipes. The brown, abluting again. The thought of it makes her want to purge, to stand under the water of the shower for hours until she is scrubbed clean.
‘Mother?’
She turns and sees Jane, who takes her hand, leads her down the corridor. Penter covers her mouth and nose with her hand as they pass the brown’s room.
Jane pulls her into one of the few rooms with unobscured windows. ‘Look,’ she says, pointing at the glass.
Penter looks out into the precinct and sees the educator trespassing through the gate. ‘What does it want, Jane? Did you invite it here? Did... did Father ask you to contact it again?’
‘No, Mother. Shall I go and talk to it?’
As the Mother, Penter should be the one to go downstairs and oust it from the precinct, but right now she can’t deal with it. ‘Thank you, Jane. Please tell it that I am not available.’
Jane smiles. ‘Of course. Today,’ she says brightly, ‘trespassers will be corrected!’
Penter watches as Jane exits the room, listens to her light footfalls, then makes her way down into the kitchen. Danish is there, packing up the appliances and the other props. When his back is turned, she removes a mimeograph of Father from its frame and slips it up her sleeve. Why? He is a Player with warped predilections, baser even than a brown, but for some reason she wants to keep this picture, as if it will remind her of the time before she saw his... collection.
She steps into the hallway. She can hear Jane conversing with the woman, but cannot make out the words. She will give Jane a primo recommendation.
‘Danish,’ she calls. He scuttles towards her. ‘Wait for the brown to leave and then lock the gates. Ask Jane to meet me in the garden.’
Danish nods, shivers. His hands are trembling, his eyes are dull in his skull. After he has completed his duties here, he will be sent straight to the Terminal Ward for recycling, although Penter cannot imagine that he’d have any viable parts.
She walks outside, pauses next to the swimming pool. There is a depreciated thing floating in the water, its belly bloated and white, its eyes opaque. She sighs. All the life up here that is left to rot away in the sun. She picks up a stick, drags the creature to the edge, scoops it out with her hand. She places it in the grass, watches as an army of ants quickly surrounds it. She enjoys watching them work together in the kitchen and in the garden. Nothing distracts them from their duty.
And nothing must distract her.
Jane is already in the garden when she arrives, playing with another of the pets that Danish has scouted for her, a black thing with too many legs that’s running over and through her fingers. Each time it tries to skitter away, Jane catches it in her cupped hands. She does not seem to tire of the game.
‘Will you miss the upside, Jane?’
‘No, Mother,’ Jane says.
‘Not even the sun?’
‘No. Not even the motherfucking sun.’
‘What about your chum? That educator? Will you miss her?’
‘Oh, her. No.’ Jane laughs, almost like a real brown. Jane does not incite the same gut-turning emotions in her as Father does – did – but Penter’s still pleased that Jane holds so little regard for the educator. ‘She said that Ryan was dangerous. That he wanted to touch me.’
Penter laughs with her, feeling lighter. So that was all it was. ‘She thought we didn’t know?’
Jane smiles at her and clenches her fist, squishing the pet between her fingers. ‘I told her that today is forespecial and that trespassers will be corrected.’
‘Goody good,’ Penter answers, although her levity is strained by nerves. She herself has trespassed inside Father’s study. She doesn’t know if she’s doing the right thing; what the right thing is.
She wonders how Jane will evaluate her. ‘Jane, do you think I was a good Mother?’
‘Yes. You were primo.’
‘Should I have shown more... love?’ She watches Jane’s expression. Does she even know about love?
Jane smiles as she drops the depreciated pet onto the ground, touches her hand. ‘No, Mother. That would be obtuse. Laters.’
Penter watches as Jane slips back through the garden and into the house, leaving her alone with her karking thoughts.
Penter spends a moment saying goodbye to the garden. She feels lucky not to have had to leave the precinct. She may not be delicate, but she is pleased she didn’t have to see first-hand how the browns deface the surface of their world; the pictures of the unsightly mess on TV are bad enough. She looks up at the sun for one last time; it makes her eyes water.
She picks a handful of ready beans. She’ll petition the Ministry and Management to let her grow a tame bean plant in her Apartment. She has done well. She has been a good Mother, a good home-maker, and they will credit her for this.
They would also credit her if she told them that Father is collecting upside artefacts for his personal use.
Father is a Player after all. After what she has seen, there is no doubt. How can such a scenic man have such unnatural preferences?
She takes the mimeograph out of her sleeve, traces the shape of his face with her finger. She tries the words in her head, the only safe place to do so. I love you, Father.
But first, she thinks, watching Ryan move the ladder to clean the top-floor windows, there is one piece of unfinished business that she and Father must conclude together.
Chapter 19
RYAN
Ryan’s up a ladder again, this time cleaning windows that are opaque with red soil and concrete dust. From this vantage point he watched Danish take Jane out in the car at lunchtime. He hoped he’d come back and take Mother out somewhere too, but when he returned half an hour later, Jane was still with him.
He has to wait until they are all away from the house before he can go and explore upstairs, but meanwhile he can case the upper rooms as he washes the windows. Up to now, he’s seen nothing remarkable, just vacant rooms, their f
itted carpets stripped back and rolled to the side, the once-white lacquer paint on the built-in cupboards yellow with age, nothing on the walls but outlines of departed picture frames, peeled pockmarks where posters were once hung.
Now he’s hauled the ladder around to the back of the house. He turns away, dunks the sponge into the soapy bucket, sluices it onto the pane. Making things clean, repairing loose ends, has always been calming to him. He rubs away the dirt, causing the glass to squeak and shine. He thinks of Tess, her sad little hideout in the bushes. He thinks of Alice and Karin, growing out of his reach.
He rubs at the window until he can see inside. Again there’s nothing in it, but unlike the other rooms this one is carpeted with an expanse of new, earth-brown plush and the walls are painted dove grey.
When he goes down the ladder with the bucket, he automatically checks for Jane, but she’s either inside or out of sight. He shifts the ladder to the next window and brings up the loppers and the saw to hack back the gnarled wattle boughs that obscure it. He makes sure the ladder’s stable and harnesses himself to it, stretching a little too much to get at the branches. He’s done this enough to know how far is too far, he figures, but when a pigeon flaps out in front of him and the ladder almost tips, he has to grasp at the downpipe to keep from falling and cuts his right palm again.
The sharp pain in his palm clears his head, and he goes down to the garden tap to rinse his hand. The cut’s not too deep this time; he blots it on his jeans and it soon stops bleeding. He prepares a fresh bucket of soapy water for the next window, scanning the garden for Jane as he climbs up again.
This window looks into a study, Ryan sees as he gradually clears the grime. It’s dark inside, with a heavy wooden desk laden with neat piles of papers and old-fashioned ledgers in leather bindings, an olive-green rotary-dial telephone and a rolodex. There are two straight-backed wooden chairs on the brown carpet and, as Ryan rubs, he can make out a grey steel filing cabinet against one wall, a calendar, a cork pinboard with lists of numbers... Hang on...
Ryan rubs too hurriedly, smudging the clean glass again with the sediment from the filthy section. He dunks and rinses the sponge again, wipes. Yes, next to the pinboard is a series of pictures... photos...
Ryan remembers vomiting into the waste bin in Sybil Fontein’s office.
They can’t be, his mind objects, but Ryan knows they’re the same pictures as Duvenhage’s. He can see the shape of the children laid out on their gurneys. It’s not so much the pastel colours of their skin – pale blues and purples and pinks and greys – it’s those dark lines scrawled on the bodies that convince him. They have to be the same pictures.
What the hell are they doing hanging on the wall in this house?
He hurries down the ladder, hoping this time that the girl’s not watching him. He washes his hands and arms under the garden tap with a good squeeze of washing-up liquid. He heads to his room, piles his few belongings into his backpack.
He should just go, he knows. Now. Don’t ask questions. Isn’t what he’s seen proof enough that Duvenhage has something to do with these people? That it’s some elaborate trap?
Evidently it’s not enough, because now he’s creeping through the lounge, expecting to find Jane hiding somewhere. But there’s nothing, nobody... The house is dead quiet. This deep into it, he can’t even hear birdsong from outside. The world is muffled.
Up the stairs, also carpeted in earth brown, that same smell of must and soil pervading everything. Instead of up, he feels like he’s going into a cave. The landing has no lights on and all the doors are closed. The passageway is like a dark tunnel. The thick carpet absorbs the sound of his footsteps. The loudest sound is his breath.
Ryan gets to the rooms on the south side. There are signs up on each of the doors in this row. Heed the notices, she said.
‘No admittance to unauthorised personnel. Trespassers will be corrected.’
Ryan maps the windows he’s just cleaned. Which door will lead to the study?
He tries the door on the far right.
Good choice.
The dark contents of the study seem to flinch away from the yellow afternoon sunlight coming through the window, as if someone has just shone a floodlight into a night creature’s burrow. A flurry of dust motes rides the beam of sunlight as Ryan peers in and then enters, closing the door quietly behind him.
He goes straight to the gallery of bodies on the wall. He knew it, but the confirmation still kicks him in the gut. These are the same fucking photos. Ryan can’t help scanning them again, although what he should do is turn and go. Printed out like this the children look so much more like children, and so much more vulnerable, their nakedness much more vivid.
The churning in Ryan’s gut is compounded by the fact that this family has something to do with Duvenhage. It can’t be a coincidence. They must have lured him here deliberately somehow. But why haven’t they done anything yet? They’ve let him come and go as he pleased, they’ve let him leave to get food at the shops. He could have escaped any time he liked. What sort of game are they playing?
The neat header above the gallery of portraits reads ‘Edification Hub 1:307:561/h Exemplar Viability Assessment Mark-Up’. That’s something like the label of the directory on Duvenhage’s disk. The children’s skin is uniformly pale, but on the high-definition prints he can see the detail on their bodies, the sort of bruises and scars and minor wounds that kids get. Some of them still have small dressings or healed scars on their faces. The children lie with their eyes closed, in a deep sleep.
Ryan can’t bring himself to believe they’re not asleep.
And here, half obscured by a list of figures, is a portrait of a black-haired girl wearing the Crossley uniform, and fuck, she’s got pale grey eyes and high cheekbones. It’s Jane. There’s no doubt about it, Jane is looking back at him, twisting his gut with her eyes just like the real girl does.
Ryan shifts out of the light from the window and crouches to look closer at the photo. Jane’s eyebrows are straw pale. The black hair must be a dye job or a wig. Why? It covers her ears, and there may be a bandage pressing the lower lobes to her head. Maybe. He can’t make out that much detail in the postcard-sized photo, but there’s something there under her ears. What have they done to her? What are they doing to all these kids?
Moving across to the desk, Ryan grabs the first leather-covered ledger, but it’s just filled in with hand-written numbers. There’s a blue-card folder placed squarely to one side of the pristine desk blotter. It’s marked ‘Encounters Pilot: Crossley College, Node 2:34:731/s’. He opens it, scans a list of names and numbers he can’t make sense of.
He flips the page, there’s a letter beneath.
Headmaster _KENNETH DUVENHAGE_,
It is with pleasure that we confirm our transfer arrangements for the pilot exercise of the Encounters scouting programme which you have kindly agreed to allow us to run at your Institution. In payment for the lease of _CROSSLEY COLLEGE_ premises and access to _TWELVE (12)_ selected learners for purposes of assessment for donor viability or operational aptitude, we confirm payment of 67% balance of _ZAR 1,892,146.72_ towards _BSA_ account number _564-324-099_ on period pay run date stipulated in Ministry of Energy Contractors’ Guidelines section 16.3.7.
We thank you for facilitating the assimilation of the pilot project’s Viability Scout _JANE SMITH_ into your Institution. The pilot has been a great success and has identified prime candidates and we look forward to rolling out the project in several Institutions in the node in the periods to come. The Ministry of Upside Relations has reissued its Codes of Engagement, which are enclosed herewith.
Yours in continued respect and cooperation,
Varder Batiss,
Senior Liaison, Ministry of Upside Relations
Whatever this means, the massive amount of money changing hands catches Ryan’s eye. Duvenhage is in on something even more crooked than kiddie porn. It all makes a twisted sort of sense. He can’t shake the feeling th
at he should make Duvenhage pay, but he’s got to come up with a better plan than a petty blackmail scheme. If only he had more of a criminal mind.
And what is this about Jane? What does ‘Viability Scout’ mean? Is it a foreign-exchange programme for Girl Guides or something? If Jane is a Girl Guide, it’d be just another reason for the brats at Crossley to shun her. The poor girl is most definitely not being assimilated properly.
‘Assessment for donor viability’ for a shitload of money? What does it mean? ‘Rolling out the project in several Institutions’? Is it some sort of trafficking ring? And would child traffickers keep such careful written records? Wouldn’t they want to cover their tracks? Ryan can’t make sense of it. Then again, he supposes, the Nazis left behind a huge paper trail, didn’t they?
Whatever it is, there’s something not right going on here, but who can he tell? Who would believe him? Who would be able to do anything about it? He’s not about to go to the cops about this. They’d just look at him blankly, then arrest him for whatever Tess’s father thinks he did to her. Persecuted for showing a girl some tenderness; it’s ironic.
Ziggy? He’s a lawyer in some NGO, isn’t he? He deals with stuff like this, doesn’t he? Maybe that’s his best bet. He can’t just leave things like this. He’s got to help these kids, expose this thing.
He uses his phone to take a photo of the letter and of the lists on the pinboard and of the photo collection. Then he takes one for himself of the picture of Jane with her black hair.
He types out a message to Ziggy.
Come to think of it, that library volunteer woman was here the other day with Jane. Could she be in on it? What the fuck was her name? Oh, yes... Tara something. He remembers because it’s the name of that psychiatric hospital and he thought she could probably fit in well there.
