Vurt

by Jeff Noon

  ‘Is that you, Mister Scribble?’ her tinkling voice asked.

  ‘Get lost, kid!’ was my response.

  ‘Mister Scribble, that’s not fair,’ she answered back.

  Twinkle was a blue-eyed sweet kid of ten, with a patchwork bob of hair, as blonde as the day was doomed. I loved her dearly except that she was a total pain, and a bit of a nutflake.

  ‘What’s under the blanket, Mister Scribble?’

  ‘Kid, fuck off,’ said Mandy.

  But the kid was hot: ‘It’s that alien from space, isn’t it?’ she asked.

  Twinkle lived on the first floor, the child of a three parent family; man, woman, hermaphrodite.

  ‘It’s just Bridget under here,’ I offered. ‘We can’t wake her up.’

  ‘No way. I saw you kicking Brid down just before. You’ve got an illegal alien.’

  ‘No we haven’t,’ said Mandy.

  ‘I’ve seen him before. I’ve seen you carrying him around. The whole place knows.’

  ‘Listen, Twinkle…’

  ‘Leave her, Scribb,’ said Mandy. ‘Let’s get it loaded up.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind an alien of my own,’ Twinkle continued. And then, the dreaded question; ‘Can I be in your gang? Can I, Mister Scribble? Can I be a junior Stash Rider?’

  She was always after this. ‘No you bloody can’t!’ I answered. ‘Now get out of here!’

  Twinkle looked at me for a couple of seconds, and then took a slow, toe-scuffing walk back down the corridor, towards the door of her flat.

  First off the Beetle drove us over to Chorlton, where we checked out the Vurt-U-Want for signs of Seb. The manager, a paper-thin young wisp of a girl, told us that Sebastian hadn’t turned up for work that morning, and that, as of now, he was off the payroll anyway, for bringing the cops down on them, and that Vurt-U-Want was a peace-loving company, and that kind of employee just didn’t fit in with their current business vision. She gave us his address from the employee file, and we drove the van out there, West Didsbury, only to find that Seb wasn’t in, and that he hadn’t be home since last night. The pale and spotted youth that answered the door told us that he didn’t have a clue where Seb was.

  Now we were heading down the Princess Road, towards Bottletown and Tristan, away from the bad dream of Murdoch and the cops. It wasn’t that bad, maybe, not to my mind; just a dumb cop out on a limb, looking for the easy pickings. Beetle thought otherwise. ‘That Murdoch bitch will be back, no kidding,’ he called from the front seat. ‘She’s got that look, that hunger. Believe me. You ever been down the Bottle, Mandy?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’ll love it. It’s real scary—’

  ‘Beetle, you’re a twat,’ Bridget announced.

  ‘That’s life,’ he answered.

  ‘I heard you last night.’

  ‘And here’s me trying to keep it quiet. It would have been worse, otherwise.’

  Brid threw Mandy a bullet stare.

  ‘That girl can sing. Real good,’ said Beetle.

  I thought Brid was going to tear Mandy’s eyes out then, except that the van was snaking like a rocket in a bad patch of space, and the Bee was driving like a maniac. He made a deliberate swerve towards some old pedhead with a walking frame. That old woman screamed. Beetle missed her by a Jammy whisker and then made an ultra-left onto Princess Road.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Bee!’ snarled Brid, from the floor.

  We all got back in place and Mandy hid her face behind the latest copy of Game Cat. She was on some kind of crash course in home study, no doubt trying to get within loving distance of Beetle. No chance, baby. He’s a closed up shop. Find that out, and soon. Some things you just can’t say in the back of a crowded-up box of rust on wheels, speeding down towards Bottletown.

  ‘I’m looking at you,’ said Brid, her dark eyes brooding on Mandy.

  Mandy ignored her, face hid behind the mag. ‘We going down the Bottle, Bee?’ she asked.

  ‘That’s right, babes. Straight down the Bottle.’

  ‘We’re going to visit Tristan?’

  ‘We are.’

  ‘After English Voodoo?’ Mandy was playing on all the information she had over Bridget.

  ‘That’s right, babes.’

  ‘I found out about Icarus Wing,’ said Mandy, proud as a pimp.

  ‘This is my van, bitch.’ The Brid spat, once, and then carried on; ‘Get the fuck out!’

  ‘Pardon me,’ replied Mandy, lowering the Game Cat, ‘but the vehicle is moving at quite a pace.’

  ‘I know what you’re thinking.’

  Mandy looked nervous, just for a moment. Her eyes flicked over to the Beetle, and back to Brid. Brid had her best smoky stare on. ‘It’s good you know, then,’ said Mandy, braving the stare. ‘Beetle feels the same.’ The Beetle said nothing. New girl had everything to learn about the man. ‘Maybe now you’ll leave us alone.’ A groove of pain appeared across Mandy’s brow. That’s how it started. Beads of sweat running down her face. Her mouth tightened. ‘Beetle!’ Her voice was feeling it too. Christ! Brid was doing the shadow-fuck! Mandy was holding her hands to her head, her face creased up with the pain. ‘Beetle!!! What’s she doing?! Help me!!!!’

  ‘Brid!’ I shouted. ‘Leave her alone!’ Did no good.

  ‘Beetle!!!’ Beetle didn’t even look round to see the action. Maybe he knew just how far Bridget would go, before deciding that the message was home. Maybe.

  ‘Get the fuck off! Fucking shadowbitch!!!’

  Bridget was smiling. ‘You know what they say, new girl. Pure is poor—’

  Mandy went for her, claws out, tripping over the Thing, who was still too feather-drunk to care. The two women ended up in a mess on the floor, and the Thing was joining in anyway, tentacles waving; no doubt adding it to the whatever Vurt dream he was still revelling in.

  And I was just watching the mess, thinking, why is life like this? Why the fuck is life like this?

  Beetle poured the van into the Moss Lane East.

  Brid and Mandy rolled off the Thing, and into a corner clinch. I couldn’t say a thing, but the Beetle was on hand; ‘Quit the fucking. We’re here.’

  Indeed we were. Beetle swung the van into a parking space marked NO GO. Jammer didn’t care any more. The van jolted to a vicious halt, sending Mandy and Brid back into the embraces of the Thing. The six tentacles wrapped themselves around Bridget. It was a loving embrace. Mandy scrambled away from the mess, breathing hard. ‘Fuck that! Fuck it! I just don’t need that! Okay!’

  The Beetle turned back to look at the women. ‘My bed is warm and wide,’ he said, ‘and life is short. Is that clear?’

  ‘Clear,’ said Mandy.

  Brid said nothing. Her eyes were closing to the pain. She was moving deeper into the Thing’s enveloping body, gathering comfort from the deep shadows there.

  Beetle twisted further round, to look me sideways in the eye. ‘Let’s go, Scribble.’ Then he saw something in my eyes. ‘You scared?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You should be. Pures don’t go down the Bottle.’

  ‘I’m waiting. Let’s go.’

  ‘No options. Know what I mean, Scribb?’

  Sure. Sometimes you just get no options. Even when you’re as pure as the rain, and your life is just a wet kiss on glass. And the Thing was speaking to me. ‘Xhasy! Xha, xha! Xhasy, xha!’ Don’t leave me here, alone. Something like that.

  ‘We can’t take the Thing,’ I said. ‘Too dangerous. We need him too much. One of us will have to stay.’

  ‘That’s right, Scribb. That’s why you’re staying here?’

  ‘Beetle!’

  ‘No options.’

  ‘It’s my trip, Bee. I know what we’re after.’

  ‘And I know this place. Your battle’s to come, Scribb.’

  Mandy opened the back doors. ‘Let’s do it, Bee!’

  Beetle turned back to Bridget. She was lying in the arms of the alien. ‘You got anything to say to me, Brid?’ His voice had some kind of
feeling in it. Tenderness. Just a trace. Bridget lifting her sleepy head slightly, from the arms of the Thing.

  ‘It’s your game, Beetle,’ her voice was shadow-deep. And then I got it. She wasn’t talking, she was just thinking! I’d picked up the path between them.

  The Beetle answered in a whisper. ‘That’s right. My game.’

  Beetle got out of the van, and went round to the back doors, where Mandy was waiting for him. He leaned into the van, to talk to me. ‘You look after things this side,’ he said. Then he lowered his voice some. ‘I’m doing this for you, Scribble. Remember?’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘And for Desdemona…’

  I remember.

  GAME CAT

  EXCHANGE MECHANISMS. Sometimes we lose precious things. Friends and colleagues, fellow travellers in the Vurt, sometimes we lose them; even lovers we sometimes lose. And get bad things in exchange; aliens, objects, snakes, and sometimes even death. Things we don’t want. This is part of the deal, part of the game deal; all things, in all worlds, must be kept in balance. Kittlings often ask, who decides on the swappings? Now then, some say it’s all accidental; that some poor Vurt thing finds himself too close to a door, at too crucial a time, just when something real is being lost. Whoosh! Swap time! Others say that some kind of overseer is working the MECHANISMS OF EXCHANGE, deciding the fate of innocents. The Cat can only tease at this, because of the big secrets involved, and because of the levels between you, the reader, and me, the Game Cat. Hey, listen; I’ve struggled to get where I am today; why should I give you the easy route? Get working, kittlings! Reach up higher. Work the Vurt.

  Just remember Hobart’s rule; R = V ± H, where H is Hobart’s constant. In the common tongue; any given worth of reality can only be swapped for the equivalent worth of Vurtuality, plus or minus 0.267125 of the original worth. Yes my kittlings, it’s not about weight or volume or surface area. It’s about worth. How much the lost ones count, in the grand scheme of things. You can only swap back those that add up to something, within Hobart’s constant. Like for like, give or take 0.267125.

  We have prostrated ourselves at the feet of goddess Vurt, and we must accept the sacrifice. You’ll want them back of course, your lost and lonely ones. You’ll cry out for them, all through the dark and empty nights. Swapback can be made, but the way is full of knives, glued-up doors, pathways of glass. Only the strong can make it happen. Listen up. Be careful. Be very, very careful. You have been warned.

  This comes from the heart.

  DOWN THE BOTTLE

  The Beetle and Mandy, walking on a path of glass.

  The noise of a window cracking in the afternoon.

  A spectrum of colours radiating out from the sun, as it flared above the high-rises. The light refracting through moisture suspended in the air.

  The shimmering air.

  A million pieces of the sun shining on the walkways.

  Beetle and Mandy disappearing into the rainbow mirage.

  I followed them as best I could, moving up to the front seat for a better look. From every direction the crystal sharp segments of smashed up wine bottles, and beer bottles, and gin bottles, caught and magnified every stray beam of Manchester light. The whole of Bottletown, from the shopping centre to the fortress flats, shone and glittered like a broken mirror of the brightest star. Such is beauty, in the midst of the city of tears. In Bottletown even our tears flicker like jewels.

  I knew that the Beetle had the gift of seeing beauty in ugliness. It’s just that I’m more used to ugliness than he is, seeing it every day in cruel mirrors, and in the mirrors of women’s eyes.

  Bottletown had only been around for ten years or so. Some kind of urban dream. Pretty soon the wholesome families moved out and the young and the listless moved in, and then the blacks and the robo-crusties and the shadowgoths and the students. Pretty soon the students moved out, sick to the back of mummy and daddy’s car with too much burglary, too much mugging. Then the blacks moved out, leaving the place to the non-pure—hybrids only need apply. About a year later the council opened a pair of bottle banks on the outskirts of the town, one for white glass, one for green. The nice people from the outlying districts would come there, just to the edge of dirtiness, in order to drop their evidence of excessive alcohol intake. The council stopped emptying the bottle banks, and anybody walking there had to sink into a bed of pain, just to get near the good times.

  When the banks were full, and overflowing, still they came, breaking bottles on the pavements and the stairs and the landings. This is how the world fills up. Shard by shard, jag by jag, until the whole place is some kind of glitter palace, sharp and painful to the touch.

  On one of the nearby walls someone had scrawled the words, pure is poor, but I was watching Beetle and Mandy rise above all that, walking the stairwells one by one, heading for the fourth floor. They would vanish from sight, and then come back into view, as they reached each landing. It was a rhythmic picture, and I was lulled by it. I saw them for a moment, just before they entered the fourth staircase, then they were gone, and my eyes jerked up to the next landing, waiting for them.

  Waiting.

  Waiting.

  Waiting for them to reappear.

  Minutes passed with no sign. And then Mandy was running along the fourth corridor, some stranger chasing her.

  I was out of the van in seconds. Glass cutting into my feet, through my trainers, as I raced towards the ground floor entrance. Lift wasn’t working, so what’s new? I took the stairs three at a time. I could already hear Mandy’s cries, even from down there, that low, and I didn’t have a weapon, no gun, no knife, just these two weak arms, these legs, pounding the stairs.

  Second landing.

  Racing upwards.

  Towards the noise.

  Falling onto the third landing, out of breath, sweat pouring off me. Get up! Get up, dumbfuck! Keep going!

  Next stairs. I could hear the Beetle’s voice now, calling out in defiance, and all the light draining from the day, as my eyes filled with sweat and the blood made a fast pulse all through my veins. I was running through the feelings, struggling to find courage, and my left ankle was throbbing with a piercing ache. Don’t start on me now, old wound.

  There was a fight going on, just beyond the stairwell, and I managed to pull myself back, holding onto fear.

  Crack! My body hitting the liftshaft, pressing itself into the shadows there.

  I glanced around the corner, taking it all in. The Beetle was down. He was down on the floor, his arms clutched around his head. Three men were laying into him with kicks to the head, the chest, and the back. The men had that death warmed-up look so popular with the younger robogoth; all plastic bones shining proudly through tight, pale skins. A woman was overseeing the attack. She had the smoke coming off her, dark swirls of mist rising from her skin, just like Bridget when she was roused. Shadowgoth! Mandy’s voice was echoing down the walkway, all the curses of the young and strong. Then she came into my field of vision, being dragged along by another two robogoths. She was digging her nails into their flesh. Did no good; that roboflesh was long dead to feeling. One too many live bootleg Vurts of the Shadow Cure, I guess. The woman had black webs over her eyes and she was chanting a black litany—Pure is poor! Kill the pure! Mandy screamed in pain as the goths flung her against a wall, and held her tight there. The shadowgoth came up close to Mandy’s face. I guess Mandy was cruising for another shadow-fuck because the first thing she did was spit a big glob of sputum straight into the shadowgoth’s face.

  The Beetle and Mandy were out there, still fighting, and all I could do was cling to the shadows of a dead liftshaft, holding back the urge to run, to jerk out, except that this wasn’t theatre, this wasn’t a feather trip. Real life, like Yellow feathers, has no jerk-out facility. This is why the two are so alike.

  Even in shadows, no place to hide.

  A slithering noise at my feet.

  Shadowgoth wasn’t reacting to the spit that clung t
o her cheeks. ‘I’m getting a tingle,’ she said. For one second I thought she was referring to herself, to her feelings of power, but then I got the story.

  Shadowgoth had heard me thinking!

  Christ! Girl must have a heavy shadow, to think around corners, into the darkness.

  That slithering at my feet again, and my ankle calling to me, from the years gone by, with a hard knot of pain.

  ‘I’m getting the tingle of another pure one, my brothers,’ Shadowgoth said. ‘Pure is coming!’

  I watched them from my depths, turning towards the darkness where I buried myself. Their robo-eyes were glinting with red lights, and the shadowgoth had eyes of smoke, which were looking into my soul, seeing the fear there. The slithering was so loud now, I just had to glance down. Dreamsnake! Violet and green whisperings. Snake seeking out my wound!

  It must have been the panic and the fear that sent me spinning, into a vision of myself catching spikes between my teeth, spitting them loose, snapped in two, taking up a long-handled hammer against the mighty weight of the Nailgunners. Shit! I felt good! Done this low-level Blue some years previous, but here it was again, in my brain, and totally featherless! Vurt was called Spike Attack and usually I ended up dead from the spikes, one in each eye, but now I felt good! Well good, and I wanted to take on the world, especially some thin-bodied smokegirl and her rusting robo-nerds.

  I stepped out of the shadows, kicking at the snake the same time. It landed some four feet off, directly under the feet of one of the robogoths. He jumped back from the snake, losing his balance. Goth was falling. He looked a bad mess, on the floor.

  This was me, Scribble, hero of Spike Attack, coming to the rescue.

  Some kind of fool.

  The snake was withering from the Spiked-up strength of my kick, but somewhere between there and my reaching the fray, the Vurt dropped away and I felt a distant pain somewhere, far off, and then realised it was my cheekbone. A fist like iron had smashed into it, and then another, to the left eye, and I was down, and thinking. This isn’t me! I’m not like this! Last time I had a fight, I was thirteen years old. It was my dad doing the beating and I got hammered. I had my arms wrapped like a mother around my head. I stole a look through my fingers and thumbs, only to see the shadowgoth standing over me. She aimed a vicious beauty at my teeth. Jesus, that hurt! This was some heavy kind of real life, and it hurt like a knife blow, even more so because the glass shards were breaking my skin as I pressed myself into the floor, seeking relief.