by Tanith Lee
He made a gesture of mock panic. ‘Good God, I don’t want to lose Greena. Let’s say three and a half days, shall we? I’ll see if I can’t rustle up a special courier to get my letter to you extra fast.’
We said goodbye, and he shook my hand again and kissed both cheeks. A great pure warmth came from him, and a sort of power. I felt I had been kissed by a tiger, and wondered if I was in love.
At the Entry-exit, though it didn’t rain again, my mother and I had a long wait until the speakers broadcast the All Clear. By then the clarified sunset lay shining and flaming in six shades of red and scarlet-orange over the suburbs.
‘Look, Mum,’ I said, because shut up indoors so much I didn’t often get to see the naked sky, ‘isn’t it beautiful? It doesn’t look like that through the dome.’
But my mother had no sympathy with vistas. Only the toxins in the air, anyway, make the colours of sunset and dawn so wonderful. To enjoy them is therefore idiotic, perhaps unlawful.
My mother had, besides, been very odd ever since we left Mr Alexander’s office. I didn’t properly understand that this was due to the huge glasses of gin he’d generously given her. At first she was fierce and energetic, keyed up, heroic against the polished sights of the Centre, which she had begun to point out to me like a guide. Though she didn’t say so, she meant Once you live here. But then, when we had to wait in the exit lounge and have a lot of the rather bad coffee-drink from the machine, she sank in on herself, brooding. Her eyes became so dark, so bleak, I didn’t like to meet them. She had stopped talking at me.
Though the rain-alert was over, it was now too late for buses. There was the added problem that gangs would be coming out on the streets, looking for trouble.
The gorgeous poisoned sunset died behind the charcoal sticks of trees and pyramids and oblongs of deserted buildings and rusty railings.
Fortunately, there were quite a few police-patrols about. My mother gave them short shrift when they stopped her. Generally they let us get on. We didn’t look dangerous.
In SEK, the working street-lights were coming on and there were some ordinary people strolling or sitting on low broken walls, taking the less unhealthy air. They pop up like the rabbits used to, out of their burrows. We passed a couple of women we knew, outside the Sealtite house on the corner of our road. They asked where we’d come from. My mother said tersely we’d been at a friend’s, and stopped in till the All Clear.
Although Sealtite, as the advert says, makes secure against anything but gelignite, my mother had by now got herself into an awful sort of rigid state. She ran up the concrete to our front door, unlocked it and dived us through. We threw our clothes into the wash-bin, though they hardly needed it as we’d been in the Centre most of the day. The TV was still blaring. My mother, dragging on a skirt and nylon blouse, rushed through into the room where the children were. Immediately there was a row. During the day Jog had upset a complete giant can of powdered milk. Daisy had tried to clear it up and they had meant not to tell our mother, as if she wouldn’t notice one was missing. Daisy was only seven, and Jog was three, so it was blurted out presently. My mother hit all of them, even Angel. Daisy, who had been responsible for the house in our absence, she belted, not very much, but enough to fill our closed-in world with screaming and savage sobs.
After it was over, I made a pot of tea. We drank it black since we would have to economise on milk for the rest of the month.
The brooding phase had passed from my mother. She was all sharp jitters. She said we had to go up and look at the hens. The eggs were always registering too high lately. Could there be a leak in the sealing of the shut-yard?
So that was where we ended up, tramping through lanes of lettuce, waking the chickens who got agitated and clattered about. My mother wobbled on a ladder under the roofing with a torch. ‘I can’t see anything,’ she kept saying.
Finally she descended. She leaned on the ladder with the torch dangling, still alight, wasting the battery. She was breathless.
‘Mum… the torch is still on.’
She switched it off, put it on a post of the hen-run, and suddenly came at me. She took me by the arms and glared into my face.
‘Greena, do you understand about the Alexander man? Well, do you?’
‘Yes, Mum.’
She shook me angrily but not hard.
‘You know why you have to?’
‘Yes, Mum. I don’t mind, Mum. He’s really nice.’
Then I saw her eyes had changed again, and I faltered. I felt the earth give way beneath me. Her eyes were full of burning water. They were soft and they were frantic.
‘Listen, Greena. I was thirty last week.’
‘I know — ’
‘You shut up and listen to me. I had my medicheck. It’s no good, Greena.’
We stared at each other. It wasn’t a surprise. This happened to everyone. She’d gone longer than most. Twenty-five was the regular innings, out here.
‘I wasn’t going to tell you, not yet. I don’t have to report into the hospital for another three months. I’m getting a bit of pain, but there’s the Insurance: I can buy that really good pain-killer, the new one.’
‘Mum.’
‘Will you be quiet? I want to ask you, you know what you have to do? About the kids? They’re your sisters and your brother, you know that, don’t you?’
‘Yes. I’ll take care of them.’
‘Get him to help you. He will. He really wants you. He was dead unlucky, that Alexander. His legal girlfriend canced. Born in the Centre and everything and she pegged out at eighteen. Still, that was good for us. Putting you on the sterilisation programme when you were little, thank God I did. You see, he can’t legally sleep with another girl with pregnancy at all likely. Turns out he’s a high-deformity risk. Doesn’t look it, does he?’
‘Yes, Mum, I know about the pregnancy laws.’
She didn’t slap me or even shout at me for answering back. She seemed to accept I’d said it to reassure her I truly grasped the facts. Alexander’s predicament had anyway been guessable. Why else would he want a girl from outside?
‘Now, Angel — ’ said my mother ‘ — I want you to see to her the same, sterilisation next year when she’s five. She’s got a chance too: she could turn out very nice-looking. Daisy won’t be any use to herself, and the boy won’t. But you see you get a decent woman in here to take care of them. No homes. Do you hear? Not for my kids.’ She sighed, and said again, ‘He’ll help you. If you play your cards right, he’ll do anything you want. He’ll cherish you, Greena.’ She let me go and said, grinning, ‘We had ten applications. I went and saw them all. He’s the youngest and the best.’
‘He’s lovely,’ I said. ‘Thanks, Mum.’
‘Well, you just see you don’t let me down.’
‘I won’t. I promise. I promise, really.’
She nodded, and drew up her face into its sure, habitual shape, and her eyes dry into their Sealtite of defiance.
‘Let’s get down now. I’d better rub some anesjel into those marks on Daisy.’
We went down and I heard my mother passing from child to child, soothing and reprimanding them as she harshly pummelled the anaesthetic jelly into their hurts.
For a moment, listening on the landing, in the clamped house-dark, I felt I loved my mother.
Then that passed off. I began to think about Mr Alexander and his clothes and the brilliance of his eyes in his tanned healthy face.
It was wonderful. He didn’t send a courier. He came out himself. He was in a small sealed armoured car like a TV alligator, but he just swung out of it and up the concrete into our house. (His bodyguard stayed negligently inside the car. He had a pistol and a mindless, attentive, lethal look.)
Mr Alexander brought me half a dozen perfect tawny roses, and a crate of food for the house, toys and TV tapes for the children, and even some gin for my mother. He presumably didn’t know yet she only had three months left, but he could probably work it out. He made a fuss of
her, and when she’d spoken her agreements into the portable machine, he kissed me on the mouth and then produced a bottle of champagne. The wine was very frothy, and the glassful I had made me feel giddy. I didn’t like it, but otherwise our celebration was a success.
I don’t know how much money he paid for me. I’d never want to ask him. Or the legal fiddles he must have gone through. He was able to do it, and that was all we needed to know, my mother, me. (She always kept the Insurance going and now, considerably swelled, the benefits will pass on to the children.)
She must have told him eventually about the hospital. I do know he saw to it personally that she had a private room and the latest in pain relief, and no termination until she was ready. He didn’t let me see her after she went in. She’d said she didn’t want it, either. She had already started to lose weight and shrivel up, the way it happens.
The children cried terribly. I thought it could never be put right, but in the end the agency he found brought us a nineteen-year-old woman who’d lost her own baby and she seemed to take to the children at once. The safe house, of course, was a bonus no one sane would care to ignore. The agency will keep an eye on things, but her levels were low, she should have at least six years. The last time I went there they all seemed happy. He doesn’t want me to go outside again.
Six months ago, he brought me officially into the Centre.
All the trees were so green and the fish and swans sparkled in and on the water, and the birds sang, and he gave me a living bird, a real live tweeting, yellow, jumping bird in a spacious, glamorous cage; I love this bird and sometimes it sings. It may only live a year, he warned me, but then I can have another.
Sometimes I go to a cubicle in the foyer of one of the historic buildings and read out announcements over the speaker. They pay me in Centre credit discs, but I hardly need any money of my own.
The two rooms that are mine on Fairgrove Avenue are marvellous. The lights go on and off when you come in or go out, and the curtains draw themselves when it gets dark, or the blinds come down when it’s too bright. The shower room always smells fresh, like a summer glade is supposed to, and perhaps once did. I see him four, five or six times every week, and we go to dinner and to films, and he’s always bringing me real flowers and chocolates and fruit and honey. He even buys me books to read. Some days, I learn new words from the dictionary.
When he made love to me for the first time, it was a strange experience, but he was very gentle. It seemed to me I might come to like it very much, (and I was right), although in a way, it still seems rather an embarrassing thing to do.
That first night, after, he held me in his arms, and I enjoyed this. No one had ever held me caringly, protectingly, like that, ever before. He told me, too, about the girl who canced. He seemed deeply distressed, as if no one ever dies that way, but then, in Centres, under domes, death isn’t ever certain.
All my mother tried to get was time, and when that ran out, control of pain and a secure exit. But my darling seems to think that his girl had wanted much, much more, and that I should want more too. And in a way that scares me, because I may not even live to be twenty, and then he’ll break his heart again. But then again he’ll probably find someone else. And maybe I’ll be strong like my mother. I hope so. I want to keep my promise about the children. If I can get Angel settled, she can carry on after me. But I’ll need ten or eleven years for that.
Something funny happened yesterday. He said, he would bring me a toy tomorrow — today. Yes, a toy, though I’m a woman, and his lover. I never had a toy. I love my bird best. I love him, too.
The most peculiar thing is, though, that I miss my mother. I keep on remembering what she said to me, her blows and injunctions. Going shopping with her, or to the cinema; how, when her teeth were always breaking, she got into such a rage.
I remember mistily when I was small, the endless days of weather Warnings when she, too, was trapped in the house, my fellow prisoner, and how the rain would start to pour down, horrible, sinister torrents that frightened me, although then I didn’t know why. All the poisons and the radioactivity that have accumulated and go on gathering on everything in an unseen glittering, and which the sky somehow collects and which the rain washes down from the sky in a deluge. The edited pay-TV seldom reports the accidents and oversights which continually cause this. Sometimes an announcement would come on and tell everyone just to get indoors off the street, and no reason given, and no rain or wind even. The police cars would go about the roads sounding their sirens, and then they too would slink into holes to hide. But next day, usually there was the All Clear.
In the Centre, TV isn’t edited. I was curious to see how they talked about the leaks and pollutions, here. Actually they don’t seem to mention them at all. It can’t be very important, underdome.
But I do keep remembering one morning, that morning of a colossal rain, when I was six or seven. I was trying to look out at the forbidden world, with my nose pressed to the Sealtite. All I could see through the distorting material was a wavering leaden rush of liquid. And then I saw something so alien I let out a squeal.
‘What is it?’ my mother demanded. She had been washing the breakfast dishes in half the morning ration of domestic filtered water, clashing the plates bad-temperedly. ‘Come on, Greena, don’t just make silly noises.’
I pointed at the Sealtite. My mother came to see.
Together we looked through the fall of rain, to where a tiny girl, only about a year old, was standing — out on the street. No knowing how she got there — strayed from some squat, most likely. She wore a pair of little blue shorts and nothing else, and she clutched a square of ancient blanket that was her doll. Even through the sealed pane and the rainfall you could see she was bawling and crying in terror.
‘Jesus Christ and Mary the Mother,’ said my own mother on a breath. Her face was scoured white as our sink. But her eyes were like blazing fires, hot enough to quench the rain.
And next second she was thrusting me into the TV room, locking me in, shouting, Stay there! Don’t you move or I’ll murder you!
Then I heard both our front doors being opened. Shut. When they opened again and shut again, I heard a high-pitched infantile roaring. The roar got louder and possessed the house. Then it fell quiet. I realised my mother had flown out into the weather and grabbed the lost child and brought her under shelter.
Of course, it was no use. When my mother carried her to the emergency unit next day, after the All Clear, the child was dying. She was so tiny. She held her blanket to the end and scorned my mother, the nurse, the kindly needle of oblivion. Only the blanket was her friend. Only the blanket had stayed and suffered with her in the rain.
When she was paying for the treatment and our own decontam, the unit staff said horrible things to my mother, about her stupidity until I started to cry in humiliated fear. My mother ignored me and only faced them out like an untamed vixen, snarling with her cracked teeth.
All the way home I whined and railed at her. Why had she exposed us to those wicked people with their poking instruments and boiling showers, the hurt and rancour, the downpour of words? (I was jealous too, I realise now, of that intruding poisonous child. I’d been till then the only one in our house.)
Go up to bed! shouted my mother. I wouldn’t.
At last she turned on me and thrashed me with the plastic belt. Violent, it felt as if she thrashed the whole world, till in the end she made herself stop.
But now I’m here with my darling, and my lovely bird singing. I can see a corner of a green park from both my windows. And it never, never rains.
It’s funny how I miss her, my mother, so much.
ELLE EST TROIS (LA MORT)
Years of interest in the Decadent Artist seemed to have combined to produce the next story. It’s a projection of what one supposes the fin de siècle genius supposed itself to be — webbed in its own expectations, a poison-forest of the subconscious made real.
Variations of Paris haunt me
too, and that city never remade herself so potently for me as here.
The third manifestation terrified me — one of those instances where I would have loved to run away, leaving only my hands to complete the work.
Across the river, the clock of Notre Dame aux Luminères was striking seven. How deep the river, and how dark, and how many bones lying under it that the strokes of the great gilded clock upon the Gothic tower, winged with its lace-work, did not rouse. Down there, all those who had thrown themselves from the bridges, off the quays of the city: the starving, the sick and the drugged, the desperate and the insane.
Armand looked down in the water, black as the night, looked down and searched for them — and there, a pale hand waved from the flowing darkness, a drift of drowning hair, now passed under the parapet — a girl had flung herself into the river, and should he rescue her, was it morally right that he should save her from whatever horror had driven her to this?
The young man, a poet, rushed across the bridge and stared over from the other parapet. This time there was help. A lamp globe at the bridge’s far end caught the suicide as she glided out again into view. The poet, Armand, sighed with relief and a curious disappointment. The thing in the water was only a string of rags and garbage woven together by the current.
Straightening, Armand pulled his threadbare coat about him. It was spring, but the city was cold in spring. There was no stirring in its stones, or in his blood. He glanced now, with familiar depression, at the cathedral towers on the far bank of the river, the tenements of the nearer bank, towards which, returning, he was bound. Above, the stars, and here and there below a greenish lamp. So little light in the darkness.
He had not eaten in two days, but there had come to be enough money to buy cheap wine in the café on the Rue Mort. And for the other thing, purchased — was it yesterday?