You could walk through these depopulated suburbs, Dad said, as far as the M25. That was the line of interdiction. For humans, barbed wire, personnel mines, watch-towers; for dolls, the screen. The Americans had linked elements of their strategic defences (neutral particle beam space platforms) with the interdiction’s early warning system. A doll-shaped blip on radar and an NPB would score a neurotronics kill, grounding the escaping doll and leaving her in the throes of a grand mal. At night, from the top of the tower block where I lived, I would look out over the Rainham marshes and, seeing the searchlights panning the sky, imagine myself, high above the deserted city, eluding our captors and disappearing into the wild vista of England’s other shore. But none crossed the ring road of the M25.
‘We’ll get her for you, Ig,’ whispered a boy to my right. It was Myshkin. Myshkin had the knobbly, dirt-caked aspect of one of Phiz’s street urchins. He turned up his lapel to display a tiny steel badge: the winged double helix of the Human Front. ‘England for the organic,’ he said, taking from his pocket a pair of rubber gloves. Myshkin was a medicine-head.
The bell sounded; it was lunch-time. I gave myself to the current: the subterranean stream of boys and girls that poured through the narrow caverns of our school to spill into eye-splitting sunlight.
The playground—a tarmacked yard half melted in the summer heat—held a microcosm of the Soviet diaspora: the children of those economic migrants who, since the end of the last century, had turned westwards in search of food and jobs. The old nationalist hatreds—which had once set Armenian against Azerbaijani, Transylvanian against Romanian, and just about everybody against dispossessed Russia, had been submerged in a new chauvinism in which speciesism supplanted ethnicity. In the playground, human children who, before the plague, would have segregated into warring tribes, celebrated their inverted cosmopolitanism in the sun, confining the recombinant to the shadows of the bike sheds.
I crouched by a wall; my lunch, a bag of crisps. About me, a grey facade pocked with broken windows and scarred with lichen and desiccated moss drew a stone curtain across the flood-ruined Neverscape. Only a few slummy towers, like the one I lived in (like the ones we all lived in), sanctuaries against the winter’s deluge, were visible above the blinding concrete. Why wouldn’t the floods come now, and drown my shame? Rise, sea. Fill the Thames. Lap, then overlap the barriers. But the streets were as dry as a dust-filled cistern. I hated June.
I had borrowed The Adventures of Tom Sawyer from Dad’s small but uncompromising library. (‘The Battle of the Books,’ he’d say, laughing, as he clubbed to death one of my government-issue primers with the aid of a Hasek, Havel or Seifert.) The book fell open at a passage I had read again and again. Tom had arrived late at school and had been told to sit with the girls. That was okay with him. It meant he could sit next to Becky Thatcher, the new girl in town whom he secretly adored. Becky ignored him. Then he gave her a peach. Drew pictures on his slate.
Now Tom began to scrawl something on the slate, hiding the words from the girl. But she was not backward this time. She begged to see. Tom said:
‘Oh, it ain't anything.’
‘Yes it is.’
‘No it ain’t; you don’t want to see.’
‘Yes I do, indeed I do. Please let me.’
‘You’ll tell.’
‘No I won’t—deed and deed and double deed I won’t.’
‘You won’t tell anybody at all? Ever as long as you live?’
‘No I won’t tell anybody. Now let me.’
‘Oh you don’t want to see!’
‘Now that you treat me so I will see, Tom’—and she put her small hand on his, and a little scuffle ensued. Tom pretending to resist in earnest, but letting his hand slip by degrees till these words were revealed. ‘I love you.’
‘Oh, you bad thing!’ And she hit his hand a smart rap, but reddened and looked pleased nevertheless...
Why wasn’t it like that? Why wasn’t it ever like that? I savoured my self-pity. I would never grow up, but I would never be a child; never know childhood’s grace.
Myshkin came to sit beside me. ‘Look at them,’ he said. Jostled by the scampering figures of two football teams a group of Lilim walked across the playground and took asylum amongst the scooters and amphibious bikes.
They were older girls, fifth formers, their humanity spent, girls no longer, really, but simulacra, dolls. Wrapped in shadows, and wearing black, black sunglasses, they still seemed to wince at the sun. An irritability coursed through their limbs: they mussed their hair, arranged and rearranged their clothes, applied make-up with a tic-like, incipient hysteria. Muzzled, like all dolls achieving metamorphosis, some slurped at raspberry slush ices through straws; one doll, finishing her ice, and seemingly unsatisfied, removed her shades, shielded her eyes, and squinted through the convective air as if seeking life across a bloodless desert.
‘Gopnik,’ said Myshkin. ‘Slink-gang. Call themselves the Nutcracker Sweets.’ He had pulled on his rubber gloves and was tying a surgical mask to his face. ‘They’ll die soon, of course. Two or three years. They’ll burn out. Go mad. They always do. Their bodies can’t accommodate all those crazy molecular changes. Two or three years. You can spoil a lot of seed in that time...’ He drew a dog-eared magazine from his blazer. ‘My Dad has a library too,’ he said, taking Tom Sawyer from my hands. ‘He’s ... a collector.’
The magazine was called The National Health. Inside were photographs of people I had seen on TV, such as Vladimir (‘Vlad’) Constantinescu, leader of the Human Front. There were also lots of photographs of young girls in straitjackets, padded cells, and on mortuary slabs; of pathologists caught in flagrante delicto as they performed hysterectomies on the dead; of kidney dishes full of tissue, polymers and bloodied steel.
‘Medical experiments,’ said Myshkin, who smirked as if he knew I only dissembled revulsion. ‘They have to try and find a cure. Not as if it’s premortems, is it? Anyway, they’re not like us. Not self-conscious. They’re robotniks. Sets of formal rules...’ His apologia trailed off as, slack-jawed, I flipped through the glossy pages.
‘They don’t move,’ I said. ‘The pictures don’t move.’ Myshkin took back the magazine, disappointed less, I think, by my lack of candour than that I had failed to appreciate the antique beauty of photographic still life. ‘Bitches,’ he said, surveying the playground, his eyes pausing whenever they encountered a serried group of dolls. ‘They’re taking over, Ig.’ He passed a hand through the stubble of his hair. ‘My brother’s sixteen. The interdiction began when he was born. People still lived in central London then, not just in the suburbs, like us. Now there’s only a quarter million of us left. Every kid you meet these days has a doll for a sister, or a sister who’ll most likely turn into a doll.’
‘As a population gets smaller, it gets younger, I quoted.
‘Neo-Malthusian economics. Yeah. Bloody right. We’ll be outnumbered by dolls in five years. In, say, ten, fifteen years, who’ll be left? And if the plague gets outside...’ ‘Maybe it is,’ I said. ‘They say that in Manchester...’
‘The Human Front—your Dad going to vote for them?’
‘What do they care? None of their leaders live in London. My Dad says they’re just exploiting us for—’
‘Vlad’s the man, Ig. It’s the only way.’
‘Zut! You mean all that stuff about his ancestor? That’s just toffee. Anyway, dolls have Mums and Dads too. You think they’d vote HF?’
‘What we vote for don’t matter. There’s not enough of us. But sure: the Neverland’ll vote HF. Like the rest of the country. A doll is a changeling. Mums and Dads want their real daughters back.’
‘That’s superstition! That’s—’
‘Mums and Dads know that their daughters are returned only after the changeling dies. Returned in spirit! That’s what the HF wants: to give parents back their kids. To save souls!’
‘ “Sanitization”. Oh yeah. I call it murder.’
‘It’s them tha
t’s murdering us. They’re parasites, Ig.
They use us to propagate themselves. For them, we’re just vectors. If we let them carry on they'll take over the world. And when we’re gone, and they can’t replicate, they’ll die, and that’ll be the end. Of everything.’
‘They’ll find a cure,’ I said. ‘Some day. They’ll find out how it all started, and then—’
‘The only cure,’ said Myshkin, ‘is us. Me and my mates have begun work already. Up West.’
‘But it’s not allowed.’
‘Up West where the rogue dolls are. Runaways. Girls in need of a little radical surgery.’
‘You’ll be infected. You’ll bring the infection home.’
‘Don’t be wet. Anyway, I’m never going to have sex. All these kids making babies all the time. Agh—le nombril sinistre!’ Myshkin wrung his hands, the gloves emitting rubbery squeaks. ‘Sex is for robotniks and junkies. Sex is... Sex is bad news. You won’t catch me making Lilim.’
‘You've got junkie written all over you. You'll be dead before you’re twenty-one.’
‘It’s a crusade, Ig. You’ve got to make sacrifices.’
A football bounced into my lap; I returned it to the dirty-faced mêlée. The slink-gang, the mooncalfs, the misbegotten little mommas who were the Nutcracker Sweets had begun to play hopscotch in the asphalt bower of the sheds.
‘In class—what you said about Primavera...’
‘La salope—she's pretty.' Myshkin laughed, his voice breaking in mid-pitch. ‘Don’t worry. My brother’s a prefect. We’ll take care of her. After school.’ He patted the magazine under his blazer. ‘We’ll play doctors. It’ll be Psycho-Zygo. It’ll be diddly-woo!'
Corridors. Corridors. Dark highways through childhood’s ruins. Corridors threaded with boys and girls who seemed to be picking their way through an attic, vast and musty, foraging for the bric-a-brac of innocence.
Sunbeams intercepted their progress, splintering through the cracks of boarded windows; I slipped into the throng, the throb of mote-lousy air counterpointing my temple’s metronome. Beneath eaves, over rafters: no shouts, no screams, only an enervated mumbling as tongues wagged lazily, fattened by the summer heat. A pair of bluebottles, coupled in flight, fell satiated to a mildewy wainscot. A bloody-nosed boy lay blubbering on the floor. Such urban pastoral; it called for surrender, to seek no more in that attic of dreams...
All afternoon I sat behind her, heart thudding, unable to escape, so near that I could smell her piebald mane, so intoxicatingly newly washed. Primavera ignored me. I thought to touch her on the shoulder, to say Don’t cross the park, or Let me walk you home. But desire took the charity from my heart, and I thought of her in the gulag of the Dolls’ Hospitals, and me, in surgical gown and mask; I thought of straitjackets, padded cells, slabs; and the cheap schoolgirl scent of her hair seemed to mix with the smells of chloroform and ether.
Sunlight fell obliquely across the room; I breathed deep, and then deeper again. My sinuses tingled with black romance. I would have to do it. Do the medicine thing. How else did boy meet girl? How else. The alternatives were abstract; you read about them in Tom Sawyer and in history class they taught you of times before love had become indistinguishable from pornography. They meant nothing to you. You were a Never-Never Kid, sent to school only to show the outside world that there was hope, that you didn’t deserve to be abandoned, that you were worth the food and materiel dropped from the night skies. Tom and Becky? Forget.it. History? God damn it. Love? Abuse it.
Last bell. Home time. The corridors, in their eternal dampness, a counterpart to our sticky adolescent bodies, channelled the four o’clock rout onto the streets. Myshkin passed me a scalpel, and we ran through the milling schoolchildren to rendezvous with his brother in the baked mudflats of the park. A policeman—a joke policeman; one of our heroic citizens’ militia—seemed to have an intimation of our purpose, and wandered away.
We lay in wait behind a dying strip of hedgerow, shaded from the sun’s mellowing embrace, our school’s postmodern gothic (with its Oh so funny references to Victorian warehouse, workhouse and blacking factory) playing incongruous mood music—a lugubrious black mass -against the brilliant and deceptive optimism of the late afternoon sky; it was a mood that had long been my own; it clung to me as the smell of decay, of mildew, clung to my clothes, my flesh; I had grown up to its fetid sway. Ever since I had been little, school—not the visible school, the school of appearances and discipline, but a wraith-school, a school of the umbrageous heart—had inculcated in me, through the violence of the heart, that voluptuous mood, that music of wanton despair. My memories were all of strange angle shots, monstrous close-ups, distortions, blurrings, dialogue broken-tongued and inane: the bullying in the bell tower (the bell was still ringing, carrying over the housing estates, the marshes); the diagrams, stick-figures and exhortations in the boys’ toilets; our science master’s lectures on posthuman biology, the biology of master and slave; and, of late, that half-metre of yellow-black hair, those bratty ways, that promise of transcendence.
A haze-distorted column of kids began winding between the liverish pools that had resisted evaporation. The Myshkins pulled up their masks and unsheathed their scalpels. No need for a particle weapon, no need for magic dust; Primavera was still half girl, refractory, but weak. As she passed by the Myshkins broke from the bushes; Primavera’s dollfriends scattered across the park. By the time she had been bundled into the cricket pavilion, around fifteen, twenty boys and a few girls—human girls—had gate-crashed the party.
The pavilion was hot; its odour, urinous. Half naked (her blouse had been tom open and her brassiere used to tie her hands behind her back), Primavera knelt in the shadows, head bowed, crying.
We taunted her.
‘Witch!’
‘Baby killer!
‘Vrolok!’
‘Dead girl!’
‘Changeling!’
‘Robotnik!’
‘Out Patient!’
‘Sangsue!’
Bored with this sadoschlock exercise (a tired borrowing from one of Myshkin’s razzle mags), and, despite the cravenness of our law enforcers, fearful of discovery (dolls then still possessing some rights), her tormentors soon departed; all but one. I lingered, hidden behind a locker. Looking about, and seeing that we were alone, I emerged, tremblingly, to stand before her. She studied me from behind sharp metallic eyelashes, her eyes those of a run-to-ground animal, pitiful but calculating. I felt a stinging in my cheeks; I turned away; then, biting my lip with resolve, swung about to face her. ‘Witch,’ I said, voice hoarse with its confession of love. I aimed a kick into her side. The adored one moaned and keeled over.
I sat on my haunches and put a hand to her cheek. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘You b-bastard. You fucking boy-slime.’
Big tears rolled over my fingers. Cool and inhuman, they were; and her skin—like a compound of PVC and epidermis of milkmaid—plasticky cool, and white, with an impurity that allured and saddened; an impurity to which the blonde hair, scarred with Cartier black, and black eyes, veined with emerald, added their testimony.
Teeth flashed; a rush of pain. With bestial speed her cute kittycat fangs had bitten through my shirt and chest. I raised my fists, but the opiate of her saliva was already in my wounds; I cried kamerad! to the invasion of her kisses.
Shells burst behind my eyes; I was her beachhead, first blood in a guerrilla war against humanity. Fifth columnists leaped from her spittle, a microrobotic army dedicated to overthrowing my gametes. They infiltrated in their billions. Ignoring Y, digging in to X, they would wait, wait for me to fill a human womb so that they might stage their coup and set up a puppet government.
A blue-white flash...
Tombstones. The coach. The fall of night.
Primavera was eating my brain.
I awoke from post-coital sleep on the hard floor of the pavilion, my head rich with traces of midsummer dreams. Primavera slumbered on, fulfilled, it
seemed, in her doll-hood, her bosom rising and falling on a tide of ease, her cheek pressed to my own.
Her skirt was in disarray, hoisted to her waist; the umbilicus, that dark well of unreason, rippled to her clockwork pulse.
I disengaged myself, slithered down to her belly, and peered over the umbilical lip. If I had picked up a small stone and dropped it into that well, would I have heard, long seconds later, an echo, a ricochet, a splash? I dismissed the conceit, my hand slipping beneath my waistband to where cold metal ached against my thigh.
Unsheathing my scalpel, I held its blade to the umbilicus; the umbilicus puckered, withdrawing into itself, and the blade trembled like a plumb line above a door to the underworld. I thought of the magazine Myshkin had shown me, the photographs of vivisected flesh; and I moved the blade to the centre of her belly, a hair’s-breadth from the taut vinyl skin.
I would not hurt her; I would never hurt her. This was playtime. A game. Pretend. Primavera sighed; I secured the scalpel in my waistband.
Too late: from her umbilicus a light, pale and green, rose like the presage of a genie, diffracting above my head. I panicked, spreading my hands over the bleeding aperture, scared, at any moment, she would awake.
She did not stir.
I screwed my eye to the light source, a Peeping Tom at his lady’s chamber.
What was happening in there?
It was a silent picture show; an end-of-the-pier amusement. Men, women, children - figures tinted in shades of green - were flickering into semblances of life. Then came colour. Sound, too: voices of homunculi; the turning of earth; the desolate keening of birds. Primavera was dreaming. And she dreamed of death.
I saw myself standing in the midst of a great cemetery. Mausolea, tombstones, defined the horizon. It was dusk; all was silent beneath a reddening sky. The mourners had departed. Beneath me, an open grave. The stone was carved Ignatz Zwakh, 2056-68, Remember me, but ah! forget my fate. Icy fingers entwined about my own.
Dead Girls, Dead Boys, Dead Things Page 3