Dead Girls, Dead Boys, Dead Things

by Richard Calder

  ‘Money,’ said Kito. ‘That remind me, Mosquito. I meant ask you...’

  Night fell as we approached Udon. The highway, tapering into a conduit, squeezed lorries, bright with headlights utilitarian and ornamental, unremittingly towards us, so I felt as if I struggled through the high-pressure spray of a photoelectric hose. Each time a lorry moved to overtake another (their robot drivers insensitive to any concept of mortality) my eyes were scorched, and I would swing the ZiL onto the crude hard shoulder, sometimes clipping a palm, uprooting bamboo, or annihilating a termite colony. There was grit in my eyes and the car’s AC parched my throat. My head throbbed with Mosquito’s hospitality. I looked for somewhere to rest.

  Speeding through the outlying shanties (bottles smashed against the ZiL’s ostentatious hull) we came to the town centre and its oasis of privilege: a handful of de luxe condos and department stores set like cheap jewels in a pitiful base surround. In the central square, under the aegis of an imitation Seiko clock, a few coffee shops and bars were opening for business. Primavera and I decided upon a place called Le Misanthrope; Kito chose to remain in the car, though the crowd of noisily inquisitive children that had clustered about the big limo seemed to preclude her intention to sleep.

  The coffee shop was deserted. We sat in an alcove, the shadows to our taste, and ordered fried rice and beer. CDs of Thai pop songs—songs of sad love, of broken hearts and minds—lent Primavera’s despair, and perhaps my cynicism, a bittersweet, if wholly superficial, ambience. Two waitresses, smiling with unselfconscious pleasure, held each other by the hips and began to dance.

  ‘I need a shower,’ said Primavera. ‘And as soon as we get out of this stinking country you can get me some new clothes.’

  ‘How do you feel?’

  ‘The headache’s gone, but I feel like I’ve been kicked in the guts.’ She looked at her rice with disinterest. ‘You figured out where to go yet?’

  ‘Laos,’ I said. ‘And then China. From there we can go anywhere you want. Russia. India. Tibet—yeah, how about Tibet?’

  ‘Too cold. And all those mountains...’ She brushed nervously at her fringe. ‘I guess I don’t care really. As long as it’s not Europe—’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Yeah, well you used to have this thing about wanting to see the Carpathians.’

  ‘Ah, I’ve had lots of crazy ideas.’ I sank back into the sticky, plastic bench and dropped ice in my Singha. ‘I know I’ve said it before, Primavera, but I’m sorry, I really am. I’m sorry I ran away. I don’t know why I did it. Everything was just sort of... sour. It was the killing, all the killing.’

  ‘Hypocrite,’ she said. ‘Prig.’

  ‘Okay—I know, I know. But that was what made us leave England in the first place. The killing. The blood. I needed time to think. To grow up.’

  ‘Me and you can never grow up, Iggy. We’re Neverlanders.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I know.’ I peered into the amber-backed mirror of my beer glass; Jesus, I looked old. At least eighteen. But the eyes were still those of a child. The waitresses glided by.

  ‘There’s nowhere to go really, is there?’ said Primavera. ‘I mean, we’ll always be running. Always looking over our shoulders. No one likes us...’

  ‘If we have to keep running, then that’s what we’ll do.’ I placed my hand over hers. ‘I’ll never leave you again, Primavera. I’ll never let them get you.’

  ‘Boy slime,’ she said. Disengaging my hand, she took an ice cube from my beer and popped it into her mouth. ‘It all hardly seems to matter. I’ll be dead soon. My matrix has just about had it.’

  ‘There’s plenty of engineers in China,’ I said. ‘We’ll find one who can help. I promise.’

  ‘It’s too late, Iggy. Don’t worry. Lilim sort of get to accept the idea of dying young. Ephemera, Titania calls us, our lives a hundred times more intense than those of humans. Titania. That cocksucking bitch. How did I ever believe in her? Lies. Too many lies. You get lost in them. None of us wants to be dolls, Iggy. We all want to be real girls, no matter what we say.’

  ‘Real girls,’ I said.

  ‘Sure. You ever seen PinocchioV I stood up. ‘Come,’ I said. I held out my hand. Primavera frowned, uncomprehending, and then smiled.

  ‘You are an idiot, Iggy. Such a She took my hand and I led her onto the improvised dance floor. The waitresses looked on approvingly. Primavera placed a hand on my shoulder. ‘I don’t really know how to do this.’

  ‘Neither do I.’ I clasped her waist.

  ‘It would have been nice,’ she said, ‘to have been normal, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Like the medicine-heads?’ I said. ‘Like the Hospitals? Like the Human Front?’ We shifted awkwardly through the tables, swaying gently to the rhythms of meretricious sadness.

  ‘You’re sort of normal, human boy.’

  ‘I’m a doll junkie. A traitor to my race. A card-carrying nympholept. I’m glad.’ My heel came down on a steel-hard foot.

  ‘I wish you hadn’t made me kill, Iggy.’

  ‘I never thought—’

  ‘Once I got the taste—’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. I’m the guilty one. And all those like me. We made you what you are.’

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ she said. ‘England made us both. We’ve been programmed by her perversities. Sometimes you seem as much a machine as me.’

  ‘England, yeah, well—’

  Primavera tucked her head into my shoulder. ‘But we’ve done lots of things, haven’t we? Things other people never dream of. We’ve had fun. And laughs. It was all worth it.’

  ‘Sure. To hell with England. She can bum.’

  ‘I’m burning, Iggy. Burning up inside. You know that, don’t you?’ I stroked the fool’s gold of her hair. ‘I’m dying, Iggy. I’ll be sixteen next month. An old lady. And all this dust inside me...’

  ‘Shh! We’ll be in China in a day or so.’

  ’But we haven’t got any passports. We haven’t got anything. How are we going to—’

  ‘Shh! I’ll sort things out. You’ll see.’

  ‘It’s the end, Iggy. But I don’t care any more. I just want it to stop. The thirst. Always wanting the blood. Wanting, until it drives you mad... Rest. It would be so nice if I could rest.’

  ‘Let’s go outside,’ I said. ‘I don’t like sad songs.’ ‘Remember what you promised, Iggy?’ The scalpel I had taken from Spalanzani pricked against my thigh.

  ‘I didn’t promise anything.’ I paid the bill with some of the electric baht Mosquito had given us and left, Prima-vera at my side.

  A monsoon wind was blowing from the south-west bearing the dull boom, boom of a drum; monks were being summoned to prayer. The wet season was ending, though a smudge of dark cloud across the moon (like burned meringue spread across a miserly slice of cake) gave prescience of a dying spasm of rain. Primavera took my arm.

  ‘Let’s not go back yet,’ she said.

  We wandered into the grounds of a temple. Drone-like chanting resonated from the boht. The coiled bodies of dragons—thinly glazed by the sickle moon—looked down at us from the gutters. Small bells tinkled in the wind. The moonlight faded; a monk was taking in newly-washed robes. As the first gouts of rain splashed at our feet we hurried to the shelter of a sala.

  ‘Let’s never go back,’ said Primavera. ‘Let’s stay here. Forever.’

  The blackboard, teaching aids and desks indicated that the sala was used as a schoolhouse. The LED on my baht read TB 0001.1 dropped it into a donation box.

  ‘Cheap Charlie,’ said Primavera. ‘That won’t save you.’

  ‘A million baht wouldn’t do that. Ten million. A hundred million. But it’s a good place to hide.’

  ‘Girls don’t become monks, silly. But I could become one of these.’ She drew alongside a half-human, half-bird kinnari and pulled a face.

  ‘They’re meant to ward off evil spirits,’ I said.

  ‘Well, they don’t frighten me.’ She walked to th
e blackboard. Rain exploded off the white-washed courtyard, hammered against the sheet-metal roof. Screw the Human Front, she chalked; then And screw Titania too. ‘I’m sick of it all,’ she said. ‘Why can’t everybody just leave us alone.’ She signed her graffito Miss Nana

  ‘Let me,’ I said. I chalked Vlad Constantinescu fucks

  dolls, and signed myself The Enemy.

  I sat down at one of the desks. Primavera sat down in front of me. ‘Who’s the teacher?’ she said. Giving me no chance to reply she added, ‘I know, Mr Spink.’

  ‘What’s the lesson?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Primavera. ‘I never used to listen.’

  ‘Divinity? History? Geography?’

  ‘All I remember,’ said Primavera, ‘is Neo-Malthusian economics.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘we got that every day.’

  ‘Human beings,’ said Primavera, ‘increase at the ratio 1,2, 3, 4. . .’

  ‘Dolls,’ I said, ‘at the ratio 1, 2, 4, 8...’

  ‘The passion between the sexes,’ said Primavera, ‘is necessary and will remain.’ She threw a stick of chalk at the blackboard. ‘Yah, Spink the Kink!’ The chalk ricocheted off the slate like a stray round from the massed gunfire of the storm. ‘Teachers were no better than the kids. "Lil-im, Lil-im, Lil-im." Jerks. Always sending you for checkups. “ You been taking your pills, Primavera?’’’ “ Yes, nurse." Sure I had. Those appetite suppressors used to*go straight down the suam. Best days of our lives, Iggy, eh?’ She turned to face me. Her eyes were closed; hastily applied eye-shadow, contrasting with the sickly curds-and-whey flesh, made them seem bruised, panda-like. Her canary yellow fringe had, together with a little of Mosquito’s powder, almost completely hidden the plugged bore-hole above the bridge of her nose. She was the prettiest little girl in school. The prettiest little girl in the world. Pretty? No; she was beautiful. Since first seeing her across a playground, a classroom; across the dinner hall, the assembly hall; since first seeing her walking home, I had been lost, lost. How had I not known she was so beautiful? Very carefully—as if she were a cat approaching a timid bird—she leaned forward and...

  kissed me, lightly, so lightly, her brow knitting with fervent gentleness. She turned away almost at once; I caught a look of terror in her eyes. ‘Spink,’ she said, her voice quavering. ‘Spink the Kink.’

  My ears rang with silence. ‘The rain’s stopped,’ I said. Primavera rose from her desk and walked out of the sala towards the boht. I ran after her. ‘Sometimes,’ I said, ‘sometimes they don’t like women coming within the boundary stones.’

  ‘So? I’m not a woman.’ She kicked off her thongs and ascended the temple steps. ‘I won’t go inside, don’t worry.’ She sat back on her heels in the mother-of-pearl doorway. At the end of the nave was a big gold-plated Buddha; beneath it, an altar decorated with garlands and pots of smouldering joss sticks. The walls were painted with mythological scenes from the Ramakien.

  ‘It’s lovely,’ said Primavera. ‘And there are women here. You always worry so, Iggy.’ Her lips parted, her tongue running over her fangs in a lewd display of appetite. ‘Buddha says that suffering arises through craving and desire. At least that’s what Madame tells me. The end of desire leads to the end of suffering.’

  ‘And life,’ I said. ‘Of wanting to be, of ever having been. Peace.’

  Primavera ground her teeth. ‘No peace for the wicked, as my Mum used to say.’

  ‘I’m glad I don’t believe in reincarnation.’

  ‘What if you did? What do you think you’d come back as?’

  ‘A doll. Lilim.’

  ‘It’d serve you right.’

  ‘And you’d come back as a junkie.’

  ‘Fuck. Bad karma all round.’ A monk surfaced from his meditation to shoot us a dhamma-sharp look. Primavera poked out her tongue.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ I said. ‘We’re creatures of desire.

  We don’t belong in this place.’

  The sky had cleared; the moon turned its fickle sickle profile towards us, welcoming us back into the shadows.

  ‘Madame?’ Primavera pressed her face to the ZiL’s smoked glass.

  ‘It’s not locked,’ I said. I sought a curse of appropriate malevolence; didn’t find it; sighed. The limo was empty. ‘If she thinks we’re going to wait...’

  ‘She can’t have gone far.’

  ‘Yeah, well she should have stayed put.’ I slipped into the front seat.

  A crack of exploding air.

  ‘Ah, shit,Iggy—’ Primavera threw herself across my lap, scrambling into the passenger seat. She looked up. A burn mark ran across her left cheek, a lesion half obscured by frizzled hair singed to its Cartier black. My hands tightened on the steering column; a sob-sob-sobbing fluttered inside my chest; there was a question I had to ask, it seemed, a vital question. Stuttering, I watched, fascinated, as a twist of smoke curled from Primavera’s face; what was the question? I knew the answer would make everything all right. But to know the answer I had first to know...

  Primavera turned the ignition key.

  ‘Under the back seat, Mr—’ It was Kito; her voice died in a stream. Crack, crack, crack; lightsticks whipped the air.

  ‘Get hold of yourself, Iggy.’

  ‘Kito?’

  ‘She’s gone. Maybe she’s hidden her stick—’

  ‘She said something about—’

  ‘Just get us out of here!’ I stamped on the accelerator. ‘The back window’s refractive. Keep our nose pointed straight ahead.’ The left wing clipped an unmanned food stall; an empty tureen clattered across the road. The radio came on (’Oh doctor, doctor . . died. I switched on the headlights. ‘No!’ yelled Primavera; I switched them off.

  ‘Your face—’

  ‘They fucking lasered me.’

  ‘Morgenstern,’ I said. ‘He’s out to finish the job.’

  A red circle danced across the windscreen; I threw myself to one side as the split-second intensification shattered the glass. I jerked the wheel left, right; the car zigzagged, shuddered as metal buckled against metal. I peered over the parapet of the dash; a motorbike spun through the air; our wheels bumped over something soft, skidded. We tore through a spray of scarlet.

  Primavera grabbed a spanner from the glove compartment, knocked out what remained of the glass, and rolled onto the back seat.

  I had lost control. We were thundering through the shanties. A group of old women, their toothless mouths drooling betel-nut, smiled, frowned, then gawped, coweyed, as the ZiL bore down on the still of faux gasoline they were camouflaging with rattan and plastic sheet. The still upturned, caught light; we entered a tunnel of flame, emerged to demolish a cardboard house, its occupants (sub-android pieces of sixth-generation shit) trashed along with their owner’s dreams of mitigating the toil of the harvest. I wrestled the ZiL back onto the road.

  ‘There’s a pick-up behind us,’ said Primavera. I heard her pull up the seat cover. ‘Well, rust my clockwork...’

  ‘Lightstick?’

  ‘It’s a stick of some kind.’ I looked over my shoulder and saw that Primavera had uncovered an antique rifle.

  ‘Keep your eyes on the road, pinhead!’ A dog bounced over the bonnet; traffic veered to either side. ‘What the fuck am I supposed to do with this?’ she said.

  ‘Percussion cap?’

  ‘Guess so. Old war weapon. Kito used them to macho-up her bars.’

  Percussion cap. Like in the movies, I thought. Like in Myshkin’s videos.

  ‘Heave the front bit out the window and pull the trigger. See what happens.’

  ‘There’s this sort of bulgy thing under the barrel.’ I swung the car onto the highway. ‘They’ve stopped firing,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah. There’s a police checkpoint ahead. By that railway junction. Don’t shoot.’ I decelerated until we were within the speed limit.

  ‘They’ll want to see identification,’ said Primavera. ‘What’ll we do?’

  ‘It’s
under fifty kays to Nongkhai. We might be able to outrun them. This thing can move.’

  The police waved us through. The smoked windows, I suppose, helped; perhaps those grunts—unacquainted with the news of Kito’s ouster—had simply recognized our personalized number-plates, Nana 1. Kito had paid a lot for those plates; almost as much as her daily payola to Bangkok’s finest.

  ‘They’re stopping the pick-up. Someone’s getting out. It’s that slut, Morgenstern.’

  ‘What’re they doing?’

  ‘Can’t see—lost them!’

  I began to accelerate; the speedo climbed from 40 to 80 kph. ‘We’ll be in Nongkhai soon. And once we cross the river...’

  ‘Here they come again!’ cried Primavera. Morgenstern would have shown the police his diplomatic passport; Morgenstern, or the stand-in telerobot he was operating from a hospital bed. The road was unlit; there was little traffic. We were in the middle of that place murderers come to in their dreams.

  A Harley emerged from behind the pick-up, overtook it, and closed on us, screaming like a chain-saw-toting psychobike. ‘The other Twin,’ said Primavera.

  ‘Guess she’s upset we squashed her sister. We must have bijouterie all over our tyres.’

  The Pikadon began to fill the rear-view mirror. Primavera clutched the rifle. ‘Try using that thing,’ I said.

  Primavera wound down a window and, leaning out, tucked the butt of the rusted weapon into her shoulder.

  DRRRP!

  ‘Wow!’ she said. ‘It works!’

  The Harley vacillated, switched lanes once, twice, then surged forward to bring the avenging Twin alongside. The famous Pikadon smile, cold and as cruel as childhood, iced my throat in mid-scream. ‘Mr Ignatz kill Bang,’ she yelled above the 2500cc roar of her bike. ‘Not nice. You bad boy. Now Boom spank you.’ She raised a lightstick.

  Imminent meltdown concentrated my mind, though not on salvation (I should have driven the bitch off the road); instead, my brain, intent perhaps on compensating for the bum rap of death, seemed to inject a chemical unconcern into my limbs, and, against my will, called my attention to the sweetly wrought pretty-prettiness of my executioner. No Cartier blood in her. What was she? The Pikadons had often passed as human, their sloe-eyed physiognomy similar to that of the average Siamese girl’s; their complexion—a dilute olive—unexceptional amongst the Big Weird’s monied elite. But their legs were gy-noidal: impossibly long, disproportionate to the compact principal-boy torso, as if their blueprint had been fashion design’s grand manner. Dior? I guessed their mae would have been made by a couture house, rather than by a jeweller’s. I thought of the giraffe-legged bar girls of Twizzle’s.