When We Have Wings

by Claire Corbett

  When had it been implanted? They’d had a few chances. When she’d had the first operation for her wings? Or earlier?

  A soft thud from the living room below. Peri freezes, listens for the rustle of feathers. An intruder? Has someone followed her? Oh god, if they find me up here, what will they do? Cut off my wings, throw me into the sea. Luisa’s dark hair, floating like weed. Peter couldn’t be back yet, could he? Fliers so hard to keep track of, then they’re on you in a rush of wings.

  Peri runs to the landing. Frisk looks up at her from the pile of cushions he’s knocked over.

  ‘Go on, Frisk, you great stupid thing.’

  Peri jumps down to the living room, darts into Peter’s workroom overlooking the ocean. One more thing. She scatters slicks across the huge table, flings open drawers and spills their contents. A flash of red, buried in a bottom drawer. She pulls it out, turns the solid rose, her gift, in her hands. You bastard. Of course you’ve hidden it. Luisa had almost laughed at her, she’d almost cried for her, when Peri had shown it to her. Ah, no, no, no, she’d said. This is the oldest story, my dear. Don’t you know yet what he is, what he has done?

  Peri finds what she’s looking for, almost slicing her finger off as she grabs it, the blade Peter uses for cutting drafting slicks to size. Her hand shakes. She pulls down her shorts and twists around, spraying her skin with the anaesthetic. A hard spot to reach; she’s going to carve herself up more than she needs to. Skin, fat, muscle part like rotten silk. A gasp escapes her as the pain burns. The spray has limited strength but makes the pain seem far away.

  Hugo wails, the thin sound tugging at her.

  Hot blood runs down Peri’s leg. She pokes around in her flesh, like digging for a deep splinter. There. She levers the sliver out, flicks it away. Pastes over the cut with antiseptic new skin.

  She flings the dripping knife onto the table, feeling bleak satisfaction when her blood splashes over the soaring design for Peter’s newest tower and runs from her leg onto the polished floor. How he’ll hate this defilement of his workspace. Let him find the mess in the morning. Least of his worries by then.

  For a moment her eyes wander over the drawings, posters and displays on the walls of the workroom as if she’s never seen them before. That blue ice cliff on the wall to her left, the church; how impressed she’d been, when she first came to the house, to discover that Peter had designed that. The church had been her homing beacon from RaRA-land, the only landmark she’d known to look for when she first came to the City.

  Her first day in the City. She’d had a temporary permit—thank you, Mama’lena—and a determination never to leave, never to be pushed back out into the wilds. Peri rubs the taut skin over her left upper bicep. There, under her skin, is another implant, one she checks compulsively, ten, twenty times a day. Her City permanent residency. Wherever she goes she could be scanned and the permit would confirm she’s legal in the City. When she got that, she’d been euphoric for weeks. Can’t deport me now.

  Hugo’s crying. Hurt flares deep in her muscle as Peri runs to the nursery.

  He’s hungry, he’s past sucking on his hands, he’s red-faced, bawling. She picks him up, feels his heart, the little life beating against her, calming as she holds him chest to chest, settles him to nurse. He sucks at her breast, staring up into her eyes. Fly, fly, fly. I have to leave you but how can I? No matter how much Avis hates me, no matter how much Peter ignores me now, I’ve never thought of leaving you, never.

  She stares at Hugo’s beautiful things, the exquisite model earth dangling over his cot. You’re going to lose all this too, Hugo.

  Can’t leave you here alone. Especially not now. Someone might come looking for me, find you instead. One-handed, her other supporting Hugo, she fishes out her slick. Ring Peter, beg him to come home right away.

  No answer. Leave a message. She hesitates.

  Last time she’d left a message it’d been three days.

  Call terminated.

  She looks at the blank screen. Oh god, didn’t even think of it. Drops it to the floor. Have to leave it behind. It could be used to track her. Nothing easier.

  Luisa’s body, rolling in the low waves.

  Frisk pads into the nursery, leaps onto the bench next to Peri, shoves his head under her hand. She strokes his nose, willing Hugo to finish nursing. Hurry, Hugo. Please. She looks at the wall clock; every second counts. She looks into Frisk’s amber eyes. I’ll miss you.

  Hugo pulls away, smiles. ‘Pah,’ he says, his eyes widening at the little explosive sounds he makes. ‘Pah-pah-pah.’ I’ll miss you too. No. I can’t leave you here alone, alone in the house and alone in the world when they farm you out to another family. The only solution is that I stay with you and I can’t.

  I can’t do this.

  Her head fills up with static. The world around her judders to a halt—no, she’s the one frozen, while the unthinkable stares back at her, unblinking, from the abyss.

  I have to take you with me. Keep you safe. Keep you loved. No-one else will do it.

  The world spins again, fast, faster, she’s moving like the wind, if she stops everything will stop, she won’t have the courage to save even herself, let alone Hugo, she’ll freeze, sit here. A sitting duck.

  She puts Hugo down on his floor mat, rummages through the nursery. A few more things to pack: absorbent squares for Hugo, a hundred no thicker than her palm; warm clothes for him—his cloudsuit and . . . what else?

  What else do you need, little man?

  You need me.

  That’s all, really.

  I am everything you need.

  She picks up Hugo, wipes his cheeks and puts him in the sling. Where can we go? Nowhere safe in the City. She rubs her upper arm, feels for the implant. That micro-seal of acceptance is priceless, many spent their whole lives seeking it.

  But now, for Hugo’s sake—well, she might as well dig it out too and throw it on the floor, token of her exile, but she does not.

  This is it. After this, no return, no forgiveness. The moment I throw away every single thing I’ve ever wanted, ever struggled for, this life, the City.

  Peri locks Frisk in the house, where he whines and scratches in a seeming agony of grief and apprehension. She walks to the edge of the cliff outside the front door.

  ‘Sorry, little man.’ She strokes Hugo’s cheek and then, with one step over the edge, Peri lets herself fall.

  Peri was an extraordinary girl. I don’t remember exactly when I first realised that but it was towards the end of that long, wet, stormy summer. Not right away, of course, when Peri—and, more to the point, Hugo—were only names to me, spoken by the shaken man calling me in my home office on a sweltering Sunday morning and my first reaction was why me?

  The reason was obvious in one way. I was a private investigator, recommended to him for my discretion, experience and wide range of contacts, so why not ring me? But then again, with his baby missing, why would he ring me and not the police? I would find out there were many reasons Peter Chesshyre rang me that hot Sunday. One was that I wasn’t the only investigator he hired that day. The others had to do with the fact that Peter Chesshyre was a whole different species of client, literally, to any I’d had before. I had no idea just how much I had to learn.

  It was nearly midday and I was sitting at my dining table in my shorts, half-heartedly sorting through a few documents. I’d been woken earlier by bloody Sunil, an old mate, now a ministerial adviser, who thought nothing of calling me first thing on a Sunday. ‘Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, mate,’ he said when I grumped at him. ‘Time and tide, and the media cycle, wait for no man. Got work for you. Keep an hour or so free Thursday. Brief you soon as.’

  Staying at home had been a mistake; there was no breeze and the six-storey block of flats, absurdly named Ventura, was baking. I was sweating and my neighb
our Vittorio was away with his boyfriend, which meant the people who camped up on Ventura’s flat roof felt free to resume last night’s salsa party.

  I got up and pulled on a shirt, planning to go anywhere with shade and cool water. I was halfway out the door when I felt my slick vibrate. I was only half listening as Peter Chesshyre introduced himself but the sweat chilled on my back when he explained he’d discovered his baby was missing that morning. He wanted me to come to his house right away.

  Peter Chesshyre? The name rang a bell. I ran through my mental files as I exchanged my shorts and shirt for a suit and walked out to the access laneway next to my ground-floor flat. I stopped in front of Ray’s folding card table and bought one of his locally famous samosas cooked in a little solar oven.

  He smiled, weatherbeaten lines crinkling around his eyes. ‘You go for a drive, huh?’ he said. Ray kept an eye on Taj for me for a monthly retainer. It gave him status among the other street sellers. No-one else had a car to look after.

  I wolfed down the samosa and slid into the car, grateful Ray had already unplugged Taj from the charger for me. Lucky there was even one of those still working on this lane.

  ‘All good?’ I asked as Taj brought his lights on.

  ‘Yeah, it’s all shiny,’ he purred.

  ‘We need to get going, Taj.’ The first hours after an abduction are the most critical and these had already slipped by while we all slept.

  If baby Hugo’s captors intended to kill him, he was already dead and had been dead long before his parents woke up. If he was still alive then other scenarios came into play but they all required me to act fast.

  ‘Hey dude, using me means you finally got a rich client,’ Taj observed. ‘Makes a nice change. Maybe you’ll invest in a better suit one of these days. What took Golden Boy so long to ring you, anyway? Sunday morning sleep-in?’

  ‘I’m wondering the same thing,’ I said, putting on my tie but leaving the knot loose. Exactly when had Chesshyre and his wife discovered Hugo missing? I glanced at my watch. It was nearly half past twelve. Shit.

  Rain. A steaming monsoonal downpour started just as I set out for the Chesshyre house. To reach it, Taj had to negotiate an unpredictable route through backstreets, tunnels and motorways towards the old Eastern Distributor. Bitter experience had taught me it was always better to let Taj navigate. City road maintenance was so dangerously haphazard it took all Taj’s ingenuity and satellite input for him to drive anywhere safely. It occurred to me, as it did every time I used him, that this first car of mine would also be my last. The City’s life did not depend on roads anymore; instead, there were the canals, light rail and, of course, Flight. It struck me Flight was more than just a toy for the rich, a wild extravagance in their excessive lives. It was highly practical.

  I glanced at my watch again. One o’clock.

  ‘Not been here before, dude,’ Taj remarked as we crossed the EastGate tollbridge over Blue Canals into the exclusive eastern suburbs greenbelt. ‘Pricey shops along this bridge but down there it looks like a mini Edge City.’

  He was right; below the bridge and along the median strip of the Eastern Distributor clung the plastic scrap tents of those who had to live near their jobs as couriers, porters and cleaners. Rather than struggling to build a shack in Edge City, the squatter satellite cities surrounding the City proper, they set up anywhere that was not actual roadway. Their shanties even extended over the water of Blue Canals, though bull sharks and water police kept numbers down.

  ‘Cool,’ said Taj. ‘Golden Boy already gave my details to bridge security. Usually takes so long to get into these snobby places.’ Yes. Getting through security into these enclaves was time-consuming and inconvenient. Unless you could fly. Another huge advantage of Flight: fliers were literally above security checks, body searches and sniffer dogs, the whole rigmarole, most of the time. Their comings and goings were less monitored than those of us mere mortals.

  So why had this flier Chesshyre summoned me? The tollbridge receded and the number of pavement-dwellers on this side of it fell to zero. As Taj purred along these lusher streets, his tyres swishing and sending up fountains of stormwater, it came to me where I’d seen Chesshyre’s name before: it had been linked with a picture of rooms stacked one on top of the other like caves in a cliff, rooms with heights and drops, around a central void.

  A year or two ago I’d seen reports on a controversial new child-care centre, the first one designed exclusively for flier children. This was why it was a big story. The usual suspects brawled over it: media commentators, academics, politicians, child-care experts, most condemning the separation of flier from non-flier children. a new apartheid screamed the headlines, while Origins cultists, those extremists, picketed the construction site. There’d even been a legal challenge but somehow the developers got round the anti- discrimination laws, leaving the fledglings, the little fliers, free to live out every child’s dream as they darted and tumbled through their aviary, their enclosed sweep of sky.

  Kohn Chesshyre Li, the now-famous architecture firm, had been named in all the reports. Was my client that Chesshyre? My slick confirmed he was. My eyes glazed as I skimmed the information it dredged up—licences and qualifications, membership of professional associations, articles he’d written for architecture journals, references to his honours thesis. A picture popped up of a church he’d designed, a berg of irregular neon blue.

  Then I saw something that made me whistle out loud.

  ‘What?’ said Taj.

  ‘Well, what do you know? Chesshyre and I went to the same school. St Ivo of Kermartin’s—you’ve heard of it, Taj.’

  ‘Have I?’

  St Ivo’s was an elite private school run, in my time at least, by stiff-backed black-clothed seminarians, stern, learned old men (though looking back they could only have been in their forties). I wondered if any of them were still around.

  Chesshyre was younger than me, though, so I had not known him there. The real difference between us was that I was the poor boy, or at least the not-rich boy—and let’s face it, that’s the same thing—picked for a sporting scholarship because I was fast on the football field. But no matter how much glory I brought the school in the mud and blood of the playing field, I never belonged. Oh gawd, the rich careless boys drawled to each other if I dared speak to them, it runs and it talks. Did you know the Chook could talk? One or two smart kids were my friends because they had to be—they weren’t rich either. The school fed on their brains and my speed.

  Chesshyre now, he was the real deal, I could see—tall, handsome, rich. Head prefect. Rowed for the First VIII. Now he had wings. Of course he did. Oh Christ, I could feel my resentment, like the old football injury throbbing in my right knee. It was going to be hard to like this man, to listen to him, work for him. But you don’t have to like him. Worked for his type before, remember? You’re just one of the hired help: get the job done, try not to track mud on their floors. Just find his son. Yes, I’ve worked for his type many times but never for an actual graduate from my old school, a real live master of the universe even before he got his wings, drawling at me from his Olympian height in that strange flat accent the boys at the school all tried for and the rich ones managed for real.

  Chesshyre was rich alright and I knew there were a few good reasons why people like him would ring a private investigator on a case as serious as this. For a start, rich people want to be sure they’re calling the shots. They don’t want the police deciding what priority to give their case and they don’t want arguments over the ‘appropriate use of public resources’.

  But there could be other, darker reasons. After all, the first thing police do in a case like this is scrutinise those closest to the victim. Too often that’s where the answer lies. Chesshyre already told me they thought their nanny, Peri Almond, had taken Hugo. Well, we would see.

  Also, you could never overestimate
the desire of the rich to avoid publicity. The infamy of a kidnapping brings other dangers in its wake: it gives people ideas and one lot of bad luck usually attracts more. The cabinet minister whose daughters were abducted in the Charon nightclub case found that out for sure. My experience on the Charon investigation, the most notorious I’d ever conducted as a cop, was probably the reason Chesshyre wanted to hire me. After all, it was a kidnapping too.

  Taj drove through increasingly wealthy neighbourhoods—Diamond Waters, Aalto Park, Boyd Beach—towards the sea. ‘Look at the size of these houses,’ he said. The houses were growing larger, block by block, veiled by cascading bougainvillea and hibiscus. ‘What are those?’

  ‘Those are the fancy engineered cultivars rich people like. That’s year-round blooming jasmine and those are the infamous fluoro-gardenias. Lily loves them. A rare lapse in taste explained only by their fabulous cost.’

  Lily. I looked at my watch—twenty past one. We were making good time on the better roads but still I jiggled my knee impatiently. Too long. This was all taking too long. My ex-wife Lily was the real reason I’d wanted to escape my flat. She was fed up with me not answering her calls and I worried she’d resort to coming over. There’d be a scene, same as last time. A quiet scene; Lily’s not a shouter. She’s trained herself to speak low when she’s angry; just as scary as the shouting, really. A few days ago she’d materialised at the door of my flat, wearing her lawyer’s uniform, the well-cut grey suit she uses when appearing in court. She’d started by refusing a glass of water. Wouldn’t even sit down. ‘We need to talk about Tom.’

  Oh god, when did we ever talk about anything else? Thomas lived with her and Richard but had been spending nearly half of each week with me.

  ‘Now Tom’s started preschool,’ she said, ‘he’s so tired in the afternoons. I think he needs the stability of one home during the week. He’s so little, Zeke.’

  I had to agree, he was indeed little.