‘Wilt thou hunt the prey for the lion? or fill the appetite of the young lions?’ I said to him as I watched him eat, though eat was not the right word. ‘What you do needs another word, Frisk, something like snarfle. Scrumch.’
Frisk kept his head down, snarfling.
‘There’s lots in the Old Testament about lions, Frisk. Did you know, my history teacher at St Ivo’s told us that one of the main causes of death for travellers in the Roman Empire was lions? Eating travellers.’
Frisk did not react to this information.
‘Guess you’re not about to eat any travellers. Just as well, since I took you running with me this morning.’
Frisk growled as he gorged.
I picked up the comb I’d used that morning on Frisk’s mane. Golden and black hairs tangled in the comb’s teeth.
‘You’re magnificent, Frisk, but you’ve been made safe. Your ancestors ate mine; now we grow by shrinking you. Will the world be full of miniatures? Tiny whales for our aquariums? Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? Wilt thou play with him as with a bird? Or wilt thou bind him for thy maidens? He maketh a path to shine after him; Upon earth there is not his like, who is made without fear.’
Not only will we bind him for our maidens, we’ll take out a patent on him too. Copyright: one small leviathan. Features: 1. Fearless. 2. Unique. 3. Maker of shining paths in the fishbowl.
Beer in hand, I wandered into the living room, Frisk padding after me. I’d brewed the beer myself down in the basement, where my bottles shared space with Vittorio’s wine. Every now and then I was woken by one of his bottles exploding.
I surveyed the room. ‘Well, Frisk, this place isn’t quite what you’re used to, is it? Lily didn’t like it either. In fact she hated it so much she moved out.’ Should’ve known better than to marry Lily. I had fair warning. We shared the same tutorials in the arts courses of our arts/law degree but she finished the degree and I dropped out of it before the end of first year. So how was I ever going to measure up? I wasn’t, not once I went into the force. ‘You’re still in the law,’ she’d say, excited by feeling there was something a bit rough, a bit dangerous about me, but her career soared and mine plateaued; not only was I not going to be commissioner by the time she took silk but I’d left the force altogether. As you get older, the only real aphrodisiac is money, and her colleagues, like Richard, were far more loaded than I would ever be.
Frisk jumped onto the couch and I lay down next to him. He clambered onto me, rubbing his chin up my arm. He puffed appreciatively a few times as I scratched his strong jaws. I’d learned a puff or sigh was his lion way of expressing affection.
As soon as I’d come in I’d seen the light blinking in the corner of the darkened VaporView. I waved my hand at the screen to bring it to life and sat up to listen, pushing Frisk down onto my legs. Lily. Sure enough, badgering about the treatments.
‘Now I’m just mentioning it again because Thomas is at the perfect age and the longer we leave it, the harder it’ll be for him and the more expensive it’ll be for us. So you need to get back to us as soon as possible. I’m going to make his initial appointment for assessment next month so it’s really important we talk about this soon.’
I scratched my head, digging my blunt nails into my scalp. I’d felt a surge of rage by the end of Lily’s message. How dare she threaten to make an appointment without my permission? Typical Lily. She knew very well that nothing succeeds like a fait accompli. If I didn’t act she would go ahead and once my son was turned into a bird I could hardly turn him back again. I couldn’t stall much longer. We spoke so casually of the treatments but what did they entail exactly? I needed more information. I pulled the slick from my wallet with Dr Ruokonen’s details and called her office. It was late but a practice assistant was still there. Of course the renowned Flight Specialist was busy but I was told that as I’d been referred by Dr Eliseev they could squeeze me in the day after tomorrow. I had the feeling I was meant to be grateful.
The next message was from Chesshyre and I was struck again by how drained and light his voice was; he had no news but in this case that was not good news.
I forced myself up off the couch and over to the dining table which served as my office. Time to tackle Peri’s files. If what I needed wasn’t there, I might as well give up now and turn the case over to the police, a day before my self-imposed deadline. As I scrolled through the documents I’d captured, I thought of myself at Cam’s desk, turning the file pages quickly, eager to find the documents at the heart of Peri’s story, already knowing the nature of files, fearing I would find little that was meaningful. It’s never the complete official record many people assume a government file is or ought to be. Worse, there was not even a plain thread of narrative to follow; you had to construct your own incomplete version of the story from the debris.
As I searched through the load of inconsequential documents, I became increasingly frustrated. ‘God,’ I said, tugging at the short spikes of hair on top of my scalp, ‘why do people file this crap? Because it proves they do stuff even though most of the stuff they do is useless.’ Probably the most important things hadn’t been written down at all, though there were at least brief references to why she was fostered in the first place—her father disappearing, then her mother abandoning her on top of a building, poor kid. Most of these documents were not even about Peri; she was just the presumed cause that set in motion all these meetings, phone calls and messages.
I’d nearly reached the end of the documents I’d swiped when I saw it. A letter from a Bronte Shaw at the Venice caravan park, Pandanus, to the department. The foster carer. Asking for money.
One address. One precious lead. I stood up, so elated that I had to move. Pacing the room, I thought about what I was going to do. I had an address in RaRA-land and I had to check it out. I brought up a map onto the large VaporView screen and zoomed in on the Pandanus region. Where else could Peri go? Shaw was the closest thing to family Peri had.
Shaw’s letter, and the records of her calls, were all asking the department for more money. Looking after Peri had been a job, an income stream. I looked up, struck by the sense that this girl was at the centre of no-one’s life. She was the means to an end: money for Shaw, milk and care for Hugo’s parents, a job for me, a headache for Cam. Baby Hugo was the exception. Peri might be the centre of his world. If I did my job properly they would both lose that.
I brought up my draft report for Chesshyre, tidied it up, added a paragraph, and sent it. It was short but at least I could reassure him I was on Peri’s trail. I felt no need to outline the details of my leads, no need to mention the names Venice or Shaw.
I grabbed another beer and sat on the couch again, rubbing Frisk under the chin as I mulled over preparations for my trip to RaRA-land. Frisk dozed while I stroked his mane, his broad forepaws, his noble lion face. He smelled of oranges, the same scent as my aftershave. Must have patted him that morning with the stuff still on my hands. I pushed Frisk aside and sent a message to Henryk letting him know where I was going and when I intended to return. I did not expect, and would not get, any police back-up, but Henryk was my friend and if I vanished in the wilds of RaRA-land I wanted at least one competent person to know where to start looking for me.
I went out to Taj, concertinaed to his smallest silhouette in the access lane. As Ventura’s only car, and for an extra fee on top of the annual block levies, Taj was allocated space and a place in the rounds of Bronson, Ventura’s fat, lazy and easily frightened nightwatchman. Ray was only around to keep an eye on Taj during the day. Taj glowed blue briefly, acknowledging me.
‘Early start tomorrow morning. Be ready by four-thirty.’ I’d be on a tight schedule to drive up to Pandanus and get back in time to pick up Thomas but I wasn’t going to miss out on an evening with my son. I’d just have to get back in time.
‘Dude.’
On my way to bed,
I paused at the dining table and flicked through the documents from my working file. I was no closer to understanding Peri’s motive for abducting Hugo and what I’d seen on her file alarmed me. This girl had been neglected, that much was clear. Had her life made her hard, possibly even jealous of this kid? It struck me I was ignoring the best evidence I had: Peri’s own words. I read through them again, more searchingly than the first time.
Dear Hugo,
I want to tell you about a day we had, nothing special but it was the most wonderful day. We sat under the green beech tree and you were lying on your special mat, the one you liked to pat with the animals on it. I picked you up and held you. You turned your head and kissed my cheek. Once. A baby kiss, soft as one of the new leaves on the beech tree.
That letter wasn’t the kind of thing a nanny would write. What nanny wrote letters to a baby, for heaven’s sake?
Dear Hugo,
It was tempting to do anything to make you laugh. Even rolling a ball in a silly way along the floor, so it zoomed into the wall or a window and you’d racing-crawl after it, giggling like mad. Or setting up a soft toy—the fat hippo—and knocking him over. Over and over. You laughing and laughing.
Dear Hugo,
I wrote these for you because I wanted you to know how it was when you were very little. Because you can’t remember it yourself. And I was the one who was there with you. Who saw you and listened to you and knew how you were.
I ran the security footage on my slick again. Over and over this anxious girl stepped quickly, carefully, from the house, shut the door behind her, stroked Hugo’s head. I searched her face. Peri cared for this baby. How had such an unloved girl kept any love in her own heart? This was the clue. Her feelings for this kid. And Chesshyre bloody knew it. What was he so desperate for me not to discover, what was in the story of this lonely girl that would explain her attachment to Hugo? Identification? Sense of loss? Hugo was probably safe. How I hoped I was right.
We did not meet any traffic on our way to the Owls. The road petered from gravel to dirt that, judging by the ruts, hadn’t made the acquaintance of a grader in a long time.
‘What the fuck is that, Taj?’
‘Eagle, dude.’
‘Oh Christ,’ I said as we passed the huge bird nailed upside down to a fence post, wings pegged out along the fenceline. ‘Some evil bastards round here.’ I drew my weapon out of my leg holster and laid it on the seat. I was vanishing from the real world, swallowed in a malign bog inhabited by invisible backwoods thugs.
The Venice was starting to look civilised in comparison.
I’d got up just after four this morning, checked my weapon, stashed a spare fuel cell in Taj’s boot and scanned Taj once more to clear him of any tracking devices. Every stage in my journey into RaRA-land grew more sinister, more dangerous, than the one before. I’d passed over the sprawling pirate subdivisions of Edge City on the orbital road connecting to the Oceanic Highway, entered the Red Quarantine Zone that marked the City limits, and driven through once-beautiful country now revealed by the gold-red light of the rising sun lighting up the dark masses of vegetation along the highway to be utterly, drearily ugly.
The trees were stunted, suffocating under strangling webs of monotone green. The ocean side of the highway drowned in a sea of bushes thrusting up oval glossy leaves. Beyond the green shrouding the trees and roadside on the one hand and the shiny bushes on the other I could see only glimpses of beaches heaped with yellow-brown kelp. What had gone so disastrously wrong?
Superweeds. The land, lakes and rivers, even the surrounding seas, had been engulfed by a rising tide of weeds: morning glory, water hyacinth, bitou bush, Japanese kelp and many others. Weeds had infested the land for many years but some had cross-bred with genetically modified crops and acquired resistance to pests and herbicides, making them virtually indestructible. Land not kept clear by continual labour was rapidly smothered.
Welcome to the Northern Green Zone, announced a sign as we exited the roadside bay where I’d washed Taj, paying particular attention to his wheels, as I’d been directed to do before leaving the Red Zone. An initiative of the Federal Government in partnership with regional and rural councils. By working together, we can keep the regions productive!
‘Disturbing,’ said Taj as we pulled onto the Oceanic Highway. ‘If that exclamation mark’s meant to be reassuring they’ve screwed up bigtime. The Superweed situation must be far worse than we realised.’
‘Taj, how is it that out of five hundred and one artificial person- alities, I get the cynic?’
‘I’m the PI model, remember? I got your back. Pollyanna’s no use to you.’
As we drove further into the Northern Green Zone, into countryside that looked more like the rolling farmland I remembered from my childhood, my alertness shifted to a gnawing anxiety. Except for the raid on the Origins compound during the Charon case, it’d been a long time since I’d ventured into RaRA-land and I’d never hazarded the place alone. The raid, a tense operation I’d directed in pounding rain, had involved the over-armed and over-eager Tactical Reaction Unit. My best memory of that case was seeing the heavily bearded (and dripping), gorgeously gowned and bejewelled Trinity Jones forced to his knees in the mud in front of one of his own solar yachts by a TRU officer so heavily armoured he looked like a giant beetle in his shiny casing.
What was not so good was watching His Incandescence, now Serene indeed, walk free from the courtroom less than two years later, officially not guilty. The cult had very deep pockets; they’d fought the Charon case with the best legal minds money could buy. We never did find out the source of the endless flow of funds.
Trinity not guilty. That was the kind of thing that had made me drop out of law years earlier; couldn’t believe in a justice system so naive it could switch between only two extremes: guilty, not guilty. Henryk liked the Scottish verdict: not proven. In other words, you’re guilty as hell but we haven’t quite been able to prove it so don’t go around skiting you’re innocent. A more realistic view of the world than the childish binaries: guilty/not guilty; good/evil; heaven/hell. Who can believe any of this unless they’re stuck with the thought processes of a three-year-old?
A half-hour after seeing the dead eagle, with Taj steering around potholes, ruts and washouts, and me peering along stretches of fenceline for a number or a name, I worried we were reaching the end of the road. I thought of the storm clouds massing over Pandanus. As if reading my thoughts, Taj warned, ‘We’ll have problems if it rains before we get back onto the gravel. You should seriously consider turning back, dude.’
From the endless shanties rising out of the dust of Edge City to the land mummified in its shroud of alien green and the disconsolate towns we drove through, nothing had prepared me for the only address I had for Peri or her foster carer, Bronte Shaw—the Venice.
I tried to look more confident than I felt as I walked into the Venice, back into Peri’s childhood. Past the sign at the entrance so pocked with bullet holes it was hard to make out what was on it, past dunes of rubbish towering far overhead, past the women washing clothes in the dirty canal, its banks compacted from solid garbage, past the wall of rickety shacks perched on flimsy stilts lining the canal, a sluggish tide of rubbish washing up under them, each shack a jumble of rusting corrugated tin, plastic packaging, star pickets strung with wire, fraying rope and broken plasterboard, each teetering shack looking as if it would topple into the canal with one shove.
In my first minutes in the Venice, I learned more about what made Peri tick than Chesshyre had ever known.
Edge City was a bastion of order compared to the Venice; I was beginning to grasp why so many people fled places like this to the promise of a new life.
And yet what awaited them, what had awaited Peri, in the City was so hard. Permanent residency was so difficult to get that even in the unlikely event that PapaZie, say, persuaded a
resident to marry him, that marriage had to last longer than twenty years before he qualified for permanent residency himself. Without that, the City gave you nothing: no health care, no protection, no services at all. If they decided to evict you it didn’t matter whether you lived under plastic along the highway or in a highrise, and it made no difference if you’d worked in the City for six days, six weeks or six decades.
Even that was not the worst of it. The real price was paid by your children, who possessed no birth certificates, existed in no records and were not citizens but drifted like phantoms, condemned to live in the shadows forever. And yet Peri had achieved the impossible. She’d made her escape from RaRA-land permanent. Must be something pretty important that made her risk losing that.
As I rounded the corner of a vast garbage mountain attacked by shrieking gulls, trying not to breathe in the stench of dirty water, excrement, rotting vegetation, salt and the haze of smoke from cooking fires, I tried to see this place through Peri’s eyes. After growing up here Peri must’ve thought she’d died and gone to heaven, living in Ches- shyre’s house. Though when I thought of how disorienting even I found Chesshyre’s place, stuck in its stone setting like a cut diamond, with its little lion, its captive stream and tree, its artificial sky and stars, its winged master and mistress, it seemed fair to ask not why Peri hadn’t coped but rather how she’d coped so well. At least, up until the point of stealing their baby and fleeing.
My slick. Taj was alerting me.
Something heavy and sharp slammed into my cheek. I gasped as another rock hit me on the head. Blood trickled into my mouth. I looked around wildly but could see no-one except a woman at her cooking fire to my left. She kept her head down as rocks and pieces of hard, sharp rubbish flew at me from the garbage dunes ahead. I started to back away. No point brandishing my gun; I couldn’t see my assailants and if they saw I had a gun it’d get me killed. A glass jar whizzed past my ear. I abandoned any pretence of dignified retreat and ran for it.
When We Have Wings Page 13