She was full-on weeping now – at least her eyes were. She let out a little noise, half-word, half-choke.
‘That glow,’ he said. ‘I thought it was something you’d brought back with you – a souvenir of all that sun and optimism. I thought you’d brought it back for me. But no, it was him. Wasn’t it? You’d brought him home with you.’
The way he said that one word: him. Bethany wiped at the mess of tears and snot with the ball of her hand.
‘It’s over,’ she said. ‘You need to know that. I’ve been an idiot and he’s dropped me like a – used-up – thing. I deserve it.’
‘Leaving good old Peter to pick up the pieces.’
‘No I – darling—’
‘Well, like you say,’ he said, brisk now, ‘we’d better talk about it properly when you get home. Whenever that may be.’
‘Please don’t—’
‘So. Bye for now.’
‘Peter?’
This time, when the line clicked, it fell into a single dull tone that held up until she replaced the receiver. She hugged her arms around her legs and curled up on the upright desk chair. So tired now, so much at the end of everything. The sobs that took full hold of her were deep and forthright. Sobs she’d refused for so long burst like unexploded mines from a war lost years ago.
¶riotbaby
PIGWATCH: All on Panton Street: START RUNNING NORTH NOW.
Sixteen
The swipe works. Leo’s in. The concrete back-way smells of metal. Just like the building it penetrates, it gives off the message host server unknown. Leo takes the corridor ahead, hangs the first left and puts himself on silent running. Turn right, door, door, turn left, service lift – just like riotbaby said. Leo hits the button, steps into the lift and riffs on buttons. Eeny, meeny, miney, thirty-two. He leans back on the fascia and watches the LEDs go one, two, three. He hefts the ripped-metal equipment cases in each hand, checking the contents by weight.
Ten, eleven.
He knows it’s all there. He checked it a googolplex times this morning. Shit, this morning only! This has been the biggest day of Leo’s life. If only he could proffer. But he’s taken the battery out of his phone. You never know who those things’re talking to.
Twenty-one, twenty-two.
Then he has a panic over has he forgotten the hi-def jack, and spazzes a moment with the clip of the right-hand case. He gets it the wrong way up and the whole crap nearly spills on the floor.
Twenty-eight, twenty-nine.
No, all the kit’s in place, obv. Tucked into neat-cut compartments like an assassin’s rifle. He clips the box shut and breathes again.
Thirty-two.
Ping. Paydirt. The doors glide open smooth as destiny to reveal – another service corridor, this one narrow as the secret passage through a castle wall. One more swipe of the smartcard and he steps into a ballroom made of light. It’s the final scene of 2001.
This is the screen control room. The long high space is empty, like the Persona said it would be, but the conditioned air is filled with strobing colour. Leo holds his breath and gazes up, up, further up. His eyes are ‘does not compute’. Leering over him, flared by perspective, are two giants, taller than a house. The image is rendered for viewing city-blocks away. This close up, it takes several seconds to resolve the flash-lit figures of two slebs braving the red-carpet paps. A metre-high caption stripes their bellies.
This is mirror-world. He’s emerged behind one of 404 City’s mega-screens. He’s a tiny insect trapped in a living flatscreen twenty metres high.
Two screens, actually. The big one faces out across the unholy city sky. The other faces into the building’s central atrium. Nobody can hide from Mondan’s non-stop data vomit – not even its own wage-slaves. Leo’s on a floorplate suspended between the backs of these two screens. The outward-facing screen is cropped by the floor – Leo can only see the top part. In all, it’s twelve storeys high. This is the north-facing screen – the one he sees each morning from his top-floor window at the Flamingo. A flatscreen for a Game of Thrones giant.
The opposite screen, the one facing inwards, is nothing like as tall. It starts two metres above the floor and rises six metres max. It’s part of a mega news ticker wrapping around the inner walls. There are doors set into the wall below it.
Six metres overhead, a boxed-in area runs up between the screens like a periscope. This holds the video hub and the mass of cables feeding the vast displays. That’s where Leo’s going to hack the screens.
He puts his metal cases on the ground, shrugs off his backpack of tools and walks to the outer screen. He puts a palm against it. A patch of purple flares briefly under his hand then trickles to red. He thinks of the wasted girl he left back at the Flamingo, how the blood flames behind the birthmark on her jaw. The screen is warm. It’s made from a grid of liquid pixels the size of his hand. Each cell strobes though millions of possible colours twenty times a second, to the tune of the video hub.
Leo steps back from the hypnotic light and looks for the door to the video hub. In the opposite wall, under the inner screen, is a strip of wall with a choice of four doors. The doors are labelled in tiny utility typeface. He gets up close to read. The left door, near the south-east corner of the room, says east. The next, video hub room. The third, set at the end of a little alcove in the wall, is top spot – private. The fourth, west. It’s like an old-skool adventure game. Go n, w, s or e?
He should make for video hub room right away, but top spot is a thing. Online, the scuttlebutt says Sean Perce basically lives in this eagle’s nest, suspended over 404 City’s atrium. From this panopticon he trolls his minions and follows the stats and images that rotate about his perch, on the inner screens.
How awesome would it be to grab a look. Leo checks the top right corner of the inner screen, where a metre-high clock tick-tocks. It reads:
Awesome: is time.
He uses his magic card to swipe the top spot door. A huff of air farts out: the top of the atrium is hotter than the room he’s in. He steps out onto a gantry and his sense of scale contracts and expands. He’s a seabird roosting on a cliff-face of sheer impossibility. He reaches behind him, finds a rung and takes a sweaty hold.
The gantry skirts the full perimeter of the atrium, under the lip of the flickering ticker screens. The only protection here for high-walking maintenance men is one flimsy rail and a clip-wire for a safety harness. Leo has no harness to clip. He’s pasted to the wall, neck bent under the overhang created by the screen. At his feet is a rackety aluminium lattice; it’s all there is between him and a glassy gravity well that runs straight down so steep and square it can’t be real. Badly rendered polygons from a cheap-ass gamestage, all the way down to the basement levels.
He looks Leo ahead instead – and sees a flash of himself, naked, gigantic and fringed by text. Shaky news footage, taking up a section of the opposite screen. It cuts to Bethany Lehrer, panicked and retreating on the stage; and to Sean Perce, chickening it to his limo. He can’t see it all. The images are cropped by an impossibility: an office room, hovering in mid-air, fifty metres above the ground.
It has to be supported – perhaps by girders hidden in the shiver of metal that links it to the west wall – but it’s awesome the games it makes with Leo’s eyes. Its glass walls are patterned with chaotic strips of black, making it hard to see inside the box. Leo cranes his head and spies the spider, Perce, perched casual against a desk, shirtsleeves rolled like he’s ready for a fight. He works his arms to punch his muted words, with more energy than Leo would use to lift a Coke machine. Leo is cowled in the dark like Batman. No way Perce can see him from inside the halogen brightness of his Top Spot.
Then Leo sees: power, corruption and lies. The copper from before, the tall one whose gun Leo and Dani stole, is sitting in one of Perce’s easy chairs. He listens and nods. There’s a big square plaster on the side of his shaved head: it’s for certain the same cop who fell on the basement floor at the hotel. Parliamentary Br
anch? Corporate Asslick Branch. Late Capitalism Branch.
The cop stands and shakes hands with Perce. Everything Leo ever believed about the world is proved with a rugged clasp of palms.
Perce turns, still speaking, and walks to the glass. His eyes close on Leo as if he’d always known he was there. He nods. By the time he speaks again the policeman is already in motion, racing for the bridge to the west wall, eyes locked on Leo like a heat-seeking missile.
Leo turns and fumbles with the door-handle, all vertigo gone.
¶riotbaby
RIOT TIP: Teargas. Rinse your mouth without swallowing. Blow your nose, cough and spit. RESIST THE URGE TO RUB YOUR EYES.
Seventeen
At some point doors slick open and Dani falls into the room.
This is something she’s only seen in films set in New York: the lift door opens right into Sam’s sitting room. Or is it a studio? Some word that means open plan with frosted brick and heavy timber. Open kitchen to the left, low bed up a step to the right. She giggles like a mentalist. Sam lets her mischief run ahead into the room. He places keys and wallet on a table by the elevator-slash-front-door. Dani drops her backpack. Careful: remember what’s in it.
‘Why does your flat look like my office?’ she says.
There’s some connecting formula here. Sam laughs from behind her. Maybe she did a joke. He heads for the kitchen zone while Dani has a blank.
Then she’s cross-legged on the floor, checking out a server cabinet. Fat guts of Cat 4 cable spill across the floor. A network station of awesome power – no reason why this shouldn’t be here. Everything tonight is potent and natural.
Except why is there a violin case, leaning against the sound system? Sam watches impassive from the kitchen island, stirring a glass jug, as Dani touches the curvy black case. It’s new, high end. Not for the first time she doubts Sam’s easy surface. This isn’t some childhood relic of grade exams, preserved for show.
He’s here with a glass. Dani takes it and draws a deep slug. Gin and ancient herbs. The glass licks its lips as she lowers it, and Sam smiles. She’s accepted his gift, stepped inside his palace. Now she’s his. Or maybe he Rohypnoled her.
‘Come and sit.’
He walks to a quadrilateral of sofas with bandy metal legs.
She’s in a curl with him on this one sofa, telling of the brutal week when all the people she is were in a head-on crash. To hear her, it might have happened years ago.
‘All those different me’s, out in the real. All that? Me.’ Sam strokes her hair. ‘Now I’m getting panic attacks, at being everything outside. I mean – for a while I forget, then they come back. It’s like having my insides eaten out by dogs. They’re fucking –’
She gestures. Time slides back into a familiar groove.
‘This afternoon,’ she says, ‘with Bethany, it was like I was watching myself doing every single thing. And all I saw was this – blank. And I kept thinking – I don’t even know what it’s like to have me in the room. What’s that even like?’
The one light, a glowing cube down low at the corner of the sofa, strobes gently but insistently. Sam is around her.
‘Like, like you: you’re lovely. No I mean it, you are. And it sort of, it fills the room. Me, I feel like I’m sometimes –’
Sam’s mouth is over hers and it’s hot and tight.
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t get that.’
Who the fuck spoke?
Sam twists to find the source, sits up. Rubs his face into awareness. Dani shifts. There’s a Sam-shaped dent in her tits. His taste in her mouth: plum, hibiscus – something. He looks dangerous. She touches his arm.
‘Sam? What was that?’
For a moment it seems too intimate to last. Then he laughs.
‘Oh. Huh.’
He pulls his phone from behind a cushion. He shows it to her then speaks into it.
‘Suck my dick.’
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t get that.’
She catches on and crawls across him to get to the mic.
‘Hairy gonads!’
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t get that.’
‘Anal warts!’
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t get that.’
Their first in-joke. They overplay it.
Naked on the pallet Dani curls away from Sam. He stretches out, eyes to the ceiling. He wants her to believe he’s cool about this, or not that, but that he’s capable of more. His diaphragm flutters, calling bullshit on his calm. The clock’s hands trace big arcs of time above their heads. Dani shivers as the night air cools her sweat. She talks and talks. All the imaginary times she’s fucked this man – so different from the abortive grapple they just unwound from. Her fantasy Sam was too real to survive reality. That lank Adonis from an island beach was neater than the actual Sam.
Anyway, at what point did she set herself up as Sam’s little virgin? She hunts for words to cover the static, keeps straying into confession; wishes she could shut up.
‘You think I’m cold,’ she says.
‘I don’t.’
She waits but apparently that’s all. Words keep marching out of her face.
He eases his leg between the rear of her calves and looks down her back. All he wants is to touch her soft arse. He’s not listening to her. He gazes down the soft comma of her body, watching her cheeks go taut and loose. In general he only fucks skinny girls; but now all he wants is to slip the pads of his fingers down the small of her back and trace an opening between those cheeks. He’s hard again.
‘I mean,’ she’s saying, ‘when things work we don’t know where it comes from. There’s something automatic. I don’t care how smart you are. You don’t know what the fuck’s going on any more than I do.’
‘It’s true. I know nothing,’ Sam says to her crack.
‘No, I mean it.’
His fingers make patterns along her spine.
‘You shouldn’t be hard on yourself,’ he says. ‘You’re more special than you give yourself credit.’
‘How do you mean? Oh.’
His first two fingers are doing the thing.
‘I’m not trying to shut you up.’
‘No, it’s fine. I like to talk while – hmm.’
‘You like that?’
‘. . .’
Her spinal cord judders. She bites her lower lip, her whole body focused on the fingers working down between her buttocks. He nuzzles up to her and kisses between her shoulder blades, works his spare arm under and around, pulling her in. She has nice, unassuming little breasts. She wriggles into place. They fit together well.
His two fingers part as they reach her arsehole. A tip touches. Muscles recoil like sea-life into its shell. She gives off heat and pushes at him as he slips the finger in. She gasps. He’s never done this before: always shy of filth. As he works another in, he reaches the other hand around to grasp her breast. She’s struggling to turn and face him. Her head snakes around to bite his ear. It terriers onto the lobe. Deadlock. She won’t unclench her teeth and he won’t move his fingers.
She gives first. His stinging earlobe slips from her mouth. He shakes his head and moves on top, his cock painfully hard. He turns her over, fingers inside to the middle joint. She glares up at him, a flush running across her chest like brushfire. As her pelvis flattens against the mattress he twists his fingers in her tightness. She takes a sharp breath and folds her leg so he can unloop his arm. He looks down on her compact body. When he first undressed her he couldn’t get past the puppy-flesh, would not get fully hard. Now she inflames him. The bright purple song of her birthmark, its bottom tip kissing her collarbone. He plays it with his tongue.
She grabs his cock and grapples it down, twisting it hard. He cries, ah-ha-ha and he’s laughing, at how completely she’s surprised him. He hopes she heard him give in. She flattens her other hand against his chest. The eggshell smoothness of his face turns to raw red as it crosses the ridges of his ribcage. His cock is slim and knotted.
Fuck the foreplay
. All the fists she’s made of her own pleasure in her creaking swivel chair. Fake, fake. This is real, she thinks; but he thinks, this isn’t real.
Both of them are hungry and racing for the prize. She scrapes her palm across his thistle-down head then pulls back and slaps his face. His shocked expression cracks her up. He rears back, his fingers popping out of her, too fast. She punches him in the chest: hard. He grapples at her fist but she shakes it free and gives his cock a squeeze with her other hand: no you don’t. He glares at her in actual fury. Ah, so it was in there somewhere. She punches him again, one, two, on his tight pectoral. It flares red. Before his face can settle she moves him down and eases him in: Christ, she’s like water. She racks and he gasps. She slaps him and grabs his jawbone, squashing up his pretty face. Grabs his arse and forces him in.
Something just unlocked. He lets her handle him like a mechanical toy. She rucks him into her with both hands.
She doesn’t make it: but it’s close. He starts to buckle and lets it out with a low moan. She roars and keeps working him into her but he’s slipping away.
She lets him ease out. They look at each other for the longest time. Whose move?
‘Well,’ he says, ‘second time’s the charm.’
She laughs and slaps his shoulder.
‘Fucking teenager.’
But her grin says she’s lying. She strokes his cheek with the backs of her fingers.
‘Sorry, I guess.’
He means it.
‘No, no.’
‘That was – surprising for me.’
That sheepish grin: the boy Sam.
‘Me too. Sure.’
He slips back around her. She shifts and realises she’s oozing like mad. Ah, fuck it: it’s his side of the bed. Presumably.
Sockpuppet: Book One in the Martingale Cycle Page 28