by Simon Ings
The driver shrugged, pressed a button and the doors opened.
Ajay climbed in first. He reached into his jeans pocket, drew out a card Rosa had not seen before and ran it twice through a slot by the driver’s arm. He beckoned Rosa to follow him. They walked to the back of the bus and sat down. The bus pulled away from the stop, and slipped silent and smooth along the blacktop.
‘Better than the car,’ she said to Ajay, joining him on the seat at the back of the bus.
Ajay took her hand and squeezed it hard. Rosa struggled with him. His grip was iron. ‘What did I say.’
It wasn’t a question.
‘Okay.’
‘What did I say.’ He bent her wrist back.
Rosa gasped. ‘Okay, silence, okay.’
He let her go.
She nursed her wrist, fighting back tears, and cast him a resentful glance. She gasped. He was deteriorating fast. His face was sunken. His eyes were closed, not with tiredness, though he looked exhausted, but with concentration.
He glanced at her. But there was no anger there now. Something dumb and terrible looked out at her from behind his once fiery eyes.
‘Oh Ajay,’ she sighed, and leaned against him: ‘Ajay, don’t die.’
He squeezed her fingers and managed a smile. ‘Hush I said.’ His breath smelled foul. ‘Hush.’
The ride seemed to go on forever. He slept fitfully, his head resting upon Rosa’s shoulder. She stroked his hair; it came free between her fingers. Beneath, his scalp was badly inflamed. She looked at his neck, his hands. No wonder he’d been pushing her off the whole time. Unsoothed by milk, his skin was raw and peeling.
She too slept at last, and woke up to find the bus was full, and a black woman was edging her along the seat none too gently to make some room. So many different people. Were people then like trees, all different for all they were the same? All different skins, eyes, fingers, teeth: like trees, and shells, and reeds? Again, the world’s fecundity outstripped her Ma’s by miles. Amazed by the variety around her, Rosa paid little attention to the outside. When at last she looked past Ajay’s shoulder out the window, she found they’d reached some town far bigger than the others they’d passed through: Santa Cruz itself, she guessed.
Under the surgical orange light of the street lamps, the buildings looked scrap-built, like the tree-house, though thrown together on a scale she couldn’t comprehend. This was no ordered space, no intelligent structure. Shadows formed no patterns nor surfaces a mind, but all lay incoherent and passive, spread out across empty lots. Unlit paths led nowhere among broken hedges, avenues of wilted trees, derelict squares and dusty lawns.
They pulled into the station and disembarked. Ajay left the bag for Rosa to carry. She followed him into the street. Ajay leaned against a wall to catch his breath.
She waited, impatient, fearing for him.
He said, ‘I need to get inside.’
‘How?’
‘A motel.’
The word meant nothing to her. ‘I’ll find someone to take us.’
‘No.’
She sighed. ‘Conspicuous?’
‘Yeah.’ He pushed himself up from the wall. ‘Come on. They can’t be far.’
‘Motels.’
He nodded, eyes tight shut, took a few steps than sank to his knees.
‘Ajay?’
He started to retch, right there on the sidewalk.
She dropped the bag and knelt beside him, hands upon his shoulders. She pressed her forehead to his back, willing him well. His heaves were dry; they brought up nothing but a foul yellow phlegm. ‘Oh Christ alive,’ he muttered, between breaths, and retched again, and slumped.
‘What is it?’ she begged, although she knew: Ma’s rays had burned his insides.
He choked and spat. ‘Help me up.’
She stood, took hold of his hands and pulled. He staggered up and past her, fetching up against a chain-link fence. Beyond, across the barren lot stretched a blank brick wall. On a rooftop scaffold, a blue neon sign read Warm Seas.
‘What does that mean?’
Ajay glanced: ‘I’ve no idea.’
‘What seas are there?’ she asked him, wondering. She reached out with her mind again, but there was nothing there: no minded things.
The whole city was like the hospital: brutal, obvious and dead. She shivered with disappointment.
‘Help me along,’ Ajay told her. He put his arm around her shoulders and let her take his weight. She took up the bag and put her free arm around his waist. They walked like that for about fifteen minutes. It seemed longer. They met no one. Occasionally a car would pass, its insides hidden behind tinted windows. But no one stopped them, or questioned who they were, and no one helped. Santa Cruz was empty of people: but Ajay was too ill to be unnerved, and Rosa, knowing no better, simply accepted what she saw. She was used to empty places, silence and solitude. The emptiness unnerving her was of a different kind: an emptiness not of sight or sound but of senses she’d never needed a name for or really, until now, knew that she had. If she’d tried to put into words the emptiness she felt, they would have made no sense: a lack of Ma-likeness; a lack of hum and colour-bleed? Set against Ajay’s worsening sickness, it seemed trivial. She said nothing.
It dawned on her slowly that many of the buildings they passed were in ruins. The damage was not recent. All the roads were clear, the rubble ’dozed into tidy weed-grown piles she’d thought at first were mere decoration. Knowing nothing of Moonwolf, nor of the Lobby Wars, she imagined mere abandonment explained the empty lots, the air of dereliction. Sprung from a womb that was itself a long-abandoned city, she did not feel deterred; but rather as though, after a long and arduous journey, she had at last stumbled upon something familiar.
They came in sight of the beach: a band of lights, a pier, a fairground; beyond, a blackness deeper than the sky’s. Rosa looked about her, her eyes filled with bright billboards and neon lights. ‘What’s a motel look like?’
‘Follow me.’ Ajay let go of her, the way an unsure swimmer lets go the side of a deep pool. Unsupported, unsteady, he staggered along the pavement, straightening his jacket as he went. Rosa followed with the bag, afraid for him, ready to catch him should he fall. The street was full of signs. Chem-Dry Excel. No Entry. Copyprint. Charlie Dodd. No Parking. Barn Dance Agency. Xing Ped. Alex’s. Plumb Control. Kahlon Grocers and Meat. 7:30 p.m. daily. Still. Closed. Jetmaster. Open. R&B. Autoship. She searched them all for orders, clues for how to behave, how to blend in; but here again there was no sense, no sign of mind, just blank and passive chaos, neon-lit.
Ajay reached the pavement’s edge and turned around, flapping his arms to keep his balance. ‘Help me cross the street.’
She took his arm. The crossroads lay before the pier whose blue-white strip lights reached into the blackness like some brave but tawdry challenge. ‘What’s it for?’
‘Fishing. Thinking. Tourist stuff.’
‘“Tourist”?’
A car horn blared at them. Rosa wheeled round and threw her hand up against the lights of an oncoming 4×4. She struck out with her mind to stop the thing. Nothing happened. She glimpsed the driver, white-faced, leaning into the wheel. She gritted her teeth, feeling the impact already—
And opened her eyes.
The car had veered around them: none of her doing. She turned to follow its tail lights receding, blending in at last with the blinking chaos of the seaside street. It had missed them. None of my doing.
‘Come on.’
She turned back to Ajay. He was staring blindly at the road surface, spittle edging his lips. ‘Ajay—’
‘Hurry up.’
Rosa thought, He doesn’t know what’s happening. Scared for him, she ushered him off the road.
‘There,’ he said, and pointed. ‘There, that’s it. That’s a motel.’
Beyond the pier, set on top of a low hill, lines of low buildings formed a courtyard, dark and calming to the eyes. Rosa helped Ajay up the shallow concrete steps
and brought him to the courtyard. An office lay to one side, visible through a door of wire-netted glass. Ajay shook Rosa off and walked as straight as he could to the door. He pulled it open. The handle slipped out his grasp and the door fell to again. Ajay staggered. Rosa tried the door herself.
Cold air scudded across her face. The office had a dry thin smell. Behind the counter, a plastic tassel curtain rippled listlessly. There was a buzzer on the counter. Ajay pressed it. An old woman shambled in through the curtain. She had a smooth, unnatural face and deep black eyes she kept directed at the ground. Even as she spoke she hardly looked at them, and instead busied herself at a monitor set into the mock pine counter. She said something Rosa didn’t catch. Ajay handed her the card she’d seen him use when they boarded the bus. The monitor bleeped. More words: a tongue Ma’s screens had played sometimes but which Rosa had never learned.
Ajay knew it; he replied in kind. Much shrugging, pleading, smiles: some last reserve sustaining him – but for how long?
The woman ran the card through the slot above her monitor again: again the machine bleeped. She shrugged, and brought her eyes up to theirs, and sighed, as though their very looks had won some sort of victory over her. She spoke again and pointed. Ajay nodded, and smiled, took Rosa by the arm and led her out again into the warm, thick night.
‘Forty-three,’ he said, ‘oh Christ, oh Christ—’ He slid against her. She stumbled and dropped him. He fell to his knees. Rosa glanced behind her at the office. It was empty once again. No one had seen him fall. No one came out to help.
He lay there on the ground, shaking, retching. Rosa watched him, helpless and frightened, till at last the fit was past.
‘Here, get me up.’
Quickly she helped him to his feet.
‘Find forty-three.’ He pointed at the buildings around them. The doors had numbers on them. Rosa looked round. ‘They stop at thirty.’
‘Upstairs, then. Hurry.’
The treads were wooden, uneven, widely spaced.
‘Take the card.’
He pressed the plastic into her hand. She found the door, saw the slot by the handle and pushed the card inside. A spring inside the mechanism shot the card back into her hand. The door swung open. Ajay plunged in blindly. The light came on automatically as he toppled onto the bed. Rosa stepped inside and closed the door behind her. Ajay squirmed and groaned, pulling things from out the pockets of his jacket: pills and phials. ‘Where’s the worm?’
‘The what?’
‘In that lot.’ He gestured weakly at the scattered drugs, then curled in on himself, groaning again. Creamy saliva edged his lips. Rosa flicked through the medicines, not knowing what she was looking for.
‘That, that.’
A clear plastic tube in a cellophane wrapper: inside the tube—
‘What is it?’
‘Tapeworm. Grows to make an artificial lining while the gut repairs. Hard to swallow. Wriggly.’
‘Ugh.’
‘Don’t let me throw it up. I must reswallow.’
‘Okay.’
‘Well open it then!’
She tore the packet open, pulled the stopper from the tube.
‘Careful, I need to drink the jelly too.’
She handed it to him: a long flat worm, wrapped around itself and set in greenish stuff. ‘Is it alive?’
‘Sleeping. Stomach acid wakes it.’ He let go his belly long enough to take the tube and chug the contents. ‘Rosa, put the bag in the cooler. Just shove the beer on the floor.’
She looked around. What cooler? What bag?
He looked around him. ‘Where’s the bag?’
‘The bag—’ Her mind raced: what had happened to it?
‘The bag!’ he shouted, sat up sharply, groaned and keeled.
‘I left it in the office,’ she remembered. ‘I’ll go fetch.’
He laughed, hysterical. ‘Christ, hurry up.’
She fled the room and half fell down the stairs. The office was empty. She let herself inside. The hold-all with the head was leaking fast: water stood in pools about the floor. Rosa snatched up the bag and took it out into the courtyard. A sign under the stairs said ‘Ice’. There was an ice-maker there, and instructions in two languages, neither of which she knew. She tried to figure the machine, minding it, but nothing came. It was dead, like the hospital, the pod and the whole wide world of Santa Cruz. She sighed and studied the machine closer. There was a metal flange, and below it a black rubber spout. She opened the bag. There was a strange smell inside, from the sea-water perhaps. She held it up under the spout, touched the lever and minded it again. Still nothing happened. She screwed up her eyes and concentrated, minding it as hard as she could.
‘You have to push the lever down.’
She whirled around. There was a stranger behind her. She was new to the world. People surprised her. This man especially: curly haired, very tall, and fat round the middle. A little moustache. She smiled at him experimentally. He smiled back. ‘Push the little lever down.’
She pushed it down. Ice tumbled into the bag. She pressed again, again, again, filling it up—
‘Hey,’ he said gently, ‘leave some for me.’
She closed up the bag and stepped out his way.
‘What you got there, anyway?’
She said, ‘A head.’
‘Yeah, right,’ he grinned. He hit the button and filled his bucket up with ice. He gave her an appraising glance. ‘Room thirty-six,’ he said smoothly, ‘you’ve nothing better on your mind. Fix you a drink.’
She zipped the bag. ‘I’d best be gone.’
‘What sort of head?’
‘Goodbye.’
She took the stairs three at a time, heart hammering, afraid.
WIFE
For a long time nothing bad happened; and if they were here by Ma’s design, then that design remained mysterious.
No one came after them. No Haag agents, no black-robed ghouls from the nerve-frozen cloisters of Presidio, not even the local law enforcement; and the murders she and Ajay had committed remained unsolved.
To become less conspicuous they had to find some better place to stay than the motel. Risking all on a poorly hacked smartcard, they found themselves a house to rent.
It was advertised in a local paper. Ajay was so ill he could hardly focus, and anyway he had little concentration, so Rosa had to read him the advertisement. It was in the local Hispanic dialect, and Rosa did not know it. She had to spell words out for him.
Because he was ill it was Rosa who met the landlord, paying him with Ajay’s stolen card. His BusinessMan took the card without a murmur. A simple unit – simpler even than the one at the motel – it had no nose for the crude frauds Ajay had wreaked upon the plastic.
The house was clapboard, painted pink, clad only on the inside so its owners would be comfortable even in summer’s heat. It was built on a small outcrop, set above the other houses. The path to the front door was choked with wild grasses and strange, sparse bushes with huge serrated leaves. The front of the house had a veranda and bay windows. There were no curtains. Rosa made some as best she knew how. They were useless: too thin, too short, and they didn’t meet in the middle. She was inordinately proud of them. Ajay said nothing, glad for anything that came between the daylight and his raw and bloodshot eyes. The hill sloped away from under the rear of the house. The back rooms rested on stilts. The air wheeled dustily between the stilts, cooling the floors above.
From the back windows, they could see the wind making waves in the wild brown grasses which had overtaken the lawn: beyond, a line of dying firs formed a gap-toothed screen between the lawn and the waste ground bordering an abandoned military airstrip.
At night people gathered on the waste ground, crowding round a bonfire of building timber and old furniture. Sometimes they played heavy music inside a large, low prefabricated shed. The shed’s walls absorbed all the treble frequencies leaving only the backbeat, a bass line thudding like the heart of some pre
historic predator. On bad nights Ajay confused the beat with the rhythm of his own heart and found himself sweating and shaking, all out of tempo with himself, a fevered night ahead. On good nights the backbeat simply angered him. It kept him awake. It made his head spin.
So she’d get by in shops and in the street. Ajay taught Rosa some words of Spanish. The more ill he became, the more confused were his lessons. Half of the words he taught her were not Spanish at all but Portuguese. When she ordered food or asked directions, people scratched their heads and frowned.
She cared for him as best she could. She fed him. No foul milks this time, but light foods. Nothing overcooked or fatty. Lots of simple sugars. She learned fast, enjoying the work. She bought fresh herbs and avoided hot spices. She cooked everything quickly, on a high heat, so that the food lost none of its savour. A little oil sufficed; but if his belly was tender, she used the steamer instead, adding nothing to season what she cooked, not even salt.
He ate five dinners a day – two helpings of every course – and drank only water from the healthfood store, bottled at source. Ice and cooking water too had to be bought and carried in from the store. No tap water for Ajay, no nitrates, nothing force-grown or out of season. Buckets of food went down him daily. There was hardly a moment when he was not eating. Chomping listlessly, he imagined himself a gigantic mouth, a huge intestine let loose in a greengrocer’s store. It made him ill to imagine how big the worm in him must be by now. It wasn’t their looks that made parasites ugly, he realised, so much as their enthusiasm . . .
The worm’s huge metabolic demands required constant satisfaction. Ajay’s dreams were all of food, his every memory a taste. ‘In Brazil they make fruit pastes, dosas of guava, papaya, banana. Steak with everything and beans they cook for days. Farofa. Meal. I miss it. Christ, ice creams! Burití, acerola, lime, cashew . . .’
‘Home again. They’ve raspberries and kale!’
She cared for him. She tended him.
She came in from the kitchen, and with her the smell of sesame oil, parsley, ginger. Food for him. Courgettes in garlic, peppers stuffed with pine nuts, meal . . .