by Maggie Gee
Finished. Gone. There are no more escapes, except through lighter fuel or cleaning fluids, which every so often the wild boys try. Then there is mayhem, fire and death, and Chef and I creep away and hide … Such beautiful, desirable words: aspirin, somnifer, paracetamol, diamorphine, tenebrol, heroin, lullane. Lulling us away from hurt and grief. We grew used to them, and then we lost them.
Now I suppose the only drugs are stories. That’s why the kids still look to me. They see I’m writing. They’re curious. Don’t you see, you boneheads, I’m Scheherezade? I’ll spin out my story night after night, hamming, stalling, to save my life –
Scheherezade! Don’t make me laugh. None of them knows what I’m talking about. It’s a world ago, the Arabian Nights my mother used to read to me, the Bible, Dickens, Hans Andersen ... What a waste, what a shame, the old twists, the old tales, all of them lost on these little savages. Vile little shits, ignorant brutes, spitting out their elders like chickenbones, I’d like to kick them to the back of beyond …
No use, no use. Too many of them.
Now Kit is offering me a leg. ‘Take it, old man! Save it for you!’ Long, fringed with blackened, gamey meat, glistening in the light of the fire, its shape unpleasantly familiar. Sometimes I eat, but today I’m not hungry. I want to feel human, as I once was. I wave placatingly. Back to my story.)
In the early 2020s I lived in central London. I was happy because it was so different from home. Walking the streets until the cool of the early hours, dancing in the squares, by the river, on the pavements. Teen life had come out of the molelike tunnels where the young liked to hide at the beginning of the century.
My generation did things differently. We travelled everywhere, easily as swallows, we students with money from waiting tables, on cheap, safe airlines that competed for our business. The countries we flew to still had governments. Lisbon, Reykjavik, Beijing – we saw the world, packed in like sardines. Everywhere we danced to the same music. And the smaller towns were even better. There you could dip into the twentiethcentury, a time when each place had its own special taste. That quiet square in Avila. Cool pale beer, smoky black olives. The townspeople were dark like me; there were darkeyed girls in bright satin dresses …
(Euro got bad in my early twenties. There were three years of plague that closed the frontiers, a new kind of Ebola coinciding with haemorrhagic sleeping sickness; blazing summers when viruses flourished and civil order couldn’t stand the strain as hundreds of victims bled to death in their cars, choking the roads to hospitals. Our government fell, and was barely replaced. Looking back, my late teens were paradise.)
We young ones chose to live in the open, though our parents hardly left their homes, hiding behind electronic gates. We ate in the sun; we danced in the sun. We laughed at the old – we called them ‘the slows’, and sometimes ‘the bits’, for all their spare parts – with their cautious, waxy masks of whitish suncream. When the evening came, we mobbed the streets.
We liked to be under the orange sky, with the flaring thunder clouds above us. We waited for the little chill of morning, the slight but miraculous lessening of heat that slipped in with the breezes of three or four am, so that people lying clammy and bare on their beds would reach out in their sleep and pull up a sheet. Outside, the kids drew closer and threw arms round each other, enjoying being young together … I was happy, whether cool or hot, and slept as little as I could. We were all hotblooded, we were raised on heat. I loved fiery middays and baking afternoons, and the long, familiar nakedness of summer evenings, when no one under thirty ever wore a shirt.
Yet my body was strangely illadapted to heat. I was hairy, unlike my father. I had a thick pelt of curling dark hair which ran down my chest and across my shoulders, and defined the strong muscles of my legs in shorts. Some women were fascinated by it, and would stare, letting me see them noticing. Others were shocked, even a little disgusted, for the fashion was for shaving, of heads and bodies.
Why was that? Hard to recall now, but it lasted for decades, that egglike baldness. Perhaps it was a kind of streamlining, an attempt to keep cool at any cost. And the style appealed to both men and women. The fashion of the time was for androgyny, so hair was suspect, for it signalled gender.
And yet, though our clothes and hair denied it, a great gap had grown up between the sexes. Segging we called it. From segregation. Almost everything we did was segged. Girls with girls, boys with boys, great droves of animals bypassing each other, eyes darting across, wild in the neon, jostling, signalling, twisting through the night, two big streams that couldn’t make a river.
The problems with fertility had started to get worse. The screens were full of alarming statistics. They didn’t mean all that much to the young, who were too busy having fun to think that having children mattered, but our parents discussed it in solemn voices. They wanted grandchildren. They wanted a future.
I knew, in any case, with that complete confidence that young people have once, then never again, that these reports weren’t about me. I wasn’t like them. I wouldn’t have a problem. I knew I was a man who wanted women. When I had had sex (which wasn’t very often because it wasn’t easy to get women to have sex, what with segging, and mutant hivs) the pleasure was huge, easy, instinctive. It seemed so natural, like having children.
I felt on the brink of owning the world. I was a man, and human beings ran the planet. There were eight billion of us, though numbers were shrinking, but few other animals were left to compete. Insects, bacteria, viruses. (And cats, of course. Cats everywhere. The city streets were patched with fur, ginger, tabby, blackandwhite. I liked cats though, so that was all right.) I was tall, and strong, and a techie, which qualified me for a lifetime’s good money. It was new and wonderful to feel like this; home had too many small sadnesses.
When civil order broke down, over the next few years, I stayed optimistic. Who needed governments? If you were young, you were selfreliant. The plagues passed me by, though I lost several friends. The streets grew rougher, but I stayed away from trouble. In wealthier areas, life went on as usual. I didn’t let the newscasts upset me.
I found I had a gift with machines. They were alive to me, and entirely absorbing, like the aphids I once bred in a matchbox. I was fascinated by artificial life, by the huge range of mobots in the college labs, the multitravellers, the swarmers, the sorters, though my speciality was nanotechnics, working with invisibly small molecular machines. I had delicate powers of manipulation that helped me pass out with high honours. Job offers came in plenty from military and security firms. For some reason I found myself turning them down. My father was shocked, but I knew I wasn’t ready. Something had to happen first, some great adventure. For the moment I took a part-time job as a tech teacher in a Learning Centre.
One day a week was the teachers’ Dee Stress. No pupils came in, and only half the guards were working. The underground trains were back in service, after more than a year of being sealed off. I tubed in, reading a weird story about some people in Portugal living in caves. They said there were hundreds, maybe thousands of them, living as people did in the Stone Age. And they were breeding. There were children everywhere. They looked dark, in the picture, with sparkly eyes. The reporter wanted to know their secret. I thought how much I’d like to go and see for myself. Order in France had completely broken down, but things were still peaceful in Iberia.
The school garden was overrun with big pink mallow flowers like English faces burning in the sun. The litter waved gaily like little silver flags. I remember I felt something good was going to happen.
Three metres away, the front door coded me. I got the normal access signal. The doors opened. The lights came on. The uniformed guard was not in her place, but I was early, and besides, it was Friday. The voicetone welcomed me, as usual. ‘Good morning, Officer 102. It is eightothree am Cooling is in progress. Please specify rooms you want unlocked and conditioned.’
I always said ‘Good morning’ back, though other teachers laughed
at me. They thought I was joking, but I wasn’t. It seemed to me anything might be alive. What was the boundary between living and nonliving?
(Now I would give a different answer, as I approach closer to the shadowy line that separates the living from the dead, but then I was besotted with our cleverness.)
I confirmed my code, then asked for the lift, and coffee upstairs in the Dee Stress room. Dee Stress began formally at nine, so there was probably halfanhour or so before the other teachers arrived. I had nothing to prepare; the sun blazed outside the window. And so I requested the day’s chillout sounds, sponsored by StartSmart Buildings Inc. ‘First up today, we bring you ‘‘Nessun Dorma’’ …’ I never tired of it. ‘Thank you, that’s great.’ When the wonderful music surged up through the silence, it felt as though the building were giving me love.
Behind me, the entrance slid open again. I was waiting for the lift, and didn’t look round. The normal welcome routine began, and the music continued more quietly. It spoke of passion, space, grandeur, of hot black windows in high white walls. It made me think with longing of Euro. Mountains. Plains. I should be free … What kind of life did they live, in the caves?
Then the music cut out. The welcome was repeating. I turned and saw a woman with her back to me, staring mystified at the input by the scanner.
‘Just show your coder,’ I began to say, but at that moment she raised a pale hand and tried to do something to the input panel. At once the warning buzzer sounded. ‘Security,’ the building said. ‘Security to entrance, please. Security. Security.’
The entrance doors closed firmly behind the woman, who was spinning round slowly, looking nervously upwards, and then the lift doors, which were opening for me, changed their minds, shuddered, closed again. ‘Entrance hall sealed,’ the building remarked. ‘Secur-’ But it didn’t finish the word.
‘Ohgod,’ the woman said. I looked at her. She had long hair. Most females under fifty had short hair, unless they were under ten, that is. She was small, slim, in a loose white dress, not fashionable, a ‘pretty’ dress. What my mother would have called a pretty dress.
‘I’ve done something awful. I’m new,’ she said. ‘I’m Sarah Trelawney. How do you do.’ Her voice was composed, soft, with a burr. A very young voice, despite her appearance.
The voicetone hissed, seethed, strained, as if the building were trying to breathe. Then it suddenly said, in a cheerful voice, ‘The emergency has been contained. We apologise for any break in transmission.’ I waited for the doors to move, but nothing happened. And the music began to unroll again, wave after wave, into the vacuum.
She walked towards me, and the fog fell away. The sun sheared across her, shining on her hair. She wasn’t old. She was younger than me. But how strange she looked, with that loose pale dress, how perversely erotic, when everyone else was wearing clothes that were thinner than skin and clung to the body, to halfglimpse the swell of her belly, her breasts. I tried very hard not to stare at her breasts.
That weird waterfall of hair. Such childish hair. Reddish-brown, shiny, glinting like conkers against their white shell, and her skin had tiny freckles like dots of honey. She looked miserable, but her eyes were very blue. She came closer. The music gathered and poured. My heart swelled absurdly.
‘Nessun dorma …’ Let no one sleep …
Then she spoke, and her firm voice cut through my fantasy. She had sharp small teeth, which caught the light. ‘I seem to have locked us in. Sorry.’
‘I’m Saul,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry. The others will be here in ten minutes or so.’ She had a small nose, a square, strong jaw. We shook hands. Hers was mysteriously cool – most handshakes then were a slither of sweat.
‘You must be an officer,’ I said, ‘to be coded.’
‘It’s a new post,’ she said, shy. ‘I’m something called a Role Support Officer.’
‘What does that mean, then?’ I asked her.
‘The government’s decided that boys and girls have to be taught to get on together. It’s partly political, I’m afraid. They’re making appointments all over the country. Because the fertility figures are down again, and they have to seem to be doing something. Elections next year, of course.’
‘How do you mean, get on together?’ We were leaning side by side against the desk where normally the guards were posted. I noticed her nails: very white moons. Small freckled hands. No rings. A chain. She wasn’t pierced, or tattooed. I wanted to get on with her.
(Be honest: I wanted to make love to her.)
‘Well – I mean – you know – ‘ She was intensely embarrassed. ‘Live together, I suppose. Try to get them living together again.’
Live together. It was shockingly intimate.
‘I bet you got the job because you look like that.’ As soon as I’d said it, I knew it was offensive. ‘I didn’t mean –’ I said, then stopped.
But she smiled. ‘You mean – I look twentiethcentury,’ she said. ‘What they used to call feminine. Probably, yes. And I’ve dressed the part. But I can teach. As a matter of fact, I’m good. I’ve taught Outsiders, you know. I can teach without screens. I even taught for two months in the towers –’
‘Wow,’ I said. So she was tough. Like everyone else in my year at college, I’d turned down the chance of practice teaching in the towers, despite the huge bonuses they offered and the promise of fulltime protection from zapsquads.
She was staring at me, letting her frank blue eyes run over my neck, my arms – and was she looking at the curly hair on my chest? ‘You have a slightly old-fashioned look yourself,’ she said, and smiled. ‘We could almost coteach.’
Then neither of us could look at each other, but I could feel, a centimetre away, her small white hand beside mine on the desk, burning into me like a naked current. We stood transfixed in a cube of sunshine, saying very little, staring at the glass where hands had begun to wave at us, gesturing, impatient, frustrated, irrelevant. I hardly saw them, because I was with her.
Was it ten minutes, or an hour, before the building yielded? By that time, I was falling in love with Sarah.
And Sarah? I’ll never know about her, but she told me later she felt the same way.
We said very little, and a lot. That we both had dreams of escaping from the city. That both of us needed to escape our families. That we both wanted children, and expected them. We couldn’t say the word ‘children’, of course, which would have meant ‘sex’, to both of us. I said ‘I’d like a family of my own, one day,’ and she said ‘Of course,’ and smiled at me.
‘I like you,’ she said, although it was obvious.
‘Why?’ I said, feeling happiness spread through my body like oxygen.
‘I like the look of you. You’re – different. You’re not just English, are you? What are you? French? Spanish?’ She looked straight at me. Her curiosity was like a kiss. Then she lit up. ‘You’re beek, aren’t you. You must be, of course! Tell me I’m right.’
And she had seen the thing that I wanted her to see. Beek was short for bicolor, the French insult that black people themselves had taken over to mean ‘mixed race’, and she used it so easily.
‘Yes, I’m beek. Most people don’t notice. My father’s halfAfrican, my mother was white.’ Had I ever said it straight out before? She made me feel I could be myself.
‘That explains why – well, you look good to me.’ She finished the sentence in an awkward rush. ‘I’m very interested in all that. It was part of my Ethnicities diploma course.’
I’d always disliked the word ‘ethnicity’ – it sounds like someone cleaning their teeth – but on her lips, it seemed tolerable. ‘You’re English, I suppose.’
She shook her head fiercely. ‘I’m Scottish and Cornish. Not an English drop of blood in me.’ (Which must have been nonsense, but it sounded exciting.)
‘Did your parents have red hair?’ I looked at her hair. It was like some glossy animal fur. What couldn’t a man do with hair like that? Wrap it around him, burrow into it.
But something was happening outside the door. Two beings had arrived in brilliant spacesuits. Somewhere to the rear my colleagues hovered, leaving a clear space between themselves and the spacemen. ‘The emergency services are going to invade,’ I told her, thinking now it will be over.
‘I hope they don’t sack me for crashing the system.’
‘Come dancing with me tomorrow night.’ I had to say something or lose her for ever.
‘Mygod, just look at the size of those vappers!’ she said, amused, and then suddenly alarmed. ‘Are they going to use them with us inside?’
And then I remembered; it was mirrorglass. We could see out but they couldn’t see in. The people outside weren’t waving to us, they were simply beating on the glass in frustration. No one would know there was anyone inside. We were in danger; she was in danger.
I tried to sound calm. ‘Let’s get out of range.’ But the spacemen were aligning their vappers with the doors. Something earthshattering was going to happen. Without thinking, I grabbed Sarah by the shoulders, flung her to the ground, and fell on top of her, covering both our heads with my outstretched elbows. She felt soft and small, and smelled of sweat, and flowers, and part of me registered these pleasant things as most of me waited for the end. One second, two, three, four –
I felt her struggling, her small steel fists. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ she panted, furious. ‘You’ve torn my dress. Get off me, you idiot!’
Then the building spoke. Both of us froze. ‘…contained,’ it said. ‘Waiting to code. Waiting to code. Good morning. Please approach and code. Please show all codecards so we can help you.’
It was over. The lift doors glided back like silk. I rolled off Sarah, and patted her placatingly. Outside, the silver spacemen laid down their vappers, and the crowd behind them began to push forwards.
‘I was trying to save your life,’ I gabbled. ‘They couldn’t see us. It’s mirrorglass.’ She was straightening her dress and staring at me. Her pupils were pinprick small with shock, and her skin was webbed with pink where I’d clutched her. ‘I was trying to shield you with my body.’