Death & the City Book Two

by Lisa Scullard

  “I have to change my costume for the next presentation,” she says, taking a watch out of her pocket and consulting it. “Maybe I’ll put my thong on back-to-front and see if it gets a laugh.”

  “See you later,” I grin, as she heads backstage again with a little wave. She reminds me of Elaine and Martha. Kind of, this is the real me now, and I’m out enjoying myself. Screw what the rest of the world thinks.

  It’s only after she’s gone that I realise the whole conversation was in Japanese. Glad I’m not a WW2 spy, like Alice thinks she is. I’d have been rubbish. My personality just adapts or switches on autopilot to match whoever’s in front of me. I don’t even get time to think about it first or make a choice. Everybody would have thought I was their cause sympathizer. I’d have been done for being a double or triple agent before I walked the length of a row of shops and chatted to three people along the way.

  Not my problem in this job, though. It’s meant to be the way things are run. See all points of view. Take all sides of the story. And then act in enforcement of the law, without bias or prejudice. That’s the textbook case scenario. In reality, security staff do bring their own personalities to work, as much as anyone else does, but with all the latest cameras and surveillance technology watching us and listening in on us, it’s repressed. Occasionally only glimpses appear, like in Doorman Harry’s report-writing language, or the fact that Hurst Knightwood regularly sports a Batman or Superman t-shirt under his uniform.

  Thinking of The Plaza guys, I get a surprise when my replacement on the next rotation turns out to be Niall Taylor. It turns out he started his shift at lunchtime, and was on an hour’s break when mine started later.

  “Hi ya,” he greets me, with a playful thump on the shoulder. “Michelle would love this. Got a total thing for fantasy role-play. Not in the bedroom, just the internet communities. She’s a vampire schoolteacher on Double Life. Spends hours reading those horror romance books as well, the ones meant for kids? Reads me bits out loud and then says, you should be more like that. What, a bloodthirsty monster who disappears on you without explanation, sulks, and stands you up all the time? No problem. I’m going to give her a shovel for her birthday and tell her to go dig up a new boyfriend, at this rate.”

  The rest of the evening is spectacular in the performance, but uneventful in the security job. Once the customers leave, the stars all having disappeared well before the end, the roadies appear out of the darkness to start packing up. The bar managers do a rapid stock-take, and Greg from security orders in pizza for everyone.

  “There’s enough booze left for everyone to take two drinks home with them,” the head barman announces. “First come, first served.”

  “Bet all the cola has gone,” Greg grumbles, as bar and door staff all converge on the bar. “If anyone sees a soft drink, grab it for me.”

  “Are you in A.A?” I ask. “Or are you pregnant?”

  “Both,” he grins, suddenly and unexpectedly. “No, I just hate the taste and hate being drunk. Haven’t touched alcohol since I was eighteen.”

  There’s an untouched crate of apple-watermelon JJ, so I get two bottles of that. Greg gets one of those also, and the last can of Red Akuma. Niall takes two beers with him and leaves mysteriously early - because I haven’t heard from head office, probably only to check up on Michelle after his long double shift, who he never admits to being possessive and obsessive about.

  The rest of us all sit on the edge of the stage when the pizzas arrive, while the roadies take down the taffeta, boasting that they’ve just had All-You-Can-Eat Indian curry buffet at the pub down the road.

  “How many First Aid cases tonight?” one of the guys asks, as Greg hands out incident sheets needing signatures, and I scribble briefly on mine.

  “Er, three,” he says. “Good result. One asthma attack, one too much to drink, one Ingestion Of Other.”

  “How was the asthma case?” someone else chips in.

  “Fine.” Greg bites into his pizza. “Grabbed him and did the acupressure point on his ear, he was breathing normally before his girlfriend finally found his inhaler in her handbag.” He glances at me as I give him a critical look. “I’m Traditional Chinese Medicine qualified. Acupuncture and herbalism. Not the kind you smoke, you dorks.”

  A couple of leering door staff snigger.

  “You see many customers at these gigs on drugs, like the guy outside earlier?” I query.

  “Yeah, some of the Medieval hippies turn up on mushrooms at the right time of year, or munchied out of their heads on hash brownies. They’re assholes. Always saying it’s authentic. Well, I just tell them, so is gonorrhea. Come back when you’ve got that, and smallpox.”

  “What do you think he was on?”

  “Looked like Phencyclidine, or LSD, or something similar. Or mushroom tea, that can be horrible. He’s gone for a stomach pump because they can’t establish from him what he took, so they’ll test if it was anything in that bottle he had with him, flush him out anyway, and give him some anti-psychotic downers.”

  Gladly I have had very little contact with drug users, out of my own avoidance of the stuff. It just means I avoid the people as well. Due to my inflexibility over the matter, they also avoid me. Fortunately for them. The last thing my artificial psychopathic nature needs is to relax its inhibitions.

  The delightful Darth Malaga was a recreational drug user. Couldn’t spend an hour alone, or in intimate company, without a smoke. He said he used to be an alcoholic, then found he preferred alcohol when it was inside young women in large quantities nearby, where he could take better advantage of it. I still don’t know whether being an evil bastard came naturally to him, or if he had to work on it to build up a character like that.

  It was the boasting about paying for his ex-girlfriends’ abortions as his regular birth control method that made me think he must have had a few role models of his own. It’s not even as if he was anyone important - behaving like an early 20th century Hollywood casting director, or sleazy New York art dealer or music producer. Hey baby, wannabe famous?

  No thanks. Just sane.

  Maybe I’ll take Connor’s suggestion and sort out a child support claim. Would serve the guy right. Considering I never filed against him for holiday rape.

  I’m still thinking about it as I rejoin the motorway on the start of my trek back home. Junior drops hints, like why does she never get birthday cards, but not like the daily I-want-a-Dad wail that I got when she was four. Because, like me, she saw the family demographic portrayed every day on TV. Brian, from My Parents Are Aliens, has a lot to answer for - giving single mums a hard time explaining that sometimes, there is no Brian. Not every family has a Brian. And not every family has a Sophie.

  Connor seems to have the same bone to pick about the Media representation of families. By the sound of it, both his parents successfully alienated him. Like his only purpose in life to them was a means to hide their ongoing infidelities, by having him supposedly corroborate each of their stories, filling his childhood ears with their guile and lies. If I was him, I’d be more than just a surgically enhanced psychopath, I think. No wonder he avoids relationships, and goes well out of his way to avoid certain types of women.

  I wonder if it’s a really healthy form of empathy that I share with Connor, which means we seem to be getting along. Empathy in what’s so unstable about both of us. Because in a strange way, we’re not competing over it - about who’s got the worst deal, which of us is the more complicated. At least it doesn’t feel like that. We both allow each other airtime, see each other’s point of view, and then get on with something else. It’s as if we can both see inside each other a bit of us which was never affected by any of it, the bit which wasn’t impressed by all the drama. The unemotional, objective, altruistic part of each other, which at the end of the day meant we stayed objective, sane, and pro-active, in our regular day-to-day responsibilities. Whenever I seem to start straying into something emotionally confusing, Connor says something log
ical about it, and I automatically stabilize again.

  However, I feel as though HIS feelings are more under control by physical outlet, rather than logic, or at least threats of a physical outlet - going by the last few nights. I get the feeling he enjoys the challenge it gives his self-control. Like if he can control that particular urge, he feels more in control the rest of the time. Or something like that. It sounds a bit Zen. Almost a monastic thing.

  Funny how abstinence cults haven’t caught on as much as you’d think they would, with the whole world trying to sell everyone stuff all the time nowadays. I remember Junior asking me if she could give up being shown any commercials for Lent. I told her that would be cool, and to turn the sound off whenever they came on, if there was no avoiding them. Although the year before, she did ask if it was possible to give up hiccups, and the anticipation of any breakthrough hiccup seemed to cure her of them altogether. Maybe I could make that work for me, and stay vigilant for the next pair of shoes that tries to catch me unawares. Supposing Crank’s hotel in Vegas has an on-site shopping mall? I might actually get to see my iBay bargains with the designer price tags on.

  I’m alone on the motorway, except for the tail-lights of a lorry in the distance ahead, and equally distant headlights behind. Deep in thought about parenting matters, my phone on the dashboard is quite a rude interruption.

  “Yeah,” I sigh, pressing Connect, once the volume on my stereo is down to background level.

  “Lara, you need to set up voice recognition now,” says Warren. “You’ve got a target on the road.”

  “Is it human or FTO?” I ask, really not bothered one way or the other. I could just go straight home, to be honest. Where’s Connor when I need him? That’s what I need a wingman for. To take out the target while I get a long overdue lie-in.

  “In the compartment under your arm-rest you’ll find a USB toggle and a hands-free Bluetooth earpiece,” he says. “Put one in the stereo and the other in your ear, and don’t play cute asking me what goes where, those kind of games are for the bedroom.”

  “I always thought this compartment was for smokers,” I mutter, levering it up and finding the new equipment. “I hope you didn’t pull this out of Van Helsing’s ear. Don’t know where he’s been.”

  “When the toggle light starts flashing blue, you need to talk into the earpiece until it stops flashing and stays on,” he says, as I find the earpiece’s On button and press it, initiating the USB remote. “Just say anything you want. Recite a nursery rhyme, tell me a story - but don’t sing, it gives a misrepresented version of your voice.”

  “So I can’t do my Bruce Dickinson impression?” I say. The blue light starts to flash. “Okay, I can’t think of a nursery rhyme and I don’t know any stories off the top of my head, so I’ll just tell you how my night went - seeing as nobody ever asks when I get home, because so far nobody’s ever there. It was fine, thank you for asking, Warren. Didn’t have any trouble, one or two First Aid cases, a kid on drugs - looking for Medieval dragons. I met a famous celebrity, Dr. Wang who wrote psychology books like Free Your Mind or whatever it was called, we had a nice chat. I thought about whether I should claim child support or give up my job, but then I think about giving up my job every night I’m stuck standing around looking at drunk people. I also thought about quitting playing Hit-Man’s Nemesis today. I don’t think I’ve got the right conscience for it. Okay, it’s stopped flashing now. Actually it stopped flashing after I said thank you for asking, but I had a lot more to say than I thought.”

  “Good girl,” says Warren, ignoring anything else I’ve just divulged for now. “Okay, nothing should happen when I say this on Speakerphone, but when you say it, you should get a response. Say: ‘System status check.’”

  “System status check?” I repeat automatically, without thinking. “Ow. It’s beeping in my ear.”

  “Three beeps means it’s ‘On Standby.’”

  “No, it was like five or six.”

  “That means it’s one step ahead of you already, it means probable target in range, but that could be anything from a police scanner nearby, to a Gatso camera.”

  “Isn’t it configurated for anything specific?” I ask. “Can I go back to using a baseball bat and skateboard? It sounds a bit indiscriminate.”

  “It’s you that has to be specific. Ask it for system status ‘surveillance.’”

  I repeat the phrase with added ‘surveillance’ and report back three beeps.

  “Means ‘On Standby,’” he reminds me. “Not a surveillance target in range. Try ‘offensive.’”

  “System status offensive,” I repeat, feeling like a Stormtrooper clone more than ever. I start thinking about hot chocolate for when I get home. I get six beeps in the ear. “Six this time.”

  “Means your target in range has a recognised arms signature,” he tells me.

  “Oh, good,” I remark, with even more boredom in my voice than I was hoping to summon up. “Shall I carry on playing twenty questions with R2-D2? Like, is the target a man? Are they wearing a hat? Have they got glasses? Are they ginger? Do they have a beard? I’m not getting any responses from these, you’ll have to give me a clue.”

  “You forgot to ask if it’s human. It could be another remote device.”

  “System status human,” I ask. It is just like a game of Guess Who, only more remedial. I get four beeps. “What does four mean?”

  “Four means inconclusive. There might be body armour compromising a signal, or it might be simply a body.”

  “So either someone’s learning lessons from what happened to the FTO and put on some padding, or a body’s been dumped in a vehicle they want to get rid of somehow?” I reply.

  “Yeah, okay, we’re not jumping to conclusions, it’s not like we want to stop them and ask for their details,” Warren says. “We want it off the road.”

  “All at once, or one wheel-nut at a time?” I query. “I’m just wondering, what else I could ask this scanner to detect, other than human. Like non-human, considering whose car this voice recognition came out of, and his fantasy bounty hunter world.”

  “Well, you can play with it in your own time. Right now it’s the arms signature that’s the priority, not some hit-man’s private life.”

  “I guess he’s not talking yet, then.”

  “Oh, he’s talking plenty. Just too much information to analyse under the influence of your boyfriend’s truth cocktail. Got to filter out the fantasy from the reality.”

  “He’s not my boyfriend. We’ve been on one date.”

  “What’s he got to do, get on his hands and knees and beg?”

  “Only if he’s a target,” I concede.

  “I don’t know what’s worse, women who delude themselves too much, or women who refuse to be deluded at all,” he remarks. “Both types are too much like hard work. All right, you need to catch up to the HGV ahead of you. We’ll let you know what we pick up from the sensors.”

  “Is that the target, then?” I ask, touching down on the accelerator a bit.

  “No, that’s going to be your cover,” he replies. “You’re going to hang around loose in front and wait for the target to catch you up.”

  “Oh, okay - sounds like a plan.”

  “In the meantime you need to set up the A.I. You’ve got to ask it to download, unzip and then install a program called Response Version 7.1. You’ll get a single continuous warbling tone after each command to denote it’s operating, then if it’s successful you’ll get the ‘standby’ notification to move onto the next. If you get ‘inconclusive’ you have to ask it to confirm the operation, if it’s still inconclusive you have to start the operation again. You’ll get a spoken tutorial when it’s installed. It’s not interactive, just a recording, so don’t go thinking anything in your car has a personality.”

  “Does that include me?” I grin hopefully.

  “You can listen to the tutorial any time just by asking System Status for it,” he says, as I ask System Status to download the
file, and a very 1980’s jingle-jingle tone starts in my ear. “And you can skip it at any time too.”

  “Why all the binary code and Morse noises?” I mutter. “Why not a Speaking Clock or Pythonesque sat-nav voiceover?”

  “Well, it slows down operation, has to be translated for various territories, takes time to write and program, and users expect too much of it from watching too much Transformers and Knight Rider,” Warren says, logically. “The simplest form of interaction has the least amount of things that can go wrong with it as well. You’ll get an SOS Morse notification if the system is ever compromised or inoperable. Meaning you are then welcome to get out the old baseball bat.”

  “Awesome,” I reply, with a nod. “Glad to hear I’m not tied inextricably to the onslaught of modern technology.”

  “Speaking of old technology, you’ve got Scud navigation built in now instead of the remote control drive. It’s not set up yet either, you’ll have to bring it in when we’ve got something suitable.”

  “Well, apparently, I’m going away for a week this Sunday - you’re welcome to play with it,” I say, and the system tells me it’s On Standby again. “Er, system status unzip file.”

  “Be specific,” Warren reminds me, as I get four beeps in response.

  “System status unzip Response Version 7.1,” I say, gritting my teeth and wringing the steering wheel in irritation. The warbling tone starts promptly, and I calm down again. Already expecting too much of it. I’ll be dreaming about it giving me sartorial and dating advice next. Probably a good thing that it sounds like a ZX Spectrum. Never mind the N.A.S.A. Space Program. It’s more like the Nishikado Space Invaders program.

  The file unzips quickly and I give it the ‘Install’ command, as I overtake the HGV and pull into the lane a safe distance in front. I begin reducing speed to keep it in my rear view, settling to a steady cruising pace. The recorded tutorial suddenly starts in my ear with a very confidence-inspiring, motivational-toned ‘Hello!’ which makes me jump a mile - particularly as I’m sure it’s either Robert Llewellyn, or Stephen Fry’s voice.