by Debbie Moon
Yeah, preach it, brother.
Another enforcer got on at the first stop, strumming absently on a harp the size of a pizza and about as tuneful. A woman shepherding four or five children took over the end of the carriage, huddling on a broken car seat under a rambling slogan in Arabic. Jude amused herself for a couple more stops trying to count her brood, but they wouldn’t stay still long enough. The carriage echoed to their voices, mostly monosyllabic cries of rage as they fought for toys or seats or their mother’s attention.
It was only as the woman got up to leave that Jude thought she recognised her. The name was on her lips before she could stop herself.
‘Yona?’
The woman looked round. Her hair hung lank, and she limped badly. It was hard to see the ghost of the giggly trainee ReTracer in her face, but it was there still, buried under years of resentment and despair.
‘Well,’ she said, as the children clustered around her, proving their allegiance in the face of this strange threat. ‘Jude. You’ve obviously done well for yourself.’
For a moment, that made no sense; then she remembered the suit and the briefcase, and was about to protest, but Yona was already saying, ‘I never thought you were the type.’
‘You were right. I, er, should probably have left years ago.’ Straining to put together the pieces, calculate how Yona’s past might have been changed by this constant interference with reality, ‘Like you did?’
‘Oh yes,’ Yona agreed, a death’s-head grin spreading across her taunt face. ‘Because that’s the life, isn’t it? Your only decision – today, do we beg, borrow, or steal?’
She nudged the oldest boy, a lanky thing of about ten, with big blue eyes and startlingly pale skin. Snapping into a familiar routine, he stepped forward and extended a hand in silent entreaty.
‘What happened to you?’ Jude asked his mother.
‘Don’t play dumb with me, Jude.’ She was already shoving the youngest kids onto the platform; the carriage vibrated as the engine built up a head of steam for the next stage. ‘We weren’t all as lucky as you. Mart, c’mon!’
Confused by his role in this pageant of adult hostilities, the boy took a step back. Jude pressed the briefcase into his still outstretched hand, almost unbalancing him, and then he leapt from the moving train and was gone, hugging his unforeseen bounty as the cloud of steam in their wake blurred him into nothingness.
The enforcer frowned at her over his harp and began to play something that sounded unnervingly like a lament.
But he made no comment, the suitably elderly blind man at the barrier accepted her ticket without any attempt at evangelism, and she emerged on to the desolation of the Hammersmith flyover in the wake of a shower, the wet pavements glazed with sunlight.
Didn’t look like Warner had anticipated this. No sign of helicopters, no sign of tails or armoured cars or any kind of official presence. Just the usual. Fires burning under the flyovers, kids rollerskating: racing each other, tag-teaming, hurling insults and stones across the central reservation to confuse the other team. Shabby men in leather coats handsignalled the odds to one another, or counted gambled cash with the same mechanical precision as the blind ticket seller.
She wondered if the two worlds ever collided; if the touts would give odds on the arrival of the sweaty, reeking trains, or the Ferrymen had the faintest appreciation of the shouting, shrieking battles being fought in the world above.
We’ve separated off into our own little worlds. Legal or illegal, rich or poor, above the street or under it. Perhaps that’s what the fortune teller in the park meant when she said the city was dying. It’s not ceasing to exist, it’s just changing. Fragmenting into ever smaller units, each isolated by an empty expanse of motorway or canal or abandoned parkland. A world of tribes lost in a concrete Amazon, each thinking themselves the sum of creation, blissfully unaware of what lies outside their little kingdom.
Jude ground her knuckles into her eyes, blinked a couple of times. Windows greased with rain reflected sunlight across the emptiness. Under the shadow of the high and glittering entrance of the Palais, a pack of scrawny dogs lounged, regarding her with suspicion. No doubt other eyes, human eyes, were watching too.
Hurrying despite the total, decades-long absence of traffic, she crossed the cracked expanse of the Broadway – a green-way now, tufted with grass and silvery thistles – into King Street.
The theatre was still standing. Which was good. In a manner of speaking. The sight of its cracked and patched glass frontage, the lopsided signs in the windows, sent a shiver through her. Unsure if it was terror or relief, Jude forced herself to keep walking. All the way up to the crumbling access ramp, the perpetually open door, and through into the gloom.
At what must have been the ticket desk, an old man was sitting with his feet on a wooden box, entering data via a keyboard with one crooked finger.
‘Public meetings are Monday and Thursday,’ he said gruffly, without raising his eyes from the screen. ‘Please do take a leaflet.’
Jude shook her head. ‘I’m here to see Ms DiMortimer.’
‘On what business?’
‘Call it a family reunion.’
’This is extremely tiresome of you, Judith,’ the woman sprawled on the chaise lounge sighed as she entered. ‘You know that I told everyone here that I don’t have any children. What I’m going to say now, I really don’t know.’
Jude stood there for a moment, watching the light of the candles on the window ledge play across her mother’s face. It reminded her of the toy projector she’d had for her sixth birthday, a cheap rotating ball that scattered the bedroom ceiling with flecks of blue and gold. For the ten days until the batteries ran out. A light that seemed designed for hiding than for looking, for concealing things that neither of them wanted to face.
‘That’s nice,’ she said.
‘Oh, it’s this damn stratification,’ Milena DiMortimer sighed, sitting up with the lithe, balanced grace of a young girl. ‘New revelations have proceeded from the Divine Link. No one gets to progress to Second Level Enlightenment unless all their close relatives are following the Path. Or dead.
Jude was about to blurt something stupid, something primal and hurt. Then she remembered that she was actually dead – legally dead anyway – and something else occurred to her.
‘You don’t seem surprised to see me.’
‘Should I be?’
‘Well. I – wondered if you’d had any calls from GenoBond.’
Drawing her perfectly manicured nails across her throat in a gesture of languid anger, Milena shook her head. ‘Not for years. Not since they told me you were dead. Which was rather silly of them, since you’re obviously not. You’d have thought they’d have learned to tell the difference by now. I’m just glad I didn’t waste time going to the funeral.’
Advancing into the gloom, Jude looked around for somewhere to sit. Scraps of her past peeked at her from the rickety shelves, the folds of the ornate Indian rug hiding the stains on the sofa. No photographs, of course. Unlike the Ferrymen, the devotees of this religion left the entanglements of the flesh far behind them. Just ornaments, the familiar orange spine of a book, the blue and silver of a scarf she remembered her mother wearing to a school party. Secret memories, locked in everyday objects whose significance only the two of them could comprehend.
‘I always had a suspicion,’ Milena continued, ‘that they’d turn out to be wrong about that. You always were an awkward child. Anything anyone ever told me about you was wrong. All your teachers, for a start. Didn’t one of them say you were going to be in jail before you were fifteen? And remember that deacon who swore you were called to the priesthood?’
‘He was a bishop. I think.’
‘He was still wrong.’
Lowering herself cautiously onto the edge of the sofa, Jude asked softly, ‘So. Mother. You are still taking the lithium?’
Milena froze. A split-second freeze to draw attention to her perfectly still hands before she
adopted a comically shocked pose, all fingernails and pale lips. ‘But of course I am, Judith dear. Can’t you see the doctor waiting to sign my prescriptions? The dispensary in the foyer? The armoured car that ferries my drugs from the nearest Hurst three times a day?’
Sighing, Jude bowed her head.
I should never have come here. Too far apart, too much between us. But stubbornly, stupidly, I keep treading the same path in the hope that something will change. That some rote action or predictable response will suddenly turn under me like a loose stone and catapult me forward, into some new version of our relationship.
‘I’m sorry for what they did,’ she said, as she always did. ‘Despite the fact that it wasn’t my fault, I was a child and I couldn’t stop them – I’m sorry for leaving you.’
Milena sighed.
‘Now what?’
‘I do wish you wouldn’t keep bringing that up. Depressing thoughts do so lower the tone of the place. The spiritual atmosphere of the building really hasn’t been up to scratch today. Probably the gulls.’
Jude couldn’t quite suppress a frown.
‘They gather on the roofs over there.’ She waved a hand vaguely through the wall of the tiny room. ‘They’re all bugged, you know. We shot one once. Found a camera attached to the side of its head. That broke as soon as we touched it, of course. Specially designed to. They’re clever like that. So we took the transmitter off its legs and sold it to one of the newspapers. They were really quite insulting about the whole business. The article described us as a colony of paranoid mental patients.’
Jude leant back into the uneven padding of the sofa. ‘You are, Mum.’
‘Paranoid?’
‘Paranoid. Ex-mental patients. A colony. All correct so far.’ The alcohol was adding an edge to her words that she’d never intended, and she was running out of energy. ‘This was a mistake, wasn’t it? I shouldn’t have come. Or I should have come years ago, under different circumstances.’
Milena grunted. ‘So. Go ahead.’
‘What?’
‘That’s what you do, isn’t it? Leap backwards through time to rescue the innocent.’
‘It doesn’t work like that. If it did, I would have gone back and stopped them from separating us. But apparently, being torn screaming from your only relative doesn’t constitute a crisis, so no ReTracing permitted, so what’s the point of the whole bloody thing anyway?’
Her mother looked at her and, just for a moment, she saw a flash of connection, of sanity, of real understanding even. Then Milena closed her eyes and the moment was gone, and to fill the silence Jude said ‘Anyway, I can’t do that any more.’
‘Oh. Well. I doubt there was any future in it anyway. Did they show you the creation?’
‘The what…?’
‘The creation. My dear, you don’t think we just lie here all day meditating and achieve nothing?’
Jude smiled what she hoped was an amused, endearing smile. She knew she just looked hostile. The mirror on the far wall told her that much. In this suit, she looked like an executive paying a sympathy call to a barely known colleague, guilty and shocked by what she’d found.
‘Which is yet another reason why I can’t have the lithium. The focus of the inner mind can only be achieved when the body is entirely free of pollutants. Apparently.’ Milena stretched, sending a shimmer of movement through the tiny brass bells strung around her ankle. ‘Pity, really. I do miss coffee.’
‘There hasn’t been real coffee on the streets for years.’ Jude observed, thinking wistfully of Warner’s office and his espresso machine, aluminium sticky with fingerprints.
‘On your salary? You do surprise me. Don’t the minions of the Government get whatever they want?’
‘Mother. We agreed we weren’t going to do this.’
‘Do what?’ Milena murmured, as wide-eyed as a child. ‘Remind each other of our failings? Remind each other to take our respective poisons, like good meek little citizens?’
‘You,’ Jude said, unable to keep the smile from her face, ‘were never a meek little citizen.’
‘And still my little girl shifts history around for the Government.’
‘Not any more, as it happens.’
‘Hmmm,’ Milena said, as if she doubted that. ‘You still haven’t looked at the creation.’
Waving a hand in acquiescence, Jude stood up. ‘Where is it?’
‘Outside.’ A quick gesture toward the flaking rattan blind. ‘Careful. Don’t open it too far.’
Jude moved to the window, tugged lightly on the cord. Dust billowed from the folds as it furled, rising like a theatre curtain to reveal some unforseen wonder.
Whatever she’d been expecting, this was entirely… different.
Twisting, spiralling skyward on the vacant ground bordering the river, an anthill of rusted metal and moss rose slowly from the ruins. Pressing her face to the glass, she could distinguish the shapes of machinery, forklifts and strimmers and crane-arms, all subsumed into a Babel-tower twenty or thirty times the height of a man. Leaves poked from the crevices, tiny white flowers crowned jutting stumps or splayed like broken spider’s webs from unfinished arms.
‘What is it?’
‘The beginning of a new city.’
Jude blinked, contempt choking on bewilderment. ‘You’re building this? But there’s no scaffolding… How?’
Milena tapped the smooth skin of her temple with one long nail. ‘Power of the mind.’
‘Oh, for goodness sake.’ Words failed her, and she stood for a time, watching the jagged silhouette shed dead leaves into the wind and thinking, If I saw it grow now, indisputably, what would I do? What would I believe?
‘It’s nice,’ she said finally, turning away from the window. ‘What’s it for?’
Milena laughed.
‘And that’s funny because…?’
‘If you have to ask, my dear, then there’s no way I can explain it to you.’
‘Platitudes. Great.’ She stepped back, leaving the blind raised. ‘So this is it. Ten years, and all you have to offer is a heap of rust and annoyance that I’m not dead.’
‘And you, Judith? You haven’t exactly been forthcoming. In fact,’ shielding her eyes from the light, she managed a dry smile, ‘you haven’t been coming at all.’
‘I have to go now,’ Jude told her. ‘My day’s turning out to be pretty busy. It started pretty well, but now some time-travelling lunatics are trying to kill me – I think – and Warner wants to put me in a jar, and Fitch is a man, and frankly I don’t know who you are. Guess I never did.’
Milena nodded. ‘Let the blind down, dear. The sunlight burns me so.’
Releasing the cord, Jude watched the blind thump back into place. ‘Better?’
‘Oh yes. Now run along. Go do whatever it is you do as a cohort of the fascist repressors.’ Closing her eyes, she relaxed back onto the curve of the chaise lounge and folded her hands dramatically across her chest. ‘I have to finish the bracing section before Martina can work on the next level, and she’ll only yowl about it all through dinner if it isn’t ready on time. Take my advice, never get involved with redesigning reality. No one thanks you for it.’
Nodding confirmation of that particular, belated piece of wisdom, Jude turned her back on the tower of rust and walked away.
THIRTEEN
When she emerged into King Street, the rain was still falling.
Too tired to huddle or hunch or scurry, Jude tipped her head back and let the stinging, acrid droplets massage her face, smooth her wind-tangled hair. Nearby, a child was laughing behind a garden wall, a laugh of naughtiness and sheer delight at this peculiar adult. A smile tugged at the corners of Jude’s mouth and, surprised, she gave way to it.
I’m wet, I’m catching cold, I’ve got nothing to my name but a handful of Underground tickets and a wallet full of debit cards I daren’t use. My mother’s every bit as mad as I expected – though it’s hardly her fault – and more interested in psychic Lego bricks
than in assisting her daughter to outrun the goon squad.
I’m out of places to go.
Water was pooling in her eyes, forcing her to blink, lower her head. She remembered crossing Tower Bridge in the rain, Fitch holding her hand like a child. A Sunday afternoon, and all the ships were in; lopsided planks and lurching, bobbing rope walkways down to the decks, where leather-faced Greens in from the hills would trade fresh vegetables and intricately carved bowls for knives or garden tools or salt. Fitch studying their grubby faces and ritual tatoos with such appalled astonishment that people started muttering about spies and ‘Govimenters’, and they beat a hasty retreat into the backstreets, looking for coffee and a culture that intersected more closely with their own.
I could go there. Get a ship owner to take me out of the city, round the coast. I’ve never been on a boat. Or hitch-hike to a new city. Catch rides on the supply trains, flag down container trucks plying between Hursts. I’ve seen that on the TV, it doesn’t look so hard.
There are a thousand places I could go, a million things I could do. All I have to do is put aside fate and predetermination and waiting for the right moment – and, for the first time in my adult life, decide.
Brilliance flickered across the puddles at her feet, reflected from some unseen corner of the sky. She thought it was lightening and turned, hoping for a sign, a direction, the hand of the Almighty inscribing her destiny in the sky.
All she saw was the searchlight beam skimming the wet tarmac of the Broadway like an accusing finger, backed by the steady chip-chop-chop of helicopter rotors.
Warner had picked a great time to come over all Sherlock Holmes, that was for sure.
‘Jude!’ the loudspeaker crackled, barely audible through the rotor noise and the rain. ‘Let’s be sensible about this.‘
Jude simply stood there, watching the searchlight beam creep across the glistening road towards her as if hunting her out in the dark.