2184

by Martin Parish

  Chapter 9

  I didn't see Tom again for a couple days. Our hours intersected with his; but on Wednesday I saw him as we passed the chain-link fence on the way in to our shift. We were early, so we had a few minutes. He seemed glad to see us, even if his pronunciation of Kamal resembled the name of an animal also known as the "ship of the desert".

  "So how are you both then?"

  "Tired," Kamal said. "But other than that, better than ever."

  "I hear you're old Ben's latest victims," Tom said.

  "Yes, he's got a lot to say," I said, shaking my head.

  “That'd be one way to put it. Don't mind anything he says, he's long gone."

  "Oh, I wasn't planning on it," I replied. "I do my job, I leave him to do his."

  "That's the right way to look at it. The way some of these people talk, you wonder why they don't just find work somewhere else. Listen, I've got to go but I wanted to ask if you'd like to come over for dinner Sunday night, since that's the first night you've got off. You can meet the wife and kids. And we might have a couple other friends coming over."

  Secretly I was annoyed. I paused, searching for an excuse. Unfortunately, my hesitation afforded Kamal all the opportunity he needed.

  "We'd be delighted," Kamal replied while I listened in dismay.

  "Wonderful," Tom said. I waited until we were alone again to vent my frustration.

  "What do you mean we'd be bloody well delighted? That's the first night we can leave."

  Kamal shrugged. I found the way he shrugged infuriating. "We'll need the Sunday anyway. So it's no use worrying about it. We can leave on Monday morning."

  "So instead of getting back to London we'll be spending the evening listening to him talk."

  "And eating," Kamal pointed out. "I can't remember the last time I had enough to eat." That was true; I couldn't either. "Besides which, I don't see why you're in such a hurry. If London isn't there on Tuesday it probably wasn't there on Monday either."

  "But I feel like we're taking advantage of him, you know, coming over for dinner like we're his new neighbours then the next day we disappear."

  Kamal grinned. "I thought you said that was his problem.”

  “All right. All right. Whatever.”

  The week passed slowly. We worked, slept, and used various expedients to find food - everything from foraging through trash(usually just after dawn, to avoid being seen) to borrowing money from an obliging co-worker, all with varying success. It was far too dangerous for two recent escapees to approach any of the Mods, but we tried nearly everything else. I remember one morning when, after leaving the plant, I saw a wolvo slurping a messy green-brown meal from a bowl down an empty alley. My hunger inspired what I can only describe as my most idiotic idea ever - I thought I'd try to distract him and steal his food. I edged my way towards him, but as I approached he shrewdly guessed what I had in mind. He looked up from his bowl, his yellow eyes shining with suspicion.

  “It's all right. Good boy, good boy,” I said, my heart pounding. The wolvo barked a warning. At any moment he would spring. I backed into the wall.

  If left to my own devices I'd have paid for my stupidity with my life; fortunately, however, we weren't alone. The wolvo's owner appeared at a back screen door. “Stop that, Wolf. What the hell-” he said.

  “What do you mean?” I snapped - to disguise my embarrassment. “Your wolvo nearly attacked me.”

  The man looked me up and down and sniggered. “Bloody likely when you're trying to steal his food. I've got a good mind to let him have you. Save me money.”

  “I was not-” I said, reddening.

  The man burst into a roar of laughter. “All right, then, mate. Here. Go buy yourself some food. Fetch!” he jeered as he cast a crumpled-up note down on the ground, and I – as ashamed as I am to remember now – stooped to retrieve it and set off, the man still laughing at his own joke. At the end of the alley, I unfolded it. It was a five-national note.

  “Guess what?” I told Kamal upon my return. “I've got five nationals.”

  “How?”

  “I found it,” I said, too embarrassed to explain the rest of the story.

  “You found it?”

  “Yeah, I did. Isn't that amazing. I'm not kidding,” I said, elaborating to lend my lie the appearance of authenticity. “In the dirt in an alley. I saw what looked like a scrap of paper and – lo and behold.”

  “Well. Isn't that something.” He didn't know it, but it certainly was.

  We weren't always that lucky, however, and there were a few nights when I worked with an empty belly. At such times the work seemed especially difficult. The thing I found most annoying was the three-fifty requirement. That meant seven hundred cells every two hours. When I fell behind, I'd often try to add up the number I'd assembled in my head, all the while fitting more of them together. If I did fall short of the goal, however, Sam didn't say anything, sot least I was living up to his expectations - the only standard worth worrying about.

  At last Saturday arrived and with it, pay day. Our employer paid cash; the Mods had all but obliterated the banking system. While there were small Mongrel-operated banks the larger cities, they were shackled by government restrictions on communications, and they focused on loans to customers with collateral. So Sam and one of the other managers took the cash from a safe and counted it out. It wouldn't have done you any good to rob them. The company dealt with the Mods and could report you easily if you were unwise enough to provoke them. Greedily I watched Sam sorting the bills until it came my turn, and when I left I fingered the bills in my pocket as if to remind myself that they were really there - a physical barrier in front of starvation.

  On my way out that morning, something - perhaps some lingering feeling of guilt - prompted me to stop a moment and talk to Ben as he left his workspace.

  "Ben?" I said. He shot me an anxious glance. "Just wanted to say thanks again."

  "What for?"

  "For all your help."

  "You mean showing you - Well of course," he said, surprised. "That's my job. See, that's like what I was just saying the other day-" I excused myself by claiming that the plumbing at our place needed fixing. The last I saw of him he was walking away down one of the alleys, a lonely, garrulous old man with a few years left to live. What with his arcane knowledge and his outdated ideas, he was like some sort of fossil preserved through the accidents of nature, testifying by its existence to the shape of things past and years forgotten. I wondered how he avoided being mugged on his way home. Probably he detoured through Central Reading, since crime was uncommon beneath the Mods' watchful eye. If his luck held, he'd die at his workspace; if he were unlucky, his vision or his hands would fail him and he'd be fired; he would linger on for a few days, an old man rooting through other people's trash, until his body became another corpse in an alley. Either way, it didn't seem likely anyone would care. I felt deeply grateful for Becky.

  "Kamal," I said, "we are incredibly lucky."

  He nodded sagely. "I hope so.”

  We spent the rest of the day spending our cash, keeping a reserve against the unexpected. By the end of it, I felt like a different man: I had a change of clothes, food, a travel case and some other necessaries - and a quarter of our week's pay still in my pocket. We'd finally shed our fugitive appearance for a civilized veneer, and the reflection that confronted me in the mirror was a different one to the face from the week before.

  "Looking sharp," I said; Kamal with his neatly trimmed moustache and well-combed hair had changed beyond recognition.

  "By the time we get there we're going to look like crap again, that's the trouble," he said. "But at least we'll start out all right."

  "We'll justk to the M4 until we reach London. I wasn't planning on any cross-country detours."

  "That's good, because if you're planning any detours I'm not taking them."

  "Everything else I've planned worked out all right,” I said. “Look at the thing with the train, and there you di
dn't want to take it. We'd still be wandering around the countryside, or maybe we'd have ended up as food, I don't know. I guess we nearly did.”

  We knocked on Tom's door at about five thirty and of course the dog started his ungodly racket. Tom came to the door and welcomed us in.

  "Mark, Kamal-" he still didn't have it right - "this is Abbey." His wife was buxom and brown-eyed with short brown hair. She was stocky but not fat – fat people were rare in our world. Her dull eyes and upturned nose gave her a docile, bovine appearance, so that she was perfectly suited to her husband. She wore a sweater and jeans and seemed distracted, probably because of the two children I could hear quarrelling in the other room.

  "Nice to meet you.” She gave me a limp handshake. "I'll be back in a sec."

  "Here, follow me," Tom said, Butcher trailing us. The crude wooden table in the parlour had been laid out for six, and an appetizing aroma spread through the room from the kitchen. Immediately it became difficult to think of anything else. The reusable plastic plates and utensils(the most common kind of silverware, since the Mods inevitably took anything with silver or aluminium) were of different patterns, as if someone had mixed up several sets. "I invited a couple of the other fellows," Tom explained, "but they couldn't come, so it'll just be us."

  "Tom, we've put the power on, so we've got a couple hours of power, I think, and then we've got to turn it back off," Abbey called out. She separated her two children, one of them a snub-nosed little boy with flaxen hair and blue eyes, the other a freckled little girl with a brown ponytail. The girl was the older of the two.

  "I know, I know. Don't worry about it," Tom replied to Abbey. "I'll fix it up. Katrina? Drew? This is Mr. Kamal and this is Mr. Mark. What do you say when you meet somebody? Come on then!"

  "It's nice to see you again, Mr. Kamal," little Katrina said with her hands behind her back, aping her father's pronunciation.

  "No, no, you haven't seen him before! Say it's nice to meet you."

  "It's nice to meet you," she said, looking at Tom rather than at Kamehl, who beamed a sunny smile. At this little Drew inserted himself into the conversation, frowning.

  "What's wrong with his ears?" he said, looking at Kamal.

  Kamal laughed. "I don't know, what is wrong with my ears?" But Tom and Abbey were less amused.

  "No, that's very rude, we don't say that. I'm sorry," Abbey apologized to Kamal, "we've been trying to teach him good manners and - he's very good most of the time, it's just he has days, you know." Drew turned away to his sister; having made this penetrating remark, he lost interest. Kamal proved himself an able diplomat.

  "Actually, it's probably a good thing he's outspoken. Sometimes the most intelligent children are the most difficult to teach - because they've got their own ideas."

  "That's very perceptive of you," said Abbey, pleased. Like most parents, they were irrationally proud of their own children. "That's very interesting, I'd never have thought of it like that. Here, please go ahead and sit down. Tom told me you'd just moved here from London."

  "Yes, that's right."

  "What's it- Oh, no, don't do that. Excuse me a sec." Clever little Drew was feeding something to Butcher that broke Butcher's dietary restrictions - and Abbey was off again.

  The meal was good if frequently interrupted; Katrina and Drew were supposed to sit still, but they kept on committing new sins - sitting with their elbows on the table, kicking each other, picking the bits of sea asparagus out of the soup. But I enjoyed the interruptions; children's shenanigans are easier to tolerate when they're someone else's problem. Besides, it was pleasant to sit at a table with a clean cloth and friendly faces, listen to local gossip, hear all about Abbey and Tom's kids; I felt human again.

  And at the dinner table, with well-laden plates shining in the kindly glow of an electric light, it was easy to forget the Mods; easy to forget that our world, the complex and intricate world of humans, was melting away like ice castles in sunshine. The Mods seemed like a distant abstraction, and we could pretend once more that they were only the background to our lives, could forget we were their animals. Of course they made all the rules, but no matter who's in charge you have to follow rules devised by others; whether the people in government are human or not, the end effect is the same.

  "Would you like some more of that soup?" Abbey asked me. It was a red-algae and sea asparagus soup. Virtually all food at that time was made from algae or sea asparagus, which are easy to farm - you don't need land, just light, water, and equipment, and most farming took place in cities like London and Reading. Biotech had devised hundreds of strains of algae with flavours from sweet to sour, so you could invent some fairly creative concoctions by mixing different flavours. If you wanted meat, really the only thing you could get was insects; and these, especially flour made from roasted crickets, had become popular in recent years, since they were easy to raise en masse.

  "If you don't mind, thank you, it's just too good. My compliments to the chef," I said.

  "Well, Tom told me you both looked as if a decent meal wouldn't hurt you," she confessed, "and I didn't really believe him until I saw you."

  I paused for a moment, chagrined. Were we really that thin? "I eat all the time, I just - I don't know how it is," I said with a laugh.

  "What we thought, " she said with a deliberate, studied vagueness, glancing at the children, "was that you were from - you know, downtown."

  I sat dead still. The room suddenly seemed very faraway. Katrina was talking to the dog and Drew was picking through his food; Tom stirred his soup as if he hadn't heard. Kamal and I exchanged a wary glance. Danger. Be careful.

  "No, not if you mean-”

  "It's all right," Tom said without looking up. "That doesn't bother us. I'd already guessed. Hardly anyone ever gets out of - of there, so I have to say I'm impressed if that's what you did. And now that you're all moved in and everything no one'll ever know. It's not like we'd ever tell anyone."

  "Well, thank you," Kamal said; "it's kind of you."

  "No, nonsense!" Abbey burst out. "I'm just glad we've been able to help you out - at least I hope we have. The way I see it is, if all we Mongrels don't stick together, I don't know who is going to look out for us. We're all in this together.”

  "Lot of people don't see things that way," I said.

  "Oh, I know-Drew! stop that." Abbey said.

  "Butcher likes sea asparagus," an unchastened Drew explained. Butcher, to the contrary, appeared perplexed at Drew's attempts to force-feed him the softened vegetable, but being a dog he suffered in silence. Dogs are a patient race.

  "No Butcher does not like sea asparagus. Butcher eats cricket flour, that's different. Now stop it and eat what's on your plate."

  "Here, if he won't have his sea asparagus he can always save it for me," I said.

  Tom laughed. "Now that's what I call seizing your chance. We have so much trouble getting him to eat everything sometimes though I just don't know. When I was a kid I used to eat everything I could get my hands on. Course we were all starving back then, so maybe that was why.”

  “Never look a gift horse alouth, that's what I say.” With the uncomfortable moment past, I actually felt more at ease. There was no need to keep up a pretence; the awkward secret had been shared and was no longer our own. And if our neighbours were curious enough to know how we'd been arrested, they were also tactful enough not to ask.

  Dinner came to an end when we ran out of electricity. The lights began to dim and Tom shook his head. "Looks like we're running out of juice."

  "I'll bet you could get a lot more out of that than you have," I said. "It's a solar powered supercap, isn't it? You should be able to get at least six hours' mileage on full power."

  "Yeah, it's solar. I got some artphoto panels from the plant, they'll let you have the ones from the recycle bin if you ever want any, but I don't know too much about it. Like I said, if you could come and take a look at it sometime-"

  For a moment I hesitated. The following e
vening would find us far away. Should we tell them our plans? Could we tell them our plans? But force of habit silenced the impulse. It becomes second nature to be mistrustful, to camouflage truth with white lies. "Of course," I said. "And thank you very much again."

  "Our pleasure," Tom said. "Don't mention it." In assuming he was stupid, I'd misjudged him. He guessed we'd escaped the government, and rather than trying to take advantage of it he'd helped us. As I left I saw my neighbours with a new-found respect. Better an honest friend than an intelligent one if you have a choice.

  "All right," I said, "let's go." We weren't exactly sure where the M4 was but we knew we'd reach it eventually by going due south. If we needed we could ask for directions. We wanted to skirt central Reading as widely as possible, and with that in mind we changed direction several times, although a couple of the bridges over the Kennet had been demolished - the roads ran to the bank but no farther – and I began to think we'd have to cross in the shadow of the government tower. We retraced our steps, made several wrong turns and at last blundered our way into a narrow residential street lined with brick terraced houses. Next to us an short alley ran to a dead end, a courtyard hemmed in beneath small windows like squinting eyes.

  "Stop a minute," I said. "This is no good. We should just follow the river south. I think there's a road that runs south out of Reading that follows the river. I saw it one time on a map."

  "Hold on a sec," Kamal said. I followed his gaze to see a woman crawling on the pavement at the farther end of the alley. She retched and the sound echoed dully between the brick walls. She was vomiting, not for the first time, either, because a thin strawberry-coloured stream flowed around one of her hands into a gutter. Her long hair hid her face but I guessed she was on the verge of death. "Hold on," Kamal said. He started down the alley.

  In an instant I was a child again, watching the little girl hacking up blood and knowing the invisible enemy on her breath could creep into my lungs. I panicked. I seemed to hear Shelley's words - "they're working on a disease...."