Pollen

by Jeff Noon

  Indeed the dog driver has an almighty erection. He can feel it nudging the bottom of the steering wheel, and it feels so good that Coyote thinks he can drive that cab no-handed. It must be something to do with the smell she’s giving off, stroking that dead Zombie like a well-fucked lover; the whole cab feels like a garden in the springtime, heavy with a fog of pollen. Coyote is sneezing with a hard-on, which is like coming from both ends. It tastes like summer is in his mouth and in his pants, and the night is turning into the golden flower of morning as he slides the cab down the throat of the hills towards the drop-off, twelve miles to go before the seeding point…

  Frontier Town North.

  The clingers to the centre have absolutely zero idea of what the boundaries are like. They imagine giant, electrified fences encircling the limits of the Manchester map. They imagine heavily armed City Guards patrolling the circumference. Of course, at the four gates, the north, east, south and west gates, this was more or less true. But all the spaces in between are populated with chancers eager for extra cash. The further you went from the centre, the trickier the company. Frontier Town, they called it, this circular conglomeration of shanties and gypsy-dog camps. Edge-walkers. The people of the limits. Outlaws and roustabouts. Coyote pays an Asian dog-girl two black Vurt feathers to let him through her hidden road. Some small trouble then, with a couple of cop-cars patrolling the frontier. But the map and the road come together. The journey is foreplay, and he handles it with aplomb. He has to stop off a few times to let some more patrollers go by, and just to collect his fear and his bearing, but mostly he makes the driving easy, bringing the cab into a smooth entry.

  Manchester was his lover.

  Cruising home.

  At one point, riding the Oxford Road, just past the University, an Xcab passes them, heading back towards Manchester Centre. With a sweet rush of blood to his head and yet more to his groin, Coyote recognises Boda behind the wheel of the rival cab. He raises a wet paw to her wave, and he can hear her talking to him, in his mind; she’s saying something like Imperial driving, dogboy, like she can send these messages out, loud and clear. Like she has the Shadow. Maybe she was a Shadow. Maybe she was. He sends back the message, Got young Persephone girl on board. Just thinking it, and, sure enough, Boda comes back with, Good Limbo tripping, Coy. Maybe they could really get something together, Coyote and Xcabber. Definitely. He would go find her in the taxi-rank later, once this fare is dropped.

  ‘Good Limbo tripping, Coy,’ the passenger repeats, like she too has been spoken to by Shadows.

  The fare meter, all added up, thanks to the sorry little cop chase, now reads a very healthy 1597.20. Big money! Coyote’s ticket out of trouble. But listen to him sneeze. Also, the almighty hard-on. ‘Perfume heavy, flower-girl,’ he says.

  ‘Thank you,’ the passenger answers. ‘Are we there yet?’

  ‘Nearly there,’ he replies. ‘Alexandra Park, you want?’

  ‘Take me to the grass.’

  It was an easy ride. Driving towards the curried flavours of Rusholme, and then a right on to Claremont Road. The park was shimmering by, a brooding expanse of trees and shadows.

  ‘Just here, on the left, please,’ the passenger calls.

  Coyote stops the cab by the park gate. 6.14. Spots of rain are hitting the windscreen. The dogman feels at home. ‘You okay, passenger?’ he asks. ‘No cab-lag?’ This is what some of the weaker travellers feel when pushed through bad fare-zones. One glimpse tells him that all is sweet with the young girl. He looks at the fare meter. ‘That will be one thousand, five hundred and ninety-nine pounds and forty pence, please.’

  When it comes to asking for a fare, Coyote speaks pure English.

  ‘Got it right here.’ She pulls a flower, a black pansy, out of her anorak pocket.

  ‘What this?’

  Persephone passes the flower through the grille, so that Coyote can hold it in his paws. The eyes of a poor dog captivated by petals of night. But still, will this pay for Pleasureville?

  ‘Some joke, passenger-girl?’ Coyote asks.

  ‘Try it,’ the young girl says. ‘Why don’t you?’

  So Coyote feeds the flower into the credit slot on the meter. At 6.16 a.m. precisely the green light of the fare turns to a yellow 1599.40, and the words PAID IN FULL appear on the screen, and Coyote is amazed at the sight. The money has flooded into his system.

  At that precise moment—Monday 1 May, 6.16 a.m.—a boy named Brian Swallow vanished from his feathery bed in Wilmslow. The parents, John and Mavis Swallow, didn’t notice their son’s disappearance until they awoke at 7.30. Brian’s room was empty, his blankets ruffled as though by a violent struggle. His window was locked, from the inside, as were all other windows and doors. They called the police. An Inspector Tom Dove came to see them. The parents told Tom Dove that they’d kissed their loving son before he went to sleep at 10.15 the night before, and then gone to bed themselves, locking all the doors behind them. The detective had looked around the boy’s bedroom, sniffed at the bed sheets, and then at the air. He had experienced this atmosphere too many times before not to know what it meant. Somebody, somewhere, was being exchanged for something from the Vurt. That wouldn’t make it any easier to explain to Mr and Mrs Swallow. Tom Dove sighed, and then broke the news to the distraught parents.

  Coyote feels light-headed. The money is getting to him. He feels like an insider all of a sudden.

  ‘You like?’ Persephone asks.

  ‘I like. I do like. Good ride.’ He gazes at the paid-in-full sign for a while, before opening his door. He curses at the broken window, and at the pain in his right cheek, where the glass was digging in. Never mind all that. This fare was worth it. He moves around to the back door of the cab. The girl undoes her straps, pushing the now weightless body of the Zombie on to the cab floor. Coyote realizes that he’ll have to dump that sad and drained creature somewhere. Then the young girl gets out of the cab. She steps up close to Coyote. Her perfume is caressing his nostrils. He wants to sneeze, but manages to hold it back.

  ‘Thanks for getting me here,’ she says.

  ‘No problems,’ he answers.

  Just a cold, rainy morning on the moors, a bad trip through Limbo, two crazy Zombies, one of them lying dead in the cab, some glass in the cheek, some half-dead flesh in the mouth, a big mother of a Vaz truck almost flattening me, a small loss of blood, a maze-game with the City Guards, a ride with the scent of flowers exploding my nose.

  ‘Let me pay you,’ Persephone says.

  ‘Already done.’

  ‘More than that.’ Persephone pulls down her hood.

  Coyote looks at the young girl. Her face is very beautiful. He feels like a bee, drawn to that sight, that perfume. So tempting. He doesn’t know where to look. He looks over to the trees of Alexandra Park. Does no good. He has to look back. Those sparkling eyes of green, they look just like two flowers staring deep into him. The girl’s young and full lips, like two trembling petals. ‘Kiss me,’ she says. This girl must be eleven years old at the most, but Coyote’s lips cannot help but descend to hers, tasting the pollen. He can feel her tongue pushing deep into his throat…

  Jesus, nobody can have a tongue that long.

  He is thinking about his unknown father, his dead mother, and his rarely seen daughter. And about his angry ex-wife, and about Boda’s sweet and tempting song. Some last feelings.

  And then his mind explodes with blackness and colours.

  …oh my God! The flowers are dancing…dancing…

  One minute twenty-five seconds later, Coyote was dead.

  My boss was called Kracker: Chief of Police, Jakob Kracker. The only man named—by his parents—after a certain brand of thin, dry wafer. All the cops called him the Biscuit Boy behind his back. It was Kracker’s voice, coming over my bedside telephone, that started me on this trip. It was early morning, 1 May of the year in question. His words took a hard journey towards my parched, wine-heavy brain: ‘Sibyl Jones…I’ve got a case for you.’ A b
ody had been found, just outside the gates of Alexandra Park. I was to get over there immediately. This was a strange one, Kracker had said, but would say no more. What did I care? Death was my speciality. So I had dressed quickly and then made my usual detour into the second bedroom, where my love, my Jewel, lay sleeping. I had lifted the lid to his cot, blown him a kiss. Then I left the house and stepped into the Ford Comet, riding it through the rain towards the park at Moss Side. I hated to leave Jewel alone, but a cop must work hard in bad times. I grabbed a cigarette from the dashboard pack with one hand. Napalms, of course. The message read: SMOKING MAKES YOU WRITE BETTER—HIS MAJESTY’S OFFICIAL BIOGRAPHER.

  The taste of smoke in my throat. In these days of dry dust I can still remember that taste like the breath of a wicked lover on the lips and tongue.

  I lived in Victoria Park in those days, as I still do; a comfortable rented flat that I had bought from the landlord after my husband left. I had married early, age of eighteen, already pregnant. Had my baby girl, Belinda Jones, seven months later. My husband left nine years after that. And four days after my husband, my daughter, Belinda, ran away. She was nine years old, and that was no age for a young girl to go wandering. But wander she did, calling me some bad names for forcing her father to leave. This was her way of seeing it. I guess she loved him more than me, despite everything. But where did she go? Where? I had searched all over for Belinda since then, but no trace of her anywhere, not even her name or her destination. This has been one of the journeys of my life.

  Now that journey was nearly at an end. Towards the dream…

  The cop system was a bellyful of messages that long-ago morning as I drove my Fiery Comet over towards Moss Side. I wasn’t in the mood for official voices—all those coded tales of imminent or actual violence—so I had moved along from the police waves, until I picked up the Gumbo YaYa talking. The Manchester Cops had been searching for this hippy pirate for years, finding nothing but his voice floating down from nowhere…

  ‘Dearie dearie. Good morning, or what? That was I Can Hear the Grass Grow by The Move, and there has been a sudden surge to the old Gumbo’s nostrils. Flowers in the rain, indeed. Big jump in the grain count. I can hear them jumping. This old hippy is sneezing already. Ya Ya! The flowers are spurting pollen all over the Manchester map. Gumbo never seen such a giant, golden step before. Spent some seconds accessing the data-feather; last such power-surge logged in the far-off and forgotten days of Fecundity 10. Of course we are nowhere near the all-time record count yet, but still, this is worrying. Must be a freak blip. Stay cool. Keep those nostrils clean with Sneeza Freeza. Send off today for the Doctor Gumbo’s own-brand nostril plugs. May John Barleycorn show mercy. The pollen count is 85 and rising. News just in from the street of a juicy murder. More on that when I access today’s cop-feather. You know they change the code every day but the good Gumbo, he can always find a window. And now my people, listen to this beauty from Scott Mackenzie, nineteen sixty-seven. And remember, if you’re going to San Francisco this year, be sure to wear something floral in your hair…’

  Gumbo YaYa always seemed to know more about cop-cases than we did ourselves. He even had a phone-in line up and running, but whenever a cop called that number, the signal vanished into a mesh of darkness, which was the symbol of hiddenness in those days. A condom-virus was on the wave.

  Through a veil of rain, I negotiated the sharp, fast left onto Wilmslow Road and then the right onto Claremont, riding the Comet towards a stranger’s death. It was 6.57 a.m. Just down the road I could see the police lights flashing, making red arcs in the rain, and the half-darkness, the black trees of Alexandra Park passing by to my left, the flickering lights of robocops moving through the leaves. One more scene of crime. My life. A crowd of dog-people were hanging around. Luminous cop ribbons were strung from lamp posts and cop-cars. One vicious dogboy had his jaws clenched around the ribbon. As I pulled up next to a black cab that was parked, half on, half off the pavement, I saw sparks fluttering in the morning rain. The dogboy yelped at the shock and then fell back into the paws of a young bitchgirl. A fleshcop brandished his gun at the crowd. I got out of the car and a young robocop officer came up close, beaming on me for identification. I walked over to where a crowd of cops were pressed around a dark shape on the ground. We were just opposite the side gate to Alexandra Park, Claremont Road entrance. A big dogcop was growling at a bunch of pissed-off, rain-dampened officers, telling them to shake some flesh. One of them sneezed.

  ‘What have we got, Clegg?’ I asked.

  The dogcop turned at my voice. His dirt-brown fur was greasy-slick from the downpour. ‘Where’s Kracker?’ he asked. Clegg was the one cop who didn’t call the boss the Biscuit Boy. Sometimes he even used the word Master when referring to the chief. Now, Kracker wasn’t one for the dirty work. He usually put in a scowling appearance at the scene of crime and then rushed back to his desk. This time he hadn’t even shown his face. He had a good excuse; his wife was expecting their twenty-first baby any second.

  ‘He’s looking out for his new kid,’ I replied.

  ‘That’s a shame. So they send us a fucking smoke.’

  Chief Inspector Z. Clegg was a fine, upstanding dogcop. His long snout and extra-rich sense of smell had sniffed out a whole batch of homicides and dogicides. He was half dog, half man, with a real hatred in his mind for anyone with the Shadow in them. Me, for instance. I am a smoking-woman, which means I have an abundance of Shadow in me, mixed in with the flesh. All creatures have got a trace of the Shadow, but some of us have direct entry. Clegg’s intense dislike for the Shadow was pathological.

  ‘The victim’s got some dog in him, Zero?’ I asked. I said this because of the wet, glistening look in Clegg’s eyes. I’d seen it too many times on previous cases not to know what it meant.

  Z. Clegg just nodded.

  The Z stood for Zulu, but Clegg hated that name, so he called himself Z. I called him Zero, just to get the fur on his back erect. He really hated it. Zero was one of those dogmen who desperately tried to deny their canine side. Which was some kind of joke considering the patches of fur on his face, and the long whiskers that sprouted from each side of his cheeks. He really hated being called a dog. Maybe because the dog-people were considered the lowest of the low in society. Most citizens saw them as being only a claw-scratch above the people of Limbo, the so-called Zombies. Even a robo was seen to be of more worth than a dog. Zombies, Dogs, Robos, Shadows, Vurt and Pure; this was the scale of worth. Therefore most dogs ended up on the wrong side of the law. A dog who joined the cops was constantly under pressure. Not only from the pure cops but also from the mad dogboys on the street, who saw it as the ultimate betrayal. On top of that add Clegg’s dislike of the Shadows, and the fact that he wasn’t married, that he was never seen lusting after women, or men, or even dogs for that matter—and you’d find a picture of crossbreed loneliness building. I had a million theories about why Clegg acted like he did, all that twisted bitterness. None of them made our relationship any easier. But most of all Zero hated it when somebody with even a tiny bit of dog in them got killed. This was his one concession to the dog he carried around inside his mixed-up genes.

  ‘You got a name, Zero?’ I asked. ‘You got a time of death?’

  ‘Sure. The ID card in the cab calls him Coyote. Forensic clock puts the last gasp at 6.19 a.m.’

  ‘Ever heard of him?’ Zero knew all the dogs of importance, especially those on the dark side of the law.

  ‘Get to it, Sibyl,’ Zero growled. ‘Make me a happy man.’

  I pulled a pair of steri-gloves onto my fingers, and then knelt down next to the body; early twenties, a smooth wave of black and white fur rising from his shirt collar, forming a sleek and spotted mask all over his face. Dogboy beautiful. Dressed in black jeans and a leather blouson, the jacket decorated with fan-club badges—Manchester City Vurtball Club, Belle Vue Robohounds, Rusholme Ruffians Basketball Posse. This victim was a Manchesterophile. Some wounds on the face—teeth m
arks and glass shards. Despite all this, the victim had a smile. It was captured on his dead face. Inside of the smile someone—the murderer?—had stuffed a bunch of flowers. Red flowers they were, rising on tall green stalks and then drooping back over his cheeks, softly. Clusters of red petals all tightly bound into long tassels. Their sticky smell was getting to me as I lowered my face back towards the body. Beyond the mouth of flowers a thin glaze of grease was smeared across the nostrils. His fur was shining, here and there, with spots of yellow powder.

  ‘Anybody touched the body?’ I asked.

  Zero Clegg sneezed before answering. ‘You’re the first.’

  I sniffed at the grease on his nose. ‘He was suffering from hayfever,’ I said. ‘This is Sneeza Freeza.’

  ‘This is really going to help us capture the perp, Jones,’ Zero answered. ‘You want to do that shadow-search?’ He made it sound like some kind of disease.

  Maybe it is.

  This is why the cops employed me. I can read the minds of the living and sometimes, if we get to them early enough, I can read the minds of the dead, their last thoughts, whilst they still linger. This is what I was now trying, letting my hands of smoke play over the corpse’s face, feeling my way towards his final seconds of life.

  Contact. Dying moments coming through to me, dust to dust, smoke to smoke…

  …taste is so sweet, so rich…can hardly breathe…so sweet…so full of the taste of honey…I am kissing flowers…her tongue is like a vine…and for a girl so young, so very young…it is the taste of…the taste of Eden…let me sleep there…let me sleep…sleep and grow…let me sleep and grow…Jesus! Nobody can have a tongue that long…