Pollen

by Jeff Noon

  She’s looking back at him, smiling.

  Clegg ignores her, returning to his paper.

  ‘You’re Inspector Clegg, aren’t you?’ the woman asks.

  Clegg puts down his paper. ‘Do I know you?’ he asks, without looking round.

  ‘I should hope so,’ the woman replies. ‘You tried to kill me once.’

  ‘Did I?’ Clegg had pointed a gun at many people in his time, and remembering every one of them was difficult, especially since his fever. ‘What went wrong? Did I miss you?’

  ‘No. I shot you first.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘In the shoulder.’

  Clegg turns then to study the woman. ‘Sibyl…’

  ‘Her daughter.’

  ‘Of course…erm…’

  ‘Belinda.’

  ‘That’s right. Belinda. The memory’s not up to much. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be. We only met once. And I had a shaved head then.’

  ‘No, no. I don’t mean that…’

  ‘Oh, for trying to kill me? That was your job.’

  ‘I’m sorry about Sibyl, I mean. Your mother…she…’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She was a good woman…I mean…a good cop.’

  ‘She was both.’

  ‘I was very sad to learn of her…’

  ‘Suicide.’

  ‘Yes. I was suffering from the fever at the time. I just wish I could have done something.’

  ‘My mother was happy with her life. She’d done all that she could. I guess she wanted to leave it at that.’

  Clegg looks away from the woman. One of the new Safecabs moves slowly along the road, its dull grey sheen smeared with ice. The woman asks him how he’s doing, and he replies that he’s doing fine, fine, a desk job, which is, well, boring to be honest, but, otherwise, fine, fine…

  ‘I’m pregnant,’ the woman says. ‘Twins.’

  Clegg is suddenly embarrassed and he’s not sure why. He looks back at the woman. He looks closely at her face, searching for traces of her mother in her features. He finds very little resemblance, except for…

  ‘You have your mother’s eyes,’ he says, finally, which makes Belinda smile.

  ‘You loved her, didn’t you?’ she asks. ‘You loved my mother.’

  It takes an age to answer. ‘Yes. Yes, I did. Very much.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You’re thanking me?’

  ‘Well, I mustn’t keep you.’ Belinda stands up.

  ‘You’re right.’ Clegg stands up. ‘I should be getting back. The desk…beckons.’

  Embarrassed once again, especially by the way he towers above her, Clegg wants to run for cover, but feels also the need to reach out for this woman.

  Belinda saves him the trouble by touching him, gently, on the shoulder. His right shoulder. Where she had wounded him all those months ago.

  Clegg turns away and then starts to walk back towards the station. Halfway across the square the woman calls out to him. At least, he assumes she had called out; it sounded like the word just came into his mind. ‘Zero…’

  Zero? Nobody had called him Zero, not since…not since Sibyl Jones…

  He stops, turns around. The young woman is still standing by the bench, smiling. ‘Take care,’ she says. Clegg can’t see her lips move, but maybe that’s just a lingering symptom of his fever.

  He turns once again, to shuffle over the frost back to his desk, his paper in one hand, a half-eaten sandwich in the other.

  JEFF NOON is a musician, a painter, and a playwright. He was born in the outskirts of Manchester, England, where he still lives today. In 1994, he won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Vurt and, in 1995, the John W. Campbell Award for best new science fiction writer.