Bang

by Charles Kennedy Scott

  ‘We didn’t know about the flies,’ said the warden. ‘Rather, we did. But we did not know we knew until just now when you told us. What are your demands? Tell us so that we may engineer a way of not meeting them.’

  ‘Not so fast, warden. We will get back to you.’ The student held a buzzing bloodbottle by its legs to the Life. There was a gasp at the other end and the student hung up. The suitcase still hummed.

  ‘So you intend to kill me,’ said Delilah, rather flatly, not wishing to excite the kidnapper students by her tone into sacrificing her a moment earlier than necessary.

  ‘Not unless we have to. They want us to kill you. It would save them from doing it, save your court case too. Down here in the System, life is judged against drifting parameters.’ The rich one said this in his foreign-sounding accent, which was odd: compulsory ‘accent and diction’ lessons at school were intended to iron out such accents and remove dialectal confusion (confusion being property of the Center of Disinformation). He had quite a high opinion of himself too, thought Delilah, not particularly enamoured of her kidnappers, wondering why everything always went quite so wrong and whether she was in some way to blame.

  ‘I was about to escape. Until you idiots came along and ruined it. The lift doors were open, waiting for me. I’d have tickled the lift and made it take me to the top and been back in the salon by now, doing my job, earning tips, repairing this –’ she grabbed a fist of her hair and shook it.

  ‘Escape? I don’t think so. We overheard discussion of the whole sorry affair when we were lilac painting – you can get anywhere in the System disguised as lilac painters. Everything you did, they knew you would do, every move a foregone conclusion right from the start. In the System, possibilities, all possibilities, are worked out long in advance and predicted. Your behaviour, for instance, was so clear, especially with your being a hairdresser, that nothing you could do would surprise the System. Other than that time you put your hands between your legs and went Ooh. They weren’t expecting that. But after it happened they knew, looking back, that they knew it would happen. And then they knew that they had known it would happen.’

  ‘Huh?’ said Delilah.

  ‘I do not see why, as a kidnapper, I should convey to you our hard-earned information, while you slouch around in a black dress and a victim’s posture expecting facts. How you ever got such a high opinion of yourself I shall never know, not even if you tell me. You’re waiting for me to give you the low-down simply because you want to use it to escape. As a victim, you are the most selfish I have ever met, beyond selfishness, though what is beyond selfishness I am none too clear.’

  Delilah replied, ‘So don’t tell me then. Forget it. Did I ask to be kidnapped?’

  ‘No, it is important that you hear. It is simple. Let me ask you this. Have you ever had that sensation, often overbearing, that you know you know something but don’t know what it is? You are about to have an idea, for instance, but haven’t got it yet. Or, you know full well that something is wrong with an idea, yet don’t know what it is. Try as you might, you cannot discover what’s wrong. You can’t put your finger on it and it is infuriating. This is the gap between what we know and what we know we don’t know. We call this the data gap. Probably as a hairdresser you have not experienced the data gap.’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘As brainy students we get it all the time, don’t we?’ he asked, scratching his partner’s face where a stray hair brushed over his cheek, looking much relieved for it.

  ‘Don’t do that!’ snapped the long-haired student.

  ‘The System is the same, Delilah. While it knows everything, it sometimes does not know what it knows at any particular time. Thus it knew a particular fact, that you would act in a vulgar manner, and knew that it knew, but, try as it might to know before, it could not, and only knew after, when you triggered it into knowing that it knew before by the very act. By this same process, it knew about the bloodbottles but did not know it knew, not until just then when we told them. To get here, where we are today, we exploited the data gap. Such exploitation requires great intelligence.’

  There was a distant clunk, again a bang.

  ‘But that doesn’t just mean you can escape,’ said the other student, now trying to draw Delilah’s attention to his hair by flicking the ponytail over his shoulders, ‘by jumping through one data gap to the next.’

  ‘No, because you cannot establish what the System knows it knows and what it doesn’t know it knows or indeed what it doesn’t know it doesn’t know, or what it knows it doesn’t know but is trying to find out. Clear?’

  As a kidnap victim, Delilah felt hungry more than anything, especially now she’d smelt food being prepared her. Her head spun, too, from hunger or this data gap business she was sure. ‘As crystal,’ she answered.

  ‘Stop. This is too much information for Delilah the hairdresser to make sense of. In a moment her brain will overload and steam will issue from her ears, making her believe she’s back in her hairdressing salon under one of those hair-treatment units, and she’ll call out with her rough voice for another cup of char and a digestible biscuit.’

  Delilah said, ‘I’m not so stupid, you know. Even for a hairdresser. I have a rough voice, granted, and it perhaps misleads you into underestimating my brain power. But let me tell you this, when it comes to untangling clients’ hair I am the quickest the salon has to offer. I work it out up here, knots and all.’ She tapped her head. ‘I can visualise everything, untangle it in my mind.’

  ‘Pah. Untangling hair? This is the System you’re dealing with here. Untangling hair, forget it. Listen to her, my darling.’ He scratched his friend’s scalp, where the ponytail pinched, and sighed, again with relief, saying, ‘That’s better.’

  ‘Get off me!’

  Delilah quietly said, ‘Not all people in jobs you consider stupid are stupid.’ She wanted to cry now – something sad had come at her from somewhere. ‘And I have the voice of an angel, too, when I sing, despite how I sound when I talk,’ she continued miserably, letting out a blub. Her food was brought over. ‘Thank you,’ she said on another blub, and ate through her crying, ravenous, rib-achingly hungry. The poor student in the t-shirt dropped a tear, too, then remembered he was a kidnapper and wiped his eyes. Next he untied his ponytail and swung his hair in Delilah’s proximity, secretly hoping for some advice on what to do with it. She was too busy eating to pick this up, but had observed when he’d taken the bag off her head his massed fuzz of split-ends, and wondered how he’d let it get so far into disrepair.

  The rich student spoke. ‘We only poisoned those prisoners because they were nasty to you, didn’t we, doll. Especially that plumber, he broke your heart. Your only friend and he does that, welds you up in a cage fabricated from see-through bars and tells you to shut your mush and not say another word about the bump on his forehead, though you’d repeatedly been going on about it and looking at it with a kind of longing as if you wanted to kiss it better. He treated you as if you were nothing. I’m surprised you didn’t squeeze your head between the bars and try twisting it off, so upset you must have been. You know they had that plumber up all night building wheels? Said he’d rather build those wheels than sleep in the really comfortable bed they offered him, made with the softest sheets the System has – coated, they are, with a substance used to coat non-stick saucepans, so that if the bed is at a slight angle you will slide out, while if it is flat you will have the most frictionless night’s sleep of your life. But no, refused didn’t he. Those wheels meant a lot to that plumber. Greedy he was, too. At the feast he wolfed down as many prawns as he could, sucking those eggs out with a vengeance. You probably saw how they poured from his nose like pate from a tube – we did, from our ladders. He was the first to succumb to the biotoxin. There he was on the floor with his hands round his neck, dying, or trying hard to anyway. You wouldn’t have heard his shrilly screams up in the Theater of Religion – does the minister really wear a silver tracksuit? We offered to help
drag away the plumber and the bodies of all those prisoners who’d been so horrid to you – especially the two who kicked and beat you and cut off your long hair the night up there when you lost your Life and slept rough, they suffered badly, you’ll be glad to hear – but our help was rejected. Painters, the officers said, had not the first idea how to dispose of bodies. Little did they know. And little do you know if you think we’d kill your enemies only to kill you. We need you alive. Because without keeping you alive the threat to kill you cannot be made, either by us or the Authority.’

  There came another clunk.

  ‘So, in that way, Delilah, you are responsible for their mass murder.’

  Delilah felt sadness.

  ‘Because you conspired with us right from the start,’ continued the student. ‘Unwittingly, perhaps, but that is hardly important. You will hear these accusations again, if you are not killed when you’re rescued. Had it not been for your support we would not have acted. Before you came along – and you did so right we needed you most, thank you – we were simple genetics students locked in a copyright battle with the Former Bottle Manufacturer over the name bloodbottles. How far we have come since, thanks to your morale-boosting imprisonment and your subsequent railing against the Authority. Our prior selves were but shadows of the great kidnapper biological terrorist students you see before you now. And you, you made us do it. You!’ The students intertwined arms and shone proudly at Delilah, then danced a little jig clapping their hands.

  Delilah asked, ‘What exactly are you demands?’

  ‘An end to all miscarriages of justice within the Authority. Accompanied by our release, unconditional, obviously.’

  Delilah choked on a lump of food she’d forgotten to swallow. ‘You what?’

  ‘We’ll kill as many people as necessary until everybody round here starts behaving decently.’

  ‘Now, I’m only a hairdresser but–‘

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘But it seems to me that you’re just another part of the System. All you’ve done is hurt the prisoners. And that, from my observations, is the primary goal of the System. No, I’m convinced, you’re part of it. Even if you don’t know it yourselves. You’re very misguided.’

  The foreign kidnapper spoke out, more brokenly this time. ‘Don’t talk to us about primary goals and what we do or don’t know, little girl. You don’t know anything. We are genetics students, we have unravelled genes, all you have unravelled is hair. The comparison is not there. A meeting of minds cannot be found. We are talking below ourselves, when we talk to you. And if your own hairstyle is anything to go by you are not much of a hairdresser either, though I do understand that persons who work in such places wear hairstyles they would not dream of inflicting on paying customers, and it is my suggestion that that’ – he swiped at Delilah’s head but missed and spun round hitting his friend instead, whose eyes enlarged at the pain – ‘is such a style. You cannot even offer my girl-like friend advice on his terrible problem of split ends that makes his hair fuzz in bright light and look like an explosion of fine liquid.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the other, ‘What about my hair?’

  A deep bang this time, from somewhere nearer by, answered that question. Such bangs, and clunks, were not uncommon within the System. Even the best architects struggled to sink a structure 333 storeys into the ground without some risk of lateral and vertical stresses due to heat or slight seismic activity. Thus these bangs from the earth itself had been incorporated by the Authority into the System, further terrifying new prisoners during their incipient nights. However, this bang just gone was not such a bang, for it had been followed by other bangs of a distinctly human rhythm, like those of a door knock, a dance sequence, or a set of punches. The shout of ‘We know you’re in there’ made ever more clear the situation, yet the rich and poor student remained apparently calm. Only now did Delilah wonder where in the System the three of them actually were. She knew from the wet room that infrequently inhabited or visited sections of the System existed. It seemed highly unlikely though that a safe haven existed within the System for prisoners, a place they could appropriate and control like this. Yet her kidnappers, with languid movements of their hands and limbs, suggested relaxation and, for now at least, assumed control.

  ‘Kidnappers, give yourselves up, you are surrounded,’ came a voice dull and metallic still from some distance. ‘Let the prisoner go, dead or alive, she is our property.’

  Delilah whispered, ‘Where are we?’

  ‘Officially? We’re in Nowhere 110.’

  ‘Nowhere’s nowhere,’ remonstrated Delilah.

  ‘Exactly,’ said the limp-wristed foreign kidnapper student, ‘and that’s precisely where we are. For the System to be somewhere, the Authority decided that there had to be incorporated into it places that were nowhere.’

  ‘I find you hard to understand,’ said Delilah. ‘But don’t know whether it’s because of what you say or the way you say it. Oh dear. But let me guess, these Nowhere places are places of necessary redundancy, which nonetheless perform the vital secondary purpose of allowing the model of the System as you describe it to function, providing in this current example of kidnap a hideaway that would not otherwise exist? Slack, if you like, of which if there were none the System would jam up, like an engine built with no tolerances. That about the size of it?’

  ‘My word!’ said the long-haired fuzz-ball student, wobbling his head on his lazy neck. ‘How did you work that out for yourself?’

  The other said, ‘She could not have formulated such a theory. It is beyond her comprehension. Therefore I will ignore it.’

  Delilah said, ‘I read a book once at school that said something about how authoritative states deliberately left areas in which criminality, vice, undesirables, what have you, could live and exist, how these areas acted like nets, if you like, which could periodically be checked and emptied. The book was banned, and for my reading it my teacher hit me on the head with a cabbage. This was unfair because she had given me the book the night before and told me to take it home and not read it. But I did.’

  ‘If you read it in a book it does not count. We can all regurgitate second-hand theory, even if it is second-hand theory never heard before. No, you are a hairdresser and nothing more. We cannot accept you as anything else. Be a good girl and cut my friend’s hair and wait for what happens next. What happens next will happen soon, not so much soon as any moment now. Here, the scissors you asked for. They are left-handed even though you are not.’

  ‘Do not allow my ears to show,’ said the other student. ‘They are bad ears, just trim the split ends. I don’t want it almost bald like that idiot Gentle’

  ‘Actually I do,’ said the rich student. ‘I want it all off. I am sick of it. It has been driving me mad for years. Off with it. I will feel so much better.’

  ‘I think you’re wrong,’ said the student whose hair it was, ‘but if you’ve made up your mind …?’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘Come out with your hands up,’ called the voice, dull and metallic.

  ‘Commence cutting!’

  Nervously, Delilah began to trim the long-haired student’s hair. It fell to the floor and picked up the light, and was pushed around by a breeze that approached from under the door, from the people behind the bangs presumably. Meanwhile, the other kidnapper student approached the suitcase, looked inside very quickly, allowing a burst of hum to escape, appeared pleased, and said, ‘Keep cutting, hairdresser, this is what you’re good at, I can tell from your cutting style because you have your hip jutting out. A bad hairdresser stands bolt upright and cuts with jabbing movements, sometimes stabbing a neck or a skull, but not you. When you’re finished, sweep all the hair up and stuff it down the front of your black mourning dress. I can’t stand to abide by the sight of fuzzy hair blowing about on the floor, it makes me itch, even if it’s hair I have grown to know and love and then ultimately detest over the past years. No, for me, hair only has emotional stat
us when still attached to its owner’s head. This business of keeping the locks of a loved one’s hair in a silver snap-shut case is beyond me, I would more readily have about my person their genetic makeup. Then I could at any moment, given the right equipment, recreate, for instance, their aroma. It is their aroma I am sure you’ll agree that makes them so much what they are. Ignore the door, it is designed to dent like that, cut his hair.’

  Bang.

  ‘Yes, we humans are reliant on smell so much more than we like to admit.’

  Bang.

  ‘Without smell, love would have been all the poorer. And without smell, we could never have imparted the scent of prawns in the bloodbottle eggs. The seafood aroma convinced the feasters they were safe to eat, despite being much redder than prawn eggs usually are.’

  Bang.

  ‘Now sweep up the hair and stuff it down your dress where it will itch you not me.’

  Bang!

  And the door came crashing down. Over it trampled Warden 111 and Officer JJ Jeffrey in his pith jungle hat – which he stopped to empty of water, not that this still made any sense. He entered accompanied by the two interchangeable officers. They may or may not have been the same two similar looking but non-descript officers from Remand 111, it was hard to say. Delilah placed them as probably the originals – by the tea leaves on one’s upper lip and eggshells on the other’s. They also had the water-bag buttocks.

  ‘Release the suit,’ cried the rich student. His poor, now bald, accomplice opened the suitcase and with his fingertips lifted out the suit, which now made a furious amount of noise, and threw it in the direction of the officers. It somehow flew towards the officers and certainly put frightened looks on their faces.