White and Other Tales of Ruin

by Tim Lebbon

  Because he was in love. Love. That elusive, haunting myth. The place he’d never thought he would be.

  Love.

  The Baker had finally done it, even if it had taken fifteen years to have effect. If only he were alive to see it now. Tom smiled and closed his eyes for a moment, remembering his old friend. And then he thought of Honey and opened his eyes again.

  The morning washed last night’s doubts away. Tom made himself some toast and sausages, drank a pint of orange juice, visited the toilet four times before the sun had cleared the chimneys and sprung free into the sky above the city. The smog was always dissipated in the morning. It was as if industry paid worship to the sun for the first hour of the day, and then when the main shifts began, worship turned to profit. The sun never seemed to mind. It came and went, came and went. It was the reservoirs and food chains and fields that were protesting, and strenuously. Tom was fortunate enough to be able to afford lab-grown food, but there were many who were not.

  Honey, for one. What diseases could she have? What malfunctions waiting to happen, tumours biding their time, rots working away at her joints and flesh?

  “I love her,” Tom said, shaking his head to dispel the negative thoughts. And he said it again, because he liked the sound and feel of the word in his mouth.

  The Baker had given him the virus of love fifteen years before. A clumsily written and input programme, Tom had actually felt it take root inside his head, spreading electron-tentacles, feelings its way into his artificial cortex and brain-stem … and then vanishing as it sought to establish itself fully. He’d never thought it would have taken so long. The Baker — Tom had never even known his real name, great friends though they were — would have been a happy man today.

  He spent the next hour sitting at his window and looking out over the city. He hadn’t found anywhere to flee to, but he was sure that they’d find a good place, a safe place. He had no idea of what to do if Hot Chocolate Bob confronted them in their escape, but he was confident that they could slip away unseen. The thought that Honey would have changed her mind — or, worse, had been playing with him all along — came once, and once only. He killed it. He chased it down into the pits of his mind, drowning it in other, more established forms of hopelessness and fear.

  Totally unprepared, lightened by a love he had never been designed to feel, Tom set out just before noon to rescue the plastic bitch that had stolen his heart.

  The change in the streets was as breathtaking as ever. Last night they had been flooded with people in black, a tide of leather and metal and mutilation with one single, enveloping thought: pleasure. It was as if that flow of people was a solitary organism, pushing through between buildings and parks and walls, penetrating the city to plant its thoughts and intentions, leaving the pale residue of hopelessness behind as dawn drove it away.

  By morning, the streets belonged to the workers. People thronged the pavements and cars coughed their way along roads, filled with people heading for work. Thousands flocked east towards the factories — those who could not afford monorail or tube tickets — with many more filtering into office buildings or sweatshops built in deep, cavernous basements. Steam hissed from manholes and there was the intermittent thud of accumulated gases burning off in the sewers. Something flew by just over Tom’s head, and he saw the trailing heat-stick of a policeman. The platform dipped and bobbed before accelerating away and disappearing down a side street, aiming to ruin someone’s day.

  Tom tried to keep himself to himself, which wasn’t difficult. He was an artificial, and with so many people opting for body chopping he was camouflaged by normality. And he was dressed in the uniform of a factory worker, even though he did not work: the Baker had seen to it that he had enough money to want for nothing. So he blended in, becoming one of a crowd. A crowd that shed curiosity like water from oil.

  It was not a long walk to the area of the city where Honey worked. Shops and offices gave way to boarded-up buildings and plain-fronted stores, many of them selling counterfeit produce and dealing drugs, or worse. Tom knew of several places down here where an artificial could buy a black market charge, and he began to see a few of them around. The worst of the buzzed people could barely walk, let alone see and talk. They screamed; there was always screaming. Illegal charges were like fake foodstuffs: they’d feel and taste the same, but eventually they tortured the body and polluted the mind, leading to a slow death.

  The gangs were here as well. Some were all human, like the Draggers, renowned for tying perceived enemies to their cars with sharpened chains and driving at speed through the city. In turn there were the artificials’ gangs, who rarely named themselves because identity was something they shunned. Rebellion was their cause, their drug, and most of them chose to get buzzed even if they could afford legitimate charges. The Draggers fought for money and turf and women and drugs. The artificials rebelled against creation. Such differences ensured that they rarely fought each other.

  The gangs that did fight each other were the mixed ones. But daylight was their enemy, the night’s exertions drained their energies, and for now Tom felt safe.

  Three human Draggers hung around by a gambling emporium. They looked tired and drawn, pale from whatever they had taken the previous night, and they didn’t even look as Tom passed by. He caught a whiff of drugs bleeding from their pores. Blessed with the gift of love and loving, how could these people demean themselves so?

  But love and loving … that was something he had now! He looked up out of the concrete canyon and grinned at the hazy sun.

  A burst of laughter brought him back.

  The buildings fell back to reveal a small, shaded park, so boxed in by facades that only a weak, pale green grass grew. Hidden from the sun most of the time, the park was home to escaped pets and carrion birds. Tom had been here before but only once, and only at night. The sights he had seen had chased him away, the gutted dogs and bloated crows too fat to fly, too big and mean to tackle. Here was evolution aggravated and progress tainted.

  Now, during the day, it was home to people having fun. They danced and jigged and laughed, and Tom tried to shrink into himself and move away quietly until he saw what the people were watching.

  Here was the finger-puppet man.

  He sat cross-legged on the ground beside the stump of a long-dead tree. Before him was a wooden box, about the size and shape of a coffin. Along the length of the coffin, back and forth, up and down, danced the most fluid and lifelike puppets Tom had ever seen. They captivated him from that instant, drawing him into the crowd, pulling him through to the front, between hard shoulders and muttered curses from those he shoved aside. His view was better here, and all the more amazing for that.

  The Chinaman sitting behind the box was impassive, expressionless. The only sign that he was even awake was the subtle twitching of his cheeks as his eyes shifted left and right to follow his finger performers. It looked for all the world as if the puppets were controlling the man, not the other way around.

  Tom looked closely at their carved wooden faces, and he was sure he saw smiles directed at him.

  A clock struck one o’clock somewhere unseen, and he realised suddenly that he had somewhere else to be.

  He walked around the shaded park twice before he saw the sign for Ashley Street. It was a lane rather than a street, and an alley more than a lane, home to a few squat fast-food shops, a couple of porn palaces and a chop shop that stank of blood and desperation. A couple of its regular clients hung around outside, bad advertising if ever Tom had seen it: the woman had no nose or eyelids, but bled profusely out of open veins above her eye sockets; the man displayed his mutilated genitalia, balls the size of footballs and a dick like a joint of uncooked pork.

  “Need something doing?” the man asked.

  “Leave him, he’s a fake,” the woman said, dismissing Tom with a bloody glare.

  “Doesn’t look like one.”

  Tom walked by, feeling their pained eyes on his back. They were
wondering what he had, he knew. Secretly craving a look beneath his skin and flesh. Well .. they’d be surprised. In a way he too was chopped. The Baker had seen to that.

  He passed Hell’s Bookshop and found the alley Honey had mentioned. Its walls were so close together that Tom’s arms brushed them as he made his way along, stepping over a vagrant who may have been dead. Before him — the shadow at the end of the alley, a great wall of black concrete pointing at the pink sun — stood the whorehouse.

  Tom was amazed to find the back door open. It wasn’t as if such a salubrious establishment needed a rear entrance for shady patrons.

  As he opened the door and a flush of smells came out at him — the tang of sex, old greasy cooking, smoke, drugs, the sparkle of ozone from an illegal charger somewhere — he realised that he had not yet seen Hot Chocolate Bob.

  Not out on the street, working his patch.

  Not down in the dead park watching the incredible puppeteer.

  Which meant, very likely, that he was inside.

  Tom closed the door behind him, but he made sure he knew where the handle was.

  He thought he could remember where to find Honey’s room. It was on the third floor, facing out onto the street. He hurried along the dark corridor, stepping on things that cracked or snapped and, in one case, squealed. He tried not to look down because he didn’t want to see, didn’t want anything to mar this moment, this occasion when he would do the most valiant thing of his life: rescue his love from the purgatory she had been created for, and which she endured still. Why she endured it he did not know. It was something he may ask her … one day.

  He reached the stairs and quickly moved up towards the third floor. At each landing he sensed doors opening around him; just a crack, wide enough for the inhabitants to see out. A couple of times he heard a relieved sigh when they saw him walk past.

  There were many sounds permeating the air, turning the dank stairwell into an echo-chamber for the whole building. A blasting television here, a whining drill there, the screams of a child from far along one refuse-strewn corridor, the grunting of sex, a soft mumble somewhere else, as if someone was trying to talk themselves out of this hellhole. And smells as well, even worse than those that had hit him upon opening the door. Shit, piss, cabbage, saliva, rotten food, death, spunk, cordite, smoke, drugs … very little good, hardly any sweet. Neither belonged here.

  Honey was both, and her time in this place was now numbered in minutes.

  Tom had found her door. He ran up the last flight of steps and stood before it, surprised at how nervous he felt, how terrified that she’d only mock him when he opened the door. She’d be sitting there with her legs open and her hand held out, ready to scan his card and take her ten measly percent.

  “No,” he said, shaking his head. “No. No. She’s better than that. She meant it. No.”

  Someone pushed him from behind. He spun around to look into the wizened face of an old man, tall and angular where he had been chopped in an attempt to avert aging. “Yes,” the old man said. “Yes. Don’t torture yourself son, do it. She’s sweeeetttttttt!” His voice rose into a bird-like cackle. Tom leaned back against the door as the old man stumbled away along the corridor, laughing to himself and shrilling “Sweeetttt, sweeettttt!”

  The door opened behind him and Tom stumbled into the room.

  “Tom! You came!” And there was so much relief and joy in Honey’s voice that Tom knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the love was not his and his alone.

  Here was hope. Here was trust. Here was the rest of his life.

  Honey had caught him in her arms and he twisted around to kiss her.

  “No time for that!” Honey said, kicking the door shut. “I thought you’d be here half an hour ago. Hot Chocolate Bob will be back anytime, he knew I wasn’t going out, he’ll be here to have me. We have to go. We have to go now!”

  “Come on then!” Tom said. Honey had a rucksack over her shoulder, and today she wore no make-up. He didn’t know how he could ever have forgotten her face. He saw her for what she really was and loved her more. Years of abuse with her face pressed into pillows and against walls had given her skin a pale sheen, but he had enough money to sort that out. He’d give her new skin. He’d give her anything.

  “You’re going to have to do something for me, Tom,” Honey said. “It’s the only way we’ll get out.” She swung the backpack his way and quickly stripped.

  Tom went cold.

  “You want me to —”

  “If anyone sees me out of this room with you — anyone — they’ll tell Bob. He’ll be on us in seconds, and … I’ve seen him kill before, Tom. He wouldn’t hesitate today.”

  “But it’s so dangerous.”

  “I know. Tom … let me down. Turn me off, let me down and get me out of here.”

  Tom knew that this was a drastic step. Reinvigorating Honey would take hours, and he’d heard that half of the plastic artificials this was done to never came back. They weren’t designed for this. It was like killing a human in the hope that they could be resuscitated.

  She put her fingers into a fold beneath her left breast. Tom saw the muscles on her wrist tense. “I’ll do it myself if you don’t. But I want you to do it.”

  Honey removed her hand. Tom reached out and slipped his fingers inside the fleshy slit, felt her Christ valve — so named for its artificial powers of death and resurrection — and twisted it sharply to the right.

  Honey gasped and slumped into Tom’s arms. “I won’t watch,” he said. He closed his eyes and felt her wrinkling lips pass across his mouth, heard a hissing exhalation of love as her weight lessened. Folds of flesh hung over his arms, a warm rush ran down his legs as she voided herself, steam rose around him and stung his nostrils as he breathed in sharply …

  And it was over so quickly.

  He tried not to see Honey’s flattened, lifeless face as he rolled her up and stuffed her and her clothes into the rucksack.

  At every step, every landing, every corner in the staircase, he expected the pimp to be waiting for him. He would have no defence, no way to fight off such a person. Run or die, that was all. No bluffing, no pleading, no fighting … just running.

  The stairwell didn’t seem so dark on the way down, nor so pungent. Maybe it was because the sun had edged around and found a break in the smog, bathing the stairs in heat and light through a rooflight. Or perhaps it was simply because here he was, escaping this pit for the last time with the woman he loved over his shoulder.

  The Baker had told him a few thing he should look out for, but he had never explained exactly what love was, what it would do, how it could change the way Tom thought. He guessed that the old bastard could never have explained anyway, genius though he was, and so he had simply neglected to try.

  Tom wished the old man could see him now.

  At the bottom of the stairwell he headed along the narrow corridor towards the rear of the building. The door was still ajar — he could just see the slice of light in the gloom — and he had made it. He was there, he was out, and a flush of relief relaxed his muscles as he opened the door and stood facing Hot Chocolate Bob.

  The pimp glared at him in comical surprise. He must have seen the guilt in Tom’s face, the backpack over his shoulder and the fear in his eyes. “What the fuck?” said the pimp, slipping a silver gun from his belt at the same time and lifting it up towards Tom’s face.

  Tom used his head. Flipped forward as hard as he could, his artificial muscles writhing and knotting as he pumped them with adrenaline, Tom’s forehead connected squarely with the pimp’s nose. The sounds was sickening. The pain and shock must have been dreadful, because the man didn’t even scream as he sank to his knees and slipped down the slimy wall.

  “Leave us alone,” Tom said. “We’re in love.” He vaulted Hot Chocolate Bob’s splayed legs, kicked the gun down the alley ahead of him and sprinted for Ashley Street. It only took a few seconds, but they were filled with so many thoughts that it felt like
hours.

  Most of them centred around whether the pimp carried more than one gun.

  As he burst out in the street and angled left, Tom felt a foolish sense of elation. He may be away now, yes, but he’d made an enemy, a deadly enemy. From this moment on the city was no longer safe, could never be called home again … but the sun shone down on his adventure, laughter still came from the dead park at the end of the street, Honey’s weight hugged his shoulder as if she had an arm draped there and he could smell her on him, smell her.

  He wondered whether this place would become famous, just as Pudding Lane had in London. That’s where the Baker had taken his name from. He’d said that he would be responsible for initiating a new Great Fire, but this one would be a conflagration of love.

  Tom ran through the park, noticing that the Chinaman was still entertaining. There were fewer people watching him now but he seemed not to notice, so intent was he upon his little play. The finger puppets bobbed and weaved and stared. Tom wished he had time to stop, but danger loomed large and dark behind him, an almost palpable force that drove him on into the city.

  He stopped running after a mile because he was drawing attention. Glancing around constantly, he was certain that he was not being followed. Enraged and bloodied, pride dented, Hot Chocolate Bob would certainly not be silent in his pursuit.

  The midday lull was almost over and now the streets were buzzing again. Cars vied for space and ground against each other, coughing out exhaust fumes at pedestrians. Street performers were counting their lunchtime takings, many of them looking sad and despondent as they pocketed a few measly coins. Nobody looked at Tom. Nobody could know what he had in his rucksack.

  He felt like a murderer. Honey may well be dead in there, a coiled, folded mess, a smashed egg with no hope of reconstruction. Each time he caught someone’s eye he looked away guiltily, blushing with the obviousness of what he had done. Surely they could see it on his face? Surely they could discern the shape of her bulging the rucksack, smell her scent as Tom took her towards salvation or death?