Slow River

by Nicola Griffith

  They are at the van. Crablegs is standing at the lip, holding out his arms to her. Fishface is behind her. He moves his hands from her arms to her waist, not gripping now, just getting into position to boost her up and inside.

  Lore pretends to stumble. As she knows he would, Fishface reaches to catch her. She turns fast, nail in fist.

  His eyes are brown. The look that flares behind them is part shock at her speed, part fear, part a strange kind of acceptance: she will kill him. That nearly undoes her. But her fist is already swinging in its short arc. He doesn’t move. The nail rips into his neck and blood fountains. They tumble into metal. Something sharp. Bright pain. Blood splashes on her face, her arms, her throat, in her hair. She is screaming. Crablegs is screaming. Fishface is silent.

  Shock makes all the rest hazy, unreal, underwater slow-motion: the van, the shouting, then silence as the van rumbles through the night. The long sigh, the hissing nasal spray creeping across the air between her and Crablegs molecule by molecule, deadly.

  And breathing it in, sucking it down, tumbling backward out of, the van while it’s still moving is a rite of passage. She could have died. She should have died. She moves from one life, from Frances Lorien van de Oest, to another, arriving—as all newborns do—naked and covered in blood.

  Chapter 27

  I set the Hammex 20 up on its tripod and sat opposite, in the chair beneath the window. The camera lens was like a cold fish eye, unblinking. I stared at it, forgetting what I was supposed to say. The reflection of a bird flying past my window flashed in the glass eye and made me jump.

  I cleared my throat. “When I was seven, someone tried to sexually abuse me. I think it was my mother…”

  I talked for hours, occasionally sipping water from the glass next to me. I told the camera about Greta helping with the lock, about Stella killing herself, about Tok calling me in Uruguay. I told the camera everything I could remember about my kidnap; about Fishface and Crablegs and the tent; how they had known I was allergic to spray-injector drugs; what they had said and how they had said it. I talked about the nail.

  When I found I was talking at great length about the qualities of the nail—how it smelled, how it felt in my hand, how big it was—I turned the camera off, used the bathroom, made myself some tea.

  When I resumed, I was much more terse. “So when they took me outside, I thought they were going to kill me. I tried to escape. In the course of that escape attempt, one—the one I called Fishface—was seriously hurt. Then I was bundled up into a van.” I described the van as well as I could. “Crablegs threatened to kill me. He tried, with some kind of nasal spray. I got away. I was hurt, naked, alone. I was helped by a stranger.”

  That’s what Spanner still was: a stranger. One with a dangerous smile and skillful hands. I wondered what she was doing, right now. I wondered if someone was hurting her for money. It was getting dark outside. The sun went down early on winter afternoons.

  “I illegally took the PIDA from the corpse of a woman called Sal Bird, who had died, I was told, in a swimming accident in Immingham. I worked at Hedon Road Waste-water Treatment Plant.” I gave my address and phone number. I explained about the sabotage; about Meisener; about Montex and the van de Oest corporation and Greta. “I think Lucas Chen has been abducted by the same persons as myself three years ago.”

  I thought about saying more, but there wasn’t any point. This was only to give them enough to start with while I was. dealing with my family and dodging the glare of publicity. No doubt I would spend hours closeted in some grim-looking police station while being politely interviewed by the officer or officers in charge. For all that I had done, I had never seen the inside of a police station. The idea frightened me.

  On the other side of the window, neon in shopwindows and the sodium of streetlights were blinking on. The flat was gray and shadowy beyond the camera flood. I should really stand up and make some calls: tell Ruth and Ellen the truth before the net caught the story; let Tom know that the building would be swarming by this time tomorrow. Maybe he had a relative he could stay with for a day or two.

  I just sat there, hands and feet getting cold, watching the camera light grow more sharp-edged as the shadows in the flat turned from gray to black.

  * * *

  It was spring again. Lore had been prostituting her body for more than a year. All that money. She lay there for a long time, stroking the quilt, dunking, finally admitting to herself what she had known, on some level, all along. That evening, as they were preparing to go out to meet more customers, Lore sat down on the rim of the bathtub.

  “How much does it cost?”

  “Hmm?” Spanner was facing the mirror. She continued to brush her hair, but Lore knew Spanner was watching her.

  “The drug. How much does it cost?” Spanner paused in midstroke, then shrugged. “What does it matter? We have enough money.”

  “We’ve been earning an average of six thousand a week for more than a year. That’s more than three hundred thousand-”

  “I can count.”

  “-and where has it gone?” Lore stood up, took the hairbrush from Spanner’s hand, and shook it in her face. “I want your attention, and I want the truth. Why, exactly, have we been selling our bodies for the last year?”

  “To earn-”

  “The truth!”

  “That is the-”

  “But not the whole truth, is it? Yes, we’ve been letting old ladies watch while you sodomize me; you’ve tied me up while some executive jerks off because it’s his birthday; I’ve had to watch while you piss on some jaded couple. For what?” Lore was pacing up and down now, hairbrush still in her hand. “And don’t tell me money. It’s the drug. I thought the drug was to make our lives bearable while we made money the only way we knew how. But that’s not it at all, is it? I got it all backward. That was never the point. The whole point was the drug. The whole point was what you and I did while we took the drug. Because you like it. Deep down inside, you like it.”

  “You do, too. Otherwise you wouldn’t be doing it.”

  That wasn’t true. Was it? Lore shook her head. “Just tell me how much we’ve been spending on that drug.”

  “A lot. Everything.” And Spanner smiled.

  Lore hit her. An open-handed slap that sent her spinning across the sink.

  “Why?” She was panting. But Spanner said nothing. “I should have figured it out sooner. Why hadn’t I heard about this drug? Why didn’t anyone else know about it? Because it’s new. Who steals it for you? You make me so angry! We could have earned more selling it than using it. Couldn’t we? Couldn’t we!”

  But if they had merely been selling it, Spanner would not have had the same power; she would not have known something Lore didn’t.

  Lore wanted to hit Spanner again, hit her over and over, blame her for everything. But something held her back. She was already the kind of person who sold herself, who humiliated herself on a regular basis. She did not want to become the kind of person who enjoyed hurting others.

  Spanner had turned her back on Lore and was examining her face in the mirror. “It’s swelling already. I’ll have to use a lot of makeup to cover it before we go out.”

  Lore felt cold and sick. She had hit Spanner. She could not understand why Spanner wasn’t reacting to that. “We can’t go out. Not now. We-”

  But Spanner whirled, teeth bared and tendons standing out in her neck and shoulders. “We have no choice! You think the drug’s expensive? You have no idea!” She barked with laughter. “We owe money, you fool. And they know where we live. They’re not forgiving types, either. So you get your body into that dress and come with me, because if we don’t earn some cash tonight, tomorrow you won’t be in any position to worry about what kind of damage this stuff will be doing to your health.”

  Lore’s mind went terrifyingly blank. She was beginning to feel that the whole world was out of control. She closed her eyes. Think fast. “They know you. Not me. You need the money more than I
do.”

  “They won’t take long to figure-”

  “But for now, you’re the one.” Lore made her voice hard and flat. “So you need my help, for a change. So I’ll make you a deal. We’ll go out tonight, and tomorrow, and the next day. For as long as it takes. But we won’t use that drug anymore. And we’ll save the money.”

  Without the drug, it would be unbearable. At least, she hoped Spanner would find it so. And then maybe she could be persuaded to look at the possibility of a net-commercial scam.

  “Is there any left?”

  Spanner held up a vial, still half-full.

  “Then you can use it.” She no longer trusted Spanner to look after her while she was in throes of hormonally induced ecstasy. And maybe the effects of the drug would not be lasting if she stopped taking it now.

  Without the drug it was terrible. Lore felt like a receptacle, one of those plastic vaginas she and Spanner had both laughed at in the sex shop. But she stayed with it grimly. And she stuck to Spanner’s side like a burr.

  “I won’t let you run up any more debt,” she told her. So they earned their money, and they saved, and after six weeks Lore decided it was enough.

  Lore prepared the garden for a long absence. That’s how she thought of it, a long absence, not a permanent one; she did not want to examine why. She just pruned and aerated and clipped. She had hoped to see the cat one last time, but it stayed away. It would always be wild, coming and going unbidden. Like hope. She hoped Spanner would feed it. Probably not.

  Afterward, she cleaned her spade and shears and clippers carefully and wrapped them in oilcloth. Then she waited patiently for Spanner to wake.

  When she did, Lore called her into the living room. She gestured at the two piles of debit cards on the table. “Choose one,” she said. “They’re roughly equal. You can check them if you like.”

  Spanner looked at them, and at the two suitcases against the wall. “Does this mean what I think it means?”

  “Yes.” Lore sat on the couch. She had meant to be businesslike, but the lost look on Spanner’s face brought back memories of all the good times they had had: the exhilaration of riding the freighters; packs full of stolen slates; champagne at four in the morning. “Yes,” she said again.

  Spanner squatted on her heels by the table, examined the pile thoughtfully. “You know, there’s enough here to bankroll that scam you were talking about earlier.”

  And Lore couldn’t leave without one more try. “We could both start afresh,” she said. “You’ve got skills. It wouldn’t be hard. We could move, find another flat. Somewhere where Billy and the others couldn’t find you.” Spanner said nothing. “We could take new names. Get real jobs. You have skills. It’s never too late to start again.”

  “Isn’t it?” She looked up, and Lore was reminded of the ancient look, the soft pain she had seen that first night on Spanner’s face when she had seen how badly injured Lore had been.

  “No,” she said, but even to herself she did not sound convinced.

  Spanner laughed, but it was a sad laugh this time. She scooped up the nearest pile of cards. “Well, it lasted longer than I expected that October night, and it was more fun.”

  “Please, Spanner…”

  “No. We’re different. This may not be what you feel you deserve from life, but it’s the level I’ve found, the place I call home. It’s where I belong.”

  “No. It’s where you think you belong, because you believe you don’t deserve any better. But you do. We all do. There’s a chance here, with this.” Lore nodded at her own pile, “Don’t dismiss it.”

  But Spanner was already getting up, flipping the switch on her screen, pulling up a swirling graphic in vibrant colors. Lore picked up a suitcase in each hand, paused. “I’ve entered my new address in your files.”

  Spanner said, without looking up from the screen: “I’ll see you again. You’ll always need me.”

  * * *

  I stood and stretched, turned off the camera light, looked at the clock. Eight-thirty. Morning in Ratnapida.

  A bath first.

  The tub took a while to fill. I don’t remember thinking anything in particular.

  I climbed in but felt no urge to use the soap. Gradually, the water stilled. My face came into focus on the surface, between my bent knees. I looked at the reflection curiously: brown hair, gray eyes, good bones. The gray eyes watched me back. This was me. I didn’t need Sal Bird anymore.

  This is what my father would see when I met him tomorrow. What would I say? How would I explain how I had lived the last three years? I wouldn’t, not right away. It would be enough that I was here. At last.

  And then I was filled with a sudden energy, the need to call, to meet Oster and show him my real face, to wait for Magyar outside the plant afterward. I reached for the soap.

  I was toweling myself dry when the screen chimed. I wrapped the towel around myself and took the call.

  “Magyar!”

  “You haven’t called yet, right”

  “No, but as soon as my hair’s dry-”

  “Too late. Your father’s here, demanding to know where you are.”

  That couldn’t be right. I hadn’t called him yet.

  “Look, if… if you need more time, I can foul up your employment records to hide your address.”

  “No.” It came out crisp and decisive. “I mean, yes, hide my address. I’m coming in to see him.”

  “Now?”

  “Right now.” My hair could dry on its own.

  I don’t remember getting dressed, or whether I took the slide or walked, but I do remember the sheen of Magyar’s hair in the street light outside the plant, and I remember walking through the gates next to her, carefully, as though my body were built upon bird bones, hollow and light. And I remember the door.

  It was pale woodash, something like that. Very pale. There was a nameplate: P. Rawlin, Superintendent. I stood in front of it, my face about four inches from the grain, long enough to worry the assistant. He shifted slightly behind me, and Magyar gave him a look. I closed my eyes. My father was behind that door. Whom I had loved, then hated, and did not know at all. I took one last look at Magyar, who nodded.

  The handle was one of those old-fashioned knobs. Brass. Slippery under my sweating hands. It turned easily.

  Dark red carpet. A desk, a big slab of some dark wood. A man climbing to his feet as the door shut behind me—the plant superintendent. To the right, a woman in a brown suit. A quick glance from her pale eyes to me and then from me to the man sitting on the left side of the desk. A strange, eerie silence. Then the superintendent, Rawlin, saying something at the same time that the door swung shut with a click and my father jumped to his feet, face eager, hands open: “Lore! Oh, thank god, Lore!”

  His words were like solvent on cheap varnish, stripping away my comforting glaze of unreality.

  “God. Lore. When I heard, I came as fast as I could. We’ve just land-”

  The world was painfully bright and real. I held up my hand, making him stop. “Who told you? Was it Meisener?” Oster dropped his hands. “Who?”

  “Meisener. Or that’s what he calls himself. He works here.”

  “Wait a minute,” the superintendent said, coming out from behind the desk. “One of our workers knew you were here?”

  “Oh, he’s not yours.”

  Rawlin frowned at that, then ignored it. “But if he knew you were here, why didn’t he claim the reward?”

  “It wasn’t Meisener?” I asked Oster. But of course it wasn’t. And then all my adrenaline had boiled away and I felt old and sad and tired. They were all staring at me. I sighed. “Let’s start again.” I nodded to Rawlins. “Superintendent,” I said, then held out my hand to the woman. “I’m Lore van de Oest.”

  She responded automatically, as people do. “Claire Singh. Director of City Sewage.”

  I smiled the polite smile I had not had to use for a long time. “My father and I haven’t seen each other in a while. W
e would like some privacy.” It took her a moment to understand; then she flushed. Perhaps it was the smile, perhaps she remembered that Oster could buy her and her city from his daily operating budget. “Rawlin,” she snapped. “We’ll leave father and daughter to themselves for a few minutes.”

  I watched them leave, refusing to meet my father’s eyes until the door was closing behind them. I tried to imagine what Magyar would make of their exit. I felt better knowing she was there.

  Then there was no way to put it off any longer. I turned to my father.

  He held out his arms again, but more cautiously this time, and that caution, almost timorousness, undid me. He was my father.

  “Oh, Papa…”

  I threw myself into his arms. But I wasn’t six anymore, and he couldn’t keep out the world. And he seemed smaller than he had been. We moved apart a little to look at each other, hands still wrapped around biceps and triceps.

  “Lore…” Long and drawn out, as though it was new in his mouth. “Lore, I thought you were dead.”

  “I was, in a way.”

  He reached up, seemed about to ruffle my hair, then touched the ends gently. “Brown suits you.”

  We held each other at arm’s length in silence, measuring. Still daughter and father, but changed. “Come for a walk with me. By the canal.”

  “In the city?”

  His surprise and distaste amused me. “I’ve lived here three years. I’m one of the people I used to be scared of. We’ll walk by the canal and no one will bother us. Assuming the media doesn’t have this already.”

  “It’s tight as a drum. That won’t last past tomorrow morning, of course.”

  “Unless your informer takes it to the net for extra money.”

  “No. That was one of the conditions of receiving the reward.”

  It made sense. “Will you come for that walk? You can have a bodyguard follow us, if you like.”