by S. L. Grey
Penter shakes her head. A stupid idea.
When she compares her body with those exotic brown bodies, why is it that she feels inferior? They’re the freaks, not her. But there’s something about the relationship between the world and the upside that idealises them and makes normal people second best. The various Ministries’ cravings for upside resources and supplies, whether Scrupulist or Player, the sheer amount of time and energy they spend on courting browns, somehow gives the whole world a great inferiority complex.
She soaps herself and stands for several moments under the water. This is a luxurious by-product of the missed penetration. Normally she would automatically shut the taps after three moments, but she’s standing here wasting water, and more importantly, the energy to warm it. Kark it, it’s upside energy anyway; it probably comes straight from that burning sun.
She puts on the apparel designed by the project researchers – it’s the outfit that the Mother in some television document wears – and goes downstairs to make breakfast for the family and the tame brown. That is what Mothers do. She turns on the television and watches the upside documents while she prepares the meal. The television is a primo tool for language acquisition.
‘Pastel tones can inject an aura of summer into every living space,’ she repeats. ‘Reaching the final four is my whole life,’ she repeats. ‘A cook-off doesn’t get tenser than this,’ she repeats.
Chapter 4
RYAN
The dying afternoon sun sprawls over Julie’s bed. It’s not yet soft enough to flatter her, so Ryan looks away, out through the wood-framed French windows into the manicured garden. It’s peaceful here and Ryan almost doesn’t want to leave. It reminds him of those dirty weekends in luxurious bed-and-breakfasts he used to take with Karin before Alice was born. So long ago. They were so young.
Everything got fucked up and there’s no way to reverse it.
Julie strokes his thigh with her little hand. She offers him a cigarette but he declines, watching instead as she wraps herself in a sheet, trails out of the French windows and lights up on the patio. He knows she feels his eyes on her back while she smokes. He knows she wants him to come out there, but he doesn’t move. He thinks instead about the new girl, how those grey eyes locked into him. Julie exhales her last lungful, grinds out the butt, comes back inside, dropping the sheet as she walks, and curls into his side.
He’s been in this house, in her bed, three times now; that’s probably enough.
‘I’d better go, ma’am,’ he says, using a fragment of the banter they employed to get here. Bored housewife and maintenance man. It works for her, he figures, so it works for him. She’s a nice enough woman, small enough, and certainly enjoys her afternoon excursions.
‘There’s no rush. Artie will be back around eight and Dino’s away, as always. Dubai this time. I could... we could...’ she says tentatively, knowing that she’s crossing a line. This isn’t their arrangement and she doesn’t want to show him that she wants more.
Ryan is painfully sensitive to need – it’s another of his big problems. He can’t help reaching out to people who need love, who need to be held; he never wants to hurt anyone, but he’s powerless when the urge to fulfil that need strikes. It’s his downfall. Others might think it’s cruel, but all he’s ever wanted is to be kind. But not this middle-aged woman. Not now.
He leaves her lying on the bed instead, and goes to take a long shower. Why not here, a room-sized shower, multiple heads, a toilet that flushes properly, rather than the sporous, stenchy shared bathroom at his hovel? He changes, slings on his backpack and blows Julie a kiss as he heads out to the front hallway.
As he reaches for the handle, the door thumps into his hand and knee. Ryan winces before he sees someone standing on the threshold.
‘Who are you?’ A fat kid, up to Ryan’s chest, squeaky voice all over the place.
‘Uh, plumber.’
Then from behind him, a sound in the passage. ‘Befo—’
The kid looks past him, goes purple, then looks away. Ryan turns and there’s Julie, with nothing on but a G-string. She clasps her arms over her chest. ‘Artie, honey, it’s...’ She scurries back to the bedroom.
‘Plumber, my fucking arse!’ the boy shouts.
‘Hey, wait a minute. Show some...’ Ryan stops before he makes himself sound stupid. But, seriously, an eleven-year-old kid? Speaking to him like that? Despite the fact that he’s the father of a thirteen-year-old himself, he has no idea how to handle kids, especially not boys. He’s not sure whether to admire this kid’s balls or give him a smack.
The boy seems set on making his decision for him. ‘I’m going to tell my dad and he’s going to fucking kill you, you arsehole.’ The kid’s taking out his cellphone and is aiming it at him.
‘Hey! Give me that!’ Ryan grapples the phone out of the boy’s hand, but not before a couple of faux shutter clicks have fired off.
‘Hey! Fuck you. Give me my fucking phone!’
Ryan holds the struggling boy off with one arm, gripping and twisting the sleeve of his T-shirt, and thumbs through the images with the other hand. Nothing but hand-shadow. Good.
‘Mom!’ The boy’s about to cry.
‘Come on, come on,’ says Julie behind them, now dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt. She comes to the doorway where Ryan and the boy are still standing, awaiting orders. She holds out her hand to Ryan, who deposits the phone into her palm.
‘You’d better go now,’ she says.
‘Yeah, I know,’ he says. In the calm now, he can feel a thump start up at his temples. He winks at Julie – now she’s having none of it – then heads out the door. As he saunters down the driveway, the gate starts to slide open. He’s not sure whether Julie’s watching him leave or knows how long it takes someone to walk down the drive. The driveway curves towards the road, so there’s no direct view of the gate from the house. Ryan scans for cameras: there don’t seem to be any up over the gate, and they’re not likely to be hidden, not in a normal suburban house. Big cameras are a deterrent to would-be thieves.
Ryan walks out onto the pavement and buzzes the intercom. He hears the cluck and static of the line opening. She doesn’t say anything. He’s really pissed her off. It’s not surprising, really, that she would defend her child. Isn’t that what mothers are supposed to do? ‘Thanks, I’m out,’ he says. ‘Sorry.’ The gate trundles shut in answer and he ducks back inside just before it closes. He stashes his backpack under a bush near the entrance and skirts around the side of the house to the main garden. It’s dark now, and the security lights studded along the inside of the perimeter wall are on. There aren’t any motion-activated lights that Ryan can see, and it’s unlikely that Julie arms the external beams or interior passives before she and Artie go to bed.
The French windows to Julie’s bedroom are still unlocked and he slips in, stands quietly. There’s plenty in this room that he might consider taking as a memento: Julie’s gold lighter, perhaps; an item of jewellery she’d never miss? Or he could take something that belongs to the absent husband, he thinks, going into the bathroom, opening the cabinets. A shaving brush, a razor. He’s tempted to pocket something of Julie’s anyway, but there’s no reason, it won’t satisfy the urge. Ryan’s not a sentimental man.
He pads soundlessly across to the bedroom door. The modern house’s mix of thick carpeting and travertine tiles make sneaking much easier than the creaky wooden floors of older houses. He puts his ear to the gap. There’s the sound of shooting, explosions, hard music: the kid’s in the lounge, playing games. He can’t tell where Julie is until she speaks.
‘Artie?’ No answer. ‘Artie?’ She’s calling from the kitchen. Still he doesn’t answer. Show some respect to your fucking mother, Ryan seethes inside. The passage from the bedroom leads to a T-junction in the front end of the house. Ryan sees Julie cross from the kitchen to the lounge. ‘Artemis?’ he hears her say in a conciliatory tone before she goes to where he’s sitting and her voice is lost behind the
noise of the game. Neither of them is likely to come back to the bedrooms for a while. He hurries out of Julie’s room and into Artie’s, the next door down on the left.
The kid’s room is unnaturally neat, obviously tidied by a housekeeper every day. Again, Ryan is reminded of a bed-and-breakfast or boutique hotel, as if the child’s a short-term guest in this lavish room. Instead of rock stars or models, idealised scenes of forests and seascapes decorate the walls. The only hint of the boy’s personality is a row of comic-hero figurines lining a clean, white shelf above a desk. On the desk is a small pile of school textbooks and a wafer-thin Mac.
No way can he take that. But he needs to punish the boy just the same. Take something. The compulsion isn’t as strong as it was in Duvenhage’s office, but it’s there all right, manifesting itself as a low throb behind his eyes this time. He opens the built-in wardrobe and a funk of pubescent boy wafts out. He scans the shelves of precisely folded clothing, and then, down there at the bottom of the closet, a neat, white, woven-cane toy box. Ryan opens it. It’s stuffed full of plush toys and plastic cars that the kid probably doesn’t play with any more, but there’s something else down there. Ryan shoves his arm in, scratching around towards the bottom, transported back immediately to when he was a boy. There was always something shameful and illicit you had to hide far away from judging eyes, but at the same time it was always within reach. Eleven years old, precisely when shameful compulsions and the taste for risk emerge from their cocoon.
Right at the bottom he feels something soft, a tightly folded silky something.
Shit. He hears a door click open, too close by. Ryan freezes, afraid to look around. But the door closes again and he realises it’s the bathroom, hears the boy pissing, scrambles to the side of the bed where he can’t be seen from the doorway. If the kid comes into the room, he’s fucked. He scans for escape routes, but the window is security-barred and the only way out is the door.
There’s a flush from next door; the basin tap runs and the door clicks open again. Go back to the lounge, go back to the lounge, you little fucker. Ryan can’t hear which way the kid’s going. Fuck those tiled and carpeted floors.
Ryan waits for a minute, lets his breathing calm down, tunes his ears again. The kid’s probably gone back to his game. If he were going to come into the bedroom, he would have done it by now. Ryan shifts back across to the toy box and digs in again. He’s not going to take the boy’s stolen underwear; it’s probably not very clean. Probably his mom’s.
He’s beginning to lose the taste for this, rifling around in some boy’s secrets. But as he’s drawing his arm out of the box, his fingers scrape past something hard and velvety and sharp. He brings it out: a yellowed, time-logged paperback, The Dominion of Slaves. Not a history text: three rouged and chained and half-naked women sigh at him wantonly from the cover. Ryan smiles. This will do.
Something about the smell of the book, the specific funk of sweat and semen and mildew and guilt, takes him back to his boyhood again and he’s hit by a wave of nausea. Christ, kids are supposed to keep soft porn and sticky underwear in their rooms; they’re supposed to be allowed to. Ryan’s own father, curse his rotten fucking degenerate soul, would have beat the shit out of him if he found something even as silly as this book in his room; it wasn’t even that Ryan had to learn better methods of evasion, they were just in him, hardwired from the time he was a baby, when, presumably, his father would hit him for shitting in his nappy.
He imagines Artie’s reaction when he finds his book missing. He’ll know someone found it, but he’ll never know who. He’ll look at his mother differently after that. Fuck him; kid has to learn, doesn’t he? That’s the difference between boys and girls. Girls deserve love and tenderness; boys need to learn to toughen up. Ryan pockets the book, closes the wardrobe and exits the room.
Slipping back through Julie’s room, he lifts the gold Zippo anyway, but it’s an empty gesture; the impulse to take something has already been sated. He drops the lighter on the carpet and closes the French window behind him. In the shadow of the curve of trees at the front gate, he puts the book in his backpack and scales the wall.
It’s eight thirty when he gets back to his boarding house. He makes toast from stale bread and spreads peanut butter on it. He feels like a beer but he’s out, so he has a glass of water to complement his dinner.
Ma Beccah bustles in and clatters a cup and saucer into the sink. ‘There was a man here looking for you, Ryan.’
‘For me?’
‘He said he was a friend of yours and you borrowed something from him and he came to get it back. That’s what he said.’
Shit. He doesn’t have friends, only enemies, a list as long as a toilet roll of people he’s stolen from or pissed off in some way. But borrowing, that’s something he doesn’t do. He owes nothing to anyone – not money or favours, that is – and that’s one thing he can be proud of. Karin’s brother, maybe? Karin and Alice have been staying with Ziggy and he always takes care of Alice whenever Karin loses it. Maybe it’s something to do with Alice, but why wouldn’t he just phone? But then again, Ryan can’t remember the last time he used his phone or charged it. He thinks it’s in his bag. Fuck, he should be a more responsible parent, keep it with him for situations just like this.
‘Did he say his name?’
‘No.’
‘What did he look like? Was he tall? Well-built guy?’
‘No, he was short. Sort of round face. He looked... I don’t know... like he wasn’t telling the truth. He asked me to let him into your room, he’d find the thing and just go. I said no ways, he must speak to you.’
‘Thanks, Ma.’ Whoever the fuck it was, it’s definitely—
Oh, fuck. Duvenhage. Of course. Ryan had completely forgotten about the flash drive. He feels in his pocket. The little dove is still there where he stuffed it earlier today. ‘Was he wearing a grey suit, maybe?’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
Fuck, how could Ryan have been so stupid? He slumps down at the kitchen table and stares at his toast. He should have known Duvenhage would miss something like that. The first thing Ryan used to do when he started up his computer was stick in a back-up drive. And why had he filled in his real address on the job application in the first place? Who does that? This is getting out of hand. The things he’s taken before have always been completely anonymous. Now this compulsion is directing him to do dangerous things. Steal from his boss, for Christ’s sake. And then the kid. Going back into Julie’s house for no reason at all. He’s never done anything that risky before; he could have been arrested, for fuck’s sake. Julie knows exactly who he is and where he works. There was no reason, he knows, except he was angry with the kid.
He was angry with Duvenhage too, speaking to him like that, and Ryan just had to nod and smile and suck it up. He can’t let it get out of control. Two items in a single day. It’s as if he’s trying to sabotage his life; as if his own fucking mind is trying to destroy him.
‘Are you all right?’ Ma Beccah asks.
Ryan realises he’s sitting there, his hand clasped over his mouth. ‘Yes, sorry,’ he tells her. He tries to shake himself out of it. If there’s any chance of him keeping his job, he’s got to replace the drive back in Duvenhage’s office without him noticing. And he needs his job to keep any hope of living with Alice again. It’s school assembly first thing, so he can do it then.
But if Duvenhage’s so keen to get that drive back, there might be something of value on it. There are different ways of looking at this problem. How badly does Duvenhage want it back?
‘Hey, Ma Beccah. Do you have a computer I can use?’
‘No, but Fransie next door lets me use his when I need to send an email or go online. I’m sure he won’t mind if you ask him.’
‘Okay, thanks.’
Fransie next door is not the first person Ryan would like to visit. The situation there is weird. Fransie and his alcoholic dad living there together in that filthy, dilapidated house
with Fransie’s little girl, Tess. No mom, no auntie, no nothing. He’s seen Tess playing in the front yard a couple of times when he gets back from work. She told him that she’s ten, that she goes to Ridgefield Primary, central Malvern’s run-down government school. She’s sweet and polite, almost too polite. There’s just a bad feeling about it. But Ryan’s in a rush and he has little other option at this time of night. He goes to his room and scratches through a desk drawer until he finds the back-up drive he used to use at work, takes a deep pull from the Three Ships in his backpack, then heads over to Fransie’s house.
The rusted metal gate squeals as he pushes through it redundantly. He could just as easily step over it. Fransie’s father is sitting in a wicker chair on the paint-peeling veranda in his usual stained wife-beater. His eyes follow Ryan as he climbs the six steps and crosses the veranda to the front door.
‘Evening,’ says Ryan, and the old man grunts.
Ryan knocks at the door, and after a minute Fransie comes out, scanning ahead of him before smiling and opening the door wider. ‘Hey, brother. What can I do for you?’
‘Hi, Fransie. I’m Ryan from next door.’ He holds out his hand and Fransie gives it a limp, distracted shake; his small hand is rough and dry.
He narrows his eyes at Ryan. ‘Ja, bru, I know.’
‘I’m sorry to bug you so late, but... I have a thing.’ Ryan’s about to launch into a lie about needing a document for work but feels less comfortable lying to a man like Fransie than to the middle-class suckers over the hill. His tribe, who he understands much better. ‘I wonder if you can copy this drive onto this one.’ He displays the little flash drive. ‘Ma Beccah says you have a computer.’
Fransie snorts back a laugh. ‘Sure thing, brother. You don’t mind waiting out here? Keep my pa company, hey?’
‘Of course. Thanks.’
Ryan’s relieved not to be invited in. He’s unsettled enough as it is, and he wouldn’t want to see what it’s like inside. He sits down on the top step of the veranda, thinking about Tess, what it must be like to stay here, wondering about where her mother is, when the girl appears out of an overgrown thicket at the side of the house like a spirit summoned. She’s still wearing her school uniform, which is as grubby as her face. Her hair is tangled with leaves and twigs.