The New Girl (Downside)

by S. L. Grey

  She follows Stephen up and onto the landing, sees Olivia poking her head into their bedroom, calling for Martin. If he’s not in his room, locked in the bathroom or in the other two bedrooms, there’s only one place he could be.

  She races towards her sanctuary, tries the door. Goddammit. She must have forgotten to lock it. She peers inside, sees Martin sitting at her desk. Heart in her throat, she glances round the room, relieved that Baby Tommy’s limbs are still neatly laid out where she left them. Thank God – the pre-Encounters Martin would have had a field day in here doing God knows what to them. ‘Martin, what are you doing in here?’

  He hands her a piece of paper. ‘I did what you said, Tara. I drew it.’

  Tara can’t make sense of it immediately. It seems to depict the hunched figure of a man, looking over its shoulder, its eyes scrawled black circles, its head lumpy and misshapen.

  ‘This is what you saw?’

  Martin nods. ‘The bogeyman,’ he whispers.

  ‘Oh, Martin,’ she breathes.

  He stands up and throws his arms around her waist. Tara is so taken aback, she only notices that Olivia and Stephen have entered the room when Olivia speaks.

  ‘Martin?’ Olivia says. ‘Mommy’s here.’ Martin makes no move to disentangle himself and Tara can’t help the surge of triumph she feels. ‘Martin!’

  He finally looks up. ‘Hi, Mom.’

  Tara watches Olivia’s expression of aggrieved concern turn to disgust as she stares at the collage of Baby Tommy. ‘Jesus Christ, Stephen. What the hell is this? No wonder Martin’s having psychological problems.’

  But Stephen isn’t listening. He sniffs noisily. ‘I can smell burning. Tara? Are you cooking something?’

  ‘No. I’m—’ Tara’s stomach plummets. Oh God – Baby Tommy! She wriggles out of Martin’s embrace, pushes roughly past Olivia, races downstairs on numb legs, flies into the kitchen. Sees a drift of black smoke curling out of the oven. Pulls the door open and reaches inside, ignoring the heat searing her unprotected hands. When the pain gets too much she finally lets the blackened ruin of Baby Tommy’s head drop onto the tiles.

  She slumps to her knees. She can’t believe what she’s done. How could she forget him like that? Her Tommy...

  She reaches out to touch him, his little pursed mouth now a melted snarl. She looks down at her right palm, where a blister is already forming.

  She doesn’t lift her head, even when she hears the bark of Olivia’s laughter behind her.

  Chapter 15

  PENTER

  Penter picks another ready bean and places it on her tongue, enjoying the tickle of its furry skin. As she chews it slowly, encouraging its juices, she watches the new brown – ‘Ryan’ – mixing the soil and spraying water on the shoots. Ryan doesn’t seem to care about consuming, or that his hands and body are muddied with sweat and soil. How can he bear to look so abnormal? A few of the browns she has seen on the documents look as if they have undergone the browns’ primitive modifications, but this one seems proud to be unsightly.

  Apart from that educator, the only brown Penter has been in close proximity to is Danish, and Ryan is very different from him, not only in appearance. Whereas Danish’s eyes are passive, there is something more active lurking in Ryan’s. His eyes follow Jane in a different way from the way he looks at her, or even Danish. She raised this with Father at dinnertime.

  ‘He is a primo specimen,’ Father said. ‘Much impairment there.’

  ‘Why doesn’t the upside just recycle deviant browns like him?’

  ‘Perhaps they serve the system in some way we cannot understand,’ was Father’s response. ‘They allow them to loiter.’

  If Penter were a character in one of those boring and predictable movies, she would fall in love with the brown – they would find a connection across the divide. Imagine choosing someone as unsightly as the brown over someone as scenic as Father. The thought makes her embarrassed – yet another of the barrage of emotions evoked by the thought-seep – and she laughs.

  Ryan looks up at her and scrimps his face. Is she meant to converse with him again? She’s not sure what is expected. She has played her part, she has given him work as Father requested, she has completed her duty.

  She wants to go back into the house. Ryan, like that educator, smells of bleeding meat, of that amber liquid he imbibes, of decay. He reeks like that karking yogurt. She can’t stand close to him for long without covering her mouth, even out here in the ether. The Manual of Upside Contrivances explains that browns do not have a bag. Instead, they dribble their waste out like the pregrowns in the vats who have no control over their bodily functions. It’s disquieting. No, worse; it’s repellent. Father disagrees with her; he tells her that the ablution booths the browns so favour have become quite fashionable among senior members of the Administration. Penter will believe this when she sees it. At a stretch, she might imagine people abluting into a puddle in a chair in the lower levels of the Malls or the CCOs’ Apartments, but not in the Tower, surely.

  Swallowing the last of the bean, she turns her back on Ryan, makes her way into the house. She has things to do. It is not long now before they must depart. Danish is already starting to dismantle the precinct, hauling the set and the facades away. She has wondered many times if she will miss the upside, but, after encountering SKY, she has no strong desire to stay here, even with the beans and the sun and the love movies. No, what she will miss is her growing connection to Father. She knows it will be severed when they return home and have their penetrations renewed. Will she be glad when she no longer feels these inappropriate emotions? When the thought-seep is gone? She will be glad to have her clarity restored, but at the same time, perhaps she’ll miss something about this lifestyle. One thing’s for certain: she will be glad not to be Mother any more. It is an unsatisfying role; she’s nothing more than a karking victual servant.

  She walks through the house, listening for sounds that Father is near. He has been in his study all day, and she finds herself anxious, looking for him, waiting for him, wanting that ache in her entrails when she sees him. She feels like the little browns on the screen, as if someone is recording everything she does.

  She creeps upstairs to his study door. It is disregardful, she knows, but she cannot stop herself from knocking. ‘Father?’

  The door clicks open. There he is. Her chest clutches in disappointment when she sees his face. He looks disconcerted, impatient. ‘Mother? What is it?’

  She invents a reason for disturbing him. ‘Have you informed the Ministry about the trespassing brown?’ she asks.

  ‘I am awaiting a response from them.’

  His gelphone trembles in his hand. He looks down at it, grimaces. ‘I must report,’ he says. She retreats and closes the door behind her.

  She shouldn’t have gone in there; she feels foolish. She walks to Father’s sleeping quarters, pauses, then opens the door. It smells of the luscious oil he uses on his hair. She kneels down next to his bed and presses her face against it, inhaling his odour. How different and refreshing it is after that brown’s stink! She knows she’s being absurd. She tries to remind herself who she is. I am Penter Ulliel, Deputy Node Liaison for the Ministry of Upside Relations. If she were watching herself in a movie, she’d be appalled. But it’s not a movie and she can’t help recalling the way he touched her, the weight of his hand on her shoulder. It makes her shiver. She runs her hands over the blanket, pauses when her fingers brush against a lump. She ferrets under the cover and pulls out a book. She looks at it, uncomprehending. There’s a picture of an unsightly brown female on the front, with the words ‘BabyEx Mothercare Catalogue’ above its head.

  Mothercare? Did he obtain and secrete this for her? Does he love her after all?

  She turns the pages, expecting to see mimeographs of Mothers sitting around tables with yogurt, perhaps Fathers bringing them convenience foods, but all she sees are pictures of disturbingly small browns – pages and pages of them. Penter feels a cold
gasp of air tickling the back of her neck, just below her shunt hole.

  This is disregardful in the extreme.

  She has encountered halfpint browns in the documents, of course, and there was that one that the educator brought, but the ones in this book are way too small to be out of their vats. She has seen some in the advertisements, but cannot understand what browns do with such things. They look feeble, inadept. How can they work or consume? What do they do? In most of the mimeographs they are attached to small chairs, their toothless mouths open as if they are normals advertising gum-shine.

  Father has made notes on some of the mimeographs: ‘Why so unsightly?’ ‘Do they not choose?’ ‘Why vat free?’ and ‘Punishment?’

  Penter has heard the stories of brown birth that circulate like some Player’s bad dream and simply does not believe them. But sure enough, here are also pages of female browns with distended stomachs. Can the stories be true? Parasitic pregrown halfpints pushing their way out of a gash in the Mother’s body? The thought makes her bilious. It is worse than SKY. It is even worse than Jane’s favourite movies.

  She pushes the book back under the cover and stands up, dizzy from the obscene images.

  What else is Father hiding? She will need to inspect his study on her own. The shunt hole tingles at the back of her neck, protesting against the enormity of her disregard, but she continues to make her plans. It is her duty, as the Deputy Node Liaison for the Ministry of Upside Relations, to investigate the potential of such a massive breach of regard. He will leave soon to harvest the primary viable, and she will be free to explore.

  If he is a Player, if he is purloining artefacts that are nothing to do with the purview of their project, then she knows what she must do. She touches the bony nodule fused above her heart, presses down on it. ‘Heartbreak,’ she whispers. That’s what browns call it when blissful love is flushed.

  Chapter 16

  RYAN

  Most of the grounds consist of the clotted red soil and concrete dust of a perpetual building site, but the vegetable patch is a well-tended oasis in the corner of the large garden. There are neat rows of spinach and corn and tomatoes, and beans grow healthily up canes. Ryan wonders who has tended this garden, since he is apparently the first casual labourer the woman, Mother, has hired. The family doesn’t seem to mind living in half-built clutter, but they tend their vegetable patch like it’s a Zen garden.

  Ryan feels his tension melting as he works the patch, trimming back tendrils and cleaning up fallen leaves, turning the soil. Thoughts of all the needful girls and the angry men outside these walls recede into the back of his head, a head that hasn’t felt this clear, this mollified, for ages. That’s what he should do, he decides: go somewhere into the country, work on a farm. Or even join a monastery, safe and quiet behind high walls he’ll never be forced to leave. The octopus-headed Adonises and hook-handed Shivas studded through the gardens look on beneficently, blessing his plan.

  It had been a disappointment on Friday when he’d got to the post office at the shopping centre and had seen the parking lot bristling with police cars. He shouldn’t have been surprised. A creep like Duvenhage wouldn’t have got where he has with perversions like his without being canny, careful, self-protective. He wasn’t going to lose this battle with a two-bit blackmailer like Ryan that easily.

  Ryan just walked past, scanning the cars in the lot, trying to get a glimpse of Duvenhage, but he didn’t find him. He hurried back up to Excelsior Avenue, taking the side routes, glancing over his shoulder, but nobody seemed to be following him. He lay down on his cot in his windowless room. He knew he should go and find Mother and do the work he’d been paid to do, but he just wanted to rest for five minutes, breathe, regain his equilibrium, calm his nerves.

  He must have fallen asleep because he was startled awake from a dream, the burning pale eyes in the girl’s face the only scrap remaining. He shook the image and reoriented himself. He needed to pee, and didn’t want to piss in the basin again.

  He turned left out of his room. He tried the first open door in the passage, but behind it was only a pile of four dust-coated water heaters. The next room was similar to his: bare white tiles and an unused cot against one wall. The corridor, which up to this point was illuminated weakly by the light coming from the garage at the far end, now jerked around an odd angle into dusky greyness. There were no doors on either side of this segment of passage, and it curved one way and then the next for several metres before straightening out again into a huge white room. This one was decked with white-painted parquet and was empty apart from a massive fireplace flanged by dressed stone against one wall. A series of neoclassical embassy-style French windows lined another side, and from there Ryan saw a landscaped green lawn with a kidney-shaped swimming pool indented into it. This must have been the living room and garden of the original house. The sight of this middle-class normality – and of generous quantities of natural light – relieved Ryan after the odd angles and bareness of the confusingly constructed new wing he’d walked through.

  But still no place to pee.

  The fireplace room had no exits other than the one he’d come through so he backtracked through the serpentine corridor. Or so he thought. He passed the two doors he had looked into and came back to his room. Only now it wasn’t his room. The space was much the same size, but instead of containing his bed and backpack, this one housed a stack of loose floor tiles and a collection of concrete statues. Set into the far wall was a green door.

  Jesus, he should have brought breadcrumbs to drop behind him. And the need to piss was becoming urgent.

  Through the opaque-paned door was a warm expanse of terracotta floor tiles and black granite and hard-oak kitchen shelving. It looked like a kitchen in a catalogue, an impression compounded by the fact that the windows were all sealed over with wood-veneered chipboard. And it was vast, bigger than any dream kitchen he’d ever seen. These people were probably expecting to have the extended family – an entire clan of moles by the look of it – round when the building work was completed. If this was the house of a mafia boss, how many hits and takeovers would it take to finish the construction? The counter tops were lined with coffee makers, interspersed with sandwich toasters, industrial-sized hot-water urns, mounted can openers, sandwich presses, rice steamers, blenders. The further he walked inside, the more it looked like a kitchen showroom.

  Of course! Import-export. That would explain everything. It was the perfect business for recent immigrants and would explain the half-finished opulence. Keeping the warehouse at home would help keep the business off the taxman’s radar, and it would serve as a neat front for the more illicit business he imagined the mysterious ‘Father’ practised.

  Ryan heard a noise and turned around, straight into Mother. His forearm swiped her side and scraped against something hard and knobbled under the lacy material of her bodysuit.

  ‘I’m sorry, I...’ he said, trying his hardest not to wipe traces of her off his arm.

  She looked at him curiously. ‘Can I assist?’

  ‘I... Sorry... I was just wondering where the toilet is.’

  ‘Toilet? That... Yes. You do not have a bag,’ Her face twisted in an expression he couldn’t read. ‘There is a convenience that is suitable for upside citizens in the hallway. I will show you.’ She led him out of the kitchen through a lounge area that was overstuffed with furnishings like another department of the showroom. The room was rank with the petroleum odour of plastic still clinging to it, but just underneath that, a smell of wet soil. Mother noticed him looking at the clutter and she smiled her skew smile at him. ‘We have not been here long, so have not converted the entire abode. Primo, is it not? We are attempting to decorate just in the local style as we have seen in the facsimiles.’

  ‘Yes, uh... it’s very nice.’

  She opened the door of the guest bathroom near the front door; Ryan tried to brand the exact location on his mental map of the house. ‘Here is the convenience.’


  As he pissed, he took in the pictures framed on the bathroom walls. Pictures of cows and trees and kittens in baskets, as if they’d been cut haphazardly from Women’s Monthly Magazine of Cheap and Generic Kitsch.

  ‘You will find next door in the closet the implements for your labour,’ Mother said to him through the door. ‘You may start in the greenery patch, then sweep the dust. Walk where you will, but remember not to transgress on the upper level. That is for the family only.’

  ‘Sure,’ he muttered. You don’t have to repeat yourself.

  He rinsed his hands and dried them on his jeans. When he came out of the bathroom, Mother was gone.

  After a few hours of digging and hoeing, he had completely shucked off the disappointment of the morning’s excursion. He was relieved, in fact. Petty theft aside, he was not cut out to be a criminal, to live in paranoid fear of the enemies he’d make. Sure, a hundred grand would have made his life easier, but if he was honest with himself, he knew he’d never get it. He’s always been the sort of man who likes to work for his money, and now, bending his back and pushing his shoulders, sweating into the soil, he felt like he was earning an honest wage, not like that menial, meaningless, computerised crap he had done back when he had a full-time job. Besides, he didn’t want to add a man like Duvenhage to his growing list of enemies. He was a sick pervert, and he should be exposed. Ryan still had the files, and he’d think of some way to get them to the police without involving himself. In the meantime he was safe here, and was earning good money to do good work. That’s the way he should have lived his life all along.

  Around five that afternoon, he heard a metallic clang and rattle and peered through the bushes to see a station wagon pushing through the gates. Instead of parking in the garages where he’d slept the night before, the car drove on up to the side of the house and the man with the cane and the big head got out of the driver’s side, limped round and opened the back door. The girl got out and, like a radar, swivelled her head to where Ryan was standing up in the higher terraces of the garden. She made him out through the bushes, stared at him for a moment, then bared her teeth. She might have been smiling, but despite himself, Ryan thought it was a signal of rage or desperation or – God help him – passion, or all three compounded.