Link Arms with Toads! (9 page)

Instead of protesting, as she thought he would, his fingers jumped to unbutton his shirt. Below, he wore a string vest: his chest was very hairy, trapped under the grubby net like a fur coat. A scroll was fixed by a ribbon to one of the vest’s interstices. Untying it, he gave it to her and cradled his skull in his hands.

Breaking the seal, spreading the parchment on the desk, she moaned. “This is a street map of Birmingham.”

He giggled. “Take a closer look, Ms Sting.” He allowed her a second perusal. “Did you read the names? The old suburbs have gone. The craters and plains have more suitable appellations.”

She traced the parchment with a finger. As if a moon chart had been superimposed on the urban map, exotic words stretched across the prosaic boroughs. She pronounced the names self-consciously, mindful of her poor aptitude for dead languages: “Aristarchus, Mare Nubium, Ptolemaeus, Mare Imbrium, Eratosthenes, Albategnius…”

The councillor interrupted her by clearing his throat and slotting three fingers into his largest pocks, as if preparing to bowl his head. Melissa felt she was not his target, but the skittish city beyond. “The Midlands. The final frontier, boldly gone.”

She removed her hands from the map and it snapped back into a tight cylinder. “But what is the point?”

“
When I was a boy, Ms Sting, I regarded the future as a benefactor. I looked forward to the shining cities we were promised: gleaming towers connected by aerial walkways, frictionless monorails, a populace free of the degradation of hunger and poverty. We would all be wearing togas and discussing philosophy in spacious parks. I thought that by the beginning of the new millennium we would be living on the moon. A crystal dome for a sky, a purple sea, an alien forest.”

“
You should have tried to make friends.”

“
You don’t understand. The disappointment stayed with me. When the First Space Age ended, the real moon was derided. Instead, we seemed to want our inner cities to turn into substitute lunar landscapes. Was that a cheaper way of getting there? I believe it was. This subconscious need influenced councils more than you might imagine. I inherited the policy, but knew it for what it was. By that stage, it was irreversible, so when space was rediscovered, and the moon colony competition was announced, I chose to accelerate the whole process.”

“
Hence the bulldozers and explosives. An amusing effort at twisting the rules, but to no avail. The Commission is very strict on this score. Birmingham is not an eligible moon.”

“
Consider the similarities, Ms Sting! Both are unavoidable, lack an atmosphere and shine by reflected glory. To deny us the victory would be churlish. Our citizens are the perfect colonists, resigned to bleak and unforgiving environments. Did you know our junkies have started to cut their heroin with an oxygen compound?”

“
You are insane. My report will recommend instant disqualification. You’ll be grounded for a century.”

“
There’s no leaving us now. The project is too far gone. The limits of the city are finished. How will you get beyond Solihull? Your car is not pressurised. You’ll bleed to death through your nipples!” He thumbed his own chest, as if needing to convince himself of the possibility. “It will be a municipal stigmata.” He pondered this thought, which seemed to provide solace, like the dream of a ladder to a stylite. To puncture it, she delved into her pocket for her smirk.

“
What will you call the colony? A new name is essential. Birmingham is inappropriate. How about Moonchester?”

He recoiled, confused and miserable. “Ms Sting! Such questions will be decided by committee. It is presumptuous…” He grinned unpleasantly, wagging a finger. “You must call it home from now on. There’s no running away. The cosmic radiation will kill you.”

She turned to leave. “You’ve confused semblance with reality, image with modus. A city sculpted to impersonate a moon does not automatically become that moon. You are a lunatic!”

He appreciated the joke. “But the way things
feel
is more important than how they actually
are
.” Again, he rotated his proboscis, tuning in to her recent thoughts. “If you felt our city was tugging at your elbow, then that is surely what it was doing.”

Before she reached the door, she stopped and asked, “So what’s your real name? Is it less comfortable than your pseudonym?” Glancing at her elbow, she was shocked to notice a few unravelled strands. Alleneal was trembling, chomping on nothingness.

“
My mother was startled, Ms Sting. She was carrying me at the time. The monkey came from behind a curtain in the Repertory Theatre. Some say there is no link between the incident and my condition. Our family has a noble heritage. We have dominated Birmingham for generations. The Rattle clan is respected and feared. I pluck my face every day: soon I will try electrolysis. The surface of the moon is devoid of laughter. The gravity of my problems has been lessened.”

Standing up, clutching the flag behind him for support, he mustered every ounce of dignity and announced: “I am Simian Rattle,
Conducator
of Lunarhampton.” He sagged and wept into the woodworm, unaware or uncaring that Melissa had already departed.

Outside, the rain had stopped falling. Globules of moisture drifted sideways over the pavements. At last the sky was clearing: ribbons of cloud strangled denticulated peaks. Bouncing toward her convertible, delirious as a bubonic puppet, Melissa desperately tried to laugh, while a million heliographs flashed from crater rims.

(v)

To reach escape velocity, she knew she must never take her foot off the accelerator pedal. The mountains merged into a wall, a grey tongue. Her ears played a staccato rhythm: pressure was leaking from her improvised canopy. She had picked up one of the flapping sheets from the aeolipile and wrapped it round her chassis. She hoped the fabric was tough enough not to burst. Speed and style were the vital factors. Overhead, despite the sun, stars burned in a black sky.

On the horizon, at the end of the road, a movement caught her eye. A tiny object was bounding towards her, growing larger at an astounding rate. Each leap was the width of despair. At last she made out a human form. It had a bucket on its head, connected by a length of hosepipe to an oxygen cylinder. A syringe glittered in a wrist. It was the squeegee merchant, charging with drawn sponge.

They connected silently, his body rotating over her bonnet and off at a steep tangent. He left a soapy smear across her windscreen and she watched in her mirror as he gyrated into outer space, stretching a palm to accept payment. One way of clearing them off the street, she thought. But she made a symbolic movement toward her pocket. It was too late: he was already an orbital beggar. An inverted meteor, harbinger of failure, he vanished in a subsidised explosion.

The speedometer was exhausted, lying horizontal on its right side, but her velocity increased. There was less friction, less of everything here, but now she knew she would make it. If a city wants to tug at your elbow, be firm with it. Do not permit yourself to be bullied. The music of the spheres washing in her head, Melissa allowed herself to dream of an asteroid shaped like a fake Gaudí house. It lay out there somewhere, in the void, beyond the adventures that awaited her on the alien worlds of Redditch, Bromsgrove and Kidderminster.

(1997)

The Expanding Woman

It was the year Klingon became the official European language. Laura and I were present when the police broke down the door of the last Esperanto Institute to resist the change. There was fierce fighting in the cellars and gun smoke poured from the external vents. The global, pacifist dreams of Zamenhof had finally been upstaged by a joke. Not that the decree was issued in a spirit of fun. It was simply that a federal society required a common tongue and Klingon was the obvious choice. A modern bureaucracy must always place economics before taste.

The fact that Klingon was cheaper to standardise throughout schools was largely due to the enthusiasm generated by the more neurotic pupils. Nobody had ever wanted to learn Esperanto, despite its phonetic spelling and absolutely regular verbs. It lacked glamour. Klingon, with its gruff militaristic timbre, appealed equally to the bullies and the bullied. It had originated as a cult among obsessive, solitary disciples of escapist science fiction in the closing decades of the twentieth century, growing rapidly in popularity on the campus, where new phrases were exchanged by timid freshers huddled in padded anoraks.

We watched the scrap until hunger drove us away. As we took a short cut across the hovertrain tracks, Laura turned to me with an exclamation of surprise. In the dying light, only the gleam of her myriad nose rings confirmed her identity. I am not suggesting that paranoia is a necessary survival trait but any attempt to fit in with the new world order should be applauded. If the federal government intended to give every advantage to the misfit and sociopath, it made sense not to discourage such latent qualities in my own psyche. I squinted in the direction of her seemingly detached finger, extended to the shadows.

“
What’s the matter now?” I demanded.

She gripped my elbow, bruising the bone. “Something’s there, animal of unknown species.” I like the way she talks when startled, panicky yet rational. There was a snort in the weeds.

I stumbled over the rails. Vandals had sabotaged the electromagnets with disruptors made from anvils and loops of wire taken from bundles of forged banknotes collected by the police. Regular raids on the remaining National Health hospitals unearthed millions of fake eurodollars printed by starving nurses in Radiography departments. After confiscation, these were incinerated by fraud squad flamethrowers, but the technetium strips that survived were dumped on landfill sites and retrieved by scavengers who haggled with them on council estates.

“
It took the wrong evolutionary path,” I hissed, still referring to Klingon, but Laura assumed I meant her unnamed monster. A coil snared my foot and I sprawled, trousers ripping at the knee. She helped me extract myself from the tangle, hurling it aside.

Homemade disruptors rarely derailed trains because express services were fitted with scoops to catch the devices. I had discovered an easier way to interfere with commuter schedules, a technique of manipulating my environment that served to reduce stress. I would make use of it later, after humouring Laura in her belief that a beast was stalking our realm. I could see almost nothing in the gloom but groped my way vaguely to the spot from where the snort had emanated. It was quiet now. Laura was irritated with my poor night vision, my scepticism.

“
Didn’t you see it? It was enormous and hairless.”

The embankment was suddenly pitted with frozen light. NARCISSAT had risen in the east. A vast mirror designed to relieve the winter darkness of the Shetland Isles, it had been cracked by a meteor and sent spinning in an erratic orbit that covered London.

“
I note a footprint. I agree it’s somewhat large.”

“
Surely a human couldn’t make that?”

As the satellite passed overhead, catching the shattered remains of the Greenwich Millennium Dome, I knelt and tested the depth of the print with my hand. I chewed my lip in disgust.

“
I believe it’s the spoor of the expanding woman.”

Laura sighed in disappointment. She knows exactly which urban myths inflate house prices and which bring an area into disrepute. The Genetic Circus had been in town during the summer. Had an unhappy exhibit chosen to flee into the overgrown gardens of our district, media interest would have generated considerable investment from outside. The expanding woman can generate nothing but calorific value.

The expanding woman owns a chip shop. Over a period of a month, she doubles in size, giant chins swelling like udders. Her maximum width has been estimated as that of a piano. The type of piano is never specified. I have rarely seen the expanding woman at perigee, when she eclipses her husband and children. She is always civil to customers. Her chip shop is an example of insidiousness. Many locals, even the greasiest ones, avoid our street because of its noxious allure.

I have a theory. I believe the expanding woman submits to extensive liposuction during each new moon. The fat that is removed is used to fry the chips. Also, she sustains herself by eating the garbage in our bins. This may explain why the expanding woman is so confident of taking early retirement. She has no need to buy cooking oil or food. If the operation is performed with makeshift equipment, bicycle pump and garden hose, for example, the savings must be substantial.

Laura nodded and we descended through the nettles, over a wall into our yard. The rusty swing cast an ominous shadow across the untidy lawn, telling the time with its relative slant. NARCISSAT has largely replaced the sun as the luminescence of choice for outdoor timepieces, though the recent adoption of metric minutes means we have less opportunity to idle in our gardens. I unlocked the rear door and we entered the kitchen. The house was playing up again, nervous system sparking. I have doubts about the benefit of printed circuit wallpaper.

While I watched teevee, Laura set about reprogramming the scrambled domestic functions. The News Channel offered an account of the Esperanto rebels and the battle. The report was in English with Klingon subtitles. Soon it would be the other way around. A journalist in a pale suit stood outside the Institute while faint explosions echoed from within. Tatters of green flag whipped his ankles. The walls were daubed with messages in clotted blood, something that neither Laura nor myself had seen. As the story progressed, I grew increasingly concerned. Helicopters circled and settled on the roof, disgorging soldiers.