Nicola Griffith (17 page)

Lore is someone else and it excites her. She wonders why she didn’t start dyeing her hair years ago. Now when she looks at herself in the mirror she sees a young woman who has designed herself. She can do anything she wants. She toys with the idea of wearing lenses but decides she likes the gray eyes and black and white hair. It gives her a cool, distant look, like the faces of dead heroes buried under ancient ice. It is a face that knows.

But what Lore knows is only through film. The time has come to discover with her body.

She calls up her anonymous friends on the net and asks about sex clubs.

The films Lore has seen and made are hard-core, not glitzy, romanticized versions of the truth, but, even so, the truth is more than she expected. The bar seems bright and friendly from the outside, as though there is nothing to hide, but the people Lore watches as they go in pay the cover using temporary debit cards, probably bought from one of the score of midtown dealers who convert PIDA credit to anonymous cards for a two-percent commission. Lore waits until they have disappeared inside, then offers her own card.

The hot, crowded bar smells. Beneath the high tickle of perfume and the raw throaty sting of alcohol lies the heavy, deep scent of bodies clothed and unclothed: leather, latex, the tang of sweat and excitement, and older smells, the kind that come from the stains the dim lighting is designed to hide. A thick bass line slides between and through the bodies standing at the bar, sitting at the tiny tables, dancing on the floor. It pushes against Lore’s abdomen, like a hand.

She heads for the back room.

A woman at the door stops her, hands her something. A leaflet. In the back room it is too dark to read anything but the header:
Safer Sex Guidelines.
Lore puts it in her pocket and heads for the scene room.

There are about a dozen women there. Some are engaged in sex, some are watching. One woman with long hair and fashionably loose muslin clothes stands by the wall. She is petite but not frail and there is a bag at her feet. Lore knows what she should do: she should catch the woman’s eye, walk over, and lay her hand on the woman’s arm; she should look into the woman’s eyes and say in a voice that means
Let’s pretend,
“I’m Star,” or Jade or Ellie, “a helpless, nervous virgin,” and then they would just . . . do it. She has seen pictures of everything. She knows how it goes. But life is different from pictures.

She does not know what to do.

The woman sees her, smiles. Lore smiles back, then blushes. The woman pushes herself off the wall, hesitates. They both walk toward each other at the same time.

“I. . .” says Lore, and feels paralyzed.

“I’m Anne,” the woman says, and takes her hand.

It is like the closing of an electric current, and suddenly Lore knows everything will be all right. They move off into a corner where a woman nods them to a stairway. Lore knows she climbs the stairs, but all she remembers is the feel of another woman’s hand in hers. And there is a bed and some words but Lore barely pays attention. For years her want has been undirected, amorphous, aimed now at some figure on the net screen, now some character in a novel, but for the first time she knows exactly who will touch her, will kiss her, will make her sweat.
This woman. This woman
with her long hair and small hips will ease inside her clothes;
this woman
with the New Zealand accent will open her legs and smile conspiratorially when she finds Lore wet;
this woman
will slip her fingers inside Lore and talk to her and encourage her and fuck her until her tendons strain and she starts to thrash and then cries out until her throat is raw.

Lore feels her need boiling up inside her like lava in a bore. “Now,” she says, “now,” and pulls Anne to her, not knowing whether to laugh or cry with wonder when soft breasts touch hers and that beautiful mouth, soft as plums, fastens on her neck. She comes as soon as Anne touches her through her clothes, and feels a string of orgasms waiting to be told off, one after another like beads.

“Again,” she says into Anne’s neck. “Oh, again and again and again.”

Lore is fifteen. It is summer once more, and she has been at Ratnapida for nearly five weeks. She is being driven demented by the constant push-pull of her parents. She wishes Tok were coming—but he is on a project on some island chain or other and will not be there for three or four days.

She digs out her camera again.

She has gone beyond putting her parents in fantasies, and now that she has the real thing, library sex is not much fun. So she uses the camera to make herself real. She takes it into the garden and films trails of ants moving endlessly as a stream between a fallen mushroom and their nest. At night, she plays the sequence to herself: only she has seen this. It is her vision, unique. No one else has seen these particular ants in this particular lighting. It is something to hang on to.

Something to hang on to becomes a genuine interest. She takes the camera down to the most secret of the carp ponds and finds that seeing through its lens makes her a more disciplined observer. She sees a frog, and films it carefully. Later that afternoon, she goes back, gets the frog in her viewfinder, and realizes it is a different frog. It is a revelation: frogs are not all the same. This one has a dull patch under its throat where shadows gather as it waits patiently for a fly to pass by close enough to hook with its tongue. She is fascinated by its eyes, the nictitating blink.

Hours later, when she turns the camera off and stands, her knees are stiff, but she is happy. She has discovered a whole new world: frogs and mosquito fish, caddis flies and damselflies, cattails and duckweed and the slow, stately open and close of water lilies. She smiles as she falls asleep that night.

One evening Stella and a horde of her friends descend upon the island, glittering with jewels, their clothes and hair shimmering like peacock feathers. As far as Lore can see, they do nothing but change clothes, party, and boast of who has given how much to what charity. They watch the net, and when charity commercials run, they transfer money via PIDA to the charity accounts. And they do it fast. Seconds count—microseconds, even. They have asked the charities to provide official lists of who has given what to whom and when, and the charities, being practical about money matters, have obliged. It is now chic to appear as the first donor to any charity, even more so if the unknown fledgling organization grows into an international institution or becomes popular with average people. Stella and her friends call themselves the Almsgivers. Although no doubt various of the agencies are glad of the largesse, Lore finds it mildly disgusting that it is nothing but a game to these people. Sometimes it is hard to believe that Stella is Tok’s twin, her sister.

She is glad when Stella leaves and takes her crowd with her, but then there is nothing to come between Lore and the rest of her family.

Six of them sit down to dinner: Lore, her parents, Greta, and Willem and Marley. No one speaks while they shake out napkins and servants bring bowls of cold consommé. Fans turn slowly over their heads. Lore feels like an alien. The others all seem to be in their own private worlds. Greta as usual is almost Zen-like in her invisibility. Lore often thinks of her as being gray and somehow shriveled, but her skin is fine and close-pored, soft, like a honey glaze. Her eyes are deep brown. Lore wonders if she gets that color from Katerine, or from her father, the man Katerine divorced ten years before Lore was born. Willem, too, has dark eyes. Lore decides that Katerine’s eyes must be brown, but
brown
, she decides, is not enough. She is Katerine’s daughter, she has a right to know.

Just as she opens her mouth to ask, the butler appears at her mother’s elbow with a silver tray. “A letter from Mr. Tok,” he says.

“He always did like to do things the old-fashioned way,” Oster says as Katerine opens it. Across the table Willem picks up his spoon and sips at the soup. The others follow suit.

Katerine folds the letter carefully and tucks it under her plate. She picks up her spoon. “He’s not coming.” Her voice is steady, but Lore hears something, the slightly faulty note of a cracked bell, and is immediately alert.

Willem must have heard it, too. He leans and slides the letter free. He scans it quickly, then reads aloud. “Dear Everyone, I’m afraid I won’t be able to make it to Ratnapida as promised, but I’ve taken an opportunity I wish I had taken years ago. Mother, I’m sorry, but I’ve resigned my job as project manager and don’t intend to take it up again. Sahla is competent until you find a replacement. I’ll be in touch soon.” Willem puts it down. “It’s just signed, Tok.”

Everyone is looking at Katerine. She seems calm, but Lore understands that she is devastated. It means the world to her that her children work in the family business. For the first time in years, Lore feels something for her mother apart from the urge to please. She feels the need to protect her. Katerine looks so fragile.

Oster sighs. “He’s probably decided to go study the flute, like he was always threatening to do.”

“What?” Katerine looks dazed.

“The flute,” Oster says again. “He has always loved music.”

Lore is staring at the table, watching dozens of tiny fans turn the wrong way in the spoons, trying to understand. Music. Her brother, Tok, has always loved music. How had she not known this? She looks at her father. And how had he known? She looks at the family, at Greta and Katerine, Willem and Marley, and wonders what else she does not know.

Why did Tok say nothing? Why did Oster not tell her? Something inside her twists just a little.

“. . .working on the phosphorus problem in the Lau Group islands,” Greta was saying.

Katerine seems to have moved out of her daze. “Is Sahla up to that?” she asks Marley.

Marley shakes his head thoughtfully. “I don’t think so. No.”

Katerine wipes her mouth decisively and drops her napkin on the table. “Then I’ll fly out there tonight.”

“Katerine,” Oster says. “For god’s sake. You can call him instead. And he knows how to ask for help. He—”

“Who knows when Tok wrote that letter—”

“It’s dated three days ago,” Willem says.

“—how long Sahla’s been out there alone, making who knows what kind of errors. Costly errors.” She pushes her chair away from the table.

“It’s not a big project. Not that important—”

But Katerine is already standing. “I’ll fly tonight.”

Lore finds herself standing, too. “I’ll come with you.” She tries not to see the hurt in Oster’s eyes.

THIRTEEN

Magyar was not around when the shift started, and Paolo was as eager as ever to learn. We were scheduled to check the leachate barriers under and around our troughs, a tedious, time-consuming job. It seemed like a good time to start him at the beginning.

“There are all kinds of different ways to classify bacteria. There’s temperature: thermophilic bugs prefer hot water, fifty-five to seventy-five Celsius; mesophiles like it medium; psychrophiles a bit cooler. They can be grouped by how they do or don’t use oxygen. Aerobic bacteria only work in oxygen, anaerobic only work without it, and facultative bacteria work with
or
without. Beyond that, there’s what the bugs eat. Heterotrophic bacteria feed on organic carbon sources, and autotrophic bacteria utilize carbon dioxide. Lots of those categories can be further divided into gram-positive and gram-negative, which is to do with the difference in the cell-wall structure.” Paolo looked confused. “You’ll have to stop me when I talk about things you don’t understand.”

Maybe someone had told him to shut up at school. Asking questions did not seem to come easily. I just waited. “What’s the difference between bacteria and fungus?” he asked diffidently.

Fungi,
I thought, but now wasn’t the time to correct him. I wasn’t sure where to begin. “There are different ways to differentiate, but for our purposes, the difference is in how the microorganisms go about breaking down pollutants. Bacteria produce enzymes that break down the bonds between elements in a carbon chain. The enzymes are specific to certain types of organic compounds, and they’re intracellular.” He looked blank. “It means that the contaminant has to be soluble. It has to be able to enter the bacterial cell. So if the contaminant is a heavy organic, then a fungus is probably better. The enzymes they make also break down the carbon bonds but they’re nonspecific and extracellular. So they need only close proximity, not solubility.” His face was closing up. “Where did I lose you?”

“Everywhere.” His eyes were hard and dry, but his voice shook. “I don’t know enough to even learn. What’s a carbon chain? Or organic? An enzyme? What does soluble mean? I feel like there’s a whole world floating just out of my grasp, as though I’m blind and you’re talking about colors.
Heterotrophic,
you say, or
enzyme,
and you may as well be talking about . . . about
flying
to a bird that’s had its wings chewed off!”

He turned away and I wanted to reach out to him, put an arm around his hunched shoulders. I remembered just in time that he didn’t like to be touched.

“I’m sorry. It’s my fault for starting in the middle instead of the beginning.”

“You just didn’t expect me to be stupid,” he said bitterly.

“You’re not stupid.” He wouldn’t turn around and look at me. “Paolo, listen to me. You’re not stupid. Not knowing the right definitions is no different from not having the right tools to fix a burst water pipe. You can learn. I can teach you.”

He looked at me over his shoulder for moment, then turned all the way round. “Can you?”

“Yes.”

He studied me. By his expression, he didn’t know whether he wanted to believe me or not. Hope could be dangerous.

He probably needed time to think. “We need to get all these barriers checked and that feed line on forty-two unclogged before the break. We can talk about it more then.” He seemed relieved.

Paolo and I were the last into the breakroom. When we got there, both screens were off and the assembled shift was very quiet. Magyar was there, with Hepple. Her eyes were as hard as beryl.

“. . .and so our acting shift manager—”

“Night manager, now.” Hepple was smiling slightly and rocking up onto the balls of his feet.

Magyar forced a smile. “Mr. Hepple, recently promoted to night manager, has decided to take a look, in person, at our particular part of the operation. He’ll be on duty with us this evening.” So. That was what she was angry about. He was checking up on us and, by implication, her.

Hepple nodded at her, a patronizing, dismissive little gesture. It made me angry. “Thank you, Cherry.” Oh, he was enjoying himself. “As you may know, I have long asserted that Hedon Road could be even more efficient than at present. I have been given this new position with a mandate to improve productivity. Toward that end, I have decided to pay closer attention to the on-floor management process.”

Magyar’s smile was brittle. We were
her
team, only she could harangue us or praise us, and now Hepple was embarrassing her in front of us all. Judging by the way she kept her body turned slightly away from him, the stiffness in her shoulders, she wanted to stuff him in our dirtiest effluent and watch him swallow sewage. “And now we’ll leave you to take your well-earned break in peace.” She stressed
well-earned
, letting us know that this was not her idea, that she knew we worked hard enough as it was without being dogged every step of the way.

But Hepple had not finished with us. “I’m looking forward to watching you all in action. I’m sure I’ll find—despite Cherry’s protestations of understaffing—that you are a fully capable and hardworking team. That’s all.”

He seemed to be waiting for us to leave, then remembered it was our breakroom. He nodded at the room in general and opened the door. Magyar preceded him.

“Christ,” Cel said. “That’s all we need.”

“I thought Magyar was going to pop him.” Kinnis sounded as though he wished she had. “What do you think of that crack about ‘Cherry’s protestations’?”

Cel pulled a meat roll out of its self-heating carton and blew on it. “Means we won’t be getting any more workers, and that he’ll be looking for someone to fire and not replacing them.”

“He’s an ambitious little snot,” Meisener said. There were general nods. One or two people wondered out loud if now might not be a good time to look for a job somewhere else. “I looked around before I signed on here,” Meisener said. “Nothing. Tighter than a rabbit’s arse. But I’ve seen these young turks get revved up before. Sooner or later he’ll go too far, get too greedy too fast, and then things’ll be back to normal. All we have to do is wait him out.”

I wasn’t so sure.

Hepple, immaculate in cliptogether over skinnysuit without a mask, came onto the floor half an hour after the break. I was at the influent station when he appeared, accompanied by Magyar. She explained the various readouts, and that “Bird here is on analysis.”

He turned to me blankly, then snapped his fingers. “Ah, yes. Bird. New here. Three weeks, is it?”

“Almost four,” I said.

“And how are you getting on?”

Magyar tensed.

“Very well, sir,” I said. “I’ve found section supervisor Magyar attentive to the needs of both workers and process, which makes everything run very smoothly.”
There, Magyar. What do you think of that?

Hepple frowned very slightly, making his soft mouth pooch out like a baby’s. “No doubt, no doubt. But we’ll have things running even more efficiently soon enough.”

If I had been Magyar I would have been insulted.

“Now, tell me. The viability of the bugs—” He pointed to the lines that fed the various species of bacteria and their required nutrients, if any, into the troughs. “—they’re checked every two hours?”

“Yes.” I looked at Magyar for some kind of clue. Her face was as stiff as a mask.

“Hmmm.” Hepple turned to Magyar. “I think we should increase that schedule, don’t you?”

“We will of course be happy to follow any of your suggestions.” What else could she say?

“Indeed. Indeed.” He sighed contentedly, like a cat contemplating a crippled mouse. “Yes. I think we’ll have those readings taken every hour.”

That was ridiculous.

“Sir,” Magyar said smoothly before I could frame a reply, “I’m sure Bird would be more than happy to comply.” She shot me a glance. I nodded earnestly. Slave and overseer ganging up on the plantation owner. “But she and I will need some input from you on our revised priorities.”

I thought I saw where Magyar was going. “Yes, sir. That would help. I mean, at the moment the most important part of my job is monitoring the nitrogen and TOC levels. If I split my focus, mistakes will be made. Besides, the extraction and testing is routine and automated. Any significant deviation from the norm would activate the alarms.”

“
Significant
isn’t good enough now, Bird. From now on, any deviation, no matter how small, must be corrected immediately.”

“Sir, might I ask why?”

“I want to run a lean, fit operation. Even small deviations lead to inefficiencies.”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Magyar open her mouth and then close it. I knew how she felt. Microadjustments were a waste of everyone’s time. All of the strains used at Hedon Road were premium, genetically tailored van de Oest varieties, which bred true and, given the correct substrate and feeds, kept to a steady and reliable rate of growth. The automatic systems were finely tuned. Unless influent changes were sudden and massive, the system was capable of correcting itself.

In the overhead arc lights I caught the glint of sweat on Hepple’s lip. He was worried about something. Worried people are not always rational. Best to acquiesce. “Sir.”

“Good. Good.”

I wondered why he felt he had to repeat everything. I was uneasy now. Insecure people could be dangerous.

He must have misinterpreted my expression. “If you can’t keep up with the monitoring, then draft someone to help.” He looked around vaguely, alighting on Paolo, who had just climbed from the trough with an armful of cut bulrushes. “You there! Yes, you. What do you think you’re doing?”

Paolo, who was doing nothing wrong, stopped, uncertain.

I stepped between them. “He’s new here, sir. I’ve—”

“Don’t you have things to do, Bird?”

Magyar caught my eye, shook her head very slightly, then pointed to herself:
Protecting Paolo is my job.
She could probably do it better. I obediently turned back to the bank of readouts, but I listened hard, and kept them in my peripheral vision.

“As Bird says, sir, Paolo here is new, though he seems to be an excellent—”

“Yes, yes. Look, Cherry, I’m sure you have pressing duties elsewhere.”

Magyar could do nothing but bow to the inevitable. Hepple turned to Paolo, and smiled. Paolo waited.

“Now, Paolo, is it? Yes, well, as you’ve no doubt heard, Bird here will be conducting hourly test sequences on our bugs. The results of those tests, and the monitoring numbers, will come directly to me instead of Magyar. And I want you to bring them to me. Personally. Every hour. No matter where I am, or what you might be doing.”

That was ridiculous.

“Of course,” Hepple went on, “this does not give you any excuse to slack off in your other duties. Is that clear?”

Paolo nodded, expressionless.

“When I ask you a question, I expect an answer. Once again, is that clear?”

“Yes, sir.” His voice was thin and tight with anger. I moved around the instrument displays so I could see them both.

“Good, good.” Hepple slapped Paolo on the shoulder, pleased with himself now that he had found someone to bully. I don’t think he noticed the muscles bunch along Paolo’s jaw. “Now, I want you to take me through your little part in our operation. Don’t leave anything out.”

There was no sign of Magyar. I wondered if she was somewhere grinding her teeth.

Eventually, Hepple got bored and left Paolo alone to pick up the pile of rushes he had had to abandon. I walked up behind him. The support strap that stretched between his shoulder blades was vibrating slightly, and I could smell his stress sweat. I wanted to lay a hand on his thin back, but did not.

“Paolo?” I said gently. “Paolo?”

“I’m fine,” he said, stuffing rushes jerkily into a sack. He did not turn around.

“I’ll talk to Magyar. She might be able to do something.”

He whirled. “I said I’m fine.” Something about his pale, thin face reminded me of Tok. A muscle at the corner of his mouth jumped. His eyes were almost black with anger and humiliation.

“I could—”

“I don’t need a woman to fight my battles!” His voice was clotted and violent and I could not have been more surprised if he had hit me. We did not speak for the rest of the shift except when I monitored the viability of the microbes and gave him the figures to take to Hepple.

“He’ll be sorry,” he swore. “You’ll all be sorry.”

When I got home, it took me a long time to fall asleep. I dreamed of the loading yard at Hedon Road, of trucks screaming through puddles, trying to run me down.

Lore and Spanner came back from the Polar Bear and the windows of the shop under their flat were bright behind the shutters.

“What do they sell there?” Lore asked, remembering the people coming and going that first night she had spent in Spanner’s flat.

“Tired old porn. Want to see?”

They went inside. The lighting was bright and cheerful, as were shelf after shelf of plastic products: purple silicon dildos, bright pink things that looked like modern abstract art and took Lore a moment to recognize as artificial vaginas. Several screens were running two-minute demo loops. Lore watched one. Spanner was right. The porn was old and tired, almost laughable. The characters moved jerkily and in several frames the skin color of the man’s body did not match his head. “I can do better than that.”

“Yeah. Anyone who isn’t blind could probably do better than that.”

“Does this stuff actually sell?”

“I suppose.”

“I want to see some more.”

A woman with huge, meaty arms and several chins came out from behind the counter. “Then you have to pay for it.”

“You’re kidding,” said Spanner. “No one would pay for this garbage.”

“Lots of people do. You want it or not?”

Spanner looked at Lore. “No.” The woman shook her head in disgust and lumbered back behind the counter.

“Look at this one,” Lore said. Spanner glanced at it cursorily. “The sea in the bottom of the frame is a different color to that at the top. That’s just sloppiness.”