Nicola Griffith (32 page)

“Getting yourself back doesn’t mean going back to everything the way it was. Or would you want to leave me behind like your tired old identity?”

“No.”

“Then what? You think I won’t be able to cope with the change? You think that just because I was brought up poor I wouldn’t be able to adjust? No? Good. Because I can. I always knew you weren’t who you said you were. At least now I know who you are. It might take me a while, and there might be some bumpy times, but I can adapt. Don’t throw me away.”

She was looking at me. Her eyes were steady. I could see things reflected in them, too small to make out. The reflections seemed to be changing shape. Her eyes were wet.

I held out my arms. She stepped into them. To my surprise, she was an inch or two shorter than me. We stepped back half a pace. I kissed her. She blinked and tears spilled. I kissed her again. Then she held me. We stood like that a long time, my face hidden against her shoulder, while the world changed, while the sodden weight of the last few years evaporated from my head, my shoulders, my calves, until my arms felt light enough to rise into the air of their own accord, as in those childhood games where a friend pins them to your side and you struggle to lift them, then the friend releases you, and the muscles remember the struggle, and the arms move away from your ribs as though floating on a tidal swell.

“Look at me,” I said. “I am Frances Lorien van de Oest. I have a job. I have a place of my own. I have friends.” I knew who I was. Lore. And when I forgot or became confused, Magyar would know. “I have a future.”

Magyar squeezed me tight, and released me. She wiped at her face, then grinned. “You also have lots of money.”

The mynah bird screamed at us, but from close by, like a mother scolding her children.

We walked around the pond. I was hungry but I didn’t want to leave the park. I didn’t want to have to talk to anyone who wasn’t Magyar. And there were too many decisions to make.

“You’re sure that nothing’s turned up on that body search?”

“Sure. I checked again before I left to meet you.”

“The records might be being withheld. Because my family’s involved.”

“Who would know?”

“Greta.”
But she had given me a lock.
We walked in silence, feet hitting the pavement at the same time, hips moving together. “I’ll go ahead anyway. Even without knowing. I can’t hide forever. I’ll call Tok first, and then my father. He could probably find out if the police are holding anything back.”

“Do you want to tell him everything?”

“I don’t want to hide anymore.”

“Privacy isn’t always the same as hiding.”

“I think it will be hard for me to tell the difference for a while.” We stepped over the gnarled roots that twisted over the pavement. It was the second time we had passed the tree. “Once I’m fairly sure I won’t be arrested for anything, I’ll reclaim my identity.”

“How long will that take?”

“I don’t know. Depends if I’ve been declared legally dead.” I could have been dead. Because of Greta. Crablegs had tried to kill me with that nasal spray. I could have been a skeleton at the bottom of the river, along with all the tens of thousands who had died here since humankind had been able to swing a rock. But I knew Oster wouldn’t have had me declared dead. He wouldn’t want the publicity. “When Oster is here, when I’m sitting across from him, face-to-face, when I can smell him, see the wrinkles in his shirt, I’ll tell him about his wife, and Greta. I’ll give him time to get used to it before I go to the police.”

“Not too much time.”

“There’s Chen, I know.”

We were going past the tree again. “When, then?”

“Tomorrow. I’ll tape a statement for the police, have it all ready to hand over. We’ll get them all: Katerine, Greta, Meisener, Crablegs. All the others.” I was shaking. “They have no right! Years they’ve been playing with people, as though we were just chess pieces. I don’t even think Greta knows that other people apart from her really exist. Thousands of people have suffered. Tens of thousands.” And she had suffered because of Katerine. As I nearly had. As I had.

I wanted to see Katerine alone on a chair in a windowless room. I wanted her to weep. I wanted her eyes to turn red and sore. I wanted her to beg, to plead for some water, her contact lens case. “I want to see the color of her eyes.”

“Who?”

“My mother. I want to see her suffer.” No, it was more than that. “I want her to see me. I want her to look up at me and see me. I want to be able to look into her eyes and see myself reflected there. I want her to see that I see the world through my own eyes, and not hers. I want her to acknowledge me. See that I’m real, I exist. I’m grown, my own person. That I’m finally free to become who I might be.” I linked my arm through Magyar’s, pulled her to a halt. “Tomorrow. I promise. This time tomorrow.”

“Tonight. Right now would be better.”

“But tomorrow I’ll be ready. I’ll—”

“Lore, if you wait for the right moment, you’ll wait forever. There
is
no perfect time. You just have to do it anyway. Things won’t be any better tomorrow.”

“But what’s the hurry?” I had waited three years. “If it’s Lucas Chen you’re worried—”

She made an impatient, chopping motion. “I’m sorry for what he’s going through, but it’s you I care about. Tell me honestly—will it be any easier to talk to your father tomorrow than today?”

Me and Oster. I took a deep breath, let it out again. “No.”

“Tonight, then.”

I nodded reluctantly. “Tonight. But I’ll make the tape first. And after tonight’s shift . . . What?”

“You’re doing it again. Not facing things. Tell me, why wait until after the shift?”

“It’s my job. . .” But, of course, she was right. I would never work there again. There was no more Sal Bird, aged twenty-five. Done with, all done with. Tonight, during winter dark in this part of the world, I would call Ratnapida. A blaze of light, clear water. Limpid reflections. No more obscuring the truth. No more shadows and lies. Tonight.

“Do you want me to come home with you?”

“No. Tonight will be soon enough. I need some sleep. And I need to tape that statement. I’ll call you at the plant when . . . when . . . I’ll call you.”

I held her again, for a long time. I could feel the shape of her through her coat and mine, the hard bone, pliant muscles. I wanted her with a hard, deep ache. Tonight.

TWENTY-SIX

The next day in the tent passes slowly. Lore gets her breakfast, but long after her internal clock tells her it is early afternoon, there is still no lunch. She begins to worry. Why haven’t they fed her?

Why feed someone you are going to kill?

Thirty million. It isn’t much. She has no idea what the family’s total holdings are but she knows it adds up to tens of billions. Thirty million. She had requisitioned more than that herself for the Kirghizi project.

It must be Oster. He must have found out that she and Tok know about Stella, know what he has done to her. Maybe he has already killed Tok, somehow. Maybe he is deliberately stalling negotiations so that her kidnappers will kill her, then no one will know what he has done. But how is he stopping Katerine from paying? Her mother is smarter than Oster.

Lore shakes her head. She has to understand, has to work it out, find a way to make them pay.

The afternoon ticks on. She does stomach crunches, leg lifts, push-ups, and stretches. She is hungry. For the first time in nearly two weeks she finds herself longing for one of the pills she has hidden under the tent. She takes out her nail, holds it, puts it back in the sleeping bag, takes it out again.

The afternoon turns to evening. No supper.

When her body tells her it is time to sleep, she isn’t tired, but she lies down in her sleeping bag because it makes her feel less naked. She holds the nail tightly and breathes slowly, evenly, trying to relax her muscles one by one, from the feet up.

Bright light floods the tent from outside as someone rips open the flap. “Up. Now.” It is Fishface, but Lore hardly recognizes him, his voice is so harsh. “I said now.” He steps menacingly toward the sleeping bag and Lore wriggles out hastily, nail tucked in her left fist, out of sight. He grabs her arm. “We’re leaving.”

“Did they pay?”

He does not answer.

Lore looks around her as they head across the old floorboards she has only been able to feel with her fingertips. It is a barn, very old. Hundreds of years old, probably.

Outside the night is cool and clear. The smell abruptly changes, and she knows she is in a northern European country—England, perhaps, or Ireland—and that the scents of garlic and sun permeating the inside of the barn are a trick. So much planning . . .

She shivers as Fishface marches her across a cobbled yard toward a pair of headlights. Some sort of vehicle. Lore moves slowly, docilely: she is supposed to be drugged, and she needs to think.

They are now only forty yards from the vehicle. It is an off-track van, the kind with doors that open at the back. The doors are open. She does not want to climb in.

They are going to kill her. She is sure of it. Old farm equipment lines the stone walls of the yard. She can smell the rusting metal.

They are almost at the van now. She can see someone inside, programming directions into the instrument panel. Crablegs. The floor of the van is covered in plasthene. To catch the blood? She maneuvers the nail into position in her fist.

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.

TWENTY-SEVEN

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 Wastewater 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, thinking, 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?”

“Mmn?” 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 wood: ash, 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?”