Sequela (42 page)

'The Director went on to talk about the danger of removing a centre of scientific excellence from the country's capital and the possibility that the Institute would revoke Kester Lowe's doctorate as a punishment for the insult he has caused.'

'Off!' Farrell said. She snatched Yule's Book from his hand and the wall fell blank.

She looked round at Kester. His head was in his hands. He didn't speak for a long time. Farrell could feel the anger emanating from him. It was extreme, the kind of rage that shatters your bones, renders you unable to stand, to function; dream rage that leaves you punching through syrup-thick air, unable to defend yourself, all your blows misaimed or useless.

'When did they announce the freeze?' Kester asked, barely audible.

'Friday afternoon, just after four.' Farrell braced herself for the next question.

'Did you know?'

'Kester,' Yule stepped in to defend her, 'you had more important things to think about. We couldn't risk any distractions. We knew how hard it was going to be for you.'

'More important things?' Kester raised his eyes, his head still low, threatening, like a cornered dog. 'More important than my friends losing their jobs? More important than embarrassing the Institute? More important than losing my doctorate?' He sprung to his feet. 'Oh, that's right, I had more important things to do – performing as a royal rent boy, getting my arse ruined by a twisted egomaniac rapper.'

Farrell stepped back to give him room. She had never seen him properly angry before. This was not his face. She didn't like it.

'Chen –' she started to explain, holding her hands out in front of her in a protective gesture.

'I know, I know,' Kester spoke over her, his voice rising. 'Chen wouldn't let me – Chen Chen Chen. You swagger around like Mrs Billy Big Bollocks the whole time – Alexis Farrell, she's nobody's bitch – but the minute Chen calls your name you go yapping to her like a horrible little bitey dog and sit in her fucking lap.'

He was panting, looked fevered. Farrell closed her lips tight and tried to hold it down. He was angry. She wasn't the one under attack here. She stared at the wall for a few seconds, breathing through her nose, before replying.

'The MoD are bluffing. They're still investigating internally. I have it on good authority that they're tearing themselves apart behind closed doors. When they find the culprit this will all blow over.'

'It's fine, it's fine, it'll all blow over,' Kester parroted her in an unhinged high-pitched voice. 'It'll be fine after you do the VIP pit – it'll be fine when we book the appointments – it'll be fine, just get in the box and let her fuck you.' He paced around wildly for a moment. 'No! Enough!'

Farrell stepped back again, giving Kester a clear path to the doors. He stopped just before he reached them.

'It's – not – fine.' He pinned each word to the air with a jabbing finger. Turning to leave, he caught the doors by surprise. He slapped his hands against them as they started to slide open.

'Kester, I'm sorry,' Farrell said. It was worth a try. He didn't look back.

'Goodbye…Doctor Lowe.'

Kester swung a wild punch at one of the doors as it retreated into the wall, catching it a glancing blow on the edge, then tore towards the lifts, gripping his injured fist tightly in his other hand.

'That didn't go as well as I'd hoped,' Yule said. 'I have to tell you the public mood is surprisingly positive – his fans just don't care.'

Farrell shot a glare at Yule, said nothing, folded her anger in on itself. She watched the doors as they slid shut, a small splatter of Kester's blood sealing them like a ruby clasp.

This was no Sunday. Sunday had no right to be this way.

Kester walked fast away from the V building, across the square. It was like any other morning in the City: swarms of people in logoed work clothes, branded lunatics going to and coming from pointless meetings. He put his head down and ignored the
heyhey!s
and
whohoo!s
that rang out every few minutes. Were they jeering him? Congratulating him?
Autumn was playing around the edges of the September breeze, making the hairs on his arms rise despite the mellow sunshine. He should have brought a jacket.

He would go down to the Institute, see who he could find, apologise, do something. Kester headed down towards the Underground. As he looked up to navigate through the crowds, the scene before him became a spyhole. People were drawing in towards him, looming as they passed, grinning and leering like guests at a nightmare masked ball. Once, the stream of scabs, sores and rashes was interrupted by a clean face sporting a small stencilled letter like a beauty spot: L for Luminescence. The owner winked at him and pushed her face in front of him as she passed to make sure he reacted. Further on, the unmistakeable butterfly patterning of Persona bobbed past above a smug smile. His viruses were out there, starting to make it through the ranks. All those desperate fuckers fucking. He sneered.

Rounding the corner he was faced with a billboard of himself standing on the V shelf, looking like a tool. Cringing, he crossed the road. A large wall display was running the news, a group of angry Institute workers spitting words at an interviewer. Dee was there in the background, ignoring it all, staring right through the camera as if she knew he would be watching: emotionless, accusing, a psychotic shop dummy. At the next corner, he turned again. He would go back to V, confront Alexis properly. This was V's mess; they had to sort it out.

'Hoho!' a voice came at Kester and stuck with him at his shoulder, a thick European accent. 'That Pera Pera! What a crazy woman! You OK man? What a beast she is, but I'd take your place any day.'

Kester sped up as the man patted him on the back in congratulations.

'Hey, I come to your next show, get some myself!' the voice said, then became lost in the crowd behind him.

So, this side of the checkpoints he was some kind of sex-hero; the other side he was a deviant betrayer. Between them they would pull him apart. Kester looked up to see where he was. He was nearly back at the square. Changing his plan, he turned off again. Back at V they would be busy telling each other that it was all alright and they would try to tell him that too. Alexis would be planning his next degradation instead of speaking to Chen like she had promised.

It wasn't long until Kester found a bar.
Brass
was a popular City haunt, but was unusually quiet. The main bar was mostly standing room with a sweep of shelved pillars looping out from one end of the bar and ending at the other. Further back, small round tables with padded banquette seating were set back into the scalloped semi-circular wall. Everything was money. The Perspex pillars were inset with old paper notes, arrested in gentle floating motion. Kester smoothed one hand over the bar as if to spread out and count the thousands of brown one and two pence coins that sat below the surface. The place was a monument to traditional City values. The owners hadn't caved and rebranded in the face of wearing culture. They had understood that whatever the fad, money would still underpin everything.

'Will it stay like this?' Kester asked the barwoman.

'Doctor Lowe! What brings you to our humble establishment on a Sunday morning?'

Kester didn't reply.

'What can I get you?'

'Vodka.'

The barwoman took a glass from the rack above her head.

'A bottle, please. I'd rather not have to come back to the bar. It'll get busy right?'

'We'll be busy by lunchtime.'

'I'll pay double if you promise not to let anyone know I'm here.'

'Right.'

The barwoman's movements turned slow, like a bank clerk considering pressing the alarm button. She sensed something was wrong, but her disease-addled City brain couldn't make sense of it, even though there was footage of the Institute running on the news, even though she would have watched last night's debacle with the rest of the world. She produced a bottle and an ice bucket. She held out her pad and Kester swiped his Book for the amount, then went to swipe it again. The barwoman withdrew the pad quickly.

'Don't worry about it, hon,' she said with a wink, 'your secret's safe with me.' She handed him a card. 'Scan this and you can make your orders from the table. Had breakfast? You look a bit pale. You might want a bacon roll with that.'

Kester forced a smile, clutched the bottle and the glass and found the table furthest from the bar. The tabletop was the same design as the bar, a scree of loose change, this time copper and silver. He filled his glass.

Kester drank steadily as the noise in the bar behind him rose. Every ten minutes or so his Book beeped. He ignored it. What a fool. If he'd gone with his instincts and had the balls to say no to Chen and Alexis, none of this would be happening. Well, except for the Institute part, but he could be down there, supporting them instead of being strung up as a target for their anger. It wasn't his fault they had been shut down. He tried to figure out how it had all become about him.

The screens, he had decided by the time he was a quarter of the way down the bottle. The screens were the thing. But nobody wanted to see them developed besides him and Dee. He toyed with the idea of messaging her, telling her what he had achieved, then remembered the terrifying expression she had had on the news report. She would strangle him with his own innards. No: he was alone.

V wouldn't touch the screens despite what Alexis had said. If she really thought they would, she would already have taken it to Chen. She had been playing her pretty pipe and he had been dancing merrily along behind her towards the gaping mountain of her ambition. And why should she want to see the screens made? He was her creation – Kester Lowe the superstar viral designer – why would she be happy to have
her
Kester upstaged by Kester the serious scientist? But then the scientific community, despite their high and mighty act, were no better. For how many years had they been in thrall to the whims of the funding bodies? How could they have a clear conscience having blocked his proposals so many times in the past? He couldn't believe that still being with them would be any better.

Halfway down the bottle, Kester got up. He stood, wobbling, for a bit.

'Ha ha!' he shouted, as if he had just discovered something.

The people at the tables either side looked round at him.

'Hey,' said a pretty young woman with curly ginger hair. 'Doctor Lowe! The one and only!'

'Hey, it is him,' her male companion said. 'It is you. You still wearing your virus from the weekend? Any chance of a sneaky exchange?'

'You mistake me, sir!' Kester announced, lifting a heavy arm. 'I am not Kester Lowe, V's little shag-puppet; I am Doctor Kester Lowe, the scientist. Sci-en-tist – you know what that is?' Their faces went all indecipherable. They were impressed, he decided. 'The Kester Lowe you are looking for died suddenly in a bizarre sex accident involving taking the wrong job and a young lady who calls herself Dog Dog.' Watching their faces, Kester recognised laughter creeping into their eyes. He had their approval. It spurred him on. He stepped out from his booth and steadied himself. The room was full and he now had a captive audience. 'Dead, I tell you!' He became aware that he was talking in an outrageous English accent of the sort that normally came with a shooting stick and pack of hounds. This wasn't the way to go. He needed to be serious – look serious, look sober. He picked up the half-empty bottle and shouldered his way through the surprised drinkers to the bar.

'Oh,' the barwoman said, surprised to see him.

'Oi,' said the angry voice of the large man he had pushed aside.

As Kester turned, he felt the steam-iron impact of a fist against his face. The room toppled over. He curled up on the floor, his whole body a cradle for his throbbing, flattened nose. Large hands were pawing at him, trying to prise open his protective hedgehog curl. Voices were shouting at him, loud and muddled.

'Sorry sorry sorry,' eventually the voice came through, 'I didn't know it was you.'

Kester looked out from himself tentatively. A ceiling of saucer mouths stretched and swooned above him.

'Sorry, Doctor Lowe,' the man said again, 'I didn't know it was you. That was totally out of order.'

'Lance!' The barwoman appeared at the edge of Kester's vision, leaning over the bar top. 'That's two strikes. And that should count for two – it's not even four o'clock. One more and you're barred.'

As Lance and the barwoman withdrew into their own conversation, Kester pushed himself onto his hands and knees. Helped into a sitting position by the hands around him, he inspected his blood-splattered shirt front and put a hand back to his nose. The bleeding had been furious but had stopped as suddenly as it had started. He could already feel the blood drying into a crusty red snout, felt it crack as he flared his nostrils. They had him on his feet.

'Lance,' he said, tapping the man on the arm. 'I'm sorry. I pushed in. I shouldn't have. I had a bad morning.'

'Bad morning,' Lance said, 'but a badass weekend! Man you are crazed.'

Kester swayed. The bar was made of eyes, all tumbled in together like the coins in the tabletop. Things were still a bit twinkly round the edges.

'Here, I caught your bottle,' said an enthusiastic, androgynous youth, pressing the vodka back into Kester's hand.

'Thanks,' he said, still puzzling over Lance's comment. 'No, no,' he said eventually, having turned around a few times on the spot. 'You didn't hear me – that wasn't me.'

'What?' Lance asked.

'I said – I was telling these people…' Kester knew they were out there somewhere in the bar. He pointed in a couple of different directions, squinting, looking for red hair. 'I was telling them…'

This was no good. They couldn't hear him. They needed to hear the end of his explanation. He needed to get things straight with the redhead. Kester plonked his bottle down on the bar and clambered up after it, sliding up onto his belly. He grabbed the neck of the bottle and used it to push himself up on to his knees, then his feet. The lighting in the bar was strange, like a monitor on the blink, the colours slightly wrong, a scrolling lag pulling the picture up and up. He took a slug of vodka from the bottle and surveyed the crowd. Seeing a shock of red hair, Kester pointed and smiled.

'You're there!' he cried out. 'There you are! Now…' He moved his feet further apart and stopped smiling. This required seriousness. This needed to be said and said now. 'Everybody, Lance, red haired lady, you – barperson – listen. Let me tell you.'

-o-

Blotch just couldn't stop laughing. He knew it was wrong to laugh at someone else's ills but he just couldn't help it. This was the best Monday in living history. He wiped a tear away from his eye and looked back at his display. Doctor Kester Lowe was on the front page of every site. He had thought it was good when he saw the Pera Pera pictures, but this was priceless. There was the City's precious hero, pictured standing on top of a bar, clutching a bottle, stains down his corporate front and blood encrusting his nostrils. His face was captured in mid-shout, distorted, his frowning brows sending horned shadows up his forehead. DR NO! the headline read.

Blotch clicked a link and his fallen nemesis came to life before him. The sound wasn't great and Lowe's voice was struggling over the drunken whoops of his audience but the message was clear – he was denouncing his employers, making lurid claims about his scientific ambitions and abilities – he had completely lost it. Blotch allowed a wild laugh to escape his shuddering form and clicked again to stop the clip. He mustn't revel in it.

This was unexpected to say the least. All the effort they had put in to get Cherry in place and here V was tearing itself apart from the inside thanks to its degenerate practices. The Doctor might even turn out to be an asset. Blotch took a few deep breaths to calm himself, flicked off his display and set off to brief Clarke.

-o-

Kester lifted his head from his arms and buzzed for another coffee. Sunday's revelations had been brutal, but right now Monday was his worst enemy. He was poisoned. His head was solid pain, and his internal organs were tenderized and swollen with the after-effects of drink. His previous night's binge in the City was already homepage news: details of what he drank, the two fights, one with a stranger and one with a bollard, the slurred lecture he had given whilst standing on the bar in
Brass
clutching a bottle of vodka. It had made him feel better at the time. He chose not to read any of the reports; he didn't want to know what he had said.