Sequela (7 page)

'You'd certainly be busy.' Kester laughed.

'You start a week on Monday?'

'Yes, they seemed to rush me through the security checks. I had no idea it would be so soon.'

'Make sure I'm alerted once you have your induction. I'd like to go through some…ethical issues with you before you get started on your work.'

'Of course. I look forward to it.'

Every time Farrell smiled, Dee felt she was making a joke at Kester's expense. Her lipstick was too perfect, her teeth too straight, too white.

'Anyway, I see you have other business to deal with, so I'll leave you to it.' Farrell made a move to leave, then paused and turned back towards Kester. 'You don't have a costume?'

She indicated his friends, avoiding eye contact with them, smiling with amusement at their faked signs as at a child's toy. Dee realised she hadn't given Kester his stickers.

'No,' he said.

'Not wearing?'

Kester shrugged his shoulders. Mrs Farrell leaned in closer than was necessary.

'You're the only one in here, you know.'

A wave of Farrell's perfume came around Kester and reached Dee. It was warm, nocturnal, the smell of a stranger's bed.

'I know,' Kester said.

Farrell turned so that her hair swished against Kester, and then she disappeared through the crowd, a path opening up before her towards the central spiral staircase. At the foot of the staircase, one of the bouncers whispered into her ear. She looked like she was giving an instruction. He lifted the cordon and she ascended into darkness, leaving the rising noise of the bar below. Dee watched the staircase for a moment or two after she had gone.

'Right you lot.' The bouncer heaved over to where they stood gathered outside the archway. His subsonic voice erased the noise from the bar when he spoke. 'Back in your room. You're lucky you're drinking so much or you'd be out of here.' He winked at Calvin. 'Table service only.' Looking out to the bar, he caught the eye of one of the waitresses and signalled her. 'And do yourselves a favour and take that shit off before you leave. You go back into London like that and the fukpunks'll rip your tiny heads off.'

-o-

Dee bided her time. John quietened down and then left with Calvin. Betta and Sienna weren't far behind them. The night slowly fell to pieces, until just she and Kester were left in the back room of the bar. She drank Farrell out of her mind. They picked out individuals in the bar beyond and laughed about their appearances, talked about stupid things that had happened during Kester's years at the Institute. Dee's confidence grew as she saw nostalgia take Kester over and a latent disgust at the wearers rise to the surface.

'Shall we make a move?' Kester asked when their conversation slowed to closing-time pace.

Dee nodded and smiled. She started picking off the scabs that she had left and sticking them to the table.

'Let's smuggle this last soldier out,' she said when she was done, grabbing hold of the neck of the last champagne bottle. It was still half-full.

They moved swiftly through the crowd, which was as boisterous as ever, constantly renewing itself with workers just finished their shifts or taking illicit breaks. The bouncer clocked the champagne bottle, but just smiled grimly at them as they walked out onto the street.

'Good night!' Dee called to him from a safe distance, smiling winningly and holding up the bottle in a toast. 

'Come on,' said Kester. 'Now it's my turn to show you something.'

'What?' She handed him the bottle to take a swig.

'Don't you worry – it'll be a treat.'

Kester took her by the hand, stuck his thumb in the neck of the champagne bottle and started walking, jogging, running.

'Where are we going?' Excitement rose in Dee's chest.

'Now, now – you'll find out soon enough!' Kester laughed.

He led her ducking down silvery glass alleys, lit up screen-stage bright by the office windows above, where the City night-shift worked under sunshine lighting. In the narrow alleys between buildings the darkness tumbled down, heavy velvet curtains falling. Every now and again they would slow down to a walk and Dee would ask the same question.

'Where are we going?'

Kester's answer each time was to take a swig of champagne, hand the bottle to her, take it back and carry on.

They ran past offices and offices and offices, stacked to vanishing point, past long luminous windows full of off-duty workers, chattering and slurping noodles at ranks of low blonde benches, past the happy neon pool-hall entrances to the Pigs.

Outside an old church Kester stopped and announced, 'Here we are!'

Above the church stretched a mammoth glass and steel archway, supporting a stilted skyscraper. A placard, caught in a design vacuum between old and new, explained the origins of the church and showed where the churchyard had been. On the ground by the entrance old-fashioned paper money, dampened by the dew, stuck to the pavement. Here and there free corners fluttered like trapped moths. Kester gave Dee just long enough to see where they were and open her mouth, then cackled with laughter, grabbed her hand and led her on again, now at a shuffling jog.

'Kester, my feet!' Dee let out a pretend sob. Her feet were throbbing and she could feel a blister forming on one heel, but anticipation pushed her on.

'Come on, we'll be late!'

Suddenly they burst out onto a large square. Dee looked up. On the three sides facing her, the walls were lined with tiny figures. Figures sitting at desks; figures walking around. It was as if someone had put a lid on the City and trapped the daylight. In the centre of the square, invisibly suspended, almost at pavement height, hung a glass globe large enough to crush a man, in which the building ahead of them and all the City beyond it was reflected upside down, bringing a muddy orange slab of sky down to pavement level.

'Oh my god, Kester.' Dee stared at the globe in wonder. 'It's beautiful.'

'No no, not that,' Kester panted, as if she were admiring a bollard. 'Look!' He grabbed her by the shoulders and swung her round to face the fourth wall of the square. 'The changeover.'

The whole side of the building was radiating red light. The steel divisions glowed as if they were molten, as if the building was about to slide down into a mass of metal and light at their feet. The Stark Wellbury logo sat at the top of it all like a giant red prawn, towering above the buildings of its competitors, clashing with the orange sky above them.

'It's not…' Dee stared, mesmerised by the colour, her chest heaving.

At first she thought that the shifting hue was an illusion, but as the windows faded from red to green she realised that she was watching the heat dissipate from the building. The outer booths, faster to cool, faded first and the green closed inwards until it snuffed out the building's red heart.

And they appeared: pairs of Stark Wellbury employees, side-by-side, staring out into the square, their symptoms invisible from this distance. Dee heard Kester laugh nervously as if unsure how she would react, as if he hadn't really believed the story either. The figures stood eerily still for a few seconds. She half-expected them to break into some synchronised dance routine. Then, all at once, as if a bell had sounded in the booths, they threw themselves at each other, tangles of clothes and limbs, unwrapping each other like lapsed abstainers overtaken. Some dropped to their knees, some kissed ravenously. There were hands in hair, hands up shirts and in culottes, clothes wriggling off as if it was a race, as if none of them could wait. In seconds, the whole building was writhing and heaving.

Dee and Kester stood side by side, still, as the figures had a moment before. They were still panting from their run. Dee laughed suddenly, shocked at herself, at her desire to see.

'We look like a couple of perverts, standing here panting.' She giggled.

Kester laughed. They stared at the spectacle for a few seconds more.

'I didn't really think…' Kester tailed off.

Dee looked round at him. His cheeks were flushed. His face was tinged a surreal reflected green, like a divine alien. His mouth was slightly open. She felt the space between them keenly; a Perspex wall.

Kester looked round. The wall vanished.

They were on each other, kissing violently. Their arms interlocked, and their feet scuffled back and forth, as if they were struggling to climb through one another. When they disengaged, they both staggered back as if from a fight. Dee squealed. Kester was back; she finally had him.

'What's going on? Where are we! What are we doing?' she said.

Kester laughed, panting again.

'Come on, come on!' Dee jumped on the spot, then laughed and grabbed Kester's hand. A charge passed between them. They ran.

At the opposite side of the square, Kester swung Dee round by the hand. They paused, laughing wildly at the upside down view of the Stark Wellbury building in the glass globe, and then ran on.

On the tube they sat opposite one another, sharing the spectacle they had just seen with their giggling stares, laughing out loud every now and then, swigging from their almost-empty champagne bottle and passing it between them. A space cleared around them, as if they might go off. This was it. Dee felt the intensity of the coming encounter in her buzzing lips, in her eyes. Finally. There would be no question of Kester leaving – leaving her, leaving their research. Out of the tube they ran again, all the way to Dee's door.

It was quiet in Lady's living room. Cherry sat in the middle of the floral couch. She was slight in build, but it sagged anyway. It had seen so much action over the years, so many buttocks, clothed and bare, that it had given up on supporting weight or springing back in any meaningful way. The antique clock in the centre of the mantelpiece was ticking loudly.

Lady was on her way.  Cherry could hear her hollering at seekers through the building. She approached like a school marm with a purpose, chastising here and laughing there, changing swiftly between aspects as she marched through the long corridors.

This place hadn't always been Lady's quarters. It used to be a small children's ward, annexed to the main hospital, but she had now taken it over as the base for her business. In the long hall that ran through the annex some of the bright cartoon paintings still survived, but not here in Lady's sitting room. It was more like the sitting room of a real house. It sat right down the end of the corridor, holding her at arm's length from the rest of the building. 'Lady's rooms' they called them, this collection of small living spaces. Cherry had always imagined that the warden used to live here.

The clock's tick became less and less dominant as Lady drew closer. Soon the laughing and chiding stopped and all that was left to hear was Lady's heels clicking on the linoleum tiles. It reminded Cherry always of her brief time at school, of the sound of grownups walking in the corridors while lessons were on. The sound peeled years off Cherry's age as it drew nearer: twenty-two, twenty-one, twenty…by the time Lady reached the door, Cherry was a twelve year old girl again.

Lady didn't open doors like anyone else. She didn't just come into a room. This was a classic Lady entrance in three acts: the door burst open and she paused in the doorway for a moment; she stepped aside and glanced over her shoulder like a woman being followed; and then she closed the door tenderly, as if to make up for her brutal treatment of it moments ago. She acted as if no-one was party to this performance, ignoring Cherry as an actress ignores the audience.

She went to the window, checked who was outside, then pulled a chair out from the table and set it in front of where Cherry was seated on the couch. Placing her bottom neatly on the chair, Lady straightened her posture, crossed her legs and smoothed her pencil-skirt down along the top of her thigh, her hands meeting and clasping when they reached her kneecap. Cherry had never seen Lady stay still for very long but today she looked as if she was settling in for a long conversation.

Cherry observed Lady's clothing. At first sight she always looked well dressed, well heeled, but if you looked for long enough, the details started to offer themselves up to you – loose threads, lines where an item of clothing had been taken out or let down, dark colouration along the collars of her blouses. Lady's makeup, which was also quite striking from a distance, had an inaccuracy about it, as if over years of applying the same shapes to her mouth and eyes her standards had slipped. Cherry remembered being impressed by Lady's flawless appearance when they had first met, but then that was a long time ago and Lady was approaching her fifties now. Perhaps, Cherry thought, her makeup was still the same. Perhaps it was her face that had changed and the two no longer aligned.

'Cherry,' Lady said. A frown was hovering on her forehead, held back by her tightly-bunned hair. 'You can feel something starting?'

'I feel a bit funny,' Cherry replied after a moment.

Lady exploded up from her chair and back into movement as if Cherry had said the magic word to release her. She paced and let her hands wander around her person, into pockets and out again, up to her face, onto the backs of chairs, across the table top.

'Funny? Funny ill?'

'I guess. Not so much now, though. I just mentioned it to Marlene for something to say.'

Lady laughed a false high-pitched laugh, as if to emphasise how unfunny the situation was to her.

'Not the sort of thing I'd recommend for small-talk, Cherry. Not something to be joked about really. What do you think?'

'I do feel funny…just…I couldn't say how yet.'

'Funny pregnant?'

'No!'

Lady snorted. 'And how would you know? Been pregnant lately?'

'I'm sealed.' Cherry tried not to raise her voice. Even if she hadn't been sealed, raising the subject of pregnancy with her, a seeker of disease, seemed in bad taste to say the least.

'I forget.'

Lady sounded as if she had genuinely forgotten this about Cherry. It was possible that she had. She had forty-two or forty-three seekers working for her right now, a lot to keep a track of. On the other hand, Cherry was the only one from central London. Girls who lived outside the big cities tended not to be sealed. The governors believed that it encouraged promiscuity and so it was frowned upon. This wasn't a problem in the cities, where everyone had nanoscreens fitted thanks to the key workers scheme. They could do whatever they wanted and get away with it, disease-wise – one less disincentive to having sex – so in the name of either population control, infant rights, or youth preservation depending on who you listened to, they would have their female children cervically sealed age ten.

For Cherry, being ex-London had its benefits. The screen made her a good seeker, as it flagged up unknown infections and dealt with known ones. Never mind that, it meant that she was guaranteed a job as a seeker, going out to find viruses, rather than being stuck in the Hospital knocking shop waiting for viruses to come to her. She could get uploads on the blacknet to keep her up to date with all the logged and registered viruses that were out there. A registered virus was worth nothing to Lady and could put a worker out of service for weeks, maybe permanently. She needed one of two things: new mutations of high presentation STVs, or commissioned exclusives caught somewhere down the chain from the buyer, both of which could be sold on to the collectives who ran the Pigs.

Lady tottered round and round, drawing a neat circle about the sofa where Cherry sat, as if there was some invisible line there that she didn't want to cross. Her lips were pursed and her eyes darted around the room, as if she was looking for something.

Cherry looked up to the window. From where she sat she could just see the giant billboards that lined the opposite side of the retail park. She straightened her back to get a better view. They had just uploaded new ads. Staring Cherry in the eye, five times life-size was Galletti, Barcelona's newly signed striker. Creeping down from the outer edges of his eyes were two neat spikes of rash, red raw, as if two triangles of flesh had been peeled from his cheekbones. It couldn't be real – nothing she'd seen was that neat. Then she noticed the Glaxo logo in the bottom corner. It was real then; a paid for exclusive. Airbrushed though. It must be brand new, as it hadn't been featured in yesterday's seeker bulletin. Either that or Lady was slipping behind on her admin.

As Cherry watched, the image zoomed out to show Galletti performing tricks with a Nike football. He was in good company: the next billboard featured the actress Tilly Harrison wearing a sheer gown, blown against her by an unseen source of wind to reveal shadows of red on her thighs. Droplets of Dior
Rash
flew towards her from a giant atomiser as she writhed on the spot, scratching herself. That one would be real. Wearing was rife in the fashion world. To Galletti's other side, New York band
The Itch
were silently slamming away at their guitars, the singer periodically lifting his by the neck to show his fukpunk-style smeary crotch-window. Cherry shuddered.

'It costs me if you're wrong, you know.' Lady stopped mid-circle.

Cherry looked up at her. She wasn't sure if she was supposed to answer. 'I know.'

'Testing has just gone up again.'

'I…' Cherry paused, unsure of the correct thing to say. 'We could wait.'

'Wait? I need you fit to seek at the Global Finance Conference next week.'

'I feel…funny, but I couldn't put my finger on it. I mean it might not even be an STV.'

'Didn't you get your uploads?'

'Yes, but you know sometimes they can be out of date.'

'You should be careful where you get them.'

'I am, but we could wait for some proper signs – wait and be sure.'

'We can't wait. Not if there's a possibility. What if Franco's lot has picked it up? Rumour has it he picked up an exclusive and a mute last month alone. He's got ten girls and fifteen boys now all out seeking. And he's got all the bases covered – sends them all over; sends them to all types of places.'

'Spreads them thin.'

'Did I say that?'

'Yes Lady.'

'Then yes, he does. But he's got more than before.'

Lady started another circle of the couch then paused right behind where Cherry was sitting. Cherry could feel Lady's breaths stirring the hair on the top of her head. She felt for a moment like something might come down on her crown. She braced herself.

'You logged all your encounters?' Lady asked. 'Did anybody claim to have anything? Anybody look like they had something new?'

'There was a guy with sores, but I think it was an oldie. His skin smelled like ointment and I could see the shadow of where the sores had extended originally. I think he was trying to shape them to look like an exclusive.'

'Tosser.' Lady strode over to her door. 'Bring up Cherry's log,' she ordered as she walked in. 'I want to see her account of everyone she's tried for the past two weeks – no, three to be certain. And mark up likely candidates for me. Thank you Ben.'

Lady was already closing her office door when Cherry got up from the couch. She was visible through the frosted glass, pacing up and down. Ben isn't in there, Cherry thought. Lady would never show her emotion like that in front of her secretary, surely. But then she was increasingly frantic these days when she did her rounds. The threat of the big companies catching up and taking all the business in-City was getting to her. Rumour had it that she had had to let Ben go but was too proud to admit it. Cherry watched as Lady's silhouette moved to merge with that of her desk, continuing to fidget.

The ads outside changed again and drew Cherry's eye. Standing, she could see the traffic moving around the busy retail park. She watched as a dad dropped off a clutch of pre-teens at the cinema, parked, then walked a roundabout route to the Hospital, glancing over his shoulder now and again. At the far corner of the park, a trickle of red and white figures started to appear, waving their scarves, dancing and singing. Beyond the crop of housing she could see the top of the stadium rising up. Past that there was nothing until the City's north eastern boundary, its ludicrous buildings appearing from this distance as an impenetrable wall. Time to go, Cherry thought. With the football out and a movie just about to start most of the hookers would be busy – prime time to use the showers.

As Cherry walked to the door, she caught sight of herself in the full length mirror. The mirror here was much better than the one they had in the wardrobe room, which was poorly lit because the windows were rarely washed. It usually had a hoard of girls jostling for position in front of it, too. If you got to see what you looked like, it was what you might look like shouldering for position at a market stall; a portrait in motion.

Cherry looked funny in her terry towelling tunic. Like an inmate of the old children's hospital, she thought. Her hair needed cut. It was starting to look wild. She was surprised that Lady hadn't pulled her up for it. Her pale brown skin looked darker against the boil-wash white of her tunic. The tunic had been laundered so much that she could see the shadow of her nipples through it. She glanced round to Lady's office door. Seeing that the silhouette was still ensconced behind the desk, she grabbed the hem of her skirt and lifted it up quickly to her neck. Her pubes were squint again – she knew it. Barbara was rubbish, or she did it on purpose. One of the two.

Cherry pulled back her long mane of straightened black hair and tried to look objectively at her body. She seemed thinner – just on the cusp of being too thin, girlish. Satisfactory though, she thought to herself, maybe more. Her years on the job had certainly given her toned muscles – that was for sure. And unlike some of the workers, she laid off the junk. But then she had an advantage, the one good thing she had brought with her from the city. She turned and twisted round to see herself from the side, from the back. She was sinewy, tough. Could have been a ninja, she thought.

Her Book beeped: a scan update. Through the glass door, Lady's silhouette stopped and stiffened. Cherry let her tunic drop and took her Book out of the small thread-bare pocket at her hip. H1N1 mute. Flu. Another small-mutation causing delays on her nanoscreen. She sighed, walked over to the glass door and knocked.