Sequela (8 page)

-o-

It was a couple of hours until Cherry started her shift. She lay on her back in her runk and stared at the low ceiling above her. She stretched as well as she could, her arms meeting with cold plastic behind her and to the sides. She trailed them bent along the white walls.

'That's just brilliant,' she said to herself. She put on her Lady face. 'Who wants to buy flu, Cherry? Would you want to buy it? Is it sexually transmitted? Does it look impressive on a business man?'

She had the second runk from the bottom in her stack. Most of the workers on the lower level runks were hookers, but there were a few exceptions, chiefly seekers who didn't like heights or couldn't be bothered with the climb. Ten shelves above her was the top runk, most of the seekers' ultimate aim. Cherry understood the ambition though she didn't share it. She had climbed up to visit seekers further up the stack before and had sat with them, dangling her feet over the edge, making paper airplanes to send messages to their mates in the runks across the room, laughing as they flew off course and landed wherever they wished. She liked the slight feeling of vertigo, the feeling that she might at any minute just launch herself out into the air and fall. She imagined them all doing it at once, drifting to the floor like terry-towelling snowflakes.

Cherry sat up and pushed herself into a crouch, then leaned forward to the locker that walled the foot end of her mattress, taking care not to bang her head on the ceiling. There was nothing much in there, really. Her old Book from when she lived in London. It still worked, and though she still used it to update her screenware, it spent most of the time as a picture frame, showing an old photo of her mother.

Her Book beeped, and her mother's face was momentarily obscured by a message reminding her to do her updates. She grimaced, then picked it up and pressed her thumb onto the ID pad. It beeped a welcome and she scrolled the menu and chose 'updates'. The display went slow, then white, and eventually a garbled message appeared. The blacknet update server she'd been using had been shut down.

'Damnit.' She held the Book tightly, restraining herself, swallowing down the urge to smash it against the wall. She couldn't break it. It would be too hard to get another one that would work with her old screen, besides which the blackmarket versions were expensive and buggy as hell. She started a search on the blacknet for a new update server, adding a few filters and leaving it to do its thing. There was so much information out there now, so many unregulated servers, that it was a slow process. The advertisers and so-called help sites were always one step ahead of the search engines, dominating the results lists. She touched the Book's fingerplate and propped it back up, a picture frame once more.

There was a dull knock at Cherry's front wall. She grabbed the handle on the back of the rigid plastic panel and pulled it up and back along its runners so that it became a second ceiling. There, filling her exit, leaning in from a few rungs up the ladder was Marlene, naked. Using her free hand Marlene lifted her breasts one by one so that they rested on the edge of Cherry's mattress. A higher runk would spare her this view every shift. Cherry tried to peer round her ample friend.

'Hi, sweetie,' said Marlene, then in a deep voice, 'Morning Cherry.' She jiggled her breasts from beneath. 'Thought we'd tell you your favourite dress is still up for grabs.' She continued in her own voice, 'How'd you get on last night?'

'More dead ends.' Cherry glanced over at the picture of her mother and frowned.

'You need to get into the City, get pillow talking with someone at the records office.'

'I know, I know. But I'm fresh out of friends in high places and my guardian angel seems to have misplaced my number.'

'They're notoriously bad for that, though we've never had any trouble with ours, have we girls?' Marlene looked down at her breasts again, then shot Cherry a disturbing grin. 'Anyway, I sent you three planes, but I guess you didn't get them.'

Cherry laughed, then yawned. 'You going out too?'

'Yes.' Marlene gathered her frizzy brown hair with one hand and twisted it over her shoulder. 'Thought you might want to buddy up for the first part of the night. We're both working the airport.'

'Yeah, sure.' It would be nice to have some company, Cherry thought. Seeking in a pair was sometimes easier, definitely safer and always more fun.

'Come on, then.' Marlene descended the ladder and waddled away from the runk stack, beckoning with a bearlike arm. 'Let's get tooled up.'

Cherry hung her legs down over the edge of her runk.

'Hey,' came a shout from the runk below, 'get your feet out of my face, Cherry.'

'Sorry babes.' Cherry jumped down to the floor.

'Jeez, you're going to break my nose one day,' said the girl in the runk below. She was new to the Hospital and was still getting used to things. Some of the other seekers would have gone all diva if a hooker had spoken to them like that, but Cherry had never got the hang of feeling superior.

'Come on,' Marlene said, already halfway across the room.

The runkroom was in the old teaching theatre. It must have been circular when it was built, with seating up the sides for the trainee surgeons to observe their masters at work. It had since been transformed into a many-sided polygon by the twenty runk stacks that had been installed around the walls and the narrow ladder panels which ran up in-between them.

Cherry looked around. Most of the doors were closed. The once-white panels had been decorated by their owners in different styles: classical, abstract, graffiti, but mostly in block colour. The room looked as if it had been hung with a patchwork quilt. Here and there a panel was open and the occupant was lounging in their runk, rummaging in their locker at the foot of their mattress, or just sitting, legs hanging out, watching what was going on below.

An open shower unit stood in the middle of the room. Each shower stand had a set of cleanser dispensers, and a large extractor above the showers sucked out the steam. Right now the whole theatre smelled of just-used shower. Cherry liked it. It reminded her of being little, of going into the bathroom after her mother had washed. It was a welcome break from the dreadful changing room aroma that filled the room at shift change: Lynx, Source, Impulse, Sensorra;
Ocean Lotion, Spice it Up, Manjack Musk
,
Mint Tingle
; a muddy blend of hormone-tinged scent.

'I need to shower,' Cherry called after Marlene.

'Well, hurry up,' Marlene said. 'I'll go down and pretend to try that dress on for you so no-one else snags it.' She laughed to herself, and threw the double doors wide open before her.

Cherry wriggled out of her tunic and put it on the floor at her feet before soaping up. Picking it up again she scrubbed herself red with it, then rubbed and rinsed the tunic itself. She finished just as the water stopped. She wrung her tunic out, then opened it out again and gave it a shake so it wouldn't dry creased. She half danced back to her runk and flicked it over the rail on her closed door.

'You're in a good mood,' the new girl said, smiling up at her.

'Yes! Just woke up feeling good.' Cherry realised she had goosebumps. 'Cold today. I'd better get downstairs.'

Holding one arm across her boobs to stop them bouncing – she'd once heard that running-bounce could stretch them prematurely – Cherry jogged across the room to the double doors that led to the stairs.

The staircase was as it had been when the building was still a hospital: painted two different offensive tones of olive, floored with flaking lino, cold. Cherry took the stairs two at a time, until a door opened with voices on the floor above. She changed her gait suddenly, taking more demure single steps.

What used to be the level three renal unit was now the seekers' dressing room. It was a long room with dirty windows all down one side, minimal and white, a little less clean on the inside than it had been as a ward, but not by much.

It was first come first served. There was no sensible way of having your own clothes in the Hospital, unless you wanted to waste time going out into the town to get them cleaned at the launderette. That cost money too, and none of the seekers really wanted to waste a coin when they could wear what they chose from the communal wardrobe and have it washed for them in the old Hospital laundry rooms.

'Imagine no possessions…' Marlene crooned and then hollered, 'Shop every day at the House of Lady!'

Cherry burst out laughing. Marlene was standing by the rail with Cherry's favourite dress over her head. That was as far as it would go.

'Come on, Marlene,' another girl was saying, 'it doesn't even fit you – you're going to rip it. Let someone else have a go.'

'Fair enough,' Marlene said, hearing Cherry's laugh. She pulled the dress off her head and tossed it into Cherry's arms.

'Oh, come on!' the other girl said, stamping her bare foot and swearing.

'Sorry, honey,' Cherry said. 'How about you have it tomorrow?'

The girl snorted and started rummaging through the rest of her size section of the rail.

Cherry slipped into the dress. It was old fashioned, or classic as Marlene described it, but it fitted Cherry perfectly. It was black satin, with a small print of the kind that you never saw any more. The berries on the print looked a little bit like cherries and though she knew they were too small and a bit too red to be, it pleased her. Its skinny belt fitted her waist perfectly on the tightest hole and the flared skirt swung just at her knees. She thought of it as her dress.

She felt drips from her long wet hair starting to seep through the fabric at her back.

'Will you do my hair tonight, Marlene?' she asked, twisting it up out of the way and tying it in a knot.

'Sure thing, Madame C.' Marlene was round the other side of the rail, trying on dresses that were more her size. 'You know Lady never buys in any new stuff that fits me – still the same five things. I'm sure this one isn't even a dress.' She appeared from behind the rail in a brown sack-like get up. 'I look like a giant shit.'

'You know, maybe with a belt,' Cherry said, but couldn't keep a straight face.

'Oh, like a two-parter, yes, I like it.'

'You're disgusting.' Cherry started to look through the shoe rack to see if there was anything new.

'Hello, ladies.' Tim was leaning in the door, bare-chested. The strip-lights laid a pale halo across his smooth blonde hair. 'Ooh, baby,' he said, seeing Marlene, 'take that off before I cream myself!'

'You always did have a faecal fetish,' Marlene said, winking at him. 'You're as bad as the clients.' She disappeared back behind the rail to pick out a new outfit.

-o-

'So who are we tonight, Marlene?' Cherry asked as she and Marlene stepped off the airport bus.

While Marlene mulled over her question, Cherry took in the scenery. The sky overhead was gradated: toward the City it was misty with white office light, punctuated by occasional neon bursts where a logo crested a building; over the airport it became a traditional suburban bar-heater orange; further out still it was dark. The walk from the bus stop took them along a bright ring road. There were tall floodlights every thirty feet or so but they were made redundant by the blinding advertising hoardings that fenced the outer edge of the road. On the opposite side of the road was a long strip of airport hotels, the building materials and window design betraying the decade that each was built in. The target client base of each hotel was revealed by the products being advertised on the hoardings opposite.

'We're on our way back from a hen party,' Marlene said. She had a knack of coming up with scenarios off the top of her head. 'The hen works in the fashion industry so we all had tickets to the launch of Dillinger & Bosch's new range in Berlin. We slept with all sorts of people there. We're here on a stopover on our way home to Edinburgh.'

'A stopover flying London to Edinburgh? That seems a little unnecessary.'

'OK, smart arse. Our flight was cancelled so they've put us up here for the night and we're getting on the first flight tomorrow.'

'Fine. Sounds plausible. But what if they ask what Berlin was like?' Cherry had never left London.

'Just say, "Wild, totally wild…" Then let your eyes go misty as if you're remembering something. That should satisfy them. And we didn't have any time to visit anything cultural because we were too busy drinking and shagging and watching the show.'

'Good.' As they passed the Sofitel, Cherry's eye was caught by the Galletti advert she had seen earlier outside the hospital. 'Been in here lately?' she asked Marlene.