The New Girl (Downside) (19 page)

‘He should be in his room,’ Tara says. Goddammit. She hasn’t checked on him for hours.

‘Martin!’ Stephen yells up the stairs. ‘Martin! Your mother’s here.’

‘I can go up,’ Olivia says.

‘No, let him come down,’ Stephen says. ‘He was fine this morning. No reason to treat him like an invalid.’

Olivia’s eyes narrow. The last thing Tara feels like is being caught in the middle of a Stephen–Olivia bout. When the two of them are together she always feels oddly like an
intruder, or at best an awkward teenager.

‘Can I get you something to drink, Olivia?’ Tara asks.

Olivia turns her mascaraed gaze on her as if she’s only just realised she’s there. ‘No thank you, Tara. What I
would
like to know is what’s going on with my
son.’

‘Didn’t Stephen tell you?’

‘He said he’s having some emotional issues.’

Stephen snorts. ‘He’s fine. I told you there was no reason for you to come racing back here.’

‘He’s my son too, Stephen.’

‘Martin!’ Stephen yells again. ‘Get down here
now
!’

Olivia sighs. ‘Really, I expected better than this, Stephen.’ She pushes past Tara, thumps up the stairs.

Stephen shoots another exasperated glance in Tara’s direction and hares after her.

What now? Tara thinks. She supposes she ought to go too. At least show that she’s concerned about Martin.

She follows Stephen up and onto the landing, sees Olivia poking her head into their bedroom, calling for Martin. If he’s not in his room, locked in the bathroom or in the other two
bedrooms, there’s only one place he could be.

She races towards her sanctuary, tries the door. Goddammit. She must have forgotten to lock it. She peers inside, sees Martin sitting at her desk. Heart in her throat, she glances round the
room, relieved that Baby Tommy’s limbs are still neatly laid out where she left them. Thank God – the pre-Encounters Martin would have had a field day in here doing God knows what to
them. ‘Martin, what are you doing in here?’

He hands her a piece of paper. ‘I did what you said, Tara. I drew it.’

Tara can’t make sense of it immediately. It seems to depict the hunched figure of a man, looking over its shoulder, its eyes scrawled black circles, its head lumpy and misshapen.

‘
This
is what you saw?’

Martin nods. ‘The bogeyman,’ he whispers.

‘Oh, Martin,’ she breathes.

He stands up and throws his arms around her waist. Tara is so taken aback, she only notices that Olivia and Stephen have entered the room when Olivia speaks.

‘Martin?’ Olivia says. ‘Mommy’s here.’ Martin makes no move to disentangle himself and Tara can’t help the surge of triumph she feels.
‘
Martin!
’

He finally looks up. ‘Hi, Mom.’

Tara watches Olivia’s expression of aggrieved concern turn to disgust as she stares at the collage of Baby Tommy. ‘Jesus Christ, Stephen. What the hell is this? No wonder
Martin’s having psychological problems.’

But Stephen isn’t listening. He sniffs noisily. ‘I can smell burning. Tara? Are you cooking something?’

‘No. I’m—’ Tara’s stomach plummets. Oh God – Baby Tommy! She wriggles out of Martin’s embrace, pushes roughly past Olivia, races downstairs on numb
legs, flies into the kitchen. Sees a drift of black smoke curling out of the oven. Pulls the door open and reaches inside, ignoring the heat searing her unprotected hands. When the pain gets too
much she finally lets the blackened ruin of Baby Tommy’s head drop onto the tiles.

She slumps to her knees. She can’t believe what she’s done. How could she forget him like that? Her Tommy...

She reaches out to touch him, his little pursed mouth now a melted snarl. She looks down at her right palm, where a blister is already forming.

She doesn’t lift her head, even when she hears the bark of Olivia’s laughter behind her.

Penter picks another ready bean and places it on her tongue, enjoying the tickle of its furry skin. As she chews it slowly, encouraging its juices, she watches the new brown
– ‘Ryan’ – mixing the soil and spraying water on the shoots. Ryan doesn’t seem to care about consuming, or that his hands and body are muddied with sweat and soil. How
can he bear to look so abnormal? A few of the browns she has seen on the documents look as if they have undergone the browns’ primitive modifications, but this one seems proud to be
unsightly.

Apart from that educator, the only brown Penter has been in close proximity to is Danish, and Ryan is very different from him, not only in appearance. Whereas Danish’s eyes are passive,
there is something more active lurking in Ryan’s. His eyes follow Jane in a different way from the way he looks at her, or even Danish. She raised this with Father at dinnertime.

‘He is a primo specimen,’ Father said. ‘Much impairment there.’

‘Why doesn’t the upside just recycle deviant browns like him?’

‘Perhaps they serve the system in some way we cannot understand,’ was Father’s response. ‘They allow them to loiter.’

If Penter were a character in one of those boring and predictable movies, she would fall in love with the brown – they would find a connection across the divide. Imagine choosing someone
as unsightly as the brown over someone as scenic as Father. The thought makes her embarrassed – yet another of the barrage of emotions evoked by the thought-seep – and she laughs.

Ryan looks up at her and scrimps his face. Is she meant to converse with him again? She’s not sure what is expected. She has played her part, she has given him work as Father requested,
she has completed her duty.

She wants to go back into the house. Ryan, like that educator, smells of bleeding meat, of that amber liquid he imbibes, of decay. He reeks like that karking yogurt. She can’t stand close
to him for long without covering her mouth, even out here in the ether. The
Manual of Upside Contrivances
explains that browns do not have a bag. Instead, they dribble their waste out like
the pregrowns in the vats who have no control over their bodily functions. It’s disquieting. No, worse; it’s repellent. Father disagrees with her; he tells her that the ablution booths
the browns so favour have become quite fashionable among senior members of the Administration. Penter will believe this when she sees it. At a stretch, she might imagine people abluting into a
puddle in a chair in the lower levels of the Malls or the CCOs’ Apartments, but not in the Tower, surely.

Swallowing the last of the bean, she turns her back on Ryan, makes her way into the house. She has things to do. It is not long now before they must depart. Danish is already starting to
dismantle the precinct, hauling the set and the facades away. She has wondered many times if she will miss the upside, but, after encountering SKY, she has no strong desire to stay here, even with
the beans and the sun and the love movies. No, what she will miss is her growing connection to Father. She knows it will be severed when they return home and have their penetrations renewed. Will
she be glad when she no longer feels these inappropriate emotions? When the thought-seep is gone? She will be glad to have her clarity restored, but at the same time, perhaps she’ll miss
something about this lifestyle. One thing’s for certain: she will be glad not to be Mother any more. It is an unsatisfying role; she’s nothing more than a karking victual servant.

She walks through the house, listening for sounds that Father is near. He has been in his study all day, and she finds herself anxious, looking for him, waiting for him, wanting that ache in her
entrails when she sees him. She feels like the little browns on the screen, as if someone is recording everything she does.

She creeps upstairs to his study door. It is disregardful, she knows, but she cannot stop herself from knocking. ‘Father?’

The door clicks open. There he is. Her chest clutches in disappointment when she sees his face. He looks disconcerted, impatient. ‘Mother? What is it?’

She invents a reason for disturbing him. ‘Have you informed the Ministry about the trespassing brown?’ she asks.

‘I am awaiting a response from them.’

His gelphone trembles in his hand. He looks down at it, grimaces. ‘I must report,’ he says. She retreats and closes the door behind her.

She shouldn’t have gone in there; she feels foolish. She walks to Father’s sleeping quarters, pauses, then opens the door. It smells of the luscious oil he uses on his hair. She
kneels down next to his bed and presses her face against it, inhaling his odour. How different and refreshing it is after that brown’s stink! She knows she’s being absurd. She tries to
remind herself who she is. I am Penter Ulliel, Deputy Node Liaison for the Ministry of Upside Relations. If she were watching herself in a movie, she’d be appalled. But it’s not a movie
and she can’t help recalling the way he touched her, the weight of his hand on her shoulder. It makes her shiver. She runs her hands over the blanket, pauses when her fingers brush against a
lump. She ferrets under the cover and pulls out a book. She looks at it, uncomprehending. There’s a picture of an unsightly brown female on the front, with the words ‘BabyEx Mothercare
Catalogue’ above its head.

Mothercare? Did he obtain and secrete this for her? Does he love her after all?

She turns the pages, expecting to see mimeographs of Mothers sitting around tables with yogurt, perhaps Fathers bringing them convenience foods, but all she sees are pictures of disturbingly
small browns – pages and pages of them. Penter feels a cold gasp of air tickling the back of her neck, just below her shunt hole.

This is disregardful in the extreme.

She has encountered halfpint browns in the documents, of course, and there was that one that the educator brought, but the ones in this book are way too small to be out of their vats. She has
seen some in the advertisements, but cannot understand what browns do with such things. They look feeble, inadept. How can they work or consume? What do they do? In most of the mimeographs they are
attached to small chairs, their toothless mouths open as if they are normals advertising gum-shine.

Father has made notes on some of the mimeographs: ‘Why so unsightly?’ ‘Do they not choose?’ ‘Why vat free?’ and ‘Punishment?’

Penter has heard the stories of brown birth that circulate like some Player’s bad dream and simply does not believe them. But sure enough, here are also pages of female browns with
distended stomachs. Can the stories be true? Parasitic pregrown halfpints pushing their way out of a gash in the Mother’s body? The thought makes her bilious. It is worse than SKY. It is even
worse than Jane’s favourite movies.

She pushes the book back under the cover and stands up, dizzy from the obscene images.

What else is Father hiding? She will need to inspect his study on her own. The shunt hole tingles at the back of her neck, protesting against the enormity of her disregard, but she continues to
make her plans. It is her duty, as the Deputy Node Liaison for the Ministry of Upside Relations, to investigate the potential of such a massive breach of regard. He will leave soon to harvest the
primary viable, and she will be free to explore.

If he is a Player, if he is purloining artefacts that are nothing to do with the purview of their project, then she knows what she must do. She touches the bony nodule fused above her heart,
presses down on it. ‘Heartbreak,’ she whispers. That’s what browns call it when blissful love is flushed.

Most of the grounds consist of the clotted red soil and concrete dust of a perpetual building site, but the vegetable patch is a well-tended oasis in the corner of the large
garden. There are neat rows of spinach and corn and tomatoes, and beans grow healthily up canes. Ryan wonders who has tended this garden, since he is apparently the first casual labourer the woman,
Mother, has hired. The family doesn’t seem to mind living in half-built clutter, but they tend their vegetable patch like it’s a Zen garden.

Ryan feels his tension melting as he works the patch, trimming back tendrils and cleaning up fallen leaves, turning the soil. Thoughts of all the needful girls and the angry men outside these
walls recede into the back of his head, a head that hasn’t felt this clear, this mollified, for ages. That’s what he should do, he decides: go somewhere into the country, work on a
farm. Or even join a monastery, safe and quiet behind high walls he’ll never be forced to leave. The octopus-headed Adonises and hook-handed Shivas studded through the gardens look on
beneficently, blessing his plan.

It had been a disappointment on Friday when he’d got to the post office at the shopping centre and had seen the parking lot bristling with police cars. He shouldn’t have been
surprised. A creep like Duvenhage wouldn’t have got where he has with perversions like his without being canny, careful, self-protective. He wasn’t going to lose this battle with a
two-bit blackmailer like Ryan that easily.

Ryan just walked past, scanning the cars in the lot, trying to get a glimpse of Duvenhage, but he didn’t find him. He hurried back up to Excelsior Avenue, taking the side routes, glancing
over his shoulder, but nobody seemed to be following him. He lay down on his cot in his windowless room. He knew he should go and find Mother and do the work he’d been paid to do, but he just
wanted to rest for five minutes, breathe, regain his equilibrium, calm his nerves.

He must have fallen asleep because he was startled awake from a dream, the burning pale eyes in the girl’s face the only scrap remaining. He shook the image and reoriented himself. He
needed to pee, and didn’t want to piss in the basin again.

He turned left out of his room. He tried the first open door in the passage, but behind it was only a pile of four dust-coated water heaters. The next room was similar to his: bare white tiles
and an unused cot against one wall. The corridor, which up to this point was illuminated weakly by the light coming from the garage at the far end, now jerked around an odd angle into dusky
greyness. There were no doors on either side of this segment of passage, and it curved one way and then the next for several metres before straightening out again into a huge white room. This one
was decked with white-painted parquet and was empty apart from a massive fireplace flanged by dressed stone against one wall. A series of neoclassical embassy-style French windows lined another
side, and from there Ryan saw a landscaped green lawn with a kidney-shaped swimming pool indented into it. This must have been the living room and garden of the original house. The sight of this
middle-class normality – and of generous quantities of natural light – relieved Ryan after the odd angles and bareness of the confusingly constructed new wing he’d walked
through.