Transition (22 page)

“When I went to Theodora with some misgivings, after watching what was basically a torture session when a man strapped to
a bed was injected with a mixture of psychotropic drugs and corrosive chemicals, she told me about the menace we were all
facing. She’d convinced herself that the Concern and every world it could reach was under some terrible threat from outside,
that there was some diabolic force forever pressing at its boundaries – wherever they were supposed to be – and we had to prepare
ourselves for onslaught. I pressed as much as I thought I could get away with to get her to be more specific, but whether
she was talking about a sort of anti-Concern, some equally worlds-spanning shadow organisation opposed to everything we tried
to do, or was hinting at space aliens or supernatural demons from unglimpsed dimensions it was impossible to tell. All that
mattered was that it – they – posed an unmitigated and existential threat to the Concern. In that cause, nothing was too great
a sacrifice and no action was inexcusable. Our inescapable duty and solemn obligation was to explore without stint absolutely
everything that might help us prevail when our time of testing came, entirely regardless of any petty and irrelevant qualms
we might feel. We could not afford to indulge our own squeamishness; we had to be brave.

“She talked to me for a long time. During that hour or so I calmed down, I relaxed a little and I realised that I no longer
felt quite so distressed. I accepted a handkerchief from her and dried my tears, I took a few deep breaths, I nodded at what
she said, I clutched at her hand when she offered it to me and I hugged her when that seemed like the right thing to do. I
thanked her for listening and for suggesting that I take the rest of the day off, which I did. I did all this and I felt relieved
in that way because I’d realised she was mad and that soon this would all be over, or at least my part in it would soon be
over, because I had to get away from that place for my own sanity, my own peace of mind, and if, as I suspected, Madame d’Ortolan
would rather have had me imprisoned or even killed than let me go from there while I might be harbouring any doubts about
what was being done, then at least making the attempt would bring an end to it one way or the other. It hadn’t occurred to
me that she was more likely to turn me from one of the investigating to one of the investigated. If she’d caught me I’d have
been the one in the padded cell or the strap-down bed. I heard that happened to a couple of other dissenters, later.”

Our chips were removed. Mrs M leant forward to replace hers with another, almost colliding with the retreating rake removing
the previous one. She hesitated, then she nodded at our two piles of chips. “Shall we put them together?”

“You have more to lose,” I pointed out.

“Even so.”

“Then, certainly.” I used my hand as a blade, pushing my small pile into hers. She took all our remaining chips and stacked
them onto the square she had been favouring.

“Theodora had miscalculated,” she continued. “I knew people. I’d made friends with some of the trackers and the septus chemists,
taken a few as lovers. Some of them had misgivings too. Some just needed somebody to talk to. Some only wanted sex. When I
left, very suddenly and without warning – despite the fact that Theodora was having me watched by a team of spotters and trackers
brought in specially, immediately after our talk – it was without a trace, without the traditional puff of smoke, and with a
plastic drum the size of my head containing a supply of untraceable septus in micropill form that will last me into my dotage,
or until Theodora finally captures me or has me killed. I even have enough to share around, Tem,” she told me, glancing at
me. “I am a bandit queen with a following these days. I have my own small band of outlaws. Care to join?”

I sat back, took a deep breath, put a hand to my bald head and smoothed my hand over my naked scalp. “What would I be supposed
to do?”

“Nothing direct yet. Just keep what I’ve said in mind. Keep your eyes and ears open and, when you’re asked to jump, jump the
right way.”

“Is
that
all? You could have sent a note.”

“You’ll remember tonight, Tem,” she said, with a wintry smile. “I’ve risked a lot to come and see you like this. That… emprise
is a signifier of both my seriousness and that of the situation.”

“And why me, anyway?”

“You’re Theodora’s golden boy, aren’t you?”

“Am I?”

“Have you had to fuck her yet?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Astonishing. She must actually like you.”

“So why do you think I would act against her?”

“Because I know that she’s an evil old fuck and I hope that you’re not.”

“What if you’re wrong?”

“And you’re an evil old fuck too?”

“I meant about her; but either.”

“Then we are lost. Because I am
not
wrong about her.”

“Hmm?” I said in response to somebody nudging my elbow. I looked round and saw a substantial pile of chips being pushed up
the table towards us like an untidily clacking wave of gleaming plastic.

“Isn’t that just the way?” she breathed, and swung herself onto my lap, draped herself over my paunch, threw her arms around
me and in the midst of a deep kiss, with her legs wrapping around mine under the table, we transitioned back to the dark bedroom
of my house just in time for her to slip off me and me out of her.

She placed a single straight finger across my lips and then rose, dressed and left.

She had left two tiny pills on my bedside cabinet. They were exactly like septus micropills except that each had an almost
invisibly small red dot, rather than the standard blue one, centred on the top surface.

The Philosopher

I met GF in the doctor’s surgery. GF were her initials as well as being what she was. She was one year below me in school.
I had seen her a few times in town, at bus stops and in the library. She was tall and skinny and had thin brown hair. She
always walked with her head down and shoulders hunched as though she felt she was too tall or was always looking for something
on the ground. She wore braces and cheap glasses and always dressed in long dark dresses and long-sleeved tops even on hot
days. Often she wore a sort of shapeless hat which looked like it had been pulled down hard over her ears. Her face and nose
were both elongated. Her eyes looked quite big until she took her glasses off.

I had left school that spring and was in a training college. Even though I was now a young man I didn’t know how to approach
girls so I followed her home from the surgery and got up very early the next morning so that I could be waiting at her bus
stop when she got the school bus. When she arrived at the bus stop I said hello and left it at that, burying my face in my
newspaper. I had intended to engage her in conversation but decided that it would be better to take things more gradually.
Two other girls in school uniform turned up but they didn’t talk to her. The bus came and they got on. I couldn’t, of course,
because it was a school bus and I wasn’t in school any more.

The next two days were the weekend and I hung around places in town where I’d seen her before but she didn’t show up. At the
start of the next week I went back to her bus stop. This time I smiled and said hello and attempted to engage her in conversation
but she was very quiet and looked embarrassed. When the other two girls appeared she stopped talking altogether and stood
at the far end of the bus shelter. The other two girls looked at me strangely. I took the next ordinary bus that came along
even though it wasn’t the one I needed.

I returned the next day, undaunted. I spoke to her again. She wore sunglasses even though it was a dull day. I thought perhaps
she imagined that I would not recognise her, though this was wrong. The other two girls huddled together and glanced at her
and giggled and sniggered. One of them asked if she had walked into a door and she ran away in the direction of her home and
appeared to be crying. She missed the school bus, which the two girls boarded.

She had left her school bag behind. I looked in it and found school books, pencils and pens and a girl’s magazine as well
as some sweets. Something rattled inside her pencil sharpener, which was of the type that comes contained in its own cylindrical
waste-shavings bin. I unscrewed it and discovered four spare blades for the sharpener, though no small screwdriver with which
to facilitate the replacement of one blade by another. Two of the spare blades had what looked like dried blood on them. I
kept one and replaced everything else as it had been, save for a Sugar Cherry, which I ate.

I remained, awaiting my own bus, and she reappeared. I said hello again and handed her the school bag and asked if she was
all right. She muttered something and nodded. She got on the same bus as me but sat elsewhere.

The next day she still wore the dark glasses. She stood in the bus stop and stared at me, though she ignored my attempts at
polite conversation. When the two other girls appeared – to be joined later by another – she ignored them too. When the school
bus came she ignored that also. The driver shrugged and drove off. When my bus came she got on it with me and asked to sit
beside me. I of course said yes, and was happy at this unexpected turn of events. I was beside the window, she was by the
aisle.

When the bus was moving she turned to me and hissed, “Where’s my other blade? What have you done with it? Where is it?”

I was sitting so close to her and the light fell in such a way that I could see that behind the dark glasses she had bruises
around her eyes and the top of her nose.

I had meant to study the blade that I had removed from the pencil sharpener, perhaps using an old microscope I knew I still
had at the back of a cupboard. However, there had hardly been time. It had been a busy day at the college yesterday. I had
forgotten about an exam – which was not like me – and I had been involved in a fist fight with another boy. This was also not
a common occurrence, certainly not since mum had left and I’d renounced her idiotic sect and taken up the True Faith. The
tiny blade had slipped my mind until that morning. I’d looked at it while walking to the bus stop but this had revealed nothing.

Initially I denied all knowledge of what she was talking about, but she was adamant that the blade had been present before
she had left the house the morning before, and she knew that I must have looked in the bag when she had left it behind and
removed the blade. She accused me of stealing a Sugar Cherry, too. I remember that I started to panic, realising that she
did indeed know what had happened and that I was guilty, but then a strange calmness seemed to descend on me and I thought
about what I could say that would be convincing and yet leave me relatively blameless in her eyes. I told her that now I remembered;
the two girls had looked inside her bag and had been messing around with the stuff inside for a while and one of them must
have removed it then. They had found a dead mouse in the bus shelter and put it in her bag but when they had gone on their
bus I had taken the dead mouse out again, though I hadn’t wanted to say anything because I felt bad about looking inside her
bag even if it was just to search for the mouse and remove it. The girls must have taken the sweet, too; I didn’t even like
Sugar Cherries.

She frowned, and the bruised skin above her nose trembled. I knew then that I had convinced her, and I felt a sense of great
relief and victory. I was especially pleased with the bit about the mouse.

“It was one of them?” she asked, still sounding suspicious.

I nodded.

“Which one?”

I said I didn’t know. I hadn’t actually seen either of the girls take anything from her bag, but nobody else had touched it
so it had to be them. She appeared to accept this.

I introduced myself. She told me her name too. Her initials were GF. I pointed out that if she was somebody’s girlfriend then
she had the right initials, and she seemed amused at this, though she did not actually laugh. When she smiled she would always
put her hand to her mouth to hide her braces and teeth.

I threw the tiny sharpener blade down a drain outside the college.

I started to meet her after school, at a café. I told her jokes and amusing things that had happened at the college. She talked
of pop stars and other celebrities and sometimes we listened to the music she liked, sharing one earphone each. She had no
brothers or sisters and her mother was dead so she lived alone with her father. I told her she was lucky to have no annoying
siblings but she did not seem to share this view. It was very hard to get her to talk about her father or her life at home
at all.

GF first let me kiss her at a bus stop while she waited for a bus back home. Her braces proved less of an encumbrance than
I’d anticipated, though it still felt odd. We went to a dance for young people at the town Youth Club and danced very close
throughout the closing songs of the evening. I think she could feel my erection through our clothes but far from holding back,
as I’d feared, she pressed herself amorously against me. Later, in a shop doorway, we kissed very passionately, and I was
allowed to put my hand up her blouse to feel her bra and breasts.

One day on a weekend she came to my house when my family were away visiting a dying relation. I had been expected to go as
well but I’d claimed I was supposed to go on Work Experience that day. She brought a quarter-bottle of spirits with her and
we got a little drunk. She had also brought some of her music and so we danced in my parents’ lounge, which felt odd. This
time when we danced and kissed she let me undo her bra inside her blouse and put my hands on her behind through her long skirt,
allowing me to cup her buttocks and tease them apart and slide my hands as deeply into the space between her legs as the skirt
would allow. Her fingers dug into my back through my shirt and she made a cage of her fingers and clutched at my head, ramming
my mouth against hers.