Nicola Griffith (16 page)

Then suddenly she was through the gates and five paces away, fog billowing around her.

“Magyar.”

She whirled, pulling her hands out of her pockets. “Bird! What are you doing here?” We stood ten feet apart. The fog made everything feel enclosed, quieted, unreal. She put her hands back in her pockets.

“I want to talk to you.” My voice was steady. How odd.

“It’s too cold to stand around. You can talk while we walk.” She set off, obviously not caring whether I walked with her or not. She walked fast, with big strides. Her shoes were soled with some soft, absorbent material; I felt as though I were watching a film with the sound turned off.

Try it,
I told myself.
Just try.
“You seemed angry. Earlier.”

“I was.”

“I just thought we could clear the air between us.” It sounded lame. She seemed to think so, anyway. She snorted. This was a mistake. “It’s just . . . Look, you were angry—”

“I still am, Bird.”

But the anger did not seem to be directed at me. “Is something wrong at the plant?”

She stopped abruptly, swung to face me. “Now why should I want to tell you?”

I felt a bit bolder. “Because it might affect me and everyone else who works on the night shift. I don’t like surprises.”

“You don’t like surprises? What a shame. I don’t much like being lied to, by you or anyone else. You want to know what’s wrong with the plant? Then go to your bosses and get
them
to tell you what’s going on.”

“I can’t. I’m not who you think I am.” And I was stupid for thinking I could have achieved anything, risking myself like this.

“I know you’re not Sal Bird.”

“I’m the only Sal Bird there is.”

She waited, hands clenching and unclenching in her pockets, but when it became obvious I wasn’t going to tell her any more, she walked away.

The woman on the screen had dark brown hair cut in a sharp, shoulder-length line. “Spanner? Ellen. Sorry we missed your birthday. Thought you might like—”

A woman who knew when Spanner’s birthday was. With brown hair. Lore hesitated, then sat before the video pickup and touched a button. The woman on the screen frowned. “Who are you?”

“Lore.” She remembered to make the word slippery, in her new accent. They stared at each other a minute. Dyed brown hair, dyed red hair.

“No wonder we haven’t heard from her for a while.” Ellen smiled. It was an open smile, genuine, and Lore im mediately liked her. “I was calling to invite Spanner for a drink. A belated celebration. You’ll both come?”

They looked at each other some more. Lore wondered what Ellen saw. She almost asked her. Instead, she nodded.

“The Polar Bear, then.”

“Who is it?” Spanner came through from the shower, drinking coffee, no towel.

“One moment,” Lore said to Ellen, and turned off the video pickup. “It’s Ellen,” she told Spanner.

Spanner motioned Lore aside, slid into the chair. Lore was not surprised when she turned the video back on. “Hey. Did I hear something about a drink?”

“You did.” Ellen grinned, looked Spanner up and down. “You seem in the pink.”

They both laughed, and Lore felt like a child left out of a grown-up joke.

“Ten tomorrow?”

“Fine.”

“We’ll expect both of you,” Ellen said, and the screen went gray.

“Who’s ‘we’?” Lore asked.

“Ellen and Ruth.”

“The PIDA picker?”

“The same. Maybe some others.”

“I feel like I’ll be presented for inspection.”

Spanner shrugged. “You know how it is. People always want to check out who you’re with.”

People,
not friends. “Business?”

“Dilettantes. Ex-dilettantes at that.”

Later, in the Polar Bear, as she sat at a table with Ellen and Ruth, and Billy and Ann, Lore thought she must have imagined the edge of disdain in Spanner’s words.

Spanner was in high gear, drinking hard and dragging the others along in her slipstream. She smiled at Ellen and Ruth, bought them drinks until their cheeks were red and their eyes sparkled, until they laughed out loud and their bodies moved more freely. She drew the normally surly Billy into the circle until his pinched face relaxed and he stopped looking at everyone sideways; she listened attentively until Ann stopped punctuating all her sentences with a nervous laugh. Spanner’s energy pulled them all together, made them relax and feel good.

Lore found herself being sucked in, despite herself; felt Spanner’s attention like a small sun. She wanted to turn her face to that warmth, bask in it.

The late evening turned to midnight, then one. Ellen and Ruth made vague motions toward leaving, but Spanner waved them to sit down again and ordered another round. She made some joke about enjoying life while you can, even when you had joined the ranks of the faceless employed, and everyone laughed. And in that unguarded moment Lore saw Spanner’s expression change.

It was a subtle thing: the raised eyebrows that had been full of concern and interest were now canted just differently enough for Lore to reread them as sardonic—contemptuous, even. She glanced around the table, caught Ruth’s face, and realized that Ruth knew: Spanner was scoffing at them for joining the sheep; for no longer living on their wits; for being soft. She looked away, studied her beer.

It was a bright, sunny morning, cold in the metallic-tasting breeze but warm where the sun bounced off sandstone and pavement. I stopped in one of those sun traps on the way back from the shops and enjoyed the warmth while I could. It felt like a moment, a bubble stolen from the summer, as though maybe while someone had been away for July and August with their windows closed, the sun had heated their room, made it warm and round and smelling of dust and hot carpet, and then the flat owner had returned from a long holiday and opened the window and let out this last, little bit of sunshine. I didn’t want to go back to my flat and be alone all day.

I knocked on Tom Wilson’s door. “I bought some Lapsang souchong.”

“You’d best come in, then.” His eyes were bright, but he walked stiffly. “Sit down, sit down. The kettle’s boiled.” I sat while he fussed with trays and teapots and cups. His slippers shuffled as he carried everything carefully to the window-side table. I poured. “Now, then. What’s on your mind?”

“I need your help.”

He smiled. “Well, that’s gratifying.”

“What I want you to do isn’t exactly legal. That is, what I want you to do, here, wouldn’t break any laws, technically, especially if you said you didn’t know what it was all about—”

“You’re planning to get caught?”

“No.” I wished he wouldn’t yank me to a standstill like that.

“Glad to hear it. Is what you want to do dangerous?”

“Not physically, no.”

“Who will it hurt?”

Not
Will it hurt anyone?
but
Who.
He wasn’t smiling, exactly, but his sandy-gray eyebrows were slightly raised, and the deep lines in his cheeks were deeper. “Some people’s pride. A few very rich people who get their kick out of patronizing the poor, and the executives in charge of net security.”

“And who will it benefit?”

For one wild moment I wanted to treat him like a father confessor, pour out my whole life—the kidnap, the years with Spanner, the trouble I was in and how this might, once and for all, get me out, but then I realized I was looking for forgiveness, absolution. “Me. It will benefit me, and a friend, and you. If you decide to help.”

“Then tell me more.”

“Spanner and I are going to piggyback the net signal with a thirty-second commercial of our own. No one will know that it’s not genuine.” I told him about Stella, the fashions of the rich Almsgivers. “So we put our signal out there and these ghouls send money, which gets electronically shunted up, down, and sideways and pops out in the form of anonymous debits which we then take and spend. End of story, except that we need some footage we can’t get from the library. We . . .
I
need to film you.”

“Nice to be needed. But as you can see,” he gestured at his swollen knuckles, “I can’t always get out and about. Could you film it here?”

I nodded. “And I can doctor the disk, make it look as though I shot through a zoom—maybe through a window or something, without your knowledge. Just in case.”

“Good enough. What sort of things will I have to do?”

“The main thrust is going to be about how the elderly are feeling bemused by the world. I want to show how things have moved too fast for some.”

“The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

“Um,” I said, noncommittally.

“You don’t agree?” His hand shook a little as he put down his teacup. “Rape, murder, torture, it’s all been done before. Loneliness, joy, love—been around for thousands of years. Clothes are different, but there’s always been fashion. Food is different, but there’s always been taste and fads. Oh, there may be new ways to read books these days, there’s the net instead of radio and these silly PIDAs instead of a good leather wallet, but people don’t change. Not really.” He laughed. “The expression on your face! Live a few more years and you’ll find out. Nothing really changes.”

“But how did you feel when your money no longer worked and you had to get a PIDA?”

He shrugged. “It was twelve years ago. I was a bit uncertain at first: What if something went wrong in a computer and my account got tied up? How would I pay the rent then? But after a month or two I liked it. No more rushing to the bank. No more filling out bills. Everything’s so easy.”

“For some,” I said. “I heard a story once about when the book reader first came out, a young man gave one to his grandfather. He turned it on, pulled up a copy of
To Kill a Mockingbird
, and showed grandfather how to change the pages. Granddad said, Thank you very much. The younger man left him happily reading. A year later, when he went back to visit, the young man found his grandfather reading the same book. ‘Wonderful thing, this reader,’ the old man said, ‘but I wish they’d brought out some different stories.’ The old man had no idea that there were nearly twenty thousand different books on that disk. That he could have bought hundreds of other disks, or simply downloaded others—anything at all—from the net. He was used to a book being immutable. The fact that the words on each side of the ‘page’ changed didn’t make a difference: this was
To Kill a Mockingbird
, so how could it be anything else?”

We looked at each other thoughtfully.

“Anyway,” I said, “that’s what I want to look at. And don’t worry about acting. All I want is some standard shots of you sitting, walking, talking, reading, eating. My programs can change your expression and put you in the street or whatever. I’ll give you ten percent of my cut.”

“When do you want to start?”

“How about now?”

TWELVE

Lore is midway between thirteen and fourteen. It has been months since Oster and Katerine have spoken to each other about anything but business. Now it is late spring and all of the immediate family except Greta are gathered together at Ratnapida for the first time in almost a year.

“I’ve ordered a picnic,” Oster tells them all. “We’ll take in the grounds, sit in the sun and relax together. No,” he says to Tok who is folding up his screen to take outside, “we’re going to leave all the bloody paraphernalia in the house for a change.”

They walk single file behind Oster, who is carrying the rug, to the pond, the ornamental one with the fountain. Lore assumes he has chosen this one, the first in a series that becomes progressively less formal, because Katerine hates the casual disorganization of nature. Lore knows they do sometimes think of one another, try to please each other, to find common ground, but they are like two planets following separate orbits.

It is a beautiful day; the sun is lemony and light, not too hot, and the grass is that particular lush bright green only seen when the first flush of spring growth is ending. Everything should be perfect, and everyone tries—lots of oohs and ahs about the food, some conversation about the two-year lawsuit against the company, which is nearing its climax in Caracas—but it is an effort. Lore watches Katerine stare into the distance, then reach to her belt for the slate that is not there before she remembers she is supposed to be relaxing. Tok sits on the grass, just outside the intangible circle of family on the rug. Every now and then he reaches to the plate in front of him and picks up some rice salad between his fingers, but most of his attention is focused on the pile of twigs and leaves and a pebble before him. Lore wonders what he is making, but Oster is in the way.

Oster is talking to Stella, who is sitting on the stone rim of the fountain, drinking straight from a bottle of vodka. This month, Stella’s hair is layered: bruise purple on top and underneath—when she lifts her head to swallow—red, then ocher, then white. Unnerving, like splitting open a bruise with a scalpel, seeing blood, fatty tissue, bone.

“So, tell me how you managed to stay out of the scandal at Belmopan last month.”

Oster’s words suggest he is tolerant of and mildly amused by Stella’s increasingly wild exploits with her set of friends, but Lore can tell—by the way his fingers are pick-picking at the cloth of his shorts and the glances he shoots up at Stella from under his brows when he thinks she is not looking—that he does not understand his daughter any more than he would if he had planted a potato and grown a rose.

“I wasn’t there that night.” She pauses to suck at her bottle. “I was passed out in my room.”

Lore wonders about that. She thinks either Stella drinks less than she pretends to or she is extraordinarily lucky. For while Stella appears to go through the motions—driving recklessly while under the influence of various drugs, swimming with sharks while drunk—the accidents she has only ever seem to involve property or the occasional species of wildlife not on the endangered list.

“I assume you have at least six people who are willing to back you up on that,” Oster says, trying for irony, but sounding waspish.

Stella laughs, and Lore wonders if the rest of the family understand how shrewd her sister is. In the last four years of wild behavior, she has never injured herself or another person, nor been the subject of any scandal that would have a negative impact on her character. Media-literate people on five continents probably know her name, but they speak it with a smile and a shake of the head, not with a spitting curse. Lore has always wondered why Stella does nothing with her intelligence and wit but travel from one party to another with as much fanfare as possible. She wonders for the first time whether or not Stella has a purpose, but cannot figure out what it might be.

It is getting hot. The sunlight makes Stella’s upturned bottle sparkle. “I think I’ll take a swim.” She sets the bottle down on the rim of the fountain and stands up. She has unbuttoned half of her dress before Lore realizes she has no clothes on underneath. Oster is a little slower.

“What are you doing?”

“Preparing to climb into this nice cool water with the fish. Who probably have more feeling than some people.” She glances over at Katerine, who pretends not to notice.

“But . . .” Oster seems to know he has missed something.

Stella pauses, dress halfway off her shoulder. “What’s the matter? Don’t you want to see what a fine figure your daughter has?”

Katerine simply ignores them.

“Stella! This is not appropriate—”

Stella laughs, a great, brittle shout. “Appropriate? Since when has this family ever been
appropriate
?”

Oster is looking confused and Katerine still staring at nothing when Stella lets her dress fall from her shoulders and steps into the fountain. The dress catches on the vodka bottle and as the material sinks, waterlogged, into the fountain, the bottle teeters, then falls toward the pool. Katerine and Oster dive for it at the same time. Lore is not sure who actually catches it, but the bottle comes up out of the water grasped by two tanned and streaming arms. Oster relinquishes it to Katerine. He wades into the fountain and shouts. “What are you doing? I don’t understand you. Why are you doing this?”

But Lore is watching Tok, who is looking at Stella, and his expression is terrible, as though some huge revelation has fisted into his face and crumpled it like tin. He has a twig in his hand and Lore can see how white the skin is where he grips it. She wants to rush over there and cry
Tok! Tok!
but quite simply dares not. She thinks that if she calls him back from whatever horror he has seen he will return without some vital part of himself. She has read many fairy tales and understands instinctively that those who are dragged places unwillingly must find their own way back. She wonders what place he has found, what he has seen.

But then Oster slips and falls to one knee. He stands up making cross sounds, and sloshes his way back to the edge. “I’m going inside to change,” he says to Stella, who has her face tipped up to the sky and seems to be smiling. “When I get back I expect you to be sobered up and decent.” He stalks off. “I will not be mocked in my own house. . .”

Katerine is examining the vodka bottle, seemingly unperturbed. Lore glances back at Tok, who is now sitting still and sad by his pile of twigs. She catches his eye and he shrugs slightly. Lore does not understand, but she knows no one will explain; she does not even know the right questions to ask.

When Oster is out of sight, Katerine, still not looking at Stella’s body, says, “Your father has asked you to be decent by the time he returns.”

“Does my body offend you, Mother?” The words are a challenge, but the tone is tremulous, as though Stella has gone much, much further than she intended, and does not know her way back. Katerine turns slowly, deliberately, and looks at Stella.

Lore wonders what Stella sees in her mother’s eyes. Her sister goes utterly blank. She steps from the pool mechanically and reaches for her dress. No one says anything while she fastens her buttons. She looks at the bottle, but Katerine is still holding it. Lore understands that Stella is unwilling to step any closer to her mother to reach for the vodka.

Stella, hair dripping, uncertain whether to reach for the bottle or leave without it, looks like a whipped dog.

“Your father will want to see you here when he gets back,” Katerine says. She smiles, and Stella sits abruptly, leans back against the stone fountain rim, and closes her eyes. Just like that, she absents herself. Gone. Lore has seen Greta do that: just disappear. Tok returns his attention to whatever he is building from sticks.

Katerine lifts the bottle from the stone rim, checks to make sure the cap is secure, then looks at Lore speculatively. “Tell me,” she says, “if Stella had dropped the bottle in the fountain and it was, by some miracle, both uncapped
and
full, how would you have gone about the remediation of the pond system?”

Water tinkles, the sun beats down, and Tok strips the bark from a twig while Lore tries to work out the approximate flow per minute in gallons from this fountain to the next pond and the next; the effect of about a pint of raw alcohol on the flora and fauna; the breeding rate of carp . . .

Tok makes some involuntary movement.

“What?” Lore asks.

He sighs. “It’s a trick question, Lore. We were taught that the first thing to remember when faced with—”

“The first thing to remember when faced with a problem,” Katerine interrupts, “is not to make the problem more complicated than it is. With this surface area,” she gestures at the series of ponds, “and this heat, a pint of vodka would evaporate before it did any damage that would not remediate itself naturally in a week or two.”

Lore digs a hole in the turf with her finger. She feels stupid, the idiot younger sister, the one who never knows what’s going on, the one always left out of the joke. But when she looks up, Katerine is smiling at her and it’s a nice smile, not cruel at all.

“You looked like you were working out some pretty complicated reactions. Had you considered and included the lethal-fifty dose for fish?”

“Yes,” Lore admits shyly, “except I don’t know the alcohol concentration L-fifty for freshwater fish so I was going on the figures I read in that report last year on the spill of ethanol in the salmon fishery in Scotland, so—”

“You read that?”

Lore nods cautiously. “I try to read as much as I can.”

Katerine smiles. No, she beams, and Lore cannot remember getting that kind of approval from her mother before. She smiles back, tentatively.

“That Scottish job was complicated by the fact that the ethanol was contaminated by printers’ ink.” Katerine absently fills a plate, hands it to Lore.

“I know. I tried to compensate for that. But it was mostly guesswork.”

“It often is, at least in the evaluation phase of a project.” Katerine begins to fill another plate for herself. “Did you try for a differentiated flow rate or go for a median rate?”

Lore sits up straighter. “Wouldn’t a median rate defeat the object? I mean, when Willem took me round the plant in Den Haag he said the whole point was to calculate and bear in mind the different rates at which living things speed up or slow down flow.” She gets a nod and an encouraging smile for that. “And that’s not even taking into account the different ways those plants act on the contaminant. . .”

And Lore finds that she is enjoying herself. Her mother is talking to her as an equal, not as the family pawn, the commodity to be traded on for points. When she is the center of attention she does not have to think about Stella, does not have to worry about Tok and what he saw. And she finds that while she talks of flows and systems, she has images in her head of bright water and cool colors, of sunshine and green plants. It is a miracle to watch phenol turn to carbon dioxide, to see metal absorbed by moss and made harmless, to see a natural ecosystem survive because someone, somewhere, bothered to sit down and think about a way to design a biosystem to augment it.

As the sun begins its downward slide and the blades of grass cast longer shadows, and she and Katerine continue to talk, she wonders if her grandmother—the rich one, the one who was stupid enough to spend money playing with their genes but smart enough to also tailor bacteria that made her family’s company possible—ever saw whole systems shining in her head that way Lore does that afternoon.

When Oster gets back wearing his clean, dry clothes, Lore looks up and is about to smile at him, happy, when she realizes Katerine is grinning, hard, in triumph, as if to say,
See? Her heart is mine!,
and Lore’s smile falters and she feels the shining systems in her head crack and tarnish.

Spring is long gone and the summer grows tired and hot and brown around the edges. Tok suddenly announces that he is ready to take on more responsibility and leaves immediately for Louisiana to take charge of the family’s ongoing remediation project in the bayous. He has avoided everyone since the picnic, even Lore, and she suspects he wants to work harder not because he wants to assume the burdens and privileges of adulthood, but because he does not want to have time to think about the place he went to, the thing he saw, when he looked at Stella in the fountain.

Lore spends some time with Oster, trying to count the number of fish species in the azure and turquoise waters off the island. Her hair turns gray-white, like ash, and her skin darkens. Oster gets more pensive.

The water is as still as glass, and Lore is staring out at the distant horizon, thinking of nothing, when he asks, “Has Stella talked to you?”

Lore does not turn to look at him and does not ask what he means. “No.”

“She must have said something.”

“She didn’t. She never talks to me.”

“What about Tok?”

“What about him?”

“Don’t be difficult, Lore.”

Lore feels something rising up inside her, hot and empty, like an air bubble. “Tok hasn’t said anything, Stella hasn’t said anything. Nor have you or mother, not even Willem or Marley or Greta. No one ever really says anything.” As she lists the family she notices how easily they slot into subsets, all but her.

Oster has the grace to look down at his feet. “It’s just that I forget you’re not little anymore. I’m used to you being the baby of the family. I think of you as being seven, of sitting up in bed demanding to know why your hair is gray. And it’s still gray.”

“What do you mean?”

He opens his hands, pleading for understanding. “Stella started dyeing her hair when she was eleven. Tok when he was twelve. Yours is still gray. I look at it and immediately think: Still too young to dye her hair, thank god.”

Lore touches her white-gray hair self-consciously. Her youthful vow to never dye it now seems childish, as irrelevant as milk teeth.

Lore is fourteen two days before term begins. She arrives at school in Auckland with hair dyed in black and white flashes, like a head of lightning.