Sex and Death (25 page)

‘Hey kid,' she says, putting a mug of tea by my bunk. ‘Sleeping?'

This is a trick question, because the only honest answer is no.

‘Well, up and atom,' she says.

Then after we've chatted for a while she settles into bed and starts watching movies. It helps her unwind, she says, though there's not a great deal to get wound up by. I think the thing with Sally is that she doesn't much like being alone, and the TV helps. It occurs to me that this may not be the best job for her in the long term, but that's not something I can control, so I don't see the point in mentioning it.

‘So how long since the last guy left?' she asks, one morning.

I shrug. ‘A couple of months,' I say. It is eighty-seven days and nineteen hours. Not that I've been counting, but some events stick in your mind.

‘He just quit, did he?'

I give her a look.

‘Sorry,' she says. ‘Not my business. But you've been all by yourself since then?'

‘Yeah.'

‘Wow. No days off?'

‘I can't really afford to take them. There's nothing to do, anyway. I'd probably just end up watching the screens.'

‘Wow,' she says again. ‘I'd hate to be here by myself.'

‘There are worse things.'

‘Not for me,' she says. ‘Leave me here for a week on my own
and I'd go crazy. Seriously. You'd find me sleeping with the worker drones or something.'

For me it's the other way around. I miss the feeling of knowing that there's no one else near. I like Sally's company, but there are times when I'd like to be able to choose to be without it. Sally seems to need a lot of conversation to feel at home, and though I do my best to accommodate her, occasionally it's a struggle. She has picked up on this.

‘Warning,' she says sometimes, when she wakes me up with a mug of tea, ‘chat mode fully operational. Prepare to engage.'

One day, when the talking gets too much for me, I tell Sally I'll be back in a few minutes and I wander up to the glass viewing walkway. I look down over the power plant. The morning is murky and grey, but the buildings shine chemical bright. In the gloom behind them are the familiar shapes of the cooling towers, barely visible in the blurring dark. Then out there beyond them only the open moor, then the sombre sea. It's the saddest place, really; even I can feel that, and I like working here.

I stay there until I've restored some of my solitude, then mooch on back to the control room. Sally's shift is over, but she's still staring at her screen, a small notepad cupped in her hand and a frown on her face. The instant she sees me she puts the notebook down and starts chatting in my direction. I like hanging out with her, but I wish she'd talk a little less, and smile a bit more.

Sally stays at her monitor all day. She doesn't seem to need as much sleep as I like to get, but I know from experience that back-to-back shifts like this aren't healthy. You have to pace yourself, or you won't last. I start to worry that perhaps she's already bored in the job. During my break I go to the snack area and get two mugs of tea. She empties three sachets of sugar into hers, plays
around with a fourth in her hands while we talk, and then twists that open too and stirs it into the tea. We drink our tea and compare our pills. They look the same, which is reassuring. One of the first things I was made to sign was some kind of indemnification form. I worry about that. I realise that they have to tweak the area's health statistics – to provide some evidence of increased rates of leukaemia – but I always assumed they'd just fiddle the statistics, rather than the actual rates of leukaemia. Now I'm not so sure. I wonder if there's a list somewhere with leukaemia quotas waiting to be filled.

‘What do you think they are?' I ask her.

Sally takes one and instead of swallowing it whole as usual, bites the pill in half. She crunches it between her teeth.

‘Sugar,' she says, and grins. ‘Definitely.' She eats the other half.

*

A few days later the chat box pops up on my screen with a message from Barbara. The message reads:

Good morning, Todd! I hope the weather isn't getting you down. How are things working out with Sally?

I think about this for a while, then I write:

Sally is great. She's very professional and a pleasure to work with. We're getting along great.

I consider writing that she doesn't make the tea as often as I do, but I'm not sure they'll get that I'm joking. I wouldn't want them to take it seriously and fire her for not making the tea.

It occurs to me that my problem with establishing whether someone is joking or not might be because I don't have a very good sense of humour. I'm not sure how easy it would be to tell.

I don't know why I lied for Sally. It's true that she's mostly a pleasure to work with, but I don't follow everything she says. Last
night I had some music playing quietly on the computer when she arrived for her shift.

‘Is that radio active?' she asked.

‘It's just the computer,' I said. ‘I'll turn it off.'

‘Well, let's not fall out over it,' she said.

I stared at her.

‘Oh, brother,' she said.

I kept out of her way for the rest of the evening.

Also, I don't think she's very professional at all. She should be spending most of her time in the control room, sitting at her desk and watching the screens, or if I'm there with her, perhaps chatting a little about what the weather is like outside. In fact what she's spending most of her time doing is wandering the corridors with a Geiger counter in her hands. I'm not sure where she found the Geiger counter, because I don't remember there being any Geiger counters. I assume she brought it with her, in her rucksack. She's been taking long walks through the corridors over near the reactor. I've warned her about the radioactive paint, but she's having none of it.

She waves her Geiger counter at me and it makes a disturbing, lurching, clickety wheeze.

‘Paint,' she says. ‘Sure.'

*

A week or so later I roll up for my shift and there's no sign of Sally, just a yellow Post-it stuck on my screen with a note that says:
Gone fission
. I peel it carefully off the screen so I can get on with work, and stick it to one side.

Two hours later I look at it again, and my heart does an odd double jump of alarm.

In the corridor, the door leading towards the reactor chamber is ajar. It doesn't seem to have been forced, merely unlocked, and I'm pretty sure that Sally doesn't have the keys, because I have the keys. I pause at the door. I've always been able to go through if I wanted, but I've never wanted to. After all, I can always watch it on the monitor. I think about how it looks on the screen, grey and empty, and I think about how it will look with me walking down it. It seems a shame that it will be the most excitement the corridor has seen for ages, and there'll be no one watching.

‘Sally?' I call down the corridor. The sound makes a thin echo, dying as it goes. I scuttle after it.

At the end of the corridor, the steel door to the reactor chamber is thickly, defiantly shut.

‘Sally?'

There is a long silence and I'm about to give up and go. Then a muffled voice comes from the other side of the door. ‘What?' it says.

‘It's me. Hey. Open the door.'

‘No.'

She sounds grumpy, as though she's sulking.

‘I told you it was empty.'

‘Go away,' she says.

I think about this for a moment. It seems a good suggestion. I turn round to leave three times, but each time I feel that I'm somehow letting her down. But I can't quite work out how to express this, and I don't think my concern is fully communicated by what eventually comes out.

‘What am I supposed to do?' I say.

‘Do whatever it is you usually do. What do I care?'

There is a pause.

‘You could make me a cup of tea,' she says.

I walk back through the corridors to the snack area. The air feels unnaturally warm. I wonder if there's a problem with the
heating, if I need to call Debbie in Maintenance. I think it over as I make the tea. I put extra sugar in Sally's. It sounded like she needed it.

I bang on the reactor door. There's no reply.

‘I'm leaving your tea here,' I call. ‘Don't let it go cold.'

I wait a moment, and then retreat the way I came. If I had a tail, it would be curled between my legs.

I spend the rest of the day watching the cameras showing the door to the reactor chamber. I bite my nails down until the soft flesh underneath starts to ache. Eventually the door opens and Sally comes out, sloping sadly along the corridor, her mug dangling loosely from one finger. She shuts the doors behind her, and tries them to check they're locked. I give a sigh of relief, exaggeratedly loud, as though just by hearing it I'll feel twice as reassured. Then, so Sally doesn't catch me looking at the screens where she's been, I switch to watch outside. Things are quiet. The heather ruffles in the wind. A grouse flies by.

What seems like a long time passes and Sally doesn't return to the control centre. I can't find her on the screens so I get two teas from the snack area, load one up with sugar, then head off to look for her. I check her bunk, to see if she's gone back to bed, but she's not there. I finally find her sitting on a bench by the glass viewing screen, staring sadly at the work area. I give her the tea, which has gone cold. She doesn't seem to mind.

‘What are you doing?' I say.

She doesn't reply for a while, but then makes a visible effort to perk herself up and points down to the laboratories below.

‘I'm giving the robots names. Listen,' she says, ‘that one is John, and the one over there that's listing slightly is Don. And the fellow in the corner is Ron. Which one do you think we should elect leader?'

I start to point to Don, mostly out of sympathy.

‘Think about it,' she says. I lower my hand. I try to furrow my brow the way she does.

I think about it for a long time, until it comes to me.

‘We should elect Ron,' I say.

I glance at her, and for a moment it looks like there's a smile playing around her lips, but she hides it quickly behind the edge of her cup so that I can't tell any more.

‘Attaboy,' she says, quietly.

*

Some time early the next morning I'm reminded how small the bunks are, and that they are in fact only big enough for one person, when Sally climbs into bed with me.

‘Budge up,' she says. ‘It's you or the robots.'

I shuffle as far as I can to one side, but it's still a tight fit keeping us both under the blanket, and we're pressed pretty closely together. Her skin holds a faint sweet smell of perfume and sweat. When I work up a bit of courage I move my hand so it's resting on her bare arm. I marvel at the heat.

‘You're really warm,' I say.

But Sally, unusually, doesn't seem to be in the mood for conversation. She squirms around, and I'm worried she's going to push me out of the bed, so that I'll have to go and sleep somewhere else. As I try to keep my place in the bunk I grab hold of something soft and warm, and I realise that a lot of her squirming was so that she could take off her pyjamas. At this point it occurs to me that she should probably still be on her shift, and I'm about to mention it when she leans over to nuzzle her forehead against the side of mine, and then sticks her tongue inside my ear. After that I get so distracted I forget to bring it up.

*

When I get up for my shift the next day Sally is sleeping in her own bunk. I stand beside her for a while, wondering if I should say something, but she stays unhelpfully asleep, and eventually I have to go to start my shift.

Beyond saying hi, Sally ignores me for the next two days. In the morning when she finishes her shift she goes straight to her own bunk. I stay in my blankets for longer than I usually do, hopeful, but all that happens is that my shift starts without me and I begin to feel guilty about it. In her bunk, Sally snores, convincingly.

Every time I see her in the day and go to talk to her she gives me a grin as though she's pleased to see me, and then walks away before I get to her. The first time it happens I follow her, thinking that maybe she's heading back to the bunks, but she just makes a big loop around the control centre and ends up right back where she'd been. As I trot in after her she is already sitting at her monitor looking somehow pleased with herself and I don't know what to say.

On the afternoon of the second day, I'm at my desk flicking through the monitors when I see Sally standing in one of the drone-patrolled corridors near the laboratories, waving patiently at the camera, waiting for me to see her. I'm a little surprised to see her there, as that corridor is usually locked, and I thought she was still in bed. I focus the camera on her and zoom in a bit, and she sees the lens move and stops waving. Then she turns her back to me and slowly, carefully, starts to undress.

She's down to her underwear when a hazmat-suit-clad robot whirs up behind her and pauses, detecting something in its path. Sally turns around and mouths an exaggerated ‘oh' to the camera, putting her little finger to her lips. She starts to step out of its way, but at the last minute just bends forward to pick up her clothes, so that the drone gently bumps into her. She slips out of the rest of
the clothes, and leans backwards against the robot's yellow rubber suit, moving her hips against it, closing her eyes and reaching back behind her with one arm. Then she glances at the camera again, gives it a wild and frankly terrifying grin, turns round to face the machine and starts to climb it.

The drone just stands there and takes it. I don't think it's been programmed for this. I have some sympathy. My hands hover over the keyboard, not knowing whether to switch to a different monitor. After a while I take them away. I watch for quite a while. When Sally walks into the control room later, smirking, I don't know where to look.