The Fahrenheit Twins (22 page)

‘The lid, gimme the lid,’ said Manny. Gee handed it to him. Careful not to lift the tub more than he absolutely had to, Manny began to slide the lid under. The mouse huddled in one corner until the last possible instant and then hopped onto the interior of the lid, allowing Manny to slide it the last few inches into place. He snapped the container shut. Mission accomplished. One Mouse Jalfrezi.

‘What do you want me to do with it?’ he asked Gee. His voice shook a little from the excitement of having done so well. His hand wanted to tremble but he kept it still.

‘Throw it out the window, I guess,’ she said.

‘Out the
window
?’ He was disappointed in her. She had been so concerned for the animal’s welfare. His image of her was all bound up with kindness.

‘Sure,’ she said. ‘I’m only on the second floor. There’s grass in the back yard. Mice are built different from humans; they’re light, with different bones. You could throw one off a skyscraper and as long as there was grass below, it would survive. Second floor is nothing to a mouse.’

She had her arms folded across her chest, a bit defensive. He tried to decide if she was trying to hide the fact that she knew bugger-all about the aerodynamic properties of mice, or if she was just scared the rodent might jump out of its plastic prison and nip into her clothing.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Which window?’

She led him into her bedroom, which was a duplicate of his: exactly the same dimensions, layout, everything. Well, not everything. The bed was a double, leaving very little room to manoeuvre. Piles of clothes lay on the floor, handbags, supermarket bags, hairbrushes, books. He trod gingerly, afraid to step on fragile things, embarrassed to be here at all.

‘My bedroom window is directly above the thickest part of the garden,’ she explained. She drew the blinds, opened the shutter.

‘Don’t drop it back in here, whatever you do,’ she said, as he lifted the container up. He stretched his arm out into the night air. The rear façade of another apartment building, on the far side of the communal garden, had lights on in several of its windows. In one of these windows, a young man and woman stood watching. They waved to Manny as he unclasped the plastic container and let its furry little burden fall out into the dark.

‘Done,’ he said, and drew his arm back in. She pulled on a sash and the blinds closed again, giving them privacy in the bedroom.

‘Thank you,’ she said.

‘No problem,’ he said.

Adrenalin was still flowing through him. He felt the need to do something masculine and demonstrative, something additional to what he’d already done. With a casual flick of the wrist, he tossed the plastic container onto the bed. The bed was a rumpled, exotic affair with three or four quilts in clashing colours and textures. It looked very comfortable. A cotton nightdress was draped over one of the pillows. The other pillow had an open book laid on it, half-finished and face down.

‘Well, thanks again,’ said Gee, and walked out of the room. She waited until he’d followed her out before reaching her hand back inside to switch off the light.

In the living room, the Americans were still chanting ‘HU’.

‘You don’t find it a wee bit annoying?’ he asked her. ‘I mean, after a while?’

‘Find what annoying?’ She seemed deeply pensive all of a sudden, focused on some deeply private part of herself.

‘The Yanks singing “HU”.’

‘I’ve got it programmed to repeat, actually.’

‘Oh.’ He hadn’t picked her as the sort of person who could program a CD player.

‘HU is an ancient name for God,’ she explained, and yawned, showing all her grey fillings and a cute pink tongue. ‘Sorry, I’m really sleepy. I start work at six in the morning, so this is way past my bedtime.’

‘Don’t let me keep you up,’ he said.

‘It’s OK, I’ll crash soon.’ She pottered around the living room, collecting empty mugs and glasses. She had a way of clasping them with her fingers so she could hold three in each hand. ‘Excuse the mess,’ she said.

‘You should see
my
flat,’ he said.

‘Maybe I will one day,’ she said. ‘As long as there’s no mice in it.’ And with a touch of her big toe she turned the sound system off. The worshipful voices disappeared abruptly.

‘Thank God for that,’ said Manny.

Gee fronted up to him one last time, her expression darkened by disappointment. Or anger, maybe. There was a hefty weight of stoneware and glass dangling in her hands, and if she lost her rag and smashed the lot against his skull, he would be in big trouble.

‘Singing HU,’ she said wearily, ‘lifts you into a higher state of awareness. But only if you’re open to it. I have days when I’m not, and then I can’t stand to hear it. Which lets me know I’m in a dangerously bad state, and I should be singing HU even more. But sometimes … sleep’s important too.’

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Goodnight, then.’ And he got the hell out of there before she had a chance to pull anything else on him.

Back in his own flat, Manny found it difficult to calm down. The front door was shut behind him, but he didn’t feel private. After all, anybody could ring his doorbell any time they liked; they could knock at his door if they were so inclined; this had never occurred to Manny before. He was used to feeling the building around him like a suit of armour or a giant phone cubicle or something – a structure that contained only him inside it. Now he was forced to reconsider it as a network of dwellings, a honeycomb of competing lives.

Also, because his place was architecturally identical to Gee’s, he had a hallucinatory sensation that he was still down there. As though he were wandering around in her flat but it had been filled with his stuff, or as though his own flat had been subtly altered, Photoshopped, Micrografixed, to resemble hers. His computer table, with the PC equipment stacked on top of it, seemed insubstantial, as if all this stuff had been beamed in from another galaxy and was just a glowing illusion, a hologram. He reached out to touch his monitor. It was solid and warm.

He sat down on his swivel chair. He took his accustomed position in front of the screen, whose glassy surface had gone black from lack of intervention. He touched the mouse gently and the screen sprang back to life, a gallery of icons.

He checked for emails. More offers of penis enlargement, miraculous credit, cheap drugs. Oh yes, and a response from Varez. Very detailed instructions as to how to fix the minidumps. The guy clearly had an ultra-methodical mind. ‘
Follow the instructions in the first section. If the problem is not
resolved, proceed to the next section
.’ Not exactly a buddy-buddy tone, but lucid.

Manny followed the instructions faithfully, resizing the swap file to a smaller amount of RAM, rebooting, then restoring the swap file’s original RAM. Time would tell if this made any difference. If it didn’t, there were the more radical options of deleting the Minidump Files, deleting the Sysdata. xml File, or even disabling the Automatic Restart.

‘
Any more questions, just ask
,’ said Varez.

OK
, thought Manny,
How about: Can a mouse really be
chucked off a skyscraper without being hurt when it hits the ground
?

He clicked and clicked, feeling horny and irritable and bloated and hungry. The
Runner
menu blossomed onto his screen like the opening shot of a movie. Lena stood immobile, all alone in an Eastern-European-style street with cathedrals and monuments silhouetted against the polluted sky. Her Slavic features were impassive. She had all her clothes on: a long red raincoat, shiny like PVC, a black roll-neck sweater, knee-length boots. Winter had come to Lena-land.

READY 2 PLAY?

He closed his eyes, pinched them with his forefingers. In his mind’s visual display, a tiny mouse was falling through space, gathering speed as it fell. Splat. Mouse brains on a slab of concrete. A star-shaped pattern of blood surrounding a little furry body. What else could you expect, for fuck’s sake?

He clicked to indicate he was ready to play. He tried to visualise the ground underneath Gee’s window, under his own window. He couldn’t recall ever having seen any grass down there. On his PC screen, a sudden flash of motion alerted him to danger. Lena had been run over by a tank. She was fully clothed, with realistic tyre-marks on her raincoat. Her current health status was, according to the digital counter, zero.

In disgust, he pressed the exit icon and got up. He rummaged around in the kitchen cabinet for a torch. Amazingly, in amongst the useless crap – the spare bags for vacuum cleaners, the candles, spare bits of sink – he found a small torch complete with batteries. Providence of this kind seemed beyond rational explanation.

He put on some shoes and a windcheater, gripped his torch like a weapon, and went out into the night.

It was true what Gee had said. The area behind the flats, under his window and hers, was covered in grass. Mown not that long ago (God knows by who) but still soft and springy, and smelling damply green in the dark. A lush vegetal carpet, an organic mouse mattress. He could go back inside now.

But he didn’t. He had come this far and he wasn’t going back until he’d made sure. A falling body wasn’t like a leaf fluttering to the ground, it was flesh and bone. Manny had felt the weight of that little creature when he’d let it go.

He squinted into the cold. Besides his narrow torch beam, there was precious little light. The inhabitants of the ground floor flat had gone to bed, as had Gee, if her darkened window was anything to go by. His own window was a feeble square of light in a monumental edifice of gloom. At this upwards angle, he could see the lightbulb in his kitchen and the ceiling cornices, but nothing else. The block of flats on the opposite side of the gardens was almost totally lost in the blackness; just two windows had lights on, right near the bottom, as if the whole apartment block were a gigantic stack of electronic equipment on standby. He pointed his torch at it, wielding it like a remote control. The beam didn’t reach. It didn’t even get as far as the fences which he knew, from memory, kept one garden bordered off from the next.

The area of ground to be examined was maybe twenty foot square. Logically, if the mouse was dead it would be lying directly underneath where it had been tossed out. If it was horribly injured it might have dragged its broken body a few steps before perishing in agony. If it was OK, it would be nowhere to be found. He shone the torch into the grass, but could only see inside a small circumference, not the cinematic sweep he’d imagined. The batteries weren’t as robust as he’d thought. The beam of light had started off white, then turned pale yellow almost at once. He would have to be methodical, strafing the designated area in a strictly geometrical, non-overlapping pattern.

After a couple of minutes traipsing back and forth, his batteries were almost dead. He blinked hard and wide, willing his eyes to function better than they naturally wanted to. He should’ve started in the centre of the rectangle, not the edge. He should’ve had the guts to test out if Gee was just playing hard to get. He should have put a warmer jumper on. He should never have left home.

Stumbling in the dimness, he almost stepped on something small and grey. It was the mouse. He went down on his knees before it, and the fabric of his track pants was instantly soaked with moisture.

‘Jesus,’ he muttered. The torch beam illuminated the mouse quite neatly; the scant circle of light and the tiny rodent were just right for each other. The animal was alive, unconcerned, just sitting there in the grass.

‘What are you doing here, you dumb bastard?’ Manny whispered.

The mouse looked up at him, chewing on nothing. Manny wondered if a certain percentage of mice were born totally lacking a scamper reflex, or if this particular specimen was brain-damaged.

‘Get moving, you loser,’ he muttered, feinting an attack on the furry body with the tip of his torch. The mouse turned around, one leg at a time, and walked off into the darkness. Manny kept the torch beam on the tail, tracking the mouse’s progress. Within seconds he’d lost sight of it and was left with nothing but a few watts of battery-powered torchlight, a patch of damp grass and an invisible world.

Manny switched the torch off. Everything went black. He was shivering. He was blind. Then, tinge by tinge, the colours started coming through.

SOMEONE TO KISS IT BETTER

When Dougie got home,
she
was there, as per usual. Sitting on the sofa, as per usual, with no housework done. Watching television, as per usual. Except … Except this time there wasn’t a television for her to be watching.

‘Where’s the TV, then?’ he asked.

‘It’s gone,’ she said.

‘What do you mean it’s gone?’

‘It’s been stolen.’

‘Stolen? What the fuck you playin at?’ It was impossible the television had been stolen. She had sold it, broken it, lost it, lent it out, given it away to the fucken Red Cross.

‘I went out shoppin,’ she said. ‘When I got back, our stuff was gone.’