This is Shyness (19 page)

I find a zebra-striped toiletry bag and pass it through the bars.

Wildgirl uses a pair of tweezers to remove a wad of cardboard from the lock and then rummages again in her make-up bag.

‘Voila.' She pulls out a hairpin and sits cross-legged with her bag in her lap. I pace down the corridor the way we came and peer into the distance. Nothing. Just the tap and groan of the pipes.

‘Any time now,' I say. ‘Any second a flood of psycho children may come through that hole, but, you know, take your time.'

Wildgirl doesn't look up from her task. She's bending a hairpin out of shape.

‘How old is Ortolan's kid?' she asks out of nowhere.

I blink. ‘I don't know. She had her while she was overseas.'

‘Which was after she and Gram split up, right? Which was how long ago?'

I have to stretch my mind to remember. Everything's a blur. Nothing from before seems real.

‘You're the one who's seen a photo of her.' I manage to keep the care-factor out of my voice, but Wildgirl still looks up. ‘What do you think?'

‘Maybe four or five years old. And how long ago did Ortolan break up with Gram?'

‘Maybe five years ago…' The words are sluggish in my mouth. Ideas uncoil, oily and slow like eels.

‘And you've all been living in the dark for almost as long.'

Wildgirl's eyes meet mine, then she looks down again. She sticks the bent hairpin into the lock and then removes it, working it into the right shape.

If your girlfriend got pregnant to another man, you'd be pretty upset. You'd have to break up and everything you'd planned for your future would be up in smoke. It wouldn't seem as if you had much to live for in those circumstances.

Gram was only nineteen. Next year I'll be the same age as he was when he died. And the year after that I'll be older than he ever was. I used to think he was a man, used to think he knew everything, but he was barely an adult when he had to cope with all these problems. I can barely deal with anything more complicated than eating and sleeping.

‘My mum has never told me who my dad is,' Wild-girl says. ‘He could be anyone. Best-case scenario is this: they were young and he was scared. My mum couldn't go through with an abortion, and he couldn't go through with being a dad. So he ran. Refused to have anything to do with it. With us, I mean, with me.'

Wildgirl's arms are by her sides, her make-up bag and tools on the dusty ground in front of her. Her eyes are liquid and big.

‘Worst-case scenario,' I reply. ‘She pushed him away, she refused to let him have anything to do with it.' But I'm thinking about Ortolan, not Wildgirl, and I'm adding and subtracting in my mind.

Wildgirl's face is scrunched up with something like pain and I'm sure mine is the same, but I didn't mean to be cruel. Wildgirl kneels in front of the lock and tries the hairpin. The pin scrapes against the metal and I hear a click. Wildgirl presses down on the handle and the gate moves.

‘We don't know, do we?' she says quietly. The gate creaks open, wiping an arc in the dust as it swings. The sound it makes is a rusty wail.

I walk through. The tunnel looks exactly the same on the other side. Same pipes, same lights on the roof. I take Wildgirl's hand and hold it so tightly I can feel a faint pulse in her fingers. She looks up at me and her smile is strangely grateful. Our words have hurt each other but we didn't mean them to. The truth hurts, but not knowing the truth hurts more.

twenty-five

The basement in Six is almost identical to Seven's, except instead of washing machines there's a collection of cardboard boxes and a rotting mattress in the corner. A single hanging bulb lights the corridor at the top of the déjà vu stairs.

‘If I was going to have a safe room,' I remark, ‘I would put it in a separate purpose-built building, with a moat and armed security guards and an electric fence.'

‘Then everyone would know exactly where you kept your best stuff. And that's the first place they'd attack. With the biggest army they could muster.'

‘Didn't you hear me? Gunmen? A
moat
?'

Wildgirl rolls her eyes, refusing, for a change, to play along. ‘There are twelve floors in every building. Didn't Blake say around ten units live in each building?' I nod. ‘So, they need to set aside ten rooms. You'd definitely use a spare floor, at either the top or bottom of the building. Let's search this level, and then switch to the top level and work our way down. That way the longer we've been in here—'

I interject. ‘And the more likely it is that they're gonna find us—'

Wildgirl jumps in, nodding. ‘Then the closer we'll be to the ground floor, and our escape route.'

There are two doors on each side of the corridor before the elevator shaft. Without the need for further discussion I take the left-hand side and Wildgirl does the right.

The first door I try leads into a storage closet containing a cache of plastic jerry cans and a suffocating smell of petrol. I pull the door shut, and move on to the next one. ‘They're not down here,' I call out. ‘There are no locks on the doors, and everything's dusty. No one's been this way for a while.'

The next door opens onto disused sports equipment: spongy basketballs, tangled nets, an old wooden vaulting horse. Nothing useful.

‘I think you're right,' she says, ‘but at least I got this.'

I turn around to find her in a fencing stance and swishing a green gardening fork. Her movements send doppelganger shadows flashing across the walls.

‘It's my trident. Nice, huh?'

‘Lethal. Did you find anything for me?'

‘Of course. I wouldn't forget you.'

She holds up a small spade with a metal scoop and a short wooden handle.

‘A trowel?' My voice still goes squeaky when I'm indignant. ‘Behold, the awesome might of my
trowel
?'

She throws it at me and I catch it with one hand. It looks like a teaspoon in my hands. I fit it into a mesh pocket on the side of my backpack.

‘You're right, there's sweet eff-all down here. Let's head to the top.'

Wildgirl marches past the elevator and opens the last door. There is a large ‘6' painted on it, so there's no doubt anymore that we're in the right building. Wildgirl props the door open with a foot and gestures for me to follow. Cold air wafts through the open door.

‘No elevator?' I ask.

‘I've gone off it. We'll take the stairs instead. If we hear anyone coming we can go up or down a level and duck through a door.'

The stairwell extends high above us. I peer up through the central gap, all the way to the top of the building, and get reverse vertigo. The stairs are divided into half-flights, with a small landing at the halfway point, and then a larger landing at each floor. A frosted window on each main landing lets in dim moonlight.

We climb side-by-side, wordlessly. Wildgirl has tucked the garden fork into her belt loop. I settle into the climb, glancing across at her occasionally. Every now and then a pale stripe of moonlight cuts across her face. Neither of us has mentioned what we talked about in the tunnels. It's as if it never happened. Maybe what goes on underground stays underground.

‘You're miles away. What are you thinking about?' I ask.

‘I was thinking about revenge.'

‘On the Kidds?'

‘No. Not the Kidds.'

‘Then who?' I ask, but she doesn't reply.

The problem with Gram's death was that there wasn't anyone to blame except for him, and he wasn't around to take it. I know my parents went dark on Ortolan, or at least my father did. If I was forced to pick sides I would have put the blame closer to home.

‘What level do you think we're up to?'

Wildgirl's cheeks are pink and she's short of breath.

‘Coming up to Seven,' she says. ‘I've been keeping count.' I stop. ‘That's the Elf's home floor. Why don't we take a quick look?'

‘Too dangerous. We know they were heading for home a while ago, so we could walk right into their clutches.'

‘We don't know for sure that the safe rooms exist. If for some chance they're there with the lighter, we could negotiate.'

Of course there's no way the Elf would give up the lighter for a plastic bag full of garden-variety chocolate bars, but there are other things we could bargain with, no matter what Blake thinks. I know people in Shyness who can get you whatever you want, at a price. Or I could offer my own services.

‘Don't you think your friend Blake tried to reason with them? And look what happened to her.'

Wildgirl climbs again, her boots making way too much noise on the concrete stairs.

I give up. I'm supposed to be the one who knows how Shyness operates, but it occurs to me that we're acting on a bunch of second-hand information. From people who may or may not be trustworthy. Maybe we need to quit the subterfuge and ask the next Kidd we see where the Elf is. Deal with him directly.

At the top of the stairwell I glance down at all the floors we've passed. If we have to get out fast, it will be straight back down here. I judge the distance between flights. I could vault over the railing and take half a flight of stairs at a time, but I'm not sure Wildgirl could do the same.

Wildgirl stands in front of the final door.

‘When we go through this door, there will be the elevator to our right, and stairs to the rooftop on the left, same as the other building. To get to the main corridor we go through a glass door on the right, beyond the elevator.'

I picture it, trying to fix the layout in my head.

‘Ready?'

I push past Wildgirl, and press my weight against the door. She may be calling the shots, but I can at least take the first blow when it comes.

The twelfth floor glows with purple light from two UV lamps positioned at either end of the corridor. I hit the locking mechanism at the top of the glass door to keep it open. Someone has stuck rows and rows of different coloured electrical tape along the length of the floor, making a rainbow. I move forwards on the balls of my feet, hugging the wall. The ceiling and walls are painted black, with silver stars that glow.

Wildgirl follows close behind. We pass a door on our right: there's a faint throb of music behind it. Wildgirl raises her hand to the handle and I shake my head. We keep sliding forwards. The next door, on our left, is bolted and padlocked. I could get a screwdriver out of my bag and have a go at it, but I think we're better off seeing what the other rooms hold.

Wildgirl lays her ear against the next door and nods.

She steps back and I open the door onto a room bathed in moonlight. There's a clump of blankets on the floor, a cache of spray cans in a box, a death-metal poster tacked to the wall and a terrible stench. I hold my nose, walk inside and take a cursory look around. Off the main room there's a kitchen full of lab equipment, and a festering bathroom. Another tiny room contains a blow-up mattress and a sleeping bag.

It looks like we're on an ordinary residential floor. The next few doors are unlocked. One opens onto an empty apartment with a burnt-out kitchen. The next is stocked heavily for entertainment. The bedroom has a wall-to-wall stereo system instead of a bed. The kitchen is unused. The corridor ends in an open smoking room. I use one finger to indicate we should do a U-turn. Wildgirl backtracks but stops again at the door with the bolt and padlock.

I stare at the bolt, assessing the risk. It looks flimsy. I could probably get the screws out fairly quickly. But if it was a safe room wouldn't it be secured better than this? Wildgirl puts her hand on my arm, about to say something, when there's a thump at the end of the corridor.

The elevator.

I don't have time to think.

I pull her by the hand and we run up the corridor towards the stairwell beyond the elevator. We've only got a second or two, at the most. We're just through the glass doorway when there's a ding.

The elevator doors slide open and we stand in front of it, momentarily shocked into stopping. Three suited men look back at us, and, towering palely in the corner, is the Elf.

Wildgirl grabs my arm and pulls me away. She hurtles up the steel steps to the rooftop and I have no choice but to follow her. We're out in the night air, looking around frantically before I even have time to consider how trapped we are.

twenty-six

Another concrete rectangle bounded by a concrete wall, with the black sky above, and only one door in and out. The men in suits and the Elf can only be a few metres away on the other side of the door. My hand jams the handle upwards, so it can't be pressed down on the other side. We look at each other with dinner-plate eyes.

‘Quick.'

I have no thoughts other than getting away from the door and finding a good place to hide. We dodge stacked paint tins and crumpled tarpaulins and canvas sheets spattered with colour. We need something tall. I leap over a discarded typewriter and take a split-second look back.

The door swings open and the three men and the Elf step onto the roof. The suits fan out around the doorway. The Elf hangs back, silhouetted against falling yellow light.

I pull Wildgirl down behind an upright ladder draped with a sheet. Not ideal, but good enough. We're almost as far away as we can get from the men, huddled in the back corner of the roof.

I peek through the rungs. A rip in the sheet frames one of the suited men perfectly. He stands statue-still and switches his gaze from place to place efficiently. Sunglasses cover half his face. I don't think he's one of the men I saw earlier at the car but there's something familiar about him. He gestures for one of the other men to circle around the back of the stairwell, and the second to check in our direction. The way he stands suggests that he's more than just a security guard.

I look around, seeing if there's anything within arm's reach. A bucket full of paint rollers won't be much use. Nor will a pile of old egg cartons. Could I use the ladder to make a bridge to the neighbouring tower? No. Far too dangerous. Wildgirl crouches lower than me, looking around the side of the ladder. She unhooks the garden fork from her waist and stares at the sunglasses man.