In World City (22 page)

A year turned as Dion went on listening to Miranda being too confident. Into winter and out the other side he listened to how there was already a trend beginning to appear in the data and how it was only a matter of time before it hit statistical significance. In spring, he listened to her talking about how she would soon be holding the whole of the Ageing Initiative in the palm of her hand and in summer it was all about how rich Dion and the boys would become.

None of this Dion trusted. It was not that he didn't believe it would happen. Riches might come from the project, or they might not. It was just that she was too confident. When she talked confident she didn't feel in touch. She sounded like one of Dion's corporate traitors when they came to him for the first time, high on the sudden freedom that turning against their employer had given them. Then, when the days had shortened and the wind was beginning to whip leaves from God knew where in the godforsaken Waste, Dion finally lost patience with her. “Miranda, there's somebody going to mess you up over all this. You are too fucking confident. I can feel it.”

“Dion, don't worry. You can't imagine what they're like, the people who are running the Ageing Initiative. William Burger gives me an update on them each week. They're pushing us with everything they've got. They want results. Any results. Anything. They'll be over the moon about what we're doing here.”

Dion kept on with his protests, trying to chip away at her resistance, trying to ease his growing anxiety. He began to doubt if he was ever going to get through to her.

But, with years now spent beyond the edges of World City and with the dissolving rains of autumn beating against the stained, concrete tower blocks of the Waste, Miranda Whitlam was finally becoming capable of getting through to herself. She just needed the right kind of push. It came from one of the boys, one called Mysté.

Mysté was very careful to let people know how they should pronounce his name. It wasn't Misty, it was Meestay, and people either got it right or, if they couldn't be bothered or forgot, Mysté would put them right. His reprisals were delayed, personal and humiliating, which meant that it was usually only the transgressors who noticed they were being put right and they didn't much feel like telling anyone about it afterwards. So Mysté carried no safety warning, and if someone was foolish enough to continue pronouncing his name wrong, there was no culture of caution to restrain them.

One of the boys, Ferrie – a year or so younger than Mysté – was the next one not to pronounce Mysté's name right. Worse still, Ferrie did it deliberately.

“Hey, Misty – why don't you call yourself Misty?”

“Ferrie, you call me Meestay. That's all.”

“Stupid fuckin' way to say it. Makes you sound like a fuckin' hairdresser. Like you're some kind of queen or something. Why don't you see if you can pick something up at one of those pretty places just over the border? Pick something up – ha, ha – I was thinking of hardware, but maybe you go for software instead. Software – you know? – Kind of meaty. Maybe that's what you'd like.”

“You call me Mysté, Ferrie. That's all.”

But there was something about Mysté that had got to Ferrie – as if having what it took to dictate what others called you was an insufferable provocation. Ferrie wanted to damage that self-possession. So he didn't let up. He went on about it, and on.

Ferrie went on about it so much that the kind of private settlement Mysté generally made became increasingly inappropriate. It became a public matter and others started getting uncomfortable. “Leave off, Ferrie,” said the strong and normally silent Mayer. “You're not being funny.”

Ferrie gave Mayer a line about how he should stop acting the big brother and went right on baiting Mysté. But Mayer wasn't being anyone's big brother, though he fitted the part quite well. His inwardness opened him up to how dangerous things were getting and he just didn't want to see anyone damaged.

Others were more explicit. “You're going to get your head kicked in, Ferrie, if you keep on like that,” warned Dom, one of the younger ones.

“You want a fight, Ferrie? You jus' goin' to get a fuckin' knife in your back,” pronounced Jetter.

“You tell me when you're going to have it out. I wanna be there to watch,” Juan urged.

Dion watched, wondering whether he should shut Ferrie up. Something had got into the boy, some kind of itch. From his own point of view, Dion wasn't too worried by the damage that might be done. He was just afraid that however much it was it might mess up the experiment. He thought back to himself and Maskel and how Leo had handled that and decided Ferrie and Mysté would have to work it out themselves. But they wouldn't do to each other what he did to Maskel; they were too equal. There wouldn't be too much injury involved.

Then Miranda had them all together in Dion's Place for the next sampling session and Ferrie decided he was going to push it further. He was going to take the piss out of Mysté in front of Miranda.

Mysté was on the couch and Miranda had the tissue sampler in place. “Hey, Misty,” Ferrie called out, “With a name like that, how come Miranda can even see you?” Then, with his feelings on a roll, Ferrie pushed it further still. “Anyhow, you're so fuckin' black that it's a fuckin' wonder anyone can see you.”

This was the first time Ferrie had made a thing out of Mysté's colour. Dion thought of Maskel again and readied himself to give Ferrie a slap across the face that would send the boy flying. But Mysté was quicker. He was off the couch and, with Miranda's sampler in hand, was across the space between himself and Ferrie while Dion's muscles were still tensing. While Dion was moving across the floor, Mysté had the sampler up in the air and down into Ferrie's left eye. And before Dion reached them, Mysté had said, in a cool, clipped voice, “Now you tell me who can see and who can't.”

He raised the sampler in readiness for the other eye and Dion thrust himself between them, saying, “Leave it there, Mysté. That's enough.”

Ferrie had fallen on the ground and was screaming in a high, thin falsetto, like a small animal being tortured. He had his hands to his eye. Dion firmly took both wrists and separated Ferrie's palms to examine the damage. There was nothing but a bloody, empty socket.

*

Miranda held on to herself long enough to drive Ferrie through the wet, dark streets of the Waste into World City and then a long way to a discretely lit avenue lined with private clinics. There, she paid enough money for a qualified surgeon to examine the wound, pronounce the boy irrevocably blind in his left eye and clean up the mess with no questions asked. Ferrie returned with a black patch over his eye. Mysté said within hearing of enough witnesses for word to get around, “You look good, Ferrie. Patch suits you. I like the colour, too.” But word also got around how this had been said with no animosity, no triumph, nothing, just dead straight. Unprompted, a few others said the same, and Ferrie seemed to gain something from the damage. He relaxed.

As for Miranda, she came back from the surgeon's white as a sheet and speaking to Dion in monosyllables. He took her to his apartment on the edge of World City, gave her a brandy and wrapped a blanket around her. He could feel the wind and rain outside trying to get past his walls. He just wanted to make sure she was all right. She looked so hopelessly vulnerable. He just couldn't understand the state of shock she had gone into. Hadn't she trained as a doctor? In her training, she must have seen bloodier things than Ferrie's eye socket.

She stayed one night, then another. “You okay, Miranda?” he would ask, when she obviously wasn't.

“Hmm, I'm okay. Thanks for putting me up. I just don't much feel like being on my own at the moment. It's so dark outside.”

He didn't press her any harder. It seemed best just to let her be and let whatever had been surprised in her settle back down. At least that isolating confidence she had been enveloping herself in had gone. She just seemed to be in some kind of limbo, healing maybe.

On the third day, the weather cleared and a warm, hazy sun began to shine. Miranda brightened a bit. “Dion, can we go out for dinner again. There's a place I'd like to go to. It's a bit of a way from here. I just want to get out into some trees, away from all this.”

The wave of her hand took in an unbroken swathe of buildings and concrete, steel and glass, that might, for all the gesture conveyed, have stretched from ocean to ocean.

*

The restaurant had, in the Middle Ages, been a monastery, built above the Rhine, with a terrace that looked down through trees to the river below. The place was in the centre of a broad green enclave set apart for preservation from the encroachment of World City industry. A rare, warm autumn twilight bathed the old stones. Trees crowded up from the river, their yellowing leaves whispering white noise with every passing breeze. Far below, the river ran much as it had always done – despite periodic attempts to make it more efficient.

They took their seats on the edge of the terrace and sat in silence some moments, relaxing into the sounds and scents and feel of the place. Dion experienced an odd pull inside himself. This wasn't the kind of business place he was familiar with, and it wasn't the kind of high, glittering, isolating place Miranda had taken him to before. This place didn't seem to require anything of him. It just let him be and, letting him be, it enabled a kind of current to start flowing in him that made him feel some way he couldn't put words to. It was okay, though. There was an easiness being allowed between the two of them. All the circumstances of their lives were for the moment suspended. He looked at Miranda and she looked back and smiled. A waiter came and they ordered a bottle of wine and something light to eat they could share. The wine came, was sampled and full glasses poured.

Miranda lifted her glass, took a sip, carefully placed the glass back down and looked at Dion, holding his gaze. She asked carefully, as if afraid she might damage something of extreme fragility, “Why did Mysté do that? Why did he dig out Ferrie's eye?”

Dion felt at ease with himself, sure of his opinions. He said, “Ferrie pushed it too far. Mysté takes his name very seriously. He takes himself very seriously. That got to Ferrie, but he didn't know how to stop. There was a guy once who didn't know how to stop with me. Only he was much older and I couldn't get away from him. I killed him.”

It was as well Miranda had sought out this place of safety so instinctively. Instincts are generally accurate and this place had insulated her sufficiently from the horrible immediacy of Mysté's violence to allow her to ask about the boy and openly acknowledge what had happened. Now it allowed her to hear with understanding rather than shock or judgement what Dion had once done.

“The guy you killed must have been pretty bad,” she said.

“He was. Ferrie might have turned into someone like him, if he hadn't had his eye put out.”

“I don't know, something happened to me when Mysté did that. I don't know what happened. I just sort of went into shock.”

“That's what I thought. That's why I let you be. I thought you'd come round. You're okay now?”

“Sort of. I don't know.” She looked around uncertainly then said, “But you didn't go into shock, did you. Maybe you're more used to violence than I am. But none of the kids went into shock either. Is there something wrong with me, Dion? Have I just had things too soft all my life?”

“I don't think you've had things soft. You wouldn't have got to where you are if it had all been soft for you. I think maybe there's things you don't see, though. You maybe don't see how dirty people can get. Generally they hide it from people as powerful as you. People who've come up along your kind of track can use the law and their education and contacts in ways that don't spill too much blood. It probably comes down to the same thing in the end, but the viciousness gets hidden. Your kinds of people don't go around putting other people's eyes out – least, not anymore. My kind still does.”

Miranda listened but Dion's words seemed far away, like shouts from a distant shore. She was beginning to feel as if she was swimming, as if the space they were in was somehow liquid and she was being borne on deep, powerful currents. It should have been frightening but she felt strangely reassured. If she hung onto anything fixed and rigid, the currents would thrash her around and she would be damaged. Casting herself adrift, she felt buoyed up, safely supported, carried. Where they were was just right for cutting loose, a no-man's land that was neither Waste nor World City, a place that referred far back to a time before such distinctions had been made. The building was of old stone, not steel and glass, and the trees and the river had been there forever.

And there was a man being carried into this otherness with her. The world this man was describing was obscene and dangerous. It was dirty and hot and far away from anything secure and familiar. It was a world one was utterly alone in, prey to whatever predators might fix their attention on you, to do with you what they chose, to do things that were filthy and agonizing and were utterly negating of all you might ever become. Yet all the time they had been together, Dion had kept her safe in this world, safe enough to begin dealing with that awful moment in Dion's Place when she had seen a violence unleashed that had shaken her to a depth she had not known she possessed, safe enough even to begin dealing with whatever else crawled about in those depths.

*

No critical memory swept over Miranda Whitlam, no image of violence, dirty concrete walls, empty, sightless eyes and stilled life. But the feeling was there. The knowledge of the nothingness that had once been revealed to her was entirely present. In sympathy with the place inside herself she had arrived at, the sunlight dimmed and a truly cold wind rolled up from the river. She hardly noticed. The wind was merely part of what she knew, what she was.