In World City (3 page)

*

The air over the lake was suddenly chill and Dion opened his eyes to see the sky had clouded over. He felt a lick of wind pass over his face and jackknifed himself upright, treading water firmly. A shadow was moving across the water and seconds later the gust hit him full in the face. He made for the shore with regular, determined strokes, though the wind piling waves in his face made for a difficult swim.

Cycling hard, he still got home late, but there were no recriminations. Instead, he found an open bottle of wine on the table and two empty glasses. His parents only ever had wine on special occasions. Dion looked at the wine bottle then at his father; he'd not heard of anything special happening. His father looked pleased and slightly flushed. He said, “Whitlam's coming next week. He'll turn this place round if no one else will. I've made a deal to acquire this whole area for him to develop. Where this squalid little street is, there'll be a golf course and holiday flats.”

Dion was pleased to see his father pleased; it made the house an easier place to be. But who this Whitlam was he had no idea. Neither did he care – no more than he cared about golf courses or holiday flats. Dion's parents lived in a world that meant nothing to him. He had a world of his own: his island that he had seen the wholeness of and whose life he felt as his life; his island to whom his grandmother was introducing him; his island that had in it a place he could live forever.

Dion watches the porter insert the lock card. He thinks of Miranda Whitlam – at least, Miranda Whitlam when he had last known her: Miranda Whitlam, who brought down everything he had built. Miranda Whitlam, he had tried to betray.

How does such a person greet you after ten years?

“Hello, Dion. How's it going? I hear you're working in World City now.”

He had recognised her voice instantly, had felt a sick emptiness and replied, “I'm all right. Where are you?”

“I'm back where you started – in the Waste. Where did you think?” A pause, then, “Listen, I have something new I want to get going. Can you give me a way in?”

“I'd rather not.”

“I know that. Where do you want the contact made?”

“What is it?”

“You'll see.”

Dion had known he could turn her in. But he'd already tried that once. In the ten years since, his only consolation had been that he had not succeeded.

“Okay. Handelmann's, room 243, 3.30 p.m. Saturday.”

He watches the porter reach for the door handle, thinks of his own hand on the handle of a hotel-room door, with the warmth of her body close to him, the pressure of her hand on his shoulder, the softness of her hair against his cheek. He waves away the porter and walks into the room alone.

Miranda Whitlam discovered that if she stared hard enough at the moonlit wall of jungle confronting her from her new bedroom window, she could make of it an abstract picture in planes of grey. She could make the moonlight shadows flatten over instead of beckoning her to fall into them, and she could see the tangled, writhing foliage that threatened to reach out and grasp her become no more than an intricate arabesque.

Continuing to stare fixedly at the two-dimensional picture, she could feel her anxiety easing with the increasing depthlessness she could impose on the scene. More than that, just two dimensions made jigsaw-puzzle pieces of the tangled jungle screen, pieces she might be able to reach out and grasp and perhaps rearrange, reorder in some way, just as her father had done with those lines on his screen.

Shortly after seeing him work his magic, just before they had left for the island, she had tried it herself with some interlocking plastic bricks the house-clearance had revealed, pushed to the back of one of her cupboards. She built what she called ‘a world' with them. Then, as she changed the strange, geometrical wasteland she had constructed into an arrangement of towers and palaces, Miranda imagined that a part of the real world was changing accordingly. The game carried an eerie fascination. She felt herself being drawn up into her head; into a strange, cool, crystalline way of seeing things. It was rather like the feeling when she had believed herself able to walk into the tapestry scene in her father's study; detached; free of the world around her.

Now, on the island, staring at the jungle and turning it into pieces of grey jigsaw puzzle, she could just about recover something of that detachment. There was a difference though. Now she felt her life depended on it.

*

Miranda and her father had travelled most of the way to the island in a large, spacious airliner. Then, in somewhere hot, dimly lit and full of black faces, they transferred to a tiny propeller-driven plane that they had to themselves. After bumping through turbulence and making several steep, banking turns, they touched down on an airfield set among mountains, the runway seemingly barely big enough for a bird to land on.

After climbing down from the plane onto the shimmering heat of the tarmac, they had been obliged to walk across to the airfield's main building where there was another sea of black faces, looking to where a slightly larger plane had just landed and was beginning to disgorge its cargo of passengers. Miranda carried a small bag across her shoulder in which she had the book and two handheld computer games that had been her sole occupation during the journey. She felt herself beginning to sweat in the humidity. She didn't like this place they had come to. Her distaste deepened with the smell of engine fumes and the sight of the stained concrete of the airfield building, then the milling black faces that crowded around her; the shouting, the waving and the agitated, excited exchanges, the scattered splashes of colour on the materials the women wore, the sweat-stained armpits of the men's white shirts.

Whether or not her father liked it, she couldn't tell. For most of the journey he had been working a portable screen, which she had watched him take from his briefcase at the beginning of the flight in the same way the gardener back home would have reached for a trowel or knife – a barely conscious action, only to be noticed if she had surreptitiously moved the expected implement. Now her father applied himself to the island's air terminal with the same determined detachment.

Without pausing, he headed directly for a door signed ‘immigration', beyond which was a room with clattering air-conditioning units, a few worn-looking desks and two uninterested officials talking easily to each other. Her father had some documents immediately to hand, and Miranda watched as his certainties carried the officers through the formalities at a pace that looked unfamiliar to them. Then they were passing out of the narrow confines of the immigration room, away from the harsh, cold draughts of the air-conditioning units and back into the close, tropical heat of the main hall.

A man stepped out of the throng and came straight across to her father. “Mister Whitlam, welcome. I am Charles Lefevre. Your man, O'Donnell, has made everything ready for you. I insisted that I came to welcome you myself, though.”

Miranda watched her father grasp the proffered hand. She watched and listened as practical issues about their baggage were dealt with, then followed after her father and Mr Lefevre, who, she noticed, had skin a shade lighter than most she had seen so far. He opened the back doors of a quite smart-looking limousine, but her father nodded that he would sit in the front next to Mr Lefevre.

Miranda clambered into the rear alone. The car was cool inside and had tinted windows. She felt it move off and stared at the tinted world outside. The road they passed along seemed no more than a track. Rough cultivation and backyards gave way to plantations and then dense jungle. Miranda put her hand to the glass of the back-seat window just to make sure the barrier was there. Only a few cars passed them going the other way. Occasionally they had to overtake a slow-moving truck.

Her father and Mr Lefevre talked all the way but they seemed to be merely confirming matters agreed long ago, dull, practical matters about land and money. Only when her father said, “We may be out of here sooner than I expected,” did she take notice and therefore heard, remembered, but didn't understand when he concluded, “Knowing you, you'll have been watching the markets closely enough, Lefevre, so you'll see there's a storm brewing already. That's my doing. Soon there'll be people arriving here cap in hand, people who've never had to take instructions from anyone. But they're going to have to now. I'll make sure you gain from this, Lefevre. I'm going to need some dependable people around me when I get moving again. How does a spell in Europe sound?” And Mr Lefevre replied that it sounded very good indeed.

Miranda's attention returned to the tinted glass and the jungle beyond. It was like the wildwood back home, only worse. Back home, the trees were contained within a clear perimeter and, scary though the sight was, she could at least be reassured it did not go on forever. But here, apart from a few small villages set in patches of plantation or tilled ground, the trees were everywhere. The boundaries of the little human settlements did not contain the jungle; rather they were contained within it. Miranda's initial dislike of the island deepened.

Her growing despondency was eventually interrupted by Mr Lefevre announcing their arrival. She looked around but could still see only jungle. Then she caught the movement of high, remote-control gates, felt the limousine turn sharply and they were sweeping up a broad drive to the front of the house.

The building was different from home – new concrete rather than old stonework – and the feel was different. Nowhere were there any open vistas for her to look out on; no formal gardens, nor steps where she could lie down and gaze at the clouds. Instead, there was some grass, some bushes and a high wire fence, which, but for the gates onto the entrance drive, appeared to run unbroken around the house and grounds. Beyond the fence there was nothing but a wall of jungle.

On the inside, the house looked ready for occupation but entirely unlived in, much as their home had looked when they left it. Donnell came out to greet them, pick up their bags and lead them in. He offered Miranda a choice of three rooms, one on the ground floor, two upstairs. She chose the one that was upstairs at the back. If she was going to have to look out on the wildwood again, it might as well be from a similar vantage to that offered by her room at home. She recalled Lissel saying of the wildwood view from her old room, ‘It's a site of special scientific interest. Your father is only allowed to cut the wood under strict control.' Miranda looked out through the metal-framed window of her new room at the tangled, unbroken mass of vegetation. This might be the wildwood, but it was clearly no site of special interest, subject to agreements and controls.

As he put Miranda's bags down, Donnell said to her, “Your father's renting this place, though he's still a guest of sorts. I believe the government uses it, mostly to put up visiting VIPs – but it looks to me like they haven't had many of those lately. A bit down on its luck this place, I'd say. But your father's got some ideas for it. That's probably why they've let him take this house on. There's less than a hundred thousand live on this island and most of them don't have a job except growing whatever they can in their backyards. They're just about ready for your father, I'd say.”

Later, staring through her window, still trying to get the measure of the place she had been cast out into, Miranda watched the jungle grow dark. From her old room, she had at least been able to look out over the trees on moonlit nights and see the milk-white disc as if sinking into the dark sea of the wildwood canopy. Here, in this new place, the trees were higher and closer and the moon brighter. Before it sank below the tree line, this different moon cast shadows that seemed to have a deep luminosity of their own. Those shadows made Miranda shiver. She felt she might see beyond them if she kept staring, might even be tempted to step out of the window and into those shadows, into the shivery world they beckoned her to enter. That was when she set about trying to turn the scene into no more than a two-dimensional jigsaw, inwardly repeating her father's words like a charm: ‘We may be out of here sooner than expected.'

*

Lissel had left Miranda with a regime of screen-learning to follow and this was reinforced by her father shortly after their arrival. He described to her the terminals present throughout the house they now occupied.

“It doesn't matter where you are, Miranda,” he said. “These screens can get you anywhere you want in the world. You can use them to learn about anything you want, in the same way as I can use them to work on anything I want. You remember me changing the lines on the screen back home?”

As if she didn't. So powerful had the act seemed that, beyond playing make-believe games with her bricks, Miranda had found herself wondering whether anyone had died after he adjusted the glittering web he contemplated so many hours each day. She had wondered whether anyone had been saved. Nothing had prevented the death of her mother, but that had been before the screen with the glittering lines had appeared on her father's desk.

Of course, in reminding her about the lines on the screen, he was only trying to gain her cooperation in his own plans for keeping up her education. But Miranda was willing to play along. Staring into the screens, she imagined herself back in the Land of the Princess, with the images dancing attendance on her every wish. Clothed in their variety and richness, the screen images could crowd around her and keep the world outside safely at bay.

So it was to the screens that Miranda increasingly turned when she couldn't sleep or woke early, when all she could see from her window was the harsh moonlight that fell into the open area of the compound and washed over the jungle wildwood, casting amongst the trees shadows she feared she might fall into. And so it was to a screen she turned, waking early one morning with an unpleasant sensation in the pit of her stomach, a sensation that grew as she stared out through her metal-framed window into the darkness beyond.

She decided to give a program called Wheel of Fortune a turn.

Wheel of Fortune was popular with parents who wanted to give their children an impression of the awesome fund of information available to them. Selecting at random, it could access any one of several thousand sites set up to be especially interesting and attractive to a curious child or teenager. Miranda watched as the usual entry images came up: a wheel of fortune, then waves of pictures morphing in and out of each other to present an eyeblink overview of the world of knowledge that might be explored by the program.

Then something odd happened.

Usually, at this point, you were asked to click the ‘spin' button to get the wheel turning, but instead a crude fuzz took over the screen. The fuzz resolved itself into a grainy video-picture of a city. Miranda looked carefully, intrigued by the departure from the usual sequence. The picture panned from a dense conglomeration of skyscrapers, intersected by broad streets teeming with traffic, to a distant view of soiled tower blocks against a backdrop of green, densely-forested hillside. Then the picture zoomed in close to the city's edge. Miranda noted broken cloud in the sky and a patchwork of light and shade falling on the crumbling margins of the city. It looked hot and humid, morning approaching midday. Then there was a cut to a street scene in which the cracked, rust-stained concrete facades looked like the bases of the tower blocks previously seen from a distance. Battered transits, open lorries and poster-strewn vans bumped slowly over potholes.

The camera picked up a dirty, undistinguished car and followed the vehicle into the kerbside, where it pulled up next to a group of five raggedly-clothed children. The picture zoomed in to show their faces, tired, dirty and suspicious. The bulk of the car obscured the details of the transaction but it appeared as if one boy in the group, maybe eight or nine years old, had been singled out and offered something, which he stuffed into an inside pocket of the ill-fitting jacket he wore. The boy gave his companions a noncommittal nod and climbed into the front of the car. The camera was then inside the car, turned towards the front seats, taking in the boy, who was wedged between the driver and another man on his right. They were talking in a language Miranda could not understand. The driver joked with the boy and the other man offered him a cigarette. Miranda could see the boy relaxing. Only fragments of the track the car took were seen through the windscreen but it appeared to be circling the periphery of the city, the driver picking a track through an interminable waste of broken concrete and strewn rubbish. The only changes were the increasing desolation and the diminishing number of people.