Tamaruq (3 page)

‘Osiris is a lost city,’ mutters the Teller. Adelaide jolts back as if struck, but the Teller clings on, nails digging into her shoulder.

‘She has lost the world and the world has lost her.’

In close proximity, she can see the hems of the Teller’s robe are stained with dirt. The skin of her face is peppered with spots and shiny with grease. Everything about the woman is repulsive to her, and yet she cannot move, pinned as much by the rasping voice as by the need to remain invisible.

‘Not dead,’ says the Teller. ‘Not dead yet.’ She laughs drunkenly. With a gesture that is almost tender, she strokes a finger down Adelaide’s cheek. ‘I can spy a heretic. I can smell them! When did you last perform the salt?’ The Teller hiccups, and covers her mouth with a giggle. Her fingers tighten. ‘Not lately, not lately. They’re not dead yet, the ghosts. They’ll deny it, but it’s true, you know.’

The Teller darts quick, paranoid glances around them. She lowers her voice.

‘Something is coming. The ghosts have roused it.’

Adelaide stares. She wants to ask, what? What is coming? But the words won’t come and the Teller now bears a guilty expression, as though she has already said too much. She reels away, reaching out to clutch at her next victim, repeating her mantra.

‘Not dead, no, not dead yet. The ghosts are not dead yet.’

The white-garbed figure recedes into the crowd. For a moment Adelaide remains where she is, very still, until the motion of the crowd pushes her too deeper inside.

The sheer volume of people makes the tower unbearably hot, causing her glasses to steam up continually. This is good, she tells herself. People are good, the more the better. In the crowd you can disappear. Everyone here is on the hunt. Their eyes are alert and animated, exaggeratedly so; they seem to her like people on the o’vis, in those old Neon reels she used to watch, alone in her City apartment, dulled by voqua, as though life was difficult, problematic, then. Voqua. She hasn’t drunk alcohol since she crossed the border. Not since her father’s bodyguard – no.
Don’t think about that
. The thought of alcohol glitters. Perhaps it would make her feel something. Perhaps it would give her a purpose, even if the purpose were oblivion. All around her, people are moving.
Not dead yet
. Their concerns are now her concerns; like them, her focus must be to survive, but she will always be an intruder, not wanted here, and reliant on camouflage to avoid detection.

She walks the height of the tower, floor by floor, barely noticing the ache in her feet. She counts the remaining peng in her pocket. There is enough to get herself something to eat. Her stomach churns at the thought of food. She needs to wait, to spin the money out. What is she going to do now? She can’t go back to the Larssons. She has no credit, no belongings but the clothes she is wearing. She’s alone.

She keeps wandering until the stalls begin to shut down. Evening brings a different crowd, one intent on liquor and gaming. She watches as objects are exchanged, City things, petty there but of value here, and realizes that what she is witnessing is the black market. In one hall there is a pit where huge rats are taken out of cages and set against one another. She can hear the scrabble of their claws and the shrill squeaking and she can see flecks of blood where their teeth sink into haunches and bellies. She stares, transfixed by the vicious struggle of the creatures. Bets are called, money changes hands. There are arguments. Heated words. A rat whimpers in a pool of blood.

She hasn’t been there long when a fight breaks out. She is too slow to spot what is coming, or to move; the first thing she knows is the weight of a woman crashing into her. She falls and lands awkwardly. All at once the hall is full of noise and limbs lashing out. She rolls out of the way just in time to avoid a boot in her ribs. The grey blur of a rat scurrying away. Through the commotion she senses eyes upon her.

Dizzy, overwhelmed, she goes outside and manages to sidle onto the waterbus without paying for a ticket. It’s getting late and she doesn’t know where to go. She stays up on deck and the western towers slip by in the dusk, barely lit, gargantuan and prophetic against the deepening sky. It’s cold, bitter, end-of-winter cold. The conductor calls the stops:
Ess-two-seven-four-west, ess-two-seven-five-west
. His voice is hoarse and thick with phlegm.
Ess-two-seven-six-west. Ess-two-seven-seven-west.

She sees the light from a fry-boat hatch parked at a tower decking, and it is only then that she remembers the kelp. She still has the kelp. All day the bag has been in her hand and somehow she has clung on to it, even during that fight. She scrambles to get off at the stop with the fry-boat, and approaches the vendor, resolute. The vendor is chatting with a customer. She waits for the man to notice her. When she has his attention, she taps her throat, which has become her sign for muteness, and holds the bag of kelp to the hatch. They haggle. The man says it is stale. She shakes her head and squeezes the bag.

She gets half the price she paid for it this morning, but it is peng in her pocket, and the vendor also gives her a bag of leftover weed squares and a few hot squid rings. The transaction brings a glow of pleasure to her cheeks. She holds on to it, telling herself over and over that this is a victory: her first in this hostile new world. She sits on the decking trying not to eat too quickly, feeling faint with the sudden influx of protein. But soon enough the dusk is swallowed into the night. The fry-boat packs up and drives off to another tower, and with its departure her elation fades.

She gazes up at the dilapidated tower. Washing hangs down from the windows, strung from lines, the clothing shapeless in the dark. Its owners are out or they have forgotten it or they are not coming back. She goes inside. There is no security on western towers. Further up, people are sitting in the stairwells, smoking manta, their eyes glazed and sated. She chooses a level with a bridge out so she can run if she has to and curls up, chilled and exhausted, in the stairwell. Now she can feel the deep ache in her feet and calves.

Slumped against the wall, she chases sleep half-heartedly, and through the night she senses other people coming and going. Drunks stagger back from the bridge, uncertain of their footing. There are other homeless, shuffling up and down the stairwells. She wakes from bad dreams, crying, her lips mouthing
I’m-sorry I’m-so-sorry
but no sound, still no sound. She wakes again to find hands on her body.

She lurches upright. Fingers slip from her pockets and the thief darts from her side, but she is too late. The peng she earned from the sale of the kelp is gone.

The thought comes and will not retreat.
He is dead
. He is dead because of her. Vikram is dead.
Not dead yet
. No, but he is. She wants to hit that stupid, drunk Teller, sink her teeth into the woman like a rat from the pit. The whirlpool advances. The floor opens up and she falls into the whirlpool, through all the floors of the tower above the surface and below it, where the ocean sucks you down, down, and the core of the earth opens up to swallow you whole. She stays like this, cheek to the filthy floor, listening to the low, atonal humming of the manta addicts, the restless footsteps up and down the tower, the crank of the lift. Flickering lights emit a static, intermittent burr. After a time it all becomes part of a single disconnected symphony, and her thoughts revolve in kind.

Dead.

Not dead yet.

Dead.

Not dead yet.

Vikram’s dead.

She keeps on the move. Sleeping in different towers, never quite in step with the daylight world. More than once she is woken by the pounding boots of skadi soldiers, and the other homeless get to their feet and they shift as one, a loose, amorphous mass, like a shoal ejected from their coral. One day a boy gives her a cigarette, and they smoke together companionably, in silence. Another day her hat is stolen while she rests. She becomes aware that there are striations even within this side of the city. There are towers where the homeless are permitted to sleep. There are other towers where the residents will kick you if you so much as park your buttocks on a step, and each day the residents go doggedly to their jobs at the plants or to queue for a western work party. There is talk of
the shanties
, clusters of boats roped together like a crust of scum over the sea, out near the unremembered quarters, on the very edge of the city. It’s a place even the homeless don’t want to go.

The days are spent walking, through the towers, over uneven raft racks and swaying, precarious bridges, where the sea glints invitingly below. Everywhere she goes its voice is with her, soft and sibilant. She remembers the horses of Axel’s hallucinations, and finds they have a plausibility now that they did not have before. Once or twice she thinks she glimpses them: a white flank, or the turn of a long head, its eye black and portentous.

At twilight she gathers with other homeless at the fry-boats to beg for scraps. At first the corrosive ache in her stomach is at the front of everything, and then it becomes a dullness, always present, but a mundane part of existence. Some days she is too tired to go anywhere and stays where she slept, breathing in the fumes of the manta addicts.

Her movements become furtive. Calculated. Scraps are not enough so she watches the food of others. Her first attempt at stealing is a disaster. As her fingers close around the food she hears a shout. Faces turn towards her. She drops the food and sprints away over the raft rack, loses her balance and falls into the water. Her heart jerks. The cold is terrifying. She loses her glasses, sees them float for a precious second and thrashes about, trying to grab them. Too late. She drags herself spluttering onto the raft rack. A hand comes down upon her throat.

‘Try stealing from me or mine again and I’ll fucking cut you.’

The man pushes her back under the water and holds her there until she thinks her lungs will burst. Just as her vision starts to go black, he lifts her out, and up, to her feet. She sees his face, scarred, and his neck, bare, encircled with a tattoo of interlinking chains. Then he launches her from the raft rack. She crashes back, goes under, fights for the surface. The man is striding away. As she struggles back to the rack, she can hear the jeers of onlookers. She grabs the rack, gasping for breath, her heart still racing. A kid ducks close to her and mutters, what the hell you thinking trying to steal from a Roch, are you insane, and she thinks:
I can’t afford this. I have to learn faster.

The second time she is more careful. She watches the western kids. How they do it. The way they watch. She learns to recognize the moment they identify a target. Then the slow nonchalance of the approach and the dash away, quick as sin. She copies their movements. She has always been a good mimic. The first success is a dull thrill. Squid rings. Only a quarter-full bag but she doesn’t care, it’s food, it’s hers. She took it. She stuffs the rings into her mouth, an explosion of fat and salt, aware if she doesn’t dispose of the evidence fast enough someone else will take her prize. She turns the paper inside out and licks out every scrap of grease.

Here and there she catches glimpses of herself. In water, in smeared glass, thin slivers, an eye, a limb, a half of her mouth. Her face, at once familiar and unfamiliar, has become her greatest hindrance. She maintains a mask of grease and grime. When her hair starts to grow out, she steals another hat.

Inevitably she finds herself drawn to the border. She watches from the rails of waterbuses and the precarious ledges of bridges. From raft racks and deckings and public balconies where children stare and point at the spectacle below. The angle is different but the view is the same. The conical towers in their emerald and silver casings. Birds drifting in slow spirals above and about their peaks. Sometimes lone pairs, sometimes a flock in sudden inexplicable ascent, shrieking and clouding the sky with their beating wings. She used to be afraid of them. She is not afraid any more, not of birds. Along the length of the border waterway, the netting lifts from the waves as though suspended from invisible hands.

There was a girl over there. A girl who threw parties and sketched gardens and her words were like a charm, even when they were about nothing of importance, which was most of the time. That girl ceased to be real in the moment the City abandoned her, the moment the Rechnovs, her family, gave the order to fire upon the tower, knowing she was trapped inside.

Adelaide, run.

What he told her. She is running now, though there are times when she believes it would be easier to let go. Slip through the gap in a bridge. Lie on a raft rack in the night and ask the stars to freeze her with their great cold hearts.

People look at her in a way she has never experienced before. She is painfully aware of the softness of her own body, of never having learned to defend herself, of being frightened. One night a fight breaks out in the corridor where she is sleeping. She sees a westerner break a bottle against the step and stab the jagged end into the face of another.

Glass shards are strewn across the floor, spotted with blood. The fight blunders away down the hallway, accompanied by crashes and screams and someone shrieking.
What have you done, look at his eye, holy fuck look at it!
She surveys the glass. The glimpses of red. She lets her eyes travel over it until she sees what she is looking for. An edge piece, a long, narrow triangle shaped like a blade. When no one is looking she darts forwards and takes it. Slips the glass into the pocket of her coat. Walks quickly away.

Later, she uses a wall to grind the edges smooth at one end and wraps around scraps of cloth to make a grip. She brings the sharp end of the glass to her face, trying to find the courage to make a cut, rendering her face unrecognizable forever. The point of the glass presses into her cheek. Her hand shakes. She tries to make herself drag the glass down but she can’t do it. When she lowers her hand her cheeks are wet with tears.

At night she keeps her fingers locked around the glass and doesn’t let go until morning.