The Courier's New Bicycle

You can change the story. You are the story.

Jeanette Winterson

The.PowerBook

Cover

Dedication

Epigraph

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Acknowledgments

About the Author

Copyright

‘Eve's Delight?'

The shop assistant on door duty with the atomiser sprays indiscriminately. It's too late to veer; I hunch over the bike's handlebars straight through the cloud of cologne.

‘Gives your hormones a lift,' the woman spruiks.

Yeah, right. Up my nose and down my throat. Makes me cough. I swear and dodge a pedestrian, then cycle off the pavement to snug in beside a slow-moving tram.

I don't want a dose of Eve's Delight. I already have another woman's scent on my skin. Last night Inez faced me, too close for conversation. ‘So kiss me,' she said. I responded as only the unpractised do: immediately.

I lean for a left turn, and nearly collect a scooter rider. We both make rude signs. Scooters are the latest scourge of the road now the petrol guzzlers are gone, banned from Melbourne's CBD. These ecotech replacements are zippy, erratic and ridden by thrillseekers aged nine to ninety.

Northeast of the city grid, Dingle Street is a crowded Fitzroy thoroughfare lined with dilapidated shopfronts separated by the occasional service alley. Here there are more scooters and some motorised three-wheelers towing small covered buggies. Halfway along, the Good Bean café squeezes between an Asian grocery and a laundromat. On a busy day when all the washer-dryers are going full bore, the café vibrates. It can give a gender transgressive a bit of a thrill if they're sitting astride their barstool right.

I wheel the bike through the door and rest it against the inside glass, nodding to the proprietor, who lifts a finger in reply. Sitting at the end of the bar, his hand permanently attached to a demitasse of the Good Bean, Frank oversees all comings and goings, his boxer-faced features set in a permanent droop. He's one of the few I trust with my most treasured possession: an aging road racer, sought after by thieves in a city nobbled by fuel shortages.

The café is narrow but deep-backed. The barista's shiny work station and metal counter take up one wall, a line of formica tables the other, lampshades hanging low over the tables like card players' lights.

‘Salisbury!'

Gail strides my way in executive black, her broad frame filling the space. Closer, a square jaw amplifies lush, colour-delineated lips below a patrician nose and plucked brows. The brows rise, amused, taking in my helmet-mussed hair and cycle jacket moulting its reflector strips. Her voice remodulates to speak of private things in public places.

‘So glad you could extricate yourself from Inez's charms.'

I wince, feel the blush. News travels to my boss faster than telepathy.

Bussing my cheek, she murmurs, ‘I have a little job for you.'

She leads me to a table and gestures me to sit. Frank brings our usual over himself.

‘New Guinea blend,' he says gruffly then dabs the edge of Gail's saucer with his tea towel, betraying the soft spot I've long suspected he has for her.

She sips appreciatively. When Frank leaves, she says low-tone, ‘I need something delivered to Cutters Lane.'

That lane runs like a deep vein through a section of the city called the Red Quarter, an enclave of bordellos, surrogacy organisations and fertility doctors.

‘When?' I ask.

‘Tonight. And there's something else.'

Now we get to it. Gail sells fertility hormones — ‘kit', once legal, now banned — which makes me a midnight postie, a courier of secret packages … and sometimes, under sufferance, a snoop.

She frowns. ‘Word is there's a new player on the field. Not one of us, so we need to find out if it's one of them.'

She means a distributor of kit sourced from animals in the out-of-town hormone farms — a barbarous practice Gail has no truck with.

She waits for a café-goer to pass. ‘I've heard they're operating out of Fishermans Bend. If they're rookies, they'll
be easy to spot. Take a quick nose around the area tomorrow, starting with the old hormone factories at the end of Barrow Road. Nothing fancy, just casual daytime stuff. See what you can see.'

I sigh inwardly. I'm to scope out rookie players. And if they catch me looking?

I check sideways to the patrons seated at the bar, then back to where my coffee wisps a genetically altered steam. Frank buys his beans from an associate of Gail's, an importer of illegal GM produce.

‘I'm a bit short of friends,' I say casually to the cup.

‘Fixed.' She slides a hand into the breast pocket of her expensive suit then palms across two blister strips of tiny blue-filled capsules. ‘The ones with a yellow stripe are a new recipe,' she warns. ‘Come by my office later for your parcel.'

 

Outside, dusk smudges the air between buildings, the streetlights blinking on, coral pink. Under the halo of the closest, a Saturday prayer meeting is hands high for a miracle. Of course, there's really only one they're after these days. And with the current government's B2N — Back to Nature — laws prohibiting ‘unnatural practices', including gene therapy and hormone replacement, a miracle is all they have left to hope for.

The huddle comprises two men and three women in sackcloth penance shawls. I glide past, eyes front, the bike's chain ticking quietly around greased cogs. ‘Good luck,' I murmur.

Further down the street I pass another lot. Dusk always brings them out like moths.

I turn the corner and push in among a slow line of solar-electric vehicles, the streets no less congested but strangely quiet since the phasing out of the old engines. Personally, I prefer leg power. Always have. But I never intended a life of skulking in the city's alleyways, one foot on the pedal, ready to bolt.

No one could have predicted what the flu pandemic ten years ago would bring, the vaccine dispensed Australia-wide messing badly with human endocrinology. The effects of endocrine disruption from everyday chemicals had been creeping up for decades. The vaccine, cut with an untried adjuvant to make it go further, was simply one straw too many, pushing what were already primed physiologies into auto-immune overdrive. As fertility plummeted, people scrambled for restoratives like adulterers for clothes, and entrepreneurs like Gail positioned themselves to exploit the opportunity. Her legitimate hormone-distribution business was forced underground when, five years later, Nation First won the elections and closed down all surrogacy organisations, then told the public to cast aside the Devil's help, place their trust in God and pray for the return of their fertility.

A tram clangs a warning up ahead, its front light a bright star below the umber-streaked sky. With Gail not expecting me until eleven, I head first for home.

My flat is in an unrenovated row of terraces in Fitzroy, opposite an overflowing public housing high-rise. A creaky
old wattle provides shelter at the front, while in the enclosed courtyard accessed from the laneway at the back a pebble path meanders like a dry creek bed between stands of native grass and bonsai dunes — xeriscapes
de rigueur
now due to the permanent water restrictions. Call me ungrateful, but I pine for English green: lush rolling lawns and a few water-sucking willows.

I stash the bike temporarily beneath paint-peeled eaves, put the key in the back door and push on old wood. Hinges squeal complaint; I leave them that way deliberately. My pauper's version of an intruder alarm.

Nitro waits for me on his kitty couch, his fur glowing a muted purple the equivalent of six watts. Eight years ago I picked him from a mewling litter a variety of colours, ears tagged by wattage, shortly before glow-in-the-dark enhancements — animal or otherwise — were banned. Now he's one of the few left in the wake of the Unnatural Practices Act, and wanted by the Animal Patrol.

He pads across the carpet to rub against my leg. I always expect some of the colour to come off, but happily it stays with the cat. I lean down to stroke along a flank, the thick fur a reassuring plush between my fingers. He mews plaintively and leads me to the galley kitchen. I splash some formula into his Benjamin Bunny saucer and watch him lap avidly, purring as he drinks, a miracle of feline survival.

I plug in sitting on a corner of the bath. A blue — unstriped — capsule goes in the dispenser then it's a quick subdermal shot, the portable unit delivering its contents
into the soft tissues and lymphatics using electricity as the carrier. A tingling sensation in my forearm and it's done.

Gail calls the stuff ‘Courier's Friend', a special mix she distributes to her delivery team. It's an EPO concoction with a few feel-good extras thrown in. She likes to keep her messengers efficient and happy. As for me, I just like the occasional buzz.

I lean against the cool of the wall and watch a black juggernaut of cloud edge into frame through my bathroom window, its underbelly aflame. The effects of the capsule will trickle into my system across the next few hours, peaking around midnight. I return the dispenser to its niche behind a sliding section of bathroom wall, flush the empty capsule and step into the shower.

As I change into warmer cycling clothes, Nitro kneads the discards on the bedroom floor and I get a frisson of recollection. Here, less than twenty-four hours ago, Inez — my unrequited love interest of many months — undressed in front of me and led me to my bed.

I glance at the clock on the dresser. Time to fix myself some food before I go to Gail's. As for later … maybe I can persuade Inez back between the sheets.

 

My preferred route to Gail's office zigzags through back alleys into the old railway-workers' district of West Melbourne, its silent streets lined with ill-cared-for bungalows pressing ever closer to the earth. Here, windows are battened against the dark fingers of the night and fences
give way to inky pools of unlit parkland. A dilapidated chain-link fence looms on my left; behind it the cutting drops steeply onto railway lines and freight yards. I breathe hard, shoulders working as I lean over the bars and push, guilty that a last-minute flurry of salacious text messages initiated by Inez has delayed me.

Four blocks out from Gail's, a boy in a muscle shirt and commando pants is stubbing his boot repeatedly against factory brick. I ease past his self-absorbed vehemence. Fertility issues aside, puberty is a treacherous passage chock-full of confusion and inexplicable bouts of self-hate and rage. Added to it now are the frustrations of the B2N prohibitions and temperance laws. So should I stop and give him a little blue capsule from my emergency stash? Guess not.

I come up off the seat for the last rise, pushing into the toeholds, enjoying the burn in my muscles and the surge of kit in my system. My physiology, made for sport, earned me the tag ‘freak' at school; but now, when I choose to do it, that capacity combined with Gail's special recipes makes cycling lots of fun and me a useful employee, because in this job, bikes rule. I can get anywhere I want in the inner city, regardless of traffic regulations and curfews, and I can do it at speed.

Gail's business premises come into view: a two-storey warehouse occupying a prominent position on a corner, the Cute'n'Cuddly brand name writ large across the front. It's always been a source of amusement to me that my
decidedly un-cute and non-cuddly employer's day job is trucking soft toys — wombats and wallabies, echidnas and cockatoos — out to a market hungrier than ever for comfort.

Closer, industrial windows and candy-striped brick make a patchwork of darkly reflective surfaces. I type on the keypad at the deliveries entrance and the heavy steel gate clicks open. Inside the enclosed yard to my right is a row of plain white delivery trucks sitting under carport cover; left is the main building with a recessed workers entrance and a pair of matching roller doors. Of the latter, one gives access to the warehouse at ground level while the other leads into the basement, which is a storage area ostensibly, and where Gail's ‘alternative' business is conducted.

I lean the bike and press on the button that releases the catch for the door. Gail is waiting behind it in her office: the unmarked one with no windows that the Cute'n'Cuddly clientele never get to visit. There's no chair for visitors, no one else meant to be so comfortable as to want to sit in Gail's personal space — not even Gail it seems, who's perched on the edge of her desk, jabbing at the keys of a laptop.

She snicks the lid closed. ‘You're late.'

Never one to belabour a point, she goes to a filing cabinet, opens the top drawer and hands over the parcel for delivery to Cutters Lane. As usual, it's neatly aesthetic and understated: brown paper wrapped with string. I wonder
which of the ‘cuddly' options tucked inside has been chosen to be the Trojan horse. A zip-up bilby, perhaps, or a chirruping galah?

‘Number 137. Knock & drop,' she says, and shepherds me out the door.

 

The Red Quarter carefully minds its own business in a mid sector of Melbourne's CBD, its network of streets and alleyways home to a trade made perpetual pariah, each glowy pink entrance protected by a security grille and intercom.

This part of town is run by the Bordello Workers Union, a powerful cabal of madams who joined forces to buy up the real estate vacated during the flu pandemic, then successfully muscled out the local mafia and roving street pimps. The madams also took on the role of brokers for those working in the publicly disbanded surrogacy network after its members were ‘outed' as Jezebels by Nation First and hounded mercilessly by the prayer groups. Any still prepared to meet the ongoing demand end up living here for their protection.

Mostly, those in the wider community partake of the services offered along Madams Row and leave the rest of the Red Quarter in peace, although occasionally a Neighbourhood Values Brigade gravitates further inside to bang on the iron grilles and shout of retribution. But even they don't venture down the numerous passages that have become home to an even more secret profession: the
fertility specialists and gene doctors plying their illegal trade on the ‘God-given' physiologies of their beleaguered clients.