The Iron Woman (6 page)

The interviewer was a beautiful young lady famously known as Primula. Her hair swung about, long, blonde, shining, thick. Her made-up face dazzled like a tropical fish. She was known to be fearless. Politicians and celebrities were afraid of her questions. The crowd stared, seeing her so close and alive. Every second, more people collected.

She had listened while three men from the factory had given their descriptions of what was happening. And the Manager, Mr Wells, had promised to speak to her later. She felt more and more excited but also more and more uneasy. What exactly was this terrible scream they were all talking about? So far she had managed to avoid being touched by anybody who carried it. But the more she heard about it the less she liked it.

‘Here they are now,’ cried the Accounts Clerk, who had been describing to her how, the night before, when he got home, his wife had met him with a kiss – and fainted. And how his little two-year-old son had grabbed at his legs, then fallen screaming to the floor, and then had gone on screaming, because every time his father touched him to comfort him the roar of creatures’ screeches and wails had blasted the child again. And how it had got worse when his wife recovered. The first thing she did was to pick up the screaming child, to comfort it, and then, of course, they both got it again – he from her and she from him. They had all become scream batteries. It was absolutely horrible. And other people were the same.

Something had to be done about it.

Listening to this, all Primula could think about was – what was going to happen to her if she too became a scream battery. Her famous baby was only two months old. And her husband was a doctor, touching people all day long. It did not bear thinking about. Television had never shown anything like this, but she wished she’d never come near the place. How was she going to get out of it?

And now here were the two who began it all. Just a pale little girl and a funny gawky boy. Nevertheless, probably the scream-power in them was terrific. Primula watched them warily as they came nearer. But Lucy and
Hogarth were just as wary of Primula. Her red lips stretched like sponge rubber when she smiled. They felt like woodland wild animals when her fine, rich perfume reached them.

They had made up their minds what to say. No
matter
what questions they were asked, they were going to tell the TV cameras just what the factory was doing – dumping poisons not only into this river but all over the land, and importing poisonous wastes from other countries to dump somewhere, all ending up in the living creatures of the rivers, the land and the sea. No matter what this tall, glittering insect of a lady was going to ask them, that’s what they were going to tell her camera.

And those people with their tape recorders from radio, and those journalists from newspapers, all
crowding
to listen – that’s what they were going to get. And, Lucy had decided, at some point she was going to grab Primula’s arm and give her the full scream.

Primula was already introducing them to the camera. ‘What are your names?’ she asked, in her famous voice, and her sound recorder held his furry microphone near their faces.

Lucy began to speak. She didn’t give her name. She knew she had to say everything the Iron Woman wanted her to say. She kept thinking of all those creatures – all those wide-stretched mouths and dreadful eyes. And those creatures in the fiery tunnel of light. Hogarth
stood amazed at the stream of words that poured so fiercely from his new friend.

Primula tried to get in a question. ‘But tell us about those strange screams.’

Lucy simply ignored her, and at last Primula let her go on. After all, it was quite a sight, watching this little girl in such a fury. And it would all make sense in a minute, when they got to the scream.

But as she spoke, Lucy had the strangest feeling. She felt as if nobody believed her. It needed something more. Primula was listening, but with a smile on her face. She frowned a little, but mainly she was smiling. Lucy fixed her eyes on that blue sleeve, just above the elbow, and edged a little closer. At that moment a man came pushing through the crowd.

It was the Company Secretary, the man who had helped the Manager and who had grabbed Hogarth. He looked extremely angry and he was shouting.

‘Excuse me, I think you may be talking to the wrong people –’

Lucy stopped, and Primula turned towards the new voice. As she did so, her eyes widened. The man’s eyes had widened too. In fact, they had become perfectly round. As they watched, his face went dark and his mouth, opening and closing, became enormous. Then he fell to the ground at Primula’s feet. Everybody stepped back as he writhed there, on the concrete, like a
gigantic eel. At the same time, everybody saw him slither out through his collar. He actually had become a giant eel! His trousers and jacket lay flat and crumpled. A
six-foot
-long eel, as thick as a man’s neck, lay squirming, knotting and unknotting, flailing its head this way and that, snapping its jaws which were the size of an Alsatian dog’s – and truly were very like an Alsatian dog’s.

Right there, in front of their eyes, the Company Secretary had become a giant eel.

Primula let out a tiny choking cry and collapsed. Her cameraman could not believe his luck. His camera zoomed in on her carefully painted face, with its bluish eyelids closed as if asleep, her hair spread out on the rough old concrete. From there it panned to the
gnashing
, glaring face of the great eel, only a yard from her. The newsmen’s cameras blazed. One of the journalists held a microphone close to the pointed snout.

‘Can you tell us what it feels like –’ he began, in that half-shouting, jerky voice used by interviewers, ‘– aaaaaaaaagh!’ The eel had clamped its jaws over both the microphone and his hand. He tore his bleeding hand free and staggered backwards. Others pulled Primula to her feet and she began to stare around woozily.

Now the eel, as if it knew exactly what it was doing, writhed on to the grass and away like a snake towards the river. Its tail flipped in the air as it went in.

The whole thing had taken barely a minute. All the
journalists began to jabber at each other. Primula had suddenly recovered and was yelling at her cameraman: ‘Did you get any footage?’

The cameraman was busy filming the flat,
forlorn-looking
suit of clothes lying there. He held a long
closeup
on the empty shoes, one with a fancy red and yellow patterned sock still draped emptily over its side.

‘Incredible!’ came the shouts. ‘Unbelievable! What’s going on in this town?’

Lucy and Hogarth watched it all without a word. They were as astounded as everybody else. But now Lucy suddenly shouted:

‘Look what’s coming!’

While all this had been going on, the Manager, Mr Wells, had been holding a meeting with the owners and manager of an international firm called Global Cleanup. This firm did nothing but transport poisonous wastes from one country to another. Whoever had a problem getting rid of their wastes, Global Cleanup stepped in and did the job. They found all kinds of ways of
making
the stuff disappear. Some they dumped in far-off countries, where nobody protested. Some they dumped in the sea. Some they dumped in rubbish dumps. Some down old mine shafts. Some in large holes under fields which they simply dug wherever they could persuade a farmer to let them. And some they burned.

Now they were signing an agreement with Mr Wells. They would pay him £1 per tonne if he would get rid of one million tonnes of special chemical poisonous waste. A million tonnes!

They were sitting round his desk. He had just signed the agreement and was now staring at the cheque. It was the first time he had ever seen £1,000,000 written on a cheque. A waitress was pouring drinks. After that, it would be lunch in the boardroom. Mr Wells raised his glass of malt whisky.

‘Here’s to Global Cleanup,’ he cried.

‘To Global Cleanup!’ they chanted in chorus, and with big smiles raised their glasses towards Mr Wells. Then they all put back their heads and drank.

But as they lowered their glasses and squashed the fiery drink over the back of their tongues, the four men from Global Cleanup saw an impossible thing. They saw Mr Wells’s face go purplish, like a ripe fig. His glass tumbled and rolled over the table, and at the same time he too flopped forward, chest down over the cheque he had been admiring. Four chairs fell over backwards as the men scrambled to their feet. Was Mr Wells having a heart attack? Or a fit? No, this was no longer Mr Wells.

‘My God!’ cried the Global Cleanup Sales Chief. ‘It’s a catfish! And what a catfish!’

All four stared at the broad, blunt, purplish,
glistening
head sticking out of Mr Wells’s burst white collar.
They saw the tiny eyes, which looked like buttons of the same stuff as the skin. And they saw the tentacles writhing round its lips.

Then it lurched, with a ponderous, coiling fling, and there was the whole fish, still inside Mr Wells’s shirt and jacket, lying across the table. His trousers had fallen off, with his shoes and socks. It slammed its tail down hard and gaped two or three times.

One of the four panicked and ran straight at the wall which stopped him with a bang. Then he tried to climb the wall, bringing down a long picture of the factory on top of himself.  

At the same time, the other three became aware of screams, shouts, wild commotion in the offices along the corridor. The door clashed open and Mr Wells’s
secretary
ran in. She was escaping from something. She did not try to explain, she simply screamed. Beyond her, two big sea lions wrestled to get past each other, away down the corridor, bellowing: ‘Woink! Woink!’

Then the secretary saw the catfish and with a wail
collapsed
on the floor, where she huddled sobbing.

The four men dashed out but then halted at the door. Screaming and sobbing secretaries ran in all directions. Junior executives with staring eyes and strange, wild spiky hair shouted at each other. One embraced a writhing sturgeon the size of himself. He was a man with a cool head:

‘This is Mr Plotetzky!’ he cried. ‘We have to get him to water. Help me get him to the river.’

A first-class idea! The four men from Global Cleanup grasped what was happening. ‘Explanations later!’ cried one. ‘Get Mr Wells to the river.’ They crushed back through the office doorway as a knot of enormous eels burst out from one office and rolled down the corridor, lashing tails.

All over the building, staff were collapsing on to
flippers
and thrashing about, knocking over waste-paper baskets and filing cabinets.

‘To the river!’ was the cry. ‘Janice! Daphne! Grab a tail will you!’ ‘Jane, can you manage?’ ‘Help, Joanna, help!’

Pandemonium is a poor word for that uproar and confusion. Glass shattered from doors, office furniture staggered and toppled, as slim secretaries struggled with man-sized barbels, carp, salmon and pike, tripping over the litter of empty shoes and tangling, empty trousers. The seals, giant frogs, colossal water beetles helped themselves, and so did the big eels.

The factory’s entire office personnel lurched, flopped, thumped and slithered towards the exit. ‘To the river! To the river!’

Like a mob bursting on to the pitch at the end of a football game, they burst out through the front of the office block.

This was what Lucy had seen when she pointed.

‘I can’t believe it!’ screeched Primula. ‘Camera! Camera!’ And she began to yell and pant into her
microphone
as the mixed and struggling mass of giant fish and people and humping water beasts surged towards them.

That was only the first wave. The second wave was much bigger – the factory workers. Here they came, the same mixture – men reeling under the weight of huge fish that had been their workmates.

The river boiled as the heavy bodies flung themselves in, or slithered in, churning and swirling. The men who carried their friends did not escape. As soon as they had dumped their fishy fellow workers into the river, they simply fell in after them, changing in mid-air. The river was a heaving mass of clothes and great dorsal fins as the fish squirmed free.

‘Oh, get them as they change! Oh, get them half-man half-fish,’ screamed Primula to her cameraman. ‘Get their faces at the actual moment of change – what a
stupendous
sight! Never before! It’s a first! Look at that! Get that horror – oh, gorgeous! Get that terror in their eyes! Wonderful!’

But now it was beginning to dawn on those who watched all this that only the men had changed. Not a single woman had changed. The film crew, too, and the journalists, were all still as they had been, staring down at the dark, beaky faces, the great hard mouths opening
and closing, the round astonished eyes. The giant water creatures could not come out. Nor did they want to go away. They bobbed at the river’s edge, along the
concrete
of the riverside walkway, lifting their heads out and even resting their chins on the concrete, gaping silently, sometimes gasping a dry croak, then rolling under to breathe, while the secretaries and canteen women and aroma chemists gazed down, and the scaly long bodies swirled and heaped in the foamy suds of the river.

‘If that water hurt the Iron Woman’s eyes,’ said Lucy, ‘think what it’s doing to theirs, and to their gills.’

Even as she said that, a great catfish hurled itself into the air, shaking its head. Then a giant barbel. Then a sturgeon. Soon there were three or four fish in the air at any moment, shaking their gills and contorting their bodies, while eels rocketed out of the water and speared under again.

‘They’re trying to get away from the water,’ said Hogarth. ‘But they can’t.’

‘The river water’s poisoning them,’ cried Lucy to Primula. ‘You know what I told you. Look at them. It’s poisoning them.’

‘She’s right,’ cried Primula, ‘it’s a river of tortures! Just look at them. Get that!’

Her cameraman needed no telling. The news cameras too were flashing non-stop. And the great bewildered
fish reared up and plunged under, or lolled their heads along the concrete edge for as long as they could
manage
before they had to duck back under to breathe the poisonous water, unable to close their lidless eyes in the stinging chemicals.