The New Girl (Downside) (8 page)

‘Just that if a vacancy comes up, perhaps you might consider being part of our family.’

‘You serious?’

‘Always, Mrs Marais. Now. I hope you don’t mind me saying, but you’re looking peaky. Why don’t you go home, have a hot bath. We can do without you for one day.’

Actually, Tara thinks, maybe that isn’t a bad idea. After all, she’s got a hell of a lot of issues to process, including Clara’s left-field offer. The school may have a strange
method of naming and shaming, but so what? Most of the schools she’s taught at over the years have had some kind of hokey philosophy underpinning them. It’s the kids that matter, and
surely they need someone like her – level-headed, concerned for their welfare – to balance out the other, more... disturbing elements? And if she went back to teaching she could make
her Reborns on the side. Hell, maybe she wouldn’t have to sell them at all. If she gets her work permit and permanent residency, that is. Which isn’t entirely out of her grasp now, is
it?

She pulls out her phone, opens the drafts folder and flicks through to her unsent

message.

Before she loses her nerve she presses the send button.

There’s a response almost immediately:

It’s only when she’s climbing into her car that she realises her headache has gone.

She dumps her bag on the kitchen counter, switches on the oven – she’ll need it at the right temperature to set the paint – then flies up the stairs.

Giving Baby Paul’s drawer only a cursory glance, she clicks on the computer and prints out the photograph. Now that it’s in hard copy, it looks much clearer – she should have
done this last night. She pins it above her work table, traces the lines of the baby’s lips and eyes with her finger. If it is photoshopped, it’s a brilliant job. Apart from the thread
sealing its eyes and mouth, the baby’s features are regular and even, he or she looks perfect – almost alive. She’ll have to decide on a sex; she can’t tell from the pic if
it’s male or female. It’s so generic, in fact, that Tara realises that she could, quite easily, get away with using the Baby Gabby head she’s currently working on, with only a few
minor adjustments. Batiss’s baby’s skin is a delicate pinky-white, soft blue veins showing through the skin of the forehead, and she finds herself automatically working out which
pigments she’ll need to mix to overlay that shade on Baby Gabby’s darker skin tone. Its skull is only slightly dusted with hair, so she won’t have to spend weeks rooting its
scalp, and she can use her new nasal drill to widen Baby Gabby’s nostrils to make them match Batiss’s baby. She tries not to think about how she’ll feel when it comes to adding
those all-important finishing touches; for now she has enough to get on with.

Her phone beeps again. She snatches it out of her bag. It isn’t Batiss this time, but Stephen.

is all the message
says.

Yeah right, she thinks. Talk about what? Why he lets his son treat her like shit? Why he won’t even broach the subject of her getting pregnant again? Or perhaps why it is he no longer
races home after work, but seems to slink in later and later each day? Then it hits her. Could Martin have told him about the slap? Is that what he wants to discuss? And if Martin’s told
Stephen, isn’t it likely he would have also told Olivia?

She deletes the message without replying, and feverishly unwraps her new batch of Genesis paints. She doesn’t want to think about Martin, about Stephen, about anything except the baby in
front of her.

She screams through the school gates, tyres squealing. She’s been so lost in her work that the afternoon slid away from her – she’s over twenty minutes late
to pick Martin up from his Encounters group.

She races into the parking area, sees him waiting alone in the gloom next to the ‘Differently Abled’ sign, steels herself for the usual barrage of snide comments and a marathon sulk
session.

She pulls up next to him, winds down her window. ‘Sorry I’m late.’

Martin shrugs.

That’s odd. It’s not like him to pass up an opportunity to give her a hard time. ‘You okay, Martin? How was your meeting?’

Martin mumbles something under his breath that could be anything from ‘go fuck yourself’ to ‘great, thanks for asking’.

‘Listen, Martin,’ Tara says, before he climbs into the back seat. ‘About what happened this morning. I just want you to know, it was all my fault. I shouldn’t have raised
a hand to you.’

She’s expecting him to say, ‘No you shouldn’t, you stupid bitch,’ or words to that effect, but he just shrugs again.

‘We’ll talk about it when your father gets home this evening. We’ll sort it out.’

‘I don’t need to talk about it,’ Martin says.

‘Your father should know what happened, Martin. Unless... unless you’ve already told him. Have you?’

He yawns. ‘No. Why would I?’

Tara experiences a twinge of guilt at the relief she feels. Is it possible that this could be buried? It’s not as if she’s been abusing the kid, is it? It was just a moment of
madness. Could’ve happened to anyone. And no one could say she wasn’t provoked.

He straps himself in without having to be asked, yawns again and starts humming something under his breath (Tara hopes it isn’t ‘I Just Wanna be a Sheep’). She’s so used
to seeing him continually fiddling with his iPhone that it’s disconcerting to see him without it. And does he look paler than usual? He rests his head against the window, a faraway look in
his eyes.

‘Martin?’ she asks, twisting round in her seat. ‘Are you feeling okay?’

He stops humming, looks straight into her eyes and says, ‘Yes, thank you, Tara. I’m just primo.’

Penter pokes her head around the gate and looks at the road outside the precinct. There’s a constant stream of the machines going by and from the documents she’s
seen, there are even more on other roads. She’s amazed that the browns don’t all just smash into each other and terminate themselves. Despite herself, she feels another prickle of
admiration for their organisational skills. To live at such speed and not cannon into one another is a feat in itself.

She shuts the gate and retreats into the quiet precinct. If she were here longer, or if her role were different, she’d need to venture out, but as it is, she has work to do in the precinct
and there’s no reason to brave the rushing machines.

On her way back to the house, she looks up into the bewildering sky and stops to feel the sun’s warmth. It’s like when she was a halfpint and would move too close to the heat vents.
She knew it was hazardous, was parching her skin, but at the same time the warmth in her muscles and bones was irresistible. She’d heard about the sky and the sun, of course – everyone
has; everyone dreams of them secretly when they’re due for a renewal, she’s sure – and the Ministry warned her just how uncanny they were, but nothing could have prepared her. The
thin air out here makes her feel like she’s floating and about to evaporate away. The sun is like a prophetic floodlight, like all the faulty wiring in the world coiled into a single, massive
point of danger. The sky is like all the garment dye ever produced and she doesn’t know how it could have been manufactured, how they could have made it so big, how they could have used so
much material, and how it still stays floating above them.

She detours through the garden and marvels at the opulence of green, the acrid breath of the trees’ leaves. She plucks a sappy leaf off a berry tree, consciously suppressing her guilt at
the desecration. Up here, there’s an abundance of plant life, leaves are left to coat the ground and rot into the soil. Fruit is left to fall and is given over to the insects and the birds
– those creatures that swirl in the ether like solid breath. She looks at the living green tissue in her hand and a drop of white sap leaks out of the end of the stem and spills onto her
palm.

Some of the trees are higher than the central victual court at the Mall, higher than the prefab palms in the piazza at the Apartments. And all around her, the birds are singing songs that make
her chest ache. Animals that fly! With their colours, they swoop in the open air and they soar off into the nothingness above. Everything lives exposed out here, stretching and growing and moving
and moulting.

The tame brown has been tending a patch where vegetables grow on living wood. Even the soil, something she knows well, smells different here. No matter how well they prepared her, it’s
overwhelming.

She walks upstairs to the television room, finds Father on the couch, scanning through a sheaf of mimeographs from the evening session. She watches him for a moment without him
noticing. She’d never met him before she was assigned, doesn’t even know his real name, just as he is unaware of hers – up here, he is simply Father, and she is simply Mother. He
finally looks up, nods distractedly at her.

‘Was it a good session?’ she asks from the doorway.

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Plenty of viable. The Ministry’s prognosis was sound.’

Realising that he is busy, Penter turns to leave.

‘Mother?’ he says.

‘Yes, Father?’

‘The meal you prepared. “Breakfast”. It was... interesting. In the sense of unpleasant. I think you could make some more effort to prepare a meal that allows the family to
remember the comforts of home.’

The bubble of good feeling she was nurturing is rudely burst and she’s stung. ‘May I remind you that I am a Deputy Node Liaison for the Ministry of Upside Relations, and not a
victual servant?’ A terrified thrill runs through her. Her disregard is a direct result of the thought-seep. Despite her status, Father is the team leader on this project and she knows she
would never address a team leader in these terms back home.

‘May I remind you,’ Father says, still smiling coolly from the couch, ‘that here you are Mother?’

Penter walks further into the room. ‘My name is Penter Ulliel,’ she enunciates. When she embarked on her path, she was assigned the name by the senior Node Ministry Commissioner
himself. He told her that she was named after an auto-loading haematology analysis device which he had admired on a visit to the Wards, but after he was depreciated, she realised that he had
mispronounced the word, so now she has a unique name. Despite its idiosyncrasy – or perhaps even because of it – she’s proud of her name.

But, she realises, this is another extraneous conceit that won’t worry her when the assignment is finished and she goes back home and has her penetration renewed. She won’t be
arguing with her superiors either. By the look on Father’s face, he’s enjoying the unusual exchange as much as she is.

‘That notwithstanding, Mother,’ he says, ‘your organisational role in this project team is to behave as the female head of an upside nucleated family does, which the research
has clearly shown’ – he indicates the television set in the corner – ‘definitively includes victual preparation. Nourishing, comforting victual preparation.’

She shakes her head but she knows he’s right. Still tingling with the thrill of disregard, she goes downstairs to find the tame brown and send him out for some proper ingredients.

‘You wanted to see me, Mr Duvenhage?’ Ryan says. As expected, he managed to sneak in while everyone was religiously at assembly and drop Duvenhage’s flash
drive on the floor under the desk, as if he’d just mislaid it himself. He looks forward to seeing the man backtrack. ‘My landlady said you came to visit last night, but I was out. She
said you didn’t leave your name but described you, and, well... you’re the only person I know who—’

‘Yes, yes, okay, Mr Devlin.’ Duvenhage’s standing in the doorway, clutching the doorknob. His skin is as pallid as ever, but even more sweaty. ‘I, uh, I have a
meeting.’

‘I just wanted to check, sir. Was it you? How can I help, sir?’

‘Uh, yes, it was...’ Duvenhage straightens, draws the door shut behind him and steps towards Ryan in the corridor. ‘Yes, Mr Devlin, it was me. I thought I had lost something
and I wanted to ask you about it. It was something very important.’

‘What was it? I can tell you if I’ve seen it. It must have been very important if you—’

‘Thing is, I found it. So there’s no problem. But frankly, yes, I suspected you. Locking my office door like you did yesterday. Really, that’s suspicious behaviour. An
important part of being seen as honest is behaving, at every moment, in an honest fashion.’

‘I’m not sure what—’

‘It’s fine. I need to go now. My associate is expecting me.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Ryan says to Duvenhage’s back. ‘I’m glad it’s all sorted out, sir.’ He sighs with relief as Duvenhage goes and notices Sybil Fontein staring
at him. He smiles at her and heads out of the administration wing and towards the staff room, where he should be helping Thulani clean.

It’s just after one, the last teaching session of the day, and most of the teachers are in class. Even though this room is a hundred years newer than the one in his high school, Ryan still
gets the same feeling from it. When he went to school, kids were not allowed near the staff room unless they were handing in punishment work or doing a chore for a teacher; neither was desirable.
And despite the fact that this staff room is only eight years old, it still somehow has the same outdated green coffee mugs on a tray and scale-encrusted stainless-steel urn bubbling away for
nobody, the same bland dove-grey vertical blinds that always get snagged up and droop from their cheap and broken plastic catches, the same square, butt-indented chairs covered in sticky green
polyvinyl that haven’t been properly washed in all their days. Ryan’s fucked if he’s going to scrub between those seams.

‘Hey, Ryan,’ Thulani says, smiling. Ryan doesn’t know how the man can be so cheerful. He’s been here since the school was established, and before that he was a night
janitor at a shopping mall. Cleaning up after other people all his life. But he’s always smiling from his grey-peppercorn-dusted cheeks and has a different loud shirt for every day of the
week which he makes sure shows from between the buttons of his overall. Is that all happiness takes? Just a small, quiet assertion of individuality?