White Queen (4 page)

Johnny wasn’t just a journalist, he was an engineer. He took things apart, he put things together, he actually handled the marvelous, vulnerable, magical “Blue Clay,” through nothing more than a skin of silky plastic. He would never be able to do that again. He was a risk even in normal life, because the QV killed humans too. Death would come, at the Diagnostics’ best estimate, within two or three years; after a brief plunge into premature dementia.

The infected space program personnel had vanished into Quarantine, and presumably died there. Johnny would have to live and die there too. Not many federal laws were still respected in the third decade of the twenty-first century: but that was one. Seimwa’s doctor—a human being, ironically for privacy and style—gave Johnny the hint that it would be a few hours before his foreign correspondent’s passport could be cancelled. Johnny just had time to get home and kiss goodbye… He’d taken flight, knowing that he was
not
infected, and understanding that the mitigation came from Seimwa, as did his punishment. The doctor wouldn’t have dropped that hint on his own initiative.

He could have disappeared, gone native. But Johnny meant to survive. Therefore he kept himself registered, did the things Notifiable Disease people were supposed to do in countries that did not quarantine: and continued to protest his innocence. He couldn’t work, he couldn’t even clean toilets: but he had a pension from the paper, delivered to him through the Embassy in whatever country he was in. He had contacts in long-haul travel who would still give him rides. These trips were hedged around with gruesome indignities but they provided some distraction. They permitted him to keep up his fantasy game, his imaginary treasure hunt.

Life was still awful, simply awful.

Johnny came home from L’Iceberg and lay on his cot staring up at Byron the Bulb, reviewing his horrible plight. And the moral of the story is—he thought—don’t tease the dinosaurs, kids. Doesn’t matter how decrepit those pea-brained bonepiles may seem. Their teeth just go on getting bigger.

Johnny’s hotel was called The Welcome Sight, a cheap doss, but tolerant and friendly. The room was cleanish (he swept it himself) and furnished with an iron cot, a three legged wardrobe, and an antique beatbox, The Welcome Sight’s version of en suite entertainment. Room service was covered by the resident sticking his head out of the door and yelling; there was a public phone and message-pad at the desk. In his private bathroom, a tiny closet, he was able to practice an ancient alchemy of coated-paper and light that produced reasonable still photos. On the beatbox he was able to record his notes, on recycled metallic tape. He kept his library in a rigid leather suitcase, bloomed with age and damp. In another life he had been a spendthrift book-collector. A chosen few from the surviving collection came everywhere with him. They were like diamonds, he told himself, sewed into a money belt. But to sell one of these would be truly desperate. It would put him well on the way to partytime under the Gromyko.

A ten centimeter skewbald cockroach crawled over his stomach, the rain rattled on murky plastic corrugations overhead. The back of the bathroom door was his photo gallery. It was a poor showing: mere glimpses of the mystery. Her eyes, a half-profile, her loose-limbed figure blurred and anonymous walking down the street. If that girl was what he thought she was, she might be Johnny’s ticket home. He should be excited. If another pro was interested, his fantasy might be real. In fact he didn’t know which depressed him most. Wilson’s presence in Fo, or her body.

“Robert—” The cockroach halted, directing its head towards the sound in a way that looked curiously purposeful. Johnny sat up, gathered a small plastic box from under his pillow and shooed his pet inside. A scuffed label on the lid said dimly ESaZRT…. The batch number that followed, Robert’s ID, had faded away.

“Problems. That ageing sex-kitten isn’t here for a detox.”

It was probably too late, but he stopped looking for the girl, and kept away from L’Iceberg. A few evenings later Braemar Wilson turned up at Mama’s, still dressed like an expensive tart. She must be in her forties, he supposed. Which was nothing these days, though Johnny’s grandparents would have called her middle-aged. However, that was hardly the point. Johnny just detested the kind of female executive Wilson epitomized. The equation of whorishness and power, the way she oozed sex was an affront. To Izzy, to any decent woman trying to live with dignity in a man’s world. He pretended total indifference. She ended up heading off with David Mungea and his friends, and Johnny had to endure David’s congratulations next morning.

“So, you’ve found yourself an African woman this time.”

Johnny was bemused. “She’s British.”

David laughed delightedly. “We’ve all been British, it’s an occupational hazard for my generation. Your friend was born in Kenya: Afrasian mother, she belongs to us. You lucky fellow. She spent the whole night asking questions about you.”

Johnny took sour pleasure in imagining what Ms. Wetlips Wilson would look like now if she’d stayed in Africa. In fact she would look dead. Not many middle-aged East African whores about, these days.

It had to happen.

He crept, ratlike, into The Planter’s, devoured by curiosity after days of lurking in his room. “Oye!” cried the barman.
“La jolie-laide!
She was here, Johnny. She left you a message!”

He drank his beer standing, with nervous speed: remembered too late that he couldn’t afford another and tried to hang on to the dregs. The barman whipped the glass away with slickly gloved hands and thrust it into the superheat cabinet. Johnny carried the scrap of printout to an island. The screen was running a new Korean animation feature about ’04. He stared at his treasure in dismay. He piled prawn crackers from the cocktail-tray into a fantasy condo, and read the message again.

“I must see you. I’ll be at the Devereux fort at midnight, tonight and every night until you’re there. Please be there.”

No address, no signature. Idiomatic English. She just came up to the bar and wrote it: as if she’d been stood up by her boyfriend.
Hey, you, you know who you are. Where were you?

He didn’t know what to do.

The barman appeared and laid another beer.

“Who ordered this?”

The man grinned broadly. “Your
other
girl, Johnny. You can stay a while, if she paying.”

But don’t breathe on anything with a processor in it.

Ms. Wilson came down the steps from the hotel, in a mulberry colored sheath of clinging and fluid bodywrap. He seriously wondered why she’d hauled these outfits to darkest Africa, if not for the sole purpose of making his life a misery. She must have suborned the barstaff, unless she had fixed her room system to trawl the hotel’s external. CCTV for something that looked like Johnny Guglioli. Which wasn’t unlikely. It was the sort of thing people used to do all the time, in the lost world. She came over slowly, giving him the chance to walk away. But he stayed.

The dress was the same shade as her hair. The artful simplicity of it brought out the non-Caucasian in her features, somehow; and in her skin, that was the color of heavy cream.

“You speak French, don’t you,” said Johnny, after a pregnant pause. “What does the term
‘jolie-laide’
mean?”

“In English? Attractively ugly, I suppose. Attractive, though one can’t explain it as conventional goodlooks.” She smiled wickedly. “Why d’you want to know that?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

Braemar sat near him. “Have you decided to stop freezing me out? I hope so. You need me, Johnny.”

“Oh?”

She sighed in exasperation. “I don’t want to hurt your pride, but how can I avoid it. You might have a hot story, my boy. Anything’s possible. But you have no way to take it home.”

“Tell me about this story,” suggested Johnny.

She moved: into his space and out again, a shock to his whole system. She was curled back on the red plush, the scrap of printout between her fingers.

“Oh, Johnny. It’s been a long time, hasn’t it.” She grinned. “Since you last practiced your profession, I mean. Surely one’s supposed to eat these things after one has memorized them?”

Johnny was furious with himself, but only for a moment. He had a sudden and powerful intuition that Wilson wasn’t such a threat as he’d feared.

He stood up.

“Okay, you win. Go along on your own. I can’t stop you.”

Braemar lit a cigarette and used it to point at Johnny’s feet. His shoes were still soaking from the walk over here.

“She wants
you,
Johnny. I think she might notice the difference. But the Devereux fort is thirty kilometers out of Fo. Are you going to paddle all the way?”

“I have money.”

“Fine, you have money. No doubt you can even work out ways of spending it, here in darkest Africa. But are you going alone? Do you think that’s wise?”

She looked past him, at the screen, where a sequence of astonishing technical bravura was playing out the terrible litany of fire. The red chrysanthemums: Asamayama, Asosan, Sakurajima, Mikhara, Fujiyama.

“I know how you feel. You’re reduced to playing around with a loony sideshow when you should be at home, covering the main event. It’s demeaning. But a newspaper isn’t print on paper, comic strip on a screen, a multipage charged up over the phone. Or even the program belonging to the proprietors. It is an assessment of newly critical events, sacred to words alone: a survival of human communication in a world that’s reverting as fast as it can to chimpanzee bottom-jerking and grooming noises. You’re a reporter. They can stick you in the Gulag but they can’t stop you from doing what you do.”

Her eyes, dark and clear, told him
more.
Press my pad and I’ll go on like this indefinitely. He’d been right first time. She was selling herself, her geisha presence and a discreet ego-massage, in exchange for a piece of Johnny’s fantasy game. He felt a surge of elation, as he realized he was going to give way to temptation. It was something for nothing. He’d be mad to refuse.

She collected him from outside The Welcome Sight in a huge, horrible white convertible. The hotel’s logo, a hologram of the tower, leapt up from the hood like a rhino horn as soon as she cut the engine. Johnny’s whole street—nameless, like all the streets in the old city—came out in the dark to admire.

“What the fuck is that? It’s disgusting.”

“I suspect the original germ plasm was 1958 Cadillac. What’s wrong with a few fins, anyway? I thought you were supposed to be an American.”

He got in. She shut the door. Immediately, once more, she was in his space or he in hers: a profound assault. Johnny looked out of the window, grinning bitterly. It was like being fourteen again. But he was a professional at this by now. He could deal with inappropriate sexual arousal. The car was semi-automatic and Fo was supposedly beaconed: but only a lunatic would use auto on these roads. At least she’d be pinned behind the wheel, he could be thankful for that.

Macmillan was empty. Bandits and guerrillas lurked in the suburban darkness, by repute, at any rate, but they left the mutated Cadillac alone. It rumbled like a tank over the potholes.

“What’s it feel like, Johnny?”

“Huh?”

“To do it with a machine,” explained Braemar.

“I don’t know.”

They reached the Devereux fort with an hour to spare. Once buried in forest, it was now surrounded by ribbon development and only a few hundred meters from the granderoute. There had been a half hearted attempt to set it up as a tourist attraction. Braemar dropped him at the dilapidated gateway and went on to put the car out of sight. Johnny prowled the carpark and helipad, feeling very exposed. He didn’t need his flashlight. An invisible half moon silvered the clouds, the random lights of nearby houses winked in the lower darkness. The fort stood up against the dim sky like a pile of child’s blocks. It had been Portuguese originally, before a consortium of locals plus stateless-European entrepreneurs took it over. Inside the roofless keep you could see genuine relics of those days. The shelves where the goods were stored, stacked up like damp kindling; rusty holes in the stone where chains had been pegged. Those South Africans would probably come here with their guide, point their cams, pose on top of the moldering cannon. There were even free souvenirs to take away, if you cared to scratch the dirt. Some of them weren’t very old. The Devereux had had a bad reputation in the bloody right-wing years.

Johnny had trained himself to avoid times like this: silence inside, alertness without occupation. He had no purpose here. His only plan was to get home, somehow. To hold Bella in his arms again. The connection between that goal and a game of make-believe did not exist. It was an imaginary thread that vanished when you touched it. He felt utterly desolate.

Someone walked up behind him. It was Braemar, with a needle of light. She bent and pulled a spray of colorless flowers from a small mound like an unmarked grave.

“Flower of a heart whose trouble, must have been worse than mine….
What a terrible place.”

“If it isn’t haunted, it ought to be.”

“It is haunted. The word means the way we feel here. The fantasy figments we call “ghosts” were invented, in their time, for the sort of clowns who now have to plug into a sensurround horror-feelie to get scared of death and pain.”