Authors: Jeff Noon
“Christ-Vurt!” Tom banged his hand against the dash.
“What is it?” I asked.
“God, I’m so stupid! Barleycorn can’t touch you, Sibyl. It’s me he’s working through.” And with that, Tom Dove opened the Comet’s door and stepped out.
“Tom? Where are you going?”
“It’s up to you now, Sibyl.”
“Tom?”
“Keep driving.”
I watched him as he went in aid of the injured woman, and then I shut down my mind to let the Shadow have full play. Immediately a tiny light flickered into life in my smoke. Like the smoke was an ever-changing map and the light was my love. You must always follow the fire. And I had a vision then, of all the Dodos of Manchester being motivated by some hidden design. A time to fight back. Even my daughter… at last, a role to play…
I started up the Comet and then took the third turning on the left.
One second passing…
And then I arrived in Ardwick Industrial Estate.
Kracker experiences the nasal blast as a welcome sign. Demon snot fills the alleyway, and the building shakes with the vibration. He can hear screams from the inside and the outside. Persephone has shown him the true and faithful route. She has warned him about the explosion. 6.19 a.m. The new map. 2000, the pollen count. Hot and painful was the flowery route, but this is the way he would take, clinging onto that young girl’s petals whenever she let him. Persephone has been so sweet to him, so tempting for a man whose veins ran with Fecundity 10 rather than normal blood, how can he resist her pleasures?
Petals to petals, opening and closing; his long ride to success.
He steps forward to view the outrage at the front of Gumbo’s building. The camp is in a shambles; dogmen and bitchgirls of various mixes are running around the area, some of them trying to help the injured on the ground, others just running for cover. Screams and curses rise through the sweltering heat. A black woman with an afro hairstyle is bending down to comfort one of the victims. A man with long, straggly hair and flared trousers is wandering through the chaos, his arms flung to each side, and a mad peal of laughter springing from his lips. Kracker imagines that this must be the old Hippy Gumbo himself, purging his soul because of the breakdown.
Kracker steps back into the alleyway, guided by Persephone’s flower.
The side door is now split asunder by the snot blast. Kracker wrenches the partition aside. Now he is stepping down lightly into a vast underground room, stippled with shadows, and filled with water amidst marble walls.
A young woman is floating in the water, a cut flower of a quite delicious hue nudging between her legs. Persephone herself is floating between Belinda’s legs, which is how she has led him this far, this close.
Belinda…
The target of this day. The good target. This time he will finish it.
Kracker steps down into the shadows…
Belinda, that glass of poison to her lips. Two-fifths of the Boomer swallowed down by now. Absolutely blasted, good and strong. The high carries you over into wanting to finish the job, to suck down the whole trip.
Death is very patient. He doesn’t mind the few extra seconds taken to make the decision. The glass tips against your mouth. Some drops touch your tongue. They tingle.
Tingle and burn.
A noise from the far end of the pool…
Shit!
Belinda listens, willing these visitors to go away, whoever they are. Is it Gumbo or Wanita? Can’t they see this girl is trying to kill herself? Do they think this is easy?
“Who is it?” Belinda shouts.
“It’s the cops,” a voice answers. “Come easy now.”
Belinda waits for five seconds. And then…
“What do you want?” Peering through the shadows to where a thin, dry shape trembles…
“Don’t worry, Belinda. We know who killed your doggy friend. We know it wasn’t you.”
Seven seconds. The voice is kind of familiar.
“I already know who killed him,” Belinda says. “Persephone did, with Columbus’s help.”
“You’re a very clever girl,” replies the voice. “I’m going to have to kill you.”
Our various lives moving closer. My daughter is floating naked and mapped out in the pool. Kracker, the Chief of Cops, moves forward into the light, sweating like a wound. He sits on the edge of the pool, his shoes dangling into the water. Persephone’s flower is stroking her petals between Belinda’s thighs. The half-finished glass of Boomer is back on the pool-side. The cop-gun hidden in Kracker’s pocket. All the elements in place now. Myself working towards the scene. Columbus also, revelling in his new map. That underground swimming hole, that shimmering hole, my daughter at the centre, magnetic in the shadows and the marble. A compass of strange desires all around her, closing in like the far-apart streets that rest on top of each other as a map is folded.
The outside world still green-darkened by droplets of mucus. Inside, a stuttering of ghosts from the snot-covered window, the only light.
“It’s you again,” my daughter says. “Your name is passenger Deville.”
“No longer, no longer.” Kracker smiles. “A mere disguise. My name is Kracker, the Chief of Cops.” His target looks so tender with her map of skin shivering under the water; she’s making the Casanova unfurl in his groin. He can’t keep his eyes off the floating flower between the girl’s legs, the one that has led him this far. He feels jealous of the flower taking its pleasure elsewhere, and he can feel Persephone’s eyes crawling all over his skin from the patterns of lichen that cover the ancient marble walls of this dungeon. All he has to do to please his lover is plunge a bullet straight into the target’s body. But he’s afraid of death, his own and anybody else’s. He has killed criminals before now, gleefully taking them out, but an innocent, a fellow sufferer? How can he manage this task?
“What do you have to do?” Belinda asks.
“I have to kill you.”
Belinda stares at him.
“I’d like you to,” she says.
“What?”
“It’s simple. I want you to kill me.”
“But why?” His glands are dripping in the heat.
“It feels right.” Belinda’s mind is clear now, cold.
Kracker is taken aback by this. It really gets to him. A simple man, simple needs. He pulls the gun out of his pocket, snagging it on the cloth, so that he has to reach around with his other hand to free it. Then he has some trouble releasing the hammer. “Please… I’m sorry,” he mumbles. “I’m sorry… I can’t seem to… There! I have it now.” The gun is cocked, at last. This clumsiness makes him feel so normal. It gives him courage, the normality. He’s no longer trying to prove himself. Maybe he can really pleasure Persephone this time. He holds the weapon out in front of him, as far from his body as he can reach. The barrel is trembling, catching tiny glints of light from the shrouded window.
Belinda smiles. “Can you do it?” she asks.
“I… I can try.”
“Go on then. Make it a good one.”
Be a man. Be a man at last
. This is what the girl is saying to him. Despite all the Fecundity surging through his blood, be a man at last. And he cannot take it. His gun-hand is shaking. He brings his left hand up to hold the right hand steady around the butt. Still it shakes.
“You’re laughing at me,” he says.
“No. I’m working this out with you. That’s what we both want, isn’t it?”
Belinda has picked up the glass of Boomer from the pool’s edge. She holds the glass up in front of her face. “This is Boomer. You know Boomer?” Kracker nods his head. “You’ve taken it?” Kracker tells her that he has. “You know the ruling then?” Kracker does, but she tells him anyway: “One for the money, two for the show. Three to get ready for a clean and sexy death.”
“Are you going to kill yourself?”
“If you won’t do it.”
“Please…”
“There are over five measures in this glass, and I’ve taken two already. I’m feeling very good at the moment, very sexy. Don’t you want me?”
The gun is moving through the gloom, trying to fix upon her. Kracker cannot find his target. This girl is spooking him. “Please… I…” he says. He fumbles at the gun. “I don’t think you should…”
Belinda dips her tongue into the poison. She lets the Boomer burn her nerve-endings for the tiniest part of a second.
“Don’t…”
Belindia tilts the glass until the Boomer is edging against the lip. “This is what you want?”
“No!” The cop’s voice crying. He stands up from the pool-side. “No… yes… I… shit! Please… it’s all going wrong. I just wanted to… nobody should die. Nobody…” Kracker can hear Persephone screaming inside his head. “Please,” he says. “Don’t do this.”
“It’s what we both want.” Belinda’s Shadow has never been so fluid.
Kracker sweating. Sneezing. But the aim is firm now, he is motivated. The gun steady and true in his clenched fingers. If he could only break this circuit—his fingers and the handle and the trigger and the young skin of this girl. Maybe then he would be free of all this worry. Persephone’s perfume is yelling at him. The stench of her is filling the cellar. All he has to do is pull the trigger, complete this story. Belinda tips the rim of the glass. Kracker jumps into the water, making a fat splash, and then pushes through heaviness to get at Belinda.
“Please, Belinda… don’t kill yourself!”
I drove my Comet into this tangled story. 6.22 a.m. Even time was becoming fluid under the new map. None of the old rules applied. The map was filled with broken roads. Twenty-five car crashes occurred that day, drawn together by the newly tangled roots of the city. But I was free of that structure now; I was driving on Shadows.
A dirt track running between factories. Everything was still and silent at the edges, ghost-ridden and abandoned, but as I rode closer to the centre of that lost industrial city, it was like entering into Babylon. A screaming woman ran towards the Comet, her clothing in rags and her face covered with mucus. I worked the wheel to avoid impact, and she glanced off the left-hand side of the bonnet. She was down on the track for a few seconds, but I didn’t stop the car. Let’s think about the daughter, this was my only vision. The poor woman staggered to her feet. I kept on driving until I manoeuvred the Comet into a wide open space between a square of warehouses and depots. A Gypsy-dog camp was set down in the arena, a chaotic mess of bone-piles, iron sculptures and tepee kennels. The whole place was covered in a glaze of nose-juice and bodies were covering the ground, some writhing around, many others lying as still as death. A black woman sporting an over-funded afro was administering to some of the victims of the quake. That would be Wanita-Wanita. I parked the Ford Comet and walked over to where Wanita was offering a glass of something to a sufferer. The dog man refused the drink, so Wanita drank it herself, and lowered her head to kiss the dog, passing the healing mixture from her mouth to his. I’d loosed my gun from its holster, but it seemed rather heavy in my fingers now, seeing that act of kindness. “Wanita-Wanita?” I asked. She looked up at me, her eyes heavy with resignation. She saw the gun in my hands and knew me for what I was: a bastard cop, everything her whole life had raged against. I could see the deviance dying in her eyes. She looked over to a warehouse, where an Xcab and a painted van named Magic Bus were parked. Above the door the words Slavery House were partly obscured by flowers, so that the sign seemed to read S ave y ou. The whole building was covered in a verdant net of blooms. An aerial feather fluttered from the roof, and I could feel Belinda’s Shadow from within the warehouse, struggling against temptation.
The time was pushing on towards fullness, and the morning air was inch-thick with yellow heat and pollen and snot.
I pressed a finger on the door’s intercom system. A metallic doggy voice answered me. “Who that?”
“It’s the cops,” I said. “Open up.” The main entrance spread its two doors like a slow lover, a reluctant sigh, and then I was through to the lounge area of Slavery House. I was pulled along by anger, feeling Belinda’s Shadow from below my feet. Something was happening to her. The desk clerk was a balding masked-up robodog cowering behind his counter, clutching a copy of Nude Bitch Digest. “What want?” the dog growled.
“Key to the cellar, please,” I responded, flashing the badge.
“We no cellar.”
I pushed my gun Into the dog’s face: “Shall we dig one together, mutt?” The doggy clerk was lolling his long pink tongue out of his jaws, searching for good air. He looked over to a door beneath the stairwell. His left paw was reaching to a key that hung on a numbered board behind him. “This you want,” he growled. As soon as the gun was off-target, that robohound was running out of the door on all fours. I felt his fetid breath pass by me on the furry wind as I worked the key into a door under the stairs, following the scent of Belinda.
A voice from below, soft and sweaty: “Who’s at the door?”
“Nobody,” I shouted. “Just your worst ever fear.”
“Oh yeah? Like who?”
“A Shadowcop called Sibyl Jones.”
“Shit!”
“That enough for you?”
“Fuck!”
Panic from below.
I take the dark steps two at a time, three at a time.
Radio waves…
Colours in the black air as messages were sent. Febrile scents on the wing. Scrapings and breaths. Glimmers of blue transmitter lights. Iridescent purple feathers floating through the waves of panic. Dark aromas. Sweetness. Sweetness and fear. I was falling into those colours. Wires and sparks. A Sixties beat from the radio. My vision seeping away into the gloom, and the Gumbo Hippy himself rising up from the feathers.
“You’re under arrest, Gumbo,” I said to him.
“Who’s taking me?” he answered, “You’re all done, cop lady.”
“Where’s Belinda?”
“Who knows?” Then he was stepping towards me, his long, raggedy hair swinging from side to side. “Who cares any more? Don’t you realise the whole fucking world is ruined now. What you cops gonna do, uh? Arrest a dream?” Gumbo started to laugh. “Reality is fucked.”
“I don’t care about the world right now. I want my daughter back.”
“I can’t allow that.”
“What’s your problem, Gumbo? If it’s really all over, what are you fighting against?”