Dead Girls, Dead Boys, Dead Things Read online

  First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers

  DEAD GIRLS

  Copyright © 1992 by Richard Calder.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 95-9975

  ISBN: 0-312-95717-3

  Printed in the United States of America

  St. Martin’s Press hardcover edition/June 1995 St. Martin’s Paperbacks edition/February 1996

  10 98765432 1

  For Gilberte Swann, Dolores Haze

  and Wednesday Adams

  CHAPTER ONE

  Road to Nowhere

  They smashed through the door; I vaulted the balcony, running. It was midnight in Nongkhai City and I was lost. The story so far? The Pikadon Twins—notorious henchgirls to Madame K—had pursued me to the banks of the Mekong. But where was the Mekong? Too dark, too quiet—and I used to bright, clamorous Bangkok—this town had me drunk on shadows. Across the Mekong, Laos. From Laos I could escape into China. And from China . . . The roar of Harleys; twin headlights violated the night. There. The lights of a riverside cafe. And there, there. Glint of moonlight on water. Dogs and chickens scattered in my wake.

  The cafe—The White Russian—opened its arms; I fell into its refuge. Farang diners, Thais, all but the gynoids dressed as matrioshkas regarded me curiously. Wiping the sweat from my face, I was trying to still my breath, my hands, trying to assume the disguise of a newly-arrived farang celebrating deliverance from Europe. ‘I’m like you,’ my body language tried to say, ‘a roadrunner, a survivor. Genes a little dirty, perhaps, but hey, who’s to know?’ No police; should I care if they believed me? An ankle had swollen; I sat down. Lights of fishing vessels spangled the unswimmable deep.

  From across the river I could make Vientiane in under an hour; but a passing matrioshka (imitation Fabergé, she looked) informed me No sir, sorry sir, no ferry until daybreak. Trapped. End of series. No sequel to my getaway: avoiding airports and the TGV, driving my old Mercedes as far as Hat Yai (as if I were heading for Penang), and then backtracking, taking government buses north, then north-east, towards the Thai-Lao border. That night, arriving in Nongkhai, I’d found a hotel, napped (too long), to be awoken by two half-human battering rams at my door.

  Pikadons!

  Coolly-cool, those murderesses. Surely they wouldn’t make their move here? Not in public, I reasoned. But they were shameless.

  ‘Wodka,’ said Bang and Boom, the Pikadon Twins, ‘for our friend, Mr Ignatz.’ The credits rolled. No reprise of revved motorbikes; like phantom lightsticks, like switchblades keen and spectral, the Pikadons. They pressed down on my shoulders, checking an impulse to flee.

  Like their mistress, Madame Kito, mamasan of Nana - that dragon lady with three generals and a cabinet minister in her bed—the Pikadons were the daughters of a Japanese and a gynoid. Bijouterie, they called them: hybrid jewels as distinguished from all-precious joaillerie. ‘Boy run away.’

  ‘Bad boy. Madame miss you.’

  ‘And Primavera. Poor Primavera. She miss you too.’ ‘Write you love letter, no?’

  ‘Primavera,’ I said, ‘is a fucking season in hell. I’m not going back. I’ve had enough killing.’

  ‘But you like killing, Mr Ignatz, no?’

  Would you like to find out how much? I thought. If I’d had a weapon, even my scalpel, then perhaps . . . but the Twins wore body stockings of artificial spidersilk, a midnight-blue weave grown from E. Coli that was as strong and as refractive as the fibres of laser-proof vests. Why weren’t they trying to kill me?

  ‘Primavera not work with other boy.’

  ‘Madame try...’

  ‘Primavera in love with Mr Ignatz.’ The Twins studied the curlicues and flutings of their manicures, eyes cold as crescent moons. ‘Every gun need finger on her trigger, Mr Ignatz. But if you want go, maybe Madame let Primavera go. Home. To England.’

  Kito needed Primavera. Primavera was Bangkok’s prima donna of assassins. A supervillainess. Hep Cat Shun, dead. Terminal Wipes, dead. Rib-Dot Delay, dead. I was merely her escort; a cover. The Twins were bluffing. Jealous. The cheaper the femmes, I thought, the cheaper the fatales.

  ‘Little English half-doll.’

  ‘Lilim.’

  ‘Self-replicating cyborg bloodsucker, no?’

  ‘Dead girl.’

  ‘Our kissin’ cousin.’

  ‘Land of Hope and Glory no like Primavera, no like Lilim.’

  ‘If Madame tell police...’

  ‘Police Madame friend.’

  ‘If Primavera go back home...’

  Bang (or Boom) pressed a long fingernail into her abdomen.

  ‘Schstick!’

  ‘Scream, little doll.’

  ‘Scream sexy-sexy!’ The Twins began to laugh.

  ‘But you know all about that, Mr Ignatz.’

  ‘No?’

  I shook my head. I wanted to laugh too; to mock them. I couldn’t. My jawbone had locked. Vain, spiteful, faithless Kito: would she really send her little ninja home? There, the Dolls’ Hospitals awaited. But why had Primavera refused to work? She no longer loved me. (Had she ever loved me?) She loved only the blood, the killing. Her metamorphosis was complete. My little girl needn’t mourn: Kito would find her another beau. An arm to lean on at parties, someone to take her to hotels, to bars. A mask. A human face.

  One of the Twins pulled a magazine from her décolletage.

  ‘Madame Kito.’

  ‘Her life, her time.’

  ‘Special edition. Page sixty-nine. Message for Mr Ignatz. Look...’

  Page sixty-nine—the centre spread—was a diorama of a penthouse choking on a miasma of kitsch: Italian marble, jungle-cat prints, fountains, revivalist art nouveau and deco furniture, corporate art, corporate toys—a backdrop, it seemed, for a soap opera of unusual vulgarity. The Twins smoothed their hands across the photograph. Activated by that biochemical signature pixels crystallized and two figures mounted the paper stage. The figures moved. Photo-mechanicals. Primavera and Madame K.

  They sat together, schoolgirl and matron, on a tiger-striped chaise longue. Someone unacquainted with how the bloodlines of hybrids differed in East and West might have assumed that the two women were related, for both had the green eyes, plump lips and kiln-glazed flesh that signalled Cartier workmanship. But whereas Kito’s progenitor had been an imitation doll (as were all dolls in Bangkok’s Big Weird), Primavera’s distaff side could be traced back to the fabulous automata of Europe’s belle époque. Kito—stroking her ward’s bleached hair like the wicked stepmother of a thousand fairy tales—resented bijouterie whose claim to the Cartier logo was more genuine than her own. Her snobbery was equal to her viciousness.

  ‘Such little English rose,’ squeaked Kito, her voice—in contrast to her usual husky tenor—small, tinny and distorted. ‘But what nasty place England become.’

  ‘She’s going to have me deported, Iggy,’ said Primavera. ‘Repatriated. She means it. You know all my papers are false. Like yours. She only has to tell her friends. Come back, Iggy. Come back to the Big Weird. I miss you. We can have fun together. Like before.’

  Primavera was a melodramatic little doll. Wearing a cropped T-shirt that erroneously declared her Miss Nana ’71, the third eye of her umbilicus played peek-a-boo with the camera as she shuddered with the effort of restraining bitter tears.

  ‘It would be slab, Mr Ignatz. Spike. Tzepa, as you English say. It is good my Pikadon find you. B
oy like you have no place to run. England very bad now. English roboto go crazy. Doll bite man, man fuck lady, and lady have baby turn into doll. People say have world of doll soon. World of Lilim.’

  ‘Primavera’s done everything you’ve asked,’ I mumbled. ‘Just because she was human once...’

  ‘And I never human? That what you mean, Mr Ignatz?’ My hand sprang from the page; the magazine ran interactive software. Kito rose and walked to the missing wall of the proscenium, her geisha-white face filling the page. ‘Sure,’ she said, ‘my mae roboto. I half machine when bom. Bangkok nanoengineer use foetal template—no grow doll atom by atom like in land of farang. Sometime, just sometime, Siamese roboto ovulate.’ An eyebrow twitched like the beat of a butterfly’s wing that threatened to precipitate a storm. ‘But Primavera—’ her lip curled; thunder growled in the distance—‘Oi! Twenty-six year ago, I remember, doll-plague begin: not with us Cheap Charlie counterfeit doll; no, it was farang roboto, genuine Cartier get virus, go crazy, give virus to man. Now when little English girl go pubescent, she go roboto too. You think I want be like Primavera, Mr Ignatz? Walk through wall? Jump over car? Spit death? Fly? Primavera reproduce herself; I sterile, mule. But my software not fucking crazy...’

  The storm passed; Kito’s face withdrew, and Primavera, having surrendered to schoolgirl hysterics, was revealed stamping her feet and tearing at her hair.

  ‘Not the tzepa. Iggy! Please!’

  Primavera always overacted...

  Beyond the still life of the apartment, through a panoramic window, beneath the stalled course of a ruinous sun, lay Nana Plaza, arrested in time and space, denied forever the night. Night. Ha. Then the capitalists of narcissism would emerge, the warrior merchants who had raped Europe’s empire de luxe and carried off her ideas, her names, her designs, to sell them in the thieves’ market that was Nana. Then street vendors would hawk Europe’s vandalized dreams: a magpie’s hoard of imitation objets and couture: psychotropic perfumes from Chanel, off-world jewels from Tiffany, and, dissembling the cut of an Armani or a Lacroix, a de Ville, de Sade or a Sabatier, dermaplastic, the outlawed farang textile woven from live tissue culture. Then Kito’s gynoids—Cartier and Rolex, Seiko, Gucci and Swatch—would step from their vacuum-sealed boxes promising to fulfil the most baroque desires. This was Nana, Kito’s stake in the Big Weird: a pornocracy of copyright ponces and technopimps; an island shimmering with the bootlegged flotsam of Europe’s shipwrecked past; an apotheosis of all that was fake.

  And was this plea from Primavera—this SOS from a castaway of human shores—was this too a fake? A photomechanical maid had begun to serve drinks.

  ‘You always seem such gentleman,’ said Kito. ‘I always think every Englishman—’

  I slapped the magazine shut, crushing its paperdust CPU, and searched the cover for the date. My language skills, even after three years in Bangkok, were still rudimentary. I struggled to decipher the fiery tongues of the Thai characters; the Pikadons yawned.

  ‘Magazine come out yesterday, Mr Ignatz.’

  ‘Primavera Weirdside, still...’

  Whether Kito’s threats were empty or not they had offered an excuse. (‘Shut up!’ I told those angels—good?

  bad?—who were whispering Trick! Hoax! in my ear.) Maybe that’s what I’d been waiting for during those fugitive days: an excuse to return. I was a doll junkie; my limbs ached for the kisses of dead girls. For vampire kisses. For the allure.

  Not the tzepa, Iggy! Please!

  It had been a cry across a war zone of desire. Should I step again into no-man’s-land? Outside the coconut trees were swaying, fainting to an alien tide. Primavera was here, even here, her hunger that of a dog picking at the world’s remains; her stealth, the scuttling of a cockroach. Escape. Get up; go, before... But across the star-filled paddies she reaches out; like a serpent, her torso twists, strikes...

  Primavera was twelve; her DNA had begun to recombine. She sat in front of me in class, her long blonde hair betraying its first streaks of Cartier black. Primavera Bobinski. One day a classmate similarly progressed in doll metamorphosis had said something to her in a giggly undertone. Primavera shook her head. Throughout that lesson—divinity? history? geography?—scraps of paper appeared on her desk, passed on by that handful of girls who, like her, wore the green star of the recombinant. I grew nervous. Primavera was a girl I had stared at, I suppose, too long; whom I had been observed following down those interminable school corridors, or across the park after last bell; and now the adored one was being goaded to take revenge. At last, piqued by their teasing, eager to show she could take a dare, she waited for our teacher to avert his gaze, then turned contrapposto, put her face close to mine, bared her teeth, and cut open my lip with a swift, expertly aimed glance of one of her newly extended canines. ‘Oh?’ she said, in pert demotic Londonese, ‘did I hurt you?’ her death mask of a face insolent as the toothy laughter of her peers. I put my hand to my lip; felt blood; flushed.

  Did I love her, still?

  London, Marseille, Bangkok. From the Seven Stars to across the Seven Seas. Three years, now. Escape. We had spent our small lives escaping. But there are watchtowers of the mind, of the senses, machine guns, bloodhounds one can never flee.

  ‘Not so bad for you, Mr Ignatz.’

  ‘A team, you and Primavera.’

  ‘Come from the land of sex and death.'

  ‘To the land of smiles!’

  ‘Stay with Madame.’

  ‘Madame say just one last job, Mr Ignatz.’

  ‘Jing-jing, Mr Ignatz, you no want to leave.’

  ‘Skunk hour for Europe now.’

  No escape. I was possessed. And from what had I been running? Bastard, she whispers, boy-slime, hypocrite, prig. You made me what I am. You think you’re better than them, don’t you? The medicine-heads. The Human Front. But l know what you like ... I lift my hand to my lip; still, there is blood; still, I flush; still, the throb of desire and hate.

  ‘I’ll come,’ I told the Pikadons, ‘of course I’ll come.’ Fatalism, these days, comes easily to an Englishman.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Wine and Roses

  We sat in The Londoner, a newly-opened restaurant in the downtown Weird that indulged the morbidity of Bangkok’s nighthawks. ‘If this is Kito’s idea of a joke,’ said Primavera, ‘then—’ A cry, sharp and girlish, excised her indignant conclusions. There followed a gentle balm of applause.

  The tables were arranged about a circular arena. Inside that little O, equidistant, like the spokes of a wheel, three marble slabs presented a pageant of life and death in contemporary England. Upon each slab, prone, naked, wrists chained to an iron ring, a gynoid writhed in a ham display of agony, a glistening needle emerging from the small of her back.

  The muted sighs of those in extremis mixed with the sounds of polite conversation, the clatter of cutlery, the popping of corks.

  ‘You’re saying that you didn’t refuse to work? That Kito lied when she said she’d have you repatriated? And that you lied too?’ Sorry, angels. Next time I’ll listen.

  Primavera fidgeted, playing with an ice cream sundae as blonde as her bottled hair, her flesh. ‘Don’t get upset. I like having you around. It was just a little white lie. Anyway, Madame said I was to; and what Madame says...’

  I looked about the restaurant. Something festered beneath the nasty theatrics; something real, something nastier; one cut, and the pus would ooze.

  I had arrived at Nana that afternoon. Kito hadn’t deigned to meet me; instead, I had been briefed by her PA, Mr Jinx. No, Kito wasn’t angry; one last hit, he’d said, and we’d be free. Free of all obligation. There followed my reunion with Miss Bloodsucker ’71. No words, just the sex-game (sticky plaster covered my chest and groin); and we had walked out, everything right, so right. But now—our intimate dinner disturbed only by those aping the death agonies of England’s damned; about to confess my addiction to certain kisses and pledge that I would never despise them again—Primavera had c
laimed the spoils of her victory: my dignity and pride.

  ‘I know you don’t want my love, Primavera, but why do you have to humiliate me?’

  ‘I said don’t get upset.' She pushed her ice cream to the side of the table. ‘I wasn’t supposed to tell you actually. But since you did come back... Okay. So it was a game. One of Primavera’s little games. Madame said you loved me; I said no, it wasn’t like that. She said she could prove it, that you’d come back if you thought I was in trouble. Wanna bet? I said.’ Surprise, hurt, guilt, malice: Primavera could combine the look of a woman betrayed with that of one caught in the act of poisoning her lover. ‘Iggy,’ she said, with slippery plaintiveness, ‘why did you have to run away? Am I really so bad?’

  ‘Kito,’ I said. ‘I can understand her having me followed; I can understand her wanting me offed—I know too much. But why bring me back to Bangkok? If you’ll work without me, she doesn’t need me.’

  Primavera—bored by any script in which she wasn’t the leading lady—let her eyes drift from the floor show to the gallery of newspaper clippings that lined the walls: headlines and photographs from the English tabloid press. Beneath dozens of grainy pin-ups of impaled young girls ran captions like: ‘Tatyana, 16, from Brixton, says all her girlfriends have had a bellyful of the Human Front, and she was gutted after the HF won the General Election! Now she knows all about bellyaching! Got the point, Tatyana? Another skewered lovely tomorrow...’ Beneath an air-conditioning vent a tattered Union Jack (monochrome since the kingdom’s dissolution) fluttered as if atop an outpost at the world’s end.

  ‘Primavera—I’m talking to you.’

  ‘It wasn’t all fibs, you know,’ she said, exasperation counterpointing her skittishness. ‘I do like having you around. I don’t love you; I’m Lilim; we don’t do that sort of thing. But I can miss you.’ She shivered. ‘You introduce me to such interesting boys.’

  ‘I smell a rat.’

  ‘And I,’ she said, leaning over the table, ‘smell the blood of an Englishman.’ Her bright red tongue ran over ranks of tiny cuspids.