Dead Girls, Dead Boys, Dead Things Read online

  ‘Sit down,’ I muttered, ‘and close your mouth. You want someone to see?’

  ‘But you like it, Iggy. And you know it only hurts a little.’ *

  How pretty she was. She was always at her best before a kill. Tonight she wore a black dermaplastic cocktail dress that clung to her like the excoriated but still living hide of a Harlem beauty queen. Fifteen years old (the same age as me, though my anaemia made me look older) and milky pale with a sweetness that had sickened of itself, curdled and turned rancid, Primavera was a little dream of feminine evil: hateful because desired; desired because hateful. She was the dream of the age.

  At an adjacent table a group of Japanese salarimen had summoned a waiter. ‘This one—she dead—can have another please?’ The waiter, dressed in surgical gown, rubber gloves and mask, saw to it that a fresh gynoid, her programme engaging obligatory signs of fear, replaced her cataleptic sister. On all fours, wrists chained, the steel needle pointing uncompromisingly to that ritual spot midway between pubis and umbilicus, it remained only for the condemned doll to tremble in expectation until the waiter should grasp her ankles and pull... The salarimen—eyes screwed in states of voyeuristic satori -clapped and whistled with drunken glee.

  ‘God,’ said Einstein, ‘does not play dice with the universe’; but Primavera did. Her green eyes grew bigger, more luminous, as they focused on something beyond the restaurant’s walls, beyond the Big Weird, beyond the world. Reality, for one moment in which the universe held its breath, existed in those eyes alone, eyes tunnelling into endless possibilities. For Primavera the universe was a fixed table. The dice rolled, loaded with her will.

  Beer glasses exploded, showering the Japanese with Singha and broken glass. Waiters mopped anxiously at spattered suits, picked splinters from beer-anointed hair. The fire in Primavera’s eyes died to a smoulder. Newton and Einstein shifted in their graves.

  ‘Right through her clockwork, Iggy. Right through her matrix! They really shouldn’t laugh.’

  The belly of the doll (say Lilim) is sacred; it is the womb of uncertainty; the well of unreason; the quantum-mechanical seat of consciousness.

  ‘Sometimes,’ said Primavera, ‘sometimes I don’t like boys.’

  ‘I guess tomorrow night they’ll settle for Soi Ginza. Now no more games, he’s just walked in.’ A tall farang in a bespoke suit was being ushered to a ringside table. ‘Is he the boy I get to kill? I like those sorts of boys.’ ‘Antoine Sabatier. Parisian fashion slut. Angry with Kito for stealing his designs. Prosecuting her through ASEAN.’

  ‘I do it here?’

  ‘Unless you mind getting blood all over your new frock?’

  ‘My table manners are impeccable. But doesn’t a girl get to eat in peace any more?’

  ‘I’ll find you a nice takeaway later.’

  ‘But Iggy, you’re so tired, of killing, remember?’

  I tapped a spoon against a glass, calling an end to playtime. ‘All we have to do is wait for the maitre d’ to... There. He’s being told he has a telephone call. That he can take it out the back. Just like Mr Jinx said. Come on, c—okay, he’s going.’

  Primavera, tossing her bleached mane over her shoulders, had already risen. Hurriedly, she took a mirror from her handbag and reapplied her lipstick, then dabbed a little of her favourite perfume, Virgin Martyr, behind her ears.

  ‘For you, Titania,’ she whispered, ‘sweet queen of dolls,’ and touched the brooch on her left breast—a pentacle of emeralds; symbol of pride won from shame -that was her most (perhaps only) sentimental possession. I watched her leave, the two vertical seams of her stockinged calves weaving between the tables and chairs like the exotic markings of a rare and deadly reptile. The doors leading to the kitchens and toilets swung shut. Bon appétit, little witch, I thought.

  A Filipino quartet had begun to sing their cover of ‘Oh doctor, doctor, I wish you wouldn’t do that,’ the latest hit for English zygodiddly band Imps of the Perverse. The waiters had pulled up their surgical masks and—assuming the roles of mad gynaecologists—performed unspeakable mimes in the aisles. I hid behind the menu—Fish ’n’ Chips, Pie ’n’ Eel, Steak ’n’ Kidney Pudding (lead sent the Romans crazy)—and put on the complimentary headphones that hung from my chair. ‘... the beautiful carefree days of the aube du milli were over: England braced herself for what was to come...’ Those films they showed us at school: Hamlet, Richard III, Henry V; the voice synthesizer was an Olivier. I reselected and then stabbed play.

  ‘Europe, during the days of the aube du millénaire—a historical period that some have compared to the belle époque preceding the First World War—had absorbed

  the moribund Soviet empire to become the hub of the world economy. Not seeking to compete with the manufacturing might of the Pacific bloc dominated by Japan and its junior partner, America, Europe became the world’s arbiter of elegance, an empire of style, a luxury goods conglomerate dedicated to satisfying the age’s narcissistic pursuit of health, beauty and longevity. Its investment was in superminiaturization: the creation of objects that the rootless nouveaux riches—the Information Revolution’s arrivistes—could carry on or in themselves, to define their social value and status. As these objects lost their functionalism and became the empire de luxe

  became a magic toyshop, a creator of adult fantasies. And amongst its bimbeloterie, nothing was so fabulous, so desired, as the automata.

  ‘The Cartier automata designed by the man we know today only as Dr Toxicophilous were of a series called L’Eve Future. Built 2034-43, in Paris and London, this series represented an attempt to create a synthesis between the world of classical physics and the submicroscopic quantum world. The human brain, it had long been realized, is unlike any artificial intelligence because it had learned to harness quantum effects. Toxicophilous nanoengineered his machines from smaller and smaller components; he manipulated particles, waves. What Toxicophilous called “fractal programming”—wherein hardware and software is indivisible—resulted, not so much in a human intelligence, but in a mind, a robot consciousness, which acted as a bridge between classical and microphysical worlds, a consciousness that manifested “quantum magic”.

  ‘ “Tricks,” said the inventor of L’Eve Future, “that is all they perform. Party-pieces. Entertainments. Feux d’artifice!” But even then their programmes bubbled with toil and trouble...’

  Nothing new. It was what they dumped on you in

  school. I nudged the fast forward.

  ‘The life cycle of... The doll’s imperative is to reproduce itself via a human host... Infects the human male through...’

  A farang had sat down in Primavera’s chair. ‘That’s taken,’ I said, removing the headphones.

  ‘You’ll excuse me.’ He was American: confederate drawl; a Nobodaddy somatotype with white hair and beard. ‘I’ve always wanted to meet an Englishman, and the waiter said...’ I was second-generation Slovak: what Thai would have been able to identify the mid-European distortion of my East London vowels? My accent was as inscrutable as Primavera’s Balkanized cockney.

  ‘I’m not English,’ I said.

  ‘But the waiter was so sure!’

  ‘I’m from Slovakia.’

  ‘People still live there?’ He swallowed his laugh and grimaced in distaste, as if it had been a clot of phlegm. ‘I’m sorry, that wasn’t funny.’

  ‘My sister will be—’

  ‘Poor kids.’ His eyes were on the cabaret. ‘I know they’re just machines, but what about those little ladies back in England? What do you call them? Yeah, Lilim.’ He pointed to a gynoid faking a death orgasm, her performance akin to that of a gymnast, a contortionist, a dancer, rather than that of a girl so cruelly wounded. ‘For heaven’s sake, she can’t be no older than my daughter.’ He put his finger to a puddle of beer and drew doodles across the table.

  I checked my watch. Primavera had been gone ten minutes. A long time for her. After weeks of abstinence, she would be offing her trick slowly. Playing with him. Sucki
ng the slut dry. I decided to humour my interloper; my jealousy needed a distraction.

  ‘He’s economized,’ I said.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘The proprietor: he’s economized with his gynoids. These girls are a fleet of second-hand gigolettes from one of the Big Weird’s discos. Imitation Seiko, I’d say. They’ve been customized to look like Lilim, but you can still see the coin slot between their breasts. See?’

  ‘Yeah, I do see.’

  ‘Ten baht a boogie,’ I said. ‘Happier times.’

  ‘Look, I’m sorry to bother you, Mr—’ I didn’t reply. ‘Let me get you a drink before I go.’ He hailed a waiter. ‘Boy, I wish you were English. Sure some amazing things going down there. Been five years now since my country restored diplomatic relations. Sometime I hope to get to visit.’ Two beers arrived. ‘Jack Morgenstern,’ he said, extending a hand (and proffering a heavy tip with the other). ‘Cheers. Let’s hope that sad little country gets a better deal under the Human Front.’

  I took a sip of my beer. ‘The Human Front,’ I said, ‘are scum.’ Morgenstern’s hands fluttered about his glass.

  ‘Believe me,’ he said, ‘I’m no fan. Anybody who could do this...’ He gestured towards the circus of blood and its artistes. ‘But you have to admit those fellas have established something like order. God knows, if those Lilim ever got out—and some say they already , that they’ve been seen in mainland Europe—if anybody got out, started spreading that doll-plague around...’

  ‘Then it’s just as well I’m not English.’

  ‘Lord, not everybody’s infected. I’m not prejudiced. Only Londoners have the virus, and London’s sealed off. Quarantined. It’s just a pity the English didn’t handle things as well as the French did all those years back when the plague began. Anyway, nobody gets out of London.’ ‘That so?’

  ‘Sure. But my waiter friend tells me there’s lots of clean English people in South-East Asia...’

  Was he being naive or ironic? The English who sheltered in Thailand necessarily held forged papers; despite the assurances of Her Majesty’s government, it was an open secret that the plague had broken London’s cordon sanitaire. From this exclusive club of exiles, Primavera and I had ourselves been exiled. We hadn’t had the Deutschmarks to bribe the requisite officials in this most bribable of countries. Besides, club rules barred inhuman refugees. Blackballed their paramours. We had had to rely on the sour charity of Madame K.

  ‘Why are you so interested in the Lilim?’ I tried to ask. I wanted the dope on Morgenstern’s dopey act of American innocent abroad. But my lips hadn’t moved. They were as numb as if I’d snacked on a cocaine popsicle. How many beers had I had? I had a strong head, but the room had begun to spin, and Jack Morgenstern’s voice was as faint as if he were calling station to station from Mars.

  ‘So you could be English. Theoretically, that is...’ I wiggled a finger in my ear; an insect was buzzing inside my skull. ‘You could be from Madchester. That’s what everybody calls the capital now, eh, Madchester?’ My skin, filmed with sweat, was as cold as the slick of condensation on my beer glass. ‘Sure would be something,’ he said, ‘if you were a Londoner.’

  I got up. I was going to be ill. Where was the suam? And Primavera, where were you? Where were you when I ever needed you? Tucking me into bed Mum would tell stories about when she was a little girl. The farm outside Bratislava. Summer walks through the Carpathians... The floor hit me like one of Primavera’s hexes: a dimension unpredicted by unified theory, something that should not have been there. Carpet bristles invaded my mouth. My veins were full of ice—like allure, but pleasureless, no fun—and my muscles were frozen. I was a statue that had fallen from its plinth. Tik-tik-atikka, went the drum machine. She did the hula-hula. Tik-tik-atikka. And then

  I had to shoot her. Tik-tik-atikka. C-cos she’d stolen my computer.

  I beheld the paralysis of my face in a patent leather toecap.

  ‘Sir, sir?’

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Morgenstern. ‘He’s a friend. Our car’s outside. You’ll give me a hand?’

  CHAPTER THREE

  Beata Beatrix

  The stretch limousine turned amphibious at the Ploenchit Road. Conscious but immobile, my eyes like fused glass, I stared, unblinking, through the spray-flecked windscreen at the cleft black water of the klong. High-rises, shopping malls, jeux vérites arcades rose like giant nenuphars to spill their photoelectric sap into that dead, viscous sea; a sea that had reclaimed the city of angels and made it once more the Venice of the East. From the water protruded chedi and prang of sunken temples: indices of an obsolete civilization. The traffic—splashing those humbled steeples with their blasphemous slalom—shimmered behind a veil of luminous gas, a gasoline-methane smog lit by the green lasers and floodlights of advertisement hoardings, holographic and photo-mechanical; by the green mercury-vapour glow of underwater road signs; by the green paper lanterns hanging from the shop-houses of adjoining sois. Sheet lightning scattered the moonless sky and for an instant the green filter dissolved and the city was delineated in hues of sepia, like a time-damaged print of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. This was an art nouveau city, a deco city, its sinewy, undulating lines and geometric chic copied from the fashions of the aube du millénaire and imposed on the slums of its twentieth-century inheritance and the sublimities of its ancient past. Again, the pall of greenness descended, a peasouper, a gangrenous membrane, a steamy decay of tropical night. Monorails, skywalks, with their hoards of winepressed humanity, passed above us; autogyros too, with their fat-cat cargoes, hovering above the city’s stagnant pools like steel-hulled dragonflies. Once more, the lightning; and then the rain began, coagulating the green tint of the night so that we seemed to be moving through an ocean’s depths. Green was that year’s colour; green, the colour of perversity; a green as luminous as a certain pair of eyes.

  I could see her in my peripheral vision. She was muzzled, blood dribbling from the side of her mouth; her dress (the dermaplastic palpitating against me) rucked up, with something resembling a chastity belt girdling her waist and hugging her perineum. Below the waist the dress was torn, bleeding a midnight dye; through the tear a glass cable disappeared into her umbilicus. Part of a scanning tunnelling microscope, perhaps? Or an ovipositor spawning a dust-brood of malicious little machines? Whatever it was, it had turned the lock on Primavera’s box of tricks. Like me, she sat in the front of the limo like a dummy being delivered for display.

  Morgenstern read the question in my wall-eyed stare. ‘Took six men to clamp that on,’ he said. ‘Two of them are on their way to hospital. They had particle weapons too. Pity about Monsieur Sabatier. He was very cooperative. I guess the Paris catwalks will have to do without him next season. Another nail in Europe’s coffin. First the crash. Then the plague...’

  In the back, other voices:

  ‘Jesus, they’re just kids.’

  ‘The Neverland—that’s what they call London now. No one gets to grow up. It’s a city of kids.’

  ‘Lost girls, lost boys.’

  ‘Don’t weep over these two. They’re animals. The kind that’d slice ’n’ dice an old, lame, blind, pregnant woman.’

  ‘That kind, eh? But hell. What we do for democracy.’ ‘It’s building bridges. It’s the Special Relationship.’

  ‘It’s hearts,’ said Morgenstern, ‘and minds.’ The two goons in the back made huh-huh-huh noises of mock amusement.

  Well fuck you, Jack, I thought, as we entered the grounds of the American Embassy.

  They left us in a dark windowless room, with a marine standing guard. The squawk of lizards, the grunting of frogs, carried across the night. The ceiling fan slewed round the shadows...

  ‘Oh?’ she said. ‘Did I hurt you?’

  The left canine, a speck of blood on its enamel, overlapped her lip with gothic coquettishness. ‘Lil-im,’ whispered some of our classmates, ‘Lil-im, Lil-im.’

  ‘Stop that!’ said Mr Spink, our form teacher, his vo
dka-ruined larynx rasping with the attempt to muster authority. ‘I’ve told you before: I won’t have any of this superstitious “Lilim” nonsense in my class.’

  A massed raising of hands.

  ‘Sir,’ said the girl—a human girl—‘Primavera just bit Ignatz.' The susurration peaked, then died.

  ‘Primavera?’

  ‘I didn’t do anything, sir, honest!’ A pencil dropped to the floor. My classmates scraped their feet, chewed their lips: a pack of wolf cubs at bay.

  ‘What about you, Zwakh?’

  ‘I'm all right, sir,’ I said, my cheeks still flushed. Primavera glanced over her shoulder, her eyes narrowing with contempt.

  ‘Primavera, I think you’d better see Nurse.’ And the contempt surrendered to confusion, the green-speckled irises dilating with fear.

  It would mean an appointment at the Hospitals, another checkup where she would be probed, examined, observed, an updated prognosis entered in her records. A doll remained an out patient (they said) until the unassuageability of her appetites was thought to threaten public health. Interned—committal papers signed by parents or guardians with sometimes marvellous haste -and disabled with magic dust, her brief mortal term was concluded (they said) in conditions similar to those of an eighteenth-century madhouse, a Bedlam where, racked by visions of ruptured jugulars, of banquets of blood, she died (they said) drowned on her own monstrous salivations. The corpse was used for medical research.

  So they said. But could you believe them? The boys in the playground; the grown-ups whispering in corners; the TV, with its coded references to London’s fate? On a hot summer’s day, with your nostrils filled with the perfume of the prettiest little girl in school, you could believe anything.

  Primavera sloped out of class; a backward glance, as she closed the door, sent me and the human race to perdition.

  Our teacher had sat down and was staring at the stack of exercise books that, for months, he had never opened, never touched. Quiet desperation, Dad called that despair (its quietness sometimes disturbed by Mr Spink’s hacking coughs, his lungs besieged by the mutant bacillus that had been the forerunner of the doll-plague). I gazed out of the window. Sparrows wheeled over the roofs of abandoned houses; dogs prowled empty streets.