Bang (11 page)

He said, ‘And now I will see to the stopcock. The
plumber cleared your towel out of the jets, but not just your towel. He
retrieved all sorts of junk. Torn clothing, for instance, shoe laces, hair,
toenails, you name it, half a tooth. Before turning saboteur he informed us the
unit would be more powerful than ever before, once it was up and running again.
Lucky him, he will be able to verify this first hand. Once I’ve dealt with him,
I’ll deal with you. Or – and I have just thought of this – or –
and what a challenge this would be, I could deal with both prisoners together.
Two prisoners in Shower Unit 101. Can you imagine? What a spectacle. I don’t
think such an acrobatic extravaganza has ever being staged before. I could sell
tickets. It is widely acknowledged, as you may have heard already, that I am
best at the controls. It is undisputed, incontrovertible. Officers talk openly
of my quiet dedication, of how I have mastered the controls. You’ve experienced
for yourself the skill I display. Yes, I am quite hooked on the idea of
flinging two people around Shower Unit 101, putting to test its extra power, my
endless talents. Mind, I shouldn’t imagine the heaving crowd would mind were I
to crash the prisoners into each other, breaking various of their prisoner
parts, in fact they would be all for it, and call for an encore I expect. What
does this prisoner think of my suggestion?’ Gentle rubbed the hole on his cheek
and picked at the scab. ‘Well?’ he demanded.

I’m a plumber, thought Delilah, a bleedin plumber, and
I’ve had
enough
. She said, her voice at the roughest she could muster,
‘You're messing with a plumber here, and you'd better believe it. Tangle with
me and I WILL PUT YOU DOWN. Make no mistake about that, sonny. I've got your
number, now outta my way.'

Gentle had not expected such force of language from Delilah,
nor such force of manner, and Delilah saw evidence of this as he tensed in his
synthetic yellow fur outfit and fear flashed across his face like the passing
of explosive light. ‘Move aside, fuckhead,’ she said, ‘I’m coming through,’ and
she walked behind the open palm of her raised hand, reassured by the cold
weight of the wrench in her chest pocket that knocked against her ribs with her
stride.

Rooted by fear or now fight, Gentle stood firm, and in
her path, and did not move. Delilah knocked him flat, which she hadn’t
expected, the Officer’s heel caught by the shiny shackle he’d only recently
drilled into the floor to shackle her, pitching him headlong. Delilah brought
her hand to her face and stared at it in astonishment. Officer Gentle didn’t appear
to be moving. She hoped she hadn’t killed him. And yet she hoped she had, he
deserved it. But she hoped she hadn’t. She bent to take a closer look at him,
his eyes flickered. Then, as his hand shot up towards her neck, and Delilah was
hit by this new predicament, the wrench took care of everything by slipping
from her pocket and landing on Officer Gentle’s forehead with a reassuring
crack. Promptly, and at the shock of what she might have done, and it certainly
sounded like she
had
done it, Delilah fainted, falling flat on the
officer, an elbow wedging against his windpipe and ending probably any chance
of survival might have had.

When Delilah came round she discovered that she was
asleep. In this sleep she slept on the most comfortable mattress she’d slept on
for many days, albeit a rather lumpy one. But it was at least warm and made a
change from her recent sleeping surfaces, which had been hard and cold and
often wet – when she hadn’t been hanging from her ankle 100 feet in the
air, that is. She dreamt, as she’d dreamt before in the System, of the moving
floors far above her and of the rich suburbs with their fake blue skies she was
yet to see and of men she had known and of men she had not. Such dreams made
the return to reality so much harder and she therefore resisted them, and
fought against them when awake, but they were inside her and came for her
whether she liked it or not when sleep wrested the controls from her
consciousness. She dreamt too of her Life, her shiny pride and joy, and
wondered now, in her sleep, at the trouble it had got her into. She promised
that when she got out of here she wouldn’t show it off again, and would keep it
close to her person, and would not carry such a flash version either. This was
when she got out of here. Getting out of here was such a huge subject, so
important, so
everything
, that its enormity woke her up.

Her own scream completed this process of waking.
Arghh!

She got out of bed. She leapt off Gentle’s near
lifeless body and screamed again at his aghast face. Then screamed inside her
own head, a noise horrible in itself, at the danger she was putting herself in
with all this screaming. She didn’t want anybody to come running in. She hoped
Wet Room 102 was as cut off as the two officers had claimed. Quickly she
wondered, could she just walk out of here, down the corridor, enter the lift,
and escape.

She adjusted Gentle’s body, slipped out of Wet Room
102, and swaggered along close to walls, making for the lift, her eyes alive
now and working her surroundings, working her options. She pressed the
up
button. The lift responded with its ting and its doors sprung open with their
mouthy kiss. She entered, excited.

‘Which floor, please?’ asked the elevator. This hadn’t
happened before, this was new.

‘Zero,’ said Delilah, pressing a button that to all
intents and purposes was white, yet just wasn’t quite.

‘No officer detected,’ said the elevator. ‘Which floor
please?’

‘One.’

‘Sorry. No officer detected.’

‘Two?’ said Delilah.

‘No officer detected. Which floor please?’

’99,’ suggested Delilah.

‘No. Find another lift, I won’t take you there.’

‘Please,’ said Delilah, frantically pressing a barely
perceptibly yet perhaps slightly less nearly white button than the previous
button, which she hoped might be the Floor 1 button. And then, when that failed
to have any effect, punched any other very, very light lilac buttons, which to
upset any rational thinker were arranged at random on the lift wall.

‘No officer detected,’ said the lift. ‘Elevator
resetting. Elevator resetting.’ And now the lift moved right. This was new too.
And this, Delilah’s sense of direction informed her, wasn’t up,
right
,
her fear concurred, was wrong. She banged on the
left
button. Nothing
doing. She regretted leaving the wrench in the wet room. With it she’d have
hammered on the button to force the lift
left
, or smashed the lift up
enough so she could escape, prised its doors, or something. But maybe she was
better off without the murder weapon. She bashed the
left
button again
with her fist.

‘Ouch,’ said the elevator.

‘Let me out here,’ said Delilah. ‘I’m a plumber and
have work to do. I specialise in U-bends and stopcocks. I’m expected.’

‘Nonsense,’ said the elevator. ‘About all you
specialise in is blowjobs. Go on, give me one. You know you want to. Come on,
I’m very hot. Mouth and hand, it’s what I want. Get down.’

‘You’re crazy,’ said Delilah, remembering she’d been
recently crazy herself, and perhaps was again now – in a lift that
travelled right and asked of her sexual favours.

The lift said, as if sensing her self-doubt, ‘Come
now, young girl, I am only joking. Not about your not being a plumber, because
you are not, but about your administering me a blowjob. The truth is that I do
not even know what a blowjob is. I hear officers talk of this ‘blowjob’ with
such reverence and at the same time disgust that I know that it must be a
terrible thing. Mouth and hand? What would I know? I am a talking lift.’ The
talking lift paused, and asked very amiably, and without a trace of
embarrassment at its earlier proposition, ‘Tell me, how are you enjoying your
stay in the System. Have you experienced much pain? You look remarkably well to
me.
Look
is the wrong word, I can only
sense
you. But I sense
your well-being. It is cheering – or would be were I an emotional
creature – to sense that you still possess for instance your full quota of
limbs. So many of my passengers do not. You have both eyes, too. A passenger
some days ago, en route to 330, had none. But I believe he was dead. At least,
I sensed so. I’m sure that you have worse to come, though. The Whipping Boy,
where I’m taking you because I rely on him to reset me with his phenomenal
technical skills, he will probably do nasty stuff to you, which is I’m afraid
unavoidable, and you have my apologies, which if I had a heart would be
heartfelt. But that is the System – as I am taught to tell all potential
escapees. I’m part of the security, you see. Well, sort of.’ Throughout its
chatting, the elevator was very cheerful, and continued on a chatty note. ‘If I
have one complaint about working here, apart from being so far underground,
though I’d rather be here than going up and down the outside of one of those
tall glass buildings they used to have once, then it’s the colour scheme. I
mean,
why
lilac
? Of all the colours the architect could have
chosen – lilac? 330 hundred shades or hues or whatever you want to call
them, of
lilac
. Then what happens? Some bottle manufacturer who’s gone
nutty at work one day comes along and wants to put in an extra three floors.
All sorts of problems – far more than just extending my cables. The lilac
on 330 is as dark as lilac can go before becoming very light violet –
that’s official. So what does the Authority do? It moves the Color Coding
Office from the Public Body to 49 to search for three new shades of lilac, so
that the entire building – apart from Authority Welcome, which is the
lightest lilac possible before becoming white – that’s official too –
can be repainted. I overheard today that another new hue was discovered. Took
long enough, didn’t it? Last one was nearly a year ago. You know, as far as I’m
concerned all the Color Coding Office has really done since it moved here is
change its name to the Office
of
Color Coding. I ask you. Sometimes I
wonder if the Authority has got its head screwed on properly. Splendid. We’re
here.’

‘Come in,’ called the Whipping Boy from his desk.

‘So long,’ said the lift, and tipped Delilah out and
closed its doors.

‘Sit over there until I’ve finished my homework. And
be quiet,’ instructed the Whipping Boy. ‘Then I’ll deal with you. After I’ve
reset the lift. I’m very busy.’

I’ve just killed a man, thought Delilah. I’m a
murderer. I’ve had some bad luck, over the past few days, but now I’m in real
trouble. Maybe how I left him will trick them into thinking it wasn’t me. It
was an accident, after all, I didn’t mean to kill him. I’m glad he’s dead
though. I hated that man. And with this, she rubbed her hands and then clapped
them.

‘Shut
up
. What are you doing. Didn’t I tell
you? Clap your hands like that again and I’ll whip them off.’

‘Sorry,’ said Delilah.

‘Quiet. Can’t you see, I’m doing some really serious
calculus here.
Hold on
, just now, were you doing an impression of
Officer JJ Jeffrey? You were, weren’t you.’

‘No,’ replied Delilah, terrified that she was.

‘Everybody does, even my pal Gentle, whose birthday it
was not so long ago. He’s a good man, isn’t he. So he lacks confidence from
time to time? I’m only ten, though quite advanced for my age, but know how he
feels. Sometimes you just don’t have it in you to interact with other people.
You feel weak in your shoulders, your legs, and can’t cut it socially. Gentle
confides in me along those lines. I’ll grow out of any similar shortcomings,
especially when I hit my teens. Bam! They say I’m gonna be a
monster
.
Meanwhile I’ve got my pizzle to play with. Did you hear, Gentle’s going into
modelling? I’m so pleased for him. He deserves it. He’s on the verge of great
things, I know he is. I want to be like him when I’m older, but without the high
voice, and I won’t wear the same clothes, I’m not so keen on synthetic fur. I
think I have a sort of
crush
on him, but I’m just a schoolboy so that’s
all right. If y = u/v is the same as y = u v
^-1
, then apply that to y
= e
^x
/x and we get y = e
^x
× x
^-1
, so, using the
product rule, do that in my head, we get dy/dx = e
^x
(- x
^-2
+ x
^-1
), yes, this is easy.’ And the Whipping Boy reapplied himself
to his calculus – leaving Delilah to review the terrors of the murder
being discovered. I like my eyes, she thought, and closed them. I don’t want
him whipping them out of me – which he will when he finds out, or worse.

The Whipping Boy groaned and removed his studded top.
For a ten-year-old he was, Delilah noted with more of her worry, very strong.
Where normally ten-year-olds had little muscle definition and still resembled
girls in many respects the Whipping Boy showed off bulbous muscles and veiny
arms. Alarmingly his eyes resembled these muscles, being also bulbous and
veiny, which Delilah put down to his drug habit. Even now, rather than swallow
it, with the edge of his Life he chopped an orange pill into a powder, so
bright it glowed, and made a line of it across his calculus, which he took up a
nostril in one almighty sniff. He slapped his face with both hands, shook his
mouth about, flung his head back over his shoulders, let out a satisfied roar,
which for a ten-year-old sounded unsettlingly impressive, and cried, ‘That’s
better,’ and pushed his homework aside. He got up,
Voltaire
in hand,
whipped at Delilah, taking her off the chair by her legs, and approached a
control panel by the lift. Inside it he tapped out information, squinted at
something that didn’t make sense, worked it out, tapped more information in,
and slammed the panel closed.