Bang (21 page)

Next the bottom left bed leg bowed and gave way.
Delilah slid off the bed, knocked herself on the floor. ‘Replace the leg!’
called someone. ‘New wax leg on bed 1009!’

She didn’t expect what happened next. Or know when it
happened. Just that somebody new was now saying, ‘Here’s your hat. Don’t drop
the product. Drop the product and I’ll drop you, drop you so fast you’ll never
stand up again. Stand up straight. These are important people. Mess this up and
you’ll be right back where you started. Urgh, you’d better not still be
contagious. Pull the hat down over your brow, we don’t want anyone recognising
you. Do you have any idea what kind of a risk I’m taking here? I must be off my
rocker. I’m doing it for you, you know. If you don’t get to see the end result,
how can you get better at it. You’re good anyway, very good, but even the good
can get better. I want that you get better. I want that. Perhaps this really
means I’m doing it for me: if you’re good, I’m
fantastic
. But that is
fair enough, any great person must seek his own betterment before another’s or
he will not be a great. I am a great. Stop swaying, be polite, and if anyone
asks, you’ve been a popcorn seller all your life. As an actress you should be
able to manage that. Yes?’

‘Uoho.’

‘What?’ asked the filmmaker Saint.

‘Huh oh.’

‘Whatever. Quick, get selling, the lights will lower
soon and you’ll trip and spill corn down the stairs, like the last girl, who
has since become a waitress who specialises in evening events for legal
gentlemen held after successful court cases. She is a special waitress.’

Theater of Theaters 05 already had about it a steady
dimness. Delilah had no recollection of getting here. This was a turn up. It
made little sense. But it was Floor 05! She felt the freedom, not five floors
above. It hurt like the lovesickness hurt. It pulled, she could feel freedom’s
tug. The filmmaker gave her a boot.

‘Popcorn,’ hollered Delilah. ‘Come and get your
popcorn. Popcorn for sale. Popcorn here. I am a popcorn girl!’

‘Over here,’ called the voices, and she ran around
pouring it out. ‘I would rather buy popcorn off you, darling, than that bossy
waitress who tells jokes I don’t understand, or that other seller with the head
so large I’m surprised it doesn’t explode when he sneezes.’ Delilah scooped and
poured. The popcorn would not spill, even when she tried, just channelled
itself straight into the tubs. To the sound of crunching the film began. There
she was, upside down, again, gasping with the audience, scene by scene.
The
Murderer
played to an enthusiastic theatre.
The Murderer
caused one
death (a popcorn choking – as predicted), but ninety nine lived. And
The
Murderer
caused Delilah to feel special, more special than ever in her life
before. Cutting hair didn’t come close to what she’d done up there on the
screen. Through all her filmmaking pain and now her funny panicky illness she
felt pride. Of course, she knew that this pride would subsequently be harnessed
and used against her by the System, but for now, while it was still hers,
before they got their hands on it, she luxuriated in it and it felt great.

‘Take the film away and destroy it,’ called the great
filmmaker as the audience stumbled out and prepared over the coming hours, days
and months to make meandering journeys to the Center of Disinformation.
‘Archive a broken fragment for historical purposes as usual. Destroy the rest,
we have no use for it now.’ He finished, addressing Delilah directly in her
eyes, eyes which fought, as they so often did, against tears, ’No use at all.
It’s garbage now. Grind it up into that paste they mould the Superintendent’s
gavels from. He’ll be needing a new one for that upcoming trial my best friend
Poy Yack keeps talking about.’

‘Let me keep it,’ said Delilah. ‘Please.’

‘Pah,’ said the filmmaker.

‘When will she learn,’ asked Officer JJ Jeffrey, with
one hand on the filmmaker’s shoulder and his other stealthily slipping an egg
turned blue because it was out of date into the filmmaker’s viewfinder pocket,
‘to conceal her weaknesses? What use is our educating you, prisoner, if you go
on to make the same mistake over and over? You have been overcharging people
for popcorn, by the way, you stupid woman, and you tried spilling it, too,
which is a littering offence, but these are not the reasons I’ll be coming to
arrest you later. Don’t worry, I’ll do it when you’re at your most vulnerable,
which is how all arrests should be made, when the villain is at their most
helpless. I even arrested a man once as he lay unconscious on the operating
table and System surgeons tried, unsuccessfully, to replace his hands, which
he’d lost in some door-slamming accident, terrible accident, hands trapped,
real carnage. I can assure you he will not resist arrest again! Nor shall you
when I come for you. Authority is such a wonderful thing. I do so like being in
charge. Where is your cage? You made those wheels wobble, you unsightly
menace.’

Then Delilah was back in the sanatorium.

‘It’s up to you,’ one of the students managed to say,
‘we’ve got you this far, by kidnapping you, now you must do the rest.’

They sat huddled together on a bed. Disease moaned and
groaned nearby. The smocked and hooded orderly looked on from a distance,
caressing his ornate glass syringe, occasionally fitting. The heater pumped
heat at them, back at the wax legs, whose purpose Delilah still just couldn’t
figure but soon would.

‘The rest of what?’ she asked.

‘You know. Shsh.’

‘Know what?’ asked Delilah.

‘What you must do.’

‘I don’t,’ said Delilah. ‘All I know is that I must
get out of here.’

‘Yes, yes.’

‘And I won’t give up,’ she insisted.

‘No, no.’

‘And that’s it.’ This was all she had to say.

‘We’re depending on you.’

‘To do what?’ Delilah demanded.

‘To get out of here. You’re unpredictable. You can do
it. You can beat the System. You can. You can. That’s why we kidnapped you.’

‘Why else do you think we’d poisoned the walls of
111,’ said the other weakly. ‘You couldn’t do anything in another cage. Had to
keep you … oh my head … keep you out of there.’

The other one said, ‘We made a film too. An
anti-copyright film, and horribly familiar. But they’ve beaten us. We’ve given
up now. You won’t. You’ve shown you won’t. We did. But you won’t. It’s up to
you now. We’ve done our part, put everything in place for you. What we’ve done
will get you out. Now you’re on your own.’

Delilah, in her customarily inquisitive manner,
squinting her big eyes, peered at them, their ailing faces, seeking more
information. She tried pressing her hand into one of the student’s, but could
glean no more from either. With a sickly lurch the bed legs gave way and the
bed toppled sending the three of them crashing to the floor. Both students went
taut in the face, the eyes, the throat, their red spots lining up to form two
boxes on their cheeks. And while one was saying ‘about the pl– the p– ’ and the
other was saying ‘you’re a l–, a l–‘ they both suffocated to death. The smocked
and hooded orderly came quickly over to tick the boxes on their cheeks with a
red pen.

Delilah got up and walked away bewildered. Sleep came
back for her when she lay down.

‘More murder,’ someone screamed in her ear, causing
her eardrum to crackle. ‘Can’t help yourself, can you? If there’s a life, you
take it! You’re a killer, a slayer, an assassin. Isn’t anyone safe? You knew
full well those heaters work directly on the duration of the sleeper’s sleep,
by reflecting heat off someone once their body has reached its specific heat
capacity, which is a person who has slept too long, collapsing the bed. You
also knew that they worked by reflecting heat off the total body area they
detect above them, and would collapse the bed. You made the students huddle
with you because you knew the bed would collapse and knew from the disease they
had that a sudden jolt, a bang on the floor, would kill them. You killed by
calculation. Bang went the bed, and with it came their deaths. Does your
murderous wont know no bounds? Up, prisoner, up, you’re coming with me. I told
you I’d be back for you.’

‘I’m asleep,’ mumbled Delilah, ‘go away.’

‘I’ve come to arrest you,’ screamed Officer JJ
Jeffrey, infuriated.

Here we go, she thought, another murder charge, trying
not to inhale the officer’s egg breath, which forked from his nostrils so
pungently it appeared to redden his transplanted eyes and certainly stung hers.

‘Get up, get up, we’ve a hearing to get you to. The
Superintendent’s waiting. Have you any idea what time it is. The Superintendent
is not happy with you, let me tell you, for being got out of bed at this time
of night. Dreaming, apparently, the Superintendent was, of wonderful washing
machines and magnificent driers. You really know how to ruin a Superintendent’s
night. Or anybody’s, for that matter. Would you like a nice yellow egg? This
way.’ The officer led Delilah off trying to stuff the blue out-of-date egg down
her throat.

‘You will now face an additional charge,’ explained
the ugly, grumpy, man or woman, Superintendent.

Delilah slumped in the dock, which had to its fore a
wetted wooden rail, which was new and hadn’t been there before. Wood was
uncommon in the System, and this wood was smooth and porous and also wet and had
a texture that reacted uncomfortably with human skin causing the person to
shiver and shudder. Delilah had been instructed to grip this rail at all times
while it slowly revolved, or risk being injected by the smocked and hooded
orderly, who was not by his movements the same smocked orderly from earlier –
but who, before coming along, in his words, for the ride, had taken fluid
samples from both dead students. The rail rolled under Delilah’s hands.
Shuddering and shaking horribly, she waited to hear the double-murder charge
put, hoping to get this over quickly so she could get back to sleep.

After falling asleep himself or herself, and after
waking again and after looking around and blinking, and working out where he or
she was, the Superintendent announced with grumpy relish, ‘Kidnap. You are to
be charged with kidnap.’

‘Kidnap?’ asked Delilah.

‘That’s right, girly, kidnap.’

‘But I was the one kidnapped,’ she protested.

‘Precisely.’

Delilah waited again, shivering on the rolling wood,
while the nearby needle watched on with its sharp eye and pushed out from time
to time a bobble of liquid, which after falling to the floor the smocked and
hooded orderly knelt to carefully dab up and place, with his face averted, in a
containing marked
Highly Hazardous – Property of the Authority. Reward
if Found. Alternatively, ingest swabs and report quickly to Toxicology Research
103.

‘And why do you think that was?’ asked the
Superintendent. ‘You incurred that kidnap by your own doing entirely. Had you
not made yourself such an attractive target within the confines of the System,
no crime would have been incited. You are therefore by your very actions solely
responsible for that crime. Such a crime cannot go unanswered. Impossible You
will therefore answer it. Kidnap victims, as you inaccurately like to describe
yourselves, are rarely successful at evading justice, as you will learn –
and are nearly always found guilty, as you most certainly will be. After all,
what small fry it is for a murderer, yes a murderer, to try his or her hand at
being kidnapped. For you, easy, as you have proved. Your court date, by the
way, at which you will answer this charge of kidnap and the mounting murder
charges, the foremost being dear Officer Gentle’s, has now shifted from an AM
to PM slot because we’re having an evening party afterward to celebrate your
being found guilty. Luncheon celebrations just aren’t the same. Luncheon gives
me indigestion in the way that supper just doesn’t and leaves me heavy for the
rest of the day. Not only that but the special waitress, a popcorn seller by
trade I am told, though I cannot believe this, can only service an evening
celebration, and we must absolutely have her in attendance. She is quite
extraordinary, you know, and learns the facts and figures of every case and
then, at functions such as the function to be held after you have lost your
case and we have won ours, reels off these facts in a manner so effortless that
one believes she’s been part of the prosecution team right from the off. She
interacts so fully she can toss out an in-joke without apparently needing to
pause to think. Thinking – now there’s a subject. I believe you discussed
thinking with Officer Gentle prior to executing him. Perhaps he even asked you
if you thought you could get away with his murder as he lay there in your arms
dying pleading with you with his sweet and unsure eyes. You probably thought
you could. It is a sad fact that he or she who thinks they
can
think
probably
cannot
think, sad for people like you who will err. Such
people – and this is abundantly clear to me – are unable to think
sufficiently well enough to be aware, as any good thinker is, that they cannot
think
adequately.
Such people by this shortcoming alone attain a
dangerous conviction of their thoughts. You are such a person, dangerous and
self-assured purely by the limitations of your thought processes. Do not think,
however, prisoner, that this is an excuse for your behaviour: “I am sorry,
Superintendent, but I am not to be blamed for my actions, they result from my
inability to think things through.” No, this will not do. One prior legal
system, you mentioned it when last in my presence, had a name for such a
defence. I will not name it. I will only say, Ridiculous. I tell you this to
pre-empt any similar pleas you might put before me, and to appeal to your
better nature, not that you have one, to not waste our time when we reconvene
at a later date. You are guilty because you have killed, not because you are
stupid, which you are, as we have before established, and clearly will again.
Stupidity is no defence and will not lead to acquittal, and only a killer who
has not killed can be found innocent of killing, and even then it is unlikely,
especially if the case has proceeded this far, as yours has. No, you will go
down, further down, into the System and we will celebrate by our being attended
to by the special waitress. Oh, she is so lovely. By the by, for I can see
plainly the thoughts in your eyes, I have the law behind me, such as it, and am
therefore, in my thoughts,
right
. You have nothing behind you, nothing
but you life, which was nothing anyhow. While in front of you, you have an
apparatus designed to offer a glimpse of how a long-term prisoner will feel in
the System when awaking each morning – excruciating shivers and shudders
that he or she will come to know and love, representing the endless misery
rolled out before their life. Court Attendant, roll the rail, wet the wood,
roll the rail!’ And the rail rolled and Delilah shuddered and shook, stamping
her feet, throwing her shoulders.