Benighted (15 page)

Ellaway and Franklin climb in from their different sides. I stand a little out of their way where they can’t knock me down, and scrawl the new car’s number on the back of my hand. Its engine croons as it pulls past me, and I lean against a pillar, my head against the concrete, and the dull yellow lights ripple over gleaming silver paint as the car glides away.

TWELVE

“C
ircle,” Paul says.

“I haven’t finished it yet.” We’re some hours into the evening. I’m getting better at speaking without watching my every word.

We’re playing the ice game. I lean over Paul, the ice cube in my hand, using it to draw an image on his back. If he can’t guess what it is, he has to perform a forfeit; if he can, I do. We play for best of five. Paul is a better draftsman than me, his pictures more elaborate. I don’t mind. I’m keeping my sketches as simple as possible, making it easy for him: his forfeits are more inventive than mine.

“How did you come up with this game?” My voice is growing softer, unstrung. I rest my free hand against his shoulder blade; it sits curved in my palm, palpable and shapely as an apple. I can’t get used to the sensation of his body against mine, the warmth of it, at once alien and familiar. Flesh of my flesh.

“Your idea…” He speaks quietly, not flinching under the ice. “In the restaurant, remember? When I burnt my fingers. We’ve just improved on it.” He sighs. “It’s a smiley face.”

“Well done.” One out of five. I lick the running water from the cube, and smooth my hand up and down his back to dry it. “Not just this game, though. Where do you get your ideas?”

He crinkles his nose and grins. “Spent a lot of time alone in my room when I was a teenager.”

I think of that, Paul as a boy, the cube slipping like a fish between my fingers. “What were you like?”

“I was a very nice boy.” I set the ice to him and he takes a breath, closes his eyes.

My hand spiders across his neck, testing the heat and resilience of the muscles. Closing my eyes, I picture a younger Paul, sitting alone in his room, waiting to grow up. Brushing the hair from the nape of his neck, I set the ice down and rest my face against him, my fingertips settled at the warm furrow where spine locks into place with skull, and inhale. The warm smell of the air and the solid muscle beneath my cheek are adult, male. This is what children wait for.

“It’s another face,” Paul says, his voice vibrating against my ear. “A brown-eyed and lovely one.” I lay a light kiss against his spine, just a brief taste. He smiles. “Two out of five.”

“Not fair.” I sit up. “That wasn’t an ice picture.”

“It was a print. It counts. I’m winning.”

“No such thing.” I drop the ice cube on his back, and he tumbles over trying to remove it. “You’re a cheat.”

Paul reaches the ice cube before I do, but I grab his hand before he can press it against me. We scuffle and I tighten my grip, wrestling his arm away from my face, knowing I’m outmatched. “Jesus, she’s strong for a little ’un.” Paul laughs, and seizes my foot, pulling me down out of harm’s way. We lie on the bed, face-to-face, and look at each other. Paul grazes his fingertips against my lips, and I open my mouth, curling one leg around him to hold him in place. I lean my head up, trying to reach him, but he covers my eyes and holds back.

I flinch as the ice touches my collarbone, draws a slow, stinging path downward. A circle, small and slippery, and I shiver, images prickling across my skin. He slides it down, cold and sweet against me. Drawing a deep breath, I hold myself still. I want this. There’s a triangle, a sweep of something that settles over my beating heart, and then the ice glides high, around one breast, then the other, some symmetry that ends in a rippling line underneath on each side where flesh gives way to ribs. He draws down, a three-sided figure that ends in a line across my stomach, and as my back arches I tangle my fingers in the sheet, holding steady, water chasing in droplets down my waist. Then the ice lifts away, and I nestle my face against his covering hand, an icon glowing against my frosted, shuddering skin. He holds my eyes closed, and my voice catches in my mouth as he draws again, a tiny, wet oval inside the hollow of my throat.

I lie still, eyes shut, trying to keep this, but a tremor shakes me and I crush up against Paul, burrowing for warmth. His hand comes off my eyes and cups my jaw, and I find my teeth are chattering. He runs his thumb across my face. “Are you okay?”

I nod, catching him by the back of the neck and pressing myself against him. He kisses my neck, touches his forehead against mine and smiles at me, his eyes sleepy with heat. “Any guesses, pretty girl?”

“I—I don’t know.” Only lines on my skin. Only someone’s arms around me. I mumble “What?” into his enclosing hand.

“An angel.” His hand slides into my hair, cradling my head. “Don’t you know an angel when you see one?”

There isn’t any answer.

Later, he finds more ice, and I try my hand at art, calling up round-edged images from my childhood books. For Paul, I will do my best at pretty pictures. I begin on a car, then wipe it out and start again, because I was thinking about cars all day. Nothing must get into this room from the outside. I draw apples, I draw a tree and let him mistake it for a lollypop, I draw cats and fish and leaves. My pictures are open and guessable. I invoke the brightest colors and most innocent lines I have seen in all my twenty-eight years, and sketch them out in melting water, playing to lose.

There’s a weightlessness to my body today, a suffusion. I perform my tasks slowly, watch my drowsy hands drift about their business as if there was a soft mist between my arms and my eyes. The day is close and chilly, threatening rain, but I’m warm inside my shirt. Finding no seat on the bus, I lean up against a pole and let it dig into my back, thinking about Paul’s good-bye kiss, wondering how anyone can sleep so little and yet not wake me. We talked about adolescence, told each other things all weekend. My adolescence did not make me inventive, and when I said this to him, Paul talked about lying awake at night. He sleeps maybe four hours to my eight, he said, and can lie still for another four untroubled by restlessness or unease. He teased me, saying it gave him ideas, four hours of lying motionless with nothing to do but think what we could be doing if I was awake. Then he told me about the glow of the streetlamps through the blinds, the sound of my breathing half-echoing in my tiny bedroom, my hands playing piano on the bedclothes and the arias rustled into the sheets, the voices he hears in the streets and the color of the walls in the darkness. I wasn’t awake for it, so he saved it to give me when I opened my eyes.

At work, I settle into my office and open my files, my hands still lazy on the pages. What I take in is the cool grain of the paper under my fingertips, the texture making it hard for me to pay attention to the words written onto it. When I check my e-mails, I’m more enchanted at the antics of the cute little cursor on the screen than interested in my messages. I shake myself, stretch my fingers out.

I return, once again, to Ellaway’s case. Checking up on the car I saw him in, I find that it’s a courtesy car provided by his employers. He hasn’t reclaimed his old one. The DORLA car patrollers didn’t pick it up. Some serious hacking has located it, and it’s at a small mechanic’s shop in the Benedict Park district. Benedict, the edge of town, the oldest park. It used to be the village center before we became a city and sprawled westward, building backward from the river. The colleges and schools are around Benedict Park, the bookshops and delicatessens. Scholars must need to get their cars fixed as often as anyone else, I suppose, but it’s not the district you’d take your broken vehicle to. Ellaway lives in east Kings, he broke down east of Foundling Park. It would have made more sense to take it to north Sanctus.

It only takes a little record-checking to find out which shelter Ellaway was taken to, after Johnny’s partner managed to collar him. If he wanted his car taken to a favorite mechanic, it’s possible he called from the lock-up; for that I’ll need a witness. I close the cabinet with some good news: it was my friend Ally in charge that night.

Everyone makes exceptions sometimes. Ally is one of mine.

No one talks about the creches. Lycos know little about them; to a lyco, the word means a plastic box full of toys and some young woman looking out over a floor full of crawling children. The mommy comes around in her suit and picks up whichever child is hers, saying, hello darling, have you been good? Sunlight comes through the windows.

My first night in a creche, I was two weeks old. My last night, I was a few counted days short of eighteen years and admittance to basic duties in DORLA. They try to break up the age groups, but can’t spare the staff to do it properly.

The babies scream. Under cheap bulbs, the light on those nights is synthetic, tainted like the world seen through a fever. Often they’re faulty, and strobe and buzz till our eyeballs burn, the cracks in the paint leap and shake. Little cots muster along the walls, plastic-sheeted mattresses for the older ones. There are blinds on the windows and broken toys no one plays with. Toddlers sometimes pound the infants. Teenagers huddle under blankets in the corners.

There were nights when I let no one near me, when I knew that the boys who came to try their luck were just taking an opportunity, and I’d fight them, kick and scratch in a silent battle under the harsh fabric coverings. There were nights when I hadn’t the strength to fight and would reach down, moving my hands fast to get the encounter over with as quickly as I could. There were nights when I’d lie unresisting and close my eyes, slipping my fingers under boys’ clothing in case I might find succor there. Sometimes the young ones would watch the stirring blankets; sometimes I watched, when I was young. There were nights when the supervisors could stop any of this happening, and nights when they couldn’t, and nights when they didn’t. Sometimes the children would play, and sometimes attack each other, and mostly everyone lay or sat speechless. In eighteen years, I cannot remember a night where there was more than an hour free from the sound of babies crying.

They thought it would be traumatic to stay at home and listen to our parents moan and snarl. Until we were old enough to work, we had to be taken away. Some children would ask to be taken home, the very young ones, the ones who had just learned how to speak. Whatever adult was asked would usually stiffen and ignore them. If they were young enough to ask, they were too young to understand. How do you explain to an eighteen-month-old child, If your mommy saw you tonight, she’d kill you.

Until I was eighteen years old, I never saw a lune.

The day I signed the lease on my apartment and walked into my own place, I sat down, leaned my head against the door and cried with relief.

Few friendships come out of the creches. We do too much to one another within them. Sometimes you recognize a face, but there are no reunions. We have nothing to say to each other.

Ally and I are friends more in spite of meeting in the creches than because of it. Once upon a time I would pull myself up to the cots, heave a crying baby out and sit down with it on my lap, trying to sing to it. Red skin and knotted flesh, a baby more intent on screaming than breathing. Ally would rattle the cots, shouting for them to be quiet. We didn’t talk. Later, I stopped singing, and Ally stopped shouting. I knew by the time I was six that I would never sleep in a creche. I experimented. Reading didn’t work: it meant sitting still, holding the pages steady, and unless I could move there was nothing to stop me flying apart altogether. I couldn’t bring in a toy I liked better than the creche ones: things got broken in there. Cat’s cradle; solitaire, the cards lined up in rows and complicated shuffles that took me months to learn; jacks on the grimy linoleum. On my eighth birthday Becca gave me a craft book she’d found about origami. I never asked if she’d seen me looping string and shuffling decks, rehearsing, improving on ways of wasting time. She gave it cautiously and stood away from me when I opened it.

Paper: light and easy, if a foot comes down on your work you start again, with nothing lost but the time you were trying to fold down into small pieces in the first place. Pleasant colors, and sharp, precise edges. I couldn’t tell her what it meant, not without telling her how jagged the nights were away from home, but over a few months I made her a whole houseful of paper dolls, paper cats and dogs for their pets, paper rooms to put them in.

Ally was building with matches then; many of us have some habit or other that we learned to fill the hours. He wanted me to teach him how to make airplanes. I wasn’t kind, but there was so much time to compress. Given something to think about, I devised Spitfires, Concordes, tanks. We didn’t talk much, but we knew we’d found something to keep our eyes off the dark-edged windows and the wailing babies in the dazed, hectic light. When we were older he would sometimes creep under my blanket and reach into my shirt, but I didn’t know how to resent it. We all wanted some consolation. Sometimes he let me kick and bite him, sometimes I let him clutch paltry handfuls of my flesh. We were in our twenties before we were able to mention it. We seldom talk about it, only a passing joke here and there, never for more than a few seconds. He never laid a finger on me outside the creches. None of the boys did. I never laid a finger on or raised a hand against them. More often, we’d cut our eyes away from each other. I couldn’t feel wronged by them, didn’t have any sense of how to begrudge what was done. I might not have wanted it—as much as you ever know what you want when you’re fourteen—but we all knew it wasn’t personal. Even looking back, I don’t know what I wanted. Except to be some other girl that things like this didn’t happen to.

Ally’s the only one I know from the creches that I’m in much contact with, and we don’t talk about any of it.

Ally and I first met as adults when we were training. He came in a few months after I did, but was well ahead of me in dogcatching skills before the year was out. He’s a technical boy. I never understand why people want to go into Weapons, but Ally loves it. He gets a big kick out of the fact that they have to put up with his unmilitary appearance because he’s so good at it. Every now and again someone tells him to get his hair cut. He reminds them of his bet with me—that he’ll shave his head when a lawyer manages not to mention public opinion or the word “majority” within ten minutes of arriving. Though now I come to think of it, Franklin hasn’t said any of those words, not once.