The Unblemished (40 page)

Bo said, 'They're all dead.'

'But that's a good thing, yes?'

'Bees in winter,' he said.

'What?' Sarah asked.

'I'm not sure about this,' he said. He appeared worried,
thoughtful.

'Who fucking cares? It's voodoo. It's juju. It's
War of the
fucking
Worlds.
Switch on your targeting hologram thingy,' she said. 'Zero in
on
so what.
It's over. We just have to find Claire.' Now she felt some
muscle come back to her. She called out but there was nothing to
bounce her daughter's name back to her; the syllable fell, as leaden as
any of the bodies surrounding her. She might as well have been
speaking in a vacuum.

'It's not all we have to do,' he said. 'The bees in winter. They die
when their work is finished. The hive is complete. It's primed.'

She was losing her patience with him. If Claire wasn't here, then
she wanted to leave; she would be somewhere else and somewhere
else was where Sarah needed to be. 'What are you talking about?
They're dead. Something's finished them off. Common cold. Food
poisoning. Boredom. Let's rejoice. Let's set off some fireworks. But
let's find Claire first. Please?'

Bo didn't say anything; he was distracted, still hunkered down,
staring at the bodies as if they might suddenly reveal their mysteries
to him. 'Everything that went before this was about preparation,' he
said. 'The city has been cleansed. It's like ... like insects. A first wave
doing reconaissance on a new site for the colony. They mop up. They
scorch the earth. Get rid of any threats. When the coast is clear, when
the conditions are right, their usefulness is over.'

'And they die.'

'Yes.' Slowly, he stood up. 'They'll collapse in the street. The city
will be reclaimed. And then they'll return. A second wave, a stronger
breed, will hatch. They'll get everybody. Nobody will escape them.'
He looked like a man on the brink. He was looking around him as if
he could see this new dawn trembling into view.

Sarah turned towards him. Pale-red light from the fires along the
bank underscored his features, picked out some form of triumph
there. She asked, 'Are they still chasing us?'

He shook his head. 'She was carrying the Queen. While you were
looking after her, they knew she would be protected. What could be
a better guardian than a mother? They let us get this far. As soon as
we lost her to them at the river, we became useless. We are nothing
now.' The redness flashed over his eyes as if they were filled with
blood. 'But while she's alive we might have time to end this. There
might be a chance for the city yet. And your daughter. They're foolish
to turn their backs on us.'

Sarah thought she saw bitterness in him at this rejection. Their
stain was in him yet. 'Where is she?' she asked.

'She's near,' Bo said. 'She's so close I can taste her.'

Salavaria felt the impact of failure burn through him like electricity
twisting out of a malfunctioning wire. He was aggrieved that he
had even given Graham Greene the time of day, yet he had allowed
himself to be persuaded, perhaps after seeing his own body reflected
in the cruel bathroom mirror at the hotel. A lifetime spent away from
the accoutrements of vanity did wonders for self-confidence. But
thrust back into a modern city where image was all, well, it didn't
take long for the doubts to begin. He looked old. Despite eating
frugally and healthily, despite putting himself through a regime of
exercise every day that would have shamed an athlete, he could not
stave off the damage that years visited upon the flesh. His reflection
had shown him a weak man, fading fast into senescence. Although he
was still physically strong, he had lost the ability to diminish people
merely by regarding them. Aging men did not carry the swagger, no
matter how hard they tried. And now that the sliver was in him, it
was doing its best to worm its way deeper, to unstitch him
completely.

He had not possessed the guts to stand up to that freak of nature
with the mouth of an ironmonger's dustbin. That Greene was out of
the frame was of no solace to him. It only served to highlight his
impotence. Mulvey was a slippier fish than he had given him credit
for. The hope that Greene and Mulvey might cancel each other out
had been misplaced. But he had to believe that thirty years of belief,
of training, of mental preparation, meant more to his destiny than the
seat-of-the-pants heroics of a reluctant navigator.

His time was still now, he had to believe it. The Queen was about
to be born; the first wave's shoring up of the city's boundaries was
ample proof of that. Some places, such as the tiny alleys – Lumly
Court, Bull Inn Court and Exchange Court – that linked Maiden Lane
to the Strand, were so rammed with grinning dead that he would have
needed to climb over them to get through. Bodies lay dotted around
as far as he could see. He found an articulated Scania lorry on
Whitehall, its windshield smashed in. The keys were still in the
ignition. He kicked out the remaining glass from inside the cabin, and
dumped the driver on the pavement. He started the engine and
floored the accelerator. By the time he hit Westminster Bridge he was
doing sixty miles an hour, shunting vans and cars out of the way,
grinding bodies through the wheels and axles like some mobile
mincing machine. He almost lost the lorry at St George's Circus,
turning hard left into Blackfriars Road, but although the wheels
bumped and juddered, threatening to jacknife the HGV into the
obelisk, he was able to correct the steering and roared on towards
Bermondsey, his heart in his mouth, the excitement of decades peeling
him clean, giving him the illusion of childhood again. The road
became pearlescent under a sudden slice of moonlight. It was as much
of a sign as he needed. The air seemed to crystallise, as if he were in
the rarefied atmospheres of the far north. He felt as though he were
being purified, prepared; some secret, forgotten gene was fizzing into
life with an ancient set of pre-programmed commands. He drove on
auto-pilot, barely registering the street names and buildings that
flashed by. For the last mile of his journey he might as well have been
driving with his eyes shut, his destination so bright it burned a hole
through his thoughts.

His foot came off the accelerator without his knowing it. Close.
Close. Some monumental heat radiating out of that urban snake of
decayed buildings, spent factories, fossilised machinery. He felt a
portion of his mind closing down, the part of his brain that had
helped him endure the decades of stagnation, that had stood by him
as his bearing on the world dwindled, and whispered that he still
mattered, that he still had his part to play in this formative drama of
the 21st century. At the same time, another, alien chunk was
stuttering into life. It was the confirmation, if any were needed, that
he was a synergy of worlds, he was the man best designed to take the
reawakened breed into the next thousand years. It didn't matter to
him how it had happened, whether his male ancestor from way back
had been in love, or forced at stingpoint to inseminate his freakish
mother. What mattered was that he was at the leading edge of that
bloodline, the conscious spearhead, the man of the moment. Happy
birthday.

He muttered that song tunelessly to himself for a while, blinking
at the unfolding within his thoughts, coming to terms with the
manifold skills being revealed to him. Without his realising it, the
lorry had stopped, coming to a standstill on the shattered forecourt
of a building project that had never been completed. He sat there for
what might have been ten minutes or ten hours, staring at the
bedraggled chain-link fences and padlocks, the faded security
warnings, a line of spit spiralling from his slack mouth as the images
of race memory rioted through his mind. He saw through the eyes of
his true father – how ever many hundred generations separated them
didn't matter – the man who dislodged the pebble that caused the
dam to collapse. Centuries folded like paper, allowing their distant
surfaces to meet. He suddenly knew the man as intimately as he knew
the shape of his own hands.

He was aware of the arthritic pains he suffered in the ankles of both
legs, his halitosis, the poor state of his teeth, the milkiness of his sight
as a cataract thickened in his left eye. He saw him walking through the
narrow streets of the city befouled by corpses in the road. Outside
every sixth timber-framed house a fire burned, in an attempt to drive
away the humours of the Black Death. Salavaria could taste the shit
and decay hanging in the air. He heard moans and pleas rising up from
behind sealed doors marked with red crosses or painted appeals to the
Lord for mercy, petitions that went unheeded by the watchmen
standing guard. He saw a man with a bludgeon chasing a thin dog into
a corner where he hacked at it until it was silent. There were no
children playing in the toxic streets, just meringues of filth, drifts of
blowflies, the frequent sight of a body hastily wrapped in a sheet and
tossed on to a cart, destined for a plague pit saturated with quicklime.
Voices, raised voices, discordant with hysteria, seethed around
churches stuffed with people desperate for divine intervention.

He visited the pest houses constructed north of Old Street and
Tothill Fields – the Seven Chimneys – a verminous social club for the
dying where membership involved skin devastated by buboes and stains
and you were never allowed to leave. There he talked to one of the
infamous nurse-keepers, a woman so desperate for financial reward
that she was willing to risk infection if it meant she could fill her
pockets with booty from the patients she hurried towards death. For
five shillings, she showed him what hell contained. He saw their bodies
in coffins waiting for collection; men trying to walk with sticks, their
faces nothing but gritted bars of teeth as the ulcers in their legs bled and
wept. A child in bed, too weak to cry any more, holding on to his dead
brother for comfort. A sea of vomit. The fevered jabbering of people
mere heartbeats away from death, their last dozen breaths carrying
garbled rumours of a saviour waiting out in the deep rural thicket north
of the city.

The journey. The houses diminishing, the encroaching countryside
of Stoke Newington, the plague pits being excavated there. Showing
his permit to the patrols at the edge of the city. The deep, rural clean.
Days of wandering. Getting lost. Losing his walking cane. The
descent of calm, or madness. The endless, bullying green. A panic that
the same ground had been covered; a belief that death was wandering
here too, picking up his trail, charging through the trees with the
flavour of his shadow in its craw.

Great hunger, deep thirst. A sense of no longer knowing who he
was or why he had come here. The permit turned to pulp in his tunic
by a sweat that seemed to come direct from his organs, a hot offal reek
as he felt himself being devoured from within. The sense that the trees
were becoming denser, the grasses so long that they prickled against
his throat. The strange illusion that meant he could see the stars
shining down through what ought to have been an impenetrable
summer canopy.

Realisation. As the stars blinked. And began to move. Dropping
from the trees in their thousands. Needle fangs bared. His entreaties.
His fear and relief. His invitation to return with him and rid the
capital of its filth.

Salavaria whooped in a great lungful of cold air, his head beating
as he was rammed back into the reality of Brompton Road. He didn't
know how long he had gone without breathing, but the redness in his
eyes and the battering of his heart spoke of minutes. Tears filmed his
cheeks. He ached for the man who had tried to save his city and was
then repaid by being banished. The Great Fire of 1666 had been
down to an arsonist's intent, not the accidental negligence of a
Pudding Lane farriner. What had the pompous mayor expected? That
the hordes streaming into his city would somehow separate the
plague from its hosts and suck it down like Thames oysters? That
they went on to consume the clean living was a minor problem. It was
expendable collateral; many more thousands would have perished
had there not been this crucial intervention. They ought to have
thought of it as a reward. Medals should have been pinned on their
chests; instead they had been chased by the fire from the streets they
enthusiastically purged.

Something caught his eye; moments of heat in this cold wasteland.
He jerked his head to the left and saw footprints as though written in
phosphorescence, fading on the lime-whitened sliproad. Someone was
here. He felt a sudden grip of panic as he considered that his prize
might be stolen from him at the last. He elbowed the driver's door
open and leaped down. At the crippled gates he paused for a while,
his feet covering the footprints that were dying into the cold of the
ground. He placed a hand on the fence and pushed his way inside.

The cathedral seemed to have no end. The dark waxed like a film
of oil on water. It adhered; it fretted at the nostrils and lungs like
black asbestos. Occasionally a wall would bow inwards, as if victim
to a massive failing in the foundations, and a face would stretch and
quiver into view, features so maimed as to suggest something beyond
human. Bo wondered where the black throats behind all those silent
screams might lead to.

'A bit heavy on the old numinous,' he muttered.

'What?' asked Sarah.

'Never mind.'

They were sinking. There were no steps, but both felt the strain on
their calves as they negotiated the incline, and had to lean back so as
not to slip. Sarah did not want to touch any part of this place.

Bo said, 'I liked to go to the library, you know, the British Library.
Sit in a corner, watch the people come and go, flip through the pages
of the great photographers as well as the photographers that deserved
to be called great but never got the recognition. I loved that library.
Go for a cup of coffee, maybe lunch. They always had an interesting
exhibition on, and a great shop where you could buy books, gifts,
pencils. I loved their pencils.'

He reached out and touched her hand. She laced her fingers into
his and squeezed. She could feel his pulse in his wrist, so forceful that
it might break out of the papery skin. She realised she was not
breathing. He was whispering; it was hard to hear him above the
clamour of her own heart.

'But it was always a bit chilly there. In the little handbook they
give you if your application to become a reader is successful, it says
that they have to regulate the temperature, keep it on the cool side,
on the dry side, to protect their books. And that you should dress
accordingly, so I had a pullover of some sort with me whenever I
went, even in high summer. In Humanities One, where I always did
my work, there'd be this racket as the air-conditioning switched on to
balance the temperature and humidity. It could really throw you out
of what you were doing.

'I was there recently. Hiding from these fuckers. Trying to get my
head around it. Trying to get my head straight. Knowing that outside
there were things happening in the street. Horrible things. Bodies
being dragged into the shadows of St Pancras. Things happening. But
inside, I never saw one of them. They never came near the place.
Because it was too cold for them. Not a great place to hatch your
offspring. Which is why it's so hot in here.'

It was getting hotter. Sweat created a barrier between her skin and
her clothes. There was a terrible smell of things gone beyond the
animal rankness of decay and now broken down to constituent
chemicals. There were notes in the air that Sarah could not identify
because she had never smelled them before. They were so offensive
that she had to breathe through her mouth. Deeper still, and she was
convinced they were underground, a suspicion confirmed when she
heard muffled echoes, shouts and screams, perhaps from some tube
tunnel close by. They stopped talking to each other, and simply kept
walking through the softness, here and there slithering, here and there
tripping over some mushy obstacle, hands entwined, waiting to find
whatever there was left to be found.

After what seemed like miles, like hours, Sarah thought she
detected a change in the darkness. It became more granular, less
intense. She couldn't perceive shapes, beyond Bo's hunched, intent
posture, but she was grateful for that. Eventually, the path began to
constrict around them and the heat intensified. She couldn't shake the
thought of guts, imagined herself unable to return, being peristaltically
fed into some large chamber where she and Bo would slowly be
digested. After a nasty few minutes when the walls of the corridor
began to brush stickily against her face and she was almost bent
double with the cramped conditions and her burgeoning claustrophobia,
the corridors quickly spread wide again, and began to
honeycomb.

'Shit,' Bo said. His voice came at her as though through layers of
hot cotton. 'Now what?'

But there was no hesitation on her part. A sweet warm smell, a
smell that meant life itself, was streaming along the farthest right
channel. She moved to it immediately.

'Sarah, wait.' Bo hurried after her, and clasped the hand she had
shaken free. 'What is it?' he asked. 'How do you know?'

'Mother's milk,' she said. And dragged him after her. It didn't take
long. Soon they were in a chamber scattered with clothed limbs that
had been wrapped in preservative matter. She stared at a fist
clenching a pair of spectacles. The walls took on a corrugated aspect
here; behind the largest of the folds, something mewled.

Bo turned to regard Sarah. His eyes were filled with tears that
wouldn't come. He nodded towards the crease. 'Claire is in there,' he
said.

Her own tears beat him to it, squirting out of her as if released by
a hidden switch that had just been thrown. Bo was saying something
to her, something about guardians, but she couldn't properly hear
him. It didn't matter. She had decided she could hear the measured
pattern of her daughter's breathing. She could smell the apple
goodness of her hair, feel the babyfine perfection of her skin.

She stepped forwards and three things happened at once: the fold
in the wall quivered apart, allowing a woman she had never seen
before to emerge; Bo's hand gripped her arm; and something jealously
guarded by the darkness moved into the chamber behind them.

Before she could say anything, Bo said, 'I have to go and speak to
her. I'll be back in a minute. Wait here.'

The pressure behind his voice told her that this tiny, slim girl with
long black hair and Japanese features, a bottle-green sweater clinging
to her delicate curves, must be precious to him. She was studying
Sarah intently, but without any hostility. Sarah was so taken by Bo's
obvious tenderness towards her, the way he approached and reached
out his hand to touch the girl's face; so filled with the urge to run to
her daughter, that she forgot all about the shadow behind them until
Bo had led the woman to one side and Sarah was alone, the soft
sounds of the cathedral's constant fluxing and realignment
whispering to her like the incremental growth of trees in a wood.

How could Bo expect her to wait? He didn't have children of his
own. He didn't understand. She strode quickly to the crease and,
grinding down against her revulsion, peeled it open. She was greeted
by gummy walls that pulsed and moaned. Strange blues and purples
streaked with violet. Membranous colours. Placenta colours. The
heat was moister here, it hung in the air like steam. She didn't like the
way occasional tendrils framed her to the point that she seemed to be
bleeding into the damp air, as if she were losing herself to something
equally insubstantial. She felt the centre of herself crumble and
imagined herself silently imploding, sucked into the vacuum where
her heart used to beat. Detail began to ooze out of the fug. She saw a
figure coiled on a bench. Sweat gathered. She rubbed the itching cuts
on her arms, irritated by the heat and humidity.

She sat down at the end of the bench and waited. She didn't feel
able to reach out and touch the figure because she didn't know if it
was Claire and if it was dead.

She closed her eyes and the shadow that had been creeping behind
them turned to blood that ran and ran, filling the entire subterranean
complex. She didn't care who it was. The more the merrier, she
decided. Things would end, one way or another, here. She opened her
eyes and the figure on the bench, lying naked with her back to the
room, turned slowly towards her. Her eyes were black discs, her
mouth a collapsing black bar.

The mist intensified. Sarah saw, before the whiteness eclipsed it, a
grubby vest, smeared with blood. A hole in the armpit.

'Claire?' Sarah said.

The figure on the bench turned her head. 'Mum?'

Sarah gasped and hot air flooded her chest. Her daughter was
inching her way around, albeit haltingly, perhaps because the wound
was so debilitating. Sarah rose and reached out to help her when she
realised that it wasn't the wound causing her to hesitate, but the thing
that was clamped to her breast, champing and drooling at her nipple
like a blind hairless mole. Claire wore the drowsy expression of
someone mollified by drugs, although Sarah was convinced it was
down to the suckling effect of the creature pawing at her chest. She
felt conflicting emotions rock through her. She had never been able to
get her daughter to drink the milk she had made. Sarah had suffered
badly with mastitis after the birth, and her cracked bleeding nipples
had not been the best enticement to Claire to latch on. Her jealousy
at seeing her daughter effortlessly nourish this beast on her belly was
tempered by a pride that made her heart swell, at the same time as
sickening her, filleting her of all sensations, opening her up to the
realisation that her daughter was no child, that all innocence was lost.

Memories of Claire's hand reaching out to touch her face, the
wonder of her daughter's eyes upon hers. The toy, a cheap plastic
fish, that she would not let go of on pain of tears. The first instance
of joined-up laughter, the giddy lack of control of it, at something as
everyday as water poured from a tap. She felt a pang for all of that.
She felt knifed that it was gone for ever.

She did not possess the strength to drag that thing from Claire's
nipple and rip the life from it – with her teeth if need be. She wished
she had the steel to give herself up for the betterment of everyone else,
but she was too weak, too selfish. Not while Claire was breathing.

She backed away, stepped out beyond the fold in the wall. Cooler
air swept into the thin gaps between her clothes and her skin. She
would fetch Bo. He would know what to do. He could read the
situation better than she could.

A sudden smell of pear drops.

The thin man who filled the doorframe was larger, somehow, than
the dwindling creature she had seen picking his way around
Southwold. He smiled. The bite mark in her thigh jumped with recognition.

'Stay away from her,' she managed, glancing around her for a
weapon. There was nothing. But it didn't matter; she doubted
anything she could lay her hands on would be substantial enough to
harm this man who seemed so driven.

His pupils had swelled to a point where it seemed they must take
over his entire eye. She saw his nostrils flaring. The dented, bruised
knot on his jaw where she had struck him with the cash register
glistened as wounds reopened under the clenching of his teeth. He
wasn't even acknowledging Sarah's presence any more. He began to
take off his clothes, moving into the room as he did so, dominating it
with his bulk, causing Sarah to back away until the writhing faces in
the wall were pressed up hard against her.

'Leave her alone!' she yelled, and lashed out with her fist, catching
him above the left eye. He blinked the blow away, scowling slightly
as if he couldn't understand what had assaulted him.

She was about to go for his face again with her nails, perhaps try
to pull him down by the hair, when her daughter's voice called to her.
It was lower than she remembered it, thick with what she suspected
was desire, but she hoped was the deadening effect of the steam and
her fatigue.

'It's all right, mother,' she said. 'Let him come to me.'

She froze at that order, utterly bereft, unable to coax any kind of
decisive movement from her limbs. She felt her flesh puckering at the
way Salavaria sauntered towards her daughter, his prick thickening
with each step. But there was nothing she could do. She could not
bring him down. She could not go against what her daughter
demanded, even though she did not seem enough herself to be making
such decisions. Sarah dropped to her knees. She had not eaten for
such a long time; she felt faint, imperceptible, so pale as to not be
there. She could almost believe that the thin man had been unable to
see her. She was water. She was air.

She moved back outside the fold in the hope that Bo was there. She
listened for his voice but could not hear anything. She called out:
'Bo?'

Bo had been unable to speak at first. He was slaughtered by her
simple beauty; glad that she was here, but unable to figure out why.
The map had shown him so much, but not those who were betrayers
of his trust. He loved her so much that the word did not do his
feelings justice. She had moved slowly towards him and folded
herself, in that way she had, on to a hard wooden bench with such
grace that it looked as though it must be the most comfortable seat in
the world. She pressed her hands together, her lovely almond-shaped
nails catching his eye before she buried them between her thighs and
dropped her head. She always adopted this pose, a religious posture
almost, when she was expecting an apology from him. But not this
time.

'Keiko,' he said, the name suddenly alien to his tongue. He could
say no more.

Keiko was wearing her favourite jeans, snug-fitting and riding low
on her hips. When she wore them, he said, she could be as mean as
she liked to him and he wouldn't mind. He would let her grate him
like cheddar cheese as long as she was wearing those jeans. The
smooth slope of her throat beneath her jumper was maddening. Her
skin was like a narcotic coating, a habit that he could not kick. He
wanted to reach out and stroke her throat now. To kiss her, inhale
the maddening scents that her flesh breathed out.

'I'm sorry,' she said. 'I sold you.'

Bo stared at her. He shook his head, but minutely, as if he would
not yet allow himself to completely deny her. He did it again. He tried
to absorb what she was saying, but he could tell from her posture and
the misery pulling her face down that this was going to be anything
but a reconciliation.