The Scioneer (14 page)

‘Well, you got
my number. Beep me if you want me to set something up.’

‘Will do.
Take it easy Dom. Come on boys.’

The three
men stepped back inside the Reincarn8 to find their meals waiting
for them, and while Joshua and Kane didn’t waste any time devouring
the pile of sauerkraut mash and bratwurst, Cesar picked at his
food, his thoughts elsewhere, and guilt chewing at his
appetite.

Chapter
20

It was
Crystal’s idea and sh
e
wouldn’t be talked out of it.

‘It makes
perfect sense,’
she
said, swinging into a parking space. ‘They know our faces, right?
They know what we look like, never mind what we’re wearing. Plus,
this way, we’re off the beaten track, out of sight for an hour and
if they
are
still
searching for us, they certainly won’t be expecting to find us
here. Besides, it might be fun.’

‘It’s
too... public.’ Lek argued, although they both knew he was
clutching at straws.

‘You’re just
scared, Doctor,’ said Crystal, and she pulled him out of the car
and down the street.

Ursula
Fayette hadn’t had a single customer all day and was sitting with
her head in her hands at the counter, trying to balance the books
for Skindeep, her failing be
autox parlour when Crystal pulled Lek through the
door.

‘What
time do you close?’ asked Crystal
breathlessly.

‘Well, I was
about to clock off now actually, but if you need something
urgently…?’ Ursula left the question hanging, and Crystal found
herself on the verge of saying too much, until Lek interjected.

‘We’re
eloping,
’ he said. ‘Our
families don’t approve. My fiancée here, well, her brothers are
looking for us, so we need a complete…’ he searched for the word,
‘overhaul?’

If
Ursula’s face lit up with surprise and joy, there was no sign of
laughter lines around her eyes or on her forehead. She slammed the
accounting ledger shut and sashayed around the counter, her
Amazonian ear-plates swinging with every step.

‘Well
you’ve come to right place! Congratulations!’ she squealed, and
kissed Crystal on both cheeks in such an intimate way,
Lek might have thought they
were related. He was quick to extend a handshake for fear she might
try to embrace him.

‘So
here’s what we’re going to do. Hair, no question. Eyes, I think so.
Certainly for you, honey. Semi-tatts and paints, definitely, yes,
they’re just so hot right now. Blepho-suck? Chin-tuck? We’ll see.
Let’s get started! I’m so excited!’ Lek looked almost as horrified
as he had been the moment Delić had pulled the Meister on him
earlier that afternoon.

***

‘So, she
takes the python to the vet, yeah? Because it hasn’t been eating
and she’s starting to worry about it, yeah? Because every morning
when she wakes up, she finds the python stretched out next to her
in the bed, yeah? So she thinks the snake’s, like, lonely bro, or
cold or some shit like that. So anyway yeah? The vet tells her –
get this – the vet tells her that there’s nothing wrong with the
python, yeah? It’s like totally measuring itself against her to see
if it can swallow her in her sleep!’

Ulan
and Fogo
fell about laughing on the sofa in Osaze‘s bedroom. Arid had
already heard the story about Ulan’s aunt and her pet snake and
though he had found it funny at the time, right now he had other
things on his mind. Osaze was speaking to him in hushed tones about
the rumble taking place that night – he’d been looking forward to
it for weeks, after he had heard the rumours from a sixth form drug
dealer at school.

‘It
happens every month bro,
’ he whispered to Arid, ‘The wolves and hyenas come
together for a pack-clash under the full moon to fight for turf
rights south of the river. It’s part of the deal. If you’re using,
then you’ve got to do your duty for your pack. It’s going to be
a-maz-ing.’

If Arid
was beginning to have doubts, he pretended not to show it. He
hadn’t been taking Hyenarc for long – a couple of months perhaps,
and he felt he could stop at any point, whenever he wanted in fact.
Osaze had given him his first wrap, telling him he
had
to try it, that
every
body was
doing it, that it made you feel ‘connected’. And Arid had to admit,
it did. For the first time in his life, Arid Bomani truly felt he
was part of something.

The legal
equivalents of Hyenarc and
Lupinex were originally created for sports teams –
footballers, basketball players and the like – to give individual
sportsmen and women a better understanding of their position within
the team, and to bring them together as a cohesive unit on the
pitch or court. It helped coaches and managers find the natural
leaders in the group, and in turn helped the group understand the
strengths and weaknesses of its members.

It wasn’t
long
after these
authorized scions were introduced into the world of professional
sport, that companies like those controlled by Pechev began to
flood the market with low-quality cheaper versions. Across the
nation, ‘Laughing Bag’, ‘Little Red’, ‘Joker’ and ‘Bad Moon’ found
their way into the hands of ambitious university and college PE
teachers, who would stop at nothing to further their careers with
another trophy on display in the school cabinet. The same was true
of the students themselves: so keen were they to be the captain of
the winning rugby team, or the girl who had scored that all
important goal in the county hockey tournament, or the player who
had won the baseball scholarship in Florida.

Before
long, the drugs were everywhere: outside the gates, in the yard, on
the corridors, in the classroom.
School governors and head-teachers had at first
turned a blind eye to the drugs, seduced by the impressive
extra-curricula scores and weekend results into believing they were
creating good team-workers and fine young men and women. Now they
faced the challenge of a drug epidemic: schools overrun with
aggressive junkie teenagers, forming vicious cliques and gangs, all
vying to be the best.

Scion
drugs wielded
a strange
power over the impressionable minds of the youth.
School-psychologists found themselves inundated with pupils
complaining of alpha peer pressure, fear of failure, irrational
bouts of rage, mood-swings, and deep-seated inferiority complexes,
resulting from their lowly position in the pack. Their adolescent
bodies, still enduring the turbulence of puberty, also struggled to
cope with the changes which the drugs affected in them. Gender
became harder to distinguish: both girls and boys were stocky,
muscular and broad-shouldered, and they all had facial hair,
whether they wanted it or not. Those addicted to Lupinex complained
of severe lower back and leg spasms, and chronic pain in their gums
and teeth. Hyenarc abusers suffered from inexorable acne, stiffness
of the neck and jaws, and a once rare psychological condition
called pseudobulbar palsy, which left them paralysed by bouts of
uncontrollable laughter. Everybody had nits.

In short, it
was school on steroids.

In
time,
the fierce
competition on the playing fields turned to violence and spilled
out on to the streets after school hours. Muggings, house
burglaries, looting and car crime became commonplace in local
communities, but it wasn’t until the body of thirteen year old
Simon Casey was found at the bottom of a wheelie bin in Kennington
that society as a whole realised that it had created a monster.
While many still clung to the belief that Simon had been savaged by
a rabid fox or wild dog that had somehow made it through one of the
Europatrans Tunnels, forensic evidence confirmed otherwise: in
spite of the extensive bite marks and lacerations, Simon’s killer
had been human. He, or she, was never apprehended.

It wasn’t
the last slaughter of its kind. In 2026, f
or the first time in a decade, juvenile gang
violence and related suicides resulted in more teenage deaths than
skin cancer. Since that time, the statistics had only worsened.
Fourteen years later and the situation was beyond the law. Armies
of juveniles, many born into the drug culture, had turned the city
suburbs into gang-lands, and patrolled every night after
electricurfew, killing one another at will for the right to say
they owned a scrap of wasteland.

Full moon
pack-clashes were the only formalised gathering
s of the various gangs throughout the
city. At any other time of the month, a pack had to look after
itself, protect its own and fight for its turf. But long standing
members - Mohawk-sporting, perma-tattooed, one-eyed veterans in
their twenties - from both sides spoke of the feelings of
togetherness and camaraderie that the full moon clashes engendered.
Like all wars, there had to be casualties, and over the years, the
hyena brothers had suffered more at the hands of their lupine
counterparts. It seemed they simply couldn’t focus on the fight in
the same way, content instead to scavenge on the fallen. But not
tonight…

‘…
. Not
tonight!’ said Osaze, and Ulan and Fogo were jerked out of their
hysterical laughter at the emotion in his voice. ‘I have promised
Yakuba that we will be with him, and that we will fight like...
like lions!’

‘Like
h
yena!’ shouted Arid, in
all seriousness, and they all fell about laughing once
again.

The door
bell rang - t
he
carry-out had arrived. Osaze paid the delivery boy, only a couple
of years his junior, and tipped him ten creds, because he liked the
way it felt to hand out money to people who had to work for a
living. There wasn’t an ounce of altruism in the gesture. The boys
cracked open the pastry-bag shells and let the aroma of oxtail wash
over them. Osaze had ordered it the way he liked it these days –
bloody. He found that nothing else quite satisfied his aching jaws
like crushing a piece of bone between them. Arid had to agree. He
ate until he could eat no more, then lay back on the floor and
picked at a patch of acne on the side of his mouth.

Osaze
picked up the landline again and dialled a number. When he heard
the beep on the other end, he replaced the handset. ‘We need more
carry-out,’ he said to the room, by way of explanation, and the
phone rang immediately.

‘Dispatch,’ said the voice on the line, ‘what do you
need?’

‘2 grams of
your finest clown.’

‘Collection or
delivery?’

‘Delivery.’

‘Address?’

‘Flat 16,
number 8, St Olaf’s Road, Fulham.’

‘Will you
be paying by cred or thumbprint?’

‘Cred. How much
will that be?’

‘120 cred.
Should be about ten minutes. Please have the money ready for the
driver.’

‘Not a
problem.’

‘Have a nice
day.’

Eight
minutes later, the door-bell rang again
.

In a haze
of
Hyenarc ecstasy, Ulan
had fallen asleep, and Fogo, also woozy from overindulging,
announced he was going to ‘wank in the bathroom,’ to wake himself
up.

‘Osaze
, brother’
said Arid, when they were alone, ‘I don’t know the... the rules
south of the river. Am I ready for this? Tonight?’

‘Yes,
brother. Do not worry. Tonight we will fight as one. There will be
safety in our numbers. Yakuba has told me it will be so. Victory
will be ours. Do you have a weapon?’

Arid
showed him
the blade he had tucked inside his vest.

‘That is
strong bro! What you need now, my brother, is some courage to stick
it where it deserves to be stuck.’ And he opened the palm of his
hand to reveal a wrap of ‘Joker’ with its distinctive smiling face
logo, and Arid Bomani took it and held it under his nose as if he
were savouring the aroma of a fine Castro, and Osaze
laughed.

Chapter
21

By the
time they emerged
from
Skindeep, the skies above the city were completely dark, and Lek
and Crystal looked like new people. Crystal had enjoyed the whole
experience and even Lek had to admit, it wasn’t quite as traumatic
as he had imagined it would be. As for Ursula, she couldn’t believe
her luck – four hundred cred for one hour’s work and a hundred cred
tip for staying late. She had wished them the best of luck in their
new life together and kissed them both as they left.

They
stood under a street lamp and looked at their
reflection
s in a shop
window. Lek’s hair had been cropped short and dyed from dark brown
to brilliant white. He was also sporting something the beautician
had called a ‘doughnut’, taking hairs from his head and
electro-planting them as a perfectly circular white goatee beard
and moustache. Finally, his eyes, which before had been hazel and
hidden behind his scientist spectacles, now shone with bright blue
semi-tattooed irises in 24-hour corneal viz-skins.

‘I look
just like one of them,’ said Le
k, bemused. ‘Look at me! I could be Vidmar, or Delić, or
any of them! I look like a gangster!’ He smiled and turned to
Crystal. It was inconceivable to him that anybody or anything could
make her more beautiful than she already was. Ursula was clearly
fond of her scissors and had cut Crystals long locks into something
she called a ‘bob’, whispering ‘Classic Sassoon’ to herself while
she ran her fingers through the new cut. Then, against Lek’s
protests, she dyed the ‘bob’ pink; bright pink. The whole process
took only a couple of minutes - chameleonic semi-permanent
alkalizing gel – and when Lek opened his eyes to see the results,
he was more than pleasantly surprised. The contrast of the
colouring against Crystal’s warm brown skin was something to
behold. ‘You look wonderful,’ he had breathed, and Ursula had shed
a tear, either through the depth of the emotion in his voice, or
pride in her own work. Lek had drawn the line at semi-tatts for
Crystal’s irises however, and refused to give a reason. In truth,
he did not want to look at her that night of all nights and have to
search for the real Crystal Purcell hidden behind another woman’s
eyes. As a compromise, Ursula had gone to great lengths over
Crystal’s make up, face-painting spectacular paisley
peacock-feather swirls of colour around her cheekbones and lips. A
Metropolitan Fashion Police Officer swaggered past, swinging her
riding crop, looked them both up and down and raised her bowler hat
in acknowledgement.