Falling Sideways (5 page)

‘Hello?'

‘All done,' said an unmistakable voice. ‘You coming over to collect tonight, or do you want me to stick her in the freezer till the morning?'

‘No! I mean, no, that's fine, I'll be right over.'

‘Don't forget the rest of the money.'

‘I won't, I promise. And, um, thank you—'

The line went dead; either Honest John had no stomach for such displays of raw emotion, or he kept an eye on his phone bill. David gently replaced the receiver, as if he was afraid of waking it, then took a long, deep breath and tried to relax. Some hope.

Just for once, he decided, he'd get a taxi. Normally he wouldn't dream of doing such a wickedly indulgent thing (if God had intended us to take taxis, he wouldn't have authorised the Devil to create London Transport) but this was something of a special case.

Luckily, the bank was only a few hundred yards from the cab rank, opposite the station, and there was a taxi waiting. Of course, he didn't know the name of the street, so he said ‘Ravenscourt Park Tube' and hopped in. The driver looked at him, as if to say that people who took a taxi to get from one Tube stop to another were the reason why the country was going to hell in a handbasket, and drove off.

The journey took longer than he'd anticipated, partly due to a plague of municipal moles that obliged the driver to take a detour, apparently by way of York and Kiev. That didn't help David's nerves very much – what if Honest John got fed up with waiting for him, or assumed he'd decided to leave it till the morning after all, and gone home? It had been bad enough enduring the last few hours. Trying to keep his head from exploding till nine a.m. the following morning would probably turn out to be downright impossible.

Just when he'd reached the conclusion that the taxi driver was the Flying Dutchman, the cab slowed down and stopped. He could see the lights of a Tube station dead ahead. He paid the driver the price of a small communications satellite, and clambered out into the night air.

It occurred to him to wonder whether the sign, or indeed the whole building, was there when he wasn't; whether it was some kind of miracle, vision or practical joke that only he could see; or whether there were lookouts posted all around to give notice of his approach, whereupon dozens of mischievous pranksters scurried round furiously assembling the shed and carefully arranging the props so that it'd all be ready as soon as he came within visual range. He could almost have believed in something like that, except that he knew he was too unimportant to warrant so much trouble and expense.

The door opened before he could knock. ‘You're here, then,' said Honest John.

‘Yes.'

‘Well, you'd better come in.'

So he came in; and there were the glowing green tanks, and the many cats, and the workbench cluttered with tools (what did a clonefounder need with two angle grinders, a cutting torch and four big lump hammers?
Really
don't need to know that), and the empty coffee mugs, some of them with dust-clogged spiders' webs spanning their rims; and there he was, and there was Honest John. Other than that—

‘Um,' he asked nervously, ‘how did it go?'

‘Hm? Oh, fine, no problems. Well, the neutrino collimator had a funny five minutes, and an earwig managed to get inside the Kluth diffractor, which means it's going to be interesting working in here after dark for the next week or two. But you got to take stuff like that in your stride in this business.'

David waited for a second or so, while Honest John bit off a hangnail. ‘So,' David ventured cautiously, ‘is she, um, ready?'

‘ 'Course.'

‘Great. So can I, er—?'

Honest John looked at him quizzically. ‘Can you what?'

Not for the first time in his life, David felt as if he'd missed last week's episode. ‘Um, can I see her, please? If that's all right, I mean.'

‘You want to look at her?'

‘If that's all right.'

Honest John shrugged. ‘Don't see why not.' He beckoned, and crossed over to the row of glowing green tanks. ‘I've written out an invoice,' he said over his shoulder.

‘Ah, right. Thank you.'

‘'S no problem.'

They were standing beside one of the tanks. The sides were misted up, but David reckoned he could just make out a shape that could conceivably be that of a reclining humanoid. ‘In there?'

Honest John nodded. ‘All yours, mate,' he grunted. ‘Soon as I get the balance, of course.'

For a moment David couldn't think what he meant. Further adjustments needed to the clone's inner-ear mechanism? One leg slightly longer than the other, just hold on a mo' while I fetch the oxy torch?

‘The rest of the money,' John explained.

‘Ah, right, that sort of . . . Here.' He took the cash-point-crisp notes from his top pocket and thrust them at Honest John like a fencer. The clonewright looked at them.

‘Don't suppose you got the right money, have you?' he said. ‘Only I'm a bit short on change. You want to hang around a few minutes, I can nip up the Spar shop and get 'em to change a tenner—'

‘Don't worry about that,' David said. ‘Please.'

Honest John shrugged. ‘Suit yourself,' he said. ‘All right, if you're ready, I'll wake her up.'

David had thought about this moment, of course; ever since the idea had first crawled, wet-furred and muddy-pawed, through the cat flap of his imagination. And, not unreasonably, the thought had presented itself to him in various conventional, archetypal images: Sleeping Beauty (the Disney version); Pygmalion and Galatea; Brynhild kissed awake by Siegfried on the firecurtained mountain; Aphrodite, rising from the white foam; even (in a dream, after a toasted Edam sandwich and a strong black coffee) Frankenstein's monster, wreathed in lightning. Above all he'd imagined her eyes opening, her lips parting—

‘Yurghsptttt!' said a voice from inside the tank, followed by frantic splashing noises. A glob of luminous green snot the size of a snowball shot out over the rim and hit David in the face. It tasted like iron filings in rancid egg white.

‘All right, all right, hold your bloody water,' sighed Honest John, taking a long stride over to the tank and reaching inside it. David heard another wild spluttering shriek, followed by a glub-glub noise. Two green feet rose out of the end of the tank, like lobsters crawling out of a saucepan, and kicked ferociously, spraying more of the green stuff in all directions. One of the feet (humanoid, but disconcertingly green) caught Honest John neatly under the chin; he made a grunting noise and sat down on the concrete floor, looking distinctly cross-eyed.

‘YURGHSPTTTTGNURGYTTCH!' yelled the voice inside the tank. It was unmistakably female, probably human and definitely unhappy about something. ‘YNGMMPTCHOO!' it added, and David ducked just in time to avoid another massive green glob hurtling from the tank. Whatever it was in that tank, it was fairly safe to assume it wasn't a morning person.

‘Shut it, you!' snapped Honest John, scrambling to his feet and reaching for a broom that stood propped up against the workbench. ‘Sorry about this,' he added in David's general direction. ‘Some of 'em take it a bit funny, you just can't tell. It'll be better when the language centres kick in.'

Holding the broom over his head like Neptune wielding his trident, Honest John advanced on the tank, sidestepped a flailing green leg and jabbed down with the broom-head. There was a shriek of pure rage; then something grabbed hold of the broom and pulled sharply, dragging Honest John up sharp against the glass; whereupon a naked female humanoid sprang almost vertically out of the tank, broadcasting green slime like a wet dog shaking off water, and kicked him Bruce Lee-fashion on the chin before dropping to the ground on all fours. David jumped back about a yard and groped instinctively for one of the lump hammers. Between this, he decided, and the equivalent scene in
Sleeping Beauty
, there were a number of rather crucial differences.

‘Yaaagplutchk!' shrieked the female creature, springing backwards and using Honest John's chest as a bouncy castle. ‘Mmpluj ykkk! Splut!'

(Admirable motor skills and coordination, though. And absolutely nothing whatsoever wrong with her lungs or vocal cords.)

‘Splut?' She was staring at David, pointing to herself, then him. ‘Spluffle splut?
Splut?
'

From one perspective, she was a raging monster, an inhuman, savage harpie. She was also, nevertheless, a girl he'd only just met. Accordingly, David felt himself go pink and couldn't think of anything to say.

Just then, Honest John crept up behind her with a heavy-duty paper sack in his hands and popped it neatly over her head. Before she could claw her way out of it, he produced a hypodermic. A moment later, she was peacefully asleep on the floor in a little pool of green slime, like some nouvelle cuisine recipe.

Honest John cautiously felt his jaw, and winced. ‘All yours,' he said.

Clearly, David's thoughts were lucidly reflected in his face, because Honest John sighed and said, ‘You got anything to take her home in?'

David shook his head. The thought hadn't occurred to him, and the situation was obviously way, way beyond carrier bags.

‘All right,' said Honest John wearily, ‘I'll see what I can do. Properly speaking, I ought to charge extra. Let's have a look over here.'

‘Over here' turned out to be a big cardboard box containing black plastic dustbin-liners and raggedy old hessian sacks. ‘Where are you parked?' Honest John asked, as he sorted through the heap.

‘Actually,' David whimpered, ‘I came in a taxi.'

Honest John looked up at him. ‘Marvellous,' he muttered. ‘All right, I'll keep her under while you go back and get your motor.'

‘I, um, don't drive.'

‘You don't drive,' Honest John repeated. ‘Fine. Well, I'll tell you this for nothing, you won't find a cab round here at this time of night.'

‘Oh.'

It was one of those moments that made you believe in telepathy, because as David and Honest John looked at each other, it was apparent that they were sharing the same mental image: of David trying to get a fighting, squirming, green-slime-flecked girl in a potato sack back home on the District Line. ‘Bugger it,' said Honest John, in a very sad voice. ‘Whereabouts do you live?'

‘Ealing Broadway,' David replied.

‘Fine,' said Honest John, with a nothing-surprisesme-any-more look. ‘I'll drive you.'

David breathed out hard through his nose. ‘Thanks,' he said, just about managing to keep from bursting into tears of gratitude. ‘That's really—'

‘Give me a hand with this lot,' Honest John interrupted. ‘Come on, you take the feet. I got to be home by midnight.'

So David took the feet. They were hard to get a grip on, because of the slime, and because David had never touched a girl's foot in his life before, let alone a bare one, let alone a
green
bare one belonging to a creature he was responsible for bringing into the world. He averted his eyes, which didn't do a lot for his ability to navigate—

‘Look where you're going, for crying out loud,' John muttered, as they nearly knocked over the pillar drill.

‘Sorry.'

They had to dump her on the pavement while John opened the back doors of his old, ex-British Telecom Bedford van. It was the most conspicuous moment of David's life, and he felt like he'd just committed a murder. (Illogical, since he'd just done the exact opposite. That set him thinking: the law recognised a variety of different forms of unlawful killing, but were there equivalent gradations of unlawfully bringing to life? Probably.)

‘Right,' John said, wiping his hands on a bit of old cloth before turning the ignition key. ‘Ealing Broadway, you said?'

‘Just off Warwick Road,' David replied. ‘You know it?'

John shook his head. ‘But you do,' he replied, ‘so that's all right.'

They drove in silence for a while, until David managed to save up his courage allowance and ask: ‘Excuse me, but the, um, colour—'

‘What?'

‘The colour of her skin.' Dear God, he sounded like the Ku Klux Klan. ‘Is it meant to be like that? Green? Not that I mind,' he added quickly, ‘I mean, brown, yellow, green, it really doesn't matter to me one little bit, I was just wondering—'

‘It wears off,' John said wearily. ‘Quicker in daylight. It's your basic photosynthesis.'

‘Ah.'

He turned left at the very last possible moment, sending David cannoning into the door. ‘Because basically,' he went on, ‘what you got there at the moment is a plant.'

‘I see,' David said, as truthfully as a politician. ‘A plant.'

‘That's right. Definitely the vegetable kingdom. Physiomimetic fungoid algae. Bloody wonderful stuff, couldn't do a thing without it.'

David closed his eyes for a moment. ‘You're saying,' he murmured, ‘that the thing in the back, the
girl
, she's a
fungus
?'

John shrugged. ‘It's a grey area,' he said. ‘See, there's this goo. It's what's in the tanks. Give it like a template to copy, and it'll grow into anything you like. That's just for starters, mind. Treat it and feed it like a human, pretty soon – a day or so – all the plant cells get replaced with human ones and it becomes
really
human. Just like you and me.'

‘Ah.'

John nodded. ‘All there is to it. 'Course, that's the only reason I can do cloning, with the law how it is. Because technically, see, it's not human, it's a plant. You can buy and sell it, keep it, sling it out, you could slice it up thin and make toasted sandwiches if you wanted to. No red tape, no bullshit: it's as if I was growing roses. Or turnips. And by the time it turns human, of course, it's nothing to do with me.'