In World City (16 page)

It happened sooner than Dion had anticipated, just fifteen months into the project. He had expected her to wait until close on the two years she had said the experiment would last. It would have been summer then; the children would have been more attached to her; she would have been able to take them away from him more easily. But in their fifteenth session together – in the clean, white-painted, concrete cubicle, with its couch and cushions, and its travel poster of a tropical island taped to the wall at four corners – Dion was aware of a deep disturbance around him, an instability that threatened to undermine all his expectations.

As the children arrived, he listened to the autumn wind crying around the walls of the concrete block. He could feel the wind of the dying year pulling at his feelings somehow. He could sense the pull of dissolution in its groans and roars. Even for late autumn, it had been unusually dark. Not even the faintest trace of pale, rain-washed sunlight had broken through the cloud cover for weeks on end. The semblances of form the world normally sustained seemed to be dissolving in rain and darkness, their increasingly tenuous coherence finally being torn apart by the great swipes of wind. He had felt the wind on his way over and watched the leaves being whipped from God knew where in the treeless Waste to plaster in the rain against the windows of the old Asian lady's apartment high above. He could imagine those leaves outside now, gathering in the corners around the concrete cubicle of Dion's Place. As he waited, Dion suddenly felt complete desperation. There was simply no time left. Something had to give way.

All the children had appeared except Nial and Nial was usually among the first. Miranda was late as well. Usually, she would arrive when about half the children had turned up and, until all were present, she would listen to them as they exaggerated their adventures to her. Only then would she start on the business of blood-taking and health-checking.

“Come on, where that Miranda, Dion?” demanded one who called himself Face.

Face liked to make out to himself, and anyone else willing to listen, that he had a degree of maturity way ahead of his stringy little body and tense eyes. One way of doing this was to find questions that put the weight on Dion. Normally, Dion didn't mind too much. Face was still far too young to be able to come up with anything that counted. It was just an act. But in the anxious, disrupted atmosphere that was crowding in on him and with the growing sense of his own complete lack of power over Miranda Whitlam, Dion suddenly felt Face's demand as intolerable.

“How the hell should I know?” he snapped, “I'm not in charge of her.”

“I'll bet she and Nial are sexing each other,” Tel cut in brightly, pleased to be the one to make a connection between the two absences.

The others giggled, relieved to have the edge of Dion's irritation turned. The comments came fast after that. “I'll bet they've got their clothes off right now.” “I knew he was in love with her.” “They're in the back of her Mercedes.” “Hey, I know, she's got the submarine capability on, and they're doing it underwater.”

The fantasy grew in the telling, cobbled together from fragments of video, magazine covers, advertisements. Then, as each vied for the most explicit imagining, the others took to acting it out with as much lewd exaggeration as they could manage. They had been bored waiting for Miranda, frustrated at not having her there to listen to their adventures. Their energies boiled over.

Dion was dimly aware he should have yelled at them to shut up. But he had something even more insistent beating on his mind. He had been watching for fifteen months, checking every nuance of exchange between Miranda and the kids for anything that might have suggested some hidden understanding. There had not been a trace he could detect. But suddenly, in the midst of the storm blowing outside and his growing unease, there were things out of place.

He heard steps coming up the stairwell.

“Sorry – I'm late,” Nial said, not looking at anyone in particular as an expectant silence fell in Dion's Place. The other kids all wanted to shout out, “Well, did you?” but somehow, with Nial there and present with them, their fantasies were just embarrassing.

“Where's Miranda?” Nial asked.

Dion, nerves on maximum gain, heard Nial's question as slightly flat, as if he knew the answer already. A few minutes later, Miranda arrived.

*

The session was unusually subdued. Miranda seemed distracted and offered no opportunities for the kids to tell her what they had been up to. Dion listened to the wind buffeting against the walls of the concrete cubicle. They were perched twenty floors up on the roof of a stained, forgotten apartment block, in a forgotten part of the planet and his sense of there being no time left grew as the dissolving wind whipped about the block.

The kids filed out down the stairwell. Dion said, “Nial, there's something I need to talk to you about,” calling the boy back as he was about to follow after the others. “Miranda, I'll see you next month,” he added, and watched her go. At least he could still dismiss her from His Place.

When they were alone together all Dion needed do was look at Nial.

“She asked me to cut loose and go off with her,” Nial said.

Dion nodded. “How did she put it?”

“She said it was ridiculous we were all coming here when she could put us up in World City and pay us twice as much. She said she couldn't see any point in you being involved anymore.”

“What do you want to do?” Dion asked.

“What do you think?” Nial said – convincingly quietly. “I'm not going to be put up in some World City boarding school to have blood taken from me by someone I've got nothing going with except money. Give over. The others might get taken in by that, but not me.”

Dion nodded. He put a hand on Nial's shoulder as he headed for the door and said, “Thanks, Nial. Don't worry, I'll sort her out.”

*

The sixteenth session was at the bottom of the year and Miranda was tense as hell. She had given Nial a contact number and he hadn't contacted her. He must have told Dion.

The ease she had begun to feel with the children and the confidence that had led her, recklessly she now recognised, to believe she could lift them out of the Waste and set them up without any middleman were entirely gone.

It felt like the first day she had seen them all, desperately insecure, wishing it could all go away.

She cursed herself for having made the play so soon, but she had felt she just had to: the days had been so dark, the wind so relentless; she had felt she had no strength left. There was simply no time left. She'd had to bring the experiment under her total control.

But now there was a good chance this Dion would withdraw from the whole thing and take his children with him. Presumably he had some kind of hold over them, even if it was only fear. Why else would Nial have gone and told him? Her one shred of hope was that Nial, caught between the two of them, had been simply too afraid to do anything.

Yet through the whole session Dion neither told her to leave nor did he make any move to leave with her after all the children had gone. Miranda waited, poised for whatever might be coming.

“Why did you want to take my kids away?” Dion began steadily. “I said we would trust each other. I said we were going to get on with this business and I was going to make it possible for you. Why did you try and mess me about?”

In the stress of the moment, Miranda clutched at the role she knew best: affronted manager holding off a pushy contractor; someone whose services she had bought who was now asking for more than their due. She said, “Listen, I'm perfectly free to make whatever arrangements I choose. I came to you in order to get this work started. Well, now it is started. I told you it would last two years, and now I'm looking for ways of making it last longer. But how I do that is my business. And if the children choose to go with me, that's theirs. If it stops short of the two years, I can pay you for anything you lose. I'll even give you a bonus. What more could you want? Anyway, those kids aren't any use to you. They won't be making you any serious money for another ten years – whatever you said when we first fixed the price. You've been lucky to get anything at all for them. I'll be here next month and we can discuss it then.”

Miranda needed time. After telling Nial to go away and think about it, she had expected to be able to talk more with the boy, to have some kind of conversation with him from which she would be better able to judge how the children felt about their situation. She was wondering now whether, when Nial gave her no reply, she should simply have hired enough muscle to silence Dion and lift the kids straight out. Given only a little more time, she could still do that. Surely she could hide them well enough in World City. What she couldn't stand any more was the desperate uncertainty of having them only available at monthly intervals, and then at the behest of this man who, now the project was up and running, was of no use to her whatsoever. Miranda turned to go but found her way barred. Dion was a big man and she backed away, her right hand reflexively reaching for the gun in its holster beneath her left arm.

Dion's words came in a breathless growl. “Listen, you can shoot me if you want. Say that you did it in self-defence, that kind of shit. But you need to hear some things before you do that.”

His rage was palpable, a kind of density between them. It had been building slowly as Miranda spoke and now it reached out and entered her in the pit of the stomach. And this was not the anger of a frustrated contractor – the kind of self-serving affront that is launched on reasons or is pulled out to back up excuses. This was different. This made her guts feel loose.

“Just when are going to fucking well recognise me, Miranda Whitlam?” Dion exploded.

It was the first time in the Waste her surname had been spoken and the first time her surname had been spoken between them.

“Just when are you going to fucking well recognise me?”

All Dion's plans for keeping control of the situation were blown apart. He just had to let it out and have her hear him, even if he died in the attempt.

“I've given you the best I've got. I've done that twice now. You don't fucking know that, do you. Twice I'm telling you. First when we were kids on that island. When we were kids on that island. Do you remember? Thirty fucking years ago. I showed you a place that was magic. That place was the best anyone could ever have offered you. And you knew that and then you denied me. You denied me in front of that fucker of a servant of yours just so he could beat me up and abuse me. And now I deal dead straight with you over these kids of mine and you've fucking well done it again. You've denied me again, Miranda fucking Whitlam. Again. Even your fucking father denied me – showed my father a whole lot of money, just like you show me now, and the next thing I know, my home's sold off, the land I love is covered in fucking holiday homes and golf courses and I'm taken to this fucking arse-end of the world. You need to know this, Miranda Whitlam, before you pull that gun out and shoot me for just having made myself inconvenient to you again.”

But Miranda's hand had dropped. Instead of moving to defend herself, she stared in paralysed wonder at this unfathomable black man, whom she now remembered with absolute clarity. But the dissociation between their past and present, and the total unlikelihood of it all, lent to Dion an awesome immediacy, like the sudden appearance of a ghost. She just managed to stop her knees giving way. All thought was suspended in shock. All she was aware of were images and feelings: a pool, glittering in shafts of afternoon sunlight that streamed through forest branches; ice-cold water that somehow turned warm and tingling as she lay on her back gazing up into the branches; and a kind of relaxation that carried with it a sense of having been there before, of knowing that moment, as if forever. Then Donnell had come, her father's bodyguard who had died of a heart attack a few years back, and she'd made out she hadn't known the boy was there, and Donnell had started hitting him. And something else, right at the edge of her memory, something she really didn't want to know about.

Dion saw her remembering and said, “When you were lost, I saw you before you knew I was there. You were the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. So I let you know I was there in a way that wouldn't frighten you and then I showed you the most beautiful place I knew.”

It had been the place where he could live forever he had been seeking. He had been sure he was about to find that place and he had found Miranda. And, as he had lain against the rock looking up into the trees while she floated in the pool behind him, he had realised he was actually there – in that place where he could live forever – in Dion's Place. Dion's Place. The place where he was now.

And Dion knew with absolute certainty the answer to the question that had been eating into him ever since he had come upon her again, sitting with eyes closed on that filthy floor, surrounded by rat shit and old paper. The question – why had she, of all people, landed in that wretched concrete cubicle that had been his first foothold in the Waste? It was because it was Dion's Place. Dion's Place. The place where there was life eternal.

He walked up to Miranda and placed his hands lightly on her shoulders, the better to look her straight in the eyes. “Those kids,” he said, “How much longer are they going to live – how much longer than everyone else?”

Dion takes a step back at the sound of a lock card being slipped into the door and watches the boy enter. His blanket is gone; instead he is covered by a fine cape that would easily have passed unnoticed in the hotel concourse. Why has she sent a child? Is it a reminder of their past association? But she must know such a reminder is no way to gain his cooperation. Most likely it hinges on the weaknesses of those who can offer access to the hotel. There would have been no way the boy could have got past an immuno-ID system. Maybe the security director has a weakness for children, or an important guest.

The boy walks across the carpet, unclips the cape and tosses it aside to reveal nothing but the familiar rags of a Waste kid. He stands there empty-handed, staring.

“So how did you get through?” Dion asks.

The boy holds his palm out and goes through the motions of placing it in an immunotype analyser.

“I your twin,” he announces.

Dion gazes at the boy's face – his twin. No wonder the face seemed familiar. “How old are you?”

“Nine years,” the boy says.

Dion is nearing sixty. He walks slowly across to one of the room's two beds, sits down heavily and gazes at the floor. It's a possibility – given a few cloned cells taken some years back. He gropes for an explanation. Has she anticipated the need to get to him past an immuno-ID? – But they've only become fashionable in the past five years.

“Do you have something for me?” Dion asks. Suddenly he wants to avoid the reality of his nine-year-old twin, wants to make it the usual business transaction, nothing personal.

“Yeah, it's me,” the boy says, “I've got me for you.”