Skin (2 page)

“
What the
hell, Dimie?” I kept a careful lid on my words.

“
Ever had
an offer you couldn’t refuse?” he said.

“
But
Prime Life? You’ve sold out to Prime Life?”

“
It’s
still a gym, Rev and you’ve still got your job. With more cash and
better everything. What’s wrong with that?”

“
What’s
wrong with that is that it’s Prime Fucking Life.”

The Prime Life
building towered over Downtown like a spectre. Guessing is a big
place and I wouldn’t know a quarter of what went on in those
buildings that made our skyline. Evil corporations are to a city
like Guessing as vines are to a forest and Prime Life was probably
just one among many curling their tendrils around, climbing up over
anything in their path and sucking the life as they moved.

How can a
company that sells health and vitality be an evil corporation? The
answer is in the question. That, and they’d killed my mother. He
knew that, he’d been there in the good parts before she hired that
sleezoid manager and in the bad parts after she’d got sick. And now
Dimie had sold me off to them, like a widget, just a number on a
deal.

“
You’ll
get used to the idea, Rev,” Dimie said. He kept on talking but I’d
already turned and walked away.

My mother. My
girlfriend and now my job. Was there a part of my life that Prime
Life wasn’t going to take from me?

As if summoned,
my phone buzzed in my pocket. It was a message from Victoria
reminding me of our date tonight, managing me like one of her
corporate projects. I’m not going to compare Victoria when we first
met to Saturn’s, but the transformation since she’d been working
for Prime Life was exactly what I expected was about to happen to
my gym. It would look so new and pretty and energised from the
outside while on the inside, everything that was ever anything real
would be moved out, packed up and hidden away in some deep dark
basement or just put out with the trash. I should’ve dumped her as
soon as she got the job. I texted back.

Of
course
I’ll be there Birthday Babe.
Wouldn’t dream of missing it.

Novo was
unusually busy, even for a Saturday. It was Victoria’s favourite
place to eat and I think that wasn’t only because of the staff
discount she got as a Prime Life employee. I’d promised her a good
night out for her birthday. I didn’t buy her a present and she
hadn’t yet found that out.

Victoria hadn’t
worked at Prime Life when I met her about a year before. She’d been
headhunted from the rival brand, Vita-Scene. We’d hooked up at a
sales expo for the fitness industry I hadn’t wanted to be at. Dimie
had sent me to check out new machines he never ended up buying.

We’d made out
like teenagers on that first day. She initiated it. We kept meeting
for the rest of the week, hooking up in the back of the trade shows
and taking it upstairs to the hotel room Victoria always paid for.
Neither of us said much and I was pretty sure she was only using me
for my body. It was mutual. We kept on it for a few weeks after the
expo, sticking to the same hotel but then after about a month she
was calling me her boyfriend and wanting meet at her apartment.

I told her I
loved her after she had said it to me because that’s what was
expected. She was gorgeous, I was the first to admit it, and smart
in her way. And fit, even if she was constantly pouring those
chemical cocktails they called energy drinks down her throat. Did
that stop her from being Natural? As far as I was concerned, the
pill poppers and shake swillers were just a different brand of
Mech.

She’d been with
Prime for weeks before she told me and I’m still not sure why I
kept seeing her after that but there we were, one year on and I
still wasn’t sure what I was doing or why I was doing it, but it
was mostly to do with sex.

Novo was
everything you’d expect from restaurant chain owned by Prime Life.
It was entirely fabricated; soft down lighting to make it seem
better than it was, fake plants to make it seem more natural than
it was, and the food—every time Victoria forced me to eat there,
which was at least once a month, I was in the bathroom for a good
twelve hours later, purging. This was me trying to be a good or a
real boyfriend. The things we do for a tight bit of tail.

I stared into
the tofu steak I’d ordered, flicking the slip of green they called
a salad around on the end of my fork. Victoria nibbled like a bird
at whatever it was that was on her plate masquerading as nutrition
and sipped at a drink, Prime Life’s Winner, she’d poured from a can
into a wine glass. It was a caffeine bomb laced with who the hell
knows and It looked like carbonated neon piss. She’d stopped
telling her story and was doing this thing with her lips, pursing
them and then stretching them back real thin, that told me she was
annoyed with me. I didn’t care.

“
I get
you’re upset, Rev,” she said, doing a crappy job of sounding
comforting. “But it’s not my fault that Prime Life has bought out
your gym. It could even be a good thing though. That place was a
rust bucket death trap. Prime’s going to come in and spruce it up,
you’ll get a whole new fit out and the place will be looking great.
In a week you won’t even recognise it. ”

That’s exactly
what I was dreading. She stretched out across the table and laid a
patronising hand on mine.

“
You have
to trust Prime Life did not give your mother brain cancer. It’s
just a company. We’re trying to do good in the world.”

I laid my fork
down slowly, carefully. Wiped my clean mouth with the paper napkin
and took a sip of water. Did they teach her that smarmy smile as
part of her marketing training?

“
Yeah,
you’re probably right. I’m overreacting,” I said. “What was it you
were saying? Something about a new energy supplement?”

Victoria
slipped right back into the story where she’d left it. “You know
I’ve been working on the OU development line? At Brandt’s right
hand.”

I’d heard her
talk about it but without knowing one way or the other what it
meant. She called it ground breaking and her voice grew louder
whenever she mentioned how secret it was.

“
Doctor
Margot, I don’t know if you remember meeting her at the Christmas
party? Anyway, she was killed during the development. Quite
gruesome too, Brandt said.”

I did remember
meeting her, but only because I’d seen her the next day in Thel’s
Grocer and she remembered me. She was buying dried locusts and I
liked her straight away. I saw her in there every now and then and
we always said hi. It was tragic. This shit they made was killing
people even when they didn’t take it.

We finished our
meal and I watched Victoria eat a dessert, a low fat sugar laden
thing, iridescent in its toxicity and waited for another comment
about her ever wonderful boss, Brandt Delaney.

“
You’re
coming back to my place?” Victoria said. Her eyes softened and she
smiled. “Make it a birthday to remember?”

I was about to
say yes. But then I saw her. She was sitting at the bar at the font
of the restaurant, sipping on a glass of ice water. We were likely
the only two people in the room drinking water. She stared right at
me and likely had been doing for a long time. Those eyes stood out
even from across the room. Green and yellow, like emeralds flecked
with gold, a long slitted pupil black and deep like an eternal
night.

“
I’m
actually not feeling great. My arm is really sore and I’m dead
tired,” I said to Victoria and that part wasn’t a lie. “I just want
to go home and crawl into bed, OK? I’ll make it up to you next
week, we’ll go out, make it a really special night.”

Victoria
started to protest, a sulky disappointment I likely deserved.

“
Why
don’t you just drink a can of Winner? Perk you right
up?”

It wouldn’t be
a date with Victoria is she wasn’t trying to get me to drink a can
of Winner at least once.

It’s weird. I
couldn’t describe a single item from Victoria’s closet and could
really only describe her hair as dark blonde, but I noticed
straight away the snake eyed woman wore that same single piece
black jumpsuit, that revealed arms that looked like they had been
sculpted from smooth, white marble. Her hair was down, caressing
her long neck every time she moved.

I motioned for
the waiter to bring the bill. When I looked back, she was gone.

The Mechs were
already at Saturn’s when I arrived just after ten, filling the
place with the same old music, but there was no sign of the snake
eyed woman who I was sure would have followed me here.

I’m not here
for anyone but me, I told myself and set to work on the first round
of bicep curls with the solemnity of a religious salutation.

With my
injury, the story Victoria had told me about the dead doctor, the
whiny sulk she had thrown at me after I’d ended the date, and all
of the new Prime branded equipment that was strewn about the place
half unpacked, I needed the release of a good workout but it was
these things exactly that wrecked my focus.

I could barely
keep form with my usual weight. Weight lifting is more than a
sport. It is a personal movement, forward, upward, always more,
always stronger, always heavier, just as much an exercise for the
brain as it was the body. That’s what my mother used to say. To go
backward, to lift less weight after you’d already accomplished a
particular level, it was failure. I tried to concentrate, brought
my mind into myself and tried to feel only the movement of my arms,
the delicious tension in the muscle, the rise and fall of my breath
with the rise of the bar and the excruciating grab of tendons and
blood ripping apart my shoulder from the inside. I had to rest.

The Mechs were
taking it in turns to hurl medicine balls at each other’s chests,
laughing and swearing like the meathead jocks they’d probably all
been forty years before.

I felt their
eyes on me and the more they pretended they weren’t watching me,
the more obvious it was they were. I tried to squeeze out one last
curl but just could not get the bar to my chest. I dropped it,
defeated and heard them laugh. Ignore it, I told myself, sitting on
the end of a bench, breathing hard, trying to kid myself I was
doing just that.

The front door
opened, bringing the sound of the city at night in with it. I
looked up too quickly to pretend I hadn’t been waiting for her. It
was a kid, maybe sixteen. He came inside, glancing around nervously
and obviously trying hard to pretend he belonged there. He took up
a place at a bench near me and fumbled setting plates onto a
dumbbell. I watched.

For the space
of a couple of decades and a few million reps and sets, that kid
was me. Small and weedy, skin hung on bones and, I guessed, already
a lifetime’s worth of teasing, probably fresh out of the Sprawl
like I had been too. The kid started pressing out some chest flies,
sloppy, shaky and misaligned. The Mechs were watching too.

“
You
need a hand, buddy?” I asked when the kid had finished his
set.

“
I know
what I’m doing,” he said, defiance and youth breaking a tremor
through his voice.

“
OK,” I
said. “But if you want any tips, just let me know. I can help. It’s
better when you know what you’re doing.”

“
I’ve
got a tip for you too, Son,” one of the Mechs called out. “Three
gauge platinum bicep implants, chest plates and maybe a couple of
carbon leg rods. A basic kit out, just to get you
started.”

“
You
think I want to put all that shit in my body and end up looking
like you robot freaks?” The kid snapped back. I wanted to hug
him.

The Mech
dropped the medicine ball and the group moved to where the boy lay
on the bench preparing a second set, as if they really were
robotically linked as the same unit, which could be likely. The one
who spoke first snatched the weights from the kid’s hands.

“
You’d
do well to learn some manners, son.” He said.

I edged
closer, standing almost between the kid and whatever punishment the
Mechs thought he deserved.

“
Leave
him alone, he’s just a kid.”

“
All the
more reason he should learn some respect,” the Mech said. He held
his mechanical arms aloft. “You want to see what this shit, as you
call it, can do?”

A Mech I
hadn’t noticed behind me, slipped an iron grip around my neck and
my body lifted inches off the floor. I choked, flailing like a
landed fish dangling from a line. I grappled at the mechanical
fingers that held tighter and tighter to my throat, stealing my air
and making me look weak, helpless as a baby. My feet flapped, the
Mechs laughed and the boy looked on in wide eyed fear.

Do something,
I thought, an instruction to myself and to the kid who just stared.
The Mechs laughed. I squeezed my eyes closed and fought to find the
strength to react and free myself. When I opened them again, my
vision was filled with stars, a galaxy of swirling colour that
meant I was losing.

Through the
patterns I saw her, standing by the door like she had been the
previous night, watching. I swung my legs backward, hard, taking a
punt that there would still be one part of this asshole’s body that
was still respected enough not to be filled with steel. I was
right. The Mech grunted as my heel planted into his soft groin, it
was just enough of a distraction for his grip to loosen and for me
to struggle free. A dirty tactic, sure, but I knew this lot would
have done a lot worse to me.