The New Girl (Downside) (27 page)

‘We’re not afraid of browns,’ yells a fattened, crooked girl from the back row. ‘We’ll stun your cortex and hand-recycle you!’

‘Hand-semi-recycle you and watch you try to crawl,’ adds a boy with a neck brace.

‘Now, now, halfpints. The central ethos of all Upside Relations protocol is to avoid ostentatious confrontation at all costs. While you are indeed far more capable than most of the
halfpints upside, they vastly outnumber you. So—’

‘Hand-recycle them!’

‘So,’ Ryan says firmly, ‘on to today’s lesson. Making invisible ink from lemon juice in the field. Firstly, we’ll need lemons. The Academy has kindly supplied us
with two very valuable lemons for the demonstration.’

‘Stun their cortices!’

When his shift is over, Jane is waiting for him outside the Victuals R Us market.

‘Soup and bread okay again?’ he asks her.

‘Primo.’ She smiles. Now that he’s been here for several shifts, he can tell just how ordinary-looking she is compared to the rest of the people who live here. She was chosen
for the Encounters project in part because of just how much she looks like upsiders, like normal people. The people around here are either freakishly huge or skeletal; and each of them has some
deformation or mutation – an extra leg, a hump, spongiform bumps or weeping sores. Looking at Jane, he feels like he’s looking at someone from home.

He doesn’t feel the same way when he looks at her as he did. He has a vague memory of that uncomfortable pull inside, but what they did to him has neutralised that feeling. He rubs the
back of his head. The wound is not quite healed and his fingers come away sticky. Now he feels at peace, a peace, he realises, he’s been craving all his life. If only he’d felt like
this all the time, he wouldn’t have had the compulsions he had.

He smiles back at her and they enter the market through a broad glass door.

The market is held in a vast hall with white walls and white floors. The bays for each of the stalls are marked out in silver duct tape, and several of them are vacant. As he walks, he’s
aware of the dusty prints his shoes make on the floor, and of the narrow wheel-tracks of the barrows, the scrapes and shuffles of the customers’ gait, and the spatter of various dirty
liquids. A few barrows cluster in the middle of the hangar, filled with local produce: bread made from mildew flour, soups and stew mixtures made from reductions, root vegetables and a vast variety
of mushrooms, anything that can grow or be husbanded underground, all of it coloured in a spectrum between dirty cream and dark earth brown. Inflamed cuts of unidentifiable meat lie on ice chips in
a refrigerated case. The drone of a hurdy-gurdy and some sort of pipes played by a small band in the corner of the hall throbs beneath the hubbub of the customers milling about. The market smells
of the clods the food was picked from, a musty, mouldy smell he’s quickly become used to.

‘Are you sure you don’t just want a burger?’

She regards him quizzically. ‘You know that convenience food is only subsidised on-shift. We haven’t got the tokens to consume it off-shift. Besides, fresh produce is hygienic for
your passages.’

Ryan shrugs. He doesn’t mind cooking.

Jane selects a punnet of grey-blue mouldy something and sniffs it. ‘Primo fungus. This will go well with cheese-and-extract soup.’

‘You can put it on the side. I’m not having any of that.’

She shakes her head and drops it in his sack. ‘You’re such a brown, Mr Ryan.’

Despite the medieval feeling of the market, a bright neon sign reading ‘FORFEIT’ indicates a row of electronic check-out counters. As they make their way over to it, they come across
a melee at a crate on the patch of floor marked ‘Exotic Fresh Produce’.

‘Ooh, new imports,’ says Jane and joins the throng of downsiders snarling and drooling and moaning at each other as they jockey to get the best of the produce. Jane circles around
the crowd, but she’s too small to get into the thick of the throng so Ryan puts down his basket and pushes up behind her, jostling and elbowing a path between them. Effluent from the
downsiders’ sores and scars smears his sleeves as he goes, and he feels the gristly lumps under their clothes but he continues to shove through.

‘Kark off, brown,’ somebody hisses, ‘and take your abnormal halfpint with you.’

‘Kark you,’ he snaps back, his shunt hole tingling.

Soon, a narrow way is cleared for Ryan and Jane, almost as if the locals are too disgusted by them to offer much physical resistance, and they peer down into the box as other, braver drones dig
around among the produce.

The import crate contains plump apricots, green apples, bunches of model bananas, but there – there – is something he wants, a small package of green beans. There’s a
two-fingered claw gripped around them but he bends one talon back, ignoring the outraged cry from the woman it’s attached to until she drops it. He tucks it under his arm and grabs two
apricots for good measure before bulldozing his way out again, gently ushering Jane ahead of him.

‘Oh, Mr Ryan, you got beans!’ Jane is ecstatic, and an unbidden flash of a younger Alice’s laughing face flits through Ryan’s mind again. Then Jane’s expression
falls. ‘But we’ll never be able to afford them.’

Ryan’s afraid she’s right, but this is something he wants to do – something he needs to do. ‘You never know. Let’s see.’

They stand in the queue and bypass the temptations of SugarGas and Fatty Tissue, which appears to be a sort of nutritional supplement (
Accelerate your way to the Wards!
). At the
counter, the CCO tots up their purchases: the apricots cost ten times more than the bread and soup and fungus combined, and the beans twice that again.

‘I told you, Mr Ryan. There’s a premium on upside greenery.’

Ryan’s never seen Jane anywhere close to tears, but it looks as if she might cry now. He hands his tokens to the CCO. ‘Have I got enough there?’

The CCO blows boredly over her newly lacquered finger stump and says, ‘If you leave one of these.’ She points at an apricot like it’s a novelty dog turd. Clearly, the allure of
exotic produce is lost on her. The finger stump has something like a rat’s skull painted in precise miniature on the end of it.

‘Okay. I’ll leave that and take the rest.’

‘No, Mr Ryan, you can’t,’ Jane says. ‘That’s all your tokens. What about apparel? What about entertainment? What about victuals for the rest of the week?’

He shrugs. ‘I’ll fill up on McColon’s on-shift and besides, I’ll be paid again next week. I want to do something nice for my... uh, for you.’

Jane looks at the beans and grins. She hugs him around the waist. ‘Thank you, Mr Ryan.’

They drop their groceries into their root-fibre weave bag and head out of the shop towards the Apartments.

‘You spent too many tokens, Mr Ryan.’

‘It doesn’t matter. It’s worth it. Please, don’t worry about it.’ Ryan doesn’t want to spoil Jane’s treat, but he does feel he’s been seriously
ripped off. There’s no reason these imports should be so expensive.

‘It’s not going to get you any closer to discharging your debt,’ she says.

He wants to tell her not to worry again, but now that the euphoria of winning the sale is wearing off, he realises he has been stupid. He wants to pay off his debt and go home; he wants to see
Alice.

Jane’s blabbering away in excitement. ‘You should see the sort of produce at special market days for Shoppers. They sell a wide range of colourful and fresh upside victuals, tip-top
quality.’

One of the first things Ryan learnt about the Mall is this bizarre distinction between Shoppers and people with real jobs. ‘What’s the deal with the Shoppers?’ he asks Jane.
‘It’s almost as if they want to pay as much as possible for things.’

Jane shrugs. ‘They have to consume. If they don’t consume enough, they get depreciated. That’s the way it works.’ Ryan can’t understand some things down here, but
others seem all too familiar. ‘When I was in the Encounters project unit,’ Jane continues, ‘when I was upside, I felt like a Shopper for the duration. All that produce just
hanging there. On produce trees! It was like a phantasm!’

They take the lifts up to their flat. Or is it down? Whenever Ryan gets into one of these lifts, he’s completely disorientated, like that time he went to the Rand Show as a kid and they
went into a gold-mining exhibit. A group of visitors would cram excitedly into the industrial lift, the doors would slam close. Lights would flicker and the lift would shake about. Doors on the
opposite end of the lift would open, and there they’d be, underground, in a stuffy tunnel, hearing the blast and spray of the pneumatic rock drills. It didn’t feel like any suburban
lift he knew; it was more like they’d all gone for a ride in some magic time machine.

Then some older kid, a pimply and bored teen, mumbled, ‘It’s just a trick. We haven’t gone anywhere. They just shook us around and opened the door to the other side of the
room.’

Ryan couldn’t believe it; he didn’t believe it, until he saw the boy’s mother glancing in his direction and nudging the boy in the ribs. ‘Shhh.’ Don’t break
the spell. Then he knew it was all some elaborate joke.

These lifts are something like that. They play music, they appear to move, and when they open, he and Jane are somewhere else. He reminds himself that there is only one set of doors here, so
they must actually have moved somewhere – up or down, he can’t tell. Unless there’s a whole crew of stage hands who rush out as soon as the doors close and change the set outside?
That would be too much, wouldn’t it? Just for Ryan’s benefit. Surely?

Of course that’s not what’s happening, Ryan tells himself. But he can’t quite shake the feeling he’s being toyed with in some intricate way.

‘I’m very felicitous that the Administration agreed to lodge you with me in my Apartment,’ says Jane, bumping Ryan out of his thoughts. That much is concretely true: he
is
here, standing with this strange girl in a strange lift. ‘It’s primo that such good chums should abide together.’

‘Yes,’ he says, trying to remember how he got here. He was working at the school, staying at a boarding house in Malvern. He remembers that clearly. He remembers talking to the girl
next door – Tess, that was her name. She showed him something, a dark place. The rest is a bit fuzzy. He was hiding somewhere; he was in a garden. Cutting things? Climbing ladders? Or is he
getting it confused with the work he did at the school? He has the feeling that he left that job, or lost that job, but can’t exactly work out how.

Not remembering doesn’t bother him as much as it should. He feels at peace, his mind is calm, and he knows that calmness like that is a state he’s been after for a long time. Ever
since he had to leave Alice and Karin. He misses Alice. The more distant the memories, the clearer they are, as if someone has smudged the last couple of weeks – days? months? – of his
life. The thought of Alice is the only thing that spoils his peace, the only thing holding him to an unquiet past.

The lift door pings open and sure enough, they’re up – down – on their floor. ‘Welcome to the Apartments, Level F½’ reads a sign decorated with a clown in a
hot-air balloon, the sort you might see on the wall at a children’s party or in a children’s ward. Ryan shoulders the grocery sack and follows Jane along the corridor. The doors are not
numbered and he has to rely on her to lead the way.

When they get to the right door, one of a row of identical grey doors on this level, she lets him in with a swipe of her gelphone and he unpacks the sack onto the kitchen table.

‘Have you got butter here, Jane? Or olive oil? Tomatoes, onions? I’d like to prepare these beans the way my mother used to make them at home.’

‘Prepare? Don’t you just chew them? That’s what I did in the upside precinct. They were appetising!’

‘They’re even tastier when you cook them. Trust me, I’d like to make a special meal for you.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t have any comestibles like that. You know that I can’t afford luxury produce on a trainee’s tokens.’

‘Damn. I don’t want to just eat them raw. It’s not...’ Ryan slumps against the table top. He wants to treat the girl. He feels something for her, something he
didn’t think he would, an almost maternal care. He’s always wanted to care for the girls in his life, but right now he realises that he’s gone about it all wrong. Care is about
giving, not taking. What they did to him down here has made him realise that; he’s a changed man.

And despite himself, he thinks about Alice. If he could prove to her – and to Karin – that he realises he got it wrong, and that he can love someone properly, maybe he’ll get
another chance. But Karin and Alice seem so far away; right now there’s a child right here he could make happy, with a simple meal of beans.

‘I’ll go and ask the neighbours,’ he says. ‘Surely someone’s going to have some ingredients.’

‘That’s not likely on this level,’ says Jane. ‘This level is designated for inferior Ministry drones. They won’t have sufficient tokens for fresh
produce.’

Ryan sighs.

‘But,’ adds the girl, ‘I met a brown Shopper in the lobby the other day. She was so benevolent and sociable – she even smiled at me and spoke to me. Only a brown Shopper
would do that, only a forespecial brown Shopper. Perhaps we can ask her for ingredients for the victuals.’

Ryan senses that Jane is trying to make him happy as much as he is trying to please her; she’d be just as pleased to munch the beans raw. ‘Okay. It’s worth a try.’

They take the lift up – down? – to Level U. The doors here are painted a variety of pastel colours and there’s plush orange-and-purple carpeting through the corridors. Ryan
feels like his grubby shoes are smearing the thick pile as he goes. The doors are spaced far apart along this stretch and numbered with engraved brass plaques. The light sconces that line the
corridor are intricately whorled.

Jane hobbles rapidly along the passageway until they reach door number 401. She knocks timidly, then again, and at length the door opens.

‘Yeah?’ The woman is wearing a silky green mini-dress and gladiator-style high-heeled shoes. She has cropped hair and a huge, patchy scar running across one side of her face.
It’s a bizarre get-up, but compared to most of the people he’s seen here, she looks comfortingly normal. An old part of him deep inside, the part that would stare at this woman’s
long legs and imagine seducing her, flickers briefly and then dies.