The New Girl (Downside) (29 page)

‘And Father – Varder Batiss – requested that you make this?’

That name. Varder Batiss. She knows that name. Tara fights once more to unjangle her thoughts, put them in some kind of order. Then, all at once, she gets it. They are all connected. Batiss.
Encounters. That pervert, that maintenance man – Ryan. The house. Jane. And Martin. Yes! She was at the house looking for Jane after Martin disappeared when that guy in a hat did something to
her. Knocked her out? Shot her, even? But apart from that abrasion on her neck she just feels sick rather than injured. Whatever this Penter woman says, they
must
have given her something.
Drugged her. Poisoned her. ‘Where am I?’

‘Varder Batiss’s private quarters.’

‘Where?’ The apartment, if that’s what it is, looks,
feels
, expensive, high-end. Somewhere in Sandton, maybe? If she could only look out of a window, get her bearings.
But there don’t seem to be any windows. ‘How did I get here?’

Penter sighs. ‘Varder Batiss, Mrs Tara Marais, is a Player. You have been illegitimately purloined from the upside.’ She shares a glance with the purple-faced freak. ‘He
instructed a node agent to transport you to the Wards for unauthorised recycling, charging you with contractual breach. But, of course, the contract was never authorised by our Ministry.’

Upside? Recycling? Ministry? What the hell is this woman talking about? That this Batiss person kidnapped her? And is Jane’s mother in on it? Why, though? ‘And Martin?’

Jane’s mother frowns. ‘Martin?’

‘My stepson. He... he was at Encounters. He’s missing.’

Penter relaxes, beams at her. ‘Ah. The primo viable. We have good news for you, Mrs Tara Marais. The viable is already safely integrated into the system. Its penetration and deployment
were a great success!’

Jesus, Tara thinks. These people are clearly deranged. ‘Look, my husband is a lawyer. He’s connected. He’ll be looking for us, he won’t stop. You have to let me go. Let
Martin go.’

Penter and Purple Face share a chuckle. ‘You are not a prisoner here, Mrs Tara Marais. You were brought here erroneously. You can exit at any time.’

‘I... can?’

‘Of course. Unless you choose to integrate, of course. There are several options for a—’

Tara waves her off and gets to her feet, trying not to scream as the pain in her thigh muscles intensifies. At least her head has cleared somewhat.

‘Apologies for the discomfort,’ Penter says. ‘When you arrived at the Wards you were prepared for harvesting. The discomfort will fade. The shunt you have received will
facilitate both your forgetfulness and your speedy recovery.’

Tara slams her fists on her legs, wills herself to take a step, just one.
Move.
She sweeps the room, sees a door three or four metres to her right. She stumbles forward. The soles of
her feet are numb, but every movement sends fresh agony shooting through her muscles as if red-hot knitting needles are being skewered into her legs. She reaches the door, grasps the handle, waits
for them to stop her, for that purple-faced freak to pull out his gun.

Neither Penter nor Purple Face move, but continue to watch her with blankly polite expressions. Are they torturing her? Playing with her? It can’t be this easy. She turns the handle,
expecting the door to be locked, but it opens smoothly onto a long, empty corridor as bland as the apartment itself. There’s a bank of lifts at the end of it.

‘But before you exit,’ she hears Penter say behind her, ‘may we ask for your cooperation?’

Tara hesitates, looks over her shoulder. ‘My... what?’

‘We are confused.’

Tara almost laughs again. ‘
You’re
confused?’

‘Yes.’

Tara battles again to clear her muddied thoughts. Recalls someone telling her – or maybe it’s something she’s read – that the best thing to do in a dangerous situation is
agree and cooperate with the aggressor. Penter doesn’t appear to be dangerous – although Tara’s certain she is mentally ill – but she can’t be sure about that freak of
a man. And she can’t forget about Martin. She needs to find Martin. This woman knows where he is. That’s all she needs to concentrate on now. She’ll make sense of all this other
crazy shit later. ‘If I... cooperate, will you take me to Martin?’

‘That would be most irregular.’ Purple Face chuckles.

‘Indeed it would,’ Penter says. ‘But not unprecedented. It is possible that we can accelerate a special authorisation. Bakewell Klot, would you initiate the process?’

‘You are certain, Liaison Ulliel?’ Purple Face says in his weird squeaky voice.

‘Yes.’

‘I will.’ He bows his head and shuffles towards the door. Tara steps away from it and cringes as he brushes past her, watches as he waddles down the corridor towards the lifts. Now
it’s just her and Penter. Could she overpower her? If only she didn’t feel so goddamned woozy.

‘Please,’ Jane’s mother says, gesturing towards an identical door on the opposite side of the room. ‘I would most appreciate if you would enter through there.’

‘And then you’ll let me go? Take me to Martin?’

‘Yes.’

What should she do? Christ. There’s no way she can trust this woman, but what choice does she have? Martin. Martin has to be her priority. She hesitates, then hobbles towards the door,
keeping an eye out for anything she might use as a weapon, but the counter tops and surfaces are free of clutter.

Penter holds the door open for her, waves her forward with a sweep of her hand. ‘Please. I would be most appreciative.’

‘What’s through here? Hey, is Martin...?’ She steps past Penter, voice dying away as she takes in the wholly unexpected sight in front of her. What the fuck is this now?

The room she’s entered – which is half the size of the impersonal kitchen cum living room area – is stuffed full of vintage furniture and clutter, most of which appears to date
from the fifties. Tara gradually realises that it’s arranged in twee tableaus: a kitchen area complete with a Bakelite larder cabinet and Formica table, and a facsimile of a cosy lounge with
a plastic-covered three-piece suite behind it. But that’s the least of its bizarreness. Someone – the mysterious Varder Batiss, perhaps? – has posed a collection of mannequins,
waxworks and several of those lifelike silicone sex dolls on and around the furniture. Swallowing a burble of hysteria, Tara stares at a waxwork figure of Princess Diana wearing a ‘Kiss the
Cook’ apron; it’s frozen in the act of serving a plate of plastic cupcakes to a tableful of busty blond sex dolls dressed in flowery dresses.

Tara shuffles further into the room, the throbbing in her legs momentarily forgotten, and claps her hand to her mouth to hold in another humourless giggle as she spots a male silicone sex doll,
a pipe glued into its O-shaped mouth, leaning against a faux mantelpiece, apparently sharing a joke with the familiar-looking waxwork standing next to it... Jesus, is that George W. Bush?
It’s like being in the middle of a chaotic movie set or museum – Madame Tussauds for the insane.

She squeezes past the Dubya model, careful not to knock against it, aware that she’s still unsteady on her feet. Several figures are lolling on the plastic-covered lounge suite – a
poorly rendered Nelson Mandela waxwork flanked by a couple of maniacally grinning naked child mannequins – all of them staring straight ahead at an ancient television set.

Tara looks down, feels her breath stop in her throat.

Jesus.

Lying on the carpet in front of the set is a jumbled mass of limbs, heads and tiny bodies.

She’s never seen so many Reborns in one place before. There must be at least thirty. Unlike the other figures, the baby dolls look as if they’ve been haphazardly thrown on the floor,
as if whoever dumped them here did so in a hurry. And, as she looks closer, she realises with dawning disgust that each one has something...
wrong
with it. An ice-skinned baby with a
spider-web tattoo over its face; another with... Jesus, are those tentacles for arms? A perfectly mottled Reborn with a smooth, featureless face; nothing where its eyes, nose and mouth should
be.

Tara knows with sickening certainty what’s missing from this scene: a baby with a sewn-up mouth and eyes. She shudders to think of Baby Tommy ending up in this room; is now almost glad
that she ruined him.

She turns to Penter, who is staring in bemusement at a scuffed male mannequin dressed, for some reason, as Disney’s Snow White. ‘What the hell is this?’

Penter sighs. ‘It is Varder Batiss’s collection. We believe he has an unhealthy obsession with upside bodies, with anatomical facsimiles.’ Penter points at the Reborn pile.
‘Can you inform what these are for?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Am I not clear? What do browns – forgive me, upside citizens – use these for? Why do you create them?’

Browns
– she knows that word. Jane used that word. Who the hell
are
these people? ‘They’re just dolls. You can buy them on the internet.’

‘Yes, but why?’

Tara tries to think of an answer for this, tries to push a clear thought through the fug in her mind. ‘Um. Loneliness, I suppose. A... need to...’ To what? Whatever they’ve
given her is seriously screwing with her ability not only to think, but to speak straight. She tries again. ‘A need to connect. Some people find it hard to... to... be with other
people.’

Penter narrows her eyes. ‘Loneliness? But there are so many of you. Why make facsimiles?’

‘People want something to love, don’t they? It’s not always that easy.’ She pauses as she’s hit with another wave of regret for Baby Tommy. ‘Sometimes when
people have lost... um, when they’ve lost a person they love, they want a reminder. Reborns can be... an outlet, I suppose.’

Penter sighs. ‘Do you think Varder Batiss is lonely? That he needs outlets? That he is searching for love?’

‘I don’t know.’ Tara feels a spurt of anger. It helps clear her mind. ‘How would I know? I’ve never met him. I’ve answered your questions. Now take me to
Martin.’

Penter nods. ‘Yes, that was agreed. Please follow me.’

It’s a relief to be out of that nightmare of a room. On her way out, Tara remembers to grab Baby Tommy’s head from the coffee table, shoving him into her bag before joining Penter at
the front door. She winces as she’s hit with another muscle spasm.

‘Do you need help, Mrs Tara Marais?’ Penter asks, and for a second Tara’s sure she is going to touch her. The thought fills her with revulsion.

‘No!’

Tara can’t make sense of what she’s just seen. The best explanation she can muster is that these people are in some sort of strange cult or religion and Varder Batiss has
transgressed one of their moral codes. But what has this got to do with her? With Martin?

She can’t dwell on this now. She’s in no condition to unpack this craziness. Her thoughts are still too sluggish. Still, she’s grateful that although her leg muscles are
throbbing, the shooting pain has faded, and she’s able to make the long walk to the lifts without too much discomfort.

The door in the centre hisses open and Tara follows Penter in. She numbly registers that there don’t appear to be any control buttons on its walls.

‘Where are we going?’ Tara asks. ‘Where is Martin?’

‘In the Factory, of course.’

‘The
what
?’

Pan-piped musak drifts from the ceiling. She’s not certain, but it sounds like ‘Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)’ by Cher.

It’s too much. She leans against the lift’s smooth metal wall, closes her eyes. It would be easy to give up, to collapse on the floor, curl up into a ball and wait for all of this to
be over.

But she can’t do that. Not with Martin waiting for her. She pictures bringing him home, turning up at the town house, Stephen and Olivia rushing out to greet them; imagines Stephen’s
outpouring of relief and love, Olivia’s gratitude and grudging respect.

‘Mrs Tara Marais?’

Tara jumps. She must have drifted off.

The lift pings, and its doors slide open onto a high-ceilinged empty space that resembles a disused warehouse. The walls are of face brick, the floor dusty and bare, but as Tara follows Penter
across it, she makes out taped square areas on the floor, the words ‘Butcher’, ‘Cleaner’, ‘Reader’, and ‘Lemons’ printed on the concrete in faded
black stencil.

‘This is one of the old markets.’ Penter tuts. ‘The Players used it for some disregardful experiments and it was shut down. Sometimes I think they don’t know they were
even vatted, do you agree?’

Tara doesn’t bother answering. It’s clear, as her mother would say, that Penter is crazier than a junk-yard dog. And you have to be careful around crazy people. Who knows what
they’re capable of doing, what could set them off? She trails Penter around a corner, comes face to face with a wide brick wall, on which some inept artist has painted a gruesome mural of a
clown riding a tiny motorbike, the words ‘Brum Brum Welcome to the Factory!’ snaking out of his mouth. There’s a narrow door camouflaged in that awful painting, a sign on it
reading: ‘Warning: keep appendages closed at all times.’

Penter turns the handle, and Tara follows her straight into a cavernous area – the largest interior space she’s ever seen. It has to be double the size of a football field at least,
so expansive that she can’t see where it ends. Awed by the scope of it, it takes her a few seconds to realise that it’s crammed with row after row of old-fashioned school desks.

And not all of them are empty.

‘Holy
fuck
,’ Tara says, when she finally finds her voice. The figures sitting in earth-brown overalls with their backs to her are diminutive – so small, in fact, that
she’s almost certain they must be children. But that can’t be right, can it? Didn’t Penter say this was a factory? It certainly doesn’t sound like any of the factories
Tara’s encountered before. Apart from the constant faint mechanical hum that she heard back in that apartment, the immense area is eerily quiet.

Penter beams at her. ‘Yes. Isn’t it
primo
?’ She points at an empty desk. ‘But look at all the vacancies. You can see why we have to scout, can’t
you?’