Zombies Don't Cry (4 page)

“That’s right,” Mum hastened to agree. “You’re better off than a lot of….” Again she left it at that.

I
was
better off than a lot of the recently reborn. Not many of the older afterliving had parents young enough to take them in and lend them support—and some of those who did were refused, even if they hadn’t tacitly insulted their families by topping themselves. If Mum and Dad hadn’t been willing to take me in, I would have ended up at the former Bail Hostel on South Street, which was now an Afterlife Hostel, conveniently located only a couple of hundred yards from the old Salvation Army Hall, now the local Afterlife Center—which was itself, presumably not entirely by virtue of coincidence, only half a mile from the Royal Berks Burking Unit. All very cosy.

“Anyway,” Mum added, “you don’t have to worry. You can stay as long as you like.”

I knew, and she knew that I knew, that she wouldn’t have said that if I’d still been alive, having just recovered from a conventional operation, because we’d all have taken it for granted, so it wouldn’t have needed saying—but it didn’t seem to matter. The fact was that it did need saying

“I feel fine,” I assured her. “According to the internet, that’s normal. Zombie convalescence is only protracted if there’s been substantial neural reconfiguration. In my case, there hasn’t. Clean death, clean afterlife, as they’ll probably say once I’ve had time to establish it as a proverb.” Nobody laughed, so I pressed on: “I passed all the tests. I’m okay—and I’m still the same person I always was. Top goalscorer, wicked wit.”
Head over heels in love
, I didn’t add—but not because it wasn’t true.

“Of course you are, love,” Mum said, with as much sincerity as she could muster.

Kirsten wasn’t quite as vapid, when she eventually turned up. Sisters don’t labor under the relentless pressure of parental responsibility. They can even be spiteful if they want to be. Mercifully, my darling Kirsty didn’t. She wasn’t a teenager any more, and even when she had been, she’d been a full paid-up member of Greenpeace.

“We’ve already had threats, you know,” she said, when we’d managed to persuade Mum and Dad to go home.

“What threats?” I said. “Who from.”

“They’re not that specific,” she said, “and they’re not signed. The policewoman we called said that the black spot is from the ED—adapted from
Treasure Island
, apparently. It’s a death-threat, but she said not to take it too seriously. England’s Defenders apparently haven’t got the manpower or the time to follow through on everyday threats of that sort. They have to be selective in planning their publicity stunts.”

Kirsty was right, even if it was a trifle undiplomatic to say so. I’d been killed by a publicity stunt. I hadn’t even been an innocent bystander at a purposive murder. I was collateral damage to a headline, and not much of one at that. Making a bang in the Oracle wasn’t exactly blowing the dome off St. Paul’s Cathedral, or flying a jumbo jet into Canary Wharf. It was a run-of-the mill firework in a run-of-the-mill shopping mall, which had killed seven run-of-the-mill passers-by. England’s so-called Defenders didn’t even have the manpower or the guts to keep up with the jihadists on a strict tit-for-tat basis.

“The bastards should have sent you flowers and an apology, never mind a black spot,” I observed, with a sigh. “After all, they weren’t targeting
us
, were they? If you and me and Mum and Dad aren’t numbered among the True Britons they’re supposed to be defending, who is? Our name’s Rosewell, for God’s sake.”

“I’m in Greenpeace,” she pointed out. “The ED don’t like Greenpeace.”
And you’re a zombie
, she didn’t add, though not because it wasn’t true.

“Even so,” I said, “given that they’ve already killed me, it seems a trifle churlish of them to threaten my afterlife. Who were the other threats from, do you think?”

“The rest are probably from religious nuts, but the policewoman who collected them says that people of that sort are far more likely to confine themselves to writing anonymous letters, saying ostentatious prayers and ranting in the street than to attempt physical violence—even the rabid jihadists are more urgently concerned with fighting manifest infidels than supposed demons.”

“You’d think
they
might lay off too,” I remarked, “given that it was their sworn enemies who killed me. If I’d been a Muslim, I’d have been a martyr, wouldn’t I?”

“Not once you were reborn. When it comes to the crunch, some westernized Muslims do sign the consent form, but a lot refuse. You’re right about that being a reason why the ED shouldn’t be so down on zombies—I mean
the afterliving
. It’s not just you—ninety per cent of the afterliving in Reading must have started off as so-called True Britons.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “You can call me a zombie. Sisterly privilege. And don’t worry about the threats—even if an ED hitman does get through to me, I’ll be back again in no time.”

“Second resurrections rarely work,” she told me. “I looked it up.”

So had I. “But I died young,” I told her. “Resilience to spare. There’s some guy in New Zealand who’s already been resurrected three times—he was about the same age as me when he shuffled off his original mortal coil.”

“I’d rather you didn’t go for any world records,” she said.

“I’m glad you care,” I told her, sincerely.

She burst into tears, perhaps because she was mortally afraid that there might come a time when she couldn’t.

“Have you seen Helena?” I asked her, when she’d wiped her eyes. “I was expecting her to come, as soon as she could.”

“Not recently,” she said.

“Maybe the hospital hasn’t notified her that I’m conscious, because she’s not a relative. Could you give her a ring, just to make sure that she knows?”

“Okay,” she said, unenthusiastically. She didn’t reach for her phone.

I had to let her off the hook—she was my sister. “She
has
been to see me,” I told her. “Nurse Pearl said so—but you can leave it until later to phone her, if you want.”

“I will,” she promised—and hesitated before adding: “It might not be a good idea to hope for too much in that direction, Nicky.”

“Hope doesn’t come into it,” I told her. “Everybody knows that true love lasts forever.”

“Till death us do part,” she quoted, quietly, as if slyly laying a trump on my ace in a game of Knockout Whist.

“This is the twenty-first century,” I reminded her. “Death no longer parts.” It was a weak reply, though. Death voided marriages as well as other kinds of contracts, even in the eyes of the church, let alone engagements and not-quite-engagements. According to the web, the number of marriages severed by death that had been voluntarily remade after rebirth was tiny—which didn’t bode well for engagements, not-quite-engagements and simply being madly in love, even though there were no actual statistics available.

“I really need to talk to her,” I added. “That’s all.”

“Sure,” said Kirsten, in a way that suggested that she was anything but sure, about Helena or anything else.

“I still feel the same about her as I did before,” I persisted, “Just as I feel the same way about you.” I didn’t suppose for a moment that my darling little sister was in doubt about that, but I thought it was worth emphasizing.

“Helena might not be able to feel the same way about you,” she countered, reluctantly, as if she felt that she’d been forced into saying it for me because I couldn’t bear to say it for myself.

“Are
you
?” I asked. It felt as though it slipped out, but I couldn’t hep wondering whether that was what I’d being dying to ask all along, without being able to admit it to myself. “Is Dad? Is Mum?”

“That’s not fair, Nicky,” she replied, with deadly accuracy.

“Should I take that as a no, then?” I demanded, compounding the unfairness.

She started crying again, and this time didn’t try to wipe her eyes. “I’m on your side,” she told me, resentfully. “I’ll
always
be on your side. We all will.”

I didn’t doubt it for a moment. Even so, it didn’t answer the question, did it?

It’s a commonplace of sociology that the self is a social product. It’s all very well for Rabbie Burns to remark that, if we could only see ourselves as others see us, it would free us from many a blunder and foolish notion; the sad fact is that the ability we have to insulate ourselves from the gaze of others by means of the armor of delusion is strictly limited. By and large, we have little alternative but to see ourselves as others see us, and little opportunity to take any grievances that may arise to any Ombudsman capable of winning us a reappraisal.

Or, to put it simply—even though it really isn’t as simple as that—if people see you as a zombie, you really don’t have much alternative to being what they believe a zombie to be.

You can resist, of course. You can make your stand—be a valiant Knight of the Living Dead, as the hoariest pun in today’s world puts it—but that makes you into Don Quixote, not Sir Lancelot, in the eyes of others. As soon as you start tilting, you realize that those bloody windmills really are giants, and that your chances of bringing any of them down are pretty damn slim.

You shouldn’t get bitter about it, though. Every living person who condescends to speak to you will tell you that. You should, in fact, be grateful for a second lease of life. Even now, most of the living don’t get one. Even now, most of the dead stay dead. SSCs can only do so much. The best way to guarantee yourself an afterlife, if that’s your ambition, is to kill yourself carefully. Letting nature do the job for you is too risky.

Ironic, eh?

It’s foolish to blame others for seeing you as a different person, though, once you’ve passed on, because you really are a different person. They’re right, and if you don’t think so, you’re wrong. Even if it were just the albinism, that would be enough…but you know as well as they do that it’s so much more. Nobody knows exactly why, but that’s the way it is.

Given that zombies are genotypically identical to their previous selves, there’s no obvious reason why they should be unable to produce melanin in their skin cells, or tears in their eyes, or why they should mostly be slightly less able to metabolize lipids and slightly better able to metabolize proteins, or why they should mostly be seemingly immune to the common cold and many kinds of cancer but not to gonorrhoea or syphilis, or why they should mostly be subject to any manner of other subtle modifications, some of which have doubtless yet to be discovered. Opinions, as the most basic internet search reveals, are very varied and deeply divided.

At first, I was attracted to the sober explanations, which focused on gene-switching. Even “identical” twins, it seems, begin to accumulate differences as soon as the original ovum divides, because embryological development has its idiosyncrasies. Genes switched on in particular tissues of one twin are sometimes switched off in some or all of the other twin’s relevant tissues. Obviously, the key differences between the living and the afterliving are much more consistent than that, so they must be caused by some aspect of the rejuvenative process by which superstimulant stem cells are produced, but the way those differences take effect has to be determined by particular genes being switched on or off in particular tissues. Even the totipotent stem cells regenerated for the treatment of the living don’t necessarily reproduce the same patterns of function as the cells of the mature body from which their ancestors are taken, and superstimulant stem cells are more potent still, as they obviously have to be.

In theory, two egg-cells with exactly the same stock of genes could produce vastly different phenotypes, depending upon the order in which genes are activated as the embryo develops; perhaps the real wonder is that SSCs produce something so nearly similar to the living individual. The similarities are, in fact, greater than they appear; it isn’t that zombies don’t produce any melanin at all, but rather that they produce it in a more limited spectrum of tissues, while producing an alternative protein in superficial tissues, which happens to be colorless. All things considered, therefore, the variant switching theory requires very little in the way of hypothetical elaboration; in the judgment of Occam’s razor, it wins hands down against its rivals, most of which tend to the bizarre.

In the beginning, I was inclined to shy away from the bizarre. Sometimes, habits die harder than life itself.

* * * * * * *

There were yet more tests, of course, and the doctors had to make sure that I could cope with solid food again, but it quickly became obvious that the NHS needed my bed more than I did, so they only kept me in for observation for one more night. Mum brought the car to pick me up at eleven o’clock the next morning, when all the formalities had been sorted.

I made a point to saying goodbye to Nurse Pearl, who simply sighed and said: “You’ll be seeing a lot more of me, I fear, Nicky. Andy too—whenever we’re not here or asleep, we’re practically always at the Center.”

I hadn’t told her that she could call me “Nicky,” but she’d obviously heard my parents using that particular diminutive. Dr. Hazelhurst’s first name was Andrew; I didn’t know whether he’d given her permission to cal him that, or whether she’d just heard other doctors doing it. “I might not be there that often myself,” I said. “After all, I’ve got a home to go to.”

“Trust me, Nicky,” she said, “you will be seeing more of me. It doesn’t matter a damn whether either of us likes the idea, or not.”

“It’s fine by me,” I hastened to assure her. She didn’t reciprocate, and she didn’t help me to smear on and rub in my factor-32, even though she was a nurse, and it was probably part of her job-description.

After I’d done the smearing and rubbing for myself, I walked over to the guy with the index fingers. “It was very kind of you to send me so many plus signs,” I told him. “I really appreciated the kind thought, and the innovative enterprise—the old thumbs-up is
so
passé.”

I don’t think he understood what
passé
meant, but that wasn’t why he didn’t laugh at the joke.

Mum had brought me a set of clothes selected from the stuff that Dad had cleared out of my flat—including a woolly jumper, even though it was twenty-seven degrees outside. Mercifully, she’d also brought a brand new broad-brimmed hat, cotton gloves and sunglasses. The hospital had presumably given her a list.

I couldn’t sit still in the car; I had a bad case of restless leg syndrome. While I was alive, I’d always thought of restless leg syndrome as one of those ingenious notions invented by pharmaceutical companies because it’s so much easier to invent effective cures for imaginary diseases than real ones, but it’s real. Even zombies can get it.

“I’ll need to use your phone and email account, temporarily,” I said to Mum. “I need to contact the OO, to let them know I’ll be reapplying, and I ought to notify the lads in the footy team that I’ll be available when training for the new season starts, in case they’re worried…and I need to let Helena know where I am. It’s okay if she comes to the house when she finishes work, isn’t it?”

“If she wants to,” Mum said, evidently doubting it. Like Kirsten, she seemed to know more than I did about the reasons why Helen hadn’t returned to the hospital to visit me once I’d woken up—and like Kirsten, she wasn’t about to tell me what she knew, or how.

“It’s probably better than me going round to her place,” I said, deliberately misunderstanding Mum’s cautionary reservation. “Her flat-mate will probably be there, and she didn’t like me much when I was alive. I really need to talk to her—Helena, that is, not her flat-mate.”

“Don’t expect too much too soon,” Mum said, diplomatically.

I really did think that she was being overly cautious, especially when I eventually got through to Helena on the borrowed phone, and she agreed to come round to the house to see me as soon as she finished work. I thought, judging by the sound of her beloved voice, that everything was going to be all right.

On the other hand, when I phoned the captain of my Sunday Morning League team to tell him that his star striker was well on the way to recovery and would available for pre-season training in spite of no longer being alive, and he told me how glad he was, and how he’d be sure to send me an email, I didn’t believe a word he said—any more than I believed the exceedingly polite and well-spoken guy in the call-center in Mumbai when he assured me that the Ombudsman’s Office would welcome my application to fill the vacancy presumably left by my death, and would give it their most sympathetic consideration.

Helena was a primary school teacher, so it wasn’t very late when she arrived at my parents’ house—she was well in advance of Dad and Kirsten getting back from work, on the doorstep on the dot of four. I only made a half-hearted attempt to kiss her as she came in, and tried not to read too much into the fact that she avoided the clinch.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t contact you from the hospital,” I said, while Mum went to make a pot of tea. “They gave me a laptop so I could search the web, but all my communication credit’s been cancelled. I could have borrowed Kirsty’s phone last night, but I wanted to see you face to face. Anyway, I figured that you might need some notice, if the hospital hadn’t notified you that I was conscious, on account of your not being family, technically speaking. Did Kirsty ring you?”

“Yes, she did,” Helena confirmed.

“Good. I thought it would be best to meet here. Have you missed me?”

“Of course,” she said.

“I wasn’t gone that long, though,” I said. I’d worked out that this was only the twenty-third day since the bomb-blast. “We’re still okay, aren’t we?”

Her silence spoke volumes. I didn’t want to press the point immediately.

“There’s no need to worry,” I told her. “I’m still the same person I was before. No substantial brain-damage, you see. A glass dagger in the heart—quick and clean. Externally singed, but not internally pulverized. I was just far enough away, thank God—I must have been taking a short cut back to the office after stopping in at the library on my lunch break. I wasn’t shopping…even if I had been, my masculine instincts would have made me give TK Maxx a wide berth.”

She smiled, but it was forced. “I did come to see you,” she told me, adding—entirely gratuitously, in my opinion—“to say goodbye.”

“I was unconscious,” I reminded her.

“You were dead,” she countered.

“And now I’m not.”

“No,” she admitted, “you’re not…but it’s not the same, Nicky.”

She stopped, and again her silence spoke volumes. I wasn’t going to let her off the hook, though. I waited for what I was due.

“I thought I owed it to you to come and tell you in person,” she said, finally, “because it would have been cowardly not to, but I can’t. I just can’t.”

There was no point in asking her to specify what it was that she couldn’t. There were tears in the corners of her eyes, but none in mine. There was no point, either, in repeating that I was still the same person that I was before, whether it was true or not. The point was that I didn’t appear to be.

“I still love you,” I told her, “with all my heart.”

“I know,” she said, weakly—although she couldn’t know, really.

“I always will,” I told her.

She wasn’t even going to pretend to know, or believe that, or even to take it seriously.

“I can’t, Nicky,” she said, again. “I thought I could, for a day or two. I honestly tried. But I can’t. You died. And you came back—but coming back isn’t the same as not going. I can’t.”

“Maybe if we got to know one another again…start afresh….” I said. Maybe that was when I first began to develop a taste for the bizarre. It sounded ridiculous, even to me.

“No, Nicky,” she said. “It’s over. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is. I have to go now.”

“You haven’t drunk your tea.”

“I know.”

It should have ended there, but it didn’t. There’s no point in reproducing the rest, though. It wouldn’t show me in a good light, and as it’s my story, I reserve the right not to do that, so long as I don’t actually falsify anything. Sometimes, the abbreviated truth is better than the whole truth and nothing but the truth. And even if it’s not…well, as I say, it’s my story, and I’ll tell it the way I want to.

The way I want to tell it is that I was still in love with Helena, and convinced I always would be, but that it really wasn’t her fault that she couldn’t reciprocate any longer. After all, it wasn’t as if we were engaged to be married, or even almost-engaged. No promises had been made, no sworn undertakings given. We’d simply been in love, and now one of us wasn’t, any longer.

And for once, in spite of everything I could do to resist the fact, it really was as simple as that.

When Helena had finally gone home, Mum came in, and tried to put her arm around me. She couldn’t—perhaps because I was grown up now, no longer a child.

“That’s the way it is,” I told her.

For once, she had nothing to say.

“It doesn’t need to be,” I told her. “If we could just…pull ourselves together. I’m only a couple of shades paler than I was before, for God’s sake! I don’t even have to wear the hat and sunglasses indoors. It’s next to nothing. I’m not Frankenstein’s fucking monster.”

“Of course not,” she said, not bothering to complain about my intemperate language. “You’re the same person you were before. She doesn’t deserve you. You’ll find someone else. That nurse liked you, I think.”

There was no need whatsoever to ask which nurse, and no earthly point in pointing out that Pearl had shown no evidence of any such liking.

“I think she’s in love with Dr. Hazelhurst,” I said.

“What makes you think that?” Mum asked, warily.

“All nurses fall in love with doctors,” I said. “If soap operas teach us nothing else, they teach us that. And she calls him Andy. He’s not in love with her, of course. He’ll break her heart. Doctors always break nurses’ hearts. If soap operas teach us nothing else, they teach us that. The fact that she’s a zombie and he’s not is irrelevant, in this instance.”

“Well if that’s the case,” Mum said, probably not in the least deceived as to what we were really talking about, “he doesn’t deserve her, and she’ll find someone else.”