Zombies Don't Cry (8 page)

“I can see your point,” I conceded.

“Then again,” he said, “it might turn out to be an invaluable exercise from the personal point of view. Whether or not, and to what extent, I’m a different person now from the one I used to be, I’ll certainly become increasingly distanced from him as time goes by. If I don’t record my impressions of my living self now, in as much detail as I can, I might lose part or all of it. You should write your life story too, you know, even though you died so young…especially because you died so young. You don’t want to lose touch with the person you once were.”

“If he was actually anyone at all,” I said. “He’d been a trifle lazy, I fear—he always thought of achievement as something he’d have time for later. Still does, alas.”
Except that he
had
figured out who he wanted to do it with
, I added silently, for my own benefit.
And still does, alas
.

“Pearl’s writing her autobiography,” Methuselah observed, politely refraining from protesting against my self-denigration.

“Is she?” I said. “She hasn’t asked me to proofread it. She probably thinks that her English is every bit as good as mine.”

“Probably,” Methuselah agreed, probably implying that he had another possibility in mind. It was probably the same one that had occurred to me: that Pearl might not want her fellow zombies reading her account of why she’d killed herself—assuming that she had figured it out herself.

“What about Stan?” I asked. “Nobody seems to know much about his lifetime.”

“He doesn’t seem to be much inclined toward writing—more a man of action.”

“And Marjorie? As you pointed out to me when I met you on my first day, she’s the only one among us who was actually famous, to some degree, while she was alive. She’s certainly inclined toward writing.”

“Far too busy,” Methuselah said, shaking his head slowly. “Still trying to change the world—for the better, mercifully.”

At that moment, one of the panes in the windows in the front of the building shattered, and a pebble whizzed through, landing on top of the table at which we were sitting. Fortunately, the broken glass didn’t carry that far.

“Fuck!” howled Stan, and bounded to the door.

He’d only been outside for a few seconds, though, before he came back in. “Bloody kids!” he said.

In all fairness, I thought, it must have been a very well-aimed stone, or a lucky one, because both of the windows at the front were protected outside by stout iron bars that were not so very far apart. Most stones hurled at the windows bounced back, or at least took a deflection before colliding with a pane or part of the wooden frame. The glass in the panes wasn’t bullet-proof, but it was quite strong, and required a direct hit at considerable velocity to break it.

I walked over to where the stone had landed, near the door to the kitchenette, and picked it up.

“At least it hasn’t got a piece of paper wrapped round it inscribed with a black spot,” I said, trying to make light of the matter.

“We’ve already had our ration of black spots,” Stan told me, still seething. “If it were up to me, I’d just put steel shutters over the damned windows. After all, we don’t need the daylight, do we?”

“It’s probably a good idea not to make the place look like a bunker,” Methuselah told him, as he fetched a broom in order to sweep up the broken glass. “Anyway, its Council property. It’s up to them to replace it.”

“Sure it is,” Stan said. “If I don’t do it myself, it’ll take them at least three weeks—and it won’t do a bit of good to send them the invoice. They’ll just sent it back stamped UNAPPROVED.”

“At least it’s midsummer,” I said. “The draught won’t be icy.”

“And at least they ran away,” Marjorie put in. “It’ll be time to worry when they wait for you to come out of the door and start pelting
you
.”

“It’s only a matter of time,” Jim Peel opined. He was standing at the window, fearlessly looking out, as if to threaten any other potential stone-throwers with the bulk of his presence—or provide them with a tempting target. No one took up the challenge, thank God. “Your stalker’s out there again,” he said to Pearl. “Tonight, you really must let me walk you back to the hospital.”

“I’ll go talk to him,” Pearl said. She got up from her armchair and headed for the door.

Stan intercepted her. “I really don’t think that’s a good idea, Pearl,” he said.

“Why? You surely don’t think it was him who threw the stone?”

“No, of course not—but you’ve said yourself that it wouldn’t be a good idea to identify him as a zombie-lover to anyone else who might be watching the building. While he’s out there on his own, he’s just an idler, but if you engage him in conversation….”

“
Are
there people watching the building?” I asked.

“Probably,” Stan said. “Even if they’re only curtain-twitchers, gossip will spread. Best leave him alone, love.”

It was probably the only argument that could have made Pearl change her mind, but it worked. She sat down again. “He is harmless, though,” she insisted. “He’s just having a hard time, that’s all.”

“Nobody doubts that your heart’s in the right place,” Stan told her. “We just worry about you.”

“Nobody here,” she muttered.

As I was still standing up, and Metrhuselah was still busy picking up bits of broken glass, it didn’t seem inappropriate to sit down next to her for a minute or two. “Somebody at the hospital giving you a hard time?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Nothing serious, You’ve been there—you know what it’s like.”

“Not the idiot with the crossed index-fingers?”

“He’s not the only one. We don’t have anyone newly passed over on the wards just now, so I’m working entirely with the living, and some of them can be difficult. It’s not their fault, mind—they’re in hospital, after all, hurting and scared. They turn their anxiety wherever they can, just to get it away from themselves for a moment or two. The living nurses take flak too. It comes with the territory.”

“Can I walk you home, then?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “You’ve got a girl-friend, remember? I met her when she came to see what had become of you.”

I really didn’t see how that was relevant, but I let it pass. I didn’t want to start a row—and I didn’t want to annoy Jim Peel any more than I just had, by substituting my offer for his.

I went back to my former position, to resume pointing out the errors of Methuselah’s grammatical ways.

I’d been warned more than once about the possibility that my appetites might change, so I was rather disappointed that they didn’t, much. On the other hand, I’d always been a meat-and-two-veg kind of person, having inherited the habit from Dad
via
Mum, so the two major shifts associated with conversion by anecdotal evidence—a keener appetite for meat and a marked distaste for highly-spiced food—didn’t really apply to me.

It’s possible, of course, that the former shift is all in the mind—not just the minds of zombies but those of their living observers. When you borrow a word like “zombie” from the lexicon of the folkloristic and cinematic imagination to apply to an actual but novel phenomenon, there’s bound to be a certain amount of mythical pollution. Because the zombies of modern legend were supposed to be driven by cannibalistic appetites, it was only natural that some such suspicion should fall on the actual beneficiaries of medical resurrection, if not in any serious sense, at least in jest. Nor is it surprising that the suspicion should be carefully toned down to credible proportions. The living must have been pre-inclined to look for evidence of enhanced carnivorism in the afterliving, and the afterliving must have been be pre-inclined to look for it in themselves. A rapid proliferation of supportive anecdotes was only to be expected.

The second element of allegation is, however, less expectable, especially in view of the common analogy drawn between supposed “zombie cravings” and those of pregnant women. Pregnant women are routinely said to develop cravings
for
highly-spiced foods, not aversions to them. It is, however, conceivable that what was involved here, in the semi-conscious processes of rumor-mongering, was a deliberate inversion. The one thing that differentiates afterliving females most conspicuously from living ones—far more conspicuously than mere paleness of complexion—is that afterliving women do not, so far as anyone can yet tell, fall pregnant. They are, in a sense, not merely a pale shadow but an antithesis of their living counterparts: hence, in pseudological terms, the inversion of their craving.

Having said all that, though, I must confess that I did become noticeably hungrier than I had been in life. If my appetite didn’t change in direction, it did in volume. Whether that had anything to do with physiological changes in my ability to process the various major food-groups, I don’t know, but I was more inclined to put it down to enthusiastic rockmobility. I’d had a reasonable amount of exercise while I was alive, at least during the football season, but the “training” we’d done for the Sunday Morning League was nowhere near as intensive as Stan’s daily workouts. The fact that I’d rapidly made it a point of pride to finish the scheduled two hours—because rather than in spite of the fact that no one else seemed able to do it—meant that I was throwing myself into it more wholeheartedly than I’d ever thrown myself into
anything
in life.

Mum obviously noticed my enhanced appetite, and started increasing my portions without being asked, but she didn’t comment on it, almost as if she was afraid to bring it out into the open. I tried to open the subject by offering to increase the housekeeping money I was giving her from my dole, but she refused. If Dad noticed, he didn’t comment. Kirsten probably did, but she was always on a diet anyway, and knew better than to comment on what anyone else was eating in case she became the butt of retaliatory mockery. If it had been practical, I would have eaten more at lunch-time, when I as usually at the Center, but ordering food to be delivered there was far more expensive, and I simply didn’t have the money.

I comforted myself by telling myself that it wouldn’t be surprising if all zombies had to eat more than the living, simply because they had a different kind of life to support—and that it wouldn’t be surprising, either, if they mostly kept quiet about it, for fear of being stigmatized as even more of a burden on the world’s dwindling resources than they constituted simply by virtue of existing.

That was the way I was beginning to think, when my philosophical moods gripped me.

* * * * * * *

On my way to the Center on the Wednesday of that week I had my first run-in with religious nuts. I suppose I should have been ready for it, but I wasn’t. The nuts in question were Afro-Anglicans, although I didn’t attack any particular significance to the denomination. I couldn’t tell whether they were from Nigeria, Kenya, Zimbabwe or some less prolific source of the inspired, but I knew they weren’t regulars at the local Anderson Baptist Church round the corner from where my parents lived, which seemed to be attended entirely by middle-aged Jamaican ladies who’d known me by sight when I was in short trousers and still occasionally said hello to me on Sunday mornings without giving the slightest sign that they’d noticed that I’d turned into a zombie.

The nuts were lurking in wait for me round the corner of London Road. Obviously, the news had got around that my daily routine involved walking to the Center on my own, at more-or-les the same time, most days of the week. There were three of them, although two of them were obviously only there to lend crude but effective support to the would-be exorcist, which they did by flanking him like a pair of flying buttresses.

When the exorcist—who might actually have been an ordained minister, for all I know—launched into his spiel, I briefly considered pushing past and proceeding on my way, but I figured that they’d only follow me, so I thought, after careful and rational consideration, that it would be best to stand my ground and brazen it out stoically, putting on a saintly display of patience and tolerance.

Only joking. Actually, I guess I panicked. At any rate, I lost my rag.

If the guy who was trying to send me straight to hell without passing
go
had been chanting in Latin I’d have understood at least a few words and might even have been able to correct some of his grammar, but whatever Missal he was holding was printed in some language with which I was totally unfamiliar. If I’d been able to see the humor of it, I might have been able to laugh the whole thing off, but I wasn’t in a laughing mood, and I let that show.

“Come on, you freaks,” I said, raising my voice so that the dawdling passers-by would get the full benefit. “I see the book, but I don’t see the bell or the candle. There are three of you, for God’s sake—surely you could manage a bell and a candle between you. If you’re going to play the part, at least try to get it right. Mind you, it’s a pretty lousy part, isn’t it? I mean, all the world’s a stage, so we have no choice but to play our roles, but at least we get to be our own casting directors and script-writers. What kind of brain-dead backwoodsman, given the choice, would actually volunteer to become a missionary, dispatched from his gloriously Godforsaken equatorial backwater to make a pathetic attempt to re-convert the heathen descendants of the cack-handed imperialist scum who forced his great-great-great grandfather to give up his own perfectly adequate mumbo-jumbo in favour of the whiter-than-white brand? Obviously, you’re no good at football or you’d be representing Manchester or Birmingham in the Premier League, but is there really no other option but lurk on street-corners, like flashers in Oxfam-bought macs, waiting for some poor sod you can fail to persecute with a ludicrously fake exorcism that couldn’t even send a hungry cockroach scuttling back behind the fridge. Give me a fucking break, why don’t you?”

It was at that point that I realized that I was shouting, not only drowning out the sound of the attempted exorcism by making myself clearly audible on the other side of the road, spite of the roar of the traffic. At least thirty people had stopped to stare, at distances ranging from ten feet to thirty yards, and at least half of those had their mobile phones out, filming every last word and gesture. I knew that the video would have been posted at half a dozen different locations on the web by the time I reached the Center, and suddenly had a moment of terrible doubt, wondering what the hell my casting director could have been thinking, and wishing that my script-writer had done a considerably more measured and better proof-read job.

“On the other hand,” I continued, in a more measured voice. “Why not? Just go ahead, why don’t you? Why should I care whether you send me to hell or not? What have I got to lose?”
My girl-friend isn’t even speaking to me
, I didn’t add. When you’re being filmed, you have to be careful not to give in to self-pity, because it’s the least photogenic emotion there is.

When the Afro-Anglican preacher finished, he actually looked surprised that I was still there, although I couldn’t believe, even for an instant, that he’d actually thought I was going to disappear infernowards.

“Oh my,” I said, struggling to keep my voice strictly on the level and as mild as milk. “I feel just terrible—as if archangels with flaming swords were slicing and dicing me. Oh, the agony. Oh, the awesome revelation. Oh, the cringe-making power of the Great Almighty. Oh dear, look at the time—must be off, lads. Same time tomorrow? No? I expect you’ve got other demons to hunt down. Busy, busy, busy—no rest for the unwicked. Here endeth the lesson for today. Amen.”

I didn’t try to excavate a path between the pillar of the church and one of the flying buttresses; I walked around the entire party. They didn’t follow me. Neither did the crowd of amateur cameramen, who were rooted to the spot by the need to email their little windfall.

I couldn’t help wondering what Wise Old Methuselah would think if and when he happened to pick up the performance, or even Stan the action man, let alone Dad or Helena. None of them, I felt certain, would be amused. I tried to take refuse in the thought that
Kirsten
, at least, would be able to laugh at it, even though I hadn’t been at my best—but I couldn’t convince myself even of that.

I knew that it was no good hoping that everyone would miss it; any selectorbot programmed to pick up local news would flag it. By the time we’d finished rockmobility, if not before, every workstation at the Sally Ann would be flashing alerts to every user who sat down there.

Surely, I thought, Marjorie Claridge would understand and sympathize.

If she did, she didn’t say anything. The most surprising thing of all, perhaps, was that nobody actually
said
anything. By lunch-time, they must all have seen and heard it, and must have known that I knew that they knew, but they didn’t utter a word of criticism—not directly or explicitly, at any rate.

I was a newreborn. They were making allowances. And they
did
understand…and, at least after a fashion, sympathize.

That afternoon, Marjorie asked me if I’d take a look at her latest brief epic before she posted it. I knew that she didn’t think that she needed a proof-reader, so my first thought was that she was just trying, in her subtle fashion, to let me know how protest
ought
to be carried out, soberly, carefully and decorously.

Once I’d read what she had written, though, that hypothesis didn’t seem quite so plausible.

“I realize that you’ll be posting this anonymously,” I said, “but wouldn’t it be better to tone it down a bit? I understand that you’re only extrapolating a philosophical argument, but there are sentences in here that, if taken out of context, might seem to be breaking the law, let alone stirring up trouble.”

“Law?” she said. “What law do you mean?”

“The law prohibiting public incitement to violence.”

“Is there one?” she said, with blatant disingenuity. “And even if there is, how could a rational philosophical argument be held to be breaking it?”

“Well,” I said, trying to choose my words carefully, “even though you don’t quite say so in so many words, some people might think that what you’re advocating here is that the afterliving should be allowed, in certain circumstances, to murder the living, in order to increase their own numbers proportionately.”

“Nonsense,” she retorted. “What I’m arguing, purely hypothetically, is that if the afterliving have the same human rights as other members of the human population, as they surely should under any conceivable system of justice, then that includes the right of reproduction. Given that there’s only one way, at present, that the afterliving can reproduce, the logic of the argument suggests that the conversion of a living person should be regarded as a rightful act, provided that the principle of informed consent is observed. You’ve only been here a matter of days, and you’re obviously unfamiliar with the earlier articles in the series, but if you’d been following it, you’d have seen that I’ve already demolished the moral case for continuing to regard calculated and mutually-agreed acts of conversion as homicidal, so I might seem to you to be taking a little too much for granted, but….”

“Well, maybe,” I agreed, “but it seems to me that your rhetoric does occasionally go beyond what might be considered typical of a balanced philosophical argument….”

“
Balanced!
” she interjected. “Balance is for wimps who refuse to reach conclusions. There’s no
balance
in logic. A conclusion is either true or it isn’t. Mine is. The afterliving not only have a moral entitlement to help the living pass over, but a moral obligation, in instances where inaction would permit further organic deterioration to a state in which resurrection would be impossible, or even unlikely. You were fortunate enough never to grow old, but have you the slightest idea how many people there are in Britain whose chances of resurrection are diminishing and vanishing with every passing day? Tens of thousands…hundreds of thousands…millions. If we aren’t prepared to help them, who is? Not their living brethren, that’s for sure!”

“Well, maybe,” I agreed, again, “but if you look at it that way, there isn’t actually anyone over the age of eighteen currently alive whose chances of resurrection are increasing on a daily basis, are there? So where do you draw the line?”

“
Exactly!
” she exclaimed, emphatically. “I knew you’d understand, Nicky. That’s exactly what this whole discussion is about—and exactly what
you
should be thinking about, instead of bouncing about to
Shout at the Devil
or mooning after young Pearl. Where should the lines be drawn?—not just thus one, but all the others. My
next
article will be about infantile resurrection—and it’ll come out strongly in favor. To be perfectly frank, I won’t care overmuch what you or anybody else thinks about that one, either, but I’ll give it to you to read anyway.”