Authors: Jeff Noon
A noise then, from the passenger compartment of the cab. “What the fuck is going on here, Barleycorn?”
Barleycorn broke off from the kiss, and then twisted around to view the new passenger. “You’re rather late for the party, my friend,” he said.
I also twisted around to see who was there.
Columbus…
“You promised me a new map, Barleycorn,” Columbus said. “Now you’re wanting to stop the fever.”
“Columbus, don’t be angry.” Barleycorn’s reply.
“Don’t be angry? I’ve worked all of my life for this moment, and you’re telling me not to be angry. I’ve not finished the new map yet. Maybe you’re forgetting my power, Barleycorn. I control the ways between the worlds. And no way is this girl getting back to reality.”
“I need this woman to help me make the new world happen.”
Columbus laughed. “This road is closed.” And then: “What’s that noise?”
I heard it too, a soft slithering through the air from all directions.
“Barleycorn, no!” screamed Columbus. “Don’t do this to me.”
And then all the windows of the black cab were broken as four bullets flew together towards a single target, high speed. All four of them pounded their way into Columbus’s skull, the North, South, East and West of him. He screamed again, and then his head exploded. A crown of thorns. The black cab was blood-map-splattered.
“There you go, Columbus,” John Barleycorn whispered. “Bullets coming home to roost. That’s the end of your story. Excellent ending!”
“Did you make that happen, Barleycorn?” I asked.
“Why, it would take a very powerful creature to make that happen. What do you take me for?” He laughed then and leaned closer to me. “Come visit me, Sibyl.”
“What about Jewel? And Coyote? How will they survive?”
“They’ll survive. And when you’re ready, so will you. Free passage. A taste of wine. You hear?”
“Give me back the insect.”
John Barleycorn fed the Dodo beetle back to my lips. I swallowed it whole.
Dreamless I was, once again. The fluttering in my stomach. Thankful for that.
The fight over.
And then the cab was moving into free space, under my Belinda’s command. John Barleycorn vanished from the passenger seat. Only the hot breath of his dark-lipped mouth remained. I looked over to the forest one last time. The moon was a glistening droplet of pollen, and the black-hearted leaves were shaking against the edge of the garden, marked by the stone columns with their twinned angels, the boy and the dog. Oh God! I was receiving the message at last: exchange rates.
Of course… Belinda had taken two lovers.
Christ! How would I cope with it? How would Belinda cope?
I noticed a pack of Napalms on the dash. I stuck one in my mouth, lit it, read the pack message: SMOKING IS NOT GOOD FOR PREGNANT WOMEN, REPEAT, NOT GOOD—HIS MAJESTY’S MUTANT DAUGHTER.
Oh well, one last drag. Black cab gliding away towards home…
Home. Manchester. The new map turning into the old as I travelled backwards. The fever coming to rest against the edges of love. The black cab travelling into St Ann’s Square where the people were already dancing on air at the lessening of the fever. Roberman was parked there, almost as though he was waiting for our return.
I climbed out of the cab inside Belinda’s body and fell into the arms of the robodog driver.
“Belinda, you made it!” Roberman barked over the Shadow.
“Yeah,” Belinda sighed. “We made it.”
Monday
Rise and fucking shine, prisoners! That’s right, you guessed it. This is Radio Strangeways YaYa. In the living world it’s 4.00 a.m. on a bleak, August morning, and the whole of Manchester is sleeping. Unfortunately, for us outlaws, it’s time to leave our clotted beds. Wakey, wakey! This is Doctor Gumbo himself, at the feathery controls. Exercise time. Down to the yard-feather, you lot. Double quick. Boy, am I loving this! Wanita-Wanita, come close to me. Oh please, stop whining, you prisoners. We’re here in the Vurt. All together and forever, in the feather. Pollen count is down to a sad 29, and still falling. This first record goes out to Chief Inspector Kracker over in dream-cell number nine. It’s by The Move, and it’s called I Can Hear the Grass Grow. Keep stretching, Vurtbirds. May the flowers of love come visit you. On visiting day. There ain’t no such fucking day. Hah, hah, hah, hah, hah!
Autumn came early that year. By the end of August most of the trees had shed their leaves and the ground was hard and brittle with frost. Inspector Zulu Clegg left his desk at the Bottle Street cop station at 12.30, deciding to take an early lunch. He walked out into the cold air, bought a beef sandwich and a paper, and then went to sit at one of the benches in Albert Square.
He was the only person there, it being too cold for the usual lunchtime crowd.
Halfway through the sandwich, his mind nodding off in the middle of a story about how the new Safecabs were proving such a success, he heard footsteps approaching, cracking against the frost. The person sat down on the bench, some feet away from him, and, when he looked round, Clegg saw that it was a young woman.
She’s looking back at him, smiling.
Clegg ignores her, returning to his paper.
“You’re Inspector Clegg, aren’t you?” the woman asks.
Clegg puts down his paper. “Do I know you?” he asks, without looking round.
“I should hope so,” the woman replies. “You tried to kill me once.”
“Did I?” Clegg had pointed a gun at many people in his time, and remembering every one of them was difficult, especially since his fever. “What went wrong? Did I miss you?”
“No. I shot you first.”
“Oh.”
“In the shoulder.”
Clegg turns then to study the woman. “Sibyl…”
“Her daughter.”
“Of course… erm…”
“Belinda.”
“That’s right. Belinda. The memory’s not up to much. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. We only met once. And I had a shaved head then.”
“No, no. I don’t mean that…”
“Oh, for trying to kill me? That was your job.”
“I’m sorry about Sibyl, I mean. Your mother… she…”
“Yes.”
“She was a good woman… I mean… a good cop.”
“She was both.”
“I was very sad to learn of her…”
“Suicide.”
“Yes. I was suffering from the fever at the time. I just wish I could have done something.”
“My mother was happy with her life. She’d done all that she could. I guess she wanted to leave it at that.”
Clegg looks away from the woman. One of the new Safecabs moves slowly along the road, its dull grey sheen smeared with ice. The woman asks him how he’s doing, and he replies that he’s doing fine, fine, a desk job, which is, well, boring to be honest, but, otherwise, fine, fine…
“I’m pregnant,” the woman says. “Twins.”
Clegg is suddenly embarrassed and he’s not sure why. He looks back at the woman. He looks closely at her face, searching for traces of her mother in her features. He finds very little resemblance, except for…
“You have your mother’s eyes,” he says, finally, which makes Belinda smile.
“You loved her, didn’t you?” she asks. “You loved my mother.”
It takes an age to answer. “Yes. Yes, I did. Very much.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re thanking me?”
“Well, I mustn’t keep you.” Belinda stands up.
“You’re right.” Clegg stands up. “I should be getting back. The desk… beckons.”
Embarrassed once again, especially by the way he towers above her, Clegg wants to run for cover, but feels also the need to reach out for this woman.
Belinda saves him the trouble by touching him, gently, on the shoulder. His right shoulder. Where she had wounded him all those months ago.
Clegg turns away and then starts to walk back towards the station. Halfway across the square the woman calls out to him. At least, he assumes she had called out; it sounded like the word just came into his mind. “Zero…”
Zero? Nobody had called him Zero, not since… not since Sibyl Jones…
He stops, turns around. The young woman is still standing by the bench, smiling. Take care,” she says. Clegg can’t see her lips move, but maybe that’s just a lingering symptom of his fever.
He turns once again, to shuffle over the frost back to his desk, his paper in one hand, a half-eaten sandwich in the other.