0513485001343534196 christopher fowler (19 page)

'My god, that's supposed to be a sterile area. You left a corpse in there with the building's sensor units?'

'I wasn't thinking too clearly. I'm better now.' The heavy executive suddenly lunged at her, and they fell back on to her desk as Marie desperately cast about for something to hit him with. Grabbing wildly behind her, she smashed a 'You Don't Have To Be Mad To Work Here But It Helps' breakfast mug over his head, which briefly dazed him.

Clark scrambled after Marie as she fought to get away. She rammed her chair at him, and while he was tipped back against the desk rubbing his head she pulled the plastic bottle from the water cooler beside her and flung it at him. From the way he suddenly grew rigid and began grinding his teeth she could only assume that her keyboard, too, was now electrified, and that he was sitting on it in wet trousers.

Marie and Ben stumbled into the building's deserted atrium and made for the main doors. They had been forced to use the stairs down, as people were making love in the lifts. Fights had broken out on every floor. 'I'm sorry I took so long to find you,' wheezed Ben, 'but a gang of bookkeepers ambushed me in Accounts.'

'The system won't let us out,' said Marie. 'These things are locked.'

'What do you mean, locked?' he said stupidly, staring at the steel deadbolts that had slid across the inch-thick tinted glass. He hurled himself against the door but it did not even vibrate under his weight.

'We'll never get out now.'

'What are you talking about? The police, fire, ambulance, emergency teams, they'll all turn up here any minute.'

'No, they won't,' shouted the elderly caretaker. Hegarty was hobbling toward them using a desk-leg as a stick. There was a thick smear of blood on one side of his head. 'The phone lines are all diverted. The entrances and exits are all sealed. The building will deal with the crisis without enlisting outside help. That's what it's designed to do.'

'So what happens now?'

'In an emergency situation - a Code Purple - the system can attempt to restore balance in the building by starting all over again.'

'And how will it do that?' asked Ben, dreading the answer.

'By sucking out all of the air, purifying the structure with scalding antiseptic spray, flash-freezing it and then slowly restoring the normal temperature. The process won't harm office hardware. Of course, it's never been used on humans.'

Ben looked up at the flashing purple square on the atrium wall and listened as the warning sirens began to whine. 'I guess now would be a bad time to ask for a salary increase,' he said as the great ceiling ventilators slowly opened.

ARMIES OF THE HEART

Looking down at the child, he realised he had surprised himself with his own strength. The boy lay face down in the litter-strewn grass, his hands twisted behind his back with the palms up, as if he had fallen to earth while sky-diving. His jeans were torn down around his thin ankles, his pants and buttocks stained carmine. His baseball cap had been caught by the thorns of the gorse bush that hid them both from the road.

His attacker rose and wiped the sweat from his face. It was getting dark. He would soon be missed at home. He had not meant to be so rough. At his feet the boy lay motionless, the focus of his eyes lost in a far-off place. Thin strands of blood leaked from his oval mouth to the ground like hungry roots. An arc of purple bites scarred the pale flesh below his shoulder blades where the cheap cotton T-shirt he wore had been wrenched up. His life had been extinguished four days before his eleventh birthday.

There was nothing to be done for the lad. Readjusting the belt of his trousers and shaking out the pain from his bitten hand, the man stepped away from the cooling body, walking back toward the path that bisected the waste ground. His main concern now was relocating the Volvo and getting home to his wife and children before they started to ask where he had been.

•

'You won't.'

'I will.'

'You won't.'

'I
will
.'

'You bloody won't.'

'I bloody will.'

'Wait, I forgot what you two are arguing about.'

'She says she'll get in, and I say she won't.'

'Well, we'll just have to see, won't we?'

The venue was five hundred yards ahead of them, a large Victorian pub standing by itself at the junction of two roads. It appeared derelict; the windows were covered with sheets of steel and wood, painted matt black. No lights showed. The tenebrous building reared against the stars like a great abandoned ship. On either side of it apartment blocks curved endlessly off into darkness.

'We should get off the street, man,' said Bax. 'This is not a good area to be seen in.' There were three of them, Bax, Jack and Woody, whose real name was Claire Woodson. There was no-one else around.

'It's okay for you,' Woody complained. 'We're white. We stick out like neon bulbs.'

'Fuck you, Woody. You wanna know something? There's as many white people living here as black. You're just scared of being around poor folks. You wanna hang out with your low-life friends so you can piss off your mummy and daddy. They ain't gonna let you inside, anyway.'

'If they don't,' said Jack, 'Bax and I are still gonna go in, okay? That was the deal.'

'I know. I agreed, didn't I? Well, you don't have to worry about me.

I'll just head somewhere else. There must be plenty of other places.'

'Around here?' Bax released a guffaw. 'Right. Gangsta bars full of guys with spiderwebs tattooed on their elbows. I don't know why you have to do this, Woody, it's like you got something to prove. You just hanging out with us 'cause it makes a change from shopping. You need to get something goin' for yourself, girlfriend.'

'Hey, this is a new experience,' said Woody as they reached the side-entrance of the pub. 'Something I haven't tried yet.'

'Yeah? So's having a kidney removed, don't mean you gotta do it.'

Jack reached over their heads and rang the doorbell. They waited outside the dingy crimson doors, their breath distilling in the chill November air. Bax and Woody were dressed in padded jackets, tracksuit bottoms and Caterpillars. Jack hitched up a pair of baggy combat trousers. All three wore black hats over shaved heads. There was a specific reason for their loose clothing. From inside came the sound of a bolt being drawn back. Heat and thumping techno ballooned out at them as the door opened and the knuckle-dragger on the ticket stand stepped back to allow them entry.

'That's five quid each.' His gimlet gaze shifted from one to the next.

His eyes lingered on Woody, who lowered her head as she pretended to have trouble unbuttoning her jacket. The other two held their breath. The doorman accepted fifteen pounds from Jack, who held all the cash, and pointed them to a stack of green plastic bags on the floor.

'Okay, in you go, bags are over there.' Jack scooped up three and passed the other two back as they walked on along the corridor.

'What are these for?'

'To put your clothes in,' Bax explained. 'Check 'em behind the counter in the corner.'

'Where are you putting your wallet?'

'Down the side of my boot.'

The corridor had opened out into a large bar area. Beyond this were the flashing greens and violets of a dance floor. The interior was also painted black. As Woody's eyes adjusted, she could see men in their underwear lounging around the bar drinking, smoking and talking just as if they were fully dressed. Some wore jockstraps, but most sported white designer-label pants and boots. Men were undressing beside powerful radiators in the gloomier corners. Jack stopped and turned to watch Woody. 'This I've got to see,' he said, grinning. 'You know they'll go nuts if they find out there's a girl in here.'

'Well, they're not going to find out.' Woody removed her jacket to reveal a tight-fitting khaki combat vest.

'What did you do with your tits?' Bax was amazed.

'I strapped them down with tape.' She pulled down her track-suit bottoms to reveal a pair of men's Calvin Klein Y-fronts. Her breasts were small, and suppressing them gave her the appearance of having developed pectoral muscles. She bundled her discarded clothes into the bag and stepped back with her hands resting lightly at her hips. 'So - do I look okay?'

'You look like Valdez in
Aliens
.'

'But do I pass as a man?'

Jack pulled off his nylon cap and carefully stuffed it into the front of Woody's pants. 'You do now.'

'You wish.'

'I
know
.' He and Bax stripped down to their underwear and headed for the bag-check. The bag-man handed them three reclaim tickets and took their clothing out into the small annexe behind the bar that housed the cloakroom. Jack wasn't entirely sure how he had been persuaded to smuggle a girl into a men-only club on Underwear Night of all nights, but now they were inside together he decided to make the best of it. She had been nagging them to take her for weeks, ever since she'd heard about the place. Jack and Bax were her best friends, and the fact that they happened to be lovers never deterred her from hanging out with them wherever they went.

The club was called The Outlook, and attracted men who were prepared to take a walk on the wilder side of life, partly because the activities that took place beyond the dancefloor were apt to get a little raunchy, and partly because the pub was situated at the edge of South London's largest and most trouble-ridden public housing estate. In the mid-1850s the Skinner's Arms had been a boxing pub with a glass cupola above a sweat-stained ring, where workers gathered to cheer and bet on the neighbourhood's finest fighters. The matches had been halted by an unavailability of suitable pugilists in the Great War, and the old glass roof had been demolished by a stray bomb in the next. In the seventies the ground floor had been cleared of its separate Snug and Saloon bars to become a disco, and in the late eighties it had turned into a crack den. No matter how many times the police held raids, the local hoods continued to trade drugs both inside and on the street. By the time it was turned into a gay club the exhausted police and the desperate residents were happy to leave it alone because, in their eyes, anything was better than pushers, even queers. Just so long as no-one could see or hear what was going on inside it remained under a flag of uneasy truce, on the frontline of a no-go area. People entered and vacated the building quietly, and the smart cars that parked outside were left alone, because even the local kids could figure out that if they started smashing quarterlights and boosting stereos the bar would close down and the junkies would return, and nobody wanted that.

'What have you got in your briefs, a pound of sausages?' Woody released a high laugh, then quickly lowered the timbre, looking guiltily around.

'This is all me,' said Jack, looking down at his underpants. 'Can I help it if God was bountiful? This is yours.' He passed Woody a pint of strong lager, which she had ordered in the belief that it would provide her with additional gender-camouflage. She took a sip in a way that showed she was unfamiliar with holding such a glass, like a non-smoker drawing on a cigarette. As she did she took covert glances at Bax's sculptured torso.

'I'd drink that slowly, if I were you,' said Jack. 'There's no ladies'

room in here. You may be able to pass for a man but I doubt even you can convincingly pee standing up.'

The room was starting to fill. The temperature had begun to climb with the volume of the music. Woody clutched the glass to her flattened chest and took a deep breath, drawing in the smell of bitter hops that had soaked and impregnated the surrounding wooden bar for more than a century. All old pubs had this odour, but here there were other scents; traces of aftershave, cologne and the musky maleness of nearly a hundred stripped, sexed-up and overheated men. She felt herself becoming aroused, even though she was aware of the paradox; they would only be interested in her if she could successfully prove herself to be male, and that was the one thing she could not do. In the dark beyond the dancefloor she sensed naked torsos touching, arms and legs shifting across each other. Maybe she had made a mistake coming along, and they were right when they asked her what she was trying to prove.

'You okay?' Bax laid a hand on her shoulder.

'I have a faint suspicion,' she said, narrowing her eyes, 'that there may be people fucking in here. It smells like fucking. Don't you think?'

'A fuck's just a way of celebrating life, princess, like a champagne toast. Look, you asked to come along with us.'

'I know, I just didn't realise I was going to end up in the House of Testosterone. Who's Jack talking to?'

Bax looked over his shoulder. Behind him stood a vague, thin-limbed boy of about nineteen. He had carelessly cropped blonde hair, watery blue eyes and the self-absorbed stance of a piece of minor Victorian statuary. He also had a dog-chain tightened around his pale cigarette-burned neck. 'His name's Simon. He knows us from evening classes. Gives me the creeps. He's into humiliation. Likes to take punishment. They say his dad sexually assaulted him for years, and nobody found out about it until after the old guy was dead. I don't know why Jack talks to him. I never do.'

'You mean he's a masochist?'

'Yeah, why? You wanna interview him for your thesis?' Bax drained his beer and set the glass down on the cigarette machine. 'He won't be very interesting. People who are into role-playing never are.'

'Why's that?'

'Because they're selfish, working out their childhood shit. They just take what they want from sex.'

Woody peered around Bax's chest. The boy was flirting shamelessly with Jack. 'Perhaps he has no choice.'

'You're right there. Kids like that are just whipping boys, put on earth to suck up all the bad vibes and take the blame.'

'Don't you get jealous when guys flirt with Jack?'

Bax looked surprised. 'Me? We've been together for six years. I hardly think he's about to run off with someone else, and if he did I'd like to think he'd choose someone attractive. Besides, we have a deal. It's simple; if he ever leaves me, I'll kill him. You want another beer?'