Nicola Griffith - Slow River

She looked at Spanner for a long time. At the hair that needed combing, the light blue eyes she had seen cry only once, at the beginning of the wrinkle on the left side of her mouth, where the muscles pulled when she laughed. She wanted to hold Spanner close, stroke her hair, tell her it was all right, she didn’t have to be a realist all the time; she, Lore, would let her dream, let her stretch and reach and try, and if she failed, then it wasn’t the end of the world.

But Spanner’s pupils were tiny and her arms were still folded and her face was like a mummy’s: thin, drawn too tight, used up too early. She had never had the chance to play, to laugh without calculation, without looking over her shoulder. Kittens should be round.

Lore was suddenly very, very tired. “I’m going to lie down.”

She went into the bedroom and drew the curtains against the lights outside, The close, dark air reminded her of the tent. She felt trapped. There had to be a way out. For both of them.

She fell asleep and dreamed of Stella, surrounded by her friends at Ratnapida, laughing, watching the net charity commercials, thumbing her PIDA into the base of.the screen and sending thousands to some aid organization Lore had never heard of. Then jetting off to some other island paradise to do the same thing. Always traveling. Running, running, but never getting away. Stella, who had escaped by dying.

When Lore woke it was dark, and she knew how they could escape.

I slept for nine hours and woke up feeling stiff and sore, as though my body had tried to rearrange itself physically to fit three people inside one skin. I felt denser, more closely packed. Solid and strange. There was a message on the screen from the plant: shifts were back to normal. I had received four other calls, all aborted without leaving a message.

The flat was stuffy. I went down to Tom’s. “I brought you a recording of the…” I was suddenly embarrassed. Scam, I thought, fake commercial, and was ashamed. I held out the disk. He took it. “This is yours, too,” I pulled the small packet of debit cards from my pocket. “We got more than I thought. There’s about five thousand here.” It was more than the share we had agreed upon, but he needed it more than me. Now it was his turn to look embarrassed, but he took the packet. “I thought Gibbon might want a walk.”

We walked along the canal, the dog at the fullest extent of his leash. A stiff wind pushed the clouds along at a tilt and slapped water up against the banks. The air smelled of weeds and wind and Gibbon’s coat. We saw two Canada geese landing in a wide dike. Gibbon ran for them, barking and dragging me behind him, but the geese just ignored us. He wanted to run some more, so we did, feet thudding on the densely packed dirt of the towpath, mouths open.

For a while, it seemed that I ran through the fountains with Tok, that I ran through the city streets with Spanner, that I ran on my own in an older skin. I felt as though I swam through the swirling meeting point of three rivers, each at a different temperature, each tugging me this way and that. Then it was just me, and Gibbon, and a windy afternoon. Tom was watching the net when I got back. Not the scam. Soup was heating.

“You didn’t watch it?”

“No. I didn’t want to see myself looking old and useless.”

He was old, and arthritic, and lonely—but his eyes were not heavy-lidded and ancient and used up, like Spanner’s; they weren’t dull and eaten-away and dead like the kitten’s. How did he watch the net for hours and keep eyes like that?

I wondered if he had seen the video of Chen’s kidnapping, of me; what he might do if he had recognized me and seen the reward posted; whether he would turn me in… and if I would blame him if he did. A quarter of a million would change his life.

He looked at me a long time when I handed him Gibbon’s leash. I met his eyes. Not like Spanner’s at all. I patted Gibbon. “The walk was a good idea,” I said.

I got to the plant a little before six. Magyar was waiting at the gates. Her relief was obvious.

“Was it you who called and hung up? Thought I wouldn’t show?” It had occurred to me while I dressed, sweating, remembering the look on Tom’s face, my own doubts. I didn’t want to tempt friends, or those who might become friends. I could have run, disappeared, just another tiny rodent in the undergrowth of the city… But if I ran I would be alone again, never knowing who I was when I bent to look at my reflection.

Being near Magyar made me feel known and understood.

We walked into the locker room very close but not quite touching. We caught a few slantwise glances, coming in together, and Kinnis even slapped me on the back, grinning hugely.

I wondered why I wasn’t telling them that their obvious assumption was wrong. I wondered why Magyar wasn’t, either.

“Later,” Magyar said, “at the break.”

We went our separate ways.

All through the first half of the shift, Cel kept watching me, raising her eyebrow at me when I caught her gaze. Annoyingly, I kept blushing.

Five minutes before the break Magyar came to find me. I watched her striding toward me, loosening her mask, frowning. The different lights ran across her hair, which looked very clean and soft. When her right leg moved forward, the skinny pulled taut over her left breast. The plasthene would feel warm under my hands.

“Bird.”

“Magyar.”

“We need to talk.”

“Anywhere but the breakroom. I’m beginning to feel like a trophy wife.” I just blurted it out, and she blushed, which meant I did, too, imagining what she might be thinking, and I couldn’t take my eyes off her lips, which were very red. And then of course Cel was there, raising her eyebrow at us both.

Frowning ferociously, Magyar led me to the glass-walled office where we had faced off with Hepple. She went around the desk and sat in the comfortably upholstered chair. She was angry again. “Feels good. Want a try? No? Well, I suppose you’ve sat behind big desks a lot. You were probably used to chairs like these by the time you were seven.”

I thought we had gone through all this rich girl—poor girl stuff yesterday. “What’s bothering you?”

“Have you checked the police records yet?”

“No.” I should have. Of course I should have, but I had been sleeping, exhausted and confused.

“I did. Or my friend did. She works in the county records office. I called her this morning, asked her to check.”

“And?”

“And nothing. At least not from this part of the country.”

There was a large dry patch high up in my throat. “How about hospitals?”

“Also nothing.”

The dry patch was getting bigger. “I don’t understand.”

“Nor do I, frankly.”

I didn’t really want to ask her. “Do you believe me?”

“I wonder if you’re telling me everything.”

“You’ve heard the high points. There are some things I don’t want to talk about. Some of them are a matter of public record,” like the net video, “some are things only I know about.” And Spanner. “But I haven’t lied to you. Except about my name.”

There was another chair on my side of the desk. I took it.

“So, what do we do from here?”

I didn’t have any suggestions. She was the one who didn’t trust me. I was tired of dancing to other people’s tunes. Somewhere below, water gushed loudly through a pipe. It was hot in the glass box.

Eventually, she sighed and put her feet up on the desk. “You’re a van de Oest. But you won’t go back to your family because your mother abused your sisters and might have abused you. And because you think you killed someone. But there’s no record of a dead body. No body, no murder, no crime. And if your mother did abuse anyone, it’s not your fault, so why should you suffer? Why not just go back and get her arrested?”