Nicola Griffith - Slow River

I talked for hours, occasionally sipping water from the glass next to me. I told the camera about Greta helping with the lock, about Stella killing herself, about Tok calling me in Uruguay. I told the camera everything I could remember about my kidnap; about Fishface and Crablegs and the tent; how they had known I was allergic to spray-injector drugs; what they had said and how they had said it. I talked about the nail.

When I found I was talking at great length about the qualities of the nail—how it smelled, how it felt in my hand, how big it was—I turned the camera off, used the bathroom, made myself some tea.

When I resumed, I was much more terse. “So when they took me outside, I thought they were going to kill me. I tried to escape. In the course of that escape attempt, one—the one I called Fishface—was seriously hurt. Then I was bundled up into a van.” I described the van as well as I could. “Crablegs threatened to kill me. He tried, with some kind of nasal spray. I got away. I was hurt, naked, alone. I was helped by a stranger.”

That’s what Spanner still was: a stranger. One with a dangerous smile and skillful hands. I wondered what she was doing, right now. I wondered if someone was hurting her for money. It was getting dark outside. The sun went down early on winter afternoons.

“I illegally took the PIDA from the corpse of a woman called Sal Bird, who had died, I was told, in a swimming accident in Immingham. I worked at Hedon Road Waste-water Treatment Plant.” I gave my address and phone number. I explained about the sabotage; about Meisener; about Montex and the van de Oest corporation and Greta. “I think Lucas Chen has been abducted by the same persons as myself three years ago.”

I thought about saying more, but there wasn’t any point. This was only to give them enough to start with while I was. dealing with my family and dodging the glare of publicity. No doubt I would spend hours closeted in some grim-looking police station while being politely interviewed by the officer or officers in charge. For all that I had done, I had never seen the inside of a police station. The idea frightened me.

On the other side of the window, neon in shopwindows and the sodium of streetlights were blinking on. The flat was gray and shadowy beyond the camera flood. I should really stand up and make some calls: tell Ruth and Ellen the truth before the net caught the story; let Tom know that the building would be swarming by this time tomorrow. Maybe he had a relative he could stay with for a day or two.

I just sat there, hands and feet getting cold, watching the camera light grow more sharp-edged as the shadows in the flat turned from gray to black.

It was spring again. Lore had been prostituting her body for more than a year. All that money. She lay there for a long time, stroking the quilt, dunking, finally admitting to herself what she had known, on some level, all along. That evening, as they were preparing to go out to meet more customers, Lore sat down on the rim of the bathtub.

“How much does it cost?”

“Hmm?” Spanner was facing the mirror. She continued to brush her hair, but Lore knew Spanner was watching her.

“The drug. How much does it cost?” Spanner paused in midstroke, then shrugged. “What does it matter? We have enough money.”

“We’ve been earning an average of six thousand a week for more than a year. That’s more than three hundred thousand—”

“I can count.”

“—and where has it gone?” Lore stood up, took the hairbrush from Spanner’s hand, and shook it in her face. “I want your attention, and I want the truth. Why, exactly, have we been selling our bodies for the last year?”

“To earn—”

“The truth!”

“That is the—”

“But not the whole truth, is it? Yes, we’ve been letting old ladies watch while you sodomize me; you’ve tied me up while some executive jerks off because it’s his birthday; I’ve had to watch while you piss on some jaded couple. For what?” Lore was pacing up and down now, hairbrush still in her hand. “And don’t tell me money. It’s the drug. I thought the drug was to make our lives bearable while we made money the only way we knew how. But that’s not it at all, is it? I got it all backward. That was never the point. The whole point was the drug. The whole point was what you and I did while we took the drug. Because you like it. Deep down inside, you like it.”

“You do, too. Otherwise you wouldn’t be doing it.”

That wasn’t true. Was it? Lore shook her head. “Just tell me how much we’ve been spending on that drug.”

“A lot. Everything.” And Spanner smiled.

Lore hit her. An open-handed slap that sent her spinning across the sink.

“Why?” She was panting. But Spanner said nothing. “I should have figured it out sooner. Why hadn’t I heard about this drug? Why didn’t anyone else know about it? Because it’s new. Who steals it for you? You make me so angry! We could have earned more selling it than using it. Couldn’t we? Couldn’t we!”

But if they had merely been selling it, Spanner would not have had the same power; she would not have known something Lore didn’t.

Lore wanted to hit Spanner again, hit her over and over, blame her for everything. But something held her back. She was already the kind of person who sold herself, who humiliated herself on a regular basis. She did not want to become the kind of person who enjoyed hurting others.

Spanner had turned her back on Lore and was examining her face in the mirror. “It’s swelling already. I’ll have to use a lot of makeup to cover it before we go out.”

Lore felt cold and sick. She had hit Spanner. She could not understand why Spanner wasn’t reacting to that. “We can’t go out. Not now. We—”

But Spanner whirled, teeth bared and tendons standing out in her neck and shoulders. “We have no choice! You think the drug’s expensive? You have no idea!” She barked with laughter. “We owe money, you fool. And they know where we live. They’re not forgiving types, either. So you get your body into that dress and come with me, because if we don’t earn some cash tonight, tomorrow you won’t be in any position to worry about what kind of damage this stuff will be doing to your health.”

Lore’s mind went terrifyingly blank. She was beginning to feel that the whole world was out of control. She closed her eyes. Think fast. “They know you. Not me. You need the money more than I do.”

“They won’t take long to figure—”

“But for now, you’re the one.” Lore made her voice hard and flat. “So you need my help, for a change. So I’ll make you a deal. We’ll go out tonight, and tomorrow, and the next day. For as long as it takes. But we won’t use that drug anymore. And we’ll save the money.”

Without the drug, it would be unbearable. At least, she hoped Spanner would find it so. And then maybe she could be persuaded to look at the possibility of a net-commercial scam.

“Is there any left?”

Spanner held up a vial, still half-full.

“Then you can use it.” She no longer trusted Spanner to look after her while she was in throes of hormonally induced ecstasy. And maybe the effects of the drug would not be lasting if she stopped taking it now.

Without the drug it was terrible. Lore felt like a receptacle, one of those plastic vaginas she and Spanner had both laughed at in the sex shop. But she stayed with it grimly. And she stuck to Spanner’s side like a burr.

“I won’t let you run up any more debt,” she told her. So they earned their money, and they saved, and after six weeks Lore decided it was enough.

Lore prepared the garden for a long absence. That’s how she thought of it, a long absence, not a permanent one; she did not want to examine why. She just pruned and aerated and clipped. She had hoped to see the cat one last time, but it stayed away. It would always be wild, coming and going unbidden. Like hope. She hoped Spanner would feed it. Probably not.