Nicola Griffith - Slow River

I was just glad I still had a lump of money left. How did other people manage without pay for a month?

“Good. I’m sure you’ll enjoy working with Cherry Magyar, your section supervisor. You should find her understanding. She’s new at her job, too. I promoted her myself, just two weeks ago.”

We did not shake hands. No welcome-aboard speech. He just nodded, told me to get myself assigned a locker for the skinny and goggles, and to report back at 6 P.M. sharp tomorrow.

It was cool outside. I walked the mile and a half back to my fifth-floor flat, trying to sort out how I felt about starting a job as a menial in a plant I could have run in my sleep.

I didn’t expect to get much sleep tonight. That direct mains release setup would give me nightmares.

While her back healed, Lore’s days passed in a haze of drugs and conversations at odd times of the day or night. Spanner would disappear some evenings and not return until the following afternoon. On the mornings she was alone, Lore had nothing to do but watch the window.

There was always the tree, of course. Even when she could not see it, she could hear it. The leaves hung down like dead things now, and when people walked past, she heard their feet crunching on those that had already fallen. She spent hours watching the sun travel across the warm sandstone of the building opposite. When she got well enough, she sat up against the window. When the sun was at just the right angle, she could see where layers of sandstone had been blasted away to cleanse it of the soot: acid, black effluvium from generations of factories, coal-burning fires and, later, combustion engines. The sandstone shone a deep, buttery yellow early in the morning, bleaching to lemon and then bone as the light increased. She guessed at the shape of the building she lived in by the shadow it cast, on the one opposite.

She listened to the morning chorus of sparrows and the evening calls of thrushes as people came and went in algal tides. She liked to drowse while the pigeons on the window sill cooed and whirred their wings. The sill was white with their excrement. She wondered what they found to eat in the city. Once, waking from a thick, Technicolor afternoon dream, she found a squirrel on the cable outside, watching her. She could see the muscles and tendons of its haunches as it gripped the thick cable with tiny claws. It had eyes like apple pips, hard and opaque. Then it ran off, tail twitching.

But the window could not keep her occupied all the time, and then Lore would wonder if the man, the kidnapper she knew only as Fishface, had really died, if the police were still looking for her. Perhaps the other one, Crablegs, had confessed, or been found. Maybe Tok had already denounced Oster.

Once she tried to access the net, to check back on the news, see if any bodies had been discovered, what the police were doing about finding her, but she was locked out. The keyboard was dead, and voice commands resulted in nothing but a flat, still screen. She did not mention her attempt to Spanner. She wasn’t ready. Not yet. She began to wonder if this whole episode was a drug-induced nightmare, some scheme of her supposedly loving father.

But then Spanner would return from her jaunts crackling with manic energy and a restlessness that did not disguise her fatigue, and Lore would understand that it was all too real.

Lore never asked where Spanner had been, but she wondered what she did in those hours that made her so tense. Business, she supposed, though she wondered why Spanner had to get so wired to transact a supposed victimless, low priority crime. Sometimes it would be two or three hours before Spanner’s deep blue eyes stopped their constant roving around the room, alighting on windows, doors: checking, always checking, as if for reassurance, the exits.

After a wreck, when Lore could get around the flat a little, Spanner called her over to the screen. “Sit,” she said. Lore sat on the couch.

“It’s me,” Spanner told the terminal. The screen lit to light gray. “It’s voice-coded. Won’t even display the message-waiting light unless I tell it to. I’m going to set it up to accept certain commands from you.” Lore felt herself being studied but she refused to give Spanner any idea of how it made her feel to be controlled like this. She said nothing.

Spanner sighed. “This is just a precaution on my part. I want you to understand why I’m doing this. I don’t want you calling Mummy and Daddy when those painkillers start to wear off and you realize what a mess you’re in. I can’t afford any kind of notice, never mind the kind of wrong conclusion the authorities might jump to if they find you here, injured, and half out of your mind on drugs.”

Lore kept her face still, but she remembered a tent, drugs, being naked. Was this any different?

“I’ll allow any passive use. That means you can listen to my messages. Or some of them. You can access news. But you can’t interact: no talking, no sending messages, no shopping. I’ll bring you anything you need. At least for now.”

“I’m not a child.”

“No,” Spanner agreed. “But this is the way it has to be.”

The first time the screen bleeped when she was alone, it was a man’s face that appeared: black spiky hair, blue eyes, thin eyebrows, smile like a cherub. “Remember those chicken hawks we came across last month? If you’re still interested, get in touch.”

That was it. Even with all Spanner’s precautions the message had not said much. But Lore knew about chicken hawks. That was not victimless crime.

When Spanner got home, she went straight to the screen, took the message, called back. “Me. Yeah, I’m still interested. Usual place? Fine.”

Lore waited for an explanation.

“Billy,” Spanner said. “Business.”

“I thought you said your business was victimless.”

“Yes.”

“Where there are chicken hawks, there are chickens getting hurt.”

“You know more than I thought you might.” Lore just nodded, and waited. Spanner sighed. “We got the information from some straight-looking punter’s slate: he runs a daisy chain.”

“Daisy chains?”

“A ring of fresh young faces. Younger than chickens. This one and his friends like them younger than four.”

Lore felt her cheeks pulling away from her teeth in disgust.

“It’s not much to my taste, either. So what Billy and I do is put a tap on him. Blackmail,” she amplified. “A certain rough justice to it, don’t you think? Those who hurt others get a taste of how it feels to be powerless, and we make money. All very neat.”

Lore stared at her. Spanner thought she was some kind of Robin Hood. “But the kids still get hurt.”

“Often they stop molesting them, once they’ve been burned.”

“Often isn’t always.”

Spanner shrugged.

“You don’t care, do you?”

“It’s business. We can’t go to the police because they’ll want to know where we got our information. Besides, it could get dangerous if we meddled too far.”

Lore remembered Spanner coming home with flushed cheeks; the hectic eyes, the sharp jaw where her teeth were clenched together and could not or would not let go, not for hours. Blackmail. “And who else do you blackmail?”

“No one who doesn’t deserve it.”

No one who can’t pay. Lore thought about chicken hawks and daisy chains. “You could send an anonymous tip to the, police.”

“We’ve done that. Now and then. When we think the situation warrants. But without solid evidence, they don’t usually take any action.”

Lore saw that the lack of police action suited Spanner just fine. If the men who ran the chains weren’t making money, they couldn’t pay quiet fees to insure silence.