M. Harrison: Nova Swing

"She cracked and ran. She's in the aureole somewhere. Antoyne, go to the door, tell me if anyone's in the street."

"All I want is a chance to fit in," the fat man said.

"For fuck's sake, Antoyne."

Antoyne said, "No one understands that."

Serotonin opened his mouth to say more, then he seemed to forget Antoyne altogether. "I never saw panic like it," he said. He shook his head. "You couldn't even say we'd got inside. It's bad this morning, but it's not that bad." He finished his drink and held out the glass. Instead of taking it, Liv Hula caught his wrist.

"So how bad is it?" she said. She wouldn't let go until he told her.

"Things are moving about," he admitted. "I've seen worse, but usually further in."

"Where is she, Vic?"

He laughed. It was a laugh he had practised too often. "I told you," he said tiredly, "she's somewhere in the aureole. We never got any further. She runs off between the buildings, I see silk stockings and that fucking fur coat, then I see nothing. She was still calling from somewhere when I gave up," he said. "Get me another drink, Liv, or I don't know what I'll do."

Liv Hula said, "You didn't go after her, Vic."

He stared.

"You stayed where it was safe, and shouted a couple times, and then you came home."

"Vic would never do that," the fat man said in a blustering way. No one was going to say Vic would do that. "Hey, Vic. Tell her. You would never do that!" He got up out of his chair. "I'm going in the street and keep an eye open now, just the way you wanted. You got a wrong idea about Vic Serotonin," he said to Liv Hula, "if you think he'd do that." As soon as he had gone, she went to the bar and poured Vic another Black Heart rum, while Vic rubbed his face with his hands like someone who was very tired and couldn't see his way through life anymore. His face had an older look than it had when he left. It was sullen and heavy, and his blue eyes took on a temporary pleading quality which one day would be permanent.

"You don't know what it's like in there," he told her.

"Of course I don't," she said. "Only Vic Serotonin knows that."

"Streets transposed on one another, everything laid down out of sync one minute to the next. Geography that doesn't work. There isn't a single piece of dependable architecture in the shit of it. You leave the route you know, you're done. Lost dogs barking day and night. Everything struggling to keep afloat."

She wasn't disposed to let him get away with that.

"You're the professional, Vic," she reminded him. "They're the customers. Here's your other drink if you want it." She leaned her elbows on the bar. "You're the one has to hold himself together."

This seemed to amuse him. He took the rum down in one swallow, the colour came back into his face and they looked at one another in a more friendly way. He wasn't finished with her, though. "Hey, Liv," he said softly after a moment or two, "what's the difference between what you've seen and what you are? You want to know what it's like in there? The fact is, you spend all those years trying to make something of it. Then guess what, it starts making something of you."

He got up and went to the door.

"What are you fucking about at, Antoyne?" he called. "I said 'look.' I said 'take a look.' "

The fat man, who had trotted up Straint a little into the predawn wind to clear his head, also to see if he could get a glimpse of Irene the Mona through a chink in the boarded windows of the chopshop, came in grinning and shivering with the cold. "Antoyne here can tell us all about it," Vic Serotonin said. "Everything he knows."

"Leave Antoyne alone."

"You ever been in there when everything fell apart, Antoyne?"

"I was never in there, Vic," Antoyne said hastily. "I never claimed I was."

"Everything was just taken away, and you had no idea what established itself in exchange? The air's like uncooked pastry. It's not a smell in there, it's a substrate. In every corner there's a broken telephone nailed to the wall. They're all labelled Speak but there's no line out. They ring but no one's ever there."

Liv Hula gave him a look, then shrugged. To the fat man she explained, "Vic just so hates to lose a client."

"Fuck you," Vic Serotonin said. "Fuck the two of you."

He pushed his glass across the counter and walked out.

After Vic Serotonin left, silence returned to the bar. It crowded in on itself, so that Liv Hula and the fat man, though they wanted to speak, were hemmed in with their own thoughts. The onshore wind decreased; while the light increased until they could no longer deny it was dawn. The woman washed and dried the glass Vic Serotonin had used, then put it carefully in its place behind the bar. Then she went upstairs to the room above, where she thought about changing her clothes but in the end only stared in a kind of mounting panic at the disordered bed, the blanket chest and the bare white walls.

I ought to move on, she thought. I ought to leave here now.

When she came down again, Antoyne had resumed his place by the window and with his hands on the sill stood watching the pay-loads lift one after another from the corporate port. He half-turned as if to speak but, receiving no encouragement, turned back again.

Across the street someone opened the chopshop door.

After a brief quiet struggle, Irene the Mona stumbled out. She took an uncertain step or two forward, peering blindly up and down Straint like a drunk assessing heavy traffic, then sat down suddenly on the edge of the sidewalk. The door slammed shut behind her. Her skirt rode up. Antoyne pressed his face closer to the glass. "Hey," he whispered to himself. Irene, meanwhile, set her little shiny red urethane vanity case down beside her and began to claw through its contents with one hand. She was still sitting there two or three minutes later, showing all she had, sniffing and wiping her eyes, when the cats came out of the Saudade event site in an alert silent rush.

Who knew how many of those cats there were? Another thing, you never found so much as a tabby among them, every one was either black or white. When they poured out the zone it was like a model of some chaotic mixing flow in which, though every condition is determined, you can never predict the outcome. Soon they filled Straint in both directions, bringing with them the warmth of their bodies, also a close, dusty but not unpleasant smell. Irene struggled upright, but the cats took no more notice than if she had been one of the street lamps.

Irene was born on a planet called Perkins' Rent. She left there tall and bony, with an awkward walk and big feet. When she smiled her gums showed, and she did her hair in lacquered copper waves so tight and complex they could receive the mains hum, the basic radio transmissions of the universe. She had a sweet way of laughing. When she boarded the rocket to leave, she was seventeen. Her suitcase contained a yellow cotton dress with a kind of faux-Deco feel, tampons and four pairs of high heel shoes. "I love shoes," she would explain to you when she was drunk. "I love shoes." You got the best of her in those days. She would follow you anywhere for two weeks then follow someone else. She loved a rocket jockey.

Now she stood with tears streaming down her face, watching the Saudade cats flow around her, until Liv Hula waded fastidiously into the stream and fetched her back to the bar, where she sat her down and said:

"What can I get you, honey?"

"He's dead this time," Irene said in a rush.

"I can't believe that," Liv Hula said. Immediately she was tidying up inside, planning to stay back inside herself away from the fact of it. But Irene kept repeating in her disorganised way, "He's dead this time, that's all," which made it hard to dissociate. Irene took Liv Hula's hand and pressed it to her cheek. It was her opinion, she said, that something makes men unfit for most of life; to which Liv Hula replied, "I always thought so too." Then Irene broke into snuffling again and had to fetch out her vanity mirror. "Especially the best parts," she said indistinctly.