Tanith Lee - Metallic Love

I gazed at him sidelong. Grandfather, with all his snarling about sin, had never directed that sex should be interpreted to any of us—ignorance being, seemingly, safer. Nor, therefore, had anyone warned me about men who prey on girls or children. Nevertheless, I was wary. The very fact this man had talked to me, me, less than the dust or the weeds that could rise from the dead—maybe I was cautious even of that, for was he another religious maniac?

So I didn’t answer at all.

Then he said, “I’m Danny. Who are you?” Like a kid might.

Only I wouldn’t have answered someone my own age right then, either.

He shrugged. “You’ve run away, I guess. Yeah? Some old feller mistreating you, yeah?”

Yes, I said in my skull, thinking of Grandfather with abrupt belligerence.

“Well, look here, little lady. I have a kind of little gang of girls, some of them a tad older’n you, and some your age—eleven, right?”

Wrong, I thought, twelve-years-old affronted. I said nothing.

“There’s not a lot of work you can get without your labor card, and I guess you don’t have one. But this might suit you.”

I blinked at him. Then I said softly, “What do you want me to do?”

I asked mostly in total ignorance, as I’ve explained. Yet I sounded uneasy and guarded, and he laughed.

“Hey, hey, no, I don’t mean anything like that, honey.” He shook his head, as I sat there wondering what that meant. He said, “The rich folks, they got all the robot cleaners—automatic little dinkies that run up the walls, scrub out the toilet, that kinda thing. But round here, well, we got a few people can afford a human to do all that—if’n they can’t afford an automatic. They like girls best; they like young fit girls who can do the work. Think us fellers make a mess more’n we clean up. So I’ve gotten together my gang. Fifty of ’em. Fifty-one, if you care to join. It’ll mean a bit of money. You won’t get rich. What do you say?”

Much of what I’d done on Babel Boulevard had been in the cleaning department, and I hadn’t received a quarter for it. It had had to be done for God.

Now I equated that version of God with Grandfather. An old, gaunt, ranting man with angry red eyes. The other sort of God, glimpsed by then, however obliquely, through the pages of Jane’s Book, had no face I knew. He was like the white light Jane had written about. And He didn’t need a bloody maid.

I was still cogitating, the sidewalk hard on my backside, when my stomach growled at the top of its intestinal lungs.

It startled me. The starvation-training I’d had seemed to have ensured I was never really hungry. Maybe now my body only missed its usual thin soup and half-slice of bread the Apocalytes served up at sunfall.

But Danny rose to his feet and said to me, “C’mon. I’ll buy you a hamburger.”

And in a kind of trance, like Eve enticed by the serpent to the forbidden fruit, I, too, got up and followed where he led.

This, then, was the next five years of my life.

As part of Danny’s “gang” (no, his name isn’t Danny, either), I lived in various places, always sharing with two or three other girls of the cleaning teams. We got along, or we didn’t. But there was no Big Joy. No Grandfather. No glowering, unreasonable God. (I confess, once or twice I got scared the Apocalytes might find me, drag me back. So I used to imagine I was invisible to any pursuer. I initiated a sort of mantra I’d say over and over if I felt weird, stuck hard at it. Guess it worked.)

I changed my name, too, when I was about fifteen and a half. What had I been called on Babel Boulevard? Honesty. That had been my name. Maybe why I learned so quickly to lie. However, at fifteen and a half, I altered to Loren. I’d heard it somewhere, and it made an impression. It seemed to fit me, too. A dark name like my hair, my tawny skin, which is what they used to call “olive,” my light brown eyes.

The best of Danny’s flats I stayed in was the last one, situated in a partly ruinous apartment block near the Old River. At night, bats flew out of the top stories—which was where they alone roomed. They circled and flittered round and round through the blue-going-gray dusk, and the first stars came out, pale cold-gold embers, just visible above the haze of river pollution, for this wasn’t a well-lit area.

The cleaning work was always okay. That is, it was dull and repetitive—once you’ve cleaned one really filthy apartment, you have, with a few disgusting variations, cleaned them all. None of the areas we went were rich, of course. There were a multitude of mossy, green-veined baths and cracked lavatories, carpetless stairways of broken tiles, walls mottled by damp like the pelts of leopards, and rat-riddled kitchen-hatches.

But we got paid. (Any trouble of any kind, there was always backup from Danny’s male contingent.) And sometimes, off the nastier employers, we took the odd goody—a glass of cheap sherry, a cigarine from a two-thirds full packet that usually wouldn’t be missed, one go from a bottle of nail polish, if the resident was out, or a box of eye makeup. Sometimes some of us stole things, too. There was a girl called Margoh (how she spelled it, though it was all she could write). She was a genius at petty theft. A knife here, a fork there—a neglected lipstick from the back of a drawer—sets matched up from endless visits to different apartments, put together and flogged to the less moral-conscious markets. Margoh also utilized an actorish streak. Sometimes she would thieve something very missable, like a string of glass beads, or a lightbulb. Then she would go sniveling at once to the person renting our services. “Oh, I’m so worried—I knocked those beads of yours behind the couch—can’t find them, I’ve looked—maybe the sweeper sucked them up—” She’d have the owner, as well as the rest of us, searching everywhere. Margoh became so upset they rarely docked her money. The lightbulbs, etc: she had always broken. Then she wept copiously and offered to pay. Again, it was a harsh employer who turned on her. Rarely did anyone complain to Danny. Most clients thought Margoh a bit dim and felt sorry for her. After all, among the poor, they weren’t doing too badly, and she was a much lower life-form.

I never copied Margoh’s antics. This wasn’t scruples. I didn’t think I had her talent. But no doubt, she taught me something about deceit.

Other than flats and bats and thefts, by the time I was fifteen going on sixteen, I had become, I believed, me. There’d been a couple of, well, shocks. Unnerving experiences. I don’t really want—I won’t itemize those. But I’d held together. I had gotten through. And I went out on dates with boys from my own walk of life, saved enough money for contraceptive protection, had my first sexual experience in the back of a dumped car. Sound bad? Hey, it was quite a decent car, still. And I thought how clever I was, proud of my achievement. Forgetting Jane the Virgin’s words to her lover:

Not so I can boast, or to get rid of something…

Forgetting, actually, a lot about Jane, and Silver, too. They were my gods, but they were far off. They’d led me to a better life. But now I was grown-up.

Even the Book—I’d not read it again. It lay in my portable luggage wrapped up in a plastic overcoat. Mind you, I hadn’t thought to pass it on.

You don’t need love to have terrific sex. You need a couple of drinks, a packet of two—contraceptive shots being too expensive—and a guy who (a) you didn’t find repulsive, and (b) knew his way around.

Cynical? Sure. Sure as the stars are fire.

When I think back, even now, I see how brave Jane was, that sheltered, self-esteem-drained child, older than me only in years, risking everything. But I was a slum cat and I didn’t mind, not now, not since I was free.