Fairyland Read online

  He remembers the years just after the birds died, the plagues of grasshoppers, aphids, flying ants and flies, the food shortages and the long lines outside supermarkets. The little world Lexis drew around them both, back then—he should go and see her, once this is over, once it’s safe. She’s getting on, and her current boyfriend is younger than Alex, for Christ’s sake. If he’s safe, he’ll go and see her. He offers this up like a prayer. Home, safe and free. Playing tag in the stairwells of the tower blocks, Alex was always anxious about being left out, being left behind—he was overweight even then, although he could run as fast as most of the other kids, could wrestle most of them into submission, too. His weight gave him a presence—he still likes to think that. He remembers the one girl who could outrun everyone. Tall, knock-kneed Najma, her thick black braid sticking out as she flew across the ground. Gone now, gone away. Her family caught in one of the repatriation sweeps and sent to India although they’d all of them been born here. If she’s still alive, what must life be like for her now? Alex should count his blessings.

  He thinks all this as he takes underpasses beneath busy roads and skirts a threadbare acre of grass between tattered deck access housing projects where kids play football amongst burnt-out cars, so many cars abandoned here it looks like a parking lot. The pyramid-capped monolith of Canary Wharf disappears and reappears behind the tower blocks. The sun beats down, baking the crown of Alex’s skull inside his black hat.

  He has a bad moment in the unmade alley that runs past a scrap yard under the cantilevered Docklands line, but the two figures at the far end of the alley are just a crack dealer and one of his runners. Alex vaguely knows the dealer, a muscled Nigerian who always wears wraparound shades. There’s a baseball bat tucked under his arm, for sorting out argumentative customers. The dealer nods languidly and asks Alex how it’s going, is he still making that strange shit?

  ‘You want to sell some for me?’

  ‘Oh man, there’s no percentage in that stuff. My customers know exactly what they want. You should be getting into that, man. You cook me some DOA, I can move it for you no problem. You worked for the Wizard, man. Any stuff you cook up will sell, I guarantee it. The punters appreciate a good pedigree.’

  They’ve had this conversation before, but Alex isn’t crazy or desperate enough for this sort of deal. Not yet, at least. He starts to sidle past the dealer, saying, ‘It’s just that I’m not into industrial chemistry.’

  ‘Well, you think about it,’ the dealer says genially. ‘This here is a steady trade, and I hear the law is about to catch up with the weird shit you make. But I can’t talk now, man, people be quitting work, hurrying over to get their fix. Later, eh?’

  Past the elevated railway line is the back end of the dilapidated row of workshop units where Alex lives, half a dozen in a row, overlooked by the gutted wreck of a toytown yellow brick office block dating from the eighties, its blue and red plastic fittings faded and broken, every window smashed. Weeds push up through the tarmac of the access road; buddleia bushes have established themselves on the flat roofs. The sharp smell of solvents from the chip-assembly shop at the far end. Frank, the old geezer who sells second-hand office furniture, is sitting in the sun on a black leather swivel chair, and nods to Alex as he goes past. Alex thinks he’s exchanged about ten words with Frank, and they’ve been neighbours for the last three months. On the other side, there’s the busy chorus of Malik Ali’s industrial sewing machines: three of the units are used by Bangladeshis in the rag trade.

  Alex has another bad moment when he ducks through the little access door set in the double doors that front his own unit—someone could be waiting for him in the dark—but then he clicks on the fluorescent lights, and of course no one’s there. He gets a quick shot of reassurance from a couple of tabs of Cool-Z, which he washes down with that day’s carton of Pisant, this orange cinnamon drink he discovered in a vending arcade on the Tottenham Court Road. Pisant lasted about a week in the frenzied sharkpool of niche marketing, probably because of the name, but Alex tracked down the supplier before it disappeared, and the last of the world’s supply of Pisant is stacked in one of his three industrial fridges.

  For the rest, there’s an extruded stainless steel kitchen, empty except for a big cappuccino machine and the microwave Alex uses to heat up reconstituted Malaysian army rations—he has about a thousand unlabelled packs crated in the back of the workshop—and the food he orders from the Hong Kong Gardens takeaway. There’s a bed in the back, too, behind a Chinese screen of lacquered paper, and a little toilet and shower cubicle rigged up in what was once an office. The rest of the space is taken up with lab benches littered with glassware, a containment hood, ultracentrifuge, freeze-drier and benchtop PCR, a second-hand bioreactor, a metal-framed desk with the computer Alex uses for sequence modelling and for running his artificial life ecosystem, and, in the middle of the bare concrete floor, the machine for which he sold his soul: Black Betty, a sleek state-of-the-art Nuclear Chicago argon laser nucleotide sequencer and assembler.

  The smell of the place, a potent cocktail of solvents edged with hydrochloric acid fumes, reassures Alex’s backbrain. He’s been here three months now, and he still likes it. Black Betty is purring and clicking, the mini-Cray which controls her scrolling through the assembly program a line at a time. She’s making another batch of the stuff he trashed at King’s Cross, but he doesn’t have the heart to switch her off. Of course, he should never have bought her and put himself in hock to Billy Rock’s family, which was the only place he could get the money. But what can he say? It was love at first sight.

  Alex checks his mail, but there are no messages. His online daemon tells him it’s logged a couple of interesting discussion threads, and asks if he wants a new database of chemical suppliers, but Alex tells it he’s busy. The daemon—a dapper red devil with a forked tail and a pitchfork—knuckles its horned forehead and does a slow fade.

  Right now Alex’s contact could be spilling his guts in some police station interview room, although since he has diplomatic immunity he should be smart enough to say nothing even if it does incriminate him. Alex thinks about this, and knows he should get out even if the guy doesn’t talk. But it isn’t as if he’s done anything illegal, and besides, he can’t leave his stuff.

  The Cool-Z is working now, an icy sheath of calm closing around him. Alex does what he should have done at King’s Cross, if he hadn’t panicked at the sight of the squad cars. He calls up Detective Sergeant Howard Perse.

  Perse answers on the first ring, as if he’s been waiting for the call. He is sitting close to the camera of his phone, distorting Alex’s view of his heavy, pockmarked face.

  ‘You look fucked,’ Perse says.

  ‘You should know.’

  ‘I heard that something went down at King’s Cross,’ Perse says. He seems to be smiling, but it’s hard to tell. ‘Was that your drop, Sharkey?’

  ‘You know it was, you fucker,’ Alex says, angry despite the Cool-Z.

  ‘Now, now.’ Perse is amused. ‘I could tell you it doesn’t matter, Sharkey, that there are always other clients. Is that what you want to hear? What were you selling anyway? HyperGhost? You’re a naughty boy, Sharkey. The slants watch enough TV as it is.’

  ‘It isn’t illegal.’

  ‘But you know it will be. The Bill comes up for its final reading in two weeks. Is that why you were in a hurry to offload it?’

  ‘Yeah, and when it does you’ll always be there to do me down, keep me small, under control. Maybe I won’t cooperate any more, Perse.’

  Perse says nothing.

  Alex adds, ‘I’ll have to talk to Billy Rock. I’m not going to be able to pay my insurance this month.’

  Perse says, ‘It’s always a good idea to keep on the right side of Billy Rock.’

  And Alex makes a connection he should have made right at the beginning. Perse’s foot. He’s being fucked over because of Perse’s fucked up foot!

  ‘This is more than keeping
me down, isn’t it? You’ve got some kind of bullshit scheme to get me close to Billy Rock. You’ve been told to keep away from Billy, you’ve been told not to hassle him. So you want to use me.’

  Perse doesn’t bother to deny this accusation. Everyone knows that he wants to nail Billy Rock after the little bastard broke his foot, even though it was an accident. He says, ‘How deep are you in with Billy?’

  Alex swivels back and forth. The air suspension of the chair sighs under his weight. He says, ‘I had to take the protection along with the loan. It wasn’t optional.’

  Perse says, with his infuriating smile right up against his phone’s lens, ‘You ever think that Billy Rock might have something to do with your run of bad luck?’

  ‘He can call up a couple of squad cars? Because that’s what happened at King’s Cross.’

  ‘Sharkey, he can call out a fucking Chief Inspector if he wants to, because his family has at least two on retainer. You know the way it works, so stop dicking around.’

  Alex knows the way it works. It’s like an eternal triangle. Triad Families like Billy Rock’s run both the Yardies and the bent coppers. The Yardies do the necessary streetwork, and the police keep the Yardies under control. Anything that might perturb the relationship is rubbed out or incorporated.

  Alex says, with a bad taste in his mouth, ‘What would I do if he did fuck up my deal?’

  ‘Why don’t you talk to him about your problem, let him make his move? He might reveal something.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Alex is thinking that if it was Billy Rock, someone still had to tell him about the deal in the first place.

  ‘Son, if Billy Rock lends anyone money to expand, the next thing is that he’ll want a piece of the action. That’s the way it is.’

  ‘Why should I want to expand?’

  ‘What’s that stuff you drink called? You have a fridge full of it.’

  ‘Pisant?’

  ‘Yeah, whatever. You’re going to run out of it one day, you ever think of that?’

  And then Perse cuts the connection. Alex still doesn’t know who fucked him over, but he does know that Perse is right about one thing. He should call Billy Rock.

  3 – Billy Rock

  An expert system, masquerading on the phone as a sleekly groomed receptionist with pneumatic breasts scarcely concealed beneath a wispy blouse, takes Alex’s message and promises to pass it to Mr Rock. While he’s waiting for Billy Rock to call back, Alex spends a lot of time tracking the latest changes in his a-life ecosystem, and more time on the Web Bulletin Board that a-life freaks use, talking with a Professor of Biology in the University of Hawaii about edge gliders. It seems that someone with the ethertag Alfred Russel Wallace has a new twist on the parasite problem that’s pushing the edge gliders towards extinction.

  Still no reply from Billy Rock, who at this time of night is probably higher than the Moon. Fuck him, Alex thinks. It is late enough to go and see his friend Ray Aziz, who runs a Total Environment Club called Ground Zero, and Alex needs to make a deal to at least try and cover the beating he’s just taken at King’s Cross.

  Alex arrives just in time for the second ground burst of the night, a vast glare and an earth-shaking boom contracting into a hologram mushroom stalk that seems to rise beyond the huge video screens and roof girders of the club, dancers thrashing away like damned souls in the middle of all this light to a pulsing technoraga beat. The club isn’t called Ground Zero for nothing.

  Alex talks with Ray in the mixing booth high above the dance floor, where three tech jockeys keep the music and lights and effects jumping. Ray is a mellow fifty-year-old E-head, his serotonin level so low he can’t get angry at anything, but he has been doing the club scene a long time, and runs a tight ship where it counts. He is also a good customer of Alex’s from way back, from before the bust that netted the Wizard and his apprentices. Alex was one of the first gene hackers to crack the code for Serenity, and his very own psychoactive RNA virus, variously called Ghost or Fade or Firelight, is popular in the TECs because it enhances the flicker effect of TVs and holo systems, makes them appear to be saturated with coded meanings, revealing ghosts in the electronic glimmer. Clubbers like as much information density as possible, along with the sense that they’ve been transported to another dimension, and Ghost helps them along. If Alex could have patented Ghost, he would have made a fortune, but of course being a gene hacker cuts both ways. And thanks to Perse or Billy Rock, his chance at going international with a new version of Ghost, before psychoactive viruses are made illegal in the UK, has just gone down the toilet.

  The deal with Ray takes a while to complete. There are sensibilities to satisfy, forms as elaborate as Japanese tea ceremonies to be observed. It is too late to even think about sleep by the time Alex gets back to his workshop and finds a message from Billy Rock’s expert system telling him that a limo will pick him up at ten in the morning. Apparently Billy Rock was expecting Alex to make contact. He wants to meet.

  Fuelled with amphetamines and paranoia, Alex calls up Alice, his regular amongst Ma Nakome’s string of part-time whores, sleepy, plump Alice who expertly relieves him of his tensions and stays over to have breakfast. He likes Alice—their relationship is entirely commercial, but there’s also a nice mutual pretence at an intimate familiarity.

  While he waits for the limo to arrive, Alex catches a cycle of the BBC Breakfast News and switches back and forth between three of the greater metropolitan area cable news channels, but there is no mention of any Indonesian diplomat arrested at King’s Cross. Not that he expects any news. Instead of carrying the batch of HyperGhost to Paris, by now the guy will be on a stratocruiser on his way back to Jakarta, a luckless pawn in the campaign to harass Alex Sharkey.

  Alex is too restless to sit still. He wishes now that he hadn’t called up Billy Rock, but it’s too late to unring that bell. He goes out into the hot, bright sunshine and chats to old Frank, who is already sitting in his customary place outside his office furniture store, until the limo arrives.

  Billy Rock’s runner is this sixteen-year-old black kid with a razor-cut, a white Joseph T-shirt and baggy blue jeans with transparent cutouts in the thighs, box-fresh Nikes and a bad attitude. Alex has met the kid a couple of times before: he calls himself Doggy Dog, after some dead rap singer. He’s a small wiry fucker, sitting right back in the deep blue oxhide upholstery as if he owns the limo; his Nikes don’t even reach the nice blue carpet. There are LEDs in the soles of the sneakers, little red blips chasing each other round and round. The kid sees Alex staring at them and grins—he’s got a diamond chip set in one of his front teeth.

  The limo glides off. Alex pulls out a cigarette and lights it without asking permission.

  ‘You’ll get cancer,’ the kid says, giving Alex a contemptuous hooded gaze, seeing this balding fat guy in blue denim bib overalls over a rumpled purple sweater with both elbows out, and scuffed, no-fashion, orange construction boots.

  Alex blows out a riffle of smoke and returns the kid’s look. ‘Maybe I’ll give you cancer first.’

  ‘No way, bwoy. I’ve had my shots.’

  ‘Billy Rock has a health plan for his runners?’

  ‘Runner, shit. I got out of that two months ago. You be sorry you don’t show me more respect.’

  The limo swings out on to the East India Road. Alex settles back in the plush upholstery and smokes his cigarette and watches the cluster of Docklands skyscrapers catch the light of the sun. The limo’s smoked glass shades everything blue. Alex didn’t sleep last night. He is running on coffee and amphetamines, and feeling a weird nervous high. He is almost tempted to ask Doggy Dog how Billy Rock gives it him—in the mouth or in the arse, and is that why he’s called Doggy Dog?—but the reason the kid is sitting slumped in the seat is he has a pistol tucked in the waistband of his jeans.

  The limo speeds through the Rotherhithe Tunnel, turns past the Norwegian Church, and comes out in a little road cramped between high warehouses somewhere by Canada Dock. It drives
around two sides of a big muddy pit where little yellow electric bulldozers are working and pulls up in the shadow of a gutted warehouse.

  The kid, Doggy Dog, waits for the driver to get out and open the door. Alex has to slide over to follow Doggy Dog out into the soggy heat. The driver, a big impassive man in a cutaway T-shirt to show off the carbon whisker spurs implanted in his muscular forearms, gets back into the limo and drives off, and Doggy Dog leads Alex into the warehouse. Alex has the bad feeling that he’s somehow being led to the slaughter, and maybe Doggy Dog senses this, because he catches hold of Alex’s arm just above the elbow, as if to restrain him.

  There’s a big bare high space inside the warehouse. At the far end, in the concentrated glare of arc lights on scaffold towers, is a circular arena fenced with wooden boards, with tiered benches rising above it. Billy Rock is sitting ringside, his boots cocked on the wooden palisade.

  Billy Rock—he’s about twenty-five, small and wiry, not much bigger than Doggy Dog. He wears a raw linen suit, with a panama hat pulled low over his face and a cane cradled between his knees. White gloves, ostrich skin boots with cuban heels. His jacket is slung like a cape around his shoulders, and he sort of hunches into it as he stares down into the arena. His smooth-skinned petulant face is masked by shades. Alex suspects that Billy’s high cheekbones are the result of plastic surgery, but of course no one would ever ask.

  Alex leans at the palisade and looks down, and the thing in the pit snarls, bounds forward, and slams on to its back as a chain brings it up short.

  Alex jerks away and Doggy Dog laughs, a kind of snorting giggle.

  The floor of the arena is covered in sawdust. In the centre, an iron stake anchors a chain. The thing at the end of the chain has gouged deep tracks in the sawdust, down to the grey sand beneath. It springs to its feet now, very fast, very limber. It is a blue-skinned doll, heavily modified by selective somatic mutation or surgery. Probably both, Alex thinks. It’s naked—and female, although its dugs are little more than enlarged nipples. The wide powerful jaws are like something found on an old tree bole blasted by lightning and infected with fungus and rot, layers of knotted cankerous growth. The doll has a crest of muscle on the top of its skull to work these big jaws, a nose so flattened that the nostrils are slits, little black eyes close set under a craggy brow.