Imagined Slights Page 6

  Sir William Shakespeare was known as the Bard of Avon, a hereditary title handed down from one generation of bards to the next in the town of Avon, which was situated a few miles from London, capital city of Britworld'.

  The Globe Theater was first constructed by USACorp Entertainments to the same specifications as the original, but since the fire a number of alterations have been made, for instance the use of steel and plastics in place of wood and plaster.

  Let's go in.

  Shhh. On the stage at this very moment a play is being performed. The play is Macbeth, about a barbarian king who goes on a rampage of slaughter and mayhem before being brought to justice by his best friend. You've all seen the old Schwarzenegger movie on cable.

  "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow."

  We don't need to hear much more to get an idea of the genius of Sir William Shakespeare's dialogue.

  And here, I'm sorry to say, the tour ends. Before we leave via the exit marked "EXIT", may I say what a privilege and a pleasure it has been for me to share with you the sights, sounds and smells of Britworld'. As you will have seen, everything has been designed to the most rigorous of standards, including the automata, which incorporate a number of technological breakthroughs that allow for a wide range of facial expressions, body odours, minor blemishes and deformities, even perspiration!

  On behalf of USACorp Entertainments, I would like to thank you for accompanying me on the experience that was ... Britworld'.

  The following souvenirs are available at the merchandise kiosks: reproduction bric-a-brac; a Cockney phrase book; Union Jack baseball caps; CD-ROM editions of the works of Sherlock Holmes and Sir William Shakespeare, abridged and modernised; My Parents Went To Britworld' And All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt T-shirts; foam-rubber crowns for the kids; the fabulous You Are Saucy Jack computer game (all formats); and MiniDisc and DVD recordings of favourite Britworld' folk songs, including "Strawberry Fields Forever", "Jerusalem", "God Save the King", and many many more. All major credit cards accepted.

  And finally, may I remind you about our other Lost Worlds" experiences, all bookable. They include the Native American Experience', Dreamtime: the Australian Aborigine Experience' and Life Among the Bushmen of the Kalahari'.

  USACorp Entertainments - where the science of tomorrow brings the past into the present.

  Have a nice day.

  © USACorp Entertainments

  Britworld' is a registered trademark of USACorp Entertainments

  The House of Lazarus

  Visitors were welcome at the House of Lazarus at all times of day and night, but it was cheaper to come at night, when off-peak rates applied. Then, too, the great cathedral-like building was less frequented, and it was possible to have a certain amount of privacy in the company of your dear departed.

  Because it was dark out, the receptionist in the cool colonnaded atrium betrayed a flicker of amusement that Joey was wearing sunglasses. Then, recognising his face, she smiled at him like an old friend, although she didn't actually use his name until after he had asked to see his mother, Mrs Delgado, and she had called up the relevant file on her terminal.

  "It's young Joseph, isn't it?" she said, squinting at the screen. She couldn't have been more than three years Joey's senior. The query was chased by another over-familiar smile. "We haven't seen you for a couple of weeks, have we?"

  "I've been busy," Joey said. "Busy" didn't even begin to describe his life, now that he had taken on a second job at a bar on Wiltshire Street, but he didn't think the receptionist wanted to hear about that, and, more to the point, he was too tired and irritable to want to enlighten her.

  The receptionist folded her hands on the long slab of marble that formed her desktop. "It's not my place to tell you what to do, Joseph," she said, "but you are Mrs Delgado's only living relative, and we do like our residents to get as much stimulation as possible. As you know, we wake them for an hour of news and information every morning and an hour of light music every evening, but it's not the same as actual verbal interaction. Think of it as mental exercise for minds that don't get out much. Conversation keeps them supple."

  "I come whenever I can."

  "Of course you do. Of course you do." That smile again, that smile of old acquaintance, of intimacy that has passed way beyond the need for forgiveness. "I'm not criticising. I'm merely suggesting."

  "Well, thank you for the suggestion," he said, handing her his credit card. The receptionist went through the business of swiping it, then pressed a button on a panel set into the desktop. A man in a white orderly's uniform appeared.

  "Arlene Delgado," the receptionist told the orderly. "Stack three thirty-nine, Drawer forty-one."

  "This way, sir." The orderly ushered Joey through a pair of large doors on which were depicted, in brass bas-relief, a man and a woman, decorously naked, serenely asleep, with electrodes attached to their temples, chests and arms.

  As they entered the next room, a vast windowless chamber, the ambient temperature dropped abruptly. Cold air fell over Joey's face like a veil freshly dipped in water, and his skin buzzed with gooseflesh. He craned his neck to look up.

  No matter how many times he came here, the wall never ceased to amaze him. At least a hundred and fifty feet high and well over a mile long, it consisted of stacks of steel drawers, each about half as large again as an adult's coffin. Each stack began roughly six feet above the floor and rose all the way to the roof. The wall, comprising a thousand of these stacks all told, loomed like a sheer unscalable cliff, lit from above by arc-lights that shot beams of pure white brightness down its face. Sometimes it was hard to believe that each drawer contained a human being.

  At the foot of the wall plush leather armchairs were arranged in rows, ten-deep, all facing the same way like pews in a church. About a quarter of them were occupied by people murmuring quietly, as if to themselves. Every so often someone would nod or gesticulate, and silent pauses were frequent. The human sibilance was echoed by the sound of machinery, thousands of cryogenic units all whirring and whispering at once, fans exhaling, unseen tubes pumping liquid nitrogen.

  The orderly walked down the aisle between the chairs and the wall, with Joey in tow. Some acoustical trick carried the clack of Joey's boot heels up to the metal rafters but kept the squelch of the orderly's crêpe soles earthbound.

  Arriving at Stack 339, the orderly gestured to Joey to take the nearest seat, then began tapping commands into a portable console the size of a large wallet. Without needing to be asked, Joey picked up the mic-and-earphones headset that was wired into a panel in the armrest of the chair and fitted the skeletal black device over his head. He took off his sunglasses and folded them into his breast pocket. The orderly glanced twice at the dark purple rings beneath Joey's eyes. Joey looked as if he had been punched, but the rings were just very heavy bags of exhaustion, packed with long days and late nights.

  Realising he was staring, the orderly returned his gaze to his console. "Right," he said. "I've given her a nudge. Can you hear anything?"

  Joey shook his head.

  "She may take a moment or two to wake up. Press the red button if you need me and push the blue switch to Disconnect when you're done. OK?"

  Joey nodded.

  "Pleasant chat," said the orderly, and left, squelching along to a door set into the wall. The door was marked "STRICTLY PRIVATE" and could only be opened by tapping a five-digit code number into the keypad set into its frame. It hissed slowly shut on a pneumatic spring.

  Joey sat and waited, his gaze fixed somewhere near the top of the stack of drawers, where his mother lay.

  The first sounds came as if from deep underwater, where whales wail and the mouths of drowned sailors gape and close with the come and go of the currents. Up they surged in the earphones, these subaquatic groans, bubbling to the surface in waves. Indistinct syllables, tiny glottal clucks and stutters, the gummy munches of a waking infant, the wet weaning mewls of still-blind kittens - up they came from the darkness, t
aking form, taking strength, slowly evolving into things that resembled words, white-noise dream-thoughts being tuned down to a signal of speech, babel finding a single voice.

  >wuhwhy the - dear? is that - huhhh - nuhnnnno, nothing, no, no, nothing - on the table, you'll find them on the - huhhhello? - she never said that to me - hello? is there someone - hrrrhhh - dear, I'm talking to you, now please - it's these shoes, you know - wuhwwwwell, if you want to buy it, buy it - someone at the door, would you - yes - hahhhhhello? is someone listening? I know someone's listening. Hello? Hello? Who is that? Who's there, please?<

  "Hi, Mum," said Joey. "It's me."

  >Joey! How nice of you to drop by. It's so good to hear your voice. Been a while, hasn't it?<

  "Just three days, Mum."

  >Three days? It seems an awful lot longer than that. It's so easy to lose track of time, isn't it? Well, anyway... How have you been keeping?<

  "I'm well. And you?"

  >I must be all right, mustn't I? Nothing much changes in here, so I suppose I must be staying the same. Are you quite sure it's only been three days? I try and keep a count of the number of times they wake me. The news. And that dreadful music. Mantovani, Manilow...<

  "OK, maybe not three. A few days."

  >You shouldn't feel you have to lie to me, Joey.<

  "I've been meaning to get down more often, Mum, but what with one thing and another..."

  >It's all right, Joey. I do understand. There are plenty of things more important than your old mother. Plenty of things. How's work?<

  "Oh, OK. Same as usual."

  >It's not a job for a bright boy like you, taking shopping orders. It's a waste of your talents.<

  "It's all I could get, Mum. I'm lucky to have a job at all."

  >And have you found yourself a nice girl yet?<

  "Not yet."

  >Don't make it sound like such a trial, Joey. I'm only asking. This isn't an interrogation. I only want to know if you're happy.<

  "I'm happy, Mum."

  >Well, that's good, then. And the flat? Have you had the cockroach problem sorted out?<

  "I rang the Council yesterday. They said they'd already sent a man round to deal with it, but he never turned up. I think he must have been mugged on the way. I read somewhere there's a thriving black market in bug-dust. You can sell it to rich kids as cocaine and poor kids as heroin."

  >Really, Joey, you ought to have moved out of the wharf district by now. Even with a job like yours, surely you can afford somewhere a bit nicer. There's lots of new property being built. I heard it on the news. Residential blocks are popping up all over the city like mushrooms. Why do you insist on staying where you are?<

  "I like it there."

  >That's as maybe, but I don't like the idea of you being there.<

  "I can't afford the down-payment on another place."

  >Oh, rot! There must be more than enough left over from the money your father left us.<

  "Mum, it's not as straightforward as that."

  >Seems perfectly straightforward to me.<

  "Well, it would, wouldn't it?" Joey was aware of raising his voice. In that great archetraved ocean of cryogenic susurration-and-sigh, it was the merest drop of noise, but to his mother, in the dark, cramped confines of her mind, it must have sounded like he was bellowing.

  >And what's that remark supposed to mean?<

  "Nothing, Mum," Joey said softly. "Nothing at all. I'm sorry."

  >What is it, Joey? What's wrong with you? We always start out chatting so nicely, and then I say something, I don't know what, but something, and all of a sudden you're shouting at me, and I don't know what it is I've done, I don't what it is I say, but I wish you'd tell me, Joey, I wish you'd tell me what it is I do that makes you so angry.<

  "It's nothing, Mum. Honest. Look, I've had a long day, that's all. I get a little snappish sometimes." He decided not to tell her about the bar job. She would only worry that he was taking on too much, and if, with her acute sense of what was proper and what was not, she thought working for TeleStore Services was bad, what would she have to say about serving drinks in a glorified pick-up joint?

  >Yes, well...< she said. >I'm sorry, too. But you must understand, it gets very lonely in here. Very, very lonely. It's just me in the dark, and you're my lifeline to the world, Joey. You're all that makes the solitude bearable. If it wasn't for your visits, I don't know what I'd do. Go mad, I expect. If I didn't know that you were coming, if I didn't know that you were going to visit me again soon...<

  "I will, Mum. I promise. And I won't leave it so long next time."

  >That's the best I can hope for, I suppose. Off you go then, Joey. Thanks for dropping by. It was lovely talking. Come back when you can. Ha ha - I'm not going anywhere.<

  "All right, Mum. Take care."

  >Bless you, Joey.<

  "Goodnight, Mum. Sleep tight."

  He removed the headset, pushed the blue switch to Disconnect, and sat there for a while, listening to the hum of the electric tombs of fifty thousand slumbering men, women and children, his skin tingling with the icy chill that emanated from the wall of steel drawers, until the orderly arrived with his portable console to shut down Joey's mother's brain and send her back to sleep.

  The receptionist presented Joey with a bill to sign.

  "I took the liberty of adding the rent for this quarter. Seeing as it's due in a couple of days, I thought it wouldn't hurt."

  It did. Joey winced at the figure at the bottom of the slip of paper.

  "I'm not sure my credit's up to this," he said. "I can afford the conversation OK. I just wasn't expecting the rest."

  The receptionist's smile of a lifetime's affinity lost perhaps a fortnight, but no more than that.

  "That's fine," she said. "I just thought it would be easier this way. You do, of course, have a month to come up with the rent, although I should remind you that failure to settle the account by the end of that period could result in your contract being declared void and your mother being decommissioned."

  "I know," Joey said, returning the bill to her.

  "I just thought I should remind you," the receptionist said, and tore up the bill and printed off a new one.

  "How was she?" she enquired as Joey signed for the price of the conversation.

  "Same," he said. "Same as she always was."

  It had been her last request.

  I don't want to die.

  Spoken in a small, frail, frightened voice by dry grey lips, while eyes too big for their sockets rolled, trying to find and focus on Joey's face.

  Oh, Joey, I don't want to die.

  On the bus bound for home, Joey pressed his face to the window and watched the city ease past. The black stone walls, the shopfronts behind their protective grilles, the blowsy smears of shop-sign neon reflected on the wet pavements, fast, gleaming cars and drab, slow-moving citizens - all sliding by with a steady, measured grace.

  I don't want to die.

  She had barely been able to talk. Each sentence had been an effort, gasped out between blocked-drain gurgles. Moving her head had been a Herculean labour, but she had done so, in order to fix those swollen, terrified eyes on her son - glassy marbles that were already losing their lustre, pale-blue pupils swimming in sepia-tinged whites.

  Her arms, so thin. The veins, strings binding slender strips of flesh to bone. Brown parcel-paper skin.

  The man next to Joey on the bus was watching a game-show on the screen set into the headrest of the seat in front. He chuckled and gave a little round of applause whenever a contestant answered a question correctly. He groaned if a contestant was eliminated. He groaned harder if he knew the answer to a question and a contestant did not. He was very drunk.

  There are ways, Joey.

  He remembered that her cheeks had been so sunken that she had appeared to have no teeth, no tongue, just a sucking vacuum where her buccal cavity used to be. Her skull had loomed beneath her face.

  Outside, the city slicked by, silk-li
ned with artificial light.

  In a hard hospital room, where there had been too much brightness, Joey had taken his mother's hand. It was the first time he had touched her in as long as he could recall. She had touched him often enough, held his arm, kissed his cheek - he had never been the one to reach out across the space between them and make contact.

  She tried to squeeze his fingers. He felt the creak of her knuckles as they grated together.

  We have money, she said. Your father left us enough.

  A sales rep for the House of Lazarus had been around the hospital the previous week. He had left brochures and leaflets in every ward. There were leaflets by Joey's mother's bedside. They had been well read. One of them contained an application form which she had half completed, filling in the blanks with scrawled handwriting like an EEG readout until the effort had become too great for her.

  A girl sauntered down the gangway as the bus pulled into a stop. Earlier on she had given Joey a long, simmering look. Had he not been so dog-tired, he might have done something about that look. Might have taken her up on her silent offer.

  "Next stop Eastport," chimed a disembodied voice. "Change at Eastport for the Satellite Islands and the Coastal Route."

  We have money. Were it properly invested...

  It had all seemed so simple to her in the last dwindling days of her life, with her body failing organ by organ. It had all seemed so clear, during her moments of painful lucidity, at the ebbing of the tranquilliser tide. She didn't want to die, and here was her chance not to die.

  I just need you to complete the form and give your consent.

  What choice had he had?

  It's what your father would have wanted, she had said.