“You’ve no family?” Lawrence said.
“I fell out with ‘em a long time ago. My father was a drunken bastard. Always coming in and beating my mother up, then he’d come after us, especially me. He hated me for being a chimp. His work mates used to take the piss out of him that an ape had fucked his old dear and I was the result. So he’d come at me with the buckle end of his belt…” Spiderman’s eyes blazed with rage. Lawrence laid a hand on his shoulder.
“I didn’t mean to dig up painful memories.”
“They aren’t painful—I got the last laugh. I had an evening job hauling with a gang of spays to pay my school. They kept telling me I should get ’em chopped off, best thing I could do and all that sad crap. The carrying made me strong like a bull, though. I went home one evening and when he tried to get started on me, I bust his face with one punch—left him knocked out cold against the mantelpiece with blood streaming off his face like a waterfall. Best memory I have of my whole growing up. I signed up with Guards to the People the same day and never looked back. I’m the same as you. Except I miss my poor old mum, the sad cow. I like to think she left the old bastard to drink himself to death under a bridge somewhere.”
They downed a few more shots of stiff. The drinking game beside them grew ragged, the circle swayed, the toasts were shouted, humourless and repetitive, they hacked laughter at nothing. Tears streamed down their faces.
Lawrence felt a pang of guilt at having left Mirror-Face out of the conversation. The big, morose man sat slumped on the end of the bench, eyes drooped, glistening at old memories. Spiderman followed Lawrence’s gaze. He took the cue and gave the man a nudge. Mirror-Face leaped to his feet.
“I am Stanley Vihaan Patel!” he shouted.
Lawrence and Spiderman sprang around him, soothing and settling him back down, fixing another slosh of stiff whilst yelling what a jolly night everyone was having. If anyone had noticed the offence, they kept quiet about it. The tables of Undead Nameless Gone around them certainly would not be running to tell anyone.
Mirror-Face sat crying, his tears shimmering under the fat lamps. Lawrence crouched to one side and Spiderman sat to the other, their arms around their mate trying to cheer him up.
“I was so stupid,” Mirror-Face kept sobbing. Spiderman rolled his eyes. There was obviously an old tale coming. “I was so stupid to end up here.”
“Tell us all about it, big man,” Spiderman said, patting his mate’s shoulder. From his brotherly expression, it was clear this was not the first time he had heard the story. It was, though, the first time for Lawrence.
As a young countryman—the most junior officer rank in the glory trusts—Mirror-Face had been posted to a sovereign land ruled by a clan of mid-brown complexion. They were racists—they only tolerated glory officers of mid-brown tone like themselves. Guards to the People duly selected Mirror-Face as suitable. With his impressive physique and good looks, the local account-captain assigned him to the personal bodyguard of the clan’s top family, where he quickly drew admiring glances from two of the daughters. They were twins, aged seventeen. Mirror-Face’s story grew confusing. As far as Lawrence could tell, Mirror-Face began a secret affair with one of the twins behind the back of the other. Unfortunately, there came a day he encountered the wrong twin and was well into amorous clutches and disrobing—it must be said without objection from her—before he realised his error and made the idiotic mistake of apologising—a fatal reaction. The young lady guessed what was going on with her sister and denounced him as having attempted to rape her. He was court martialled. Attempted rape of a client was such a scandalous crime that the court had to set an example. It handed down ten years’ Night and Fog without possibility of re-employment by any glory trust. It was in effect a death sentence. His request to be hanged in lieu of the sentence was refused.
For two years he carried bags of water up the walls of a gorge somewhere a long way west of London, deep in old woods. From the top of the gorge they then had to carry the bags even higher, up a concrete water tower that was an heirloom of the Public Era. In the summer, the cliffs of the gorge baked them alive and the mosquitoes ate them alive. In the winter, the winding path was lethal with frozen streams. They worked in pairs, bearing a hundredweight of water in a canvas bag slung from a pole between them, gasping step by step upwards until the river was just a winding ribbon in the shadows far below. Six days a week, twelve hours a day in three shifts with five minutes’ rest per hour. The monotony of it was crucifying. Every couple of days, someone threw themselves to their death, or provoked an ultra to kill them.
One evening in late March, Mirror-Face managed to escape. It happened on the steps of the water tower. A couple of carriers overbalanced backwards and set off an avalanche of exhausted men all tumbling down in a heap at the base of the steps. The ultras were running around in a screaming rage about failing the quota. In the gloom, Mirror-Face and several others vanished into the
