15.
She denied me a last night. She cheated me of it. She lied about the date of her Chance and left a day before she had said. I awoke to find only a note, carefully printed in a handwriting that seemed too young for the words it formed. Shivering, naked, I read it.
Dear Lumpy,
You would have gone crazy. I know you. We couldn’t part like that. I’ve seen the hate in your eyes but what I will remember is love in them after a beautiful fuck.
I’ve got to be with Mum and Dad. When I see beggars in the street I think it’s them. Can’t you imagine how that feels? They have turned me into a Hup well and proper.
You don’t always give me credit for my ideas. You call me illogical, idealist, fool. I think you think they all mean the same thing. They don’t. I have no illusions (and I don’t just mean the business about being sick that you mentioned). Now when I walk down the street people smile at me easily. If I want help it comes easily. It is possible for me to do things like borrow money from strangers. I feel loved and protected. This is the privilege of my body which I must renounce. There is no choice. But it would be a mistake for you to imagine that I haven’t thought properly about what I am doing. I am terrified and cannot change my mind.
There is no one I have known who I have ever loved a thousandth as much as you. You would make a perfect Hup. You do not judge, you are objective, compassionate. For a while I thought we could convert you, but c’est la vie. You are a tender lover and I am crying now, thinking how I will miss you. I am not brave enough to risk seeing you in whatever body the comrades can extract from the Fastas. I know your feelings on these things. It would be too much to risk. I couldn’t bear the rejection.
I love you, I understand you,
Carla
I crumpled it up. I smoothed it out. I kept saying “Fuck” repeating the word meaninglessly, stupidly, with anger one moment, pain the next. I dressed and ran out to the street. The bus was just pulling away. I ran through the early morning streets to the Chance Centre, hoping she hadn’t gone to another district to confuse me. The cold autumn air rasped my lungs, and my heart pounded wildly. I grinned to myself thinking it would be funny for me to die of a heart attack. Now I can’t think why it seemed funny.
16.
Even though it was early the Chance Centre was busy. The main concourse was crowded with people waiting for relatives, staring at the video display terminals for news of their friends’ emergence. The smell of trauma was in the air, reminiscent of stale orange peel and piss. Poor people in carpet slippers with their trousers too short sat hopefully in front of murals depicting Leonardo’s classic proportions. Fasta technicians in grubby white coats wheeled patients in and out of the concourse in a sequence as aimless and purposeless as the shuffling of a deck of cards. I could find Carla’s name on none of the terminals.
I waited the morning. Nothing happened. The cards were shuffled. The coffee machine broke down. In the afternoon I went out and bought a six-pack of beer and a bottle of Milocaine capsules.
17.
In the dark, in the night, something woke me. My tongue furry, my eyes like gravel, my head still dulled from the dope and drink, half-conscious I half saw the woman sitting in the chair by the bed.
A fat woman, weeping.
I watched her like television. A blue glow from the neon lights in the street showed the coarse, folded surface of her face, her poor lank greying hair, deep creases in her arms and fingers like the folds in babies’ skin, and the great drapery of chin and neck was reminiscent of drought-resistant cattle from India.
It was not a fair time, not a fair test. I am better than that. It was the wrong time. Undrugged, ungrogged, I would have done better. It is unreasonable that such a test should come in such a way. But in the deep grey selfish folds of my mean little brain I decided that I had not woken up, that I would not wake up. I groaned, feigning sleep and turned over.
Carla stayed by my bed till morning, weeping softly while I lay with my eyes closed, sometimes sleeping, sometimes listening.
In the full light of morning she was gone and had, with bitter reproach, left behind merely one thing: a pair of her large grey knickers, wet with the juices of her unacceptable desire. I placed them in the rubbish bin and went out to buy some more beer.
18.
I was sitting by the number five pier finishing off the last of the beer. I didn’t feel bad. I’d felt a damn sight worse. The sun was out and the light dancing on the water produced a light dizzy feeling in my beer-sodden head. Two bream lay in the bucket, enough for my dinner, and I was sitting there pondering the question of Carla’s flat: whether I should get out or whether I was meant to get out or whether I could afford to stay on. They were not difficult questions but I was managing to turn them into major events. Any moment I’d be off to snort a couple more caps of Milocaine and lie down in the sun.
I was not handling this well.
“Two fish, eh?”
I looked up. It was the fucking dwarf. There was nothing to say to him.
He sat down beside me, his grotesque little legs hanging over the side of the pier. His silence suggested a sympathy I did not wish to accept from him.
“What do you want, ugly?”
“It’s nice to hear that you’ve finally relaxed, mm? Good to see that you’re not pretending any more.” He smiled. He seemed not in the least malicious. “I have brought the gift.”
“A silly custom. I’m surprised you follow it.” It was customary for people who took the Chance to give their friends pieces of clothing from their old bodies, clothing that they expected wouldn’t fit the new. It had established itself as a pressure-cooked folk custom, like brides throwing corsages and children putting first teeth under their pillows.
The dwarf held out a small brown-paper parcel.
I unwrapped the parcel while he watched. It contained a pair of small white lady’s knickers. They felt as cold and vibrant as echoes across vast canyons: quavering questions, cries, and thin misunderstandings.
I shook the dwarf by his tiny hand.
The fish jumped forlornly in the bucket.
19.
So long ago. So much past. Furies, rages, beer and sleeping pills. They say that the dwarf was horribly tortured during the revolution, that his hands were literally sawn from his arms by the Fastas. The hunchback lady now adorns the 50 IG postage stamps, in celebration of her now famous role at the crucial battle of Haytown.
