Murder

It never happened. That’s the point. Our cycles never did coincide. All those fears were in vain. What did happen was, I suppose, worse.

It was her - Celeste. She wanted to die. She’d been saying that for years, and yet all the cutting, all the swan-dives had failed. She was still here, miserable and afraid – the same gentle person I’d known (and loved?) so long, now a tortured soul caught inside an aging body.

Her friends had been through a whole host of enhancements by then, of course. It had become quite fashionable to prostheticise. You could tone up - or just replace -virtually any organ you chose. Eternal life seemed pretty much around the corner. But Celeste wouldn’t – even the thought of an operation, of going under the knife, was enough to threaten a relapse.

It was summer vacation. The weather was very hot. We were in our apartment (the house I have now is the one we owned then – but only as a summer house, not a residence. I can’t remember offhand why we weren’t there – some renovations, I suppose). Anyway, my work for the year was over, but we were still stuck in the city.

We had an argument, I think. At any rate there was a lot of shouting, but that was nothing unusual. She stormed off to bed, and I followed an hour or so later, having taken my medication and fortified myself with a couple of drinks.

That’s the point, you see, the crucial point. I was on my medication. I wasn’t supposed to drink with it, of course, but everyone does. I’d done it so many times before. There was nothing out of the ordinary, nothing to arouse suspicion.

I woke with a start sometime later. Celeste was in my arms. Her neck was between my hands. Her head was lolling back. She was completely limp. I put her down and started to shake her, but she didn’t respond or stir. I started to understand that she was dead. My mind was clouded, but still I could hardly believe what I was seeing. Dead! And her neck between my fingers. Had she been strangled? Had I strangled her? Had I choked the life out of her, as she'd asked me to do so many times?

That’s right – she’d often begged me to put an end to it all, in a variety of ways. At the height of her fury and then again in the depths of her despair. She’d told me repeatedly that it was what someone who truly loved her would do. I’d even hit her once or twice simply to shut her up from that constant litany of “kill me's.”

But that hadn’t come up for years! How did it happen that … ? I had no answers.

All that night I did nothing, lay beside her, warming her body with mine. When morning started to lighten the room, though, lightening the scattered clothes and disordered sheets, I began to wake up to what I had done. I had killed my wife. There was no-one else here. It must have been me. And yet I had no memory of it at all!

I rang one of my friends. An important, influential friend. On the governing council. I can’t remember what I said to him. I may have confessed, or I may have pleaded innocence. I don’t recall. The point is that either one would have been true. How could I know what had taken place in that room? I’d been unconscious the whole time, my mind clouded.

He believed me. He said he believed me, anyway. He told me not to move, not to touch anything I hadn't already touched. To wait for him.

When he came it was with a group of doctors. I tried to talk to them, but they gave me an injection instead. I don’t remember anything more after that until I woke up back in the clinic, the same old bed in the clinic I’d been in so many times.

And that was that. There was no trial, just a hearing to determine my state of mind. I didn’t even have to testify on the spot. They questioned me in my hospital room. The doctors talked about me and about Celeste. So many of my friends had heard her going on about death, talking about her longing to end it all. They spoke up on my behalf.

But I never saw any of them again.

It was almost a year before they would let me go. My apartment had been sold to defray the bills, but the country house remained. As they drove me there I noticed some placards outside the hospital, some shouting people. It never occurred to me that they were waiting for me.

And then the phone calls started. People, usually young women, would ring up and abuse me over the phone. Some came to the door, until I installed the security gates. There were articles about it in all the papers. It became a scandal. Not what I had done (if I did do it – I’m still not sure. Not that I think she could have strangled herself … but, you never know. She was a very intelligent woman) – not so much about what I had done, as I say, but about the way it had been handled. No trial, no public airing of grief and rage. I’d literally, in their words, got away with murder - all because of my connections.

So there I was, serving a sentence of involuntary house arrest, since I could never go out anywhere without the risk of being accosted. I had to have things delivered to the house, and even then quite often they suborned the delivery personnel, planted messages - razor blades, once - in my groceries.

That's when I bought the gun.

I drank a lot, went downhill, then finally tried to pull myself together. If I was forced into isolation (I couldn’t do my former job – but they couldn’t face the complexities of explaining why they'd fired me – so I was on a kind of indefinite leave), I’d go back to my work. Which is why I wrote that book, the one you read, the one you saw the launch for, the day we met.

So, yes, I killed my wife, if you're curious. And yes, I loved her. And yes, she was the most truly human person I ever knew. And no, you’re not in the least bit like her …

Madness

It was the rainstorms that would bring it on. At first, anyway. You know, those heavy rains we began to get in the latter stages of the greenhouse effect, before the temperatures stabilised again? Apocalyptic sheets of water descending in cloudbursts which could flood entire cities in an hour or two.

I’d find myself feeling nervous and irritable for days before one of them, and then when the rain actually came I’d howl and leap about for joy – release! It seemed completely beyond my control.

So, as I say, it was the rain that started it.

Before long it wasn’t enough to strip off and run out into the rain, dancing and capering like a goat. I had to do something when the moment of release came.

Sex with my wife, with a student – anyone, virtually – that was the kind of thing I was looking for. But you can’t really set that up so easily in advance, be ready to go when the first drops start to fall.

On one occasion I got into a fight with a man in the street. Just walked up and slapped his face, like a kind of surrealist outrage. He ran away, but soon a crowd gathered and I fought with them, too. It was a kind of madness – a cyclical pattern I’d got myself trapped in.

So it’s wrong to think it was all Celeste’s fault. True, she had her depressions, her suicidal outbursts, but I had my manic fugues, too.

Until one day I got really drunk at a bar before the promised thunderstorm, and woke to find myself manacled in a cell. Apparently I’d gone prancing around the city stark naked, begging the lightning to make an end of me, and slashing with a steak knife at anyone who came near me.

They had to sedate me, and I ended up in a clinic under heavy medication for three or four months, while they gradually began to piece my mind back together.

When I got out, I was a wiser, sadder man. Or so I told myself. I loved my wife, and I was going to stand by her – no more excitement, no more release. Just steady dripping drizzle, no more paroxysms of rain.

And so it went for a year or two. Until, inevitably, it started up again. I’d get more and more enthusiastic about the things I was studying, learning – about the brilliance of certain young colleagues or students. And then would come the crash. Every time it seemed like the last time I could go through this process. I felt so wounded, damaged, diminished – nothing in me stayed unscarred by this brutal regimen.

In the end it came down to a simple choice. Live my life as a series of cresting highs and abominable lows, or dull myself down to one monotone level of grudging domesticity. Each time I chose the latter alternative. Each time I lapsed, through neglect or bravado, as the months went by, and persuaded myself I could lower the drug dosage and still function as a person.

Because I never really made the choice at all, I see that now.

Our unspoken fear, the whole time, was that our cycles would coincide some day. She’d go off the edge when I was at the height of one of my furies. Then who knew what might happen? Neither one of us would be in a state to safeguard the other. We kept open house for all the students in the college in hopes of avoiding that.

But inevitably guests go home, however much you press them to stay. The time comes when you’re alone together, and you look at each other, and you realise that you hardly recognise this person opposite you.

If you ever really knew them in the first place, that is.

Together Forever

How did we live? Uneasily, I would say. After that first withering blast of self-revelation, she backed off from intimate explorations of her past, preferring to concentrate on the here and now.

To be honest, she was never that much of a talker. Cleaning, cooking, organising the house – those little things were her forte.

She expected little from me, too. I helped her sometimes, then less and less as it didn’t seem to make any great difference to her.

The problem was, I never had any idea whether I was pleasing her or not. Was she happy? Was she unhappy to the point of desperation? How could one possibly tell?

She might just as well have been a doll or a clone (sorry – but that’s how I felt) for all the communication we shared.

Sometimes we would discuss ideas. My work was getting ahead. I’d finished my degree, got appointed to a new job, managed to move out of my box coffin on the fringes. We were living in more comfort now.

I’d talk about my work and try to get reactions from her. And you know, when I compelled her to it, she showed great insight and would strike invariably to the heart of the matter. Which is why I persisted, I guess.

I never hit her – shouted at her once or twice, I suppose (more, really, to be honest). She would never retaliate, but then I’d hear her sobbing late at night when she thought I was asleep, which negated the whole point of the enterprise. To break through. You understand? Perhaps not.

I asked her, once or twice, if she’d like to see her father again, but she just stared at me with those big doe-like eyes. I said we could go down and look for him (or better still, pay someone else to go down there for us). No reaction. She never mentioned that part of her life, which was one reason I felt so inordinately curious about it, I suppose.

And that’s how it went. For the first few years, at any rate. To all appearances we were a very close couple. Unmarried, of course. She had no identity papers, birth certificates, official proofs of existence, but those could have been retrieved or fabricated somehow, I suppose.

Then one day I came home from work to find the whole place in a mess.

It was as if a gang of robbers had been through the apartment. All the machines and monitors had been smashed. There was broken glass (mingled with blood) in every room. I called for her – no answer. I stepped gingerly into the chaos of our living room. Nothing. Checked all the other rooms. Nothing. Had she been kidnapped? I was on the point of calling the police, had actually highlighted them when I heard what sounded like a faint mewing noise from upstairs (we shared a roof garden now – I was prospering in my profession).

I followed the sound, went up, saw nothing – stars, the plants in their little rows, the parapet … the parapet! No, nothing visible down below. Then, turning around, crouched in the tiniest little corner of the wall, curled up like a hedgehog, naked as she was born, Celeste, the tiniest of sounds coming (no doubt unconsciously) from between her clenched teeth.

She was covered with blood, slicked over her like a second skin. She wouldn’t speak to me, but didn't really resist my attempts to uncoil her, check her for wounds and lacerations. There were a few cuts here and there – mainly on her feet, from the broken glass, but only superficial.

I hugged her, rocked her to and fro in my arms, put my jacket around her. She didn’t resist, didn’t respond.

Finally I had to call for help. The doctor, when he came, was sympathetic but nonplussed. By then I’d managed to get her into the bathroom and the shower. She was clean and clothed – but still acting like a catatonic ragdoll. He said it was beyond him – that they‘d have to take her in.

So that was the first time. The first of many. I came to be able to sense them approaching – like the metallic taste in the mouth you get sometimes before a thunderstorm. There were little hints in the air of her actions and her style. She’d be as polite and unassuming as ever right up until the crash. And then it’d come. She’d go berserk, rant and rave, destroy everything within reach (even, later, trying to hurt herself with any objects that came to hand).

Nothing – no treatment they could come up with – seemed to help. It was a like an irregular curse. Sometimes they drugged her like a zombie – sometimes they sparked her up to try and discharge the negative energy prematurely.

It was as if she was two people. I wasn’t sure which one was real. It wasn’t possible that both could be. Increasingly I suspected the real woman was the one I’d held in my arms that night on the roof. Sad beyond sobbing, naked and simple in the dark, bathed in her own sweat and blood.

So that was us. That was our happy little home. The frequency of her attacks varied greatly. Once we went for a couple of years without one. I began to think she was cured. Then, one day out with friends, I saw it start again. What’s worse, they saw it, too – everything that was most private between us dragged out into the light of common day.

It’s one thing to hear about the wife of a close colleague that she has to go to a clinic for a little rest from time to time. It’s another thing to watch her raving and smashing things, tearing off her clothes and trying to cut herself. I saw my friends and acquaintances – most of them, at any rate – turn into strangers at that moment.

Any outside invitations we received after that I took care to turn down. She never complained about that, either.

And what of me? How did I deal with all this? Was I a tower of strength, a shoulder to cry on, a saintly orderly mopping her fevered brow? Yes, most of the time I think I was. I say that without conceit. I have little enough reason to fel conceited about anything in my life, but I do think that I did as well as a man in my position could have done.

Or at any rate there’s nothing I can think of, even now, that we didn’t try.

But nobody can be on duty all the time. You can’t live on a cabin on the side of Vesuvius, perpetually waiting for the eruption, without some sort of release – some method of escape. The bouts of madness were hers. And mine?

Well, affairs, of course. A teacher has plenty of opportunities for those, generally speaking. Young students who mistake second-hand professional commonplaces for the voice of inspiration. In a crowd so large, there are bound to be a few who like you or develop a crush on you.

So I spent a fair amount of time and ingenuity arranging such little incidental matters – taking care that Celeste never heard about them. To this day I don’t know if she knew or not. Probably she did. It’s hard to believe that it ranked very high among the various demons tormenting her.

Worse, I suppose, was the drinking – and the late night skin parlours – and the drug haunts. I tried all those things, but my mainstay was (and remains) that traditional, banal thing of drinking to excess.

And yes, I would come home drunk, and maybe shout at her, demand she tell me what was on her mind, why we had to live like this, why she couldn’t simply love me, as human beings do, why she couldn’t tell me what to do to cure her? What magic potion, diamond tear, fragment from the giant’s heart, would be the key to tearing it out of her?

“It” — as if it were a kind of original sin, like a curse she'd been born with, or had been implanted with the day her mother died, or worse, at the moment she saw her father’s chamber of horrors – the artificial agony he'd created for the pleasure of others.

The Vivisectionist

On our way back to the surface, she started to tell me parts of her story. I knew enough even then not to prompt her with questions on what seemed like little inconsistencies here and there. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the fact that it was pitch dark so much of the time I doubt she could ever have brought herself to tell it at all.

Her mother she didn’t know – had never known. She died in childbirth. Not down here, in the caverns, but aboveground, where her father worked as a cosmetic surgeon in one of the larger hospitals.

She grew up, then, under a kind of shadow. There’d been no other children to shield her from the sheer intensity of her father’s sense of loss, and the only human tenderness she’d experienced at all had come from the long succession of Nannies and babysitters who looked after her from time to time - none for very long.

They moved about a lot. First luxury apartments, then houses in the suburbs, then smaller apartments back in town as his career gradually began to suffer from the personal disintegration he was undergoing.

He drank, and took a variety of drugs too, she thought, but she seldom saw him intoxicated. Nor did he ever strike her or act abusively towards her. His fault was, in fact, more in the other direction – coldness, distance, a reluctance to reach out to any other human being for fear of being hurt once more.

When no more hospitals would employ him, he relied on his private practice, until that too began to shrink. By now (she thought) he must have had substantial debts from gambling, and she began to notice a rougher element hanging around the house.

Then, very abruptly one day, he came to her school and took her away with him to a small building on the fringes of the crater region (that region we were now traversing like a pair of sleepwalkers).

Her formal education stopped there, but of course there were online tutors still, and now her father seemed to be making a conscious effort to be more attentive. Worryingly so, in fact. He would hug her for hours at a stretch, was unable to let her out of his sight for more than the shortest periods, and generally showed an almost hysterical desire to be with her continuously.

There was one other girl she knew, still, from the old days – one girl who kept up with her through emails and texts – where all her other friends had dropped away. She was a shy, sullen girl, with few other friends, and Celeste must have bulked large in her personal pantheon.

At any rate, one day, when the loneliness was bad, she asked to be allowed to visit her friend.

The first response was a flat negative, then (when she persisted) a listing of the obstacles to such a plan – the difficulties of transport – the possible reluctance of her friend’s parents to allow such a visit on a weeknight – a whole series of half-hearted reasons.

She’d been trained already by life to expect little from it, so at this point she gave up pestering him. Her father must have thought about it later himself, though, because a few days later he gave her permission to ask for an invitation to visit.

And so it happened. One Saturday afternoon her father took up on the skyways to her friend’s stop, then arranged to come back and collect her in a few hours, retiring discreetly himself into the crowd when he saw her friend, Jeanette, and her two parents coming.

Her little friend seemed happy enough to receive a visit.

The two chattered away about the doings of mutual acquaintances, the music they were listening to, the entertainment feeds they were downloading. As time went by, though, the conversation began to dry up.

Her friend had fault to find with such a lot of things – her hair, her clothes, her appearance generally was falling behind the norms of pre-teen fashion (perhaps the most rigidly caste-governed age of all). Her tone grew peevish, quarrelsome.

Celeste was puzzled and hurt. She hardly knew what to make of this change of heart, though it was true that Jeanette had never really been at the centre of her circle before the move. Perhaps she’d felt overlooked then, was keen to exact revenge?

Celeste, a direct, simple-hearted girl, asked her if this was so, and apologised for any unconscious pain she’d caused.

“As if you could hurt me! With a father like yours …” the girl sneered.

A father like what? Celeste had no idea what her friend was talking about, but it was true (now she came to think of it) that her father no longer entertained at all - even the more dubious friends and acquaintances who used to come by the house had all dried up. He seemed more nervous in crowds, constantly glancing round. Was it possible he was afraid of being followed?

Jeanette would elaborate no further – possibly she knew no more than a few vague innuendoes handed onto her by her parents, but the so-long-anticipated visit broke up in disarray.

Waiting for her father at the skyways station, Celeste determined that she would find out what was wrong. She couldn’t bear the finger of blame to be pointed at him unjustly – and if he had done anything wrong, she’d rather know what than continue to live in this atmosphere of suspicion and distrust.

Her father had never evaded a direct question of hers. God knows she hadn’t asked him very many, but be that as it may, he’d always done his best to answer her fully and frankly.

Her first approaches were direct, accordingly. She asked him what he did.

“You know that, sweetie. I’m a surgeon.”

“But you don’t work at the hospital anymore.”

“No, I’m in private practice now.”

‘Why did we move? Why don’t you ever see any of your old friends anymore?”

“It’s more about their not wanting to see me, I’m afraid, darling. You’ll understand better when you’re older, but what I’m doing now is … not what I did before.”

“What is it?”

“I … can’t tell you that, sweetie. Maybe when you’re older. It’s just for a brief time. Just until I can get clear of … certain obligations. I just don’t want any of it to touch your life.”

She told him then what her friend had said, and he nodded and gave her a hug.

"I was afraid of that,” he said. “That's the reason I wasn’t keen on the whole idea of this meeting. For the moment it’s best that we keep to ourselves – just for a short time. Just till I’m over this hump …”

But he didn’t deny any of what Jeanette had said.

Celeste tried hard to live in a state of doubt, but it was beyond her power. The subject preyed on her mind continuously. She began to examine her father’s clothes, so immaculate formerly, now growing gradually ever more shabby and down-at–heels. Nothing. Nothing except for the shoes, which occasionally had a slightly red sheen, as if they’d been cursorily wiped clean of some liquid.

He was a surgeon, though, which might explain it. Perhaps the clinics he was working at now had less exacting standards of hygiene than the hospital – perhaps it was blood on his shoes. The moment she thought of this she became convinced that it was true. That was the big mystery solved, then: he was working as a black market surgeon for people outside the law – possibly performing abortions for the socially prominent. Such scandals were familiar to her from the feeds.

And yet, and yet … why the extravagant lengths to which he took concealment? A bit of black market work was surely nothing to hang one’s head in shame about? How could that be the whole secret of what he was doing?

One day she cracked. Ignorance, she told herself, was infinitely worse than knowledge of whatever kind. She would follow him and find out where he was going.

And so she did.

He wasn’t easy to track. She’d hardly gone beyond the confines of their building grounds for months, and the city’s underworld was dark and bewildering, Luckily her father ambled rather than strode – reluctant, almost, it seemed, to reach his destination.

It was a low door in the side of a dark wall.

Her father knocked and a pair of eyes appeared at a roughly-hewn slit in the thick iron. The door creaked open. She could hardly follow him in there.

She waited, indecisively, watching the people come and go around the door.

The ones who came were generally rich-looking and well-dressed. Couples in furs and Italian suits, packs of high rolling business-drones … was her father gambling again? This seemed the kind of illegal place where illicit bets were made.

But no-one came out. That was the point. There must be another exit somewhere, or else they were all gathering in there for some purpose.

Finally, she took her courage in her hands and went up to the door and knocked.

The eyes appeared.

“Yeah, girlie.”

“My friends have all gone in without me. Can you let me in?”

The eyes considered. A young girl, not too ill-dressed. But definitely underage …

“Nah,” he said, but at that moment another voice interposed.

“Oh, there you are – I told you she’d make it.”

“Yes, you told me, dear, but I still didn’t believe you.”

The speakers were a young couple, evidently somewhat the worse for wear, who’d presumably overheard her timid approach and wanted to help her out.

The conversation now turned into a series of rapid whispers between the young man and the owner of the eyes, which culminated in the exchange of a few credit-points on a keypad.

The young, blonde woman, sparkling and fizzy like the champagne-flute she was still holding in one hand, pressed Celeste to her, and said “Don’t worry, darling, Peter’s awfully good at this sort of thing. He’s awfully good at every sort of thing, if you want to know ...”

And so she got into the club.

It was so dark inside that it was difficult to make much out. The young couple ("Call us Honey and Peter ...") swept her along with them, though, so she saw only enough to give her the sense of a place where normal standards were offended – ghostly pictures and naked bodies looming up in the gloom. It seemed almost like a dream, a replica of the kinds of places she’d imagined her daddy gambling in when she was a little girl.

Finally they reached the room.

“You’ll love this, Honey – you too, girlie. What is your name, anyway? Selene? Celeste? Neither of you will sleep tonight, I’ll bet, but you’ll never forget this show. This guy’s the best.”

They were seated on a hard wooden bench at the side of a small auditorium – rather like an old-fashioned operating theatre, wooden benches banked up towards the ceiling, and a central metal-floored space with a table and some screens.

"What is this? Did you bring us here to watch an operation?” giggled Honey. “I mean … I can do that at home anytime on the medical channel.”

"Oh, it’s an operation, all right – but not the kind you’ve ever seen. Unnecessary surgery, that’s the idea.”

“Unnecessary?” faltered Celeste.

"Yeah, doll. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been to plenty of those clubs where they have catpeople and rhinoceros men and all the rest – guys and girls who’ve gone to a surgeon and got him to turn them into freaks. There’s not even anything illegal about that. But this is different.”

“How different?”

But then whe was shushed,the lights went down, and the show began.

You’ll have to understand, Eva, that much of this story I pieced together long afterwards. Only part of it was told me at the time, as we were slowly climbing up through the darkness of that hidden kingdom. I could never gather just what the show had been.

One thing is certain, the participants weren’t human.

Not that they were aliens. Not that at all – they were your kind of people: androids. Clans, you call yourself. You know how some people are about breaching social taboos. Cosmetic surgery is pointless, for them, when it’s done according to someone’s own desire. I gather some very rich people had got together and formed a club whose main aim was to have bodies surgically altered in front of them into grotesque, misshapen, monstrous forms.

No-one human was involved, of course. They knew better than that. And all the spectators knew it, too. Or at any rate chose to believe it. But what difference does that make to a young girl who’s standing watching her father cut with a scalpel into living flesh, the flesh of bodies held down on a stainless-steel operating table without any anaesthetics – screaming and spouting blood till it drenches most of the audience with red?

It was as if she’d entered hell and he was the chief devil. The monsters he’d already created, some still in their crude bandages, some in animal hides, with wings and fur and extra eyes, were all around, holding down new victims, hanging upside-down from the rafters (not that she told me that - I gleaned those details from her persistent nightmares, later).

She screamed, of course. Screamed and could not stop screaming. And finally, as the commotion grew, he lifted his eyes and saw her – his own daughter in the middle of the world he’d created.

It was the last thing he saw. It was the act of a moment for him to reach up with his scalpel and neatly slice out his eyes. This she told me with a kind of deadpan emphasis, as if she in fact approved.

That was the end of it for him, in any case. What use was a blind surgeon to the people at the club? The two of them awoke (drugged, presumably, by one of the other doctors there when they wouldn't quiet down) to find themselves lying, scrubbed and clean beside a small stack of their possessions. They’d been evicted from their apartment, and the money he had would buy them only a few days in a hotel.

And that was when she'd led her father underground, to live wherever they could in the dark ragged fiefdoms under the earth, peddling his services as a wiseman and a healer – a position constantly undermined by the superstitious fear of blindness which had developed down below.

Now that she was of an age to sell, rather than simply use casually, their present tribe had been hawking her about for quite some time.

The chance to fob her off on a surface dweller must have appealed to them. They held her father in some awe -- the myth of the blind shaman, in close communication with the spirit world, dies hard -- and therefore would not go directly against his will. Since he’d approved the union, here she was.

Searching

There was a way in. That much I knew. Whether there was any way out again I wasn’t so sure.

You have to understand that the city then wasn’t the way it is now. There were still large tracts of territory beyond the network of streets which weren’t city – open farmland and trees – mountains even, for all I know. The blanketing effect wasn’t complete yet.

As a result, a lot of what went on underground still had connections with the surface. There were chasms and gaps in the barricades and plenty of ways to interact – if you wanted to – with the tribes that lived down there.

I’d been down before. Who hadn’t? It was a dare at school to go in a few yards. Later on, as teenagers, we would bargain for drugs and hooch at the various parley points. But we never went far, we never went alone, and we always took note of the time when we went in.

You’ll imagine, then, that the prospect of going underground, beneath the radar, to look for one waif-like girl was not exactly something that I relished. But I had no choice. She was on my mind, now, and I knew from bitter experience that once things get on my mind, I have no choice but to pursue them.

I’d haunted that same street corner, the one where we’d met, but she hadn’t been back there - as far as I could tell. I’d given up trying to keep my search for her discreet after the first couple of weeks. Now I’d taken to badgering the various peddlers and small criminals who proliferated in the barrios – the ones who would listen to me, at any rate – or who showed signs of understanding what I was saying. Languages had long since started to proliferate strangely underground, away from the clipped nasal tones of the official databases.

There were other girls. That was what I focussed on. I had to pay them to stop and talk to me – but even with money in hand they were as cagey as wild animals. I had to take them back home in several cases before they would agree to listen.

I suppose, eventually, that word must have got around, because as I was walking disconsolately home one night, after a hard day in the archives, I heard a voice say “Hey! You the one?”

It was a small raggy boy – bug-eyed, dirt-encrusted, crouched almost invisibly at the corner of an alley – one of the darker ones you tended to go around.

“Hey what?” I replied, a little brusquely. I was tired of tbe whole business by now. Tired of being harassed, tired of having something on my mind which didn’t fit the scheme – the scheme of get ahead and I’m all right, Jack.

“Hey you, you looking for a girl, right?”

“Maybe. Not just any girl, though.”

“You the one?”

“The one what?”

“That one what’s been looking?”

I can’t reproduce his accent – so guttural and quick. If I hadn’t been talking so much with them recently, I’d hardly have understood a word he was saying. And yet these were clearly his company manners, the voice he put on to communicate with strangers.

“Maybe I am. Does that mean that you know where she is?’

“Maybe. What’s it worth?”

“Credit – what else? A taste now and the rest when I see her. I don’t have it all on me, either, so if you’re fooling with me you get nothing but the taste.”

“Fair enough. Less go.”

And off he scuttled, like a little four-legged spider, across the rubble scree and down into the darkness.

“Hold on, hold on …”

So our journey began.

As I say, I’d been in a short way before, but I had no idea of the extent of it. I could see, now, why the eyes of these underdwellers grew so large and bright, and why they tended increasingly to come out only at night. The sole illumination for kilometres at a time was small cracks in the paving, radiating down from unimaginable heights above.

Luckily, in the damper regions, luminescent glow-worms tended to gather, and were treated as taboo by the innumerable wandering tribes. Otherwise I’m sure I would have slipped a dozen times as we worked our way round slippery ravines and steaming rockpools of waste.

My guide was surefooted, but not really alert, at first, to the fact that there were places a small boy could squeeze through which might trap a grown man. A few bad experiences in cramped sewer pipes soon taught him to lead me by a more circuitous route, though; somehow he always seemed to find a way around.

We camped for the night in a little back adit to one of the tunnels. Or rather, he flung himself down and said, “We sleeping here,” suiting the action to the word.

I sat there wide-eyed in the dark for what seemed hours, then years, then thousands of years … waiting for the light, I suppose. But no light would ever penetrate down here, not to this lowest level of that cancerous thing we’d created – the world-blanketing city – that Babel Tower we’d built up in our pride.

Next day we reached his tribe.

I think he’d hoped to sneak in and out on the quiet, alerting only the girl to our presence. He knew her by sight, he said, but not to speak to. I couldn’t really work out what kinds of interlocking family and clan-systems there were down here, but I gathered her people were more fringe-dwelling even than his – hence her extreme emaciation when I met her.

His plan, then, was to wait by the path where the women came and went to wash their clothes, and accost her if and when we found her alone.

Of course we were spotted (or rather I was), shrill voices rising in the dark at this lurking male; of course I was sprung on and dragged out in the open with kicks and curses; of course the boy melted away the moment the disturbance started (he never told me his name, and my description of him – small, furtive, bug-eyed - could hardly have been terribly incriminating).

They would have slit me open then and there. The knives were out and burnished. I was babbling like a madman, promising them money, help – increased political representation for all I know – and then I said the name “Celeste.”

At once they fell quiet. There was an older man to one side of the little group. He might have been blind – or at any rate so adapted to the dark that the whites of his eyes were all one could see – they pushed me in his direction with many blows, and bent me down before him.

I said it again: “Celeste.”

He nodded.

Upon which they set on me with sticks and stones, and drove me like a steer far from that place, kicking and shouting and cursing – spurring me on when I didn’t run fast enough. They didn’t seem concerned to kill me, simply to lose me in the maze, I thought – nor did they drive me over the edge of a precipice, which would have been easy enough.

Hours later, when the din had died down, the hunters gone back to their tribe, I collapsed in in a small corner of masonry and started to cry, great choking sobs coming up from the depths of me.

As I lay there in the pitch dark a small slim hand took hold of mine.

First Night

What were my feelings that first evening? Cruel, I suppose. First of all I wanted to see if she actually would wait for me. Rather relishing the idea of her standing there in the cold, hesitating to solicit others on the half-chance that I might come back again and that my intentions might be … what? Hardly honourable. Profitable enough to her to make it worth her while to stay.

Dinner, I guess, was at the forefront of her mind – the fact that she waited a sign of the difficulty she was finding even in getting enough to eat ...

Did I want sex from her? Not especially, I don’t think. She was so scrawny and thin that it was hard to anticipate any pleasure from it, but again – I don’t deny it – the fact (I was sure) that she was fearing and anticipating it gave me a little flush of satisfaction.

The pleasure I anticipated was in treating her well enough to keep my conscience smug and beaming, whilst secretly enjoying her fear of the moment when I would force her to strip and prostrate herself for me.

But it didn’t go like that. It didn’t work out like that at all. In retrospect, I suppose my mistake was in thinking that I could control the situation in any way: control myself, for one thing; but most of all, control her, preprogram the actions of another human being: a good human being – kind and gentle and full of sympathy for others – almost an empathic genius, I’d say now.

I didn’t even look round until I reached the sealed hatch of my coffin apartment.

“You’ll have to climb in first,” I said. "The mechanism is keyed to my wristchip, and it won’t stay open after I’ve gone through."

She nodded, wary now, scenting a trap.

I opened the hatch and in she crawled.

You know what men are. You above all people -- maybe that’s not something I can call you, really – not a person, but not a thing exactly, either – you of all creatures can understand what men are. I checked her out as she crawled under my nose – checked to see if she was wearing underwear, eyeing up her thin legs and her little bony behind.

She didn’t try to conceal them at all, coyly gather her rags around her. How could she, really? She crawled in as if it hadn’t occurred to her to do otherwise, as if a simple action could be performed simply in this world we’ve made for ourselves.

“Food’s in the cupboard,” I grunted, falling forwards on the mattress, as the hatch swung shut behind me.

I’d intended something more ceremonious, no doubt – some showing off of the glories of my boxed-in manor – but I was far too drunk. Let her deal with the intricacies of the situation, I thought. I’m a kind man, I thought, I won’t make her fuck me before I sleep.

I woke up, once, to see a tiny light off in the corner. I could hear a scrunching sound coming from there, as if a little mouse were gnawing at some crumbs. To be honest, I doubt if there’d been much more in the house for her to scavenge.

There was a bucket by the mattress, and I was naked. She must have undressed and washed me (so far as she could), and – from the reek of it – cleaned up some vomit, too.

Then she’d left me to it. My head was whirling still, in that way that tells you that you’ll regret the waking up tomorrow morning. That whatever has gone down will soon be coming up again, and that any attempts not to mix your drinks and to balance them with copious draughts of water have been in vain. The throbbing head you’ll soon be feeling is already shaping up for you, but hasn’t hit you yet.

And when I woke next morning she was gone.

It was late, it must have been almost midday. My head (as I’d predicted) was throbbing like an open wound, and my whole body felt convulsed with illness and nausea. "Never again," I resolved -- as if I didn't say the same thing every week, relapsing again as the days unfolded their manifold boredoms and indignities – "Never again am I going to put myself through this. It isn’t worth it!"

And yet – this time, though I was drenched in sweat, sweat that had soaked right through the mattress – I wasn’t festooned in puke. My clothes weren’t swaddled around me like ineffectual towels. I was (comparatively) clean and fresh. There was a glass of water by my elbow which I proceeded to knock over before I could sip on it – but still … This was undoubtedly an improvement.

“Fuck! The girl!”

I remembered her then. Made a brief sweep with my eyes to see what she had taken. Fair rent for a night spent nursing the dead-drunk, one might have thought. Even I scarcely grudged her some kind of toll. The only question was what? The printed books?

No, they all looked undisturbed in their little fileboxes.

The clothes were worth practically nothing, but at least they lacked very obvious rips and holes. I thought at first she’d contented herself with them, till I discovered they’d been put away – folded - in the chest-of-drawers.

That folding was almost too much. Had I really entertained an angel unawares? An angel who’d taken the time to sweep and tidy, an angel who didn’t want payment? Of any kind? Or was it my soul she’d stolen?

There was nothing else to steal! That was the point. To be sure, she’d eaten some of my food, but there was so pitifully little that the wonder was she could have taken any of it – there was still some left for me: enough and more than enough for all the breakfast I’d be eating, at any rate.

I began to feel more curious about her. Perhaps I should have brought her back here at once last night, I thought. Before the long hours of drinking had turned me speechless and retching. Who was she? Where did she live? Would I ever see her again?

Her actions had succeeded in arousing my curiosity (I won’t say my compassion, as I’m not sure I possess such a thing – certainly didn’t then, at any rate). I felt a strange desire to see her again: a strong desire.

Not that I was going to search. Oh no, bad enough that I’d started taking an interest in another human being – especially a beggar girl whom my friends would laugh at and whom everyone would assume I’d taken home for sex. Any attempts to look for her, ask after her, would be fatal – alerting her and everyone else to my deviancy.

I would have to search by affecting not to search. Wander as if at random through such streets as she might frequent – speak to her (if I deigned to speak at all) in as offhand a manner as I could manage.

And yet I did strongly desire to see her. That was the fact of the matter. And who in the whole wide world would have cared if I’d gone after her to my heart’s content? The burning searchlight of my egotism persuaded me that my doings were at least worthy of gossip (possibly they were), but how I could have managed to conclude that I must avoid all occasions for malicious inference is beyond me.

I’ve ended up a worse pariah than if I’d set out from the first to make myself a moral leper: an outcast shunned by everyone – everyone human that is – that knows him.

Strange Meeting

It was a Friday evening, I think. It must have been, in fact, because that was the night I always went out, after a long week slogging away, plugged into the library stacks. I was a poverty-stricken student in those days (I was about to say a poor student, but I was never that – never a poor student. No, I was always the one at the front of the auditorium, jostling to ask the right questions).

There was a long route and there was a short route from my bedsit to the nearest pub, the place where I usually met my friends to plan the course of the night – whether on to the narco dens, the virtual reality palaces, or just getting shitfaced in some anonymous bar. The last was my secret preference, but I didn’t want the rest of them to see just how dependent I'd become on these regular debauches. For the most part they were rich kids slumming – waiting for some distant parental unit to take them safely back under tow.

She was waiting for me at the corner of the alley. Not for me, precisely, of course – for anyone who might come by. I could see at once the kind of girl she was. Big eyes, an emaciated body, ragged clothes – part of the fallout of the narcolepsy laws.

“Please,” she said. “Please.” Holding out her hand.

Normally I would have hurried on by. That was one of the unfortunate side-effects of taking the short way. One had to pass by the dark chasms of the forgotten city – the one gradually expanding and proliferating in the shade of all that was bright and glossy and endlessly renewed above.

This time, however, I stopped. I don’t know why. I’ve interrogated my motives a thousand times, and I still can’t come up with a clear answer. She was attractive, yes -- in a kind of fey, artless way – but that wouldn’t normally have been enough for me. I was very keen on intellectual stimulation and the true companionship of minds in those days, sombre little prig that I was, and wouldn’t have given the time of day to any mere party girl who tried to distract me from what I fondly imagined to be the dark intricacies of my midnight studies.

Not that any of them did.

“What’s in it for me?” I asked, roughly enough, imagining that would be enough to bring the conversation to an end.

“I … don’t know,” she replied. “What would you like?”

There was an indescribable delicacy in the way she spoke, as if she were some angel fallen into the midst of this desolation. There were sections of the city (still are, I suppose) where the very foundation stones had given away, opening up huge caverns and pools with waterfalls, framed by impenetrable fences of iron. She’d come creeping up from one of them, I supposed. How could she seem so clean, so unsullied by her bestial surroundings?

I suppose the worst romantics are those who pride themselves on their unrelenting realism.

“Who are you? What’s your name?”

“Celeste,” she said, letting her skinny hand drop to her side. I could see the emaciation of her body through a rip in the side of her dress – pitiful half-starved ribs protruding through the ivory skin.

“Well, Celeste, I’m going out on the piss tonight. D’you understand that? I’m going to spend all night getting roaring, fall-down drunk, and then I’m going to stagger home, possibly in this direction, possibly in another …” I’d already had a bit to drink before leaving home, which no doubt accounts for my elevated mood. I suppose I already felt something for her – a bemused half-contempt, mixed with a tiny tincture of pity and even (I suppose) some lust spawned by the sight of her skinny, half-starved body.

“Yes, sir.”

“Don’t call me sir. I’m not 'sir' to the likes of you, even if you are a little whore or a beggar … and you’re both, aren’t you, Celeste?”

“Y—yes”

She seemed honestly to find it more difficult to leave off the “sir” than to admit to her status in her eyes. Humble she always was, my little Celeste.

“How old are you?”

“Seventeen.”

It might even have been true. God knows she didn’t look a day over fourteen, with her little screwed up face and those huge, childlike eyes, eyes like the saucers of a tea-set, but with depths of blue within them: eyes captured in a perpetual flash of surprise.

“D’you want to wait for me, Celeste? Wait for me right here?”

“If you like.”

I could see that she’d be off in a second if I didn’t increase the offer.

“There’s a bed for the night in it for you, little girl. There’s some late supper and possibly some breakfast tomorrow. I might even give you some money, though God knows I’ve little enough of that for myself.”

Silence. I could see her thinking it over, sizing me up. A little angel she might be, but to live this long she must have learnt at least some survival traits. Whether or not she waited was nothing to me, of course. I’d only suggested it to get out of making any immediate decision about her. Why had I stopped to talk to her in the first place? And yet those few instants when her eyes were playing over me were some of the most intensely felt of my life – it was as if I were before the Judgement Seat, with some incomprehensible deity scanning my very soul. Looking in and finding me wanting, I cannot but conclude.

“All right, I’ll wait,” she said, and it was as if she were conferring a favour on me by choosing to stay. How had she turned the tables like that? I’d still like to know that, I’d like to know that about you, about all of you ...

Anyway, the rest is quickly enough told. I met my friends, as I said before, and we agreed to hole up for the night in some gin palace. I was morose and touchy the whole evening through, though – little disposed to talk, as the one thing most on my mind was the thing I was most determined not to share with them – so they finally concerted among themselves to go off to the virtual palace, leaving me soaking grimly at the bar.

I was hardly in the best of humours when I got back to my section of town, then. It was a difficult climb around the rocks and thickets of rusty steel – old monorails and mars-rockets, scavenged for scrap by the underdwellers – and it shocked me further to find her still there.

I’d been wondering all night if she’d wait for me, hoping against hope that she would, but trying to deny to myself the whole time that that was what I was hoping for.

Accordingly I tried to make as light of it as possible when I saw her leaning against a broken railing – her eyes half-closed with sleepiness.

“Come then if you’re coming,” I barked at her, and hurried off as fast as I could stagger-shuffle (I’d had a bad fall earlier in the evening, which had left an oozing cut on my leg, and of course the huge amount of alcohol I’d drunk had left me only barely perambulatory).

She fell in behind me. And that, Eva, is how I met my future wife.