The New Girl (Downside) Read online

  ‘We’ve got Martin for another week.’

  Goddammit, Tara thinks. Just what I need. ‘Okay,’ she says, hating herself for giving in so easily. ‘No problem.’

  ‘You okay to man the fort? I’m going to the gym after work, might be back a bit late.’

  ‘I was hoping to get some work done tonight, Stephen.’ At least when Stephen’s around Martin is forced to be civil to her.

  A pause. ‘So? Martin’s hardly a baby. He can look after himself, can’t he?’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘See you later.’

  ‘Love you.’ But he’s already hung up. In the rear-view mirror she sees Martin miming vomiting. She has to slam on the brakes as the taxi in front of her screeches to a halt, feels the bite of the seat belt digging into her breasts.

  ‘Don’t you know how to drive?’ Martin says. ‘I could have died.’

  Good, Tara thinks, furiously flicking on the radio and turning it up too loud. She does her best to concentrate on the Katy Perry track filling the car with perky good cheer, but her palms are aching from gripping the steering wheel.

  Martin pushes past her the second she unlocks the security gate, making a beeline for the kitchen. Tara hesitates in the corridor. All she wants to do is lock herself into her sanctuary, but she forces herself to follow in Martin’s wake, stepping over the shoes he’s kicked off, the discarded backpack that’s vomited pencil shavings, an apple core and textbooks over the tiles. Whenever she’s alone with him, her insides feel like stretched rubber, a twanging anxiety that’s grinding her down. Sometimes she fantasises about secretly dosing him with Ritalin, or even better, tranquilisers. Occasionally these fantasies turn darker – a swift plane or bus crash perhaps (instant and painless; she’s not a monster).

  Martin’s already foraging in the fridge. She knows that the glass of milk he’s pouring will sit, untouched, next to the couch until it grows a skin, until she clears it up.

  ‘Don’t forget to do your homework before you watch TV, Martin.’

  ‘Ja, ja.’

  ‘You need any help with it?’

  ‘Course I don’t. What are you? Stupid?’

  That’s exactly what she is, she thinks. Putting up with this crap. She can almost hear her mother’s voice: ‘You made your bed, Tara. This is what you get when you steal another woman’s man.’ It still rankles that her mother didn’t come to the wedding last year. Stephen offered to buy her a plane ticket, but she didn’t even respond to their emails until three weeks after the event.

  And anyway, her mother’s right. She did steal him, didn’t she?

  She’s done her best to connect with Martin; tried to imagine how she would have felt if her father had left her mother and married someone else. For the first six months after she moved in, Stephen had been supportive, sympathetic. ‘Don’t worry, my baby,’ he’d say when he caught her crying after Martin had called her a bitch, or refused to eat the lasagne she’d spent hours making from scratch. ‘It won’t be long before he accepts you.’ Deep-fried bullshit with a side order of crap, she thinks. And Stephen’s no longer quite as supportive; she knows he thinks she’s not trying hard enough, although God knows what he expects her to do. It’s not as if Martin treats only her with contempt. She’s lost count of the number of times Stephen was called into the school last year to discuss Martin’s ‘anti-social tendencies’ with the counsellor. The kid’s a spoilt brat and a bully. Plain and simple.

  She knows she should make Martin apologise to her for his rudeness, but she can’t be bothered. Leaving him to paw through the fridge, she hurries up the stairs to the only place she can really call her own – the smallest of the four bedrooms at the top of the house.

  She slips inside it, locks the door behind her and breathes in the comforting scent of Johnson’s baby shampoo and talcum powder. She buys the essence bottled, it lasts longer that way on the babies’ skin, and every day she adds a drop to the carpet so that it’s the first thing she smells when she enters the room.

  She opens the drawer where she keeps Baby Paul, all snuggled up in the monogrammed blanket she cross-stitched herself. She’s not a fan of sewing, but Paul is special – he’s her fourth baby, but her first boy. She’s only sold two of her babies so far, and both times it’s been a wrench. She doesn’t know how she’ll cope when Baby Paul is adopted, but if she wants to make this a success then she has to learn to let go. But, God, he’s so beautiful; that perfect blush of health on his cheeks, his little fists scrunched to his chest. For a second she can almost imagine he’s breathing. She gently strokes the fine hair that coats the shallow dip of his fontanel. There’s no doubt about it, she’s getting better. Really, she has every right to call herself a professional.

  She fires up her laptop, clicks onto the Gmail account again. Nothing from Susannah, but there’s another email from the weird, spammy account, this one saying: ‘Perhaps we were being unclarified. Be assured we are serious beyond belief. We necessitate a forespecial baby now. Can you dispense?’

  Could the sender be foreign? That would explain the odd syntax. And if so, she thinks, feeling a flicker of excitement, could this be a commission? God, that would be a real challenge. It would mean sculpting at least the head from scratch, rather than working from a kit, something she’s never done before. She knows that some of the more skilled Reborners work from photographs, and she’s well aware of the sad history many of the women who desire to own Reborns share. Women who can’t have children of their own; women who have suffered terrible tragedies – a cot death or premature death – and who long to hold a facsimile of their lost baby in their arms.

  People like her, she thinks, although she doesn’t allow herself to dwell on this. She’s only thirty-eight, there’s time to try again. She gazes down at Baby Paul, lifts him out of his drawer, gently supporting his head. She still can’t believe how quickly she caught the Reborn bug, remembers the exact moment when the desire to own one of these hyper-realistic infant dolls had swamped her. It had been during a holiday in Cape Town, a trip Stephen had organised a few weeks after their hasty wedding. They’d visited a toy shop in a sprawling mall to buy Martin a present, and she’d stopped dead, hardly able to breathe, when she spotted the Reborn section in the corner of the store. At first she’d been repelled, almost nauseated by the sight of the lifelike dolls displayed in their own little incubators, several complete with feeding tubes and heart monitors, a sign above the section reading ‘Shhhh, babies sleeping’. As she stood there, she felt her initial revulsion turning to fascination, and when a sales girl offered to let her hold one, she felt something inside her shift as she cradled its little body in her arms. The next day she’d made an excuse to return to the mall and, using her US credit card, she bought Baby Lulu, a preemie baby with darling curled eyelashes. Stephen had been horrified but she blocked out his reaction, and when she discovered that with the right materials pretty much anyone could learn how to Reborn a doll, she decided to purchase her first starter kit. She found that she had a talent for it – an artistic side she never knew she had.

  She writes a response before she loses her nerve: ‘Hi! Thanks for your email. Sorry for not responding earlier. Are you interested in commissioning a baby? I would be very happy to help you, if so. Reborning is my passion! I think you should know, though, that the rates for me to create your own special baby will be slightly higher than those for adopting my existing babies.’ How much? Five thousand? Should she dare? Why not? ‘R5000, with a fifty per cent deposit required.’

  Heart in her throat, she presses send.

  She gets on with unpacking the parcels that arrived from the States yesterday – a selection of rooting needles, a fresh paint kit and a new torso that she purchased at a bargain price (and, again, bought with her American credit card so that Stephen won’t be able to gripe about the expense). Her latest baby – Baby Gabby – is almost complete, and she carefully removes the infant’s parts from her work-in-progress drawer. She finished mottling Baby G
abby’s limbs at the weekend, using a new technique she learnt from a step-by-step tutorial on the internet, so all she has to do is make a decision about the baby’s hair.

  Something makes her turn back to her computer. That was quick – a response!

  ‘This is primo news! We will supply mimeograph exemplar forthwith. The rate expressed meets our yearnings. Send remuneration details.’

  A mimeograph? Strange use of language. This Batiss person must be foreign; probably uses Google Translate to write the emails. She feels another thrill of excitement as she taps in a response, remembering to include her bank account number. This could be it. If she can’t go back to teaching, well, there’s no reason why she can’t make a success of her other passion, is there?

  ‘Tara!’ Stephen’s voice floats up from the hallway downstairs. She checks the time. God, it’s past eight already. She should have taken the steak out of the freezer hours ago.

  She rushes out of the room, pausing to lock the door behind her. She doesn’t dare leave it open for even a second. Months ago she’d made the mistake of showing Baby Lulu to Martin in an attempt to connect with the little shit. That had resulted in weeks of snide comments. She doesn’t want to imagine what destruction he would wreak if he found his way in here.

  She finds Stephen slumped in his La-Z-Boy in the lounge, flicking through the DStv channels. Martin’s stretched out on the opposite couch, laptop on his chest, earphones in place. She tries not to look at the detritus from his after-school snack scattered on the rug.

  ‘There you are,’ Stephen says.

  She bends for a kiss. He doesn’t smell as if he’s been to the gym. Perhaps he showered afterwards; he does that sometimes.

  ‘How was your day?’ she asks.

  ‘Hard. Yours?’

  ‘Usual. Hey, guess what?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Looks like I might have a commission.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A commission for a baby. They’re sending through a photograph for me to work from.’

  His eyes flick back to the reality show on the screen. ‘That’s great. We going to eat soon?’

  ‘Won’t be long,’ she says, fighting to keep the disappointment out of her voice.

  In the time she’s been holed up in her sanctuary, the kitchen has turned into a bomb site; the expensive Lurpak butter melting on the counter top, bread crumbs and empty Lay’s crisp packets scattered around it. And guess who’ll have to clean it up? Stephen refuses to hire a maid – he’s paranoid about security, says that letting a stranger into the house is asking for trouble, even though they live on a security estate with more razor-wired fences than Rikers Island. Tara often feels guilty about not providing employment for one of the desperate women she sees begging at the traffic lights; it’s not as if they can’t afford to hire someone, labour is cheap here.

  Tara hauls the steak and bag of fries – the chips, goddammit – out of the freezer. She chucks the steak in the microwave, presses the defrost button.

  ‘I’m starving,’ she hears Martin whine. ‘Can’t we get take-out, Dad? Her cooking tastes like crap.’

  ‘Martin,’ she hears Stephen say.

  ‘But, Daaad.’

  ‘Enough!’

  She puts the oil on the stove for the fries, then rests her head on her hands and watches the steak as it whirls round and round on its plate in the microwave.

  If she’s quick, she’ll have time to scoot upstairs to see if there’s another message from Batiss. Maybe this time he – or she, who knows? – will have attached the photograph. She flies up the stairs, unlocks her room, her heart leaping as she sees the ‘1’ next to the Gmail icon on her email.

  It is from Batiss, and even better, there’s an attachment! ‘This is what we require’ is all the message says. At first the attachment doesn’t want to open, and she’s forced to reboot her computer, then a tiny photograph about the size of a thumbnail appears on the screen. How is she expected to work from this?

  ‘Tara!’ she hears Stephen shouting. ‘Tara!’

  She clicks on the zoom icon, and the photograph instantly increases in size, although it’s too pixellated to see clearly. She experiments with the size settings, and gradually it begins to resolve; she’s never seen an attachment behave like this before.

  She leans closer. Is that...? There’s a leg, the chubby shape of a baby’s arm...

  ‘Tara! Something’s burning!’

  It’s a photograph of a baby all right, but there’s something wrong with its face.

  Her stomach tips over when she realises what it is.

  The baby’s eyes and mouth are sewn up, the flesh of its eyelids and lips scored with coarse, black thread.

  Chapter 3

  PENTER

  The thought-seep this morning is even more noticeable than yesterday. She can’t shake the feeling that she’s being disregardful, even though she knows she’s on assignment and has special dispensation from the Ministry. Up here she can’t get her regular penetration renewal; they can’t haul an entire clinic into the field with them. When you’re upside on a special project you’re on your own; you’ve got to monitor yourself. The drones warned her about the thought-seep. They said it would be disconcerting, and it is. She lies in bed, on the dark south side of the house, and tries to keep her mind quiet.

  She grabs her gelphone and hides under the blankets with it. She reads the proclamation ticker for comfort, to make herself feel closer to home. ‘Victuals are precious. The meat tree is a fable. Use your tokens appropriately.’ ‘Apparel does not auto-generate. Wash sparingly.’ ‘Energy is scarce and opulent. Save energy for essential tasks and services only.’ Everyone knows that resources are scarce, she finds herself commenting, you don’t have to repeat yourself. She tries to block out the disregardful thoughts.

  She remembers talking to a now-depreciated member of her grouping. He was old. He used to tell stories about when the world didn’t know about the upside. She’d never been upside, nor had anyone she knew, and though there were plenty of mimeographs and artefacts and browns wandering around like off-course ants, sometimes she just couldn’t believe it existed.

  There were fewer people then, the old man said, and they got by. They burnt peat for warmth and light and ate what produce lived in the walls. Then when whoever it was discovered the upside, apparently all glare and ether, people flocked to the nodes like starving leeches to a wound. The first ones became blind, so the story went, their lungs grew weak and their skins became dry and sore with seeping cracks and strange moulds.

  You’d think that would have been enough to keep them away from the nodes, but what they found up there was a temptation too great. Colour, radiance unimagined. Victuals of such strange variety and with flavours that first burnt their mouths with their intensity but then became addictive. Soon the traditional victuals were forgotten and people started copying the style of upside victuals. Which meant that upside supplies had to be gathered. The browns crowded at the upside of the nodes in numbers that bewildered the explorers. They swarmed like a mindless colony, but they had remarkable technologies: self-generating light and heat, machines for every conceivable purpose, and they exuded such energy themselves, a thin, light energy which was good for floating objects in ether – not much call for that in Penter’s world – and a darker, heavier energy which permeated the walls.

  The upside people were willing to trade; there were always many upside leaders clustered around a node who would sell their resources in exchange for their crude symbolic tokens, for numbers on a gelscreen.

  That’s when people started calling their own world the downside, trapping it forever after into an unbalanced relationship with the ants up in the ether. Then the world became what it is, what she’s always known, a place of generated glare and colour and flavour to which her people are addicted. They have created an energy-sapping facsimile of the upside, even though there are no resources to maintain it. She can sometimes understand the argument of t
he Moles, those who believe people should cut their ties to the upside, stop living like slaves to the foreign influence of the upside and become self-sufficient again.

  Just allowing the Moles to enter her head like this is treasonous disregard. While the Players and the Scrupulists battle over the best way to exploit upside relationships, some Moles threaten to destroy the facsimile altogether. It’s a relief to remember that when this assignment is over she will have her penetration renewed and all thoughts of the Moles will be erased. Politics is not in her purview.

  The Moles would never manage. There are too few of them, and besides, who would support them? They have darkness and scrabbling around in mud and eating root porridge to offer, while the status quo, always running critically low on energy and labour and parts though it is, is a pleasureland of tastes and styles in the Mall. There is good inculcation at the Academy, solid justice, a primo bureaucracy, and excellent modification and termination at the Wards. There’s no way the world would go back to its primitive roots.

  It was all a fable anyway, just like the meat tree. The old man would sit by his fire and stare at the flashing neon as he told the story. It was just a whimsical myth to describe the way the world is now.

  She shrugs and stretches in her sheets. It doesn’t matter anyway.

  The proclamation ticker says: ‘This shift’s efficiency rewards include two lemons imported from the upside!’ She realises with a certain shock that she can go and pick a basketful of lemons from the tree outside, right now.

  She gets up to shower and she can’t help comparing her body to those of the browns she’s seen. They’re so bizarre, but there’s something about them... Their shape is much more uniform than normal people’s so they can all wear the same specification of apparel. She once watched a couple of brown Shoppers at the Mall and they looked more like some sort of arthropod, but the apparel does work well on them. Is that proof that apparel was invented upside first?