Plastic jesus, p.10
Plastic Jesus, page 10
‘You’ve a friend: Kenny Fee. Can’t seem to find him on the streets. Maybe McBride’s got him?’
King’s face changed.
‘How long you going to hold me?’ he said.
Rudlow leaned forward in his chair.
‘King, you know what McBride will do to you when he finds you? What he’s doing to this Kenny guy right now?’
‘HOW LONG?!’
A line of spittle left King’s mouth, spraying across Rudlow’s coat. It was pink, bloody. The fly was back now, excited by the sudden drama. It settled on the desk next to them. Waited.
Rudlow sighed.
‘Tell you what, we’ll forget about the murder.’
King glared at him.
‘What?’
‘Geordie Mac, Heroin dealing scumbag. I could forget his murder,’ and here Rudlow slapped the fly against the desk, spreading its tiny remains in a red smear, ‘as easily as I forget the death of that fly.’
‘You’re crazy, man.’
‘You’d be facing a charge gun if we pinned Geordie Mac on you. Thirty years if some bleeding heart judge swallowed all that bullshit about what a bad life you’ve had. Out when you’re sixty. How does that suit you?’
King laughed. It was a hollow, spiritless laugh.
But Rudlow continued: ‘We’ll put you back on the street. Stick a mic on you. Wait ‘til McBride makes a move, sings to the mic, then crimp him. We’ll pin Geordie Mac’s murder on him. You can testify, lie, slap him with every damn thing your dirty little hands have gotten away with over the years. Won’t bother me. I want McBride. I don’t care about you.’
King wasn’t impressed. Goon had no hold over him. There was nothing to fear from a man with his back against the wall, his hands outstretched and begging. A needy man was not a powerful man. And Rudlow seemed pretty damn needy right now.
King leaned forward and in a flat, level voice asked again, ‘How long you going to hold me?’
TWENTY THREE
It was just shy of midnight.
Kenny had spent the last few days under wraps, paying cash for a small gaff on Water Quarter, keeping his head down, avoiding trouble. But guilt got the better of him. He’d heard King was still on the streets, no doubt peddling crack to anyone and everyone.
Typical, he thought. Brother can’t hold his water.
Kenny didn’t know if King was the man’s real name or just some nickname he’d inherited over the years; indicative of his well-earned reputation as a bullshitter. This one time, King told Kenny he’d spent five years in the Barrenlands, trading gold and oil. Kenny didn’t believe it. King was a Koy boy through and through. The wind farms and beaches up north were probably as far as he’d ever travelled.
Tomb Street.
Kenny had checked a few places already: eateries, pawn shops, Route 66. Vegas was his next stop, still buzzing despite the late hour. And it was there that he found King, stoned, propping up the bar.
He called as Kenny came through the door, both arms outstretched, a sloppy grin on his face.
Kenny shushed him, pulled up a nearby stool.
‘Need to talk to you, man.’
‘Have yourself a drink.’ King snapped his fingers at the bored looking man behind the bar. ‘Get my friend here a glass. And bring us a bottle of your finest Buckfast.’
The Bar Man sighed before reaching for the notoriously expensive drink. Previously made by monks, Buckfast wine had become something of a legend in Lark city. Vegas was the only bar that stocked it, and Kenny always doubted its authenticity. But he placated his friend, nonetheless, accepting the glass.
‘You here long?’ Kenny asked but the answer was obvious: King was a mess; washed-out face, greasy hair, dog breath. A sliver of light fell across the yahoo’s face, a flash of neon from the bar’s dated rig, but it was enough for Kenny to notice bruising. ‘Hey, what happened your face?!’
But King wasn’t listening. His eyes were fixed on a table of young girls sitting across the bar. The girls were giggling, syncing pics or vids to each other’s cells.
Kenny grabbed him, ‘You’re all swollen, man. What happened?!’
King smiled proudly.
‘Goons,’ he said. ‘Tried a shakedown. But they got nothing on me.’
A shiver ran down Kenny’s back.
‘Jesus, we have to –’
‘We have to nothing!’ King slurred. ‘They’ve fuck all on us. We’re untouchable, Kenny Boy. Even said they don’t care ‘bout Geordie Mac. In fact, they’re glad he got crimped.’
‘It’s not the goons we need to worry about,’ Kenny protested. He glanced around the bar before continuing, ‘McBride’s looking for me.’
King didn’t say anything, still staring at the girls.
‘Do you know what this means?!’
‘No. What does it mean?’
Kenny drew an index finger across his own neck in answer.
‘Both of us,’ he added. ‘So we need to lie low for a while, let this thing pass. You hear me? He’ll forget us if he don’t hear nothin’.’
King laughed, his wheezy little cackle drowning out the low hum of ambient trance music.
Kenny glanced around, nervously. The Bar Man stood nearby, quietly cleaning a glass, watching them.
‘This is fucking serious,’ Kenny said through gritted teeth. ‘You need to sober the fuck up!’
But King still wouldn’t listen. His eyes were on the door. Kenny followed his gaze, finding a small, punky girl enter the bar.
King was grinning ear-to-ear.
‘Helllloooo, sweetheart,’ he said.
She moved across the bar like a hologram, the sheen of her vinyl drains reflecting the poor, two-tone light. When she reached her table at the back corner, she set her drink down. Removed all of the cushions from the sofa next to the table, piling them up neatly. Only then did the girl sit, leaning forward in her seat, glass held tightly in both hands.
‘She’s hungry for it,’ King said and Kenny didn’t have to ask what it was she was meant to be hungry for. ‘We’ll give her a few minutes to settle herself.’
Kenny grabbed King by the arm, pulling him back around to face the bar.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘this is exactly what I mean! We have to put the brakes on for a while. Keep our heads low. I’ve got this place over on Water Quarter.’
But King wasn’t having any of it: ‘You must be fucking kidding me, man. She’s the biggest earner we’ve got! Ever since we offed that little scrotum, Geordie.’
‘YOU offed him,’ Kenny corrected. ‘I had nothing to do with it.’
‘You were there,’ King said, suddenly a lot more sober. ‘You held the door. Can’t say you’re not involved.’
‘Listen you stupid fuck,’ Kenny’s voice was more raised than he intended, ‘we need to lie low and let this whole thing blow over.’ He thought for a moment, added, ‘Even better, we’ll get the stash, head out of town.’
‘I’ve got the stash on me right now,’ King said.
He grinned, opening his jacket, showing off several clear plastic pouches.
Kenny couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He grabbed hold of King’s arm but the older man pulled away, zipped his jacket, stood up and then strolled over to the girl at the back of the bar.
Jesus! Kenny thought, before getting up and following. Jesus Fuck!
He reached a second time but King shook him off, his step quickening. The yahoo was still a bit shaky on his feet, the booze affecting more than just his head, but he made it through without tripping, pulled up a nearby stool and sat himself down opposite the girl.
Kenny stood beside the table, still keen to get away.
‘How’s it going, sweetheart?’ King said, his southern accent slurring.
She didn’t respond.
‘Got your stuff.’ King reached a hand inside his jacket, retrieving a small package. ‘You can have it right now, if you like.’
King leaned forward and pushed the package across the table towards her. His hand brushed hers but she didn’t move, didn’t as much as look at him.
‘Fuck’s sake,’ Kenny protested, eyes darting around the bar.
But no one seemed interested. The girls were still busy with their cells. Everyone else was either zoning or staring at the Box in the corner.
‘Hey, I’m talking to you, bitch!’ King spat. ‘Are you some kind of retard or something?’
She still didn’t speak, blinking once, setting her water down and wiping her face of spit. Then she lifted the drink in both hands, continued to stare straight ahead.
‘Fucking schizo.’
King went to lift the stash, but as he reached across the table, the girl pulled a needle from somewhere and brought it down squarely on his hand. The needle went deep, sliding through flesh, cartilage and bone to spear the bag the yahoo’s hand was grasping. The smack burst over the table as King pulled away.
Kenny glared at her, hardly able to believe what she’d done. But her eyes were as blank as ever. There was no soul in this girl.
‘You crazy BITCH!’ Kenny yelled.
He swung the back of his hand, connecting with her bony jaw. She fell against the cushions stacked to the side of the sofa. Suddenly she started flailing about in panic, as if she’d just fallen onto a bag of snakes.
She was screaming. King was screaming. People were starting to get up from their seats, move towards the doors.
King eased the needle painfully from the pierced hand.
‘I’m going to fucking kill that junkie whore!’ he spat, pulling a switchblade with his other hand.
He stepped forward, but a sound from behind stalled him.
As Kenny watched, powerlessly, the man he’d known for years as simply ‘the Bar Man’ aimed a charge gun to the back of King’s head. He flicked the trigger switch, sucking up power from the battery and jettisoning it out in a blinding white light. It seemed to go straight through King, the poor bastard’s skull turning to pink mash almost instantaneously.
Kenny stepped back as his friend’s body fell, close to where the still hysterical girl lay.
He looked up, found the charge gun aimed in his direction.
‘Don’t move,’ the Bar Man said.
TWENTY FOUR
Two a.m. and Johnny was still working.
When he got started on a project, it was difficult to stop. He would live and breathe it. When his body fell asleep, pushed to sheer exhaustion, his mind would dream about it. It consumed him. It became his life, raison d’être, religion.
His fingers hurt, forever sifting the layers of touchscreen, burrowing through the code. But Johnny kept going. He was determined to finish this.
The MAGIC MOMENTS VR: it was good, sure, but it wasn’t perfect. The VR would say things that Becky wouldn’t say. Once, twice perhaps, Johnny’s own mind had too much control over the experience, and Becky didn’t seem real enough to him.
But it didn’t matter.
It was something that Sarah had said which got him thinking. The real Becky was lost to him, gone forever. He knew that, he accepted it. And the Charles 7 incident helped him get over it (in a weird way). Becky’s smile, her habits, her ways: these were things he would forget. She was gone and all he had was her legend. What was important was not how Johnny remembered her, but the fact that he would remember her.
Likewise, the historical Jesus meant nothing. Facts, figures: unimportant. It didn’t matter a damn how he was portrayed by those who wrote about him, whether in the bible or some Netpage nuthouse. It only mattered what the user wanted him to be, needed him to be. After all, the customer was always right.
(Right?)
Johnny knew how important this Jesus project was. The Alt Corp elite were circling Garçon like hungry loan sharks, dangerously close to pulling the plug. Maybe that’s why Garçon was offering him a blank cheque pay rise if he could make this thing work by the end of the week. Of course, if there was any truth in what he’d heard, that cheque was hardly worth a dime.
But Johnny wasn’t doing this for the money. He wasn’t doing it for Garçon either. Johnny had an entirely different reason: he wanted to be distracted. Because despite what he told himself, despite what he was feeling, Becky Lyon wasn’t gone just yet.
In the corner of his touchscreen, the small envelope icon persisted. Still calling him. Becky’s name was written beside it. But Johnny was afraid of that e-mail. Afraid of the many, many things it might reveal.
It wasn’t that he ever thought she’d have an affair. Not since their first year, the early days when Johnny thought himself way too lucky to have a girl like Becky on his arm; when practically every man she walked past was a man who could take her from him. No, Johnny had been feeling quite secure in recent years. Complacent, comfortable, maybe even lazy. In fact, there were even days when he saw Becky as something that wasn’t special or magical.
But that icon in the corner of his screen might say something destructive, something that poured mockery over their whole relationship.
Maybe, as Johnny had suspected, she too had become complacent, and Becky wasn’t one to deal well with complacency. She feared it, like others feared death. For Becky, it was little better than death. Boredom was not something she handled well and Johnny had that small comfort in all of this: her death had been anything but boring. It was violent, tumultuous, tempestuous. But never boring.
The e-mail could change everything or it could change nothing. A flipped coin, 50/50 as it spilled across the screen, telling him exactly what was going through her head on that last day, the day before the hospital and the doctors and the (not so) pretty nurses descended upon them like vultures and ripped their lives apart.
Johnny looked to the screen, its layers spread open, a collage of colours and text and image files dancing literally before his eyes.
That e-mail.
TWENTY FIVE
Kitty opened her eyes to find herself in bed. It wasn’t her own bed, the old stained mattress from her Tomb Street apartment. No, this was her mom’s bed. The bed she remembered so vividly from her childhood.
Nothing had changed. The same luxurious duvet that would have wrapped her mom like white mink now wrapped Kitty.
Several pillows cradled her head, puffed up like silk clouds. Yet Kitty didn’t fear these pillows, didn’t feel the need to stack them on the floor like she stacked the cushions from the bar or church. She felt relaxed, comfortable, pulling the duvet tight against her naked body, the softness of the fabric making her skin tingle.
This was bliss. This was better than a hit.
Kitty rolled over, content to slip back into a long, deep sleep, to allow whatever nightmares she had experienced to drift away and be forgotten.
But something wasn’t right.
Her eyes opened again, searched the room.
She could smell burning.
The duvet suddenly became less like the soft clouds from her childhood and more like thick bellows of grey smoke. Flames rose up from the mattress. The pillows caught fire, spreading, catching Kitty’s hair.
She snapped up, patting her head, but the flames kept thriving, the room now an inferno, curtains like two fiery pillars on either side of the window.
The glass blew out, its sound deafening, the fire now roaring all around her.
Kitty started to scream but where noise should have come from her mouth she heard only a deep, low moan, a sound she did not recognise as her own.
The room became silent then, even though the flames still lapped at everything around her.
Kitty screamed again, but still couldn’t hear her voice, only that crackling moan; a deathly carp, a last desperate gasp, a drawing in of breath where there was no breath.
The bellow of the flames returned, furious now, and Kitty saw a figure, sitting opposite her at the other side of the bed.
It looked like her mom.
She was dressed in her fairytale gown, sitting peacefully while the flames spread across her body. But where her face should have been, Kitty saw only an old pillow. Acrylic stuffing hung from its open seams. The pillow face wasn’t burning, somehow immune to the flames.
And then her mom spoke.
‘You can change it,’ she said. ‘You can change everything, make it better again.’
But the voice wasn’t her mom’s. It wasn’t even female, the pillow-shaped face morphing into a man’s face, the fairytale gown now a blood stained white tunic, ripped and torn, deep red scars beneath its fabric.
She woke with a start.
Pulled the wiretap off, patted her hair, her face. But there were no flames.
Again, she was back in her mom’s room. The look, feel, smell was familiar to her. The bed felt smaller as a grown-up; a lot more compact. Less like the landscape of endless white clouds she knew as a little girl.
The pillows were removed and the bedding unfurled; both stacked, safely, at the bottom of the open wardrobe across the room.
Kitty was still dressed in her New York Dolls tee and vinyl drains. Her flat slip-ons sat on the floor by the door.
A spent needle lay dead on the bedside table.
Her cell sat beside it, the coil running onto the bed.
An empty glass sat beside the cell. It was crystal and Kitty found herself staring at it for a second. It was the same glass she remembered from years ago, the one Paul McBride would carry up on its tray, accompanied by a plastic brown bottle with a label Kitty could never read.
The plastic bottle held her mom’s pills. They were supposed to make her feel better but Kitty remembered her mom feeling worse. That brown bottle was the sign that their games were coming to an end for the day. A seriousness would descend upon the room and Kitty would have to leave.
She remembered standing by the door watching as her mom would sit up, face solemn and suddenly drawn. Her dad, Paul McBride, would drop a single pill into her outstretched hand. Her mom would throw the pill into her mouth, wash it down with some water, then set the crystal glass down onto the bedside table. Paul McBride would then kiss his wife on the forehead. He would pat the pillows then lift the duvet up, wait for her to lie down again.
