The Bharatani were all smiles: they knew what a vengeful female was capable of. They even had a word for such a woman, but it was not a word which appeared in the first dictionary of their newly scripted language.
‘Hai, boss!’ they waved.
After an hour’s work, the temperature started climbing, and Ivan decided to go deeper into the desert, the crust of Hell proper, before it was too late.
On the way there he passed the army barracks, where a group of young women were waiting for the daily delivery of food and water. Lydia was with them, her black dress and white skin the perfect reverse of their white dresses and black skins. They were all laughing hysterically, squatting around a large sheet of what appeared to be aluminium foil; Ivan tried to see what was going on as he drove past, but from his angle of vision the sun reflected blindingly off the foil. He waved uncertainly out of the jeep’s window, ignored. He would never find out that his daughter was teaching the Bharatani women how to ‘chase the dragon’ – a game in which heroin is heated on foil until it turns black and wriggles like a snake or dragon, while giving off an intoxicating plume that is chased by a snorting device. Lydia and the Bharatani women were using plastic ballpoint-pen casings.
‘Fak’n eh! Fak’n eh!’ crowed the Bharatani, delighted with this American expletive Lydia had taught them. Lydia was learning their language, too, something that her parents never would. She was beginning to feel quite at home here.
The guide who accompanied Ivan to the desert was in a cheerful and energetic mood. He kept smiling, smiling all the time, and his teeth weren’t even stained with lat leaf: the white powder the white girl had given him was better than anything he’d had before to get him through another hard day on the crust of Hell. He felt as if his body was made of a different clay that needed less water.
‘Good day today, Boss,’ he grinned.
Ivan didn’t reply, didn’t even hear. He was peering through the dust-opaque windscreen at the desert, trying to judge whether he was hallucinating or if he really could see a massive cloud formation just up ahead.
The Gossip Cell
[A]
ED JEROME’S wife was, at most, half a dozen thrusts away from orgasm when the bedside telephone rang.
‘Don’t answer it!’ she wailed.
‘It might be our Helen,’ Ed suggested.
‘It’ll be Willie Spink,’ his wife threatened through clenched teeth.
Ed disengaged himself gently, explaining that their daughter had promised to ring some time today, to pass on the latest news about the custody battle for little Fergus.
‘Hello?’ he panted into the mouthpiece.
‘Hello! It’s Willie!’ gushed the voice at the other end of the line.
Ed’s neck thickened while the rest of him slumped somewhat.
‘I – it’s late,’ he growled. Behind him, Mrs Jerome was quietly metamorphosing from sex goddess to relationship troubleshooter.
‘Never too late for a world-changing idea, Ed,’ enthused Willie. ‘By this time next year, you and I will be millionaires and people will be eating ice creams in the Gobi desert.’
‘Ice creams in the Gobi desert?’
‘Yeah, and going back to their cup of coffee six hours later!’
‘Sounds brilliant, Willie. Call me back tomorrow afternoon, after work.’
‘But you don’t un—’
Ed hated to hang up on him like this; it was contrary to his generous nature, but, in the circumstances, it was the only way to earn points with Mrs Jerome. She was putting her bra back on, and it was a front fastener, too, which only she knew how to operate.
‘Feeling cold, love?’ he said nervously.
‘Oh, I’ve cooled down considerably,’ she remarked.
Two days later, Ed Jerome went to visit Willie at the laboratory. It wasn’t a dirty secret from Mrs Jerome: she’d given her blessing. She was not an unreasonable woman.
It would have been different if Willie Spink had been a no-hoper, a harmless crank whose discoveries existed solely in his own imagination. But Ed – and even Ed’s wife – had to admit that there was much more to Willie than that. He was a genius, and a marketable one, at that.
His essential flaw (apart from a perennial inability to understand that other people went to bed at night) was that his vision of the practical uses of his inventions diverged from that of the average citizen of Earth. He was the sort of boffin who might have discovered nuclear fission and imagined it might be useful for garbage disposal or popcorn machines. Fortunately he had never discovered anything as dangerous as nuclear fission, but he had, three years ago, developed an eczema ‘vaccine’ in tablet form: the sufferer took the tablet, whose active ingredient was then sweated out through the pores, delivering constant, all-over relief. In truth, it wasn’t the eczema vaccine as such that Willie had invented, it was the dispersing agent, based on a synthesised fusion of garlic and alcohol. Trying to imagine a suitable active ingredient, Willie had thought it could be one of those fancy perfumes like … erm … Chanel No. 5?
‘Who would want to take Chanel No. 5 in tablet form?’ Ed had challenged.
‘I dunno,’ Willie had said. ‘Women who don’t want to carry the stuff around, I guess. I mean, wouldn’t the bottles leak into their handbags and so on?’
‘Willie … Take it from me: women enjoy actually squirting themselves with perfume from a fancy bottle – it’s part of the glamour.’
‘Oh.’ Willie was in awe of Ed, who knew so much about women – slept with one, even – and about the world in general. ‘Well, I guess I’ve come up with another non-starter.’
‘No, wait a minute,’ Ed had said, becoming aware of Willie’s dog frantically scratching itself in the corner of the lab. ‘Wait just a minute.’
That minute had eventually translated into the Sperome Eczema Vaccine and a largish sum of money in the bank for Willie Spink and the Jeromes. Even now, there was interest from the deodorant industry which might mean more money in the future.
And face it: with poor Helen’s ex-husband dragging the custody battle for little Fergus into higher courts, more money was going to be needed very soon, or that mad Cypriot bastard would ship the littlest Jerome straight to Nicosia and transform him into a little Papasidou there.
‘So what have you got, Willie?’ said Ed, looking around the laboratory, which resembled a failed amateur plumber’s garage, as always. Willie wasn’t a failed amateur plumber, even though he had the face and the habits of one. He was a failed pharmacist. He’d had his own shop and everything.
‘What went wrong?’ Ed had asked once.
‘I dunno,’ Willie had answered. ‘I stocked all the usualdrugs. I gave my customers personal attention. I didn’t overcharge. I stayed open late. People just stopped coming.’
‘And your shop – did it look like this?’ pursued Ed, waving his hand at the circumambient chaos of slimy beakers, test tubes, scribbled notepads, discarded packaging, old cups of coffee and trampled junk mail. Willie looked where Ed was waving, a frown materialising on his spherical forehead.
‘Like what?’ he replied.
Relieved of his duties as a pharmacist, Willie Spink was free to research the essential nature of chemistry. Some of his discoveries, like ‘fugitive’ gel (it shrank away from approaching spoons and flipped itself out of shallow containers) had not yet been paired off with a use. Others, like the universal odour-neutraliser which converted even the smell of cat diarrhoea or chloroform into a distinctive ‘paradigm’ odour suggestive of giant vats of burning curry, attracted the attention of the police and the fire brigade. But the Sperome Eczema Vaccine had been a winner, and enabled Willie to buy all sorts of hi-tech equipment which at last made it possible for him to experiment at a cellular level.
Now, proudly, he showed Ed Jerome an old cup of coffee, tipping it forward slightly so that the pond-scum of milk floated free.
‘Have you ever noticed,’ he said, ‘how you make yourself a cup of coffee? And then you
get engrossed in something, and by the time you remember your coffee it’s cold?’
‘Yes,’ said Ed for the sake of argument. Personally, he drank his coffee fast.
‘Well,’ continued Willie, ‘I’ve invented a substance – synthesised into a colourless, tasteless, odourless liquid – of which just one drop will maintain the temperature of that cup of coffee for many hours.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘The work is done by a sort of … “gossip” cell,’ elaborated Willie, putting the coffee cup down next to his densely scribbled notebooks with a slosh. ‘Imagine the hot coffee is a community of cells. The ones in the centre are oscillating wildly, maintaining the heat. The ones further out are responding to the cold air, slowing down, losing interest. But introduce my gossip cell, and what it does is it zips around telling uninvolved cells what the central ones are up to, and persuades them to behave the same way – pulls them back into line, you might say.’
‘For ever?’
‘Nothing is for ever. Do you think I can overturn the principle of entropy?’
Ed combed his hands through his hair and tried to think, which was difficult for him on an empty stomach and without caffeine. Despite all the talk about hot coffee, Willie had, of course, not offered him any.
‘Of course,’ Willie went on, ‘the gossip cell can incite cells to stasis just as easily as to frenzy. Which, in practical terms, means that you can buy a gossip-cell-impregnated ice cream at the beach, walk around with it for the rest of the afternoon, and then eat it.’
Ed was sweating now, but not because he was thinking of what, ‘in practical terms’, he could do with an ice cream at the beach. He was thinking of what, in practical terms, would be the commercial feasibility of central heating that only needed firing up once or twice a day. What about the electricity companies? Would they have him assassinated? Ed was a firm believer in the maxim ‘Build a better mousetrap and the multinational mousetrap corporations will beat the shit out of you’.
‘How much …’ he groped, ‘how much of this stuff would you need to keep … ah … for example … a heated swimming pool the same temperature?’
‘A ratio of 1:1000 is optimal – a drop in a cup of coffee, maybe a small bucketful in a swimming pool.’
‘And how expensive is it to make?’
‘It doesn’t cost anything!’ scoffed Willie goodnaturedly. ‘I’ve got all the stuff right here!’
Ed breathed deeply; he was having a very clear vision of Willie Spink handing over the secret of converting base metals to gold in exchange for a box of clean test tubes.
‘Willie,’ he said. ‘Make me a coffee. We’ve got things to discuss.’
[B]
Exactly six months later, Lindy Jerome was kneeling in front of an unfamiliar CD player, trying to figure out how to get sound as well as flashing lights, and wondering whether she should change her name from Jerome back to Witts, her maiden name. Now that she and Ed had been separated for almost a month and she had started a new life with Bryan, surely it was time to shake off the trappings of her old identity.
Trouble was, Lindy Witts was an awful name by any standards, and the lights on the CD player suddenly went off, which made her worry she’d wrecked something, which suddenly made her afraid that Bryan would kill her when he returned. The fear took her by surprise: only last night she had lain cradled in Bryan’s arms, entrusting her most secret hopes and dreams into his care; she had spooned intimacy into his mouth like luxury ice cream, and he had murmured for more. But today he was away at work, and she realised that although she had already managed to get to the bottom of all his old relationships, she had no idea how he felt about his CD player.
‘Don’t stop now, you bitch,’ she hissed at the machine. Mercifully; the random jab of another button abruptly caused loud music to blare out of the speakers: Joni Mitchell, but with electric guitars, computerised drums and synthesisers. Last night, Bryan had said he really respected her – Joni Mitchell, that is – for having the guts to change direction so radically, for refusing to conform to past expectations. ‘Just like you, darling,’ he had complimented her.
As Shiatsu therapist to the stars, Bryan had even met Joni Mitchell and been a backstage guest at one of her rare concerts. ‘She was really good – better than I expected, even.’
What the hell had he meant by that?
Lindy noticed suddenly that the telephone was ringing.
It had actually been ringing for a while, but she’d taken it to be a sound effect on the Joni Mitchell song currently playing, a take on consumerism called ‘Shiny Toys’ which also included samples of people saying ‘I love my Porsche’ and suchlike. A ringing telephone hadn’t seemed out of place, until she realised the place was right here.
‘Hello?’
‘Hi, it’s Helen.’ Not Ed, then.
‘H – Helen? How did you know where to call me?’
‘You gave me the number last week.’
‘I did?’ The notion seemed absurd, as if she had given her daughter the phone number of a supermarket she was nipping out to do a bit of shopping in, or a train she was catching to town.
‘Yeah,’ said Helen, sounding weary and tense and fed up. ‘You said it was going to be your home from now on. You were talking about finally having a future and not just a past.’
‘I was?’
‘Listen, Mum, I’ve got a bit of a problem. I need to go away for a while.’
‘Away?’
‘All this media attention now that our family is rich – it’s really getting me down. The newspapers keep calling me the Sperome Heiress; I used to be just an anonymous human being! The media all know where I live because of Fergus – they see the chauffeur driving him to school.’
‘So?’ Suffering the slings and arrows of outrageously good fortune had made Lindy unsympathetic: she herself had had to adapt to the new balance of energies in her life and find a way forward; other people should do the same thing.
‘All these journalists …’ lamented Helen. ‘They want to know what I think of my father brawling with other members of the Sperome Corporation and buying a Monet when he can’t pronounce “Monet” and getting arrested for drunk driving. They keep asking me if I know where Willie Spink has disappeared to, and … and how I feel about your separation from Dad. They hang around my house in … clusters, Mum, shouting through the doors and windows. I can’t take anymore. I’m leaving Fergus with Dad, and going to Tunisia.’
‘Tunisia? What about me?’
‘Well, I’d rather you didn’t come, Mum. The media—’
‘No, I mean …’ Lindy breathed deeply. What did she mean? ‘How can you leave your little boy in the care of a man like your father?’
‘Cut the crap, Mum. Dad loves Fergus. He needs someone to care for. He’s just a lonely guy in his fifties who’s lost all his old friends and has got far too much money. A bit of grandparenting will do him the world of good.’
‘I … So when are you leaving?’
‘It’s happened already, Mum,’ said Helen, breathing very deeply herself. ‘I’m ringing from the airport. Fergus is at home.’
‘Whose home?’
Lindy Jerome’s only begotten child started crying then, her quavering voice vibrating the fibres of the telephone connection.
‘I don’t know whose home it is anymore,’ she wailed. ‘Are you and Dad divorced yet?’
When the telephone receiver was nestled back in its plastic depression, Lindy noticed that the house had grown rather chilly. She knew Bryan’s central heating was Sperome-assisted (almost everybody’s was), but she didn’t know how or where to switch it on. Shivering in her bathrobe, she remembered the hot bath she and Bryan had shared last night, and how good it had felt. Only momentarily hesitating over her bearings to the bathroom, she found her way back to the now frothless tubful of adulterated water and dabbled her fingers in it experimentally.
It was still pretty hot, though: Bryan didn’t spare the Sperome.
&
nbsp; [A]
Exactly six months later still, Ed and Lindy Jerome were, at most, half a dozen thrusts away from simultaneous orgasm when the bedside telephone rang.
‘Let it ring,’ moaned Ed. ‘It’ll be Helen, with another change of plan about tomorrow.’
‘No, no!’ panted his wife. ‘I know who it is. I just know it!’
She stretched one arm out as far as she could without leaving Ed, and flipped the telephone receiver on to the pillow where she could grab hold of it.
‘H – hello?’ she said.
‘Hello! It’s Willie Spink!’ was the reply.
‘Willie!’ squealed Lindy. ‘Where are you?’
Willie had been missing for the best part of a year. Newspaper articles liked to describe him as the first casualty of his invention’s sensational success, and this was true enough. As soon as his gossip cell rocketed through the stock-market roof, his laboratory had been besieged by journalists of all kinds. Willie had lost all ability to concentrate on his research, quarrelled furiously with Ed, wept unconsolably on Lindy’s shoulder, and disappeared in a cloud of media speculation.
Since then, the fortunes of Sperome had continued to rise, reached a peak, and then slipped into a dizzying decline.
When first abandoned by his partner, Ed had sought expert legal advice, the inevitable result of which was that Sperome became a limited company of which Ed, through the alchemy of boardroom manoeuvring, was soon not even the majority shareholder. After a while, the majority shareholders signed a deal with the electricity companies, which, under cover of a glossy publicity campaign about a glorious new era of customer service, effectively raised the cost of Sperome-assisted heating by 500 per cent.
Worse still, the company’s overtures to the food industry provoked disaster when a leading fast-food chain, seeking an overheads edge on its competitors, decided to use Sperome in its coffee and ice cream. Almost immediately, customers were checking in to hospitals complaining that the piping hot coffee they’d sipped hours ago was still piping away in their tender stomachs now, or that a hastily swallowed mouthful of thick-shake had turned their innards to ice. Doctors prescribed drinking warm or cold water in sufficient quantities to dilute the Sperome; a simple, obvious and wholly effective remedy which nevertheless eluded the imagination of most people. Inexorably, litigation followed, with the earliest cases being sniggered out of court, but then finally an elderly woman in Duluth, Minnesota, got medical opinion to corroborate her claim that she had oesophageal incompetence brought on by the Sperome additive in her banana sundae, and after that the compensation jamboree was on. Universities which had been injecting rats with massive doses of Sperome for many months finally managed to rush some cancers through, and this story, more than any other, spread across the media like a nuclear reaction.