Think or Swim: part III
When he surfaced and looked back at the Malaga Barrier, Mao could see a major security operation cranking up. Floodlights were arcing out across the night sky, someone was barking commands, boat engines revved and helicopter rotors began to thump the air.
He shrugged off the two oxygen tanks, attached his face mask and scuba suit and let the lot sink into the dark water. Then, he took a risk: He fished the communicator out of his backpack, switched it on and waited for a location signal. But it was a calculated risk because the device was using Galileo, the flawed satellite navigation system the EUSA had introduced in 2013, after the American GPS had been outlawed. With luck, no one would lock onto him in this quadrant and even if they did, they'd probably get an inaccurate reading.
Galileo showed him that Nerja, a holiday resort to the east of Malaga, was the nearest coastal town. If he could make landfall somewhere below it, he'd throw on the change of clothes in the backpack and then break into an empty holiday home.
Calling up ProPedia and searching for Nerja, he found exactly what he needed: "Hacienda Brûlé... elegant, geometric structures ... wind-powered... muscular Finnish carpentry... Med-cool... linen... Nordic/Japanese... rest-space... workplace... best craftspeople from the Gulf of Bothnia... staff from... shuttle service... low-key utopian..."
He scanned another screen and turned off the communicator. It sounded perfect. Certainly too posh for guard dogs, not to mind armed security types, he thought. It probably had some kind of sensor fencing, and definitely retina ID, time locks and pressure alarms, all of which should not be that difficult to deal with. The real danger might be mature Scandinavian housewives prowling for anomalous sex. But after midnight?
He began swimming towards Spain.
Ploughing the rolling waves of the Mediterranean, Mao Kelly was, for the first time in five years, at peace with the world. Naked, apart from the backpack, he felt as if the had been born for the water, like the sea turtle, which can be found in all the world's oceans, except the Arctic Ocean. He'd learned that in primary school in Dublin.
His parents had told him that for many Chinese, turtles symbolise health and longevity. Maybe that was why they ate so much turtle soup. Meat, skin and innards, nothing turtely was wasted in the Kelly kitchen. Seeing turtles in your dreams meant something, too, they'd said, but he'd forgotten what.
An object brushed against his leg. Sea turtle? Not very likely in the fished-out Mediterranean? Mine? Very possible in the Mediterranean, given the low-intensity war going on between the EUSA and the Salafist Maghreb states. But a mine behind the Malaga Barrier? Unlikely. So what could it have been, then?
"Think or swim", he said to himself, and ploughed on.
When the clouds pulled back, he saw a silvery chain of pin-prick light stretching out along a dark shoulder of coastline. He was almost there.
The sideboard was lined with knives, which Nolie Doland was shining and drying with two kinds of soft cloth. Opposite her, Janey Kennerflock held the pliers up to the light and was removing something stubborn from between its jaws with a sliver of metal. The ropes were soaking in two black buckets that were filled to the brim. Again, the reddish hue.
Mrs Rathbone spoke rhythmically and ceaselessly, which was why they didn't interrupt her, as she recalled great-grandfathers long dead, cousins in the Big City, aunts emigrated to Beyond and relations of relations of relations who had married men and women from Below and Behind. She described the bad times before liberation and the worse times after liberation and emphasized how tough the people had to be. Neddy looked down at her grey hair tied up with a blue string as she knelt on the cold floor applying a white powder now to the wound. She told the small room with its ticking wall clock and her audience of two about his uncle Joe John who had been shot by the liberation army as he crossed the big hill near Oldhouses late on a winter's evening, and how he had lain up there for two days in the mud, bleeding his life away, conscious of his coming death, before they could bring the body down to wake him. Which he once though meant the person was sleeping, but since then he'd been to lots of houses with Granny where people were crying and giving each other tobacco and glasses of the strong stuff and he'd learned that those lying in their timber boxes being waked weren't sleeping. It just looked like it. Unless their faces were broken. In which case the boxes were shut.
It began to rain, so he began to run. Which was when he fell. Which was when the note his mother had pinned to the lining of his corduroy jacket came loose. Not that he noticed. The gravel that had embedded itself all across his kneecap required concentration. He had been knocked down often enough on the school yard to know how sore gravel could be. The knee was every bit as bad as the elbow, but not as bad as the forehead, but none of these was as bad as the Jeyes Fluid his mother used for treating the gravel cuts. Breen's mother put mercuricome on grazes, which smelled much nicer, but because of the truthings and the disinfecting that had to be done after the informers had been cut up, Jeyes Fluid was all they had at home.
constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove. Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their apartments on the corners of hidden streets, and they turned and smiled back at me before they faded through a door into warm darkness. At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others — poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner — young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.