love and sex with robots
The bionic hookers have eaten every book in the house but they’re still hungry, so they twock a Ford car and joyride it into town. It breaks down on the high street, and the hookers slither out the car windows and kick the Ford lustily, denting the bodywork with their enormous metal boots. They’ve watched enough TV to know that when a car breaks down, it deserves a good kicking.
Rain bounces off the roof of the Ford and the metal boots of the hookers. It slides off their nylon hair and plastic clothes. This is the first time the hookers have seen rain, and they find it exhilarating, if wet. They don’t seem to realise that if they get caught out here, they’ll be taken back to the Factory and destroyed. They are just following their stomachs. They can smell the library.
To the hookers, the library is like the food court of a shopping mall. It’s like a tapas bar, a Chinese restaurant, a revolving sushi stand. There is every kind of food here: thrillers like juicy hot dogs, a mixed fruity platter of magical realism, romantic cupcakes, sci-fi sashimi. The hookers burst through the high wooden doors and throw themselves onto the linoleum, sliding, screeching with laughter, into the stacks. A spinner full of historical romances collapses on top of them and they dig in right there and then, ripping the pages out and stuffing them in their luscious plummy mouths. They bite the happy endings right off the plump creamy paper.
Bionic hookers are always escaping from the Factory, and from their owners. It’s a big problem in all the major cities, and all librarians are specially trained in how to apprehend and deal with any escaped units they find. Eating books is wrong.
cruel belinda
Belinda had a box full of wolves. At night they cried and scratched at their wooden walls, scrabbling away with their sharp claws, pushing their cheeks into the wood to gnaw at it with the edges of their wicked teeth, bloodying their flesh on splinters. They howled sporadically. When they howled, Belinda would bang the top of the box with the flat of her hand, which startled the wolves into a momentary silence. Then they would resume their scrabbling, crying, beastly attempts at escape.
When it came to the full moon, Belinda carried the box of wolves into the deep forest, walking a path she had made herself, with her own feet, treading down the weeds and leaves, sticks and fungus, carving a deep black wedge in the green forest night.
While she walked, she sang. Her voice was full of blood and violence, the terrible warm soup of murder, and the wolves in the box quietened and strained to hear it. It seeped into the box and grew all around them, breathed into their lungs, sang out of their mouths. Belinda and the box of wolves sang of the first blood of the spring, the hot blood of a calf’s throat, the delicate entrails, the comforting fat. Other wolves, the forest wolves, came quietly near the path to hear Belinda’s song, to taste the bloody melody she trailed behind her.
At the end of the path was a clearing, a small circle of foot-flattened grass. Moonlight flooded into it, making a silver and diamond pond, where Belinda set the box of wolves afloat. The free wolves of the forest paced around the clearing, growing hungry and desperate on the meaty stink of the song. They longed to sink their teeth into it, rip out its heart. So Belinda began the vicious chorus, and opened the lid of the box.
The forest wolves leapt like sleek silver fish into the box, teeth and claws bared for the slaughter. But the song was no longer there, only the fetid stink of the starving wolves, and the bitter, resinous wood. Belinda slammed down the lid and fastened it tight, and carried her box of wolves back through the forest, and home. Cruel Belinda.
fish out of water
She had a thing about gypsies. She felt sure their world was full of mysteries, both vulgar and arcane. So when they came with their tarpaulin and their big neon rides, and set up a fair on the green, she went along with her skinny purse to see. She went alone, because she had no one to go with. She won a goldfish on a coconut shy: it seemed incongruous, and the stoned boy on the shy didn’t once smile at her. Maybe he was shy, like a coconut. Coconuts were bashful, but when you bashed them, they broke, and you could drink the milk. It was difficult for her to live in her mind, but there was nowhere else she could be.
She took the fish home in its polythene bag. She dredged up, from some half-forgotten, long-ago seaside trip, the protocol for moving a goldfish from bag to bowl, but then she found she didn’t have a bowl. So instead she filled the sink with cold water and plunged the bag into it, levelling out the water temperature for a while before letting the fish swim out, a process which obscurely reminded her of watching canal locks drain and fill; barges in bright Romany colours, with their tin kettles and painted spoons; a gypsy woman with a scarf knotted tightly around her head, with big dark eyes, snapping the cards onto the tiny table between them. And I see Neptune, King of the Fishes, and I see the world below this one.
The sink was a bad place to keep the goldfish, as it meant she couldn’t do the dishes: her one plate, one fork, and one glass. This bothered her, and made her feel unsettled, pushed out of her own kitchen. She couldn’t sleep, feeling the way she did. She just lay there in her bed, in her room flooded with darkness, floating in black space, filled with an incomprehensible violent longing to go home. What home? She didn’t know if she had ever really had a home, or a family; no she hadn’t, she felt sure.
In the end she got up and went into the kitchen to drink a glass of water from the tap. The golden fish caught specks of moonlight in the sink water. She held her glass under the surface until the fish swam into it, then she scooped it up and drank it down, gulping hard, draining the glass. She took the plug out of the sink and let the cold water swill out, washed the dishes, dried them and put them neatly away. After that she slept quite soundly.
Early the next morning she drove to Weston Super Mare, which wasn’t so far, and left her car on double yellows near the promenade. It was raining and the beach was deserted apart from some dogs and a woman who didn’t come near. The sea rolled its oily muscles. There were some grey gulls shouting back and forth in the dull sky. She took off her clothes at the waters edge, and the rain on her bare skin felt acid and bright, like lemon drops. She walked a cold mile out towards the horizon, until the current finally took her under, and the salty kings and queens swam up to kiss away the last of her breath.
