Doctor Who_ Cat's Cradle_ Warhead - Andrew Cartmel [13]
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On the seventy‐third floor Maria unlocked her storage locker and trundled out the heavy trolley with its soft wheels. She checked her equipment, then went back to the elevator to continue up to 74. She would start there then methodically work her way down to 72, tidying offices, wiping screens, making sure any hard copy had been thoroughly shredded.
And, of course, cleaning the floors.
Maria pushed the trolley past the executive squash courts and the private gym and male and female saunas, the rubber wheels squealing as she manoeuvred it. The expensive leisure facilities all around her were dark and silent. Empty but with all the doors open. No need to keep anything locked. Not with security as tight as it was. She got back to the elevator and found that it was gone again. Sent up or down on some mysterious errand devised by the building’s control system. While she was waiting for it to arrive she checked the trolley. The big plastic drum of industrial cleaning fluid had almost run out. She’d have to buy a new one before the weekend.
Sometimes when she was working late, like tonight, Maria’s mind would just switch off, trusting muscle memory for the work at hand. In her brain other, more complex, memories were operating. Flashes of being young and the way she’d danced. Basement shaking like an earthquake. She still had nostalgic dreams of dying that way. Quickly and violently in the sunshine. Outside. Not like this. In a metal honeycomb in a cold city. In darkness with the cancer eating away, doing its own cleaning routine in a further darkness inside her. The paramedic who’d diagnosed her had also given Maria some basic counselling. He’d suggested that she try to visualize the cancer, give it an image. Like a crab or a shark. Maria said she visualized it as a drain which she poured money down. The pain was bad tonight, but manageable, thanks to the chemicals. The chemicals were expensive but there was no choice. You had to keep working, for the money. If a portion of the money went straight into pain relief, that’s just the way it was.
It was a trade‐off.
Life was full of trade‐offs.
Like the way Jerome made her feel when he was alive, and the way he’d made her feel when she heard he was dead.
Or like poisoning her body with decades spent bent over cleaning fluids, triggering the cancer and dying before her time, in pain. But with enough money to get her son out of this city. You could still get people out to Canada if you could guarantee support finance for their first three years. Maria almost had enough money put away. And if she died the insurance policy would pay off the balance.
Maria wasn’t scared of dying. She wasn’t scared, but she didn’t like to think about it much. Looking ahead, into the darkness. If she did think about it she visualized snow whipping around big buildings, a lot of empty space in between, and cold air. Forever. She preferred to look back and remember the dancing. Now as she bent down and loaded the floor polishers, checking their EPROMs and switching them on, she could lose herself in those memories. The simple mechanical routines of her job didn’t break her revery.
What broke it was the cat.
A small grey cat, its close short fur almost silver in the glow of the lights on her cleaning trolley. At first she thought it was one of the laboratory animals that had escaped from 51. Then she remembered that the Butler Institute hadn’t had any laboratory animals for years now. They didn’t need them. The cat turned to look at her as it walked through the doorway into one of the stock acquisition offices.
The cat’s eyes were flakes of strange flat shine, gleaming blue, then green, then yellow as the angle of its head changed, looking at her in the darkness. They looked more like the status lights of an unusual machine than the eyes of any living