Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [101]
I met Henna through Mal, when I was twenty-two and had just joined the cops. Mal had been in the Life for a year, and seemed to be liking it. We’d been Bright Eyes together—the only two survivors from our unit. We came to New Richmond after being sideslipped out, full of secrets and in search of some kind of life. Mal was originally from Roanoke but didn’t want to go back. I didn’t have anywhere to go back to anymore. My mother was dead of cancer by then, my father soon afterward in a petty suicide. None of the towns we’d lived in meant any more than the others, and I went to New Richmond to look for a place to call home.
Neither of us had much of an education, or a family to help us up the ladder and over the TOO line, but we didn’t care. For a few years we tried different things, hoping that something would reach out and grab us. We were entranced with the city, with its possibilities, even when it didn’t seem to harbor much more than apathy toward us. New Richmond was a house with many rooms, and I wanted to visit every one of them, make them open to me. When I should have been looking for work I walked its streets, delving through its hidden passages until I knew I could live there-forever.
In the end Mal decided that there was nothing much he could do so he might as well join the police. I watched him for the first year, saw him get wrapped into his work, and concluded that the kind of things he was doing would probably suit me, too. Suit me better than they did him, in some ways; the trawling through debris and junk, the psychos and streetwalkers, the blood and violence seemed to speak directly to some part of my mind. It looked like fun. The Gap had affected Bright Eyes in different ways, and in my case it was as if I’d blossomed there. Leaving it was like having some essential nutrient removed—not one whose absence kills you, but one that simply changes the color of your leaves. I’d learned to live inside fear. The idea of being a cop appealed to that side of me, as did the notion of remaining outside society. I wanted to stand looking in. So I went to the office, proved I could spell at least one of my names, and they gave me a badge and a gun.
I met Henna a few months later, in the depths of a riotous party on 110. Mal had wangled us invites, having met a group of above-the-liners somewhere along the line of duty, and we spruced ourselves up, hopped on an xPress and went in search of fun. I didn’t have much in the early parts of the evening, as I remember, and felt conscious of the fact that I was currently bunked down in a nasty apartment on one of 38’s more alarming streets. It’s possibly my imagination, but I rather got the impression that Mal and I had been invited as performing bears. I responded in the most constructive way I could: by getting profoundly drunk.
By ten I was so wasted I had been officially downgraded to a lower rung on the evolutionary ladder. Some guy in a suit came up, listened to my attempts to string words together, revoked my rights as Homo sapiens on the spot, and reclassified me as some kind of plant life. I had to fill in all kinds of forms and shit. It was very embarrassing.
But then I saw Henna, and got talking to her, and the evening turned out to be fun after all. She was tall and slim, with cool green eyes and an agreeably rangy figure, and even in my state I saw immediately that she was both intelligent and beautiful. She in turn seemed prepared to ignore the chip on my shoulder and the whiskey on my tie, and to find at least some of what I said interesting rather than merely aggressive, and at the end of the evening I staggered away with her phone number.
A month later she moved down from 102