The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [29]
At the end of the block the savage girl stops. Shoulders hunched, hands tensed and open at her sides, she follows with her eyes the course of a metal gangway zigzagging up the face of a windowless brick building. Possibly a power station. Ursula edges closer, moving hunched over from car to car. The savage girl turns back to scan the street, and Ursula freezes, too afraid even to duck. But she doesn’t seem to spot her and continues what she’s doing, taking off her pack and crouching over it, her hand emerging with what appears to be the sawed-off top of a coatrack attached to a coil of rope. Holding her arm out to her side, she swings the hub of coat hooks around on the rope, widening the arc until she releases it, sending it up and over the railing and onto the gangway. She pulls the rope gently until the hooks catch on the railing, gives it a couple of tugs, then begins to climb, twining her bare legs around the rope and hoisting herself with her arms. She scoots up over the railing and takes the stairs the rest of the way up.
At the very top of the gangway, she hops back onto the railing, and for a moment Ursula thinks she’s planning to jump, but instead she wraps herself around a support pole and inches up it until she can clamber onto the gangway’s tin roof, her legs kicking out behind her like a frog’s. The tin gives off a muted clangor, like a cracked gong, and the half-dormant pigeons in the stonework at the building’s crest cluck and flutter.
She crouches. Then springs. The birds squawk and tear off madly, but she’s managed to catch one in either hand, pressing and trapping them in their niches. She pulls them out and brains them against the wall, quickly, again and again, until they stop flapping. The tin roof continues reverberating as she kneels and twists the birds’ necks around like bottlecaps.
In a dark, weedy, junk-strewn lot, the rest of the night passes in staggered, disjointed time as Ursula hides between two parked vans and watches, transfixed, at once horrified and exhilarated: the savage girl plucking the birds, their dark heads dangling from the skin of their broken necks; the savage girl roasting their pale-gray bodies on an umbrella-pole spit over a garbage-can fire; the savage girl ripping at the steaming meat with her hands and teeth, her face wild and orange in the glow, the whites of her eyes blazing behind the mean iris hillocks like a jack-o’-lantern’s, ash and pigeon grease encircling her mouth; the savage girl squatting in a corner of the lot, her face proudly impassive as she excretes a loose stream of waste.
Surfaces
Chas unrolls the airbrush painting on his desk, pinning the corners in place with his desk phone, his cell phone, his Palm Pilot, and a bottle of Pepto-Bismol. He leans over it, forming an arch of tanned fore-arms, ironed sleeves, muscular shoulders, greased gray hair. A vertical crease bifurcates the horizontal creases of his forehead into two columns, doubling the look of physical strain, as though at any moment he might kick his feet up onto his chair and start doing marine-style pushups over the painting.
Instead he simply lowers his head, a couple of wet-looking kilostrands coming loose and pointing at her like the horns of a bull.
“Ah, shit,” he mutters. “You just don’t get it.”
To allay her dread she searches for something about him to laugh at: she studies the top of his head, looking first for a combed-over bald spot, then, a little more desperately, for evidence of implantation. But his hair is receding in an altogether dignified manner.
“What’s wrong with it?” She was shooting for a tone