The Migration, page 22
It’s not even close to how it’ll feel to be airborne, but I don’t want to think about that too much right now. Today is a day for mindless routine. I lean back into the harness, and my bare feet lift in the air. I’ve painted my toenails bright orange, the brightest I could find, the orange of safety vests and warning signs.
When I look at the paramotor—nylon straps, a square of plywood, a fuel hose leading to a tank—a feeling of calmness washes over me, of hope. It is the only chance I have to see Kira again, even if it is a long shot. A leap of faith. I don’t know what comes next but I have to try.
“We’ll attach the parachute to the back,” Bryan says, “but the propeller should keep you in the air. Give you direction, all your control.” He touches it, and the blades begin to rotate.
“How long before it’s finished?” I ask.
“Not long.” Bryan says.
“How long is that?”
“Soon.”
* * *
—
The sun rides lower in the sky as we cut along Five Mile Drive. The spokes of Bryan’s bicycle wheels flash like a spinning silver plate. I’m close behind. Past the Perch Inn, the Thames is swollen, but slow-moving as it twists its way east toward London. We follow the edge of Port Meadow where cows low in the field, their tails flicking halfheartedly at the flies that swarm whenever the wind dies down.
We hear the noise of people before we can see them.
There are maybe forty of them, massed on the field, blankets checkering it. The music is loud, blasted from a portable speaker system, and the smell of kerosene is everywhere. As we get closer to the footbridge over the river, Bryan holds up his hand warningly. When we see it’s mostly students and younger people, no police, he relaxes.
“How do you think this all came together?” I’m thinking of how few young people I’ve seen on the street, the violence at the last gathering.
Some littler kids are chasing ducks by the river’s edge, their elbows scabby and shoulders peeling with sunburn. A dark-haired boy in an unbuttoned linen shirt, maybe fifteen or so, grins at me over the remains of a watermelon as we pass him. As I watch he spits something into his palm: a seed, I think at first, but it’s white and gleaming. A tooth. He seems surprised to see it.
There’s a drugged, blissed-out quality to the party. All the faces are thin and hollow, hematomas blooming beneath the skin. They are sick, all of them. We are sick—but strangely euphoric too, an electric spark jumping from person to person.
Us, us, us.
Someone offers us tinned frankfurters cooked on a camp stove and I take one, eating it quickly, then licking the grease from my fingers. I want to laugh, feeling light-headed and dreamy among them.
We spot Redmond near the shallows of the Thames. “Bryan!” He waves us over. “My good fellow, you’ve decided to join us!”
Bryan shrugs. Redmond comes toward me, Liv next to him. “And you, Sophie, what a pretty young thing you are.” He kisses me lightly on the cheek.
“Hey, Redmond. Keeping well?”
“Better than some. I’m glad to see you, love.” I wonder what happened to his plans, if he’s made a decision. I want to tell him we’ve been making our own plans but the way his eyes glitter makes me nervous.
“What is this?” I ask them.
“We wanted to celebrate!” Redmond says, offering us each a cup filled with something that smells sweet and medicinal. “Celebrate what?” I call.
He takes a swig from his own cup. “It’s not quite May Day but we’re pretending, aren’t we? The first day of summer—or it might as well be. Who knows if we’ll get another. So linger a while, will you?”
With that he strips off his shirt. A flash of pale skin, his sun-darkened wrists, fingers working at the buttons of his jeans, then he’s down to his trunks. A spring-heeled leap sends him into the river. He comes up sputtering. “It’s lovely. Join me!”
Eat, drink and be merry…
I strip down to my underwear, and throw myself in after him. The water is cool, a blessed relief after the heat. My toes dig for the bottom, barely managing to graze the slick mud of the riverbed. The current whips me around—I’m breathless, weightless, invisible, free.
Bryan lowers himself slowly into the water from a makeshift wooden platform. I wedge my nails between the planks and haul myself up, letting the river run over my thighs.
Only Liv keeps herself on the bank. “You shouldn’t be in there. It isn’t safe.”
“Aye, but where is it safe now?” Redmond says. He gets hold of my ankle and drags me back into the water. My head goes under, and I come up sputtering as he laughs.
The current carries me downstream and I crawl up onto the bank next to Liv, my skin glistening with water. The crowd of people seems to give her a wide berth. When I look more closely I notice dark bruises underneath her eyes, a feeling of wrongness. She looks fragile, bone-thin in her tattered skirt and blouse.
“Liv, what’s happened?”
“You know what’s happened.”
“No, I mean—you look like you’re going to be sick.” Suddenly her breath hitches. “I’m pregnant.”
“God, Liv, with—”
“Yes, with Reddy. We were very careful. But…”
This is the last thing I expected her to tell me. “What can I do? Are you okay?”
“At first I thought it was my childhood illness coming back. I was sick when I was younger, I told you that. They warned me that JI2 could cause complications even now, that my heart might have been weakened by the fever. So when my temperature started running high and I felt nauseous all the time, I thought—well, it wasn’t that after all.” She laughs, but it’s a strange, unhappy sound.
“Does Redmond know?”
She looks me in the eye. “I don’t want to tell him. Not yet, anyway. Things between us never seemed…permanent. He’s charming and clever, sweet when he wants to be. But I don’t know how he’ll react. His head is full of mad ideas right now and he doesn’t trust the Centre.”
“What’re you going to do then?”
“My clinician says I’m at a high risk for all sorts of complications.” She picks up a handful of stones and stares at them, letting them drop one by one from between her fingers. “He offered me choices. They’re trialing a new drug called M-Plagge. It’s not approved yet but he thinks I’m a good candidate for it.”
M-Plagge—the drug they tested on Martin.
“Liv, you need to listen to me.” Urgency makes me stumble. “You can’t take M-Plagge. You don’t know what this drug will do to you, or to the baby.”
“I was told it will inhibit the juvenile hormone. My symptoms are supposed to improve almost immediately.” She’s staring at the rocks, out at the swimmers, the sky, looking anywhere other than at me. I grab her wrist but I feel no shimmer of connection. Her skin is cold, leaden.
“I know all about M-Plagge. It isn’t some wonder drug that will make everything better. It doesn’t eradicate JI2. It just stalls it, stops the body from taking its natural course. They have no idea what the side effects will be, no idea how it will work on people like us.”
“How do you know that?”
“It’s what happened to Martin.”
“Martin?” she says with surprise. “But he’s dead. What are you talking about?”
“He signed a donation agreement. My clinician gave me a copy of the report. They tested M-Plagge on him. It trapped him in his own body, left him halfway between one form and the next. He wasn’t him but he wasn’t…one of them. A nymph. He was somewhere in between.”
“I don’t believe you,” she says, on the verge of tears again.
“Why would I lie about this? The donation term expired. Liv, they cremated him, what was left of him. Even though they could tell he was still alive. That some part of him had survived.”
“But that’s wrong,” she whispers.
“It’s inhuman. That’s why you need to find another option, we can figure something out.”
“Sophie.” She shakes her head. “What you’re saying is horrible but…but it also proves that M-Plagge works, doesn’t it? It stalls the transition. And if I continue taking it…”
“What’re you talking about?”
“They gave me the first injection this morning. I’m going back to the Centre tomorrow. After that they’ll move me to a facility where they can monitor my health. Don’t you understand? Whatever risks there are, they’re worth it. This isn’t just about me.”
“You’re talking about a containment facility.”
“Maybe that’s what we need. Maybe we need somewhere we can be safe.” She wraps her arms around her legs, tugging them close.
“What if they won’t let you keep the baby?”
“It doesn’t matter. At least the baby will have a chance.” Her voice is frightened and the tears come hard. I fold her up in my arms, trying to comfort her. The sharp press of her nose against my shoulder as she sobs in short, shallow gasps.
“I’m sorry, Liv, I’m so sorry,” I tell her and then when she doesn’t stop I try again with the same thing Mom keeps telling me: “Everything’ll turn out all right, I know it will.” Around us I can see evidence of the lie: the sheen of spoilage, of bodies beginning to break down. But it doesn’t scare me the way it used to. There’s something mesmerizing about it, an alien beauty that Liv can’t seem to see.
When she’s cried herself out Liv pulls away from me and pushes herself from the ground.
“Please, Sophie, don’t tell anyone.”
“Redmond deserves to know. I’m sure he’ll surprise you. I can tell how much he cares for you.”
I want to believe my own words but I can tell she’s drifting away from me, spiralling off in a different direction. I wish I could help her see what I see but she’s made her choice.
I wander back into the crowd, uneasy, searching for Bryan. There are dark clouds gathering overhead. When the first few drops of rain fall, Redmond cries, “It’s raining, everybody in!”
And I don’t understand it entirely but they listen, all of them crashing into the water now, whooping and hollering, knowing their clothes will be soaked anyway. Their mood is contagious. Before I know it I’m in the water too, feeling the current rush around me, the blur of legs kicking furiously beneath the surface.
Liv is on the bank a stone’s throw away, watching us—but distant somehow, separated from it all. She isn’t part of it, I realize, she doesn’t feel the intense bleed of emotions. The drug is already changing her.
But it’s different for me. I can feel something growing inside of me, an awareness. Something as thick and urgent and overpowering as desire. What Liv’s choosing is wrong, I know it is. Trying to clear my head I swim out into the middle of the Thames where everything moves faster. My arms carve out strange geometric shapes as I push against the current, away from shore—if I stop moving for an instant then I’ll be whisked downstream.
Redmond swims after me and when he breaks the surface, his grin has changed, is less convincing. “Come back to the shore, love.” I shake my head, frog-kick once, twice in the direction of the dock but my legs have taken on the weight of lead.
But the feeling is with me, that whispering in my blood. As if someone is calling to me from the other side of some thin and insubstantial barrier. I push myself under, just for a moment, just to see what it looks like, those pale limbs flashing, shimmering. It hurts to keep my eyes open, but I do anyway, wanting to see the river all black and sunlit at the same time. Its power is phenomenal, swallowing me up in a dizzy welter. Pressure sucks at my ears and my hands are otherworldly, mottled in silver and shadow.
A trickle of lacy bubbles rushes out of my nose. My feet touch bottom for a moment, skittering over pebbles, old coins, lost fish hooks anchoring colourless threads. What if I stayed under? What would it be like to feel the water overtake me?
My ears ache with pressure and my vision is stippled with dark spots and bright chromatic bursts. There is no sense of alarm—what I feel instead is an unexpected ebullience. The death wish, the jitterbug. My whole body begins to pound like the taut skin of a drum, pushing oxygen-poor blood to my extremities. A slight tremor in my fingertips, numbness in my toes.
Distant noises. There are other faces around me, like bright moons. The pug-nosed girl, her hair floating like a wreath around her. Darkness pushes down on me from all sides, but I’m glowing, golden, full of light. This is what I want. This is—
* * *
—
Then Bryan’s face is hovering over mine, angry and frightened. He pushes down with both hands on my chest, and it hurts. Water bubbles over my lips, gritty with silt. I suck in air, choke, spit again.
“What the bloody hell were you doing?” He’s close to shouting at me.
I’m exhausted, exhilarated, but sad too, the feeling after you wake up from a good dream, knowing something irretrievable has been lost. It felt as if I was coming into some special form of knowledge.
Redmond is still treading water, a streak of black hair plastered to his forehead. But Liv looks furious. “Come in, Reddy,” she snaps. “Right now!” In three strokes he covers the distance, and she practically yanks him onto the platform.
I’m shivering even though the air is still hazy with heat: “I’m fine,” I whisper, “really. Nothing happened, I wouldn’t have let it.” I push myself up, chest still heavy, fatigued, black spots dotting my vision.
Liv is glaring at Redmond now. “You can’t take chances. You know that.”
“I’m fine,” I repeat, shaking my head, trying to clear it. And then: “It’s fine.” But I don’t know what’s fine, not exactly. Too many feelings crowd my head: embarrassment, dismay, regret but the last traces of joy too, the sense I was close to understanding.
“I’ll take her home,” Bryan says. I don’t want him to look at me. I force myself to stand.
“I wasn’t going to do anything.”
“Liv’s right. Someone could’ve got hurt, don’t you understand?” he replies.
“Didn’t you hear them?” I ask. He stares at me helplessly, and I can tell he didn’t. Not the way I did. Redmond and Liv are giving us space, but neither of them looks happy. Finally Bryan shakes his head. “Let me take you home.” I don’t want to fight him, not now.
I search out my dusty cut-offs and espadrilles, swing my leg over my bike and pause to look around. The others have dragged themselves from the water and are now knotted in clusters on the bank. They look small and fragile, pigeon-chested boys, girls with slender legs, hair glistening with dampness. It hurts me to see them, to think about what’s coming. I shiver with a premonition: I’ll never see them again.
Liv sighs, then leans forward and takes my shoulder. An unexpected, protective gesture. “Don’t be so quick to give up on the world.” Her face is pale. She glances at Redmond.
I tell her, “It isn’t that. I promise.”
35
Just the two of us now. Bryan rides his bike along the towpath from Port Meadow, me a short distance behind. We pass over Fiddler’s Island, water lapping close on either side of the narrow causeway. Our tires make slow clacking sounds as we cross the footbridge.
“This is where I lost Kira,” I say, and he stops, turns back to me.
“You never told me that.”
I shrug, still feeling hurt by his anger, unsure of myself. “I was holding onto her. At least I was trying to. But she didn’t want me to.”
Bryan’s voice is tense. “We need to keep going. The weather is turning.”
“I kept playing it over and over in my mind. She had this look in her eyes. She wanted me to let her go.” I can make out a thin stretch of sky through the branches of creeper-cluttered hawthorn and willow. “I don’t want to go home.” What I mean is I don’t want to leave him with this hanging between us. “I wouldn’t…I mean, nothing was going to happen to me.”
He runs a hand through his wet hair. “Not yet.”
“I can’t turn back from what’s happening to us.”
“And I don’t want to lose you.”
“I thought you said—”
“It doesn’t bloody well matter what I said before!” Water trickles down his chin. We’re both thoroughly soaked. Finally, he shakes his head. “My house then, okay? The rain is getting worse.”
* * *
—
His place is a part of an old council property on the opposite side of the Thames. Decaying terraced houses and empty parking lots, debris that hasn’t been cleared from the communal gardens. Most of the ground floor flats have been abandoned, and the windows are boarded up but damp darkens the frames. The signs of neglect are everywhere.
Bryan leads me up a concrete external staircase. “The funding goes to flood defences in posher areas,” he mutters. “Places like Osney. The river broke the bank close to here, but they still haven’t been able to afford proper repairs. Da bought this place when he was young and thought it’d see Mum taken care of. But now? If the banks break again, the foundations may not last. We could lose everything.” He pushes the door open. “Mum won’t be back tonight. She’s just started her shift at the hospital.”
Inside, there’s plenty of space, but somehow we’re still bumping into each other in the hallway. The ceiling is low, webbed with tendrils of black mould above the windows. Bryan tries the light switch and sighs when nothing happens. “I’d offer you tea, but.”
Nervousness makes me want to hold my body tight, compact.
“It won’t be long before the power’s back, I reckon. But you need to get dry at least.”
“Bryan…”
He doesn’t answer. Instead he turns and disappears into the room on the left, returning a minute later with an oversized Glastonbury T-shirt. It smells thickly of him. “Sorry, I don’t have much that’s clean,” he says.
“It’s fine, really.”
He steers me toward the bathroom, which is lit only by a small window, looking out toward the river. I change out of my clothes quickly. A slug of toothpaste is crusted against the drain of the porcelain sink and plastic pill bottles are lined up along the wall, exposed, all with Bryan’s name on the label. Paroxetine, an antidepressant that Mom has used, Haloperidol, and others I don’t recognize. Fibrin sealant glue like I have to carry, in case of cuts that won’t stop bleeding. I wonder what else his mother might be hoarding, what contingency plans she has made.
