Bella Cray chuckled.
'Like it, Ed?' she said. This is what's going to happen to you. But first it's going to happen to everyone you know.'
Neena Vesicle's long legs hung out of the waste bin. Bella Cray, as if she needed something to busy herself with, began to try and stuff them back in. 'If I could fold the bugger up a bit more,' she said. She leaned in over the bin until her feet came off the ground, then gave up. They're just as fucking awkward as they were alive, your friends,' she said. She wrenched at her skirt and blouse until she got them back into place. She patted her hair.
'Well, Ed,' she said.
Ed looked on at this performance. He felt cold; he didn't know what he felt. Annie would be next, that was obvious enough. Annie was the only other person he knew.
'I could pay you something now,' he said.
Bella pulled a lace-edged handkerchief out of her bag to wipe her hands. While she was at it she checked her look in a little gold compact mirror. 'Whoa!' she said. 'Is that me?' Out came the lipstick. 'Tell you what, Ed,' she said, applying it freely. 'Money isn't going to help with this.'
Ed swallowed.
He had another look in the bin. 'You didn't have to do this,' he said. Bella Cray chuckled.
At that moment Annie Glyph, who had worn off her irritation throwing stones into the tide, walked up out of the darkness, calling, 'Ed? Ed, where are you?' She saw him standing there. 'Ed, you shouldn't be out here in the cold like this,' she said. Then she seemed to notice the contents of the waste bin. She stared at it puzzledly, and then at Bella Cray, and then Ed, with a sort of slow, patiently dawning anger. Finally, she said to Bella: 'These people got no one to speak for them, they live in a warren, they get the shit end of every stick: you got no call to stuff them in a waste bin too.'
Bella Cray looked amused.
' "You got no call",' she mimicked. She stared interestedly up at Annie, who was perhaps twice her height, then went back to working with the lipstick. 'Who's this horse?' she asked Ed. 'Hey, let me guess. I bet you're fucking her, Ed. I bet you're fucking this horse!'
'Look,' Ed said. 'It's me you want.'
'That's clever of you, to work that out.'
Bella replaced the compact in her purse and started to zip the purse up. Then she seemed to remember something.
'Wait,' she said. 'You've got to see this-'
She had the Chambers gun half out when Annie Glyph's hands -big-knuckled and clumsy, callused from five years in the rickshaw shafts, trembling a little from all that cafй йlectrique-closed over it. Ed loved those hands but he never got the wrong side of them. There was a barely noticeable struggle then Annie had passed the pistol to him. He checked the load, which resembled a black oily fluid but was really a kind of particle-jockey's nightmare held in place by magnetic fields. He swept the shadows for tell-tale signs of gun-punks, which were generally raincoats, shoes with big soles, anyone with a nova grenade or a bd haircut. Meanwhile, Annie had one hand still clamped over both of Bella's: this simple grip she used to hoist Bella slowly off the floor.
'Now we can talk face to face,' she said.
'What's this?' Bella said. 'Is this your dubious shot at fame? You think you won't get hurt for this?' She raised her voice. 'Hey, Ed, you think I don't have guys out there?'
'That's a valid point,' Ed told Annie.
'There's no one out there,' Annie said. 'It's the night.'
Her free hand went up, curled all the way round Bella's neck and met itself coming the other way. Bella made a noise. Her face got red, she milled her arms about like a baby. One of her shoes fell off.
'Jesus, Annie,' Ed said. 'Put her down and let's get out of here.'
The fact was, it filled him with anxiety to see one of the Cray sisters treated like this. He owed his recent personality to being her victim. Bella was everywhere. In this city at least she was broadband, nationwide. She earned from everyone she saw. She had her finger in every pie from Earth-heroin to giftwrap. Bella bought gun-punks and love-kiddies. For relaxation she had a patch which made her come all day then, like a female mantis, eat Mr Lucky with her favourite sauce. This was the woman who had sworn to revenge herself after Ed killed her sister. If she proved so easy to show up on her own turf, where did that leave Ed? Besides, no one, as he knew from the personal evidence in the waste bin, turned the tables on Bella Cray for long. He shivered.
'There's a fog coming up, Annie,' he said.
Annie was explaining to Bella, 'You don't see the consequences of your acts, you might as well be in a twink-tank.' She forced Bella to look in the waste bin. 'I want you to understand what you did when you did this,' she said. 'What you really did.'
Bella tried to laugh. What came out was, 'Guck guck guck.'
Annie's grip tightened. Bella's colour deepened. She squeezed out one more guck and went limp. At that Annie seemed to lose interest. She dropped Bella on the floor and picked up Bella's purse instead. 'Hey Ed, look! It's full of money!' She sheafed the money into her hands and held it up and laughed like a kid. Annie's delight never knew any bounds. She was a rickshaw girl. Everything she did, she was full-on inside it. They would have called her simple in another age; but that was the last thing she was. 'Ed, I never saw so much money!' While she was counting it, Bella Cray scraped herself off the concrete and limped quickly away into the fog. She seemed a little one-sided.
Ed raised the Chambers gun, but it was too late to get a shot. Bella was gone. He sighed.
'No good will come of this,' he said.
'Oh yes it will,' said Annie. She rolled up the money. 'Better I have it than that little cow. You'll see.'
'She won't rest until you're dead too.'
Towards dawn the two of them trundled the waste bin across the concrete and into the dunes, where Ed buried Tig and Neena and stuck the Monster Beach sign in the sand over them. Annie stood in the fog for a moment, then said, 'I'm sorry about your friends, Ed,' and went to bed; but Ed stayed until the fog cleared, the seabirds began to call and the onshore wind ruffled the marram grass, thinking of Neena Vesicle and how when he was inside her she would tremble and say, 'Push harder. Oh. Me.' Something changed for Ed that night. The next show he did, he dreamed right through his childhood and into another place.
TWENTY-FIVE
Swallowed by the God
Michael and Anna Kearney, with their English accents, careful clothes and slightly puzzled air, drove north from New York City again. This time they were in no hurry. Kearney rented a little grey BMW from an uptown dealer, and they dawdled north into Long Island, then, back on the mainland, followed the coastline up into Massachusetts.
They stopped to look at anything that caught their eye, anything the highway signs suggested might be of interest. There wasn't much, unless you counted the sea. Kearney, with the air of a man suddenly able to accept his own past, browsed the flea markets and thrift stores of every town they passed through, unearthing used books, ancient videotapes and CD remasterings of albums he had once liked but had never been able to acknowledge in public. These had titles like The Unforgettable Fire and The Hounds of Love. Anna looked at him sidelong, amused: puzzled. They ate three times a day, often in waterfront fish restaurants, and though Anna put on weight, she no longer complained. They stayed a night here, a night there, avoiding motels, seeking instead the picturesque bed-and-breakfast offered by retired lipstick lesbians or middle-aged brokers fleeing the consequences of the Great Bull Market. Genuine English marmalade. Views of gull, tidewrack, upturned dories. Clean and seaside places.