Spares. Michael Marshall Smith

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СКАЧАТЬ and I turned and walked quickly out of the door.

      A short corridor led out into the restaurant proper, and I skirted round the edge of the room toward the exit. With the time now coming up for nine o'clock, the place was in a transition period. The 8th floor runs on a kind of shift system. It romps twenty-four hours a day, but in practical terms this breaks down into three evenings of eight hours each. I once went round the clock twice. I can't recommend it, except as an expensive suicide attempt. The restaurant was about half-full of people from floors in the 60s and 70s, most of them either on the edge of unconsciousness or so wired you could hear their teeth vibrating. The others looked spruce and enthusiastic, rubbing their hands together in anticipation.

      No one saw me walk out of the ladies, and no one paid any attention as I walked through the restaurant. Feeling light-headed at seeing so many normal people at once, I escaped into the avenue outside.

      Floor 8 is an anomaly in the lower levels of New Richmond. It's fairly civilized. Floors 1 to 7 and 9 to 49 are bad. Each varies, depending on who's got control of it at any given time, but basically they're places you don't want to go, especially the 20s and 30s. They're dead code, cut out of the loop of normal life and left to fester by themselves.

      You probably wouldn't actually want to go to the 8th floor either, but at least it has pretensions. Originally, it had been the lowest food court in the MegaMall, and it was still predominantly a place where you came to eat, drink or have a good time. Whatever the focus of your sexual inclination, you can go to the 8th floor and watch it dancing on a very small stage. You can also score recreational quantities of pretty much whatever you want, without danger of being caught in a fire storm. Most of it is only one storey high, and they keep the ceiling lights off, relying on orange street lamps which run along either side of the thoroughfares. If you don't check the corners too closely the floor has a kind of lop-sided charm, like a run-down but cheery portion of some European capital, or the Old Quarter of New Orleans. The ceiling is covered in creepers and foliage, making the roads feel like paths in a forest. Forests usually give me The Fear, but I like 8, and always have. It's full of neon, autumn jazz, the smell of good food and, for some reason, the feeling that it has just stopped raining. It never has, of course, but it always feels that way to me.

      I walked quickly down the centre of the street, noticing what was new and what remained. The streets were quiet but music slunk out of most of the open doors, buoying up the desultory strippers who swayed on table tops. A few down-and-outs sat on street corners, stuck in main() with their handleMouseDown() mitts held out, but from the look of them I didn't think anyone's cursor was ever going to find them. It's an image problem, I think. Maybe they should all club together and hire a PR consultant, put out a few TV ads, find some way of making begging seem cool. I'm sure there's money to be made in it somewhere.

      I had to be out of here quickly, but I wanted to make my last visit right. I stopped at one corner to catch a few minutes from a news post, just like I always used to. New Richmond has a twenty-four-hour local events feed on every corner. Flatscreen monitors hang like banners wherever your go, twisting and turning to foist information on the unwary public as they approach. It helps the upper floors think they know what's going on. They don't, of course, but they spend so much time talking about the twenty per cent it covers that no one even guesses at all the rest.

      Arlond Maxen had opened a new school on 190, I learned. Big fucking deal. The people who lived that high had so much money they had to be sedated every morning to stop them going berserk with glee. The only floors richer than 190 to 200 were the ones built on top of the MegaMall – all owned by Maxen himself, the de facto king of the heap. In the news footage, Maxen looked the same as he always had: distant, a man who was always the other side of an LCD panel or cathode tube. It was some times hard to believe that he was anything more than a pattern of lights, moving across the face of New Richmond, always at one remove.

      The next item said that Chief of Police McAuley was lobbying to relocate people out of 100 and fill it with concrete, to finally stop the plebs from accessing the higher floors. Cunning, I thought, and never mind that the real lowlife have fuck-off great houses on 185. The C of P in New Richmond is one of the world's premier dickheads, and also one of the best kickback receivers in the country. Never known to fumble a play.

      The new hobby for the young and stupid was wall-diving: jumping out of upper-storey windows without a rope or parachute. And some woman had got psychoed and spread over twenty square yards of 92: the murderer had wrought ‘unspecified damage to her face’, and the cops were hopeful of an early arrest. Yeah, right.

      Nothing much had changed.

      Passing all the food stands wasn't easy. The one thing Ratchet hadn't been able to cook properly was burgers, and after five years I'd almost turned the idea of them into a religion. I took a turn off Main and walked some sidestreets until I reached the place I was going. The sign outside had been made bigger and more ostentatious, but apart from that the bar looked exactly the same. I stood outside for a moment, looking past the wooden window frames, stained deep brown with polish, at the dim pools of light within. I came here a lot, at one time, when things were different. Seeing it again made me feel old, and tired, and breathlessly sad.

      Just as I was reaching for the door, something odd happened. I thought I felt a hand try to wheedle itself into my palm, down where it hung by my side. It was plump and warm, like the hand of an eight-year-old girl. I felt it try to pull me away.

      As soon as I noticed it properly the feeling was gone, and though I turned and looked both ways up the sidestreet, there was no one there. I stood still for a moment, breathing shallowly, aware of a small tic under my left eye. So far, I'd managed to blank the things I should be feeling, but I knew I couldn't keep it up for ever. For the first time in years I wanted something which came in small rolls of foil, wanted it suddenly and completely with a need that defied all reason.

      I forced myself to push open the door and walk into the bar. It was mainly empty, a few hopheads nodding over their drinks. I went straight through into the back area, which is smaller, cosier, and also where the owner tends to hang out.

      ‘Jack Randall,’ said a voice, and I turned.

      Howie was sitting at one of the tables, piles of receipts and general administrative junk strewn all around him. That kind of stuff makes me want to go back to barter economy, but he lives for it. An unopened bottle of Jack Daniels was at his right elbow, next to a large bucket of ice and two empty glasses. He was slightly rounder, had lost a little hair and gained an alarming scar on his forehead, but apart from that he looked pretty much the same. He grinned at me affably, a picture of relaxation.

      ‘Guess you're not surprised to see me,’ I said.

      ‘To see you, no. To see you alive, always, and especially today. Dath? Paulie?’ Howie gave an upwards nod towards the couple of steroid abusers lurking round a table near the back. They rose and split up, one going to cover the front entrance, the other the back. I'm a cautious man, but Howie sleeps with a bazooka under his pillow. Dath nodded at me as he passed. ‘The guys at the back door gave me a call,’ Howie said, dropping a couple of cubes of ice into the glasses, and then filling both with whiskey. ‘Sounded like it had to be you.’

      ‘That's a big drink,’ I said, accepting a glass.

      ‘By whose standards? Come on Jack, I've seen you unconscious earlier than this. Time was you thought by nine o'clock the evening was getting old. You want any Rapt while you're here?’

      I shook my head, silently cursing Howie for being able to read my mind. ‘I've cleaned up a little,’ I said.

      He laughed. ‘You just think you have,’ he said, and lifted one of the glasses. ‘A man who lays it on like you did only ever goes on holiday.’

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