The Year's Best Australian SF & Fantasy - vol 05 Read online

Her tone icier now, a note of warning clearly sounded, but Faith plunges ahead nevertheless. “You don’t have to put up with that shit, Mara. You don’t have to be scared of getting help either, and if you need someone to be here with you when that arsehole comes back - “

  “He won’t be coming back,” Mara snaps. “Believe me.”

  “How can you be so sure? Guys like that - “

  “Do you take me for an imbecile? A victim?”

  Faith swallows, searching for the right words. “I’m just ... concerned. I can hear stuff through the walls, you know. Stuff that doesn’t sound too good. “

  “What do you think is happening here? Do you think that man is my lover? That I need to be rescued from him?”

  The sneer in her voice unmistakable despite the peculiar accent, perhaps even because of it, and all at once Faith has had enough, has had more than enough. Feels a little like she’s being kicked in the guts herself once too many times tonight and, “Oh, fuck off. I’m not the one sitting there with my face looking like it got pushed through a plate-glass window.”

  Incredibly, Mara laughs.

  “This is funny? Some sad prick beats you up a couple times a week, and it’s meant to be funny?”

  “He’s not a prick,” Mara says, still smiling. “Well, he may be that, but he’s also a client. Or at least he was - tonight was his first visit and I doubt he left with a good impression. Lasting perhaps, but not good.”

  “What sort of a client?” Asking even as the pennies start to tumble.

  “The kind who pays for services rendered.”

  It’s not like Mara is the first prostitute Faith has ever encountered. Hell, half her former friends could be considered whores in kind, blow jobs and sleights of hand casually swapped for half a tab of speedspun bliss almost any night of the week, a gram or two of pot any given morning after.

  Faith takes another mouthful of wine, its flavour grown acidic and sharp.

  “Look,” she says. “That doesn’t matter. Just because a guy pays you, doesn’t mean he gets to hurt you.”

  Mara shakes her head. “Sweet girl, that’s what they pay me for.”

  ~ * ~

  Except that they don’t.

  Pay her, definitely. Pay her enough to mean she only has to work when she wants, and can afford to be choosy about who she sees, and how often.

  But they never actually hurt her.

  The disorder has a complicated name and even more complicated diagnosis, but what it boils down to is her nervous system is defective, has been all her life. What it boils down to is she can’t feel any kind of pain, can’t feel extremes of hot or cold either for that matter, can’t feel much more than pressure and touch.

  What it boils down to is this:

  Mara can be slapped and bruised and cut and burned and left broken in more ways than any human being should ever have cause to know, and none of it will hurt. All of it will heal, and most of it will heal very fast.

  This makes her special.

  This makes her expensive.

  ~ * ~

  Faith hasn’t bothered setting up an internet connection at home yet - no one she cares to email and too many who’ll be wanting to email her - so she’s McSurfing through her thirty minute lunchbreak instead. Greasy hamburger in one hand, fritzy trackball mouse in the other, and nothing but frustration on the screen in front of her. Loads of words, masses of infocrap - googling can’t feel pain gets her more than sixteen million results just to start with - but nothing really useful. Sensory neuropathy and congenital insensitivity and Riley-Day syndrome and every time a piece seems to fit, it turns out she’s just been holding it upside down.

  Mara doesn’t fit anywhere. Not precisely.

  Unless it’s on one of the forbidden pages, the family-friendly blockerbots insisting she maintain a minimum safe distance.

  Yet another click to bring up congenital analgia and maybe this is it at last: a syndrome characterized by a global insensitivity to physical pain. Following the links to find not a perfect fit but the best one so far, even with the short life expectancy, the high rates of undiagnosed infection, the frequency of scratched corneas, amputated fingers and tongue-tips bitten clean off in infancy. List after list of predictable injuries, obliviously accidental wounds without pain to give notice, but so what?

  Maybe Mara just knows how to take care of herself.

  Rattle of ice from the boy behind her who’s slurping the dregs of his drink right in her ear, and Faith takes the hint. Five minutes late already and they’ll dock her for that, dock her but still demand that she make up the sales, push her quota of crappy holiday deposits onto pensioners who only leave their homes every second Thursday to punch the pokies and dream of rolling over those three magic bars.

  ~ * ~

  Mara has brought fruitcake. A large, moist lump of a thing that crumbles when Faith tries to cut too thin a wedge, her butterknife clearly not up to the job.

  “Don’t feel obliged to eat it. I didn’t.”

  The cake left by one of Mara’s clients last Christmas and Faith wonders at the type of men who take pleasure in first reducing a woman to tears and bruises and bloody wounds, and then in bringing her gifts.

  “It’s good, I like fruitcake. You sure you don’t want a piece?”

  Mara wrinkles her nose. “Thank you, no.” She’s only come to say there’ll be company at her place tonight, from eight until ten give or take half an hour depending on how things develop. In case Faith would rather not be here.

  “Thanks for the warning.”

  “I don’t mind if you play loud music. That’s what Matthew used to do.”

  “Who?”

  “The tenant who lived here before.” That midnight gaze sliding over the kitchen where the two of them sit at the wonky little table Faith picked up for twenty dollars at St Vinnies, along with three matching wooden chairs. “Not as neat as you, but better furniture.”

  “Right.” Faith wonders just what sort of man he had really been. The bury-your-head-in-the-stereo kind, or the kind who angled for a free sample. She breaks off a sizeable corner of cake and pops it into her mouth, chews very slowly and tries to ignore the thought that emerges yet again from some sick little hollow of her mind.

  Sneaking up on Mara with a needle, just to see what would happen.

  Just to see if she could make her flinch.

  “Come on, then,” Mara says and Faith almost chokes on a chunk of maraschino cherry. “You obviously have questions. Ask away.”

  The cake now dry as unbuttered toast on her tongue, too much of it to swallow quickly so Faith chews and chews, but Mara is already flicking a dismissive hand in the air. Never mind the questions, those cautious-curious inquiries posed by so many others in not so many ways. She knows them all by rote anyway, so how about they just skip straight to the answers?

  The clients, these men who come to see her, they each have their reasons: sadistic power trip or erotic wish fulfilment, extreme role-playing or morbid curiosity plain and unadorned. In some, the reason dwells deep below the surface, inscrutable even to themselves, and there is only the need, a desire pure and compulsive and absolute, that draws them to her. Some she only sees the once before they retreat ashen-faced from her door, the experience not quite what they’d expected, or else, too much more. Some are regular as the new moon. All of them want to hurt her; an uncommon few wish the favour returned. The clients, they’re complicated.

  As for Mara, it’s simple. She does it for the money. And for the record, there is no sex involved; she’s not that kind of whore. On occasion, for a certain kind of client, she’ll use her hands to finish things off. But that service costs extra, quite a bit extra, and in any case, most of those who need it prefer to relieve themselves.

  What she does, it’s not about sex.

  And never mind the soundtrack; every good girl knows how to fake it.

  “So you don’t get hurt?” No matter how many websites she looks at, Faith can’t really get her head
around this. Pain doesn’t cause damage, it heralds it, and if someone can’t feel pain, then how can they judge if they’re hurt, or how badly?

  “I see a specialist,” Mara says. “Regular check ups.”

  “Does he know? How they happen, I mean, all your ... injuries?”

  That greyhound smile again, swift and lean and borderline dangerous. “He should do. He causes his fair share.”

  “Okay.” Faith swallows, hard. Pushes the rest of her fruitcake away. “I’m not even gonna pretend that I understand -”

  “I don’t need you to understand,” Mara cuts in sharply. “I don’t even need you to care. I’m not a puzzle, I’m not something you need to solve. Or rescue. I’ve told you this so you know what’s happening and you won’t come hammering at my door again in the middle of a session and cost me a client.”

  “I already said I was sorry -”

  “I don’t need that, either.”

  The two of them glaring at each other until at last Mara pushes back her chair and gets to her feet. “I realize you’re lonely, Faith. But I don’t do friendship.”

  “Even if I paid you for it?”

  A cheap shot instantly regretted, but Mara only laughs. “Even then, Faith. Especially then.”

  ~ * ~

  She doesn’t leave. Doesn’t turn on any music or even the lights. Just sits on her bed in the dark with her cheek pressed against the wall, and listens.

  To nothing very much, in the end. Random sounds of movement and the occasional murmur of voices, low-key and indecipherable. Not every psycho likes his girl to scream, apparently, and Faiths wonders why she doesn’t feel more relieved.

  (Or less disappointed?)

  Awkwardly crossed, her left leg has fallen so deeply asleep that she needs both hands to straighten it out. Heavy-numb lump of flesh below her knee, and only the vaguest sensation of pressure as she digs a fingernail into the muscle of her calf, digs hard enough to leave a little red smiley behind.

  Is that what Mara feels or, rather, what she doesn’t? Ever?

  Faith tries to imagine what it would be like to have your whole body cocooned in this way, to have never known even the incidental pain of stubbed toes, torn fingernails and paper cuts, never mind anything more profound. Might it be so bad, if you were careful? Thinking of the reasons she left Sydney, left the people in Sydney, what was left of them, Faith grimaces.

  Painlessness, on both sides of her skin: she could wish for worse.

  ~ * ~

  Sometimes, Mara leaves a note. Little scraps of powder blue paper wedged into the screen door at eye level with a handwritten date and time, three or four days’ notice for Faith to make other plans if she feels the need.

  (Mostly she doesn’t.)

  But more often lately, it’s a personal appearance, a handful of words or perhaps a whole cryptic, fractured conversation about spoiled milk, lost languages, or the tribe of magpies that wander along the street each morning, spotting grubs in the nature strip and marking each passerby with a polished-marble glare.

  “Friend of the crows,” Faith murmurs.

  “Pardon me?”

  “I used to know someone who said that whenever she saw a magpie: friend of the crows, and she’d point two fingers at it and then back at herself. So they wouldn’t dive-bomb her come spring.”

  “And was she?”

  “What?”

  “A friend of the crows.”

  Mara sounding so serious that Faith has to laugh. “Geez, I don’t know, maybe. Never did get swooped on, not that I remember.” And Mara nods, once, and turns on her heel, and that’s the end of that yet again. Two steps forward, three steps back, like someone braving herself to jump from the high-dive board, and Faith wonders what it is that Mara is after. Why she can’t come out and say straight up that maybe she is just as lonely as Faith, that a friend might actually be what she needs.

  And yet.

  There is definitely something not quite right about the woman. Not drugs or drink or any other kind of mundane madness - and Faith has known enough of these in recent times to tell - but something else she can’t quite identify.

  Mara is just... not right.

  ~ * ~

  Middle of the night phone calls never a good thing and Faith swears loudly as she lurches from her bed, tripping on a boot and bumping her knee on the corner of the dresser on her way to the door. Three months in the townhouse and she still can’t find her way in the dark, so it’s a speedy zombie shuffle down the hall with arms outstretched to fumble for the loungeroom lightswitch while she tries to pinpoint the handset’s location from its shrill, persistent ring.

  Who the fuck could be calling at this hour?

  No one has this number except work and her mum, and she’s sworn, she’s sworn, that no matter who turns up on her doorstep or what they say or plead or promise, she won’t let them know where Faith has gone.

  Of all people, she knows the importance of this.

  The phone is under a couch cushion. Faith’s stomach tightens as she presses the talk button, lifts the thing cautiously to her ear. “Hello?”

  Someone breathing, or just static on a crappy line? Hey babygirl, when you gonna come back to us? She can almost hear Livia crooning those words, and she swallows hard. Please not her, not Liv - the one person in the whole damn world she can refuse nothing, even when those brilliant green eyes are cracked and scattered and ice-locked, or perhaps especially then - and hello, she says again. “Hello?”

  “Faith? Faith, it’s me.”

  “Mara?” The voice so scratchy-faint that for a second she thinks she’s guessed wrong. Thinks she should hang up right now before it’s too late, because she really doesn’t have the strength to do this all over again, but please the voice whispers, please come get me, and her heart falls back from her mouth just a little.

  “Mara, what’s wrong? Where are you?”

  ~ * ~

  She must have misheard, or miswritten, because Grafton Avenue only goes up to number 119 and then it’s nothing but parkland. Close-huddled shrubs and knee-high grasses, with a wan yellow streetlight illuminating the sign that tries to pass this place off as Urban Forest. Yeah right, and Faith checks the envelope where she scribbled down the address. Definitely 141, but maybe it should be 114? Or perhaps not Grafton Avenue, but Street or Crescent or Road, if such a beast exists?

  Unclipping her seatbelt, she reaches across for the Melways on the passenger seat and flips to the index. The interior light in the old Toyota hasn’t worked for two years, so she’s squinting her way through the Gs when something taps at the driver-side window. Little scared-mouse tap still sudden enough to startle: Mara standing out there in the night with a half-curled fist and a face bleached whiter than Faith has ever seen on someone still living, pointing at the locked rear door with her other hand, her mouth moving soundlessly beyond the glass.

  Three frozen seconds before Faith finally gets her arse up and out of the car. Mara is wrapped in something that looks like a sheet, low-budget toga costume hanging in thick folds from her shoulders, the dull-dark fabric even darker in patches, and Faith doesn’t want to think too much about those just yet. More concerned with getting Mara into the car, Mara who shakes her head when Faith tries to lead her around to the passenger side, who wants to lie down instead, who says she needs to lie down, and so Faith opens the back door and helps her crawl inside.

  Even with legs loosely curled, Mara takes up almost the whole length of the seat. This tall, lean woman not so solid now, and the way she shivers in her goosepimpled skin almost breaks Faith’s heart. One bare foot sticks out from beneath the sheet with toes clenched tight, pallid little piggies turning their backs to the world, and Faith tugs a corner of the fabric over them.

  “Mara, don’t go to sleep on me, okay?” Leaning in and over the woman, pushing damp-matted hair from her face. “Listen, I don’t know this area. Where do I go, where’s the nearest hospital?”

  A cobra could not have struck as quick
ly.

  “No hospitals!” Hand closing rat-trap tight around Faith’s wrist, pupils so dilated they make her whole eyes glow black, and no, she hisses again. No hospitals.

  “Fuck that, Mara. You need - “

  “No! If you even drive past a hospital, I swear to - “ Turning her head aside as she starts to cough, brutal as broken glass, and when it’s over her chin is smeared with blood. “I swear I will get out of this car. I’ll get out right now, if that’s what you’re planning.” And she almost does, pushing herself up off the seat and sliding towards the door until Faith wrestles her back down, or tries to, tells her not to be so fucking stupid but she already knows the battle is lost. No way she can take this woman anywhere against her will, and she’d bet both tits that Mara really would throw herself from a moving vehicle if she so much as smelled an Emergency Room sign.