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  How long she had been stationary she did not know. Only that now her holding position on the fountain matched that of the towel prior to its violent and near-instantaneous destruction. Additionally, needle-like jets focused themselves on her prawn-fingernail finger. Wherever she moved it to these jets relocated it, even prising the hand from between her legs in a successful bid to get at it and hit the shell with occasional high-heat bursts. As best she could, she made a ball of her poor body. And waited. The System was about waiting. In waiting was stored an immense power, thought Delilah, regretting she’d ever been nice to the man with no confidence. And she waited to be blown to pieces by System Shower Unit 101. She waited, and waited, knowing it would come.

  The next morning – though by now to Delilah lightdim and lightup were states she could only dream of, not that she had slept or dreamt one jot up there on her fountain – she began to feel a powerful upward force. So this was it, then. The juddering force raised her on her fountain toward a spike in the ceiling and as it did so the disco lights began to spin and flash – this was nothing but a variation on a theme, an alternative version of death, and she knew that this time, and finally, and at last, and she welcomed it, and she pleaded for it, that she would die. Upon reaching the spike the water jets gave a huge and impressive burst. Delilah opened her body to the spike and hoped it took her through the heart. She lay flat on her back, cruciform on the water, and said goodbye.

  Yet the spike gave way to light – a bright orifice though which Delilah exited at great velocity, landing hard on her coccyx on a hard metal floor, smelling its cold aroma when she bounced over onto her nose.

  In a nearby wooden chair, the chair from the bathroom or one very similar, sat Officer JJ Jeffrey eating a fried egg, with his chin still yellow. ‘Here is your towel,’ he said. ‘Take it. Cover your body. This is not some sordid strip club. And comb your hair, you look ridiculous. How dare you turn up looking like that! Now, are you ready?’

  ‘Ready?’

  ‘For the disinformation bulletin, you stupid girl. What do you think we have been preparing you for? Not for your own benefit, surely? I trust you’ve learnt your lines. You’ve had plenty of time. Days it’s seemed like. There will be no excuses. However, let me take this opportunity to welcome you to floor 100.’

  2 – A Film

  Delilah blinked – and looked around.

  ‘There will be an audience of ten to view the final piece,’ explained JJ Jeffrey. Of course there will be onlookers, as you would expect, during the making, whose reviews will be considered unreliable. We’ll film the whole thing in here. This will be our studio. But I am wasting my breath, you know all this from the script. Stop looking at my egg. It’s mine, eyes off! Now, scene one we’ll get going with in about ten or twenty seconds time, I can’t be any more specific than that.’

  Delilah could not take her eyes off the fried egg or the old-fashioned cup of tea and its contemporary pot. Wrapped shivering in the towel – which she’d been told had been sown back together by prisoners in the System – all she could think of was water. But there was no water. This cup of tea and on the plate the runny yellow egg were all there were, and they came a close second to water.

  ‘Disinformation is an exact science,’ the officer went on. ‘Get it wrong and Society finds itself in all sorts bother. Society, if you ask me, should stop complaining so much and get on with what’s provided it. You give society a name like, er, Society, and in no time at all Society has become a playground for the ungrateful. Who puts a roof over Society’s heads does Society think? No, no, it’s given them on a plate, the whole shebang. Where was I? That’s right. And it produces the likes of you.’

  ‘Delilah made a move for the egg.

  ‘No, it’s mine. My egg I say!’

  Delilah grabbed the egg from the plate.

  ‘Take that!’ Officer JJ Jeffery stabbed his fork at Delilah’s fingernail-less finger. She gulped – and grabbed his cup of tea, risking all the floors the System had to offer for a drink of something, not that she would have, had she known.

  ‘And this is what Society gives back. This!’ The officer turned to the camera and held out both hands, giving it Delilah. ‘Hold her hand down. Here, help me, you morons. Over here.’ Some assistants rushed along. ‘Bring in the prop fork. Here, give it here. What are you waiting for? Not to him, me. What would he do with the prop fork, you idle fool, he is the only the grip. Do I have to do everything myself? If I must. Oh if I must.’ Officer JJ Jeffrey yanked the prop fork out of the assistant’s hand and attached it to Delilah’s finger – a fork designed to look like a fork stabbed into her finger but actually a fork attached by a ring of blood-disguised metal, which the officer clamped very tightly, so that when Delilah tried removing it she only caused her finger great pain, and she quickly realised she was stuck with the prop fork on the end of her maltreated finger for the foreseeable future. But she’d managed to steal some tea and that was the important thing, and other than the fork abuse had suffered no direct consequences yet.

  The officer clarified what the film was about. ‘As you know from the script, the first scene is about a girl who has had her Life stolen on the way up an escalator. By a mugger, we thought. Do you think you can manage that?’

  ‘Of course I can manage that.’ Delilah held out her hands, and popped her eyes in disbelief. ‘That is exactly what happened to me.’

  ‘Do not lie, idiot girl. This could never really happen. This is disinformation. My word, we were up for days, my colleagues and I, nights, thinking up an example that could never happen but we could use for our little film. How else could we frighten the populous, or should I say Society, into behaving? Upstairs has been onto me for months about it. And the Center of Disinformation onto them in turn. And what did we do? We magicked it out thin air. Just like that. Happened to you indeed!’

  ‘But officer, I am not lying,’ said Delilah, not ready to give up yet.

  ‘Pah. It’s no wonder that you’ve spent time in the System, with such an imagination. You just say your lines, girlie. Get them wrong and each time you do, you’ll get a floor. Is this understood? I certainly hope so, for all our sakes, not least of all mine, my sake especially, the most important sake of all round here. Now get on with it. I have terrible colic from all these eggs I eat and must get to a toilet soon. Speak, damn you, speak.’

  It just so happened that Delilah knew all the words to this scene. She stood in front of the background and acted it out, prompted not by a prompter but by her own clear and accurate memory. And this was how was down here on floor 100 when the Authority put together another of their, or its, disinformation bulletins for the Center.

  ‘And now,’ said JJ Jeffery, ‘scene two. This is about how the girl is left stranded – because she has lost her Life. We, that’s my colleagues and I again, we are especially pleased with what we came up with here. Would you like to hear? Did your agent get scene two to you in the end. Only we were worried because he was locked up with some writers in 149 and what with all the injections he’d had in his tongue we could not make head nor tail of what he told us – the stupid mumbling nincompoop. Anyway, the girl cannot get into her housing unit and finds herself in a deserted tract. Here she beds down for the night – but is happened upon by a wayward bunch, a most unsavoury gang, who are thankfully more threat than action. You will not believe what transpires next. And I would not want to put you through it. Well, I would, but I won’t. Suffice to say she finds herself nearly two days later shooting out of a hole in System floor 101-stroke-100 into the company of an officer – where, if you please, she tries stealing an egg, and the officer, an eminent officer at that, with many years distinguished service, and greatly decorated, even being awarded a medal for his modesty, which he has never mentioned to anyone and never will, is left with no option but to counter this feisty food thief with a quick stab of his fork to her felonious finger. I admit that at this point we, my colleagues and I, well we were stumped. We could not thi
nk where to take the disinformation bulletin next. We’d hit a brick wall, so to speak. All we could think of was she winds up in a useless old towel, but you’re wearing that. No, endings are not our forte, apparently. I can only hope that what we do have cuts the mustard with Upstairs. Otherwise it’s my head for the chopping block, so to speak again. What do you think? I am interested in your opinion.’

  Delilah opened her mouth to speak. She knew it unlikely she’d get any words out. She was correct. The officer said, ‘Anyway, for you the future is not so rosy, needless to say.’

  ‘There was a call, sir.’

  ‘Who said that?’ The officer spun round. ‘Do not interrupt me. Take that officer away and shower him.’

  ‘Perhaps you should hear this, sir,’ said another officer in inside-out uniform, a subordinate like the first.

  ‘Damn this insurrection. Very well, speak. Make is snappy, I’m dying to go.’ JJ Jeffrey squeezed his knees together.

  ‘There was a man,’ repeated the first man, ‘who came into the Floor 0, into Authority Welcome. And the man asked after the prisoner here’ – the officer indicated Delilah – ‘and expressed an interest in posting her bail.’

  ‘A man. Who is this man?’

  Having no one out there, Delilah was also keen to discover who this man was. She had not banked on a saviour. In her heart leapt a keen hope. And time and hunger recalibrated themselves, in anticipation of her release, in anticipation of their return to normality. She felt hunger’s strong tugs and time’s aching measurements. She thought about getting out of here, out of the System, and she could barely bear it, the soaring hope of freedom.

  ‘The man is a Nothing, sir. That is to say, we have nothing on him. Only that he has associated in the past with a small-time pickpocket. But this small-time pickpocket is too old for pickpocketing now, so I wouldn’t worry about that.’

  ‘I’ll decide whether to worry about that.’ Officer JJ Jeffrey drifted into a kind of trance or reverie. Whilst taken, he mindlessly twiddled the fork attached to Delilah’s finger, as if for inspiration – causing her great discomfort. Upon return he said, ‘I’ve decided. It was easy. I ran it through my mind. Weighed up the pros and cons. When the answer came I knew I had it. I’m not a man given to foggy thought. I am like the law in that respect, I know my own mind. While the law might not know its own law, it does, unequivocally, know its own mind. I’ve decided no. We can’t just let her go, just like that. She’s not ready yet. Not at all. It is out of the question. Not that there ever really was a question.’

  ‘And she stole your egg, sir.’

  ‘That she did. If you had mentioned that at the beginning, there would have been no need for me to waste time deciding.’

  ‘She had away with your cup of tea, too, sir.’

  ‘No? That I did not notice at all. Who can this man in Authority Welcome possibly think he is, attempting to bail such a recidivistic and dangerous criminal.’

  Delilah wondered this too. She wondered also why this person wanted to bail her. This why was bigger than that who. But biggest of all was the when – the when that went with the When will I get out of here?

  JJ Jeffrey said, ‘That’s it then. I’m going to the toilet. You. Yes, you, you edit the film. No, you do it, I do not like the look of you’s face. It is like an inside-out vegetable. Then show it to the audience of ten, don’t give into their demands of popcorn, and then send them along to the Center of Disinformation to chat about what the film was about. Tell them to pass on its key points as best they can.’ He rubbed his hands. He clapped them. ‘When all this gets back to Upstairs in a few weeks or so, I should be looking at another promotion, and the Decorating Officer will come looking for me. I’ll certainly deserve it. Am I still here …?’

  And then he was gone.

  ‘What should we do with her now?’ the one subordinate officer asked the other. Both resembled each other and Delilah had trouble telling them apart.

  ‘It wasn’t made clear, was it,’ said the other. ‘I could not interpret Officer Jeffrey’s expression at all. I failed all my expression-reading tests in the Academy.’

  ‘I shouldn’t worry about that. I passed mine, every single one of them, with flying colours, and still couldn’t decipher Officer Jeffrey’s expression. It is a special ability he must have, something we can but aspire to. You can see what separates the top officers from the merely mediocre, like us.’

  Delilah spoke up, ‘He was just desperate to get to the toilet, that’s all.’

  ‘Quiet.’

  ‘Quiet!’

  ‘So what should we do with her?’

  ‘We could feed her?’

  Delilah’s heart gave another of its leaps. But this, she thought, I must learn to control. I mustn’t get my hopes up. But it’s hard, not to want.

  ‘What, food? Do you think so? Let’s have a look, see if any instructions were left. Lift up that chair, look underneath. I’ll do the table.’

  ‘Mind you check under that plate too.’

  ‘And in the teapot.’

  ‘There’s a bag in it.’

  ‘What kind of bag?’

  ‘This kind. Do you think it’s a clue?’

  ‘Do clues usually drip brown liquid over tables?’

  ‘You’re right. I don’t think it’s a clue. But I do think it would be allowable for us to give to the prisoner.’

  ‘But what would she do with it?’

  ‘I thought she could eat it.’

  ‘What a splendid idea. She could have it with some eggshells. I know where there are eggshells, lots of them.’

  ‘Well that’s that problem sorted.’

  ‘We make quite a team, you and I. We should open a restaurant.’

  The two officers shook hands. Delilah settled down to her breakfast. Or was it her tea, or supper, or lunch? She didn’t know. She had no idea. All she knew was that what she ate was the worst meal in the world. And as she ate it the prop fork wobbled around painfully and very annoyingly. The shell texture gave her the shivers, bits of it sneaked up into her gums, wedging in the hole from which her broken tooth had finally been extracted by the intricate dentistry of the water jets in the shower unit. And the tea leaves – she ate them, and even wolfed down their paper. But still it was the worst meal in the world.

  ‘Cut!’ shouted somebody, and everyone but the two similar-looking officers scurried out of the room, dragging with them their equipment, screeching it along the metal floor, onto which Delilah now fell, exhausted, banging her chin on its hard metal, knocking herself out.

  When she awoke, or tried slipping back into semi-consciousness, she did not know where she was. She wore an outfit of terrific pain, but this was normal, and this was the flesh and bone of her being itself. Beyond that, in a tangle of shoddy repairs, existed the towel. She felt sure she was close to death, and perhaps by rights she should have been, but she was not, and had a long way to go, further than she could have imagined. Her introspection revealed that her mind was still intact. It’s a fallacy, isn’t it, she murmured on gritted teeth, which hurt, that the human being will under extreme pressure, mental and physical, retreat into a shell of madness, of sunk-eyed, finger-to-mouth-tugging craziness. More disinformation. More misplaced hope. And she said to herself, No, I’m here for the ride. Whatever it takes, whether I like it or not, and I don’t, I hate it, I’m going all the way. But where am I now? I’m upside-down, I think. What’s that noise? Now what? What now? What’s that incredible pain? She sent messages through her body, requests for precise information on what was going on. And then her mind cleared, and she knew. And she wished it hadn’t, and that she didn’t.

  In Dormitory 100 the System’s prisoners currently on Floor 100, or in transit – and they could be going up or down, or sideways – slept, tried to, or just couldn’t. This was what the noise was: the sound of people trying to sleep. And how loud they were, these sleep seekers. How they cried and screamed and hollered for peace and quiet and rest. How they dema
nded of each other silence and solitude – as they hung there in the air thirty metres off the floor, in suspended hell, in protesting wakefulness, staring face-down at the ground, from ‘beds’, if they were lucky enough still to be in them. Periodically turbines in the great walls created a wind climate that blew the beds about. A sleeping or unconscious prisoner would only not be flung from the beds in minor gusts. A greater gust could easily blow the prisoner out and have them hanging upside-down by a shackled ankle 100 feet high, waiting for the next gust to come and blow hard enough to offer the prisoner a chance of regaining the bed. These gusts came and went. And this was where Delilah was now, 100 feet high off the ground, sick with vertigo, sick with everything, upside-down, hanging by her shackled ankle, waiting for the next gust.

  By chance the prisoner adjacent to her dangled too, by the wound of his ankle, a fat man, very fat, who looked too heavy to last much longer on the hang of the creaking bed harness above.

  ‘What is your name?’ asked Delilah, when her slow spin took her face to face with his slow spin also.

  ‘I am an anatomist,’ said the man, in what light there was, a light whose yellow bulbs lived behind the turbine blades, a light that was for now, with the unturning blades, motionless.

  Delilah and the fat man span away from each other. Delilah caught the eyes of other danglers, saw them through the noise and frustration of sleepers who couldn’t sleep.

  She said, when their spins again coincided, ‘Yes, I dare say you are an anatomist, but what is your name?’

  ‘I am an anatomist,’ replied the fat man, ‘and I would like to dissect you.’

  Delilah was not impressed with this. Her first peer-to-peer contact with a prisoner and she’d expected some camaraderie. ‘Go dissect yourself,’ she retorted in a hurt voice, and hoped the winds would come again soon, for her ankle was finding new forms of pain to send up her leg (or down it), and her prawn-fingernail finger complete with the prop fork, and the hole in her gum, and her head, and especially her head, pounded now with painful blood.