“Every month I check my wages—every month I hope someone somewhere made a mistake, or a program screwed up and I’ll be a billionaire. Every month it says I made seventeen hundred.”
“You should know better,” Cel said, sitting down to unwrap her food.
“Hey, Bird. You think I should know better. No, and I’ll tell you why. Hope is good for a person. You think I’d keep shoveling shit if I knew, really knew all I’d get was seventeen hundred?”
There were two other people waiting to use the reader to check their wages, so Kinnis moved aside. He sat between me and Meisener. “You got paid yet?” he asked Meisener.
“Na. Timed it all wrong. I’ll have to wait until next month now.”
“You?”
I blinked at him. Payday. Money. I nodded and joined the queue at the reader. Put my hand in when it was my turn, read the figures. Almost sixteen hundred. I had earned money, in my own right, without family help, without hurting anyone else. I drew my hand out and looked at it. I wondered if Paolo would get paid.
When I woke up the next morning the sun was bright and I lay in bed a few minutes, smiling. I was alive. I had the next two days off. I had been paid.
Sixteen hundred was not much, but it was manageable. I still had a chunk left from before—nine hundred, maybe—and the scam would net tens of thousands. I felt rich.
I took breakfast onto the roof and watched the clouds, the glints from the river. There were several barges on the water. I wondered what they were carrying today. Steel from Scunthorpe, maybe? I closed my eyes and let the breeze blow soft against my lids. People had been using the river for thousands of years. Wheat during Roman times. Clay before that. Maybe blue beads arid young, scared slaves; a tun of beer. And before then, in the days when boats were hollowed-out logs, scraped goatskins, dried fish from the coast, dyed feathers for a religious rite. What had the weather been like then, and how had the air smelled? Maybe life had been more simple. Maybe it was possible to sit high up every day of your life and just sniff the breeze. Maybe not.
When I climbed back through the window, the sun was shining full on the west wall, adding yellow to the already acidic green. Very ugly. I turned away from it, then turned back. This was my flat. I could change the color. I didn’t have to tell anyone, or ask, or take them into account. I could spray everything purple and orange if I wanted. I laughed, delighted. Mine.
Perhaps something neutral, alabaster or beige. Or linen. No, not warm enough. Maybe peach? The possibilities were overwhelming.
I sat down at the screen and pulled up the inventory of a couple of decorating shops. There were little tables that showed you how to work out how much paint you’d need. I did that. Decided I could afford it quite handily. Except I’d forgotten all the brushes and dustcloths and cleaning fluid and trays… I added it up again. Still manageable.
But then I looked at the walls again, at the kitchen, the bathroom, the steep stairway and complicated gables over the bed. I’d never picked up a brush or spray gun in my life. Where would I start?
Maybe Tom could help? But he was old. The only other people I knew were Spanner, and my shift at Hedon Road, and I couldn’t, wouldn’t, ask them.
Or there were Ruth and Ellen.
I remembered that interview with my mother on the net. How do you persuade employees or team partners to take on such difficult projects? the interviewer had asked.
Easy, she said. People love to be asked to help.
Easy.
It took twenty minutes pacing the living room before I could bring myself to tap in their number.
Ruth answered. The tendons down each side of her neck tightened for a second when she saw me, but she managed a guarded smile. “Lore. What can I do for you?”
“I just got paid. And I know we agreed to have dinner sometime, the three of us, but I wondered if I could impose on you for some help instead. My flat needs decorating and, well, I don’t know how. I thought maybe you could give me, ah, some advice. If you’ve ever done it yourself. I mean, I’ve never even bought paint before.”
She was looking puzzled. “You want me and Ellen to come help you choose paint.”
“Essentially, yes.”
She smiled, and this time the skin around her eyes stretched. “You’re settling down, then?”
“Yes. The flat’s nice, except for the color. And the temperature. I think it’ll be cold in a month or so.”
“Then you’ll need Thinsulate paper for all the outside walls. Have you thought about colors?”
“You’ll help, then?”
“Of course we’ll help! Why don’t you bring the measurements and samples and things round and we’ll have dinner.”
Dinner. “When?”
“The weekend.”
I grinned at her so hard I think there were tears in my eyes. “The weekend would be wonderful.”
Chapter 16
Lore is seventeen. Her final exams are done. Two weeks before the end of her last term at school, her mother calls.
“Are you ready to leave that place yet?”
Lore grips the table beside the screen. “You’ve decided? You’ll let me do it?”
“I’ve decided. I’ll let you do it.”
“Complete control?”
“No. You’ll be Marley’s deputy.”
“But-”
On-screen, Katerine holds up her hand. “Marley has graciously agreed to let you co-lead, unofficially, but I can’t justify giving you complete control of such a high-profile project.”
“High-profile? The Kirghizi project?”
“It is to the Kirghizians.”
And now Lore grins. Second-in-charge of a huge project. The one she has been waiting for. “When are we scheduled to start?”
“Our contract with the Kirghizian government is valid as of this afternoon. I suggest you talk to Marley. And Lore, don’t screw up.”
Lore packs, hands shaking—partly from a fierce exhilaration, partly from nerves. Ever since the company started bidding on this project she has had her heart set on it. She has disk after disk of plans, all ready to go. Working with Marley will not be too bad; she usually gets on well with her uncle’s husband. He’ll let her use some of her ideas, surely. She leaves without a backward glance, for the school, but she takes a taxi ride past the sex club for old times’ sake. She thinks briefly of Anne, the first one. She will never come here again. She will probably never use a sex club again. There is no need.
Lore makes several overflights of the Kazakhstan region three hundred miles north of the Aral Sea. The area is suffering from the Soviet Union’s disastrous attempts in the middle of the last century to turn the sun-drenched deserts of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenia, and Kirghizia into a vast cotton monoculture. The Aral Sea, once the largest body of water in Central Asia, is beyond immediate salvation. The Soviet regime drained the inland sea of two-thirds of its volume, diverting its sources, the Amu Darya and Syr Darya, into thousands of miles of irrigation canals and ditches crisscrossing the new fields of cotton that stood where once there had been only arid steppe. Muynak, once the Aral’s largest fishing port, now stands forty-five miles from the water’s edge. Rusting hulls of abandoned vessels and barges line what was once the shore. When Lore orders the copter lower, she sees that many of the hulks have been scavenged for the metal.
The family has won the first of the multilevel, forty-year programs: to clean up the water table of Kirghizia and route the clean water back to the Aral. Marley has suggested that her initial brief should be the fertilizer, pesticide, and defoliant pollution resulting from wholesale crop spraying throughout the nineteen sixties, seventies, and eighties. He will deal with the biological contamination—bacteria, viruses, parasites, and algae. If she has any questions, all she has to do is ask. And he, of course, will have to approve any requisitions over ten million.