Pongo #53

Insa

The lump on my head is still angry. So is my head. I can't believe it. I had her, and not just a glimpse in passing, I held her scarecrow body in my arms and said her name, and I still lost her.

I don't know what to think about the stabbing. I was lying unconscious at the feet of thousands of Marenettes when it happened, and have had to rely on hearsay. Admittedly, many things are judged solely on rumour, but in this case I need proof as tangible as her hair on my hand. I need to know what I suspect, or else, better: I need to be proved wrong.

I've been quizzing the last Marenettes still drifting around town as to what the stabber looked like. This has not been altogether fruitful, being as how they are morons. When you ask them and mention the name sewn into their eyelids, they stare off across the landscape. Some start crying, clawing at your coat with snotty hands. At best, their descriptions usually amount to a mynah bird-esque "Maren, Maren. It is incredibly hard, picturing my sister potentially cornered in an alleyway by muggers, rapists, hitmen or whoever, to maintain patience in front of these bleating idiots, but you have to try.

I've cried myself. A lot, actually. A few times, after a barren interview with some clone or other, I've just sat down on the steps of the nearest building and cried, sobs forcing through in air bubble pops. I tell myself it's just tiredness, and that I should sleep, but I can't. The newspapers have no more information than I do.

I just keep remembering that look. Her eyes rolling in panic, showing too much white, wide like those of a spooked horse. That terror at the faces all around her. They were all imposters, reveling in the community of doppelgangers they had created; this dumb army. I see now that Cadderine was the only one genuinely ill enough to believe she was Maren Gilligan. She was the only mermaid in an ocean of monkeys sewn onto fish.

Still, eulogising about her only makes doubly sure she's dead, so I grab a cup of rocket fuel from the nearest take-out café and hit the road once more.

Miffy

Flash memory: Marty asking me why I did it. It was a few years back and we had just wrapped up a soft-lit convent scene with Peach Fluff, an Alabama girl who specialised in prop-assisted discipline. From an innovative paddle with sunken reverse lettering, my arse now bore the legend "SLUT in scarlet.

I explained to Marty that in days gone by, people used to learn a trade from a young age and that trade would become second nature to them, would define everything from their salary and lifestyle to their surname. I was never started young in such a trade, I explained, and so I did what there appeared to be a market for. I have a USP, I explained. That's pretty rare in any market place.

You're still young, he'd joke, tugging at the hem of my petite dressing gown, or cool-down-gown as he used to call it. You can't be a day over eight, me deario!
And I'd laugh, but what I couldn't bring myself to slog through was the explanation of acquisitional skills and their deterioration. The body may be fit, but the mind's ability to acquire skills and knowledge, from languages to bassoon solos, well it starts to crumble from day one. It's like some Chasey Pollen adventure, some race against time in which the hero scrambles across a brittle stone walkway pitched conveniently above hot lava, as, behind their heels, stone by stone drops neatly into the goop below.

He asked if I'd ever thought about killing myself. I said yes, who hasn't, but outlined the problems that came with a clean break: the have-a-go-heroes I mentioned before who wait by riversides, who stand in foursomes at the bottom of buildings, one at each corner of a laundered sheet; the waste of resources; the mess. He nodded with an empathy which only comes first-hand. Our reasons for trying? Mine orbited confusion mainly. I couldn't decode the world because the world would not grant me audience most of the time. His concerned his sister, that maypole whose ribbons were glued to him, forcing him to dance like a gun-jabbed puppet. He told me that getting to know me had stopped him even thinking about her. I told him that talking to him had stopped me even thinking about ways to evade rescue.

That was before my eyelashes started falling out en masse, before I invited into my home the two men who killed my best friend. Who are still sitting in my chair, looking as confused as cats who have brought their incompetent humans a fresh mouse and have been greeted with nothing but screams.

Andaw

The alarm goes, waking me from a dream in which Insa was the owner of a volcano and dressed in white satin. My gnarled right hand snoozes the appointment reminder on my phone, a backup in case the clock's batteries died overnight. I wasted no time in finding myself a good radiologist with Maren's money, and today my consultation is at an ungodly 8 am. I prepare myself for the now usual gut punch that my stomach's grey passenger is going to deal me. It doesn't come.

That's odd.

Pila

While I am half-dozing, I become aware that the porter is wheeling a chair in. I hear a voice reassure the contents that it's "just one little HUP! And onto the bed. When they have gone, I turn to look at my new room-mate. Always have been curious.
It's hard enough detecting her beneath the mass of sheets. A tiny white-haired woman lies beneath the layers of crisp cotton. Her face is inside out with age, jaundiced mustard and dry as a leaf. Her hands look like they've been carved out of walnuts. I can see very little else above the bedclothes, but I've gotten the idea. She looks as though at the tap of a twig she would crumble into powder.

I swing my bony legs around, slowly and quietly, and step out of bed. Making sure her breathing is sleepy, I softstep my way to the end of her bed, where her chart hangs, and peek at the name.

"One word of this leaves this room, you nosey old bitch, and I will have you shot with an unmarked weapon.

She has twisted upright, and is hissing through me, straining through cataracts to memorise my face. The sleepy little dear has gone, and I am staring at a snow-haired
gorgon.

"I don't know what pissing happened on that stage, or why I suddenly look like the living dead, but the second I'm discharged, all of this (she gestures at her fogged eyes, bunched mouth, bent body) is going straight to someone else. I want my tits and arse back. Nobody will ever fucking know I looked like this for a microsecond ' understand?

I notice as I do so a pronounced lump on her sagging stomach. I imagine that's part of the package to be sent off too. Wouldn't look so hot in a Chase Star bikini ad with that gracing the gap.

"If I find so much as a single snapshot of me in your clutches, I will have everybody you love hurt.

Her voice has taken on an almost cartoonish quality. I remember watching a Gilligan film a few years back and noting the unnatural bounce to her delivery. It reappears here, so that even her own spontaneous speech seems jerkily-written and badly voiced.

"You're wasting your time, I tell her. I don't have anybody to hurt. But then I have no interest in revealing everything to the press about your Peaches treatments anyway, so you may as well pipe down.

She squints, still suspicious. "They're offering a lot of money for evidence. Everyone, Zoom, Flashbulb, Glare, Portrait. They're throwing it around.

"I have a lot of money already. My pension is about the best there is. As for fame, I don't want to be visible to the naked eye most days. Plus, and here I lean towards her, my knees groaning, "don't think for a second that you're the only one who would hurt me if word got out even in rumour format that this could happen to Peaches users.

Her mouth, puckered as an arsehole, opens and shuts gently, sifting the air for words.

"I don't think you realise exactly which nosey old bitch you're talking to, Ms Gilligan. I think you may know her previous employers, though, and as a result, I'm fairly sure you know how far they would go to keep all of this under wraps. I may be old, but I'm not stupid.

I think I was on the brink of leaving the company by the time Maren Gilligan came to us, cap, or rather crows' feet, in hand. She was hitting on for thirty-five when she first started donating, and I imagine then she had to search for imperfections, or make 'to send' lists every time she noticed something that could stand to be disposed of, in case she forgot. Still, like fine lines that plough into full wrinkles, the bug spreads and deepens once it has hold of you, and if you have the finances, you have very little reason to stop. After all, the money begets the beauty begets the money, and so.

I recognised in the woman standing in front of me that day the same panic I had felt for maybe five years before joining the company. My films had ceased to be glamorous semi-work and had begun to feel like test after test. A scrap of excess flesh here or there and the camera became a gun trained on it. I used to dread close-ups, for fear that the slight laughter lines I had begun to display would magnify in the lens and I would become a monster on screen. I considered everything from surgery to laxatives, and I'd almost settled on one when I saw the ad.

After initial safety testing, an unlimited subscription. And a second income into the bargain. When the film work dried up due to my preferred genre slipping out of vogue, I went full-time. It was only when I realised the mask, that spell which had then not been perfected in its final version, didn't come off that I began a slow panic. All around me, everybody I knew began to age and die, the signs creeping across their faces, colouring their hands, and eventually I could hardly stand to look in the mirror. The glass became a cage. I had the Holy Grail of my profession: a face which would never change. I left the house less and less, gave up any idea of meeting someone ' how could you explain this?

I'll tell you what it felt like. It felt like I was in one of those stories where an idiot sells their soul to the Devil for beauty or for unearthly shooting skills or perfect poker fortune, or for the most orgasmic apple pie in the world. As soon as they sign the scroll, the Devil begins to laugh. He laughs and laughs and every breath he takes in and spews out as a laugh cuts you deeper and deeper, like a saw into an oak.