Slow River

I couldn’t help glancing at the bench again. She noticed, of course, and laughed the laugh I had first heard a few months before I left, the ugly one. “Don’t worry. I haven’t lost my touch.” She ran her fingers through her hair, and the familiarity of the gesture here, in this flat, almost gave me vertigo.

“Let me see the PIDA.”

I handed over the baggie. “It’s sterile.”

Spanner carried it over to the bench. She took off covers, Ripped a couple of switches, then pulled on a pair of white cotton gloves, took the PIDA out of the bag, and slid it into the reader. She scanned the information that came on-screen. “How much detail do you want?”

“Not much for now. Change the fingerprint ID and physical description to start with. And add my middle name, of course.”

She nodded. “Less is better.”

It was as though that single sentence had been echoing in the flat for nearly three years, as though I had somehow just stepped out for a while and stepped back in to hear it once again. Less is better. If only she had kept to that axiom. I wanted to grab the PIDA, leave the flat, and never come back, but I did not know anyone else who could do this for me. At least, not anyone as good as Spanner. As Spanner used to be. “I have the fingerprints ready to go.”

“Let’s have those, too. You’ve used them to open an account?”

“Not yet.”

“Good. You remember some things, then, despite your distaste.”

I sighed and pulled a list from my pocket. “Here are the things I want. Her education and employment background are fine for now—unless someone wants to pay for an extensive backcheck.”

Spanner just nodded for me to put the paper down on the tabletop by the screen. “You could make us some coffee.”

I went into the kitchen, put on the coffee, and opened the cupboard under the sink. The watering can was still there.

Most of the plants around the flat were beyond revival. I watered them anyway. I stopped by one pot for a long time. When I had bought the cheese plant for her it had been just over four feet tall. When I left it had been nearly six, the leaves as big and glossy as heavily glazed dinner plates. And now the cheese plant was dying, the edges of its leaves yellow and parchment thin, the trailing aerial roots hanging like the shriveled skins of snakes.

“Put it on the table,” she said when I brought out the coffee. “I’m just about done here.”

I sat, and after a minute she joined me. It felt very strange to be sharing the same couch.

“So. Payment.”

“Yes,” I said, and waited.

“That scam you were so keen on a few months ago. The net ads for charity. Think it’s still possible?”

“I can make the film, and it’ll bring in money. Can you do the rest?” I deliberately didn’t look at the dust on the bench.

“No problem.” She made a dismissive gesture. “The hard part is going to be start-up costs.”

“I’ve got nothing left. Not to speak of.” I wondered briefly what it would be like to get a paycheck. Another three weeks to wait for that.

“I’ll provide start-up, then, on condition that it comes out of the pot before we divide it.”

“Fifty-fifty?”

She laughed. “You already owe me, remember? Seventy-thirty.”

“Sixty-forty.” I didn’t care about the money. All I wanted was the PIDA. I was bargaining because Spanner would think me weak if I didn’t. I wondered how dangerous her creditors were, and how much she owed them.

“Sixty-forty, then.” She didn’t bother to hold out her hand. I wasn’t sure what I would have done if she had.

“How long?”

“I’ll need to work out what equipment we need. And then I’ll have to find it. Hyn and Zimmer should be able to help.”

I stood. There was no point talking further until we found out about equipment. “I know the way out.”

I walked back to my flat, thinking about Spanner and her dying plants.

Trees are not delicate. You can do all kinds of things to a fully grown tree—drench it in acid rain and infest it with parasites, carve initials in its bark and split branch from trunk—and it will survive. It is not presence but absence that will kill a tree. Take away its sunshine and it will stretch vainly upward, groping, growing etiolated, spindly beyond belief, and die. Take away its water and its leaves wrinkle, become transparent, and fall.

I tilted the watering can into the pot of my ficus tree, watching the brown, granular soil darken and smooth out as it absorbed the water. I sprayed the leaves, wondering when the light green of the leaves grown in the summer, summer when I had left Spanner, had blended with the seasoned, deeper green of all the others. And then I cried.

I was still crying when I went into the bathroom. It was small, painted peach and cream, and everything in it was clean, but somehow it still reminded me of the bathroom Spanner and I had shared. Even the mirror, which was new and square.