Pongo #71

Pila

I am woken by a pair of firm hands yanking me upright by the throat, nails digging into the slow-healing tissue. What is it with my throat?

“Hello Roomie.”

Her smile is the single plump line of an eighteen year old. Her forehead is an ice rink.

“What do you want?” I rasp.

Gilligan releases her grip and I slump against the stiff pillows.

“Just to say goodbye. I’m checking out today.”

“You were nearly dead yesterday. I hoped you’d do a home run on that one.”

“Charming. Good to know my fans haven’t deserted me altogether.”

“I was never your fucking fan.”

“Oh, you’re all my fucking fans, Ms Quene. Especially the little darling who gave me all this -” she cups the firm skin of her fruity breasts. “Gave it back, that is.”

“It’s Pila. I’m not Ms Quene, even if I once was.
You above all people have no right to call me that.”

She pouts. Damn, she’s beautiful. I smell the leather of her knee high boots before I see them.

“You know,” her raspberry lips savour each word.

“I didn’t realise who you were at all when I last threatened you. I had a vague idea from what you said that you were some Marley runabout. It was only after I came round that someone told me exactly who I’d been sharing with. Maybe someone told me. Maybe I remembered. I don’t know.”

“So it’s just goodbye then. That’s all you came to grab me by my wound to say? Well it’s a good job you never took on a career as a doctor. Your bedside manner’s godawful.”

“Why do you think I haven’t had you killed, Pila?”

“I have absolutely no idea. I really haven’t. I’ve been wondering that, and the best solution I can come up with is a severing of your ties with the company if you hurt one of their pensioners.”

“Please.” She laughs briefly, humourlessly. “As if there aren’t dozens of companies out there now, running round like worker ants for people like me.

If I left this one, a bunch of others would be sucking my toes to convince me to join them.”

She leans in, her chest looming like a swollen horizon.

“You’d suck my toes, wouldn’t you Pila?”

Her breath is hot cinnamon.

“You’d suck them like you sucked them back then.”

She strokes my shriveled cheek, and my eyes close despite themselves, and as if on a counterbalance, my mouth opens, my tongue more grey than pink, but still wet. A toned finger, nail rounded but not too round, trams along the tracks in my cheek, igniting every half-collapsed nerve ending, trespassing onto the delta of my mouth. I wish, I wish for the first time since the stabbing that I could have my firm, hot cheeks back, just for a moment. Just so her finger wouldn’t hesitate with revulsion. A long low tremor runs through my spine.

“But only if I choose to let you.” She withdraws the finger sharply, just as it grazes the fine hairs by my top lip. “That’s the way it works.”

After a second, I compose myself enough to speak.

“You still haven’t answered the question. Why haven’t you killed me?”

“Maybe I’m nostalgic. Do you want me to kill you?”

“Sometimes, but don’t flatter yourself. Anyone would do.”

She smiles, shakes her head. “You don’t mean that.” Then down she goes onto the bed.

“You know, you could get it all back, Pila. The whole lot. I mean Christ, girl. You look half-decomposed. You know you could get it back.”

“No.”

“I could help you. Look,” her voice goes listy. “In this state, I give you maybe a month at most.
I suspect that left to your own devices, you would have died years ago. As it is, you’ve got another chance. Sure, whoever knifed you burned out any chance of Marley’s treatment helping you in any way. I doubt their stuff will work on you again. That retro process is very scarring after all, but you can get it back, all of it. All you need to do is switch companies.”

“I don’t want to,” I tell her. “It’s been exhausting, never being allowed to be exhausted. My limbs have been as spry as a faun’s for far too long, and while my body may not realise it, my mind’s been at full stretch for too long. You can soak up too much. When I woke up and found that I had lost my looks, the ones I’ve been mummifying for years under scarves, the smile I’ve spat at in the glass every day these past few years, it was like having a very ornate set of fetters snipped off my feet. I don’t want it back, in all honesty, and that may be hard for you to comprehend, but try. Anyway, you know as well as I do that I have my loyalties. The company pay my pension after all. They may have screwed me over psychologically, but they meant well -”

“Come off it,” she scoffs. “Who do you think pointed those boys towards you – the ones who cut your throat in the first place? Your details, along with everyone who ever worked at Marley’s, are kept on a labyrinth of a database, only accessible to the highest eschelons.”

“What?” I realise I never even asked them. Well, you don’t challenge someone with a scimitar in their hand. A paring knife, even. My scars ache, as if they are glowing. “How the hell would you pretend to know anything about that?”

“I was curious, so I paid a lot of people a lot of money to find out.”

“I don’t believe you, you blood-gobbling witch. This is some campaign to convince me to switch to a rival. Or just to drive me mad. You can’t take that I didn’t want to play your fucking games back then – that I’d had enough. This is some revenge you’re trying to make me exact upon myself, so you don’t get your hands dirty. Either that or – I don’t know.”

“Sure,” a smirk creases her face. “A campaign for another company. And what – I’ve just been beta-testing Marley’s all this time? You suspect me of espionage? I pay people to dress me in the morning, with good reason, and you’re right about one thing: I do NOT get my hands dirty. I rarely undertake any serious responsibility myself, so I never leave a trail of crumbs behind me, so to speak – only a bunch of fictional characters for people to obsess over. You see, contrary to popular belief, not everyone wants their legacy to remain forever. I don’t care what happens after I’m gone. I won’t be there to make anything out of it anyway, but that said, I do not intend on going just yet. Not while there’s a glow in the brand.”

“That’s a godawful bag of lies, Maren Gilligan,” I tell her, in finest schoolmarm timbre. “Branding something marks it for good by its very definition.”

“Skin dies,” she shrugs, her almond eyes lidded
then unlidded

“Yours has a habit of not doing so, even after it should have. You want to stay like this for good. It’s just that you extend today into tomorrow, doing it bit by bit, partly to test the water, partly so nobody suspects anything and partly so you can tell yourself you’re just lucky. Maren, you should be collecting your pension and any bartender would consider IDing you! I don’t know when you’ll decide to die, but it won’t be soon. But don’t tell me you don’t want to leave your mark. You want to BE the permanent mark. Problem is, you’re not alone, and however much money you’re making, there’ll be someone ready round every corner to get you. They’re going to get you,
Maren, so just watch who you screw with.”

She pauses, thinks for a moment.

“Every point of contact I have with the outside world is made by my employees.”

“Oh, your employ -”

“And I trust everyone I pay, because I pay them so fucking much they’d be idiots to betray me.”

“Really?” My left eyebrow reaches up like a TV evangelist.

“Oh what, now you’re going to tell me something new?”

“You could say that.” And I tell her what I saw that night, taking great care to include the detail about her pissing herself.

Maren Gilligan turns every colour of the paint chart.

“I didn’t kill you because I wanted to find out what happened,” she hisses. “I thought it would have been you, and you know what? I honestly wouldn’t have blamed you. I was going to get that bitch to type my memoirs and give her a cut. I was going to ask her to go in on a lot of things with me, but you see what impatience does? You see?”
She rises.

“This dose is modern,” she says, brushing a thumb against her nipple. “It’s not like in our day. This body doesn’t fly and squeal when punctured. No knife wound will make me into that creature you shared a room with. Not even a silver fucking bullet. And so, though my release plans are changed somewhat – I was due to give an immediate press conference on my ‘nervous exhaustion’ – they’re still rather exciting.”

As the most prominent film star of our times turns to leave, her fingermarks still necklacing my throat, she draws from those skin-scented boots a kitchen knife.

“Maybe I was going to kill you. Whatever happened would have been improvised. I had no firm plans other than information gathering. But you know what? I like your spirit, and I always did,” she sighs. “It’s a shame you don’t want my help. I could get those delicious thighs back for you, that fine arse you used to have, the breasts – you were a goddess, Pila.”

“I don’t want them back. They’re filled with blood.”

“Oh, you’re getting all morally conscious. That’s sweet. Bit late, though, don’t you think?”

“I just don’t want them back.”

“Have it your way.” She kisses her fingers and walks them across my cheek to my bunched, half-swallowed lip. “Well anyway, as I say, I have things to do.”

She sounds like a school teacher organising a class outing to the zoo. Twirling the knife once more, she slides it back into the leather hugging her calves. I wish I were hugging her calves.

Before she slides out of the door, she turns and winks the wink of a thousand parts.

“E tu, Florin?”