Avenging Angel chapter 8

RECUPERATION

The rest of that day and the succeeding weeks have remained with me as fragments, forming no recognisable sequence, islands of recollection like fleeting memories of early childhood. Some were dreams, some happened in waking life, but it was hard to distinguish which was which. Someone gave me the clothes I’d left in the Recovery Compound and I changed into them, kicking my brothel lingerie into a corner. I tried to make Katrina change as well but she’d fallen asleep and couldn’t be roused. She slept on as we drove into the countryside. People were talking to me, telling me things, but I couldn’t understand or respond. All my attention was on the wide lands and clouds that passed as we drove. How could I have forgotten how distant the horizon was, how high the sky?

I asked to stop so I could walk outside and breathe fresh air. The mobile home halted and I staggered to the door. Helen came with me, supporting me lest I stumble. Outside, under the sun and cloud, feeling the wind in my hair, I inhaled and inhaled again, my body rejoicing in the incredible odours of the beautiful world. Tears blurred the vista. Helen smiled.

“What do you most want to do, Clarissa? What would you like to do right now?”

“Wake Katrina, get her changed, then build a fire. Out there, near the edge of the wood.”

The driver was called Nils Bergstrom. He and Señor Ortega – Sergio – gathered wood. As the sun was setting and the cool of night started to creep across the world, they lit the fire I’d requested. As soon as it was well alight I made Katrina gather up the lingerie she’d worn in the brothel and throw it into the flames. Mine followed. As the symbols of our slavery were consumed we laughed and danced and wept and sang, and our friends joined in: Helen, Sergio, Nils, and Nils’s girlfriend, a strongly-built Englishwoman with flowing blonde hair. She seemed familiar. The men cooked food on the camp fire and brewed coffee and we ate and drank. Then Katrina was sick.

“Heroin,” I explained. “She’s hooked. They made… they made – “

“You?” said Helen.

I shook my head. Right to the end I’d eschewed drugs and, mostly, alcohol.

“I think you did not hear what we tried to tell you earlier, Ms Hendry,” said Sergio. “We leave it until tomorrow, or next day, when your mind will perhaps return.”

“We need to find help for Ms Müller,” said Nils. “There’s a clinic in Switzerland…”

Irish accent. Born in Dublin, I learned afterwards, of Scandinavian parents. The world remained wide but in many ways it had shrunk. National boundaries had grown porous. Europe’s greatest political invention, the nation state, had been spread across the globe two centuries ago. Our expanding empires had drawn lines on maps that had no meaning for indigenous peoples, and most of those lines still remained. Nevertheless, the nation state was obsolescent as a political entity.

Who’s Ms Müller? I wondered. Then I realised – I’d never heard Katrina’s surname. Or Helen’s until that day. When we were specimens we’d had no names; in the Recovery Compound we’d used only forenames; in the brothel we used our working names.

That night I dreamed I was Douglas Hendry. I woke with dawn light piercing the windows of the mobile home, panicking because I needed to be on shift… But Douglas wasn’t a prostitute, wasn’t a slave… I sat up in bed and struggled to focus. Was I Douglas dreaming I was Clarissa, or Clarissa who’d dreamed she was Douglas? Zhuangzi, I recalled; Chinese, third century BC. Dreamed he was a butterfly and awoke unsure whether he was Zhuangzi who’d dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuangzi.

I’ve had the same dream since, more than once. I wonder whether Zhuangzi had a similar recurring dream. Or whether the butterfly did. But over the restless nights that followed I had many other dreams, dark, confused and frightening. Sleep was fitful at best. Eating was sporadic, too.

– – – – – – –
It wasn’t until the following day, or the day after, or later in our journey across Europe, that I connected with my travelling companions. However, Katrina caused more concern than I did because of her withdrawal symptoms. We stopped in a small town and Nils returned with methadone. How he’d acquired it was a mystery, but it was an immense relief to the sufferer and thus to all of us.

Helen, I learned, had been recruited as a cleaner in the Recovery Compound. Many of the less attractive upgrades were given low-grade employment. Several went as cleaners to hotels and airports. It was another Olga Matveeva-inspired insult: educated, clever women like Helen were given menial work with no prospects.

“My life will improve again now, though,” said Helen, “thanks to… our benefactors. But being a cleaner wasn’t nearly as bad as what you and Katrina suffered. It’s made someone extremely angry.”

“Me, for a start.”

“Of course, Clarissa. But someone with power and influence, too.”

I told her about Jagoda’s suicide and Magda’s sale to an unknown purchaser. Apparently Sergio had already alerted the ‘angry person with power and influence’ and Magda’s whereabouts were being sought. As yet there was no news.

When I was able to listen to Nils’s girlfriend I discovered why I’d half-recognised her.

“Jennifer Matheson,” she said. “You’ll have seen me on film. Specimen Five that was.”

An upgrade who’d found a boyfriend! Perhaps Katrina’s dream could yet come true.

“Does Nils know your history?” I asked, remembering how enraged a man can become if his partner fails to disclose her past.

“Of course, quite a lot of it. One must be reasonably honest.” She smiled. “I went through the same purgatory as you, Clarissa, but I was rescued more quickly, so I was lucky. Luckier still when I met Nils. One thing I envy: the pioneering surgery on your larynx made your voice more feminine than mine will ever be. But there are things I must tell you. We tried the day we collected you but you were in no state to take anything in.”

True, I hadn’t been. I still wasn’t up to absorbing much. Like a wet towel.

Jennifer gave me a package containing a new passport and U.K. driving licence in the name ‘Clarissa Hendry’, each complete with photograph (how had they managed that?), a cheque book and bank debit card in the same name, with coded PIN, a bundle of British bank notes, a new mobile phone, the keys to my old flat, referral to a GP who’d keep prescribing my hormone pills, and a lawyer’s letter declaring that Douglas Hendry, believed to have died abroad while evading a police manhunt, had left his entire estate to his cousin Clarissa: flat, furnishings, bank accounts, royalties from publications, editing business. It seemed I’d bequeathed everything to my upgraded self without benefit of will and testament. The legal profession moves in mysterious ways but it can perform wonders.

Overwhelmed with surprise and gratitude I transferred the contents of the package to my handbag, but questions filled the space they’d vacated.

“How – ?”

“I’ve been the tenant of your flat,” said Jennifer. “Douglas’s flat, I mean. Remember, while you were Specimen Ten, being told your flat was safe in the care of a reliable woman? Everything’s fine, Clarissa. As nearly as possible it’s just as you left it. As Douglas left it.”

“But how did you get all – ?”

“I didn’t.”

Jennifer summoned Helen, who entered the living quarters carrying a cup of tea. She looked nervous. So did Jennifer. I said I owed someone, presumably everyone in the party, a very big thank-you, but I’d like to know who’d accomplished it and how. My two companions waited for each other to speak.

“It was Mandy,” said Helen, at last. “No, don’t blow a gasket, Clarissa. Mandy arranged everything. Paid to get you out of that bloody brothel, got the lawyer on side, arranged the passport and – ”

“Why? She’d set us up!” I spoke through gritted teeth. “She had us sold. What’s her game now?”

According to Helen, Mandy had ordered that none of the old ‘Dawn Chorus’ was to be sold to a brothel or anywhere else, but Olga Fyodorovna Matveeva had ignored the instruction and in Mandy’s absence she’d put us on the market.

“Mandy was furious,” said Jennifer. “There’s big trouble between those two. The same thing happened to me, Clarissa. Mandy said I wasn’t to be sold, and then she came back and had to buy me out of the brothel. She was angry then. More than angry now.”

Was she indeed, I thought. Can neither of you see the pattern? Mandy makes sure we’re established as women or at least reconciled to being women, buggers off so Olga-bitch can sell us while her back’s turned, waits a few weeks or months so we can suffer the trauma of forced prostitution, and then returns like a knight in shining armour to rescue us, making sure we’re supplied with everything necessary for our future lives so we’ll be eternally grateful.