Zeruzeru: Lyme Road School Series, #2

Acknowledgements

Many thanks for wonderful editing by Lucretia Castillo, Joel Denno, Simon Fay, Sheena Macleod, Jonathan Rowe, Jake Vickers and Florian Weinhold, and many others from the now defunct Authonomy site - all of whom are pursuing their own literary art. Thanks to Giacomo Conserva who pointed me in the right direction in my psychology research.

Graffiti artwork: Minotaur picture found in an abandoned factory of Galicia, Spain, painted by riquinho, safary, napalm, no3l and colleagues. Photographed by r2hox, source: Wikimedia Commons.

I think this is a very hard choice, but the price: we think the price is worth it.

―Secretary of State Madeleine Albright

Heathrow

Candice choked back a profanity and adjusted her seat. The hostess had awoken her as the aeroplane began its descent. The screen in front was showing movie credits; she would watch it again when it came out in the cinema. Or maybe not. Back in LA they said films in the UK came out years after the US: "They’re like way behind."

Her first trip to England, and for once she wasn’t travelling as Candy Girl. She’d been almost everywhere else, performing in places like Sao Paulo and Sydney. Her parents hadn’t ever said why, but they didn’t want her going near London. Her publicist, Janey Rowbottom, had used that fear to leverage Candice’s father: London or Shanghai, you choose. After a sell-out concert, Candice was a hit in China. A middle-aged woman with the mind of a shark, Janey had the face of a Viking even after makeup, and her true personality might only be revealed in war. Candice liked her, most of the time.

The plane banked into a final descent at Heathrow. The hostess adjusted the seatbelt of the passenger in front; some businessman dressed in the grey uniform they all wore. Candice asked her for rosehip tea, for the vitamins. You could do that in first class. The plane would have to be rumbling along the runway tarmac before you couldn’t get what you wanted. Further ahead sat the longhaired drummer from Sixth Sensation. Candice had made eyes at him the entire flight, but if he recognised her he kept it to himself. The downside of being fourteen was that the men she liked ignored her.

In the terminal, waiting for her luggage was a bore, and everything she had been warned about Heathrow proved true. It was a grunge fest: the building, the people, the Third World vibe. She’d toured in impoverished countries with better airports than this. There should have been a sign: Welcome to Brazil - the movie, not the country. Come to think of it, Rio de Janeiro had a dump of an airport too, but was easily the most beautiful city. What she saw of it anyway. After the performance, security became convinced she’d be kidnapped and Candice wasn’t allowed out of her hotel room.

A customs officer, a crumpled man who gave the impression of not having slept in a week, returned her passport and, with the slightest lift of his index finger, waved her through. Another advantage of flying first class: you could be fourteen or a hundred-and-fourteen and no-one stopped you.

At least the taxi was relatively clean, driven by a man from one of those countries with better airports than Heathrow. It was a London black cab. There had been a yellow one, identical in shape, at the taxi rank, but Candice waved another passenger onto it. Poor bitch, she thought as she chose the black one next in line. Only use the black cab taxis in London, her manager Mike Telford had advised. The other taxis have a higher proportion of rapist drivers.

The cab drove deeper into London, on motorways and flyovers lined with modish, galvanised lights, and eventually into uneven streets where once upon a time two horses pulling carts could barely pass. On the crooked urban skyline, Brutalist residential blocks loomed ever higher and Candice experienced a moment of apprehension; was this route a short cut to her uncle’s luxury apartment? The taxi passed zombie humans lurking in shadowed stairwells, trash without trashcans and endless, deep-layered graffiti. The scene would make an excellent first-person-shooter game map: an urban war zone, only these buildings had miraculously escaped any direct missile hits. With her phone at the window, Candice photographed actual bullet holes in the walls of the nearest tower. Entering a junkyard that was once a car park, she stared at people wearing the national costumes of nameless impoverished countries. Candice thought she must be the only white person in a five-mile radius. And possibly the only rich person in fifty-miles.

The taxi pulled in beside a car that had wheel axles supported on bricks. A wizened, toothless face popped up in the backseat. Was the taxi stopping here? Would she be mugged or worse? Candice began freaking about the taxi driver, although the cab was definitely black.

Here we are, said the driver.

Don’t you dare say this is it.

That’s seventy quid, luv. You’ve got the right address, have you?

What? Retrieving her phone from a shiny black Chanel handbag, Candice double-checked. She read aloud the text from her uncle, Meadow Tower, Farm Estate? Meadow? Farm?

That’s it, luv. You sure you want to get out?

My luggage. Would you take it up to the apartment?

Then we’d both get robbed, wouldn’t we?

Could you at least wait here while I phone my uncle?

The driver sat back and stared at the meter. Candice manipulated her phone.

Excuse me? Do you know the telephone code for this country?

Beatrice and Gertrude

Ainslie caught up with Frank in the school corridor. What did Professor Ash say?

Beatrice is the wrong sort of rabbit. Frank’s nickname was Bunny because he was in charge of the rabbits in the science department. That, and other reasons too, like he was the teachers’ pet. Yet, Ainslie noticed Frank’s fair hair had reached his collar and he had recently taken to wearing a long leather jacket like his brother. His demeanour had changed too. Something had happened, but Ainslie didn’t know Frank well enough to ask.

But she’s all alone now, Ainslie said. If she could just play with the other rabbits. The truth was he wanted her out of the apartment; he had a serious problem with his pet rabbit Beatrice.

Frank shook his head. Ainslie, this is a secret, but I think Professor Ash is selling our rabbits to a scientific laboratory. You know, for weird tests? You wouldn’t want that to happen to Beatrice, would you?

Weird tests? The rabbits they played with in Trauma Group were sent to a scientific laboratory? He recoiled at the idea of it. Frank stared at him oddly: he too must have the wrong idea about how Ainslie’s other rabbit died. Ainslie couldn’t explain Gertrude’s death; even his mother thought he’d murdered her.

That was that: Beatrice would live in the hutch alone. She was there now, waiting for an answer.

Through the throng of pupils, Ainslie made his way to the science room. Weird tests? Ainslie had played with the baby rabbits too many times to remember.

Everyone moved aside as he approached: the Lyme Road Warriors in black, the gaggles of Islamic girls, the brightly dressed Indian girls, the African girls with their elaborate cornrows, even those pupils with no links to any group. The whole school knew of his problems. Ainslie exhaled in despair.

Mr Johnson stood smiling at the front of the science class. Ainslie sat alone at the back, with Frank two seats ahead. Girls wearing coloured niqabs and saris chatted in foreign languages. The six Lyme Road Warrior boys lounged together at desks on the left hand side. The black of their puffa jackets camouflaged the cloth strips tied around their right arms; they mourned friends who’d been shot in the riot.

Here we are again, said Mr Johnson. The girls thought their teacher went to a tanning salon. I’m going to speak to you for the next forty-five minutes about all sorts of interesting things, and in the last few minutes I’m going to ask three questions. If anyone, and I mean anyone here, can answer even one question, I will give him or her fifty pounds, no questions asked.

Mr Johnson had asked these fifty-pound questions for a while now, but no-one ever knew the answers. Ainslie didn’t understand what Mr Johnson said most of the time, and especially not when he was teaching.

I suppose someone has told you that we all came from the sea, Mr Johnson said. Not like Venus riding on her shell or some other surfing apparatus, but as mud-skipping fish. Slimy, scale-covered and with huge mouths. Boy were we ugly then. And yes, when we imbibe the fish from the chippy, it’s some sort of relative. Or, you can believe we were magicked up, that’s entirely up to you. But, if you want a shot at the fifty, you’d better assume for the next hour the ocean is teeming with distant cousins. Now, we’re no longer in the ocean, but we each carry around a small part of the ocean inside us. It’s all around our cells, to be precise. Anyone know what a cell is?

No cell hold me, said Anthony, one the LRW crew. It a break-out.

I ditch my cell, said Mustafa, another gangsta dressed in black. Feds all over me.

We made of dem, innit, said Mohammed. Millions of cellphones.

"I see. Let me reformulate the question: what is a biological cell?"

Little round things, Andrew Patel piped up. Inside us.

They come in all different shapes and sizes. Mr Johnson spread his arms. Like fish in the sea. But what exactly is a biological cell?

Is this the end already and that one of the questions? asked Rachel, a girl with Chinese features.

Are you asking a rhetorical question, Rachel?

I don’t know. When you start talking, I don’t know anyting.

That’s excellent news, because it already seems certain I’ll be solvent at the end of the day, and also because the cell is what I want to tell you about.

Ainslie noticed there were tiny lines connecting the pores on the back of his hand.

It was possible Beatrice had killed Gertrude. Or Gertrude died and Beatrice just hopped all over her, flattening her down, making it look like she’d been defeated in a rabbit fight to the death. When he opened the hutch door, Ainslie had noticed a strange fluid oozing from Gertrude’s mouth. Maybe that happened to everyone when they died.

What do you do with a dead body? He couldn’t bury her, not around the Estate. The million urban foxes in London would dig her up and eat her. He couldn’t just put Gertrude into the rubbish either. So he’d left her in the hutch inside his bedroom while he tried to decide. Two days later, when he’d put Gertrude into a shoebox coffin, she fell apart, and writhing maggots spilt over the cage floor. His mother had been close behind, hunting for the smell, which was really bad, and when she saw what was left of Gertrude, she screamed.

Then his mother cried, and said she was So, so, sorry. So, so, sorry.

Wrapped in her arms, Ainslie knew that she was really apologising for what her boyfriend Mark had done years before. It wasn’t necessary because Gertrude’s death had nothing to do with what Ainslie had suffered. Still, although Ainslie wasn’t responsible for Gertrude’s death, no-one else seemed to think so.

Even with Mark in prison, Ainslie should have felt a desire for revenge. Instead, he simply never wanted to see him again. He would be glad if he heard that Mark had died a horrible death, burning in a car wreck, for example, or burning and falling off a very tall building at the same time, but he wouldn’t know where to begin organising such an end, or whether he would enjoy making it happen. Enjoy it enough to justify the effort, anyway.

Ainslie glanced up at an image of a biological cell that lit up the screen at the front of the classroom. Mr Johnson had positioned a red laser spot on its blobby centre.

There’s billions of them in each of us. This bit in the centre is the DNA recipe for a worm cell. The DNA splits into two whenever the cell divides and, surprise surprise, when the cells divide, the worm grows. You young people have cells dividing inside you like crazy. And the DNA recipe is expressed slightly differently while you’re still growing. Which is why you have cute puppy-fat faces and knuckle dimples on the backs of your hands. Sort of like caterpillars and butterfly cells have the same DNA recipes, but it’s cooked up differently depending on the age of the organism. True, it’s a little less extreme in your case. Except maybe for Frank, whose appearance has changed remarkably in the past few weeks, if I’m not mistaken. This variation is called gene expression.

I’m still the same underneath, Frank said, if any girls want to check after class.

Now, now, Mr Allen! Plus, all these worm cells have exactly the same DNA inside, Mr Johnson continued, but some come out as slimy skin and some as squishy guts and others form the simple brain. Same DNA, but the cells themselves will look completely different. Our blood cells are flat disks but brain neurons are long and thin. That difference is called cell differentiation…

Ainslie caught sight of Lorelei and Mr Johnson might as well have vanished. She was like a beautiful butterfly, changed from a caterpillar. In the last Trauma Therapy group session, Ainslie thought her so happy she didn’t need further treatment. Mrs Brown’s smile revealed her beautiful, white teeth whenever Lorelei spoke, and that must be the sign that her charge was cured. Later she had announced that a new girl would join the group: an albino girl from Africa who only had one arm and was still too afraid to go into proper classes. Her trauma likely had something to do with losing her arm.

"Our cells are structured a lot like bacteria. Way back in time individual bacteria types merged into cooperative groups, sort of like ant colonies but far smaller. The bacteria evolved into groups of cells and became life forms. Eventually, out of the mess, we evolved. But our cells still have salty water all around them, like leftover ocean. And like the ocean, it’s filled with nutrients that feed the cells.

Now let’s look at the things floating around inside the cell. There, the fluid is not salty. The bean-shaped ones are called ‘mitochondria’. Not to be confused with the ‘midi-chlorians’ that showed up in Anakin Skywalker’s blood sample. You all have mitochondria, but none of you have the other one. So, I’m very sorry to announce that none of you can be trained as Jedi.

Imagine if we were Jedi, thought Ainslie. We could kill people like Mark with ease, and never go to prison. But we couldn’t kill them out of revenge, like Anakin did with the Dark Force. In the movies, everyone sits there imagining doing terrible things, but when we go outside again, nothing in the world changes. Ainslie wondered whether Beatrice was like Mark: a torturer who burned things with his cigarettes. So, so sorry, his mother had said.

Now, these mitochondria are what turn food and air into energy. Energy you need for getting even more food, and watching more TV. Look at this slide of an onion cell: plant cells have mitochondria like us, but also little biological machines called ‘chloroplasts’ that use sunlight and carbon dioxide to create energy. Remember: ‘mitochondria’ in animal cells, but both ‘chloroplasts’ and ‘mitochondria’ in plant cells.

Hey, Mister Johnson, bruv, said Mohammed, can you start all this from the beginning, yeh? His LRW gang tag was Westral.

An speak English. Or die, said Mustafa, also known as Silva.

I can start at the beginning during your detention, you boys. Does that work for you?

No, no, we good, Mohammed said.

Glancing around, Ainslie speculated that no-one understood what Mr Johnson said. Maybe like Ainslie they too heard lots of words that didn’t make sense when put together.

Even though they had been his classmates, Ainslie didn’t feel anything for the LRW gangstas who had been shot in the riot. Mrs Brown had explained that his lack of empathy for other people was because of his experiences when a toddler. To overcome this, she suggested he try to imagine how Frank would feel in social situations. Frank was a normal person. Yet he hadn’t appeared upset when Young Retz and Batter died either.

"You might not find it fascinating, Mohammed and Mustafa, but chloroplasts have to be inherited during cell division, and can’t be produced by the plant itself. Which proves that at the beginning of evolution, chloroplasts were in fact separate organisms from their bacteria hosts! How’s that for earth-shattering?"

A week ago, Ainslie had asked Beatrice whether she’d killed Gertrude, and was shocked when Beatrice denied it. It was the first time ever Beatrice spoke. Her voice sounded half inside his head and it had frightened him to think he might be going insane. It still frightened him. Her little rabbit mouth moved as she spoke, and for a rabbit she was very clever. Even to talk was clever, but she knew things she shouldn’t. She knew more than Ainslie, and that’s what made Ainslie think there was a chance it might be real and not madness.

It was Beatrice who had suggested he put Gertrude in a shoebox and carry her to the canal. Then she blamed him for not doing something sooner, for flies had laid thousands of eggs all over her and the caterpillar-maggots had hatched and begun eating away at her, until her insides were filled with wriggling white grubs. Beatrice had explained that if he had just left the maggots they would have made cocoons like caterpillars then, instead of butterflies emerging, thousands of bluebottle flies would have broken out. Ainslie hadn’t known that. And just now Mr Johnson spoke of caterpillars turning into butterflies.

Beatrice also knew all about what Mark had done, although she must have seen the cigarette burns on Ainslie’s body. She even knew what Mark had said to him, and Ainslie didn’t know what to make of that.

My, my! Look at the time! Mr Johnson made a show of examining his watch. We’re almost at an end. So my three questions are: first, what did Anakin have in his blood that qualified him to become a Jedi?

Everyone in the class looked to their neighbour, but no-one remembered the term.

Mito…chondria? said Yoko, a Nigerian girl with cornrows.

"I can’t believe it. There’s not one Star Wars freak here? That was a giveaway, people. A gift from me to a fellow savant. I thought I would lose my money for sure. Midi-chlorians, is the answer I am looking for."

That’s not a science question.

An accurate observation, Yoko. Next question. We came from the ocean as fish, but how did Venus come out of the sea?

Who? asked a wannabe gangsta near Ainslie.

These are just trick questions, said an Indian girl named Shreela.

Trick questions are questions. Anyone?

A surfboard, didn’t you say? Frank said. You said a surfboard.

I said ‘surfing apparatus’ at some point, but it isn’t the answer. Anyone else?

On a fish!

No. Anyone? A seashell. Botticelli’s painting, ‘The Birth of Venus’, shows her coming out of the sea on a shell.

The class groaned.

Last question. Last chance for fifty pounds. How come you have knuckle dimples on the backs of your hands?

Everyone examined the backs of their hands, some unobtrusively, some by holding a hand up in front of their face.

I’ll accept any correct answer.

I don’t have any knuckle dimples.

Pretend you do. Anyone? Is my fifty really safe? Come on! Fortune favours the brave.

Splooge, said Mustafa.

He’s right, Mohammed added. Girls too.

Splooge? Mr Johnson asked.

A number of students began laughing.

"Ohhh, I see. Logical attempt, boys, Mr Johnson said. Scientifically proven to have no adverse effect on the hands. Reputedly only blindness. Anyone? No? The answer is - gene expression. Bad luck people. As they say, tomorrow is another day. Unless you live on Taveuni Island in Fiji, where it’s a short walk. Maybe I should do some rapping? ‘I’m like the Sphinx, you can’t get past my jinks.’ How’s that Mustafa? Eh? Eh?"

Ainslie hadn’t known the answers, but he had a brilliant idea. To test whether he was insane or Beatrice really was a talking rabbit, he would ask her the same three questions. If she didn’t know the answers, then she was real. If she did, Ainslie wasn’t exactly sure what it would mean, but it wouldn’t be good.

Candy

Uncle Remo led Candice up the filthy stairs of the tower block. Unlike her, he appeared unconcerned by the Muslim men staring from the balconies, or the crack-dealer click on the second floor, or several gossiping young mothers on his landing whose arms sported prison tattoos. As if he were a fish and these were his waters.

Uncle Remo was her father’s brother, and had made the mistake, according to Candice’s mother, of marrying a Limey. There had been a swift divorce in the 90’s leaving Uncle Remo stranded in London. After this, Candice’s father said his brother had been fired from his job with Scotland Yard for some psychological issue, but he wasn’t sure of the details because they no longer spoke.

Or, hadn’t spoken until her father had