What was that? A noise? Outside?
Daisy pulled herself out of spiralling thoughts, turned off the radio and listened hard. Nothing, now…
There! There it was again. The door was being pushed open.
‘Who’s that?’ Daisy’s voice echoed in the candlelight.
No answer.
‘Celia?’
Flickering shadows.
‘Eddie? Edward Irwell? That you?’
‘Not quite.’
A blurbfly came out of the darkness. A man stepped through the shadows its flight had generated. The man was big, fat even, tied into a crumpled jacket and stretched casual slacks. The blurb was painted with a luminous letter W. Two more Ws burned in the darkness.
Play to win
Jazir had a hard time of it Saturday night. He got some orders for curries mixed up, nearly dropped a plateful of Chicken Korma over a woman, gave the wrong change for a ten-spot puny. His father gave him an earful, told him to get in line. His two brothers sniggered through the whole episode, sharing half a smile between them.
Two hours still to go before closing, the place jammed to the flock walls with spicehounds. Working the tables like a slave for no wages. It was the family business after all. Yes sir, no sir, two Madras, four Korma, one Dhansak, six poppadoms, two naan, one chapati, four pilau rice, straight away, kind sir! (And fuck you too!)
The thought of Daisy was pressing on him. The last thing on his mind was the game. Funny then, in the midst of this feeling, he gets a major insight.
It was when he was in the kitchen, sorting a twelve-headed order. Just for luck, he took a mouthful of Thunderloo hot sauce, and got some on his hands. Did the order, needed a piss. Forgot the precautions. Five minutes later his dick was smarting with hot knives. Bloody chillies! Seeping through the skin.
That was it. Just that thought, standing awkward, trying to adjust his trousers.
Fuck! It’s seeping through! That’s it. Porous membrane. So obvious.
At midnight he checked at Daisy’s door. No answer. OK, he’d go tomorrow, first bus out. He had some other work to do that night. Some thinking, anyway.
Lying in bed, gentle Masala blurb crawling over his chest, biting his skin playfully. Jazir hardly noticed it was there, nor the two that flickered around his room, nor the one resting on the window ledge. His mind, instead, was filled with a large rotating image of a single domino. He’d gone to bed clutching his week’s purchase, two of them, tickling his palm with random life.
The genetics of chance.
It’s a porous membrane, nothing to do with who buys the domino. Witness Eddie buying them for Celia. There was only one way the lucky bleeders could affect the bones, and that was by holding them. Something happened, something to do with the fact that everybody held their dominoes tight, all through the week. Osmosis. Something was coming out of Celia, through the skin, and seeping into the bone. Or else the other way – bone to girl. A pheromone? Maybe. But if something could get in, even if it was only a message, then he could get in there as well. If he just knew the coding, the chemicals, the smell, the sweat, the nervous vibrations, whatever it was that made the bone come good. Maybe it wasn’t genetic?
They really needed to find this Celia.
In the past he’d assumed, like everyone, that the bones were made up of some simple random number chip, a power source, some kind of transmitting device locked to the AnnoDomino frequency. Now he wasn’t so sure. Not since finding out how the blurbs were functioning. This was beyond technology.
Organic engineering. Grow your own. Grow your own dream.
But how were the dominoes connected to each other, and to the House of Chances? Were they like the blurbs, half alive with something, communicating through some new process? Maybe they were filled with the same stuff as the blurbs. The grease, the gloop, the Vaz. If he could only get one open!
Sleep brought dreams. Dreams brought an answer. The image from his computer, his screen. Like the screen was his brain, and a window was opening, and a window inside that one, and a window inside that, and a window and a window and a window. Smaller, smaller, smaller, all the way to infinity. A bone on each screen. A bone on each bone. Numbers upon numbers. Fractal dreams.
Miss Sayer’s face appearing to him, thousands of times. Grab the wings!
Tumbling through space, he woke up smiling, crunching on sugar.
At least a dozen blurbs were hovering above his bed, under Masala’s command. They wanted escape, he could feel it. Escape from the bones.
Jazir got up, went to the window and looked out. The darkness out there. The blurbs had followed him to the window. And a million more fluttered over Manchester, increasing daily. He could see some of them, glittering wings through the night air.
Jazir stepped up on the sill, and crouched there on his haunches. The blurbs took off for some distant place. He could follow them, surely he could. Play a part. He looked down. It wasn’t too far a drop, first-floor window, but he wasn’t thinking about that. He smeared some Vaz all over his naked body. It glistened. He wiped some on his tongue, swallowed. It glistened. Inside and out.