Twenty Sixty-Four

Chapter 3

'We can come here once more,' Marsha said. 'It's usually safe to use a hide-out two times. But not for another month or two.'

As soon as she woke up her demeanor changed. She was alert and business-like, put her clothes on, knotted the wan orange sash around her waist, and began arranging the details of the journey home. It seemed natural to leave this to her. She had a practical cunning Bradley lacked, and she also had an exhaustive knowledge of Halifax's hinterland, stored away from innumerable corporate hikes. She gave him an alternate return route bringing him out at a different bus terminal. 'Never go home the same way as you went out,' she said, as though enunciating an important general principle. She would leave first, and Bradley was to wait half an hour before following.

She had named a place they could meet after work, four evenings from now. It was a street in a more rundown part of town with a farmer's market, crowded and noisy. She would hang around the stalls, pretending to be in search of nylons or vegetables. If she judged the coast was clear she would blow her nose when he approached; otherwise he was to walk past her without recognition. With luck, in the middle of the crowd, it would be safe to talk for a quarter of an hour and arrange another meeting.

'Now I must go,' she said as soon as he had mastered his instructions. 'I'm due back at 19:30. I've got to put in two hours for the Sex League, volunteering on web-cam, or something. Isn't it bullshit? Give me a brush-down, would you? Have I got any twigs in my hair? Are you sure? Then good-bye, sweetheart!'

She flung herself into his arms, kissed him almost violently, and a moment later pushed her way through the saplings and disappeared into the wood. Even now he did not know her surname or address. It made no difference, it was unlikely they could ever meet indoors or exchange any kind of open communication. He touched his lips, still feeling echoes of hers. He almost didn't believe it had happened.

They never went back to the clearing. During the month of January they succeeded in making love only once. The spot was another hiding-place known to Marsha, the basement of an abandoned library in an almost-deserted stretch of country where a large barrage of eco-bomb had fallen two years earlier. The place reeked of sulfur. It was a good hiding-place once you got there, but getting there was very dangerous. Otherwise, they met only on crowded streets, in a different place every evening and never for more than half an hour. They had to take precautions like having any devices turned off, in case they were recording. As they drifted down the crowded pavements, never looking at one another, they carried on a disjointed, intermittent conversation which flicked on and off like the morse code beams of an old-fashioned signal light, occasionally nipped into silence by the approach of an orange uniform or the proximity of a faceboogle. Their talk would continue minutes later in the middle of a sentence, then abruptly cut short as they parted at the agreed spot, then continued almost without introduction on the following day. Marsha appeared to be quite used to this, which she called 'talking under the noise'. She was skilled at speaking without moving her lips. Just once in almost a month of nightly meetings did they manage to kiss. They were passing in silence down a side-street (Marsha never spoke when they were away from main streets) when there was a deafening roar. The earth heaved, the air darkened, and Bradley found himself lying on his side, bruised and terrified—a suffocating stench of sulfur everywhere. A corporate eco-bomb. Suddenly he became aware of Marsha's face a few inches from his own, deathly white, as white as chalk. Even her lips were white. She was dead! He clasped her against him and found that he was kissing a live warm face. But there was some powdery stuff that got in the way of his lips. Both of their faces were thickly coated with plaster. They coughed and laughed at the irony: in the midst of terror his fantasy realized.

There were evenings when they reached their rendezvous and then had to walk past one another because a patrol lingered or a drone was hovering nearby. Even if it had been less dangerous, it was almost impossible to find time to meet. Bradley's working week was sixty hours, Marsha's was even longer (although her pay was less), and their free days varied according to the pressure of work and did not coincide often. Marsha seldom had an evening free. It amazed Bradley at the time she was required to spend attending lectures and demonstrations, arranging promotional AI-generated porn for the Sex League, preparing videos for Firing Week, taking collections for upcoming rallies, and so on. It was worth it, she said, it was camouflage. If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones. She even convinced Bradley to mortgage yet another of his evenings by enrolling himself for the part-time electronics work done voluntarily by zealous technically-inclined Corporate members. So, one evening every week, Bradley spent four hours of paralyzing boredom, soldering together small bits of circuit boards of surveillance tech, in a drafty, ill-lit workshop where the chattering of 3D printers mingled noisily with the music of the faceboogles.