Cargo
Scanlow helped me with the unloading.
A good thing too, or it would’ve taken forever. The heat of the day had worn dust into the creases in my elbows, behind my knees, into the corners of my eyes. My godsyrup had long since gone; I was never very good at rationing.
Scanlow was a small, greasy man with permanently wet lips and a sliver of hair that he plastered over his head. He watched some female Uppers stalking past and winked at me. “Nice,” he said, indicating a towering brunette with brash lipstick and legs like pistons.
I mumbled a reply and turned my attention back to the cargo. I was always on the back foot; never quite knowing how to deal with wretches like Scanlow, conscious of my position always. I’d tried to dampen down my accent, to join in with the jokes, lounge around the Hangar One bar at the end of my shift humming old slave tunes. But I could tell, by the way the conversation halted on my approach, that they still didn’t quite trust me. The posh kid, they called me, and I was always at the end of the bar, the last to get the joke.
I decided to make an effort. “You staying for a drink later?” The cargo was unwieldy today; it bumped reluctantly over the landing slope as I hustled it from the lorry. Scanlow was on the other side, eyes roving about the dusty plain.
“Might do. I reckon I’m on a promise with that Jansis from Skylark.” Scanlow was looking the other way, so didn’t notice me cough on the dust. I tried to hide a smirk; I’d tell Jansis later what Scanlow thought, see her eyebrows knit with horror. I allowed myself a secret flash of Jansis in my bed, her limbs wrapped in my bedsheet, her hair set loose from its daytime cage.
Scanlow jiggled the butt of his rifle in his palm. “Yeah, looks like she could do with a good seeing-to. All them uptight ones love a bit of it.”
All of a sudden I hated my job. Hated everything about it, but especially this part, unloading the cargo. I’d had emotion trained out of me at the Institute – at least that was the theory, but I couldn’t help the godsyrup rising as bile back into my throat.
One of the cargo caught my eye. A female, although so skin and bone the humanity had left her long ago. I flicked my glance away, towards the bandaged sky as the heat hazed across it and the blare from the tannoy could still faintly be heard. I forced words out of me. “Come on, move along now.”
I heard the shuffle of her feet as she stumbled towards the Cleansing Station, and I wished away the sore that had opened up in my bones.
Stephanie Lam grew up in the London suburbs and now lives in a crumbling Victorian building near the sea in Brighton. She has been trying to live in an imaginary world since birth, and has been writing fiction since she could hold a pencil. She recently took a break from novels to write short fiction instead. Her story Mrs Sadler Makes Some Tea, set in a run-down bed and breakfast during the 1960s, appears in the current edition (May 2011) of online journal paraxis.org. For more please visit Stephanie at iamstephanielam.wordpress.com.
