The Vitals, page 19
There it is again. That being-needed thing.
‘All right,’ I say.
‘Come through this way,’ says Liv, and ushers me in through the belly of herself. I drive through a warren of illuminated underground tunnels, passing giant Haulpaks piled with iron ore. Then I’m on a sealed road, driving into a more industrial area, with its chemical smells and hazard signs. I pass through Liv’s lab, with all its bubbling test tubes, and come to a set of sliding doors that automatically open for me, and the sound of resounding cheers.
There they are, Digestive Tract plus Liv and Kelly, drinking ginger beer in a blood-spattered foyer. Through the giant windows, the harbour, Opera House and ferries.
Gaster
And now we are six. The ATA is growing nicely. Other than Col, none of us have seen Ute in person since we were all kids. Here she is, greying, older-looking, lean and tanned. She is covered in red-dirt dust and mud and splashes. There are dead flies on her hat, sharp three-horned prickles known as doublegees caught in her socks. She is in high spirits, saying the trip so far has done her the world of good. She doesn’t mention her exhibition at all; she just turns her attention to the whiteboard, staring at the rabbit parts.
Kelly holds up a green envelope. It is a letter for Queen Bee, our best attempt at walking the complicated lines between begging and threatening, inspiring and scaring, resenting and respecting. A diplomatic letter, in other words, that puts the case for immediate hospital attendance. Instead of simply handing the letter to Ute, Kelly suddenly grabs Ute and hugs her, allowing red dirt to smudge her tailored green suit. An ever-so-slight grimace from Ute. I don’t normally notice these things. Perhaps I’m becoming more observant.
‘ILL-KAY ABY-BAY!’ The chant goes up, quietly but intensely.
There is no time to lose. I invite Ute to choose an eyestalk. I wince in pain as she revs up and crashes through. A burning sensation engulfs me. I can feel the inside of my stalk being shredded as she ascends, higher and higher. I feel her push through the highly constricted Throat before entering the Head.
The others help me mend the hole that Ute has torn in the base of my stalk, taking handfuls of epithelial Spakfilla and slapping it on. Ute will be coming back down the other stalk, to spread the damage and avoid reopening the wound. This is risky. This mission could easily blind me to the outside world forever. We sit in our circle of chairs, mentally following along, willing Ute onwards and upwards. The insides of my eyestalks are very slippery. Ute could easily slide back down into the Throat at any point.
She’s there!
I can feel her triumphant loop around the eyeball and the sensation of release and relief as she dives into the Cranium. Now there is no incoming sensory data. She is on the dark side of the moon. All we can do is wait until I feel the leap back onto the other eyeball.
Ute
It was tricky, but I managed to cross the rushing blood-brain barrier without being washed away. Then I drove delicately along the spokes and threads of Queen Bee’s arachnoid web until I found a lobe with the lights on.
I am now parked under a giant, almost infinitely large tree strung with twinkling lights. Some areas are dark; others are lit up, showing the outlines of pears and pomegranates and other fruits hanging from golden stems. There are birds’ nests and multicoloured parrots and flittering fairy wrens flashing iridescent blue. There are beetles with iridescent green shells and spiders and grasshoppers and webs and webs and webs of life. There is a hum in the background, similar to the Song of Homeostasis sung in the Peritoneal Cavity, but – I must admit – infinitely richer and sweeter. I feel an impulse to worship, which I immediately suppress because I am not religious. Then I notice a small dark area on the ground some distance away. There is someone sitting there, at a desk. It is definitely Queen Bee: I can tell from the bearing and movements, which I remember from our infancy. Of course, this place is all Queen Bee, from the web to the vast twinkling tree to the ground beneath me, but, for now, Bee has focused herself in on the desk. She is a surprisingly small figure, dressed in black from head to toe. Her gold crown is at her feet under the desk. She has kicked off her black leather boots. On one side of her desk there is a towering stack of papers, and on the other side, a much smaller pile.
I move quietly around to the front of the desk. Bee is so absorbed in her work that she doesn’t notice I’m here. She is using a red pen to make marks on paper. I give my engine a tiny rev, to draw attention.
Queen Bee screams and leaps to her feet.
‘What the hell! You startled me!’ She is scrabbling around, taking off her glasses, putting on another pair. As she peers through her lenses, recognition dawns. In the distance, an area of the tree lights up and small birds twitter excitedly.
‘Ute? Is that you?’ says Queen Bee.
‘Yes. Your Majesty,’ I say, wondering whether I should attempt a curtsey.
Her face now takes on a haughty air; she smiles tightly. ‘Ute, it’s lovely to see you again, but you’ve caught me at a really, really bad time.’ She speaks in slightly halting, rather archaic Organ.
‘Sorry, Your Majesty, but we were just wondering if –’ I hold out the green envelope with the ATA wax seal. Queen Bee waves it away.
‘Whatever it is, and I know it’s important because you wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t, I simply don’t have time right at this minute.’
She points to the tower of papers in her In box.
‘I’ve got to finish this by nine o’clock in the morning.’
I’m puzzled. Doesn’t Queen Bee have servants for this sort of thing? Maybe it is important work, to do with Inter-Assemblage relations, work that nobody else can possibly do.
‘What are you working on?’ I ask. I immediately regret my question. It’s a waste of time that would be better spent urging her to join the Alliance.
‘Marking,’ says Queen Bee, tiredly. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’
This is patronising, but Queen Bee’s glance is not unkind. I detect a flicker of sibling recognition, a flash of the companionship of the old days before Mr Hedgehog, before the Estrangement. I see lights flickering dully in another part of the giant tree. Distant, nostalgic lights.
I must get to the point. It is now or never. And I need to be clear and direct and the message needs to be unmistakable. Col’s matter-of-fact reporting style will not do.
‘CANCER,’ I shout, in English. I’ve been practising the word for hours, on the long drive.
This has a remarkable effect. The word passes through Queen Bee like an electric jolt. Birds screech, lights burn bright in multiple sections of the overarching tree. Then she shakes her head, vigorously, as if shaking something out. The lights dim, the birds go quiet.
‘Don’t be silly,’ she says evenly. ‘It’s just a bit of indigestion and constipation, a temporary gastric thing. Now, I really must ask you to leave. I have to get back to work.’ She picks up the next paper and begins scribbling on it, ignoring me.
I start shouting in Organ, as if over an intercom: ‘Rabbit-proof fence down! I repeat: rabbit-proof fence down!’
It’s as though I’m not here. She puts a finished paper on the smaller pile, picks up another from the In box.
‘Queen Bee – Your Majesty,’ I say, in a quieter voice, trying to get the conversation going again. She keeps ignoring me. Tears run down my cheeks, making tracks through the red dust. Bitch, I say to myself.
Queen Bee looks up, sharply.
‘What did you just say?’
I don’t answer. Instead, I boldly place the green envelope on the top of the towering stack of papers.
‘Please just read this when you get a minute, maybe when you need to take a little break,’ I say.
Queen Bee glances at it. She doesn’t pick it up and throw it back at me. She doesn’t scrunch it up and put it in her wastepaper basket. There is hope. She lifts half of her giant pile and puts it on her desk. She puts the green letter on top of the remaining papers and then places the rest of the stack on top of it. It is now about halfway down her marking pile.
‘Thank you!’ I say.
‘No promises,’ murmurs Queen Bee, and returns to her marking. Now I am truly dismissed. The energy of it sweeps me clean away, like a spider being swept by a straw broom.
*
‘So, are we the Secret Seven?’ Gaster asks in his best class clown voice, after I’ve smashed through the base of his good eye and taken a moment to catch my breath. ‘Has Bee joined the ATA?’
‘Maybe,’ I say, which of course is not what anyone wants to hear. They were waiting for a nice clear yes or no. Triumph or tragedy. Not this no-man’s-land of ambiguity.
I start at the beginning, tell them everything.
As I reach the end of my story, Liv starts pacing around the circle of chairs, wringing all of her hands.
‘Why didn’t you stay there until she’d read it?’ she asks.
‘No!’ says Kelly, who normally agrees with everything Liv says. ‘Ute did exactly the right thing. If she’d pushed any harder, Queen Bee might have thrown it out altogether. As it is, there’s a good chance she’ll read it when she gets to it. It’ll be a nice contrast to the rest of her paperwork. She won’t be able to resist.’
‘Hope so,’ says Liv, but she keeps pacing.
‘What is it to be, yes or no?’ wonders Folderol. ‘Will Queen Bee take us to hospital, or will we be left here to die?’
‘We’ll just have to wait and see,’ says Gaster.
Kelly’s beautiful office is now a pigsty. The carpet is covered in blood and grey mush and tears and maybe snot. The Air Wick can’t compete with Col’s rich scent.
Incredibly, it’s time to switch gears, return to our desks and get to the next Organ Board meeting. There, laughably, we will keep up our pretence in the face of Baby and her rabbits. I guess I’ve put my retirement plans on hold.
Gaster
Time for another wretched Organ Board meeting. I say ‘wretched’ because it has been pure torture seeing Baby’s face, and that of her inscrutable pet rabbit, while going through the motions, listening to reports, keeping up the act. We members of the ATA are almost at the limits of our endurance, stretched membrane-thin by our desperation to hear from Bee. I worry that Liv, who has run out of Rage’s rage, has given up hope. At the last ATA meeting, she spoke of handing the keys for the Peritoneal Cavity over to Baby to simply ‘get it over with’. It was Ute who pepped us all up, saying she continued to feel ‘quietly confident’.
Twelve rectangles: six members of the ATA, two black rectangles for Panno and Rage, two brainwashed organs, two tumours. We sing the Song of Homeostasis. Liv is back to her usual white lab coat, dark circles under her eyes. Maureen looks kindly, as usual, which feels creepy now that I know she’s one of them. Ute is still looking lean and alert. Peri turns up in a flowing see-through dress, frangipani behind her ear. We sing Baby’s sloganeering claptrap, or try to, because we’re distracted by a glitch in reception. The screen dissolves into halting pixelation, then goes black, then switches itself back on. When normal transmission resumes, the symmetry of the twelve rectangles – three rows of four – is broken by the addition of a thirteenth, which has pushed its way into the centre of the middle row.
The rectangle shows a small figure in a book-lined study, metal-framed glasses, and a cat – yes, I’m sure that’s a cat, quite edible – walking past the camera, licking itself, showing its bottom, twitching its tail.
‘Queen Bee!’ gasps Ute. ‘Hi! I mean, Your Majesty!’
‘Hello, everyone,’ says Bee, as though she normally joins our Zoom meetings. As if this is not a turn-up for the books. As if there were no decades of Estrangement, and we were all still together in our primordial disc, before we curled into a tube and went our separate ways. As if I had not almost blinded myself when I let Ute drive up my eyestalks. As if we had not been waiting for her reply so strenuously that we had almost expired in the meantime.
Baby looks nervous. Her rabbit twitches and dives off screen, leaving just a patch of gravelly ground, a kerb and a blue straw in view.
We wait for Bee to speak. It takes me a moment to realise she is crying and trying to compose herself. She blows her nose, starts speaking, breaks off, cries some more. The cat tries to rub its head against her head. She pats the cat, fortified, and has another try, and fails again. She’s a complete and utter mess.
Baby, lip curled in a sneer, says, ‘Who is this?’
‘It’s Queen Bee,’ says Maureen, frowning. ‘She doesn’t seem well.’
Baby continues to look puzzled, but doesn’t reply. I realise Baby has probably gone her entire short life without ever hearing about Bee. About Mr Hedgehog, Estrangement. She stares straight ahead and, like the rest of us, waits for whatever is about to happen next.
‘So, I read your letter,’ says Bee, finally able to use some words and run them together into a sentence. A prickle goes down my spine. If she got the letter, and read it, she would not be talking about it in front of Baby herself! She’d be trying to get a secret message back to the ATA. It’s crucial that Baby has no idea what we’re trying to do. She might go ballistic, take us all down! What the FUCK! I’m trembling now. Liv is wide-eyed, wringing some of her hands. Ute just seems pleased that Bee is here. Kelly has her notebook and pen out, ready to take notes.
‘I’ve got the results of the scan,’ says Bee, holding up a piece of paper. Realising we have all cocked our heads – scan? – she explains herself in a way we might understand. ‘The Donut, the white donut? That was a scan.’
‘What?’ I say. I vaguely remember the big white donut. Once I’d worked out it was not edible, I’d retracted my eyestalks. They were still sore from Ute’s drive on them, and needed to be rested.
‘The scan took photographs of the entire Peritoneal Cavity from hundreds of different angles,’ says Bee. ‘And then we got this report.’
Queen Bee switches to her other glasses, focuses on the piece of paper in front of her. The cat tries to smooch on it, so she uses one arm to hold it at bay. She clears her throat.
‘It’s in English, of course, but I’ll do my best to translate. Okay, so it describes – it describes – oh, God, I can hardly bear to even look at it. Sorry. I’ll try again.’ Pause. ‘There is a nine centimetre lobulated mass at the juncture between spleen, pancreas and stomach. There is a five centimetre mass in the Pouch of Douglas between rectum and uterus.’
She sits back, clearly happy to have that out of the way. The cat settles in her lap and looks into the screen, as if it has now joined the meeting.
‘There’s some more information, but that’s the gist of it.’
There is a long silence. I don’t know what she means by ‘lobulated mass’. I don’t think the others do, either.
‘Your Majesty –’ says Kelly.
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Bee cuts in. ‘I’m not your majesty. I’m just another organ. Just call me Bee.’
This is too much.
‘That’s not what you said before!’ I shout. ‘You told us to call you Queen! You said we were gross!’ A lifetime of resentment, capped off by the stress of recent times, pours through me.
‘I never said that,’ says Bee.
‘Yes, you did!’ shout ten organs, all together. Bee looks genuinely confused.
‘No, I – oh,’ says Bee. ‘Oh. That might have been the Autopilot. I’m sorry to say I left day-to-day running of the Peritoneal Cavity to her. I’m so sorry. She might have embroidered or exaggerated my – er – I don’t think you’re gross. It’s just that I was terribly, terribly busy and – and sort of lost touch.’
‘Okay, then, Bee,’ says Liv coldly. ‘Can you confirm that these two so-called masses are in fact tumours?’
‘Yes,’ says Bee, quietly.
‘What do you mean?’ asks Maureen. ‘I don’t know what you’re all talking about.’
‘Baby and Bunny are tumours,’ says Liv, tiredly. ‘They’re trying to kill us.’
‘They’re baby organs!’ says Peri, quickly.
‘They are not,’ says Kelly, sharply. I can see she is trembling.
‘Yes, they’re baby organs,’ says Maureen over the top of Kelly. ‘The top one is Baby and the bottom one is her rabbit, Bunny.’
Bee ignores this. ‘We haven’t had official confirmation, but it’s very unlikely they’re benign. They’re most likely malignant tumours.’ Then she raises her voice, almost shouting: ‘We’re all going to die. Me, all of you, the tumours, arms and legs, the whole damn assemblage. It’s goodnight nurse!’
There is a long silence. Bee hugs the cat so tight it squirms out of her hands and leaps offscreen. She grabs another tissue out of her box, dabs her red nose.
‘I am so, so sorry, everyone,’ she says, finally, between hiccups. ‘You were doing your best, you were trying to tell me. And now it’s too late.’
Peri and Maureen stare straight ahead, clearly puzzled and offended.
‘What’s a tumour?’ asks Baby.
‘That’s YOU, Baby!’ yells Kelly. ‘You’re a fucking tumour! You’ve been eating our red blood cells, invading other organs while you renovate your fucking loft studio, and you are the ugliest, stupidest bitch I’ve ever seen and I hate your cheap vinyl beanbag and I’m glad you’re going to die!’
‘Bullshit, Kelly!’ yells Peri over Kelly’s speech. Then she actually blocks her ears, dislodging her frangipani, and starts singing, ‘LA LA LA.’
Kelly continues to hammer Baby. ‘You killed Rage!’ she shrieks. ‘Now you’re killing Panno!’
Peri throws up her hands, says, ‘I don’t have to listen to all this shit. Come on, Baby, let’s go,’ and blinks out. But Baby does not blink out. She stays right where she is.
