The Expanding Woman
It was the year Klingon became the official European language. Laura and I were present when the police broke down the door of the last Esperanto Institute to resist the change. There was fierce fighting in the cellars and gunsmoke poured from the external vents. The global, pacifist dreams of Zamenhof had finally been upstaged by a joke. Not that the decree was issued in a spirit of fun. It was simply that a federal society required a common tongue and Klingon was the obvious choice. A modern bureaucracy must always place economics before taste.
The fact that Klingon was cheaper to standardise throughout schools was largely due to the enthusiasm generated by the more neurotic pupils. Nobody had ever wanted to learn Esperanto, despite its phonetic spelling and absolutely regular verbs. It lacked glamour. Klingon, with its gruff militaristic timbre, appealed equally to the bullies and the bullied. It had originated as a cult among obsessive, solitary disciples of escapist science-fiction in the closing decades of the twentieth-century, growing rapidly in popularity on the campus, where new phrases were exchanged by timid freshers huddled in padded anoraks.
We watched the scrap until hunger drove us away. As we took a short cut across the hovertrain tracks, Laura turned to me with an exclamation of surprise. In the dying light, only the gleam of her myriad nose-rings confirmed her identity. I am not suggesting that paranoia is a necessary survival trait but any attempt to fit in with the new world order should be applauded. If the federal government intended to give every advantage to the misfit and sociopath, it made sense not to discourage such latent qualities in my own psyche. I squinted in the direction of her seemingly detached finger, extended to the shadows.
“What’s the matter now?” I demanded.
She gripped my elbow, bruising the bone. “Something’s there, animal of unknown species.” I like the way she talks when startled, panicky yet rational. There was a snort in the weeds.
I stumbled over the rails. Vandals had sabotaged the electromagnets with disruptors made from anvils and loops of wire taken from bundles of forged banknotes collected by the police. Regular raids on the remaining National Health hospitals unearthed millions of fake eurodollars printed by starving nurses in Radiography departments. After confiscation, these were incinerated by fraud squad flamethrowers, but the technetium strips which survived were dumped on landfill sites and retrieved by scavengers who haggled with them on council estates.
“It took the wrong evolutionary path,” I hissed, still referring to Klingon, but Laura assumed I meant her unnamed monster. A coil snared my foot and I sprawled, trousers ripping at the knee. She helped me extract myself from the tangle, hurling it aside.
Homemade disruptors rarely derailed trains because express services were fitted with scoops to catch the devices. I had discovered an easier way to interfere with commuter schedules, a technique of manipulating my environment which served to reduce stress. I would make use of it later, after humouring Laura in her belief that a beast was stalking our realm. I could see almost nothing in the gloom but groped my way vaguely to the spot where the snort had emanated. It was quiet now. Laura was irritated with my poor night vision, my scepticism.
“Didn’t you see it? It was enormous and hairless.”
The embankment was suddenly pitted with frozen light. NARCISSAT had risen in the east. A vast mirror designed to relieve the winter darkness of the Shetland Isles, it had been cracked by a meteor and sent spinning in an erratic orbit which covered London.
“I note a footprint. I agree it’s somewhat large.”
“Surely a human couldn’t make that?”
As the satellite passed overhead, catching the shattered remains of the Greenwich Millennium Dome, I knelt and tested the depth of the print with my hand. I chewed my lip in disgust.
“I believe it’s the spoor of the expanding woman.”
Laura sighed in disappointment. She knows exactly which urban myths inflate house prices and which bring an area into disrepute. The Genetic Circus had been in town during the summer. Had an unhappy exhibit chosen to flee into the overgrown gardens of our district, media interest would have generated considerable investment from outside. The expanding woman can generate nothing but calorific value.
The expanding woman owns a chip-shop. Over a period of a month, she doubles in size, giant chins swelling like udders. Her maximum width has been estimated as that of a piano. The type of piano is never specified. I have rarely seen the expanding woman at perigee, when she eclipses her husband and children. She is always civil to customers. Her chip-shop is an example of insidiousness. Many locals, even the greasiest ones, avoid our street because of its noxious allure.
