The Survival of Molly Southbourne Read online

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  For Maria Adeola

  I shall feel the affections of a sensitive being, and become linked to the chain of existence and events, from which I am now excluded.

  —Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

  One

  I am holding a telephone while watching a house burn.

  “Please hold,” says the voice on the other end of the line.

  It is both my house and not, but that will become clearer with time. It is not an accident; this is arson, and were this crime to be investigated, I would be found guilty of it, even though I had nothing to do with the decision to set such a fire. I would be found guilty of using an accelerant, in this case petrol, and piling furniture in a manner that ensures the best blaze. My fingerprints on the can, on all the furniture, my DNA everywhere. An abundance of genetic material, in fact. An investigator paying attention would find more of my blood than it is possible to find from one person.

  “Please hold.”

  The phone receiver is smeared with my blood, as is the Hogarth Avenue sign where I brushed against it on my way here. I’m bleeding from both palms because of my escape through a broken window. I covered the jagged edges in fabric, but it seems the glass cut through. I was so jacked on adrenaline that I didn’t feel it. I have cuts on my knuckles from fighting and circular bruises around my wrists and ankles from being chained down. My ribs are bruised and every movement hurts. I slide to the floor of the phone booth, stretching the cord, fielding waves of déjà vu. In typical London fashion, the booth is filthy, but I can’t care right now. I’m not clean, anyway. The left arm cuff of my top rides up, and I can see the crude tattoo of the phone number I just called. A new tattoo, redness all around, some dots of blood because it wasn’t done well.

  The house flares up, triumphant like a Neanderthal’s campfire, with flames rising up in the morning breeze, yellow highlights against the blue-black cloud of smoke. Shame. It’s a good house. It was a good house.

  “Hello?” says a harried voice.

  “Hello,” I say. I don’t think my voice sounds as strong as I would like.

  “Confirm your name, please?”

  “I already did.”

  “Again, please.”

  “Molly Southbourne.”

  “Thank you. Are you injured?”

  “Yes, but I think it’s minor.”

  “Are you bleeding?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you been unconscious?”

  “Yes.”

  “How many?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “How many of them were there?”

  Oh. Them. “Five or six.”

  “All right. Molly, I need you to stay exactly where you are. We need to contain the blood, as I’m sure you know.”

  “Yes.”

  “A team will be with you in fifteen minutes. Do not come out of the phone booth and do not speak to anyone.”

  “What about the police?”

  “Especially not the police, Molly. Don’t worry. We’ll fix whatever happens.”

  * * *

  They’re here in ten minutes, six of them, one in a suit with official papers and ID that makes the police and fire service melt away. Five of them are in protective gear, hazmat or something. They spray me where I stand even before checking my medical condition. They follow my path on Hogarth Avenue, spraying the pavement where they find blood. They incinerate my clothes as a medic attends to my hands and the rest of my body until she is convinced that I no longer leak essential fluids. When the fire is out, they cover the burnt house in a fumigation tent and do whatever it is that they do. I sit in a car and wait. I sort through memories and impressions.

  Neighbors have gathered to watch. I know them because Molly knew them. She never interacted, just observed their lives in silence. The lone old man with the suspect video equipment delivery. The pregnant newlyweds to her left. The snooty kid from number fifteen. Murder-cake woman at number eight, suspected to have killed her husband, but not served time for it, likes to bake at Christmas.

  The suit comes to speak to me, or rather to interrogate me under the guise of debriefing. I tell him a version of events, enough to allay his suspicions but not enough to expose me.

  When we’re done he says, “Okay, Molly, we’ll get packed up, then take you to your new place in a few minutes. Stay here.”

  “Okay.” I close my eyes and rest my forehead against the cool glass.

  The thing is, I’m not Molly Southbourne.

  * * *

  Okay, I am, but I’m not the Molly they think I am.

  I look, to any observer, like I’m twenty-six, twenty-seven. I’m only about eighteen hours old.

  The Molly Southbourne they think I am is dead, her body burned up in the fire. I did not kill her.

  Molly Southbourne was a freak whose blood grew genetically identical duplicates of her. One drop of blood, and a new molly popped up, but it wasn’t cute. It wanted to kill her. Molly spent her whole life killing her duplicates just to survive, but it was too much for her to deal with emotionally, so she arranged to kill herself.

  I am one of the duplicates, the last surviving one, I believe. She made me, beat me into submission, chained me down, told me her story, then gave me the keys to free myself, not caring whether I lived or died, whether I took her identity or not. She set fire to the house, and died fighting other duplicates that she made.

  I escaped, and here I am.

  These people cleaning up are part of an arrangement Molly’s mother made before she died. One phone call, and whatever mess Molly has made gets neutralized. They used to get called in when she was overwhelmed by duplicates and unable to clean up the bloody chaos created in the process of murdering them. That’s why Mr. Suit and the rest of them think they are here.

  They are treating my spilled blood with chemicals because they think it will grow duplicates. It will not. Duplicates are sterile.

  In my head, I can feel the slow return of Molly’s memories. Stories Molly told me just hours ago recur in stereo. It’s a weird double image, double sensation.

  I hope they don’t take me out of London.

  * * *

  They find me a place in Acton, a two-bedroom flat on a quiet street. They give me the credentials for a building society account with a warning not to “overdo it.”

  “Do not, under any circumstances, go back to Hogarth Avenue. Good luck, and be more careful when you bleed.” And he is gone.

  Molly’s rules are stricter:

  Don’t bleed.

  If you see yourself coming, run.

  Blot, burn, bleach.

  None of this is a risk to me, so I ignore the rules, and I ignore the fitness and hand-to-hand combat that Molly needed for survival since childhood.

  Drones have no fear of laying eggs.

  All I have to do is keep my head down and my mouth shut; a quiet life, come what may.

  That’s the key to survival.

  Transcript

  [Video is blank
at first, showing a furnished front room with nondescript furniture and dozens of books both in and out of shelves. Prof. Down (PD) enters the frame from left and sits on a stool.]

  PD: Hello, this is Professor Down, first recording. I’ve decided instead of accepting my fate, I’m going to try something radical. It might not work, but there’s no alternative, so I’m going for it.

  I was going to use a central line to deliver nutrients straight into my bloodstream, like they do for cancer patients on Total Parenteral Nutrition, but that needs initiating and maintaining. I can’t find anyone to do it for me without a reasonable explanation, which I don’t have. I could pay a medical student, but when I made overtures they looked at me as if I were a crypto–drug addict.

  I’m going to have to eat the food, eat myself into survival. Cut energy use right down, weaponized laziness.

  This is strangely exciting, in part because I am transgressing against a lifetime of healthy eating habits.

  I’ll do what I can.

  Permitte divis cetera.

  Leave the rest to the gods.

  [cut]

  Two

  I think of Molly, the original, a lot. I dream of her as well.

  I dream I am her.

  I shut and lock the door on the shackled girl, then turn to the mollys, naked, aflame, and enraged, all of them. There is fire and smoke everywhere, and I can feel my throat tightening, but I have a mission. I fight, though not to win, but to provoke. I want them to fight back, as ferocious as mollys can be, focused on me and not the person behind the door. Something pops and glass shards spray the room.

  They are on me, hot sizzling flesh, choosing to grapple rather than strike because of the close quarters and abundant obstacles. There is pain, but I cannot shout because of the smoke. With this lack of oxygen, a lung full of the wrong stuff, all I can do is croak. How are they still active? What are they made of? I just want to give up and die.

  They bring me down with a clumsy playground maneuver, pushing me over an extended leg, slamming the back of my head on the floor because I didn’t tuck my chin in. My left shoulder pops out of the joint, and my belly is on fire. I know I should smell the cooking flesh, but I don’t. A face rises, blackened and bald from the fire, and I punch it with my good arm just to keep the dance going. It has the desired effect and the mollys do not flag. They bite and they gouge and they hit me with furniture-derived improvised weapons. I am above it all now, as the fire spreads and the lack of oxygen narcotizes me. . . .

  Then I wake and I open the window and remember who I am, and who I am not. There is always traffic in Acton, always a siren or a scream, or the songs of the amorous or drunk, and it reorients me.

  The stories Molly told me are as seeds, each one a focal point for the budding and flowering of memory. The stories of Southbourne Farm, of Pile the dog, of Mykhaila and Connor, her parents, become real images and sequences in my mind. The love for her parents and affection for Professor James Down grow to fill some of the emptiness I have, and is counterbalanced with guilt and regret for being responsible for their demise. And death. So much death, a lifetime of it, from childhood. Killing mollys through the decades.

  The last thing that comes to me is my own creation. I see the self-cutting and the dripping of blood into a pile of wood, and the waiting as my cells consume the wood and build a body. I see Molly Prime dress me up and then . . . nothing. It confuses me, this viewpoint, but it is one of Molly’s last memories before she died. My memory now.

  * * *

  Everything is new, and once I learn to endure the pain and nightmares, I enjoy discovering the rest of existence. I walk a lot, taking in the aromatic smells of the kebab shops, feeling the wind on my face, staring at the faces of strangers in crowds, touching the barks of different kinds of trees, examining the different kinds of vomit on Sunday mornings from Londoners’ Saturday nights out, considering the weird inconsistencies of the city geography: Acton hosts Hammersmith Hospital, while Hammersmith hosts Charing Cross Hospital. There is no actual hospital at Charing Cross. The pineapples that tip the obelisks on Lambeth Bridge, the weird, incongruously bright Madonna outside the Church of the Precious Blood in Southwark, and the monuments to the disinterred dead whose graves were along the proposed Underground lines. After reading about it in a book, I visit Sir Richard Burton’s tomb and see for myself the stone tent at Mortlake.

  I stare at clouds. I have them in my memory, but that does not prepare me. I go to the park, lie down, and look at the sky, making shapes.

  The record shops and street dancers fascinate me, and I spend time in Shepherds Bush and Ladbroke Grove, stealing fashion bits and pieces here and there till one of the kids says I look like a Buffalo Gal from the 1982 Malcolm McLaren hip-hop song. He means it as a put-down, but I don’t care. What is fashion but periodically changing attitudes? What is old will become new again, and the new will become old. So I wear the large ruffled skirts and a variety of hats and masklike eye shadow because I like it. I’ll change when I feel like it.

  I cut myself and bleed on the carpet, but nothing grows from my blood. The voice in my head most of the time is Mykhaila’s, and she explains the duplicates to Molly.

  They are not clones or sisters. Best to consider them a kind of fleshy construct, biological robots, androids. Or should that be gyneoids?

  So, who programs the robot? Why do they attack? And what is to become of me, now that Molly One is dead?

  This existence fills me with an aimlessness. I am constantly waiting to be attacked by mollys, but they never come. The waiting marinates my blood with adrenaline, which makes me anxious and ready for a fight. No duplicates appear, I never see my own self coming toward me.

  I go to the farm where I was born, where Molly was born, but nothing remains of the Southbourne family. The house is rubble, the fencing removed, the land reclaimed by vegetation, which surprises me because it was sold, not abandoned.

  I go to my old university, clinging to familiarity like ivy to a tree. I do not feel better for doing this, worse when I see James Down, my erstwhile lover. I don’t think it’s been two months since I, since Molly One, last saw him, yet he has ballooned in size. His clothes are ill-fitting, his cheeks swollen, squeezing his eyes into slits, his skin blotchy with eruptions and diseased. I see him in the quad, stuffing his face, not with hunger but with a compulsive desperation that speaks of addiction. The last time I saw him, he said I had killed him. He seems to be intent on killing himself.

  I leave without speaking to him, with a deep feeling of dissatisfaction.

  The whole nostalgia business leaves me with an ache, and I pick up a guy to fuck from a jazz place in Hammersmith, but it doesn’t feel right. He is unhappy when I tell him to leave, but I insist. I think he’s going to hit me, or try to hit me, but he seems to think better of it. Good for him. The mood I’m in, I may have killed him if I had to fight him off. I have a strong hunger, a need to be held by a woman, but I do not know the rules so it takes weeks before I meet someone. This helps still my restless soul for two days, but the yearning returns, that yammering of the mind, that disquiet. I work my way through a number of women in West London, but my ache does not go away, and I get a reputation for not being serious. I cannot find the right femme because I am not the right femme.

  I think I’m missing my mother. I spend hours meditating, conjuring up all the memories I have. I do not know her people. She left the country too early, and Mykhaila isn’t her real name. I do know my father’s people, though. I know of them. They’re in Dublin, a place I don’t know and have no inclination to visit until I feel safer in my own skin.

  I know, from the force of Molly’s memory, that I should be going to the gym, to keep my skills sharp and my body ready, but ready for what? I don’t have duplicates; there is no danger of waking up with my double trying to strangle me. I do not need to be the strongest or the fastest, neither do I need to be fastidious in the disposal of blood.

  I wander about London, adrift
, sometimes lost in a cannabinoid haze. I pass HMP Wormwood Scrubs, notorious prison, former dueling ground in the 1800s. I run through the open fields, trying to catch some of the carefree attitude of my childhood, of Molly’s childhood, and failing.

  I don’t know exactly when I get lost, but I stop at some point. While I am no longer running, my thoughts are. I cannot stop thinking, and the people are staring at me, and I think they can hear what I’m thinking, which makes me want to stop thinking, but I can’t and it’s frightening. Am I running yet? No. I’m out of the grass, onto the street, and people are staring, wanting to kill me. I run from them. Some man tries to hold me down, to bury me in the asphalt, so I break his arm. I am gentle, although his screams suggest otherwise. Believe me, not him.

  The police arrive, for me, to lock me up, no doubt. I dispatch the two officers quickly. They can call backup to look after them, because feeling the way I do, I don’t want to deal with people anymore. I have never been so terrified, and I can no longer hear my mother’s voice in my head.

  Everybody I pass is staring at me. Each person in the shop fronts, every face in every magazine, all the drivers of all the cars, all the bicycle messengers, the beautiful faces on the billboards, all snap their heads in my direction and they do not blink. I feel like prey, so I run faster. Mostly, people part, but some are in my way, and I take them down with prejudice. Why are they all after me? What do they know? I need a place to hide so I can figure things out. Blue lights flashing, a meat wagon cutting me off. Police, in riot gear, no guns that I can see, six of them, self-confident, clubs drawn.

  “Lie down on the pavement! Lie down right now! Do it!”

  No.

  I weave, and though I try to avoid them, I run smack into their scrum. So be it. I’ll take as many of them with me as possible. Some people are screaming. When a truncheon hits me in the mouth and one of the voices stops, I realize I was one of the screaming ones all along.

  When you are fighting multiple opponents your aim is not to beat them. Your aim is to escape, so you fight in one direction, to thin a barrier, to form a hole, and to run through it.