The Mall by S L Grey Page B

pieces.
    I don’t want to think too much about that now, so I try and break the ice. ‘Jesus, Rhoda, you’re quite hardcore for an academic’s daughter.’
    ‘Fuck off.’
    ‘I can’t believe you’re, like, wealthy and shit. I could have sworn you were—’
    ‘What? What? Some blacks have money, you know, Daniel.’
    ‘Jeez. You don’t have to tell me… I wasn’t—’ She’s got this fuck ing unsettling way of turning everything I say around.
    She’s still squirming and wriggling in my grip. Her filthy gritty shoes are hurting my hands; sewer water is dripping off the hem of her trousers. I’m scared I’m about to drop
her. ‘Hurry up, Rhoda. What are you trying to do?’
    ‘I’m just tryna…’ comes the muffled response.
    ‘It’s pointless. You’ll come out onto the top of a lift in a shaft that’s fuck knows how deep. Just as dark, just as airless.’
    ‘Shut up!’
    ‘If this lift shaft is anything like that bottomless pit we climbed down… And it has a bottom. A bottom we can smash on like melons from the fucking tower of Pisa.’ Now
I’m just babbling, and I should just shut up, but I can’t. The fucking panpipes are driving me insane.
    ‘I said shut the fuck up,’ she bellows as she jumps out of my braced hands. I shake them out. Rhoda punches the wall again. She’s breathing too fast, and it dawns on me that
her panic is for real.
    ‘Hey, Rhoda,’ I say, intent on calming her down. ‘Listen to the music. I know this tune.’
    The panpipe muzak piping out of the roof was designed to be calming, and to my surprise it’s working. On me, if not Rhoda.
    ‘It reminds me of a holiday we took to Durban when we visited my cousin,’ I continue talking her down. ‘He was three months older than me, had much cooler toys, much cooler
stuff. He put on this soppy CD and showed me a poem a girl at school had written for him. She’d copied the lyrics word for word.’
    Rhoda’s breathing is starting to slow. ‘God, I’m going to puke,’ she says, but at least she’s starting to calm down to normal. If you can call her usual condition
normal. It hasn’t escaped me that she’s probably about to start going into some sort of drug withdrawal now that her stash has been washed down the sewer. ‘Lionel motherfucking
Richie. They’re cruel bastards. We know that much.’
    ‘I was fucking jealous of my cousin,’ I continue, trying to keep it boring. ‘Girlfriends writing him poems. He became a rabbi. Never married. Wonder how much his
Lionel-Richie-toting primary-school sweetheart had to do with that.’
    She manages a smile. ‘Yeah. Probably had a lot to do with it. “Hello”,’ she croons half-heartedly, strangling the words as if she hates them. ‘“Is it me
you’re looking for? Cos I wonder what you are and I wonder blah blah blah”.’ She peters out.
    Okay. She’s back. Thank God. ‘Just carry on thinking of open spaces, okay. Listen to the music. Imagine you’re in the desert, on the open sea, in a meadow. Anything fresh and
clean. Okay?’ She doesn’t ask how I know so much about claustrophobia.
    ‘Yeah, okay. Thanks, Dr Phil. I got it now. Breathe and think about fairies and unicorns,’ she says. ‘It would be easier if we weren’t stuck in a fucking falling
lift ! What the fuck do we do, Dan?’
    ‘Well, we know the name of the song… What do we do with it?’ I ask, more to myself than her. ‘The message said “name that tune”. Who do we tell? How?’
If there’s one thing I know a lot about, it’s games. And I know this is too easy. This is Level One. And I know Rhoda isn’t ready to hear that just yet.
    ‘I guess we just text the name back.’ Rhoda pulls out her phone.
    ‘No, wait. I don’t think so. Nobody’s going to design a game based on cellphones. The coverage and the relay time are just too unreliable. Maybe in the future. The control has
to be something internal.’
    She looks at me like I’m talking in Vulcan. ‘What are