The Crying Machine. Greg Chivers

       1.

       Clementine

      Men stare from shadowed doorways. She is too obviously alien here, even with the paleness of her skin concealed behind high collars and a tinted visor. The women are invisible in this part of the city. Two sparsely bearded teenagers in baggy sherwal and thawb unashamedly follow her. It does not occur to them she might feel threatened, that they should exercise any kind of restraint. A trapped bird of fear flutters in her chest. All the tacit understandings of gender from home, with all the protections they give, are absent here, replaced by a new labyrinth of unwritten rules she flouts with every step. She is the transgressor in this place.

      The address she was given by the trafficker in Marseille should be somewhere close, but the streets are unmarked, the buildings unnumbered save for intermittent brass plaques which seem to follow no recognizable order. She shoves the paper under the nose of a fat man selling leafed oranges from crates. His eyes narrow as he takes in the curling lines of script, then his face relaxes and he stares into the middle distance, pretending not to see her. All the eyes here play the same game, following the pornography of her movement intently, becoming blind the moment she approaches.

      A corner leads her into an alley that ends suddenly in a wall topped with curves of broken glass. The two stubbled faces lurch into view when she turns around. They’re close enough to smell – turmeric and teenage boy beneath the faint tang of Jerusalem’s dust. It’s hard to tell the ages; the Arab boys grow hair younger. Their short, compact bodies warn of muscle beneath the loose fabric of their clothes. One looks away instantly in flawless imitation of his elders, but the other smiles nervously before dropping his gaze. Perhaps he has sisters.

      The shorter one touches her. His hand on her cheek is damp with sweat. Her stillness should be a warning, but he is too enraptured with the discovery of blond hairs to notice. Without meeting her eyes, he fingers the stray strands behind her neck where they’ve come loose. Her teeth clench as she suppresses the urge to bite or kick. Violence brings attention.

      ‘Leave me alone.’ She hears her own voice struggling around the Arabic sounds, too high, too frightened. A mistake here could ruin the city for her. There are only so many places left to run.

      The boy’s eyes show he understands the words, but a hiss of excited breath is the only response as his eyes travel down her body. As he moves around her, something metal glints behind his ear, a flat circle barely bigger than an earring. A tiny filigree of dark lines betrays the presence of circuitry within. She raises a hand with fingers curled to touch him. He pulls back, wary, but stays still just long enough for her to brush against the thing. The burst of code that passes through her fingertip is benign, a harmless interrogative. It identifies the ear stud as a simple communication device, capable only of voice or lo-fi sub-vocalizations. It requires user authorization to accept incoming signals, but the firewall is laughably primitive.

      A moment later he screams. His hand comes to his ear, fingers clawing uselessly at the lobe and cartilage. The pain comes from inside; a continuous pulse of ultra-high frequency bursts at the edge of human hearing, but still capable of stimulating the aural nerves. It will stop soon. The damage will heal quickly and leave no lasting mark that could betray her presence here.

      The other one stares in confusion as his friend falls to his knees. She tries to mirror the surprise on his face, a second too late to be convincing, but he isn’t looking at her, eyes fixed on the twitching figure on the floor. She presses the paper with the address into his hand.

      ‘Where is this? Can you show me?’

      A trembling hand points back down the street towards a doorway behind the orange-seller.

      The fat man ignores her as she walks past. She resists the urge to brush past him or topple his crates, forcing an acknowledgement of her existence. She feels the presence of others in the room before her eyes adjust to the gloom. Faintly apple-scented shisha smoke glows in slatted light where the sun penetrates wooden shutters warped with age. Four male faces examine her, but the inspection is more human than the ruthless dissections she endured outside. Her transgression is muted within the confines of these walls. Three leather-skinned old men pass the hookah pipe between them without taking their gaze off her. The bald-headed man behind the bar is younger, on the cusp of middle age with a heavy, muscular frame only slightly turned to fat. He acknowledges her with a raise of the chin.

      ‘I’m looking for Levi.’

      He turns away and utters a stream of Arabic too fast for her to catch the syllables. A stool scrapes on the stone floor and movement reveals another figure hunched over a small circular table in the corner covered with trinkets of some kind. Hooded eyes squint to see her and she realizes she must be standing silhouetted in the light of the door. The watcher’s face has the same look of indeterminate age as the teenagers who followed her, but his eyes are older, half-hidden by thick-skinned lids with heavy lashes. A too-big leather jacket fails to hide his youthful skinniness.

      ‘Are you Levi? Can we talk here?’

      ‘I don’t know you. This is not how I do business. Maybe I don’t want to talk to you.’

      She uncurls the paper with the address and holds it out. He doesn’t look. ‘Farouz Mubarrak told me to come here. He said you could help me.’ She watches for a flicker of recognition at the name but Levi’s face shows nothing. ‘Farouz Mubarrak … from Marseille?’

      ‘I don’t know anyone in Marseille. He must have heard my name from someone.’

      The barman’s cough doesn’t quite conceal a barked laugh. For a moment, hopelessness threatens to overwhelm Clementine. The trafficker in Marseille had promised to make her disappear. The names were part of the plan. Everything was paid for. ‘Can you help me? I can get money.’ The lie feels obvious. If she can change the dirhams in her belt she might have enough for two nights in a hostel and a few days of street food.

      ‘Sorry, sweetheart. In my experience, money doesn’t come in off the street like a bum looking for a free lunch.’

      ‘But …’

      ‘You’re pretty but I don’t need a girlfriend right now. You want help? Go to the Mission. I hope you like to pray.’ He bends over the table, dismissing her with silence, busy fingers teasing the tangled chains of the trinkets apart.

      The barman coughs again and she realizes she’s been standing, staring, paralysed by hopelessness.

      ‘I don’t know what you’re looking for, but Levi … he’s maybe