Authors: Nick Harkaway
Tags: #Fiction, #Humorous, #Action & Adventure, #Espionage
“What about you?” Vaughn Parry says at last. “What’s the deal with you? The way I hear it, they hate you even worse’n me.”
Joe sighs, and gives an abbreviated version of recent events, and an even more curtailed description of life in the House of Spork. He doesn’t want Parry inside his life, even if his confession is a true one. The man who was considering giving Mr. Ordinary a taste of his own medicine is not someone he wishes to share intimacies with, more than he must.
“Mechanical bees,” Vaughn Parry mutters. “And you say it’s big?”
“Huge, I think. Going-to-war sort of big.”
“Bloody hell.”
The road surface changes, the whine of the tyres giving way to a deep grumble.
“Well, for what it’s worth,” Parry goes on, “I’ve got more to tell you. I s’pose I owe it to you, or to bloody Dalton. Payback. And if it’s that important, too …”
“What is it?”
“Your friend Ted … confessed to me, is the only word. Because I was an undertaker once. I didn’t tell him I wasn’t a Waiting Man proper. Didn’t seem to matter much at that point. Not to him, anyway.” Parry’s face flickers with something like horror. “He was all messed up. They’d had at him, then they let him know who I was and brought him to me. They wanted him to be scared of Monstrous Vaughn, you see, but he was past caring. Something was broke in his chest. You could hear it flapping about … he wanted absolution.” Parry sighs. “From me. Of all the people on God’s Earth, he wanted absolution from the man supposed to be the worst bastard ever walked. And I couldn’t give it to ’im because it’s bin so long since anyone even looked at me with anything other than hate I didn’t have the words. I just stared at him and he choked out the ’ole thing and then he died.”
Vaughn Parry shudders. “You’ve got this thing they want, though?” Vaughn Parry says abruptly. “I mean, it’s not all a complete bloody joke, right? Not a total waste of time?”
“Yes,” Joe says absently. “I worked it out, in there.”
“Sholt said you had. It was like a kind of revelation for ’im. Like an angel, he said. But I was—” He stops. “I’m rattling on like a pillock.”
“No, it’s fine.”
“I haven’t talked for a bit.”
No. You haven’t
. But Parry’s lisp is already better.
“It’s fine,” Joe assures him. “What were you saying?”
“When he said that, I was, well … I was afraid. For the first time in howeverlong I had something to hope for, that you’d find this blessed whatsis and stick it up their collective arse, ey?” Parry laughs. “Although, maybe you better just hang onto it. Keep it in a safe place.”
It’s a relief to be able to talk about this aloud. Joe has been screaming it, in rhyme, for—he doesn’t know how many days.
Breath of the docks. Beneath the rocks. Frankie’s drum has chicken pox
. He frowns and makes an uncertain gesture with his hand: this way, that way. “It’s safe for the moment,” he says. “It’s in the Death Clock. She sent it to my grandfather and he kept it in the Death Clock, because it’s so ugly no one looks at it twice. And he commended it to me for ‘special study.’ I thought he was just being annoying and educational. And now they’ve got it and they don’t even know. All this,” he waves at himself, his bruises and by extension the whole of Happy Acres, “and it was there, all the time. They’ve probably got it in a box.”
Vaughn Parry peers at him. “Well, I’m sure you know what that means to the world at large,” he says at last. “Buggered if I do, though. No, for God’s sake, don’t tell me! Bloody hell, I don’t want your trouble as well as mine, do I?”
Joe Spork shakes his head. He feels an urge to get back to his natural habitat, even if he has to hide beneath the streets among the Tosher’s Beat, in the rooms the toshers don’t bother with.
The bus stops briefly, and a man climbs on board who must be a fruit picker. His hands are swaddled in elastoplast. He wears a T-shirt written in a European alphabet Joe doesn’t recognise, and carries a white plastic bag full of unseasonal greenhouse plums.
Joe Spork considers his good fortune. He has escaped from a heavily guarded institution in the company of a monster who turns out to be quite nice. He has eluded what must be a major search—by speed? Stealth? Confusion? And he alone in all the world—apart from Vaughn Parry—knows the location of the calibration drum.
Just the two of them.
“This bus is now non-stopping all the way to London,” the driver says. Joe feels a momentary claustrophobia, and then his mind jumps sideways and around a corner. Not claustrophobia. Vertigo, on the
cliff of impossible convenience. A straight course, all the way home. Back to Mercer and Polly. Parry giving answers to questions desperately asked. Parry as Sholt’s confidant, in that strange clarity before dying. Parry, the country’s most wanted man, suddenly a kindred spirit.
Too easy
.
All that time being tortured, and then this. So simple. A bit of pain and a bit of work, and the whole place gone. A prisoner’s dream.
They have shown you the stick. Soon, they will show you the carrot
.
A prisoner’s fantasy.
There is no carrot. Polly and I are your only friends
.
This game is fixed.
Not lucky at all. Three-Card Monte.
I thought I was choosing the card I wanted, but the bunco man was slipping me the one he wanted me to have. I haven’t found the lady. I’ve drawn the Joker
.
Vaughn Parry.
In which case, you work for someone, don’t you? I’m wrong. You’re not a loner at all. You’re not what you say you are. You’re a lie and a liar, and I’m taking you where you want to go. Telling you what you want to know
.
In which case, you could well be a killer, after all
.
Hell, hell, hell
.
But this is a new, activated Joe Spork. His body has a plan before he does, is already moving when he gives the okay, flows into the shape he needs without thought—thank God, because if he thought about it he’d mess it up, no doubt.
He times it exactly right. The driver takes off the brakes and the bus jolts. Joe Spork grabs Vaughn Parry by the shoulders and slams his head sharply into the chrome steel pole in the aisle. Parry’s face flashes through shock and pain, then for the briefest instant into a bottomless, appalling rage. Then the bus judders again and Joe repeats the manoeuvre, and Parry slumps. Joe rests him against the window, and rushes to the front.
“I’m so sorry,” he says, “I’m on the wrong bus.”
The driver sighs. “Anyone else?” he asks. The rest of the passengers shake their heads or stare in venomous accusation at the idiot Joe, and the driver lets him off.
He watches the red tail lights fade, and runs to a phone box to call Mercer.
Joe is expecting a large black car with tinted windows, or possibly several cars. He allows himself to wonder if there will be a helicopter. He is quite sure there will be people in dark suits, grave of mien and taciturn and fraught with black-lettered magic.
In the event, Mercer sends four ambulances, two fire engines, a climate-change protest, a Scottish travelling circus, and a fox hunt. These various distractions arrive separately but with immaculate coordination, so that one moment Joshua Joseph Spork is hiding in the shadows of a pub garden and hearing pursuit in every whisper of wind, and the next the whole suburb is lit with blue lights and resounding with sirens, and seventy-eight beagles and a gross of meteorologists are sharing road space with Darla the Bearded Lassie.
Through the midst of this paralysing confusion comes an unremarkable Volkswagen people-mover in green. It slips gracefully between the hunt master and a brace of urban foxes who are apparently admiring the view, Mercer himself at the wheel. The side door slides open.
“Get in,” Polly Cradle says gently, and Joe’s heart leaps to see that she is here. Then he stops abruptly: beside her sits Edie Banister, complete with odiferous pug and giant revolver.
“Come on, Joe,” Polly says. “It’s time.” She glances over her shoulder at Edie, then extends her hand to him. “Get in. We’ll explain on the way.”
By a circuitous route and through lanes and towns and all around the London Orbital, they leave the circus behind.
Joe Spork gazes at the back of the passenger seat. The leather—or it may be leatherette—is torn around the headrest, revealing a sliver of foam. Part of him wants to explore it with his fingers, touch something real and simple and solid outside Happy Acres and know that this is not a dream. That he is not still on the operating table, dying. The world is oddly quiet and colourless, as if he has slipped sideways into a monochrome film or an underwater documentary. He assumes this is shock or post-traumatic stress, but does not particularly care.
He lifts his eyes from his study of the leather and looks around. Polly Cradle is like a log fire, a warm, comforting thing. She catches him looking and smiles, puts her hand on his leg, and a little patch of heat grows where her palm is. He looks the other way and finds Edie Banister.
Edie Banister looks back at him and waits. And so they pass a few miles: Polly, Joe, Edie. The front seat is another country.
“Did you do this to me?” Joe asks.
Edie sighs. “Yes. Well, yes and no. I put you in the line of fire.” After a brief struggle, honesty compels her to add, “I thought it was necessary and then I realised it was rather out of spite. I’m sorry.”
He looks at her some more, and wonders why he hasn’t pulled her head from her shoulders and thrown it out of the window. Carefully, so as not to cause an accident. He wonders if she is really sorry, and if sorry helps in any way. Then he says, “Spite?”
“Your grandmother, not you.”
It’s always about his bloody family, somehow. “How’s Harriet?” he asks belatedly.
“Your mother is fine, Joe,” Mercer says firmly. “The C of E has hidden her away—I’m sure you can talk to her if you want.”
Joe goes back to studying the seat, and finally does reach out to play with the loose edge. He flicks it one way and another until Polly very gently encloses his big hand in her two smaller ones and draws it away to kiss it as if he’d burned it on something. She does not ask if he is all right.
“I’m all right,” he says, a bit fuzzily, only now realising that it may turn out to be true. If only the colours will spread out from her, into the world.
She manages not to burst into tears, but it’s a close thing. Instead, she looks sternly at Edie and tells her to get going on the story. Edie nods, and then abruptly stalls, mouth open. “I don’t know where to begin,” she says. “I’ve lost it. Senility.”
Joe nods. He is familiar with the sense of not being able to trust your own mind. “Who are you?”
Edie nods, grateful. “You know my name. I used to—well, I used to work with your grandmother. We were friends. I’ve been a lot of other things, too. A spy, mostly. Sort of a policeman. And now a revolutionary, I suppose. A terrorist.” She sighs. “This changing-the-world business is harder than I imagined.”
“I didn’t know Frankie had any friends,” Joe says.
“Joe, don’t be dense,” Polly murmurs, kissing his hair to take the sting out of it. “They were lovers.”
Joe glances, automatically, at Edie, and sees her embarrassment become a wide grin.
“Well, yes,” Edie says. “We were. And you, young miss, are a bucketload of trouble, aren’t you?”
Polly shrugs. “I believe in getting these things out in the open. It saves misunderstandings later.”
Edie finds that she agrees, and a moment later she begins the whole story from scratch—albeit in highly abbreviated form—telling it without restraint from the moment Abel Jasmine came to the Lady Gravely school, all the way to her recent abrupt decision that something had to be done.
Joe listens to the secret history of the House of Spork—or Fossoyeur, as it seems—and feels, beneath the monochrome, a sense of place. This is where Daniel’s sorrow came from. Where Mathew’s mania was born. This is how it was, and how it came to be.
That it is also the root of his recent pain is less important. Edie is a treasure house of his own self, his roots. He wants to put her under glass, wind her up and play her in the evenings. Her life is so bright. And he, Joe, is part of this story, and her story is part of his. Finally, he is not too late for something, after all.