Force Majeure (10 page)

Kay knew that men found her attractive –
physically
attractive – for only one reason, because she was forceful. Some of those men saw her as a challenge, others as a vice, and so she was disappointed and disappointing in love. Xan betrayed no signs of belonging to either type.

They were alone in white corridors. She didn’t stop him with a hand on his shoulder. She didn’t remove her coat or her top, didn’t roll the hem upwards to display her breasts, didn’t let him take one in each hand to test the weight. No, there was no hot, embarrassed rash in her skin. No, he was not kissing her and his mouth wasn’t dry and airless. No, she didn’t trot after him like a schoolgirl virgin lost in foolish fantasies. No.

Xan knew exactly what she was thinking, and turned to her and almost-winked.

He spent the morning showing her round a building full of cobwebbed space and bursts of life. They started on the ground and worked their way up, but Kay had to fight her impression of
descent
. The lingering taste of dried steam was joined in these rooms by fresh cigarette smoke (which made her stomach ache in sympathy) and coffee fumes (which, for the first time in her adult life, smelled over-rich and ashen). They felt like gangster rooms, full of secret energy devoted to known but unspoken activity. What should have seemed utterly ordinary – and would have done in London or New York or Buenos Aires – was turned seedy and suspicious by its surroundings. She estimated she saw at least two dozen people at work.

‘There are around 300 active members of the Club,’ Xan explained. ‘The numbers bounce about like a rubber ball, but only a fraction of them actually work here. Not everyone is suited for the task. The rest are waiting.’

‘For?’

‘For Club activities. I swear that if I didn’t know better, I’d think you were snooping for the Bureau of Appearances.’

‘Maybe I am.’

‘You’re not,’ he said certainly. ‘This is a private club. We don’t even own these premises, we were granted them in trust by the city.
Candyland
.’

‘What?’

‘Candyland,’ he repeated, then no more, but she refused to let him prick her curiosity.

They left the office spaces and passed rooms turned into living quarters for the permanent residents of the Club, the permanently Appeared. She asked Xan where he lived, and his little fingers horned upwards. The top, he mouthed; the top floor. She relaxed, seeing hierarchy here. Xan was a prince; he had the unhurried certainty of a man in control of his circumstances, a quality she’d always aspired to. He would have his own bosses, but not in Candida. He
was
Prospero. He led her through his maze and his kingdom.

‘Who have you left behind?’

They sat in the dining room on the second floor by a window with an expansive view up the mountainside towards the old free house. Kay, never a heavy eater, used her cutlery to move the food round her plate. Fish and vegetables and thin meaty gravy, with none of the spices or sauces that coated the food in the house of dragons’ refectory. Fish and vegetables and thin meaty gravy, the essence of everything Candida. Xan sat opposite her, the essence of everything not-Candida.

He ate heartily. He cleaned his plate with hunks of wholemeal bread while she talked business.

‘I’ve been dropped in at the deep end, which in some ways is good.’ Her only props were her hands, and she kept them flat and visible on the tabletop. ‘It’s given me a different perspective on life here; one that I wouldn’t have got if I’d started day one with Prospero.’

She still felt unclear about the offer laid before her. She gave Xan a guarded smile. He leaned back, chewing bread.

‘So,’ she finished, ‘that’s solid experience I can bring to the table. To be honest, I don’t see much potential here, except maybe tourism or corner-cutting. I’m not an economist but … I don’t know, my gut instinct is that it’s a diseconomy of scale.’

Xan swallowed hard. ‘More trouble than it’s worth?’

She nodded. He released his sharp-edged smile.

‘That’s their only line of defence against us.
We’re too small, we’re too small! Don’t notice us, we’re too small,
’ he crooned. ‘There’s more at stake here than opening up a tiny market to the wider world. And it is tiny, just a bite, the last piece on the finger buffet.’

He looked away from her and started going methodically through his pockets, pulling the lining inside-out to expose their emptiness. The movement drew her eyes; he was the magician, misdirecting her. Then he asked her the question, mumbled it, threw it away: ‘
Who have you left behind?
’

‘Sorry?’

‘Who do you miss, Red? Who’s waiting for you to come back home?’

A family I don’t talk to. Colleagues I don’t connect with. Friends I don’t like. Relatives with barely a drop of blood in common and their awful, goggle-eyed spouses.

She said nothing. Xan pushed his plate aside and leaned towards her, conspiracy-voiced. ‘Are you married?’

‘I have a Better Half,’ she replied. ‘Though frankly I wouldn’t be here if it was working. We’ve been coming apart at the seams. We all make bad investments,’ she finished on a note of clarity. The words came coolly from her as old news. She fixed Xan with a level stare, and he threw back a succulent, unsurprised smile.

Was that a come-on? Was I coming on to him? Yes? No? Yes?

‘You’d be happy to stay in Candida?’

Shake of head. ‘That’s not what I meant.’

‘It’s funny, so many of us –’

‘Appeared?’

‘So many of us
displaced
, we foreigners if you like, forget who we’ve left behind. That’s why we don’t get everyone to join the Club.’

The old free house was now between them and the rising twilight. Kay made a play of not looking at it, of ignoring it with prejudice. Again, Xan seemed to see into her thoughts.

‘That’s why your girlfriend isn’t here. She’s too far gone for us.’

‘She’s not my girlfriend. Far gone?’

‘Into Candida. After a while, it gets into your skin and paralyses you. It lays eggs in your body. One day, they’ll hatch and eat you from the inside-out. She’s been eaten right up. Yum.’

‘Have you ever met Azure?’

‘I know the type. There are a lot like her. The good thing is, there are a lot like
you
and a lot like me as well. We’re still –’

‘What?’

‘– ourselves.’

‘Aren’t you making a big assumption there? About me, about my type.’

‘If we don’t get you now, you will stop caring about Prospero, you will stop wanting to leave. They will get you in the end.’

‘I don’t want to leave. I have a job to do.’

He nodded. ‘And then what?’

‘Then I leave.’

‘How would you go?’

‘I’d go to the station and catch a train.’

‘Really? Do you know how to get to the station from where you live?’ (No.) ‘Do you know when the train arrives?’ (No.) ‘Do you know where it goes after it leaves Candida?’ (No.) ‘Do you know where to go to find this kind of information?’ (Maybe Esteban would … No, actually, no.) ‘Do you think they will let you go?’

‘They can’t stop me.’

‘Can’t they?’

‘Why would they bother? Why am I saying
they
? There’s not a big conspiracy to keep me here. And so what if I can’t find the train? If I walked long enough in one direction, I’d hit the edge of the city eventually.’

‘You’d think that, wouldn’t you?’ His lips were properly curled, but there was barely a trace of his usual smile. ‘
This
is the closest place you’ll get to an exit. You know it.’

‘That’s paranoid.’

‘There’s a lunatic fringe in the Club. They think someone’s putting mind-altering drugs in our food or implants up our noses.
That’s
paranoid. I just have bad dreams.’

‘What sort of dreams?’

‘I dream one day everyone will wake up in Candida, and I mean
everyone
. On that day, there won’t be a world any more, there’ll just be Candyland. We were given the Earth and everything under the sky is ours. Candida is’ – briefly lost for words, he struggled for the right expression – ‘an affront. It doesn’t belong in
our
world.’

‘Hence Prospero.’

‘Hence,’ he licked his lips – he had a thin, sharp tongue – ‘Prospero.’

Suddenly she wanted to know who was waiting for Xan in the outside world. She knew nothing about him. She didn’t even know his nationality – which of the flags strung outside the club could claim him? She had a question, she realised, that would put her hook into him.
What about you Xan, who did you leave behind?

She pushed back her chair, it squealed. She rose, he remained seated and allowed her to tower over him. He was waiting for the question, he was willing it. She saw herself with him on the flat roof of the clubhouse, twined round him, naked and warmed by the heat radiating out of the brickwork. Ask, she thought, just ask, and put yourself back in the saddle.

His head was tilted arrogantly back to meet her eyes. She knew him. She knew his eyes from long ago. The words she wanted died in her mouth.

‘So,’ she said instead, ‘if I’m working here, where would I be sleeping?’

The nervous gob of saliva she swallowed felt like a stone passing down her gullet. He took her to a suite that she could call her own and offered her Prospero. She agreed, they shook hands, he still called her Red. They talked, no more than that, into the rest of the deepening evening, while a third voice whispered privately in Kay’s ear, calling her a coward, and frigid, and a fool.

She left the Displaced Club after midnight at best guess. She’d stopped wearing a watch when it became obvious that its only purpose was to provide reassuring pins-and-needles tightness round her wrist. Time’s pressure only trickled in Candida, and though there were clocks, their chimes were enigmatic, measuring the day to scales she’d yet to grasp. She’d grown used to that, but she’d rarely been out this late.

By night, Candida filled with people and light and music. Oh, especially music – flutes and zithers and hurdy-gurdies and tambourines and rebecks and Spanish guitars and cacophony. She’d heard the parties from her window, but she was always an efficient sleeper and didn’t let them disturb her. Now she was swamped and panicked, and the exposed skin of her hands and face itched. The streets and alleys, already narrow, choked with human fat. She struggled to push her way through. Overhead, the sky turned fish-pink in the glare from the ground, while spotlights made leprous white circles on the sides of the old free house, which watched over the party as an impotent and senile chaperone. Children dressed as pirates and angels strung paper lanterns between the lampposts; candles gathered on window sills and even the natural lustre of human skin added to the yellow glow creeping the streets.

‘Bare-faced witch!’ called a gang of boys in gross cherub masks, in foetal pig masks. She was jostled and fondled, fingers licking at the line of her cloak as she passed. There was a stitch in her stomach, a needle of pain up her thigh. It was hard to breathe. She grabbed a random thought.

‘Is it Christmas? Is it Christmas already?’ she hollered, but her shouts were drowned out by the din. Her mouth was dry; she spent some of her flaking money on still lemonade and the rest on a present for Azure. Shopping usually cheered her, and she needed a boost after the meeting with Xan. She was in the aftermath, the slippery, fatal downer that followed the high. She picked as her gift a wooden stick with a carved gargoyle-head. A charm, said the jigsaw-faced shopkeeper, to ward off evil spirits. It looks suggestive, she complained. He disconcerted her with laughter. It’s a dragon; it’s half-price.

She pressed on. Laughter pursued her through every street.

People were
looking
at her! Disguise, disguise, I need a disguise.

‘Where can I buy a mask?’ she asked, snatching at a passer-by. It turned; it was a dragon, a Chinese dragon with flared nostrils and painted zig-zag teeth. Black mirrored eyes revealed nothing of the man or woman beneath, and if there was a reply from within, it was hidden by the mask. Startled, Kay stepped away. The passer-by moved on, arms and legs pounding to a distant drumbeat, followed by a conga-train of sexless bodies swathed in red and gold and green cloth, the colours of the dancing dragon.

Chinese New Year? Too early. Too early for Christmas too, she decided.

She sucked in a deep breath. She stuffed the wooden charm into her pocket and it chafed all the way home.

‘Up-up-up, you lazy bastard!’

Luna wore a dusty perfume that smelled like cold tea, while Quint’s skin was lightly-scented and lemon, so she knew it was them before she was fully awake. Quint was shaking her out of bed – it had to be Quint, she was the less sentimental, the more physical. An impersonal weight pressed down on her stomach. It wasn’t morning; the only light in the room was a ferocious glare from the door. She groaned. She swore, air escaping.

‘I need my sleep, I’m up first thing,’ she protested in a strangled, just-woken voice. She was already alert but feigned sluggishness. Quint hunched over her, shaking, a blurry monkey-king crouched on the bed. Luna, fainter still, lurked at her shoulder.