Force Majeure (14 page)

Kay declined, then, at Azure’s insistence, mounted the long saddle. Azure joined her, half-sitting on Kay’s lap and pushing her further back. She wasn’t heavy; she was all pressure, no weight. For a moment they jostled awkwardly in the rider’s seat, compromising their postures until Azure let out a good-natured cackle. ‘I can live with this!’

Kay’s arms locked round the girl’s waist, finding no hint of the body beneath the layers of protective coat. Azure’s hair filled half her view, the warm, dry scalp bumping against her face. They sat stationary on the bike, Azure holding up the weight of three bodies with a foot placed firmly on the pavement. ‘Whenever you’re ready?’

‘I’m ready.’

Azure cocked her head; Kay saw only a slice of her face behind the white crest of hair. ‘When I ride, I fly. When I ride, I really do become a bird, and so does the bike and so will you. You’ll become part of me, and it’ll be great.’ She breathed. ‘
But
you might not feel it that way, and if you don’t, then just hold on as tight as you can. Don’t mind me. I can take it. Just don’t fall.’

One foot left the safety of the ground. The other stamped at a pedal. The bike lurched under their combined weight, then steadied, then leapt.

And afterwards, Kay couldn’t recall the detail of the journey, not any of the streets they flowed through or the buildings they skirted, none of the people they passed and nearly hit, none of the activity they disrupted with their velocity. Azure’s untied hair lashed at her face, hard enough to sting and draw blood, wounds that were still sore once she’d dismounted. No, all she would remember was speed, impossible speed, measured in excruciating heartbeats, in explosive half-taken breaths and words blasted unspoken back into her mouth, while mites and glowing insects splattered on her naked face.

She remembered dismounting onto a spinning world. She remembered making giddy circles in the street. She didn’t so much fall as allow her body to find its natural place on the ground. Sure-footed and wryly amused, Azure helped move her into a more comfortable crouch against the nearest wall. It was cool stone, an anchor. She clung to it.

Azure grinned. ‘I s’pose you didn’t feel it.’

‘I felt
something
,’ she gasped

They had stopped at the gate to a cottage in a sparse quarter of Candida. The closest buildings were dark and merged into the blue dusk so the cottage seemed to stand alone. Kay had to squeeze her eyes sharp to see that she was still actually in the city limits and not on a flat outcrop of the mountain beyond. The cottage walls were greenwashed and luminous. A woman came from the door to meet them, lighting her way with a lamp that was hardly needed. She was the oldest person that Kay had seen in Candida, but her hair was still perfect Indian-black. A guard of scruffy children followed her out, small hands clutching at the train of her saffron dress, but she shooed them inside.

She acknowledged Azure. She lifted her lamp towards Kay – pink glare, Kay went blind.

‘Do you know who this is?’ Her voice was brittle as an old radio broadcast. It was directed away from Kay, into air, to Azure.

A heartbeat. ‘This is Kay, my second. She sat with me on the mountainside.’

Pink light dawned again, then sank, then faded. Godma January chirped: ‘Bugger me!’

Kay’s eyes blinked back to life, and she saw that the old woman had taken Azure into a conference huddle further down the path. Their bodies were calm, their faces pushed heatedly against each. Azure came flapping back, discontent muted on her face.

‘She doesn’t want you inside. It can’t be helped. I’ll bring something to eat when I come back and something to drink. I won’t be long.’

‘Azure, what’s going on?’

The bird twitched her arms helplessly.

Alone, Kay looked out at the buildings of Candida, seeing only pinlights in the dark, and she half-smiled at the idea of even trying to turn this all into a model or a set of statistics. Her smile was borrowed from Xan, his typical smile, the one he must have worn as he seduced and mastered Mae. Neither the old free house nor the steamworks were visible from the Godma’s cottage. Kay felt isolated. She found herself filling the wait with Prospero, turning over the fresher details and figures from the account in her head until they lost all meaning. Prospero had become an unshakeable, pointless habit, a series of blank scars on white pages in grubby grey folders.

Azure returned with bread and cheese, and Kay ate hungrily. White bread; that was rare in Candida.

‘So what’s her problem?’ she asked, of the Godma.

‘She says she doesn’t like the company you keep. Things are a bit tense right now, but the Godma’s always been a bit eccentric. She came here with Luis, back when he could still half-see, long before my time. They were gunrunners. They got lost in the mountains. That’s his story.’

Azure sat beside her, her legs spread out, her arse plonked casually on the floor. Kay was half-crouched, making contact with the wall only on the small of her back, with the ground only on the balls of her feet. It was an effort. She should sprawl. She couldn’t. She tried. She couldn’t.

Azure remained cagey about the nature of her business – ‘which is, you know,
private
’ – and turned the conversation towards the Fedayeen, then Kay’s stalker. ‘He’s an officer, one of Doctor Arkadin’s mob, which means he’s not nearly as smart as he thinks he is, which is why the Godma spotted him. He probably just fancies you and knows you worked at the house.’

‘Cheers,’ Kay replied, and took a swig of her wine. It was tasteless. ‘Have you got a cigarette? I’ve been gagging for one since I got here.’

‘I don’t, you should know that. I didn’t know you smoked.’

‘I don’t. I gave it up.’

‘That must have been hard.’

‘Not really. I had to force myself to do something about it. It was willpower, but it’s run out. I quit just before I came here the first time, so there’s a balance at work.’

‘You were here before?’

‘Yes. Oh, not
here
here. I meant when I was in South America. That was really different. Never 50 miles from an airport. Now I’m 50 miles from nowhere in all directions. Nothing adds up. Nothing in Candida connects. Why doesn’t anything connect?!’

‘You’ll get used to it.’

Kay was startled to find herself crying. The tear welled, trickled and dried. She tried to speak, but it was only the sound of air escaping. She composed herself. ‘I can’t stand being here. It’s like I’m lost and I’m never going to get away.’

Azure laughed. ‘You
are
lost, and you’ll get used to it. No, that’s not helpful, is it? One day, one day soon I’m sure, something will happen, something wonderful, and you will find that you are so comfortable and so
right
here. Do you want to know how I first Appeared in Candida? Luis made me think of it again, when he was stirring it, the cheeky bastard.’

‘If you don’t want to tell me, that’s fine. It’s like you say, private.’

‘Do you know how old I am now? Seriously?’

Kay took Azure’s chin and turned the child’s face full-on towards her. It was lit by the gleaming walls of the house. There were dark smudges on her cheeks. Kay licked her thumb and used it to rub the dirt away. ‘You look very young. What’s the big secret?’

‘Azure was never young, but she always looked it. That worked for her as she got older. She could dress as a schoolgirl or in a party dress and play the virgin, nice and tight with no tits. After a while, she wanted the trick to wear off, but she never lost her looks. She’s Peter Pan. She never had a childhood till I came here.’

Kay’s head went back, pressing against a cold stone wall that could numb her thoughts and freeze her emotions. She wanted to feel the way Azure looked as she’d spoken, anaesthetised and hollow. ‘Where are you from?’ she asked, softly.

‘Does it matter? All countries are the same these days. It’s the nature of the world. All cities look identical from a low angle. You know London, it might as well be London, let’s say it was London.’

‘Yeah, I know London.’

‘I was never homeless. There was always some place to stay. Getting a roof over my head wasn’t the problem. Getting money wasn’t the problem, especially at first, though losing it was. Finding people to be with wasn’t the problem. Azure grew up on tranqs and – this is London, so let’s say the
Beano
. When you go out expecting to be beaten, half-expecting to be raped and half-hoping to have your throat cut, you need something to get you through the night. She had no power over her life, she had all the power taken from her in everything she did. She was on heroin by the time she was 11. Do you know I couldn’t read till I got here?’

‘Except the
Beano
.’

‘Except the
Beano
. Luis taught me to read. Don’t look at me like that. Don’t look at me like you think I’m lying.’

‘I wasn’t,’ Kay replied, but it hadn’t been a real accusation. Azure’s body was at rest and her face was a calm and unruffled surface. It was as though she was a surgeon, dispassionately inspecting a pit left on her body by a once-poisoned sting, still visible but long since healed.

‘There’s an urban myth I picked up from the older girls and the rougher ones, not the escorts, not the college-fee crowd. It was a street story you’d hear in the dives and alleys and up against the fences. The story goes that somewhere there is a tunnel.
The
tunnel. The black tunnel.’

‘Sounds like a metaphor.’

‘Don’t laugh, Kay. Don’t you dare laugh.’ But again it wasn’t an accusation. ‘It was supposed to be the most disgusting place in the world. There’d be no light; it would stink like a sewer; it would be full of water and shit and dead dogs. It was nowhere you’d want to go, but if you could bear to crawl through it, it was the escape route. It’d take you somewhere you could be free. The older girls, they called it a Valhalla for whores, and no-one really believed it.

‘One night, I got thrown out of a car. I’d been at a party and they needed to get rid of me in a hurry, so they drove me out and dumped me in the middle of nowhere. I don’t know where; it could have been a golf course! So here’s Azure: naked, covered in blood, covered in bruises, covered in bites, covered in shit, covered in vomit; everything running half-speed because her heart couldn’t cope with the junk she’d taken; totally, incredibly, unbelievably surprised because she’s not dead. All night, to her utter amazement, she continues being
not dead
. She can’t move for hours, and everything’s bleeding away, drifting to sleep, drifting awake. And as the sun comes up in the morning, she sees it – right in front of her where it’s always been – the black tunnel.

‘So I went to it. God knows where I found the strength, but I pulled myself up and stumbled there and sank into it, into this impossible, stinking, sunless tunnel full of water and disease and decay. The walls were rotten, used-up concrete and the whole thing looked like it would come down on top of me, but I went for it. I went into this
myth
, this total lie that no-one believed, and it didn’t matter because I was
dying
. That’s what I thought. I was dying and this was the only way into Heaven.’

‘And then?’

‘I Appeared in Candida. You don’t believe a word of this, do you?’

Kay paused, frightened of what she might say, then: ‘Do you think I’m that callous? No, don’t answer, please don’t answer.’ Azure’s head lolled against her side. Kay was surprised to find she was smiling. ‘You’re here, aren’t you?’ Kay finished. ‘You must have got here somehow. Is that what the Fedayeen story was about?
This
is paradise.’

‘This is Xanadu. This is the stately pleasure dome and I’m one of its sacred warriors. That or I’m on drugs,’ and she giggled to prove it. ‘I’m not on drugs. I know drugs, and I’m not. It was a long time ago, Kay. I’m better now. I’ve found a place in the world and I love it. And if anyone tried to take that away from me, I would do anything –
anything
– to stop them.

‘Trust me. Whoever they were, I’d kill them.’

Azure got to her feet and stretched, her arms held back like wings, her chest pushed out and bursting, her white hair gleaming in the light of the walls of the Godma’s house. She offered Kay a tiny hand in an overgrown leather glove, and Kay stared back at it, afraid to take it.

‘Come on then,’ Azure said, ‘let’s fly.’

Kay reached out and gripped her friend’s fingers. They tightened tenderly in response, and in the moment before it happened, she knew that Azure would pull her upright with a single unforced tug.

And this time, she remembered flying.

This time, as she clung behind Azure in the saddle, as Azure brought the bicycle to life with a firm kick, she was ready. The wheels turned and then they were no longer wheels. Her fingers, interlocked in a fist pressed to Azure’s stomach, broke free, and they were no longer fingers and she was no longer Kay and Azure was no longer Azure. Movement transformed them from their separate flesh into
one
, into a delicate, beautiful bird, suddenly in flight. Without ever leaving the ground, without ever leaving their bodies, they rose above Candida and soared.