Force Majeure (15 page)

Afterwards, Kay remembered travelling through the runs and traps of the city, but she also remembered gliding above them on borrowed wings, seeing each new street and alley with a subtle, revealing eye that teased out lives and secret histories. Ever-hungry, ever-moving Candida wasn’t a single thing that could be trapped by measurement, it was a concertinaed crush of history and history’s atoms, its people, all alike and all dissimilar, sweating out their lives and hopes and ideas and loves in this shared, compromised space visible from above, from the non-existent vigil of the dragons.

Do you know who we are? We are the circumstances beyond your control. We are the acts of God and the greater power. We are the forces you cannot name, so you call us dragons (which is better than nothing). We are the confounders of humanity, and Candida is our gift to you, our respite. We are the force majeure.

Bring us the word, little bird.

Kay was part of deep, transformed, radiant Azure. She saw Azure as she saw herself, a bird not rising on wings, not into the air, but returning to the timeless
now
that she had joined forever on that morning on the mountainside, the unplace where the dragons lived and waited for her. They rose together in a single naked unbody into the dragons’ embrace, which felt like the rapid-rolling wheels of a bike, the roar of the passing world, a smooth movement through part-paved streets. Kay saw the cruel teeth and terrible barbs of the dragons as Azure saw them, powerfully capricious but powerfully compassionate. The dragons-of-the-empty-sky unfurled their wings to embrace them, to cradle the little bird in their ancient, threatening warmth.

This is for you, Kay
, said their shared unvoice,
this is for you, my beautiful friend, my love.

Chapter Six:
The Fox Hunt

Green vegetable strands decorated the bathroom in the Displaced Club, pushing in through cracks in the corners and round the narrow windows that lined the walls just below the ceiling. This was a basement room, half sunk into the ground, and soil crumbled in through the leaks made by the encroaching wilderness. Grass and wild flowers grew through the sills and lent colour to the steam-grey walls and the blind glass. There were patches of red and white, of rich, blackening purple, and everywhere there was green. Kay breathed chlorophyll.

It was a damp room – the fresh towels already felt wet and heavy – but it had a bath, a
bath
. After weeks of showers, she wanted to wallow. The water ran white and frothy. It had a deep tray, meant for laundry not human bodies, and she sank into it with her hands folded over her navel. She’d left the door unlocked – she’d had little choice – but there was no need to panic, she didn’t drown and the sound of no intruders carried through the depths to reach her. She lasted for over a minute-and-a-half underwater before pushing up to break the surface, to breathe.

She washed and dried quickly. Always when drying, Kay would save her toes until last. They were almost too far away and too fiddly to bother with, but this time she was meticulous. Xan had left clothes for her in the annexe. She dripped a little water on the cold tiles, but touched the costume with dry hands. The uniform was better than she had expected. She might have chosen it herself. She dressed.

Xan had also left an attaché case – no shoes, no underwear, but an attaché case, placed unobtrusively to catch her eye. She tripped the locks, then stood, inspecting the contents curiously for some time. She closed it, having taken out nothing except a loose slip of paper on the top bearing a single word in Xan’s confident hand:
Pandora
.

Now dressed and ready, she hefted the case for the long trip up to Xan’s quarters, through corridors and up wrought-iron stairs. He was waiting for her in his shirtsleeves, his cuffs unlinked and flapping. He smiled. She had trouble remembering an occasion when he hadn’t. He lounged on his bed and didn’t rise. A bud of white, the clean tails of his shirt, spilled through his open fly. He looked unfinished. Without speaking, she placed the case at the foot of the bed.

‘I wanted you to know the stakes,’ he explained. ‘Did you count it?’

She shook her head briskly. ‘No, but I can guesstimate. Quarter-of-a-million US dollars?’

‘Close enough. At this stage, it’s a gesture of goodwill more than a real payment. Were you tempted to keep any of it?’

‘No, of course not.’

His smile found a new gradient. ‘I didn’t think you were the type, but you
are
curious. You’d open it, I knew that. I
know
you, Red. You’ve got a question you’re dying to ask.’

All right, she admitted to herself, all right. ‘Why dollars?’

‘Not the one I was expecting,’ he murmured. ‘The people coming here tonight are traditionalists. They’re like the wild bunch back at the turn of the last century, addicted to the taste of gold and not sure what to do with all these new-fangled greenbacks. No, I’m surprised with you. I thought you’d ask how I got it into Candida. There’s more than that, a lot more, and not all in American currency, because our friends are practical as well as traditional. You look ravishing, by the way.’

‘I don’t know. Can I have a mirror?’

There was one on his door. She had to turn her back to him, and that made her nervous, even though she could see him as clearly as herself. The mirror wasn’t glass but polished bronze, lending her reflection a brown cast. She had put some weight back on since joining the Club; not much, but enough to draw the teen-like anorexic gauntness from round her eyes. She was poised. Everything in the image was precise and proportionate except for her hair, which straggled like wet, naked grass. Xan, on the bed, nodded approval.

‘Red is your colour. I always thought it was, now I’m sure.’

The uniform was solid scarlet, a high-collared tunic and a knee-length skirt, all featureless. She wasn’t sure of the colour even now; its full impact was hidden by the brown of the mirror.

‘I’ll need time to do my hair.’

‘No-one-but-no-one will be looking at your hair. There’s only one rule tonight. Don’t talk to anyone unless they talk to you first. I know you’ll want to, because it’s in your nature, but don’t try to engage with anyone. A lot of the guests will be locals, and one word out of place could bring the whole show to an end. Do you think you can cope with that?’

‘I can cope. Why do you need to ask? Does the team call me blarney behind my back?’

‘I just want to get things straight. There’s one more thing, part of the uniform.’

‘Shoes? Shoes would be nice.’

He left the bed and moved out of the unflattering bronze frame of the mirror. She adjusted her collar, tightening it, waiting for his return. She blinked. ‘Have you slept with every woman in this building?’

‘Not all of them. There’s at least one I’ve missed.’ He loomed close behind her with a parcel in his hand, shapeless. ‘You do realise it’s none of your business?’ he finished, quizzically.

‘It is if it distracts my team.’

‘Do you really think it’s affecting your work? Because I think you’re the powerhouse of Prospero; you could be sitting there on your own and as much work would be done.’

‘Well,’ she began insistently, and her voice came harsher than she’d wanted, ‘maybe I didn’t want to move out of one brothel and right into another.’ She turned, and he was closer behind her than the mirror had made it seem.

‘What you want to ask is:
why hasn’t he hit on me?
’ When she stayed silent, Xan added: ‘That
is
what you’re thinking. I know you.’

She shrugged, tried to shrug, didn’t move. Xan ploughed on.

‘You’re thinking:
is it because I’m not attractive?
Or is it the other way round:
does he respect me too much to try it on?
You’re thinking:
this is a professional relationship
and that needs distance, but you
know
you wouldn’t have come here if you hadn’t thought we might be something together. You don’t know where you stand, and it’s the uncertainty that bothers you. Am I right?’

She considered, a still moment of defiance, then gave a curt nod. He’d pinned her. There was no aggression in him, no malice. He held his half-wrapped bundle as a barrier between them. She wanted him to put it down idly and close the gap, create certainty. She knew he wouldn’t, not yet; he would keep her in suspense. She was as transparent to him as he was to her.

‘I know you too well,’ he explained. ‘I know you like we’d been married all our lives. I know you like you were my wife or my sister. That’s why I haven’t done anything. You’re complicated.’

I know you, Xan
. No, no, no, not yet, later, after the party.
I know who you are.

A cramp had formed at the back of her right leg. That would hurt all night if she didn’t move now. She refused. Xan’s attention slid elsewhere. He unwrapped his parcel and Kay made a play of not-looking. He placed the final item of her costume over her head. It pushed down on her crown with a dull weight and covered the top of her face like a visor. There was a moment of darkness, then she found the eyeholes, twin slivers of the world.

‘Turn round, it needs to be done up at the back.’

He took her shoulders and spun her round gently before she could react. Unlike her eyes, her ears were clear; the expected sensation of being submerged or wrapped in a nutshell wasn’t there. Xan picked at the back of her hair, tightening straps, and the mask clenched. She was drawn back against his body, against his heat. The face of a cat stared back at her from the mirror. Her hair grew out from behind pixie ears. Beneath the mask, the soft underlay irritated her skin. She willed the party to be over already.

‘There now,’ Xan said as he tightened the last of the straps, ‘no-one is going to notice your hair.’

Seven rooms were set aside for the party and each was colour-coded according to Xan’s design. This much Kay gathered from the other waitresses, who were dressed identically though in different colours to match the rooms.
Reservoir Dogs
, one girl joked, irritating Kay,
Reservoir Waitresses
. Kay was the only cat; the others had their own masks, not all animals, and she put this down to another of Xan’s affectations. This was a part of him that wasn’t open to her.

She didn’t object. The mask was uncomfortable and she found her sweat trapping itself in the airless gaps between her face and the foam coating, but she liked the anonymity, she liked having a private space of her own in rooms otherwise packed with people. As the guests arrived, they were also given masks by the Nigerian, who alone displayed his naked face and slipped away soon after the party had gained momentum, perhaps to mask himself, perhaps to vanish. Xan was waiting upstairs; he had a mask too, but he’d refused to show her or let her guess its form. That was just as well. She didn’t have his imagination.

As befitted her colour, Kay began waiting in the red room. The paintwork had been hurried in the last few days, and she spotted thin, slapdash work, crude brushstrokes and the liverspots of the old walls fading up from under the new coat. The redness of the light was raw and intense; it made the room seem bloody as if the walls were made of flesh and the guests were stepping into the chamber of a bloated and overgrown body. Not that this first impression lasted: the room smelled bloodless, it smelled chemical fresh, and the walls remained disappointingly flat and unmoving. It wasn’t a popular room, the red, though it held all the champagne. The guests preferred the tropical coolness of the blue – served by the anti-mermaid waitress with human legs and the head of a fish – or the parched desert of the orange. The orange servant wore a sand-blasted old man’s face. They soon fell out of their proper rooms, all the coloured waitresses.

Kay took champagne round the rest of the party. There were other drinks, but the champagne felt like her responsibility. Champagne meant achievement or success. It wasn’t a drink she associated with her time in Candida. Champagne meant triumph.

She went into the largest room, the white. Around her burst bubbles of conversation.

‘fantastic the way the Club’s been transformed’

‘don’t know her myself but look at her shadow’

‘opportunity to make what we do mean something’

‘who hasn’t but the lessons they teach I could live without’

‘me me me it’s always me me me me’

‘I grew up in Potsdam but no English was always my first language it’s such a relief’

‘says
Are you hunting for rabbits again, your grace?
’

‘made some mistakes but what wonderful gargoyles’

‘went to sleep in Toronto and literally I swear
literally
woke up in Candida’

‘to you dear I can lay my hands on anything you want cornu-bloody-copia’

‘spheres and the fifth as a perfect balance of them all now you and I know it’s nonsense’

‘midnight I reckon midnight and by Jesus we’ll have fireworks’

‘haven’t left you’ll always be there in timeless now where we are always talking’

‘the uniforms are good I like being informal no one wants a regiment’