Force Majeure (16 page)

‘mentioned in Bede’s chronicles years earlier that touching the earth business is a myth’

‘had her scrubbing floors what a waste of her talents fantastic tits’

‘what sort of name is that for a worm’

‘long term what Dubai was ten years ago Candida will be ten years from now’

‘that is the best mask here no I don’t know who I don’t want to it looks so real’

‘call it the old free house they have their own names for it the witches’

‘they opened it up and there was a midget inside making it work’

‘I don’t know who that is and I don’t care to find out’

‘just for the food history tells us its untameable I’m scared of history’

‘no not that room it’d give me a headache it’s
red
’

Kay wove among them. They took tall flutes from her without damming the flow of their conversation, and they never saw her, only the cat of her.

The white room backed onto the Club’s freshly-scrubbed but unprepossessing gardens, though the curtains were closed and in any case the view would have been hidden by the drawing night. The white room baked in the radiation from unfiltered bulbs, and some fresh air would have leavened the atmosphere. Kay suspected that the purpose of the curtains was to keep out not the dark but the overpowering sight and sound of the rival party held nightly on the city streets. The white room was also home to the main buffet, and densely packed. Its clown-masked hostess had taken charge of several other waitresses and directed them like a silent comedy troupe. Kay stayed out of her way.

It was here that she first saw the dragon and it was here that she first saw the fox.

She noticed the dragon first, how could she not? Even without its horns, it would have stood taller than her. She thought at first that it might be Xan, but it was too tall, its clothes were wrong and it didn’t move the way Xan would. It didn’t have his St Vitus energy. It moved elegantly, despite the weight of its mask. It wore evening dress and a cape; not a man, not a woman, a genderless dragon. She looked to its hands for a clue, but it wore gloves. It was nothing like the Chinese dragon she’d seen after her first night at the Club; it was a cruel-snouted crocodile with mottled pink skin and ribbed goat’s horns. It was the best mask of the night.

It looked at her, and she was there in the black bulbs of its eyes.

She had an empty tray; she knew without looking. The dragon glided on hidden hooves towards her, the throng parted and no-one but Kay paid it any attention. She put her tray aside, turning away carefully before she could flinch. Then she looked back and it was still there, waiting. It said nothing.

For the first time that evening, she broke her composure.

‘I’ll have to fetch some more from my room,’ she announced, and the party went on without her, but the dragon remained. Perhaps, under all those layers, its occupant couldn’t hear. ‘Can I help you with anything?’ she continued, and she knew she was breaking Xan’s cardinal rule, but the dragon’s silence was demanding. It was a vacuum to be filled.

She picked up her tray again and held it in front of her as a shield.
Jeanne d’Arc
, she thought stupidly,
Jeanne d’Arc in red
.

‘I’ll bring some champagne. If you need anything else, you have only to ask.’

Satisfied, or bored, the dragon wheeled away, gliding ominously towards the curtains with its cape dragging on the floor behind it. At that moment, some half-drunk reveller in another room took it upon himself to start screeching like an owl; the sound carried through the clubhouse, and Kay’s heart rattled in her ribs. Red, red, back to the red room,
red
.

Around her, the partygoers had broken off their conversations and were laughing – at the noise? At the dragon? At Kay’s sudden startled retreat? She couldn’t tell. She was invisible. She hugged the inside of the mask. She passed the fox on her way out of the white room; another anonymous mask, unnoticed. She found herself in the soothing indigo room, too gloomily dark for the crowds. Even the waitress was gone. Xan had installed a coffin clock with plain, unvarnished wood and a working pendulum but no hands on the dials. Tock. Kay measured the beat of her heart against its rhythm. Tick. The length of a second seemed to have grown since she’d last paid attention to the time. Tock. She needed to use the toilet; no, she didn’t yet, but she might soon. Tick. Xan could be downstairs by now; she should return to the white room and face the crowd. Tock. Or to her natural place among the glass towers of champagne in the bloody vault. Tick. Where was Xan?

The fox had followed her, and stood at the doorway.

She saw him there and made none of the mistakes she had with the dragon.

He wasn’t Xan, that was clear. He was too short, but there was more. Xan would look striking in the shabbiest clothes, but the fox reversed the trick, turning his elegant grey suit into a rumpled rhinoskin. His mask looked too small to contain an entire head. His nose was a fuzzy brown cone, reaching a whiskered point. His ears pricked, his eyes gazed, he was hungry. He didn’t smell like a fox, he smelled like a man in papier mâché.

The fox was a wary animal with human hands. He paced around the walls of the indigo room, considering Kay. Food/danger? Hunter/hunted? Meat/not-meat? No, she was projecting. She took a tray from the nearest trestle. Tiny fishcakes, that was okay, the fox wouldn’t be a vegetarian. She offered it. She
should
speak; the fox might reply and break the illusion. She stayed silent and the fox didn’t react and she imagined suspicion and hesitancy in his empty glass eyes. She put the cakes away. Behind her, the clock began to chime softly. She bowed slightly and backed away, toward the door.

The fox jumped forward, his hands raised.

Then Kay became afraid of the fox and afraid of the emptiness of the party rooms. There were murmurs of chatter and laughter in the distance but not loud or close enough to drown out the senile chorus of the clock. She looked at the outstretched hands, then at the tight head, and it occurred to her that she was
prey
, that the fox wanted to kill her. She laughed.

The fox, deadly serious, took another step.

Kay spilled backwards out of the indigo room, and the fox came after her.

Why, she wondered later, had she turned towards the interior of the clubhouse? Why not run for the edge, where the people and the party were? It was instinct to head inwards, the pure buzz of a body reacting out of blind fear, but that explained nothing. Part of her believed that the fox really would kill her, and she wanted to find a lonely place to die. She didn’t want to end her life in front of so many people, so many careless eyes.

‘Did you want to kill me?’ she would ask the fox, once he’d shed his skin.

He held her cigarette in his man’s mouth. He would pass it back to her before replying. ‘I didn’t want to. I thought I had to. I
believed
I had to.’

She didn’t run at first but fast-walked, and the fox padded behind her at a casual distance. His footsteps, like hers, were silent on the dull-concrete floor, but she could feel his weight at her back. Her heart was pumping, she was thinking fast and clear. The idea that the fox was hunting her was still faintly ridiculous, but the ancient parts of her brain were telling her to find shelter, high ground, the tribe’s totem. She blundered past the door to the red room, which would not have been the right place. Too bloody, too
thick
. The fox kept his distance; he was always there.

She moved briskly into the creamy yellow room, but it was deserted and in disarray. Tables had been overturned. Food, drink and decorations were scattered across the floor, the traces left of a fight or an eruption that had passed into another room. A pinkish wet stain had exploded on the far wall. She brushed it with her fingertips as she passed; it was still damp, and her hand came back smelling of wine. The fox moved round the scene of the devastation and came leisurely after her.

She wished it would make a sound. She wished it would grunt or breathe hard or howl or give something of itself away.

There were people in the brown room, including the room’s waitress (with her piebald horse’s head) and a cluster of fat, chattering monkeys in cummerbunds. They paid the cat little attention as she moved through the room and no more to the fox as it pursued her. It would have been a good place to stop and stand her ground, to see what the fox would do, but she’d decided to keep moving. Stopping would have felt like cheating. The chase was important. The aim wasn’t to hide or fight. She wanted to outrun him.

She left the brown room and the party behind and they ventured one after the other into the vacant, dim-lit, unhaunted passageways of the Displaced Club. Kay hobbled on her cramped leg, the tendons tightening against the bone like a line of knotted rope, and the fox kept an easy respectful distance. She stumbled past the stairs. Going up wasn’t an option. Going up would be running to Xan for help, and she didn’t need his protection.

The dark gave her some advantage. They ventured into windowless territory where the fox stumbled, banging into walls and furniture, but she was less familiar with the terrain than she’d hoped and made as many mistakes and as much noise. He stayed close behind her; how could he see her? She imagined herself luminous in the dark, the hair poking out from the back of her cat-head giving off a lustre like a beacon. Glancing back, she saw the white V of a shirt beneath a jacket. The fox’s hand touched her shoulder. She pulled away silently and plunged through another door and into a glass cul-de-sac filled with light.

The dead end was a viewing platform looking down the ridge of the city, and the light was the collective glow of Candida itself. It was an almost starless night, a single bright exception flickering unfixed around the horizon. Kay was briefly dazzled by the off-white glow of the city. She smacked into the glass and tumbled. Behind her, the fox emerged into the doorway, his lidless eyes unblinking. He stood there patiently as she hit the floor. There was no other way out

Kay stayed low on her haunches. The mask was acting for her; she poised herself defensively like a cat. Small though he was, the fox filled the only exit. His hands came up and he licked his palms. His jacket had come open during the chase and its tails balanced unsteadily. He wasn’t ready to spring. He was toying with her. Still a cat, Kay spasmed her spine, stretching out to her full height. The fox looked wary. She had almost forgotten that there must be a face beneath the mask. The false head turned to sniff the air. The fox shuffled forward and took her hand in his paw; it was trembling. Contact.

He’s not a fox. He’s a man, full of a man’s doubts.

He tried to pull back, to break contact, but Kay twisted her hand round and tightened her fingers into a crush. Snared, the fox gasped, in surprise more than pain. Since leaving the party, Kay had heard nothing but her own rasping, desperate breaths, and it was only the fox’s trapped squeal that made her realise that she alone could hear herself, in the private space of the cat-mask. She let the fox go and he stood there, probably hearing the echoes of his cry reverberating in the cavities of his own head. His hands had been warm, glowing with the heat of the chase. So were hers. She barrelled into him, pushing them both back through the doorway, away from the glass and the light.

Their masks nuzzled, cold cardboard batting against cold cardboard. Sweat quickly filled the inside of their faces. Their bodies fought for a while – the fox trying to pin the cat against the wall, the cat wanting the fox crouched on the floor beneath her with her invisible skirt flapping over him – the fox crudely gentle and uncertain, the cat vicious and hungry – the fox sliding her knickers down as though they were sacred, the cat kneading his groin as though it was plasticine. They chased, they struggled, they compromised.

‘Where’ve you been?’ Xan whispered serenely from under his mask.

Kay had been back to the bathroom to freshen up and wipe away the sweat. She had pins-and-needles at the base of her stomach, but otherwise there was no trace left of her fox hunt, and she’d made bloody sure she was presentable before she returned. ‘I had to get changed. I spilled something. Don’t worry, nothing’s broken.’

Xan seemed to accept that, though the mask made it impossible to tell for sure. She had returned to the party minutes earlier, but it was only now that the fox rejoined the throng. He was prowling round the edges of the white room, looking no less dishevelled than before.

‘A lot of these people are officers,’ she observed.

‘They are.’

‘Doctor Arkadin’s men,’ she said.

‘They were.’

Xan was the sun. His mask was a golden disc with a mane of curled coronas. The eyes behind the grooves were unmistakable. He brought energy into the white room, which in Kay’s absence had begun to sag with prandial exhaustion. He had become the centre of gravity for the whole party, with his guests pushed into the margins of the room. They watched the sun through the corners of their eyes, and Kay guessed that most of the hushed conversation was about him and his plans. Among the midnight-tired bodies, he was the only one who still seemed fresh and awake.

‘Can you trust them?’ she asked. The sun cast its head one way then the other.

‘In a few moments, we’ll be going out into the grounds. Then you’ll see how big Prospero is and the extent of its powers. I’ve been keeping this quiet, but you
know
. You’ve always known.’ Kay shook her head deliberately. Behind his radiant light, the sun would be smiling, always smiling. ‘There’s an attaché case in the red room under the table in the corner. I’d like you to fetch it now. Send anyone you meet there through to the garden. Don’t leave any stragglers, make sure you’re the last to leave.’