Force Majeure (3 page)

Bloody hell.

The emcee strutted between them, below their prize. He’d filled his hat with his gambling receipts and restored it insecurely to his head. With every shout and every emphatic gesture he shed money like dandruff.

‘Good people! Officers! Citizens! Friends!’ He half-stole a glance at Kay: ‘Appeared! I give you the Captains of the White Horse, Ernesto de Broca and Emilio Esteban, who for your delectation and amusement – no more bets please! – will duel to the blood. The winner to receive a prize of her own devising from our fair and delightful hostess! The loser to crawl away on his belly in shame and ignominy! Agreed, gentlemen?’

Both men roared and rattled their banners. The emcee snatched rabbit glances at both quarters then leapt nimbly out of the way, leaf-money streaming in his wake. ‘On your signal!’ he hollered.

The blur shifted on the balcony. Something – white, a handkerchief? – drifted to the ground. The duellists in faded-peacock jackets hoisted their brooms to make points. They rose from the saddles, pushing forwards. They howled harder, expelling mock-violence and masculine heat from their stomachs. It became the battle hymn. Lances erect, bikes shaking, they charged.

Exhausted, Kay closed her eyes.

It hadn’t been a handkerchief falling but the whole white dress, sustained on the cool afternoon air. It didn’t reach the pavement but draped itself around the limbs of a lamp-post. The blur-woman herself had gone, retreated into the dark as the victor scrambled up foliage, across piping and over the balcony ledge to reach her. The crowds, mostly pleased at the outcome, beat their hands and stamped and cheered. The emcee and other touts dished out rewards to the successful gamblers, carefully, very carefully.

Azure knelt in the middle of the courtyard, clutching the broken frame of her bike. Its front tyre was folded almost in half and she cradled it as if it were the head of a newborn. A grief posture; she might have been crying.

The loser, with a stunted shadow hanging round his ankles, loped into Kay’s view. ‘These are yours,’ he said, and pressed a shape like infinity into her hands: her glasses. She held them up to the light, seeing scratches and dirt on the lens. She sighed her thanks. The winner was hauling himself in an ungainly sprawl head-first over the balcony. The loser sat on the pavement beside her. He smelled of sweat and grime and grease.

‘You trashed her bike,’ she said, thin-lipped. Watching Azure was painful.

‘It’s not an arm or a leg. It can be mended.’

‘It’s her livelihood.’

‘
Voladora
are much too precious. I’ll have it mended. Who’re you to care anyway?’

‘No-one special. Just make sure you get it mended, Captain Esteban.’

‘
Milo
. My friends call me.’

‘I’m not making friends. I’m telling you your name. I’m telling you I’ll remember it.’

He had been staring at her, but she felt no inclination to meet his gaze. She pressed her glasses against her stomach; without them, he was a brownish haze in the corner of her eye.

‘You’re an Appeared?’ She blanked him. ‘A newcomer,’ he explained.

‘I arrived this morning.’

‘Then you’re my job, and fate has put you in my way,’ Esteban declaimed. She looked at him, at the deep-eyed feminine face radiating friendly insincerity. ‘I work for the Bureau of Appearances. You should make yourself known to us.’

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘The Appeared don’t. What the outside world knows of Candida is often out-of-date. We’re’ – he groped for the right English expression – ‘too
quick
for you. Don’t look so worried. I won’t bite.’

Kay, who prided herself on giving nothing away in her face, didn’t rise to his bait. She shrugged. ‘
Business
.
Indefinite
. This is my address.’ She thrust the necessary piece of paper at him. ‘If you could give me directions it would be helpful.’

‘I could take you now.’ He studied the address, frowned, slipped it smoothly into his breast pocket. ‘Perhaps not. This is old news. You may have to find alternative accommodation while I investigate.’

He hesitated. She didn’t allow a flicker on her expression. ‘I can sort myself out.’

Esteban brushed the stray hairs from her face and placed an unwelcome hand on her forehead. The cold dry press of his palm made her realise how hot she was and how sweaty. ‘No. Not in your condition.’

‘Tell me something,’ – she restored her glasses and brought the scene back into the hard and the clear – ‘what was the point of this today? Fighting with bikes and brooms like kids. Don’t you have anything better to do with your time?’

‘You’re such an Appeared. You’ll get used to it.’

Irritated, she hauled herself to her feet. Her legs quivered and she found herself lowering, reluctantly, back into the warm spot she’d made for herself. Esteban wore a sad, droopy smile under his sad, droopy moustache. He seemed pettily pleased with his meagre power over her. He clapped his hands together and called for Azure, though the girl didn’t react, not straightaway.

‘You can’t just land me on her,’ Kay protested, though feebly.

‘She’s from the old free house. They’ll cope. So will you.’

Azure crouched at a blank space on her wall and, with one smooth and apparently thoughtless movement, drew a silhouette-outline in red chalk. It was taller and leaner than the rest of the crowd, with curved hips and exaggerated bangs at the side of the head. A woman, then. The artist crept back to inspect the outline, froze for a moment in her caveman crouch, then rolled her head in satisfaction. She had the long, brittle fingers of a pianist or a pickpocket.

‘That’s you, that is,’ she said proudly. ‘I’ll fill you in later.’

Kay, her mouth full of breakfast, nodded approval, then swallowed. ‘Do you do this for everyone?’

‘Sort of. It’s a memory wall. It remembers everyone I’ve let into this room.’ (Kay didn’t count heads, but there were over a dozen.) She shrugged. ‘I tried being a pavement artist before I got here, doing pictures of people and stars and Jesus and the Last Supper and Blake and all that shit, but I was crap. Now I just do shadows.’

‘You don’t mind me being here? I don’t want to be an imposition.’

Azure smiled benevolently at her guest. ‘Everyone comes through the old free house. It’s no imposition.’

‘Esteban –’

‘– didn’t do much more than what I would have thought of eventually anyway.’

‘He likes throwing his weight around.’

‘He knows his home better than you is all.’ Azure interlaced her fingers, making a prayer-knuckle, which she pressed to her mouth. ‘And he’s scared of me.’

‘Should he be?’ Kay tried not to laugh.

‘Of the house, yes! Don’t look so alarmed. You’ll be fine.’

Kay was sure that she’d neither looked nor felt alarmed. She was practised at making her face numb, her eyes sightless, her limbs folded. She’d learned poker-stillness to keep the unstable world at arm’s length. Until today, it had worked. She had an uncomfortable feeling that she’d stepped into a game without rules, or with rules so complex they made poker seem quaint.

‘I slept well,’ she remarked. ‘It helped, I think. I feel a lot better.’

‘Did you dream?’

Kay nodded. Azure was grinning again, showing those crooked, gappy teeth again. ‘I don’t dream at all since I came here. Except three times. First time, I dreamed I found one of those big coins like they don’t use now, big as a wagon wheel. Second time, I dreamed one of the Follies was burning and no-one could agree whether to put it out or let it burn. Third time, I dreamed there was a body in the library, a man with angel wings instead of arms, and really old, really wrinkly skin, and eyes like he’d died from shock. Those three dreams, no others; and I used to dream like mad back in the real world.’

‘Maybe you don’t remember them. A lot of people don’t.’

‘That’s not the point. The point is, I
found
one of those big coins under a floorboard in this room just like I dreamed. One of the Follies
did
go up, two days later. Can you see a pattern emerging? I asked the-Lady for advice and she told me
dreams are true
.’

‘Some dreams come true. Never the really good ones.’

‘Please, listen,’ Azure insisted. ‘They don’t
come
true. They
are
true. They’re real in spite of being dreams. It’s that simple.’

‘I don’t get it.’ Kay shook her head and thought of the car crash in the woods, of the frightened, fascinated girl she’d been and of the boy who’d intruded on the scene in her last sleep without ever having been there before. ‘What about the third dream? Did you find a body?’

‘No, no I didn’t,’ Azure admitted, ‘
I
didn’t. But you ask Luis and he’ll tell you they
did
find a body in the library, long before his time, and they buried him in the grounds.’

Kay raised an eyebrow. ‘A body with angel’s wings?’

‘
Angel
just means
messenger
. Luis’ll tell you about it, if you ask him.’

Kay sighed, thinking of the hectic outside world, which somehow felt more sedate than the new and unexpected chaos of Candida. There was a little breakfast left, scraps of vegetable and at least one mouthful of cooling salmon. ‘So your point is …?’

‘My point is, dreams are true. Your dream is true. It will happen.’

‘It already did,’ Kay told her, and forked the last of the salmon into her mouth; but her head was full of the dream, and she tasted nothing but hot smoke and the sweet, poisonous oil burning in the body of the dragon.

Chapter Two: In the House of Traps

Don’t let it touch you.

Kay inspected herself in the anteroom mirror. She wanted to appear dignified. There was little she could do about the clothes, but she had washed as best she could in Azure’s tiny bathroom. It would be polite and politic to meet the chatelaine. Besides, she owed Azure.

Don’t let the city touch you. Don’t let its stink get into your pores. Be clean-skinned.

She looked rough, her eyes and her skin purpled by tiredness. There were more lines than she cared to remember, the slow erosion of time. She wondered how she had come to look so old when she hadn’t really lived. Her unpinned hair had gone jitterbug overnight, sprouting random strands and knots and tangles. She reached for her brush … damn, it was in her bag back in Azure’s room at the other end of the labyrinth. She tried to flatten it out with her fingers, and it barely noticed. She twirled the raggedy strands into the semblance of pigtails.

Don’t let the city taste you. Don’t flirt with it. Don’t flash thigh or tit. Don’t copulate.

‘Don’t suck your hair like that. The strands fill your stomach to bursting. Then you die.’

They were simply and unexpectedly there at her side, smiles like duelling scars. Kay tried not to look startled, even when the shorter of the two, the silent one, reached out to stroke her hair. In the mirror, her face formed a stoic grimace, faintly distressed by physical contact. Both her assailants burst into fits of schoolgirl giggles.

The speaker – top-hatted and taller, with a grease-paint Groucho moustache – made a sweet clucking noise with her tongue. ‘I was like you. When I first arrived here, when I first Appeared, I was a fish without a bicycle. All those years I’d spent planning for the revolution, and here it was spread out before me like Lenin’s succulent, hairy vagina, and I panicked. Why didn’t I choose the blue pill? What I’m saying is that you grow into it. What’s Appeared can’t be Disappeared. It violates the laws of conservation.’ She was breathless. She sounded French. ‘I’m Luna and this is Quint. We represent the Lollipop Guild.’ More giggles.

They flanked her, both lean and unthreatening, but still she felt trapped between them. She didn’t look at them directly but drew in their reflections. They were grinning like morons. Both were Victoria’s Secret connoisseurs (or victims), ridiculously overdressed in their elaborate costumes of basques, laces, suspenders, rings and belts strung with dangling windchime chains. It was difficult to tell how old they were beyond
younger
– clearly much younger than Kay. They might be tall children or freaks escaped from some locked attic. Their skins were pale, as if never exposed to the daylight.

‘You’re a real Celt, aren’t you?’ Quiet Quint spoke at last, shy, squeaky. She had a jester’s triceratops cap, with little bells that tinkled in time with her breath.

Determined to remain dignified, even polite, Kay asked: ‘Do you live here?’

Luna doffed her hat. ‘We are Flower-of-the-Lady’s Gestapo, her paladins, her sex-warriors. Show her, Quint.’

Quint reached behind Kay’s ear and pulled out a small, patched kitten, which mewled on her palm then scampered down her side to the floor and was gone. ‘It’s a trick,’ she confessed, and looked away.

‘We’re
bruja
and sister. We’re daughters of dragons. Welcome to the family, Kay.’

Luna clapped a comradely arm round Kay’s shoulder while Quint took her hand into a limp shake.