Force Majeure (6 page)

At least once a week, she was sent up the long, winding stair to the roof to ring the house-bell, which spoke with the sacred authority of any monastery chant. In the rare altitude, her head ballooned, and too readily she imagined herself teetering on the brink. She imagined Candida spreading out in impossible directions from the base of the house to cover the whole world. Wild purple flowers grew on the inhospitable outcrop round the bell, and she decided to pick one each time, wearing it for the rest of the day as a symbol of good luck, of not falling, of clinging on.

There was one other friend besides Azure. On her first afternoon cleaning the library, blind Father Christmas ambushed her, taking dustpan and brush from her hands. He was nowhere near as tall as her. He was squat. Unlike most people his height, he didn’t trouble to look her in the eye – why should he? – but directed his deep, jovial voice just below her throat.

‘A library cleans itself, except in extremis. Dust is a line of defence.’ He laughed heartily and strode deeper through the maze of shelves with the confidence of a sighted man. Kay kept a close eye on his heavy brown hands, hoping to see them go to the carvings and notches that distinguished each shelf, but they remained swaying at his side. If that was his system, he’d mastered it long ago. He had her pick out what seemed to be a circular table from a junk room and set it up in a corner of the library. It was in fact a War in Heaven board on a stand, and he spent the afternoon teaching her how to play.

‘Am I going to get into trouble for this?’ she asked.

‘Hell, no. Don’t you worry about me either. I have tenure.’

She hung up her tabard and sat in her black skin-suit under the blind man’s gaze, trying and failing to master the intricate game. Luis’ thick fingers probed each sculpted piece carefully, to memorise them before placing them on the board. After that, she began to hope for more daily assignments to the library, but her supervisor showed no sign of yielding either way.

There was free-time, which she came to loathe as much as the work-time. Leaving the old free house should have been a relief, but Candida felt at least as oppressive under its cheerfully blank skies. The streets felt like the open-air extensions of the house, and the noise and pressure of the crowd reminded her of the more intense but subtler intermingling of bodies she’d left behind. It made her self-conscious, the possibility that she might be seen by someone who knew her business and her home. She explored, a little, but the city was a warren. She considered compiling a rough map – she felt the same mild urge to do the same for the house – but dismissed the thought as Adolescent and Impossible. Mostly she ventured outside to buy food and fresh clothes. The paper money she earned started as healthy green but withered visibly as the days went by, turning yellow, then brown and slowly flaking away in her pockets.

‘You’re an Appeared,’ she remarked. She was slumped with her legs apart. Luis’ blindness gave her licence to relax, at least visibly. He had her cornered, if such a thing were possible on a curved game-board. He laughed.

‘I came here like you. Voluntarily.’

‘I was misinformed.’

‘So was I. So was Doctor Arkadin. He came out here looking for the mountain made of gold and didn’t find it.’

‘It was greed, then? El Dorado, greed and stupidity. The usual reasons?’

Luis shook his head. Thunder. Despite his full beard, his scalp was thinning, grizzled and grey. ‘The mountain is a metaphor. Who knows what his real motives were? He says he wanted to bring European culture to us savage Americans. He had whole buildings hauled into the mountains by mules, then by …
thunderers
the journal calls them … and then …’ Her breathing or her heartbeat must have quickened, as Luis noticed her agitation. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘Doctor Arkadin’s journals? You’ve read them? They’re here?’

Luis’ shoulders rippled genially. ‘Someone wrote a journal, not him. I read it years back. Lord knows where it is today.’

‘I’d like to see it.’

Luis held out a hand full of spare War-pieces. ‘It’s your move,’ he told her.

So: there was the city where she couldn’t clear her head; there was the library, the place of secrets and conspiracies; there was the room she shared with Azure, precariously private; and on the roof, there was the howling pressure of the air, little of which ever reached her lungs. The only place where she felt truly herself was the memory garden, a scrubland full of stones on the mountainside. There was, Azure had said, an angel buried there, and it could well have been a cemetery. The stones – marked by inscriptions not in English and occasionally not even in Roman script – could well have been grave-markers, but most were ancient, and the earth, disturbed or not, was hidden under wild grass that grew waist-deep in places. Kay’s task out here, sometimes alone, sometimes as half of a taciturn pair, was ostensibly taming the ragged edges of the garden. In practice she was on guard duty. She was given tools – they were a sentry’s weapons.

The last stone in the garden was a tottering obelisk on a crumbling base, its edges and inscriptions eroded into smoothness. A short way beyond that was the wall, which met the canal, which met the city. Aside from the bridge, under constant vigil, it was the narrowest gap between Candida and the old free house that claimed to predate it. Invaders came this way, jumping, bridging or swimming the moat. They were city boys mainly, barred from the house because of their age and their frame of mind. They came to gloat mostly and sat on the walls or the branches of overhanging trees, often soaked from the crossing or naked. They shivered helplessly as Kay and her companions patrolled the grounds. They shouted suggestions to the watchwomen like crude, hooting monkeys.

‘Show your boobs!’

‘That’s the wrong frame of mind,’ Luna said, walking with her on her first day in the garden. ‘They’re nothing but mouths,’ Quint mock-whispered.

‘
Don’t
show your boobs,’ Luna warned.

Kay shook her head. Gardening duty wasn’t peaceful but it was
clear
. She felt useful here and alert. Occasionally, very occasionally, an over-heated youth dropped from the wall and made a break for the doors. They couldn’t get far into the house without being seen and caught, but the gardeners were the first line of defence, and that gave Kay an odd sense of responsibility, and pride if she could intercept them. She charged them, becoming the fierce-haired giantess of her childhood fantasies, a red-haired Boudicca in an overgrown garden. The boys usually broke ground or dodged rather than counter-charged. If they tried, she cracked them lightly across the temple with the handle of whatever garden-weapon she’d brought; a hoe, a rake, a spade. The same handle, carefully turned, could knock the legs out from beneath them. In the last resort, she barrelled into them, trusting her height and her momentum to knock them both squirming to the ground. It was play-fighting.

Don’t enjoy it.

It isn’t a game.

At the end of the third week, she caught a boy, topless and slippery with canalwater, at the base of the obelisk, and pinned him there with her boot firmly on his chest until his eyes and his mouth offered surrender. A dirt-etched picture on the side of the pillar showed a four-legged animal – a horse? – vaulting the sea-gap between two headlands, its rider a mere passenger clinging desperately to its mane. Kay felt for him. Her breaths fired hard, like pistons. The youth shivered underfoot.

‘Show me your tits,’ he snarled. She showed him her teeth.

In spite of the misery and the grind and the cold, she felt mildly elated when she returned to her room that evening.

A man was sitting on her unmade cot among her cast-off clothes. She ignored him and felt her good mood deflating at the prospect of another uncomfortable night in the tub. That, and he was occupying
her
space. She unbuckled her boots sullenly and lifted her tabard over her shoulders. He was staring at her, needle-eyed.

‘Azure isn’t here,’ she said, then in a fit of malice she immediately regretted, ‘and you’re not her first.’

He shrugged. ‘I know that. I’m not here for sex. I’m here for you.’

Don’t drop your guard.

Now she inspected him. He was slim and tall, though not quite as tall as her, and very precise in his poise, even now when he half-sat, half-lay on her bed. Sharp-faced – she liked that – light-haired and clean of complexion. He was a Westerner, maybe Scottish if his voice was a guide. He seemed unintimidated by her gaze, moving only his fingers and then carefully, to hint at what was going on beneath the skin.

He wore a cream linen suit with a tie. Kay had something similar back home. She’d stopped wearing it after Her Better Half had told her it made her look like a Mob enforcer, or the Man from Del Monte.

She shrugged, matching his first nonchalant gesture. ‘Prospero,’ she said.

‘My name,’ he replied, ‘is Xan.’

‘You’re an Appeared?’

‘I don’t like that word. It has connotations.’ He produced a business card from his pocket and passed it to her.

THE DISPLACED CLUB
– then a street number in Candida.

‘Displaced,’ she said, tasting the unremarkable word.

‘Come along when you can. It’s a place you can be yourself.’

He made a display of getting to his feet. Kay, with her free hand, reached automatically to clasp the fabric of her vest over her navel. She twisted; the cloth tightened round her shoulders. Xan noticed. He had the eyes of an assayer.

‘You’re interested, then?’ he remarked.

Her guard was down. There was no point in dissembling. ‘Very,’ she admitted.

He squeezed past her on his way out.

Kay undressed and lay in the warm rut left on her cot by Xan’s body, turning his card over in her fingers. The address she’d already committed to memory. The back of the card was a shiny blank, a mirror. She regarded her reflection, seeing herself clearly without glasses. She looked smooth and healthy again, like the struggling boy she’d pinned down by the obelisk. The weariness and the aches she felt were simply not reflected, shed like age with an older skin. It could be a teenager’s face. She watched herself smile bitterly.

Don’t let it touch you.

Chapter Three: Dreams of Doctor Arkadin

Kay weighed the chalk in her fingers and considered the blank gap on the wall by her cot. It was some time before she moved her hand to make the first mark. She wanted to recreate his face in all its detail in her mind’s eye before drawing, but it wouldn’t come. There were fragments, impressions, identikit pieces, adding up to nothing. Had he worn spectacles? A moustache? A beard? The shape of his head and the colour of his hair eluded her. She adjusted her glasses, odd light moved before her eyes. She slid the edge of the chalk down the wall, describing a line that might have been a cheekbone or a question-mark or a meaningless squiggle.

She stared at it. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t him.

Most guests left the house of dragons dazed or elated. Esteban trudged, always carrying away the same burden he’d brought with him. He was a frequent visitor. Kay assumed – naively, she realised with hindsight – that he was here on city business with Flower-of-the-Lady. Then she happened to see him through a window in the spy passage. She’d been sent to clean the glass, an unappetising task. Esteban was sharing a lurid, red-lit suite with Luna and Quint. They had stripped him to the waist and were planting kisses like seeds on his stomach and back. He reacted damply, as if they were slapping him with flannels. Since they’d last spoken he’d shaved the hair on his head down to a scalp-buzz. His body was wiry, pale-skinned and hairless, except for straggly tufts round his nipples. Both of the-Lady’s favourites were wrapped in elaborate layers, their faces and skins masked but still unmistakable.

‘We were telling him his fortune,’ Luna told her, when she cornered them front-stage, ‘and sucking his wounds.’

‘He won’t meet a tall dark stranger,’ Quint began.

‘He was in love.
That
poison.’

‘He will meet a tall ginger familiar,’ Quint finished, ‘in heat.’

Kay left feeling glum and seedy. The weeks of frustration tightened the muscles in her chest next to her heart; she could feel them coiling and twisting into a knot that throbbed, pebble-sized. The previous night, she’d wrestled sleeplessly with her covers, nagged by long-dormant nicotine pangs. Her shift was almost over, and after weeks of sullen, diligent service, she was owed a little slack. She hurried back to her cell and changed. By the time she was dressed for town, Esteban was on his way out.

Xan’s invitation, a week old and still unanswered, lay burning under her pillow.

She clattered over the bridge, leaving the house by the main entrance for the first time. Servants were lighting the beacons along the rails. These were sculpted into the shapes of elongated mouths that belched fire from between their teeth – summer was a-coming in, but the nights were still dark and fuliginous. The beacons punctuated the evening chill with intense bursts of heat.

Esteban had a solid head-start, but she made good guesses and tracked him down to a pavement café a short stroll from the house. There were two chairs at his table, and she took the second without his blessing. He noticed her only as she sat. Kay folded her arms on the table top and leaned forward. In the nomansland between them was a half-eaten sandwich on a plate, a mug of tea drawn from a small pot, a peaked officer’s cap, a sheaf of unruled paper and a fountain pen that nestled there undisturbed. Under the table, their legs were so close that his warmth was palpable through her skirt. The long wounds of his eyes inspected her in surprise. He didn’t recognise her, not straightaway.