Pandaemonium (22 page)

‘His dad
was
a bastard,’ Rocks argues, getting fucking sick of this. ‘You never heard the stories about him? Fuckin’ psycho.’

‘Like father, like son then,’ Kirk retorts.

‘Is that not what Matt was trying to say?’

Kirk turns round and shoots him a threatening look.

‘Whose fuckin’ side are you on?’ he demands.

Dazza intervenes, standing up from his spot on the tree trunk.

‘We’re all on the same side, big man. Just not so sure Barker was on Matt’s side or Matt was on Barker’s. Barker was on Barker’s side, and that’s all.’

But Kirk isn’t having it.

‘Shite. Dunnsy’s dead because that weirdo prick couldnae fight his own battles and Barker was his back-up. Well, I’m Dunnsy’s back-up - and the battle’s not finished.’

Kirk stomps off, batting away Dazza’s attempted restraining arm.

Dazza looks to Rocks as if to ask ‘What are we going to do?’

‘Somebody needs to talk to him about this,’ Rocks says.

‘We all need to talk about this,’ Dazza replies. ‘That’s why we’re here.’

Rocks glances at the rock-face again, in time to see Matt suddenly spin and tangle, ending up hanging upside down. He doesn’t panic, and nor does the Sergeant up top, who just calmly calls down some instructions. Matt hangs there a moment with one foot tangled above him, the other tucked behind his knee, a slightly bashful smile on his coupon. He’s a cool customer, the Matt boy. Enigma probably sells it better than ‘weirdo cunt’, though Rocks can understand why Kirk finds him frustrating. What he doesn’t understand is why the big man hasn’t learned, after all these years, to leave the boy to get on with it.

‘It’s beautiful,’ Heather says. ‘Makes you feel . . . I don’t know . . .’

‘Insignificant,’ Kane suggests.

‘I was going to say inspired.’

‘How about blessed?’ asks Blake.

He and Kane share a glance: touché.

‘It is beautiful,’ agrees Sendak warmly. ‘It’s also cold, cruel and extremely unforgiving if you don’t treat it with respect.’

Heather fixes both Kane and Blake with a warning stare.

‘First one to make a female comparison gets a boot in the peas.’

‘The Fool is taking a step over a precipice,’ she explains. ‘We’re most of the time too cynical, too insular or just too scared to take a step into the unknown. But if we don’t, then we never explore, never expand our horizons.’

Gillian and that lot are about fifteen yards away, though their ostentatious cackling is audible even over the gentle wind and the murmur of umpteen different conversations. They’re being extra noisy for her benefit, Deborah suspects: it’s not paranoia, she’s done it herself often enough when she’s been among them. It’s bound to have put a few noses out of joint that she didn’t come scampering over to them at breakfast (where they had grabbed a table for four anyway), or out on the hike this morning. She knows from experience that there’s no fun dangling possible exclusion over someone who doesn’t want to be included in the first place.

It isn’t a statement she’s making or anything, though she’s aware they’ll be dissecting it as such. Well, it probably is, but the point is it’s not aimed at them; it’s not about them. It’s about her. That’s what she realised last night.

It took her ages to get to sleep, but in a good way. A lot of things seemed clearer after her long talk with Marianne, and one of those was that it was a much more enjoyable experience to talk to Marianne than among that little coven. It feels easier to speak with other folk too, maybe because she’s actually listening to what they’re saying for a change, instead of looking for nuggets of embarrassment, sifting out reasons to slag them off.

This, though, sparks a moment of obsessive-compulsive anxiety, as Deborah asks herself whether, in the midst of so much emotion and revelation, she got around to deleting that picture. She’s fairly sure she remembers doing it, but now that she’s thought about it, she needs confirmation. She pulls out her phone and surreptitiously checks. It’s gone, but it still makes her shudder to think how close she must have come to disaster, to doing something unforgivable to Marianne and calamitous to herself. It also seems amazing how far she has come from the person she was this time yesterday.

While her phone is out, she decides to have a look at the pictures she has taken this morning, and gasps a little at the first, snapped just as they were leaving the FTOF. It’s Beansy with his bag dangling from a stick over his shoulder as he steps, smiling, off the edge of a stump and into thin air. She glances from the phone to the card in Marianne’s lap and sees exactly the same composition. Marianne lifts it to put it back in the pack, but Deborah stops her.

‘Look,’ she says, showing her the phone.

‘How appropriate,’ Marianne observes. ‘The Fool. Couldn’t have picked a better model.’

‘I didn’t choose anything,’ Deborah says, a little disappointed (but in another way a little relieved) that Marianne doesn’t find it spooky.

Deborah nudges the joystick on her phone to view the next pic as Marianne invites Cameron to turn over another card. The shot shows Matt hanging upside down by one foot, his other tucked behind his knee. Cameron reaches for the deck and turns over the Hanged Man. Again, the composition is identical, right down to the curiously serene smile on his face.

‘Marianne,’ she says, showing her the phone again and trying to keep a tremor from her voice.

‘Fuck,’ Marianne responds, this time leaving Deborah under no doubt that she does find it spooky. ‘That is . . . that is out there.’

‘Jesus,’ Cameron agrees. ‘Hey, Adnan, mate, you gotta see this. Let’s hear your quantum physics explain this shit.’

Marianne shows Adnan the two cards as Deborah passes him the phone.

‘That’s the order Cameron just drew these, too,’ Deborah tells him.

Adnan has a look at the two images. The similarity of the composition is unsettling, he would admit.

‘Are you familiar with tarot cards?’ he asks Deborah.

‘Not really. Marianne showed me some last night, but . . .’

‘But you have seen them before?’

‘Yes.’

Adnan nods. ‘Pattern recognition,’ he says. ‘It’s one of the human traits that helped us get out of the caves and make it to here.’ He points up at the sky. ‘We see faces in the clouds because we latch on to things that make sense in the chaos. Seeing those cards last night is what prompted you to push the button when something resembling the same images appeared in front of you. No mystic forces required.’

Again, Deborah feels a mixture of relief and disappointment.

‘Isn’t there room in your scientific world for a little magic?’ Marianne asks.

Adnan sits up straighter and smiles, a response that Radar knows him well enough to read.

‘Aw fuck, you’ve set him off. Don’t go there, Marianne.’

‘No, I’m interested,’ she insists.

‘You’re familiar with Aleister Crowley, I take it?’ he asks. Marianne nods. ‘Well, as someone said of his supposed wizardry, “the only problem with magic is that it doesn’t work”.’

Marianne laughs. Adnan is pleased to see that she has taken it in good spirit; more pleased that she appears to have a response.

‘It’s true, from a practical point of view, but he missed the point. Magic is about the realm of the imagination, about exploring the human subconscious.’

‘So you’d admit it’s all just . . . metaphors and symbols.’

‘Kind of. But that’s selling it extremely short. Look.’

Marianne reaches into her backpack and fishes out her book on demonology.

‘You bring books up mountains?’ Cameron asks.

‘I bring books everywhere. You never know when you might get a quiet five minutes to read.’

Adnan almost apologetically produces a Michio Kaku paperback from his own bag, just popping it up for a second as a gesture of solidarity to Marianne and a two-fingers to Cam.

Marianne flicks through her volume, showing Adnan several plates depicting different demons from a variety of cultures. He sees demons with pitchforks, with horns and pointed tails; some demons crawling on walls, others with wings, hovering in the air.

‘These are from all different societies, different religions, different eras,’ she says. ‘Empires that rose and fell . . . and yet they all have their own myths of the same thing. Ancient Greece, Mexico, China . . . Often very similar demons too. You can say they’re purely symbolic, just an image or an idea that spreads between humans. But why did that same image spring up independently in cultures that have had no contact?’

‘That doesn’t mean there
is
such a thing as demons, though,’ Adnan argues. ‘The idea could be something primal, something hard-wired to the human sub-conscious that—’

Adnan cuts himself off as he realises he has just echoed what Marianne already said.

‘See? Magic.’

‘I guess that’s why gods and demons don’t show up on each other’s turf. We have Bernadette at Lourdes, and the kids at Fatima or Medjogorje seeing Mary, but little kids in European villages never see Vishnu or Ganesh or any of the multitude of Hindu gods, while nobody in India has visions of the Madonna.’

‘We all have localised myths of the same archetypes,’ Marianne says. ‘Creation myths, mother goddess myths, rival sibling myths.’

‘Like the one about the son of God who was betrayed and killed, only to rise again, and through whose resurrection all mankind could achieve eternal life?’ Adnan suggests, eyeing Marianne closely to see how she likes her heresy. ‘Name of Osiris?’ he continues. ‘Worshipped in Egypt fifteen hundred years before Christ?’

‘Son of Geb, the sky god, and Nut, the earth goddess,’ Marianne says, letting him know this is not news and that
he
is on
her
turf. ‘And if you want more Christ antecedents, you’ve got Prometheus - bringer of light to man, similarly punished by being brutally hung up and his side pierced.

‘All over the planet, we’ve been telling ourselves the same stories since the dawn of time. You can say they’re only stories, only “metaphors and symbols” as you put it, but I think they’re more than that. Myths are like truths we somehow knew about the universe and about ourselves but didn’t quite understand, and didn’t always even understand why we knew them. For instance, civilisations all over the world worshipped the sun as a god that gave birth to Earth. Thousands of years later we discovered that the Earth
was
actually created from the sun as part of the debris that was whirling around it four and a half billion years ago.’

Adnan wears a strained expression, reluctant but duty-bound to disagree.

‘I take your point, but they were worshipping the wrong sun.’

‘Here we go,’ Radar says, flinging himself backwards as if in recoil.

‘Our sun isn’t actually hot enough to fuse hydrogen to helium. The sun that “gave birth” to us died billions of years ago in a supernova, which created the higher elements that make up our solar system. And that means that every one of us here is literally made of stardust.’

Marianne simply stares at him for a moment, with an expression he can’t read at all, and which he fears for a moment will turn to one he has seen on dozens of faces before, most frequently Radar’s. Then she speaks:

‘That is the coolest thing I have ever heard.’

Adnan says nothing, but his honest response to what she said would comprise precisely the same words.