That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote (10 page)

‘
I’m not even
in
the bloody casino,’ she went on. ‘I couldn’t work in there. It’s smoky, and I get asthma.’

I nodded to be sympathetic.
‘So health, not principle, keeps you out here.’

‘
Exactly. I tell my friends that it’s actually quite a principled place. You notice that people don’t judge each other by unreasonable standards in there. It takes a certain humility to carry your money around in a little plastic bucket. Unless you play the coinless machines. But then it’s easy to spend more.’

‘
I dare say.’

‘
But the point is, coins or notes or bloody cowrie shells, if you go in there it means you’re looking for something that you’ve got no power to get except by dumb luck, the grace of fortune. You’re admitting your inadequacy and throwing yourself on the mercies of the universe. It’s as good as praying, wouldn’t you say?’

‘
Oh, for sure,’ I said agreeably. She was wearing a cerise skirt and blazer and a strong perfume, and her voice was rather loud. Next to her I felt drab and insubstantial. Though it wasn’t just her. It was the place we were in, the first-floor mezzanine above the atrium at the intersection of the casino, the adjacent hotel, and the shopping mall that ran along the extensive river frontage of the whole complex.

There was an entrance to the mall between Armani and Prada, facing towards Gucci. Versace and
Hermès were down an escalator to the left. The corridor boasted black marble walls and brass fittings. Around the corner from Gucci, the corridor opened into the atrium, a cavernous space clad in more black marble and ringed by two mezzanine levels.

A light show with a theme of the four seasons coruscated over glass walls within the atrium, to the accompaniment of a musical soundtrack. Laminar fountains danced in time to the music, the solid water arcs leaping in and out of holes in each fountain
’s polished black surface. Liquid nitrogen fog floated up from the fountains every time winter had its turn. The ceiling high above was an inverted, iridescent ocean, fashioned from thousands of pendant crystal beads, through which the colours of the rainbow, projected by lights around the edge of the ceiling, waved like soft corals and darted like fish. The effect of all of this was sense-pleasing and fantastical. It was obvious how it might inspire one with the feeling of being in a magic realm where the chance of wonderful things happening was high. Back on the ground, the brighter lights of the casino were flashing through a wide entrance from the atrium.

To reach my present location I had climbed a glassy black staircase with small lights set in the steps. The area upstairs was opulent in a muted and comfortable way. Around the mezzanine there were several bays like the one
I was in, furnished with sofas and lamps, inviting people to sit and relax. Warm-toned abstract paintings hung on the walls, and doors led to bars and function rooms.

Although the bosses of this place were obviously wealthy, none of the bodies enjoying the fountains below and the sofas above looked affluent. Those gathered in the dark to watch the dancing water were mostly parents with kids and people with the rumpled, drip
-dry look of budget tourists. A young woman sat at the bottom of the black stairs with two toddlers and a baby in a stroller. A thin man wearing a flannel shirt and tracksuit pants was lying sound asleep on a sofa under one of the paintings. None of the staff who frequently walked by had even looked as though they wanted to move him on. I assumed the great and the glamorous would make their appearance at night.

I had come here from the Medina. I had discovered what only Authorised Personnel know: that there is a magic to the back corridors in shopping malls. They
’re like the secret tunnels of Agharta, all interconnected below ground. And busy – there was a great coming and going of people, suited types like the man I saw in the Medina, and others who were obviously technicians and cleaners. I could only suppose that they all had assumed I was Authorised, as no one had detained me. Many of the people, both suits and maintenance staff, were going around on upright electric scooters with round platforms to stand on. I found these stored in parking bays every kilometre or so. A card swiped across a sensor on the handles started the motor. Since I had no card, I had to make do with Shanks’s pony.

The tunnels were painted in shades of grey, grey
-green and grey-blue, with polished concrete floors. They all had the same fluorescent lights and No Smoking signs, and they all smelled faintly of fly spray. There were cafeterias down there, with plastic tables and chairs and menus offering tea and coffee, chips, ham sandwiches, noodles and buns. Although people were buying meals without identifying themselves, I was concerned that something in my manner would give me away as an intruder, so I went without eating. I kept a lookout for a vending machine, but never saw one. At least toilets were fairly frequent, and I was able to drink at the washbasins.

Nor was there a shortage of doors, marked with green signs, exiting the tunnels. I decided to follow someone who appealed to me, and if they went through an exit, to follow them. If I encountered someone who appealed more, I would switch to following that person, as long as it was possible to do so discreetly.
Sometimes I had to let opportunities go, when to suddenly change direction in order to follow someone would have risked drawing too much attention. I simply did the best I could.

After a few hungry and footsore days of this, one of my stalkees left the tunnels. When I followed (after resorting again to the
pretence of tying a shoelace so as not to be too close behind), I found stairs that led up to the cheaper end of the casino mall, where there was a food court. The door at the top where I exited was lettered Only Authorised Personnel on its other side. Before letting it close I looked around to see if someone else like me was nearby, hoping to go through, but there was no one. After I had eaten and rested, I wandered through the shopping mall, found the atrium and climbed the stairs, and so came to meet the talkative woman. She spoke to me first, while I was leaning on the balcony, watching the light-show year cycle through for the third time.

‘
This is a holy place,’ she said. She had been writing in a book covered in red velvet, which she closed and put away in her handbag as she spoke. ‘It’s a place of sacred energy. Only our poor whitefella sacred, mind you. In effect, a cathedral.’

I believed I knew what she meant.
‘A place of soul,’ I suggested.

‘
I knew you’d understand,’ she said. ‘Too many people don’t get it. Come and sit down. You look tired.’

I sat. She kept talking about the casino.

‘Maybe I should go in there, then,’ I said. ‘I’m looking for something.’

‘
You mean someone,’ she said shrewdly, ‘don’t you? But you’re not thinking about them quite as much as you used to. Are you sure you’re still sincere in your quest?’

I felt guilty. You were still on my mind, very much so. I wanted to find you, and I didn
’t want to find someone else instead of you. But somewhere along the path, I’d left behind the feeling that my own being was defined by yours. If anything, yours was defined by mine. I had lived so long without you that to say I couldn’t live without you would have been silly.

‘
One might consider,’ the woman said, ‘the influence of your work with the Department. It distracted you with the allure of procedure. In the bazaars, you imagined your goal in terms of a conclusive distraction. You committed mental adultery with the mansions, just because they were there. Passionate yearning for the unattainable is hard to sustain. You have to die, or go mad; or find something else, a good enough diversion. Like this,’ she said, gesturing at the atrium, where the coins of summer were dropping again to the strains of a cool oboe.

I wondered how she knew these things about me. Even I didn
’t know about the Department, although it sounded familiar.

‘
It’s because I know you,’ she said. ‘I know plenty about you. For instance, you didn’t like the demons. You didn’t appreciate the humour in the situation. Poor things, they just wanted to be in the story. A bit of comic relief. You didn’t have to knock them off like that.’

‘
Do you know so much about everybody?’ I didn’t intend to feel sorry about the demons. If I didn’t have much of a sense of humour, too bad. The thought occurred to me that nothing would be liable to distract one’s mind from an important purpose like a sense of humour.

‘
Some people.’ She stood up, and beckoned me to stand too. We looked down at the atrium. ‘Him,’ she said, pointing to a gentleman who was climbing the stairs. He was dressed in metal armour, and had a face so solemn as to be woeful. Behind him came a smaller, muddy person tottering under the weight of dozens of shopping bags, on which I could see prestigious brand logos.

‘
He’s looking for a grail,’ she said. ‘Or a graal. He doesn’t know if the damn thing’s a cup or a plate or a stone. He thinks it could even be a sword. Well, that’s wrong. If you get the sword, you can be king. If you get the grail, you meet God and enable a regeneration of the world. And there’s a car. If you find the car, you can have the lover who haunts your heart. These things transform your being, you see. If he can’t find his grail soon, he’s going to look for an honourable death. Not sure how he’ll manage that here.’

I wanted to know more about the car.
‘Are those things all obtainable here?’

‘
What does it mean to possess something? You can own a thing without having it, and have a thing without owning it.’

The knight and his servant reached the top of the stairs and turned towards the hotel.

‘He’s losing heart,’ the woman remarked. ‘He’ll take anything now. Hospital corners, wigwam wheels, wall sharpeners… there are some things fated to be lost and found and lost again on memory’s endless roundabouts.’

I mentioned that my own memory was poor.
‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘you can tell me where I was before the desert.’

‘
I can’t recall your childhood for you. I can hardly recall my own. And who can remember before they were born? Don’t worry about it. Desire is wasted on the past. Listen, I’ll tell you something for nothing. Don’t waste yourself on this person you’re chasing. It may not even be a person. There’s hardly a single thing that isn’t something else when you look at it a different way. Have you ever thought,’ she asked, startling me, ‘that someone might desire
you
? That someone’s following, back behind you, trying to see where you’ve gone?’

‘
No, never.’ The startled feeling left me quickly. I wasn’t interested in the idea.

‘
Snakes and ladders,’ she said. ‘You can take your token off the board, you know, and throw it out in the back yard. Let the grass have it. The ladder of lights takes you up, the old snake takes you down. Where does a lawn take you?’

Snakes and ladders again. Repetition of an unusual element indicated
– to speak accurately, made – an opening, like placing two posts to make a gateway. I wanted to say ‘anywhere’, or ‘home’, but a mental warning bell told me I needed to be a bit wilier. I needed to ask for a little more. If I was to earn you, or win you, I’d better show I’d been paying attention.

‘
A driveway,’ I said.

The day was overcast and windy. The streets mazed around seemingly without any reason, as the ground was completely flat. They branched, looped, hairpinned and turned circles. This area of the city was so new that it wasn’t in the street directory. I say ‘city’, but it was city only in the sense that it wasn’t countryside; or rather it was countryside, a great paddock, in the process of being turned into a suburb.

It was another land of mansions, these so new that many sat on bare earth with string marking where the lawns were to go. The
houses were grouped in clusters separated by fields. Some of the fields hosted billboards advertising the homes that were to be erected there in the near future. Both the built and the unbuilt were a long way from the exuberant follies near the Medina, which I had driven past on my way out here. I counted only four or five very simple, very similar designs. They reminded me of the houses children draw when they are young and want to convey the idea of a house before they have learned to observe architecture. Here was uniformity reminiscent of the desert city I had visited when, chasing the cure to a malaise of the heart, I had gone overseas. I would have taken them for housing built for the poor, had each home not been as large as a block of six or eight flats. I read the billboards: 5 bedrooms, 3 living rooms, 2 rumpus rooms, ‘laid-back living’.