That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote (9 page)

The browns, reds and ochres of the desert gradually gave way to drab olive greens. The flight map showed that we were nearing our destination, a city in the south
-east.

I
’d been told someone would pick me up at the airport. After getting through immigration I looked around at all the meeters and greeters, and spotted my name in the hands of a pale, downy-skulled kid wearing a white shirt and grey slacks. The name was the one in my passport, not my real name, for which I didn’t have a very good memory. The kid returned my wave. I came around the barriers and he walked quickly up to me and pumped my hand. He said his name was Virgil Croaker, and asked if I’d had a good flight.

Then he turned around to show me a third eye in the back of his head.
‘So you’ll know I’m an official guide from the government,’ he said. ‘There are a lot of hustlers who pretend to be guides. It’s very bad. But they can’t fake the eye. Hey, where’s your luggage? Don’t tell me you’ve been robbed already.’

‘
I’ve just got this,’ I said, patting the small satchel in which I carried my papers and some toiletries.

‘
Really? Good for you. It’s better not to look too rich. Where are you from?’

‘
Back there,’ I said.

Up shot his pale eyebrows.
‘No kidding? Gee, that’s an amazing coincidence. My uncle lives there. He loves it; says it’s the best place in the world.’

‘
Uh huh,’ I grunted.

‘
You’re going to have a wonderful time,’ Virgil said, taking my arm and pulling me along at a faster pace than I would normally have walked, ‘but you have to be careful. People here are very clever. They’ll try to take your money any way they can. I have to look after you, so you mustn’t run away, all right? Yes, all right?’

‘
All right,’ I said, just as we stepped outside. The sky was pale and cloudy, the air cool. A grey Suzuki minivan was waiting for us in the pickup area. The driver was a dark young woman whom Virgil introduced as Sharon.

She started the van and drove towards the car park exit. The van had seats facing each other in the back. Virgil had seated himself opposite me.
‘We’re going to the Medina right now,’ he said. ‘All visitors to our city love the Medina. But you know, you shouldn’t try to go around it alone.’ His two front eyes fixed me with a look of sincere concern. ‘The Medina is very big. It’s absolutely true what they say: it’s a labyrinth. By yourself you’d get lost there, believe me.’

‘
I’ve just come from a labyrinth,’ I said, feeling patronised. ‘I managed to get around without too much difficulty.’

‘
You’re a very intelligent person, I can see that,’ this freakish being said, while giving me the kind of smile that the smugly bright bestow upon the dim. ‘But you’ve never been here before; that I can also see. I’ve been all over the world, so you must trust my opinion. Forget Fez, forget Cairo, forget Venice, forget the Paris sewers – the Medina is the labyrinth of labyrinths. And it’s full of low types. Suffering has made them hard and cunning, and they’ll find ways to make you want to give them your money. So I’m here to see them coming up behind you.’

I smiled politely, wondering how far we would have to go. From the airport we entered a freeway that cut through paddocks of dry
-looking grass. The traffic on the freeway was quite heavy, and a brown haze on the horizon indicated the city. I breathed the air-conditioned air and waited for us to arrive, while Virgil Croaker chattered about the bargains to be had in the Medina.

While the city centre was still nothing more than a smudgy
outline of tall buildings, we entered suburbs. After drawing up a long hill, we came to the crest and once over were plunged into a valley of strange mansions and palaces crowded almost wall against wall, and time against time: while these grand domiciles were clearly new, no more than twenty years old, and were made of modern materials, I saw the
disjecta membra
of Roman villas, medieval castles, Tudor manors, Swiss chalets, Spanish monasteries and Arab forts. Some of the crossbreeding efforts were remarkable. At first they struck me as crass, but I soon berated myself for this judgement. If by being built of brick veneer and synthetic stucco, and cramped onto average suburban blocks, these stately homes were unable to appear perfectly dignified, was it their fault?

To enjoy them properly,
one only needed to make slight adjustments to the view: change the surface textures, impose details where the builders had skimped, add weathering and, above all, grounds and landscapes to surround each house with the necessary amount of space.

I was taken with the thought that these were dream homes, literally: here was space from which history had been expunged, and an optical illusion of history set up in its place. The real houses were elsewhere on earth. Was this what one built when one lived with a sense of being precariously positioned in space and time? I imagined them all to be sleeping an enchanted sleep that would go on through the years, until they were embedded in a thick enough buildup of time to wake without vanishing into the air.

No shops or workplaces were in evidence here, only these evocations, these love letters to the past and the distance. I wanted to go invisibly wandering through them. Such nostalgic houses cried out, I thought, to be haunted.

You might well have been inside one of them.
It was their nostalgic quality that had made me think of you, of course, or you who had made me think of their nostalgic quality. However, I knew there would be no point asking Sharon to drop me off down there so that I could go looking door to door. Since it was a weekday, you probably wouldn’t be at home in any case.

We drove out of the valley onto a wide flat plain. This, too, was covered with houses, but only brick bungalows too modest and sensible to inspire any further flights of sympathy for the devil. We were heading towards a structure in the middle distance. A fort
-like grey building made of numerous intersecting boxes, I began to appreciate its titanic size as we approached it. There were colourful flags on the parapet of its flat roof, and crowning it an enormous sign in red and blue lettering.

‘
There it is,’ said Virgil, pointing at the prodigious building just as I was deciphering the sign:

MEDINA

WORLD OF SHOPPING

I felt distinctly swindled, but decided to hold my tongue until we were there. Leaving the freeway, we
headed out a road that eventually reached a ramp curving down into the black, tiered harbour of a vast car park beneath the Medina.

Down and around, around and down. I waited,
getting impatient and a little motion-sick, until we were inserted in a parking spot on the fourth underground level. Sharon turned off the engine.

‘
Thank you for the lift,’ I then said, ‘but isn’t this just a shopping mall?’

Virgil laughed and ignored my question.
‘You should give Sharon a good tip,’ he said. Sharon reached around into the back of the van with her hand held out and wiggled her fingers expectantly. This was when I saw that she had an eye in the palm of her hand.

‘
And you should give me a good tip too,’ Virgil said. ‘Otherwise, maybe I won’t be able to help you find what you want.’

They were both grinning, as if they didn
’t take any of this too seriously.

So I grinned too. We were all grinning. Lovely. Who were these two jokers? Were they local demons, or had I somehow brought them with me from the sandy city, or even the preceding desert? Had they been going ahead of me, like long morning shadows? Was this all some kind of scam, to which the woman at Delphi Travel had also been party?

An idea had been sitting quietly in the back of my mind while we were driving. It now moved to the front of my mind.

‘
Okay,’ I said, and began fishing in my bag, ‘but you have to face the other way and close your eyes. All of them. No peeking.’

‘
Okay, okay,’ they both agreed, nodding. Good, they assumed I was an idiot. They turned their heads, so that only Vigil’s rear eye and Sharon’s palm-eye faced me, and both of those were squeezed shut like the eyes of children waiting to be given a surprise present.

Bringing out two of my mirror coins, I held one over Sharon
’s palm, and the other just in front of Virgil’s eye.

I didn
’t have to do anything else, because both eyes opened a crack, trying to peek at what I was giving them.

Any question about the
species of my two chaperones was answered. Demons cannot bear to have their demonic nature reflected back at them. They cannot survive it. The experience turns them inside out.

I threw the door open and jumped out of the van, because the inside of a demon, even a minor one, has little to recommend it.

Déjà vu. Hairdryers, lunchboxes, clothes, lamps, carpets, perfume, sink plungers, caged birds. This time the bazaar had been separated out from the city, and there was no sand, and no sun; but essentially I had come halfway across the world only to find that there was nothing new to see. And there were no salient serendipitous signs.

I sat down on a bench next to an escalator and indulged in self-pity. I no longer felt like an adept of cledonomancy, or of anything. I couldn’t be sure that the Delphi woman had set me up with the two demons, especially since she had given me the mirror coins; but then, how else could she have given me my change? And there being no reason for her to suppose I’d have any idea what to do, wouldn’t it have been amusing to think of me having the power to free myself but not knowing how to use it?

I tried to think where I might have gone wrong. Was the mistake a recent one, a bad choice made at a point to which I could possibly return? Or had it been made a long time ago, behind some door that was now closed to me? I remembered my traipsing through the desert city, and my prior traipsing across the desert itself. And
before that… there should be something before that, I thought. I felt that I had been somewhere, and, before that, somewhere else. Smaller places? Small rooms?

Thinking of small rooms made me need the loo. I got up and walked until I found toilets down a corridor between shops
.

There were eight doors in the corridor: female, male, disabled, baby change, female staff, male staff, cleaner, and Authorised Personnel Only. I looked into the baby change and the disabled toilet. They were empty. I tried opening each of the four non
-public doors, but all were locked. Pretending to tie my shoe, I waited until I was sure that everyone who had been in the toilets had come out. I recognised none of them. Despondent, I availed myself of the appropriate chamber and returned to the corridor feeling more comfortable but no less at a loss.

I was considering going back down to take the van, never mind the condition in which I had left it, and driving somewhere, perhaps back to the mansions. However, fortune intervened. After I stepped out of the restroom, a man in a suit came out of the Authorised Personnel door and strode down the corridor in a great hurry. He had pushed the door open wide, and it was closing itself slowly.

My thoughts about small rooms had brought me here at exactly the right moment to see the opportunity and take advantage of it. With recovering self-confidence, I caught the door and slipped through.

‘I’m told I shouldn’t be here at the casino,’ said the woman with whom I had got talking in one of the lounge areas overlooking the atrium. ‘I especially shouldn’t be writing here. I am, apparently, profaning the sacred Word by dragging it into this place. This is the same language, more or less, that Milton and Emily Dickinson used, and my pious friends chastise me because I’m taking it within spitting distance of
poker machines
. Well, listen, my father used to take a book into the toilet every night to read while he had a leisurely shit. I’m reliably informed that many people do this, particularly when they have children and can’t get peace and quiet anywhere else. So if they can read in a toilet, why can’t I write in a casino?

‘
No reason at all,’ I said.