The Great Wheel (41 page)

He said, “You’ve grown your hair.”

“Yes.” Laurie held out her hands, palms down, to show him her fingernails. “The stuff you have to take plays havoc with these. Where have you been?”

“At the clinic.” He shrugged, fanning his hands. “I had a special case. Were you—”

Laurie said something quick and unfathomable to Bella, then picked up her pack of tubes and bag, pushing back her newly lengthened hair with a half-formed gesture. It shone, combed and washed, but John noticed, with a hot, weary tug, that, Laurie being Laurie, the ends were already split.

“John, we need to talk…Your room’s down there, isn’t it?”

Bella watched as he and Laurie went out into the corridor and down, their paths separate but interlocked. He opened the door, and Laurie lifted the crumpled cards off the chair by the dresser and sat down with her legs crossed, her back to the streaming window.

“Bella says she’s turning off the generator now,” she said.

He nodded and took out a chemlight. On cue, the bulb in the ceiling dimmed. The darkness pulsed in, then rearranged itself to the corners of the room as the chemlight’s catalysts hissed. He took a seat on the bed, conscious of the snap of the springs, the rug’s faded pattern, the crucifix on the wall. No wonder, he thought, that I never wanted to bring her here.

“John, you look dreadful.”

He smiled.

“This place smells of…” She looked around and saw the old Quicklunch box full of koiyl leaves. Her hair swayed. The fall of it made her face look thinner. Too thin, perhaps—but he thought he could get used to it. “Bella says you’re chewing those now.”

“They’re harmless. Everyone says they’re harmless.” He chuckled. “Apart from me, that is. And it would have been presumptuous, don’t you think, to try to do something about the koiyl trade without understanding what it was really about. I have a good supply now. There’s a room half full of them down the corridor. I was given them by Ryat—you remember Ryat?”

She reached into her bag and broke open a maroon-colored tube. “You must be wet. Cold…”

“You’ve spent too long in the Zone, Laurie,” he said. “Out here we have to get used to the rains. And why, when you grew your hair, didn’t you change the look of your answerer?”

“I thought about it, knowing that you were always calling. But I decided you might try to…To make some interpretation.”

“Then why did you let the answerer talk to me at all?”

She waved the question away with her hand, the smoke from the tube drawing a jagged symbol that suggested in the moment before it dissipated that the whole matter was complex, beyond the scope of anything that they might have to say to each other.

“But I’m sorry,” she said, “that it’s ended like this.”

He nodded. The room swayed. “So am I.”

“It had so much…promise. I suppose that having sex was a mistake.”

“I’ve made worse ones.”

She smiled. “It was really Tim Purdoe,” she said, “who talked me into coming here.” She gestured at the room. “Although I didn’t want you to go back without…” She searched for the right word. “A farewell.”

“I saw Tim—a while back. He said that he wanted to examine me. But I suppose you know that, looking through the net. I seem to remember that your answerer knew.”

“I’m not my answerer, John. It’s just a trick of the net. Something I once did, overdid really, just playing around, looking for someone to talk to. Anyway, this is all ridiculous.”

“What is?”

“The way you think you’re being betrayed, let down.” She squeezed out the tip of her tube and stooped to pull out the tin wastecan that lay between her and the bed, noticing as she did so, he was sure, the chewed red lumps in it. “It isn’t true.”

“I suppose you’ve spoken to Felipe. And of course to Bella.”

“I just wanted to see if you were taking care of yourself.”

“Here I am. You can see that I’m taking care.”

“When are you going back to Europe? Has the bishop said?”

“No, she hasn’t.”

“What do you expect to achieve this late?”

“The leaf—”

“You’re not the only person in the world, John. And I’m not saying that you should give up everything, forever. Just…”

“You think I should leave here?”

“Now that I’ve seen you, yes. I think you should go back. There are other healers and helpers. And you’ve said often enough that Nuru can cope with the clinic. I don’t want you to break up here, John, I don’t want you to get hurt. I have no idea how you’ve managed to get like this, but I’m sure it’s not that difficult to damage your recombinant if you really try. Even a child could.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about, Laurie,” he said. The chemlight was starting to fade now, and a space of darkness was flowing in the room between them. But how could she dismiss the silver tangle beneath his flesh so easily? As though it was something you could step out of, discard…

“I see now,” she said, “why you’re like this. It’s simple with you, really, John. Everything you do and say keeps coming back to…” She broke open another tube and blew out a stream of smoke. “You’re not like him. I know you well enough at least to know that.
He
thought that life would be easy just because he had talent and advantage. By the time he learned it wasn’t, it was too late.”

“I wish I could have taken you back to Europe, Laurie,” he said. “Not Hemhill, I don’t think Hemhill. But Ley. It’s part of my life, and I needed…Someone else to go back there with.”

She smiled, keeping her distance.

“So you’ll go back?” she asked. “Can I tell Tim that? Or at least you’ll speak to the bishop? As for the rest, John. The leaf. Us. Everything. Sometimes you have to break things off, separate from them, leave them truly behind, before you can find out what the truth was about them.”

Laurie picked up her bag, her tubes, shook out and reparted her long hair with her fingers. He followed her from the room and into the corridor, past the closed door where Felipe was snoring. He stood in the hallway with the rain seeping in through the front door, hearing the slip of her footsteps as she moved away from him.

“The carnival should be soon now,” she said. “You can feel the change in the air. It’s like…” Her hands moved in the mottled light. “Do you remember some time when you wanted to throw your head back and laugh for no reason? You once asked what the carnival was like, John. Do you remember a time like that?”

He stood on the last stair, his hand burning on the damp rail, searching for a face and time in his mind, finding only a clear white space of emptiness.

The door screeched open. He heard the swish and patter of the street.

“So,” she said. “Goodbye.”

“
Gonenanh.
”

She closed the door. Her van was barely audible through the rain as it started down Gran Vía.

S
OMETHING IN THE AIR
, clear and metallic, turned and flashed, then cracked into separate notes. He opened his eyes as the room snapped back around him, and the tang of tubesmoke still hovered above the soggy earthbound scent of koiyl leaves, his own sweat, the dust and damp of the presbytery. He sat up, and pain ran through his spine.

He crossed the room, gripping the waxy corners of the ancient furniture. No leaf today, he thought, seeing the chair by the window set at an angle, and the scatter of Laurie’s tubes in the wastebin beside it. He dressed in the dysol-reeking clothes that Bella had put out, and light poured with him into the corridor as he descended towards the smell of cooking.

Felipe was already seated at the table, the steam rising from his coffee.

“A good day for it,” he said. “Don’t you think so, my son?”

John went over to the window and looked out. The air was still. Every brick, lintel, and patch of flaking plaster on the tenement opposite was sharply etched. The windows and rooftops were held in glassy suspension as the sky glowed white—no, the sky was gray, like the pressure he felt at the back of his eyes. Still somehow gray despite all the brightness.

He turned when Bella emerged through the doorway with the breakfast tray tinkling in her hands. He sat down, and Felipe grunted and flapped out his napkin as she leaned over the table, the bare stretch of her forearm touching John’s shoulder as she placed the plates before them. There were fungi leaking grayish juice, fried kelpbread, several crustacea, two rashers each of bacon, the pale watery eye of a fresh egg.

He said, “Laurie was here last night.”

“Yes.” Felipe watched the sway of Bella’s departing rump. “So I gather.”

“There seems to be some concern about me,” John said. “Tim Purdoe thinks I’m unwell.” He looked down at his plate, the blue pattern that he’d stared at many times before without really noticing. “Not, I think, that I’m exactly…” The beaded black eye of the shrimp stared back at him. He knew that if he put the thing into his mouth, he’d only spit it out again. “Not that I’m entirely fit. I’ve been taking the leaf…” He swallowed, conscious of the brightness flooding from the window at his back; of how the noises in the street sounded so different now that there was no rain and even the wind had stilled; of the dry, odd-sounding croak of his own voice. “I’ve been chewing it in a spirit of scientific experiment. But now I seem to be coughing up a little blood.”

“I’ve seen people looking worse, my son,” Felipe said. “But also better. If you really want to stay here, then you should stay.” He waved the eggy tines of his fork at his feet. “That is, if you want to become like me. But otherwise, I think you should go back to Europe right away. You only have—what is it?—two weeks left of your term.”

“Is that all? I’d thought…” He felt as though he should be getting up. Running somewhere. Doing something.

Felipe chuckled, mopping kelpbread around his plate. “After all, you’ve left me often enough already. And I see the bishop’s flag is flashing on the airwave again. Has been for the last couple of days…But this time I decided not to take a message for you.”

“I’d like to see today through at least. This carnival after the rains…”

“Of course.” Felipe pushed back his plate and folded his arms over his stomach. “Bella,” he called, “excellent as always!” He turned to John. “And after that? Your plans for the priesthood?”

“I’m still going to leave.”

Felipe nodded. Then he leaned forward across the table, his face suddenly grave.

“Now, my son.” His gaze shifted down to the untouched breakfast. “If you’re not wanting that, perhaps I might…?”

He checked his bicycle in the hall; he’d used it little lately, but the powerlight still gleamed and the tires were firm as he wheeled it out into the street. The clear flat puddles reflected fractured images of the roof-segmented sky as he cycled down to the clinic. Outside, a queue was forming, although Nuru had already arrived and unlocked the doors. He was sitting inside at his desk in the outer office, little columns of coins on the desk before him, busy with his preparations.

“Fatoo…”

“
Gunahana
.”

John changed gloves and took out a fresh wad of dysol cloths. The doctor’s lens followed him as he entered the backroom. He heard the usual chatter of voices when Nuru began to sort out the queue. Those who were keeping a place for someone else, those who’d let a friend in, those who weren’t really sure why they’d come. John listened, smiling, watching the play of shadows through the half-open door.

The first patient came in. A tall man, he mistakenly held his wounded hand out to John rather than to the doctor, his eyes downcast.

“Not many this morning,” Nuru said cheerfully from behind him. “People got other…”

“Yes. The carnival.”

The man mumbled, and Nuru explained that he should step towards the doctor’s suite of mandibles. Sitting on the edge of the desk, John watched. This patient was, for all the difference in his clothes, the spiky hair, the stubble on his jowls, the unmatched shoes, and the bloodshot green eyes, almost the exact double of Father Gulvenny, the priest of John’s teenage years at St. Vigor’s. Father Gulvenny would be dead now, of course. The cut along this man’s thumb had already been frozen by some kind of fixative; there was no real danger, but John watched anyway as the doctor’s delicate mandibles drew the sides of the wound together and bound them with a filmy fluid that would soon change, harden, and become part of the flesh. When the doctor finished, John was still looking at the man’s face. Father Gulvenny, he was tempted to say, it really
is
you, isn’t it? This wasn’t the first time he’d glimpsed people he knew, in the Endless City. There was the witchwoman who, but for the steel eye and the caroni bird on her shoulder, could have been his mother. And there was Annie, standing in a spice souk one night last winter as the snow fell and the lanterns swung, casting light and shadow over her lovely half-turned face. But he hadn’t seen Hal yet. He was still looking.

Blinking, half dazed, Father Gulvenny left the clinic, making a surreptitious sign against the evil eye with his damaged hand as he left. There were other patients. A blind man who often came on some pretext or other, hoping that John or the doctor would suddenly offer a cure. And children with bellyaches and sores, muttering
ma, madre,
today worried that they might end up confined to bed and miss the carnival fun. And elderly people, pulling aside baggy elastic to show joints swollen by nothing more than a lifetime’s use. Some were past seventy, even eighty, although they seemed grumpy, ungrateful for their fullness of years. But he envied the way life here could begin or end like the turning of these streets, narrowing, widening, opening suddenly into a whole new vista or closing unexpectedly on a dead brick wall.

The final patient came and went. Light billowed in from the open window. Even today there was a breeze. The posters on the wall crackled. “Don’t,” one of them muttered, the remnant of some long-forgotten health campaign. “
Danna
…” The doctor creaked forward slightly to regard him, a lens focusing in his direction as it absorbed the odd metabolic changes that had taken place in his body, changes it recognized as human yet also alien and beyond its capabilities to heal. Looking down at the screen as he moved his fingers to turn it off, John briefly saw the flashing image of his silver-threaded body.