Angelmaker (55 page)

Almost unwillingly, Mercer turns the record over.
Crackle, pop. Fizzle, splot. Crackle, pop
. After the savage horror of the confession, it is almost soothing. They listen for a while. Finally, Mercer scoops another from the bag and sets it on the turntable. The voice is older, and mercifully the horror is absent, though in its place is a soul-deep regret, a sorrow which has weathered in and will never leave.

I confess, I thought you were an idiot. Yes, Daniel, I know, you have never given me cause and I am an impatient old baggage. I am what I am, and what life has made me. I try to be better
.

You were right. I made the machine strong so that it would cover a larger area and that made it too strong for the mind
.

Pause.

I know the solution, now. How to make it work. I knew even while it was happening, but it was too late. The answer is to retransmit. To have a great network, so that the signal can be very gentle and yet reach around the world
.

Do you remember that we made love in the field outside my mother’s house? And you were stung on the rump by a bee and mourned for her because you said bees were creatures of creation, and having only one sting were loath to attack? That this was why almost every culture in the world venerates the bee and hates the wasp?

Make me a bee, Daniel. Just one. Make me a glorious bee which people will love, and I will make something wonderful. Bees will be the messengers of my truth. They will spread across the world and connect everyone
.

Make it splendid, Daniel. Make it wild and pretty. The thing I do now must be so much more than a machine
.

Polly Cradle is grinning, and so is Joe. Mercer frowns at them both.

“What?” he says. “Don’t tell me it’s just that they were still in love. I shall be sick.”

“No,” Polly says. “I was just thinking: maybe this isn’t a disaster. The bees. The machine. Maybe it’s a good thing that’s happening, and all we have to do is wait.”

Joe nods. Mercer does not. He opens his mouth to make some objection, but then three things happen on top of one another and whatever it was he was going to say is put aside.

The first thing is that the absent Bethany returns and passes a slim folder to Polly Cradle, who frowns at it and then lays it out on the table.

Two photographs, freshly printed from old images, most likely magazines or newspapers: a gorgeous matinée idol with a high forehead,
smiling lightly into the camera, and his older brother, grim-faced and silvered, scowling from the hood of a cloak.

“Shem Shem Tsien,” Polly Cradle says, “also known as the Opium Khan. Think Idi Amin with a dash of Lex Luthor. And this Brother Sheamus of the Order of John the Maker. This is a picture of him from before they all started wearing veils all the time.”

Yes. The same man. Although … it can’t actually be the same Sheamus, now. A son, surely, taking up his father’s vocation.

I thought I had it rough, father-wise
.

And then:

Does that mean the Opium Khan has reformed, or that the British government has been corrupted?

But while that’s a question which might have made sense a few years ago, no one seriously believes in the good conduct of their leaders any more.

Just as he is about to share this with the others, the second and third things happen, and the world changes.

One is silent and invisible; an intangible explosion which occurs entirely inside the head of Joshua Joseph Spork. The other is very public and very specific, and takes place three and one-half feet off the ground. They happen at approximately the same time, and so the strange, inaudible detonation which afflicts Joe is missed even by Polly Cradle, who otherwise would spot it clearly for what it is.

Between two records—one claiming mendaciously to be by Duke Ellington and the other labelled with equal falseness as being by Eddie Lockjaw Davis—is sandwiched a single sheet of shiny accounting paper, split down the middle into two columns with a single sure stroke of red pen. It has no timer, no spring, and no pineapple indentations which will fly off as shrapnel, and in fact looks almost exactly not like a hand grenade, and yet all the same it goes off under Joe Spork and vaporises him entirely.

Joe Spork, the exploded man, cannot understand why everyone is looking so calm, until he realises that none of them, not knowing Mathew and Daniel and their appalling confrontations, can understand the columns of figures for what they are.

Here, squeezed between the secrets of Daniel’s non-jazz collection, is something the old man squirrelled away. Something he couldn’t
face? Or something he treasured and understood, which brought him some measure of peace?

If these numbers are to be believed, if Joe correctly interprets the figures in Mathew’s own somewhat careless hand—and he surely does, having struggled himself for a decade against the same rip tide—Daniel Spork’s great, stand-alone, splendid business of clocks, the bulwark he set against the surge of modernity and careless consumerist tat, lost money hand over fist. The shop was not, had never been, profitable. Only the ceaseless intravenous transfusions of money from Mathew, evidenced here on this hastily scribbled account, ever made it possible to balance the books. And these transfusions Mathew had managed as best he could in conditions of total secrecy, above all from his father, so that Daniel could continue to believe in his straight-arrow path and continue to deride his son’s choices.

Mathew the gangster, Mathew the liar, Mathew the thief, had begun his life of crime to save his father’s honest business. Had carried it, all along.

Joe is still staring at this earth-shaker, this profound and alien intrusion into his universe from another where everything is different, when he hears Mercer’s voice calling to him through the fog and the final event changes the game once more.

“Hey, sleepyhead!” Joe turns, and Mercer tosses him the golden bee. “It’s warm!”

Joe extends his hand, but—he has never been any good at catching, kicking was always his thing—fumbles the take. He drops instinctively to catch the bee before it hits the ground, and misses again.

Misses, because it is not falling.

Six inches from his cheek, the multifaceted rose-quartz eyes glint at him, and gold-veined wings hum in the air. It flitters towards him very slowly, and lands on his nose. Joe tries to look at it, winces as he inevitably crosses his eyes. He swears he can hear the whisper of golden legs as it moves onto his cheek.
Am I in danger?
And if he is, what can he possibly do about it?

The bee drops back into the air and lands on the tabletop again, where it wanders bee-ishly around in a random pattern.

Apis mechanica
. Live and in person. He watches it without thinking about it, because all of his mind is burning with Mathew and Daniel, and the sense that he has misunderstood everything he has ever known to be true.

A moment later, the bee takes wing again and bumbles around the
room. It bumps cheerfully into Polly Cradle’s head, the lampshade, and finally the window.

Everyone starts talking at once, and in the confusion it’s quite natural for Joe to slip out and wash his face.

When Joshua Joseph Spork steps out of the door of Polly Cradle’s house, it is with a strange feeling of coming home and a powerful sense of betrayal. Moving down the street in the gathering dark, knowing that he is to some degree on the run, he feels a kinship with his father which surpasses anything he has ever before experienced. He flinches at shadows, ducks away from lamplight, and when he accidentally catches someone’s eye, he rides the stare, throws such aggression into it that they immediately look away, and do not see him. Indeed, they actively seek to forget him. He steps onto a bus, and out of sheer perversity steps off at the next stop and takes another which goes the long way around to his destination. Or rather, not perversity, but a natural understanding that what he is doing now is rash, and stemming from that, the certain knowledge that it must be done well, or not at all. It must be done in the high style of the Night Market, with all due deference to misdirection and sleight of mind.

He feels alive.

On the other hand, he feels rotten. Mercer will be fine, will call Joe an idiot and then set about rescuing the situation. It’s not quite so certain that Polly Cradle will be fine. Obviously, she will take no physical harm, but that Joe has sneaked out—successfully executing this time the plan he formulated when she caught him before—will wound her, and he knows it and she will know that he knows it and has done it anyway, and that will hurt her again. He has no regrets about his decision: this isn’t a case of wanting to recant. Blood is not optional. At the same time, whatever is happening between them is also not to be underestimated. They have found in each other some kind of jigsaw-puzzle match, a mutual knowing which goes beyond the smell of her still on his skin, and which he is at pains not to define or recognise until it has time to settle into him.

That Polly could be family one day, that she might—and he might—unite Cradle and Spork in one great dynasty of unlikely rules and criminal histories, his present, practical mind puts firmly to one
side. Before he can even reach for that future, or one like it, he has to climb up on top of the rubble of the past and see what the world actually looks like. The rubble of Mathew’s past, which now appears to have been less a wrong turn than the heavy footsteps of a man carrying more than his fair share of other people’s history—a description which Joshua Joseph Spork has always considered applied to himself, and which it now appears applies to almost everyone.

He changes buses again and peers through the window, seeing his own eyes as black gaps in his reflection, and looking through them. The building he needs will be an absence against the dark; a shadow in a shadow. It’s not a tourist spot. The nuns do not light their façade with burning lamps as some churches these days do. The place is less than a hundred years old, and ugly beyond reasonable measure. It is the most woebegone religious building he has ever seen.

The gate is black, and so is the path leading up to it: black gravel, pieces of marble and basalt. It must have seemed like a good idea in ’68 and now no one is allowed to change it; the design is protected by all manner of orders and by-laws.

The walls are yellow stone, stained by time and by London’s population of motor vehicles. When Harriet Spork first came here, there was a pile of flowers left at the foot of a lamp-post in memory of a cyclist killed in a collision with a glazier’s van—decapitated, apparently, by a sheet of reinforced safety glass destined for a local school. From sideways on, the safety turned out to be limited.

All of the bouquets were removed after a few weeks save one, a narrow vase the woman’s brother glued to the lamp-post and the concrete slab in which it is set with some concoction not even the borough’s street-sweepers have been able to undo. Joe came once a month in those days, until Harriet asked him to stop, and over half a year he watched the grim little flowers go from living, to dead, to dry, and finally to a kind of strange fossilisation.