Angelmaker (60 page)

“So they’re torturing me to keep everyone safe.”

“They are not torturing you, Mr. Spork. That is against the law. I could not use them if they were to subject you to any sort of degrading treatment. However, I do use them. I know them to be lawful. I have asked exacting questions. I have received assurances. Therefore you are either making this up, or you are deluded. If you are making this up, I should warn you that manipulative falsehood is now considered a technique of Lawfare. You understand what that means? Warfare using the legal code, thus Lawfare. There are penalties for illegitimate Lawfare.”

“They won’t even tell me what they want. I want to tell them, you see. Only I have no idea.”

Rodney Titwhistle sighs. “They want the calibration drum for the Apprehension Engine, Mr. Spork. A small item. A thing no bigger than your hand. The Book, as it transpires, will turn the machine on but not off. We must have the drum. There is some suggestion that you possess it. Or that your grandfather did. You would do well to consider carefully before denying anything.”

“I don’t know. I want … I want my lawyer! Get me Mercer. I have rights. You know I do.”

“No, you do not. Not here. Not in this room, or this building. Here you are a patient. You are suspected of an act of terrorism so gross, so destructive, that it is the definition of madness. Patients have no rights. And I told you before, sir: there are penalties for Lawfare.”

Mr. Titwhistle leaves in a huff, and it turns out that there are, indeed, penalties. But Joe knows there are penalties for everything now, and they touch him less and less.

He lets himself go away for a while.

“This task. These words. Are against nature. They are against everything. Fathers should not bury their sons.” Daniel Spork, pendulum-straight, choking like a gritty caseclock.

“Not in war, not in peace. I have seen both.” He stops, and works his right shoulder, his neck. He contains a furnace of sorrow, and he is burning through. “My son was not a good man. By the measure of our country’s law. He was a transgressor. He. Could not be made to see. I tried, but I was alone, and I cannot. I am not. Good with words. Or people, even. I understand machines. So. He was a bad man. He stole. He robbed. He broke things and fired guns and he encouraged others to do the same. He tried to sell drugs. He went to prison. My son was bad. I mourn my bad son.” Defiance flares in him.

“But he was not. He was not bad. He was not. He loved. He loved his son. He loved his wife. He wanted above all to love his mother. My Frankie. His Frankie, that he barely knew. I believe he loved even me. Even though I failed him. Every day, I failed. I am so sorry that I could not. I could not.” Daniel stops again. Whatever, exactly, he could not, Joshua Joseph will never learn, because his grandfather must gather himself and go around it, or he will not recapture himself, will fail this one last time, and that is something Daniel Spork will not permit. The spring must unwind all the way.

“He was not bad. He was not. He was intemperate. Angry. Lawless. Not dishonest. Although sometimes the truth could not—like many of us, could not—could not keep up with him.

“And in this last thing, he is revealed. That he knew he was. He knew. He was not long. That he was. Dying. He got out of prison. To see his son and say ‘goodbye.’ He did not tell me he was coming. I could kill him.”

And this, impossibly, makes them laugh, not bitterly, but wholeheartedly. Yes. Mathew Spork, in going to his grave, is as infuriating as he ever was, and as stupidly, stubbornly heroic about it.

“So grieve. Please. Today, let it out. For me. Scream. Weep. Drink
too much and be unwise. Be like him. Let go. Because I cannot. I do not know how.

“Fathers should not bury their sons.”

Outside, they lower the coffin into the ground. For some reason, the hole is decked out in AstroTurf. Joshua Joseph had imagined the soil would be loamy and soft, and that he would be able to scatter it, but London is built on clay, and so instead he hefts a great mustard-coloured clod into the hole and it makes a muffled, hollow thudding as it lands. He worries he may have chipped the varnish, and then feels stupid, because no one will ever know, or reproach him if they did.

The burial goes on and on.

Until, nearly an hour later and the box buried safe and sound, Joshua Joseph stands with his grandfather looking out across a little road. For five minutes they have stood thus, the old man boiling with whatever self-reproaches he has not voiced, and the boy seeking by instinct the one person equally responsible for Mathew Spork in life and death. Together, they watch—but do not watch—a red double-decker bus, the first of two, draw up to the stop across the street. After a moment, it pulls away again, revealing a single figure in mourner’s black, gaunt and straight against the newsagent’s window.

Joshua Joseph has a brief impression of grey hair cut in a severe bob, a scrawny neck like a silver birch tree, and two knobbled, arthritic hands clutching at a pair of severe black trousers. Very slowly, very deliberately, she raises the left in a gesture of greeting, and Joshua Joseph can see, even at this distance, that she has been crying. By her shudders, he deduces that she is crying still. He wonders dimly whom she mourns, and if she comes here every day, or every week, or if there is another funeral following on the heels of this one, and then his dawning realisation finds voice in his grandfather’s appalled, desperate shout, as the old man lurches forward, one hand outflung as if reaching from an icy sea for one last chance at the lifeboat’s ladder.

“Frankie!” he shrieks, “Frankie, Frankie, please!” as he flings himself, heedless of his gammy knees and his spindly ankles, towards the East Gate. “Frankie! My Frankie!”

And she responds. She does. Her face lights up at this unlooked-for, unimagined blessing; that even now, even in this cruellest moment, his love remains. The waving hand extends towards him as if blown by a breeze. And then, sharply, the open door slams shut. She is not yet done. She is not ready. She snatches back her hand and begins to turn
away, and the second bus draws a temporary curtain between them. Daniel struggles with the catch on the gate, his grandson torn along in his wake, as desperate—almost—as the old man himself. The gate swings open—but when the bus moves off again, Joshua Joseph knows already what he will see. Sure enough, the bus stop is empty.

Daniel stares without understanding, and then whips around to follow with his eyes the departing double-decker, and sees—they both see—that narrow figure clasping tight to the silver pole at the back. Her face is turned away from them even as her body and her heart refuse to complete entirely the abandonment, and she remains rooted to the running board, standing full square as if she will embrace them both even as the bus carries her away and turns a corner, and she is gone.

They find Joe’s resistance—his unresistant resistance—curious and frustrating. They shut him in his little white room and a moment later the box seems to detach from the building and hurl him around, up, down, around. It occurs to him, as he hangs suspended, watching one side of the box retreat and knowing that the other must be rushing up behind him, that if he is moving at fifteen miles an hour—not unlikely—and the box at fifteen as well in an opposing direction, then he will strike with a total force of thirty miles an hour and quite possibly die.

He spreads his arms out and tries to slow himself. He does not die, or even suffer serious injury—although he suspects he may have dislocated a thumb and cracked some ribs, and wonders at the change in circumstances which causes him to see this as minor—and when they are finished, they let him out. He staggers and weaves and empties his stomach onto the white floor. They hold him, and he thanks them.

Mr. Ordinary smiles.

Instead of taking him back to his box (he struggles with himself to avoid identifying it as “home”) they put him into another room just next to it. There is a man inside, smelling of rubber boots, mud and seaweed, and his body is a mass of burns and scabs.

“We’re down in the ivy,” Ted Sholt says.

Joe, looking down at this silvered head and the man he suspects is dying, feels a strong familiarity.

They have done something strange to Ted Sholt, something odd and clever and very terrible. He is shaking, but not like a man who is cold or tired or afraid. He is shaking as if his muscles are coming away from his bones, and his skin has a strange, stretched look, as if the fat of his body is pooling in places where it should not.

“Ivy inside,” Sholt says hoarsely. His eyes are searching, but not finding, and Joe realises that he cannot see. “Ivy in the blood. Ted’s head’s full and Ted’s a fool, God’s a figment, devils rule.”

“It’s me, Ted,” Joe says softly. There’s no need to shout. They are pressed against one another like lovers. They can have something approaching privacy only if one of them stands. “It’s Spork the Clock.”

“You can’t let him go through with it,” Ted says vaguely. He tries to lift his body with his stomach muscles, and something makes a gristle noise. He moans.

“Ted … I don’t think there’s anything I can do. I don’t know what’s going on.”

“Brother Sheamus. Frankie’s machine.”

“Yes, but I don’t know what that means. I don’t know what they want from me. I don’t know anything. I’m just the idiot who turned the key. You were there, Ted.”

Sholt tries to speak, and then screams again, and this time when he arches his back he crackles, as if his bones are breaking. “What cart will Frankie’s engine pull? Science has many faces, each mouth whispers to the world in different ways. Frankie’s gone, her blade will cut in all directions. Whose hand holds the knife? Sheamus, of course. Always Sheamus. Bastards.” He shudders, and Joe feels something move inside the other man’s body, something which a profound instinct tells him should stay in one place.

“Ted, please. Stay still.”

“She said it was salvation. She said too much truth turns us to ice and we shatter, so she set it all perfectly. But Sheamus … he wants more than that. Wants a reckoning with God. Wants to reset the machine. See all the truths at once. He’ll kill the world.”

“But he can’t do that without the calibration drum, and he doesn’t have it, does he? Of course, he doesn’t. Because Frankie wasn’t an idiot. She gave it to someone she could trust.”

Oh, shit. Daniel. She gave Daniel the keys to the apocalypse. Of course, she did. Who else do you give something which can destroy the world, which will be hunted by monsters and thugs, except the father of your child who still loves you even after you’ve played hide and seek with his heart for thirty years?

Daniel, and hence, Joe.

Shit, shit, shit
.

If Joe has it, he does not know. If they took it when they raided the warehouse, they also do not know. Therefore it is concealed. It is hidden, of course, hidden by Daniel against this very day. Hidden too well. Perhaps it was in Daniel’s lost effects. Perhaps Mathew, all unknowing, sold the ignition key to the most dangerous object in the world for the price of a meal at Cecconi’s.

Shit
.