Force Majeure (11 page)

‘Not
this
morning; you’re promised somewhere else.’

Both wore grey gowns and pallid, earnest expressions clean of make-up. Flower-of-the-Lady was watching from the doorway. Kay hadn’t seen her since her first morning, but she hadn’t changed. Her lamp, roaring paraffin, filled the cell with clean light, then the nausea of burning oil. A car crashed in Kay’s memory. A boy flitted from the scene, leaving the scent of singed hair. She almost made a connection, but it was gone, vanishing into the woods and sleep.

Luna and Quint succeeded in tumbling her out of bed. Her naked soles touched frosty carpet scrub. Her bare legs felt comfortably warm, then they didn’t. She gave up the pretence of tiredness. She estimated she’d slept for two, maybe three hours. She could cope with that. She swatted away the cajoling arms of the Gestapo Twins. Across the way, Azure’s cot was already empty and the bedclothes strewn violently, as if she’d been ripped out of the world.

‘You said you’d be there for her,’ Luna said accusingly.

‘I didn’t realise it would be this soon.’ She dressed. The clothes were yesterday’s; she felt herself putting on yesterday’s grime and slick sweat like an extra layer of warmth and protection. She sniffed at the fabric cautiously. Meat. She would smell of dry, day-old beef. The wooden charm was still in the pocket and jutted awkwardly into her hip.

‘This’d work a lot better if you were a man,’ Flower-of-the-Lady remarked, with indifference not disapproval. Like the others she was in grey, but where Quint’s and Luna’s gowns were full and promised concealed bodies, the-Lady’s was shapeless and might have been empty beneath the folds. In the shadow behind the lamp, her hair curled like climbing flowers or weeds.

‘Don’t listen to her,’ Quint interjected. ‘Azure thinks you’re right for the job, so you’re right for the job.’

‘Men always cock this up,’ Luna added acidly. ‘So do women, but not as often.’

‘So what does she do?’

‘She becomes a bird.’

‘Is it going to hurt?’

‘That’s up to you.’

‘And what do I do?’

‘You follow me,’ said Flower-of-the-Lady. She stepped back from the door, and the light emptied from the room, turning Quint and Luna into wicked-curling lines of white teeth in darkness.

Kay went barefoot into the passages of the house, with the chatelaine lighting the way. Quint and Luna locked arms with her and bore her along after the-Lady’s hem. She preferred to stride, but they set her an ambling, leisurely pace. They wouldn’t let her look round as they walked, so she became convinced that they were being joined by more and more followers until she was marching at the front of a silent, odourless procession. Unable to turn, she looked down. Both her escorts were barefoot, their feet crushed, like hers, into the shape of the inside of the shoes. She stumbled, but momentum kept her going.

The old free house never rested and was suffused with light, whispered gossip and the scent of cinnamon, but their path soon took them away from the front-stage. They travelled downwards, always down, by lift or staircase, through gently sloping corridors, while the air tightened as if they’d left the structure of the house and were venturing into mines, into the mountain, and from there into the centre of the Earth. Furnished passages gave way to bare wood and plaster, to white brick, to crudely worked stone, all echoing with no-sound.

The path led them out of the tunnels and onto the mountain slope. There was no sign of the lights from Candida – and the stars glistened naked and undisturbed in the black overhead – so Kay presumed she’d been led out of sight of the house and the city.

‘It’s a beautiful night.’ she remarked, breaking a long silence. The words reverberated back at her as if this was a part of the world that had never heard human
voice
before and was savouring the novelty. She wished she’d chosen something more portentous; her echo sounded shrill and sentimental. She hadn’t paid attention to the stars for a long while.

‘Can you name any constellations?’

‘Not in this hemisphere.’ She wasn’t joking. The sky was truly beautiful, she realised, in a raw and pagan way, and Luna’s frivolous question seemed to demand an earnest reply. ‘Orion. I always knew him by his belt.’

Flower-of-the-Lady’s back was to them, and she spoke evenly without breaking her pace. ‘Just imagine how massive the stars must be that you can see them from this distance, and how old they must be that some have been dead for millions of years but are still alive to us. This is where you need to be.’

A larger star with a bluish tinge was welling on the horizon, too small to be the sun or to shed more than a little light on the mountainside. On the ridge ahead of them was a tent, more of a pavilion, its walls a livid red like a raw hunk of meat in the bloodless grey landscape. The-Lady dampened her lamp, and the tent glowed from within, low firelight revealing the veins and creases of the walls and promising a real warmth that the chatelaine’s cold fusion couldn’t.

‘Go in,’ said the-Lady, ‘she’s waiting for you.’

Kay peeled back the folds of the tent with both hands.

A few days earlier – Kay had lost count – Azure had popped the question. She pranced on the spot and all the appendages of her insect suit jangled.

‘The-Lady says, the-Lady says, the-Lady says I’m going to be made a
voladora
now I’ve got my bike back. This is – I can’t put it any other way – the big one. This is my life, this is my everything, and I need someone to be there. I need a second to catch me if I fall. I’m asking you, Kay. If I believed in God, I’d say she put you here for a reason. You Appeared to me to do this.’

Kay had been sceptical. ‘What do I have to do?’ She had also been on the brink of a bad temper, which Azure’s bubbly good humour hadn’t registered and had done nothing to assuage.

‘Just stay with me for as long as it takes. Ah, you have to bring me a present. Nothing big or special.
Seriously
, I don’t want you to think I’m trying to cadge a freebie ...’ (Kay shook her head and watched the relief blossom out of her cellmate.) ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you so much. I just need a pole star, someone who’ll guide me back down to Earth.’

Kay already knew she would say
yes
but still – ‘I don’t understand. I’ll be there if you want, but I don’t know – what
happens
to you?’

The pause. And then:

‘I don’t know,’ she admitted.

Azure was becoming a bird.

Kay squinted. Everything was cast in red light, from the fire and the reflection of the flames on the hide of the tent. The fire burned in a hollow bowl at its heart, and Azure was embryo-curled on a blanket by its side. Kay assumed she was asleep, but her head twitched up and her face was a red blank.

Azure was naked and her skin was scored and ridged like a nut. She sniffed at the air suspiciously, then rolled back from the fire towards the back of the tent. Her body settled into a new and defensive poise, crouched on her haunches with her knees drawn in front of her chest and stomach. There was something new at her neck; a thick braid, dangling.

Kay drew out her dragon-stick and stepped cautiously forward. Azure hissed.

‘Who’s that?’ She was hostile. She sounded almost vicious. Her arms came forward warily, fingers formed into digging points. Her skin was mottled and discoloured. Kay’s eyes sharpened; Azure was blindfolded, but otherwise there didn’t seem to be another square inch of her body that wasn’t newly-textured, riddled with fresh lines and blotches.

‘I know you’re there,’ she insisted. ‘I can hear you breathing. I can smell you.’

Kay took another silent step.

‘If you move just an inch closer without telling me who you are, I swear I will cripple you. There’s no point in pretending. You think I don’t know the smell of a man, huh? You think I can’t reach the coals before you. I can make the both of us burn, but’ – she tapped the side of her head with a canny finger – ‘that’s what I’m here for. I’m here to be eaten. Hear that, I’m here to be
eaten
, so you don’t scare me.’

Kay didn’t move any further but instead squatted on the floor. This moment felt both wry and wrong. It was odd and oddly funny that Azure didn’t recognise her under the blindfold, but there was real fear and aggression in her. Kay hadn’t seen anything like this since her first day. The shapes on her skin were clear now. They were pictures, not blotches. They were designs executed in paint on her body.

The thin ridges on her arms were feathers, fine brushstrokes.

Azure didn’t relax once Kay had sat down. There was still a spring in her, a promise of violence. Kay didn’t want to speak and break the spell.

‘
Now
, who are you and what do you want?’

The paints flickered with life where the firelight touched them, when Azure breathed. Her shoulders were covered with flowers. Mandala lines coursed up and down her flanks, and snakes coiled round her left leg below the knee. Half her face was a bird with a single painted eye on her blindfold, its beak resting on the bridge of her nose. The bird was burning, its feathers turning to flame along the line of Azure’s cheek.

‘Who painted you?’ Kay asked. ‘Who’s going to eat you?’

At the level sound of her voice, Azure breathed heavily, out, but she stayed poised.

‘Kay,’ she said, no longer hostile, now distressed. ‘I thought that … Is there someone with you?’ Stupidly, Kay shook her head and Azure went on: ‘Is there a man with you?’

‘No,’ Kay replied. ‘I’m alone. The-Lady brought me here, but she’s outside, it’s just me.’

Azure’s nose twitched at the air, not bird-like, not insect-like, rodent-like. ‘That’s odd,’ she murmured, ‘I’d’ve sworn it.’

‘I’ve brought you a present,’ Kay said and extended her arm out, stick in hand, over the fire. The flame was dying; she didn’t feel it. Azure stretched out gingerly, stroking the air until their fingers met. There was a cathedral painted on her stomach, every stained-glass window a bead of colour; over her left nipple was a ragged-edged sun, on her right a moon, and a child’s face peered from the sag of flesh at the base of her neck. Her fingers inspected the dragon-head of the stick.

‘That’s right, that’s all just right. Thanks for coming. You were out so late last night, I got worried …’ She giggled.

‘I didn’t know. I didn’t mean to let you down.’

There was a collar round her neck, and the dangling braid Kay had noted was a chain.

‘Azure, what’s going on?’

She pushed forward and put her hands on her friend’s neck. The bone felt brittle, as if it might snap with a gentle squeeze; the skin was marshmallow-soft; the collar was cold leather with cold metal studs. ‘Shit! What have they done to you?’

Azure pushed Kay’s hands away, lightly. ‘They’ve staked me to a mountain. It’s not far off what I expected. I’m a virgin sacrifice. I’m bait. I’m going to be eaten.’

‘This is a sick thing to do. It’s
sick
. What am I supposed to do? I can’t … I just can’t …’

Under the fabric of her blindfold, Azure blinked, and Kay was close enough to feel that flutter of movement. ‘Don’t think about it. How long have I been here? How many days?’

‘Just the one night.’

‘One? Is that all?’ Azure yawned. No longer alert, she unfolded her limbs and stretched out on her back, with the chain swaying slack beside her. Kay scouted round for the tether, but it trailed out under the hem of the tent, and somehow the prospect of going outside was more frightening than waiting with Azure for her ordeal. The soon-to-be-eaten victim was taking it all with relaxed good grace.

Is that it then? Am I her proxy? Do I do it all for her so that she doesn’t have to think about how strange this is? Do I have to shoulder all her fears? Do I have to take them inside me?

Jesus.

‘Don’t be afraid, Kay,’ Azure said. ‘Fear eats the soul.’

That settled it. Kay took Azure’s hands in her own. ‘All right, all right, I don’t care what this bollocks means. I’m here for you. I’ll protect you.’

Azure sighed. ‘I haven’t slept since they brought me here. Did you have anything different to eat last night?’

Kay thought back. She’d grabbed something in a hurry from the kitchens in the old free house, nothing special, just sustenance and fuel. ‘There was something in a bowl, tasted pasty. I didn’t like it. It was grey. Tasted grey too.’

Azure nodded. ‘What did you think it was?’

‘More fish. I’m getting sick of bloody fish.’

‘Maybe, but I reckon there was a lot of root as well. You won’t have it again, unless you have to stand second for another
voladora
someday. This is
initiation
. We, you and I, are supposed to be outside time. Whatever it is we ate, it makes the whole event feel timeless. I’ve been dreaming too, dreaming without sleep.’

‘Drugs?’

‘No. I know drugs. Not drugs.’

‘Why timeless?’

‘Because
they
don’t live in time any more and this is the only way we can come face to face with them, so they can eat me and shit me out again. And I become a bird.’ She was up again, and waving the gift-stick in her face. ‘This is a dildo, isn’t it?’