Force Majeure (12 page)

‘It’s a charm.’

Azure snorted. ‘Did you go out and buy me a dildo?! We live in a brothel!’

‘It’s a dragon.’

‘No wonder I thought you were a man when you first came in!’

Kay retreated and stretched out on the blankets on the opposite side of the fire. As she settled, it felt as though she was watching herself, a stranger spreading her body down on the floor in a life unconnected with hers. Then abruptly it wasn’t; this was real, it was happening to her and she felt all the strangeness of the moment reach out for her and … and …

‘Clobber you?’ Azure suggested.

‘Yes,
clobber
, that’s about the right word.’

The sound of Azure’s even breaths soon lulled Kay back into a calmer state of mind.

‘You might start to hallucinate soon. Me, I don’t know if you’re real. No, I do, I do, I know you. Where do you think we are?’

‘In a tent.’

‘That’s what I thought at first. Are you on your back?’

‘That’s where I’m comfortable.’

‘I can see the stars.’

‘Even with the blindfold?’

She could fall asleep like this. Since Azure had mentioned the grey paste, that was all she could smell, on her fingers and in her mouth, where before she wouldn’t have remembered.

‘Even with. I can see lots of things. Except the pictures. You’re the only person who’ll ever see those, you and the dragons. Are they good?’

‘In what sense? I don’t know anything about art.’

‘Do they cover all of me?’

‘I think so. I haven’t seen all of you. That’s not a come-on.’

‘I know you better than that. I’ll take it on trust.’

Slippery silence washed over them. Kay lay looking up at the red ceiling and waiting for the stars to appear, while Azure’s breaths grew so shallow it would have been hard to tell if she were still alive. Except …

Except Kay gradually became convinced, as she willed the roof to unfurl and reveal the sky, that the warmth she felt wasn’t from the ebbing fire but from Azure’s skinny body. It was the kinetic heat of the blood pounding through her veins, the powerhouses of heart and lungs, the furnace of her stomach, the sweating hothouse of her womb.

Xan’s questions nagged at her, preventing her from settling.

‘Azure,’ she asked, quietly, ‘do you ever go back home? Do you ever want to?’

Azure rolled. Onto her front, Kay guessed, revealing the invisible pictures of her back. Tempted, she didn’t look. ‘My life before I Appeared, all my past,’ she replied, ‘is a blank page.’

‘And you like it that way?’

‘
Uh-huh.
’

‘But is there anyone – I mean
anyone
– you miss?

She tasted
grey
, and almost before she’d asked the question, she lost time.

Kay was 20, still a student and full of naive wonder. She sat by the window in her grandmother’s cottage and gazed out toward the road and the hills beyond. It was late in the year and the fields were churned brown and pocked with white patches of newly-turned earth, as if the whole landscape was sickening. Overnight, the shape of the surrounding hills had changed. Kay’s forehead was pressed against the cold pane; she had a headache that felt like a fever and she was trying to squeeze it out into the glass. She had been crying and the surface of her eyes still felt raw. She was floating. Her feet didn’t touch the floor, which reassured her that this was an hallucination, just an effect of the grey paste.

She’d had a dream about a car crash during the night, but that wasn’t unusual.
Anxiety
, she guessed. Cars meant anxiety. She turned away from the window and went to visit every room in the house, trying to find some key or object in each that would help her focus her memory. Each room was haunted; the people who had once been here were now wiped from her mind. Thoughts were fragile, like magnetic tape. Grandmother’s house smelled of cinnamon. It was empty, its occupants long since dis-Appeared, as Xan had predicted.

You don’t destroy a thing just by forgetting it. Where do they all go, all the lost things, all the things we think we’ve banished?

It was morning, but late enough for the dew to have dried on the hedges and the lawn. Last night she’d been woken by Earth-thunder. She’d stumbled into the door jamb, convinced that the cottage would come down around her ears. It was an earthquake. No, it couldn’t be an earthquake, not in the British Isles, where the geology just isn’t that treacherous, where these random acts of nature couldn’t happen.

Kay left the cottage and strolled across the fields, her feet miraculously failing to make contact with the mud and the sheepshit and the dank water. The night had turned the world upside down, scattering detritus and treasure across the churned land. Plump, pink worms writhed helplessly on the surface where they’d been deposited by the storm. Ahead of her was the road, sprinkled with earth from the night’s mudslide but also with heavy chunks of stone where one of the old walls had collapsed. A car was stalled, its passage blocked by the largest piece – a slab too unwieldy to be moved without machinery. The three passengers, all men, gathered round the stone, as if trying to shatter it with the concentrated power of their minds.

Kay waved to them, floating down the slope to meet them. They regarded her with no-faces. Let me have a go.

They stepped aside and let her inspect the slab. She rested a palm on its coarse surface, gauging its weight and texture. This was slow work; the men shifted impatiently and she felt uncomfortable in their gaze. The air was unsettled, full of ozone and croaking birdsong. This was a test; she had to prove she was still in control. The slab revealed its secrets to her touch and she braced her hands beneath it, ready to move. She tightened her muscles and it flinched. She pushed, her forearms burned, she roared, the stone flipped over and rolled off the road into the ditch. The bland men applauded politely.

Confidently, she turned to them, but by then it was too late. She’d touched the earth and it had caught her with its gravity. Already she couldn’t move. Her limbs were turning numb, the flesh browning and wrinkling, the strength seeping out of her bones. She felt herself turning into Candida money, her hair and skin shedding in large, coarse brown flakes. She sank onto the tarmac and the air wheezed out of her lungs, but she could still smell her body ripening with time.

She spasmed back into the red womb of the tent.

‘What was that? Did you see that?’

‘This is a myth of origin,’ Azure shushed. ‘Don’t try to move, just listen.’

The sky was red. It was, she knew, the roof of the tent. It was also the sky and full of clustered stars, a tight whorl of them denser than she’d ever seen of a night. And here was the grey paste on her tongue and her teeth, and here was the bright new sun rising over the mountain, and the sky smelled of spent fireworks. She was still in the tent; she was lying on the wet grass beneath the naked sky.

She didn’t feel like Kay. Everything that was Kay was leaking from a wound in her side.

‘Candida is such an unexpected place. How do you think Doctor Arkadin felt, him and everyone before him, when he stumbled on the Mystery? It must have been like Armstrong and Aldrin finding blood-jewels on the moon, a discovery that they couldn’t put into words. How could he even imagine its builders, except in the spaces they made for themselves in his dreams, in his madness and imagination? There was a time before the mountains rose, when there was only one land and one sea, and even then there was Candida, without beginning or end, the serpent swallowing its own tail.

‘There. That’s the Mystery. It really is the Oldest Profession.’

She didn’t sound like Kay, but it was her voice, no doubt about that. She was giggling, her head and stomach made light by the paste.

Further up the mountainside were the dim figures of an expectant audience. They were still, but she could imagine them dancing, she could imagine them singing. They were Flower-of-the-Lady’s army of holy whores – or very much like them, their past or their future. Azure was sitting on the edge of the ridge beyond the tent, reaching for the horizon, and the chain was twined round her body, long and slack enough to go twice. Her back was visible and it held one picture and that picture was exactly the scene spread out before Kay – the dawn mountainside, the naked girl-sacrifice tied to the rock, her arms raised in supplication to the sky. In the picture, the sky was red. The sky had eyes, had teeth, had claws and wings. This sky was hungry.

The dragons filled the sky, the dragons
were
the sky, and the sky was unravelling, like catastrophe, towards the ground. Azure leapt from the ridge to meet it, and if she was lucky, she’d become a bird before she fell.

Chapter Five:
Conduits

Xan was her secret. This was the only power she had over him, and she would keep it locked away and silent until it could be used.

Kay was later joining the Displaced Club than she had expected; later by a whole week. She’d told Xan she’d been taken sick, and he’d accepted her explanation without comment. He’d smiled uncynically; that was the power he had over her. She had been bed-ridden and feverish but not, in actual fact, ill. Luna and Quint claimed she’d spent two whole days unconscious after the morning of Azure’s initiation. They dressed as nurses and took turns ministering to her, mocking her, while she lay helpless in the old free house’s lazaret. She had already decided to move into the Club. Their antics didn’t move her one way or the other.

Though she recovered her strength after those two days, Azure’s initiation haunted her. She was afraid she might be picking pieces of grey paste fever from her thoughts for the rest of her life. Fragments of that strange morning would rise unbidden to the forefront of her mind, feeling as fresh as new-minted experiences, brief dislocations overwhelming her with flashback. The real world would wink out and leave her back on the awful mountainside. She’d had moments like that before Candida, and now it felt like they had been ripples from her future, displaced back through her life from
this
time, the taste lingering before the meal.

Xan was there in the fever. He was transparent. I recognise you, Xan. I
know
you. That was her secret.

The Club gave her an office and her own team. Xan gave her Prospero. It was all she had ever wanted and, as he’d promised, it was bigger than she expected. Prospero was more than an account now – it was a project. It was all the heads that had plotted Prospero, it was all the hands that put it into action – hers included – and it was the philosophy that guided them. She put on Prospero’s robes and airs but they were too big and too empty. They weighed Kay down and the power they might once have commanded had long been spent by Xan. He had outmanoeuvred her; he had beaten her to it. She arrived to find that she had very little to do in her new job. That was almost as bad as the prospect of endless rote toil at the old free house. She had a ghost job reading reports and crunching numbers, sifting through Xan’s table leavings. She would make it work.

‘TV.’

‘Really?’

‘Yah, I didn’t watch much, but I had it on all the time. Even in bed. The noise is relaxing, like having someone in the room but just as a comfort and a presence. No demands, no distractions, none of those things you get from, y’know,
people
.’

‘Even in bed …?’

‘Yah, even in bed. Look, it was better than radio. Radio’s a pain on the ear; it makes you listen. TV just babbles like water. And how about you?’

‘Coke.’

‘What sort of coke?’

‘You mean what brand? Coca Cola or Pepsi? No-one can tell the difference. I shouldn’t say that, I used to work for –’

‘No, no, no, no, I mean’ – (gulp) – ‘coke or’ – (sniff) – ‘coke.’

‘Both! We’re in South America, and you can’t get either. Unbelievable!’

‘Xan could get coke.’

‘I’d let him snort it off my tits.’

‘Yah, you wish. Red?’

‘My name is
Kay
.’

‘
He
calls you Red.’

‘He’s him.
What
?’

‘What do you miss that you can’t get any more?’

She looked up at last from her numbers, with a sour face that made her team snigger. ‘Office gossip,’ she said, lowered her eyes, and returned to ignoring them.

‘So … absolutely no-one at all here misses sex?’

They laughed. She didn’t.

This was what was left of Prospero, this was what she had to do – put a value on Candida. She had to itemise everything in the city, every structure from the humblest crop of standing stones to the old free house itself, then price them until she’d totted up the full financial worth of the land for Xan and his principals. It was, she realised early on, a task as impossible as it was tedious. There was no formal land registry in Candida. There were no trustworthy maps. There was no legible money that she could translate into Dollar Amounts or Rupee Amounts or Yen Amounts. There were no landlords, or if there were, they were well hidden. Worst of all, there was no method she could think of that would simplify the job.

It took a whole morning for her to work up enthusiasm for the challenge and only a minute to learn that even this impossibility was out of her hands. The raw and unsourced data arrived from other departments in the Club. Xan had a codename for everything. Prospero had only the one dedicated office. Other rooms were devoted to Merlin, Navajo, Carousel, Shelmerdine and Malice. They were outside Kay’s portfolio and she didn’t bother to tag them. Their statistics came mainly in grey card folders labelled with new departmental names that might have been invented on the spot. Xan assured her they were subsidiary projects but still she wondered if the Club hadn’t set loose dozens of rival schemes to tame Candida, jostling in close quarters in a bloody Darwinian scrabble for survival. If that was true, Prospero would have to win and she would have to win it on Prospero’s behalf. She had to make sense of it all, chewing and regurgitating the numbers until they were in a fit state to be shown to Xan. She took her responsibility seriously.

She was close to him. That was something; not enough.

Team Prospero had a windowless office on the first floor, near the back of the building. Thick-walled and oppressive, it felt more like a bunker, sealed off from the life-thrum of the city. The décor was drab olive, with brown patches where the paint had been spread too thin. The other girls, not Kay, brought their own photographs and posters, usually famous landmarks from their home countries or other familiar sites from around the world. Kay was always the first in the office each morning and would sit alone at her desk, a vantage point overlooking the Taj Mahal, Tower Bridge, the Eiffel Tower and the Great Wall of China. The light, slow and electric, was louder than it was bright. The walls trapped wet heat so dense it was almost steam. Some days, the team brought laundry into work and strung it from clothes-lines halfway up the wall. Tights and T-shirts wilted over their heads. The heat made casual dress a necessity.

Kay was given a team of three, all bright and decent, all younger than her and all bored by Prospero. For them, Prospero was a job, not a vocation. They formed a conspiratorial clutch against her and her work ethic. It was good-natured but it prickled at her. It wasn’t the distraction that bothered her but the sense that she was losing them to Candyland. The club had failed to give them a common purpose, she realised dispassionately.
She
was failing, and they were her responsibility.

She hoped they would speak English for the working day, but in practice they would slip carelessly into their native tongues or the Candidan polyglot. Mara was from somewhere on the Indian subcontinent, a country that Kay could never quite pin down; she was the next eldest, the only other to have topped 30. Monika was German and the most grounded, the most like Kay in temperament, though they had little else in common. Her favourite was the youngest, Mae. She was only 16, dark-haired, pudgily shy. Her skin was a pizza of freckles.

‘Xan wants to see us when we’re free,’ she told Kay, during an afternoon’s break. The sweaty heat had become too much to bear and had driven Team Prospero out into the cooler passages on the first floor. ‘He told me this morning when I was coming in. He spoke to me.’

Mara and Monika talked about Xan incessantly, and though Kay had never felt moved enough to ask them directly, she got the impression that he was almost as much of a newcomer as she was. His stewardship of the Club had begun little more than two months earlier. He’d transformed it, filling it with energy and velocity. He’d led Prospero and all the other weird little projects in his wake, like the pied piper, and arranged them into the new order. He knew the holes in the walls of the city. He was a conjuror who could smuggle little chunks of the outside world into Candida. He knew how to procure clothes and nick-nacks and foreign currency, though Kay had found, to her frustration, that none of the native merchants and marketeers could see a point in taking euros over disintegrating Candida scrip. Monika used worthless American dollars to roll cigarettes. Everyone else in Prospero’s office smoked.

Mae was smoking. She and Kay had found a cool balcony at the back of the clubhouse, overlooking the flat of wild scrub and concrete that made up the grounds. Mae stood lumpenly back from the jamb, out of the sunlight, while Kay sprawled forward over the ledge to avoid the tempting second-hand ash-perfume of her junior’s smoke.

‘He did more than speak to me. He
looked
at me. It was, y’know, kind of nice.’

‘Really?’

‘Do you mind that?’ She leaned forward to tap her cigarette’s smouldering end into the gap. It fell cool and unnoticed on the labourers who were working to clear the grounds. There was an oblong pool in the concrete directly below the balcony that had once been a cooling sink for the steamworks. It was lined with sludge now, and today’s work was concentrated on sluicing down the walls and making it clean. Kay wondered who the workers – the anonymous tops-of-heads – actually were. Appeared with a taste for back-breaking jobs? Native Candidans who’d been persuaded to toil for the Club without payment? The indigenous Andeans who, she was half-convinced, were Xan’s conduits to the outside world?

‘Why should I mind?’ she asked warily.

Mae seemed embarrassed. ‘
Because
. You and him.’

‘What about me and him?’

She tipped her head sideways. ‘
Red
. We thought it was his pet name.’

‘We’re not an item.’

‘Would you like to be? It’s just, if you’re not …’

‘I’m not his keeper. I don’t know him that well. You do what you want.’

‘You two seem to get on. You have
something
. I don’t want to go making a fool of myself.’

Kay moved back from the edge, into the doorway and out of Mae’s sight. ‘Come on. He wants to see us.’

There were the empty, echoing corridors of the clubhouse – and Kay shivered, imagining she was walking inside the calcified corpse of a giant, set into the earth by Doctor Arkadin. Xan had quarters on the top floor that Kay, never having been summoned before, hadn’t seen. They found him in a cream-walled office, looming over a Lilliputian city at the centre of the room. The model was made of lollysticks and matches with unspent red heads; beneath it, the mountainside was moulded in plasticine and toy clay, more ingredients smuggled through the secret windows into Candida. It was almost as high as Xan was tall, but it was unfinished. Its buildings had ragged, half-completed walls.

‘I’ve been mapping,’ Xan said, without looking up, without turning. He was naked to the waist, displaying a lean back, skin drawn tight over pronounced ridges of bone. He shone red from exertion, and there were hard muscle-clusters round his shoulders and down his spine. His legs were stretched apart. He was a general poring over the field of his campaign. ‘It has to be 3-D,’ he insisted.

‘Has it?’

Still he kept his back to them. ‘2-D doesn’t work, I tried it. There are too many tricks, too much false perspective. I’ve had agents out measuring streets and buildings. That’s where your data comes from. I want to know every inch of the bastard before we put it on the market. Is that Mae with you?’

‘Uh, yah.’

‘Good. Mae, I’d call you
Freckles
, but look at Red here, she’s worse for it than you. I’m playing favourites with the two of you; forgive me. What are you doing tonight?’

‘Nothing. What is there to do? Go out, listen to music, dance, not my scene, never was.’

‘Red?’

‘I have plans.’

‘Washing your hair?’

‘I have
plans
,’ she insisted. Xan turned to them. His chest hair was blonde, much lighter than on his head, and formed the shape of a tree. His navel was a perfect whorl. Kay tried not to look. She slapped her arms apologetically: ‘I promised a friend.’

‘I hope we’re not losing you?’

He was all muscle, knotted with disapproval. She shook her head, and the knots unspooled. He invited them into a more comfortable room and offered them a drink. Scotch, brandy, spirits, whisky
and
whiskey, all smuggled in past the Bureau of Appearances. Mae accepted, Kay chose water. They sat on a couch, while he rested against the wooden rails that lined the walls. The tumbler shook in Mae’s hands.

‘Not used to it?’ Xan asked. She turned her head abruptly from side-to-side.

‘So,’ Kay said, ‘what can we do for you?’

‘Two things.’ He made a pop with his lips. ‘Two separate things. I’m holding a Club party later this week. It’s going to be fairly important. Big people are coming, from inside the city and … well, you’ll see.’

She saw where this was going. ‘We need to clear the decks on Prospero?’ He didn’t react. ‘I have no idea how much data we still have to process.’