Ink (81 page)
Authors: Hal Duncan
I wave a hand, dismissively.
As Jack would say, if he existed anywhere other than in my imagination, anywhere other than everywhere I look around me in the world, riding sparks of fire, dangling his feet over the edge of a wineglass, scaling a blade of grass to bring the finest dew down to Puck waiting below, as Jack would say: Fuck that shit.
Is our Joshua more Jack or more Puck? I wonder. I see a little of them both in him. A flash of impetuous, imaginative id as he swoops through a room with airplane arms, machine-gunning—vrrrrroooooowwww buda-buda-buda-buda. A flirt of string-pulling self, in his wide eyes and wide-kicking feet, hands behind his back as he pleads innocence of drawing on my notes. And more: a fury of scrapping wildcat just like his mother dragged out of a fight and still irate at the injustice of the world; a jut of determined jaw and folded arms against bedtime, so much the stern implacability of his uncle Don, who can deal with Anna's temper far better than I; a solemn peer, elbows on the table, fists under his chin, my mirror image as I puzzle over some enigma of translation and he puzzles over his reader; a shadow of sullen sulk, the cold and certain fury before a tantrum starts; the unashamed, unafraid sentimentality—almost maturity—of him reaching out to take his mother's hand as we stood at her brother's grave, reaching out for her hand as if to say, hush now, sure and it'll all be fine, it will, after a while.
And it will. It bloody well better be, or I'll have Don to answer to.
“Have you got everything?” she says.
“Yes,” both Joshua and I answer simultaneously.
She looks at Joshua.
“Have you got Rabbit?”
“Yes, Mom,” he says.
“Have you got all your writing?” she says to me.
“Yes, Mom,” I say.
I give her a peck on the cheek and heft the rucksack into the trunk of the car, slam it down, look back at the cabin. It's not quite true, of course; I don't have everything. Jack and Puck are still here, lounging on the roof, human-size now but with horns and wings, Puck's iridescent as a peacock's tail, blue and green and glistening like wet oil or wet ink, Jack's golden and yellow and red as a phoenix's would be, I imagine. Jack wears Bermuda shorts for the sake of decency—
hello… children about
, I warned them both when they showed up in the morning to see us off. Puck wears denim shorts cut off so high they look less decent than if he were naked, even more so with the fly as it is, unbuttoned. He passes a bottle of wine to Jack, wipes the red from his lips.
I'll be leaving them here. This is where they belong, far more than in the pages of some book; however grandiose and audacious it might be, no book is a match for the idyll of a sunbeam and a bottle of wine, I think.
—And thou, says Puck to Jack.
“After Thomas died,” she says, “I went off the rails. I think I went crazy for a bit. It was like I was four or five different people, maybe more, you know, because you don't just go through
stages;
it's not fucking shock and denial and anger and all that bullshit. Least not for me. For me, it was all of it together. I was fucking burning with rage, and cold as the dead. I was a drunk and a whore and a firestarter and Christ only knows what else. I think what got me through was one part of me that said…
screw all the bullshit.
It's really a fucking waste if death doesn't make you see just how fucking precious life is… and screw all the rest of the bullshit. That's a cliche, isn't it?”
“All the important truths are cliches,” I say.
It's our last night in the cabin and we lie in bed, the light on, propped up with pillows. In her hand, she holds a picture of Thomas, kitted up for some costume party in fake horns and a tutu over denim cutoffs. Above the waist, he wears a suit jacket, shirt and thin tie, glittering pink wings of the kind you'd buy for an eight-year-old girl, a fedora propped up by the horns to a steep angle. He's holding a toy machine gun. Robin Goodfella, she explains. The Fairy Godfather.
The light flickers through the trees that arch their branches over us in a broken canopy as we drive down the winding road from Little Switzerland into the valley.
I see them leaping from leaf to leaf, Jack and Puck, riding the flashes and the sparkles of dappled sunlight as white steeds, keeping pace with the car, racing each other. Or not so much leaping as … just being there on the next leaf as we reach it, and the next one, and the next one, and the next one, like images on a reel of celluloid, the motion projected on the silver screen only an illusion of continuity. Of course, Jack and Puck are creatures of jump cuts and loops, whatever film they inhabit moving out of phase with our own, not twenty-four frames per second but even faster, so they seem to flicker or, like the wheels of a car at certain speeds, go backward even.
In the back, Joshua is lost in a film of his own, or of his and Rabbit's, reinventing reality the way all children do, by turns solemn and silly, playful and ponderous. I've listened to him playing, tried to make sense of his ever-shifting dreamworld, sitting down cross-legged in front of him as he taps me on the nose and tells me I'm a pixie house. How do you make sense of that? How can a human be a house inhabited by pixies, by sprites or fairies or sylphs, or whatever you want to call them?
Or maybe it makes perfect sense.
I watch out the window as Jack and Puck leap and tumble and flip and flop from shining leaf to shining leaf, to patch of sky, to dart of bird, to glint of sunlight on a tin roof, on the wet nose of a dog on a porch, on a chrome bumper of a car, on a green bottle by the side of the road, weaving round each other, pulling arms to get in front, and tripping, and tumbling off into long grass, into long grass and wild flowers, and we drive away, leaving them behind in the mirror, in a sunbeam, in a poem or a memory or a novel or a song, leaving them in a place and time we can return to because it is as unreal as it is real, and therefore as eternal as it is ephemeral, leaving them in their happy ever never.
As with
Vellum
, much of
Ink
draws heavily on classical source texts, so I feel I should make clear my gratitude both to the original writers and to those translations that have proved most useful.
The rewrite of Euripedes’
The Bacchae
, which the players enact in volume three, owes much to the translations of Philip Vellacott (Euripides,
The Bacchae and Other Plays
, London: Penguin, 19 54) and of Gilbert Murray (Euripedes,
The Bacchae
, NY: P. F. Collier & Son, 1909-14).
The epilogue is in part a remix of Virgil's “Daphnis at Heaven's Gate” and “Are These Meliboeus’ Sheep?” for which I drew on J. W McKail's 1934 translations (Virgil's
Works: The Aeneid, Eclogues & Georgics
, Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2003) and the translations by E. V Rieu (Virgil,
The Pastoral Poems
, London: Penguin, 1949).
Without these works, this novel could not have been written. I urge all readers to seek out these original, unbutchered versions if they want to see them free of myfiddlings.
On a personal note, I'd also like to express my gratitude to all those of the GSFWC who gave me feedback during the writing, to my editors, Peter Lavery and Jim Minz, and to all those at Pan Macmillan and Del Rey who have worked so hard on this book, I hardly know where to begin to thank them.
H
AL
D
UNCAN
is the author of
Vellum
,
which was a finalist for both the William H. Crawford Award
and the Locus Award for Best First Novel.
He is a member of the Glasgow SF Writers’ Circle.
He lives in the West End of Glasgow.
Ink
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2007 by Hal Duncan
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Del Rey Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
DEL REY is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Duncan, Hal.
Ink : the book of all hours/Hal Duncan.
p. cm.
Sequel to: Vellum.
eISBN: 978-0-307-49619-5
I. Title.
PR6104.U536I55 2007
823′.92—dc22 2006050805
v3.0