Ritual (6 page)

After the dive in the harbour Flea's legs were like lead. She felt every second of twenty-nine years weighing on her. Coming out of Bristol she let the car slow. She pulled into a lay-by, switched off the engine and got the bag of mushrooms out of the glove compartment. She sat for a moment, studying them, feeling the last exhausted scraps of imagery tinker in the back of her head.
We went
the other way
. She wanted to open the bag and shovel them into her mouth. More than anything she wanted to be back in those woods, going down the path where she knew her mother was still crouching, examining dog violets.

But she didn't. She put the mushrooms back into the glove compartment and fumbled out her phone. Earlier this evening, when she'd checked her texts, there'd been one from Tig. She liked the irony there: Tig, one of the few people in her life who would understand everything about her hankering for those mushrooms, literally
everything
, and after three months of silence he'd chosen tonight of all nights to text her. As if he was reading her mind. His flat was on the Hopewell estate, not far – with the streets this quiet she could be there in twenty minutes. It would be easy, and comfortable, to tell him about Dad and the drugs, and the trip, about how she wanted to take the drugs again and slip back into that forest where Mum was waiting. But then she thought about the way the mushrooms had been so carefully coiled into the jewellery roll, she thought about her father lying on the sofa with a cushion on his face, and right away she knew there
was
someone else who could unravel it for her even better than Tig. One person who could really set her straight.

She shovelled the mobile back into her pocket, fired the engine and swung the car into the road, heading south. Quickly the houses on either side of the road thinned. Soon she was past the last of the streetlamps and on to the dark roads that would take her into the lonely Mendip Hills.

Kaiser Nduka.

If Dad had ever admitted to having a close friend it would have been Kaiser Nduka. They'd been undergraduates together at Corpus, and at first sight two more different people you couldn't imagine: Dad with his Swedish heritage, papery, bruisable skin and delicate hands like a child's, and Kaiser, the eldest son of an Ibo chieftain, a spectrally tall man with shinbones thinner than walking-sticks, a greying halo of curly hair, and a face so heavy it looked as if it might unbalance his body. Kaiser had been sent in the nineteen seventies from Nigeria by his oil-rich family to study in England and had arrived wearing an
abeti-aja
dog-ear cap and a Western suit. Somehow the two misfits – Kaiser and Dad – had found a common ground in their studies, applying philosophy and psychology to world religion. A professor of comparative religion, Kaiser's speciality was hallucinogenic experience in shamanic ritual. His career path was smooth until, with a chair at a Nigerian university, he'd become involved in a research project that had gone disastrously wrong and had been thrown off the faculty. At the same time his fiancée had left him.

'They probably worked it out . . .' Mum had said darkly. 'His girlfriend and the university probably worked out that he was only half human . . .'

Kaiser always made Mum edgy. She never said why but she'd find excuses to stay at home when Dad came out to the Mendips. Thom was afraid of Kaiser too – he said he looked like the devil and that he'd had nightmares about him hunting people in the streets. Flea tried to imagine where he'd got that idea from, and what he'd seen in those fevered childhood dreams: the greasy half-lit streets of Ibadan, the hawkers and never-ending traffic, a silent shape slipping through the alleys: Kaiser. It struck her as almost humorous, Kaiser, his big head wrapped in a cloak, prowling the streets for human beings. She laughed at the idea, but Thom wasn't swayed. He was terrified of the house, the way it was always being worked on, boarded up, tarpaulined, sometimes unexpected parts of it peeled open and exposed to the sky.

Pulling into the long, darkened track now, the only illumination the moon cutting a sharp circle against the sky in front of her, Flea sort of knew what Thom meant. The place did have a remote, forgotten feel you could think of as spooky, isolated out here in the rainy limestone forests of the Mendips. Wet weeds hung over the car as she drove, trailing long fingers on it until she had to turn on the wipers to clear them. Up and up she went, the headlight beams bumping all over the place, almost a mile, until the driveway opened to a pocked field that stretched out silver under the open sky. At the furthest end the land dropped away to nothing – the furthest ridge of the valley was two miles distant – and it was there, at the edge of the drop, poised as if ready to tumble, that Kaiser's house stood, built from the local blue lias, once pretty but scarred by his perpetual renovations and changes. A single light was on in the living room, dim, barely visible behind a tackedup blanket. He'd be in there, in his usual place – slouched in his reclining chair in the corner.

She parked, shoved the bag of mushrooms into her fleece pocket, and crossed to the back door, arms folded, shivering because suddenly it seemed so late. She went inside, into the kitchen, closing the door carefully, and breathed in the heat and the good spicy smells.

Kaiser's house was full of clutter. Every surface in the kitchen was piled with dusty stacks of journals and letters and oddities he'd collected from around the world. Just like Dad's study. So it always seemed utterly improbable that Kaiser's biggest hobby was cooking. Over the years he'd singled out Flea for his attention. It was always her he took aside, telling her stories, showing her secret places in the garden, letting her put her fingers through the eyeholes of his family's traditional masks. But, most of all, he showed his affection by cooking. His recipes were borrowed from every nation and tradition. Sometimes it was coconut pie, sometimes it was couscous sweetened with condensed milk served in chipped bowls from Woolworths. Tonight it was sticky date loaves – two were cooling on a wire tray. Flea sliced one, arranged the pieces on a plate, and carried it through into the draughty corridor.

'Just me,' she said, lowering her head and pushing through the plastic sheeting hanging over the living-room doorway. 'Only me.'

The room was dimly lit and chaotic with its stacked shelves and lumpy furniture, a tattered standard lamp on in the corner. Kaiser was exactly where she'd known he'd be: in the chair in the corner, his legs elevated and lightly crossed, his hands steepled contemplatively. He didn't move when she came in, didn't look surprised or pleased. Instead he seemed to be concentrating on a space a few inches in front of his nose. He was dressed in pyjamas that ended mid-calf, ridiculous blue Turkish slippers on his long feet.

She put the date loaf on the coffee-table. He stared ahead, his long yellow nails positioned just under the tip of his wide nose as if it was too heavy for his face and he was trying to stop it falling. Next to his chair, on top of a small cabinet, the computer was open at divenet, the international sport divers' forum, and next to that a photo of his African ex-fiancée, Maya. He'd lost Maya thirty years ago but said he still loved her. Maya's mouth, Flea noticed, was exactly level with Kaiser's right ear.

'Kaiser?' she said eventually. 'Kaiser, the door was open.'

He nodded.

'Kaiser? Can you hear me?'

He shook himself, glancing at the computer screen. 'Yes, Phoebe,' he said wearily. 'I can hear you. But I am so sad. So sad about your parents. Still. After all this time.'

Ordinarily she might have sat down then, perhaps at his feet, or maybe she'd have hugged him. But she had to speak to him seriously. She sat in the chair opposite and tipped forward, elbows on her knees.

'Kaiser,' she said. 'Remember whenever you cooked us anything Dad always used to nudge you? Remember? Nudge you and say, "Kaiser, old man, you sure there's nothing in this cake we should know about?" '

Kaiser smiled. He dipped his chin, half laughing at the memory.

'Except,' she said seriously, 'this time it's not a joke.'

His smile faded. 'I beg your pardon?'

'This time, Kaiser, it's not anywhere near as funny as I used to think it was.' She gave him a long, level look. His eyes were pus-coloured, a bit bloodshot. Something about his big-boned face had always made her think of a hairless goat. 'See, now I realize it wasn't ever really a joke. Not to the people who mattered.'

'What on earth do you mean?'

She turned to the cupboards in the recesses on either side of the fireplace. They were locked and, now she thought about it, there had always been things in Kaiser's house that were locked away, places she and Thom weren't allowed. People were always contacting Kaiser to ask about his shamanic skills and it made him laugh: 'I'm hardly a shaman. Just a dusty old lecturer.' But there was something hidden about Kaiser, something in the sinewy body, quite strong in spite of his age, something in the way he would stare fixedly at a person. Dad said Kaiser knew 'whereof he spoke' and that the cupboards were where he kept the ritual drugs. Flea'd always thought it was one of Dad's jokes. She wasn't sure she'd ever believed it or given it much thought. Until now.

'Phoebe? I asked you a question.'

She sighed. Picking up a piece of date loaf she sank back into the chair, sticking her feet out in front of her, her hands on her stomach, looking morosely at the cake between her fingers. 'I went into Dad's study, Kaiser. The place he keeps all his books. Some of your things are in there.'

'Yes?'

'Yes, and there's a safe too – I couldn't open it.

The code's not in the study.' She fiddled with the cake, not giving in to the temptation to look at him. 'I searched everywhere but I couldn't find it so I wondered if you'd know what it is. Or if you know where he might keep it.'

'Is that what you came here to talk to me about?'

'Do you know where he'd keep it?'

Kaiser took in a deep impatient breath, and let the air out slowly through his nose. 'I don't know anything about a safe or a code. And I repeat, is that what you came here to ask?'

Flea put the cake back on the plate, and rotated her head, as if she had a crick in her neck. 'Kaiser,' she said, after a while. 'Kaiser, do you know why Dad used to lock himself in the study for days on end?'

Kaiser levered the footrest down with a clunk so he was sitting forward. There were a few moments' silence. 'Let me ask you, Phoebe. Do
you
know why? Do you know why your father did it?'

'I think so. Yes. I think I probably do.'

'Your father's drive to understand was greater than anyone's I've known. He must have talked to you about Secondary Attention.'

'The places in our heads – places we can't always get to except if we're dreaming or fainting. Or maybe hypnotized. That's what he used to talk about. A place that holds keys to things we've buried. And his way of getting there . . .' She lifted her eyes and met his. 'Was with drugs?'

'Your father had many different routes. Sometimes it was meditation, but, yes, often it was drugs.'

'I knew it.'

'Don't judge him too quickly. David always had the need to uncover, to strip down his head – pull things out.'

Flea let a moment pass. Then she took the bag of mushrooms out of her fleece pocket and dropped it on the floor between their feet. 'Psilocybin,' she said. 'I looked it up. It means "baldhead". The Aztecs called them
teonancatls
– flesh of the gods.' She was silent for a while, looking down at them. 'They could lose me my job.'

Kaiser made a clicking sound in his throat. It was a sound she remembered him making years ago and had always thought you might hear it on the plateaus of Nigeria, a herdsman calling the shorthorn cattle to his side. But now she understood it was his way of marking the moment an idea came together. 'And you've taken them. I know you, Phoebe, I can hear it in your voice. You've taken them. Without consulting me.'

'Yes,' she said slowly. 'And I want to take them again.'

He snorted. 'Don't be an idiot.'

'You said Dad used them to pull things out of his head?'

'Yes.'

'Don't laugh at this, Kaiser, but in all your research have you ever—' She let her voice drop to a whisper. 'Have you ever heard anyone say drugs can let them communicate with people who've died?'

Kaiser sighed. 'Your parents, you mean?'

'Mum.'

He shook his head and got up, standing facing the locked cupboards. He put one hand in the small of his back. That fragility – it was a lie, she thought, not for the first time that night. There was something strong in his long muscles and his claw-like hands. 'Phoebe,' he said, in a low voice, 'there are some things you have to let rest – you can't keep going back and raking it over.'

'Would Dad have let it rest?'

'No.'

'Then you know I'm never going to.' She sat forward a little. 'It could lose me my job, but that doesn't change anything. I want to go back where I went last night.' She paused. Her voice had been getting quieter and quieter. 'I saw her, Kaiser, I saw her. She was trying to say something about the accident.' Flea shook her head and screwed her hand into a fist. 'But I couldn't quite . . . couldn't quite understand what she meant.'