Spin (3 page)

She felt bad
about her father and Macy. Macy was harmless and meant well, yet
Layla hated the thought of her father being involved with her. In
the end though it was none of her business. She felt a wave of
relief at the thought, the knowledge that now she had left home she
could let all that go. Macy Persimmon could move in with Idmon
Vargas if she wanted and it need not concern her. She was free. She
had a sudden vision of the pine-panelled white-painted breakfast
room of the house in Kardamyli, filled to bursting with Macy’s
mirrored scatter cushions and her apparently innumerable family of
glass elephants.

The vision was
horrible but so implausible it was almost funny.

The Atoll City Museum held the largest collection of
the sibyls’ works in the whole
of Europe. The modern era works were mostly in good condition but
many of the older tapestries were faded and torn in places, their
subjects partially obscured by centuries of inculcated dust. It was
widely known that the museum’s curators were caught in a seemingly
inextricable deadlock over whether the weavings should be cleaned
or not. The museum’s director and his allies were keen to employ
the latest biochemical cleansing techniques to restore these
important artefacts to their former glory, but many of the older
trustees were firmly against it. There were those among them that
believed as the ancients had that tampering with the work of the
sibyls could give rise to involuntary time amendment, a spontaneous
unravelling of history that could theoretically result in the
deaths of millions.

Layla
had always dismissed such theories as primitive nonsense. She
revered the sibyls’ work, not out of any superstitious belief in
its power but for what it was: the highest achievement to date of
the weaver’s art. Livia Sol’s weaving of Poseidon’s stallions, the
handkerchief-sized
petit point
of
the children in the furnace by the then fifteen-year-old Crea Atoll
– these were works of such high technical accomplishment and
profound emotional impact that for Layla it did not matter whether
they had in fact predicted the Nantucket tsunami or the ovens of
Belsen as many had claimed. The point of the work was the work, and
nothing more.

The prodigy
Crea Atoll was the last of the sibyls to be granted official
sanction but it was precisely during her lifetime that the
anti-clairvoyancy laws had been passed and towards the end of her
life she was forced to emigrate. Her works were priceless now but
in many of the official historical accounts the facts of her life
were often glossed over or even altered.

It was seen as
bad manners, somehow, to talk about the difficulties she had
encountered.

Layla had read
both of the full-length biographies of Crea Atoll as well as the
illustrated brochure you could buy in the museum gift shop and the
lengthy scholarly treatise by Duchen Selwar. Selwar’s book had been
banned briefly but was now available again, albeit in a small and
prohibitively expensive print run that had put it beyond the reach
of most interested readers. There was a copy in the public library
in Kardamyli but it was for reference only. Layla had been forced
to read it on six consecutive nights under the close scrutiny of
Admos Tsoilkos, the head librarian.

When she first
asked if she might read the book he had looked at her in a strange
way, as if to convey that she, Layla Vargas in particular might be
better off reading something else.

It was because
of her mother, of course. They thought it was catching.

The
colour reproductions in the Selwar book were stunning, but next to
the real thing they looked like dull lithographs. Standing for what
must have been the fortieth time in front of Crea Atoll’s
The Barbarians at
the Gate
, Layla found
herself wishing that old man Tsoilkos had been there beside her, so
she could tell him that what she admired most about Crea Atoll was
that she was a mortal woman who never claimed anything for her
works other than what was there before the eye. The rest of it, the
myths and the counter-myths and the downright falsehoods were the
invention of academics and proselytisers, pompous acolytes who
grafted on their theories and imaginings and vested interests until
the inevitable political backlash sent them scurrying back into
their rat holes.

Crea Atoll had
been a weaver, an artist. Her greatness had nothing to do with the
supernatural; her power lay in her ability to translate the inner
workings of her imagination to a physical form, to reveal in the
images she created such intellectual and emotional complexity that
those who viewed them could be persuaded they were being granted a
glimpse of the sacred. This was what all artists strove for but few
achieved. It was the depth of Atoll’s commitment that was divine.
To Layla, godhead was like beauty or physical strength: unearned,
and therefore of little consequence.

She left the
museum and entered the network of narrow streets that formed its
hinterland. She had grown accustomed to the city almost overnight,
recognising in its parched squares and sunken gardens and
junk-filled backyards a landscape that tolerated her presence and
soothed her spirit like no other. Also there were colours, colours
everywhere. What she was used to was the aqua-sage-rust palette of
Kardamyli and the Taygetus. But on the streets of Atoll City the
sheer profusion of peoples and commodities meant these three base
hues were overlaid with a thousand others: wasp-orange and
devil-white, the sour blue of mould, the sweet chestnut of horse
dung, the weeping pink of azalea blossom, the searing catamite
yellow of the robes of choirboys on their way to temple. In the
slashed-mauve lips of the movie actress Bella Lukic – the posters
for her latest film were everywhere when Layla first arrived in the
city – she recognised again the royal purple first made famous by
her father then copied and diluted by a thousand others.

Her job at the
textile factory meant rising at six and taking the tram to
Bethsheba, a region of stunted palm trees and bleached concrete
where stray dogs trotted hopefully between the dumpsters and
loud-mouthed adolescents sprawled on parched lawns playing raucous
music on ancient ghetto blasters salvaged from the wrecked steam
freighters that blistered and peeled on the rocks outside the
harbour. The work itself – designing print templates for the
Minerva factory’s line of soft furnishing fabric – was not
difficult but it was sometimes interesting and it meant that she
had money in her pocket, money she had earned and that was
sufficient to pay the rent on the studio flat she had found for
herself behind the fish market. And when her shift finished at
three she was free to wander the city as she pleased. The
afternoons were hot, but she relished the heat, even in the city
centre where every ironwork bench and stone-flagged entranceway
seemed to magnify it. Once the shutters came down on the meat
markets and the garbage trucks had done their rounds the streets
became quiet, criss-crossed with knife-edge shadows, patrolled
softly by cats. People trod softly then also, as if afraid of
waking the giants that according to legend slumbered away the days
in the abandoned oil refineries and factory wastelands to the north
of the city.

There were
thrift stores Layla liked to visit, places where you could pick up
a set of pearl buttons for three drachmas and occasionally turn up
a Regina Wilding jacket or a Bullinger belt. Most of all though she
liked just to wander, letting her feet learn the city, eventually
coming to rest in some overgrown local park or shut-down
marketplace where she would listen to the cicadas and let her
fingertips and her mind absorb the colours. She especially loved
the lacquered craquelle green of the thorn bushes that grew inside
the walled gardens of the tall, whitewashed merchants’ houses on
Athenaeum Street. These thorn bushes were home to many dozens of
orb-weaving spiders, attracted by the heat stored in the great
fissured blocks of sandstone that made up the walls. Layla came to
think of the bushes as spider-citadels, their crenellated upper
bastions hung with silk banners, their narrow windows set with
snares to trap invaders.

The Christian
cultists called them Saint Joan Spiders, or Johannas. Iona had
always insisted this was because the Christians believed the
spiders were the secret emissaries of their peculiar god, but Layla
thought it was more likely to be their distinctive markings that
gave rise to the name, the simple white cross on the sweet
nutmeg-coloured background of their plump little bodies. She liked
to watch them as they worked, their focussed determination as they
spun out the silk from inside them, measuring and cutting each
length with the practised exactitude of the true artisan.

It’s not just silk to them
, she thought.
It’s life. A material extension of their
being
.

At first
glance the Johannas seemed identical, an interchangeable army of
miniature monsters, but close to, Layla found she was quickly able
to distinguish between individuals. The discovery fascinated her.
There was one spider in particular she felt close to: a large and
agile female with a pendulous, rose-brown belly, the cross on her
back so clear and so bright it looked as if it had been painted on.
She liked the way that so long as she kept still and didn’t say
anything the spider seemed perfectly happy to let Layla watch her
at work, demonstrating her methods in a thousand patient and
skilful repetitions, almost as if she was giving a masterclass in
advanced web building. Layla got into the habit of visiting her
most days. She liked to think the spider recognised her, that she
even looked forward to her coming.

The first of
July was so hot that the soles of her trainers felt sticky against
the paving stones. Beneath the thorn bushes, the sandstone walls
were alive with geckoes and red-tailed leafcutter bees. The spider
was there as usual but her web was in tatters. Layla thought the
damage had probably been caused by a lizard, or by the successful
escape attempt of a particularly large hornet. She watched as the
spider set about the painstaking work of repairing it. The heat was
making her head swim. Time, in that hidden sunny place at least,
seemed to have stopped.

“
She puts us to shame, don’t you think?”

Layla jumped
inside her skin and turned around. She had been so absorbed in
watching the spider that she was not aware that she was no longer
alone, that she too was being watched. People – tradesmen and
peddlers, mostly – did sometimes make a short cut along the access
path but the voice seemed to come out of nowhere. The figure she
saw before her seemed enclosed in heat haze, not so much a human
being as a concentration of energy. Layla shook her head, trying to
clear it, and saw the shifting bands of sunlight reassemble
themselves into the body of a hunched old lady.

“
I’m sorry, dear,” said the woman. “I didn’t mean
to startle you.” She nodded her head, as if agreeing to a
suggestion that had not yet been made, and Layla saw with
consternation that it was someone she recognised, the ancient crone
who had sat beside her on the bus between Kalamata and Tegea. The
old woman was as ugly as she remembered, ugly in a way that had
little to do with vanished youth or beauty but in an outlandish,
almost spectacular way that could only be described as
a displeasure to
the eye
, the repulsive
visual anomaly that might be recognised in a stonefish or
wolverine.

Her eyes
though were lovely, and so unusual in their violet coloration that
Layla found herself wishing she had brought her watercolour box
with her, so that she could make an attempt at mixing the colour
herself for later use. The beauty of those eyes in that desiccated
face formed a contrast that was somehow indecent. It was as if the
eyes belonged to someone else entirely, a lovely young woman who
was being held prisoner in the body of the monstrous hag.

“
I know you,” Layla said. “You were on the bus.” She had no
idea why she said this, only that she wanted to startle the woman
as she had been startled, to make surprise dawn on her face, to see
her freakish features rearrange themselves into something more
human. She gave a small laugh, impatient to get a reaction. The old
woman leaned forward, peering directly into Layla’s face. Layla
could smell her breath, the almond-sugar scent of
macaroons.

“
I know you, too,” she said. “You’re Layla Vargas. I was a
friend of your mother’s. Or perhaps I should say not so much a
friend as an admirer.” She turned her eyes away from Layla and back
to the spider, busy anchoring the frame of her web to the stiff
barbed uprights of the thorn bush. “She’s a beauty, isn’t she? You
could learn a thing or two from her, I’m sure.”

“
Not really,” Layla said. “A spider has no idea of beauty, she
just spins. She doesn’t even know she exists, much less what she’s
doing. You can’t think that’s the same as real art.” She spoke
absently, voicing ideas that had always felt real and important to
her before and yet now seemed imperfect and indistinct, partial
truths only, perhaps not the truth at all. She didn’t care. She was
struggling to assimilate what the old woman had said immediately
before she started raving about the spider, that she knew who Layla
was and had known her mother. This last thing didn’t seem possible.
Romilly Perec had been just thirty when she died; this crone looked
as if she had been alive since the fall of Rome. Yet Layla found
she wanted to believe her, wanted it desperately.

If this woman
remembered her mother it would mean that some part of Romilly Perec
still survived, no matter how small. Layla had known for a long
time that her father had killed what remained of her mother within
himself, had obliterated her from his existence more thoroughly
than the court judgement or the city executioners or the peerless
cobalt waters of the Mediterranean could ever have done. He had
been ordered to erase his memories, and he had complied.