Spin (4 page)

Layla
could not imagine this woman complying with anything.
She would die
first
, Layla
thought.
She
would let them grind her bones into chalk dust
.

“
I have some books on spiders you can borrow, if you like,”
the woman said. “You’d be surprised what they can do, what they
know.”

“
Who are you?” Layla said. “Is it true, what you just said
about my mother? Are you a relative?” She remembered something Iona
had told her, about her mother’s family coming from Tsokla, the
arid enclave to the north of Atoll City, where the sheep drovers
came in from Ankhara to ply their trade, and where a shanty town of
plasterboard shacks and canvas lean-tos sprawled in ragtail heaps
like a tumbled deck of cards beneath the vast concrete pylons that
held up the skyway. Her mother’s family had been rich once, Iona
said, but they lost everything in the spillages and had been forced
out to live in two dank basement rooms of the great house that had
once been their home. About her mother’s father she had no
idea.

“
Not a relative, no,” said the old woman. She was still
watching the spider, her violet eyes darting to and fro in time
with the creature’s movements. “I used to attend her readings. Not
that she read in public very often. She said it made her nervous.”
She switched her gaze abruptly from the spider to Layla. “You do
know that you share her gift? It sticks to you like
pollen.”

“
I don’t believe in any of that,” Layla said. “I don’t want to
talk about it.”

“
Because you think it killed your mother or because you’re
afraid that it might kill you?”

Layla felt her
insides clamp together, and she became aware as she sometimes did
of the meaty organic wetness of her vital organs. She remembered
how in school once she had been sent home for swearing at a teacher
who had told them the clairvoyancy laws had been brought in to
protect the state from foreign spies. Layla had never spoken of her
mother’s crimes, not aloud, not to anyone. She clenched her fists
as if to meet an attack. Her palms were sticky with sweat.

“
My mother was murdered,” she said. “She was killed by human
beings. Men who didn’t want anyone to speak their mind because they
believed free speech threatened their power. What my mother
actually said wasn’t important. It was crazy stuff.”

“
Is that what you think? That she was mad?”

“
She believed she could tell the future. What else would you
call it?”

“
She was a poet, Layla Vargas, that’s all she claimed. She
never admitted clairvoyancy for herself, she was like you in that
way, although she was never so fearful or strident in her denials.
You shouldn’t be so quick to thrust back your birthright. Not all
the gods love a savant, you know, especially not an ungrateful
one.”

“
I’m not a savant, I’m a weaver. And the gods are
dead.”

She held the
old woman’s gaze for a moment then lowered her eyes. She wished she
had not said that. Taunting Iona with her unbelief was one thing.
But this woman with her amethyst eyes was another, and Layla found
herself hoping she had not offended her. Her thoughts undulated in
slow waves like the sands of the desert, rattling and twining
together like snakes in a pit. Sunlight poured down like molten
metal, scalding the nape of her neck and rendering her tension to a
muddied ecstasy. Her head filled up with the roar of cicadas and
she realised, the irony of it pooling in her mind like grease at
the bottom of a cooking vat, that she was waiting for the
steel-blue heaven to open and swallow her.

The old woman
shimmered in the heat like a mirage, and for a moment Layla seemed
to see not the monstrous ruined crone’s mask but the angular,
fiercely clever face of Bella Lukic, who began her career by
playing Athena in the vTV comedy at the centre of the KenTech
blasphemy trial, the scandal that made her notorious and then
successful. Layla blinked and then moved towards her, wanting to
see her more closely, to touch her even, but nausea rose in her
throat and she stumbled and fell. She crawled on her knees, feeling
the dust-covered gravel pierce her skin in a dozen places. She
clutched at a fence post, trying to right herself. A nettle bit
into her palm. Later that evening she saw its mark, a row of small
red welts, like the dotted line on a sewing template.

When she
finally rose to her feet the old woman was gone.

Idmon Vargas was a good father. He had cared for
Layla with
devotion even when Layla knew there were
those among his friends and his enemies who had said that it would
be better for him – better for business – if he disowned her as he
had disowned her mother. Layla loved him for his obstinate refusal
to listen to their advice. More than that, she loved him for the
way he had always treated her as an equal. It was from Idmon Vargas
that she first learned about the alchemy of colour, the quality of
silk, the seemingly magical properties of the murex snail. He
himself had learned the hard way: from scratch. He loved to repeat
the story of how he walked out of his own father’s house at the age
of fifteen with a ten-drachma note in his pocket and nothing to
show for himself in terms of work experience but the two summers
he’d spent as a dock worker in Tyre.

Layla knew her
father’s methods were considered old-fashioned. The press method,
which involved harvesting the murex in their thousands and then
crushing them to a pulp to extract the dye, had been in use for
more than a generation and was the method employed by all the major
commercial cloth factories. By the time Layla was old enough to
card her own silks, even the exclusive couture houses who catered
to top clientele and who had derided the press method initially as
a cheap gimmick had gone over to it.

Of the
larger producers only her father maintained the live cultivation
method, husbanding the murex snails in their natural environment
and milking them for their extract on a seasonal basis. Idmon
Vargas’s rationale was that the press method was wasteful and that
the dye it produced was never as pure or as rich as dye produced
using live cultivation. It sounded crazy but Layla knew he was
right. The untrained eye perhaps could be fooled, and press dyes
were serviceable enough for most usages, but for Layla her father’s
live bed dyes had a clarity of tone, a fragrance almost, that made
them inimitable. Layla sensed the difference with her mind as much
as her eye, feeling the true purple as a billowing radiance that
filled out the cloth, the same way that wind and sunlight filled
out the sails of the
Auster
when her father brought her in on the morning
tide.

There was also
the fact that the stink and mess of the press vats revolted her and
the idea of so much killing – whole cities of sea snails, their
pastures laid waste, their soft bodies rendered down to a foul gunk
– made the bile rise in her throat. It was not the kind of thing
you could explain to people, but it came to her more than once in
the days following her encounter with the old woman that she would
have no trouble in understanding. She returned to Athenaeum Street
each afternoon, illogically hoping the old woman might be there
again, but she never was. Layla couldn’t believe she had let her
escape without finding out where she lived or at least her
name.

The old hag
scared her a little, but the thought that in losing sight of her
she might also have lost a link with her mother was more
frightening still. She hung around in the lane, gazing into the
heart of the thorn bushes and pondering what the old woman had
said, that Layla could learn from the dainty orb weavers if she
chose to. The more Layla watched the spiders the more she felt
prepared to admit there might be something in it. Their fixed
devotion to their task was something she understood completely. She
was forced to concede that the spiders’ ways were less of a mystery
to her than those of her work colleagues at Minerva Textiles, the
daughters of fishermen mostly, who were adept enough with their
hands but who took no interest in aesthetics, and who used the
slightest departure from routine as an excuse to forget about their
work entirely.

The spiders’
work was part of them, integral to their survival as their stomachs
and guts. Since coming to the city Layla had begun work on a new
panorama, a tableau depicting the escapades of the infamous female
brigand Jocasta Zet. It wasn’t until she had been at work on it for
a week that she realised she’d based her image of Jocasta on the
black receptionist at the Hotel Europa.

She planned to
mount an exhibition the following spring. Her boss at Minerva had
offered her a portion of the firm’s trade stand at the Atoll City
Expo that autumn but in the end Layla had said no. It was an
opportunity of sorts, but Layla did not want her work becoming
permanently associated with the commercial sector. She had already
received two private commissions on the back of the publicity
generated by the competition she had won three months before her
departure for Atoll City. Both commissions were lucrative, and a
couple of galleries had expressed a tentative interest in
representing her. If things continued to progress she hoped to be
able to give up her job with Minerva within a year.

In the middle
of August she began her first love affair. John Caribe was a silk
and cloth merchant, originally from Madrid. He had known Idmon
Vargas for years, and traded his silks for high prices all over the
world. He had full lips and a swarthy complexion, and the tips of
his fingers were callused from measuring yarn. Layla knew plenty of
women would be drawn to Caribe by his diamond cufflinks and obvious
charisma but what attracted her most of all was the way he talked
about colours, throwing down their names like a gauntlet in his
odd, burred accent, rattling them off one by one as if reciting
some obscurely riveting piece of street poetry.

She first met
him when she went to buy silk, joking that she couldn’t afford her
father’s prices, and when eventually Caribe pressed his mouth down
over hers in the stockroom of his cavernous premises on Salamanka
Street she did not resist. She was shocked and secretly thrilled at
how this slant-eyed tycoon with the sardonic grin and the coolest
head for figures she had ever known became on the lumpy daybed in
the back of his office as foul-mouthed and unhindered as a common
soldier.

That she was
not the only woman he was seeing did not occur to her. After their
affair was over she wondered how she could have been so stupid.
Women were a game for Caribe. The only things that truly moved him
were money and silk.

“
He’s a tight bastard, your dad,” he would say as he pulled
one of the dyed silk squares her father always sent out as samples
back and forth through his outspread fingers as if frustrated he
could find no fault with it. Layla felt a surge of pride whenever
he said this, knowing Idmon Vargas cared far more about quality
than he did about money, that somehow through her father she and
John Caribe met as equals. Later she was forced to wonder if this
had been the truth all along, that Caribe had seduced her as a way
of getting back at her father. She understood that he genuinely
begrudged the money he had to lay out on Idmon Vargas’s purple,
even though he knew he could sell his allotted consignment ten
times over.

He held the
square up to the light. A purple dusk descended on his upturned
face.

“
Damned swindle if you ask me. Highway robbery.” But the first
thing she noticed about the woman she saw him with at the Parnassus
was that she was carrying a clutch bag sewn from purple damask, her
father’s blend. The Parnassus was a matador club at the western end
of the docks, a place where minor starlets congregated in the hope
of hooking themselves a major league fighter or attracting the
attention of one of the dozens of agents and talent scouts who were
said to hang out there. Layla watched the women passing to and fro
beneath the lights, sneaking glimpses of their own reflections in
the mirrored ceiling, and wondered what they did with themselves in
the daytime. She would not normally have entered a place like the
Parnassus, but she had been invited to the club by the management
to discuss a commission. The saloon was stuffed with expensive
artwork already, most of it bull-themed, and Layla privately
thought that cramming in more would be a waste of money. But the
price named was so high she couldn’t refuse, and the glitzy
opulence of her surroundings even gave her the confidence to ask
them to raise it a little.

The manager
seemed vaguely familiar and at some point during the course of
their discussions Layla realised it was Steely Jurassic, the prize
fighter who had often been on vTV shows when she was young. He
asked if she would join him for dinner but she declined. She did
not want to run the risk of the man making a pass at her, then
jeopardising the commission by refusing him. She was making her way
to the exit when she saw them, John Caribe and the woman with the
purple clutch bag, sitting together in one of the velvet-curtained
booths to the side of the bar. They were laughing together,
forehead to forehead. Caribe’s arm lay lightly about her
shoulders.

She hurried
from the club, telling herself that the woman was probably just one
of Caribe’s business clients. She decided not to mention the
incident, but when Caribe came to her flat the following evening it
came spilling out.

The thing that
shocked her most was that Caribe laughed.