The Age of Magic (8 page)

Deciding that what one decrees from within is what the world sees in you, and at that moment happening to see himself as a prince from an infinite kingdom, Lao regained the integrity of his being. He cast a protective spell around Mistletoe, as she cast one around him.

So they strode into the depths of the pub like enchanters, altering reality by altering themselves. All at once they seemed like regulars who had been away for a long time. They went to the counter and ordered two pints of the local beer and looked around, as if they were curious about the new faces they saw leaning against the walls, standing in clusters, darkening the ceiling with smoke.

Lao engaged one of the bartenders in conversation. He asked about the copper tankards that were ranged on shelves along the walls according to their sizes. Etched on the side of some was the figure of a goat-footed man, on others a noble stag. The barman told him that every year, on midsummer nights, they had drinking competitions in the open air. The winner, in addition to their prize, got to drink from a tankard. It was a tradition that went back a thousand years. But this year the winner had been a complete unknown; and when he won he had disappeared back to where he came from without drinking from the winner’s tankard or collecting his prize, like a figure from a fairy tale.

‘What was the prize?’ Lao asked.

The barman gave an obscene leer.

‘It’s a secret. Only the mayor knows.’

The publican had to go and serve someone. Mistletoe and Lao drank their beer in silence, leaning against the counter.

The pub had changed its mind about them.

They soon discovered a pool table at the back of the pub. On the walls there were dusty swords, ancient poignards, muskets, an armorial shield, and the stuffed head of a stag with branching antlers.

To their surprise, among the players they saw their driver, Bruno the Second. He was coming to the end of a game with one of the bulky denizens of the establishment. Bruno was not surprised to see them.

‘I knew you two would turn up here sooner or later,’ he said.

He seemed different from the fresh-faced young man who had driven them from Basel station to their hotel. He seemed more himself.

‘I’m glad you came. We’re not having a very good game. This man is a lazy player – don’t worry, he doesn’t speak English. Would you like to play? A bet would be nice, don’t you think?’

Lao was immediately interested. He liked the occasional gamble, though he hadn’t played pool in years and was very rusty. But he was fond of it, the sociability it called for, the concentration it demanded, the precision it required. It was a game of courage and canniness, risk and rhythm, intuition and intelligence. He enjoyed its theatricality. Being upset when beaten and generous in victory were part of its pleasures. The game offered him scope to express both his villainy and his heroism.

Bruno dispatched his mediocre challenger, invigorated by the new arrivals. With a cocky air he racked up the balls and chalked his cue stick. He and Lao agreed on a bet, just big enough to compel concentration.

‘I’m at a disadvantage,’ Lao said.

‘How?’ asked Bruno. ‘Because you’re black?’

Lao looked at him and smiled. It had been said with warmth, with innocence even. That made all the difference.

‘No,’ Lao said. ‘Because my woman is here. There is more pressure on me.’

‘Oh, I see. Can’t afford to lose, eh?’

‘Something like that.’

‘It’s easier to lose if you have to win.’

Lao shrugged. He had been lying. He knew he could lose a thousand times and Mistletoe would put it in context with a phrase. She made herself invisible to Lao. The pressure was on Bruno, but Bruno didn’t know it.

Bruno won the break. The game progressed, and the crowd of on-lookers grew. They brought their murmurs, their side bets, and their cigarette smoke. Bruno played to the limit of his limitation.

He talked while he played. Lao liked him the more he listened.

‘All my life I have wanted to be a doctor. I have one more year to go. I want to go to Africa, to help the poor and the sick. I am doing two other jobs besides being your driver. My father was an engineer. Now he’s retired. He worked in Africa. Maybe you know him. My mother is a teacher. It’s because of her I speak English. Is my English good?’

Lao nodded.

‘Thank you. I was born near Basel, but all my life I have dreamt of going to Africa. I don’t know why. All my school-mates used to read books about America or mountain climbers or racing-car drivers, but I read everything I could about Africa. Isn’t that strange? I have never been there, but I feel in a way African. Can I say that?’

Lao shrugged again.

‘Why not?’ he said encouragingly.

Bruno paused in his play. He had been playing formidably well. He gave Lao a long thoughtful look. Then he said:

‘This feeling I have for Africa is one of the greatest mysteries of my life.’

Lao wasn’t sure what to say, so he stayed silent. He had met people with a nostalgia for Africa. Most of them had never been to the continent, but said they had Africa in their souls. Some of them spoke of Africa as a place they had known; it was a place in them older than memory. Reincarnation was a subject Lao seldom discussed. To know something means needing no explanation and having no need to explain to others. Life is coloured by such knowledge. To know one thing is to know many others. To know is to be silent. Lao never spoke of such things. Instead, he played. Bruno had lost a shot, and it was Lao’s turn.

Having not played the game for a while, Lao had no sense of his limitations. To his mild surprise he potted balls he would normally have missed even before he’d played them. In the past, faced with such shots, he would fear that he couldn’t pocket the ball. More often than not, it worked out as he feared.

In the past, before a game began, Lao always knew whether he would win or lose. Often, leaning towards a lazy fatalism, he knew deep down that he would lose; but he would play for fun, and lose anyway. Then he would feel bad. The bad feeling, stored away for the next game, made him feel he would lose again.

Then sometimes when he won it was in spite of himself. When he thought about it, though, he realised that when he won it was usually because he was absorbed in the game, engaged but detached, and that natural flow made him victorious. He found that he could determine the outcome from one moment to another if he danced with the nature of his opponent’s game, playing as if in a dream.

In the past, Lao estimated his chance of victory or defeat on how well his opponent played. But he sometimes found that he was victorious even when his opponent was many times better than him. And when he thought about it, he came to the conclusion that there are three levels of skill: the actual, the real, and the amplified. The actual skill is the game as one plays it normally: it is apparent. The real skill emerges in the negative spaces of the game: it is one’s potential. Amplified skill, superior to the others, is akin to perpetual inspiration. It is when a player is possessed by a higher force. To have all three levels consistently high is what makes a master. But genius plays the infinite game.

Then there is the game of reality, and the reality of the game.

These were some nebulous fruits of Lao’s meditations on his victories and defeats.

For the first time in his life, inspired by an Arcadia growing in him, Lao played with no sense of limitation. He played with an enchanted freedom. It was as though he had left behind all his complicated baggage. It was curious that the new bud of tranquillity in him had found something so ordinary as a game of pool to reveal its powers.

He went round the green baize table, potting balls leisurely, inspired by the click of contact. He didn’t soar, or experience an epiphany; he was no different from normal. He was just more himself than normal. He felt himself to be a truer Lao; and some mysterious picture he had of himself was clearer.

As he played he was dimly aware of the faces watching them, of the smell of beer, and the pop song on the jukebox. With clean shots he potted a blue ball, then a red, then a yellow. The balls dropped into the pocket with a maternal sound.

For a moment he was aware also of the mountains around them. He glimpsed the dream that lurked in the heart of reality. He felt both in the present and eternal. For a moment, he was his fact and his fantasy. He had already decided the outcome of the game, and was merely toying with the route by which to get there.

By then, the atmosphere in the pub was electric, presided over by the stag’s head. Bruno kept twirling his cue stick between his palms. Lao kept on winning. Mistletoe noticed the unusual gleam in one of his eyes and included it in the sketch she had been making of the two of them. She had never drawn people playing pool before, and this was a unique opportunity. She drew the faces round the table, hinted at the smoky atmosphere; even the stag’s head found a place in her drawing.

While pondering a shot Lao found himself staring at that head. He had a sudden vision of a magnificent stag high on a rock in the dark mountain. His mind wandered for a second. When he took the shot he missed the pocket and found he had lost his Arcadian mood. He began to play badly. He lost game after game. Then Bruno, prancing round the table, put the balls away with a vengeance, and caught up with him in the scores.

It occurred to Lao that, on the whole, people don’t change. He hadn’t changed. He had the same bad habits of mind. We are like layers of rock, he thought, and our true self is covered over with strata of experience, habit, education, ideology. The true person is in there, somewhere. Can it be awoken? I was once a magnificent stag high up on the mountaintop. Can I be that stag again?

This thought came as a shock to Lao, but he didn’t have time to think it through. The game was coming to an end and he was losing. To make matters worse, Bruno had him snookered.

At that moment Lao also had a premonition of Malasso. He sensed his presence in the night, and it made him shiver. Then it occurred to him, as he got ready to take the shot from his snookered position, that a tincture of evil aids excellence. The evil faces from history rose up in his mind. He allowed them to summon a force of opposition in him. From the air he stole the power of heroes. He succeeded in his shot, and played with a new concentration. A gem-like toughness compacted itself in him.

It was at this point that Bruno made his gravest error. He sidled across to Mistletoe and gave her drawing his intense concentration.

‘What is this?’ he asked, charmingly. ‘Ah, such a beautiful drawing! You are making art as we play? You make your friend look too serious, no? I like the stuffed stag. Very realistic. You have beauty and talent, yes?’

Bruno continued in this way in a friendly voice just as Lao was contemplating a difficult shot. It was a ricochet blue into the middle pocket from an awkward angle. Lao frowned. It seemed the attention Bruno was paying Mistletoe was working.

But Bruno did not know that between some people exists the original Enochian language, the ability to speak to each other in spirit. He did not know what had been forged between these two people, forged through time, gnosis, and their mutual commitment to the highest things in life.

Bruno did not know that Mistletoe saw through him and thought it shabby that he was playing Iago to Lao’s concentration.

She did something curious. She included Bruno in the sketch, placed him in a net of rough lines, and on his back she heaped rocks and around him she drew the dark women of mythology, Lilith, the lamia, the medusa.

Bruno, noticing that Lao was fighting his distraction, leant towards Mistletoe again.

‘A beautiful artist and a beautiful woman…’ he murmured.

But when he looked at the drawing again, he froze.

Mistletoe, in a soft voice, said, ‘I think a lesson is called for.’

Lao may or may not have heard. But he smiled. Reaching for an obscure evil in him, and converting it into skill, the ricochet was executed, and the ball returned to its home. The rest of the shots followed from an amplified clarity of spirit. The balls sank into the pockets smoothly.

He returned the cue to its stand. He shook Bruno’s hand, collected his winnings and, with a nod to Mistletoe, went past the crowd, to the outer chamber of the pub.

On his way out the barman called him over.

‘You are like the man in the drinking competition,’ he said.

Lao shrugged. The barman touched him affectionately on the shoulder.

‘This is a strange town,’ he said confidentially.

‘Is it safe?’ Lao asked.

‘Yes, of course. But interesting things happen here.’

‘Like what?’

‘People see things.’

‘I’ll be careful.’

‘Would you like to drink from a tankard to celebrate?’

‘Another time, perhaps.’

The barman gave him a knowing smile. It half occurred to Lao that the town was enchanted, but he shook the thought from his mind, and went out into the dark.

Not long afterwards Mistletoe joined him. Not one word was said about the game.

They wandered in silence into the midsummer night and made their way back up the lane. They passed the quaint buildings that were like giant dolls’ houses and they thought about fairy tales, trolls, and wizards guarding treasures. Dreams floated past them in the dark.

Reality can be altered by the mind, Lao thought. All it takes is the right magic, the right attitude. Whoever knows this secret never fails.

They turned into the road and saw in the dark ahead of them a playground. The seesaw was tilted heavenward, and the swing twisted lightly. Mistletoe noticed how curious the playground was when there were no children and when only the night played there, along with silent forms.

In the distance they saw a bridge, faintly lit. It looked as if it went from darkness to nowhere. They walked towards it, without purpose, drawn by the fairy tales lingering in the air. Beyond were lights that changed, that summoned.