The Great Wheel (42 page)

“I won’t be here much longer,” he told Nuru, who stood waiting in the doorway. “You know that?”

Nuru nodded and pushed his hands into his pockets. His hair was freshly cut in neat sharp lines across his ears and forehead. His eyes fixed on John’s, tracked away, came back again.

“This may be my last day.”

“You last?”

“It’s a little early. But you know where all the codes and cards are. You know that you can call on Felipe. And there’s Kassi, of course. And the people at the Zone.”

Nuru nodded.

“And I’ll make sure,” John said, “that you can keep on working here when someone else arrives in a few days. But you really need a proper salary.”

“Salary?”

“Regular money paid by the church instead of cash from that box over there.”

Nuru looked at the cashbox, then at John, his face a little pained.

“Well…” John leaned back on the desk, spreading his hands to take the strain from his back, feeling the gloves pull and wrinkle, the painful itch of his palms. “Perhaps things work well enough as they are. But, you know, you could run this place on your own…”

Nuru nodded, but he still looked pained. He wouldn’t want that, either. Without a European and aid from the Zone to keep the doctor going, he’d just be another local healer.

“But thanks, Nuru. Thank you. I’ll never forget the help you’ve given me. And don’t worry about Mass this morning—just go and do what you want to do. And there’s that bicycle outside—my bike, you know?—I’d like you to have it, as a gift.”

“Yes Fatoo.” Nuru looked at John thoughtfully, probably calculating whether the machine would be worth more sold in one piece or broken up. “Thank you too…”

John left Nuru to lock up. He walked away from the clinic, where his bicycle leaned with its powerlight glowing, across the Plaza Princesa, and up the hill. It felt good to discard things—and the odd sense of lightness that had been with him all morning was even stronger now. This was a different city, strangely quiet under a white haze with the smells of coalsmoke, fresh paint, and wet jelt breaking over him in papery veils. He wandered the climbing alleys and quarrelsomely tangled streets, nearly losing himself, tripping over duckboards and puddles. In this odd, detached silence, he missed all the usual clues. He checked his watch, seeing frozen lines, and jumped as a cat hissed unexpectedly at him from the top of a glass-strewn wall. He now recognized the big brick-paved square where Sarai and Mo had their tenement. They would be busy with their goat this morning, washing, combing, putting in ribbons, trying to cover up the remains of the foot rot. He looked up at the windows, but they all shone black. His footsteps clipped and echoed in silence as he walked towards the open door of the big warehouse where the carnival floats were stored, expecting noise, the commotion of the last hours before the procession. But even here it was empty. A small girl sat alone, snipping out shapes from paper, her face pale with concentration, her cheeks two angry red spots. She looked up when he came in, and shook out a tumble of people holding hands. He said
gunahana
and pushed his way through the gleaming displays. Close up, they were hard to make out, really just angles and curves, splashes of primary color, but the big spidery float at the back of the warehouse had at last taken shape into something familiar. It was covered with sheets of the thin film that the old man had been sewing, and it had been painted filigree-white and given great ghost wings and spars. John sat down on a crate beside it, looking up. A cloudpicker. It was big, but still far too small, and wrong, he guessed, in every detail. But it was also unmistakably right. The taut membranes shimmered rainbows, popping and straining as if ready to take flight.

There had once been nights, he thought, blinking, his shoulders hunched against some unaccountable pain, when the sea and the sky joined, became one element, when the climate was pure and warm and the rest of the world slept far away. But the summer after Hal’s accident, they hadn’t gone to Ley; Hal’s condition hadn’t stabilized yet; although actually, if you looked back, Hal had been stable enough. He was settled and at peace—it was everyone else who hadn’t stabilized, who still oscillated wildly from joy to hope to anger to puzzlement and grief at the merest twitch of his eyelids, or at the unexpected stab of a memory or regret. Two years afterwards, they finally went back to Ley. John, his parents, Hal. Technically, moving Hal hadn’t been so difficult. A big doctor was rented to lift him up, carry him downstairs to the van that his father had also rented and was even talking of buying. Hey, look at these features, Son. And the machine had stayed by him, monitoring and clicking on the strange and familiar journey to Ley’s seagull-wheeling streets, where the process, with some minor difficulty at a sharp turn in the stairs, was repeated in reverse. For all the weeks that they were there, the big doctor squatted self-importantly in the room with Hal, strung to him by silver. John had weird visions of taking the thing out with him with its heraldic head to walk the cliffs or navigate
Omega
—although that year he never quite got around to making her seaworthy. Or even—now that he was too old to do so—imagined sitting with it on Chapel Beach, digging castles and canals in the pale hot sand. The hope, of course, had been that if they reenacted some of the normal rituals of their old summers at Ley, a still functioning part of Hal’s consciousness would clear. He’d hear the seawind, feel the soft grit of the sand that John dribbled between his toes. He’d awake to the cry of gulls and the tinkle of spars and say,
Hey, Skiddle.
Or he’d come in the night to the cabin where John lay awake and gazing up at the big sea moon that so often filled his window, waiting, as sometimes happened, for a shape, winged, dark, to pass between him and it…Not that it happened, not that he expected it to happen, even if the sun each morning was as bright as ever, and the sky—well, the sky; he still hadn’t worked out a proper word to describe that deep blue that lay over your eyes in those noonday depths. But nothing happened, and they went back to Hemhill when the evenings began to chill. They caught the house and the garden, as always, in green and ragged surprise, and arrived just in time for the festival of harvest, the big carnival, and the night when the long trucks went past and the low deep humming of the compound at the end of the valley rumbled deep between the hills.

John stood up. The cloudpicker squealed and fluttered. He could almost feel the pull of it, like a kite, and now he could also hear voices and the growl of a handtool back at the entrance of the warehouse. He walked out. The people drifting in to prepare for the carnival made a space for him to pass.

Darkness was already rising in the square when John stood above it, swaying on the steps that led back through lost alleyways to the church where he had waited, lost as well, in a timeless moment of empty prayer. The sky was still pale over the rooftops, but dim now, faded as white paper fades. Twilight billowed up, softening the paved square where the people wandered through a mist. Suddenly, now, they were all here, and dragons and hippogriffs unfurled their wings from the big main doors of the warehouse. He walked down the steps as a giggling river of girls dressed in white ran by him. There were cheers when the warehouse disgorged a giant dark-eyed figure, the leering half-solid head emerging through the roof even before the body left the doorway. Then came the cloudpicker, hardly visible, a bubble of light.

Now, the goat was coaxed down the ribboned steps of the tenement, Sarai and Mo leading it. The crowd sighed. Doubtless drugged more heavily than ever, but with its coat a glossy white and its legs apparently fully healed, the creature managed to look regally important as it was coaxed onto the back of a flatbed truck that was now wreathed in rocket cones of pink and yellow hyacinth. A figure, caped and many-jeweled—possibly a witchwoman, although today they were hard to distinguish from the rest of the population—raised a hand that glinted with a vial and proceeded to anoint the goat. Then the engines started. White balloons lifted from the square, the drums commenced their clatter, colored lights played through the smoke, the procession began to move.

John followed at the back, where the small boys scampered. He felt empty-handed, and almost wished that he’d followed Felipe’s example and brought the incenser with him. But at least he was in the carnival now. It had lost the intimidating strangeness he’d witnessed looking down at it from the window of the presbytery all those months ago; the demons were mostly papier-mâché, and the faces behind the painted-on skulls usually seemed to be laughing. In many ways, it wasn’t that different from the carnival at Hemhill, even if Hemhill’s was confined to a field. The occasional talk there of a procession down High Street always came to nothing, because people were too busy with the harvest to get things organized, or they were away on holiday like his parents. Lifted up in Hal’s arms in the days when he was small, he’d often watched the trucks arriving on the empty field, the big rigs and the gaunt, scary shapes of the self-propelled gantries.

People lurched around him, bearing monolithic heads on their shoulders, barely able to see where they were going through the eye slits in the mouths. One, either weary or drunk, staggered into him. The looming face, he saw, was unmistakably one of the stone kings on the cliff face of Hettie’s cave near Ifri Gotal. Then something stuck John hard on the back. When he looked around, he saw a black-robed woman at the side of the road. She was bending down to the mud to scoop up more.

He was borne in the river of the procession now. The sky was fully dark, and the buildings flickered with lights, screens, and lanterns. Looking over the bobbing heads at the Pandera presbytery, he saw the open window of the top room where Felipe would be sitting. He shouted out the old priest’s name as a tinkling keyboard rang in his ears, but the crowd surged on and, looking back, he couldn’t even be sure that he’d seen the right building. But he knew that everyone was here. The image in his head was of this carnival procession running like a glittering snake east to west for all the thousands of kilometers of the Endless City, as far as Mizraim and over the wreckage of Jerusalem to the domes of the albino people, the clifftop dwellings, the ash deserts of the tundra. All joining together under a dark-white sky.

He looked ahead for the goat now as the procession spilled out into the Plaza El-Halili and the purposeful movement of the crowd grew turbulent and air filled with the sound of arguments and the smell of spice, fried onion, sour manure, fresh popcorn. Parents grabbed anxious hands, and he heard the wailing pull of children’s voices.
Madre, ossar. Ah protho
…He wandered the lines of stalls, finding his way easily past bats fluttering in cages, crabs scuttling through mazes and urged on by cheering crowds, and, everywhere, balloons squealing. Some stalls, it seemed to him, contained monstrous clawing shadows, and there was an edgy sense that it would be easy to step sideways from here into the darkness that underlies every kind of carnival, to take a wrong turn where feathers and blood trickled in the gutter beside him. But by the stage and the brightly lit Kasbah wall, the local bands were playing music while people clapped and danced and nodded their heads and held babies and camera screens up to see. He was hit by the bass and the heat, the thrump of many generators, the dizzy lights that swept the sky.
Ah, fatoo, gunafana
…Fireworks and rockets clattered over the stage, and he shivered, looking up and losing his sense of horizon as the fire-threaded black poured over him. Whoosh. Bang.
Nach.
Ahhhh. He stumbled out of the crowd towards the steps of an empty alley, vomited quickly and discreetly in a gap between the buildings, then sat down on the slick paving to nurse his dizziness and watch the show.

It was easier here, anyway—just watching being apart. That autumn after they returned from the Annie-less summer in Ley, he’d gone down through the carnival turnstiles at Hemhill when the grass was still wet and the rides were scarcely open. He’d wanted to catch the day off-guard, and in a way—in a wrong way—he’d succeeded. For the first time he found himself looking at the back of things, the way the tents were pegged, the screens supported, the rides powered and anchored; looking at the hot juddering cables and the chipped corners and the flaking paint, the half-broken crabs that climbed and tended the great wheel that he’d broken his promise again last year to ride. This year Hal had been too absorbed with departure to extract the same promise from him.

It already had the feeling of a last carnival, and John wondered if Hal would even find the time to come. He hadn’t seen him that morning. Hal would probably be in his room packing now, or off somewhere with Annie, or saying farewell to one or another of his secret haunts. This was, after all, his last day before London. But John really wasn’t that bothered. He was glad, for once, to be back in Hemhill. At Ley this year, his brother had pottered around like some mournful ghost, getting in the way. And things went wrong, were misarranged.
Omega
hadn’t been serviced, John had to do it himself, and even a lazy afternoon on the beach had been polluted by the atrocity of that seagull. Although he knew it wasn’t fair, John blamed Hal for that as well.

It was still too early for any sign of his own friends at the carnival, or for anything really to happen. He walked into the beer tent, wondering if he’d be stopped this year as he’d been every other. But no one noticed; the invisible barrier that had always separated him from this dim and green-lit adult world, where he’d once peered under the flaps and seen old Father Virat staggering drunk, had dissolved. He walked past the largely empty lines of trestles. He asked for a beer at the counter and looked for a place to sit after the machine served him.

And there was Hal, sitting alone with a beerglass in his hand and a corral of empty ones around him. He looked up without smiling when John sat down beside him.

John took a sip of his beer. It was cold, slimy. “I was thinking,” he said, “that this year, I’ll go on the great wheel. I won’t run like I did last year, you know.”