“No, it’s fine.”
“I haven’t talked for a bit.”
No. You haven’t. But Parry’s lisp is already better.
“It’s fine,” Joe assures him. “What were you saying?”
“When he said that, I was, well … I was afraid. For the first time in howeverlong I had something to hope for, that you’d find this blessed whatsis and stick it up their collective arse, ey?” Parry laughs. “Although, maybe you better just hang onto it. Keep it in a safe place.”
It’s a relief to be able to talk about this aloud. Joe has been screaming it, in rhyme, for—he doesn’t know how many days. Breath of the docks. Beneath the rocks. Frankie’s drum has chicken pox. He frowns and makes an uncertain gesture with his hand: this way, that way. “It’s safe for the moment,” he says. “It’s in the Death Clock. She sent it to my grandfather and he kept it in the Death Clock, because it’s so ugly no one looks at it twice. And he commended it to me for ‘special study.’ I thought he was just being annoying and educational. And now they’ve got it and they don’t even know. All this,” he waves at himself, his bruises and by extension the whole of Happy Acres, “and it was there, all the time. They’ve probably got it in a box.”
Vaughn Parry peers at him. “Well, I’m sure you know what that means to the world at large,” he says at last. “Buggered if I do, though. No, for God’s sake, don’t tell me! Bloody hell, I don’t want your trouble as well as mine, do I?”
Joe Spork shakes his head. He feels an urge to get back to his natural habitat, even if he has to hide beneath the streets among the Tosher’s Beat, in the rooms the toshers don’t bother with.
The bus stops briefly, and a man climbs on board who must be a fruit picker. His hands are swaddled in elastoplast. He wears a T-shirt written in a European alphabet Joe doesn’t recognise, and carries a white plastic bag full of unseasonal greenhouse plums.
Joe Spork considers his good fortune. He has escaped from a heavily guarded institution in the company of a monster who turns out to be quite nice. He has eluded what must be a major search—by speed? Stealth? Confusion? And he alone in all the world—apart from Vaughn Parry—knows the location of the calibration drum.
Just the two of them.
“This bus is now non-stopping all the way to London,” the driver says. Joe feels a momentary claustrophobia, and then his mind jumps sideways and around a corner. Not claustrophobia. Vertigo, on the cliff of impossible convenience. A straight course, all the way home. Back to Mercer and Polly. Parry giving answers to questions desperately asked. Parry as Sholt’s confidant, in that strange clarity before dying. Parry, the country’s most wanted man, suddenly a kindred spirit.
Too easy.
All that time being tortured, and then this. So simple. A bit of pain and a bit of work, and the whole place gone. A prisoner’s dream.
They have shown you the stick. Soon, they will show you the carrot.
A prisoner’s fantasy.
There is no carrot. Polly and I are your only friends.
This game is fixed.
Not lucky at all. Three-Card Monte.
I thought I was choosing the card I wanted, but the bunco man was slipping me the one he wanted me to have. I haven’t found the lady. I’ve drawn the Joker.
Vaughn Parry.
In which case, you work for someone, don’t you? I’m wrong. You’re not a loner at all. You’re not what you say you are. You’re a lie and a liar, and I’m taking you where you want to go. Telling you what you want to know.
In which case, you could well be a killer, after all.
Hell, hell, hell.
But this is a new, activated Joe Spork. His body has a plan before he does, is already moving when he gives the okay, flows into the shape he needs without thought—thank God, because if he thought about it he’d mess it up, no doubt.
He times it exactly right. The driver takes off the brakes and the bus jolts. Joe Spork grabs Vaughn Parry by the shoulders and slams his head sharply into the chrome steel pole in the aisle. Parry’s face flashes through shock and pain, then for the briefest instant into a bottomless, appalling rage. Then the bus judders again and Joe repeats the manoeuvre, and Parry slumps. Joe rests him against the window, and rushes to the front.
“I’m so sorry,” he says, “I’m on the wrong bus.”
The driver sighs. “Anyone else?” he asks. The rest of the passengers shake their heads or stare in venomous accusation at the idiot Joe, and the driver lets him off.
He watches the red tail lights fade, and runs to a phone box to call Mercer.
Joe is expecting a large black car with tinted windows, or possibly several cars. He allows himself to wonder if there will be a helicopter. He is quite sure there will be people in dark suits, grave of mien and taciturn and fraught with black-lettered magic.
In the event, Mercer sends four ambulances, two fire engines, a climate-change protest, a Scottish travelling circus, and a fox hunt. These various distractions arrive separately but with immaculate coordination, so that one moment Joshua Joseph Spork is hiding in the shadows of a pub garden and hearing pursuit in every whisper of wind, and the next the whole suburb is lit with blue lights and resounding with sirens, and seventy-eight beagles and a gross of meteorologists are sharing road space with Darla the Bearded Lassie.
Through the midst of this paralysing confusion comes an unremarkable Volkswagen people-mover in green. It slips gracefully between the hunt master and a brace of urban foxes who are apparently admiring the view, Mercer himself at the wheel. The side door slides open.
“Get in,” Polly Cradle says gently, and Joe’s heart leaps to see that she is here. Then he stops abruptly: beside her sits Edie Banister, complete with odiferous pug and giant revolver.
“Come on, Joe,” Polly says. “It’s time.” She glances over her shoulder at Edie, then extends her hand to him. “Get in. We’ll explain on the way.”
By a circuitous route and through lanes and towns and all around the London Orbital, they leave the circus behind.
Joe Spork gazes at the back of the passenger seat. The leather—or it may be leatherette—is torn around the headrest, revealing a sliver of foam. Part of him wants to explore it with his fingers, touch something real and simple and solid outside Happy Acres and know that this is not a dream. That he is not still on the operating table, dying. The world is oddly quiet and colourless, as if he has slipped sideways into a monochrome film or an underwater documentary. He assumes this is shock or post-traumatic stress, but does not particularly care.
He lifts his eyes from his study of the leather and looks around. Polly Cradle is like a log fire, a warm, comforting thing. She catches him looking and smiles, puts her hand on his leg, and a little patch of heat grows where her palm is. He looks the other way and finds Edie Banister.
Edie Banister looks back at him and waits. And so they pass a few miles: Polly, Joe, Edie. The front seat is another country.
“Did you do this to me?” Joe asks.
Edie sighs. “Yes. Well, yes and no. I put you in the line of fire.” After a brief struggle, honesty compels her to add, “I thought it was necessary and then I realised it was rather out of spite. I’m sorry.”
He looks at her some more, and wonders why he hasn’t pulled her head from her shoulders and thrown it out of the window. Carefully, so as not to cause an accident. He wonders if she is really sorry, and if sorry helps in any way. Then he says, “Spite?”
“Your grandmother, not you.”
It’s always about his bloody family, somehow. “How’s Harriet?” he asks belatedly.
“Your mother is fine, Joe,” Mercer says firmly. “The C of E has hidden her away—I’m sure you can talk to her if you want.”
Joe goes back to studying the seat, and finally does reach out to play with the loose edge. He flicks it one way and another until Polly very gently encloses his big hand in her two smaller ones and draws it away to kiss it as if he’d burned it on something. She
does not ask if he is all right.
“I’m all right,” he says, a bit fuzzily, only now realising that it may turn out to be true. If only the colours will spread out from her, into the world.
She manages not to burst into tears, but it’s a close thing. Instead, she looks sternly at Edie and tells her to get going on the story. Edie nods, and then abruptly stalls, mouth open. “I don’t know where to begin,” she says. “I’ve lost it. Senility.”
Joe nods. He is familiar with the sense of not being able to trust your own mind. “Who are you?”
Edie nods, grateful. “You know my name. I used to—well, I used to work with your grandmother. We were friends. I’ve been a lot of other things, too. A spy, mostly. Sort of a policeman. And now a revolutionary, I suppose. A terrorist.” She sighs. “This changing-the-world business is harder than I imagined.”
“I didn’t know Frankie had any friends,” Joe says.
“Joe, don’t be dense,” Polly murmurs, kissing his hair to take the sting out of it. “They were lovers.”
Joe glances, automatically, at Edie, and sees her embarrassment become a wide grin.
“Well, yes,” Edie says. “We were. And you, young miss, are a bucketload of trouble, aren’t you?”
Polly shrugs. “I believe in getting these things out in the open. It saves misunderstandings later.”
Edie finds that she agrees, and a moment later she begins the whole story from scratch—albeit in highly abbreviated form—telling it without restraint from the moment Abel Jasmine came to the Lady Gravely school, all the way to her recent abrupt decision that something had to be done.
Joe listens to the secret history of the House of Spork—or Fossoyeur, as it seems—and feels, beneath the monochrome, a sense of place. This is where Daniel’s sorrow came from. Where Mathew’s mania was born. This is how it was, and how it came to be.
That it is also the root of his recent pain is less important. Edie is a treasure house of his own self, his roots. He wants to put her under glass, wind her up and play her in the evenings. Her life is so bright. And he, Joe, is part of this story, and her story is part of his. Finally, he is not too late for something, after all.
“The world is in the hands of idiots,” Edie cries, by way of exculpation, mistaking his quiet for doubt or disapprobation. “The Cold War is over and what do they do? Go looking for a new one. We’re richer than we’ve ever been. What happens? We burn the forests and borrow so much money that suddenly we’re poor. Everything’s upside down and it’s just because people don’t pay attention. It ought to be a perfect world! That’s what we wanted. That’s what I worked for. For decades! I hid Frankie’s machine for years and years. For nothing. For a bunch of charlatans to tell me I’ve never had it so good while they steal my neighbour’s pension!”
She subsides, muttering. Mercer purses his lips.
“The bees are now distributed over most of the globe,” he says. “From time to time there are outbreaks of truth, but I have to say I don’t see a new age of love and understanding being ushered in. The West Bank is in flames, but I suppose it was going that way already. A lot of Africa is looking bad. The Special Relationship is effectively finished. The nuclear states, by the way, have reciprocally pledged to launch their weapons should it turn out that the Apprehension Engine—they’re calling it a weapon of mass destruction—has been deliberately deployed against their citizens by another nation. All of which, I gather, is before the machine is properly effective. These are just tasters. If this is a global improvement of the lot of mankind, I don’t want to know what a crisis looks like.”
Edie ducks her head. “It’ll get better. Frankie worked it out. She was never wrong. When the bees come back, the array will be complete and things will … get better.” Her certainty is fading as she says it out loud. What made sense in the twentieth century sounds odd in the twenty-first. Blockish, even, and naive.
Mercer sighs. “Possibly. Although I was never very fond of perfect, sweeping solutions. I always feel sympathy with the people who get swept. But in any case … the machine is no longer going to do what it’s supposed to, is it?”
“I don’t see what he gets out of it,” Polly Cradle interrupts. “How does all this make him godlike?” She looks over at Edie.
Edie scowls. “Chaos. Confusion. Wickedness. It’s always like this with him. Becoming God is an excuse. He says God’s alien and appalling, so that anything ghastly he does just makes him more transcendent. It’s a fiddle. Not that it is him. It can’t be.”
“Only,” Polly goes on, “from what you say, he doesn’t strike me as chaotic at all. He strikes me as the opposite. You called him a spider. You said he loves elegance. Chess and bluffing and forked strategies. Heads I win, tails you lose.”
“Well,” Edie says, waving her hands vaguely to indicate, perhaps, that evil is as evil does, and you just can’t fathom it, you have to shoot it when the opportunity arises. Mercer waits a moment, but that seems to be the extent of her response. He carries on.
“But in the meantime it would appear that the apparatus from Wistithiel is now in the hands of a monster who proposes to abuse it in some way so as to bring about the end of the world or his own elevation to godhood or possibly both. And my best friend has spent the last while in a government-sponsored torture farm being given the full works. So while I greatly sympathise with your perception, Miss Banister, I imagine you will understand when I say that I’m not sure your actions have greatly improved our lot.”
Edie looks stricken. Joe finds himself confessing in turn the days of his captivity, and his brief, strange, un-friendship with Vaughn Parry.
“I should have killed him,” he concludes. “That would have been the professional thing to do. I told him what they wanted to know all along. I just didn’t think. I just wanted to get away. I should have finished it.”
Edie Banister sighs. “The professional thing. Yes. The tactically wise thing. You might have bought us some time, at a cost. But I have come to believe, young Joe, that it’s no bad thing to be a bit amateurish, in one’s heart. The professionals have been in charge for a while now, and it hasn’t done a blind bit of good.”
She shrugs, including herself in this damnation. Joe realises he has not touched her, this strange leftover person from his family’s life. He reaches out to shake her hand.
There is a noise like someone jointing a chicken, and the car fills with the sharp aroma of doggy regurgitate. The handshake never quite happens.
After a few minutes with the windows open, there is general agreement in the car that a brief stop for a cup of tea may be in order.
The café table is made of scratched red plastic with a metal surround. The chairs are uncomfortable, and the tea tastes mostly of sump. Joe Spork drinks his and then steals Mercer’s, too. Edie, having washed out her bag, stares into the swirling circle of her cup as if it is showing her mysteries. Mercer leans on the wall next to the till, watching the car park. Joe worries that they’re worrying about him, that he needs to say something which will make them all feel better. He can’t imagine what it would be.
Only Polly seems to be exactly who she always is. She smiles charmingly at the lovestruck teenage boy who brings the tray, tips him too much and tells him she’s a rock star and not to admit to anyone she was here, and then looks across at Edie.
“This isn’t what you had in mind,” she observes.
“No,” Edie says.
Polly waits, but Edie doesn’t continue, so she tries again. “What was supposed to happen?”
Edie waggles her hands in the air. “Good things. Frankie had the maths, you know. She actually calculated the consequences. If they’d just leave it alone, the machine would make the world better. Nine per cent better, she said. Enough to push us in the right direction over time. Make a perfect world.” She stops. “A better one, anyway. But I didn’t imagine all this would come out of the woodwork.”
“ ‘All this’ meaning Sheamus. The Ruskinites.”
/>
“Sheamus is dead. The one I knew, the Opium Khan. He must be. He was years older than me.”
“You’re here.”
Edie snorts. “Barely.”
The roads are empty and the night is very dark. Inside the car, the only light is from the instrument panel and the street lights as they zip past. Joe knew a man once who made a career out of chopping them down and stealing them for the aluminium. It’s an expensive material. He counts, in his head, reckoning weight and value, and London draws closer, green motorway signs displaying the distance to the statue of Charles I in Trafalgar Square. It occurs to him that he has no idea where the car is going.
“Can’t go to the shop,” Mercer replies, meaning Noblewhite Cradle rather than Joe’s shattered warehouse. “It’s being watched. Bethany’s gone in a few different directions to lead them off. I told her it was dangerous, and she said—they all said—‘Bring it on.’ They’re a doughty bunch, my Bethanys. And good lawyers in their own right, of course.
“But we don’t have a lot of options. The firm is under a ton of pressure from the forces of illiberal and irresponsible government; writs and control orders and demands for our account numbers. We’re fighting back, but it’s hard to win anything when the other fellow changes the rules under you. I did persuade a local magistrate to grant me an Antisocial Behaviour Order in respect of Detective Sergeant Patchkind, which I must say was very satisfying …” He flashes a grin, then sobers.
“But we couldn’t risk using any of our regular London places. We set it up as if we were heading for our out-of-town offices, which are frankly a sort of fortress. I suspect they’d be delighted with that: all the rats in one sack … We’re going somewhere a little more out of the way. Blood over law. Or friendship will do, in the pinch.”
Joe doesn’t bother to point out that this is not an answer to his question. He’s too tired to fret, and the aches in his body are burning everywhere except where he rests against Polly Cradle’s shoulder. “Ted said we need to go to Station Y,” he murmurs, but the sounds of the car smother the words and only Polly hears them. He lolls, and mercifully does not dream.