‘You can’t hold me here against my will,’ he said. ‘I’ve done nothing wrong. I’ve offended no one. I’ve apologized for the offence I gave. I meant nothing by it.’ But the words were coming out too loudly, revealing the fright that was beneath the calmness he was trying to project. Fertin Mercier was as composed as if he were reading from a script, and Sheeld had felt himself speaking with the same semi-formal stresses, but his own image of self-control was slipping. He tried to moderate his words. ‘Let me leave and I will have nothing to do with any of you again.’
‘That is our intention,’ Mercier said. ‘But how can I be sure you mean it?’
‘I’m planning to catch the evening ferry. Two days from now I will be at home.’
‘And your home is?’
‘Foort.’
‘It would take you only a day or two to return here.’
Alanya spoke for the first time.
‘He could eat the puthryme, Fertin.’
‘That old superstition again!’ But he looked thoughtful. ‘Would you accept that?’ he said to her.
‘Now I would. He knows what it signifies.’
‘Forgiveness,’ Sheeld said cynically.
‘If it is eaten together,’ Mercier said, turning on him swiftly. ‘Did you do that with my wife as well? Have you forgiven each other too?’
‘Fuck you,’ Sheeld said. The sheer unreasonableness of what was happening had finally reached critical.
‘Profanity won’t help you.’
Sheeld looked towards the gateway out of the garden, wondering what would happen if he simply tried to dash away. Most of the relatives looked fairly old and many of them were obviously feeble, but Mercier and his brother were fit and youthful. Then there were the servants. Four of them were standing in front of or near to the gate.
‘What is it you actually want of me?’ he said to Fertin Mercier.
‘Let us say you could do as my wife has suggested. Eat the puthryme, then you may go.’
‘I can’t believe you said that.’
‘We are too influenced by the past here,’ Mercier said, with a sudden edge of reflectiveness in his voice. ‘I myself sometimes wish we could throw it off. But the funeral today has been a great family occasion, and not everyone here thinks like me.’ There was the sound of assent from some of the people watching. ‘As my wife has said, eating a puthryme traditionally signifies forgiveness between two people. You may feel you have nothing to forgive, but that is not so. Forgiveness has to embrace both sides of a dispute. You slighted my wife. To gain her forgiveness, and therefore mine, and therefore that of the rest of us, you should do as I say. The puthryme is a tradition with us. Isn’t that so?’
Fertin Mercier turned unexpectedly, looking around at the rest of the family to include them in what he was saying. Sheeld heard more sounds of agreement. One of the men said something quickly in patois, glancing towards the people immediately to his side, seeking their concurrence. Sheeld heard again the word that sounded like ‘graiansheeld’.
‘Then I can satisfy you,’ he said. ‘I have already eaten some of your disgusting fruit.’
‘You said you wouldn’t touch it,’ Alanya said.
‘I was thirsty. I tried some of it.’ Sheeld still had the sour aftertaste in his mouth. He indicated the plate on the table behind him, where he had left the uneaten hemisphere of orange fruit. He noticed that several of the black pips were lying on the surface of the plate beside the fruit. How had they made their way out of it? ‘I ate some of what you left.’
Both Alanya and her husband looked intently at the fruit.
‘My God, he did!’ Alanya said.
The other people were pressing forward to see. Sheeld felt a distinct jab of fear. Fertin Mercier lifted up the plate for everyone to see, then put it down quickly. He wiped his hand against his leg and stepped back and to the side, clearly making way for Sheeld to depart. The relatives were also moving back, now they had seen.
A servant stepped up to Mercier’s side, presumably responding to some unseen signal.
‘Deal with it quickly!’ Mercier said. He turned to Sheeld. ‘You should watch this before you leave, Graian Sheeld.’
Mercier moved further back.
The servant was carrying a small silver bowl, with a lid. He removed the lid and inside the bowl could be seen a quantity of a transparent liquid. It sloshed around with quick movements, suggesting that it was not water or water-based. The servant poured the liquid on to the plate where Sheeld had put the remains of the fruit, then stepped back.
Fertin Mercier took a cigarette-lighter from his pocket and handed it to the servant. The man flicked the flint wheel, then put the flame to the fruit. There was a flash and a popping sound, barely visible or audible in the open daylight, and a yellow flame guttered around the half-eaten puthryme.
‘In the islands,’ Mercier said to Sheeld, ‘there are some things we always cremate. But you probably know that by now.’
Sheeld stared at the fruit as it burned. He saw the yellow flesh turning brown, sizzling and charring inside the flame. The pips curled and wriggled as the heat reached them, squirming like the maggots he suddenly knew they were. Then they abruptly frizzled up and died.
They made a pungent smell, disgusting and foetid.
Sheeld looked desperately at Mercier, at Alanya. Someone in the semicircle of relatives spoke loudly in patois, and a woman fainted. Most of the people began to back away.
Sheeld thrust two fingers into his mouth, reaching down into his throat, trying to make himself vomit. He gagged, then belched. Foul fumes eructated up from his gut. Alanya was watching him. Her eyes were half closed and her lips were moist. She held the arm of her husband, pressing one of her breasts rhythmically and sensuously against him.
Sheeld stepped away from her, felt his back arching as a spasm of excruciating pain coursed through him. He stared up at the sky. Two jet aircraft, high in the blue, reflecting silver sunlight, were heading towards the south on converging courses. Behind them, their condensation trails stretched away across the sky in huge curling spirals.
The
Watched
•
Sometimes Jenessa was slow to leave in the mornings, reluctant to return to her frustrating job, and when she lingered in his house Yvann Ordier had difficulty concealing his impatience. This morning was one such. He lurked outside the door of the shower cubicle, fingering the smooth leather case of his binoculars.
Ordier was alert to Jenessa’s every movement, each variation in sound giving him as clear a picture as if the door were wide open and the plastic curtain held back: the spattering of droplets against the curtain as she raised an arm, the lowering in pitch of the hissing water as she bent to wash a leg, the fat drops plopping soapily on the tiled floor as she stood erect to shampoo her hair. He could visualize her glistening body in every detail. Thinking of their lovemaking during the night he felt a renewed lust for her.
He knew he was standing too obviously by the door, too transparently waiting for her to emerge, so he put down the binoculars case and went to the kitchen. He used the microwave oven to warm up some coffee left over from the night before. Jenessa had still not finished in the shower. Ordier paused again by the door of the cubicle and knew by the sound of the water that she was rinsing her hair. He could imagine her with her face tilted up into the spray, her long dark hair plastered flatly back above her ears. She often stood like that for several minutes, letting the water run into her open mouth before it dribbled away, coursing down her body. Twin streams of droplets would fall from her nipples, a tiny rivulet would snake through her pubic hair, a thin film would gloss her buttocks and thighs.
Again torn between desire and impatience, Ordier went to his bureau, unlocked it, and took out his scintilla detector.
He checked the batteries first. They were sound but he knew he had recharged them too many times and that he would have to replace them soon. He used the detector regularly: a few weeks earlier he ha
d discovered by chance that his house had become infested with a large number of the microscopic scintillas and since then he had been systematically searching for them every day.
Today there was a signal the instant he turned on the detector. He walked through the house listening for the subtle changes in pitch and volume of the electronic howl. He traced the scintilla to the bedroom, where he switched in the directional circuit and held the instrument close to the floor. He found the scintilla moments later. It was in the carpet, near where Jenessa’s clothes were folded over a chair.
Ordier parted the pile of the carpet and after a brief search picked up the scintilla with a pair of tweezers. He took it through into his study. It was the tenth he had discovered this week. Although there was the usual chance that it had been brought into the house accidentally lodged in someone’s hair or clothes, or stuck to the underside of a shoe, it was always unsettling to find one. He placed it on a slide then peered at it through his microscope. There was no serial number engraved on the silicon-mounted lens.
Jenessa had finished her shower and was standing by the door of the study.
‘What are you doing?’ she said.
‘Another scintilla,’ Ordier said. ‘This one was in the bedroom.’
‘You’re always finding them. I thought they were supposed to be undetectable.’
‘I’ve got a gadget for locating them.’
‘You never told me.’
Ordier turned to face her. She was naked, with a turban of golden towelling around her hair. A few curling, tangled skeins of wet hair framed her face.
‘I’ve made some coffee,’ he said. ‘Let’s drink it on the patio.’
Jenessa turned and walked away, her legs and back still moist from her shower. Ordier watched her, thinking of another woman, the young Qataari woman in the valley below his house. He wished that his response to Jenessa could be less complicated. In the last few weeks they had become at once more intimate and more distant, a process that had begun when he realized she was satisfying desires that the Qataari woman could arouse but never fulfil.
He turned back to the microscope and pulled the slide gently away. He tipped the scintilla into a quiet-case – a soundproof, lightproof box where nearly two hundred more of the tiny lenses were already being kept – then went back to the kitchen. He collected the pot of coffee and some cups and went outside to the glare of sunlight and the rasping of crickets.
Jenessa stood in the morning heat, combing the tangles from her long, fine hair. As the sun glared down at her she talked about her plans for the day.
‘There’s someone who’s recently started in our department,’ she said. ‘I’d like you to meet him. I said we’d have dinner with him and his wife this evening.’
‘Who is it?’ Ordier said, disliking any interruption of his routine.
‘A professor. He’s recently arrived from the north.’
Jenessa sat down on the low wall that surrounded the patio, positioning herself so that her shadow fell towards him. The sunbright garden glared behind her. She was at ease when naked in the open air, showing herself off, knowing he was looking at her.
‘Another anthropologist? Here for the usual reason?’
‘Of course. There’s nowhere else to observe the Qataari. Why else would someone like him come to the island? He knows the difficulties, of course, but he’s been given a research grant so I suppose he should be allowed to spend it.’
‘Why should I have to meet him?’
‘You don’t have to,’ Jenessa said. ‘But I’d like him to meet you.’
Ordier was idly stirring the loose white sugar in the bowl, watching it heap and swirl like a viscid liquid. Each sugar grain was larger than the biggest, most powerful of scintillas. A hundred or more of the tiny spy transmitters mixed in with the sugar would probably go unnoticed. How many scintillas were left in the dregs of coffee cups, how many were accidentally swallowed?
Jenessa leaned back on her elbows along the low wall. Her breasts spread across her chest, the nipples erect. She raised a knee and shook her long hair out so that it fell behind her. She checked to see if he was still looking at her. He was, of course.
‘You like to stare,’ she said, giving him a candid look from her dark eyes. She raised herself restlessly, turning towards him, so that her large breasts rounded out again. ‘But you don’t like being watched, do you?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The scintillas. You go quiet when you find one.’
‘Do I?’ Ordier said, not aware that Jenessa had been noticing. He usually tried to make light of them and assumed they didn’t bother her. As a natural exhibitionist maybe she liked the idea of unknown eyes watching her every movement. ‘There are so many of them,’ he said. ‘All over the island. But there’s no evidence anyone is planting them in the house.’
‘You don’t like finding them, though.’
‘Do you?’
‘I don’t look for them.’
‘The one I found this morning was in the bedroom. It was concealed in the carpet, on your side. If it was switched on someone could have been watching you get undressed last night. From below.’
‘They could be watching me now,’ she said. She briefly opened her legs a little further, as if inviting a spying camera to move in closer. She picked up her cup and took a sip of coffee. She was perhaps not so calm as she pretended because her hand trembled as it held the cup and a tiny trickle of coffee ran down the side of her mouth and over her chin. It plopped down on to one of her naked breasts. She rubbed it with her fingers.
‘You wouldn’t like it any more than anyone else,’ Ordier said. ‘No one likes being spied on.’
‘True.’
Jenessa stood up and brushed away the particles of grit that had attached to her backside from the top of the wall. The granules of sand and crumbled plaster scattered like grains around her. Some of them caught the sun as they fell, and glistened like microscopic jewels.
Ordier took her move to be a signal that she was about to get dressed then drive to her job at the university, but instead she took a dry towel from under the table on the patio. She placed it along the top of the low wall and draped herself along it. She raised her face to the sun.
In common with most of the expatriates in the Dream Archipelago, Ordier and Jenessa did not often speak about their past lives, either between themselves or to other people. In the islands past and future were effectively suspended by the Covenant of Neutrality. The future was sealed, as were the islands themselves, because until the conclusion of the war on the southern continent no one was officially permitted to leave the Archipelago. No one, that is, except the crews of ships and the troops of the combatant sides. And the airmen who flew overhead; the missionaries and consultants and medical supervisors; the government functionaries and the administrators of the military matériel warehouses; the whores and the con men and the drifters; all of these came and went without apparent hindrance. Most people stayed in the islands because they had to, or because they wished to. Neutrality was official, but it could only be enforced with broad consent.
With a sense of future removed, the past became irrelevant and those who came to the Archipelago, choosing the permanence of neutrality, made a conscious decision to abandon their former lives. Yvann Ordier was one amongst thousands of such émigrés. He had never told Jenessa the details of how he had made his fortune, how he had paid for his relocation to the islands. All he had told her was that he had been successful in business, connected with scintillas, enabling him to take early retirement.
Jenessa, for her own part, had also said little about her background. He had thought when he first met her that she was a native islander, but he learned later that her parents had brought her from the north when she was a small child and had raised her on the island of Lanna. Technically, she was as much an expatriate as he, although in his eyes she was almost indistinguishable in her attitudes, accent and looks from true islanders. She was now a
lecturer in anthropology at the University of Tumo, a member of one of several teams who were attempting, unsuccessfully, to study the refugee Qataari.
What Ordier did not want to reveal to Jenessa was how he came to possess a scintilla detector.
A few years before, in the full blood of opportunistic youth, Ordier had seen a chance to make a great deal of money and had snatched at it. At that time the war on the southern continent had lapsed into stalemate that was proving expensive in both lives and money. The enterprises sections of the armed forces had been raising money by unconventional means, using as an excuse the need to break the deadlock. One of the schemes was the selling of private commercial franchises to some of the hitherto classified matériel. Ordier had swiftly obtained exploitation rights to the spy scintillas.
His formula for commercial enrichment was simple: he sold the scintillas themselves to one side of the market and the detectors to the other. Although once the technology was out in the world it could be copied and emulated, by a clever system of patents and trademarks Ordier had ensured that a flood of royalties continued to come to him. In any event his business remained the market leader and his company was the prime distributor of the scintillas and the digital image-retrieval equipment. These sold more quickly than the army ordnance factories could produce them.
Within a year of Ordier opening his agency the saturation use of the scintillas meant that no room or building was closed to the eyes and ears of others, whether they were enemies, jealous spouses, criminals, commercial interests, government agencies or the merely voyeuristic.
For the next three and a half years Ordier’s personal fortune had accrued. During the same period, paralleling his rise in wealth, a deeper sense of moral responsibility grew in him. The way of life in the civilized northern continent had been permanently altered. Scintillas were used in such profusion that nowhere was entirely free of them. They were in the streets, in the gardens, in the houses, in shops, offices, airports, doctors’ surgeries, schools, private cars. You never knew for sure that a stranger was not listening to you, recording your words, watching your every action. Social behaviour changed. Away from home people moved with neutral expressions, said or did nothing that was not bland or apparently harmless. At home, not because they assumed they were unwatched but simply because they were at home, they broke free and acted without restraint. Everyone knew about what went on behind closed doors, because, of course, you could buy scintilla-sourced videos of ordinary people acting uninhibitedly in their homes. A mirror-image industry quickly arose as a reaction to the spread of the scintillas: hotels advertised rooms that were guaranteed scintilla-free; offices and conference suites were routinely cleared before important meetings or seminars; houses were sold on the basis that they had been scanned and cleared and could be maintained scintilla-free; code languages and signs were developed that were claimed to be untranslatable through the fish-eye lenses that otherwise saw everything. Naturally, nowhere was entirely safe from the scintillas. Wherever you went you were one of the watched.