I do not watch the rest of it. The bees from the black hive—Africanised Megachile pluto, most likely—recognise us by the smell of nectar goo as fellow (if weird-lookin’ and useless) members of the hive. The ninjas are therefore aggressors of some sort who must be dealt with. The last thing they see before the vengeance of the bees is Old Man Lubitsch, shrouded in inch-long black insects, stepping towards them with a garden rake.
“You would have hurt my wife,” Old Man Lubitsch says through the sound of the hive.
But when I turn away, because death by bee is a ghastly thing, and death by rake not much better, it is not his wife I see, but mine.
. . .
LEAH’s hiding place is upstairs, between the guest room and the airing cupboard. A false wall makes room for a corridor, and the corridor leads to a small space under the eaves like an artist’s garret. Old Man Lubitsch built it during the Reification. He and Ma Lubitsch hid there when Cricklewood Cove was overrun by bandits, and then they hid a young man there when the bandits were defeated and a hanging mood took the town. Currently, Leah shares it with a family of cats who moved in unofficially. She explains that the cats were here first. They are nice cats. Leah likes them. She misses her dog, but the dog went with Gonzo. She stayed behind. Gonzo insisted. It was too dangerous. So here she is, sharing space with La Gioconda (the mother cat) and Sunflower, Waterlily, Adoration (which is short for Adoration of the Magi) and Flea. She named the kittens after paintings, but realised that she didn’t know the proper names of very many. She declined to name Flea after an approximation of the title of a painting. Flea is called Flea because she can jump right up in the air. She was so bored up here (Leah, not Flea), but Gonzo insisted she must be safe. From whom she does not know. He wouldn’t tell her anything. The cats walk on her face in the mornings to wake her up. She must look terrible.
“Leah,” I say, but she has more to tell me, more she needs to say, things of great importance. She pauses, then begins. The room gets very cold at night, so she’s quite glad to have them around then, and of course they need her to protect them from owls. Owls are a great hazard to kittens. Owls eat more kittens in a year than dogs do in ten. Dogs chase cats, they don’t eat them. Owls eat anything. Fortunately, the owls are scared of Old Man Lubitsch’s mutant bees, so the kittens are safe in the garden. Leah washes them in nectar shampoo, which makes them furious (and very cute) and the bees sort of hover over them and scowl, not that they can scowl, but they do. Leah was listening through the floor last night, all night, she has bags under her eyes this morning, even kitten maquillage doesn’t leave her this harrowed normally, she heard and understood and she had no idea what Gonzo had done, he just told her that I was new and made out of him and not to say anything to anyone and I was leaving. She has no idea what to say to me.
Since I don’t know what to say either, we sit there and look at one another in silence for a while.
Leah looks depleted. She draws strength from the mountains, but primarily from love. She takes delight in love. This passage has injured her in the place from which she draws her strength. My instinct is to hold her. I offer her my hand, and she looks at it with deep uncertainty. We are sitting opposite one another. To take it, she must shuffle forward. She does, but she takes a grip on me which is opposed, so that her palm faces me while her fingers wrap around mine. Thus far and no farther. Her palm is like one of Ike Thermite’s invisible walls. I want to storm the fortress. I might. She might respond. And then what? In Gonzo’s house, with his parents standing guard, to cuckold him and take her away? “What is the most monstrous thing you have done?” Oh! I know! I know!
So. We sit opposite one another. My back hurts. I have never been able to sit comfortably on the ground, even at my most flexible. When I was at Jarndice, and I could—by dint of constant practice in the Voiceless Dragon forms—do the lotus position from cold and come within seven inches of the box splits (that’s the ones you do by opening your legs to the side rather than pushing one foot forward and one back), even then the business of sitting on the floor was an agony. Aline found it a cause for annoyance. Furniture was bourgeois when good people had none. Comfortable furniture was almost certainly counterrevolutionary. (This was the army which George Copsen’s Government Machine so desperately feared.) When my hips start to hurt too, I shift position, which is difficult because I do not want to let go of her hand. I wince.
“Are you all right?”
“I love you.”
Bugger.
She stares at me. In for a penny.
“I love you. I have always loved you. I remember your letter, in the hospital. I remember asking Gonzo to find us somewhere to have a date. He got me a suit. You had that amazing dress, from nowhere, by magic. We made love in the castle, all night. And when I smell jasmine I think of you, of getting married and of how you hated the city, so Jim Hepsobah helped me find a house in the mountains. I remember carrying you over the threshold and falling over, and we just lay there and laughed.” The only time I have ever been comfortable on a floor. Leah is shaking her head, her whole body twisting one way and another in denial. She has not let go of my hand. We are welded together by pain. “Leah, please . . .” But please what? And because I don’t know, I apologise. I tell her I am sorry. My outburst was inappropriate.
She looks at me sharply. Certainty. I have sealed my own rejection. Leah loves a man who would never be concerned with inappropriate. Leah loves a man who would have brushed her objections aside and held her, and been slapped if need be. Leah loves a man who does not do stalemate.
Gonzo.
And what am I? Where does Gonzo finish and where do I begin? We were both there. I ask her outright. What am I to you? And then I wish I hadn’t.
“Suppose,” Leah murmurs, and she will not look at me while she destroys me, “suppose Gonzo had been hit on the head. Fallen off the roof. And suppose his brain was damaged. He changed. Couldn’t remember things. Suppose he needed my help to recover, to be who he was. Suppose this had nothing to do with Stuff and monsters. He was just hurt. He would need me. More than ever. Need love.” She shrugs. She is indifferent. Clinical. It’s a lie. She is making it true. “This isn’t different. Not between me and him.”
Leah, the nurse, looks at me and sees an injury. I love her. She thinks I am aphasia with feet. I tell her I am not.
“Do you remember asking me to marry you?”
Of course. It was on the roof garden of Piper 90.
“No,” she says, “the first time.”
In the recovery room. I know I did it. I could lie.
I cannot lie.
Leah nods.
“I’m so sorry,” she says. “This must hurt so much.”
Yes.
“But you and me . . .” She is still going. Determined. “You remember loving me. But do you love me right now, this minute? Do you feel it? No. Your business,” Leah says, “your thing is with Gonzo. Not with me. We’re strangers.”
Yes. You’re a nurse. I’m a disease.
“I’m so sorry.”
I feel agony. But I have no idea if I feel love. I don’t have a great deal of experience sorting memory from the present. Is this love? Is that? What about this sort of squidgy feeling there? She might be right. Agony is not love. Not by itself. Unless love comes in various flavours and textures, and this is the one which hurts. That might be. Perhaps love is like hell, and every one is different.
There is water in my eyes. She will not release my hand. We sit. She waits for me to sob out. So. My thing is with Gonzo. We’re strangers. Saying it makes it true. My Leah would never do this to me. And damn you, Gonzo, anyway. You couldn’t be bothered to dream a dream girl for me too. If you had, we wouldn’t be here.
Leah has a question. She is waiting for me to struggle back to myself. I nod.
“Gonzo . . . used to joke about Sally.” Joke. Yes. Of course he did. About how he spent the night with her. About the things they did. All a joke.
“Just kiddi
ng around,” I tell her. It might even be true.
She lets me go. I leave.
IKE THERMITE is lying on the sofa in the living room, and Ma Lubitsch is filling him with cake and some kind of murky grey infusion she makes from her window boxes, and which (like me) has no name. Her husband is in the garden, burying ninjas. He is assisted by the Matahuxee Mime Combine, which might or might not be a good thing. I go out and help.
Corpses are dead weight. Ha ha ha. Old Man Lubitsch has a technique. He shoves a board under one cold shoulder, and shoves it with his rake. The mimes, armed with poles and sticks from the garden, shove as well. The friction between the corpse and the board is less than that between the corpse and the grass, so the corpse stays where it is and the board goes most of the way underneath. If the corpse starts to slip, mimes rush around and brace it. Then Old Man Lubitsch runs to the other side and kicks the corpse until it is almost entirely on the board. Finally, he clamps little barrow wheels to each corner, and he has a corpse on a go-cart which he can drag around to the west paddock, now redesignated the ninja disposal area. The kicking part is the most effortful, but quite apparently also the part which he most enjoys. I do not intend to take this pleasure from him, but he clearly feels I need to kick something, so I get the last one to do myself. We slide the ninja off the board into a pit, and cover him. I sit down on a stone and moan. I wail—not tears, just a heart-deep noise of rejection. The Matahuxee Mime Combine all stand around looking awkward. Old Man Lubitsch puts a rough hand on my shoulder, but that makes it worse. I cannot face his approval, not now. I have done the right thing, in spite of myself. I stare at everything. It’s too bright.
Old Man Lubitsch squats down beside me.
“She needed a safe place,” he says. He looks away. I think he’s guilty.
I want to tell him that he does not have to apologise for sheltering his son’s wife in a strange time. Instead, I make some sort of dry sound. He seems to understand what it means. We sit for a while. I hope he won’t say anything else.
“It’s never easy,” Old Man Lubitsch says. “You did right.”
Didn’t mean to. Meant to, couldn’t stick to it, failed to be evil. Not the same.
“You did right,” Old Man Lubitsch says again. We sit. He stares straight ahead, seeing something private and very distant.
“You look like him,” Old Man Lubitsch says.
Like Gonzo?
“No,” Old Man Lubitsch says, “not like Gonzo.” And there is a tremor in his voice. The mimes have filed out of the garden, and we are alone. I don’t turn to see his face, because I don’t think I could stand it if he was crying.
“Not like Gonzo,” he says. And he gets up and walks away, leaving me alone.
Something happens to my mouth then. It twists and opens, and my eyes make water, and from my throat and belly come deep, raw noises. It’s like crying, the way wine is like water.
Strange, slender arms surround me. They are strong and warm. The black wings of a theatrical cloak wrap around me to keep me warm. Dr. Andromas. The arms rock me, and the gloved hands soothe my hair, and I rest my face against the odd goggled head. Dr. Andromas is a lumpy person to hug, but very giving. Oh yes. Comrade Cow is Dr. Andromas. Gives good hug. But why did you cry on me, Doctor? Do you cry for all your patients?
Dr. Andromas rocks me, and my wounds begin to heal. Again.
“I’m sorry,” I tell Dr. Andromas’s upper arm. “I’m sorry.”
Perhaps, from within the gauze, there is a whispered “shush.” The narrow shoulders stretch and the hands crawl a little farther across my back, settle again to hold me tighter. The only person who can do this for me, right now, is a stranger.
I HAVE decided that I need to go to Haviland alone. Gonzo has gone to Haviland. Dickwash came from there. The enemy plan is there, whether that is where it nests or just a place along its route. I must go, and go quietly. I cannot do this if I am being followed around by a small army of neo-Marceauists in berets. I need to ask questions in discreet rooms. The Matahuxee Mime Combine is not a covert operation. It is, especially for a completely silent group of people, stunningly loud. And so I have suggested to Ike that—for the moment—we must part company. I’m a little surprised at how hard this was. Ike has become a friend.
Ike, though, is not the problem.
Dr. Andromas turns to peer at me, then looks back at Ike. Ike shrugs. Andromas makes a sort of irritable wiggle, as if to say I’m an idiot but that doesn’t change anything. What it apparently doesn’t change is the doctor’s intention to come with me to Haviland City.
“It’s no good,” Ike Thermite says. “Don’t look at me.”
“He works for you.”
Andromas rolls his eyes at Ike, who sighs.
“Andromas,” Ike says, “works for Andromas.”
“I’m going alone.” Ike nods. Andromas doesn’t. Andromas just stares into space, like a cat being told to get off the bed. He gazes at the horizon as if I’m talking about someone else. I wave my hand in front of his goggles.
“Hey! Alone!”
Andromas nods. Yes. I am going alone. Andromas is just going in the same direction at the same time. He is not following. We are fellow travellers. Coincidence is wonderful, Hesperus is Phosphorus, no cause for alarm. I glance back at Ike. Ike is wearing the same face: this isn’t his problem, there’s nothing he can do about it, why am I talking to him? I’m surrounded by a benevolent conspiracy of idiots.
Andromas fluffs his cloak and cocks one arm with the elbow, so that the fabric covers the lower part of his face (already covered, of course, by his gauzy mask, and when did I stop finding that alarming and weird?), and stalks forward. Then he stalks off to the left and makes a full circle around us. Then he cocks the other hand and stalks back the way he came. He will disguise himself. He will be invisible, like the wind in the trees and the shadow of a tiger in the moonlight. No one will notice him.
Apart from everyone in the world who isn’t actually blind.
Perhaps I can lose him on the road.
“Don’t get in the way,” I tell him. Andromas nods happily and bounces off to warm up his truck. Annabelle—trucks should have proper names, not silly ones like Magic of Andromas—is waiting. I look back at Ike.
“I’m sorry,” I tell him. “I just think I should do this myself.”
Ike grins.
“I’m a mime artist,” he says, “not a superman. What could we possibly do but get in the way? But if you need us, Andromas will know how to find us. And K, of course.”
My shock troops. I can’t lose.
“And Andromas might surprise you.”
Yes. That much is almost certain.
There’s a fruity noise somewhere between a klaxon and a trumpet. Andromas—who isn’t coming with me, wouldn’t dream of it, just going in that direction—is eager to be off. I climb into the cab. The Matahuxee Mime Combine stand in a long line outside the Lubitsch house and wave, each a little out of synch with the next. From the porch Gonzo’s parents look on. We have already said our goodbyes, and the physical evidence is sitting next to me on Annabelle’s bench: a bundle of clothes, a Tupperware container and an envelope. The clothes are a mixture—cast-offs of Gonzo’s and a few of those mysterious items which accumulate in a big house over the years (the canary waistcoat is my favourite; I cannot conceive of any circumstance under which I would wear it) and two pieces of slick black fabric—a ninja outfit in my approximate size for the confusion of my enemies. It smells ever so slightly of bees. I put it down sharply and open the envelope. Money. Not a fortune but some, and thus infinitely more than I had before: facilitating money. And last a card, with two words written on it in Old Man Lubitsch’s awful scrawl—the name of one of the executives who came to take Gonzo away for his important new job. A familiar name. Richard Washburn.
Hello there, Dickwash.
The Tupperware tub is simpler. It is the old kind, a milky basin and a tight-fitting lid, the latter moulded with a flimsy t
ab at one corner to help you get it off again. The tub contains a sandwich—home-made bread jammed with more chicken, bacon, lettuce, tomato, egg, cheese and mayonnaise than any right-thinking loaf would ever willingly attempt to contain—and a bottle of home-made fizzy pop. There is even an apple and a little pot of honey.
Ma Lubitsch has made me lunch, and with it she has packed her love.
Chapter Fourteen
Working the System;
the paper trail and Mr. Crabtree;
I get my arse kicked.
THE PLAIN WHITE,” Libby Lloyd says definitively. She flicks her hair. Libby Lloyd’s shop is in the glitzy part of Haviland, which is all of it except the bits which most Havilanders don’t think of as the city proper, like the slums and the outer metropolitan area. It wasn’t hard to find. I ditched Annabelle at a truck stop after the drive and took a bus into the centre, then asked the nearest tourist where the best shops were. She consulted a little guidebook and said that the good deals were over to the west of the square. I thanked her and went east. Andromas pottered along behind me for a while, then ducked into a doorway to look at glittering rows of rings and necklaces. I expected him to pop up again, but he didn’t. Perhaps he’s invisible, or perhaps he has a short attention span. In either case, he’s not bothering me. I look back at Libby Lloyd.
“I like the stripes.”
“The stripes are very popular among the senior executives.” Subtext: surely you aren’t one.
“Ideal,” I tell her briskly. Subtext: then why on Earth are you showing me this other crap?
Libby Lloyd reassesses. She does not know me, so she has assumed that I am not important. On the other hand, I’m in her insane little shop in Haviland Square buying unpleasantly tight sports gear. More, I’m buying top of the line, and I’m not scared of the Big Dogs. A new customer. A new executive. Possibly unmarried. She tosses her head. It’s a full-service effort. One hand goes to her fringe, catches it lightly. The other rests on her stomach, emphasising its flatness and drawing attention to the elegant curve of her bust. She twists her neck sharply. Blonde hair spreads like a parachute and spins around her, light and feathery and infinitely strokable. It falls around her in a haze, and she fires a smouldering look at me for just a heartbeat before smoothing it into something professional and cool; you’d swear you hadn’t seen it. Libby Lloyd makes more money in a week than I have ever seen in one place. Money is not the issue. The issue is access. Running the most exclusive sports boutique in Haviland is still being a shopkeeper. It’s not being part of the System, and Libby Lloyd wants In. I know this because in Haviland everybody who isn’t In wants In, and everybody who is In wants to keep them Out. Pencilneck Heaven. A brief conversation via the electric telephone with K (the original and still the best) filled in my sketchy understanding of life here. Essentially, K said, the more ludicrously you behave, the more they will assume you have the right to.