It was both an extraordinary sensation, and one she felt perfectly at ease with. When, at the last moment, it seemed not to want to go, she pressed it forward and it obeyed her, its stream flowing into him. It was hers to control, she realized, with a rush of exhilaration, which was followed immediately by an ache of loss as the body below her drank the torment down.
He was greedy for healing. Her joints began to jitter as the menstruum ran from her, and in her skull that alien song rose like a dozen sirens. She tried to lake her hand from his head, but her muscles wouldn’t obey the imperative. The menstruum had taken charge of her body, it seemed. She’d been too hasty, assuming control would be easy. It was deliberately depleting itself, to teach her not to press it.
An instant before she passed out, it decided enough was enough, and removed her hand. The flow was abruptly stemmed. She put her shaking hands up to her face, Cal’s scent on her fingertips. By degrees the whine in her skull wound down. The faintness began to pass.
‘Are you all right?’ Cal asked her.
She dropped her hands and looked across at him. He’d raised himself from the ground, and was now gingerly investigating his bloodied mouth.
‘I think so,’ she said. ‘You?’
‘I’ll do,’ he replied. ‘I don’t know what happened …’ The words trailed away as the memory came back, and a look of alarm crossed his face.
‘The carpet –’
He hauled himself to his feet, looking all around.
‘– I had it in my hand,’ he said. ‘Jesus, I had it in my hand!’
‘They’ve taken it!’ she said.
She thought he was going to cry, the way his features crumpled up, but it was rage that emerged.
‘Fucking Shadwell!’ he shouted, sweeping a copse of table-lamps off the top of a chest-of-drawers. ‘I’ll kill him! I swear–’
She stood up still feeling giddy, and her downcast eyes caught sight of something in the litter of broken glass beneath their feet – she stooped again; cleared the fragments, and there was a piece of the carpet. She picked it up.
‘They didn’t get it all,’ she said, offering the find to Cal.
The anger melted from his face. He took it from her almost reverentially, and studied it. There were half a dozen motifs worked into the piece, though he could make no sense of them.
Suzanna watched him. He held the fragment so delicately, as though it might bruise. Then he sniffed, hard, and wiped his nose with the back of his hand.
‘Fucking Shadwell,’ he said again, but softly now; numbly.
‘What do we do now?’ she wondered aloud.
He looked up at her. This time there were tears in his eyes.
‘Get out of here,’ he said. ‘See what the sky says.’
‘Huh?’
He offered a tiny smile.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Must be Mad Mooney talking.’
Part Three
The Exiles
‘Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born.’
Matthew Arnold
The Grande Chartreuse
I
THE RIVER
he defeat they’d sustained was utter. The Salesman had snatched the Weave from Cal’s very fingers. But, though they had nothing to be jubilant about, they had at least survived the clash. Was it simply that fact that made his spirits rise when they stepped out of the warehouse into the warm air?
It smelt of the Mersey; of silt and salt. And it was there – at Suzanna’s instigation – they went. They walked without exchanging a word, down Jamaica Street to the Dock Road, then followed the high, black wall that bounded the docks until they found a gate that gave them access to the wharfs. The region was deserted. It was years since the last of the big cargo vessels had berthed here to unload. They wandered through a ghost-town of empty warehouses to the river itself, Cal’s gaze creeping back, and back again, to the face of the woman at his side. There was some change in her, he sensed; some freight of hidden feeling which he couldn’t unlock.
The poet had something to say on the subject.
‘Lost for words, boy?’ he piped up in Cal’s head. ‘She’s a strange one, isn’t she?’
That was certainly the truth. From his first sight of her at the bottom of the stairs, she’d seemed haunted. They had that in common. They shared too the same determination, fuelled perhaps by an unspoken fear that they’d lose sight of the mystery they’d dreamt of for so long. Or was he kidding himself, reading lines from his own story into her face? Was it just his eagerness to find an ally that made him see similarities between them?
She was staring into the river, snakes of sunlight from the water playing on her face. He’d known her only a night and a day, but she awoke in him the same contradictions – unease and profound contentment; a sense that she was both familiar and unknown – that his first glimpse of the Fugue had aroused.
He wanted to tell her this, and more, if he could just find the words.
But it was Suzanna who spoke first.
‘I saw Immacolata,’ she said, ‘while you were facing Shadwell…’
‘Yes?’
‘… I don’t quite know how to explain what happened …’
She began haltingly, still staring at the river as though mesmerized by its motion. He understood some of what she was telling him. That Mimi was part of the Seerkind, the occupants of the Fugue; and Suzanna, her granddaughter, had that people’s blood in her. But when she began to talk about the menstruum, the power she’d somehow inherited, or plugged into, or both, he lost any hold on what she was saying. In part because her talk became vaguer, dreamier; in part because staring at her as she struggled to find the words for her feelings gave him the words for his own.
‘I love you,’ he said. She had stopped trying to describe the torrent of the menstruum; just given herself over to the rhythm of the water as it lapped against the wharf.
He wasn’t sure she’d heard him. She didn’t move; didn’t speak.
Finally, she just said his name.
He suddenly felt foolish. She didn’t want professions of love from him; her thoughts were somewhere else entirely. In the Fugue, perhaps, where – after this afternoon’s revelations – she had more right to be than he.
‘I’m sorry,’ he muttered, attempting to cover his faux pas with further fumblings. ‘I don’t know why I said that. Forget I spoke.’
His denial stung her from her trance. Her gaze left the river. and found his face, a look of hurt in her eyes, as though drawing her gaze from its brilliance pained her.
‘Don’t say that,’ she said. ‘Never say that.’
She stepped towards him, and put her arms around him, holding him hard. He answered the demand and hugged her in return. Her face was hot against his neck, wetting him not with kisses but with tears. They didn’t speak, but stood like that for several minutes, while the river flowed on at their side.
Eventually he said:
‘Shall we go back to the house?’
She stepped back and looked at him, seeming to study his face.
‘Is it all over; or just beginning?’ she asked.
He shook his head.
She made a tiny, sideways glance back at the river. But before its liquid life could claim her again he took hold of her hand and led her back towards the concrete and the brick.
II
WAKING IN THE DARK
hey returned – through a dusk that had autumn in its hollows – to Chariot Street. There they scoured the kitchen for something to placate their growling stomachs – ate – then retired to Cal’s room with a bottle of whisky they’d bought on the way back. The intended debate on what they should do next soon faltered. A mixture of tiredness, and an unease generated by the scene at the river, made the conversation hesitant. They circled the same territory over and over, but there were no inspirations as to how they should proceed.
The only token they had of their adventures to date was the c
arpet fragment, and it offered up no clues.
The exchange dwindled, half-finished sentences punctuated by longer and still longer silences.
Around eleven, Brendan came home, hailing Cal from below, then retired to bed. His arrival stirred Suzanna.
‘I should go,’ she said. ‘It’s late.’
The thought of the room without her made Cal’s heart sink.
‘Why not stay?’ he said.
‘It’s a small bed,’ she replied.
‘But it’s comfortable.’
She put her hand to his face, and brushed the bruised place around his mouth.
‘We’re not meant to be lovers,’ she said quietly. ‘We’re too much alike.’
It was bluntly put, and it hurt to have it said, but in the same moment as having any sexual ambition dampened he had a different, and finally more profound, hope confirmed. That they belonged together in this enterprise: she the child of the Fugue, he the innocent trespasser. Against the brief pleasure of making love to her he set the grander adventure, and he knew – despite the dissension from his cock – that he had the better of the deal.
‘Then we’ll sleep,’ he said. ‘If you want to stay.’
She smiled. ‘I want to stay,’ she said.
They stripped off their dirty clothing, and slipped beneath the covers. Sleep was upon them before the lamp had cooled.
It was not empty sleep; far from it. There were dreams. Or rather, a particular dream which filled both their heads.
They dreamt a noise. A planet of bees, all buzzing fit to burst their honeyed hearts; a rising swell that was summer’s music.
They dreamt smell. A confusion of scents; of streets after rain, and faded cologne, and wind out of a warm country.
But most of all, they dreamt sight.
It began with a pattern: a knotting and weaving of countless strands, dyed in a hundred colours, carrying a charge of energy which so dazzled the sleepers they had to shield their minds’ eyes.
And then, as if the pattern was becoming too ambitious to hold its present order, the knots began to slide and slip. The colours at each intersection bled into the air, until the vision was obscured in a soup of pigments through which the loosed strands described their liberty in line and comma and dot, like the brushstrokes of some master calligrapher. At first the marks seemed quite arbitrary – but as each trace drew colour to itself, and another stroke was laid upon it, and another upon that, it became apparent that forms were steadily emerging from the chaos.
Where, dream-moments ago, there’d been only warp and weft, there were now five distinct human forms appearing from the flux, the invisible artist adding detail to the portraits with insolent facility.
And now the voices of the bees rose, singing in the sleeper’s heads gave names to these strangers.
The first of the quintet to be called was a young woman in a long, dark dress, her small face pale, her closed eyes fringed with ginger lashes. This, the bees said, is Lilia Pellicia.
As if waking to her name, Lilia opened her eyes.
As she did so a rotund, bearded individual in his fifties, a coat draped over his shoulders and a brimmed hat on his head, stepped forward. Frederick Cammell the bees said, and the eyes behind the coin-sized lenses of his spectacles snapped open. His hand went to his hat immediately, and took it off, to reveal a head of immaculately coiffured hair, oiled to his scalp.
‘So …’ he said, and smiled.
Two more now. One, impatient to be free from this world of dyes, was also dressed as if for a wake. (What happened, the dreamers wondered, to the brilliance that the strands had first bled? Were those colours hidden somewhere beneath this funereal garb: in parrot-bright petticoats?) The dour face of this third visitor did not suggest a taste for such indulgence.
Apolline Dubois the bees announced, and the woman opened her eyes, the scowl that instantly came to her face displaying teeth the colour of old ivory.
The last members of this assembly arrived together. One, a negro whose fine face, even in repose, was shaped for melancholy. The other, the naked baby he held in his arms, drooling on his protector’s shirt.
Jerichau St Louis the bees said, and the negro opened his eyes. He immediately looked down at the child he held, who had begun to bawl even before his name was heard.
Nimrod the bees called, and though the baby was surely not yet a year old, he already knew the two syllables of his name. He raised his lids, to reveal eyes that had a distinctly golden cast to them.
His waking brought the process to an end. The colours, the bees and the threads all retreated, their tide leaving the five strangers stranded in Cal’s room.
It was Apolline Dubois who spoke first.
‘This can’t be right,’ she said, making for the window and pulling back the curtains. ‘Where the Hell are we?’
‘And where are the others?’ said Frederick Cammell. His eyes had found the mirror on the wall, and he was scrutinizing himself in it. Tutting, he took a pair of scissors from his pocket and began to snip at some overlong hairs on his cheek.
‘That’s a point,’ said Jerichau. Then, to Apolline: ‘What does it look like out there?’
‘Deserted,’ said the woman. ‘It’s the middle of the night. And …’
‘What?’
‘Look for yourself,’ she said, sucking spit through her broken teeth, ‘there’s something amiss here.’ She turned from the window. ‘Things aren’t the way they were.’
It was Lilia Pellicia who took Apolline’s place at the sill. ‘She’s right,’ the girl said. ‘Things are different.’
‘And why’s it only us who are here?’ Frederick asked for the second time. ‘That’s the real point.’
‘Something’s happened,’ said Lilia, softly. ‘Something terrible.’
‘No doubt you feel it in your kidneys,’ Apolline remarked. ‘As usual.’
‘Let’s keep it civil. Miss Dubois,’ said Frederick, with the pained expression of a school master.
‘Don’t call me Miss,’ Apolline said. ‘I’m a married woman.’
Immersed in sleep, Cal and Suzanna listened to these exchanges, entertained by the nonsenses their imaginations had conjured up. Yet for all the oddity of these people – their antiquated clothes, their names, their absurd conversations – they were uncannily real; every detail perfectly realized. And as though to confuse the dreamers further, the man the bees had called Jerichau now looked towards the bed, and said:
‘Perhaps they can tell us something.’
Lilia turned her pale gaze towards the slumbering pair.
‘We should wake them,’ she said, and reached to shake the sleepers.
‘This is no dream,’ Suzanna realized, as she pictured Lilia’s hand approaching her shoulder. She felt herself rising from sleep; and as the girl’s fingers touched her, she opened her eyes.
The curtains had been pulled apart as she’d imagined they’d been. The street lamps cast their light into the little room. And there, standing watching the bed, were the five: her dream made flesh. She sat up. The sheet slipped, and the gaze of both Jerichau and the child Nimrod flitted to her breasts. She pulled the sheet over her and in so doing uncovered Cal. The chill stirred him. He peered at her through barely open eyes.
‘What’s going on?’ he asked, his voice slurred by sleep.
‘Wake up,’ she said. ‘We’ve got visitors.’
‘I had this dream …” he muttered. Then, ‘Visitors?’ He looked up at her, following her gaze into the room.
‘Oh sweet Jesus …’
The child was laughing in Jerichau’s arms, pointing a stubby finger at Cal’s piss-proud groin. He snatched up a pillow and concealed his enthusiasm.
‘Is this one of Shadwell’s tricks?’ he whispered.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Suzanna.
‘Who’s Shadwell?’ Apolline wanted to know.
‘Another Cuckoo, no doubt,’ said Frederick, who had his scissors at the ready should either of thes
e two prove belligerent.
At the word Cuckoo, Suzanna began to understand. Immacolata had first used the term, speaking of Humankind.
‘… the Fugue …’ she said.
Naming the place had every eye upon her, and Jerichau demanding:
‘What do you know about the Fugue?’
‘Not much,’ she replied.
‘You know where the others are?’ Frederick asked.
‘What others?’
‘And the land?’ said Lilia. ‘Where is it all?’
Cal had taken his eyes off the quintet and was looking at the table beside the bed, where he’d left the fragment of the Weave. It had gone.
‘They came from that piece of carpet,’ he said, not quite believing what he was saying.
‘That was what I dreamt.’
‘I dreamt it too,’ said Suzanna.
‘A piece of the carpet?’ said Frederick, aghast. ‘You mean we’re separated?’
‘Yes,’ Cal replied.
‘Where’s the rest?’ Apolline said. ‘Take us to it.’
‘We don’t know where it is,’ said Cal. ‘Shadwell’s got it.’
‘Damn Cuckoos!’ the woman erupted. ‘You can’t trust any of them. All twisters and cheats!’
‘He’s not alone,’ Suzanna replied. ‘His partner’s one of your breed.’
‘I doubt that,’ said Frederick.
‘It’s true. Immacolata.’
The name brought an exclamation of horror from both Frederick and Jerichau. Apolline, ever the lady, simply spat on the floor.
‘Have they not hanged that bitch yet?’ she said.