King of Morning, Queen of Day (35 page)

At least the need to empty her stomach into the avocado-coloured porcelain seemed less urgent.

Jaypee was uncharacteristically testy when she returned to the glass and plastic work space.

“Well Words?”

“Well Pictures?”

“Green Cow?”

She squinted at the hand-drawn rough, grimaced.

“Leave it with me. I’ll stay late tonight and see if I can generate some suitable words for your pictures. Sorry, Jaypee, but the hemispheres of my brain feel like two distant tribes communicating by talking drum.”

She made sure both the Blessèd Phaedra and Oscar the Bastard saw her stay after the rest had gone back to their timber-frame Tudorette dwellings in corporate ghettos with names like Elmwood Heights and Manor Grange. The Little League of Decency and Purity came around with their vacuum cleaners and environmentally friendly spray polishes. Enye sat in a box defined by dribbling white aerosol and polishing yellow dusters, the victim of a troupe of geriatric French mime artistes.

“Make sure you switch off and lock up when you go, now.”

She waved to the Little Leaguers through her gleaming glass walls and presently hers was the only illuminated glass box in the Glass Menagerie. She scribbled things on pieces of paper. She stared at Jaypee’s Early Plastics Connoisseur calendar. She pushed the pieces of paper with things scribbled on them around her desk. She cut out the drawing of the Green Cow with scissors and blue-gunked it to the wall. She threw crumpled pieces of paper with things scribbled on them at the miniature waste bin basketball net Jaypee had bought her to welcome her to QHPSL. She found her Walkperson and listened to the stringent, ascetic counterpoints of the Brandenberg Concertos. She wrote
I hate DairyCrest Creameries. I hope you all catch Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy
in large fat letters on a sheet of A2, taking a minute for each large, fat letter.

Nothing would
come.

The Garfield wall clock informed her it was twenty past ten
(ten!)
and in panic she scribbled down the first five things that came into her head.

And yes, she remembered to put off the lights and lock up.

In the elevator it struck like a physical assault. She gasped, pressed her forehead against the dimpled metal walls, praying for cool, for release. The door opened. She stumbled into the stale-exhaust atmosphere of the underground car park. Bulkhead lights in wire cages threw uneasy shadows over the oil-stained concrete and squat pillars decorated with black and yellow warning chevrons; the exit ramp curved up into darkness. She fumbled in her handbag for the pass card. Her green and white Citroen with the bamboo and wicker pattern was the only car. It seemed a tremendous distance away across the ulcerous concrete. Each footstep set nuclear fireworks exploding through her frontal lobes. Safely behind the wheel, she closed her eyes and waited for the throbbing to ebb away. She opened her eyes.

The air was boiling.

Soft motes of black light fell from infinite height to detonate on her retinas.

She reversed the Citroen 2CV around in a reckless arc, pointed its de Gaulle nose at the ramp.

The boiling air coalesced, solidified. At the foot of the ramp hovered what looked like nothing more than a transparent vagina.

Enye pressed her fingers to her temples, pressed, pressed, as if she could press them through into her brain to tear out the pain.

The vagina-mouth puckered and opened.

Out of the mouth in the air emerged something that looked like a pepper pot made of elephant flesh that crept upon thousands of red millipede feet.

It advanced into the car park. Its top, which, had it been a pepper pot and not something altogether other, would have turned to grind pepper, revolved slowly. It was studded with eyes. From each eye shone a beam of poisonous lilac light.

Behind it, within the vagina-mouth, Enye saw others struggling to push through, pushing at each other, pushing at the invisible muscles of the gateway. Others: like a spinning black-and-white-striped something that went from being like an upturned grand piano to being thinner than a razor’s edge. Others: like a dog with the head of nun, like a crimson tree with its branches covered in mouths, like leprosy that has devoured its victim and still walks erect, like something that could not be clearly seen but which sounded like oiled steel being bandsawn.

The pepper pot’s eye beams glanced across Enye; she heard bells and rocks being crushed, tasted brass, felt elation, disgust, vertigo, and acute ennui.

She jammed the Citroen into reverse. The engine wailed as she slewed back across the car park. The pepper-pot thing sent its eyelights flashing and darting off pillars, roofs, warning signs, bulkhead lights. Half blinded by the pain, Enye slammed the car into forward gear, gunned the engine, popped the clutch, tyres, screeched and smoked. The left fender of the Citroen caught the pepper-pot thing and flipped it up and over the roof. It lay on its side, millipede feet waving frantically, eyes rotating from side to side.

Tyres screeched again. Enye put the car into reverse, lined up the weaving eye lights in her rearview mirror, and put her foot down.

The Citroen jolted.

The pepper-pot thing split and burst, spilling a watery blue ichor across the concrete.

Something like a headless wolf dipped in luminous oil with a grinding lamprey maw tore free from the pressing labia of the gateway in the air. Screaming hysterically, Enye rammed the car into first again and floored the accelerator. The Citroen juddered and slewed. It caught the lamprey-wolf squarely, shattered its thin bones beneath its wheels. Enye threw up her arms to protect her from the impact as the Citroen’s Gallic nose wedged and stuck in the vagina mouth.

The pain inside her head went up in a searing detonation, as if lightning had struck inside her skull.

The smell of ionisation woke her; the sharp tang of electricity and smoking rubber. Every electrical circuit in the car was burned out, every fuse blown. Thin smoke trickled from the cassette player. The tip of the radio aerial had melted and run into chromium droplets.

She had no idea of the time—her watch had stopped. The metal casing was slightly warm to the touch.

She stepped out of the car. What had been might never have been. That patch of blue dampness on the concrete might have been glycol from a leaking radiator, that shrivelled, decomposed thing behind the pillar a black plastic garbage sack left by the Little League of Decency and Purity for pickup. She pushed the dead car back into her parking space.

Her head was clear.

Her head was
clear.

Shivering by night in her day clothes, she wafted by the university palings to the taxi rank. A pair of hopeful buskers held a pitch in a shop doorway, hunting down the small change of the pub-and-club crowd. A boy played electric guitar through an amp/speaker assembly mounted on a backpack; his colleague, a punky girl in holey fishnets and leotard, danced with startling gymnasticism to the stalking, rhythmic guitar. Driving home in the taxi, Enye thought it strange that the boy should have been wearing shades after midnight, well after midnight; the little plastic digital clock on the driver’s dashboard, between the little plastic Garfield and the little plastic BVM, read twenty past one.

The shakes hit her on the third stair. She sat on the worn carpet and willed her hands to be still. When finally she could open her front door, there was an envelope waiting for her on the mat. The envelope had a distinctive smell she could not quite place. Taped to the creamy white envelope was a note from Mr. Antrobus: the letter had been delivered at noon by a bicycle courier and in her absence he had signed for it. He hoped she did not mind his using his passkey to leave it for her.

The creamy white envelope contained an invitation for her to call at the offices of Mr. Martland of Messrs. Ludlow, Allison, MacNab, Solicitors, at her earliest convenience.

She could place that distinctive smell now.

Lawyer.

Mr. Antrobus has lived since the end of the last world war in three downstairs rooms of the house on L’Esperanza Street with his posters of Greek temples by Ionian sunsets, his twelve (at the last census) cats, and his television. In those forty-four years he has never opened his front door any wider than necessary to collect his morning milk. The people of L’Esperanza Street, he maintains, have always been suspicious of him, partly because of the foreign sound of his name, mostly because of his Proclivities. He was conceived in a misfortunate decade, he says. One generation later and he could have taken his Proclivities and waved them over his head and no one would have batted an eye. Anywhere but L’Esperanza Street, that is. Enye tells him he should try again—it is never too late, you are never too old—but he dismisses her suggestions with a wave and a scowl.

“Changed too much,” he says. “Too aggressive, too violent these days. They terrify me, all that barely contained aggression. For a time, it was a beautiful thing. Not anymore. Anyway, there’s always the chance of… you know.”

The truth is that for the last forty-six years he has mourned an unrequited love for a fiacre driver on the island of Kos where he landed with the Allied Forces in 1943. On the first night out of Alexandria, he had dreamed that a youth of Homeric beauty beckoned him across the wine-dark sea to an island of sun-bleached white houses and olives older than the topless towers of Ilium. And there, standing on the quay with his duffel bag on the sun-bleached limestone, he had glimpsed among the rowdy fiacre drivers, sham-fighting each other for the privilege of driving the Liberators to their accommodations, the face he had dreamed of in the belly of the troopship. It was love at first sight. He stood paralysed by the drugged arrows of Eros.

He never rode in that fiacre, never spoke to its driver, never came closer than a street table at a café across the square from the stand where the drivers gathered under the shade of the trees outside the Church of Aghios Nicolaos. But he has carried in his heart like an icon these forty-six years the image of the young men of Kos diving naked at sunset for sponges and his young fiacre driver standing like Apollo newly sprung from the brow of Zeus, silhouetted against the sinking red sun.

It is a story Enye never tires of hearing, as Mr. Antrobus never tires of telling, for they both understand that unrequited love is the most enduring love of all.

After the war Mr. Antrobus came into possession of the house on L’Esperanza Street through a succession of bequests and, having hived off sufficient living space for himself, rented the upper floor as a self-contained apartment under the stipulation that any tenant must undertake to do his weekly shopping for him. Enye enjoys shopping for him—she sees it as her duty to introduce him to a new and interesting culinary experiences. Proclivities notwithstanding, she knows that Mr. Antrobus is not a complete prisoner of his three rooms. High summer has been known to lure him into his back garden in Panama hat, singlet, and aged, aged Army shorts with aged, aged deck chair to join her on her sun lounger, and in the dawn and dusk hours she has seen the beam from the lamp on his aged, aged black Phoenix bicycle weaving unsteadily down the alleyway at the back of the row of houses. She knows better than to ask. They have their closenesses, and they have their spaces. Sunday afternoons she visits him for tea and individual apple pies.

Sunday mornings are for the dojo. Her
sensei
has noticed a tendency toward open aggression in her sword style, contrary to the spirit of
Ai Uchi,
of cutting the enemy in the same instant as he cuts you, the spirit of dispassion, of treating one’s enemy as an honoured guest.

“My enemies are not honoured guests,” Enye says darkly.

“You will lose the Way,” her
sensei
admonishes.

Enye does not say that she fears she lost the Way long ago. Master and pupil, they kneel in
seiza,
swords on the right-hand side, and bow to each other.

Now she sits on Mr. Antrobus’s overstuffed old chesterfield, curled like one of his contented cats in a pair of old jeans so soft from washing they spontaneously go into holes and a loose rag top she knitted herself. Mr. Antrobus passes a willow-pattern teacup with an individual apple pie still in its foil cup perched on the side of the saucer.

“Have you ever thought what hell is like?” In the four years Enye has been visiting him the emphasis of his conversation has moved with stellar slowness from love remembered to death anticipated. “I think about it a lot. At night, when I cannot sleep, I feel the oldness and tiredness of my flesh and a dreadful chill comes over me, as if a cold hand has closed on my heart. I am going to die. Some day, and that day is drawing closer with every tick of the clock, I will die. No escaping it. No exceptions, no exemptions. My heart will stop, my blood will go cold, my thoughts will freeze in my brain, and this consciousness, this self that is all I know, will gutter out like a candle. Do you think about death?”

“Like Picasso said, a little every day.”

“But then I think, what if it is not the end? What if there is something beyond death? What if there is a heaven and a hell?”

“The smart money bets on there being a God. If there is no God, and you bet there is, you lose nothing. If there is a God, and you bet there isn’t, you lose. In spades.”

“Yes, but have you placed your bets?”

“No, not yet.”

“Ah. And neither have I. But either of us could have to face that question at any moment, and if we are wrong, it will be hell for all eternity. Hell.” He licks his lips. “Can you imagine the moment when you are dismissed from the presence of God? Can you imagine the fall that is supposed to last nine days and nine nights? Can you imagine the demons that carry you through the walls of hell that are four thousand miles thick? Can you imagine the moment when the chains lock around your body and you know that you will never move again? And then you pass through the brass gates of Pandemonium that bear the legend ‘Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here,’ and you hear the screaming—a million, a billion, a trillion voices, all screaming, screaming for a million, a billion, a trillion years—and the demons that have borne you thus far set you down at the edge of the pit and you see the bodies: as far as you can see, bodies, piled on top of one another, the bodies of the damned, screaming and roaring and blaspheming at each other. Then the demons of the pit itself lift you to take you down to the place they have chosen for you, and as they set you on top of a pile of bodies and fly away you know that eternity begins now, that from now on nothing will ever change, nothing will ever happen. You will never be free, you will remain in the same place forever and ever and ever, the same people beside you, the same people in front of you and behind you, the same people below you and heaped on top of you. You will never see anything else but their bodies; you will never hear anything other than their screaming and roaring. A hundred years will pass, a thousand years will pass, and a hundred thousand, and a hundred million, and still…” He lowers his voice to a thin whisper: “And still:
not one instant of
e
ternity will have passed.
It never ends. It never ends, on and on and on and on and on, forever and ever and ever, never changing, forever.”