King of Morning, Queen of Day (40 page)

Jaypee sets two cream-capped jars of the Great National Beverage on the mock Art Deco table.

“To quote the immortal Flann O’Brien, ‘A pint of plain is your only man!’” he says by way of toast and invitation to pour it out let it run and plume and splash onto the floor, run out the door and into the streets, fill them with its torrential onrushing, down to the sea, the sea, and forgetfulness. And suddenly she wants more than anything to say it, say it out, say it now. Be free of it; her albatross.

“Jaypee?”

“What?”

“Jaypee, I have something I have to tell you.”

“Please remember that you are in licensed premises and may not legally, much less morally and ethically, be responsible for anything you might say.”

“No, Jaypee, I have to tell you this. You’re my oldest, dearest friend; nobody else knows this, not even Saul.”

“I tremble in anticipation.”

The words come. In a rush. In a storm. Like many, many birds. They come to the edge of her lips, the tip of her tongue.

And will not go any farther.

“My life is kind of… complex.”

The shadow.

He knows it. She knows he knows it. He knows she knows he knows it. And as if it is the sign and seal of her isolation, it comes to her: the wrongness, like a throbbing pressure, like a sore about to burst and spew black pus. She excuses herself, makes for the mock Art Deco Ladies’ Room, where she cries aloud from the pressure in her head and heart. She excuses herself, apologises: a migraine. Jaypee comments that she has been getting a lot of those lately. Pressure of work, she tells him. He looks at her in a way that says many things at once, none of them capable of being spoken aloud. She goes home to wait for night. The city is dark. In the darkness of her apartment she pops a tab of Shekinah. She pulls on her black zip-up one-piece. She ties her hair back from her face. She laces her red shoes onto her feet. She pulls on a short brocaded jacket and an embroidered Moroccan hat Jaypee brought her from one of his many and wide-ranging travels. She goes to the rack in her living room, bows respectfully, lifts the swords, and puts them in the back of the car.

She is afraid. Every time, she is afraid. As she drives, the fear is so intense it is almost sexual. This time she may not be able to defeat whatever is waiting for her. This time whatever waits for her may destroy her. Impelled by the vertiginous swoop of Mygmus energies on the edge of her perceptions, Enye MacColl drives out of the two
A.M.
city to the corrugated steel hulks of a recession-struck industrial estate close by the threshold lights of the airport. The location does not surprise her. They tend to be attracted to places with which she has associations. She stops at a closed-down factory unit. A hoarding inside the perimeter wire directs interested parties to a city centre real estate company. The light in the small glass and plywood booth is the security guard. He is reading a horror novel by an American author. A car at this hour does not concern him. It is a popular area for couples. Enye should know. Under the scream of back-throttling Boeings she cuts the wire with a pair of bolt cutters she keeps in the back of the car. She has quite a respectable little house-breaking kit in there. She gains entry to the vacant unit and there does battle with an Iron Age warrior armed with a spear that unfolds into a rosette of barbs. They battle across the concrete floor, striking sparks from the steel pillars, while the big jets come and go in thunder and light. The warrior goes down before her fire-and-stones cut. She slips out the way she came in, under the wire, into her car; drives off. The night watchman is listening to his radio now.

A police car stops her on the way home. She tells the incredibly young policeman she is coming from a party. The incredibly young policeman shines his torch over her; looks into her face for signs of drink, drugs; checks her license; and salutes as he wishes her a good night, remember to drive carefully. During the entire encounter the incredibly young policeman’s overweight, middle-aged partner sat chewing at the edges of a hamburger while the prowl car radio crackled and spat night-static.

When she is sure they are not behind her, she stops the car and shivers spastically for the best part of half an hour from nervous tension.

She opens the door of number twenty-seven L’Esperanza Street to find Ewan watching the late news and drinking her coffee. There have been mass resignations in Eastern Europe, apparently, and bomb warnings to American airlines. A delegation of twelve European Muslims has failed to lift the death sentence for blasphemy imposed upon a prize-winning author. The star of an Australian soap opera is to appear in a pornographic movie.

She is furious. And afraid. There are things he should not see all around him.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“Your landlord let me in. Said you wouldn’t be long. What time do you call this?”

“Is my brother my keeper? Just what do you want?”

“What do you think?”

“Our mother. Our sacred, virginal mother.”

“She’s been to the doctors. They say there’s nothing wrong with her—nothing medical, that is. They say she’s as fit as a flea, but she’s going downhill, Enye. Downhill. You should see her—she’s lost pounds, she’s listless, she has no energy, no enthusiasm, won’t eat, won’t talk, won’t go out. She’s sick. She’s a sick woman. She’s a woman who has made herself sick. She’s a woman who is being eaten from within because her own daughter will not forgive her for what she did to her father.”

“Well, let me tell you why this daughter will not forgive her mother. Because her mother lied to her. Not once, not twice, not three times, or ten times, but repeatedly, constantly, for fourteen years. She tied to me, to us, to both of us, Ewan, never forget that, about why our father left. She has never told us the truth, she never will. I know she lied. I was here, at the time of the Christmas tree.”

Names have power. To name a memory, to say it out, is to live it again.

She cannot remember why she is decorating the Christmas tree on her own; that has been edited out, cut and recut like life in an Australian soap opera. She is draping tinsel garlands over the branches of the fir by the glow of the faery lights. She loves that glow—it is the light of Christmas, the Christ light captured in a hundred tiny glowings. The doorbell rings, she goes to answer it. It is a man her father worked with. She knows him vaguely; he obviously knows her better than she knows him. Can he come in? Yes. Can he sit down? Yes. She continues decorating the tree. They are both uncomfortable.

Is her mother in? No.

It’s about her dad. Just to say, when he comes back, if he comes back, his job’s open. Any time, he can have it, we’ll always find a place for him.

And he goes.

And she knows…

(Slipping the rubber band around Li’l Lilli Langtree the faery’s wasp waist onto the top of the tree)

… that this is the first of too many moments she will never be able to share.

“She said they’d fired him because he had been embezzling money. She said it wasn’t the first time it had happened, but it was the last—she couldn’t live with someone she couldn’t trust.”

“And?”

“I am too much like my mother.”

“For God’s sake, because of a little white lie, you won’t forgive her?”

“Won’t. Can’t. As I said, I am too much like my mother.”

“She’s willing to forgive you.”

“Very magnanimous.”

“She needs your forgiveness.”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Just drink your coffee and go away, Ewan. I don’t know anything anymore.”

When he has gone, long gone, she goes to the telephone. There are a number of messages on her answering machine, all of them from Saul. He is angry, a sound to be pondered over, savoured. It is a rare vintage, Saul’s anger. Where the hell is she, what is she doing, and with whom? This is the way it ends, staking claims around other’s lives, with demands, and suspicions, and message after message on answering machines.

She cuts the machine off.

“Saul, my life is kind of complex,” she whispers. On the pale blue screen tomorrow’s weather unfurls across the country in neatly positioned symbols. She punches a number she has never quite managed to forget.

It is ringing. Two, three, four times. It is late. There will be wondering, who can be phoning at this time of the night? Maybe there will be alarm, maybe fear. Maybe she should hang up and call again another night, another week. Six times. Eight times:

“Hello? Who is this?”

She cannot say it.

“Hello? Hello? Who is this? Who’s calling?”

She cannot say it. Not one word of it.

“What’s going on here? Who’s calling? Look, you had better tell me who you are or I’m putting the phone down, right now.”

“Hello?”

“Hello?”

“It’s me.”

Even those words are too many. She presses the hangup button. Prrrrrr. After a time that seems like no time but is longer than she has realised, a computer-generated voice says, “Please replace the handset and try again. Please replace the handset and try again. Please replace the handset and try again. Please replace the handset and try again. Please replace the handset and try again. Please replace the handset and try again. Please replace the handset and try again…”

He who does not have the spirit of discipleship will never become a Master of the Way. The spirit of discipleship is the Way of the teachable spirit. The Way of the teachable spirit is the spirit of the open hand; which is the spirit that brings nothing with it, that lays claim to no thing, no value, no knowledge; the spirit that is open and receptive.

Her
sensei,
in his homespun Zen
koans,
often chided Enye that the only thing that stood between her and true mastery of the Way of the Sword was the want of a teachable spirit. “Your hands are too full,” he would say, striking the knuckles of them gently with the sheath of his
katana.
“Your head is too full—full of strategies and tactics and cluttering thoughts. That may be the Way of Advertising, but sure as shit it isn’t the Way of the Sword. Let go, woman. For the love of God, just for once, let go. What the hell is it you’re holding onto so tightly?”

She was never sure.

Only when she came to kneel at the feet of new Masters did she begin to understand what he meant. With the fall of the early autumn nights she would return, and return again to the place beneath the railroad arch where the Midnight Children in their exquisite deformity waited to lead her in the new Way.

She learned the names and natures of her enemies, the phaguses, the Nimrod—both names uncomfortable and unwieldy, though in time they would become as familiar as old gloves—and why, despite the appalling wounds she had inflicted upon it, the Nimrod had refused to die, was even now regenerating itself into a new form. Not being any kind of living creature, but a manufacture of the subconscious mind, it, all phaguses, would continue to manifest themselves as different aspects of that same subconscious mindset. Until either the anomaly in the reality/Mygmus interface that permitted their existence was restored to harmony. Or the subconscious mind-set was erased.

She learned the name and nature of her own power:
mythoconsciousness.
The word tasted bitter at first, like her first sip of ceremonial Japanese tea, but as she drank deeper of it, so its sacramental nature filled her being. Mythoconscious—she was mythoconscious; of that rarest sisterhood that throughout human history had channelled and shaped humanity’s deepest fears and hopes into the gods, demons, and heroes of its darkest nights.
Mythoconscious;
she wielded the name, the title, like a sword; like a sword, it cut reality and left it bleeding.

“Unlike your Adversary, you don’t have the gift of the great dream-shaping,” Sumobaby told her, with the ember light raising dull highlights on his sweating flesh and the boom box wired to the car battery beating it out into the night hip-hop rhythm. “The genes were diluted by recessives. Skipped a generation. You have only recently developed the ability to interact with the Mygmus. The talent must be consciously developed if you are to bring the healing.”

And, pressed up close to the afterglow warmth of Saul’s sleeping body in her bed, she read from the Rooke archive by the light from the yellow streetlights:

I have this dread that afflicts me in the dead of night: it is that somehow, we have lost the power to generate new mythologies for a technological age. We are withdrawing into another age’s mythotypes, an age when the issues were so much simpler, clearly defined, and could be solved with one stroke of a sword called something like Durththane. We have created a comfortable, sanitised pseudofeudal world of trolls and orcs and mages and swords and sorcery, big-breasted women in scanty armour and dungeonmasters; a world where evil is a host of angry goblins threatening to take over Hobbitland and not starvation in the Horn of Africa, child slavery in Filipino sweatshops, Colombian drug squirarchs, unbridled free market forces, secret police, the destruction of the ozone layer, child pornography, snuff videos, the death of the whales, and the desecration of the rain forests.

Where is the mythic archetype who will save us from ecological catastrophe, or credit card debt? Where are the Sagas and Eddas of the Great Cities? Where are our Cuchulains and Rolands and Arthurs? Why do we turn back to these simplistic heroes of simplistic days, when black was black and white biological washing-powder white?

Where are the Translators who can shape our dreams and dreads, our hopes and fears, into the heroes and villains of the Oil Age?

And again, with the rain cutting in sheer and cold across the grey industrial sloblands, she muffled up in her fleecy hooded sweat top:

“You keep telling me telling me telling me I’m to bring healing. I don’t know what you mean, how, even why.”

Raindrops drummed on the black plastic roof to their small council chamber. Lami had coiled herself tight, hugging thin arms about her body for warmth. The joints passed around the circle, to the left-hand side, to the widdershins, the witching side. Moonface spoke.