Masked (2010) (50 page)

When Namid was done—and Maude was truly, irrevocably, dead—she sat down by the fire and found Captain Shao crouched on the other side of the flames. He was nearly naked, soaked; a deep scratch ran down the length of his side. But he was alive. Staring at the poisoned remains that had once been his sister.

“I’m sorry,” she said to him, too weary and heartsick to feel anything but shame at seeing him again; shame, that he should witness her covered in the blood of the only family he had left. Anger simmered in her gut, too—and despair.

“It had to be this way,” he said quietly, also without emotion. “But if she had seen me again. . .”

He stopped himself, and said nothing more for a very long
time. Namid lay down on the sand, holding her revolver close. Just before dying, Maude had told her that no other Juggernauts were close. The rest had remained in Shanghai, working with the British to overrun what remained of the Emperor’s southern seat. The Chinese military still fought, but not for long. They were running out of hope.

Light was creeping into the horizon when finally, softly, Captain Shao said, “I understand now why you left.”

“I doubt that,” she whispered, but pushed herself up and rubbed her face. “Your men are safe. As many as could be saved. We should find them.”

His eyes glittered, reflecting the dying firelight. “We have no submersible. And there is a war raging.”

Namid studied the revolver in her hands. She had found the vial of poison nearby. More bullets could be made. “I suppose that’s true.”

A sad smile touched his mouth, so much like his sister’s that Namid’s eyes burned with tears. “And I suppose it might also be true that the only way for us to survive is to fight.”

Namid sighed. Captain Shao whispered, “Can you be what they need?”

“What people love in war, they hate in peace,” she said quietly. “But yes, I can be what they need.”

Captain Shao stood and walked to her. He did not look at his sister’s body, but held out his hand to Namid.

“Lady Marshal,” he said. “You, MacNamara.”

“Yes,” she said again, and took his hand.

Ian McDonald
is the acclaimed science fiction author of such works as
The Dervish House, Brasyl, River of Gods, Cyberabad Days, Desolation Road, King of Morning, Queen of Day, Out on Blue Six, Chaga
, and
Kirinya
. He has won the Hugo Award, Philip K. Dick Award, and the BSFA Award, has been nominated for the Quill Award and the Warwick Prize for Writing, and has been nominated several times for the Hugo and Arthur C. Clarke Awards.
Asimov’s Science Fiction
called him “one of the most interesting and accomplished science fiction writers of this latter-day era. Indeed, maybe the most interesting and accomplished.” Need more be said?

I
AN
M
C
D
ONALD

It’s the particular metallic rattle of the football slamming the garage door that is like a nail driven into Chester Barnes’s forehead. Slap badoom, slap badoom: that he can cope with. His hearing has adjusted to that long habituation of foot to ball to wall. Slap baclang. With a resonating twang of internal springs in the door mechanism. Slap baclang buzz. Behind his head where he can’t see it. But the biggest torment is that he never knows when it is going to happen. A rhythm, a regular beat, you can adjust to that: the random slam of ball kicked hard into garage door is always a surprise, a jolt you can never prepare for.

The bang of ball against door is so loud it rattles the bay window. Chester Barnes throws down his paper and is on his feet, standing tiptoe in his slippers to try to catch sight of the perpetrators through the overgrown privet. Another rattling bang, the
loudest yet. A ragged cheer from the street. Chester is out the front door in a thought.

“Right, you little buggers, I had enough of that. You’ve been told umpteen times; look at that garage door, the bottom’s all bowed in, the paint’s flaking off. You’re nothing but vandals. I know your parents, though what kind of parents they are letting you play on the street like urchins I don’t know. This is a residential area!”

The oldest boy cradles the football in his arm. The other boys stand red-faced and embarrassed. The girl is about to cry.

“I know you!” Chester Barnes shouts and slams the door.

“Chester, they’re nine years old,” the woman’s voice calls from the kitchen. “And the wee one, she’s only six.”

“I don’t care.” Back in the living room again, Chester Barnes watches the five children slink shamefacedly down the street and around the corner. The little girl is in tears. “This is a quiet street for quiet people.” He settles in his chair and picks up his paper.

Doreen has balanced the tea tray on the top of her walker and pushes the whole panjandrum into the living. Chester leaps to assist, sweeping up the precarious tray and setting it down on the old brass Benares table.

“Now you know I don’t want you doing that, it could fall as easily as anything, you could get scalded.”

“Well, then you’d just have to save me, wouldn’t you?”

There is tea, and a fondant fancy and a German biscuit.

“Those chocolate things are nice,” Chester says. “Where did you get them?”

“Lidl,” Doreen says. “They’ve a lot of good stuff. Very good for jam. You never think of Germans having a penchant for jam. Is it in again?”

“What?”

“You know. The ad. I can see the paper, you’ve left it open at the classifieds.”

“It’s in again.”

“What does it say this time?”

“Dr. Nightshade to Captain Miracle.”

“And?”

“That’s all.”

“Are you going to reply?”

“With what? It’s nothing. I’ll bet you it’s not even him. It’s kids, something like that. Or fans. Stick on the telly, we’re missing
Countdown
.”

“Oh, I don’t know, I don’t like that new girl. It hasn’t been the same since Carol left.”

“It hasn’t been the same since Richard Whiteley died,” Chester says. They watch
Countdown
. Chester’s longest word score is a seven. Doreen has two eights, and gets the numbers games and today’s Countdown Conundrum. Doreen gets up to go and read in the backyard, as she doesn’t like
Deal or No Deal.
“It’s just a glorified guessing game,” she says.
Not for me it’s not
, Chester Barnes says. As she advances her walking frame through the living room door, she calls back to Chester, “Oh, I almost forgot. Head like a seive. The community nurse is coming round tomorrow.”

“Again?”

“Again.”

“Well, I hope it’s after
Deal or No Deal.
”

Doreen closes the door after her. When the creak of her walking frame has disappeared down the hall, Chester Barnes picks up the newspaper again.
Dr. Nightshade to Captain Miracle.
A rising racket on the screen distracts him. Noel Edmonds is whipping the audience up into a frenzy behind a contestant reluctant to choose between the sealed prize boxes.

“Twenty-seven, pick number twenty-seven, you blithering idiot!” he shouts at the screen. “It’s got the ten pounds in it! Are you blind? No, not box twelve! That’s got the fifty thousand! Oh for God’s sake, woman!”

Nurse Aine is short and plump and has very glossy black hair and very caked makeup. She can’t be more than twenty-two. She radiates the rude self-confidence of the medical.

“You’re not Nurse Morag,” Chester Barnes says.

“No flies on you, Chester.”

“Nurse Morag calls me Mr. Barnes. Where is she anyway?”

“Nurse Morag has moved on to Sydenham, Belmont, and Glenmachan. I’ll be your district nurse from now on. Now, how are we, Mr. Barnes? Fair enough fettle? Are you taking your half aspirin?”

“And my glass of red wine. Sometimes more than a glass.”

“Bit of a secret binge drinker, are we, Mr. Barnes?”

“Miss, I have many secrets, but alcohol dependency is not one of them.”

Nurse Aine is busy in her bag pulling on gloves, unwrapping a syringe, fitting a needle. She readies a dosing bottle, pierces the seal.

“If you’d just roll your wee sleeve up there, Ches. . . Mr. Barnes.”

“What’s this about?” Chester says suspiciously.

“Nasty wee summer flu going around.”

“I don’t want it. I don’t get the flu.”

“Well, with a dose of this you certainly won’t.”

“Wait, Miss, you don’t understand.”

Plump Nurse Aine’s latex hands are quick and strong. She has Chester’s arm in a grip, and the needle is coming down. She checks.

“Oh. I’m having a wee bit of a problem finding a vein. Chester, you’ve obviously no career as a heroin addict.”

“Miss, I don’t—”

Nurse Aine comes in again, determination set on her red lips. “Let’s try it again. You may feel a little prick.”

“Miss, I won’t. . .”

“Oh. Wow.” Nurse Aine sits back.

“What is it?” Chester asks.

She holds up the syringe. The needle is bent into a horseshoe.

“I’ve heard of hard arteries. . . I can honestly say I’ve never seen anything like this before. Mr. Barnes—”

The living room door opens. The walker’s rubber toes enter first, then Doreen’s low slippers.

“Suppositories,” Doreen says. “My husband gets all his medication by suppository.”

“It’s not in my case notes,” Nurse Aine protests.

“My husband is a special case.”

The rattle of the letter box disturbs Nurse Aine’s departure.

“There’s your paper, Chester.” She hands him the
Telegraph
as the paperboy nonchalantly swings his leg over the fence to Number 27 next door. Chester waves it after her as she goes down the path—daintily for her size, Chester thinks—to her small green Peugeot 305.

“Mr. Barnes!” he calls. But the kids are hovering around the garage door again, casting glances at him, trying to block the football from his view with their bodies.

In the living room Doreen sits on the unused seat beside Chester’s big armchair in the window bay rather than her wing-back chair with the booster cushion by the door.

“Yes?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re hovering.”

“I am not hovering, I’m perching. So is it in?”

“Is what in?”

“Don’t come that with me, Chester Barnes. Turn to the small ads right now.”

They flip through the pages together. Their fingers race each other down the columns and sections, stop simultaneously on bold print.

Dr. Nightshade to Captain Miracle. Ormeau Park.

“Ormeau Park. He’s close. Where do you think he is?”

“I heard Spain, on the Costa, with the rest of them.”

“What do you think he wants?”

“I don’t know.”

“Chester, I’m concerned.”

“I’ll look after you, don’t you ever worry. Nothing will ever harm you.”

Doreen lays her hand on her husband’s.

“If only you could do that.”

Then with a slap baclang! like a steel avalanche descending into Haypark Avenue, the first goal hits the metal garage door.

Old men wake easily in the night. A bulge of the bladder, the creak of something that might be an intruder, the gurgle of water in the pipes, a night plane, the lumber of a big slow truck making deliveries to Tesco, the sudden start of a dream, or a nightmare, or that edge-of-sleep-plummet into nothingness that is much too much like death. Anything at all, and they’re awake and staring at the ceiling. And no amount of lying and turning and punching up the pillow to try to make it comfortable or flicking the blankets in under your feet will send you off again. Doreen sleeps sound as a child, her mouth open, her eyes crinkled up in a private, slumbering smile. Every insomniac knows the rule that a partner steals the sleep from you.