Qinmeartha and the Girl-Child LoChi (5 page)

6: Alas, Poor Jas

Joanna spent the next few days smoking too much, drinking too much and trying to work out the solutions to two riddles: first, what had happened that night on the moor, and why the two young Gilmours had lied so comprehensively about it; and, second, the reason – if any – for the symmetry that existed between her experience on the moor and the recurring dream of the light-saturated world. On the moor the sky had been unrelievedly black, save for the stars' pinpoints, and even the flame of the match had shown no light; while in the world of her dreams there was no escape from the sky's radiance, no merciful shadows even in the lee of tall objects. There had been noise on the moor, the cries of large animals and the racket of their rapid movements; while in the desert the sluggish creatures of which she herself seemed to be one made no noise as they slithered from each almost identical site to the next.

Had the dreams been some kind of forewarning of the reality, skewed into oppositeness as precognitive dreams so often were? Or was it possible that the reality had, in some way she couldn't properly understand, sparked off the dreams ahead of time? A third possibility, one that she didn't much like to think about, was that in some obscure fashion the dreams might have
triggered
the reality. But if that were the case then she had to re-examine her whole notion of what the word "reality" meant. She was not prepared to accept that her recollections of events on the moor were illusory, but neither was she able to accommodate mentally the concept of solid, basic, physical reality being sculpted by something as transitory as dreaming – as soon accept the possibility that someone could dream the world was flat and wake the next morning to discover that indeed it had become so.

But, if the events of that bleak black night had been brought into being by the dreams – as a reaction to them, perhaps: a form of psychological enantiopathy – and if, at the same time, reality was some kind of tangible, inalterable substrate to the universe, then how could the two be reconciled? Only, she mused, if there were varying
degrees
of reality, different
types
of it, different
qualities
of it. And here her mind rebelled: the whole line of speculation was beginning to lead her into territory that she regarded as mystic claptrap: today pondering the nature of reality, tomorrow signing up as a full-time Hare Krishna zombie – no sirree!

Something else puzzled her, but, because of the amount of scotch she was drinking, she couldn't bring her mind to focus on it. She was fully aware that matters had gone seriously awry in the village of Ashburton-by-the-Moor, and that in the normal way she'd be trying to call the attention of the authorities to what was going on – or, at the very least, she'd be trying to get away – but there was something stopping her from doing either of these two things. Something more than just the lethargy induced by the booze, although that was undoubtedly playing its part: when she wasn't reeling from the debilitating effects of last night's excesses she was already half- or entirely pissed from the morning's.

~

She didn't go out much during those few days, except to fetch further supplies of cigarettes, whisky and food from the International Stores down on the corner of Queen Street and Fleet Street. Even as lacking in alertness as she was, she couldn't help noticing that the little supermarket was like a haunt of its customary self rather than the real thing: the assistants behind the cheese counter and at the check-out were pale and listless, and spent most of their time playing with their nails or chatting dully because of the dearth of customers. She felt obscurely glad, once she'd signed her cheque and loaded up her carrier bags, to be scuttling out of the place and into the fresh air.

She kept these excursions as brief as possible, and made no detours: she just went straight down West Street to the junction, crossed over, into the shop, and then back home again, not looking to right or left. If she had had any courage, she kept telling herself, she'd have made a point of confronting the Gilmours rather than avoiding them; but there was always a good reason why it would be better for the moment of confrontation to be put off until tomorrow.

Life just ... flowed on, at a very low ebb. She hoped that ghosts didn't exist, because Aunt Jill would be horrified at the kind of existence her solitary niece was leading; but even the image of that erect, vital figure, with her grey hair in its neat curls and her mouth drawn into a featureless tight line of contempt, didn't have the power to drag Joanna out of her laggardly abyss. And she didn't
want
to be dragged out of it: she was honest enough to recognize this, and accept it. The longer she continued this half-existence, the longer she could delay the moment when she had to accommodate herself to reality – or reality to herself.

And so it was back to the nature of reality again, and from there into conjectures about the werewolves on the moor, and from there ...

The circle was unbroken.

~

On the Sunday night Mike phoned.

"Darling! Is that you?" His voice was distorted on the line, and for a few moments she thought someone must have rung the wrong number. She'd got out of the habit of thinking of herself as anybody's darling.

"Who's there?" she said guardedly.

"Mike. That
is
you, isn't it?"

"Mike – Joanna."

"Darling, I've been worried about you. No word for nearly a fortnight."

"You're not responsible for me any longer," she said, knowing she was being unfair. "We're not an item any longer: we're two individuals."

She hunkered down beside the telephone and put her back up against the landing wall. One of Aunt Jill's cacti served as an ashtray.

"That's easy enough to say." Mike's voice, even through the
Hitch Hikers' Guide to the Galaxy
effects, was obviously distressed. "You can't just draw a curtain over the past and pretend it never happened."

"You no longer have any claims on me," she said.
It's easier to put it that way around than to admit to him the great act of betrayal I've performed. It was his fetus as much as mine that was flushed away at the clinic. I took that fetus from him without his permission.
"If you hadn't got it into your head that you owned me, maybe we'd still be together. But we're not. That's over."

"I'm trying to be your friend, darling. One of the things that friends are
for
is to look out for each other. I'm not making any claims on you."

"Same difference."

"Oh,
shit
! We're getting into an argument again. Do
you
want an argument? No?"

"Of course I don't. There's nothing left between us to argue about."

There was a long enough silence on the line – if the sound-effects for an electric toaster going berserk could be called silence – that she began to wonder if he'd hung up on her. She deserved to be hung up on. She took another swig from the bottle and told herself she enjoyed being a bitch, and, anyway, Mike was such a doormat that he deserved whatever shit got wiped on him.

"You're all right?" He was there again.

"Yes."

"You're not lying, are you? Just to not worry me? If you like, I could get in the car and be with you by the morning."

"I'm fine. Everything's brilliant. Aunt Jill's died – did I tell you that? – and I've inherited everything, although it'll be a few months before all the papers have been signed. Oh, yes, and I've decided to stay down here in Ashburton rather than live in London any longer: I'm going to be a country girl from now on, and go around with muddy boots and a straw in my mouth. Apart from that, though, it's been just another humdrum fortnight in sleepy little Ashburton-by-the-Moor."
Or should I tell him about the night when a pack of werewolves stretched around me from one side of the moor to the other? Or the way that Aunt Jill's life was drawn from her, sucked out as if by a vampire's bite? Or the way that, every now and then, I catch myself fancying Tony Gilmour, which is a new and not entirely welcome development so far as I'm concerned? No, better tell him none of these things. They'd only make him pile into the car, like he threatened, and come down here to make everything even more complicated and even worse ...

"You're still there? Joanna?"

"I'm still here."

"Your voice sounds funny. Are you
sure
there's nothing wrong?"

"It's a fundamental impossibility that my voice should sound any funnier than yours," she said deliberately. "Impossibility" was something of a triumph. "The BBC Radiophonic Workshop would be proud of what Telecom's doing for you."

He laughed, observing the protocols. "You sound a bit newted," he said at last.

"I am. I'm allowed to be. I told you, I'm a free person, now."

"You always were."

"Sez you."

"You know you were. Don't let's get into that again. All I was trying to say was ..."

"... that if I ever get into any trouble or difficulties, you'll always be there to help me out. I knew that already. Your script's beginning to repeat itself rather too often, Mike."

There was another of those crackling, explosive pauses. When he spoke again his voice sounded much fainter, as if Ford Prefect were retreating across the galaxy.

"You're not a very easy person to be a friend of, Joanna."

"I never said I was."

She put the phone down, feeling in some obscure way that she'd scored a point, but almost immediately it rang again.

"Joanna? We got cut off."

This time his voice was as clear as if he'd been in the next room.

"Spose so," she said.

"Are you going to be coming up to London any time soon?"

"Maybe in a week or two. I've got to see Rinaldo about terminating the lease on the flat, and I've got to sort out how I'm going to get everything down here."

"I can help with the van," he said. She'd known he would – she'd been relying on his van – but at the same time she hated him for his predictability.
It's a good job you like being bitchy, Joanna my lass, because you do it so well and such a hell of a lot of the time.

"If you want to," she said.

"I do." He breathed heavily. "Just don't let yourself ever forget that I'm your friend, darling. I don't ask to be anything more than that, I realize the way ..."

"Don't," she said. "Don't go on. I'm happy you're my friend."
Now I'm sounding patronizing, which is surely
'way
more than the poor guy deserves.
"Let's just leave it at that, hey?"

"Yeah." His voice was subdued. She knew him well enough to know that he'd been hoping for something more, telling himself not to hope for it, and was now disappointed that his non-expectations hadn't been fulfilled.

"I love you," she said out of habit, then hurried to make amends. "I mean, I love you as a friend. I'm not
in love
with you. It's different."

"Yeah. I know. 'Night, Joanna."

She relented a little.

"You're one of the good guys, you know, Mike? Maybe people don't tell you that often enough. Maybe
I
don't tell you that often enough."

"Yeah. Joanna, it's late: I've got to be up early in the morning. Night-night. Sweet dreams. Don't let the beasties ..."

She slammed the phone down, and lit a cigarette fiercely. She tilted back the bottle and drank deeply, the whisky seeming to scorch the tender inside of her throat.

How do you
stop
the beasties biting when there's a moorful of them and only the one of you?

You bite them first, I guess.

But what if you have no teeth?

~

It was a couple of nights later that the dream presented itself to her in its fullest manifestation yet.

The world of the Wardrobe Folk, and the Wardrobe Folk themselves, were brought into existence at the same time as the rest of the universe by the god Qinmeartha, known to the other gods as "the Insane" – for surely only an insane god would wish to create existence, and then to continue to tamper with what went on in it. Qinmeartha had initially revelled in the glories of his creation, but after a few billions of years he had come to resent the way that the other gods mocked him, and he had begun to avenge himself on his creations. In those days the world (which had never been named, even by Qinmeartha himself, who was better at making worlds than naming them) of the Wardrobe Folk was a balmy, temperate place, with forests covering much of the land and broad grey clouds often in the sky. Each of the Wardrobe Folk had been attended by their personal angel, who hovered always overhead and had voluminous black wings that could be spread wide whenever the person required greater shade. It was always summer, in the world that used to be, with the trees eternally panoplied in protective leaves; but the summer was a cool one.

The Wardrobe Folk had speech then, and music, and eyelids. They built tall houses, ascending and descending between the floors using ramps. They were not immortal: they bred in groups of three or more, imitating their god by producing offspring before they died; perhaps, in that case, they were possessed also by something of his insanity, but what is madness in a god is benign necessity in a mortal.

Pastoral days.

Soon ended.

Qinmeartha could not express his wrath against the other gods, for their retaliation would have destroyed him and then, as an afterthought, the universe he had brought into being, so that there would have been nothing at all of him left. But the mortals who dwelt within his universe were without power, and he had long ago – without knowing why he was doing so – designed them so that they could experience pain to a depth of excruciation beyond, although he did not admit this, even what a god could suffer.

Qinmeartha the Insane, in the cosmic glory of his spite, took away the shadows from the universe. Everywhere there was unalleviated light, so that nothing could escape being seen. He drove the angels who had ever accompanied the Wardrobe Folk into invisibility and intangibility, so that, while they were still there hovering overhead – this was a matter of knowledge that transcended faith among the Wardrobe Folk – they could no longer interpose their dark wings between the lurid sky and the wide eyes of their wards. The flaring sunlight stripped the leaves from the trees and then the bark from the branches and at last the branches from the boles; and the rivers and seas dried away to leave a world of sands. All the myriad sounds that the world had been accustomed to enjoy were replaced by just one: that of the wind blowing dry sand over dry sand; the music and speech of the Wardrobe Folk had died along with the rest. The Insane God burnt the buildings the Wardrobe Folk had erected, so that the light of the flames ascended into the sky and added to its brightness; and in one terrible day he sent imps down into the world who with their long serrated knives cut away the eyelids of every one of the folk, from the newest child to the dying.