‘Then what is wrong with you and the residents of this town?’ She turned to the crowd, hysterical now. Years of unheeded complaints and angry letter-writing, years of polishing the silverware in the front room cabinet and longing for a better life, years of sitting alone in cinemas watching lands she would never visit, years of witnessing the restrained acquiescence of her husband and sons; it all poured out in one great emotional fireball. She threw her arms up in a despairing gesture. ‘What is it that keeps you from taking back what belongs to you? Why can’t you feel some pride? You let your children waste their lives, you sit back and do nothing when all it would take is one little push, one step, that’s all.’ Again she snapped back to Cottesloe, who had foolishly thought he was safe for a moment. ‘And before you say it, yes, I know my sons haven’t done so well either, but I’m still proud of them, and I’d give anything to see their lives work out—’
The crowd, as crowds still do nowadays, remained silent and stupefied. Even Bob could see that his wife’s anger was as much directed at the men she had loved and lost as it was at the townspeople who stood by and watched. He reached out his arms to catch her as sadness overcame her and she fell against his shoulder with a strangled sob.
Ernest Cottesloe was a man who rarely passed a day without initiating an argument. He was also a believer in the old saying, ‘Let not the sun set upon your wrath’, but as he could see no easy way of placating this extremely angry woman, he attempted an alternative gambit and changed the subject entirely.
‘If your husband’s out of work, why are you both so dressed up?’ He stared at Bob’s testicular cufflinks in puzzlement.
‘Because it’s a special day, only you’ve gone and ruined it,’ replied Pauline without managing to provide an adequate explanation. ‘Our clothes are soaked and we wanted to look nice, and Kay’s missing—’ She accepted a Kleenex from Bob and wiped her dripping nose.
They made a miserable little group on the beach, windswept, rained-on, like a funeral party who had been accidentally set down at the wrong venue. Danny and Julia arrived, along with some local children, and the man who did the Punch and Judy shows, and a youngster from the Cole Bay Mercury started asking people questions and making notes in a book he kept tucked in his windcheater. And they all stared out at the sea and wondered if Kay had suffered an asthma attack, overturned the boat and—God forbid—drowned himself in the icy green waters of the Channel while they stood bickering.
Chapter 48
Through the Crash Barrier
Floundering among the fried fish in the harbour water, the smouldering General Bassa was having trouble remaining afloat. His glistening steel epaulets were twisted around his blackened neck from the force of the electric shocks, and his gold chains weighed him down heavily. The fur on his helmet was still alight. With a final anguished scream, he went under.
‘Kay, what in heaven is going on?’ asked Trebunculus.
‘Menavino and Scammer brought down the platform,’ I shouted. ‘We must get into the water too. It’s safe now. The Belligeratron has shorted out.’
But the way ahead was barred by the dark form of the Lord Chancellor. Buffeted on all sides, he stood his ground, separating us from the sea, his grimace mirthless, his anger infinite. He searched my face for a sign.
‘So, the donkey finally bucks its master,’ he said. ‘You fail in one world and try to spread your failure to another.’
‘No,’ I replied. ‘It’s taken me a long while to understand, but what I need to do is unite them both.’
‘Treason, then. You wish me harm.’
‘I have no desire to harm you, Septimus. You have simply acted according to your nature. Calabash, such as you have made it, now falls to you. Look upon your new kingdom. It is all but destroyed.’
Looking behind us, we could see the population in pitched battle with the guards, and it was already obvious that the leaderless army was being routed. Stepping around the disheartened Lord Chancellor, I dragged Trebunculus along with me and pushed him onto the stone steps leading to the Skylark.
The motor launch was built to carry twelve passengers and could probably take more. Together, the doctor and I began pulling Bassa’s surviving prisoners from the water. Menavino lifted the Sultan’s wife and the Royal Concubine, for whom he had a private fondness, from the tangle of netting into which they had been thrown, and the doctor hauled apologetically at the Sultan, who swatted irritably at his fluttering hands. Rosamunde came running, to loop her arms around my neck as I deposited her onto the seat of the launch, at my side.
‘I was always sure that you would find a way to reunite us,’ she said. ‘I knew you would come to understand our deeper intention.’
‘I’m just sorry it took me so long.’
‘Rosamunde, you brazen strumpet, soiled jade, painted harlot, return here at once! You can’t go there, it will be the end of everything!’ On the dock, her estranged husband Maximus ranted and bellowed at her, held back by a rippling wall of fishermen and farmers.
‘Ignore him, Kay. It won’t be the end, it’ll be the beginning. Complete your task.’
Before I had time to consider her remark, an explosion in the water returned my urgency of purpose. Some of the General’s men had found a working cannon on the dock. With the boat filled to capacity and the sea thrashed white with the floundering of soldiers, I turned the ignition of the Skylark and opened the engine to full throttle.
As I did so, it seemed that I was granted a sign from the gods, for the clouds parted to release sunlight onto the great shields of the harbour warriors. Powering the launch to its greatest acceleration, our hull lifted us in the placid sea as we raced forwards towards the illuminating cross. With just a hundred yards to go, I looked back to the kingdom of my dreams for one last sight of Calabash. The city seemed like any other now, grey and smoke-stained, rather drab and ordinary, lost beneath the swarming weight of its people, torn down from within, to be further razed in preparation for rebirth.
Above us, a flock of bluebirds swooped and folded, following the motor launch. I turned back to face the streaming wind, and raced the Skylark into the sun. The speedboat hit the dazzling intersection of light and found itself at the peak of an immense wave. We left the water and leapt the rift, to crash down on a sliding green wall of ocean that broke across our bow and almost swamped us. But the launch righted itself in time for me to spin the wheel and bring her around from the dark thicket of struts at the end of the ruined pier.
‘You did it!’ shouted Rosamunde excitedly, throwing her arms around my neck as I steered the boat towards the shoreline. The Sultan attempted to rise and make a pronouncement, but was tipped back into his seat by another wave. I realised now that we had emerged from the centre of a seastorm. The turbulent currents beneath our rudder snatched the wheel from my hands, and the throttle stayed jammed down even though my foot was no longer on it. Blue petrol fumes blasted into our wake as the engine howled and laboured under the swell.
‘This is going to be a very bumpy landing,’ I called back as we were caught in the next wave rising to shore and thrown forwards. I saw the brown pebble slope of the beach and the knot of people gathered on it before I realised just how fast we were travelling. The waiting assembly scattered as the Skylark, gripped by a great incoming wave, shot forwards, cresting the shallow water to plough waves of stones up either side of the hull.
The effect was that of hitting a brick wall at high speed. I was thrown from behind the wheel, into the air and onto the wet stones, while the motor launch, its engine screaming, ran out of beach and shot driverless through the gap in the railings and across the esplanade. With their brakes screeching, cars skittered and skewed in both lanes of the main road. Barely impeded, the Skylark mounted the kerb on the other side. The doorman of the Scheherazade Hotel watched in horror as the great boat headed straight for him. He leapt aside, and the bow of the cruiser ploughed into the giant picture-window next to the revolving doors with an awesome crash, imp
loding it in a million glistening shards. It finally came to rest against a bank of tables in the empty restaurant, the propeller still turning.
I found myself being lifted from the crater I had made in the pebbles and set upright by an erupting red-faced man who bore some passing resemblance to my employer Mr Cottesloe.
‘You bloody moron!’ he bellowed into my startled face, flicking spit over me. ‘Look what you’ve done!’
Someone said, ‘Stop shaking him, you idiot! His bones may be broken!’
Someone else said, ‘Hang on, son, there’ll be an ambulance here in a minute.’
But Cottesloe seemed unable to stop himself, and continued to yell, ‘Look what you’ve done! Just take a look at what you’ve done!’ The crowd drew itself in around us, as if for warmth, and so I looked.
Here is what I saw:
The rain had stopped and the sky was clearing. The afternoon had turned to evening, and stars had begun to glimmer through the deep blue void above my head. The mist on the sea had lightened to a slight softness of lines, and the end of the pier could now be seen. The dying sun shone upon the glistening beach so that the stones appeared as bright as boiled sweets. The Skylark had gouged a path to the esplanade, then left a black trail across the road to the demolished window of the hotel. The crowd that had gathered around me began to take on individual personalities. I could see Julia and Danny, and my mother and father, bizarrely dressed as though they had been detoured on the way to church, and other people I knew and loved, like Dudley Salterton and Miss Ruth, even though I knew they were dead so it couldn’t possibly be them, and I realised then that I was suffering from concussion, because behind them all, walking along the esplanade, turning this way and that to take in everything they saw, I recognised the delighted Grand Sultan and his mother, and the Royal Concubine, followed by Menavino, Scammer and Dr Trebunculus, and led by my beloved Rosamunde.
But as they reached the group assembled on the beach, they walked into the crowd and began to merge with them, blurring in my sight so that I could not tell any of them apart, and soon everything had grown as soft as the distant mist. Rosamunde was the last to leave my vision. And in the very final moment, like the green ray that appears just as the sun dips below the line of the sea, she looked up, caught my eye, and smiled.
Far above Rosamunde, the flock of bluebirds that had followed the motor launch on its voyage between two worlds dispersed across the storm-clouded sky like scattering slivers of silk.
‘I’m all right,’ I said shakily, turning to the figures who remained.
‘He’s all right,’ said Bob. ‘He’s woken up, haven’t you, lad?’ I later thought that he might have said, ‘He’s shaken up, aren’t you, lad?’ but it’s not the way I remember it.
Suddenly Pauline shoved forwards from the others and was holding me in her arms, and I knew things were different somehow, that I had indeed woken myself to the world. I think I saw the Semanticor talking with Miss Ruth as though they were old friends enjoying a school reunion. I think I saw Scammer and Dudley Salterton shaking hands. The Royal Concubine kissed Danny on the forehead. For a moment even Parizade was there in the crowd, her face slowly tilting to the evening sky.
As my mother cried, I looked over her shoulder to Julia, who gave a shocked smile, and I noticed for the first time how much her eyes were like Rosamunde’s. The strangest sight I saw that night was the Grand Sultan pushing Mr Cottesloe aside to stand before me, his eyes bulging with pleasure as he spoke. ‘You did it, Kay. You freed us. You’ve freed yourself.’ And he stepped back inside someone who could only have been my father, and was gone.
But the real thing I remember, the real moment I hold inside my head, was looking away from the crowd to see the broad figure walking down towards us across the canyon of pebbles as the promenade lights flickered on. I thought the ambulance had arrived because he was carrying a leather holdall, but it was my brother, Sean, who walked up and stood before me.
‘We were getting ready to go to the station,’ said Bob, ‘when the Greek girl came and called for us, and told us you were in trouble. Pauline made me wear this shirt. I wanted to stop and change.’
Sean stepped closer. He had lost some weight in his face and looked older than his years. His eyes were dark and tired, and he needed a shave. The lower half of his left sleeve hung empty. ‘It’s good to see you, little brother,’ he said, awkwardly placing my hands in his palm. He used to do that when I had trouble breathing, hold me until the panic passed.
‘I’m sorry, Sean,’ I said.
‘So am I,’ said Sean. ‘You don’t know how much.’
‘I didn’t know you were coming back today.’
‘I didn’t get much notice myself. Nothing was settled. Then it all happened very quickly.’
‘You’re really here, aren’t you?’
‘Yes,’ he laughed. ‘I’m here.’
An outraged voice cut through the gathering. ‘Here, what about my boat?’
‘Bugger your boat,’ said Pauline. And everyone began talking at once.
Chapter 49
Reborn in Dreams
‘He’s waiting for you,’ said the nurse. ‘You’re twenty minutes late.’
‘The buses are all delayed,’ I explained. ‘It’s started snowing. It’s cold enough to freeze the—’
‘Don’t you dare,’ she warned, ‘there’s children here. Go on in, then. I’ll bring you a mug of tea in a while.’
I sat on the edge of the hospital bed where I always sat, not in the chair, because he liked me closer. He moved less and less these days, but I knew because he always strained to move nearer beneath the bedclothes. His name was Alan Wickes, his condition degenerative to the point where his mother could no longer care for him at home. I had first seen him on my way to visit Miss Ruth in her ward. When I became a hospital visitor, his nurse asked me if I would sit with him and read. The library was a jumble of broken-backed romance novels, so I asked his mother what he liked, and brought in books from my own collection.
When the Simon Saunders Arcadia novels came into my possession, I read those to him. He enjoyed them so much that I read them all again. Then, one bitter winter night, after Sean was home and life had settled into something very different from how it was before, I told him about Calabash. I told him how it gained its name, of the legend of the gourd, the receptacle of the imagination that could bring life to the driest desert, and how I had finally managed to make the kingdom pour itself out into the real world, bringing new life, new colour, new hope.
After that I saw him change. Although he was losing the use of his limbs, he seemed less restless. I knew why. I knew where he was going. I could no longer go there, but I had no need to now.
Sometimes I imagine Alan’s flight into the city, and what he finds there when he arrives. I see the buildings and people rise up before him, twisting and changing to fit their new owner’s dreams. I suppose the name of Calabash has joined all the others in a list that stretches back to the beginning of time. I like to think that in a forgotten part of the woods there lie a few remnants of the Sultan’s magnificent palace, the iridescent turquoise tiles of its spires and golden fountains catching the sunlight through the ferns, polished pieces of walnut and sandalwood from its intricately carved windows half buried in the warm soil. I wonder if he favours an adventurous life, galloping across the skyline to the outposts of the kingdom, or if he prefers to lie in the arms of a girl like Rosamunde, watching the sunlit sea beyond the city walls. And I know that, unlike me, he has no need to leave it all behind, because with each passing day there is less to keep him here.
His mother has no illusions. She understands what is happening to Alan, and I think she has some inkling of where he goes. I know she wishes she could go with him just once, to see what it is that provides her son with such comfort. Although he deteriorates, his continued well-being has come as a surprise to the nurses, who now talk of a time when he might stabilise. His mother knows I am part of the solutio
n to the mystery of her son’s survival, but cannot bring herself to talk with me. Instead she sits beside me sometimes, touching the books and watching the boy’s eyes, as though one day she might catch a glimpse of the extraordinary world that lies beyond, a land denied to some, destructive to others, and always slightly out of reach.
Chapter 50
My Life
‘Now I know why you like standing here,’ she said, looking out from the shelter to the sea. ‘You can see the end of the pier.’ Her hand felt small in mine, but there was a strength in her that I had not sensed before. She released my hand and walked forwards into the cold sunlight. ‘You can feel the sea on your skin this morning.’ She pulled the hood of her coat back and ran her fingers through her ragged fair hair, closing her eyes. ‘Smell the salt.’
For a minute we just stood there, breathing the air. My chest was clear today.
‘Do you want to go on the pier?’
I thought for a moment. ‘No, it’s fine. We’ll be late for lunch. You know how they get.’ Pauline and Bob were still basking in the attention the family had received. My maritime collision with a stationary hotel had made national news. More alarmingly for the Cole Bay council, it had placed the resort under an unwelcome spotlight. Sensing a broader human-interest story, a couple of ambitious young journalists from one of the Sunday papers had discovered some sloppily hidden but fairly spectacular funding irregularities. Their investigation resulted in several front-page exclusives, a spate of arrests, some firings, an independent inquiry and the reopening of the Scheherazade under private management. Although I had been the unwitting catalyst for this, I nearly went to jail, and had been required to pay a share of the damages.
Julia looked up at the pier. The Crow’s Nest had a new artistic director, and had just been prevented by the council from showing Hair with its nudity intact. Not such a far cry from the days of Barnacle Bill and his saucy sea shanties. ‘Come on, just to the end and back. There’s time yet.’
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