He crouched and looked at the legs, which were puffy and scabbed to the hooves. In Borderer, interrupting each other, Sarai and Mo told him that it wasn’t like the usual foot rot. John turned on the translat to keep track as their explanation became more and more complicated. For several weeks now, they said, since the rains had started, they’d tried giving the normal injections and creams. He took a sample from one of the flaking red scabs and kidded the doctor into doing an analysis. After several outraged pronouncements about nonhuman tissue, he got what he wanted from the screen.
“It’s caused by a fungus,” he said, “like the stuff that grows on the walls.” He selected a syringe. The goat, either too ill or too drugged to notice, barely moved as he jabbed its rump.
Uncomfortable, the boy was shredding the end of the tether with his fingers. He and Sarai were avoiding John’s eyes. Weren’t penicillin and antifungal systemics sold in the souks?
They’d have heard, anyway, that he normally refused to treat animals. Nuru, he knew, would see it as a lowering of standards and be quietly outraged. Then Sarai said something the translat didn’t catch, and they led the goat out through the surgery. He called, “You’ll bring it back, won’t you?” The translat echoed unt oo? as the children vanished into the rain.
He was at the clinic again next evening, still working on correlating the doctor’s data. Time was short now, but he didn’t know how short, having blanked out the screen’s calendar a while ago. He was surprised at how easy it had been to forget the actual date his term in the Magulf ended. He knew that he’d come here after the rains, and he knew that the streets had been dry and windy and cold, that there had been an almost Ley-like tang of salt on the waters of the Breathless Ocean, but he’d given up counting the days.
He began to search his pockets for a new leaf of koiyl, patting and squeezing each pocket in turn, wondering as he did so why it felt odd, until he realized that he was mimicking Felipe’s regular search for blisterpacks. There. His gloved fingers closed on the familiar rounded shape and traced the notched and indented spine, the little stub of the cut-off stalk. He took the leaf out and looked at it, feeling his mouth stretch into a smile. Not a Lall leaf. He put it whole between his lips, his cheeks bulging, his tongue tracing the sharp underridge, and felt his saliva sweeten and thicken as the surface oils were released. The leaf swelled and grew more pliant, inviting his teeth to sink in. His heart began to skip. Dee-dah, dee-dah, like one of Felipe’s stupid half-remembered tunes, drowning out the sound of the rain on the roof. There. He bit, and felt the leaf open up, break, separate. The rush of his senses, the ease of his pain, the stars that always floated momentarily before his eyes.
When a tap at the door came, he swallowed the fibers, paused the screen, and went out to where Sarai, Mo, and the goat were standing, again backlit by the bonfire lights in the towerblock. The echo from the day before was so complete that he had to stop for a moment, his back stiffly arched and his hand on the doorframe.
We keep him in our room now, they told him as they shuffled in. We don’t mind the smell—but he tries to eat our beds. The goat looked no worse, perhaps even a little better, but Sarai and Mo seemed disappointed: they must have expected more than this gradual remission. The creature butted John when he crouched down to examine the legs. Sarai and Mo cheered up a little at that.
John asked, “Doesn’t he have a name?”
No name. They shook their heads.
“Who does he belong to?”
They waved their hands, and said the Borderer word that meant both no one and everyone.
He jabbed in more penicillin. “He’s for the carnival, isn’t he? The sacrifice?”
They nodded, and the goat blinked drugged brown eyes. John took a tin of zinc oxide off the shelf.
“So when is it? The carnival?”
They shrugged, and waved their fingers. Two, three days—or even tomorrow.
“Why did you come to me?”
They said nothing and shuffled closer together. Their brown eyes were as impenetrable as the goat’s. Then Sarai nudged Mo, and John guessed that they had noticed his red koiyl-stained teeth.
“Okay.” He disengaged the doctor. “The goat should be fine soon anyway.”
“Fatoo pray no rain?”
“Yes. But I want you to show me something.”
He closed the clinic and followed Sarai and Mo up the hill. The climb was steep this way, and he had to stop as a hot chill ran over him. He spat out a series of stringy lumps. Then a gout of reddish fluid followed. He coughed and blinked back stars as the mess washed into the gutter, then hurried up the street and stood waiting, leaning on the bottom rail as Sarai and Mo took the goat up the steps of their tenement. When they returned, he followed them across the square to a lighted doorway that gleamed over the cobbles. The inside was filled with a drumming and tapping that came only partly from the rain. Faces turned towards him as people paused in their work on the carnival floats, but no one seemed that surprised to see him here.
He wandered the aisles, where arc lights sparkled, hammers hammered, drills and saws howled. A huge glittering dragon that clawed the air of the warehouse ceiling was almost lost in misty, methane-lit space, its jaws roaring out the smell of glue. Children were scolded when they climbed scaffolding or tried to use one of the great skeins of new material for a slide. He found Sarai and Mo with their parents, painting an ornate sash around the flatbed that would carry the goat. Fatoo, they said, and blinked slowly at him as their brushes dripped red pools onto the floor.
Where the darkness was deeper, a giant screen-demon reared up towards the roof. Its head was a vague triangular lump, with slotted irises that reminded John of the sheep he’d used to talk to on his way across the Yorkshire moors to some deathbed; the eyes had the same bland and unquestioning gaze. Beyond that was an antique float, nothing more than a half-collapsed frame, a squashed spider. John ran a gloved hand along one of the rusty poles and saw a flicker of light that came from an old man who sat working almost hidden in a corner. The man pulled whispering transparent material through a machine. Without using his translat, John tried asking what the float was going to be. He got nowhere. The man only gestured at the sky, saying something about the Scuro Rey—the gods, the Dark King.
There was no Mass this evening, and John felt more than usually empty as he wandered out into the rain. He checked his watch, running his finger over the slight inflammation that had appeared in the ridged flesh around it. Walking back up Gran Vía to the presbytery, stopping to spit into the running gutter, watching as the red froth was swept away, he saw snatches of life through windows that the weeks of rain had washed almost invisibly clean. Pans steamed on stoves. Cats preened by fires. A man stood buttoning his shirt. John stopped outside a window set almost level with the street. It was dry and warm inside, and children crouched in the light, painting each other’s faces. Powdery white first, then black for the eyes and nose, hair drawn back and lips clenched for them to draw skull-grinning teeth. One of the children caught sight of the figure outside the window, and their fluttering hands streaked their faces as, silently through the glass and the rain, they began to scream.
He walked quickly on. Dripping power cables stretched uselessly overhead, segmenting the disordered sky. On Gran Vía, he saw that the presbytery lights were still shining, and that a van had parked outside. Laurie’s van.
He pushed the door aside and climbed the stairs and halted halfway, breathless, to inspect his face in the mirror. Corpse-white skin, straggling rivulets of hair, bloody mouth, and silver eyes—but it was too late to do anything about the way he looked, and he could hear voices, female Borderer voices conversing, warm and engaged, along the corridor at the top of the stairs.
“Ah!” he said, standing at the edge of the light that opened into the smoky fragrance of Bella’s kitchen, thinking he might as well dramatize his newly awful appearance.
Bella sat on a stool, the light from the stove gleaming on her bare kne
es. She had a cup in her hand. The other woman seemed so different that for a moment, as she turned, John thought she wasn’t Laurie.
He said, “You’ve grown your hair.”
“Yes.” Laurie held out her hands, palms down, to show him her fingernails. “The stuff you have to take plays havoc with these. Where have you been?”
“At the clinic.” He shrugged, fanning his hands. “I had a special case. Were you—”
Laurie said something quick and unfathomable to Bella, then picked up her pack of tubes and bag, pushing back her newly lengthened hair with a half-formed gesture. It shone, combed and washed, but John noticed, with a hot, weary tug, that, Laurie being Laurie, the ends were already split.
“John, we need to talk…Your room’s down there, isn’t it?”
Bella watched as he and Laurie went out into the corridor and down, their paths separate but interlocked. He opened the door, and Laurie lifted the crumpled cards off the chair by the dresser and sat down with her legs crossed, her back to the streaming window.
“Bella says she’s turning off the generator now,” she said.
He nodded and took out a chemlight. On cue, the bulb in the ceiling dimmed. The darkness pulsed in, then rearranged itself to the corners of the room as the chemlight’s catalysts hissed. He took a seat on the bed, conscious of the snap of the springs, the rug’s faded pattern, the crucifix on the wall. No wonder, he thought, that I never wanted to bring her here.
“John, you look dreadful.”
He smiled.
“This place smells of…” She looked around and saw the old Quicklunch box full of koiyl leaves. Her hair swayed. The fall of it made her face look thinner. Too thin, perhaps—but he thought he could get used to it. “Bella says you’re chewing those now.”
“They’re harmless. Everyone says they’re harmless.” He chuckled. “Apart from me, that is. And it would have been presumptuous, don’t you think, to try to do something about the koiyl trade without understanding what it was really about. I have a good supply now. There’s a room half full of them down the corridor. I was given them by Ryat—you remember Ryat?”
She reached into her bag and broke open a maroon-colored tube. “You must be wet. Cold…”
“You’ve spent too long in the Zone, Laurie,” he said. “Out here we have to get used to the rains. And why, when you grew your hair, didn’t you change the look of your answerer?”
“I thought about it, knowing that you were always calling. But I decided you might try to…To make some interpretation.”
“Then why did you let the answerer talk to me at all?”
She waved the question away with her hand, the smoke from the tube drawing a jagged symbol that suggested in the moment before it dissipated that the whole matter was complex, beyond the scope of anything that they might have to say to each other.
“But I’m sorry,” she said, “that it’s ended like this.”
He nodded. The room swayed. “So am I.”
“It had so much…promise. I suppose that having sex was a mistake.”
“I’ve made worse ones.”
She smiled. “It was really Tim Purdoe,” she said, “who talked me into coming here.” She gestured at the room. “Although I didn’t want you to go back without…” She searched for the right word. “A farewell.”
“I saw Tim—a while back. He said that he wanted to examine me. But I suppose you know that, looking through the net. I seem to remember that your answerer knew.”
“I’m not my answerer, John. It’s just a trick of the net. Something I once did, overdid really, just playing around, looking for someone to talk to. Anyway, this is all ridiculous.”
“What is?”
“The way you think you’re being betrayed, let down.” She squeezed out the tip of her tube and stooped to pull out the tin wastecan that lay between her and the bed, noticing as she did so, he was sure, the chewed red lumps in it. “It isn’t true.”
“I suppose you’ve spoken to Felipe. And of course to Bella.”
“I just wanted to see if you were taking care of yourself.”
“Here I am. You can see that I’m taking care.”
“When are you going back to Europe? Has the bishop said?”
“No, she hasn’t.”
“What do you expect to achieve this late?”
“The leaf—”
“You’re not the only person in the world, John. And I’m not saying that you should give up everything, forever. Just…”
“You think I should leave here?”
“Now that I’ve seen you, yes. I think you should go back. There are other healers and helpers. And you’ve said often enough that Nuru can cope with the clinic. I don’t want you to break up here, John, I don’t want you to get hurt. I have no idea how you’ve managed to get like this, but I’m sure it’s not that difficult to damage your recombinant if you really try. Even a child could.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about, Laurie,” he said. The chemlight was starting to fade now, and a space of darkness was flowing in the room between them. But how could she dismiss the silver tangle beneath his flesh so easily? As though it was something you could step out of, discard…
“I see now,” she said, “why you’re like this. It’s simple with you, really, John. Everything you do and say keeps coming back to…” She broke open another tube and blew out a stream of smoke. “You’re not like him. I know you well enough at least to know that. He thought that life would be easy just because he had talent and advantage. By the time he learned it wasn’t, it was too late.”
“I wish I could have taken you back to Europe, Laurie,” he said. “Not Hemhill, I don’t think Hemhill. But Ley. It’s part of my life, and I needed…Someone else to go back there with.”
She smiled, keeping her distance.
“So you’ll go back?” she asked. “Can I tell Tim that? Or at least you’ll speak to the bishop? As for the rest, John. The leaf. Us. Everything. Sometimes you have to break things off, separate from them, leave them truly behind, before you can find out what the truth was about them.”
Laurie picked up her bag, her tubes, shook out and reparted her long hair with her fingers. He followed her from the room and into the corridor, past the closed door where Felipe was snoring. He stood in the hallway with the rain seeping in through the front door, hearing the slip of her footsteps as she moved away from him.
“The carnival should be soon now,” she said. “You can feel the change in the air. It’s like…” Her hands moved in the mottled light. “Do you remember some time when you wanted to throw your head back and laugh for no reason? You once asked what the carnival was like, John. Do you remember a time like that?”
He stood on the last stair, his hand burning on the damp rail, searching for a face and time in his mind, finding only a clear white space of emptiness.
The door screeched open. He heard the swish and patter of the street.
“So,” she said. “Goodbye.”
“Gonenanh.”
She closed the door. Her van was barely audible through the rain as it started down Gran Vía.
SOMETHING IN THE AIR, clear and metallic, turned and flashed, then cracked into separate notes. He opened his eyes as the room snapped back around him, and the tang of tubesmoke still hovered above the soggy earthbound scent of koiyl leaves, his own sweat, the dust and damp of the presbytery. He sat up, and pain ran through his spine.
He crossed the room, gripping the waxy corners of the ancient furniture. No leaf today, he thought, seeing the chair by the window set at an angle, and the scatter of Laurie’s tubes in the wastebin beside it. He dressed in the dysol-reeking clothes that Bella had put out, and light poured with him into the corridor as he descended towards the smell of cooking.
Felipe was already seated at the table, the steam rising from his coffee.
“A good day for it,” he said. “Don’t you think so, my son?”
John went over to the w
indow and looked out. The air was still. Every brick, lintel, and patch of flaking plaster on the tenement opposite was sharply etched. The windows and rooftops were held in glassy suspension as the sky glowed white—no, the sky was gray, like the pressure he felt at the back of his eyes. Still somehow gray despite all the brightness.
He turned when Bella emerged through the doorway with the breakfast tray tinkling in her hands. He sat down, and Felipe grunted and flapped out his napkin as she leaned over the table, the bare stretch of her forearm touching John’s shoulder as she placed the plates before them. There were fungi leaking grayish juice, fried kelpbread, several crustacea, two rashers each of bacon, the pale watery eye of a fresh egg.
He said, “Laurie was here last night.”
“Yes.” Felipe watched the sway of Bella’s departing rump. “So I gather.”
“There seems to be some concern about me,” John said. “Tim Purdoe thinks I’m unwell.” He looked down at his plate, the blue pattern that he’d stared at many times before without really noticing. “Not, I think, that I’m exactly…” The beaded black eye of the shrimp stared back at him. He knew that if he put the thing into his mouth, he’d only spit it out again. “Not that I’m entirely fit. I’ve been taking the leaf…” He swallowed, conscious of the brightness flooding from the window at his back; of how the noises in the street sounded so different now that there was no rain and even the wind had stilled; of the dry, odd-sounding croak of his own voice. “I’ve been chewing it in a spirit of scientific experiment. But now I seem to be coughing up a little blood.”
“I’ve seen people looking worse, my son,” Felipe said. “But also better. If you really want to stay here, then you should stay.” He waved the eggy tines of his fork at his feet. “That is, if you want to become like me. But otherwise, I think you should go back to Europe right away. You only have—what is it?—two weeks left of your term.”
“Is that all? I’d thought…” He felt as though he should be getting up. Running somewhere. Doing something.
Felipe chuckled, mopping kelpbread around his plate. “After all, you’ve left me often enough already. And I see the bishop’s flag is flashing on the airwave again. Has been for the last couple of days…But this time I decided not to take a message for you.”
The Great Wheel Page 32
