by Dan Vyleta
There is always a madman who will risk his life for money. And so there was here: a Captain Fry, Edmund by Christian name, the part owner of a rusty little trawler amongst whose nets and tools the visitors were told to sit, arrayed in borrowed sailor’s oils for the occasion, for the sea was moody and the wind on the rise. They chugged across to the grounded ship; transferred onto a rowing boat, and boarded. A half hour on board, then a quick return to beat the tide. Some say they carried a box off the boat, some say they did not: the boys do not know but look for clues within Livingstone’s face, ready to vouch for either, depending on his needs. The very next day a storm struck and the hull was wrenched loose. It tore on the rock and sank, right there (five pointed fingers, all of them sure of the direction), and lies there now with its front chimney exposed at low tide. The boys have taken a boat out and looked down at the wreck. The mackerel own it now; the sea crabs and urchins. The water around it has stained a tarry black.
[ 3 ]
It is up to the leader to pick the divers. It leads to an argument and a bloody nose. In the end the boys he has chosen—the youngest two, one tall and gangly, the other a runt of thirteen—are more afraid of him than of the sea. Livingstone rows out with them on their little, leaking boat and watches the two strip naked, whilst another boy busies himself bailing the water. One of the boys lowers himself in by inches—feet, legs, hips, and shoulders—before letting go of the boat; the other simply leaps, arse-first, then comes up again gasping with the cold. On three they dive together: bubbles in the tarry sea.
The first time they dive, they don’t stay down long. Yes, they say, the wreck is right there, just a few feet underwater; they can stand on the hull and breathe. Livingstone has asked for a full survey; he wants the captain’s cabin and the hold explored in detail. Perhaps they cheat, perhaps they don’t, but they dive six, seven, eight times, bringing reports of tarred walls and a thick spread of jet-black algae dancing on the current; of barnacles edged by a strange yellow fur. There are no bodies, no sign of the men who sailed the boat. The captain’s cabin was ransacked, they say, its chests and drawers flung wide open, objects floating freely in its waters; the hold is dark and empty like a tomb. At long last Livingstone permits them to return. Their friend pulls them up over the gunwale. They have no towels and sit shivering, pressing their clothes against their bodies. The boat is still leaking; Livingstone’s boots are wet up to the ankles. A drizzle starts. By comparison to the sea, the rain is warm as piss.
[ 4 ]
“So it appears Miss Naylor took it. Or else it consumed itself when it blew up.”
“What exactly are you looking for?” asks the smaller of the two divers. The boy is dressed now but his lips and fingers remain blue with cold. There is so little meat on him, you would not give a farthing for his chances if he catches cold.
“There was something on that ship. A kind of bomb.”
“You are looking for a bomb?”
“Actually, I am looking for a fuse.” Livingstone pauses, thinks of the stories, how everything started with Lady Naylor’s own search for a fuse. The irony does not displease him; history’s wheel, iron-shod and all.
“Have you heard of a pied piper?” he carries on. “Someone up north who is collecting children. An Angel, he calls himself. Living amongst perpetual Gales? Has anybody come here, preaching his faith?”
But the boy is too busy with Livingstone’s earlier words to give weight to his question.
“What does the South want with a bomb?”
“That’s a rather dangerous question, wouldn’t you say? And here you stand being inquisitive rather than getting warm. Mind, don’t catch your death now.”
It takes the boy a heartbeat to catch his meaning. Then he runs away into their hut.
[ 5 ]
Livingstone asks for dinner before he leaves. One of the boys makes it, fish soup and greens. He is a good cook, though there is little spice to the dish other than a bit of fermented seaweed he scoops from an old barrel. It lends the food an iodine tartness.
After the meal, the boys sit over mugs of hot water. There is, of course, no tea. Livingstone digs in his pocket and produces some lumps of sugar, with which he is well supplied. He has found that after years of sucking on sweets he cannot quite abide without. The boys stare at the scattered lumps and his gesture of welcome; then each scrambles for a piece. A contentment spreads through them, almost comical to behold. Next thing he knows, they surprise Livingstone by launching into song. It is one of those that tell of the coming of the Second Smoke: the one in which Julius is shot by Grendel; a sentimental variation Livingstone has not heard before. When they are finished, he clacks his tongue.
“So you, too, sing the songs and tell the stories?”
“You don’t?”
“I live in the South. The songs are forbidden there. All the same, everyone knows them. Stories are like mice. They will crawl in through the smallest hole.”
[ 6 ]
Before he leaves, Livingstone tells them of his fascination with the story about Julius visiting the farmer. The boys have not heard this one before, so Livingstone recounts it in full: how Charlie comes to the farmer, begging for food, and is given rotten potatoes; how Julius, hunting him, arrives soon after, already half mad with Smoke; how he gets his answers from the farmer without trouble, but rather than leaving at once, he lingers. How he makes the man cut off a finger; takes it away as a trophy and then, not ten steps hence, throws it in the shrubbery, like a child who badgered its parents for a toy and then ignores it once it is bought.
“That’s what gets to me every time,” Livingstone says, whispering now, the way one tells ghost stories, “precisely the fact that he threw away what he took. I always wonder whether the farmer saw it: his finger flying into the dirt. In one version of the story, he hangs himself from the gables the very next day.”
He spreads his hand on the table whilst he whispers it, spreading it wide upon the wood; then scoops up the hand of the boy sitting across from him and flattens it out just the same, like a pale crab pinned down in the sand. The others make no move to help him. The boy whose hand is pinned has grown very pale.
“Which one?” he asks at last, Smoke pouring out of his rump and creeping up his back.
Livingstone studies the hand, touching each of its fingers with his own.
Then he lets the boy go. “It’s just a story.”
The boy runs out of the hut and can be heard vomiting outside.
“Time to go, I suppose.”
[ 7 ]
While he stands, saddling his horse and scribbling a note for one of the pigeons to carry south, the leader of the pack follows Livingstone outside. The old servant can sense him behind him, shuffling his feet and wrestling with a thought.
“You do not smoke,” the boy says at last. There’s complaint in his voice. Evil, for him, has always worn a plume.
In answer, Livingstone pulls up his shirt and lifts it clear at his back. The evening light catches the lines that swirl out of his waistband and snake up his spine and flank; like a twist of thistles growing in his skin. This frightens the boy further.
And yet: curiosity is a devil.
“What is it?” he asks.
“The future. The sign of those who will be spared.”
“Spared?”
“When the reckoning comes and the rain falls black once more. A Storm is coming, boy, and it will cleanse the world for good.”
“Cleanse it of what?”
Livingstone gives his master’s answer.
“Corruption,” he says. “The road to virtue is full of pain.”
HANGOVER
[ 1 ]
It’s good staging is what it is. A child petitions the masses. And of course she is small, thin, and red-cheeked; is speaking neck craned upward, as though from the bottom of
the ocean; stage lights in her eyes, so that she cannot see. Little Mary from Butterwick, asking Minetowns for help. Asking for food. She does not say, ‘Help us, we are starving,’ it’s more refined than that. ‘If you have some little something you can spare,’ et cetera. She’s rehearsed it ahead of time—of course she has!—but it comes out nice and natural. Her voice so quiet everyone has to lean forward in the stalls.
“Only then the hecklers move in and drown her out, just as she tries to tell us something about the Angel being on the march. Oh, the pathos; the fear and anger, all very righteous. ‘Where are they?’ ‘Where is my daughter?’ ‘My son?’ ‘I am his father, I have a right to know.’ All of them shouting at once of course, spreading a Smoke of ill will, as though it is she, pretty little Mary, who has hidden their children away. Hidden them in her bonnet perhaps: any moment now they will leap onto the stage and search her head to toe.
“Then Charlie saves the day. He steps forward, into the light—and coughs. A proper stage cough, larger than life, it rattles him right down to the bones. Raises his handkerchief to his mouth. And as he charges forward in defence of little Mary, the handkerchief unfolds and hangs limp from his fingers, like a flag. It turns out he has new family colours: red spots on a field of white. The House of Consumption, well respected across the world. The light catches it just right.
“And then? Tears in the audience. Silence followed by fresh shouting. Exit stage right. Gossip for applause.”
Etta May blows a raspberry. Back in New York, they call it a Bronx cheer.
“God, what a little drama queen you are when you are drunk, Balthazar. ‘The House of Consumption’! Please! Besides, I was there, hon. I don’t need your summary.”
They are sitting in an ironworks foreman’s living room. There are three tables packed into the stuffy little space, but they are the only customers. It’s not a public house, exactly; Smoke is Minetowns’ only legal drug. But there is always someone who will turn their potato ration into liquor, and the Council’s been too busy lately to bother with Toptown civic regulations.
Balthazar reaches for the bottle and refills his glass. He tries to refill Etta’s, too, then realises it remains untouched. Liquid and glass have the same colour. Both look like they could use a rinse.
“At least nobody’s talking about the show.”
“So that’s what’s eating you! Not that it’s been a failure, mind, nor that half the world’s seen you in your birthday suit, but simply that your play has been ignored. What a vain old cock you are.” She studies him dispassionately, leaning her elbow on the table and her head on one palm. “Go back to work, Balthazar. You’re tiresome when you’re not scribbling away at something.”
He drinks, shudders; reaches for tartness. But the words come out drink-slurred and weak. “Can’t. My notebook’s in Ekklesia. I left it behind after the show.”
“So, go fetch it then. And for God’s sake, stop drinking, old girl. It really doesn’t do you any good.”
[ 2 ]
It has been a week since Charlie’s sudden appearance in Ekklesia. In its wake, there has indeed been much “gossip for applause.” The evening itself finished with people charging the stage while the ushers showered them with coal dust, to quell their passions. Next anyone knew, Charlie and the little girl had been whisked away somewhere: to Livia’s; to a special suite of guest rooms adjacent to the Council; to a prison built in secrecy even from the Council itself. In Toptown, crowds soon gathered outside the warehouses holding the city stores, some demanding the immediate release of “a third part of all food and other supplies in aid of our children”; others making sure that “not a scrap of food be stolen to fuel some fool crusade.”
For despite the fact that everyone had heard the exact same version of Mary’s plea, there exist a score of opinions on what precisely her words meant. Some see in her appearance little other than a new strategy of beggary, a way of “going after the whale, not the minnow”; others as clear evidence that the Angel is desperate and the children are starving to death. Ergo, the Angel must be denied, “to teach him a lesson”; or else indulged, “for we cannot eat whilst our children hunger.”
One little “fact” excites passions most of all: the Angel is on the march! It’s a pity, in retrospect, that they shut up the girl before she could tell them what the phrase means. Busybodies have long filled this gap in knowledge. The Angel is outside Glasgow, with an army of ten thousand mites. The Angel is in the Borders, heading for the coast, where a hundred ships have assembled to carry them to Norway, or Holland, or some mysterious island in the Baltic Sea. The Angel is in the Pennines, not at all with an army but with a pitiful gaggle of children, a dozen at most, all of them dying of disease. The Angel is a criminal, a crank, a “soft-brained messiah,” “holy for all that.”
A Parental Committee has been formed, made up not just of the actual parents of children who have followed the Angel’s call but of all manner of persons, all of them pledging to “head out into the wilderness, and fetch back our babies once and for all.” If only they knew where to go. Shovel, the anonymous author of the city’s chronicle, pours oil on the fire by printing a flyer depicting, as from the point of view of a bird flying high above the city, a vast mob of Miners leaving the city, going west, even as the Angel’s own mob enters it from the east. He’s titled it “A Change of Guard.” People read it and decide Shovel is a “wise man”; a “cynic”; a “blackguard and a shite.”
As for Charlie himself, here the rumours are at their most heated. Charlie has been questioned—nay, interrogated!—by the Council and has refused to speak. Conversely, Charlie has addressed the Council and won them over, making everyone weep. Charlie and Livia are fighting, “almost at knife-point.” Charlie and Livia are rutting like rabbits. He, Charlie himself, is the Angel and is trying to pull the wool over everybody’s eyes. Charlie is an errand boy, a victim of the Angel’s ruse; is a fanatic; is a saint and a fool.
Charlie is as good as dead.
It is only this last whisper, fuelled by the memory of his terrible cough, that has the power to silence the crowd. People will bow their heads and snatch their caps off their crowns whenever conversation turns to this; touch their temples, tracing the Mark of Thomas, and ask the Smoke to keep Charlie safe.
As for Balthazar, he has spent much of the week in the blackest of funks. His play was a failure. Worse, it—he—is irrelevant. He is a stranger to the city, a spectator, uninvolved in its fate. Livia has not sent for him and has no reason to. It might be time to leave and rebuild his theatre abroad. If it weren’t for a nagging truth. The Angel is nigh. He knows how to lure Gales into bottles.
It’s a trick Balthazar wouldn’t mind learning for himself.
[ 3 ]
Etta May is right about one thing, though: he is missing his work. In the past week, sober, hungover, and drunk, Balthazar has caught himself scratching words and stage designs into the dust on his windowpanes, or repeating to himself colourful lines overheard in the streets, trying to commit them to memory. Corpse twitchings, he tells himself. The artist is restless even after the art has gone to shit. Still, it is infuriating, not having his notebook by his side, and all the drinking does is give him a headache, and the runs.
And so Balthazar takes Etta May’s advice and heads Downtown. He half expects to be told he has lost access, but nobody challenges him when he joins the queue for the lift, then climbs aboard the cage with a half dozen workmen heading down. They stand a little too close for comfort, Balthazar squeezed in in their midst, the men eyeing him up. They know who he is, of course. The playwright with tits. One of them is not content with stares and snorts his Smoke at Balthazar the moment the cage gathers speed; repulsion and scorn in a thick purple puff. His neighbour spits and tells the man to keep his stink to himself. Soon coal dust binds all bodily emissions and the mine’s half-light makes Negroes of them all. Downtown w
elcomes Balthazar with the feeling he is unknown; safe. It’s the first time he appreciates it for the sanctuary it is.
[ 4 ]
Ekklesia is much as he left it. Someone has picked up the costumes and props and put them in a box to one side; and the stage has been scrubbed with lye soap. The day is overcast and the light is murky. Perhaps that’s why he does not notice Livia at once. It is only when he collects his notes, left undisturbed on a table near the door, the top page marked by drizzle and dew, and surveys the space in a silent good-bye, that he sees her, sitting high up in the stalls, her knees drawn up into her chest. Alone. He climbs up the steep staircase and walks over to her; the drop so sheer it gives him vertigo. She has seen him, of course, but does not acknowledge him until he is right next to her.
“May I?” he asks as he folds himself down next to her, feeling his age. “Where’s Charlie?”
He expects something sharp in response, the haughty sourness he has met with before, but receives instead a little thread of Smoke, shy, young, and heartbroken. It is only now he sees that she’s been crying. Awkwardly, he tries to comfort her, patting the back of her hand. Even that feels like an imposition. She tries to say something—thank him; assure him she is fine—and starts crying again; wipes at the snot stuck to her upper lip.
“How I’d longed for him to come! All these months, waiting for news. And then he does and he is sick. He didn’t even want to kiss me. ‘I don’t know if I’m infectious,’ he says.” Livia blushes. “Listen to me. I sound like I am ten years old.”
“Fourteen. Ten-year-olds don’t care about kissing.”
