Her husband had collapsed, sprawled onto the bed his face slick with sweat like one just released from a fever, a look of bafflement on his face. He seemed about a stone lighter. His arms were thrown wide like he’d cast something from himself into the room...
Out the window Erica saw a flock of birds rise up, circle on white wings, and fly towards her. She blinked and when she opened her eyes they were gone, already overhead.
Staedtler had pronounced it a success, and Erica wondered how she already knew.
The whole thing had taken about twenty-four hours.
When she awoke late the following day, Erica could have believed it all a dream, save for the ache in her body and the sound of Charles shouting at someone on his mobile phone two storeys down.
“I don’t care how you do it, just do it! Cancel it. All of it! Cancelled or revoked or... I don’t know, I pay you to know...”
Erica smiled.
Later, she saw Mr. Staedtler as he was leaving.
“Thank you,” she said. “You did it. It’s out of him, he’s back to his old self.” Charles had already ordered replacement bottles for the liquor cabinet and wine cellar, and cancelled all of the oversized charity cheques that hadn’t yet been cashed.
Mr. Staedtler just nodded gravely; if he was thinking about their time together in the smoking room he didn’t show it. Didn’t show anything.
“And you still don’t believe in demons?”
He shook his head, once.
Erica smiled. “Maybe I do, now. What else could it be?”
Charles was shouting at someone else on the phone and it could be heard across the whole house. He doesn’t know, yet, Erica thought.
“And what about you?” Erica said. “Is there a demon in you? Or will you take some money as a thank you?”
Eventually, just as stony-faced and seemingly reluctant as the previous night, he capitulated to her. The heat of his hands as she pressed a cheque into them surprised her all over again.
“But this... this is too much!” he said, when he looked at the amount.
“It wasn’t too much for Charles, so why should it be too much for me?” Erica said. “Thank you again, you don’t know how much you’ve done.”
Which is true, she thought, as she ushered him out of the door, Staedtler didn’t know. She hoped the innocent man would never know. When she had spoken to her lawyer on the phone the evening of his arrival, he had been very clear: her husband calling in an exorcist, of all people, could be the answer. She could have him declared of ‘unsound mind’, which the prenup, so watertight in other respects, made allowances for. Control of the estate and all of his fortune bar a small allowance had passed to her, until he could be pronounced cured.
She’d already cancelled the champagne he’d ordered.
As she headed towards Charles’ room to tell him, she saw the pretty maid was scurrying down towards his door as well. Erica called her over, and she couldn’t tell if the girl’s youthful face already looked guilty, or if she was innocent of what was to come.
But Erica was beyond all that now.
With a beaming smile, she took the priceless wedding ring from her finger and pressed it into the amazed hands of the maid. She raised one finger to her lips—ssssh—and told the girl to make sure Charles didn’t see it.
Maybe she should have listened to Staedtler and not gone into the room when he had cast out whatever had been in Charles.
But Erica couldn’t shake the idea that if felt so good, so right, to help people!
Especially as she now had so much more opportunity to do so.
~
Fellows turns the page as if expecting more, but there is none. He blinks a few times, re-entering the real world. Was that it? Has he been had, conned? There was no actual haunting in the story, and any exorcism was ambiguous at best. Charles Taschen and Staedtler were only haunted by things in their own head, surely?
But why expect it to make sense? Fellows rises from the park bench, stretching his limbs that have become stiff in the cold still air. Does he really believe that fiction is so transparent in its workings, that allegory is nothing more than X=Y? And if not, why expect what Boursier had written to so neatly dovetail with his own life? For while he knows there have been some obvious changes in the quarantined city that he can see directly reflected in Boursier’s stories, he believes there have been other, more subtle shifts in his surroundings. Like a change in pressure, invisible but altering everyone’s inner weather. Why, even the statue of the city founder looks different today, less covered in gull shit for a start, and what can he have read to change that?
Or maybe it has just been cleaned, for he sees down near the fountain someone is pulling up the bamboo canes and signs of the protestors. The man is gamely ignoring both the calls of the birds waiting to get to the exposed soil and of the first prostitutes abroad, their faces twice as aged in the winter daylight as they will be under the gaslight tonight.
Fellows walks over to the gardener—an employee of the unity government no doubt.
“Bloody protestors,” he says cheerfully, for something to say. “Idiots, eh?”
The gardener mutters something Fellows can’t catch.
“What?” he says.
“Spare any change?” the gardener says, quietly and angrily; embarrassed and angry at his embarrassment, Fellows realises.
“What, but... You’re not a beggar, you’ve got a job,” Fellows says. “Why do you need to ask for money?”
“They only pay us in this new money, plague money I call it,” the man says. “Will be worthless when this infection is over...”
“There is no infection,” Fellows says, his voice sending the park pigeons and gulls clattering up into the sky. “That’s just a rumour, gossip.”
“Maybe, but still, they’re paying us with kiddie money,” the gardener says. “Look, the coins don’t even look the same!” Aggrieved, he stands, and pulls two of the thin coins from his overalls, turns them both face upwards in his soil-stained palms. “Spot the difference,” he says bitterly, and Fellows has to admit that the two profiles of the city founder do look slightly different, and neither resemble the statue behind him.
He shrugs. “What do you expect? What do you want the unity government to do?” The gardener stares at him from his weather-beaten face. “But anyway no, I haven’t got any of the old money. What makes you think I would have?”
The man turns angrily from him, throws the bamboo canes into his wheelbarrow and goes to fill up his watering can at the fountain, to yet more catcalls from the prostitutes. Stony-faced, he comes back and waters the bare ground.
“Hey, aren’t you supposed to be digging up what the protestors planted?” Fellows says.
The man angrily flicks the two coins at Fellows’ face, causing him to flinch. They barely make a sound as they hit the path they are so thin.
“You’re an idiot,” the gardener says, not looking at him.
~
Fellows leaves the park and heads towards the sounds of the harbour, faint because the newly persistent noise of the city’s motorcars is drowning out the dockers’ cries and thud of machinery. The wind is coming from the sea—from beyond the quarantine he thinks as he buttons his jacket against its chill. He should surely get out of the cold, but he shrinks from the thought of returning home and seeing whether the story has worked. For what if it hasn’t and the ghost is still present, then what options does he have? Despite its crippled body the fact that it is utterly silent makes him afraid that one day the boy will catch him unawares; he imagines its touch as cold and foreign as the wind assailing him.
Unacknowledged, there is another reason Fellows isn’t simply going back home: he can’t remember the way. That is, he can picture the route from where he is to Georgia’s flat, and from there back to his house—the route he took this morning—but he can’t think how to get directly home from the street outside the park. Every time he thinks he has it a car rushes past and drives the
thoughts from his mind as he watches its blurred and hazy progress. He is not expert, but the models look newer as if the unity government, unable to get fresh peaches or salted butter through the quarantine, can somehow get the latest automobiles.
Fellows shakes his head to drive this fruitless speculation from it; home, he thinks, but again all he can picture are the streets leading to Georgia’s apartment, and from there doubling back on himself to get home. Imagining stepping off these streets there is nothing, a black space in his internal map of the city. Here be dragons. It is the same when he tries to imagine how to get to other places too—he can remember the route from the Carousel to the harbour say, or from there to The Echo Bookshop, but his thoughts crumble if he tries to make the V into a triangle and go from the Carousel to the Echo.
Fuck it, he thinks, you’re all worked up with worry about the ghost and whether Boursier’s story will have got rid of it. So what if you go to Georgia’s flat first? She invited you. Let’s go and see what this surprise of hers is.
So thinking, he heads back up the road he took this morning, the shops and signs reassuringly familiar. See, nothing’s changed he thinks. Even the faces of people walking towards him seem familiar, as if they are retracing their route too.
~
Georgia’s surprise comes with a sound like a car backfiring, causing Fellows to jump up from the sagging sofa in alarm. Georgia stares at him in surprise, and then realises frothing liquid is bubbling from the bottle she has just popped open.
“Shit, shit, shit,” she says, quickly pouring some into two flute glasses. “Don’t want to waste a drop of this. You wouldn’t believe how much this is going for on the black market.” Triumphant, she holds a glass out to Fellows, who is still frozen in shock. “Champagne!”
“What the fuck?” Fellows says. “Champagne?
“Yes, champagne. Real champagne from, you know, actual Champagne...” Georgia trails off when he doesn’t react, doesn’t step forward to take the proffered glass.
“But that’s... It’s just something from Boursier’s stories,” he says, “one of his, his things he’s made up and expects you to understand like ‘motorways’ or ‘mobile phones’ or...”
“Hello? Fellows?” Georgia says. “It’s champagne. It’s alcohol. Expensive alcohol. So stop being weird and sit down and have a glass with me.”
Fellows does as she says, but warily, taking the glass but not sipping from it. Even without tasting it the smell is familiar; the faint noise of the bubbles rising and bursting is familiar. The word, champagne, is familiar and not just from A Lack Of Demons despite what he said. But when he tries to think of it, of ‘champagne’, it is like when he tried to envisage the way home earlier—he can’t get there directly. Instead, his thoughts have to go via an indirect route...
Via the night that Lana left him.
“Champagne?” Lana said in disgust; he’d popped the cork when she’d come up into the kitchen after work. The sound had been almost lost amidst the noise of rain against the windows outside.
“Sure,” he said. “Why waste the bottle? And we might have something to celebrate after all. Some good luck.”
“Good luck?” Lana said; she hadn’t taken the glass he held out to her, frozen in the act of unbuttoning her coat.
“Sure, I called the lawyer and he thinks he sees a way out of it. A way to...”
Lana stepped forward and dashed the glass from his hand; it smashed against the side of the kitchen cabinet before it even hit the floor; the room will stink of stale champagne in the days after Lana leaves him, no matter how hard he scrubs. She turned from the room and went upstairs without a sound, not bothering to finish taking off her coat. Fellows listened to the noise of her packing but didn’t leave the kitchen. I hate this life, he thought, downing his champagne and pouring another glass. I hate this...
Fellows comes back to the present; his memory can’t be fully accurate if details from Boursier’s stories are infecting it. ‘Champagne’! The night Lana left him, and the memories that preceded it, are things he needs to keep sealed off. And he has been successful for the most part; today is just a temporary blip caused by...
He sips at the glass Georgia has given him, and the aroma makes him think of bleach and cleaning products, the taste is as if diluted by his own salty tears. He gags, feel as though he will be sick with a tremendous feeling of regret and guilt that bubbles through him, bursts inside him. With a cry he stands, dashes the glass to the floor. On Georgia’s faded woven rug, it doesn’t even shatter; but as its contents foam on the floor the sickly smell of it is almost overpowering.
“Why are you giving me this piss?” Fellows shouts. “Why are you calling this piss ‘champagne’ when there’s no such thing?”
Georgia gives him a look half concern, half annoyance.
“Fellows, you can still get some genuine stuff from the blackmarket, how do you think all the toffs in the Enclave get by? Stuff gets lifted all the time. The lame boy who brings me stuff told me about this house all empty because the people who lived there were on the other side when the quarantine...”
Fellows gives a hollow laugh, as if his throat were parched.
“Oh so this was from those idiots was it? Did they read the label to you?”
“What?”
“Never mind. But that’s not what I meant anyway, I meant there’s no such thing as ‘champagne’, it doesn’t exist...”
“Doesn’t exist? You’ve just spilt it all over my bloody floor!” Georgia says, exasperated.
“And that’s the worst crime imaginable isn’t it, to an alcoholic like you? Spilt booze?”
He isn’t looking at her when he says this, but in the resulting silence he does so and sees she has gone very still and pale. Something about the way her anger has hardened reminds him of that last night with Lana, and he hears I hate this life faintly in his own thoughts, as if it has never gone away and he has been hearing it ever since. And maybe something in his own body-language changes in response and serves to annoy Georgia further, for she suddenly throws her glass into his face. He manages to duck slightly but still he tastes the nauseating fizzy champagne and his own salty blood.
“Alcoholic am I?” Georgia says. “Get out.”
“Georgia, I didn’t mean...”
“Get out, get out,” Georgia says very quietly. One look at her face and he knows there is no way to change her mind, the equations applied to his actions making the outcome inevitable from the start, like a man stamping on the brakes when all hope of stopping in time has passed...
“I didn’t mean... Hey, I’m probably an alcoholic as much as you are,” he says.
“Get the fuck out of here Fellows!” Georgia yells.
~
Outside Georgia’s building, he takes a deep breath and shudders with the after-effects of his anger and nausea. And he is assailed by the same terrible gaps in his memory—where does he go from here? His mental map of the quarantined city seems to be shrinking; he pictures the city at night from above, each light a place he knows how to get to. And gradually they wink out—the Carousel, Georgia’s flat, the house in the Enclave. And as they do so the lines between them fade, and the possible routes he can envisage across the city diminish.
Home, he will have to go home, ghost or no. He has been putting it off too long. Let’s see the results of Boursier’s damn exorcism, he thinks.
But as he starts to walk the dark and watchful streets of the old town, he remembers there is somewhere else he knows how to get to, after all. Somewhere close by.
~
“I read your story,” he says to Boursier.
The other man blinks at him, the movement a brief ripple across his smooth and wrinkle-free features. Fellows was expecting some of the nervous expectation he used to feel when someone read his work (similar to how he now feels about going back to his house and checking for the ghost) but Boursier merely smiles in polite enquiry, waiting for Fellows to continue. He gives no sense of havin
g been interrupted doing anything when Fellows knocked on his door, as if he had just been sitting in his small and empty room above the liquor shop waiting. His lodgings seem as empty of character as Boursier himself, as if he has just moved in without any baggage to unpack. Fellows is aware he has thought all these things before, but his first meeting with the man has faded from his memory like something imperfectly imagined, despite it being only yesterday. Another light blinking out.
“My friend read it too,” he says in the face of Boursier’s continuing silence.
“Did she like it?”
“No,” Fellows says curtly, hoping to illicit a response. “She doesn’t like fantasy; she likes her stories set in the here and now.”
Boursier’s only reaction is to smile so mildly it barely creases his face; Fellows imagines yelling at the man, slapping him and still receiving only the same maddeningly placid smile as the print of his hand faded from Boursier’s face.
“I think your friend misunderstands how fiction works,” Boursier says. When he hears the word ‘friend’, Fellows feels a sharp stab of regret and guilt.
“Yeah, well. I didn’t come here for a literary criticism class,” he says.
“Indeed.”
“Look, you know why I’m here,” Fellows says. “Will it have worked? Your story—can you assure me it will have worked, before I go back home?”
“Like a guarantee you mean?” Even the man’s sarcasm feels bland, an arrow fallen short through being shot with insufficient force. “Please return within seven days if the effects on your imagination are not as expected?”
“It’s not the effects on my imagination I care about,” Fellows says, “although it was an interesting story,” he admits.
The Quarantined City Page 12
