Babylon

by Richard Calder

  I eased past her and began to ascend the stairs. After a few steps, I halted, and looked over my shoulder. ‘What’s wrong with Shulamites, anyway?’

  ‘Nothing’s wrong with them,’ she said, still looking towards the front door, as if she half expected my troublesome friend to make a reappearance. And then she turned and gazed up at me. ‘Is she from Spitalfields?’ I nodded. ‘Is she fast?’ I said nothing. ‘I don’t want you to go there. Not to Spitalfields, Madeleine. I don’t want you going anywhere after dark. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, as complaisantly as I could. ‘Of course.’ I resumed my ascent. Behind me, mother gave a long, weary sigh.

  ‘Madeleine,’ she said. Sighing myself, and insolently, too, I again looked over my shoulder and fixed her in my sights.

  ‘Yes, mother?’

  Her eyes were wide with disbelief. ‘Are you tight-laced?’ I froze. Mum thought tight-lacing a depraved practice second only to that most evil of habits: the unmentionable sin of sins itself.

  ‘Of course not, mother,’ I said, attempting to hide my guilt behind a sardonic grin. But my hauteur, by virtue of its self- consciousness, exposed me. I flushed. It was as if Mum had crept into my bedroom in the middle of the night, flung back the sheets and left me with no other option but to play the Stoic and hold my breath until death covered up my shame. I spun about, raced down the stairs, past mother, past hope, past shame, past care, and, throwing open the front door, sped outside.

  With Mum’s cries ringing in my ears, I ran down Wilmot Street towards the dwindling figure of my friend, Cliticia.

  We sat in Victoria Park.

  ‘It’s cold,’ said Cliticia, turning up the collar of her topcoat. She took an old crust of bread out of her pocket, broke off a piece and threw it to a duck. ‘But I often come ’ere,’ she added, ‘despite the weather. It’s peaceful, y’know? Even when it’s crowded, like today.’ Holidaymakers passed by in straw boaters and plumed bonnets, laughing and eating fish and chips as they promenaded along the pathway that skirted the ornamental lake. ‘It’s nice to ’ave a bit of peace sometimes, innit?’ She broke off another piece of bread. The duck waddled nearer. ‘Seriously, though, you really should go ’ome and tell your Mum you’re sorry.’

  ‘She knows,’ I said.

  ‘Rubbish. She don’t know nuffink. None of ’em do.’ She shivered, threw the duck her offering and then edged along the wooden bench. ‘Brrr. Put your arm round me, Maddy.’ I did so, and she snuggled up, her head against my shoulder. ‘That’s nice,’ she said. ‘I like being with you.’ She took off a glove and placed her hand on my lap. ‘Black and white,’ she continued, softly, comparing her hand with my own. Then she gave a little laugh. ‘I never ’ad a white girl for a friend before.’

  I ran my fingers lightly across her knuckles, first one way, and then the other.

  ‘Is that what I am, then? A friend?’

  She shrugged. ‘I told you before, didn’t I?’ she whispered.

  I hugged her more tightly and squeezed her hand.

  ‘Promise?’ I said, knowing at last I would no longer be alone.

  ‘Course,’ she said, and giggled. ‘But you promise you make it up to your Mum, okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. A shiver went through me to match her own.

  ‘I love your hair,’ she said. ‘It’s... sun-kissed.’

  Again, I squeezed her hand. ‘You’ve been kissed by the moon. The Babylonian moon.’ Another duck emerged from the bulrushes that grew at the edge of the lake and waddled towards us. Cliticia ignored it.

  ‘Is that why I’m black?’

  ‘Nigra sum sedformosa.’

  ‘Wot?’

  ‘I am black, but comely,’ I recited.

  ‘But I ’aven’t been to Babylon,’ she said, between giggles. ‘Not yet I aven’t, anyway.’

  ‘The negritude is in your blood. Just as it’s in your mother’s blood. And her mother’s, too.’

  She breathed deep, as if inhaling the scent of my newly washed hair.

  ‘If you stay off-world long enough, will you turn black, too, Maddy?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ I said.

  ‘But the Minotaurs stay white.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘Their blood is different.’ I gazed across the lake to the farther bank where a group of children unaccountably splashed about in the shallows. ‘Or so I’ve heard.’

  ‘You see—that’s the sort of thing I need to learn.’ She tilted her head to one side and looked up at me through her absurdly long eyelashes. ‘I’m sorry I lost my temper with you. But the tests are important. And everything else that’ll come after. We’re going to ’ave to ’ave special lessons. Not just dancing, ritual, and invocations and all that, but ’istory, too.’ She sucked at her teeth. ‘I’m shit at ’istory.’

  ‘I’ll teach you,’ I said. I leant over and kissed her on the cheek. ‘I’ll teach you about Ishtar, and her dark side, Lilith. I’ll teach you about the Babylonian moon. I’ll teach you everything.’

  ‘Everything?’ she said. She looked down at her hand, so smooth, so satiny, like a hand Phidias might have carved out of obsidian. ‘I understand the darkness, Maddy. You can teach me lots of fings. But forget about Lilith. What I don’t know about Lilith ain’t worth knowing.’ Then she gave a great sigh, and I felt her full weight against my body, as if she had somehow been mysteriously filleted and could no longer support herself. Her brow creased. What she had asserted about Lilith was undoubtedly true; suddenly she seemed like someone who knew everything and had grown infinitely tired of knowing. She snuggled closer. ‘Sometimes I like to fink I’m a little girl again. I like to imagine I don’t know anyfink about the Modern Babylon and never will.’ Freeing her hand, she ran her thumb along her lips, biting fleetingly at its chipped, strawberry-painted nail. ‘Yeh, I like to fink I’m a little girl. A child, Maddy. I like to fink I’m just child.’

  I held her tight. Far away, people were gathering about a glass- domed refreshment kiosk. A flock of geese circled overhead. Then a breeze gusted, and the tree we were sitting under rustled its leaves, as if it were conferring life’s greatest, most wonderful secret: that all would be well, now, and forevermore.

  ‘That’s nice,’ she whispered. ‘Oh, yes, that’s nice.’ The holiday- makers ambled past, chatting, laughing, and singing. Like me, they seemed oblivious to everything but the bliss of a perfect day.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ‘Please, Madeleine, try to concentrate.’

  I screamed.

  ‘Should we halt the procedure?’ asked the psycho-mechanic, a young man perhaps only a few years older than myself. During morning recess we had all stared at him as he had unloaded the black wagon parked ominously outside the school gates.

  ‘She shouldn’t try to fight it,’ said the Duenna. ‘Increase the power.’

  I was strapped into a high-backed chair. The chair stood on a small wooden dais. Girl, chair, and dais were in turn enclosed by a polished steel dome that served as an isolation ward for young women suspected of suffering from terminally overheated imaginations. A grille at eye level provided the Duenna and mechanic with the means to interrogate me, or to check on my health.

  The Duenna moved sideways, allowing me to see past her to where, aligned against the far wall, a high-pressure steam engine went about its angry business. The mechanic stood by it. He depressed a lever. And I heard a sharp click as the lever engaged another ratchet. The engine’s piston rods blurred and the flywheel began to rotate so fast that its spokes seemed to spin in countermotion.

  ‘Please,’ I said. ‘I’m going to be sick.’

  Above the engine, cylindrical helixes of copper wire crackled and sparked; the dome’s interior swam with colours.

  ‘No harm will come to you,’ said the Duenna, whose head had reappeared at the grille. ‘You must simply try to relax. Now, once again—and concentrate, dear, concentrate—when did you first start developing a certain, let us say, susceptibility to the Black Order’s p
ropaganda?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I mumbled. I tried to say more but my tongue had become inert and I lapsed into incoherence. The swirling colours drew me into their labyrinth. Beads of sweat ran down my forehead and dripped from the tip of my nose. The air seemed to have become incandescent. I gritted my teeth. Images of those men who threatened to incriminate me danced and flickered against the backdrop of steel and then as suddenly disappeared. ‘I don’t know any Minotaurs!’ I blurted out.

  The mechanic glanced at the engine’s control panel: an array of dials, meters, levers, and gauges. Then he inspected the oneiroscope: an oblong panel of steel that hung from the wall like a looking-glass above a roaring fireplace. ‘It’s the truth,’ he said.

  The Duenna sighed. ‘The truth’ was obviously proving to be a considerable irritant. ‘It does not answer my question,’ she said. I heard her fingers drum against the latticework of the grille. ‘Now, listen to me, Madeleine Fell.’ I ignored her, trying to think of the things I had done during the last weekend, and of the long, glorious hours spent with Cliticia: Victoria Park, the street party in Brick Lane, and a whole Sunday afternoon of promenading up and down the High Street. But however much I tried to keep those happy thoughts uppermost, the weekend had, of course, like all weekends, inevitably resolved into Monday morning. As usual, I had walked to school, lined up to see the nit nurse, attended roll call, and listened to Miss Nelson read from scripture. Then the black wagon had arrived. Summoned once more to the headmistress’s study, I had found myself alone in the company of the Duenna and her assistant. Within minutes, I had been introduced to the steel dome: a strange, anonymous place where dream had become indistinguishable from reality.

  ‘The Minotaurs are incendiaries,’ continued the Duenna. ‘Their so-called Black Order is dedicated to death. It is necromantic.’ The urge to close my eyes was almost irresistible. But I forced myself to keep them open, determined to show that I was prepared to bear witness to the present miscarriage of justice. ‘For years they confined their outrages to Babylon. Their cowardice paid off. Knowing that no man would pursue them off-world, they evaded arrest and punishment. But now they grow brazen. They bring their horrors to Earth Prime, to the heart of Empire itself.’ She pressed her face to the grille, so that her dark, still beautiful features seemed to merge into its grid of lozenges.

  ‘In 1883 two underground railways were dynamited. There was even an unsuccessful attempt to blow up the offices of The Times! Then in 1884 a portion of Victoria Station was blown up and Scotland Yard was attacked... ’ Her face drew away and I saw that the grille had left its imprint on her flesh. Despite my predicament, I almost felt like laughing. ‘And now we have one of these Minotaurs prowling the East End, committing unspeakable murders!’ She pressed her hands together, made a steeple of the index fingers, and held it up to her lips. ‘We simply cannot afford to recruit young women whose sensibilities have become corrupted by the Black Order’s politico-mystical agenda. To do so,’ she concluded, growing more prim, ‘would be to collaborate in their suicide, and, what is more, betray the other volunteers entrusted to our charge.’

  ‘I haven’t been corrupted,’ I said, queasily. ‘I haven’t, I haven't.’ Not by any ‘politico-mystical’ agenda, certainly, I thought. I was a sick English rose who had known the invisible worm long, long before she had even heard of the Black Order.

  ‘Do you have a morbid imagination, Madeleine? Do you dream of forbidden love?’

  The colours that swam past my field of vision assumed the proportions of a tall, hooded man. He was familiar to me. In childhood, I had called him Barbarossa.

  ‘I’m getting something,’ said the mechanic, twiddling furiously with his infernal machine. ‘Make her answer. Quick.’

  ‘Keep the oneiroscope focused,’ said the Duenna, walking over to him, unwilling to place full confidence in his abilities, it seemed, now that matters had reached such a critical juncture. Unable to keep my eyes open, I screwed them shut. Then I balled my hands into fists and concentrated. But the more I tried to still my thoughts, the more noise they seemed to make. I heard footsteps, followed by the reprise of the Duenna’s voice. ‘They seek to impose a regime of waste and loss. They seek a new age and a new race unpolluted by Babylonian blood.’ With one huge effort I willed the image of the Minotaur to disappear.

  ‘I have to recalibrate,’ said the mechanic. ‘Try again.’

  The Duenna cleared her throat. ‘Listen to me, Madeleine. The popular press have dubbed the members of the Black Order Minotaurs. But temple-maidens have always simply referred to these incendiaries as the Men. The 300-or-so males who lurk, quite blasphemously, within the ruins of Babylon are, after all, the only men on that all-female planet.’ The fingers recommenced drumming against the grille, her long, silver-painted nails lending the impression that a spider shod in tiny, steel boots was performing a dance of dark and terrible joy. ‘It is no shame to confess, Madeleine. You mustn’t feel embarrassed. I was your age once. I understand, really I do. I understand what is in your heart.’ Her voice had become subtle, like the snake’s when it had tempted Eve. ‘You ask yourself what the Men might be like. What do they want of us? And the thought sends an inexplicable thrill through your body.’ Her voice had become so low, so velvety, that I strained to hear. ‘You’re a clever girl. You know about their demands. You know their history. The Minotaurs are philo-tyrannical intellectuals, a monstrous hybrid of the excessive rationalism of the Enlightenment and the romantic folk-nationalism of the counter-Enlightenment. But that does not prevent you having certain feelings, does it?’

  I bit my tongue and tasted blood. The sweat poured off my forehead. My fingernails cut into my palms. My imaginary childhood friend Lord Barbarossa threatened to reappear at any moment, a flickering phantom such as might be conjured up by a magic-lantern show.

  The Duenna began to tap her toe against the floor in a rhythmic correlative to her increasing impatience.

  ‘The Men,’ she continued, ‘usually display a cool, ironic exterior. Self-control is of great importance to them. But beware, Madeleine, anger, even hate, may be concealed behind gentlemanly affectations, gallantry, and lovemaking.’

  She was wrong. The Men fought the Illuminati, not us. Besides which, their gallantry was genuine. When Lord Barbarossa held a swooning girl in his arms, he adjudged her not merely an exotic animal—something close to vermin that might be killed without qualm or regret—but a creature helpless, vulnerable, indeed, quite innocent, something he was impelled to protect and pity. What was more, Lord Barbarossa... but no, no, I thought, sending his lordship forcibly back into my childhood past, and this time, with such dispatch that my head seemed little more than an empty box packed with cotton wool.

  ‘Open your eyes, Madeleine,’ said the Duenna.

  I met her tired, despairing gaze.

  She glanced over her shoulder. ‘What do you have?’

  ‘An average reading,’ said the mechanic.

  The Duenna pursed her lips.

  ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘That will be enough.’

  I heard bolts being thrown. The door of the steel hemisphere opened. The mechanic walked in, stooping slightly to avoid hitting his head against the domed roof, and began to remove my restraints.

  ‘I am sorry for any distress,’ said the Duenna. ‘But we have to be so careful these days.’ She began to pace back and forth, the swish of her skirts becoming audible as the steam engine’s pistons slowed and then finally stopped. ‘So many volunteer merely because they want to die.’

  The mechanic took my hand and led me out into the study. The light streaming through the windows hurt my eyes.

  ‘I believe you are acquainted with Cliticia Lipski,’ she continued. ‘I would advise you to stay away from her. You will go far, Madeleine. I believe we have found in you an exceptional candidate. Do not let yourself down.’ She walked up to me and placed a hand on my shoulder. ‘Once upon a time girls like you were the rule,
not the exception. But these days, those from privileged backgrounds—and of course I speak of backgrounds far, far superior to your own—are kept on Earth, even if they become part of the sisterhood. It falls to those who must need seek an income to serve Ishtar off-world.’ She ran her fingers playfully through my curls. ‘I cannot help but wish that your present score had not been quite so average. But then, with the dangers you will face, and the fate that you may not unreasonably expect, it would, I suppose, be cruel to deny you the consolation of a little morbid romanticism. After all, if worse comes to worse, it may be all that you have to see you through.’ The mechanic handed me a towel. I mopped my face. ‘Yes, you will go far. But do not spoil it by allowing yourself to be contaminated by the kind of truly degrading thoughts that pollute others.’ She took the towel from my hands, and I looked up and studied her bland expression, wondering if my initial assessment of her had been correct. Did she really understand me? ‘See no more of Cliticia, Madeleine. That way treachery lies.’ For the first time that day, she smiled. ‘And death, too, of course,’ she concluded.

  At dinnertime I rendezvoused with Cliticia in the playground. Like me, she had that morning been subjected to tests. And she seemed confident that all had gone well. Despite the Duenna’s insinuations, I was equally confident. Cliticia was a true Shulamite. Both of us had yet to have ourselves certified intacta by a qualified midwife. But I no longer had any doubts: we were born to live off-world.

  ‘What’s that noise?’ I said, looking southwards towards the high street.

  ‘Marie Jeanette!’ said Cliticia. The hullabaloo that greeted the cortège that was proceeding towards the Shulamite Cemetery at Leytonstone was clearly audible. ‘Come on,’ she added, excitedly. ‘We don’t want to miss it!’

  She tugged at my sleeve and I followed her through the gates.