‘There are around 300 active members of the Club,’ Xan explained. ‘The numbers bounce about like a rubber ball, but only a fraction of them actually work here. Not everyone is suited for the task. The rest are waiting.’
‘For?’
‘For Club activities. I swear that if I didn’t know better, I’d think you were snooping for the Bureau of Appearances.’
‘Maybe I am.’
‘You’re not,’ he said certainly. ‘This is a private club. We don’t even own these premises, we were granted them in trust by the city. Candyland.’
‘What?’
‘Candyland,’ he repeated, then no more, but she refused to let him prick her curiosity.
They left the office spaces and passed rooms turned into living quarters for the permanent residents of the Club, the permanently Appeared. She asked Xan where he lived, and his little fingers horned upwards. The top, he mouthed; the top floor. She relaxed, seeing hierarchy here. Xan was a prince; he had the unhurried certainty of a man in control of his circumstances, a quality she’d always aspired to. He would have his own bosses, but not in Candida. He was Prospero. He led her through his maze and his kingdom.
‘Who have you left behind?’
They sat in the dining room on the second floor by a window with an expansive view up the mountainside towards the old free house. Kay, never a heavy eater, used her cutlery to move the food round her plate. Fish and vegetables and thin meaty gravy, with none of the spices or sauces that coated the food in the house of dragons’ refectory. Fish and vegetables and thin meaty gravy, the essence of everything Candida. Xan sat opposite her, the essence of everything not-Candida.
He ate heartily. He cleaned his plate with hunks of wholemeal bread while she talked business.
‘I’ve been dropped in at the deep end, which in some ways is good.’ Her only props were her hands, and she kept them flat and visible on the tabletop. ‘It’s given me a different perspective on life here; one that I wouldn’t have got if I’d started day one with Prospero.’
She still felt unclear about the offer laid before her. She gave Xan a guarded smile. He leaned back, chewing bread.
‘So,’ she finished, ‘that’s solid experience I can bring to the table. To be honest, I don’t see much potential here, except maybe tourism or corner-cutting. I’m not an economist but … I don’t know, my gut instinct is that it’s a diseconomy of scale.’
Xan swallowed hard. ‘More trouble than it’s worth?’
She nodded. He released his sharp-edged smile.
‘That’s their only line of defence against us. We’re too small, we’re too small! Don’t notice us, we’re too small,’ he crooned. ‘There’s more at stake here than opening up a tiny market to the wider world. And it is tiny, just a bite, the last piece on the finger buffet.’
He looked away from her and started going methodically through his pockets, pulling the lining inside-out to expose their emptiness. The movement drew her eyes; he was the magician, misdirecting her. Then he asked her the question, mumbled it, threw it away: ‘Who have you left behind?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Who do you miss, Red? Who’s waiting for you to come back home?’
A family I don’t talk to. Colleagues I don’t connect with. Friends I don’t like. Relatives with barely a drop of blood in common and their awful, goggle-eyed spouses.
She said nothing. Xan pushed his plate aside and leaned towards her, conspiracy-voiced. ‘Are you married?’
‘I have a Better Half,’ she replied. ‘Though frankly I wouldn’t be here if it was working. We’ve been coming apart at the seams. We all make bad investments,’ she finished on a note of clarity. The words came coolly from her as old news. She fixed Xan with a level stare, and he threw back a succulent, unsurprised smile.
Was that a come-on? Was I coming on to him? Yes? No? Yes?
‘You’d be happy to stay in Candida?’
Shake of head. ‘That’s not what I meant.’
‘It’s funny, so many of us –’
‘Appeared?’
‘So many of us displaced, we foreigners if you like, forget who we’ve left behind. That’s why we don’t get everyone to join the Club.’
The old free house was now between them and the rising twilight. Kay made a play of not looking at it, of ignoring it with prejudice. Again, Xan seemed to see into her thoughts.
‘That’s why your girlfriend isn’t here. She’s too far gone for us.’
‘She’s not my girlfriend. Far gone?’
‘Into Candida. After a while, it gets into your skin and paralyses you. It lays eggs in your body. One day, they’ll hatch and eat you from the inside-out. She’s been eaten right up. Yum.’
‘Have you ever met Azure?’
‘I know the type. There are a lot like her. The good thing is, there are a lot like you and a lot like me as well. We’re still –’
‘What?’
‘– ourselves.’
‘Aren’t you making a big assumption there? About me, about my type.’
‘If we don’t get you now, you will stop caring about Prospero, you will stop wanting to leave. They will get you in the end.’
‘I don’t want to leave. I have a job to do.’
He nodded. ‘And then what?’
‘Then I leave.’
‘How would you go?’
‘I’d go to the station and catch a train.’
‘Really? Do you know how to get to the station from where you live?’ (No.) ‘Do you know when the train arrives?’ (No.) ‘Do you know where it goes after it leaves Candida?’ (No.) ‘Do you know where to go to find this kind of information?’ (Maybe Esteban would … No, actually, no.) ‘Do you think they will let you go?’
‘They can’t stop me.’
‘Can’t they?’
‘Why would they bother? Why am I saying they? There’s not a big conspiracy to keep me here. And so what if I can’t find the train? If I walked long enough in one direction, I’d hit the edge of the city eventually.’
‘You’d think that, wouldn’t you?’ His lips were properly curled, but there was barely a trace of his usual smile. ‘This is the closest place you’ll get to an exit. You know it.’
‘That’s paranoid.’
‘There’s a lunatic fringe in the Club. They think someone’s putting mind-altering drugs in our food or implants up our noses. That’s paranoid. I just have bad dreams.’
‘What sort of dreams?’
‘I dream one day everyone will wake up in Candida, and I mean everyone. On that day, there won’t be a world any more, there’ll just be Candyland. We were given the Earth and everything under the sky is ours. Candida is’ – briefly lost for words, he struggled for the right expression – ‘an affront. It doesn’t belong in our world.’
‘Hence Prospero.’
‘Hence,’ he licked his lips – he had a thin, sharp tongue – ‘Prospero.’
Suddenly she wanted to know who was waiting for Xan in the outside world. She knew nothing about him. She didn’t even know his nationality – which of the flags strung outside the club could claim him? She had a question, she realised, that would put her hook into him. What about you Xan, who did you leave behind?
She pushed back her chair, it squealed. She rose, he remained seated and allowed her to tower over him. He was waiting for the question, he was willing it. She saw herself with him on the flat roof of the clubhouse, twined round him, naked and warmed by the heat radiating out of the brickwork. Ask, she thought, just ask, and put yourself back in the saddle.
His head was tilted arrogantly back to meet her eyes. She knew him. She knew his eyes from long ago. The words she wanted died in her mouth.
‘So,’ she said instead, ‘if I’m working here, where
would I be sleeping?’
The nervous gob of saliva she swallowed felt like a stone passing down her gullet. He took her to a suite that she could call her own and offered her Prospero. She agreed, they shook hands, he still called her Red. They talked, no more than that, into the rest of the deepening evening, while a third voice whispered privately in Kay’s ear, calling her a coward, and frigid, and a fool.
She left the Displaced Club after midnight at best guess. She’d stopped wearing a watch when it became obvious that its only purpose was to provide reassuring pins-and-needles tightness round her wrist. Time’s pressure only trickled in Candida, and though there were clocks, their chimes were enigmatic, measuring the day to scales she’d yet to grasp. She’d grown used to that, but she’d rarely been out this late.
By night, Candida filled with people and light and music. Oh, especially music – flutes and zithers and hurdy-gurdies and tambourines and rebecks and Spanish guitars and cacophony. She’d heard the parties from her window, but she was always an efficient sleeper and didn’t let them disturb her. Now she was swamped and panicked, and the exposed skin of her hands and face itched. The streets and alleys, already narrow, choked with human fat. She struggled to push her way through. Overhead, the sky turned fish-pink in the glare from the ground, while spotlights made leprous white circles on the sides of the old free house, which watched over the party as an impotent and senile chaperone. Children dressed as pirates and angels strung paper lanterns between the lampposts; candles gathered on window sills and even the natural lustre of human skin added to the yellow glow creeping the streets.
‘Bare-faced witch!’ called a gang of boys in gross cherub masks, in foetal pig masks. She was jostled and fondled, fingers licking at the line of her cloak as she passed. There was a stitch in her stomach, a needle of pain up her thigh. It was hard to breathe. She grabbed a random thought.
‘Is it Christmas? Is it Christmas already?’ she hollered, but her shouts were drowned out by the din. Her mouth was dry; she spent some of her flaking money on still lemonade and the rest on a present for Azure. Shopping usually cheered her, and she needed a boost after the meeting with Xan. She was in the aftermath, the slippery, fatal downer that followed the high. She picked as her gift a wooden stick with a carved gargoyle-head. A charm, said the jigsaw-faced shopkeeper, to ward off evil spirits. It looks suggestive, she complained. He disconcerted her with laughter. It’s a dragon; it’s half-price.
She pressed on. Laughter pursued her through every street.
People were looking at her! Disguise, disguise, I need a disguise.
‘Where can I buy a mask?’ she asked, snatching at a passer-by. It turned; it was a dragon, a Chinese dragon with flared nostrils and painted zig-zag teeth. Black mirrored eyes revealed nothing of the man or woman beneath, and if there was a reply from within, it was hidden by the mask. Startled, Kay stepped away. The passer-by moved on, arms and legs pounding to a distant drumbeat, followed by a conga-train of sexless bodies swathed in red and gold and green cloth, the colours of the dancing dragon.
Chinese New Year? Too early. Too early for Christmas too, she decided.
She sucked in a deep breath. She stuffed the wooden charm into her pocket and it chafed all the way home.
‘Up-up-up, you lazy bastard!’
Luna wore a dusty perfume that smelled like cold tea, while Quint’s skin was lightly-scented and lemon, so she knew it was them before she was fully awake. Quint was shaking her out of bed – it had to be Quint, she was the less sentimental, the more physical. An impersonal weight pressed down on her stomach. It wasn’t morning; the only light in the room was a ferocious glare from the door. She groaned. She swore, air escaping.
‘I need my sleep, I’m up first thing,’ she protested in a strangled, just-woken voice. She was already alert but feigned sluggishness. Quint hunched over her, shaking, a blurry monkey-king crouched on the bed. Luna, fainter still, lurked at her shoulder.
‘Not this morning; you’re promised somewhere else.’
Both wore grey gowns and pallid, earnest expressions clean of make-up. Flower-of-the-Lady was watching from the doorway. Kay hadn’t seen her since her first morning, but she hadn’t changed. Her lamp, roaring paraffin, filled the cell with clean light, then the nausea of burning oil. A car crashed in Kay’s memory. A boy flitted from the scene, leaving the scent of singed hair. She almost made a connection, but it was gone, vanishing into the woods and sleep.
Luna and Quint succeeded in tumbling her out of bed. Her naked soles touched frosty carpet scrub. Her bare legs felt comfortably warm, then they didn’t. She gave up the pretence of tiredness. She estimated she’d slept for two, maybe three hours. She could cope with that. She swatted away the cajoling arms of the Gestapo Twins. Across the way, Azure’s cot was already empty and the bedclothes strewn violently, as if she’d been ripped out of the world.
‘You said you’d be there for her,’ Luna said accusingly.
‘I didn’t realise it would be this soon.’ She dressed. The clothes were yesterday’s; she felt herself putting on yesterday’s grime and slick sweat like an extra layer of warmth and protection. She sniffed at the fabric cautiously. Meat. She would smell of dry, day-old beef. The wooden charm was still in the pocket and jutted awkwardly into her hip.
‘This’d work a lot better if you were a man,’ Flower-of-the-Lady remarked, with indifference not disapproval. Like the others she was in grey, but where Quint’s and Luna’s gowns were full and promised concealed bodies, the-Lady’s was shapeless and might have been empty beneath the folds. In the shadow behind the lamp, her hair curled like climbing flowers or weeds.
‘Don’t listen to her,’ Quint interjected. ‘Azure thinks you’re right for the job, so you’re right for the job.’
‘Men always cock this up,’ Luna added acidly. ‘So do women, but not as often.’
‘So what does she do?’
‘She becomes a bird.’
‘Is it going to hurt?’
‘That’s up to you.’
‘And what do I do?’
‘You follow me,’ said Flower-of-the-Lady. She stepped back from the door, and the light emptied from the room, turning Quint and Luna into wicked-curling lines of white teeth in darkness.
Kay went barefoot into the passages of the house, with the chatelaine lighting the way. Quint and Luna locked arms with her and bore her along after the-Lady’s hem. She preferred to stride, but they set her an ambling, leisurely pace. They wouldn’t let her look round as they walked, so she became convinced that they were being joined by more and more followers until she was marching at the front of a silent, odourless procession. Unable to turn, she looked down. Both her escorts were barefoot, their feet crushed, like hers, into the shape of the inside of the shoes. She stumbled, but momentum kept her going.
The old free house never rested and was suffused with light, whispered gossip and the scent of cinnamon, but their path soon took them away from the front-stage. They travelled downwards, always down, by lift or staircase, through gently sloping corridors, while the air tightened as if they’d left the structure of the house and were venturing into mines, into the mountain, and from there into the centre of the Earth. Furnished passages gave way to bare wood and plaster, to white brick, to crudely worked stone, all echoing with no-sound.
The path led them out of the tunnels and onto the mountain slope. There was no sign of the lights from Candida – and the stars glistened naked and undisturbed in the black overhead – so Kay presumed she’d been led out of sight of the house and the city.
‘It’s a beautiful night.’ she remarked, breaking a long silence. The words reverberated back at her as if this was a part of the world that had never heard human voice before and was savouring the novelty. She wished she’d chosen something more portentous; her echo sounded shrill and sentimental. She hadn’t paid attention
to the stars for a long while.
‘Can you name any constellations?’
‘Not in this hemisphere.’ She wasn’t joking. The sky was truly beautiful, she realised, in a raw and pagan way, and Luna’s frivolous question seemed to demand an earnest reply. ‘Orion. I always knew him by his belt.’
Flower-of-the-Lady’s back was to them, and she spoke evenly without breaking her pace. ‘Just imagine how massive the stars must be that you can see them from this distance, and how old they must be that some have been dead for millions of years but are still alive to us. This is where you need to be.’
A larger star with a bluish tinge was welling on the horizon, too small to be the sun or to shed more than a little light on the mountainside. On the ridge ahead of them was a tent, more of a pavilion, its walls a livid red like a raw hunk of meat in the bloodless grey landscape. The-Lady dampened her lamp, and the tent glowed from within, low firelight revealing the veins and creases of the walls and promising a real warmth that the chatelaine’s cold fusion couldn’t.
‘Go in,’ said the-Lady, ‘she’s waiting for you.’
Kay peeled back the folds of the tent with both hands.
A few days earlier – Kay had lost count – Azure had popped the question. She pranced on the spot and all the appendages of her insect suit jangled.
‘The-Lady says, the-Lady says, the-Lady says I’m going to be made a voladora now I’ve got my bike back. This is – I can’t put it any other way – the big one. This is my life, this is my everything, and I need someone to be there. I need a second to catch me if I fall. I’m asking you, Kay. If I believed in God, I’d say she put you here for a reason. You Appeared to me to do this.’
Force Majeure Page 8
