Force Majeure

by Daniel O'Mahoney

  Beyond the front door, the kitchen is curtained by so many plants and flowers that the light has turned green and the air rainforest-wet, a hothouse without the heat. Kay’s grandmother sits, as she always does in these memories, at the kitchen table in her wide, cushioned armchair, warming herself on a portable electric fire. Kay perches on a harder seat, a grown-up seat, but her legs are already long enough to reach the floor.

  Child-Kay hangs on every word her stout, doll-skinned grandmother says. What she says – what she tells – are stories about her side of the family, about the country of her youth, and tales from a wider world. Kay learns about the Black Hole of Calcutta, the Lambton Worm and the Mighty Khan’s storm-frustrated invasions of Japan. Her grandmother always seems distracted, her face turned into the middle distance and her hands occupied, usually with sharp implements – needles knitting, knives peeling or pens scratching. Today she’s rolling a ball of twine, drawing it from the cat’s cradle wrapped round Kay’s fingers. Kay was her little red daughter, splattered with freckles.

  ‘You’re a sharp instrument as well, Kay. Don’t let yourself get too sharp now.’

  She isn’t, Kay realised, particularly old, though at the time she seemed ancient.

  There were no longer flowers in the kitchen, except for a few straggling pot plants. The old chairs and furniture were long lost. Kay switched on the radio, low, for company. The news headlines were announced – a catalogue of natural and unnatural disasters, followed by the weather and the prose poetry of the shipping forecast. She listened dispassionately until it was replaced by music, then she turned it off. She looked for post and newspapers while she waited, but there were none. Her Better Half kept a tidy house with nothing out of place.

  She ventured through the rooms of the ground floor and found a stranger in her grandmother’s sitting room, a red-haired young woman sprawled on her settee in sweater, jeans and bare feet. She was watching television and didn’t notice Kay immediately. When she did, it was with only a flicker of surprise. She turned off the telly and sat up.

  ‘It’s you,’ she said. She couldn’t have been more than 18. She was a tall girl, like Kay, but gangly and clear-skinned. ‘We weren’t expecting you back this soon.’

  ‘It feels like I’ve been gone forever,’ Kay replied, seating herself in one of the armchairs, a relic from her grandmother’s time that still seemed too large for her. The redhead – she wore her hair in a bob, not long, not like Kay’s – unselfconsciously picked up her balled socks and rolled them onto her feet. Kay couldn’t place her, but it was soon clear that they hadn’t met before; the girl recognised her only from photographs.

  This was Her Better Half’s new Better Half. She was his type.

  They spent half an hour talking aimlessly about nothing. Kay’s replacement wasn’t ruffled by her predecessor’s return, which meant that she’d settled, she felt secure. She had skinny arms and pronounced breasts under her tight top. She offered Kay stilted hospitality in her own home; tea, snacks, she refused. Kay told her a little about South America, mostly about Buenos Aires and her travels around the Andes. Candida was difficult to describe. Their Mutual Better Half had gone for a walk in the woods. Eventually they heard the front door slam and he strolled jauntily in on them. His face deflated as he saw Kay, pricked by her presence. He sent his new girlfriend to make coffee – she scurried off, grateful to escape the newly-tense room – and took up her place on the settee. Kay imagined it was still warm with the impression of her body.

  ‘Where did you find her?’ she asked flatly. ‘And shouldn’t she be in school? It’s not a holiday today, is it? I’ve lost track of time.’

  Her Better Half sank back in the settee, staring at her, still winded.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m not here to complicate your life,’ Kay drawled. ‘I’ve come back for a day to put my affairs in order.’

  Still shocked, Her Better Half tried to speak. The words came out half-formed, barely coherent. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘oh’. Kay realised she had exhausted him long ago.

  The chokes of the coffee percolator carried to them from down the hall. Kay’s stare was making Her Better Half uncomfortable. His eyes moved round the room, trying not to settle on her or meet her gaze. He cleared his throat. Anything he came out with now would be said purely to fill the silence.

  ‘Have you found someone else?’ he asked, cautiously.

  ‘Not in the way you have,’ she told him.

  He was struggling. She smiled calmly, as Flower-of-the-Lady might have smiled. She was trying to encourage him, but his eyes were terrified, as if she was a revenant of the ancient past. Time had moved on here while she was in South America.

  ‘Your head,’ he asked. ‘What happened?’

  She brushed back her hairline and rubbed the bandage on her temple. It didn’t hurt, not any more. ‘I had a fall, nothing serious. It looks much worse than it is.’

  Her head smacked against the kerb of the canal and cracked open. She recoiled, slipping back into the waters. She had already passed out, losing consciousness as she fell. The water was flowing, drawn by distant locks. It tugged at her slowly, pulling her away from the walls of the house, from the smoke and the violence. She’d twisted onto her back on impact and this saved her life, keeping her nose and mouth above the line of the water. The gash on her head trickled blood, a pink blossom trail marking her drift through the city.

  No-one saw her as she passed, and no-one dived in to save her. That day, no-one in Candida was looking downwards, and if someone had glanced at the canal as she meandered past, they would have seen only a bundle of discarded scarlet rags. Her skin bloated with dirty water. The artificial tide drew her under the arches of the Follies, beneath gangways and half-finished bridges designed to demonstrate misunderstood principles of geometry or engineering. The flow pulled her through channels of stone, concrete, mud and rustless metal. The automatic gears and screws designed by Doctor Arkadin turned, oblivious of her presence. The sluice gates on the drains rattled and scraped open around her, rising like an honour guard, and the counter-tides welled and caught her and drew her down into brick-walled Bazalgette pipes.

  She dropped on hard cushions of water through black, measureless tunnels before coming to rest in Doctor Arkadin’s most splendid and most secret Folly, the cavernous cathedral of shit beneath the city. She sloshed down in a pocket of clean water in the sizzling lake of sewage, her body gradually submerging itself in the mire until only the tip of her face protruded above the surface, like an iceberg, breathing. Around her, vast spider-gears powered by methane and perpetual-motion machines churned and sifted the nightsoil; diplodocus-head cranes raised it in buckets; and Archimedes screws whisked it back up towards the distant farms and roof-gardens of the city. Unseen by Kay but lit by glistening, sugary stalactites, Candida spilled its precious waste from every wall, through pipe outlets carved into the shape of dragon-mouths. And she dreamed; in Candida, Kay dreamed.

  That was how they found her, hours later.

  The flat boat prowled slowly across the poisonous surface of the lake, its two glass-eyed, bare-breasted pilots pushing carefully towards her with long punt poles. Reverently, Luna and Quint hooked her and lifted her sopping and stinking to safety. After that, she slept undreaming.

  Kay dreamed three dreams in Candida, in the water, in Candida (where dreams are true). This was the first of them:

  Armed with broom handles, shielded by dustbin lids and carried on commandeered bicycles, loyal officers of the Order of the White Horse prepared to storm the headquarters of the enemy. A small advance guard, including Captain Ernesto de Broca, Captain Emilio Esteban and six other warrior-poets, entered the building mid-morning. The plan was to evacuate the Club, confiscate any weaponry and – if possible – arrest the ringleaders of the coup and their hired thugs. Secretly, Esteban, with his first-hand experience of the threat, had little fait
h in their prospects, though there had been encouraging omens. There would be minimal resistance, as most of Prospero’s private army was laying siege to the old free house. The invaders were a small force and they were divided. The arrival of the mercenaries had also split the conspiracy within the ranks. Fear had turned half the officers against Prospero; half of the remainder had gone into hiding; the last quarter stayed allied to the coup only out of fatalism. They were monkeys with their fists caught in slim-necked pots, unable to let go of the prize they’d sought to snatch. He sympathised with them.

  There were more soldiers coming. He couldn’t put that out of his mind. There would be more helicopters. There would be more guns. Even if the officers captured the clubhouse, there was still the larger force at the old free house to deal with, and that wouldn’t be easy. There would be deaths. Ancient rumours were already circulating that Doctor Arkadin was long dead, that he had committed suicide. No matter how events fell, Candida would be a changed city by the end of the day. Esteban hoped there might still be whores and officers and dreadful poetry, and money that flaked and shrivelled in your pocket, and trust, and Kay – and Kay –

  – and Kay was, technically speaking, one of the enemy, one of the leaders. He expected he would find her in the clubhouse and it would fall to him to arrest her, maybe even fight her, maybe even to the death. Or perhaps she would have fled the city by now. He hoped fervently she had simply gone home, as she’d promised, and he hoped just as fervently – he glanced up the mountainside to the old free house, wracked by explosions and gunshots – that she had lied to him.

  The previous night, after he had reported to his fellow officers, he had returned home and destroyed every single photograph of Kay that challanco had bequeathed him. He hadn’t been able to rationalise it; he could have pretended he was protecting her or himself, but the truth was, he was simply compelled to it. Each picture had flickered and burned at the touch of a match, another moment of Kay’s past consumed, another of challanco’s oblique accusations silenced. Days later, the victors of Candida would venture into the service tunnels below the city and find that the great metal head had fallen permanently silent, that a crack had opened across its scalp, revealing the smashed clockworkings of its brain. Sombrely they would break it apart, like an egg, bringing the age of Doctor Arkadin to an end.

  A harsh wind rose up from the valley, and de Broca’s team shivered in their ludicrous, mock-military party coats. Esteban glanced up into the clouds, expectantly. The wind had a distinct character, it was the type that would bring the first wet drops from a summer storm. There was no rain, the rush was dry, even warm, and the horizon was thickening with black clouds. The helicopters would fall out of that, from the sublime vista behind the mountain.

  Had he warned de Broca about the other helicopters? Yes, of course he had, even in his addled tiredness; but no-one was prepared to talk about them. Candida had always been vulnerable from the air, but who imagined powered flight at this altitude? He had proposed capturing the helicopter that had already landed, but a scouting party from the back of the Club reported it had gone. That was disappointing. Then again, there were so many things about it that could go wrong.

  He imagined himself plummeting to earth. That felt too giddily real, a prophecy.

  ‘Do we go?’ he asked de Broca.

  ‘We go,’ said his rival and his comrade.

  They went. First they embraced.

  The first of the Appeared they encountered was the Club’s secretary, the man called the Nigerian. He confronted them in the annexe to the building, brandishing an automatic pistol with the quiet faith of a man who has a gun to hide behind. With a flick of a broomstick, de Broca swiped the confidence out of his hand, and the pistol fell echoing onto floor tiles. Startled, the Nigerian dropped to his haunches, ready to leap or fly, but caught undecided between the two. De Broca broke the secretary’s nose with a prod from the knob of his broom. Deprived of his gun and sweating blood from the middle of his face, the Nigerian ceased to be a challenge and was sent out meekly into the arms of the waiting officers. The tiny victory cheered de Broca’s team, though Esteban hung back from the general mood, certain it wouldn’t last.

  Esteban picked up the discarded gun, holding it between forefinger and thumb like a diseased thing, and dropped it into a carpet-bag they’d brought to confiscate the weapons. Six more helicopters. The silent walls of the steamworks were deceptive and lulling. He didn’t expect the rest of the day to be as easy but – as they crept into the passages and offices of the Club – the sense of unthreatening calm held. Few members had turned up for work the morning after the party. Those that de Broca’s team found were dazed and frightened, checking in to work because they felt it was expected. Some of them had been present at the party and hadn’t grasped the implications of what they’d seen. They went out at the officers’ request, almost relieved.

  Esteban began to agitate to head upstairs, to the suites on the upper floors where the ringleaders might be hiding. De Broca let him go, concentrating his efforts on evacuating the club and preparing to face resistance. As he climbed the stairs, Esteban expected to hear the first gunshots, but they didn’t come. Later, he learned that there had been three armed men left to guard the building, but by the time the search party had encountered them it was clear that the day had been lost and won, and there was no fighting at all in the clubhouse after the Nigerian was disarmed.

  There was a woman, a girl in fact, hiding naked under the bed of one of the suites. She had Kay’s freckles but was smaller and looked pathetically vulnerable in a way that ferocious Kay, even at her lowest ebb, could never have managed. Esteban covered her up with his Prussian riding jacket. She had an American accent, but he didn’t catch her name. (Mae, thought Kay, dreaming. Her name is Mae.) She was frightened but not distraught; she had been abandoned rather than abused. She could walk, so he gave her his broomstick and sent her to find her own way down. On the wall beyond the door to the suite, the bloodstain made by Azure was hardening and ugly. Esteban sat on the bed, staring at the accusing pattern through the jamb and rubbing warmth into his shirtsleeved arms. Azure would never have been a good officer. The old free house was welcome to her.

  He found no-one else. In one office there was a strange, incomplete, distorted model of the city, with the old free house secure and unyielding on the mountainside. He left it alone. In an adjacent room there were briefcases full of paper money, nothing from Candida. He recognised Australian and US dollars, yuan, euros, quaint old English pounds, currencies all the colours of the rainbow. He was tempted to lug each case to the window and set them free one by one, rain multicoloured paper streamers on the city. No; tempting though it was, it would give away their game to the occupation forces. No; this was a building full of pipes and sinks. He filled the nearest basin with cold water and drowned every last note and bill, watching them swirl and pulp and mate in the water.

  Certain and not undisappointed that the top floor had been evacuated, he went to the roof and scanned the skyline through bronze-rimmed binoculars. Black, unmoving clouds obliterated the sky, hiding all incoming traffic. He swung round to inspect the siege at the old free house, and the old free house was on fire, smoke belching from every window, smudging its façades dirty grey.

  ‘Dragon’s breath!’ he swore.

  Then he heard the first distant thump of the helicopters. He turned back to the horizon, and through his binoculars caught a glimpse of the half-dozen strong swarm as it broke through a gap in the clouds then vanished into the gloom. ‘Shit!’ he swore, and dashed the binoculars to the ground. He didn’t turn, and so missed seeing the red shape that erupted through Kay’s window and into the air.

  And this was Kay’s second dream:

  There was no fire.

  There was smoke, but it wasn’t made by the blasts or the bombs of Prospero’s men. Flower-of-the-Lady had sent the house’s mauve-col
oured maids down into the boiler rooms, rubbish chutes, service ducts and ventilation wells where they would be out of immediate danger but also useful. There was a plan that had been put in place centuries earlier, long before Doctor Arkadin’s day. At her desk in the library, the-Lady sat in reverie, recalling how she had sat at the feet of her mother and her grandfather as they had described the workings of the trap to her.

  She’d made her own modifications to the plan since becoming chatelaine.

  The barbarians were at the gate breaking through. She could hear them thumping at the doors with guns and explosives and blunt axe-heads. Less than an hour earlier, she had sealed and barred the same entrance. The ranks of servants, almost all of whom had chosen to stay and put the plan into effect, stood in the vaulted front-stage antechamber of the house, waiting for her word, armed with mounds of cloth and rags, with frothing buckets of water, with wood blocks and oil. At her request, they went down into the conduits of the house and lit their fires in the places where the air carried. So there was no great, single conflagration raging out of control, consuming the house. That was the illusion, that was the trick. Instead, there were many tiny fires contained in tight makeshift braziers. Before the intruders had even breached the walls, the maids were soaking and burning rags.

  The smoke rose and filled the house, the dragons waking from a secret slumber.

  Once the doors finally gave, the mercenaries spilled inside as an unthinking human tide. This wasn’t a base to be secured but a symbol to be torn down and smashed. That needed little finesse or strategy. They were facing courtesans armed with carelessly flung pots of human waste, with kitchen knives and bondage toys. They had backup riding in on helicopters. They had guns. They were in no danger. They blundered into the pall, without masks, without even handkerchiefs to protect them. Once inside the house, they Disappeared.

  The sound of guns faded away, replaced by the softer, more-human chorus of retching and coughing. The burning rags were soaked in water mixed with a chemical solution that stung eyes and lungs. From behind her desk, the-Lady gave orders for the marvellous mechanical traps to be switched on, the engines built into the fabric of the house. Then she rose, put on her mask and set out for the battlefront.