The Courage Consort

by Michel Faber

  'Kill, Hadrian, kill!'

  It was Magnus's voice ringing out, mock-imperious, but she couldn't see where it was coming from. All she knew was that a large animal, barking raucously, fangs bared, had sprung into her path, ready to knock her sprawling.

  'Hey!' she yelped, half in fear, half in recognition. Hadrian leapt back on his haunches, panting with pleasure. His cream-coloured snout was still twitching, his teeth still bared, but in a whimpery, goofy grin.

  'Show 'er no mercy, boy,' said Mack, jogging into view. He was taller and better-looking than she remembered, stripped down once again to athletic essentials, his bare legs glistening in the sun, his T-shirt stained with a long spearhead of sweat pointing downwards.

  'You scared me,' she chided him, as he drew abreast of her and continued to jog on the spot, his limbs in constant motion.

  'Sorry. Cruel sense of humour. Blame it on my father.'

  Though his face was flushed and she was regarding his pounding feet and pumping fists with disdainful bemusement, he seemed unable to stop running on the spot. It was an addiction, she'd read somewhere. Exercise junkies.

  'For goodness' sake, stand still.'

  'It's a glorious day!' he retorted, throwing his arms wide to the sun as he continued to pound the stone under his feet. 'Come on, let's run up the steps!'

  'Be my guest,' she said.

  'No, together!' He leapt onto the first step, sending Hadrian bounding ahead in a fit of joy; then after scaling a few more, he ran back down to her.

  'Come on—show me how fit you are!'

  Siân was sick with embarrassment, dumbstruck by his rudeness. If he noticed her distress, it only spurred him on.

  'Come on—slim young woman like you,' he panted, 'should be able to run up a few stairs.'

  'Please, Mack…' His flattery was crueller than insults. 'Don't do this.'

  'It's all about pacing yourself,' he persisted, his face flamered now, suggesting he was ashamed, but had gone too far to retreat now. 'You take a breath … every three stairs … sixty-six breaths…'

  'Mack,' she said. 'I'm an amputee.'

  For a moment he paced on, then abruptly stopped.

  'Christ,' he said, his fists dangling loose at his sides. 'I'm sorry.'

  Hadrian had scampered down to join them again, bearing no grudge for the way they'd teased him. He looked up at Siân and his master's faces, back and forth, as if to say, What next?

  Mack wiped his huge palm across his face, then did a more thorough job with the hem of his T-shirt. A little boy finding a pretext for hiding his face from an angry parent. A beautiful young man baring his abdomen, muscled like a Greek statue.

  You bastard, thought Siân. I want, I want, I want.

  'Which leg?' asked Mack, when he'd recovered himself.

  She lifted her left leg, wiggled it in the air for as long as she could keep her balance.

  'It's a good prosthesis,' he said, adopting his best physicianly tone.

  'No it's not,' she retorted irritably. 'It's a Russian job, mostly wood. Weighs a ton.'

  'You haven't considered upgrading to a plastic one? They're really light, and nowadays—'

  'Magnus,' she warned him, caught between bewildered laughter and bitter fury, 'it's none of your business.'

  To her relief, he dropped the subject, swallowing hard on his no doubt encyclopaedic knowledge of artificial limbs—if 'encyclopaedic' was the correct word for a professional acquaintance with the glossy promotional brochures that prosthetics companies sent to doctors.

  'I'm sorry,' he said, sounding genuinely chastened. Hadrian, impatient for action, fidgeted between them, his downy black forehead wrinkled in supplication. Siân stroked him, and it felt good, so she knelt down and stroked him some more.

  Mack knelt too, and since her hand was busy with the head and mane, he stroked the flank, hoping she wouldn't pull away.

  'How did you lose your leg?' he said gently, not like a doctor quizzing a patient, but like an average person humbled by curiosity to know the gory details.

  Siân sighed, not angry with him anymore, but struck by how absurdly inappropriate the verb 'lose' was in this context, how coy and, at the same time, judgmental. As if she had absentmindedly left her leg on a bus and it was still lying unclaimed in a lost property office somewhere. As if, when the pain inside her was ready for the kill, she would 'lose' her life like an umbrella.

  'I lost it in Bosnia,' she said.

  He was instantly impressed. 'In the war?' he suggested. She knew he was picturing her doing something exotically heroic, like pulling wounded children out of burning wreckage and being blown up by an enemy shell.

  'Yes, but it had nothing to do with the war, really,' she said. 'I was there because my boyfriend was a journalist. And we were stepping out of a bar in Gorazde when a car knocked me down, right there on the footpath. It was a drunk teenager behind the wheel.' She frowned irritably at Mack's look of disbelief. 'They have drunk teenagers everywhere, you know, even in Bosnia, even during wars.'

  'And your boyfriend?'

  'What about my boyfriend?'

  'Was he … injured?'

  'He was killed—'

  '—I'm so sorry—'

  '—four weeks later, by sniper fire. He'd already dumped me by then. Said he just couldn't see it working out, him and a disabled person. He'd have to devote his whole life to taking care of me, he thought.'

  Mack grimaced, tarred with the guilt of a fellow male he'd never even met.

  'You've done brilliantly, though,' he said.

  'Thank you.'

  'No one would know.'

  'Not unless they tried to make me run up a hundred and ninety-nine steps, no.'

  'I'm really sorry.'

  Siân patted Hadrian's head. It was as far as she was willing to go towards letting the dog's master off the hook. Let him sweat, she thought. Metaphorically speaking, of course. Every muscle on his torso seemed already to be defined with the stuff.

  'Speaking of contrition…' she said. 'Your message in a bottle … your confession…'

  'Yes?' He seized the change of subject gratefully, his head cocked in deference.

  'The job is trickier than I thought. You're going to have to decide what's more important to you, Mack: knowing what that document says, or keeping it the way you like it. The shape of it, I mean. If I succeed in peeling those pages apart, I'll be doing well. I can't give them back to you in the form of a nice tight scroll inside a bottle.'

  'So what are you suggesting?'

  'I'm not suggesting anything,' she said, manoeuvring him gently towards where she wanted him. 'It's your heirloom, Mack. I can glue the bottle shut again, return it to you tomorrow.'

  She turned away to acknowledge Michael coming up the steps, greeting the poor little duffer with a cheery wave. Michael nodded back, squinting, almost tripping over his own feet in his attempt not to intrude. She could tell that in his myopic eyes, she and Mack were the enigma of romance, stumbled upon, unearthed, only to be handed over to experts for analysis. Sweet, shy little man—how she despised him…

  'I don't know,' Mack was saying. 'There's something magic about it, just the way it is…'

  'Well, there is one thing we could do,' she said, figuring she'd softened him up enough. 'I could make you a new scroll out of papier-mâché, and stick a facsimile of the outermost page on the outside. I know how to make things like that look old and authentic. The original papers could be mounted on board, preserved properly, and you could have a replica that'd look pretty close to what your dad found.'

  He laughed.

  'More historical fakery, eh?'

  She looked him square in the eyes.

  'Do you want to know what the confession says or not?'

  He pondered for no longer than three seconds. 'I do,' he conceded.

  That afternoon, Siân and her colleagues at the dig said goodbye to Keira and Trevor, who were decamping to the Middle East. In their place, the 'very nice people' from north Wales
had already settled in—another married couple who'd been together forever. They wore matching jumpers and identical shoes. They whispered to each other as they worked, and kissed each other on the shoulder or on the side of the head. Siân knew very well they were adorable, but disliked them with an irrational passion. They smelled so strongly of happiness that even on the exposed headland of Whitby's East Cliff, the odour was overpowering.

  I want, I want, I want.

  At three-thirty, the heavens opened and the site supervisor declared the day's digging at an end. Thirteen of the fourteen archaeologists hurriedly dispersed into the downpour, hunched under nylon hoods and plastic habits, like a herd of monks fleeing a new Dissolution of the Monasteries. The younger ones sprinted down towards the town, free to embrace the unimaginable luxuries of the modern world.

  Siân, without a raincoat or umbrella, walked gingerly on the slick and treacherous terrain, watching where she put her feet as the rain penetrated her scalp and trickled down the back of her neck.

  Every few seconds, she cast a glance towards the hundred and ninety-nine steps, hoping against hope that Mack and Hadrian would be coming up to meet her. They weren't, of course. Still she cherished a forlorn fantasy of Mack surfacing from the horizon, running up the steps, one arm holding aloft an umbrella. Pathetic. Saint Hilda would be shaking her head despairingly, if she knew.

  The car park between the abbey ruins and Saint Mary's Church, which ordinarily failed to register on Siân's consciousness at all, annoyed her intensely today as she crossed it. What was it doing here, littering a sacred space with automotive junk? Buried somewhere underneath this dismal moat of concrete, this petrol-stained eyesore, lay oratories and other buildings erected by simple Christians more than a thousand years ago. What would it take to clear away this garbage, short of a bomb?

  Siân winced at a flash of recollection—the sound of the shelling she'd experienced in Bosnia, the blasts and rumbles that drove her deeper into the crook of Patrick's arm as they lay in bed, a few miles from the action.

  'Pretend it's a thunderstorm,' he'd advised her. 'It can't hurt you.'

  'Unless it hits you,' she'd said.

  'Then you won't feel anything,' he'd said, almost asleep. A lie, of course. Nothing dies painlessly. Even a limb that's long gone keeps hurting.

  For more than an hour, Siân traipsed around the streets of Whitby, searching for something to eat. She was in one of those perverse moods where nothing seemed appealing except what was patently not on offer. A lively Greek or Turkish restaurant, with lots of different dips and delicacies and peasant waiters hollering at each other across the room—that would do. Or a Chinese buffet, with spiced noodles and tiny spring rolls and hot soup. She was most definitely not in the mood for fish and chips, which, in Whitby, was an unfortunate way to be.

  Window after window, street after street, she peered through foggy panes of glass and read menus that offered her cod and potato in its various disguises, served with mushy peas, pickled egg, curry sauce, gravy. A sign on the front door of the Plough Inn said 'Sorry, no food today'. A bistro that looked promising wasn't open till the evening. The Tandoori place near the station was good, but she'd eaten there yesterday, and besides, she wanted something instantly.

  She ended up eating a banana-and-ice-cream crêpe in a café across the river. They served it with the ice cream folded inside the pancake rather than on top, so the whole thing was already a lukewarm mess even as she made the first incision with her toothless knife. Chasing the disappearing warmth, she ate too fast, then felt sick.

  If she'd been one of Saint Hilda's nuns, she reflected, she would have dined on bread and wine, in the company of friends. She would have drawn a circle in the air and someone would have silently handed her something wholesome, and there wouldn't have been this Top 40 gibberish blaring into her ears.

  Dream on, dream on.

  She paid for her pancake and crossed the bridge to her hotel, still haunted, to top it all off, by the fantasy of Magnus cresting the horizon with an umbrella held aloft.

  Siân's nightmare next morning was an ingenious variant on the usual. In this version, she had just a few precious seconds to find where her severed head had rolled and replace it on her neck, before the quivering nerves and arteries lost their ability to reunite. Her consciousness seemed to be floating somewhere between the two, powerless to guide her headless body as it groped and fumbled on the floor, its gory neck densely packed with what looked like gasping, sucking macaroni. Her head lay near the open door, inches from the steep stairwell, its eyes fluttering, its lips dry, licked by an anxious tongue. With a bump, Siân woke up on the floor next to her bed.

  I really am losing my mind, she thought.

  Still, looking on the bright side, she'd slept quite well, and for an uncommonly long stretch of hours. Buttery-yellow sunlight was beaming through the velux window, flickering gently as seagulls wheeled over the roof. The screaming was over, and breakfast would be served downstairs. Most cheeringly of all, she'd made good progress last night on Thomas Peirson's confession.

  Before going to bed, she'd managed to liberate the whole of the outermost page. Aside from those o's and e's already lost to the corrosive ink, there'd been no further mishaps; she'd proceeded with the utmost gentleness, ignoring the pangs of indigestion and … and whatever that lump in her left thigh might be. The lump was more palpable and more painful all the time, but she refused to let it terrorise her. She'd made a solemn vow, when she'd finally walked out of that hospital in Belgrade, feeling each clumsy step reverberating through the cushioned mould of her prosthesis, that she would never lie in a hospital bed again, ever. She would keep that vow. And if she was condemned to die soon, at least she'd die knowing she'd done a good job on this confession.

  A hastily scribbled transcript of what she'd unwrapped so far was lying on the spare pillow of her double bed. Pity it had to be written on a cheap little notepad with a Star Wars actress on the cover, but that was the only writing paper to hand last night, and she was so impatient to share Thomas Peirson's secrets with Mack that she simply couldn't wait. He would be in seventh heaven when he saw this. He was just the sort of guy who'd be keen on murder mysteries, she could tell.

  She scooped yesterday's skirt off the floor and held it up to the sunlight. It was well and truly ripe for the laundromat; she would wear something fresh today. To celebrate the first page.

  All the way to work, the cheap little Star Wars notepad burned a hole in Siân's jacket pocket, and her ears were cocked for the sound of Mack's voice, or the heavy breathing of Hadrian. Neither sound came to her, however, and she joined her colleagues at the dig, tilling the soil for human remains.

  At lunchtime, she wandered down to the kiosk and had a peek out into the world beyond the abbey grounds. Nothing. She considered going down to Loggerhead's Yard and actually visiting Mack at his house, but that didn't feel right.

  After all, he might kill me, she thought—then blinked in surprise at the idea. What a thing to think! Nevertheless, she'd rather wait until he came to her.

  She strolled back to the abbey remains. The fine lunchtime weather was luring visitors to the site—not just tourists, but also the children of English Heritage staff. Bobby and Jemima, the son and daughter of one of the kiosk workers, were running around the ruins, shrieking with laughter. At seven and six years old respectively, they weren't worried that their scrambling feet would erode the stonework of the pedestal stubs littering the grassy nave. They were so young, in fact, that they could even kiss each other without worrysing about the consequences.

  'Hi, Bobby! Hi, Jemima!' called Siân, waving.

  The children were mucking about near the vanished sacristy, lying down flat and jumping up in turn, pirouetting gracelessly.

  'What are you doing?' said Siân.

  Jemima was swaying on her feet, dizzy after another spin; Bobby was lying in a peculiar hollowed-out depression in a rectangle of stone, staring up at the sky.

 
'We're tryin' to see the wumman jumpin',' he explained.

  'What woman?'

  'The ghostie wumman that jumps off the top.' Bobby pointed, and Siân followed the line of his grubby finger to the roofless buttresses of the abbey. 'You spin three times, then you lie in the grave, then you see her.'

  'Have you seen her?' said Siân.

  'Nah,' said Jemima. 'We've not spinned 'ard enough.' And the two of them ran off, laughing.

  Siân looked down at the hollow in the stone, wondering what it used to be before it served as a toy sarcophagus for superstitious children. Then she peered up at the abbey buttresses, imagining a woman moving along them, a young woman in a flowing white gown, her bare feet treading the stone tightrope with all the sureness of a sleepwalker.

  'HUSH!'

  Siân almost jumped out of her skin as the dog shouted his greeting right next to her. She staggered off balance and did a little dance to regain her footing, much to Hadrian's delight.

  'Honestly, Hadrian,' she scolded him. 'Who taught you that trick?'

  'My dad, I suppose,' said Mack, ambling up behind. He was dressed in black denim trousers and a grey Nike sweatshirt with the sleeves gathered up to his elbows; he looked better than ever.

  'That's right, blame the departed,' said Siân.

  'But it's true,' he protested. 'I'm just a foster carer, stuck with a delinquent orphan. Aren't I, Hadrian, eh?' And he patted the dog vigorously on the back, almost slapping him.

  'You didn't need to pay £1.70 to meet me,' said Siân. 'I would've come out eventually.'

  He laughed. 'Sod that. I want to know what that confession says.'