The Courage Consort

by Michel Faber

  When she wandered over to the dig and said hello, her fellow archaeologists treated her like a returning heroine, everyone downing tools to crowd around her. Even the lovey-dovey couple from Wales were distracted from their industrious serenity long enough to ask how she was getting on. To be honest, everyone seemed extravagantly relieved that she was upright and walking around. This surprised Siân; she'd told no one she was going into hospital, only that she was ill and needed some time off work, but her colleagues made such a fuss of her, she could have been Lazarus. Perhaps, in those agonised last few days before she'd gone to the medical centre and burst into tears in the arms of a nurse, the fear of death had been showing on her face, naked and ghostly pale, for anyone to see.

  Then again, perhaps the fear had been showing for years.

  The site supervisor told her that a handsome young man had been asking after her every day. Siân took the news pensively, as if calling to mind a host of men who might possibly be the one, then enquired if this guy had a beautiful dog with him. More a miserable-looking, whiny sort of dog, was the reply.

  Warmed by the brilliant afternoon sun, Siân walked down to Saint Mary's churchyard, to the very edge of the cliff. She could tell that some of the soil had crumbled away during the storm, and fallen off the headland to the rocks below. Erosion was nibbling at the East Cliff, a never-ending natural labour to equalise the disparity between land and water. With every clod of earth that fell into space, empty air encroached closer to the great community of graves. At some stage in the future, sometime between tomorrow and when the sun turned supernova, Thomas Peirson's remains, and the remains of his loved ones, would tumble down to the shore of the North Sea.

  Siân walked back from the edge onto the firmer terrain, found the Peirson headstone, and stood staring at it. She swayed a little on her feet, dopey with painkillers and antibiotics and the lingering aftereffects of anaesthetic. The marks on the ground where she'd hacked with her trowel were barely perceptible, like scratches from a dog's claws.

  Suddenly, out of the corner of her eye, she glimpsed something hurtling towards her, but before she could brace herself against the impact, she was knocked reeling. She didn't quite fall, though, and her assailant wasn't a car—it was Hadrian, bouncing back from her torso like an oversized soft toy thrown in a tantrum. While she was staggering and windmilling her arms, he danced around her and offered woofs of encouragement.

  A man's deep voice shouted, 'Hadrian, no!' just as Siân managed to steady herself against Thomas Peirson's headstone. Magnus leapt to her side, his hand extended, and she grasped hold of it, even though it wasn't strictly necessary now.

  'Christ, I'm sorry…!' said Mack. They stood locked in an absurd handshake over the graveplot, he dressed like a corporate businessman, she all in black like a Goth—the modern kind. Hadrian was bouncing up and down between them, panting and snuffling, and although his manic behaviour was annoying at first, it gave them a convenient excuse to let each other go.

  'Maybe he's desperate for exercise,' Siân suggested, fondling the dog's sumptuous flank with both hands. 'Have you given up running?' And she aimed a nod at Mack's classically formal suit, the trousers of which were the kind she could imagine the wearer fastidiously inspecting for evidence of dog hair. The memory of this man plastered with a dark arrowhead of sweat, scantily clad in T-shirt and shorts, was difficult for her to retrieve now, so faded had it become.

  'It got a bit … unmanageable,' he said, jerking forward in an abortive attempt to assist her as, with a grunt of pain, Siân knelt next to Hadrian and started stroking the dog in earnest. 'Hadrian wouldn't run with me anymore, you see. He'd just shoot ahead like a missile. Totally out of control.'

  'And this is what drove you to dress up like a sales executive for an insurance firm?'

  But his appetite for sparring seemed to have deserted him; instead of firing off a witty rejoinder, he only winced.

  'I've got a meeting today, a conference,' he explained, his already rather pained eye contact with her faltering. 'In fact, I'm leaving. Leaving Whitby.'

  'Oh yes?' she said, after only a moment's pause in her stroking. 'Going back to London?'

  'Yes.'

  'Research paper finished?'

  'Yes.'

  'Proved what you wanted to?'

  He shrugged and looked down towards the town, in the general direction of the railway station. 'That's for my examiners to decide.'

  Siân had her arms around Hadrian's neck, her chin nudging his bony, downy skull. She waited a few more seconds to see if Mack would oblige her to ask, or if he'd have the courage to put her out of her suspense.

  'What's going to happen to Hadrian?' she enquired at last, in the silence of the headland.

  Mack blushed crimson, an ugly inflammation from the roots of his hair to the collar of his creamy-white shirt. 'I don't know. I'll take him with me, I suppose, but … I can't see myself being able to manage him in central London.' Sweat glistened on his great blushing forehead, and he began to stammer. 'Still, he … he's a pure-bred, isn't he, and I'm sure he's worth a mint, so I expect there'll be … experts, you know, connoisseurs, who'd … ah … take him.'

  'How much do you want for him?' said Siân. She'd no doubt he would respond badly to this overture; braced herself for a shamefaced display of something horrible—craven retaliation, evasion, anger. She was wrong. He was enormously, unmistakably relieved.

  'Siân,' he declared, clapping a palm to his brow, 'if you want him, you can have him.'

  'Don't be silly,' she said. 'He's worth a mint, as you so … bluntly put it. How much do you want?'

  Magnus smiled, shaking his head. 'I've owned him long enough, Siân. Now I want you to have him as a gift—like those history books you dropped through my letterbox.'

  'Don't be patronising.'

  'No, no!' he protested, as animated and confident now as she'd ever seen him. 'You don't understand—I was thinking of offering for ages! It's just that I … I didn't know where you lived—whether you'd be able to have a dog there. I had an idea you might be staying in a hotel…'

  'I might be,' she said. 'But I could move somewhere else, if I wanted to. If there was a reason to.' Yes, yes, yes, she was thinking, hiding her daft grin of exultation inside the dark fur of Hadrian's back. Mine, mine, mine.

  'I just don't want you to be left,' Magnus was saying, 'with the wrong impression of me, that's all. Like I didn't have a generous bone in my body…'

  She giggled, hugging Hadrian tighter to keep a grip on her own hysteria, her own longing to weep and wail. The wound in her thigh was throbbing; she wondered if it had burst its stitches when she was staggering off balance.

  'Don't want to go down in history misunderstood, eh?' she said.

  With a flinch he acknowledged she'd scored a direct hit. 'Yeah.'

  Siân stood up, using Hadrian as a four-legged prop, which the dog seemed to understand instinctively. She noticed Mack cast a furtive glance at his watch; only now did she twig that he probably had a train to catch, and a roomful of people somewhere in London waiting to be impressed by a man in an immaculate suit.

  'I'm making you late, aren't I?'

  'Nothing a few grovelling apologies to a bunch of medical registrars won't fix.' And he enclosed one giant hand gently inside the other, in an attitude of prayer, bowing his head like a penitent monk. 'Mea culpa, mea culpa.'

  Time accelerated suddenly, as Siân realised this really was goodbye.

  'I'll have to return your confession,' she said. 'And the bottle. Not through your letterbox, though.'

  'Don't worry about it,' he said wearily. 'Keep it.'

  'It's worth a hell of a lot more than a Finnish Lapphund, you do realise that, don't you?'

  Her attempt to speak his language missed its mark; he smiled ruefully and looked away. 'Not to me. I liked it the way it was, before … before I understood it. When it was a mystery, a mysterious object my dad rescued from the ruins of Tin Ghaut when he was a kid. Something he'
d take out to show me if I was good, and then put back in its special place.'

  'I'm sorry, Mack,' said Siân. 'Mea culpa.'

  'It's OK,' he said breezily. 'I'm sure you'll write an academic paper on it one of these days. Then you can thank me in the acknowledgments, eh?'

  She stepped forward and embraced him, pressing her hands hard against his back. He responded decorously at first, then allowed himself to clasp her tight, uttering a deep and protracted sigh. He smelled of toothpaste, deodorant, aftershave and, very faintly, mothballs—a combination which somehow got past her defences and, despite her vow to avoid a melodrama, made her cry after all.

  'I don't even know your surname,' she said.

  He groaned, and a hiccup of laughter passed through his breast into hers. 'Boyle.'

  'Can't blame your father for that.'

  'And yours?'

  She hugged him tighter, suppressing a tiny fear, left over from the nightmares, that his hand would cease stroking her hair and seize her by the throat. 'It's a secret,' she said, and, pulling his head down to her lips, she whispered it in his ear.

  When Mack was gone, Siân took shelter behind Thomas Peirson's gravestone and lifted her skirts to inspect her bandaged thigh. The gauze was clean and white, wholly devoid of the spreading stigma of blood she'd envisioned. Overactive imagination, as always.

  Tentatively, she prodded the site of the surgery; it hurt less than before, and the pain was localised now, no longer a web of soreness throughout her innermost parts.

  'It seems you've been carrying a little chunk of Bosnia around with you for quite a few years,' the doctor had said, when the X-rays were ready. She'd been slow to catch on, assumed he was making some smug, oh-so-penetrating comment about her relationship with the past. All he meant was that a fragment of stone, ploughed deep into her flesh when the car was dragging her mangled body twenty yards across a street roughened by tanks, had managed to escape detection in the desperate attempts to mend her afterwards. Overworked military surgeons saved her life, did their damnedest to save her knee, were forced by monstrous swelling and infection to sacrifice it. Somehow, though, in all the drama, an embedded crumb of tarmac had been overlooked, and had spent all these years since, inching its way—millimetring its way, more like—to the surface.

  'That's not possible, surely?' Siân had said. But her conviction that she must be the eighth wonder of the world was gently undermined by medical statistics. The tendency of foreign objects to work their way out of people's bodies had been recorded, the doctor assured her, as far back as the Renaissance; there was, historically speaking, a lot of it about.

  Siân stood at the top of the hundred and ninety-nine steps, fingering the morsel of rubble in her pocket, wondering if Magnus, running at the top speed that his suit and stiff black shoes allowed, had reached the railway station yet. She wondered how much older he might need to be, how much he might need to live through, before Time weathered him into the right man for her—counselling herself that he was sure to have found somebody else by then. The stone in her pocket was smooth as a pebble, as if her flesh had sucked it like a toffee for years, hoping to digest it. Overactive imagination again.

  How odd to think that Whitby's sleepy harbour was twinkling here below her, obscured by a mushroom proliferation of typically English rooftops, while nestled inside her palm was a relic of a war-torn Balkan street thousands of miles away. She considered tossing it down the steps, just to see how long she could keep her eye on it before it became, ir-reclaimably, part of the British landscape. But, on balance, she preferred her original idea of getting a jeweller to fashion it into a pendant. A silver chain would be nice; Saint Hilda would have to forgive her.

  She reached the abbey just as the last of the day's visitors were leaving. Homeward-bound American tourists looked at her in pity as she made her way towards the ruins; she wondered why, then realised they must think she'd just arrived on a late-running coach and was only going to get five minutes' worth of antiquity before being evicted by the English Heritage folks.

  She walked to the sacristy and found the stone rectangle where Bobby and Jemima had shown off their superstitious spinning game. The vaguely human-shaped depression in the stone was, she had to admit, very inviting to lie in, even though its grey austerity had been tarnished by the words I WAS HERE graffiti'd in yellow felt-tip. Tomorrow, with pious diligence, those words would no doubt be erased.

  Siân looked right and left, to confirm that the tourists were all gone, and then she balanced herself carefully on one foot and, after a deep breath, began to spin. Her intention was to spin thirty-four times, but physicalities got the better of ritual and she found herself deliriously dizzy after only ten. With the land and sky revolving before her eyes, she laid herself down in the stone hollow, settling her shoulders and head in the proper place. For what seemed like ages, the turrets and piers of the abbey moved to and fro on the turf of the East Cliff like giant sailing ships made of rock, then finally glided to a standstill. Up there on the buttresses, the ghostie woman not only failed to jump, but failed to appear.

  Siân gasped in surprise as her cheek was touched by something rough and wet and rather disgusting; Hadrian was licking her. She opened her mouth to scold him, but his preposterous name stuck in her throat.

  'I think I'll call you Hush,' she said, elbowing herself up a little.

  'Hush,' he agreed, nudging her to get to her feet.

  The Fahrenheit Twins

  In memory of Panda

  AT THE ICY ZENITH OF THE WORLD, far away from any other children, Tainto'lilith and Marko'cain knew no better than that life was bliss. Therefore, it was bliss.

  Certainly they had plenty of space to play around in—virtually unlimited space. All around their house, acres of tundra extended in all directions, unpunctuated by fences, roads, or other dwellings. A team of huskies could easily pull a sled with the little bodies of Tainto'lilith and Marko'cain on it, for miles, without even losing the frisk in their step. Time was also no problem: in almost perpetual Arctic twilight, there weren't any rules about being back by sunset. The only thing the children's mother absolutely insisted on was that they never leave the house without a compass, since the tundra looked much the same in all directions, especially when the snows were fresh. During the darker months, even the uncannily keen vision of the Fahrenheit twins was strained by the gloom, and navigation by the light of the moon on a sea of grey snow was impossible.

  Still, however dark and treacherous, all that they surveyed was their domain. Nominally, the island of Ostrov Providenya was part of an archipelago that belonged to the Russians, but in reality no law extended far enough to include this barren wasteland encircled by a shifting morass of ice. The Fahrenheits were monarchs here, and their two children prince and princess.

  'What lies beyond?' the twins once asked their father.

  'Nothing special,' Boris Fahrenheit replied without looking up from his journals.

  'What lies beyond?' they then asked their mother, knowing she tended to see things rather differently.

  'Oh, darlings, too much to explain,' she teased. 'You'll see it all when you're tired of this little paradise.' And she ruffled their unwashed hair, in that distantly affectionate way she had.

  Physically, there was little in common between parents and offspring. Boris Fahrenheit was a tall thin German, grey of face and silver of hair, walking always slightly stooped as if the weight of his oversized knitted pullovers was too much for his skeletal frame to bear. Una was also tall, a blue-eyed, rosy-cheeked Aryan beauty with dyed black hair cut short in a between-the-wars style. She walked erect, keeping all the flesh firm. She was fifty-nine years old and had produced her children well past the age where such things were considered feasible.

  Tainto'lilith and Marko'cain were small, even for their age, which was somewhere between nine and eleven. No one had recorded the birth, and it was now too long ago for Boris and Una to recall the exact date. The children were clearly not adolesc
ent yet, anyway. They tumbled around below the furniture, giggling, rounded with puppy fat. They smelled sweet. They wore without demur the embroidered sealskin jumpsuits sewn together for them by their mother. They conversed with the huskies as equals.

  Their hair was naturally black, hanging long over their ivory-white faces. Each pair of cheeks was sprinkled with cinnamon freckles, as well as a scattering of tiny puckered scars from a mysterious disease that had thankfully run its course without needing medical attention. Their brown eyes were large, with something of the seal about them: all dark iris and no whites, or so it seemed. They resembled neither their father nor mother, despite the fact that the Fahrenheits were, at the time of the twins' conception, already long exiled from past friends. But Boris and Una had been shaped and coloured by the Old World, and their children by a subpolar archipelago, whose glacial contours could not even be mapped.

  More than anything else, the twins' characters were formed by benign neglect. To their father, they were an indulgence of their mother's which he tolerated so long as it didn't interfere with his research. To their mother, they were like robust little pets, pampered and cooed over when she was in a frivolous mood, forgotten about utterly when she had better things to do. Typically, she might spend hours bathing them and massaging whale oil into their skin, scolding them for spoiling their beautiful young flesh with so many calluses and scars; then for the next week she might scarcely notice their existence, nodding absentmindedly as they tore away into the icy night.

  In any case, Boris and Una Fahrenheit were themselves often away from home, advancing the progress of knowledge. Specifically, they were away visiting the Guhiynui people, on whom they were the world's foremost authorities. The Guhiynui being mistrustful of strangers, however, progress was slow, at least on fundamental issues. Una's book on Guhiynui handicrafts had already been published and she was compiling another on their cuisine, but there was no end in sight on Boris's long-awaited history, and despite the Fahrenheits' best efforts the dark secrets of the Guhiynui's sexual taboos had not yet been illuminated.