by Glenn Myers
Keziah-land
A gentle knocking woke me. ‘It’s me, Caroline,’ said a voice through the door.
‘Hello Caroline,’ I said.
‘Don’t expect this every morning,’ she said, pushing the door open and carrying a tea-tray. ‘I brought you an apple for your breakfast. Seeing the mess in the kitchen I can’t imagine you’re hungry.’
‘What time is it?’
‘Eight o’clock. Leopold said he wanted you in the forest clearing by 8:30.’
‘Ugh.’
‘Quite.’
‘Caroline. Could you round up Mel and Annie before I go? I want to say goodbye to you all. And could you make sure Dumbo is ready outside?’
‘OK. Oh, Jamie,’ she added lightly. ‘Is it OK if we keep the gorilla?’
‘Is that a trace of pink I see on your cheeks?’
‘That’s because I’ve just climbed the stairs,’ said Caroline primly. ‘It’s called vasodilation.’ With a trim swirl of modest calf-length skirt she was gone.
My brain rebelled against this day. Surely there was some way to escape, or wake up, or be told everything had been cancelled, or for the U.S. cavalry to appear over the hill. Surely there was something other than this sense of, yet again, being strapped in a car facing a headlong collision.
I sipped the tea and ate the apple and arrived in the lighthouse kitchen. The gorilla had his arm round Caroline’s shoulder. She was feeding him grapes.
‘He’s very friendly,’ said Caroline, by way of explanation.
‘Guys,’ I said. ‘I hope you don’t mind but I’m going to have to send you back to the memory storage.’
There were murmurs of protest.
‘I know, I know,’ I said. ‘But I don’t know what’s going to happen to me. I can always call you back if things work out.’
‘Jamie,’ said Mel. ‘I’ve put in hours in the gym and lost loads of weight. I hope you’re not going to lose the weight I’ve lost.’
‘I’ll make a mental note,’ I said.
‘What about the gorilla?’ said Annie, then blushed furiously.
‘I’ll send him too,’ I said. ‘If you like, I can make one each for you when we come back.’
The girls weighed this in an approving way.
‘In some ways it’ll be a relief,’ said Caroline. ‘It’s such a strain being what you think I am all the time.’
‘I thought I was being clever to make you think that way,’ I said.
‘An obvious literary device,’ sniffed Caroline.
‘Well, I’ve enjoyed your company, girls,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’
I gave Mel and Annie a hug each. Caroline didn’t extract herself from the gorilla’s arms but offered her face for a kiss, which I obliged, keeping one eye on the seven-foot primate. Then with a little twist of thought, like in a dream, I sent them all back to the deeps of my memory.
I stepped out of the empty lighthouse kitchen and trod carefully over the wet rocks to where Dumbo was standing, the foam splashing around his legs. He hoisted me onto his back, and we soared into the air.
My habitat looked good from the sky: the lighthouse washed by the sea, Osama’s on the coastline, the hotel next to it, Lord’s Cricket Ground, the beach with the ruins of Pablo’s bar, the maglev. Further inland was the Cam and Edwards’ Air Force Base, with the shuttle neatly parked up.
I wheeled Dumbo round and we flew towards the central habitat. As we neared the woodland clearing we flew over the walls of a giant rainbow-coloured oval stadium that had sprung up in the night.
Dumbo lowered us down into the centre of the stadium, which rose high all around us. Each tier was a different colour, and the whole thing flickered slightly. The tiers were wide and deep, built for something far other than a human span. They were completely empty. I felt a whiff of fear. I caught a glimpse of Leopold pushing a kind of trolley across the ground.
Dumbo lifted me off his back and I patted his leathery skin. ‘I’d better send you away too. I don’t want you run into the ground by joyriders.’ He put his trunk on my shoulders by way of goodbye, and was gone.
Leopold was walking towards me. He was in full Scottish gear with, thankfully, a longer kilt than yesterday.
‘Morning!’ I called. ‘How are you?’
‘Terrible,’ he said. ‘Migraine. Caused by digging half the night through Mordant’s memories.’
‘Is she—’
‘No,’ he said. ‘No, unless you can do something we have to demonstrate our new human society with just one examplar. You.’
‘Do you think—’
‘Disaster,’ he said, rubbing his forehead as if trying to squash the migraine against his skull. ‘Utter disaster. Gaston spent some time last night trying to persuade her to come over. Nothing. He threatened to bring her over by force. She laughed at him. The cow. He warned her about being thrown out of the habitat to the mercies of the rain and the marauding evil spirits.’
‘Why didn’t he just do it right then?’
‘Because we still hoped that one more night of torture might push her over the edge.’
‘But it hasn’t.’
‘She said nothing outside her head can frighten her as much as what’s inside her head, and she’s not frightened of that any more.’
‘Did he try bribery?’
‘Of course he tried bribery. There’s nothing left but you, Jamie. That’s how desperate it is.’
‘Me?’
‘She said she wanted to talk to you again. Privately.’
I scratched my neck.
‘What are you going to do if I can’t persuade her?’
Leopold looked uncomfortable.
‘I don’t know. We may say she’s shy.’
I whistled.
‘We may say she’s shy and very traumatized by the whole experience. We may say that we haven’t had long to get everything ready, but in principle it will all work.’
‘You expect them to believe that?’
Leopold gave me a bitter look. ‘What do you think? I can tell you what Gaston thinks. After Gaston left Keziah last night, he went to see the Toad. He pleaded for mercy. He offered all our assets and our servitude to the Toad if the Toad would just get us out of this mess.’
‘Gaston didn’t think I was going to persuade Keziah then?’
‘There was some talk of the Lake of Fire freezing over first.’
‘I see. What did the Toad say?’
‘The Toad didn’t say much. Gaston’s memory is more of the Toad’s feet jumping on his face.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘Gaston? Working off his feelings on the snake.’ Now he mentioned it, I did hear, over the birdsong and the rustling wind, a distant sound that could be a snake, wrapped in chains, being kicked and whipped.
‘Well, that’s all wonderful,’ I said bleakly. ‘So what do you want me to do first?’
Leopold sighed. ‘OK, I’ve got to finish stacking up the amphitheatre with supplies, so why don’t you get everything absolutely ready for the dress rehearsal? Then we can go through the whole thing and practice your questions and answers. We’ll get all that done before the guests start arriving. Then you can go and see Keziah.’
‘And if I persuade her to come?’
‘It’s going to be too late to build her patchwork god, but we can probably get away with that. Perhaps she could lean lovingly on your arm while you do your worship routine.’
‘Nothing difficult then. Hey, I just thought. Couldn’t we use one of my memories? Instead of Keziah? I did create Caroline, my ex-girlfriend, and I’ve really worked hard on making her realistic.’
‘Jamie, the difference between a real girl and your mere impressions of a girl wouldn’t fool—’
‘Fair enough. Just a thought. So what are you doing with the trolley?’
‘Refreshments,’ said Leopold. ‘We’ve built the whole stadium out of the Seven Deadly Sins, pixellated, which our guests will enjoy standing on. I’m just laying these snacks aroun
d to provide variety: a pile of Malice on the Lust tier of the stadium, for example. These pixellated sins, like Pixellated Fear, glow with a gentle ambience that the spirits find restful. Not that any of it’s going to do us any good.’
We went to our work.
Gaston briefly returned, red-faced and blowing after giving Stub what he described as a ‘therapeutic beating’.
He was dressed in a ceremonial Army uniform, but his eyes were bloodshot. After checking up brusquely on the preparations he left to welcome the guests. Things did not seem too affectionate between the Lord and the Overlord.
We were still working on our questions and answers when the first of the crowd waddled in, two fat four-legged reptiles with small heads and vast bodies, not unlike what older children’s books used to call brontosauri. (You remember this species had a long existence in dinosaur books until it was realised they were a paleontological error. Thus the poor brontosaurus is not merely extinct, it never existed in the first place. Say what you like, however, these two definitely looked like brontosauri to me.)
‘Why do they look like dinosaurs?’ I asked Leopold quietly as we watched the two brontosauri making themselves comfortable on the Greed tier of the terraces.
‘Not all of them will,’ said Leopold, waving at them with a grin that fell off his face as soon as he turned to me. ‘They’re dressing down. Not a good sign. They’re treating it as an afternoon out rather than a proper networking opportunity.’
‘Why do they look like dinosaurs at all?’
‘It was a complete mess-up,’ said Leopold. ‘Our Research Department had Earth in its targets for a long time. They watched a couple of mass-extinctions, saw some promising developments and then told us to move in. We had a full-on invasion.
‘It was all a terrible mistake. They hadn’t done their research properly and millions of us ended up stuck in the bodies of dinosaurs. Absolute tragedy, no idea how it happened. So for 100 million years we were beleaguered on earth wandering around marshes and eating ferns and each other.
‘Disgusting, dear boy. You died but then came back as another one. Did you know what that world smelt like? The mud and the parasites and the predators and… you don’t want to know about the sex. It was awful. Worse than not having sex.
‘Anyway. Rumour went around that we weren’t going to get out until the seas had laid up enough oil and gas for the beings that were due to emerge after the next mass extinction. They needed a lot. So it proved.
‘The world did finally end again, not a moment too soon, and we were free to travel through the Omniverse. But it left scars. We spirit beings still default to reptile-shapes unless we constantly work on our appearances.
‘Now, you’d better get over to Keziah. I’ll be waiting for you in the house.’ He put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Don’t fail us Jamie.’
‘OK,’ I said.
‘Jamie,’ Leopold said, taking hold of both my arms with surprising force. ‘You’ve got about an hour.’
‘OK,’ I said.
‘I know there isn’t any hope, not really. But just imagine beating the Toad. Imagine being a celebrity and superstar. Imagine being a fashion icon all through the Omniverse.’
‘OK,’ I said.
‘Instead of, you know, just being a nearly person. Someone who never quite made it.’
‘I’ll do my best,’ I said.
‘It’s sad really,’ said Leopold. ‘I can’t help wishing… never mind.’
‘I’ll do my best,’ I said again.
‘Sometimes I wonder if really just living a quiet life would be better. Than all this ambition and glitz and, let’s be honest, slight sense of almost failure at times. Oh, I don’t know. Too late now.’
Finally, he let me go. I streaked out of his sight, but veered back to my habitat where I entered the lighthouse, grilled the mushrooms quickly, made toast and tea, arranged a breakfast tray. Then I streaked over to Keziah’s door, and phoned her.
‘Is it OK if I come over now?’
‘I was wondering if you were still coming,’ she said.
‘I said I would.’ I was a little piqued.
‘It’s open,’ she said, ‘just push.’
It was still teeming with rain in Keziah-land. Keziah was sitting on the grass, with her back to a rough stone wall, brooding.
She stood up quickly when I pushed through the door, and for a second looked slightly empty-handed and awkward. A kiss, clearly, was too intimate a way of saying hello but a handshake too formal and in any case I was holding a tray. In Jane Austen’s day a small bow and a little bob-like curtsey would have done the business, but this was the graceless twenty-first century and we were its clueless inhabitants.
‘Thank you for coming,’ she said, offering a hesitant moment of eye-contact by way of welcome. She tucked a sodden strand of hair back behind her ear.
‘I brought some more mushrooms,’ I said. ‘And toast. I don’t know if there’s anywhere to eat them.’
‘I’ve got a little dining room in the cottage,’ she said.
I saw now that the door through which I’d come was the entrance to an outside privy. Next to the privy stood a small cottage, at just about the highest point of the mountain plateau. The cottage had thick walls, a slate roof, small windows—built to survive the weather.
The cottage door opened directly into a small living room which was minimally furnished and covered with piles of paper. Keziah had, however, laid up for a meal at one end.
We busied ourselves sorting everything out to eat.
‘How much time have we got?’ Keziah asked.
‘Leopold told me to be back in an hour. They’ve built a stadium around our Dream House and it’s slowly filling up with dinosaurs. It’s a long story. They’re all reptiles at heart, it seems.’
‘An hour should be enough.’
Keziah started neatly cutting her way through two slices of mushrooms on toast. The atmosphere was strained: being pleasant to each other wasn’t easy.
‘I finally followed your example and ate some mushrooms last night,’ I told her.
‘What did you think?’ she asked. ‘These mushrooms are fantastic, by the way.’
‘I didn’t much like them, to be honest,’ I said. ‘It was like, big sad emotions.’
‘That basketful you sent me kept me going last night. They made me think, I don’t have to take this.’
‘You did beat them, you know.’
‘I know,’ she said, with a sudden shy grin. ‘It’s the next bit that’s more tricky.’
‘What, facing whatever happens at the end of today?’
‘Not that so much,’ she said. ‘Showing you around. That’s terrifying. Come on. There’s a raincoat if you want it.’
I took an oilskin from the coat-stand and she led me out of the cottage towards the volcanoes. The rain tumbled down and was being picked up and flung at us by the wind.
‘You aren’t going to laugh or make stupid jokes,’ she told me, a requirement, not a question. ‘I’m expecting a large amount of not being able to cope on your part. But you will cope so long as you don’t try to give me any advice or counsel. Just by listening you’re helping. Is that clear?’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Remind me why you’re doing this?’
‘To explain myself before I die,’ said Keziah.
‘Fair enough,’ I said. ‘I knew there was a reason.’
‘This scree here,’ said Keziah as we tramped, ‘is like a great scar. It runs almost the whole length of my landscape. Can you see how it’s all gouged up? You can often see insects and crows poking in the mess that’s been brought to the surface.’
‘Glaciation,’ I said. ‘We did that in geography.’
‘My mother,’ said Keziah. ‘Her hardness into my softness. She ploughed my heart.’
I shut up. Keziah stopped and looked over the great scar. Half of the landscape was scar, ripped-up earth, uprooted trees, and slimy moulds and underneath (no doubt) were squirmy
orange things with too many legs. ‘Then all the abuse got in as well. Right into the wound. Like a canker, made sure it never healed. Look at it. My life.’
She gazed out over it, then snapped: ‘I’m not crying. These are angry tears.’
If we were being pedantic here, Keziah, I thought, that wasn’t logical. The emotional source of the tears is irrelevant. Excessive moisture from eyes equals tears. I’m glad to say I kept this thought to myself. Caroline accuses me of being insensitive! Hah! If she could see me now. Jamie. The Listener. The Wise Counsellor.
‘The volcanoes,’ Keziah continued, blinking, starting to walk towards them. ‘That’s my response.’
‘They stink,’ I said.
‘Yes.’
‘Sulphur dioxide,’ I added. ‘Rotten eggs.’
‘And smoke, and poisonous gas, and lava, and rocks. See how the lava and rocks ruined the landscape far beyond the scree.’
We clambered through the rocks that led to a high pass between two of the volcanoes. Still the rain fell.
Keziah’s words were as brisk and steady as our walk. ‘The volcanoes try to fill in the damage caused by the scree. All they really do is trash the landscape and the sky. Look how barren the land is. Look how foul the air is. Look how ugly it all is. Look how all the rain gets in, despite all my efforts.’
‘Why do you want to stop the rain getting in?’
‘All this is just a crust,’ said Keziah, nodding her head to the smoking rockscape. ‘The whole mountain is hollow. I spend a lot of time fixing stream-beds and blocking up holes to stop the water getting inside. Come on.’
We climbed to the top of the pass—a volcano on each side—and looked over. A further rumpled slope fell away in front of us.
‘Now some other relationships,’ she said. The path zig-zagged down the stony mountainside, with the two volcanoes slowly diminishing behind us. We kept glimpsing a wide, grey lake, to which, with a final turn, the path led.
Nothing grew at the lakeside. ‘See all these ruins? There used to be trees here and grass and a beach. There’s even a deserted boathouse over there. It was like our own private loch in the mountains. I was a princess here. Can you see all the appropriate technology gadgets?’ I did notice some curious pieces of rusty metal. ‘That’s a plough. That’s a solar cooker. Next to it is a solar dryer. That over there is a micro-hydro electricity generator… But then a frost killed the plants, dust from the desert stopped the gadgets working and the volcano poured lava and rocks into it. Do you see what this is?’
I felt her green eyes searching me. They searched the top of my head, since I was looking at my feet. ‘This is the space in my heart for my dad. He was depressed,’ continued Keziah. ‘When I really needed him to be not depressed. The attacks started when I was five. Come on.’
Perhaps there are worse things even than death, I thought desperately. The secrets of a woman’s heart, for one. But it’s only an hour. Surely I can spare her an hour.
‘You can hardly see this,’ she was continuing, pointing at a stone-filled slope. ‘That was a park. There was an enormous dolls’ house, storybook characters, wardrobes full of clothes. African friends. Every stone you see I personally fired out from my volcanoes until I buried everything. My sister Jemima’s buried under there. It took a long time to bury her, and she was crying all the time. If you ever get back to your body and see her, I know you won’t, but if you do, perhaps you could tell her I’m sorry. I couldn’t stop myself. I hated her so much.’
After this slope, the landscape flattened out and some patches of green appeared, battling the scree. We crossed several streams. Still the rain poured down.
Keziah led me over a stile into a rock-strewn field. Here and there among the rocks, we could see ceramic pots. Some were very large. Some had been smashed by falling rocks. Most had plants in them, a few of which were in flower. Each pot, I noticed, was labelled in what I assumed was Keziah’s handwriting.
‘This is where I keep all my other relationships,’ said Keziah. ‘All these plants are invasive. I keep them in pots, I tell myself, for their protection. I don’t want them growing up towards the volcano and getting poisoned. But that’s a lie.’
‘Hey, that’s me,’ I said. In the same way you can hear your name across a crowded room, I’d spotted a notice penned with the words Jamie Smith. It was a four-inch terracotta pot containing a young, rather round and leafy plant, with funny little dark flowers and no fruit. ‘It’s not very big,’ I pointed out.
‘It’s not you,’ she said. ‘It’s my relationship with you.’
‘Still,’ I grumbled. ‘Looks like a geranium cutting that didn’t take.’
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘There’s a path round the volcano and then back up to the cottage.’
We turned and started off round the volcano.
‘Does it ever stop raining here?’ I called out to her.
‘It hasn’t yet.’
Rounding the volcano we saw below us was what looked like a film-set: a street made of shabby house-fronts, interspersed with the facades of motels and nightclubs. A back alley or two snaked away. All of it was falling apart in the rain, dissolving like cardboard. Several buildings had fallen down.
‘I won’t take you down there,’ said Keziah. ‘Do you remember that artist who once put up a tent and inscribed it with all the names of the people she’d had sex with?’
‘I try to forget all I hear about modern art,’ I said.
‘That’s my tent down there. Guys and girls. All different encounters. Not one I cared about. I built all those houses myself and I made them out of rubbish to do rubbish things in them with rubbish people. I didn’t need to destroy them. They just fall apart of their own accord.’
‘Especially in the rain,’ I muttered.
‘Yes.’
I looked at the shabby street of housefronts and I hated it. This was miserable for someone who in another world could be being loved and cherished and be teaching toddlers to ride bikes. For example. Or, of course, holding down an important and professional career. You know what I mean. Whatever Keziah was for it wasn’t for this—empty encounters in the night.
We trudged on. This is terrible, I thought, worse than performing in front of Gaston and Leopold and a stadium-full of evil reptiles. Which is also on the agenda for the day. I stopped for a moment and lifted my face to the skies, hoping the rain would wash everything off.
‘Hey,’ I said, ‘this rain doesn’t taste bad.’ It reminded me of something. I couldn’t think what.
‘Come on,’ she said, pulling her sodden cotton hood over her ears. ‘I want to do this right to the end.’
I like hill-walking, but Keziah was lithe as a whippet and as determined as a falling boulder. It wasn’t that easy to keep up. I cupped my hands and took another surreptitious drink of the falling rain. It was good stuff, sweet and warm, with deep notes of things I didn’t have time to savour.
The path wound back to the cottage. Keziah was waiting there while I laboured up the hill.
She was looking out at her landscape.
‘There’s hardly anything that isn’t trashed,’ she said. ‘What’s trashed it? I’ve trashed it. I’ve trashed me.’
‘It didn’t start well,’ I said sympathetically.
‘It could have finished better,’ said Keziah.
I said, ‘So what happens at the edges of this landscape?’
‘It’s an island. I try to send the water over the edge. The landscape is shaped like a letter A—the cottage here is at the highest point and the sharpest point.’
‘A delta wing,’ I said. ‘A pity you just send the water off the edge like that. It’s good stuff. You could use it for hydro or something.’
‘You won’t think that when you see the inside. Come on.’
‘Is there much more of this?’
‘Lots, but it won’t take long.’
‘You’re sure this is doing you good? Because I definitely wouldn’t be doing this if
it wasn’t helping.’
‘It’s helping,’ she said. ‘Especially if you stop moaning.’
She opened the door and led me into the cottage again. ‘I want to show you the downstairs.’ She walked me through a door at the end of the room, which led to a stone spiral staircase, which seemed to burrow straight down for a very long way.
‘It goes right through the mountain,’ said Keziah, slightly echoey, her black hood bobbing out of sight.
‘I can see what you mean about the water,’ I said. The stone sides of the staircase were dripping and moss grew.
We stopped at the first landing, where a dank corridor led off into the gloom. ‘It’s mostly a warehouse,’ said Keziah. ‘This whole landscape is a honeycomb. When the memories fall, they seep through the land and get stored here. So if you walk down this corridor, you can see row after row of them.
‘They’re quite animated. Some are dangerous. You don’t invite them out of their cages.
‘There are corridors like this all the way down. Not all are for memories. There’s a whole section for vengeful thoughts, for example. Another for self-hate. One of the things Stub taught me was to keep all these filed things in order. Not to keep breaking in and fishing them out. You don’t deny them but you do file them. Simple really.
‘Then, there’s all kinds of other things walking around in these caves and I’m not really sure what they are.’
‘You could probably pay some analysts,’ I said. ‘They’d give you suggestions.’
‘Yes, I think that’s right,’ she said. ‘And the landscape itself moves and breathes. I’ve never got down to the bottom. Very hot. It’s often shaking and sliding around.’
‘And water everywhere?’
‘Yes. Making everything more treacherous.’ We turned another half circle on the spiral stairs. ‘This is on the other side from the corridors. It looks out over the front.’
We had climbed down to a plywood inner door, with some frosted glass for a window and a plaque outside that read:
MORDANT & CO.
Solicitors
‘Your office,’ I said. ‘Who’s the “& co.”?’
‘Nobody,’ said Keziah. ‘It’s just the way you have to do it.’
‘So strictly speaking,’ I said, ‘“Solicitors” should read, “Solicitor”.’
‘I might expand,’ she said defiantly. ‘Anyway, come in. This is home.’ She leaned against the door and pushed it open.
It was a high-ceilinged room, with full-length picture windows at the far end. Keziah seemed to have a taste for heavy furniture—a big walnut desk covered with papers, a black leather chair, a sofa and two unmatched armchairs surrounding a coffee table and a rug.
On the wall hung dozens of portraits of the kind of people you see in Wanted posters. Several sets of metal filing cabinets, bookshelves and a set of kitchen units lined one wall: survival tools for workaholics. I could imagine Keziah extracting a scalding ciabatta from the microwave and pouring coffee as the moon rose outside and she flipped her way through witness statements and tape transcripts.
‘This office is a copy of the one I had on earth. The whole lot was donated from one of those communities that takes ex-prisoners and does furniture restoration,’ she told me. ‘When they heard I was starting up on my own, they moved everything in a single weekend.’
‘I see what you mean about the water, though,’ I said. Water was dripping through the ceiling in various places. ‘You know, I’d put that little watering can under one drip and catch something for your houseplants. I’d put your kettle under another drip for your coffee, and I’d put your water-cooler under that other drip. Save on water meter costs and stop your floor flooding.’
‘This is the place I’ll be tonight. This is the thing I’ll be saddest to leave. The one place I did some good perhaps. Felt like it, anyway. Come on. One last stop.’
We left the office and trod down the stairs again.
‘This is nearly the end of the tour,’ said Keziah.
‘Where are we going?’
‘My bedroom,’ said Keziah. ‘The quiet space at the centre of me. Or as you will see’—we’d gone round two full turns and were now directly below the office as she pushed open the door—‘not.’
She had to give the door a fierce shove to get it completely open, and she led me in.
It was a narrow, dark room, with a single bed, and you could hardly move for the junk. The sedimentary layers of a girl’s life: teddy bears, books, models of horses. On top of that, complicated girly make-up things and the crazy clothes that pre-teens try, green tights and strident lipstick and blobby mascara. Next layer: drug equipment and contraceptives and tattoo needles and razor blades and the black clothes, some of them ripped. And chaos everywhere. Bongo drums. African cloth wall hangings that had fallen down. An overflowing laundry basket. Half-opened packets of chocolate biscuits and a whole taxonomy of chocolate-wrappers. In the corner, I noticed, Keziah had tied a well-made hangman’s noose to a hook in the ceiling.
‘Keziah, what’s that?’
‘The logical conclusion,’ she said. ‘Isn’t it? I just never had the courage to be logical.’
Water was dripping through the ceiling, splashing onto everything.
‘I can understand the whole metaphor,’ said Keziah, angry, like she’d had this conversation with herself many times. ‘It’s not rocket science. I don’t need telling that I’m complete mess here, right deep inside, and need nothing but a complete sort out. Here’s where the chaos starts and the anger and everything else. But how can I even begin to fix it when there’s all this stuff pouring in all the time that I can’t control?’
She sat on the bed and looked down, as if exhausted. A fresh irruption of water started dripping onto her head. She let it fall.
I was standing in the doorway, for the excellent reason that moving anywhere would have involved ploughing a furrow through mountains of girly detritus. In my house on earth I have grown used to treading carefully in case of used leg-waxing strips or hot hair-straighteners. But this was something else. Can a room get so untidy that it passes a critical point and can never be sorted out again? Beyond the capacity of all the cupboard space and bin bags in the world?
‘Look, water’s even falling into that glass you have next to your bed. I’d drink it.’
‘I wish you’d shut up about the water,’ she snapped. The room rocked with her flaring of anger. More water started dripping through the ceiling.
‘Suit yourself,’ I said, stung.
She looked at me furiously. ‘All right, I will try some of this wonderful water since it’s so fantastic.’
‘It doesn’t matter now.’
‘Never mind the fact that water is causing all the mess.’
‘I said it doesn’t matter.’
She picked up the glass and drunk.
She held the empty glass against her lips for a long time, with her eyes closed.
‘You all right?’ I asked. ‘I didn’t really mean, drink it. It was just a… comment.’
When she removed the glass from her face, her eyes were staring into the middle distance and slowly, tears started to drip.
She swore.
She carefully took the jug (which was being refilled by drips from the ceiling) and looked at it. Then she poured out and downed another glass.
Her face wore a betrayed look. She swore again.
‘Look for things you can’t see the point of,’ she said, quietly.
She drank a third glass. Then a fourth. Carefully she put the glass and the jug at her feet. Sobs started shaking her body. Another rumble rattled the room. The ceiling cracked and water started pouring in. This was rapidly becoming like a scene from Titanic. Pools were gathering on the floor.
I was standing by the door, paralyzed. A river was now gushing through the roof, down the walls. The junk in the room was being unsettled by the rising water, which was now covering my ankles. It was, I noticed, nicely warm, unlike in Ti
tanic.
She looked up at the trashed ceiling.
I had absolutely no idea what to say or do. Put an arm round her? Offer to make a cup of tea? Run away?
‘Are you all right?’ I asked.
She answered with a single word, in the shocked whisper of someone betrayed:
‘Abba!’
‘What?’ I said.
Then the ceiling fell in.