Paradise - A Divine Comedy

by Glenn Myers

Back to the Dome

  They call the type of injuries I had ‘Traumatic Brain Injury’. One of the symptoms is that you remember what happened before the trauma much better than what happens afterwards. You can also have delusions, get tired easily and suffer depression, and those are the good bits.

  I know now that I was in a coma for about a week, until I had lifesaving brain surgery. The whole story in ‘paradise’ took place in that week. After I returned to my body, I stayed in Intensive Care for another month, having more surgery and drifting in and out of consciousness, but staying rooted to planet Earth.

  I only have the haziest memories of those weeks. Lizzie visited often, as did my parents, who had tied up their wittily named yacht The Children’s Inheritance in Madeira and flown home. My sister Alison and her Brilliant Children were less frequent (terribly busy, orchestra on Saturdays and the kids have to be with Oh-Hugh! on Sundays), which was a bit of a relief as I was getting quite bad headaches. When they did come, Ali wanted to bawl out the nurses, my niece wanted to talk to me to cheer me up, and my nephew’s fingers simply itched to be back on the internet.

  I spent my few waking hours organizing my bodily functions, which I found comforting and fascinating. Only the right-hand side of my body worked. When I had visits, it took all my strength to keep my eye open and pay attention and grunt. I did try smiling but stopped after I heard Lizzie say, ‘I think he’s going to be sick.’

  After being lost in the heavens and surrounded by the spilled-out contents of my own mind, I can’t tell you how extraordinary it was to see real things again. Nurses, both female and (somewhat to my alarm) male, seemed so beautiful as they stretched over me, injecting things or taking my blood pressure. Einstein taught us that matter is sky-sized skeins of energy knotted into atoms. I believed that now, when I looked at these godlike creatures of lustrous flesh. Matter, I thought, is an exotic super-concentrate in a sloshing, dreamy Omniverse of waves and spirits. No wonder the demons covet it. How amazing to touch others and be touched.

  I began to realize that the accident had smashed up my emotions as well as my body and brain. Extreme feelings now seemed to come at me raw, like a pack of dogs. I was frightened about getting out of bed, anxious at the thought of visitors, angry with my saline drip. I was brimming with frustrated sexual desire and I thirsted for joy or felt sorrow with such a passion that it was as if I’d eaten some more of the habitat’s magic mushrooms. I cried a lot, and for no reason.

  Lizzie for example, grey-eyed, blonde hair freshly frizzed, perfect oval face and stubby nose, made me cry the first time I saw her. It was such a struggle to understand what she was saying. Or stay awake, for that matter, but I was enthralled during those moments as she gabbled on.

  In my heightened emotional state I even forgave her for bringing the latest boyfriend, whom I’m almost sure was genetically a Neanderthal, sitting surly, hairy and ugly on the chair, legs apart, uncomfortable in his boots and leather jacket, sighing heavily.

  By about four weeks after leaving the coma, I was doing really well organizing my bodily inputs and outputs, I could tell the day and time, and I had learnt this about my new situation:

  1. Lizzie had let the Neanderthal into our shared house. That’s my home trashed, then.

  2. With that destructive efficiency of which only blondes are capable, Lizzie had written to the half-dozen clients whose websites I maintained. She’d told them I’d be off work for at least six months, but not to worry because I was fully insured. They’d all written back thanking her and explaining how they would necessarily be looking elsewhere for website support, and wishing me well for the future. So that was my business down the tubes.

  3. My dad was in the process of sorting out insurances and benefits. Coming from an insurance dynasty, as I did, I had felt obliged to insure everything that moved, which was now proving to be a good thing.

  Five weeks after the accident I was a moved to a slightly less-intensive care ward; or more strictly, to a the-nurses-are-busy,-cross,-and-engaged-in-a-feud-with-management ward.

  I started learning to talk and bravely went places in my wheelchair. Mostly the toilet, which was exciting enough and occasionally to the TV lounge if no-one else was there. I began to learn how not to pour tea down the left half of my face. Physios (some more beautiful girls) got me to waggle things and said they were pleased. I slept less. Walking, however, was a distant dream and I wasn’t even sure I wanted to learn again.

  As soon as I could talk I started asking about Keziah. It took me much thought before I realized that neither Lizzie nor my other visitors nor the nurses knew whom I was talking about.

  In the darker moments I wondered if I knew her or if there was something seriously delusional going on.

  I asked about the crash. My dad told me it was with the insurers and the police. We would hear the full story eventually, don’t worry, just get better.

  Lizzie said the police had come round several times but she had hidden from them. Lizzie has not had good experiences with police officers, since an unfortunate incident with a boyfriend who asked her to look after some of his pot plants. (The pot plants proved to be strange pinnate things that needed surprising amounts of light, but which also needed to be kept in a dark room.) When the police did finally speak to her, she’d been so unhelpful that they’d exchanged the minimum of information. The police had clearly left with the idea that we were a dubious family with much to hide.

  The nurses kept promising to find out if anyone else from the crash had been in the hospital. Then they forgot, or went off shift, or became embroiled in some crisis that required much gossipy whispering at the nursing station. And it was a big hospital, suspicious of giving out information.

  I think now that they thought I was having delusions and were quietly fobbing me off.

  I had the problems that babies and dogs have, of just being on the point of working something out when I was distracted by some bodily function, or by being fed, or by falling asleep.

  Still. Over the weeks I did piece things together so that I knew that whoever had crashed into me:

  1. Wasn’t dead.

  2. Had been in Intensive Care alongside me.

  3. Had emerged from her coma a few days after I first opened my eye.

  4. Had been one of those Traumatic Brain Injuries that recovers quickly and smoothly. The brain disappears into some deep realm of unconsciousness, but then resurfaces, reordered but remarkably well.

  5. May have been that girl who, a few days later and on a different ward, was excitingly interviewed by the police, who were thinking of a Dangerous Driving charge.

  I was completely thrown one day when Caroline walked into the ward.

  Thinking back, I wondered if she hadn’t already visited me a couple of times in Intensive Care. It would be a Caroline-like thing to do. She seemed to find me at once, unlike most first-time visitors. (Usually I had to endure shocked expressions as people looked round the ward, thought I wasn’t there, then recognized me.)

  Caroline was accompanied by a large, stocky man who had a creased brown face and a ridiculous, 14-year-old’s moustache.

  ‘Hello Caroline,’ I said, then added as they approached my bed, ‘as you can see, I decided to rent out half my face but I can’t find a tenant.’

  (I won’t trouble you by transliterating what I actually said, but it was something like Arro Arorine, Av oo cam he, Ah befided oo wen ou alf my ace, bu Ah car fi a nenan. By now, people were usually picking up what I meant, though it sometimes took a couple of goes.)

  ‘Hello Jamie,’ she replied, giving me an invalid’s peck on the forehead. ‘You’re looking tons better.’

  ‘Good grief.’

  Caroline pinkened. ‘No, really.’

  She looked different from my memory of her. I think she’d paid someone (other than a farmer) to do something about her hair. Her clothes were new and—I don’t know—slinky.

  ‘I want you to meet Umberto.’ She indicated the bulky yo
ung man. He had greasy hair and was struggling with unstacking some chairs. ‘He’s from Mexico on an Advanced Librarianship Exchange Programme organized by the British Council.’

  Their shoulders touched unnecessarily in a way that implied that, as the representative of all that is fine in British Librarianship, she wasn’t undercooking the welcome.

  ‘Umberto,’ I said, shaking his hand once he managed to disentangle the chairs. ‘I understand from Caroline that librarians are novel lovers.’

  Caroline sighed and translated the pun into her fluent Spanish, and possibly mentioned the need to humour me, whereupon Umberto seemed to say, in Spanish, I understood it perfectly. I just didn’t find it that funny.

  ‘Very good,’ he said in English, and we talked for some minutes about inconsequential things, mostly haematomas and footballers.

  ‘You know,’ said Caroline eventually. ‘I wear this ring and most people notice it without me having to say anything.’

  The cogs in my head slowly turned. Did that mean she was—

  ‘Engaged?’ (I think I actually said en—age?). Good grief. To him? I tried to smile. ‘That’s great.’

  What I was thinking was, but Caroline, I was half-hoping that you and I might have had another go.

  We talked about their wonderful news for a while. Honeymoon in Cuba, possibly. Then we had an unsatisfactory talk about Gabriel García Márquez.

  I believe he wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude.

  I did most of my crying at night, secretly.

  Having suddenly become an unemployed cripple was a big part of it. Caroline’s foolhardy descent into greasy Mexican cuisine hadn’t helped my fragile emotions. Caroline was a classic novel: the small print gave you a headache sometimes but she was utterly engrossing. Now she’d been removed from the shelves.

  Alongside these heaving emotions was the suspicion that my character was in even worse shape than my physique or my circumstances. It was just possible I wasn’t all that good a person. I hear you protesting, but no, it’s true. My week in the heavens had not been entirely a glorious display of bravery and decency. It was conceivable that I was vain, cowardly, proud, chauvinistic, insensitive and totally self-absorbed. Naturally, I put these worrying thoughts out of my head whenever they fluttered in.

  The police interviewed me shortly before I left the hospital for a specialist Brain Injury Rehabilitation Clinic in the Fens.

  ‘So what were your memories of the accident?’

  ‘Aw, it was just one of those things,’ I replied. ‘Two people were just being a bit careless. I maybe wouldn’t have crashed if I hadn’t been reaching into my glovebox for a bon-bon. I don’t think it was anybody’s fault. Maybe she misjudged the speed of the lorry that she was overtaking. Maybe the lorry didn’t see her and speeded up. The sun was low. I just think it was one of those things.’

  ‘How do you know the driver was a she?’

  ‘Because the accident replays itself over and over in my head. I could tell you what she was wearing.’

  I wasn’t going to incriminate Keziah. Neither would the police tell me much about her. I think the police tired of trying to interview me, and they left.

  Two months after the accident, I was moved to the King George V Centre, a former TB hospital now fitted out with beds and physiotherapists, set in gardens in the Fenland countryside. From here they hoped to get enough bits of me working that I could go home and be depressed there, at a considerable saving to the stretched budgets of the National Health Service. I had, presumably, by now consumed all the tax I’d ever paid and was adding to the National Debt.

  They gave me a single room, a garden to look out on and—joy of joys—wireless Internet access. Lizzie brought my Mac over, miraculously managing not to spill nail-polish remover into it while it was in the back of the wheeled skip that was her—our—replacement car.

  I still wasn’t walking, but the left side of my body was occasionally twitching with life, Frankenstein-like. Enough fingers worked for me tenderly to lay my hands on my Mac’s holy white keys and comfort-surf.

  Three days after I arrived at the King George V Centre, Keziah quietly stepped through the door.

  I was reading Wired at the time and for a second I was completely disoriented. I stared at her almost with a look of panic. She was dressed in a dark business-suit, with a grey camisole top—smarter than I’d ever seen her. Just come from court, perhaps. The pale face, the full turned-down red lips, the green eyes, the shoulder-length thin black hair, the eye-liner, the endless not-quite-being five feet tall: unmistakably it was Mordant & Co, Solicitors. Perhaps she was ever so slightly less scrawny; but then, I’d hardly seen her in the flesh before. She looked uncertainly at me, her back still against the door.

  I felt tears stinging my eyes and dripping down my cheek.

  ‘You know me, don’t you?’ I said uncertainly.

  ‘Of course I know you, you dork. I brought you some bonbons.’

  Tears were rolling down my face. She looked unusually ill-at-ease too, trying not to stare, as people did, but staring nonetheless.

  ‘Good practice for the left side of my face,’ I said. ‘Chewing.’

  ‘They’re from the Old Fashioned Internet Sweetshop,’ she said. ‘I looked it up on your hospital site.’

  ‘That’s about all that’s left of my site,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Least I could do.’

  I blew my nose. ‘Would you hold my hand?’ I asked.

  With a puzzled look, even a glare, she sat down on the red chair next to my bed, put the bonbons on the bedside cabinet (National Health Service chipboard, brown top, Gideon Bible within) and obediently took my hand lightly in hers.

  ‘I usually ask people to hold my hand,’ I said, truthfully. ‘Touch is so wonderful. I hope you don’t mind. Please don’t be sympathetic.’

  ‘How are you?’ asked Keziah. Our conversations were always cursed with awkwardness.

  ‘I’m told there are stages in loss,’ I said. ‘You start with Denial and end up with Acceptance. I can’t remember the middle bits and I’m not sure what stage I’m in. It’s either Denial or Acceptance, I think. I cry a lot and my hand shakes.’

  ‘Will you—’

  ‘Get better?’ I’d had this conversation with so many visitors now that I didn’t need to wait while they edged their way to the main point. ‘They never say. What they do say is, Yes, you can almost fully recover. Yes, you can go on recovering all through your life. Either way I think that’s a No. I’m shooting for a full Yes. You?’

  ‘I’m fine. Miraculous recovery. Happens with brain injuries.’

  ‘Not with mine.’

  We subsided into awkwardness again.

  ‘In the end they didn’t pursue the Dangerous Driving charge,’ said Keziah. ‘It never came to a plea. Too much conflicting evidence.’

  ‘I gave them a statement,’ I said. ‘That might have confused them a bit.’

  ‘It seems that your evidence contradicted the forensic evidence and they can’t trace the driver of the Polish truck. There’s doubt over whether he accelerated when I tried to overtake. So it would never work in court.’

  ‘Good,’ I said.

  ‘I was preparing to plead guilty,’ said Keziah.

  ‘You were?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘In the end the Crown Prosecution Service suggested I did plead guilty to a lesser charge. I ended up with a fine and some points on my licence. There was no request for compensation from the victim.’

  ‘I know. I told the police. The victim is insured up to the eyeballs. The victim’s dad ran an insurance broker’s, and the victim’s dad’s son gets to have all the insurance policies he can eat.’

  ‘Still. You didn’t need to be kind. I completely deserved prison and it would have been OK.’

  ‘Upsets the natural order. You can’t have lawyers in prison.’

  ‘When I was facing the original charge I wa
s bailed not to make any contact with you. That’s why I’ve been so long.’

  ‘You didn’t die,’ I said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Happy about that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘It’s a long story.’

  Outside, the first sunshine of spring was licking the trees. Narcissi were poking up like periscopes, seeing if it was safe for the rest of the garden to come out.

  ‘If you gave me twenty minutes to get ready, you might be able to wheel me round the garden a few times?’

  ‘I’m not that heavy,’ I said, twenty-two minutes later.

  ‘It’s uphill,’ complained Keziah, as she pushed.

  ‘I expect it’s the wheel sticking,’ I said.

  She parked my wheelchair and sat on a bench beside me, both of us looking over a patchwork of Fenland fields—some black and ploughed, others ankle-high with winter wheat. It was one of those fragile early spring days that are warm if you stay in the sun and the wind doesn’t blow.

  ‘All I remember is, I was doing my performance in front of all these dinosaurs, and your habitat exploded. Then they all started fighting each other.’

  ‘It was you who put me onto it. The rain. Start drinking the rain.’

  ‘You were certainly doing that when I left. Why did you start jabbering about Swedish pop groups?’

  ‘Abba is the Aramaic for Daddy. It’s a word people use for God. You never forget Sunday School,’ Keziah was looking steadfastly out at the Cambridgeshire mud. ‘I felt held.’

  ‘Held?’

  ‘Held. In a good way. Just held and loved. Do you remember the first time you visited my habitat?’

  ‘I try not to.’

  ‘In all the chaos, there was a park, and the five-year-old me sitting on my dad’s shoulders while he pretended to be a horse.’

  ‘I’ll take your word for it. I was mostly trying to get out as fast as I could.’

  ‘It was there. Because it’s always been there, through everything. It was from a time before everything went wrong in our family. And this was like that, being hoisted onto God’s shoulders. No words. Just joy. Just love. Like he’d been waiting for me all these years.’

  ‘Because rain was falling on you?’

  ‘Because mercy was falling on me. Always had been. Always is. I’d just always brushed it off before.’

  ‘The return of the prodigal lawyer.’

  ‘Yes. This mercy was everywhere, of course, when you looked. Mushrooms growing. Even a hint of it when First Trumpeter played for us that day, do you remember? Even the evil spirits must have glimpses of it.’

  ‘Why didn’t Stub just tell us? “Drink the rain”?’

  ‘Would you have listened?’

  ‘No, but you might have.’

  ‘I think he knew that my heart had to make a journey first. When I understood myself—what had been done to me, what I’d done to myself—only then did I properly despair.’

  ‘So why did you explode?’

  ‘I didn’t. Corrie Bright—you remember Stub telling us about her—told me it was Angels with Party Poppers. When they saw what was going on with me they gatecrashed the habitat. This sort are like teenagers, only in a good way. Clubbing. Setting off fireworks. Lit up the whole Omniverse for a few moments.’

  ‘Like a nova in the sky,’ I said.

  ‘That’s a star, right?’

  ‘Yes. Well a supernova, which is a big nova, is a giant star blowing up. You can see them all the way across the Universe. Certainly frightened the dinosaurs. Then Corrie Bright picked you up?’

  ‘Yes, and Jonah came for Stub.’

  ‘But not for me.’

  ‘No. I tried to get them to. I couldn’t understand why they left you behind.’

  ‘Neither could I.’

  ‘They said, “Never save a drowning man until he’s gone under for the third time.” You’d obviously only gone under for about the second time.’

  ‘Charming.’

  ‘I told them all about the Biennale. How you were likely to be torn apart by dinosaurs and so on.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  ‘But Jonah said, “It’ll do him the power of good.” He mentioned that it was easier than, for example, spending three days and nights in the belly of a great fish.’

  ‘I suppose he would know,’ I said, but I was still piqued.

  ‘So anyway, Miss Bright and Jonah flew out of the habitat with Stub and me in their carts.’

  ‘How did you get past the blue fear-demons?’

  ‘They were flying around in confusion because of the Angels. When they saw us coming they all herded together to let us pass. We flew right out of the satanic realms altogether. That part of the heavens is called Pandemonium. John Milton had an idea of it, when he located it as the palace complex in Hell. It’s bigger than that but that’s where our habitat was.

  ‘So we flew up into the heavenly realms proper—which is enormous, a lot bigger than the space taken up by Pandemonium. It has plenty of problems of its own, bureaucracy mostly. I’m sitting next to Miss Bright—who’s this really old lady, but she drives like a lunatic—flying through the heavens.

  ‘I looked over my shoulder. I thought our habitat had broken up. My part of the landscape was following us. It was huge, and it was being pulled through the sky by this thing that looked like a penguin. Miss Bright explained that it wasn’t my part of the habitat at all. It was the real thing. I’d been building a model of it all this time. I’d kept seeing it in my dreams. My memory-storage: my soul.’

  ‘You were being followed by your soul?’

  ‘Yes. It turns out that wherever you are in the heavens—where your spirit is—your soul tries to get near. When we were locked up in the habitat, our souls were orbiting the habitat, bumping against the Pixellated Fear, trying to link up with us. Which of course made it easy for Leopold to dig around in them and for Stub to work on them.’

  ‘So the soul and the memory storage are the same thing?’ I asked.

  ‘They are,’ said Keziah.

  I was beginning to think about the consequences for my soul. Presuming I had one, which was not something I’d given much thought to. What was that watertight Dome that I’d visited in my dreams? Stub had shown me the sign outside it: ‘Jamie’s Myth—a creation of Jamie Smith Fantasy Productions’? That haunted landscape around the Dome, so polluted and out-of-whack, soiled by the presence of the Dome? What—come to think of it—was that cliff-edged landmass that nearly ran me over when I flew to the edge of the habitat? Were they all the same thing? Was that my soul?

  ‘Miss Bright explained that all the time I was in the habitat, I was making a model of my own soul. That’s what everybody does all the time, she told me. If anyone lives anywhere for any length of time, soon their home comes to resemble their soul. You know, it might be homely, or cluttered, or super-tidy, or cosy or cold. And so on.’

  ‘I built a playground.’

  ‘Yes, and I built a wasteland. So I kept looking back over my shoulder as we flew through the heavens. My soul is a delta wing like you suggested—built for flight. It was being pulled by this strange penguin creature—called a pengub, incidentally—and it was doing a victory roll, barrelling through the skies being splattered with the Golden Rain. It looked happy and free. It was happy. I was happy.’

  ‘You?’ I asked. ‘Happy?’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘But I was. Of course, I forgot to mention, this yellow rain was pouring on us all the time. It’s a weather feature, tipping down out of the high heavens.’

  ‘So it wasn’t rotting you?’ I asked.

  ‘No, I was lapping it up. So was Miss Bright. So was Jonah—we were flying parallel with each other at that point. Only Stub was hiding from it.

  ‘We arrived at where Jonah and Miss Bright have their base, which is a staff restaurant and leisure facility. They don’t have an office, apparently—another long story. They looked after me. Miss Bright
spent a long time talking everything through. I had plenty of sleep and shed quite a few more tears and had some good meals.’

  ‘They have food?’

  ‘Mostly muesli,’ said Keziah.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Or Afghan, Indian, whatever you like.’

  ‘Don’t scare me like that.’

  ‘My soul was outside, and it was being washed by the yellow rain. Which I wasn’t sluicing away so much. I was letting it in. New things were growing and maybe the old volcanoes weren’t so fierce. Miss Bright was explaining it all.

  ‘Of course, they were pleased with me because that’s what they do. Therapists. I was one of their success stories, I suppose.

  ‘I had a long time of healing—it’s T12 up there, twelve days pass for every one of ours. So three earth days after you woke up—which was over a month with Miss Bright and Jonah—I was healed enough to drop back into my body.’

  ‘What are you doing now?’

  ‘I called my sister Jemima and we cried. We met up a few times, and we cried some more.’

  ‘You’ve done plenty of crying.’

  ‘Lot to catch up on… Now the court case is over, and now I’ve seen you, I’m handing over my clients for another month and going to Africa to meet my mother and mend some fences.’

  ‘Your mother didn’t come over even when her daughter was in a coma?’

  ‘She didn’t.’

  ‘Lot of fences.’

  ‘One big one. I’ll still be commuting to the heavens. Jonah and Miss Bright recruited me into the CANSORT.’

  Keziah was still looking out at the fields. ‘Jamie. They want you to join them too. Like me, you’ve now got the ability to leave your body when you want. But you’ve still got a body that you can use on earth. Not many people can do both things. It’s a kind of gift.’

  ‘We can commute, like they do.’

  ‘Better, given that Corrie Bright is quite restricted and Jonah’s body is under the desert in Mosul.’

  ‘They’re offering me a job?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. Both of us.’

  ‘Oh great.’

  ‘I’m not sure I can explain this, Jamie,’ said Keziah. ‘I’ve seen things up there. What happened to us wasn’t random.’

  ‘True. It was mostly because you were driving like a suicidal maniac.’

  ‘It was an accident but it was also a chapter in a story.’

  ‘Oh goody. I’m enfolded in a Higher Purpose. Very Milton.’

  ‘Knowing you, I don’t think it’ll be very High a Purpose,’ said Keziah.

  ‘You may have a point… What’s Jonah like to work for?’

  ‘Cynical. Weary. Lovely.’

  ‘And Corrie Bright?’

  ‘Batty, stern, emotionally limited, intellectually brilliant. Kind. Goes surfing in Number Space for a hobby.’

  ‘You can do that in the heavens?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Have they got a thing going?’

  ‘Good grief, you’re so obsessed…’

  ‘Only asked… of course they don’t. Sorry. And this work. Presumably you can do it… when you’re asleep on earth and things.’

  ‘Yes. The fact time passes at different rates helps too.’

  ‘Hmm. Do they pay us?’

  ‘No. It’s fun, though.’ Coming from Keziah, this was roughly like a full orchestra playing the Hallelujah Chorus. ‘They have things in mind for us. Mixing and baking a new world, you know, that kind of thing. Gardening in the rain.’

  Since we last met, then, Keziah has started using words like ‘fun’ and ‘happy’ and seems to mean them. I, meanwhile, have been ambushed by big sad emotions.

  ‘We’d be colleagues,’ I said, as much to avoid analysing the preceding thought as anything.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘There is that.’

  ‘Perhaps there’s a website or something that would help,’ I said.

  ‘Just you not being so irritating might help.’

  We pondered this.

  ‘I’m still not ready, though, am I?’ I said. ‘That’s what you’ve come to tell me. I’m welcome to work for them—which is kind to be offered—but I’ve still got to go under for the third time.’

  She gazed out over the Fens and sighed.

  My sleep patterns are all out of whack, partly because I spend so much time asleep during the day, tired out meeting the insatiable demands of the beautiful physios.

  That night I lay awake for a long time, pondering everything.

  I made a decision.

  Very gently, I unhooked my spirit’s feet from their comfortable resting place in my body. This was very brave, actually. I felt my spirit bobbing upwards, held in my body now only by willpower. Then I thought of my soul, and up I went.

  And I was in the Dome-land, on my soul. In the polluted landscape of my heart.

  I swooped around a bit and saw it all, much as I had seen in my dreams—a great, flying island, with mountains and valleys. A town full of people whom I didn’t much want to bother with. The Dome trying to keep me and my friends isolated, but poisoning the whole land, like a rich settlement in a poor country. The rain falling, firmly kept out from wherever it might do some good. Well, hardly worth pushing the metaphor.

  As in the dream, I flew past the sign at the Dome’s entrance:

  JAMIE’S MYTH

  and stood inside, surveying it for the first time as its owner.

  This Dome needs opening up to the elements. Then I can work on the wastelands outside, rebuilding and irrigating and restoring.

  Pretty thought.

  Tricky job.

  I couldn’t bring myself to throw open the doors to the Dome all at once. Even the yellow rain itself (sloshing and beating against the outside of the Dome) perhaps was too much of a good thing.

  Nor was I honestly sure what I might be getting myself into. My soul, the world, the Omniverse, splattered endlessly with mercy and tenderness and joy? It was a novel picture of things, and not one that I could immediately square up with everything else I knew.

  Worse, it was a letting go, a surrender.

  Definitely a good idea not to overdo things at first.

  I stood and looked at the Dome, its high curve stretching over me. With a careful sequence of thoughts, I created a small openable window at the very top, and connected this window to a long series of metal rods and gears, ending in a handle.

  I took the handle and moved it half a turn. Rods creaked, gears ground, metal strained. At the top of the Dome, the tiny skylight opened half an inch: a tentative, reversible, agnostic opening to the possibility of grace.

  I thought I felt a little zephyr of moist fresh air briefly against my face.

  Someone was knocking on the Dome behind me. I turned and saw a familiar cadaverous figure in his Sam Spade hat and raincoat.

  ‘Stub!’ I said.

  He signalled me to meet him at the entrance to the Dome. I walked over, keeping an eye on him as he traced a parallel path round the outside of the Dome. The entrance was bolted and barred, so I had a tedious job of unlocking. Finally I opened the small door and poked my head through the polythene hangings.

  ‘Hello sir,’ said Stub. ‘Jonah and Miss Bright and Keziah wondered if you’d like to join them for a meal. They said they’ve ordered murtabak specially.’

  ‘I see.’ I felt a sudden pang of anxiety. ‘What am I letting myself in for?’

  ‘Murtabak, sir,’ said Stub. ‘And probably curry sauce.’

  ‘Quite. But what else? Pain, danger, fear? Commitment?’

  ‘Why not take it a step at a time, sir?’

  Because that’s how wars start, and disasters happen, and people get into things they regret, I thought.

  ‘I suppose I could give it a go.’

  I walked out, and left the door to Jamie’s Myth slightly open.

  ‘Are you better, then?’ I asked Stub.

  ‘Still hanging on,’ he replied.

  ‘Why don’t you take
your coat off? This rain is good for you.’

  ‘Not for the likes of me, sir,’ said Stub. ‘Come on.’