The Absolute Book

by Elizabeth Knox

  ‘Are you saying they think they can force him, and they can’t?’

  ‘He’s almost as shifty now as he was when he was a child. Back then, when he wanted to whistle, he’d turn himself into a songbird. When he wanted to run he’d be a deer or horse; swim, and he’d be an otter. There’s that. And his bones still remember his formation in the womb when his grandmother took his mother from gate to gate for months, trying to make a Gatemaker of Adhan’s unborn child, in the same way she’d tried to make Gatemakers of Adhan and me. Her efforts didn’t pay off in the way she wanted, but when he has the glove the gates answer him faster, and move further. His only weakness is the sidhe susceptibility to iron.’

  ‘You’re saying he’s too strong or slippery for your people to force him to do anything? That the only chance they have is to persuade him to show his love for them by sacrificing himself?’

  ‘Or to be so sad and afraid of forgetting that he just gives up.’

  Neve kept washing. Taryn watched tiny grains of iron rolling out of the wounds. There was no sign of swelling or bruising and Taryn wondered whether these people swelled or bruised. Swelling would staunch the bleeding—but then the iron wouldn’t wash away so readily.

  ‘Does he know you’re worried about him?’

  ‘I think his attachment to you is a very good sign. And this business with the Firestarter seems to be holding his interest.’

  Taryn wondered if the main reason Neve was involved in their search for the Firestarter was to oversee a therapeutic activity for her dangerously depressed relative. But she didn’t dare ask.

  Neve said, ‘He seems to have decided to stay free and trust his friends to teach him about himself again. And next time Shiftback is looming as it is now I can tell him that, once he’s a child again, I’ll be a mother to him.’

  Taryn thought of the dazed, bewitched human child she’d glimpsed at Neve’s house, and shivered.

  Neve became practical. ‘I’ll send you to London, then go gather some worthies so we might approach Hell and demand Shift’s immediate return.’

  Taryn waited to hear her add ‘Don’t worry’, or somesuch, but realised she’d be waiting forever for ordinary reassurances from this woman. She wrapped her arms around herself. ‘Will I be safe?’

  Neve actually scowled. It took a little of the edge off her beauty. ‘I’ll put you in Hyde Park, not Hell.’

  ‘I mean safe from my demon. It won’t find me?’

  ‘It’s trapped in Princes Gate.’

  Taryn pressed her lips together and nodded.

  Neve picked up the glove and fastened it on again. She sat for a moment, head down, shoulders heaving. She took deep breaths, gathering herself.

  Taryn got up and walked onto the gleaming leaf carpet and waited. After a moment Neve joined her, stood beside her and stretched out her arm.

  This time Taryn felt the gate as a lurch in the centre of her chest. A wind blew through her and filtered her life away with it, giving her in return sorrow and longing, with a lift of wonder at its end. Neve put a hand on Taryn’s shoulder and propelled her forward into the park, a meadow surrounded by great trees and bathed in traffic fumes. Taryn stood breathing her world. Her throat and eyes prickled. She was alone.

  And then her phone vibrated. The message welcomed her to British Telecom. The time was 7:13am. The date was the 11th of May.

  After a shower and change, Taryn went right back out again to spend the day doing many more things than she’d bargained on. She visited her bank to order a new credit card, replaced her phone, transferring the number of her old one, which had drowned when she came through the gate under the lake on her first return from the Sidh. She decided to keep Stuart’s phone, but not use it unless there was something she wanted MI5 to hear.

  She finally thought of food, but managed only a few mouthfuls of pot noodles before feeling the sodium and preservatives pinching the blood vessels in her legs. The noodles went in the rubbish.

  Taryn switched on her new phone. There were 116 text messages, and her voicemail was full.

  Fifteen of the voice messages were her agent, each message progressively more desperate, until, after ten, Angela’s tone suddenly became careful and gentle. She said she’d heard from Taryn’s friend Carol about the retreat. She hoped it was ‘doing the trick’. She said she’d taken Carol’s word for it that Taryn wouldn’t want to cancel anything. ‘So, I’ve fielded calls from your editor and the chair of your session in Auckland. Now is your time, Taryn—you have to seize these opportunities.’

  When Taryn was two thirds of the way through her voice messages she had a clear sense of the story her father and Carol had been telling to fend everyone off. No, Taryn wasn’t in rehab. No, she hadn’t had a breakdown. It was just that a police detective had upset her by stirring up matters around the murder of her sister, and she’d decided to go on a retreat.

  The story appeared to have originated with her father, whose latest message was a series of statements, half boast and half reassurance, about how he’d ‘set that copper straight’. Presumably Jacob. ‘I’ll call you when I land, darling. I’m flying out early. I have to make time for Peter. He’s been in touch about a new project,’ Basil confided, in gloating tones. He was also a guest at the Auckland and Sydney festivals, with his tell-all memoir of his years working on the fantasy epic.

  Only six of the messages were silences, though the last was four days ago.

  Taryn got a cramp. She’d been sitting at the dining table for over an hour. She wasn’t used to immobility. She did some stretches, then stayed on the floor answering emails. Then she sent a text to Carol. ‘Thank you for fielding Angela. The “retreat” was a good idea. I’ll call you tomorrow.’

  And she would, from the airport.

  Then Angela. ‘I’m on deck. I’ve spoken to my Auckland chair.’ She hadn’t, but she would.

  To her father: ‘Thank you for being there for me. You’re a lifesaver. I fly out tomorrow. It’ll be great to see you.’

  She got up, found her other phone, the one from the OtterBox, which offered her not a single communication other than Telecom’s welcome. She located the few photos and videos she’d made, uploaded them to her Dropbox and used her new phone to send Jacob the link. Shift claimed Stuart’s phone was bugged—‘bugged’ he’d said, then, racking his brains for a term from his thrillers, ‘cloned.’ If the phone was cloned, then let MI5 make something of icy blue mountains, a long tunnel of blossoming fruit trees, a dark blue pond fringed by yellow irises, Jane at the cooking fire, Shift—as difficult to photograph as he was hard to see—drying his boots, his bare feet curled upwards, toes underlit by the flames. Let them make something of the three white deer on a green hillside, a fishing eagle on a branch by a cascade, a village of peat sod huts with turf roofs, three old women in the foreground, smiling toothlessly. Let them make something of the vague, slender, dark-skinned young man—the same seen earlier drying his boots—leaning on one menhir while a heart-stoppingly beautiful woman inclined on its mate; both relaxed, one hard to see, the other impossible to miss. And then those same two in action, as if in a movie, which is what MI5 might suppose the footage to be—leaked images from the television fantasy, foolishly sent by Basil Cornick to his daughter, then even more foolishly passed on by her to her new friend the detective inspector. Someone she trusted, sure, but isn’t that always how leaked things got around? So, television, that’s how MI5 would see the fighting figures facing a dark clot of something smoky, tattered, opaque. Though surely someone smart would ask how Basil Cornick could use his phone to produce a process shot with the FX monster already in it?

  The flight was an ordeal. Thirteen hours from London to Singapore, and ten and a half from Singapore to Auckland. Taryn had booked a stopover on advice from her New Zealand hosts, but her hotel was over an hour from Changi in slow traffic, and from the motorway the view of ships in the white haze of the Singapore Strait wasn’t wonderful, as it once would have been. There had been a cat
astrophic leak right outside her hotel room and all night she could hear the roaring whine of a commercial carpet dryer even through her earplugs.

  On the second leg of her journey Taryn sat in the dimmed airliner cabin, scrolling back and forth through the scant notes she’d taken on the tale she’d been so ceremoniously given the keeping of—the story of a woman who seemed only able to ask of her life which king it would be best to serve. Taryn readjusted her headrest for the tenth time and reflected that the headrests in economy class were made for men with substantial back fat. Her demon hadn’t caught her up at 30,000 feet and going 800 kilometres an hour, but here was that impatient, cruel eye again. Her eye. Anything that made Taryn uncomfortable always seemed to suggest some person she could blame.

  Perhaps, in a world too full of people, she was the one too many.

  Taryn put herself aside and returned to Kernow’s tale.

  The orphan child of a virgin, required by a tormented king as a sacrifice to stabilise the foundations of a tower.

  ‘This story is familiar,’ she thought, and ran the thread of it back through her hands.

  The witch changed herself into a horse to get to the river in time to use its water to make a shield for herself and Kernow’s men. Kernow was puzzled that the horse the witch had changed into was a colt, not a filly or mare. So that meant Adhan was the one under the iris-covered grave mound. Her son had dressed in her clothes and used her name. He had presented himself as dead. The boy. The little god of the marshlands.

  A tower, a stripling wizard, a cruel and troubled king. It was like a fairytale. Familiar. But fairytales were always familiar.

  Taryn was tired. Her brain had snagged on the story’s details, its deer horn medicine bottles, tree bark rain barrels, and smell of scorched river weed. She knew the Monnow, but couldn’t think where Shift’s marsh might be. Probably it had been ditched and drained in the eighteenth century, and used for pasture, and was now a grassy tract full of mobile homes, half of them inhabited by frugal retirees.

  I have to sleep, Taryn thought. The jet’s engines were only a little lower pitched than the carpet-drying machine of the night before. Taryn was desperate to stop listening and making comparisons. Weighing matters. Thinking things through. She closed her eyes and remembered somewhere quiet and uncrowded, the gallery at the top of her grandparents’ house. She was walking on the long runner of balding carpet. Rain was ticking on the skylight. And Beatrice was walking behind her, quiet only for a moment as she came up with another story about the blank spaces on the walls where there should be Northovers, those complete people, who were now almost completely gone.

  19

  Questions from the Audience

  Auckland spread out along an isthmus. From the air it appeared less built than grown, like coral on the bones of a volcanic cone. It was green, wet, sunny, its atmosphere white with water vapour rather than traffic fumes. The plane came in over throngs of mangroves, sunlight scintillating on the water between muddy leaves, and blunt suckers thumbs-up in silt. It crossed warehouses, part of a spreading low-built light industrial zone. A bulldozer was carving out a new footing from loose black earth, and James Northover’s granddaughter, passing overhead, wondered whether all the soil sealed under roads and buildings and parking lots was as good as that. What a waste.

  Taryn pulled her plait in front of her and, as she had used to when she was a child, pressed it to her nose and inhaled. The smell of her hair always turned back the clock. At school it held the scent of home. Now it smelled of the airliner’s recycled air and the shampoo from her noise-besieged hotel room in Singapore. She had wanted it to smell, at least at its roots, of cold pond water.

  Taryn was keen to get out in the sunlight to reset her body clock. She set out without directions from the concierge and took the easy downhill, looking for coffee. She passed places where sugar was spilled on tables and the cups not cleared away, and internet cafés full of boys in big sling chairs facing screens.

  She went back uphill, and turned to walk along a ridge and over a viaduct with an inward-curving Perspex barrier mounted on its balustrade. Not a safety barrier, but suicide prevention. She thought, This must be the place of impulses. She remembered Pujol, whose family would still suppose he jumped, when he was in fact pushed.

  Taryn picked up her pace and hurried off the bridge.

  She found a café to her liking and sat outside with the sun on her back. A diverse population ambled past. Most were young. Half of them were wearing T-shirts.

  I’m in the South Pacific, Taryn thought, with real delight.

  Even after two coffees her eyes kept drifting shut. She gave in, returned to the hotel, closed her curtains, and set her phone to wake her in plenty of time for the gala opening, a ‘true stories told live’ event featuring, among others, the famous actor Basil Cornick.

  Five minutes later she sat up and phoned reception to tell them she was expecting a guest, sometime during the next few days. ‘If Mr Shift arrives can you let me know at once—but otherwise not disturb me.’ She said thank you, hung up, and returned the room to darkness.

  The pillows, quilt and mattress topper were down-filled and almost as talkative as a bracken bed.

  The smoky demon had shrunk and shivered before it seized hold of Shift. It had grown in volume but thinned at its edges. And when it grabbed him and backed towards the gate, it was less a trapdoor spider seizing a mouse and withdrawing into its burrow than someone in a movie shootout taking hold of a bystander to use as a human shield.

  Neve had injured it. It was retreating from her, or from the sword she carried. Shift was just an object it put between itself and its assailant. Shift hadn’t put up a fight. Was his surrender a last-minute change in his plans, or lifelong, temperamental curiosity? Was taking off the Gatemaker’s glove like putting on a disguise? Like dressing in his mother’s clothes and name so he could leave the marsh he was always being sent to hide in?

  Fifteen minutes after the opening night performance, festival guests, patrons and people with swing passes returned to the stage for the party. They lined up at the long barrier of a bar covered in gleaming ranks of champagne flutes, wineglasses, tumblers and dewy bottles of craft beer. The servers standing with their backs to the orchestra pit were the only ones in danger of a calamitous exit downstage.

  Waiters appeared from the wings with platters held head-high, swinging them down to waist height at the first knot of people. Taryn was stuck in a press centre stage and ate whatever canapés managed to reach her: sliced roast beef curled on tiny toasts and dabbed with horseradish cream, porcelain spoons with chopped abalone in yuzu mayonnaise. This had to be her dinner. She was now short of cash, and her credit card hadn’t arrived.

  Taryn spotted the tall and imposing figure of her father. She took a glass from a tray and headed for him. She slipped under his arm and stood on tiptoes to kiss him. Delighted, he introduced her to his circle of admirers and made a point of mentioning the day and hour of her solo session. Taryn sipped her champagne and waved away a tray with red meat. Her father noticed. He held her at arm’s length, inspected her and smiled approvingly. ‘You must give me the details of that retreat. For when I next need some privacy and pampering.’

  ‘It wasn’t an actual retreat. I was just holed up at Alan’s Norfolk house.’

  Basil Cornick’s face did something odd. It was a very expressive face, and whenever he was rethinking his first reaction strange pauses were produced, like a glitch in a film. ‘But Alan’s still with Saoirse?’

  ‘Yes, Dad. He’s just let me use the house to write.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Basil. ‘And there’s that DI Berger.’

  ‘And what do you know about that DI Berger?’

  ‘When we spoke he seemed very confiding. Then I got off the phone and discovered I’d learned next to nothing.’

  Taryn laughed.

  ‘Whatever or whoever it is that’s put the roses in your cheeks, I thank them. You look marvellous.’
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  Taryn had been restored by just one good sleep. She was very fit, and enjoying her own skin, the air on her bare shoulders, and the sight of her fingers twined in the knotted fringe of her shawl. How strong and defined they were. Hands that had been shelling beans and scaling fish.

  Basil Cornick kept hold of his daughter while accepting more compliments about his True Story—which was told against himself, and involved a haughty and glamorous horse. People who had read his book wanted to discuss it. Those who hadn’t wanted to pick his brain about what the future held for his mega-hit fantasy programme, now in its fifth season.

  ‘The scriptwriter fellows like to keep us in the dark,’ Basil said. ‘But I think my character is the only one with enough goodwill in the bank to intervene to save the lives of various people the audience will want saved. So, my prophecy is that I’ll live long enough to cry mercy for other men.’

  A spotlight went on stage right and the speeches began.

  Taryn’s father bent to her ear and whispered, ‘And that’s enough for one evening from the artists. Now let’s hear from the actual Arts Sector. The people with salaries.’ Then he straightened and favoured the first speaker with a sunny-natured smile.

  The festival organiser was brief and gracious. The mayor of Auckland brief and boosterish. The minister for the arts spoke at length, opening with vigour and certainty, then circling back to sniff at her own certainties as if to check that they were indeed her own, and proof of her intestinal wellbeing.

  Taryn’s father winked at her. A great mimic handed a whole new routine. By the time he got to Sydney, he’d have the New Zealand minister for the arts down to a T.

  The speeches concluded; the audience changed partners. Taryn’s chair bowled up to her and introduced himself, and she spent the next half-hour talking about her book with him and various others who leaned in to hear her. After that she persuaded her chair to introduce her to one of the two international guests she was most keen to meet—an American novelist, a tall man, lanky, yellow of complexion. They had a largely one-sided ‘Where have you just come from?’ conversation. The novelist was on the festival circuit and making the most of it with travel between gigs.