Age of Legends

by James Lovegrove

  These were the last words Ajia heard before she plunged down a deep, dark hole into unconsciousness.

  Chapter 5

  AJIA DREAMED OF that day.

  It was one of the worst days of her life, the other being the day the officials from the Resettlement Council came to take her mother away.

  The day when she came home from sixth-form college to find the flat strangely silent. Normally at this hour her father would have been getting ready to teach his after-school lessons. He’d be running through scales or practising his blues fingering, or else trying out some flashy flamenco piece or a Keith Richards riff. Over the next three hours the front room would be occupied by a succession of pupils, some better than others, all learning to play guitar under Tony Snell’s calm, measured tutelage.

  Today there wasn’t a sound coming from the front room. Ajia, though, wasn’t worried. She assumed her dad had just popped down the road, maybe to buy some new strings at the music shop or get something in for tea. She went straight to her room. Her plan was to take her bike out for a spin later, but first she wanted to get some drawing done in her sketchbook. Her likenesses of Derek Drake were coming along nicely. The image she was working on at the moment, and was particularly proud of, showed the prime minister and his chief Paladin Dominic Wynne from the waist up, side by side, shirtless. Each was reaching out of frame in such a way that it was clear his hand was at the other’s crotch. From this and the smiles on their faces, the viewer had to infer that mutual jerking-off was happening.

  Of course, she was careful to keep the sketchbook hidden at the back of a drawer. If her father found it, he’d flip his lid. And if someone in authority ever saw it…

  When the door buzzer rang, Ajia went down the hallway to open it. Obviously her father had forgotten his keys. Again. Duh, Dad. He’d been doing that a lot lately. In fact, lately he hadn’t been just absentminded––he’d been absent, in the sense that he could be there with you in the room, even talking to you, but his mind would be elsewhere. Two years since his wife was deported, and he’d been putting up a brave front but it was starting to wear him down. Ajia could see it. The effort of carrying on as normal, hoping that things would get better, that somehow, miraculously, his Padma would come back. The agony of not knowing where she was. If she was even still alive. It was etched around his eyes. His eyes looked so tired.

  Ajia was feeling the strain too, but she had been able to cry about it, and scream, and mope. And she had her drawings through which to vent her bitterness and frustration. Her father, in his oh-so-English, masculine way, just internalised it all. He seemed to think that by remaining stoical, not showing his pain, not giving it any outlet, he was somehow protecting Ajia. Do his teaching, perform the odd pub gig, make sure there was food on the table, everything as it was meant to be. He was a sensitive man but it was all on the inside, not on the surface.

  At the door stood Nathan, her father’s first pupil of the day. Earnest twelve-year-old Nathan, fresh off the bus, with his guitar case slung over his back.

  “Not late, am I?” Nathan said, seeing her look of mild surprise.

  “No,” Ajia said. “Bang on time. I just thought you were my dad.”

  “He not in?”

  “If he isn’t, he’ll be back in a mo. Wait here.”

  A thought had occurred to her. Maybe her father was taking a nap. That was something else he’d started doing these past few weeks, sleeping at odd times and not sleeping at night.

  “Dad!” she called out. No response. “Dad!”

  She knocked on the door to his bedroom.

  “Dad, you dopey twit, you’d better get up. Nathan’s here. Dad?”

  Still nothing.

  “Right, well, I’m coming in. You’d best not be naked. I’m closing my eyes just in case.”

  She opened the door.

  “Dad?”

  Even with her eyes shut, she could tell he was there. She could smell his aftershave. That and another odour, mustier, less pleasant. Sinister.

  She knew then that she did not want to look, and that she must look.

  She knew exactly what he had done.

  He lay propped up on the pillows, staring straight ahead, sightlessly.

  There was an empty glass on his bedside table, and next to it an empty packet of paracetamol.

  Ajia stood in the doorway, trembling. The enormity of what she was seeing drove the breath out of her, like a gigantic tonnage pushing down on her from above.

  The loll of his head. The grey pallor of his face. The sheer stillness of him.

  “Is your dad all right, Ajia?” Behind her, Nathan was peeking round the door jamb. She hadn’t even heard him approach. “He doesn’t look all right. Is he ill? Should we call the ambulance?”

  Ajia dreamed of these events exactly as they had happened, with as much clarity as if they were happening now. It was a loop of memory she chose not to replay if she could help it, but in her dreams she had no say in the matter. She could do nothing but relive the moment as though it was all brand new, the first time every time. It was her private hell.

  She struggled out of the dream, clawing her way back up to reality.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa. It’s okay. Be calm, good fellow. Nothing’s the matter.”

  She blinked around her. It was Smith who was speaking. She was on a bare mattress on the floor. Smith sat nearby, cross-legged. He was heating up a frying pan over a camping stove.

  “Bad dream?”

  “You could say that,” Ajia said.

  The waking world brought with it pain. Ajia’s body felt stiff and brittle, as though she were made of broken glass. But at least it was just physical pain. It wasn’t the mental torment of walking in on her dead father and knowing that she had been sitting in the adjacent room for half an hour with no idea that he was there. Knowing, too, that this was something he had been hiding from her for weeks if not months––this loneliness, this despair, this anguish that had gradually sapped his will to live.

  Smith cracked eggs one-handed into the pan. As they started to sizzle, Ajia took stock of her surroundings. A flat in a high-rise. Tenth or eleventh storey, must be, judging by what she could see out of the grimy, curtainless windows––a vista of rooftops beneath a broad noonday sky. Aside from the mattress and a wooden chair, there was no furniture to speak of. The wallpaper was peeling, as was the linoleum, exposing jagged patches of bare concrete. A smell of blocked drains permeated the air. It might have been quite a nice flat, once upon a time, but nobody had lived here, not properly, for some while.

  “Not the dezzest of rezzes,” Smith said, following her gaze. “But the rent is cheap, by which I mean free, which is the best price of all. Strictly speaking, the building is condemned and unfit for human occupation, but as far as I’m concerned it remains habitable until someone actually gets round to knocking it down. The views are excellent. On a good day you can see all the way to the Shard, or on a bad day, depending whether monuments to unbridled capitalist greed are your thing or not. From other flats you can see Wembley Stadium, if you’d rather, but I was never into football.”

  “A squat.”

  “Such an ugly word. I prefer to think of it as ‘repurposed domicile’. Not all of us can afford a roof over our head, and if there’s a perfectly acceptable dwelling lying vacant…”

  “Look, Mr Smith…” Ajia began.

  “Ah-ah!” Smith held up a hand. “Remember? No ‘Mr’. Just Smith.”

  “Smith, then. Look, I owe you again, obviously. I guess I must have passed out back there in the park and you carried me here.”

  “You are a slender little thing. It was no great labour.”

  “But…”

  “You’re uncomfortable being here, alone in a flat with a strange man you don’t know.”

  Emphasis on strange, Ajia thought.

  “That’s putting it mildly,” she said.

  “I understand. Rest assured, I harbour no sinister intentions towards you. I am no tortur
er or rapist. You are free to go, should you wish, any time.”

  Ajia debated how easy it would be to take him up on the invitation. The way she felt right now, if Smith wanted to prevent her leaving, there wouldn’t be much she could do about it. She was a wreck. He was in much better condition, not to mention bigger and bulkier. Plus, there was that hammer of his, still tucked into his belt.

  “I would just ask,” he continued, “that you stay to have a fried-egg sandwich with me and listen to what I have to say. After that, what you do is entirely up to you.”

  It sounded reasonable, Ajia supposed. And those frying eggs did smell good.

  THEY TASTED GOOD, too, slapped between two slices of butter-lathered white bread. Ajia ate and almost felt contented.

  “First of all,” Smith said, licking grease off his fingers, “I think I should know your name. The name you used to have. It’s only polite to ask.”

  “Used to have?”

  “Humour me.”

  “Ajia,” she said. “Ajia Snell is the name I used to have, and as a matter of fact still do.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Ajia Snell. I used to be Auric Wright.”

  “I see. So, do, er… people like you, do you have before-and-after names? Is that a thing? Before you became homeless and after? Like, a change of identity. A street alias. I didn’t know that.”

  “Oh, my name change has nothing to do with my social status, or lack of same,” Smith replied. “It’s somewhat more complicated. Tell me, Ajia, do you remember dying?”

  “What?”

  “I said, do you remember dying?”

  “I heard what you said. I just didn’t think you’d said what I heard. No, I don’t remember dying, because I haven’t died.”

  “Haven’t you? Cast your mind back. At some point, very recently, you will have lost all sensation. You will have entered a state of complete and utter extinction.”

  “You mean when I blacked out when I got up from the bench? But that was just, like, fainting.”

  “No, not then. Earlier. Try and think. I know it can be hard. The mind has a tendency to draw a veil over uncongenial experiences, and experiences don’t come much more uncongenial than dying. It’s a kind of self-protection mechanism. You may dimly recall becoming detached from your body, being able to observe yourself with dispassion and, perhaps, a certain compassion too. Does that sound familiar?”

  “No,” Ajia said, but it did. Back in the police cell, during her third beating. The feeling of watching herself getting pummelled. Telling herself to close her eyes and go to sleep.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. Well… Okay, I might have gone through something a bit like that.” Briefly she outlined the sorry tale of how Met officers had shot, arrested and abused her. “But I didn’t die.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because I wouldn’t be sitting here now chatting with you,” she said, as if it could not be more obvious. “I’d be in heaven, or the spirit plane, or hanging around in the bardo waiting to be reincarnated, or none of the above, delete where applicable.”

  “Is death so easy to verify?” said Smith. “One’s own death? After all, no one has come back and definitively described how it feels to die. At least, no one has gone on record about it. Some have darkened death’s threshold and been revived at the last instant. They have come close but, self-evidently, they have not actually died. A few of us, however, have indeed passed through death’s portal and returned. We are the ones who can say with some accuracy what it is like. I include not just myself in this category, good fellow, but you as well.”

  “Why do you keep calling me that?”

  “What? Good fellow?”

  “Yeah. Is it just some affectation?”

  “No. No affectation.”

  “I notice you didn’t call that other guy, Rich, it.”

  “Rich?” Smith chortled. “Rich is just Rich, as in short for Richard. That’s his name, ironic as it is. ‘Good fellow’ is yours.”

  Ajia was not greatly enlightened.

  “But back to my point,” Smith went on. “Death came for you. Now that I tell you that, you must see it’s true. But life was not done with you. Life had other plans. That is why you are still breathing, still extant. And why, also, you are not quite you any more. You are different.”

  “Different? I don’t feel different.”

  “Tell me, has anything unusual occurred since you came back from the dead?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “What is the first thing you remember after your brief spell of nothingness?”

  Ajia pondered. “The cops. The two rozzers who did me over. They were going to put me in a bodybag, I think.”

  “Were they? Or had you perhaps just been in that bodybag? Had they thought you dead, until you soundly disabused them of that notion?”

  “Don’t know. It’s all a bit of a haze, on account of the whole getting-shot-and-then-having-the-crap-beaten-out-of-me-several-times thing.”

  “But you got away from the policemen.”

  “Now that I do remember,” said Ajia. “I ran like fuck, and they were too old and slow, or just too bloody lazy, to run after me.”

  “Or,” said Smith, “you were just too fast for them.”

  “Same difference.”

  “No. Not the same at all. Didn’t it seem peculiar to you, how fast you were going?”

  Ajia shrugged. “I’m a bike courier. I’m pretty fit.”

  “When you ran, did it feel as though nobody on earth could ever keep up with you? As though you were faster than anyone has ever been? I’m only guessing about this. I can’t know what it’s like.

  I’m just projecting from my own experience of developing a new-found ability.”

  The conversation had taken a bizarre turn.

  No, Ajia corrected herself. It hasn’t taken a bizarre turn. It was bizarre to begin with, and it’s getting bizarrer.

  “I was scared,” she said. “I was running for my life, or so I thought. I didn’t really have time to analyse it while it was happening. Didn’t conduct a scientific study. Too busy just doing it.”

  “You don’t, in hindsight, consider that there was any unnatural about your speed? Preternatural, even?”

  “Nope.”

  The traffic signal that took so long to change. The way sounds became attenuated, long and slow, like whalesong. The three people at the mini mart, not looking at where she was but at where she had been, as if their gazes were lagging behind.

  “Let’s try another tack,” said Smith, and he picked up the frying pan and flung it at her.

  Ajia heard the hollow spanggg of the pan hitting the wall and bouncing off. She herself was in the opposite corner of the room at that point.

  Smith turned to look for her. “Ah, there you are.”

  “What the hell did you do that for?” Ajia demanded.

  “I think your question ought to be ‘How the hell I get from one side of the room to the other in less time than it took for a hurled frying pan to travel a few feet?’ And from a standing start, what’s more. Don’t you see, good fellow, that what you just did was impossible. I gave you no warning. I threw the pan as hard as I could. I was aiming for your head. If you hadn’t moved like you did, it would be you who now had a dent in you instead of the wall. Your reaction time was incalculably swift, and the distance you covered in a split-second––remarkable. You were human lightning.”

  “No,” said Ajia, shaking her head. “No, I just… just got out of the way, that’s all. So I have good reflexes. So what?”

  Smith stooped to retrieve the frying pan.

  “Don’t even think about trying that stunt again,” she said menacingly.

  “Wouldn’t dream of it,” Smith said, dusting the pan off and setting it back down beside the camping stove. “Even if I did, I know I couldn’t touch you. You would dodge the pan every time. But perhaps some other sort of demonstration is in order. You seem unconvinced of your
own talent. How about I show off mine? That might clinch it.”

  He drew his hammer from his belt.

  “You are definitely not going to chuck that at me,” Ajia said.

  “My hammer is not for violence.”

  “Could have fooled me. You were ready to hit Rich with it last night.”

  “Again, wouldn’t have dreamed of it. I was bluffing. Not that Rich realised. I needed a prop in order to out-bully the bully. No, this hammer, good fellow, is a construction tool. It does not cause damage. It creates.”

  Smith grabbed the wooden chair with his free hand, raised it up and smashed it onto the floor. The first time, a leg broke off. The second time, one of the spindles in the back came free. The third time, the entire chair collapsed, disintegrating into so much tinder.

  “I am Wayland the Smith,” Smith intoned, brandishing the hammer. “I am the Forger. The Maker. The Crafter of Things.”

  He began to tap the ruined chair with the tapered end of the hammer head.

  And the chair began to reassemble itself.

  With every tap, the sundered parts came together. Legs reattached to seat, seat to back. The spindles were restored into place one after another. Splintered ends knitted, like fractured bones healing. Within half a minute the chair was complete again, as if it had never been destroyed.

  “There,” Smith said. “Good as new. How about that?”

  Ajia gaped.

  “IKEA,” she said at last. “New type of IKEA chair. Comes apart, springs back whole, if you press it in the right spots. Haven’t seen that one in the catalogue but I bet it’s there.”

  “You know that’s not the case. You saw with your own eyes. This was no trick. What I unmade, the hammer remade. And that is just a fraction of my abilities. Consider your broken rib. I imagine it still hurts, but does it hurt as badly as it did? No. In fact, what you are feeling is just a mild residual ache. Does that describe the pain?”

  Hesitantly Ajia nodded.

  “Your range of movement is not inhibited, as it would be were the rib still broken,” Smith continued. “We’ve seen that.”