Turquoiselle

by Tanith Lee

  Carver asked for, and unhurriedly drank, a single whisky.

  He did not want it, but could tell it was a decent one, despite the unknown label and name.

  No one approached now, in the clinical bar. The bar staff were attentive and friendly. Anyone who caught Carver’s eye either looked at once away, or smiled radiantly at him. (Did he imagine this? Again, the residue of drugs?)

  Later he went into the canteen, which resembled, unlike the bar, a plushy and rather expensive London restaurant, perhaps belonging to a private political club. He ate a hamburger and salad under the darkly tawny drapes.

  He was not tired, only exhausted. He left about eight-thirty. His room had been, as before, and as in the best hotel, immaculately hoovered, brushed and dusted, the bed made up, the bathroom cleaned and aromatic with .flowery bleach. New clothes had arrived for him also, still in their packaging, shirts, T-shirts, trousers, underwear. All similar to things he had worn.

  Beyond the window a quarter moon lay sideways on the western rim of the sea. Twilight and water. He left the blind up.

  Would Anjeela Merville visit him tonight?

  Carver thought not.

  In this he was correct.

  Fourteen

  A series of codes began to move through his head. On the black screen of his mind: letters, numbers. Stupid, simplistic. ABC. 123. U.R.U.I.M.E.

  Sara, his – Andy’s – mother went entirely mad the day she found out she was pregnant again. Her madness, until then, had been eclectic, and composed of elements that might be explained away, put out of sight. Some things she did were only hysterical – screaming sometimes out of the window of the flat over the off-licence after drunks, once they had gone – or, skittish always, ‘making sure’ the front door was properly shut three (even six) times after leaving the flat. Small things.

  It was just before he took off for the college. Sunderland had come back, and spent about an hour talking to Andy, explaining transport and routine, necessities. After he left, Sara began slowly to seethe and then come to the boil.

  “You get everything, don’t you? Yeah? It all comes to you, if you’re a fucking man. You don’t even get in the family way.” (One of her more prissy expressions.) “Well, I’m not going to have the little fuck. I had enough shit ‘cuz of you. That was enough. Or you wan’ it, yeah? No, din’ think so. Just fuck off to your poncy college, you little bugger. And I’ll get rid of this one that’s been stuck up me. Once’s enough.” And she flung her mug and then, snatching it, his, against the wall.

  Andy, despite himself, had been shocked. He had not even known – why, how, should he? – that she had had recent sex with a man, maybe many men. He knew nothing about Sara but the outlines of the past, inside which she had still seemed to move.

  He supposed she had cared for, and financially supported him, but she had never had any lasting interest in him (“Why should I?” she might well say, “I never wanted you. And what have you done?”) But she had protected – tried, actually uselessly, to protect – him, from his father. She had made him skimpy but regular meals, and washed his clothes and bought him sweets and, when he was little, walked him to vile schools and left him there, skimmed off some of her hard hard-earned cash to give him his ‘dole’.

  Put up with his own indifference and absences. Pretended to like his few (ill–devised?) generosities.

  Presumably she did get rid of the second child. Or else she had never been afflicted by it, just a fearful mistake put right by her next menstruation.

  Once at the college, he had ceased to see her. He did not need to ‘go home’. He did not call her ever. They never wrote. Not even cards.

  Then she did write him a letter, when he was sixteen. It was poorly spelled, as by then he could see, and put its words together less ably than Sara did when speaking. She told him she was moving north with someone she knew, she did not specify gender or connection. She called her son, as ever, Andy, and she wished Andy luck. She, however, did not sign it ‘Mum’, as she had with his birthday and Christmas cards in childhood, but with her name, this spelled correctly and in full, Zarissa Maria Cava.

  A.B.C. 1.2.3. 1.4. 1.4. 1.4.

  Another day arrived, flared blue, green and gold, and sank to darkness in the sea.

  Carver spent it, as he had substantially the days before. He had, though, some company in the afternoon.

  Following breakfast in the kitchen, Carver lingered. The others, including the non-communicative Anjeela Merville, gradually ebbed away, she in company with the boiler-suited Fiddy. It was a different boiler suit today in deep orange.

  Ball was the last to leave. He and Van Sedden seemed scowlingly to have fallen out, did not exchange a word with each other or with anyone else. When Ball rose he glared also at Carver and said, “Have a nice day, Car, why don’t you.” Carver nodded and went back to reading the ancient copy of The Independent he had found lying at an empty place on the table. He continued to read a while after Ball had also gone. The paper seemed fairly fresh and crisp, but that must be some treatment – it was dated 2009. (He had noted such or more out-of-date news-sheets and magazines in the bar, but that was strangely in keeping with the bar’s hygienic hospital ambience.)

  The kitchen was vacant then aside from Carver.

  He was, he had concluded, expected – meant – to steal something. So he picked up the black mug he had drunk from and walked out with it.

  In the cloakroom off the hall below the stairs, Carver annexed an unused bar of hand-soap, dressed in its white wrapper.

  Going through the appropriate corridor that he now knew led out to this side of the grounds, one passed a cupboard for office-type stationery, and left unlocked. Carver selected three pens, some batteries and a ringbacked notepad.

  Carrying everything openly, he went out. There was never any human security on any of the doors, at least, not to be seen.

  Outside, it was remorselessly there again, the Wonderful Weather. But this place was some sort of movie-set after all. Conceivably they had finally cracked the scientific formulae for weather control, just as the USA and Russia had been rumoured to have done as far back as the 1960’s. Weather control: people control. And here, just sufficient rain, endless warmth and light. Keep the leaves green. Keep summer up and running.

  Carver was walking back along the rise towards the line of railway-carriage sheds when the fat cycling enthusiast burst from the trees below, and called out to him.

  “Hi! Car!”

  They all used the office abbreviation of his name now. It would have been in the inevitable file on him.

  Carver turned, stopped, waited for the out-of-breath young man to reach him. This morning Charlie, if that was his name, wore jeans, overstretched from hip to knee, too loose at calves and ankles – he did not, certainly, have a cyclist’s legs. Additionally he had on another white tent of T-shirt, this one written over by the optimistic motto Long Life. As before, under duress, he was scarlet, and puffing from exertion.

  “Some hill,” puffed Charlie. He reached out and clapped Carver on the arm, man to man.

  Carver waited.

  Charlie regained his breath. “How are you doing?”

  “Fine.” Carver paused. “How’s your bicycle?”

  “Oh God, she’s lovely. Did nearly thirty miles on her yesterday. Getting there. No lie. Getting... Where you headed?”

  When Carver did not comment, Charlie decided. “The sheds. I’ll trot up there with you.”

  They trotted very slowly.

  “Shame you can’t see the sea this side,” said Charlie.

  The sea lay to the south, the sheds northerly.

  “Should you be able to? Is this an island?” Carver asked.

  “An isle of adventure, old mate,” gasped Charlie.

  “I meant, is this place surrounded by sea?”

  Charlie stopped, so Carver stopped. Charlie frowned at him and for a moment Carver thought something useful might be said. But then Charlie exclaimed, “You know, o
ld son, you’re the spitting image of my dad – I mean, about sixteen years ago,”

  “What year was that, then?”

  “Oh, when he was younger. You know what I mean.”

  “So I look like your father. When younger.”

  “You really do. Although –” Charlie tilted his head, quizzically, “more like my uncle, maybe.”

  Carver started to go on up the hill.

  A jolly dog, Charlie scampered after him, just too out-of-breath to bark.

  By now the sheds were clearly in front of them. The sun had not yet topped the higher parts of the building behind. But light still fell on the golden syrup shed-wood in thick separated slices, somehow optically doubling several of them, so seven became eleven.

  Croft had left Carver the three-way keys.

  Carver undid the centre door of the central (light–doubled) shed.

  “I won’t come in, OK...” said Charlie, as if anxious not to offend by not doing so. “I’m off to get in some cycling.”

  “Do you find you have a lot of time for that?”

  “Every day, old mate. Regular as a clock.”

  “What happens the rest of the time?”

  Charlie would not, as he had not, give a direct answer. Or would he? Charlie said, “I’m just an errand boy, Car.” And for a moment he looked sly. It was, of course, how Carver had described himself.

  Then Charlie let out a somehow surprising bray of laughter, spun round and hurtled off down the slope, waving his arms and ungainly as a drunken windmill so that Carver too, for a second, was reminded of someone from the past. Heavy.

  Carver went into the shed, and shut and locked the door behind him.

  There was a narrow table in there now. A plain, clean, modern table of renewable wood. Waiting to receive anything he might want to set down on it. Displaying, en passant, they too had kept keys.

  Carver put the pens, batteries, notebook, soap, mug, in a group at the centre. The arrangement seemed very foreign to him. All this was as unlike anything he had ever done as it could be. He too, he felt, was unlike anything he could properly target as himself. Whatever caused this effect, it disturbed him only to a degree. Because perhaps the different Carver might find a way out of this mess.

  Lunch was a sandwich got from the take-out annexe between the canteen and the bar. He had a small bottle of beer (label unknown) to go with it, mostly for the fluid content. He ate and drank outside, sitting on the bench he had shared with Croft.

  Carver sat and thought about Croft, going over all the points he could remember. “London wasn’t built in a day.” What had been the other off-kilter word or phrase? It would not come. (Charlie too had said something just off the general phraseology. Regular as, not clockwork, but a clock. But people got mixed up. Or altered things to be ‘clever’.)

  None of this was remotely like the takes, adornments, extrapolations, transpositions of someone like Heavy. Theave. Wolfs. Underland for Sunderland. The wind runs backward.

  Carver watched the light breeze dapple about in the leaves. He tried to gauge if any tiny giveaway blink or shimmer indicated a spying device. He could not detect anything. Yet he knew they were there. They had to be, with such otherwise lax security. And besides he could sense the faint reflected buzz of their electronics on the skin of his bare forearms, his forehead. Sometimes at the tip of his tongue. He had experienced that with women, too, once or twice, when intimately kissing and licking them. Never with Donna. With the black woman he had, Anjeela. He had half expected to. Oddly, suddenly, he recalled Silvia Dusa. The pressure of her hands on his chest, so hot, then the impression of them left behind afterwards, so cold. Like the coded numbers, letters, that had splintered over his eyes in semi-sleep, he saw again that terrible image of her mortuary corpse, the inert body eviscerated of life, her riven and evacuated arm–

  Carver lurched on the bench. He had been sleeping again now. And now, was awake.

  He checked the sky. The sun was deep in the nests of trees. They had not left, or given him, a watch to tell the time, (unlike Ball?), but he could judge reasonably well by the sun. Nearly five again? He planned to go in. He would retreat to his room from the bustle, the beaming smiles and hotelish fake camaraderie – or reticence. As with the college, they all seemed to live in. When darkness arrived he would go into the corridor and look out towards the shed. See if it had begun to glow blue-green. That would not occur, he was fairly sure. But then. Who could say?

  As he returned, tramping in along the gravel drive for a last scan of the sea from the promenade-terrace, he heard a furiously whirring mechanical sound. Carver stepped back against the wall of the building as a bicycling Charlie came buffeting past, turgid and erratic, his legs, in their too-tight-but-floppy jeans, labouring like a pair of whipped epic-film slaves hauling rocks. The gravel sprayed up, the split wave of a shallow pool. Some hit the outer glass of the blinded ground floor windows.

  Carver did not believe that Charlie saw him. Maybe Charlie could see nothing beyond the weird and possibly ill-advised goal of driving the bicycle on and on at the topmost speed he could conjure, which was about three miles an hour. Charlie’s face was dense red again, and angrily fixed. He rained sweat.

  His eyes were filmed and blind as the windows.

  Midnight. Carver knew, since the small screen he could access behind a panel in the wall, (the helpful food-bringing girl had shown him) gave him the hour, along with a selection of concurrent hours in other time-zones. It was 7 p.m. in New York, around 4 p.m. in San Francisco. No clues there to anything much. He would know without looking. As for it’s being 5.20 of the following morning in Cesczeghan, he had never heard of it, though it must lie considerably farther east than Britain.

  Carver opened the door of his room and went into the corridor. The blurred amber light that automatically came on there after sunset, reminded him of the sort of stormy gloaming paraphrased in some old paintings. It gave sufficient illumination to find the walls and doors, and just too much to let the unblinded windows keep their views all clear. Carver pressed close to a pane, (a child looking out at the wide world), shading his eyes in against the glass. Now he could see a sable landscape beyond. Black blocked on black, taking a muted glint from the building’s lights.

  On its hill, the shed was glowing like a torch.

  The colour was vivid, not needing any enhancement. (He must have been aware of it before shading out the corridor light. And, as before, his imagination had mitigated, dismissed the glow. Now nothing but sightlessness could.)

  Turquoise. Alert Level low, between Blue and Green.

  Even so, a Level of Alert.

  There were just seven objects in there, of five categories, unimportant, mundane, adrift in the middle of a wooden table. On a rise in a group of trees, a quarter mile off.

  Burning bright.

  A loud noise, and Carver stepped back from the window. (It was true, like this, the glow faded, was minimised, might even pass as some security lamp, if your mind was on other matters.)

  Into the corridor, from the direction of the stairs, rolled Ball and boiler-suited Fiddy, and then Van Sedden. Then Charlie, even from the stairs pink, if not scarlet, and in a plain black T-shirt over another pair of equally unequal jeans. Anjeela did not appear. Why would she?

  “Car, Car,” cried Ball, with a drunken happy musicality. “Come join our revel!”

  He theatrically bore an uncorked bottle of red wine, one third full. Van Sedden had a bottle of greenishwhite, two thirds full. Fiddy carried a bottle of scotch. This was three thirds full, but open. Charlie had a tall glass of what looked like Coke, fizzing. He and Fiddy did not seem pissed, as the other two did, but even so, ‘merry’, as Sara had been used to say. Car, at bay, stared at them. But there would be surveillance out here too. “Sure,” said Car, and let Fiddy hand him the whisky.

  Fifteen

  “Pass the port.”

  “There is no port, you arsehole. ‘Swhisky.”

  “Whisky and wine�
�”

  “Rich and fine–”

  “Fucking the fuck shut up and pass the fucking booze, you arrant bloody cunt.”

  “Pour it out,” expanded Fiddy, (this piece of conversation was between him and Ball), “and stick it in.”

  “Stick it somewhere,” grumbled Van Sedden resentfully.

  His own white wine was consumed. He had said he did not like whisky. And the red wine – Ball’s – had gone down Ball’s throat to the last drop, Ball balancing the bottle-neck in his mouth, his head tipped right back, a kind of divertissement, (as Sedden had remarked), based on a performing seal.

  “Shoulda got more,” observed Ball. He could drink, he claimed, “anything”. He and Fiddy therefore were by now two thirds down the whisky bottle. Carver – considerately? – had only taken a couple of mouthfuls from it. (The exchange of probable germs did not especially concern Carver. Immunisation was a matter of course at Mantik. And, you assumed, here at this place, too.)

  “Fucking bollock they don’t keep the bar fucking open after twelve,” said Sedden to the terrace pavement.

  “True, fucking true, dear swine,” (Ball), “though maybe they rightly think guys like you, my prince, need to stop after two bottles of Pinot Grigio and one of Sauvignon Blanc. Eh? D’you suppose?”

  Charlie giggled. It transpired his Coke had also contained a double vodka, his fourth double. But he had eked it out.

  “Shut the fuck up,” suggested Sedden.

  And for a while silence dropped.

  The five men sat on three of the griffin-armed benches, on the terrace above the cliff-end and the stretching, glinting, now moonless ink of the sea. Stars in the sky were pale as grains of rice, since some dim light still leaked from the building to dilute them. Though none from the shut main doors.

  Carver was bored and restless, both these states under firm control. There had been sessions like this at the teenage college. He had swiftly managed to avoid them. Two hours, he estimated, had tonight dragged themselves through and away from the drinking party. In a short while, Carver could take himself also away to his room.