Calabash

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘Because as his wife died, the Sultan let out a terrible scream and collapsed. The court was in turmoil. For three days he lay unconscious, until my potions and the crying of his newborn daughter roused him back to life.’

  ‘And by then the crime scene had been cleared.’

  ‘That’s right. Eliya’s effects had been removed to her burial vault, but I found the shards of the glass I had prepared for her awaiting disposal beside the headquarters of the royal nursemaid. When I examined the shards I saw that a solution coated one side.’

  ‘What aroused your suspicions?’

  ‘Eliya was a strong woman, in good health. The delivery should not have killed her.’

  I asked him who else had attended Rosamunde’s birth. Trebunculus stroked his long chin for a minute. ‘I see things in my mind’s eye. And yet it was all so long ago.’

  ‘You must try to picture the scene,’ I told him.

  ‘Very well. I remember the gathering in the jade chamber, the flickering of the balsam lamps. The room had no windows, and only one door. I prepared the sedative outside and took the glass in to Eliya myself. After helping her to take a few sips, I set it on the octagonal table near her head.’

  ‘What else was on the table?’

  ‘Nothing. By rights the table should not have been there at all. It was tall, carved in onyx, and set with five carnelians. Onyx is regarded as an evil stone, you understand. The carnelians temper its harmful nature. It was considered bad luck to even have it in the room, but the piece was a favourite of Eliya’s and so it stayed. She looked so small in that great bed. The swan-bed, carved from rosewood, as smooth as her own fair skin.

  ‘The Sultan was not in attendance for the delivery. He was only summoned to the bedside after his wife began her death throes. The Valide Sultan—the Queen Mother—was in attendance, of course. Eliya’s own mother had died several years earlier, and Fathmir had adopted Eliya as her own blood family. They were very close. The two handmaidens of the inner court were also present. Eunuchs guarded the doors. Oh, and the Lord Chancellor was present when Eliya’s contractions began to quicken, but was ushered from the room for the sake of propriety.’

  ‘So he had access to the sedative glass,’ I replied. ‘Of all people, surely suspicion must fall most heavily on him?’

  Trebunculus sucked thoughtfully at his teeth. From the opposite side of the bench, a great convex mirror exaggerated his gnu-like features. ‘I understand your reasoning, but you must realise that the Chancellor had everything to gain by the birth of a royal daughter. His own son was four years old and destined for leadership training under General Bassa. It meant that, for the first time in decades, there was the opportunity to heal the division between the sovereign state and the militia by means of a marriage. The glory from such a strategy belonged—and still belongs—to Septimus alone.’ The doctor’s tone grew confidential. ‘The Sultan is not the man he was. He can no longer afford to risk internecine war with his own military powers. The unity of the kingdom is essential, and it is the Lord Chancellor who has engineered this miracle where so many others have failed.’

  I tried another tack. ‘Did anyone approach Eliya apart from yourself?’

  ‘The handmaidens bathed her forehead with strips of wet cloth.’

  ‘And the glass remained on the table?’

  ‘It stood at the head of the bed, so I suppose both Septimus and Fathmir were within reach of it. My concern was for Eliya, you understand. She began to convulse moments after I had cleared the baby’s lungs.’

  ‘Whoever added the poison to the glass must have done so between your setting it down upon the table and Eliya’s first sip.’

  ‘But there was only the briefest of moments between the two events, I am certain. Poisoning is not uncommon in our kingdom’s history, but it remains a delicate art. To introduce granules to the glass is not a momentary action.’ Trebunculus slumped forwards at the bench, distraught.

  ‘I don’t understand. Why not?’

  ‘For the simple reason that too much poison would have taken action immediately, risking the life of the unborn child, a child everyone in that room needed. Too little poison and there would have been time for me to administer an antidote. You see our dilemma, Kay. The poison from the scarlet octopus is so powerful in concentration that a single grain would make a difference in its effect. The exact amount of toxin had to have been measured out at the bedside. But I ask you, how would that have been possible?’

  ‘I agree, it is a puzzle,’ I admitted. ‘But perhaps not beyond solution. Would it be possible to visit the jade chamber?’

  ‘Why, the room was dismantled after Eliya’s death upon the order of the Sultan, and everything in it destroyed, except for a few items which were buried in the royal vault along with Eliya.’

  ‘Then we must visit the vault and examine the body.’

  ‘Impossible!’ cried Trebunculus. ‘Such an act would constitute the purest form of sacrilege. If caught we would be tortured for weeks, slow compression—’

  ‘—of the testicles, yes, I remember.’

  ‘And then, if we were very lucky, we would be beheaded.’

  ‘Very lucky?’

  ‘Oh, beheading is an honourable form of execution.’

  But even as he spoke, I could tell that he was already thinking of a way to achieve our goal.

  Chapter 23

  Farewells

  There had been a storm in the night; huge puddles covered the car park. The air was damp and everything smelled of seaweed. Not that there was anything new about that.

  ‘What’s all this stuff?’ Sean asked, peering down into the plastic shopping bag.

  ‘Supplies for the journey. Fry’s Mint Chocolate. Teabags. Seasick stuff. Your old bobble hat. Uncle Harry’s number in Beirut. It wasn’t my idea, Mum wanted me to give it to you.’ Uncle Harry was the nearest relative we had to Singapore. Pauline’s thinking here was that if Sean had some kind of emergency he would automatically ring us in Cole Bay, and if we were out he would phone the next nearest living relative, not counting my step-grandad, who answered his phone but could never understand the person on the other end. Beirut was still a beautiful city then. Uncle Harry was five years away from suffering a fatal heart attack after his apartment was shelled.

  Sean stuffed the bag into his holdall. He wiped his blue nose on the back of his hand and looked towards the ferry, the great blue and white wall rising motionless beside the dock with its deck lamps glowing coldly in the grey dawn light. It didn’t look like a boat at all, more like a factory on night shift. ‘Well, I’d better get on or it’ll go without me,’ he said. ‘Everyone else is already on.’

  Bob and Pauline were sitting in the car, looking uncomfortable. Pauline said the waiting around was too damp for her back. Janine had, unsurprisingly, opted not to see my brother off.

  ‘And what’s this?’ Sean took the slim plastic case from me and turned it in his hands.

  ‘Open it and see.’

  He unclasped the lid and removed the fountain pen from its holder. He gave a low whistle. ‘This must have cost you a bomb, Kay.’

  ‘There’s six ink cartridges too. Just remember your promise.’

  ‘You daft bugger. Come here.’ He made a lunge for my head and squeezed it so hard against his chest that his coat buttons made marks on my face. ‘I’m not going for ever, you know. I just need to sort things out in my mind. Like you do with your maps. But you have to stay here and do it. And look after them two. Everything will be all right. Here.’ He pulled a hand free and took a tiny paper Union Jack pin from his lapel, some kind of flag-day offering. He shook the fountain pen. ‘Is there ink in this thing?’

  ‘Of course, I filled it up last night. Had to make sure it worked.’

  Uncapping the pen, he wrote his name on the back of the flag, twirled it dry and handed it to me. ‘Put me on one of your maps. I’ll write and tell you exactly where I am, and you can keep track of me, is that a deal?’

&n
bsp; I smiled. ‘A deal.’ I carefully pinned the flag onto the lapel of my overcoat. When I looked up, Sean was walking away towards the silent ship with his suitcase and his shopping bag, his big boots making no noise on the concrete plain. The weight and sway of his confident walk stayed in my mind long after his form had blurred into the thickening sea mist. I looked back at the car, at Bob and Pauline staring out through the condensation on the windscreen, and felt lost, stranded between ever-widening points.

  —

  The best way to forget about losing my brother was to get as far away as possible from Cole Bay. While I waited for Trebunculus to plan our excursion into the royal burial vault, I passed my time with Rosamunde. The Princess brought a seductive, illicit rhythm to my days and nights in Calabash. I could not stop thinking about her, especially when I was stuck at home with Bob and Pauline. Her luminous beauty, her swaying body, the guileless advances she made in my presence, combined to enslave me. Lying on a wind-freshened hillock, I waited for her to pass on Ebu, her favourite mare, a prancing, angular creature with powdered withers and kohl-lined eyes. As the sun set I watched her undressing in a conical room lined with wicker, silk and tortoiseshell, where the concubines were arranged for royal presentation. And one day, hiding no more from public view, not caring if the Sultan himself saw us, I approached her in the courtyard below her apartment, and embraced her in the shadows of the great colonnade.

  I knew I was behaving like a lovesick idiot, and that Rosamunde was soon determined to leave me for the Chancellor’s son. The last thing I wished was to upset the balance of this finely run kingdom, but I also knew how little the laws of logic counted in matters of the heart. Night after night, the Princess drew me to her chamber and kissed my bared chest as I slid her warm brown thighs around my waist. Unmindful of the dangers of discovery, we lay within the rumpled bedding until dawn restored the voices of the palace canaries.

  I knew it was too good to last, of course.

  ‘You have to leave,’ urged Rosamunde one morning, kissing me anxiously. ‘My maids will arrive at any moment.’

  ‘I just want to be with you,’ I begged pathetically, half-pushed towards the door in my unbuttoned shirt. ‘There must be a way.’

  She held an unsealed note before me. ‘I have received word that Maximus Peason has been awarded the highest honour of his rank in General Bassa’s annual review of troops. He is arriving today to claim his bride. There are military documents to be signed by all parties, then the ceremony of our betrothal will be set to take place at the quarter moon.’

  ‘But this is terrible! Is there no way you can stop him?’

  ‘I warned you of this moment, ajnabee. There has been further strain between the monarchy and its military force of late. I must make this marriage work for the sake of my father, so that his weakening power may be restored.’

  ‘Marriage for love is the only kind of union that can ever last,’ said I, who knew absolutely nothing about the subject.

  ‘Poor Kay. It is not quite over yet for us. I will see you until the eve of my wedding, and then no more.’

  Sulkily I took my leave, clambering through the tangle of briar below Rosamunde’s bedroom window just as the servants arrived for her morning toilette. The Sultan’s daughter was a prize worth fighting for. I imagined witnessing the arrival of her future husband’s military cortege, a confrontation with Major Peason at the altar, a duel during which my fencing skills would finally come into play, a blade at his throat, acquiescence, the carrying off of my treasure.

  I also remembered that I was an incredibly hopeless coward with a thing about pain, that I had left school before the conclusion of my fencing lessons, and that I was a lowborn commoner with no hope in hell of marrying a member of a royal family that didn’t even exist outside of my fevered imagination.

  But hey—it didn’t hurt to dream.

  —

  ‘You’re lying to me,’ said Julia, shouting above the clatter of the winch. ‘If you really did have a girlfriend I’d know about it. Someone would have seen you out together and told me. What’s her name, then?’

  I looked over the side of the car at the passing white-painted struts. It didn’t look very safe. The roller coaster was the most forbidden ride in the entire off-limits amusement park. It had been closed down for yet another safety check last month after some kid fell out at the top and broke his back. ‘I’m not telling you. You don’t know her, she’s not from around here. You wouldn’t recognise her if you saw her.’

  ‘Then how did you meet her? You never go outside of Cole Bay,’ she bellowed back. We were nearly at the peak now. ‘What happened, did she get washed up on the beach one afternoon while you were down there chucking stones in the water? Did you give her artificial respiration and bring her back to life? Is she a mermaid or something? You’re making it up, you lying little sod.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘You are. You know how your imagination always gets the better of you.’

  The clattering stopped as we came off the chain. The little car levelled out and curved around on its track. For a moment, the only sound was the wind in our ears.

  ‘There’s no point in telling me this sort of thing, anyway,’ shouted Julia. ‘If you were really in love you’d be shouting about it from the rooftops.’

  The car tipped down and gathered speed as we began to scream our heads off.

  —

  If my trips to Calabash were a secret that I could not share, then falling in love with a girl who in all probability did not exist was even worse. I had been stung by Julia’s sarcasm into hinting about the situation, but could not face any further risks from disclosure until I had made a few decisions about my other life.

  I began to lose count of the number of times I returned to Calabash. Nothing disturbed the safe calm haven of the days I passed there, the warm expectant eroticism of the nights. Every minute spent apart from Rosamunde seemed to me like time irretrievably lost. She was a wilful, thrilling lover, who used the lonely hours of darkness before her impending wedding in lustful escapades with her traveller from across the sea. What passed between us on those hot nights was almost childlike, free from guilt and responsibility, free, I suppose, from reality. Whenever I came back to Cole Bay, I found myself cold and dog-tired, physically and mentally bereft. A familiar depression settled over me, and always lasted until the moment I decided to return.

  Our last night together was—at least on my part—beset with melancholy. I sat on the edge of the royal counterpane and stared glumly out at the indigo hills, and generally moped about like a dog whose owner had been shot. Rosamunde was calmly accepting of her fate. We did not make love; I had no wish to renew the pain I felt, and she was preoccupied with the practical arrangements for her wedding day. When my hand brushed her arm she moved away from me, and I knew that our time together was over. As lovers part, their final words are supposedly imbued with import. ‘Well, I’d better be off then,’ probably won’t go down in history as one of the great romantic farewells.

  ‘Kay—wait,’ she called back, unclasping something from the chain at her neck. ‘I want you to take—this—with you.’ Her hand revealed a smooth oval gemstone, the colour of flames through honey, the colour of her eyes. ‘It belonged to my mother. Now it belongs to you, as I cannot.’

  She turned her back and brushed her fingers across her face. I would like to think she shed a tear, but I knew that she was already lost to me, growing distant, thinking of her future husband. She was fully prepared to follow the path of her duty, and setting aside her childhood in order to grow up was part of the process. She made me feel immature.

  I dropped the polished jewel into my pocket and left.

  So my Rosamunde was married at the quarter moon, in a ceremony of such might, splendour and opulence that its sights and sounds could be sensed throughout the kingdom. Unable to keep myself away, I attended the procession from a distance. Maximus Peason was pretty much as I expected him to be, tall and tan
ned and shaven-headed, with a shovel-shaped beard and a merciless gaze. He was bedecked in silver braid, and his high-collared sapphire tunic acted like a neck brace. He was a commander of men, whose military training dictated his movements and revealed itself in every measured step he took. Rosamunde made a proud and dutiful bride, bound tightly in yellow lace and purple violets, unfaltering in her instruction. She stared ahead from the palace steps and smiled as if periodically remembering to do so. The Sultan was absurd with pride. His Nubians showered the couple in jacaranda petals, and fired a couple of gold-painted dwarves from cannons. Hurrying beneath an arch of shining unsheathed scimitars raised by the Sultan’s sipahis, his personal cavalrymen, the Princess was spirited away by her new husband, but not before she had been taken to the heart of the cheering populace.

  Although I tried to engage her attention, nothing I could do would encourage Rosamunde to catch my eye. But just before the Major raised her up to his carriage door, she cast back a fleeting look of such sadness that it was all I could do to keep from pushing my way to her side.

  That evening, I trudged back to my village feeling unworthy and miserable. There, in the shifting shadows of the bougainvillea, Parizade was waiting to draw the sting from my pain with the sweet balm of her body. It crossed my mind that she had been sent for. Whether she had or not, I was glad of her company. She stayed until it was time for me to step back into chill reality.

  Back to the coast of England.

  Back to Cole Bay.

  Whenever I returned to that rain-blasted pier, I wondered what it was that kept me coming home at all. Right through that appalling winter, when the seashore silted up with dirty snow and pensioners froze to death in their flats, when angry scraps of cloud glanced across the clifftops, and seafront shops boarded their windows against the hammering of the wind and the ice-green sea, I remained in my bedroom, marking my brother’s position. The flag he had given me was now flanked with rows of colour-coded pushpins chronicling his travels. He was working as a courier and making frequent business trips to Thailand, a country I still preferred to think of as Siam. A letter arrived from him every Friday morning. He wrote of glittering temples and floating markets, saffron-garbed monks, elephants and water buffaloes, women frying trays of squid by the side of the road, noise, squalor, life. I left the pages open on the dining room table for Pauline to read. She treated them as if they were infected, leaning forwards to verify Sean’s handwriting and turning them over with the tips of her fingers. She never commented on his adventures.