But today I was there with an entirely different motive. I knew I couldn’t carry the astrarium around for much longer, especially now that the Was had surfaced. I owned a permanent locker in the baths, virtually impossible to find among the other lockers unless you knew the number. The perfect hiding place. I hurried up the narrow stairs, the astrarium in a small bag tucked under my arm. There were several men in various stages of undress in the locker room. A huge West Indian gentleman, his black skin gleaming with droplets of water, was towelling his great shiny back, the rolls of flesh rippling down to his waist. Two young cab drivers, just off the night shift, were exchanging anecdotes about dodgy customers in thick East End accents, while a sullen-looking adolescent in a pair of grubby Y-fronts sat in the corner reading a martial arts magazine that had Bruce Lee glaring out from the cover. They barely looked at me as I unlocked my battered steel locker.
Just then a young Arab entered; lean and muscular, he scanned the room aggressively as if searching for someone. A shudder of fear ran through me and I ducked immediately behind the open door of my locker, hiding my face. I waited a moment before peering over the top. To my relief, the young Arab, having established his territory, was now sitting on the bench. He began stripping his clothes off. I waited until he’d swaggered off in his bathers before placing the astrarium deep inside my locker. Throwing several layers of gym clothes on top of it, I fastened the lock, stripped and then headed to the steam room.
I settled myself on a bench and stared at the pinewood panelling, thinking over the past few days. The moisture in the steamy air condensed and ran down my forehead. I let my thoughts free-fall and in the drifting steam a vague recollection took shape. It was about seven months ago, just before we were due to leave for Egypt. Isabella had received a letter earlier that day and I’d found her sitting at her desk staring at the scrawled Arabic. She’d looked tense. Worried that it was bad news, I’d asked if it was from Ashraf, who wrote regularly. Frowning, she told me that it was an invitation to a conference from a society of archaeologists she used to belong to and that it had surprised her - she hadn’t been involved with them for years. Trying to lighten the atmosphere, I’d joked, asking if it was some kind of coven. To my surprise, Isabella had lost her temper and left the room. Now I wondered whether it had anything to do with the photograph taken at Behbeit el-Hagar. A couple of months after she’d received the invitation she’d gone to a conference in Luxor. Was that the same conference Hugh Wollington had mentioned? My mind wandered to the Egyptologist and our unfortunate meeting. Was he out there, tracking my movements? Would he be waiting for me when I got home? Uneasiness mingled with fear, dark shadows fluttering though my mind, each more threatening than the other. Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was the sullen adolescent, his acne-marked face leaning over me.
‘The guv’nor told me to tell you there was a bloke looking for you before, at reception, a nasty piece of work, a foreigner. We didn’t let him in, though. You being a regular and all,’ he said gravely. ‘Guv’nor told me to tell you to watch your back. People die in weird places nowadays.’
As I swung the car into my street, I saw Dennis sitting on the doorstep of my building. He was dressed in an old pinstriped suit beneath which the cuffs of pyjamas were visible. Wondering how he’d got hold of my address, I steeled myself for bad news before pulling up in front of the house.
‘Something’s happened—’ I started, but his grim expression cut me off in mid-sentence. All my anxieties about my brother’s self-destructiveness shot through me.
‘We’ve been trying to ring you for ages. We didn’t know where to look for you. It’s Gareth.’
‘Has he overdosed?’
‘It was an accident . . .’
‘No.’ The possibility of his death made me reel. Dennis grabbed me by the arm. ‘Oliver, Gareth’s still alive. He’s in a coma, at the Royal Free. Zoë’s with him . . .’
Before he’d even finished his sentence I was back in the car.
My first impulse on seeing Gareth lying there so unnaturally still was to tear the tubes from his body, lift him out of the bed and run with him out of the hospital, to whisk him back to my father’s house and tuck him under the hand-stitched quilt. To return him magically to the boy I used to read to; mapping out his future with story books filled with adventure. But I couldn’t. Gareth had done this to himself, had pushed the life out of his own body until there was almost nothing left but a papery shell.
As I watched, tremors ran under his eyelids, as if he were scanning the horizon of an interior world inaccessible to anyone else. I pulled my gaze away from the clear plastic tube that ran from his wrist up into a drip, terror of further loss rising up in me like bile.
‘I knew he’d done too much, and then he wanted a bath - I should have stopped him.’ Zoë rocked herself in a chair beside the bed. She looked at me, her face drawn thin around her eyes. ‘We had to break the door down.’
I took Gareth’s hand. It was cold. I barely noticed the doctor entering the room. He glanced with disapproval at Zoë’s unbrushed hair, miniskirt and fishnet stockings, then turned to me.
‘You’re the brother?’ he asked brusquely.
I nodded.
‘He’s been in a coma for over five hours, I’m afraid. It’s too early to tell what the outcome will be.’ He waved the chart in his hand. ‘The blood tests indicated high amounts of both amphetamine and cocaine. The combined effect plus the heat of the bath most likely caused the seizure. Frankly it’s a miracle he didn’t drown.’
On the other side of the bed a heart monitor blipped regularly. The guilt of not forcing Gareth to come and stay with me, of not watching him all the time, washed over me. I knew I wouldn’t survive the death of somebody else I loved, not now. I wished then that I believed in God, in any kind of afterlife. Dread threatened to overwhelm me. To combat it, I focused on Gareth’s appearance; on how ridiculously young he looked without all the fashionable paraphernalia and eye make-up - like the boy I’d known. Someone, a nurse probably, had combed down his hair into an even parting. Gareth would have hated that.
‘Will he live?’ I asked. ‘Is his brain damaged?’
The doctor hesitated. ‘It’s too early to say. But I must tell you that his brain was without oxygen for quite a few minutes - we don’t know how many - and the longer he remains in a coma the worse the prognosis. We must hope he regains consciousness soon.’
I stood up, towering over him. ‘For God’s sake - is there nothing you can do?’
The doctor stepped back nervously. ‘Mr Warnock, you should prepare yourself for the possibility that Gareth may already be virtually brain-dead. We just don’t know yet.’
Incredulous, I looked at my brother’s prostrate figure. ‘Brain-dead?’
‘The next twelve hours are crucial.’
Having escaped the oppressive atmosphere of the ward I stood dazed at the entrance of the hospital, watching the rest of the world bustle along in sickening normalcy. The daughters helping their elderly mothers through the glass doors, the pregnant women clutching overnight bags, the ambulances pulling up at the side entrance. Zoë stood next to me. Sighing, she lit up a cigarette.
‘Hampstead Heath is nearby - we could take a walk,’ she ventured. ‘Doesn’t have to be for long, but it might help?’
I nodded blankly.
It was late afternoon by now. Pollen smudged the light as dandelion puffs floated through the air like tiny parachutists intent on flight. We walked from South End Green up towards the Hampstead ponds. Above us, a corridor of chestnut trees waved majestically. The heady scent of lilac conjured memories from my youth: of Gareth as a boy playing cricket on the green, of us fishing illegally in the village pond, of taking him out for his first drink down at the local pub. And I was filled with irrational anger - at my brother for his utter disregard for his own life, for the people who loved him; and at the rest of the world that kept on functioning, seemingly indifferent.
Zoë and
I walked in silence; words seemed superfluous. She stopped, her settling foot breaking a twig. There was a fine film of sweat on her upper lip and the sunlight illuminated her skin as if she was lit from within; I imagined all the blood corpuscles, her unmarked youth, racing under its surface in an abundance of hope and health. And, despite my fear and anger, I found that I suddenly wanted her.
As if she knew, she reached up to kiss me. I responded, then, filled with chagrin, broke away from her.
She smiled at my mortification. ‘It’s okay, you know.’
‘No, it’s not - you’re my brother’s girlfriend.’
‘We haven’t got that kind of relationship. Gareth would understand.’
‘I don’t.’
We’d reached a clearing, a hidden sunlit circle set away from the path, and I threw myself down on the grass. I couldn’t help feeling I had betrayed Isabella by desiring someone else. But then I realised I was angry with her too; angry that she’d withheld so much of herself from me - her past, the real nature of her work. I stared up, Zoë beside me. The tree branches above us formed a swaying tent of dark green and lime, of blue and the burning globe of the sun.
‘Want a cigarette?’ Zoë asked.
‘No, thanks, I’ve given up.’
‘Thought you might have.’ She lit up, exhaling against the sky. ‘Tell me, what’s that bird that follows you around?’
Shocked, I sat up. ‘What bird?’
‘C’mon, you know what I’m talking about - it’s like a small hawk. I saw it that night at the gig, just about here . . .’ She waved her hand around my shoulder.
‘There is no bird.’
‘There is, but if you don’t want to admit it, that’s fine. Is it something to do with Isabella?’
Amazed, I stared at her. ‘There is no bird,’ I repeated.
‘If that’s what you want to believe.’ Zoë blew smoke into the silvery air. ‘Gareth will live, won’t he?’
Her question pulled me sharply back into the moment. ‘I don’t know.’ I closed my eyes again, the sun a dancing red dervish against my eyelids.
‘I wish there was a way of turning back time,’ Zoë said. ‘I used to fantasise about that, you know, when my father died. There’s the minute before and the minute after. If only it was possible to undo events - or at least to manipulate the outcome. But we can’t. We just stumble on, thinking we’re in control, until we’re confronted with our own death.’
Her words seemed to drift like the pollen in the air. But as she talked on an idea began to manifest in my mind; crazy, irrational but persistent. What if Enrico Silvio’s theory about the astrarium were true? If I turned the key, would I influence my brother’s destiny? An absurd thought, but, as hard as the rationalist in me argued, I couldn’t repress the idea that at least it would be like rolling the dice.
‘What if you could manipulate destiny?’ I found myself saying out loud.
Zoë turned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘What if a person’s death date is the result of a combination of circumstances - a belief that you’re fated to die on that day, which leads to a subconscious vulnerability as you abandon the precautions you usually take instinctively? And what if there’s a way of changing that date?’
‘I suppose it might be possible,’ she answered cautiously.
The urge to get to the astrarium was overwhelming. I leaped up and reached into my pocket for two five-pound notes.
‘Here,’ I said, handing them to Zoë, ‘this is the cab fare back to the squat. Get some sleep. I’ll go back to Gareth,’ I lied.
She stared at me, her green eyes questioning.
By the time I reached the Turkish baths it was almost six o’clock. The locker room was full of day workers finishing their evening workouts - amateur bodybuilders, city businessmen looking for a way to unwind. I went straight to my locker and collected the astrarium, abandoning all vigilance.
I ran up the stairs to my flat without looking right or left, thinking only of Gareth. Once inside, I hurriedly unpacked the astrarium and set it on the kitchen table, the key beside it. I felt as if it was coaxing me, calling me in some insidious way. I took the key between my trembling fingers and studied the mechanism.
In the oilfields I had witnessed the potential of belief; it amazed me how many oilmen were susceptible to superstition. I’d even known geophysicists who performed their own special rituals before the final test to separate the oil from the porous rock cuttings - the test that would decide whether they’d hit black gold or not. Men with IQs of well over 150 would cross themselves, kiss a good-luck charm, rub a lucky talisman, before leaning over the UV box to watch whether the dripping perchloroethylene would change the colour of the sandstone chips from milky white to shimmering blue. The more spectacular the hue, the better the quality of oil detected - many described it as the colour of heaven. Was I succumbing to the same irrationality? Despite my inherent scepticism I could feel my own belief system changing, shifting into the realms of the extraordinary. Was this sheer desperation, the overwhelming drive to help my brother survive? There was no time for analysis; I knew I had to act, not think.
Despite Professor Silvio’s tutelage, I barely recognised the hieroglyphs on the astrarium, and the Babylonian numbers were completely incomprehensible. I searched the shelves for a reference book that I’d seen Isabella use in her translation work. It contained a graph correlating the Ancient Egyptian calendar with the Christian calendar, with a projection forward that Isabella had boasted was accurate to the day.
I calculated the day, month and year of Gareth’s birth according to the ancient calendar then turned on the lamp and directed its beam onto the astrarium’s dials. The tiny etched symbols danced under the bright light. Holding my breath, I turned the outer dial so that the marker was aligned with my brother’s zodiac sign: the two twisting fish, Pisces. Then I turned the other dials to the corresponding year, month and day of his birth. To my mortification, I found myself muttering the Lord’s Prayer and my hand was trembling as I lifted the Was.
I inserted it into the machine and turned it.
I waited. Nothing had happened. Scepticism swept through me; I teetered between disappointment and vindication as the scientist fought the romantic. I couldn’t believe I’d let myself be swayed by the power of a mere legend. Then, just as I was about to give up, a faint ticking sounded somewhere within the ancient jumble of cogs. I stood up and stepped away from the machine, amazed and nervous. It was hard not to feel some reverence for the ancient device. I bent down to listen. It was extraordinary, but as I strained my ears the ticking became stronger and stronger. Images of previous owners flashed into my mind: Moses bent over the small bronze instrument as he stood before a churning sea, Nectanebo II dressed in his ceremonial robes, the Pharaonic headdress tilting forward as he too listened apprehensively for the clicking of the mechanism, Cleopatra, her hair streaming behind her, in the bow of a battleship. Disbelief, panic and awe collided in a medley of emotion. What had I set in motion?
Bronze teeth clicked over one another as the cogs moved. As Professor Silvio had predicted, the death-date pointer slid into view: it was blackened silver and tipped with a miniature sculpture of a doglike creature with a forked tail and long hooked snout, like the elongated nose of an anteater.
The death-date pointer ticked past the tiny dashes that marked the decades and arrived at the year 2042 AD. The astrarium had given its verdict. Gareth would live until the age of ninety-five. I exhaled slowly. I’d actually turned the key, invested belief in this ancient tangle of dials and dates. Isabella’s desperation suddenly seemed easier to understand than before. I sat back and waited . . . for what? The telephone to ring? For my brother, resurrected, to walk through the door? But at least I had acted. It was a consoling thought.
On the street below, a group of revellers from the nearby pub strolled past. Their conversation was reassuringly pedestrian: one man complained about his sister-in-law, another boasted about his football t
eam’s prowess - normal life, twentieth-century realities. Yet here I was, gambling with arcane sorcery, a desperate man resorting to desperate measures.
A slight whirring sound, almost imperceptible, interrupted my thoughts. I bent my head to listen, then peered inside the astrarium. The two magnets were now spinning, revolving around each other at a speed that amazed me. The heartbeat of the machine appeared to have been activated.
I remembered the spinning stones that Isabella had shown me in the dream. If Professor Silvio was right then she had wanted to set the machine in motion to postpone her own death. It should have been Isabella who turned the key all those weeks ago, and perhaps our own lives would have spun on untouched, seamless, innocent.
‘If not Isabella, then Gareth, please,’ I prayed. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d made such an entreaty. And to whom?
23
It was after hours, but the night nurse had taken pity on me and allowed me into the ward provided I didn’t wander into any other area of the hospital. I sat by the bed watching the shadowy angles of Gareth’s face under the dim night-light. In his unconsciousness the softness of boyhood eclipsed the sharpness of age. I’d been sitting beside his thin, motionless body for over an hour. The astrarium, packed in its rucksack, was on the floor beside me.
Gareth’s breathing reverberated through the room like some distant sea breaking on an invisible shore. My mind wandered back over the past few weeks and fastened on Isabella that last night, her face bent over her research, her expression one of apprehension. Her frantic search for a way to cheat death. I reached down and laid my hand on the rucksack, the shape of the astrarium pressing up between my fingers.
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