Father Orteau was right: the low red sky really did signify rain.
It came chattering across the lake, obscuring the Hyatt, roiling the waters with reddish gray streamers of desert sand, drowning out the end of Mister Mero’s speech, sailing hats over the trees and the bandstand, sending the guests scurrying to shelter.
John sat alone on a marble bench in the Temple of Winds. He could have made it into one of the big marquees or the tropical houses with everyone else. They’d be there now. Drinking, smoking, laughing, eating…
The path that wound through the pear trees to the sunken garden ahead of him was now a brown stream cascading down stone steps where roses and clematis raised drowning hands. Every now and then, the wind sucked in on itself, spraying water from the temple’s sand-clogged gutters.
Still, it wasn’t a mudstorm. Just ordinary rainfall by Magulf standards, turning the world rusty brown. And outside the Zone, the filters for the water butts would be clogging, overflowing, the sewers would be backing up, the streets running thick and fast. The Endless City would be sinking into mud. It was the same in the Zone. On the way from the carpark with Tim, John had seen the lines of yellow tractors that the Borderer gardeners used to cut and vacuum the lawns; the crabs and ladders for cleaning the tropical houses’ acreage of glass; the pumping gear.
He shivered and shook his head, rubbing at the flesh around his watch, which still ached slightly from his examination, as it had when his recombinant was reformatted before he came here, to provide the viral barriers that lined his mouth and throat and lungs. The rain was thinning, but he was soaked by now anyway. The wind rocked the trees. A few more heavy droplets splattered down into his face. He could taste oxidized grit. Still, the gardens looked beautiful. The rain had almost stopped. And now, of all things, the sun was making a rare appearance. Bright rays, the lawns a sudden haze of steaming green, involving every sense. Tame birds started to squawk and sing. He saw a pair of the Trinity Gardens’ famous blue macaws. Squabbling, perhaps mating, fluttering together from branch to branch down the pear tree avenue like tangled flags.
The air was heavy, wet, earthy, and alive. The sunken garden was already draining, rescued by hidden pumps. The paths gleamed. The sky was arched with a rainbow.
Standing up, feeling his wet trousers shift and cling, John saw a blue-striped umbrella approaching along the avenue of pear trees. He wondered if he should wander off to avoid the encounter, but decided that he’d already taken the easy option once too often this afternoon. And it would probably only be Tim, drunk by now on Armagnac.
But it wasn’t Tim. It was a woman.
She climbed the steps, shook and folded her umbrella, and turned to sit on the bench.
“I wouldn’t sit there,” John said. “Everything here is soaked. Me included.”
“All right.” She straightened, twirling her umbrella. “Shall we walk? There’s little else to do here.”
He didn’t recognize her. She was dressed in a blue business jacket, the cuffs hanging down to her knuckles, and a skirt that looked creased and a little less than new. Like him, she probably felt out of place this afternoon.
He got up. “I’m John Alston.”
“The priest? I thought so.”
“Is it that obvious?”
“Someone pointed you out.”
His shoes squelched as he and she descended the steps towards the sunken garden. “The rain,” he said. “It must have ruined the party.”
“I thought it was rather picturesque, everyone running for shelter. Like an old movie.”
“Or a sepia print.”
“Hmmm.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know your name.”
“Laurie Kalmar. I work the net.”
He raised his eyes from the puddles, expecting her to offer a hand for him to shake. She didn’t.
“I’m based at the presbytery beside Gran Vía,” he said, “about ten kils from here…” He stopped there. Few people in the Zone knew or cared where he lived.
“Really? The Pandera presbytery? You live with old Father Felipe?”
“That’s right.” Surprised, he looked at her again. She was younger than he, no more than in her mid-twenties, which in itself was rare among expats, who generally came to the Zone after years of doing—or attempting to do—something else. Her dark hair was cut shoulder-length, and her thinnish face was dominated by wide, slightly protuberant silver eyes and a square jaw. “You seem to know your way around the Magulf a little better than most people,” he said.
She laughed. Like her voice, her laughter was soft yet oddly precise. Both warm and constricted. “Just because I’ve heard of your presbytery? The truth is, I do sometimes get involved in charity things like this one. I would be a leading light if they’d let me.”
“I guess it’s got to be the way forward. More kelpbeds.”
“That doesn’t impress you.”
“It doesn’t matter whether I’m impressed. The Medersa project will feed more people than I’ll ever be able to help. It’s big money, high profile…”
“And all the Europeans sitting at home will be able to feel good for a little while longer about helping the poor bloody Gogs…” She shook her head. “This doesn’t seem to be doing either of us any good, does it? Let’s talk about something else.”
They followed the path around the top of the lake. At first, they did talk about other things—about Father Orteau, the staff at Magulf Liaison; it seemed that he could mention any name and she would know who he meant—but mostly they still talked about the Endless City. Or he did: complaining about the antique doctor at the clinic, the erratic supplies, and the stupidity and ignorance that he encountered in the Zone—and outside, among the Borderers. What it was like to be forever alone in a crowded place: the sense of distant nearness.
“Your Church has always been obsessed with poverty,” she said. “Like all those appeal leaflets—as though starvation had some kind of inherent dignity. You work in a clinic, you must realize that money and medicine could do so much more…”
She opened her umbrella as they passed beneath the dripping canopy of willows beside the boathouse. He was puzzled by her attitude. People were expected to argue with and question priests—it was one of priests’ functions—but they rarely did. Workers on the net were notoriously eccentric—but your Church? As if there were some other.
“How long will you be staying here, Father John?”
“Just a year, unless the bishop extends my term.”
“You think that’s enough?”
“No, of course not. But the experience is that priests in the Endless City grow weary after a time.”
“Is that how you feel?”
“Weary?” He raised his shoulders and shrugged. “Not yet. Confused, maybe. A year isn’t anything like long enough. But how long would be enough—and for what?”
“And then, of course, you have your whole life in the Church.”
He nodded. The grass and the lake were gleaming and steaming. He was walking with a young and apparently charming woman, but he felt weary and alone.
“You didn’t happen to meet any of my predecessors?” he asked.
“I suppose I did. I meet a lot of people. You must know what it’s like in the Zone. You really never get to know them.”
“I passed the one before me, on the ferry,” John said. “He was going out to the shuttle as I came in.”
“That sounds quite typical.”
“There’s no continuity.”
“Of course. No…”
“It’s absurd, really, that so little attention is paid. Even the people you meet here seem in a dream—most of them, anyway.”
“They probably wish they were somewhere else.”
“Do you?”
She smiled and shook her head. Over the lake, blackish clouds were starting to ambush the sun. “And what would happen?”
“What?”
“If everyone woke up.”
“I’ve not
iced…” He paused. “Things about the people who come to the clinic. The kind of illnesses they have, disease rates. I’m sure that something could be done—simply—to help.” Just then, the clouds met over the sun. As though someone had turned off a switch, the whole of Trinity Gardens darkened. The effect only lasted a moment. Stimulated by the change, all the lights around the gardens came on. The lake was suddenly glowing. Shadows flared out across the grass from the dripping trees.
In silence, they walked back up the slope to the noise and light of the tropical houses. The southerly wind had picked up too, almost as quickly as the change in the light, tumbling fallen branches, flailing the sodden beds of tulips and black daffodils, throwing scattershots of desert sand.
Suddenly Laurie Kalmar stooped, her hand to her face.
“What is it?” he asked. “Your eye?”
Leaning over the puddled path, she waved him away. “Just grit…”
Fumbling in the pocket of her dress, she produced a small vial. Tilting her head back, lifting the vial, she squeezed out a drop into her right eye.
“There.” She blinked and looked at him. By the second blink, the green of her right iris had turned silver again. “You didn’t realize,” she said. “Did you?”
“No…”
“You thought we Gogs were all waiters, gardeners, cleaners, or peasants, right?”
“Of course I don’t—”
“Come on. Let’s go inside.”
A uniformed waiter had seen them approach the tropical houses and was holding the door open. As it swung shut behind them, John was enclosed in a green wash of heat and the clink of glasses, the smell of European sweat, perfume, citrus fruit, wet clothes, buffet food, and tubes. He attempted to push through, but Laurie Kalmar was already squeezing away from him, between the hats and suits and dresses, between the birds and palm trees. The backs of her legs, John saw as she vanished, were striped with mud.
WEDNESDAY BREAKFAST AT THE Pandera presbytery, and Father Felipe was spruced up in a much-mended brown suit, a silk tie and gold brooch, his best silver cross and chain, and polished black brogues that were cut along the soles to accommodate his feet. Felipe loved Wednesdays; they were his days at the Mirimar Bar.
He rumbled with pleasure and cracked his knuckles as Bella brought in trays of coffee and toast. The bread, the butter, and the coffee beans were all real, not a kelp synthesis but from one of the mysterious packages that often arrived on the presbytery doorstep. John had tried to refuse once or twice, but the smell of toast and fresh-ground coffee was persuasive.
Felipe lifted his slice of toast. Inspecting it, he pulled an elaborate face and replaced it on the plate. “Bella, my dear,” he said, “I think you might find there’s some of that rough-cut marmalade if you look top left in the kitchen.”
“You finished it Monday, Fatoo.”
“Damn.”
The remainder of breakfast passed—apart from the noise of the old priest eating—in silence. John remembered his first days at the presbytery, when all this had seemed so gothic and strange. The empty rooms, the dark skies, Felipe with his bandaged and swollen feet, caused, so he said, by rheumatism brought on by his own body’s defense against a minor fungus that had started between his toes. John, who had hardly ever seen a European with a chronic illness, believed that as much as he believed anything else Felipe told him. Sometimes at night, when John came back from the church or the clinic or from wandering the streets, there was music from an ancient piano and laughter in the presbytery’s big upper room. Looking in through the smoke, he would find Felipe with a half dozen Borderers—generally old, male, and tattooed—seated in drink-drowsy poses on the armchairs around him. Of course, John would be beckoned in, encouraged—amikay—to find a seat and join and talk, but the music would already have been stilled and even the smoke seemed to hang frozen in the air. He knew enough about Borderer etiquette to understand when he wasn’t welcome.
The old priest finished his breakfast, wiped his lips on the sleeve of the jacket that Bella had freshly cleaned for him, downed three trisoma capsules with his fourth cup of coffee, then levered himself up from his chair and into the leghelpers that waited beside him. He hissed and clicked his way to the window.
“Ah! I’m awaited! I must hurry, John.”
The routine was the same every Wednesday. Felipe clanking down the stairs and across the street to the donkey cart that came to collect him for the bumpy ride along Gran Vía to the Mirimar Bar. There, watched by giggling Borderer kids, swigging from his flask and humming snatches of hymns and old popular songs, waving gleefully to passersby, he would climb out of the cart, and the barman Perez would hold the door open for him, making genuflections of his own invention as he did so. Once or twice, John had gone along: Pérez was, after all, a convert to the Church; he kept an assortment of crosses and religious pictures hung on the Mirimar’s smoke-blackened walls to prove it, even if he never did go to Santa Cristina. At the back table near the odorous toilets, Father Felipe, with his special seat by a screen decorated with cuttings from an illustrated Bible, a big glass and an even bigger bottle before him on the table, was set for the day.
When the front door had banged shut and Bella had returned to the kitchen, John checked his gloves and watch. Leaving his bicycle in the hallway, he started up the hill towards Santa Cristina. The streets were morning-crowded. The souks down the alleyways were busy and bright, roofed over with colored fabrics that sheened and fluttered in the wind. There were hawkers and beggars and people heading everywhere in and out of the alleys, including a koiyl vendor carrying a basket filled with the shriveled leaves said to give a sense of easy resignation, a release from pain. Everything parted in John’s way.
John raised the chalice that contained the sealed packet and turned to face his congregation.
This is the Lamb of God
Who takes away the sins of the world.
Happy are those who are called to His table…
As those Borderers who knew the words repeated them after him, a loud thump came from the patched roof, followed by the sound of claws and wingbeats. Shadows floated over the windows as more birds came in to circle the hill. Primarily scavengers, messily communal, they were black with pink beaks and considerably bigger than rooks or crows. The Borderers called them caroni birds.
People were already drifting along the aisle towards the front of the church to receive the sacrament. John stood a few paces back from the altar rail, murmuring The body of Christ as each hand reached forward to take a tiny white circle from the freshly opened pack. Here was Juanita, her jaw working as she chewed on rice paper, mystery, and air, taking the blessing of God even now that her son Daudi was dead from leukemia. Here was Kassi Moss. And here were all the others, people John knew without knowing. Homes he had visited, babies he had blessed without the touch of his gloved and dysol-anointed hands.
The service ended with a ragged hymn. Afterwards, he stood waiting behind the altar rail as the congregation departed, muttering, blinking like sleepers, returning to the cares of their lives. Some came up and placed cards on the rail for him to pick up later, or paused to fumble the relics by the Inmaculada, or asked if Fatoo could come around and visit some member of their family who was mal—sick, old, or desperate. They were fat or thin, tall or short, dark or light-skinned, and had that air of vigorous health that Borderers, when they weren’t actually ill, usually radiated, although one was scarred across the neck, another was missing a finger, another limped…John was still useless at remembering their names. A girl paused on her way out, scratching the flaky backs of her arms as she asked if in Europe they knew when it was going to rain, and did it always snow at Christmas? She nodded when he turned on the translat and explained that, na, no, it wasn’t like that. But she still looked doubtful; it would have snowed at Christmas on every satellite broadcast from Europe she’d ever seen.
He was alone in the church, filled with the emptiness that now always came upon him after Commun
ion. He remembered raising the chalice filled with the host for the first time, and how even then there had been no lightning bolts, no shivers; how it seemed to mean more to everyone else around him. Even his parents, so doubtful for so long, had been a little awed. Then his first solo duties had commenced, in a parish up in the high grazing lands of Yorkshire, where communities were scattered and the sheep were like boulders dotting the moors. The gray-green and purple landscape was fresh and new to him—in a way, it was almost like the Magulf, for there was deep cloud cover and often rain. He would stop on the way to his pastoral visits, get out of his car and watch as the wind silvered the hills. The sheep, slow and curious animals with heavy snouts and blunted horns, would amble over and gaze down at him. Close up, they were big as mammoths.
Soon he began to stop for the sheep, and talk to them, rehearsing the arguments and conversations that he might have at the big slate houses that waited beyond gates, walled gardens, windbreak pines. At least twice a week he was called to one of the local resthomes or some back bedroom and asked by sad and yet generally clear-eyed relatives to look down at the rags of flesh and bone on the bed. And was asked, Father, don’t you think the time has come? He seemed so chipper in summer, but now. A shrug. He seems to have given up…And, as if to emphasize its unhappiness, the figure might moan and turn in the shadows. A glimpse, perhaps, of an exposed powerpack or a silver thread protruding from the spine like a crude aerial, or a pool of blood thickening over the screen of a watch. Or, more alarming still, a quavery voice agreeing, saying, Yes, Father, it all seems to have gone from me now. My friends, my life. Even this room, the presence of my family and the scent of these flowers. I visit past times in old photographs, but nothing tastes. Someone once said that, didn’t they? Nothing tastes. One of those phrases you remember even though you don’t understand until later when something happens that makes it clear. Perhaps I’ve already lost my soul, Father, maybe that’s what it is. Perhaps I’m already up there with my Lord, the part of me that matters. So you will say I should make an end to it, Father, won’t you? Your prayers and a blessing would be a great help…
The Great Wheel Page 5