‘We all have ways of dealing with it. You know that.’
‘Right,’ Jules says bitterly, and grinds the heels of his hands into his eye sockets. Morag wants to comfort him, but she hesitates, and then the moment is gone.
Bloody cotton swabs are spilled on the floor around a big trashcan. Morag pulls on a pair of latex gloves and tidies it up. It takes a while, because she’s always wary of needles. The clients don’t always deposit them in the needle exchange bank outside the door. Many have odd, secretive habits, especially the disturbed ones. Morag can’t blame them—so much of their lives are lived in the public eye. They eat and sleep in public, use public toilets, public washrooms. There is nowhere for them to retreat but inside their own heads—and even that can be arbitrarily violated at the whim of any teenage meme hacker or love bomber.
Jules sprawls in his chair, watching the TV. He’s been talking about the Mars expedition for days now, and this is the night the astronauts are due to land. Morag sleeps a little, wakes with what feels like sand behind her eyes, and Jules tells her, ‘They’re nearly there.’
The TV is showing a ravelling mix of grainy reds and ochres with a brilliant dot in the centre. The dot is the Mars lander. It is firing its engine to slow it down and bring it out of orbit. The picture is being transmitted from the base camp established on Phobos.
Jules says, ‘They’ve about four more orbits to make, and then they’ll begin airbraking. They’ll be down just after the end of our shift.’
Morag says that she has seen so much suffering in Africa that this seems irrelevant, and Jules shrugs. He’s happier to talk about this: it’s a refuge.
‘There will always be suffering,’ he says. ‘I see this Mars landing as the forward point of progress, pulling the rest of humanity behind it.’
‘Yes, and I remember the right wing economic theories of the last century, all that rubbish about creating a wealthy élite that would enrich the whole community. We’re still living with the problems that caused. The whole world is. There would be no famines in Africa if its countries stopped exporting the grain they must export to finance their debts. And most of those debts are because of adventures in inappropriate technological projects, or because of massive arms purchases.’
‘I agree that the world is old and tired. But here is a new one. Perhaps from that we get a perspective on this world’s problems. Half the world is watching this. Six billion people.’
‘And the other half don’t have anywhere to live, let alone a TV set. We’ve enough troubles in this world, without starting on a new one,’ Morag says. It sounds harsh, and she regrets it. She says, ‘There is sometimes a whole hour when I don’t think about the little girl, the little boy. I know that I shouldn’t think about them at all. People die so easily, don’t they? How many people died down here, this year?’
‘Probably not more than twenty. I know what you mean. But it was very different, was it not? The way she was cut open…Alessi is frightened.’
Alessi is Jules’s wife. Morag says, ‘Oh, Jules, I’m sorry.’
‘And the children sense something, too. And then this man came to the apartment this morning.’
‘English? Very fat?’
‘Ah. You know him.’
‘He’s a reporter, I think. Don’t talk to him, Jules. Call the police if he comes back. I know his kind. He was harassing me this evening. Their kind would dwell lovingly on the mutilation, and not on the fact that this was a little girl living in a shack in the middle of Paris’s rubbish tips.’
‘We have our own way of dealing with things in La Gouette d’Or. Or at least, that’s what I told him. I doubt that he’ll be back.’
‘You make an unlikely tough, Jules.’
Jules grins. It makes him look very young. ‘It is a matter of attitude. Listen, I’m just going to check on a few patients. I won’t be long.’
Morag smiles, knowing that Jules is also going out to smoke a cigarette. She needs one, too. She smoked all the time in Africa. Everyone did. But she doesn’t want to start again, not now.
She dozes again, and wakes with a crick in her neck. The TV is showing half a dozen men and women talking around a table, with a vast blow-up of Mars in the background and a clock running backwards in a corner of the screen.
The coffee is a few degrees colder. Morag drinks it anyway, and goes outside to find Jules. At first she isn’t alarmed when she can’t see him. She walks up the platform, past the bedrolled sleepers, then back down to the other end.
A man is standing there, swaying from one foot to the other in the practised manner of those who must stand and wait out most of the day. An orange blanket is draped around his skinny frame. He has yellowing bruises around his eyes and fresh stitches in his scalp, the kind of thick black sutures that a public emergency room would put in. The skin around the raw wound is stained blue by antiseptic ointment.
The man favours Morag with a bleary gaze and says, ‘I told him not to go down there. Train’ll be along in a minute.’
‘Jules!’
‘I don’t know his name. He said he saw children. He went down there.’ The man, clutching the blanket to his throat with both hands, points by raising one elbow, points into the tunnel.
Morag presses the emergency button so hard she bruises her hand to the bone. She doesn’t remember running back to the clinic, is so out of breath that, after she wakes Louis, it takes her a full minute to tell him what has happened. Outside, the first train of the morning roars through the station, and Morag screams into the noise.
Louis makes her sit down. He is gone a while. Morag looks at the TV screen. It is showing a close-up of jumbled, pitted red rocks. Things dumbly persist. Nothing seems changed. Her hands are shaking. She jams them together. She is feeling cold, colder and colder. She is going into shock, she thinks. Her peripheral blood system is shutting down to divert blood to major vessels, adrenalin is flooding her body. But the thought is remote from what is happening to her.
One by one, a few of the homeless enter the clinic. Timid as mice, they steal glances at Morag, then turn to look up at the TV. The view jerkily swivels to show a sweep of rocks of all sizes and then dunes saddling away, crimson under a salmon sky. The camera holds on this panorama for a few moments, then tracks sideways. A glittering segment swings down from somewhere offscreen. It is a ramp. One of the homeless has found the remote control, and a man’s voice suddenly blares in the clinic, explaining that the images shown are of what happened twenty-two minutes ago. We are, he says, already in a new historical era.
Louis comes back. He looks grim. The homeless briefly glance at him, turn back to the TV. Red light falls on their upturned faces. A shadow spills across the ramp, moves forward. It is someone in a bulky white pressure suit.
Louis kneels beside Morag and tells her that Jules is dead. Morag knows. It doesn’t matter that she knows. Louis holds her cold hands. He won’t tell how Jules was killed.
‘The police will be here soon,’ he says. ‘This is a terrible thing.’
‘Someone saw him. A young guy with a shaven head. A wound, here.’ Morag touches the back of her head. ‘We must find him.’
‘The station is open. Most of the people have left. Give his description, I’m sure the police can find him.’
‘He might have killed Jules!’
‘I don’t think so,’ Louis says.
‘Hey,’ one of the people watching the TV says, ‘keep it quiet, eh? This is history.’
On the TV, the astronaut is standing amongst pitted red rocks at the foot of the ramp. The astronaut’s gold-filmed helmet visor reflects the angular bulk of the lander, the two pressure-suited figures watching from the top of the ramp.
The commentator has fallen silent: the clinic is filled with the hiss of the carrier wave. Then the astronaut speaks. It is a woman, her voice surprisingly clear across the millions of kilometres of seething emptiness between the two worlds.
‘This is the beginning,’ she says, ‘of a great a
dventure.’
8 – The Poor Knight
Armand walks with the little boy through falls of soft saffron light, by crystal waters lapping a shore of ivory and pearl. He feels very calm, even though a voice is screaming in a corner of his mind. He is showing the little boy Fairyland. It is the little boy’s first time, and he is confused. He wants to know where all the concrete has gone.
‘This is real,’ Armand says. ‘The other was just a dream. There’s all sorts of reality. Don’t you watch TV?’
The little boy says that of course he watches TV. He likes something called Hopalong Frog, and, with the tireless, uncritical fanaticism of the very young, tells Armand about it at length. It is set in a pond in the American Wild West. Hopalong Frog is the sheriff.
‘Things seem very real when you’re watching them on TV. Better than the world, brighter, more real than the world. But you can’t ever go there.’
‘I go to sleep and see Hopalong Frog.’
‘This is that dream. But the thing is, the dream is real. Don’t you ever think that the people on TV might be watching you?’
The little boy says with stubborn logic, ‘Hopalong Frog does watch me. He talks to me at the end of every show.’
Armand ignores this. He says, ‘There’s a switch in your head, like the switch on the TV that turns it on when you order it. What you’ve been given is like that switch. Now you can see things as they really are. It’s a great gift. Most people live their lives without ever really seeing what the world is like.’
Armand feels strange. It is as if someone else is speaking through him, giving him these thoughts. The screaming voice is very far off, but it is very persistent. It doesn’t let up because it doesn’t need to gulp for breath and it can’t wear its throat raw. It just screams and screams.
The little boy says, ‘Will we see Hopalong Frog? Does he live here?’
‘Perhaps,’ Armand says.
The little boy is better now, no doubt about it. He had to be held down by Armand and one of the Twins while the other Twin laid the living communion on his tongue. But as soon as the thing had bonded, one of the Folk gave the boy his first taste of soma, and he calmed down right away. He saw.
Armand says, ‘It’s a huge and strange world, full of strange and wonderful people. I’m sure Hopalong Frog is out there somewhere, but I don’t know where he’d be living.’
‘I’m going to look for him!’ The little boy lets go of Armand’s hand and runs down the slope of living marble to the edge of the pool. One of the shy silken creatures that bathes there, startled, slips deeper into the crystalline water. Patterns of silvery light race across the pool, curving and multiplying and growing so bright that Armand has to look away. That’s the thing about Fairyland. Its beauty is so intense that humans can’t live in it all the time. Only the Folk can do that.
Armand can’t see the boy any more—he’s dissolved into the light. Instead, the Twins are walking towards him. Their shadows are like tunnels that lead back into the pearly glow, aping their every movement. How beautiful they are! They are clad in beauty. Their attendants scurry at their heels, clever faces aglow and bent towards their mistresses as Armand, their poor knight, receives their instructions on bended knee.
He must travel far. From the womb of light into the cold night, beyond the grim shadow of the castle, across a land where the fey fires of the fringers are scattered in the velvet dark like stars fallen to earth.
Armand hikes along a road. The lambent eyes of argosies cleave the dark, rushing onward on their own breath, glittering with little lights strung across their bulks. Their sonorous voices boom and howl, and again and again Armand staggers into the motorway ditch, clutching his ears, his clothes flapping around him in the backdraught of the hovertrucks. He can hear the screaming still. He can never travel far enough to escape it.
Frosted grass creaks beneath his boots. His breath makes cloud-shapes before his face and the thin wind tugs the clouds away. At the station, he paces up and down the platform, shivering as he waits for the train that will come just before the dawn to take him into the strange and terrible city. The soma is wearing off, and the tired world of things is showing through. He recognizes the voice now, although it is growing fainter and fainter. It is Mister Mike. He is screaming in rage because he isn’t in charge. Not yet. Not yet. Not until he finds the woman.
9 – Conspiracy Theories
Everyone is drunk, grinning like apes around the table. They raise their glasses and toss down brandy, slam the glasses on the table so hard that the flames of the candles dance. Morag is as drunk as anyone in the back of the little neighbourhood bar. Brandy burns in her stomach, and her head is dizzily stuffed with fumes. It is the evening of the day that Jules was killed, and the off-duty members of the Mobile Aid Team are holding a wake.
Michel Guidon stands, holding on to the back of his chair with one hand as he slops brandy into his glass with the other. Candle flames are reflected in his wire-rimmed glasses. It is his turn to propose a toast. Many of the doctors and paramedics of the clinic have worked in Africa, where they picked up this habit from the local aid workers. They are mourning Jules by celebrating what he did, by what he meant to each of them.
‘He played chess like a demon,’ Michel Guidon says. ‘I remember that on hot summer evenings, when he had finished working and it was still light, he would sometimes take me to this little café in the Jardin des Plantes. There are always old men there, playing chess, maybe drinking a little beer. I’ve seen Jules take on three at once, and trounce them all.’
‘He used to play with the Poles,’ someone else says.
‘To Jules and his chess-playing,’ they all shout and toss down another round of brandy.
It is Morag’s turn. She has enough wit left to pour herself a shot of brandy before she gets up. The room tips towards her and she plants a hand on the wet table-top to steady herself. Everyone is looking at her.
‘Space,’ she says, after a moment’s thought. They have talked about Jules’s love of jazz, his children, his work in Africa, his fierce care for his patients, the way he would painstakingly stitch their wounds so as not to leave a scar. Now she says, ‘He was watching the Mars landing. He was gone before he saw the woman step out, but there were people there who would not be alive to see it if not for Jules’s care.’
They all rise around her and drink to this, they all sit down and drink some more. One of the other customers complains about the noise, and the proprietor tells the man to shut up or leave, this is in aid of a good friend. The man ends up joining the party, and so does everyone else in the bar. Michel Guidon plays jazz guitar, stumbling on the runs, while everyone claps time, and then Gisele Gabin sings several plaintive folk melodies. Somewhere in the middle of this, a taxi arrives for Morag. It’s close to midnight, she’s not the first to leave. She stumbles towards the door accompanied by the loud farewells of her friends.
The driver, a solidly built woman in a leather jacket, helps Morag into the taxi. Morag has reached that stage of drunkenness where one accepts whatever happens next with an amused disinterest, as if the world is a virtuality set. She doesn’t question why the driver lets another passenger climb in.
It is the fat man. Just as Morag recognizes him, and belatedly remembers that she never ordered a taxi, the fat man lifts something to her face.
A cold spray pricks her skin. Freezing electricity crackles inside her skull. She feels instantly sober, but she can’t coordinate her movements and only bangs her elbow hard when she tries to open the door. It is locked.
‘You’re in danger,’ the fat man says, and flinches when Morag brandishes her taser.
But Morag has it the wrong way round, and the taxi driver closes a hand over hers.
‘Easy, sweetie,’ the woman says. ‘We’re out to save you. If we wanted you dead, I wouldn’t even be talking to you.’
The woman’s scalp is clean-shaven except for a strip of what looks like leopard fur growing down the centre.
A string of tiny skulls carved from bone dangles from her right ear.
The fat man says, ‘Don’t frighten her, Kat. Just drive.’
‘I know who you are,’ Morag says. ‘I won’t talk. I told them I won’t talk.’
‘My name’s Alex Sharkey. I’m not with the press, Dr Gray.’
‘Not a doctor. A paramedic.’
The taxi driver—if she is a taxi driver—says, ‘She won’t talk, Alex. She is in denial. I say dump her now, find some other way. There’ll be another killing in—how long to the next full moon?’
‘We don’t know that it’s cyclic.’
The woman says emphatically, ‘Always it is cyclic.’ She has a German accent.
Morag meets the woman’s eyes in the rear view mirror. Morag says, ‘Kat, what do you know about this?’
‘That’s Katrina to you, little bird. Only my friends call me Kat.’
‘Patience,’ the fat man, Alex Sharkey, says. ‘Where do I begin? I don’t have the time. Truly. Nor do you. What you saw has put you in danger, you must realize that. What you have to do is tell us what you saw, and then we can help you. I promise.’
The woman, Katrina, lights a cigarette and says, ‘Tell her about the good fairies and the bad fairies.’
Morag says, ‘How many murders have there been? Six?’
‘Seven,’ the fat man, Alex Sharkey, says.
‘Seven. I forgot to count the one I was involved in. All of them little girls. My friend was killed, too. And you know who did it and haven’t told the police?’
Alex leans forward (Morag thinks of a mountain shifting—he takes up two thirds of the space in the back). He tells Katrina, ‘I want to drive by a sweep.’
‘Just do her, Alex! We can’t risk—’
‘I think we can. There are plenty of fast food outlets up by Les Halles. Shut up and drive, Kat. That was the deal.’
Katrina turns round and tells Morag, ‘Anything this fellow tells you about deals, don’t listen.’ Then she starts up the taxi and accelerates into the traffic with a screech of tyres.
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