Sleep and His Brother

by Peter Dickinson

  “Only one old man who’d given it all away.”

  “Decided that the club was getting crowded, I bet. You eaten, Jim?”

  “No, but—”

  “What can we rustle up, Tony?”

  “I’ve ordered hamburgers.”

  “That’ll do.”

  Mr. Thanatos turned and began to rattle at bottles on a silver tray under the only picture in the room, a vast Canaletto of roughly the same view that lay outside the window. It was a curious room; the things in it looked battered but newish, as though they had had their sheen knocked off them in a few weeks by the millionaire’s clumsy energy. Only the disdainful model was perfect; Pibble wondered whether his host owned, in her, the only fully clothed Allen Jones statue in the world. The New Statesman had come unstapled under his glare. Mr. Thanatos seemed to have been reading the same article that Pibble had seen on the weekend, about how the disputed South Bank site ought to be converted by the government into a world centre for student protest, and not allowed to swell the profits of this notorious crony of the Athens colonels.

  Mr. Thanatos swung round holding an oddly shaped bottle from whose neck gold gouts fell foaming to the carpet. Catling produced two tall glasses and when they were full handed one to Pibble. Mr. Thanatos returned to his rattling and sploshing, and emerged at last with a pint-sized Bloody Mary.

  “Sit down, Jim. Here’s to life. Sit here.”

  Mr. Thanatos fell into the sofa like a demolished factory chimney and banged the cushion beside him to stake a claim for Pibble’s buttocks. The red goo in his mug slopped slightly onto the fabulous carpet, but he paid no attention—judging by other bloody flecks it had happened before. Pibble took a beer drinker’s swig at his glass; it was not at all like the stuff you get at weddings. He sat, feeling as though he had been lowered into an upholstered bear pit.

  “Pretty foul deal you got over your job, Jim,” said Mr. Thanatos.

  “I’d have been retiring in a year or two, anyway. How did you know?”

  “Tony was at school with a guy. That’s what I pay him for.”

  “I don’t think they were necessarily wrong,” said Pibble. “I seemed to be becoming sort of accident prone.”

  “Sure. But there are ways of giving a guy the push, and there are other ways. You don’t feel sore at my checking, Jim? Ram Silver gave you a pretty hard sell this morning.”

  “Of course not. Sacked policemen don’t exactly inspire confidence.”

  “Depends where you are. Some countries they’re the only guys you can trust. What’s your attitude to life after death, Jim?”

  He gave the phrase capitals—Life After Death—and his Brooklyn vowels shifted a few degrees toward Billy Graham-land.

  “I’m afraid I haven’t thought about it seriously enough to have an attitude. Usually I don’t believe in it, I suppose, and when I do it’s not exactly a fervent belief.”

  Mr. Thanatos nodded and looked sad.

  “Tony’s the same,” he said. “It’s something to do with your bloody weather. But Ram’s onto something pretty exciting down there, wouldn’t you say?”

  A faint bell sounded, and Catling, who had been standing looking out at Saint Paul’s, went and opened a small door in the wall and brought out a plate whose meaty reek filled the room.

  “I’ve only known about it since this morning,” said Pibble.

  “Spread a lot of mustard on it,” said Mr. Thanatos, watching Pibble’s movements very closely as if to make sure that Pibble prepared his hamburger in such a way that no droplet of pleasure should be wasted. The big rolls were warm from baking, the meat in them a steaming, oniony swadge. Pibble smeared on the mustard, took a good bite at his roll, chewed, and washed it down with the princely fizz. It was schoolboy food, a truant picnic, buns and lemonade rendered fabulous by the touch of Midas. Eating it made him feel strangely cheerful and gave him time to think.

  “I’m quite certain, myself, that some of the children are telepathic in certain circumstances,” he said.

  “Tell me.”

  Pibble explained between mouthfuls about his meeting with Marilyn Goddard by the mausoleum in the wood.

  “Hold it,” said Mr. Thanatos when he’d got to the first of the hidden articles, the sixpence.

  “Give me some wine now, Tony,” he said. “And fill Jim’s glass. We’ll try it again, Jim. I’ll be this girl, you can be you. Do just what you did with her. I’ll guess what you’re holding and Tony can try to spot if there’s any way I could be cheating. She was sitting on the ground, right?”

  Mr. Thanatos threw himself with a thud to the carpet and Pibble squatted before him to produce in turn the knife, the mower nut, and the invisible conker. As each try ended he told them what Marilyn had said. Mr. Thanatos leaned against the sofa and glared at Pibble’s fists in a fury of concentration, breathing so hard that he snorted at the end of each breath. Catling lounged above them, aloof but apparently just as intent, as if the charade had been some game on which he had wagered his whole estate. When it was over Mr. Thanatos erupted back to the sofa, emptied his glass, and bit a huge crescent out of a fresh hamburger.

  “Two out of three,” he said through his chewings. “Crap. Bloody near evens, and that’s only guessing which hand. I should have known you’d carry a penknife, Jim—you’re the type—but that would have been experience and reasoning, which aren’t what we’re looking for. The other two were as near impossible as makes no difference. What did you spot, Tony?”

  “Damn all. I think if I’d been behind him I might have seen what he took out of his jacket pocket—that was the nut—but not from the front.”

  “And this kid got all four of them, Jim? Hand correct, object correct?”

  “Well, not quite,” said Pibble. “They’ve got a very small vocabulary, and I expect ‘Hole in it’ is as near as she could have got to the mower nut, but I’d have thought that she’d know the word for ‘knife’ and she said ‘sharp.’”

  “Crap. That’s the word she’d know. It does for knives, scissors, anything that might cut you. Have another bun. Finished that bottle, Tony? How did this kid react?”

  He sprang from the sofa, picked another bottle out of the ice bucket, ripped the foil and wire off it and hoicked the cork out, as though he were too thirsty to let the pressure blow it out for him. But once the wine was frothing out he stood there and let it fall to the carpet while he listened to what Pibble had to say.

  “You can’t tell what they feel until you know them very well, which I don’t. I got the impression that it really was just a game—a way of staying awake until she felt like going back to the house.”

  Mr. Thanatos nodded, filled his glass, and sat down again. “That’s pretty interesting,” he said admiringly. “Yes, that’s pretty interesting. What do you say, Tony?”

  “It sounds like a remarkable experiment. I wonder whether Jim could repeat it.”

  “What did Ram Silver make of it, Jim?” said Mr. Thanatos.

  “I didn’t get a chance to tell him before I was brought up here. You’ll remember I may be lying, won’t you? Or at least exaggerating.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Well, the McNair Foundation was very poor and ramshackle, but suddenly there’s a lot of money available. The money depends on your favour, and that depends on the continued significance of Doctor Silver’s work. He’s offered me a post, so it must be in my interest to produce apparently remarkable results with the cathypnics.”

  “I don’t know why I ever come to England,” said Mr. Thanatos. “It rains all the time, softies and lefties take turns to ruin me, and the streets are full of hypocrites. Listen to me, Jim. I don’t know who my family was, so I can’t have a family tree or a scutcheon like Tony wears on his underpants. But I can have a motto. It says ‘Everybody is lying.’”

  “Not just Cretans?” said Catling.


  “Everybody.”

  “Have another hamburger, Jim,” said Catling. “Thanassi’s going to tell you about life, and that takes time. Don’t hold back—he’ll eat eight—there’s more coming up. Where’s your glass?”

  “Adana,” said Mr. Thanatos.

  Pibble felt blank, and no doubt looked it.

  “No, no one’s ever heard of it,” said Mr. Thanatos. “It’s a town in Turkey.”

  “Just north of the top right-hand corner of the Med,” explained Catling. “Not far from Tarsus, where Paul came from.”

  “That’s the place,” said Mr. Thanatos, “but it might have been any other hick town, anywhere, except that in 1909 they had a bit of a riot there. The local Turks decided that the local Armenians were letting the tone of the place down, so they knocked them about a bit. Thirty thousand Armenians got the chop in that riot, Jim. Thirty thousand. You wouldn’t say I looked like an Armenian, would you?”

  “No,” said Pibble, bewildered.

  “Nor would I. Sometimes I think I may be Georgian—there’d have been some of them down there, and a lot of Greeks, and some Jews and Bulgarians and other trash. When you go on the town like those Turks did, you don’t stop to ask exactly what sort of foreigner the guy you meet is—if he’s not a Turk you give him the chop. Sometimes I think I might be German. Germany was building up influence in Turkey, so there’d have been a fair sprinkling of Huns even in a hole like Adana, but they’d all have run to the consulate and if anyone was missing there’d have been one hell of a fuss. I’ve looked through all the documents, and the Herrenvolk made no complaints about any of their friends being sliced up and thrown into a mass grave. You needn’t look at me like that. I wasn’t sliced, but I was thrown. A little old Greek priest snuck out in the dark to pray by one of the big holes they’d dug and hadn’t filled in yet in case they found a few more oddments lying around; and he heard something moving in the pit. At first he thought it was just the bodies slithering against each other as they settled, but it went on and the moon came out and he saw something moving, so he climbed down and walked over the corpses and found a child, two or three years old, crawling about down there. He was pretty struck with the incident, so he called me Athanasius Thanatos, but he didn’t tell me why until he was dying of pneumonia in a sod of a cattle boat trying to get across from Smyrna in 1922, full of hysterical Greeks. Course, he didn’t think it mattered who the hell I was—I was going to serve God and wear a stupid black hat and smell of incense, and for all civil purposes I was Greek. But I’m not. Since those two days on that cattle boat I belonged to no nation. I was sore about it at first, but in the end it’s got me where it has. Do you know why this Common Market crap you’ve fallen for won’t work, Jim?”

  “Tell me,” said Pibble. He had drunk a lot of champagne and his glass seemed full again. Catling had passed him a fresh plate of hamburgers. He felt happy, as though Mr. Thanatos’ dervish energy was enough to change the air of the room and give all who breathed it new hopes, new strengths, new fires.

  “Right,” said Mr. Thanatos. “You try and do business with an Italian. You’ll lie British and he’ll lie Italian and you’ll finish your deal with both of you feeling that the other one’s a dirty customer. That’s why countries have to go to the crazy expense of hiring ambassadors—they all lie diplomatic. But if I have to do business with a wop, I lie wop and we get along fine. I can even lie alongside prickly sods like you, Jim. OK, so I know you’re lying, because everybody’s lying. But you aren’t lying about what this kid said and did—you’re lying about something else; I know that, too. Get it?”

  “Thanassi rides his hobbyhorses harder than any man I know,” said Catling.

  “And the pale one hardest of all,” said Mr. Thanatos. Pibble thought it was a good joke, but that he had made it before. It is a considerable measure of luxury to have a viscount as your straight man. But Catling had somehow altered the flow, so that Pibble no longer felt compelled to tell his host about the Paperham murderer—an irrelevance which he had deliberately left out.

  “OK, I’m lying,” he said. “And it’s no business of mine who you trust. Tell me why you think that the telepathy of the children at the McNair can throw any light on life after death.”

  “You done any prospecting, Jim?”

  “No. But I do believe in dowsing, as it happens.”

  “Water divining,” translated Catling.

  “I go prospecting when I can,” said Mr. Thanatos. “It’s a thrill. I like it best in bits which other people haven’t thought of. You trek and you trek and you come to a stretch of desert which looks like any other stretch of desert and the guy you’ve hired to do your guessing for you says, ‘Here, maybe,’ and your team sets up the instruments and you let off a few bombs—I do that bit—and you take the readings to another guy back in the city and he says it looks promising and takes his fee. So then you go and haggle with governments and try and find some suckers to pay for the drilling, and it’s two, three, four years before you can say for sure whether the stuff really is down there. I’ve lost more money over oil than I’ve made—tell him so, Tony.”

  “I’d have thought you’d just about broken even,” said Catling.

  “Not even enough. Now, Jim, death is a desert. Same all over, nothing growing anywhere, nasty. But under it there’s a secret, an answer. I can’t go tunnelling down there—no one can—so I’ve got to judge by what I can see on the surface, right? Those kids of Ram’s look sort of promising to me, so I hire a guy to test for results: that’s Ram. He tells me he’s getting interesting results from a new seismograph: that’s you. And I’m the sucker who’s going to pay for the drilling, because this matters one hell of a lot to me. I had sixteen years of my life stolen, and I mean to get them back.”

  Pibble thought of the swathed shapes of children lying in Kelly’s ward. Hamburgers are good food for negotiating over, because you have a chance not to say anything while you chew; then you say something different, provided the champagne lets you.

  “Do you think the medical side of the disease is important?” he said.

  “That Irishman?” said Mr. Thanatos. “What’s he like? What’s he up to?”

  “I knew him before, as a matter of fact. He’s clever and works hard, and he seems to be learning quite a bit about the physical aspect of the disease.”

  “That’s a pretty serious aspect,” said Mr. Thanatos. “I don’t want an afterlife if it’s not physical. When Ram and this Irishman have worked out everything about cathypny, they’ll know how the kids see into each other’s minds, and then we’ll get hold of somebody who isn’t a moron and induce the same effect in him, and then we can go places.”

  Crippen, thought Pibble, he means it.

  “You’ll have to look for a very dedicated volunteer,” he said. “The children’s abilities are probably the result of some deficiency, or a combination of deficiencies. They’re deficient in almost everything that makes life worth living. Have you met them?”

  “No, and I don’t want to. I like things to be perfect, and people to be perfect. Of their kind. I choose girls who are perfectly beautiful, even if they are perfect bitches—I prefer them that way. I like Tony because he’s a perfect specimen of his class. I’m not sure if I like you yet, Jim, and I know I wouldn’t like a lot of kids with metabolic deficiencies. I don’t like any kids—they can’t be perfect till they’ve finished growing. I never was a kid.”

  “If you look at it the other way,” said Catling, “you still are one. Shall I open another bottle?”

  “Do that,” said Mr. Thanatos.

  “Not for me,” said Pibble. Mr. Thanatos drank much faster than he did, but had given the Englishmen the start of his Bloody Mary, so they’d all three drunk about two-thirds of a bottle. Not that it was the type of champagne that makes you think after your second glass that it’s time for a different taste—and the second lot of hamburg
ers had been much spicier, perhaps deliberately mixed to keep the thirst pricking. Catling turned, bottle poised, and Pibble put his hand over his glass.

  “Crap,” said Mr. Thanatos. “I haven’t done talking to you. Too, you have a moral duty to drink as much of this stuff as you can pump into your gut. You’ll never drink it again, but if you swill away like a soldier now until it’s coming out of your ears, you’ll get to know the taste of it like a catechism. You won’t forget it. Twenty years from now you’ll be able to say, ‘Once I drank Thanassi Thanatos’ champagne and it tasted so!”

  He pointed the last syllable with a quivering hand cupped under Pibble’s nose, as though he were offering him this immortal taste as a physical gift. Then the hand snatched Pibble’s away from the glass and Catling filled it up.

  “It’s worth remembering,” said Pibble. “Did you know that there aren’t any perfect beers left? I can remember what Bass tasted like before the war, in pubs where the landlord knew how to nurse it.”

  The thought made him suddenly melancholy, darkening the tone of his voice.

  “Jim,” said Mr. Thanatos, “I believe I’m beginning to like you. Let’s have some more hamburgers.”

  “Coming up now,” said Catling.

  “What’s on your mind, Jim? You think somebody down there is trying to take my money off me? Ram Silver? Your Irishman?”

  “Nothing as clear as that,” said Pibble. “Doctor Silver’s an extraordinary man. How did you come across him?” Mr. Thanatos laughed.

  “It was the damnedest thing,” he said. “Iráklion. I wouldn’t go near the place normally, but we were trying out my new boat and my girl bullied me into going over to Crete and putting in to the Venetian Harbour so that she could rook me for some Minoan junk. I reckon she knew some of the junk sellers and was getting a rake-off, but the day you start fretting about that kind of graft is the day you find you can’t get along with anyone except a bunch of other millionaires, and I hate their guts. I’m rogue rich, Jim—I belong to the club, but they’d all be happy to see me slung down the steps. Anyway, we bought these fakes and we all went back to the harbour; but just as we came out of the Khania Gate Karen spotted this very spectacular Arab type sitting at a table in front of a taverna, and ran over to photograph him. He said she’d have to pay. She was sore—she’s used to being paid. I like to see ’em sore, so I sent my man over with a drink for the guy. He stood up, poured a libation like a priest in a temple, and said, ‘Zeto o thanatos.’ You know what that means?”