Living Next Door to the God of Love

by Justina Robson

  “Damien the elf!” I repeated, catching my breath and biting my lips to try and stop.

  “It’s not that funny.”

  “No. Okay.”

  “You don’t even have a proper name . . .” he said. “Or a . . . what did you say you were?”

  “I didn’t,” I said. “Shall we go and dry out, get a drink?”

  “You’re buying,” he said with a shrug. His eyes glowed, literally, as a natural streak of roguish bravado emerged. “Where’s my pack, then?”

  I picked it off the sand and held it out to him. He took it, briefly inspected the contents, and slung it onto his shoulder. His glance as he looked back left me in no doubt that I had met with his approval—more than that. “Been here long?”

  A pang of hunger ran through me. “Ten days.”

  “Ahhh!” His smile this time stretched almost to his ears. “That explains it.”

  “Explains what?”

  He looked me up and down, slowly. “I’ll show you after . . .” He made a drinking gesture and beckoned, coughing and spitting a final bit of seawater. “Come on.”

  3 / Francine

  Two months later . . .

  It was raining salt water again. I could taste it when I licked it from the back of my hand. It fell on me gently from a grey sky that was soft, like a blanket placed over your face to hide you, but you can see light through it. There wasn’t any breeze, even off the sea. Ludo, the leader of our happy band of moronic dreamers, said this morning that we were in a depression and laughed about it, like the old joke hasn’t worn thin on him yet. Maybe after a billion repeats it gets funny again.

  I kept going along the length of the boardwalk, handing out leaflets. They were going soggy, and the few people who passed me were all turned in on themselves because of the weather. After another fifteen minutes had crawled by, and nobody showed any signs of interest in the Love Foundation (and it would have been pretty difficult for them, because I wasn’t exactly the enthusiastic convert), I took myself out to the end of the pier and leant out over the ornate iron railings. The tide was in.

  Lonely, depressed, unfulfilled? the violet papers said hopefully.

  I let them go and they separated out as they fell, like giant leaves, down and down onto the surface of the waves. Hey—it’s a purple autumn this year in the kingdoms of the socially dead . . .

  The sea refused to take them away.

  I figured that for fair: after all, the sea in Sankhara wasn’t unfulfilled. It was too full of sacred whales, oceangoing dragons, spellbinding Ootoo, pirate treasure, lockers of the ancient dead, tribes of merpeople and Forged research submarine bases for that. And it was already too salty to care about the rain anyway. At least the fish would enjoy eating the Foundation’s words. The Foundation got them printed on premium biodegradable rice paper, vitamin-enriched, so that if any of them were to end up in the trash (heaven forfend), then they’d be food for the wildlife.

  Best place for them, I thought—shit to shit.

  I ran back down the pier and turned onto the weathered grey boardwalk that stretched the length of the beachfront. Katy, my team leader, was back up by Buddy’s Surf Shack with her psychedelic rainbow umbrella, promising self-worth and unconditional acceptance to the unwary. She was nice in a prole sort of way, and I didn’t like not liking her because it seemed really unfair.

  I hunched deeper in my borrowed raincoat and tried to look smaller so I could pass her unnoticed.

  “Ssst, you there! Pasty-faced Earth girl!” The sharp, clear voice hissed out from between two of the sheds that served on good days as market stalls for the fishermen. Today they were just wet cubes of wood panelling with a tall, dark figure crouched theatrically between them, beckoning to me with a long, pale hand, his coat sleeve dripping. From beneath the brim of a ridiculous pale cream cowboy hat I saw his long, agile mouth grinning at me, teeth white.

  “Damien!” I jumped in beside him, glancing around to be sure that Katy hadn’t noticed the move. I looked up into his face with its high, sculptured cheekbones, its long and slanting eyes that glowed with faint greenish light. “I haven’t seen you since forever.” (Four weeks is forever here.)

  I stood back and made to look at his outfit, too pleased to be angry with him, though I should be, the way he picked me up and dropped me on this crew of fools. He was wearing a detective’s trench coat besides the cowboy hat hiding his ears. “What’s with the disguise? You look a right . . .”

  “Look, my hat does this!” He overrode me, as usual, tipping his head forward and catching me with a stream of cold, stinging water from the hat brim. Then, moment over and forgotten, he jumped forward and picked me up and kissed my cheek and put me down all in one swift action. “I came to say I was sorry sorry so very sorry for leaving you with these awful lost-dog people but I had money problems and, look . . . tell me you’re not a convert, tell me everything in fact, every single . . . shall we get the hell out of here? I can get us drinks and oh, I knew there was a good reason to see you, my pretty angel of the sands. I got you a job.”

  I was surprised, thrilled. “You what?”

  “Well it’s a really dull job, really bad but there’s nothing you can do except that kind of thing and . . .”

  I pushed the brim of his hat back—it fell off onto the walk—and kissed him on his still-talking mouth. “Thank you! Gods, Damien, I’m so . . . you don’t know how grateful I am . . . You know when I didn’t see you for all that time . . .”

  He blushed, bent and turned in a big, graceful move to recover the hat, the long, long tips of his pointed ears turning pink as he stood up. The beads and bone voodoun charms braided through his long brown hair tinkled as he replaced the hat.

  I couldn’t prevent myself insisting. “Why are you in disguise?”

  “I owe some people a bit of cash,” he said. “Never mind that. Why are you . . .”

  “Because I have to or they’ll make me go through that bloody praying and chanting boot camp everything-is-solved-with-love mindscrew again,” I hissed at him. “You didn’t come back.”

  His face was a picture of regret. “I’m here. I’m here, sweetie, now, here I am. Come on, I can hear your madwoman there getting closer. Come with me and drink free tea. I’ll show you where your job is and everything. I know it took a long time, I know that, but . . .” He took hold of my hand and put it with his into the pocket of his coat. Water ran down from his cuff onto our fingers. Then he glanced at me with his elongated eyes wide and as cheeky as no elf should ever be. “I was in a bit of trouble, actually. Had to hide and keep my ears to the ground and it’s all very very boring, honey. But the thing is you’re all right and I’m all right and it is all my fault that you are living with the biggest dickhead to fall down the pipe in ten years, did you know that? I guess you knew that, right? Has he tried to fiddle with you yet? I always thought that must be his thing but I heard it was more complicated . . .”

  “Shut up,” I told him, too happy at seeing him again to get as angry as he deserved. I knew what trouble meant for him. He’d probably been in the criminal world’s equivalent of prison, or trying to keep up three lives at once, and he probably deserved it. “Tea. You promised.”

  “I am a creature of my word, for you at any rate,” he said, looking very conspicuously around the side of the fish-stall that hid us from Katy’s sight-line. “Coast is clear. Madam, this way.”

  I looked past him at Katy. She was so intent on talking to some uncomfortable wet person, and so blinkered by the snorkel hood of her coat, that we slipped past her easily. All the surfy hardcases were hanging out at Buddy’s, including a few I knew from begging off them in the past, so I made Damien keep going fast until we were well beyond them, although I guessed they were more interested in bitching about the lack of waves and the weather than they were in recognizing me. Homeless starving girls not so cool.

  We turned in towards the city proper at the tram stop called Engine House and walked into town.

 
“So, tell me your life,” Damien said. “Come on. We’d only got through the early years last time, and tell me what you’re going to do with this money I’m going to give you just as soon as I have it.” His slim, cool fingers tightened fractionally around mine inside the pocket.

  He was hugely unreliable, a born liar. Talking to him was far too easy.

  Whoffy lines . . . mist . . . memories unpacking . . . here we are in my past . . .

  I told him about Sula, leaving out the night I left her, and about my home. I said that it’d been almost eight months since I left, and it was possible that my mom would have forgiven me for running away.

  It was even possible that, in a fit of despair after I went, she finally realized that Darren is someone who only has pretensions of behaving nicely because he wants to be liked, so that he can get what he wants out of people, and not because he actually likes them. But I doubt it.

  My mother prefers to think that everyone is basically honest, and of course she wants to believe that Darren’s feelings for her are genuine, and not preprocessed feelings he has to stop and talk about like a psychologist so that he gets them right. If she had to recognize they were as manufactured as plastic, then she’d have to realize that Darren is using her. So, in order to save herself from being miserable, she chooses a lie.

  So, I guess that even if I was to go back, and we had a reconciliation (unlikely), things wouldn’t last for five minutes, whether Darren was there or not. I can’t stand not living in the real inside of me. I try to tell the truth as much as I know it, even though it makes people quite uncomfortable because it’s either too much, not enough, the wrong thing to be feeling or the wrong time to say it.

  Normal people don’t blurt out the workings of their true selves and I can see why. It’s very frightening to have to believe what other people say about what they think and feel because you don’t know what’s really going on in their heads. And, because you know that they are lying to themselves about it (and even if they wanted to be brutally honest it would be hard, because everybody has so many fears and doubts and needs and wants and, between all those different inner proddings, they find it difficult to know which way is up, let alone whether or not you might be a genuine friend or whatever), this makes them untrustworthy.

  And because they suspect that they themselves are unreliable witnesses, living in the post-psychology age where everyone knows they’re making themselves up, they know that everyone else is too, like it or not, and so they have to dance through it all with various calculated kinds of lying just to get from A to B. And it’s all very tiring so you want to scream.

  But I don’t want to get from A to B. I think it’s more interesting if you could go sideways from A, along some kind of A-line, and get to F, or even Z.

  Of course there’s a danger in lying. From the minute you start you never know who you are anymore.

  The day before I left home we were in the kitchen when I informed Darren that he hated me because I was standing in between him and what he wanted—my mother to support him emotionally and financially—and I told him I fully expected him to try to get rid of me. He was going about it a really clever way too, I said, and he even probably believed that he had Mum’s best interests at heart, so it wasn’t necessarily evil—unless evil is like a flea riding up on top of the guard dog of wanton ignorance.

  Darren had rolled his eyes and said, “Can you just listen to her? That’s not right. Not normal to talk like that. Fleas and dogs. It’s silly not to have her sent for an assessment at least, Dawn. Come on, if it was straightforward autism, or something with an obvious label like schizophrenia, you’d be straight off to the clinic with her. It’s not like there can’t be a reason for it. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you? The lab report on her genome always said there was a chance that things had gone a bit wrong in the mix when there was that protest which cut the power. And if there’s a reason, there can be a fix. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

  Oooh. Power failure. Lab. Genome. Be still my beating geek heart.

  He had all the lingo, I thought as I sat at the top of the stairs, biting my nails, praying that she wouldn’t go along with all that crap.

  “If it was autism, she wouldn’t have it,” my mother said angrily. “They’d have filtered it out right from the start. Let it alone, will you? She’s just sensitive and more intelligent than most people, which is exactly the way she’s supposed to be. Top of the class, remember? Gifted. Scholarships all the way. Sponsorships. Guaranteed. Anyway, don’t you remember being a teenager yourself? Pretentious gloom and self-righteous idealism go with the job.”

  I came down from the landing on the heels of that ringing endorsement. “Darren wants me to go so he can persuade you that you need him around and can’t do anything without him, when really it’s the other way around and he can’t do anything on his own.” I wished she didn’t have to feel all the anxious worry that she always felt about me (feels about me, I suppose) even though I’d told her not to.

  “Don’t talk in that silly way.” Darren tugged at his hair and raised his voice as he turned towards me. “For god’s sake, HS,” (he always shortened it when my mom was around), “can’t you find something an ordinary thirteen-year-old girl could be interested in, like boys or clothes or whatever?”

  “I’m fourteen.” I stuck my tongue out at him and left the room (kitchen) because if I stayed there, I thought I might have to stab him with whatever sharp implement was nearest (fork). But later, as I sat and pretended to immerse in a soapverse, I could hear him talking her round.

  I do speak in a peculiar way, I realized that: too many words, in badly organized orders. But I think that way, and it was the only way I’d found that stopped words from changing what I meant into an approximation. But it wasn’t always very clear even then, because conveying meaning is tricky. And finding it in the first place is even harder.

  Of course, I was bound to hate Darren for the same reasons he hated me, so we were even.

  No, I’m not going back yet, but I wish I could because I’m very cold and hungry here, and not only outside but inside, which is much worse. Damien knew it. It’s why he was holding my hand and why I wanted him to.

  There’s nobody like me here either, even though I thought maybe the Engine might have constructed a few. And nobody in the Love Foundation has any more real patience than Darren either, although they really try their hardest to put a good face on it. They’ve all come to the end of something in themselves, and this front is their despair, trying to write them a letter.

  Whoffy lines . . . mist . . . memories all told.

  I thought silently about the day I found Damien, when we had a fight about who got to dig through a trash can first and I saw that he was trustworthy, at least for me, for now, and when there was nothing in the can either of us wanted he gave me a credit. Every day after that he came by the boardwalk and found me and gave me another credit and we sat under the ’walk drinking soda and we talked, neither of us having anyone else to whom we could tell anything like the truth.

  Then one day he didn’t come. The days became a week and the week finished me as effortlessly as a finger knocking over a domino because I had no idea where he’d gone, until today. Now I explained to Damien’s ever-ready ears that the price for meals and a roof over your head ran to sitting in meditation and lectures three hours a day, communal bathrooms, domestic chores, always telling them where you are and spending two days a week going out recruiting with them. And without them I’d be dead by now.

  “Sorry,” Damien said quietly. “I couldn’t make it. I didn’t mean to leave you.” He looked genuinely pained.

  “No big,” I said, shrugging awkwardly in the lie. “Where are we going?”

  “Can’t go in the Massif today,” he said, leading me past its huge gateways, their arches like the entrances to the palaces of ancient kings, guarding a few of the inroads into the biggest structure in Sankhara. “But I’m good in Aelf 1, the old home-t
own. Reputationo intacto. Okay?”

  “Are we going to your flat?” I asked hopefully, wanting a rest.

  “No, darling. I’m . . . sort of in between flats at the moment actually.”

  We soon came to the front of Aelf 1, the great tower of glass—more like a minor city in itself, along with its partner, the living giant tree that is Aelf 2.

  Damien led me inside beneath the blue and green lintel of the Water Element Arch. Here the sea-coloured glass of old shores had been liquefied and extruded into curling, watery shapes at three times the normal scale until they reared up the huge face of the building to unite with the other Elemental Force Supports: Air, Earth, Metal and Fire. Then they shot up two hundred metres towards the sky, where they all ended in a big spun-sugar orgy of abstract decoration just beneath the clouds.

  Out of habit we unlocked fingers and both took a run up, joining with a couple of kids who were also running and skidding along the preternaturally slippery floor. All boot soles slide here, even the ones charmed to stick like glue to anything short of thin air. We braced our feet and shot along like snowboarders.

  From far beneath us—the glass goes about as far down as it does up—the frozen expressions of mythical beasts glared up at us silently as we surfed across the world’s biggest paperweight. We jumped clear at the end, onto the marbled surface of the atrium proper.

  Here, where the centre of the tower was completely hollow and open to a tiny dot of sky, I took a walk past the ubiquitous coffee franchise and checked out what people had left on the tables, just out of habit. Damien caught my sleeve and pulled me away. “Not today, Cinders,” he said, pulling me with him to the slick service and slicker underwater theme decor of Ran’s Kitchen. “Today we pay.”

  “You pay.”

  “ ’S’what I said.”

  He bought me tea and a fiendishly expensive dish which he claimed incorporated every possible vitamin and goodness a body could want. I ate it, trying not to gulp or look desperate. Elf food was better than Foundation food. He smiled hopefully at me, playing with his hat, his ears twitching as he told me about this job—cleaning—and how great it was going to be and how it was like, really good money for that kind of thing and at the coolest place in town. Then, when the flight of red cardinals came down, scattering like sparrows to the corners of the atrium to announce the hour at noon, he muttered something about having to go.