Force Majeure

by Daniel O'Mahoney

Xan was there in the fever. He was transparent. I recognise you, Xan. I know you. That was her secret.

  The Club gave her an office and her own team. Xan gave her Prospero. It was all she had ever wanted and, as he’d promised, it was bigger than she expected. Prospero was more than an account now – it was a project. It was all the heads that had plotted Prospero, it was all the hands that put it into action – hers included – and it was the philosophy that guided them. She put on Prospero’s robes and airs but they were too big and too empty. They weighed Kay down and the power they might once have commanded had long been spent by Xan. He had outmanoeuvred her; he had beaten her to it. She arrived to find that she had very little to do in her new job. That was almost as bad as the prospect of endless rote toil at the old free house. She had a ghost job reading reports and crunching numbers, sifting through Xan’s table leavings. She would make it work.

  ‘TV.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yah, I didn’t watch much, but I had it on all the time. Even in bed. The noise is relaxing, like having someone in the room but just as a comfort and a presence. No demands, no distractions, none of those things you get from, y’know, people.’

  ‘Even in bed …?’

  ‘Yah, even in bed. Look, it was better than radio. Radio’s a pain on the ear; it makes you listen. TV just babbles like water. And how about you?’

  ‘Coke.’

  ‘What sort of coke?’

  ‘You mean what brand? Coca Cola or Pepsi? No-one can tell the difference. I shouldn’t say that, I used to work for –’

  ‘No, no, no, no, I mean’ – (gulp) – ‘coke or’ – (sniff) – ‘coke.’

  ‘Both! We’re in South America, and you can’t get either. Unbelievable!’

  ‘Xan could get coke.’

  ‘I’d let him snort it off my tits.’

  ‘Yah, you wish. Red?’

  ‘My name is Kay.’

  ‘He calls you Red.’

  ‘He’s him. What?’

  ‘What do you miss that you can’t get any more?’

  She looked up at last from her numbers, with a sour face that made her team snigger. ‘Office gossip,’ she said, lowered her eyes, and returned to ignoring them.

  ‘So … absolutely no-one at all here misses sex?’

  They laughed. She didn’t.

  This was what was left of Prospero, this was what she had to do – put a value on Candida. She had to itemise everything in the city, every structure from the humblest crop of standing stones to the old free house itself, then price them until she’d totted up the full financial worth of the land for Xan and his principals. It was, she realised early on, a task as impossible as it was tedious. There was no formal land registry in Candida. There were no trustworthy maps. There was no legible money that she could translate into Dollar Amounts or Rupee Amounts or Yen Amounts. There were no landlords, or if there were, they were well hidden. Worst of all, there was no method she could think of that would simplify the job.

  It took a whole morning for her to work up enthusiasm for the challenge and only a minute to learn that even this impossibility was out of her hands. The raw and unsourced data arrived from other departments in the Club. Xan had a codename for everything. Prospero had only the one dedicated office. Other rooms were devoted to Merlin, Navajo, Carousel, Shelmerdine and Malice. They were outside Kay’s portfolio and she didn’t bother to tag them. Their statistics came mainly in grey card folders labelled with new departmental names that might have been invented on the spot. Xan assured her they were subsidiary projects but still she wondered if the Club hadn’t set loose dozens of rival schemes to tame Candida, jostling in close quarters in a bloody Darwinian scrabble for survival. If that was true, Prospero would have to win and she would have to win it on Prospero’s behalf. She had to make sense of it all, chewing and regurgitating the numbers until they were in a fit state to be shown to Xan. She took her responsibility seriously.

  She was close to him. That was something; not enough.

  Team Prospero had a windowless office on the first floor, near the back of the building. Thick-walled and oppressive, it felt more like a bunker, sealed off from the life-thrum of the city. The décor was drab olive, with brown patches where the paint had been spread too thin. The other girls, not Kay, brought their own photographs and posters, usually famous landmarks from their home countries or other familiar sites from around the world. Kay was always the first in the office each morning and would sit alone at her desk, a vantage point overlooking the Taj Mahal, Tower Bridge, the Eiffel Tower and the Great Wall of China. The light, slow and electric, was louder than it was bright. The walls trapped wet heat so dense it was almost steam. Some days, the team brought laundry into work and strung it from clothes-lines halfway up the wall. Tights and T-shirts wilted over their heads. The heat made casual dress a necessity.

  Kay was given a team of three, all bright and decent, all younger than her and all bored by Prospero. For them, Prospero was a job, not a vocation. They formed a conspiratorial clutch against her and her work ethic. It was good-natured but it prickled at her. It wasn’t the distraction that bothered her but the sense that she was losing them to Candyland. The club had failed to give them a common purpose, she realised dispassionately. She was failing, and they were her responsibility.

  She hoped they would speak English for the working day, but in practice they would slip carelessly into their native tongues or the Candidan polyglot. Mara was from somewhere on the Indian subcontinent, a country that Kay could never quite pin down; she was the next eldest, the only other to have topped 30. Monika was German and the most grounded, the most like Kay in temperament, though they had little else in common. Her favourite was the youngest, Mae. She was only 16, dark-haired, pudgily shy. Her skin was a pizza of freckles.

  ‘Xan wants to see us when we’re free,’ she told Kay, during an afternoon’s break. The sweaty heat had become too much to bear and had driven Team Prospero out into the cooler passages on the first floor. ‘He told me this morning when I was coming in. He spoke to me.’

  Mara and Monika talked about Xan incessantly, and though Kay had never felt moved enough to ask them directly, she got the impression that he was almost as much of a newcomer as she was. His stewardship of the Club had begun little more than two months earlier. He’d transformed it, filling it with energy and velocity. He’d led Prospero and all the other weird little projects in his wake, like the pied piper, and arranged them into the new order. He knew the holes in the walls of the city. He was a conjuror who could smuggle little chunks of the outside world into Candida. He knew how to procure clothes and nick-nacks and foreign currency, though Kay had found, to her frustration, that none of the native merchants and marketeers could see a point in taking euros over disintegrating Candida scrip. Monika used worthless American dollars to roll cigarettes. Everyone else in Prospero’s office smoked.

  Mae was smoking. She and Kay had found a cool balcony at the back of the clubhouse, overlooking the flat of wild scrub and concrete that made up the grounds. Mae stood lumpenly back from the jamb, out of the sunlight, while Kay sprawled forward over the ledge to avoid the tempting second-hand ash-perfume of her junior’s smoke.

  ‘He did more than speak to me. He looked at me. It was, y’know, kind of nice.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Do you mind that?’ She leaned forward to tap her cigarette’s smouldering end into the gap. It fell cool and unnoticed on the labourers who were working to clear the grounds. There was an oblong pool in the concrete directly below the balcony that had once been a cooling sink for the steamworks. It was lined with sludge now, and today’s work was concentrated on sluicing down the walls and making it clean. Kay wondered who the workers – the anonymous tops-of-heads – actually were. Appeared with a taste for back-breaking jobs? Native Candidans who’d been persuaded to toi
l for the Club without payment? The indigenous Andeans who, she was half-convinced, were Xan’s conduits to the outside world?

  ‘Why should I mind?’ she asked warily.

  Mae seemed embarrassed. ‘Because. You and him.’

  ‘What about me and him?’

  She tipped her head sideways. ‘Red. We thought it was his pet name.’

  ‘We’re not an item.’

  ‘Would you like to be? It’s just, if you’re not …’

  ‘I’m not his keeper. I don’t know him that well. You do what you want.’

  ‘You two seem to get on. You have something. I don’t want to go making a fool of myself.’

  Kay moved back from the edge, into the doorway and out of Mae’s sight. ‘Come on. He wants to see us.’

  There were the empty, echoing corridors of the clubhouse – and Kay shivered, imagining she was walking inside the calcified corpse of a giant, set into the earth by Doctor Arkadin. Xan had quarters on the top floor that Kay, never having been summoned before, hadn’t seen. They found him in a cream-walled office, looming over a Lilliputian city at the centre of the room. The model was made of lollysticks and matches with unspent red heads; beneath it, the mountainside was moulded in plasticine and toy clay, more ingredients smuggled through the secret windows into Candida. It was almost as high as Xan was tall, but it was unfinished. Its buildings had ragged, half-completed walls.

  ‘I’ve been mapping,’ Xan said, without looking up, without turning. He was naked to the waist, displaying a lean back, skin drawn tight over pronounced ridges of bone. He shone red from exertion, and there were hard muscle-clusters round his shoulders and down his spine. His legs were stretched apart. He was a general poring over the field of his campaign. ‘It has to be 3-D,’ he insisted.

  ‘Has it?’

  Still he kept his back to them. ‘2-D doesn’t work, I tried it. There are too many tricks, too much false perspective. I’ve had agents out measuring streets and buildings. That’s where your data comes from. I want to know every inch of the bastard before we put it on the market. Is that Mae with you?’

  ‘Uh, yah.’

  ‘Good. Mae, I’d call you Freckles, but look at Red here, she’s worse for it than you. I’m playing favourites with the two of you; forgive me. What are you doing tonight?’

  ‘Nothing. What is there to do? Go out, listen to music, dance, not my scene, never was.’

  ‘Red?’

  ‘I have plans.’

  ‘Washing your hair?’

  ‘I have plans,’ she insisted. Xan turned to them. His chest hair was blonde, much lighter than on his head, and formed the shape of a tree. His navel was a perfect whorl. Kay tried not to look. She slapped her arms apologetically: ‘I promised a friend.’

  ‘I hope we’re not losing you?’

  He was all muscle, knotted with disapproval. She shook her head, and the knots unspooled. He invited them into a more comfortable room and offered them a drink. Scotch, brandy, spirits, whisky and whiskey, all smuggled in past the Bureau of Appearances. Mae accepted, Kay chose water. They sat on a couch, while he rested against the wooden rails that lined the walls. The tumbler shook in Mae’s hands.

  ‘Not used to it?’ Xan asked. She turned her head abruptly from side-to-side.

  ‘So,’ Kay said, ‘what can we do for you?’

  ‘Two things.’ He made a pop with his lips. ‘Two separate things. I’m holding a Club party later this week. It’s going to be fairly important. Big people are coming, from inside the city and … well, you’ll see.’

  She saw where this was going. ‘We need to clear the decks on Prospero?’ He didn’t react. ‘I have no idea how much data we still have to process.’

  Xan waved her objection away. ‘Prospero will continue after the party.’ He put his tumbler on the floor. He was barefoot and he couldn’t keep himself still. Kay imagined that he would forget the glass existed and accidentally crush it underfoot. She imagined her own soles, lacerated and bloody, flecked with glass splinters. ‘Prospero’s going on and on forever. This party is Prospero’s coming of age do. It’s when he inherits. Prospero, that’s a good name. I’d claim credit for it myself, but it wasn’t me, it was the powers that be. Good name.’

  ‘Beats Candida,’ Mae muttered.

  ‘Only a city run by slappers would chose a name like that, or maybe Doctor Arkadin was thinking of Voltaire. There was a man educated beyond his ability.’ Xan inspected Kay’s unamused, blank, impatient face and returned to the point: ‘What I have in mind for you is undignified. You’re a very proud woman and I’ll understand if you say no, walk away, no mark on your card. I need people to work at the party. I need Club members and I need Club members I can trust and who are going to make an impression on my guests, and that’s you, Red. I told you you’re important.’

  She finished her water and carelessly placed it on the floor at her feet, more broken glass waiting to happen.

  ‘You want me to be … what?’

  ‘A waitress.’

  ‘A waitress.’ She tasted the word.

  ‘For one night only.’

  ‘I can be a waitress.’ It sounded no worse than some of her work at the old free house; besides, this was an invitation to something serious, somewhere she needed to be. He wanted her to crawl to get there. ‘I’ll need a uniform.’

  On my knees if need be.

  ‘Delivered tonight. That’s why I mentioned it now. There’ll be something to fit you. You’re very tall, you know?’

  ‘So are you.’

  ‘Not as tall as you.’ His eyes went to Mae, who had fidgeted during their exchange and fidgeted again in the crush of his sight, even as he smiled. ‘Don’t worry, Mae, I don’t see you as a waitress. Red, I’ll be taking this one away from you.’

  ‘That’s more pressure,’ Kay said. So I go from doing the work of four to doing the work of three.

  ‘It won’t be. These will be a quiet few days, the calm before the storm.’ She clicked her tongue, shrugged. I can live with it. ‘Why don’t you take the rest of the day off?’ he suggested.

  ‘I’d prefer to get back to work,’ she replied. ‘Without me … Well, the work has to be done. You understand?’

  She blinked. It lasted. Grey paste coated the inside of her mouth. Ozone. Smouldering hair. Azure rising into the morning on newly-sprouted wings, the light falling through grey baby-feathers, a bird, a voladora. Kay lifting her hand to shield her face from the alien dawn. Precise light, fresher and brighter than the grubby streams that wheedled through the clubhouse windows. Azure shedding blood and offal from the sky, wetting Kay, baptising her. The voladora can return to her human body only once she has changed and changed utterly. Kay watching her closest friend wheel through the clouds, all the while sweating and murmuring in the care of the-Lady’s favourites on the bunk in the grim lazaret.

  Grey paste. Ozone. Burning hair. She was in Xan’s war office, poised exactly halfway between the Candida model and the exit, like an action figure, like she’d been moved into position by a great cosmic hand. No, she wouldn’t believe that. She had left Xan and Mae to return to work, but she didn’t remember. She had lost time. She inspected her thoughts and found that, in spite of what she’d told Xan, she wanted to give the afternoon’s work a rest and walk for a time in the city, while it was still unspoiled.

  She had tried to move out of the old free house when she had joined the Club, but it had drawn her back. She hadn’t been able to sleep in her Club quarters on the first night, and that had blunted her game the following day. She had felt ashamed. She had felt failure. Xan had visited her that evening and spoken sympathetically, but even so, the next night, she’d lain impossibly tired among ruffled sheets, her body spasming but never finding the comfortable shape to sleep in. She had gone back to the old free house, where Flower-of-t
he-Lady had welcomed her. Kay had done enough, she said, to be allowed to stay for longer. Hadn’t she sat vigil while Azure became a bird? She had earned trust.

  Kay turned away from the model city and went back to the room where Xan had served them drinks. The door was ajar, and through the gap she saw Mae stretched forward on her front on the couch. She was naked below the waist, her stubby hands clawing at the cushions. She was being screwed precisely from behind, from behind the door. Her body shuddered to one rhythm, her gasping breaths made another. In her native land, she would still be a child in law. Whoever was mounting her – and Kay felt disappointed at herself for even entertaining the possibility of doubt – was invisible behind the jamb. Kay inched into the gap to see and confirm the inevitable.

  Yes.

  Shit.

  Kay took off her shoes then went on tiptoes back to the model of Candida. She stared at it for several minutes, neither moving nor thinking, and finally she decided she would not smash it, she would go out into the world and leave it be.

  ‘Do you know who the Fedayeen were?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Okay, okay, I’ll tell you. Can you cope with a lecture? I’ll keep it short.’

  ‘I’ve got the whole evening and I’m getting used to this wall. Gathering moss, I am.’

  ‘Okay. Once upon a time, in ancient Iran, there was a Muslim ascetic, some say a Sufi, known as the Old Man of the Mountain. His name was Hasan-i-Sabah, and his warriors were the Fedayeen, also called the al-Assas. This is where the word assassin comes from.’

  ‘I thought that was from hashish.’

  ‘It’s the same story as this one. It’s always the same story. The Fedayeen were fanatically loyal to Hasan, and he used them to destroy his enemies in the Caliphate. Now here’s the point I want to make. Do you know how he kept the Fedayeen faithful? He fed them hashish, and while they slept, he’d spirit them away into a secret valley in the mountains, sealed from the outside world behind a huge wall. When they woke, they were still off their heads on weed and imagined they were in Heaven, because this place is beautiful, it has everything they could possibly want, and their every desire is attended to by houris, the most beautiful women in the world.’