Force Majeure

by Daniel O'Mahoney

  ‘So how’d he get them to stay faithful?’

  ‘Good question. I don’t know. Anyway, when Hasan needed someone killed, he would whisk an assassin or two out of the valley and set them to work – and they’d do what he wanted, because he was the only one who knew how to return them to paradise. That’s got to be a major hold you can have over someone; that’s got to be real power, a force greater than which nothing can exist. He was like a god.’

  ‘Where did you get all this from? Luis?’

  ‘Oh no, no, no, I knew this long before I got to Candida. I had a mate back in the old days. She’d come out with this stuff, usually when she was high. She was pretty quiet the rest of the time. They found her body in a ditch, long time ago now, long time. That’s all I’m going to say about it.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to ask.’

  ‘No. You’re a good person. At heart, you’re good. What do you think of the story?’

  ‘I think Hasan was an idiot. Why did he bother? If he knew there was a place where he could have everything he wanted, he should have stayed there and been happy.’

  ‘That’s good. I reckon it’s got to be some big ego-trip. People like Hasan, they’re tricky bastards. I can understand that. What I don’t get is why the assassins obeyed him. If someone took me away from paradise I’d want to kill them, and if I was a trained killer on drugs in a total berserker frenzy, I probably would.’

  ‘But would they let a woman join in the first place? Assassins sound like the Boy Scouts. Y chromosomes only.’

  Her friend laughed. Her hair, albino white, had almost spilt Kay’s blood, but now it fluttered harmlessly on the night breeze. ‘You know we’re being followed? Godma January told me, but I’d already picked it up on the way – and it’s not me he’s after, it’s you.’

  Kay rolled her eyes. ‘How can you tell?!’

  Earlier, she traipsed through the passages of the old free house towards the library. She had entered the house through a side door, partly because it was comfortable, partly because she’d never mastered the route from the bridge without help. It didn’t connect with the geography of her mind. Even through the familiar door, it was becoming harder to locate her old workplaces as they receded into the past. The library was still welcoming, and Luis always seemed pleased to see her.

  This evening she had an assignment, and she found her way there without confusion.

  The War in Heaven table was set up in the middle of the library with a half-played game spread across the board. Evening was drawing in as Kay arrived, and Luis had abandoned play to close the tall shutters on the windows and lay out the lights. Azure sat on the second stool, contemplating her move. She didn’t notice as Kay entered, as she crossed the room to join her, as she took up Luis’ seat to consider the board. Azure was black, Luis red. Azure’s hand looked strong, Luis’s slightly stronger. Azure was a good player, better than Kay.

  Azure had bleached all her hair white after she became a bird. Her skin, now clean, was ruddier than before, but only by contrast. She wore the same heavy brown bikeskins, now with confidence. No, not confidence, collection. She had changed not at all, she had changed completely, the world had changed around her. She adopted a carved, serious expression as she inspected the board. She tapped a minor piece with the point of her little finger, jabbing it forward by one place, moving it almost imperceptibly from one room to another.

  ‘That doesn’t change much,’ Kay murmured.

  ‘It’s not supposed to. Hello stranger.’

  ‘Are you enjoying it?’

  ‘The game?’

  ‘Being a bird.’

  ‘You can’t imagine. I wouldn’t say enjoy exactly.’ Her eyes met Kay’s. They were solemn. Kay could no longer remember what colour they had been before, but now they were hazel. ‘I lie. I enjoy it. Are you on for tonight still?’

  Kay nodded. Luis returned, taking plodding steps and bearing miraculous unasked-for cups of tea. ‘You’re still with us then?’ he chortled, placing the tray on the board’s Southern Hemisphere in such a way that, had it been a playing piece, it would have thrown the game into confusion and doubt. ‘I could have done with you as an assistant. One day, all this could have been yours.’ He threw an arm out to describe the room he had never seen.

  ‘I’m not one of nature’s librarians.’

  He laughed again. ‘Neither was I till I got here. We were all different back in the day. Azure has her story and so have I.’ (Azure shuffled embarrassed on her seat, slipping back for a moment in time to before she was a bird.) ‘Maybe she’ll tell you.’

  ‘Maybe I will. I’m losing this,’ she said and swatted. Her black dynasty piece toppled. ‘I’ll get you next time. Is this all?’

  ‘For Godma January, out on the boundaries. She and I go back to the Jazz Age. Say hi to her from me.’

  With the tray and the tea, Luis had brought a pouch decorated with the red seal of the house of dragons, a coiled crocodile-face in wax. ‘It’ll be a quiet night,’ Azure observed, slipping her package into one of the larger pouches at her midriff. She looked to Kay, her face losing a little of its sobriety. ‘The dragon lines connect the house with former residents who’ve moved out into the city. Voladora’s just a jumped-up messenger – that’s what I am now. I carry messages to the dragons and back again. Do you still want to come flying?’

  Kay nodded. She bade farewell to Luis, promising herself quietly that she would seek him out for another game when she had some free time. That would have to be after Xan’s party. Luis could wait; she knew she could rely on him for that. He would always be here, as massive and enduring as the mountain. He was the least transient person she had ever met.

  Azure went ahead of her, but she had to skip to stay in front of Kay’s impatient strides.

  ‘You know why I’m doing this?’ Kay asked, trying to sound pleasant.

  ‘Because you don’t want to lose touch with me?’

  That was a surprise. ‘You guessed?’

  ‘You’ve been away from home, and you’re still not properly settled. You’re going to value new friends more. Anyone would.’ She led them out into the evening, which was already dark. The air was half-cold and scented by distant bonfires. This must be high summer, Kay thought, somewhere near the Solstice, somewhere near the hot Southern Christmas. Azure’s bike was chained to a drainpipe at the side of the house. The young bird rattled her keys. They were new.

  ‘If you need a helmet, now’s the time to say. I’d hate for you to get hurt.’

  Kay declined, then, at Azure’s insistence, mounted the long saddle. Azure joined her, half-sitting on Kay’s lap and pushing her further back. She wasn’t heavy; she was all pressure, no weight. For a moment they jostled awkwardly in the rider’s seat, compromising their postures until Azure let out a good-natured cackle. ‘I can live with this!’

  Kay’s arms locked round the girl’s waist, finding no hint of the body beneath the layers of protective coat. Azure’s hair filled half her view, the warm, dry scalp bumping against her face. They sat stationary on the bike, Azure holding up the weight of three bodies with a foot placed firmly on the pavement. ‘Whenever you’re ready?’

  ‘I’m ready.’

  Azure cocked her head; Kay saw only a slice of her face behind the white crest of hair. ‘When I ride, I fly. When I ride, I really do become a bird, and so does the bike and so will you. You’ll become part of me, and it’ll be great.’ She breathed. ‘But you might not feel it that way, and if you don’t, then just hold on as tight as you can. Don’t mind me. I can take it. Just don’t fall.’

  One foot left the safety of the ground. The other stamped at a pedal. The bike lurched under their combined weight, then steadied, then leapt.

  And afterwards, Kay couldn’t recall the detail of the journey, not any of the streets they flowed through or the buildi
ngs they skirted, none of the people they passed and nearly hit, none of the activity they disrupted with their velocity. Azure’s untied hair lashed at her face, hard enough to sting and draw blood, wounds that were still sore once she’d dismounted. No, all she would remember was speed, impossible speed, measured in excruciating heartbeats, in explosive half-taken breaths and words blasted unspoken back into her mouth, while mites and glowing insects splattered on her naked face.

  She remembered dismounting onto a spinning world. She remembered making giddy circles in the street. She didn’t so much fall as allow her body to find its natural place on the ground. Sure-footed and wryly amused, Azure helped move her into a more comfortable crouch against the nearest wall. It was cool stone, an anchor. She clung to it.

  Azure grinned. ‘I s’pose you didn’t feel it.’

  ‘I felt something,’ she gasped

  They had stopped at the gate to a cottage in a sparse quarter of Candida. The closest buildings were dark and merged into the blue dusk so the cottage seemed to stand alone. Kay had to squeeze her eyes sharp to see that she was still actually in the city limits and not on a flat outcrop of the mountain beyond. The cottage walls were greenwashed and luminous. A woman came from the door to meet them, lighting her way with a lamp that was hardly needed. She was the oldest person that Kay had seen in Candida, but her hair was still perfect Indian-black. A guard of scruffy children followed her out, small hands clutching at the train of her saffron dress, but she shooed them inside.

  She acknowledged Azure. She lifted her lamp towards Kay – pink glare, Kay went blind.

  ‘Do you know who this is?’ Her voice was brittle as an old radio broadcast. It was directed away from Kay, into air, to Azure.

  A heartbeat. ‘This is Kay, my second. She sat with me on the mountainside.’

  Pink light dawned again, then sank, then faded. Godma January chirped: ‘Bugger me!’

  Kay’s eyes blinked back to life, and she saw that the old woman had taken Azure into a conference huddle further down the path. Their bodies were calm, their faces pushed heatedly against each. Azure came flapping back, discontent muted on her face.

  ‘She doesn’t want you inside. It can’t be helped. I’ll bring something to eat when I come back and something to drink. I won’t be long.’

  ‘Azure, what’s going on?’

  The bird twitched her arms helplessly.

  Alone, Kay looked out at the buildings of Candida, seeing only pinlights in the dark, and she half-smiled at the idea of even trying to turn this all into a model or a set of statistics. Her smile was borrowed from Xan, his typical smile, the one he must have worn as he seduced and mastered Mae. Neither the old free house nor the steamworks were visible from the Godma’s cottage. Kay felt isolated. She found herself filling the wait with Prospero, turning over the fresher details and figures from the account in her head until they lost all meaning. Prospero had become an unshakeable, pointless habit, a series of blank scars on white pages in grubby grey folders.

  Azure returned with bread and cheese, and Kay ate hungrily. White bread; that was rare in Candida.

  ‘So what’s her problem?’ she asked, of the Godma.

  ‘She says she doesn’t like the company you keep. Things are a bit tense right now, but the Godma’s always been a bit eccentric. She came here with Luis, back when he could still half-see, long before my time. They were gunrunners. They got lost in the mountains. That’s his story.’

  Azure sat beside her, her legs spread out, her arse plonked casually on the floor. Kay was half-crouched, making contact with the wall only on the small of her back, with the ground only on the balls of her feet. It was an effort. She should sprawl. She couldn’t. She tried. She couldn’t.

  Azure remained cagey about the nature of her business – ‘which is, you know, private’ – and turned the conversation towards the Fedayeen, then Kay’s stalker. ‘He’s an officer, one of Doctor Arkadin’s mob, which means he’s not nearly as smart as he thinks he is, which is why the Godma spotted him. He probably just fancies you and knows you worked at the house.’

  ‘Cheers,’ Kay replied, and took a swig of her wine. It was tasteless. ‘Have you got a cigarette? I’ve been gagging for one since I got here.’

  ‘I don’t, you should know that. I didn’t know you smoked.’

  ‘I don’t. I gave it up.’

  ‘That must have been hard.’

  ‘Not really. I had to force myself to do something about it. It was willpower, but it’s run out. I quit just before I came here the first time, so there’s a balance at work.’

  ‘You were here before?’

  ‘Yes. Oh, not here here. I meant when I was in South America. That was really different. Never 50 miles from an airport. Now I’m 50 miles from nowhere in all directions. Nothing adds up. Nothing in Candida connects. Why doesn’t anything connect?!’

  ‘You’ll get used to it.’

  Kay was startled to find herself crying. The tear welled, trickled and dried. She tried to speak, but it was only the sound of air escaping. She composed herself. ‘I can’t stand being here. It’s like I’m lost and I’m never going to get away.’

  Azure laughed. ‘You are lost, and you’ll get used to it. No, that’s not helpful, is it? One day, one day soon I’m sure, something will happen, something wonderful, and you will find that you are so comfortable and so right here. Do you want to know how I first Appeared in Candida? Luis made me think of it again, when he was stirring it, the cheeky bastard.’

  ‘If you don’t want to tell me, that’s fine. It’s like you say, private.’

  ‘Do you know how old I am now? Seriously?’

  Kay took Azure’s chin and turned the child’s face full-on towards her. It was lit by the gleaming walls of the house. There were dark smudges on her cheeks. Kay licked her thumb and used it to rub the dirt away. ‘You look very young. What’s the big secret?’

  ‘Azure was never young, but she always looked it. That worked for her as she got older. She could dress as a schoolgirl or in a party dress and play the virgin, nice and tight with no tits. After a while, she wanted the trick to wear off, but she never lost her looks. She’s Peter Pan. She never had a childhood till I came here.’

  Kay’s head went back, pressing against a cold stone wall that could numb her thoughts and freeze her emotions. She wanted to feel the way Azure looked as she’d spoken, anaesthetised and hollow. ‘Where are you from?’ she asked, softly.

  ‘Does it matter? All countries are the same these days. It’s the nature of the world. All cities look identical from a low angle. You know London, it might as well be London, let’s say it was London.’

  ‘Yeah, I know London.’

  ‘I was never homeless. There was always some place to stay. Getting a roof over my head wasn’t the problem. Getting money wasn’t the problem, especially at first, though losing it was. Finding people to be with wasn’t the problem. Azure grew up on tranqs and – this is London, so let’s say the Beano. When you go out expecting to be beaten, half-expecting to be raped and half-hoping to have your throat cut, you need something to get you through the night. She had no power over her life, she had all the power taken from her in everything she did. She was on heroin by the time she was 11. Do you know I couldn’t read till I got here?’

  ‘Except the Beano.’

  ‘Except the Beano. Luis taught me to read. Don’t look at me like that. Don’t look at me like you think I’m lying.’

  ‘I wasn’t,’ Kay replied, but it hadn’t been a real accusation. Azure’s body was at rest and her face was a calm and unruffled surface. It was as though she was a surgeon, dispassionately inspecting a pit left on her body by a once-poisoned sting, still visible but long since healed.

  ‘There’s an urban myth I picked up from the older girls and the rougher ones, not the escorts, not
the college-fee crowd. It was a street story you’d hear in the dives and alleys and up against the fences. The story goes that somewhere there is a tunnel. The tunnel. The black tunnel.’

  ‘Sounds like a metaphor.’

  ‘Don’t laugh, Kay. Don’t you dare laugh.’ But again it wasn’t an accusation. ‘It was supposed to be the most disgusting place in the world. There’d be no light; it would stink like a sewer; it would be full of water and shit and dead dogs. It was nowhere you’d want to go, but if you could bear to crawl through it, it was the escape route. It’d take you somewhere you could be free. The older girls, they called it a Valhalla for whores, and no-one really believed it.

  ‘One night, I got thrown out of a car. I’d been at a party and they needed to get rid of me in a hurry, so they drove me out and dumped me in the middle of nowhere. I don’t know where; it could have been a golf course! So here’s Azure: naked, covered in blood, covered in bruises, covered in bites, covered in shit, covered in vomit; everything running half-speed because her heart couldn’t cope with the junk she’d taken; totally, incredibly, unbelievably surprised because she’s not dead. All night, to her utter amazement, she continues being not dead. She can’t move for hours, and everything’s bleeding away, drifting to sleep, drifting awake. And as the sun comes up in the morning, she sees it – right in front of her where it’s always been – the black tunnel.

  ‘So I went to it. God knows where I found the strength, but I pulled myself up and stumbled there and sank into it, into this impossible, stinking, sunless tunnel full of water and disease and decay. The walls were rotten, used-up concrete and the whole thing looked like it would come down on top of me, but I went for it. I went into this myth, this total lie that no-one believed, and it didn’t matter because I was dying. That’s what I thought. I was dying and this was the only way into Heaven.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘I Appeared in Candida. You don’t believe a word of this, do you?’