Force Majeure

by Daniel O'Mahoney

  She picked up her tray again and held it in front of her as a shield. Jeanne d’Arc, she thought stupidly, Jeanne d’Arc in red.

  ‘I’ll bring some champagne. If you need anything else, you have only to ask.’

  Satisfied, or bored, the dragon wheeled away, gliding ominously towards the curtains with its cape dragging on the floor behind it. At that moment, some half-drunk reveller in another room took it upon himself to start screeching like an owl; the sound carried through the clubhouse, and Kay’s heart rattled in her ribs. Red, red, back to the red room, red.

  Around her, the partygoers had broken off their conversations and were laughing – at the noise? At the dragon? At Kay’s sudden startled retreat? She couldn’t tell. She was invisible. She hugged the inside of the mask. She passed the fox on her way out of the white room; another anonymous mask, unnoticed. She found herself in the soothing indigo room, too gloomily dark for the crowds. Even the waitress was gone. Xan had installed a coffin clock with plain, unvarnished wood and a working pendulum but no hands on the dials. Tock. Kay measured the beat of her heart against its rhythm. Tick. The length of a second seemed to have grown since she’d last paid attention to the time. Tock. She needed to use the toilet; no, she didn’t yet, but she might soon. Tick. Xan could be downstairs by now; she should return to the white room and face the crowd. Tock. Or to her natural place among the glass towers of champagne in the bloody vault. Tick. Where was Xan?

  The fox had followed her, and stood at the doorway.

  She saw him there and made none of the mistakes she had with the dragon.

  He wasn’t Xan, that was clear. He was too short, but there was more. Xan would look striking in the shabbiest clothes, but the fox reversed the trick, turning his elegant grey suit into a rumpled rhinoskin. His mask looked too small to contain an entire head. His nose was a fuzzy brown cone, reaching a whiskered point. His ears pricked, his eyes gazed, he was hungry. He didn’t smell like a fox, he smelled like a man in papier mâché.

  The fox was a wary animal with human hands. He paced around the walls of the indigo room, considering Kay. Food/danger? Hunter/hunted? Meat/not-meat? No, she was projecting. She took a tray from the nearest trestle. Tiny fishcakes, that was okay, the fox wouldn’t be a vegetarian. She offered it. She should speak; the fox might reply and break the illusion. She stayed silent and the fox didn’t react and she imagined suspicion and hesitancy in his empty glass eyes. She put the cakes away. Behind her, the clock began to chime softly. She bowed slightly and backed away, toward the door.

  The fox jumped forward, his hands raised.

  Then Kay became afraid of the fox and afraid of the emptiness of the party rooms. There were murmurs of chatter and laughter in the distance but not loud or close enough to drown out the senile chorus of the clock. She looked at the outstretched hands, then at the tight head, and it occurred to her that she was prey, that the fox wanted to kill her. She laughed.

  The fox, deadly serious, took another step.

  Kay spilled backwards out of the indigo room, and the fox came after her.

  Why, she wondered later, had she turned towards the interior of the clubhouse? Why not run for the edge, where the people and the party were? It was instinct to head inwards, the pure buzz of a body reacting out of blind fear, but that explained nothing. Part of her believed that the fox really would kill her, and she wanted to find a lonely place to die. She didn’t want to end her life in front of so many people, so many careless eyes.

  ‘Did you want to kill me?’ she would ask the fox, once he’d shed his skin.

  He held her cigarette in his man’s mouth. He would pass it back to her before replying. ‘I didn’t want to. I thought I had to. I believed I had to.’

  She didn’t run at first but fast-walked, and the fox padded behind her at a casual distance. His footsteps, like hers, were silent on the dull-concrete floor, but she could feel his weight at her back. Her heart was pumping, she was thinking fast and clear. The idea that the fox was hunting her was still faintly ridiculous, but the ancient parts of her brain were telling her to find shelter, high ground, the tribe’s totem. She blundered past the door to the red room, which would not have been the right place. Too bloody, too thick. The fox kept his distance; he was always there.

  She moved briskly into the creamy yellow room, but it was deserted and in disarray. Tables had been overturned. Food, drink and decorations were scattered across the floor, the traces left of a fight or an eruption that had passed into another room. A pinkish wet stain had exploded on the far wall. She brushed it with her fingertips as she passed; it was still damp, and her hand came back smelling of wine. The fox moved round the scene of the devastation and came leisurely after her.

  She wished it would make a sound. She wished it would grunt or breathe hard or howl or give something of itself away.

  There were people in the brown room, including the room’s waitress (with her piebald horse’s head) and a cluster of fat, chattering monkeys in cummerbunds. They paid the cat little attention as she moved through the room and no more to the fox as it pursued her. It would have been a good place to stop and stand her ground, to see what the fox would do, but she’d decided to keep moving. Stopping would have felt like cheating. The chase was important. The aim wasn’t to hide or fight. She wanted to outrun him.

  She left the brown room and the party behind and they ventured one after the other into the vacant, dim-lit, unhaunted passageways of the Displaced Club. Kay hobbled on her cramped leg, the tendons tightening against the bone like a line of knotted rope, and the fox kept an easy respectful distance. She stumbled past the stairs. Going up wasn’t an option. Going up would be running to Xan for help, and she didn’t need his protection.

  The dark gave her some advantage. They ventured into windowless territory where the fox stumbled, banging into walls and furniture, but she was less familiar with the terrain than she’d hoped and made as many mistakes and as much noise. He stayed close behind her; how could he see her? She imagined herself luminous in the dark, the hair poking out from the back of her cat-head giving off a lustre like a beacon. Glancing back, she saw the white V of a shirt beneath a jacket. The fox’s hand touched her shoulder. She pulled away silently and plunged through another door and into a glass cul-de-sac filled with light.

  The dead end was a viewing platform looking down the ridge of the city, and the light was the collective glow of Candida itself. It was an almost starless night, a single bright exception flickering unfixed around the horizon. Kay was briefly dazzled by the off-white glow of the city. She smacked into the glass and tumbled. Behind her, the fox emerged into the doorway, his lidless eyes unblinking. He stood there patiently as she hit the floor. There was no other way out

  Kay stayed low on her haunches. The mask was acting for her; she poised herself defensively like a cat. Small though he was, the fox filled the only exit. His hands came up and he licked his palms. His jacket had come open during the chase and its tails balanced unsteadily. He wasn’t ready to spring. He was toying with her. Still a cat, Kay spasmed her spine, stretching out to her full height. The fox looked wary. She had almost forgotten that there must be a face beneath the mask. The false head turned to sniff the air. The fox shuffled forward and took her hand in his paw; it was trembling. Contact.

  He’s not a fox. He’s a man, full of a man’s doubts.

  He tried to pull back, to break contact, but Kay twisted her hand round and tightened her fingers into a crush. Snared, the fox gasped, in surprise more than pain. Since leaving the party, Kay had heard nothing but her own rasping, desperate breaths, and it was only the fox’s trapped squeal that made her realise that she alone could hear herself, in the private space of the cat-mask. She let the fox go and he stood there, probably hearing the echoes of his cry reverberating in the cavities of his own head. His hands had been warm, glowing with the heat of the chase. So were
hers. She barrelled into him, pushing them both back through the doorway, away from the glass and the light.

  Their masks nuzzled, cold cardboard batting against cold cardboard. Sweat quickly filled the inside of their faces. Their bodies fought for a while – the fox trying to pin the cat against the wall, the cat wanting the fox crouched on the floor beneath her with her invisible skirt flapping over him – the fox crudely gentle and uncertain, the cat vicious and hungry – the fox sliding her knickers down as though they were sacred, the cat kneading his groin as though it was plasticine. They chased, they struggled, they compromised.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’ Xan whispered serenely from under his mask.

  Kay had been back to the bathroom to freshen up and wipe away the sweat. She had pins-and-needles at the base of her stomach, but otherwise there was no trace left of her fox hunt, and she’d made bloody sure she was presentable before she returned. ‘I had to get changed. I spilled something. Don’t worry, nothing’s broken.’

  Xan seemed to accept that, though the mask made it impossible to tell for sure. She had returned to the party minutes earlier, but it was only now that the fox rejoined the throng. He was prowling round the edges of the white room, looking no less dishevelled than before.

  ‘A lot of these people are officers,’ she observed.

  ‘They are.’

  ‘Doctor Arkadin’s men,’ she said.

  ‘They were.’

  Xan was the sun. His mask was a golden disc with a mane of curled coronas. The eyes behind the grooves were unmistakable. He brought energy into the white room, which in Kay’s absence had begun to sag with prandial exhaustion. He had become the centre of gravity for the whole party, with his guests pushed into the margins of the room. They watched the sun through the corners of their eyes, and Kay guessed that most of the hushed conversation was about him and his plans. Among the midnight-tired bodies, he was the only one who still seemed fresh and awake.

  ‘Can you trust them?’ she asked. The sun cast its head one way then the other.

  ‘In a few moments, we’ll be going out into the grounds. Then you’ll see how big Prospero is and the extent of its powers. I’ve been keeping this quiet, but you know. You’ve always known.’ Kay shook her head deliberately. Behind his radiant light, the sun would be smiling, always smiling. ‘There’s an attaché case in the red room under the table in the corner. I’d like you to fetch it now. Send anyone you meet there through to the garden. Don’t leave any stragglers, make sure you’re the last to leave.’

  ‘I can talk to them?’

  ‘This time you can talk to them. Are you frowning under there?’

  ‘I’m not frowning.’

  ‘You are frowning. You should relax; you’re about to achieve something. Go on.’

  She traced her steps back to the red room. The party conversations that had once been so voluble and unguarded were now careful whispers, and she barely caught words, let alone sense, as she walked. The guests weren’t moving far beyond their own little circles of influence, and that made her self-conscious. Before she went, the sun placed a hand on her mask’s forehead, patting her, reading her temperature, anointing her. She felt marked out. There were a few random guests in the passages and she set them on their way. This time, she wasn’t followed; there was yawning space at her back.

  In the red room, the dragon loomed over another guest. They had been alone, and both drew away from the door as Kay entered. They kept talking in a low Candidan dialect that Kay would have struggled to follow, if she’d been so inclined. The dragon’s accomplice had cautious eyes that tracked Kay warily as she padded into the room. She was a moon, the moon as a verdant green dial. Spread around them on the tables, the plates and glasses of the party had been spent.

  Kay approached the duo and explained Xan’s request. The moon nodded curtly. The dragon remained enormous and motionless until the moon took it by the hand and led it to the door. Kay waited for a minute, knocking back a last, half-full glass of champagne, before peering out into the corridor to make sure they had gone. The case was where Xan had promised, under the table. It was of a different design from the one he’d shown her earlier, but it was equally heavy. She didn’t open it. She imagined seven cases in seven rooms, one for each waitress. One-and-three-quarter million dollars, based on her initial guesstimate. That was only close; the total would be two, round numbers being important. A down-payment.

  The champagne sparkled as it reached her stomach. She could still feel the impressed shape of the fox’s clumsy penis inside her and the splash of hot animal semen he’d left there. Her body was fuzzily warm and encouraged her to relax. She felt changed. She felt as though she had, at long last, made a choice and sealed a loyalty. The weight of the case now troubled her. She waited, she waited. She went back to the white room.

  The curtains were drawn back and the doors opened onto the clubhouse’s concrete garden. Ushers were encouraging the late guests through, and outside, the sun, his voice reverberating through the metal mask, was mouthing rousing peptalk buzzwords at them. Even without his face, Xan knew how to hold a crowd, and his audience seemed to be responding, not with evangelical fervour but with an intense, complex longing that expressed itself in their bodies, in their postures, the way they held themselves as they looked at him. It was as much fear and scepticism and weary patience as desire or rapture; Kay recognised this from her childhood trips to church, where the adults always seemed to stand in an idiosyncratic C-of-E posture, like crooked plants craning towards the light.

  Only Kay and the other waitresses seemed to feel the cold out on the slab. Their uniforms were identical, the poor light bleaching them into different shades of grey, with their legs exposed to the air. The others all had cases, as Kay had expected. The ushers led them past the crowd and had them stand facing in the opposite direction, lined along the lip of the cleaned and stripped steaming-pool. It was a ten foot drop at least, if she mis-stepped now, if the wind should happen to nudge too hard at her back. Broken legs for sure. The wind unsettled the hems of their skirts.

  The skittering blue evening star shone overhead. It chittered like an insect.

  ‘Candida is not a city,’ Xan declaimed, though Kay sensed he was winding towards an ending, a crescendo. He paced round the edge of the pool, passing between the waitresses and the invisible party crowd at their backs. ‘Candida is a landlocked island. It sustains itself on the wreckage and flotsam that’s washed up on its shores. Tomorrow, this changes. Tomorrow, you officers will finally be the corps that Doctor Arkadin dreamed of before his city sank into decadence. Tomorrow, you displaced will be given back your proper places. Tomorrow, we wipe the rouge off the faces of the whores. From tomorrow, this city will be made fit and presentable to rejoin decent society. If you want to know what Prospero is, look around you. If you want to know what Candida will be, look around you.

  ‘We’ll change the name to something better and brighter, oh yeah.’

  Kay, listening to the meagre sense not the voluminous sound, felt unmoved. In the dark, Xan had no body, only the golden fan of the sun sustained in darkness. The swelling star flared behind him. She saw the cold blue outline of his body, his arms flinging towards the heavens to call them down.

  Kay was punched back by the force of air. The line of waitresses rippled.

  The star dropped to earth, its wings roaring. Behind her, the crowd began to panic, began to billow backwards under the pressure of the descending wind. The air was whipped with shallow points of rain. Kay fought to stay upright and cling onto her case, but the line was already broken; some of her colleagues had dropped their bundles and were beating a retreat to the safety of the clubhouse eaves. She imagined the case locks breaking open, the paper money bursting out and vanishing on the whirlwind, but they held. Some in the crowd were screaming.

  She stared Xan down, though he didn’t notice, his
head craned up to watch the light descending. Lights, not one light; not a single star but a cluster. Its whine drowned the general panic. He wasn’t trying to scare them. He wanted them to see how insignificant their fear was. It was a display of his power and his confidence. She saw a car-dragon bursting through the still surface of the world and explode. She saw a frightened, writhing boy and smelt singed human flesh.

  Uncloaked, the star had the silhouette of a helicopter, hidden under the blue arc of its spotlights. It came in close to land, on the far side of the grounds beyond the pool, behind Xan. The light washed back across its body, revealing drab olive paint and scrubbed white patches where the flags of nations long since obliterated had been washed out. It was a fat metal fist; it seemed impossible that it could stay in the air. It touched down daintily, and now even Xan began to tumble back from the noise and the storm.

  Kay snatched a look around her. A few of the guests hadn’t joined the general retreat back into the safety of the building. Some of them had taken off their disguises. Some she thought were officers, their fleshy faces revealing a mix of admiration and fear that the masks would have hidden. Xan must have told them they were going to inherit the world.

  Across the pool, the helicopter’s blades were chattering slowly. A hatch opened on its side and solid khaki men were climbing out, men with guns. The first dropped out almost tentatively, as if afraid his boots would break the soil. Armstrong on the moon, Kay thought. Xan pushed through the easing blade-winds to clasp his hand and thump his shoulder.

  Kay’s arm was numb from holding up her case. She slung it aside. It thudded on concrete, dead weight.

  ‘What the bloody hell is going on?! What have you mixed me up in?’

  ‘Prospero. And you knew; don’t tell me you didn’t know.’

  ‘I knew what?! I knew we were opening up an untapped piece of real estate to the world. I knew that. I didn’t know you were planning a military coup.’