‘I’m not. I used to be. I gave up when I was in college.’
‘Do you mind if I ask …?’
‘No. My boyfriend back then couldn’t stand it. He couldn’t bear to let me touch him because of the smell on my fingers. So I stopped.’
‘You gave it up to make him happy?’
‘I couldn’t care less what he thought. I gave up for me. I didn’t want to be that way.’
‘Until tonight.’
‘Tonight’s different,’ Kay said. She sucked in smoke, and it nearly choked her.
She wasn’t sure how far she could trust Esteban, until she realised that he faced the same dilemma, deeper. When he looked at her, he saw one of the architects of Prospero, one of the leaders of the campaign to roll over his city. She wasn’t sure if he’d decided to trust her or had simply stopped playing the conspiracy games. He was as tired as she. The tea and the nicotine kept them awake but didn’t refresh them. She felt stretched thin on a frame, like a soap bubble vulnerable to the mildest tremor. Esteban rested his head on his hand, with the little finger tucked into the corner of his eye; he looked how she felt.
‘I want to go home,’ she told him.
‘Is that why you got involved in all this? You just want to get back to Britain?’
‘No. I meant the old free house. I can relax there, if I’m in the right mood. I never could here.’
‘Will your friends let you leave? Because I think you might not be in charge any more.’
‘I never was in charge of Prospero.’ She batted her eyelids at him, and it was an effort not to let them close for the night. ‘They can’t stop me.’
‘They can try.’
‘Even if I wanted to stay here, Flower-of-the-Lady should know about Azure. What happens then is up to her. I can stop worrying and I might get some sleep.’
‘Kay,’ Esteban said. He put his hand on hers, touching her for the first time since they’d made love in the darkened office, transforming one another, radiating chemical heat and stinking of hormones. ‘Kay, tomorrow there’s going to be a show of strength. The Club will want all of Candida to know they’re taking over. That’s not going to be easy to organise but there’s one very big target that everyone will notice.’
‘I know that; I’ve thought it through. If I’m there, it might help calm things down.’
‘Like I say, I don’t think you’re in charge any more.’
‘Like I said, I never was.’
He stood. He had to shake out of his chair, to spark some life into his resistant muscles, to get momentum going. He half-walked, half-shambled to the door, then told her: ‘Stay put. I have something for you.’
‘What is it?’
‘It’s nothing,’ he said. ‘A going-away present.’
She let him go and sat alone in the dark, not sure whether she’d stayed because she genuinely trusted him or from uncomplicated inertia. The gloom had its own rusty, worn-out texture. The clubhouse was one of the Follies, permanently falling apart, an enduring monument to transience. She closed her eyes. A hard yellow lozenge, the shape of the wall-lamp, glowed on her retinas. Coloured petals fell in the dark behind her lids, the confused patterns made by dead cells crumbling in her eyes. She almost slept. Esteban kissed her on the forehead and brought her back to life. His moustache tickled her.
‘It’s been a hundred years,’ he said, and smiled. The uneven white line of teeth was the first thing she saw. She pursed her lips, the most humour she could manage.
‘Charming,’ she replied.
He’d brought a book and placed it on the desk between them, away from the drying tea-stain. It had a plain cloth cover. Its binding was stubble-rough. It felt old. She opened it to the centre, and it made a noise like snapping wood. The pages were brittle but not flaking. The text was black on yellowing cream leaf – not a printed book, a handwritten journal.
‘For you,’ Esteban said. She saw that he was amused by the attention she was showing his present, by her meticulous and humourless inspection. She turned to the start.
‘There’s no title.’
‘It’s a record of the expedition. I’ve not read it, just flipped through it.’
‘What? Arkadin’s expedition?’
‘Doctor Arkadin’s, yes. Not his personal account, but definitely eye-witness territory. Hey, if you don’t like it, you can donate it to the library. If it’s still there after tomorrow.’
‘Where did you get this?’
‘You wouldn’t believe me.’ Esteban returned to his seat. ‘I think it’s meant for you.’
She skimmed the pages. Barely half had been used, and those that had been often held nothing more than a single, impersonal paragraph. There were no dates or clues that would pin it down without further reading. The handwriting remained small and cramped and defiantly neat to the end, but the later leaves were ink-stained and grubby. Kay closed the book and weighed it in both hands. It felt larger than any book she’d held since she was a small-fingered child.
‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘I’ll take it home to read. Promise.’
She slipped it inside her uniform, into a large fold of cloth above her stomach that would serve as a makeshift pocket for the walk home. It meant that the rough bookhide would rub against exposed skin, but she didn’t want anyone taking it from her. Her tiredness dulled all her senses except the paranoia. She imagined herself being challenged by gunmen at the Club door. She imagined them trying to shoot her and the bullet embedding itself in thick pages, saving her life. She thought of closing her eyes and drifting away into that fantasy. She giggled.
‘I should go,’ Esteban said. He didn’t elaborate; she knew how he felt. She wanted to extricate herself from Prospero. She would go to the door and walk away and not look back. Esteban hugged her before she went, not in affection but in mutual anxiety, and his book was an oblong pregnancy caught between their colliding bodies.
There was a man with a gun at the door, but he didn’t shoot her or even notice her. Kay went out into the city and, as she’d expected, she didn’t turn. She knew the dust-sweating stone façade of Arkadin’s Folly intimately and pictured it in her mind as she walked away. Her imagination supplied the lit window; she guessed there would be only one. Xan would be there, of course, looking out over Candyland from his apartments, watching her go. He wouldn’t stop her; it was only a physical escape, only her body was getting away.
He wouldn’t even see her, not even a scrap of red in the darkness, but he’d know.
Somewhere in that building is a sealed door, and Xan is behind it and Azure with him.
As Kay walked out into the silent city, part of her mind remained, lingering over Xan and what he might be doing. She imagined. She didn’t dream. She only imagined.
She imagined living in his skin, thinking what he thought, feeling what he felt, and she was sure of one thing, that he didn’t – for a moment – believe that he was her alter-ego, the Hyde to her Jekyll. He wouldn’t entertain that kind of illusion. For Xan, doubt and ambiguity were corrosive, eating away at his ego and his selfhood. She pictures him hard-headed, as she liked to believe she was hard-headed. He knows Kay has gone and he turns away from the window, comfortably certain she’ll come back to him. He gives instructions for the disposal of the body of the man Azure killed. Dump it in one of the canals. Candida eats the bodies of its enemies, so let her eat well tonight, the last meal of the condemned.
He goes to the secret door behind which Azure is being held. He’s not angry with her. He’s pleased, in fact, to have a subject. Princes are nothing without subjects to command, without the power to create defiance and resentment. He has been frustratedly aroused since Kay got away from him. Behind the door, Azure has been stripped and beaten. The mercenaries have raped her – No! No, no, no, this is my imagination and I will not imagine that into being. I
t won’t have happened, because Xan has warned them not to. She’s his prize, after all. Save her for later, he tells them jealously. He orders them out, just in case.
Xan and Azure. Azure and Xan. What do they say to each other? Do they even recognise one another?
There was light rain, near-sleet, snow-breeding in the Southern summer. There was wind, more heard than felt. There was Esteban’s cold genetic mulch dying in the warm lining of her body. There was Candida stretched around her, vacated and unwhispering. The streets were all empty, the parties – if they still lasted – politely muted indoors. No lights shone from any windows. Nothing gave, nothing broke, nothing spoke louder than the wind. There were no signals, no reports and no revelations. Candida was already under curfew, bating its breath for the morning.
Kay could hear the sound of her feet pacing on stone, which she’d never have caught above the carnival din of a normal night. Ahead of her, the house of dragons was as bleakly quiet as the rest of the city, a radiation shadow in the darkness. The doors beyond the bridge, usually wide and decorated and welcoming, were half-closed. The beacons were lit, but as Kay approached they began to wink out one by one. As she got closer, she saw Luna and Quint moving between them, putting them out with an elaborate hinged snuffer that dug into the base of the flame and cut the oxygen at the wick. They were two cheerful stranglers. For once, she saw them before they saw her.
Both women wore plain green suits, silken and undecorated, like pyjamas. They’d washed away their make-up, displaying plain faces reddened with the cold. They gave her a synchronised baleful smile as she approached.
‘Someone’s glowing,’ Quint began, but Luna had seen Kay’s expression and shushed her.
Kay stopped at the foot of the bridge and displayed open palms. ‘Azure is in trouble. I need to tell the-Lady.’
Luna and Quint swapped glances. ‘She already knows.’
Esteban’s rough-edged book, which had become almost intangible on the walk home, woke in her gut and shifted out of its pocket. It hung suspended in the tight folds at her waist, threatening to give. Kay put a surreptitious hand to her stomach to hold it fast. She must have looked winded. The Gestapo Twins wore no lipstick and their mouths held unexaggerated smiles.
‘What does she know?’ Kay asked.
‘She knows, we know, the whole house knows. You don’t think you were keeping any real secrets in that ridiculous Club of yours?’
‘Plots and plans and conspiracies are like babies. They’re hungry all the time, and all the time they want to cry. Azure must have found out and blundered in, wanting to do something. She should have come to us.’
‘Poor, silly, brave thing.’
There was one last beacon guttering. Luna lowered the snuffer’s hood into the carved flaming mouth and choked it with a turn of her wrist. The light cut out, the pair became silhouettes, darker than the night. The sky behind them was fuzzy, the same texture as the bookbinding on her stomach. Luna and Quint lit roaring handlamps. They linked their leaf-coloured arms and knotted their fingers together into a Siamese fist.
‘You should get to sleep,’ Luna told her gently.
‘You’ll need your rest for tomorrow.’
‘A difficult day,’ they agreed in one voice.
Kay shook her head. ‘I can’t. Not with Azure where she is.’
‘We’re going now to fetch her.’
‘We’re her rescue party.’
Kay was no longer sure that she wasn’t dreaming. ‘They won’t let you in.’
No, she wasn’t dreaming. Picking at the thread of dreams always unravelled them and woke her up. Luna and Quint stayed solid, two symbiotic plants growing around each other for comfort and security.
‘There are always ways in. We know Candida better than they.’
‘They’ve –’
‘Your friends have only studied Candida. We’ve lived in it.’
There was one more thing to say. ‘They have guns.’
Xan, had he really been part of her, would have turned his back on her in disgust, no longer recognising himself. With these three words, she’d sided with Candida against him. And Luna and Quint, hearing this final and irrevocable act of treachery, broke into a shared snort of derisive laughter.
‘Oh, they have guns! What cowards!’
‘We can do better than guns. We have weapons left over from the Sex Wars.’
‘We have pert breasts and perfect smiles. We have sweat and pheromones.’
‘We have all the sex and all the violence in the world on our side.’
‘And we have a city that eats guns and shits saltpetre fertiliser.’
‘Bless you for telling us.’ Quint stroked Kay’s cheek with a pillow-soft hand.
‘Don’t,’ she slurred, almost offended. ‘Don’t make this a joke. Someone will get hurt.’
‘They already have,’ Luna kissed her chastely on the lips. ‘Go and sleep.’
Xan and Azure. Azure and Xan. What do they say to each other? Do they even recognise one another? Azure knows his scent, the scent I carried with me into the tent on the day of the initiation. She’s naked and bruised and bound but unharmed. I don’t want her to be hurt. Please don’t let her be hurt. When I last saw her, she was bestial, howling filth and bile. Would that be how she is now? Perhaps she’s calmer. I need to think what they would say to one another.
Xan might know her, a little. He knows I had a friend in the house – he called her my girlfriend – but did he recognise her when he pulled off the moon-mask? I don’t remember. He doesn’t say. He undresses in front of her, stripping completely naked. This is something I’ve imagined before, though never in these circumstances. Azure watches him unblinking, with practised contempt. He still wears a gun, a pistol. He points it at her head.
You’ve killed a man, he says. A man who was paid well to die, says she, though I would prefer to have killed you instead. She’s very lucid, more lucid than I believe is realistic, but I don’t want to believe her beaten or raped or dead – no, not dead, not dead, she’s not dead. She’s survived worse. She came through the black tunnel!
How much does the-Lady know of my plan, he asks? Nothing, says she. You’re lying, he accuses, and hits her – no, he doesn’t. He only touches her, to prove he could hit her, if he wanted. He’s not fury, he’s not rage, he’s control. Nothing! she shouts, defiantly. They know something bad is coming but they won’t do anything about it, and someone had to and that might as well be me! (I know this is true; Luna and Quint told me.)
Then I might as well kill you, but I must ask Kay first. Kay? Yes, she is my ally, didn’t you know? She is in my bed now, waiting for me. She was the cat. She was my mistress in the red dress. You saw her eyes; you know it’s true. She is more than just one of us. She is Prospero, the whole reason that we’re here together in this room.
No!
Yes! I am her instrument. Everything I do is her will. When this is over, when Doctor Arkadin is dead, it will be Kay who sits on the dragon throne and rules Candida.
No! Not Kay! She’s my friend.
As predicted, Kay didn’t sleep that night. She returned to her cell with Esteban’s book held naked in her hands, too tired to keep up the effort of concealing it. Her old room was familiar enough to be negotiable without any light. Azure’s bed glistened unslept in; her own, she knew, would be half-ruffled, half-made, as she’d left it the previous morning. The chalk shadows on the walls were frozen in time, ignoring her. One of them, the livid red woman, was Kay herself. She wanted to erase it. No, she wanted to sleep. She wanted to forget and be forgotten. Without changing, she climbed onto her cot. Hours later, as the dawn began to blush through the cracks in the shutters, she was still hatefully awake.
She lay on the cot, shuddering. The unkempt sheets were a bed of insects. There was pain, the distressed lum
p in her chest, like a high stitch, like she’d been running. She put a hand under her tunic, feeling for the knot. Her fingers traced the line of her ribs, trying to find a way in. Not asleep, not dreaming, she imagined using her sharp fingernails to dig in between the bone and squeeze out the growth. It was a cancer, it was a misplaced embryo, it was a clot of jaundiced bile. It would seep pus like teenage acne. It was an egg laid in her body, it would hatch.
She didn’t sleep. She lost herself in her unrelaxing fantasies, and when the dawn came she had bitten her sharp fingernails down to nothing.
She gave up eventually and went to the bathroom, taking the book as toilet reading.
It wasn’t, she soon surmised, Doctor Arkadin’s personal journal. Assuming it was authentic, then it was the work of one of his company, Team Arkadin. The first entry, a brief description of the geography covered in a day, dropped her into the expedition without explanation. The author was familiar with her circumstances and didn’t bother elaborating for her readers. That suggested two possibilities: either this wasn’t the first volume, or the writer had been moved to start it only as Arkadin’s folly blossomed into life.
Kay studied the spine and the binding. There was no indication, that she could see, that this was the second or third or umpteenth book in the set. On later pages, the brisk style became stoic, occasionally frustrated and bad-tempered. The woman who’d once spent a page cataloguing all the wild flowers she’d seen on a single day ceased to be so thorough halfway up the Andes and instead became frighteningly lucid. Doctor Arkadin, wrote the author, was sinking into delusion. She reported his madness with patient, loving clarity. He recited old Celtic fairy tales to her and she recorded them verbatim, with commentary as though they were events they had lived through together. Their voices merged so it was impossible to tell which was Doctor Arkadin’s and which was his confessor’s.
Kay was sure the author was a woman, long before it was confirmed in the text.
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