Force Majeure

by Daniel O'Mahoney

  She whiled away the early hours with the book, distracting herself from her thoughts of Azure and Xan and the difficult day ahead. She lingered in the bathroom far longer than was necessary, sitting on the flat toilet seat and reading. Beyond the door, in the bedroom, Azure’s empty pallet waited for her as an accusing absence; beyond the house, there was the uncertain city cast in white and grey stone; beyond Candida, there were the breached walls of the world. Doctor Arkadin’s legacy, whatever it amounted to, would be washed away on the day’s tides.

  She read until she became hungry. She put the journal away and left to get some breakfast at the refectory. On the way, she met fewer people than usual and no guests. She saw ashen, determined, frightened faces – one was her own, reflected on a metal sheet at the canteen door.

  There’s going to be a siege, she decided, but a strange one. There were far too many ways in and out of the old free house for a proper stand-off. The club’s hired guns wouldn’t be able to cover every entrance, even the ones she knew and Xan knew. She ticked them off mentally. She thought of six more fat helicopters bobbing on the air like nectar-heavy bees. Both Xan and Esteban talked about displays of strength. Maybe she was wrong about a siege. The house would be an example. There would be lightning war. There would be shock and awe. The house would be demolished.

  Gunpowder ended the fastness of castles and brothels alike.

  By the time she returned to her rooms, it had begun. The sound carried through from outside. She leaned cautiously through the balcony shutters. It wasn’t too dangerous yet; all she’d heard were raised voices and threats, in English, in other tongues. Taking her weight again, the balcony swayed. Far below her, the canal waters lapped gently, an oblivious babbling witness.

  A troop of mercenaries had gathered on the far bank by the bridge. Their khaki uniforms seemed ludicrously colourless against the stones of the pastel city. The bland façades of Candida revealed more shades and tones and subtle colourings than the invaders could muster. The vegetable-strung walls and rusted metalwork follies were naked rainbows now. Xan’s private army gathered in a protective formation that must have looked aggressive at street-level but from above was a bewildered huddle, threatening to spill out spontaneously into violence. They were more than half the force the Displaced Club had at its disposal, plus a few officers who stood away from the pack and whose loyalties were impossible to gauge from this distance. Kay twitched away, instinctively checking the horizon for the incoming swarm. She looked back. Inscrutable, curious Candidans were pausing in the street to inspect and judge the new Appeared.

  Are they Appeared? I suppose they must be.

  Xan wasn’t there.

  The bridge was blocked by two of the house-girls, both dressed in pale green pyjamas, like Luna’s and Quint’s. Nothing was said, and no-one moved for a long minute. Then, from the bridge, dressed in green and without escorts, came Flower-of-the-Lady to present herself to the invaders. There was some chatter among the mercenaries, perhaps a brief show of hands or the picking of a short straw, and one was propelled forward to parley. Kay didn’t recognise him; she had never seen them in close-up, and his fierce, tanned face – was that from effort or embarrassment? – was as indistinct as the-Lady’s was vivid. She felt for him, not just because she knew how intimidating the chatelaine could be, but because he seemed to have been abandoned by his masters.

  Including me.

  The speaker held his gun as though it were a starving child and didn’t point it at the-Lady, who stayed motionless and solid except for her corkscrew hair, which twirled on the breeze. The discussion looked heated. The-Lady stood on the lip of the bridge, blocking it with her slender body. The mercenary seemed raw and obese in his heavy fatigues. The prostitutes flanking the-Lady swayed on the same mild wind that caught her hair. Kay realised – a chill burst in her stomach – that this was the best that the house of dragons had to offer and all that it had to defend itself with. She was – they were all – in harm’s way and helpless.

  That reminded her of Azure. She looked away, turning her eyes down to the canal beneath her feet. Sunlight fell on her face. She closed her eyes, and the insides were red. Not simply pinkish or rusty orange, but liquid, swirling red, as if a blood vessel had burst and was flooding the socket. The red lingered when she opened her eyes, a shapeless patch imposed over the cityscape. It tricked her brain; for an instant, scarlet butterflies flocked across her line of sight – then they were gone.

  The-Lady turned her back on the occupation and returned to the house. Her girls followed. Then the main doors were closed for the first time since Kay had arrived in Candida, out of her sight but echoing with the clatter of prison gates. She heard the keys turning and the bolts drawing, but only in her imagination. Outside, Xan’s gang stood thwarted. One of them broke ranks and strode irritated toward the crowd, brandishing his gun purposefully. It went off, in short bursts, into the air.

  The shooter was aiming at an invisible target in the sky, trying to scare the witnesses. They dispersed, but slower than he liked, not fleeing the scene in panic but drifting into doorways and alleys. He fired again, still tilting his gun upwards. To Kay’s ears, trained by television, it sounded tinny and fake. She retreated into the relative safety of her room. The gun rattle continued, but muffled, monotonous as a power drill or a persistent car alarm. If they kept this up, they’d run out of ammunition.

  Luna was waiting for her in the door jamb. Her face was dirt-patterned and her pyjamas were torn, exposing the whole of her right breast. She’d been in a fight? No. Quint was there in her shadow, the same rip down the fabric of her top. It was battle-dress. They beckoned to her. She went to them, taking shallow steps.

  ‘The-Lady says that anyone who wants should leave now’ – Luna.

  ‘She says that staying will do no good and might make things worse’ – Quint.

  ‘I’m staying,’ Kay told them, and herself.

  ‘Don’t stay because you feel guilty.’

  ‘Don’t stay because you want to fight.’

  ‘Neither of these things are helpful.’

  ‘I’m staying,’ she insisted.

  They took her by her right shoulder and tore a long red strip from the front of her dress.

  No! Not Kay! She’s my friend.

  Yes, Kay, and you knew it. Didn’t you know it that night outside the Godma’s cottage, the night when you went flying together, the night you threatened to kill her?

  No, that’s a false note of my imagination. Xan couldn’t know about that night, he had no reason to know, and I wouldn’t have imagined it was a threat, I know it wasn’t. It’s pure self-flattery to imagine Xan using barbed words to torment Azure, to turn her against me. He isn’t like that. He wouldn’t talk to her, and Azure wouldn’t talk to him. She only snarls at him, and he will be brutal back to her. He rapes her. Yes. He has raped her. He will rape her. I can imagine that. I know what I would do if I were him, if I were a man, if I were stripped down to my raw and naked drive. He pushes her to the floor and forces her, and I look away because I don’t need to see.

  I’m not him.

  He sees it as a re-establishment of the natural order, a microcosmic demonstration of what he’ll do to Candida. I imagine them locked together in his war room, the act of violation taking place in the shadow of his unfinished parody of Azure’s beloved city. I saw him with Mae, I saw him with me in my fantasies and imagination, and he was always on top, always the rider, the master, always in control, always the dominant power in all his relationships, and I would have let him last night if Azure hadn’t distracted him and saved me, if the fox hadn’t chased me, if the city hadn’t laid its eggs in me.

  Perhaps none of this happened. Perhaps I’m letting my imagination run away with me. Azure is locked away and forgotten. He doesn’t see her and she isn’t harmed. Xan is not a part of me. He denies it, of course, for
the wrong reasons, but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong. I’m not dreaming this, I’m thinking it, so it may not be true at all.

  I know what he does to her, because I’m about to see it.

  Xan calls for his guards. I know what you are, little bird, because Kay knows what you are. I was with her, lurking inside her, when she sat vigil with you. I know something I can do that will hurt you for the rest of your life. I know how to break you.

  No! Not Azure! She’s my friend.

  Luna and Quint never explained how they found Azure or smuggled her from the clubhouse. Kay supposed that she hadn’t been well-guarded, once Prospero’s men had spread themselves thin in the streets of Candida. The Gestapo Twins took her back to the lazaret where Kay had sweated out the fever after Azure’s initiation. They brought Kay to her. It was quiet, this deep in the house, but she could still hear the morning guns echoing in her head.

  ‘This isn’t the safest place in the world,’ Kay protested as they ushered her in.

  Luna gave a Candidan shrug. ‘It’s as safe as anywhere. We can get her out again quickly if needs be.’

  ‘If she wants to go,’ Quint added.

  They had put away their trivial cruelties. They’d already reassured her that Azure was alive and safe, but she lay white and motionless on the pallet like a fresh corpse. They had covered her in a blanket (not a shroud) to her neck (not over her face), but Kay assumed the worst. The blanket shivered as Azure breathed, and Kay shivered in sympathy, seeing not real breaths but a trick. There were no other signs of life; she might as well be dead. Kay brushed the bird’s cheek, and it was no warmer nor colder than usual. This wasn’t Azure, it was a fake, it was a Tussaud’s waxwork, a Disneyland automaton.

  Blood had pooled, hardened and browned at the foot of the blanket. Kay tugged at the edges, unwrapping the body like a mummy or a dreadful Christmas present. There were crude bandages wrapped round Azure’s pipecleaner legs, absorbing and drying her blood. Her knees and shins had been pressed together, aligning them in a parody of normal sleep.

  ‘Is that all they did?’ Kay asked. She was afraid to pull back further, to reveal – bruises? lacerations? wounds?

  ‘Is that all?! They broke her legs. They broke her legs so she’ll never fly again.’

  Kay turned the blanket back, rewrapping Azure, covering her wounds but not the guilty clots of blood. ‘Someone knew what she was,’ she whispered, ‘and how to break her.’

  Azure’s eyelids trembled open. Swollen pupils flicked rapidly before settling on Kay – who was, after all, the closest, standing over her.

  ‘You could stay if you wanted,’ Luna said, or maybe Quint said, barely heard.

  Kay watched herself fattening in the black tunnel of Azure’s eyes. Her friend was smiling wanly through layers of morphine-dulled pain. She didn’t move. It was impossible for Kay to tell what she was thinking or what she was seeing. She leaned forward, putting their faces closer, but the girl didn’t react. She might as well have been looking into darkness, at nothing.

  Then small fingers reached out from beneath the blanket and touched Kay’s mouth and Azure sighed, and Kay knew exactly what the girl was looking at.

  The hand fell. The eyes closed. The cover moved healthily, rising light, falling deep. Kay found her own hand clamping over her lips where Azure had touched her. No longer in control of her own body, she stumbled from the bed and into Luna and Quint’s receptive arms.

  ‘Perhaps,’ they suggested, ‘you should come back when she’s better.’

  These might be their last minutes. She turned back and kissed Azure tenderly on the forehead.

  Forgive me.

  Kay asked Luna and Quint to stay with Azure, no matter what happened, but they made no promises. She left alone, trudging numbly back to her cell. Urgent bodies pushed past her. She’d heard a distant explosion before she reached her rooms, and there was gunfire, one-sided gunfire, battering against the walls like rain. She stayed back from the window. She locked her door, collected the journal and what remained of her meal and huddled under the table with them, waiting for the battle to play itself out.

  Unable to resist, she flicked to the final entry of the journal.

  Doctor Arkadin killed himself today.

  Then there was page upon page of unspoiled blank white paper.

  A few feet away, one of the balcony shutters exploded into splinters, struck by a stray round. Unhinged, it half-dropped to the floor. There were further explosions; she assumed they were trying to blast through the main doors. Then there was renewed shouting and thumping and battering and cursing. There was more gunfire, raking along the façade. Luna and Quint had told her some of the girls were planning to dump sewage on the siege from the mezzanine. This must be the bad-tempered riposte.

  She wasn’t panicking. She wouldn’t panic.

  She went back through the journal, but her hands were shaking and the book shook with them and the words were unreadable. They became ant-bites on the page. She clung to the book as if it was a secure post sunk into the earth. She spilled her food, which looked inedible once cut with dirt and sawdust. She felt nothing except the air from the broken window. There were more blasts, closer. A chunk of masonry punched out of the wall, crumbling mid-air and raining down around her. Feeling soiled, she tore off more of her dress.

  Out in the corridor, a girl-child’s voice was screaming, almost singing. The doors are gone. The doors are spread wide open. The house is exposed. And another voice, coarser, indeterminately male or female, was thrashing out a single word. Fire. Fire. Fire. Fire. Fire. Fire.

  The drifting voices were followed by smoke, as white and fine as the displaced dust from the wall. It was the heat that first alerted her. She was already coughing and, once it began to seep through the lock and through the gaps in the door, she was choking. The smoke burned her eyes red. She staggered from under the table. Her hands went to her face, and the skin was porcelain-smooth and coated in soot. The only pain was in her eyes and in the knot to the left of her bra-cupped exposed war-breast.

  They’re in the walls. We’re breached, oh my sisters and my children and my lovers.

  I’m still in control. I’m still in control. I’m still in control.

  Kay screamed. She slammed through the tottering shutters onto the balcony, half propelled by the warm vent of air escaping through the walls. She rolled into the waiting grip of the railings. The front of the house careered up around her, its wounds bleeding black smoke. She bobbed up into the searing light. She remembered guns. She ducked.

  Her head was sore from where she’d butted the door, but still in one piece. All her senses were drunk on raw data and she felt every slight movement, every breath, magnified as an earthquake. The walls roared, expelling whale-lungs’-worth of ash. The only way out was to drop or jump into the canal.

  Xan, what will you feel if I throw myself off, if I break on the ground or drown in the canal? Will you howl as I fall? Will you feel me die? Will you die with me? Or were you right all along, that I’ve just become infected by Candida, and you’ve lost me to its madness? In which case you’ll feel nothing at all.

  Only one way to find out.

  She heard no more gunfire. That was something; that meant the mock-soldiers had broken into the house, that the battle was over and the house was lost. She pulled herself onto the railings and stood, half-balanced. She willed herself into a launching pose, ready to leap for water she could barely see. Would it be deep enough? She couldn’t remember how to stand; she teetered. I’m still the master of my own life and death. This is it then. I’m still in control. This is it.

  The rail chose the moment for her by buckling. Kay’s feet skidded violently and lost their grip on the perch, on anything. She fell. She became an inelegant storm of limbs tumbling into Azure’s blank gaze, into nothing, into air.

  Chapter
Eight: Kay and Her Precursors

  It was her house, but she still thought of it reverently as her grandmother’s, and returning here was always a journey back into childhood. Certain things in the house were triggers for her déjà vu: views from different windows; the patterns of light in the hall in springtime; the breeze on the leaky upper floor; and – most of all – the scents left by flowers that lingered long after their blooms were gone.

  Kay, frozen in her striped T-shirt and shorts, was distracted from the garden path by a glimpse of the broken sundial in the undergrowth. A five-year-old girl, hair streaming, ran anticlockwise rings round it in a distant summer when the garden was trimmer and drier and full of indolent, over-loved cats. It had been a tower to her, and she’d tried, unsuccessfully, to mount its smooth sides. She had never reached the top. This must have been before she’d seen the accident, before she’d given up climbing. She pushed past sopping leaves and branches to reach it, but it was an overcast day and there was no shadow on the stone. The dial was older than the house itself, dating back to the mid-17th Century. It had been misaligned at birth and had never shown the right time.

  Memento mori. She thought of her grandmother, who had vanished into the landscape when Kay was young. The spare key to the house had always been kept in a cleft at the base of the pedestal. Kay checked it with her fingers and found that Her Better Half had kept faith with that particular tradition. She fished the key out, gravely pleased that she could enter the cottage unannounced. After one of her bigger promotions, she had sunk a lot of money into renovating and refurbishing the building. Her Better Half had agreed, seeing it as an investment and a second home. What he hadn’t understood, what she hadn’t until this morning, was that she’d had no desire to sell it or own it or even live in it. She wanted to preserve it the way it had been in her memories. She studied the house front from the camouflage of the undergrowth, finding every chipped and worn brick familiar but changed, changed utterly.