by Ian McDonald
The pepper pot’s eye beams glanced across Enye; she heard bells and rocks being crushed, tasted brass, felt elation, disgust, vertigo, and acute ennui.
She jammed the Citroen into reverse. The engine wailed as she slewed back across the car park. The pepper-pot thing sent its eyelights flashing and darting off pillars, roofs, warning signs, bulkhead lights. Half blinded by the pain, Enye slammed the car into forward gear, gunned the engine, popped the clutch, tyres, screeched and smoked. The left fender of the Citroen caught the pepper-pot thing and flipped it up and over the roof. It lay on its side, millipede feet waving frantically, eyes rotating from side to side.
Tyres screeched again. Enye put the car into reverse, lined up the weaving eye lights in her rearview mirror, and put her foot down.
The Citroen jolted.
The pepper-pot thing split and burst, spilling a watery blue ichor across the concrete.
Something like a headless wolf dipped in luminous oil with a grinding lamprey maw tore free from the pressing labia of the gateway in the air. Screaming hysterically, Enye rammed the car into first again and floored the accelerator. The Citroen juddered and slewed. It caught the lamprey-wolf squarely, shattered its thin bones beneath its wheels. Enye threw up her arms to protect her from the impact as the Citroen’s Gallic nose wedged and stuck in the vagina mouth.
The pain inside her head went up in a searing detonation, as if lightning had struck inside her skull.
The smell of ionisation woke her; the sharp tang of electricity and smoking rubber. Every electrical circuit in the car was burned out, every fuse blown. Thin smoke trickled from the cassette player. The tip of the radio aerial had melted and run into chromium droplets.
She had no idea of the time—her watch had stopped. The metal casing was slightly warm to the touch.
She stepped out of the car. What had been might never have been. That patch of blue dampness on the concrete might have been glycol from a leaking radiator, that shrivelled, decomposed thing behind the pillar a black plastic garbage sack left by the Little League of Decency and Purity for pickup. She pushed the dead car back into her parking space.
Her head was clear.
Her head was clear.
Shivering by night in her day clothes, she wafted by the university palings to the taxi rank. A pair of hopeful buskers held a pitch in a shop doorway, hunting down the small change of the pub-and-club crowd. A boy played electric guitar through an amp/speaker assembly mounted on a backpack; his colleague, a punky girl in holey fishnets and leotard, danced with startling gymnasticism to the stalking, rhythmic guitar. Driving home in the taxi, Enye thought it strange that the boy should have been wearing shades after midnight, well after midnight; the little plastic digital clock on the driver’s dashboard, between the little plastic Garfield and the little plastic BVM, read twenty past one.
The shakes hit her on the third stair. She sat on the worn carpet and willed her hands to be still. When finally she could open her front door, there was an envelope waiting for her on the mat. The envelope had a distinctive smell she could not quite place. Taped to the creamy white envelope was a note from Mr. Antrobus: the letter had been delivered at noon by a bicycle courier and in her absence he had signed for it. He hoped she did not mind his using his passkey to leave it for her.
The creamy white envelope contained an invitation for her to call at the offices of Mr. Martland of Messrs. Ludlow, Allison, MacNab, Solicitors, at her earliest convenience.
She could place that distinctive smell now.
Lawyer.
Mr. Antrobus has lived since the end of the last world war in three downstairs rooms of the house on L’Esperanza Street with his posters of Greek temples by Ionian sunsets, his twelve (at the last census) cats, and his television. In those forty-four years he has never opened his front door any wider than necessary to collect his morning milk. The people of L’Esperanza Street, he maintains, have always been suspicious of him, partly because of the foreign sound of his name, mostly because of his Proclivities. He was conceived in a misfortunate decade, he says. One generation later and he could have taken his Proclivities and waved them over his head and no one would have batted an eye. Anywhere but L’Esperanza Street, that is. Enye tells him he should try again—it is never too late, you are never too old—but he dismisses her suggestions with a wave and a scowl.
“Changed too much,” he says. “Too aggressive, too violent these days. They terrify me, all that barely contained aggression. For a time, it was a beautiful thing. Not anymore. Anyway, there’s always the chance of… you know.”
The truth is that for the last forty-six years he has mourned an unrequited love for a fiacre driver on the island of Kos where he landed with the Allied Forces in 1943. On the first night out of Alexandria, he had dreamed that a youth of Homeric beauty beckoned him across the wine-dark sea to an island of sun-bleached white houses and olives older than the topless towers of Ilium. And there, standing on the quay with his duffel bag on the sun-bleached limestone, he had glimpsed among the rowdy fiacre drivers, sham-fighting each other for the privilege of driving the Liberators to their accommodations, the face he had dreamed of in the belly of the troopship. It was love at first sight. He stood paralysed by the drugged arrows of Eros.
He never rode in that fiacre, never spoke to its driver, never came closer than a street table at a café across the square from the stand where the drivers gathered under the shade of the trees outside the Church of Aghios Nicolaos. But he has carried in his heart like an icon these forty-six years the image of the young men of Kos diving naked at sunset for sponges and his young fiacre driver standing like Apollo newly sprung from the brow of Zeus, silhouetted against the sinking red sun.
It is a story Enye never tires of hearing, as Mr. Antrobus never tires of telling, for they both understand that unrequited love is the most enduring love of all.
After the war Mr. Antrobus came into possession of the house on L’Esperanza Street through a succession of bequests and, having hived off sufficient living space for himself, rented the upper floor as a self-contained apartment under the stipulation that any tenant must undertake to do his weekly shopping for him. Enye enjoys shopping for him—she sees it as her duty to introduce him to a new and interesting culinary experiences. Proclivities notwithstanding, she knows that Mr. Antrobus is not a complete prisoner of his three rooms. High summer has been known to lure him into his back garden in Panama hat, singlet, and aged, aged Army shorts with aged, aged deck chair to join her on her sun lounger, and in the dawn and dusk hours she has seen the beam from the lamp on his aged, aged black Phoenix bicycle weaving unsteadily down the alleyway at the back of the row of houses. She knows better than to ask. They have their closenesses, and they have their spaces. Sunday afternoons she visits him for tea and individual apple pies.
Sunday mornings are for the dojo. Her sensei has noticed a tendency toward open aggression in her sword style, contrary to the spirit of Ai Uchi, of cutting the enemy in the same instant as he cuts you, the spirit of dispassion, of treating one’s enemy as an honoured guest.
“My enemies are not honoured guests,” Enye says darkly.
“You will lose the Way,” her sensei admonishes.
Enye does not say that she fears she lost the Way long ago. Master and pupil, they kneel in seiza, swords on the right-hand side, and bow to each other.
Now she sits on Mr. Antrobus’s overstuffed old chesterfield, curled like one of his contented cats in a pair of old jeans so soft from washing they spontaneously go into holes and a loose rag top she knitted herself. Mr. Antrobus passes a willow-pattern teacup with an individual apple pie still in its foil cup perched on the side of the saucer.
“Have you ever thought what hell is like?” In the four years Enye has been visiting him the emphasis of his conversation has moved with stellar slowness from love remembered to death anticipated. “I think about it a lot. At night, when I cannot sleep, I feel the oldness and tiredness of my flesh and a
dreadful chill comes over me, as if a cold hand has closed on my heart. I am going to die. Some day, and that day is drawing closer with every tick of the clock, I will die. No escaping it. No exceptions, no exemptions. My heart will stop, my blood will go cold, my thoughts will freeze in my brain, and this consciousness, this self that is all I know, will gutter out like a candle. Do you think about death?”
“Like Picasso said, a little every day.”
“But then I think, what if it is not the end? What if there is something beyond death? What if there is a heaven and a hell?”
“The smart money bets on there being a God. If there is no God, and you bet there is, you lose nothing. If there is a God, and you bet there isn’t, you lose. In spades.”
“Yes, but have you placed your bets?”
“No, not yet.”
“Ah. And neither have I. But either of us could have to face that question at any moment, and if we are wrong, it will be hell for all eternity. Hell.” He licks his lips. “Can you imagine the moment when you are dismissed from the presence of God? Can you imagine the fall that is supposed to last nine days and nine nights? Can you imagine the demons that carry you through the walls of hell that are four thousand miles thick? Can you imagine the moment when the chains lock around your body and you know that you will never move again? And then you pass through the brass gates of Pandemonium that bear the legend ‘Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here,’ and you hear the screaming—a million, a billion, a trillion voices, all screaming, screaming for a million, a billion, a trillion years—and the demons that have borne you thus far set you down at the edge of the pit and you see the bodies: as far as you can see, bodies, piled on top of one another, the bodies of the damned, screaming and roaring and blaspheming at each other. Then the demons of the pit itself lift you to take you down to the place they have chosen for you, and as they set you on top of a pile of bodies and fly away you know that eternity begins now, that from now on nothing will ever change, nothing will ever happen. You will never be free, you will remain in the same place forever and ever and ever, the same people beside you, the same people in front of you and behind you, the same people below you and heaped on top of you. You will never see anything else but their bodies; you will never hear anything other than their screaming and roaring. A hundred years will pass, a thousand years will pass, and a hundred thousand, and a hundred million, and still…” He lowers his voice to a thin whisper: “And still: not one instant of eternity will have passed. It never ends. It never ends, on and on and on and on and on, forever and ever and ever, never changing, forever.”
“We create our own heavens and hells,” Enye says. “Each of us, each second during our lives, build those heavens or hells. If our lives are built generously, caringly, spiritually, in the pursuit of beauty, goodness, and harmony, then that is what we will receive. If our lives are spent selfishly, greedily, uglily, in the pursuit of wealth and self-aggrandisement, than that is what we will receive. Those who seek holiness will have holiness, forever. Those who seek themselves will have themselves, forever.”
“Not much room for a just God in your heaven and hell.”
“A just God would give each person what he wants most in the world. If that is God, he shall have God; if that is himself, then that is exactly what he shall receive. A sinner wouldn’t want what heaven has to offer.”
“Too iffy, too butty for me,” says Mr. Antrobus. “And I’m too old for philosophic casuistry. I need to know on which side to place my wager.”
“As I said, the wise money chooses God.”
“Yes, but will God choose me? Or will he say, at the very last, Away from me, you old and vile sinner, into the place I have prepared for such as you? After all those years I wasted, fearing Him, trying to live to please Him?”
The lamps have gone on in L’Esperanza Street. The yellow light is shattered by Mr. Antrobus’s blinds into narrow bands falling across the sleeping forms of the cats. The bottom half of Mr. Antrobus is illuminated, hands resting on chair arms, long shins, shoes; the upper half remains in shadow. In the room Enye feels the Mygmus shift, like magnetic particles reversing polarity to lie along new orientations.
“I brought you the Delius tape you asked about. Would you like to hear it?”
They sit and drink the tea and listen to the piano music coming from the radio-cassette recorder, each wrapped in their private heaven or hell. Night descends on L’Esperanza Street. The only light in the room comes from the yellow street lamps, the occasional flarings of collapsing coals on the fire, and the tiny glow of red and green LEDs on the radio-cassette. But Enye can smell Mr. Antrobus’s death.
The man from the garage had been almost awestruck. “How did you manage to burn out every electrical circuit?” he had asked, walking around the green bamboo and wicker pattern Citroen with the reverence of a pilgrim at the tomb of a saint. “You get hit by lightning?”
“Something like.”
“This is going to cost, you know.”
“Doesn’t it always?”
She had taken a taxi to Messrs. Ludlow, Allison, MacNab, whose junior partner, Mr. Saul Martland, was explaining his letter of the previous day.
As is the perennial lot of junior, junior partners, the more idiosyncratic cases tended to fall into his In tray, none more idiosyncratic than the Rooke bequest.
The late Dr. Hannibal Rooke had enjoyed a certain notoriety in the early decades of the century as a pioneer paranormal investigator, but in his later years had retired to a near-hermetic existence in his house on a headland overlooking the sea. He had died in unusual circumstances, which Mr. Saul Martland was not willing to disclose despite Mizz Enye MacColl’s interest, some three years before. The will had only recently been settled, due to a large number of expectant beneficiaries disappointed by their exclusion contesting the legality of a final testament on magnetic tape.
Enye envisioned a Danse Macabre Game Show with scantily clad hostesses stepping out of neon-lit, mink-lined coffins, and a gold-lamée-suited deceased cantering down a flight of silver steps from dry-ice-shrouded pearly gates to leap from prize item to prize item. “Mrs. Mary Kemohan of Sunnyside Villas, tonight is your lucky night; you have just won two hundred pounds’ worth of Marks and Spencers shares, a case of sterling silver dessert forks, and a foul-mouthed cockatiel in a Moorish bird cage on: Open! The! Box!”
“We established that you can write a will on the side of a buffalo in its own dung and it will be perfectly legal, provided it is witnessed and signed. Preferably not by the buffalo.”
She liked the way he said that. Solicitors do not talk about dung.
She liked a lot about Saul Martland—his generously cut double-breasted blue microstripe of the kind particular to just one shop in London. His jazz-coloured tie, fastened with a pin in the shape of a B-52 bomber. His hands: their jewellery-freeness. His desk: its executive affectation-in-the-shape-of-paperweights-brass-staplers-leather-bound-blotters-Newton’s-cradles-freeness. His name: its sonorous Biblicality, like tablets of stone. His reproduction Views of Edo prints which decorated the otherwise corporate stark-ness of his blacque-tech office. His eyes: how they could only hold hers for a moment before flicking away to his jewellery-free hands, his affectation-free desk, his Views of Edo.
She smiled.
He liked the way she smiled.
She liked the way he smiled when he saw her smile.
This is how it develops—by small smiles.
“There were a few—ah—unorthodox codicils to the will,” said Mr. Saul Martland. “One of which was that a package be delivered by the executor of the will—that is, myself—to the eldest female descendant of Mrs. Jessica MacColl. That is yourself.”
“What is this… ah… package?”
“This is.”
A padded yellow envelope, stapled shut, addressed to Ludlow, Allison, MacNab, Solicitors. Contours suggested something the size and shape of a B-format paperback book. Or a videotape. It did rattle videotapishly when sh
e shook it.
“Do you know what this is?”
“It could be half a kilo of Colombian White for all I know.”
She liked that, too.
“Why me?”
“All I know is that I was instructed to deliver the package to the eldest female descendant of Jessica MacColl. Who, I discovered after some poking in the public records office, to be you.”
And that, it seemed, was all the time the junior, junior partner of Ludlow, Allison, MacNab had assigned to her.
Not even an invitation to dinner.
In her apartment above L’Esperanza Street, Enye tore open the stapled yellow envelope.
As she had supposed, a videotape, unmarked, unlabelled, anonymous in every way, fell onto her welcome mat with the geese with bows around their necks. She brewed coffee as strong and black as witch’s piss and sipped it while the VCR clicked and whirred and flashed liquid crystal digits to itself.
The screen lit.
In a glass conservatory overlooking a blue, blue sea was an aged, aged man in a wheelchair. He was dressed in a white linen suit of the type that look so well on aged, aged men and so poorly on any others. In his buttonhole was a carnation. His brown-blotched hands rested lightly on a straw hat in his lap. His tie was fastened with a pin in the shape of a golden salamander.
The camera closed up on him, advancing silently through the climbing figs and geraniums in their terra-cotta pots.
The aged, aged man smiled.
“Good day to you, whoever you are, whatever your name is. My solicitors, the worthy Messrs. Ludlow, Allison, and MacNab, will have delivered this to you as per my instructions. I have my reasons for doing what I have done in the way I have done. Pray Jesus you will never need to understand why.
“Forgive me, though forgiveness is for the living and if you are viewing this, I am long past any human forgiveness. I was grossly remiss in not introducing myself. My name is Dr. Hannibal Rooke.” The aged, aged man leaned forward in his chair and beckoned the camera to close up. Enye felt drawn against her will into an intimacy of unfolding conspiracy. “My dear Mizz, forgive the use of the generic honorific, I am afraid I know very little about you, except that you are a MacColl, and, more significantly, a Desmond by blood. I am compelled to give you a warning. The female offspring of your bloodline possess, to a greater or lesser degree, a talent—yes, let us call it that; a talent it is, a gift, an art of a kind—that threatens to place you in very grave danger.