The director attempted to break in: ‘Your enthusiasm is admirable,’ he said to Kim. ‘We might wish dusty old collections caused such excitement all the time.’
Kim spun around; his face was shining with fervour, his eyes dilated into polished mirrors. He pointed at the director, ‘You said there were odds and ends, that there were wrappings – but what are they, what’s on the wrappings? She said there were documents like the one she was talking about. What are they? What do they say?’
He swivelled so that his finger was stabbing at the air between himself and Hortense.
She found herself nodding. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘There are more manuscripts, plenty more.’
Kim grew very quiet, and with him the remaining supporters in the hall went silent too. They were all gathered now near the front, guards hovering around them, trying to usher them out.
The director began moving to the steps that led down from the podium.
‘What,’ asked Kim, ‘what do they tell us?’
‘Look,’ the director cut in, as he jerked his head towards Hortense to follow him out of the hall. ‘I’ve said we’re full of admiration for your keen interest and we shall be doing everything we can to deepen our analysis of the Leto Bundle.’
Now he was using the phrase. Hortense leant her head towards the leading troublemaker as she sped in the director’s wake out of the lecture room. Conciliatory, she whispered, ‘Mummy wrappings often have prayers and charms and magic formulae and those sort of texts written on them. Get in touch with me if you really want to know more—’ She took her business card from her wallet and handed it to Kim.
As soon as they reached the offices behind the door marked Private Museum Staff Only, the director commented, ‘Wasn’t that a little unwise? He’s a nutter and clearly an attention-seeker and you’d do well to steer clear.’
Hortense shrugged. ‘I’m hardly going to be making an assignation with him in a dark alley. I’m actually pretty intrigued, myself. Nobody’s looked at that stuff since forever. It’s been lying around in the basement, mouldering. Besides,’ she added, almost gaily, ‘it’ll give a new twist to the notion of Outreach, won’t it?’
‘I knew it,’ Kim McQuy was crying out as he left the Museum, two or three of the faithful still attached to him. ‘I knew it! She’s here! She’s with us! Here, now, everywhere!’
5
‘The Angel of the Present’
Voice of the Street, a newspaper hawked by approved beggars on the pavements of Enoch, ran a front page on the unprecedented popular interest in the so-called ‘Helen’. This organ showed a familiarity with the circumstances that none of the broadsheets’ journalists possessed or were able to acquire, it seemed, as they remained torn between contempt at the credulity of some people and outrage at a public institution’s fraud. In the tabloids, the phenomenon was welcomed more warmly: it was seen as another instance of the new loosened-up sense of national identity, the response of a country newly in touch with its feelings. But Voice was closer to the bush telegraph on the pavements, the tube, on the escalators, in the bus queues and the Post Office lines, and it ran the first interview with Kim McQuy, the schoolteacher from Cantelowes.
Gramercy Poule, in the country where she was trying to tone herself up before leaving on her two month tour, her first for several – was it really five? – years, was reading that issue of Voice one evening, after Monica, her manager, had picked it up for her at the station before leaving the capital, from a stubby teenage girl with schoolgirl bunches and a sniffle hanging in her nose ring.
Fellmoor, where Gramercy Poule had bought land under a toothed ridge of the Nine Maidens, was protected by its status as a National Park: it was still a wilderness, where past attempts to settle or enclose the ground, to till or even, on the higher reaches, to graze, had collapsed in rocky ruins; the stones marched down to reclaim their territory and to trap wanderers, it was said, on moonless nights into dancing till they also turned to stone, like the young revellers who had given their names to the peak, and had been punished for their wantonness. Fellmoor had once been a pious and austere community, where fine gentlemen were lynched for attempting to make changes in the liturgy of local chapels.
On Fellmoor, Gramercy Poule exchanged her red patent stiletto thigh-high boots, her bespoke gold lace shifts, her glitter blusher and violet eyeshadows, her cross-laced camisoles and her luxury hose for waxed weatherproofing and thick socks and walking boots that braced her ankles so that not even the most hostile stone could crack her bones. She never wandered very far up on the moor, as the incline taxed her smoker’s lungs, and she did not want to heal them, not even with country air, for her singing was distinguished by her high-pitched emphysemic whisper. But she could also walk out to the bottom of her garden in the night beyond the lights of the house and stand before the slow strong black rise of the moor. Out there, it was solid and implacable, she felt, as a minor chord hanging in space when the amp’s been turned right up, and she could let herself fall upwards into the darkroom of the universe, where the sky unfurled like God’s photographer’s hood and gradually, by the glinting liquid stars, allowed a ghostly picture to reveal itself: in the summer, flaring with comets, in the winter louring with inky clouds chased across out to sea by the wind.
One of her songs included her recordings of the moor’s silence in the dark; it only seemed silent. It thrummed and rustled and twitched and moaned, to her ears as she watched and listened in the night, and to the sensors of her machine that quivered and jolted to the pulses of the landscape’s consciousness.
What Kim McQuy had to say was crazy. ‘Listen to this, Mon,’ she called out to her manager. She began to read aloud: ‘Kim McQuy is the kind of sharp outer Enochite you’d expect to be thrashing out the latest team changes in his local football club rather than spooking us with X Files-type stories. “I’m not a believer, not at all. I’m not a Jesus freak!” Kim told the Voice reporter. “This isn’t a religious experience, this has nothing to do with God or the Virgin Mary or Princess Diana being in heaven. This is History. History Starts With US – that’s the message. HSWU – by the way, say ‘zwu’ to rhyme with ‘who’ – is the way things are and the way things were. Okay, I got to know about it through unusual experiences, but, you know the stories: Newton’s apple, Eureka!, the sudden flash in the night – we’ve all had that.”
‘Kim McQuy maintains that he was surfing the web late one Saturday night – he looked at his watch afterwards (“Don’t forget, I’m a teacher, I keep time!”) and it was 2.20 a.m. He’d been looking at the CNN news and visiting lots of homepages for a laugh. He doesn’t do rooms, he says – no weirdos in his hair. His conversation with “Helen” was the very first time he’d had a two-way experience on the net. And no, he wasn’t on anything: he claims he doesn’t do “any of that stuff”. (We’ll be watching you, Kim!)
‘So “Helen”, the auncient baebe of the National Museum, spoke to our Kim at 2.20 a.m. last Sunday morning, and this is what she’s supposed to have revealed:
‘“I came from somewhere, but now I’m everywhere –
My everywhere is your here and now –
I am the angel of the present time.”’
‘Hey!’ put in Monica. ‘That sounds familiar.’
‘Doesn’t it?’ Gramercy Poule chuckled. ‘Shall we take him to the cleaners for plagiarism?’
Monica took Voice from Gramercy Poule, who put her feet up on her big, deep sofa with the soft crewel bolsters in front of her woodburner and closed her eyes.
‘I don’t know whether I’m more pissed off or flattered – go on.’
Monica began reading: ‘“I felt I was going crazy,” says Kim. “The face was speaking to me and I was so stunned that I couldn’t take down what she was saying. So I asked her to repeat it – actually, I ordered her to, and she smiled back with her eyes, the way they have lights in them, and she did say it again. Only this time she added:
‘“I am one of the scattered ones,
I am the angel of the present.”’
‘It’s my lost peoples song!’ She took the paper back and scanned the words again. ‘Not word for word, exactly. But Close. My phantom ship idea, all over again, except he’s left out the Flying Dutchman and the sirens, calling the way.’ Gramercy hummed a bluesy bar and then laughed. ‘What a nerve.’
Monica resumed: ‘Kim McQuy contests that it’s a bit – well – incredible – that she was speaking English, but says she was stiff and had an accent, as if it wasn’t her first language. “It’s the international language – everyone has to speak English now – it’s the language of science, air traffic control, doctors, and parliaments all over the world. So it’s logical she should speak it. She knows what’s going down to be understood – globally.’”
‘Fucking annoying Voice didn’t catch he’s taken my words. Honestly. Give them a call, Mon. Tell ’em.’
Monica read on, ‘Kim waxes quite emotional, however, about what the message is from the Lady of the Scattered Ones, the Angel of the Present, Lady Homeless (take your pick). This issue, as you all out there know, matters quite a lot to Voice. “She’s a figure for the way we live now,” he says. “That’s what she means when she says, ‘My everywhere is your here and now . . .’ She’s like millions of people who make their homes where they can. She’s an alternative story, that’s not about people springing up here and being rooted – she’s about now, she’s about the new Albion, the Albion of the planetary diaspora, of the lost peoples.”’
‘There it is! What did I say? Bloody hell.’
‘Outrageous,’ Monica continued, ‘If Kim McQuy’s an opportunist, he hasn’t chosen an easy row to hoe: nobody wants more aliens, refugees or immigrants. They don’t want the ones who are already here. So is this weirdo in a suit a representative of the people in the making? Is he just a young man in a hurry? Has he got his eye on politics? What’s his game?’ She paused and put down the paper. ‘Listen, Gramercy, if he’s putting it out on his website with music, we’ll really do him over.’
Gramercy Poule replied, slowly, ‘They were impressed by him, a bit against the grain though, don’t you think?’ She took the paper and turned to the article’s continuation. ‘They even finish the piece saying, “We were prepared to find an X Files crazy, but Kim McQuy may be more interesting than he first sounds. Watch this space.’” She leant back, holding the photograph at arm’s length and sizing up Kim as he stood, unsmilingly, arms by his sides, on the steps of the Museum.
‘He’s quite dishy, actually. Sort of pretending to be straight. What d’you think he is? Indian? Half this and half that, no? Needs a bit of restyling – new hair, new clothes, you know. I think, Mon, we should make an approach. See where he’s at. See how he reacts when we get on the line.’
So, when Monica rang TB later that evening to check that he and the equipment had arrived safely at Gramercy’s first stop on the Shiloh tour, they knew almost instantly what it was that Dr Hortense Fernly was conveying alongside Gramercy Poule’s lighting equipment, amplifiers, synthesisers and musical instruments.
6
A Tirzahner Baby
Kim McQuy took the short-term contract teaching post offered at Cantelowes Primary School straight after finishing his training, and then stayed on because he liked the sense of valiant urgency this first job gave him. The school occupied a purpose-built redbrick gabled Edwardian enclave behind a narrow yard and a pair of cast-iron gates that still said Girls on one side and Boys on the other. The gasometers that had fuelled the capital in the last century were visible above the high wall; when Kim first started working there at the turn of the Eighties, he would watch them out of the classroom window: he’d notch a column in his mind’s eye, keep his gaze steady and blink hard, then open them again to see how far the drum had lifted under the slow pressure of the gas piped through from the cold sea far away. He’d show the children how the great city of Enoch was powered by invisible essences, flowing near them.
The drums no longer rose within their armature’s scarlet and black battledress, but Kim McQuy still felt the stir of air around him, fuelling his energies. He could look out and hear the spirits of the city’s past lives jostling in Enoch’s clay beneath him; the dead were mutating below, like mulch, like peat, setting will o’ the wisps flickering in his head, leaping inside him in methane tongues of fire. These angelic exhalations buoyed him; he was lifted on the blue, cold energy of the spirits rising from the thousands of the nameless stacked under the crust of the world, who were calling out to him.
The school stood in the heart of the heart of Enochite blight, where the railways converged on the metropolis and the crisscrossing bridges sheltered shanties where the surprising yellow smiles of lemon slices lay scattered among the runaways’ sodden duvets. The original brick building had been sporadically extended during the last fifty years and accretions of prefabs on concrete rafts filled the space back towards the flats where most of the children lived. Long, low, four-storey developments, they’d been put up in the reaction against tower blocks. Small, boxed-in, tiered terraces for gardens faced south, away from the school; these bloomed mostly with washing, with children’s football gear in preternaturally bright fast colours, like spring bulbs in a junk mail garden catalogue. On the other side, outdoor galleries with thick stone parapets linked one neighbour to another, their front doors side by side, lit with storm lanterns where midges wriggled. These warrens were planned as arks for the city; the names of the blocks were painted on their sterns, the estate’s blank end walls; they commemorated civic-minded benefactors, all forgotten.
It wasn’t by any means one of the worst times for the estate, so Kate Daiges, his head teacher, told Kim when she gave him the job; most of the children were very young, too young to make trouble. The average age in the whole warren, she reckoned, must be around thirty, and she hadn’t a clue what was going to happen when the kids needed secondary schooling.
Kim’s classroom overlooked the rear of the estate: huge wheeled steel refuse bins, and garage space, let to commercial interests. The refuse lorries clattered into the alley below two days a week; grinding and rattling as they reversed down the narrow passage, spearing the bins on to prongs and hoisting them till they tipped and spewed their contents into a gnashing maw. When a family had moved on, leaving a heap of furniture, a busted sofa, a beer carton of discarded clothes and toys, the rubbish men would lash an abandoned stuffed teddy to the snout of the cart, beside more soiled toys and a sex doll or two. Then some of his class would sigh, longing to have the soiled animal for themselves.
Lessons had to stop while the process was completed, but Kim considered it good for his class to watch, to see the services that kept the city working. Besides, the view into the wings and the underside of things interested him more than the events in the limelight; if he hadn’t taken up teaching, he might have become a health and safety inspector, pushing through to the scullery at the back where the young illegals at the sink were being exploited, uncovering the dummy fronts of shady enterprises, enforcing decent standards on corrupt employers and entrepreneurial pressgangers.
His bus-and-tube journey to school took him up to an hour and a half from the northern suburban home of his childhood, where he left magenta cherry trees garish as food colouring and front lawns edged with careful, low maintenance shrub planting, and travelled into the level, broad brownfield sites of the inner city. Cantelowes extended behind the mainline station to the canal; this had once carried a lot of traffic, bringing coal and other essentials to the city from distant mines; it was now used mostly by pleasure craft, its dingy waters death to all but the most tungsten-gilled dingy dabs; scraps of boys angled for a catch, rain or shine. Its waterside had been fitfully regenerated by private enterprise over the last five years: near the school there was a new pub on the wharf called The Fancy, a favourite watering hole for backpackers; ramshackle camper vans were parked on the cobbled alley leadi
ng to its canal frontage and trading was good-humoured, if slow, between owners who had come to their journey’s end and others, the customers, ready to embark on world travel. Kim had listened at first as they swapped boasts of mushroom trances on rose-coloured beaches and sulphur baths on the slopes of volcanoes, aired ancient visa problems and crowed indignation at dry or homophobic cities, at societies with laws about hair length. These were people who thought the solution to every problem was moving on. They chased the exotic from one port to another; but Kim wanted whatever the opposite of exotic was – could something be inotic? For Kim the issue was how to belong somewhere and then stay put.
The tube escalators at the nearest stop to the school came up inside the station, opposite two hexagonal, bubblegum-pink kiosks which had recently gained their franchises to operate; pointy pavilions from a video game featuring mailed terminators, they winked contemporaneity among the scumbled greys of commuters, luring them to counters laden with multicoloured pic ’n’ mix sweets, to windows where a cancan of amputated forelegs kicked to display chequered, pictured, fishnet, spangled and diamanté backseamed tights, alongside lopped torsoes displaying daisy-stitched, dimity and lace knickers and bras and slips to match.
Kim walked across the concourse of the station each morning to the exit at the side, nearest Cantelowes Primary; he’d buy Voice of the Street from the vendor he knew, but refuse the begging of the new arrivals in the city who’d flopped down on the ground for the night, sleeping on their bags as all benches had been removed in order to discourage dossing. Some of them weren’t much older than the children he taught. Outside the station, across the main artery, there were agencies for them: ‘Alone in the City?’, ‘Contact’, ‘Youthline’. Occasionally Kim saw railway police working in pairs questioning the youngsters; but their numbers remained steady. Runaways. They were multiplying: quarrels at home, boredom in the country brought them to the bright lights, big city and dispersed them.
The Leto Bundle Page 5