The Leto Bundle
Page 34
Yours, HF
Subject: *Trust me*
Date: Mon, 29 June 199– 17:37:27 +0100
From: kim.mcquy
To: Hortense Fernly
Hetty Hetty don’t run away from me and from the discoveries we’re making together – I should have guessed I should have known that you were in Shiloh to bring her back – that was what you were up to wasn’t it it gives me an uncanny feeling to think of the two of you together miles up in the sky – but I wish you’d told me – I wish *she*’d told me – sometimes I feel my contact’s dimming not brightening though I know now she’s so much bigger than the mask or the mummy or even the documents: she is history yes! History now!
the hswu website is currently getting around 300-350 hits a week – the database is growing, I’m trying for grants for someone part time maybe fulltime to monitor and respond.
it’s brilliant you’ll show me the new arrangement because our members are going to be very involved
can I come by on friday after school to see the plans – I could be with you by 4 – *thank you* for giving me another chance
I can’t wait Hetty – to see you to see her – her husk but you for real –
Kim
Subject: Plans
Date: Fri, 3 July 199– 22:48:22 +0100
From: kim.mcquy
To: Hortense Fernly
Dear Hetty the plans are sad really really sad – a ghastly dungeon that’ll put everybody off – kids won’t find it scary nice just sad – we must meet to discuss getting another set drawn up – I was glad to see them but shame you couldn’t be there Anna agrees with me though
how about a competition I thought EC rulings required open public accesss to such things ??? (These plans are going to have to be scrapped)
I know how busy you are but please – I’ll come by on Monday after school cheers Kim
Subject: Re: Plans
Date: Mon, 6 July 199– 09:13:45 +0100
From: Hortense Fernly
To: kim.mcquy
Kim, Wait a minute. I am busy today. What do *you* do when you’ve disruptive pupils in your class ?! Think of yourself in that light, and then of me in your shoes. Perhaps that will help you to be more moderate. And then, to use your own kind of language, chill out.
I was away seeing my husband, if you must know. The university where he teaches isn’t a million miles from where the Leto was being exhibited. We had a good time and a much needed rest.
As for the plans, I’m prepared to discuss them with you, calmly. We’re in a new phase of relations with our ‘customers’, as the Director keeps telling me. We’ve made huge strides but I know we’ve a long way to go. Still, you should be glad of what you’ve already achieved and the attention your wishes have been given.
I think the main reason that I’m so interested in your relation to the bundle, is that you’re openly making use of the past in the interests of the present.
[I must not get involved, Hortense said to herself, as she pressed down on the backspace delete key to remove her last sentence.]
Hetty
Subject: Leto’s return
Date: Mon, 6 July 199- 23:49:16 +0100
From: kim.mcquy
To: Hortense Fernly
Hello mrs fernly – I’m attaching the stuff I’m putting out on the web subject to your approval – of the historical bits – also my call to hswu to lobby the museum for a better show – yours (I mean it, just the same) Kim
Subject: Re: Leto’s Return
Date: Wed, 8 July 199– 13.21:24 +0100
From: Hortense Fernly
To: kim.mcquy
Dear Kim, The meeting over the proposals yesterday postponed the final decision over the Leto display. Everything’s up in the air again, you’ll be pleased to hear. There’s new room for discussion – and alternatives.
And by the way the report from the conservation lab after the show has come in – and it’s really quite exciting. That frogs story Meeks transcribed and translated for which there was no surviving manuscript that we could find *is* written *on the bands*, which is as I rather guessed, after you began to ask. Best wishes, Hetty.
Subject: Re: re: Leto’s return AND film!
Date: Wed, 8 July 199– 21:24:35 +0100
From: kim.mcquy
To: Hortense Fernly
Hetty – Excellent the proposals have been ditched now we can start again do something really good as for the conservation report – I knew it – from the very moment you said there was writing I understood what she’d been telling me about how she inhabited this other form how she turned herself into well – ink – don’t you remember – she shifts shape from one creature to another when she’s raped and the god pursues her until she turns on him all legs and tentacles and . . . squirts him Yess!
theres something else Gramercy Poule – heard of her? – wants to see me about a documentary she thinks she can get up and running – she’ll write a song for Leto she says and perform at the bundle’s inauguration she suggested getting away from it all to talk about it : she has a pile on Fellmoor – she didnt say that but you know what I mean – what do you think?
You could COME AWAY WITH ME! [now it was Kim’s turn to strike out a line.]
Term will be over soon for *two* whole months.
:-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-)
your kim
Subject: Re: Re: Leto’s return AND film!
Date: Thurs, 9 July 199– 17:29:46 +0100
From: Hortense Fernly
To: kim.mcquy
Dear Kim,
Do you really have to go that far to a meeting about a film that probably won’t happen? Can’t you see her here? We need to talk this over (as well as several other things). Can you meet me at The Blue Moon tomorrow? 5.30?
Yours, Hetty
Subject: Blue Moon
Date: Thurs, 9 July 199- 23:16:37 +0100
From: kim.mcquy
To: Hortense Fernly
excellent I’ll be there Kim
PART SIX
Freedom Days
1
An Interview, Cantelowes
The escalator was conveying Ella and Phoebe steeply to the surface, where the tepid light of an Enoch spring beckoned from the steel-girt porch of Cantelowes station; at a stately pace, it carried them past bright masks and gesturing bodies, some of them stuck in the eye or nose with dingy gum, two hundred feet up through a twisting wind that blew savage and hot in their faces. The plumes on the rim of the hills around Tirzah, flaring into the blackness of the curfew, leaped up again from over a decade ago behind Ella’s eyes as the underground blast singed her lids, chewed at the fastenings of her jacket as if to strip her, and flattened Phoebe’s long skirt against her legs. Ella gasped as she stumbled off the toothed step at the end of the flight and came to a standstill to get her bearings. It was much colder up above; the tunnels were so fuggy that passengers rode in a mute torpor, their feet in drifts of old papers, their heads into new ones, as they passed through the coiled guts of the capital.
Below, far below, the train rumbled off into the depths; Ella thought of it plunging into the darkness, snug in its runnel, leaving behind humans like warm worm casts.
They had an appointment, with the Advisory Council for Refugees and Asylum Seekers, an arm of the Bethesda Foundation. When the ticket collector inspected their tickets – the narrow turnstiles of the big central stations were yet to be installed in Cantelowes – Phoebe asked him the way by showing him the address on the letter inviting them to attend. He drew a crooked map on the paper, and carefully, mother and daughter emerged into the
weekday choke and roar of Cantelowes High Street. They turned past the dump bins of free newspapers for backpackers and travellers who’d driven six thousand miles from home in camper vans; they avoided, as they had learned to do, the sales pitch of the Voice of the Street vendor. But Phoebe couldn’t help catching the eye of the scarecrow huddled with his cur at the entrance by the ticket machines. She twitched at the sight of his impaled eyebrow, lip, and nostril: at the sight of opened flesh she felt her old wounds again under their new, smooth camouflage.
Together, they began to descend the shallow incline of the street towards the third turning right after the police station, as the guard had indicated. Ella was carrying a bundle of things she thought might interest the tribunal – no, they weren’t a tribunal, they had told her that through the interpreter, but an advisory body, there to help her. This wasn’t an interrogation; this was a helping hand. To her and Phoebe. So that they could argue their case to stay here, and thrive.
In the bag, she had some mementoes to help identify her and verify the odyssey she would be telling them: a piece of shrapnel taken from Phoebe after the attack; the scrap of silver threaded scarf; a sewing kit from the Metropole with one needle left and two mother-of-pearl shirt buttons; a calling card with the crest of the Grand Hotel in Pontona and the words ‘Your room has been serviced by . . .’ followed by a blank where the chambermaid’s name would be inscribed, and closing, ‘Thank You’.
Ella made her way down the narrow and crowded pavement. Everything was in motion, even the pavements seemed to be lifting with the energy breaking through from underneath. Until now her world had been set to a slow time, but now its rhythm was picking up, so that she couldn’t take in everything; the pendulum was speeding up so much that however much she told herself, Observe, pay attention, don’t miss a thing, because it’s always in the dead spot on the skin that the witchfinder finds you out, she couldn’t keep track of everything. A fragment floated into her mind from the long time ago when she was in Cadenas: Abbess Cecily telling her and her other ‘fillies’: ‘Keep your wits sharpened, so that your spirit stays alert, like the skins of horses trembling even when their deep flesh sleeps.’
But sights and sensations and sounds were flickering and blurring and flashing around her as she plunged through the crowd streaming this way and that in the street. She wasn’t alarmed; she was used to packs. But this feeling was different, different from the jostling, narrow streets of the Citadel, from the caravan of Feltimye, from the shanty agglomerations of Tirzah. This city was whirling, and it was catching her up into a different kind of motion, rising and spinning to its own loud but unheard tunes.
Phoebe moved more confidently, with a spring in her step, and a determined thrust of her small head and neat, square shoulders. Enoch’s pace and noise appeared to refresh her, as if, her mother thought with not a little fear, her new, man-made carapace needed to vibrate to the roar of a transport lorry, like the giant now delivering frozen shrink-wrapped slabs of bread and mince on the corner they were passing. Phoebe was flourishing in this climate of grinding levers, sirens wailing and blasting, gears meshing and phones squealing, exhausts belching; she trod with light feet on the rent tarmac, the cement-tiled pavements, breathing easily as the air combusted around her, turning from fuel to ash to dust. She was growing splendid: two inches taller since the operation, with a high look from under straight brows, and a quick, clever tongue. She hadn’t reacted to the idea of the fashion spreads with the enthusiasm The Fanfare expected.
‘Do I get to keep the clothes?’ she’d asked, not sulkily, but with determination.
‘Oh no!’ the fashion editor was shocked. ‘They’re samples, and we just borrow them for the shoot.’ She paused. ‘I might be able, I suppose, to arrange for you to keep one outfit . . .’
‘Do I get some dosh?’
‘Wow, you’re a quick learner,’ the journalist responded.
Later, to Steve Catnach, she admitted her disillusion. ‘They’re just in it for what they can get, aren’t they? You’d think, after all we’ve done for her . . .’
Ella wondered about Phoebe’s obstinacy.
‘Aw, Mum,’ said Phoebe, ‘I’m jus’ fed up with being gawped at.’
At the kerb of the second turning, as they waited to cross the road, Ella took in the heaps of fruits and pulses and greens set out on the stall beside her; some of them she could identify – though nothing was familiar – but in Market Cluer, the single village shop had never overflowed with so much variety and quantity. She stood amazed before the uncommon berries and globes and leaves and fronds and spurs and bunches in orange and scarlet and yellow and even blue. Now and then the stallholder flicked his hand at a solitary fly crawling wearily on a fruit; the insect immediately lumbered off, easily worsted.
Seeing Ella hanging back, undecided, he hailed her loudly, in the words of an old friend or even a lover, and the unaccustomed cheerful language of affection, which Phoebe ignored, curled through Ella like hot chocolate in cold weather. Then, on the pavement, by the barrow’s wheels, Ella saw a higgledy-piggledy pile of cartons spilling browning bananas with snapped stems, plump cabbages with yellowing outer leaves, tomatoes with puckering round their stalks, and some small oranges with wrinkled rinds. “2’nds” said the sign in clumsy black letters. ‘50p the lot.’ Later, on their way back, she decided, she’d bargain for some of this produce.
Phoebe was plucking at her sleeve. ‘Let’s cross, c’m’on.’ She was often hostile now, Ella found, to her mother’s dogged economies.
Phoebe had taken to ironing her own clothes before she went out; and was often critical of Ella’s wardrobe: ‘That get-up is sad,’ she’d say. ‘But your mother’s not exactly a happy sort,’ Ella once protested – it was the nearest she came to teasing this tough, newborn goblin daughter, in whom she recognised, however, something of her own sense of purpose, of her capacity to adapt to new occasions.
The cascading vegetable stand spelled affluence, plenty, surplus – such possibilities! Her heart lurched: was it possible that they would never be hungry again?
They crossed the road; by the recycling dump opposite, two men were bussing each other, dribbling cider from bottles they were waving towards their mouths. The green, black, maroon plastic bins were printed with the local borough’s name in lemon yellow, with a logo showing a carpenter’s square and a pair of scissors. The two men, heads down, shouting, butted each other and then fell into each other’s arms against the charity clothes container; they came down in a heap on to the tangle that had spilled on to the paving stones, into the dried puddles of former brawls and the smears of passing dogs’ piss and worse, and lay there quietly wound together, one with a babygro drifting across his face, the other with a six-year-old’s jumpsuit twisted round his slack fist; the Strongbow bottles dripped their last drops into their newfound bedding.
One called out to Phoebe’s long skirt as she went by, ‘Go on, love, give us a kiss.’ He rolled over and the other shouted, ‘You, with a mug like a pig’s bottom. Have a heart, have some respect. But she’s a real beauty, aren’t you darling?’
They walked on by, Phoebe haughty in contempt – though, again, Ella’s fingers itched to sift the rags. Later. In Enoch, even the refuse was rich, richer by far than the rubbish tips of the foreign corps that the Tirzahners picked over.
Reaching a bus stop, where the queue was growing, Ella watched as a mother bent down to reinsert a dummy in a toddler’s mouth; at her waist, between her top and the belt of her jeans, a wide smile of creamy skin appeared all of a sudden, with the plump pleat of her buttocks sliced by a black strap that slid into the crack: this strapped flesh smiled up at Ella.
Freedom, thought Ella. You can do anything here.
The young mother straightened, and Ella, her vigilance distracted by the face that belonged to the thong, was jostled by two ten-year-olds suddenly ejected from the newsagent’s by the bus stop.
‘See this sign,’ the newsagent said. He was turbaned
and bearded in suit and tie. He pointed to his window where in crooked capitals, Ella read ‘NO MORE than 2 children at a time’. ‘Can’t you read? Don’t they teach you anything at school? Why aren’t you there now anyway?’
The boys hung gleefully just out of reach, dancing on their feet as if they wanted to pee.
‘We don’t have school, and we’s goin’ to report yer,’ said the larger, freckled one, ‘You’s violent, you’s laid your fuckin’ ‘ands on us.’
‘Yeah, we’re going down the social services,’ said the other, ‘and tell on yer. Yer abusing us – y’re child abusers.’ He looked thrilled with this inspiration.
The newsagent’s daughter appeared by his elbow. ‘I know you lot. You’re not being let in here again. Let’s see your pockets . . .’
But the boys were off, one of them scooting out into the road in front of the bus that had just pulled up and hurling over his shoulder at his partner, ‘Chicken!’, so that the other child flew out in his wake and a messenger on a motorbike skidded and slewed across the tarmac hitting the big concrete planter where something spiky was growing out of a bed of empty crisp packets and small bottles of alcopops.
Phoebe pulled at her mother’s arm; sometimes, her former, scared, small girl self swam up again through the blaze of her prideful new being. She almost whimpered, but caught herself, as the rider tottered to his feet, apparently uninjured.
A woman came out of the discount shop with a folding garden chair and sat him down on it.