“I’m not sure what half of it is to be honest.”
“Didn’t think so.”
“The things that man wanted. Can I ask what they were?”
She gave him a wide smile that showed almost all her pearly teeth. “Sure thing: you can ask.”
“But you’re not going to tell?”
“Aren’t you a bright boy! Top of the class for you.” Her smile stayed broad.
“Sorry, I shouldn’t have asked. Guess you have to protect your customer’s privacy.”
Her head wavered from side to side and she whined as she considered his explanation for her reluctance. “Sometimes, but I don’t have a policy. That’s not why I am not going to tell you. I don’t think I would keep a secret for him. It’s just that if I tell you what the things are, then you sure as Hell gonna then ask me what they are for. Then I gotta explain and look like a damn fool in front of you, not that I care much what you think, it’s just you have sceptic stamped on you like a hallmark and I’m sure it runs deep all the way, like rings of age in a tree. At my age I got myself lots of spare time, but don’t much care to be spending it talking in circles, if you don’t take offence at that.”
Martin nodded. Said goodbye and headed for the door, her sparkling eyes and fixed smile on him the whole while. He ducked under some hanging wind chimes and mobiles of beads and crystals, but he decided he must have knocked into what appeared to be something like a Native American dream catcher but more intricate than he had ever seen, as it had suddenly begun to swing and swirl above his head. He apologised over his shoulder to the woman, and quickly set about steadying the complex web of strings and precious looking hanging stones that hung over the door and disturbed the thick lazy atmosphere of incense above him into wildly snaking strands and tendrils.
“Wait…” The woman called. There was an insistence in her tone. “Come back here boy! Let me look at you.” Her voice was stern and urgent and he walked over to her ready to apologise again. The woman plucked up a jostick as thick as a cigar from the counter and stabbed and swirled it around his head leaving ghostly white trails around him. “Someone’s been putting some JuJu on you. You’re under a ‘fluence.” She dispelled the trails she had created by shaking a small velvet draw string bag amongst them. The clicking and clacking noises that emanated from within revealed that there were stones being tossed about inside the bag. “You been losing control of life?” she whispered. “Yes I can see it. Your will is diminished. You been feeling lost, boy? I see it is so. Boy, you are so lost.” She tutted and replaced the jostick on the counter and slipped the bag back into the pocket of her chunky knit cardigan.
“What do you know about that?”
“Sit here.” She pointed to a stool further down the counter, near to the archway with the table and crystal ball in it that Ebony had pointed to earlier. The woman moved down the counter so she would be in front of him. “Come, boy, sit. I aint gonna bite you. I know that something is influencing you. That’s what I know.” Martin sat in front of her, still unsure what was happening or what she was saying. “I can see it in the cards.” She pointed to hand-painted antique looking tarot cards arranged before her. “I see you have found your own future.”
He glanced down to the Mephisto’s tarot card that was still in his hand. “Oh that, I found that. Just wasn’t sure what it was.”
“Signs and portents. You know what it means?”
He shook his head and decided not to mention he was going to use one of her books to find out, suddenly frightened she would frown on him referencing her materials without a purchase. She took it. “The Tower. Your world has been turned on its head. Things are changing. The tower of order falls into chaos and despair.”
Agatha placed the card on the counter and tapped a card from her own cast deck. “I do the cards all day. To idle the time while I wait for customers willing to pay rather than browse. I do the cards on my customers while they shop, just for my own interest. Sometimes I choose who to read, sometimes the cards choose for me. My deck has been giving me cards all day I didn’t understand. Cards I now know are from your reading.” She pointed at a card she had played onto the counter earlier, it was another Tower card. “I did your cards when you came in see?” She cast both her hands over the cards before her as if she could read the air above them with her hands. “They knew you were coming. The JuJu on you is powerful, creating ripples…” She seemed to read his puzzlement as concern. She raised a quieting finger between them that asked for calm when there was no need, and suggested she had a solution. “What you need is tea.”
Martin neither wanted to socialise nor hear anymore. “That’s very kind of you…”
She shook her head and waved down his protestations like a grandmother well versed in ignoring grandchildren’s excuses about why they couldn’t stay longer, and started unscrewing jars and measuring out powders and dry herbs, none of which smelt like fresh loose tea. “Hush now. It’s special tea. A JuJu tea against the ‘fluence on you.” There was a click from under the counter as a hidden kettle was switched on.
Martin had visions of being force-fed some herbalist tea with LSD qualities. “I’m sorry, you were right about me being a sceptic.”
Her forehead crumbled into a frown and her eyes hardened. “I’m not gonna make a fool of you, if that’s what you’re worried about. So who’s gonna judge if you sit here with an old lady and listen and believe, and sup a little tea?” The toothy smile returned and her eyes brightened as she gathered her measured ingredients and began mixing them in a dish. “See; the cards already tell me you’re starting to believe… Your eyes have been seeing things, things that you aren’t dwelling on. You are being awakened to a world beyond your world.” She emptied the powders in a small earthenware teapot and produced a steaming kettle from under the counter, its domesticity incongruous within the strange little shop of otherworldly goods.
The woman’s act was good, and he could imagine that many a tourist or first-time visitor to her shop would be taken in by her theatrics and broad statements that served as ‘insight’. With Martin she was even luckier because her broad generalisation was true: there were lots of things about Ivory he couldn’t explain. “Without sounding rude I am in a new age shop, and it’s obviously my first time. So to say that I am being awakened to new things ‘beyond my world’ is not exactly going out on a limb.”
“There is a catalyst in your life working its JuJu on you.” Her finger travelled the lightning on the card again.
The hairs on his neck prickled. He had considered and described Ivory as a catalyst. “I don’t believe in magic.”
“You think that saves you? No, boy. Magic believes in you. That’s all it takes.” She cautioned with an air of revelation. “You were following Eban – THE GIRL!” She made the connection as if she had just uncovered a critical fact. “Yes I see her in the cards…” She tapped her version of the tower card and traced her finger through the shearing white light. She shook her head gravely, as if this had changed everything. “No tea for you, boy.” She pronounced darkly, her eyes as black as coal. “You are lost.”
Chapter Eighteen
Martin stubbed his finger onto Richard’s doorbell for a third time and heard its muffled chime from outside. He stepped onto the pavement for a glance up at his window, sure that the thick muslin had been displaced since he had arrived. He stepped back onto the step to listen for any movement before prodding the doorbell again, this time he held it firm for a full minute in the hope of irritating Richard into answering. The door neighbouring Richard’s flew open and a scruffy young man in sports clothing leaned out.
“Mate, if someone doesn’t answer it means they aren’t in.”
“Sorry.” Martin flushed.
“Yeah well, I’m sorry I have a flat with thin walls.” He slammed the door behind him.
Martin looked about him consciously but none of the passers by on the busy street showed any interest. He pulled his coat close to him against a cool bree
ze and looked up to Richard’s flat one last time. The sky was grey with dark clouds and the promise of rain, but an area of cloud over the apex of the flats’ roof was darker and shifted suddenly in the gust, and he realised it was smoke, a column of smoke anchored behind the flats. Probably burning refuse from one of the shops, but it lead him to wonder if the back of the flats might be accessible. He could scale the fire escape to Richard’s flat and that might force Richard from hiding and to let Martin in. Martin walked to the end of the block, rounded the corner and found a wide and well-maintained paved alleyway servicing the rear gardens of all the shops. From what he could see over low walls or through chain-link fences, most of them were concreted over or used to house extensions or storage. Counting the rear facings as he walked he soon found the back of Richard’s flat behind a high wall with a full-size gate and a sign warning against trespass.
Through the gaps in the bars he could see the fire escape, but could only make out the beginnings of the windows of Richard’s flat. Martin gripped the bars of the gate and sank against them. Richard was the only person in his world that he could talk to about what was happening. The wind picked up again and the smoke curled around the wall and into his face. He coughed and spluttered and winced against the smoke that tickled his throat and pricked at his eyes. He stood back until the smoke cleared from the gate and then looked back into the concrete courtyard. Orange flames sporadically licked at the air above a metal bin crammed with large sketch pads and canvases smashed to fit the receptacle. The new art materials the blonde boy had mentioned Richard buying. Martin staggered back from the smoke as it shifted back into his face again and studied Richard’s unreachable flat from the far-side of the alley. Richard had spoken of his confusion and doubts that had come around from his first encounter with Ivory. He had warned Martin of its dangers and now Richard had fallen for them himself. Martin finally accepted that he also faced the same fate.
Alone with his situation and with no idea what to do next he found himself driving to the road next to Ivory’s and watching from the alley as he had done before. He waited for Ivory to return to Ebony with the money he had left her that morning and any earnings she had made that day. He had been tempted to not leave the money. He had produced his wallet and replaced it in his pocket several times before plucking the wad of notes out and throwing them down on the kitchen table in self-loathing. He had left her without saying goodbye or the pretence of explaining that the money was to replace her missed earnings and not payment for her body, although if it had been to pay for sex she had earned it the night before.
Martin had thought that after knowing she had been with others in the day he wouldn’t be able to touch her himself. Yet he had wanted to see her face in bed, to see if the face she wore with him was really just the mask she wore with all those that paid to satiate their lust for her. With each twitch of expression on her face in response to his efforts, his ardour, had become more vigorous and aggressive in trying to make her face change, to ensure that her face was genuine passion and ecstasy. During his third and final effort he had ended up behind her, and although the room was dark the weak light from the street picked out the details of her face and the opaque glass of the wardrobe doors had reflected it. Despite the groans of pleasure he could hear from behind her, her face had been a blank canvas devoid of emotion.
His hope, or his delusion, of breaking her from her trade and luring her into loving him died with his passion in that moment. He couldn’t bring himself to finish with her. Couldn’t even touch her that morning. He didn’t feel angry with her, only at himself for still wanting her.
There was still the chance that it was her work that had conditioned her into feeling nothing and acting in lovemaking. The resentment that knotted his intestines and twisted his gut was for Ebony for turning someone so ethereally beautiful into something so emotionally flawed. It was Ebony’s work that forced Ivory into her work, and her duty to Ebony that would come between any chance of her falling in love with him.
Ivory arrived at her home after two hours of Martin waiting, and her return to her home was a wound reopened. With the same wariness of being followed she entered the gate and reached into the letterbox to retrieve the key. He thought it strange that she didn’t keep her key with her, but then in working the streets she was vulnerable, and he supposed that if she was robbed of her earnings she and Ebony might have some comfort in knowing that their home was safe from uninvited guests.
She disappeared within the house and after half-an-hour she left in the direction that she had come, although today he doubted if he would find her at his house when he returned. Sure that Ebony would tell Ivory of his visit the day before and that Martin knew she still worked the streets. The duplicity would be over. For a moment Martin wished that he didn’t know what she did when he wasn’t with her. Ignorance would mean the charade could continue, but he knew that although fantasies could be infinite, his finances would not be. Tonight would be the last night he could pay for her to stay off of the streets and the last night he could pay for her to stay with him. After tonight Ivory would be gone. All he would have left would be questions. Questions that were impossible for Ivory to answer and that Ebony would refuse. The age-darkened house stood as a keeper of secrets.
Chapter Nineteen
Martin checked his rear-view mirror, seeing that there were no other cars behind him he eased his foot off the accelerator and rode slowly down his road. He was in no hurry to return home. He had called in sick at work. He had once considered witnessing King’s death to be the worst thing that he had ever experienced, and it had been difficult enough to hold it together and maintain the status quo, but unimaginably yesterday he had experienced, and been involved in, far worse events. Work would have been impossible to focus upon today. He had not spent the day with Ivory as he might have done a few days earlier before he had realised the charade. He hadn’t even told her he was taking a sick day. He had driven around London, stretched his legs on Hampstead heath and sat atop Parliament hill, and looked out over the city spread below him. The grand view of the city’s monuments and landmarks had always impressed him and this spot had been a place to escape any troubles he might have had. From this vantage point he could see the whole of London, his world, from afar and everything seemed knowable and understandable, and he took comfort from being outside the world and looking in upon it with the knowledge that although he might not be connected to them, there were millions of others struggling with their own personal dissatisfactions and difficulties and he was not alone.
Today the swathe of the city had appeared dwarfed by grey clouds that built from the horizon into black tumultuous ranges. It was not only the threat of a storm that robbed him of his comfort. He had returned to Ebony’s again yesterday, intending to discover what drove Ebony and Ivory to live the life they lived and for what purpose. As a result of that fateful visit, the world was now a different place. In Ebony and Ivory’s suburban corner of London, within a quiet street, indiscernible within the vast panorama that had stretched out before him he had encountered things beyond his comprehension. If Ebony’s revelations yesterday were to be believed then he finally had answers, although they were answers he could never have imagined and would rather not have, it was knowledge that opened him up to a world beyond the one that he understood. The world he had looked upon that afternoon had not been one of familiarity that connected him with his surroundings; it had been a landscape of potential frightening secrets and unnameable terrors.
The mountainous clouds had spread across the city like a pyroclastic flow over the course of the day, as though the world were growing darker with his awakening. The broad stripe of sky visible from within the trench of the terraced houses in his street was a slowly churning flow of dark clouds. Martin glanced from the sky to the road and his eyes were caught by a face in the mirror: lacerated and grisly with beady black eyes and a mocking grin. He turned sharply to the shadowy back seat from where the smile came, but fou
nd nothing but the clutter of the parcel shelf and his coat propped up on the backseat. Back in the mirror he saw that the simulacra face had gone from the gloom, but for the voice in his mind; “We are the same, you and I.” He was struck with terror, not at the voice but that he knew that he was worse than his father and King.
He drew the car to a stop beneath the orange glow of a streetlight and sat for a moment staring up at his home. He had been surprised that Ivory had been waiting for him at his home the previous night. Ebony had told her that Martin had been to see him and that he now knew she was continuing to sell herself. Ebony had said to Martin that while he paid her she would continue to stay with him, and he had been right. Why should she feel uncomfortable about her deceit being uncovered when Martin would actively provide for it to continue anyway? He had left her the money that morning as before. However, this had not been a payment to ensure that she would return but was pretence, because after yesterday things would be different.
He stepped out of the car and the static heat hit him as though stepping from a plane into a tropical climate. There was no breeze and seemingly no air. The warmth brought his blood closer to the surface of his skin and caused the wounds he had received yesterday on his ankle, hand and ear to throb. After his ordeal he had realised that he couldn’t have hidden his wounds from Ivory, and he had had no choice but to come home bloody from his ordeal. He had lied and explained that he had been set upon by the pimps again. She had looked concerned, he had been unsure if it had been for him or for Ebony’s safety, as the pimps knew where she and Ebony lived. Her fear that the pimps might set upon Ebony could prove useful later. He was glad he had used the pimps lie, as it allowed him to exhibit his frayed nerves and shock from his actual experiences.
He couldn’t bring himself to have sex with her last night, not after what had happened. He hoped she would have thought it was the shock of the pimp’s attack that had doused his lust and that he hadn’t given himself away by not performing. He couldn’t face being intimate with her now that he knew what he knew: she frightened him.
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