The Disestablishment of Paradise

by Phillip Mann

Yes they had stairs in their house, not like ours, and I don’t know why they had street lights, Jemima. Perhaps so that people could read on their way home from the library. Now hush and listen, because this is interesting.

  She tiptoed down to the bottom of the garden and went behind the blue waltzer, which was a big tree by now, and Mr Pescatti was thinking of cutting it down so he could see when Mr O’Dwyer was watching a tri-vid. Francesca looked and looked, but there was no one there. Then she heard a sound like mee mee – the sound a swing rope makes when first you swing on it – and she climbed up on the old fence and peeped over and there she saw something very strange. Four of the big red fly-by-night balloons were coming towards her, and dangling under them was Valentine, pulling for his life along a cord and getting closer. You see, earlier that day he had come over and attached a line to the fence to guide him. And he had practised for some time to see how many fly-by-nights he would need to float in the air and he found that four would carry him easily.

  He climbed down at the fence. Tied his balloons to a piece of wire he’d fashioned earlier. Climbed through the fence because he’d already put one of the palings on a hinge so he could get in and out quickly. They were in one another’s arms in a minute like that drawing I showed you by Mr Sergel where the lovers are eating one another! And then the two of them were in the shed. And she was only in her nightie. And then she wasn’t.

  What happened that night I do not know. Well, not exactly. And even if I did, I wouldn’t tell you, Jemima. Not yet anyway. But soon there came the dawn. Night’s candles were all burned out and sunrise turned the misty mountain tops to gold.

  She ran to her bedroom and stood at her casement and waved as he pulled himself over the dark ravine. The balloons he rode on were red as the blood that she found on her nightie and washed out herself with pride, her mother never knowing.

  That day she offered to clean out the shed and her father approved. She made improvements. Sharp things were hidden. A couple of cushions from the summer house made a big difference. A couple of plums picked at dawn set in a bowl. Clean water in a jug. A candle down low. Her father approved. ‘I can come here when your mother is in one of her moodies,’ he said. ‘And get some calypso in, girl, and it’ll be shining.’

  Valentine came the next night, and the next and the next, until soon his garden was running out of the big red fly-by-night poppies and he had to steal from the neighbours. But their love grew with every touch and sigh, and soon they became bolder. He came to her earlier and left later. They felt like gods in their fortune.

  And then one night, Mr Pescatti coming home late, smelling of beer and perfume, heard strange sounds in the shed while he was smoking his last pipe of calypso in the garden and relieving himself into the honeysuckle. He knew those sounds, heard his daughter sigh, saw the balloons, heard her love cry, went into the house and got down his gun, preparing to shoot the O’Dwyer son.

  But he was cunning too, as well as mean. He sat up all night in the garden, and when the dawn, in russet mantle clad, touched the misty mountain tops, he saw the young man kiss his fair Francesca, long and lingering, one hand on her breast and the other above holding the balloon tether. Then Valentine swung away and pulled himself along his line.

  Mr Pescatti hid until the girl was in her room and the boy was waving kisses from above the dark ravine, and then he shot him. Not him. He shot the balloons. One. Two. Three. Four. And the boy fell down into the stream and lay still among the rushes.

  Francesca looked down from her window and she heard her father laugh and saw his bald head below, pale as a graveyard mushroom. She took the big Bible, the one she was given when she was eleven after her first bleeding, the one with the wooden covers and the big crucifix, and she threw it down from the window as hard as she could and she sconed him.

  Then she ran into the garden, down to the fence, out through the hinged paling and down the path into the ravine. Behind her was confusion. The neighbours came running. Men in pyjamas. Women in nighties. They found the man stunned, the Bible, the gun and Mrs Pescatti crying that her daughter had gone from her bed and run away. No one knew what to think but they looked to one another in the knowing way that grown-up people do when they don’t want to say what they think but want you to know that they are thinking it. They did not think, however, to go looking behind the wise old waltzer or down in the muddy ravine.

  Francesca had found her Valentine. He was not dead but wounded. She plucked down osiers and wove a willow platform and placed him on it. She sang cantons, whatever they are, to the wanton air, whatever that is. And then she gathered nine fly-by-night balloons from a secret place she knew. Four for the head. Four for the feet and one for luck. She tethered them, and she lay down beside her Valentine. They folded together like hands at prayer, and she cast off.

  They floated up from the dark valley and into the bright morning sunlight. The neighbours looked in astonishment and pointed. People came out onto their balconies and saw the bright red balloons of the fly-by-night as they lifted high above the town. Dogs barked and children rubbed their eyes and stared up from their windows in wonder. And all the lovers of the town rang their bells lustily, laughed aloud and fell upon one another.

  The willow bed went higher. It drifted out over the sea like a small cloud, and then over the horizon like a lone bird, and was gone. Francesca and Valentine went to their own place, you see, a bay not far from here. And when they got there, they put down, built a house and lived happily ever after. And she had lots of babies and he wrote her lots of poems and made her laugh.

  And as for the families, the O’Dwyers and the Pescattis, they took their fences down and became friends. They even built a bridge between their gardens. They had learned their lesson, you see. They had both lost children, and that is a terrible thing for a parent. They left the wise old blue waltzer alone and the pull-line in place and the hinged paling so that they never would forget the time Francesca saved her Valentine.

  And that is why the fly-by-night is now called the Valentine lily, why the dashing silver stream that runs through New Syracuse is called the Valentine River and why every year, on the anniversary of that day, lovers of all ages write messages on hybla leaves to the one they love, tie them to Valentine poppies and send them up into the sky.

  And you can do that too, Jemima, when you get a bit older.

  Sleep now.

  End

  For a solution to the 12-ball problem on page 341, please visit www.phillipmann.co.nz, where you will also find more information relating to Paradise.

  Endnotes

  1. This is the plum referred to by Professor Israel Shapiro in Document 5, the plum he left to Hera in his will.

  2. See Document 6.

  3. See Document 6.

  4. Thomas Babbington Macaulay, ‘Horatius’, verse 27.

  5. See Document 7.

  6. See Document 11.

  7. See Document 5.

  8. Hera is referring to Sasha Malik, ‘If You Go Down to the Woods Today . . .’ here published as Document 8. She may also be thinking of the strange lines that Malik wrote at the end of her short love story ‘Getting Your Man’ (Document 2).

  9. See Document 12.

  10. For further information on Professor Shapiro and his addiction to the Paradise plum, see Document 5.

  11. See Document 2.

  12. Evidence of conflicting attitudes to the Michelangelo-Reaper can be found in Documents 2, 8, 9 and 10.

  13. See Document 6.

  14. See Document 11.

  15. Hera is referring to ‘Shunting a Rex’. See Document 6.

  16. Sasha Malik in ‘If You Go Down to the Woods Today . . .’ (Document 8) gives a humorous account of this kind of event.

  17. See Document 12.

  18. Waltzer or blue waltzer was the original name of the plant which later became known as the Tattersall weed.

  19. Rex was the early name for the Dendron peripatetica.

  20. The solar powered uti
lity tractor used on all farms.

  Also by Phillip Mann from Gollancz,

  available at www.sfgateway.com:

  The Eye of the Queen

  Wulfsyarn

  Master of Paxwax

  Fall of the Families

  Pioneers

  Escape to the Wild Woods

  Stand Alone Stan

  The Burning Forest

  Copyright

  A Gollancz eBook

  Copyright © Phillip Mann 2013

  All rights reserved.

  The right of Phillip Mann to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in Great Britain in 2013 by

  Gollancz

  The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

  Orion House

  5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane

  London, WC2H 9EA

  An Hachette UK Company

  This eBook first published in 2013 by Gollancz.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978 0 575 13264 1

  All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  www.phillipmann.co.nz

  www.orionbooks.co.uk

  Table of Contents

  Title page

  Dedication

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Part One The Political Tale

  1 Concerning Paradise

  2 Political Games

  3 A Moment of Madness

  4 Political Games – Concluded

  5 Sister Hilda Speaks of Hera

  6 Count Down to Vigil

  Part Two Alone on Paradise

  7 Elegie

  8 The Witness

  9 Lux in Tenebris

  10 The First Day

  11 The Call

  12 Tattersall Errant

  13 At the Heart of the Labyrinth

  14 Mack the Dreamer

  15 Ordeal in the Labyrinth

  16 Convergence

  17 Things Fall Apart

  Part Three Saving the Dendron

  18 A Team

  19 Abhuradin Worried

  20 A Moment of Peace and Reflection

  21 The Path of the Pendulum

  22 Dendron!

  23 First Close Encounter

  24 A Closer Encounter

  25 Sirius

  26 Third and Final Encounter

  Part Four Paradise Menacing

  27 Love – a Transcript

  28 The Courtesy of MINADEC

  29 Round the Head of the Horse

  30 Haven

  31 Concerning Mack

  32 The Watcher on the Heights of Staniforth

  33 Down the Tuyau

  Part Five Michelangelo-Reaper

  34 Reaper – Mack

  35 Reaper – Hera

  36 Disestablishment

  Documents

  1 ‘Concerning the Fractal Moment’, from the Daybooks of Mayday and Marie Newton

  2 ‘Getting Your Man’, from Tales of Paradise by Sasha Malik

  3 Extract from the official report into illicit trade in Paradise products: Paradise plum and Dendron

  4 ‘Agricultural Developments and a Recipe’, from the Daybooks of Mayday and Marie Newton

  5 ‘Plum Crazy’, from the private notebook of Professor Israel Shapiro

  6 ‘Shunting a Rex’, from Tales of Paradise by Sasha Malik

  7 ‘One Friday Morning at Wishbone Bay’, from the Daybooks of Mayday and Marie Newton

  8 ‘If You Go Down to the Woods Today . . .’, from Tales of Paradise by Sasha Malik

  9 ‘Child Spared Grim Fate’ by Wendy Tattersall, News on Paradise 27

  10 ‘The Pity of It’ by Wendy Tattersall, News on Paradise 28

  11 ‘Buster’, by Professor Israel Shapiro

  12 ‘How the Valentine Lily Got Its Name’, from Tales of Paradise by Sasha Malik

  Endnotes

  Also by Phillip Mann

  Copyright