‘I like Sibyl.’ Otis is in reflection-mode, arms crossed at the chest, chin nestled in the palms of her long, elegant hands. ‘She’s like grandma. I’ll bet she even has a jar full of those orangey cream biscuits. It’s sad she had to die.’
‘She didn’t die,’ Milo counters. ‘She flittered into the Void. It’s totally different.’
Amelia stretches, pulls a ragged fringe from her eyes.
‘What’s the third hazard?’ she asks.
‘Difficult,’ I tell them sombrely. ‘Very difficult.’
The rose leopard travelled quickly now, borne forward by the giant forces of star-gravity and the spirit of the Enlightenment. She knew that the Swicks would probably be ahead of her because she had lost time battling those devious Songmasters. Still, she was progressing well and had renewed hope that she could somehow save the Mother Star, when, suddenly —
She was picked up — smashed, and flattened.
She felt her breath go oomph and the aches in her body bruise instantly, realised that she had encountered something that was very, very hard.
But what? When she gathered her wits and looked in front of herself for a solid object, there was nothing there.
‘Oh,’ said the rose leopard, nursing a sore shoulder. ‘Oh dear. I suppose this must be the third hazard: the Swinging Walls of Cosmosia. Lucky I didn’t touch the edges, or else …’
Swinging walls are like huge flat planes that arc back and forth randomly. This, and the fact that they are invisible, makes them difficult to pierce. They’re only found in a few sections of the Spectrum, usually gathered around something of value such as a Mother Star. The area known as Cosmosia is the final section of space in the Bright Universe. It is hot and empty, without moons or comets or even asteroids, without anything except the Swinging Walls.
‘Like giant axes,’ says Milo happily. ‘That is so cool.’
‘Shut up and listen,’ admonishes his sister.
Before she had set out on her journey, the rose leopard had been told about the Swinging Walls of Cosmosia by kind-hearted Charyb.
‘You cannot hope to go through them,’ the Eternal had said. ‘It is impossible. They cannot be seen and they strike at random. Those who have previously risked breaching the Swinging Walls have been proven to be fools — one touch of those sorcerous edges and they were instantly vaporised. No, there is only one way through. You must break the Enigma that controls them.’
The rose leopard must have looked puzzled because Charyb, who hadn’t been going to say any more, gave her a funny stare then continued: ‘All Swinging Walls are controlled by a pre-determined Spectral Enigma. Only one who has the Enlightenment may solve this. When you reach Cosmosia, I shall telepath the Enigma to you — but it is up to you to solve it, then to focus the solution upon the Swinging Walls. Then, and only then, will they cease … and thus, you will be provided with safe access to our beloved Mother Star.’
Now the rose leopard stood before the Swinging Walls of Cosmosia, waiting for Charyb’s message. And sure enough it came, entering her consciousness as simply and efficiently as breath enters our lungs. She closed her eyes, relaxed her body and allowed the message to fully transmit. It read:
How big is infinity?
She concentrated again, waited for a second reading to confirm that the message was correct.
How big is infinity?
‘Oh my,’ thought the rose leopard, ‘that is a particularly difficult Enigma. How do I solve that?’
She hovered a while and reasoned further. She could offer a massive number as the answer, the most massive she could ever think of — like a zillion gumphillion oberdillion enormotrillion cubic kilometres — but the trouble with numbers was that you could always add another integer. So the largest number in the Spectrum couldn’t be ‘infinity’ because someone could always just shrug, look superior and say ‘+ 1’, and that would be the end of that.
She thought some more. She could offer a comparison, like ‘infinity is as big as Eternity’ — but any sentence with ‘as big as’ in it was only going to be beaten by another sentence with a more impressive, more calculated ‘as big as’ in it. So that was no use.
Then she thought she could say ‘infinity is the biggest’ — but that wasn’t necessarily true because there might be a place beyond the Spectrum, beyond even their imaginations, that was bigger than infinity, a place of such breadth and width and depth that it had yet to be contemplated.
In which case she would never pass through the Swinging Walls.
Then she had it — the simplest of simple answers came to her in a giddy rush of clarity. The rose leopard allowed herself a slight smile, then once again she called up the Enigma:
How big is infinity?
She closed her eyes, rediscovered her answer and beamed it in the direction of the notorious Swinging Walls of Cosmosia:
Bigger.
Then quietly, tentatively, she resumed her passage towards the brilliant radiance of the Mother Star — and this time, nothing stopped her.
‘Bigger.’ Infinity is bigger than anything we can think of, bigger than anything we can see or hear or touch. She had defeated the third hazard. She had solved the Spectral Enigma.
I stop then because uncannily the light has changed. When I look up I see that Francesca is standing in the doorway, her shadow as sleek and sharply contoured as the blade of a knife.
‘Oh, it’s Mum,’ says Amelia, both surprised and confronted, but I am already staring shamelessly at the woman in the purple velvet dress and black traveller’s coat, realising — perhaps for the first time — how much Francesca and Kaz did actually resemble each other, how they shared the same spaghetti-thin lips pushed slightly forward in contemplation, the same intelligent eyes that glittered like polished gemstones, the same brittle spider-arms lined with cobalt veins, but most of all the same emotional atmospheres around them, a deeply ironic mix of poise underscored by fragility. The image flits irresistibly through me: insects, I think, both of you — a pair of miniaturised perfections sailing along on a wet leaf, drinking in the world as you await the inevitability of predators. And what of me, what of sprawling raw-boned irreverent me? What of aimless drifting disrupted me, the unoriginal writer who re-creates someone else’s verbose detritus in summer-storm flashes, the unemployed wordsmith who rejected the sorts of static jobs and lives that most of us are not free to reject and who is probably, in real-world terms, chronically unemployable? Am I one of those predators? Now, or before? Have I always been?
‘Um, hallo,’ says Francesca. She sounds nervous. ‘Sorry to … well, I did ring the door-bell but there was no answer.’
‘We were down here,’ Amelia tells her curtly. ‘You can’t hear much down here.’
Francesca nods gently, reminds me of one of those Renaissance portraits that features a duchess with whimsical smile and ermine-lined mantle. For a moment we are all snared; her in the incongruity of the barn’s entrance with its sagging beams, splinters and drooping spider-webs, us in a now-familiar tableau of story-telling. The golden light of a pre-autumn day drifts among us; elsewhere, I am certain that I can hear the distant humming and wailing of other civilisations.
Amelia stands, rubs the dullness from her limbs.
‘Come on.’ She pulls the children up. ‘There’s chocolate hidden in my bedroom for the first person who can find it.’
There is a pause as they register the cue then they rush out, whooping like released prisoners. Yet, I think, each seems to leave a defined space, an emptiness which will, in the future, reaccept their bodies as easily as young fish slide between knobs of coral.
Diminishing sounds, followed by an onset of silence.
‘Well,’ I say, trying to ignore the looming sub-text: Look at what you’ve let yourself become … belladonna, a rare and poisonous beauty …
‘Well,’ she agrees and I think I can guess the corresponding sub-text: The flower that I should never have allowed you to touch …
Caugh
t within the flux, we eye each other cautiously.
‘I — Vince, I don’t want any more bad blood,’ she says hesitantly.
Bad blood. I smile at that; it’s a brilliant euphemism. I find you distasteful, you find me odious, together we are clashing karma, an unsavoury melange, but it’s just bad blood. Never mind the indescribable — that once we spent three months shagging (By Appointment Only) because I was idiotic and you were disingenuous. Never mind the fact that we pitter-patter around our shared past like ballet-dancers, that we step past each other with the same lightness as tongues of morning mist falling on pond lilies. This, you say, is no more than bad blood ?
‘There’s no bad blood.’ Big lies, sneaky lies, lies that become folklore: they are the building blocks of families.
‘There is.’ Her answer is immediate. ‘Vince, we share a child. You and I, our creation. It’s not common knowledge but she shapes us, no matter what we think. And as much as that, we share a … a death. Given all this sharing I think there’s work to be done, don’t you? For both of us.’
Now the sun drops behind the mountain’s tree-line and she stands in shadow, a sculpture of juts and angles, city girl shrouded by the sudden country dusk.
‘Is that why you’re here?’ I ask. ‘Because there’s work to be done?’
Preceded by the familiar stench of citrus, Francesca walks towards me.
‘Partly,’ she admits, locking and unlocking her fingers. ‘Actually … well, to be honest, I miss her. So I’m here for that as well.’
‘Amelia?’
‘Yes — but Katherine too.’ She stands before me, sighs then continues. ‘You know, even when she was alive, I felt like Katherine and I had lost something. Something big, bigger than I realised at the time. As sisters I mean. When we were kids, there was none of this. We used to play together, talk, invent stuff — she was so good at inventing. God, I remember being down behind the tomato plants, smoking and giggling like idiots. It was good, really good. It’s a dumb cliché I know but we really were best friends. And we were best friends in the way that only sisters can be. There’s this thing you’re born with that means you don’t need to communicate. More than genetic; it’s just there somehow, like a private part squeezed into your heart.’
‘A shared pulse?’ I suggest.
‘Yeah.’ She smiles self-consciously, runs her fingers up and down her arms. ‘We were really good friends — then we got older, got jealous and competitive, got hormonal and catty and just plain bloody-minded … and we lost it.’
I am silent.
Francesca sighs again then says: ‘But you know, I always thought — one day. One day we’ll get it back. One day we’ll sit down, together again, and we’ll laugh about the way we were and enjoy our children and make jokes about our men. One day … but it’s never going to be like that, is it? It’s never going to be like that —’
And so her mask breaks. Yet there is more than tears; a carefully maintained lifestyle cracks like old china before me. All the half-truths and putrid self-deceptions seep from her. Two decades of precise orchestrations crumble at her feet.
‘Fuck it,’ she mumbles as I take her awkwardly in my arms. ‘It’s so bloody unfair. I mean, how come … how come I didn’t realise how much I wanted the chance — just to do that, just to get it back.’
‘Frannie … Frannie, she’d understand,’ I say, realising too late how pathetic and platitudinous it must sound. ‘Kaz never held a grudge against anyone, never. She’d understand.’
She sniffs and half-nods then we stand like that for a long, languid moment, swaying as gently as wheat-stalks and sharing our grief but also — it’s distasteful yet I must admit it — reminding ourselves of those times long ago; Peer Gynt, the delicious frenzy of illicit love-making, our private, locked-away visuals of skin slotting into skin.
‘I have something else to tell you.’ Francesca lifts her eyes, dabs at them with her wrist, steps back a little.
I drop my hands and wait. Inside the barn, I notice, the walls are shaded grey and brown. Around us are distorted figures, elongations and unfamiliar shadows. Night has begun to throw its spangled coverlet.
‘She knew,’ says Francesca. Then, without pause: ‘She knew, because I told her.’
It is simple and direct, a stiletto to the heart.
Five
It was our first afternoon in southern England, mid-May but unseasonably cold with long needles of rain spearing from the slate-grey skies. The traffic from the airport was resigned to centipede-like inertia and the olives and steels of the outer-London countryside lay flat and drenched, but none of this mattered because we had a room at the Inn.
‘Like Joseph and bloody Mary,’ I commented wryly. I was seriously jet-lagged and hoping for two suitably lengthy doses of the twin panaceas: beer and sleep. But Kaz — who had been virtually silent throughout the thirty-hour journey — was disrobing too quickly, leaving a shirt and jeans and day-old knickers strewn haphazardly beside the dressing table. I remember thinking how out of character that was, but then even more disturbing was that our subsequent coupling, usually so pacific and — I’d always thought anyway — guided by a spirit of mutual obligation, was ferocious. Kaz held me down with her fists, hurt me with the ruthless grind of her hips, spun around and took me into her mouth, bit me, twisted and bucked, pushed herself hard onto my surprised face, concentrated all of her energy into an overwhelming physical power. It scared me because during her attack she made no sound and gave no explanation. Neither was there any obvious culmination, none of the normal release. It was as if she had been caught in this frenzied rote of unthinking athleticism, like an ultra-marathon runner for whom the biomechanics of the movement, not the end goal or prospect of victory, assumes greatest importance.
‘Do you still love me?’ she asked afterwards as we lay apart and gasped like landed fish, pretended to stare at the obscenely ornate architraves.
‘Of course I do. Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘Good, I suppose. So, did you like that? Was that what you would call good sex?’
I raised myself on my elbow and tried to find her eyes but they were turned to elsewhere.
‘Kaz, are you all right?’
‘I’m fine. So tell me — was that good enough for you?’ Her voice was bitter; the words spat out and scattered like shotgun pellets. ‘Come on, I want to know! Was I horny enough? A bitch in the sack? Or a good fuck — Vince, am I a good fuck? Is that what I am?’
‘Day one of the dream trip and you’re worrying me, you know that?’
‘So answer my question, you arsehole!’ she screamed and then she was on top of me, flailing at my face and chest with her fists, jabbing her knees into the cushion of my stomach.
‘Jesus, Kaz —’
‘Answer my question! It’s simple enough! Come on, I want to know — am I a good fuck? Am I? Am I a good fuck, you bastard — you useless cunt — you bastard — bastard of a man …’
She wept and snuffled for the remainder of the afternoon, her poor hot head nestled between my shoulder and neck. Later I went downstairs for a drink and to stare at the pristine, lapping waters of a nearby lake. The leaden skies had cleared to a gentle wash of claret. I stood with whisky in my hand and shivered in that bald, aching chill then I historied the lake: I saw the eyeless brainless cadavers of drowned monks, blankfaced children with soft tendrils of floating hair, spongy boats rotting in the murky depths, a dead grinning witch, the translucent spines of fish, two rebellious bishops trapped by plaits of weed. I stayed and drank steadily as the lake corrugated beneath a gathering breeze and my new wife lay crumpled and alone in our room, her blank eyes turned to the ancient mirror on the wall.
‘Kaz? I’m bored. Talk to me.’ I remembered slurring this from seat 26C as we crossed over Pakistan. Maddened and constricted, sick of the self-gratifying in-flight mags, sick of straining my neck to watch inept Hollywood movies that had gone straight to video, sick of being enclosed within that thick stink of huma
nity.
‘Come on, talk to me’
Nothing in return. She’d lain motionless behind the company-supplied Batman mask but her fingers, hands, wrists and arms, everything had tensed like fine wire. I’d shrugged and ordered another drink; it wasn’t until we were outside London, fifteen hours on, that I saw fit to blush at my own insensitivity as I sniffed my way towards a chill and gazed at the dark gooey swill of lake.
When I returned to our room at the Inn, the sky had gone and she was asleep beneath the quiet glow of a new moon. I sat and dozed on a chaise-longue , imagined huge golden-rippled king tides, felt my dreaming swing from light to vivid; the ceaseless rhythms of gravity. In the morning I awoke with a stiff shoulder. We dressed quietly, consumed a ‘hearty English’ breakfast — rubber eggs, bacon that shattered between your teeth, soft thick toast — then left the Inn to catch a train to Dover because Kaz wanted to see the White Cliffs. There, buffeted by the whipping winds, we took photographs of each other in front of new and ancient landmarks, wandered hand-in-hand around the docks, fed fat chips to skinny seagulls and somehow, as if by tacit consent, agreed never to speak about that afternoon again.
‘It makes sense.’ On the veranda, I can’t see much of Frannie beyond the glowing tip of her cigarette and two neat cones of smoke.
‘I told her the morning you flew out.’
‘At the airport?’
‘Yes. I suppose that must sound even more horrible. Of course, I was jealous. She was flying off to a fantastic European holiday with the man she loved whereas I was stuck at home with a child that was only half-mine, a lifelong secret and a future that amounted to nil. I’m not normally impulsive, as you know, but I got angry, and so I told her.’
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