The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal

Missy was looking flagrantly at her watch and not panicking.

‘It’s seven thirty anyway. We can adjourn for now and meet somewhere else tomorrow. I will not tolerate this kind of mutinous –’

‘Missy, I’m in the process of proposing a book.’

‘You’re in the process of conducting a MUTINY!’

‘Outrageous!’ said Runner with delight, as Missy continued.

‘Proposing a book, any book, using threats, using coercion that undermines the sanctity of and that stamps and spits and trammels our constitution – you’re … the Pony Palimpsest!

Now Runner was overjoyed. ‘Don’t you call me a Pony Palimpsest.’

The reader, like Priya, might turn to Romy and ask, ‘What does it mean?’ and be as unsatisfied as Priya by Romy’s response: ‘It means the gloves are coming off.’18

Missy continued to berate Runner in a manner that might require more footnotes.

‘But I’m not sure you’ll accept the book any other way!’ protested Runner.

‘I will not accept any book this way.’

‘But you have to accept it whatever way will work!’

‘What’s the book?’

‘That’s the book!’

And Runner pointed to the heap of stones at Anna’s feet.

What did we see? We saw a pile of stones covered with small notches, some kind of writing. If there was a palimpsest there, it was literature written over archaeology. Any pony prints in that hard clay would have been left thousands of years before it was ever dug up, baked and written on.

Still, impressive as the individual stones might have looked from an archaeological standpoint, there was nothing to suggest we were looking at a book.

Runner had anticipated our ambivalence.

18 A palimpsest, of course, is a document that has been written over a pre-existing document, a holdover from the days before printers, when paper was precious and writing took a long time. So the image of a Pony Palimpsest, in the mind’s eye of the members of the Lacuna Cabal, is a skittish young horse mucking up a pre-existing document, preferably printed on beautiful medieval parchment inscribed by monks. ‘You are the Destroyer’ would be a synonymous statement.

‘I assure you: it might appear cumbersome, but it’s a real book.’

‘Um,’ said Missy, who never said ‘um’. ‘What’s it called, Runner?’

Runner bit her lip. ‘That’s a matter of opinion.’

‘Runner, I’m not going to choose a book that looks like that and has a title that is “a matter of opinion”.’

‘He Who Saw Everything. That’s what it’s called. It’s Mesopotamian. It’s pretty much the first book ever written. And if we are to hold on to our status as the premium book club, then we should be interested in reading the first book.’

There was a pause. And a sigh.

‘I was going to propose Possession.’

‘That book is fifteen years old!’

‘Your book isn’t even a book. It’s a bunch of rocks.’

‘And I’m willing to bet we’ve all read Possession already! Every single one of us!’

‘Not as part of the group.’

(Aline and Romy agreed quietly that Possession was an amazing book.)

Runner shifted in Du’s arms. ‘I can’t argue right now. I’m in pain.’

‘Well, suffer,’ said Missy and immediately regretted it, since it had become clear in that moment, to her as well as the rest of us, that Runner’s leg was hanging strangely off the soldier boy’s forearm. The truth was, Missy didn’t want Runner to suffer anything but defeat, but it suddenly didn’t sound like that. She was, for this rare moment, tongue-tied.

We were all looking at the leg. Aline finally ventured what she considered to be a reasonable argument, expressed in a tone of compromise: ‘Runner, I’m just not sure the Lacuna Cabal should be reading, like, unpublished material –’

Unfortunately for Aline, this was the argument Runner had most hoped to receive. ‘Just fuck off, Aline, okay? Why should the Lacuna Cabal be a carbon copy of other book clubs, reading only material that has been copied ad infinitum? I just want to try this book, okay? It’s my most favourite book in the whole world and just because it’s carved in stone and it’s written in an ancient language and there’s –’

An ancient language?

‘– only one copy and it looks funny or weird or whatever, doesn’t mean it sucks, Aline, okay? I bring the true experience of the prehistoric reader straight to your door. But if it sucks, we’ll switch, okay? We’ll just switch if it sucks we’ll switch, okay? Okay?’

Aline had switched her attention entirely to her sneakers, which had both suddenly come untied, and she was carefully rethreading the laces so they would all be of equal length. Runner watched for a moment, fascinated by the totality of Aline’s absorption in something so meaningless, and then she laid down her ace.

‘You’ll love it, I swear, on the grave of my sister who’s added her weight to my own.’

This maxed everyone out. Suddenly the pressure was unbearable and we were all desperately in need of escape. Runner sensed it. She paused and let out some of the steam. A beat. A breath. Then she offered to read a bit – just the beginning, just the beginning of the story. He Who Saw Everything. Literature as escape. It was deftly done.

‘Just let me read a bit. Just a little bit. A little bit of the first words that anyone ever thought to write. Just let me read a few of the first words of the first book. And then we can see if I’m crippled for life.’

We accepted it. It was allowed, though Missy was the only one who said, ‘Okay.’ There was no vote. Runner looked to Neil.

‘Neil, put down your gun.’

Neil looked at Runner.

‘Now get me the first stone.’

He did as he was told, as his sister spoke a brief editor ial preface:

‘There is, incidentally and for your information, Missy, a goddess at the top of the heap in this book who might sound familiar to you.’

Neil poked around the heap and finally pulled out one of the irregularly shaped stones. What indicated its status as first among the slabs was by no means apparent, though it was certainly believable that these stones were old. We could see that there was writing, if you could call it that, on both sides, and also that there were small patches of blank space, roughly textured, as if the text had been eroded. We, or some of us, found ourselves wondering how Runner would make the leap over these gaps, these … and the word occurred to Missy alone: these lacunae. With a sense of dread as pronounced as anything she felt about her own womb, Missy caught a flickering moment of import, as if something here were being fulfilled – a prophesy, like Herod first hearing of the baby Jesus.

What’s more, Missy realised, whatever was to come, whatever this prophesied, she herself had been the inadvertent origin of it, the namer of it. She wished she knew what it would be, this gap that held the future. This perfectly obscure lacuna.

Had she named the Cabal for this?

Neil handed the stone up to Runner, who sat up a little in Du’s arms and slowly began to translate the alleged first words of this alleged first book:

In the very old days, back when years were long, like the first year of a child’s life, only this is the way things felt to adults and children alike, because it was the beginning of the world, the future was full of everything and there was nothing in the past–

‘I wish I could feel that way,’ murmured Emmy.

– there was a time when everyone was happy in the beautiful city of Uruk, with its strong walls and its proud goddess Inanna –

Neil interjected, as if on cue, ‘Who was like Missy?’

A lot like Missy: always ready to leave if she didn’t get her way, march straight out of the universe …

But like rabbits in the warrens of Watership Down –

Romy forgot Emmy, for a moment.

– for a thousand years the people were happy.

And Runner paused and looked down at everyone from the arms where she wanted to spend the rest of her life.

Look at the walls of the city. They surround you. They were built for you, to protect you from the rain. These walls were built by one man, and he made them well, although in other ways, all other ways, he was a tyrant, with a stride as long as a league and eyes the rarest, rarest shade of …

She paused and paused some more. She would have paused forever and Missy would have let her, quietly praying for everyone to remain silent. But Romy, with her weakness for colour, took the bait.

‘Of what?’

Runner smiled, as sweetly as anything Missy might venture.

‘Can we vote on this?’

Romy could not believe it. She had been manipulated once again into taking the rap for the whole group, only this time it was at the hands of someone she trusted probably more than anyone in the world: ‘Runner Coghill!’

‘I’m sorry, Romy. I do what I have to. Can we vote on this?’

Missy sat stoically with eyes downcast. Calmly demurred. ‘I’m not ready to.’

Runner’s turn to panic: ‘I have to get to the hospital!’

‘So we’ll take you to the hospital.’

Romy demanded to know what was the colour of the tyrant’s eyes, but Runner kept her focus on the Missy stopgap.

‘But you’re interested.’

‘Whatever.’

‘You are!’

She was. It was obvious from the hesitation that followed. This proved enough for Romy, who was holding the Book of Days and so was entrusted with proclaiming the calls to vote. She shouted the motion as Neil quietly bent over his notebook and wrote, On this very day …

‘The proposal is to do Runner’s stone book and also to accept the new member Anna so we can keep coming back to this building. And also learn the colour of the tyrant’s eyes. All in favour?’

Romy, Priya and Emmy all raised their hands with Runner, who almost broke her bearer’s nose. Aline raised her hand, tipping the scales in Runner’s favour. But then Missy raised her hand too, taking our breath (the breath of the two of us) away. And as our hands (the hands of the two of us) shot up as one, faster than the speed of thought (because it was true: we were curious too), Romy shouted in tones of joy, ‘The motion carries us!’

And Missy, standing and pulling her fists to her hips in that exquisitely Wonder Woman pose: ‘Carries. The motion carries, Romy.’ Then, turning the full weight of her attention toward Runner and her injury, she managed to take her into her arms without acknowledging the presence of the boy.

‘Let’s get you to the hospital, you stupid, crazy girl.’

And she swept across the floor to the stairs, the rest of us following, like all her little dogs.

Dumuzi would have been relieved to be alone again with Anna, were it not for the anxious revelation that Anna did not wish to be alone with Du. She was following the crowd and he couldn’t shake the thought that it was mostly to get away from him.

In a flurry of semi-words that came out in an improbable series of W’s and B’s, he tried to inquire politely where she was going. He had longed for nothing more than to be alone with her again. Instead he got this: Anna, always moving on, always heading towards some future that did not include him, leaving him with his anxiety spikes. It was amazing how swiftly they came on. Just amazing.

‘I just want to see her to the hospital,’ said Anna, annoyed.

‘But you don’t even know her.’

‘I don’t know. She reminds me of … somebody.’

‘Who?’

‘Somebody.’ And then she flushed with her subtle anger, wounding him, as Priya might say, with the lash of an eye: ‘I don’t know who. That’s why I want to go. So that I can figure it out, you know?’

Dumuzi felt there was only one way now. ‘But I thought you wanted to, uh.’

A glint came into Anna’s eye, transforming all of Du’s anxiety in an instant to basic, focused arousal. ‘I thought you didn’t.’

His flurry of B’s and W’s again.

Anna put him out of his misery. ‘Meet me here tomorrow – next floor up.’

‘When?’

‘Same time.’

‘Okay.’

‘You sure?’

From Du a single W, half a B, and then a gesture of assent, and then Anna was gone. This was much more pleasant. An uncertain road, rife with even bigger spikes, land mines even. But for the moment everything was great. Sex. The feeling of possession. He tried to stop thinking, blowing out from puffed cheeks, blowing out again, waiting, allowing Anna to get far enough ahead of him that he couldn’t catch up and tell her he’d changed his mind or have her tell him the same. Then he followed.

FOUR

ROYAL VIC

The Royal Victoria Hospital was, as always, Runner’s destination of choice, despite or, we suppose, because of the stories of mould in the walls of the surgery rooms that got into the bodies of patients and killed them. Runner loved the Royal Vic because it was flagrantly, royally Scottish, designed in the Scottish Baronial style, which reminded her that she was herself Scottish, or at least part Scottish, that her surname came from a Scottish word for a Danish word for someone who wore hoods regularly, a practice she was planning to take up very soon. Perhaps, she thought, she would take up the wearing of hoods, when the day came that her eyes got too big for her head, perhaps in this very hospital.

Runner loved the Royal Vic because it was nestled into the side of the mountain, perched in solitude on the slopes. The main building, she would explain to you, had been conceived and constructed as a fortress for the sick and injured among the city’s poor, and so she loved too the fact that, since no one dared to use the main building for the low purpose of privately treating the wealthy, the Ross Pavilion had had to be built up and behind, shamefully sequestered. If the private patients wanted a building, she imagined some nineteenth-century hospital president saying, they could go and chip it out of solid rock.

There were, she felt, no new political arguments under the sun.

She loved the fact that nurses used to live in the attics. She wished she could have lived there with them, dressing up in their uniforms and shrieking with delight after hours, scaring the patients in the upper wards. She loved the fact that Emergency was located in the back of the building, up the hill, and required a running start. And she loved that in winter some of the emergency exits led out into twenty-foot snowbanks on the side of the mountain. She wondered whether anyone had ever been buried in an avalanche because some jittery kitchen worker had pulled the fire alarm.

She liked the balconies a lot. She used to go out onto the balconies and wait for Neil, who liked the cafeteria on the third floor. And she would count the entrances and exits (seven main, plus a hundred and five extra) while he played with his food and looked at the people and wrote in his notebook.

She had spent a lot of time here. And so had Neil, to keep her company. Neil had taken up the writing of notebooks in this very hospital. He had purchased his very first notebook here in the gift shop. The only family he had ever known was his big sisters Runner and Ruby. And now there was only Runner.

And now, on 18 March 2003, 10.14 p. m., he sat by the door to Runner’s hospital room and ignored Runner’s condition as best he could, filling his notebook, as he did most of the time, with disparate, irrelevant thoughts.

He wrote: I like to do my homework in the dark with a head¬ lamp behind the couch.

Well, who wouldn’t?

He wrote: I like to roll change with a headlamp in the dark too.

He wrote: I’ve been making wallets and change purses out of duct tape.

He wrote: I’ve been studying origami.

He wrote with an absorbed concentration that he knew could be shattered in a moment by Runner’s voice, speaking up eventually from her bed when the parade of girls had passed and they were finally alone.

‘So, Neil, we got them.’

‘Yes.’

‘We got them on our side. We get to read all ten tablets. Isn’t that great?’

Neil put away his pen and nodded vigorously.

‘It’s a special, unique book,’ she said, sighing happily and lying back into the pillow that was big for her head if not her eyes. ‘We just have to do it in our special, unique way.’

Neil was full of ideas for how the Lacuna Cabal could do the book in a unique way, but before they could be expressed they were interrupted by the entrance of the new girl, Anna, bearing a glass of water.

Runner, he could tell, was thrilled that Anna had stuck around. Romy had wept and Priya, arriving late19, had been spooked by the look of the place. Missy would have stayed but she said she had to go home and water her plants. Missy’s father had purchased for her a greenhouse and filled it up with bonsai as something they could cultivate together. But really, she explained, it takes only one person to cultivate a greenhouse full of bonsai. It had seemed like an unnecessarily elaborate explanation. And then she had said how sorry she was about the broken leg and left.

Anna had hung back. Some spidey sense had prompted her to stay. She handed over the glass.

Runner said, ‘You’re left-handed.’

Anna said, ‘Yes I am,’ and blushed.

‘How very interesting.’

‘Why, um?’

‘Some people say that all left-handed people are one of a pair of twins.’

‘Oh, I’m not a –’

‘They mean at the beginning, before you were born. So you might not know.’

‘Oh.’

19 She had stayed behind at the Lighter Building for a few minutes to practise a song she was working on in front of her imaginary audience. Like many people, Priya habitually saw herself as the star of her own movie, and often wondered if this had replaced the idea of God in governing her behaviour, causing her to put her best face forward and leading her to wonder further whether she shouldn’t start writing better songs.

Runner said, ‘So maybe you pine for a long-lost sister,’ flirting. ‘Other signs are crooked teeth and funny birthmarks.’

Anna’s hand went instinctively up to her mouth, even as she smiled a little. ‘I do have crooked teeth.’

Runner smiled back, sharing the secret, delighted. ‘Yes, I know.’

Anna covered her whole mouth now. ‘My parents wouldn’t let me get braces.’

‘Oh no, don’t worry,’ said Runner. ‘It’s like a mole on the cheek: the flaw that accentuates beauty.’

Anna tried to think what else to say and then she said she had to go. She did like this girl, though. This girl was a crazy chick, but she was smart. She was smart with an open heart, and that made her do stupid things. Anna never did stupid things. Not deliberately, anyway. She was too careful for that.

‘Will we see you tomorrow?’ asked Runner, hopeful, failing always to keep her cards close to her chest. She meant for the book club, Anna had to remind herself. It wasn’t her habit to hang around so much with women, preferring the company of men, but maybe now she’d take it up, maybe it would be good for her; like eating beets.

‘Yeah, sure, yeah. It’s fun,’ she said, and realised it was true.

‘Nice to meet you.’

‘Nice to meet you too.’

Anna hesitated. She didn’t know how you were supposed to address injured people. She ventured, ‘I hope you feel better.’

Runner beamed. Anna backed out of the room, nearly tripping over Neil, and then was gone.

In a moment, Runner was sulking, taking pills she hated. Moments she enjoyed went by far too fleetingly, she thought, wishing she could find some way to stop time, instead of gulping pills like she was doing now.

Neil sat quietly for a while, distracting himself by folding a sheet of paper. Finally he spoke up. ‘You scared her.’

‘No I didn’t,’ said Runner, who felt like maybe she had, but it was okay. ‘Not really.’

‘You want her to be a twin too. Why?’

‘No I don’t, Neil! We were just talking.’

Neil crumpled up the half-formed origami. He was in a bad mood now. And jealous. ‘How did you get osteoporosis and, and accident-proneness all of a sudden, anyway? You were the healthy one.’

That was true. Though Ruby had been plagued all her life by brittle bones and an overactive thyroid, Runner was athletic. It was often said that she chose the solo pursuit of track and field in order to spare Ruby the sight of her on the field as part of a close-knit scrum of girls. Later, the Lacuna Cabal was a team they could join together.

And Runner loved to swim, even as Ruby hated to put one single toe in the water. Runner had a swimmer’s milky complexion – both healthy and ethereal – whereas Ruby’s was merely ethereal. Of course, to say ‘merely ethereal’ is akin to saying ‘merely angelic’ or ‘merely brilliant’. It is ‘merely’ the condition one aspires to before all others. That’s what Runner must have believed. She must have idealised her sister’s condition. Not ‘healthy body/healthy mind’, but ‘brittle body/aerial mind’.

It had been impressed upon Runner from an early age that, for her, a healthy lifestyle and diet would easily keep bone brittleness and other thyroid-related problems at bay. The only way she could ever develop such problems as plagued her twin would be by becoming full-blown self-destructive.

Which brings us back to Neil’s persistent questioning.

‘How come you fell through that floor?’

‘You’ll have to take that up with the floor.’

Neil paused to consider the option of becoming a structural engineer, rejecting it. He wasn’t about to spend the rest of his life trying to protect Runner from harming herself. He might as well go in for mass-producing throw pillows; he might as well start telling jokes.

‘We shouldn’t call you Runner any more – we should call you Hobbler or Limper or something.’

‘Don’t make fun of a cripple.’

‘A fake cripple.’

To which her response was disappointingly mild. ‘How dare you.’

‘You were the healthy one.’ Pleading a little.

Runner closed her eyes, which was, for Neil, the worst. Like a city blacking out. Like a fin whale heading for the beach. But he had to bear it. As she spoke, a familiar-sounding fatigue crept into her voice. But hadn’t she slept for ten hours last night? This was not fair.

‘Don’t worry, Neil, it’s nothing. It’s just hard for twins to be separated, that’s all.’

Here he was concerned for her very survival and she was bringing up the ineffable.

‘I know,’ a cappella. ‘I know, I know, I know.’ And then, after a brief pause: ‘I know.’

‘But don’t worry. We’re doing the book now. It’s going to be fun and it has a happy ending.’

‘But it’s just a book.’

The desired effect. Runner’s eyes snapped open. The room filled again with light, though Neil was going to have to pay a whopping bill.

‘It is not just a book and you know it. How can you even say that? Anyway, people who live in glass houses should not throw stones.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, don’t you think maybe it’s time to drop the bookish-kid act?’

‘What?’

‘The act. It’s limiting for you. I mean, you know, Harry Potter is just a boy in a book. You’re a real person. You should be Neil Coghill the Real McCoghill.’

He didn’t have the slightest idea what she was talking about. If she wasn’t aware that he had repudiated the entire genre of nine-to-twelve literature, then he wasn’t about to tell her now. He’d let her figure it out on her own.