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Weaveworld
‘So, if you’d be so kind …’ the woman’s lip curled at this courtesy. ‘… tell me where the carpet’s gone, and we can have the matter done with.’
‘Such easy terms.’ the Salesman said. ‘Tell us, and we’re gone.’
Claiming ignorance would be no defence, Cal thought; they knew that he knew, and they wouldn’t be persuaded otherwise. He was trapped. Yet dangerous as things had become, he felt inwardly elated. His tormentors had confirmed the existence of the world he’d glimpsed: the Fugue. The urge to be out of their presence as fast as possible was tempered by the desire to play them along, and hope they’d tell him more about the vision he’d witnessed.
‘Maybe I did see it,’ he said.
‘No maybe,’ the woman replied.
‘It’s hazy …’ he said. ‘I remember something, but I’m not quite sure what.’
‘You don’t know what the Fugue is?’ said Shadwell.
‘Why should he?’ the woman replied. ‘He came on it by luck.’
‘But he saw,’ said Shadwell.
‘A lot of Cuckoos have some sight, it doesn’t mean they understand. He’s lost, like all of them.’
Cal resented her condescension, but in essence she was right. Lost he was.
‘What you saw isn’t your business,’ she said to him. ‘Just tell us where you put the carpet, then forget you ever laid eyes on it.’
‘I don’t have the carpet,’ he said.
The woman’s entire face seemed to darken, the pupils of her eyes like moons barely eclipsing some apocalyptic light.
From the landing, Cal heard again the scuttling sounds he’d previously taken to be rats. Now he wasn’t so sure.
‘I won’t be polite with you much longer,’ she said. ‘You’re a thief.’
‘No –’ he protested.
‘Yes. You came here to raid an old woman’s house and you got a glimpse of something you shouldn’t.’
‘We shouldn’t waste time,’ said Shadwell.
Cal had begun to regret his decision to play the pair along. He should have run while he had half a chance. The noise from the other side of the door was getting louder.
‘Hear that?’ said the woman. ‘Those are some of my sister’s bastards. Her by-blows.’
‘They’re vile,’ said Shadwell.
He could believe it.
‘Once more,’ she said. The carpet.’
And once more he told her. ‘I don’t have it.’ This time his words were more appeal than defence.
‘Then we must make you tell,’ said the woman.
‘Be careful, Immacolata,’ said Shadwell.
If the woman heard him, she didn’t care for his warning. Softly, she rubbed the middle and fourth fingers of her right hand against the palm of her left, and at this all but silent summons her sister’s children came running.
II
THE SKIN OF THE TEETH
1
‘They turned off the gas and electricity in the house years ago,’ Violet said. ‘She hadn’t paid the bills. Living in squalor, she was, and it weren’t for want of me keeping a neighbourly eye. But she was rude, you know, if you enquired about her health.’ She lowered her voice a little. I know I shouldn’t say it but … your grandmother wasn’t entirely of sound mind.’
Suzanna murmured something in reply, which she knew would go unheard.
‘All she had was candles for light. No television, no refrigerator. God alone knows what she was eating.’
‘Do you know if anyone has a key to the house?’
‘Oh no, she wouldn’t have done that. She had more locks on that house than you’ve had hot dinners. She didn’t trust anybody, you see. Not anybody.’
‘I just wanted to look around.’
‘Well there’s been people in and out since she went; probably find the place wide open by now. Even thought of having a look myself, but I didn’t fancy it. Some houses … they’re not quite natural. You know what I mean?’
She knew. Standing finally on the doorstep of number eighteen Suzanna confessed to herself that she’d welcomed the various duties that had postponed this visit. The episode at the hospital had validated much of the family suspicion regarding Mimi. She was different. She could give her dreams away with a touch. And whatever powers the old woman possessed, or was possessed by, would they not also haunt the house she’d spent so many years in?
Suzanna felt the grip of the past tighten around her: except that it was no longer that simple. She wasn’t here hesitating on the threshold just because she feared a confrontation with childhood ghosts. It was that here – on a stage she’d thought to have made a permanent exit from – she dimly sensed dramas waiting to be played, and that Mimi had somehow cast her in a pivotal role.
She put her hand on the door. Despite what Violet had said, it was locked. She peered through the front window, into a room of debris and dust. The desolation proved oddly comforting. Maybe her anxieties would yet prove groundless. She went around the back of the house. Here she had more luck. The yard gate was open, and so was the back door.
She stepped inside. The condition of the front room was reprised here: practically all trace of Mimi Laschenski’s presence – with the exception of candles and valueless junk – had been removed. She felt an unhappy mixture of responses. On the one hand, the certainty that nothing of value would have survived this clearance, and that she’d have to go back to Mimi empty-handed; and on the other, an undeniable relief that this was so: that the stage was deserted. Though her imagination hung the missing pictures on the walls, and put the furniture back in place, it was all in her mind. There was nothing here to spoil the calm good order of the life she lived.
She moved through from the parlour into the hallway, glancing into the small sitting room before turning the corner to the stairs. They were not so mountainous; nor so dark. But before she could climb them she heard a movement on the floor above.
‘Who’s there?’ she called out –
2
– the words were sufficient to break Immacolata’s concentration. The creatures she’d summoned, the by-blows, halted their advance towards Cal, awaiting instruction.
He took his opportunity, and threw himself across the room, kicking at the beast closest to him.
The thing lacked a body, its four arms springing straight from a bulbous neck, beneath which clusters of sacs hung, wet as liver and lights. Cal’s blow connected, and one of the sacs burst, releasing a sewer stench. With the rest of the siblings close upon him. Cal raced for the door, but the wounded creature was fastest in pursuit, sidling crab-like on its hands, and spitting as it came. A spray of saliva hit the wall close to Cal’s head, and the paper blistered. Revulsion gave heat to his heels. He was at the door in an instant.
Shadwell moved to intercept him, but one of the beasts got beneath his feet like an errant dog, and before he could regain his equilibrium Cal was out of the room and on to the landing.
The woman who’d called out was at the bottom of the stairs, face upturned. She stood as bright day to the night he’d almost succumbed to in the room behind him. Wide grey-blue eyes, curls of dark auburn hair framing her pale face, a mouth upon which a question was rising, but which his wild appearance had silenced.
‘Get out of here!’ he yelled as he hurtled down the stairs.
She stood and gaped.
‘The door!’ he said. ‘For God’s sake open the door.’
He didn’t look to see if the monsters were coming in pursuit, but he heard Shadwell cry out:
‘Stop, thief!’
from the top of the stairs.
The woman’s eyes went to the Salesman, then back to Cal, then to the front door.
‘Open it!’ Cal yelled, and this time she moved to do so. Either she distrusted Shadwell on sight or she had a passion for thieves. Whichever, she flung the door wide. Sunlight poured in, dust dancing in its beams. Cal heard a howl of protest from behind him, but the girl did nothing to arrest his flight.
‘Get out of here!’ he said to her, and then he was over the threshold and into the street outside.
He took half a dozen steps from the door and then turned around to see if the woman with the grey eyes was following, but she was still standing in the hallway.
‘Will you come on?’ he yelled at her.
She opened her mouth to say something to him, but Shadwell was at the bottom of the stairs by now, and pushing her out of the way. He couldn’t linger; there were only a few paces between him and the Salesman. He ran.
The man with the greased-back hair made no real attempt at pursuit once his quarry was out in the open. The young man was whippet-lean, and twice as fleet; the other was a bear in a Savile Row suit. Suzanna had disliked him from the moment she’d set eyes on him. Now he turned and said:
‘Why’d you do that, woman?’
She didn’t grace the demand with a reply. For one thing, she was still trying to make sense of what she’d just seen; for another, her attention was no longer on the bear but on his partner – or keeper – the woman who had now followed him down the stairs.
Her features were as blank as a dead child’s, but Suzanna had never seen a face that exercised such fascination.
‘Get out of my way,’ the woman said as she reached the bottom of the stairs. Suzanna’s feet had already begun to move when she cancelled her acquiescence and instead stepped directly into the woman’s path, blocking her route to the door. A flood of adrenalin surged through her system as she did so. as though she’d stepped in front of a speeding juggernaut.
But the woman stopped in her tracks, and the hook of her gaze caught Suzanna and raised her face to be scrutinized. Meeting the woman’s eyes Suzanna knew the adrenalin rush had been well timed: she had just skirted death. That gaze had killed, she’d swear to it; and would again. But not now; now the woman studied Suzanna with curiosity.
‘A friend of yours, was he?’ she finally said.
Suzanna heard the words spoken, but she couldn’t have sworn that the woman’s lips had moved to form them.
At the door behind her the bear said:
‘Damn thief.’
Then he poked at Suzanna’s shoulder, hard.
‘Didn’t you hear me telling you?’ he said.
Suzanna wanted to turn to the man and tell him to take his hands off her, but the woman hadn’t done with her study, and held her with that gaze.
‘She heard,’ the woman said. This time her lips did move, and Suzanna felt the hold on her relax. But the mere proximity of the other woman made her body tremble. Her groin and breasts felt pricked by tiny thorns.
‘Who are you?’ the woman demanded.
‘Leave it be,’ said the bear.
‘I want to know who she is. Why she’s here.’ The gaze, which had briefly flitted to the man, settled on Suzanna afresh, and the curiosity had murder in its shadow.
‘There’s nothing here we need …’ the man was saying.
The woman ignored him.
‘Come on now … leave it be …’
There was something in the tone of his voice of one coaxing an hysteric from the brink of an attack, and Suzanna was glad of his intervention.
‘… it’s too public …’ he said, ‘… especially here …’
After a long, breathless moment the woman made the tiniest of nods, conceding the wit of this. She suddenly seemed to completely lose interest in Suzanna, and turned back towards the stairs. At the top of the flight, where Suzanna had once imagined terrors to be in wait for her, the gloom was not quite at rest. There were ragged forms moving up there, so insubstantial she could not be certain whether she saw them or merely sensed their presence. They were spilling down the stairs like poison smoke, losing what little solidity they might have owned as they approached the open door, until, by the time they reached the woman who awaited them at the bottom, their vapours were invisible.
She turned from the stairs and walked past Suzanna to the door, taking with her a cloud of cold and tainted air, as though the wraiths that had come to her were now wreathed about her neck, and clinging to the folds of her dress. Carried unseen into the sunlit human world, until they could congeal again.
The man was already out on the pavement, but before his companion stepped out to join him she turned back to Suzanna. She said nothing, either with her lips or without. Her eyes were quite expressive enough: their promises were all joyless.
Suzanna looked away. She heard the woman’s heel on the step. When she looked up again the pair had gone. Drawing a deep breath, she went to the door. Though the afternoon was growing old, the sun was still warm and bright.
Not surprisingly the woman and the bear had crossed over, so as to walk on the shadowed side of the street.
3
Twenty-four years was a third of a good span; time enough to form some opinions on how the world worked. Up until mere hours ago, Suzanna would have claimed she’d done just that.
Certainly there were sizeable gaps in her comprehension: mysteries, both inside her head and out, that remained un-illuminated. But that had only made her the more determined not to succumb to any sentiment or self-delusion that would give those mysteries power over her – a zeal that touched both her private and professional lives. In her love-affairs she had always tempered passion with practicality, avoiding the emotional extravagance she’d seen so often become cruelty and bitterness. In her friendships she’d pursued a similar balance: neither too cloying nor too detached. And no less in her craft. The very appeal of making bowls and pots was its pragmatism; the vagaries of art disciplined by the need to create a functional object.
The question she would ask, viewing the most exquisite jug on earth, would be: does it pour? And it was in a sense a quality she sought in every facet of her life.
But here was a problem which defied such simple distinctions; that threw her off-balance; left her sick and bewildered.
First the memories. Then Mimi, more dead than alive but passing dreams through the air.
And now this meeting, with a woman whose glance had death in it, and yet had left her feeling more alive than perhaps she’d ever felt.
It was that last paradox that made her leave the house without finishing her search, slamming the door on whatever dramas it had waiting for her. Instinctively, she made for the river. There, sitting awhile in the sun, she might make some sense of the problem.
There were no ships on the Mersey, but the air was so clear she could see cloud shadows moving over the hills of Clwyd. There was no such clarity within her, however. Only a chaos of feelings, all unsettlingly familiar, as though they’d been inside her for years, biding their time behind the screen of pragmatism she’d established to keep them from sight. Like echoes, waiting on a mountain-face for the shout they were born to answer.
She’d heard that shout today. Or rather, met it, face to face, on the very spot in the narrow hallway where as a six-year-old she’d stood and trembled in fear of the dark. The two confrontations were inextricably linked, though she didn’t know how. All she knew was that she was suddenly alive to a space inside herself where the haste and habit of her adult life had no dominion.
She sensed the passions that drifted in that space only vaguely, as her fingertips might sense fog. But she would come to know them better with time, those passions, and the acts that they’d engender: she was certain of that as she’d been certain of nothing in days. She’d know them – and, God help her – she’d love them as her own.
III
SELLING HEAVEN
‘That’s right.’
‘Do you happen to have a son by the name of Calhoun?’
‘What business is it of yours?’ Brendan wanted to know. Then, before the other could answer, said: ‘Nothing’s happened to him?’
The stranger shook his head, taking hold of Brendan’s hand and pumping it vigorously.
‘You’re a very lucky man, Mr Mooney, if I may make so bold.’
That, Brendan knew, was a lie.
‘What do you want?’ he said. ‘Are you selling something?’ He withdrew his hand from the grip of the other man. ‘Whatever it is, I don’t want it.’
‘Selling?’ said Shadwell. ‘Perish the thought. I’m giving, Mr Mooney. Your son’s a wise boy. He volunteered your name – and lo and behold, you’ve been selected by computer as the recipient of –’
‘I told you I don’t want it,’ Brendan interrupted, and tried to close the door, but the man already had one foot over the threshold.
‘Please –’ Brendan sighed, ‘– will you just leave me alone? I don’t want your prizes. I don’t want anything.’
‘Well that makes you a very remarkable man,’ the Salesman said, pushing the door wide again. ‘Maybe even unique. There’s really nothing in all the world you want? That’s remarkable.’
Music drifted from the back of the house, a recording of Puccini’s Greatest Hits which Eileen had been given several years ago. She’d scarcely listened to it, but since her death Brendan – who had never stepped inside an opera-house in his life, and was proud of the fact – had become addicted to the Love Duet from Madam Butterfly. If he’d played it once he’d played it a hundred times, and the tears would always come. Now all he wanted to do was get back to the music before it finished. But the Salesman was still pressing his suit.
‘Brendan,’ he said. ‘I may call you Brendan –?’
‘Don’t call me anything.’
The Salesman unbuttoned his jacket.
‘Really, Brendan, we have a great deal to discuss, you and I. Your prize, for one.’
The lining of the jacket scintillated, drawing Brendan’s eye. He’d never in his life seen a fabric its equal.
‘Are you sure there’s nothing you want?’ the Salesman said. ‘Absolutely sure?’
The Love Duet had reached a new plateau, the voices of Butterfly and Pinkerton urging each other on to fresh confessions of pain. Brendan heard, but his attention was increasingly focused on the jacket. And yes, there was something there that he wanted.
Shadwell watched the man’s eyes and saw the flame of desire ignited. It never failed.
‘You do see something, Mr Mooney.’
‘Yes,’ Brendan admitted softly. He saw, and the joy he felt at what he saw made his heavy heart light.
Eileen had said to him once (when they were young, and mortality was just another way to express their devotion to each other): ‘– if I die first, Brendan, I’ll find some way to tell you what Heaven’s like. I swear I will.’ He’d hushed her with kisses then, and said that if she were to die he would die too, of a broken heart.
But he hadn’t died, had he? He’d lived three long, empty months, and more than once in that time he’d remembered her frivolous promise. And now, just as he felt despair would undo him utterly, here on his doorstep was this celestial messenger. An odd choice, perhaps, to appear in the shape of a salesman, but no doubt the Seraphim had their reasons.
‘Do you want what you see, Brendan?’ the visitor asked.
‘Who are you?’ Brendan breathed, awe-struck.
‘My name’s Shadwell.’
‘And you brought this for me?’
‘Of course. But if you accept it, Brendan, you must understand there’ll be a small charge for the service.’
Brendan didn’t take his eyes off the prize the jacket housed. ‘Whatever you say,’ he replied.
‘We may ask for your help, for instance, which you’d be obliged to furnish.’
‘Do angels need help?’
‘Once in a while.’
‘Then of course,’ said Brendan. ‘I’d be honoured.’
‘Good.’ The Salesman smiled. ‘Then please –’ he opened the jacket a little wider, ‘– help yourself.’
Brendan knew how the letter from Eileen would smell and feel long before he had it in his hands. It did not disappoint him. It was warm, as he’d expected, and the scent of flowers lingered about it. She’d written it in a garden, no doubt; in the paradise garden.
‘So, Mr Mooney. We have a deal, do we?’
The Love Duet had ended; the house behind Brendan was silent. He held the letter close to his chest, still fearful that this was all a dream, and he’d wake to find himself empty-handed.
‘Whatever you want,’ he said, desperate that this salvation not be snatched from him.
‘Sweetness and light,’ came the smiling reply. ‘That’s all a wise man ever wants, isn’t it? Sweetness and light.’
Brendan was only half-listening. He ran his fingers back and forth over the letter. His name was on the front, in Eileen’s cautious hand.
‘So tell me, Mr Mooney –’ the Seraphim said, ‘about Cal.’
‘Cal?’
‘Can you tell me where I can find him?’
‘He’s at a wedding.’
‘A wedding. Ah. Could you perhaps furnish me with address?’
‘Yes. Of course.’
‘We’ve got a little something for Cal too. Lucky man.’
IV
NUPTIALS
1
Not that a little lunacy would have been noticeable in such a heady atmosphere. Norman Kellaway’s ambition for his daughter’s wedding day seemed to have been upped a notch for every inch her waist-line had swelled. The ceremony had been grand, but necessarily decorous; the reception, however, was a triumph of excess over good taste. The hall had been decorated from floor to ceiling with streamers and paper lanterns; ropes of coloured lights were looped along the walls and in the trees out at the back of the hall. The bar was supplied with beer, spirits and liqueurs sufficient to intoxicate a modest army; food was in endless supply, carried to the tables of those content to sit and gorge by a dozen harassed waitresses.
