Desolation (20 page)

Peter emerged from the pub carrying another bottle of wine. “You look thoughtful,” he said.

“Busy resolving the meaning of life,” Cain said, and he could not help returning Peter's smile.

“Whistler,” Peter said, sitting down, recommencing the conversation before Cain had a chance. “Yeah, Whistler.” He poured the wine, opened another bag of potato chips, and crunched his way through a mouthful, all the while looking over Cain's head at the clear blue sky.

“So?” Cain said at last.

“So you've seen the room in his flat filled with his followers.”

“Yes, animals and a woman. Stuffed. Killed and stuffed.”

“Not killed,” Peter said.

Cain frowned, not understanding. “Animals don't commit suicide, Peter.”

“Not suicide, either. They're not dead.”

Cain raised his eyebrows and thought back to that afternoon, his experience in Whistler's flat, those musty creatures moldering away in the spare room. And the woman tucked away in the corner, so lifelike and yet so obviously dead.

“I'll explain,” Peter said. “As best I can, at least. I've no right to do this, no right to betray Whistler's history and Way to you. But I think it will work for you, and therefore you deserve it. As I said, whether or not you want what your father called Pure Sight, I believe it wants you.”

Cain said nothing, although those words stung him with memories of his father.
After so long?
he thought.
Can Peter be right after so long?

“Whistler's followers hear something in his music that appeals to them. I heard the potential of the Way. It was as though he makes the one true music we should all hear and know. It promised me so much that I could not help but fall under its spell. Others hear the same thing, I suppose, but in their own different ways. And the animals . . . who can say what animals think or believe? Maybe it's just a nice tune; perhaps there are frequencies that get in their heads and affect them. But Cain, you've seen those creatures in his room, the way they're
standing there, frozen, listening forever. It has as much meaning to them as to me.”

“They were dead and stuffed,” Cain said. “I smelled them.”

“They're not dead,” Peter said again, firmer this time. “They're Whistler's main followers. He plays to them nightly, and each morning I suspect they're in a slightly different pose. They're so enrapt with his music and what it conveys that they've forgotten to do anything else. Their life is his music. Their mind, their memory, their concentration, is obsessed with the one tune that did it for them. They smell, I suppose, because they're slowly mummifying. Not drinking, not eating . . . just existing somewhere in their heads, living their dreams.”

“That's grotesque.”

“You may think so, but I'll bet they're the happiest beings on the planet.”

“What about you? Why aren't you in there? Why aren't you happy?”

“I never heard him well enough.” Peter drank his wine and poured some more. His eyes were starting to glitter with drunkenness, but his voice was firm, his words clear. “The woman, she came to him a couple of years back. Really latched on quickly, never left his side for months, and then suddenly she began to drift away. Usually with the animals it's very quick, but with her there came an awkward time when Whistler had to leave her in the room, not quite gone. She tried to get out and follow him, but she'd lost the use of her limbs. She screamed for a while. In the end, he stayed in there with her for three days, playing nonstop until she
became still. He continues to play to her, but not quite so often.”

“Why?”

“I suppose he has other things to do.”

“No, I mean
why?
Why does he do it? What's he gaining from all this?”

“Why do you breathe, Cain?” Peter asked, eyes wide as if surprised at the question. “Why do you drink, why do you eat?”

“To survive.”

Peter held up his hands, explaining everything.

“They were arranged,” Cain said, remembering the strange tableaus in Whistler's flat. “Set up in weird poses. Not right.”

“He does that for his own reasons, and I have no idea what they are. Maybe it's something as simple as him playing games.”

“I don't understand any of this. I don't know if I believe you. It's ridiculous. Absurd. And . . . I don't understand.”

“Do you need to understand something for it to work? If we understood everything, imagine how boring life would be.”

Cain did not reply. A butterfly drifted down and landed on the photograph album, and he watched it stretching its white wings, bathing in the sun. Whistler was as inexplicable as that butterfly.

“I'm sorry it's no easier,” Peter said. “I've been with him for so long that I'm used to not understanding. He plays his tune and sometimes I get lost, but I always come back. Not like those animals, or that woman. Wherever they are . . . I'd give anything to be there.”

“They found the Way?”

“Oh no!” Peter said, shaking his head. “Not at all. They've been lost on its path. They're swallowed in Whistler's Way, shadowed by his greatness,
part
of that shadow. Very few get to know the Way—or Pure Sight, as your father chose to call it—but often those who do affect a lot of people with their knowledge.”

“So George, Magenta, and Sister Josephine have it?”

“In their own peculiar ways, yes,” Peter said, but his face became guarded, his eyes downcast.

“So if it's such a personal epiphany, how come they all come together?”

Peter shrugged. “Likes attract. Protection in numbers. Tribal instinct.”

“Tell me about them. Can the nun really fly? Who is the real Magenta? And George . . . what has he got to do with a wild animal?”

Peter's expression showed that there was more left to say, but he leaned back and crossed his arms. “I've told you too much already. I can't go on, not about them. They trust me.”

“You're talking as if they're another species!”

Peter looked at Cain but did not reply.

“I need to know, Peter. You can't just string me along like this and then leave it. They're against me, all of them. Are they dangerous? Should I leave?”

“They're not against you, Cain, they
can't
be. They're way beyond taking sides. They're gifted with what they have and they use it, and sometimes people like me—and you—get caught up in that. In
your case that's good, because it'll help bring out what your father nurtured in you. And yes, they can be dangerous. Can't everyone?”

“For fuck's sake—”

“What about your father?” the landlord asked, gently touching the photograph album. The butterfly fluttered away. “Don't you want to know about him? That's what you came for really, isn't it?”

Cain looked at the album, and suddenly he was terrified. There could be photographs of his father in there as Cain had never seen him. He may be about to learn so much more than he had ever known about that cruel, naive old man who had kept him incarcerated for years. And right then, with the wine singing in his veins and the evening sun fading on his skin, Cain was not sure he wanted to hear.

“I need to piss,” he said. “I'll be back in a minute. And then maybe you can tell me about my father.”

“Leonard and I go way back,” Peter said, smiling up at Cain.

Cain went into the pub, and the unbelievable thought thumping through his head in time to his heartbeat was
I never knew his name, I never knew his name
. Leaning against the wall in the Gents toilet, he cried as he pissed.

When Cain returned to the beer garden, Peter and the photograph album had vanished.

Good
, he thought, but that was immediately replaced with an intense disappointment and anger. Not only had Peter given him some small assurance
that he was not imagining things with Whistler and the others, he had also offered a chance for Cain to discover things about his father from another perspective. It was a unique and unexpected opportunity, and now it was gone, at least for a while.

“Went off in a bit of a rush,” a voice said. Cain turned to a table tucked away between some trellis, and a young woman sat there nursing a bottle of beer. She was quite obviously waiting for a friend to return from the pub and she seemed nervous. Her smile faltered, and she hid it by raising the bottle.

“Which way?” Cain asked.

The girl nodded at a gate exiting the garden. “He was looking up at the sky, and he went as if he saw something scary. Just jumped up, picked up that big book, ran. Knocked over your bottle of wine.”

“Did you see anything?”

The girl shrugged. “Dunno. Big bird, that's all. Buzzard probably, they circle here sometimes looking for leftovers and stuff in the pub garden.”

“Big bird,” Cain echoed, thinking of the brief glimpse he had caught of the shape above the park earlier that day. “Thanks,” he said.

“No problem.”

As Cain turned to leave, the girl's boyfriend emerged from the pub, throwing a cautious glance his way. Cain smiled, but it did not work; the boy hurried across to the table and sat close to the girl. Cain turned away. Such affection. There had been sex at Afresh, but never closeness. It was something lacking in his life. He supposed he was destined to be alone, as isolated now as he had been in
that room in his father's basement. And now that Peter had vanished, he felt as though he were being experimented upon all over again.

Cain left the pub, strolling at first, then walking faster. The sun was settling down behind the high buildings in the city, and the smell of hot smog was slowly fading into a cool echo of the day.

Peter could not be far ahead. He had that album, and in there were truths that Cain was terrified of facing yet felt he must. It may even contain pictures of his mother, the woman he had never, ever seen. His father had refused to talk about her, saying only that she died when Cain was born. But there must have been a time when there was love between her and the old man? Affection? Cain had no idea whether knowing that would change anything for him, but he had to find out.

He glanced up at the sky, but there was no sign of any large bird.

Cain was sure he could remember the way back to Endless Crescent. Peter had led the way earlier, and there had been several turns at the ends of streets and through narrow alleys. But the way he was going felt right, and for now he was confident with that.

He started walking a little faster. Peter was hurrying as well, Cain could sense that.
You have it
, Peter had said, and Cain tried to analyze how and why he knew that Peter was walking quickly. There was no logical answer. He simply knew the Way things were.

For the very first time in his life, Cain considered
the possibility that his father had succeeded. For years Cain had viewed Pure Sight as a madness. Even when he knew things that he really should not, he dismissed it as a peculiarity, an effect of his long incarceration, an exaggeration of his senses when they had been so forcibly starved by his father. Now, knowing all this, he wondered whether that torture really had opened up his inner perceptions, just as his father had intended.

I don't want it
.

Peter stopped, looked up, searching for pursuit.

Not if it does to me what it's done to Whistler
.

Peter was scared, and a bitter, inexplicable sense of betrayal simmered in his mind. He clasped the album to his chest as if it could protect him against blows, running now, dashing along an alley lush with overhanging foliage. He ducked and pushed his way through, head down, and Cain saw every movement, knew every thought.

“I don't
want
it!” Cain shouted, but he began to run as well, ignoring the curious stares from passersby.

He came to a junction he did not remember from before, turned right, then realized that left was the correct way. He did not question his reasoning, because he knew where it came from. He was reading Peter's route, sensing it in the air as if the landlord had left a trace of himself behind; a smell, a sound, the taste of his fear.
And now the siren will cut me down
, Cain thought, but he had begun to believe that he would never hear the siren again. He had passed that time. This was the first day of his new life. Chasing Peter felt like pursuing his own destiny,
and much as he claimed he did not want it, Pure Sight beckoned from every street corner. Cain did not even consider halting the chase.

The sun had fallen into the city now, smearing its pink afterglow through dirty brown smog. Cain reached a point where the street split in two and took the left fork, leading down a gentle slope toward a small park. He caught sight of a shape disappearing around the corner of the park, and he was sure it was Peter. He ran harder, feet pounding the pavement, his heart thrumming with the unaccustomed exercise. The rhythm of his footsteps seemed familiar, and it took him a few seconds to realize that it matched the beat of the tune hummed by the shadow. Cain started humming himself, glancing into doorways and gardens, not expecting to see the shadow but searching for it anyway.

He turned right at the park. There was no sign of Peter, but the road ended here, and several paths and lanes led off at different angles. Cain chose a route without hesitation, the image of Peter going the same way clear in his mind. He breathed in the smell of the photograph album; time, and lost memories.

Something flitted overhead, drifting out of sight behind a house just as Cain looked up.
Big bird
, the girl had said. Cain sniffed. There was no hint of honey in the air. People just do not fly.

“Peter!” he shouted, not really expecting the landlord to stop. Why was Peter running? And why was Cain chasing him? He could see him again tomorrow if he so wished. Perhaps because
Cain had built himself up for an evening of revelation, and their discussion about Whistler had not been enough to satiate his hunger for knowledge. There was George and Magenta and Sister Josephine to consider, and of course, his father, old dead Leonard, whose name Cain had only just come to know.