Force Majeure (21 page)

‘Is that
all
?! They broke her legs. They broke her legs so she’ll never fly again.’

Kay turned the blanket back, rewrapping Azure, covering her wounds but not the guilty clots of blood. ‘Someone knew what she was,’ she whispered, ‘and how to break her.’

Azure’s eyelids trembled open. Swollen pupils flicked rapidly before settling on Kay – who was, after all, the closest, standing over her.

‘You could stay if you wanted,’ Luna said, or maybe Quint said, barely heard.

Kay watched herself fattening in the black tunnel of Azure’s eyes. Her friend was smiling wanly through layers of morphine-dulled pain. She didn’t move. It was impossible for Kay to tell what she was thinking or what she was seeing. She leaned forward, putting their faces closer, but the girl didn’t react. She might as well have been looking into darkness, at nothing.

Then small fingers reached out from beneath the blanket and touched Kay’s mouth and Azure sighed, and Kay knew exactly what the girl was looking at.

The hand fell. The eyes closed. The cover moved healthily, rising light, falling deep. Kay found her own hand clamping over her lips where Azure had touched her. No longer in control of her own body, she stumbled from the bed and into Luna and Quint’s receptive arms.

‘Perhaps,’ they suggested, ‘you should come back when she’s better.’

These might be their last minutes. She turned back and kissed Azure tenderly on the forehead.

Forgive me.

Kay asked Luna and Quint to stay with Azure, no matter what happened, but they made no promises. She left alone, trudging numbly back to her cell. Urgent bodies pushed past her. She’d heard a distant explosion before she reached her rooms, and there was gunfire, one-sided gunfire, battering against the walls like rain. She stayed back from the window. She locked her door, collected the journal and what remained of her meal and huddled under the table with them, waiting for the battle to play itself out.

Unable to resist, she flicked to the final entry of the journal.

Doctor Arkadin killed himself today.

Then there was page upon page of unspoiled blank white paper.

A few feet away, one of the balcony shutters exploded into splinters, struck by a stray round. Unhinged, it half-dropped to the floor. There were further explosions; she assumed they were trying to blast through the main doors. Then there was renewed shouting and thumping and battering and cursing. There was more gunfire, raking along the façade. Luna and Quint had told her some of the girls were planning to dump sewage on the siege from the mezzanine. This must be the bad-tempered riposte.

She wasn’t panicking. She wouldn’t panic.

She went back through the journal, but her hands were shaking and the book shook with them and the words were unreadable. They became ant-bites on the page. She clung to the book as if it was a secure post sunk into the earth. She spilled her food, which looked inedible once cut with dirt and sawdust. She felt nothing except the air from the broken window. There were more blasts, closer. A chunk of masonry punched out of the wall, crumbling mid-air and raining down around her. Feeling soiled, she tore off more of her dress.

Out in the corridor, a girl-child’s voice was screaming, almost singing. The doors are gone. The doors are spread wide open. The house is exposed. And another voice, coarser, indeterminately male or female, was thrashing out a single word. Fire. Fire. Fire. Fire. Fire. Fire.

The drifting voices were followed by smoke, as white and fine as the displaced dust from the wall. It was the heat that first alerted her. She was already coughing and, once it began to seep through the lock and through the gaps in the door, she was choking. The smoke burned her eyes red. She staggered from under the table. Her hands went to her face, and the skin was porcelain-smooth and coated in soot. The only pain was in her eyes and in the knot to the left of her bra-cupped exposed war-breast.

They’re in the walls. We’re breached, oh my sisters and my children and my lovers.

I’m still in control. I’m still in control. I’m still in control.

Kay screamed. She slammed through the tottering shutters onto the balcony, half propelled by the warm vent of air escaping through the walls. She rolled into the waiting grip of the railings. The front of the house careered up around her, its wounds bleeding black smoke. She bobbed up into the searing light. She remembered guns. She ducked.

Her head was sore from where she’d butted the door, but still in one piece. All her senses were drunk on raw data and she felt every slight movement, every breath, magnified as an earthquake. The walls roared, expelling whale-lungs’-worth of ash. The only way out was to drop or jump into the canal.

Xan, what will you feel if I throw myself off, if I break on the ground or drown in the canal? Will you howl as I fall? Will you feel me die? Will you die with me? Or were you right all along, that I’ve just become infected by Candida, and you’ve lost me to its madness? In which case you’ll feel nothing at all.

Only one way to find out.

She heard no more gunfire. That was something; that meant the mock-soldiers had broken into the house, that the battle was over and the house was lost. She pulled herself onto the railings and stood, half-balanced. She willed herself into a launching pose, ready to leap for water she could barely see. Would it be deep enough? She couldn’t remember how to stand; she teetered. I’m still the master of my own life and death. This is it then. I’m still in control. This is it.

The rail chose the moment for her by buckling. Kay’s feet skidded violently and lost their grip on the perch, on anything. She fell. She became an inelegant storm of limbs tumbling into Azure’s blank gaze, into nothing, into air.

Chapter Eight: Kay and Her Precursors

It was
her
house, but she still thought of it reverently as her grandmother’s, and returning here was always a journey back into childhood. Certain things in the house were triggers for her
déjà vu
: views from different windows; the patterns of light in the hall in springtime; the breeze on the leaky upper floor; and – most of all – the scents left by flowers that lingered long after their blooms were gone.

Kay, frozen in her striped T-shirt and shorts, was distracted from the garden path by a glimpse of the broken sundial in the undergrowth. A five-year-old girl, hair streaming, ran anticlockwise rings round it in a distant summer when the garden was trimmer and drier and full of indolent, over-loved cats. It had been a tower to her, and she’d tried, unsuccessfully, to mount its smooth sides. She had never reached the top. This must have been before she’d seen the accident, before she’d given up climbing. She pushed past sopping leaves and branches to reach it, but it was an overcast day and there was no shadow on the stone. The dial was older than the house itself, dating back to the mid-17th Century. It had been misaligned at birth and had never shown the right time.

Memento mori
. She thought of her grandmother, who had vanished into the landscape when Kay was young. The spare key to the house had always been kept in a cleft at the base of the pedestal. Kay checked it with her fingers and found that Her Better Half had kept faith with that particular tradition. She fished the key out, gravely pleased that she could enter the cottage unannounced. After one of her bigger promotions, she had sunk a lot of money into renovating and refurbishing the building. Her Better Half had agreed, seeing it as an investment and a second home. What he hadn’t understood, what
she
hadn’t until this morning, was that she’d had no desire to sell it or own it or even live in it. She wanted to preserve it the way it had been in her memories. She studied the house front from the camouflage of the undergrowth, finding every chipped and worn brick familiar but changed, changed utterly.

Beyond the front door, the kitchen is curtained by so many plants and flowers that the light has turned green and the air rainforest-wet, a hothouse without the heat. Kay’s grandmother sits, as she always does in these memories, at the kitchen table in her wide, cushioned armchair, warming herself on a portable electric fire. Kay perches on a harder seat, a grown-up seat, but her legs are already long enough to reach the floor.

Child-Kay hangs on every word her stout, doll-skinned grandmother says. What she says – what she
tells
– are stories about her side of the family, about the country of her youth, and tales from a wider world. Kay learns about the Black Hole of Calcutta, the Lambton Worm and the Mighty Khan’s storm-frustrated invasions of Japan. Her grandmother always seems distracted, her face turned into the middle distance and her hands occupied, usually with sharp implements – needles knitting, knives peeling or pens scratching. Today she’s rolling a ball of twine, drawing it from the cat’s cradle wrapped round Kay’s fingers. Kay was her little red daughter, splattered with freckles.

‘You’re a sharp instrument as well, Kay. Don’t let yourself get
too
sharp now.’

She isn’t, Kay realised, particularly old, though at the time she seemed ancient.

There were no longer flowers in the kitchen, except for a few straggling pot plants. The old chairs and furniture were long lost. Kay switched on the radio, low, for company. The news headlines were announced – a catalogue of natural and unnatural disasters, followed by the weather and the prose poetry of the shipping forecast. She listened dispassionately until it was replaced by music, then she turned it off. She looked for post and newspapers while she waited, but there were none. Her Better Half kept a tidy house with nothing out of place.

She ventured through the rooms of the ground floor and found a stranger in her grandmother’s sitting room, a red-haired young woman sprawled on her settee in sweater, jeans and bare feet. She was watching television and didn’t notice Kay immediately. When she did, it was with only a flicker of surprise. She turned off the telly and sat up.

‘It’s you,’ she said. She couldn’t have been more than 18. She was a tall girl, like Kay, but gangly and clear-skinned. ‘We weren’t expecting you back this soon.’

‘It feels like I’ve been gone forever,’ Kay replied, seating herself in one of the armchairs, a relic from her grandmother’s time that still seemed too large for her. The redhead – she wore her hair in a bob, not long, not like Kay’s – unselfconsciously picked up her balled socks and rolled them onto her feet. Kay couldn’t place her, but it was soon clear that they hadn’t met before; the girl recognised her only from photographs.

This was Her Better Half’s new Better Half. She was his type.

They spent half an hour talking aimlessly about nothing. Kay’s replacement wasn’t ruffled by her predecessor’s return, which meant that she’d settled, she felt secure. She had skinny arms and pronounced breasts under her tight top. She offered Kay stilted hospitality in her own home; tea, snacks, she refused. Kay told her a little about South America, mostly about Buenos Aires and her travels around the Andes. Candida was difficult to describe. Their Mutual Better Half had gone for a walk in the woods. Eventually they heard the front door slam and he strolled jauntily in on them. His face deflated as he saw Kay, pricked by her presence. He sent his new girlfriend to make coffee – she scurried off, grateful to escape the newly-tense room – and took up her place on the settee. Kay imagined it was still warm with the impression of her body.

‘Where did you find her?’ she asked flatly. ‘And shouldn’t she be in school? It’s not a holiday today, is it? I’ve lost track of time.’

Her Better Half sank back in the settee, staring at her, still winded.

‘Don’t worry, I’m not here to complicate your life,’ Kay drawled. ‘I’ve come back for a day to put my affairs in order.’

Still shocked, Her Better Half tried to speak. The words came out half-formed, barely coherent. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘oh’. Kay realised she had exhausted him long ago.

The chokes of the coffee percolator carried to them from down the hall. Kay’s stare was making Her Better Half uncomfortable. His eyes moved round the room, trying not to settle on her or meet her gaze. He cleared his throat. Anything he came out with now would be said purely to fill the silence.

‘Have you found someone else?’ he asked, cautiously.

‘Not in the way you have,’ she told him.

He was struggling. She smiled calmly, as Flower-of-the-Lady might have smiled. She was trying to encourage him, but his eyes were terrified, as if she was a revenant of the ancient past. Time had moved on here while she was in South America.

‘Your head,’ he asked. ‘What happened?’

She brushed back her hairline and rubbed the bandage on her temple. It didn’t hurt, not any more. ‘I had a fall, nothing serious. It looks much worse than it is.’

Her head smacked against the kerb of the canal and cracked open. She recoiled, slipping back into the waters. She had already passed out, losing consciousness as she fell. The water was flowing, drawn by distant locks. It tugged at her slowly, pulling her away from the walls of the house, from the smoke and the violence. She’d twisted onto her back on impact and this saved her life, keeping her nose and mouth above the line of the water. The gash on her head trickled blood, a pink blossom trail marking her drift through the city.

No-one saw her as she passed, and no-one dived in to save her. That day, no-one in Candida was looking downwards, and if someone had glanced at the canal as she meandered past, they would have seen only a bundle of discarded scarlet rags. Her skin bloated with dirty water. The artificial tide drew her under the arches of the Follies, beneath gangways and half-finished bridges designed to demonstrate misunderstood principles of geometry or engineering. The flow pulled her through channels of stone, concrete, mud and rustless metal. The automatic gears and screws designed by Doctor Arkadin turned, oblivious of her presence. The sluice gates on the drains rattled and scraped open around her, rising like an honour guard, and the counter-tides welled and caught her and drew her down into brick-walled Bazalgette pipes.