Need (33 page)

H
e was a temporary man just. Nothing more than a stopgap while Miss Root took her holidays. The Adirondacks, she had said, and very nice too, though he himself favoured the seaside. Balmy breezes, shimmering strands, you couldn’t beat the old bucket and spade.

Desperate peaky she’d looked as she said goodbye. Small wonder in it either, the horror she had lived through. Ten years’ love and labour desolated, that would steal the roses from any woman’s cheeks. And then as well, of course, she’d be grieving for Miss Crow.

It had been almost dawn before they’d brought Anna to the surface. Randall Gurdler had issued his statement and posed for his pictures, gone home to bed long since. Or back to headquarters, as he claimed himself, but John Joe would not believe one word out of that man’s mouth. A born smarmy boots, you wouldn’t buy a used fart from a tosser like that. Although some of the men under him seemed decent sorts. Master Maitland had said not to trust them an inch, they were the Antichrist’s bumboys one and all. But those firefighters and ambulance men had plunged in the burning earth more times than you could count this night, bringing forth their dead.

Most were victims of smoke, it seemed. Two lawmen had expired from friendly fire, and one civilian from a heart
attack. The majority, though, were still extant. Strapped onto stretchers, they were trundled under the klieg lights to the ambulance, their stunned faces caked thick with soot and oil. White and black alike, they looked like Mitchell’s Minstrels down there. Strangers passed by in a breakless line. Then came Joe Easter, his chest stoved in. Then Burdette Merry-weather and Marvella Crabtree, both smoke. Then a body in Jerzy Polacki’s clothes, head bandaged like the Invisible Man. And Brulant Boniface, on foot, in handcuffs. “What became of the Master?” John Joe called out.

“Vamoosed,” Brulant replied, then the lawmen took him away. The smoke pouring out of the subway exits was getting denser by the minute, you had to keep a handkerchief over your face, and even then you choked. The concrete underfoot kept gaining heat, it felt like hot coals. John Joe was forced to shuffle and hop, stay constantly on the shift, or else his rubber-soled Trudgett’s might have got stuck to the sidewalk. And still the stretchers kept coming, the firemen’s hoses kept sweeping their path, the kliegs kept drilling black holes in your eyes. Between the lights and smoke and weariness, he almost missed Anna Crow.

She did not seem damaged in any way. John Joe’s first care was to search her for pain, but he found no trace. For a wonder, the worst soot had kept off her face. A few streaks and smudges on her forehead just, the rest of her was unblemished. As if the embalmer had done his work already, all fear and anger smoothed away. So this was not Anna. That person was elsewhere; vamoosed, like Master Maitland. While this waxwork lay in her place, borne in procession for all men to see.

All the ambulances were fully loaded, there was a logjam behind. Even as Anna Crow was being paraded, another great roar came from underground, and water rushed, foaming, from the earth. A burst main perhaps, or some other flood.
Within a space of seconds, countless fountains erupted from fire hydrants and subway vents, unclassified holes in the ground. In the glare of lights, with the stretchers gliding slow and stately beneath, it was almost like the water-ballet in the
son et lumière
at Kilmullen Castle. John Joe had watched one summer night with Juice Shovlin, they had got in for half price.

Beautiful it had been then, and lovely now: the form of Anna still and white, the paramedics bent over her, tending. Better than the castle even, it might have been St. Conall’s stream, that night the stoats had buried their female. In silence they’d passed through the grove and over the stream, into the shelter of the bull,
Scaith-na-Tairbhe
. That was a burying proper, but Anna had shrugged when he told her. She wanted jazz, she’d said; she wanted cocktails with a cherry. But she got neither here, just one more blow-up underfoot, a gusher that sent the crowd floundering backwards, thrashing, and by the time John Joe could struggle into place again, the ambulance doors had shut, there was no more of Anna Crow.

He made his best way home then. Straggling through the lightening streets, water to his ankles and the fire above, and the sights he saw on his journey, the fornication and the drunkenness, the looting and burning, smoke-blindness would have been a blessing to him. And again when he passed that Black Maria outside the cop shop, and it was full of Swans. Valence Holt was one he recognized, and Gladstone Rivers too. Hilario Vargas and his wife Angelique, Clarence Codd, James Jeffries Word, and all of them in shackles, down by law. But still no sign of Master Maitland.

Where could he be hid?
Vamoosed
was not a word that told you much. Scrammed, skedaddled, he might be anywhere. Might have burrowed deeper yet in rock, found himself a fresh hiding place. Or been snatched away to heaven, just the
way he had predicted. Risen with the raptured, enthroned at God’s right hand. A Black Swan in glory, he might have the last laugh yet.

Well, strength to him, he might. But John Joe didn’t feel confident. Regardless that they had been foretold, this night’s affairs did not strike him as correct.

If only the Master had been at hand to explain. Maybe John Joe misunderstood the programme, and this was just a dress rehearsal. A test of faith, to see who truly believed, and who was expendable. Maybe the top Swans, those chosen as worthy to survive, would regroup at some later date and create another Mount Tabor. But it could never again be so snug. So companionable to his soul. Best of luck in their endeavours. Still and all, they’d have to make do without himself.

The moment he stepped inside the Zoo, anyhow, all thought of Black Swans fled his mind. Impossible, in this charnel house, to fret over Kingdom Come. He saw Barnabus the monkey pushed from the railway bridge, saw Rudkin scalded in boiling milk. He saw a white bull kneeling with its throat slit, its blood draining in black earth.

Who fathered such distress? What power of hurt could so betray a man? In their room above Duchess Gardens, his mother had pinned a poem to the wall one time.
Pain that cannot forget
, it read,
Falls drop by drop upon the heart Until in our despair comes wisdom Through the awful grace of God
. But no wisdom came to John Joe, or even a settled digestion.

It was the times that were in it. Sifting through the remains of these sliced creatures, shuffling them into plastic bags, he had to hold his breath so fiercely for so long, his skull filled with crackles and buzzings, and he failed to hear Mr. Ferdousine descend the stairs.

John Joe hardly knew him to speak to, just a casual nod on the landing was all. Mornings when the old man stepped out
to fetch his English newspaper, or Friday nights when he went to his chess club. Otherwise, they were strangers. But Mr. Ferdousine appeared nothing shy. He stepped out crisp and keen through the Zoo, cast a cold eye on the carnage, picked his way through the body parts to the counter, and there he perched on a high stool. Though it was his own living that lay in its blood, he only nibbled at a flat tablet, it looked like caramel. “Great tidings from London,” he said. “England is destroyed.”

Taking inventory was no easy task. Every time John Joe had one animal reassembled, so he thought, one piece would still be missing, or an alien piece crept in. “A most notable trouncing,” said Mr. Ferdousine, nibbling, bibbling. “At play’s commencement, the English seemed home and dry, the Ashes were theirs. And now they are not merely defeated, but utterly prostrated. Perfidious Albion brought to dust.”

One hopeful sign, there were more cages than corpses. Two skinks and a chuckwalla turned up alive behind the velvet curtain, then John Joe found the Lutino Cockatiel huddled under a macaranga, sorely carved but breathing still. No other survivors, however, were reported at this time. “Lambasted, lathered, skinned alive,” said Mr. Ferdousine, then he glanced up sharply, as if caught short. “Where is Miss Root?” he enquired.

“She stepped out for a breath of air.”

“I see.” And the old man started on a fresh caramel. “A most remarkable woman, that; I met her great-uncle once. Fred Root, the famed Leg Theorist. Late in his career, he came one evening to Westminster School, to proffer a few coaching tips. He had been representing Worcestershire against Surrey at The Oval, and made his appearance at the close of the day’s play. Hot and perspiring from his toils, he had not even time to change his flannels, but appeared in full working fig. Alas, I
myself was not cricketer enough to qualify for his attentions. However, I took up a position behind his arm as he bowled, and I will never forget the splendour of his action. Two short walking steps, six accelerating strides, then the body rocked easily back. The left arm was thrown up as a pivot, the ball held in the back-slung right hand. Then, with a final leap, came the full rhythmic swing of those heavy shoulders. Root delivered at the acme, and as he followed through, his hand seemed to press down heavily on the air. His left foot plunged into the ground, and his arm swept on after the delivery, describing a wide circle. Such beauty it was. The mastery of the thing.”

From the holy-Joe tone that Mr. Ferdousine employed, you could tell this story was meant to matter. But cricket was not John Joe’s idea of a game. The GAA did not approve it, and Juice Shovlin had always said that only nancy boys played, a bunch of Fifi la Plumes scared to get their togs mucked.

“And afterwards,” said Mr. Ferdousine, sprinking crumbs of caramel down his bottle-green velvet waistcoat, “and afterwards, I walked home by myself. An alien, I was never popular with the other boys. Their ceaseless ragging and bullying were a deep bitterness to me, so that, when Root concluded his demonstration, I was glad to escape my confreres’ unwanted attentions, and wend my way in solitude. The evening light was all but gone, the night came on apace. Lost in thoughts of the peerless exhibition that I had so recently witnessed, I walked oblivious to my surroundings. Thus, it came as a complete surprise when suddenly a car horn blared in my ear, and I looked up to see Root’s smiling face at the window of his Morris Minor. It was not a handsome countenance; no amount of hero worship could make it so. Gnarled and lumpen, it was the face of a gargoyle rather. But humorous, warm, infinitely kind. And now he smiled on me. Something
in my posture may have apprised him of my loneliness, for, without a word, he reached inside his cricket bag and brought out a cherry-red ball, as yet untouched by willow. A moment he paused to rub it on his flannels for luck, then tossed it to me. But the light was poor, and I was ever a duffer at catch. Slipping through my fingers, the ball fell to the pavement with a thud, then rolled away. When I retrieved it, its perfection was scuffed and marred, my humiliation complete. In desperation, I tried to blame the gathering dusk.
It was the dark
, I protested. But Root only laughed.
It always is
, he said, and drove on.”

Was that all? Surely this couldn’t be the punchline? But Ferdousine said no word further. Merely waggled his birdy head sideways, staring at John Joe out of those yellow eyes, then he brushed the last crumbs from his hands, descended from his perch and, with one brisk nod of farewell, he went back upstairs to his quarters. Leaving John Joe with his broom and pail, and ten plastic bags filled to bursting.

Perhaps he’d missed something. Perhaps there was some hidden clue to that tall story he’d been too tired to catch. Or perhaps the old man had simply been gaming with him. Pretending to share a confidence, only to leave him dangle. In any case, there was disrespect involved, and he would not stand still for mockery. To slave and suffer as he did now, up to his udders in innards, and then be made a sport, he could get all that from Juice Shovlin, he didn’t need it from any man else.

A minute there, resting on his broom, he was tempted to sling his hook. Walk out on the whole damned set. But where was he to go? Not back to Scath, his room would be rented by now. Nor off to London either; England was destroyed. The sore truth was, he had no spot he fitted. On TV sometimes he’d hear some politician or golfer in polyester pants speak highly of patriotism. “How must that feel?” he’d ask himself
then. “To hear the words
My Country
in your mouth?” But he had no way of knowing, and no likelihood of finding out.

If he didn’t lie, the Zoo was his best offer. His only offer, why pretend? So he went back to his sifting and bagging. It was turned one o’clock,
Days of Our Lives
must be on. Billie looked smashing in her bridal gown, but, as for Bo, he wouldn’t trust that man with Randall Gurdler’s mother.

Outdoors beyond the ruins, when he looked, it was pissing down rain. No, tell a lie, it was snivelling more than pissing. On Broadway the last of the looters were making their way home. A child and his mother passed, they were bearing a toaster-oven, a microwave and a CD player, their arms hung heavy with new clothes. The same child it was that John Joe had seen on the street that day, the first time ever he’d met Miss Root.

A golden boy, he’d been, curled up on his side with his one hand stretched out in the light, the fingers bent as if begging. And his mother at the door of Blanco y Negro, her fat fingers clustered with rings. And the way he rose like a whistled greyhound at Miss Root’s call. So now they went home with their spoils. Back to their fifth-floor apartment. Two rooms, John Joe saw, with a connecting corridor, the bathroom off to one side. He saw a portrait of the Virgin over a bed, an altar. Scented candles, Lucky Kentucky glasses full of pink water, green water and blue, a necklace made out of horse’s teeth, hanks of hair, a sequined crucifix, and one spent bullet, ringed by fairy lights. But there was no cause to hurry, they might as well save their shoe-leather. That place was up in flames.

The image exhausted him finally. He had to use his broom like a crutch, or he might have fallen out of his standing again, the way he’d fallen after Miss Root shaved him.