SYLVIE'S RIDDLE (10 page)

Then as she was turning away, he said this: 'Oh, by the way.

Your husband phoned this morning. He wondered if you might be here, since you apparently weren't there. Sadly not, I told him. I had no idea of your whereabouts, of course, any more than he did.'

Sylvie drove through the Birkenhead Tunnel in a state of chilled exasperation. No graffiti down here, she noticed. Even the taggers weren't prepared to
endure so much carbon monoxide
for their urban art. She put on the cassette that her best student had given her the day before. Paul Darcy.
Through the Concrete Corridors.
'He's into some of the same things you are,' the student had said. She tried to concentrate on the music and ignore the hundred thousand tons of w
ater thrashing about above her.

Dreams and speculations, fragments washed up by the waves

Ruins under mountains and ancient treasures deep
in
caves

I
stepped into your labyrinth,
I
heard the monster roar

But a doctor
in
a white coat with a clipboard led me gently
to
the door

And when you arrived with a pen-torch and a smile
on
your face

Bringing all the medicine
I'd
need for my stay
in
this place

Through the concrete corridors, your smiling words were feathery and slight

When the blindfold came off, darkness flashed not light.

Another minotaur, then. Blinded by passion and bewilderment. But she couldn't concentrate, and switched over to the news instead. More slaughter in the caverns there. Bombs going off in the mountains. When she arrived back she heard the sound of one of
Johnny
and Owen's films. She walked across to the set and switched the sound off.

'Why did you phone the Institute this morning?'

'To find out where you were ... how you were.'

'How very solicitous. You bugger off to Llandudno and then start snooping around after me.'

'I wasn't snooping. Anyway, where were you?'

'With a friend.'

'Have a name, this friend?

'I don't owe you anything, Owen. I'm not saying you owe me anything either, but I definitely don't owe you anything.'

'Do you want a coffee?'

'Yes, please. I'll go have a shower and get changed.'

'I like the get-up, to be honest. Only hope your friend did.' Then he went to the kitchen
. She turned and looked at the
silent images on the screen. Tom posters on a decaying wall. Balls of dead grass blowing down the street. A child crouched beside a blown-up truck, his face a miniature diagram of the world's desolation.

'Do you want me to sleep in the other room again?'

'Yes please.'

But he came to bed anyway, half an hour after her. Lay beside her. Placed a hand on her breast.

'No.'

'It was so warm the other night.'

'So warm you went to Llandudno the following day. It had been a long time before that, Owen. Given everything that had happened. Maybe you haven't remembered it all yet. Alex, I mean.'

He hadn't removed his hand; neither had she.

'I was just trying to help you remember who you were. So much of sex is politeness, remember. A woman in one of your scripts says that.'

Only minutes before falling asleep did she remember Henry.

She hadn't phoned him back. He'd survive the night though, wouldn't he?

Earth, Water, Fire and Air

Alex read the passage from
The One True Elemental
for the fourth time and told herself that the pain in her gut was merely the sound of earthly grossness leaving. So much corruption for so long had rotted the invisible conduits and made them flesh-like in weightiness and sloth. She was being pulled down temporarily towards what Lady Pneuma called the dark plumbing of sad bodies, th
e potbellies, the gross tongues
, those with soulless skins and iron brains. The pain was the low dirge of lament of a defeated army stumbling home. Soon enough she would hit the wall of elation, that resurrection into the region of Mary's colour, the azure of the abandonment of the fleshly. Pneuma had described it so beautifully. It would soon be hers. Only for now the pain, the sweats, the cramps and the cold. Such a terrible cold. She had never felt so shiveringly cold; the soul itself seemed to shiver. Shaking off the filth of its imprisonment. That was the dark matter leaving.

She could still just manage to turn around and see the image of Pneuma, a vague vignette, framed in a white-heart plastic frame, redolent of sainthood. It made her look considerably thinner than she actually was these days, but her skin was still lit from the light within. And she also saw Owen Treadle, whom she did not choose to see at all. His ectoplasmic face was grinning, pursuing her across space and time. 'Go on, you can do it. It's not really happening, Alex. This is acting, for God's sake.' But it was rea
lly happening, wasn't it? Even
something only made to be re-played again and again on film still had to happen. Images could not have an afterlife unless they had a l
ife first. She passed out then.

*

Lady Pneuma now claimed one hundred thousand members worldwide. There was no way of affirming or disproving this statement, since if she kept any records, she had not as yet made them available to anyone else. The Inland Revenue in Britain and the IRS in the States were both beginning to make some interested murmurs about all this. But Pneuma, while seemingly living at the Claymore for one half of the year, and the New York Waldorf for the other, remained elusive. Her communications with the world were carefully controlled. A DVD (Alex had it in her bag, but there was no way of playing it in the electricity-free bothie); occasional booklets; hermetic appearances on television, very infrequent, and controlled entirely by the Delta Foundation. Her followers had to turn back to the compacted wisdom brought together in the pages of
The One True Elemental.
There they could find it all. All that she had discovered. All she had endured. Everything she had now transcended.

Alex was clutching her copy, even as she sank into unconsciousness. Her own copy was signed; or at least the words Lady Pneuma had been imprinted on its title-page in some manner. A few sceptical journalists who had set off in pursuit of the enigmatic lady were far from convinced that she spent her days signing books for her numerous disciples. Alex had the special copy because, after paying three hundred pounds to become an associate member, she had then spent a further four hundred to become a full initiate. This accorded her privileges, like the signed book, in which she had read
–
enchantingly
–
that the urethra had only become so engrossed and enfleshed at a late stage in female evolution. Before that it had been a translucent passageway through which light could travel freely. This had been the burden of the myth of Zeus and Danae: though encased in her tower of flesh, Danae was penetrated by the luminous shower of gold. In other words, the riches of the world of light had overcome all obstacles and seeded the womb of the future. So what did gods live on and in? Air, of course. Like Pneuma herself.

Alex had also been entitled as a full initiate to personal communication with Lady Pneuma; this prospect had been what had prompted her to spend the extra money. In her desperation before leaving to head north the month before, she had phoned and phoned. Day after day after day. Over a hundred times. But it was always the same recorded message she found herself listening to.

'This is Lady Pneuma. You are now a full initiate of the Delta Foundation, which has found the path of escape from a life of bodily entrapment. We are free spirits who live only on what the spirit offers. If you have not made the full journey yet, you must understand that you now have the means to do so. I have eaten nothing but air for ten years. Take a look at my pictures ...
’

The Second Interval

Henry Allardyce looked in the mirror. He couldn't really blame Sylvie for not phoning back; he wouldn't have phoned himself back, if he'd been a woman. God, look at yourself, Allardyce. Your hair needs cutting. You haven't bothered shaving. Your shirt collar is frayed. Your doctor says your blood-pressure is always on the up and up. Where's it all going to end?

Phttt,
he thought. I'll go like that. Run out of air one day like a dead balloon.
Phttt.
Shrivelled skin on the pavement where the boots go hurrying by. One great
phttt,
and a mild, baffled obit in the local paper. Heading for flame and ashes, and maybe a little earthenware vase with a name inscribed and two dates: from this terminus to that one. A life. The exit from the womb and the entry to the grave. And as for the rest, the civic amenity site or, as we used to say when syllables were rationed during the war, the tip. Not my Picassos though; not my minotaurs. No one will be chucking those away. And, pray, what do you do about it all, sir? Pour yourself another glass of wine and listen to Thelonius Monk, why don't you?

Monk was a particular favourite of Henry's, who liked a great deal of modern jazz before it decided to abandon the tune entirely, though he had been told it had recently been returning home to it. Monk's version of
Nice Work if you Can Get It
was plinking and plonking through the gallery at the moment, gathering up contingencies as it went and transmuting each one into own
weird causality. Henry poured
himself a glass of red. French
vin de table.
Nothing fancy. Mustn't spend too much this month. Then the bell rang to indicate that someone had entered. Henry took a stern swig of his glass, adopted an expression of entirely insincere affability, and walked through to the main room. It was Bernard Trasker, MBE and Mrs Bernard Trasker, MBE by gender proxy and adoption. Henry could never think of them as anything other than this, since Bernard seldom let an opportunity pass of telling everyone about the existence of his gong. It was all over his letterhead, his compliment slips. Even, Henry suspected, his notes to the milkman. Probably had it embroidered on his socks. Should he ever omit to mention the honour, his wife would make good the lacuna. Her role as dutiful companion to a distinguished lifelong civil servant surely deserved some sort of recognition from the world. Bernard occasionally bought paintings for his fine old house up on the hill. Whatever he bought, his wife would disapprove of. She was looking with considerable disapproval now at the Nolan portrait of Rimbaud, which Bernard had been examining for the sixth or seventh time. Evidently pondering.

'Hello Henry.'

'Hello Bernard. Still thinking about the Nolan then?'

'It's a powerful piece of work.
’

'But where on earth would it go, Bernie?' his wife asked. 'We can hardly have it in the front room. The man looks positively demented.'

'He has shuffled off the coils of civilisation,' Henry said. 'Well he might have kept one or two on, if only for decency's sake.'

'He has got down to the essential core of things,' Henry said, now in his curatorial role. He could prattle on merrily like this for hours. 'He is a poor, bare, forked creature. As are we all, up on the heath, if old King Lear is to be believed.' Mrs Bernard