SYLVIE'S RIDDLE (4 page)

He had claimed to the other directors that this was an unfortunate necessity, a result of a residual racial clot in Liverpool's cultural arteries, a disfigurement still capable of affecting even so healthy a body as the Signum Institute, because, Hamish claimed, of the mental conflicts which three centuries of slavery, immigration, emigration and religious strife had between them generated on Merseyside. In fact he was primarily if not solely concerned with any references made to the diminutive stature, combative personality and geographical origins of the present Director of Studies. Himself, in fact. So the Racial Epithet Catchment Enumerator (RECE for short) would surely have appeared unexpectedly specific to anyone other than Hamish who might have gained access to it, which no else in fact ever could, since he had ensured that he was in possession of the only monitoring trigger. The lexicon of sought-for phrases which he trawled daily, and usually nightly too, included 'malignant Hiberian dwarf', 'Glaswegian toad', 'kilted wanker', 'Jockstrap Willie', 'Scotch Midget', 'masturbating Pict', 'Clydeside Chlamydia' and 'Gorbals Gonad'. He was entirely convinced that such disobliging phrases were continuously passing back and forth through the ether, but he could never manage to nail a specific user. He knew what they said about him: he didn't need telling. He'd always known. He'd get one of them one day. But for now they were managing inexplicably to evade his scrutiny. He often saw them huddling together at the bottom of corridors, trying to hide their giggles and guffaws as he approached. He wondered if they might have dreamt up some sort of code. An inserted semi-colon perhaps, to facilitate the disparagement of his own still semi-colonised land and those engendered there? Or full-stops inserted, just the simple minuscule black mark in the middle of certain words, perhaps? He tried it out on the scanner:
Toe. rag. Scum. bag. Dick. head.
Shitf
ace
.

Still nothing. Evidently something more exotic and encrypted then: they were a hieroglyphic lot at the Signum Institute. He knew that well enough.
Bast
ards
.

Thus it was that while Sylvie finally switched off the light and stared out over the Mersey and its mighty ships, Hamish click-clicked on his keyboard
with quiet determination four
doors away. She switched the light back on for a moment to look at one of the pictures pinned to her wall. In the art of Laos, the river-dragon itself is indistinguishable from the river. Those spumes, fumes, flushes; thos
e fanged rushes; those meanders…
And yet there was something she was trying to focus. The river god was sluggish, dark, possessive where the nymph was quick, light, constantly escaping. Where did that leave Deva then? Had she combined them both in one? She switched the light off again. The waters of Lethe at last: they were the ones that brought forgetfulness.

*

When she arrived back the following evening in Cathedral Close, Chester, the lights in the house were on. As she opened the door she heard the soundtrack of the film. She knew it only too well. Owen was back and was watching
City of Ghosts.
It seemed an appropriate choice for his return trip into his own dark time. He was re-acquainting himself with his work, finding out what might be contained in his head. She walked into the room quietly. Lennon's lugubrious tones were lamenting his inability to go back to the place of his birth because of all the drug-charges against him. Owen looked up from the armchair and smiled. Anyone would think he'd popped out to the shop fifteen minutes before, to buy some red peppers.

'Back then, Owen.'

'I always come back.' A cargo ship bleated through the mist and Lennon's voice came over the soundtrack once more, disparaging one old comrade, annihilating another.

'Reminding yourself who you are?'

'I thought I was reminding myself who someone else was.

But let's not quibble.'

*

She made him shower and shave, then let him come to bed.

He stared down at himself rising. His body had memories that his mind had lost. It was veined with memories.

'This has happened before, you know.'

'I don't know.'

'I do know, Owen. And it has.'

'Even this.'

'Even this. It's you on day release from repetition. Your little wormhole out of consciousness.'

A little wormhole. Eve's little wormhole. That was in the mystery play, wasn't it? He felt her flesh and clutched it tightly. Closing his eyes at last, praying tonight there would be n
o dreams.

In
the morning she left him sleeping. She went down to the cellar and saw the greatcoat hanging from its rusty hook. Out of the pocket you could just make out the newspape
r Alfred had given him. She lifted it out and saw the image of the young woman's face. That was enough. She didn't need to read any of the words.

Living on Air

Keep pushing on towards the headland. What had begun as inanition was now transmuting to energy inside her. It was true, everything Lady Pneuma had told her was true: food was an impurity, a bodily impurity for an impure spirit. With the spiritual cleansing came physical redemption too. She might need tiny fragments for now, morsels to assuage the wren of contamination still fluttering inside her. But even that would soon be over. Air and water would then suffice. The air, as Pneuma had predicted, now tasted like invisible gold. Never before had she known the taste of gold. All she had to do was find the hut and she could rest. She had made the right decision, she had no doubt about that. Back there, she had become what she had pretended to be. He had written the part for her, and she had given her soul to it, even though he had lied. The contaminated always lie. They live on lies; that's what they eat. The Delta Programme had established that all she now needed was to commit herself entirely to breathing divinity and thereby being sustained within it. In the little bothie, she shredded the wrappers from the Bounty bar to make a tiny fire. So insubstantial, its ashes. So little was needed for a flame either inside or out. Those wrappers were the last contact she would have with material food. The last clearing finally beckoned.

Once we lived on light and the
anima
inside us fed on nothing at all but air, and took its sufficiency from such elemental provender. Only the corruption of the spirit had led to the material distraction of food. Alex had decided to make her way back to that primordial state where we swallowed air as the glow-worm does, and the soul generates its own electricity, a little bulb gleaming inside the lampshade of the body. Lady Pneuma had done it now for ten years, and Alex had never seen a healthier looking human being. She needed nothing but air, not even water any more.

Soon her own exhausted body was lying on the makeshift bed. It was growing dark. The air was chilling. She focused entirely on air. Owen Treadle was an impurity, like food, the mind's soiled food, left entirely behind her. She was shedding the skin of her disastrous former life, and what she had been made to do inside it. She was being re-born, free now of the entanglement of dark matter.

*

As the disciple lay so far to the north eating air, the object of her devotion sat in her rooms in the Claymore Hotel staring out of the window, down at the traffic moving slowly along Piccadilly. Lady Pneuma,
aka
Rachel Askarli, had begun her spiritual journey twenty years before in Bermondsey, when she had noticed a coin outside a confectioner's shop. She had not picked up the coin, but had instead stood and watched for ten minutes as people walked over it. Many of them noticed it lying there, but not a single one bent down to pick it up, until she herself did.
It was on the table now before her, encased in perspex, a monstrance holding its own demotic host.
This coin of small denomination she had shown to her disciples many times: the currency of our civilisation, debased to the point where it could be discarded on the street and left there. Retrieved finally as a spiritual emblem, a memento of the dynamics of triviality.

Her studies had been long and arduous. She had needed to visit the sites of many traditions until the truth had broken through at last, ten years earlier on the first day of May in New York. She had been on the top floor of the Waldorf Hotel in Manhattan, listening to the unearthly siren of the elevator, when all had been made clear. She could never have formulated it herself. It was a gift.

We had let ourselves fall into the realm of dark matter. We had engrossed our spirits with materiality. We had corroded our souls with the food of animals and forgotten that our true realm was in fact the air, Ariel's dimension. We had come to imagine that what we once experienced as no more than a beastly degradation - the consumption of earthly food - was now a necessity. This was the real fall, the one true vertical descent from grace. Its itchy concomitant was all too evident: that the generation of new life required coition, another insalubrious address marked out in the neighbourhood of dark matter. The revelation came on Lady's Day, for that was how the patriarchs of meat had disguised the miracle of the goddess as their own feast, now another festival of the great male schedules of entry and subordination.

From that day on she dressed in blue, Mary's colour, and started to proclaim her philosophy, her revelation, her religion: air nutrition and parthenogenesis. We could live on the nutrients in the air itself and, once the spirit was sufficiently purified, generate life from within ourselves, through the self-intermingling of the spirit. She had written her testament,
The One True Elemental.
Or to speak more truthfully, she had transcribed it. It was published by The Delta Foundation, her movement, the world-wide movement that proclaimed her faith.

And this was the only book which Alex had taken with her to the bothie. She was staring at its pages now as a bad wind headed over from the hills towards her. The Claymore was warm; the bothie very cold. Alex was pale with inanition; Lady Pneuma was bronzed and almost plump from feasting on her unearthly nutrients.

Through the Lens

Owen woke with a blister forming on the skin of his mind. He saw the note propped up against the mirror.
Try to remember who you are, love.

He washed; he dressed; he went to St. Clare's and walked swiftly down the corridor to Alfred's room. His companion was sitting on the bed with the Bible open on his lap.

'You put a lie inside my mind.'

'No, Owen, I put a truth back inside your mind. You would like to replace that truth with a lie, I think. The replacement would be what most people call forgetting. You're a specialist at that. You've done it before, you know. Usually it was just women. Women you weren't married to. They came and went. This time there's something that can't be forgotten. A woman again. But something different.'

'Why should I believe you?'

'Because I gave you the proof. You put it in your greatcoat pocket. Why aren't you wearing your greatcoat today?' Owen hesitated.

'It's in the cellar.'

'That's where the truth is then, Owen. Back down in the cellar. You've put the truth in the cellar again. Better make sure you don't go down there for a while, until you've fitted the plastic cover back on your memory. The one that keeps the dust out.'

Owen left without another word. He walked along the city walls. He knew these walls, didn't he? He'd walked them many times, once as a writer, once as someone re-arranging reality, and once as a lover. One of those for whom the world is made new. He couldn't be sure. He went down the steps and found a bar. He didn't want any alcohol. He could still taste the bitterness of Alfred's whisky from two days before, and it was a bad taste. A bad taste that left its traces in the mind. He asked for a mineral water and sat down at the table. Had he already been here? He felt as though he'd been everywhere before. He stared at the woman at the next table. Blonde, mid-thirties, maybe older, looking at her watch and grimacing. She was evidently waiting. He wondered if she knew she kept sighing. Then he arrived finally, the awaited one, all waving arms and sandy hair in his eyes. Younger than her, a lot younger. Not her son though; he could tell that immediately.

'Finally turned up, have you? Good of you to come.'