The Gone-Away World (11 page)

“You want to hear a story?”

I nod, cautious. The chair I am sitting in is the chair in which I lost my faith in God; it reeks of lonely realisation. Only now I seem to be finding a friendly face where I least expected it. The chair and I are reassessing our relationship. This is far safer than reassessing my relationship with the Evangelist, who has clearly lost the plot and may at any moment begin frothing at the lips or singing bawdy show tunes. She wriggles again, down into what must be a cushion (it looks like a
luxurious
cushion, rather than one full of rocks or razor blades, as I might have expected). Content with the position of her backside, Assumption Soames begins. The story is by way of being a parable.

“A traveller on the road one night misses his turning and finds himself lost in a forest. He has a dog, but the dog is doing the dog thing, can't seem to decide which way is home. Perhaps he's in a car, and the dog doesn't know. Anyway, when he's totally and irredeemably lost amid the trees, he comes to a fork in the road. He has his faithful hound, so he isn't afraid, but he
does
want to get home”—she waves the cigarette in a narrow circle—“so he's pleased when he sees that there's an inn at the fork where he can ask directions. A hotel, maybe, with a bar. No one really has inns any more, right? So he comes to a hotel. A nasty, sawdust-on-the-floor kind of place. The kind of place where
you
should not go. Okay?”

I nod.

“So, sitting at the bar are three scary old hags so ancient he can't see their eyes. Their faces are that wrinkled. Hmm?”

I nod again. This is the first time ever in conversation with the Evangelist that I have had a sense that my consent and even participation were a necessary part of her game plan, and the discrepancy is making me tense. Assumption Soames, on the other hand, is shedding tension from muscle groups as if she's been unplugged from the current. She waves her arms, taps her feet, and stabs the cigarette through the air to make little glowing full stops when she gets to the bits which are important.

“So the traveller goes up to these ladies and asks them, polite as can be, how best to get home. And the oldest one—in the middle—she grabs her forehead and parts the curtains and glowers at him and she says she
don't answer questions no more
!” Assumption Soames hits the desk with her hand and her voice for a moment is scratchy and back-country and alarming. “And she points at her sisters on either side of her and she says
one of these ladies always tells the truth and the other always lies, and they only answers one question between 'em
!

“So if he wants directions from these ladies, he's got to ask a pretty sophisticated question. But fortunately, our traveller—Evander John Soames of Cricklewood Cove—is a teacher. He knows just what question to ask.
Right,
says Dr. Soames, looking at the hag nearest to the gin,
then my question to you is this: which of the two roads would the other of you tell me is the way home?
Because Dr. Soames is no slouch with the logic, and he knows if he's talking to the truthful sister, she'll tell him truly which the wrong road is, because that's the road her sister would choose, and if he's talking to the liar, she'll tell him that the right road (which her sister would tell him to take) is the wrong road—so whichever answer he gets, he knows to take the other road. So the hag tells him to take the southern road, and off he goes, north.”

Assumption Soames takes another draw on her gasper and frowns across the desk. It would be unsatisfying if that was the end of her narrative, but this pause has the feel of an audience participation moment. I cast around and ask a question.

“Does he make it home?”

“No.”

“What?”

“No. He does not make it home to his wife and baby. Nor does the dog. Dr. Soames goes along the north road where he is waylaid by the many sons and daughters of the three hags, who are all
anthropophagi.
”

“Um.”

“Cannibals. With man-eating, and sadly also dog-eating, dogs.” She leans forward. “They make Soames pie, and
they
all live happily ever after until they are wiped out by an outbreak of kuru, or possibly by the marines. And the moral of this story?”

“Don't leave the path.”

“No. The moral of this story in so far as it has one is that cannibals can study logic, and that
if
you are going to leave the path, you better have your wits about you and know better than to trust the first scary old lady who talks to you in a public place. ‘One of my sisters lies and the other tells the truth!' What a load of crap. For God's sake, why doesn't he ask the barman? Or just retrace his steps? The man's an idiot.” She sighs. I adjust the angle of my jaw again, bringing my lips at least near enough to one another that I will not be mistaken for a tea chest. It must be moderately obvious to the Evangelist that I have no earthly idea why she is telling me this, or what is happening in this room if it is not the case that I have gone totally batshit or she has, or the Devil has come and stolen away her soul and left in its place that of a New Orleans brothel madame. She makes a circular gesture with her hands, an inviting twitch which I recognise from her occasional interventions in my education as meaning “
Think,
boy, the Lord gave you grey matter between your ears for something other than ballast.” I answer as I generally do—with a sort of hopeful hiccough. There is a resigned pause.

“Your pal Gonzo,” says Assumption Soames, “does not leave the path. Not ever. He does everything from the shelter of the path, and the path kind of takes him where he wants to go because he's cute. You're sitting in my office now and you can't figure out how you never saw I wasn't just a crazy Bible lady or why I was so goddam mean to you for fourteen years, and the answer is that I'm a very good liar and that is the only way I can make sure to be allowed to teach you the stuff you need to know. People don't want children to know what they
need
to know. They want their kids to know what they
ought to need to know.
If you're a teacher you're in a constant battle with mildly deluded adults who think the world will get better if you imagine it
is
better. You want to teach about sex? Fine, but only when they're old enough to do it. You want to talk politics? Sure, but nothing modern. Religion? So long as you don't actually think about it. Otherwise some furious mob will come to your house and burn you for a witch. Well, hell. In this town, the evil old lady who tells everyone what they can and can't read because it isn't decent is
me.
So I can hire whoever I damn well like to subvert my iron rule and they can teach evolution and free speech and the cultural bias of history and all the rest. And I do this because you, you
are
going to leave the path, however much you want to stay on it. And if that's going to happen, you better damn well be prepared!” She slumps. “Man's an idiot,” she mutters. “I'll take care of Jarndice for you. It is Jarndice you want, I take it?”

Yes, it is. She makes a note, and we sit there, exhausted, and she's wondering whether she's gotten through to me and I'm wondering whether I can trust her and we're both wondering in shy, weird little ways whether we've made a friend today or whether, if we offer the hand, it's going to mean laughter and a bit of hurt before we can slam the shutters down again. And then, because I have never learned to quit, most especially while I am ahead, I ask if it's a true story. Assumption Soames does not immediately say anything. She puts her hands back in their church steeple position and she draws a breath of clear air and thinks about it. And she puts out her gasper a bit solidly and draws herself in sharply as if she's getting ready to jump off the top diving board.

“No,” says Assumption Soames. “The true story is that Dr. Soames managed to persuade the cannibals to let him go, under certain conditions. And then he used their phone and called a bunch of breakdown services and taxi companies and had them send drivers out to the little cannibal town where they were killed and dressed and served up with apples, and the cannibals and Dr. Soames all had a big meal together and Dr. Soames fed bits of some telecoms engineers to the big evil cannibal dogs under the table and to his own dog and then the stupid sonuvabitch came home and died of kuru in my house. Even the dog died, because one of the big, evil cannibal hounds took a fancy to dessert.” She shrugs. “Get out of here. I have calls to make. And take care of my kid.” Which I would, but she doesn't need me to. Assumption Soames waves me away.

I go tell Gonzo the good news, at which he roars skyward like a great ape and beats his chest with delight, because Tarzan is showing at the drive-through and Belinda Appleby has developed a burning desire for Johnny Weissmuller and Gonzo desires to be the nearest available approximation by the time he happens to meet her in the Crichton's Arms this evening.

“But,” Gonzo says, with one index finger loosely held to his lips. I know this “but.” It is the precursive “but,” the “but” of truly terrible plans and splendid coups. The “but” of boy/boy dare-making and the finish-my-sentence double act which is our friendship. “But,” says Gonzo, “we should
entirely
go out there and see.”

And I know what he means, without asking. He means that we—and possibly Belinda Appleby and any of her slender, be-cleavaged, feminine, supple friends who happen to be around when we later have this brilliant notion out loud—should pile into some form of car or truck, most likely Ma Lubitsch's moody 4 ×4 with its ancient green metal flanks and dinted grill and boxy workhorse shape, and go out to the inn and see whether there are really cannibals at the crossroads in Cricklewood Marsh. And when there are not, but we have startled a few screech owls and seen a badger and the ladies have imbibed all the safe scariness they can, we should proceed in an orderly fashion to our mutual place of reclinings and partake of lusty private delights and serious physical celebration with one of those fine examples of enthusiastic early womanhood.

Which is how I come to be riding shotgun with Gonzo Lubitsch, with Theresa Hollow's face next to my ear and her fingernails lightly scratching my neck with each jounce of the jeep, almost by accident—except that every time I move to point the heavy torch at some suspect shadow and Gonzo yowls and the girls shudder and laugh and hit him, Theresa's hand resettles in the exact same place and commences to raise all the hairs on my body, in a ripple which spreads out evenly from that single point of contact and collects hotly somewhere between my knees and my heart in a kind of writhing, pleasurable knot.

T
HE NIGHT
is not actually spooky. It's summer and there's no mist and there are animals grunting and gurgling all around, and off away to the south there are lights and a murmur of traffic. Somewhere out to sea there's an ocean liner having what is most likely a shuffleboard competition, lines of elderly orgiasts tossing their car keys into the hat in the hope of spending a night of Zimmer-frame lovin' with the winner of the round (they won't be disappointed because the cruise companies always make discreetly sure everyone's sexuality lines up nicely; I spent a month balancing the applications one spring, and it was hellish tough allowing for seasickness and cancellation and catalepsy, but they had a formula and we got the job done). There's a disappointing lack of mist and sadly no howls, though a dog at one of the farms on the other side of the delta is barking at something, fit to burst. Gonzo has the windows open to push some cool air into the back of the jeep and induce the ladies to a little close contact with the manly radiators in the front seats, and they're nothing loath.

Theresa's fingernails have just slipped under the double-stitched neck of my T-shirt when we round the corner and there actually is an inn, burned out and broken down and covered in vines. It isn't marked on the map; there's no signage. If you weren't looking, you'd just see trees and a few boards, but since we
are
looking, my torch picks out a doorway still standing and a flight of two or three steps and Belinda Appleby, damn her unto a thousand hells, murmurs “We can't go in there” and Theresa's fingers stiffen on my skin and her breath catches. Everyone knows there's only one possible response to that.

“Of course we can,” I say, because Gonzo is already slowing the jeep. Theresa exhales softly, in admiration or alarm, I cannot tell.

Silence should not frighten you. In silence, even the slightest sound can be heard. The beating of your heart and the sound of your breathing become audible because you strain to hear what is not there. When Gonzo stops the truck, it is not silence which claims the crossroads, but a humming sound of presence. There are a hundred other things going about their business in the night around us: tiny rodents and the flapping nightbirds that hunt them; shrubs whispering and rustling as the wind stirs them; wild pigs grating their tusks against the trees and shaking loose their fruit, which drop like stealthy footsteps on the ground. Somewhere, a small mammal has just been caught and eaten by a larger one. The barking dog across the delta is still going, and the sound of pensioners getting jiggy with one another filters over the sand and through the woods and bounces around so that voices call softly all around, words just on the edge of hearing. In the darkness, things go
crack
and
tssssht.
Theresa's high heels sink into the turf. Belinda leans on Gonzo. I draw the torch in a slow circle around us, scrutinising every metre of the darkness for watching eyes and predatory smiles. There cannot possibly be cannibals here. There never were, and if there were, they died. Even their pets died. I have no doubt about this at all. None. At all.

Gonzo leads us in.

Dust and dirt, rags and cracked mirrors, bottles broken and bottles filled with off-colour booze. A small space, maybe a snug or saloon, bare walls gone to cracks and shadows. A ripe, musky smell of animals. Someone has made a fire in the middle of the room, and smoked, and gotten drunk, but not on what was behind the counter. They brought their own: some previous expedition, come and gone. Perhaps Marcus came here, before he went to war.