Julia (32 page)

“Lovely, sweet Annis,” Mark said, holding her again, “darling, lovely, gorgeous, sexy Annis, how could I send you away?” He laughed at both her absurdity and his own, bubbling up within him.

“Is meditation responsible for these moods? I think I’d advise a little rest. Are you up on something?”

“On you, Annis, on you,” he chanted, and swung her around.

She pushed at his arms. “Mark, put me down. Mark, I don’t like this.”

He whooped with laughter, seeing himself from both within and without, and nearly fell down. “Are you going somewhere? Let’s go to a pub. Let’s go to a pub and hold hands. I was just noticing how the sky looks like a Turner. Don’t you think?”

She looked at the sky half with genuine interest, half with bemusement. “It looks like a slate roof, if you want my opinion. You know, you don’t have to act like this with me. I’m perfectly willing to start seeing you again. But I thought you had some new interest in your life.”

“On the contrary, dear Annis, I am shedding some of the old interests. I decided to quit teaching. I’m just going to travel for a while. Travel with me, Annis. You’d look lovely on a boat.” He began to laugh uncontrollably, and fell onto a bench. Annis and Julia shared one substance, and Mark giddily witnessed Julia’s features shining through the other’s face. When she turned away from him in irritation, he caught her wrist and pulled her down beside him. “I’m serious, let’s have a drink and talk about it.” He looked into her wide, beautiful, hungry face and felt himself turn on all the voltage he possessed. Annis’s face broke over him like a wave.

“Well,” she said. “I’m going somewhere now. How about lunch at one?”

“Lunch at one, what fun,” he sang. “Only an hour away.” Joy seemed to smash at his ribs again, and he gripped her hand. “Name two places you want to go to, Annis.”

“Well, I’ve never seen California,” she said. “I can’t think of any other place I’d like to go.”

“Europe?”

“Europe is boring. I’d settle for California.”

“You’ll have it.”

“Doesn’t it take a lot of money to get there?”

“Doesn’t everything come through meditation? Lord Buddha provides, Annis, Lord Buddha provides.”

“We’re going to have everything,” Magnus said, having by now passed firmly into outright anger, “we’re going to have the lot, and you decide to get mysterious and orphic. Aren’t we going to have everything you wanted? I have a mad wife who’s going to be locked away for God knows how long, but you’ll have the bleeding lot, Lily. What do you think you’re trying to do to me?”

“Self-pity isn’t your most attractive trait,” she said. “What I think I am trying to do, as you put it, is to tell the truth at last. Look, Magnus. Suppose that Julia came to you with some idea about a point of law that you’d been thinking about for months? Suppose she said something about it at breakfast?”

“Bugger the analogies,” he said, even angrier, and causing her more fear than she knew she could afford to reveal.

“I’ll tell you what you’d do. You’d ignore her, and resent her incursion on your special territory. That’s the way I felt.”

“The law is not a ridiculous bundle of lies and fantasies!” he shouted.

She merely looked at him, not daring to speak further.

When he turned away and slammed his fist into the counter top, she waited for him to settle down again—she could see his shoulders sinking back to their normal level, and his neck lose its swelling, as if it were shedding layers of tissue—she said, “Try to ring her again. I am afraid for her, Magnus.”

“Damn you,” he said, but said it quietly.

She said to his back, “Someone killed those two men. Julia knew about it before they were in the papers.”

“Are you sure? She’s no fortune-teller.”

Lily thought back to her last conversation with Julia. “I
think
so. She told me about the second one, certainly. The Swift man. She was in his flat.”

“Then I’m glad he’s dead.”

“She was there to warn him about Olivia Rudge—I think that’s what she said. Or I may have gathered it.”

“That’s two things you’re vague on. You’re not terribly persuasive.”

“And Mrs. Fludd was killed because she saw Olivia.”

“Nonsense. Wait. Did you imply that Julia was in the Swift man’s flat when he was killed?”

“That’s what she told me.”

“She told you that she saw him—what? Die? Be killed? What did she say?”

“I can’t remember. She said that she was there.”

“Damn,”
Magnus said loudly. “Didn’t she inform the police?”

“I shouldn’t imagine that she thought they had much chance against a ghost.”

“Ghosts don’t murder people,” Magnus said and went quickly back to the telephone. After dialing and listening intently, his lips working in and out, he said, “Still no answer.”

“Then she has either drugged herself to sleep or she’s gone out,” Lily said. “We must do something quickly, Magnus. Olivia is after her. I know it. She’s already tried to kill her once.”

“I wonder if Julia is actually madder than you. You should both be put away.” He considered a second, containing his anger, and said, “Think about this, Lily. If Julia was right, then aren’t we all endangered? You and I as well as Julia? After all, we know about Olivia too.”

“We’re all touched by it, we’re all soiled,” she answered
him. “Mark, too, I should imagine. We may be in as much danger as she is.”

“Rubbish.”

“Remember how you felt inside that house,” she said. “She hates you too, Magnus. She’s enjoyed torturing you.”

Julia was carrying Kate, a bundle no heavier than an armful of leaves and twigs, to the hospital. Kate was injured, and it was urgent that Julia find the hospital immediately: she could feel some warm fluid soaking into the sleeves of her blouse. Down grimy, vacant streets she was wandering, looking up at barred doorways for the name of the hospital. It was her fault that she could not find the hospital, that instead she was trudging through these gritty hopeless streets, looking exhaustedly into one filthy sunless court after another, dirty cobblestones … she had failed, and she knew that Kate had already died, that the merest breeze would lift away the feather of her body. Soon she would be on the bare rooftop, surrounded by failure and loss, carrying them within her. She saw herself turning the knife from Kate’s body and turning it toward herself.

Footsteps ran through the house, raising the smells of heat and lions.

She wandered through these hopeless streets, looking for the hospital that could undo what already had been done.

“Where are you going?” She watched tensely as he rushed around her flat, gathering up his raincoat and umbrella.

“I have to get out of this room,” he said as calmly as he could. “Before I deliberately break something, I am going to take a short walk.
You
ring her.”

“Will you be back? Magnus, please.…”

“I’ll be back,” he said harshly, almost barking the final word. As she watched, half-cowering by the door to the kitchen, he turned away from her and thundered across the floor like a bison. When he left he banged the door with such force that he split a section of the jamb.

Julia moved fractionally toward consciousness, her heart thudding, aware that the hand she had turned toward herself had not been Magnus’s. It was a woman’s hand, like hers. It was hers. Her mouth flooded with pain and a residue like tar, and she realized moments later that she had bitten halfway through her tongue. She had recognized her hand from the dream. She swallowed a trickle of blood, not really feeling the pain for longer than the time that lay between the vision of the woman’s hand with the steak knife in its fingers and the recognition that it was hers. Instead of pain, there was a drumming sensation through her tongue. Her entire body seemed as dry as a cracked riverbed. Kate’s twig-light, leaf-light body lifted out of her arms. Her lips went numb.

In the next instant she had fled back into the condition of the drugs, and was walking up filthy stairs to the bleak rooftop. She knew every discoloration and stain on the walls, every warp of the stairs.

Mark lay sprawled on wet grass, feeling the ground damply claim his shoulders and buttocks. He was dimly aware of the burnished tips of his new boots, gleaming a dark rich brownish gold all the way down the length of his body. His head was filled with birds. That he had just met and spoken to someone appeared miraculous to him, an unbelievable effort of coherence and will.

But I’ve seen her, too, thought Lily, still facing the door and listening to Magnus go noisily down the stairs. It was the day I saw Rosa Fludd sitting on the park bench. She led me across the park. Was Rosa really there, or did she conjure her? She wanted me to see Magnus breaking into Julia’s house. She wanted me to feel that sick disappointment. Perhaps Rosa came to me as a warning. She had warned Julia, and that day she was warning me. Lily sagged against the counter, felt the metal strip along the top of the wood dig into her hip.

Mark was moving at the center of a golden, glowing haze, a bowl which had settled down over him as he lay on the wet grass. He knew that this humming golden aura was the outward form of his headache, given him by his most successful meditations, and that it was transformingly beautiful proved the rarity, the absolute value of his mind. It proved also the absolute value of his exercises, even of the headaches, since they had transported him bodily into euphoria. Into paradise.

The trees past which he moved burned at him, the bark blistering in his vision and the leaves rattling like gold. He had felt like this before, but he could not remember when. His boots made the path shiver. If he hit hard enough with his heels, he could open a crack all the way to the planet’s red, seething core.

Asleep now, Julia reached the opening to the roof and walked out onto baking tar paper that adhered tackily to the soles of her shoes. The sky into which she moved was a flat field of gray striped with vibrating, humming pink. The strange union
of colors gripped the pit of her stomach and made her bowels full and watery. Her mouth drummed, lined with a bitter substance like tobacco juice. A pine needle pierced her tongue. She wanted Kate, but Kate was dead. Olivia raged beneath her in the empty house screeching with laughter. Even up on the flat roof, hopelessness pouring into her like salt, she could hear the noise from downstairs: hoarse screams, shouts, loud breakage. It no longer made any difference. She was watching herself as in a mirror. Her skin burned in anticipatory shame.

Lily pushed herself away from the counter and went unsteadily into the living room. She knelt before the telephone and with a shaking hand dialed Julia’s number. Now instead of the ringing she expected, she heard only the bottomless space, filled with the echoes of static, which precedes the dial tone. She punched the button and the gray depthless space hung in the receiver. When she struck the button again, the depthless sound mercifully gave way to the dial tone. She tried Julia’s number again, and heard the digits slot into connection; then a sound like that of a man falling through deep space, spinning away from life.

Lily banged the receiver down, waited until she felt safe enough to lift it again, made sure of the reassuring, chunky dial tone, and then dialed 100. She gave the operator Julia’s number and waited.

“I’m sorry,” the operator’s twanging voice came back a minute later. “That number appears to be temporarily out of service.”

“Why?” asked Lily. “What do you mean, out of service?”

“We are not permitted to offer that information,” the operator disdainfully said. “You may speak to the supervisor.”

“Yes.”

“Hold, please.”

Lily licked her lips and waited again. The silence in the telephone was furry and dense, more solid than the other. She listened to it for what seemed entire minutes before she could bear the waiting no more and hung up. Then she paced nervously in her living room, waiting for Magnus to return. She would not go to Ilchester Place alone.

Something flew along the upstairs hall, something infinitely despairing.

Slowly, with merciful intent, the knife in her hand slid into Kate’s blocked throat. Her hand, the hand she had dreamed of turning toward herself, gripped the sleek little knife between thumb and finger, blade up. Kate uttered a half-conscious, choking noise and opened her eyes at the instant Julia began to carve into her throat. Kate’s eyes were clouds. As in a mirror, the scene glinted at her from where it was happening at the flat edge of the roof, two figures bent together in a clumsy parody of love. She heard the door to her room bang open, and the hot wind gusted about her, making the scene before her and the pink-striped sky mist over, like a mirror. The one who wanted her was with her, and she whirled about on the roof and saw only desolation, dirty tar paper and a ruined sky. A white column of air blew toward her. She could see dust and scraps of paper whirl about inside it, spinning crazily. From somewhere below in the streets or from another side of the bedroom came a chortling sound she knew was the suppressed laughter of a small dark-skinned child whose name she could not remember. Strong arms braced her, and Olivia’s smoldering odor invaded her nostrils and the white column of air whirled her into it, caught up with dust and scraps of old newspapers, dust and paper.