The Gone-Away World (56 page)

The ninja has two largish holes in the back of his head. There is white stuff coming out. He shakes.

“I saw all the planks,” says Ike Thermite cheerily. “Gosh, there are a lot of planks. But I couldn't decide which one. And then I thought, what the hell are you talking about, it really doesn't matter which one. Only I think perhaps it does. Yes? Because this one has nails in it . . .”

The ninja stops moving. The smell of blood is rather acute.

“Oh dear,” Ike Thermite says. There is brain matter on his shoe. “That's quite unpleasant.” He drops the plank and passes out.

I have been saved from death by a specialist in physical theatre. This is bad. Sadly, it is not the worst thing about this moment. The worst thing is that the dead man has five friends—or at least colleagues—standing in the azaleas.

Ma Lubitsch throws a bucket of perfumed furniture polish out of the living room window. It mostly lands on Ike Thermite. A healthy dose of it splashes on me. If this was an attempt to wake Ike and unleash his dreaded Mime Powers, it does not work. Ike stays down. I have nectar goo on my trousers. If it comes to a fight—and it will—I'm going to be all sticky. I hear a voice, surprisingly calm and very dignified.

“May I have your attention, please?” says Old Man Lubitsch. “You are on private land. You are not welcome. You were not invited. You have offered violence to my house. I would like you all to leave.”

The five remaining ninjas look at him. I turn to look too. Old Man Lubitsch is standing next to his beehives. He is standing, in fact, next to the large black hive he was building the last time I came to Cricklewood Cove. It is tall and oddly shaped, ugly where the others are uniform little whiteboard houses. Clearly, he feels it represents some sort of threat.

The ninjas don't. They step forward. Old Man Lubitsch shrugs. He reaches up and pulls the lid off the hive. And then, demonstrating that sanity has absolutely passed him by today, he gives it a solid kick.

The noise which emerges from the big hive is a deep Harley-Davidson growl of warning. Quite apparently, the occupant is a mutant bee. Gonzo's father has raised a single, furious, man-size bee with teeth like razors. It is a guard bee. Even the ninjas pause. The nearest one is about eight feet from me, and from Ike Thermite. He looks as if he doesn't like the idea of fighting a giant bee very much.

Old Man Lubitsch kicks the hive again. It explodes.

It doesn't actually explode, of course, but the phenomenon is remarkably similar. There is a noise as of war in heaven. A black shadow crosses the face of the sky like the end of days, racing out from the hive in a circle which expands until it covers all of us. We are struck by a thousand tiny impacts, like a shower of gravel: bees landing, swooping, tasting.

I do not watch the rest of it. The bees from the black hive—Africanised
Megachile pluto,
most likely—recognise us by the smell of nectar goo as fellow (if weird-lookin' and useless) members of the hive. The ninjas are therefore aggressors of some sort who must be dealt with. The last thing they see before the vengeance of the bees is Old Man Lubitsch, shrouded in inch-long black insects, stepping towards them with a garden rake.

“You would have hurt my wife,” Old Man Lubitsch says through the sound of the hive.

But when I turn away, because death by bee is a ghastly thing, and death by rake not much better, it is not his wife I see, but mine.

.                           .                           .

L
EAH
's hiding place is upstairs, between the guest room and the airing cupboard. A false wall makes room for a corridor, and the corridor leads to a small space under the eaves like an artist's garret. Old Man Lubitsch built it during the Reification. He and Ma Lubitsch hid there when Cricklewood Cove was overrun by bandits, and then they hid a young man there when the bandits were defeated and a hanging mood took the town. Currently, Leah shares it with a family of cats who moved in unofficially. She explains that the cats were here first. They are nice cats. Leah likes them. She misses her dog, but the dog went with Gonzo. She stayed behind. Gonzo insisted. It was too dangerous. So here she is, sharing space with La Gioconda (the mother cat) and Sunflower, Waterlily, Adoration (which is short for Adoration of the Magi) and Flea. She named the kittens after paintings, but realised that she didn't know the proper names of very many. She declined to name Flea after an approximation of the title of a painting. Flea is called Flea because she can jump right up in the air. She was so bored up here (Leah, not Flea), but Gonzo insisted she must be safe. From whom she does not know. He wouldn't tell her anything. The cats walk on her face in the mornings to wake her up. She must look terrible.

“Leah,” I say, but she has more to tell me, more she needs to say, things of great importance. She pauses, then begins. The room gets very cold at night, so she's quite glad to have them around then, and of course they need her to protect them from owls. Owls are a great hazard to kittens. Owls eat more kittens in a year than dogs do in ten. Dogs chase cats, they don't eat them. Owls eat anything. Fortunately, the owls are scared of Old Man Lubitsch's mutant bees, so the kittens are safe in the garden. Leah washes them in nectar shampoo, which makes them furious (and very cute) and the bees sort of hover over them and scowl, not that they can scowl, but they do. Leah was listening through the floor last night, all night, she has bags under her eyes this morning, even kitten maquillage doesn't leave her this harrowed normally, she heard and understood and she had no idea what Gonzo had done, he just told her that I was
new
and made out of him and not to say anything to anyone and I was leaving. She has no idea what to say to me.

Since I don't know what to say either, we sit there and look at one another in silence for a while.

Leah looks depleted. She draws strength from the mountains, but primarily from love. She takes delight in love. This passage has injured her in the place from which she draws her strength. My instinct is to hold her. I offer her my hand, and she looks at it with deep uncertainty. We are sitting opposite one another. To take it, she must shuffle forward. She does, but she takes a grip on me which is opposed, so that her palm faces me while her fingers wrap around mine. Thus far and no farther. Her palm is like one of Ike Thermite's invisible walls. I want to storm the fortress. I might. She might respond. And then what? In Gonzo's house, with his parents standing guard, to cuckold him and take her away? “What is the most monstrous thing you have done?” Oh! I know! I know!

So. We sit opposite one another. My back hurts. I have never been able to sit comfortably on the ground, even at my most flexible. When I was at Jarndice, and I could—by dint of constant practice in the Voiceless Dragon forms—do the lotus position from cold and come within seven inches of the box splits (that's the ones you do by opening your legs to the side rather than pushing one foot forward and one back), even then the business of sitting on the floor was an agony. Aline found it a cause for annoyance. Furniture was bourgeois when good people had none. Comfortable furniture was almost certainly counterrevolutionary. (This was the army which George Copsen's Government Machine so desperately feared.) When my hips start to hurt too, I shift position, which is difficult because I do not want to let go of her hand. I wince.

“Are you all right?”

“I love you.”

Bugger.

She stares at me. In for a penny.

“I love you. I have always loved you. I remember your letter, in the hospital. I remember asking Gonzo to find us somewhere to have a date. He got me a suit. You had that amazing dress, from nowhere, by magic. We made love in the castle, all night. And when I smell jasmine I think of you, of getting married and of how you hated the city, so Jim Hepsobah helped me find a house in the mountains. I remember carrying you over the threshold and falling over, and we just lay there and laughed.” The only time I have ever been comfortable on a floor. Leah is shaking her head, her whole body twisting one way and another in denial. She has not let go of my hand. We are welded together by pain. “Leah, please . . .” But please what? And because I don't know, I apologise. I tell her I am sorry. My outburst was inappropriate.

She looks at me sharply. Certainty. I have sealed my own rejection. Leah loves a man who would never be concerned with inappropriate. Leah loves a man who would have brushed her objections aside and held her, and been slapped if need be. Leah loves a man who does not do stalemate.

Gonzo.

And what am I? Where does Gonzo finish and where do I begin? We were both there. I ask her outright.
What am I to you?
And then I wish I hadn't.

“Suppose,” Leah murmurs, and she will not look at me while she destroys me, “suppose Gonzo had been hit on the head. Fallen off the roof. And suppose his brain was damaged. He changed. Couldn't remember things. Suppose he needed my help to recover, to be who he was. Suppose this had nothing to do with Stuff and monsters. He was just hurt. He would need me. More than ever. Need love.” She shrugs. She is indifferent. Clinical. It's a lie. She is making it true. “This isn't different. Not between me and him.”

Leah, the nurse, looks at me and sees an injury. I love her. She thinks I am aphasia with feet. I tell her I am not.

“Do you remember asking me to marry you?”

Of course. It was on the roof garden of Piper 90.

“No,” she says, “the first time.”

In the recovery room. I know I did it. I could lie.

I cannot lie.

Leah nods.

“I'm so sorry,” she says. “This must hurt so much.”

Yes.

“But you and me . . .” She is still going. Determined. “You remember loving me. But do you love me right now, this minute? Do you feel it? No. Your business,” Leah says, “your thing is with Gonzo. Not with me. We're strangers.”

Yes. You're a nurse. I'm a disease.

“I'm so sorry.”

I feel agony. But I have no idea if I feel love. I don't have a great deal of experience sorting memory from the present. Is this love? Is that? What about this sort of squidgy feeling there? She might be right. Agony is not love. Not by itself. Unless love comes in various flavours and textures, and this is the one which hurts. That might be. Perhaps love is like hell, and every one is different.

There is water in my eyes. She will not release my hand. We sit. She waits for me to sob out. So. My thing is with Gonzo. We're strangers. Saying it makes it true. My Leah would never do this to me. And damn you, Gonzo, anyway. You couldn't be bothered to dream a dream girl for me too. If you had, we wouldn't be here.

Leah has a question. She is waiting for me to struggle back to myself. I nod.

“Gonzo . . . used to joke about Sally.” Joke. Yes. Of course he did. About how he spent the night with her. About the things they did. All a joke.

“Just kidding around,” I tell her. It might even be true.

She lets me go. I leave.

I
KE
T
HERMITE
is lying on the sofa in the living room, and Ma Lubitsch is filling him with cake and some kind of murky grey infusion she makes from her window boxes, and which (like me) has no name. Her husband is in the garden, burying ninjas. He is assisted by the Matahuxee Mime Combine, which might or might not be a good thing. I go out and help.

Corpses are dead weight. Ha ha ha. Old Man Lubitsch has a technique. He shoves a board under one cold shoulder, and shoves it with his rake. The mimes, armed with poles and sticks from the garden, shove as well. The friction between the corpse and the board is less than that between the corpse and the grass, so the corpse stays where it is and the board goes most of the way underneath. If the corpse starts to slip, mimes rush around and brace it. Then Old Man Lubitsch runs to the other side and kicks the corpse until it is almost entirely on the board. Finally, he clamps little barrow wheels to each corner, and he has a corpse on a go-cart which he can drag around to the west paddock, now redesignated the ninja disposal area. The kicking part is the most effortful, but quite apparently also the part which he most enjoys. I do not intend to take this pleasure from him, but he clearly feels I need to kick something, so I get the last one to do myself. We slide the ninja off the board into a pit, and cover him. I sit down on a stone and moan. I wail—not tears, just a heart-deep noise of rejection. The Matahuxee Mime Combine all stand around looking awkward. Old Man Lubitsch puts a rough hand on my shoulder, but that makes it worse. I cannot face his approval, not now. I have done the right thing, in spite of myself. I stare at everything. It's too bright.

Old Man Lubitsch squats down beside me.

“She needed a safe place,” he says. He looks away. I think he's guilty.

I want to tell him that he does not have to apologise for sheltering his son's wife in a strange time. Instead, I make some sort of dry sound. He seems to understand what it means. We sit for a while. I hope he won't say anything else.

“It's never easy,” Old Man Lubitsch says. “You did right.”

Didn't mean to. Meant to, couldn't stick to it, failed to be evil. Not the same.

“You did right,” Old Man Lubitsch says again. We sit. He stares straight ahead, seeing something private and very distant.

“You look like him,” Old Man Lubitsch says.

Like Gonzo?

“No,” Old Man Lubitsch says, “not like Gonzo.” And there is a tremor in his voice. The mimes have filed out of the garden, and we are alone. I don't turn to see his face, because I don't think I could stand it if he was crying.

“Not like Gonzo,” he says. And he gets up and walks away, leaving me alone.

Something happens to my mouth then. It twists and opens, and my eyes make water, and from my throat and belly come deep, raw noises. It's like crying, the way wine is like water.