In which case, you could well be a killer, after all.
Hell, hell, hell.
But this is a new, activated Joe Spork. His body has a plan before he does, is already moving when he gives the okay, flows into the shape he needs without thought—thank God, because if he thought about it he’d mess it up, no doubt.
He times it exactly right. The driver takes off the brakes and the bus jolts. Joe Spork grabs Vaughn Parry by the shoulders and slams his head sharply into the chrome steel pole in the aisle. Parry’s face flashes through shock and pain, then for the briefest instant into a bottomless, appalling rage. Then the bus judders again and Joe repeats the manoeuvre, and Parry slumps. Joe rests him against the window, and rushes to the front.
“I’m so sorry,” he says, “I’m on the wrong bus.”
The driver sighs. “Anyone else?” he asks. The rest of the passengers shake their heads or stare in venomous accusation at the idiot Joe, and the driver lets him off.
He watches the red tail lights fade, and runs to a phone box to call Mercer.
Joe is expecting a large black car with tinted windows, or possibly several cars. He allows himself to wonder if there will be a helicopter. He is quite sure there will be people in dark suits, grave of mien and taciturn and fraught with black-lettered magic.
In the event, Mercer sends four ambulances, two fire engines, a climate-change protest, a Scottish travelling circus, and a fox hunt. These various distractions arrive separately but with immaculate coordination, so that one moment Joshua Joseph Spork is hiding in the shadows of a pub garden and hearing pursuit in every whisper of wind, and the next the whole suburb is lit with blue lights and resounding with sirens, and seventy-eight beagles and a gross of meteorologists are sharing road space with Darla the Bearded Lassie.
Through the midst of this paralysing confusion comes an unremarkable Volkswagen people-mover in green. It slips gracefully between the hunt master and a brace of urban foxes who are apparently admiring the view, Mercer himself at the wheel. The side door slides open.
“Get in,” Polly Cradle says gently, and Joe’s heart leaps to see that she is here. Then he stops abruptly: beside her sits Edie Banister, complete with odiferous pug and giant revolver.
“Come on, Joe,” Polly says. “It’s time.” She glances over her shoulder at Edie, then extends her hand to him. “Get in. We’ll explain on the way.”
By a circuitous route and through lanes and towns and all around the London Orbital, they leave the circus behind.
Joe Spork gazes at the back of the passenger seat. The leather—or it may be leatherette—is torn around the headrest, revealing a sliver of foam. Part of him wants to explore it with his fingers, touch something real and simple and solid outside Happy Acres and know that this is not a dream. That he is not still on the operating table, dying. The world is oddly quiet and colourless, as if he has slipped sideways into a monochrome film or an underwater documentary. He assumes this is shock or post-traumatic stress, but does not particularly care.
He lifts his eyes from his study of the leather and looks around. Polly Cradle is like a log fire, a warm, comforting thing. She catches him looking and smiles, puts her hand on his leg, and a little patch of heat grows where her palm is. He looks the other way and finds Edie Banister.
Edie Banister looks back at him and waits. And so they pass a few miles: Polly, Joe, Edie. The front seat is another country.
“Did you do this to me?” Joe asks.
Edie sighs. “Yes. Well, yes and no. I put you in the line of fire.” After a brief struggle, honesty compels her to add, “I thought it was necessary and then I realised it was rather out of spite. I’m sorry.”
He looks at her some more, and wonders why he hasn’t pulled her head from her shoulders and thrown it out of the window. Carefully, so as not to cause an accident. He wonders if she is really sorry, and if sorry helps in any way. Then he says, “Spite?”
“Your grandmother, not you.”
It’s always about his bloody family, somehow. “How’s Harriet?” he asks belatedly.
“Your mother is fine, Joe,” Mercer says firmly. “The C of E has hidden her away—I’m sure you can talk to her if you want.”
Joe goes back to studying the seat, and finally does reach out to play with the loose edge. He flicks it one way and another until Polly very gently encloses his big hand in her two smaller ones and draws it away to kiss it as if he’d burned it on something. She does not ask if he is all right.
“I’m all right,” he says, a bit fuzzily, only now realising that it may turn out to be true. If only the colours will spread out from her, into the world.
She manages not to burst into tears, but it’s a close thing. Instead, she looks sternly at Edie and tells her to get going on the story. Edie nods, and then abruptly stalls, mouth open. “I don’t know where to begin,” she says. “I’ve lost it. Senility.”
Joe nods. He is familiar with the sense of not being able to trust your own mind. “Who are you?”
Edie nods, grateful. “You know my name. I used to—well, I used to work with your grandmother. We were friends. I’ve been a lot of other things, too. A spy, mostly. Sort of a policeman. And now a revolutionary, I suppose. A terrorist.” She sighs. “This changing-the-world business is harder than I imagined.”
“I didn’t know Frankie had any friends,” Joe says.
“Joe, don’t be dense,” Polly murmurs, kissing his hair to take the sting out of it. “They were lovers.”
Joe glances, automatically, at Edie, and sees her embarrassment become a wide grin.
“Well, yes,” Edie says. “We were. And you, young miss, are a bucketload of trouble, aren’t you?”
Polly shrugs. “I believe in getting these things out in the open. It saves misunderstandings later.”
Edie finds that she agrees, and a moment later she begins the whole story from scratch—albeit in highly abbreviated form—telling it without restraint from the moment Abel Jasmine came to the Lady Gravely school, all the way to her recent abrupt decision that something had to be done.
Joe listens to the secret history of the House of Spork—or Fossoyeur, as it seems—and feels, beneath the monochrome, a sense of place. This is where Daniel’s sorrow came from. Where Mathew’s mania was born. This is how it was, and how it came to be.
That it is also the root of his recent pain is less important. Edie is a treasure house of his own self, his roots. He wants to put her under glass, wind her up and play her in the evenings. Her life is so bright. And he, Joe, is part of this story, and her story is part of his. Finally, he is not too late for something, after all.
“The world is in the hands of idiots,” Edie cries, by way of exculpation, mistaking his quiet for doubt or disapprobation. “The Cold War is over and what do they do? Go looking for a new one. We’re richer than we’ve ever been. What happens? We burn the forests and borrow so much money that suddenly we’re poor. Everything’s upside down and it’s just because people don’t pay attention. It ought to be a perfect world! That’s what we wanted. That’s what I worked for. For decades! I hid Frankie’s machine for years and years. For nothing. For a bunch of charlatans to tell me I’ve never had it so good while they steal my neighbour’s pension!”
She subsides, muttering. Mercer purses his lips.
“The bees are now distributed over most of the globe,” he says. “From time to time there are outbreaks of truth, but I have to say I don’t see a new age of love and understanding being ushered in. The West Bank is in flames, but I suppose it was going that way already. A lot of Africa is looking bad. The Special Relationship is effectively finished. The nuclear states, by the way, have reciprocally pledged to launch their weapons should it turn out that the Apprehension Engine—they’re calling it a weapon of mass destruction—has been deliberately deployed against their citizens by another nation. All of which, I gather, is before the machine is properly effective. These are just tasters. If this is a global improvement of the lot of mankind, I don’t want to know what a crisis looks like.”