“Actually,” Polly puts in, “a bath would be better. With a duck. And possibly toast.”
“There’s a bathroom here,” Mercer says a bit doubtfully.
“What’s it like?”
“Eerie, to be honest.”
“Then I’d prefer a hotel,” Joe says firmly. Eerie, on top of everything else, he can do without.
Polly tuts. “He can stay with me.” She glances at Joe politely. “If you’d like. You shouldn’t have to be by yourself in some hotel. I’ve got plenty of space and Mercer will know where to get me if anything happens. It’s discreet and it has Cradle’s panic buttons for emergencies. There’s a nice bed in the spare room and lots of hot water. And a rubber duck you can borrow.”
Rubber duck has somehow become the most erotic expression in the English language. Joe Spork stares at her. He looks at her mouth and wonders whether she will say it again. She doesn’t.
“You really have a rubber duck?” he says hopefully.
“Actually I have two rubber ducks,” she confirms, “but one of them is no longer seaworthy and is, as you might say, retired. I like ducks.” He sees a flash of her tongue on the D.
I like ducks. She cannot possibly have meant that to sound the way it did. Did it sound that way? Or was that only him? Mercer looks quite unaffected. Fevered imaginings. Restraint. Joe finds himself wishing he could be a duck, see the things that duck has seen, though of course he would then be unable to do anything about them. Polly smiles at him encouragingly.
“See?” she says to Mercer. “He looks less like a dead mouse just thinking about it.”
This ought to dampen Joe’s sense of acceptance, but somehow it doesn’t. Being called a dead mouse by Polly is better than being called handsome by anyone else—or so it seems to him at the moment. A shower or—amazing idea—a bubble bath might just be the beginning of life. He still has his arms crossed, but he loosens them a little to say thank you. He wonders whether he really does want to have sex with this woman as much as he thinks he does, or whether it’s just deprival and crisis. And then he wonders what it means to wonder whether you want to have sex with someone. Surely it’s a thing where you want or you don’t want. He concludes that he thinks too much. He wonders how many times in a day he thinks that, and then stops himself, because the Bold Receptionist is looking at him as if she can hear every word.
“My car’s parked at the back,” she says.
“Good, then.” Mercer puts down the cup. “We’ll all be in touch.”
Polly drives a very well-loved and stylish old Volvo, from the time before their cars were made with the intention of conveying boxy solidity, back when Volvo was a gorgeously curvaceous Continental designer with an eye to quality. The car itself is silver-grey, with chrome trim. The brown seats are extremely soft and smell of beeswax. She turns the key and the engine fuddfudds into life, then growls a little, like a sleepy cat smelling tuna. The seat belt is an actual old-fashioned racing harness, and Joe struggles to get into it, the more so because part of him is absolutely determined to watch the Bold Receptionist as she twists her upper body lithely around and about, then reaches back with both hands to catch the clips and fasten them across her breast. Muscles move under her skin, and for a moment he can actually taste her scent in his mouth. He blinks hard.
She smiles. “This car,” she says proudly, “won a road race in Monaco in 1978. Of course, I wasn’t driving. But I was alive. Just.”
So now he knows her age—a little older than he would have said, a little younger than he is. Did she mean to tell him that? To let him know they are of comparable generations?
“Have you smelled the leather?” Polly asks.
He nods. The car smells richly of old leather, cracked and polished and in one or two places stitched. It’s like a members’ club in St. James’s, or somewhere his father might have played cards with the Old Campaigners.
“Sometimes I just put my nose into it and breathe in. Mm-mm. Lovely!” Her eyes are very bright. She loves the senses, loves the world. He finds that… admirable, and a bit daunting. I am a mole. I am hiding, in the company of a woman who adores the sunlight and the rain.
Seeing that his harness is fastened, Polly puts her foot on the pedal.
The car moves as if smacked on the arse, and his head bounces slightly against the seat back. There actually is a head restraint, which must be a later modification, although not much later, because it seems to be made of clay. She snorts slightly, then looks guilty, and changes gear, which nearly does it to him again. For a machine this age, Polly’s car has some notable grunt.
The house is, in some way, very much the same. It’s elegant and a bit ramshackle and surprisingly large, tucked away at the end of a cul-de-sac. A railway embankment rises up behind.
“The trains are a bit loud,” she murmurs, “which makes it affordable. But I’m used to it.”
“You just sleep through?”
She smiles again, and this time it starts at the very middle of her mouth and spreads like ripples in a pool all the way to the corners and across her face, until she has dimples on both cheeks and a glint in her eye which is unmistakably mischievious. “Something like that, yes. If you want to know, I’ll tell you later.”
Later, as in, when it’s dark and secret and we know each other better.
She opens the door and beckons him inside.
The bathroom is bitterly cold and very blue. Cracked powder-blue tiles line the walls and the blue wooden window frame is moulting flakes of paint. The floor is silvered wood, warped by years of wet feet and splashes, at some time or other carpeted and now bare once more. Joshua Joseph lies in the chipped blue ceramic tub and lets the hum of the single bulb and the coils of steam rising from any limb he allows to surface from the water lull him into a trance.
He drowses, and for once there are no ghosts, no relevant memories clamouring for his attention. A drop of very hot water scalds the top of his foot, and he barely flinches. The foam is slowly dissipating into a silver marbling on the surface of the water, and he can see the action of plate tectonics playing out on the meniscus. He waves his hand an inch below the surface, pictures tiny marsupials suddenly separated from the rest developing into sapient kangaroos, then—when their wildly rotating island rejoins the world—finding themselves at war with angry evolved lizards from beneath the great mountain of Knee.
Joe sighs. Why at war? Why not coming together for a great celebration of lost kin, two sentient species sharing the world of Soap?
“I blame you entirely,” he tells Mathew Spork, seeing his face for a moment in the steam.
“Very wise,” Polly replies from the doorway. He jumps a bit, manages to keep the water mostly in the bath. She smiles encouragingly, then goes on. “How do you feel?”
“Fine. Great, actually. Just… talking to my father. I do that, sometimes. Talk to dead people in my head.” Oh, marvellous. I also have a collection of ears and eat puppies. Oh, by the way, would you like to have dinner sometime?
But Polly is nodding.
“Yes. I do it, too. Do you find they’re helpful?”
“Sometimes.”
“And sometimes just as infuriating as they were when they were alive.”
“God, yes.” He grins. He’s extremely nude, but even this is insufficient to alarm him. The bubbles will do as a fig leaf, and he’s in perfectly acceptable shape. She’s a grown-up. If she’s happy, so is he.
“Good bath?”
“Wonderful.” He swirls his hand again. The United Nations of Soap is convened in a mountain fastness, for the betterment of the inhabitants of the world. Good.