Glenn Miller beckoned to her.
“Come on.”
“I have a granddaughter to find.”
“That you surely do, but I don’t think you even have an idea where to begin.”
“The Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family has a mail-order department here.”
“The Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family will be at the Pleasance,” Glenn Miller said. “Devastation Harx was a major contributor to Beldene’s election fund.”
“How do you know this?” Grandmother Taal said warily.
“I’ve got my own bag of secrets.” This last with a glitter behind the pebble glasses. “Come on. If nothing else, you need to eat. And anyway, I owe you, remember?”
A big band setting up is of marginal interest to non-musicians so after her mint tea and morning rolls Grandmother Taal asked a velveteen usher to show her the way to the street and she spent the morning wandering affably confusing alleys looking for anything church-like, ever-circling, or spiritually familial. She found nothing fitting those criteria, and the one mail-order warehouse she came across shipped hand-made fetishwear, but she did catch a curious climate in Molesworth’s decked laneways. A city’s mood is a subtle thing, divided among many people and activities, but it showed itself in glances, habits, touches; details of life. Heaped in the middle of a street Grandmother Taal found a dead machine, some indeterminate civic servitor, now terminated. Molesworthians skirted around it without regard or respect. No one had shown even the small grace to close its gaping ports and sockets. Grandmother Taal could not rid herself of the suspicion that it had been murdered. And the parasols! On a grey day of overcast. Silk white parasols, citizens huddling from the sky. All along the Marche shop awnings were pulled out in a continuous swoop of striped canvas, on Long Drag and Steel Market the sunny central strips of the streets were deserted, the morning shoppers clinging to the shade of the arcades. Over morning tea in a dusty plaza encircled by top-heavy tenements she tuned between conversations with the practised discrimination of the elderly. Grazestock prices could be better. Aye, and a bad turn of the weather. In next week for the hip job, and couldn’t I do without it? Keep calling at the door and I’ve told them he hasn’t lived there in a halfyear but will they believe me? Tea’s not what it used to be; they scorch the leaves. Waited half an hour, half an hour, then three came at once and there were bloody kids rampaging all over them. Well, I for one won’t be out waving my little flag, waste of the taxpayer’s dollars, if you ask me. Strangers in town, and foreigners too. Nothing in the news these days: wireless soaps and pelota-players’ wives.
Trivial in themselves, these gripes and scraps betrayed the deeper climate of moaning that Grandmother Taal had sensed in Molesworth’s streets. These were uneasy people. This was an uneasy grandmother, sipping her mint tea and decorously breaking her almond madeleines. A perpetual foreigner in every town she visited, this was the first time she felt like a stranger. As the waiter counted the change from his pouch, she asked him if he knew of a Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family.
“No madam, but I do know now that they have a mail-order depot over in Sunny Mallusk. The brother works there.”
“And where might that be?”
He drew a map on the back of the receipt in silver pencil. It was a few hundred metres but many turns away. Grandmother Taal had to check with locals that she had taken the correct number of rights and lefts. Sunny Mallusk was a dour, yellow-brick huddle of tall, steep-gabled, small-windowed warehouses around a square in which litter rattled, stirred by a stable system of microtornadoes. Two Malluskers had never heard of the Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family but a third had and directed her to a buff-coloured door with a hatch at eye level. Her knock was greeted by an eye at the hatch.
“Yes?”
“I’m looking for my granddaughter.”
“Who is?”
“Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th,” Grandmother Taal said in one breath.
“Nah,” said the eye. “No one here by that name.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’d be sure.”
The tip of Grandmother Taal’s stick stopped the hatch from snapping shut.
“I don’t suppose a Mr. Devastation Harx is on the premises today?”
“You suppose correct.”
“But he is in town?”
“He’s up for the bash.”
“The Inaugural Pleasance.”
“Aye. That.”
“Will he be calling here?”
The eye hatch shot open again. A sigh came from beneath the eye, which was a very dark blue, and showed much sclera.
“Look lady, I just run the depot. If he comes, he comes, if he don’t, he don’t. He’s holy; that’s what holy people do, or don’t do. If you’re that desperate to see him, bluff your way into the bash, whatever. Me, I’ve got orders to fill.”
The eye vanished from behind the hatch. For an instant Grandmother Taal had a powerful perspective view of a corridor of shelves, racked a hundred high, dwindling to a vanishing point that she suspected lay beyond the physical bounds of the building. Tiny figures suspended from rope harnesses floated up and down the mile-long-aisle, filling baskets slung from their waists with religious wares. Then the buff metal slide slammed shut and, by reversing the order of the directions on the waiter’s bill, Grandmother Taal found her way back to Molesworth’s thronged Viking-Lander Plaza.
A clanging tram wormed through the intestinal streets to drop Grandmother Taal at the Rathaus. Down by the stage door an altercation was taking place. It involved the following elements: an eclectic group of four fronted by a stocky young woman with spiky hair—clearly furious—a girl in a spangled bikini with silver boots and hoolie-hoolie feathers in her hair—clearly impatient—and a flatbed truck with the legend “Let ’Em Eat Cake!” printed on a side-tarpaulin and a cylindrical, ziggurat structure on its back. The issue seemed to be this object, which Grandmother Taal concluded must be a cake, of the kind from which girls in spangled bikinis and hoolie-hoolie feathers leap at appropriate moments.