“ ‘Justine!’ ” he thought. It made him smile.
He sorted through the courier bag until he found the Shrander’s dice. He held them in his hand. They always felt warm. The symbols on them appeared in no language or system of numbers he knew, historical or modern. On a pair of ordinary dice, each symbol would be duplicated; here, none was. Kearney watched them rattle across the tabletop and come to rest in the spilled coffee by his empty cup. He studied them for a moment, then scooped them up, stuffed newspaper and phone hastily into the courier bag, and left.
“Your change, love!”
The women looked after him, then at each other. One of them shrugged. By then, Kearney was in the lavatories, shivering and throwing up. When he came out, he found Anna waiting for him. Heathrow was awake now. People were hurrying to make flights, make phone calls, make headway. Anna stood fragile and listless in the middle of the concourse, staring every so often at their faces as they brushed past her. Every time she thought she saw him her face lit up. Kearney remembered her at Cambridge. Shortly after they met, a friend of hers had told him: “We nearly lost her once. You will take care of her, won’t you?” He had remained puzzled by this warning—with its image of Anna as a package that might easily slip the mind—only until he found her in the bathroom a month later, crying and staring ahead, with her wrists held out in front of her. Now she looked at him and said:
“I knew this is where you’d be.”
Kearney stared at her in disbelief. He began to laugh.
Anna laughed too. “I knew you’d come here,” she said. “I brought some of your things.”
“Anna—”
“You can’t keep running away from it forever, you know.”
This made him laugh harder for a moment, then stop.
Kearney’s adolescence had passed like a dream. When he wasn’t in the fields, he was at the imaginary house he called Gorselands, with its stands of pine, sudden expanses of sandy heath, steep-sided valleys full of flowers and rocks. It was always full summer. He watched his cousins, leggy and elegant, walk naked down the beach at dawn; he heard them whisper in the attic. He was continually sore from masturbating. At Gorselands there was always more; there was always more after that. Inturned breathing, a sudden salty smell in an empty room. A murmur of surprise.
“All this dreaming gets you nowhere,” his mother said.
Everyone said that. But by now he had found numbers. He had seen how the same sequences underlay the structure of a galaxy and a spiral shell. Randomness and determination, chaos and emergent order: the new tools of physics and biology. Years before computer modelling made bad art out of the monster in the Mandelbrot Set, Kearney had seen it, churning and streaming and turbulent at the heart of things. Numbers made him concentrate more: they encouraged him to pay attention. Where he had winced away from school life, with its mixture of boredom and savagery, he now welcomed it. Without all that, the numbers made him see, he would not go to Cambridge, where he could begin to work with the real structures of the world.
He had found numbers. In his first year at Trinity someone showed him the Tarot.
Her name was Inge. He took her to Brown’s and, at her request, to a film called Black Cat White Cat by Emir Kusturica. She had long hands, an irritating laugh. She was from another college. “Look!” she ordered. He leaned forward. Cards spilled across the old chenille tablecloth, fluorescing in the late afternoon light, each one a window on the great, shabby life of symbols. Kearney was astonished.
“I’ve never seen this before,” he said.
“Pay attention,” she ordered. The Major Arcana opened like a flower, combining into meaning as she spoke.
“But it’s ridiculous,” he said.
She turned her dark eyes on him and never blinked.
Mathematics and prophecy: Kearney had known instantly that the two gestures were linked, but he couldn’t say how. Then, waiting for a train to King’s Cross the following morning, he identified a relationship between the flutter of cards falling in a quiet room and the flutter of changing destinations on the mechanical indicator boards at the railway station. This similarity rested, he was willing to admit, on a metaphor (for while a cast of the Tarot was—or seemed—random, the sequence of destinations was—or seemed—determined): but on the basis of it he decided to set out immediately on a series of journeys suggested by the fall of the cards. A few simple rules would determine the direction of each journey, but—in honour of the metaphor, perhaps—they would always be made by train.
He tried to explain this to Inge.
“Events we describe as random often aren’t,” he said, watching her hands shuffle and deal, shuffle and deal. “They’re only unpredictable.” He was anxious she should understand the distinction.
“It’s just a bit of fun,” she said.
She had taken him to bed eventually, only to become puzzled when he wouldn’t enter her. That, as she had said, was the end of it as far as she was concerned. For Kearney it had turned out to be the beginning of everything else. He had bought his own Tarot—a Crowley deck, its imagery pumped up with all of that mad old visionary’s available testosterone—and every journey he undertook after that, everything he did, everything he learned, had drawn him closer to the Shrander.
“What are you thinking?” Anna asked him after they landed in New York.
“I was thinking that sunlight will transform anything.”
Actually he had been thinking how fear transformed things. A glass of mineral water, the hairs on the back of a hand, faces on a downtown street. Fear had caused all these things to become so real to him that, temporarily, there was no way of describing them. Even the imperfections of the water glass, its smears and tiny scratches, had become in some way significant of themselves rather than of usage.
“Oh yes,” said Anna. “I bet you were.”
They were sitting in a restaurant on the edge of Fulton Market. Six hours in the air had made her as difficult as a child. “You should always tell the truth,” she said, giving him one of the haggard, brilliant smiles which had captivated him so when they were both twenty. They had had to wait four hours for a flight. She had dozed for much of the journey, then woken tired and fractious. Kearney wondered what he would do with her in New York. He wondered why he had agreed to let her come.
“What were you really thinking?”
“I was wondering how to get rid of you,” Kearney said.
She laughed and touched his arm.
“That’s not enough of a joke, really, is it?”
“Of course it is,” Kearney said. “Look!”
A steam-pipe had broken in some ancient central heating system beneath the road. Smoke rose from the pavement on the corner of Fulton Street. The tarmac was melting. It was a common sight, but Anna, delighted, clutched Kearney’s arm. “We’re inside a Tom Waits song,” she exclaimed. The more brilliant her smile, the closer she always seemed to disaster. Kearney shook his head. After a moment, he took out the leather bag that contained the Shrander’s dice. He undid the drawstring and let the dice fall into his hand. Anna stopped smiling and gave him a bleak look. She straightened her long legs and leaned back away from him in her chair.
“If you throw those things here,” she said, “I’ll leave you to it. I’ll leave you on your own.”
This should have seemed less like a threat than it did.
Kearney considered her, then the steaming street. “I can’t feel it near me,” he admitted. “For once. Perhaps I won’t need them.” He put the dice slowly back in the bag. “In Grove Park,” he said, “in your flat, in the room where I kept my things, there were chalk marks on the wall above the green chest of drawers. Tell me why you washed them off.”