“Why, hullo!” laughs Violet, scratching him behind one animated ear. “You’re voiced by Alain Mbengue, aren’t you?”
“Sure am!” Marvin puffs out his fluffy chest.
Violet shakes his paw. “My goodness, we’re practically related!”
Cythera produces a brass gong from behind the Myrtle Lounge bar and wallops it with a hammer. “I’ve always wanted to do that,” she confesses. “Enough with the patty-cake and the chit-a-chat! Eyes forward, mouths shut!”
Anchises begins. “Very well! As I see it, there are two possible solutions to this mystery. I shall lay them both out and we shall have a vote. Acceptable? Excellent. Now, the first solution is the easiest one, Occam’s old standby: I propose that Severin is dead.”
“Well, that’s not very nice,” Calliope the Carefree Callowhale harrumphs. She speaks with the voice of the actress who played her—an unsettling experience for the lady herself, Violet El-Hashem, seated one mongoose away. The whale’s long-lashed eyes narrow. “And I resent the implication. I mind my own business; you lot ought to mind yours!”
“That is the trouble, isn’t it, Miss Calliope? We haven’t been minding our own business. In fact, we—human beings, I mean—have rather taken hold of your business and called it our own without so much as a by-your-leave, isn’t that right?”
“Damned right,” huffs the cartoon whale. “How would you like it if I came and yanked on your personal bits while you tried to have a nap and made ice cream out of whatever oozed out?”
“How dreadful!” gasped Mr Bergamot, hiding his face with his tentacles. “I do hope none of these bandits have my address!”
“I’m sure we’re all very sorry,” snaps Mariana Alfric. Flakes of jade-coloured mould fly from her lips. “But we didn’t know. None of us were even alive when the Yue Lao landed on Venus. It doesn’t give you the right to go around smashing up villages and sticking your personal bits in my personal bits!” Mariana waves her tentacled hand by way of illustration. A chorus of approval echoes through the dead.
Calliope the Callowhale sniffs indignantly. “I feel we made it perfectly obvious we didn’t want to be interfered with. Would you trouble a tree for apples if the branches vaporised you instantly? I should think you’d leave it well enough alone! We ought not to be castigated for defending ourselves! Ask her!” Calliope points her animated fin at Violet El-Hashem.
“I don’t know what you think I had to do with any of it,” the radio star opines.
“You were one of the first of the robbers to come knocking at our door.”
“I beg your pardon! I was eight years old!”
“Oh, come off it. We know your voice. We’ve heard it over and over in our heads, sizzling back and forth like incandescent grease in an infinite pan. ‘When I looked upon that new world, splendid in every way and in every way terrible, I looked upon a tiger with stars falling from his striped tongue. I looked and saw my true bridegroom!’ I am not your bridegroom, sweetheart, but I shall be your tiger if I have to.”
Violet El-Hashem laughs long and hard. “Fishie, my love, it was only radio! The first time I set foot on Venus my publicist handed me a script, a contract, a cocktail, and slapped my bottom twice.”
“May I ask a question?” Arlo Covington raises his hand, still in its thick diving glove. Muck dribbles from the corner of his mouth and into his cool green drink.
“Hold your question for one moment, Arlo?” Anchises begs. “I fear some of our friends are getting rather upset. Let’s remember we’re all stuck in this together, shall we? We can play happy families for one evening, can’t we? Mariana? Violet?”
“Fine,” the girls grumble.
“Calliope? Let’s see some of that carefree callowhale we all know and love?”
“Fine,” spits the whale.
Anchises claps his hands together. “Now, Mum, you old scamp, get up here.”
Severin Unck disentangles herself from Erasmo and skips up to the bar, where she fixes herself another gimlet.
“Come on, Mumsy. You can tell us.”
“ARE WE POISONOUS?” holler Erasmo, Maximo, Mariana, Santiago, and Arlo, collapsing into helpless giggles.
But that’s not Anchises’s question. “Are you dead?”
Severin’s celluloid eyes twinkle. She taps her nose with a silvery finger. “I don’t want to spoil it.” She smirks. “Never go swimming for at least an hour after lunch, kids!”
Madame Mortimer stands up, stroking her eye patch as she thinks. “The only reason anyone thought twice about the whole business was on account of the footage of your bloody great eyeball, Calliope. Normally, death requires a body; but there are many exceptions, and this easily qualified. Callowdiving is a dangerous profession at the best of times. The careless are atomized like a ball of af-yun. It’s tragic, but it’s happened a thousand times without all this Sturm und Drang and beating of breasts. Without that little filmstrip, it’s an open and shut case.”
Mary Pellam pipes up. “That, and the fact that Maxie-boy over there has blubbered all over the known universe that he killed her.”
Anchises nods. “Yes, I do think it’s time we had a whack at that, don’t you, Prospero, old friend?”
Maximo Varela does not stand. He salutes with his margarita. “Ah, but I did kill her, my boy.”
“Liar,” purrs Severin from behind the bar. She saunters back to Erasmo, bearing a fresh pink lady. She perches on the seat of his armchair. “Oh, what a big fat liar you are.”
“Are we playing the lying game?” yips Marvin the Mongoose. His whiskers sproing merrily. “I love that game! I’m aces at it! Pick me! Pick me! I killed Severin, too!”
“Who are you?” sighs Peitho Kephus in exasperation. “What do you have to do with any of this? What are you doing here?”
Marvin the Mongoose puts both paws over his mouth. He hiccups. “I don’t know!” he yips. “I hitched a ride with the octopus!”
Max’s plague-slicked face droops. “I’m telling the truth. I’m so sorry, Rin.”
Severin rolls her eyes. “Good grief, Max, whatever for?”
“I hit you.”
“I hit you, too. I’m comfortable with our score.”
Maximo’s sunken eyes fill with rheumy tears. “I shoved you. You fell onto the rocks.”
“I had a bruised arse. Big deal.”
“You fell onto George and smashed it.”
“You’ve got me there. Your honour, Maximo Varela murdered George the kinesigraph camera in cold blood. I saw it with my own eyes. Take him away!”
“Baby, you should listen,” says Erasmo softly.
“I did kill you,” the Mad King of Pluto whispers. “But I did it after you died. On the Clamshell. Erasmo and Cristabel cut Radiant Car for you. As a way to say goodbye or a way to keep you alive, I don’t know. It took them weeks. Konrad and Franco brought food to the darkroom and left it outside the door. We didn’t see them or the boy for weeks. It was like they’d vanished, too. And all the while, I still had that static in my head. That horrible static filled with voices, our voices, sawing on my skull every minute. I can still hear it.”
“You never told me that,” says Erasmo.
“I don’t tell you much, Raz. But it’s true. And then, a month out of lunar orbit, the three of them emerged from their exile. They asked us all to come to the cantina for a screening. They even made popcorn. Trying to make some little happiness. And we watched The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew. It was a hundred and twenty-seven minutes long. When the lights came up, everyone wept. They hugged each other, kissed foreheads and cheeks. In movies and books they always say: A spell had been lifted. But it had. They were in grief. But they would live.”