Aldred still thrashed and kicked. Fingers dug savagely into his mouth and pried it open. He felt his tongue being stretched and tasted blood when the cold steel of a blade was brought to it, threatening to sever it if he ventured so much as another twitch. He conceded and the men drove his cheek into the tarmac and held it under a filthy, callused foot. A kick to the ribs had him curling up like a foetus.
After the ordeal Aldred limped over to the steps in front of an old tenement and fell against an old, spalling pillar. He closed his eyes. The noise of the gaming houses was now a distant drone. Their dim interiors threw wan shafts of light onto the fivefoot way.
Then footsteps approached, slow and gritty.
“I am a friend of your father’s and I will offer you my lodging,” said a voice.
Aldred kept his eyes closed. The voice and the sounds around him had a detached, dreamlike quality to them.
“I will offer you my lodging,” the voice repeated. Aldred peeled his eyes open.
The appearance of an exceedingly tall man roused him from the malaise. The man was wearing an enormous black overcoat and a black top hat of fine beaver felt. His smooth, pearly skin shone as if it were made of moonlight and his eyes glittered green and yellow under bony brows that jutted like the crags of a glacier. He stood straight as a cedar, as if allowing Aldred to appreciate the full measure of his immense stature.
“Who are you?” said Aldred.
“My name is Origen,” said the man. His voice, flat and toneless, flowed like a thick, oleaginous substance. “I am a friend of your father’s and I will offer you my lodging.”
“I don’t know my father. He walked out on us a long time ago.”
“Still, I will offer you my lodging.”
Aldred fingered his ribs and winced. “What do you want for it?”
“You will live in it as your home and you will work for me.”
“What kind of work?”
“You will labour in a pineapple factory at Grove Estate. Someone will take you there at six in the morning. You will not see much of me, but your needs will be taken care of.”
“That’s generous of you.”
“I am a friend of your father’s.” Origen’s thick monotone filled Aldred’s head. “You may do well to stay out of trouble.”
They walked over to Church Street where a gharry stood waiting with its canvas top furled back under the lamplight. It was tethered to a black horse that would’ve been invisible in the dark if not for the swishing of its tail. The gharry-wallah was a skinny young Kling who turned his turbaned head at them when they got in and grinned brightly.
They said nothing the entire way. Origen sat beside Aldred and moved little despite the bumps and ruts. He sat rigidly upright and rested his large hands decorously on his lap. His large face, strangely ascetic, was a portrait of Serenity personified.
They passed through unlit groves and plantations that were so dark that the gharry-wallah had to turn up the wick of the kerosene lamps. After driving for almost an hour the gharry halted in front of a modest two-storey house along Grove Road.
It looked empty and its windows stared at them like black eye sockets. A thin mist was taking form near the ground. All around it coconut plantations stretched unendingly into the thick phantasmal gloom beyond.
Origen handed Aldred two bronze keys. “You may enter.”
Aldred hefted them in his palm. “I don’t think I can thank you enough.”
“I am a friend of your father’s.” Origen’s voice rose from the depths. “I knew him well. Live as you have always lived. And you may do well to stay away from trouble.”
“Trouble,” said Aldred. “Yes, I’ll do very well to stay away from trouble.”
Origen gave a half-bow. “Then I shall bid you good-night.”
“Good night, Mister—” Aldred faltered, scorched by the shame of having forgotten the name of his benefactor.
“Origen,” came the reply, rich and thick.
“Origen,” said Aldred. “Thank you.”
The strange man boarded the gharry and stared stiffly ahead. As the gharry drove off Aldred caught another glimpse of the gharrywallah’s bright, flawless grin. The rumbling of wheels soon fell away and the songs of katydids rushed in to fill the silence.
39
FIRST NAMES
THE HEADLONG PLUNGE into the water crushes the bonnet and the inflating air cushion almost smothers Landon. Water gushes from the open windows and quickly floods the floor. Landon tugs madly at the handle but the door jams. He doesn’t realise he is yelling.
Which dumbass would open the windows at a time like this?
Beside him John deflates the air cushions with a pocket knife and stays in place while the rising water eddies around him. He is looking through the windshield as if waiting for the change of lights. Landon unbuckles himself and tries unsuccessfully to dive through the open window against the surge of water. John’s arm lashes out and hauls him in.
“Trap a foot and the panic will drown you,” he says. “Just sit tight and wait it out.”
Landon gawks wide-eyed at him.
“Stay calm,” he squeezes Landon’s shoulder as the water creeps above their midriffs. “And follow the direction of the air bubbles on your way out.”
Their noses go under. At John’s count Landon takes a deep breath and holds it. Water fills up the interior and the doors, aided by their own weight, now swing open with surprising ease. But the water is pitch black and the initial relief of having fled the car diminishes. Landon doesn’t know if he is swimming up or down.
In nothing short of an epiphany, John’s advice about the bubbles surface like a dialogue from a dream. He blows and feels the bubbles run between his fingers and over his head. Furiously he kicks, until at last he breaks the surface and sees the city lights shimmering on the black waters around him. The underside of the Benjamin Sheares Bridge looms high, its colossal, branchlike columns reaching over the channel like great trees of stone. Farther on, the illuminated ring of an observation wheel beckons like a beacon.
A rumble of distant thunder, and rain begins to falclass="underline" thinly at first, then quickly escalating into a torrential downpour. Landon swims under the viaduct to flee the murderous pelting. He passes the islet footings and realises that the bank isn’t quite as near as he thinks.
An onset of cramps locks up his calf muscles and panic engulfs him. He thrashes and his head starts going under. A large arm sweeps in over his jaw. A hand lifts his chin and he feels himself being dragged through water. In no time his heels scrape against rock. John wraps an arm around his chest and helps him over the granite boulders of the rip-rap. “Can you walk?”
Landon hobbles across the craggy surface, nodding. “Nothing broken.”
They stumble first upon a patch of lawn, then onto a jogging track of interlocked pavers, dimly lit under streetlamps spaced far apart. They pass through concrete columns clad in creepers and enter a dark, inhospitable space just beyond a row of shrubbery.
It turns out to be a disused segment of a Formula One roadway that leads to the pit building. Construction trash and partly dismantled scaffolding lie strewn across the ground. Generator sets sit cold and dormant. Shambolic, skeletal structures haunt the gloomy setting like the silhouettes of dystopian wreckage. The viaduct, flanked by smaller descending slipways, looms as the lofty ceiling of a sunken cathedral. Against the faint rush of rain multitudes of hidden toads begin their throaty songs. Somewhere in the heights a bat screeches.