— Who is she playing tonight?
— Sedak. She has beaten him before. Then if she goes through she’ll meet Torlione who won last week.
— How is she doing?
— Bishop, three pawns apiece. She’ll take the rook next. Running round the queen as usual.
— What do you mean?
— Girl’s weakness is her queen. She won’t ever gambit, surrenders far too many pieces to protect her, leaves the king thin, priorities out of whack. Cost her plenty a game, I’ll tell you. Means she has to suffer twice as hard on the back end defending double, especially as it’s her favourite long attacking piece. Can’t have it both ways. Quite a common eccentricity, of course, but sentimentality always has a price. You play?
— Not really.
— Here’s the trick. You watch her — watch her go after the other queen like she’s got a fire under her hood. That there is the giveaway. Keeps her for a reason, see. And if queen takes queen chances are she won’t get taken — there’ll be cavalry. All of a sudden, Boom! Lightning down the passageway and it’s the only risk she’ll take with her. Beautiful to watch, that spontaneity, that charge, makes my night when she does it.
— Got a thing against her own kind, do you think? Bit of a harridan?
— Bit of a hellion. Got a thing against the best fighter, got a thing for disabling the heaviest weaponry. Someone like Torlione or Sedak will get scrambled by her eventually on a set-play, if she gets clear. Real tough to pull off that style, then again so was any war that went the wrong way. Little Joan of Arc, I call her.
— Is she a genius?
— Nothing to do with it, buddy. The formal mathematic play is a given here. They all have memories like elephants. Past that it’s all about being fearless. And lady luck.
A conspiratorial voice chipped in from the side.
— She sleeps with a black queen under her pillow I heard. Spooky woman. Brrrrh.
Cy and the commentator turned to see who had elaborated so audaciously on the discussion. It was Claudia. She winked at Cy and laughed, her orange hair bobbing.
— Oh, hello Claudia. Do you know Grace?
Claudia nodded, emphatically, still laughing. Then she suddenly became serious and paused to collect her thoughts. Cy fancied for a moment that she might have had a tear in the corner of the black explosion of powder around her eye.
— Ja. Of course, who does not know Grace! She is my good friend. Sie ist meine Königin.
Claudia had a secret that only Grace knew. She was obsessed with the baby incubator exhibition at Coney. She could not keep away from it. Outside there was a painted sign that read ‘Little babies who came before their time’, and there was a note that the youngest surviving infant to date had been born after just twenty-one weeks of pregnancy, though there was no formal medical verification that Claudia knew of to substantiate this claim. Cy had passed the place often but never been inside the show. He disapproved of it. It was one of the more extreme and less tasteful enterprises at the Island, a macabre maternity ward. Beyond the unseemliness of the place it also disturbed him on a sinister, childhood level, for it brought to mind the strange work of his mother, all the children of her unmaking, all the undone babies of Morecambe Bay. And even though he had long ago reconciled what his mother had undertaken as a sideline profession, he never went inside the exhibition, just in case all the sick infants within stood up in their cots and waved to him, intent on delivering messages from their ghostly British brothers and sisters, in the manner of Professor and Madame Johnson.
The show brought Claudia sadness finer than any requiem or any gravestone or anything beautiful or sorrowful that she could think of. On afternoons when she wasn’t working with her husband or rotating on the platform in the Human Picture Gallery at Luna, she would go off by herself and pay her dime and linger in the corridors of the exhibit. Looking into the room of plastic sheeted cots, where the city’s poor mothers brought their premature infants in the hope that they would be taken and saved, somehow miraculously transformed from the translucent, purple-limbed, bulging-eyed creatures they were into normal opaque, pink, brown or white skinned babies, like the children of fully termed mothers. Then, eventually, they would cry normally, tears of participatory complaint and appetite, not fatality, not like ratsbane-screaming rodents, but like hungry, healthy mammals eager for the breast. And their white drenched eyes would grow coloured telescopes to see the world.
She would stand in the greenhouse hallways, very, very still. She would watch the women dressed as nurses, she did not know if they were actually nurses, in stiffcaps and red-crossed aprons, thick medical shoes, drifting through the room on the other side of the window and monitoring the babies, patient as gardeners in a mushroom factory, gentle in amongst the planted glass beds. Claudia watched with bird-quick eyes and a worried forehead. She watched for the roll of an all-white eye, or for tiny purple hands to reach up and grasp the air — a sign of life, a sign of hunger, a sign of hopeful brain activity. And then when there was movement she would knock on the divider and point and point until a nurse’s attention was raised and the starched woman would move to the baby, smiling. Claudia watched for the mice-fast hearts to beat a little slower, a little less furiously and more privately behind their skin. There were tubes that she did not understand. There were suckling procedures that tugged at her own breast.
Claudia had miscarried six times in her life and Arturas did not blame her, even as she was confounded by her own body and wept for not giving their love issue. He fixed their dead children’s names to her mighty body in black ink, like eulogies on a mausoleum. Though her magnificent, vital anatomy seemed it should allow for the breeding of a hundred robust little warriors, she had not once brought a foetus to term. Six half children in hospital dishes and in the roadways of Germany, of New York and Florida, and lately in the powder room of Varga. Six small babies with tails like tadpoles, with whole souls like bright bubbles as they left her. The doctors said it was unsafe to try for any more. It was unsafe to try again, they said. Her womb was tipped, her womb was now unstable, her womb was very faulty. She had control over all the regions of her body, its power of gesture, its constantly increasing muscle, the coloured skin wrapping up her brawn. But in the secret hidden valley of her reproductive system the rebels still burnt down houses, strangled children and the rivers ran red with blood.