Something was happening to him. It felt like a flow in the brain: rearrangements of currents and temperatures … Suddenly the sky went an olive colour, and the sea turned white.
‘Tormenta,’ she said.
‘I want to lie down. I’m sorry, I’m not feeling well. I’ll be all right if I lie down.’
She took him to her bedroom and left him alone to shed some clothes. He was already half asleep when she returned.
‘I’ll put this on you. The principle of lullabies — it’s not the song. It’s not that the song soothes and dopes you. The point is that you know the singer’s still there. I can’t sing, but I’ll go on patting this shawl so you know I’m still there.’
While he slept and turned he kept remembering the final minutes of the sex-act he had witnessed on Dolorosa Drive.
Karla was on her knees. She was about to complete a presumably ancient human activity. But it didn’t look ancient. It looked as though it had been invented earlier that day — or was now, in fact, in the process of coming into being. For the forward thrust the arms were clasped about Burl Rhody’s waist; his phallus, ideally black, seemed to constitute an obstacle: she couldn’t go past it, she couldn’t go round it. No, she had to go through it, as if her real goal lay somewhere within his loins. On the reverse thrust, her hands were placed flatpalmed on his hipbones, to achieve greater traction, and each withdrawal ended with a tremendous smack of the lips before Rhody was as vociferously reengulfed. Then all was speed; and after a while he found himself thinking of a child with a party-whistle. And then she was Billie, or even Sophie, with yoghurt or vanilla icecream all over her face.
Consciousness was upon him. Before he opened his eyes he heard the sound of breathing. More than this, he heard sleep — the economical downdraughts which were the sound that sleep made … He found he was some way down the bed, under the sheet and the shawl; and the thing between his legs was a harsh concentration of gristle. He turned over: there was Karla’s apparently headless body, and the sleepless and incorruptible interrogation of her breasts. He moved towards them.
Soon he heard her somnolent sigh of approval and felt her hands on his neck and hair as he squeezed and kissed. Time passed.
‘I love you, I love you,’ she said.
And when she started to weep, he paused, expecting her to stop (then he’d stop). But she didn’t stop. Like Billie when she wept (faintly incredulous, naïvely eloquent), he thought. Her thighs were apart, and now his hand loomed. But then he reached out to her face and found that her cheeks were dry. Their eyes met. All was subtracted from him; and he turned away.
After several beats of his heart Xan said, ‘See? … Love doesn’t like fear. Size zero.’
‘Oh, I suppose you mean it should be tucked in nicely while you sprint for your life down the beach … That’s what they never say in the books or anywhere else. With a little girl you’re big, even when you’re little. You ought to go ahead with Billie. We get over it.’
‘No you don’t.’
‘No we don’t,’ she said. ‘Obviously.’ And with a whip of the sheet she was gone.
When he was woken again, this time by the storm, he got out of bed and reached for his clothes as if they were items of body-armour. The thunder was escalatory: fusillade, cannonade, heavy artillery, the fundamentally egregious cataract of tactical nuclear strike. He opened the bedroom door. There was a figure on the balcony, smoking.
She said, ‘God has got the movers in. There will be breakages. No, we don’t. We don’t get over it. Obviously. In bed we don’t know our rights.’
And he thought: obviously. Because that is what you do, Daddy, when you do that, when you play that game, when you go down that road. You place them in another dimension where they’re always one step behind, one step beyond.
‘Do you want to see Jo now?’ she asked. ‘You still want that?’
He said yes, but with a reluctance, and a sadness, that he took to be a failure of courage. ‘Are you my enemy?’
‘I used to be your enemy.’ And she told him who she was.
‘… Jesus Christ, Cora.’
Beyond, arthritic feelers of lightning were lancing out, sideways, upwards, forming coastlines with many fjords. There was a repeated jumpcut effect, and shifting blocks of nightscape.
Cora Susan waited with the keys.
4. Anger of the just
‘Come in, dear. Come in out of the wet. Xan … They’re waiting for you, dear, through there. Paquita’ll get you anything you need. Bit of business.’
Joseph Andrews pushed open a red-leather swing door with a porthole in its brow. Around a cardtable you could see a fat hot man in braces, a small natty figure in a borsalino and a chalk-striped suit, a Chinese woman with a pair of sunglasses lodged in her quiff, and the set of a pair of unknowable shoulders. Cora went inside and the door swung shut behind her.
‘You’ve got some arsehole coming here, haven’t you mate? Are you daft or what? This way: follow me. Follow me.’
Xan was led into a long low room: its recreation of an English pub was not entirely literal, but there were damp beermats and glistening black plastic ashtrays on the round tables, as well as a dartboard, and horsebrass and horsehair and prints of racing scenes. A log fire drew noisily in the hearth, like emphysema, with additional sputters and spatters.
‘First, the past,’ he said, and lengthily exhaled. ‘I’ll say this for Mick Meo: you’d have to hurt him. I’ll say this: you knew you was in a row when you was in a row with Mick Meo. You’d have to hurt him. A wall. A drop. We had it out the once back in them days, before he come on board. And it went on a bit but I done him. Six months later, when he’s up and about again, he come on board and there was no hard feelings whatsoever. Him and me, we’d have a drink. On several occasions he invited me to his home. Consistently. I’d have little Leda on me knee. This was before your time, son.
‘Then come the liberty. We was both in Strangeways. He’d pulled a three for grand larceny, whilst I was serving me six for uh … for malicious wounding. Now. Our mate Tony Odgers has lost remission for doing the two screws who’ve burnt a letter from his wife — in his face. I’ve said to Mick, “I’m not having that. I’ll do the Governor.” And Mick’s gone, “I’ll do him.” And I’ve gone, “No I’ll do him.” And Mick’s gone, “I’m not having that. No I’ll do him.” Deadlock.’
Said with a lingering stress on the last consonant, like the beginning of a cough, and joining all the other coughs in the log fire.
‘So we’ve had a word with the Chaplain. It’s arranged. A straightener, with gloves, in the main quad. It sometimes happened in them days. You sort it out, with the uh, permission of the Governor. The Governor didn’t know what it’s about, of course …’
Xan said, ‘What was it about?’
‘… About who’d do the Governor.’