Corvus Page 25

  Still groggy, he's tempted to lie down and sleep. Something tells him, however, that he needs to stay awake and moving for a while longer, and in any case he's a bit afraid of his dreams. Once the circulation is completely restored to his fingers, he picks up the clarinet. The blisters make it difficult to hold, but he's nothing if not stubborn. The more it hurts, the more he perseveres; the more he perseveres, the more it gives him purpose, gratification even. He wonders if pain can become addictive, here in this limbic nightmare.

  'What am I doing wrong?' he asked.

  'Maybe if you hurt me a little . . .' Laura said.

  'Never!'

  With a cry of anguish, Zach throws his clarinet to the floor, heedless that it may break. Wanting it to break. Wanting all of its virtual keys to fly like silver bullets through the air and put an end to the bite and suck of memory, its persistent taint. But though the instrument bounces several times, then rebounds off the fuel drum to clatter to a halt near the sleeping platform, it seems undamaged. He waits—perhaps he won't pick it up at all. Another of his lies, he tells himself grimly, he's never been any good at letting go.

  He crouches before the instrument without touching it. There was a wooden recorder once, his grandfather's, before his first clarinet. One keepsake, they'd said when he was consigned to the Foundation. With cinematic clarity he replays the final morning—the sleek noiseless black car with tinted windows, the dented music case clutched in his lap, the permanent smile of Mrs Holmes, their housemother, whose breath smelled of peppermints—to this day he gags if obliged to brush his teeth with the usual sort of toothpaste. Remembers too the other new boys, especially Donald with his pale blue, nearly colourless eyes—watery, tremulous eyes that stayed open long after lights-out. Remembers the high electronic gate, the endless gravel drive, the grounds. The neat bunkbeds, the computers. The smell of roasting lamb and potatoes and something lemony awakening his hunger like an unwelcome guest who's dropped by for dinner (at least they'd always been well fed). Sometimes he wonders what made him take the recorder, rather than his beloved clarinet, rather than a book, one of his dad's, say, what made him take the recorder rather than the ivory and ebony chess set his mum had brought with her from home, rather than that silly teddy who'd lost an ear ages before he'd passed it on. There was no way he knew about the envelope at the time, tucked away in a faded satin pocket amid folded sheet music and a handwritten fingering chart. Maybe because it was the very oldest thing he owned, the recorder on which Oupa had taught Zach's mum to play? Though he still hopes it'll turn up on an auction site, common sense tells him its splintered fragments were thrust vengefully—gleefully—into a campfire.

  At last he retrieves the clarinet and blows a few tentative notes, which sound clear and true. He sits down on the sleeping platform, trying to empty his mind of all else. That's the thing about music—he thinks of sex as a wonderful impossible biological prank, the sort of trick the Monkey King himself would have delighted in devising, but even the simplest drumbeat or chant, as any shaman knows, slips the trap of time, of thought, of memory.

  Whenever agitated, Zach chooses the lucidity of Bach—not fire and frenzy, but cool fresh water welling from a subterranean source, the very mineral impurities and air bubbles of his own inadequate renderings a reason to keep drinking and drinking. After a good beginning, his breathing falters. He starts again. A few phrases in, he lets the clarinet drop to his lap. Angrily, he wipes the tears from his eyes, then jams the mouthpiece to his lips and drives a loud jazzy uplifting tune out the bell until a delighted laugh fills the iglu. He gasps and swings round. 'Laura,' he calls out before he can stop himself. There are no echoes in this house of ice, and very few shadows.

  Where is she?

  He knows he ought to eat, but instead finishes the lukewarm coffee, lowers the flame on the lantern, and strips completely. Ignoring his sleeping bag, he constructs a nest for himself among the caribou furs. He's not going to pretend any longer, he wants Laura so badly that he'll do anything to reach her. Anything to tell her what he should have told her when he was too proud, too stubborn, too scared to speak.

  For a few minutes he watches the light flicker along the pelt-lined walls, playing an old childhood game. He's back in the Foundation woodlands after dark, where he'd sneak off by himself to lie in a moist nest of bracken and leaves, not doing much of anything—listening, mostly, and watching the trees, the shifting latticework of black and deeper black. He shared the night with all manner of creatures, who tolerated his presence so long as he made no threats. His heightened senses meant that he was never alone, but it was a respite he needed again and again from the uninterrupted thereness of the other boys, the teachers, the staff—a thereness as stifling as the air in the tube during a severe heatwave. After a while you couldn't breathe.

  He'd also learned to masturbate in those woods, where there was no danger of being overheard by your roommates. The other boys didn't seem to mind, they joked enough about it and even coordinated their wank-off sessions, but he always pretended to be asleep. A couple of piss-taking skirmishes, then they let him be. Later on he told them he was meeting a girl from the village, which soon proved easy enough to arrange. And he was a pretty good pimp, too, though of course no one ever called it that.

  You used them, he could imagine Laura saying. Maybe so. And why not? What did she think they were busy doing? 'You're a terrific fuck,' Melanie used to tell him. No, that was Georgina.

  He can remember when he stopped. No matter how tightly he shuts his eyes, the scene in the shed intrudes—the knife, the smell of dank mould and piss (his own), the hatred on their faces; the elation. 'Reckon you can rape our girls?' If the croakers had been in a hurry, they wouldn't have thrashed him first. During the week in hospital he'd tried hard to be thankful for the stitches, the pain. But it wasn't at all hard to be grateful to Smyles, the cranky gardener whose name and stuttering were always good for a laugh—dour skinny Smyles who, hearing the thuds and groans, came to investigate. By that time they'd already got Zach's trousers and pants down by his ankles. He still sends Smyles a card for his birthday, goes round with a bottle at Christmas. Even crankier with age.

  One of the softest calf pelts is just the right size. At first Zach lies on his back, then he curls on his side, finally he tries stretching out full length on his belly, the thick fur of the bedding almost coarse enough to abrade his skin. Laura's pendant slides back and forth under him. He pictures it gleaming in the candlelight, swinging gently between her breasts. It's warm by the fire, and the sweet smell of woodsmoke will cling to their hair. Her cheeks are flushed; her eyes lit by the flames, backlit by something very much like mischief. On occasion he's wondered if girls find an erection amusing, if not downright preposterous.

  In the end he gives up, his body is refusing to respond. Maybe hypothermia can do that to you, maybe it's this place. It's happened before, especially when he'd miss taking his serum on schedule. He pulls the furs up over his face and settles in for a long night. At the moment even Chloe would be welcome.

  Sleep doesn't come. His body aches with exhaustion, bouts of shivery spasms seizing his muscles from time to time, though he's warm enough. But his mind will not settle, writhes like a spawning eel in the weed mats of the Sargasso Sea. There's no sunlight to penetrate the waters, no clear blue depths. It's as though undiscovered species await him, if only he could permeate the murk.

  The Zach she saw, he's gone now. There remains only a fleshless skeleton of the person he might have become. He slides a hand from under the furs, holds it up towards the low flame, and spreads his fingers. The light reddens the webby parts of his skin to near translucence. He remembers how she once matched their hands, palm to palm. With an inarticulate sound he throws back the covers, scrambles to his feet, and bounds to the lantern, then slaps his hand onto its hood. He holds it there, feeling nothing and everything, till his palm begins to shrill in agony. Laura. He clenches his teeth to choke off her name. He will not say it. Words a
s slippery as eels have always been his self-defence, spawning guile and deceit and spite.

  'Why won't you talk to me?' Laura cried.

  Because the sea is fathomless, forever hidden by sargassum. Because it's not as warm as you imagine. Because we'd drown.

  Chapter 31

  'Who's there?' Laura cried, whirling instinctively to peer behind her.

  There was no answer, and though she could see the flickering on the screen from the corner of her eye, there was no beam of light from the projection booth either. Her hand unsteady, she swept her torch over the seats, discovering nothing—discovering how many wells of darkness there were in which to hide. Finally, with deep reluctance, she turned round again to face the screen.

  She discovered you could gasp without making a sound.

  Zach was sitting on a platform made of ice, shoulders slumped and head propped on one hand. Aqua light tinted everything, even his hair and skin, but this was no underwater setting. Could he be inside an ice cave or grotto? a glacier? He looked so tired—so defeated—that Laura found herself descending the steps towards the screen as though she could take him in her arms, but halted with a shiver of recognition at the sound of his clarinet. Suddenly light-headed, she dropped to the carpeted tread and hugged her ribs. This was impossible—impossible.

  Maybe the dead could also rise up and speak.

  Her neckhairs stirred, and for a moment she was tempted to crawl under one of the cinema seats, the way she'd done as a small child. She'd nearly forgotten: her dad used to take her to his favourite scifi films, the classic ones with scary aliens and megalomaniac cyborgs and grotesque virus-deformed plague victims, till her mum got wind of where they'd been. Nearly forgotten, too, the ice cream and popcorn; the delicious taste of conspiracy.

  I'm not going to look at them, she told herself. The dead stay dead.

  After a quick backwards glance, she raised her eyes to the screen. As if on signal, Zach lifted his face, and she could see tears wetting his cheeks. He put his free hand to his hair—his beautiful hair, now uncombed, dirty, lank as Zach himself. Never more beautiful.

  'Zach,' she said, hoping that whatever window had opened between them wasn't glazed in mirrored glass. 'Zach, where are you?'

  He raked his fingers repeatedly through his hair, then straightened up. Laura glimpsed a tousled, black-haired head asleep on his lap. The sight drove her to her feet.

  'Damn you,' she said, 'I get to find dead bodies while you—' She stopped, conscious of how ridiculous her words sounded, even if nobody could hear. How contemptible.

  For there was no mistaking the despair on Zach's face. Plainly thinking himself unobserved, he closed his eyes, and fresh tears continued to slip from under his lids to the accompaniment of unfamiliar but exquisite music—music which she suspected was his own. He'd lost weight again, and there were smudges under his eyes, dark cratered smudges deriving from more than lack of sleep. The cigarette burn on his cheek had healed to a pearly cameo, crimped at the edges and likely to remain beardless.

  Where had they taken him? Fulgur's network was so extensive that he could be thousands of kilometres away—even, she supposed, on one of the outstations. Laura studied the scene: the blocks of ice, Zach's clothes, the intense, almost surreal blue light. She felt like directing the camera operator to pan for her. Under her fixed stare, the picture was beginning to blur. She wiped her eyes angrily, she couldn't afford to miss any details which might provide a clue, though how she intended to penetrate some secret installation had not yet occurred to her—but it would.

  Then she noticed that the music was fading as well. 'No,' she cried, her voice like a wrong note, 'wait!' Now the image was dimming visibly, so that it reminded her of a transparent webskin. 'Zach!' The webbed texture of the screen itself lent Zach's skin a macabre reptilian appearance. Frantically Laura started down the stairs, caught her foot, and flailed the rest of the way to the bottom, cracking her forearm against one of the aisle seats with a jaw-clenching jolt of pain, despite the padding of jacket sleeve and jumper. Fuckfuckfuck, she was making this a habit—falling to reach Zach. Winded, she took a few minutes to right herself, massage her arm, and scrabble for her torch, by which time Zach was no more than a pale shadow of himself.

  'Zach!' she cried even louder, no longer concerned about being overheard.

  Zach straightened and opened his eyes. Laura had no reason to believe he saw her, though his gaze was disconcertingly point-blank. Squinting, he leaned forward with an air of fierce concentration, as if searching for something which had slipped from his grasp into deep surf. For a moment his image sharpened, filling the screen in a close-up so that the rest of the room disappeared from view. Then his lips moved, but it was impossible to tell whether he was talking to himself, to his companion, or to someone else entirely, and Laura couldn't read his lips.

  'Zach, listen to me'—she started again after a shaky breath—'listen. Play, don't ever stop. I'll find you.'

  She watched without moving as the screen became blank once more, the cinema dark. She could never be sure at which point Zach's image dissolved into afterimage, though in retrospect she believed it was just at this threshold that she caught a whiff of the sea, briny and chill; that she saw, though only for a fraction of a second, a flash of speaking, bright blue eyes.

  Keep telling him.

  *****

  Fulgur was famous for its Christmas bash—luscious food, wine from its own South African cellars, a top band, always a few dazzling celebrities to mingle with the crowd. And a themed children's party, held simultaneously. It was said you needed a postdoctoral degree in child psychology or education, plus a minimum of ten years hands-on experience, to serve the fruit punch. Last year one award-winning children's author had been unobtrusively escorted from the room because he'd been caught spiking his own glass of orange squash. There were always gatecrashers to both events, despite stringent security measures.

  Laura spent the evening before the party at Zach's flat. Whatever Josh had done—and he refused to tell her—the neighbours were no longer a problem. 'Just don't make it too obvious,' he'd warned. After cooking him a meal, she presented him with his Christmas gift, though she planned to come by sometime during the holiday. She wasn't a particularly creative cook—Zach, she remembered glumly, had far more flair—but her mum had insisted on teaching her the basics. For years she'd resented not being allowed to eat the frozen pizzas and tinned puddings on her mates' supper tables, so it came as something of a surprise to find that she took pleasure in rolling out a slab of pastry.

  'Wonderful mince pies,' Josh said, already on his third or fourth.

  'My mum likes to bake when she's not disinfecting the toilets or scrubbing the floors with a toothbrush.'

  'About to get your period? Listen, in my younger days I used to bake my own bread.'

  Laura grimaced. 'All that kneading.' She no longer blushed at his remarks.

  'As good as a massage when you're wound up, and much better than bashing pillows. Think of the feathers everywhere.'

  She smiled to herself at the scene conjured. A shame her mum was allergic, a split pillow or two would be just the thing to induce a heart attack.

  'The way my mum hates mess and muck, I'm surprised she doesn't wear surgical gloves when faced with a mound of sticky dough.'

  'Kids never have a clue about their parents.'

  'Don't bet on it. And besides, fair's fair. Parents haven't got a clue about their kids.'

  Just before she left, Josh shuffled to a cupboard and handed her a newspaper-wrapped parcel. 'Sorry about the paper.'

  He always seemed to know when she got teary. 'No need for that,' he said, patting her as usual on the shoulder, 'it's just some old thing I've had lying around in a drawer. But don't open it now, keep it for Christmas.'

  When she kissed him on the cheek, his face pinkened with pleasure. 'Mind, we don't want to make Zach jealous.'

  They were both silent till Josh said, 'Ah well, those simus don't
make much of our holidays anyway.'

  Laura went back to Zach's flat to tidy up the kitchen, her fantasy only fleeting that Zach was in the living room, reading or studying a score, tapping away at the computer. She'd stored extra pies and cheeses in the fridge, two containers of a meaty pasta in the freezer compartment, though she knew Josh would never fetch the stuff for himself. His code of behaviour reminded her a bit of Owen, and rather more of the heroes in the soppy historical romances Olivia liked to read.

  Christ, what a bitch you're turning into. Olivia reads all sorts of stuff, she never goes anywhere without a book or, since her last birthday, her reader. In fact, Olivia ought to have been far more Zach's type.

  'Come on, you know what he's after,' Olivia had said even before the club bombing. 'You don't think he's interested in your mind? No matter how much I dislike him, there's no denying he's damned smart.' She'd laughed in that cool way of hers that made you want to riposte with a subtly double-edged thrust—if only you could think of one. 'About as smart as me, I reckon.'

  Laura stopped scrubbing the baking tray for a moment while she recalled the peculiar, almost cagey expression on Olivia's face.

  To avoid temptation, she stowed Josh's parcel out of sight in Zach's wardrobe before sitting down at his desk. As futile as the exercise seemed, she was writing him a Christmas letter, and by hand. Zach had an old-fashioned predilection for fountain pens; he collected—and used—the oddest things. But she uncapped one, an elegant black-and-amber instrument she'd seen him write with: some thoughts needed the delicacy, the weight of ink; its idiosyncrasy. It was slow going, and she blotched, then tore up more than she kept, but in the end she folded two closely written sheets of paper, slipped them into an envelope, and addressed it with his name. She stretched and went to the window, thinking how much she hated the short dark days of winter. The streetlamp which barely lit this stretch of canal gleamed like the single baleful eye of an old tom, scarred survivor of innumerable street battles. There was no sign of the snow that was predicted, yet again. Everyone had their own theories about the severity of this particular winter, right down to the religious fanatics.