I spent about forty-five minutes on Quinn’s laptop, reading everything I could about Leith Carlisle and Thanatrope. There’s not a huge amount of information, but you can watch the movie in its entirety on the avant garde site Ubuweb, and read commentary by Derek Jarman, Nicholas Rombes, and Sally Mann. Elsewhere, you can find a few conspiracy theorists who believe there’s an arcane message encoded into the film, or a curse activated every time the movie’s shown.
“Hey. What’re you doing?” I slid over on the couch so Quinn could sit beside me, a bathrobe hanging loosely from his lanky frame. He lit a cigarette, peering at the laptop. “Come back to bed.”
“I want to see this first.”
“What the hell is it?”
“It’s a movie, shut up.”
The sound quality wasn’t good, but that didn’t matter. Carlisle had shot it without sound, later dubbing in buzzing flies, random laughter and conversations, snatches of music. Rundgren’s opening guitar riff from “Juice It Up.”
“Right!” I turned up the sound. Quinn looked at me curiously. “Poppy Teasel would’ve cleared that song for him. And she knew Rundgren. And—wait.”
The screen showed a field, high grass bleached out to a lunar white, red-streaked clouds. Blobs and shimmers of violet appeared and disappeared like birds shot out of the sky, or silent explosions in the grass. Three long-haired teenage boys walked in a line, followed by three young girls, all of them naked. Occasionally one of them would turn to face the camera, smiling beatifically. In the background shone the sunlit towers of what I now recognized as Kethelwite Manor, the castle in an acid-fueled waking dream.
If you factored out the visual effects caused by lens flare and damaged film stock, it was an idyllic scene. That wholesome adolescent frolicking in the nude, proto–Ryan McGinley stuff. Yet the overdubbed soundtrack, that aural mosaic of random sounds, was unnerving—birdsong, the drone of bees, snatches of conversation, none of it miked at the same level.
And while I could remember that whole Free Love vibe from when I was a teenager, right now I felt complicit in Leith Carlisle’s brand of seedy voyeurism, and not my own.
There was something else going on, too; something that made me wonder if those conspiracy theorists, with their chatter about subliminal images, might not be so crazy.
The double-exposed scenes of people were disquieting, as if I stared at a cave wall and only gradually became aware of the human figures painted there. I felt a strange queasiness, like seasickness and also what I can only describe as a kind of moral nausea. It was a sensation I’d experienced once before, when I’d taken THC that turned out to be PCP—angel dust—and felt my consciousness reduced to a spark in a yawning abyss, the closest I’ve ever come to believing in hell.
“You okay?” Quinn touched the back of my neck. “Your skin is clammy.”
“Yeah.” I tore my gaze from the screen. “It’s giving me vertigo or something.”
“Probably the aspect ratio’s wrong. Gives me a headache.”
I looked back at the laptop. As the kids walked out of the frame, Poppy Teasel’s unaccompanied voice echoed eerily from the soundtrack—the sixteen-year-old Poppy, not the ravaged woman I’d seen a few hours ago, her words so high and sweet and charged with yearning that tears filled my eyes.
“The wind, the wind, the wind blows high
Ash comes falling from the sky
And all the children say they’ll die
For want of the Golden City.”
As her voice died away, a smaller figure came running up behind the teenagers. A child, three or four years old, with a dandelion puff of dark hair. A little girl, I thought at first, T-shirt flapping to her knees like a tunic. One of the girls turned and swept the child up into her arms.
“Hey!” I leaned forward to pause the film. “That’s Poppy.”
It was definitely her, very young—she couldn’t have been older than seventeen—and heartbreakingly beautiful. It was almost impossible to reconcile her with the woman I’d seen in Stepney. I thought of the words of the doomed girl in The Picture of Dorian Gray: “I knew nothing but shadows, and I thought them real.”
“Yeah, that’s her,” said Quinn. “Great tits.”
I hit play and pause, running the same few seconds back and forth. Between the original film quality and the laptop’s poor resolution, I couldn’t get a good look at the little kid’s face.
“Is that Adrian Carlisle?” I asked. “I think it is.”
“Adrian?” Quinn seemed alarmed.
“Why not? They have the same last name. Him and Leith Carlisle. They all seem to have known each other—Leith and Poppy and Morven and Mallo.”
Quinn took a nervous drag at his cigarette. “So this guy, he’s Adrian’s old man?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Probably.” I looked at Quinn. “What’s the deal with Adrian? I don’t know a fucking soul in London. He turns up, and now it turns out you know him.”
Quinn stared at the laptop. At last he said, “Yeah, okay, I know Adrian. We used to do business. When it looked like my flight was gonna be delayed I called him and asked him to track down Derek and look out for you. He’s owed me for a while. Now I owe him,” he added ruefully.
“You asshole.” I punched Quinn’s arm. “I can look out for my own goddamn self.”
“I think we have proven beyond a reasonable doubt that is not the case,” said Quinn, rubbing his arm. “I should have known better. Hurricane Cass.”
“Fuck you.”
I turned back to the frozen image of the child on Quinn’s laptop. Was it Adrian? I did the math and yes, he would have been about the right age. I tried to remember what Poppy had said.
He was such a beautiful kid. I always wished we could have stayed close.
“Look, I’m sorry.” Quinn ran a hand along my thigh. “I thought he’d put you up till I got here.”
“He’s living in a squat,” I said without looking up. “I slept on his goddamn floor.”
“Yeah, okay, I get it. Next time I’ll put you in touch with Ronnie Wood.”
“You know Ronnie Wood?”
“Nope. Can this wait? I don’t see you for thirty years and you’re gonna spend the night on YouTube?”
“It’s not YouTube,” I said, but he’d already closed the laptop.
“Come back to bed.” He finished what was left of my Scotch and stubbed his cigarette out in the empty glass, kissing me as he pulled me to my feet. “Now.”
Afterward, I again watched him sleep, his skin a ruined canvas on which the history of the last thirty years had been carved and inked and burned. What had happened to him back in New York, in Barrow and Oslo, before he ended up in Reykjavík and tracked me down?
I knew better than to ask. Instead I breathed him in, nicotine and alcohol and whatever other chemicals kept him alive. Finally I slept. When I woke, Quinn was seated on the edge of the bed, holding a mug of coffee.
“Here,” he said, and handed it to me. “I’ve got to go out for a few hours. I’ll be back before eleven.”
“What time is it?”
“Almost eight.”
The coffee was way too sweet. Every junkie I’ve known loves sugary coffee and coffee ice cream. I set down the mug and started to my feet. “Give me a couple minutes and I’ll be ready.”
Quinn shook his head. “I have some last-minute stuff to finish up. Just be packed and ready to go when I get back, okay?”
I frowned. “Yeah, I guess. Can’t I just meet you?”
“No. You need to lay low. You got your passport?”
“I told you—”
“Let me see it.”
I fetched my wallet and showed him the passport. He stared at it, then at my face. “You do look like Dagney in this. I think she’s taller, though.”
“Like I give a shit.”
I snatched back the passport. Quinn gave me a crooked grin. “You jealous?”
“Fuck you. Do I need to be?”
I stared at him until he looked away. “No,” he said.
He went into the living room, slid his laptop and a few other things into his backpack, then sat for a few minutes speaking softly on his mobile before sticking it into his pocket.
“Okay, I’m outta here,” he said, pulling on his leather jacket. He’d shaved earlier, nicking the new scar alongside his mouth. Blood seeped to his jaw; I stepped over and wiped it away with a finger. Quinn took me gently by the shoulders.
“Cassie, listen. Do not let anyone in. Do not answer the phone. And do not under any circumstances use that fucking mobile. I’m going to get us both some TracFones while I’m out.”
“What if I need to call you?”
“You won’t. I’ll be back in a couple hours. If someone knocks at the door, ignore it. If by some insane chance Bruno shows up, just tell him you’re my girlfriend. I’ll see you in a bit; we can grab lunch then split.”
“Where you going?”
“Rotherhithe; I know a guy there with a barge. Trying to finalize our plans.”
“We’re taking a barge to Greece?”
“That’s the first leg. You didn’t enter the UK on your own passport. Neither did I. We need to make other travel arrangements—that’s what I’m going to do now. We’ll leave tonight if I can swing it. Sooner the better.”
He held me close and kissed me, and I could feel his heart beating hard against my breast. “See you in a bit, Cassie. Lock the door after me.”
I did, then went to make more coffee and scrounge for breakfast. The kitchen was like a Williams-Sonoma showroom: Bunn coffee maker, La Cornue stove, Misono knives in a block of bird’s-eye maple, a miniature washer/dryer. Everything but food. The fridge held nothing but liters of bottled water and cans of Irn-Bru and, in the freezer, a half-full bottle of Sapphire gin and a miniature bottle of Polish vodka with a stalk of buffalo grass inside.
I settled for tuna from a can, washing it down with Scotch, then popped a Focalin and threw my clothes into the washing machine. I spent a few desultory hours doing laundry and watching TV, compulsively flipping back to Sky News. Poppy’s death still seemed to be unreported; that or it had been bounced to the bottom of the newsfeed by the most recent round of explosions, machete attacks, volcanic eruptions, tornadoes, child abductions, and celebrity deaths. Most coverage focused on the apocalyptic storms in the southwest UK: gales and whiteout conditions, monster waves pounding Penzance and Falmouth. The coast guard had suspended efforts to search for onlookers swept out to sea in Trevena. A section of the Great Western railway line had been destroyed by flooding.
At last I switched off the TV, pulled a chair in front of the floor-to-ceiling window, stared out at the stark canyons of Canary Wharf shining through a curtain of fine snow, and waited for Quinn to return. He never did.