Winston and Franklin, May’s grandchildren, sons of Shirley and Elroy Edwards, can’t go to nursery school today, because it is closed for teacher training. Usually Shirley, who is doing a degree with a view to becoming a teacher herself, would leave the boys with their grandmother, but May has just had her house treated for woodworm, and Shirley fears it’s toxic.
And so the boys fight each other, soundless, possessed, within the box of steel that drives them to the Towers.
They love each other as twins do; adore each other with wordless belonging. They hate each other like a blade and a cut. They somehow need to be one, not two, and they maul each other to make it happen. The boys need exercise, air and sunlight, but days of rain have hemmed them in.
As Shirley drove towards the east of the city, the streets outside grew smaller, dingier, jammed with battered vehicles because there were no garages. Franklin had his finger up Winston’s nose: Winston was biting hard on something pink and chunky; yes, the thumb-pad of Franklin’s hand. ‘You hurt Bendy Rabbit,’ he shouts at Franklin. Bendy Rabbit is sacrosanct. Oddly, Franklin doesn’t have a favourite animal. Winston is his favourite animal.
Shirley frowned forward into the traffic. She was late. Doubly late, for the sitter, Kilda, aged fifteen, and her Accessing Culture class back in the centre. And she worried. Kilda was too flighty to mind two four-year-olds alone all day, but Shirley couldn’t miss another class. Kilda was a sniffing, nasal redhead at the sullen epicentre of her teens, who had come to Shirley through her mother Faith, Shirley’s former cleaner.
(Shirley was fond of Faith in a way. Fat little Faith, bucketing onwards, who helped her out before her first husband died. But Faith’s daughter Kilda was an unknown quantity; Kilda was an accident, Faith had once confided. Kilda was beautiful, sweaty, and silent, statuesque where her mother was short. She had huge grey eyes that to Shirley seemed blank, though Elroy said they were beautiful.)
Now she frowned and drove, drove on the brakes and the accelerator, not swearing through recourse to her religious faith. ‘Sugar. Sugar, sugar. Shoot, shoot …’ The streets were slippery and parts of them were flooded; her tyres were soft; the car handled badly. She wanted to be somewhere else, another person, in another life, a slimmer, younger, childless person. She blinked with shock at her disloyalty, she who had longed all her life for children –
In the split second when Shirley’s eyes were closed, a dented yellow rust-bucket, blinded by the sun blazing down the road, suddenly pulled out from the kerb, straight across her, making her swerve.
‘Shoot … oh shoot …’
Franklin’s finger slipped out of Winston’s nose and jabbed, quite by accident, into his eye, a good result for Franklin, till Winston, roaring with surprise and pain, crushed his elbow into Franklin’s genitals. Both of them bellowed like startled bulls. Shirley span the wheel hard and the crucifix hanging in the front of the car swung wildly and hit the roof.
‘Oh shoot… Shit… oh FUCK.’
She had hit something, something not very hard, low to the ground, something living. The boys stopped yelling to turn round in their seats and pick out in the dazzle a dark awful shape outlined in gold dragging itself across the road between the cars. It was a mangled tabby cat. Something dying.
‘You hit a pussy!’
‘Stop, stop!’
‘It’s all bleeding.’
‘It’s fell over! Mum! Mum!’
The two boys put their arms round each other and hugged tightly, with big grave eyes. Their tiny digits played light rapid grace-notes in their opposite’s skin, till the fluttering calmed them. On two different notes, they began to hum. Being two was easier when they were one.
Gripping the wheel with big white knuckles, Shirley roared on towards the Towers.
They loomed towards her out of the haze, standing up like guns, identical, as if the architect had only one idea, which had replicated, blindly, where people were poor. They rose above the earth like a forest of dead trees, their tips in sunlight, their root-balls dark.
Dirk has been out of prison three months. He still doesn’t quite believe he is free when he wakes from sleep, shaking and terrified.
Dirk was in prison long enough for the bolts and bars to grow inside him. His original sentence was considered light, insultingly so by the victim’s family. The barrister got the charge reduced to manslaughter, claiming the victim had made a sexual suggestion, which had naturally horrified his client in his state of distress over his dying father.
Dirk felt quite hard done by, hearing this speech. That Winston geezer was a fucking pervert!
Though he got full remission for good behaviour, and some extra wangled by the prison chaplain, who was always happy when the men found God, prison seemed to Dirk like the unending hell he has teetered on the edge of all his life.
Why has no one helped him to make a life? It can’t be too late. He is only in his twenties.
Other white prisoners liked him at first, since the man he killed was black, and also a poofter. ‘One less of them does no harm,’ someone hissed. He came in with a rep for having bottle.
But quite soon the others turned against him. They said he smelled bad. They called him Banana-Face; he looked in the mirror and saw it was true, prison had made him look yellow and crooked. And his hair was thinning, which made him wretched. Like he had to grow old before he’d had any chances.
And the cell had been small. Small and stinking. There was trouble with the drains, with all the rain. Some days the sun never seemed to shine. Life had got smaller, uglier. Smaller and darker. If possible. Life with May and Alfred had been small enough. Dirk got the crap bedroom, because he was the youngest. He had the crap job, in a newsagent.
There’d been poofters in prison, wherever you looked. Nowhere you could go to escape them. There were things that had happened at night, sometimes, which made him twitch with disgust the next day. In there it had been a jungle, or a pigsty. In there he had had to let standards slip. For a few minutes life flashed red and alive, but afterwards shame made it worse. There was no … no … Whatever it was that his cow of a mother hadn’t given him wasn’t here either. People did it to each other out of hatred, and they hated Dirk, of course, and he hated them, but still he had to do it. And live with it, half-closing his eyes. Swearing never again – never again. Knowing it would always happen again.
But now he’s found something he thinks is his own. Dirk has his own vision of heaven, a mount of blood and gold and glory, a place where his enemies will burn like straw, all the people who picked on him.
One day some priests had come to visit. All the lads volunteered to go, to wind them up. Dirk had looked at the slip of paper. He didn’t read as fast as some. ‘The Brothers and Sisters of the Last Days’. (Sisters and brothers. What good were they? Dirk’s sister Shirley had married a darkie, and his big brother Darren had fucked off abroad.)
Dirk read it, very slowly and effortfully, because he was bored, because he wanted something, he wanted anything, he needed, he needed – it was like hunger, pressing him on.
‘We believe in saving souls,’ he made out. ‘Anyone can be saved. Come home to the One Who is All.’ (At first he read it as ‘the One Who is Ali,’ and thought, disgusted, they must be Muslims.) ‘One Way, One Truth, One Path. Open your hearts, and come home.’
Something like a pain, like indigestion, had risen up towards his throat, and an odd hot feeling scratched at his eyes. When he’d read it again, for the meaning, the pain got clearer, catching him out, sneaking up on him. He had crumpled the paper into a ball, flung it into his chamber-pot, watched it go yellow, then dark, then sink into the foul depths…
Mum had come to see him a few times in prison, and told him some lies, but quite soon, she stopped. Even when she came, she had never stayed long. Then she started writing letters, but they made him depressed, going on about Shirley having babies and Darren getting divorced again, all the normal achievements that seemed beyond him.
In fact, his mother hated him.
She always had done. (There was nothing, no one.)
So did Shirley, his sister, who had once seemed to love him. That was over for ever, since Dirk had killed Winston. The pansy fucking brother of Shirley’s black boyfriend.
(It was the one moment in Dirk’s life to date when he had felt like himself, or at least like someone. They were in the park, where his father was God, but Dad was in hospital, on his last legs, and the coloureds took advantage, they were everywhere, laughing, and this one had lured Dirk into the toilets, and Dirk went in after him to do Dad’s work, to protect the park, to stand up for justice, but then the man played with himself, in the dark, and Dirk had to kill him to save himself from the raw red hunger that came upon him. For once he had power over another body. But the blood was soon everywhere, the mess, the terror, and he had been left as before, alone, creeping back like a rat before his mother could see him.)
But Mum must have noticed. Must have gone to the police. She tried to blame Dad, when she first came to visit, but Dirk knew Dad would never have told of him. They all said it, though, even the police, and Shirley, the one time his sister came to see him, they all pretended Dad had grassed him up. But Dad had been fond of him. Hadn’t he? Dad had tried to teach him football, in the park, for weeks, and only gave up because Dirk was hopeless.
Now Dad was dead, the only one who’d loved him.
They had sent Dirk to Gallwood, the city prison, which was only a bus ride from where Mum lived, but she didn’t bother. She’d forgotten him.
So he hadn’t told her he was out of prison. She wouldn’t be glad. She wouldn’t want to know. He didn’t need Mum, or Darren, or Shirley.
It didn’t matter now, because he had a new family. Now Dirk had Brothers and Sisters again, the Brothers and Sisters of the Last Days. He was accepted at last. He was one of them.
He was, wasn’t he? He went to the meetings. No one had actually turned him away.
‘Open your hearts, and come home.’
‘Oh here you are dear,’ said Faith (insincerely, for when the women she worked for weren’t around she sometimes called them ‘that cow’ or ‘that bitch’) as she finally opened the door to Shirley. ‘I hope you haven’t had to wait.’
It had seemed an age to Shirley, who was horribly late, who had climbed the stairs, because the lift was broken, who felt she’d stood for ever on the bleak, echoing landing above the narrow, precipitous stairwell, clutching the hands of the twins, afraid; they were trying to wrest away from her. It felt dizzily far above the dank basement. She clutched the boys tighter, though they yelled louder, and tried not to hear what Faith was saying, what she had somehow known she would say – ‘I did say eight thirty and I don’t want to, you know, make a big thing of it but we are trying to, you know, help you out, I should have been in the centre by nine because Mrs Segall’s kid can’t really be trusted to go to school even though Lola is sixteen now –’
She broke off briefly and at last let Shirley and the twins in through the door to the welcome fug of warmth with its undernote of damp, but as Shirley let go the little hands at last Faith’s small eyes glittered and she pounced again. ‘– But then, the mother’s got more money than sense. You car-drivers,’ she said, with a meaningful look, ‘whizzing round polluting everything, no offence, but do a good turn when you can, is what I say, it’s very central, it’s on your way –’
‘But Faith, you don’t know where I’m going –’
‘– I don’t suppose you know Mrs Segall, Lottie? Used to be a looker, now she’s getting on a bit, just drop me off there and then we’ll all be happy.’
‘I thought you were going to be here with Kilda?’ Shirley asked blankly. But the large determined bottom had barrelled away. ‘Where is Kilda?’ Shirley asked the wall.
‘Mummy kills cats!’ shouted Franklin triumphantly, hugging Winston, who hugged him back. The two boys began kissing each other’s faces like cats licking each other, making little breathy noises of happiness. Franklin broke off first. ‘Mummy drives on top of cats! The cat got dead!’
‘That cat got dead. Poor cat,’ said Winston, and suddenly began to cry, big tender tears in which, as Shirley stooped to wipe them, she briefly saw a perfect miniature ribbon-crossed parcel of light, the reflection of the four-paned kitchen window; a black cross on a white background. There had been a large cross just inside the front door. Perhaps Faith or Kilda had become religious. Shirley felt glad; it would keep her sons safe. But the tears kept welling from Winston’s eyes.
Faith reappeared in a blue velvet coat with frogging, which Shirley guessed had once belonged to an employer. It gaped over Faith’s big reddened chest. ‘I can’t hang about,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry about the kiddies, Shirley.’
‘Where is Kilda exactly?’ Shirley inquired, finding herself hustled out of the door, as the boys began to understand she was leaving and set up a desolate caterwaul.
‘Well she has to wash her hair, obviously,’ Faith said.
‘But the boys –’ said Shirley, more insistently.
With a martyred air, Faith screamed like a banshee: ‘KILDA! GET YOUR ARSE IN HERE AT ONCE OR I’LL KILL YOU!’ To Shirley she said calmly, ‘She loves her bed. Sleep is very good for them, at that age.’
Kilda came stomping through from the bathroom. Red eyes, pale face, Medusa rats’ tails of dark red hair, a strong jaw in a jut of temper. She said loudly right in her mother’s face: ‘Do you mind, Mum? I was washing my hair.’ But she winced swiftly away when her mother yelled back at full volume: ‘WELL YOU’VE DONE IT NOW HAVEN’T YOU YOU LAZY COW?’ And then continued in a normal voice, quite as if nothing had gone amiss, ‘Mrs Edwards wants to see you having a nice play with the boys.’
A frown creased Kilda’s forehead over wet-pearled eyebrows. Then her face relaxed, and you saw her gleaming beauty: her waxen skin, cream-pale, unmarked; her cheek like the curve of an altar-candle: the serene, full symmetry of her lips.
Youth, thought Shirley, was beauty. In that second Kilda was as lovely as a saint glowing in a window, looking down from the glory of her height, for Shirley wasn’t small, but the girl was much taller. ‘Shall I put a video on?’ the vision inquired. Her voice was low and musical. ‘No, don’t worry’ Shirley said hastily. ‘But you can’t really leave them on their own, you know, Kilda, they’re, you know, always on the move –’
‘Well they are a bit difficult,’ said Kilda with a queenly condescension she had learned from her mother. ‘But they’re all right with me. I don’t mind kids. I think we’ve got Ram Raiders Three somewhere.’
‘Good,’ said Shirley uncertainly, scouring her memory. ‘Oh yes, Raiders of the Lost Ark. Lovely.’
‘Later on I might take them out.’
Shirley decided not to ask more. ‘I’ll pick them up at two and take them to the zoo.’
‘Kilda’s lazy,’ said Faith loudly, to Shirley, but speaking entirely for Kilda’s benefit. ‘She never gets off her arse, you know –’ She suddenly seemed to remember that this person was the one she was recommending to Shirley.
Was this the best Shirley could manage? Yes, she told herself silently as she trotted after Faith down the endless steps back to the drenched car park.
‘If the rains keep on, we’ll be in boats,’ said Faith, with a kind of perverse satisfaction. ‘They say they are diverting the floods from the centre. No one cares about people round here.’
‘That can’t be true,’ said Shirley, desperately, partly because her boys were there. ‘In any case, it’ll soon dry out. If the sun holds up. Which I expect it will.’
By the time she reached the Institute it was gone eleven. The sun had disappeared. It was raining again. She was red in the face with shame and frustration.
As Shirley parked, badly, and ran towards the door, a large blonde woman in a sleek grey fake fur was just flinging some money at a taxi driver. ‘If you’d listened to me,’ she was shouting, loudly, ‘we’d have got here much sooner, and I wouldn’t be late.’
Shirley recognized her suddenly: someone from her Accessing Culture class which all first year students had to go to, a chic woman, fortyish, who came irregularly. Close-up, she saw the fur was probably real. What was her name? Lottie Something. That was a coincidence. ‘You’re for Paul Bennett’s class, aren’t you?’ Shirley panted in passing, and at once Lottie turned away from her fight with the driver and her face lit up in a beatific smile. She had blonde springy curls, seeded with rain-drops. In fact, she might well be older than forty, but she had a perfect, polished look, as if every curve of her skin was buffed and burnished.
Shirley wished her own hair looked like that. Lottie’s lipstick was glossy, she smelled exquisite, her shoes and bag looked impossibly groomed. Before Shirley had children, she too looked like that. This woman probably didn’t have children.
‘Oh how wonderful. Someone else is late. Come along,’ said Lottie, pushing Shirley forward, a surprisingly strong hand in the small of her back. ‘I’m Lottie by the way. Lottie Segall-Lucas. You’re Sheilah, aren’t you? Haven’t you got two little boys? I saw you with them, gorgeous, I could have eaten them. I always think half-castes are so attractive! My son Davey’s got a lovely black girlfriend, frightfully brainy, not that I’m a judge…’
‘God said to Noah, “The loathsomeness of all mankind has become plain to me, for through them the earth is full of violence. I intend to destroy them, and the earth with them.” The Lord said, “Make yourself an ark with ribs of cypress …”’ In Victory Square, there was a wide raft of people round a placard like a mast, painted in red. The letters dripped and ran down like blood. ‘LAST DAYS’, it proclaimed. ‘ONE WAY OUT.’ ‘Awake,’ roared the man, addressing the crowd. ‘Awake and look around you! What do you see? Filth! Corruption! In God’s sight the world has become corrupted, for all men are living corrupt lives on earth.’ The rest was inaudible, but every so often, ‘Awake’ surged up again, like an island in the flood.
Around the preacher stood a little knot of the faithful, facing outward, like soldiers, towards the crowd, clutching hundreds of pamphlets of cheap thin paper. The face of a young black man gleamed with faith: Samuel believed that the good would be saved. Next to him, his white wife Milly pulled back her shoulders and threw up a ‘Praise him’. She felt happy; she began a new job tomorrow, cleaning at the City Swimming Pool. Next again, a middle-aged white woman with a thin pinched face sighed and yearned, eyes turned ecstatically up to heaven. ‘Amen,’ Moira called, ‘Amen, Brother.’ As she spoke, one bony hand ruffled, then smoothed the coat of an enormous red-brown mongrel with the longing eyes of a labrador. She dropped a few pamphlets and began to panic, hissing explanations as she crouched to pick them up. ‘They’re wet,’ she lamented. ‘Everywhere’s wet.’ As she spoke, it started to rain again. ‘Be still now, Moira,’ said Samuel, kindly. ‘We’ve thousands of copies of the thing.’
In a twenty-storey tower two blocks away, people who made books were arguing.
‘Thing is,’ said Delorice Edwards firmly, ‘it isn’t original.’ She was talking about Emma Dale’s new book, provisionally titled A Breast in Winter, an ‘upbeat rural cancer saga’, as the marketing department’s notes informed them. Delorice hadn’t meant to say this – wrong time, wrong place – but the constant rain made her feel depressed. There was a nagging sense that her years of study, the way she had turned her life around, her amazing coup with Farhad Ahmad, had not finally brought her the thing she wanted; just a room of polished surfaces and blank whiteness.
Ten faces swung towards her round the oval table. In the centre, a glinting hi-tech tin of waxen lilies, rather larger than life, stuck up boldly, redolent of incense, interrupting their eye-lines. The expressions she could see ranged from annoyed to amused. Mohammed, who was newer than her, looked interested.
Briefly Delorice flunked the challenge. She gazed out of the window: two pigeons swooped past, dive-bombing downwards through the sunlit rain. Somewhere desolate, sirens wailed. A plane engine gnawed like a distant headache.
She had had a major breakdown when her brother was murdered. Brilliant Winston, who had always been their pride. Delorice’s mother had to care for little Leah; now her daughter was five and still living with her grandmother. They had all come back from the edge of despair (and she herself from the edge of madness) through Delorice becoming what Winston had been, the straight-A student, the hope of the family.
Now she pulled herself back into the lily-drugged room, and made herself smile sweetly as she said, ‘This book is naff and sentimental and dated.’
Helena Harp, Headstone’s editorial director, felt a sudden twinge of hatred for the girl she had hired, who sat before them, smiling, all glossy with newness. Delorice must have thought she had it all: that lacquered black hair, pulled back from a face with high cheek-bones and dark clever eyes; a reputation as the brightest new kid on the block; the glozing trade profiles, which never failed to mention the tragedy of the murdered brother; that whiff of grief and integrity.
Ignorant, she thought. And arrogant.
‘You don’t think it’s original?’ she said, and smiled. Then the smile snapped to nothing, like a rubber band. ‘It is a mistake,’ she enunciated, slowly, ‘to think our job’s about looking for genius.’
‘Course, I didn’t mean –’ Delorice flushed with embarrassment.
Then, just as swiftly, she was furious. At college she had proved to be brilliant at English, since she’d always been a reader, in every spare moment: in bed; in the bath; when she breast-fed Leah. Her shyness, too, had quickly vanished as she learned to use the language of her lecturers. Delorice was afraid of nobody, now.
Patricia forged onwards. ‘The bottom line is, Emma Dale makes a lot of money for us.’
Sid, the sales manager, was frowning slightly. ‘Well, the figures for Lover in Clover weren’t brilliant –’
Patricia interrupted. ‘Thirty thousand hardbacks of Farmyard Matters plus three hundred thousand paperback!’
Delorice tried again, more determinedly. ‘Look, it’s hard to make sex and cancer boring, but this book does. Have you read it, Patricia?’
‘Of course.’ The older woman glared back. Delorice knew at once that she hadn’t.
‘Point is,’ Brian said, rushing in to mollify, anxious at the turn the conversation was taking, for if people started asking if publishers read books, the game would be up for all of them – ‘I reckon we could shift half a mill of this one, if it’s as raunchy as Farmyard Matters:
‘But,’ Delorice tried, one last time, ‘the public is going to see it’s rubbish.’
‘Writers can’t all be Farhad Ahmad,’ hissed Patricia, rearing up like a snake, the white cords in her long neck standing out sharply. (She never could pronounce his name; Farhad Ahmad had been discovered by Delorice, and gone on to win the Iceland Prize, the most prestigious of the book prizes.) ‘Emma Dale is not trying to be Angela Lamb.’ (Another winner of the Iceland Prize.) ‘And we aren’t Third Dimension, Delorice.’
Now everyone sniggered except Delorice, and Mohammed, who didn’t get the reference. Everyone at Headstone hated Third Dimension. This was why they’d been so glad to woo Delorice away from their younger, hipper, rivals. Delorice’s protégé Farhad Ahmad was beautiful, young, foreign, sexy, and mega-selling, after winning the prize. Headstone had assumed he would come with Delorice, but instead he’d done a massive deal with Dingleberry.
‘It’s nothing to do with Farhad or Angela,’ Delorice protested, feeling hot again. ‘I just think, it’s like, a real pity if we print all these copies of something that’s bullshit.’
A barrage of voices broke out around the table.
‘We’d get coverage on the sex-and-cancer angle.’
‘I can see it in the Post’s “Good Health” pages.’
‘The book clubs are bound to come on board.’
‘Patsy Rowan will give a good quote. They’re mates.’
‘And Bea Browning will give a quote for anything.’
‘Rocco could do the cover. Sort of “Tasteful Tits” –’
‘Would the tits be a reference to the breast cancer?’ Delorice interrupted, brutally. Everyone looked politely away. Of course, she had a chip on her shoulder.
Their target sales were half a million copies.
Delorice decided to go home early.
Afterwards she wandered through Victory Square. A crowd straggled over the Monument steps. It was raining, lightly, in little gusts. The centre of the square was submerged in water, but the sun was burning through the clouds. Somewhere, she thought, there would be a rainbow.
The crowd was carrying banners and placards; there were crackling speeches; someone shouted ‘Amen’. It was that strange new religious cult, she realized, the One Way Brothers, the ‘People of the Book’, who claimed to unite Jews and Christians and Muslims because they all shared the same sacred texts. (She’d heard that the Christians and Muslims in One Way were already worshipping in different places, however. And that not a single Jew had joined. They were doing very well, though, where people were poor.) It was queer that ‘the Book’ should be so honoured – not what she was used to, in publishing.
She wondered, grimly, what they’d think of Emma Dale. If all those copies of A Breast in Winter were spread out across the square, they would cover it completely. Half a million copies would spill over the side-streets, infect the libraries, infest the bookshops. The city published thousands of books every year, spewing them out then pulping them.
And yet, she was somewhere on top of this heap, and part of Delorice was still pleased to be there. Another part wondered how on earth she’d done it. It was dream-like, uneasy. It all seemed random.
The defining moment was her brother’s death. She would never escape it: it had turned her life around. While Winston was alive, he had been the clever one. Delorice could hide and dream in his shadow, read novels during lessons, drift into motherhood. Her gain had been built on that terrible loss.
Sometimes she saw Winston, walking down the street, slim and rangy, reading a book. Once she had even called out his name; it was another young man, with another book. Chance made those spectres cross her path. And yet she believed her brother was somewhere. His long, dancing limbs, his golden eyes. He would be walking along, talking to himself, quoting Baldwin, discussing, laughing. Winston had always talked to himself. It was part of what made him special, different. And he had high standards; he believed in things. She wished she could embrace his long, wiry body, press her cheek against his rougher one.
They had never thought they could lose Winston. That he could be murdered by a stupid racist. Chance, blind chance, for despite the rumours she knew that her brother had been no battyman.
Perhaps everything in life was nothing but chance. At her feet, two pigeon-feathers skimmed across a puddle; wind shook the banners of the crowd across the way.
It was chance, too, meeting Farhad Ahmad at college, when he hadn’t long arrived in the city. He was two-thirds of the way through writing a novel, but it was already eight hundred pages long. Reading it, she knew at once what to do. The delicious certainty of the editor’s itch. After they became lovers, she cut and rewrote, and the three-hundred page result was snapped up by Third Dimension, who asked her to start a list of young black writers. Then she broke up with Farhad, who was eager to forget her once he got the big prize and the ecstatic reviews.
And now she was here, and still wondering why. Sometimes she felt dizzy at her lack of experience, the terrifying speed of her ascent. Every morning Delorice felt that fear again in Headstone’s superfast lift with its see-through floor, which made her hover and swoop over nothing. Would she ever believe in anything they published? Sometimes her job seemed like a kind of germ warfare.
But then there was love, small and real. What she felt for Leah, Davey, her sister – Viola had always been there for her.
As Delorice dipped down into Victory Metro Station, she looked back for a second across the square. The rain had stopped. The black water glittered. The sun lit up faces, blank and identical, all turned submissively in one direction.
‘Look, we have to be prepared for germ warfare,’ Mr Bliss said eagerly, raising his eyebrows, to a roomful of grumpy ministers. They stared at the president, dully, and said nothing. Perhaps he was on speed. He seemed horribly young. Yet his floss of pale curls had begun to recede.
‘Is there any evidence they’ve got biologicals?’ someone grunted, at length, from beyond Bliss’s eye-line. Far down the table, he would soon go further.
‘Intelligence is preparing a dossier.’ Mr Bliss tried to ignore a deep suppressed titter that broke from the bottom of the room. He was a sensitive man; disbelief stung him. ‘But that’s not the point. We have to be pro-active. We think they’ve got nuclear as well.’ His candid eyes sought those of his colleagues. Why were they looking away from him?
‘I’ll brief the press,’ said Anwar Topping, his closest friend, the government’s spokesman. ‘But the public is going to demand protection.’
‘Attack,’ said Bliss, ‘is the best form of defence.’ He hoped his voice didn’t sound excited. He sat more erect and straightened his jacket. ‘It’s unpalatable, guys, but we have to face it.’
There was silence, for a second, in the rich, dark room. Everyone wondered, briefly, how they’d come to this moment.
‘But we have attacked them,’ said the same dissenting voice. (Bliss knew who it was; it was Darius Blow. He’d been given a job, which they’d hoped would enlighten him. It hadn’t worked, so he would soon lose it.) ‘We’ve been bombing them for years,’ Darius went on, coarsely. ‘It hasn’t made them any nicer.’
‘But now you’re talking something of a different order,’ said Anwar to Bliss, drawing him out, crossing and re-crossing small plump knees. His little eyes were bright, pleased. Something enormous was going to happen.
‘We have to be realistic, guys,’ said Bliss, spreading out soft pink hands and smiling. He knew he was right, but he wanted them with him. He frowned, for a change, to be statesman-like. ‘I sense a new mood among our people. There is a historic opportunity here. We have to be big enough to seize it.’
The dissenters sulked, and slouched in their chairs.
Jenner Footle, one of the inner circle, came in on a pragmatic note. ‘If the rains continue, we have to do something. The people are restless around the Towers. A common enemy will unite us –’
‘Not that that’s the point, of course,’ said Bliss.
‘What time-scale are we thinking of?’ prompted Anwar Topping.
‘We have to get men and weapons in place. And then there will be national security issues.’
‘Mass vaccinations?’ probed Hogben, from Health. ‘There’s nothing very plausible around for anthrax. Or most of the nasties they could throw at us. Do we have any detailed information –’
‘Look, guys, what they have is academic,’ said President Bliss, with an engaging grin. ‘We’re not going to give them the chance to use it.’
‘March?’ suggested Anwar Topping. ‘What is the thinking in Hesperica?’
‘Mr Bare’s very much onside,’ said Mr Bliss. ‘We’re thinking May. Provisionally. But if things worsen, we could go in April.’
There was a small, collective, exhalation. The thing was spoken; a date had been named. Fear, still tiny, but sharp and cold, skated into the room. The president shivered.
In Victory Square, the crowd had trebled. The sun was steadying, almost hot. A beautiful girl, very tall and pale, hove gracelessly through the ranks of gawkers. She tugged two little boys by the hand, pulling them through by main force, ignoring their wails and squawks of protest. ‘Come on, Winston. Get a move on, Franklin. Have they prophesied yet?’ she called to Moira. As the crowd yelled and the microphone howled, volleys of banned pigeons took fright and wheeled skywards, their dark wings flaring into fans of bright silk when they hit the buffeting wind and white sunlight.
The man who was watching from his car across the square anxiously reached for his sunglasses, rubbing a damp finger across dry lips. He made a gun with his fingers, pow-pow-pow, but there were too many of them, too dirty, too free, and the light on their wings was a pain in his forehead, and there wasn’t enough air, with the windows closed, but he was afraid to open them.
Sanctity, for Bruno, remained indoors; outdoors, life was multiple, uncontrollable; he kept himself pure, while the others went out and did God’s work in the market place. But he found, to his horror, he was sweating in here. He tried to remove from his mind the suspicion that a piece of old food was mouldering somewhere.
The crowd was doing well. Gathering, breeding. From this distance, they all looked alike, turned towards the placards with their letters of blood. It would do for a start. Bruno nodded, gratified, but somewhere a buzzing scratched at his brain.
Something disgusting was in his car. Something had hatched, or squeezed through the crack that he always left open in case of suffocation. The bluebottle hung there, low and sleepy, as if the sun had just poked it awake. A fat black body trailing fat black legs that might have dragged through unspeakable fluids, women’s nastiness, excrement, wings that had circled the stinking city, tainted with blood and sour money. Now it was here, corrupting his air.
Bruno carefully took aim with his newspaper, then trapped the fatness against the window, feeling its juiciness under his thumb. He held it there, trembling, feeling his power, though the moment of joy was lost as he squashed it. He flicked the thing, horrified, out of the car.
They were all the same, but now there was one less.
And out in the square, goodness was growing. Calm spread through him as he watched the crowd, more stick figures drawn in to join the others, moving slowly together, unstoppable. It reminded him of something they had once done at school, an experiment with magnets and iron filings. Twenty years later he had understood. Though the other boys elbowed him out of the way, he had glimpsed over their shoulders a great … Becoming. The tiny ants shuddered and shot into line. The will of the One: the One who was All. When the One was with Bruno, he was not alone. He was quiet, and good, and contained great multitudes, swollen with infinite power and love. Bruno picked up the Book, on the seat beside him, and read the future of the world: ‘The first angel blew his trumpet. And there came hail and fire mixed with blood, and this was hurled upon the earth. A third of the earth was burnt, a third of the trees were burnt, and all the green grass withered.’