October 26
AT THE FOOT OF THE STAIRS I hear this thought, He is on his way, and goosebumps shimmy up my arms. Who? Up ahead, Zimbra turns to see what’s keeping me. I sift the sounds of the late evening. The stove, clanking as it cools. Waves, shoulder-barging the rocks below the garden. The creaking bones of the old house. The creaking bones of Holly Sykes, come to that. I lean over the banister to peer through the kitchen-sink window up the slope to Mo’s bungalow. Her bedroom light’s on. All well there. No feet on the gravel garden path. Zimbra doesn’t sense a visitor. The hens are quiet, which at this hour is the way we want it. Lorelei and Rafiq are giggling in Lorelei’s room, playing shadow puppets: “That looks nothing like a kangaroo, Lol!”; “How would you know?”; “Well, how would you know?” Not so very long ago, I thought I’d never hear my two orphans laugh like that again.
So far so normal. No more audible thoughts. Someone’s always on their way. But, no, it was “He is on his way,” I’m sure. Or as sure as I can be. The problem is, if you’ve heard voices in your head once, you’re never sure again if a random thought is just a random thought, or something more. And remember the date: the five-year anniversary of the ’38 Gigastorm, when Aoife’s and ?rvar’s 797 got snapped at twenty thousand feet, theirs and two hundred other airliners crossing the Pacific, snapped like a boy in a tantrum snapping the Airfix models Brendan used to hang from his bedroom ceiling.
“Oh, ignore me,” I mutter to Zimbra, and carry on up the stairs, the same stairs I once flew up and flew down. “Come on,” I tell Zimbra, “shift your bum.” I stroke the whorl of fur between his ears, one sticky-uppy and one floppy. Zimbra looks up, like he’s reading my mind with those big black eyes. “You’d tell me if there was anything to worry about, wouldn’t you, eh?”
Anything else to worry about, that is, besides the fear that the dragging feeling in my right side is my cancer waking up again; and about what’ll happen to Lorelei and Rafiq when I die; and about the Taoiseach’s statement about Hinkley Point and the British government’s insistence that “a full meltdown of the reactor at Hinkley E is not going to happen”; and about Brendan, who lives only a few miles from the new exclusion zone; and about the Boat People landings near Wexford, and where and how these thousands of hungry, rootless men, women, and children will get through the winter; and about the rumors of Ratflu in Belfast; and our dwindling store of insulin; and Mo’s ankle; and …
Worrying times, Holly Sykes.
“I KNEW THAT was going to happen!” says Rafiq, swamped in Aoife’s old red coat that now serves as his dressing gown, hugging his knees at the foot of Lorelei’s bed. “When Marcus found the brooch was missing from his cloak, that was a—a dead giveaway, like. You can’t nick a golden eagle from a tribe like the Painted People and expect to get away with it. For them, it’s like Marcus and Esca have stolen God. Of course they’ll come and hunt them down.” Then, ’cause he knows how much I love The Eagle of the Ninth, he tries his luck: “Holly, can’t we have just a bit of the next chapter?”
“It’s almost ten,” says Lorelei, “and school tomorrow,” and if I close my eyes I can almost imagine it’s Aoife at fifteen years old.
“All right. And is the slate recharged?”
“Yes, but there’s still no thread and no Net.”
“Is it really true,” Rafiq shows no sign of shifting from Lorelei’s bed, “that when you were my age you used to get as much electricity as you wanted all the time, like?”
“Do I detect a bedtime postponement tactic, young man?”
He grins. “Must’ve been magno to have all that electricity.”
“It must’ve been what?”
“Magno. Everyone says it. Y’know: boss, class, epic, good.”
“Oh. Looking back, yes, it was ‘magno,’ but we all took it for granted back then.” I remember Ed’s pleasure at unlimited electricity each time he got back to our little house in Stoke Newington from Baghdad, where he and his colleagues had to power their laptops and satellite phones with car batteries brought by the battery guy. Sheep’s Head could do with a battery guy now, but his truck’d need diesel, and there isn’t any spare, which is why we need him.
“And airplanes used to fly all the time, right?” sighs Rafiq. “Not just people from Oil States or Stability?”
“Yes, but …” I flounder for a way to change the subject. Lorelei, too, must be thinking dark thoughts about airplanes tonight.
“So where did you go, Holly?” Rafiq never tires of this conversation, no matter how often we do it.
“Everywhere,” says Lorelei, being brave and selfless. “Colombia, Australia, China, Iceland, Old New York. Didn’t you, Gran?”
“I did, yes.” I wonder what life in Cartagena, in Perth, in Shanghai is like now. Ten years ago I could have streetviewed the cities, but the Net’s so torn and ragged now that even when we have reception it runs at prebroadband speed. My tab’s getting old, too, and I only have one more in storage. If any arrive via Ringaskiddy Concession, they never make it out of Cork City. I remember the pictures of seawater flooding Fremantle during the deluge of ’33. Or was it the deluge of ’37? Or am I confusing it with pictures of the sea sluicing into the New York subway, when five thousand people drowned underground? Or was that Athens? Or Mumbai? Footage of catastrophes flowed so thick and fast through the thirties that it was hard to keep track of which coastal region had been devastated this week, or which city had been decimated by Ebola or Ratflu. The news turned into a plotless never-ending disaster movie I could hardly bring myself to watch. But since Netcrash One we’ve had hardly any news at all and, if anything, this is worse.
The wind shakes the windowpane. “Lights out now. Let’s save the bulb.” I have only six bulbs left, too, stowed under the floorboards in my bedroom with the final slate since the spate of break-ins up Durrus way. I kiss Rafiq’s wiry-haired head as he traipses out to his tiny room, and tell him, “Sweet dreams, love.” I mean it, too: Rafiq’s nightmares are down to one night in ten, but when they come his screams could wake the dead.
Rafiq yawns. “You too, Holly.”
Lorelei snuggles down under her blankets and sheepskin as I close her door. “Sleep tight, Gran, don’t let the bedbugs bite.” Dad used to say that me, I used to say it to Aoife, Aoife passed it on to Lorelei, and now Lorelei says it back to me.
We live on, as long as there are people to live on in.
IT’S PROPERLY DARK, but now I’m in my seventies, I need only a few hours—one of the rare compensations of old age. So I feed the stove another log, turn up the globe, and get out my sewing box to patch an old pair of Lol’s jeans so Rafiq can inherit them, and then I need to repair some socks. Wish I could stop longing for a hot shower before bed. Occasionally Mo and I torment each other with memories of the Body Shop, and its various scents: musk and green tea, bergamot, lily-of-the-valley; mango, brazil nut, banana; coconut, jojoba oil, cinnamon … Rafiq and Lorelei’ll never know these flavors. For them, “soap” is now an unscented block from “the Pale,” as the Dublin manufacturing zone is known. Until last year you could still buy Chinese soap at the Friday market, but whatever black-market tentacle got it as far as Kilcrannog has now been lopped off.
When I’m sure the kids are asleep, I turn on the radio. I’m always nervous that there’ll just be silence, but it’s okay: All three stations are on air. The RTé station is the mouthpiece of Stability and broadcasts officially approved news on the hour with factual how-to programs in between about growing food, repairing objects, and getting by in our ever-more-makeshift country. Tonight’s program is a first-aid repeat about fitting a splint to a broken arm, so I switch to JKFM, the last private station in Ireland, for a little music. You never know what you’ll get, though obviously it’s all at least five years old. I recognize the chorus of Damon MacNish and the Sinking Ship’s “Exocets for Breakfast,” and remember a party in Colombia, or was it Mexico City?, where I met the singer. Crispin was there as well, if I’m not wrong. I know the next song, too: “Memories Can’t Wait” by Talking Heads, but it reminds me of Vinny Costello so I try our third station, Pearl Island Radio. Pearl Island Radio is broadcast from the Chinese Concession at Ringaskiddy, outside Cork. It’s mostly in Mandarin, but sometimes there’s an international news bulletin in English, and if the Net’s unthreaded this is the only way to get news unfiltered by Stability. Of course, the news has a pro-Chinese slant—Ed would call it “naked propaganda”—and there’ll be not a whisper about Hinkley E, which was built and operated by a Chinese-French firm until the accident five years ago when the foreign operators pulled out, leaving the British with a half-melted core to ineffectively contain. There’s no English news tonight, but the sound of the Chinese speakers soothes my nerves and, inevitably, I think of Jacko; and then of those days and nights with the Horologists in New York, and out of New York, nearly twenty years ago …
THE CHAPEL, THE battle, the labyrinth: Yes, I believe it all took place, even though I know that if I ever described what I saw, it’d sound like attention-seeking, insanity, or bad drugs. If it’d just been the trippier parts that I remembered, if I’d woken up in my room at the Empire Hotel, I might be able to put it down to delusion, or food poisoning, or an “episode” with memory loss, or false memories. There’s too much other stuff that won’t be explained away, though: Stuff like how, after touching the golden apple in the domed room of the bird shadows I vanished in a head-rush of vertigo and found myself not waking up in my hotel room but in the gallery at 119A, with my middle finger touching the golden apple on the Bronzino picture, a dove trilling on the windowsill outside, and all the Horologists gone. The marble rolling pin was missing from the kitchen drawer. My knees were scabbed and sore from when Constantin ambushed me in the labyrinth. I never knew why Marinus didn’t travel back in my head—maybe the golden apple only worked for one passenger. Last of all, when evening came and I gave up waiting for a friendly Atemporal to appear, I got a cab across Central Park back to my room, where I found all charges for the week had been paid by a credit card that wasn’t mine. If a New York hotel receptionist tells you your room’s been paid for, you can bet your life you weren’t dreaming it.
So, yes, it happened, but ordinary life carried on at the speed of time, and the following day doesn’t care about all your paranormal adventures in the days before. To the cabdriver, I was just another fare to LaGuardia Airport who’ll leave her glasses on the backseat if he doesn’t check. To the Aer Lingus air steward, I was just another middle-aged lady in economy whose earphones weren’t working. To my hens, I’m a two-legged giant who throws them corn and keeps stealing their eggs. During my “lost weekend” in Manhattan I may have seen a facet of existence that only a few hundred in history have glimpsed, but so what? I could hardly tell anyone. Even Aoife or Sharon would’ve gone, “I believe you believe it, but I think you may need professional help …”
There has been no sequel. Marinus, if she got out of that domed room, has never reappeared and it isn’t going to happen now. I streetviewed 119A a few times and found the tall brownstone townhouse with its varied windows, so someone’s still looking after it—New York real estate is still New York real estate, even as America disintegrates—but I’ve never been back, or tried to find out who’s living there. Once I deviced the Three Lives Bookstore, but when a bookseller answered, I chickened out and hung up before asking if Inez still lived upstairs. One of the last books Sharon sent me before post from Australia stopped getting through was about the twelve Apollo astronauts who walked on the moon, and I sort of felt my time in the Dusk was a bit like that. And now that I was back on earth, I could either go slowly crazy by trying to get back to that other realm, to psychosoterica and 119A and Horology, or not, and just say, “It happened, but it’s over,” and get on with the ordinary stuff of family and life. At first, I wasn’t sure if I could, I dunno, write up the minutes for the Kilcrannog Tidy Towns Committee, knowing that, as we sat there discussing grants for the new playground, souls were migrating across an expanse of Dusk into a blankness called the Last Sea—but I found I could. A few weeks before my sixteenth birthday, I met a woman twice my age in an abortion clinic in the shadow of Wembley Stadium. She was posh and composed. I was a scared, weepy mess. As she lit a new cigarette from the dying ember of the last one, she told me this: “Sweetheart, you’ll be astounded by what you can live with.”
Life has taught me that she was right.
… Zimbra’s barking in my dreams. I wake up in my chair next to the stove, and Zimbra’s still barking, on the side porch. Fuddled, I get up, dropping the half-darned sock, and walk over to the porch: “Zimbra!” But Zimbra can’t hear me; Zimbra’s not even Zimbra, he’s a primeval canine scenting an ancient enemy. Is anyone out there? God, I wish the old security floodlight was still working. Zimbra’s barking stops for one second—long enough for me to hear the terror of hens. Oh, no, not a fox. I grab the torch, open the door only a crack but our dog barges through and scrabbles at what’s probably the fox’s hole under the wire. Dirt flies over me and the chickens are going berserk around the wire walls of their coop. I shine the torch in and can’t see the fox but Zimbra’s in no doubt. One dead hen; two; three; one feebly flapping; and there, two disks on the head of a reddish blur on top of the hen coop. Zimbra—fifteen kilos’ worth of German shepherd crossed with black Labrador with bits of the devil knows what else—squeezes into the cage and launches himself at the henhouse, which topples over while the hens squawk and flap around the wire-mesh enclosure. Quick as a whip, the fox leaps back to the hole and its head’s actually through before Zimbra’s sunk his fangs into its neck. The fox looks at me for a split second before it’s yanked back, shaken, flung, and pounced on. Then its throat’s ripped out and it’s all over. The hens keep panicking until one notices the battle’s over, then they all fall quiet. Zimbra stands over his prey, his maw bloodred. Slowly he returns to himself and I return to myself. The porch door opens and Rafiq’s standing there in his dressing gown. “What happened, Holly? I heard Zim going mental.”
“A fox got into the chickens, love.”
“Oh, bloody hell, no!”
“Language, Rafiq.”
“Sorry. But how many did it get?”
“Only two or three. Zim killed it.”
“Can I see it?”
“No. It’s a dead fox.”
“Can we eat the dead chickens, at least?”
“Too risky. Specially now rabies is back.”
Rafiq’s eyes go even wider: “You weren’t bitten, or …”
Bless him. “Back to bed, mister. Really, I’m fine.”
SORT OF. RAFIQ has plodded upstairs and Zimbra is locked on the porch. It’s four dead hens, not three, which is a medium-sized loss, with eggs being my main bartering token at the Friday market, as well as Lorelei and Rafiq’s main source of protein. Zimbra looks okay, but I can only hope he doesn’t need veterinary attention. Synthetic meds for humans have all but dried up; if you’re a dog, forget it. I turn down the solar, dig out a bottle of Declan O’Daly’s potato hooch, and pour myself what Dad would’ve called a goodly slug. I let the alcohol cauterize my nerves and look at the backs of my old, old hands. Ridged tendons, snaky veins, vacuum-packed. My left hand trembles a little these days. Not much. Mo’s noticed, but pretends not to. If you’re Lol and Raf’s age, all old people’re trembly, so they’re not worried. I pull my blanket over me, like Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother, who I feel like, in fact, in a world of too many wolves and not enough woodcutters. It’s chilly out. Tomorrow I’ll ask Martin the Mayor if we’re likely to see a delivery of coal this winter, though I know he’ll just say, “If we see any, Holly, the answer’s yes.” Fatalism’s a weak antidepressant, but there’s nothing stronger at Dr. Kumar’s. Through the side window I see my garden chalkdusted by the nearly full moon, rising over the Mizen Peninsula. I should harvest the onions soon and plant some kale.
In the window I see a reflection of an old woman sitting in her great-aunt’s chair and I tell her, “Go to bed.” I haul myself to my feet, ignoring the twinge in my hip, but pausing for a moment at the little driftwood box shrine we keep on the dresser. I made it five years ago during the worst grief-numbed weeks after the Gigastorm, and Lorelei decorated it with shells. Aoife and ?rvar’s photo is inside, but tonight I just stroke my thumb across the top edge, trying to remember how Aoife’s hair felt.
“Sleep tight, sweetheart, don’t let the bedbugs bite.”