“Oh, it’s quite special, I can see that.”
Louise raised her eyebrows. “Is this some kind—something made out to look ancient or whatnot? It’s lovely.”
“It’ll keep you safe,” he said. “You keep it.” He looked at Louise’s cloud-earrings.
“Can I . . . touch one?”
“You can try,” said Louise. “But they’re illusions. It’s light. Pure light.”
Cuthbert reached beneath Louise’s ears, and indeed, nothing was there.
“Bostin!”* he said.
Rebekka asked, “You say you heard about this bracteate on a TV broadcast, in the 1980s, whilst you were living in Handsworth?”
“Arr. It’s all to do with Drystan, you know.”
“Drystan?” asked Rebekka. She looked at Louise, who smiled at Cuthbert with apprehension.
“Are you all right, Cuddy?” asked Rebekka.
“Read it. The inscription. It says, ‘g?gog? m?g? medu.’ That’s how—that’s how,” he said, his arms tremoring badly. “That’s how otters speak. Them’s the words I heard in Dowles Brook—when Drystan and meself almost drowned, roight? I heard it from this animal underwater, right? You say those words—g?gog? m?g? medu—and every time, animals hear you.”
Rebekka held her cousin’s shaky hand as he told her all this.
“What’s the matter, Becks?” he asked.
“Nothing, you. Just having a little sigh.” She looked at the Undley Bracteate in her palm, sniffing a little. “Now, Cuddy, what’s this all about really, now? What’s the matter, dear one? Have you got a place to sleep, in London?”
“Nothing. It’s for good luck. It’ll help us find Drystan. ’E’s somewhere in London, I’m convinced.”
“Oh, Cuddy. Listen, your brother, he passed away, I’m afraid.” Rebekka’s hand was taken up gently by Louise. Rebekka had tried, so hopelessly, so many times, to explain to her cousin, gently, what had happened to Drystan at Dowles Brook, she now relied on simple repetition.
“’E’s not,” said Cuthbert. “You shouldn’t talk that way. ’E’s gone to UCL, you know. ’E’s brilliant, he is.”
“Cuddy,” said Rebekka. “You’re the one that’s brilliant. You’re the one that went to London on that clever-clogs grant. You keep imagining your brother’s around, and we don’t always have the heart to say it otherwise, but you need to know, my dearest love. You need to know. Please, Cuddy. The poor boy—he died—in 1968, Cuddy—we all loved him. Any Drystan you imagine after that—it’s just you. It’s you, love. You’re the one you keep calling Dryst.”
“No one loved him—no one but Granny and me—and maybe you.”
“I’m sure your mum and dad tried to love him.”
“Bollocks,” he had said to Rebekka. “You’re a great girl and all that, but you’re wrong, Becks. I’ll find him.”
Rebekka insisted that Cuthbert keep the commemorative Undley Bracteate. He refused, but she finally pushed it into his trouser pocket, and he relented.
“You need it more than we do,” said Rebekka.
“But I have one—in my heart,” he said.
He learned a few months later that Rebekka and Louise had ended their relationship, partly because Rebekka couldn’t reconcile her own sexuality and her devotion to the Church, and she’d absconded in a matter of days to a Calm House. Cuthbert never saw either one again, but he liked to imagine her holding the bracteate in her hand even as a Nexar hood leeched away her soul.
Now he carried it in his pocket wherever he went. Apart from his mental illness, it was his only permanent possession.
CUTHBERT JUMPED OUT of the queue outside the zoo and stood awkwardly to the side. He was attracting serious unwelcome attention now. A single Eye3 scan of his face by a Watchman, and his life would be effectively over. He knew that much, if not as clearly as he ought. But it had fully dawned on him that he must leave the entire area or risk imprisonment and virtual lobotomization.
A man who had been behind him in the queue, with very old-fashioned, rectangular OHMD* glasses, the precursor to corneal readers, seemed reluctant to move into the gap where Cuthbert had been standing, and so Cuthbert moved away farther. The man raised his eyebrows and stepped into the spot.
“Thanks, Indigent,” the man said. “Ha!”
The red-arm-banded Watch Auxiliary officer from earlier began walking toward him, rubbing his fingers together. Cuthbert looked away from his stare, as if it were fire.