‘That’s the most fantastic thing I’ve ever seen, is it – what are these vines? I’ve never seen anything like . . .’
‘Candle ivy, but stop, don’t go any further in. The border’s just there, it’s in front of you. They’ll kill you if you cross it, stop walking.’
‘I’ve stopped.’ I swung my hand to and fro in front of my face, because there was a weird, after-firework glow whenever I moved. ‘It’s thinner here, they were further in . . . bloody hell,’ I laughed, because a hummingbird had just dived down to snatch something from a tangle of candle ivy just in front of me and shot back again so quickly that it left a hummingbird ghost in the pollen. ‘Come and show her this.’
‘She’ll see it every day.’
‘How often do you look at it? I live a mile from a beach but I’ve never swum there.’
He looked like he might have accused me of childishness if he had had the voice to spare, but he came after me and let me take the baby. She was like a hot-water bottle and she squeaked and laughed when I waved a zigzag pattern into the pollen for her. Well up ahead, through the trees, whoever had brought her came into view again, or his pollen trail did. There was another one too, more off to the left, and another on the right. They came together while we watched, person-height half-ghosts. The light gleamed on something shiny on the ground: water or ice. I climbed up into the roots of the tree beside me to see. It was a straight line, the glass road, continuing well on into the trees. The light hung above it a long time after the pollen stopped flaring. When I eased back down again, the wind was stirring Raphael’s hair and motes of pollen floated by us like cinders.
The baby cheeped and tried to catch one, which only set more off. Raphael touched my shoulder to turn me back towards the church.
‘Go inside. I’ll be with you in a minute.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘To find some milk, go on.’ He gave me a push, very light.
Although I hadn’t taken off my coat and he had come out without his, he didn’t seem worried about the cold and went to the bridge in only his shirtsleeves, without even putting his hands in his pockets. I cupped my hand over the back of the baby’s head. The cold was already taking the feeling from my fingers, and the skin across my knuckles felt like it was cracking even while we walked. I wound the rope of the pollen lamp round my wrist so that the baby could hold it and tugged the church door back open with my free hand. She pressed the lamp against her eyebrow to see the pollen move. I dragged a chair in front of the stove.
When I sat down, I balanced her on my knees and put the lamp back on the table. She was just about old enough to sit up. She clapped twice and grinned when I copied her, then leaned forward to pat her hands against mine.
‘Clapping game?’ I said. I couldn’t tell if it was deliberate or not. She was the first person I’d met who was so young.
She clapped again and waited for me to copy her, then looked irked when she tried and missed her own hands. I snorted and helped her.
‘Nothing wrong with you, is there?’
She smiled. She was just starting to grow some teeth. When Raphael came back, he tipped half the jug of milk he had brought with him into a new pan and stretched to fetch down a glass beaker from the middle shelf of the cupboard. He was much smaller than whoever had put the cupboards up; he could only just reach.
‘Crippled children left here,’ I prompted him.
‘They leave three or four a year.’
The milk started to boil before I would have expected and he moved it off the heat. Somewhere in the oven’s complicated interior, hot water and steam were singing and plinking. There was a sigh as a new bucketful rushed into the pipes. Once the beaker was full, he held his hands out for her. I gave her back again and touched the beaker to be sure it wasn’t too hot for her. The baby settled with it in Raphael’s lap. He had his hands around her ribs, which were so tiny he could lattice his fingertips together. Next to her, he looked pale and mistreated. The ring finger on his right hand was too stiff to move much, broken once and never quite set properly.
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘This place is a hospital.’
‘With . . . one doctor with a hacksaw and some ants.’
‘Somewhere for them to live,’ he said impatiently. ‘Together. Being looked after. Not slowing down anyone who isn’t already slow.’
The baby held out the empty beaker, just like anybody else would have, though she wasn’t old enough to seem like a proper human being yet. He gave it back to her again once I’d filled it. She took it carefully because it was too heavy for her. While she drank, she put her ear to his ribs and I had a feeling she was listening to his voice through them. When he wasn’t speaking, she looked up.
‘Bizarre thing to do, leaving them here,’ I said.
‘Is it?’
‘Yes. Slinging unwanted babies off a cliff isn’t bizarre. That saves time, food, labour over someone who’s never going to be useful. But leaving them somewhere . . . they’re not saving themselves anything, are they? They must have spared people to look after the first ones, and people here farm land and take up space and territory, same as they would if they hadn’t been left here – they might as well keep everyone together. Same effort.’
He had been looking at me, but he turned his head slowly away while I talked. ‘I wouldn’t try and talk about Indians and common sense at the same time.’
‘I hate to break it to you but . . .’
‘There is a tribe,’ he said, over me, ‘about sixty miles up the road who decided it was a good idea to make women give birth alone in little huts two miles from everyone else, on the edge of a cliff. They’re well on their way to killing themselves off. Leave humans in a place like this for ten thousand years and you breed a special sort of moron. We’re not very impressive, as a race.’
‘The Inca were pretty bloody impressive,’ I protested.
‘The Inca lived in Cuzco, not in the Antisuyu.’ It wasn’t the first Quechua word he had used since coming back inside, I realised suddenly, but my hindbrain had parsed them without noting them. The Antisuyu was the land beyond the mountains. Anti, Andes. He had more of an accent now that he was tired too, with sharper consonants and those tiny sharp pauses mid-word which sounded profoundly more dextrous than English. However ambivalent I felt about his company, I could have listened all night. It was like hearing the moment when a ballerina stops walking and begins to spin. ‘We are not them. Are we?’ he said to the baby, who seemed not to hear. ‘Maybe she’s deaf,’ he murmured.
‘What happens to her now?’ I said. ‘And can you call her Ivy, please, because it would be a shame not to.’