I laughed as she hugged me over the counter. ‘I’m sorry, ma’am.’
‘Inti, I’m Inti. I was named after your grandfather, actually,’ she said, and didn’t explain. There was no time to ask her and I was getting used to being confused and tired most of the time. It didn’t seem to be improving, even if the dull pain in my ears had gone now. All the stories we’d heard on the way about acclimatising to altitude after a few days were rubbish. ‘I shall call you . . . Merry-cha, that’s excellent I think. Oop, milk, thank you,’ she added to an invisible Raphael somewhere on her left. He had gone in through a side door while we’d been talking. ‘Coffee?’
‘Yes, please,’ I said, still laughing. ‘Pleased to meet you.’
‘Yes, I expect you are.’ She gave me too much sugar, but I had a feeling that not everyone got any sugar at all.
Raphael came back rubbing his hands dry. It was getting dark now and all around us, inside the haphazard houses and out, hanging from the eaves, were pollen lamps. The ones Raphael made were small and neat, but some of them here were much bigger. Hands from what must once have been sturdy outdoor clocks turned inside them, churning the pollen. Some had a deep ambery glow, but some had had their mechanisms altered so that they ran fast and spun much brighter light. Hanging as they were on different levels and in different sizes and shades of gold, it was like sitting in the middle of a star field. Inti put two glass cups on the counter in front of us, and a bowl of diced pineapple. I wondered who had cut it up.
‘Have you met the markayuq?’ Inti said, as if she were talking about local landowners whose unofficial permission I’d need in order to stay.
‘Yes, yesterday. They’re fantastic. I’ve never seen statues like them.’
She laughed. ‘They’re not statues. Nobody could make anything like that. They’re people who turned to stone. Didn’t your father tell you anything?’
Raphael didn’t see, though, because he didn’t look up.
‘Why would they do that?’ I said.
‘Do what?’
‘Turn to stone.’
‘Stone lasts longer than a person. They do it so they can watch over a special place. We’re extra-special. We have six.’
‘Did it use to be seven? I . . . know my father took one when he was here.’
‘Yes, yes, seven before, but St Matthew was unhappy. He wanted to go with Jack, see somewhere new, and everyone thought it was for the best.’
‘How could you tell, that he was unhappy?’
She had been winding up more lamps while she talked, little ones whose clockwork hummed rather than clunked, setting them alongside our coffee, and one in the empty pineapple bowl. ‘Nearly walked off the cliff.’
‘Oh.’ I found myself doing what I’d always hated seeing other people do in China: glancing at Raphael for a secondary translation. The words made grammatical sense, but the undersense was hard to catch. Chinese tea farmers had always looked at my interpreter that way, it being broadly and well known that even quite fluent white men were nonetheless mad and not to be trusted with things like numbers and adding. They had used him like a cultural limbeck through which to filter everything I said, even though we had all been speaking Chinese.
Raphael didn’t see, though, because he didn’t look up.
‘Do you not have markayuq in England?’ she said.
‘No. Or I don’t think so.’
‘That’s unlucky,’ she said. ‘Perhaps they had to leave.’
Raphael was still watching the rainbow bubbles in his coffee and I felt sorry. To live wading through little myths and trying to hold markayuq and saints together in overlay for a congregation who thought statues lived because nobody could possibly put together stone like that, when he must have known that somewhere out across the sea was Rome, must have seen etchings of the Vatican – it was bleak.
‘But what happened to your leg?’ Inti said, motioning at my cane with her own cup.
‘Shrapnel.’
‘Are you in the army then?’
‘No, no, I’m a gardener. It was just an accident.’
‘Gives you trouble?’
‘Yes. But the doctors at home say there’s nothing much they can . . .’ I tried to check with Raphael again, but he didn’t help.
‘Oh, no, don’t be silly. Measure round above where it hurts, mark the place with your finger.’ She held out a length of red string.
‘Pardon?’
‘Do as I say. This is the biscuit of co-operation,’ she added, setting a biscuit down on the counter by my cup. I laughed and she winked. ‘Oh, Ra-cha,’ she said when I took the string. ‘Upstairs is getting a bit, you know, and I was wondering . . .’
‘I was going to ask . . .’ Raphael disappeared inside again and left me none the wiser.
She lifted her eyebrows at me. ‘Measure?’
I did and gave the string back to her with my nails pinched over the right place. She took it folded there and flicked a knot into it one-handed. She smiled.
‘Soon have you sorted out.’
‘In . . . what way, exactly?’
‘Oh, for a manacle. It helps with bones, you know?’ She held her arms out to show me the wooden bands around her wrists. They were whitewood, carved in forest patterns. ‘Grow you tall, if you wear them when you’re little, help with strain when you’re older.’
‘How does wood help?’
‘It’s a sort of magic. Anyway, come in, come and see the shop properly. Bring your coffee. I only make coffee so people will sit here and I can persuade them to buy things,’ she added, grinning. ‘It’s a lot of bother, with the goat, but it works out overall.’
‘Inti,’ Raphael’s voice said from somewhere above us. As I ducked in through the trapezium-shaped door, I passed a steep ladder that led up to a loft like the one in the church. The rungs to about head height were hung with dry laundry. Raphael had nudged things aside to make a narrow way up through the middle. ‘There are two black guinea pigs up here.’
‘I’m selling them to the doctor,’ she called ‘Give them some corn.’
‘I am not feeding them so the doctor can dismember them over an idiot with a chest cold.’
‘Oh, but—’
There was a clunk and a rush of cold air, then a firmer clunk. Inti winced. She was much taller than I’d expected her to be, nearly as tall as Raphael – everyone here was tall. ‘Did that sound to you like a man liberating two quite valuable guinea pigs onto my roof?’
I nodded.