Spin, page 6
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I was going to say you reminded me of Plato or something. One of those people. I don’t know what I’m talking about really.”
His mouth stretched wide in a soundless gagging she realised was laughter. “I think you know a lot more than you let on. Anyway, I don’t have much time for philosophy, all those tidy little theories they dream up. I sometimes think the philosophers are as keen on averaging people out as the lawmen. That’s why I love the poets so much. A poet isn’t really interested in any system of thought except his own. The academics would say Panteleimon was an anarchist, a supporter of the founding twelve hundred. But really he was too wrapped up in his own life even for that. And it’s only when someone speaks for himself and for himself alone that you know he’s speaking the truth.”
His speech ended in a burst of coughing, a terrible raw hacking that made it sound as if his insides were being wrenched free. He covered his mouth with both hands. When he finally lifted them away Layla saw that the palm not covered in bandages was smeared all over with green phlegm. He wiped his hand on a square of towelling that had been left looped over the headrest, then reached for a porcelain cup on the invalid table. His fingers were trembling. Layla leaped up from her seat and went to his side. She picked up the cup, which was heavy and bulky as a beer tankard. She supposed that made it less likely to be knocked over. The water in the cup had the same metallic smell as the water she had drunk from the fountain on the road to Corinth, and once again she found herself thinking of Thanick Acampos. She held the cup to Alcander’s lips, holding it in both hands to keep it steady.
“You shouldn’t talk so much,” she said. “Not all in one go, anyway.”
She smiled, and he gulped the water, but his face when he raised it afterwards had a stricken look.
“How embarrassing,” he said. “God only knows what you must think of me.”
“I think you’re probably the most interesting person I’ve ever met.” She took the cup from his hands and placed it back on the table. “And definitely the bravest.”
“Interesting and brave.” He pulled a face. “That’s almost worse than good sense of humour.”
She laughed. “What if I was to tell you that interesting is the finest compliment I know.”
“I’m not sure I’d believe you. I’d have to suspend my judgement until I knew you better.” He reached again for the cup, and Layla saw that his hands had stopped shaking, that he was able to lift the beaker by himself. “If you’re forbidding me to speak then you’ll have to talk instead. The way you responded to The Pirates, as if it was vTV, or some exciting news story – that’s exactly how poetry should be read. If you treat works of art like fossils that’s what they become. You understood that instinctively. I want you to tell me why you said you didn’t know anything about poetry when clearly you do know a lot.”
“You’re wrong,” Layla said. “I don’t know anything. It was the colours, that’s all, the way he described things.” She paused. She realised this was a turning point, that this was the moment she must decide if what she felt for Alcander Xenakis was important enough for her to allow herself to trust him. She had never shared the facts of her life with anyone. With John Caribe she had constructed a relationship based on the facts of her life since she had arrived in Atoll City. With her co-workers at the Minerva less even than that.
If anyone asked her about her mother she said simply that she had died when Layla was a child. If she was going to tell Alcander about Romilly Perec it should be now. It came to her that she was lucky to have a choice in the matter. The facts of Alcander’s life were seared into his flesh for all to see. Whether he wanted to be or not, he was naked in front of her.
“I’ve always felt safer with pictures, with colours,” she said. “When you make an image it’s just that: an image, and an image is only what you make of it. People can say what they like about it, but they can’t really accuse you of anything. Words are different. Words are so final, somehow. Once you’ve said them you can’t take them back. You’re stuck with them forever. And people can use them against you any time they like.”
She crossed to the window again and looked out at the lake. She wondered what was really there, behind the simulation. A walled garden perhaps, of a moderate size, stocked with fig and azalea and dwarf olive like the gardens of the houses on Athenaeum Street.
If I lived here with him we would go back to that, Layla thought. Just the garden, the way it really is. “My mother was a poet,” she said. “She was executed under the clairvoyancy laws. My father was forced to publicly disown her.”
Alcander drew in his breath, and for a moment she was afraid he might start coughing again. “Layla,” he said. “I’m so sorry.” He was looking straight at her. His blue eyes, she saw, were exactly the same shade of blue as the small Delft soap dish on the shelf above the hand basin in the corner. She realised it was the first time he had called her by her name.
“Do you know how they execute savants in Messinias?” she said. “They bind their limbs and throw them off a cliff into the sea. The law says that if they manage to reach the shore without human aid they are allowed to go free. But of course with their arms and legs roped to their bodies most of them sink like stones in less than a minute. My mother was taken out just after dawn. Normally there would have been a crowd, but apparently my mother’s execution was not popular and so it was just the lawmen and my father.”
“Your father was there?” Alcander spoke so quietly she could hardly hear him.
“Oh yes, that was part of the sentence, that he had to watch. He told me she floated on her back, at least at first, at least for a little while. She was a good swimmer, my father said. She was never afraid of the sea, and that was why she was able to relax enough to allow the water to carry her in towards the shore. But then a large wave rolled over her, and when it subsided she was face down in the water. He could see her trying to right herself but she couldn’t do it. It’s impossible to do anything in the water without the use of your arms and legs. I know because I tried it once. I swam out to sea then turned on my back with my arms by my sides and my legs pressed together. I began to sink almost at once. But of course all I had to do was kick out a few times and I was afloat again.
“I kept trying to imagine what went through my mother’s mind, what it was like for her in those last few minutes when she knew she was drowning and that no one was coming to save her. In the end I had to stop trying to imagine it because it gave me nightmares. But they were only nightmares. I could kick my way out of those the same as I could kick out in the water to stay afloat. My mother couldn’t do that. She had to live the nightmare right to the end.”
Layla began to cry, small, hard tears that forced their way out from under her eyelids and scuttled away down her cheeks. The last time she cried in public she had been thirteen, when she had let Iona goad her into a petty argument about how much vTV she should be allowed to watch before a school exam. She still remembered the humiliation she felt, that she had allowed her personal feelings to be exposed in this way.
This time it felt different. It felt as if she was sharing something that could not be shared in any other way.
“I want to hold you,” Alcander said. “But my hands are so awful.”
She raised her head, meeting his eyes, and then took his bandaged hand in both her own. She did it as gently as she could, afraid that her touch might be hurting him.
“Your hands are not awful,” she said. “It’s the disease that is awful, not you.”
“But if you live with something long enough it becomes you. That’s what frightens me, anyway. That without this thing to define me the person I know as myself wouldn’t exist.”
“That’s rubbish,” Layla said. But it occurred to her even as she said it that he might be right. Would she still be who she was without her mother’s execution, and the way she had secretly formed her identity around it all these years, guarding its horror within her like a vital organ? The thought was new to her and terrifying. But she guessed it was too late to worry about it now.
She saw the way Alcander looked at her as she held his hand, with wonder and also with fear, as if he knew, even so soon, that in allowing another person to approach him so closely he was opening up an entryway for hurt.
She saw also that he looked tired.
“I should go,” she said. She thought he might object but he did not, either because he really was tired or because, like herself, he wanted to be alone to think about things. She squeezed his fingers gently, exerting the slightest possible pressure. The bandages were stiff to the touch, encrusted with solidified mucus, and this repulsed her even as she felt anger rise up inside her at the thought of his pain. She felt like crying again.
“Should I see your mother before I go, do you think?” she said.
“Don’t bother,” said Alcander. “She goes on the simulation most afternoons.”
“You mean – ?”
He nodded. “You’ve seen the garden? She had a print made of Dad, the same kind of ultra-high-resolution holoprint. The holograms are like a drug with her. She’s probably bonking her brains out as we speak.” He smiled wanly. The mention of sex seemed to float in the air between them, a miasma of yellowish particles, acrid as pollen.
“What about your sisters?” Layla said finally. “Who looks after them while she’s…gone?”
“The girls are holograms too. I thought you knew.”
“But I touched them. I talked to them.” She remembered the fairy cakes and then the lemonade, sweetly fizzy against her tongue. She did not believe she had imagined these things, though she had to concede that the more she tried to concentrate on them the vaguer they grew. She did not know which was worse: that Nashe Crawe should have to invent two normal children in order to make up for the fact that her real child, Alcander, was probably dying, or that Alcander appeared to be alone in the house with an insane mother.
“I don’t like leaving you,” she said.
“I wouldn’t worry. There are servants. Real ones, I mean. They keep me clean and tidy, mop up the mess.”
“Don’t joke about it.”
“I’m not.” His hand shifted in her grasp as he tried to squeeze her fingers. “I’m so happy you came back. Will you again, do you think?”
“I will,” Layla said to him. “Soon.”
She made her way back through the house, listening for the sounds of Nashe Crawe cavorting with her simulacrum, but there was nothing. The silence was deep and total, and if she had not been with Alcander just a moment before she would have sworn that the place was empty and had been empty for years.
It was a ghost place, like the bombed tenements she had seen out in Tsokla. She could almost imagine that if she were to return to Alcander’s room and fling open the door there would be no one there.
The house, she thought, was like a glass palace. Viewed in a certain way and in a certain light it would slide out of existence entirely. She remembered something John Caribe had once said to her, that once you surpassed a certain level of material wealth you attained a new level of madness, something the rest of the world had no conception of. She had reacted with scorn at the time. Now she found herself inclined to believe him.
The afternoon temperatures were in the high nineties, and without air conditioning the flat became too hot to work in. Once her shift at the factory was over Layla rode the trolleybus out to Voula where she would swim off the rocks and afterwards take an iced ouzo at one of the beach tavernas. The friable heat of late August made her glad to escape the city, and during those hours she spent staring across the water towards the humped island mass of Aegina she could almost imagine she was back in Kardamyli, that if she stayed at the beach just a short while longer she would catch sight of her father, steering the Auster into port. It was at these times that she thought of leaving Atoll City, of packing up her studio and secreting herself in one of the dozens of dilapidated farmhouses out at Stoupa or Areopoli. She could work there undisturbed and in total safety.
She did not know why the word safety kept returning to her with such insistence but it did. She could not help thinking of Livia Sol, who went mad in the end, tortured or so it was said by her own visions. But as the temperature dipped in the late afternoon, and the gusty breeze brought the reek of lobster pots and shark entrails from the fishing rigs tethered in the harbour at Piraeus she returned to her apartment and to her work on The Night Hounds with renewed intensity. There was something in the obsessive struggle between the seaman Atlas Tyburn and Telos Mavrommatis the assassin that reminded her of the vendetta between Alcander’s father Demitris and the nameless warlord whose son he had killed. She supposed she had known this from the beginning, that it was this knowledge that had determined her choice of The Pirates as the subject for Alcander’s panorama.
Whatever the truth of the matter, Layla did not waste time dwelling on it. The work had reached the stage where it was in and of itself the inspiration, and it occupied her thoughts to the exclusion of everything else.
It was the character of the hound master Aegesth who preoccupied her the most. He appeared in Panteleimon’s poem only briefly, but his role was significant, and Layla had placed him in the foreground of the action. He was a slim, mercurial youth, lithe and whip-backed as one of his own hounds, and Layla knew he was really a stand-in for Alcander. For his naked flesh she chose a moon-coloured silk of the finest grade available. She worked his form with care, and as the days progressed the youth came increasingly to life beneath her fingers. There were nights when she did not lay down her work until the sea had begun to reflect the first light of dawn.
For the first part of the day she was barely awake, and once she fell asleep on the bus to work, passing right through Bethsheba where the factory was and ending up at the terminus out by the skyway. She was woken by a crowd of schoolchildren, storming their way on to the bus like a swarm of bees. Her head was still stuffed with sleep. She used her mobile to call in sick, then returned to her apartment and slumped down on the bed. Her dreams were noisy and uneasy with the barking of dogs.
She woke after sunset, hungry and restless with the same kind of sexual longing that had followed her separation from John Caribe. She wolfed down the remains of a takeaway paella she had bought for her supper the evening before and then took a taxi to a bar she had heard of, in the cellar of one of the hotels just south of Amberville, frequented mostly by actors in search of work and successful businesswomen in their mid- to late fifties. It did not take her long to find what she was looking for. The boy was pale and skinny, his fair hair pulled back from his forehead and twisted into dreadlocks. They agreed on a price, then he led her through a curtained archway to a green-tiled corridor with a number of smaller archways leading off. The booth he brought her to was stark but clean, reminding her of the room at the Hotel Europa. When the boy took off his shirt Layla saw that his back was striped with old scars, the flesh raised and corrugated in places like a section of torn packing material. She pressed her lips to the hardened scar tissue, tasting salt, then lifted herself astride him, thinking that she did not have to ask him how he came by the scars, she did not have to ask him anything. As her flesh parted she thought of Alcander, and came at once.
It was gone one by the time she got home. She felt filled with an immense darkness, a starry vacuum in which power and despair seemed evenly matched. They circled each other warily, like fighting dogs. She did not think she would be able to sleep, but she was unconscious less than a minute after getting into bed. She was awoken by her mobile phone; Nashe Crawe’s name was flashing on the display screen. Layla felt a flicker of dread, suddenly certain that what she had done with the boy the night before had pitched Alcander into terminal decline.
“I need you to come,” Nashe Crawe said. She sounded breathless, strident, as if she had been calling Layla’s number for a long time without getting a reply. “It’s a miracle.”
“Mrs Crawe,” Layla said. She still felt groggy. “Are you all right? What are you talking about?”
“It’s Alcander,” she said. “His arms and face are clear of the sores – completely clear. There were some scabs but they just brushed off. The blisters on his legs are drying up, too. Even the big ones.” There was a catch in her voice, as if she was on the brink of hysterical laughter. “His skin is renewing itself. He’s – beautiful.”
Layla rubbed at her eyes with the back of her hand. She felt nauseous and hungry at the same time. “How is he in himself?”
“Sleeping, mostly. It’s as if his body is using all his energy to heal itself. But each time he wakes he seems stronger. He’s eating well, too.” She broke off, starting to weep. “I knew you could do it.”
Layla pressed the phone to her ear, listening to the woman’s choked crying. On the other side of the room the night hounds, tawny as cougars, frolicked and span around the figure of their master Aegesth. They were shadowy as devils, the canvas worked in such a way that when you first glanced at it the dogs appeared to be nothing more than a swirling drift of autumn leaves.
She remembered the boy from the night before, taut as a bowstring above her, her fingers digging into the lattice of scars on his back.
“It wasn’t me,” she said to Nashe Crawe. “I didn’t do anything.”
“You shouldn’t deny it, you know. If the gods favour you with a gift you should feel blessed.”
Layla fell silent. She wanted to put the phone down and take a shower, but Nashe Crawe was still talking, telling her she had been trying to get through to her husband all morning but no one seemed to know where he was. It was eleven o’clock already. Layla could not remember the last time she had slept so late.
“You will come?” Nashe Crawe was saying. “Alcander will be wanting to see you.”
“I can’t,” Layla said. “Not until I’ve finished the tapestry.”
Nashe Crawe started to say something else, to protest maybe, but Layla disconnected the call before she could finish. She felt stark fear, of a kind she had never before experienced, and the knowledge that she could never enter the glass house again.
