The Lighthouse at the End of the World, page 17
“Yeah,” replied Oyster, “I know you might think that, but I mean this is proper weird.”
“Yes, yes,” said Marya Petrovna, “so you keep saying. Come along, lay on, Macduff and all that.”
“In here,” Oyster said, leading Marya Petrovna to the bathroom. He opened the door slowly and peered into the corner, half-expecting the ink beetle to have disappeared. But sure enough, there she was. Exactly as he had left her. He turned and put his finger to his lips.
“Don’t want to disturb ’em. They can get a bit antsy. How’re you with creepy crawlies?
“Ach, enough of this,” said Marya Petrovna impatiently, pushing past him and round the door to where the ink beetle lay.
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Oyster readied himself for her reaction.
“My eyes, boy, not so good in the dark,” said Marya Petrovna. “What am I looking at?”
Oyster spoke in hushed tones. “Over in the corner,”
Marya Petrovna leaned towards where the nuajin lay.
“Oh my. By all the saints.”
She turned to Oyster with a look of wonder on her face.
“It is ink beetle. I never thought I’d see one of these again.”
FLAPDOODLE
You know about these things?” said Oyster, surprised.
“I had friend a long time ago. Engineer of sorts,” she said with a sad smile. “Kept one as pet. Both long gone now.”
Oyster was shocked and slightly disappointed at the same time. After all the woman’s hocus-pocus, he’d been looking forward to weirding her out for a change.
Marya Petrovna knelt with a crackle of tendons. She stretched her hand out to the nuajin and issued the sort of cooing sound that people usually made when trying to attract a cat’s attention.
The creature immediately unfurled. She chittered in response and moved towards Marya Petrovna’s outstretched hand.
“Don’t tell me you can talk to her too?” he said.
“Well now, aren’t you a little beauty,” said Marya Petrovna, ignoring him. She looked up. “I think there may be more things that you want to tell me, eh?”
“Um, yeah, maybe,” said Oyster.
Marya Petrovna shook her head. She bustled to the kitchen to fetch a saucer of milk which she placed near the nuajin. She petted the creature’s head and turned to face Oyster, standing with a staccato accompaniment as her bones clicked back into place. She led him back to the kitchen and collapsed into a chair. The nuajin followed behind them, flying up on the table and rolling into a ball next to the coffee pot.
“Now, tell Marya Petrovna all.”
And so, Oyster talked.
Being in the crew had developed his pre-existing taciturn streak to mammoth proportions, so he was surprised how good it felt for him to unburden himself. He told Marya Petrovna about the drop and the Mannish Boys and the strange beach. He told her about Nonesuch and the clerks and the looüt (and here, to his satisfaction, she really did appear to be surprised). Then he went over the city and its vast dome with its painted sky, even telling her about Mr Primrose and his enigmatic job offers.
Marya Petrovna worked through a series of roll-ups while he spoke, drinking two more glasses of the cherry liquor, and offering Oyster top-ups which he refused. He wanted to keep this all straight in his head. By the time he had finished the room was choking in smoke.
“Well,” she said, stubbing out her final cigarette. “That is that, then.”
“What do you mean, ‘that is that’? Is that good or bad?” said Oyster.
Marya Petrovna shrugged.
“Don’t go doing the inscrutable shrug thing, either,” said Oyster. “‘That is that’ is a definite thing. You’ve come to some conclusion. Come on, spill.”
Marya Petrovna blew the remaining smoke through her nose and tossed back the last of her drink.
“Very well, flapdoodle. These are Marya Petrovna’s conclusions. Firstly, Mannish Boys did nothing to you that you had not already done to yourself. You are simply a walker. Someone who can move between the worlds. Secondly, this Minkowski incantation you have on your skin, it is word of power, a symbolic code which is designed to pull you in a certain path through the world, to certain points in time and space. Imagine it as opinionated occult compass. It helps to open the way for you to go back and forth between our world and the place you call Greater London. Other places and even times too, theoretically, what with time and space being one thing. Thirdly, this ability is perhaps reason Primrose wants you. But there is bigger pattern here, too, I just cannot see it yet.”
Oyster experienced a strange sense of satisfaction mixed with the dislocation that he’d felt earlier. At some level he knew what Marya Petrovna was saying was correct. He just didn’t want to believe it.
“But I don’t want any of this,” he said finally. He thought again of his home and Cécile. Would he ever see them again?
“Hard cheese,” said Marya Petrovna with a grimace. “From moment you saw fit to tattoo yourself with this word, your fate was set. Probably.”
Something fell over in the lounge with a loud crash. The nuajin flitted up into the air and settled on Oyster’s shoulder.
Marya Petrovna’s long face knitted in concern. She motioned him to remain still.
“Is anyone else here?” she hissed.
Oyster shook his head.
“Kurwa!” she said.
She tiptoed to another of the kitchen cupboards and slipped open the door. Oyster was impressed by how the old lady was able to move so silently. Feeling around inside the cupboard, she removed a cricket bat. Oyster grabbed a knife from a rack in the kitchen.
She opened the door a crack and waved him behind her. They peered out into the empty corridor beyond. The lounge door was ajar.
Marya Petrovna halted. She counted to three on her fingers and then kicked the door open.
The three of them charged into the room.
Pinker lay face down on the floor, his outstretched arm keeping the ape’s rigid body at an angle.
There appeared to be no one else in the room, but if that was the case, who had pushed over Marya Petrovna’s coat-hanger?
“Look!” yelled Oyster. Scuttling across the top of the bookcases was a second nuajin, smaller than his but more brightly coloured, sporting a streak of yellow across its back. He recognised it immediately as the one belonging to Nonesuch, Bamyasi.
His own nuajin flew up from his shoulder to join the newcomer with a chittering noise. Nonesuch’s creature answered with its own cackle and the two of them rolled over and round each other to form one larger conjoined ball.
Marya Petrovna hurried to the room’s bureau, retrieved some sheets of yellowed paper, and lay them on the Turkish rug at the room’s centre.
She looked up at the nuajin and cooed.
“I think you have mail,” she said in answer to Oyster’s unspoken question. “But let us see.”
She made the cooing sound again and the ink beetles separated. Oyster’s buzzed to the ground, landing on one of the sheets of paper. With a gurgle, she extended a tiny point from her tail and shimmied across the paper, leaving a scrawl of characters behind her on the page.
“Blyat! It worked,” exclaimed Marya Petrovna.
Oyster watched as the creature scuttled back and forth, left to right and top to bottom. After a few lines, the ink beetle emitted a sort of exhausted cough and stopped. She flew back up to the bookshelf to join Bamyasi and the two of them emitted a stream of clacks and tweets.
He pressed a hand to his damp armpit, worrying at the flap of skin through his T-shirt as though it was a loose tooth. He was already becoming accustomed to it.
“Quick! Quick! What does this say?” Marya Petrovna asked.
Oyster grabbed the paper and squinted at it. The wet ink glistened, and up close the paper had a robust scent, like dust and libraries. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected exactly, but the note was comprised of a couple of lines of characters that were inscribed in the neatest handwriting he’d ever seen. He read it aloud.
“‘Dunno where you gots to, Dry Bob, but we got glaziers on your quarry. Shickle your arse. Get here quickest, N.’
“Get here quickest?” said Oyster. “Easy for her to say. How the hell do I do that?”
Marya Petrovna grinned at him.
“Ach, what do you think we do, moron? We train! We train!”
THE CRACK IN THE WORLD
Marya Petrovna was shin-deep in discarded books and manuscripts. She had already cleared one of the bookshelves in her search and now she was working her way through the next one down.
“I have it somewhere here, I am sure.”
“Have what?” asked Oyster.
He had seated himself in a leather chair with the ink beetle he was beginning to regard as his on its headrest. Receiving the message from Nonesuch’s nuajin had drained her.
Similarly, Bamyasi had buzzed against the dirty lounge window until Oyster had opened it onto the afternoon traffic and the creature had zoomed up into the grey sky like an oversized bumble bee.
How on earth had it ended up here?
Perhaps these ink beetles could do the walking thing that Marya Petrovna had been talking about? It would make it easier to get messages back and forth, he guessed.
Meanwhile, Marya Petrovna had busied herself wandering to and fro throughout the length of the flat, muttering. Then, she started pulling books from the shelves, flicking through them at a pace and emitting sounds that Oyster was sure were increasingly exotic swear words, before dumping the volumes unceremoniously on the floor.
“What are you after, lady, maybe I can help?” Oyster had said.
“Ha! Ha! Yes! Yes! You will help! But not this right now! Conserve your energies! Conserve! Conserve!”
Oyster wasn’t sure if she was still under the influence of the “nerve tonic” she claimed to have knocked back earlier, but since the arrival of Nonesuch’s note she was full of a manic energy that he hadn’t seen before.
The paper lay on his lap. He read it and re-read it.
He was pretty certain that it meant Nonesuch had located the Mannish. And that meant he was in with a chance now; an opportunity to clear things up, to prove to Mickey and the rest of the Urbans that he was on the up and up. He shut his eyes. Until the crew had been taken away from him, he had never been sure if it was the right thing for him, but his sudden exile from their ranks affected him keenly.
It was as though he had been racing over some dark, empty plain, only to plunge over an unseen precipice. He was in freefall now. What happened next depended on where he landed, if he even landed at all.
Marya Petrovna had climbed a set of collapsible steps and was now running her hand over the top of the bookcases themselves. Clouds of dust mixed with the smoke that filled the room.
“Aha!” exclaimed Marya Petrovna. She was holding something small, red and rectangular.
“Is that it?” he asked, disappointed. He hadn’t been sure what she was looking for, but he’d imagined that it would be something more spectacular and a bit more in keeping with her mystic-nutcase vibe, some sort of enormous leatherbound tome, or a magic staff.
“Not very Gandalf, is it?” he said.
Marya Petrovna dismissed his complaints with a flick of her hand.
“Look, look!” Her eyes were beaming.
She climbed down from the steps and handed it to him.
It was a foldout map of central Madrid.
Oyster took it from her and examined it. The creases were worn, as though the map had been in and out of pockets, many, many times throughout its lifetime. There was nothing remarkable about it at all.
He shook his head.
“I don’t get it.”
“You want to return to where note came from? Yes?”
Oyster nodded.
“Then we must drift,” she said.
He shrugged.
“Still not feeling you,” he said. “Drift what, how, where?”
“To drift, or to give it true name, dérive, is elevated technique discovered by Arch-mages of the Situationist Order.”
“And?” said Oyster.
“Ach. So obnoxious are you,” she replied. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a tangerine and held it in front of him. Oyster noticed that the tips of her fingers were flat and stained yellow from her endless flow of roll-ups.
“Observe orange.”
Oyster stared at it exaggeratedly.
“What do you see?”
“A pair of old fruits,” he replied.
“Very good,” said Marya Petrovna. “But you are not really seeing orange. The mind, if we can grace your atrophied organ with that description, is taking sensory input from eyes and matching it to concepts it already has. ‘Ah, this is probably orange!’ it says, then fills in the rest with things we know about oranges: orange has this colour, this size, this shape, this smell. What you see is idea of orange, not orange itself. Put in simplest way, you have no access to reality that does not come though senses and interpretation.”
“I get it,” he said. “So, it’s like if I’m asleep and I hear a siren, I might dream about the police.”
“Yes, and your dream will feel real, but siren might be ambulance, fire engine or so forth. Brain extrapolates reality from available inputs. So it is with everything. Even when you are awake, you dream the world into existence. Materiality is constructed from concepts and symbols in mind, but there is no fundamental connection between world outside and your internal reality. All meaning is mediated, constructed from labels in the mind. This is symbolic order. If reality is computer game, symbolic order is operating system it runs on. Mostly we all just play Space Invaders, so do not need to know where or how high scores are stored.”
She tapped the side of her head, then dug a large thumb under the tangerine’s soft skin, twisted her wrist a few times, and with a flourish removed its peel in a single piece.
“Arch-mages of Situationism realised this. Understood that since actuality is byproduct of language system, walking through a world deliberately mislabelled creates sensitivities to ur-structure underpinning it. Now you understand? Yes? Yes?”
She stabbed at his forehead with her forefinger and he winced.
“Hey! Still dooked in, remember?” He rubbed his temple.
She dropped the orange peel into his lap, its aroma tickled his nose.
He thought about the evening he’d got into it with the Mannish. One of them had been holding a map of Paris.
Marya Petrovna marched out of the room and reappeared moments later holding a freshly lit roll-up, wearing a trench coat and holding a blue plastic bag. She beckoned.
“Come, come,” she said. “What are you waiting for? Put orange peel in bin and put on coat. As little Marie Curie used to say, ‘Best way to learn is by doing’!”
* * *
The sky had brightened now, and Oyster and Marya Petrovna tramped across the grass of Primrose Hill towards the largest clump of trees they could find. Oyster had needed a lot of persuading to leave the relative safety of Marya Petrovna’s flat, and even now he felt exposed, surrounded as he was by its flat grassy expanse. Parks had always seemed like anomalies in his natural environment, green blisters in the city’s concrete skin; an easy place to get spotted. He pulled his hood up and looked down at his feet.
As he had readied himself to leave, his nuajin had squealed and chattered until he had relented and allowed her to climb back into the cavity under his armpit. She was nestling there now. It was more comfortable than he’d expected. To be honest, from the moment she’d crept back in there he felt whole in a way he hadn’t since she’d emerged. It was odd, but on the scale of all the odd shit that had happened so far today, he was just going to let it slide.
Marya Petrovna had smoked three rollies between here and her flat. She huffed and puffed, navigating the scattered paths and Narnia-esque streetlamps that organised the park’s green spaces. He could only imagine what the old woman’s lungs must look like. He visualised a pair of leathery bellows that breathed smoke.
At last, they reached the sparse cover of a copse and Oyster’s overwhelming sense of being under observation abated. He took a breath and glanced upward. The clouds overhead scudded restlessly, revealing an even greyer vault beyond them. From this vantage point he could see the city spread out all around. There was the pencil topper of the BT Tower and the brutal magnificence of Centre Point. It was late afternoon, and the darkening horizon already hinted at the evening to come. He was suddenly lonely, as though he had been cut off from some vital galvanising current.
Marya Petrovna stomped her final cigarette underfoot and unfolded the map. A sudden breeze flapped its edges back and forth.
“Very well,” she said. “This is how it is done. You take map. You close the eyes and walk. You feel where map wants to go. When you are lost, the way is found. Typically, one also needs symbolic connection to destination. In this case, you have ink beetle.”
“Very Yoda,” said Oyster. “Is that it? Don’t you got any other words of wisdom?”
Marya Petrovna handed him the map and clapped him on the back.
“Such travel is beyond words. Beyond signs and literal meanings. Is exciting, though, eh?” she said. “Can you feel it?”
Oyster wasn’t so sure what he felt was excitement, but he was prepared to indulge her. He was out of any other options now, anyway.
“Right, let’s give it a go,” he said.
“So, first look at map and fix at point on it. Try to soak in deep information that map abstracts rather than detail of what is shown. Shut the eyes and try to lay map onto grass, trees, sky that surrounds. Laying one on top of other creates semiotic fissure. This is the crack that opens door.”
Oyster peered at the jumble of lines and colours that he held. At the map’s centre, Marya Petrovna had drawn a solid black circle from which multiple arrows flew. Beneath and around the symbol, unfamiliar place names leapt out at him: roads that were coloured in yellow and blue, patches of green with exotic names; the geometric sprawl of the metro system. He began to wish he’d paid more attention to the few Spanish lessons he’d had at school.
