Cloud Cuckoo Land Page 13

  The dead man was rolled off the edge of the roof and the shooting resumed.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The bar top TV flickered into life. It had been switched off earlier, after the hardcore drinkers had turned up, but now it was way past midnight and the last few old soaks who had braved curfew were sobering up with self-inflicted slaps and black coffee.

  Ian stretched up and adjusted the volume control; he twiddled the aerial and tried to tune the set in. These days it seemed like every channel was a news channel, more than ever before, twenty-four hour news. It was great television though, the production costs are kept low because they are met accidentally by the whole world and the script just seems to go on and on, episode after episode, producing hour after hour of unequivocal truth. There’s so much of this truth being produced these days that the underlying lies have been lost in all the noise.

  Ian sat back down, lit up another cigarette and tuned his ear into the political commentary. The TV screen showed a good moving picture of the prime minister, talking down to the audience once again. His body was arranged behind a polished desk, he wore a dark suit and a touch of mortuary style make-up for the benefit of the cameras. He looked a little bit over-rouged though, and punchy, like he’d been in a play fight and escaped a head-lock. He had that face on, the face they all wear, the one that registered the discomfort of having an unseen hand way up the arse. A hand which worked the eyes, the ears, the mouth, but circumvented the heart, a good heart really, one that started out with all the best intentions. He’d had a good career, this one; he’d been earnest and brave, saying all the right things, rallying, giving hope and strength. But today he was hedging; he was saying all he could, except what everybody suspected. He wouldn’t say what he should say, he wouldn’t admit that he knew, that we knew, that it really was time now for him to go through the garage and dig out ‘the end is nigh’ sandwich-board from his student days.

  To wind up, he at last delivered the line everyone had tuned in to hear: ‘the heavenly body will impact with the earth in seven weeks time’.

  Tony had noticed Ian messing with the TV. He hated it when a punter worked the controls, switched things off and on; it was his job to set the levels, his job to tinker with the atmosphere!

  Tony just didn’t like Ian; he didn’t like his pink and puffy skin, his clammy handshake or even the smell of him. He hoped it didn’t show, but he didn’t like the overall look of the man, he found him long headed and flat in the jaw line, like he was already wearing dentures. And whenever they had a conversation, Ian was only ever half listening, daydreaming. Tony suspected that the dream Ian was mostly dreaming was of how to fuck you over. You just couldn’t trust a man like Ian. He rubbed Tony up the wrong way because Tony was the kind of man who, when he found a stray piece of something which had fallen off something else, he picked it up and asked himself, ‘where’s that come from?’ And then he would get some tools and set about fixing it. Ian though wouldn’t bother, and weeks later when something critical rattled and then fell off, he would just wonder why.

  Ian sipped his coffee; it was smooth and smoked and had no beery bitterness to it. He emptied out his pill bottle onto the table and felt a tightening in his gut when the last two oval capsules bounced out. He popped them into his gob and washed them down with the dregs. He could see Tony out of the corner of his eye, shuffling around in the background, stacking chairs up on the far tables. He knew how to handle a chair, did Tony. It was not too big a step to imagine him in the circus ring with a family acrobatic act. All he needed were a few gymnastic relatives in leotards, that would suit Tony. Ian could see it all, it made him smile to think of the way they would say ‘hup’ with each leap. Hup, and then someone else would be somersaulted up into the chair that Tony would be balancing on his head. But none of this was possible for Tony; he had the necessary brothers, but not the one very beautiful, very heavily made-up sister.

  Tony was a roughly hewn man, the eyes of his hangdog face slid away over the top of his cheeks and his ears looked plasticined onto his neck. He was a broad-shouldered man carrying a bit of extra weight, a bit of a light heavyweight, around the midriff.

  Tony stacked the chairs until only Ian’s table was left, then he ducked behind the bar and came back with his own mug of coffee. He sat down with Ian and turned his head towards the television.

  ‘How’s the other half then, Tony?’

  ‘She’s fine, thanks.’

  ‘One thing I’ve never understood, is just what in the hell you were doing with a woman like that? Alright, she’s very attractive and all but she must be a right bloody handful.’

  Tony grinned as he replied, to blur his anger.

  ‘Are you pissed, Ian?’

  He shook his head and raised his coffee.

  ‘Not today, no.’

  Tony tried to let it go but couldn’t, it soaked in, the question did, it made him uncomfortable because, well, what was he doing with Adeline?

  ‘What’s it got to do with you, anyway? I didn’t ask for your opinion on my private life.’

  ‘Just being sociable, Tony, making chit-chat, that’s all.’

  ‘You don’t think we’re suited?’

  ‘I didn’t say that. She’s just… well, she likes to play the field, wouldn’t you say so?’

  ‘What do you mean by that? I wish I knew what you were getting at.’

  ‘I’m not getting at anything in particular. I’m just mouthing off, poking fun.’

  ‘Look Ian, it’s shutting up and chucking out time. So if you’d like to kindly piss off, that would suit me just fine.’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes. Listen, it’s just that I’m a confirmed bachelor right, I don’t understand relationships. I was wondering if you could shed any light, that’s all.’

  ‘God, do we really have to have this conversation?’

  ‘Why not? Why not indulge me a little?’

  Tony felt stuck with having to elaborate.

  ‘I don’t know! We met, we found that we liked the same things. We concluded that we were very similar people, so we got married.’

  ‘And then what happened?’

  ‘Well, pretty soon after that, we discovered that we were just not happy in one another’s company. We tried a few things but…’

  ‘Oh yeah, like what?’

  ‘We thought that maybe we were too similar, so we tried to change; we tried to make ourselves opposites so we might attract? But that was just confusing, it just didn’t work out.’

  ‘But there’s something else, isn’t there? I mean, that’s not the heart of it, is it?’

  ‘What you were getting at?’

  ‘Oh come on, you know what I’m talking about, you know that she’s a witch.’

  ‘You are pissed!’

  ‘A white witch.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, you can’t know who’s a witch.’

  ‘She must have told you, Tony?’

  ‘Look, if a witch ever says “I am a witch” then all her spells come undone.’

  ‘Well, that’s confirmed it for me. Seems you know about this stuff too, so maybe you’re in on it. Maybe you can tell me: can men be witches too or do they have to be wizards? That sort of thing can lead to a lynch mob, very nasty…’

  ‘There’s the door Ian. Go through it would you.’

  Ian skidded his chair back and stood up. He had an urge to throw Tony the chair and step back for some applause, but he didn’t, he only waved and walked, light headed to the door.

  Tony locked the door behind Ian and lifted his own chair up onto the table. That Ian knew something about Adeline was a problem; he would use it against the both of them if he could. It was true that Adeline’s mother was known as a ‘guesser’, which is a kind of watered down way of saying witch, but that was in another part of the world. Tony had intercepted some of her letters and he’d seen stuff lying around the house before now, like candle wax and bowls of water, photographs of the Milky Way and the polar stars ringed in red. If
they went for a walk in the woods, she would ask him to urinate in the open air, as a mark of respect for the forest and sometimes, in the summertime, she bathed in ice-water.

  It was none of Ian’s business but he was right, there was far more to Adeline than meets the eye. Sometimes he felt that she didn’t mean anything she said, that she didn’t mean it even when she smiled; when she looked, she wasn’t really looking, and maybe it wasn’t even black for her when she closed her eyes.

  She’d gone up to bed hours ago and when Tony finally hauled himself upstairs after tidying up the bar, he trod gently, made every effort not to wake her. He looked down at the white skin of her trailing arm; it was locked out against the elbow joint, in a ballet dancer’s gesture. He had the idea of sitting on this outstretched hand, which would quite easily break her arm. But instead he kissed the exposed blue arteries of her forearm and then her right cheek; she stirred, lifted her head and turned onto her right-hand side. Her breathing was slow, she was taking long, deep breaths, her face registered nothing; she was switched off.

  Tony dropped his clothes in a pile, T-shirt inside shirt, inside sweater, then he lifted the covers and slid in. Her body lifted as he set himself down, but she was fast asleep. He switched off his bedside lamp, waited as long as he could (maybe ten minutes) then slapped Adeline hard on the side of her face.

  She woke slowly, in a daze, and rubbed her cheek. The room was dark and still; she waited, then settled her head back again into the depression in her pillow. Though her blood was boiling over, she managed to give a perfectly understated performance of bewilderment and Tony was quite happy to fall into a reassured sleep. But Adeline had heard his every move, the way he’d crept into the room, the sound of fabrics sparking off each other as they were whisked over his head. She felt the lifting and tipping as Tony performed his stealthy hippo crawl into the bed, and of course the weight of his hand as it stung her face.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The following morning, Leonard stood in front of his wardrobe for fifteen minutes, not really looking at the clothes and not realising that he was in a kind of delayed shock. The point was that, well in simple terms, he had achieved what he’d set out to achieve. He was now relatively safe, he’d gained a place on the vessel, and he had his own survival pod earmarked. All he had to do now was sit tight for the next fifty days and take his chances with the others at impact.

  But it wasn’t that simple was it, not now that he had to consider Beryl and Lena. The survival pods were being systematically hijacked by the rich and powerful, an elite ruling class of casual murderers; did he really belong?

  The entire course of human evolution was about to dogleg God knows where and Leonard was wondering whether or not a simple end to the human race might not be just as well. The hominid eye had been opened for a few hundred thousand years, now it would be closed again and why not? That seemed to be the shape of all other manifest life anyway. It starts and then it finishes, that’s it, trying to last it out forever was a terrible pressure, and it was bringing out the worst in all of us. Even if he did survive impact, how safe would he or anyone else be in an environment where the law would be enforced by mercenaries, acting as henchmen for a bunch of extremist leaders? What pissed Leonard off most of all was this great big, highly publicised lie, which had people flooding to the city in the hope of being judged on their merits and included in the survival programme. There were fifty days until the impact, at least that was a known and fixed parameter. If he was going to do anything at all to influence the programme, that was the amount of time he had left.

  The thing was, the coming events were lined up and on their way, and Leonard had a very particular and privileged position within them. If you looked at it like that, what he had to do was simple. He would have to upset the way things were developing, upset the apple cart and do what he could to make a difference.

  ◊

  Leonard stayed away from the breakfast bar, he called room service instead and ordered coffee and sandwiches, scotch eggs and chocolate. He packed the food into a sports bag, then dressed for the great outdoors in plenty of layers, with the waterproof jacket over the top. He sat on the floor and pulled his boots on. He checked the room before leaving, but he had no personal effects.

  He made his way through a series of bright, top-lit corridors, looking for an exit. He wanted to get outside into the cool air so he could think things over and get his head on straight again. He turned away from the directions offered by the signposts and found that he was making his way downstairs. The ground floor of the accommodation block didn’t seem off limits and Leonard moved quickly through a less spacious layout, multiple corridors flanked by unmarked offices. There windows ran out, but the interior of the building was still brightly lit with overhead bulbs. The wooden floors ended and spotless, white Linoleum took over. The only sound was the faint squeaking of his rubberised soles as he turned the sharp, right-angled corners. Eventually he reached a dead end corridor with ‘Alarmed’ and ‘Emergency Exit’ pasted onto the door. He walked back a few paces and tried one of the office doors. It opened into a quiet laboratory space. There was a metallic smell in the air which was strong enough to have a taste and it was cold, too, colder than just no heating, it was probably refrigerated.

  Leonard entered and stepped in between two long benches which had steel racks sitting on top, starting at waist level and finishing above his head. Labelled metal tubes were contained within the steel framework, each tube a few centimetres long and held into the frame with safety-wired locking screws.

  ‘Yes, hello?’

  An old man in a lab coat had entered the room carrying a smoking box of the same metal tubes. Leonard moved away from the frame and smiled.

  ‘Hello.’

  He stood in the doorway with his head, hands and feet covered in elasticated cloth bags. He was looking over his glasses at Leonard, wondering how to proceed. It upset him because this was not the usual sequence of events. He worked alone and nobody else came here. Usually he entered the lab, loaded the tubes into the frame and went straight back, uninterrupted, to get some more.

  He asked the obvious question.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Well, it’s ah… Patrick sent me on ahead to have a look around. I’m not disturbing you, am I?’

  ‘Isn’t it obvious that you are? I have had to stop what I was doing and I am now having to listen to you and respond to what you say.’

  ‘Please just carry on, act like I’m not here.’

  He did; without further reference to Leonard’s existence, he carried on walking into the room, sat the rack of steaming tubes onto the bench and began to load the frame.

  ‘What are those, then?’

  ‘Seeds.’

  ‘And what are you doing with them?’

  ‘Loading them into this frame.’

  Leonard realised he’d better try and work it out for himself; this old man didn’t want anything to do with him. He was obviously a kind of lab assistant and he wanted to be left alone so that he could be of assistance to the lab, that was all. He lifted the metal tubes very gently from the rack and slid them into place.

  ‘But what are they exactly?’

  The lab assistant’s shoulders were hoiked up around his neck; he really was very uncomfortable with Leonard just hovering there beside him. He finished placing the tubes.

  ‘If you really must know.’

  He bent close to the labels and wiped condensation from the stamped letters.

  ‘These are Avena Fatua.’

  He giggled.

  ‘Is that funny?’

  ‘Yes yes, very funny. Avena Fatua, the common name is the wild oat.’

  ‘And what about those?’

  ‘Moringa Oleifera, horse radish tree.’

  ‘How many seeds are you going to preserve?’

  ‘The project has 24,000 plant species, that’s only about ten percent of all the seed-bearing flora. We’re trying to protect as many species as po
ssible. We need to hang on to some biodiversity.

  ‘It’s for after the impact?’

  ‘Well, of course.’

  ‘So how will you grow seed in a densely polluted atmosphere?’

  ‘They’ll be transferred into the artificial light propagators as soon as the immediate after-effects of impact have passed.’

  Leonard walked along the frame reading the species names.

  ‘Well, I’ve got to go and prepare more samples.’

  The lab assistant didn’t want to leave Leonard in the room, he was standing in the doorway with his right arm held out, showing that he wanted to sweep Leonard into the hall.

  ‘Where’s my nearest exit?’

  The old man pointed.

  ‘Go that way ‘til you meet a corridor on your right, follow it and you’ll find your way out.’

  ◊

  Outside, the air was cold and sweet and thickened by a pale mist which was lying in the bottom of the valley. Leonard walked towards the construction domes, across stems of emerald green grass, caked in ice like frozen green-beans.

  The chrome chimneys venting the buildings were pumping out clouds of smoke, vertical plumes which rose straight up into the still air until they evaporated in the sun’s rays.

  A black and white football rolled out from between the construction domes, leaving a dark trail in the frosted grass. Then a man skidded after it, turned tight and flicked it back the way he came. It was Eddie digging up the turf, and all the time he was talking to himself like he was a radio commentator looking on, describing the action. Leonard turned the corner to see Eddie curl a long cross in toward Vicky. She caught the ball at head height and threw it back out, over-arm. She waved to Leonard and Eddie trapped the ball, then looked over his shoulder to see who she was waving at. He smiled and laid the ball off towards Leonard; it rolled downhill fast and stopped when it hit his feet.

  When he looked up from the ball, he could see that Eddie was bothering Vicky in the goal mouth, dodging around her, crowding her out, looking towards Leonard and pointing at his head. Leonard put down his bag and tapped the ball forward a bit. He tried to figure out whether he should strike it on the inside or the outside of the foot to give it lift. He knew he only had a few good kicks in him before his knee would start playing up, so he skipped three short steps and punted his toe into the leather. It was good, had good flight and reasonable direction. Eddie fixed the thing in the air and started to run on to it; as it hit the top of his head, he lifted and twisted underneath to touch the ball on, deflecting it in the direction of the goal. It flew past Vicky and bounced off the curved wall of the dome. She started to clap, while Eddie punched the sky and started to sing a song with the same tune as a Christmas hymn called ‘Noel Noel’, but with the words changed to: ‘Twelve nil, twelve nil, twelve nil, twelve nil, la la la la la la la la la la.’