Cloud Cuckoo Land Read online

  ‘Oh, come on now Leonard, ignorance is not at all bliss.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘Definitely not no, forewarned is forearmed.’

  Barry dusted the whisky with nutmeg and handed it to Leonard. He raised his own glass and offered a toast.

  ‘Welcome, and well done for making it out of that God-awful city alive.’

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  It rained all the time now, there was probably some ominous reason for the phenomenon but Warden was, as in most other areas of his life, way past caring. At night, he liked to be driven around the glistening streets with the good old music playing, the big band stuff like Buddy Rich or Duke Ellington. He had big, fat cushions in the back and he slept now and then, waking in fits and starts to check that his driver was still at the wheel. He popped pills when he had to and they dragged him through indifferent black and white dreams of the celluloid heydays.

  He was mostly only half conscious and he liked it that way, the pain threshold was higher and it helped him to be graceful and forgiving, helped him to be glad about giving up and giving in. Sometimes though, his brain was sharp enough to think things through, to forward a motion - and he would remember then, how he could no longer sleep in his own bed, it just wasn’t safe anymore. He had picked up too many enemies and the few people he kept on his staff were paid very dearly for an uncertain amount of loyalty. The light though, at the end of the tunnel, was the Ice Moon. He spent all his spare time wishing on this star. It would come, all his hopes were pinned on it. He even prayed some nights that he might be killed outright by the impact, somewhere very near ground zero. This idea was keeping him alive, turning up the corners of his rippled mouth.

  ‘Stop the car!’

  The driver turned to check he’d heard right, then he indicated and pulled over, breaking smoothly. They were in a wide, dark street with a tall building just to the right and behind. Warden kicked on the door but it wouldn’t budge, so the driver stepped out and opened up. He reached in, slid Warden’s body along the leather and helped him onto his feet. He snatched his cane and took a few steps across the pavement, then he stopped and swayed. The rain hitting the top of his head helped his eyes find focus. He spotted the sheet of paper but he couldn’t bend down to it, not right down to the page. What was so weird was that it was his own, much younger, grinning gob staring back at him, a wet likeness flattened against the paving slabs. It made him chuckle this did, that someone somewhere had called out, ‘Hold the front page!’ and they had held it, until his portrait was typeset. So there he was, with his very own cover shot and the following headlines: ‘The Man Who Sold The World’! ‘Survival programme exposed!’ ‘The corruption of hope!’ ‘Gangsters, bribery and the Warden’s lies!’

  He looked good though, a lot better than he did these days and also somewhat immune to the present circumstances, in just two dimensions. More newspaper seemed to be falling from above, along with the rain, more and more mirror images ganging up as they settled. He craned his neck and looked up. Even with his underwater eyes, he could see that it was Beryl up there on the roof of the Mirabelle, tipping out the usual mix of anti-authoritarian propaganda.

  Warden climbed the steps up to the entrance door. He hoped the lift was working because his legs were shaking and he had it in mind to get to the top of the building.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  He woke early, stretched his spine, rolled over and pushed his feet into the tight, cool corners of the bed-sheets. He could hear someone moving around downstairs, rattling a cup, dropping a spoon, kicking a table leg. He heard the back door being opened and then closed heavily, which sent a minor tremor up through the floor and into the bed springs. Leonard turned the clock to face him, it was six thirty am. He sat up, put a finger in his ear and wiggled it, then he yawned and got out of bed. It was a bit of a shock to go from horizontal to vertical, and Leonard felt light-headed as he walked to the bedroom window. He pulled the drawstring on the roller-blind and peered out into the predawn colours. Sea birds were crossing the sky and swirling clouds were evaporating. In the distance, the marshes were a shadowy mass, with the reed beds billowing this way and that, as the breeze stirred.

  Barry was standing out on the lawn down below the window, drinking a mug of tea and sniffing out the weather. He wore khaki shorts and a sweatshirt, he had chunky calves and white trainers. He took a couple of swallows from the mug and shook out the final drop. He turned to face the reddening sky, held his arms out in front of his body with his palms turned upwards, and he started to say something. Leonard opened the window, Barry’s voice was formal, well articulated.

  ‘Salutations to the East.’

  He cleared his throat.

  ‘Thy dawning is beautiful in the horizon of heaven,

  O living Aten, beginning of life!

  When thou risest in the eastern horizon of heaven,

  Thou fillest every land with thy beauty;

  For thou art beautiful, great, glittering high over the earth;

  Thy rays, they encompass the lands, even all thou hast made.

  Thou art Ra, and thou hast carried them all away captive;

  Thou bindest them by thy love.

  Though thou art afar, thy rays are upon the earth;

  Though thou art on high, thy footprints are the day.’ 2

  When he’d finished, he lifted his arms up above his head then lowered them to the previous position but this time with his palms turned over, so they faced the ground. He repeated the movement twice more, then he started some stretching exercises.

  Leonard pulled on a pair of trousers and a T-shirt, it was warm enough these days to wear shoes without socks. He splashed some water in his face and wandered along the hallway. He poked his head into Lena’s room but she wasn’t there. He went down to the kitchen to fill the kettle, then he opened the back door so he could see the pond. Just as he’d thought, there was Lena, crouched down beside the water, throwing stale bread for the ducks.

  A diesel generator coughed into life. Leonard stepped out and walked along the side of the house until he could see what was going on. He joined two men who were shovelling sand and cement into a rotating mixer.

  ‘Need any help?’

  ‘Yeah OK, we’ve got to pour a lot to do over the next few days. Get yourself some breakfast first, check the chickens.’

  It was true that they had a lot to do; they had to pour concrete into a flat cage, criss-crossed with reinforcing bars which lay below ground level. These were the last stages of a D.I.Y shelter project which had taken Barry and his crew the best part of a year to cobble together. They’d built an underground bunker big enough to house twenty to thirty people and hopefully keep them alive through the initial and the secondary stages of impact with the Ice Moon. This was the last stage of construction, the roof of the shelter. They’d welded a steel cage over the top of the structure which would add a final layer of blast protection. It was as heavy and as strong as they could make it, with the materials they could find. The clever thing was, although the whole site was built on solid granite, they’d found a fissure of softer limestone. This had been relatively easy to dig out, so the shelter was positioned in between two great outcrops of the purple-flecked granite.

  They’d fill the reinforcing bars with a concrete lid, then cover it all over with earth in a few days time. Barry was outwardly confident, he reckoned the structure could offer them the protection they needed, but Leonard was not so sure.

  He walked away from the shelter and swung around the back of the house past the neglected tennis court. It didn’t look like it had ever been used. It had a loose, low-slung net and grass grew up through cracks in the tarmac.

  The hen-house was behind the tennis court, where the ground started to slope away down to the level of the road and the reed beds. As he approached a couple of the chickens started to cluck, they all had something to say when he opened the door. He lifted half a dozen warm, tanned eggs from beneath the hens.

&nbs
p; ◊

  The black Labrador followed Barry all around the house, it stayed close on his heel and hurried through the opened and closed doors so that it wouldn’t be left behind. That used to happen a lot, and the dog would find himself locked into a cold wing of the house, without food and missing a car journey. Barry opened the kitchen door and the Labrador shot through; the dog was excited because Barry was carrying one of the its favourite things - a wooden duck. It was a naïve bird shape, a decoy duck used by hunters.

  As Barry and the black dog entered, Leonard and Lena looked up from their breakfast plates.

  ‘Morning. How’re you both feeling then?’

  ‘Fine. And you?’

  ‘So-so.’

  ‘I saw you earlier, Barry, heard you chanting outside my window. What was that all about?’

  The dog had been waiting patiently, long enough in fact, so he started to bark at Barry.

  ‘Ah yes, it’s a prayer, an old habit of mine. Its purpose is simple enough, it’s a salutation to the dawn.’

  He turned and gave the dog the wooden duck.

  ‘He loves to chew on its head, see. It’s the only one he’s allowed to play with, the rest are on display in the music room. You must have a look at them, they’re beautifully crafted objects, very collectable. They’re antiques and yet they were just tools of a trade at one time, wildfowl decoys for the hunters who worked the droves.

  ‘So, Leonard, what do you make of our last stand?’

  ‘Your project seems well organised. And there seems to be a good atmosphere here, a sense of community.’

  Leonard finished his cup of tea and took the breakfast plates to the sink.

  ‘If you don’t mind, Barry, I’m going to give some of the lads a hand with the roof of the shelter.’

  ‘That’s good of you, it’ll be a great help because we’ve fallen behind schedule. I’ll show Lena the rest of the farm.’

  ◊

  Barry led the way out onto the ground behind the main house. As he walked, he pointed out how water was pumped around the grounds.

  The circuit started at the pond, water flowed out through a buried pipe, uphill alongside the house and to the rear where the supply entered a walled garden. In the centre of the garden there was a stone statue, a naked woman called ‘Siren’. She was supposed to spit water six feet into the air, but she really only dribbled like an imbecile because the water pump wasn’t powerful enough and kept on clogging up with silt. Everyone called the statue the ‘dribbler’. ‘How are you settling in then, Lena?’

  ‘Alright. I thought you were all kind of weird to begin with.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘You just look weird.’

  ‘Don’t be fooled by appearances, these are very clever, very capable people. Independent, free thinkers and practical with it. These are my kind of people, Lena, men and women with bright ideas!’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘We are most of all a group of outsiders and I’ve always had a soft spot for an outsider, for an underdog.’

  Barry pointed towards a small barn.

  ‘We’re going in there.’

  They walked towards the building and Barry had to fiddle with a rusted padlock before he could slide the door open. As he rattled the steel, there was a single dry screech from inside, followed by a series of screeches, all at exactly the same volume and pitch, one after the other. The noise was not a complaint, it was more like a statement of fact, a cry to convey relevant information: I’m in here and I’m a fickle creature, remember? Barry lifted the padlock off and opened the door. Light flooded in, it excited the creature inside. Barry walked through the skewed triangle of light stretched across the concrete floor and into the shadowy interior.

  ‘Come on in, Lena.’

  Lena stepped in and strained her eyes, it took a while before she could see the interior. The space was quite empty, with spots of light coming in from the outside. One wall clad with vertical timbers let strips of light squeeze in through the joints. Barry was standing next to an upright wooden post with a crossbar, and he was whispering to a bird perched on top. He put something on the bird’s head and then he pulled a long leather glove onto his right hand. The bird screeched four times, stepped onto his forearm and then stayed silent.

  Barry turned and started to walk back towards Lena, some light bells hanging from his glove jangled like a pocketful of change. He had the bird standing on his hand and he spoke very softly.

  ‘Lena, this is Maurice and Maurice, as you can see, is a very beautiful Peregrine falcon.’

  Maurice had a leather hood over his head, it was polished red leather with toggles and a blue feather plume on top. He had lovely breast feathers, white and grey-blue, and his feet were butter yellow with spiked talons which dug into the leather glove.

  ‘Come on then, let’s take him out for a spin, get him up into his natural element.’

  Barry walked away downhill with Lena and the dog following. The falcon half opened its wings every now and then to keep balance. Carrying him was like carrying a technically perfect machine, the latest version of something, an example of rare bio-engineering. Inside his hood, Maurice was calm, the leather blocked the world out completely and the dark acted as a kind of off switch. An antidote to the Peregrine’s killing need. He was dead without his eyes, locked into a kind of buffering coma.

  Barry stood on a slightly raised area with a clear view of the reed beds and scattered birch trees. The horizon was perfectly flat and the cloud cover was fast-moving.

  ‘Stand here, Lena, I’m going to take his hood off now, so you can see how beautiful he is.’

  Barry lifted off the hood and the bird appeared, as brilliant as an unsheathed knife. It didn’t shake its head with over-excitement, it just blinked calmly and panned smoothly, left then right. It looked forward at Lena and she saw that his eyes were like shining glass beads, oil black and brilliantly reflective. He had yellow eye rings, the same colour as his feet, his head was grey-blue and his cheeks were a darker slate. The beak looked fish-hook sharp, scythe shaped for tearing flesh.

  Without the hood, the space-age lenses recorded the surrounding visual information, he latched on to his immediate environment and felt the breeze ruffle his tail feathers. Barry took the tethers off his hand and held his arm still. There was a slight downward pressure on Barry’s hand as Maurice kicked off, his wings whipped through the air and carried him low to the ground at first, before he tipped a wing and started to climb.

  There was no confusion in Maurice’s life, not a moment’s doubt or indecision, flight was automatic and the reason for flight was to hunt and to kill his prey.

  ‘Isn’t he beautiful?’

  ‘Yes, he is.’

  Lena watched the Labrador set off into the reeds. Barry moved forward too, onto sodden ground, he kept his eyes on the sky as the Peregrine began to circle high above.

  ‘You should stand over there, Lena, where it’s dry.’

  She saw what he meant, the ground was wet except for where reed stems from previous years had been cut back and laid flat, compacted down into a thick layer.

  ‘Watch how the falcon and the dog work together, they’re looking for waterfowl, or a shorebird. He’s a duck hawk really, that’s what he likes the best.’

  Lena strained her eyes to follow Maurice. He worked hard, sometimes flapping furiously to gain height and then he slid, glided, or wheeled over in a gust. Head-on, his silhouette was like a flattened ‘W’, but sometimes hard light broke through the cloud and hit the underside of his wings. Then he glittered silver for a few seconds, his outline became chrome bright, like a speed-shape from the bonnet of a Polish limousine.

  Out in the reeds, the Labrador advanced, he was soaking wet. He’d tracked a wide circle through the marshy ground, jumping across canals where he could, but swimming if he couldn’t. Where the reeds thinned out, they gave way to larger areas of shallow water. Close to the sedge grasses, the water was still, but out in the channels,
the wind whipped at the surface. The dog jumped into the water and three ducks started flapping and sprinting across the surface in a blind panic. Their wings lifted them and they scattered away in different directions.

  Barry had just enough time to lift Lena into the air before Maurice went into a dive. He folded up like he’d been shot and he literally dropped out of the sky. Lena saw the falcon tear into the duck, very fast and hard with feathers flying where they’d crashed together.

  ‘There you go, that’s dinner I reckon, you’re very lucky to see that first time out! Very lucky, two hundred mile an hour dive, that was!’

  The falcon opened his wings fully, breaking his speed and flaring out into a stall as he approached Barry. Just for a moment, when he was air-breaking, he looked like a red Indian head dress. He set his feet very neatly onto Barry’s forearm.

  One thing Lena couldn’t understand was why the bird came back after he’d been set free.

  ‘Well it’s all he knows, it’s what he understands. Ever since he was a yearling, it’s been me standing here with my glove on. That makes perfect sense to him.’

  The Labrador came out of the reeds with the downed mallard dangling from his mouth. The duck’s shimmering two-tone neck was broken because the head flopped around, the colour flashed peacock green, then deep purple. Lena wanted to pat the dog but his nature had changed. She didn’t think it was the right time to grab his hot ears and scratch his head, not until he’d dropped the bird down beside Barry and become a domestic animal again.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The cement mixer rocked on three, uneven footings, it was tumbling a gritty mix of 3:1, with a flinty aggregate. Ben cut open a fresh bag with the blade of his shovel and threw four scoops into the mixer. Gary, a big dark-haired man with pale skin and flecks of grey-green cement stuck to his hair, stood over the barrel looking in.

  ‘That looks more like it.’