Читать книгу Calypso Dreaming - Charles Butler - Страница 10

“Why did you come now, Dominic? Why did it take you four years to start looking for me? Did you care if I was alive or dead?”

It had taken only one night to unravel Sophie and Dominic’s truce. Calypso was still in bed – although her open window overlooked the lawn on which Dominic, Sophie and Sal sat, watching the foragers buzz about the hive.

Dominic glanced quickly at Sal. “I knew you were alive.”

“Of course, you’ve got a direct line to God! So why didn’t you know how miserable I was?”

“I knew that too,” Dominic muttered.

“And you didn’t think to drop me a line, to visit? To phone, even once?”

Dominic bit back a word. “Where I was there were no phones. And you didn’t exactly leave a forwarding address. Life is not a game of hide and seek. While you were having your teenage rebellion, half the planet was crashing into ruin. You are my sister, Sophie, and I love you. But when I put your fate against the floods, the poison algae, the triple plagues—”

“You’re dribbling, Dominic,” said Sal.

“Put it in that scale and one person’s misery just doesn’t register. You and I don’t matter much to the world. No one person matters.”

“Screw the world! I needed you more.” Sophie threw the words at him like plates. Dominic let her. She would get tired, as she always did.

“At least,” she said, “you came here eventually.”

Dominic did not reply. He stroked the rim of his glass. Sophie heard the silence, and something unspoken in it. “Why did you come?” she asked.

“I sent for him,” said Sal beside her.

Sophie stared at Sal. Her mouth dropped.

“She did the right thing, Sophie,” Dominic began – but the look on his sister’s face silenced him.

“I can’t believe this,” she said, with a moan of despair. “I thought I could trust you, Sal.”

“It was Calypso,” Sal began, “the things that were happening to her. I was scared. For her and for you, Sophie. I couldn’t think of anyone else to ask. After that time with the music—”

“Music?” interrupted Dominic. “You didn’t tell me about that.”

Sal looked to Sophie for permission. Sophie held her gaze, then tossed it aside. “Tell him, then – tell him everything.”

Sal turned to Dominic. “It was about six months ago. This place wasn’t quite the same then. There were more passers-through, sneaking a holiday at Winstanley’s expense. We didn’t see so much of Winstanley himself. One was a nasty piece of work, a guy called Neil. We named him Masher. Just a joke at first, but later we found out he’d broken his parole and pulped a social worker’s face. He was trying to lie low, but someone like that can’t be anywhere without trying to take control. You never knew when he was going to take a swing at you. Most of the time he was drunk though, lying in his room with the speakers full up. All that beauty outside and he might as well have been in prison. The time Calypso was ill last Christmas, he kept everyone on edge with that machine-gun music. Sophie begged him to stop. He just pushed her out of his room, cracked her head against the stairs. Calypso saw that.”

“Now,” interrupted Sophie, “we don’t know if Calypso had anything to do—”

“Next morning we found him lying in bed. The tape was going round and round in the machine, but no sound except the hum of the speakers turned up full. We played it again afterwards. There was no sound on that tape, only the spindle squeaking—”

“Gulls,” said Sophie. “It was the gulls outside the window.”

“There was a trickle of blood coming from Neil’s ear. When we woke him he didn’t seem to know who he was. He couldn’t hear us at all. They said he had a perforated ear drum. As though a grenade had gone off just by his head, they said. Only none of us had heard a thing …”

“You can’t think Calypso would do a thing like that deliberately,” Sophie muttered.

“And something else. His arm was covered with little scratches and bite marks. A stoat, Davy Jones thought. But—”

“Don’t tell me, there are no stoats on Sweetholm,” Dominic said.

Sal grimaced. “Calypso has no guile. When Sophie asked her, she didn’t try to hide it. She just said, ‘But Mummy, he pushed you! He pushed you, Mummy!’ Those big eyes staring. It broke my heart.”

“What do you say, Sophie?” asked Dominic at last.

Sophie sighed. “I knew Calypso had done it – done it somehow. For me she’d taken on that bully and flushed him out. Oh, it frightened me. Somewhere in the pit of my stomach it sickened me. But … I was proud too. That power streaking from her!” She stopped and eyed him with dull hostility. “But you’re the last person to understand.”

Dominic looked puzzled.

“It’s obvious, isn’t it? My whole life I’ve been pushed around – by Mum and Dad, by teachers. And by you, Dominic—”

“Sophie!”

“Don’t say you hadn’t noticed! You were always so sure what you wanted. You always saw everything as your duty, God’s will. How could I compete with that? I’m not blaming you – it was easier to fit in. I was just ordinary, you see? Nothing special about me, till Calypso came along.”

“Till Joe swam into the rip tide,” Sal corrected her.

Sophie spread her skirt about her, with the fleur de lys. “I guess.” Her gaze lingered on Calypso. “And now that’s turned sour too.”

“Not if we can help it, Sophie.”

“You see,” Sophie said, suddenly urgent, “she doesn’t understand at all. She’s only a child. It’s not her fault she’s the way she is.”

“I know that,” soothed Dominic. “I came to help her, Sophie, if I can.”

“I suppose once they would have called her a witch. We’d both have been for the bonfire in those days. Now, no one knows what to do with us. When she was born …”

“Yes? What is it, Sophie?”

Sophie tried again. “When she was born she was so small, with that coat of downy hair all over her scarlet body. The doctor kept giving her to me to hold, saying she would lose the hair in a few days, that it was nothing to worry about, it was commoner than you’d think, it was all right. He was scared I’d reject the little scrap, you see?”

“He didn’t know Sophie,” said Sal proudly.

“After Neil, Sal persuaded me to take Calypso back to the mainland for tests, but it was still the same. They looked at her and all they saw was the fur on her legs, the eyes, the webbing of her toes and fingers. I overheard the nurses discussing her.‘How’s the Beautiful Freak today?’ they said.”

“She hated hospital,” said Sal. “They were talking about plastic surgery, grafts and all sorts. But when they lifted up her hand her fingers clenched so tight … It was pitiful, Dominic. She cried every time Sophie left the room. She wouldn’t use words, just shrieked like an animal. And of course their instruments began to go haywire. That’s when I knew.”

“Knew what?”

“That we had to leave. They’d done all their tests, you see, dozens of them and they were trying to think of more. They didn’t have a name for what she was and they couldn’t stand it – not having a label for her. They were going to poke her about until she gave them a name. And I thought: this is an interrogation.”

“And Calypso was a suspect, a criminal,” said Sophie. “That’s why I ran away …”

Between them they finished their confession. Dominic stared down the bridge of his nose into his glass.

“You suspect something yourselves, it seems,” he said.

Sal hesitated. “You’ve been at Lasithi, in the camps. You’ve seen how the Red Leprosy strikes there. We’ve only heard rumours, the radio tells us nothing. But they say the children develop gifts sometimes. Prophecy, second sight. As if nature were trying to compensate them …”

“And you’re wondering if that’s true of Calypso?” Dominic shook his head. “Believe me, no. I’ve seen cases like that often. Those children! The eyes are cataracts, mother of pearl and weeping. But their magic is usually no more than a fakir’s trick. They stick a red-hot needle through a limb where there is no feeling. They are cunning and pathetic, but their ambitions stretch no further than the coin in your pocket. Calypso here is a different case entirely.”

“Calypso is not a case.”

“Sal, if you knew! I have to think that way, to keep sane. But Calypso—”

“Quiet!” cried Sophie. “I’m sure I heard her calling!”

Sure enough, Calypso had flung her shutters wide and was singing from the bedroom window above their heads:

“White bird featherless

Fell from paradise,

Over the garden wall …”

Her voice was a silken filament of sound, drifting in the air. It coiled invisibly about the garden, and silenced them.

“Here comes Lord Landless,

Takes it up handless,

Rides away horseless –

Off to the King’s Great Hall!”

Dominic came in for breakfast, which in the Manor was taken around two long trestle tables, at no fixed hour. He sat near two young men who were helping themselves to cereal from an economy-size packet. He tried again to discover what kind of house he was staying in.

“Have you lived here long?” he asked them.

“Nine months,” said one of the men.

“Nine months, one week and two days,” added his friend. “To be precise.”

“If you want precision.”

“Otherwise, nine months will do.”

Dominic smiled thinly. “Then you know Gerard Winstanley well?”

“It depends what you mean by knowing, doesn’t it? ‘What do I know?’ – that’s Winstanley’s motto.”

By now, half a dozen of the Manor’s residents were staring at Dominic politely.

“You want to know about Gerard Winstanley?” asked the oldest, a woman of about forty.

“Haven’t you seen him yet?”

“He lives upstairs with his computers. Playing the market.”

“Surfing the net.”

“Hacking into the World Bank,” said another man, entering.

“Mike!” the woman reproved him. “You know he doesn’t do that.”

“No, no, I forgot,” said Mike. “Winstanley’s straight as a die.”

“No one’s forcing you to stay in his house.”

Dominic made a tactical withdrawal into a slice of toast. As a matter of fact he had already gathered some information about the Manor’s inhabitants, these and the rest of the hangers-on who used the Manor as a meeting place if not a home. Half a dozen tepees had been pitched in the meadow beyond the moat, in the shade of one of Sweetholm’s few acres of woodland. Much of the time they appeared unoccupied, but occasionally he was able to spy the smoke from a camp fire and a furtive clustering of campers round it. A trip to the Manor’s kitchen for water was not unheard of, nor was a trip for food, all of which Winstanley dispensed without question. The distinction between the campers and the Manor’s more permanent residents appeared only nominal.

Of all the people who crossed the moat and walked the path to the Manor’s front door only Davy Jones was a native of Sweetholm. The divisions between tourist and local, farmer and fisherman, meant nothing to him. The rest of the islanders stayed in their smallholdings, or the narrow strip of coastal buildings round the Haven. Dominic knew what they called the Manor folk. The God-Botherers – with a hint of a sneer in the voice.

By now, Gerard Winstanley had arrived at the breakfast table. He was a neat man in his fifties. Both chin and scalp were clean shaven and he was trimly dressed in close-fitting jersey and chinos. Dominic would have known him at once. His movements had an authority that immediately shifted the room’s centre of gravity, though Winstanley was doing nothing more than stare ruefully at the bottom of a glass jar.

“Sometimes,” he said, “I wonder why I put myself through it all. The blackcurrant jam’s been scraped clean and I’m reduced to this pitiful shop-bought stuff.” His prominent brow began to crease in lines of self-pity.

“It’s because we make you feel young, darling. Admit it!” cried the older woman. On her way out she hugged Winstanley impulsively from behind.

“Old! You make me feel very old,” said Winstanley and let a little milk spiral into his coffee. “These people treat me appallingly,” he said, laughing, to Dominic. “You’ve no idea.”

Dominic smiled.

“You bring that on yourself,” said Mike. “All the dossers looking for an easy ride, the bigots down in the Haven, all that talk of the God-Botherers. You enjoy it.”

“Let’s say I’d go mad if I didn’t have the stimulation you delightful people give me. I’d be a mad old fool hutched up with just a keyboard for company. But enjoy?”

He pulled a long-suffering expression. Dominic looked away, to the weathercock that pirouetted on the gable of the barn. The wind was turning the bird to and fro, sliding light off its gilded skin.

“I must fetch the rest of my things from my van,” he said. “There’s a storm coming.”

“Harper will help you.”

“I’d rather—” Dominic began, but seeing that Harper had already risen, added, “Thank you, I’ve very little to carry. But you’re kind.”

“Come to my office afterwards, Mr Fowey,” called Winstanley as he left. “We’ll need to talk.”

Harper trotted after him into the yard, where the breeze was beginning to raise eddies of straw and loose paper. In fact, the back door of the van was hanging open too.

“Seems I’ve had visitors,” Dominic remarked. Inside the van the floor and the basin were printed with crows’ feet. A loaf had been hollowed out by their beaks and the food was tainted. Dominic looked behind him and saw Harper watching with grey eyes. He was, what – thirteen maybe? Sal had been right in her letter: an Aquarian child.

The state of the van seemed not to astonish Harper at all. Instead, he asked, “Is it true you came from Africa?”

Dominic started to strap up his sleeping bag, tightening a leather belt that had been skewered with an extra hole for the purpose. “Take this,” he said, lobbing it down. He shouldered his small canvas bag. “Why? What do they say about me?”

“They say you’ve been working in the camps in Africa. You know – with the Red Leprosy. At least, that’s what Sal told Mr Winstanley. She told him you were a priest.”

Dominic smiled at that. “Crete, for the last year. Africa before. Why do you ask?”

“I’m interested. I thought maybe I should do that kind of work myself. I don’t mean as a Healer. I want to be a nurse.”

Dominic stepped down from the van and slammed the door shut behind him. “The Asklepians always need help. You’ve seen the TV I expect.”

“There isn’t a TV here. But when we were travelling, yes,” Harper nodded. “Those big camps in the desert. Kids with stumps where their hands and feet should be. They look so scared, always. I don’t know how you carry on.”

“How could we stop?” asked Dominic. He clasped his hands in front of him, staring at his fingers’ ends. “The plague strikes at random – maybe one child in a family will fall, maybe a whole village. The army makes no exceptions: they’re all trucked out to the isolation camp, to live or die. And most live, with our help.” He sighed, as if that thought were melancholy. “The disease runs its course, they return home, they take to beggary. People give them food, although they hate them. It’s bad luck to refuse and their curse is deadly. So they are kept just fed on the street corners. I don’t know if I do them any favour in saving their lives.”

“You do what you can,” said Harper.

“What I was born to do, yes. Till now I’ve never doubted that my gift was a blessing from God.”

Harper was working his way round to another question. Dominic could feel himself being weighed. Harper, he guessed, was not a boy who would trust anyone easily, for all his placidity. But his trust once bestowed might be tenacious. “What is it?”