Part 55 (1/2)

'It's OK,' my father said. He was a well-dressed, handsome man, an actor. He was hearth folk. He came towards Peggy Kram, holding up his pale pink hands. 'Peggy, please. It's OK, really.'

But Peggy could no longer see him. She could see only the horrid creature that had put its red p.r.o.ng between her legs. She saw blood, snot, some ill-defined horror like a piece of meat, wrapped in plastic, left too long in the refrigerator.

'It's It,' she cried, crossing herself in front of me. 'It's Marchosias. G.o.d save us. It's the Hairy Man. G.o.d save us.'

If this was Efica we could have dismissed all this as 'just religion', but this was Voorstand and we were Ootlanders and my father therefore wrapped his strong body around mine. He lifted me into the air with his left arm. He held out his right hand to Jacqui Lorraine.

'It's Dagon,' screamed Peggy Kram. 'G.o.d save us.'

'Goodbye old man,' Bill said to Wally's body.

'It's Red Saatanil,' said Clive Baarder, and I swear he meant it. 'G.o.d save us.'

'G.o.d save us,' hollered Peggy Kram, throwing herself on her knees before the triptych.

We left the dear old Human Ball. We had no choice. We left him grinning, stretched out with his victim. The elevator was rising towards us, but Bill, fearing it contained more a.s.sa.s.sins, led us through the fire door to the stairs.

Why did we flee? We had done nothing wrong. Why did we rush out the back way and abandon our belongings like criminals?

Because, Madam, Meneer, my father had studied your Great Historical Past, and when Mrs Kram began to recite the Thirteen Names, he recognized the ritual from the Geloof Trials of a hundred years before. He saw the way Tristan Smith's own history was moving.

A bright red rail spiralled down twenty storeys to a chessboard floor.

'Hoop,' Bill said, and knelt so he could pick up Jacqui Lorraine around the waist.

She was one hundred pounds. I was sixty-five. When he got astride the banister he had the hundred pounds over the stairs, the sixty-five above the abyss. There was no rehearsal, no net, and his balance was by no means perfect, but as Gabe Manzini rose inside the elevator, as Kram and Baarder screamed the Thirteenth Name down into the pit, we were speeding towards sanity at thirty miles an hour.

On the fifteenth floor we wobbled.

On the twelfth I thought we were dead.

'Ooop-la,' Bill cried, holding us both, spinning on his toes as we landed. He wore his grey silk suit with snakeskin patches. He wore his elastic-sided boots with diamonds in the heels.

56.

If you registered motor cars, like any other country in the world, perhaps you would have tracked us as we ran from you.

But you are who you are, and we who we are, and we drove five days across some of the most beautiful country I have ever seen. We travelled across the dairy belt, up higher and higher into the Gelt Plateau. In other words, we travelled in the opposite direction to the one you had expected, into the country where they still hang the Hairy Man to make the corn grow. We drove through the night, through lone pine forests with no other habitation but simple miners' shacks with their kitsch folk figures in the barren front yards, with their neat stacks of yellow wood lined up along the high verandas, ready for the winter. As we went higher the cornfields were silver, gold, brown. And everywhere the flag, crimson in the morning, carmine in the shade.

After we left Highway 270, we took roads so small they often had no names. Then we travelled through a lace-work of little lanes and plateau towns where you could see tin cut-outs of Bruder Mouse nailed to the barn doors.

Each night we slept in the car, fogging the windows with our life stories Jacqui and her drinking mother, Bill and I and all those long-lost performances at the Feu Follet.

In the early mornings, before dawn, Jacqui left the car and went stealing. You know, by now, exactly what she stole: the three blankets, the raisin buns, the whole round of cheese, the red woollen s.h.i.+rt, all that drearily itemized account which is the substance of the charge against her. But I doubt you know, Meneer, Madam, that d.a.m.n cheese weighed twenty pounds and she dumped it on the roof of the car at five a.m., scared us s.h.i.+tless, laughed herself silly to see Bill Millefleur dancing round the steering wheel trying to get his pants on.

Jacqui had returned the long skirt and blue top to Malide. Now she had another black skirt, a loose grey sweater, and a white singlet. As we travelled higher, as the cornfields grew gold and silver, she also became burnished. Her eyes (perhaps they were always like this, but I only saw it now) became flecked with colour like an opal, beads of soft brown in the hazy blue light, and there was a calm about her, a pa.s.sivity I had never seen in her in all the time I knew her.

She, whose life had been marked by the sharp snapping of her fingers, her need for risk and action, now sat calmly for hours on end. I do not mean to suggest that she travelled silently. Indeed she talked rather a lot.