Katy lashed out with her whole bound body and tripped him so he fell, heavily between them. He bolted up, surprisingly fast for his state and size. He lunged at Katy.
“I don’t know what or who to do first!” he cried.
“You’ve promised these people impossible and horrible things,” said Astrid.
“They’ve done it to themselves,” he bellowed, drawing up onto his knees, making a playful grab at Katy. “They had the fucked up space-agey ideas in the first place. They want to think space is all unicorns and happiness and purity—so who am I to stop them? I want to believe that too! That’s what I long for. Purity!”
His hands shot out to grab Katy then, and with enormous strength he pulled her down to him. He dragged on her hair and set about pushing his wet cock in her face. She rolled all too compliantly, the tin-opener’s stubby blade glinting once, brightly on the air, held up close to her face as she made one untidy gash at the base of his cock, squishing it neatly into his balls.
He stared down and his look at first seemed to be one of puzzlement at the way he was losing his erection, and then at the blood rushing out and the wormy silver threads of the tubes from his balls spilling apart in dirty festoons. Then he howled and pitched over onto his side.
There was a pause before the unicorn people came running.
“I know,” breathed Katy. “Jesus God. Jesus fucking God.”
“Katy,” said Astrid. “That is blasphemy.”
The tent flap shot open. “He’s had a heart attack!” Katy shouted, to buy them time.
“He was trying to be fucking us both,” Astrid added, “and he took a massive fatal attack of the heart!”
By then Katy was attacking her own bindings with the tin-opener. Free, she pushed past the stricken followers and dragged Astrid bodily out of the tent.
By the time his followers managed to pull the wailing bulk of the Professor onto his back and discovered his wounds, the women were gone. Katy staggered headlong into the grass, half a German sikh grasped in both arms.
“Murder, Katy,” Astrid was whimpering. “This is murder we have created.”
Nothing more was said until they were back in the hotel room they were sharing.
They looked out the window and saw the fires still raging. There was no sound from Timon and Wendy’s room. There were no policemen at the door, axing their way in, no management calling, no ambulance bawling. They were out in the wilds and the fuss was dying down.
Bloodied and sooty, Katy and Astrid slept.
Timon and Wendy slept half-naked in the grass and they hadn’t fucked at all. He’d fallen asleep inside of her at his first thrust and shrivelled and crept back out and she’d slept too, holding him tightly.
When dawn came they were the first on the whole glen to wake up.
The fires were smouldering gently and sending out purplish, dirty-looking smoke as they died. The horses were all gone. Fled at last. And the dancers, the revellers, the followers of the Professor’s church, lay still on the ground.
“Everyone slept out of doors last night,” said Wendy, dressing hurriedly.
She and Timon stumbled down the hillock towards the fires’ remains. Each member of the church lay oddly straight, at regular intervals on the ground, describing a ragged circle. Each had a square of blue silk over their faces, their chest and arms.
Elsewhere, in the smaller camp, it was the same.
All had neat blue silk covering their faces, except the tortured remains of the Professor, and the last surviving member, the woman in the black sweatshirt whom Wendy had met years before. She was the Church’s very first member and author of their manifesto. She had been laying them out till dawn, until now, when she was sure she was almost too late to catch the Starship as it passed. Quickly she took the pill and lay down beside the fire where the black charred wheelchair sat in a heap of hot rubble. She swallowed the pill down, thinking the Professor was doing some very strange things last night and maybe his ending wasn’t what he had planned. She was thinking that maybe they were wrong to let him get so extreme. Maybe last night he was showing a true underneath self. The unicorn woman couldn’t think straight about it. Yet it was too late now, with everyone following the plan to its end at last. All of them gone home like this. All she could think of was her glimpse of the dying Professor’s ruptured scrotum and those pale ribbons hanging out. She’d thought: That’s all his power spilling away, spilling into the mud? That’s his words, that’s his long sentences coming out of his punctured balls?
She swallowed her pill down and lay straight in the filthy earth and tugged the silk that she’d kept for herself into a neat diamond over her face. She closed her eyes to wait.
FORTY-TWO
In the end all you want to do is protect them. I’d spent so long in the years of being married to Josh wondering if Katy could feel like my daughter. It didn’t matter in the end. She was mine because I wanted to protect her, an urge that came out of nowhere and pushed me to go after her, to check who she was with, what she was doing, that she was safe. When she took up with David—and she did, she took up with him again as soon as we returned to London—I was meant to be jealous and cross, maybe eventually concede and realise that I’d grown older, and let him go by. I never felt like that. Maybe at first I did. What I felt in the end about Katy with David was relieved, that I knew him, and that he was all right really and he’d be good with her. After Argyle she was in a peculiar state. We all were, but it
