whirlwind. His wings held steady in the revolving air around the funnel. Like a pilot fish he soared in, as if steering the tornado towards Leonora’s villa.
Twenty seconds later, when it struck the house, I lost sight of him. An explosion of dark air overwhelmed the villa, a churning centrifuge of shattered chairs and tiles that burst over the roof. Beatrice and I ran from the yacht, and lay together in a fault in the glass surface. As the tornado moved away, fading into the storm-filled sky, a dark squall hung over the wrecked villa, now and then flicking the debris into the air. Shreds of canvas and peacock feathers fell around us.
We waited half an hour before approaching the house. Hundreds of smashed glasses and broken chairs littered the terrace. At first I could see no signs of Leonora, although her face was everywhere, the portraits with their slashed profiles strewn on the damp tiles. An eddying smile floated towards me from the disturbed air, and wrapped itself around my leg.
Leonora’s body lay among the broken tables near the bandstand, half-wrapped in a bleeding canvas. Her face was as bruised now as the storm-cloud Manuel had tried to carve.
We found Van Eyck in the wreck of the marquee. He was suspended by the neck from a tangle of electric wiring, his pale face wreathed in a noose of light bulbs. The current flowed intermittently through the wiring, lighting up the coloured globes.
I leaned against the overturned Rolls, holding Beatrice’s shoulders. There’s no sign of Nolan – no pieces of his glider.’
‘Poor man. Raymond, he was driving that whirlwind here. Somehow he was controlling it.’
I walked across the damp terrace to where Leonora lay. I began to cover her with the shreds of canvas, the torn faces of herself.
I took Beatrice Lafferty to live with me in Nolan’s studio in the desert near Coral D. We heard no more of Nolan and never flew the gliders again. The clouds carry too many memories. Three months ago a man who saw the derelict gliders outside the studio stopped near Coral D and walked across to us. He told us he had seen a man flying a glider in the sky high above Red Beach, carving the strato-cirrus into images of jewels and children’s faces. Once there was a dwarf’s head.
On reflection, that sounds rather like Nolan, so perhaps he managed to get away from the tornado. In the evenings Beatrice and I sit among the sonic statues, listening to their voices as the fair-weather clouds rise above Coral D, waiting for a man in a dark-winged glider, perhaps painted like candy now, who will come in on the wind and carve for us images of seahorses and unicorns, dwarfs and jewels and children’s faces.
Prima Belladonna
I first met Jane Ciracylides during the Recess, that world slump of boredom, lethargy and high summer which carried us all so blissfully through ten unforgettable years, and I suppose that may have had a lot to do with what went on between us. Certainly I can’t believe I could make myself as ridiculous now, but then again, it might have been just Jane herself.
Whatever else they said about her, everyone had to agree she was a beautiful girl, even if her genetic background was a little mixed. The gossips at Vermilion Sands soon decided there was a good deal of mutant in her, because she had a rich patina-golden skin and what looked like insects for eyes, but that didn’t bother either myself or any of my friends, one or two of whom, like Tony Miles and Harry Devine, have never since been quite the same to their wives.
We spent most of our time in those days on the balcony of my apartment off Beach Drive, drinking beer – we always kept a useful supply stacked in the refrigerator of my music shop on the street level – yarning in a desultory way and playing i-Go, a sort of decelerated chess which was popular then. None of the others ever did any work; Harry was an architect and Tony Miles sometimes sold a few ceramics to the tourists, but I usually put a couple of hours in at the shop each morning, getting off the foreign orders and turning the beer.
One particularly hot lazy day I’d just finished wrapping up a delicate soprano mimosa wanted by the Hamburg Oratorio Society when Harry phoned down from the balcony.
‘Parker’s Choro-Flora?’ he said. ‘You’re guilty of overproduction. Come up here. Tony and I have something beautiful to show you.’
When I went up I found them grinning happily like two dogs who had just discovered an interesting tree.
‘Well?’ I asked. ‘Where is it?’
Tony tilted his head slightly. ‘Over there.’
I looked up and down the street, and across the face of the apartment house opposite.
‘Careful,’ he warned me. ‘Don’t gape at her.’
I slid into one of the wicker chairs and craned my head round cautiously.
‘Fourth floor,’ Harry elaborated slowly, out of the side of his mouth. ‘One left from the balcony opposite. Happy now?’
‘Dreaming,’ I told him, taking a long slow focus on her. ‘I wonder what else she can do?’
Harry and Tony sighed thankfully. ‘Well?’ Tony asked.
‘She’s out of my league,’ I said. ‘But you two shouldn’t have any trouble. Go over and tell her how much she needs you.’
Harry groaned. ‘Don’t you realize, this one is poetic, emergent, something straight out of the primal apocalyptic sea. She’s probably divine.’
The woman was strolling around the lounge, rearranging the furniture, wearing almost nothing except a large metallic hat. Even in shadow the sinuous lines of her thighs and shoulders gleamed gold and burning. She was a walking galaxy of light. Vermilion Sands had never seen anything like her.
‘The approach has got to be equivocal,’ Harry continued, gazing into his beer. ‘Shy, almost mystical. Nothing urgent or grabbing.’
The woman stooped down to unpack a suitcase and the metal vanes of her hat fluttered over her face. She saw us staring at her, looked around for a moment and lowered the blinds.
We sat back and looked thoughtfully at each other, like three triumvirs deciding how to divide an empire, not saying too much, and one eye watching for any chance of a double-deal.
Five minutes later the singing started.
At first I thought it was one of the azalea trios in trouble with an alkaline pH, but the frequencies were too high. They were almost out of the audible range, a thin tremolo quaver which came out of nowhere and rose up the back of the skull.
Harry and Tony frowned at me.
‘Your livestock’s unhappy about something,’ Tony told me. ‘Can you quieten it down?’
‘It’s not the plants,’ I told him. ‘Can’t be.’
The sound mounted in intensity, scraping the edges oft my occipital bones. I was about to go down to the shop when Harry and Tony leapt out of their chairs and dived back against the wall.
‘Steve, look out!’ Tony yelled at me. He pointed wildly at the table I was leaning on, picked up a chair and smashed it down on the glass top.
I stood up and brushed the fragments out of my hair.
‘What the hell’s the matter?’
Tony was looking down at the tangle of wickerwork tied round the metal struts of the table. Harry came forward and took my arm gingerly.
‘That was close. You all right?’
‘It’s gone,’ Tony said flatly. He looked carefully over the balcony floor and down over the rail into the street.
‘What was it?’ I asked.
Harry peered at me closely. ‘Didn’t you see it? It was about three inches from you. Emperor scorpion, big as a lobster.’ He sat down weakly on a beer crate. ‘Must have been a sonic one. The noise has gone now.’
After they’d left I cleared up the mess and had a quiet beer to myself. I could have sworn nothing had got on to the table.
