Weaveworld

‘I’ve told you everything I know.’

‘We’ll start from the beginning. How did you meet the terrorist Suzanna Parrish?’

5

After two and three quarter hours on the carousel, Hobart finally bored of the ride, and pronounced that he was finished with Cal for now. No charges would be pressed, at least not immediately, but Cal should consider himself under suspicion.

‘You made yourself two enemies today, Mooney,’ Hobart said. ‘Me and the Law. You’ll live to regret that.’

Then the rats left.

Cal sat in the back room for five minutes, trying to gather his thoughts, then went up to see how Brendan was faring. The old man was asleep. Leaving his father to his dreams, Cal went in search of his own.

6

She’d gone, of course; long ago.

He wandered around in the vicinity, searching amongst the warehouses, hoping she’d left some message for him, but there was none to be found.

Exhausted by all the day had brought, he headed home. As he stepped through the gate back onto the Dock Road he caught sight of someone watching him from a parked car. One of Hobart’s clan, perhaps; one of the Law- lovers. Maybe Suzanna had been nearby after all, but unable to make her presence known for fear of being spotted. The thought of her being so close, frustrating as it was, cushioned the blow of not seeing her, at least a little. When things were safe, she’d call him and arrange another rendezvous.

In the evening, the wind got up, and it gusted through the night and the following day, bringing the first chill of autumn with it. But it brought no news.

II

DESPAIR

nd so it went on for a week and a half: no news, no news.

He returned to work, claiming his father’s illness as reason for his absence, and took up where he’d left off amid the claim forms. At lunchtimes he came back to the house to heat up some food for Brendan – who, though he could be coaxed from his room, was painfully anxious to return to it – and to feed the birds. In the evenings he made some attempt to tidy the garden; he even patched the fence. But these tasks received only a fraction of his attention. However many diversions he put between himself and his impatience, nine out of every ten thoughts were of Suzanna and her precious burden.

But the more days that went by without word from her, the more he began to think the unthinkable: that she wasn’t going to ring. Either she feared the consequences of trying to make contact or, worse, she no longer could. Towards the end of the second week, he decided to try and find the carpet by the only means available to him. He set the pigeons free.

They rose up into the air in an aerial ovation, and circled the house. The sight reminded him of that first day in Rue Street, and his spirits lifted.

‘Go on,’ he willed them. ‘Go on.’

Round and round they flew, as if orienting themselves. His heart beat a little faster each time it seemed one of them was detaching itself from the flock to head off. Running shoes on, he was ready to follow.

But after all too short a time they began to tire of their liberation. One by one they fluttered down again – even 33 – some landing in the garden, others on the gutters of the house. A few even flew straight back into the loft. Their perches were cramped, and doubtless the night trains disturbed their sleep, but for most of them it was the only habitat they’d ever known.

Though there were surely winds up there to tempt them, winds that smelt of places lusher than their loft beside the railway line, they had no wish to chance their wings on such currents.

He cursed them for their lack of enterprise; and fed them; and watered them; and finally returned despondently to the house, where Brendan was talking of rats again.

III

FORGETFULNESS

1

he third week of September brought rain. Not the torrents of August, which had poured from operatic skies, but drizzles and piddlings. The days grew greyer; and so, it seemed, did Brendan. Though Cal made daily attempts to persuade his father downstairs, he would no longer come. Cal also made two or three valiant efforts to talk about what had happened a month before, but the old man was simply not interested. His eyes became glazed as soon as he sensed the drift of the conversation, and if Cal persisted he grew irritable.

The professionals judged that Brendan was suffering from senile dementia, an irreversible process which would finally make him impossible for Cal to nurse. It might be best for all concerned, they advised, if a place were found in a Nursing Home, where Brendan could be cared for twenty-four hours a day.

Cal rejected the suggestion. He was certain that Brendan’s cleaving to a room he knew – one he’d shared with Eileen for so many years – was all that was keeping him from total breakdown.

He was not alone in his attempts to nurse his father. Two days after he’d failed to set the pigeons flying. Geraldine had appeared at the house. There was ten minutes of hesitant apologies and explanations, then Brendan’s condition entered the exchange and Geraldine’s good sense came triumphantly to the fore. Forget our differences, she said, I want to help. Cal was not about to refuse the offer. Brendan responded to Geraldine’s presence as a child to a long-lost teat. He was cosseted and indulged, and with Geraldine in the house in Eileen’s place, Cal found himself falling back into the old domestic routines. The affection he felt for Geraldine was painless, which was surely the most certain sign of how slight it was. When she was there he was happy to be with her. But he seldom, if ever, missed her.

As to the Fugue, he did his best to keep his memories of it sharp, but it was by no means easy. The Kingdom had ways to induce forgetfulness so subtle and so numerous he was scarcely aware of how they dulled him.

It was only when, in the middle of a dreary day, something reminded him – a scent, a shout – that he had once been in another place, and breathed its air and met its creatures, it was only then that he realized how tentative his recall was. And the more he went in pursuit of what he was forgetting the more it eluded him.

The glories of the Fugue were becoming mere words, the reality of which he could no longer conjure. When he thought of an orchard it was less and less that extraordinary place he’d slept in (slept, and dreamt that this life he was now living was the dream) and more a commonplace stand of apple trees.

The miracles were drifting from him, and he seemed to be unable to hold onto them.

Surely dying was like this, he thought; losing things dear and unable to prevent their passing.

Yes; this was a kind of dying.

2

Brendan, for his part, continued to continue. As the weeks passed, Geraldine managed to talk him into joining them downstairs, but he was interested in little but tea and television, and his conversation was now scarcely more than grunts. Sometimes Cal would watch Brendan’s face as he sat slumped in front of the television – his expression unchanging whether the screen offered pundits or comedians – and wondered what had happened to the