‘Yes?’
‘Did They do this? Did They think we might have been on one of those trains?’
‘I don’t think so, son,’ his father said. ‘Remember, They want us alive.’ And as they turned to leave Bailey heard yet again the squeak of the green wheelbarrow…
Moving like a clockwork automaton, Bailey approached the crowd of CalTech students so he could hear what they were saying about the car on the roof of Dabney Hall.
‘They must have lifted it up there with a crane,’ someone suggested.
‘Where would they get a crane that tall?’
‘Maybe they had a teleportation machine.’
Bailey glanced with suspicion at the originator of this last remark, but he saw that the boy had been joking — he didn’t know anything.
‘You’re all dumb-asses,’ someone else said. ‘They took it to pieces, lugged it all up the utility staircase, and put it back together. There’s no other way to do it.’
‘That would have taken all night.’
‘Anything worth doing takes all night. Don’t you remember when they bricked up that door in Page and then painted it over like it was never there?’
‘Where would they even get a car like that? It must be fifty years old.’
So it was just another student prank, thought Bailey. The boys here loved pranks — once, before his death, Marsh had decreed that they must wear jackets and ties for evening meals, and that night they had all arrived for dinner in jackets and ties but no trousers or shoes. He should have known, of course, but for a moment the car on the roof had seemed to him like some sort of malevolent lesion in time. It had been a long while since anything had reminded him of that day. By now some of the students had noticed Bailey standing there, so he nodded at them curtly and walked on towards Throop Hall. On his way past the front desk, Mrs Stiles waved to him. ‘Oh, Professor Bailey, I’ve been calling your lab.’
‘I’m sorry about that, Mrs Stiles, I was at the Gorge Auditorium.’
‘How are the rehearsals coming along?’
‘Very well, I think. Was it anything urgent?’
‘There’s somebody here to see you.’
Bailey couldn’t see anyone waiting. ‘Who?’
‘An old coloured woman. She just went to powder her nose. She says she’s a family friend.’
That wasn’t possible. ‘Did she give her name?’
‘Lucy,’ said Mrs Stiles.
Bailey stared at her.
‘
‘Yes, ma’am,’ said Lucy.
She put down the knife with which she had been boning a chicken and went to wash her hands. It was only then that Bailey’s mother noticed Bailey’s father sitting on a stool by the kitchen window.
‘Tom,’ she said sharply, coming forward into the kitchen. ‘I didn’t know you were down here.’
‘Oh, sweetheart, Lucy and Franklin and I were just having a little tongue wag — weren’t we, son?’
Bailey didn’t look up from his toy steam engine. He was inside the train as well as above it and the great black oven beside him was its coal furnace. With Lucy gone he would have to stoke it himself. His mother waited until the cook had gone out and then said, ‘I wish you wouldn’t do this.’
‘Do what?’ his father said.
‘All these “discussions” with Lucy.’
‘I treasure our discussions.’
She tutted incredulously. ‘I grew up with her, Tom, I love her as much as anyone, but we both know the only reason you keep coming down here is so you don’t have to talk to my father. I’m sorry you think he’s so unbearable.’
‘I don’t see why—’
‘In fact, no, I’m not sorry you think he’s so unbearable. I don’t care what you think of him. I’m only sorry you take such pleasure in being rude to my family. Do you think I like apologising for you all the time?’
‘Oh, sweetheart, you know I don’t mean to offend your daddy any more than necessary. I come down here to talk to Lucy because I like talking to Lucy. Have you ever discussed God with her?’
‘No, Tom, as it happens I haven’t ever discussed God with the cook.’
‘You know she believes in everything? I mean it. Everything. African deities, Red Indian spirits, Catholic saints — they’re all the same to her.’
‘And that’s fascinating to you?’
‘Yes. Because she doesn’t see any contradiction. The priests on Hispaniola taught her grandparents that there’s one god and all different kinds of angels. It’s a sort of cheerful, omnivorous credulity.’
‘It sounds like a child’s religion.’ His mother took off her glasses and folded them up, which was how she showed she was resigned to seeing a tiresome conversation through to its end. Bailey wondered what it would feel like to run the wheels of his steam engine over the raw flesh of Lucy’s chicken.
‘It does have a child’s honesty. The other religions dissemble. Everything that’s in Lucy’s faith is in your parents’ Catholicism too, sweetheart. The difference is that your parents’ Catholicism has to suppress the parts it doesn’t like. Lucy told me that back on Hispaniola her grandparents used to sacrifice livestock, and every so often, if things got desperate, someone might sacrifice a cripple. Her family didn’t take part, she says, but it happened. Don’t you think that’s in Catholicism? All that bloodshed? But it’s hidden. Not very well hidden, though — you’ve seen that crucifix they have on the wall that frightens Franklin so much. And who knows what goes on in that chapel of theirs?’
‘Nothing “goes on” in there. That’s where I was christened.’
‘Then why won’t they let me inside?’
‘You’re an atheist. It’s the family chapel and no atheist has ever set foot in there before. You know that. You’re lucky they even let you into their house. Especially when you behave like this.’
‘No atheist? What about you?’
‘Tom…’
‘You’re not telling me you’ve changed your mind again? That you believe in their god after all? Next you’ll decide you want to let them put him through that initiation ritual.’
‘Confirmation is not an initiation ritual.’
‘Confirmation is bullying our son into joining their cult when he’s still too young to understand why he might not want to.’
‘Our son is right here and when you talk like that you probably scare him a lot more than that trinket on the wall. I don’t want to have this argument again.’
‘Come along, sweetheart, you promised me. You’re going to help me make sure they don’t put him through that. You’re going to talk to your mother about it. Why don’t you go now? She’s always in a good mood when she’s with her orchids.’
That was three weeks before his mother disappeared and his father took him away in the middle of the night…
‘Are you all right, Professor Bailey?’ said Mrs Stiles.
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Stiles, but I don’t have any family friends named Lucy and I won’t have time to see her today.’
Bailey turned and strode away as fast as he could without quite breaking into a jog. He’d come here to pick up some typing from one of the girls but instead he carried on until he was out of Mrs Stiles’s range of vision and positioned himself behind a pillar so that he could observe whoever came out of the women’s bathroom near the reception desk. And then, sure enough, there she was, this shadow out of time. She was old, now, of course, probably almost seventy, walking with a stick, but she didn’t look all that different. Hurrying out of Throop Hall by the doors at the other end, he tried to pretend to himself that he hadn’t seen her, but this was a rupture in his history far harder to deny than that Model T on the roof of Dabney Hall. Some sort of storage tank had been broken open in his head and now he couldn’t seem to stop the memories from gushing through him.
