Desolation (7 page)

“Careful,” Cain said, “you'll wear away your skin.”

“There's always new skin,” she said, closing her eyes as she rubbed at her forehead.

“So where have you been?” he asked.

“Huh?”

“To play the clown?”

“Oh, nowhere. Here. One show's over, the next could begin at any time.”

“Street performer, then.”

“I'm an impersonator, Cain. Always working.” She grinned, and he saw her real smile for the first time, the clown's face having been rubbed into
oblivion. It was challenging and attractive, confident and brash. It dared him to talk back.

“So who are you without the makeup? Still Magenta?”

“I'm always Magenta.” She dropped the paper towels, sighed, leaned to the side so that she could see her reflection in the window. She looked for a full thirty seconds, as if it was the first time she had really seen herself. “That'll have to do for now.” She took a long sip of her coffee.

Cain drank, looked around, but his gaze was always drawn back to Magenta. Her eyes pulled him in, green, gorgeous, intelligent, sparkling with wit. And she was strong, he could see that. She intimidated him. He glanced at her breasts and away again. She smiled.

“So how do you like your flat?”

“It's fantastic!” he said, pleased for the distraction. “Much better than I expected from . . .”

“From the outside? Yeah, everyone says that. It's a shit hole from the outside, but I think Peter does that on purpose. Keeps away the undesirables.”

Cain shrugged. “It's the inside that matters.”

“You think so?” Magenta asked, staring with an intensity that made Cain shift in his seat. “You think the facade is unimportant? Surely it's part of the whole effect?”

Word games again
, Cain thought, but he only shrugged again. He wanted to chat to this woman—his neighbor—not enter into some deep philosophical debate.

“Well,” she said, but her sentence fizzled out in the smoky café air.

They sat together and drank coffee, ate cake, stared from the window at the few people walking by, and only when the silence started to become awkward did Magenta ask Cain where he came from.

He had no wish to answer. If she knew his background, it would surely scare her off. She was pretty unique, of that he was sure, but she was a woman with a job, an income, and a flat of her own. Cain was, as the kids in the street had greeted him, another fuckin' nutter.

“I've just come here for a change,” he said.

Magenta smiled and nodded. “Another fucking nutter, then.”

Cain sat back and blinked at her, shocked as much by her brashness as what she had said.
The siren
, he thought,
it'll bear in and take me down soon, so much input here, so much to see and hear and smell and understand about this strange woman
. But the siren remained silent, and when Magenta laughed it was a pleasant sound, and he knew that she was not really mocking him.

“I'm sorry,” she said, still giggling, “that's really fucking awful of me. I'm so sorry. It's just that Peter makes a living hiring out his flats to people who may not be able to get accommodation elsewhere. He's much more . . . open-minded.” She raised her eyebrows and sat up straight. “How polite is that? I'm even complimenting myself, considering what I've done.”

“What?” Cain asked, but she ignored him again.

“So please accept my apology, Cain. Don't want us to start off on the wrong foot. It goes for an entertaining time living in Endless Crescent—and
there's
a name! You don't seem all that unusual to me, to be honest. Nice guy. Something about your eyes, though . . .”

“I'm sorry if you don't like the way I look at you,” he said, not really meaning it.

“No, not that, not at all. I mean, there's something powerful in there, deep, and deep down.” She leaned across the table, knocking over her cup but ignoring the rush of coffee into her lap. She moved so close to Cain that he could smell her, strangely muted traces of coffee and the tang of something more elusive. “It's as if you know so much more,” she whispered, and for the first time Cain thought he was hearing her true voice.

“I read a lot of books,” he said.

Magenta snorted, sat back down, wiped at the spilled coffee. “Right, that'll be it, then.”

They fell silent for a couple of minutes, Cain picking at his cake, Magenta scratching at the remnants of makeup and smiling at him. “Not much of a conversationalist, are you?”

“I haven't had much experience of it,” he said.

“Was it so bad, the place you came from?”

Cain wondered which place she could mean—his father's house of torture and deprivation, or the Afresh home with the Voice and the Face doing their best to make him better—but then he realized that she knew neither.

“Only as bad as my memories make it,” he said.

“Oh, very profound.”

“Memory's changeable, don't you think? You ever had a dream that you thought was a memory, or a memory that may have been a dream?”

Magenta stopped picking makeup from the corner of her eye and nodded. “Oh yes.”

“What's happened to me is like that.”

“And what
did
happen to you?”

“You're very forthright,” he said. She smiled, but did not withdraw her question. “Well, I've told you as much as I want to,” Cain said. “As much as I've told anyone since . . . Well. And here we are, only just met.”

“I'm glad you're living in Flat Five!” Magenta said, and she sat back and picked at her cake, embarrassed.

“So when is your next impersonation job?”

“It's not a job, it's my way. And I have no idea. The urge has yet to take me.”

“You still have makeup on your face.” Cain was suddenly tempted to reach over and touch Magenta's skin, wipe away the paint and feel how hot she burned beneath. But that would be far too familiar. The siren had once blasted him every time he touched something. It lasted for a week.

“I'll wash it off later. Cain, it's been a pleasure, and now I have to go. I'll get this.” Magenta stood and threw a five-pound note on the table.

“Hang on!” Cain had no idea why he was asking her to wait, or whether he even had anything to say. She raised her eyebrows, inviting him to continue. “You're right,” he said at last. “Everyone's scared of clowns.”

She nodded and left, and he wondered just how much of himself he had revealed in that parting shot.

 

He remained in the café for a few minutes, finishing his cake and taking a few guilty bites from the slab Magenta had left on her plate. He hummed to himself, that familiar tune he knew but had never been able to name, and looked around as if expecting to find someone staring at him from another table.

After paying with Magenta's money, Cain bought a Mozart CD from a small music shop several doors away. He took his time walking home, still humming that tune, hoping against hope that Mozart would put a name to it but knowing that, as usual, it would remain a mystery.

He had memories of a time when his father tried to operate on him.

Cain is directed into a small room in the basement of the house, a place he has never been or seen before. It has a strange new feel to it, as if it has been added to the house or opened up only recently. Perhaps his father has just discovered this room. Its bright surfaces glare under the highwattage lighting, the walls polished and gleaming, ceiling white and reflective, the few pieces of functional furniture all chrome and plastic sheets. If the room has not actually been built as an operating theater, then it must have taken little effort to turn it into one.

The furniture consists of an operating table—with channels for blood and fluids along either side and straps and buckles for tying the subject down—and a simple trolley covered with a surgeon's
paraphernalia. Cain sees scalpels and saws, probes and clamps, gauze and stitching. He also sees more esoteric equipment, such as several acorns sharpened to a point, a large feather apparently dipped in molten metal, and a selection of pickled eggs of various species. He has no idea what purpose any of these could serve, but they are mingled with other equipment as if a natural part of any operation. He goes to ask his father, but the old man is washing himself vigorously at a sink in the corner. Not only his hands but his face, neck and shoulders, his arms and chest, scrubbing with a chunk of rough soap, scrubbing so hard that the flesh of his saggy stomach and hips wobbles with each movement. His skin is red-raw where he has washed, and Cain is sure that the surface will split at any moment.

Eventually, his father turns around, pink and glowing from the wash, hands held up, fingers splayed, and smiles down at his son.

It's all for the best
, he says.
Sometimes a process has to be accelerated. You have to be helped along. How can you gain Pure Sight when your eyes pollute your mind?

He sends Cain into the next room to strip and prepare for the operation. (Cain—eleven years old then, maybe twelve—can remember that room in detail, even though in reality he is quite certain that none of this has ever taken place.) There is a gown laid out on a bench, paper underwear, a paper hat with a ridiculous painted smiley face, as if to grin away the terror. There is also a toilet in the corner of the room, unscreened and without a seat. He
needs to go before the operation—the thought of fouling himself under anesthetic is awful—but he cannot bring himself to sit down and try. There is no privacy here. There is also no one else in the house to see, but with that thought comes a low, variable humming noise from elsewhere in the room. There is a definite tune to this, and although Cain is sure he has heard its like before, it is unfamiliar. He looks around and there is no one with him, only shadows where light should fall.

He strips and the humming alters its tone, as if changed by grinning lips.

The gown is rough and itchy. The underwear is worse. Cain folds his clothes on the chair, then opens the door to go back into the operating theater. The sourceless humming stops with a snigger, or perhaps it is the door hinge squeaking. From upstairs he hears the heating creaking on, the boiler firing up; the realization that they were still at home comes as something of a surprise, and yet, perversely, a comfort as well.

Cain's father smiles as he loads a syringe with a foul green concoction, something glowing and steaming that will put Cain to sleep, small things bumping frantically in the glass tube as if eager to dull his consciousness.

It's all for the best
, his father says, and his eyes have taken on the same sickly green tinge.

Cain lies down on the operating table and falls asleep.

In his dream he imagines a cool, scarp scalpel descending toward his eye, and when he wakes up he is always somewhere else.

 

He was unsure whether this was the memory of an old dream, skewed into a version of reality by time, or something more removed. There were no scars, no acorns pressed into his eyes, no feathered cuts across his throat. There was no evidence that this had ever happened at all.

Memory was a fickle thing, exercised as it was in a place where true imagination was the only place to wander.

Cain paused outside Flat Three, smiling selfconsciously at the door in case Magenta was already home and watching him. He moved closer to listen. No sounds from inside, no music, no signs of life. Perhaps that urge to impersonate had taken her again on the way home. He wondered whether she had always been a clown, but it seemed quite certain that she had not. He looked at his fingers and saw colorful makeup smeared there, but then he remembered that he had not touched her after all, and the paint was gone.

He had seen nothing when he looked into her eyes—nothing more than he should have—and he was glad. He did not like knowing more. It made him believe that he was more like his father than he could bear.

He stood there for some time, thinking about Magenta, wondering who she was. An impersonator, but for whom had she been impersonating? Was she a true street artist, practicing her art for the love of it and nothing more? He had not seen a collection dish as she sat outside the takeaway. And
a dozen local shops were probably not the best place to do something like this for profit.

She had been eating when he arrived; she had only actually performed for him.

“No,” he muttered against the wood of her door.

“I would.”

Cain spun around. A man stood on the staircase leading from the ground floor, one foot on the first-floor landing, a bag in each hand. He had a long gray ponytail and a face as wrinkled as old leather. Cain felt vaguely guilty at being discovered leaning against Magenta's door, and he would have apologized if the man had not spoken first.

“I mean, I'm sure you would too. Sexy girl. Mostly. Difficult to tell sometimes, of course.”

“I don't think I know you,” Cain said, uttering the obvious, buying time to recover from the shock. His heart was beating the same way it did when the siren sounded, and he felt chided by this stranger.

“You don't, yet.” Saying no more, the stranger set the bags down on the landing, unlocked the door to Flat Four, picked up his bags, glanced once more at Cain, and went inside. The door slammed shut, locks were thrown, chains rattled, and seemingly before the last key had turned Cain heard the first muted hoot of a pan pipe.

“Nice to meet you too,” he said, but his anger lasted only seconds. It was melted away by the music. There was no real tune, but there is no order to the roaring of waves on rocks or the whisper of leaves in a breeze, and yet they comfort and ease. The music came to a sudden stop, cut off by a dull
thump, and Cain hurried up the stairs to Flat Five. He glanced at the scored door next to his while he fumbled with his keys. Vlad had been found with his stomach eaten, Peter had said. Cain wondered whether whatever had done it had been looking for someone else.