Rose Leopard (18 page)

‘We are all victims of advertising, my love —'

‘Who makes fifty bloody phone-calls just to get quotes for new curtains? Who washes and irons and pays the bills? Who organises our goddamned lives? Me — all the time, me! You're so bloody wrapped up in your world of crappy, unfinished, pseudo-literary stories, so frigging smirkingly self-contained, you do nothing!'

‘Gibber gibber gibber.'

‘Nothing nothing nothing!'

‘Kaz, is this becoming a serious argument? Are you turning our cleansing — dubious as though the concept may be — into full-scale warfare?'

‘What do you care?'

‘It's just that … well, I have an appointment with my gynaecologist at four.'

‘Not funny. Never funny. Why don't you just fuck off?'

‘Kaz?'

‘Go on, fuck off. You're incapable of taking anything seriously. I hate it. Hate it, hate it, hate it! You know, sometimes — no, often — I think that you're demented'

‘Only demented with love, my sweetness.'

‘Don't call me that. It's patronising, again! You're always patronising me. You treat me like a stupid little girl, like this simpering cot-case who just happens to have tits and a warm place for you to park your penis.'

‘Sorry, sugar-plum. Kaz, this cleansing — it's actually a bit of a turn-on for me. Honesty makes me horny.'

‘And don't touch me, especially not there! Or there! Oh, and that's another thing. Don't shove so hard.'

‘Pardon?'

‘When we're having sex, you moron. You forget I'm there then you shove like a piston and grunt and gasp and your breath stinks and it hurts then you come and roll over and don't give a shit, and I'm lying there with bruises and all this soreness, and wondering why the hell I just put up with that, why the hell I just put up with being treated like something inanimate, nothing more than a convenient hole for your shoving fucking satisfaction.'

‘Jesus! Is it always that bad?'

‘Yes … no — sometimes. Sometimes it is. When you're drunk, especially — so that's most of the time, isn't it? I mean, how often do we have sober sex? It's a joke.'

‘Now I am sorry.'

‘You should be! Look, just piss off, Vince, will you? Go on. Go write a poem about modern men being emasculated and misunderstood. Go and bleat truisms on behalf of the burgeoning masculinist movement. I don't want to talk any more.'

‘Kaz, please, this was supposed to be cleansing. How come I feel so soiled?'

‘You just don't get it, do you? You never ever get it, never.'

‘I'm sorry, okay.'

‘Just go, Vince. Go!'

So I went.

Sometimes we tiptoed around the frictions. Sometimes, maddened and hurting, we blasted each other. Sometimes we sat outside — together but apart, married but lonely — our thoughts popping and bubbling but refusing to break surface, refusing to be free.

You're not perfect.

I'm not perfect.

Neither am I.

Nothing is.

Perfection is unattainable. Illusion.

Then, shall we let it go?

Does it really matter?

Is this whole thing a mistake?

And love, is this love? Or a façade?

Or just the way things are …

Sometimes, most times, we did what most couples do. For days on end we avoided any discussion of us, and then we smiled heartily in public and pretended everything was okay. And we both assumed that not mentioning the disruptions was part of our mapped togetherness, a blueprint for what we envisaged as sixty years of shared wisdom.

Late night stillness, glass of cushion-soft burgundy, Mendelssohn gracing the CD player. The phone rings.

‘Sorry for calling so late,' Stu says, too cheerfully. ‘Just wanted to see how you were getting on?'

‘I'm fine,' I tell him. ‘Actually, I've got a bit of a story happening.'

‘Good!' His exultation seems genuine. ‘Can I ask … what it's about?'

I stretch, plonk my feet onto the coffee table.

‘It's a … sort of a kid's fantasy thingummy. Lots of dark and light. Magic. Quests. That sort of stuff.'

‘Goooood! Huge market, Vince. I mean, we're talking HUGE here! Mega. I can see it now: stalking trolls, dark lords. Mm, hidden jewels, muscular sabre-masters with weird Scandinavian names. Sounds great. Can I have a synopsis?'

I do not hesitate.

‘No.'

‘Oh. Um, can I ask why not?'

‘Because —'

‘Because?'

‘Because here, now, it's the story that matters, Stu. The story is what matters. I don't think … I don't want the whole business this time. I don't want products and market-faces and sales appeal and editorial massage. None of that. I just want to tell the story, okay?'

‘Just tell the story?'

‘To my kids,' I say to him. ‘Okay?'

And then he does an amazing thing, my agent fair and foul, and I want to pucker my lips through techno-space and plant a BIG kiss on his BIG shiny forehead.

‘Good idea,' he says. Exactly like that, cool and clean and disarmingly casual. ‘Just tell the story, Vince. Sometimes that's better.'

Yeah, I whisper, though probably to myself only. Sometimes it is.

Four

T
he rose leopard knew that she was through the Mazes of Madness when the strange sucking noises began to fade, and then disappeared altogether. Because she was heading towards the Mother Star, the whole of the Bright Universe seemed even brighter, as if someone had simultaneously flicked the switches of a million lamps. She continued to move forward, still wrapped in her magic cloak, but all the time she could sense the Swicks somewhere around her. She couldn't see them of course, but there was a coolness despite the light, an occasional clammy wetness, like a poltergeist had just licked her cheek.

She knew that there would be other hazards because every Universe in the Spectrum is filled with them — mazes, holes, carnivorous planets, comet attacks — but she did not know for certain what they would be. It was only when she heard the tell-tale sounds — small, light, tinkling — that she realised what was happening. Remember, as I told you before, the universe is silent. Travelling amidst the stars, away from the birds in the gardens, the wheezing mountains, whooshing rivers and echoing deserts, the only thing you might hear is the thumping beat of your own heart and the rise-and-fall of your own breath.

‘Unless, of course,' said the rose leopard to herself ‘you are attacked by the Songmasters.'

The Songmasters are tiny specks of live dust. They swirl throughout the Spectrum in groups of a quintillion or more, barely visible except as a vaguely yellow, sometimes glittery patch. In the brightening light, the rose leopard could not see them at all — but she could hear them, and this is what made the Songmasters so dangerous.

As they swirled, they sang. They sang notes that were pitched so high, notes that were so achingly beautiful, that none could resist listening to them. Their songs were weird but they were seductive too: the music entered your brain and slid around inside, danced merrily with your blood, entranced your mind. It became louder and louder, the pitch increased, the notes soared and soon you were ruled by the Songmasters, held within their music as surely as any mortal imprisoned by rings of titanium. Before you even realised it their songs had total control of you, and suddenly you were tumbling haphazardly, bewitched and besnaggled by the wondrous tunes, tumbling, swirling, falling until you ended up lost at the Bottom of Nowhere, which is a thousand times worse than Hell or anywhere else for that matter.

Now the Songmasters were all around. The rose leopard could hear their singing, a strange blend of noises, like scraping harps or coughing choirs. She could hear the whistles of birds, the cries of the dying, the cracks of falling trees, the psss-snap of burning fires, the swish and lash of new rain, the drumrolls of returning winds, the howls of dervishes: all coming from the Songmasters. She tried to keep moving but the songs had left her numb; her mind was screaming because of the intensity and power of the music. She felt dizzy, as if she had no balance — she stumbled, regained her feet awkwardly, strained to travel on.

‘What can I do?' she thought. ‘Their song has taken me over. How can I stop it? How can I keep going to the Mother Star?'

And the Songmasters came closer and their seeping music filled her even further. She began to despair that her journey was nearly over, that the Swicks would strangle all light and the Bright Universe would be destroyed because of her failure — when suddenly there was something else in her mind, something which challenged the presence of the Songmasters, a fresh goodness that could only have been powered by the Enlightenment.

It was a vision. It had started as a series of indistinct lines, then gradually the lines took shape and texture was added until soon her mind's eye was gazing upon the face of Sibyl, the wisest of all Eternals.

‘Rose Leopard,' Sibyl whispered. ‘Keeper of the Gardens of Replenishment. You must continue. You must …'

The rose leopard concentrated fiercely. The vision of Sibyl became stronger, ushered the Songmasters' tunes into the background, if only for a moment.

‘You must use the cloak,' Sibyl urged. ‘Use the cloak to defeat the Songmasters.'

Then Sibyl's eyes flickered like the last flames of a night bonfire, and as the vision slid away the rose leopard knew that Sibyl had finally filtered into the Void. She was saddened but determined now to beat the Songmasters. She considered the Eternal's advice then, in a moment of clarity, she managed somehow to pull the cloak from behind her. She could feel herself beginning to fall as she twisted the cloak into a thick scarf, then wrapped it around her head, as tightly as she dared. The cloak went over her ears — once, twice, three times — then she tied it and dropped her arms to her side, exhausted by the effort.

The songs were gone.

She could still see the Songmasters — there was an uneven patch of yellowness just nearby — but the music, those brain-splitting tunes, had been blocked out by the magic cloak around her head. She could feel her strength returning, her mind recovering, and as she once again moved towards the Mother Star, she offered a silent thank you to her benefactor, the brave and very wise Sibyl.

‘I like Sibyl.' Otis is in reflection-mode, arms crossed at the chest, chin nestled in the palms of her long, elegant hands. ‘She's like grandma. I'll bet she even has a jar full of those orangey cream biscuits. It's sad she had to die.'

‘She didn't die,' Milo counters. ‘She flittered into the Void. It's totally different.'

Amelia stretches, pulls a ragged fringe from her eyes.

‘What's the third hazard?' she asks.

‘Difficult,' I tell them sombrely. ‘Very difficult.'

The rose leopard travelled quickly now, borne forward by the giant forces of star-gravity and the spirit of the Enlightenment. She knew that the Swicks would probably be ahead of her because she had lost time battling those devious Songmasters. Still, she was progressing well and had renewed hope that she could somehow save the Mother Star, when, suddenly —

She was picked up — smashed, and flattened.

She felt her breath go oomph and the aches in her body bruise instantly, realised that she had encountered something that was very, very hard.

But what? When she gathered her wits and looked in front of herself for a solid object, there was nothing there.

‘Oh,' said the rose leopard, nursing a sore shoulder. ‘Oh dear. I suppose this must be the third hazard: the Swinging Walls of Cosmosia. Lucky I didn't touch the edges, or else …'

Swinging walls are like huge flat planes that arc back and forth randomly. This, and the fact that they are invisible, makes them difficult to pierce. They're only found in a few sections of the Spectrum, usually gathered around something of value such as a Mother Star. The area known as Cosmosia is the final section of space in the Bright Universe. It is hot and empty, without moons or comets or even asteroids, without anything except the Swinging Walls.

‘Like giant axes,' says Milo happily. ‘That is so cool.'

‘Shut up and listen,' admonishes his sister.

Before she had set out on her journey, the rose leopard had been told about the Swinging Walls of Cosmosia by kind-hearted Charyb.

‘You cannot hope to go through them,' the Eternal had said. ‘It is impossible. They cannot be seen and they strike at random. Those who have previously risked breaching the Swinging Walls have been proven to be fools — one touch of those sorcerous edges and they were instantly vaporised. No, there is only one way through. You must break the Enigma that controls them.'

The rose leopard must have looked puzzled because Charyb, who hadn't been going to say any more, gave her a funny stare then continued: ‘All Swinging Walls are controlled by a pre-determined Spectral Enigma. Only one who has the Enlightenment may solve this. When you reach Cosmosia, I shall telepath the Enigma to you — but it is up to you to solve it, then to focus the solution upon the Swinging Walls. Then, and only then, will they cease … and thus, you will be provided with safe access to our beloved Mother Star.'

Now the rose leopard stood before the Swinging Walls of Cosmosia, waiting for Charyb's message. And sure enough it came, entering her consciousness as simply and efficiently as breath enters our lungs. She closed her eyes, relaxed her body and allowed the message to fully transmit. It read:

How big is infinity?

She concentrated again, waited for a second reading to confirm that the message was correct.

How big is infinity?

‘Oh my,' thought the rose leopard, ‘that is a particularly difficult Enigma. How do I solve that?'

She hovered a while and reasoned further. She could offer a massive number as the answer, the most massive she could ever think of — like a zillion gumphillion oberdillion enormotrillion cubic kilometres — but the trouble with numbers was that you could always add another integer. So the largest number in the Spectrum couldn't be ‘infinity' because someone could always just shrug, look superior and say ‘+ 1', and that would be the end of that.

She thought some more. She could offer a comparison, like ‘infinity is as big as Eternity' — but any sentence with ‘as big as' in it was only going to be beaten by another sentence with a more impressive, more calculated ‘as big as' in it. So that was no use.

Then she thought she could say ‘infinity is the biggest' — but that wasn't necessarily true because there might be a place beyond the Spectrum, beyond even their imaginations, that was bigger than infinity, a place of such breadth and width and depth that it had yet to be contemplated.

In which case she would never pass through the Swinging Walls.

Then she had it — the simplest of simple answers came to her in a giddy rush of clarity. The rose leopard allowed herself a slight smile, then once again she called up the Enigma:

How big is infinity?

She closed her eyes, rediscovered her answer and beamed it in the direction of the notorious Swinging Walls of Cosmosia:

Bigger.

Then quietly, tentatively, she resumed her passage towards the brilliant radiance of the Mother Star — and this time, nothing stopped her.

‘Bigger.' Infinity is bigger than anything we can think of, bigger than anything we can see or hear or touch. She had defeated the third hazard. She had solved the Spectral Enigma.

I stop then because uncannily the light has changed. When I look up I see that Francesca is standing in the doorway, her shadow as sleek and sharply contoured as the blade of a knife.

‘Oh, it's Mum,' says Amelia, both surprised and confronted, but I am already staring shamelessly at the woman in the purple velvet dress and black traveller's coat, realising — perhaps for the first time — how much Francesca and Kaz did actually resemble each other, how they shared the same spaghetti-thin lips pushed slightly forward in contemplation, the same intelligent eyes that glittered like polished gemstones, the same brittle spider-arms lined with cobalt veins, but most of all the same emotional atmospheres around them, a deeply ironic mix of poise underscored by fragility. The image flits irresistibly through me: insects, I think, both of you — a pair of miniaturised perfections sailing along on a wet leaf, drinking in the world as you await the inevitability of predators. And what of me, what of sprawling raw-boned irreverent me? What of aimless drifting disrupted me, the unoriginal writer who re-creates someone else's verbose detritus in summer-storm flashes, the unemployed wordsmith who rejected the sorts of static jobs and lives that most of us are not free to reject and who is probably, in real-world terms, chronically unemployable? Am I one of those predators? Now, or before? Have I always been?

‘Um, hallo,' says Francesca. She sounds nervous. ‘Sorry to … well, I did ring the door-bell but there was no answer.'

‘We were down here,' Amelia tells her curtly. ‘You can't hear much down here.'

Francesca nods gently, reminds me of one of those Renaissance portraits that features a duchess with whimsical smile and ermine-lined mantle. For a moment we are all snared; her in the incongruity of the barn's entrance with its sagging beams, splinters and drooping spider-webs, us in a now-familiar tableau of story-telling. The golden light of a pre-autumn day drifts among us; elsewhere, I am certain that I can hear the distant humming and wailing of other civilisations.

Amelia stands, rubs the dullness from her limbs.

‘Come on.' She pulls the children up. ‘There's chocolate hidden in my bedroom for the first person who can find it.'

There is a pause as they register the cue then they rush out, whooping like released prisoners. Yet, I think, each seems to leave a defined space, an emptiness which will, in the future, reaccept their bodies as easily as young fish slide between knobs of coral.

Diminishing sounds, followed by an onset of silence.

‘Well,' I say, trying to ignore the looming sub-text:
Look at what you've let yourself become … belladonna, a rare and poisonous beauty
…

‘Well,' she agrees and I think I can guess the corresponding sub-text:
The flower that I should never have allowed you to touch
…

Caught within the flux, we eye each other cautiously.

‘I — Vince, I don't want any more bad blood,' she says hesitantly.

Bad blood
. I smile at that; it's a brilliant euphemism. I find you distasteful, you find me odious, together we are clashing karma, an unsavoury melange, but it's just
bad blood.
Never mind the indescribable — that once we spent three months shagging (By Appointment Only) because I was idiotic and you were disingenuous. Never mind the fact that we pitter-patter around our shared past like ballet-dancers, that we step past each other with the same lightness as tongues of morning mist falling on pond lilies. This, you say, is no more than
bad blood
?

‘There's no bad blood.' Big lies, sneaky lies, lies that become folklore: they are the building blocks of families.