The Crack (4 page)

‘Matter and energy,' he muttered to himself. Then he decided to tell his secret to his wife.

‘That big red O.' He paused solemnly. ‘You saw it? It is my belief –'

‘That was the Odeon Marble Arch under there,' Tommy pointed out. He turned up his transistor and prised open a tin of Persian caviar.

‘O for Odeon,' the youngest daughter trilled. ‘Ben's buried in a cinema.'

She gave a high laugh and Waters turned away, his heel scraping the edge of the Jumbo's nose. A wave of sadness and despair filled him.

The Nash terraces along Regent's Park had been thrown several hundred feet in the air, so that they resembled a series of slides of the Acropolis in Athens.

With a low murmur of appreciation, Greta got out her camera and started snapping. Waters wandered dejectedly away, skirting the fallen chestnuts in the big avenue.

In the distance, like the sound of tons of water being released from a pent-up dam, something was rushing closer.

At the foot of the splendid pillars of the ruin of Chester Terrace, Waters fell to the ground in fear.

Another crashing Jumbo Jet? A real spacecraft this time?

He closed his eyes and waited.

By the time Baba reached the river, her head and her feet were aching so much that she had completely forgotten the strange death of Simon Mangrove. Following Medea seemed the obvious, natural thing to do.

None of the women, who walked, Baba noticed, with an odd determination, as if their destination had been set for them centuries before and they had only just been permitted to reach it, paid any attention to the two robed analysts in their wake. Only one – a girl of about nineteen who told Baba she was called Noreen and worked as a waitress in the Hilton – burst out laughing when Thirsk and Harcourt subsided on to the ground at the corner of Flood Street and what had once been the Embankment.

‘No place for them where we're going,' she said with another giggle.

‘Why?' Baba asked eagerly. ‘Where
are
we going anyway? I don't think I can walk much longer,' she added, close to tears.

‘Can't you
feel
where we're going?' Noreen said. She hugged her arms to her body in enthusiasm. ‘No more washing up. No more frilly aprons,' she ran on in the quick trilling voice Baba found so attractive. ‘Same for you, Baba. No more serving drinks dressed as a rabbit. What do you think?'

Baba reached behind and felt for her furry tail. It was hard to understand Noreen when she talked like this.

‘What about the other women?' she said. ‘What's in it for them where we're going?'

At this, a head-scarfed woman of about fifty turned round. ‘Supper on the table at six when he gets home,' she snapped out. ‘Wash it up. Darn the clothes. TV. Bed.'

‘No more of that,' suddenly chorused a whole section of the procession.

‘Up with the baby at six,' a youngish woman just behind Baba crooned in her ear. ‘Cereals for the school-goers. Sausages too. Vacuum the sitting-room.'

‘No more of that,' came a strong gust of sturdy voices.

‘Stop at the launderette on the way back from work,' the older woman continued. ‘Stand in the queue for the food when the shop's closing anyway.'

‘No more of that,' Baba muttered with the others. She felt it only polite to join in. But where could this place be that had no cereals or vacuums or TV? She gazed anxiously at Noreen for the answer.

‘Now you understand,' Noreen laughed. ‘Look, Baba – why don't you do the same?'

There was a chorus of approval as Noreen tugged at her eyelids. A pair of what looked like dead black centipedes fluttered to the ground, and several of the women clapped.

‘Do I have to get rid of mine too?' Baba asked miserably. Already she wished that she hadn't chosen to follow Medea to the river. But at the time there had seemed to be no alternative. Cautiously, she glanced either side of her. Whichever way she looked, it was a bad prospect.

The crack in the river-bed had widened even in the short time it took Medea's army to march along Cheyne Walk. It would now be almost impossible to jump across – and other cracks, small still and thin as spiders' webs, were breaking away from it like splintering ice. The opposite bank, only just becoming visible in the thinning brown light, looked ominous and uninviting.

As for the houses in Cheyne Walk, there was little hope of finding asylum there. Leaning drunkenly forward – even moving towards the river, Baba could have sworn – they looked like the exhausted guests at the end of a fancy-dress party. Pale pink façades and climbing clematis gave an air of tired gaiety. In several cases the front door had fallen off its hinges and the black hallways gaped like missing teeth. The only thing to do was to follow Medea.

At the end of Cheyne Walk, Medea turned inland. Silent once more, the women followed her. Baba looked wonderingly about her. No one to be seen. Not a human voice, no sign of
life anywhere. She pulled at her bunny ears in perplexity. Were these women the only people left on earth? Had Medea led only women to safety? And if so, why?

It would be sad if all the men had disappeared, Baba thought. Stifling a sigh, she increased her step to match Noreen's and walked the last few steps with as cheerful an air as possible.

For they had reached their destination. Of one accord, the women stopped. Before them – and clearly marked as an early victim of the property men, for a crumpled bulldozer lay beside the building – stood an abandoned church. Children had scrawled obscenities on its walls, and half the roof was missing. But, miraculously, it stood. All round it lay the ruins of Limerston Street and Lamont Road. Only Cheyne Walk, like an up-ended comb, was visible behind them.

Medea's voice reverberated in the thin, windless air. ‘Sisters, this is the Temple. Enter!'

The women went in two by two. Soon the church was filled to overflowing. As they went, although there was no wind outside and nothing stirred, a great rushing sound accompanied them.

It was stiflingly hot in the church, and the chanting voices of Medea and the other women soon sent Baba into a sort of trance. Snatches of the tunes she had danced to in the Playboy mingled with the sonorous wailing:

Our time is come …
The River is Broken …
Tell Laura I love her, Our Oppression is Ended …
Blue suede shoes …

The murky brown light of the now fully-advanced morning turned the stained glass sombre. Medea's hair was the colour of weed at the bottom of a pond. Several of the women were smoking, and a thick smog hung in the condemned rafters. With a sudden agonizing feeling of constriction, Baba jerked herself upright.

‘I want to get out of here,' she said loudly and clearly.

‘Sssh!' The woman on her left looked disapproving. ‘We're making preparations. Can't you see that?'

But Noreen, on Baba's other side, smiled in sympathy. It was clear that she too had no intention of staying in the church all day.

‘Preparations for what?' Baba asked crossly. ‘Excuse me please.' And she rose to her feet with a determined expression; Noreen would almost certainly follow.

‘To get to the other side, of course,' the woman hissed. ‘How do you think you're going to get there if Medea doesn't help you over?'

‘The other side?' Baba yawned in spite of herself. ‘Why – what happens there?'

Before the woman could answer, a great hush that seemed louder than the singing and chanting which had preceded it
swept through the congregation. All the women fell to their knees. Baba was dragged down by Noreen. With a little moan of sadness, she watched a ladder in her tights run swiftly up past the knee.

‘Sisters!'

Medea, so tall now in the pulpit that her head seemed to disappear in the swirling mists of brown smoke, had become more a voice than a presence: a black voice that filled the church and echoed in the organ pipes with a booming sound that was truly terrifying.

‘Sisters, we are preparing ourselves to reach the Other Side. There will be tribulations, as our oppressors will try to stop us. But let me tell you what awaits us there. A matriarchal society. More than equal pay and educational opportunities. Liberation from childbirth and childcare.'

That's odd, Baba thought sleepily. How can you have a matriarchal society, if that means the mothers running things, and not have children? But her brain hardly felt capable, in such conditions, of dealing with the problem. So far, she thought, it didn't sound particularly tempting on the other side.

‘A chance to develop our personalities to the full,' Medea chanted.

‘Serious subject – not sex object.'

‘And abandonment of our sex roles.'

At these words, Baba felt a sort of sadness creep over her. Surreptitiously she felt for her little bunny tail, which had become so ragged and forlorn now, and wondered if it would be possible to get back to the Playboy and ask for a replacement. And as for her ears! They were flopping all over the place. She must look a real mess.

As if she had read her thoughts, Noreen placed an affectionate hand on Baba's knee. ‘It'll be all right,' she whispered. ‘We'll get out of here.'

It didn't take long for the opportunity to present itself. But it was hardly as Baba would have wished it. In the great silence, with the women on their knees, eyes closed and hardly breathing it seemed, and the soft rushing sound of Medea's voice playing over them like wind pumped from a bellows, footsteps
could be heard coming closer and closer to the church, and then stopping in the vestibule outside.

All the women opened their eyes and listened. There was something both strange and familiar about the footsteps. Something sinister, too; several of the women shifted uncomfortably, and for a time Medea's message was lost.

Baba glanced over her shoulder apprehensively. Noreen was frowning and chewing her finger. ‘I know what that sound reminds me of,' she hissed at Baba finally. ‘It's – it's stiletto
heels!
Isn't it?' she added as half the congregation looked round and nodded agreement. ‘What's someone wearing stiletto heels doing
here
, for God's sake?'

Even Medea, at this point, was forced to break off and stare ahead of her at the church door, which was opening slowly. The rushing sound which accompanied her prophecies died away and an expectant silence, as at the beginning of a play, filled the hall. Baba suspected that the women were relieved at the break.

What came round the ancient oak door was a head so apricot blonde, sheepswool curly, heavily rouged, eye-lined and beauty-spotted, that a gasp came up from the audience at the sight. Memories of magazine covers before the Crack – that was only a few days ago, but the event had made the past seem an eternity away – swam before the eyes of the astonished women. Hands dived into shoulder bags for forgotten powder compacts. Tiny tubes of eye-shadow spilled out their iridescent contents on roughened palms. Noreen, with a sigh of envy, simply sat back and stared at the apparition.

Stiletto heels went clack-clack on the worn stone floor of the church. A tent coat in deep plum swung proudly out to either side so that the women felt the rich stuff brush their faces. A leather handbag, with its little lock and golden key, dangled provocatively from creamed, sharp-nailed hands.

‘A real Fifties Woman,' Noreen whispered piercingly in Baba's ear. ‘What d'you think can have happened?' Then her mouth fell open in a circle of disbelief and excitement. ‘Are we time travellers?' she gasped. ‘Are we back in the fifties now, d'you think?'

The strange woman walked with the same even, disturbing
step up to the pulpit and stopped there. Separated by many thousands of years, by spinning galaxies of massage, Silkglo Foundation, nylon negligees – separated by a great rift, on one side of which shimmered the prophetic hair and fighting muscle of Medea, and on the other the depilatories and electric dildoes of the decadent twentieth century – the two women faced each other.

Medea was the first to speak. ‘Why do you desecrate our temple?'

Her voice, low as a subterranean stream before it bursts triumphantly out on the parched hillside, sent a shiver of fear down Baba's spine. She clung to Noreen for protection.

Then it was the turn of the visitor to answer. The women, ashamed now of their first instinctive dive into their bags for products forbidden by their priestess, looked on sternly.

‘I have come in search of an adulteress,' the shining apparition replied.

The leather bag, deftly opened with the cute key, disgorged papers. Medea, a terrible frown lying across her brow like the incision of a surgeon's knife, bent down from the pulpit and took them with a magisterial air.

There is an adulteress here,' the stranger repeated.

From beneath the double trim-yourself eyelashes, a pair of artificially glistening eyes went slowly and suspiciously round the church. Baba felt herself beginning to squirm in her seat.

‘What can she mean?' she whispered to Noreen. ‘What does that word mean?'

Medea handed down the papers. When she spoke, rage as menacing as the promise of thunder lay under every word.

‘Sisters! We have here a woman who proposes to waste our time by speaking of past relations between women and men!'

Contempt, too, was in Medea's voice; and the women cringed at the hard glister that fell on their shoulders from on high.

‘We will ask this – this imposter to leave the Temple immediately. And we will resume our preparations for the other side.'

But the small eyes, blinking under their load of mascara and
paint, continued to move systematically round the hall. Then they stopped.

Just a second too late, Baba dropped her head. Her ears flopped defensively over her face.

‘You!' The stiletto heels rang out like pistol shots on the floor. The women in Baba's pew backed nervously. A perfectly fashioned plastic arm, with freckles gaily painted on it in charming little groups as far as the elbow, extended itself from the hidden hook under the permanently deodorized armpit and groped at Baba's breast. The women gave a moan of fear and disgust.