Stands a Shadow

CHAPTER FOUR

The House on Tempo Street

In sweat, they lay with their lungs heaving and their cries still ringing in their ears, both of them splayed like martyrs on the sodden bed, their bodies glistening in the daylight cast through the tattered, mouldy curtains of gala lace that hung across the open window.

Bahn blinked to clear his eyes. Through the air above the bed the dust motes were dancing as though in play, whipped up by the frantic action of the last hour.

‘We make too much noise,’ she muttered next to him, but without much concern in her voice, even as a child’s yell rang up through the thin boards of the floor, and voices murmured from behind the even thinner wall at their heads.

Bahn could only gasp and wait for his galloping heart to stop racing. He was burning up, and he kicked away the thin blanket that had snared itself around his ankles. He wiped his stubbled face dry, and realized that he’d forgotten to shave that morning.

The room was a cupboard-like space with a triangular, slope-beamed ceiling too low for a man to stand properly beneath. It reeked of dampness, sex, and the spiced smoke from an incense burner sitting beneath the open window. A perch, they called this kind of attic room in Bar-Khos; the preserve of prostitutes and street hustlers, or those in hiding from the law.

Bahn looked down at the girl as she rolled against his side and rested an arm across his stomach, her white skin as smooth as paper. Like her face, her small breasts were flushed, and he lay there and enjoyed the sensation of them flattening against his chest while the soft lilt of her voice played in his ears. ‘Or rather, you make too much noise,’ she was saying in her Lagosian accent, and she slid her hand downwards past his stomach, and stroked his downy hair with painted nails.

‘You were hardly quiet yourself,’ he breathed, and felt his scrotum tighten as her nails explored him further – sweet Mercy, he was responding again already. He could not get enough of this girl.

Absently, Bahn wondered if a shade had possessed him these past days and weeks; one of those spirits of mad impulse that seized hold of lives and spurred them headlong into tragedy with their insatiable needs.

If only I believed in such things, Bahn considered in his usual rational way. He knew that this weakness was his alone to carry. He thought of Marlee, his wife, and felt the usual first flutters of guilt in his stomach, a nausea he would carry with him for the rest of the day. He sighed heavily.

The girl beside him knew that sound by now, and she drew her hand away to leave him in peace. She cradled her head against the nook of his shoulder, her blue eyes fixed on the low sloping beams of the ceiling above them. He observed the spikes of her honey-coloured hair as they bristled against his skin.

‘I hardly recognized you, when I first came in,’ he told her.

She looked up with those eyes that he still found so mesmerizing.

‘Your hair,’ he explained, nodding to the ridge of erect hair that ran along the middle of her scalp, like the mating display of some jungle bird. He could smell it, the wax that coated it and made it stiff like that. ‘It makes you look like one of those travelling tuchoni.’

‘You don’t like it? Meqa did it for me. She’s half tuchoni herself, or so she tells it.’

‘I like it well enough. It’s certainly… exotic.’ Yet Bahn couldn’t help but think of the first time he’d ever laid eyes on her, standing on a corner with the other street girls of the Quarter of Barbers, in a thin rain that had plastered her short hair in curls around her head. ‘I just thought it suited your name, the way that it was.’

‘I still have my curls,’ she purred, twisting one with a finger, blinking up at him through her lashes.

‘Enough now,’ he urged.

‘What?’

He said nothing for a few moments. ‘Let’s just lie here a while. Two people in a room together. I’ll still pay for your time.’

She smiled, and it was the first genuine smile she had ever offered him. ‘I can do that.’

The girl lay back against his arm. She pursed her lips and blew at a shining dust mote to push it away from her face. Her eyes followed it and Bahn found himself doing the same, tracking its motion through the cloud of swirling specks that filled the room.

The mote drifted over a stack of folded clothing pressed between the bed and the wall. At last it vanished amongst the leaves of a jubba plant in a chipped wooden bowl, where a single blue flower was in late bloom. A Lagosian thing that, to pot plants and bring them indoors, a fashion that had been catching on in the city since the steady influx of refugees from Lagos had first begun; Marlee had even started doing it.

Outside, a crow flapped past the window, making its ugly calls. For long moments Bahn simply gazed through the curtains of lace, staring at the meagre view of housing tenements under construction on the other side of the yards and communal vegetable plots, the cranes and scaffolding poking up beneath a slab of azure sky. The voice sounded again through the sheet-thin wall behind them; Meqa, bartering with a customer over her price. From below, the sounds of the children continued to rise from the ground floor.

They were a tribe, those fifteen children, and they were ruled only by their mother Rosa, the landlady of the house, who as it turned out was not their mother at all, save for two of them; rather, she was a middle-aged widow with a good heart, who could not help but take in every stray hungry child that she encountered. The children themselves barely seemed to notice the men who clambered up the creaking stairs at the rear of the house at all hours. Bahn, on his handful of recent visits here, had been ignored by them after only a few glances his way – the children too busy shrieking around in the muck of the backyard, fighting over worms and yelling in delight each time they snapped one in half.

It was enough to make Bahn think of his own son and infant daughter, though he chased those thoughts away, quickly, before they could gain any substance.

‘It’s quiet,’ the girl said.

She referred to the silence of the guns at the Shield, half a laq to the south.

Bahn nodded. The Mannian guns had lain silent for more than a week now. It was said that a period of mourning had been declared across the Empire in respect for the death of the Matriarch’s son. In return, the guns of the Bar-Khosian defences had followed their example, though purely to preserve their blackpowder.

His voice was wistful as he spoke. ‘It was like this ten years ago, before the siege and the war. Just normal everyday sounds of a city.’ Bahn sighed once more. ‘I wonder if it will ever be this way again.’

‘You sound troubled,’ she said, and narrowed her eyes as she watched his expression. ‘Have you heard something?’

For an instant Bahn felt a tension in his chest, his muscles clamping tight around his heart. In his mind’s eye he saw the far sparkle of fires in the distance, like cities burning.

‘No,’ he lied to her. ‘Not that I could tell you, anyway, if I had.’ Bahn squeezed her shoulder and tried to ease the tension in his chest by breathing deeply. ‘I’ve too much on my mind, that’s all.’

She asked nothing more of him, and simply laid her head upon his beating heart. ‘You should not fret so,’ she murmured.

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Because you worry like an old woman. Too much thinking,’ and she lifted her head to tap him twice on his left temple.

He forced a smile to his face. ‘My mother is the same. Always worrying about something or other.’

She nodded, understanding.

Bahn looked at her fully, sprawled as she was against him; the slight redness of her nostrils from inhaling dross; the bruise on her neck the precise size of his pursed lips. He had been rough on her again.

When had he last given Marlee a lusty bite like that? he wondered. Before their son had arrived, he realized. Before the war, when they had both been young and carefree.

Bahn ran a finger across the smooth skin of her shoulder.

I will feel this guilt either way, he considered.

Without warning he rolled himself on top of her. For a moment there was surprise in her eyes, though it was gone in an instant as he bent and kissed her throat, to be replaced by something unreadable.

He was losing it, Curl thought to herself as Bahn departed and the thump of his boots faded on the outside stairs. Curl had seen it before in other siege-shocked soldiers of the city, men ready to snap and run amok through the lives of those around them, tearing and snarling for a way out. They were always the roughest ones, she’d noticed, but Bahn in truth was not so bad on her, more fiercely passionate than anything else, as if he simply needed, in these brief hours with Curl, to forget everything about his present circumstances.

A suicide case, perhaps; hardly a berserker.

She hadn’t liked the fear in his voice though, when he had been talking about the guns lying silent. As if he was doomed; as if they were all doomed. She didn’t need to hear things like that; let him share those worries with his wife, whose name he kept crying out in the heat of the moment.

Curl rose and slipped her payment into her hidden pouch of coins in the pot of the jubba plant. The pouch held a handful of silvers and a little more in coppers. Not much for all the business she was doing. With the worsening shortage of food in the city leading to ever-higher prices, forcing Rosa to ask for larger contributions to their meals, she was finding it hard to maintain even that small sum from week to week.

Curl poured a jug of water into the clay washbasin. She stood naked on a cotton towel that she lay on the small portion of floor-space before the stand, and washed herself down with a bar of apple-scented soap. Around her, the smoke from the incense coiled about her body and chased away the after-scents from the room. Still, an atmosphere of heaviness remained behind, the man’s woes and low spirits lingering on in the quietness. Curl hummed something from her childhood, making the room her own again.

Goosebumps rose on her skin as a cool breeze played through the open window. She dried herself quickly, and smeared a little lemon juice over her legs where the fleas kept biting. She checked her hair in the broken sliver of mirror that leaned next to the washbowl, then slipped into the cotton robe that she wore whenever she wasn’t working. Still humming, she slipped the wooden charm back around her neck, and listened to the shouts of Rosa chasing the children from the kitchen.

Rosa rented out all the upper rooms of her house to feed and clothe her tribe of wayward urchins. It made for a curious combination, with their world of playful youth and tantrums seeping always upwards through the cramped, sordid sessions of the working women in their tiny rooms, and the ghostly lives of the hardcore dross junkies, and the gentle madness of the urban hermits and struggling artists who lived alongside them. But it worked somehow, perhaps simply because they had no other choice but to make it work. Rosa kept the rents as low as she was able, and ensured that everyone felt part of an extended family. Against all expectations, there was a warmth in the house, a sense of belonging.

Curl was shaking now, though not from the cold. With care, she gathered her small wooden box from the floor and sat back against the pillows. Inside lay her precious stash of dross, the dusty grey powder held in an envelope of folded graf leaf. Curl poured a line of the stuff along the back of her hand, returned the envelope to the box and laid the box on the bed. She placed the stub of the reed she used for these occasions into her nostril, and held the other nostril shut, and took a deep, sharp inhalation that cleared the dust from the hand in one go.

She rubbed her nose and sniffed and lay against the pillows with a gasp, the back of her throat turning numb already. Her fingers and toes tingled, and the tingling spread to leave heat and pleasure in its wake. The sensation filtered up her limbs, her body, her head.. . until at last, with grace, it reached into her mind.