The Gone-Away World

Chapter Thirteen

I HAVE NOT considered the time of day, or night. The house is not wakeful. I stand between the two brass lanterns outside the Lubitsch storm porch and I can hear the hall clock through the door, and I realise that it is after midnight. They will assume some emergency. I should come back tomorrow. On the other hand, I have already woken them. I can hear Ma Lubitsch’s careful, full-footed tread on the stairs, and behind her the tango patter of Gonzo’s father. Old Man Lubitsch wears slender, suede-bottomed slippers, neat around his small feet. His wife wears sandals, even in winter, because her feet get too hot in the furry boots her son brought from the city that first winter home from Jarndice. If the weather is cold enough that she has to cover up, she wears woollen socks, and on each foot the thong of the sandal pulls the fabric tight over her (enormous) big toe. Socks which are not well made will shortly tear at the seam or fray over the edge of her nails, and often she has to take a purchased sock and graft onto it a lower section of her own manufacture, so that from the ankle upward she wears a grey, ho-hum sort of sock, but from there on down she is a riot of colour, wool from a dozen tail ends and unravelling jumpers pressed into service.

Either she has become a tad more frail this year or the season has been harsh, because this is what I see as the door opens a crack: a foot like a loaf of bread in a Father Christmas costume, and behind it another with purple toes and chartreuse heel. The brass lanterns come on, and a deep, suspicious voice says “Yes?” except it is a more like a “Eeyehh-iss?” and I realise that I am too ashamed to lift my eyes. Ashamed about what, I do not know; but the fact that I exist at all must surely be a horror to them, and yet here I am seeking something from them, be it sympathy or support or even information about Gonzo and his intentions, and these things I have no right to ask. But then again this is my refuge in time of trouble. Nowhere else but here did I ever get disinfectant on my grazes or buttered toast after falling in the creek. I cannot help it if I am a monster. This is my home.

“Who is that?” Ma Lubitsch says insistently. “My husband is here,” she adds, in case I am contemplating an attack upon her virtue. “He has arranged to defend me!” And I am quite sure that he has, by simple force or some baroque design. Perhaps the brass lamps are wired to the electrical main, and he can cause lightning to arc between them. Perhaps he has just obtained a shotgun. These are troubled times, and Cricklewood Cove has surely seen her share of marauders and the rest.

Hangdog, I linger, head down. Obviously I must flee—this was a mistake. In fact, the matter of my continued presence bears examination. The way lies open behind me for an inglorious bolt into the dark, surely less ghastly than saying the words out loud to these people: I am the product of your son’s mourning, all grown up, and tried to make off with his wife, shot and yet still crawling home to haunt him and extract a reckoning, of whatever sort (and that, now that I think about it, is something I should consider in the light of recent revelations). Infinitely less unpleasant to blurt out some apology, wrong house, so sorry, bit drunk, and vanish for ever. Perhaps I could go and live with the Found Thousand, among my own kind. Perhaps they have room for a confused man with a fictional past.

But something has happened to my feet. They are glued to the ground. Part of Old Man Lubitsch’s home defence system, perhaps, shortly to be followed, unless I explain myself sharpish, with a bolt of purging electrical fire and a sudden jolt of heat as I am turned to vapour. And yet I am still here. I can lift one foot. I can lift the other. I can in fact jump up and down. (Oh, marvellous. I am continuing my lunatic act, this time for the benefit of Gonzo’s parents. Ideal.) But backwards, it seems, I cannot go. Or no, not cannot, but will not. And that is an absolutely extraordinary idea. I will not go back into the dark. I will raise my head. I will be seen.

And then I have been seen. I am looking into the face of Old Man Lubitsch as he elbows his way around his wife (a task requiring both arms), and it is hard to say which of us is more amazed.

Gonzo’s father has not aged so much as he has acquired topography. His skin is folded, refolded, counterfolded, until it is almost smooth. Deep subduction lines have appeared around his mouth and eyes. His face is all over rock and water, with a fine spray of lichens on the lower slopes, and I observe him as he does me. His eyes widen, then contract, then narrow: recognition, confusion, suspicion. Then, as I flinch back, and half-turn to escape his dismissal, his gnarly arm shoots out and fingers tested by generations of bees clamp around my wrist. His hand stays me, then draws back; dabs at me once, twice, ever upward as if gathering pollen; finally folds around my shoulder to reposition me. He pulls me closer to the brass lamp on the left, then turns me away again for the other aspect. Unabashed, he reaches up and squashes my cheeks, then hauls down hard upon my shoulders so that I must bend my knees or lift him from the ground, and when I do bend, he touches my face as if sculpting it, to and fro. His skin is like brown paper. At last he steps back, mission accomplished, and still he has no idea what to think or what to do. He mutters to his wife: Ul-li-ye-na? And I realise it is her name; Yelena Lubitsch. She huffs at him, “Silly man,” and steps aside.

“Come in,” Ma Lubitsch says. She does not ask why I am here or who I am. Whatever else, I am a young man in a bad place, and the current has thrown me up upon her strand. Yelena Lubitsch does not shirk the responsibilities of such occurrences—and nor yet does she base her decisions upon swift examinations on doorsteps, between swinging brass lamps, in the middle of the night. “Come in,” she says again, more forcefully because I am standing with my mouth open like a dog unsure whether he wants to be in the garden or by the fire, and without the sense to draw conclusions from the gathering clouds. And finally, when I still stand there, she makes a “tcha” sound which I recognise as meaning that all men are idiots, and all young men most especially so (and God has cursed her with a husband eternally young), and she plucks at my sleeve with a fraction of her strength, and brings me firmly across the threshold into her house. There’s a new smell, like honey and coal and furniture polish. Not unpleasant, but strong.

“Boil the kettle,” she says, and it’s only when I look round and find that Old Man Lubitsch has already gone that I realise she is talking to me.

THE OLD IRON KETTLE is where I remember, hanging like a benevolent bat above the stove. This kettle is a miracle provider, an endless source of cooking water, but also bathwater, medical water and when necessary veterinary water as well. At the same time it is a peril. Not a big peril, but a deceptive and painful peril nonetheless. There’s nowhere in Ma Lubitsch’s kitchen to cool it down. It sits on the stove when it’s being used, and it goes back on the hook when it’s dry, and as a consequence there is a kettle code relating to procedures for taking it down again without getting burned. This code is not written. It is a part of the landscape. I follow the code without thinking.

First, check there are no toys, animals or small persons underfoot. Check your back, so that no one blunders into you. Second, remove from the hidden hook beside the stove the raggedy towel (doublestitched and padded with sand and clay) which hangs there. Wrap the towel around your hand. Third, reach up and test the weight of the kettle, in case some tomfool (Gonzo, probably) has hung it up with water in it. Repeat step one, then bring the kettle down and, without setting it on the stove because cold water poured onto the iron base will spit if it is hot, fill it from the tap. Note: do not overfill it so that the resulting cauldron is beyond your strength. Fourth, lift it back onto the stove. Finally, replace the raggedy towel on its hook so that the next user knows where to find it.

Job done, I turn and find Ma Lubitsch watching, eyes shadowed by the high line of her cheeks. I notice that even her forehead is fat.

Ma Lubitsch says “Hnuh” or “Nyuh” to indicate that I have not offended against the kettle code. Then she shoos me out of the sacred space into the hall and waves at the living room, where her husband has lit a fire in the grate and is waiting for me. I hesitate. She shoos me again and commences her three-point turn.

WE HAVE SAT in silence. We have considered one another, and the strange portents that we are. We have done all the hesitating we can do. And so I have simply asked about Gonzo, and have they seen him lately, and Old Man Lubitsch sighs and nods and scents the storm in the wind. Or has been scenting it for days.

“They came together,” Old Man Lubitsch says. “Gonzo and Leah. Yelena was delighted. They came out of the blue, and they stayed in the guest room. Why? I always have to ask why. Were they pregnant? They didn’t need money, surely. Looking for a house? But no, not that either. He had a new job, he said. A special job. He was going to make the world a better place. A safe place. He was very proud. But underneath he was something else. Something else.”

Firelight draws zigzags across the ridges on Old Man Lubitsch’s face. He expands and contracts with the flames. The room smells of pine smoke.

“Gonzo is not a diplomat. He cannot say one thing and think another thing. He cannot lie to his mother because he loves her, and he cannot lie to me because—I’m not saying he doesn’t love me, it’s just different between mothers and sons and fathers and sons—because I am an old fart with sharp eyes and he doesn’t have the practice. And he was lying with every part of him. Lying like shouting. Everything is okay, everything is wonderful. Look how happy I am, look how I am at ease. Bah.” Old Man Lubitsch picks up the poker and pokes. He starts quite gently, shunting one stray log farther from the hearthrug. The log is round and bent like a banana, so each time he rolls it over, it rolls back again. Old Man Lubitsch pushes harder. The poker slips, the log hesitates, then rolls back, and without warning he is stabbing at it, bashing it, and the fire crackles and sparks alarmingly. I wait quietly until he stops and puts the poker back on the stand. Old Man Lubitsch goes on.

“He had a bandage on his arm. Around the edge it was grubby. An old bandage. Bruises and burns. Leah went to take it off. Tender, the way that she is. He was angry. He was so angry, and afraid, and ashamed.” Gonzo’s father broods. “Gonzo is a good man. We laid down the rules to him when he was a child: we told him what men do and what they do not and he understood. Marcus . . .” Old Man Lubitsch stutters on the unfamiliar name. “Marcus also. He taught his brother what it is to be the right kind of man. So there was no violence in his anger. It’s not that he was restraining himself, you understand? It is not in him to lash out, to hit someone dear to him.” And in a funny way this is true, although there are scars on my chest to make me feel different, however the Sandpit of Truth has changed my perspective on all that with the shooting and the kicking me from a truck at speed. “So Gonzo had this rage, this horror, and he did not know what to do with it. I saw it only in his mouth. He was so still, so calm, but his mouth gave him away. I thought he would vomit, or scream. He just sat there, absolutely stiff in his chair—that chair”—and here Old Man Lubitsch indicates a very ordinary lounger with velour cushions which shows no evidence of being a place of trauma—“and he asked her quietly please not to do that right now. She took her hands away so fast . . . I wished he had shouted. It would have been easier. The bandage was quite old. She had tried before. She does not know why he refuses. How was he hurt? Was he burned? Cut? What is this injury, and what does it mean to him? It hurts her, and she cannot ask. She can only offer herself, as she always does, and be refused, and absorb it and try again. I think, eventually, it will kill her.

“And he . . . he is afraid of her kindness, that it will break something in him, some resolve. He is afraid to be loved, because he is unworthy. He is too ashamed. But also he is angry. So angry, because he is hurt in some way which he thinks is unfair, and he is like a child, he does not know why. And this new job will make it all better. It will make him good again. Make him clean. Make the bad thing go away.”

Ma Lubitsch sets a cup beside me; when she wants to, she can move like a cat. Ma Lubitsch is very good at being the woman she is. Her weight has made her graceful; her bulk has made her strong. She has brewed a smoky tea, because it is after midnight and we need the sharpness, and she has poured a spot of milk into it to make it smooth. In Ma Lubitsch’s house only she is the arbiter of how you take your tea. She judges by eye, and she awards Darjeeling or Lapsang Souchong or Assam or Pekoe as the moment requires. She gives no quarter to received proprieties of milk and sugar. She picks the vessels too, little cups on hot summer days, thick mugs for winter. Tonight we have some I have never seen, thick with glaze and chipped to reveal the terracotta underneath. Emergency mugs, for moments of desperate need.

“I spoke to James,” this being Jim Hepsobah. Old Man Lubitsch will not acknowledge the contraction. Jim is always James to him, as if Jim’s strength is too great to be contained in a nickname. “Or rather I tried. He was polite. He made small talk. He is . . . very bad at small talk. He passed me to Sally. She lies well. She lies with omission and elision and prevarication and misdirection. She was cheerful. What could possibly be wrong? She was very unhappy.” Old Man Lubitsch sighs.

“And now, you,” he says. “With that face, in the middle of the night. And you are the opposite. You want to run away, as if we will attack you. You expect to be rejected. And yet you have done nothing wrong. Every part of you is certain. You have done nothing wrong. You are angry too, but you are not guilty. Why? Who are you? And why are you here? You are not here to keep secrets. If you wanted to lie, you only had to walk past the door. So. What has my son done to you, that he is running so far and so fast?”

I cannot answer straightaway, but there is no need. There is no time in this room. The fire will burn for ever—Old Man Lubitsch tosses another log on it, and pine sap puffs and steams and burns—and the tea will keep flowing. This is the heart of the world, and I am safe. I draw my thoughts together, and I tell my tale. I do not try to separate my memory from Gonzo’s or to make judgements about what actually happened in a given room. The past is memory, and no two persons’ memories are alike. I know my story, and I tell it as it was for me. I do not skimp when the moment of my genesis arrives. I do not prevaricate. I make the position clear. I am Gonzo’s shadow. I am his imaginary friend made real. I am new.

Ma Lubitsch’s eyes widen, and she draws back, then catches herself and growls. After a moment she leans forward and pokes me tentatively in the arm with one fat finger, watching closely to see if anything happens. When nothing does, she settles into her chair again. Old Man Lubitsch simply nods as if just now understanding something he should have realised ages ago. Neither one of them seems terribly upset at the idea of having a bifurcate in the house.

“I am a monster,” I tell them, in case they haven’t understood.

“Are you?” Old Man Lubitsch wants to know.

“Yes.”

“What is the most monstrous thing you have done?”

Well, now that he mentions it, I can’t recall the last terrible crime I committed. Participated in the Go Away War, perhaps. But human people did that. Gonzo did.

I suggest that being a monster is a matter of fact, rather than action, and Old Man Lubitsch says “Bah.”

Since that seems to be all they have to say about it, I carry on with my story.

SUNRISE on the Aggerdean Bluff is cold. The wind off the ocean is wet, and the air is rich with salt and weed. The waves are quiet and slick, the colour of the sky, so that the horizon line is impossible to find except where the sun is resting on it, white behind a cloud—a world in monochrome after the warm colours of the living room. Old Man Lubitsch is wearing his preposterous fur hat, which is even more like a rat than I remember. Ma Lubitsch is bare-headed, but the bottom half of her neck is wrapped in a tweed scarf, and it climbs at the back so as to take in the lower part of her ears. Her thick coat is the colour of pea soup. When the sun cuts through the cloud, it lights her up golden, and in those brief moments you can see that she was beautiful, still is beautiful. I realise that this is what Old Man Lubitsch sees all the time. His Yelena.

We spent the first part of our walk peering through the doors of the house on Aggerdean Bluff. I offered to let them in, but when we opened the door it seemed like a pointless intrusion. Should I walk them around the house and show them the things which were never there? Here is where I didn’t sleep? This is where a mother I never had never made me breakfast on a stove which never existed? I have no appetite for it, and fortunately nor do they. I lead the way down the hill to the sandpit and show them the game. This is where Gonzo was. There was the ice cream van. You were here. Yes. And Ma Lubitsch remembers the day—of course she does, she remembers every day of that awful month separately and completely—and nods as I flatten out the sand. Yes, this was Gonzo’s game. And mine. She smiles, old love and old pain.

Through Cricklewood Cove, still in shadow, sky dark on the far side. These are my streets. They are still gloomy, but now there are shapes in them, and early risers are brushing their teeth and going to and fro, visible through their windows. We walk more quickly because our silence is oppressive. We’ve had our air, and there are conclusions to be reached. And breakfast to be had, of course. In half an hour the bees will wake, and then by turns the rest of the Cove, and Ike Thermite will be looking for me.

In the hallway that smell again: winter fires and nectar and a bitter bar across the back of the mouth. There’s something animal in it too, something doggy maybe. Perhaps Ma Lubitsch has adopted another stray, a cannibal dog left over from before. (I picture her ruffling its massive head and disciplining it with a smart tap on its thick black nose. “Tcha! No eating! Eating guests is bad. Ju-uuust the play . . . Who’s a good dog? You are! Yes!” And the vast head and scrap of tail waggle as the animal makes plain its willingness to be her eternal servant in trade for her belief—broadly applied and absolutely improbable—that there is good in everyone and everything, and a little pie and friendship will find it out.) But that’s not it, not quite, this elusive flavour in the air. Perhaps it’s just a house smell: rising damp, old furniture and good food.

“You came here to find him,” Ma Lubitsch says abruptly. I am sitting back in my chair by the fire, and she has produced fresh cold juice and bacon fried to make it crisp. You can pick this bacon up in your fingers and pop it in your mouth like a sweet, or sandwich it between layers of brown bread with mayonnaise. Served with Assam and scalded milk, so that there’s something toffeeish in every swallow.

“I don’t know,” I tell her.

“Tcha.” Ma Lubitsch is used to people not knowing. That’s what she’s there for. To know, on their behalf, until they know too; to be grumpy at them until they use their heads and figure it out. “You came because of what you are and what he is. Of course you did. And you know what he is doing now.”

I have no idea. And yet of course I do. Something big and stupid, to wipe clean the slate. Something ineffably Gonzo, with fireworks and fanfares, to restore himself in the eyes of the world. Something heroic. And there is no one there to dig him out when it goes wrong. Gonzo is flying solo. He needs help. He needs a second opinion.

Whatever else I am, I am not the sort of person to leave a friend in the lurch. I am, by definition, the other sort. By Gonzo’s definition. I could choose to become a different kind of person. I don’t want to. I’ve met those people. I don’t like them.

I have given myself away—in the face, or the sigh, or something: Old Man Lubitsch nods to himself and says his own personal version of “tcha,” which is a sort of “hihnf.” It is a noise of confirmation.

“He has a job in the city,” Old Man Lubitsch says. “They came for him. Executives, in person. They made him feel very good. Very important. It was uncomfortable. Yelena was not happy. Gonzo should not need these men to believe in himself, but he did. Without them, he was like a puppet. Slack. Leah also was not happy. She would not say why she was unhappy, but it was the job, of course. She was unhappy with what they asked of him. She was unhappy because he agreed to it.”

“A dangerous job.”

“Perhaps. But also a bad one.”

All this is making Ma Lubitsch impatient. It is man chat, needlessly precise. She raps her husband on the arm, flaps at him to be quiet.

“You must help my son,” she says. “It is who you are. Afterwards, there will be time for the rest. You can be angry with him then. But for now it doesn’t matter. Gonzo needs you.”

Ma Lubitsch understands the mathematics of love. Love is merciless. Love does not count costs, only value. I came here because of a relationship I remembered with two people I had never met. I did not expect them to acknowledge me, to return my affection. I did not expect to find, in this house, family and its attendant responsibilities, but I have. And so I will do what I have always done. I will find Gonzo. I will save him from himself. I will be a friend, in spite of all of it. Where is Gonzo? He has gone deeper into whatever enemy plan is at work.

Very cosy, Bumhole. Fraught with charm and personal growth. Now, could we return with some dispatch to the matter of cui bono? Because while you are having a group hug, you may be reasonably certain that your unfriend out there—whom we shall term the Evil Mastermind, Bumhole, so as to keep matters clear for your tiny brain—is occupying himself with further nefarious doings, most likely on present showing to be in the nature of mayhem and death. Am I right?

Yes, Ronnie, you are.

Simultaneous with this realisation comes another, even less welcome. I am standing. My eyes are moving and my limbs are light. Something is wrong. I listen. There: that silence was not a silence. It was the gap between two very faint sounds. Another. Tahhh . . . pahhh . . . [pause] . . . tahhh . . . pahhh . . . [pause] . . . The noise of footsteps, very quiet.

I move to the breakfast tray and cover my fingers in bacon fat, then transfer it to the hinges of the door. Wait. Don’t hurry. Listen . . . now. The person is not in the hall. He—or she—is upstairs. More, the next step is . . . now, which is the perfect time to open the door. It glides on bacon fat and more ordinary greases, Old Man Lubitsch’s home maintenance at work. I slip out into the hall. In the kitchen there are harmless domestic items which might be pressed into service as weapons. I should have asked Old Man Lubitsch about his home defence. Perhaps it is a big stick. I would like a big stick right about now.

The kitchen is on the north side of the house. It is still dark. The hallway is light. Move quickly.

Kitchen door. Open it. Step through.

A bee buzzes past me, a glinting, metallic bee with sharp wings. Like every other bee in history, it imagines it can pass magically through glass. Unlike every other bee, this one is right. The window breaks. This is not one of Old Man Lubitsch’s bees. It is another sort. The window shatters. I keep moving, or rather my body keeps moving: it ducks, smoothly and unfussed, weaves around and about, and my hand slaps wood as I vault over Ma Lubitsch’s kitchen table. Stout construction, it barely notices my passing. More bees float past, angry about something. One of them is a bad navigator, buries its head in the larder door. It is a most curious bee, with five sharp points. A shuriken bee, very rare. Very specific. Five spikes around a central hub, you flip it like a Frisbee or a playing card. Kill with it. Tool of butchery, indeed. My body is still moving; I twitch the shuriken bee out of the larder door, send it back the way it came, slip away as more bees fly into the shadows of the kitchen. Real bees would never do this, they like light and sun. Old Man Lubitsch’s bees converged on bulbs and glowing rods. These bees are evil bees, bees of darkness. Fear the evil bee. I do. But I cannot hide from it for ever. I cannot leave Gonzo’s parents to face the Evil Apiarist alone.

For a moment there’s a single figure silhouetted in the corridor. Bad ninja! You are revealed! Your teacher will hit you with a bamboo stick for this behaviour. If I don’t get you first. I bowl a copper pot at him and whip away again, using available cover. In this case the available cover is the kitchen wall. Thus, he knows I must come through that doorway. He will assume I must come from right or left. I wait. The softest of steps, one, two. Deliberately loud enough to hear. I am invited to gamble. Come from the left, and maybe he will guess wrong, maybe he will not be fast enough to adapt. Ho, ho, ho. He has a weapon of some sort, sharp. He will be holding it horizontally. Both my options are bad options. Don’t gamble. The house always wins.

This is my house.

I step back, bounce off the lip of the kitchen counter and catch the door frame. I slither through the doorway at head height, feet first, my hands hinging me and the lintel a brief caress on my hair as I pass. The apiarist is all in black, and he has got pollen on him from climbing Old Man Lubitsch’s trellises to reach the upstairs window. He carries a formidable thingummy with beak-like blades at each end. My feet slide over the top of it, take him in the chest, and he staggers. I land badly, try to roll back into the kitchen. The ninja springs back to his feet, whirring. If only I had some Tupperware. Must be some in the kitchen. Too far.

Damn.

He doesn’t kill me because he misjudges how winded I am from falling on (as it appears) Old Man Lubitsch’s leather umbrella stand. Instead, the blunt bit of the thingummy hits me in the shoulder. White light. Pain. Idiot. You’re fighting like Gonzo. I’m not sure whose voice it is. It’s right.

The ninja flourishes his beak-like thingummy, slashes at me. I roll away. My arm is useless. It’s not broken; it’s just switched off. Left hand only then. Slow. Relax. Think. He is strong, but I am skilled. The only enemy is timing. The only danger is fear. Master Wu’s garden, endless hours of practice. Elisabeth Soames’s mute approval as she helps me out of the fish pond. The thingummy blurrs. I step. None of my limbs comes off. The thingummy wheels away to one side with a clatter. I hit the ninja in the nose with my elbow. He hits me back. We tumble out into the garden. Real fights are undignified. Only true masters make them look effortless. I am not one. He pokes me in the eye. Master Wu would be disappointed. This is not how it’s done. I can’t find the quiet place in my head from which to fight. But hey, it’s my first time.

The ninja hits me again, gets to his feet and snaps into a sort of “ready” posture while he tries to decide which way to kill me, and then there comes a quite remarkable noise. It goes: WHACK-LUTSCHSCHslutchscludderpankpank.

The ninja stops absolutely still. He makes a sort of sad little sound of his own, a child-like reproach. And then he falls forward on his face. Ike Thermite is standing behind him, with a plank. It looks like a fence post.

“Was that right?” Ike says. “He was attacking you. So I hit him.” He waves the plank. It appears to have a couple of nails sticking out. Spare fence posts are piled against the side of the house, ready for deployment. This is probably not what Old Man Lubitsch had in mind for them. “Is he going to be okay?” Ike Thermite says. “Because I only really wanted to knock him out.”

The ninja has two largish holes in the back of his head. There is white stuff coming out. He shakes.

“I saw all the planks,” says Ike Thermite cheerily. “Gosh, there are a lot of planks. But I couldn’t decide which one. And then I thought, what the hell are you talking about, it really doesn’t matter which one. Only I think perhaps it does. Yes? Because this one has nails in it . . .”

The ninja stops moving. The smell of blood is rather acute.

“Oh dear,” Ike Thermite says. There is brain matter on his shoe. “That’s quite unpleasant.” He drops the plank and passes out.

I have been saved from death by a specialist in physical theatre. This is bad. Sadly, it is not the worst thing about this moment. The worst thing is that the dead man has five friends—or at least colleagues—standing in the azaleas.

Ma Lubitsch throws a bucket of perfumed furniture polish out of the living room window. It mostly lands on Ike Thermite. A healthy dose of it splashes on me. If this was an attempt to wake Ike and unleash his dreaded Mime Powers, it does not work. Ike stays down. I have nectar goo on my trousers. If it comes to a fight—and it will—I’m going to be all sticky. I hear a voice, surprisingly calm and very dignified.

“May I have your attention, please?” says Old Man Lubitsch. “You are on private land. You are not welcome. You were not invited. You have offered violence to my house. I would like you all to leave.”

The five remaining ninjas look at him. I turn to look too. Old Man Lubitsch is standing next to his beehives. He is standing, in fact, next to the large black hive he was building the last time I came to Cricklewood Cove. It is tall and oddly shaped, ugly where the others are uniform little whiteboard houses. Clearly, he feels it represents some sort of threat.

The ninjas don’t. They step forward. Old Man Lubitsch shrugs. He reaches up and pulls the lid off the hive. And then, demonstrating that sanity has absolutely passed him by today, he gives it a solid kick.

The noise which emerges from the big hive is a deep Harley-Davidson growl of warning. Quite apparently, the occupant is a mutant bee. Gonzo’s father has raised a single, furious, man-size bee with teeth like razors. It is a guard bee. Even the ninjas pause. The nearest one is about eight feet from me, and from Ike Thermite. He looks as if he doesn’t like the idea of fighting a giant bee very much.

Old Man Lubitsch kicks the hive again. It explodes.

It doesn’t actually explode, of course, but the phenomenon is remarkably similar. There is a noise as of war in heaven. A black shadow crosses the face of the sky like the end of days, racing out from the hive in a circle which expands until it covers all of us. We are struck by a thousand tiny impacts, like a shower of gravel: bees landing, swooping, tasting.

I do not watch the rest of it. The bees from the black hive—Africanised Megachile pluto, most likely—recognise us by the smell of nectar goo as fellow (if weird-lookin’ and useless) members of the hive. The ninjas are therefore aggressors of some sort who must be dealt with. The last thing they see before the vengeance of the bees is Old Man Lubitsch, shrouded in inch-long black insects, stepping towards them with a garden rake.

“You would have hurt my wife,” Old Man Lubitsch says through the sound of the hive.

But when I turn away, because death by bee is a ghastly thing, and death by rake not much better, it is not his wife I see, but mine.

. . .

LEAH’s hiding place is upstairs, between the guest room and the airing cupboard. A false wall makes room for a corridor, and the corridor leads to a small space under the eaves like an artist’s garret. Old Man Lubitsch built it during the Reification. He and Ma Lubitsch hid there when Cricklewood Cove was overrun by bandits, and then they hid a young man there when the bandits were defeated and a hanging mood took the town. Currently, Leah shares it with a family of cats who moved in unofficially. She explains that the cats were here first. They are nice cats. Leah likes them. She misses her dog, but the dog went with Gonzo. She stayed behind. Gonzo insisted. It was too dangerous. So here she is, sharing space with La Gioconda (the mother cat) and Sunflower, Waterlily, Adoration (which is short for Adoration of the Magi) and Flea. She named the kittens after paintings, but realised that she didn’t know the proper names of very many. She declined to name Flea after an approximation of the title of a painting. Flea is called Flea because she can jump right up in the air. She was so bored up here (Leah, not Flea), but Gonzo insisted she must be safe. From whom she does not know. He wouldn’t tell her anything. The cats walk on her face in the mornings to wake her up. She must look terrible.

“Leah,” I say, but she has more to tell me, more she needs to say, things of great importance. She pauses, then begins. The room gets very cold at night, so she’s quite glad to have them around then, and of course they need her to protect them from owls. Owls are a great hazard to kittens. Owls eat more kittens in a year than dogs do in ten. Dogs chase cats, they don’t eat them. Owls eat anything. Fortunately, the owls are scared of Old Man Lubitsch’s mutant bees, so the kittens are safe in the garden. Leah washes them in nectar shampoo, which makes them furious (and very cute) and the bees sort of hover over them and scowl, not that they can scowl, but they do. Leah was listening through the floor last night, all night, she has bags under her eyes this morning, even kitten maquillage doesn’t leave her this harrowed normally, she heard and understood and she had no idea what Gonzo had done, he just told her that I was new and made out of him and not to say anything to anyone and I was leaving. She has no idea what to say to me.

Since I don’t know what to say either, we sit there and look at one another in silence for a while.

Leah looks depleted. She draws strength from the mountains, but primarily from love. She takes delight in love. This passage has injured her in the place from which she draws her strength. My instinct is to hold her. I offer her my hand, and she looks at it with deep uncertainty. We are sitting opposite one another. To take it, she must shuffle forward. She does, but she takes a grip on me which is opposed, so that her palm faces me while her fingers wrap around mine. Thus far and no farther. Her palm is like one of Ike Thermite’s invisible walls. I want to storm the fortress. I might. She might respond. And then what? In Gonzo’s house, with his parents standing guard, to cuckold him and take her away? “What is the most monstrous thing you have done?” Oh! I know! I know!

So. We sit opposite one another. My back hurts. I have never been able to sit comfortably on the ground, even at my most flexible. When I was at Jarndice, and I could—by dint of constant practice in the Voiceless Dragon forms—do the lotus position from cold and come within seven inches of the box splits (that’s the ones you do by opening your legs to the side rather than pushing one foot forward and one back), even then the business of sitting on the floor was an agony. Aline found it a cause for annoyance. Furniture was bourgeois when good people had none. Comfortable furniture was almost certainly counterrevolutionary. (This was the army which George Copsen’s Government Machine so desperately feared.) When my hips start to hurt too, I shift position, which is difficult because I do not want to let go of her hand. I wince.

“Are you all right?”

“I love you.”

Bugger.

She stares at me. In for a penny.

“I love you. I have always loved you. I remember your letter, in the hospital. I remember asking Gonzo to find us somewhere to have a date. He got me a suit. You had that amazing dress, from nowhere, by magic. We made love in the castle, all night. And when I smell jasmine I think of you, of getting married and of how you hated the city, so Jim Hepsobah helped me find a house in the mountains. I remember carrying you over the threshold and falling over, and we just lay there and laughed.” The only time I have ever been comfortable on a floor. Leah is shaking her head, her whole body twisting one way and another in denial. She has not let go of my hand. We are welded together by pain. “Leah, please . . .” But please what? And because I don’t know, I apologise. I tell her I am sorry. My outburst was inappropriate.

She looks at me sharply. Certainty. I have sealed my own rejection. Leah loves a man who would never be concerned with inappropriate. Leah loves a man who would have brushed her objections aside and held her, and been slapped if need be. Leah loves a man who does not do stalemate.

Gonzo.

And what am I? Where does Gonzo finish and where do I begin? We were both there. I ask her outright. What am I to you? And then I wish I hadn’t.

“Suppose,” Leah murmurs, and she will not look at me while she destroys me, “suppose Gonzo had been hit on the head. Fallen off the roof. And suppose his brain was damaged. He changed. Couldn’t remember things. Suppose he needed my help to recover, to be who he was. Suppose this had nothing to do with Stuff and monsters. He was just hurt. He would need me. More than ever. Need love.” She shrugs. She is indifferent. Clinical. It’s a lie. She is making it true. “This isn’t different. Not between me and him.”

Leah, the nurse, looks at me and sees an injury. I love her. She thinks I am aphasia with feet. I tell her I am not.

“Do you remember asking me to marry you?”

Of course. It was on the roof garden of Piper 90.

“No,” she says, “the first time.”

In the recovery room. I know I did it. I could lie.

I cannot lie.

Leah nods.

“I’m so sorry,” she says. “This must hurt so much.”

Yes.

“But you and me . . .” She is still going. Determined. “You remember loving me. But do you love me right now, this minute? Do you feel it? No. Your business,” Leah says, “your thing is with Gonzo. Not with me. We’re strangers.”

Yes. You’re a nurse. I’m a disease.

“I’m so sorry.”

I feel agony. But I have no idea if I feel love. I don’t have a great deal of experience sorting memory from the present. Is this love? Is that? What about this sort of squidgy feeling there? She might be right. Agony is not love. Not by itself. Unless love comes in various flavours and textures, and this is the one which hurts. That might be. Perhaps love is like hell, and every one is different.

There is water in my eyes. She will not release my hand. We sit. She waits for me to sob out. So. My thing is with Gonzo. We’re strangers. Saying it makes it true. My Leah would never do this to me. And damn you, Gonzo, anyway. You couldn’t be bothered to dream a dream girl for me too. If you had, we wouldn’t be here.

Leah has a question. She is waiting for me to struggle back to myself. I nod.

“Gonzo . . . used to joke about Sally.” Joke. Yes. Of course he did. About how he spent the night with her. About the things they did. All a joke.

“Just kidding around,” I tell her. It might even be true.

She lets me go. I leave.

IKE THERMITE is lying on the sofa in the living room, and Ma Lubitsch is filling him with cake and some kind of murky grey infusion she makes from her window boxes, and which (like me) has no name. Her husband is in the garden, burying ninjas. He is assisted by the Matahuxee Mime Combine, which might or might not be a good thing. I go out and help.

Corpses are dead weight. Ha ha ha. Old Man Lubitsch has a technique. He shoves a board under one cold shoulder, and shoves it with his rake. The mimes, armed with poles and sticks from the garden, shove as well. The friction between the corpse and the board is less than that between the corpse and the grass, so the corpse stays where it is and the board goes most of the way underneath. If the corpse starts to slip, mimes rush around and brace it. Then Old Man Lubitsch runs to the other side and kicks the corpse until it is almost entirely on the board. Finally, he clamps little barrow wheels to each corner, and he has a corpse on a go-cart which he can drag around to the west paddock, now redesignated the ninja disposal area. The kicking part is the most effortful, but quite apparently also the part which he most enjoys. I do not intend to take this pleasure from him, but he clearly feels I need to kick something, so I get the last one to do myself. We slide the ninja off the board into a pit, and cover him. I sit down on a stone and moan. I wail—not tears, just a heart-deep noise of rejection. The Matahuxee Mime Combine all stand around looking awkward. Old Man Lubitsch puts a rough hand on my shoulder, but that makes it worse. I cannot face his approval, not now. I have done the right thing, in spite of myself. I stare at everything. It’s too bright.

Old Man Lubitsch squats down beside me.

“She needed a safe place,” he says. He looks away. I think he’s guilty.

I want to tell him that he does not have to apologise for sheltering his son’s wife in a strange time. Instead, I make some sort of dry sound. He seems to understand what it means. We sit for a while. I hope he won’t say anything else.

“It’s never easy,” Old Man Lubitsch says. “You did right.”

Didn’t mean to. Meant to, couldn’t stick to it, failed to be evil. Not the same.

“You did right,” Old Man Lubitsch says again. We sit. He stares straight ahead, seeing something private and very distant.

“You look like him,” Old Man Lubitsch says.

Like Gonzo?

“No,” Old Man Lubitsch says, “not like Gonzo.” And there is a tremor in his voice. The mimes have filed out of the garden, and we are alone. I don’t turn to see his face, because I don’t think I could stand it if he was crying.

“Not like Gonzo,” he says. And he gets up and walks away, leaving me alone.

Something happens to my mouth then. It twists and opens, and my eyes make water, and from my throat and belly come deep, raw noises. It’s like crying, the way wine is like water.

Strange, slender arms surround me. They are strong and warm. The black wings of a theatrical cloak wrap around me to keep me warm. Dr. Andromas. The arms rock me, and the gloved hands soothe my hair, and I rest my face against the odd goggled head. Dr. Andromas is a lumpy person to hug, but very giving. Oh yes. Comrade Cow is Dr. Andromas. Gives good hug. But why did you cry on me, Doctor? Do you cry for all your patients?

Dr. Andromas rocks me, and my wounds begin to heal. Again.

“I’m sorry,” I tell Dr. Andromas’s upper arm. “I’m sorry.”

Perhaps, from within the gauze, there is a whispered “shush.” The narrow shoulders stretch and the hands crawl a little farther across my back, settle again to hold me tighter. The only person who can do this for me, right now, is a stranger.

I HAVE decided that I need to go to Haviland alone. Gonzo has gone to Haviland. Dickwash came from there. The enemy plan is there, whether that is where it nests or just a place along its route. I must go, and go quietly. I cannot do this if I am being followed around by a small army of neo-Marceauists in berets. I need to ask questions in discreet rooms. The Matahuxee Mime Combine is not a covert operation. It is, especially for a completely silent group of people, stunningly loud. And so I have suggested to Ike that—for the moment—we must part company. I’m a little surprised at how hard this was. Ike has become a friend.

Ike, though, is not the problem.

Dr. Andromas turns to peer at me, then looks back at Ike. Ike shrugs. Andromas makes a sort of irritable wiggle, as if to say I’m an idiot but that doesn’t change anything. What it apparently doesn’t change is the doctor’s intention to come with me to Haviland City.

“It’s no good,” Ike Thermite says. “Don’t look at me.”

“He works for you.”

Andromas rolls his eyes at Ike, who sighs.

“Andromas,” Ike says, “works for Andromas.”

“I’m going alone.” Ike nods. Andromas doesn’t. Andromas just stares into space, like a cat being told to get off the bed. He gazes at the horizon as if I’m talking about someone else. I wave my hand in front of his goggles.

“Hey! Alone!”

Andromas nods. Yes. I am going alone. Andromas is just going in the same direction at the same time. He is not following. We are fellow travellers. Coincidence is wonderful, Hesperus is Phosphorus, no cause for alarm. I glance back at Ike. Ike is wearing the same face: this isn’t his problem, there’s nothing he can do about it, why am I talking to him? I’m surrounded by a benevolent conspiracy of idiots.

Andromas fluffs his cloak and cocks one arm with the elbow, so that the fabric covers the lower part of his face (already covered, of course, by his gauzy mask, and when did I stop finding that alarming and weird?), and stalks forward. Then he stalks off to the left and makes a full circle around us. Then he cocks the other hand and stalks back the way he came. He will disguise himself. He will be invisible, like the wind in the trees and the shadow of a tiger in the moonlight. No one will notice him.

Apart from everyone in the world who isn’t actually blind.

Perhaps I can lose him on the road.

“Don’t get in the way,” I tell him. Andromas nods happily and bounces off to warm up his truck. Annabelle—trucks should have proper names, not silly ones like Magic of Andromas—is waiting. I look back at Ike.

“I’m sorry,” I tell him. “I just think I should do this myself.”

Ike grins.

“I’m a mime artist,” he says, “not a superman. What could we possibly do but get in the way? But if you need us, Andromas will know how to find us. And K, of course.”

My shock troops. I can’t lose.

“And Andromas might surprise you.”

Yes. That much is almost certain.

There’s a fruity noise somewhere between a klaxon and a trumpet. Andromas—who isn’t coming with me, wouldn’t dream of it, just going in that direction—is eager to be off. I climb into the cab. The Matahuxee Mime Combine stand in a long line outside the Lubitsch house and wave, each a little out of synch with the next. From the porch Gonzo’s parents look on. We have already said our goodbyes, and the physical evidence is sitting next to me on Annabelle’s bench: a bundle of clothes, a Tupperware container and an envelope. The clothes are a mixture—cast-offs of Gonzo’s and a few of those mysterious items which accumulate in a big house over the years (the canary waistcoat is my favourite; I cannot conceive of any circumstance under which I would wear it) and two pieces of slick black fabric—a ninja outfit in my approximate size for the confusion of my enemies. It smells ever so slightly of bees. I put it down sharply and open the envelope. Money. Not a fortune but some, and thus infinitely more than I had before: facilitating money. And last a card, with two words written on it in Old Man Lubitsch’s awful scrawl—the name of one of the executives who came to take Gonzo away for his important new job. A familiar name. Richard Washburn.

Hello there, Dickwash.

The Tupperware tub is simpler. It is the old kind, a milky basin and a tight-fitting lid, the latter moulded with a flimsy tab at one corner to help you get it off again. The tub contains a sandwich—home-made bread jammed with more chicken, bacon, lettuce, tomato, egg, cheese and mayonnaise than any right-thinking loaf would ever willingly attempt to contain—and a bottle of home-made fizzy pop. There is even an apple and a little pot of honey.

Ma Lubitsch has made me lunch, and with it she has packed her love.