Weaveworld

4

They’d been more cautious after the near-miss in Newcastle. Instead of visiting major cities, where the police presence was substantial, they started to find smaller communities. That had its own disadvantages, of course. The arrival of two strangers, and a carpet, aroused curiosity and questions.

But the change of tactics worked. Never staying in any place more than thirty-six hours, and moving irrationally from town to town, village to village, the trail grew colder behind them. Days free of the hounds turned to weeks, and weeks became months, and it was almost as if their pursuers had given up the chase.

In that time Suzanna’s thoughts turned often to Cal. So much had happened since that day beside the Mersey, when he’d professed love to her. She’d often wondered how much of what he’d felt had been some unconscious knowledge of how the menstruum had touched him, entered him, and how much had been love as it was conventionally understood. Sometimes she longed to pick up the ‘phone and speak to him; indeed on several occasions she’d tried to do just that. Was it paranoia that prevented her from speaking, or was there – as her instinct intimated – another presence on the line, monitoring the call? On the fourth and fifth occasions it wasn’t even Cal who answered, but a woman who demanded to know who this was, and when Suzanna remained silent threatened to report her. She didn’t call again; it simply wasn’t worth the risk.

Jerichau had an opinion on the matter.

‘Mooney’s a Cuckoo,’ he said, when Cal’s name came up in conversation. ‘You should forget him.’

‘If you’re a Cuckoo, you’re worth nothing, is that it?’ she said. ‘What about me?’

‘You belong with us now,’ he said. ‘You’re Seerkind.’

‘There’s so much you don’t know about me,’ she said. ‘Years and years of just being an ordinary girl –’

‘You were never ordinary.’

‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘Believe me, I was. Still am. Here,” She tapped her forehead. ‘Sometimes I wake up and I can’t believe what’s happened … happening … to me. When I think of the way I was.’

‘It’s no use to look back,’ said Jerichau. ‘No use thinking of what could have been.’

‘You don’t do that any more, do you? I’ve noticed. You don’t even talk about the Fugue.’

Jerichau smiled. ‘Why should I?’ he said, ‘I’m happy as I am. With you. Maybe it’ll be different tomorrow. Maybe it was different yesterday, I forget. But today, now. I’m happy. I even begin to like the Kingdom.’

She remembered him lost in the crowd on Lord Street; how he’d changed.

‘So what if you never saw the Fugue again?’

He pondered this a moment. ‘Who knows? Better not to think about it.’

It was an improbable romance. She, learning all the time from the power inside her a new vision. He, daily more seduced by the very world whose trivialities she was seeing with dearer and dearer eyes. And with that comprehension, so unlike the simplifications she’d been ruled by hitherto, she became even more certain that the carpet they carried was a last hope, while he – whose home the Weave contained – seemed increasingly indifferent to its fate, living in the moment and for the moment, touched scarcely at all by hope or regret. He talked less and less of finding a safe place for the Fugue to reside, more and more of something tantalizing he’d seen in the street or on the television.

Often now, though he stayed with her and told her she could always rely upon him, she felt she was alone.