Weaveworld

3

After the visit from Apolline, nobody else came. He was not altogether surprised. There’d been an urgency in the woman’s manner, and yet more in the letter from Suzanna. Our enemies are still with us. she’d written. If she wrote that, then it was true.

They discharged him after a week, and he made his way back to Liverpool. Little had changed. The grass still refused to grow in the churned earth where Lilia Pellicia had died; the trains still ran North and South; the china dogs on the dining-room sill still looked for their master, their vigil rewarded only with dust.

There was dust too on the note that Geraldine had left on the kitchen table – a brief missive saying that until Cal learned to behave like a reasonable human being he could expect none of her company.

There were several other letters awaiting him – one from his section leader at the firm, asking him where the hell he was, and stating that if he wished to keep his job he’d better make some explanation of his absence post haste. The letter was dated the 11th. It was now the 25th. Cal presumed he was out of a job.

He couldn’t find it in him to be much concerned by unemployment; nor indeed by Geraldine’s absence. He wanted to be alone; wanted the time to think through all that had happened. More significantly, he found feelings about anything hard to come by. As the days passed, and he made a stab at reassembling his life, he rapidly came to see that his time in the Gyre had left him wounded in more ways than one. It was as though the forces unleashed at the Temple had found their way into him, and left a little wilderness where there’d once been a capacity for tears and regret.

Even the poet was silent. Though Cal could still remember Mad Mooney’s verses by heart they were just sounds to him now; they failed to move.

There was one comfort in this: that perhaps his new-found stoicism suited better the function of solitary librarian. He would be vigilant, but he would anticipate nothing, neither disaster nor revelation.

That was not to say he would give up looking to the future. True, he was just a Cuckoo: scared and weary and alone. But so, in the end, were most of his tribe: it didn’t mean all was lost. As long as they could still be moved by a minor chord, or brought to a crisis of tears by scenes of lovers reunited; as long as there was room in their cautious hearts for games of chance, and laughter in the face of God, that must surely be enough to save them, at the last.

If not, there was no hope for any living thing.