Sleep doesn't come. His body aches with exhaustion, bouts of shivery spasms seizing his muscles from time to time, though he's warm enough. But his mind will not settle, writhes like a spawning eel in the weed mats of the Sargasso Sea. There's no sunlight to penetrate the waters, no clear blue depths. It's as though undiscovered species await him, if only he could permeate the murk.
The Zach she saw, he's gone now. There remains only a fleshless skeleton of the person he might have become. He slides a hand from under the furs, holds it up towards the low flame, and spreads his fingers. The light reddens the webby parts of his skin to near translucence. He remembers how she once matched their hands, palm to palm. With an inarticulate sound he throws back the covers, scrambles to his feet, and bounds to the lantern, then slaps his hand onto its hood. He holds it there, feeling nothing and everything, till his palm begins to shrill in agony. Laura. He clenches his teeth to choke off her name. He will not say it. Words as slippery as eels have always been his self-defence, spawning guile and deceit and spite.
'Why won't you talk to me?' Laura cried.
Because the sea is fathomless, forever hidden by sargassum. Because it's not as warm as you imagine. Because we'd drown.
Chapter 31
'Who's there?' Laura cried, whirling instinctively to peer behind her.
There was no answer, and though she could see the flickering on the screen from the corner of her eye, there was no beam of light from the projection booth either. Her hand unsteady, she swept her torch over the seats, discovering nothing-discovering how many wells of darkness there were in which to hide. Finally, with deep reluctance, she turned round again to face the screen.
She discovered you could gasp without making a sound.
Zach was sitting on a platform made of ice, shoulders slumped and head propped on one hand. Aqua light tinted everything, even his hair and skin, but this was no underwater setting. Could he be inside an ice cave or grotto? a glacier? He looked so tired-so defeated-that Laura found herself descending the steps towards the screen as though she could take him in her arms, but halted with a shiver of recognition at the sound of his clarinet. Suddenly light-headed, she dropped to the carpeted tread and hugged her ribs. This was impossible-impossible.
Maybe the dead could also rise up and speak.
Her neckhairs stirred, and for a moment she was tempted to crawl under one of the cinema seats, the way she'd done as a small child. She'd nearly forgotten: her dad used to take her to his favourite scifi films, the classic ones with scary aliens and megalomaniac cyborgs and grotesque virus-deformed plague victims, till her mum got wind of where they'd been. Nearly forgotten, too, the ice cream and popcorn; the delicious taste of conspiracy.
I'm not going to look at them, she told herself. The dead stay dead.
After a quick backwards glance, she raised her eyes to the screen. As if on signal, Zach lifted his face, and she could see tears wetting his cheeks. He put his free hand to his hair-his beautiful hair, now uncombed, dirty, lank as Zach himself. Never more beautiful.
'Zach,' she said, hoping that whatever window had opened between them wasn't glazed in mirrored glass. 'Zach, where are you?'
He raked his fingers repeatedly through his hair, then straightened up. Laura glimpsed a tousled, black-haired head asleep on his lap. The sight drove her to her feet.
'Damn you,' she said, 'I get to find dead bodies while you-' She stopped, conscious of how ridiculous her words sounded, even if nobody could hear. How contemptible.
For there was no mistaking the despair on Zach's face. Plainly thinking himself unobserved, he closed his eyes, and fresh tears continued to slip from under his lids to the accompaniment of unfamiliar but exquisite music-music which she suspected was his own. He'd lost weight again, and there were smudges under his eyes, dark cratered smudges deriving from more than lack of sleep. The cigarette burn on his cheek had healed to a pearly cameo, crimped at the edges and likely to remain beardless.
Where had they taken him? Fulgur's network was so extensive that he could be thousands of kilometres away-even, she supposed, on one of the outstations. Laura studied the scene: the blocks of ice, Zach's clothes, the intense, almost surreal blue light. She felt like directing the camera operator to pan for her. Under her fixed stare, the picture was beginning to blur. She wiped her eyes angrily, she couldn't afford to miss any details which might provide a clue, though how she intended to penetrate some secret installation had not yet occurred to her-but it would.
Then she noticed that the music was fading as well. 'No,' she cried, her voice like a wrong note, 'wait!' Now the image was dimming visibly, so that it reminded her of a transparent webskin. 'Zach!' The webbed texture of the screen itself lent Zach's skin a macabre reptilian appearance. Frantically Laura started down the stairs, caught her foot, and flailed the rest of the way to the bottom, cracking her forearm against one of the aisle seats with a jaw-clenching jolt of pain, despite the padding of jacket sleeve and jumper. Fuckfuckfuck, she was making this a habit-falling to reach Zach. Winded, she took a few minutes to right herself, massage her arm, and scrabble for her torch, by which time Zach was no more than a pale shadow of himself.
'Zach!' she cried even louder, no longer concerned about being overheard.
Zach straightened and opened his eyes. Laura had no reason to believe he saw her, though his gaze was disconcertingly point-blank. Squinting, he leaned forward with an air of fierce concentration, as if searching for something which had slipped from his grasp into deep surf. For a moment his image sharpened, filling the screen in a close-up so that the rest of the room disappeared from view. Then his lips moved, but it was impossible to tell whether he was talking to himself, to his companion, or to someone else entirely, and Laura couldn't read his lips.
'Zach, listen to me'-she started again after a shaky breath-'listen. Play, don't ever stop. I'll find you.'
She watched without moving as the screen became blank once more, the cinema dark. She could never be sure at which point Zach's image dissolved into afterimage, though in retrospect she believed it was just at this threshold that she caught a whiff of the sea, briny and chill; that she saw, though only for a fraction of a second, a flash of speaking, bright blue eyes.
Keep telling him.
* * *
Fulgur was famous for its Christmas bash-luscious food, wine from its own South African cellars, a top band, always a few dazzling celebrities to mingle with the crowd. And a themed children's party, held simultaneously. It was said you needed a postdoctoral degree in child psychology or education, plus a minimum of ten years hands-on experience, to serve the fruit punch. Last year one award-winning children's author had been unobtrusively escorted from the room because he'd been caught spiking his own glass of orange squash. There were always gatecrashers to both events, despite stringent security measures.
Laura spent the evening before the party at Zach's flat. Whatever Josh had done-and he refused to tell her-the neighbours were no longer a problem. 'Just don't make it too obvious,' he'd warned. After cooking him a meal, she presented him with his Christmas gift, though she planned to come by sometime during the holiday. She wasn't a particularly creative cook-Zach, she remembered glumly, had far more flair-but her mum had insisted on teaching her the basics. For years she'd resented not being allowed to eat the frozen pizzas and tinned puddings on her mates' supper tables, so it came as something of a surprise to find that she took pleasure in rolling out a slab of pastry.
'Wonderful mince pies,' Josh said, already on his third or fourth.
'My mum likes to bake when she's not disinfecting the toilets or scrubbing the floors with a toothbrush.'
'About to get your period? Listen, in my younger days I used to bake my own bread.'
Laura grimaced. 'All that kneading.' She no longer blushed at his remarks.
'As good as a massage when you're wound up, and much better than bashing pillows. Think of the feathers everywhere.'
She smiled to herself at the scene conjured. A shame her mum was allergic, a split pillow or two would be just the thing to induce a heart attack.
'The way my mum hates mess and muck, I'm surprised she doesn't wear surgical gloves when faced with a mound of sticky dough.'
'Kids never have a clue about their parents.'
'Don't bet on it. And besides, fair's fair. Parents haven't got a clue about their kids.'
Just before she left, Josh shuffled to a cupboard and handed her a newspaper-wrapped parcel. 'Sorry about the paper.'
He always seemed to know when she got teary. 'No need for that,' he said, patting her as usual on the shoulder, 'it's just some old thing I've had lying around in a drawer. But don't open it now, keep it for Christmas.'
When she kissed him on the cheek, his face pinkened with pleasure. 'Mind, we don't want to make Zach jealous.'
They were both silent till Josh said, 'Ah well, those simus don't make much of our holidays anyway.'
Laura went back to Zach's flat to tidy up the kitchen, her fantasy only fleeting that Zach was in the living room, reading or studying a score, tapping away at the computer. She'd stored extra pies and cheeses in the fridge, two containers of a meaty pasta in the freezer compartment, though she knew Josh would never fetch the stuff for himself. His code of behaviour reminded her a bit of Owen, and rather more of the heroes in the soppy historical romances Olivia liked to read.
Christ, what a bitch you're turning into. Olivia reads all sorts of stuff, she never goes anywhere without a book or, since her last birthday, her reader. In fact, Olivia ought to have been far more Zach's type.
'Come on, you know what he's after,' Olivia had said even before the club bombing. 'You don't think he's interested in your mind? No matter how much I dislike him, there's no denying he's damned smart.' She'd laughed in that cool way of hers that made you want to riposte with a subtly double-edged thrust-if only you could think of one. 'About as smart as me, I reckon.'
Laura stopped scrubbing the baking tray for a moment while she recalled the peculiar, almost cagey expression on Olivia's face.
To avoid temptation, she stowed Josh's parcel out of sight in Zach's wardrobe before sitting down at his desk. As futile as the exercise seemed, she was writing him a Christmas letter, and by hand. Zach had an old-fashioned predilection for fountain pens; he collected-and used-the oddest things. But she uncapped one, an elegant black-and-amber instrument she'd seen him write with: some thoughts needed the delicacy, the weight of ink; its idiosyncrasy. It was slow going, and she blotched, then tore up more than she kept, but in the end she folded two closely written sheets of paper, slipped them into an envelope, and addressed it with his name. She stretched and went to the window, thinking how much she hated the short dark days of winter. The streetlamp which barely lit this stretch of canal gleamed like the single baleful eye of an old tom, scarred survivor of innumerable street battles. There was no sign of the snow that was predicted, yet again. Everyone had their own theories about the severity of this particular winter, right down to the religious fanatics.
Could her grandfather be right? Hard to imagine. But if there was the remotest chance . . . then she hoped Stella was warm enough at last.
'Why are you doing this?' Laura had asked her. 'If you're arrested, you'll be tried under the new terrorism laws. They won't deport you, if that's what you're reckoning on.'
'They've got to catch me first.' Stella had made a sound that took Laura a moment to recognise as a laugh. 'Don't you worry none about me, I'm mean and wily as a mountain cat.'
'But why?' Laura had persisted, a trifle dangerously to judge by the yellowish gleam in the woman's eyes. But Stella rose to her feet, grunting at the stiffness in her hips, and stood over Laura. With her fingertips-and with the privilege of age, or perhaps indomitability-Stella lifted Laura's chin to study her face. Laura was reminded of her mum applying paint stripper to an old wardrobe: a swimming costume was fully clothed, and then some, compared to this.
'Kids,' Stella said at last with an exaggerated sigh. 'You're in love with him, yet you've got no earthly clue who he is, do you?' A short silence. 'Who he's going to be.' Another, longer, silence, in which Laura could hear an icy surf hurtling towards the shell of her ears. 'But maybe it's better that way.'
Which was all Stella would say.
* * *
Despite the late hour, Laura made a detour to the cast-iron footbridge over the canal, from which she posted her letter to Zach via the sluggish water.
* * *
During the second set Laura was sipping tomato juice when the long-haired bloke who had been talking to Andy-his left leg still in a cast-detached himself, wended his way skilfully through the press of overdressed, overheated bodies, and stopped in front of her. Olivia would have already thrust out her chest at the approach of his arresting green eyes, diamond stud, feline grace. He looked as though he'd just stepped out of a cool shower. He looked as though he expected she was picturing him dripping wet, reaching for a crisp white towel.
'Dance?' he asked.
'Sorry, I'm waiting for my boyfriend. He'll be back in a second.'
The man took her elbow. Laura stepped back, trying to pull free without making a scene, and bumped into someone nearby, sloshing some of her juice onto her cream-coloured top.
'Damn it, let go of me,' she hissed. 'Look what you've made me do.'
His eyes danced. 'No problem. Come back to my office, I've got a couple of spare shirts in the cupboard.'
'You're mad if you think I'm going anywhere with you!'
'Is that so?' He seemed entirely unperturbed. 'We ought to leave straightaway. Randall's going to make a few remarks that I can't miss, and you shouldn't.' At her glare, he added, 'The CEO.'
