Orbit 7 - [Anthology] Read online

  Up the ramp then to the very top, past pots of planted palms, gray in the lamplight. Within the arcade there were no lights. She went Whoo, barely a whisper this time. Girls have more to be afraid of than boys, at night. The thin columns of seeming stone slanted up to the terminating darkness of the vault. Inside her weatherproof her clothes were damp with sweat. The newer ones had pores, like skin, but wouldn’t that let the heat out too? The real solution was to live somewhere that was warm in the winter. Malaga. Hollywood. Carthage. Basking in the sun. Swimming in warm saltwater, though not if it was your period of course. Sharks can smell blood.

  Unhealthy daydreams. Even if they weren’t sinful, it was a bad habit to get into.

  Four stars formed a rectangle within the arch’s parabolic slice of sky: God’s Door, her mother had said.

  God closing his door

  in the sky,

  and all trace of its outline

  disappears.

  It was a famous poem before it was a song. Her voice squeaked nervously in the high arbors of the ziggurat, but the voice she heard, interiorly, was not her own but St. Theresa’s.

  Ecstasy—Emma wondered if she had any talent for that sort of thing. Though probably it was a sin. Probably.

  She wiggled her right hand into the polly weatherproof and touched the larger breast. It had stopped hurting, but the left one was still painful, though not awfully. Another month, her mother had said, but it was already past that time.

  She was too old, really, for games like this. Boring and juvenile. Daphne was only ten. She needed a friend more her own age, but there weren’t any in this part of Hampstead. Even though they were so much better off now, she wished sometimes they were back on Lant Street.

  Two grown-ups were making love in one of the caves. She walked past them quickly, embarrassed. The man called out her name.

  It was Walt, and her mother was with him. She said, “Hello, Walt. How are you?” It had been a year or more since she’d seen him.

  Her mother said, “We’re both fine, sweetheart. Did you come up here looking for me?”

  “No. I’m the ghost.”

  “Just haunting us, eh?” Walt said.

  “It’s a game they play,” her mother said. “What time is it?”

  Emma looked at the watch on her bracelet. “Seven-thirty.”

  Walt had sat up, but her mother was still laying in the mossy stuff. She sounded high. “Is King Arthur in?”

  King Arthur was her name for Mr. Schiel, their benefactor.

  “I don’t think so,” Emma said. “I don’t know.”

  “Come and sit down with us a minute, Rose-Red.” Walt patted the moss. His hair was changed from the way she remembered it, and his face was darker. He was a cook for Wimpy’s and unbearably handsome.

  “I can’t. I have to look for the other kids. They’re hiding.”

  “Emma?” Her mother rose to her knees in slow motion. Her mouth drooped open, like St. Theresa’s. Emma had practiced the same expression when she was alone, but it didn’t work for her. Her lower lip was too thin.

  “Yes, Mother.” She assumed a tone of tolerance.

  “It would be better if you didn’t say anything to Arthur about. . .”

  “No, Mother, of course not.”

  “And if he asks—”

  ‘I’ll just say I’ve been playing on the roof since school and I don’t know where you are.”

  “Neither do I, sweetheart. Neither do I.” She chuckled, and Walt took hold of her hand. “I’m somewhere out in space, fitting all the links together.”

  “What?” Emma asked, though she knew better than to try and make sense of what her mother said at such times.

  “The links—the links between the stars, the links of my armor, the links of the endless chain.”

  Emma nodded unhappily and backed off down the arcade. When she reached the ramp, she began running. Daphne, Ralph, and Ralph’s little sister were all standing in the shadow of the vent, safe.

  “Where are you going?” Daphne called to her.

  She pressed the red button for the lift. She didn’t know what to say. Her mother was supposed to have stopped taking that sort of thing. Arthur had spent all sorts of money to help her. “Home,” she said, just as the lift opened its doors. She fed her house-tag into the slot.

  The lift said, “Good evening, Miss Rosetti. I hope you’ve enjoyed yourself.” But if you said anything back, it didn’t understand. Arthur Schiel worked for a company and was rich, so they lived in a luxury building, but even though he’d been very good to Emma and her mother, he was a stupid snob and nobody really liked him.

  Emma felt just sick.

  He was waiting in the wool chair that had cost so much, undressed. The Volkswagen was parked by the sink, filling with water for his bath. Except for the splash of the water, the room was quiet. Arthur didn’t like music.

  “Where is your mother, Emma?” he asked.

  “How should I know?” she said. She knew she should try to be nice to him, but it was so hard.

  While she tucked her weatherproof away, he watched her with a sarcastic smile. She went to the back end of the telly, where he couldn’t see her, and used the earphones while the flickering images smoothed her distress, like a hand that gently closed the lids of her eyes.

  Arthur Schiel, sitting in the costly discomfort of the woolen chair, listened to the running water and stared at Emma’s tapping feet with helpless, unassuageable rage.

  That was the night they were thrown out and had to go to Lant Street to live, once again, with Walt.

  * * * *

  The screen, an American-made holly, represented an interior of the Katsura Palace with a view onto a spring garden roseate with blossoms of apricot. Three feet by six (to match the tatami that they had always intended to buy), it rented from DER at £5 a month.

  When slid aside, the screen discovered a nest of three desks and, above and below, a utility honeycomb housing a defunct dictionary, a wonky tape machine, and an Olivetti with a frayed, faint ribbon but still functioning, except for the tab. The remaining cells of this hive were given over now to Emma’s collection of pebbles from the beaches of Brighton and Hastings: flint, shingle, sandstone, red and gray quartzite, shale, and chert.

  Emmy - the Baby Bear of the household - had the smallest of the three desks. Her desk had its own drawer, which she always locked, keeping the key on her bracelet. Inside the drawer there were a diary for the year 2088 (never completed), a plastic daff, a small bottle of Lourdes water (a departing present from Sister Mary Margaret), a string of unmatched pearls salvaged from one of her mother’s tirades, and an antique Suehard chocolate box. Inside the chocolate box, in a white envelope, were three photos, each two and a half by four inches.

  The first showed three men and a cow standing before a large ochrous house. The shutters and the long wooden balcony railing above the first floor were painted moss-green. The cow, gravid with milk, stood in the foreground, interrupting a full view of two of the men. The third, drably dressed, faced away from the camera and seemed to be there, like the cow, for the sake of local color. The men smiling into the camera had somehow the air of tourists. Their faces were tanned with the same cheery gold as the walls of the house. The taller man wore a white suit embroidered with roses and a ruffled shirt; ringlets of red hair blew across his rather weak chin. The other man, bare-chested, in shorts, held a bottle of wine up, toasting the photographer. On the back of the picture, in purple ink, was written: “Reutte, July ‘52.”

  The second photograph showed the head and shoulders of a man resembling the taller of the two men in the first photograph, though now his hair was brown and his chin was strengthened by a van Dyke. He had put on some weight as well. His cheeks and lower lip seemed uncommonly red, his expression slack. Perhaps he had been drinking. His eyelids drooped, Buddha-like, over bright turquoise eyes that focused on the camera with an intensity out of keeping with his other features. Behind him an orange tree exhibited
leaves and three small oranges. This photo was unlabeled.

  The third bore an inscription across the cloud-haze in the upper third of the picture: “Walt and Me-Summer Holyday.” The same man was once again redheaded. His beard was fuller, his face and body more lean. Except for a silver bracelet and a thick silver chain about his neck, he was naked, as was the little girl he held in the air. The skin of his torso, arms, and legs, shaved for competition and shining with oil, was perfectly smooth. His hands supported the girl’s pelvic girdle, and she maintained a precarious balance by resting her forehead against his. They grinned, staring into each other’s eyes. In the middle distance, part of the promiscuous mass of bathers, Emma’s mother could be discerned resting in a beach chair, modestly bikinied, her eyes averted from the playful pair in the foreground to regard the gray-green sea.

  Often when she found herself alone in their two-room flat, Emma would slide away the screen, unlock the drawer, and take out the Suchard box. When she had finished looking at the photographs, she would kiss each in turn, lips pressed tightly together, before replacing them in the envelope. She was in love with Walt.

  * * * *

  “Are there,” old Mr. Harness asked, “any in the class . . . who ... ?” The dry lips crumbled in an unspoken apology. The quick eyes, yellow as the basins of the school lav, caught her embarrassed glance and shifted away.

  Would I have been silent, if he had asked? Emma wondered. Would I have faced the lions?

  After all, even if they did find out she was a Catholic, they couldn’t do anything worse than tease her a bit, the way they had at the other school.

  “Of course,” he mumbled, “my account may differ significantly from the what-would-you-say ... the official account of the Irish Church. It lacks the nihil obstat. Events such as these, possessing still some flavor of controversy, resist our efforts to order them by simple schemes.”

  Charmian Levin, sitting behind Emma, touched a penciltip to a knob of her spine. Emma stiffened and tucked in her blouse.

  “History is never simple, of course, until we cease to care too terribly much. One might liken the mechanism of tolerance to the painter’s trick of aerial perspective: with distance, we lose the edge and color of things. We gain, perhaps, the vista.”

  Charmian, who at fifteen was the oldest girl at Inverness, swiveled ninety degrees on her stool and, with a schooled gesture, fluttered the white banner of her hair. “Oh, August—such blague!”

  The yellow eyes lowered to regard the girl’s glasslike sandals. The old man wondered, with a small sad spite, what part of his monthly salary they had cost.

  “I was rather straying, wasn’t I? To return, then, to the Papal Bull of 2034—”

  Emma wrote in her notebook: “Papal Bull, 2034.”

  “—which was dubbed, almost immediately, the ‘Mad Bull,’ due to a short-lived effort, within the Roman hierarchy, to call the Pope’s sanity into question. But, as the instigators of this plan were themselves immortal survivors of the Plague and, by this new pronouncement, excommunicate, their actions served only to hasten the schism that John was seeking to bring about.”

  Emma wrote in her notebook: “Heretics excommunicated.” Charmian’s pencil traced a line along her lower rib.

  “I think, in retrospect, that John acted in the best interests of his church, even though the immediate effect was an eighty percent reduction in its membership. That figure indicates how much, even then, the new sensibility had found itself at odds with the traditional outlook that the Church represented, for the ratio of mortals to immortals in the general population was then, as now, a mere fraction of one percent. In England and other more advanced nations, the falling-off had been much more drastic than that. In twenty thirty-two, two years before the Mad Bull, the Roman Catholic population of Britain had declined by fifty percent from its level at the turn of the century. And in other churches the decline was even more precipitate.”

  Emma wrote: “2032, 50%.”

  “The Church’s real strength was in Central and South America, areas where disease and famine still maintained, if artificially, a sense of the mortal and a need to believe in an afterlife. But this could hardly be considered an enduring strength, founded as it was on ignorance and poverty. I think these considerations help to explain John’s ruthlessness. The continued toleration of immortals within the Church could only have vitiated its potential as a what-shall-I-say ... a rallying-point for the mortal element. And in this he was successful, as we know. We may judge it a small success, but possibly it was the only one that could have been wrested from the circumstances.”

  Emma wrote: “The Church victorious.”

  Mr. Harness asked: “Are there any questions? Charmian?”

  “It still, you know, doesn’t seemfair. I mean, most of that eighty percent that got booted out still believed all that stuff, didn’t they? And then just to be told that it didn’t make any difference, whether they believed. Could they help it they were born immortal?”

  “On that point you would have to consult a Jesuit. The Church’s position is that they could and can help it. We are all, or rather”—and again, and even more devastatingly, the lips crumbled - ”you are all heretics. It’s not essentially different from the notion of original sin.”

  “But, I mean! It’s genetics.”

  “Yes—alas,” said Mr. Harness.

  Emma closed her notebook.

  “Emma?”

  “Please, I have to go to the lav.”

  Leaving Mr. Harness’s room, Emma stepped squarely on Charmian Levin’s splendid foot. She could almost feel, in her own foot, the pain she’d caused.

  Once, in her first months at the Inverness School, Charmian had been Emma’s best friend, but those days were gone forever. It was fruitless to suppose otherwise. Too much had been said on both sides, and there was no longer a basis for mutual respect.

  Nevertheless, she did, bolted in the loo, open Charmian’s note and read it, once, before flushing it down. It was an invitation to dinner that night with Charmian’s family. Any reply was, of course, unthinkable. Mr. Levin was a business associate of Arthur Schiel, and if Emma’s mother ever learned ... It was bad enough (as Mrs. Rosetti had often pointed out) that Emma was finishing out the term at Inverness on the tuition provided by Arthur Schiel, but to visit the Levins now, to have to answer their well-meaning questions, to stand again in Mrs. Levin’s proud salon, that perfect little temple of the New . . .

  There was a knock on the door of the stall. “Emma, it’s me, Charmian. I want to talk to you. Please.”

  “No.”

  “I have to talk to you. I told old Who-Shall-I-Say it was an urgent matter of feminine hygiene. Did you read my note?”

  “No.”

  “You did read it. I can tell when you’re lying, you know. Emma, I’m sorry for anything I said that might have offended you. I didn’t mean it. I’ve been sick thinking about it, just sick. You have to come to dinner tonight.”

  “Do I?”

  “I told my mother you were. She’s always asking after you. She said she’d order a special cake from Wimpy’s for us. We can be utter pigs about it.”

  Emma started to cry. It had not been a conscious cruelty on Charmian’s part, for Emma had never told her, or anyone else at Inverness, about Walt. Her new address was ignominy enough.

  “Is it what I said about God? Is it that? I’m sorry, but I can’t help what I believe, can I? I’d really like to believe in God, but I can’t. I think it’s a perfectly respectable idea, though, considered intellectually. I’d probably be happier if I did believe in him, but even then, I couldn’t be a Catholic. They wouldn’t let me. And I don’t care what your church says—”

  But Emma had never told Charmian she was a Catholic!

  “—a person can’t help the way he’s born. Will you come to dinner?”

  “It’s impossible.”

  “Just this once. I can’t talk to anybody anymore. Ellen is so basically stupid. You’re yo
unger than I am, but two years doesn’t make that much difference. Emma, I need you—just desperately.”

  It was another ten minutes before Emma was persuaded. On their way to the tubes, Charmian said, “I have some tickets for Westminster Abbey. St. Theresa’s going to be there.”

  “In person?”

  Charmian arched a chalk-white brow. “Mm.”

  “Oh, wonderful!” She caught Charmian about the waist and kissed her cheek, leaving a scarlet smudge.

  They are more passionate, Charmian thought with a somewhat grudging approval. She said: “You reallyare my best friend, you know.”