“Warry, for fuck’s sake, where are those old women, the two that were standing next to you?”
His sister’s head revolved unhurriedly in his direction, that of a mechanical Turk anxious to persuade spectators that there was no cramped grandmaster dwarf crouched in her ribcage. Focussing a mildly shell-shocked gaze on Mick, her optic hazard-lights blinked stupidly amid the slobbering kohl, a breeding couple of stealth-jellyfish. She looked as though she might get round to working out who he was once she’d answered the same question in relation to herself. The weighted lids went up and down a few more times to no apparent purpose in the long space-shuttle pause before she spoke.
“What?”
Mick gripped her shoulder, urgently.
“The two old ladies! They’ve been here all afternoon. They were behind you when you made your sacrifice or whatever you thought it was that you were doing. They’re not out here, so if they’re still in there underneath a table, overcome by fumes, then …”
He tailed off. Alma was staring at his tightening hand as though she wasn’t certain what it was, much less what it was doing on her bicep. He withdrew it while it still had all its fingers.
“Sorry.”
She frowned at him quizzically, and he could feel the shift as he found himself in the role of babbling psychiatric liability while she somehow assumed the mantle of concerned clinician.
“Warry, Bert’s mum was the only old gal here other than me, and if she hadn’t already gone home then I wouldn’t have lit the touch-paper. I’m not a psychopath who wants to cull the elderly or something. I’m not Martin Amis. Have a look yourself, you don’t believe me.”
His eyes darted to the nursery door, still simmering. He knew from Alma’s tone, with absolute conviction, that if he should peer inside then it would be exactly as she said. There would be no half-suffocated pensioners collapsed in tragic bundles, nothing but the glowing Dresden mess and twists of drifting yarn that curled up from its squirming embers. He pictured precisely the two women who had definitely been there and now definitely weren’t and felt the same uneasy tingle in his upper vertebrae that he’d experienced when talking to Bert Regan’s mum, a breath of the uncanny on the barbered stubble at the nape. He thought it better that he not continue with the present thrust of his enquiry, and returned his gaze to meet that of his sister.
“No, it’s … no, it’s fine, Warry. I’ll take your word for it. I must have got mixed up. Here, you do know that this place probably has a connection to the fire station, don’t you? Did you want to be here when the engines came? Or was that why you did it, for the flashing lights and uniforms?”
She looked at him in earnest startlement.
“Oh, shit. I hadn’t thought of that. Come on, let’s fuck off somewhere else so that I can reflect on what I’ve done and feel remorse.”
Seizing his elbow she commenced to drag him across Phoenix Street in way of Chalk Lane, calling back to the smoke-damaged refugees still gathered on the nursery’s moth-eaten apron verge.
“Don’t worry. Everybody gets a refund.”
Roman Thompson’s chap Dean sounded as though he were at a philosophic impasse.
“But nobody paid.”
Towing her brother along the west wall of Doddridge Church, Alma considered.
“Oh. Well, in that case nobody qualifies. I’ll give you all a call next week.”
With that the Warrens absented themselves from the potential crime scene, sauntering conspicuously in their efforts not to look like fleeing perpetrators. Scuffing over listing pavement past the loaf-bronze meeting house both of them peered first at the stranded doorway halfway up the rain-chewed stonework, a moustache of flowers and grass along its sill, then at each other, although neither spoke. From the truncated strip of peeling house-fronts opposite crouched under the raised arbour of the designated castle grounds came muffled music that was summery and old, phased in and out of audibility by the continually shifting waveband of the breeze. “Don’t Walk Away, René” perhaps. Assaying branches overdressed in pink like gypsy bridesmaids, blackbird Schuberts hung their fleeting compositions on the grey staves that still ravelled from the nursery, and rattling around the curve of Mary’s Street a flaking ice-blue Volkswagen was for a heartbeat in beguiling contrast with the toffee fringes of the burial ground. Rounding the corner in the juddering vehicle’s wake, Alma and Mick mounted the undemanding run of steps and, without need for conference, agreed to park their ageing arses on the slab-topped wall bounding the chapel’s southern face.
It was a lulling bee-drone of an afternoon despite persistent violated squealing from the smoke detectors, now off on the church’s other side and therefore easier to ignore. Mick tapped a cigarette from his depleted pack and Alma passed his lighter to him without fuss. Its work was done, apparently. After a moment, goaded by the front-bar perfume of her brother’s exhalations, she elected to spark up her last remaining stick of dream-snout and got him to light it for her, leaning in and holding back her locks like petticoats beside a hearth. They sipped their neurotoxins in companionable silence for some little time before the speechless younger sibling thought of anything to say.
“Your pictures, Warry, what we just saw. There were lots of things I don’t remember telling you. You’d taken some creative licence, I thought, here and there.”
His sister smiled, becoming briefly radiant in something other than a cracked reactor sense, and crinkled up her nose self-deprecatingly.
“Yeah. Yeah, I made most of it up, but then I don’t see that it really matters who hallucinated what as long as the real story’s in there somewhere. Anyway, nobody’s ever going to know it isn’t what you said to me. It’s your word against mine and I’m an interstellar treasure.”
Mick laughed down his nose, in writhing fronds of vaporous chinoiserie.
“And what’s all this fantastic nonsense going to accomplish, Warry? Have you somehow saved the Boroughs, like you said that you were going to do? Will they rebuild it how it was when we were children and not put up any more Destructors?”
Still smiling, albeit now more ruefully, she shook her trailing willow-canopy of hair.
“I’m not the fairies, Warry. I imagine that the Boroughs will go on being ignored until somebody comes up with a half-baked plan they think might turn a profit, then they’ll plough it under, pave it over, get rid of the streets and only leave the names. As for incinerators and destructors, my guess is they’ll roll them out across the country. It’s the cheapest, dirtiest way of doing things, it doesn’t inconvenience anyone who votes or matters, and why interfere with getting on a hundred years of cross-Westminster policy? They started pulling this place down after the First World War, most probably because the Russian revolution had made keeping all of your disgruntled workers in one place look like a bad idea. They won’t stop now.”
As frequently occurred when she was off on one, Alma’s neglected reefer had gone out. Anticipating her requirements, Mick retrieved the lighter from his pocket and allowed her to suck the extinguished end of her hashish Havana back to angry ruby life, whereafter she resumed her diatribe.
“And even if they did rebuild it, down to the last doorstep, that would just be horrible. That would just do for buildings what Invasion of the Body Snatchers did for people. It would be some sort of deprivation theme-park. Unless you restore it how it was, with all its life and atmospheres intact, it’s not worth bothering. I’ve saved the Boroughs, Warry, but not how you save the whale or save the National Health Service. I’ve saved it the way that you save ships in bottles. It’s the only plan that works. Sooner or later all the people and the places that we loved are finished, and the only way to keep them safe is art. That’s what art’s for. It rescues everything from time.”