Cerbo clears his throat, makes a little nervous gesture with his hands as though he's shooing away flies. 'Time, Mr de Selby. You are to give her your time. An hour for each Pomp. Ten hours, in total, of your undivided attention, before the Death Moot begins.'
'It's a generous offer,' I say.
Cerbo's lips curl in a grimace. 'It is more than generous. Ms Whitman doesn't want you to fail in your work. Power vacuums are something of a danger in this business.'
'And what do you think the odds are of that?'
Cerbo doesn't answer. 'I'll consider it,' I say.
I get the feeling that he was expecting a response, and an enthusiastically positive one, at that. But I'm not ready to answer, and Cerbo can tell. He's disappointed, and not all of that seems to be about going home to his RM empty-handed.
He dons his hat. Slips his folder beneath his arm, and stands. 'Don't be too long in considering it. That may be regarded as an insult.'
I nod. 'I am aware of that. Believe me, I've no desire to put anyone's nose out of joint. But this is my region, and I'll take as long as I need.'
He glances at Tim. Tim shrugs and gives him his most 'my boss is crazy' look. Cerbo sighs again. 'Good day, gentlemen.'
He shifts, and there's nothing but air filling the space he's left. The sheet of paper flutters on my desk, the Mars Bar wrapper falls to the floor.
'How the hell did he do that?' Tim asks enviously.
'I don't know.' I throw my hands up in the air, and the throne tips. Both it and me end up on the ground.
Tim laughs.
My face burning, I get to my feet. The chair looks very smug. Bloody throne. I drop back in it, heavily. 'You told me you'd do the talking.'
'Sometimes listening is better than talking.'
I want to say that he knows nothing of listening, that he knows nothing of the things I can hear, of the things bodies tell me – beating hearts and closing veins, the stealthy drift of a clot towards the brain. But I'm just not that petulant.
'You did good, I think,' Tim says. 'The game's started. Opening gambit, all that shit.'
'Whose game are we playing?'
'It was never going to be ours, at the beginning. Someone else had to make the first move. We're too new. We don't even know what pieces we've got, or what the game is.'
'Ten Pomps. We could do with ten Pomps,' I say.
'But they wouldn't really be yours. They'd be doing her bidding.'
'But they'd know what they're doing.'
Tim gets to his feet. 'That's what worries me.' He glances at his watch. 'Shift change. Things are about to get crazy. We'll discuss this tonight, eh?'
'Yeah. Holding off until tomorrow is long enough to piss her off, but only a little.'
'Annoying people isn't the greatest tactic, Steve.'
I grin at him. 'You use what gifts you're given.'
'Oh, you use that one all right, and it's a rough instrument.' He closes the door behind him.
'I didn't get this job because I was subtle,' I say to the door. 'I got it because I was stupid.'
The chair beneath me shivers, as though it is dreaming. Three people die in a car accident. Someone clutches at his chest. His heart beneath races, shudders, halts. I look at the corner where the cockroach ran. There's been enough death already. I let it be.
I'm Death, not an exterminator.
7
With Tim and Cerbo gone I get to work.
Well, I try to.
First I pick up the chip packet and toss it in the bin. The chocolate wrapper goes the same way. I straighten a few papers, open some letters, but I'm not really reading them. I switch on my MP3 and listen to some Black Flag. Henry Rollins gets me in the right headspace today.
Complacency's a killer, Morrigan used to say. He should know. He used it to kill most of Australia's Pomps. But it took him down, too, in the end. He certainly hadn't expected me to win the Negotiation.
If I'm honest, neither had I.
Here I am sitting in the throne. An RM with all the responsibilities that entails. Staff beneath me, a region and a world to save from Stirrers, as well as a commitment to good returns for our shareholders.
I think about those ten Pomps and just how helpful they would be, not to mention Suzanne's knowledge. The black bakelite phone sits there. This is the sort of thing Mr D could advise me on. But I need to start making my own decisions. I'll talk to him this afternoon, once I work out exactly how I feel about this offer.
I type up a couple of emails, then text Lissa: Interesting morning, how about you?
No response. So I send another one, creaking backwards and forwards in my throne: Wish you were here. Naked.
No response. I play the crossword in the Courier-Mail – only cheat half the time.
Then I consider the paperwork on my desk. There's a whole bunch of stuff I sign off on.
A car accident on the Pacific Highway chills me with eight deaths. It's just a gentle chill, but their deaths come so suddenly – I worry that there is no one there to facilitate their way into the Underworld. That there is, and that it is done, brings a tight smile to my lips. A seventy-five-year-old woman in her garden in Hobart clutches at her chest and tumbles among her rhododendrons. Two children jump off a bridge in some northern New South Wales town: only one surfaces. Someone takes a hammer to their husband, claw end first. Death. Death. Death. And my people are close by at every one.
It sounds terrible. But there's life before those endings, and existence after. It's not the world ending, but lives. The world's ending, though… I need to find out more about that Stirrer god.
Still no response from Lissa, so while I work I follow her via my Avian Pomps.
A crow witnesses her stalling a Stirrer in the Valley – the corpse had somehow escaped the Royal Brisbane Hospital. She lays the body gently against a bench and makes a call. An ambulance will be along soon. They'll ship the body back to the morgue and it will be as though it never happened. She binds the wound in her palm quickly and efficiently.
A sparrow watches as she eats a kebab for lunch, sitting in a mall, just a few streets from where she lay the body down. I can almost smell the garlic. I want to reach out and touch her, and the sparrow, misinterpreting this desire, flies at the back of her head. I manage to convince it otherwise an instant or two before contact.
An ibis ostensibly digs in a bin as she attends an open-air funeral service and pomps a soul, that of an elderly gentleman, whom she charms utterly. I can see his posture shift from scared, to guarded, to a chuckling disregard as she reaches out to touch his arm. He is gone in a flash – I feel the echo of the pomp through me. And Lissa is standing there, on the very fringes of the funeral service, alone.
Lissa's the ultimate professional. She talks to the dead so easily. Knows how to bring them around from loss to acceptance. She is the best Pomp I've ever seen.
After a while, she walks up to the ibis. I stare at her through its dark eyes. 'Steven, I love you, but this is creepy. Don't you have work to do?'
I'm out of there in an instant, my face flushed.
I get out of my chair and, as I do every day about this time, pull open the blinds to the rear windows. These face the Underworld. My office is immediately lit with a reddish light. The One Tree isn't far away. Down below, the traffic of the Underworld moves slowly, in a stately reflection of the living world's traffic. The various bends of the river that I can see are busy with catamarans and ferries. Traffic, cars and buildings are almost identical to the living city, except everything is that little bit ornate. Mr D says that's his fault. I haven't bothered to change it, yet. I'm not sure how, but I'm certain it's a lot of work.
With the blind open, the sunlight and unlight battle it out over my desk. They're equally matched. Where they strike my desk there's a patch of gloom, neutralised only when I turn on my lamp. I've read that the living and the dead worlds occupy the same place, but I don't really understand how that's possible. I prefer to think of them as two skins of the same onion.