After a while he got to his feet and brushed himself down, thinking about suspension systems and whether they could get latched down. Maybe a car could stay caught that way for a while, waiting for a movement inside to release it like a coiled spring, then unexpectedly bounce itself free.
Keelie was still staring at him and he raised a hand to her. The need to have her again had gone, but he knew he'd have to speak to her, and the thought made him feel tired. There'd been more to the move to Bristol than just wanting to get away from London. There'd been a giving up, an acceptance that he'd never meet the human being who'd understand how guilt and loss can take a person and squeeze the life out of them. A long time ago he'd stopped looking at women and thinking one of them might bring it back for him.
Yes, he thought now, feeling in his pocket for a smoke and checking the walls for anything he'd missed, he'd got over that one long ago. And life was all the better for it.
8
After the dive in the harbour Flea's legs were like lead. She felt every second of twenty-nine years weighing on her. Coming out of Bristol she let the car slow. She pulled into a lay-by, switched off the engine and got the bag of mushrooms out of the glove compartment. She sat for a moment, studying them, feeling the last exhausted scraps of imagery tinker in the back of her head. We went the other way. She wanted to open the bag and shovel them into her mouth. More than anything she wanted to be back in those woods, going down the path where she knew her mother was still crouching, examining dog violets.
But she didn't. She put the mushrooms back into the glove compartment and fumbled out her phone. Earlier this evening, when she'd checked her texts, there'd been one from Tig. She liked the irony there: Tig, one of the few people in her life who would understand everything about her hankering for those mushrooms, literally everything, and after three months of silence he'd chosen tonight of all nights to text her. As if he was reading her mind. His flat was on the Hopewell estate, not far — with the streets this quiet she could be there in twenty minutes. It would be easy, and comfortable, to tell him about Dad and the drugs, and the trip, about how she wanted to take the drugs again and slip back into that forest where Mum was waiting. But then she thought about the way the mushrooms had been so carefully coiled into the jewellery roll, she thought about her father lying on the sofa with a cushion on his face, and right away she knew there was someone else who could unravel it for her even better than Tig. One person who could really set her straight.
She shovelled the mobile back into her pocket, fired the engine and swung the car into the road, heading south. Quickly the houses on either side of the road thinned. Soon she was past the last of the streetlamps and on to the dark roads that would take her into the lonely Mendip Hills.
Kaiser Nduka.
If Dad had ever admitted to having a close friend it would have been Kaiser Nduka. They'd been undergraduates together at Corpus, and at first sight two more different people you couldn't imagine: Dad with his Swedish heritage, papery, bruisable skin and delicate hands like a child's, and Kaiser, the eldest son of an Ibo chieftain, a spectrally tall man with shinbones thinner than walking-sticks, a greying halo of curly hair, and a face so heavy it looked as if it might unbalance his body. Kaiser had been sent in the nineteen seventies from Nigeria by his oil-rich family to study in England and had arrived wearing an abeti-aja dog-ear cap and a Western suit. Somehow the two misfits — Kaiser and Dad — had found a common ground in their studies, applying philosophy and psychology to world religion. A professor of comparative religion, Kaiser's speciality was hallucinogenic experience in shamanic ritual. His career path was smooth until, with a chair at a Nigerian university, he'd become involved in a research project that had gone disastrously wrong and had been thrown off the faculty. At the same time his fiancee had left him.
'They probably worked it out…' Mum had said darkly. 'His girlfriend and the university probably worked out that he was only half human…'
Kaiser always made Mum edgy. She never said why but she'd find excuses to stay at home when Dad came out to the Mendips. Thom was afraid of Kaiser too — he said he looked like the devil and that he'd had nightmares about him hunting people in the streets. Flea tried to imagine where he'd got that idea from, and what he'd seen in those fevered childhood dreams: the greasy half-lit streets of Ibadan, the hawkers and never-ending traffic, a silent shape slipping through the alleys: Kaiser. It struck her as almost humorous, Kaiser, his big head wrapped in a cloak, prowling the streets for human beings. She laughed at the idea, but Thom wasn't swayed. He was terrified of the house, the way it was always being worked on, boarded up, tarpaulined, sometimes unexpected parts of it peeled open and exposed to the sky.
Pulling into the long, darkened track now, the only illumination the moon cutting a sharp circle against the sky in front of her, Flea sort of knew what Thom meant. The place did have a remote, forgotten feel you could think of as spooky, isolated out here in the rainy limestone forests of the Mendips. Wet weeds hung over the car as she drove, trailing long fingers on it until she had to turn on the wipers to clear them. Up and up she went, the headlight beams bumping all over the place, almost a mile, until the driveway opened to a pocked field that stretched out silver under the open sky. At the furthest end the land dropped away to nothing — the furthest ridge of the valley was two miles distant — and it was there, at the edge of the drop, poised as if ready to tumble, that Kaiser's house stood, built from the local blue lias, once pretty but scarred by his perpetual renovations and changes. A single light was on in the living room, dim, barely visible behind a tackedup blanket. He'd be in there, in his usual place — slouched in his reclining chair in the corner.
She parked, shoved the bag of mushrooms into her fleece pocket, and crossed to the back door, arms folded, shivering because suddenly it seemed so late. She went inside, into the kitchen, closing the door carefully, and breathed in the heat and the good spicy smells.
Kaiser's house was full of clutter. Every surface in the kitchen was piled with dusty stacks of journals and letters and oddities he'd collected from around the world. Just like Dad's study. So it always seemed utterly improbable that Kaiser's biggest hobby was cooking. Over the years he'd singled out Flea for his attention. It was always her he took aside, telling her stories, showing her secret places in the garden, letting her put her fingers through the eyeholes of his family's traditional masks. But, most of all, he showed his affection by cooking. His recipes were borrowed from every nation and tradition. Sometimes it was coconut pie, sometimes it was couscous sweetened with condensed milk served in chipped bowls from Woolworths. Tonight it was sticky date loaves — two were cooling on a wire tray. Flea sliced one, arranged the pieces on a plate, and carried it through into the draughty corridor.
'Just me,' she said, lowering her head and pushing through the plastic sheeting hanging over the living-room doorway. 'Only me.'
The room was dimly lit and chaotic with its stacked shelves and lumpy furniture, a tattered standard lamp on in the corner. Kaiser was exactly where she'd known he'd be: in the chair in the corner, his legs elevated and lightly crossed, his hands steepled contemplatively. He didn't move when she came in, didn't look surprised or pleased. Instead he seemed to be concentrating on a space a few inches in front of his nose. He was dressed in pyjamas that ended mid-calf, ridiculous blue Turkish slippers on his long feet.
She put the date loaf on the coffee-table. He stared ahead, his long yellow nails positioned just under the tip of his wide nose as if it was too heavy for his face and he was trying to stop it falling. Next to his chair, on top of a small cabinet, the computer was open at divenet, the international sport divers' forum, and next to that a photo of his African ex-fiancee, Maya. He'd lost Maya thirty years ago but said he still loved her. Maya's mouth, Flea noticed, was exactly level with Kaiser's right ear.