Sacrament

'Oh Lord,' said Rosa wearily.

'Don't roll your fucking eyes at me!'

'All right, all right, calm down. We can deal with the kid very easily-'

'He's not a kid any more.'

'In our scale of things, he's an infant,' Rosa said, putting on her best placating tone. She crossed to Jacob's chair, gently parted his knees and went down on her haunches between them, looking up at him fondly. 'Sometimes you let things get out of all proportion,' she said. 'So he's been rummaging around in your head-'

'St Petersburg,' Jacob said. 'He was remembering St Petersburg. Us in the palace. And it was more than just memory. It was as though he was looking for some weakness in me.'

'I don't remember your being weak that night,' Rosa cooed.

Jacob didn't warm to her flattery. 'I don't want him prying any more,' he said.

'So we'll kill him,' Rosa replied. 'Do you know where he is right now?' Jacob shook his head, his expression almost superstitious. 'Well, he shouldn't be hard to find, for God's sake. We should simply go back to England, and start looking where we first found him. What was that little shithole called?'

'Burnt Yarley.'

'Oh, of course. That's where Bartholomeus built that ridiculous Courthouse of his.' She gazed off into middle distance, glassy-eyed. 'That hawk of a nose he had. Oh my Lord.'

'It was grotesque,' Jacob said.

'But he was so tender about living things. Like the boy.'

'There's nothing tender about Will Rabjohns,' Steep muttered.

'Really? What about the pictures in his book?'

'That's not tenderness, it's guilt. And a touch of morbidity. There's a hard heart in that man. And I want it stilled.'

'I'll do it myself,' Rosa said. 'Gladly.'

'No. It falls to me.'

'Whatever you want, love. Let's just do it and forget him. You can put him in one of your little books when he's dead and gone.' She picked up the most recent journal, and flipped through it until she reached a blank page. 'Right here,' she said. 'Will Rabjohns. Extinct.'

'Extinct,' Steep murmured. 'Yes.' He smiled. 'Extinct, extinct, extinct.' It was like a mantra: a void where thought would go, where life would go.

'I'd better make my farewells,' Rosa said, and leaving him on the verandah, went back down into the town for a last hour in the company of the Xanith.

She arrived back at the mansion, fully expecting to find that Jacob was still sitting in his chair, brooding. But not so. In her absence, he had not only packed all their belongings, but had a vehicle waiting at the front gate, to carry them down the coast to Masquat on the first leg of their trek back to Burnt Parley.

CHAPTER X

i

Will didn't stir until a little after nine, but when he did he felt remarkably clearheaded. He got up, contemplated the shower for a few moments, wondering if he wasn't inviting trouble by stepping in. He defiantly ran the water cold and stepped under its barrage. There were no visions forthcoming, and after a minute of this masochism, he turned the heat up a little and scrubbed himself clean.

Dried, dressed and on his second cup of coffee, he called up Adrianna. Glenn picked up, sounding adenoidal. 'I got some kind of allergy,' he said. 'My nose won't stop running. You want to speak to Adrianna?'

'May I?'

'No, 'cause she's not here. She's gone to see about getting a job.'

'Where?'

'At the city-planning department. I met this woman at Patrick's party who was looking for someone, so she's gone to check it out.'

'I'll call back later then,' Will said. 'You take care of your allergies.'

His next call went to Patrick, whose first question was: 'How are you feeling this morning?'

'Pretty good, thank you.'

'No regrets, huh? Shit. I was afraid of this. The whole thing was a fiasco.'

It took a minute or two for Will to convince him that just because nobody had fallen in love or out of a window didn't mean the party hadn't been memorable. Patrick reluctantly conceded that maybe he was just feeling nostalgic this morning, sitting in the litter, but in the old days a party wasn't even considered to have occurred unless somebody ended up being screwed in the bath while the guests offered a rousing chorus from Aida. 'I must have missed that particular night,' Will said, to which Patrick replied that no, they'd both been there, but poor Will's memory had been fried standing in the sun taking family portraits of waterbuffalo.

'Moving on ...' Will said.

'You want Bethlynn's whereabouts,' Patrick said.

'Yes, please.'

'She lives in Berkeley, on Spruce Street.' Will jotted down directions, warned once again not to try calling her first, because she'd almost certainly slam the phone down on him. 'She doesn't like any air of negativity around her,' Patrick explained.

'And I'm Mr Negativity?'

'Well, face it, honey, nobody looks at your books and thinks, gee, what a lovely planet we live on. In fact - now, Will, I don't want you to get steamed about this - Bethlynn took a glance at one of your books and told me to get it out of the apartment.'

'She did what?'

'I told you, don't get mad. It's the way she thinks. She sees things in terms of good vibrations and bad vibrations.'

'So you had a book-burning on Castro.'

'No, Will-'

'What else went? Naked Lunch? King Lear? Bad vibes in Lear, man, better toss it out!'

'Shut up, Will,' Patrick replied mildly. 'I didn't say I agreed with her, I'm just telling you where her head's at. And if you really and truly want to make peace with her, then you're going to have to work with that.'

'Okay,' Will said, calming down a little. 'I'll make as nice as I can make. Maybe I'll offer to do her a book of sunflowers to make up for all those bad vibes. Big yellow sunflowers on every page, with a quote from the Bhagavadgita underneath.'

'You could do worse, man o' mine,' Patrick pointed out. 'People need some light in their lives right now.'

Oh, there's light in my pictures, Will thought, remembering how they'd flickered at the fox's feet, the eyes of the hunted and the bones they'd become shining out at him. There was light aplenty. It just wasn't the kind of illumination Bethlynn would want to meditate upon.

ii

Later, as the cab carried him over the bridge, he looked back at the fog and sundraped hills and thought for the first time in many years how fine a city it was to live in; one of the few places left on earth where the human experiment was still conducted in an atmosphere of passionate civility.

'You a visitor?' the driver wanted to know.

'No. Why?'

'You keep looking back like you never saw the place before.'

'It feels like that today,' Will said, which so confounded the man it efficiently silenced him for the rest of the trip.

However it sounded, it was true. He felt as though his eyes were clearer today than they'd been in years, both literally and figuratively. Not only did the sights around him seem crystalline, but he was taking pleasure where his gaze would never have lingered before. Everywhere he looked there were nuances of tone and colour to delight him. In the cedars, in the storefronts, in the cracked leather of the seat in front of him. And on the sidewalk, faces glimpsed that he would never see again, every one of them a burgeoning glory of its own. He didn't know where this new-found clarity was coming from, but it was as if he had been looking through a dirty lens for most of his life and become so familiar with the grime that now, when the glass was miraculously cleansed, it was a revelation. Was this what the fox had meant by the simple bliss of things?

He elected to get out of the cab two blocks shy of Sethlynn's house, in part so as to luxuriate a little in this feeling before he met with her, and in part to prepare a speech of reconciliation. The latter purpose, however, was abandoned the moment he started to walk. The confines of the cab had been a limitation on his hungry sight. Now, alone on the sidewalk, the world rushed away from him in every direction; and in the same moment came careening back to show him its wonders. There were clouds above his head that the wind had teased into frills and fripperies; the decaying boards of a home across the street paraded glorious patterns of peeling paint. A flock of pigeons, dining on the crumbs of a discarded doughnut, performed an exquisite dance as they fluttered and settled, then rose in a glorious flight and swooped away.