Now Chloe wanted to ask him for a favour. They’d arranged to meet after work in a café on top of the construction-coral dyke that held back the Thames, close to the asymmetric apartment block that occupied the site of old New Scotland Yard. The dark red dyke was topped by a broad promenade where gravel paths wound between lush islands of palmettos and bamboos and flowering bushes, and gave spectacular views across the mud-brown flood of the Thames. High above, a sky-whale black with sequestered carbon drifted on the summer breeze, accompanied by a small school of freshly budded juveniles.
Neil was nursing a bottle of beer at a table at the edge of the crowded outdoor café. Her tall handsome brother, rising to hug her. He was dressed in Lycra shorts and a red jersey. A rucksack containing his suit sat at his feet; the bicycle he used to commute from Walthamstow every day, summer and winter, rain or shine, was no doubt chained to one of the racks at the foot of the dyke. Chloe bought an iced coffee and they sat in the sunshine and caught up with each other’s lives. Neil said that he was glad she had stopped dyeing her hair blonde, it had never really suited her; Chloe asked about his wife and his daughter, her niece, nine years old now, hard to believe.
‘You should come visit,’ Neil said.
‘Please don’t make me feel guilty.’
‘The last time was Ellie’s birthday.’
‘That’s what I mean about that guilt thing.’
Neil knew exactly how to push her buttons. After he and Chloe had been allowed to return to the little house in Walthamstow, he’d given up his university course and joined the civil service and put Chloe through school with the help of their aunt and uncle; their grandparents on their mother’s side were dead, and their father had abandoned them long before and was raising a new family in St Andrews, where he lectured on medieval history. Neil was stable and stolid and utterly conventional. He’d taken refuge from their mother’s death and the arrival of the Jackaroo in a life as ordinary as possible in a world grown wild and strange. Chloe had embraced that strangeness; Neil had turned his back on it. They were, their aunt Beth said, two sides of the same coin.
They talked about their work, his in the Ministry of Transport, hers with Disruption Theory. Neil asked if she was ready for her big day tomorrow, in front of the select committee. ‘You look as if you’ve dressed for it,’ he said.
‘That’s what I thought.’
Chloe was wearing black trousers, a white shirt that an old boyfriend had left behind, and her black denim jacket, little tin badges printed with the faces of dead cosmonauts pinned to one lapel. She’d found them on a stall in the Reef run by a Russian guy who’d assured her that they were genuine antiques. Well, maybe. But even if they were fakes, they were powerful juju, the faces touchingly noble, romantic. Lost boys from a forgotten heroic age.
She said, ‘According to the high-powered lawyer who’s been preparing us, this isn’t quite the thing. She’s going to lend me something appropriate. I dread to think.’
‘Because it’ll be something an actual grown-up would wear?’
‘If this is what being a grown-up is like, big brother, you can keep it.’
Chloe had spent most of the afternoon shut in the conference room with the rest of Disruption Theory, being briefed by Helena Nichols and her two startlingly young and capable assistants, taking part in a group discussion that was supposed to analyse their strengths and weaknesses. After the lawyer finally wrapped things up, Daniel Rosenblaum had given another pep talk, telling them that he was immensely proud of their work and was certain that their abilities and enthusiasm would carry the day.
‘I can promise you,’ he’d said, ‘that we’ll be getting the best kind of support. So go home, rest up, relax. This is a big challenge, but it’s nothing we can’t handle.’
Neil told several gossipy stories about the antics of the Human Decency League and their supporters. Like all civil servants, he had a healthy cynicism about politics and politicians.
‘Last month one of their swivel-eyed MPs made a speech in the Commons about how the UN lottery was blatantly rigged,’ he said. ‘How it favoured people from the Third World, how they were flitting off to enjoy and exploit the riches of the new worlds and leaving behind the mess they’d made, because everyone knew the Spasm had started in Pakistan and India. When Robin Mountjoy was asked about it, he claimed that it was an example of the kind of robust discussion that made his party so strong. The fact is, they’re an unstable amalgamation of every far-right prejudice and crackpot theory. The only thing they have in common is a visceral hatred of the Jackaroo.’
Helena Nichols had told the same story during a background briefing. ‘I know I should care about the select committee, but I really don’t,’ Chloe said, and diverted the conversation to the little cult and its breakout.
She pulled up some of Mangala Cowboy’s pictures on her tablet. Neil, flicking through them, said, ‘They look like covers for old sci-fi paperbacks.’
He couldn’t see what she saw, either.
Chloe said, ‘I think they’re authentic. Pictures of a real place. Some undiscovered ruin on one of the fifteen worlds, or maybe on a world we haven’t been given access to. I think the guy who made these was exposed to an active artefact. Something that got inside him and compelled him to draw these pictures. And it affected his neighbours, too. They had a breakout on Saturday. And on Sunday, our artist did a midnight flit.’
She had returned to the displaced-persons camp yesterday evening, after Niome’s phone call. The girl had been waiting for her on the bench by the chestnut tree, told her that Freddie and his sister had moved out. ‘Here yesterday, gone today. Happens a lot in this place.’
She hadn’t seen them leave, shrugged when Chloe had described Eddie Ackroyd. ‘I only found out about it when I come back from school. But this boy I know, he said he saw Freddie and a couple of heads stuffing cardboard boxes and clothes and shit in the boot of a car parked over by the gates. This was about eleven, twelve last night.’
‘I don’t suppose your friend would remember the number of the car?’
‘He was so blasted I’m amazed he recognised Freddie. So, what’s this hot news worth?’
Chloe gave Niome another five-pound coin, told her to keep watching the skies. No one answered when Chloe rapped on the door of Freddie Patel’s flatlet. She went upstairs, hoping to talk to Mr Archer, but the old man’s wife answered the door and said that her husband was resting and didn’t want to be disturbed.
‘I saw his performance yesterday,’ Chloe said. ‘It was impressive. In fact, that’s sort of why I’m here.’
‘Do you know your Bible?’ Mrs Archer said.
She had sharp blue eyes, this thin old woman with a cap of white hair, clutching a cardigan draped over her bony shoulders.
‘A little,’ Chloe said.
For two years after the Spasm, she had gone to church with Neil and their aunt and uncle every Sunday, but at age fourteen she’d rebelled. Apart from weddings and christenings that had been that, for her and religion.
Mrs Archer said, ‘Perhaps you remember the passage that describes how the holy dove descended on the apostles, and they could understand every language.’