As nothing really happened in a hundred walled towns for month after month throughout the four quarters, other more imminent threats emerged: disease, fear, the failure to plant a crop, the inflation of money, a longing for home and the hope that everything would somehow sort itself out. The refugees began to return home. As a result, in Spanish Leeds the typhoid abated when an old midden, opened for the influx of alarmed peasants and which had leaked human excrement into the water supply and caused the plague, was shut down because it was no longer needed. Trevor Lugavoy recovered, as did Kevin Meatyard who turned up at the address he’d been given and started work humping sacks of grain around the city.
The Materazzi lived on like a great family fallen on the worst of times. They had no money but they did have capital of sorts: the brains of Vipond and IdrisPukke and the always reliable gold standard of snobbery. Even the surliest barrowboy-done-good, having made his fortune in bacon or horse-glue, discovered when confronted by the supercilious hauteur of the Materazzi women that something was lacking in their lives: they were as common as muck and only a Materrazi beauty could begin to remove that taint. Imagine the thought of having a wife with a thousand-year-old-name, one that could be passed on to the children. What a triumph! Underneath the stroppy bluster your barrowboy soul would no longer ping an imperfect note. And all you needed to become one of the who whom was the most fair-minded egalitarian of alclass="underline" buckets of cash.
The Materazzi men may have been shits but they were not snobs in the way their wives and daughters were. They treated the rich common-persons of Spanish Leeds with the affection they gave to their horses and dogs. So well were these horses and dogs beloved that they imagined they were equals. It must be said, though, that the Materazzienne, as the women came to be called in Spanish Leeds, were not always prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice and marry into a family who’d made their money in glue or marmalade. But in time, the reality of what was required when you were special but had no special abilities meant that many were forced to make their way, weeping, down the aisle to a future husband who had made his money in rendered fat or pork scratchings. Vipond had strong-armed a tax on these unions but the flow of money was nothing like as much as he needed, for all his furious urgings to the heads of the Ten Families to ‘beat some sense’ into their daughters. His old policy of adding his brains to Materazzi money now had to bend to the former. In this, IdrisPukke and Thomas Cale were what he had instead of a treasury. IdrisPukke’s return from the Priory with news of what had happened was a disappointment, if for less personal reasons than those of his half-brother. He admired Cale and was fascinated by him but there was no personal affection. Still, he’d hoped that the boy would be nearly better by now.
‘Is Cale worth pursuing?’ he asked IdrisPukke. ‘Be frank with me. There’s too much at stake not to be.’
‘What are you asking me to be honest with you for?’ came the bad-tempered reply. ‘You don’t have the right to make a demand like that from me. He is what he is.’
‘There’s no arguing with that.’
‘If you want to drop him then you can drop me, too.’
‘Don’t be so dramatic – you’ll burst into an aria next. I misspoke. Let’s imagine I never said anything.’
So, strapped for cash though he was, Vipond sent a messenger to Cyprus every two weeks to meet Cale’s requests for information: maps, books, rumours, such reports as Vipond and IdrisPukke could borrow or steal. In return, but slowly, came his maps and his guesses and certainties about what Bosco would do, and how he could be frustrated, and the minimum number of troops and resources it would take. It was slow for one reason: Cale was sick and he was not improving. There were times when it seemed he was on the mend, sleeping for twelve hours a day instead of fourteen, being able to walk for half an hour a day and work for the same. But then the attacks, the retching and terrible weariness came back. For no reason that he or Sister Wray could determine, the illness ebbed and flowed according to laws entirely of its own.
‘Perhaps it’s the moon,’ said Cale.
‘It’s not,’ replied Sister Wray. ‘I checked.’
Poll was sure what was wrong. ‘You’re a very naughty boy and all shagged out by wickedness.’
‘P’raps Woodentop is right,’ said Cale.
‘Perhaps she is, though she has a nerve calling anyone else naughty. You are worn out by the wickedness of others. The Redeemers poured it into you and now your soul is trying to spit it out.’
‘There can’t be much left.’
‘You haven’t swallowed a bad pork chop – you’ve swallowed a mill.’
‘One of those things that blow round with the wind?’
‘No – like a salt mill. A magic salt mill, like in the fairy tale.’
‘Never heard of it.’
‘Once upon a time the sea was filled with fresh water. One day a fisherman pulled up an old lamp in his nets. When he started to polish it up a genie came out who’d been imprisoned in the lamp by an evil magician. As a reward, the genie gave him a salt mill that produced salt for ever and ever. Then the genie flew away but the old fisherman was so exhausted that he dropped the mill and it fell to the bottom of the sea where the salt just came pouring out, never stopping. That’s why the sea is salty.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘We must stop the mill from grinding. We need to find some medicine.’
‘About time.’
Sister Wray did not react. Poll was not so reticent.
‘You ungrateful hooligan.’
‘Grateful for what?’ he said, still looking at Sister Wray who turned to the puppet.
‘He has a point. We must do better.’
‘Is that dummy part of your religion?’
‘No. Poll is just Poll.’
This made it all seem stranger than it had at first sight. It was true that he’d been startled on first meeting them. On the other hand he was used to, expected even, anyone dressed as a priest or nun to proclaim abnormal beliefs and behave in an outlandish manner.
The Redeemers’ prayer before breakfast stated their firm belief in the Eight Impossible Things. Almost every minute of every day for his entire life they had told him something about devils flying above him in the air or angels at his shoulder weeping when he sinned. Deranged behaviour and mad beliefs were normal to him. He was not even very impressed by Sister Wray’s talent for the different voice that seemed to come from Poll – he had seen voice-throwers outside the Red Opera on bullfight days.
One day he knocked on Sister Wray’s door but there was no answer. He was perfectly aware that he should knock once more but he opened the door after the shortest pause possible. He hoped, of course, to find Sister Wray without her obnubilate (she had told him what her veil was called when he asked). Surely she wouldn’t wear it when she was on her own? He might even enter to find her naked. Would she be big-breasted and with red nipples the size of the dainty saucers they used at Materazzi tea parties? He had dreamt of her like this. Or would she be ugly and old with the skin hanging from her chest like damp washing on a clothesline? Or something else he hadn’t thought of? His distant hopes were to be disappointed. He entered quietly – cats would have begrudged him. She was in her chair but asleep and lightly snoring, as was Poll – though in a completely different tone and rhythm. Sister Wray’s snoring was like that of a small child, soft and low. Poll’s was like an old man dreaming of grudges.