“Look at them!” he said. “Crome, we’re the only human beings here. Let’s renew our purity! We’ll dance on the lips of the icy gorges!”
“It’s the wrong season for snow,” said Crome.
“Well, then,” Verdigris whispered, “let’s go where the old machines leak and flicker, and you can hear the calls of the madmen from the asylum up at Wergs. Listen-”
“No!” said Crome. He wrenched his hand away.
“Listen, proctors are out after me from Cheminor to Mynned! Lend me some money, Crome, I’m sick of my crimes. Last night they shadowed me along the cinder paths among the poplar trees by the isolation hospital.”
He laughed, and began to eat gooseberries as fast as he could.
“The dead remember only the streets, never the numbers of the houses!”
Verdigris lived with his mother, a woman of some means and education who called herself Madam “L,” in Delpine Square. She was always as concerned about the state of his health as he was about hers. They lay ill with shallow fevers and deep cafards, in rooms that joined, so that they could buoy one another up through the afternoons of insomnia. As soon as they felt recovered enough they would let themselves be taken from salon to salon by wheelchair, telling one another amusing little stories as they went. Once a month Verdigris would leave her and spend all night at the arena with some prostitute; fall unconscious in the Luitpold or the Californium; and wake up distraught a few hours later in his own bed. His greatest fear was that he would catch syphilis. Crome looked down at him.
“You’ve never been to Cheminor, Verdigris,” he said. “Neither of us has.”
Verdigris stared at the tablecloth. Suddenly he stuffed it into his mouth-his empty dish fell onto the floor where it rolled about for a moment, faster and faster, and was smashed-only to throw back his head and pull it out again, inch by inch, like a medium pulling out ectoplasm in Margery Fry Court.
“You won’t be so pleased with yourself,” he said, “when you’ve read this.”
And he gave Crome a sheet of thick green paper, folded three times, on which someone had written:
A man may have many kinds of dreams. There are dreams he wishes to continueand others he does not. At one hour of the night men may have dreams in which everything is veiled in violet; at others, unpalatable truths may be conveyed. If a certain man wants certain dreams he may be having to cease, he will wait by the Aqualate Pond at night, and speak to whoever he finds there.
“This means nothing to me,” lied Crome. “Where did you get it?”
“A woman thrust it into my hand two days ago as I came down the Ghibbeline Stair. She spoke your name, or one like it. I saw nothing.”
Crome stared at the sheet of paper in his hand. Leaving the Luitpold Cafe a few minutes later, he heard someone say: “In Aachen, by the Haunted Gate-do you remember?-a woman on the pavement stuffing cakes into her mouth? Sugar cakes into her mouth?”
That night, as Crome made his way reluctantly towards the Aqualate Pond, the moonlight rose in a lemon-yellow tide over the empty cat-infested towers of the city; in the Artists’ Quarter the violin and cor anglais pronounced their fitful whine; while from the distant arena-from twentyfive-thousand faces underlit by the flames of the auto-da-fe-issued an interminable whisper of laughter.
It was the anniversary of the liberation of Uroconium from the Analeptic Kings.
Householders lined the steep hill up at Alves. Great velvet banners, featuring black crosses on a red and white ground, hung down the balconies above their naked heads. Their eyes were patiently fixed on the cracked copper dome of the observatory at its summit. (There, as the text sometimes called The Earl of Rone remembers, the Kings handed over to Mammy Vooley and her fighters their weapons of appalling power; there they were made to bend the knee.) A single bell rang out, then stopped- a hundred children carrying candles swept silently down towards them and were gone! Others came on behind, shuffling to the rhythms of the “Ou lou lou,” that ancient song. In the middle of it all, the night and the banners and the lights, swaying precariously to and fro fifteen feet above the procession like a doll nailed on a gilded chair, came Mammy Vooley herself.
Sometimes as it blows across the Great Brown Waste in summer, the wind will uncover a bit of petrified wood. What oak or mountain ash this wood has come from, alive immeasurably long ago, what secret treaties were made beneath it during the Afternoon of the world only to be broken by the Evening, we do not know. We will never know. It is a kind of wood full of contradictory grains and lines: studded with functionless knots: hard.
Mammy Vooley’s head had the shape and the shiny grey look of wood like that. It was provided with one good eye, as if at some time it had grown round a glass marble streaked with milky blue. She bobbed it stiffly right and left to the crowds, who stood to watch her approach, knelt as she passed, and stood up again behind her. Her bearers grunted patiently under the weight of the pole that bore her up. As they brought her slowly closer it could be seen that her dress-so curved between her bony, strangely articulated knees that dead leaves, lumps of plaster, and crusts of whole-meal bread had gathered in her lap-was russet-orange, and that she wore askew on the top of her head a hank of faded purple hair, wispy and fine like a very old woman’s. Mammy Vooley, celebrating with black banners and young women chanting; Mammy Vooley, Queen of Uroconium, Moderator of the city, as silent as a log of wood.
Crome got up on tiptoe to watch; he had never seen her before. As she drew level with him she seemed to float in the air, her shadow projected on a cloud of candle smoke by the lemon-yellow moon. That afternoon, for the ceremony, in her salle or retiring room (where at night she might be heard singing to herself in different voices), they had painted on her face another one-approximate, like a doll’s, with pink cheeks. All round Crome’s feet the householders of Alves knelt in the gutter. He stared at them. Mammy Vooley caught him standing.
She waved down at her bearers.
“Stop!” she whispered.
“I bless all my subjects,” she told the kneeling crowd. “Even this one.”
And she allowed her head to fall exhaustedly on one side.
In a moment she had passed by. The remains of the procession followed her, trailing its smell of candle fat and sweating feet, and vanished round a corner towards Montrouge. (Young men and women fought for the privilege of carrying the Queen. As the new bearers tried to take it from the old ones, Mammy Vooley’s pole swung backwards and forwards in uncontrollable arcs so that she flopped about in her chair at the top of it like the head of a mop. Wrestling silently, the small figures carried her away.) In the streets below Alves there was a sense of relief: smiling and chattering and remarking how well the Mammy had looked that day, the householders took down the banners and folded them in tissue paper.
“… so regal in her new dress.”
“So clean…”
“… and such a healthy colour!”
But Crome continued to look down the street for a long time after it was empty. Marguerite petals had fallen among the splashes of candle grease on the cobbled setts. He couldn’t think how they came to be there. He picked some up in his hand and raised them to his face. A vivid recollection came to him of the smell of flowering privet in the suburbs of Soubridge when he was a boy, the late snapdragons and nasturtiums in the gardens. Suddenly he shrugged. He got directions to the narrow lane which would take him west of Alves to the Aqualate Pond, and having found it walked off up it rapidly. Fireworks burst from the arena, fizzing and flashing directly overhead; the walls of the houses danced and warped in the warm red light; his own shadow followed him along them, huge, misshapen, intermittent.
Crome shivered.
“Whatever is in the Aqualate Pond,” Ingo Lympany the dramatist had once told him, “it’s not water.”