the last days of the lacuna cabal

sean dixon

This book is for the two bugs: Kat and Lida

Epigraph

(Let’s start with the epitaph.)

(Oh no. Categorically no. This should become well-established as an adventure story before anybody ever dies and anything ever changes.)

(But it’s a beautiful quote!)

(You mean the epigraph.)

(Yes, let’s begin with the epigraph. And don’t tell anyone I

made that mistake.)

(It’s called a malapropism.)

(I know!)

(And by the epigraph, are you suggesting the quote by Ezra Pound?)

(Yes!)

(Who, I might point out, is a man?)

(So?)

(Not to mention a damned fascist?)

(Don’t you like the quote?)

(I like the quote very much. I love the quote.)

(… (?))

What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee.

(Yes, just like that. That’s the perfect epitaph.)

Contents

Epigraph Part One Chapter One: RUNNER’s Fall (I) Chapter Two: The Lacuna Cabal Chapter Three: The Beginning Of Everything Chapter Four: Royal VIC Chapter Five: Ius Primae Noctis Chapter Six: EMMY’s Skin Chapter Seven: Coby In Love Part Two Chapter Eight: The Epic Of Gilgamesh Chapter Nine: The History Of The Coghill Tablets Chapter Ten: Notre-Dame-Des-Neiges Chapter Eleven: Humbaba Chapter Twelve: RUNNER’s Fall (Ii) Chapter Thirteen: Weather Chapter Fourteen: INANNA’s Descent Part Three Chapter Fifteen: In The Skin Of A Lion Chapter Sixteen: Shiduri Chapter Seventeen: Nindawayma Chapter Eighteen: To The Underworld Chapter Nineteen: Bodies Changed Chapter Twenty: Theft Chapter Twenty-One: Pax Notes Acknowledgements Praise Also By Sean Dixon Copyright About the Publisher

PART ONE

ONE

RUNNER’S FALL (I)

18 March 2003, 7.08 p.m.

When Runner Coghill fell through the ceiling, she interrupted what we can only call a domestic quarrel.

Of the arguers in question, the young man’s name was Dumuzi, though his name has been changed to protect the innocent (that is, Dumuzi). Moments before, he had been huffing and puffing from the cold, for which he was wilfully underdressed, and standing with his sometimes girlfriend Anna, inside the front entrance to the warehouse at 5819 St-Laurent, a building that, against all probability, she owned.

Anna had called him, out of the blue, on what he thought was the first warmish day of the year, although that had turned out to be an illusion propagated by the phone call and Anna’s attention; in fact, it was cold, but Anna was bored and looking for company to walk around downtown. They had met in the early afternoon and walked down the hill into the late afternoon. Anna telling him about her classes – a bit of philosophy, a bit of English, the only thing she liked was anthropology, or at least she liked the idea of anthropology, though the reality of anthropology was boring and more boring. The sound of her voice so soothed his chronic spikes of sexual anxiety – brought on by her arbitrary pattern of granting and withholding affection – that he began to question whether he’d ever felt them in any serious way.

Now it was freezing raining and it was evening, and Anna, who was wet, wanted to go inside and find a clean corner where the two of them would be able to pile some remnants of her grandfather’s old shmatte1 emporium into something that might resemble a bed and a blanket, beside a pale beam of streetlight they could roll into when they were done. Her other conditions included a solid ceiling above their heads and no turds, human or otherwise, at least not nearby. She didn’t mind a little dust and dirt though, since, as Du had noticed, she hadn’t washed for some time, either her clothes or her person, and had embarked on a more animal form of grooming.

It was a slow negotiation, because Anna was offering Du what he’d been pining after through the entire winter, that is to say, she was offering sex, in a warehouse that suddenly didn’t seem so filthy because of the way the light filtered out of the darkness and the dust and the endorphins that were suddenly released into Dumuzi’s brain. But she wanted him to pay her for it. To see what it was like. And her proposal was slowing him down.

A little note about Dumuzi: his hormones were raging, but he tried to be polite about it. He was a big squarish guy, but when you looked at him you got the whole picture. He wasn’t a bobbing Adam’s apple or a collar or a grin. There was nothing about his maleness that was easily Atwoodian. It would be unfair to describe him like that, even though he was a boy and the reader might not like boys.2 He tried to keep tidy. He wore clean lines. He was a whole guy, albeit a young guy who just needed, very desperately, to get laid. Where Anna was concerned, he definitely did not like who he became when he was with her, but still he wanted to be with her and wished only to change who he was and how and what he thought.

1 Yiddish: dress or garment. Literally a rag.

He asked Anna where she’d gotten the idea and she told him how earlier in the day an elderly gentleman had mistaken her for a prostitute and propositioned her while Du was buying gum. This shocked him almost as much as the proposal itself and he looked away, shuffling in a head-bowed, punch-drunk silence.

(Eventually.) ‘You like this place?’

She said, ‘Yeah, why not.’

He tried to speed up his thoughts. ‘Well, I don’t know about all this love of decay and dark dripping warehouses. I mean, you might try to take out your contacts every once in a while if you don’t want to go blind, and you might want to change your clothes every once in a while, and, yeah, this new obsession of yours is really going to help, although, although I think any dirty old man on St-Laurent would lose his erection if he was standing downwind of you and your –’

‘I doubt it.’

2 We weren’t fond of boys ourselves, but our opinion here is not relevant.

‘Sure.’ He deflated. ‘Sure. Me too. Anyway, this place is falling apart. There must be a million squatters living here.’

‘I can’t afford to fix it. I’m warehouse poor.’

‘Oh.’

‘Dumuzi … I’m going to let you sleep with me.’

‘But you want me to pay you, Anna.’

‘So just forget about that part.’

‘Anna, you want me to pay you a lot of money.’

‘Let’s say you don’t have to pay me all that much. I’m only asking you to pay for what most men think they have the god-given right to get for free.’

‘So why shouldn’t I think that too?’

‘Don’t you think that’s a little arrogant?’

‘You think it’s good for men to pay for sex? Wow.’

‘I’m saying it might be good for me to get paid for sex. It might fulfil some sort of destiny.’

‘Oh, I can’t stand it!’

And this is when Dumuzi’s fist hit the pillar, compromising, it would appear, the integrity of the building, and that’s when Runner fell through the ceiling above and landed behind them, among a bunch of cardboard boxes. 3

3 It might be of interest as well to note how, on this day, on the other side of the world from there, everyone who could was getting out of Baghdad, filling the outlying cities of Rawa and Anna. Water was scarce and the American dollar was worth 2700 Iraqi dinars. According to the Blogger of Baghdad. (Aline’s note.)

A new quality Du was beginning to notice about himself was his capacity to be grateful for events that reasonable people might find abhorrent or tragic, as long as these events deflected the attention of his tormentors. The truth is that he would have preferred the whole city to come down on their heads in that moment, but he had to make do with Runner Coghill, falling like debris. He unshouldered his backpack and ran over to the crumpled girl set like a small broken mannequin among the boxes and the stones. She was screaming, though Du realised as he got closer that she was shouting not incoherent pain so much as the name of a boy:

‘NEIL! NEIL! I’M HURT!’

The girl paused to reflect, loud enough for Du to hear, ‘Oh I don’t think a dose of Prozac is going to help this kind of pain.’ She was talking over his head though, aiming her thoughts straight for Anna.

‘Oh. Hi. I guess that came as a shock to you. I seem to have –’ Anna cut in, having forgotten her former business, and was trying to figure out uh what this intruder uh was uh doing here.

‘Well, I don’t really mean to be here. Upstairs is where I –’

Interrupted by Anna again, who meant to say, ‘The uh building. How did you come to be in the uh building?’

‘Cool it, sister. Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.’

Now, Runner Coghill was not exactly a looker, not by any stretch of the imagination and certainly not to Dumuzi. Runner was small. She looked like a Grey Nun out on a day pass – you could imagine her in a wimple. She was almost weightless, with translucent skin, a haughty nose – a pig nose she sometimes called it in her own garment-rending arias of despair, which were private and known to us only because they were occasionally gossiped about in fits of envy of which we are not proud. And she let her hair grow more thickly over her bumps, to try and cover them up, though this practice only augmented them. They were called pilar cysts. She insisted that everyone know what they were called even though she was supposedly trying to hide them. That is the way she was. She boasted about her minor ailments while keeping the most prominent one – the actual life-threatening one – entirely to herself. We are still amazed to report that she kept it a secret, though the primary sign, the telltale one, would have been obvious to a medically minded person had there ever been one in the group – this primary sign being that her eyes popped right out of her head, more so with every passing month, so much so that you might think she was staring even when she was not, though she did sometimes stare. It was disconcerting to some, most immediately to Dumuzi, who felt a little Gordian knot of fear every time he caught her eye, even though he was literally twice her size.

So when this wreckage of a girl, crumpled up in a coat, having fallen through the ceiling seconds before, said, to the perfect Anna, ‘Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful,’ Du, after a moment’s uncomprehending shock, laughed, a sort of stunned laugh. And that’s when the girl noticed him for the first time.

Being broken in the presence of the male gaze would have made Runner feel overwhelmed under normal circumstances but, beyond a few fleeting thoughts4, she was in too much of a hurry to be overwhelmed at the moment. Still, it was fortunate she’d got some warning, because a second later Du swooped in and was crouched very close to her, examining her, opening her coat, uncovering her, touching her leg. She gasped for air with a little yelp that she hoped sounded like an expression of pain and not its opposite, and squeezed her eyes shut.

‘Anna, I think she’s broken her leg.’

Anna swore. Runner drew a breath and let it exhale without speaking. And then drew another.

And then began to explain patiently to them – well, to Anna, still ignoring Du despite the temperance he’d suddenly inspired in her – about her ailments. She said that she was sorry, that she had a mild form of osteoporosis which, she felt, made a bad combination with her epileptic tendencies (which tendencies she was fabricating for the first time in that very moment), but that she was also really quite grateful for it, her osteoporosis, because it made her a very modern thinker. It forced her to think about the body in art and the world. Like, for instance, how was she going to get her body, broken leg and all, up to the fifth floor of this building, if she had willed herself already up to the second and it had brought her, of its own volition, right back down to the first? How was she going to get this useless shell of a body, this inattentive and ungrateful husk, back up to the second, and beyond to the third, fourth and finally to the fifth, especially when faced with such a pair of uncomprehending and unsympathetic faces as now looked down upon her?

4 His cheeks were stubbled, like the bark of a tree … the hair on his head grew thick as laundry … his beauty was consummate. He was tall! He was magnificent! He was terrible! He would scour [Runner’s] body in search of life and coax it toward maturity! He would dig from [Runner’s] most shadowy slopes the deepest well of pure water, out of which an ocean would spring, and he would cross that ocean to the sunrise beyond, arrive on some future morn when [Runner] was hale and adult and smiling fully in his arms, in the bedroom of a third-storey flat in [Montreal’s] Mile End! (From Runner’s notebook.)

Anna had kept her eye on the ball: ‘What’s up on the fifth floor?’

Runner took a deep breath and sighed, as if to say that these two were just not going to get it. When she spoke again, however, there was a green blade of hope in her voice: ‘Have you ever heard of the Lacuna Cabal?’

‘No.’

‘Well … it’s … a very exclusive … book club, and I’m sure … ’

Du, who was a devoted student of every mood that flickered across Anna’s face, here observed her try to imagine the possibility of a book club on the fifth floor of her Jacob Lighter Building.

‘ … and I’m sure it doesn’t interest you, but there are six women up there right now who at this moment are finishing up the last book and are about to launch into proposals for the next, at which point I have to make an entrance.’

Anna’s instinct of ownership kicked in. ‘But this is my building!’

‘I see you fail to see the bigger picture.’

‘How long has this been going on?’

‘I tell you, I need to get upstairs!’

‘I don’t care.’

Du recognised the expression that now came over Runner’s face. It allied him to her, at least for the moment, fellow recipient of the chill wind. The girl saw first that Anna didn’t care, and then she saw that, really, really, she didn’t care. It was an obstacle. It was a challenge. Runner launched in, like Churchill convincing an island to make war.

‘Kid,’ she said, addressing Anna, for how else do you address someone young in years who has revealed herself to be as jaded as a dead thing, except to appeal to the part of her that is still young, the bright shiny package that contains her, her skin? ‘Kid,’ she called her, and went on to ask her if she’d ever felt anything for a cause that was bigger than herself, if she’d ever wanted to throw herself behind such a cause, for the sheer bumfuckery of it, if she’d ever been curious about …

Anna’s uppercut in the microsecond’s lull: ‘I don’t care.’

‘Please,’ Runner said. ‘Those girls up there don’t expect to ever be caught by anything even remotely resembling the owner of a building. You’re missing a great opportunity here, for, believe me, they are far, far more deserving of your goddess-like wrath than I … ’

‘I don’t c –’ Anna had not expected that. Goddess-like wrath? For one moment she didn’t speak. And then another. Dumuzi could see that the broken-legged girl had hit pay dirt, found a weak spot he didn’t even know was there. He made a mental note: ‘goddess’. And then the girl on the floor went on.

‘Association with this club, which I now offer to you in defiance … ’

‘Who says I want –?’

‘– of our heartless executive, will expose you to the damaged masterpiece I am about to propose. That’s right, sister, I can see that you’re a bit of a damaged masterpiece yourself, aren’t you? Though you’re strong and beautiful and everything I’m not.’

Anna looked squarely at the girl. She was thinking that she did often feel like a damaged masterpiece. Quite often, in fact. Regularly. She gave sudden rein to the thought that this girl knew … she knew … what did she know? She knew something. Something about her. Perhaps … everything. Perhaps she was wise in all matters. Shit, man, Anna couldn’t even make her 8.30 classes. This girl, though, she obviously had it together. Anna had always wanted … Her eyes drifted up to the hole in the ceiling. Du’s, mystified, uncomprehending, followed. For a moment, considering the stranger’s words, Anna suddenly felt that she was not confused at all. She felt that she had been confused, but was, in fact, for this precious instant, pretty smart, pretty witty, pretty pretty, not dead. Gloriously defeated by the girl with the broken leg, on the floor.

But did any of this show up on Anna’s face? Nope. She was tough. She was tough as nails. The only indication of a change of heart was the gesture for Du to pick the chick up.

As for Runner, she had been relishing her victory until she saw Du’s hands zeroing in, getting closer and larger. She had a fit of sneezing. When that was through, she proceeded to lay herself bare before this boy’s deepest cell of shame: ‘Oh no, pal, not you. Her. Not you. If you touch me I’d have to ask you to fuck me, and if you said no then that would be humiliating for me, wouldn’t it? It’s been so long, I feel like a virgin. Really. Let’s be honest, I am a virgin, that’s not normal. And still you’re going to let this brute put his hands on me?’

Runner’s virgin status was not something she necessarily wanted to get rid of. But she did feel that the sexual act might just pull her flagging, barely post-adolescent body fully into the present, and force it to grow up. As for shyness around the opposite sex, her wreckage of a body had just led her to an epiphany. She decided, right here and now, anticipating the strong arms of Dumuzi, to fully explore the archetype of the foul-mouthed shy person and take it to new heights.

At least that’s what she decided deep down. On the surface she was screaming indignation that Anna was allowing a boy to lay hands on her.

Anna said, simply, sorry. She wasn’t going to lift a finger for this girl. Maybe she felt a bond with her, but she sure wasn’t about to show it.

Dumuzi, blushing pink, gathered Runner into his arms and picked her up. She was as small and light as a beanbag full of little bones, and she relaxed into his arms. As he swept her up she felt a sharp pain in her leg but ignored it. That is, her voice responded, practically bursting Du’s eardrum, but her mind ignored it. She launched again into her protests and was in mid-aria when she suddenly remembered.

‘Don’t forget those.’

Those?

There at Du’s feet, surrounding him like a toy rampart, were several irregularly shaped slabs of stone. They looked fragile, though none seemed to have broken in the fall. And they were marked all over, front and back, with tender notches of writing, presented in columns with a symmetry and order that nearly took Du’s breath away. They looked old. Really old. She must have been carrying them when she fell through the floor.

Anna clapped eyes on them too. Ten of them. Looked like she would have to lift a finger after all. No idea what this crazy chick needed them for, but she didn’t feel the need to question. Anyway, they were manageable. Weird. But small. Ish. She gathered them up, and they carried on, toward the stairs, and up, and into a bygone era.

And then Neil appeared.

He’d seen Runner negotiate her way through this sort of accident before, and knew she would survive it, this time at least, even if it wasn’t clear that she wanted to. Earlier, he’d watched, on the second floor, as she gave herself freely over to the fall and disappeared into the floor with all ten tablets. It made him tired. He knew she would apologise when he saw her next, and that upset him and made him even more tired.

He’d been here on the first floor for quite some time, through the negotiations, having made his way quietly around the perimeter. When he finally appeared, though, you would not have imagined him capable of such stealth. He looked awkward in his clothes, which were old and badly fitting, and he wore a pair of large round-rimmed glasses without lenses, and his head was buried in a book even when he walked. It was a notebook, which he held open with his right hand, crooked in his elbow, while writing from time to time with his left. As he crept across the floor towards Du’s backpack, he stopped to jot something down no fewer than five times, creating the impression of a time-lapse photograph or a Noh stage show. It seemed he had a running commentary going on the passing moments of his life.

If we were to have stood over him, in this moment, and peered down into his book, we would have seen the following entry as it emerged from his pen:

Once so strong she was … now so … crazy … accident-prone, and Neil … He carried the bag.

And then Neil bent over and with some effort picked up Du’s bulky backpack, slung it over his shoulder and crept towards the stairs.

TWO

THE LACUNA CABAL

The Lacuna Cabal had not always met on the fifth floor of the Jacob Lighter Building at 5819 St-Laurent. In our efforts to keep moving, we tried cellars, garrets, walk-in closets and bell towers, with very little account given to our general welfare and comfort. Priority was given rather to the idea that the location should suit the book, the book the location. It went beyond re-enactment and into the realm of living out, as much as possible, the story of the book, in the hope that its experience would rub off on us. Thus we considered ourselves to be the premium reading club of the English-speaking world.

This method took some refinement. An early example: we once conducted a spontaneous public reading of a novel in verse called Autobiography of Red at the airport, for which we all painted ourselves top to toe for the occasion. It was later agreed, however, that we did not absorb a great deal from the presentation, beyond a bit of pigment, some skin rashes and a charge of public mischief (dismissed).

And another time, early on, we kidnapped the aging poet Irving Layton for four hours from the Maimonides Geriatric Centre in Côte-Saint-Luc and took him for an excursion up the mountain – a trip from which he was reported to have reappeared sporting a diadem of autumn leaves and looking immensely satisfied. That one made the papers. And the evening news. Still, it had been dangerous and seemed like a cheat to meet the poet himself rather than the words in his book.

In our second year, when our methods had acquired some clarity, we once headed down to Place des Arts on a Sunday and tried to depict the scene of the nun swinging from the bridge-builder’s broken arm in In the Skin of a Lion.5 One of our members nearly hanged herself. Accidentally, of course. But it was memorable and satisfying and we declared that book a success.

Our third year was characterised by a more traditional approach: we began to calm down as a group and seek out a more or less permanent meeting place.

There’s an elongated little park just west of St-Denis on Laurier, north side, with a sandbox and small set of monkey bars.6 We tried to meet there for a while, since someone had noticed that there never seemed to be any children. But when we started going, so did the children. The park stayed empty throughout the week and even on weekends, as long as we weren’t there. But when we showed up, they were never far behind. And when we abandoned the place, so, again, did they.7

5 If the reader isn’t familiar with this particular novel, she might as well stop reading this book right now and go read that one. Or else dispense with the whole idea of reading altogether. In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje is, officially, the Lacuna Cabal’s favourite book.

6 Later note: No there isn’t.

Eventually we found a beautiful warehouse on the waterfront, rumoured to have required rent – rent rumoured to have been paid by the wealthy father of our founder and president. There we felt safe from prying eyes and blessed with a view of the river.

But then, in the fall, someone in the Cabal died, and so we decided to move. We felt that the waterfront warehouse had lost its lustre and its luck. And when the general mood failed to brighten by November, we even decided to enlist a new member as a gesture of self-preservation – someone to push against the pall that had fallen over the group.

The Jacob Lighter Building was discovered in mid-December, during a well-needed Christmas hiatus, by Romy Childerhose, on one of her long walks. She tried the door by the loading dock for five days in a row and it was always open. She finally ventured into the building and bravely worked her way up through the darkness of the stairwell, floor by floor, finding that all evidence of squatter habitation – blankets and newspapers and washrooms that would have to be sealed off – ended on the third. Thinking it over, she felt that there must have been an instinct among squatters to be ready for a quick escape, although, if it had been her, she would have climbed as high as she could, like a squirrel with a nest, and kept her stuff near a window that could be opened so that everything might be hurled out and away, to be retrieved later. But it was clear that no one had lived here for quite some time.

7 It’s not there any more. Somebody must have dreamt it. Unless our abandonment of it, along with the children’s, caused it to fade away.

Up on the fifth floor, the flappable Romy found things to be clean, spacious and empty. Though very, very cold. There was evidence that someone had begun to renovate the building up there – presumably Anna’s rovingly entrepreneurial father – but the project had been abandoned. Drywall had all been ripped out and there was little or no insulation. We have long speculated that it might have been the general state of abandonment, by squatters on one side and developers on the other, that had so drawn Romy (who hailed from a city in Ontario which she referred to exclusively as ‘Bingotown’). The building was a book – a weighty tome no less – that nobody wanted, neither for pleasure nor pillage, a gargantuan testament to wasted lives, like hers, like ours, like this book itself, whose leviathan bulk is a reflection more of waste than achievement.

When we moved into the fifth floor of the Jacob Lighter Building, it was decided by vote that we had to acquire a portable heater with a scary-looking flame and two enormous and truly frightening propane tanks, rented with the benefit of Missy’s father’s credit card. We called it ‘the blue flame thrower’. Some of us wondered how Missy’s father could have allowed such a rental to be made by his daughter. Where paternal love was concerned, we could understand the silver Sunfire with its custom pull-down top, we clocked the purchase of the flat in Outremont and we appreciated the rent paid on our waterfront meeting place. But allowing a propane heater with an eternally flaming grill, like the burning bush except indoors and blue – this took parental indulgence to a new level and led some of us to wonder whether the man was paying any attention at all. What’s more, there was a period wherein Missy erected a large tent up there – also acquired by the divine grace of her father’s card – to try and contain the heat. So the blue flame was two times indoors, a fire hazard inside a fire hazard, at least until she pulled the tent down and returned it at the beginning of March.

We wonder, from the cool perspective of three or four years’ distance, whether we didn’t all share a funny latent death wish that one weird winter.

So we stayed on the fifth floor of the Jacob Lighter Building, 5819 St-Laurent, even though it did not provide us with the poetry of shelter from winter. Missy told us that we all had our respective homes for that. The readers of Don Quixote, she said, huddled shivering for centuries in cold places and still managed to get through the book. That book was present in point of fact, she added, all the way through the worst excesses of the Industrial Revolution. You can only imagine, she said, what kind of horrors people must have endured between bouts of reading Cervantes’ book.

That’s the thing about born leaders. They convince you that you’re capable of doing – that you want to be doing – the craziest things. When they go too far, we suppose, is when you find yourself with a cult on your hands. And when they don’t go far enough, they come across as carping, opinionated, pain-in-the-ass purveyors of sloppy thinking. Missy fluctuated between these two extremes. How could she not? She was young and only beginning to experiment with holding the reins of power. Anyway, it’s no secret that the two primary writers of this book remained loyal to her and would have followed her anywhere except that point beyond which, according to the foundation principles of the Lacuna Cabal, we were expressedly forbidden to go.

Which brings us finally to the call of the role. The sitting members of the Lacuna Cabal as of 18 March 2003.

House left, stage right, in a semi-circle heading towards house right, stage left, books open in our laps, it goes as follows:

The first is one of us. One of the two of us. One of we two narrators or, if you prefer, glorified stage-direction readers. Missy liked to keep us separate so that her consolidation of power would not seem so obvious. So I, Jennifer, about whom the less said the better, sat at the farthest left, house left, all by myself, next to the newest member, whose name was (is)

Priya Underhay,

the aforementioned newest, the ray of hope and sunshine8, meant to combat the gloom that had followed a death in the club – about whom we knew, at the time, very little. She was, not coincidentally when you consider Missy’s motive for taking her on, a bit of a hippie. To us she seemed a little crazy and often could be overheard speaking in a low voice to – one could only assume – herself.

Priya, who carried a travel guitar with her wherever she went, missed the occasional meeting because she had the occasional commitment to play at the occasional small-time open-mike event. She called these ‘alt-country nights’, whatever that meant. Such events were never attended by the Cabal, for two, no, three reasons:

1 They would have blown our cover.

2 We were declaratively interested in the written word, to the exclusion of every other art form, and would pay attention to a ballad only if it were written in a book.

3 An example of Priya’s early song lyrics:

we are the fortunate ones, you and I,

who travel with the pelicans and the platypi …

‘goodnight’, lisp the smiling, dozing sarcophagi

as we pass them by.

8 There are several names here. These are presented in large print so the reader can flip back and refer to them from time to time. There is no shame in this. We’ve had to do it ourselves a couple of times.

we are the delicate ones, though we do not cry

when we wound one another with the lash of an eye …

‘and you think you’ll live,’ screech the dead sarcophagi

but they are out of earshot, by and by.

We’d like to meet some living sarcophagi.

(Allowing a folk singer into our ranks seemed, for the longest time, a very serious mistake.)

At the time when this story begins, Priya had written, by all accounts, upwards of thirty songs, most of them incomprehensible, and suffered from the occasional nosebleed, one can only imagine because of her nocturnal flights with fellow folksinging witches.

Next to Priya sat

Romy Childerhose,

the aforementioned squirrel in her nest, who hailed from the so-named Bingotown and had felt drawn to the epic seediness of the Jacob Lighter building.

We have no desire to present a negative portrayal of Romy in this passage, as we feel it might cause pain and would not be commensurate with the esteem in which we currently hold her. This presents a problem for us because, during the time this story takes place, we felt nothing but contempt for her, and this account would be nothing if it did not present something resembling the truth. In confessing this dilemma to the subject in question, however, a solution presented itself: apparently, not surprisingly, our contempt was nothing compared to how Romy felt about herself.

Here, therefore, is Romy’s introduction, in her own recently commissioned words. Characteristically, she has begun far earlier in her story than expected, and has included informa tion that we were perhaps better off not knowing:

I was born in a barn. I was. Just outside of Bingotown, Ontario, where my mother-to-be had been dropped in a field with her two older sisters, one of whom had vomited on the other two while their parents – my grandparents – were on their way to church in their Sunday best. They dropped the vomit-covered sisters in the field to wait out the hour while the clean ones – the younger boys and the parents – went off to do their churchly duty. It was just enough time to quietly induce labour, since the sisters were privy to the know ledge of my mother’s condition and the vomit had in fact been purposely induced. My mother (did I mention that my mother was very large?) had managed to conceal her pregnancy from her extremely Catholic parents. And then, for several months after I was born, she managed to hide me. You’ve heard the story of Kaspar Hauser? Living beneath the floorboards of a little house somewhere in Germany? Well, if I hadn’t been discovered, I might have been the small-town southwestern Ontario version of that poor kid. And in many respects, perhaps I was.

What’s more, Romy felt that this was one of the two seminal stories of her childhood, the other one being a Homeric narrative on the subject of fatness and responsibility:

People get fat through an act of will. Don’t they? It’s instead of a callus. The emotion is all nestled inside, like a pig in a blanket, and, as with calluses, the blows don’t land quite so hard. Is that why they do it? My mother was fat. She was a cement balloon sinking into the ocean, who held me by the ankles and pulled me down, like galoshes on a mobster who’d slept with the wrong moll. I was fat too, but my fat was an air pocket to try and keep me afloat, to try and stop my mother from consuming everything. When I was a kid I once purchased a mouse. A little white mouse. I bought it at a pet store downtown and took it home in a small cardboard box, with a big bagful of mouse food. It was in the middle of a particularly harsh winter. I don’t know what I was thinking. When I got home, my mother flipped out. Another mouth to feed that was not her own. But I have food for it, I said. A whole bag. I’m sure it’s not the kind of food that you would like, I said. Who’s to say? she said, and took the food. Besides, there was no place for the little mouth to live. My mother occupied everything. I found a little fishbowl that had belonged to a long-ago goldfish. And I put the little mouth in there. And then I watched in horror as he scrabbled around the small bottom and tried to jump free. He would leap into the air and catch a small paw at the lip of the bowl, spin his legs frantically and then fall to the bottom again. It was horrifying. Only a matter of time before he mastered the leap. I considered putting a pile of books there, at the top, to block the exit, but then he would have suffocated. I suppose I could have drilled some holes in the books, but I didn’t have a drill and you don’t treat books like that, do you? And besides, the goldfish bowl was way too small. It was way, way too small. There was a woodpile at the back of the yard. I gazed at the woodpile through a window, imagining that it might make a beautiful, spacious, multi-hallwayed new home for my little burden. No, said my mother, the poor thing will die out there in the cold. We have to return it to the store. But there’s a no-return policy, I yelled. It says so on a big sign right on the door! But we drove downtown with the mouse in the box. And when they refused to take the mouse back, my mother revealed her secret weapon, dragging a desperate, sobbing, sorry little me in through the jingling door. And they took back the mouse.

Romy on how she came to leave Bingotown:

Bingotown was not a colourful city in those days, though I haven’t been there lately. I remember reading somewhere that nineteenth-century municipal laws restricted the use of colour in the urban environment. This was true all over the world at the time, but Bingotown still had no colour over a century later. And so I left finally and came to Montreal, which, I heard, had coloured gables and coloured spiral staircases. I asked somebody, ‘What is the most colourful city in Canada?’ and they told me to go to Montreal.

Romy was, in the days of the Lacuna Cabal, a proverbial deer in the headlights, which suggested she always had something else on her mind. Still, she had one outstanding feature that made her, in our eyes, a paragon of womanhood: the most beautiful flowing locks of auburn hair you can imagine, which did much to mitigate the effects of the earnest demeanour they framed. She towered over the rest of us, trying always (and unsuccessfully) to keep her larger-than-life feelings to herself. Let’s see, what else? Romy had a soft spot for children’s literature – due, we hypothesised, to the arrested development that may have occurred as a result of not being allowed to look after that goddamned mouse – and tried to keep up to speed on its developments. She considered Harry Potter to be inferior to some book about a girl and a bear and atheism, the title of which we can’t recall, and the first book she recommended to the group (summarily rejected) was Shardik by Richard Adams, not really children’s literature at all but also somewhat intensely about a bear (though he had written more famously about rabbits). The trajectory from mouse to bear in Romy’s imagination remains a mystery to us.

Oh yes, and she found the building. The saddest, greyest, ugliest building in the city of Montreal. That was her single contribution to the Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women’s Book Club at the beginning of our story, a fact that is, we suppose, nothing to sneeze at.

Romy sat next to

Emmy Jones,

offering her constant comfort, due to a heartbreak that had occurred in Emmy’s life at exactly the same time, almost to the day, as the death that had occurred in the Cabal the previous fall. Nobody was certain why Emmy continued to feel heartbroken six months after the fact, but the generous interpretation was that she had occasionally resumed torturous relations with the man in question. The primary casualty of this heartbreak, however, even considering her self-centredness during the season leading up to the new book, seems to have been her love of literature, which made a sudden and, it seems, permanent, exit.9

What’s more, speaking now of the present, she resents, apparently, very deeply, being depicted in the ‘exaggerated mytho-poetic realm of this account’, and will not read it, will have nothing to do with it, will barely even acknowledge its existence. She stuck it out with the Lacuna Cabal’s final book, she reports, out of loyalty to and concern for Runner’s health and feelings, but was otherwise finished with fiction. She has, in fact, challenged us, through the intercession of a third party, to entirely remove her from this account. But after deep consideration afforded by many sleepless nights, we have determined that we cannot do that – at least not altogether. Many of the decisions Emmy made during the weeks in which this story takes place – decisions which, granted, may have arisen out of heartbroken self-destructiveness – rendered her de facto the catalyst for many other events, events that go to the very heart of our story. Emmy’s private story is intertwined with the larger story of the Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women’s Book Club, which fact renders it not exclusively her own. We’re sorry. We’re very, very sorry.

We considered changing her name, but that doesn’t seem to go far enough in the case of Emmy Jones. We feel, given her concern and our deep regard for the same, that we have to transform, somehow, her whole self. It’s a difficult dilemma because we can’t just replace her with a scarecrow with no past and no future, who merely commits the actions that are necessary for Emmy to commit in order to move ahead with our story. We also have to be careful to avoid becoming like the storied Islamic painter of the thirteenth century, who, having been told that he cannot depict Muhammad, begins to dream the Prophet in three glorious dimensions on canvas and so prefigures the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, depicting Muhammad and always Muhammad and only Muhammad. The last thing that we need to happen in this story is for us to become obsessed with depicting Emmy, holding up a mirror to reflect another mirror, casting Emmy forever and alone into infinity. We do not wish to be embraced by our repression, lest it bring forth monsters. We have therefore adopted a somewhat radical narrative strategy and decided to make Emmy a fictional character. And to make the fact of Emmy as a fictional character clear to the reader in every moment. In order to fulfil this mandate, we have determined to (ahem) make her striped. And to always comment on her actions and feelings with respect to the fact that she is striped.

9 As a playwright, her highest ambition, according to a recent interview published in the Mirror is to create a théâtre verité domestic drama in which not one word is spoken on the stage and all expression is made using only looks, small gestures and violence.

Emmy was striped. Like a zebra. Except saying she was striped like a zebra is like saying Einstein was smart like a fox. It does not convey the truth of the matter. Also, we should stress that her stripes were not of the zebra (or tiger, etc.) variety at all. We know that, because they did not fan out from her spine, as they do in most of the natural world, but were rather more uniform, running horizontally all the way around her body. And her stripes changed width, colour and shade, depending on her mood. Still, no matter how they changed, one shade was always lighter and the other darker.10 So, if you attended a very close eye, you would always perceive the stripes. Her mind in those days was a perpetual state of black and grey, but her skin was always projecting at least two colours, exquisitely matched. We wonder, under what circumstances would she mismatch? And was it an act of will that she didn’t? Or was it rather an act of nature? Colours always match in nature.

Her stripes manifested themselves with exquisite subtlety – if you met her on the street you would not notice that she had them. She managed, with some effort, to mask them from most observers by colouring her hair in a pair of tones and wearing brightly striped shirts. On regular days she had maybe four of them running along her face, six if you include her neck. On more intensely neurotic or desperately emotional days, there would be more. On the day that we introduce the Lacuna Cabal, 18 March 2003, there were plenty, but they were noticeable only to Romy.

So there. We have told of a body changed into a shape of a different kind. And we get to keep Emmy in our story. This does present a bit of an aesthetic challenge for us, since, as we stated in our portrait of Priya, we are interested in the written word to the ascetic exclusion of all other art forms, including all those that are rendered in colour. But we’ll do the best we can.

10 Formally, we should clarify that we’re speaking of the stripes themselves and also the spaces between the stripes. We leave it to the reader to determine which was which.

We might as well cut to the chase, let the cat out of the bag and say the thing that was obvious to everybody except Romy herself and perhaps Emmy as well: Romy loved Emmy. She would have loved her even without her stripes, but, as she was from Bingotown, Romy’s eye was involuntarily drawn to colour as something it had rarely seen. So Romy saw Emmy, and what she saw she loved, no matter how sullen was the object of her love. What’s more, despite the fact that her love was unrequited, Romy remembers it with wistful fondness and has offered her diary to be used for its edifying instances of self-loathing. We have, however, for the moment anyway, declined.

Emmy sat next to

Aline Irwin.

Aline was the most controversial member of the Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women’s Book Club, for the simple reason that she was not a young woman at all. Not that she was old, or that we would not have been able to make some kind of exemption for elderly applicants, but we’re not entirely sure that we should have made an exemption for Aline Irwin, no matter what Missy might have wished.

Still, Aline was there at Missy’s invitation and Missy’s insist ence, and there were certain matters in which no one would ever dare to cross Missy.

Priya, who was new to the group, recalled once having seen Aline, sometime in the previous year, surrounded by friends (presumably including Missy, who did everything she could to protect Aline from the world) in a breakfast café on Parc Avenue. It was something Priya recalled easily for the simple reason that she had never before seen a person who looked so miserable as Aline did that morning, especially in contrast with her crowding compatriots. It was clear that her friends appreciated Aline, indulged her, allowed her to stay the way she was: sitting with her head down and peering through her makeup at the black dress, the stockings, the shoes. They accepted her without complaint and were heroically unaffected by his moods. The way you might sit with a sick friend when it’s many of you who have come to visit and not just one.

But even in this recollection we’ve managed already to make the error of referring to Aline in the masculine. We can’t even prop up the desired illusion of femininity in our own account.

Because it was clear to all of us, including Aline herself, if that permanently alienated expression was any indication, that Aline was a boy. A boy in a dress, as distinguished from a spectacular androgyne, like Prince, or like Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean. Probably not even a fully grown boy, since he was working so hard to mentally suppress his hormones.

Yes, she was a he, dressed as a she, and no matter how much makeup and sympathy were ladled onto her, this remained a permanent, irreversible fact. She was never going to make the cover of Cosmo. Where the makeup was concerned, you could always more than make out a five-o’clock shadow – a misnomer in this case, since he shaved sometimes three times a day, so it might as well have been a 10 a.m. shadow. His skin reacted badly to the foundation and sprouted abscesses with deep reservoirs. No matter how loosely fitting her drop-waist dresses, you could always perceive the blockiness of her body, the flatness of her chest, the leggings emphasising the power of her thighs, the knobbiness of her knees.

It was appalling.

Missy (we suspect) invited Aline into the Cabal so that she might have the opportunity to meet and get to know ‘other women’ and have them rub some of their womanness off on her. Among other things, she wanted her to experience ‘the reinvention of the self through literature’ and ‘a bit of a haven from boys’.

Since there were no boys allowed in the Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women’s Book Club. Not then. Not ever. No exceptions …

Neil Coghill was an exception. Because he was ten and alone in the world except for Runner. And he was not really a member but, rather, merely present to the membership. Otherwise, no exceptions.

The one who was fierce in her loyalty to Aline, who sat next to her, protected her, displayed in the manner of all guardians that most profound test of loyalty – the commitment to a lie – was none other than

Missy Bean,

founder and president of the Lacuna Cabal, of whom we have already spoken. How could we not have already spoken of her? She touched and enriched each of our lives in myriad ways. She gave us books and she gave us one another, and she was lonely and she was from Westmount. She was our captain and our king. If we were the seven sages who laid the foundation, Missy alone was the engineer of human souls!

Which is not to say she could not be barbaric (or, if you prefer, particularly considering the aforementioned allusion to a quote from Stalin: which is to say she could be barbaric). She had the instinct for power and the will to find it. She left no question in anyone’s mind that politics is something pursued for the love of power and the craving of attention. Government is essentially barbaric – ‘barbaric in its origins and forever susceptible to barbaric actions and aims.’11 It can’t civilise itself. But it can certainly civilise the rest of us, depending on what book it elects to have us read and plunder.

And we would have followed Missy to the ends of the earth. As it turns out, Missy did indeed go there, to the ends of the earth, before this story came to its conclusion, and we – the two of us – did not follow her there. So this book is our attempt to fulfil the tenets of our oath some years after the fact.

Missy was a little older than the rest of us – a fact that she managed to conceal fairly easily, mostly by refraining from any discussion of her past. Truth be told, she’d had some experiences of her own, had travelled a bit and was, we’ve come to learn, listening very closely to the ticking of her biological clock. She kept this fact well-concealed, however, allowing us to think of her as a latter-day Sappho, indifferent to the world of men, when in truth she was more like Cleopatra. Which is not to say she was anything like the woman discussed in the previous chapter. It’s true they shared a speculative interest in sleeping with strangers, but the chapter-one girl (Anna) wasn’t thinking clearly about it, whereas Missy was focused entirely on the goal of ten little fingers, ten little toes and a crib, and the reader should not forget this fact. Also, the former girl was interested in being paid, whereas Missy had a rich father who kept her in furs and memberships, and provided the credit card that purchased the heater, in the glow of whose blue flame she now sat next to.

11 Jane Jacobs, Systems of Survival, Hodder & Stoughton Ltd., 1993.

Me.

The other I of the two of we: Danielle, at the other extreme end, the other one of the two of us about whom the less said the better, though I suppose we should say something:

We were brought into the club by Missy, essentially as loyalists – sort of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to her Claudius, with the twins, Runner and Ruby, cast as Hamlet. We were there from the beginning. Missy knew that it would take an effort to control the will of the twins, though she felt that the Cabal was better off with them than without them, since perhaps without them meant against them, and that would have been no good at all.

Though we pretended fealty and friendship to everyone, essentially we represented two extra votes in Missy’s favour. That was the private condition from the beginning, to be overturned only if we felt that, for some reason, Missy was committing a destructive act, against herself or against the integrity of the club. The only reason this caveat was ever discussed at all was that we, including Missy, shared a very high sense of drama, occasionally indulging in fantasies about going mad and that sort of thing.

But why should Missy not have three guaranteed votes? She’d built the Cabal with her own bare hands. Whatever it was that a maverick such as Runner Coghill brought to the table, she was no leader, and she could not have begun to build such an institution on her own. Mercury burns its path, cuts a swath: it’s a destroyer, not a builder. Missy built the Cabal alone.

So, yes, we were her lackeys, meant to counterbalance the influence of the twins, Runner and Ruby, and their essentially wacky ideas. Which means, we suppose, that the two of us were the anti-twins.

And that completes the call of the role for the Lacuna Cabal, 18 March 2003, 7.06 p.m. Here we are, in all our individualised glory, with our conflicts and our quirks.

Though in many other ways – many essential ways – we were, together, a single thing. Like a unit of the army in battle, like the chorus in an old Greek tragedy, like the Scooby-Doo gang. We were then, and always will be, the Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women’s Book Club.

THREE

THE BEGINNING OF EVERYTHING

How do you describe the cave you lived in before you walked out of it? What did Hell look like before the angels were hurled into it? Was there anyone who felt bigger than life in sixteenth-century London before Shakespeare stepped onto the stage? Did the Meccans have any idea of the power their language contained before Muhammad walked down the hill?

The truth is, the two of us have had enough schooling that we no longer believe in these before-and-after visions of history. History is the history of marketing and publicity; which is the smaller way of saying it’s written by the victors.

And it was certainly not all glory and roses after Runner’s entrance, either.

We said earlier that Du and Anna and Runner were climbing the stairs to a bygone era. But not yet, because the Lacuna Cabal had not yet completed their latest book. Out with the old and in with the new then. Or, more to the point, out with the new and in with the old.

The book we were completing was Fall on Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald. It was the only book we had tackled all winter, and it had borne the burden of having to distract us from daily life after the death of Ruby Coghill. Grief and loss were emotions that none of us had really experienced before, and we didn’t know what to make of them.

On the day in question, that is, 18 March 2003, just after 7 p.m., we initiated our farewell to this book with a standard ritual we called the Final Indulgence. Aline, with help from a reluctant Emmy, began to read a passage that was agreed to be beloved to everyone. It was about two women who were lovers who pledged to never leave one another, and it contained descriptions of the sea and of November. Everybody cried for some reason at the mention of that word ‘November’, especially Romy, who cried out loud. We cried too, though we don’t know why; we’re crying now, even though we can’t think of anything bad that has happened in November, other than it was only two months later than September. The truth is, we would have wept at the name of any month at all, the names of months being heavily weighted with the passage of time away from September and towards a sad and heavy future.

Emmy was weeping on the shoulder of Romy, quietly despairing that she didn’t have someone like that, someone to love who could love her like that. Nobody was noticing this except for Romy herself, naturally, and her heart was both melting and bursting. Emmy worried quietly to Romy that she was becoming repellent and unclean, that she gave off a scent that said to men, ‘Don’t come near me.’ She felt it went right down to her genes. She also proclaimed herself one of the last of the old-time nihilists, who would think nothing of throwing herself onto a scrum of sailors à la Last Exit to Brooklyn. Though she was also, she said, so fucking tired of her life experiences being governed by stories in books.

Romy wanted nothing more than to counter Emmy’s nihilism by paying homage to her stripes, which were, to Romy, the most beautiful things she had ever seen, and which seemed to pulse with her heartbeat in a way that could be discerned only by a person sitting as close as Romy was now. But she knew that Emmy did not want to speak of such things, so instead she breathlessly protested that no single man, not even a bevy of wild-eyed sailors, could possibly affect Emmy’s perfect genes and declared, perhaps a little too emphatically, that Emmy was as beautiful as she had ever been.

This was overheard.

There had been, thus far in the room, some unspoken tension, because the women of the Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women’s Book Club were not comfortable with giving themselves over entirely without criticism to a work of fiction, no matter how important or established it was. We tried to maintain a critical distance, so that only the most sublime portions of a given work would stick. But there had been something about this book that had gotten to us, and so we found ourselves, on this evening, ushering the author of Fall on Your Knees into the pantheon of the greats without so much as a whisper of protest regarding length or anachronism or political relevance or anything. And so there was a creeping feeling of embarrassment that perhaps the Lacuna Cabal was losing its edge. Still, though criticism was desired as an outlet, it had to be well-spoken and deserved, and woe betide the woman who let fly for the sake of venting alone. Nobody had dared on this particular evening, and so when Romy was overheard to be speaking quietly to Emmy about beauty and blue jeans, the collective Lacuna Id, in the person of founder and president Missy Bean, spotted an outlet. She turned to Romy and dressed her down for turning her attention towards issues of fashion and beauty at a time when attention had to be paid to more serious matters of literary analysis, to wit: ‘We are tonight attempting to recall the deepest and greatest values of this book, but Romy, it seems, would prefer to speak about … ’, et cetera.

To Romy, who was the perfect Lacuna Cabal member, this was a blow.

‘No, Missy, we’re not.’

‘Oh, Romy, you’re not? You’re speaking of more serious things?’

‘Yes we are.’

‘Could you share them with the group?’

‘Uh.’

‘Books suck, Missy, essentially, is what I was saying. Okay? Happy?’

This from Emmy, who opted in her newfound self-destructive manner to deflect attention from Romy – possibly the only kind thing she will ever do for anyone in this story. She went on. ‘Because for me they don’t do what they’re supposed to do when they need to do them most.’

Missy, shocked, spluttered something about how books, in fact, ‘have no needs, Emmy’.

‘All I know is,’ Emmy continued, ‘and this is what I was telling the poor embarrassed Romy, all I know is, I lie in my bed at night, by myself, trying to read some cosy little book, but I can’t read them any more, because they’re too small, and they don’t matter, and I have to put them down and just get on with it.’

Missy, trying to affect a sympathetic tone, began to assure Emmy that we all knew about her ‘circumstances’, an ir resistibly vague term that prompted Priya to lean over and ask Romy, whisperingly, what those ‘circumstances’ might be.

‘Priya here doesn’t,’ corrected Emmy. ‘But you were saying?’

‘Emmy, if you’re not available for the necessary suspension of disbelief through these tragic circumstances of –’

‘Missy, I’m not saying my circumstances are tragic. God forbid thinking they’re tragic. I know they’re common, they’re so common that, who knows, they might even happen to you one day.’

To Emmy, Missy presented the image of manless perfection.

‘Can we get down to the next book?’

‘Sure, shit, whatever, shit, sure.’

But it was not as easy as all that. Missy had let loose the Id, and it wasn’t going to be so easy to allow it to slip back into the dark crevice from whence it had come.

Priya spoke up now – lovely, sunny Priya – suggesting helpfully that Missy ‘say what the book is going to be so we can get it over with’. To Missy’s explosion of protest, Priya countered that, ‘Aline and Jennifer and Danielle will vote for whatever you want them to, Missy … ’

Missy, mining a deep-core reserve of calm, asked, ‘What is this, a mutiny?’

‘I’m just telling it like it is,’ said Priya.

‘But it’s not even true,’ countered Missy. ‘Aline and Jennifer and Danielle can vote however they wish, and besides, it’s not my fault that our resident maverick, Runner Coghill, is missing today.’

Romy said, ‘Runner Coghill is always missing on decision days. It’s because she can’t stand the Final Indulgence. She thinks it’s stupid.’

Missy fixed Romy with a very frank look. ‘Well, I don’t have any sympathy for her then.’

‘Missy, she just lost her sister.’

‘What does that have to do with anything? Anyway, that was six months ago!’

‘It’s harder when it’s your twin.’

‘Oh, is it now?’

‘Yes!’

‘That’s just a crutch.’

Missy did say those words: ‘That’s just a crutch.’ It is recorded in the Book of Days.12 But she only said them because she didn’t want to lose control of the argument, and that depended entirely on her belittling Runner’s intentions. Romy was shocked and silenced by the monstrous assertion, and Missy’s work was done.13

And so there followed a moment or two when it seemed like the dark cloud of the Lacuna Id had passed. Until Romy, moving on, suggested they take up The White Bone by Barbara Gowdy, a book about elephants.

12 When an actress in Emmy’s play about the Lacuna Cabal (which, last time we checked, bore the overblown title, The Girls Who Saw Everything) was asked to speak a line just like that one presented above, she protested that no one would ever be so cruel as to say such a thing: no one would ever claim that the expression of pure grief for the loss of a sister could be described as ‘just a crutch’. The actress reportedly demanded a line-change, which Emmy, to her credit, refused to grant, and the whole rehearsal ground to a halt, never to be recovered. The actors weren’t getting paid anyway and, since they were running on their own steam, felt they had the moral right to say lines or not say lines as they pleased. Only a well-paid actor, they all agreed, could be expected to spout lines that were not properly aligned with her own heart and conscience. The bigger the paycheque, the greater the possibility for emotional investment in garbage. Emmy reportedly had to spend two weeks after that filing down a shiny new set of horns that had popped out of her forehead.

13 Also, for the record, a vote by Runner with Romy, Priya and Emmy against Missy, Aline, Jennifer and Danielle would bring about a tie. Since the deciding vote in a tie goes to the executive and Missy was the execu tive, the power came in the end right back around to her. This she knew, perfectly well.

This was unfortunate. Not only was Missy against reading a book about elephants or any other animals, but she was also, for the moment at least, against Romy. So in her argument against ‘the elephant book’, she matter-of-factly revealed some private information about how Romy had become distraught over the deaths of some rabbits in Watership Down, a book she’d read outside the auspices of the club. The deaths in this elephant book, she pointed out, were much worse than the rabbit deaths: they were harrowing, terrible, horrible deaths, and the entire, like, herd was always aware of it. ‘It’s a really depressing book.’

‘Wow, dead elephants,’ said Romy, mortified by Missy’s public revelations. Her eyes brimmed with tears and she wished that something would occur that might annihilate the memory of her suggestion.

And then something did. Miraculously, from the other end of the floor there came a most welcome interruption: a voice, high, piercing and clear: ‘Either I’m delirious or the essence of my vulva is filling the warehouse!’

(!)

(Well, that’s what she said!)

Runner would not have minded what we have written here. In fact she would have approved of our informing the reader that she had a great interest in gynaecological terminology, specifically those words relating to the menstrual cycle. She was obsessed with the idea of the streamlined cycle among women who worked together in groups for any length of time. Her enthusiasm over such matters was embarrassing but also understandable, since her frailty was such that there was probably nothing much going on down there. She had told Romy once that she hadn’t had any real activity since well before Ruby had died,14 and even then there had never been much. More of a trickle than a torrent. For her, PMS meant paltry month’s supply.

In other words, the scent of Runner’s vulva was most assuredly not filling the warehouse, though the scent of her language surely was. Before we had a chance to turn around, she had already moved on to the dreaded question.

‘How many have gotten their periods today?’

But then we saw. With Runner there was a man. A grown man. Neil was there too, but Neil was always there, by his sister’s side. No one, not even Missy, would have invoked the no-boys rule against Neil. But this was different. There was a grown man, and he was holding Runner in his arms, as if he were a combat soldier. Either Runner was engaged in some kind of elaborate practical joke that would take the rest of the evening to unfold, or she was seriously hurt. The man had a kind of half-embarrassed, half-apologetic look on his face, which would have been a very satisfying expression to observe if we weren’t all so totally freaked.

Beside the man there stood a chubby little rosy-cheeked girl who didn’t look too interesting or too bright.15 Except that she was carrying several slabs of stone, which looked to be interesting and so, arguably, endowed her with a veneer of the interesting. Although, on the other hand, they didn’t appear to belong to her. She was carrying them cavalierly, like she wanted to drop them and have a cigarette.

14 A lie. (Neil’s note.)

Still, during the conflict that followed, this girl, with the self-consciousness of someone who was not accustomed to negotiating fragility, managed to lower the stack to the floor and allow the stones to slide away into a harmless little heap. We’d have expected her to let them drop and break into pieces. She looked the type. But there was some deep current of delicacy in this girl that we could not see on the surface.

‘Ladies and ladies,’ said Runner, now that the arms of the man had given her our undivided attention. ‘I’ve come to propose a book.’

‘You’re late,’ said Missy.

‘That’s a great leadership skill, Missy: you can tell the time.’

‘That’s how I know you’re late.’

‘But it doesn’t matter because I’m hijacking the agenda. Neil, show them your rifle.’

Neil’s eyes widened as he looked at Runner, and a very familiar she’s-crazy expression flashed across his face. He didn’t have a rifle. Still, Runner continued as if Neil had flourished a semi-automatic and sent a hail of bullets over our heads.16

15 Sorry, Anna.

‘Now, there’s no need to panic; if we keep our heads when all around us –’

‘But you must know, Runner, darling,’ interrupted Missy sweetly, ‘that boys are not permitted to attend these meetings.’

‘He can if he’s got a rifle.’ (Runner’s baby poker face.)

‘Runner, darling?’ (Emmy, incredulous, her eyes stuck up inside her head.)

‘I’m not talking about that boy.’ (Missy, indicating the obvious and Neil.) ‘I’m talking about that boy.’ (Missy, indicating the boy in whose military arms Runner reclined.)

‘This boy?’ asked Runner, as if she were noticing him for the first time.

‘Yes, that boy.’

Runner looked at the boy again. And then, as if she had only just recalled it, as if it were all slowly coming back to her, she explained that, had it not been (or, rather, had it NOT BEEN) for the assistance of this boy (i.e. THIS BOY), she would still be lying in a pile of refuse on the first floor, having fallen through the ceiling, indicating the possibility that she had perhaps finally become too heavy for this world.

16 The following was written in the Book of Days immediately under today’s date: ‘Salam Pax has not posted today regarding the situation in Baghdad. Why not? We can’t help but fear the worst for this courageous bear of a man.’ The authors of this account did not recognise the handwriting, but it has turned out to be from Aline, who managed to keep his obsession with the Iraq war and specifically the Baghdad Blogger a secret from everyone else in the Cabal.

At the mention of Runner’s surfeit of heaviness, Missy placed the tips of her thumb and forefinger on either side of the bridge of her nose, pressing hard in a believable display of martyrdom. Runner continued.

‘He carried me here, and I have yet to hold up my end of the bargain, since I promised to blow him if he got me up all those stairs.’

Now we all had our faces in our hands. Even Priya. The boy, we think, would also have had his face in his hands, but for the matter that he had his hands full of Runner, so he had to content himself with casting a suffering look towards the chubby-cheeked girl who stood beside him.

The girl beside him, it should be noted, did not have her face in her hands either. She was looking almost amused behind her fulsome mug.

‘Still,’ Runner continued fearlessly, ‘the boys aren’t nearly as effective a hijacking tool as the Girl. Ladies and ladies, I present to you: the Girl.’ And then, sotto voce, to the girl, ‘I didn’t get your name.’

The chubby17 girl flashed a flicker of a smile, which passed as swiftly as a sparrow round a street corner, and replied too quietly for us to hear.

Runner continued. ‘Anna. First order of business, and necessary for the historic tie-break between the two distinct factions of the Lacuna Cabal, is: Anna here must be received as a new member.’

17 Sorry … sorry …

After a pause, Missy inquired whether Runner had gone out of her mind. Runner ruminated on the question for a moment or two before Missy just said, ‘No.’ Runner asked if we could vote on it. ‘No,’ said Missy.

‘Well, as it turns out, Missy,’ said Runner, ‘Anna owns the building we’re standing in. So if this were the Notre Dame Cathedral – and Missy, I’m not suggesting that if this were the Notre Dame Cathedral you’d be the Hunchback of Notre Dame Cathedral – but if this were Notre Dame Cathedral, Anna here would be the bishop, not to mention a devoted supporter of my book proposal.’

Missy was looking flagrantly at her watch and not panicking.

‘It’s seven thirty anyway. We can adjourn for now and meet somewhere else tomorrow. I will not tolerate this kind of mutinous –’

‘Missy, I’m in the process of proposing a book.’

‘You’re in the process of conducting a MUTINY!’

‘Outrageous!’ said Runner with delight, as Missy continued.

‘Proposing a book, any book, using threats, using coercion that undermines the sanctity of and that stamps and spits and trammels our constitution – you’re … the Pony Palimpsest!

Now Runner was overjoyed. ‘Don’t you call me a Pony Palimpsest.’

The reader, like Priya, might turn to Romy and ask, ‘What does it mean?’ and be as unsatisfied as Priya by Romy’s response: ‘It means the gloves are coming off.’18

Missy continued to berate Runner in a manner that might require more footnotes.

‘But I’m not sure you’ll accept the book any other way!’ protested Runner.

‘I will not accept any book this way.’

‘But you have to accept it whatever way will work!’

‘What’s the book?’

‘That’s the book!’

And Runner pointed to the heap of stones at Anna’s feet.

What did we see? We saw a pile of stones covered with small notches, some kind of writing. If there was a palimpsest there, it was literature written over archaeology. Any pony prints in that hard clay would have been left thousands of years before it was ever dug up, baked and written on.

Still, impressive as the individual stones might have looked from an archaeological standpoint, there was nothing to suggest we were looking at a book.

Runner had anticipated our ambivalence.

18 A palimpsest, of course, is a document that has been written over a pre-existing document, a holdover from the days before printers, when paper was precious and writing took a long time. So the image of a Pony Palimpsest, in the mind’s eye of the members of the Lacuna Cabal, is a skittish young horse mucking up a pre-existing document, preferably printed on beautiful medieval parchment inscribed by monks. ‘You are the Destroyer’ would be a synonymous statement.

‘I assure you: it might appear cumbersome, but it’s a real book.’

‘Um,’ said Missy, who never said ‘um’. ‘What’s it called, Runner?’

Runner bit her lip. ‘That’s a matter of opinion.’

‘Runner, I’m not going to choose a book that looks like that and has a title that is “a matter of opinion”.’

‘He Who Saw Everything. That’s what it’s called. It’s Mesopotamian. It’s pretty much the first book ever written. And if we are to hold on to our status as the premium book club, then we should be interested in reading the first book.’

There was a pause. And a sigh.

‘I was going to propose Possession.’

‘That book is fifteen years old!’

‘Your book isn’t even a book. It’s a bunch of rocks.’

‘And I’m willing to bet we’ve all read Possession already! Every single one of us!’

‘Not as part of the group.’

(Aline and Romy agreed quietly that Possession was an amazing book.)

Runner shifted in Du’s arms. ‘I can’t argue right now. I’m in pain.’

‘Well, suffer,’ said Missy and immediately regretted it, since it had become clear in that moment, to her as well as the rest of us, that Runner’s leg was hanging strangely off the soldier boy’s forearm. The truth was, Missy didn’t want Runner to suffer anything but defeat, but it suddenly didn’t sound like that. She was, for this rare moment, tongue-tied.

We were all looking at the leg. Aline finally ventured what she considered to be a reasonable argument, expressed in a tone of compromise: ‘Runner, I’m just not sure the Lacuna Cabal should be reading, like, unpublished material –’

Unfortunately for Aline, this was the argument Runner had most hoped to receive. ‘Just fuck off, Aline, okay? Why should the Lacuna Cabal be a carbon copy of other book clubs, reading only material that has been copied ad infinitum? I just want to try this book, okay? It’s my most favourite book in the whole world and just because it’s carved in stone and it’s written in an ancient language and there’s –’

An ancient language?

‘– only one copy and it looks funny or weird or whatever, doesn’t mean it sucks, Aline, okay? I bring the true experience of the prehistoric reader straight to your door. But if it sucks, we’ll switch, okay? We’ll just switch if it sucks we’ll switch, okay? Okay?’

Aline had switched her attention entirely to her sneakers, which had both suddenly come untied, and she was carefully rethreading the laces so they would all be of equal length. Runner watched for a moment, fascinated by the totality of Aline’s absorption in something so meaningless, and then she laid down her ace.

‘You’ll love it, I swear, on the grave of my sister who’s added her weight to my own.’

This maxed everyone out. Suddenly the pressure was unbearable and we were all desperately in need of escape. Runner sensed it. She paused and let out some of the steam. A beat. A breath. Then she offered to read a bit – just the beginning, just the beginning of the story. He Who Saw Everything. Literature as escape. It was deftly done.

‘Just let me read a bit. Just a little bit. A little bit of the first words that anyone ever thought to write. Just let me read a few of the first words of the first book. And then we can see if I’m crippled for life.’

We accepted it. It was allowed, though Missy was the only one who said, ‘Okay.’ There was no vote. Runner looked to Neil.

‘Neil, put down your gun.’

Neil looked at Runner.

‘Now get me the first stone.’

He did as he was told, as his sister spoke a brief editor ial preface:

‘There is, incidentally and for your information, Missy, a goddess at the top of the heap in this book who might sound familiar to you.’

Neil poked around the heap and finally pulled out one of the irregularly shaped stones. What indicated its status as first among the slabs was by no means apparent, though it was certainly believable that these stones were old. We could see that there was writing, if you could call it that, on both sides, and also that there were small patches of blank space, roughly textured, as if the text had been eroded. We, or some of us, found ourselves wondering how Runner would make the leap over these gaps, these … and the word occurred to Missy alone: these lacunae. With a sense of dread as pronounced as anything she felt about her own womb, Missy caught a flickering moment of import, as if something here were being fulfilled – a prophesy, like Herod first hearing of the baby Jesus.

What’s more, Missy realised, whatever was to come, whatever this prophesied, she herself had been the inadvertent origin of it, the namer of it. She wished she knew what it would be, this gap that held the future. This perfectly obscure lacuna.

Had she named the Cabal for this?

Neil handed the stone up to Runner, who sat up a little in Du’s arms and slowly began to translate the alleged first words of this alleged first book:

In the very old days, back when years were long, like the first year of a child’s life, only this is the way things felt to adults and children alike, because it was the beginning of the world, the future was full of everything and there was nothing in the past–

‘I wish I could feel that way,’ murmured Emmy.

– there was a time when everyone was happy in the beautiful city of Uruk, with its strong walls and its proud goddess Inanna –

Neil interjected, as if on cue, ‘Who was like Missy?’

A lot like Missy: always ready to leave if she didn’t get her way, march straight out of the universe …

But like rabbits in the warrens of Watership Down –

Romy forgot Emmy, for a moment.

– for a thousand years the people were happy.

And Runner paused and looked down at everyone from the arms where she wanted to spend the rest of her life.

Look at the walls of the city. They surround you. They were built for you, to protect you from the rain. These walls were built by one man, and he made them well, although in other ways, all other ways, he was a tyrant, with a stride as long as a league and eyes the rarest, rarest shade of …

She paused and paused some more. She would have paused forever and Missy would have let her, quietly praying for everyone to remain silent. But Romy, with her weakness for colour, took the bait.

‘Of what?’

Runner smiled, as sweetly as anything Missy might venture.

‘Can we vote on this?’

Romy could not believe it. She had been manipulated once again into taking the rap for the whole group, only this time it was at the hands of someone she trusted probably more than anyone in the world: ‘Runner Coghill!’

‘I’m sorry, Romy. I do what I have to. Can we vote on this?’

Missy sat stoically with eyes downcast. Calmly demurred. ‘I’m not ready to.’

Runner’s turn to panic: ‘I have to get to the hospital!’

‘So we’ll take you to the hospital.’

Romy demanded to know what was the colour of the tyrant’s eyes, but Runner kept her focus on the Missy stopgap.

‘But you’re interested.’

‘Whatever.’

‘You are!’

She was. It was obvious from the hesitation that followed. This proved enough for Romy, who was holding the Book of Days and so was entrusted with proclaiming the calls to vote. She shouted the motion as Neil quietly bent over his notebook and wrote, On this very day …

‘The proposal is to do Runner’s stone book and also to accept the new member Anna so we can keep coming back to this building. And also learn the colour of the tyrant’s eyes. All in favour?’

Romy, Priya and Emmy all raised their hands with Runner, who almost broke her bearer’s nose. Aline raised her hand, tipping the scales in Runner’s favour. But then Missy raised her hand too, taking our breath (the breath of the two of us) away. And as our hands (the hands of the two of us) shot up as one, faster than the speed of thought (because it was true: we were curious too), Romy shouted in tones of joy, ‘The motion carries us!’

And Missy, standing and pulling her fists to her hips in that exquisitely Wonder Woman pose: ‘Carries. The motion carries, Romy.’ Then, turning the full weight of her attention toward Runner and her injury, she managed to take her into her arms without acknowledging the presence of the boy.

‘Let’s get you to the hospital, you stupid, crazy girl.’

And she swept across the floor to the stairs, the rest of us following, like all her little dogs.

Dumuzi would have been relieved to be alone again with Anna, were it not for the anxious revelation that Anna did not wish to be alone with Du. She was following the crowd and he couldn’t shake the thought that it was mostly to get away from him.

In a flurry of semi-words that came out in an improbable series of W’s and B’s, he tried to inquire politely where she was going. He had longed for nothing more than to be alone with her again. Instead he got this: Anna, always moving on, always heading towards some future that did not include him, leaving him with his anxiety spikes. It was amazing how swiftly they came on. Just amazing.

‘I just want to see her to the hospital,’ said Anna, annoyed.

‘But you don’t even know her.’

‘I don’t know. She reminds me of … somebody.’

‘Who?’

‘Somebody.’ And then she flushed with her subtle anger, wounding him, as Priya might say, with the lash of an eye: ‘I don’t know who. That’s why I want to go. So that I can figure it out, you know?’

Dumuzi felt there was only one way now. ‘But I thought you wanted to, uh.’

A glint came into Anna’s eye, transforming all of Du’s anxiety in an instant to basic, focused arousal. ‘I thought you didn’t.’

His flurry of B’s and W’s again.

Anna put him out of his misery. ‘Meet me here tomorrow – next floor up.’

‘When?’

‘Same time.’

‘Okay.’

‘You sure?’

From Du a single W, half a B, and then a gesture of assent, and then Anna was gone. This was much more pleasant. An uncertain road, rife with even bigger spikes, land mines even. But for the moment everything was great. Sex. The feeling of possession. He tried to stop thinking, blowing out from puffed cheeks, blowing out again, waiting, allowing Anna to get far enough ahead of him that he couldn’t catch up and tell her he’d changed his mind or have her tell him the same. Then he followed.

FOUR

ROYAL VIC

The Royal Victoria Hospital was, as always, Runner’s destination of choice, despite or, we suppose, because of the stories of mould in the walls of the surgery rooms that got into the bodies of patients and killed them. Runner loved the Royal Vic because it was flagrantly, royally Scottish, designed in the Scottish Baronial style, which reminded her that she was herself Scottish, or at least part Scottish, that her surname came from a Scottish word for a Danish word for someone who wore hoods regularly, a practice she was planning to take up very soon. Perhaps, she thought, she would take up the wearing of hoods, when the day came that her eyes got too big for her head, perhaps in this very hospital.

Runner loved the Royal Vic because it was nestled into the side of the mountain, perched in solitude on the slopes. The main building, she would explain to you, had been conceived and constructed as a fortress for the sick and injured among the city’s poor, and so she loved too the fact that, since no one dared to use the main building for the low purpose of privately treating the wealthy, the Ross Pavilion had had to be built up and behind, shamefully sequestered. If the private patients wanted a building, she imagined some nineteenth-century hospital president saying, they could go and chip it out of solid rock.

There were, she felt, no new political arguments under the sun.

She loved the fact that nurses used to live in the attics. She wished she could have lived there with them, dressing up in their uniforms and shrieking with delight after hours, scaring the patients in the upper wards. She loved the fact that Emergency was located in the back of the building, up the hill, and required a running start. And she loved that in winter some of the emergency exits led out into twenty-foot snowbanks on the side of the mountain. She wondered whether anyone had ever been buried in an avalanche because some jittery kitchen worker had pulled the fire alarm.

She liked the balconies a lot. She used to go out onto the balconies and wait for Neil, who liked the cafeteria on the third floor. And she would count the entrances and exits (seven main, plus a hundred and five extra) while he played with his food and looked at the people and wrote in his notebook.

She had spent a lot of time here. And so had Neil, to keep her company. Neil had taken up the writing of notebooks in this very hospital. He had purchased his very first notebook here in the gift shop. The only family he had ever known was his big sisters Runner and Ruby. And now there was only Runner.

And now, on 18 March 2003, 10.14 p. m., he sat by the door to Runner’s hospital room and ignored Runner’s condition as best he could, filling his notebook, as he did most of the time, with disparate, irrelevant thoughts.

He wrote: I like to do my homework in the dark with a head¬ lamp behind the couch.

Well, who wouldn’t?

He wrote: I like to roll change with a headlamp in the dark too.

He wrote: I’ve been making wallets and change purses out of duct tape.

He wrote: I’ve been studying origami.

He wrote with an absorbed concentration that he knew could be shattered in a moment by Runner’s voice, speaking up eventually from her bed when the parade of girls had passed and they were finally alone.

‘So, Neil, we got them.’

‘Yes.’

‘We got them on our side. We get to read all ten tablets. Isn’t that great?’

Neil put away his pen and nodded vigorously.

‘It’s a special, unique book,’ she said, sighing happily and lying back into the pillow that was big for her head if not her eyes. ‘We just have to do it in our special, unique way.’

Neil was full of ideas for how the Lacuna Cabal could do the book in a unique way, but before they could be expressed they were interrupted by the entrance of the new girl, Anna, bearing a glass of water.

Runner, he could tell, was thrilled that Anna had stuck around. Romy had wept and Priya, arriving late19, had been spooked by the look of the place. Missy would have stayed but she said she had to go home and water her plants. Missy’s father had purchased for her a greenhouse and filled it up with bonsai as something they could cultivate together. But really, she explained, it takes only one person to cultivate a greenhouse full of bonsai. It had seemed like an unnecessarily elaborate explanation. And then she had said how sorry she was about the broken leg and left.

Anna had hung back. Some spidey sense had prompted her to stay. She handed over the glass.

Runner said, ‘You’re left-handed.’

Anna said, ‘Yes I am,’ and blushed.

‘How very interesting.’

‘Why, um?’

‘Some people say that all left-handed people are one of a pair of twins.’

‘Oh, I’m not a –’

‘They mean at the beginning, before you were born. So you might not know.’

‘Oh.’

19 She had stayed behind at the Lighter Building for a few minutes to practise a song she was working on in front of her imaginary audience. Like many people, Priya habitually saw herself as the star of her own movie, and often wondered if this had replaced the idea of God in governing her behaviour, causing her to put her best face forward and leading her to wonder further whether she shouldn’t start writing better songs.

Runner said, ‘So maybe you pine for a long-lost sister,’ flirting. ‘Other signs are crooked teeth and funny birthmarks.’

Anna’s hand went instinctively up to her mouth, even as she smiled a little. ‘I do have crooked teeth.’

Runner smiled back, sharing the secret, delighted. ‘Yes, I know.’

Anna covered her whole mouth now. ‘My parents wouldn’t let me get braces.’

‘Oh no, don’t worry,’ said Runner. ‘It’s like a mole on the cheek: the flaw that accentuates beauty.’

Anna tried to think what else to say and then she said she had to go. She did like this girl, though. This girl was a crazy chick, but she was smart. She was smart with an open heart, and that made her do stupid things. Anna never did stupid things. Not deliberately, anyway. She was too careful for that.

‘Will we see you tomorrow?’ asked Runner, hopeful, failing always to keep her cards close to her chest. She meant for the book club, Anna had to remind herself. It wasn’t her habit to hang around so much with women, preferring the company of men, but maybe now she’d take it up, maybe it would be good for her; like eating beets.

‘Yeah, sure, yeah. It’s fun,’ she said, and realised it was true.

‘Nice to meet you.’

‘Nice to meet you too.’

Anna hesitated. She didn’t know how you were supposed to address injured people. She ventured, ‘I hope you feel better.’

Runner beamed. Anna backed out of the room, nearly tripping over Neil, and then was gone.

In a moment, Runner was sulking, taking pills she hated. Moments she enjoyed went by far too fleetingly, she thought, wishing she could find some way to stop time, instead of gulping pills like she was doing now.

Neil sat quietly for a while, distracting himself by folding a sheet of paper. Finally he spoke up. ‘You scared her.’

‘No I didn’t,’ said Runner, who felt like maybe she had, but it was okay. ‘Not really.’

‘You want her to be a twin too. Why?’

‘No I don’t, Neil! We were just talking.’

Neil crumpled up the half-formed origami. He was in a bad mood now. And jealous. ‘How did you get osteoporosis and, and accident-proneness all of a sudden, anyway? You were the healthy one.’

That was true. Though Ruby had been plagued all her life by brittle bones and an overactive thyroid, Runner was athletic. It was often said that she chose the solo pursuit of track and field in order to spare Ruby the sight of her on the field as part of a close-knit scrum of girls. Later, the Lacuna Cabal was a team they could join together.

And Runner loved to swim, even as Ruby hated to put one single toe in the water. Runner had a swimmer’s milky complexion – both healthy and ethereal – whereas Ruby’s was merely ethereal. Of course, to say ‘merely ethereal’ is akin to saying ‘merely angelic’ or ‘merely brilliant’. It is ‘merely’ the condition one aspires to before all others. That’s what Runner must have believed. She must have idealised her sister’s condition. Not ‘healthy body/healthy mind’, but ‘brittle body/aerial mind’.

It had been impressed upon Runner from an early age that, for her, a healthy lifestyle and diet would easily keep bone brittleness and other thyroid-related problems at bay. The only way she could ever develop such problems as plagued her twin would be by becoming full-blown self-destructive.

Which brings us back to Neil’s persistent questioning.

‘How come you fell through that floor?’

‘You’ll have to take that up with the floor.’

Neil paused to consider the option of becoming a structural engineer, rejecting it. He wasn’t about to spend the rest of his life trying to protect Runner from harming herself. He might as well go in for mass-producing throw pillows; he might as well start telling jokes.

‘We shouldn’t call you Runner any more – we should call you Hobbler or Limper or something.’

‘Don’t make fun of a cripple.’

‘A fake cripple.’

To which her response was disappointingly mild. ‘How dare you.’

‘You were the healthy one.’ Pleading a little.

Runner closed her eyes, which was, for Neil, the worst. Like a city blacking out. Like a fin whale heading for the beach. But he had to bear it. As she spoke, a familiar-sounding fatigue crept into her voice. But hadn’t she slept for ten hours last night? This was not fair.

‘Don’t worry, Neil, it’s nothing. It’s just hard for twins to be separated, that’s all.’

Here he was concerned for her very survival and she was bringing up the ineffable.

‘I know,’ a cappella. ‘I know, I know, I know.’ And then, after a brief pause: ‘I know.’

‘But don’t worry. We’re doing the book now. It’s going to be fun and it has a happy ending.’

‘But it’s just a book.’

The desired effect. Runner’s eyes snapped open. The room filled again with light, though Neil was going to have to pay a whopping bill.

‘It is not just a book and you know it. How can you even say that? Anyway, people who live in glass houses should not throw stones.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, don’t you think maybe it’s time to drop the bookish-kid act?’

‘What?’

‘The act. It’s limiting for you. I mean, you know, Harry Potter is just a boy in a book. You’re a real person. You should be Neil Coghill the Real McCoghill.’

He didn’t have the slightest idea what she was talking about. If she wasn’t aware that he had repudiated the entire genre of nine-to-twelve literature, then he wasn’t about to tell her now. He’d let her figure it out on her own.

‘Who gives a shit about Harry Potter?’

There was a brief pause.

‘Well, why do you wear those empty frames?’

Oh. The empty frames. Did Harry Potter wear empty frames? Surely Harry Potter didn’t have the imagination for that. Surely Harry Potter’s glasses would be regular prescription glasses. But Runner suddenly lacked the discernment to credit such a distinction. Oh, she was sick all right.

‘I’ve been wearing these since before Harry Potter.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes.’ As witheringly as could be conveyed in a single syllable.

‘Oh.’

Runner abruptly changed the subject. She decided to affect putting on makeup, something that annoyed Neil. Digging around inside the chaos of her shapeless purse: ‘Well, anyway, we can talk about it tomorrow. You should get home.’

‘I want to stay here.’ This despite everything, despite the inevitability of Runner’s closed eyes, despite the necessity for him to hide and sleep underneath her bed in order to escape the notice of the night nurses. But Runner would know it was cold under that bed without a blanket, since she desperately needed hers. And she would have thought that lying on hard floors under hospital beds for hours on end, even if he’d already done it hundreds of times before, would cause him to develop the weaknesses that had so disappointed Ruby (and her) as they grew. This could not happen to Neil. So she pulled out the next tools of alienation: mascara, blush.

‘You can’t stay here, it’s a hospital; you should go home.’

‘I want to stay here.’

(It’s true, the mascara was difficult to endure, but ‘Go home because it’s a hospital’? How lame.)

What she really needed, if she was going to make up like she meant it, was a hand mirror. She dove into her purse again.

‘No, you can’t stay here. Really. You should go home.’

‘I want to stay here.’

She found the hand mirror.

‘No, you’ve got to go home.’

‘I want to stay here.’

She looked into the hand mirror.

‘You’ve got to go home, Neil.’

And then she saw Ruby. Her face. In the hand mirror. So close to her own. Pale. Lonely. Like she was at the bottom of a crevice, or in a bungalow on the other side of the city, forever. Like she had been left in a room somewhere hanging from a nail, where nobody would ever find her, her mouth open, dry, cracked. Ruby. She looked very weak. And her pupils moved strangely, like flies crawling on the surface of the mirror. How Runner had longed to see her again and now here she was and it was scary. Runner wondered what might be below the edge of the mirror’s frame, whether Ruby was holding a book, whether she was opening it and closing it, endlessly, displaying pages of words to Runner that Runner could not read.

And Runner spoke too. Although she didn’t know it, she said, ‘That isn’t really you,’ and Neil had written that line in his notebook without any further comment. Now he was looking at his sister with two parts fear and one part accusation.

‘What’s with you?’

‘Nothing, it’s a –’

‘A twin thing.’

‘Yeah.’

Runner looked into Neil’s living eyes and saw that he too was scared. She realised, not for the first time, why repressed people were heroic. Because they sought to spare such deadly emotions in others as wracked their own trembling frames. They shut down the bad feelings before they could spread, even if it cost them. She wished she had learned. But there had been no way of knowing, as one of a pair of twins, together the fifth and sixth of nine children, of which Neil was ninth and youngest, that she would come to be his sole guardian, looking at him like this from a hospital bed and trying to shut down her fear. There’d been no early training for her in the withholding of emotion. She had always considered it a virtue to let rip, and it was too late to stop now. The effort would kill her. There had to be some other way.

‘Actually, Neil, you know what?’

‘What?’

‘I think I want to go home too.’

She was ready with a reason – she wanted to go over her notes for the next bit of the first tablet – but Neil didn’t need a reason. He needed no excuse to transform a horror story into the story of a great adventure. Because he had sized up the task ahead and he knew they weren’t just going to walk out of that hospital like normal people. Oh no. Runner was supposed to be sequestered for the night. Snug in. Battened down. No, they were going to make an escape. And if Neil could only get his hands on a wheelchair and a porter’s uniform, then he would be the master of their escape. He would be the operator. The bus driver. The taxi man. The angel of endless stairwells. A crazy carpet over the cold reflecting ice sheet of death. The living saviour. Life itself.

FIVE

IUS PRIMAE NOCTIS

19 March, 5.51 p.m.

‘So I guess you’re not in the track and field club any more, Runner.’

Missy had lost no time. Late in the afternoon of the next day, while all was still quiet in Baghdad20, on the fifth floor of the Jacob Lighter Building, where it was minus five degrees Celsius and the only heat came from the blast of the blue flame-thrower, Missy was taking full advantage of Runner’s patched-up, less dramatic state to reassert her authority over the group. Like everyone else, she had been relieved (greatly relieved) that Runner was okay, but, given that she was okay, there was no need to dwell on it any longer. Fresh tragedy had been averted. We could move on. For her part, Runner was attempting to augment the dramatic effects of the leg cast by eschewing crutches and limping around like a marionette.21 She felt some anxiety about not having come up with a special way to tell the story, but remained confident, with her usual flung faith in serendipity, that an idea would present itself.

20 Even quieter, since everyone had purchased earplugs. According to the Baghdad Blogger (faithfully, if secretly, followed by our own Aline Irwin).

Runner said, ‘What makes everyone think they can be mean to a cripple just because that cripple is me?’ and, ‘Track and field doesn’t interest me any more.’

For the call of the role, taken by Romy, present were Romy, Priya, Runner (and Neil), Missy, Jennifer (ahem), Danielle (ahem), Aline and Emmy. All of us suitably bundled and sitting close to the heater, crisp on one side, cold on the other. Anna was, conspicuously if inevitably, absent. This was not surprising to anyone, though Missy sure pretended. ‘Why isn’t the bishop joining us?’

Runner (who, correction, was indeed surprised, and wounded) said, ‘She said she would come.’

‘She’s late. Romy, could you mark that down, please.’

Romy was anxious to finally discover the colour of the tyrant’s eyes. She started to ask but was interrupted by Missy.

‘Did you mark it down?’

Romy marked it down. ‘Are we starting?’

21 Did we mention she already had a cast on her right wrist? She broke it trying to break a fall and has consequently opted to just give into the fall when it happens, even if it turns out to be a drop of several feet as, for example, between the second and first floors of the Jacob Lighter Building. Apparently, she conducted mental exercises to ensure that, if she felt herself starting to go, she would close her eyes and fold her arms lightly across her chest. At least according to what she wrote in her diary.

Missy said, ‘Yes!’ and then more gently, ‘Yes.’ It was occurring to her that she’d been horrible to Romy the day before, regarding the elephants and the rabbits. She cast an involuntary glance towards Neil, feeling like a bad example.

Aline put up his hand. ‘I move that if we embrace the past then we must also embrace the future. I move that if we accept books of stone then we should be able to propose blogs. I’d like to propose a blog for our next book.’

Priya said, ‘What’s a blog?’

Missy said, ‘Not now, Aline.’

Aline looked down at her shoes. She said, ‘But it’s a relevant blog.’

Priya said, ‘What’s a blog?!’

Missy said, ‘Not now, Priya!’

And there was a swift flurry of whispering between Priya and Emmy, who, we presume, knew what a blog was.

Romy said, ‘What colour were his eyes, Runner?’

Runner, who didn’t know what a blog was either, looked genuinely confused for a moment and then she understood. And then she seemed to grow two inches.

Cedar.

She gestured subtly to Neil, who brought her the first stone. And the room felt warmer. All discussion of blogs and the future was hushed. Those tablets emanated heat: they were clay, and had been written while still wet and then fired in a kiln to fix the words, and they released the heat again only when the words were lifted from them by the act of reading. This was a good book for winter. Even if our winter was almost through.

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