The Mad and the Bad

33

Julie was wearing her bloodstained shorts and the man’s shirt, whose sleeves she had rolled up. She was beginning to be able to walk again, leaning on Fuentès’s arm. It was now nine days since she had left the burning store. She was inspecting the room with the outsize furniture where she had passed out on the night of her arrival.

“A fantasy,” said Fuentès. “We tend to forget what it’s like to be a kid. In here you feel as if you were only a meter twenty tall all over again. You must have had a terrible shock.”

“Well, by that point. .”

Julie perched herself on a gigantic chair. She giggled like a little girl. Fuentès, beer bottle in hand, watched her sardonically. Through the window, narrow as a castle loophole, the girl could see Peter some fifty meters from the labyrinth. The boy was shooting arrows from a crude bow that Fuentès had made for him. Julie could not get used to the new figure Peter made. In a single week he had acquired a tan and slimmed down; his hair had grown thicker and his attitude had changed. He was running now among the flowers. It was like a commercial for some kind of return to nature.

“I’m already fit enough to leave here,” said Julie, who was no fan of nature.

She got down from the giant chair, went through the bead curtain, and picked her way through the debris beyond. The sun, still glorious, now shone full in her face. She heard Fuentès coming up behind her.

“You have no place to go,” the man told her.

“Straight to the police.”

“That’s a long walk.”

“You don’t have a car?”

Julie had turned round. Fuentès shook his head.

“I had an old Jeep. The right thing for hereabouts. But I drove it into a ravine one night when I was drunk. Now I’ll have to start saving up for another one. It pisses me off.”

He put his empty bottle down carefully beside the wall.

“Come and see my kiln,” he said.

They walked the perimeter of the labyrinth. Julie noticed a strictly horizontal stairway along a drystone wall and an inaccessible garden on top of a squat circular tower three meters high.

“You could stay here for weeks, even months,” remarked Fuentès as though the idea appealed to him.

“In my handbag is that photo,” Julie reminded him. “Sooner or later they’ll figure it out, and turn up here.”

“I have all I need to give them a warm welcome,” said Fuentès.

They were approaching his kiln. It was a stone-and-mortar excrescence on the outer wall of the labyrinth. Smoke issued from its base.

“What do you mean?” asked Julie.

“I have a gun.”

“You don’t know Thompson. He’s a frightening man. A gun won’t stop him.”

Fuentès laughed derisively. “A gun stops anybody.”

“You don’t get it. He’ll be at us before you know it, and he’ll kill us.”

“You’ve seen too many horror films,” said Fuentès.

He opened one of the kiln’s two doors, which were of thick rusted metal.

“I nicked these doors from a Nazi blockhouse in Normandy. Look, this is where I put the wood in.”

Fuentès piled logs onto the embers deep inside the opening. Julie touched the stone wall of the kiln. The stone was hot.

“My pots are above. I’m not opening up there, because they’re being fired. They’re all duds though. I mess up everything I do.”

He slammed the lower door.

“As for firewood,” he noted, “there’s no shortage. I simply have to go down the hill.”

Julie pictured him bare-chested, splitting logs. The picture was pleasant.

“I’ll go down tomorrow,” she said. “Down to the cops, I mean.”

“I’ll go with you,” said Fuentès. “You’ll be in a really tight spot trying to explain everything and getting them to believe you. Do you really think they’ll believe you? Anyway, you’ll need someone. I’ll find you a lawyer.”

“I’m not afraid of going to the cops anymore,” said the girl.

A hundred meters away, Peter was playing in the flowers and shouting for joy.