Transition

3

There is a certain purity to my existence. A simplicity. In a sense nothing much happens; I lie here, gazing into space or at the view presented by the window, blinking, swallowing, turning over now and again, getting up occasionally – always while they make the bed each morning – and staring open-mouthed at the nurses and orderlies. Now and again they’ll try to engage me in conversation. I make a point of smiling at them when they do this. It helps that we do not speak the same language. I can understand most of the one that they speak – sufficient to have an idea what my perceived medical status is and what treatments the doctors might have in store for me – but I have to make an effort to do so and I would not be able to speak much sense in it at all.

Sometimes I nod, or laugh, or make a sound that is halfway between a sort of throat-clearing noise and the moans that deaf people make sometimes, and often I frown as though I’m trying to understand what they’re saying, or as though I feel frustrated at not being able to make myself intelligible to them.

Doctors come and give me tests sometimes. There were quite a lot of doctors and quite a lot of tests, early on. There are fewer now. They give me books to look at with photographs or drawings in them of everyday objects, or large letters, one to a page. One doctor brought me a tray holding letters on wooden cubes, from some child’s game. I smiled at them and her and mixed them up, sliding them around on the tray, making pretty patterns out of them and building little towers with them, trying to make it look as though I was attempting to understand these letters and do whatever it was she wanted me to do, whatever might make her happy. She was a pleasant-looking young woman with short brown hair and large brown eyes and she had a habit of tapping the end of a pencil on her teeth. She was very patient with me and not brusque the way doctors can be sometimes. I liked her a lot and would have liked to have done something to have made her happy. But I could – would – not.

Instead I made that motion babies and toddlers make sometimes, clapping with fingers fanned, knocking down the little towers of letters I’d made. She smiled regretfully, tapped the pencil on her teeth, sighed and then made some notes on her clipboard.

I was relieved. I thought I might have overdone the kiddy-clappy thing.

I am allowed to go to the bathroom by myself, though I pretend to fall asleep in there sometimes. I always make mumbly apologetic noises and come out when they knock on the door and call my name. They call me “Kel,” not knowing my real name. There was a reason, something between a conceit and a joke, why I was christened so, but the doctor who named me thus left earlier this year and the thinking behind this name is not mentioned in my notes and nobody can remember the reason. I am not allowed to bathe alone, but being bathed is not so terrible; once you get over any residual shame it is very relaxing. One even feels luxurious. I take care to masturbate in the toilet on the morning of a bath day, so as not to embarrass myself in front of the nurses or orderlies.

One of the nurses is a big kindly woman with drawn-on eyebrows, another is quite small and pretty with bleached blonde hair, and there are two orderlies or care workers, one a bearded man with a ponytail and the other a frail-looking but surprisingly strong lady who looks older than me. I suppose if one of them – well, just the pretty blonde, if I am being frank with myself – ever showed any sign of sexual interest in me I might reconsider my pre-emptive pre-bath self-pleasuring. So far this looks unlikely and I am bathed with a sort of professional detachment by all of them.

There is a day room at the end of the corridor where other patients gather and watch television. I go there rarely and affect not really to understand the programmes even when I do. Most of the other patients just sit there slack-jawed, and I emulate them. Now and again one of them will try to engage me in conversation, but I just stare at them and smile and mumble and they usually go away. One large fat bald chap with bad skin doesn’t go away, and regularly sits beside me, watching the television while talking to me in a low, hypnotic voice, probably telling me about his ungrateful and dismissive family and his sexual exploits as a younger and more attractive man, but for all I know regaling me with lurid local folk tales, or his detailed design for a perpetual-motion machine, or professing his undying love for me and setting out the various things he would like to do to me in private. Or perhaps his undying hatred for me and setting out the various things he would like to do to me in private – I don’t know. I can hardly understand a word he says; I think he talks in the same language as the doctors and nurses – most of whom I can understand well enough – but in a different dialect.

Anyway, I rarely bother with the television room or the other patients. I lie here or sit here and I think about all that I’ve done and all that I intend to do once the immediate danger has passed and it is safe for me to re-emerge. I smile and even chuckle to myself sometimes, thinking of these poor fools mouldering away until they die here while I’m back out in the many worlds, living and loving; an operator, getting up to whatever mischief takes my fancy. How shocked they would be, patients and staff both, if they only knew!

Funny thing is, I always loved cocaine. I mean, obviously I loved it in the sense that I loved how rich it made me, how it helped me to drag myself up from the pretty much nothing I started with, but what I mean is I loved it when I took it.

It’s a proper brilliant drug, coke. I loved everything about it, I loved the way it all seemed of a piece. The cleanness of it, for a start. I mean, look at it: this beautiful snow-white powder. Little yellow sometimes, but only the way really brightly lit clouds are yellow though they start out looking white, from the sun. Bit of a joke it looks like cleaning powder, but even that seems right somehow. It feels like it’s cleaning out your skull, know what I mean? Even how you take it goes along with all this, doesn’t it? Clean, sharp, definite things like razor blades and mirrors and tightly rolled banknotes, preferably new, as big denomination as you like. I love the smell of new notes, with or without powderage.

And it energises you, gives you what feels like ambition and ability in one easily snorted package. Suddenly nothing’s impossible. You can talk and think your way round any problem, batter down anybody’s resistance, see the clear, clever way to make any challenge work for you. It’s a doing drug, an enabling drug.

Back where I came from they were all into dope, or H, or speed, which is the poor man’s coke, and they were starting to get into E. Speed’s like laminate instead of real wood, or faux fur not pukka, or a hand job instead of proper sex. It’ll do if you can’t afford the real thing. Ecstasy’s pretty good, but it’s not immediate. You have to commit to it. Not as much as kosher old-fashioned acid, though, cos I’ve heard people old enough to be my dad talk of these trips that lasted eighteen hours or more and just turned your whole world inside out, not always in a good way, and you needed to organise everything, too, like where you were going to spend the time you were tripping, and even who with. Support staff, practically. Like, carers! How the fuck did hippies ever get that fucking organised, eh?

Anyway, compared to that time-consuming nonsense E isn’t that bad, like drinking spritzers instead of whisky sodas or something, but you still need to organise everything to come up at the right time and it really is mostly about dancing, being loved-up in amongst lots of fellow travellers and boppers. Fine for that long drawn-out moment of collective euphoria, but it’s more like part of a sort of rite, a ritual. What was that song that went, “This is my church”? Something like that. Like a service. Bit too collective, too chummy for my taste.

Cannabis was sort of similar in some ways in that it made you mellow, didn’t it? Though how that squares with the fucking Hashisheen I’ve never quite understood. But it’s all that lying around like old hippies, wreathed in smoke and talking bollocks, that I could never take. All that claggy brown tar gumming up the cigarette papers and your brains and making you choke and splutter and wrecking you to the point where it seemed like a great idea to drink the old bong water for the final hit that’ll really take you over the edge into some other realm of understanding. What a load of bollocks. I can see it was a great Sixties drug when everybody wanted to smash the system by having love-ins and painting flowers on their bum, but it’s all too hazy and vague and sort of aimless, know what I mean?

H is proper hard-core, got to respect that. It’s a serious lifestyle commitment for most people, and it’s like discovering the mother-lode of pure pleasure that all the other drugs including the legal ones like drink have all come from, like finding something utterly pure beyond which there can’t possibly be anything better, but it’s a selfish drug. It takes you over, it becomes the boss, everything else becomes about the next hit and it takes you away from the real world, seems to say that the one where the H is is the real world and the one you’ve lived in all this time and where everybody else still lives, the poor fools, and where the money is, sadly, annoyingly, is just a sort of game, a kind of grey, grainy shadow-place where you have to go back to far too often to make these sort of robotic responses that’ll let you get back to the tits-out Technicolor of the wonderful and enchanting world of the H. Proper commitment, H is, and the way it’s served up is potentially lethal too. Bit like joining the army or something.

Plus, all that melting the mucky-looking stuff in ancient-looking spoons and searching for a vein and pulling ligatures tight with your teeth and having to draw your own blood out to mix it up in the syringe. Messy. You don’t need that. Not clean like coke. Exact opposite. And you need a bucket by you cos the first thing that happens when it hits is you chuck your guts up! Call me old-fashioned but I thought drugs were supposed to be about fun! What sort of fucking fun is that?

Like I say, respect to people prepared to suffer that sort of degradation for the sake of the river of warm bliss you end up submerged in, but fuck me, it’s not a drug you take to make your life better, which is what I’m looking for, it’s a drug that empties you out of one life and pours you wholesale into another one completely where it’s all very fucking wonderful but the drug is the only way into it and the only way of staying there. It’s like becoming a deep-sea diver in one of those old brass-helmet jobs with the porthole grilles and the air hose leading back to the surface. The H is the air hose, the H is the air. Total dependency.

No, give me coke every time. Not crack, though. Not cos it’s instantly addictive, that’s another load of bollocks. It’s just overrated, that’s all, and because you smoke it it’s got that messiness factor again, know what I mean? Something a bit sordid about crack, frankly. It’s like coke for junkies.

Proper, pukka coke is clean, sharp, accelerating, and like a smart drug, a precision munition you take exactly when you want it and need it and delivering for as long as you keep taking it. Of fucking course it’s the drug of choice of your masters of the universe, your financial wizards, your high-financiers. It’s like just-in-time exhilaration, isn’t it? A toot in both barrels and suddenly you’re a fucking genius and totally invincible. Just what you need when you’re juggling telephone numbers of money about and making bets with everybody else’s dosh. Not without its downsides, obviously, though for most people these days loss of appetite is brilliant. I mean, who wants to be fat? Collateral benefit, kind of. But the runny nose and paranoia and risking losing your septum and, so they say, having a heart attack, that’s all a bit toss. Still, no gain without pain and all that.

So it’s funny that I hardly ever took the stuff myself, given that I loved it, and still do, and I had access to the purest supplies at the best prices. Still do, too, through my contacts, of course. Just being cautious, basically. Also proving to myself who’s the boss, know what I mean? It’s called keeping things in proportion, keeping things balanced. I treat drink the same. I could guzzle vintage champagne and ancient cognac every day but that’d be giving in to that particular monkey, so that has to be rationed too. Same with the girlies.

I do love the ladies, but I wouldn’t want to be totally beholden to one of them, would I? True love and wanting kids and settling down and all that, it’s fine for most people and it makes the world go round and all like my old man said, but apart from the fact no it doesn’t, it’s gravity that does that, well, all right maybe it does make the world go round in the sense of creating the next generation, but it works just fine and dandy thanks as long as most people do it. Not all. Doesn’t need to be compulsory, doesn’t require every single person to take part, just most, just enough. What was that song, “Love Is The Drug”? Never a truer word, know what I mean? Just another temptation, another way of losing yourself. Making yourself vulnerable, that’s what it’s doing, giving in to all that romantic guff. Just putting your head on the chopping block, isn’t it?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not stupid and I know it can happen to anybody and maybe one day it’ll happen to me and I’ll be giving it all that It Just Feels Right and She’s The One and This Time It’s Different, and if it does then I just hope I don’t make a complete cunt of myself, excuse my language but you know what I mean. Even the mighty fall, they say. Nobody’s invulnerable, but you can at least show yourself the respect of holding out as long as possible, know what I mean?

Temudjin Oh, Mr Marquand Ys, Snr Marquan Dise, Dr Marquand Emesere, M. Marquan Demesere, Mark Cavan; Aiman Q’ands. I have been called many things and I have had many names and though they sometimes sound very various they tend to gyrate round a certain set of sounds, clustering about a limited repertoire of phonemes. My name changes each time I flit, never predictably. I don’t always know who I am myself. Not until I check.

I tap a tiny white pill into my espresso, rearrange the table condiments a little, drink my coffee in two gulps and sit back, waiting (another part of my mind isn’t waiting at all, it’s concentrating furiously, darting down a single filament of purpose within an infinitude of possibilities, a lightning strike zigzagging its way through a cloud, searching). I’m outside another pavement café, in the 4th, looking out across a branch of the Seine to the Ile St Louis, just entering the trance that will guide me to exactly the right place and person. Meanwhile, space to think, to review and evaluate.

My meeting with Madame d’Ortolan was most unsatisfactory. She was sitting asquint in the booth, and the tablecloth was off-centre, hanging down twice as far on one side as on the other. The only way I felt able to compensate was by jiggling one leg up and down, which was really no help at all. And then she treats me like an idiot! Self-satisfied salope.

“Plyte, Jésusdottir, Krijk, Heurtzloft-Beiderkern, Obliq, Mulverhill,” I find myself muttering, for these things must be fixed in the mind. A waiter, scooping change from the next table, turns and looks at me oddly. “Plyte, Jésusdottir, Krijk, Heurtzloft-Beiderkern, Obliq, Mulverhill,” I mutter at him, smiling. In theory a security failing, but so what? In this world, essentially, these are nonsense words. Meaningless to anybody who knows only this reality, or any single world for that matter.

The little aluminium tube lies inside my chest bag. Amongst other things it holds a tiny mechanical one-time reader; a metal device like two miniaturised measuring tapes joined by a short collar, a sort of slide with a glass window in it. One of the spools has a little pull-out handle on it. You deploy this, wind it up and let it go; it starts to pull the paper strip from the other spool past the little window. You need to watch this very carefully. You can read about a dozen letters at a time before they’re gone, into the other spool, where the specially treated paper comes into contact with the air and turns to dust, its message for ever unreadable. The clockwork mechanism, once started, cannot be stopped, so you need to pay continuous attention. If you miss any part of the message, well, you’re stuck. You will need to go and ask for another set of instructions. This does not go down well.

I read my orders in the toilet. It was a little dim so I used a torch. Taken with the highly irregular verbal changes to the instructions, it would seem that certain elisions, as we call them in the trade, are called for. I am to elide. Rather a lot of eliding required, in fact. Interesting.

A sneeze, and when I open my eyes again I am a dapper gent in a frock coat with a hat, cane and grey gloves. My skin is a little darker. A language check reveals Mandarin is back and Farsi is my third language after French and English. Then German, then a smattering of at least twenty others. A much-divided world. Paris has changed once more. There is a canal through the breadth of the Ile St Louis, the street is full of gaily dressed hussars on clopping, head-tossing horses being politely applauded by a few passers-by who have stopped to watch and everything smells of steam. I look up, hoping for airships. I always like it when there are airships, but I can’t see any.

I let the troop of horsemen pass, then hail a sleek-looking steam cab to take me to the Gare Waterloo and the TGV for England. “Plyte, Jésusdottir, Krijk, Heurtzloft-Beiderkern, Obliq, Mulverhill,” I mutter once more, and wink at the uncomprehending look of the cabbie. There is a mirror in the buttoned lining of the cab’s passenger compartment. I look at myself. I am well turned out, with a very neat haircut and an exquisitely trimmed little goatee, but I am otherwise undistinguished, as usual. The cab is number 9034. These numbers add up to 16, whose own numbers then add up to 7, which – as any fool knows – is by convention the luckiest of lucky numbers. I adjust the sleeves of my chemise where they protrude from my coat until they are exactly equal in length.

I allow myself a deep sigh as I settle into the plush of the cab’s seat, positioning myself as centrally as possible. Still with the OCD, then.

The Perineum Club sits on Vermyn Street, off Piccadilly. It is late afternoon by the time I arrive and Lord Harmyle is taking tea.

“Mister Demesere,” he says, holding my card as though it might be infected. “Oh well. How unexpected. I suppose you’d better join me.”

“Why, thank you.”

Lord Harmyle is a gaunt, spare figure with long white hair and a face that appears halfway to being bleached from his skull. His thin lips are pale purple and his small eyes rheumy. He looks ninety years old or more but is apparently only in his early fifties. The two schools of thought regarding this anomaly cite either predisposing familial genes or an especially outré addiction. He eyes me beadily from the far side of the table. The Perineum is as calm, reserved and sparsely occupied as the Café Atlantique was frenetic, rowdy and crowded. It smells of pipe smoke and leather.

“Madame d’Ortolan?” the good lord enquires. A servant wafts to our side and dispenses weak-looking tea into an almost transparent porcelain cup. I resist the urge to swivel the cup so that the handle points directly towards me.

“She sends her regards,” I tell him, even though she did no such thing.

Lord Harmyle sucks in his already hollow cheeks and looks as though somebody has laced his tea with arsenic. “And how is that… lady?”

“She is well.”

“Hmm.” Lord Harmyle’s fingers hover thinly, like the claw of a predatory skeleton, over some crustless cucumber sandwiches. “And you. Do you bring a message?” The claw retreats and lifts a small biscuit instead. There are seven of the small, anaemic-looking sandwiches on one plate and eleven biscuits on the other. Both primes. Added together, eighteen. Which is not a prime, obviously. And making nine, the throwaway number. Really, this sort of thing could be both distressing and distracting, over time.

“Yes.” I take out the little ormolu sweetener case and shake free a tiny white pill. It disappears into the tea, which I stir. I lift the cup to my lips. Lord Harmyle appears undisturbed.

“One is supposed to lift the saucer and cup together to one’s mouth,” Lord Harmyle observes distastefully as I drink my tea.

“Is one?” I ask. I replace the teacup on the saucer. “I do beg your pardon.” I lift both saucer and cup this time. The tea tastes diffident, whatever flavours it might possess holding back as though ashamed of expressing themselves.

“Well?” Harmyle asks, frowning.

“Well?” I repeat, permitting myself a look of polite puzzlement.

“What’s the message you bear, sir?”

I hope I shall never lose my sincere admiration for those able to invest the word “sir” – on the face of it a genuine honorific – with the level of brusque contempt that the good lord has just achieved.

“Ah.” I put cup and saucer down. “I understand you may have expressed some doubts regarding the direction the Central Council might be taking.” I smile. “Concerns, even.”

Harmyle’s already pallid complexion appears to lose whatever blood it previously contained. Which is rather impressive, really, given that all this is basically an act. He sits back, glances around. He puts his own cup and saucer down, rattled. “What on earth are you talking about?”

I smile, raise one hand. “Firstly, sir, have no fear. I am here to ensure your safety, not threaten it.”

“Are you indeed?” The good lord looks dubious.

“Absolutely. I am, as I have always been, attached, inter alia, to the Protection Department.” (This is actually true.)

“Never heard of it.”

“One is not supposed to, unless one has need to call upon its services.” I smile. “Nevertheless, it exists. You may have been right to feel threatened. That is why I am here.”

Harmyle looks troubled, and possibly confused. “I understood that the lady in Paris was unflinchingly loyal to the current regime,” he observes. (At which I look mildly surprised.) “Indeed, I was under the impression she herself formed a significant part of that regime, at its highest level.”

“Really?” I say. I ought to explain: in terms of Central Council politics, Lord H is a one-time waverer who is now a d’Ortolan loyalist but who has been instructed by Madame d’Ortolan to seem to grow remote from her and her cabal, to speak out against her and, by so gaining their confidence, try to draw out the others on the Central Council who would oppose the good lady. She would have a spy in their midst. However, Lord H has been conspicuously unsuccessful in this endeavour and so fears he is caught between two very slippery stepping stones and is in some danger of skidding and falling no matter which way he tries to go a-leaping.

“Yes, really. I’d have thought,” he continues cautiously, still glancing around the quiet, high-ceilinged, wood-panelled room, “that if she heard I was – that I had any doubts regarding our… prevailing strategies… that she would have been my implacable opponent, not my concerned protector.”

I spread my hands. (For a moment, my brain chooses to interpret this movement as one hand diverging into two different realities. I have to perform the internal equivalent of a mind-clearing shake of the head to dispel this sensation. My mind is in at least two different places at the moment, which – even with the rare gift I have and the highly specialised training I’ve benefited from – requires a deal of concentration.) “Oh, she is quite placable,” I hear myself say. “The good lady’s loyalties are not entirely as you might have assumed.”

Lord Harmyle looks at me curiously, perhaps not sure how good my English is and whether he is somehow being made fun of.

I pat my pockets, appear distracted (I am distracted, but I’m holding it together). “I say, d’you think I might borrow a handkerchief? I think I feel a sneeze coming on.”

Harmyle frowns. His gaze shifts fractionally towards his breast pocket, where a white triangle of handkerchief protrudes. “I’ll ask a waiter,” he says, half turning in his seat.

The half-turn is all that I need. I rise quickly, take one step forward and while he is still swivelling back to look at me – his eyes just beginning to widen in fear – slash his throat pretty much from ear to ear with the glass stillete I have been concealing up my right sleeve. (A pretty Venetian thing, Murano, I believe, bought on Bund Street not ten minutes ago.)

The good lord’s earlier alabaster appearance deceived; in fact, he held quite a lot of blood. I ram the stillete into him directly underneath his sternum, just for good measure.

I have not lied, I feel I must point out. As I have already stated, I am indeed attached to the Protection Department (though I may have just constructively dismissed myself, I admit) – it is simply that said Department is concerned with the protection of the Concern’s security, not the protection of individuals. These distinctions matter. Though possibly not here.

Stepping delicately away as Lord Harmyle tries with absolute and indeed near-comical ineffectiveness to staunch the bright blushes of blood pulsing and squirting from his severed arteries, while at the same time seemingly attempting to wheeze a last few bubbling breaths or – who knows? – words through his ruptured windpipe (he doesn’t seem to have noticed there’s a pencil-thin knife protruding from his chest, though perhaps he is just prioritising), I sneeze suddenly and loudly, as though allergic to the scent of blood.

Now that really would be a handicap, in my line of work.