Calabash Read online

  This was probably the longest speech Bob had made since he had married my mother. It was almost impassioned, almost as if he cared. I considered this radical idea as we walked back, then dismissed it as far-fetched. I knew that Bob was just following orders from Pauline in order to have a quiet life, just as I knew that he would chew a stick of peppermint gum after he’d finished his beer to stop her from smelling it on his breath. Bob was not my biological father; that honour fell to the cheerful man who had come upstairs to quell my night-time fears, someone who now existed in little more than a few faded photographs taken on outings. Pauline had divorced Phillip in 1960 and remarried two years later when I was eight. Apart from my night-time memories, attempts to recall the image of my real father yielded less each day. Faint recollections of summer afternoons, resting against a garden wall, a pleasant feeling of warmth and safety, music playing on a portable wireless; impressions as light as those on recently flattened grass, blurring even as you watched them.

  I felt that some justification was in order, an explanation as to why I had failed so badly in my examination results, but instead I allowed the silence to stretch between us on the walk home. I knew that any excuse I gave would be a lie, because he would not believe the truth.

  I was aware of what I was doing. ‘Letting the side down,’ Pauline called it, as though we were all rooting for the same thing. My stepfather was not a bad man, he wasn’t unkind or bitter. He was what would later become known as a ‘functioning alcoholic’, a banqueting manager at the Scheherazade Hotel on the esplanade, and he worked long hours so that he could provide us with the few simple luxuries that he thought we needed to hold together as a family. He came from a time, not very long ago, when that was all it took, and he couldn’t see that everything was changing, that what he wanted wasn’t what I wanted because there was nothing I wanted in the life I saw around me, nothing at all. And it frightened me so deeply, this emptiness at the heart of things, that I could barely speak without insanity pouring out instead of the chatter they all expected. And so I bit my cheek and hid my thoughts and burrowed down into my books, because only there, inside those warm white walls of words, did I have the strength to survive this hell.

  My dreams of Atlantis were pointless. The sea had already risen and drowned my world. Though I was only sixteen, all I could see before me was a grey waterscape of drifting corpses, and I could not believe that passing a few exams would save me from becoming a part of it.

  Chapter 5

  Anticipation of Arrival

  Doctor Trebunculus fluttered his hands impatiently at the palace guards who stood beneath the great bronze dragon lanterns on either side of the East Gate. The guards were bald mutes, and barely twitched their pupils as they swung aside to let him pass before returning to their official positions, with their legs astride and their fat blue-black arms folded over the enamelled handles of their scimitars. The lobes of their ears were pierced with heavy sapphires that stretched their flesh and required constant protection from the knives of brigands, so the guards were eternally vigilant. These stones were worn from birth by the palace staff as a sign of loyalty. It was said, although unverified even by the doctor, that the Sultan’s eunuchs wore similar gems inset in their groins. The palace was rife with such stories, of course, and though unfounded, they often became truthful in the retelling.

  The doctor straddled the limestone stairs, taking them in pairs until he had almost reached the top. His legs were as thin as stalks. His long chin was thrust purposefully forwards, and his coat-tails flew out behind him. He moved like a heron striding across mudflats.

  ‘Doctor!’ A young girl’s voice was calling from one of the modesty windows. Rosamunde pushed back the latticed rosewood shutters and stepped from the calm of her private quarters onto the balcony. Her braided chestnut hair fell across the nipples of her bare brown breasts. Her arms were wrapped in spirals of gold wire. Leaning forwards beneath the edge of the beaten copper baldachin that covered the balcony, she hissed down at him, ‘Where on earth have you been? He’s absolutely furious! He’s cutting the heads from the canaries! It’ll be Egyptians next! You know how he hates to be kept waiting. And why are you alone? Where is the ajnabee? Has something gone wrong?’

  ‘What could I do?’ gasped Trebunculus, pressing his knuckles against his heaving chest. ‘I could hardly drag him here against his will, could I?’

  ‘I don’t see why not. Time is not on our side.’

  ‘The caged animal has just cause for grievance,’ muttered the doctor. He gave another impatient wave of his fingers. ‘Go, run ahead and tell your father that I am arrived. I cannot enter his presence unannounced.’

  Rallying himself, Trebunculus stepped through a tall carved arch of interlocking brass stars and jade hexagons, past blue glass jars filled with fragrant jacaranda, around the piddling sapphire fountain scented with cedar oil, and into the courtyard of the great palace. Here the world descended into a delicate fretwork of shadows, as cool and still as a painting, but fraught with a tension that saturated the air like ozone.

  The doctor was the only man in the city who was allowed to enter royal quarters in civilian clothes, because of the haste in which he was usually summoned. All others were expected to wear silken sashes of honour in order that their rank could be instantly divined, but dressed in his purple velvet suit and stovepipe hat Trebunculus stood out in any crowd. As the only man of science in the kingdom, he occupied a unique position at court. Unfortunately, the Sultan tended to impatience and inattention, causing him to misunderstand almost everything he was told. This was very frustrating for the doctor, whose own mind tended towards the intellectual and abstract. The more the doctor spoke of paradigms, paradoxes and panaceas, the more the Sultan thought of his stomach and his concubine. Happily, the Princess Rosamunde was as worldly as she was intelligent, and acted as a bridge between them.

  From within the courtyard came the suspirial drone of an arghul, and in counterpoint the plaintive twangling of the rababa, a two-string bowed instrument that was an Eastern ancestor of the violin. The Sultan only allowed such peasant music to be played when he was feeling very depressed. Pausing to draw fresh breath and kick off his leather pattens, the doctor entered the ornate arena.

  ‘Do you realise what the time is?’ bellowed an uncontradictable voice. ‘In a land which finds no use for the measurement of the hours, did we not determine to present you with a pearl and bloodstone timepiece when our daughter was delivered? Trebunculus, I’m talking to you. Take your hat off, man. Demons of Trebizond, where the hell do you think you are?’

  The doctor hastily doffed his headgear and slipped it behind his back. He took stock of the situation. The Sultan was enthroned—never merely seated—upon a veined marble dais swagged in saffron cloth and dusted in marigold petals. Every time he moved, showers of flowers sifted to the ground around him. His fat right fist held a silver blade. In his left, a minuscule canary was incarcerated, yet sang on. The heads and bodies of a dozen yellow birds lay scattered at his sandalled feet.

  Whenever the Sultan grew especially petulant, he killed all the songbirds in the courtyard. It was a small cruelty that upset everyone within the palace grounds—the birds were a symbol of freedom and happiness—yet most of all the gesture hurt the Sultan, who loved the sound of birdsong. In terms of the customs of his land the Sultan was not a particularly malicious ruler, but his position was one of absolute power, and he occasionally felt the need to remind his subjects of the fact. He was flanked to the rear by the Dowager Sultan, or Queen Mother, a bulky, impractical woman swathed in grey silk, most notable for the alarming mass of copper hair that perched on her head like a sea-sponge; the Sultan’s lovely daughter Rosamunde; the melancholy royal consort, who was not allowed to have opinions and whose name no-one could quite remember; the lugubrious Lord Chancellor, whose eyes glistened like black beetles; the ancient, one-eared, smelly Semanticor; a pair of sullen eunuchs and a couple of palace dwarves, who had been invited simp
ly to prevent the retinue from forming a hard line (the Sultan had a horror of right angles—they bore the stamp of death). Before him stood the doctor. Everyone except the Sultan looked uncomfortable. Nobody moved a muscle; the Sultan detested unnecessary movement.

  ‘I am alone,’ Trebunculus stated.

  ‘Yes, I can see that. O celestial heavens, stop that infernal warbling.’ He made a threatening gesture at the court musicians, who fell silent and shuffled back into the shadows. ‘Where is the ajnabee?’

  ‘I endeavoured to locate him, Your Grace, but the celestial portents…my calculations were somewhat inaccurate. There were complications.’

  ‘I think what the doctor means,’ began Rosamunde, ‘is that the process is not as simple as you think.’

  ‘The doctor is quite capable of speaking for himself,’ warned the Sultan, raising his hand. ‘Go on, Doctor.’

  ‘The transition site has a habit of shifting about. It’s something to do with their weather. So much rain. My efforts were only partially successful.’

  ‘What do you mean, partially successful? Were you successful or not? That’s like saying you fell partially pregnant. You dropped partially dead. You were partially roped across the ignited mouth of the Imperial Battlement Cannon and blown to shreds. You were partially entombed alive in the floor of the Royal Ossuary. As there is nobody with you I can only assume that you failed to bring him here, and that registers as a total and utter lack of success in my book.’

  He reached back and snapped his fingers impatiently. The Dowager Sultan gave the Semanticor a painful nudge, waking the old teacher with a start. He hastily produced a small gold-trimmed pocket dictionary of English from his embroidered robes and passed it, open at the appropriate page.

  ‘Here we are,’ observed the Sultan. ‘Failure. A negative result. A bungle. A botch. Incapacity. Insufficiency. Inability to fulfil a promise. It’s probably a beheadable offence.’

  ‘That may well be so, Your Grace, as indeed most things are, and I’ll admit that the person whom we seek is not corporeally present as such, but I have managed to establish that he is’—Trebunculus corrected himself—‘was—in the exact spot where our calculations predicted that he would be found.’

  ‘Oh really? And where was that?’ The Sultan’s knife slipped across the canary’s throat and silenced its singing. Its tiny head fell to the floor like a bottle-cap being popped, landing in the centre of the congealing crimson pool where all the other heads were mired.

  ‘In the percheron field beyond the vale of cypress trees. Sort of over…’ He endeavoured to point through the wall of the palace.

  ‘I’m not calling you a liar, Trebunculus, but why by all the bektashi bodies of firmament and fundament should I believe you? Do you have any proof at all that he was ever there? Are we getting anywhere?’

  ‘Well, yes, Your Grace. If you will permit—’ Flustered, he dropped his hat and rooted about in the battered black leather medical bag that hung from his trousers. Finally, he produced a muddied brown woollen object with a flourish. The Dowager Sultan wrinkled her nose.

  ‘What—what—what—is that disgusting thing supposed to be?’

  ‘His scarf,’ said the doctor, much taken with his small triumph. ‘I found the boy’s scarf.’

  Chapter 6

  Lack of Calibration

  I spread the photographs carefully across my threadbare racing-car eiderdown. It was normal, I knew, for teenagers to become excited by magazines in the privacy of their bedrooms, but I was probably the only teenager in Cole Bay ogling blurred photographic studies of the suggested sites of ancient Babylon. My brother’s favourite personal reading matter was a specialist monthly entitled Birds ’N’ Bikes, which featured heavy-set girls in white PVC thigh-high boots bending awkwardly over Triumphs and Nortons. I, who could not tell a carburettor from a castanet and wasn’t much more accurate with the opposite sex, owned a single battered copy of the weird naturist magazine Health & Efficiency, which I kept on top of the wardrobe, but all the interesting bits of the nude women had been airbrushed out, so that they looked like eerie life-sized dolls. They also seemed unnaturally cheerful about playing volleyball and tennis in wintry woodland with no clothes on. The resulting effect was the opposite of sex, on a par with thumbing through Bob’s medical dictionary.

  Downstairs I could hear my mother arguing with Sean. These days her voice never fell below a certain hectoring volume, maintaining the uncomfortable see-sawing timbre of a distant factory alarm, something to be endured until the battery had worn down. I wormed my fingers into my ears and read on.

  The capital of Southern Mesopotamia, Babylon was at the height of its splendour during the 7th and 6th centuries BC. Nebuchadnezzar’s city was the largest in the world. Through it flowed the golden Euphrates, and within its eight fortified gates, decorated with enamelled lions, bulls and dragons, stood the 300-foot-high Tower of Babel, with a splendid temple in blue glaze at its summit. Greek tradition refers to its extraordinary Hanging Gardens as one of the seven wonders of the world—

  ‘Kay! Beans on toast, it’s on the table and getting cold.’ Her voice penetrated my defences, and besides, I was hungry. Deciding to chance the atmosphere downstairs, I folded away my maps, charts and photographs, and stowed my Plasticine scale model of Babylon in the wardrobe (Gyp had tried to eat it on several occasions but had only managed to masticate part of the Shamash Temple). Sean was supposed to be taking his girlfriend back to her flat for the evening, but wasn’t allowed to leave the house without having a hot meal. His girlfriend’s name was Janine, commonly considered by my mother as She Who Can Do No Wrong. Janine worked in a bakery, which explained the doughy texture of her skin and the fact that she continually wiped her hands on her slacks, as though trying to remove icing sugar from the whorls of her fingertips. The gesture was fast developing into a nervous tic that I morbidly imagined would grow and stay with her until the day she died. She already had a permanent ridge in her hair from having to wear a paper hat. Her bum was restrained by slacks that prevented her from sitting upright without first sticking a finger down her belt.

  Janine was so sweet that she was only bearable in small doses, and usually arrived carrying paper bags filled with sickly pastel slices of Battenberg cake or pastry horns filled with artificial cream. I found her habits very annoying. When watching the evening news her reactions chimed with my mother’s. If it was announced that an entertainer had died, Janine would remind us that ‘he was no stranger to personal tragedy,’ or that ‘he brought so many people pleasure in his lifetime.’ When a news presenter described the capture of a murderer, she tutted and said, ‘Hanging’s too good for him.’

  I could not stop myself from responding. ‘What would be good enough for him then, Janine?’

  ‘What?’ She looked across from her armchair, genuinely puzzled.

  ‘If hanging’s too good for him, what would be good enough?’

  ‘Pack it in, Kay,’ admonished my mother.

  ‘It’s just an expression,’ said Janine, returning her gaze to the screen. But for a moment I knew I had got to her. Her eyes unblanked and I could see her thinking. Then clouds passed across her brain once more, and I let the subject drop because I didn’t want to annoy Sean. My brother was loyal and decent and true. I didn’t think he loved Janine in the way that I had read about people grandly loving one another, but then Janine was more robust than women of the past. She didn’t moon about. She was sturdy and got on with things, and had this way of making Sean go quiet around her, the way Bob did with Pauline. I didn’t think it was love so much as fear of upsetting her.

  Sean had never allowed his girlfriends to be made fools of, and I thought this was a good thing. Physically, my brother was everything I was not: broad-chested and beefy-fleshed, blond and thick-necked. But not thick-skinned. He always stuck up for me, even when he thought I was talking rubbish. It was important to keep Sean on my side. In the war of attrition that was my life, I needed every ally I could
get.

  ‘There’s a new restaurant opening in London that has topless waitresses,’ said Pauline, reading from her newspaper. Her lips thinned out in disapproval. ‘It’s unhygienic, while you’re trying to eat.’

  ‘Could pep up the catering industry,’ murmured Bob. He knew my mother thought it was disgusting because she thought that anything new or different was somehow wrong. When pressed for a more detailed explanation, her reasoning fragmented and she became angry. She once explained to us that she’d had enough of change during the war.

  The easiest way to get her started was to mention Princess Margaret’s divorce, which she saw as some kind of defining cataclysm which would lead to the fall of the monarchy, the collapse of law and order and, ultimately, to the end of the world. She was an avid follower of royal appointments, and liked nothing more than to hear titled folk giving us proles the benefit of their opinions. As most of the royals only gained popular support by keeping their mouths shut, why the condescending remarks of these people interested her was hard to say. I wasn’t a big fan of royalty. Princess Margaret had once been scheduled to visit the Cole Bay Children’s Infirmary to open a diphtheria inoculation station, but had cancelled due to fog. They closed the hospital for two days in the middle of an epidemic to dismantle the viewing platform.

  ‘They’ve managed to get sixteen people in a Mini,’ complained my mother.

  ‘Who are “they”?’ I asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You said “they”. Who, car manufacturers? Scientists? The government? Is this being hailed as a breakthrough in miniaturisation?’

  ‘Don’t be clever, you.’ Pauline slapped the paper shut and poured more tea. My mother studied the local papers for reports of poor self-control, and viewed every small change in postwar behaviour as a fresh social transgression that would eventually drag us into a moral stone age. It didn’t pay to get her started on haircuts.