a little motion as if prying curtains a touch apart. A shaft of the night between them and the approaching woman grew momentarily lighter, a clearer line of sight. Collingswood peered and sighed and released her fingers and the dark came back.
The man beside Collingswood gawked at her. She did not look at him.
“Boss,” she said as if to air. “… Nah, boss, no sign of them, but I’m pretty sure who I did just see. Remember Leon’s lurve interest? She’s pitched up…. Fuck should I know? … Well it’s her stupid fault, innit?” But as she said that last she was sighing, she was tugging on her plainclothes jacket and opening the door.
She pointed at her temporary partner. “Stay,” she said. “Good dog.” She was gone, turning up her collar, and he could hear her muttering as she approached the nervous-looking woman.
WATI WOULD HAVE GONE CLOSER, TOO, BUT FOR THE ARRIVALS. AT last, late, striding across the scrubland, in yellow jumpsuits, carrying equipment, looking side to side with pugnacity, came a group of shaven-headed men.
Chapter Sixty-Two
MARGE COULD NOT HEAR WHATEVER IT WAS THE NEW FIGURE suddenly approaching her said, not through the chatty, chirpy bad singing. She saw a young woman mouthing at her as she came closer with so much authority and swagger that Marge’s heart lurched and she turned up the iPod frantically. Space slipped. It lurched. The little voice in her ears shouted the excited chorus of a Belinda Carlisle track and the bricks around Marge rushed in tidal passing. She kept going, like a raft on white water, even laughing at herself while the motion still continued for so violent a reaction. How were you going to face whatever really bad was coming? She hadn’t realised how stretched taut and anxious she was about that promised finality.
It was as she was coming to rest, though the phrase felt odd in her head given that she had not moved—only the pavement below the walls beside and the slates above her—that the foot that had started descending in another place was yet to touch the ground, that she recognised the woman she had seen. That rude young constable.
WHO WAS SHOUTING IN FRUSTRATION AS THE MELTING-BUTTER residue of Marge’s presence sizzled away from before her. Her noise was interrupted, and she turned to spectate on the spurious event she had helped bring about.
• • •
“WHAT IS THAT?” BILLY SAID. THE NEWCOMERS WORE MILITARY boots, moved like soldiers. The roads beside the open space were half blocked by hoardings, and motorists who glanced down might take what they saw for council workers on some late-night necessary actions.
“Jesus Buddhists,” Dane said. “Nasty.” Dharmapalite supremacists, worshippers of Christos Siddhartha, amalgamed Jesus and Buddha of very particular shapes into one saviour, accentuating brutal identitarianism, a martial syncrex. Billy could hear a rhythm, a little chant as the figures came.
“What are they saying?” he said.
“Only one and a half,” said Dane. Only one and a half! Only one and a half! “It’s how many they’re going to kill. No matter how many they do.”
“What?”
They quoted the Mahavamsa, the reassurance to King Dutthagamani after he slaughtered thousands of non-Buddhists. “Only one and a half human beings have been slain here by thee. Unbelievers and men of evil life were the rest, not more to be esteemed than beasts.” One and a half was how many the Jesus Buddhists counted in the mass of dead after any of their depredations, according to careful religious accounting.
“Get ready.” Dane held his gun. “We don’t know what’s coming.”
Would the Siddharthans be stood up? Their apocalypse would win by default, but what then? The spectators just out of sight were there to see a godwar. Things too large to be birds, too faunal to be gusting rags of plastic, circled in the wind. End-times always came with harbingers, generated like maggots in dead flesh.
“Oh,” Dane whispered. “Look.”
In the lee of a big windowless wall was a gang of helmeted men. Surrounding another man. Billy was rinsed with adrenalin. The Tattoo. “He’s here like us,” Dane whispered. “To see what this is.”
There was the punk man in his eyeholed leather jacket. Two of the men in crash helmets held him, in an alley overlooking the field of fighting. He stared in the opposite direction from it, at nothing, at dark streets, while the Tattoo spectated.
“Jesus,” Billy said. “Where’s Goss and Subby?”
“If they’re here …” Dane said. The Siddharthists were putting together a rough altar, carrying out secret ceremonies. “Wati?” But