Number 9 dream Page 0,86

He enters a number, leans over the parapet, points down at the Cadillacs, and crouches.

The night rips open its guts, I am knocked over by a sheer wall of noise, the bridge shakes, a metallic, stony hail falls, I glimpse a flaming piece of car arcing overhead, and the document wallet containing my father is cinders. The night rezips. The echo sonic-booms off the mountains. Gravel presses into my cheekbone. I sort of stand – to my surprise, my body still works. Smoke pours upward from the craters where the Cadillacs were parked.

Leatherjacket enters another number into his mobile phone. I crouch, wondering what could be left to blow up – is he a walking bomb who explodes his own evidence? – but this time the mobile phone is only a mobile phone. ‘Mr Tsuru? Suhbataar. Your wishes regarding Mr Nagasaki and Mr Morino have been realized. Indeed, Mr Tsuru. Just as they sowed, they reaped.’ He puts his phone away and looks at me.

Burning and crackling.

My lip is bleeding where I bit it. ‘Are you going to kill me?’

‘I am thinking about it. Are you afraid?’

‘I am very, very afraid.’

‘Fear is not necessarily a weakness. I disdain weakness, but I disdain waste. To survive, you must persuade yourself that tonight was another man’s nightmare into which you accidentally strayed. Find a place to hide by daybreak, and stay hidden for many days. If you assist the police in any way, you will be killed immediately. Do you understand?’

I nod, and sneeze. When I look up, smoke swallows up the night.

Five

STUDY OF TALES

MARGINS

Goatwriter peered out at the starless night. His breath misted up the windscreen. First frost floated a wafer of ice on eidelweiss wine. Goatwriter counted three noises. The candle spluttering on his writing bureau; Mrs Comb battling in her sleep, ‘Don’t care was made to care, Amaryllis Broomhead!’; and Pithecanthropus, snoring in his undercarriage hammock. The fourth noise, the whisperings which Goatwriter was waiting for, was still a way away, so Goatwriter rummaged for his respectable spectacles to leaf through a book of poems composed by Princess Nukada in the ninth century. Goatwriter unearthed this volume one thundery Thursday in Delhi. Since midsummer, every night went the same. The venerable coach parked, Goatwriter woke, and nothing would make him sleep again. One, two, three hours later the whisperings came. Goatwriter told nobody about his insomnia, not even Pithecanthropus, and certainly not Mrs Comb, who was sure to prescribe a ghastly ‘curative’ worse than the complaint. In the beginning, Goatwriter believed the whisperings were the local Aberdeen waterfalls, but this theory was scotched when the whisperings followed to other locations. Goatwriter’s second theory was that he was insane. But with no other mental faculty affected, Goatwriter had come to believe that the whisperings had their origins in his fountain pen – the selfsame pen Lady Shonagon wrote her pillow book with, over thirteen thousand crescent moons ago. Goatwriter heard a hush, a rustle, and his heart raced faster. He slid Princess Nukada back on the shelf and pressed his ear against the pen shaft. Yes, he thought, here they come. But tonight, the words were more distinct – listen! A ‘queer’ here, a ‘pear’ there, an ‘ebony mare’ everywhere. Goatwriter picked up the fountain pen and began to write, slowly at first, as the words spattered singly, but soon sentences flowed, filled and overspilled.

‘Oh, sir, this is the giddy limit!’ Mrs Comb opened the morning curtains. ‘If you go gallivanting in the wee hours, wrap up proper! If your rheumatism plays up again, Muggins here’ll have to do your lugging and carrying, mark my words.’

Goatwriter unpeeled his sticky eyes open. ‘Unquiet slumbers, Mrs Comb – I dreamed of m-metal detecting for Norse nonagons in a delta where it was Wednesday m-morning for all eternity.’

Mrs Comb tied her apron strings tight. ‘I told you ninety-nine times, sir – “Creams and honey, dreams turn funny.” But you insist on your Devonshire suppers. Now, up and about with you. Your breakfast is done. Earl Grey with Zanzibar kippers, grilled to your fancy.’ Mrs Comb looked out at the landscape. ‘A right dreary spot, and no mistake.’

Goatwriter found his pince-nez on a monocle chronicle and peered. The venerable coach had rolled to a cold shoulder of more still moored still moors. ‘Inky landscape, paperpulp sky. I remain in little doubt, Mrs Comb, we are in the margins.’ Hawthorn huddled in well-wallowed hollows.

‘Drab name for a drab place,’ Mrs Comb pronounced.

‘The soil is too