The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal

‘It is not just a book and you know it. How can you even say that? Anyway, people who live in glass houses should not throw stones.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, don’t you think maybe it’s time to drop the bookish-kid act?’

‘What?’

‘The act. It’s limiting for you. I mean, you know, Harry Potter is just a boy in a book. You’re a real person. You should be Neil Coghill the Real McCoghill.’

He didn’t have the slightest idea what she was talking about. If she wasn’t aware that he had repudiated the entire genre of nine-to-twelve literature, then he wasn’t about to tell her now. He’d let her figure it out on her own.

‘Who gives a shit about Harry Potter?’

There was a brief pause.

‘Well, why do you wear those empty frames?’

Oh. The empty frames. Did Harry Potter wear empty frames? Surely Harry Potter didn’t have the imagination for that. Surely Harry Potter’s glasses would be regular prescription glasses. But Runner suddenly lacked the discernment to credit such a distinction. Oh, she was sick all right.

‘I’ve been wearing these since before Harry Potter.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes.’ As witheringly as could be conveyed in a single syllable.

‘Oh.’

Runner abruptly changed the subject. She decided to affect putting on makeup, something that annoyed Neil. Digging around inside the chaos of her shapeless purse: ‘Well, anyway, we can talk about it tomorrow. You should get home.’

‘I want to stay here.’ This despite everything, despite the inevitability of Runner’s closed eyes, despite the necessity for him to hide and sleep underneath her bed in order to escape the notice of the night nurses. But Runner would know it was cold under that bed without a blanket, since she desperately needed hers. And she would have thought that lying on hard floors under hospital beds for hours on end, even if he’d already done it hundreds of times before, would cause him to develop the weaknesses that had so disappointed Ruby (and her) as they grew. This could not happen to Neil. So she pulled out the next tools of alienation: mascara, blush.

‘You can’t stay here, it’s a hospital; you should go home.’

‘I want to stay here.’

(It’s true, the mascara was difficult to endure, but ‘Go home because it’s a hospital’? How lame.)

What she really needed, if she was going to make up like she meant it, was a hand mirror. She dove into her purse again.

‘No, you can’t stay here. Really. You should go home.’

‘I want to stay here.’

She found the hand mirror.

‘No, you’ve got to go home.’

‘I want to stay here.’

She looked into the hand mirror.

‘You’ve got to go home, Neil.’

And then she saw Ruby. Her face. In the hand mirror. So close to her own. Pale. Lonely. Like she was at the bottom of a crevice, or in a bungalow on the other side of the city, forever. Like she had been left in a room somewhere hanging from a nail, where nobody would ever find her, her mouth open, dry, cracked. Ruby. She looked very weak. And her pupils moved strangely, like flies crawling on the surface of the mirror. How Runner had longed to see her again and now here she was and it was scary. Runner wondered what might be below the edge of the mirror’s frame, whether Ruby was holding a book, whether she was opening it and closing it, endlessly, displaying pages of words to Runner that Runner could not read.

And Runner spoke too. Although she didn’t know it, she said, ‘That isn’t really you,’ and Neil had written that line in his notebook without any further comment. Now he was looking at his sister with two parts fear and one part accusation.

‘What’s with you?’

‘Nothing, it’s a –’

‘A twin thing.’

‘Yeah.’

Runner looked into Neil’s living eyes and saw that he too was scared. She realised, not for the first time, why repressed people were heroic. Because they sought to spare such deadly emotions in others as wracked their own trembling frames. They shut down the bad feelings before they could spread, even if it cost them. She wished she had learned. But there had been no way of knowing, as one of a pair of twins, together the fifth and sixth of nine children, of which Neil was ninth and youngest, that she would come to be his sole guardian, looking at him like this from a hospital bed and trying to shut down her fear. There’d been no early training for her in the withholding of emotion. She had always considered it a virtue to let rip, and it was too late to stop now. The effort would kill her. There had to be some other way.

‘Actually, Neil, you know what?’

‘What?’

‘I think I want to go home too.’

She was ready with a reason – she wanted to go over her notes for the next bit of the first tablet – but Neil didn’t need a reason. He needed no excuse to transform a horror story into the story of a great adventure. Because he had sized up the task ahead and he knew they weren’t just going to walk out of that hospital like normal people. Oh no. Runner was supposed to be sequestered for the night. Snug in. Battened down. No, they were going to make an escape. And if Neil could only get his hands on a wheelchair and a porter’s uniform, then he would be the master of their escape. He would be the operator. The bus driver. The taxi man. The angel of endless stairwells. A crazy carpet over the cold reflecting ice sheet of death. The living saviour. Life itself.

FIVE

IUS PRIMAE NOCTIS

19 March, 5.51 p.m.

‘So I guess you’re not in the track and field club any more, Runner.’

Missy had lost no time. Late in the afternoon of the next day, while all was still quiet in Baghdad20, on the fifth floor of the Jacob Lighter Building, where it was minus five degrees Celsius and the only heat came from the blast of the blue flame-thrower, Missy was taking full advantage of Runner’s patched-up, less dramatic state to reassert her authority over the group. Like everyone else, she had been relieved (greatly relieved) that Runner was okay, but, given that she was okay, there was no need to dwell on it any longer. Fresh tragedy had been averted. We could move on. For her part, Runner was attempting to augment the dramatic effects of the leg cast by eschewing crutches and limping around like a marionette.21 She felt some anxiety about not having come up with a special way to tell the story, but remained confident, with her usual flung faith in serendipity, that an idea would present itself.

20 Even quieter, since everyone had purchased earplugs. According to the Baghdad Blogger (faithfully, if secretly, followed by our own Aline Irwin).

Runner said, ‘What makes everyone think they can be mean to a cripple just because that cripple is me?’ and, ‘Track and field doesn’t interest me any more.’

For the call of the role, taken by Romy, present were Romy, Priya, Runner (and Neil), Missy, Jennifer (ahem), Danielle (ahem), Aline and Emmy. All of us suitably bundled and sitting close to the heater, crisp on one side, cold on the other. Anna was, conspicuously if inevitably, absent. This was not surprising to anyone, though Missy sure pretended. ‘Why isn’t the bishop joining us?’

Runner (who, correction, was indeed surprised, and wounded) said, ‘She said she would come.’

‘She’s late. Romy, could you mark that down, please.’

Romy was anxious to finally discover the colour of the tyrant’s eyes. She started to ask but was interrupted by Missy.

‘Did you mark it down?’

Romy marked it down. ‘Are we starting?’

21 Did we mention she already had a cast on her right wrist? She broke it trying to break a fall and has consequently opted to just give into the fall when it happens, even if it turns out to be a drop of several feet as, for example, between the second and first floors of the Jacob Lighter Building. Apparently, she conducted mental exercises to ensure that, if she felt herself starting to go, she would close her eyes and fold her arms lightly across her chest. At least according to what she wrote in her diary.

Missy said, ‘Yes!’ and then more gently, ‘Yes.’ It was occurring to her that she’d been horrible to Romy the day before, regarding the elephants and the rabbits. She cast an involuntary glance towards Neil, feeling like a bad example.

Aline put up his hand. ‘I move that if we embrace the past then we must also embrace the future. I move that if we accept books of stone then we should be able to propose blogs. I’d like to propose a blog for our next book.’

Priya said, ‘What’s a blog?’

Missy said, ‘Not now, Aline.’

Aline looked down at her shoes. She said, ‘But it’s a relevant blog.’

Priya said, ‘What’s a blog?!’

Missy said, ‘Not now, Priya!’

And there was a swift flurry of whispering between Priya and Emmy, who, we presume, knew what a blog was.

Romy said, ‘What colour were his eyes, Runner?’

Runner, who didn’t know what a blog was either, looked genuinely confused for a moment and then she understood. And then she seemed to grow two inches.

Cedar.

She gestured subtly to Neil, who brought her the first stone. And the room felt warmer. All discussion of blogs and the future was hushed. Those tablets emanated heat: they were clay, and had been written while still wet and then fired in a kiln to fix the words, and they released the heat again only when the words were lifted from them by the act of reading. This was a good book for winter. Even if our winter was almost through.

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