chordata, click-clack, clickety-clack, climbing lizard-tailed into the deeper darknesses of the vaulting overhead. He could feel them entwined up there.
Burnell and Maté had come to the junction of the great T. The vertical limb of this overpowering masterpiece sloped downwards. Burnell stopped to stare down the slope, though it was more sensed than seen. Instead of imagining that hordes of women were passing by in the gloom, he giggled at Maté’s latest joke; the demon claimed not to have heard of the Virgin Mary either. He was now sitting on Burnell’s shoulder in an uncomfortable posture.
‘The devil’s about to appear,’ he said. ‘Hold tight.’
‘The devil? But you hadn’t heard of the—’
‘Forget reality, Roy. It’s one of the universe’s dead ends …’
‘But would you happen to know if this is Sainsbury Cathedral?’
At the far distant end of the slope, the sallopian tube, a stage became wanly illuminated. In infinite time. The. Pause. Stage. Pause. Be. Pause. Came. Pause. Wan. Pause. Lee. Pause. Ill. Pause. You. Pause. Min. Pause. Ay. Pause. Ted. Trumpets. It was flushed with a dull diseased Doppler shift red.
Funebrial music had begun, mushroom-shaped bass predominating, like a Tibetan at his best prayers.
For a few eons, these low levels of consciousness were in keeping with the old red sandstone silences of the Duomo-like structure. They were shattered by the incursion of a resounding bass voice breaking into song.
That timbre! That mingled threat and exultation!
It was unmistakable even to a layman.
‘The devil you know!’ Burnell exclaimed.
‘I’d better shove off now,’ said Maté.
‘Hey, what about those playing cods?’ But the man had gone.
Until that moment, the devil had been represented only as a vocal outpouring roughly equivalent to Niagara. Now he appeared on the wine-dark stage.
The devil was ludicrously out of scale, far too large to be credible, thought Burnell – even if it was disrespectful to think the thought. In the confused dark – weren’t those lost women somehow still pouring by? – it was hard to see the devil properly. He was an articulation, and approaching, black and gleaming, his outline as smooth as a dolphin’s, right down to the hint of rubber. Nor was the stench of brimstone, as pungent as Maté’s cigar, forgotten.
He advanced slowly up the ramp towards Burnell, raising the rafters with his voice as he came.
Striving to break from the networks of his terror, Burnell threw out his arms and peered along the wide lateral arm of the cathedral.
‘Anyone there? Help! Help! Taxi!’
To the left, in the direction from which they had come, everything had been amputated by night, the black from which ignorance and imagination is fashioned. Towards the right, however, along that other orbit, something was materializing. A stain of uninvented liquid. An ox-bow of the Styx. Light with its back turned to the electromagnetic spectrum.
‘Help! My hour is almost come!’
The devil still singing was approaching still.
Atheist Burnell certainly was, in an age when no courage was denoted by the term. But too many years had been spent in his capacity as church custodian for WACH, investigating the mortal remains, the fossils, of the old faith of Christendom, for something of the old superstitions not to have rubbed off on him. He also had some belief in the Jungian notion of the way in which traits of human personality became dramatized as personages – as gods or demons, as Jekylls or Hydes. This singing devil, this bugaboo of bel canto, could well be an embodiment of the dark side of his own character. In which case, Burnell was the less likely to escape him.
Nor did he.
Burnell took a glutinous pace or two to his right. He began to begin to paddle towards that dull deceitful promise of escape. Violet was the vision reviving there. Fading into sight came a magnificent Palladian façade: a stream of perfection that scarcely could brook human visitation. Doric columns, porticoes, blind doorways. No man – however worthy of this unwedding cake – was there to answer Burnell’s gurgle for help.
If the burrow to the left represented the squalors of the subconscious, to the right towered the refrigerated glory of the super-ego.
Still Burnell swam for it, convulsing his body into action.
‘Mountebank!’ he screamed as he went.
But the black monster was there, reaching out a hand, reaching him. Now Burnell’s scream was even higher, even more sincere. The thing caught him by his hair. Snatched him up …
… and bit off his head.
Blanche Bretesche was drinking steadily. She was in her Madrid apartment with friends. It was late. The red wine of Andalucia was slipping down her red gullet as she talked to her friend Teresa Cabaroccas. The two women were discussing love in an age without faith. They’d been in a Madrid back street, watching a performance by a once famous flamenco dancer, now a little past it and married to an innkeeper. The singing had been in progress after midnight.
‘Oh, one more damned passionate wail!’ – suddenly Blanche had screamed and stood up. She practically dragged Teresa from the crowded tavern.
‘Why have these people some kind of licence to yell their sufferings?’
‘The audience empathizes, Blanche. You can wallow in it for a bit, can’t you? And with the suffering – that spirited arrogance! Oh, it’s the arrogance I admire, not the suffering. The defiance of poverty, misery, betrayal, fate. The body says it, not just the voice …’ Annoyed at being pulled from the entertainment she had not greatly enjoyed, Teresa was drinking as rapidly as Blanche.
‘Why shouldn’t I get up and wail my sufferings?’ Blanche asked. ‘My bloody discontents? Wail them from – oh, the square, the mountains, the TV studios …’ She kicked her shoes to the far end of the room and put her bare feet up on the table.
‘But your whole life – that speaks out for women, for fulfilment.’
‘Fulfilment. I spit on the word. When was anyone really fulfilled? When did anyone ever have enough? Tell me that. Go on, tell me when anyone ever had enough. I mean there’s not enough to have. The imagination’s always greedy for more. Like that Madame Fotril when I was a girl – she lived next door to us and she ate her five-year-old daughter, cooked – with cabbage, of all vile things. Cabbage! I’ve never eaten cabbage since. The mere thought makes me sick. And then my parents took me with them to the funeral. Funeral! What could have been in the coffin, I kept asking myself. I was possibly twelve, just growing breasts like unripe apricots and hair between the legs, and all I could think was that maybe the priest had thrown the saucepan into the coffin with the bones.
‘There was a woman – a fearsome woman – who wasn’t afraid of her imagination, who demanded enough, whatever it cost. Well, I feel like that. It’s love – no, it’s not really even love, it’s wanting something I can’t have, almost like a principle, the principle that we should never ever in this life be satisfied—’
‘Oh,
