Дэймон Найт - Orbit 7

“There’ll be music in the streets and sunlight all night long, or as good as sunlight. The buildings are all fresh and new, not scabby and full of mice, and there is a park there as big as all Clonmel that’s filled with flowers, real flowers growing in dirt. And there are towers so high that on a cloudy day you can’t see to the top, because the clouds get in the way. And the people will be different there. So much happier. The people are beautiful; they’re young. No one is resentful or afraid. No one is poor. In London you can live your own life for its own sake. You don’t have to lie to yourself or to anyone else. You can’t understand what a difference it will make-to be beautiful…to be free.”

“Will we have to be pagans, too, if we go there, and never die?”

Her mother stopped and squatted so her face was on a level with Emma’s. She smiled with her mouth open, and her hair was blowing across her eyes. She looked beautiful.

“Darling! darling!” And she laughed. “It’s not as simple as that. They can’t help it that they don’t die, and we can’t help it that we do.”

“Why?”

“If I could answer that question, Emma” - she brushed her hair back, dark brown like Emma’s, and stood up— “then Ireland would cease to exist.”

They walked back to the gate on the path. A priest was standing by the second Station of the Cross, saying a rosary, swaying.

“Good evening, Mrs. Rosetti. So the end has come at last. He was a good man. The world will seem a little smaller now.”

“Yes, a tragedy,” Mrs. Rosetti mumbled, hurrying out the gate.

“Good evening, Emma,” the priest called out.

“Good evening, Father.”

She watched him flickering through the bars and holly prickles, as her mother hurried her along on the walk. How did he know her name was Emma? She’d never seen him before in her life.

His name was the Right Reverend C. S. Marchesini, S. J., from Dublin, and he gave the funeral sermon, Death, where is thy victory? St. Stephen’s was filled almost like Sunday with just a few pews at the back empty. Emma sat between her mother and Mr. Tauler, the Jew who handled the commercial end, right at the front. St. Augustine said you shouldn’t call them Jews if they were baptized, but everyone did anyhow.

Emma had a black dress too today, but the hem was only tacked because the babies were teething all night and Cousin Bridie got drunk. When her mother came in the car, there was a quarrel. Leonard said he’d be damned if he’d set his foot in that travesty, and her mother said it would come as no surprise to anyone if he was. Cousin Bridie started crying and kept it up all the way to the church.

Just before the last hymn everyone had to go look inside the coffin. Her mother lifted her up. He was wearing lipstick and smiling, and she thought he looked nice, because usually he didn’t smile. He wasn’t as fat either, and he didn’t have his cane. Unless he was laying on top of it. He used to grab her with his cane, when she wasn’t careful, slipping the crook around her neck. Her mother said that when she was a little girl he did the same thing to her. It was the sort of thing you had to put up with. Emma kissed him on the cheek. It was hard, like a doll’s.

They rode in a car to the Rock, twenty miles, and when they got there the wind was incredible and the wreath almost blew off. There were fewer people out here, fuel being what it was. The Right Reverend C. S. Marchesini, S. J. The city fathers and the Archbishop. And of course all the relatives—Emma and her mother, Cousin Bridie with Florence, her oldest, and the Almraths from Dublin and the Smiths from Cork. Old Mrs. Almrath was Emma’s great-aunt and sent her a holy card every Christmas that was blessed by the Pope. She had two, a Virgin and a Sacred Heart blessed by Innocent, and one, St. Peter, blessed by Leo. Someday, Mrs. Almrath said, she would get Emma an audience with Pope Leo.

They put the coffin with Granny in it in the hole and covered it up with dirt. Mr. Smith said, “He was a great man, a great man. They don’t come in that size anymore.” Her mother was holding Cousin Bridie around her waist, and Cousin Bridie was crying. The Anckers weren’t getting any of the money, and that’s what the fight had really been about. Bridie said she didn’t care, but Leonard said he cared. He hadn’t put up with the old bastard’s shit all these years to have his nose rubbed in it now. Her mother said Leonard couldn’t lose a game of draughts with any grace and everyone knew it. She was sorry for Bridie and the babies, but Bridie had made her mistake four years ago, and she’d said so at the time.

The last thing they did, they all gathered around the monument to admire it and to find a nice place to put their weather-sealed floral tributes. The monument was six feet tall and rather fat and there were hundreds of capital letters all over it.

It was dark and Emma was the ghost. She didn’t know if she should run when she was bleeding, but she ran. Down the row of cattleyas, shimmering behind their curtain of air: no one. She glanced up at the holly, where the decorative soldiery of ancient Rome celebrated their eternal triumph. Of course they couldn’t be hiding there. It was an illusion, something to do with light waves, she couldn’t remember. She made a scary noise—Whoo! No one answered. Maybe they were all home safe. She went back, stood within the shadow of the vent, alone. Below and above Hampstead and the sky arranged themselves in geometries of white light. Each little star was a sun, far away, burning. She had seen them depart in cars like sea-shells, though she had not understood then where they were bound. Tau Ceti. All the stars have foreign names, and the planets are Roman gods. Her own name was foreign. So many languages, you’d never learn all of them.

Up the ramp then to the very top, past pots of planted palms, gray in the lamplight. Within the arcade there were no lights. She went Whoo , barely a whisper this time. Girls have more to be afraid of than boys, at night. The thin columns of seeming stone slanted up to the terminating darkness of the vault. Inside her weatherproof her clothes were damp with sweat. The newer ones had pores, like skin, but wouldn’t that let the heat out too? The real solution was to live somewhere that was warm in the winter. Malaga. Hollywood. Carthage. Basking in the sun. Swimming in warm saltwater, though not if it was your period of course. Sharks can smell blood.

Unhealthy daydreams. Even if they weren’t sinful, it was a bad habit to get into.

Four stars formed a rectangle within the arch’s parabolic slice of sky: God’s Door, her mother had said.

It was a famous poem before it was a song. Her voice squeaked nervously in the high arbors of the ziggurat, but the voice she heard, interiorly, was not her own but St. Theresa’s.

Ecstasy—Emma wondered if she had any talent for that sort of thing. Though probably it was a sin. Probably.

She wiggled her right hand into the polly weatherproof and touched the larger breast. It had stopped hurting, but the left one was still painful, though not awfully. Another month, her mother had said, but it was already past that time.

She was too old, really, for games like this. Boring and juvenile. Daphne was only ten. She needed a friend more her own age, but there weren’t any in this part of Hampstead. Even though they were so much better off now, she wished sometimes they were back on Lant Street.

Two grown-ups were making love in one of the caves. She walked past them quickly, embarrassed. The man called out her name.