Дэймон Найт: Orbit 7

It was Walt, and her mother was with him. She said, “Hello, Walt. How are you?” It had been a year or more since she’d seen him.

Her mother said, “We’re both fine, sweetheart. Did you come up here looking for me?”

“No. I’m the ghost.”

“Just haunting us, eh?” Walt said.

“It’s a game they play,” her mother said. “What time is it?”

Emma looked at the watch on her bracelet. “Seven-thirty.”

Walt had sat up, but her mother was still laying in the mossy stuff. She sounded high. “Is King Arthur in?”

King Arthur was her name for Mr. Schiel, their benefactor.

“I don’t think so,” Emma said. “I don’t know.”

“Come and sit down with us a minute, Rose-Red.” Walt patted the moss. His hair was changed from the way she remembered it, and his face was darker. He was a cook for Wimpy’s and unbearably handsome.

“I can’t. I have to look for the other kids. They’re hiding.”

“Emma?” Her mother rose to her knees in slow motion. Her mouth drooped open, like St. Theresa’s. Emma had practiced the same expression when she was alone, but it didn’t work for her. Her lower lip was too thin.

“Yes, Mother.” She assumed a tone of tolerance.

“It would be better if you didn’t say anything to Arthur about…”

“No, Mother, of course not.”

“And if he asks—”

‘I’ll just say I’ve been playing on the roof since school and I don’t know where you are.”

“Neither do I, sweetheart. Neither do I.” She chuckled, and Walt took hold of her hand. “I’m somewhere out in space, fitting all the links together.”

“What?” Emma asked, though she knew better than to try and make sense of what her mother said at such times.

“The links—the links between the stars, the links of my armor, the links of the endless chain.”

Emma nodded unhappily and backed off down the arcade. When she reached the ramp, she began running. Daphne, Ralph, and Ralph’s little sister were all standing in the shadow of the vent, safe.

“Where are you going?” Daphne called to her.

She pressed the red button for the lift. She didn’t know what to say. Her mother was supposed to have stopped taking that sort of thing. Arthur had spent all sorts of money to help her. “Home,” she said, just as the lift opened its doors. She fed her house-tag into the slot.

The lift said, “Good evening, Miss Rosetti. I hope you’ve enjoyed yourself.” But if you said anything back, it didn’t understand. Arthur Schiel worked for a company and was rich, so they lived in a luxury building, but even though he’d been very good to Emma and her mother, he was a stupid snob and nobody really liked him.

Emma felt just sick.

He was waiting in the wool chair that had cost so much, undressed. The Volkswagen was parked by the sink, filling with water for his bath. Except for the splash of the water, the room was quiet. Arthur didn’t like music.

“Where is your mother, Emma?” he asked.

“How should I know?” she said. She knew she should try to be nice to him, but it was so hard.

While she tucked her weatherproof away, he watched her with a sarcastic smile. She went to the back end of the telly, where he couldn’t see her, and used the earphones while the flickering images smoothed her distress, like a hand that gently closed the lids of her eyes.

Arthur Schiel, sitting in the costly discomfort of the woolen chair, listened to the running water and stared at Emma’s tapping feet with helpless, unassuageable rage.

That was the night they were thrown out and had to go to Lant Street to live, once again, with Walt.

The screen, an American-made holly, represented an interior of the Katsura Palace with a view onto a spring garden roseate with blossoms of apricot. Three feet by six (to match the tatami that they had always intended to buy), it rented from DER at £5 a month.

When slid aside, the screen discovered a nest of three desks and, above and below, a utility honeycomb housing a defunct dictionary, a wonky tape machine, and an Olivetti with a frayed, faint ribbon but still functioning, except for the tab. The remaining cells of this hive were given over now to Emma’s collection of pebbles from the beaches of Brighton and Hastings: flint, shingle, sandstone, red and gray quartzite, shale, and chert.

Emmy - the Baby Bear of the household - had the smallest of the three desks. Her desk had its own drawer, which she always locked, keeping the key on her bracelet. Inside the drawer there were a diary for the year 2088 (never completed), a plastic daff, a small bottle of Lourdes water (a departing present from Sister Mary Margaret), a string of unmatched pearls salvaged from one of her mother’s tirades, and an antique Suehard chocolate box. Inside the chocolate box, in a white envelope, were three photos, each two and a half by four inches.

The first showed three men and a cow standing before a large ochrous house. The shutters and the long wooden balcony railing above the first floor were painted moss-green. The cow, gravid with milk, stood in the foreground, interrupting a full view of two of the men. The third, drably dressed, faced away from the camera and seemed to be there, like the cow, for the sake of local color. The men smiling into the camera had somehow the air of tourists. Their faces were tanned with the same cheery gold as the walls of the house. The taller man wore a white suit embroidered with roses and a ruffled shirt; ringlets of red hair blew across his rather weak chin. The other man, bare-chested, in shorts, held a bottle of wine up, toasting the photographer. On the back of the picture, in purple ink, was written: “Reutte, July ‘52.”

The second photograph showed the head and shoulders of a man resembling the taller of the two men in the first photograph, though now his hair was brown and his chin was strengthened by a van Dyke. He had put on some weight as well. His cheeks and lower lip seemed uncommonly red, his expression slack. Perhaps he had been drinking. His eyelids drooped, Buddha-like, over bright turquoise eyes that focused on the camera with an intensity out of keeping with his other features. Behind him an orange tree exhibited leaves and three small oranges. This photo was unlabeled.

The third bore an inscription across the cloud-haze in the upper third of the picture: “Walt and Me-Summer Holyday.” The same man was once again redheaded. His beard was fuller, his face and body more lean. Except for a silver bracelet and a thick silver chain about his neck, he was naked, as was the little girl he held in the air. The skin of his torso, arms, and legs, shaved for competition and shining with oil, was perfectly smooth. His hands supported the girl’s pelvic girdle, and she maintained a precarious balance by resting her forehead against his. They grinned, staring into each other’s eyes. In the middle distance, part of the promiscuous mass of bathers, Emma’s mother could be discerned resting in a beach chair, modestly bikinied, her eyes averted from the playful pair in the foreground to regard the gray-green sea.

Often when she found herself alone in their two-room flat, Emma would slide away the screen, unlock the drawer, and take out the Suchard box. When she had finished looking at the photographs, she would kiss each in turn, lips pressed tightly together, before replacing them in the envelope. She was in love with Walt.

“Are there,” old Mr. Harness asked, “any in the class … who … ?” The dry lips crumbled in an unspoken apology. The quick eyes, yellow as the basins of the school lav, caught her embarrassed glance and shifted away.

Would I have been silent, if he had asked? Emma wondered. Would I have faced the lions?

After all, even if they did find out she was a Catholic, they couldn’t do anything worse than tease her a bit, the way they had at the other school.