John Heron Project

That which divides, that which separates
Eye from meeting eye, skin from touching skin;
That also which attracts, and that which creates
Desire for him in her, need for her in him.

They turn a corner around a vast block of polished basalt and the waste ground is gone; they’re at the end of the back lane next to Acton Town tube station. As May and Sarah walk onto the street, the Rmoahal steps to one side, and then vanishes the way he came, without a word.

— How far is it to yours? says May.

— Three miles. Bit more.

— You can crash at mine if you like. I’m just around the corner. Got the time?

— Half past four.

— Crash at mine. Yeah.

— They’re the survivors of Atlantis. Or the last inhabitants of Eden, the ones who stayed when Adam and Eve were ejected from a state of grace. Or something. It amounts to the same thing, really. The point is, that they never lost their state of grace. They never had much of a fall. They might have tripped a bit. But that’s about it.

— We live in an interesting sort of world.

Sarah squeezes May’s hand, and smiles.

May finishes that second potato and gets Chloë’s attention again.

— Thank you for making us so welcome. But we have to get home.

— Where?

— Acton.

Chloë nods and whistles through those pointed teeth. A man looks up.

— They have to get to Acton.

— Wife. The man picks up his spear and stands. He cocks his raw-boned head and looks at May and Sarah.

— Time to go, says May. She gets up, offers Sarah a hand. They stand for a second, facing each other, still holding hands.

May turns around. Standing, she is eye to eye with the seated Chloë.

— Sisters, says May.

Chloë bares her teeth.

— Sisters.

Chloë’s husband takes a few steps out of the ring of firelight, stops, looks back over his shoulder at the two women.

— We need to follow him, says May. Don’t talk to him, though. It’s not the way.

After having finished her potato, May reaches up and touches Chloë’s arm.

— Thank you. We’re sisters now. May takes off her watch and offers it to Chloë, who grunts, and holds it up in the firelight, and regards it appreciatively.

Chloë looks expectantly at Sarah.

— Gift, says May under her breath.

Sarah reaches up and undoes the buckle fastening the spiked collar around her neck. She reaches across May — May can feel Sarah’s breath on her cheek, briefly — and offers it. Chloë takes it, turns it over in her fingers and straps it onto a wrist already laden with bangles and beads.

One of the men whistles, and the women and the giant turn. More potatoes.

— You hungry? says May, not looking at Sarah.

— Starving. I could go another one.

— Good. Best not to turn this one down.

They sit for a while, blowing the hot potatoes, trying not to burn the insides of their mouths. The Rmoahal women make matter-of-fact, explicit conversation about their silent menfolk, commenting frankly on their bodies, their sexual performance, their successes and failures in the business of living. Their laughs are hisses through bared, filed teeth.

May and Sarah keep silent, having nothing to add, and no leave to add it.

And the men poke the fire and prepare baked potatoes.

May steps forward and touches her fingertips to the centre of her chest, and then offers the palm of her hand to the Rmoahal woman. The Rmoahal touches her own chest, reaches down and touches May’s fingertips. The Rmoahal woman looks at May’s friend, who looks across at May.

— Go on, then, says May.

— Oh. Oh, right.

The dark-haired girl does the same thing. The giant turns without any further motion, and sits in the circle, leaving a space for May and her companion.

May motions the other woman into the circle with a nod of the head, and they take their places.

Some of the men are roasting foil-wrapped baked potatoes over the fire. When a potato is done, one of the men gingerly unwraps it, cuts it with his knife, and sprinkles those fake bacon bits over it, from a little plastic pot he takes out of a leather pouch.

He hands two to May’s host, who hands them in turn to May and her friend.

May says something to the woman.

— What did you just say? says the dark-haired girl.

— Thank you. Look, hold still a second, will you?

May balances her hot potato on her knee, and with her other hand, touches the copper ring around her neck before brushing her fingertips, ever so gently, across the other woman’s lips, catching a fingernail for a split-second on the ring. The dark-haired girl blinks, shivers.

— You should, ah, say thank you, whispers May.

— Thank you, says the dark-haired girl to the Rmoahal. Really.

The woman nods, but continues to look at May and her friend. The dark-haired girl looks at May.

— What? she whispers.

May puts her hand to her mouth.

— Shit, she says. She turns to the Rmoahal.

— Sorry. Really. Sorry. May. My name is May. And, ah, my mother was Elizabeth. And her mother was Lavinia.

She nudges the dark-haired girl gently.

— Your turn.

— Oh, right. I’m Sarah. My mother is Madeleine. Her mother was Rose.

The Rmoahal woman puts her hand to her face, as if to brush away a lock of hair that isn’t there.

— Chloë. Daughter of Heré. Daughter of Arsaké.

And that is all. The woman nods again, and the woman turns back to her baked potato. The girl leans towards May, puts a hand on her knee.

— How come she’s—?

— She isn’t. You’re speaking Rmoahal.

— Oh.

May takes the other woman’s hand again and they stand up straight and take several steps towards the fire. The women stop talking and stand; the men look up with mild interest.
May calls something out.

— What was that? whispers the dark-haired woman.

May, still looking intently towards the campfire, puts her finger to her lip.

One of the women steps to the edge of the circle of firelight. She gives no sign that she is surprised, or even curious. Her stance is, in some strange way, formal.

— Don’t talk to the men, whispers May.

A light becomes visible a few hundred yards away, flickering, and sometimes obscured by moving shapes in the dark.

— I think it’s a campfire, says May.

— Oh, says the dark-haired woman. Is this safe?

— I think this is good. I think we’re going to be all right.

Twenty yards or so from the perimeter of the firelight, they stop and hide behind two upturned, skeletal fridge-freezers. May squeezes the woman’s hand and lets go, looks more closely at the camp around a rusty white corner.

She sees about ten men and women. They are giants, the smallest of them nearly twice the size of May. Each has smooth, blue-black skin, a wide mouth, black eyes with no whites. They are naked but for strings of dyed seashells, and pale leather straps for knives and quivers of arrows. Solemn, clean-shaven men sit silently, holding bargepole-spears or sharpening knives; teaspoons, screws and SIM cards braided into long black hair catches the firelight. The women are statuesque, alien, their heads shaved bald and painted or tattooed with intricate knotwork patterns. Vicious-looking gold spikes pierce the skin of their breasts and faces, and upper arms. Unlike the men, they talk and laugh as they tend the fire. One turns in the direction of May and her companion, revealing teeth filed to sharp points.

May turns and smiles, finds herself an inch away from the face of the dark-haired woman, who was looking out over her shoulder. The woman’s lips part slightly. May pauses a moment, looks into the girl’s eyes. She turns her head.

— Sorry, she says.

May wriggles away, runs her hand through her hair, catches her breath.

— It’s OK. It’s all going to be OK, she says.

— What? says the girl.

— They’re Rmoahals. Over there. Rmoahals. It’s all going to be fine.

— Sorry? says the dark-haired woman.

— Tell you later. We’re going to say hi.

A hundred yards down the road, every building becomes a featureless cube of black stone, separated from the street and its neighbours by short stretches of rubble-strewn wasteland.
May points across a stretch of flat, soiled ground.

— We’ll be fine if we head this way.

— You sure? says the girl.

— No, says May. Better be quick, though. I don’t want to stay here.

The fluttering in May’s gut returns; it dawns on her that her new friend has made no comment on what she has done. She follows May quietly, and looks at her in that strange way when she thinks May is not looking at her.

To do magic in a place like this has its risks.

They pick their way across stones and hunks of broken concrete, blackened kitchenware, rotting magazines, broken powertools, and abandoned, filthy toys. The dark-haired woman’s thick-soled boots aren’t designed for walking in a place like this, and May frequently has to stretch out a hand to steady her companion.

After a while, they are holding hands and not letting go.

— Do you know where we are? says the girl, as they pick their way across stony, scrubby ground.

— Kind of, says May. Don’t worry. She avoids eye contact.

— What are you scared of? What’s wrong?

— Nothing.

May stands there for a moment, wondering how she’s going to get out of this place alive.

— Oh, sod it, she says at length.

May takes off the little ring of copper and brass that hangs around her neck, and letting the thong dangle, she holds it up between between thumb and forefinger. She blows through it, and it begins to glow. It’s still glowing when she lets it drop, catching it by the thong and letting it swing. She stretches out her arm and holds it out one way, and then another, until the ring gives out a sound not unlike the ringing of a half-full wineglass with a wet finger running around the rim.

May finds herself, as she steps out of the cab, staring into the empty eyes of the Herms: limbless, priapic, bolted to their posts, like the ones she read about once that they had in Ancient Greece, only the ones in Greece were made of stone. She gets that cold feeling in the pit of her gut that she always gets and thinks about Mica — and then thinks that she must not.

— That way, she says, pointing towards the waste ground.

The dark-haired girl leans across May and taps on the glass partition.

May, sitting with her back to the driver, turns around sees in the corner of her eye the driver half-crumble, half-dissolve into a cloud of dust or mist that dissipates to nothing. The cab slowly comes to a halt.

— Well, says May’s companion. At least we don’t have to pay.

May glances at the woman, and then she turns around and kneels on her seat, opens the communication hatch and checks the meter: it has stopped. She digs in her purse and pulls out two ten-pound notes. She drops them through the window onto the front seat.

The light that shows the doors are locked turns off.

— Better start walking, then, says May.

The girl points — they are passing the building where the Westaways live and the courtyard full of the Herms.

May shudders as she always does when she passes by here, as she did five minutes ago, when they passed by here last time.

— Aw, no, says May. Not again.

So in the cab, they talk about the Rachels, and about how exactly the dark-haired woman knows Coxy (they met at work, apparently, although May cannot parse the chronology or circumstance of that meeting in any meaningful way). The conversation dries up. The stranger looks across at May with her hands folded in her lap, her lips pressed together in a small smile. The streetlights glint off the ring in her nose, the ring in her lip, on and off. May tries not to maintain eye contact.

The dark-haired woman looks out of the window.

— Haven’t we passed here? she says.

(Authorial Note: Has been far too long since this was updated.)

Standing next to the coat check, waiting for Coxy’s friend to get her coat, May orders a cab, and now they’re out and waiting. A few people are leaving the club, the trickle before the flood, not enough for them to have to stand too close together, and yet May’s companion is standing close enough for the skin on May’s arm to tingle slightly with the proximity.

May tries to distract herself, falls into the old ritual of scanning windows, roofs, the corners of alleyways, looking for the tips of palsied fingers, for the reflection of rheumy eyes.

— There’s no one watching, she says out loud.

The dark-haired woman raises an eyebrow.

— Should there be? she says.

— No, says May.

The dark-haired woman turns, carelessly, brushes her fingers across the back of May’s hand, which is the sort of gesture that could be an accident, if May wants it to be.

The trance breaks. May needs some water. She leaves the dancefloor, taking the dark-haired woman by the hand and bringing her along as if it’s the most natural thing, as if they’re best friends.

She buys two bottles, empties her own in two draughts. May leaves the woman by the bar and looks around for Ryan and Ana. The woman appears at her shoulder.

— Where’d they go?

— Dunno, says May. I’ll text.

She pulls out her phone. One new message. She hadn’t felt it go off. It’s from Ryan.

— ana not well taking her home

May checks the time. Ryan sent her the text an hour ago. She’d been on the floor for a whole hour before that. Suddenly, she feels very tired. The spell wears off a little. Her arms and back ache, and her feet throb. She turns to the dark-haired woman.

— I’m off home, she says.

The girl nods.

— Where do you live?

— Acton.

The woman leans over and takes May’s hand.

— Tell you what. I’ll split a cab with you.

May leaves Ryan to go buy drinks for the others, declined the offer of her own drink with a wave and a smile, striding to the dance floor.

The beat is cleansing; she closes her eyes and gives herself up. She moves. Everything is in the release. Partly, it’s her spell, keeping her cool and fresh and comfortable, but partly it’s just the music, her need to forget her fear and her grief (and they’re really the same feeling, aren’t they?)

She dances alone in the crowd, blissed out. The warmth of the bodies around her shifts; another body begins to dance close to hers, hands almost touch her. She opens her eyes, and meets those dark eyes staring at her; the spark of recognition comes, too late. A strange feeling of transgression causes her diaphragm to contract.

But everything she does is transgression.

She goes with it.

They find somewhere where the dress code will accommodate May’s jeans without any trouble at all.

The place plays the kind of techno that people outside of London listen to. Tribes of twentysomethings mingle, without mixing. It’s as hot here as it is cold outside, oppressively so, and May does a bad thing, a thing she really shouldn’t: caressing the half-inch of rough-cut copper pipe on the thong around her neck, she focusses a tiny bead of energy through her fingertips, centring on the ring and exploding out from it, creating an aura of clean, fresh, cool air around herself. It does strange things to the ultraviolet light, and May’s skin gleams. She catches sight of herself in the mirror behind the bar. She looks youthful, and invincible, and not at all tired. She approves.

May knows that eyes will see, that there will be consequences, but she doesn’t care. Tonight, she wants the illusion of power. She wants to be free.

On the way to the club, May walks sandwiched between Ana on her left and the dark-haired woman on her right, each intent on holding a conversation with her while excluding the other.

Ryan, above all this, walks a few paces behind. Ana tries to bring in in-jokes and references to people May’s new friend cannot possibly know; the other tries to make the conversation wholly about May.

The effect induces a kind of claustrophobia in May. She wants to tell them both not to be so silly, that they remind her of schoolgirls jockeying for the attention of the popular girl, but she loves Ana too much not to notice something is very wrong; she does not know the dark-haired woman enough to be so rude.

The newcomer’s soft, cold hand brushes against May’s. May glances down at her, meets her eye, feels a little dizzy for a moment.

Come chucking out time, Ryan and Ana have already agreed to go to a club; of course, it was the plan all along. May had thought they were both looking well-turned out. May has long suspected that something was going on between the two of them, and it surprises her when they beg her to go with them.

She says, yeah, sure. She doesn’t want to be alone.

They walk out into the shadow of the Basalt Museum and say goodbye to the Rachels on the pavement, bathed in the orange light of a lamp post, surrounded by migrating punters. Rachel Cox’s friend stands herself directly in front of May and says,

— Mind if I tag along? I’m at a bit of a loose end. She smiles, and tucks her shining hair behind one ear with a dark green fingernail.

May turns and looks at Ryan. He shrugs with his face.

— Sure, he says.

Ana is silent. She is staring at the girl, who is staring at May.

Rachel Cox has brought someone that May doesn’t know, a young woman with a translucent heart-shaped face, dressed in a short black coat and heavy knee-high boots. The Rachels intorduce her to May, and May nods and smiles and flicks a lock of hair out of her eyes and says hello, and neglects to say that she has failed to catch the newcomer’s name.

Still, the mild social quandary raised by this fact no more than adds to the discomfort that May aready feels at the stranger’s presence.

She’s watching May. Sure, Coxy’s friend is sitting there between Coxy and Ryan and making conversation, and sure, every time May looks, the girl is not looking at her, but May knows. Those wide green eyes are watching May closely. She’s used to being watched. She knows.

And how does she know Rachel Cox? She doesn’t fit. It’s a tribal thing. Here’s a woman some five or six years younger than the rest of the people here. She’s surrounded by people who wear fleeces and sensible jeans and unflattering tops, and here she is with a studded strap around her neck and the kind of short, shining asymmetrical black hair that takes hours in a hair-dressers’ and rings in her ears and eyeliner and well-drawn lips and a ring in her nose and a ring in the middle of her lower lip that distorts it slightly, giving an impression of sweet, smiling serenity, of a kind of innocence.

She doesn’t fit here. And she is watching May. But not in the way the people behind the curtains watch May.

In the way that May is watching her.

Ten o’clock: Ryan Hood and Ana Jones, Rachel Cox and Rachel Owen, and May, in the pub that sits in the shadow of the British Museum, engulfed by that thousand-foot-high structure of brass and black basalt, the repository of all history, the sign that the Queen of England, whose Name must never be spoken, holds sway over the past as well as the future.

— What now? says Ana as they disembark, the old man still staring.

— Tonight’s still on. I’ll go home and change.

Ana nods.

— Ryan coming?

— Oh, I expect so. Heard from the Rachels?

— I think Scouse Rachel’s coming. Dunno about Coxy.

— OK. We’re on, anyway.

— Drop you a text.

The friends part, and May walks home under orange streetlights that dye the wintery mist with a warm, fiery colour, that only makes it feel colder. Her feet ache.

For May, this kind of thing has always been the way, as long as she can remember; the more magic you know, the more things you find. The more things you find, the more they watch you, and the more they watch you, the more you feel the need to run away, the more temptation there is to go join the Paniscae, or to turn up at the doors of the Moulding Room and let them change you into something that doesn’t fear anymore.

You can’t live with fear; in the end, all there is for May is to ignore and to go on living.

And that means the occasional night out, no matter whether she feels like it or not.

Turns out that the building is two corners away from the Westaway brothers’ home, and one more from the square with the Herms and Paniscae, and the bus stop.

The two police officers follow May and Ana for a short while, and then abruptly turn away. As they go, May turns around and catches in the corner of her eye, a curtain swishing shut in a second-floor window.

At the bus stop, they stand in the gathering mist. It’s already getting dark. The bus arrives, and they get on and Ana hands their tickets to the driver, who does a double-take, stares at them as if appalled by something, and hands them back without a word.

The only other passenger is a wronkled, dusty man with only a few misbehaving wisps of white hair, who chews on his gums and stares, even when May meets his eye. She looks away, aware of the eyes fixed on the nape of her neck.

Ana says,

— Here.

She shows May the tickets. The destination now reads:

GRIMSLADE HOUSE

When they arrive at their stop, Ana hands the tickets to May. She looks at them, as if wondering what to do, and then crumples them, throws them away.

May falls in a heap on the marble step outside the door, puts her hand in something slimy on the ground. The thundering stops abruptly. No one appears.

May’s cold. Ana’s at the bottom of the steps on the pavement. She’s looking down the street.

— I think I know where we are, she says.

May looks at her hand. Birdshit. Walking down to the pavement, she fumbles in her jacket pocket, finds a tissue, wipes her hand, crumples the tissue, throws it into the gutter among the cigarette ends and the crisp packets.

She looks back at the building, one of three that face a courtyard, all near-derelict. The fragments of sign above the foyer read:

G IMS ADE H SE

— We’d better get going, says Ana.

She nods towards the corner of the courtyard. A policeman and a policewoman have just turned the corner. They stop, and the blank ovals beneath their headgear, where their faces should be, are turned to wards the two women. May and Ana leave, walking quickly, not looking.

May hears something laugh, something old and muffled and in the building.

A rat. A cobweb. A bird nesting in the hole left by a dangling light fitting and a smashed-up polystyrene ceiling tile; it flaps around in Ana’s face and she screams and bats it away and May has to grab her arm to stop her belting into the depths of the building.

By the time they make it to the ground floor front of the building, May and Ana are ready to run; they collide with the front door, find it chained and padlocked from the outside. May grabs a broken chair from the lobby floor and swings it against the glass in the door, twice. The first time, it bounces off; the second time, the glass disintegrates, like a downward wave.

May takes off her jacket and puts it across the window frame, and she helps Ana climb through. As she climbs through herself, she hears a rumbling, like the sound of a dozen pairs of feet running down the building’s stairs.

Inside, the stink is even worse, like books left in a leaky garage for ten years or more. The carpet, so filthy and blackened that its pattern has changed into something threatening and shadowy, gives lightly under their feet, but doesn’t spring back, and as May looks down, a shoal of silverfish scoot away from her left foot. Artex on the walls carries streaks and markings that in the all-but absent light make it look like it moves under its own power.

Ana calls out.

— Hello? Anyone here?

May flaps her hands.

— No! No, don’t! She sounds too high-pitched. Her breathing is faster than it should be.

She lowers her voice an octave.

— Let’s just find the way out onto the street and figure out where we are.

— Yes. Absolutely, says Ana, hand in hair. Yeah. No question.

May looks a little embarrassed. She turns back to the path and starts walking without any further word.

They walk silently through the mist for another few minutes.

— I think we might be getting to the end, says May. She points. Indistinct, something resembling a building appears to be not far ahead.

— May, says Ana.

— Mm?

May doesn’t turn around.

— Your tape. Was it something to do with— what happened?

— No. No, I don’t think so.

The path ends, abruptly, as if interrupted mid-flow by a building that appears at its end, a concrete box identical to the one they left, only taller, stretching a dozen floors up, and more dilapidated still. The glass in the plywood door has, at some time in the past, been smashed; someone covered the hole clumsily with two panels from a cardboard box, fixed with gaffer tape. The board hangs off now, the cardboard sodden and mouldy, the shards of wired glass still remaining in the ruined window visible, the ends of wire rusty, the edgesof the glass dull.

Inside, it’s dark. Ten feet away, and May can smell the decay, the mould and the damp and the rot.

They pause at the door. May looks up, imagines, just for a second, that a tattered half-hanging curtain in a window one floor up twitches; she gets a glimpse of a shaking, liver-spotted hand withdrawing into the dark. No, it was a large moth or something. No, it was a rat. No, she imagined it.

— I don’t like it, May says.

Ana shrugs.

— It’s the exit, she says. Come on, then.

Ana pushes the door open with the tips of her fingers.

— So this tape of yours, says Ana.

— Yeah.

— You think it’s-? She cocks her head to one side, as if motioning towards some possibility.

— Yeah.

— Where did you-?

— John had it.

— Oh. Ana looks away. They walk some distance in the mist before she speaks again.

— So what are you going to do with it?

— I’m going to keep it very safe. May stops, wheels around, bars Ana’s way. You have to promise me you’ll keep this secret.

— You have to imagine, for the sake of argument, that at some point, someone decided that the world would be a better place, or a more interesting place, if it changed, not just in the present, but in the past as well, and that they figured out the best means of achieving that. It’s a theory. You don’t have to believe it. But anyway, the point is that because it was done by someone, because someone achieved it, it’s not perfect. You know how when you tape over something on the video and you get little random bits of old TV at the beginning of the tape, no matter how much you rewound the tape before you hit record? It’s like that. There was something before, and even though most things have been all taped over, tiny bits and pieces get left behind.