‘Ooh-um, Sherry. While you’re in here. Managed to smooth things over with the lesbo-Trotskyite faction for you. But, you know, old boy, tone it down a smidgen. No more said.’
Sheridan sat with head in his hands until his coffee grew cold. Because his secretary was at home with yet another day of menstrual cramps, he roused himself and collected a fresh one from the automatic dispenser then played with his magnetic paperclip pyramid until that cup also gave up its heat.
He fetched a third and picked up the phone.
First he called his financial advisor and arranged to up his life cover.
Next he telephoned his doctor and made an appointment for Monday morning.
Then he called Interflora and instructed that a magnificent bouquet of red roses be couriered to his wife. The message he dictated was, ‘Expression of affection, one, four, three.’
Traditionally, Friday morning was reserved for meetings with the advertisement managers and editors of his magazines. He lifted the phone to summon Ashby Giles, the least favourite of his managers. Ashby who said yar, instead of yes and absolutely, old boy. Who congratulated him on his employing Helen in preference to the other hounds who had applied. Who consistently defied Sheridan’s smoking ban with cavalier proclamations like, Passive smoking is for wisps. Ashby Giles who was without doubt the man behind his staff’s silent mutiny. Their failure to bid him good morning, their solemn exeunt dead on five-thirty and, of course, their utter lack of motivation and consequently sales.
He pressed the first digit of the extension number but found that he was laughing too much to go on.
‘Sea Cargo Month,’ he spoke out loud, sneering like a child saying cabbage. Then there was Warehouse Product and Service Monthly. And to top it all, Logistics and Freight Distribution Monthly. Sheridan could barely contain himself when he recalled how they’d agreed that the title rolled off the tongue. That it had need-to-read written all over it.
And then there was the business plan he was working on for James. A scheme that would in two years’ time put Sheridan Entwhistle in charge of an on-line warehousing and distribution news and recruitment network that fed directly into the established industry interface.
He opened the folder of the proposal, planning to surge on – but couldn’t. The dream was back. Blow-torching into his consciousness. And it struck Sheridan that never before in his life had he had a dream so vivid and powerful. He shut the folder. Without question this dream had need-to-read written all over it.
Sheridan was in the City or perhaps it was New York or Croydon even, surrounded by the most colossal skyscrapers.
At first, squinting up, he felt small. Small that his contribution to the perpetual motion of business in this fantastic metropolis totalled just one floor in one of the buildings and control of three unglamorous trade publications. Small that his sexual influence was limited (and extremely limited at that) to just one reluctant, aging female. And small, although he wasn’t entirely sure that this was the case, because he had forgotten to dress that morning.
The dream’s prescience, unless he was experiencing his own faculty for directing the drama, told him, even before the first tremor, that the earthquake was approaching. It said that he, and only he in this city, was naked and unable to protect himself from the imminent tremor.
Because there was very little else to do, Sheridan slumped down and let the pavement growl beneath him. The movement and noise intensified and he looked up to see cracks veining the outsides of buildings, bricks shaking loose and top stories spitting out their windows. Then whole walls began to collapse and smash into fabulous plumes of dust. Entire buildings started to go and cracks zipped through the tarmac of the road.
Did Sheridan know that this was a dream? Perhaps so, for he wasn’t unnerved in the slightest. If anything he was awed at the insane rococo beauty of it all. He knew he would shortly die and this was fine.
Things settled, or rather snapped, into the ultimate calm of a photograph and he rose and walked away from his wrought, debris-cloaked body. A joy, so sublime that there can be no words for it, permeated him. And Sheridan recognized everything. This was where he always came when released from the atrocious incarcerations of his lives. It was home. A true place where the mad concerns of bodies, money, status, fashion and all that is human were, if anything, laughable.
He turned to take a final glance at his body, perhaps to laugh at it and all it symbolized in the world of the insane. Yet someone was bent over it, carefully brushing away the rubble. He approached and saw that the girl was Folucia. Then again, perhaps it was Helen.
The girl lowered her face as if to kiss the body. The dead kissing the dead, he thought without irony. But this was no valedictory peck. The girl was performing the kiss of life and it was as if the body were vacuuming his weightless spirit back into it.
The body opened its eyes. And behind those eyes was Sheridan – re-imprisoned in the world of the insane. An intense grief overwhelmed him and he woke next to Jennifer on the very point of weeping.
Sheridan allowed the caw of the insane world’s alarm clock to drill through him for a few seconds as he interpreted his waking thoughts into the insane world’s language. The first thought said, Kill yourself Sheridan – and go back home. The second said, What, and annul your life assurance?’
Jayne and Yantra sat in Biddy’s doorway, devouring hard-boiled eggs, today’s bread and apples. They’d arced the van round to watch the sunset and deflect the outrageous north-easterly that was lashing across the Cheviots. Yantra was in two minds: should they clear out of the wasteland and roost ten miles on in the shelter of the Redesdale Forest? Or should they risk the wind shifting direction and Biddy going over in order to make love with the oncoming gale rattling agreeably outside? Of course, it was highly unlikely that the van would take a tumble. But he always felt unnerved in this grey, desolate part of Northumberland. Even when the weather was good this place was as strange and dark as the moon.
Yantra had another problem. He wasn’t sure whether they had enough petrol to make it to Newcastle. Or, more precisely, one of the poorer districts of Newcastle. If it was a toss up between dealing with petrol-cap locks, alarms and the pigs or the irate inhabitants of an inner-city estate and their dogs, there simply wasn’t a choice. A fight was generally avoidable, an arrest hardly ever was.
The wind picked up and the doors began to slam against their legs so they moved back inside.
Jayne saw something move on her coat and squealed. Yantra smiled calmly at her and remained silent.
‘Look, it’s a … flea,’ she said with disgust, attempting to move back from her arm.
Yantra pinched it from her sleeve, gave it a brief scrutiny and satisfied himself that it was of the dog variety. He crushed it with a tight twist of his thumbnail.
‘You killed it!’ she squealed.
‘I karma-ed it. It’ll reincarnate as a beetle and thank me,’ he laughed and laid a hand on her shoulder. She flinched. ‘Come on Jayne. Don’t go all Monophysite on me.’
‘Call again?’
‘The Monophysites. A cool bunch of fifth-century Christians who abhorred cleanliness and referred to fleas as pearls of God.’
‘Mmmm.’
‘Switched on, sure, but not half so wired as the Pythagoreans. Now old Pythagoras, of triangle fame, was also the founder of a religion based on the transmigration of souls.’
‘So?’
‘And the iniquity of bean eating.’ Jayne smiled. ‘Want more?’ She nodded. ‘Other sinfulness included, sharing one’s roof with swallows, walking on highways, picking up things that had fallen, stepping over crossbars, stirring fire with iron and plucking garlands. And woe betide the Pythagorean who, when he got out of bed in the morning, didn’t roll the blankets up and rub away the impression of his