The dark side of the sky, p.13
The Dark Side of the Sky, page 13
More time passed. We were having sex everywhere. You would take a walk and bump into a couple, turn a corner and be grabbed by a foursome looking for a fifth. At first we fucked out of boredom, then gradually sex became a part of our day and it was another thing we did, like eat and hum. Without words, our meetings were raw, stripped to the bare essentials. Zoey had a three-way with Sam and Mikka, which she had been angling for, although Mikka wanted to be involved only with Sam, to her disappointment. Sam and Charlie went for it (finally), and were they loud in the kitchen. Charlie’s laughter, at the climax, filled us with hope – she was healing, at last. Our moans, our cries, came like voices from another reality. We fucked in any different number and combination, to exhaustion. Even Becca and Ric joined in, which they would rarely do.
Once, when she was with Zoey, Charlie heard Bertrand’s music again.
She took her hand from Zoey’s back to point a finger at her own ear. Zoey nodded, as surprised as Charlie – she heard it too. Charlie made a large smile and sunk on Zoey again, to the tune of Bertrand blessing her. This is the Inner Pinewood.
More time passed. We reached a new clarity of mind, in which we could appreciate the minute detail of the chirp of every bird, the fact that the bark of every tree was a miniature forest. We came to the end of summer, when days grow shorter, smells mellow, and the August heat evaporates. There was an easing in the air. We were wearing cotton jumpers at night now.
Summer’s ending brought the first storm, with lightning and the thrilling scent of ozone. We repaired inside Villa Abbracciavento to watch the sky crack with blue light, and when the lightning subsided, we went out to dance naked in the rain. Every drop was a kiss on our skin. Reality was as vibrant as our imagination. This is the Inner Pinewood.
More time passed, and then one night we unlocked the hum, and broke through.
CHARLIE
My life was never the same again.
ZOEY
That night! Being there was – it was a privilege, that’s what.
LILA
I was born for that night.
THE BASTION
Look: we do not believe in the supernatural. Magic is another word for nature. Humans evolved over hundreds of thousands of years knowing perfectly well that the world is deep. Only recently they decided that what they cannot measure must not exist, and how well did that serve them? They ended up collared and chained to monstrous machines which devour flesh to cough out fumes. Humans decided they were better than the rest of the world, and as a result, they were made insignificant. No, we of the Bastion know a bigger truth; we know that inside every tree is an abyss.
When, by a mixture of chance and exasperation, we touched the right pitch, a vibration went through our body, as if we had jacked our hearts to a giant sound system which blasted their beats back to us, times a million. The night sky blazed with an impossible number of stars, visible even as the full moon grew bigger. It was the first time Zoey and Charlie saw the other sky. They both dropped their hum, and made us stumble too. There was a silence; the sky dimmed. Then Becca started humming again, we followed, and a split second later, Zoey and Charlie joined in. Soon the sky bloomed once more.
You should have seen the colours! The black of the night was also purple, and the stars shone in icy blue, dazzling white, and the awe-inducing hue of sapphires. Silver moonlight took shades of mauve. Ric stood up, without a hitch in his hum, and went to fetch his and Lila’s drums. They started drumming and we danced to their beat, without ever stopping the hum. We threw more wood into the fire and kept humming. We danced. Sam let out a long howl, then immediately his voice rejoined us. We clapped our hands on our bodies and stomped our feet.
Becca quickened the pace, and we followed suit. The dance around the fire became more and more frenzied, and when Becca started undressing, we undressed too. Our dance became more frenzied yet. We head-banged, we leapt, we slammed our chests into one another’s, we shook.
And reality snapped.
Others were joining our dance. The shadow of a tree looked just like Bertrand, and his saxophone was playing to Lila and Ric’s tempo. A horse neighed: it was Imogen’s. It had been buried under soft Hampshire grass for fifteen years. Out of the corner of our eyes we spotted them dancing with us, among us, people we knew and people we had never seen, and others yet, who were not quite people. They took our hand, kissed the back of our neck. We could never see any of them clearly. The moment we looked, they disappeared. But we knew they were there with us.
LILA
I felt two hands on my belly, and a body gently press against mine from behind. It was Galen, back from the dead. I swayed with him. I forced myself not to look at the hands and not to turn, so as not to make him go away. I saw strange birds fly out of the dark spaces among the trees. One had the body of a hedgehog, with a magpie’s wing on one side and an owl’s on the other. There was a serpent gliding on a bat’s wings.
The Oddballs.
THE BASTION
We laughed and clapped our hands – Galen’s Oddballs were coming back to us. They did not go away even when we looked. A badger danced awkwardly on skinny flamingo legs, and a cat with a fox terrier’s face howled with Sam. Other Oddballs were nothing we remembered: an owl with the face of a wizened man, a kestrel with bone spikes all over its body.
From the tip of a flame a giant soap bubble was rising, like the ones Lila used to blow on her first summer, the happiest time we ever had. We elbowed each other, pointing at it. It made us go back to that time. Other bubbles came from the fire, and from the trees.
The fig tree, our Mother Tree, had grown immense. Each branch was large enough for two of us to sleep on, and some of the leaves could envelop a whole human being. She was brimming with Oddballs, slithering on her trunk, perching on her branches.
This is the Inner Pinewood. Lila touched one of the bubbles, and found it had the consistency of marshmallow. She heaved herself up. We tried to do the same, but the bubbles we touched burst in explosions of colour. Lila stood on her floating bubble, dancing above our heads, among the flying Oddballs. We whistled and immediately took on the hum again.
Then it came – a crash and a bang in the sky.
We jumped and looked up. The sky was bulging, as if brutally punched and kicked from the other side. Someone was trying to get in, and we knew it would be no good if they managed it. We stopped making any sound, except for the hum. A music was coming from the other side, an unpleasant melody of fiddles, almost human. It played revolting notes.
There was a scream from the dark side of the sky.
We recoiled, and dropped our hum.
‘The fuck was that?’ Zoey asked, the first words any of us pronounced in a long while.
The Oddballs were nowhere to be seen, and neither were the bubbles. Lila was standing on firm ground like the rest of us. The shadows we saw were ours, the sky had reverted to normal, and nothing was banging to beat it down.
The fire was still burning, the smoke rising.
CHARLIE
The next day we used words sparingly and clumsily. They boomed like gunshots in our ears. Besides, we did not have much to talk about. Mentioning the events of the night felt crass, and nothing else mattered enough to mention. None of us was looking forward to getting back to our phones and calendars. Clockwork time was a trap, and that night we had wiggled free of Time and Space themselves.
Hadn’t we?
We had a big breakfast. We baked focaccia, sliced capocollo and mortadella, grilled aubergines, and brought to the table a whole prosciutto on a stand, which Sam sliced by hand with a long knife. We quaffed litres of strong coffee. Towards midday we headed to the beach. The summer crowds were gone; we had it all to ourselves. We swam, we threw a frisbee, we started ambling towards a normality of sorts.
When we returned to our pinewood, Becca and Ric announced they would take on kitchen duty for dinner, and asked me and Zoey to help. ‘We’re making pasta,’ Becca said. ‘By hand.’
‘So we need hands,’ Ric said.
We took a quick shower first. I was moving in a daze. Grief was not the first thing on my mind; it was a dull thump in the background. I was not used to that. I got to the kitchen with my hair still wet. The others were already there. Ric had arranged four mounds of thick dark flour on which he was sprinkling salt. ‘Hey, Charlie,’ Becca welcomed me.
Ric made a cavity on the top of each mound and poured water in it. ‘Now we knead,’ he said, starting on one of the mounds. We took one each.
Zoey sunk her hands in the flour. ‘Ric, you making pasta is the single most incredible thing I’ve seen so far.’
‘Not on-brand?’
‘Less than it’d be for me, which is saying something.’
Ric chuckled. ‘You’ll have to put in a little more energy there. Dad didn’t want Grandma to teach me; he said making pasta was for girls. Grandma answered that making pasta was for people who eat pasta.’
‘She was a character,’ Becca said.
I asked, ‘Have you guys been together long?’
‘Nobody gets it,’ Ric said, in mock desperation. ‘We’re brother and sister.’
That made me stop in my tracks.
‘Keep kneading,’ Becca said, amused. ‘Or you’ll spoil the dough.’
‘I thought…’
‘Why?’
I didn’t have an answer. Zoey did: ‘You get on too well for siblings.’
‘You say that!’ Ric protested. He pointed a dough-covered finger at Becca. ‘I bloody hate this woman! She ruined my life.’
‘There wasn’t much to ruin, sweetheart.’
I laughed. ‘Okay, I’ll need five or six months to reassess.’
‘Speaking of reassessing,’ Becca said. ‘What do you make of last night?’
A silence fell over the room, filled with the zesty scent of coarse pasta dough.
I broke it, saying, ‘It was real.’
‘No less so than Bertrand’s music.’
Zoey asked, ‘Okay, but was it real the way a dream is real, or was it real the way we are real?’
‘I don’t know there’s a difference.’
‘When I think back to it, it does feel more like a dream than an actual memory. Okay, fine, we were awake, but not exactly sober either. A shared delusion? There are precedents in the history of psychic research.’
Ric said, ‘When reality goes sideways we call it a delusion. Folks, let me see your dough… Yep, we’re good to go.’ We made four balls of dough, wrapped them in cling film. ‘This needs to rest twenty minutes,’ Ric said. ‘Meanwhile – beer?’
‘God, yes,’ I said.
After so long without a drink, beer tasted like the first day of summer. ‘It’s time for you to know what we’ve been keeping from you,’ said Becca. ‘As far as we’re concerned, you’re ready. I’ve got to ask though – are you sure you want to go on? For people like you – good people, I mean – there’s no turning back.’
‘Be serious, Becca,’ Zoey said. ‘There’s no turning back after yesterday.’
‘Oh, but there is. You still have the option to set your life back on track. Go back home and in no time you’ll be looking at everything you were up to here like a folly, a holiday fling.’
But my life went off track before I went to the Open Feast. Now it was back on again.
Zoey guzzled from her bottle. ‘I’m not chickening out.’
Ric and Becca exchanged a look. ‘You go,’ she said.
Ric made a short nod. ‘The lowdown is: you know all the weirdos saying that the end of the world is nigh?’
‘Are they right?’ Zoey asked.
‘Not entirely. The end of the world is not nigh. Too late for that. The end of the world has come. Everything you know,’ and he bent his thumb and index finger until they almost touched, ‘is just this close to being done for. A lot has been lost already, and our family is the one thing standing between what’s left of this,’ and he knocked his knuckles on the table, ‘and utter annihilation. We are humankind’s last bastion.’
‘And we are in damage-control mode,’ Becca added.
For a while Zoey and I just let it sink in. We drank our beers, and when Ric announced that the dough was ready we followed his lead, taking a piece of it, rolling it into a cylinder, and then cutting the cylinder into smaller pieces using a flat-pointed knife. He showed us the thumb movement to shape each piece into an ear-shaped orecchietta.
‘I’m gonna need some context,’ I said, setting to work.
Zoey echoed, ‘Yeah, me too.’
We were fussing with our first orecchiette; Becca had already made five. She said, ‘Just to be level with you, we have little in terms of answers, and a lot of what we do have is educated guesswork.’
‘Fair enough.’
‘See what’s going on all around us: glaciers are melting, fires larger than cities burn hectares of forest every day, hundreds of species go extinct every week. We breathe poisonous air, we drink poisonous water. The very stuff that should sustain life is smothering it. Covid-19 was bad and the next pandemic will be worse – it may be starting as we speak. Children starve in the richest countries of the world while their masters fly themselves to space on cock-shaped rockets. And while the world bends and falls, folk like you and me wake up in the morning and reach out for their phones to insult perfect strangers. Death, pestilence, famine, war – what did we expect, actual horsemen? An understated apocalypse is still an apocalypse. We are surrounded. Things fall apart. The centre cannot hold.’
‘And we make the centre hold?’ I said. I was not sceptical, only curious.
‘Sometimes shit happens,’ Ric said, ‘and it’s not the end of the world. You get your Ice Age, your pandemic, but you hang on. Usually. Lizards grow back their tail, humans learn to move around without sight. Shit happens, we survive, and if we’re lucky, we may even thrive. That goes for animals and planets alike. Death, rebirth, such is the nature of growth. Not this time, though. This time the world has jammed badly, and it’s our job to kick it back into gear.’
Becca’s craftiness with the orecchiette looked preternatural to me. ‘How so?’ I asked.
Becca said, ‘It may be a small action with far-reaching consequences, the tiny snowball starting an avalanche. We may just need to say one word to the right person at the right time. Or – or perhaps something more decisive.’
Zoey said, ‘In other words, you have no clue.’
‘We will,’ said Ric.
‘But you do know what happened last night,’ I pointed out.
‘We don’t talk a lot about that. You overthink some things, you ruin them.’
‘Let’s talk only a little then,’ said Zoey.
Ric turned to Becca: ‘Do you want to take this one?’
She said, ‘We have found a way to… not transcend reality, but be alive to a wider one. We didn’t go anywhere last night; no parallel dimensions, no astral planes. What we call the Inner Pinewood is always with us, always present, next to the Outer Pinewood, and inside it, and rolled around it. It is another way of looking at the same trees, the same sky, and the same land. The Inner Pinewood is the Outer Pinewood, experienced from a different perspective. The core of it is that we need to be together, and breathe with exactly the same rhythm, attuned to one another. That’s what the hum is for. We’d used it before for short spells, but as soon as we moved even a little bit, the spell broke. Walking, dancing, was out of question. We’ve never experienced anything like last night. That was the breakthrough we have been chasing for years. We don’t know what the next step is. We are in uncharted waters.’
‘The banging in the sky,’ Zoey said. ‘Like someone trying to crash a party.’
Ric nodded. ‘It was exactly that.’
‘And who would that be?’
‘No clue again.’
‘No offence, mate, but you don’t have all that many clues, for folks who are out to save the world.’
‘Told ya.’
‘You have a right to know our whole story,’ Becca said.
ZOEY
No one sane would have bought that story, but then again, sanity is dolled-up dullness. Becca and Ric were earnest, which did not make them right, but could I take the chance? I’d spent my adult life enabling spiritual grifters to save the world one expensive workshop at a time. What if the Bastion was the real deal? What if I was the real deal? Could I in good conscience turn my back on that possibility, no matter how small? The world needed saving – this was the one thing no one could dispute.
And I needed some perspective; I needed Janis. Before dinner I turned on my phone and gasped. 4th October. It was one and a half months since I’d sent my last email. I’d not realised. ‘Call Janis,’ I ordered the voice assistant.
‘Zoey!’ Janis’s panicked voice came. ‘Oh my God, are you all right?’
‘I’m great.’
There was a sigh on the other end, and I thought it was the baby crying, but no, it was Janis.
‘Hey,’ I said. ‘What’s up? Why are you crying?’
‘What’s up? You’re asking what’s up?’
‘I thought…’
‘Zoey, you went off grid for two months!’
‘It was less than that.’
A beat, then Janis asked, ‘Are you serious?’
‘Look, I’m sorry you had to take on my workload on top of yours, but I mailed you, didn’t I? I told you I was going to disappear for a while.’
‘Fuck the workload!’ Janis shouted into the phone. ‘I couldn’t sleep at night!’
