King of Morning, Queen of Day (32 page)

Arise, shine, for your light has come,

and the glory of the Lord has risen:

Isaiah 60:1

I
T IS NOT MUCH
of a party. But then advertising parties never are. The music is too ideologically correct to be really danceable; the people are trying too hard to have fun to be really enjoying themselves. Someone will probably be arrested before dawn, everyone hopes. Only then can the party to celebrate winning the Green Isle Freezer Foods account be judged a success. Junior copywriters and assistant financial managers are lining up to take turns singing to a karaoke machine, heavy on Elvis and the Beatles. Says a lot about the vintage of QHPSL’s junior copywriters and assistant financial managers. The Blessèd Phaedra, the boss, despite her name, Enye does not like, is thundering out “River Deep, Mountain High” in a skirt far too short for her seniority. Oscar the Bastard, the boss, whom Enye does like, despite his name, is doing a passable, if balding, Ike on the Mike.

Warping social orbits, she finds Jaypee Kinsella, her creative partner, confidante, mentor, and, yes, Best Friend, sitting under a shelf bearing a lamp in the shape of a brass Buddha seated on the back of a cow. She slips onto the arm of the chair beside him. Grossly drunk, he demonstrates how he can make the brass Buddha go on off on off on off on off like a karmic lighthouse, calling souls across the rocky Sea of Enlightenment. He seems to find the exercise hysterically funny.

In the room with the karaoke machine, Judi-Angel from Traffic, whose house this bash has appropriated, is singing about the Careless Whisper of a Good Friend as if it is something she knows a lot about.

Enye begs leave to be excused. Between the end of one note and the beginning of another, between the end of one chronal quantum and the beginning of the next, she has felt them. Distant yet, like the dim thunder of the jets that bank in over the city, but drawing closer, growing in definition and clarity.

On the street, the presence is sharper, clearer. She shivers. Her breath hangs in thin clouds, faintly luminous under the acid yellow street lamps. In the car she pops the first tab of Shekinah and clicks Mahler’s Sixth into the stereo. As the passionate tide of strings and winds surges between the speakers, she lies back in the seat and waits for the stuff to take effect.

It is never long coming, but she has never been able to give a precise moment to when it begins. She can never say when they move from something felt to something perceived. A police patrol car prowls past the end of the street. She hopes none of the neighbours have complained about the ideologically correct dance music. Keep moving, Fascists.

She starts the car, moves off down the street. Drizzle-wet, the October faces of the red-brick town houses seem black in the standardised European yellow streetlight. At this hour the avenues are empty but for taxis, police, and ghosts. Led by the twine of the sky signs, like the polarized stress patterns in car windows, she drives to a damp northern suburb of aluminum-clad boxes where every street has a name like Padraig Pearse Gardens, where every tin-town house has a portrait of the Pope in front of the net jardiniere living-room curtains and a ten-meter whip of an aerial to hook down the airwaves of the TV stations across the water from their higher ether. At some indeterminate point, the drizzle has passed into sour yellow rain.

The sky signs draw her to a small suburban supermarket. Fluorescent pink and orange posters proclaiming This Week’s Special Offers sag from their tape fastenings behind the metal security grilles. The interior of the supermarket is lit horror-movie blue by the refrigerated displays. The red eye of the burglar alarm system winks at her. The rush and flow from beyond buffets her like a mighty wind as she steps out of the Citroen 2CV. She kicks off her party shoes, fetches a pair of Reeboks from the back. Bright red. They clash with her party clothes. She wishes she could change those, too, but if shoes are all she is to be allowed, that is all she needs.

Check.

In her handbag, the computer is winking green to the burglar alarm’s red. Graph lines twine black on grey on the readout. She slips the computer onto her belt, untangles a coiled lead terminating in a multiway connector.

Check.

Still wrapped in old newspapers on the floor in front of the back seat: the swords.
Katana
and
tachi.
Long sword and companion sword. She slips them from their sheathes.
Kenjitsu,
the Way of the Drawn Sword.
Philosophic and moral considerations pay homage to victory in combat.

The spirits rise within her: spirit of expectancy, spirit of trepidation, spirit of fire, spirit of void, spirit of small suburban supermarket at twenty past one on a Saturday morning with veils of drizzle blowing in off a chill, radioactive sea.

Spirit of
crossing at a ford,
of taking your capabilities to meet your enemy’s in the place and time of your choosing.

Never let your enemy see your spirit. Be neither over nor underspirited. Both are weak.

She advances through the driving rain down the entry leading to the rear-of-store car park. By the roll-down delivery door, she plugs the computer into the socket mounted on the handle of her long sword. Words, symbols, forms too fleeting for human comprehension fill the small display: the words DISRUPTOR LOADED flash, silver on grey. Grey on silver, glyphs swarm from the
habaki,
the sword hilt, along the blade, an ideographic miscegenation of Chinese and Mayan. Within one second, the blade is sheathed in a shifting patina of silver glyphs.

She advances across the rain-wet concrete toward a lager hoarding. She can feel them as an electric tautness in the skin across her forehead.

A sound, a scuffle in the warm shadows around the gently sighing hearing ducts.

Action/no-action. Conception/no-conception. The swords whip into
Gedan No Kame, tachi
above head,
katana
held downward at forty-five degrees.

Hi-tech trainers scuff gravel. Betrayed, the syringe glitters in stray suburb-glow. Something-teen, greasy black hair, Day-Glo Wyldechylde T-shirt, severed heads, pentagrams, and bondage.

Caught crouching in the warmth of the ducts, the boy throws back his head and opens wide his mouth, as if to swallow down the raining sky.

And it spears from the open mouth: a long worm of intestinal darkness, lashing and writhing in the driving diagonals of rain that slash across the car park. Head, arms, legs bifurcate and tear free from the flexing body. In an instant, one instant, it steps out of the pile of rain-sodden clothing, the translucent, luminous husk of the boy’s body.

It towers over her, tall, thin as a willow. Its thin willow fingers are thirty centimetres of razor-blue steel. Its mouth is fused shut in a plate of whalebone; its naked skull sweeps up into an arabesque of raw cranium. It is dressed only in its own leather hide and a few scraps of clinging, pale human skin.

She strikes in
one timing:
the skill of striking the enemy while he is still undecided, spirit and body unsettled from the transformation. Steel rings on steel. It catches her cutting edge on its claws. Steel shrieks on steel as blade rakes along blade. Glyphs shower from the edge and burst about them like dying fireworks.

It heaves her back across the car park, follows closely, but she is on her feet in a thought, red Reeboks firm on the wet concrete. She flicks rain-slick hair from her eyes. The Shekinah is a burning song inside her.
Nihon Me:
the long sword flashes upward, sideways, into the
Jodan,
the middle position, to cut through the chest.
Ippon Me,
the companion sword, turns, catches the light, high to cleave the crest of bone. They clash in a flicker of steel and rain.
All strategy is to cut the enemy. Hitting, striking, touching the enemy, is not cutting.
Its blades gleam with stolen light; the long sword slips up to
Jodan
to block their downstrike. The blow almost tears the sword from her grasp.
Thought and action, one unity.
The short sword in the left hand cuts across from
Waki
through
Chudan.

“Tō”

The great
kiai
explodes from her lips. The right arm, severed just below the elbow, spins away. Steel claws scrape sparks from the concrete.

Pale ichor fountains from the stump. It reels and in that instant begins to regenerate itself. Spraying dream-juice from the horrifying wound, it drives her before its singing steel claws across the car park. Lightning screams and flies from the clashing, parrying blades. It drives her hard, hard enough to momentarily take the breath from her, hard against the lager hoarding. Five times thirty centimetres of razor-blue steel shred the blue and piss-yellow of the lager poster and draw back for the killing thrust through the throat.

And in that quantum of indecision, the long sword moves with the deceptive slowness of the flowing water cut.

It all happens in one timing. The look of disbelief that momentarily crosses its face as its head topples toward the damp concrete, which is never reached as, in one timing, body and severed head erupt in a silent detonation of thistledown sparks. The outline of her adversary burns briefly through the glow, then all that remains is a fading nimbus and a handful of errant, luminous puffballs bouncing across the car park.

She bows properly, formally, to an honourable enemy, kneels to unplug the long sword. The glyphs fade and fail. The rain drives in hard, hard across the concrete. She is shaking, dripping with sweat. And weary, so weary. Bone weary. Spirit weary. It is always like this, after the Shekinah. She picks up her swords, returns to the car. She leans, one-handed, head down, against the door, the classic three
A.M.
pose, wracked with nausea, saturated, shivering in her party clothes. She knows it is dangerous to drive in her condition, but she has no other choice. Twenty past two. She gets into the car and finds that someone has got in before her and stolen her cassette player and all her tapes.

The radio alarm wakes her with a cry, and a start, and a shudder. The duvet is a sodden, scrunched huddle in the corner of the bed. Grinding dreams. Sweat dreams. It is always bad, the morning after. It can take all day for her hands to stop shaking. Radio KRTP-FM news, headlines on the hour, every hour: ethnic unrest in the Soviet provinces, resignations in the British cabinet, Hurricane Hugo blows the roof off a church and kills everyone inside. Weather: cold front moving in across the country from the northwest; high of 12 Celsius, 52 Fahrenheit; wind slight to moderate; rain by midafternoon. Good morning! And today’s Radio KRTP-FM Listener File is sent in by Kevin McLoughlin from out there in Dundrum. Hi, Kevin, hope you’re listening. Star sign: Capricorn; favourite drink: Harp Lager; favourite food: ham and pineapple pizza; favourite band: Dire Straits; favourite film:
Dirty Dancing;
favourite actor: Sly Stallone; favourite actress: Cher; favourite car: white Austin Metro GTI.

For these disclosures, Kevin McLoughlin from out there in Dundrum wins a Radio KRTP-FM sunstrip for his white Austin Metro GTI and would they play “Money For Nothing” for his girlfriend Anne-Marie. Surely will, Kevin McLoughlin from out there in Dundrum.

Guitars pick and strum and she makes tea, Chinese tea, scalding hot, almost flavourless. Muscles she did not know she had are dully furious with her. Must be getting out of condition. She should get back into training—cycle some, swim, work out, practice down at the dojo.

Enye MacColl. Twenty-wise. Five foot-wise. One twenty-wise pounds. Pure black hair—the sort that makes you want to bury your face in it and breathe deeply, imagining that you will smell the freshness of your first adolescent love again. Smooth olive skin; a genetic throwback to ancestors swept ashore with the Armada, hints of even elder stock, the Firbolg, the dark mesolithics swept away by the red-haired, freckle-faced Celts, the First Come. The black olive eyes of an elder race; devastating in casual glances, cat-unpredictable, cat-playful in intimacy. Like all women of character, she can be both beautiful and ugly in successive instants. If you saw her on the street, you would look again and think,
What an
interesting
woman.
Enye MacColl.

The light of her answering machine is glowing. Three calls.

Call one: Jaypee Kinsella (fated to pass through the world reduced to his initials; even Enye does not know what the Jay and the Pee stand for), perilously post-party: we’ve got to do something, darling, about those station idents: the Blessèd Phaedra is rumbling.

Call two: Saul, inquiring about her enjoyment of the party last night (she had not passed on the invitation to him; she knows he despises advertising parties) and her availability for dinner that night, dress formal, pick up eight sharp, ring back if not convenient.

Call three: her brother. Ewan. He needs to talk to her. Can she meet him for lunch at one o’clock?

If she hits the shower running, she can just about make it.

The place they have arranged to meet is a wrought-iron and glass snackery on the top level of the glass and wrought-iron mall they built on top of the old flea market. People slide up and down on escalators. They look nervous, like atheists in a cathedral. Everything is open plan, plate glass and delicate filigree, transparent. That is why the people look nervous—they fear that, unbeknownst, their bodies and souls may have become as transparent as glass. Enye thinks of a megalithic Ministry of Shopping in some Capitalist Totalitarian Dystopia. She picks at her green salad, toys with her Perrier. Her hands are still trembling from the psychic and physical strain. Her brother thinks she is hung over. She wills her hands to be still.
Make your everyday stance the combat stance; make the combat stance your everyday stance.

Neither wants to say the first word, but a first word must be spoken. And a second. And a third.

“She asks about you.”

“That’s nice of her.”

“She worries about you.”

“She has nothing to worry about.”