Page 48 of The Bedlam Stacks

‘England. I’m Merrick, it’s nice to meet you.’

‘Other hand. You won’t get much from this one.’ She only had one, her left, so I swapped over to shake that instead. It was still only partially formed. She had fingers, but not full length. ‘Merrick. Now we all used to know a marvellous man called Jack who had a little boy called Merrick. You’re not him, by any chance?’

‘Jack was my father.’

‘Good. You look just like him, but then I worried that white people might all look the same anyway, so I didn’t like to say. Welcome home, took you long enough. Come here and apologise for being away.’

I laughed as she hugged me over the counter. ‘I’m sorry, ma’am.’

‘Inti, I’m Inti. I was named after your grandfather, actually,’ she said, and didn’t explain. There was no time to ask her and I was getting used to being confused and tired most of the time. It didn’t seem to be improving, even if the dull pain in my ears had gone now. All the stories we’d heard on the way about acclimatising to altitude after a few days were rubbish. ‘I shall call you . . . Merry-cha, that’s excellent I think. Oop, milk, thank you,’ she added to an invisible Raphael somewhere on her left. He had gone in through a side door while we’d been talking. ‘Coffee?’

‘Yes, please,’ I said, still laughing. ‘Pleased to meet you.’

‘Yes, I expect you are.’ She gave me too much sugar, but I had a feeling that not everyone got any sugar at all.

Raphael came back rubbing his hands dry. It was getting dark now and all around us, inside the haphazard houses and out, hanging from the eaves, were pollen lamps. The ones Raphael made were small and neat, but some of them here were much bigger. Hands from what must once have been sturdy outdoor clocks turned inside them, churning the pollen. Some had a deep ambery glow, but some had had their mechanisms altered so that they ran fast and spun much brighter light. Hanging as they were on different levels and in different sizes and shades of gold, it was like sitting in the middle of a star field. Inti put two glass cups on the counter in front of us, and a bowl of diced pineapple. I wondered who had cut it up.

‘Have you met the markayuq?’ Inti said, as if she were talking about local landowners whose unofficial permission I’d need in order to stay.

‘Yes, yesterday. They’re fantastic. I’ve never seen statues like them.’

She laughed. ‘They’re not statues. Nobody could make anything like that. They’re people who turned to stone. Didn’t your father tell you anything?’

‘Why would they do that?’ I said.

‘Do what?’

‘Turn to stone.’

‘Stone lasts longer than a person. They do it so they can watch over a special place. We’re extra-special. We have six.’

‘Did it use to be seven? I . . . know my father took one when he was here.’

‘Yes, yes, seven before, but St Matthew was unhappy. He wanted to go with Jack, see somewhere new, and everyone thought it was for the best.’

‘How could you tell, that he was unhappy?’

She had been winding up more lamps while she talked, little ones whose clockwork hummed rather than clunked, setting them alongside our coffee, and one in the empty pineapple bowl. ‘Nearly walked off the cliff.’

‘Oh.’ I found myself doing what I’d always hated seeing other people do in China: glancing at Raphael for a secondary translation. The words made grammatical sense, but the undersense was hard to catch. Chinese tea farmers had always looked at my interpreter that way, it being broadly and well known that even quite fluent white men were nonetheless mad and not to be trusted with things like numbers and adding. They had used him like a cultural limbeck through which to filter everything I said, even though we had all been speaking Chinese.

Raphael didn’t see, though, because he didn’t look up.

‘Do you not have markayuq in England?’ she said.

‘No. Or I don’t think so.’

‘That’s unlucky,’ she said. ‘Perhaps they had to leave.’

Raphael was still watching the rainbow bubbles in his coffee and I felt sorry. To live wading through little myths and trying to hold markayuq and saints together in overlay for a congregation who thought statues lived because nobody could possibly put together stone like that, when he must have known that somewhere out across the sea was Rome, must have seen etchings of the Vatican – it was bleak.

‘But what happened to your leg?’ Inti said, motioning at my cane with her own cup.

‘Shrapnel.’

‘Are you in the army then?’

‘No, no, I’m a gardener. It was just an accident.’