Three Circle Star

Part 1: Demos the Innkeeper’s Story

Welcome to The Travellers Rest at Drysau Bridge. People who enter this inn are lost. Most of them tell me how they came here. I listen, hoping that by letting them tell me their story, I will help them find their way again.

I was lost once, like you. Many years ago, when I was young and foolish, I sought adventure and new horizons. I served under Alcibiades in the naval battle of Notium. His helmsman, Antiochus, sent out a decoy to tempt the Spartans into battle, but the trick backfired and the Spartans defeated us. The injuries I sustained were life-destroying. With my existence hanging in the balance, I found myself here.

The river beneath the bridge flowed with the blood of the martyrs then. It has been dry some sixty years now, but for one shallow pool. The innkeeper gave me a choice: to eat one of the berries growing in the thorns by the river and return to life, or to walk into the sea and let my bones wash up on the shore.

I did not know which to choose. To return to life would mean facing a painful, ignoble existence, but to choose to die was the deed of a coward.

When the innkeeper saw my indecision, he spoke again.

‘There is a third alternative, more of a curse than a choice, the one I chose many years ago. Exchange places with me.’

I walked outside into the valley of bones. It stretched far away in every direction from the sea on my right to the misty circle of the distant bordering hills. At my feet lay a human skull. Beyond lay a hundred thousand more. Could all these people have given up and walked into the sea? Could they not have found the courage to eat the berries nourished by the blood of the martyrs? I reflected on the third alternative. Could I escape that choice between the two and instead live here for the rest of my days?

I returned to the inn and offered my hand to the keeper.

‘Yes, I agree to take your place,’ I said.

We shook hands. On the third shake, he smiled in bliss. His body disintegrated. The dust that had formed him blew away in the breeze.

And here I have been ever since, welcoming lost travellers like you, and listening to your stories.

Now I have told you my tale, I shall set out three places at the table for you. While we eat, it would be good to hear how each of you came here. Who will begin?

Part 2: Ginny Lee’s Story

2:1

My problems all started with a spiked drink. I didn’t know it at the time, but it nearly wrecked my career.

I came round, sitting on a bench in the rain. A giant poster next to me was perpetuating the mother myth with a twelve-foot-high image of a white-haired old lady. Her plump face smiled as she held a brightly wrapped present in her hands, half opened to reveal a box of Wiener’s chocolates. Above her gleamed the words, Happy Mother’s Day, Mum.

In my lap lay a box of Wiener’s chocolates and a greetings card covered in psychedelic flowers. I wondered why I had bought Mother the present when I needed the money to pay the fare to Kitty Derrer’s. Then I tried to remember why I wanted to see Kitty Derrer. I looked through my wet pockets and found a crumpled photo of her. The round face and long black hair looked familiar. She had written on the back of the photo, Meet me when the Moon is full in Shallier. Yes, I remembered: I had promised to see her there. But that must have been three months ago, before New Year.

I looked up at the moon. It was struggling to shine through the rain clouds, but it looked big and fat and round. Was I already too late to see her?

A bright blue bus slowed down at the junction. The windows were filled with posters of smiling people travelling to South Kenham, the area of Eleter where Mother lived. I hopped on the back of the bus and hopped off again just before the ticket clippie reached me to ask for the fare.

I alighted on a busy street. People pushed past me, faceless with waxen masks. They wielded black umbrellas in their left hands and heavy brown briefcases in their right. They were the army of clerical workers who commuted every day between the little boxes they called home in suburbia and their offices. I looked for my father in their ranks, because he was a sergeant in the army of office workers. But he too wore a waxen mask all the time he was away from home, so I wouldn’t recognise him even if I saw him in the crowd.

Mother’s fashionable pied-à-terre luxury apartment was on the second floor of a terraced villa in a prestigious street. The pied-à-terre style was all the rage at that time, as if only yesterday’s people lived in houses they didn’t have to share. As I walked up the steps to the front door, a car drew over to the kerb and two women alighted.

I rang the bell and huddled in a corner of the porch to give the women room to shelter from the rain. Their sweet spicy perfume beguiled my senses. Cracked clown masks hid their faces, with bright red cheeks and lips, bright green eye shadow and white foreheads. Though their blonde wigs were permed upwards to give the illusion of height, they were easily six inches shorter than me. The bodices of their long white dresses were bedecked with paste jewels. The fleshy hands clasping their bleached fun-fur rabbit stoles gleamed with fake gem rings. Bejewelled chokers held up their sagging chins.

‘Who is it?’ Mother asked through the intercom.

‘Conny and Asha,’ said the two women, giggling.

The latch buzzed and the front door opened. I followed the women up two flights of stairs to Mother’s front door. Mother was waiting for them on the landing. She was six inches shorter than me, with a blonde wig piled up to make her look taller. Her long white halter-neck dress glittered with diamante and her hands, ears and neck sparkled with paste gems. Her face was hidden behind a waxy, clownish mask.

She flung her arms round the two women in welcome and turned to lead them in, not having seen me.

‘Mother,’ I said.

She turned to look at me with blank eyes. I touched her hand. Her pupils cleared and she looked up brightly into my face.

‘Ginny! I’m so glad you could come.’

‘I’ve brought you a present. For Mother’s Day.’

I offered her the wet box of chocolates and card. She took them without looking at them and set them aside on a whatnot shelf as she ushered me into the lounge.

‘I wish you wouldn’t dress so sombrely, Ginny. Denim and black are so dull. Why don’t you wear bright colours like ours?’

‘Yes, white is bright, Mother,’ I said.

I looked to see if I could recognise Conny and Asha in the crowd of guests wearing blonde wigs and long white halter-neck dresses, but they had disappeared in the sea of masked faces. Mother was the only person I could recognise, as she had pinned a silk orchid on her bosom.

‘Do you want something to eat, Ginny? You look very hungry.’

I let her guide me to the table of party food. She carved off a leg from a cold roast fowl and arranged it on a plate with a salad. I took it from her with my left hand. A guest placed a glass of whiskey in my right hand. We must have met before sometime, as she knew my favourite drink. Mother’s guests surrounded us, all women. They clucked in admiration at how different Mother and I looked.

I sipped my whiskey. It tasted like water, as Mother’s drink always did. I took a second sip to make sure. It still tasted like water. I placed my glass on the table and heard it groan in protest. With a hand free, I risked a bite from the chicken leg. It tasted like cardboard, as Mother’s food always did. I took a second bite. It still tasted of cardboard. I longed to swap the plate of chicken salad for some processed food, something I could taste.

‘Mother, do you have any baked beans?’ I asked.

‘You’re not still eating out of tins, are you?’ she complained. ‘I thought you had a good job. Daddy says it’s a good job. That’s why he got it for you.’

‘Now is not the time, Mother. Let’s wait until I get back,’ I said, trying to avoid the scene that always followed my requests for tinned food.

‘I cannot wait until you get back!’

Her higher voice warned me her mask was cracking. I quickly guided her through the throng of guests into the quiet of her study before she embarrassed herself in front of them. She switched on the desk lamp as I closed the door.

‘What has been happening to you lately, Ginny?’ she demanded. Her gaudy smile had dribbled red streaks down her chin.

‘It’s been raining for three months, Mother.’

She sighed and looked away. ‘Oh, something’s triggered you again!’ Her mask dropped an inch as she looked back at me. ‘Why haven’t you been to see Mr Sinclair recently? I pay him a lot of money for you to talk with him whenever you want.’

‘You can’t buy friends. I couldn’t talk to Mr Sinclair if my life depended on it. He doesn’t even believe in real dictionaries.’

‘Real dictionaries? Of course he doesn’t! You haven’t been seeing Benson again, have you?’

‘What if I have?’

‘He’s pulling you downhill, Ginny. All that nonsense about real dictionaries is destroying your ability to reason.’

‘They’re not nonsense! Or are you saying that giant doesn’t mean small, and new and improved doesn’t mean smaller for the same price?’

‘Ginny! I despair of you!’

Mother’s broken mask fell from her face and lay melting by the lamp on the desktop. Her real face looked so much more beautiful than the clown mask that had dropped.

‘I’m sorry, Mother. I didn’t mean to hurt you.’

I put my arms around her waist to comfort her and realised how thin she was under the padding of her long white dress. Why did she go to such lengths to keep in with her crowd of false friends?

‘Mother, I need your help. I have to go and see Kitty Derrer. She lives in Shallier, and I haven’t got the fare. It’s important I go tonight, because she’s superstitious, so she wants me to come when there’s a full moon. The moon looks pretty full already. I don’t want to miss it and be forced to wait another month in grotty Paddingham.’

‘O my precious! You do end up with such strange friends. Do you have a photo of her?’

I pulled out the damp, crumpled photo and let her look at Kitty’s round face and long black hair.

‘Oh, isn’t she lovely! Of course I can help you.’ Mother found some keys in a drawer of the desk and placed them by the light. ‘Look, I haven’t any money in the apartment, but if you go and see Daddy, he’ll give you some. You can take my car to get there. Make sure you bring it back in three days though – I will need it that morning.’

‘Thanks, Mother. And don’t worry. I’ll be back in two days at the latest.’

I pocketed the keys and escaped to the safety of the door. As I opened it, I looked back. She was punching out a number on her phone. Her clown mask covered her face again, intact once more as she returned to the falseness of her glittering social whirl. The false front glistened eerily in the low light.

‘Just phoning Daddy for you,’ she said.

‘Thanks, Mother. Have a good Mother’s Day, whenever it is.’

‘I will. Safe journey. Do try the spicy chicken on your way out. You should find it more to your liking than the salad.’

The party guests gathered round me as I emerged from the study.

‘Aren’t you a handsome young thing,’ they said, complimenting me to my face but, I knew from the past, they criticised me behind my back. I picked up the bowl of spicy chicken from the party fare and took it out onto the balcony to eat in peace.

The rain was teeming down in the street, but I stayed relatively dry on the balcony, as the wall of the building sheltered me from the wind. The double-glazed balcony doors muted the babble of the party guests behind me. For a moment, I felt peace.

A taxi drew up and Sinclair got out. I swore! Mother had betrayed me, yet again! I should have known the gift of the car keys hid something devious. Her gifts always did. She hadn’t expected me to be free to drive away.

It was pointless trying to leave by the apartment door, as Sinclair would come up that way. I used instead the route I had used many times before.

Next door’s balcony was only three feet away, across a two-storey drop. I climbed up onto the stone parapet, turned to face the wall and used it to support me as my left leg swung out to find the neighbouring parapet. When I had a firm foothold, I moved my weight onto the neighbours’ parapet and dropped down onto their balcony.

As usual, the Messengers’ balcony doors were unlocked – they did not expect burglars to climb that high. I dived inside, closed the curtains and waited a couple of minutes to make sure Sinclair had cleared the stairs.

‘Mummy,’ a child called softly, sobbing.

I froze briefly, fearing a trap.

‘Is that you, Mummy?’ the child called.

The voice opened a door into my past. It wrung my emotions with my grief for all the times I had been left alone in the house while my father worked and Mother partied with her girlfriends, in those lonely years before they finally admitted defeat and got divorced. I followed the sound of the voice into a box-room sized bedroom, with the name Dawn on the door.

A girl of about six or seven lay weeping in bed, her red face and damp hair visible in a low night light. I knelt down beside her.

‘Don’t cry, Dawn. I’m Ginny Lee. Your mummy asked me to keep an eye on you.’

‘I know you, Ginny. I’ve seen you next door. When will Mummy be back?’

‘Not long, Dawn, not long. Would you like me to sing you to sleep? Then when you wake up, she’ll be here again.’

She nodded, just a slight movement of the head. Encouraged, I sang her a lullaby I had learned at school. As I sang, a part of me wished I could take her away and be a proper mother to her, unlike her own mother and my mother. But I had nothing else to offer her than understanding.

Dawn’s eyelids drifted shut. Soon, her regular breathing told me she was asleep. I crept out of the apartment so as not to wake her and made my escape.

2:2

I returned to my rather less fashionable pied-à-terre bedsit in Paddingham before going to visit my father, because I needed to find out what had happened in the last three months. The room was on the top floor of a crumbling four-storey terraced house on the main road. The woodwork needed a coat of paint, the hall carpets were threadbare and the light bulbs dim. All was covered in the amber patina of grime.

My room was on the front of the house, a nine-foot by ten-foot box with a bed, a cooker, a wardrobe, a threadbare armchair, a cupboard and a kitchen sink. The traffic noise was constant. I checked for food in the cupboard but it was so mouldy, I threw it out. My journal lay on the shelf below. I opened it and started reading, hoping to find some clues.

Most of the entries had been written in a kind of code I could no longer fathom. The ones that weren’t banged on incoherently about truth and light. So I must have been on another bender.

My neighbour Benson knocked at my door, asking in his reedy voice if I was OK. I hid the journal away in the cupboard and let him in. He settled in the chair, forcing me to sit cross-legged on the bed.

‘What’s been happening these past three months, Ben?’

‘I dunno, Gin. You seemed out of it most of the time. A really bad trip. We didn’t see much of you at all. And when we did, you kept saying it was raining when it wasn’t. You were really gone! By the way, Marcus has asked me to say he’s sorry.’

‘About what?’

Benson became evasive. It told me he knew but did not want to be disloyal to his partner. His left hand was covering the tear in his jeans from his last arrest for possession. The guy he got done with had died in the police cells. He couldn’t forget.

‘You kept telling me you couldn’t read anything, Gin: you could only read things that were true, and everything in print was a lie. So I told you about my “real” dictionaries. You were a bit obsessive about those.’

Things started to fall into place for me. I had always had an issue about people with false fronts who never told the truth.