That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote by K.J. Bishop Page A

appreciate the humour in the situation. Poor things, they just wanted to be in the story. A bit of comic relief. You didn’t have to knock them off like that.’
    ‘ Do you know so much about everybody?’ I didn’t intend to feel sorry about the demons. If I didn’t have much of a sense of humour, too bad. The thought occurred to me that nothing would be liable to distract one’s mind from an important purpose like a sense of humour.
    ‘ Some people.’ She stood up, and beckoned me to stand too. We looked down at the atrium. ‘Him,’ she said, pointing to a gentleman who was climbing the stairs. He was dressed in metal armour, and had a face so solemn as to be woeful. Behind him came a smaller, muddy person tottering under the weight of dozens of shopping bags, on which I could see prestigious brand logos.
    ‘ He’s looking for a grail,’ she said. ‘Or a graal. He doesn’t know if the damn thing’s a cup or a plate or a stone. He thinks it could even be a sword. Well, that’s wrong. If you get the sword, you can be king. If you get the grail, you meet God and enable a regeneration of the world. And there’s a car. If you find the car, you can have the lover who haunts your heart. These things transform your being, you see. If he can’t find his grail soon, he’s going to look for an honourable death. Not sure how he’ll manage that here.’
    I wanted to know more about the car. ‘Are those things all obtainable here?’
    ‘ What does it mean to possess something? You can own a thing without having it, and have a thing without owning it.’
    The knight and his servant reached the top of the stairs and turned towards the hotel.
    ‘He’s losing heart,’ the woman remarked. ‘He’ll take anything now. Hospital corners, wigwam wheels, wall sharpeners… there are some things fated to be lost and found and lost again on memory’s endless roundabouts.’
    I mentioned that my own memory was poor. ‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘you can tell me where I was before the desert.’
    ‘ I can’t recall your childhood for you. I can hardly recall my own. And who can remember before they were born? Don’t worry about it. Desire is wasted on the past. Listen, I’ll tell you something for nothing. Don’t waste yourself on this person you’re chasing. It may not even be a person. There’s hardly a single thing that isn’t something else when you look at it a different way. Have you ever thought,’ she asked, startling me, ‘that someone might desire you ? That someone’s following, back behind you, trying to see where you’ve gone?’
    ‘ No, never.’ The startled feeling left me quickly. I wasn’t interested in the idea.
    ‘ Snakes and ladders,’ she said. ‘You can take your token off the board, you know, and throw it out in the back yard. Let the grass have it. The ladder of lights takes you up, the old snake takes you down. Where does a lawn take you?’
    Snakes and ladders again. Repetition of an unusual element indicated – to speak accurately, made – an opening, like placing two posts to make a gateway. I wanted to say ‘anywhere’, or ‘home’, but a mental warning bell told me I needed to be a bit wilier. I needed to ask for a little more. If I was to earn you, or win you, I’d better show I’d been paying attention.
    ‘ A driveway,’ I said.
     
    The day was overcast and windy. The streets mazed around seemingly without any reason, as the ground was completely flat. They branched, looped, hairpinned and turned circles. This area of the city was so new that it wasn’t in the street directory. I say ‘city’, but it was city only in the sense that it wasn’t countryside; or rather it was countryside, a great paddock, in the process of being turned into a suburb.
    It was another land of mansions, these so new that many sat on bare earth with string marking where the lawns were to go. The houses were grouped in clusters separated by fields. Some of the fields hosted billboards