Diversifications

by James Lovegrove

  58:31—beep. Home. I bend over, bracing my hands on my knees. Breathing slows. Heart rate declines. Sweat accumulates at the tip of my nose and drips off.

  Marie’s up and about now, and there’s coffee in the percolator and bread in the toaster.

  “Good run?”

  “Yeah. Shaved off a few seconds on the towpath bit.”

  “Oh. Good.”

  She doesn’t really care, but she pretends to care and that’s what makes a marriage. She thinks I’m obsessed with my running. Thinks I overdo it. Thinks it doesn’t behoove a man in his early forties to be so concerned over physical fitness. I always did run, though, even before I knew her, so from the outset she’s had to accept it as just the way I am. The fact that I’m keener on running than I ever was—well, she’s learned to accept that, too.

  I shower. Shave. Dress for work. Breakfast. A kiss, then the car.

  I’m in the office supplies business. I help run a modest-sized but thriving firm. We deliver throughout the south-east. If you work in the region, there’s every chance you’ve seen our catalogue. Very possibly you use products purchased from us. Maybe that foolscap pad you jot notes on comes from us, and the pen you jot with. Maybe those staples, those drawing pins, those paper-clips—maybe even that chair you sit in every day and that desk you sit at. We have good local market penetration. Several bigger firms have tried to take us over, and failing that tried to muscle in on our territory. It’s never worked. Our customers like us. We are where we are, and we’ll stay there.

  The day, as every working day does, passes. At lunchtime I get my first glimpse of Kieran since I left for my run. I’m out buying a sandwich from the van that visits the industrial estate at half past noon every day. As I’m queuing up, I spot him at the edge of my vision, hanging around near one of our delivery lorries. I buy my chicken-and-sweetcorn on brown and carry the plump, cellophane-wrapped packet indoors.

  Later in the afternoon, I’m doing inventory in the warehouse, and there’s Kieran, waiting calmly at the end of the computer accessories aisle. I concentrate on my clipboard, not losing count of the reams of printer paper in front of me. I remember when seeing Kieran used to unnerve me so much that I could scarcely hold a pen. Now I can acknowledge that he is there but at the same time tune him out, so that he becomes just something in the background, a piece of the furniture almost. Amazing what you can cope with, what you can make seem normal, if you put your mind to it.

  By day’s end Kieran is inside my little office, hovering by my desk, just next to the framed photo of Marie. He never says anything, never does anything except look at me.

  It’s enough.

  Clocking-off time. Home again, home again. Kieran rides with me in the car, perched in the passenger seat. There was a time when I used to advise him, jokingly, to strap himself in. I’ve stopped doing that. Got bored. It ceased to amuse.

  Almost as soon as I’m home, it’s back into a set of clean running clothes and I’m off again. Kieran’s there to see me leave. No wave, no goodbye, no “See you!” As usual, he’s somewhere between the car and the front door when I go.

  I pound up to the old race course, where now horses are trained so that they can perform elsewhere. A footpath follows alongside the white rails, then diverges, taking me onto Farmer Stevenson’s land again, through a fallow field, down to the railway cutting, across, along an ancient straight lane that leads to a Norman church, and eventually to the river again, the oozing chocolate-milk river where some swans are swimming, stately and blazing-white, chins drawn to necks like disapproving dowagers, and then the river and I part company and I’m approaching a football field, netless goal posts for the public to use for games of kickabout, and past that there’s a park and then a spread of waste ground …

  Often I head here without realising I’ve headed here. My feet just seem to lead me.

  This is where it happened.

  Here, among stinging nettles and gigantic bursts of purple buddleia, his cries were never heard—here in this waste ground at the edge of town, where people frequently come, walking their dogs, cycling, heading for the football field, and of course running. Lots of people come running this way.

  I pick my way along a worn-smooth path. It’s 42:59, 43:00, 43:01 on my stopwatch.

  The memory is as vivid as if it was yesterday.

  The boy (I didn’t know his name then) and the man with him, the man holding him tightly, grimly, by the arm. I came around a corner and there they were, standing side by side on the path, a tableau. They had heard me coming. The boy in tears, the man stern and angry. Father and son, I thought. And that’s what I told the police later. I thought they were father and son. Son misbehaving, father cross with him, son upset, fretful.

  But I didn’t really think that. One glance at them and I knew something else was going on. The way they were standing, body language, their attitude to each other—none of it seemed right. I realised that, but in the selfsame instant I chose not to realise it.

  The man stepped aside, pulling the boy with him.

  The man’s name is Andrew Wilcox. He had raped and murdered four children already. Kieran was his fifth and final victim.

  They have him in prison now. In solitary for his own safety.

  I ran past.

  I run past where I saw them standing. Sometimes somebody deposits an offering of flowers here. A member of Kieran’s family, I assume. Yes. There. A dozen carnations, brittle-stemmed, petals shrivelled and brown.

  I remember Kieran’s mother in court, when I formally identified Andrew Wilcox as the man I’d seen with her son. Kieran’s mother, strong and emotionless up until that moment, and then all at once breaking down, sobbing, having to be helped from the courtroom. Up until that moment she had managed to keep it all in, but when I testified, when I, the eyewitness, said in answer to the prosecuting barrister’s question that yes, it was the man in the dock, that was the man I saw—then she lost control. Everything she had dammed up came rushing out. Not because of what had been done to her son, but because of what could have been prevented.

  The final straight. Five minutes from home. I think Marie and I have a dinner date this evening. The Motters. Or possibly the Phillipses. There’ll be the usual banter, the usual sly gossip, the usual boasting about possessions, the usual aimless drunken flirting. And someone—I guarantee this—someone at some point will turn to me and say, “It’s so impressive, all that jogging you do, Alex. I wish I had your self-discipline. A round of golf is about the most I can manage.” Or, as it may be, “a stroll down to the shops” or “a game of tennis”. And then: “It’s good to stay fit. I do admire you.”

  And I’ll give some airy, dismissive reply, something along the lines of “Well, I can’t help it, you know. I just have to do it.”

  I don’t know when it was that I first understood that the running kept Kieran at bay. I think it’s just something I became aware of gradually, something I figured out only after it had become obvious. I was running perhaps three, four times a week when he first started appearing. I went insane for a little while, of course. I can say that now quite safely. No other word for it: insane. The doctor tried to help by prescribing tranquillisers, and the psychiatrist tried to help by telling me that it was all perfectly understandable, it was just a manifestation of my feelings of guilt (my “unwarranted” feelings of guilt). Marie left me for a couple of months, but she came back, God bless her. I kept running throughout. Habit. And finally I noticed that whenever I ran, I lost sight of Kieran for a bit. As if he was dogging me but couldn’t keep up with me when I went faster than walking speed.

  So I ran.

  So I run.

  I’ve established how long I needed to run per day. An hour in the morning will shake him off till the afternoon. An hour in the evening will shake him off again till early morning.

  I think this is what he wants.

  The Phillipses tonight. Or is it the Motters?

  At dinner parties and other social o
ccasions I can always tell what friends and acquaintances really think of me, of what I did, or rather didn’t do. Oh certainly I’ve been given all the right expressions of sympathy, that soft litany of reassurance. I’d have done the same in your shoes. I mean, who would have known? But I can tell what these people are really thinking.

  That I’m the priest. That I’m the Levite. The one who passed by when I should have intervened.

  And what will happen when I’m too old to run any more? When my knees have crumbled and my hips are rusted stiff and I’m doing the walking-stick hobble, the Zimmer-frame shuffle? When I’m no longer able to outpace Kieran?

  Then he will be always at my side, my constant companion, my eternally-ten-years-old shadow.

  Well, that will be when it will be.

  In the meantime, I have my penance.

  PIECEWORK

  In Cube 117 on the fourth floor of Civic Housing Block D/83 in the north-western quadrant of Arrondissment 91, Karel Vukovic was awoken by his alarm clock at the regular appointed hour. He abluted, accoutred, ate, and arrived downstairs in the communal vestibule in good time to be picked up by Hans.

  His co-worker, however, was late that morning. Fists thrust into the pockets of his grey overalls, Karel stood by the vestibule doors and stared out through the grimy panes for a first glimpse of the Reclamation Vehicle. The street exhaled early-morning steam from its sewer gratings. Scrawny scavenging dogs scrounged in the gutters. A few weary men and women traipsed along the pavements, either going to work or returning from work, in both cases looking like sleepwalkers. Municipal trams grumbled gracelessly by, their wires crackling.

  Finally, with a sound like fifty circus strongmen rending fifty telephone directories in half, the Reclamation Vehicle appeared at a far-off intersection. Turning the corner, it bumbled rumblingly along the road towards Civic Housing Block D/83. Black and rusted and forward-hunched, the vehicle moved at a sedate pace, farting diesel fumes from the twin exhausts mounted on either side of its cab. Its six, independently-sprung, tractor-size wheels undulated across the road’s uneven, potholed surface. Even though the worst of winter had been and gone, Hans had insisted on keeping the snowplough in place, in case of a late cold snap. Hazard-striped, the snowplough fanned beneath the vehicle’s radiator grille like a wicked black-and-yellow grin.

  The scavenging dogs, having been untroubled by the passing trams, took fright at the approach of this menacing-looking metal behemoth and scurried off. Pedestrians, too, shied away as the Reclamation Vehicle neared them, moving as far from the kerb as they could, hugging the sides of the buildings. Perhaps it was simply the noise and physical appearance of the machine that perturbed them. Equally, perhaps it was their knowledge of what was usually contained within the vehicle’s refrigerated rear.

  Reaching Civic Housing Block D/83, the Reclamation Vehicle came to a halt—or rather halts, plural, because it stopped, then lurched forward a couple of metres, stopped again, lurched another metre, stopped, lurched once more, then at last stood still.

  The passenger-side door swung open, and Karel exited the vestibule, crossed the pavement, and clambered inside.

  Hans had the heat turned up full as usual, and the interior of the cab was like a kiln, replete with the customary hard-baked smells of oil, diesel, sweat, feet, plastic upholstery, cigarettes, pine air-freshener, and the faint, rank odour of corporeal decay.

  Hans was not a morning person and, as soon as Karel was in, he started complaining. “My damned leg,” he said, thumping his right thigh. “Stiff as a pair of rusty scissors this morning. I had to fall out of bed, all but. And putting my overalls on! Hell’s teeth, what a struggle! And did I get any help from Consuela? From that bitch whose tits aren’t even the same size as each other? Did I fuck! Just sat there and laughed at me, she did. Laughed like an old, brown-toothed witch.”

  “And a very good morning to you, Hans,” said Karel.

  “Close the damned door,” Hans snapped back, cranking the handbrake off. “You’re letting all the warm air out.”

  The Reclamation Vehicle was reluctant to go at first. Having made such an effort to cease moving, it was commensurately unwilling to start up again. Hans gunned the accelerator, pumped the clutch, shook the steering wheel, waggled the gearstick, and, when none of this had any discernible effect, pounded the dashboard and cursed. The last technique appeared to do the trick, for the engine gave a sudden grunt of enthusiasm and the vehicle began rolling forwards. Hans let out a sardonic cheer, and they were on their way.

  “Where are we going?” Karel enquired.

  His co-worker pointed to the dash-mounted service computer. An address glimmered in blurry green type on the cracked screen. “Arrondissement 56,” Hans said. “There’s been a party.”

  Slowly they wound their way through the city’s grid-pattern maze, Karel gazing out at the passing buildings, one so like another. He had been with Reclamation for a little over six months, and enjoyed the work. Previously he had been employed in a hospital pushing gurneys and in a butcher’s shop as an apprentice, both jobs less than pleasant but good preparation for this one.

  Hans, by contrast, was a three-decade veteran of Reclamation, and, at eighty-four, was Karel’s senior by nearly sixty years. Parts of Hans, however, were considerably older. His leg, for instance, the one that habitually gave him trouble, was almost a hundred, and his left eye was of an even greater vintage and had occupied the ocular cavities of at least two people before him. It was not quite identical to his right, its white being veinier and its iris a shade of brown lighter, but it was the closest match the Health Bureau had been able to find. Hans claimed that sometimes the eye showed him scenes from bygone eras, as though memories of sights its former owners had seen were trapped in its vitreous humour like ghosts. Historical images would unexpectedly manifest in his vision, past overlapping present, or so he said. A horse-drawn carriage might all of a sudden appear along a street busy with modern traffic, threading its way blithely through the buses and trams and cars; or an old redbrick building might become visible at the spot where a modern concrete one stood, the former superimposed on the latter, as in a double-exposure photograph.

  Karel was unsure whether to believe Hans about this phenomenon or not. He had heard similar stories from other old people and was equally sceptical of them. But then, being young and relatively intact, he knew little about what it was like to have the body-parts of others incorporated into your own body. He had lost his right index finger in an accident with a meat grinder at the butcher’s, and the substitute ached sometimes and looked noticeably out of place because it was stubbier and darker-complexioned than its companion digits, but so far, fingers crossed, he had not had any strange experiences with it.

  He often wondered what it would be like to be really old. Not in your eighties like Hans, but in your second century, or even your third. Not everyone was expected to attain such an age. There were only so many limb or organ substitutions a body could take before it became difficult to maintain physical integrity, and after a while most workers confounded the Health Bureau’s best efforts to keep them in one piece. Anti-rejection fluids could not prevent incohesion indefinitely, and in the end the strain on the system became too great. The physiology ceased to cope with being comprised from so many different types of flesh and would literally begin to fall apart. Some men and women, though, kept on going. Skin crisscrossed with suture scars, like human jigsaws, living quilts patched together from countless different sources, they continued to work and thrive and be productive on the city’s behalf, and there was no reason to think they would not do so for ever.

  Karel, a conscientious and civic-minded young man, was firmly resolved to be one of them.

  The sky had lightened by the time Karel and Hans reached Arrondissment 56, which is to say that the slice of grey visible between the building-tops had gone from the colour of porridge to the colour of cooked chicken-flesh. Little of the sun’s radiance made it as far down as ground-level,
filtered as it was by various layers of smoke and shadow and cloud. Indeed, for most workers the sun was a rumour whose truth was occasionally confirmed by the glimpse of a pallid yellow disc hovering far overhead and a just-perceptible tinge of warmth in the air during the summer months.

  Outside the building that was their destination, Hans fought to bring the refractory Reclamation Vehicle to a halt again. He swore loudly each time the brake slipped and the engine re-engaged and the vehicle juddered a little further forwards. “Buggering bastard thing!” he yelled. “Useless, obstinate piece of shit!” Finally the vehicle came to rest, and Hans switched off the ignition with the air of someone who would rather have been pulling a trigger. “I swear to God,” he said to Karel, “one of these days this pile of junk is going to be the death of me.”

  “Possibly,” Karel replied, “but if so, the Health Bureau will bring you back again. If not as yourself, as part of someone else.”

  Hans acknowledged this with a grimace. “All praise to the Health Bureau. It makes sure there’s no rest for the wicked, eh?”

  “No rest at all. Speaking of which, shall we get going?”

  “Bah. You youngsters. So damn eager.”

  Burdened with shovels, mops, cloths, bottles of bleach and disinfectant, rubber gloves and boots, and a dozen heavy-duty plastic sacks, Karel and Hans entered the building and crossed to the lifts.

  The lift they took ascended only as far as the thirtieth floor. There, they stepped out and were met by a uniformed security guard who demanded to see documentation. The guard had ears, a nose and at least one lip that he had not been born with, the C.V. of a lifetime spent in violent trades. He wore the disfiguring stitch-marks with pride, as a badge of his profession.

  Karel and Hans handed over their identification cards and work permits, which the security guard scanned first with his squinting, piggy eyes, then with an electronic wand that was plugged into a computer console.