‘I don’t think it can possibly do what you want it to do, Daniel,’ said Tom.
And I felt my heart lurch, felt dizzy almost, at the tender reproachfulness in the other man’s voice, Tom’s hair shining in the soft light. And I thought, I thought to myself, small urgent ideas of movement, of rushing up and taking him by the shoulders and kissing him softly at first and then harder, more hungry – but I hesitated, and ran my finger along the trays, making a hollow sound. Not that I cared if Tom did not want me, that I might be rejected – but Tom might want; there was a charge in the air, no falsifying that, either Tom’s great dislike of the whole mission of this place, its solemnness, made him want something else, escape, a fight, or, or, and I looked for his eyes, as if that would help, Tom having, I saw now, more to him than was visible, smooth and bold like a ship with half of it passing beneath the waves – something else then. Stopping me. Órla? Regretfully no, I was not so considerate, and anyway what, just over a month together, I wouldn’t be the wronging one, I thought, but an early disruption for what might not justly last. The room then; yes, I thought that was it, I leaned back on the trays and looked heavenward, or at the narrow quadrangle of the ceiling, the room, cupboard and greater part, held sanctuary, quiet space. Not like a church but anyway still calm air that if broken by my passion in this way would never be the same again. I saw it quite clearly, every time I returned to the cupboard as I must almost every day of my work here, it would be the cupboard where I kissed Tom (and where either Tom kissed me back, or Tom pulled back shocked a little, or Tom reacted badly – this I did not think would be likely) and forever after I would lose my peace in here, lose the tranquil security, lose the absence, utterly, of violent images. It might already be too late for that, even the idea of a sexual frisson was sharp to the touch, and I moved as if frightened of the space suddenly sidestepping out into the room, which was equally calmer than me in its inhuman, padded way but more space and the instance between the two of us, whatever it was, was –
‘Oh good, it’s finished scanning the object, nearly there on the materials,’ I said.
‘Does it take long after that?’ said Tom, looking around.
‘A little bit, it’s not a speedy process, it’s an accurate one,’ I said.
Quietness, the supreme quietness of a soundproofed room, only with two of us in it, firmly apart, waiting for a device to finish processing.
‘Are you willing to give your life to this?’ said Tom.
‘What a strange question . . .’ Though it was not phrased as a question. I tried to keep querulousness out of my voice. The proof was coming, soon, though, the thing that would make Tom realise. The epiphany of the copied good.
Not the Thing Itself
After a while the printer made the sequence of beeps that meant it was done and to take the replicated object out of the creation tray and put it into the finisher, which generally snipped around and freshened edges that needed freshening. I made sure to do this so that Tom did not see the slightly ugly object before it was truly done.
Then the process was finished.
‘There,’ I said putting the replicant into his hand. ‘Tell me if you can see a difference,’ I said, passing him the original.
‘No soundbox inside, though it almost feels like it tried to make that, since it’s the same weight,’ he said, holding them one in each hand, judging, ‘I can’t see anything else.’
I took the copy and looked into its eyes. The glitter swirled; the printer had even added a liquid into the cavity of the eye so that it would do so, judging how to do it I did not know – from some minute motion of the original during the scanning process? If the printer made a copy of a clock it would not be expected to keep time, the mechanics all being on the inside, and beyond the knowledge of the scanners, beyond the power, but this, it could do, it could try to get the slightest movement on the surface to run true. I felt a thrill – some hidden ability in my machine had revealed itself, late at night during this illicit use, as if it only would under these circumstances. I thought of a copied clock with hands that moved by some impossible means, though they wouldn’t, there had to be something. Then of the Northern Lights moving like fairy skirts, something I dimly understood as beams moving sinuously along unseen currents, and then of clocks with little spirits inside, turning the pieces. Fey magic. In short I did not think of Tom at all, until he clapped me on the back and said we needed to get home.
The Sky Falls and My Heart Is Glad
Up the stairs and down the front steps of the drab university building, crossing the small square and turning down the back alley where the leaves lay in their long piles, perfect for kicking – I was so elated, I didn’t care what Tom thought, I launched myself at the leaves and kicked them, though they were damp and fluttered down in an unsatisfying way. I had clapped the copied kelpie under my armpit, while Tom had the original – I noticed him holding it in one hand by the head, and tried hard not to work this into some symbol of Tom’s mood as it pertained to myself, instead to be carefree, to kick another big mouldy clag of leaf litter, while all we passed through was flattened to a dingy orange in the street lights. We travelled in our strange moods through first the alley and the back lanes running homewards, until we reached the start of the area of town were we lived, where it was partially student-stuffed tenement flats, then opening up into elegant roads, single family occupancy almost-mansions, or offices or nurseries. We chose the mews streets, the dimmer parts, as if still moving towards a secret plot, needing to go unseen.
‘It’s hailing,’ said Tom, holding out one hand. The hail came in a sudden rattle down upon us a second later.
‘I didn’t think it’d be cold enough,’ I said, having to raise my voice. A piece hit Tom in the eye.
‘Ow, fuck!’
‘Oh, quick, in here, there’ll be shelter,’ I opened a garden gate. Huge trees here in a garden backing a grand house not yet broken up, I think. We sheltered under the thick arms of a beech and listened to the din. The hail danced off the branches and landed around us, the ground quickly turning white, there were so many of them, small though, the size, when I stooped to pick one up, of nothing comparable. Buckshot, though what did I know what buckshot looked like? Certainly not small and whitely melting. Larger hailstones were cracking off the cars parked in the lanes. I wondered if they would break a windscreen.
‘Do you think it’ll break the windscreens?’ asked Tom.
‘Wouldn’t that be amazing,’ I said, looking at him. Tom laughed.
‘All right,’ he said. A pause. Quiet rattling sounds. ‘You know, I feel like I know you a little better now. I hadn’t – before.’
Fuck, I thought, that pause between hadn’t and before, amid the gravelly sounds of the hail falling. I stood in silence, let my gaze go lax. Then Tom crouched and scooped a handful of the stuff, now in a layer an inch thick, and put it in his mouth, and crunched on it.
‘Ehhh!’ I said.
‘It just came right out of the sky, didn’t it?’
I laughed. We stood for a minute more; the din began to lessen, and stopped all together. We walked back, almost grabbing each other for balance, rolling on marbles, homeward to the house on the not especially notable street, the place where we lived, darting through dark shadows sharpened by everything streetlit around them, and, ahead, Tom’s little rescue on her haunches under the shelter of the entranceway yowling to get in.
‘There we go,’ said Tom to Mrs Boobs, letting her go ahead, and I on the step feeling in need of rescue myself, of something to brace against, attempted to stuff back inside myself all the feelings, hopping, roiling about in me, a man of autumn weather suddenly, fallen leaves, a ragged and chilled end to decadence, with hope and desire the last indulgences to go – great blocks or sometimes little falling pieces hard and pure, watching Tom go in ahead, following his pet, into the smells – foost, bodies, bleach, popcorn, tonight – and the closeness of this place. I shut the door promptly behind me, and hurrie
d into the kitchen to make tea.
Reckon
‘How will we tell them apart?’ asked Tom.
‘Put them on either side of the fridge,’ I said. ‘What do you think?’
‘I like it,’ said Tom. ‘Listen – I kind of like them. I mean, the fact you can do that. I didn’t give it enough credit before. What you do, I might not fully grasp the technology or the point, but I like that we did this.’
‘Why, I asked, ‘why do you like it?’
‘Because it’s your thing,’ said Tom, looking around, ‘Your – passion. You’ve got a life’s work, a mission. Who has that? I don’t.’ He picked up the toy, the copy, and held it against his head, as if trying to read its mind or perhaps wipe his face with it.
‘You didn’t like the copier room,’ I said.
‘No.’
‘I can see why people might think it’s oppressive.’
‘But you don’t feel like that. Too used to it.’
‘From the minute I first walked in, when we’d just fitted the flooring and the shelves weren’t in, I was happy there. To be in that place, it’s just – calm.’
‘I think the copy’s better than the original,’ Tom said, staring out now at the garden, replica in hand, cat weaving around his legs.
‘Why’d you say that?’
‘Well, because it doesn’t have the wifi device spying on us. It’s just a lump.’ He placed the object back on the fridge and looked between them both. ‘Yeah, life is weird,’ he said, ‘I think I’ll be thinking about your room for a while, trying to get my head around it, before I can have an opinion. I normally know right away, if something’s right or wrong.’
‘You have a strong moral compass?’
Tom nodded, and looked at me. Silence. The fridge hummed. Looked at me.
‘Think we could burn the original?’ he said. ‘I think we should burn it.’
‘Yes. Outside, or on the stove, or . . .’
We settled on lighting it on the stove then carrying it outside to smoke and crackle on one of the paving slabs just beyond the back door. The fur caught quickly.
‘No EU standards here,’ I said, wincing.
When the fire got down to the soundbox, it began to sing. The normal grating jingle it had given out before; only our listening to it in the circumstances we had set in motion gave it a kind of poignancy, a feeling immediately unrooted by my thinking that it was poignant. The two of us stood around the tiny fire, staring down. Cheap sentiment, I thought. Chemical smoke poured out of it, and incongruous sounds. Tom poked it with a stick. I looked up at the woolly sky, trying not to cough.
‘It’s going to a better place, the world of silence,’ I said.
‘You’re so weird, Daniel.’
‘You’re the one that wanted to set fire to the original.’
‘No, I like it. It’s like, we made the better version, now we can rid the world of this menace,’ he said, ‘one of them, anyway. I think there are a few more. It’s just a prototype though.’
‘You didn’t say that. A prototype! Oh well, there it goes. Try not to breathe in the toxic shit.’
The singing continued longer than you might expect. I hoped the neighbours heard, and wondered about it, as the plastic of the soundbox melted off, as the wires sparked, and the sound died away. In the hush I felt empty. And then, standing there looking at the smoke severing from the burnt body and going skywards on its lonesome, I began to feel good.
Reckoning
Inside I washed my face and neck at the sink, and stripped to my boxers and with urgent disgust threw my clothes immediately in the washing machine. Tom washed his hands at the sink. ‘Good idea, can I chuck my stuff in?’ he said. Tom stripped. Bent a little loading his clothes. The dimples on his back, straightening up again. I methodically got out the detergent and poured out a measure and set the machine, and stood back, watching. Tom would move away soon. And I wobbled my head. He would go to the small ground floor shower and close the door, and steam would come out from under the door. And I wondered.
‘You okay?’ said Tom. ‘I hope smoke didn’t get in your lungs.’
I looked around. Tom’s body beside me, larger and stronger than mine, breathing in and out, hair dishevelled.
‘Ah, no, nothing. Just – what a night, eh?’
Tom in his boxers. Tom next to me, hairs rising on the side of my arm, Tom looking concerned, perhaps, or just puzzled, so hard it is to know beyond the small expressions that our faces can make, have learned how to make, what huge swath of self there is at work in this moment, and the next. The gears of the mind that we suppose are at work, but have only some control over. Against the horrors I wanted, but I had already said something flippant enough to let the other man leave, coward, and there he was going, just as I had guessed and maybe even wanted. Tom shook his head; the last few pieces of hail, miraculously unmelted in his golden hair, were unseated and scattered across the linoleum.
‘Well, off to the shower,’ he said.
But he waited. I said ‘I’m going too. Uh, upstairs,’ I added, with a little nervous laugh. Tom looked at me, again a beat too long, smiled slowly, and left the room.
Entry, Entrances
At Twelfth Night in the year 18— James Lennoxlove went to a ball at a neighbour’s house and saw a murder. This is how I was drawn back into the diary, which had languished on my table overwhelmed by the lives of living people and more incarnate crushes. But after idly reading the first line of that entry, I could not help but pursue, falling heavily into my chair to read on.
At Twelfth Night I went to a ball at Gilmour’s house and came away at midnight in mortal terror and shaking all over after seeing the murder of a maid, committed by if I am correct a groomsman of another guest, the Duke of H—. Even tho I have no thought that anyone should read this, I do not wish to share his name here, in case it is read. The Duke is a powerful man, and I do not know what his feelings might be on the matter, whether it would inconvenience him or cause him some other pains to have the crime come to attention though I know what is right is justice. I have not been well in my mind all night and it is now the morning and I must face the day, but first I give this account. I pray for everyone and the murdered girl most of all, and to know what I must do now.
In Lennoxlove’s telling, unusually disordered as it was, I could see it all: the darkness of the courtyard, back from the fires at the entranceway, the cold mire of horseshit and straw, the stable door open, him looking for something he had left in the saddlebag of his horse, and spying the terrible act, and leaping on the horse, a kick, riding it roughly away without a word to his hosts, and how he thought he heard a shout behind him, though it could have been merrymaking, or someone asking where he was off to in such a hurry. The only thing I did not know was what Lennoxlove looked like, to better imagine his look of fear, his body in the saddle as he gripped the reins and steered the spooked animal down the dark frosty lanes towards his home five miles away. He had never described himself, only other people, which he clearly enjoyed. The neighbour, Gilmour, had ‘a high forehead and nervous complexion, a kind mouth, a rag of handshake’, his wife ‘comely like a calm goose, and I suppose such a thing exists’. So for expediency I imagined Tom in his place.
Lennoxlove wrote in great excitement and despair at what he had seen, and I wondered how I would have responded, if I’d have gone to pieces, rushed in to stop the murder or apprehend the killer, stormed into the great hall – I presumed, the great hall, shining with candelabra – to yell out for all to come and witness what had been done. I played these scenarios and variations in my mind, skirting each time around the act itself, as Lennoxlove had done, sparingly, only giving the detail that it was ‘done with a knife’ and that the groom ‘looked very ill about it, like he was going to faint with the horror, but he was also laughing in bursts, like a mare’, all of which clearly had distressed Lennoxlove and caused his terrible fear and flight.
After reading this entry, I took a short brea
k and opened the bedroom window. It was blue outside. Cold, though never as cold as the cold of my childhood, and probably never would be again, barring freak weather. A cold pale hand on a hot knife, I thought, and shuddered. I stared out at the houses opposite, stolid in the falling, grainy blue, almost all divided like this one, though with more expense and formality, upgraded flats instead of single high-ceilinged loose floorboarded rooms with locks on the doors. Their large stately gardens being either left to gentle neglect – red and yellow trees grown wildly too large, shedding leaves that someone or other might scrape up, eventually – or divided into purse-mouthed squares of gravel or patio paving. A single star caught my attention winking in the slowly vanishing distance between a branch and part of a rooftop. I wondered at the lives being lived at this present moment in this district of the city, somewhere between affluent and haphazard like my own, not thinking overly complex thoughts about them in case I should imagine them knifing each other on mezzanines or by floor-length windows, fresh corpses slithering wetly down the panes like large, clothed slugs – I turned my head, wiped it, turned back – then thought about the lives of those for whom the houses had been built, roughly around the time of Lennoxlove’s day, a much easier idea unaffected by the account I had just read, sanitised by images taken from various TV miniseries: pristine cuffs, beautiful flowers in small china vases, writing sets, turns about a room that was this one, but repurposed, for use by a plucky young man with a dramatic and love-filled future just waiting to be entered.
But I’m young yet, I thought. Ish. And though James is dead, who’s to say it wasn’t like that for him, just as perfect and beautifully framed? Aside from that one aberration.
Bitterhall Page 4