Dead leaves clattered on the paths. The low sky trailed through withered trees. The ice cream stall was boarded and bolted.
“Do you like it here?” I asked Robin, crouching down to help him on with the mittens that hung from elasticated straps.
“It’s good,” he said, breathing a little grey cloud at me.
“Have you ever been here before?”
“I don’t know” he said. “Have you taken me?”
We walked across the damp grass to the swings. I pushed him slowly. The wet chains creaked. Ahead of us, the paddling pool had been drained. A bowl of flaking blue concrete, filled with leaves and the sludge of autumn. I remembered the children’s voices, the water wings, the bright spray.
“I thought Mummy might have come here with you once,” I said. “In the spring.”
“It would look different then?”
“Yes. All the birds would be singing. The sun shining. I thought Mummy might have taken you, perhaps with a nice uncle.”
“A nice uncle?”
“You know, a grown-up friend.”
Robin tilted his head back from the swing to smile at me. He seemed to think it was some kind of joke.
“Come on,” I said.
A gardener was tending a bonfire beside the damp greenhouses, raking the endless fall of leaves into a wheelbarrow, tipping them over the flames to produce more smoke. Robin and I walked over to him.
“Autumn’s a popular season,” he told us. “You’d think people would want sunshine, but they seem to like this melancholy place.”
“What about spring?”
“That doesn’t go down so well,” he said. There was a dewdrop on his nose. It looked authentic, but as he raised his arm to wipe it on his ragged sleeve, I heard the faint whir of a faulty servo. Not snot, I supposed, but machine oil.
“But you do do spring?”
The smoke spiralled into his face. He didn’t blink.
“Spring? Oh, yes. A week or so every couple of years.”
“And when was the last time?”
He shrugged. “You’ll have to speak to the mainframe about that. I don’t have a long-term memory. I’m just a gardener, you know.” The dewdrop was growing on his nose again: it made you want to sniff.
Robin got bored as we walked along the aimless paths, around the boating lake. The boats were locked up for the winter. The sign above the boathouse said BOATS FOR HIRE. Close to, I could see that the peeling paint was actually carefully moulded plastic. I gazed across the black water of the lake. I checked the copy of the picture in my pocket.
“—don’t-- ”
Robin looked up, surprised to hear his Mummy’s voice. I shrugged, patted his head. This is grownup business, Son. Meena turned and smiled. She said Don’t.
I found the spot. Inevitably, it was a disappointment. Here in a different season, with minty smell of decay and the wind ratting the litter baskets. I gazed down at the picture again. Turning, smiling, saying Don’t. There, in sunlight, she looked happy and more real.
Robin was busy clambering up onto the park bench beside me. He was a little unsteady as he stood up. I lifted him in my arms, surprised at his lightness, his weight.
“Will you take me home?” he asked, looking me right in the eye.
I gave Robin a kiss at the stasis centre, ruffled his hair before he scampered off through the sliding doors. I waved. Back at the weekend, I promise. A different woman at reception smiled. Perhaps I should follow Robin through those sliding doors. Thirty years from now, I could return to Meena, see the sags and wrinkles she couldn’t afford to put right. Know her for just what she was, laugh freely in her aged face. But the thought was only a game. Although there was nothing to stop those who could afford it from going into long-term stasis, everyone knew from the bitter experience of the last hundred years that the future was a joke. The only guarantees were that the climate would be worse, and that everything apart from wristwatches, computers and disposable umbrellas would be more expensive.
When I got back into the estate, I saw that the lips had gone from the hoarding. There was a picture there now. A tropical beach. But the voice was still there. Escape, it whispered. Treat yourself to the one luxury that money can’t buy. Invisibly, the lips smiled. Well, maybe only just... Escape. Beckoning palms, white sand. Escape. There, in the car, I couldn’t help laughing. The Volvo innocently played me a little Dvorak, thinking I was happy.
Meena and I often talked about who we might be. Do you feel like a billionaire? Well, no, neither do I. If one of us was rich, it was probably Meena, we decided. She was more decisive, I was more romantic. We were noticing things about ourselves as much as about each other. The whole idea of this process of discovery was charmingly odd. How Meena liked some time alone walking on the beach each afternoon, my interest in the music the entertainment box provided. The foods we liked, the things we hated, the way we made love.
And were we in love? There was a sense of delicious honesty, sitting out on the rattan chairs with the palm trees dripping and the sea still grey after the afternoon rain, talking about ourselves as though we were other people. The things that we surprised each other with came as much a surprise to ourselves.
Yes, we agreed, holding hands as the sun came out and the jungle began to steam. This is a kind of love, a unique childhood innocence, the love you first feel for someone. When you really don’t know them. When you ache with the specialness, the closeness, the new sharing. I mean, whoever said that love was about knowledge? And we vowed that we would remember this time, carry it with us like a jewel through whatever lay ahead.
Meena and I ran to the sea before dinner. We made love in the white bridal foam. Then Meena swam towards the sinking sun. She stood up and waved, then cried out as her foot struck something.
I helped her hop back to the bungalow. It was a deep, clean gash in the sole of her right foot. She must have caught the edge of a block of coral that the waves had washed in. She sat patiently as blood and seawater tricked over the veranda. Our little monkey ran out along the wooden rail. We had to smile when he saw Meena and pawed his face, chattering with what sounded like concern.
I called for Lin. You’d think they’d see to this sort of thing, I thought irritably, thumping the digits on the box. With the money we must be paying. But she arrived amazingly quickly. This time, her sarong was green, shot through with golden yellow. She sprayed Meena’s foot with something from the bag she was carrying.
“It’ll need stitches,” she said. Meena leaned forward to watch with curiosity when Lin got to work with silver and tread, as though it was someone else’s foot.
Lin dropped the needle. It fell between a gap in the veranda boards. Lin sighed, then sat back and took a blade from her bag. She used it to cut open both of her wrists, then grasped the dry flaps and peeled the skin away from each hand. Beneath, there was clean steel.
“It’ll be a lot quicker this way,” she said, snipping her fingers like scissors.
When Lin had sprayed on Meena’s bandage, she pulled the skin back onto her hands, smoothing out the wrinkles.
“It’s so much easier to hold things, metal to metal,” she said, smiling, looking cool and beautiful in her sarong. “I really don’t know how you humans manage.”
I found out about spring in the park. The last time they’d run it had been two months before. A special promotion, linked in with a new fashion design. Spring Is For Lovers...Of Style. Well, how ironic. I asked the park mainframe if it kept a list of visitors. Hauling out some ancient privacy programme from the depths of its memory, it told me to bugger off.
So I started to follow Meena. I hadn’t made a sale all week anyway, and was running out of fresh prospects. I’d lost the edge. It’s a hard life, being in sales—everyone’s at it. It’s the only job left now that the machines see to all the important stuff.
The Volvo enjoyed tailing Meena’s Casio. It took to playing Mahler. One minute, the music was yearning, the next crashingly ironic, I
couldn’t decide whether I liked it or not.
Meena went to pre-death receptions. She attended performance reviews at Head Office. She visited clients. I sat in the Volvo under sick skies, watching from a discreet distance amid the rubble and the chattering hoardings, the tightly fenced estates. Mahler rumbled on, symphony after symphony. I gazed at my copy of the photograph, propped on the steering wheel. Meena. Turning. Smiling. Don’t. The clients Meena saw had money, big houses. After she’d ducked back into the Casio and driven off through the rain, I had ten or so minutes to check at the door before the Volvo lost contact. Ding, dong, nice place you’ve got here, Sir. And when was the last time you thought about security? But they were all old, old. I could tell that all they truly were interested in was dying. So, for the Hell of it, I started trying to sell that to them instead. And the joke was that they were all interested. Sure, Meena was busy seeing a lot prospects, but sure as death itself she wasn’t closing her sales.
Meena criss-crossed the city in her Casio. Apart from wildly exaggerating her success rate, she did exactly what she told me she did when I quizzed her each evening. I thought, so this is your life, Meena. Another prospect, another meeting. And just exactly when is that you smile?
I couldn’t sleep that night. This island, the false beach, Lin a robot...
The moonlight fell brightly through the window nearest our bed. The jungle beyond was black, white. The trunk of the nearest palm was gashed by shadows, like the clawmarks of some huge animal. And clinging to it with tiny hands, motionless, precise, was our little monkey. Gazing through our window, watching us with his gleaming eyes.
At dawn, with Meena still sleeping, I took a bucket and walked along the shore until I found a scatter of rockpools. The morning light was still incomplete, misty grey. I fished for little crabs amid the anemones, dropped them into my bucket where they clambered over each other’s backs like the celebrants of an orgy. When I’d collected a dozen or so, I squatted over a wide flat rock, tendrils of the waves running between my toes. I broke the shells open one by one. The first three crabs were pink inside, smelling of flesh and salt. But the forth tried to scuttle away, trailing a silver necklace of circuits. I hit it again. It gave off a thin wisp of smoke, and was still.
When Meena awoke, and after we had made love, we took the jeep for a picnic in the jungle. It found us a waterfall, a clear pool to dive in. Shining rocks, drifting clouds and rainbows. Far above, impassive as a God, the great mountain at the centre of the island was half veiled in cloud. As we sat like savages in the humid shade, eating with our fingers and drinking chilled wine from the bottle, we wondered if you could really touch the sky from up there. We planned an expedition to find out one day before the holiday ended, knowing that time was already growing shorter, knowing that we never would.
“Look!” Meena pointed as we climbed back into the jeep. “Up there.”
I gazed up into the green canopy.
“Can you see?”
I nodded. And after a few moments, I could.
“Our monkey,” she said.
He was looking down at us from a thick vine. Those wise eyes.
“That’s not possible,” I said, shaking my head.
So I arranged a party. I invited all our friends. Meena said, But you hate parties. I insisted. I fixed the catering, bought the booze with money we didn’t have. I wanted everyone here, everyone that she knew.
I was drunk before the guests arrived. It was a strange feeling, wandering, smiling, saying Hello, knowing that one of these people was probably The One. That here in my flat at this very moment, drinking my wine and tracing the circles of dust were The Hands That Touched, The Lips That Kissed. The room swayed; the flat was having a good old time crammed with all these bodies, playing rock and roll. I watched Meena as she squeezed her way from group to group, looking for those secret signs, the smiles, the brush of fingers. Plain avoidance.
But there was nothing. I’d made a fool of myself. I went to throw up. I was swaying against the pull of the room. People were looking my way. I staggered into the cool of Robin’s bedroom, slumped down on his tiny bed. Over the music, I yelled at the flat to close the bloody door. Then I lay back in the linen darkness. Mickey Mouse looked down at me, smiling.
Meena came in. She had left the door open and there was silence outside. The party had ended, and the air was stale yellow from all the drink and the talk. I must have slept.
“What the hell is the matter with you, Marius?”
“Too much to drink.”
“I don’t mean that.”
“Do you love me?”
“Look,” she said. “I’ve got a busy day tomorrow. A new customer wants to suffocate in a vat of Venusian atmosphere, something original and expensive for a change.”
“You used to wear things when we made love. Said it made you feel more naked.”
“You should have some water, take a paintab.”
“What’s gone wrong with us?”
“This isn’t really the time to talk, is it?”
“Are you seeing someone else?”
She gazed down at me. I could hear the dark silence of Robin’s little room hissing the word Yes.
“Meena, are you?”
“Am I what?”
“Seeing someone else?”
“No,” she said. “Yes. Make up your own answer.”
“I need to know the truth.”
“What difference would that make? You can’t imagine what it’s like, Marius, living with you.”
“We used to be happy.”
“Yeah,” she said. “We used to be happy.”
She turned away.
“No, wait!” I shouted. My voice made the room spin.
She folded her arms. “What exactly is it that you want, Marius?”
“I found...there’s a photograph of you, in a park. Turning and smiling. You look so happy. I found it in your second drawer.”
“My drawer. How fucking typical.”
“Meena!”
The flat slammed Robin’s door behind her.
On another day, we went into town. The flying boat had just landed—more new arrivals, with people waiting for them on the quay. The lips on the big hoarding breathed Welcome across the bay. Feeling vaguely envious, Meena and I stood and watched for a moment, then wandered on through the narrow streets. There were little shops everywhere, windchimes and mementoes drooping outside in the brilliant heat, interiors that reeked of mystery and leather and donkey dung. Of course, there were other tourists here, walking arm in arm, all deeply tanned, deeply in love. It spoilt things somewhat, to see your own feelings mirrored so easily in others. People only visit the town here late in their holidays, a ancient shopkeeper told us after we’d bargained for a soapstone box. When the novelty starts to wear off, he added. I looked at him sharply. Wet eyes, a slack, toothless mouth. Would the tour company ever programme a robot to say something like that? I could even smell his breath. No, I decided. No.
We sat and took coffee in a white colonial square, resting, assessing our purchases, knowing that everything else would soon be a memory. We felt we’d bought wisely with our money. Not that the cash we had told us anything about what we could normally afford; every visitor to the island was allocated the same amount.
After a while, a couple sat down with us at the tin table. They were both blonde, handsome. I wondered if Meena and I could possibly give off the same scent of easy money. And I vaguely resented their intrusion—I was starting to count the remaining hours of our stay together—but they proved to be friendly, amusing. Of course, conversation was limited by our lack of memory, but that proved to be a surprising advantage. There was little scope for back-biting, point scoring. It was an egalitarian society here on the island—everyone could pretend to be a billionaire with reasonable conviction. So we laughed and joked together, fantasised outrageously about our real lives, wandered around more of the shops, watched the natives at work along the harbour until another marvello
us tropical sunset began to tear the sky to glowing shreds.
A headache woke me in the morning. I was still dressed, crammed into Robin’s cot with Mickey Mouse leering down at me. I hauled myself out and leaned against the window. This one was clear; we hadn’t been able to afford the special glass for Robin’s room. Not that I was complaining. As far as it was possible to make out from the dismal sky, the sun had been up for some hours. And the flat sounded quiet, empty. Meena had probably left hours ago. No chance of following her today.
I rubbed at my face, probed the weary bags under my eyes. Oh, Meena, Meena. Why can’t we just fall back into love? Down on the estate, the lips were back on the poster. They seemed to smile specifically at me through a black flurry of rain. Escape. Treat yourself to the one luxury that money can’t buy. Well, maybe only just... Yeah, I grinned back. If only.
I padded around at Robin’s tidy little room. All the toys put away, no fingerprints or crayon marks on the walls, no Playdough sticking to the carpet. The poor kid; he was hardly real, hardly here at all. And whose fault was that, I wondered. Whose fault was that? I picked up Teddy from on top of the wardrobe. He grinned at me and said, “Hello, little fella, want to play?” I put him back down. He slumped, looking disappointed.
I opened Robin’s top drawer. His tiny clothes. Red dungarees, white socks, blue mittens. Just like Meena, he felt more real to me this way. No sulks, no moaning Daddy Daddy, no wanting stuff we could never afford, making us feel like inadequate parents. Not that he was a bad kid, but still. A couple of drawers below, I found some of his baby things. I held up a romper suit, still stained around the front from some battle in the high chair. Jesus, had he ever been that small. As I moved to put it back, I heard a voice. I glared at the teddy bear to shut up, thinking for a moment that it was him.
“—hey Mu—”
But it was Robin’s voice. I looked down into the drawer. Beneath an old bib, I saw daylight, some photographs held together by an elastic band.
“—watch m—”
Nowhere: Volume II of the Collected Short Stories and Novellas of Ian R. MacLeod Page 6