Nowhere: Volume II of the Collected Short Stories and Novellas of Ian R. MacLeod

by Ian R. MacLeod

  To the extent that I can ever judge these things, I don’t imagine, that “Re-crossing the Styx” is a particularly dark story by my standards. But it clearly is about death, and, even more, about growing old. Which, and as the story probably illustrates, I find the more alarming prospect. I’ve never been on a cruise, and I’m sure I’m being hard on the people, especially the elderly, who take such holidays. But, with a writer’s usual callousness, and as the idea of this story seemed to work pretty well with the zombie dead afloat on the Glorious Nomad, I was more than happy to ditch any moral qualms and push on.

  The trigger for “Re-crossing the Styx” came from reading the entertaining and beautifully written Narrow Dog to Indian River by Terry Darlington, which describes a gloriously foolhardy attempt to navigate the rivers and canals of American Deep South in an English narrowboat. Something about the evident disgust which Darlington, a retiree himself, describes the elderly communities he, his wife and his dog encountered in Florida struck a deep chord. That, and I’d been reading a fair amount of classic American crime fiction, and really wanted to try out something resembling The Postman Only Rings Twice where a hapless man gets led on by stupid passion into an even stupider crime.

  As I was writing, I thought that the story I was telling was twisty and bitter and funny. Although I now suspect that, despite the sunny locales, its hues are probably slightly dark.

  ON THE SIGHTING OF OTHER ISLANDS

  The island which floated above mother ocean was composed of many things. Part metal, part forest, part city, part mountain, part orchard and meadow, it cast a shadow across the waters beneath and generated tides, currents, storms; it cast out nets of emerald lightning. Down in the barnacle dark of its turbulent underside, nameless sea-behemoths, flocks of blind seabirds and silvered shoals fought over its many kinds of spoor. Roots, chutes and fallings of metal sluiced, fed, or were torn apart by the endless clashings of waves. From some angles and sufficient distance, it seemed as if the island was somehow supporting itself on shimmering legs, or had just emerged from the sea, or was falling endlessly towards it, but from most, even as the eye strained to take in the scale of what it was seeing, the island appeared to be what it truly was: a bulkingly beautiful, yet seemingly impossible, vision made real.

  Those who lived on the island never saw it from such a distance. To them, it was land and it was their home, and beneath there was only mother ocean, and the drop which separated the two was too vast and terrible to contemplate. For mother ocean, it was commonly believed, was endless, and the only qualifications to this watery infinity were those rare events known as sightings. In the island’s topmost towers, the question of when and where the next sighting would occur, and then what it might mean, occupied the minds of the greatest of the dreamers. Some who lived and worked in the more mundane lowerlands claimed that the dreamers actually possessed maps of mother ocean, although such documents would surely have consisted almost entirely of ever-changing greys and greens and blues, and were thus unfeasibly hard to envisage. Others speculated that the dreamers steered the island in some direction or another in active search of new sightings, although it was mostly accepted that the island steered itself—if, indeed, it was consciously steered by anything at all. Strangely, the more common assumption was that sightings only occurred because the dreamers called them into existence out of a conjunction of their various slumbers, and that, once they had drifted beyond the horizon’s haze, these other islands vanished back into the watery, sleepy stuff from which they had entirely been made.

  After each sighting, the dreamers in their towers would put away their sacred telescopes and set about long and stringent debate as to what this particular conjunction of stone, roof, precarious field and hazy mountain signified. From there, decisions on such crucial matters as the planning of the harvest, levels of hemline and the financing of new sea-drains were then made. Over the innumerable lives and sightings through the which the island measured its history, there had been many different visions with which the dreamers had had to contend. There had been islands glimpsed at dawn, and islands which appeared to drop from the nowhere heat of cloudless midday. There had been islands which looked to be transparent, or perhaps were made entirely of smoke, or possibly ice or glass. There had been islands of iron, and islands seemingly banded with precious stone. Sometimes, and yet more memorably, there had been several islands at once, which, even in the brief period in which they could be studied, had doubled and rejoined. Most spectacularly of all within the memory of recent generations, there had been the strange, far lights of an island glimpsed at midnight, and the horror of an island hanging upside upon a blood red sea. But most sightings, rare though they were, were far more commonplace, causing the island’s more daring thinkers to posit that the beings who surely dwelt on these edifices lived lives which were perhaps not entirely dissimilar to their own. Sometimes, it was said, the dreamers with the best sight and access to the strongest and most sacred telescopes had glimpsed high towers formed in shapes of a near-recognisable architecture, or caught the sunflash of lenses trained back on them. But this, too, was merely another part of the pattern of sightings, and was soon re-woven into the fabric of the dreamer’s dreams as the island drifted on, floating vastly on shimmers of storm above mother ocean’s endless haze.

  Afterword

  I know I’ve said this in different ways several times before, but story ideas, as they develop, or refuse to develop, have a will and a life of their own. “On the Sighting…” thus began as what felt like a large and promising project. Not a novel, maybe, but at least a novella. After all, who knew what loves, conflicts, births and deaths a huge island floating over an infinite sea might hold? Well, as it turned out, I, for one, had no idea, although I did become aware that I’d tapped into a memory of the wonderful 70s LP prog-rock cover art of Roger Dean. But when I came back to what I’d started, it turned out that the vision of a floating island somehow floated on its own.

  PAST MAGIC

  The airport was a different world.

  Claire grabbed a bag, then kissed my cheek. She smelt both fresh and autumnal, the way she always had. Nothing else had changed: I’d seen the whole Island as the jet turned to land. Brown hills in the photoflash sunlight, sea torn white at the headlands.

  We hurried past camera eyes, racial imagers, HIV sensors, orientation sniffers, robot guns. Feeling crumpled and dirty in my best and only jacket, I followed Claire across the hot tarmac between the palm trees. She asked about the mainland as though it was somewhere distant. And then about the weather. Wanting to forget the closed-in heat of my flat and the kids with armalites who had stopped the bus twice on the way to the airport, I told her Liverpool was fine, just like here. She glanced over her shoulder and smiled. I couldn’t even begin to pretend.

  It was good to see all those open top cars again, vintage Jags and Mercs that looked even better than when they left the showroom. And Claire as brown as ever, her hair like brass and cornfields, with not a worry about the ravenous sun. I’d read the adverts for lasers and scans in the in-flight magazine. And if you needed to ask the price, don’t.

  Her buggy was all dust and dents. And the kid was sitting on the back seat, wearing a Mickey Mouse tee shirt, sucking carton juice through a straw. Seeing her was an instant shock, far bigger than anything I’d imagined.

  Claire said, Well this is Tony, in the same easy voice she’d used for the weather as she tossed my bags into the boot.

  “Howdy doody,” the little girl said. Her lips were purple from the blackcurrant juice she was drinking. “Are you really my Daddy?”

  It was all too quick. I had expected some sort of preparation. To be lead down corridors...fanfares and trumpets. Instead, I was standing in the pouring sunlight of the airport compound. Staring into the face of my dead daughter.

  She looked just like Steph, precisely six years old and even sweeter, just like the little girl I used to hold in my arms and take fishing in the white boat on days w
ithout end. She glanced at me in that oblique way I remembered Steph always reserved for strangers. All those kiddie questions in one look. Who are you? Why are you here? Can we play?

  Claire shouted “Let’s get going!” and jumped into the buggy as though she’d never seen thirty five.

  “Yeah!” the kid said. She blew bubbles into the carton. “Let’s ride em, Mummeee!”

  Off in cloud of summer dust...and back on the Isle of Man. The place where Claire and I had laughed and loved, then fought and wept. The place where Steph, the real Steph, had been born, lived, died. The swimming pools of the big houses winked all the way along the coast. Then we turned inland along the hot white road to Port Erin...the shapes of the hills...the loose stone walls. It was difficult for me to keep any distance from the past. Claire. Steph. Me. Why pretend? It might as well be ten years before when we were married and for a while everything was sweet and real.

  Here’s the fairy bridge.

  “Cren Ash Tou!!” We all shouted without thinking. Hello to the fairies.

  In the days when tourists were allowed to visit the Isle Of Man, this was part of the package. Fairy bridges, fairy postcards, stone circles, fat tomes about Manx folklore. Manannan was the original Lord of Man. He greeted King Arthur when the boat took him from the Last Battle. He strode the hills and bit out the cliffs at Cronk ny Irree Laa in anguish at his vanished son. He hid the hills in cloud.

  Manannan never quite went away. I used to read every word I could find and share it with Steph after she was tucked up at night from her bath. The Island still possessed magic, but now it was sharp as the sunlight, practised in the clinics by men and women in druidic white, discreetly advertised in-flight to those with the necessary clearances. Switching life off and on, changing this and that, making the most of the monied Manx air.

  We turned up the juddering drive that led to Kellaugh and I saw that one had ever got around to fixing the gate. Claire stopped the buggy in the courtyard under the shade of the cypress trees. Like the buggy, Kellaugh was a statement of I-don’t-care money, big and rambling with white walls peeling in the sun, old bits and new bits, views everywhere of the wonderful coastline like expensive pictures casually left to hang.

  Steph jumped out of the buggy and shot inside through the bleached double doors.

  I looked at Claire.

  “She really is Steph,” she said, “but she can’t remember anything. She’s had lessons and deep therapy, but it’s still only been six months. You’re a stranger, Tony. Just give it time.”

  Feeling as though I was walking over glass, I said, “She’s a sweet, pretty kid, Claire. But she can’t be Steph.”

  “You’ll see.” She tried to make it sound happy, but there was power and darkness there, something that made me afraid. When she smiled, her eyes webbed with wrinkles even the money couldn’t hide.

  Fergus came out grinning to help with the bags. We said Hi. Claire kissed him and he kissed her back inside his big arms. I watched for a moment in silence, wondering what was left between them.

  Claire gave me the room that had once been my study. She could have offered me the annexe where I would have had some independence and a bathroom to myself, but she told me she wanted me here in the house with her and Fergus, close to Steph. There was a bed were my desk used to be, but still the ragged Persian carpet, the slate fireplace and the smell of the house that I loved...dark and sweet, like damp and biscuit tins.

  Claire watched as I took my vox from the bag, the box into which I muttered my thoughts. Nowadays, it was hardly more than a private diary. I remembered how she had given it to me one Christmas here at Kellaugh when the fires were crackling and the foghorn moaned. A new tool to help me with my writing. It was still the best, even ten years on.

  “Remember that old computer you had for your stories,” she said, touching my arm.

  “I always was useless at typing.”

  “I got it out again, for Steph. She loves old things, old toys. And I found those shoot-em-up games we used to buy her at that funny shop in Castletown. She tries, but the old Steph still has all the highest scores.”

  Old Steph, new Steph...

  I was holding the vox, trailing the little wires that fitted to my throat. The red standby light was on. Waiting for the words.

  Fergus was working in the new part of the house, all timber and glass; in the big room that hung over the rocks and the sea. He’d passed the test of time, had Fergus. Ten years with Claire now, and I had only managed eight. But then they had never got married or had kids, and maybe that was the secret.

  He gave me a whisky and I sat and watched him paint. Fergus seemed the same, even if his pictures had lost their edge. The gravelly voice went with the Gauloise he smoked one after another. I hadn’t smelt cigarette smoke like that in years. He would probably have been dead on the mainland, but here they scanned and treated you inch by inch for tumours as regularly as you could pay.

  Late afternoon, and the sky was starting to darken. The windows were open on complex steel latches that took the edge off the heat and let in the sound of the waves.

  “It’s good you’re here,” he said, wiping his hands on a rag. “You don’t know how badly Claire needed to get Steph back. It wasn’t grief, not after ten years. It just...went on, into something else.”

  “The grief never goes,” I said.

  Fergus looked uncomfortable for a moment, then he asked, “Is it really as bad as they say on the mainland?”

  I sipped my whisky and pondered that for a moment, wondering if he really wanted to know. I could remember what it used to be like when I was I kid, watching the news of Beirut. Part of you understood...you just tried not to imagine. Living in it, on the mainland, you got to sleep through the sniper fire and didn’t think twice about taking an umbrella to keep the sun off when you queued for the standpipes. I told him about my writing instead, an easier lie because I’d had more practise.

  “Haven’t seen much work from you lately,” he said. “Claire still keeps an eye out...” He lit a Gauloise and blew. “I can still manage to paint, but whispering into that vox, getting second-guessed, having half-shaped bits of syllable turned into something neat...it must be frightening. Like staring straight into silence.”

  The evening deepened. Fergus poured himself a big whisky, then another, rapidly catching up on -- and then overtaking -- me. He was amiable, and we were soon talking easily. But I couldn’t help remembering the Fergus of old, the Fergus who would contradict anything and everything, the Fergus who would happily settle an intellectual argument with a fist fight. I’d known him even before I met Claire. Introduced them, in fact. And he had come over to the Isle of Man and stayed in the annexe for a while just as I had done and the pattern started to repeat itself. The new for the old and somehow no one ever blamed Claire for the way it happened.

  “You left too soon after Steph died,” he said. “You thought it was Claire and Fergus you were leaving behind, but really it was Claire alone. She has the money, the power. The likes of you and I will always be strangers here. But Claire belongs.”

  “Then why do you stay?”

  He shrugged. “Where else is there to go?”

  We stood at the window. The patio lay below and at the side of the house, steps winding down to the little quay. A good place to be. Steph was sitting on the old swing chair, gently rocking, trying to keep her feet off the slabs to stop the ants climbing over her toes. She must have sensed our movement. She looked up. Fathomless blue eyes in the fathomless blue twilight. She looked up and saw us. Her face didn’t flicker.

  After the lobster and the wine on that first evening, after Fergus had ambled outside to smoke, Claire took my hand across the white linen and said she knew how difficult this was for me. But this was what she wanted, she wanted it because it was right. It was loosing Steph that had been wrong. I should have done this, oh, years ago. I never wanted another child, just Steph. You have to be here with us Tony because the real Steph is so mu
ch a part of you.

  I could only nod. The fire was in Claire’s eyes. She looked marvellous with the candlelight and the wine. Fergus was right; Claire had the power of the Island. She was charming, beautiful...someone you could wake up with for a thousand mornings and still fear...and never understand. I realised that this was what had driven me to write had when I was with her, striving to put the unknown into words...and striving to be what she wanted. Striving, and ultimately failing, pushing myself into loneliness and silence.

  Different images of Claire were flickering behind my eyes. The Claire I remembered, the Claire I thought I knew. How pink and pale she had been that first day in the hospital holding Steph wrapped in white. And then the Claire who called people in from the companies she owned, not that she really cared for business, but just to keep an eye on things. Claire making a suggestion here, insisting on a course of action pursued, disposals and mergers, compromises and aggressions, moving dots on a map of the world, changing lives in places I couldn’t even pronounce. And although it abrogated a great many things I couldn’t help remembering how it felt when we made love. Everything. Her nails across my back. Her scent. Her power. For her, she used to say it was like a fire. The fire that was in her eyes now, across the candlelight and the empty glasses.

  I dreamed again that night that Steph and I were out fishing in the white boat again. The dream grew worse every time, knowing what would happen. The wind was picking up and Manannan had hidden the Island under cloud. The waves were big and cold and lazy, slopping over the gunnels. I looked at Steph. Her skin was white. She was already dead. But she opened her mouth on dream power alone and the whole Irish Sea flooded out.