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

by Ian R. MacLeod

  Next day Claire took me around all the old places on the Island with Steph. The sun was blinding but she told me not to worry and promised to pay for a scan. Just as she had paid for everything else. With Island money, the money that kept all the old attractions going even though there were no tourists left to see them. The steam railway...the horse drawn tramcars along the front at Douglas...even the big water wheel up at Laxey. Everything was shimmering and clear, cupped in the inescapable heat. Dusty roads snaked up to fenced white clinics, Swiss names on the signboards. I did my best to chat to Steph and act like a friend, or at least be someone she might get to know. But it was hard to make contact through the walls of her sweet indifference. I was just another boring adult...and I couldn’t help wondering why I had come here, and what would have happened I had tried to say no.

  In the evening we took the path beyond the Chasms towards Spanish Head. The air was breathlessly alive with the sound and the smell of the sea and the great cliffs were white with gulls. Glancing back as we climbed among the shivering grass and sea pinks, I started to tell Steph how the headland got its name from a shipwreck caught up on a storm after the Armada. But she nodded so seriously and strained the corners of her eyes that I couldn’t find the words.

  Claire was the perfect host. Devoting all her time to me, chatting about when we used to be together, reciting memories that were sweeter than the truth. About the Island, about what had changed and how everything was really the same. She invited people over and there were the big cars in the drive and all the old songs and the faces that I remembered. Sweet, friendly people, at ease with their money and power. They were so unused to seeing faces age that I had to remind most of them who I was. I got the impression that they would still all be smiling and sipping wine when the oxygen finally ran out and the world died.

  When Claire took me with Steph to Curraghs Wildlife Park, I was struck for once by a sense of change, if only by all the new cages filled with tropical species. Baboons, hummingbirds and sloths. The sort of creatures that would have been bones in the wildfire desert if they weren’t here, although it was still sad to see them, trying to act natural behind those bars. But all the old favourites were there as well. Ocelots and otters and penguins that the seagulls stole fish from and the loghtan sheep that once used to graze the Island. And the big attraction: Steph ran towards the enclosure almost as though she could remember the last time. And Madeleine lumbered over towards the fence.

  Madeleine had been in the papers for a while back when I was young and there were still real papers for her to be in. She might have been created by the same clinic that did Steph for all I knew. But the Islanders were more nervous in those days, bothered about what people on the mainland thought just in case they might try to invade. Take all that money and magic, the golden eggs. They wanted to be seen to be doing something that they could hang a big sign marked SCIENCE on. Something that didn’t look like simple moneymaking and self-interest.

  Madeleine rubbed her huge side against the fence. The fur was matted and oily. And she stank of wet dog. Like all the wet dogs in the history of the world piled up in one place at one time. Claire and I hung back, but Steph didn’t seem to mind breathing air that was like a rancid dishcloth. Madeleine’s tiny black eye high on her shaggy head twinkled at Steph as though she was sharing a joke. Her tusks had grown bigger in the ten years since I had last seen her. They looked terribly uncomfortable. And in this heat.

  Steph splayed her fingers through the wire, into the matted fur. Madeleine swayed a little and gave a thunderous rumble. Madeline the mammoth; her original cells came from scrapings of one of the last hairy icecubes to emerge from the thaw in Siberia. A few steps on the DNA spiral staircase were damaged and computers had to fill in the gaps. As a result there was much debate about whether she was real or simply someone’s idea of what a mammoth ought to be. There was one in Argentina made from the same patch of cells with lighter fur and a double hump almost like a camel’s. And the Russians had their own ideas and refused to admit Madeleine to the official mammoth club.

  The real Steph of ten years before had been just as interested in Madeleine. She made us buy a poster at the little shop on the way out from the zoo. Now, it seemed like a premonition. Steph and Madeleine. The big and the little. Scrapings from the dermis, the middle layer of the skin, were the most suitable for cloning. I remembered that phrase; maybe it was written somewhere on the poster.

  We sat outdoors at the zoo cafe. Lizards darted on the cactus rockery and a red and green flock of parakeets preened and fluttered under the awnings, eyeing the shaded pavement for crumbs. Steph drank another carton of blackcurrant and it stained her lips again. I couldn’t help thinking about how much the real Steph used to hate that stuff. Always said it was way too sweet.

  This Steph chatted away merrily enough. Asking about the past, the last time she was here. She didn’t seem bothered by the ghost of the real Steph, just interested. She looked straight at Claire and avoided my eyes.

  I said to her, “Don’t you think the mammoth might be too hot?”

  “You mean Madeleine.”

  I nodded. “Madeleine the mammoth.”

  She wrinkled her nose and swung her right foot back against the leg of the chair. Steph thinking. If only her lips hadn’t been purple, it was exactly the way she used to be. I had to blink hard as I watched. Then the little pink and white zoo train rattled past and her eyes were drawn. She forget my question. She didn’t answer.

  This new Steph was a jumbled jigsaw. Pieces that fitted, pieces that were missing, pieces that didn’t belong.

  The clinic where they remade Steph from the thawed scrapings of her skin lay up on the hill overlooking Douglas and the big yachts in the harbour. Claire took me along when it was time for Steph’s deep therapy. There were many places like this on the Island, making special things for those parts of the world that had managed to stay apart from all the bad that had happened. New plants, new animals, new people. Little brains like the one inside the vox. Tanned pinstripe people wafted by on the grey carpets. I was disappointed. I only saw one white coat the whole time I was there.

  They took Steph away, then they showed me her through thick glass, stretched out in white like a shroud with little wires trailing from her head. The doctor standing beside me put his arm around my shoulder and led me to his office. He sat me down across from his desk. Just an informal chat, he said, giving me an Island smile.

  His office window had a fine view across Douglas. I noticed that all the big yachts were in. A storm was predicted, not that there was any certain way to tell the weather. The thought made me remember my dream, being on the boat with Steph. She opened her mouth. And everything flooded back and back to when they finally hauled us out of the water, the chopper flattening the tops of the waves, the rope digging into her white skin, the way a stripe of weed had stuck across of her face.

  The doctor tapped a pencil. “We all feel,” he said, “that your input is vital if Steph is to recover her full identity. We’ve done a lot with deep therapy. She can walk, talk, even swim. And we’ve done our best to give her memories.”

  “Can you invent memories?”

  There was darkness on the horizon. Flags flew. Fences rattled. The sea shivered ripples.

  “We all invent memories,” he said. “Didn’t you write fiction? You should know that memories and the past are quite different propositions.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Just be around, Tony. She’ll soon get to like you.”

  “This little girl looks like someone who used to be my daughter. And you’re asking me to behave like a friend of the family.”

  The pencil tapped again. “Is this something to do with how Steph died? Is that the problem? Do you blame yourself?”

  “Of course I blame myself...and, no, that isn’t the problem. That may be the problem with a whole chunks of my life...why I can’t write. But it’s nothing to do with Steph. This Steph.”

>   “Okay,” he said. “Then what do we do?”

  I waited. I watched the masts bob in the greying harbour.

  “I have a suggestion,” he said. “Let us use your vox.”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “If you gave us the keyword, we could copy all the data onto the mainframe here. It would be perfectly secure. We’d filter it, of course. Only a small percentage would be relevant.”

  “And you would pour my ramblings into Steph’s head.”

  “A large part of you is inside that vox. Be assured, we’d only take that which is good and beneficial.” He stood up and held out his hand for me to shake. “Think about it. I’m sure it’s the way forward. For Steph.”

  Claire put the buggy hood up in the clinic car park with the first drops of rain. Steph sat in the back, sucking a fresh carton of purple juice. She was quiet, even by the standards of when I was around. I put it down to the deep therapy, all those new things in her head. The real rain started just as we crossed the fairy bridge. Hello to the fairies: Cren Ash Tou. Grey veils trailed from the sky. The buggy hood was mostly holes and broken seams and we were cold and wet by the time we got back to Kellaugh, juddering through the puddles on the drive, dashing to the front door.

  I watched as Fergus scooped Steph up in the rainlit hall and carried her dripping towards the bathroom. The taps hissed and the pipes hammered. I heard her squeal, his gruff laughter.

  I took a bath in the annexe and stayed longer than I intended. Being out of the way was a relief. The clean white walls, fresh soap and towels waiting for Claire’s next visitor. I had spent some of my happiest days there, writing, falling in love with Claire. Her father had still been alive then. She was a free spirit, spending the old patriarch’s money on the mainland as if there was no tomorrow, which wasn’t that far from the truth. We met in London before the second big flood. She wrangled the clearances to invite me back to Kellaugh, displacing, I found out later, a sculptor who had left the carpets gritty with dust. We made love, we fell in love. Her father died and I moved in with her. She had Steph, we even got married. My work was selling well then, I could even kid myself that I didn’t actually need her support. I thought the pattern of my life had settled, living here with Claire and Steph. Getting a tan and growing to some ridiculous age in the sun, letting the men in white take care of the wrinkles and the tumours. But I realised instead that I was part of another pattern. Claire collected artists. She gave them money, encouragement, criticism, contacts. She usually gave them her body as well.

  Because I thought I still needed Claire, and because of Steph, I had stayed longer at Kellaugh than I should have done. The Island was addictive, even to those who didn’t belong. The money, the parties, the power. The people who were so charming and unaffected, who knew about history and humour and art, who could pick up a phone and bring death or life to thousands, who would chat or argue over brandy and champagne until the sun came up, who would organise pranks or be serious or even play at being in love...who would do anything whatever and however so long as they got their own way.

  Fergus was only the last in a long succession. I remember coming into the annexe bedroom in the heavy heat one morning to ask about borrowing a book and finding him and Claire together, their bodies shining with juice and sweat. They sat up and said nothing. Only I felt ashamed. But then Claire had never really lied to me about her men. She just kept it out of my way. I had no excuse for my sudden feelings of shock; I had always known that the Island only kept faith with itself. But it was much harder to give up pretending.

  So I ran out and headed down the steps towards the white boat, across the patio where the bougainvillea was richly in flower. Steph was up early too that morning, sitting on the swing chair, keeping her feet off the paving to stop the ants crawling over her toes. She said Hi and are you off fishing and can I come along? I smiled and ruffled her hair. The sky was hot blue metal. Steph took the rudder. The water slid over the oars like green jelly. I kept rowing until the wind grew chill and Manannan hid the Island in darkening haze.

  That night after the clinic I went to say goodnight to Steph. Goodbye as well, although I still wasn’t sure. The storm was chattering at the window and the waves were beating the rocks below. I could see her face dark against the pillow, the glitter in her eyes.

  “Did I wake you?”

  “Nope.

  “You always used to say that. Nope. Like a cowboy.”

  “I keep doing things Mummy says I used to.”

  “Doesn’t that feel strange? Can you be sure who you are?”

  I closed the door. It was an absurd question to ask any six year old. I sat down on the old wicker chair by her bed.

  “Do you feel like a Daddy, when you see me?”

  “It’s like being pulled both ways. You didn’t recognise me.”

  “I know who you are. I’ve seen your picture on the back of the book Mummy showed me. But you don’t look the same.”

  “That was a long time ago. The real Steph...used to be different.”

  The real Steph. There, I’d said it.

  “I don’t really understand,” she said.

  “You don’t need to. You’re what you are.”

  Everything was heavy inside me. Here in this room that I knew so well. I wanted to kiss her, carry her, break through and do something that was real. But I knew that all that I would touch was a husk of dry memories.

  “What was it like when you were with Mummy and Steph?”

  I tried to tell her, talking as though she was some kind of human vox. About waking with the sun in the kitchen clutter of morning. Walking the cliffs with the sea pinks wavering and every blade of grass sharp enough to touch. About days without end when the two of us went fishing in the little white boat. About how you always end up thinking about things and places when you mean people because the feelings are too strong.

  Somewhere along the lines of memory I stammered into silence. Steph’s breathing was slow and easy as only a child’s can be. I leaned forward and kissed her forehead. Faintly, I could smell blackcurrant. I left her to her dreams.

  I found Claire holding my vox, the red light glowing in the darkness of my room. I sat down beside her on the bed. She was in a white towelling gown. She smelled both fresh and autumnal, happy and sad.

  “You know what they asked for today,” I said. “At the clinic.”

  “You’ve changed, Tony.” She swung the little wires of the vox to and fro. “I thought I could bring the old you back.”

  “Like bringing back the old Steph?”

  “No,” she said. “That’s possible. You’re impossible.”

  I stared at the vox. The ember in the shell of her hands. “Why did you drag me over here? I can’t be the person you want...I never really was. Some myth of the way you wanted Steph’s father to be. I can’t do that. Do you want me to become like poor Fergus? He’s not an artist, he’s lost his anger. He’s not anything.”

  I tried to look into her eyes. Even in this darkness, it was difficult. I could feel her power like bodily warmth. Something you could touch, that couldn’t be denied. Claire looked the same, but she had changed, become more of what I feared in her. She belonged to this magic Island.

  “At least Fergus still paints,” she said. Then she shook her head slowly, her cornfield hair swaying. “I’m sorry, Tony. I didn’t mean...You have your own life, I know that. I just want to bring back Steph.”

  Want; the way she said it, the word became an instruction to God. Not that God had much influence on this Island. The only way to imagine him was retired, sipping cooled Dom Perignon by the pool and reminiscing about the good old days, like the ancient ex-prime minister from the mainland who still lived up at Ramsey. Like her, most of his achievements had been reviled, and what remained, forgotten.

  “I can’t stay here any longer,” I said.

  “You must help.” There was an odd catch in her voice, something I’d never heard before. I felt a chilly sense of cont
rol, not because of what I was, but because of what I knew I couldn’t become.

  She asked, “Will you show me the vox? You never let me hear.”

  So I took it and touched the wires to my throat. Whispered the keyword that was a sound without language. I let it run back at random. Clear and unhesitating, my voice filled the room.

  “...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 empty glasses...”

  I turned it off. I had to smile, that the vox had chosen that. It had, after all, a mind of its own. But it all seemed academic: I’d never had any secrets from Claire.

  “So that’s the deal? I give you my memories, and you let me go?”

  She smiled in the darkness. “There is no deal.” Then she reached towards me. The white slid away and her flesh gleamed in the stuttering light of the storm. The air smelt of her and of Kellaugh, of biscuit tins and damp. There was a moment when the past and present touched. Her nails drew blood from my back. Raking down through layers of skin, layers of memory. Inside the fire, I thought of Steph, wrapped in the sweet breath of dreams, of making her anew.

  That was Tony’s last entry before he returned to the mainland. Obviously, he can’t come back now, not now that I’m here. Claire tells me that everything went tidily enough the next day. The trip to the clinic in the clear air after the storm, then on to the airport. It was the only way out; perhaps he understood that by then.

  This vox is a good copy. We have that much in common, my vox and I. It’s winter now. Life is comfortable here in the annexe, but chilly when the wind turns north and draws the heat from the fire. I saw an iceberg from my window yesterday. Huge, even half way towards the horizon. Pure white against the grey sky, shining like the light from a better world.

  The four of us eat our meals together as a kind of family. Claire. Fergus. Steph. Me. The talk is mostly happy and there’s little tension. Only sometimes I see Steph with darkness behind her big blue eyes. A look I understand but can’t explain. But everything is fine, here on this fortunate island. Even Fergus is a good friend in his own vague way. He doesn’t mind Claire’s nocturnal visits to the annexe to make love. Everything about the arrangement is amicable and discreet.