Praise for M. John Harrison
‘There are perhaps three or four writers at work today whose new books I seek out with an avidity bordering on fanaticism. M. John Harrison is one of them. His sentences have the power to leave the world about you unsteadied; glowing and perforated in strange ways. He combines sharp clarity of vision with deep compassion of heart; a merciful eagle. Once read, these stories ghost you for days and weeks afterwards.’
– Robert Macfarlane, author of Landmarks
‘M. John Harrison’s slippery, subversive stories mix the eerie and familiar into beguiling, alarming marvels. No one writes quite like him; no one I can think of writes such flawless sentences, or uses them to such disorientating effect.’
– Olivia Laing, author of The Lonely City
‘These stories map a rediscovered fictional hinterland, one tucked behind the glossier edifices of modernity and genre with views down alleyways into pubs and flats where Patrick Hamilton glares balefully at J. G. Ballard.’
– Will Eaves, author of This is Paradise
‘M. John Harrison moves elegantly, passionately, from genre to genre, his prose lucent and wise, his stories published as SF or as fantasy, as horror or as mainstream fiction. In each playing field, he wins awards, and makes it look so easy. His prose is deceptively simple, each word considered and placed where it can sink deepest and do the most damage.’
– Neil Gaiman, author of American Gods
‘With an austere and deeply moving humanism, M. John Harrison proves what only those crippled by respectability still doubt – that science fiction can be literature, of the very greatest kind.’
– China Miéville, author of Perdido Street Station
First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Comma Press.
www.commapress.co.uk
Copyright © remains with M. John Harrison and Comma Press, 2017.
All rights reserved.
The moral rights of M. John Harrison to be identified as the author of this Work have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.
‘Entertaining Angels Unawares’ was published in Conjunctions 39; ‘Cicisbeo’ in Talk of the Town (Independent on Sunday); ‘Not All Men’ in Time Out (as ‘It Isn’t Me’); ‘In Autotelia’ and ‘Psychoarcheology’ in Arc, the New Scientist magazine; ‘Animals’ in Curious Tales. Nicholas Royle published ‘Getting Out of There’ as a Night Jar chapbook. ‘Babies from Sand’ appeared in London: An Unreliable Guide, Influx Press, ed Kit Caless. ‘The Walls’ and parts of ‘Self-Storage’ were performed by Barbara Campbell as part of her 1001 Nights Cast project (http://1001.net.au/). Paragraphs of ‘Cave and Julia’ featured in Long Relay, a collaborative project devised by Tim Etchells and Adrian Heathfield for the Serpentine Pavilion Gallery Summer Exhibition, 2007. ‘Yummie’ first appeared in The Weight of Words, edited by Dave McKean and William Schafer (PS Publishing, 2017). ‘Imaginary Reviews’, ‘The Theory Cadre’ and all the shorter pieces appeared on M. John Harrison’s blog, which can be found at https://ambientehotel.wordpress.com/
A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978 1910974346
The publisher gratefully acknowledges assistance from Arts Council England.
To Sara Sarre
Lost & Found
Worn black and white linoleum floor tiles go back to a wooden counter. Furniture – mainly chromium diner stools – stacked in a corner. Some cabinets, you can’t make out what’s in those. Push your face up against the window on a dark night and a rain of silent objects drifts down slowly through this space like the index of some unreliable past: ashtrays of all types and sizes; geranium in a terracotta pot; thousands of 45rpm records; tens of thousands of abandoned paperbacks; stones off a beach; money and playing cards; the dustjackets of library novels 1956; black French knickers waist 24; cheap tickets all colours; suits, hats and shoes; bruised cricket ball, seams worn; a porcelain globe five inches diameter bearing a complex design of leaves and tendrils in delft blue; small chest of drawers, veneered; bicycle tire, gentleman’s silver cigarette case, national insurance card: all gravityless and wreathed in Christmas lights like strands of weed underwater. One night you hear Frank Sinatra behind a door to another room. Go the next night: nothing. You turn up your collar in the rain. The card in the window says open but the door is always closed. Ask around, no one remembers seeing the owner. Open book, indelible pencil on a bit of string. ‘Sign in here.’
In Autotelia
The 10:30am out-train from Waterloo lies abandoned by its passengers, who have, after half an hour’s wait, decamped to Platform 9 and the 11am. I find myself sitting opposite a man in a dark pinstripe suit. Two women, who have lost their reservations because of the move from one train to the other, wander angrily up and down the carriage, followed by their defeated husbands. ‘That’s nice, innit? Chaos, innit?’ they say to one another: ‘There’s no booked seats. It’s disgraceful.’ And so it is. Or at any rate tiresome. As the 11am finally pulls out, twelve minutes late, the pinstripe man and I exchange glances.
‘It’s getting worse,’ he says.
For a moment I think he means more than just the railway service; but he’s only being polite.
The train soon gets going and we are clattering through south London before swinging north and diving deep under the river. The trains are new but the lines are old, and seem to travel deliberately through the dilapidated back of everything. Rusty old metal bridges, trees invisible under Russian vine, short dense brambles on waste ground. I am just beginning to tell myself that despite all the changes everything is as useless as it ever was, only dirtier and more expensive, when the train emerges from London and the man sitting opposite me says suddenly:
‘If they’ve got interim reports, it would be helpful to see those. It might save time if they faxed those direct to me.’
Then he closes his phone. He’s a solicitor, as I half suspected. He’s travelling on business. He arranges some papers on the table, giving me a faint smile, and begins to use a yellow highlighter on them.
The train pushes its way through a shower of rain, then past a dilapidated farm, an abandoned house in a polluted fold of land. A woman standing alone in a channel of mud by a tiny two-arch bridge. ‘Have a splendid weekend,’ the solicitor says. ‘My pleasure.’ And then, looking at me affably and indicating the papers with their neat yellow lines, his phone, the laptop he opened as soon as he sat down: ‘I hope this isn’t a nuisance for you?’ I ask him if he could perhaps not use the laptop. As he begins to reply we break out of the transition zone into the sunlight the other side.
‘Good god,’ he whispers, more to himself than me, staring out of the window: ‘Look at that.’
I love the little steep crumbling valleys that run alongside the railway eastwards from where Norwich used to be, often bounded on one side by the line and on the other by a leafless but impenetrable thorn hedge or a wall of yellow local stone resonating with the early heat of the day. Thin terraces, irrigated by a stream or a well with its pony in harness. Dry willows. An abandoned car washed across from our side of things and already becoming part of the landscape.
Three hours later we are received in ________, by the regional president, a marching band, and an escort of police motorcycles as well. By the time we reach the main square, and see the vast buffet laid out on tables in a sort of outdoor auditorium, many of us are, if not exactly marching, then shambling in time to the music. It is all very stirring. I sit on a bench to take photographs. The solicitor has served himself a plate of food, mainly different types of sausage, on which he�
��s concentrating with a kind of puzzled greed even as he looks for a place to sit. He’s seen me and begun to smile and raise his free hand when a little local girl, perhaps three years old, grabs his sleeve and begins talking earnestly to him in her own language. She seems delighted by him, but puzzled that he can’t answer. Eventually her mother succeeds in explaining that he’s English. They whisper together for a moment; then the little girl turns back to him, holds out her hand and demands:
‘Geev me five!’
She’s full of life, she talks to everybody, all the way through the speech of the regional president.
I’ve spent so much time on trips like these.
I slip away to my hotel for a bath and an hour or two’s sleep, then a drink at the Tristan & Isolde in Central Plaza. By then it’s late afternoon. Until I order in English, Jack Daniels and a double espresso, I’m not so interesting to the young woman behind the bar: after that I can feel her approval. This, she believes, is how women can be; a role model brought to her from our side of things. My change comes in the local money, which I keep for my nieces and nephews. Espresso at the Tristan & Isolde always includes a small chocolate wafer wrapped in foil, the foil decorated with a picture of a gun and something which resembles a Tyrolean hat. I always take these home too. The children love the pictures, but are less keen on the chocolate itself.
After a while the solicitor arrives in the plaza and wanders about rather helplessly until he sees me. He’s exchanged his suit for jeans. A proofed cotton jacket. Boat shoes and a pink shirt, the off-duty uniform of the West London professional. He’s full of excitement. Down in the old town, on one of the recently-recobbled streets that runs towards the lake, he’s discovered the shop everyone discovers on their first visit here, the one that sells the Stalin alarm clocks. The window is stuffed with them, enamelled or in brass or copper, in different sizes but all with quite large bells. He struggled with himself, then bought two, one of which he unwraps and places on the table between us. A quarter to three (not the real time): Stalin has an affable look as he stares out across the hands of the clock. He isn’t looking at you, precisely. It’s nothing you’ve done. He’s looking at everyone. You aren’t sure what he’s thinking.
The solicitor doesn’t seem to know whether to be amused or shocked. Perhaps he’s both.
‘Isn’t it extraordinary?’ he keeps saying.
‘This is what they like most of ours.’
Two doors along the same street, he says, there’s another shop, the window of which is empty but for a single oil painting of Adolf Hitler on a velvet-draped easel. ‘They have all the bases covered, anyway.’
‘It’s not kitsch to them,’ I tell him. ‘It’s a real sentiment.’
There is an uncomfortable silence, during which he rewraps his souvenir.
‘Would you like another drink?’
‘No,’ I tell him, ‘I don’t think so. But do sit down. Please.’
A lake ferry must have arrived – people are pouring up the hill, some clearly tourists, some clearly locals, schoolchildren in woollen hats, teenagers dressed up as people who have an aching sense of how to dress as a teenager. An accordion has started up. A Volkswagon camper chugs its way across the square. The police keep their eye on all this. Regional police couture splits the difference between professional plumbing and special forces chic, a colour of blue you only ever see in cheap overalls and uniforms. Even their van looks as if they bought it from DynoRod. I smile at them.
‘I’ll buy supper later,’ the solicitor offers eventually. ‘Do you know of anything we could do until then?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
After breakfast next morning I take a train to the New Ministries. I love the subway stations with their mosaic tiles and coloured plaster mouldings, their central girders marching off into the darkness in either direction. There seem to be far too many girders for any structural purpose and yet they have no decorative value. They are just heavily riveted I-beams, painted grey. The clean, brightly polished trains are the centrepiece here. They look nothing like the subway trains you see on our side of things. Interiors of brushed stainless steel, colourful, comfortable seats. Almost everything you expect – alcohol vomit, graffiti, burst styrofoam burger packages – is missing. They’re cleaner than the trains in Stockholm, and they make the London Underground look like the on-the-cheap Inferno it is.
The ‘municipal room’ at the New Ministries. If you stood there with me this is what you would see: locals in an orderly line, not really a queue, facing expectantly into the room with their backs to the polished wood panelling. Facing them are looser groups of people clearly from our side of things, dressed with a certain formality though they’re not sure how to behave in this situation. They seem uncomfortable, as if this is the first time they have been here, which, for most of them, it is. Hopefully it will be the last.
The room smells of cleaning materials and wax polish, as if it has to be cleaned thoroughly every early morning to remove the traces of the previous day’s business. Names are called out. People step forward with hesitant smiles, papers are signed. To you this would seem like some ordinary, if rather old-fashioned bureaucratic activity. There is no true culture of information here, no digital culture. It’s all still pen and ink. Maybe, you think, this is something to do with marriages, births or deaths, some kind of registration anyway; or maybe it isn’t at all clear what’s going on – just people from our side buying something, dealing in something. It’s legal, though. It’s intrinsically legal.
My part is to make the medical checks. They often aren’t necessary, even so I’m required to make them. The same little adjoining room is put aside for the purpose every time, bare but very clean. Legal representation must be present, or no examination takes place; often, the representative is also the agent from our side. The women and children cover their embarrassment with smiles. The men, especially the older ones, do what’s required with an appalled dignity, as if I am an outrage that could only happen to them during war or an epidemic, a breakdown of all values and infrastructures, something to be borne but never forgotten. They are so reluctant to loosen their wide, thick, hand-tooled leather belts – a poor-quality example of which can fetch two or three thousand euros in a London store – they tremble. To help, I sometimes joke:
‘Where I come from, this is the cultural day of bad luck. Don’t get married, or travel by boat! There, you can do yourself up again now.’
All morning, thunder rumbles across the capital from the range of limestone hills that gives the region its name. The air in the room stales and darkens with each peal, the low-wattage electric lights dim then brighten beneath their flat enamel shades. The door opens and closes an inch or two in counterpoint, admitting a draught from the corridor; the smell of floor polish intensifies. I see ten, I see twenty of them, mostly women and children. They have been advised to dress without underwear that morning, to save time. At mid-day the solicitor turns up, accompanying a tall woman who leads him into the room with such composure he might be the client; he is carrying her daughter in the crook of his arm. He looks tired already.
‘She should carry her own daughter.’
‘I’m sorry.’
I shrug. ‘It’s not a problem with me. But others.’
As soon as he puts her down, the toddler begins to scamper around the room. The woman chases her, then, to indicate harassment, fans her hand in front of her face and blows out through her lips. Like most of them she has ignored the leaflet and dressed the child in its best clothes, including pink knickers like a decorated cake. She has a sort of willing self-effacement, a giving up of herself to the child. ‘I think of cutting down on the amount of food I give her,’ she says to me. Then she laughs. ‘I survived three of these but I am not sure I will survive this one.’
‘Geev me five!’ the little girl orders, flirting heavily over her mother’s shoulder with the solicitor.
I push the forms across to him.
‘Have you done t
his before?’ I know he hasn’t. ‘You’ll need to sign these. And witness here.’
‘I know,’ he says.
‘You can use this pen.’
Thereafter the examination proceeds. I am careful with the little girl but she begins to scream and throw herself about as I feel under her skirt for signs of deformity, which can appear early. I ask the mother if she can calm her, please: ‘A little thing but we must do it.’
‘It’s only that she doesn’t understand,’ the woman says gently.
Suddenly the child lies still and smiles up at the ceiling as if she has found a way to accept what is happening to her. After that, things go quickly, the mother turns away as she takes off her clothes, then forces herself to turn back. The solicitor watches all this, as he must: if the examination takes place behind any kind of curtain, it can’t be said to have been witnessed As he leaves he looks to me like someone who is going to vomit.
That evening I visit the regional art gallery. ‘If you look at too much art,’ their national poet is supposed to have said, ‘you will always leave your umbrella behind.’ Perhaps it doesn’t translate. Housed here are paintings from the last four hundred years, but the major collection is of Doula Kiminic, who went steadily mad as he painted the most recent wars and famines. Kiminic’s rawness seems as deliberate as ever. It seems reductive, a deliberate sweeping out of other values. His world of endless injustice and pain seems as wilful a construct as LegoLand. Not so much The Bombing, which on our side of things long ago lost through repetition its effect as an image, as drawings like Study in Composition VI, in which the usual eviscerated horse competes for your attention with the usual howling woman and dead child.
You Should Come With Me Now: Stories of Ghosts Page 1