by Yannick Hill
Now what he can’t remember. It doesn’t matter how hard he tries. What he can’t recall is whether he truly expected the woodlouse to be alive when he lifted the brick away again a few seconds later. Or whether it was always his intention to squash the little creature flat, find it surrounded by a tiny coin of gore. Unmoving. In his more reflective moods, when Casey comes into Room 44 and doesn’t read the comic book, lies down on the bed and closes his eyes, he will always draw the same conclusion: that moment, when one hard surface met the other, and the living creature between was no longer living, its continuum brought to an abrupt close – that moment was intentional, satisfying as a well-placed comma in a sentence about nothing.
He never told his wife this story. One of many secrets. But what would they be without secrets, without stories to tell that as yet were untold? They would be one, fallen into one another, not falling. And Casey never wanted that kind of love. He remembers, in the early years, flying across America to see her, lying next to her in the narrow bed of her dorm, her roommate already asleep. He remembers kissing her neck and saying things to her he only dared say in the relative dark. These things about the future. He remembers telling her he wanted to have kids, that he wanted to build her a beautiful house, and that he loved her. And he remembers the silence after, her reply coming only much later, years later, on a trip into the mountains, where the sky was so dark you could see the Milky Way.
Room 53
The delivery room. Casey has watched a great many births take place in this white space. He has the animals brought in at the apex of pregnancy, then watches them give birth right in front of him.
There are no cameras allowed. Casey likes to be involved. The rush of being right there at the moment of birth. But there are no cameras. He must rely on his senses to record the experience, his memory. It requires a presence of mind. He likes to be involved, the blood on his hands and clothes, the strangely wonderful smells. One expert – the lion man – said Casey was a natural, showing no fear. Says he would make a fine zookeeper.
That day. The birth of his own Transvaal lion. And yet his memory of this event is fragmented somehow. He remembers wanting very much to take the cub and show his wife, a powerful impulse. His beautiful wife. He wished she had been there for the lion, a sense that without her there the experience was incomplete.
The love for his wife. A powerful impulse to have her share in this private ritual of his, go back to when they shared most everything, their innermost thoughts and feelings. He remembers. Reaching for the Transvaal cub and the terrible roar from the mother. A warning. An almost overwhelming impulse to steal the cub away so he could show his wife. Something so real as this.
His once beautiful wife. The birth of their own children, little Missy & River Baer. Their pride & joy. Every second caught on film, Synthea’s smile as she holds the two babies in her arms, their heads nestled in her elbows. No need to rely on memory when every second of every minute is captured on videotape. A film long since transferred to digital, an undulating curtain of ones and zeroes, her smile as she begins to see things as they truly are. All this meaning, everything brought into the present. Console. A blinking cursor. Code unknown.
Room 61
The cache. A room full of drugs and guns. It is set out like a post-raid police exhibit, the guns lined up lovingly on folding tables like show and tell, the drugs piled high in their compact, bulbous bundles of shiny brown tape. Floor to ceiling. These are real drugs, real guns, from bona fide seizures around the world. There are even a couple of grenades. All this. Street value: $100 million. And while Casey has fired many guns in his life, he has never taken drugs. He’s frightened: the delayed effect, the lack of control. But something about being in this room, in amongst all this shit, all this danger – there’s no identifiable scent in this room, just this feeling that you’re completely out of your depth in the cold water. Darkness over ocean.
Casey feels alive in this room, but he takes no pleasure. The knowledge he would go to prison for the rest of his life should they discover his cache, have everything taken away from him, his family, his house, his company, everything – it leaves him in a state of extreme anxiety, no question. He doesn’t want to go to prison, of course not. He wants to survive. But more than wanting to live he wants to feel alive. Money can’t buy you love, but it can buy you fear, and fear is all Casey has left.
Room 61 is an altered state. Casey doesn’t need to touch anything to get there. These are real drugs, real guns, dark materials acquired by nefarious means. He won’t touch but he breathes deep, drinks in every detail, pupils fully dilated and yet Casey has never taken a drug in his life . . . alright, one time. But it was long ago, when he was still in college. And it was her idea.
First summer at college and Synthea was visiting. A bunch of them went out to the beach and built a fire on her last night before flying back. All his friends, all theirs. They all loved Synthea. She wasn’t like the other girls, they told him. They thought she was funny. Her deep voice and deadpan delivery. They thought she was sexy and, of course, that made her more sexy. At some point, fairly early in the evening, Synthea chose a moment when no one else was looking and stuck out her tongue for Casey. A small, blue pill. Cyan, he remembered. You want one? Casey looked into her sparkling eyes and she looked back into his. He trusted her, by now he was in love with this girl. Sure, he said, but he wasn’t. What is it? he asked. She shook her head and barely shrugged her shoulders, like, does it matter? And at the time it didn’t. He loved this girl and she was smoking hot and it was their first summer at college. Casey put the pill in his mouth and they kissed long enough that people started watching.
And it was beautiful. A real experience. He remembers them swimming together in the dark ocean, her breasts pushed up close against his chest. He remembers the dark, dark ocean, swimming under the moon and turning to look back at the fire on the beach. Too far, they were too far out, but this danger, he was sharing it with Synthea, this girl who wanted him and only him.
This room, all the danger in this room, all the suffering and bloodshed, all the history. Product. Bulbous, shiny packages, a fraction of whose contents is enough to destroy a life. All this. Street value: $100 million. One hundred million dollars, but it is never enough. This cache. It grows a little every year. A garden of death. Too far, too far, but Casey likes to keep the danger close. Room 61. No light in the gap.
Room 77
A room of brief encounters. A different set up every time. A pretty girl as seen across a hotel lobby. At the beach, waves breaking gentle in the background. On a high-speed train, America a blur. On each occasion, Casey must gather the courage to approach the actress playing opposite. Participants are encouraged to improvise, but within certain parameters. The end game: Casey gets the girl.
There is never any physical contact, only talking, each scenario designed to feel like a chance meeting, an instant attraction. And while these episodes might take place in different time periods, Casey will always turn up dressed in his anachronistic yet comfortable sneakers, slacks and zipped hoodie, the same clothes he has been wearing since he was a teenager, in and out of the boardroom.
Participants are encouraged to improvise, largely because Casey is a terrible actor and can’t remember the few trigger lines he is given at the beginning of each session. He has been known to show up drunk, but he is always respectful of the girls. Despite appearances he takes this project very seriously. He is charming, he listens, he wears his heart on his sleeve where appropriate. Some of the girls come away having genuinely enjoyed their time in his presence. Because Casey really opens up in this room. He enjoys the frisson, but it’s something more. He feels he can talk to these women, frame his life how he likes, speak freely about what’s on his mind. They take him seriously.
They used to have this. He could talk to Synthea like no one else. Those long periods apart in the early years. Always so much to talk about. Endless conversations deep into the night. No one
subject. Holding hands in sleep. Then later money. The kids. Events unfolding. Should I wear the blue dress or the black dress? These days she could not look him in the eye. They used to have— They used to be in love. Now it’s like they had nothing. Her hate for him a perfect thing. The long encounter an endless goodbye.
Room 84
Like shuffle mode for your music. Every time Casey enters this room it is a different experience. An incredible team of artists and technicians collaborating on the ultimate art form: life.
Every month they are given this space to work with and an organic budget. Sometimes the event will be very elaborate in nature, requiring long hours of preparation and the kind of ad hoc inventiveness only found on big studio film sets at the eleventh hour of shooting. Other times the team comes up with a very simple concept: lean, yet poetic. Minimalist, but effective. The last one, for example, turned out perfect. The boss seemed real happy which makes the team happy. They love their jobs, the creativity involved, the pressure, balanced with the relative freedom. No studio executives breathing down their necks. But anyway the last event: a real success story.
Here’s the set up: a generous lawn of gleaming green grass. An almost imperceptible slope up towards the house, a white Regency mansion nestled somewhere in the English countryside. Only the very tops of the trees are moving in the light summer breeze. The 8K screens depicting everything beyond the edge of the lawn render the scene utterly lifelike, an upgrade from reality if anything. And now the scenario as it played out: Casey must lie down in the middle of the lawn and wait. He has been briefed in advance about what is going to happen, but unlike most events taking place in Room 84, this one does not have a fixed narrative structure. It is up to Casey to make it work. And his task is this: tame a wild animal.
A white rabbit enters the space via a hatch concealed somewhere in the artificial horizon. Casey is lying on his back on the grass. It takes some time before he can see movement in his peripheral vision. The rabbit is very scared. It spends the first twenty minutes of the event jumping up at the screens making up the walls of the room, unable to reconcile the truth of these images with their impossibility. The team – huddled around a monitor in a separate annex – think this thing isn’t going to go their way. The rabbit is too frightened, they whisper. There’s no way this is going to work. They had a professional hunter shoot to maim this poor little creature in the woods outside the city a few days ago. There’s no way. This rabbit’s just too crazy, too far gone. But then something changes in the rabbit’s behavior. Its spasmodic efforts to penetrate Room 84’s four invisible walls have left it somewhat exhausted so it has switched to hopping about at the fringes of the lawn and occasionally stopping to nibble at the greenery. For one of the team behind this event has thought to include some delicious dandelions in the spectrum of flora allocated to the experiment.
Yes, the rabbit likes dandelions very much. Casey continues to lie on his back as instructed, barely moving a muscle. Once in a while he will tilt his head to the side a fraction, just so he can get a better look at the little creature, its circles around the room growing gradually smaller. The team can’t believe it. There’s no way the rabbit hasn’t clocked the boss, and yet here it is, getting ever closer. Hop-hop – dandelion – up on its hind legs for a quick look around, and then down again – more dandelion – hop-hop-hop – grass. The team are leaning closer to the monitor, they can’t believe this is really happening. Hop-hop – dandelion – more dandelion – hop-hop. Casey turns his head and the rabbit is no more than four feet from his head. He watches as the last of the dandelion disappears in its little mouth, a flash of its pink tongue. He never thought of rabbits having a tongue.
And then the moment. In the wrap party afterwards they still can’t believe how it happened, but it did. The rabbit turns and hops towards Casey’s shoes. It just stands there for a few seconds, apparently forgetting what it was doing. Then it turns again and hops right up on Casey’s stomach. He’s quite ticklish so it takes a tremendous effort not to burst out laughing, but Casey manages, lifting his head so that he can get a better look at this thing. Hello, little buddy, he says softly. The rabbit’s ears prick up momentarily, but it doesn’t seem too worried. Next thing it is doing that thing where it washes its face with its front paws and the team in the annex cheer and pump the air with their fists like someone just scored a touchdown.
Casey cannot resist. He reaches out with his hand, slowly so as not to frighten the little fella, but that’s exactly what he does. The moment the rabbit sees the hand coming towards him he leaps away and fairly quickly resumes his dandelion routine, albeit in ever-increasing circles this time. But the event has been a success, and that night Casey kisses Synthea on her cheek as she sleeps. She wakes to his kiss but will never know why.
Room 100
The aquarium is an unfinished love letter to his wife. Even by Casey’s standards this was an ambitious project, but money was never the problem. The truth is Casey sent the contractors home long ago, told them he changed his mind about the whole thing.
The aquarium. He’d hired the world’s leading experts on experimental concrete structures, pre-ordered several million dollars’ worth of thick, curving glass. It would be the most beautiful aquarium on earth, and all for his gorgeous Synthea. His wife, who loved the ocean and was fascinated by all life beneath it, the undiscovered country. His wife, who loved to swim, to dive under the surface of the water and forget about the world above. Her wet hair twisted over one shoulder, the smell of chlorine on her skin. This aquarium was to be her sanctuary, a place where she could get away, relax her mind and observe some of the planet’s weirdest creatures, their colors and behaviors a dynamic inspiration for her working life, her dreaming life, her life with him. But one day, something went wrong. Not with the contract itself. In fact, the build was ahead of schedule and in-budget, the morale among the construction team never better. This was something else.
They were days away. Three days and they would be ready to fill the tanks with water. It was to be the moment of truth, not only in terms of everything being watertight. For the architect, but most importantly Casey, this would be the moment when they knew whether their original vision for the space had been fulfilled. The light, the shadows, the play of light on every surface, the ambience of the place. They wouldn’t know for sure until the tanks were filled. Everyone was excited. Even the younger guys on the site interrupted their conversations about girls to guess what kind of animals Casey planned to introduce once the tanks were full. Odds were high on a great white, with dolphins coming in a close second favorite. But something happened that turned the whole thing on its head.
Casey was in attendance on the day in question, discussing something with one of the structural engineers, when the door opened behind him. The unlocked door to Room 100 opened and in walked Synthea. And that was the end. Casey lost it right there and then, screaming for her to get out of here, you can’t see this, get out. But even then it was too late. It didn’t matter that she didn’t know what she had seen. Afterwards when they were arguing she begged him to listen to her, she begged him to listen but he wouldn’t. I don’t know what it is, Casey, it can still be a surprise. But Casey’s blood was boiling, the words spilling from him like an oil slick, and then he told her, told her exactly what it was that she had seen. An aquarium, it was to be her own aquarium, and now you’ve seen it and it’s all over. And so it was. The next day he told them to go home, he paid them all in full and sent them home. And so it is, an unfinished love letter to his wife.
Years later, long after Missy and River’s escape by speedboat, Synthea returns to Room 100, the aquarium. Even in its unfinished state it is a breathtaking space, these impossible concrete structures framing the tanks, like a series of volcanic eruptions deep beneath the surface of the ocean, the lava forming and solidifying in the ice-cold water. These panes of glass, each one curving, curving by degrees of love, all for her, to witness life under the ocean. E
ven without the water, without the creatures present, she feels Casey’s love as she runs her fingers over the surface of the glass in a rainbow arc. The dust gathered there. I love you too, she writes.
Acknowledgements
I wrote Versailles in the months following my mother’s death. It was only when she was gone that I realised how much of the world was hers. And when her vibrations ceased, when the music that I didn’t know was everywhere came to an end, the silence for a time felt total. Versailles was my attempt to make some noise. So while the novel isn’t about Milena, I dedicate it to her.
It’s also for all my friends and family, particularly my legendary little sister, Egg.
And I couldn’t have got here without Tilti, my grandparents Babi and Oko, my dad Peter Hill, Sally James, Michael Gleeson, Tony Dixon, Chris Wellbelove, Nicola Barr, Angharad Hill, Naomi Alderman, Patricia Dunker, Stephen Bass, Xander Cansell, Isobel Frankish, my brilliant editor Jamie Groves, the Unbound crew and all the people who turned up to pledge for the novel. Big up.