Beacons

by Gregory Norminton

  ‘I haven’t, Marly. It’s Per. I can’t do it because if I do, what kind of future will he have?’

  ‘Per? You don’t know the first thing about him.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means that if you don’t destroy the weather station, I will do this again. And not on my own.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  She turned to look at Per and refused to talk again.

  ■

  Marly was let out of hospital two days ago and I haven’t slept since. I have watched Per every moment that I can. But today, I cannot. I got here early. I’m watching the sunrise from my mezzanine and even though I know we can control everything that moves on this goddamn earth I still find it incredibly beautiful. Today is a very special day. Kish has told me that we’ll be making our first storm. He’ll be here in half an hour.

  Marly hasn’t spoken since she came home, but I know she meant what she said. Her crazy plan all along has been for one of use to destroy the weather station so that Green people can no longer control the weather here. She believes it will give the sandtowners a chance to move away, to escape … But I have realized, if not over the last few months then perhaps the last few years, even, that Marly’s ideals are wrong. What does she expect: that we will be looked after, maybe celebrated by the sandtowners? It won’t happen. Beyond our green lands there is no Utopia. We control the weather because we have no other choice: our weather was ruined by other generations who didn’t know better, or perhaps did, but didn’t care, and now we have to live with that as best we can. If I don’t make it rain, what crops will grow? Who will feed Per? And his children? I care about the next generation, unlike those who have ruined it for us. I care about the sandtowners, too – of course I feel guilty about their suffering – but that guilt is not enough – their problems are not our fault. Marly is not an idealist: Marly is mad.

  Kish arrives, punctual and smiling as ever. He has forgiven me my coarse questioning and my almost criminal views. He knows that to be a weatherman, you have to be curious.

  ‘My friend,’ he says, putting his hand on my shoulder. ‘Today we are going to make a storm. You will rarely experience a feeling like it. Today will be your best day yet.’

  I nod. ‘I know it.’

  He grins. ‘Well now, let’s get out of this mezzanine and into the core of the earth.’

  I laugh and follow him down the stairs, right to the ground floor, where he presses his hand to the pad and the trapdoor swings open.

  ‘Come,’ he says, and I trail him, my feet sounding soft on the wooden steps, everything cool in the low light. ‘Today you are allowed.’

  And now we are at the door that I couldn’t cross before, and my heart is racing and even my palms are a little sweaty.

  ‘Nervous?’ Kish asks. ‘It’s only natural. Making a storm is a big deal. I love storm day. In some ways I know I shouldn’t – but I do.’

  I swallow dryly.

  He smiles. ‘Now, you need to press your hand to the pad at the same time as me. One, two, three …’

  The door makes a click and judders open. Behind it, a huge, bright space, almost blue. A huge hole in the ground, and a huge hole in the ceiling, which I guess is the tube going through the roof, though here, I realize, there is no tube: just the space inside it. Around the hole is a gallery, with wooden railings, chest-high, and weather panels bleeping along the walls. And buzzing. Loud and louder, lots of buzzing. I lean over the railings; the drop is huge. Kish pulls me back with a rough tug.

  ‘No, you never, ever stand that close to the rails.’

  I nod, but can’t shake off the feeling in my stomach, the bottomless-ness of the hole.

  ‘Your curiosity will be the death of you,’ he sighs. ‘Let me just tell you first. The generator works from underground, and the lightning is directed through the roof and elsewhere. You will see it rise straight through the ground through the tube.’

  ‘But how does that even work?’

  Kish shakes his head. ‘That’s not important, and, in any case, I’m not authorized to tell you. But I have told you about the buttons you must press to make it work. The panel is the same as our one in CR7. Look.’

  We turn our backs to the tube and instead face the machines. I shiver, though the room – cave, whatever – is hot. ‘You have,’ I said. ‘Yes. I see. The same.’

  ‘Well, then.’ He rubs his hands down the lengths of his coat. ‘We are ready to make the storm. I have put everything in place for it. And I want you to create the lightning.’

  ‘I had hoped as much,’ I say.

  Kish bows his head. ‘First, I must set you up.’ I watch him as he presses buttons, cranks handles and swishes about. Sweat is running down my back now under my coat.

  ‘I just want to ask: how much damage will this storm do to the sandtowns?’

  Kish clears his throat. ‘You’re very altruistic, aren’t you?’

  ‘It’s not that … I just want to know.’

  He shakes his head. ‘I’ll be honest with you: it’s these storms that have created, and ruined, the sandtowns.’

  ‘Yes … The sandtowns are our fault. I know that. But we only make storms when we need to.’

  Kish laughed. ‘You really believe that? Why would we ever need to make a storm?’

  Marly is mad. Marly is not mad. I have so many questions I can’t even ask one.

  ‘We make storms to make sure the sandtowns remain that way. We can only feed so many mouths.’ Kish pats me on the back. ‘It’s OK – you’re a weatherman, but you’re not God. We can only do so much.’

  I stare at Kish until my eyes feel dry. I knew, of course I knew, that in controlling the weather we weren’t helping the sandtowns … But to do it simply to oppress them? Marly, oh god, she was right, and I nearly lost both her and our son because I didn’t believe her.

  Kish looks at me. ‘Now, weatherman, I need you to realize that the lightning is the most dangerous part of the storm, and generates a huge amount of power which we recycle back into the weather station. For this reason, the hole through which it’s directed is very dangerous. When you have made the lightning, on no account should you lean over the railings. It might kill you.’

  ‘Might?’

  ‘Will. And it would destroy the weather station. So, that’s safety out of the way. You’re a sensible man, when you listen. And now, I am ready for you to make the lightning. Are you ready? I bet you can’t wait.’

  I nod, but I’m not ready, not by a long shot. I will never be ready for this. I know now exactly what I need to do. I think really I always knew: I just didn’t believe that I would do it.

  ‘Press the button, weatherman!’ Kish nods at me and waits for my finger to do its magic, to control the weather and to make the storm come true.

  Before I press the button, I take a deep breath and think of my dad, and how proud he would be, and think of Per, and the man I hope he will become, and think of Marly, and how this might save her, and that’s so much that I can’t think any more, and I let my mind go blank; so blank that all I can think of is the space in front of me, the button I have to push, and I close my eyes and press the button.

  ‘That’s it!’ yells Kish, applauding.

  Immediately I hear fizzing, buzzing, then a jet of white and blue so bright I blink back tears. I turn around to face the tube and Kish bounds over and puts his arm over my shoulder.

  ‘Well done!’ he calls into my ear.

  But I shrug him away, and before he can do anything I am at the railings. I climb so I’m standing on top of them, and I whoop. Kish tries to come over but the lightning is glaring; I close my eyes and think of Per. I open them once to look down into the fizzing dark that’s blindingly white at the same time and I take another deep breath.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Kish screams, hanging onto the rail but crouching on the floor. ‘Do you want to kill yourself?’ There are tears running down his cheeks because the light is so bright. My he
ad is pounding along with my heart, which may as well be my Adam’s apple it’s so high in my throat. I start to laugh.

  ‘No! I don’t want to die! But it doesn’t matter; no one is important here.’

  ‘Are you mad?’ Kish is clinging to the rail but has his other arm over his eyes. ‘You’re a weatherman! Stop this at once!’

  A weatherman. So proud. A god, of sorts. And yet I have no choice, and I know it. Focusing now on Per, wrapped in his towels, on my father’s innocence and Marly’s humanity, I suck my breath in so hard I think I’ll explode, and in one soft, small movement I throw myself down the tube and all I hear is buzzing and then silence, silence, silence.

  ‌Take Notice

  ‌Adam Thorpe

  Not that he would ever know what might happen, to him or to anyone else; one of the more extraordinary features of being human is that, while knowing the future exists, you remain entirely ignorant of its manifestations. Animals are luckier, Gus reflected: they bathe in a permanent present.

  He had his great garden, and he was continually amazed each spring – indeed, these days in any season out of the deepest darks of winter – by the earth’s profligacy, throwing up growth as soon as his gardener, the loyal but stiffening Cliff, had dug it to bare sod. This smothered Gus’s loneliness. In the beginning his children, having frittered away their years after university, would return every so often, staying sometimes two or three months in the ‘country pile’ until boredom saw them off again, whither he knew not. His perceived return to political respectability had foundered long ago, and the ache of disappointment had never really left him.

  He missed Sarah, his wife, more than ever; she had drowned in Crete so many years ago now that he had to pause before calculating the number. He had brought her body back to England in the hold of a government jet, at night, into a blaze of flashbulbs that caught him looking too official. At least, that was the complaint. Perhaps that was the start of it all: his rage at fate.

  England.

  Once he had believed in such a concept, a vague medley of flags and fields and Shakespeare’s verse. Now, despite its present, almost sacred potency (‘her commons of earth-song/not yet consumed’ in the words of the current fashionable verse-maker, Naresh Thomson), the idea left him cold. It was a withered cold thing in his hand, a dried-out mandragora upon which long ago he had supped and which now left nothing but the echo of its shriek; a sad uprooted object on a shelf, like a private memento that means nothing to anyone except to the person who found it on some special, far-off day. A dead touchstone, a husk.

  Language was left to him, of course, a delight in language, but Gus found himself even now drawn to its worst exemplars – old airport thrillers from the days when airports were open to the public, stories of green-eyed phantoms hiding behind embossed drops of blood and gore. The adventures of Sherlock Holmes or the complete edition of P.G. Wodehouse acted as a light-hearted corrective to this regrettable tendency. As for the great classics, they collected dust and spiders’ threads in his grandfather’s library, where the smell of real books and real paper was a perfume as potent as honeysuckle.

  At times he had imagined burning the lot and going over to the other side – starting afresh in a simple caravan in Wales or France or Ireland, or turning the peaty soil on some Hebridean croft with the battering ocean as accompaniment beyond a stony hill. But the days passed into weeks and the weeks slid easily into months, and so on until, with some degree of shock, he realized that he had spent over a decade doing nothing of any significance or worth – not even lending anything more substantial than considerable quantities of cash after the Great Flood. Not even making amends.

  His children no longer needed him. One of his daughters was dead, another had run off with a yurt-maker to America, a third was now rich and miserable in Staffordshire, wife to a bore who had made a fortune from portable dams and whose sole idea of fun was to sail yachts into rocks and spend millions (or so it seemed) on repairs. The dead daughter had been his favourite, but she had declined into drugs and sexual deviancy with such apparent relish that he had no longer recognized her in the last years, and her dying was ghastly and protracted. He had felt no love for her by the time she succumbed: not for the person succumbing, at any rate. He scarcely wept either at the funeral or in the lonely days afterwards, when the hospital visits no longer took him away from the house and its hungry grounds.

  Gus would stare at early photographs of Persephone and wonder where the little dark-haired girl had gone, slipping off her father’s knee into oblivion. Separated as she was from the bony white-faced spectre he had buried, he could almost believe she might return. In his nightmares this is exactly what he would see, and on awakening would wonder why it was not a pleasant dream, why instead it had brought out the sweat on his brow and upper lip so heavily that he could taste salt on his tongue.

  The dew of fear, he thought, and of some obscure longing for remission.

  He looked back on his life and found that at each point of potential there was a small dark stain like a crushed fly when movement of any significance had been deprived him – he could not explain it better to himself. He had started his autobiography, a sober account of his years in politics, his period of apparent power and influence, some twenty years ago, but it had fizzled out into a dull, apologetic tract concerning issues and small dramas no one save the academics now remembered, and it sat as a wad of unfulfilled notes in a cupboard in the study. There was only one thing the general populace ever remembered about him, and in a form of narrative that lacked nuance. Reality is all nuance, he would say, to no one in particular. To the sky, which he sometimes felt was his only true domain: its epic puffs of mountains and castles.

  By becoming a recluse, he was aware that he was depriving himself of those elements that might distract him from his increasingly inward journey, and on reading that the spiral was the essential building block of all matter, the primary pattern in its paradigmatic return and advance – each return completing an advance and beginning another – he felt himself on a course that resembled a whirlpool and might finish in the black hole of madness, where everything was … what? What it should not be, of course, while appearing eminently sensible.

  He was having tea on the lower lawn – Mrs Cutler having brought out the tray with her usual moan and long retired into the shadowy blackness of the house, the candle lamps not yet lit – when he saw a man dressed all in white cycling towards him between the croquet hoops, swerving unsteadily to avoid one of the cracked wooden balls that had been a smooth bright yellow in Gus’s far-off boyhood.

  It never occurred to Gus that his life might be in danger; the threat of assassination was long past, in his opinion. The youngish man, removing his bicycle clips, introduced himself as a friend of Persephone’s in her final, difficult years. He had once been handsome but the face was now ravaged by misuse, the eyes particularly suffering: their pale blue appeared albino, as if accustomed to darkness. Gus had initially suspected he was after ration cards – meat, electricity, whatever – or had some counterfeit versions to sell: the country was overrun by the latter since the latest edict, which reduced an average use of the national grid to about a day a week. People smelt unwashed, Mrs Cutler said.

  ‘Would you like some tea?’

  ‘Thank you.’ The man seemed surprised. He had a famished look; he was either genuinely hungry or one of those reluctant, state-rewarded vegans.

  A scowling Mrs Cutler brought out the best biscuits and one of her wobblier jam sponge cakes, which the man gobbled happily (merely famished, then). The indirect communication with Persephone was both upsetting and comforting to Gus – the gruff manner of the stranger, who gave his name as ‘Aidan, Aidan Eldraw’, giving it an air of sincerity. Although the head supervisor for a nearby community’s composting network, he was clearly down on his luck, his looseness of limb almost clumsy. Despite his denials, it occurred to Gus that this may well have been a boyfriend, someone who had played an active part
in his daughter’s decline.

  The ensuing confidences were insinuating and vague, Aidan Eldraw apparently bent on some form of blackmail.

  ‘Persephone’s upbringing was weird, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Was it?’

  ‘Nannies, a father often absent, scandals.’

  ‘Scandals?’

  ‘Pre-Revolt. Women. She often mentioned the women in your life.’

  ‘She never got over the death of her mother.’

  ‘I said to her: you can’t expect your dad to be pure as the driven.’

  Gus was relieved when the man rose to go. They walked together to the gate, sweating in the April heat, the bicycle ticking as it was wheeled over the warm lawn. So far, nothing had been said of the real purpose of the visit, although Gus was increasingly troubled by the man’s tone as they approached the iron whorls of the entrance, beyond which the postman’s horse was delivering great clots of dung on the rutted, camomile-tufted drive.

  ‘Thank you for the tea. You’ll be hearing from me again.’

  ‘Will I? I rather hope not.’

  When the letters came a few weeks later, signed ‘A.E.’, Gus was not that surprised. The overt claims of incest and neglect brought the stranger’s face into abrupt close-up, as if Persephone had been replaced by some furious demon of revenge. The old man searched back in his past, found nothing that might have been misconstrued except by a damaged hysteric, wrote back to threaten the apparent blackmailer with the police – knowing in the process that he was risking his neck, his reputation, everything.

  On an impulse he bought an old racing car, a 1968 Lotus that had reputedly won many races all over the world, and he began to enter it for club meetings. He hired a waggon-team to transport it, found a white-haired mechanic twenty miles away willing and able to accompany him or to drop by if problems occurred while he was spinning about the grounds, and began to discover in himself, in his mid-seventies, a youthful capacity for exhilaration and danger. At Silverstone one weekend he swirled off and lightly broke his leg. He drove the car round and round the garden on the gravel drive as soon as he was recovered, and went to bed with the smell of Castrol and burnt rubber in his clothes and soiled skin.