Empty Space ktt-3

by M. John Harrison

  There was a long silence. ‘Jesus,’ Gaines said.

  She told him about the Toni Reno case, and how the Nova crew had lied to her; the things that occurred in the lanthanide badlands of Funene. Gaines looked around and, as if quietly appealing to some other people, said, ‘You are shitting me.’ At that point, the field collapsed in on itself, so that Skull Radio became a cheap tin souvenir again: about which the assistant felt relieved. Moments later, in a billow of cold air, Gaines himself entered through the wall of her room. He was wearing Hampton chinos, a classic Guernsey, and over them a high fill-pressure down jacket an oily yellow colour.

  ‘Christ Jesus,’ he accused the assistant, ‘is there more to you than meets the eye? Let me ask you: what are you up to here?’

  The assistant said she wasn’t up to anything.

  Gaines sighed. He opened a pipe to the Aleph project. ‘Get me someone in Containment.’ There was a pause, during which he considered the assistant as if deciding not to purchase her. ‘Do you like cake?’ he asked her. ‘I feel like eating cake.’ Before she could think of an answer, the dial-up caught his attention again.

  ‘I know,’ he said. He listened intently for thirty-five seconds before interrupting, ‘Something’s got loose and you fuckers don’t even know what it is!’ To someone else he said, ‘I think it might have been in touch with her.’ This brought a prolonged response that failed to calm his evident anxieties. The assistant went to the window so she could watch people in the street below. ‘Don’t go away,’ Gaines warned her. GlobeTown’s small evening rain was already finished. All along the other side of the street, dub joints and crêpe stalls were opening for early business. Later, the port environs would flush themselves into Saudade proper and these streets would be empty. Until then the girls and boys laughed and kissed in the smell of food and perfume. Neon glowed through the soft renewed air; while, up in the room, Gaines presented his back to the assistant. She stared idly at the pictographs marching along her inside forearm. Sometimes they itched. Sometimes they felt like real things moving under her skin. ‘I don’t know,’ she heard Gaines say. ‘No one knows anything at this time.’ He closed the pipe.

  When he turned back to her the first thing he said was:

  ‘We should let you go after this, but we agreed we don’t want to do that. It wouldn’t make sense for us.’ He smiled. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Do you like cake? All afternoon, I wanted to eat cake!’ He walked her to a well known patisserie stall, Ou Lu Lou’s, up on the hill by the New Men warrens off Retiro Street, where the sidewalk was crammed with people eating ambient tart, listening to music and drinking small glasses of espresso or aniseed liqueur while the neon scripts and city lights shimmered across the warm air — love messages from the distant all-night venues along Tupolev and Mirabeau.

  ‘Look at this! Eclair! Cream horn!’ Gaines rubbed his hands together. ‘You look like someone who can eat cake.’

  ‘I don’t like anything with cream in it,’ the assistant said.

  She laughed. Since the events on Funene, she had felt even more like an impersonation of herself — of any self. Gaines tried to make her dance. She didn’t know how to dance. The crowd began to look uneasy, and some of them moved away. ‘Come on now!’ Gaines called after them. ‘It’s only fun.’ He asked the remainder, didn’t they think the assistant was beautiful? ‘Look at her!’ he said. He drank five or six liqueurs, but didn’t eat any cake after all. Instead he joked with everyone and made sure the assistant had the things she wanted. Later, back in her room, he sat on the bed with his knees apart and his hands loosely clasped between them, and said without preamble:

  ‘The thing about life is that if you get it wrong you can’t go back.’

  There were two kinds of people, he said: those who lived their lives in the prolonged moment of panic in which they first realised this — ‘They have no idea where the door is now, let alone how to get it open if they could find it’ and who therefore spent their lives thrashing about in what he called ‘the disorder of hearing it click shut behind them’. The other kind, after a single awful pang, ‘one fast look back’, decide to make the best of whatever happens next. ‘Those people go on,’ he finished: ‘They’re still hoping for something good.’

  The assistant did not how to reply. Nothing he said was in her area of expertise. None of it applied to someone like her. She wasn’t sure anyway that he meant her to believe him. In the end she said:

  ‘Surely we can be anything we want in this world.’

  Gaines dismissed an idea so simple. ‘When I got in this game,’ he went on, ‘I had a little daughter.’ He said this as if he was just now discovering it; or as if he was discovering it about someone else. ‘A little girl,’ he said, after a pause; and after another one, ‘I was twenty years old.’ This in itself seemed to be the story: at any rate, there was no more to tell. It was as if, ever since, he had looked at these facts obliquely — as if he couldn’t see them but could, with care, make them out as a fairly robust implication of some other data.

  He shrugged. ‘Investigate those mystery deaths if you like,’ he suggested, ‘or this Nova Swing rocket: but it’s a team game now. For all of us. Agreed?’ She had no idea who he was talking about. But each liqueur, she noticed, had caused his smile to become a little less intense. ‘Always bring the results to me,’ he recommended. ‘And never, ever say that word to anyone again.’ The assistant opened her mouth to agree, but before she could speak he walked straight out through the window, vanishing the other side, and leaving her with the impression that the view from her room was painted on the glass. As if the world fabric was a style of art to which only Gaines and people like him had the secret.

  THIRTEEN

  Eaten by Dogs

  Anna Waterman’s bedroom had what she thought of as a suicide bathroom en suite — extensive mirrors above sink and bath, everything else black faux-marble cladding. The walls matched the floor, and there was no natural light. Uplighters provided enough of an oily yellowish glow to pee by. But switch on the three hundred watts of fluorescents hidden in the ceiling and you had better keep your eyes closed: otherwise you would see — turning with you when you turned, wincing and holding its palms up to the cruel radiance — whatever pitiful thing you had become over the years. In a bathroom that implacable, even the happiest woman would find it easy to let the Jack Daniel’s bottle fall and smash. Display as many bowls of dried rose petals as you like in that kind of bathroom, but after you’ve changed the peach-coloured bath sheets and broken open a new cake of handcut hemp-oil soap, you’ll still find yourself arranging the water glass and Temazepam cartons by the sink, or sitting quietly on the too-low lavatory pan, planning where to make the first cut — and cuts will always seem necessary, whatever the financial or emotional climate.

  Some part of Anna sought comfort, or familiarity at least, in the suicide bathroom. That part of her welcomed it as a concept as much as a place, a key theory about the world she had held since she was young, a psychic refuge at the very same time as a site of existential terror, something that would always be there for her: but the part isn’t the whole, and by eight o’ clock on the morning after her swim the rest of her had begun cheerfully demolishing it.

  Marnie found her there just after lunch, crouched under the sink in a cleaning-woman overall, with her hair tied up in a batik scarf.

  ‘What do you think, then?’ Anna said.

  She had emptied the bathroom of everything that would move and piled it into the bedroom. Patchy success with the marble cladding had encouraged her to lever off one of the larger sections of mirror; this she had dropped from the bedroom window into a flowerbed where it lay, unbroken except for a chip at one corner, amid the childlike planting of lobelia and ox-eye daisy. The pipes and cavities exposed by these operations, she had done in gold or silver, according to mood. ‘Later,’ she said, ‘I’ll paint fish on them. Starfish. Seashells. Bubbles. Those kinds of things.’ The major surfaces had taken their first coat,
dark blue emulsion with enough white in it to suggest a kind of Spanish azure, applied fast with a tray and roller. As soon as it was dry she intended to put on more white, in dry combed streaks to give the effect of foam. It covered the walls well enough, but the mirrors would need more. ‘I’m planning to keep to these pastelly greens and blues,’ she told Marnie, ‘for everything but the detail.’ For the detail she had laid aside three or four of the smallest brushes she could find, beautiful sablehair modelling points. ‘But also if I can get some light into them, I will.’

  Marnie stood in the doorway of the suite, stiffly considering the heaps of bath towels and broken fittings; the carrier bags stuffed with leaking Moulton-Brown shower products; the torn black rubbish sack half full of triangular shards of marble, none larger than three inches on a side. On the fitted taupe berber by the bathroom door, Anna had prised open every can of paint in the house, from little unused tins of fancy enamel to five litre drums of professional obliterating emulsion. All of this Marnie observed in disbelief. She picked her way over to the open window and stared down at the mirror in the flowerbed. After a moment she passed one hand over her face and said:

  ‘Anna, for God’s sake what are you doing?’

  ‘I’m decorating, dear. What does it look like?’ Anna pushed some hair back under the scarf. ‘You can help if you like.’

  ‘Let’s have a cup of tea,’ Marnie said tiredly.

  Anna thought that was such a good idea. ‘Perhaps you could help me get these bags of things down to the dustbins too,’ she suggested.

  Marnie insisted they make lunch — cheese on toast and a salad — and afterwards have a stroll round the garden. They dead-headed some of the sadder-looking roses. They lifted the mirror out of the flowerbed and propped it up by the garage, where Marnie thought it looked almost deliberate, like a mirror designed to extend the space in a corner of some well known garden off towards Glyndebourne, the name of which she couldn’t remember. Down by the summerhouse she said, ‘I notice you’ve got rid of the poppies.’ Anna, who felt unable to admit to her daughter that the poppies had vanished overnight, leaving behind them a strip of earth so packed and dry that nothing could have grown there for years, agreed that she had dug them up. ‘But I don’t see where you’ve put them,’ Marnie said. ‘They’re not in the compost.’

  ‘Oh, somewhere, darling. I expect I put them somewhere.’

  Marnie hooked her arm through Anna’s. Each time they drew near the house, she steered them away again. ‘It’s such a nice day,’ she said, or, ‘Those paint fumes can’t be good for you,’ or, ‘Oh, Mum, smell all this!’ — indicating, with a delighted sweep of her arm and a clear subtext, the roses, the orchard, the August air itself.

  It was a wonderful day, Anna agreed cautiously, and she had loved lunch; but she must get back to work now.

  ‘I don’t know why you’re doing this,’ Marnie accused her.

  ‘These days, I don’t know why I’m doing anything,’ Anna said, trying to make Marnie laugh. ‘Oh darling, can’t you give me a bit of room?’

  ‘If you don’t go too far.’

  It was Anna’s turn to be angry.

  ‘How far is that?’ she demanded. ‘This place was always really rather ordinary, Marnie. That was fine for your father. It was fine for you growing up. But now I want something different.’ Staring across at the summerhouse, she caught a fleeting glimpse of herself thirty years ago in a West London bathroom, two o’clock in the morning. Fishes painted on the wall, amber-coloured soap with a rosebud trapped inside like someone else’s past — the past you’ll have, once you’re in the future. It’s the Millennium, or close to it. A dozen scented candles flicker, stuck to the bath surround with their own fat, throwing on the rag-rolled walls the shadows of twigs in vases encrusted with fake verdigris. The bathwater cooling around your nipples but still acceptable as long as you don’t move too often. 2am, and Michael Kearney’s footsteps are heard upon the stair; his key is heard in Anna’s lock.

  ‘Come with me, Marnie,’ Anna said. She led Marnie upstairs and made her look at the new bathroom. ‘I want this. I once had this, and I want it again.’

  ‘Mum, I —’

  ‘I was younger than you are now when I last had a bathroom I liked. You have a nice stable life, Marnie, but I didn’t. I’m not giving my house to you. I’m not just going to give you my fucking house and live in a shed somewhere.’

  There was a long, helpless silence. ‘Anna,’ Marnie said, ‘what are you talking about?’

  Anna wasn’t sure. Every attempt to articulate it left her feeling failed. She was getting the house ready for Michael: as much as common sense, a kind of shyness prevented her from admitting that. Over the next few days she painted. It was hard work. In the end the walls took three coats and the mirrors four. One afternoon, she left the paint to dry and walked along the lanes to a pub called the de Spencer Arms, expecting to be able to sit outside at her favourite table and — a bit windswept and pleasantly sundazzled — watch the retirees from London manoeuvring their Jaguars in and out of the car park. Instead she found the table occupied by a boy and two dogs. The boy had a woollen workshirt on over a loose pullover, and over them a donkey jacket. His jeans were tight, worn a little too long, trodden down by the heels of his black, awkward, lace-up boots. Every item was covered in mud or splattered with paint. He was sitting negligently on the table itself, next to an empty pint glass, kicking his legs and whistling.

  ‘Do you mind if I sit down?’ Anna said.

  ‘I’ll get off this table, shall I?’ the boy said. ‘It’s the cleanest table here, this one. That’s why I sat here.’

  ‘Your dogs are so beautiful.’

  ‘They won’t hurt you,’ the boy said, ‘these dogs. Some say they’re dangerous, but I know they’re not.’ They stood alertly by his legs, identical animals facing away from him into the wind, shaped like greyhounds if a little smaller, with pale blue eyes, patches of long grey, bristly fur and a kind of curled, nervous alertness. Now and then a shiver passed over one or the other of them. Every movement drew their attention. They looked where the boy looked, then looked to him for confirmation of the things they saw. ‘I’d get another drink,’ he said to Anna, ‘but I hate that posh bar in there. You don’t need to worry about these dogs, they wouldn’t harm a child.’

  ‘What kind of dogs are they?’

  The boy gave her a sly look. ‘Working dogs,’ he said. He lowered his voice confidentially. ‘I’m out lamping most nights, with that lot in the fields,’ he said. ‘They’re down the fields every night, with the lights and dogs. They’ve got some fierce dogs, that lot.’ Anna said she wasn’t sure what lamping was. The boy looked blank at that. It was so much a part of his life, she saw, that there was too much to tell. He was helpless to know where to start. She indicated the pub, with its with its pleasantly sagging Horsham stone roofs, its wisteria and virginia creeper.

  ‘I could get you a drink,’ she offered, ‘if you didn’t want to go in.’

  The boy set his face. ‘They don’t want these dogs in a bar like that,’ he said. ‘Fat boys,’ he said contemptuously. ‘Pushing their thousand quid mountain bikes up these hills. Pushing them up the hills!’

  In fact the bar was full of ex-estate agents and their wives, ignoring the sour smell of the carpets and drinking gin and tonic as fast as they could — withered men in roomy blazers, their shoulders at odd independent angles underneath; women whose gaze seemed unnaturally eager, their cheeks the red you see on pheasants, their hair tightened up chemically to within a nanometre of hair’s tolerance, ready to snap. Anna bought the boy a pint of Harvey’s Mild and a wine-box spritzer for herself. She thought he might like a packet of cheese and onion crisps. She looked forward to talking to him again. Perhaps he would let her stroke the dogs. But when she got outside with the drinks he was already walking away across the car park, head down, shoulders hunched tensely, hands in his pockets. His long, relaxed stride made it seem as if as if the two halves
of his body had nothing to do with each other. The dogs walked one either side of him on their stiff, fragile-looking legs, so attentive that their heads almost touched his knees. He turned round to wave to Anna.

  ‘But your drink — !’ she called. He only waved again and went off towards Wyndlesham.

  Anna ate the cheese and onion crisps, staring out at the curve of the Downs. She drank the wine then the beer, taking her time. The de Spencer Arms themselves, as represented on the pub sign, featured something for everyone — crosses, chevrons, bars — done in stained-glass colours as rich as the light inside a cathedral; among which was a weirdly modern, penetrative, electric blue.

  All afternoon the boy’s loose stride took him up and down the footpaths and bridleways around Wyndlesham. Patchy woodland fifty yards from back gardens. Dried up ruts in secondary growth already the colour of straw. Sunglare on dusty fields where an inch of soil, parched as early as April, was skimmed on to hectares of raw chalk; then the relief of a wide grassy rake falling away steeply between beeches. Buzzards in the updraughts and a temporary altar of concrete slabs under the tall old-fashioned single-arch railway bridge at Brownlow. He never left the same three or four square miles. He was waiting for it to be dark, so he could go down the low-lying fields between Wyndlesham and Winsthrow and run his dogs along the beam of the lamp. They were a shade heavy, his dogs, but they were good for a long night on the lamp. He loved to see them curl and uncurl in the path of light. He was happy taking rabbit but he liked hares best. ‘A hare stretches them out, these dogs,’ he would tell himself. ‘She gives them a run.’ It was something to see. It was over in a minute or two. Sometimes he was so excited he saw everything in slow motion as if hare and dogs were swimming ecstatically in the dark air. His heart was so far out to them there! He was seeing faster than they could run. He could feel his heart rocking his body. He could replay every hare his dogs ever caught, like a download in his head. ‘It’s something to see,’ he would say when people asked him. He didn’t know where to begin with them and their mountain bikes, weekend in, weekend out.