Empty Space ktt-3

by M. John Harrison

  TWENTY EIGHT

  Lay Down Your Weary Tune

  The volunteers of the Wyndlesham & District Fire Service, called to a house on Coldmorton Lane when smoke was seen rising just after dawn, attended with a turn-of-the-century pumping unit on a Man chassis and their even older Mercedes turntable (some local enthusiast’s ‘big society’ donation, salvaged from the corner of a field in southern France and lovingly restored), to find the occupier, a fifty- or sixty-year-old woman naked and with an inexplicable smile, half in and half out of a small wooden structure at the end of her garden. She was dead. Preparing to damp down, they also discovered that though it had collapsed in on itself in a curiously chaotic way — as if blown about by brief, whirling, highly localised gusts of wind — the structure, a lapboard shed about the same age as their Mercedes, had clearly never been on fire. There was no heat. There was no charring. There was no smell. The banks of glowing embers that had appeared to surround it when they arrived turned out to be only its contents, piles of colourful household stuff which had burst from the damp cardboard boxes inside when the roof fell in.

  Police, paramedics and the dead woman’s GP all turned up at once. By then, the turntable had returned to its garage in the derelict agricultural college buildings at Plumpton; and the team leader — a raw-looking Yorkshireman called Weatherburn with hacked-off grey hair, thirty years’ experience and his own sense of humour — was rocking the Man pump about in front of the house, trying to get it back out into Coldmorton Lane without cutting up the lawn. Weatherburn stuck his head out of the cab’s side window and told the doctor: ‘Whatever the caller spotted, it wasn’t a fire.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘We can usually recognise one when we see it.’

  The doctor grinned whitely and, already sick of shouting to be heard over the roar of the diesel, failed to reply.

  Not long later he rolled off his powdered nitrile gloves and informed the attending police officers: ‘A stroke. Massive.’ Everyone at his practice knew Anna Waterman.

  ‘What’s that in her hand?’

  When they pried the object loose, it turned out to be an outboard computer drive with a polished titanium shell and a style of connection port no one had seen except in museums. They passed it about, rubbing their fingers over some deep, etched-looking marks at one corner. The paramedics, meanwhile, got the body on to a trolley and pushed it effortfully up the lawn, leaving tracks in the dew. The doctor watched them go. ‘She was a nice old woman,’ he said to no one in particular. ‘A bit mad, like most of that generation.’ Suddenly depressed, he leant on the orchard fence and looked out across the meadow at some wisps of mist dissipating above the river. He was thirty years old. Anna’s age weighed on him. She had seen the world when it was still proud of its future, blown, like its economy, as a stream of bubbles. Behind him, the remains of the summerhouse settled suddenly. Dust puffed up, and from inside came faint scraping noises.

  ‘I think there’s an animal in there,’ one of the police said.

  ‘Hurry and rescue it then,’ the doctor advised without turning to look. He laughed. ‘I can’t see a health and safety issue.’ He left them to it and went up to the house to make out the formal notice of death and call the daughter.

  When Marnie Waterman arrived she found a note from him. In handwriting precise and careful, it told her how to proceed; he had also left a leaflet entitled What to do when someone dies. She folded the note in half, and then in half again. No one seemed to know what had happened to the summerhouse, much less to the cat. She watched the policemen, still waist-high in the wreckage, calling out like people who had never had much to do with pets. Stopping her car to allow the ambulance to pass in the narrow lane between Cottishead and Wyndlesham, she hadn’t thought that her mother might be in it.

  ‘Oh Anna,’ she said, as if Anna had let her down in some way.

  She repeated that silently to herself, in one tone of voice or another, all morning — talking to the police, driving to Lewes to identify her mother at the mortuary, filling in forms, making arrangements. ‘Oh Anna.’ It was less pejorative than it sounded. It was a murmur of disbelief.

  Four hours later, she was back at the end of the garden, where, alone with her thoughts in the sun, she made the same mistake as the firemen — although what she thought she saw at the base of the summerhouse was not a heap of embers but an illustration from an old-fashioned children’s book. Kegs and brassbound caskets were depicted spilling their contents — surely ‘treasure’? — across the floor of a sea-polished cave, in the dimness of which it was difficult to tell salty pebbles from jewels the size of hen’s eggs or hanks of weed from fabrics rich and strange.

  A washy resolve converted this semiotic boutique to something she could understand: burst removers’ boxes, some of them twenty years old, full of stuff she had almost managed to forget. Her father’s collection of ancient maps and charts, curtains Anna couldn’t be persuaded to throw out. Christmas tree decorations. A Hornby trainset still in its box. A cannon. Coloured plastic crockery too small for a picnic, too large for a toy. Trick items Marnie had collected, age seven, when she determined to be a magician: joke liquorice, ‘X-Ray Specs’, handcuffs you couldn’t take off. There was a japanned box in which you placed a billiard ball you would never find again, though you could hear it rattling about in there forever. There was the cup with a reflected face in the bottom that turned out not to be your own; the valentine heart which lit itself up by means of loving diodes within. They were children’s things, made of Chinese plastic, cheap rubber, feathers: objects trivial in their day but now of great value to collectors.

  ‘I feel at a loss,’ Marnie told herself.

  While she was in Lewes, the police had given up on James the cat and departed on some other errand. Marnie was relieved. Their energy had been a burden, on a day when she didn’t have much energy of her own. Should she have offered them a cup of tea? They hadn’t seemed to expect it.

  James was an old cat now. She had never much liked him, but her parents had been gently determined that she keep a pet. It was as if they were encouraging her, at the age of thirteen, to accept emotional ties of her own, to love something as much as they loved each other, to take her first steps on the path to becoming them. If she wasn’t quite as enthusiastic, Marnie had been willing enough: but James, proving standoffish, stubborn, obsessed even as a kitten, soon relieved her of the effort. She had envied him to start with, then, in a sense, forgotten him. If he had vanished now, it was just another absence in a history of absences. All of this — the cat quietly making a kingdom of its own in the long grass and thistles between the orchard and the river, then Tim dying, now Anna dying — made life seem so sinister for a moment that she sat unable to move. Up in the house the phone rang; but by the time she got there whoever it was had stopped trying. Rather than do nothing, she went through Anna’s messages. One was from a decorator whose quote for the bathroom seemed quite high, another the usual failed attempt to connect by an automated cold-calling service; a third was from Marnie herself, left late on the previous evening in a voice so tired she barely recognised it as her own:

  ‘Mum, I’ve got some news about my tests.’

  The remaining calls, half a dozen of them, were from Anna’s psychiatrist. They sounded urgent. About to call her back, Marnie heard a noise in the kitchen, the cat nosing its food bowl about on the tiles.

  ‘James!’ she said. ‘Oh, James!’

  Caught in the client’s naive but effective web of transference, counter-transference and projective identification — and more rattled than she was willing to admit by Anna’s defection — Helen Alpert had made the first of these calls on her way back from Walthamstow the previous evening.

  No reply. Quick to associate that with the idea of failing to connect, she had stopped the Citroën at the side of the A406 somewhere on the long arc of planning blight between Brent Cross and Neasden, struggling twenty yards away from it in the roar and swash of th
e passing traffic to be sure she had a signal. A minicab driver had pulled up and, assuming something was wrong with her car, first opened the bonnet without permission, then kept offering to drive her somewhere. After she had persuaded him to leave her alone she sat exhaustedly in the Citroën’s rear seat for half an hour, as if she’d given up after all and allowed herself the luxury of being a passenger. Safe in Richmond, she had begun calling again, three times in a five minute period. ‘Anna, I’ve got news I’m convinced might change your mind. Could we talk just once more? Do call when you get home!’ She had leafed through the case notes until late; fallen asleep trying to understand where she had broken her own rules.

  Now it was four o’ clock in the afternoon. Outside her consulting room the Thames ran backwards; flushed with tidal mud, it spilled across the Mall at the junction with Chiswick Lane. Sunlight, weakened and softened by the riverine air, reflected from the papers spread chaotically across her desk, highlighting the favourite vase, the petals of gladioli. Dr Alpert tried to read. She wrote, ‘Anna believes that —’ but was otherwise unable to commit herself. In the margins of the neurologist’s report, she discovered her name written several times in her own hand, as if by someone trying to solve an anagram. It was not the disorganised nature of these responses, she believed, that had made her so anxious.

  She picked up the phone.

  ‘Anna!’ she greeted Anna’s answering service. ‘Look, I’ve got some exciting news. I went to see Brian Tate yesterday. He’s still alive. Still living in the same house in North London. He’s been teaching physics at a school in Walthamstow for thirty years. He’s reluctant to talk to me about what happened, of course. That’s understandable. But I think he might talk to you. Anna, I think it would do you the world of good to talk to someone else who knew Michael —’

  There was a dull clattering sound at the other end of the line, and a half-familar voice said:

  ‘Hello? Hello? Who’s this?’

  ‘Anna,’ said the doctor. ‘I’m so relieved! I thought —’

  ‘It’s not Anna,’ said the voice, ‘it’s her daughter.’ There was a pause. ‘I’m sorry, but Anna’s dead.’

  Helen Alpert stared at the phone.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she said. She couldn’t think what to add. ‘Oh dear, I’m sorry about that. Is this Marnie?’ She couldn’t remember if there was another daughter. All she could remember about Anna’s relationship with Marnie was its elegantly unconscious symmetries. Anna, constructing the daughter as a failed adult, had defused Marnie’s early sexuality by pressing upon her the role of dowdy, unfulfilled helper; later this had encouraged Marnie to treat her mother as an ageing child whose narcissistic demands were a burden. ‘I’m very sorry to hear that,’ she said again.

  ‘It was a stroke,’ Marnie said. After a pause, she added: ‘Was there something? I’m quite busy at the moment.’

  ‘No, no. It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Do send your bill, won’t you?’ Marnie said.

  Helen Alpert said she would.

  At the age of six Marnie Waterman wanted to be married. She believed this would happen when she was twenty-one, as the inevitable consequence of reaching that age. She would also have horses and drive a car. Another inevitable consequence was: she would be tall. Though she had no plan for bringing it about, the future seemed already there for her, a dreamy thing with pre-loaded contents. At seven she said to anyone who asked: ‘I’ll certainly travel.’ Ten years old saw her adding an image of herself in blocked pink satin shoes; although this, out of shyness, she kept private. Around that time the Chinese economy collapsed and everything else went with it. Media dubbed it ‘the perfect storm’. Like most of the other fathers in Wyndlesham, Tim Waterman had put up the hurricane shutters a year or two in advance. They were one of the lucky families, he explained when Marnie was thirteen: nevertheless a lot of things fell out of her future around then. Outside Wyndlesham, stagflation wrote itself over everything like graffiti. Peak oil had come and gone. No one knew how to blow the next bubble. The financial sector, stunned by the discovery that money had been as postmodernised as everything else, passively allowed the state to clip its wings. Bankers seeking explanations read Baudrillard forty years too late. Bonuses tanked. A few footsoldiers got jobs in the remaining heartlands of the industry, where they found competition fierce. Families like Marnie’s still drove everywhere, but their Range Rovers and Audis went unreplaced year on year; and though their incomes remained good they felt hard-up. Adults were forced to find new ways of viewing the idea of success; children were having to mature earlier. Some of them felt resentful about that. Sharp divisions appeared at the upper end of the middle class. Suddenly your parents could afford the Wyndlesham cheese shop or they couldn’t: Marnie’s cohort found itself defined by this. In her mid-to-late teens Marnie revised the contents of the future, but she still expected it to bring itself about. Meanwhile, her father began to look tired, then died without warning of pancreatic cancer. Luckily he’d protected the family from that too. Marnie, nineteen and a half, came home to the funeral by train — a long, grinding journey through a landscape composed of empty industrial estates and abandoned parking structures — to find Anna sad but also frisky. They spoke about how free she felt, but it turned out she hadn’t made any plans either. All that time, Marnie had been doing well at a good university, though when her twenty-first birthday arrived she turned out not to be married after all; towards the end of graduation year she accepted a job offer from one of the emerging mutual associations.

  Looking back on it all now, she felt that so far her life had been demanding but satisfactory. Women only ten years older than her, encouraged to remain adolescent until they were thirty, had failed to make the transition from the liquid world: they seemed brittle when they had what they wanted, spoiled and bitter when they didn’t. The younger ones, struggling to avoid the underclass enclaves of Eastbourne and Hastings, were simply worn down. At twenty-eight, by contrast, Marnie had charge of herself. Though money was no longer a serious career, ‘the New Economics’ — cautious, simplified and heavily shifted to the co-operative — brought her security. A single mother since her last year at uni, she found herself able to rent a small house well away from the chaotic suburbs; her employer financed childcare until Enny Mae was five, then a nice school. Marnie could afford medical insurance. She still saw Enny Mae’s father, a man called William. Once or twice a year they had a talk. They were making sure that whatever future the little girl imagined for herself, a plan was put in place for achieving it. Anna, recognising Enny Mae as competition, had never shown much interest; to avoid fractiousness and tantrums, Marnie had learned to keep them apart.

  That was how things had rested until this morning.

  Marnie put the phone down on Helen Alpert, stared out of the window of the Coldmorton Lane house, which she supposed was now hers, and wondered what would happen next. She had woken eager to share her test results with Anna, suddenly able to feel happy after the inexplicable anxiety-states of the night before (in which relief at being cancer-free was somehow overpowered by the dread of a completely new future — one into which the possibility of cancer had now been firmly embedded): but Anna had somehow evaded her again, deftly remaining the absent parent to the end. Marnie felt weightless. It was too early to collect Enny Mae from school; to obviate further changes in his lifestyle, James the cat had eaten hastily and hidden himself under a wardrobe. Marnie washed Anna’s supper things at the sink — there was a dishwasher but she couldn’t bring herself to run it — then wandered around the living area. Anna still owned books. In them, the self figured largely: self-help books of thirty years ago, novels about women finding themselves, a book of photographs entitled Events of the Self; even books by a man calling himself Self. She turned on the TV — found only news of the Indian reoccupation of Pakistan — turned it off again.

  Ten or fifteen minutes later, she caught someone hanging about in the garden. He was a boy of about sixteen, some
what shorter than Marnie, dressed in tight grey jeans rolled halfway up his calves. His white T-shirt was too small for him, his black lace-up boots were covered in hardened dribbles and spots of yellow and pink enamel paint. With him he had a small dog, a kind of long-legged Border terrier, sand-coloured, with short, bristly hair and scruffy-looking ears. Boy and dog stood in the middle of the lawn. Both of them seemed fascinated by the wreckage of the summerhouse.

  Marnie rapped on the window.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she called. ‘Excuse me! Can I help you?’

  He didn’t seem to hear. Marnie went out on to the lawn and marched up behind him. ‘Excuse me!’ she called again, perhaps more loudly than she had intended. ‘Do you mind if I ask what you’re doing here?’