Now they returned to her in force. Fear of the family she had never met. Apprehension about what they might have been told about her, or what they might not. Worse, what they intended for her now, the lover whose existence might undermine his reputation, were she to become known to the public. The bottomless grief still sucking her down as it had done from the moment she heard the news about his illness, then latterly his death. Defiant pride in the past. The untouchable sense of loneliness, of being left only with memories. The hopes, the endless hopes that something might yet live for her. And the confusion about why the family had sent the messages to her. Were they motivated by concern for her, by spite at her, or by just the dutiful acts of a bereaved family? Or perhaps, and this was what she clasped to herself, he had remembered her and had made the request himself?
But above all these, that endless grief, the loss, the feeling of final abandonment. Those twenty years without him, holding on to an inexpressible hope, and now the rest of the years to come, finally, absolutely without him.
The driver said nothing. He drove efficiently. After her four days aboard ships, with engines and generators constantly running, the bulkheads vibrating, the car's engine felt smooth and almost silent. She looked out of the dark-tinted window by her side, staring at the vineyards as the car speeded along the lanes, glancing at the pastures, at the rocky defiles in the distance, at the patches of bare sandy soil by the roadside. She must have seen these the last time, but she had no memory of them. That visit was a blur of impressions, but at the centre were the few hours she had spent alone with him, brilliant and clear, defined forever.
She thought only of him, that time. That one time.
Then, the house. A huge crowd at the gates, pushing aside to make a way for her car. People stared curiously. One woman waved, leaning forward to try to see her. The gates opened to an electronic signal from the dashboard of the car. They closed behind, as the car moved at a more stately pace up the drive. Mature trees in the park, mountains behind, glimpses of the cerulean sea and dark islands, far away. Her eyes remained dry, but she found it painful to look around at a view she had once thought she would never forget.
On arrival she stood silently with the other mourners, knowing no one, feeling their silent disdain. Her suitcase stood on the floor outside the room. She moved away from the cluster of people and went to an inner door, from which she could see across the main hall towards the wide staircase.
An elderly man detached himself from the group and followed her. He glanced up the stairs.
"We know who you are, of course,” he said, his voice unsteady. His eyelids fluttered with apparent distaste, and he never looked directly at her. She was struck by a facial similarity. Surely not old enough to be his father? There was a brother, probably the right sort of age, but he had said they were alienated. Years ago. “He left clear instructions for us to pass on to you,” the man said. “You are free go up to his room if you wish, but you must not remove anything."
So she had made her escape, went quietly and alone up the staircase to this room beneath the eaves. But now she was trembling.
A faint blue haze remained drifting in the room, a vestige of his life. This room must have been empty for several days, yet the light mist of the air he had breathed remained.
With a sudden flowing of renewed unhappiness, she remembered the only time she had lain with him, curled up naked on the bed beside him, glowing with excitement and contentment, while he sucked in the acrid smoke of the cheroots and exhaled it in a thin swirling cone of blueness. That was the same bed, the one in the corner, the narrow cot with the bare mattress. She dared not go near it now.
Five of the cheroots, probably the last ones he ever bought, lay in an untidy scrambled pile on a corner of one of the tables. There was no sign of a packet. She picked one up, slid it beneath her nostrils, sensing the fragrance of the tobacco and thinking about the time she had shared one with him, relishing the dampness of his saliva transferred to her lips. A delirious exhilaration moved through her, and for a moment her eyes lost focus on the details of the room.
He had never travelled away from the island during his lifetime, even after the prizes and honours began to be bestowed. While she lay naked in his arms, exulting inwardly over the touch of his fingers as they rested on her breast, he tried to explain his attachment to Piqay, why he could never leave to be with her. It was an island of traces, he said, shadows that followed you, a psychic spoor that you left behind if you departed the island, but if you did you would become diffuse in some way that he could not explain. He would never be able to return, he said. He dared not try, because to do so might mean he would lose the trace that defined him to Piqay. For him, the urgency to leave was less powerful than the urgency of staying. She, feeling a different and less mystical urge, quietened him by caressing him, and soon they were making love again.
She would never forget that one day they had spent alone together, but afterwards, in the years of silence that followed, she had never been sure if he even remembered her.
Too late she had had the answer, when the messages arrived. Twenty years, four days.
She heard large cars moving slowly on the gravel drive outside the house, and one by one their engines cut out.
The blue haze was thicker now. She turned away from the lectern, aroused by her memories, but despairing because memories were all they could ever be. As she looked away from the dazzle of the window it seemed to her that the blue air was denser in the centre of the room. It had substance, texture.
She moved her face towards it, her lips puckering. The haze swirled about her, and she darted her face to and fro, trying to detect some response from it. Streaks in the old residue of smoke, denser patches, coalesced before her eyes. She stepped back to see them better, then forward again to press her face against them. Smoke stung against her eyes, and tears welled up.
The swirls took shape before her, making a ghostly impression of his face. It was the face as she remembered it from two decades before, not the one the public knew, the famous grizzled countenance of the great man. No time had passed for her, nor for the trace he had left. There were no features painted in the smoke, just the shape of his head and face moulded in the blue, like a mask, but intimately detailed. Lips, hair, eyes, all had their shapes, contoured by the smoke.
Her breath halted momentarily. Panic and adoration seized her.
His head was tilted slightly to one side, his eyes were half closed, his lips were apart. She leaned forward to take her kiss, felt the light pressure of the smoky lips, the brush of ghostly eyelashes. It lasted only an instant.
His face, his mask, contorted in the air, jolting back and away from her. The eye shapes clenched tightly. The mouth opened. The lines of smoke that formed his forehead became furrowed. He jerked his head back again, then lunged in a spasm of deep coughing, rocking backwards and forwards in agony, hacking for breath, painfully trying to clear whatever obstructed him below.
A spray of bright redness burst out from the shape that was his open mouth, droplets of scarlet smoke, a fine aerosol. She stepped back to avoid it, and the kiss was lost forever.
The apparition was wheezing, making dry hacking coughs, small ones now, weak and unhoping, the end of the attack. He was staring straight at her, terrified, full of pain and unspeakable loss, but already the smoke was untangling, dispersing.
The red droplets had fallen to the floor and formed a pool on one of his discarded sheets of paper. She knelt down to look more closely, and trailed her fingertips through the sticky mess. When she stood again, her fingers carried a smear of the blood, but now the air in the study had cleared. The blue haze had gone at last. The final traces of him had vanished. The dust, the sunlight, the books, the dark corners remained.
She fled.
Downstairs she stood once again with the others, waiting in the great hall to be allocated to one of the cars. Until her name was spoken by one of the undertaker's staff, no one acted as if they knew
who she was or acknowledged her in any way. Even the man who had spoken to her stood with his back against her. The family and the other mourners spoke quietly to each other, clearly daunted by the seriousness of the occasion, by the thought of the crowds waiting in the road at the end of the long drive, by the passing of this man.
She was given a seat in the last of the cars, bringing up the rear of the cortège. She was pressed against the window by the large bodies of two serious and unspeaking adolescents.
In the crowded church she sat alone to one side, steadying herself by staring at the flagstone floor, the ancient wooden pews. She stood for the hymns and prayers but only mouthed the words silently, remembering what he had said were his feelings about churches. The tributes to him were formal, grand, spoken sincerely by illustrious men and women. She listened closely, recognizing nothing of him in their words. He had not sought this renown, this greatness.
In the churchyard on a hill overlooking the sea, standing near the grave, back from the main group of mourners, hearing the words of committal distorted by the breeze, she was again alone. She thought about the first book of his she had ever read, while still at college. Everyone knew his work now, but at that time he was unknown and it had been a personal discovery.
The persistent wind from the islands buffeted against her, pressing her clothes against her body on one side, sending strands of hair across her eyes. She smelt the salt from the sea, the promise of distance, departure, escape from this place.
Members of the public and the cameras of the media were only just visible, kept in the distance beyond a cordon of flowers and a patrol of policemen. In a lull of the wind she heard the familiar words of the committal uttered by the priest, and saw the coffin being lowered into the ground. The sun continued to shine but she could not stop shivering. She thought only of him, the caress of his fingertips, the light pressure of his lips, his gentle words, his tears when she went away at the end. The long years without him, holding on to everything she knew of him. She barely dared to breathe for fear of expelling him from her thoughts.
She held her hand out of sight beneath the small bag she carried. The blood had congealed on her fingers, cold, an encrustation, eternal, the final trace of him.
Copyright © 2007 Christopher Priest
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THE FACES OF MY FRIENDS—Jennifer Harwood-Smith
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James White Award Winner
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The James White Award is a short story competition open to non-professional writers and is decided by an international panel of judges made up of professional authors and editors. Previous winners have gone on to either win other awards or get published regularly, which is exactly why the award was set up.
The winning story each year receives a cash prize, a handsome trophy and publication in Interzone. Entries are received from all over the world, and a shortlist is drawn up for the judges. The judges for the most recent award included Kelly Link, Alastair Reynolds and Michael Carroll, who chose as winner ‘The Faces of My Friends’ by Jennifer Harwood-Smith.
The James White Award was instituted to honour the memory of one of Ireland's most successful science fiction authors, James White. To learn more about James White and his writing please visit SectorGeneral.com. To learn more about the Award itself visit jameswhiteaward.com.
—James Bacon, Award Administrator
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"I am a 22-year-old student of New Media and English at the University of Limerick. I fell in love with my course on the first day when they told us we could study science fiction in our final year.
"I started writing poems when I was eight. When I was fourteen, after a wonderful summer course in Literature, Drama and Writing at the Irish Centre for Talented Youth, I began to write short stories. I am currently working towards completing my degree and doing my final year project on science fiction and feminism.
"I was always a huge fan of science fiction and several years ago was given eighty SF novels, most of them from the seventies or earlier—twenty of them by Asimov—so I fell even more in love with the genre at that point. Recently I've begun to read more women writers such as Ursula Le Guin and Joanna Russ and I find the power of their writing raises the bar for me in terms of what can be accomplished with science fiction. The stories I like best are the ones that challenge traditional worldviews, and are a bit uncomfortable to read.
"'The Faces of My Friends’ came about when I was walking home from college, and thinking about freedoms and feminism, and how easily progress can be lost (this kind of thinking happens after a semester of cultural theory and a forty minute walk). The original idea was for a story dealing with women in the Taliban regime, who had once been doctors and lawyers and were stripped of all their rights, but I felt that particular story wasn't mine to tell. A week or so later I came up with something I did feel was mine to share, because the narrator could be anyone, anywhere, who was unfortunate enough to be in a group despised by those in power. I am convinced that freedom is everyone's responsibility to maintain when they can do so.
"I am still quite early on in my writing, and still finding out where my voice is, so winning this award was an incredible surprise for me. I feel that writing is something that can stick with someone all of their life, and I will continue to write as long as I have a pen and a piece of paper—or my laptop—to hand."
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Tuesday, March 4th
Yesterday, Shelby was stoned and I had to watch it. He'd sneezed and reached up his hand to cover his mouth, muffle the sound. Old habits and all that. That was when his sleeve slipped down and they saw the tattoos. He did them in regular ink from whatever pens he could scrounge. They only ever lasted a few days, at most. Shelby called them ‘the shifting art of time'. He loved them, loved doing them, and wouldn't let any of us draw them. He said their beauty was in their impermanence. The trick was when we saw a group of shapes and then we'd think Wow, Shelby had a tattoo that looked just like that. I liked that about Shelby.
But they spotted the tattoos and stoned Shelby. I had to watch and afterwards two of them came over to me and just stood there, staring at me. After a few seconds one of them spat on the hem of my cloak and said, “Well? Don't you want to say anything to us? Anything at all?"
I said nothing. If I'd so much as moved they'd have had the right to kill me. They got bored after a minute or so and they went away. When everyone was gone, even the children who'd thrown pebbles, I went to where Shelby lay. The long black cloak covered his body completely, though his facemask had been pushed aside. There were more tattoos covering his face, which I'd never seen before. The sensors on the masks trigger if we ever remove them in company, and only deactivate once we're dead. It had also made it unnecessary for him to try to cover his mouth. Shelby was very handsome, and the tattoos—permanent ones, I could tell—made him stunningly beautiful. I wanted to take a picture of his face, but I had no camera. Ten years ago I'd have had one, but never even think of using it for something like this. Now I itched for the heavy feel of that equipment—forbidden to our kind—to let me record my friend's final expression. Instead I sat there for long minutes, staring and committing every detail to my memory; his long eyelashes, his thick eyebrows, the peak of his thin lips, his defined, almost chiselled cheeks and chin. I'll never know what colour his eyes were, because they were shut and I couldn't bear to touch him, to feel death where Shelby had been, but he was beautiful indeed, every tattoo designed to both enhance his own features and to be a statement in themselves. And Shelby was dead.
I didn't stay long, but left quickly, knowing he'd be found and buried where people like us are always buried. On the way home, three women spat on me and a child hit me with a stick, running after me until he got bored of it. I almost hope he turns out to be one of us. It would serve the little bastard right.
When I got in, I found a bit of chalk I'd stolen a long
time ago from a school that I was cleaning and went down into the cellar. I went to the bit behind the wall that very few could get into—and really only those with some imagination—and held the candle up to the wall and drew Shelby's face. No one will ever find it, even during the raids. I know they might find these pages, but when the book is filled I think I'll put it into a pot of water and boil it.
I felt the force in my mind battling to get out, to tell the world what happened, what is happening, and still I couldn't let it out, because I was too afraid, and all I could do was curl up in a corner and cry quietly and try not to screech out Shelby's name. I couldn't even write this yesterday. I can barely write it now. Shelby, I miss you, and I love you. You were my friend. I hope you're in a better place now, making tattoos.
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Thursday, March 6th
There was no funeral for Shelby, but those of us that are left, those who stayed in the open as the winds of opinion changed for the worse, met yesterday morning. We had to do it in a canteen, but we managed to organise another meeting for midnight. When I got there, Hastings, Darwin and Gillespie were all in attendance. Fitzgerald arrived with a few bottles of wine. I have no idea where she found them, but there they were, seeming to turn an entire decade into fiction. Gillespie couldn't have any because she has to donate a lung in a few days and they're testing her blood daily. She says they think she's going to take drugs to prevent them taking her lung against her will. She might too, but she doesn't want them to harvest the rest of her organs as punishment. She has beautiful skin, and knows that they're just dying to get their hands on it before she gets older and it gets wrinkled and thin and useless. Her nails used to be painted wild colours in the past, I remember, though her face is lost to me now. But I do know that she had such incredible style. I always wondered how she was so calm about having to wear the cloak.
Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #214 Page 12