Gathering Evidence

by Martin MacInnes

  Her lips were open, her eyes shut tight, a flicker of movement beneath the lids. The dark, wet down of hair receding. She seemed very far away. He looked around the kitchen, trying to remember where he started. There was a routine, the same routine, which he followed every day. He wasn’t making the most of his time with her. Already – four months – she had grown so much, but he seemed able to perceive it only after the fact. He wanted to acknowledge now, at the time – not later, not looking back – her presence, the fact of their being there, this extraordinary fortune. And the day drifted on and away. He made coffee and she slept; he opened up his laptop. One, two hours passed on the floor, feeding, then she slept against him, held in the sling. He checked the tightness and, in lifting the material at his shoulder, adjusting it a little, her weight was communicated quickening through one of his fingers, the faintest additional pressure, an almost imperceptible difference, heartbeat and the blood pulsing, the tiniest gradient.

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  They didn’t leave the cottage for three days. They ordered takeaway and slept late. The oil-stained paper bags by the sink in the kitchen, the spices lingering in the rinsed foil. They didn’t shower. This sense of extension, of accumulation upon himself. He trailed the smell of her, took her back to bed. He caressed her, pushed her hair back with his third and fourth fingers. Her slow, bare footsteps over the floor. She kept stopping what she was saying, inches from him. Reaching for him, pressing at him. Relying physically on the contact of the other person. All the times that she had stopped him, gently prodded him, pushed in at him, held him. The passivity of a body, the inevitability of a body slowly swaying, tipping, falling forward without this applied resistance, this reverberative force of another person. The repeated instruction to stop, stay still, remain here. Prolong the moment, keep this going, just a little longer. Just this, only this. The forefinger against him; the arm over him; the legs wrapped at his waist.

  They watched the sun from inside. The glare continued through the three days, warping the front part of the house, reflecting on the windows and the mirrors and appearing to build new space. So much room, so many things to do. No-one had known him, no-one had seen so much of him as she had in those three days. Running her hands along the pale pink scars where his wounds had healed over, pressing them as if the new, risen lips could speak, could tell her what had happened. He had changed, and there were alien parts. Licking the mark on his neck, making a soothing noise, drying him with her breath. Her eyes over him in the bed, matted hair tied up, lower body circling over him. New scratches, blotches, lumps and bites on her. Ankles stripped bright red against the sheets. The blood of opened bites, the blood she drew from biting his ear, the contraction of her abdomen, the jerk and spasm of her hips as she came. Her sweat, the new colour on her face, her neck, her hands, her lower arms. The ease with which moisture came from her, the humidity she apparently still retained, the scent, even, that she brought with her from the park. Her ripped nails, the dirt deep inside her ears. The black and green that came out from her nose. Waking up and prodding him in the night, a distant expression, unable to speak. Requiring only the evidence he is there, awake, he is with her, he is conscious. Shaking her head when he goes to speak, putting her forefinger to his mouth. Waking again in the morning, locked. The reflex of a smile in the light, the space around them, the time ahead. The reprieve, the unbelievable reprieve of the continued present, the sustained world.

  Feeling her warmth, the change in her breath, the slight stirring of her body, he waited for her arm to lift over him. He pictured this in space, surrounded on all sides by darkness, untraversable distances, immensities beyond understanding, beyond purpose.

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  He crept out of bed, stopping to watch Doll in her cot, and turned on the kitchen light. He sat at the table and opened his laptop. Shel came in, bouncing Doll on her chest. ‘What are you doing?’ she said. He read the time; he had been working hours.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she repeated. ‘Do you have to do that? Do you have to work on that thing, now?’

  ‘I’ll come back to bed soon, I promise.’

  She turned to go, and then paused, nodding to the window sill. ‘Will you throw these out tomorrow, too?’

  The garlic had withered. He hadn’t fed it and it died.

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  He laid everything on the floor: the two base towels; the waterproof mat; the soap solution; the cloth; the change of clothes; two nappies; the basin. He peered inside the basin and decided he should disinfect it first.

  The water had cooled to lukewarm. He removed the babygrow and took Doll from the cradle. Her puffy arms and legs were red, the rolls of excess skin bunched up. He took the small hand-towel, dipped it in the lathered water, rinsed it. He wrapped her lower half first and dabbed at her skin with the hand-towel. She flinched occasionally but didn’t cry as he’d expected. He used one hand to support her, tipping her gently to the side so he could wash her back. A reminder of the almost nothing weight of her, the mildest resistance to his arm as it moved through the air. He washed her lower half and changed her nappy, and lastly washed her hair, putting the basin behind her head, scooping up water in the hand-towel with his free arm. He padded her dry with a fourth towel, shook and rubbed a little hydrating powder over her. He reached for the fresh babygrow and cursed as he saw, underneath it, the large white hooded towel he was supposed to have wrapped her in.

  He put the babygrow around her and then the hooded towel over her as well, feeling a sudden chill through the room, an arrow of sharp colder air. Looking back at her while he walked, he checked the heater controls in the corridor. Behind the heater, spreading over the wall, beneath the window on the far side of the house, were the beginnings of a new black-green growth.

  He apologised, lifting her – she had been about to sleep – and took her with him through the perimeter of the house, checking the lock and seal on each of the windows and on the exterior doors. He went back, testing them again. Then as he returned to the living room he closed each of the inner doors he passed. He felt her, in her cradle – she looked a little red, although her temperature was fine. He laid her on the second mat on the floor, stretched his arms and dug the heels of his hands into his eyes. He had taken so long to accomplish such a simple task. He’d washed her many times before. He looked at her and realised he’d forgotten to feed her. The alarm hadn’t sounded or he’d blocked it out. He paced to the kitchen – he counted, now, three times in one afternoon he’d broken the vision line – and took the bottle to her, disturbing her and drawing protests as he lifted her up, sat on the floor by the mat, with his back against the wall, the top of his head just reaching the wood base of the sill, wet by a trickling condensation line. He set her in front of him, falling back into him, and fed her.

  Later, he heard something. Her crying stopped; she spluttered, coughed. She made a slight moaning sound that momentarily paralysed him. Putting his face to her, he thought her breath seemed slightly shallow. The sound – the light, fragile moaning – repeated in his ears.

  Shel texted. She would be home in thirty minutes and was there anything he needed. He was surprised; she rarely got away early. He looked at the time stamp on the message – 5.30. He hadn’t noticed, hadn’t even seen the dark. He quickly dried the floor and put the wet towels and used clothes in the laundry. He cleaned out the basin and left it to dry. He phoned her quickly, apologising, asking if she could pick up some takeaway, he’d got sidetracked. She said she would go to the Korean, their favourite, an unusual treat.

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  On the fourth day he heard Shel retching in the bathroom. She’d thought it was finished, that whatever had begun in the park was over. She had undergone a battery of tests at the clinic and then immediately after in the capital. But nothing had come up. It was something else. Something had eluded them. Something from the park, she said, remained inside her.

  They drove
to the doctor’s in silence. The sunlight mocked them, showing the scenes outside as thin and insubstantial, revealing the dirt and flaws and the incipient decay of the buildings. A feeling of torpor, of redundancy, of pointless repetition. They stared ahead in the waiting room, convinced something grave was about to be pronounced. Her name was called. He waited twenty, thirty minutes, watching the closed door to the examining room, his anxiety increasing. When finally the door opened he was surprised to see a broad grin across the nurse’s face. She placed a hand, additionally, lightly, against Shel’s elbow. Shel was white; she appeared to be in shock.

  He was to visit the offices the next day, his first meeting with colleagues in almost four weeks. A car arrived to pick him up. He was energised, exhilarated. He couldn’t keep the smile from his face. Shel told him not to, it’s too early, he shouldn’t say anything, not yet, it’s bad luck. Just in case. As the car drove past security, over the created lake, pulling in to the business park, the long network of block buildings carved out of black glass set elegantly into the landscaped green hills, his excitement grew. Ideas, future projects, tumbled out, rushing forward with every roll of the tyres. He opened the door, stepped onto the cushioned tarmac and approached the reception building. No, he would say. I feel well. I feel better than I have in a long time. I’m ready to resume work immediately.

  Recent investors had made money available for new initiatives and speculative projects, work that would be done independently of Network Engineering Solutions, over and above the day-to-day running of the company. What these investors – the venture-capitalist arm, he learned, of an enormous multinational – were doing was supplying lavish amounts of money to NES to effectively pre-empt the peripheral creativity of its employees, on the condition that everything they wrote would be offered first to themselves. At the same time, NES was one of several companies bidding for contracts on the new high-speed Perpetua Wi-Fi that was soon to be installed throughout the country. Available everywhere, at all times, free of charge, impervious to outside systems, Perpetua was explicitly a response to the productivity losses entailed in several recent episodes of aberrant weather. Never again, the promise went, would citizens be stranded from online life.

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  Shel soothed her and laid her on the mat in the bedroom, asking him to turn on the ceiling light so they could make clearer contact with her eyes. She raised Doll’s legs gently, one at a time, and pushed them slowly towards her body, making a cycling motion. Then she took both legs together and moved them by increments forward, bending them in again. ‘She’s fine,’ she said, wiping the hair out of her eyes, ‘just a bit of gas, bit of air. Nothing to worry about.’

  He began the following day brushing, vacuuming, spraying, wiping. Looking over the room, he thought he could do better. He wanted to banish any traces of dry rot from the walls. He wanted to order their things so that everything they had would be visible, easy to get to, easy to quantify.

  He scrolled past the photographs he’d taken of the mould. It was nothing, minor, barely noticeable, but as a precaution he’d arranged for someone to come out and look at it, test the walls, the windows, the doors. Across the days he saw its movement, the illusion of the fungus travelling in real time. As if directed towards something. Hunting nutrients, Shel said. That’s what it does. And he was reminded of something she had said about her father, towards the end of Ivan’s life. She said his cancer was distinct, that it had its own character, a wholly other order, with its own imperatives, customs, values. It had its own sense of time, its daylight rhythm. The idea stuck with him, disturbed him. And as he zoomed in on the individual lines that composed what he had earlier seen as an indistinct greyishgreen cloud, he looked at the way they turned, the angles and rhythms they expressed, the suggestion of a spiral inside, and he remembered, with a shudder, the mania that had overcome him in the cottage.

  Shel’s note on the fridge, her writing a blur, her distinctive letters tall, jagged, narrow like EKG displays or mountain silhouettes. He had to hold it away for a few seconds for the meaning to come through. Her writing looked laterally compressed, more so as the years went by; he wondered how it would appear if you eased it, stretched the letters out. Both of them wrote through the house, index cards and printed sheets overscored in pen. She said his pages of formatted data – his robot words – ended up in the strangest of places, in the fridge, in the back of a kitchen cupboard, behind the cushions on the sofa; sometimes she thought he was trying to code for the everyday objects in the house, firming up their identities through a back-up script.

  He still occasionally wore the wrist brace – the physiotherapist recommended it for prolonged spells at the keyboard, his hands locking down in the familiar animal grip. Shel was against it, said it was an enabler, the whole point was that he was to take time away from work. His joints had strained from overwork the past year, ever since she’d come back from Westenra. ‘We’re building a house, we’re expecting a child, of course I’m going to do long hours,’ he said. With the new investors and the Perpetua bid there were opportunities, and he didn’t want to be left behind. If you didn’t come up with something now, at the start – if you didn’t have something for them – then you were effectively dismissing yourself. It wouldn’t always be like this, he promised her, it was a temporary thing. So for the seven months leading to Doll’s birth he’d worked longer and harder than before. At first it was about ideas. He generated various proposals but then settled on one and began developing it. He took his laptop everywhere. Some nights he’d stayed over in the office. It wasn’t quite superstition, but he had a rule of not telling Shel the details of a project until it was finished. The bulk of it he’d been able to do on his own, with minimal help from the team. Within those seven months the invisible part of the app was essentially finished; he now had to decide on the front-end design. He was making it drag on, slowly pushing around features and playing with different graphic options. He went back to it at weekends, or occasionally during evenings if something was nagging at him and Doll was sleeping particularly well.

  ________________________

  Are you sure? Are you sure it’s okay? Are you sure it will be okay? That nothing’s wrong? I was sick for a long time in the park. I was exposed to lots of different things there. I had lots of tests afterwards and I don’t know exactly what they were. I have bites all over me. You need to ensure I am fit enough to carry this, that nothing is critically wrong. You need to tell me that nothing I may have contracted can be transmitted to my child; do you understand? I can’t do this otherwise. I know the first weeks are crucial and this can’t have been an optimal environment. You can’t imagine what it was like. You just can’t imagine – all the things that happened there. Are you sure the child is not in danger? Are you sure this is going to be all right? Can you tell me this? There’s just no point going on otherwise. I won’t, I can’t.

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  Her voice had changed. She spoke lower, quieter, slower. She was sure it would wear off – it was just a delayed effect of their habituation to the park; they had adapted the way they talked to minimise their disturbance. They had found, inside, that slower, slightly lower vocal expressions were less liable to produce alarm in the troop and without really thinking about it, certainly without discussing it, had adjusted accordingly. Loose, fluent, higher speech seemed to disturb, to disorient the animals, who looked around in a panicked fashion, then upwards to the higher trees, the canopy, searching for where the sound was coming from. They must have thought that birds were making this, that this long trilling was the product of things in flight. Still, it surprised her how noticeable the difference was, right from Arrivals there was some concern, some suspicion, she thought, in the way he looked at her, the way he listened to her, and he must have expected that the difference would quickly fade because he had waited a full three days before addressing it.

  Obviously, as well, the three of them were isolated throughout the
bulk of their time inside, isolated from each other, from any kind of company with whom they could communicate. They’d grown used to speaking less. He would have to be patient. She was sure he’d understand.

  Her cracked lips as well, how it appeared, he thought, to hurt her to say certain words, which meant she then avoided those words, used them less, which made her sound different in all sorts of ways. She never complained about the pain. She kissed hard, and he only later realised the cut, realised he tasted his own blood too. You could see her consider the labour of speaking, scanning the anticipated lines and the arrangement of the tongue, teeth and lips, and deciding against it, deciding it wasn’t worth it, abandoning the words and all thought of the words and saying something else.

  Later, in the first days at home with Doll, he noticed Shel speaking in this hushed, concentrated way again, slower, focused, less fluent. He watched the way she closed doors, the way she walked, how she opened out the windows. Slowly, carefully, surely. Don’t alarm Dorothy, don’t frighten her. Shel was curious about the differences he saw in her after the park, saying drily this was conditioned, learned behaviour, that under the extreme example of WEBG she was obsessed with watching herself, monitoring her reflection, observing her tiniest actions too.

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  Bathing Dorothy in the evening while Shel worked in the next room, he watched the water slipping over the edge of the basin. He padded her with the sponge, going around her, lathering the soap over her dark hair, her forehead, her crown, the base of her head. Water dripped directly from the sponge onto the carpet; water fell from his hands and from her head and splashed onto the basin surface and slipped over the edge. The amount of time it had taken him to pad every part of her head was visible as water; it implied her, a volume commensurate with her head. He was tired; he was unclear. The scene appeared as fluid, blurry. He set the sponge carefully down, lifted the towel. He dried her slowly, methodically, remembering this time, after he had changed her, to slip her into the thick white hooded towel, wrapping her like a cloud. He looked from Doll to the basin to the water-stained carpet. A displaced surface. He put his arms out helplessly. For a moment he had lost her, for a moment she was loosened, her edges came away, her form spilled across the room. He had to gather her up quickly, put her back together, before it was too late.