by Eric Brown
We had a lot in common, shared a love of books, films, and even a similar sense of humour. Moreover, I saw in Elisabeth a fundamental human decency, perhaps born out of hardship, that I detected in few other people.
“Who’re you, then?”
“Ben,” I said absently, my thoughts miles away.
He regarded me for about a minute, then said, “You always were bloody useless!”
I stared at him. He had moments of lucidity: for a second, he was back to his old self, but his comment failed to hurt. I’d heard it often before, when the sentiment had been backed by an ability to be brutal.
“Dry-stone walls!” he spat.
“Is that any worse than being a bus driver?” I said.
“Useless young…” he began, and dribbled off.
I leaned forward. “Why don’t you go to hell!” I said, and hurried from the room, shaking.
I sat in the library, staring out at the snow and shaking. I wondered if, when my father was resurrected and returned, he would have any memory of the insult.
“Hello, Ben. Nice to see you.”
She was wearing her chunky primrose parka and, beneath it, a jet-black cashmere jumper.
“You don’t look too good,” she said, sitting down and sipping her coffee.
I shrugged. “I’m fine.”
“Some days he’s worse than others, right? Don’t tell me. Mum’s having one of her bad days today.”
More than anything I wanted to tell her that I cared nothing for my father, but resisted the urge for fear of appearing cruel.
We chatted about the books we were reading at the moment; she had loaned me Chesterton’s Tales of the Long Bow, and I enthused about his prose.
Later, my coffee drunk, I twisted the cup awkwardly and avoided her eyes. “Elisabeth, I was wondering… There’s a nice Indonesian restaurant in Bradley. At least, I’ve heard it’s good. I was wondering—”
She came to my rescue. “I’d love to go,” she said, smiling at me. “Name a day.”
“How about tomorrow? And I’ll pay.”
“Well, I’ll get the next one, then. How’s that sound? And I’ll drive tomorrow, if you like.”
I nodded. “Deal,” I said, grinning like an idiot.
I was working on a high sheepfold all the following day, and I was in good spirits. I couldn’t stop thinking about Elisabeth, elation mixed equally with trepidation. From time to time I’d stop work for a coffee from my Thermos, sit on the wall I was building, and stare down at the vast, cold expanse of the reservoir, and the Onward Station beside it.
Ferrymen came and went, delivering the dead. I saw Richard Lincoln’s Range Rover pull up and watched as he unloaded a container and trolleyed it across the car park and into the Station.
At five I made my way home, showered and changed and waited nervously for Elisabeth to pick me up.
The meal was a success. In fact, contrary to my fears, the entire night was wonderful. We began talking from the time she collected me and never stopped.
The restaurant was quiet, the service excellent, and the food even better. We ate and chattered, and it seemed to me that I had known this friendly, fascinating woman all my life.
I could not see in Elisabeth the lonely, loveless woman that Jeff had described; she seemed comfortable and at ease. I feared I would appear gauche and naive to her, but she gave no indication of thinking so. Perhaps the fact was that we complemented each other, two lonely people who had, by some arbitrary accident, overcome the odds and discovered each other.
Elisabeth drove us back through a fierce snowstorm and stopped outside her converted barn. She turned to me in the darkness. “You’ll come in for a coffee, Ben?”
I nodded, my mouth dry. “Love to,” I said.
We sat on the sofa and drank coffee and talked, and the free and easy atmosphere carried over from the restaurant. It was one o’clock by the time I looked into my empty mug and said, “Well, it’s getting on. I’d better be…”
She reached out and touched my hand with her fingers. “Ben, stay the night, please.”
“Well… If it’s okay with you.”
“Christ,” she said, “what do you think?” And, before I knew it, she was in my arms.
I had often wondered what the first time would be like, tried to envisage the embarrassment of trying to do something that I had never done before. The simple fact was that, when we undressed each other beside the bed, and came together, flesh to soft, warm flesh, it seemed entirely natural, and accomplished with mutual trust and affection—and I realised that I’d never really had anything to fear, after all.
I was awoken in the night by a bright flash of light. I rolled over and held Elisabeth to me, cupped her bottom in my pelvis and slipped a hand across her belly.
The window overlooked the valley, the reservoir, and the Station.
High-energy pulse beams lanced into the stratosphere.
“You ‘wake?” she murmured.
“Mmm,” I said.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” she whispered. Shafts of dazzling white light bisected the sable sky, but more beautiful to me was holding a warm, naked woman in my arms.
“Mmm,” I said.
“I always keep the curtains open,” she whispered. “I like to watch the lights when I can’t sleep. They fill me with hope.”
I watched the lights with her. Hard to conceive that every beam of energy contained the newly dead of Earth.
“Elisabeth,” I said.
“Hmm?”
“Have you read much about the Kéthani?”
She turned to face me, her breasts against my chest. She stroked my face and lightly kissed my lips. “Just about everything there is to read.”
“Something I don’t understand,” I said. “Millions of humans die, and are taken away and resurrected. Then they have a choice. They can either come back and resume their lives on Earth, or they can do the bidding of the Kéthani, and go among the stars, as explorers, ambassadors…”
“Or they can come to Earth, live a while, and then leave for the stars.”
I hesitated, then said, “And we trust them?”
“We do now. At first, millions of us didn’t. Then the reports started to come back from those who had died, been resurrected, and gone among the stars. And the stories they told, the accounts of a wondrous and teeming universe…”
I nodded. “I’ve seen the documentaries. But—”
“What?”
“What about all those humans who are…” I tried to think of a diplomatic phrase, “let’s say, unsuited even for life on Earth. I mean, thugs and murderers, dictators, psychopaths.”
My father…
“Hard to imagine Pol Pot or Bush acting as an ambassador for an enlightened alien race,” I said.
She stroked my hair. “They’re changed in the resurrection process, Ben. They come back… different. Altered. Still themselves, but with compassion, humanity.” She laughed, suddenly.
“What?” I asked.
“The irony of it,” she said. “That it takes an alien race to invest some people with humanity!”
She reached down and took me in her fingers, and guided me into her. We made love, again, bathed in the blinding light of the dead as they ascended to heaven.
Our parents died the following week, within days of each other.
On the Monday afternoon I was working on the third wall of the sheepfold when my mobile rang. “Hello, Ben Knightly here,” I called above the biting wind.
“Mr. Knightly? This is Maria, from Sunny View. Your father was taken into Bradley General at noon today. The doctor I spoke to thinks that it might only be a matter of hours.”
I nodded, momentarily at a loss for words.
“Mr. Knightly?”
“Thanks. Thank you. I’ll be there as soon…” I drifted off.
“Very well, Mr. Knightly. I’m so sorry.”
I thanked her again and cut the connection.
I continued the section o
f wall I was working on, placing the stones with slow deliberation, ensuring a solid finish.
I had anticipated this day for months: it would mark the start of a temporary freedom, an immediate release from the routine of visiting the nursing home. For six months I would be free of the thought of my father on Earth, demanding my attention.
It was perhaps two hours after receiving the call that I drove into the car park at Bradley General and made my way along what seemed like miles of corridors to the acute coronary ward. My father had suffered a massive heart attack. He was unconscious when I arrived, never came round, and died an hour later.
The sudden lack of a regular bleep on his cardiogram brought me from my reverie. I was staring through the window at the snow-covered fields, thinking that a few walls out there could do with attention.
Then the bleep changed to a continuous note, and I looked at my father. He appeared as he had before death; grey, open-mouthed, and utterly lifeless.
A ferryman came for him, asked me if I would be attending the farewell ceremony—I declined—and took him away in a box they called a container, not a coffin. I signed all the necessary papers, and then made my way to Elisabeth’s house.
That night, after making love, we lay in bed and watched the first energy beam leave the Onward Station at ten o’clock.
“You’re quiet,” she said.
I hesitated. “My father died today,” I told her.
She fumbled for the light, then turned and stared at me. “Why on earth didn’t you say something earlier?”
I reached out for her and pulled her to me. “I didn’t think it mattered,” I said.
She stroked my hair. I had never told her of my relationship with my father, always managed to steer the subject away from our acrimony.
She kissed my forehead. “He’ll be back in six months,” she soothed. “Renewed, younger, full of life.”
How could I tell her that that was what I feared most?
The following Thursday I finished work at five and drove to Elisabeth’s. The day after my father died, she had asked me to move in with her. I felt that our relationship had graduated to another level. I often had to pause and remind myself how fortunate I was.
We settled into a routine of domestic bliss. We took turns at cooking each other meals more daring and spectacular than we would have prepared for ourselves alone.
I was expecting, that night, to be assailed by the aroma of cooking meat when I entered the kitchen, but instead detected only the cloying fragrance of air freshener. The light was off.
Then I made out Elisabeth. She was sitting on the floor by the far wall, the receiver of the phone cradled redundantly in her lap.
I saw her look up when I came in, and I reached instinctively for the light.
Her face, revealed, was a tear-stained mask of anguish.
My stomach flipped, for I knew immediately.
“Oh, Ben,” she said, reaching for me. “That was the nursing home. Mum died an hour ago.”
I was across the room and kneeling and hugging her to me, and for the first time I experienced another person’s heartfelt grief.
The funeral was a quiet affair at the village church—the first one there, the vicar told me, for years. A reporter from a national newspaper was snooping, wanting Elisabeth’s story. I told him where to go in no uncertain terms. There was less I could do to deter the interest of a camera crew from the BBC, who kept their distance but whose very presence was a reminder, if any were required, of the tragedy of Mary Carstairs’s death.
Every day we walked up to the overgrown churchyard, and Elisabeth left flowers at the grave, and wept. If anything, my love for her increased over the next few weeks; I had never before felt needed, and to have someone rely on me, and tell me so, made me realise in return how much I needed Elisabeth.
One evening I was cooking on the Aga when she came up behind me very quietly, slipped her arms around my body and laid her head between my shoulder blades. “God, Ben. I would have gone mad without you. You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”
I turned and held her. “Love you,” I whispered.
I introduced her to the Tuesday night crowd, where she became an instant hit. I think my friends were both surprised and delighted that I’d found someone at last.
We were in the Fleece, three months after my father’s death, when Richard Lincoln entered the main bar and handed me a package. “Special delivery from the Onward Station.”
I turned the silver envelope over. It was small and square, the size of the DVD I knew it would contain. My name and address were printed on both sides, below the double star logo of the Kéthani.
“A message from your father, Ben,” Richard said.
I could not bring myself to enjoy the rest of the evening: the package was burning a hole in my pocket.
When we returned home, Elisabeth said, “Well?”
I laughed, wrestling her towards the bedroom. “Well, what?”
“Aren’t you going to play it?”
“Don’t think I’ll bother.”
She stared at me. “Aren’t you curious?”
“Not particularly.”
“Well, if you aren’t, I am. Come on, we’ll play it on the TV in the bedroom.”
I lay in bed, staring out at the rearing obelisk of the Station, while she inserted the DVD into the player. Then, with Elisabeth in my arms, I turned and stared at the screen.
My father had decided against a visual recording: only his broad, bluff Yorkshire voice came through, while the screen remained blank. I was relieved that I would be spared the sight of his new, rejuvenated image.
“Ben, Reg here. I’m well. We still haven’t seen the Kéthani—can you believe that? I thought I’d catch a glimpse of them at least.” He paused. The fact that his voice issued from a star twenty light years away struck me as faintly ridiculous. “I’m in a group with about a dozen other resurrectees, all from different countries. We’re learning a lot. I still haven’t decided what I’m doing yet, when I get back…” He hesitated, then signed off. His murmured farewell was followed by a profound silence.
And that was it, as casual as a postcard from Blackpool; except, I told myself, there was something almost human in his tone, an absence of hostility that I had not heard in years.
But that did nothing to help lessen my dread of the bastard’s return.
Whenever Elisabeth broached the topic of implants, however tenuously, I managed to change the subject. In retrospect, I was ashamed at how my reluctance to undergo the implantation process affected her; at the time, selfishly, I could apprehend only my own frail emotions.
More than once, late at night, when we had made love, she would whisper that she loved me more than anything in the world, and that she did not want to lose me.
A week before my father was due to return, she could no longer keep her fears to herself.
She was sitting at the kitchen table when I returned from work. She indicated the letter I’d received that morning from the Onward Station. My father was returning in seven days; he had asked to meet me at a reception room in the Station.
It was the meeting I had dreaded for so long.
She was quiet over dinner, and finally I said, “Elisabeth, what is it?” I imagined that the news of my father’s return had reminded her again of her mother’s irrevocable demise.
She was silent for a while.
“Please don’t avoid the issue this time,” she said at last. “Don’t change the subject or walk off.” Her hand was shaking as she pushed away her plate.
“What is it?” I asked, stupidly.
She looked up, pinned me with her gaze.
“I can’t stand the thought of losing you, Ben.” It was almost a whisper.
“Don’t worry, you won’t. I have no intention of leaving you.”
“Don’t be so crass!” she said, and her words hurt. “You know what I mean.” She shook her head, trying to fight back the tears. “Sometimes
I experience a kind of panic. I’m on my own, driving to school or whatever, and I imagine you’ve been in some accident… and you can’t begin to understand how that makes me feel. I don’t want to lose you.”
“Elisabeth—”
She hit the table with the ham of her right hand. “What if you’re in a car crash, or drop dead of a heart attack? What then? You’ll be dead, Ben! Dead forever. There’ll be no bringing you back.” She was crying now. “And I’ll be without you forever.”
“What are the chances of that?” I began.
“Don’t be so bloody rational!” she cried. “Don’t you see? If you were implanted, then I wouldn’t worry. I could love you without the constant, terrible fear of losing you.” She paused, and then went on, “And this thing about not being implanted making you appreciate being alive all the more.” She shook her head. “I don’t believe it for a minute. You’re hiding something. You fear the Kéthani or something.”
“It’s not that.”
“Ben, listen to me.” Her tone was imploring. “When you’re implanted, it invests you with a wonderful feeling of liberation. Of freedom. You really do appreciate being alive all the more. We’ve been afraid of death for so long, and then the Kéthani came along and gave us the greatest gift, and you spurn it.”
We sat in silence for what seemed an age, Elisabeth staring at me, while I stared at the tabletop.
She could have said, then, “If you love me, Ben, you’ll have the implant,” and I wouldn’t have blamed her. But she wasn’t the type of person who used the tactics of blackmail to achieve their desires.
At last I said, “My father made my life a misery, Elisabeth. My mother died when I was ten, and from then on he dominated me. He’d hit me occasionally, but far worse was the psychological torture. You have no idea what it’s like to be totally dominated, to have your every move watched, your every word criticised, whatever you do put down and made worthless.” I stopped. The silence stretched. I was aware of a pain in my chest, a hollowness. “I’ve never been able to work out why he was like that. All I know is that, until his illness, I lived in fear of him.”