The Pretence

by Ramsey Campbell

  As he pulled away from the kerb she followed him. He was wondering how far she meant to accompany him—as he recalled, her first job was downtown—when she found a gap in the tree-lined strip and turned away out of the mirror. His own route took him back towards the cemetery— almost home—but he stopped short of it and took out his mobile. After several measured trills of a bell that sounded more than usually artificial, a woman's voice said "Aurora House. Constance speaking."

  "How are you?" He meant this as a greeting more than a question but couldn't tell if it was taken as either. "Is Mrs Slater available?" he said.

  "Available."

  "To speak to. This is her son."

  "Son."

  Until Constance had identified herself he could have thought she was a recorded message, and she still didn't sound much more vital. "Her son Paul, yes," he said. "She wanted me to call. I was there just yesterday but it seems longer."

  "A lifetime."

  So she was capable of finding words of her own, though he didn't especially care for the odd choice of phrase. Might she have been a Finalist? He didn't see how they could still cling to their faith, and yet he didn't like to think that any of them were looking after his mother. "So could I have a word?" he said.

  "Mrs Slater."

  "Yes, Mrs Slater. Eileen Slater, yes."

  He thought his impatience had driven the woman away until he wondered if she had been addressing his mother, not parroting him yet again. He didn't know how long the silence, which felt like the aural equivalent of the sky, gave no hint of activity before he heard his mother's voice. "Is that Derek?"

  It sounded vague and so, he was unhappy to recognise, did she. Both his parents had called him Derek when he was too young to have much of a sense of himself, but once he'd seen he had a choice he'd settled on his present name. "It's Paul," he said.

  "Paul." He could have thought she'd picked up a trait from Constance, especially when site repeated "Paul." At least this seemed to have helped define her voice as she said "Are you there at last?"

  "I have been for a while. I didn't call in case you were asleep."

  "I was."

  "Then I'm sorry. Constance should have said and I'd have called back."

  "Constance."' This earned no response that he could hear. "I didn't mean now," his mother said. "I was asleep when, you know."

  With a sense of being made to join in the game of echoes Slater said "When..."

  "When nothing happened."

  Somehow this wasn't as reassuring as it ought to be, but he said "That's fine then, isn't it?"

  "It woke me up. I didn't know where I was."

  He was close to asking what had wakened her, and then he was as far away from it as possible. "So long as you do now," he said.

  "I'm better for hearing from you, Derek."

  He kept his protest to himself and found something else to say. "Is everyone else all right?"

  "Everyone."

  Surely he could take that for a yes. "And they're looking after you," he said. "The staff."

  "Constance."

  Was this addressed to the woman? Neither its tone nor anything it brought about was telling. He couldn't recall meeting Constance; at best he had a generalised impression of people in uniform. "Her and the rest," he said.

  "That's what I need." Perhaps this was a play on words, unless his meaning hadn't immediately reached her, because she added "They're not the same as you, Derek."

  "He isn't either."

  He didn't say this aloud, and yet he had a disconcerting sense of having failed to keep it to himself. He held his breath until his mother said "Anyway, you've your family to think of. Will I be seeing them soon?"

  "I'll talk to Melanie about when."

  "Melanie." As he wondered if he needed to explain his mother said "Remember her. Your wife."

  She was saying that she did, of course, not that he should. "And the young ones," she said.

  "Tom and Amy."

  "That's right." She could almost have been commending his memory, praising him as if he'd reverted to the child whose name she kept using. "Amy and Tom," she said as though testing whether the sequence was equally valid. "Let's try and be together soon."

  Too much of the conversation seemed to consist of repetitions, in slow motion too. "We'll be in touch," Slater said. "Now why don't you catch up on the rest you were saying you needed."

  "The rest." She might have forgotten what she'd meant or somehow changed her mind. "There's plenty," she said.

  "Then you should treat yourself to a helping," Slater told her, only to feel he'd misunderstood. He had to trade several endearments before he felt comfortable with ending the call. He left the mobile on the seat beside him as token company, and was casing the Astra forward when he noticed a police car in the nearest entrance to the graveyard.

  Had the police been watching him? Now he recalled that you weren't expected just to switch off the engine if you used your mobile in a car, you had to remove the key from the ignition too. As he drove towards them, not too fast but surely not slowly enough to arouse any suspicions, he saw that both the occupants of the white vehicle were disconcertingly young. Perhaps that was one reason why their smooth scrubbed faces looked so tightly closed around a purpose, determined not to let in any doubt or humour, but he was reminded of the Finalists. He straightened his tips and gave the police a terse nod of acknowledgement before he let them see him focus on the road ahead.

  He was alongside the cemetery entrance when he glimpsed twin items at the edge of his vision, a pair of roundish objects as blank and white as the sky. Of course they weren't faces; the driver had flashed the headlights, and now he saw her stretching out a hand towards him and then patting the air as if dealing with some article he couldn't see—a child's head, perhaps, or a mound of earth. She was gesturing him to pull over, and he braked so quickly that he blocked the way out of the graveyard.

  It seemed advisable not to move on in case they took him to be trying to escape. The driver stayed in her seat while her colleague ducked out of the car, tugging his official headgear down as though to consolidate his small stiff face. He paced to the front of the Astra and scrutinised the number plate before raising his pale gaze to inspect Slater. When he came to the driver's door at the speed of Slater's pulse, Slater lowered the window. "How can I help?'" he said.

  He couldn't tell if the policeman was considering the question or Slater's face, even once the man said "Where have you been, sir?"

  "Just dropping the children off at school." Slater would have hoped this might earn him at least a hint of approval. "Mine and my wife's," he said in case this solved the unidentified problem. "We both did."

  "Where is your wife now?"

  "On her way to work if she's not already there."

  "What work would that be, sir?"

  Slater was close to laughing at the vintage phraseology, which could have been designed as a badge of maturity. Certainly the man seemed more like a memory of a police officer than today's version. "She fixes computers," he said.

  "And what work do you do?"

  "I'm in charge of music at Texts in Speke."

  "In charge."

  "Of the department, yes. I'm your classical man in particular." Slater thought he could risk showing a trace of impatience as he added "I'm on my way there now."

  This didn't change the man's blank gaze, but neither had anything else. Slater could almost have imagined that his interrogator knew the answers and was testing him to find out if he did. The policeman closed one hand on the lowered window and held out the other. "May I see your licence, please."

  "Here I am." Slater unfolded his wallet to exhibit the driving licence in its plastic window. "Nobody else would have that face," he said.

  The policeman might have been miming the absence of any response. Admittedly it hadn't been much of a joke, especially considering Amy's resemblance to her father. "Please hand it to me, sir," the policeman said.

  Slater re
moved the licence from the wallet and planted it on the man's palm, which was disconcertingly soft as well as pale and smooth enough to put him in mind of a cloud. "Wait here, sir," the policeman said.

  Slater wasn't too far from enquiring where the fellow thought he might have gone. He watched the man return to the police car and sit beside his colleague while she consulted a small computer. They didn't speak—the deserted road was as silent as the multitude of stones—and he didn't see them communicate in any way before the policeman came back to him, so deliberately that Slater would have expected his footfalls to be noisier. "All in order, then?" Slater said. "I'm who it says and this is my car and it's taxed and insured."

  The policeman lowered his head as if the monologue had weighed it down. "Where were you last night, sir?"

  "Good God, how much else do you want to know?" Having kept this to himself, Slater said "On the way home from visiting my mother."

  "That's confirmed. Tell anyone who wants to know."

  Slater didn't speak until he had his licence back. "Such as who else?"

  "Anyone who asks you, Mr Slater. Please be sure to remember."

  He had even less sense of what he was being told to do or why, and he blurted "Just how much do you know about me?"

  "Everything you are is in the system."

  He didn't care for the notion at all. "May I ask what this has been about?"

  "You'd be advised to forget about it, Mr Slater."

  "How can I forget it when I don't know what it is?"

  While he didn't feel quite confident enough to say that, he wouldn't be the first to blink. The policeman was staring at him as if searching for Slater's thoughts, although his eyes looked as dully vacant as the sky. Then his face appeared not just to flare up with the same pallor but to flatten as his surroundings did. His colleague must have been flashing the headlights, and once Slater blinked his vision reverted to normal. "You can forget this ever happened," the policeman said.

  Slater barely managed not to retort that he'd had enough of being told what to forget and to remember. As the policeman turned away at last Slater shut the window. At the sound of the engine the man glanced over his shoulder, but Slater had the unsettling impression that both officious faces were fully turned to him. He must need to catch up on his sleep, though perhaps he ought to be glad that the police hadn't tested his breath. He sent the Astra forward and saw the white car shrink to the size of a toy in the mirror. Stones and trees closed around it, and then it was gone as though it had been too transitory to have a place in the venerable landscape.

  The cemetery fell behind at last, and houses in which the windows were suffused with no colour flanked the road. Soon it narrowed, and the sky seemed to press the houses closer to the earth before they gave way to blocks of shops. These looked dingy and anonymous, as if the secondhand goods dimly visible beyond the windows had infected them with staleness, and Slater was glad to reach the main road.

  It led him towards the airport, though there weren't any planes in the sky, and then to the retail park. Apart from the outsize writing of their names the buildings weren't much more individuated than the sky. The sign for texts was in computer type and as devoid of capitals as the average message on a mobile. Slater found a space not too many ranks of cars away from the store and felt as if the sky was pacing him while he hurried across the car park.

  Beyond the shop entrance and the displays of books he shouldn't have to glance towards to recognise, music was in the air. It reminded him of the vague tentative murmurs he'd heard on the plane, and he couldn't name the composer. He was straining to hear it more clearly so that he could identify it when Shelley Blake came over to him.

  He'd never known how much the manager's name had to do with literature. Her taste in reading didn't seem to extend beyond her lifetime, if even that far. Perhaps she wouldn't be able to attribute the Text for Today, this month's quotation that was printed on the staff T-shirts: Had we but world enough and time... Either she was wearing more makeup than usual or he was more aware of the mascara that outlined her grey eyes, the pink lipstick that helped shape her full lips. Even the silvery blonde hair that framed her snub-nosed oval face might have had its tints touched up. She waited while he abandoned trying to recognise the music, and then she said "Put something else on when you're ready, Paul. Something everyone will know."

  Was that a criticism of his selections? "Any requests?" he said.

  "It's your department. We'll leave it to you."

  He might have preferred her to say what she thought the customers might like. He nodded at the trace of music in the air. "Whose idea was that, then?"

  "Whoever made it up, I should think."

  He'd already had one conversation that resembled a series of ill-defined traps in a dream. She was gazing at him as though she expected more of him, but all he could think of to say was "Sorry, am I late?"

  "Nobody's saying so."

  "I think I lost track of the time. Don't ask me why, but some police pulled me up."

  "I wasn't asking, Paul."

  "I know, but if you were..." Even if he felt as though he was talking to himself, it needed to be put into words. "You wouldn't believe how much they wanted to be told," he said, "and they already had it on the computer."

  "I expect we're all there."

  "I don't know about you, but I'd like to think there was more to me than some electronic information."

  "You should then, Paul."

  "I just don't know what they were trying to do."

  "No need to say. Really, there's no need."

  Perhaps her urgency was meant to suggest that he would soon be late after all. "I won't waste any more time, then," he said.

  As he made for the staff quarters he found his name tag in his pocket and pinned it above the Marvell. At the door he extended the plastic rectangle on its lead to fit it to the plaque on the wall. He thought the anonymous murmur in the air had muffled the click of the door release until he found that the door didn't budge. He peered at the tag, only to wonder how anyone could expect the system to recognise RETALS LUAP, which sounded like a misspelled retail outlet. Then he managed to laugh, though not before he felt as if looking down at his transformed name had seized him with vertigo. He applied the tag again and heard the lock acknowledge him.

  The staffroom was a large white concrete box in which straight chairs huddled against a table opposite a gathering of seats padded with slabs of imitation leather. Under the fluorescent tubes the room looked not just empty but impersonal. Slater clocked on with his tag, triggering a ding that put him in mind of winning an electronic game, and glanced at the memory board on the wall. Was that his handwriting? Presumably whatever task he'd written up had been dealt with, since the words had mostly been erased. Just a few letters were faintly distinguishable: RE A L, too widely spaced to be spelling the word. He couldn't make sense of them as he hung his jacket in the nearest of the lockers in the kitchen beyond the staffroom. Once he'd switched off his mobile he went back to the shop.

  The music section was at the back, past a multitude of books. Perhaps it was his lack of sleep that made their covers look oddly imprecise in the artificial light, which had as little colour as the sky that glared through the long windows. Even the cases in the racks of compact discs seemed less familiar than they had to be. The prospect of relinquishing his own taste so as to reflect everyone else's felt oddly threatening, and at first he couldn't even think how to do it. If the music was supposed to exemplify the shop, he might as well select from the label that their multinational owners had caused to be created. Perhaps in some sense that music represented the world.

  The Primest discs had their own prominent display, where the timidly classical compilations were shelved behind the more unashamedly popular. Beathoven emphasised the rhythms of the composer's best-known melodies, while High Din did the same for his contemporary, and Lud Wig showed Mozart topped by an extravagantly elaborate hairpiece composed of notes. On reflection Slater
didn't think he could live with any of those performances, let alone Bach with Bite or Poochini or Un-Ravel, and so he slipped Beethoven's Pastoral—the symphony, he thought, not the sonata—into the player. "Is this all right for everyone?" he called.

  "We've heard it before."

  He couldn't tell which of the staff had spoken. They were deployed throughout the shop, shelving books or arranging displays or checking stock against lists on handheld monitors or serving customers, although the day had brought out few of those. He heard a murmur of agreement, either with his question or with the response. He propped the compact disc case on the Now Playing stand on the Information counter, and looked up to find that somebody was waiting to be seen.

  He was a large balding man in a grey track suit that made his shape vaguer. His roundish face looked blurred by fat and to some extent defined by hair—eyebrows overshadowing the small eyes, a moustache and a restrained beard framing the mouth, uneven stubble poking out of the broad nose. As Slater met his gaze he raised his shaggy eyebrows, which appeared to expand. "Have you remembered yet?" he said.

  Slater felt rude for gazing at him, especially since it didn't make the man look any more familiar. "I'm sorry," he said, "I'm not sure..."

  "You were finding a tune for me. You thought you were the man to know."

  Slater couldn't recall being asked. He was hoping for some help, but when the fellow only stared at him he had to ask "Which tune was it again?"

  "Something like this."

  The man lifted his gaze heavenwards, suggesting that the melody resembled the one in the air. Certainly the tentative notes he hummed weren't too distinguishable from it. Slater would have been embarrassed to ask him to repeat them, but had to admit "I haven't found it yet, I'm afraid."