The World Was All Before Them

by Matthew Reynolds

  As Philip slept, Sue slept.

  As Philip rose towards consciousness for a moment when a goods train trundled past, Sue was in the stolidness of deep sleep.

  As Philip still slept, Sue’s mind stirred and her eyelids flicked open. It was light! She was, yes, she was in Charlotte’s sitting room. This was it! Excitement went from her tummy up her spine across her shoulders. Her feet and legs were ready to spring.

  She levered herself up in the sofa and looked across to the clock on the cooker.

  5.32.

  Oh right. She lay back, closed her eyes again. She stretched her arms a little bit to either side and let them go slack. She wanted to get up, and be out, and be doing things: be getting ready, be phoning, rushing, checking. But no one would be there. And anyway she probably couldn’t even gain access to the gallery this early. And anyway – she looked into her mind. There really was, apart from the three streams to set going, nothing left to do. And the three streams were wholly provided for, plus there was back-up if any of them failed. Plus if any of them failed and then the back-up failed as well – well, then that would become part of the piece. Because the whole point of the piece was not to be self-sufficient. The whole point was it relied on other people.

  Which sometimes worked out perfectly and sometimes didn’t quite.

  And even when it didn’t quite there was still the feeling that it might have done.

  Which mattered. Which really did.

  Her mind walked through the gallery.

  Her mind lifted the roof off the gallery and floated above it watching as people came in and moved around the space, pausing, concentrating as their eyes caught at this or that; drifting on when the object of their attentions released them.

  There in the first room were ponderous, gentle Cyrus and Sheila Jilla, surveying their sofa with what seemed, from Sue’s aerial viewpoint, to be a feeling of satisfaction. His thinning hair was combed across his shining skull; she wore a broad-brimmed, mauve, lacy summer hat. His shoulders were covered in the beige checks of what was probably a suit; hers in pink silk with shoulder pads. Her hand was on her bag. His toes were in polished, tan half-brogues. They leaned towards each other; spoke. Sheila shrugged her shoulders; Cyrus waved his arm in a gesture of explanation. Oh, but now they were moving on. Now they were opening themselves to the rest of the show: to the second room, and to the third, where twitchy, keen, young, ever-so-slightly-ingratiating Rory Hardwick was standing, skinny and intent, in T-shirt and jeans, holding one of the slidey tic-tac-toe boards, focused on the monitors. He was really concentrating, really trying to do it, to attach the images to the names of their places of origin. He was really trying to do it; and really failing to do it, she was sure from the signs of tension in his shoulders, the angle of his head. Of course he was failing to do it because it couldn’t be done; couldn’t be done with certainty. And then, yes, there he was giving up, turning away, but turning away (she was sure) with a smile; because he had felt the impact of trying to name and failing to name.

  Of not managing to be an Adam.

  Happiness went through her. Quiet went through her. The light in the room turned to whiteness in her mind.

  She slept.

  Here is Charlotte leaning over her. Here is Charlotte putting a hand to her shoulder, pushing it. Sue stirred, woke. It was harder to come out of sleep this time.

  ‘Are you alright?’ – asked Charlotte.

  ‘Mmm,’ said Sue. And then: ‘Yes. Of course. Of course I am.’ She was sitting up.

  ‘I’ve made green tea,’ said Charlotte.

  ‘Thank you.’

  The two women sat for a moment, Charlotte in her shiny pink dressing gown at the glass table, Sue still on the sofa wrapped in a sheet. Each cupped a hot cup in her two hands, in front of and beneath her chin. Both faces blurred a little as the steam rose up across them.

  Then the two women were moving, washing, peeing, dressing, taking a peach from the bowl or making a slice of toast by way of breakfast. They were quite smart but still informal. They went out, and down, and then were walking along the 1980s frontage which adjoined the 1780s canal. They turned right through the concourse with the permeable pavement; past The Sitting Room, Armando’s, Swarovski Crystal, Pret, Fat Face, M&S; beneath flats and offices inhabited and worked in by so many other people, until they arrived at the stark form and glass doors of Spike. Charlotte put her key into the wall to open them. The two women walked on in.

  Here is the entrance hall, all white. There is the desk. There, ready piled upon it, are the catalogues. Casually lying at an angle next to them is a clipboard upon which Osh, once he has got in, once the day has started and is progressing, will record the names and papers of visiting press.

  The two women walk further in. The first room, with the white blocky sofa and the pseudo-Moroccan coffee table and the hatstand-lamp. The second room with the photos and the names. The third . . . and here is Stuart emerging from behind the monitors.

  ‘Those,’ he said, ‘are the traces you left on the pavement coming in.’

  They all looked at a monitor which showed some greyish texture and some lighter, dusty streaks.

  Actually you could work out it was a paving slab if you looked carefully and thought about it because you could see the edge and the mortar between it and the next one, a combination that was actually quite recognisable.

  But which traces were theirs, or rather how much the two of them had contributed to the multiplicitous dusty record could not be known.

  And actually if they could rewind and watch their feet passing through and compare before and after it would still be all-but impossible to tell.

  And also, actually, now you could see that this monitor was going to be especially fun because people would look at it and puzzle. And then they would see a momentary foot in the image and go ‘aha!’ But still they wouldn’t know where the stream was from – until maybe they picked up one of the slide-frames and started working through it and saw the address here as one of the locations: maybe then it would click.

  Or maybe – think how lovely this would be. Walking back through the gallery they would notice someone’s shoe and recognise it as a shoe they had seen three minutes before on the monitor. Then they’d get it. And then, next, they’d realise that their own foot and ankle and sock and shoe had probably been up there too. Which would make them feel differently about walking and being on the ground. Maybe only for a moment but still there’d be a shiver. Surely there would. And maybe they would even, maybe this ideal person would even go back and stand in front of the monitor and stare and stare.

  ‘So now it’s just the grass and the Buddha,’ said Stuart.

  Sue looked at her phone. 9.15.

  ‘I’ll text her,’ said Charlotte.

  Sue pressed Philip.

  ‘Philip,’ she cooed when he picked up. ‘Sweetie . . . wakey wakey . . .’

  ‘Oh shit, shit,’ said Philip, ‘sorry I slept through the . . . oh bollocks.’ He had seen the time. ‘Sorry. I’ve had quite a bizarre . . . I’ll tell you about it.’

  ‘Don’t panic,’ said Sue. ‘There’s a bit of time.’

  ‘Sue?’ – he said, full of tenderness: ‘Good luck. It’s gonna be amazing.’

  ‘Yeh maybe,’ she said.

  Philip lifted his head. He slithered his torso upright and leaned his occipital bone against the wall. Pain.

  Nausea.

  He shut his eyes. He reached sideways, scrabbling on the bedside table for the ibuprofen then feeling around for the glass of water.

  He gulped. He waited a moment.

  Safely down into the stomach. Settling there.

  What he wanted to do was snuggle back under the sheet and into the microfibre pillow until the jabbing in his head had softened. But what he had to do was get up and go downstairs and sort this thing out. So he got up, dressing gown, glasses, downstairs, coffee on. He knew he shouldn’t have a coffee (he was a doctor!) but he had to have a coffee.


  He opened the back door. He turned around and bent down to where he had left the extension cord.

  Woaa!

  He was on his knees. His stomach was spiralling or rather his medulla was being bombarded with afferent impulses originating in the chemoreceptors of the upper GI tract. Stay still. Breathe.

  Move . . . ever . . . so . . . gently.

  Coffee shouldn’t help with this according to the book but in his case it always seemed to.

  Having imbibed some coffee he refilled the cup and took it outside and put it on the metal table. He returned into the house and studied the extension cord. With one hand he seized the plug and lifted it and moved it towards the socket on the wall where the toaster was plugged in. He put down the plug of the extension cord. He grasped the plug of the toaster and pulled it. He pulled again.

  When the plug of the toaster erupted from the wall the consequent soundwaves battered his tympanic membrane and jangled his ossicles and sent a flock of tin-tacks into his auditory cortex.

  Gingerly, he put that plug down and lifted the other one and pushed it in. He turned the grating handle of the spool to unwind the hissing black extension cord. He took the end of it outside and, so as not to bend down, dropped it.

  Then he realised it would have been more sensible to lay it on the table.

  He gulped some health-giving coffee.

  He went back indoors, past the kitchen table, to the sitting-room part of the room. He half kneeled against the soft seat of an armchair so as to lower himself without inclining his head or his torso. He picked up the laptop and its wire and the little webcam and its little wire which was already connected to the computer.

  All set up: just plug it in and go.

  They had tested it the other day and it had been fine: just plug it in and go.

  He turned. Carrying his precious cargo he made his way back outside and laid the computer and the wires and the webcam on the metal table. He would have to drag the table closer to the flowerbed.

  Exercising various muscles across the front and around the side of his head, he scrunched up his face. His glasses lifted but his ears would not close.

  Well obviously his ears would not close.

  Some creatures could close their bloody ears: for sure they could. So why was it not possible for him to close his ears?!

  He seized the edge of the table, his fingertips and nails gripping under its rim.

  He pulled: the table thundered and the flagstones screeched.

  He suffered without complaint.

  Now he could half sit on the edge of the flowerbed. He did a first provisional positioning of the webcam. He lifted the lid of the laptop and pressed power on.

  He confronted the challenge of the plug. The computer’s power cord and plug were on the table. The socket at the end of the extension cord was on the ground.

  He relived in his imagination the unbearable about-to-vomit feeling of spiralling stomach and bombarded medulla. He could not bend over and he could not kneel down.

  He could always leave the laptop not plugged in? – no he could not leave it not plugged in because the battery life on this machine was terrible.

  So he lifted the plug and positioned it as accurately as possible above the socket and dropped it.

  It fell.

  Now it was all about his feet. In its cork-soled, felt slipper, one foot moved to one side of the plug while the other foot, in its cork-soled, felt slipper, moved to the other side. The slippered feet approached each other. Their edges came into contact with the plug. They exerted pressure on the plug.

  In each leg the rectus femoris contracted so that each foot rose and, between them, gripped by them, the plug.

  Crane-like, the legs and feet manoeuvred until the plug was above the socket.

  The body-mechanism lowered the plug until its nubs were touching the receptor cavities of the socket.

  Then the body-mechanism pushed and the right foot slipped and the plug tumbled and it was all to do again.

  Philip extracted his feet from the cork-soled, felt slippers. Now he could deploy the more subtle forces of his phalanges and metatarsals and their multiple associated flexors and abductors.

  He tried.

  One foot, the other foot: squeeze.

  The toes against the hard plastic were strangely sensitive.

  Lift.

  Now the nubs were resting on the rims of the cavities.

  Steadying the plug with one foot he gingerly lifted the other until it was resting atop it.

  And then he pushed and the nubs went in and a satisfying ‘krunnk’ echoed around the walled-in, open-top box of the patio and the problem was over.

  Now it was going to be easy.

  He turned to the laptop. Password. Wait. Click to open Tin Cam; wait. Find Capture: click. Scroll down to Streaming Video. Click.

  We are go!

  We should be go.

  Click Firefox; click Favourites; click The Whole World cam 14. Password.

  Which was . . .

  Which was . . .

  Oh fuck, what was the fucking fucking password!

  He was going to have to call Sue.

  If he could find his phone he would call Sue.

  But hang on because in fact did he really need to check the image had gone live? Because if it hadn’t she would call him. In not very long at all she would call him. And he could ask her the password then. Only if the thing wasn’t working would she discover that he was so crap as not to have remembered the password. So that actually it was OK to stop now. To have a sit down. To just . . .

  It felt like the ibuprofen was maybe having an effect at last because his head seemed gentler.

  Leaning there against the wall was a deckchair and it would be so nice just to be sitting in that.

  If he could open it.

  Of course he can open it: what is this!

  So he walked boldly over to the wall and seized the deckchair and bloody well opened it and placed it near the laptop and sat down in it and inclined himself backwards.

  His occipital bone was resting on the wooden strut.

  He slithered himself downwards so that his head was gently on the canvas. He let it loll sideways.

  On the moorland of his consciousness, mist swirled.

  Although there was the fine-tuning but actually . . .

  He opened his eyes and tipped his head to see the camera on its little tripod.

  . . . it was obviously OK because they had a wide field of view and it was pointing at a whole load of grasses and a couple of poppies and some clover and buttercups, and the grasses were leaning this way and that, and the whole point was that it wasn’t aesthetically composed but just a bit of the world.

  And anyway if Sue didn’t like the image she would call as well.

  He let his head roll back into resting balance and concentrated on what was happening in his mind, the purple waves of pain receding to reveal tranquil stretches of bleached sand.

  The other thing was the weather.

  He opened his eyes. Pale sky. Blobs and streaks of cloud.

  Looking at them you could see that the greyness was shadow and the whiteness was where the sun was shining on them or through them.

  Well, that didn’t seem very threatening.

  And anyway the thing was that if he was out here in the deckchair in his dressing gown, then, if it started to rain, he would know. So in fact there wasn’t any need for him to put up the umbrella. Or find a plastic bag. Because, just by sitting out here, he would be doing the job. He would be a human rain alarm. Which meant that he could have a nice rest. A lovely gentle long sit-down. Because there was no purple in his mind now, only white. Because the line of land was floating on the river. Because the grass was streaming.

  As Philip dipped into sleep, a message, which he didn’t hear, pinged into his phone which was by the bed in the house upstairs.

  Thnx xxxx, Sue had thumbed. Because now it was all go. The grasses and the face of the Buddha were real
ly a very interesting juxtaposition. Because the one was stone and solid and meant to be impassive, whereas . . .

  ‘It’s so good!’ Charlotte was exclaiming, walking back from the second room into the third, in her grey, shortish, short-sleeved cotton dress, her big arms forming a W on either side of her, her face scrunched into a grin. She came close, leaned forward, whispered: ‘It could actually be by Elton Barfitt!’

  What a stupid thing to say. What did she say that for? Sue thought it was understood between them that the whole point was to use the veil of Elton Barfitt to introduce something new. Something that wasn’t . . . Oh for Chrissake, of course Charlotte understood that. It was taken for granted in all the planning they had done together.

  Perhaps Charlotte meant it as a joke.

  Sue looked back at her and smiled mildly.

  ‘Three minutes,’ Charlotte said, ‘until the doors open!’

  She sounded like a ring-master in a circus.

  Well, it was exciting. But she, Sue, when she was excited, as she was now, sort of turned in on herself, didn’t do histrionics. Sort of felt that there was a beacon sending out light from inside her and rotated her mind to bask in it.

  The thing to do now was vacate the gallery. Because the first people in needed to feel that they were the first people in. Needed to feel they were discovering it.

  Sue said: ‘I’m going up, shall we go upstairs?’

  They walked back through, out through the swing doors of the first room.

  ‘Hey Osh!’

  ‘Hey ladies!’

  They turned left and climbed the stairs.

  As the sun warmed his face, Philip slept.

  Sue was logging on; she was about to check her emails. She was listening intently.

  Damn the whirr of the computer!

  But there they were. There were footsteps like castanets on the pavement. A pause at the door. A change of pitch as the metalled heels stepped onto the polished concrete of the entrance hall. Was it one person or two? Or three? Or more if there were others in for instance trainers.

  Now they would be going into the first room. Now they would be staring at the transplanted or recreated or staged or (how would they take it, exactly?) sitting room. They would be wondering if they were allowed to sit.