by Ian McGuire
‘Six months tomorrow,’ E said. ‘It’s viable in an emergency, which is more than can be said for me.’
Morris smiled. He was checking inside, scanning himself internally for some response to what he had felt, to this child of his twisting inside his wife. There was nothing there. The sea breathed out a long, gravelly sigh; Molly was shrieking. Morris lay down, closed his eyes and thought of scopophilia.
Epilogue – Ethics in the Afternoon: it was done by mid-August. The first draft at least. It was not a great book; not even, Morris suspected, a good book, but it was a book – it had a title, a publisher and a deadline (which he had met).
Zoe finally returned from London in the midst of an unprecedented Coketown heatwave. It had not rained for a month. The River Err, usually a broad, slug-grey flood, now had the volume and the pungency of a pub urinal. Coketown Royal Infirmary was being overwhelmed with cases of dehydration, sunstroke and prickly heat. There were health warnings, hose-pipe bans. The shoddy maintenance practices of the local Water Authority became a matter of public debate.
In Corporation Square – whither Morris, armed with manuscript, hard-on and need to converse, tended at the news of Zoe’s return – the pavements were lively with street musicians, stilt walkers and pink and blistery drunks. The overheated air felt dense and fat, as if breathing itself might be a form of contamination. Morris dodged past a blind accordionist, a gang of underclad scallies, a man selling hand-crafted navel rings and entered the lobby of the Casa Urbano Apartments. Inside it was air-conditioned, chilly even. Zoe buzzed him up. In the lift Morris continued to sweat. He could smell himself – a high animal scent. Tucked under his elbow his manuscript felt like a weird prosthesis, a strange mutant addition like an extra arm or leg – a physical expression of his abnormal mental powers. He was clearly overexcited, het-up. When Zoe opened the door, he fell upon her instantly. The manuscript went everywhere. They rolled on its pages, they humped amid its chapters. When they were done, Zoe rolled aside and examined the sodden and wilting table of contents.
‘Well, Morris,’ she said, ‘it’s obviously a seminal work.’
The French windows were open wide. Gusts from Corporation Square fought with and were defeated by the scentless pump of the air conditioning.
‘How was London?’ he shouted. Zoe was in the kitchen.
‘Capital.’
‘Ha-ha.’
Morris lay naked on the sofa. Spots of cool dampness dappled his body. His head was empty and pure. His manuscript lay recollated on the coffee table. He felt perfect.
‘What are you doing in there?’
‘It’s the fucking waste disposal.’
Morris was about to suggest she leave it when there came from the kitchen a sudden, ghastly grind of metal on metal and a volley of extraordinary cursing. Zoe emerged with a mangled melon bailer and a look of sick fury. She flung the melon bailer out of the French windows. It fell seven storeys and narrowly missed the accordionist. Morris sat up.
‘Are you OK?’
Zoe lit a cigarette. ‘It’s the Hub.’
‘The Hub’s in danger?’
Zoe nodded. ‘It’s Mordred Evans. We’re this close to being fucked.’
Morris looked down at his soft, wet genitals. They seemed at that moment rather silly.
‘Go on,’ he said.
‘Mordred’s now Chair of the Panel for the Body Studies Research Hub. Hellespont is history – don’t ask me how.’
‘But the Chair only has one vote.’
Zoe shook her head, sniffed. (Hay fever – virtually unknown in Coketown – was becoming an issue).
‘The others will crumble. They’re good people, but they have careers, families. Mordred’s pitiless. In their shoes, I’d do the same.’
‘So that’s that.’
‘No, it goes deeper. Mordred’s gunning for the Digital Faculty Proposal. He wants to use Bernard’s hearing to humiliate Donald and wreck the proposal.’
‘But that’s open and shut. I’ve given a statement.’
‘You could change it.’
‘There’s a tape recording.’
‘You could destroy it.’
‘That’s what he wants.’
‘Yes.’
Morris pulled his nose, squeezed his cheeks, coughed. The dangers of betraying the Crocodile were very great and very obvious even to him.
‘Will Mordred protect us?’
‘He might, but we won’t need it. Once we have the Hub, we’re safe.’
‘The Hub will save us,’ Morris confirmed, as though committing it carefully to memory.
Zoe sat down beside him on the sofa. She smelt of elderberries and tarmac. Her hair had been cut into a mohican and bleached, and she was wearing a blue flannelette boiler suit.
‘Look at it this way, Morris,’ she said. ‘We’re the little people. Donald and Mordred are the big people, but the big people are out of control, they’re running amok. Really, it’s nuclear war out there. I mean, Christ, this Digital Faculty thing,’ she shuddered her head and rolled her eyes, ‘it’s not even funny anymore. In circumstances such as this, we need to do what we can to save ourselves, to save what’s precious to us.’
She reached over and squeezed his hand. Morris leaned his face into the hollow of her clavicle. It was like a tiny rock pool – he could still smell the salty sweat of their lovemaking.
They kissed. The accordionist’s sad and wheezing song jerked upwards from the baking square below, like a piece of litter caught and held by the hot updraughts of diesel fumes and frying.
‘I want the co-directorship,’ he said.
‘It’s yours.’
Chapter 24
E met Stella in a tapas bar on Crotchley Street.
‘Do you have anything with prunes?’ she asked the waiter. ‘Anything wholegrain?’
He pointed out the artichoke hearts.
‘They never tell you about the haemorrhoids,’ she told Stella after the waiter had shuffled off, ‘nor the involuntary bowel movements. No, they keep that stuff well hid. There’s a conspiracy of silence.’
‘But you’ve been through this before.’
‘I’m part of the conspiracy. It’s beyond my control – the experience of childbirth floods the brain with amnesiac chemicals specifically designed to wipe out all but the most pleasant memories.’
‘So these brain chemicals actually target the bad memories and wipe them out?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Is that true?’
E straightened her face.
‘It’s a plausible rumour.’
The tapas arrived. Little dishes filled the table.
‘I don’t care what they say, it still reminds me of leftovers,’ said Stella.
‘Yet another reason for not joining the Euro-zone.’
They picked.
‘So how are you, anyway?’
‘I’m obsessed with the baby. I really am. I feel like I’m one of those super-lorries. You know, those extra-wide vehicles which they close the motorways for, and the baby is in the cab, driving. The foetus is at the controls.’
‘Is that safe?’
‘I doubt it.’
‘How’s Morris?’
‘I’m not sure.’ She ate a slice of frittata. ‘I think he’s losing interest. I get a sense of waning enthusiasm.’
‘For the pregnancy?’
‘In general. He has his book of course, which I suppose is good. Last month he got locked in the Vodafone Library. He was there all night.’
‘Is that possible? I thought they had emergency phones.’
‘That’s what he told me. Try the aubergine. How’s your work anyway?’
‘Calamitous. They put me on weddings and bar mitzvahs – lots of falling on the dancefloor, lots of underwear shots, kilts a frequent motif. Can we promise right here and now that if I ever show signs of wishing to dance on a table you will act?’
‘Ruthlessly and without moral qualm.’
‘You’re a
pal. Shall I order more non-alcoholic sangria?’
‘No, I find it too upsetting.’
Stella nodded.
‘The moral of my job,’ she continued, ‘is that people never learn. They continue to believe, despite all the evidence, that, for example, punchbags make good gifts for small children, that break-dancing at a wedding reception is a good idea.’
‘It’s touching.’
‘Only the first few hundred times.’
‘I have a male friend,’ E said.
Stella suddenly stopped chewing, then, equally suddenly, started again.
‘His name is Nick. He’s an artist.’
‘Nick Kidney?’
‘You know him?’
‘He’s the enfant terrible of British art.’
‘Oh yes,’ E said, ‘That.’
‘So, is this an affair?’
‘I’m six months pregnant. How could it be an affair?’
‘Some men go for that. There are several specialist magazines.’
‘You’ve really plumbed the depths haven’t you?’
‘I come from a family of newsagents. Besides, I’ve seen his work. The pickled penises, the toilet panorama; his interests are quite unconventional.’
‘Off the record, sometimes he regrets the pickled penises. Anyway, he has a little boy.’
‘A father figure then.’
‘Well, it’s more than Morris is.’
‘I thought that Morris and Molly were like that.’
E began to eat more quickly: the chorizo sausage, the wok-turned squid.
‘The passion’s cooled in that area. Morris won’t play her reindeer games any more, plus there’s a long-running dispute over bathroom practices.’
‘Sad.’
‘Yes, it is.’
E began to cry.
‘Hormones,’ she said after a minute. ‘Another thing that they mysteriously fail to mention.’
‘Do you feel put upon? Let down? I get a sense of brooding resentment.’
‘My immediate task is to give birth, to reach the spawning grounds. Right now it’s hard to see past that. Do you have any advice?’
‘You mean after months of watching people hurt themselves foolishly for the entertainment of others?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Always wear goggles.’
A week later, E went alone to Nick Kidney’s London opening. Morris was finishing the book, his mother was over from Rotherham to watch Molly. She was not wearing goggles.
The gallery was in Spitalfields. The train was forty-five minutes late. Summer rush hour – the Central Line was a simmering chutney of pongs. In the general jostling for space and air, her condition offered E no moral advantage: it was merely a handicap, a weakness to be exploited. As they pulled out of Holborn, her varicose veins began to throb, her feet felt like red-hot flippers.
‘Could I possibly have a seat?’ she said to a kindly looking gentleman with white hair and a blue business suit.
‘Fuck off.’
E leaned against a stanchion and breathed through her mouth. Her tongue felt carpeted with yuck – there was an unavoidable taste of onions. As they finally rollicked into Liverpool Street she hurled herself backwards out of the opening doors, like a scuba diver in a hurry. The escalator was a spiritual experience. Once in the main concourse, she sat on a drilled steel bench and tried to retrieve her bearings. The station announcements wafted around her like an aural breeze. A pale yellow, swimming-pool light fell through the glass roof and softened, so it seemed to E, the faces of even the most hardened and desperate of commuters. How many years since she had been to London on her own? Five or six? Certainly before marriage. Before Molly. She had forgotten its paradoxical requirements: self-effacement, strength. Or perhaps she had never really noticed them before.
She bought an A to Z and a decaf latte. The gallery was a short walk away but she decided to get a cab. It struck her, as the cab progressed at sub-walking pace down Bishopsgate, that pregnancy, like drug addiction or fundamentalist religion, was really very simple. It was the things around it that were hard. All the pesky details: who to love, who to live with and why. When she paid, the driver asked if he could touch the baby for luck.
‘Would that be my luck or yours?’
It was an installation piece called ‘The Compulsion to be Dry’. Inside the gallery it was drizzling. Kidney had set up an elaborate sprinkler system: pipes and nozzles completely covered the ceiling. The floor had been tarmacked, there were drains. On entering, E was offered a plastic poncho and a glass of champagne. Certain people, obviously in the know, had worn their own more tasteful waterproofs; others had already taken off most of their clothes. The atmosphere was festive, the drizzle was pleasantly warm. E wandered into a back room. She saw Nick Kidney holding court beneath a mocked-up bus shelter – he was dressed like a trawlerman. E waved. Kidney came across. They kissed.
‘It’s Coketown,’ she said.
‘Of course it is. But no one else has cottoned on. They’re so fucking provincial down here. Do you want to see my workings?’
He unlocked a door into a cupboard-sized room full of plastic pipes and pumping gear. There was a control panel attached to the wall.
‘It’s on two at the moment,’ he said. ‘It goes up to ten. Ten is when I want people to leave. Ten is torrential: it threatens the water supply, it breaks bylaws. And I can do wind. Do you want to see?’
He turned the dial. A faint breeze arose from nowhere in particular. The drizzle curved slightly.
‘We’ve had technical problems with the wind, so I won’t push my luck.’
He turned down the wind and closed the door.
‘What do you think?’
E, who without thinking had drunk most of the champagne, opened her mouth and then closed it again.
‘A traditional answer is “utterly marvellous”,’ prompted Kidney. ‘“Quite superb” will do at a stretch.’
‘I don’t know what to say.’
‘It’s about emotion,’ he said.
‘Yes, I thought it might be.’
‘The irritating constancy of emotion. The way it’s always there whether you want it to be or not.’
Although the room was becoming crowded, the drizzle, like shivery curtains, drew them into a kind of privacy.
‘The inconvenience of it all,’ she said.
‘Right.’
The afternoon sun was slanting in through the picture window, there were brief rainbows by the buffet table. Someone nearby began to tap dance in the puddles. Several people were trying and failing to light cigarettes.
‘I think it’s remarkable,’ said E.
‘OK,’ said Kidney. ‘OK, that’s good, because I made it for you.’
‘You did not.’
‘Yes I did. It’s dedicated to you – look at the artist’s statement.’
He turned to point to the relevant wall, and they both realised that a rather dense and disorientating mist had formed around them.
‘Interesting,’ mused Kidney, ‘but quite unplanned. Perhaps I should try more wind. I’ll be back in a minute.’
It was two hours before E saw him again. By then everyone was drunk, the critics had left, the food had heroically been served and E had read the artist’s statement more than once.
I try to draw our attention to the things we don’t see, things that we overlook and undertook. The things that we fear to look at, or the things that we know only too well. To me, this is the purpose of all art – to return us to reality. This particular piece is dedicated to Eugenia – who is quite impossible to overlook.
‘Impossible to overlook,’ she thought. It made her sound like a scenic valley, or rather not like a scenic valley. And how did he know her name was Eugenia? No one called her that. She went outside. There were a lot of other people out there already, cheerful and attractively wet. They looked like the victims of a well-organised, upmarket shipwreck.
‘Look at you,’ said a man drunk enough not t
o care who she was. ‘The poncho actually fits.’
‘If you say it suits me, I’ll cry.’
‘My dear,’ he touched her on the arm and paused, ‘you’d look good in a paper bag.’
‘Thanks for the tip.’
‘Oooh, hoo, hoo, the tip, I like it.’ He reeled away, giggling.
Kidney popped up. He looked the worse for wear.
‘How did you know my name was Eugenia?’ she asked He looked initially confused.
‘Oh that. It was Gloria. We do occasionally talk, information is exchanged. E seemed too …’
‘Too short?’
‘Too short, yes.’
He looked at his diver’s watch.
‘It’s time for the monsoon,’ he said. ‘I’m beginning to get wrinkly and I heard several people inside mention trench foot. Will you come for dinner? It’s all arranged. Good. Back in a minute – I mean it this time.’
He went back inside. A minute later there were screams followed by a rapid evacuation.
‘My initial plan included hail,’ confided Kidney over dinner, ‘but the refrigeration costs are berserk.’
‘Hammy,’ he called down the table to Gert Hamster, his dealer. ‘Tell her about the refrigeration costs.’
‘Five figures,’ Hammy shouted back. ‘It’s not worth talking about.’
‘The hail would have been nice though.’ Kidney’s eyes glazed slightly as he thought of the hail. ‘Would have made a nice touch.’
‘What will the critics say?’ asked E.
‘They’ll play with words – a damp squib, sodden but not surprising. They’ll footle. That’s their calling. I despise them all.’
‘All? Really?’
‘No, one or two are all right. One or two you can go for a drink with. Where are you staying tonight?’
‘At a friend’s. She’s on holiday, but I’ve got a key. Finsbury Park.’
Kidney nodded, then sat suddenly straight as if he had remembered something.
‘You must be exhausted though,’ he said. ‘You must be utterly knackered. Why don’t you stay with me? It’s only round the corner. Ten minutes. I’ve got mountains of room.’
‘Mountains,’ confirmed Ghee, a strangely beautiful woman sitting diagonally opposite. Kidney glared at her, then glanced quickly back at E.