The Matrix
Page 1
Jonathan Aycliffe was born in Belfast in 1949. He studied English, Persian, Arabic and Islamic at the universities of Dublin, Edinburgh and Cambridge, and lectured at the universities of Fez in Morocco and Newcastle upon Tyne. The author of nine full-length ghost stories, he lives in the north of England with his wife. He also writes as Daniel Easterman, under which name he has penned several bestselling thrillers. By the same author
By the same author
writing as Jonathan Aycliffe
Naomi’s Room
Whispers in the Dark
The Vanishment
The Silence of Ghosts
The Lost
The Talisman
A Shadow on the Wall
A Garden Lost in Time
writing as Daniel Easterman
The Seventh Sanctuary
The Ninth Buddha
Brotherhood of the Tomb
Night of the Seventh Darkness
The Last Assassin
THE MATRIX
JONATHAN AYCLIFFE
Constable & Robinson Ltd
55–56 Russell Square
London WC1B 4HP
www.constablerobinson.com
First published by HarperCollins Publishers, 1994
This edition first published in the UK by Corsair,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson, 2013
Copyright © Jonathan Aycliffe, 1994
The right of Jonathan Aycliffe to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented, without written permission from the publisher and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in
Publication data is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-47211-120-3 (paperback)
ISBN 978-1-47211-267-5 (ebook)
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Typeset by TW Typesetting, Plymouth, Devon
Printed and bound in the UK
Cover by JoeRoberts.co.uk
To Beth:
With fond memories of my last year in Edinburgh
Acknowledgements
My thanks as always, but with undimmed enthusiasm, to my editor, Patricia Parkin, for the subtle and intelligent deployment of her skills; to Mary-Rose Doherty for her incisive and informed copy-editing; and to my wife Beth, for enjoying the stories, and for being there.
Who is the third who walks beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded . . .
T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land
‘S an fhàsach iad air seachran chaidh
an ionad falamh fàs;
Is bail’ air bith cha d’fhuaradh leo
gu còmhnuidh ann no tàmh.
Psalm 107:4
ONE
Even now, it seems strange to me that I should be writing this memoir at all. With every day and every week that passes, the whole experience takes on an air of unreality. For a moment, dark wings seem to fold about me, then there is a flutter and they are gone, and the air is clear as if they had never been. And then I listen, and the silence is silence no longer. There are sounds, familiar sounds, sounds that have no right to be there.
My rational side tells me that it was nothing more than the work of my imagination. But then I pause, transfixed by the contradiction: I am not an imaginative man. Quite the reverse. There are those who might say my powers of inventiveness atrophied in late childhood. I am an academic, a sociologist, a late-twentieth-century man of reason; not a dreamer. My approach to the phenomena I study is, as far as possible, that of a scientist: in preparing papers, I take care to censor out anything that seems coloured by personal bias or fancy, anything that derives from speculation rather than tested and testable evidence.
Was that a sound just now? I thought . . . Well, let us say . . . I will admit that I do still hear things from time to time, things no one should hear. They are in my imagination, nowhere else. If not . . .
How can it be that someone like myself, a rational man, is haunted by these nightmares, pursued in the dark hours before dawn by spectres only the most fevered imagination could create? Even in broad daylight I have been startled by sudden shadows thrown across a patch of sunlight over grass, and out of the corner of my eye I have caught sight of curious shapes scuttling away. My reason denies it, my reading and learning dismiss it; but I have seen things that I dare not think about when I am alone. There are sounds which, if I were to hear them again, would drive me mad.
I must be more systematic. If this story is to be told and if I am to attempt an analysis of what I believe I experienced, I must tackle the subject as I would any case history. In distancing myself from events, I will make my readers better able to evaluate what they read, and give myself a better opportunity to come to terms with my own experiences. If, at times, I do not succeed in preserving a detached and scientific style, you must forgive me. It is just that . . . these things are very fresh. And I think it is not over yet; these days without the darkness are just a lull.
My name is Andrew Macleod. I am thirty-three years old, having been born on the fifteenth of July, 1961. My father’s name was Calum, my mother’s Margaret. I am an only child, without brothers or sisters. My father before me was an only child, and his father before that. I understand isolation, I do not fear solitude. Or I did not until these things began.
More facts. I shall set down all the facts, so that you will know none of this is imagination, that I see and hear and think as well and as soundly as you. The facts are what separate us from children and savages. They are our best defence against our innate proneness to exaggerate and fantasize. What you will read here, I assure you, will only be facts, as far as I know them.
I was born on Lewis, the northern half of the island of Harris and Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. My father taught Gaelic in the Nicolson Institute in Stornoway, although he was originally a mainlander from Inverness. He had met my mother, a Lewis woman, while living in Stornoway during a summer vacation from Aberdeen university, where he was studying Gaelic and Irish; they married soon after he took his degree, and he stayed in Stornoway to teach.
It took the natives a long time to accept him. Mainland Scots are foreigners to the islanders, and it did not go down well at first that he had come to teach their children what they held to be their own language. In the end, however, his command of the tongue and of the literature within it, as well as his personal popularity with his pupils, won them over. In time, he occupied an honoured place in Stornoway society.
My upbringing was marked by a curious blend of my father’s scepticism and my mother’s simple faith. As a child, I went with her to church every Sunday. On Lewis, the Free Church of Scotland – the Wee Free as it is popularly known – was the dominant sect, in stark contrast to the Catholicism of Uist to the south. The sparseness of the church building, the Calvinistic fervour of the sermons, and the black clothes worn by both men and women remain to this day etched in my memory.
But it is the singing
that haunts my deepest dreams and echoes behind and ahead of me. No one who has not heard it can imagine the eerie sound of that singing, the mournful incantation of the Gaelic metrical psalms. A precentor chants each line in turn and is followed by the congregation in a low, lilting wave of sound, a disharmony of separate voices that achieves its own harmony in the rising and falling of the words as they bind them together. There is no musical accompaniment, no organ, no harpsichord, just the lonely sound of the chanting voices and, in the long dark winters, the cruel wind keening outside, with the desolation of the vast northern seas mirrored in it. It is the music of a people born among mists and endless storms, close to the sea and to death.
I did well at school and, with my father, travelled several times to the mainland in my teens. Once, we all went to London for an entire week. The great city frightened me with its size and bustle; yet it drew me with the promise of unexplored possibilities. I dreamed of its streets and high, many-windowed buildings long after I returned to my island. On a street-map, I would trace with a mesmerized finger the routes we had taken to the sights, seeing them all again in my mind’s eye: the Houses of Parliament, the Tower of London, St Paul’s Cathedral, Harrods. There had been more things in that one store than in all the shops and houses of Harris and Lewis put together.
My father was called on frequently to travel to spots in the Inner and Outer Hebrides, to visit schools, to talk to local institutes, and to consult with colleagues. I sometimes went with him, to North and South Uist, Benbecula, and Barra in a small boat sailed by a local fisherman. On other occasions, we went by McBrayne’s steamer past Skye and the Kyle of Lochalsh, to Mallaig on the west coast of the mainland. The train between Mallaig and Fort William was the first I ever saw.
I shall always remember the last time we made the journey back from Mallaig to Stornoway. We boarded the steamer at ten in the morning, sailing slowly down the Sound of Sleat and up to the Kyle of Lochalsh, where we waited for the afternoon tide. It was December and a bright, crisp day. Soon after we left, evening began to fall. I stood with my father on deck, silent and lost in thought. To the west, the sun was sinking in a golden sky behind the dark shadows of the inner isles of Scalpay, Raasay and Rona, and the purple hills of Skye. To the east, a vast carpet of stars was being unrolled above the mountains of the mainland: Beinn Bhan, Maol Chean-dearg, and Beinn Alligin, and great Beinn Eighe towering above them all. We sailed between them into the night, out into the stormy waters of the North Minch. Hours passed in darkness, the steamer itself a tiny island, ploughing through cold waters into the unknown. And then, out in the distance, a light appeared and was soon followed by others – the lights of Stornoway beckoning to us as if from beyond the world.
It was on those journeys with my father that the other side of my character was formed. He too had been brought up a Presbyterian, in a pious Calvinist family of Inverness, but he had lost his faith early. He thought of himself as a freethinker and a rationalist, and I suppose he was, though in some matters he was far from rational. Through him I learned to use my mind, to question all I was told in school or church. It took me much longer to learn to question what he said as well. By the time I was fifteen, I had joined him in my unfaith, a matter which my mother accepted with resignation. She was a Calvinist, after all, and to her everything was predestined. If I were one of the elect, it would not damn me to abandon my faith; if I were not, no amount of prayers or psalms or sermons would serve to bring me salvation.
I wonder now if I am saved or damned by what I have known. I fear damnation as not even the staunchest elder of my mother’s church could fear it, and I doubt salvation as not even the most surely damned can doubt it. The words have held new meanings for me these three years and more.
Like my father, I continued my education at Aberdeen University. I studied sociology and politics. Mine was a purely academic interest: I never wanted to be a social worker or a politician. What drove me was curiosity, a strong urge to know how society worked, to uncover what lay beneath the surface appearance of human life.
By my fourth year, I had developed a particular interest in the sociology of religion. Whenever I thought about home, about the only society I knew at first hand, I found myself coming back again and again to that unbreakable knot of religion that tied it all together. I read the classic texts – Durkheim, Weber, Tawney, and the rest – and moved on via Berger and Luckmann to Wilson and the study of sectarianism. And then I found that sects and churches were no longer the fashionable thing, that the attention of scholars had shifted to that great, amorphous mass of cults and philosophies brought together under the term, New Religious Movements.
All this led quite naturally to my PhD, on which I spent another four years, this time in Glasgow. My subject was the social location of converts to the Unification Church (the Moonies) in Scotland. I stayed on in Glasgow for a couple of years as a junior lecturer, on temporary contracts. My salary was a pittance, the workload heavy, the students unrewarding for the most part. But I stayed on, mainly because of Catriona.
We met in my second year in Glasgow, a chance meeting at a party in a friend’s flat. Quick glances, a sense of recognition, mutual embarrassment, and a feeling in the pit of the stomach, a knowing: the irrational in its purest, dizziest sense. I remember the pang of disappointment when she left that night: we had exchanged barely ten words. I learned her name and noticed that she had a Glaswegian accent, that was all. But her face and voice were fixed in my mind, for a time it seemed they were my mind, all it consisted of, all it would ever be. I knew then, that night, within minutes of seeing her, we both knew, that nothing would ever be the same again, that all had changed in a matter of moments. I had never fallen in love before, it was as though I had stepped, breathless, into a world I did not recognize.
My friend knew that her full name was Catriona Stuart and that she lived in Hamilton. He did not know her well, she was a friend of a friend, but he told me what he could: that she played or sang in a rock band, that she had a degree in psychology, that she had been a model for a famous artist with whom she had lived for a time, and that she now lived with a boyfriend called Mark or Michael.
Almost none of these things turned out to be true. Catriona did indeed live in Hamilton, and she was a musician; but she did not play in a rock band, she was a violinist with a chamber music consort. She had posed several times for Kenneth Logan, a Glaswegian artist with a growing international reputation, and one of his paintings of her could be seen in the Burrell. She took me to see it soon after we started going out together. I think it was her way of seducing me. We had scarcely slept together then, and I was embarrassed by the public display of her nakedness, the vividness of her flesh. I was also astonished by the depth of Logan’s perception, his understanding of Catriona, the obvious pleasure he had taken in her body.
She told me as we were leaving that she and Logan had never slept together. I sensed that that was not the whole truth, that they had had a complex relationship. But for the time being it satisfied me to know it. It was one less commitment in her past. As for the rest: her degree had been in philosophy and music, and her boyfriend Melvin had walked out on her almost a year before.
I learned all this later, this and much more. The second time we met was not by chance. Jamie, my friend, arranged it, though I did not know it then. At the time, it seemed like destiny to both of us; and perhaps that is what it was, perhaps Jamie was no more than a willing tool.
In the years since then I have often asked myself: what if I had gone somewhere else that night? What if Catriona had been ill? What if . . .? But there comes a point when all the ‘what ifs’ dry up and fall away. They really do not matter. We would still have met, the next day, the next week, the next year – that is the important thing, that we would have met – somehow.
We went to the theatre, Jamie, his girlfriend, Catriona and myself. Everyone tried to pretend that it was just a casual arrangement: I was Jamie’s friend, Catriona knew his girlfriend
well, it was natural that we might end up meeting again. But we all knew the truth, and throughout the evening there was a faint air of embarrassment.
I walked Catriona home. It is among my sharpest memories, the shape of her head in the darkness, the motion of her body beside mine, the faint aroma of an unfamiliar perfume, an overpowering sense of expectancy. I remember nothing of what we talked about. All that happened, happened in silence, at a level deeper than words. A movement, a glance, my hand brushing hers, her faint but unmistakable response. And later that night, much later, all movement ceasing.
We lived together for four years, Catriona and I. I was happier than most men ever are, and I believe she was happy as well. Looking back, I know I was often careless with our time together, valued it for less than it was worth. I know better now, I treasure every moment in my memory.
There is no need for detail, our lives were perfectly ordinary. All you need to know can be summed up in a single sentence: Catriona died at the age of twenty-six, died of cancer, died at three in the morning while I was asleep.
There are moments, even now, when I torment myself with the question: was he working even then to bring me to him? And not just me, but Catriona too?
TWO
There was nothing left for me in Glasgow, no street that did not bear Catriona’s mark, no landmark that did not remind me of her. I did my best with my grief. It never left me, but in time I came to live with it, as with a wound or an amputated limb. Now, of course, it has been replaced by something else – something more like fear.
I returned home for several months. There are few places better than Lewis for being alone. It was the summer of 1991, and I passed my thirtieth birthday in July. Most days I would drive to west Uig, to Mangurstadh beach. In winter, that is one of the wildest places on earth. There is nothing beyond it but the open reaches of the north Atlantic. Seals come to the rocks, and further out the flukes of whales tilt above the water. That summer, I sat alone on the beach, trying to empty my mind of thoughts I could not bear. If anyone had seen me, they might have thought me another rock thrown down on the sand.