In recent years, he has turned away from genre work to produce some of the best books of his career in a sequence of ostensibly “mainstream” novels (although, ironically, most of them contain subtle fantastic elements) such as Climbers, The Course of the Heart, and, most recently, the critically acclaimed Signs of Life. In the intense and lapidarian story that follows, a rare foray into core science fiction, he takes us to a grey, rain-swept, rather dispirited future London, for a sharp lesson in the difference that Passion makes in all our lives, no matter where we choose to invest it.
FOUR-THIRTY IN THE afternoon in a converted warehouse near Mile End underground station. Heavy, persistent summer rain was falling on the roof. Inside, the air was still and humid, dark despite the fluorescent lights. It smelled of sweat, dust, gymnasts’ chalk. Twenty-five feet above the thick blue crash-mats, a boy with dreadlocks and baggy knee-length shorts was supporting his entire weight on two fingers of his right hand. The muscles of his upper back, black and shiny with sweat, fanned out exotically with the effort, like the hood of a cobra or the shell of a crab. One leg trailed behind him for balance. He had raised the other so that the knee was almost touching his chin. For two or three minutes he had been trying to get the ball of his foot in the same place as his fingers. Each time he moved, his centre of gravity shifted and he had to go back to a resting position. Eventually he said quietly:
“I’m coming off.”
We all looked up. It was a slow afternoon in Mile End. Nobody bothers much with training in the middle of summer. Some teenagers were in from the local schools and colleges. A couple of men in their late thirties had sneaked out of a civil engineering contract near Cannon Street. Everyone was tired. Humidity had made the handholds slippery. Despite that, a serious atmosphere prevailed.
“Go on,” we encouraged him. “You can do it.”
We didn’t know him, or one another, from Adam.
“Go on!”
The boy on the wall laughed. He was good but not that good. He didn’t want to fall off in front of everyone. An intention tremor moved through his bent leg. Losing patience with himself, he scraped at the foothold with the toe of his boot. He lunged upwards. His body pivoted away from the wall and dropped onto the mats, which, absorbing the energy of the fall, made a sound like a badly winded heavyweight boxer. Chalk and dust billowed up. He got to his feet, laughing and shaking his dreadlocks.
“I can never do that.”
“You’ll get it in the end,” I told him. “Me, I’m going to fall off this roof once more then fuck off home. It’s too hot in here.”
“See you, man.”
I had spent most of that winter in London, assembling copy for MAX, a Web site that fronted the adventure sports software industry. They were always interested in stuff about cave diving, BASE jumping, snowboarding, hang-gliding, ATB and so on: but they didn’t want to know about rock climbing.
“Not enough to buy,” my editor said succinctly. “And too obviously skill-based.” He leafed through my samples. “The punter needs equipment to invest in. It strengthens his self-image. With the machine parked in his hall, he believes he could disconnect from the software and still do the sport.” He tapped a shot of Isobelle Patissier seven hundred feet up some knife-edge arete in Colorado. “Where’s the hardware? These are just bodies.”
“The boots are pretty high tech.”
“Yeah? And how much a pair? Fifty, a hundred and fifty? Mick, we can get them to lay out three grand for the frame of an ATB.”
He thought for a moment. Then he said: “We might do something with the women.”
“The good ones are French.”
“Even better.”
I gathered the stuff together and put it away.
“I’m off then,” I said.
“You still got the 190?”
I nodded.
“Take care in that thing,” he said.
“I will.”
“Focke Wolf 190,” he said. “Hey.”
“It’s a Mercedes,” I said.
He laughed. He shook his head.
“Focke Wolf, Mercedes, no one drives themselves any more,” he said. “You mad fucker.”
He looked round his office – a dusty metal desk, a couple of posters with the MAX logo, a couple of PCs. He said: “No one comes in here in person any more. You ever hear of the modem?”
“Once or twice,” I said.
“Well they’ve invented it now.”
I looked around too.
“One day,” I said, “the poor wankers are going to want back what you stole from them.”
“Come on. They pissed it all away long before we arrived.”
As I left the office he advised:
“Keep walking the walk, Mick.”
I looked at my watch. It was late and the MAX premises were in EC1. But I thought that if I got a move on and cut up through Tottenham, I could go and see a friend of mine. His name was Ed and I had known him since the 1980s.
Back then, I was trying to write a book about people like him. Ed Johnson sounded interesting. He had done everything from roped-access engineering in Telford to harvesting birds’ nests for soup in Southeast Asia. But he was hard to pin down. If I was in Birmingham, he was in Exeter. If we were both in London, he had something else to do. In the end it was Moscow Davis who made the introduction.
Moscow was a short, hard, cheerful girl with big feet and bedraggled hair. She was barely out of her teens. She had come from Oldham, I think, originally, and she had an indescribable snuffling accent. She and Ed had worked as steeplejacks together before they both moved down from the north in search of work. They had once been around a lot together. She thought Johnson would enjoy talking to me if I was still interested. I was. The arrangement we made was to be on the lookout for him in one of the Suicide Coast pubs, the Harbour Lights, that Sunday afternoon.
“Sunday afternoons are quiet, so we can have a chat,” said Moscow. “Everyone’s eating their dinner then.”
We had been in the pub for half an hour when Johnson arrived, wearing patched 501s and a dirty T-shirt with a picture of a mole on the front of it. He came over to our table and began kicking morosely at the legs of Moscow’s chair. The little finger of his left hand was splinted and wrapped in a wad of bandage.
“This is Ed,” Moscow told me, not looking at him.
“Fuck off, Moscow,” Ed told her, not looking at me. He scratched his armpit and stared vaguely into the air above Moscow’s head. “I want my money back,” he said. Neither of them could think of anything to add to this, and after a pause he wandered off.
“He’s always like that,” Moscow said. “You don’t want to pay any attention.” Later in the afternoon she said: “You’ll get on well with Ed, though. You’ll like him. He’s a mad bastard.”
“You say that about all the boys,” I said.
In this case Moscow was right, because I had heard it not just from her, and later I would get proof of it anyway – if you can ever get proof of anything. Everyone said that Ed should be in a straitjacket. In the end, nothing could be arranged. Johnson was in a bad mood, and Moscow had to be up the Coast that week, on Canvey Island, to do some work on one of the cracking-plants there. There was always a lot of that kind of work, oil work, chemical work, on Canvey Island. “I haven’t time for him,” Moscow explained as she got up to go. “I’ll see you later, anyway,” she promised.
As soon as she was gone, Ed Johnson came back and sat down in front of me. He grinned. “Ever done anything worth doing in your whole life?” he asked me. “Anything real?”
The MAX editor was right: since coring got popular, the roads had been deserted. I left EC1 and whacked the 190 up through Hackney until I got the Lea Valley reservoirs on my right like a splatter of moonlit verglas. On empty roads the only mistakes that need concern you are your own; every bend becomes a dreamy interrogation of your own technique. Life should be more like that. I made good time. Ed lived just back from Montagu Road, in a qu
iet street behind the Jewish Cemetery. He shared his flat with a woman in her early thirties whose name was Caitlin. Caitlin had black hair and soft, honest brown eyes. She and I were old friends. We hugged briefly on the doorstep. She looked up and down the street and shivered.
“Come in,” she said. “It’s cold.”
“You should wear a jumper.”
“I’ll tell him you’re here,” she said. “Do you want some coffee?”
Caitlin had softened the edges of Ed’s life, but less perhaps than either of them had hoped. His taste was still very minimal – white paint, ash floors, one or two items of furniture from Heals. And there was still a competition Klein mounted on the living room wall, its polished aerospace alloys glittering in the halogen lights.
“Espresso,” I said.
“I’m not giving you espresso at this time of night. You’ll explode.”
“It was worth a try.”
“Ed!” she called. “Ed! Mick’s here!”
He didn’t answer.
She shrugged at me, as if to say, “What can I do?” and went into the back room. I heard their voices but not what they were saying. After that she went upstairs. “Go in and see him,” she suggested when she came down again three or four minutes later. “I told him you were here.” She had pulled a Jigsaw sweater on over her Racing Green shirt and Levi’s; and fastened her hair back hastily with a dark brown velvet scrunchy.
“That looks nice,” I said. “Do you want me to fetch him out?”
“I doubt he’ll come.”
The back room was down a narrow corridor. Ed had turned it into a bleak combination of office and storage. The walls were done with one coat of what builders call “obliterating emulsion” and covered with metal shelves. Chipped diving tanks hollow with the ghosts of exotic gases were stacked by the filing cabinet. His BASE chute spilled half out of its pack, yards of cold nylon a vile but exciting rose colour – a colour which made you want to be hurtling downwards face-first screaming with fear until you heard the canopy bang out behind you and you knew you weren’t going to die that day (although you might still break both legs). The cheap beige carpet was strewn with high-access mess – hanks of greying static rope; a yellow bucket stuffed with tools; Ed’s Petzl stop, harness and knocked-about CPTs. Everything was layered with dust. The radiators were turned off. There was a bed made up in one corner. Deep in the clutter on the cheap white desk stood a 5-gig Mac with a screen to design industry specs. It was spraying Ed’s face with icy blue light.
“Hi Ed.”
“Hi Mick.”
There was a long silence after that. Ed stared at the screen. I stared at his back. Just when I thought he had forgotten I was there, he said:
“Fuck off and talk to Caitlin a moment.”
“I brought us some beer.”
“That’s great.”
“What are you running here?”
“It’s a game. I’m running a game, Mick.”
Ed had lost weight since I last saw him. Though they retained their distinctive cabled structure, his forearms were a lot thinner. Without releasing him from anything it represented, the yoke of muscle had lifted from his shoulders. I had expected that. But I was surprised by how much flesh had melted off his face, leaving long vertical lines of sinew, fins of bone above the cheeks and at the corners of the jaw. His eyes were a long way back in his head. In a way it suited him. He would have seemed okay – a little tired perhaps; a little burned down, like someone who was working too hard – if it hadn’t been for the light from the display. Hunched in his chair with that splashing off him, he looked like a vampire. He looked like a junkie.
I peered over his shoulder.
“You were never into this shit,” I said.
He grinned.
“Everyone’s into it now. Why not me? Wanking away and pretending it’s sex.”
“Oh, come on.”
He looked down at himself.
“It’s better than living,” he said.
There was no answer to that.
I went and asked Caitlin, “Has he been doing this long?”
“Not long,” she said. “Have some coffee.”
We sat in the L-shaped living area drinking decaffeinated Java. The sofa was big enough for Caitlin to curl up in a corner of it like a cat. She had turned the overhead lights off, tucked her bare feet up under her. She was smoking a cigarette. “It’s been a bloody awful day,” she warned me. “So don’t say a word.” She grinned wryly, then we both looked up at the Klein for a minute or two. Some kind of ambient music was issuing faintly from the stereo speakers, full of South American bird calls and bouts of muted drumming. “Is he winning?” she asked.
“He didn’t tell me.”
“You’re lucky. It’s all he ever tells me.”
“Aren’t you worried?” I said.
She smiled.
“He’s still using a screen,” she said. “He’s not plugging in.”
“Yet,” I said.
“Yet,” she agreed equably. “Want more coffee? Or will you do me a favour?”
I put my empty cup on the floor.
“Do you a favour,” I said.
“Cut my hair.”
I got up and went to her end of the sofa. She turned away from me so I could release her hair from the scrunchy. “Shake it,” I said. She shook it. She ran her hands through it. Perfume came up; something I didn’t recognize. “It doesn’t need much,” I said. I switched the overhead light back on and fetched a kitchen chair. “Sit here. No, right in the light. You’ll have to take your jumper off.”
“The good scissors are in the bathroom,” she said.
Cut my hair. She had asked me that before, two or three days after she decided we should split up. I remembered the calm that came over me at the gentle, careful sound of the scissors, the way her hair felt as I lifted it away from the nape of her neck, the tenderness and fear because everything was changing around the two of us for ever and somehow this quiet action signalized and blessed that. The shock of these memories made me ask:
“How are you two getting on?”
She lowered her head to help me cut. I felt her smile.
“You and Ed always liked the same kind of girls,” she said.
“Yes,” I said.
I finished the cut, then lightly kissed the nape of her neck. “There,” I said. Beneath the perfume she smelled faintly of hypoallergenic soap and unscented deodorants. “No, Mick,” she said softly. “Please.” I adjusted the collar of her shirt, let her hair fall back round it. My hand was still on her shoulder. She had to turn her head at an awkward angle to look up at me. Her eyes were wide and full of pain. “Mick.” I kissed her mouth and brushed the side of her face with my fingertips. Her arms went round my neck, I felt her settle in the chair. I touched her breasts. They were warm, the cotton shirt was clean and cool. She made a small noise and pulled me closer. Just then, in the back room among the dusty air tanks and disused parachutes, Ed Johnson fell out of his chair and began to thrash about, the back of his head thudding rhythmically on the floor.
Caitlin pushed me away.
“Ed?” she called, from the passage door.
“Help!” cried Ed.
“I’ll go,” I said.
Caitlin put her arm across the doorway and stared up at me calmly.
“No,” she said.
“How can you lift him on your own?”
“This is me and Ed,” she said.
“For God’s sake!”
“It’s late, Mick. I’ll let you out, then I’ll go and help him.”
At the front door I said:
“I think you’re mad. Is this happening a lot? You’re a fool to let him do this.”
“It’s his life.”
I looked at her. She shrugged.
“Will you be all right?” I said.
When I offered to kiss her goodbye, she turned her face away.
“Fuck off then, both of you,” I said.
I k
new which game Ed was playing, because I had seen the software wrapper discarded on the desk near his Mac. Its visuals were cheap and schematic, its values self-consciously retro. It was nothing like the stuff we sold off the MAX site, which was quite literally the experience itself, stripped of its consequences. You had to plug in for that: you had to be cored. This was just a game; less a game, even, than a trip. You flew a silvery V-shaped graphic down an endless V-shaped corridor, a notional perspective sometimes bounded by lines of objects, sometimes just by lines, sometimes bounded only by your memory of boundaries. Sometimes the graphic floated and mushed like a moth. Sometimes it travelled in flat vicious arcs at an apparent Mach 5. There were no guns, no opponent. There was no competition. You flew. Sometimes the horizon tilted one way, sometimes the other. You could choose your own music. It was a bleakly minimal experience. But after a minute or two, five at the most, you felt as if you could fly your icon down the perspective for ever, to the soundtrack of your own life.
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