The Book of Air

by Joe Treasure

  I introduced myself.

  Penny said, ‘They know who you are, Jason.’

  ‘So they know you’re my sister? I hope they don’t hold it against you?’

  ‘We don’t believe in genetics, Jason. We’re environmentalists.’

  It was the kind of thing Penny said and you weren’t sure if it was a joke or not. She was bright but had these gaps, like someone who hasn’t been speaking the language very long.

  Only the older woman, Ursula, gave a smile, but she was looking down at Simon and might have been smiling at him or might just have been smiling out of general contentment. The Asian girl, who was called Aisha, looked at me solemnly and rubbed Penny’s back.

  I made my arguments. I was preserving a piece of historic London. It was a cutting edge development in terms of energy use. It fulfilled all the requirements for social inclusion. I wasn’t Satan. I wasn’t even one of Satan’s lesser minions. So the economy was in the crapper – people still needed somewhere to live. I’d make a donation in their name to an environmental cause, the World Wildlife Fund or some tree-planting outfit. I’d find them another plot in the borough, a piece of land the same size, give them free use of it for a year to grow their vegetables.

  But they weren’t there to negotiate. They’d come to convert me. Couldn’t I see there were too many buildings already and not enough land? That we were choking the planet with our emissions, stoking the flames of our own destruction? Aisha and Penny did most of the talking, Aisha reacting to Penny’s agitation by stroking her arm or touching her hair. The meeting went nowhere. About the planet at least they were right.

  As we were leaving, Simon held something up to me. It was a plastic dog. It looked grubby, and I thought maybe one of the Diggers had found it buried in the hospital garden.

  I squatted to his level, ‘What’s this?’

  He held it up to one eye. ‘This is Dumpy. Dumpy is mine dog. He’s a brave dog.’

  ‘He looks fierce.’

  ‘He has ventures. If you’re mean to me Dumpy will biten you. And if you’re mean to Dumpy and make him cry I will biten you until you say sorry.’

  ‘Now, Simon,’ Ursula said gently, ‘no biting. Little boys who bite must be sent to their room.’

  With his eyes still on me, Simon nodded. ‘Yes, withouten any ice cream.’

  I asked if he’d mind being sent to his room.

  He thought about this and said, ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  He gave a sly grin. ‘Because I haven’t gotten a room.’

  ‘You haven’t?’

  ‘No.’ He leant towards me as if to tell a secret. ‘I got mine Dora Splorer snuggle bag.’

  Outside on the pavement, while Aisha and Penny watched for a break in the traffic, Ursula said, ‘We don’t mean you any harm, you know.’

  ‘You just want to stop me earning a living.’

  ‘If it means more buildings, yes.’

  ‘And what am I supposed to do about that?’

  Her face wrinkled up in a smile. ‘Take up gardening.’

  The hospital project was stalled. But I wanted to make peace with Penny. If things were going to get messy with the Diggers, and it was heading that way, I wanted to give her and Simon a chance to get out of there. I also wanted to give her our news – your news, Caro. So I phoned and we arranged to meet in a pub by the river.

  I got some drinks and we sat on a bench on the Embankment looking at the lights along the Thames. I asked about Simon and she said he was fine.

  ‘How’s he enjoying life in a tent?’

  ‘Oh that. We’re not doing that any more. The Diggers are irrelevant.’

  ‘That’s a relief.’

  She seemed on edge. ‘There’s this book I’ve been reading. It puts it all in perspective.’

  ‘Good. Perspective is good.’

  ‘It makes the Diggers seem so trivial, so… marginal.’

  ‘Great! I’ll buy a dozen copies for Ursula and her friends. Maybe it’ll persuade them to get off my case.’

  ‘Forget the Diggers. Listen, Jason. I’m telling you something important.’

  ‘Me first. Caroline’s pregnant.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m going to be a father.’

  I didn’t know she was going to cry until the tears spilled down her face. I put my arms round her and her body felt frail. She clung to my neck, shaking and sobbing.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘It’s not a good time.’

  ‘It’s now or never, Pen. I’m over forty. Caroline’s thirty-four. If we’re going to have a family we’d better get on with it.’

  ‘But look at what’s happening to the planet. Look at this weather. It’s November, Jason, and we’re sitting outside. Doesn’t it freak you out?’

  ‘Of course it does, if I stop to think about it. But what can I do? What can any of us do by ourselves?’

  She pulled back and looked into my face. ‘Is that it then? We give up?’

  ‘No, we elect governments and they create regulations. It’s like speed limits. Everyone cheats a bit, we moan when we get caught, but we know they’re right.’

  ‘That’s pathetic, Jason. I mean it’s insane how utterly pathetic that is.’ She turned away from me, felt around in her shoulder bag and pulled out a book. ‘You should read this.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Just read it, OK.’

  It was Kishar in Crisis. I’d never seen it before, never heard of it. How could I know it would soon be notorious and Penny with it? It was just some book. The subtitle, the seven paradoxes of human survival, was just a bunch of words – the kind of words publishers put on the front of a million books to say this one’s important, buy this one, the way an estate agent might describe any random block of flats as a prestigious development affording luxury accommodation and iconic views. It was sales talk. I saw nothing sinister in it. And I didn’t feel threatened by the blurb that called it a self-help manual for Planet Earth. I completely missed the point, that there might be some kind of tension between the planet’s survival and ours. If it was there to be seen, I didn’t see it. All I saw was this garish black and yellow cover and a title I only half understood.

  ‘What is it then, Kishar?’

  ‘She, not it.’

  ‘Who’s she then, when she’s at home?’

  ‘She was babble-odeon.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘You know, from babble-odea. She was a babble-odeon earth goddess.

  ‘Babylonian, you mean,’ I said, ‘from Babylon. Like the Whore of Babylon.’

  Penny shrugged. And in a way she was right to shrug. So what if she mispronounced a word? Why should it bother me if she mangled Babylon beyond recognition? It did, though. That kind of knowledge, what Dad called book-learning, might be overrated, but I saw how vulnerable Penny was without it.

  ‘The thing is BK’s a genius.’

  ‘BK?’

  ‘BK Compton who wrote it. She understands everything. This book is huge. It’s…’ she struggled for a word that could express her sense of it. ‘It’s got everything in it, everything that matters – that’s what Troy says. Not because it’s got all the answers but because it chucks out all the old questions and replaces them with the only important question.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘It’s a big book, Jason. I didn’t say I’d read it all.’

  ‘And Troy’s what… a sky god?’

  ‘Troy’s my boyfriend.’

  ‘And what does he do, this Troy?’

  ‘What’s it matter what he does?’

  ‘Which means he’s unemployed and grows his own vegetables, I suppose.’

  ‘He’s a zoologist. With a real job. See, that took you by surprise. He does research in a lab. He’s got a PhD and everything.’

  ‘All right, you got me. Research into what?’

  ‘I don’t know exactly. The environment.’

  ‘That’ll keep him busy then – the
re’s a lot of it about.’

  ‘And he’s big in the solutionists.’

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘People who’ve read this book, mostly. People who are looking for the solution.’

  I wanted to ask her – hadn’t she been here before? They give you a book. They say, it’s all in here, this is all you need. But I said nothing.

  She phoned me next morning and told me to forget about the solutionists. I was late for a meeting and snarled up in traffic on Tower Bridge.

  ‘How do you mean, forget about them?’

  ‘Forget I mentioned them.’

  ‘I had forgotten them until you just mentioned them again.’

  ‘It’s just that they’re not important. I made it sound like they’re important but they’re not.’

  ‘You didn’t make them sound important. You just said they were looking for a solution.’

  ‘So you hadn’t forgotten. You remembered everything I said.’

  ‘I remember it now you’ve reminded me.’

  She didn’t respond and I thought maybe we’d been cut off. The weather had broken and rain was hammering the roof of the car and falling in fat drops on the windscreen.

  ‘It’s just that Troy gets annoyed at me.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘He says I shoot my mouth off.’

  ‘He sounds like a charmer.’

  ‘Please don’t think badly of him.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I?’

  ‘Because we’re moving in together.’

  ‘Are you sure that’s a good idea?’

  ‘And because the thing is, Jason, something terrible happened to him when he was a kid. His dad murdered his mum. And he actually saw it happen. Can you imagine what that must have felt like? He was only eight. It must have felt like it was his fault.’

  ‘Why must it?’

  ‘It just must have felt like that, that’s all I’m saying. Because I think it left him feeling he had to hold everything together, be responsible for everyone.’

  ‘Your childhood was a hardly a picnic.’

  ‘Exactly. Which is maybe why I understand him.’

  She texted me a few weeks later. I gathered that Troy wanted to meet me or she wanted me to meet him or some combination of the two. I suggested a pub on Blackfriars Road. I might have taken you with me, Caro, but I reckoned you could do without the aggravation.

  I got there late and they’d already found a table in the window. Penny went to the bar and left me with Troy. When I sat down he seemed to be waiting for me to speak.

  ‘So you’re a zoologist,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, I work at the zoo. Hang out with the reptiles in the reptile house.’

  ‘But I thought…’

  ‘You thought what?’

  ‘Penny said you work in a lab.’

  ‘Oh, she told you that. I usually don’t. I prefer to keep things in separate compartments. Work life, home life, pub life, whatever.’

  ‘Sorry. She didn’t say it was a secret.’

  ‘It’s not a secret. It’s just that it’s my business not your business.’

  He wasn’t good at eye contact. He could do it, look you in the eye – he’d fixed me a couple of times already – but it was always too much. And it was a relief when his stare shifted – to his phone, the door, the noisy table in the far corner. He seemed restless and distracted, but there was this stillness in him at the same time that unnerved me, some predatory quality.

  He nodded towards the street. ‘You drove here.’

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘I know you did. Penny recognised your tank. We saw you go past twice looking for somewhere to park. It gets tedious I should think. You should get rid of it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The tank. Sell it for scrap. Get a bike.’

  ‘Sorry, I’m confused. Is that your business or my business?’

  ‘I’m just saying. It must be hard always looking for places to park.’

  ‘Well it is, but I need a vehicle for the job.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Penny didn’t tell you?’

  ‘I wanted to hear your version. She gets things wrong sometimes.’

  ‘I build things.’

  ‘Things?’

  ‘Buildings.’

  ‘You build buildings.’

  ‘Yes, look, I know you’d rather I did something else, but that happens to be what I do. And I could tell you why it’s a good thing, like nursing or teaching or growing vegetables, because people like living indoors with roofs to keep the rain out and running water and drains so that the streets aren’t open sewers and everyone doesn’t get dysentery, but that’s my business not your business and I prefer to keep things in separate compartments.’

  ‘No offence, Jason. You do whatever it is you do.’ He smiled, just slightly – a thin sneer of a smile – and he seemed to relax. He’d got me wound up and it made him feel better.

  ‘So, Troy, I hear you’re interested in finding solutions.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Penny said you’re a solutionist or something.’

  ‘I don’t think so. I think you got that wrong.’

  I wouldn’t have mentioned the solutionists. I intended not to, but I wanted to throw him off balance. I assumed it was important to him, whatever it was, because Penny had phoned specifically to tell me it wasn’t. It was either that or ask him how his dad was doing.

  Troy was looking out the window, looking at me, looking out the window again. ‘No, you’ve got me there. I don’t even know what that is. You’ve gone off on some sort of tangent with that one.’

  Penny came with the drinks on a tray – a lager for me, something short and fizzy for her, ginger ale maybe, and an obscene quantity of watered down orange juice for Troy. She put the tray down on the table and perched on the edge of a chair. ‘I hope you two found something to talk about.’ She looked at us, each of us in turn.

  Troy was staring at the tray. ‘That’s not enough change.’ There was a tenner and a scattering of coins. ‘I gave you a twenty.’

  ‘That’s all the change I got, Troy, honest.’

  ‘And you didn’t count it?’

  ‘There’s hundreds of people up there. Look. It took me ages just to get served.’

  ‘So you’re saying you weren’t paying attention?’

  ‘Are you sure it’s not enough?’

  Without warning, Troy reached across the table and put a hand to Penny’s face. I thought he meant to take her by the ear like a schoolteacher in an old film. But just as abruptly he pulled back. His hand hovered for a moment above the table and opened with the index and middle fingers pointing upwards. The pound coin between them caught the light, glinting as it turned. He smiled, put the coin in his pocket and gathered up the rest of the money.

  Penny had gone pale and her breathing was shallow. She said, ‘What was that about?’

  ‘You’ve been talking to Jason about our hobby.’

  She looked puzzled.

  ‘You know – our little magic circle – the illusionists.’ He articulated the word, the wrong word, with exaggerated care. ‘I hope you haven’t given away any tricks.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean. I don’t know any tricks.’

  ‘That’s what you do with the reptiles, then, is it?’ I said, ‘in the reptile house – teach them magic tricks?’

  ‘Yeah. The snakes are the worst. Hard doing magic if you don’t have hands.’

  We sat for a while, listening to other people’s laughter and the sirens on Blackfriars Road.

  Then Troy said, ‘We’re going to have to go now, aren’t we, Pen.’

  ‘But we just got here.’

  ‘I think you must have left the gas on. I can smell it from here. Can’t you smell something, Jason? You must have left something cooking, Pen. One of these days, you’ll burn the place down.’

  I told Penny to call me. If she needed anything, she had my number. I meant if he h
it her, or scared her to the point that she just had to get out and needed somewhere to crash, somewhere to hide.

  I googled Troy. I had that one name and I had zoology, which turned out to be enough. He did have a PhD – from Imperial College. Something to do with mutations in zoonotic diseases, which I discovered were diseases that originate in animals – HIV, swine fever, avian flu, that sort of thing. For some reason I was reassured. He was more or less who Penny thought he was, even he was a mean fucker. I thought no more about it. I had my own problems.

  Weeks passed, a month or more maybe and Penny phoned. ‘Jason, I need to borrow your car. The SUV. We’re moving, Simon and me, and we’ve got all this stuff.’

  ‘I didn’t know you could drive.’

  ‘There’s a lot about me you don’t know.’

  ‘I didn’t know you believed in driving. Aren’t cars part of the problem?’

  ‘Are you going to lend me the car or not?’

  ‘If you need a car I’ll get you a car.’

  ‘Is that a yes, then? I can’t do it on the bus, can I?’

  ‘Yes, you can have a car. And a driver to go with it, if you like. Is this for a day, a weekend, what?’

  ‘A driver to go with it?’

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  ‘Like the driver’s just another commodity.’

  ‘Not a commodity, no. A person who drives for a living and will be glad of the work.’

  ‘And of course you’ll pay for this car and this driver.’

  ‘That’s what I’m offering.’

  ‘Money. That’s what it always comes down to with you, isn’t it.’

  ‘That’s the way things work, Pen, until the whole system breaks down and we go back to bartering.’

  ‘But I didn’t ask for your money, I just asked to borrow your car.’

  I took a deep breath. ‘And you’ve definitely got a licence.’

  ‘I said, didn’t I? Are you calling me a liar?’