Empty Space

by M. John Harrison

  A long way off, in the ballroom of the Deleuze Motel, the assistant sat recovering herself. She drank barrel proof rum from the bottle and watched the old men work the overend on one another at the Ship Game – adjusting their white caps, shooting the cuffs of their formal shirts with sharp economical gestures, whispering, ‘Well now,’ or ‘Now you fucked.’ In their opinion, the night was moving along: every so often one of them would cock his head at the sound of the ocean, lean across, and, black eyes as empty as raisins, assure the assistant that the night was moving right along. Dice rattled and scattered, shedding alien luck as friction brought them to a standstill. The faint smell of vomit coming and going in the cold air, the assistant realised, originated with her. Three am, the tide was fully out. R.I. Gaines walked in through the sea-facing wall.

  ‘Wow!’ he said. ‘The Ship Game! Make room!’

  The old men blinked up at him like lizards. They made room. Something he could do with the bone interested them, they were disposed to admit. Soon, they were taking his money, he was taking theirs. ‘It’s a redistributive system,’ he proposed. Redistribution, they agreed, was the name of that particular game. The assistant watched these events from a distance, then walked over to the door. The breeze was onshore. Dawn wasn’t far off. Seeming to notice her for the first time, Gaines jumped to his feet and led her back into the room. He made a gesture that took in the salt-stained walls, the chandelier with its two dim bulbs, the dusty signs behind the bar.

  ‘Sometimes you’re quite hard to find,’ he said.

  The assistant shrugged. She offered him the rum. ‘So,’ she said, ‘do you want to go and sit on my bed together?’

  He gave her a thoughtful look.

  ‘The Aleph stopped asking for you. We wondered if you knew anything about that.’

  ‘I never know what you’re talking about.’

  Gaines grinned. He held up the bottle, studied the label. ‘“Black Heart”,’ he quoted. ‘“All the sweet lacunae of the Caribbean Sea”.’

  The assistant looked down at her arm. Nothing was happening there.

  ‘I wonder if it’s time you two met?’ Gaines asked himself.

  The fact was, he couldn’t decide. He had recently come from the Aleph site, where there had been more activity than he expected, reflections of smart displays fluttering across the shiny carbon floor, smells of ionisation and construction. Case’s people were devising new containment principles. It was a high risk period for them all. They had no idea what they were dealing with. When Gaines arrived they were arguing if they wanted a bunch of fat cables in here just for the look of it, or do the whole thing tight beam, which, hey, would be the quick and dirty solution. It was a professionally toxic but busy atmosphere. The reason being, Case told Gaines, that early the same morning Pearl had begun to emit pulsed bursts of RF.

  ‘It’s not organised, as far as we can tell.’

  ‘So what is it?’

  Case shrugged. ‘It’s not exactly random noise either,’ he said.

  ‘I’m impressed. Is there anything you guys don’t know?’

  ‘Rig, we’re doing what we can here,’ Case said tiredly.

  His imaging team produced a hologram display that rotated the woman smoothly around every axis so that she looked like virtual false-colour shots of a sculpture, spoiled by some sort of faint, in situ interference. Attempts to clean the interference out had only given her the lines of a Deco portrait, freezing the folds of her gown to create strong contentless curves suggestive of power and energy. Her eyes were rendered the same colour as her face, without pupil or lids. ‘After we took these I had them build a field tomography unit round her,’ Case said. ‘Forget it. It was like looking into nacre.’ As far as X-rays were concerned, she was solid all through. ‘Positron emission feels the same about her. We decided not to try neutrons, in case she bore some slight resemblance to a human being.’

  ‘She looks as if she’s falling,’ Gaines said. ‘Caught falling.’

  Her body was strained into such a curve that only the upper left of the ribcage touched the floor. Her right leg was raised at about thirty degrees to the horizontal, the other bent slightly back from the knee; they were as far apart as the skirt of the gown permitted. The feet were bare. The arms, outstretched either side of the head, curved towards the ceiling of the chamber; the hands were open, palm out, fingers clutching then relaxing in slow motion. The gown fluttered stiffly, as if caught in strong air currents venting through the floor of the control room. The effect was of someone falling sideways from a great height.

  ‘How close can I get?’ Gaines asked.

  ‘Close as you like,’ Case said.

  To Gaines she had that inner focus possessed by the very sick. When he whispered, ‘Hey, who are you? What is it you don’t like about yourself?’ she only looked through him, contorting herself slowly, trying to alter her position around the fall-line, her expression full of fear and rage. He stepped in and knelt down until eighteen inches of air separated their faces, but he couldn’t force himself any closer – he experienced the sensation of inappropriately invading someone’s personal space, but worse. And where he had expected to feel the air moving around her, fluttering her gown, it was just the opposite, very still.

  ‘I can feel heat radiating off her,’ he told Case.

  ‘Other people think they hear a voice,’ Case said, ‘ too far away to make out words. Or they smell something, maybe perfume. We think everyone’s trying to describe the same sensation, but so far no one’s got near enough to find out. You’ve done better than most.’

  ‘Before, there was some kind of paste coming out of her mouth?’

  ‘That’s on and off,’ Case said. As for the RF transmission, he added, it was very low power. It had a very local reach. ‘If she’s hooked up with anything, it’s already arrived. It’s in the maze.’

  ‘Jesus, Case. Do we have any idea at all where she came from?’

  Case looked amused.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘One other thing: sometimes there’s a convulsion. She dribbles – we can’t collect any of it, whatever it is – and there’s a lot of shifting and partial fading. Just for a moment she looks like a much older woman. Nothing’s finished here.’

  NINETEEN

  Anyone Can Make a Mistake

  ‘Look at all these women,’ Anna Waterman said.

  Nine in the morning, and the radiography reception area at St Narcissus, Farringdon was full of them, their anxiety expressed as a tendency to text. Their thumbs brushed the keys of their phones at ferocious speeds; they weren’t going to look up, in case that meant admitting something about their predicament. The reception area helped. It was less a waiting room than a stylised version of one – a quiet postmodern whimsy about lines of chairs against a wall – featuring upholstery in calm warm shades of blue-grey, uplighters like white porcelain cups, clean little round tables piled with the terrestrial editions of property and gossip magazines which no one read any more. Framed on the walls were silhouettes of a cat, which, when you looked at them in a certain way, proved to resemble 2-dimensional slices through the animal, a joke cooked up between the radiologists and St Narcissus’ artist-in-residence. But underneath the joke everything it referred to remained, and when you looked up there was a stain on the ceiling tiles, shaped, according to your mood, either like the map of a distant island or a section through someone’s tumour.

  ‘That,’ said Anna, who hated hospitals, ‘is the giveaway.’

  Marnie laughed.

  ‘I quite like the uplighters,’ she said, then: ‘Mum, I’ve just got to send a text.’

  ‘No one can like uplighters, surely?’

  ‘Mum—’

  The receptionist interrupted them. ‘It’s an IUV appointment, isn’t it?’ he shouted at Anna.

  ‘Excuse me?’ Anna said. ‘I’m not the patient.’

  ‘You’ve had your kidneys done, dear, haven’t you? Last week? Now look, why don’t you just read this leaflet for me w
hile you wait?’

  ‘Why? Can’t you read it yourself?’ She glanced at the leaflet, made out the words, ‘Please attend promptly at the Radiology reception desk,’ and repeated with ominous clarity, leaving plenty of space between the words: ‘I’m not the patient.’

  During the exchange that followed, Marnie’s scan was called. ‘I won’t be long,’ she promised. ‘Why not sit there, where you can watch the TV?’

  ‘Don’t you start.’

  While she waited, Anna leafed through the magazines. Homes You Can’t Afford offered high definition photography of listed buildings in Surrey and Perthshire. Old issues of Mine and Get brought her the clothes, gadgets and, especially, the elective surgeries of the rich. The eight-year-old male heir to one of the bigger hedge-fund operations of the 2010s had persuaded the family surgeons to fit him with the uterus and womb of ‘an unknown East Asian donor’ for a month; while his mother, upon having her skin genetically modified to produce downy feathers a calculated charcoal-grey colour, announced with satisfaction that she had ‘achieved the look she had always wanted’, as if she’d done the procedures herself at home. She looked a little like a Porsche. Mother and son smiled languidly out of the papagraphs, thoroughly warmed by themselves. September’s Watchtower, meanwhile, promised Comfort For The Elderly. Anna stared at it with dislike. Then, because she had been awake all night, she fell asleep and dreamed about sex. Marnie woke her not long later, and they went across the road to a branch of Carluccio’s to drink cioccolata calda, ‘nun’s revenge’, a favourite of Marnie’s since she was eight. Anna ordered an almond croissant, but instead of almond paste it turned out to have a kind of thin, rather unpleasant custard in it.

  ‘Well, I’m glad that’s over,’ Marnie said. She put her hand on Anna’s. ‘Thanks for coming with me,’ she said. ‘Really.’

  ‘Just remind me what kind of scan it was?’

  Marnie took her hand away. She looked despondent. ‘You might at least try and keep up with my life.’

  ‘I think you probably told me but I forgot.’

  ‘Anna,’ Marnie said, ‘I don’t feel as if you have any kind of grip on things.’

  ‘If you’re still upset about the bathroom—’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with that.’

  ‘Marnie, anyone can make a mistake.’

  ‘It isn’t the bathroom.’

  ‘Well then what?’

  Marnie turned away and looked out of the window. ‘I’m ill and you pick a quarrel with the receptionist.’

  ‘He was patronising me.’

  ‘I’m ill,’ Marnie said stubbornly. ‘I wouldn’t have gone for a scan if I felt well.’

  ‘I thought you said it was nothing.’

  ‘It is nothing. I’m sure it’s nothing. But that’s not the point. I tell you not to worry and you just accept that?’ Marnie made a dismissive gesture. Suddenly she pushed back her chair. ‘We don’t seem to live in the same world any more, Anna,’ she said. She got up and walked out.

  For some time after she had gone, Anna sat at the table with her hands in her lap. She didn’t know what to do or think next. Outside the huge windows of Carlucci’s, rain poured down through the sunshine, turning Farringdon – for the first and last time, you imagined – into a romantic film of itself. People hurried by, laughing; Anna watched them until the rain stopped. Across the road, an optician’s sign blinked and shifted: her eyes followed that. When the coffee machine hissed, her head turned that way. She listened to the people at the table next to her. Other people went in and out of the doors. For a minute or two a toddler ran about behind her, laughing and shrieking. People never seem to grow up or change, she thought. After about half an hour, Marnie came back and said she was sorry, and went off again to work. Anna took the tube to Waterloo and was home by midday.

  She went out into the garden to have lunch and found that in her absence vegetation had filled the beds at the base of the summerhouse again. It was taller this time. Thick bright green rubbery stems wove about in the sunshine, almost as if they were moving, ending in flowers like trumpets or Tiffany lampshades. At the base of the tangle sprouted those unearthly copper poppies; and on the earth between their stems, gelid organs in rose and pastel blue such as the cat brought in nightly. Small birds flew out of the vegetation, all colours but all single-coloured – birds from a child’s rag book, they peeped at Anna with their heads on one side. The summerhouse itself seemed to fall away upward in a distorted perspective, the parts of it leaning together as if they had been propped there loosely and abandoned, dilapidated yellow lapboard like a drawing of itself, looming against a sky too blue. She dragged open the door like someone determined to get to the bottom of things, but inside it was just a shed in anyone’s garden – dusty, hot, full of slowly bursting boxes, layered spiderwebs and a kind of archaeological time. Gardening things. Unused things. Things of Tim’s or Marnie’s, markers of the fads and bad decisions of long ago: a rolled poster here, too brittle to unroll ever again; there a small lay figure, its limbs arranged to represent a Degas dancer. Suddenly she was bloody sick of it. She could no more manage it than Marnie’s mystifying behaviour at Carlucci’s. She took her lunch back to the house, binned it and went to the de Spencer Arms instead. There she came across the boy with the dogs, without his dogs. He was sitting at a table as far away from the building itself as he could manage, his arms wrapped round one knee and his donkey jacket bundled up beside him.

  ‘If I buy you something,’ Anna said, ‘will you drink it this time?’

  Early afternoon at the de Spencer Arms. Warm sunshine. A light wind bringing the scents of gorse and salt over from the other side of the Downs, blowing deflated crisp-bags between the outside tables. The car park was empty. Skylarks hung in the air like clockwork toys, whirring and pouring out notes of music, rising and falling abruptly according to no obvious plan. Inside, it was wall-to-wall weekday afternoon: rank smell of carpet grease, cheese & vegetable fritters, ancient beer fumes; madness of boredom in the blue eyes of the pub collie behind the bar. A couple in matching dark blue double-breasted suits stood by the fake wood fire, posed as if it was October, the woman distinguishable mainly by her stature and the way her bottom stuck out. She sported ear-rings like little wheels, a piece of ribbon worn as a bow-tie, the air of an American comedienne in a knockabout film of the 1950s. ‘I told him at Niagra,’ she was saying as Anna entered, ‘as I’d told him in Datchet.’ They looked like tour guides. It was the usual warning, Anna thought, against getting old.

  She carried the drinks out carefully.

  ‘This time I got us both Harvey’s. I enjoyed the last one. Where are your beautiful dogs? I was looking forward to seeing them again.’

  ‘They’re dead, those dogs.’

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘Wasted away,’ the boy said. ‘Some say it’s nature, but I’ll have none of that.’

  ‘You must be heartbroken!’

  He seemed to consider this. Then he shrugged. ‘See over there? Over the Western Brow? Buzzard.’ He laughed shortly. ‘He’s out for something, that bugger,’ he said. He drank half his beer in one long swallow. ‘Them down the fields say it’s my fault, but I’m having none of that.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  The boy shrugged. ‘Why should you?’ he concluded. ‘But they ran well to the lamp, those dogs.’

  Though Anna waited for more, that seemed to be the end of it. They sat in the sunshine, half-awkward, half-companionable, then she bought another drink. The Downs were gilded. Something about the slow drift of afternoon to evening, the slow lengthening of shadows under Streat Hill, made objects seem closer than they were. Distant sounds seemed louder, too. Everything seemed more present. Behind them, the car park began to fill with people down from London: single men squeezing their TVRs and Italian motorcycles in between the ill-parked SUVs; single-activity tourists descending from the Downs in their cycling, walking or birdwatching outfits. Half a dozen women, one of whom wore two-tone bre
eches and brown suede boots with fringes, arrived together on immaculately turned-out horses. Two of them went to get drinks. The boy watched the women. Anna watched the boy.

  ‘Tell me about lamping,’ she said.

  He thought about that. ‘You want a good dark night,’ he said eventually.

  She could see how hard he found it – how emotionally clouded it was for him. How do you describe something you know so well? His focus was too close. It was a struggle to distinguish sensation from practice, to find sufficient distance without merging all the subtleties; and now his dogs were gone too. ‘And you want a good lamp, an old Lightforce or like that. You can get that second hand. Another thing, get a battery with a flat discharge curve. Them down the fields know all that, they’re always talking about what lamps to get. It’s a million candlepower this, a million candlepower that with them.’ He thought for a moment. ‘I don’t pay much attention to all that,’ he confessed, as if surprised by himself. ‘I like it when the dog runs down the light.’

  ‘You’re hunting the rabbits with your dogs?’ Anna said.

  He looked at her as if she was mad, as if she had made some statement so simplistic he didn’t know how to refute it. At the same time it was a relief to him: it was somewhere to start. ‘Rabbits, foxes,’ he said. ‘Anything.’ He’d preferred hares until the last time he was out: now he couldn’t seem to care about them at all. ‘You want a good dark night and a bit of a breeze.’

  ‘You find the animal with the light?’ she said. ‘Then you encourage the dogs to chase it? That seems cruel.’

  ‘I don’t know about cruel,’ he said.

  ‘But it’s killed?’ Anna said. ‘They kill the animal?’