by Simon Ings
This is the kind of digital silt Gabby’s undergraduates sieve through in their second semester, hunting for interesting mash-ups. ‘I might get one of my students to do the donkey work, so is there anything here we’re likely to turn up that should stay confidential?’
‘Possibly.’
‘Yes?’
I take a deep breath and tell her about Bryon Vaux. Some of it. The barest outline.
‘You’re kidding.’ She is impressed.
‘Dad knew him. Treated him. Taught him how to use a visual vest.’
‘Bryon Vaux stayed at your hotel? Would I have met him?’
‘Almost certainly.’
A pause while she thinks about this. Like most people who navigate data for a living – or who, as in her case, train the navigators – Gabby values her mental privacy, and wears neither wraprounds nor contact lenses. Her eyes are clear. Even over this not especially hi-def video link I can see her scepticism she tries to work out what my real motivation is here. ‘You think Vaux can help you find your dad?’
A smart guess, though wrong. ‘Possibly,’ I say, not wanting to discuss my real suspicions. For a start, they are far too incoherent to share. I can’t even convince myself that I’m on to anything important. All I know is – the sight of Bryon Vaux has put the fear in me.
‘Your dad never said anything about him?’
‘Why would he? To him, back then, Vaux would just have been another serviceman with burnt eyes—’
‘But you’re sure it’s him?’
‘I’m sure it’s him. I’m positive. Though I can’t see how it could be him, logically.’
‘Tell me what you need to know.’
‘If we can confirm Vaux was billeted at the hotel, I want to find out when and why he discharged himself. What?’
‘I thought you told me you were working for Vaux now?’
‘Loophole’s doing AR work for his production company. Why?’
Gabby folds her arms, examining me through her screen as if I were some particularly knotty firewall. ‘Conrad. I don’t mean to pry, but why can’t you just ask him these things yourself?’
‘I don’t know him.’ It’s all I can think of. I can hardly tell her about my mother. ‘He’s famous, and I don’t know him at all.’
In the end, and before I can buck up the courage to contact him myself, Bryon Vaux calls me.
Vaux’s production company is buying up immersive technologies. With them, he plans to smear movies across the real. This is where his current creative ambitions lie: in characters who’ll share your breakfast coffee. In plot beats played out on your journey to work, and confrontations staged in streets you already know. He imagines dreams woven through the real, and all the dreamers dreaming.
That Vaux now wants to buy Loophole outright comes as no surprise. If the purchase goes through he will almost certainly fold the company into his existing operation, dismantling it in order to get at its motive element. Ralf is Loophole’s golden goose, and Vaux is perfectly well aware of the fact. Were it anyone else’s commercial manoeuvre, I’d be cracking champagne along with the rest of the management team, glad of a profitable sale. Vaux will pay well for the company and we will all be winners.
But it is not anyone else. It is him. Bryon Vaux.
He invites me to his club. It’s very different from the one Ralf and I belong to, and not somewhere I would have associated with Vaux at all, recreating as it does the ambience of certain private schools. It caters to a clientele that has stepped from these schools to exclusive universities to remunerative jobs in the public arts like well-bred children stepping stones across a river. It occurs to me that the club has not been chosen with his comfort in mind at all, but mine.
‘How long have you known Michel, then?’
I expected the conversation to centre around Ralf. Our golden goose. Mention of Michel is an unexpected gambit – though of course Michel is the author of the Shaman series, source of Vaux’s wealth.
‘Michel told me about you.’
I’m surprised. ‘He did?’
Vaux smiles. ‘You grew up together, I understand. And it’s the strangest thing. I think I stayed at your hotel a while.’
I feel as though I am falling through a door I thought was locked.
‘Conrad, would you walk with me a while?’
A few minutes later, from the balustrade of an industrial museum overlooking the Forum, I weave my fingers before my eyes. The horse and rider rearing up at the centre of the square refuse to appear. They have entirely vanished. They might never have been. There isn’t the faintest visual stutter. My God, we’re good.
Vaux is sitting beside me on the bench, his hands resting on his knees, big and soft and furred as though they were a couple of pets drowsing on his lap. His feet are small, shod in pale leather handmades. It’s an effort for me to maintain my sense of distance, or, indeed, any cautious reflex at all. If it wasn’t for the steel sheen in his eyes – contact lenses over eyeballs that are already mostly plastic – I might, God help me, even be returning his smile by now.
Aside from a handful of brute physical details – his albino-white hair, his height, the cast of his face – little about Vaux meshes with my nightmares. I am finding it impossible to associate his bulk or his bigness with the brutality I remember. His hands, his boots.
‘I took Ralf out to dinner last night.’
‘Uh-huh.’
His eyes, like mine, are silver-lensed and hard to read. ‘I hope you don’t mind.’
‘Of course I mind, Bryon. But I imagine you, being you, scared the living daylights out of him.’ I contemplate the Forum, its soapy white neo-classical columns, its shallow steps and elegant black street furniture and at its centre – an aching absence where its central monument should be. Already I am finding it difficult to remember what the horse and rider looked like. Now that my eyes have registered their absence, the statue is being scrubbed from my memory, washed away as swiftly as a dream.
Loophole’s development team, swimming in all the money and resources Vaux has thrown at it, has hit a serious snag. Now Vaux wants to see if I can spot it on my own.
‘Hang on.’ I study the gap where the monument once stood. ‘I think I see it.’
A family of tourists – mum, dad, two children with backpacks – are making their way in front of the arch on the south-eastern corner of the square. As they pass behind the absent column, they stutter and vanish. A second family appears, identical to the first. Mum, Dad and the kids walk across the road, clear the statue’s occlusion fan, and disappear, one by one. Another identical family appears, several yards in front of the group that’s just vanished. Christ. The glitch. The fault.
‘That took you about eight minutes.’ Vaux smiles. With silvered lenses in his eyes, the expression is predatory. ‘Not bad.’
Vaux has another meeting. I leave him at the mouth of the metro, and walk alone through the Ministries, trying to clear my head.
One by one we are transforming the spaces we have cleared. Here, for example, the ministry buildings have been replaced by paint-blue ponds where no birds swim. Lawns. Forests. We have entirely levelled a square mile south-west of the forum, filling the gap with potato fields that our great-grandparents’ generation would recognise. Hedgerows bend and sway.
Walking through this rusticated city, the air tastes fresher, though of course I know it’s just as muggy and polluted as always. With grass under my feet – albeit imaginary grass – I have become attuned to subtle gradients. I’ve learned to navigate, less by what I see, but more by the lie of the land under my feet. I can picture in my mind’s eye the organic shapes into which the city has been plugged, and which, after so many centuries, it has still not altogether erased. Little by little, and in unexpected ways, we are rubbing the city away to reveal the pattern of a forgotten land.
The mind juggles maps very poorly. Now that I am growing used to our clarified and minimal city – city as park, as field, as bucolic blank
, like something out of one of Michel’s later, gentler post-apocalypse tales – I am finding it harder and harder to navigate the city as it really is. The truth is, I don’t like going out without my lenses now. An unaugmented walk through the stews of the city, hemmed in by its buildings, assaulted by its aniline palette, my concentration shattered by all its overlapping signage, leaves me feeling increasingly uncomfortable. My heart chatters. My breaths grow short and painful. I need a break.
I need a friend.
Airport security have to let us disembark eventually, and Gabby is at the gate to meet me. ‘Looking good,’ she smiles. She hefts the bags off my trolley. She wants to show me she’s still got her strength.
We climb into a cab.
The altitude here is serious; even in the city centre, there is still snow on the ground. Crowds in expensive coats gather around stalls selling mulled wine and buttered rum. We pull up before the cathedral. Gabby’s apartment is high up in a retail and hotel complex nearby. ‘Bloody hell, Gabby, what does this cost you?’
‘Nothing. I hacked their booking server.’
‘What will you do when they find out?’
‘Sleep under the desk at work. Busk outside the Cathedral.’
I can’t be entirely sure that this is a joke. The apartment is well-appointed, perfect for bringing home women of a certain age – the divorced, the curious, the incorrigible – and ideally suited to ejecting them again in the morning.
‘Do you want to freshen up? I’ve booked us a table for nine.’
The apartment has a wet room. A shower that wraps you up in a warmly scented tropical rain. Towels as big as blankets. Coming out, I find Gabby watching an international news channel. She lifts her hand to grasp mine. ‘Good to see you, Connie.’
‘And you.’
‘You look tired.’
‘I look how I feel.’
‘Are you up for tonight? Just dinner. Friends. We don’t have to stay out late.’
‘Of course.’
I slump opposite her in an upholstered chair.
‘I dug up what you asked me for about Bryon Vaux. But if you’re speaking to him—’
‘He spoke to me. Michel told him about me and he put two and two together.’
‘So you’ve talked.’
‘Only about work. I haven’t asked him anything – important.’
Gabby shoots me a look. She thinks I’m being obscure for the sake of it. That I’m leading her on. She’s remembering our childhood games with Dad’s tin soldiers; my endlessly changing rules of engagement. ‘Look,’ I say. ‘Tell me what you found. And I’ll explain.’
‘You promise?’
‘Yes.’
‘Okay. For a start – and you could have found this out from any celebrity site – Vaux was not a serviceman.’
This draws me up. ‘What?’
‘Vaux wasn’t in the services. He wasn’t a soldier. Everyone assumes he’s a veteran. He was a journalist. Embedded. Good at it, too. It’s why the grunts like him. Factually, his films have always been on the button.’
‘Now I’m completely at sea. I thought he was a soldier.’
‘People do. He plays up to it.’
‘But his eyes. He’s seen action.’
‘Of course he’s seen action. He was embedded on the front line. He took a laser in the face.’
‘But what was a writer doing among a bunch of army men, getting a vest fitted by my Dad?’
Gabby turns her hands palms up as though to say, where’s the problem? ‘A battlefield injury, a military hospital, and from there a referral. Wouldn’t it make perfect sense, treating Vaux alongside others blinded in the field?’
‘Did you find out why he discharged himself from the hotel?’
‘Plenty of your dad’s guests did.’
‘Really?’
‘It wasn’t strictly a clinic. Some took to the vests, some didn’t.’
‘And did Vaux?’
‘Christ. How am I supposed to find that out?’
‘I think maybe Dad would have made a record.’
‘Well, I can keep looking.’
‘Please.’
‘Now. Are you going to tell me what the fuck this is about?’
I take a breath. Another. (The air here is really very thin.) I am going to have to give her something.
In the end it’s Gabby who buys me time. ‘You can tell me as we go. Come on. We’ll walk. It’s a nice night.’
She leads me, slipping and sliding (‘I told you to bring boots’) through the city’s pedestrianised centre, from stall to stall, knocking back punch and spiced wine by way of an aperitif. With alcohol inside her, she is a little more forthcoming about what she has discovered. ‘The records have Vaux down as twenty-seven when he got his eyes burned out.’
‘How long was he at the hotel?’
‘A couple of months.’
‘Gabby.’ No way round this. ‘Do you remember – did he have much to do with my mum, do you reckon?’
Gabby is ordering us mugs of rum. She leans against the bar. ‘Oh, Conrad,’ she sighs, her gaze sliding away from mine to lose itself in the rings and smears on the bartop. ‘Who knows what your mum got up to?’
‘But you heard something. You know something. Did your mum tell you something? Did Frankie know something?’
She hands me my mug. ‘Are you finally going to tell me what this is about?’
‘I think Bryon Vaux was the last man to see my mum alive.’
‘Oh.’ Gabby sips her rum. Again. ‘I see.’ She sips. ‘Well. Fuck.’
‘Now, if you can tell me how to broach that particular subject with Bryon Vaux, without landing myself in a world of pain, I’d like to hear it.’
Gabby looks at me. ‘From what you’ve said, he doesn’t sound that much of an ogre.’
‘Maybe not.’
‘And my advice remains what it was.’
‘Which was?’
‘Just talk to him. Idiot.’
Gabby has gone to bed. On her hotel-room balcony, I sip imported whisky and stare across the skyline, pretending to myself that I’m catching up on my work.
To speed up the due diligence, we have an open audio connection running between the office and my laptop. For my colleagues at home I exist as an oracle, ready with advice, constantly appraised of their slightest doings. At least, that is the idea.
I can just about hear one of our interns making a hash of something over the phone to an old client.
‘Hello.’
No-one hears me.
‘Hello.’
No-one’s paying any attention to the invisible man in the corner. They’re just getting on with their jobs. Talking. Laughing. I wonder what they are laughing about. I expected the sound of the office to comfort me, but it hasn’t.
‘Hello!’
I should go have a shower, get to bed, get a night’s sleep like a normal person. Instead I linger here getting steadily more drunk, listening to all the life I have engendered moving around in its nest. This thing I have made. This pattern of people and process and capital: it has its own life now. It no longer needs me.
If I bow out now, gracefully, Vaux can have Loophole and I can be in business again within eighteen months, with fresh capital and an enviable reputation. Ralf will stay where he is, Loophole’s newly-fashioned ‘creative director’. Naive as he is, he will grow into the role of Bryon Vaux’s courtier. It is not what he wants. (‘We were having fun, weren’t we?’) But it is what is best for him.
I down my whisky and stalk back inside, cursing Ralf, cursing the company, cursing myself.
Vaux is a rich man, and rich men will have their toys.
FIFTEEN
Without Mum, Dad and I fell into well-worn routines. We shared the housework. I cooked dinner. Ben washed up. We were adept. This was the life we used to lead whenever Mum was laid up in bed. In many ways life was cleaner and easier now she was gone.
Winter bit down early. From my window the hotel lawn,
grey with frost, resembled fur more than grass. I closed my eyes and leant my forehead against the glass, receiving a chill fierce enough to pucker the flesh.
Dad was in the kitchen. The radio was on. Distance robbed the words of sense, though the cadences persevered. Headlines. Seven AM.
I was still wrapped in my duvet, marinating in its smelly warmth. To shed that and slip into a dressing gown and, worse, to swap dressing gown for cold, slippy, damp-feeling nylon-mix school clothes, was as painful a prospect, as traumatic, as shedding a skin. Half-naked, blue and scrunched against the cold, I was fighting with an overstuffed wardrobe drawer when Dad leaned in.
‘Up and at ’em, Connie.’
‘Yeah, yeah.’
‘What time are you home this afternoon?’
It was a regular day – no clubs, no sports, no events. ‘Four.’
‘We have someone coming to see us.’
The day passed predictably enough. Mum’s disappearance had got fed through the school’s rumour mill, but the story had quickly lost currency, sustained neither by news nor by credible conjecture. I think my friends, knowing her politics, quietly assumed that Mum was leading some debauched existence on the margins, too loved-up to phone or write.
By the end of the school day, the track by the river was still set rock-hard – a glassy mass of rills, dents and patches of dirty ice, buried here and there under mats of black, congealed leaves. Now the bracken had died back, Michel’s ring of fridges was easy to spot among the trees.
Our hotel had more or less packed in by this point. The register recorded a few waifs and strays, clueless elderly couples and a dissatisfied family of five. Still, Dad had to work, if only to keep up the fabric of the place, so he doubled as duty manager in a motel nearer the coast. On the days I arrived home before him, I worked in the conservatory – that loamy, greenish glass monstrosity that had been tacked onto the back of the house years before, as though the hotel were not big enough already. In the burnished light of a setting sun (if I was lucky; otherwise in drizzle and spreading, glaucous grey) I worked on my portfolio, my heads and hands, my architectural projections. I wrote essays, bedding the bald facts of history, geography and the classics with comfortable, indecisive phrases. Notwithstanding. Moreover. Albeit.