Empty Space: A Haunting (Kefahuchi Tract Trilogy 3)

by M. John Harrison

  ‘The moment I understood that, I knew I had to look for a name.’

  A name, in the Halo, is everything. You are no one without a name. She had tried Fortunata, Ceres, Mad Cyril and Berenice. She’d been Queenie Key, Ms Smith, The Business, Vice, Mildew, Miranda, Calder & Arp and Washburn Guitar. She had tried Mani Pedi, Wellness Lux, Lost Lisa, Fedy Pantera, REX-ISOLDE, Ogou Feray, Restylane and Anicet. She’d been Jet Tone, Justine, Pantopon Rose, The Kleptopastic Fantastic, Lauren Bacall, Avtomat and the little girl who could crack anything. She had tried ‘Frankie Machine’ and Murder Incorporated, The Markov Property, Elise, Ellis and Elissa. She’d been Elissa Mae, Ruby Mae, Lula Mae, Ruby Tuesday, Mae West and May Day. She’d been The One, The Only, The Two Dollar Radio and Flamingo Layne. For a day she had been A Member of the Wedding. Then Spanky. Then Misty. Hanna Reitsch, Jaqueline Auriol, Zhang Yumei, Helen Keller, Christine Keeler, Olga Tovyevski. KM, LM, M3 in Orion. She liked ‘Sabiha Gokce’ but wasn’t sure how to pronounce it. A name is no good if people don’t know how to pronounce it. She’d been Pauline Gower, James Newell Osterberg and Celia Renfrew-Marx. Emmeline Pankhurst. Irma X. Colette. Mama Doc. Dot Doc. Did she dare call herself, ‘The Blister Sisters’? The Best Engine in the World?

  Shortly after she drove off thinking these thoughts, George exited the Tango du Chat and, leaning against a wall, threw up. He wiped his mouth, watched the Cadillac’s tail-lights grow small. He wondered if she would ever leave him alone.

  TWENTY TWO

  The See-Not Gate

  Waking out of a foul dream to gently hectoring telephone calls from her daughter, Anna Waterman allowed herself to be persuaded into one last session with Helen Alpert.

  The doctor had spent much of the morning arguing with a Citroën parts supplier in Richmond and was pleasantly surprised when her client arrived carrying take-out lattes and almond croissants for them both. Had Anna lost weight since her previous visit? Perhaps not, Helen Alpert decided; perhaps it was in fact a postural change. ‘That’s very thoughtful of you, Anna,’ she said, though she never drank coffee after eight in the morning.

  On her part, Anna felt ashamed of herself. It was like being the one to break up a relationship. Prior to buying the coffee she had spent half an hour on Hammersmith Bridge, gazing down at the brown water at some people learning to scull, miserably trying to bring herself to face the doctor. After that, the consulting room, with its cut flowers and tranquil light, seemed such a zone of peace, and Helen Alpert so welcoming, that she didn’t know where to begin. For years, she explained, she had lived in a kind of suspended animation. That seemed to be over now. During the last few months, life had been waking her out of a sleep she didn’t want to relinquish, forcing her to take part again.

  ‘That’s what I haven’t liked about it.’

  ‘No one likes that,’ the doctor agreed.

  ‘No. But they want it anyway.’

  ‘Anna, I’m interested in the way you put it, life “forcing” you to take part again. What sort of thing do you mean?’

  ‘For example, Marnie’s not well.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

  ‘I found that I welcomed it. I know that sounds odd.’ Having admitted Marnie to the negotiation, Anna became unsure how much space to allow her. ‘Anyway, it’s time someone looked after her for a change.’

  ‘You feel she’s been the parent for too long?’

  ‘And something else has happened,’ Anna said, ‘which I’d rather not talk about.’

  The doctor smiled. ‘Your business is your business.’

  Given their circumstances, Anna considered this the cheapest of jibes. ‘Actually I just want to live my life,’ she heard herself say, with somewhat more emphasis than she had intended.

  ‘Everyone wants that. What exactly is wrong with Marnie?’

  ‘She’s having tests.’

  There followed a silence, during which Dr Alpert played with one of her gel pens and made it clear that she was expecting more. Anna considered describing the visit to St Narcissus – the women shackled to their symptoms by the system and to their lives by mobile phone; the fatuous receptionist; the cancer-shaped stain on the ceiling – but preferring to avoid the interpretive bout that would inevitably follow, in which she would feel compelled to take part out of simple courtesy, said instead, ‘I never wanted to examine my life, I just wanted to be inside it.’ This had the nature of a bid or gambit, she realised. ‘Not,’ she qualified, before Helen Alpert could take it up, ‘that I never had a point of view on myself. Of course I did. Look,’ she said. ‘The fact is, Helen – you’ll understand me, I know you will – I’ve met someone. A man.’ She laughed. ‘Well, more of a boy, really. Is that awful? Michael is dead, but I feel alive again, and that’s what I want to be. Alive.’

  This much denial filled the doctor’s heart with rueful admiration. ‘I’m delighted,’ she said, though it must have been clear that she was not. She wondered why she bothered. She reached across the desk and put her hands over Anna’s. ‘Tell me what you dreamed last night,’ she said, ‘and I’ll tell you why you mustn’t stop coming here. Not yet.’

  ‘Do you know, I didn’t dream at all last night,’ Anna said. ‘Isn’t that odd?’

  Half an hour later Helen Alpert accompanied her client to the door, where, both eager to admit how they would miss one another, they said goodbye. While Anna walked swiftly up Chiswick Mall towards Hammersmith without looking back, Helen crossed the road and leaned on the river wall. It was a sunny morning, but the air had an edge: September, accepting that the game was up. The Thames ran low, with a sullenness that suggested the tide was on the turn. Two or three mallards, who had looked as if they were going to make a morning of it, honking and squabbling in the mud, suddenly took off and swept west, gaining height until they vanished behind the trees on the far bank.

  Back inside, she put the Waterman file away; then changed her mind and, leafing through it angrily, began to make a fresh set of notes. The client, her personality frozen in adolescence, had disguised herself as an adult for the duration of her marriage to Tim Waterman. To what end? She had effectively erased the abjection of her life with her first husband, yet remained bound to it, and through it to the unthought known. Why allow the disguise to fall away now? As to the significance of the repeating dream: other dreams seemed as diagnostically valuable, and moreover came with all the necessary tools for their own decoding. The central problem, of course, was Michael Kearney. Helen Alpert couldn’t imagine being unable to forget a man whilst at the same time being unable to remember him. Anna’s self-deception seemed to have spread itself, deft and obdurate, into the real world: the very sparseness of Kearney’s biography – mathematician, suicide, patch of fog in every life he touched – gave him an unfocused quality.

  Today, however, the doctor found herself more interested in Brian Tate, who – casting himself as the assistant, the unassuming experimentalist, workhorse to his friend’s conceptual genius – had committed career suicide so as not be left out of the grand finale of Kearney’s psychodrama. The great difference between the two men was this: Dr Alpert knew enough about Tate’s subsequent life to find him. She even had an address, somewhere deep in gentle Walthamstow, cocoon of the North London academic mafia. The file remained on her desk all morning. She took it with her to her favourite restaurant, Le Vacherin at Acton Green, where she read it again while lunch ran through its rewarding, quietly inevitable cycle – duck egg cocotte to assiette of hare to prune and Armagnac tart – and the tables emptied around her. ‘Do you know,’ she told her waitress, looking up in surprise to find it was already two in the afternoon, ‘I think I’d like the bill.’

  She was soon on the way to Walthamstow. If he could be found, Brian Tate might perhaps be persuaded to speak – about Kearney, about the events of that time, about the original Anna. It would be unethical to contact him, certainly. She would have to admit, too, that she was uncovering some unsuspected feature of her own personality. Until no
w she’d made sure to buffer her life from the client’s, proud of the fact that in the face of failure she had always been able to find closure without entanglement.

  By three in the afternoon, thick moist air had piled itself into Carshalton High Street, the sharpness of the morning having long given way to a sourceless, muggy heat. Anna Waterman wandered fretfully up and down, trying to put off the inevitable encounter.

  She leafed through the second hand books in the Oxfam shop; stood for a moment next to the artificial cascade in Grove Park, where the falling water evaporated with a smell like stale bird feathers. Eventually, on the pretext of getting lunch, she went into a pub near the ponds and ordered a pint of beer. The taste of it caused her to remember the boy on top of her, so hard and nervous, his eyes inturned. Her afternoon with him came back less like a memory of events than a single seamless rush of sensation – a shiver everyone knows but no one knows the name of – and she had to walk up and down looking at the posters on the wall by the bar to give herself something to do. Club Chat Noir. The Aviator Club. A traction engine rally in October; in December, the Chinese Circus. After that, she gave up on herself and sat in a corner and let the afternoon fade into evening. People wandered in and out, saying things like, ‘I can’t cope, I was expected not to live.’ She caught the word ‘patterning’ or perhaps ‘patenting’; then, decisively, ‘contracts’; or perhaps it was ‘contacts’. On the TV above the bar, a European football game began. Pulling Anna’s third pint of Young’s, the barman looked up emptily and then away.

  Fake beams, artex ceilings and floral carpet each have a profound – if under-investigated – anxiolytic effect of their own: by seven o’ clock, she had managed to forget the discomfort of her encounter with Dr Alpert and gather enough of herself together to face 121, The Oaks.

  As she left the pub, the evening rush was under way. ‘He can’t have steak,’ someone called out, ‘it’ll give him piles!’

  Laughter.

  Away from the centre the streets were wrapped in foreign-seeming air – air that warmed and yellowed the night without transforming it. You expected to hear cicadas, catch sight of your own shadow on a curved stucco wall behind which growths of palm or jacaranda further enclosed a shuttered domain. But all you found was the usual holly tree and dirty pebbledash, and in the mossy driveway an unreliable British sports car from the 1970s or a short-wheelbase Land Rover bought for a gap-year tour: some late-adolescent project abandoned under its green tarpaulin fifteen years before, as the globalised economies, running out of new services to sell one another, preoccupied themselves with their own decline.

  Holding up the pocket drive like a permit, Anna made her way round to the rear of the house. She found the main window dimly lit, as if by a source somewhere else in the house. When she pressed her face against the glass, everything was exactly as she had seen it last: rippled green lino; a roll of carpet propped up in the corner opposite the door; and on the table the little pressed-tin Mexican box containing a downscaled human skull nestled in scarlet lace. An old sofa, loose-covered in what might have been chintz, now faced the table. On it sat two women, short, heavily-built and dressed in black clothes, each with an identical Harrods shopping bag resting on her knees. Anna could hear their voices, but not what they were saying. After a few minutes a thin indistinct figure appeared in the doorway, pushing a wheelchair. It was the boy who had offered her Lost Horizon.

  Brian Tate looked worse than ever. His upper body, no longer able to support itself, sagged forward against the chair’s nylon restraints; his skull – bald, ulcered and fragile-looking, as if the bone had thinned year-on-year since Michael Kearney abandoned him to his doomed interpretation of their data – had fallen so far to one side that it rested on his own left shoulder. His mouth was permanently open. One eye was closed, the eyelid drawn down, the cheek beneath sagging; while the other, as blue as a bird’s egg, looked brightly at the wall, the window, the Mexican box with its curious contents, whatever he happened to be facing. It was alive and focused, but it was only an eye: it wasn’t necessarily connected to anything. In his lap lay a greasy brown paper bag. The boy parked the wheelchair next to the table, facing the sofa. He set the brake carefully, forced a white 1960s motorcycle helmet and ski-goggles on to Tate’s head – a process which involved some physical effort – then sat down cross-legged on the floor.

  ‘There,’ he said, conversationally: ‘He’s here.’

  The women received this in silence, as listless and bored as patients in a dentist’s waiting room. They had left very little space on the sofa, but its third occupant, a small middle-aged man with bright red hair, had managed to squeeze in between them. He wriggled and smiled around, as if it had been a recent, good-natured public struggle. With his dirty fleece, alcohol tan and hoarse, personalised way of breathing, he looked like someone whose lifestyle choices would soon move him outdoors and to the centre of London, where he would limp up and down Shaftesbury Avenue calling, ‘I’m in bits, me!’ and showing the tourists the Krokodil sore on his neck. ‘Hey, look mate, I’m in bits!’

  For two or three minutes these three stared at Brian Tate – they were less acknowledging his presence, Anna thought, than confirming his existence in some way – then, without speaking, and with no sign that they were aware of each other, or had a shared purpose, they busied themselves with their clothes. The women folded back their skirts from their thighs and slid forward so that they could open their legs; the man struggled to unzip the flies of his tight Levis. There was a rustle of cloth, a sigh or two. They all began masturbating. Two or three minutes later, they were still at it, staring ahead with expressions of absolute vacancy on their faces. Anna thought she could smell them through the glass. It was a sharp, yeasty smell, not unpleasant but not very attractive either. At the same time, Brian Tate’s liver-spotted hands began to fumble with the brown paper bag in his lap, from which they extracted a half-eaten double bacon cheeseburger. This, Tate broke into pieces, carefully separating the bun from the meat, which he held up, nodding his head and smiling at a point in the air above the Mexican box.

  ‘It’s coming up,’ the boy said suddenly, in a strangled voice. Silence from the others – perhaps a barely perceptible speeding up of their efforts. ‘It’s coming up!’

  The women groaned from the couch. The red-haired man yelped and gasped. A telephone rang in the distance. The Mexican box, illuminated suddenly from within, emitted a cloud of fine white ash, which poured up and out into the room. ‘My name,’ said a voice from the box. ‘My name is—’ Then: ‘Is anybody there?’ Brian Tate struggled to answer, but nothing would come out of his mouth. He had plunged one hand into the cloud of ash, and seemed to be offering, for the approval of something Anna couldn’t see, the remains of the cheeseburger. After a moment, the glass door of the box fell off its hinges and Tate’s white oriental cat burst out. Snatching the hamburger, it jumped on to his shoulder and began eating. At this the women redoubled their efforts, moaning, straining, grinding busily at themselves, their activity driving the room towards a state in which it would be both dimensionless and yet full of possibilities. Shimmers distorted the air around the sofa: jumping to his feet, the boy gave the wheelchair a violent shove in a direction without logic – it was parallel, Anna thought, to an axis the room didn’t share – and suddenly it had spun away on a curious spiralling trajectory. Tate and his cat went with it, growing smaller and smaller as they accelerated, until they vanished into an upper corner. The figures on the sofa fell silent. Their will dissipated, their clothing disarranged, their shoulders covered with ash like victims of bombardment, they slumped in foetal postures. With a sharp report, the window cracked from side to side and fell into the flowerbed at Anna’s feet. The boy poked his head out and said, ‘Hey, you should have come in!’ He was tucking his penis into his jeans like a roll of soft pale chamois. Anna shuddered unhappily. She hurried out on to the street and glared back at the roof of 121. What did she expect to see? She wasn’t sure.
Brian Tate and his cat, perhaps, spinning upwards into a milky overcast through which could be made out every so often two or three unidentifiable stars, the only evidence anyone has of the infinite space in which we believe we live.

  She had remembered everything but it meant nothing.

  ‘I’ve had enough, Michael,’ she said, as if Kearney really had come back from the dead and was standing beside her, the way they had stood nearly thirty years ago outside the same house, in the aftermath of events equally strange and destabilising: ‘I’m up to here with it all.’

  She caught the nine twenty-seven into town from Carshalton Beeches. Local services were delayed by works. Freight rumbled through Clapham: cement in dry bulk, denser and more real than the place itself or the people passing through with their soft furnishings taped in plastic bags or their cat in a basket. Anna looked around and wished she had never articulated her fantasy of living there: under the mercury lamps it proved to be just another railway station. ‘I’d encourage the trains to keep running,’ she remembered saying to Helen Alpert, ‘if only for the company.’ Just another poor joke at the therapist’s expense, one more bid for attention. A man in a yellow safety vest wandered around, stopping occasionally to peer into the lighted window of the platform café as if the things inside – cups, cakes, cabinets, paper serviettes – weren’t perfectly ordinary, perfectly easy to see, perfectly legible as things. Otherwise there was hardly anyone around.