Spring Tide

by Chris Beckett

  But then again, he thought, who’s to say that gladiators themselves didn’t chat as they waited to enter the arena?

  ‘You alright, Septimus?’

  ‘To be honest, Lucius, I really could have done without this today. My bloody tooth is killing me.’

  ‘I keep telling you, mate, you need to get that pulled! It won’t get better by itself.’

  ‘I know, but have you ever watched it being done? It must hurt like shit.’

  ‘Of course it hurts, you wus, but then it’s over and done with, isn’t it? And you can stop thinking about it.’

  ‘Yeah, but knowing my luck, I’d get the old thumbs down in the next fight, and then it would all have been for nothing.’

  He didn’t mention this imaginary exchange to Judy. He would have done on their previous dates – he would have put on accents and everything to make her laugh – but his instinct was that it just wouldn’t work today. It wouldn’t be funny enough. It would come over as grey and 2D, like everything else.

  A simple admission of ignorance, however, would surely be in order.

  ‘This is going to sound stupid,’ he said, ‘given that I now live only about ten miles from here, but I’d always assumed that a race course would be lined with excited spectators all along its length.’

  It just seemed all wrong to him that, apart from himself and Judy, who hadn’t even come here for the race, and a couple of officials beside the gate, the horses and jockeys were completely on their own. The white rails of the track headed diagonally away from the dyke across a great empty expanse of mown grass. And yes, now that he looked he could see in the distance a big concrete grandstand full of people, but it was a mile away from here, a different place entirely, the people just dots, the stand itself like a toy.

  But then the gates opened and the horses were off, running together in a group between those lonely white rails, and Gerry realised he’d been wrong to imagine that there was no one here to take an interest. Almost at once a strange sound started up in the distance from the far side of that empty expanse of grass. It was brutal and primitive, an apelike hooting, harsh and violent, that rose in intensity to a kind of peak, and then stopped completely all at once, as the horses passed the distant stand, and crossed the finishing line.

  In the silence afterwards, giant amplified voices boomed out, soothing the crowd and instructing it. He couldn’t hear the words – they were all scrambled up by being repeated by many different loudspeakers that were out of sync with one another – but their authority was unmistakable.

  Gerry turned to Judy with a smile.

  ‘Who needs science fiction, eh? Who needs imaginary planets? What could be more alien than planet Earth?’

  She glanced at him, but then looked back at the distant stand. He was really getting on her nerves that afternoon.

  ‘Oh come on, Gerry. It’s just people. Just a bunch of ordinary people, having a bit of fun with their friends. What’s so wrong with that?’

  ‘Nothing’s wrong with it, Judy. Nothing at all. That wasn’t my point at all. I was just noticing how strange it was.’

  Good God, he had no objection to people having fun! People needed all the fun they could get in this grey, flat, empty world. And if they could cheer and yell and get excited even in this dreary place, about something so fundamentally dull and trivial as a bunch of running animals with men on their backs, well, all credit to them.

  He turned to face her.

  ‘You’re finding me irritating today, aren’t you, Judy?’

  There were more announcements from the loudspeakers in the distance. These voices that they could hear from a whole mile away were truly giant-like in their reach, and yet they seemed small and inconsequential in this great hollow space under the sky, just as the race track itself did.

  ‘Not really, but I just don’t see why you have to mock everything all the time.’

  More horses and riders were already trotting out towards them across the grass.

  ‘Mock? I certainly don’t mean to mock.’

  ‘Well, okay, maybe mock isn’t quite the right word. But you always seem to want to drill down through everything that people do, examine it, take it to pieces, and you never seem satisfied until you’ve got to the point where whatever thing it is you’re talking about just looks silly and meaningless. It’s… I don’t know… It’s as if someone were to show you a book, and you couldn’t help yourself from pointing out that it was really just wood pulp and ink, or that words were really just arbitrary sounds. Why not just read the words and enjoy what they have to say?’

  Gerry laughed. ‘That’s a fair point, actually.’

  Why was he always so unwilling to take things at their face value? Why did he always feel the need to step back from whatever was going on and see it from a different angle to everyone else? Judy had seen him as mocking, but the truth was that he admired and envied the ability of others to engage with the everyday world on its own terms, and he often berated himself for not being more like them. Judy herself was a paediatrician – she was Dr Judy Fotherington at work – and when she talked about what she did, he was amazed by the scale of the problems she had to resolve every working day, weighing up possibilities, dealing with distraught people, and, hour after hour, choosing courses of action that might change whole lives for better or for worse. He knew her job would terrify him. He knew that, unable to face the responsibility, his mind would keep skittering away. And then something would go wrong, and it would be his fault.

  They talked about other things now, a sister of Judy’s who’d not been well, Gerry’s son who’d been having problems at school, and it wasn’t until later, when they turned to walk back again, that he returned to her point.

  ‘I really don’t experience myself as drilling down in search of meaninglessness, Judy. Quite the opposite, in fact. I feel myself to be seeking meaning.’

  When they were back alongside the starting gate again, with its rubber tyres, they stopped to watch another race begin. Gerry recognised some of the riders and liveries from before. That red-headed guy, for instance, in the purple and green diamonds. It was the same riders, over and over, on a different set of horses.

  There was meaning in the everyday world, but it was made of gossamer, that was how Gerry saw it. It could hold you up if you were very very gentle with it, but otherwise you fell right through. People like Judy accepted that fact, and treated the gossamer with respect. People like him had to keep tugging it and wriggling about, in search of something firmer, something they could get a grip on, something which wouldn’t tear if they were clumsy, or restless, or felt like being a little rough. This wasn’t necessarily the best strategy, he acknowledged. In all probability, there was nothing firmer to be found, and you either worked with the gossamer stuff and its limitations, or you were left with nothing at all. You went along with the game – entered into it, as people said, treated it like it mattered – or you stood on the side lines while others played. He was just a bystander. Others dealt with the world as they found it, got on with what could be done, and didn’t waste their time on things that were beyond their power to change.

  Judy was in front when they came to the bridge over the dual carriageway, and she walked straight across to the other side, but Gerry stopped in the middle to watch all those tons of metal rushing by beneath him, punching their way through the air as they hurried east or west. He had felt rebuked by Judy for wanting to dismantle everything. Recognising there was more than a little justice in what she said, he had felt cornered, and had promptly responded by dismantling himself. But now he was collecting himself again. He was giving himself some time. He was gathering himself together.

  Gerry was good at getting out of corners. All this drilling down that Judy complained about, all this prodding and tugging at the gossamer, was Gerry’s way of making sure that there would always be a way out, for it meant that wherever he happened to be was provisional, and there was the possibility of being somewhere else. If he
couldn’t escape the wolf on the ground, well then, he’d just become a swallow in the sky. If an eagle then dived towards him, he’d stop being a bird and become a fish instead. And if a shark opened up its jaws and rushed towards him, he’d banish the whole ocean and run off as a gazelle, leaping away across the plain, while the shark snapped its teeth in the surf.

  Judy had stopped to wait for him on the far side.

  ‘You okay?’ she asked, as he joined her.

  ‘Yes, of course, I’m fine.’

  ‘You looked a bit troubled there, I thought, standing looking down at the cars.’

  Gerry laughed. ‘Sorry, Judy. The truth is you got me thinking, and it gave me an idea for a story. I was just quickly getting hold of it before it slipped away.’

  ‘What? A whole story came to you? Just standing there on the bridge?’

  With Gerry now walking in front, they climbed back up onto the dyke.

  ‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘not a whole story at all, but, you know, a setting. A setting and a source of tension. Which is a good start. I was imagining that road as it might be one day, far off in the future, when you and me and the world we live in are as thoroughly forgotten as the people who built this dyke.’

  ‘I guess people would still know it was a road, wouldn’t they?’

  ‘They would. And still use it as a road as well, as we still use Roman roads now that are hundreds of years older than this dyke. But the thing that really puzzles those future people about these kinds of road is that they actually consist of two roads running side by side. There’s been some kind of catastrophe in England, you see – nuclear war, runaway global warming: I’ll think of something or other – and there are no cars any more and not nearly so many people. So they look at that road back there and see that each carriageway is more than wide enough to take three big carts side by side, and they just can’t imagine a volume of traffic that would justify two such big roads running together along the exact same route.’

  The sky had become a little brighter, he noticed, and some depth and colour had returned to the landscape around them.

  ‘So they actually only use one carriageway,’ Gerry went on, ‘that’s what I was thinking. They only use the northern one of the two: the eastbound one as we’d call it now, though they travel on it in both directions. Most of the metalled surface has long since gone, but when holes appear they get filled in with gravel and the road is still the best and the busiest for miles around.’

  ‘What about the other carriageway?’

  ‘Ah, well that’s going to be the point of the story. The southern carriageway they leave alone. They’ve allowed a thick barrier of trees and shrubs to grow along the edge of it and down the central reservation, so as to isolate it from its surroundings, and they never walk or ride on it at all except when they have to cross over it to take a turning south. Even then, their practice is to pass over it quickly, with eyes cast firmly down, not looking to the left or the right, and children are sternly warned not to peek.’

  ‘Presumably they have some reason for this?’

  ‘They certainly do. What they’ve decided, you see, is that the northern carriageway was intended for human travel and the other was meant for spirits. They call the southern carriageway the spirit road.’

  ‘And the spirits are what? The dead?’

  ‘Not just the dead. They use the word “spirits” to refer to things that seem to exist in some way but don’t fit in with their understanding of the world. The people on the human carriageway can’t deny the existence of spirits altogether, however much they might like to, because the world is full of mysteries and contradictions, but they’ve very sensibly given those troublesome spirits their own road to travel on, so they can go about their own spirit business to their hearts’ content, and leave the humans undisturbed.’

  ‘But really this spirit road is just the westbound carriageway of the A14?’

  He beamed at her. ‘That’s right. That’s a nice touch, don’t you think? I’m really quite taken with it.’

  ‘Yes, I quite like it too. I can see it has possibilities.’

  ‘Most people don’t have anything to do with the spirit road, except maybe the odd furtive glance when they have to cross over it. And that makes sense. It only unsettles them, and what use is it to them, anyway? They’ve more than enough to do and to think about on the human road, where folk trade and chat and joke and argue, and make friends and all the rest of it. I’m sort of thinking Canterbury Tales in the thirty-fifth century when it comes to the human road: plenty to see, plenty to do, plenty of fun to be had, plenty of drama, plenty of problems to be solved.’

  ‘But, let me guess, a few folk prefer the spirit road?’

  ‘You’re way ahead of me, Judy. It’s strictly against all the rules to walk on the spirit road, but some people are drawn to precisely that emptiness and stillness that most are so keen to avoid. They wait for quiet moments on the human road, when no one will see them creep through the trees and shrubs, and then they go and look at it, or even step out onto it and feel the invisible traffic passing all round them. Imagine a whole carriageway with nothing moving on it, screened off from its surroundings by trees! Once in a while a bird alights on it, or a deer wanders across, or perhaps the trees on either side sway a little and sigh in the wind. But most of the time, it’s completely silent. You can still hear all the sounds of the human road, of course, just on the far side of the trees – talk and chatter, shouts and yells, hooves and rumbling wheels – but, from the spirit road, all of that seems like another world.’

  ‘What do those people call themselves? The ones who like the spirit side?’

  ‘I’m not sure yet, but let’s say Southroaders for the moment. To them, the stillness and emptiness of the spirit road is pregnant with possibilities. I guess that’s what the spirits are really: possibilities, alternatives, things that are currently excluded from the human consensus on what’s real and what’s worth talking about. Sometimes, when the Southroaders creep out at night onto that empty carriageway, they even catch glimpses of a long-ago time, when there were so many red tail lights heading west that the road became a river of fire.’

  Judy laughed. ‘Okay, so now let me have another guess. The Southroaders – who, by the way, sound suspiciously like Gerry the sci-fi man – discover some amazing new thing which the Northroaders would never have come up with. And it helps everyone. And then the Northroaders are forced to admit they’ve been completely wrong to stick so rigidly to their side of the road.’

  Gerry smiled and shook his head. ‘No, Judy, the Northroaders aren’t wrong. Not at all. They’re the ones who get stuff done. And what’s more, the Southroaders are only drawn to the empty road because there’s something on the north side they don’t quite get or can’t quite face. All that activity and banter and hurly-burly, I suppose, all those complicated and confusing games which require so much commitment and concentration: it’s all a bit too much for them.’

  ‘I think you’re being a bit hard on them now, Gerry. After all, you said yourself that most people were scared of the spirit road, and tried not to even think about it. So, at least in some ways, it’s the Northroaders are the ones who are afraid to face things, and the Southroaders who are brave and bold.’

  The walk was nearly over and the car park was in sight.

  ‘Well, I need to work on it,’ Gerry said, as they climbed down the steps at the end of the dyke. ‘These things take time.’

  Judy ran to catch up with Gerry as they walked the last few yards to her car and, to Gerry’s pleasure and surprise, she slipped her arm through his.

  ‘Maybe a couple of them get together,’ she suggested. ‘Someone who’s at home on the north road and someone who’s happier with the spirits. Who knows, they might even complete each other?’

  Gerry smiled, and cupped his hand briefly over hers before they got back into the car.

  ‘It’s a possibility, certainly. But it’s all at a very early stage and it still n
eeds a lot more thought.’

  The Great Sphere

  Of course the city has long been famous as a place of wonders. Even in medieval times, visitors enthused about its fountains, colonnades and gilded spires. But every visitor, then and since, seems to agree that the greatest wonder of them all is the Sphere of Truth. Some six metres in diameter and with its entire surface packed tightly with images and hieroglyphs, it is recessed on a vertical axis into the face of the cliff that forms the city’s northern edge, so that one side of the sphere is in full view, while the other is hidden inside the rock.

  I spent ten months over there in my youth, but I never learnt to read the inscriptions myself. Many years of study are required to master that uniquely complex ideographic script, developed specifically for the purpose of expressing abstract ideas in a highly compressed form. (So that, for instance, a single hieroglyph can represent ‘The idea that, in principle, human society is capable of improving itself indefinitely’, or ‘The belief that human beings should not necessarily be rescued from the negative consequences of their own actions’, or ‘The proposition that subjectivity, rather than material existence, is at the core of the universe’.) However, the script was beautiful and the images even more so: diagrams, symbols, scenes from stories, all beautifully inlaid with enamel so bright that it almost seemed luminous. In more peaceful circumstances, I could have spent many hours quietly examining those pictures from the tiered galleries provided for that very purpose.

  But during my time in the city there was no peace in the vicinity of the Sphere. It was a scene of constant conflict. So much so that, if set down in any part of the Cliff Quarter at any time of the day or night, I could easily have found my way blindfold to the Sphere, simply by listening out for the shouting and the angry screams. Even in the early hours of the morning (when, in those days, the Sphere was only illuminated by the weak flickering glow of nearby street lights) there were people in front of it hurling abuse at one another. During the day, larger numbers gathered, and I saw stones and rotten vegetables being flung, and sometimes full-scale fights between rival groups that might each be twenty or thirty strong.