Spring Tide

by Chris Beckett

  What the people of the city were arguing about, and what their forebears had argued about for centuries, was the position of the Sphere on its axis. No one disputed that the artefact was precious, or that it was a repository of the city’s wisdom, but what maddened people was that at any one time, half of that wisdom was beyond the reach of human eyes. Everyone knew that what was hidden was an alternative way of seeing the world that might challenge, or even overturn, the accepted wisdom that the Sphere now revealed.

  One group favoured turning the Sphere in a clockwise direction from its present position, believing that this would expose certain much-needed truths that were now hidden in the rock. Once, quite soon after I arrived, I witnessed these Clockwisers myself as they very briefly gained the upper hand, set their shoulders against the Sphere’s enormous bulk and managed to shift it slightly. The Anticlockwisers, though, soon put a stop to this. They wanted to turn the sphere too, but in the opposite direction, believing that it was on the left-hand side of the hidden hemisphere that the really important truths were hidden.

  There was intense antagonism between these two groups, but each was also internally riven. Among the Clockwisers, a faction known as the Completers believed that only a short turn of a few degrees was required in order to fully expose truths that could currently only be glimpsed in partial form along the right-hand edge, but there were also Deepers, who believed the really important material was much further back and completely hidden. Similar divisions were present among the Anticlockwisers. What is more, within both the Clockwiser and Anticlockwiser camps, there existed revolutionary factions which believed that the position of the sphere should be entirely reversed: everything hidden should be revealed; everything revealed should be hidden. The Clockwise revolutionaries were called Reversalists, the Anticlockwise ones Renewalists, and they were said to hate each other with a great passion, in spite of sharing the same ultimate goal.

  In addition to the various factions of Clockwisers and Anticlockwisers, though, there was a third whole group which believed that the side of the sphere currently revealed was the one that contained the really vital truths and the most beautiful images. Centuries of history, these people argued, had brought the Sphere, like the polity itself, to its perfect resting place, while the hidden side contained only flawed and outmoded ideas, which would only sow confusion if exposed to the light. This last group, known as the Achieved Perfectionists, was the largest of the three and, throughout the history of the city, had always been the dominant force. One reason for this was that the other two groups tended to cancel out each other’s efforts, both being able to call on the Achieved Perfectionists as allies if their opponents looked like gaining the upper hand. The other reason was that the Achieved Perfectionists had always had the support of the city’s elite, which, naturally enough, was suspicious of anything that might unsettle the established order.

  There had been times indeed, and not so long before my stay there, when the Achieved Perfectionists had used their political power to proscribe the activities of Clockwisers and Anticlockwisers, surrounding the Sphere with armed guards to prevent anyone from touching it (and so allowing visitors to examine it in peace, I couldn’t help wistfully reflecting). This was no longer the case in my time – the law now protected the right of the various groups and factions to hold and express their views – but in practical terms the Achieved Perfectionists did still dominate. Over the ten months I spent in the city, I visited the artefact many times and, though I occasionally witnessed it being shifted a centimetre or two this way or that, a move in one direction was invariably followed by a move in the other. The image that was at the centre of the hemisphere when I first saw it was a group of male and female figures in brightly coloured robes, and it was in the exact same place, as far as I could tell, when I paid a final visit to the Sphere on the day I left the city.

  Pictures of the Sphere were still strictly forbidden during my time there. Both making and possessing such images were very serious offences that attracted lengthy prison terms and it had only been comparatively recently – a matter of decades – that the penalty for both crimes had ceased to be death. Nevertheless, after leaving the city and returning home, I managed to find quite a number of pictures that had been made over the centuries in secret by more intrepid visitors than myself, and I discovered that, in spite of the dominance of the Achieved Perfectionists, the Sphere did shift over time. A century and a half previously, for instance, a Swiss traveller named Anton Gustave Meuli had managed to disguise himself as a local trader and his bulky camera as a chestnut stall, and had risked the garrotte to take a blotchy daguerreotype which shows that group of robed figures in a position very definitely to the left of the central point. Three centuries earlier, the sixteenth-century Florentine painter Guiseppe Merccini produced an astonishingly detailed reproduction by memorising small sections of the Sphere’s surface, one at a time, and running back and forth between it and his studio. He was eventually caught and duly executed – in fact, he was dismembered between four oxen in the city’s main square – but luckily for us, his painting was smuggled out, and it clearly shows that group of robed figures some way over on the right-hand edge of the visible hemisphere, while the most prominent image in view is a strikingly large and complex flower-like design on the leftward side which was completely invisible in my time, though still spoken of longingly by the members of an Anticlockwiser faction who called themselves the Lotus People. Yet, interestingly, in Merccini’s day, just as in mine and Meuli’s, the Achieved Perfectionists were the dominant group, insisting that what was currently revealed of the Sphere contained its truest and most vital messages, and that what was hidden deserved to remain unseen.

  My stay in the city was more than a quarter of a century ago, though, and the city has since then become part of the modern world. After a long period of negotiation, a reforming administration has installed a powerful electric motor which slowly turns the sphere so that it completes an entire revolution in a week. (In the deal struck between the various factions, it was agreed that it would turn clockwise in even years and anticlockwise in odd ones). Nothing is concealed any more, and only moderate persistence is required on the part of the visitor to view every part of the Sphere.

  What is more, the ban on reproductions of the Sphere has also been lifted. Photography is still prohibited for copyright reasons, but it has now become possible to view every image and hieroglyph, simply by buying guidebooks or DVDs. Also available for sale these days, as I hardly need tell you, are those now ubiquitous revolving globes which can be found on so many mantelpieces, alongside Eiffel Towers, Big Bens and Spanish bulls. My great-aunt spent a weekend in the city with her friend Gill only last year, and acquired a large and rather expensive one with an interior light and its own electric motor.

  Not surprisingly, since there is no longer any part of the Sphere that is lost or hidden, all the various factions of Clockwisers and Anticlockwisers have pretty much faded away, having lost the reason for their existence, while the modern heirs of the Achieved Perfectionists claim to have finally achieved a truly permanent settlement which accommodates everyone and excludes no one at all.

  Curiously enough, though, the resolution of this ancient quarrel has led to a general loss of interest in the Sphere itself. I’m told that the only citizens of the city ever to be seen in front of it these days are tourist guides and souvenir sellers, and that, among the younger generation, the ability to read those strange and intricate hieroglyphs has now almost completely died out.

  The Man Who Swallowed Himself

  ‘The poor guy’s a victim of emotional abuse,’ said Tim’s friend Peter to his wife Sue, as they sat on their sofa watching TV. ‘He can’t do anything without her criticising him.’

  Sue didn’t agree.

  ‘Well, it’s his own fault,’ she said. ‘It’s too easy to paint a woman like Mary as some sort of harridan. She makes demands of Tim, yes, like I do of you and you of me, but she meets no re
sistance.’

  ‘Okay. So she gets exactly what she wants.’

  ‘She doesn’t, though. She doesn’t at all. Because resistance itself is one of the things she’s seeking. It’s like a child behaving badly as a way of finding the boundaries that will keep her safe. Not that Mary’s a child, I don’t mean that at all, but we all need those boundaries. You and me provide them for one another. We both know the limits of what the other will tolerate, and it makes us feel safe.’

  Peter considered this for some time.

  ‘I guess you’re right. That’s interesting. I’ve never looked at it like that before. I mean, obviously I know that if I behave in certain kinds of ways you won’t put up with it, but it hadn’t occurred to me before that I actually need that from you. You’re right, though, I do.’

  ‘Well, it’s the same with me. Remember how I used to fly into a tantrum sometimes, all those years ago, when things didn’t go as I wanted? You just wouldn’t play along with it, would you? You just ignored me completely till I pulled myself together. So I stopped, didn’t I? And a good job too. You helped me to grow up.’

  ‘I guess if I’d have been someone like Tim I would have run around in a panic, desperately trying to figure out what I had to do to placate you.’

  ‘Exactly. And if I’d been someone like Tim, I’d have done the same when you went into one of those week-long sulks you used to go in for.’

  Peter nodded.

  ‘Tim can be very passive,’ he conceded. ‘He’s like that at work as well. Dick treated him appallingly in a meeting the other day. I mean really appallingly. We all looked round at Tim, waiting for him to react – I mean it’s not like Dick is even his boss or anything – but Tim didn’t say anything at all. Not a word. He just looked down at his hands, and kind of… swallowed.’

  ‘Swallowed? That’s interesting. I’ve seen him do that too.’

  ‘He always does it when Mary has a go at him. You remember that time at the Gibsons’ party, for instance? Okay, I take your point, it may well be his own fault, but all the same, she really did humiliate him, dressing him down like a naughty child in front of everyone. And he just swallowed.’

  ‘Yes, and remember when we went to Tenerife with them,’ Sue said, ‘and that guy in the market blatantly ripped him off. You wait for him to react, but he just —’

  ‘— swallows. You can see his Adam’s apple move. You can almost hear the gulp. Pathetic really.’

  ‘And he’s so big. That’s the weird part. The tallest man we know, the broadest across the shoulders, a great big guy. He’s like a bear that thinks it’s a mouse.’

  Peter laughed. ‘I do like him, though, for some reason.’

  ‘I quite like him too, though I often want to pick him up and shake him. I guess there’s a reason he is as he is. I just don’t accept that Mary made him that way.’

  She watched the faces on the TV screen.

  ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘he’s absolutely full of rage.’

  Peter looked round at her in surprise. ‘Who? Tim? Are you mixing him up with someone else? The man hasn’t got an angry bone in his body! That’s his whole problem, surely?’

  ‘I have this pain inside me,’ Tim said, running his hand through his sandy-coloured hair. ‘Well, it’s more like a pressure really. Like something inside me squirming around and pushing outwards. It’s probably stupid of me, but I can’t help worrying that it’s cancer or something like that. It feels a bit that way. It feels like some kind of alien force deep down in… well, I don’t know where exactly, but somewhere right deep down in the core of me.’

  The doctor laughed.

  ‘Sounds like indigestion to me, Tim.’

  He was a new doctor, fresh out of medical school, and he’d never met Tim before, but for some reason he thought it was okay to use the short form of Tim’s first name, and to talk to him as if he was a child.

  Tim swallowed. ‘Well, I think I know what indigestion’s like, actually. You could be right, I suppose, but it doesn’t feel like that at all.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re fine.’ The doctor had already turned to his keyboard. ‘But I’ll refer you for some tests for your own peace of mind. And meanwhile I’ll prescribe you some antacid pills and we’ll see if they’re any help.’

  It was growing inside him and it felt alive. It was as if there was a living animal trapped in there, struggling to free itself. And not just an animal, but a dangerous one, he was quite sure of that. He knew he must contain it, however difficult that might be.

  ‘The doctor said it was just indigestion,’ he told Mary as he came into the kitchen. ‘He’s given me some tablets for stomach acid.’

  Little Sean was already at the table, waiting for his tea. He was five years old.

  ‘Well, I told you it was nothing, didn’t I?’ Mary said. ‘You don’t need a doctor, Tim, you really don’t, but if you carry on like this, you’re going to need a shrink.’

  ‘What’s a shrink?’ asked Sean.

  ‘Hello there, my little man,’ said Tim, kissing the boy’s head as he sat down at the table.

  He loved his son with such intensity that sometimes it felt to him as if a dazzling light was blazing outwards from the little boy, almost too bright to look at.

  ‘A shrink is someone you go to when your suit’s too tight,’ Mary said.

  She meant it to be a joke of course but, funnily enough, it wasn’t a bad description of what his symptoms actually felt like.

  ‘Really?’ Sean asked doubtfully.

  ‘Well, sort of,’ Tim said, ‘except that I feel like the suit.’

  Sean looked worried.

  ‘No, not really, Sean,’ Tim told his son, squeezing his hand. ‘Your mum was only kidding. She means your dad is making a big fuss about nothing, and she’s probably right.’

  He glanced at Mary, and she gave him a thin taut smile as she laid out the sausages and mash. Later he would read Sean his bedtime story and then the little boy, already half asleep, would reach up his arms and plant a soft wet kiss on his mouth.

  ‘Goodnight, my little man,’ Tim would say, as he tiptoed out, leaving his son to the protection of the plastic lion that always kept watch on his bedside table.

  ‘You’re quite right, of course,’ he said to Mary later, when they were lying in bed. ‘I must stop worrying about it so much.’

  ‘You really must,’ she said, turning the page of her book. ‘It’s one of those silly things that feed on themselves. You’re a bit prone to those, aren’t you? You’ve let this blow up out of all proportion.’

  ‘I have,’ he admitted. ‘I’m glad about the tests, though. Let’s hope when they come back, I’ll be able to lay the whole thing to rest.’

  He glanced across at her. She looked very appealing with her low-cut nightdress showing a great deal of those shapely breasts that were beginning to swell and fill with pregnancy.

  ‘I don’t suppose you…?’

  ‘Not tonight, Tim. It’s been a long day, and I need to get some sleep.’

  Tim nodded.

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘That’s absolutely fine. Only it’s been quite a while.’

  Tim swallowed. Mary turned out the light.

  Suddenly he saw the creature vividly in his mind. It was bloody and red, with fierce, burning eyes. He knew it would terrify Sean if he ever saw it. He knew it would tear their little home apart. So one thing at least was absolutely clear: whatever happened, whether the symptoms could be alleviated or not, he must keep that thing locked away inside himself, he must never never —

  But now, lying there in the dark, Tim checked himself. These were mad thoughts, surely? Either this was an illness of some kind, like indigestion, or, more likely, it was something in his head, like that time he became convinced that there was a gas leak, even though Mary couldn’t smell anything, and even though the guy from the gas company came out twice and found no trace at all. An illness, or something in his head: it was one of those two. He must stop thinking of it as so
me kind of living thing.

  ‘He shouldn’t have spoken to me like that, though,’ he muttered, thinking about the young doctor and his patronising tone.

  A spark of anger appeared in his mind, apparently from nowhere. It was as if he was looking at a fireplace sideways from across a room. He couldn’t see the grate, he couldn’t see the fire itself, but he could see the red hot fragment as it jumped out onto the floor.

  He swallowed again.

  ‘I’m actually getting quite worried about Tim,’ Peter said to his wife. ‘He looks so distracted these days.’

  They were washing the dishes together. She was drying. Outside the window, rain was falling into their patio from a heavy dark grey sky.

  ‘Hasn’t he always looked like that? I often get the feeling with Tim that he’s not really there at all. He’s somewhere far away, operating his body with some difficulty by remote control, while simultaneously dealing with something else entirely that none of us can see.’

  Peter laughed. ‘That’s a bit harsh!’

  She picked up a wet saucepan from the drying rack.

  ‘I’m not criticising him, I’m just telling you how I see him. Like he’s never quite learnt how to inhabit himself.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Peter. ‘But there’s something else going on for him now. Some new thing. Sometimes, when he doesn’t know I’m looking, I see him wincing like he’s in pain.’

  ‘Well, maybe he is.’

  ‘He did say something about going to the doctor a couple of weeks ago. Something about stomach problems. But when I asked him how he got on, he just laughed and said it had turned out to be nothing. “Possibly indigestion,” he said, “but probably just hypochondria.” Something’s eating him, though, Sue. It’s obvious. Something’s really eating him. He’s not right at all.’