Well, specifically, like the dead and flattened guard in that photograph. Could he have been—? No, it wouldn’t make sense, there was a real autopsy and everything. But I did examine the bars more closely, in fear of some hidden trap. Then I stood back and glimpsed the trap too obvious to be noticed.
Jasper Trant himself had seen something slip from an Oxford jailhouse cell. Through the bars, no doubt. Bars, no doubt, set just as far apart as those now blocking the Area C door. There was another subtlety here. If this was a snare for people like myself, set by his long-departed curiosity, why the loophole?
Almost I could hear Keith’s voice, the eager voice of the mathematician: Didn’t you read the mention of “proof” in the book? Wasn’t I telling you last night about the austere kind of maths reasoning we call an existence proof? Trant wasn’t collecting for a zoo ... he was a mathematician and all his Trustees want is the existence proof. Which they’d certainly have, if after walking in there and triggering the hydraulics you got out through that impossible gap. Don’t you see?
I saw, and was profoundly grateful to Keith for the patterns of reasoning he’d shown me. It was heady stuff, this reason, a shiny and unfamiliar tool. I couldn’t stay and I couldn’t go. Knowledge is power and human ignorance is my safeguard. After the long years’ trek from that damned children’s home in search of more of my kind, whatever kind that might be, I did not propose the betrayal of confirming to these ... others ... that my own kind existed. Which left me caught, like the lion in the desert who (“Ever heard the psychologist’s method, Keith?”) builds around him, deduction by deduction, the bars of his own intangible cage.
Yes, I owe a great deal to young Keith. Education is a wonderful thing; he taught me how to be a lion. And at the last I remembered one thing that he’d explained to me, sentences falling over each other in his enthusiasm ... the technique of reducing a difficulty to a problem that has already been solved. All else then follows. Q.E.D.
It was solved, I think, last year.
Caught in this exact dilemma, what did my anonymous cousin do then? He could escape the cage, but at the cost of leaving the Trustees their proof. I salute him for his splendid piece of misdirection. Then as now, there was a second guard, no doubt asleep back in the control room. No live man could have slipped through those bars after springing the trap, but a dead man, topologically equivalent but stamped and trampled and flattened ... In the morning, outside the barred doorway of Area C, there lay an object that might just have been—that to any rational mind must have been—hauled and crushed with brutal force through one narrow space. Hauled from outside the cage. A bizarre and suspicious circumstance, but not one which quite proved anything.
So logic points the way. I’m sorry to be doing this, Keith. I’m truly grateful for all our conversations, and will try to make quite sure that you feel no pain.
TURNING THIRTY by Lisa Tuttle
Here’s a question you’ll be quizzed on: Name two writers and one editor from this book who were each barred from the same British Science Fiction Society Open Night by Christopher Priest. Are you reading this, Langford? Yes! The correct answer is Karl Edward Wagner, Dennis Etchison, and Lisa Tuttle! Well, we were grudgingly allowed entry and permitted to buy our own drinks, but we were not to eat anything from the buffet despite having offered to pay. Etchison had two plates anyway. Don’t know about Tuttle.
Lisa Tuttle has been weaving tales of quietly disturbing horror fiction for some years now and is finally gaining widespread acclaim. Of herself, she writes: “I was born in Houston, Texas in 1952 but have lived in the UK since 1980. After spending ten years in the London area I moved to the West Coast of Scotland with Colin Murray. We’re married and have a daughter who’ll be three next month—how time flies! My most recently published books were a short story collection, Memories of the Body: Tales of Desire and Transformation (UK only; Grafton, 1991) and a novel, Lost Futures (also 1992; published as part of Dell’s Abyss line in the US, and by Grafton over here). Just before Christmas I finished a new novel called The Pillow Friend, and I’m now working on a horror story for slightly younger readers. I used to say I was a full-time writer, but since Emily was born I write when she lets me, which isn’t very often.”
I walked into the pub off the Gray’s Inn Road and saw him slouching at the bar, and it was as if no time had passed.
The pub was one where we’d often met, and which I’d not visited since. I went in there today because I wanted a drink. It wasn’t nostalgia or anything; to tell the truth, I’d hardly taken in where I was. The pub just happened to be the one I was passing at the moment I realized I really could not face the tube just then without a little lubricant.
With the end of our affair, we’d ceased to see each other. It wasn’t something that had to be arranged: we have never moved in the same circles, and our one mutual acquaintance had moved to America soon after she’d introduced us. About two years after the last good-bye I had seen Nick in Holborn Underground station: I was on the down escalator and he was ascending; I don’t think he saw me. The sight of him sent me into such a spin that I actually forgot where I was going.
Now at the sight, so familiar five years ago but not since, of my one and only adulterous lover, I came unanchored in time. I felt a little jolt, as if I’d seen a ghost, and then I shivered as that old sado-masochistic cocktail of lust and anger and loneliness began to spread throughout my system, and I went up to him with a sort of casual, sort of wicked grin, the way I used to, as if we’d planned this meeting and I was pretending we hadn’t.
He was exactly the same. Those might have been the same pair of jeans, the same denim jacket, the same Doc Martens he’d been wearing the evening I’d first put my hand on his thigh under the table in the Cafe Pacifico. It was maybe not quite the same haircut, but definitely the same wire-framed glasses, the same blue eyes, and the same slightly crooked front teeth that showed when he grinned the same loopy grin.
Which he did, hugely, at the sight of me, and I realized he was honestly pleased to see me. He’d never been one to disguise his feelings, unlike every other man I’d ever been with.
“You look wonderful,” he said.
“You look like a refugee from the seventies. Still. And I’ll bet they’re not even Levi’s—Marks and Sparks’ own brand, am I right?”
“I was never a slave to designer labels, and, as you can see, success hasn’t changed me.”
“You’re successful.”
“Meet my backer.” He introduced me to the man he’d been drinking with; despite my hopeful first impression, he wasn’t alone. I was about to make my excuses, but the man in the suit beat me to it: cordial smile and nods all around, and he was off. Nick ordered me a whiskey and dry ginger and I didn’t stop him, although I didn’t like the mixture. It was what I’d always drunk with him, and that he still remembered pleased me.
We gave each other cautious, curious looks.
“Well,” he said.
“Your backer?”
“I’m making a film. Didn’t you know? There was a piece about me in the Face. In April.”
“I must have missed that issue.”
“I did a film for Channel Four. Part of the four-minute film series. Ratphobia. Did you see it?”
“No. Sorry. I didn’t know. The TV Times is another one of those must-reads that I just don’t ... You should have sent me a card.”
“I would have. But you told me once a long time ago never to darken your door again and that included your office mail.”
I didn’t know what to say to that because it was true, and he sounded hurt. I was always saying things to hurt and then feeling abashed by my success. An awkward silence fell, for about twenty-three seconds, and then my drink arrived.
“Cheers.”
“Confusion to your enemies.”
I would have to stay at least until I’d finished my drink, and all at once that seemed too long. We had nothing to say to each other; we never had. Back in the days w
hen we were seeing each other, if we weren’t making love we were either flirting or fighting; there was nothing else for us, no comfortable middle ground, none of the common interests on which friendships are built. He hadn’t the least understanding of, or interest in, my work, and as for him, well, at the time when I knew him his film-making aspirations had progressed no further than production work on a couple of pop videos. He spent a lot of time talking himself up to various people who might help his career, and when he talked to me, too often the same well-practiced, self-aggrandizing phrases came rolling out. I hated it. Not only because I mistrusted people who tried to impress me, but because I felt he wasn’t talking to me at those times, but performing for an imaginary audience. So I would not admire; I refused to be impressed. And I did my best (in a phrase of my grandmother’s), to cut him down to size.
Sometimes I didn’t even have to try. How could the names he dropped impress me if I’d never heard them before? I know he found my ignorance of famous film directors and musical megastars difficult to credit. But although he was only four years younger than me, we belonged to different generations, culturally speaking. I’d stopped paying attention to pop music in about 1978, whereas Nick still bought singles and read things like the Face and NME.
“You still working in the same place?” he asked suddenly.
“And still doing the same thing.” I wondered if he remembered what it was.
“That’s good,” he said. “I guess you’re happy?”
“Well, I need the money. It’s easier working than finding a backer.”
“You’re not kidding! But really, it’s a great project. I’ve got a script by—d’you remember that book that came out a few years ago, the one everyone was talking about, a big novel about—”
I gulped at my drink and felt an unexpected pleasure at the warm, bubbly kick of it.
Then Nick was excusing himself, ordering another round before he left and before I could stop him. It occurred to me that I could slip away while he was in the loo. On the other hand, I wasn’t ready to go home, and I didn’t particularly want to go somewhere else and drink alone. The first drink had mellowed me, but I wanted more.
As I put my empty glass on the bar I looked up and saw Nick walking toward me, a sight from the past I never thought I’d see again. Maybe because we were both married and always met in the center of London, well away from both our homes, my most common image of Nick is of suddenly picking out his figure against a background of strangers in some public place, coming toward me along the Tottenham Court Road, weaving among the tables in a large restaurant, or between the other drinkers in this very pub.
He had one of those long, awkward bodies you often see on adolescents. Even now, past thirty, he looked as if he hadn’t quite grown into it. Totally unathletic, of course, with a stooping, hip-slung stance. Watching this once so familiar body come toward me, I was seized with lust.
Lust is, for me, a particularly intense variety of memory. I can’t imagine feeling it for a stranger. For someone I’ve just met I might feel interest or attraction, but not lust—no more lust than love. Nick was the first man for whom I ever felt lust without loving, and even with him it was hardly lust at first sight. I thought him attractive in a kind of young, funky, nonthreatening way. My reasons for contemplating sex with him had more to do with my feelings for my husband than for Nick. I was furiously angry with Peter, desperate to right the balance of our dying marriage by taking a lover. When Nick made it obvious he was attracted to me, I felt a resurgence of a female power which Peter had all but destroyed in me.
What started out of curiosity, anger, loneliness, and revenge became something else after the first kiss. Sex, when we got to it, was explosive, quite unlike anything I’d expected, or experienced, before. It was wonderful and terrible. I’d never had orgasms so violent. Afterward I hated him for making me feel so intensely, hated him because I wanted him so fiercely and specifically.
Now I began to remember, in a pornographic, filmic rush. Positions we had used in our fierce and frantic couplings those few times we had the opportunity—on the floor, against the wall, in the bath, as well as in the beds. Even more powerful, because I’d always been left wanting more, were memories of our more public embraces, on the street, under bridges or in doorways, when we had no time, or nowhere to go, yet were desperate with desire.
It was just then, in my unusually vulnerable state, that the music began. It came from the jukebox: a plaintive love song first popular about twelve years ago. The summer I fell in love with Peter that song was to be heard on every radio, at every party, from every jukebox in the land. It was no longer in the charts, of course, hadn’t been for a long time, but it had remained popular enough for unlucky coincidence to strike, years later: it was the song Nick had chosen as a background to his seduction of me, in this pub, five years ago. He couldn’t have failed to notice the effect it had on me, and as I never told him that I associated it with falling in love with someone else, it became from that night “our song.”
And there it was again. No wonder I forgot what year it was. I realized Nick hadn’t gone to the loo at all—he’d been remembering old times and he wanted to see if “our song” had lasted the years. I hated him and loved him for it. I could no more fight the effects of that song than I could have resisted a massive shot of muscle relaxant. Already weakened by whiskey and lust I hadn’t a prayer against the power of a sentimental song.
He saw me slumping and put his arm around me. I burst into tears.
“I’ve missed you, too,” he said.
When I stopped shaking he walked me over to the table in the corner farthest from the bar where, in the old days, we’d often spent hours drinking and driving each other crazy. He had seemed determined either to undress me or to get inside my clothes with me, and I had fought him off like a reluctant virgin, my occasional delicious lapses into surrender always broken by the fear of public indecency.
It was like old times. He was just as I’d remembered—I was just as I’d remembered, roused to a pitch of desire I’d nearly forgotten. It was as if we had spent only weeks apart, not years, just as in those days the weeks apart had felt like years.
“Don’t.”
“But you like it.”
“I didn’t say I didn’t like it, just don’t.”
“But why?”
“Someone might see.”
“So?”
I struggled without success to trap his hands. “I’m no exhibitionist. Anyway, you’re the movie buff. Didn’t you see The Accused?”
He gave a soundless laugh. “This isn’t that kind of bar.”
“And I’m not that kind of girl. Can we talk?”
“We’ll only end up fighting.”
“I need another drink; so do you.”
He looked at our empty glasses and sighed. When he got up to go to the bar, I followed.
We drank; we flirted; we fought. And all of a sudden the barman was calling time. That couldn’t be right. But the clock on the wall said it was, and I looked around and realized we were the only customers left.
We walked all the way down to Holborn tube station, hand in hand, like innocent lovers. The hour and the darkness gave us that freedom. Just before we reached the station he pulled me into a recessed doorway, one that had been overlooked by the homeless sleeping in others. As he kissed me, he slipped his cold hands into my layers of clothing, seeking flesh. I felt a reckless pleasure and did nothing as he eventually managed to bare one breast. I’d barely had time to feel the cold before his hot mouth left mine and closed around the nipple.
Then the heady sensation stopped. “You’re driving me crazy,” he said, low-voiced. “This is no good. I want to make love to you. Come back with me.”
“To Kent? Your wife won’t mind?”
“I’m on expenses. We can get a hotel room. I said I might have to stay overnight ... In fact, I do; I’ve missed the last train.”
All our lovemaking had been in dark
corners or in cheap hotels. We’d only spent the whole night together twice. I’d planned and chosen nights Peter was away, but Nick had had to call home, once from a pay phone in a station, once from the hotel room. I remembered how much I had hated those phone calls, which I’d tried not to hear. Did he say “I love you” before he said good-bye? Afterward, when he’d said it to me, I’d hit him. That had been the next to last time we’d seen each other.
All those old feelings were still there, as volatile and immediate as the touch of his lips. I wanted sex with him, violent and annihilating, but I couldn’t deal with the emotions of before and after.
“I can’t,” I said abruptly, pushing him off, fixing my clothes. “I haven’t missed my train and I’m not going to.” I began walking toward the station.
“I’m sorry,” he said humbly. Although we’d both been married, both, therefore, equally guilty, I’d reserved the role of the innocent. Of course, the husband I betrayed had already betrayed me, but I didn’t tell Nick that. From his readiness to shoulder all the guilt I guessed that I was not the first woman his wife might have cause to hate. This, of course, added to the anger I felt at him and at faithless men everywhere.
“If you knew how much I’ve missed you—how much you still mean to me—can I see you again?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Nothing’s changed. Has it?”
He looked very sad. “I guess not.”
I had a ticket, he didn’t, so I pushed through the turnstile and left him without looking back.
In my mind, though, I never stopped looking back. I had plenty of time to think, for it’s a long journey from Holborn to South Harrow, with a long, cold wait on the platform at Acton Town making it even longer at that time of night. Yet with all the time I had to think, I really didn’t think at all. I was moving on automatic pilot, going through motions learned a long time ago, while in my head, playing again and again like some cheap, sentimental, incredibly powerful song, was the memory of Nick: the rasp of his whiskers on my face, the taste of whisky on his tongue, the strength of his arms around me, the light in his eyes, his voice whispering in my ear, his face.
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