by Maggie Gee
Why had she never understood? She hadn’t realized that anyone died.
‘This won’t do,’ she heard Alfred say. ‘Pull yourself together, May. Make an effort.’
She put down the book, went to the cupboard and took out some flour to make a cake. When you lived alone, you could do what you liked; it didn’t matter what time it was. Since she had the oven on, she might as well use it, though Shirley was funny about her cooking. None of May’s children would eat her cakes, but as Shirley said, ‘The twins will eat anything.’
Alfred actually liked my cakes.
She suddenly knew he was sitting next door, in his old chair, waiting for his bedtime cocoa. She could open the door and slip through to join him, in another world, where they would sit together, where everything that had been, still was, just a little way off, slightly blurred, faded.
The hairs on her arms stood on end. The light on the dresser made them burn pale gold, as if she were still that sunlit girl…
He was waiting for her, and she should go, but the doorway to the next room looked dark.
She turned her back on it, and sifted the flour, and the beauty of its slow white fall softened the moment, fell across the slope where she struggled alone through the watches of the night with the endless question, where do we go?
Five
Lights had come on all over the city. Signs flashed, gorgeous, over Victory Square, indigo, purple, silver, gold, striped and eyed, zigzagged, pulsing; selling Hesperican sugars, fats, drugs, shows, sex, hopes, holidays. Headlights queued in rows on the motorways, workers trying to escape the city, their exits slowed by the many detours put into place where roads were flooded. Water on roads, walls, bridges, washed the lights into long slurs of colour, peacock-eyed where the traffic lights stared. Trapped motorists listened to their radios; more rains predicted; demonstrations in the south and east, where the populace claimed they were being neglected, their basements left flooded, their drains left blocked. Business as usual. They sighed and switched off.
Davey, Lottie Segall-Lucas’s elder child, woke up ridiculously late, as usual, the day after doing his Star-Lite Show. Creeping back to bed with a cappuccino, he skip-read an extraordinary brief for a programme in the pipeline for April, a two-hour special being billed as The End of the World Spectacular. Target audience: treble their usual. Lots of publicity was promised. The planets were due to line up in the heavens: great excitement at CTV House. They were working on computer simulations: the repercussions could be cataclysmic. The footage, his producer promised, would be stunning. ‘Hope you’re as excited about this as we are.’
Davey did feel excited, briefly, about the possible jump in viewing figures, but there was something flakey, flakier than usual, about the concept of the show, a worm of doubt that gnawed at him, briefly. Would the planets really line up in the skies, or was it as unreal as an eclipse? Was it just an earth’s eye optical illusion?
No point asking, he told himself. Davey had never forgotten the shaming moment when, early in his days in children’s TV, he had questioned the validity of a bit of science, and the producer took him aside and said, his face briefly contorted with malice, ‘Look Lucas, we know you’re a clever little cunt but that’s not why we’re employing you, right?’
He tried to forget the end of the world as he ate his breakfast in the evening.
It was a strange life Davey had ended up living; not quite the life he had meant to have. A cartoon version of the life he once wanted. He had only ever managed to explain this to Delorice. Although she was young, or because she was young, she understood dreams, and the pain of surrendering them, here in the city that gorged on dreams.
No one on the show seemed to care what was true. Whereas Davey, in some humble, deeply buried part of him, believed in truth, and accuracy. But he lived in a world that preferred entertainment, and he did embarrassingly well in it. ‘Davey you are my success story’ his mother would shriek when he went to visit. ‘Lola is ditsy and Harold is feeble, but you, darling … – Oh, hello there, Harold.’
When Davey was a boy he had loved the night skies, watching them almost every night from his room with its skylight on to the roof. He had a gift for maths, might have done astrophysics and fulfilled his dream of becoming an astronomer, but chance had deflected his path from the stars. His progressive school, St Herod’s, was weak on science; his mother assumed that he would choose arts, and Davey did love books, and plays; then Lola was born when he was doing his A-levels, so his mother was too busy to stop him spliffing up; his results were a crushing disappointment, and the better universities were closed to him. He’d done a degree in Theatre Studies, followed, after a few dismal years of finding he was never going to be an actor, by a one-year diploma in Earth Sciences with a half-baked, one-term astronomy option (for how could Davey be a perpetual student when his mother already had one on her hands? His step-father, Harold, spent all his time reading for the great book he had been writing for decades. Harold was clever, and Davey loved him, but he wasn’t practical, he wasn’t worldly, and why should poor Mum have two hopeless men?)
And Davey had done a lot better than Harold, in the hard currency of the city. Davey worked frenetically; his sleep was erratic; Davey was famous; Davey earned money. Maybe Davey sometimes took a few too many tranx to soften the edges, when he got stressed; maybe he used a little crank or coke to keep himself ahead of the game; but that was all part of the life he lived, the tricksy, glitzy, life of the city, which perhaps he’d never wanted to keep up with, but how did you jump off a speeding train?
At nine o’clock Davey sat talking to his lap-top, TV’s ‘Mr Astronomy’, finishing his ‘Star-Lite’ column for The Biz and listening with a tenth of his mind to the news. (He didn’t have to listen, it was more of the same; another distant city was resisting liberation; nearer home, more riots had erupted in the Towers, in a block which had had no power for seven days.)
His doorbell rang loudly, a triumphant tattoo.
Davey opened his door on two wildly excited, shrieking, laughing, black-encased figures. ‘Lola,’ he said. ‘What are you up to?’
‘Let us in quick, quick, quick, and shut the door, they’re chasing us,’ Lola managed to pant out between hoots of laughter. They fell into the hallway, doubled up.
His sister’s springy gold curls were concealed by a black beret splashed with big sequins of rain, but she still looked beautiful under the light, her eyes, half-closed with laughter, green and narrow like their mother’s, her wide cheeks pink and shining with excitement. Davey was proud of his little sister. Just lately, though, she had been getting into scrapes, and having arguments with their mother. Davey sympathized; he’d been there, a decade or so ago. Mum had left him alone since he’d become successful.
‘Are you Davey?’ the other black figure inquired. She had pert features, a big smile, white teeth, red lips, wide dark eyes that took him in. A strand of dark hair escaped from her hoody.
‘Are you really being chased?’ Davey asked, frowning, and made to push past them to open the door, but the chorus of squawks that greeted this move – ‘No, no please, they’ll get us, Davey,’ – made him give up, and let himself be clutched, hugged, kissed, trampled on, smothered.
He sat them down in his yellow-painted sitting-room, which was suddenly chaotic with limbs and laughter, and made them hot chocolate, and demanded explanations, but they both became so incoherent with excitement and please for him not to tell anything to anyone that he decided to let it be.
‘Davey, you know everything about weather, don’t you?’ Lola suddenly asked him, eagerly.
‘Not everything, Lola, actually.’ Davey felt the usual twinge of discomfort that came when anyone questioned him: a nervous sifting of finite resources, the fear that gimcrack foundations were shifting. As a TV astronomer, he mostly relied on other, lesser-paid, people’s research.
‘He does,’ said Lola, turning to her friend. ‘Astronomy includes the earth. Davey, is it true this stuff
about Varna, this, like, most of an island that’s going to fall into the sea because of the dam the government’s building, and there’s going to be tidal waves and stuff, and, like, half of the world’s population’s going to drown?’
‘Probably not,’ Davey said firmly.
‘Do you know about it, though?’ asked Gracie, suspicious.
‘I do know what you’re talking about, and this dam project does sound pretty unsound, but I think the danger’s been overhyped. There are real things to worry about, you know, girls. The war, for example. The floods, for another.’
But they didn’t want to worry about real things, the things they lived with every day.
‘You see,’ said Lola, triumphant, her mouth made clown-like by a chocolatey stain. ‘I told you Davey would know about it.’
‘I’m not an expert,’ Davey said. ‘But most of these things never happen, remember. The odds are usually on our side. You girls needn’t lose sleep over it.’ Then a spurt of self-importance drew him on. ‘I mean, every year there are meteors which could hit the earth if their course veered slightly, and if that happened we’d really be in trouble, you know, flash floods, dust covering the sun, the kind of thing that killed the dinosaurs … Point is, in fact, they generally miss us. Matter of fact, we’re just planning a programme about something more dramatic than collapsing islands.’
He broke off, realizing this wasn’t helpful, but Gracie was gazing at him, bright-eyed, enthralled. ‘For example? Go on, tell us. We’re young. Young people have a right to know. We could fly to Australia, if we had warning.’
It was hard to resist such rapt attention. ‘It wouldn’t help you much, in this case. It really isn’t something you should worry about, but – it seems all the planets are going to line up. In a month or two, not long away. I’m just getting my head round the researcher’s notes. It might affect gravity, and tides, and so forth. They claim there could be massive floods. Something that would, you know, make Varna look tiny. I’m not at all sure I believe it, though.’
‘Still dams are dangerous, aren’t they?’ asked Gracie, who hadn’t entirely been listening to his answer because she was winding herself up to say something worthy of this interesting man. ‘It’s capitalism, isn’t it? Exploiting nature. You’re really lucky to deal with the stars,’ she said. ‘I mean there isn’t any capitalism, up there. There’s nothing Hesperican up there. Just beauty, I guess.’ And then she blushed, in case he saw that she partly meant, you are beautiful. And he was very handsome; dark brows, kind eyes, thick ruffled hair, and the strong jaw-line of his mother and sister, though there was something uncertain about his mouth. Gracie, like her mother, was rarely uncertain.
‘No advertising up there,’ shouted Lola, slapping Gracie exuberantly on the shoulder, and they instantly both exploded again, giggling and kicking each other on the sofa, before they subsided, looking suddenly sober.
‘I’d better go home,’ said Gracie. ‘My mother will be worrying.’
Paula Timms was a heavy kind of mother, a worrier, and since she had broken up with Gracie’s father, rather too focused on her daughter; Lola and Davey’s mother was mostly quite light, but Lola didn’t want her to float away completely.
‘Well our mother has abandoned us,’ Lola announced, enlisting Davey’s support. ‘She’s gone mental and gone off to college, hasn’t she?’
‘I’m rather pro it, as a matter of fact. Why shouldn’t our mother do a degree?’ Davey hadn’t done the degree he wanted; if Lottie, did, he would be happy.
‘Because it’s my turn,’ Lola said, real indignation widening her eyes. ‘She ought to be home, encouraging me.’ It was gone eleven when Lottie phoned Davey at the City Observatory, sixty kilometres outside the city, where CTV paid for access to the instruments. It was the best thing about his job, one of the times when Davey felt completely happy, when he got a turn at the giant Caroline Herschel telescope – though for months there had been only fleeting visibility.
‘Davey! This is your mother talking’ (as if it could possibly be anyone else). ‘THANK GOD you had Lola to supper! I am so grateful, darling. The most dreadful thing’s happened. Everyone, but everyone has been burgled. By a dangerous maniac of a burglar. Our house. Gloria’s house next door. Paula’s house, that’s Gracie’s mother, I’ve never liked her but it’s still a shame. And the girls would have been in, he might have stabbed them or raped them, but luckily they had come round to you!’
‘I don’t deserve any credit,’ said Davey, trying to digest this information. ‘I was just sitting there, and they turned up.’
‘No you’re wonderful, Davey, you always were, a wonderful son, a wonderful brother. Of course I feel guilty. Should I give up college? It wouldn’t have happened if I’d been home. I mean, poor little Lola just sitting on her own and this creepy burglar comes barging in … I would have flattened him, Davey, as you well know. I would have beaten him to a pulp.’
This was the other side of their mother.
‘Lola’s not entirely helpless,’ said Davey, remembering the girls in their black cat-suits. ‘What have you lost?’
‘Oh, just the fucking jewellery. It’s always the jewellery. Luckily a lot of it was locked in the bank. But the burglar must have been completely weird, you know, some kind of crazed starving were-wolf, he went in the kitchen and found a cold chicken and absolutely ripped it apart with his jaws, there was meat and bones all over the floor, all over my beautiful ceramic tiles … Lola is wild because the TV’s gone, the tiny one you could take into the bath, and her new lap-top, and of course her phones. Gloria next door is going demented because, she says, he got into her computer and erased all this stuff she needed for work and left rude messages everywhere, raving on as if advertising was the devil … Now even the burglars have got fucking political! I blame the floods. And the government. None of this would happen if I were in power. Still I never shall be, now I’m giving up my degree. Lola is being, you know, a bit blaming. Teenagers are hot on blame.’
‘Don’t be hasty, Mum. It’s not your fault. Why can’t Harold do something? He could work from home. And do more with Lola.’
‘Oh Harold, darling. He’s just a man. As you are, Davey, of course, but – better. One day I think you’ll be a wonderful father.’
His mother had never said that before.
After she was gone, Davey sat and thought, staring out across the flood-plains towards the distant city, the flush of pink electric on the clouds above it, the warm coral stain of the human animal. The long grids of light stretched out towards the sea. All over the world there were grids like this, spreading nerve-centres of streaming electrons, and people moving in overlapping circles who suddenly found that their fingers touched.
The richer city-dwellers all lived in separate houses. They thought they were safe behind walls and windows, in nice green neighbourhoods, far from the Towers. But actually nothing was separate any more. The walls had become as thin as paper. Thieves moved though doors and windows like smoke. The rage round the Towers spread out in slow ripples. The Towers weren’t as distant as he had once thought; he’d been shocked, and told himself not to be shocked, when he learned that Delorice sometimes stayed there with her sister …
Davey’s love for astronomy attracted him to patterns. It didn’t always give him a sense of perspective – his mother, for example, could sometimes seem enormous, a kind of tsunami or waterspout (though she was behaving quite well at the moment), and Delorice often made him so happy he couldn’t work, or breathe, or think – but the truth was humans were brief, ant-like. The earth itself was a flash of dust, briefly flaring in the light of the sun, fading, as the Herschel telescope moved out in space and the net of light extended for ever, into the faintest snowfall of planets, lost in the edgeless fields of stars.
Yet there Davey sat, at the centre of his moment. Mr Star-Lite, the TV astronomer. He was in work, in the pink, in love. Davey was over thirty years old; he’d made more than thirty circles around the sun.
His step-father said nothing could ever be lost. Harold’s great book would explain it all. The two men had talked about it many times: Davey still half-believed Harold would write it, though Lottie had always been dismissive. Harold’s answer lay in the physics of time (unsurprisingly, perhaps – his own father was a physicist). All that had ever been, still was. OK, the book might never be published, but the ideas had made a deep impression on Davey.
Harold’s physics allowed for no past or future, only a single infinite structure. A hall of time from which the moments opened, a mansion of many sunlit rooms. Davey imagined an unending honeycomb (his nanny, Amanda, had taken him to church: in my father’s house are many mansions).
Under the flat pink electric city there were other cities, flickering with firelight, a labyrinth of rooms lit by pinpricks of flame. Over the city other cities would rise, long after everyone he knew had been forgotten. With a sudden sharp pang Davey thought of his sister, his beautiful sister – then his sister’s children – fading, carried away from him on the great plain of time flattening out into the distance, and Delorice – Delorice, who he loved completely – and theory dimmed before Delorice’s face, her full, humorous mouth, the high curve of her cheek. Davey stopped his train of thought, switched off his computer, began collecting his things to go home.
I must have children, he thought in his car. I wonder if Delorice wants children? I’m in my thirties, after all. Have I already left it too late?
It was one o’clock as he drove through the city. At a junction, a Mercedes drew up beside him, a newish model with its windows open and Jamiroquai blasting out into the night. The driver, who was black, looked across at him; beside him a beautiful young black woman sat singing and miming to the music; the light showed the beauty of her cheeks, her breasts; the man’s glance seemed to say, And you’re on your own’. Davey felt briefly piqued, then annoyed, and tried to beat the man on the lights, but the other car drew away effortlessly, a lit cigarette flew out of the window and splashed into a puddle on the road, and Davey forgot about it, hungry for home.