Salvage Rites: And Other Stories

by Ian Watson

  We had a big walnut radio set through in the kitchen, the glass panel marked with strange stations with names like Hilversum… Aha, maybe the ear could play other tunes as well? Holding it to my own ear again, I rotated it slowly, as I would turn the dial to tune our radio set when my father let me.

  Voices!

  ‘Good people, to my tale give ear!’ recited a prim young lady.

  With the literalness of childhood, I decided that the ear I was clutching must be the selfsame ear to which she referred. This was the ear which had been given to her tale, of – it began to unfold – a lad’s mysterious disappearance…

  Subsequently we took a holiday. Instead of going to London to see the Festival of Britain we travelled a shorter distance in the opposite direction, just over the border into Scotland. We stayed by the seaside at St Abb’s in Berwickshire, in a sort of semi-religious hotel. Before tucking into meals, all the guests would sing in chorus:

  ‘Let us with a gladsome mind

  Praise the Lord for he is kind!’

  Since the weather was hot, a lot of salads were served; or maybe it was cheaper to serve salads. I assumed that we were all singing, ‘Lettuce, with a gladsome mind.’ Children are a literal lot.

  Again I twisted the ear.

  ‘Burke him! Burke him!’ a mob roared in the distance, voices burring with hatred like many big pussy cats with sore throats.

  Even as I put the ear back into its jar I was thinking in a very practical way that, the next time I was able to extract it, I must empty every last lurking drop out of the coil of the ear into the container itself to keep the level of liquid from diminishing and thus betraying me. Already I had become cunning, and suspected that maybe my parents might be innocent of the secret.

  Might be. I wasn’t sure.

  As I say, our front room was a ceremonial room, seldom entered unless there were visitors. I kept my eyes and ears open for any hint that my father and mother might slink in there surreptitiously. Often I climbed out of bed and tiptoed to the stairhead to peep. Or I lay awake and strained to decode noises in the house until my parents also turned in for the night. Within a year or two I was sure that they hadn’t the slightest notion of the ear’s unusual properties.

  Not that I had many opportunities – initially – to use the ear without risk of discovery. Back in those early years, before I grew older and supervision loosened, I had to ration myself strictly, which was good discipline for the future. Instead I would play with the radio set in the kitchen. Noting my apparent interest, my father reminisced about the first radio sets when he was a lad, the crystal sets, and the excitement of sticking a ‘cat’s whisker’ inside a big china cooking bowl to amplify the tinny voice of ‘2LO’. It occurred to me that those first radio sets, with their ‘cat’s whiskers’, no doubt plucked from the family cat, must have been semi-organic -something like my private radio set, of an ear in a jar of liquid. Perhaps science had missed out on a neat trick by going in for wires and electricity and glowing valves instead.

  At school I learned that the name science gives to the external ear is the ‘auricle’ – which naturally echoed the ‘oracles’ of olden days who spoke about the future; though my oracle only voiced the past. I also learned the word ‘penance’. Was William Burke’s ghost inhabiting his last remaining earthly segment as an atonement for his misdeeds? If so, he never spoke to me directly.

  Alternatively, was Margetts’ ghost involved? Was I destined to solve the mystery of his disappearance and lay his spirit to rest, whether his bones lay mouldering in an Edinburgh charnel pit or at the botton of the sea or up the Khyber Pass?

  Was Joney Aird involved? Joney the fey bird-man, endowed perhaps with second sight (thus he fled from Brown’s Flour Mill), or in this case, with second hearing. Oh no!

  It was years before I realized that the magic wasn’t inherent in the murderer’s ear, but in myself. Many years before I understood my unique talent, so fortuitously – so accidentally – awakened by our possession of an amputated sense organ. But for Burke’s ear, I might never have discovered my true self, the quality which sets me apart like saint or artist from the rest of the world. I might have grown up to be like Cousin Dick the Canadian.

  ‘So welcome, new friend, to my museum of resurrection in Grosvenor Place, North Shields! Definitely not open to the public – otherwise they would chorus, “Burke him! Burke him! Burke him with a gladsome mind!”’

  Nowadays a couple of dozen jars sit on the mantelpiece. Old friends, new friends. Please join them.

  Do you find it gloomy here, with the curtains closed? Has the house degenerated since my father died (that chest trouble! – early heart attack) and since I moved my mother into a nursing home? Has our home grown fusty and dirty and rickety?

  We wouldn’t want any cleaning woman to pop in, or any decorators, or workmen to repair things, would we?

  Keep it all exactly the same. Keep the spirit of the place identical, just in case my talent breathes this air, and no other.

  Same easy chairs, same drapery, same cracking plaster; same ancient radio set and cooker; same china sink, same cutlery, same family photos and large framed print of a sunset. Same pile of tattered old Eagle comics, which I still read and enjoy, featuring Harris Tweed the portly amateur detective, Sergeant Luck of the Foreign Legion, Dan Dare the pilot of the future, and cut-away centrefolds exposing the entrails of a luxury liner (creep, little finger, from cabin to cabin) or of an imaginary space rocket, like anatomy drawings not of cut-open animals but of huge machines. Really, all life is here inside this house. For I am the pilot of the past – which I resurrect.

  Keep uninvited visitors away, too. Let them have their Canada, their fitted kitchens and TV sets and all mod cons.

  But let economics intrude, by all means. You’re curious as to how I earn my keep?

  ‘Do you have a job, Jim?’

  ‘I was wondering when you’d ever ask. Actually, I’m away from Grosvenor Place a fair bit. So obviously I had to move my mother, now that she’s ailing. I have a fine job for my purpose.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, I’m a publisher’s representative for the North of England. Take proof copies and covers around the bookshop and library buyers; sing praises; solicit orders. I’ve an instinct for what’ll appeal. Give me a cover, a quick flip though, the blurb in the catalogue – and I’ll tell you the advance orders to within twenty-five. Don’t need to study the books in depth; I’ve other more vivid things to “read”. Don’t make a fat income by any means – don’t need one – but I get around in the old Cortina car. Lanes, Yorks, Cumbria, Borders. I get around.

  ‘And I’m disciplined about collecting specimens for my jars. Discriminating, and disciplined. Never more than twice a year. Always at least fifty miles from where I’ve lately been doing business.

  ‘Likelihood of being detected? Tracked down? Not high! The events don’t make much sense, or form an obvious pattern, do they? Dead body in Liverpool lacking an eye. Corpse in Leeds, with the tongue cut out. Finger missing in Manchester. Miles, and ages, apart. What on earth for? BLACK MAGIC CULT OPERATING IN NORTH OF ENGLAND? Ha ha!

  ‘Let me unscrew this jar and take out the tongue that floats within. Hold the tongue to my own tongue, turning it to tune through the waveband of the menu. Indian lady, Leeds. Spicy banquets.

  ‘Now put it back.

  ‘Next jar. Eye of former merchant sailor; years of travelling the globe. Rotate his eye against my eye to see foreign parts. Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney.

  ‘Take out a nose and smell such fragrances. Lilies, patchouli, bonfires, sweat.

  ‘Take out a finger, and feel all manner of things.

  ‘And you, my friend – I believe – were once a bit of a Casanova, eh? You had a way with the girls, and you had your way with them, didn’t you? Whereas I, living the life that I have, a life that guards a secret, needed to avoid girlfriends or fiancées. While away from home, I have never been to a prostitute. Leaving aside the
danger of disease, I’m sure it would have been unsatisfying. Thus: no sexual experience, on a mutual basis, for Jim.

  ‘Now, at long last, you’re here to remedy that, aren’t you? When I hold your organ to my organ, we shall make up for lost time. We shall make the music of love.

  ‘How sweet life has been since Burke’s ear first twittered bird-song at me! If that Irish navvy was a king of resurrection men, I must be the king of kings, the emperor, the sultan. After a banquet, after a vision of Bangkok, after a dazing with musk, let me turn out the light. In the darkness let me discover my harem.’

  Good people, to my tale give ear. And eye, and tongue, and nose, and you know what.

  Joan’s World

  On my fourteenth birthday my parents gave me the planet Earth as a present. They couldn’t afford a regular gift.

  Who could, in our neighbourhood? Paying for essentials was hard enough. How sad to see some mothers and fathers scraping together a little spare cash only to waste it on trash which wouldn’t last, from the camp market. I sympathized, and had told Mum and Dad well in advance that I wanted nothing but their love.

  They told me that, on the contrary, they would give me everything; and they kept their word.

  It happened this way. We lived in a mobile home on the edge of a camp of a thousand such, stuck in the middle of the countryside. None of the homes, in truth, would be moving anywhere. All had seen better days twenty, thirty years earlier. The air had leaked out of tyres, the rubber had rotted down to the bare axles. A twice-weekly bus service linked us with a town ten miles away, where you could only wander around feeling sad; hardly anybody used the bus. The landscape around the camp was a patchwork of pasture, woodland, and river meadow where you could snare a few rabbits and catch a few fish to supplement your rations. During seven months of the year I’m sure the vicinity of the camp, if not the camp itself, was pleasanter than some moribund town. Throughout the winter a fence may as well have enclosed us. Inside, we had all our basic needs: school, clinic, library, church hall, welfare office open every Monday -five corrugated iron buildings of assorted sizes. A small canvas-covered market was held every other day in the open air. School, clinic, welfare, and market were run by outsiders who drove in from town, foreigners commuting from another country, though they too had their sorrows. We in the camp were simply a special case of a more general condition. Power was laid on to all homes with reasonable reliability. In a fair proportion of the caravans old TV sets were switched on from breakfast through to bedtime.

  Once, so I heard, there’d been fights and drunkenness as signs of frustration. No longer; frustration itself had worn out. One section of our camp – ‘the monastery’, we called it – had turned religious. Make a virtue of your poverty and limited horizons; hitch your wagon to a prayer. Some young people were cultivating different inner resources by meditating, staring at the sky, chanting to themselves, trying to open the third eye. Others read romances or day-dreamed or played endless games. Babies were born, but not many. I’d been born in the camp myself and basically had known nowhere else, though thanks to TV you might say I had also known everywhere. Yet this was an out-of-date everywhere, an everywhere from the past before life turned grey, before new things quit happening, or seemed to quit. The aliens in orbit saw to that, we were sure.

  Those unseen aliens who had dimmed the life of the world, who had turned down the lights of existence for us! Every few weeks we could spy their artificial world crossing the night sky, a brighter Venus, as it wove its complex orbit around us, taking it over every portion of the Earth at some time or other.

  ‘It’s a spider wrapping up a fly in silk till the fly can’t move a muscle,’ I’d said to my teacher from town, Miss Perry. She was skinny, with freckles and hair like rusty wires. I thought of her as rusting away along with the schoolhouse walls, yet still with some spring inside her, some bounce. She did her best to make us think.

  ‘Maybe there aren’t any aliens living up there, Joan,’ she said to me. ‘Maybe it’s just a huge machine, all automatic.’

  ‘When we’re thoroughly paralysed, they’ll arrive from the stars?’

  ‘What do the rest of you think?’ she asked the class at large. Most faces remained blank. We kids never played truant, though. Coming to school was something to do. Leaving school at sixteen was a threat – of emptiness and inactivity.

  ‘Miss, I still don’t understand what they’re doing to us,’ fat Peter Dimble said stubbornly. What they were doing to Peter was making him fat and sluggish. That was the result. ‘Are they shooting some sort of ray at us from space? Why didn’t we ever shoot back? We could have. I’ve seen rockets and missiles on TV.’

  ‘In our universe we didn’t shoot back. On our world-line we didn’t.’

  ‘You mean we did shoot back in the other universe? I wish I lived there. How do I get there?’

  Miss Perry sighed. ‘You can’t. Maybe the other universes are all just ghosts, possibilities that vanish.’

  She had been explaining how each single event which could occur gave rise to two whole universes. In one universe the event happened. In another it failed to happen. The aliens forced our world to be the one where the event didn’t happen. This was what the scientists believed.

  Over and over in innumerable ways, large ways at first then lesser ones, the aliens made our world-line switch from non-event to non-event. Initiatives ran out of steam.

  Decisions had no consequences. Choices led to inaction. Plans were cancelled, unless they were of little importance in the first place. It had to be that star in the sky which was responsible, that new little moon. How else to account for our paralysis? Wars had long since ceased. Violence had tailed off. Try as we might, always the least dramatic choice was made, the choice to do less, or nothing. Things stopped being built, designed, discovered. The economy ticked by in low gear. I suppose it had to tick, otherwise something dramatic would have occurred: such as chaos and starvation. We had seen an end to disasters as well, to any terrible accidents, tragedies, calamities of the human or the natural variety. All such wild events – good or bad, proud or bloody – only existed on TV, in old films, old newsreels from back when there was news.

  ‘It’s as if we’re walking through an endlessly long building,’ Miss Perry told us. ‘We pass through a succession of rooms, where each room has two exits. Behind one door there might be anything at all – from a treasure chest to an exploding bomb. Behind the other door there’s nothing except two more doors. Always, always we choose the door behind which there’s nothing. Always, that empty room’s waiting for us, not the one with something in it. The aliens empty the room the moment we grip the door knob. They switch the doors around. Or the rooms. The moment we decided to shoot our missiles at them, we were in a universe where we didn’t.’

  ‘Can’t we decide not to do something, so that it’ll happen after all?’ asked Jimmy Taylor, one of the black kids.

  ‘It doesn’t work that way, Jimmy.’

  No, it wouldn’t. If we decided to do nothing that was fine by them in the sky. It was a very acceptable world-line. Had the aliens aimed to be kind to us by stopping war and strife and calamity, the heart-blood of those old films? I doubted it. They wanted to make us grey and slow, so that we would quit. That’s all. It would take a long time for everything to run down calmly. We’d already had twenty years of it, starting before I’d been born. We might have another fifty or a hundred to go. The whole of my life, then some more. A life of less, and less.

  ‘I’m born with three-score pennies in a purse. Each year a penny gets lost, next year another penny till finally I’m poor, utterly poor. By the time I’m old we shan’t even understand those old films. They’ll seem as absurd as cartoons, full of crazy impossibilities.’ That’s what I wrote in an essay for Miss Perry.

  On my birthday morning as soon as I opened the curtain along my bunk Mum and Dad were waiting with smiles on their faces, holding out between them… nothing. They acted as though that
nothing was large and spherical and maybe breakable too.

  ‘Here’s a special present for a very special girl!’ exclaimed Dad.

  ‘It’s the world,’ said Mum. ‘It’s the planet Earth. We’re giving it to you. No one gave their daughter the whole world before, did they? Never ever. Because no one ever did, we can.’

  I believed them. Mum and Dad weren’t mocking me. This wasn’t any bitter joke. It was a true expression of their love and kindness. Their gift counted for more than any other gift could possibly have done, for in that electrifying moment what they were giving me was vision. They handed me nothing, therefore I saw. I was overwhelmed by a sense of everything, and wholesomeness. I felt replenished, filled with strength. You need strength to hold a world, don’t you?

  So I took it into my hands, careful at first. I was about to lay it down upon my bedding like some egg in a soft nest – an ostrich egg, the egg of a Roc! – when Mum protésted.

  ‘Don’t hide it away. Take it out with you. Take it everywhere! No need to be shy, not now that it’s yours. It had to accept you as well, you know? Well, now it has. So it’ll go anywhere with you. You can balance it on your head if you like. It won’t fall. If it does fall, it won’t break so long as you always believe in it.’

  ‘Oh I shall, Mum. I shall.’

  ‘It won’t become a different world, somebody else’s,’ Dad assured me. ‘It can’t, because it’s your own, your very own.’

  ‘So long as I don’t change, you mean?’

  ‘So long as you don’t lose it. Though to do so, you’d have to lose yourself.’

  That we had all lost our selves was my immediate thought. The aliens had taken our selves away from us and substituted changeling selves who were weaker, ineffective, hamstrung.

  They wouldn’t do that to me! My talisman was nothing they could steal, nothing they could alter, nothing they would notice. I had walked through one of those two doorways Miss Perry described, and absolutely nothing was waiting for me in the room beyond – yet at the same time I had received, secretly, everything that mattered.