By Light Alone

by Adam Roberts

  George slipped his scope off, and looked at the lopsided brightness of the moon. Over the course of half a minute the flare on the bottom portion faded and the old regular gleam returned. ‘Can we go down now?’ Leah asked, in a bored voice. This, George understood, piercingly: this moment, when Leah is abstracted and bored, and I am sitting here replete with the beauty of what I have been watching, this is the perfect moment. Its perfection, a function of its asymmetry, and fashioned of the exquisite, elegiac rightness of the bond between them. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Let’s go down.’

  A sunkite sailed blackly, silently, overhead, on its way to its night-tether, ceilinging them as they walked to the door.

  Downstairs, George went through his messages. There was another, full of ire and contumely, from his assertivist therapist, raging at George’s continual absence, and heaping all sorts of abuse upon him. He watched the whole of it, up to the moment when the therapist said: ‘I shall, of course, bill you for these calls; they and their abuse in particular constitute a valuable therapeutic strategy’, when he closed it down.

  21

  How much longer? A year and a little more, and throughout this fragile perfect asymmetry, Leah’s childishness and George’s adulthood. Her semi-detachment from him as she found greater and greater focus in her own life and friends; his increasing settlement of all that mattered in the world on her life. They did very little, by the usual metrics of ‘did’. Leah improved at English Language and Creative Composition, and indeed showed flashes of genuine talent. George and she took a holiday in Antarctica – Marie was supposed to come as well, but some other pressing engagement kept her back at the last minute. Afterwards Marie, on (George assumed) the principle of equality, took Leah and Ezra both away to Argentina, leaving her husband behind. A week of dinosaur riding and adventure play for the kids. When they returned, George was almost embarrassed to ask Leah: ‘How was it?’ ‘Oh,’ she replied, folding her long legs beneath her and settling to a game screen (just like old times!) in a chair, ‘it was OK.’ ‘Just OK?’ ‘Whatever,’ she said.

  There was a message from Ergaste: he was in NY and wanted to talk. George invited him to the house.

  ‘Can I say hello to Uncle Ergaste?’ Leah asked, putting her head round the corner.

  ‘He’s not here yet.’

  ‘But I saw him!’

  ‘That was just a message.’

  ‘No,’ Leah explained, patiently. ‘It wasn’t a “message”. I saw him.’

  ‘It was on the Lance.’

  ‘Oh! What’s the Lance?’

  ‘Leah,’ chucklingly, ‘don’t be silly. You know what the Lance is.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said airily. ‘I’ve heard people talk of it. But you know, by jiminy, I’ve never been wholly sure.’

  ‘You remember when Granda was alive, and he would call us on the Lance from Scotland?’ She squeezed her eyes between cheekbones and eyebrows, as if staring into a ferociously bright light, so George went on: ‘You used to like putting your arm through his chest.’ When this elicited nothing, he added, ‘Come along, Leah. The Lance makes a picture of the person you’re speaking to, in three dimensions.’

  ‘So Uncle Ergaste isn’t here?’

  ‘Not actually, not yet.’

  ‘OK.’ Leah said. ‘Can I have some food?’

  ‘Go ask Walter.’

  ‘Walter’s gone.’

  George pondered this. ‘He shouldn’t have. He should still be here. Did you look in the kitchen?’

  ‘I looked in the kitchen,’ Leah replied, haughtily. ‘Didn’t I,’

  ‘Well, Walter is supposed to be there. Maybe he’d popped out for a moment. Why not go look again?’

  ‘I will look again,’ said Leah, as if making a concession. ‘But, Daddy, if he’s not there, can I just help myself?’

  ‘What – to food? Sure. I guess so. But I’m sure he’ll be there.’

  She said ‘thanks Dad’ languidly, and disappeared round the corner. A moment later she was back. ‘Dad,’ she said, elongating the vowel.

  Something prickled in George’s pelt. Some atavistic sense of grave danger on the very edge of his well-being. He didn’t know what cued him into this sudden apprehension. The little hairs on his arms lifted away from the skin. Naturally, the danger was not of a physical sort. He moved his face slowly towards her. ‘Yes, my love?’ he said, unable to keep the cautiousness from his tone.

  ‘I was just thinking.’

  There was a silence. A flitter went past the window with a gushing noise. It was a bright, cloudy day. To fill the gap, George said: ‘Thinking is good.’

  ‘Wondering, rather: when can we go see Mother and Father?’

  The subcutaneous tingle in George’s skin. He felt that caffeiney, or cSnuff-y, sensation of sharpened attentiveness. Something very large was balanced precariously on some teeter-totter, threatening to tumble down. He had known such contentment, the thought of losing it was ghastly. But there was nothing to do but tread very carefully, and hope he did not fall. Through a gummy mouth, George spoke carefully: ‘What do you mean, my love?’

  ‘Oh nothing,’ said Leah, and George’s heartbeat accelerated a little, as if at a dodged bullet. But then she said: ‘I just thought, we can fly to Antarctica and Argentina, and Ararat begins with a A.’

  ‘Ararat does begin with an A.’

  ‘I just wondered if we could go there, maybe. I’d like to see Mummy.’

  ‘You can see your mother right now,’ said George.

  ‘Other mother, oh it doesn’t matter,’ said Leah, launching into a slouchy gibbon-walk across the carpet in the direction of the window. ‘Only, it’s only that we never seem to go there.’

  George swallowed. ‘It’s not a place with happy associations. After all. Now, is it, my love?’

  ‘I don’t mind so much about seeing my other dad, he was a boss and he wasn’t very nice to Mummy.’ Spoken with disdain. ‘But it might be nice to see my other mummy,’ said Leah, peering through the window, and showing her teeth to the world. ‘It doesn’t matter though. I’ll go see if Walter’s in the kitchen, and maybe he can make me something containing peanut-paste-and-pear.’

  She lolled out of the room. George sat in his chair trembling like a man in a fever. But this was an overreaction. Kids say all sorts of idiotic things, after all. There was no point in getting het. In getting het up. He could see the sky through the window, so he looked at that. He directed his attention towards the bar of mottled blue and white that lay between the roof of the De Hoch Building and the top of his own window. It had a weirdly shimmery quality to it, as if it would not stay in place. But surely we can depend on the sky. White clouds moved, the sun breaking through intermittently and opening a bright claw of dazzle in the window glass. The screen was on, of course, in the corner of the room, sound off; and George turned his face that way for a change, letting his eyes rest on the silent images. It was a news feed, and the visuals were of a large mass of people compressed between two rows of stone buildings, surging and flowing up the passage in a tidal rush, encountering the fat metal posts of military police quadpods and being beaten back in spume-bursts of smoky sprayfire. All in perfect screen silence. The crowd recoiled and shuddered back down its street, and gathered itself, and surged back up again. George found it soothing, in fact: this great systolicdiastolic pulse of people. Forward they poured, in a mass, and back they washed, underneath a sky coloured from the brightest blue pigment. The margins of the images were crusted with infographics, little huddles of people waiting to be pulled out to provide commentary. George took a breath, and waved his hand in the beam to turn the sound on. Then he pulled out the News Genie from the bottom left. To the soothing wave-motion was superadded a white-noise roar and crash, and the Genie’s murmuring voice, saying (though George wasn’t really following it) ‘agromanagerial rebellion’ and ‘Mexico’ and ‘violence’ and ‘hydraulic society’ and ‘superstructure’ and ‘containment’.

  He placed a hand on his c
hest. His driving heartbeat slowed. How foolish he was!

  Marie came through, looking for something that wasn’t him. ‘Ergaste is coming to call,’ George told her, marvelling at the smooth control he possessed over his vocal organs.

  ‘If you must watch that beastly stuff,’ she replied, ‘have the decency to turn the sound off.’

  He complied with a handwave. ‘Marie,’ he said. ‘Leah just said something strange.’

  She stopped, stood straighter, turned her gaze towards him. Her gaze was calm but focused. He could read it. It said: Do not disturb the balance. It said: Do not upset the solidity of what I have, painfully, reclaimed with my daughter. So he said: ‘Nothing.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing.’ She looked severely at him, so he added: ‘Forget I spoke.’

  ‘If I could,’ said Marie, looking about her distractedly. ‘If only I could.’ And she went out of the room.

  22

  If George was not precisely discombobulated when Ergaste came in, he was not, as it were, quite combobulated either. He received him in the Blue Room. The big Englishman burlied in and began without preliminaries: ‘I’m a Catholic, a Christian-Catholic.’

  ‘Oh,’ said George.

  ‘You probably didn’t know that.’

  ‘I don’t think I did,’ George conceded. ‘Or – wait. Maybe you did mention it, once before?’

  ‘We can divorce, you know, but’s frowned on. And,’ Ergaste added, with almost furious vehemence, ‘and we eat our God. You know?’

  ‘The bread and wine stuff?’ said George. ‘Of course I had heard about all that.’

  Ergaste lowered at him, and then smiled a leonine smile that showed off all the central teeth including his four sharpest. ‘We devour our God weekly,’ he said, again. ‘We devour God every week,’ he clarified, in case George had thought he had said ‘weakly’. ‘That’s the kind of carnivorous religion mine is.’

  ‘OK,’ said George.

  ‘Thing about eating,’ Ergaste went on, in hectoring mode. ‘It has changed. Yeah? We don’t need to do it for sustenance, now, what? Any of us could get the hair.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So if not sustenance, then what? I’ll tell you. Power is what. God is the most powerful thing in the cosmos, top of the pyramid, and we eat Him, yeah? It’s not the other way around, that’s the really important part of it. Yeah. We’re the predator, and he’s the prey. That’s what it means, now. That’s what food is. Strength and force and the wolf’s delight is what. Do you understand? Do you, though?’

  ‘I’m going to come clean, Ergaste,’ George said, scratching an itch in his scalp. ‘I’m not sure I do, actually. I can’t honestly say I have the slightest notion what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Look,’ said Ergaste. ‘I know how it works.’

  ‘Then tell me. Tell me how it works. Then we’ll both know.’

  ‘Fucking is a game, now. I know you and Ysabelle got playful, on the mountain.’

  This was not the direction George expected the conversation to go, and it wrongfooted him. ‘What?’

  ‘That’s the way it’s played, I know. That’s the game. But I insist you regard Em in a different category.’

  ‘Who’s Emin?’

  Ergaste’s sculptural nostrils dilated equinely. ‘I insist’, he repeated, raising his voice, ‘that you regard Emma. In. A. Different. Category.’

  George flushed red. ‘Emma! Of course—’

  ‘I do not come here to say,’ Ergaste rolled on, as if addressing a large crowd, ‘that you ought to be grateful. I do not claim all the credit for returning your stolen daughter. I did not do this to be thanked. But to repay what I did by – fucking my wife!’ Ergaste planted his two enormous feet solidly and, with a conjuror’s flourish, brought a handgun out of his pocket. It looked, as these things do, like an augmented Fwn.

  George thought to himself: good gracious. ‘Look, look,’ he said. ‘Now now.’ Those two, for the moment, were all the words he had.

  The sunlight came in bright, briefly, through the window; and the room gleamed. Then the clouds muted the beams again, and the lighting shifted back down.

  ‘This is a gun,’ said Ergaste, pointing it at George’s chest.

  ‘Golly,’ George agreed.

  ‘I’m showing it to you. I’m not shooting you with it.’

  George pondered the difference between these two things. ‘Ergaste,’ he said. ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman. With – Emma.’

  At this Ergaste turned the gun over in his hand, looked at it, and replaced it in his pocket. Doing this, somehow, seemed even more menacing than bringing it out in the first place. ‘The one thing you could do to make it worse,’ he said, quietly, ‘would be, to lie about it.’

  ‘I’m not lying,’ said George.

  ‘You have seen the gun,’ said Ergaste. ‘That’s really why I came over. That’s why I came.’ He brooded for a bit, and peered at the carpet. Then, his voice brightening, and as if it had just occurred to him, he added: ‘I bought it in a little shop two blocks from here – just now! Amazing little emporium.’ Then the creases cracked his brow again, and he glowered at the floor. ‘The idea was: first show you the gun. Second, hope there’s no need to use it.’

  ‘There’s no need,’ George assured him. His heart, fashionably late to the party, had begun pumping and hurdling inside his chest. He had the crinkly inner sense of adrenalin fizzing along his veins.

  ‘I can tell you, Ergaste,’ said George, realizing the truth of the words as he uttered them. ‘Marie and I are separating. We’ll divorce. We’ll be divorced by autumn.’ It was an offering, the best George could do. A bowl of jungle fruit laid before the trumpet-mouthed idol. Ergaste watched him distantly. ‘It’s broken us, the whole thing. You talk about fucking as a pastime – I haven’t done that for years. Well, a year. Never with Em, you know, honestly.’

  ‘Then why would she say—’ Ergaste boomed. But he interrupted himself with ‘for the sake of fuck!’ at prodigious volume.

  ‘Honestly, in all truth. Not with Marie or anybody,’ George went on. ‘Not with anybody for longer than a year. Everything about my life is different now. Everything has changed.’ He was imploring now. Ergaste opened his mouth. Then he shut it again.

  There was a loud bang, like a bass-resonant cymbal crash, in another room.

  George twitched. The crackling of his hair-like nerves. Ergaste remained completely impassive. It sounded like something heavy falling down. It sounded like it came from downstairs.

  ‘Show myself out,’ boomed Ergaste, and spun about like a motorized gun turret.

  He was gone.

  George’s brain’s computational capacity must have been a limited thing; for he found he could not process Ergaste’s appearance, and the gun, and the realization that he was going to separate from Marie, and the loud crash from another room, all at once. His brain attempted to consolidate all these sense data, but instead of putting them together into a single unified narrative, they blurred and slid. Instead, across his inner eye there flashed the image of a man with his hands pressed together in prayer, a serpent of spraying red leaping from the side of his forehead.

  The crash. What?

  Had it come from outside the building? Was it just the sound of his own heart beating?

  ‘OK,’ said George, to nobody.

  Leah came through, looking apprehensive. George expected her to ask what the big crashing noise had been, but instead she just looked at her father with a strange longing in her eyes. It occurred to George that she knew something, or sensed something, with a child’s prescience. Or, he thought, perhaps she had actually been eavesdropping. There was no point in pretence, at any rate. The sooner she knew, the longer she would have to adjust.

  ‘Leah,’ he said. ‘Your mother and I will be – separating. Do you know what that means?’

  ‘It means being cut up,’ she said.

  ‘Yes. Sort of, yes. It means we will live i
n different houses. But you will still see the both of us.’ George’s heart was rattling like an old two-stroke. If it went on like this, it was going to shake itself free from the mounting of his ribcage and bounce down into his pelvis. He ran a hand over his face, and breathed deeply, and tried again. ‘You will spend some time with me, and some time with your mother. Yes?’

  Leah’s eyes slipped to the right, and she said. ‘I see.’

  ‘It’ll be OK,’ he assured her.

  The gaze bounced back to him. ‘You’ll get back together after a bit?’

  ‘I don’t know about that.’

  ‘So how will it be OK?’

  ‘It will be OK.’

  ‘OK, like, how?’

  ‘It’ll be OK because we both still love you.’

  ‘Ez?’

  ‘Him too.’ In the moment he had forgotten about Ezra. ‘Of course. We still love you both.’

  ‘Will Ez stay with me?’

  ‘Yes. You two won’t be separated. I’m going to sit down, now, my love.’

  ‘OK,’ she said, as he slumped into a chair. And then, with a rolling drawl, ‘O-o-oh kay.’ She let her arms droop, and performed a sort of sloping, dangling stagger to the right; one step, two steps, three steps. For a moment her limbs were ropes. Then she perked up her stance. ‘Later, Dad,’ she concluded, brightly, and ducked back through the door.

  23

  His conversation with Marie was not good. The conversation was powered by bile, a subsidiary of Recrimination Inc. They sat down together for the first time in – oh, months. And George stuttered something about how they couldn’t keep avoiding things. They were eating. They were discussing things over lunch. The food was Togliatti and Peach Cider. Marie did not cry. Of course she didn’t; that wouldn’t have been very like her. But her hostility was extraordinarily pronounced. She said right out: it was all his fault. She could not, she said, blame him directly for Leah’s kidnapping; but she could certainly point to his manifold failings when it came to supporting her during and after that profound trauma. It was her duty to point that out. As she itemized these, there was a weird sensation in George’s stomach. It felt as if it were digesting itself. The words poured down, and he ducked his head as she spoke because that was only fair; but all the time he was trying to locate the nature of this gut-tug. Some sort of cousin to hunger-for-food, like that but not that. A palpable void. It felt like his body decaying from the inside out. It wasn’t that. It felt, bathetically enough, more like gas, like something expanding out from his core. Although at the same time it was adrenalized, incipiently exciting, as if something very large were about to happen. It was, he understood with a click, the same sensation he had had upon the slopes of Mount Ararat when he had stepped out in old-fashioned skis. Poised at the top, and about to go hurtling downwards. It felt like that state of mind rare amongst the rich: that the cushion between the self and disaster had been removed. It was the intoxication of recklessness. His life would never be the same. This was the thing itself.