by Nina Allan
Contents
Cover
Praise for The Rift
Also by Nina Allan and available from Titan Books
Title Page
Dedication
Copyright
The Before
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
A Voyage to Arcturus
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Franziska’s Journey
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
If I Could Tell You I Would Let You Know
Acknowledgement
About the Author
Also Available from Titan Books
Praise for The Rift
“This calm, quiet book contemplates the spaces between worlds and hearts, reality and… elsewhere. Tristane takes its place alongside Viriconium and the Dream Archipelago as one of the great creations of British literature.”
Dave Hutchinson, author of BSFA Award-winning Europe in Winter
“A heart-rending novel about being believed, being trusted, and the temptation to hide the truth. Of people going missing, and their incomplete stories. A generous book, it leaves the reader looking at the world anew. Dizzying stuff.”
Anne Charnock, author of Philip K. Dick Award finalist A Calculated Life
“Beautifully told, absorbing, and eerie in the best way – I was left contemplating its images of alienation, connection, and parasitic threat days after I had finished reading it.”
Yoon Ha Lee, author of Hugo and Nebula Award-nominated Ninefox Gambit
“Astonishing and brilliant, the best thing this immensely gifted writer has yet done.”
Adam Roberts, author of The Thing Itself
“Combining mystery, psychology, fantasy and science fiction with cool, stylish assurance… a genre-busting treat.”
Lisa Tuttle, author of The Mysteries
“A superb portrayal of the bond between sisters in a world of ever-shifting realities. Allan weaves a line between the familiar and the profoundly strange with effortless skill and assurance.”
E. J. Swift, author of Osiris
“A startlingly original and deeply affecting journey into the otherworlds of grief and its afterlife, The Rift is a marvel.”
James Bradley, author of Clade
“An intricate and empathetic journey into the feeling of not belonging. The Rift examines what it’s like to inhabit a house, a city, even an alien landscape. Then it asks – how do we know those places? When are we accepted, and when does that place become home? It’s a deep and powerful novel, speaking to those of us who see the world and yet struggle, in flux, to be a part of it.”
Aliya Whiteley, author of The Arrival of Missives
Also by Nina Allan and available from Titan Books
the RACE
NINA ALLAN
TITAN BOOKS
To Matt, Suze and Albie with much love
The Rift
Print edition ISBN: 9781785650376
E-book edition ISBN: 9781785650390
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP
First edition: July 2017
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Copyright © 2017 by Nina Allan. All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
The Before
Selena became friends with Stephen Dent the summer before the summer Julie went missing. Stephen Dent lived on Sandy Lane, four or five doors down from where Selena and Julie and their parents lived. He taught mathematics at Carmel College, although Selena didn’t know that until later. The first time Selena saw Stephen he was getting off a bus. She noticed him because of what he was carrying: a transparent plastic bucket with a large orange fish swimming in it. Selena watched the man go into his house and then she went into hers. A couple of days later she saw him again, buying a packet of straight-to-wok noodles at the Spar shop at the bottom end of Pepper Street. Selena was there with her sister Julie. Julie was buying a glittery lipstick and Selena was buying a pop magazine but they were mainly looking for an excuse to get out of the house. The summer of Stephen Dent was also the summer that Selena’s parents almost split up. Julie and Selena weren’t supposed to know about that, but it wasn’t difficult to work out, not so much because of the shouting as because of the silences that descended when the rows were over. The sisters assumed it was their father who was having the affair. They held long intense discussions all that winter and spring about who he might be sleeping with, without coming to any definite conclusions, and only finding out months afterwards that it was not Raymond Rouane who had gone off the rails, but Margery.
For Selena, the most memorable thing about that time was that she and Julie became close again, almost as close as they had been when they were younger, giggling and whispering in corners and finding any and every excuse to be alone together. Selena felt overjoyed at this development, almost enough to be secretly grateful for the disaster that had prompted it. She had felt Julie’s growing away from her not just as a loss, but as a punishment. The reinstatement of her sister’s affections seemed like a miracle.
Not that it lasted. But for the first part of that last summer they were tight as drums, thick as thieves, close as conspirators. The memories flowed together in Selena’s mind still: the smells of baking tarmac and cracked lawns, the particular stillness of those evenings, mauve shreds of twilight collecting in the mouths of alleyways and shop entrances as it began to get dark, the charred scent from their neighbours’ barbecues. Neither of their parents seemed to care what time they came in at night, or even notice until they got back that they’d been away.
* * *
Stephen Dent was two people ahead of them in the checkout queue. Selena nudged Julie in the ribs.
“That’s him,” she said. “The fish guy.”
“What fish guy?” Julie said, too loud.
“Shut up.” Selena spun around to face the door. She did not want the fish man to turn and see her, to imprint her upon his memory. He was tall and slightly stooped, and his hair was going grey, a detail that contrasted oddly with the eye-burning Day-Glo orange of his Adidas trainers. He stood out from the crowd, Selena thought, as people who are loners or misfits tend to do. Julie glanced at him once in an offhand manner then appeared to dismiss him. At one time, Selena would have bumped her in the ribs again and whispered: “Alien.” Alien-spotting was a game they used to play all the time, back when Julie was fourteen and Selena was twelve and they were both obsessed with The X-Files. Anyone they happened to see who was wearing odd clothes or acting strangely, they would raise their eyebrows knowingly then race around the corner and collap
se into giggles. Selena remembered sometimes laughing so hard there were tears in her eyes. She didn’t believe these people were aliens, not really, but a part of her felt excited by the possibility that they could be. What she enjoyed mostly was the closeness with Julie, the way they didn’t even have to look at each other to know what the other was thinking. The laughter bubbling in their chests, threatening to burst out any minute, like the alien in the movie Alien, only without all the blood.
At some point during the months following her fifteenth birthday, Julie stopped being interested in aliens and began spending most of her time alone, or with friends from school Selena didn’t know. Even now, during the delicious, unexpected weeks of their renewed intimacy, Selena was afraid to ask Julie if she thought the fish guy might be an alien in case Julie had decided that aliens were permanently off the menu. One false step and Julie would tut and turn away and it would be half an hour at least before things were all right again.
They watched The X-Files on video that summer, sometimes, if Julie was in the right mood, but it wasn’t the same. Which was a shame, because the fish guy – Stephen Dent – was such a perfect alien. There were the trainers, for a start, which now Selena came to think of it were exactly the same shade of orange as the fish in the bucket. Then there was the contrast between his scrawny, schoolboy’s body and his wiry grey hair. He looked like an alien who had taken over the body of a child, a core X-Files concept if ever there was one, and now Selena had no one to share it with.
She watched the fish man as he paid for his noodles and then headed for the door. As he passed by her their eyes met, just for a moment, and Selena found herself thinking how sad he looked, how lost. She often wondered if it was that first glancing eye contact, their mutual recognition, that made it possible for them to become friends so quickly, later.
* * *
He told Selena he had moved up north from Stoke-on-Trent. His flat – his maisonette, actually – was an identical copy of the bottom two floors of the Rouanes’ house. Selena found it mildly unsettling, to step inside Stephen Dent’s home and find the same arrangement of rooms and hallways and dado rails as in her own. She knew perfectly well that if her mother had known about her visits to Stephen Dent’s flat she would have put a stop to them, but Margery didn’t know, she had no idea, and so the visits continued. Selena knew nothing about Stephen Dent’s history until after he was dead. She liked to sort through his books, which were piled three-deep on the shelves in Stephen’s study, or the dining room as it was in Selena’s house. Stephen’s books seemed to be in no particular order: novels stacked next to dictionaries, mathematics textbooks intermingled with biographies of Dickens and Einstein and Chekhov, and an opera singer called Farinelli, a castrato who was the star of Handel’s operas.
“How do you remember where anything is?” Selena asked him.
Stephen laughed. His laugh was strained and dry, more like a cough than a laugh, as if he found the idea of laughter embarrassing and had invented a new sound to replace it, the way the newspapers would replace swear words with a row of asterisks. “I just do,” he said. “Actually, it’s easier. When you shelve books in alphabetical order you stop noticing them.”
Selena didn’t believe him at first, but she found it was true. Stephen’s books were more interesting to look at because you could never predict what you were going to find. And the strange thing was that in spite of the random arrangement it really wasn’t difficult to remember where a particular book was, if you needed to find it again. Selena soon learned that the book about black holes was shelved next to the tragedies of Aeschylus, that the Collins Guide to British Butterflies could be found tucked in next to Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.
The only books Stephen Dent kept in order were his books on koi carp. Selena’s favourite was a long, heavy volume in both Japanese and English, with a colour photograph of a different fish on every page. Selena learned that koi carp were just ordinary river carp that had been selectively bred for colour. There were more than a dozen named colour varieties: kohaku, taisho sanke, showa sanke, tancho, chagoi, asagi, utsurimono, bekko, goshiki, shusui, kinginrin, ochiba, goromo, hikari-moyomono, kikokuryu, kin-kikokuryu, ogon, kumonryu. There was even a name for koi that didn’t fit exactly into any of the other categories: kawarimono. Stephen taught her how to write some of the group names in Japanese characters, which were called kanji. She found the kanji fascinating because they seemed to add up to more than themselves, containing many shades of meaning within the one precisely intricate set of pen-strokes. So different from English letters, which were exactly what they said and no more.
The fish Selena had seen Stephen carrying off the bus in the plastic bucket was a taisho sanke and her name was Takako.
* * *
When Selena asked Stephen how come he knew Japanese, he told her he’d spent a year in Osaka, teaching English. “I lived with a family called the Shiburins. Mr and Mrs Shiburin were both teachers. I never became particularly close to them, but I didn’t know my own parents that well, either.”
The Shiburins had a daughter, Hiromi. She was nineteen. “Did you fall in love with her?” Selena asked, knowing that the answer was obvious: of course he did. He was still in love with her when he came to live in Lymm, almost thirty years later. Stephen showed Selena a photograph of Hiromi, who had been a round-faced, gently smiling young girl with her dark hair cropped in a straight line across her forehead. Something about her made Selena think of Peter Pan, and she wondered if this was because in Stephen’s eyes at least Hiromi would never grow up. She would always be as she was in the photo, even though in real life she would be a woman now, with children of her own maybe, children the same age as she was in Stephen’s picture.
“Did you stay in touch?” Selena asked.
Stephen shook his head. “Hiromi’s father wouldn’t let her. He said she was too young to think about a relationship. He made her promise not to write to me and said that if I wrote to her he would confiscate my letters. I think he was afraid that if we kept on seeing each other she might have wanted to move to England. He hated the thought of losing her.”
Stephen learned everything he knew about koi carp from the Shiburins. Hiromi told him that individual koi might live for a hundred years or even longer. One of the Shiburins’ fish, a classic kohaku named Nero, had originally belonged to Hiromi’s grandfather, who had been given it as a coming-of-age present by his parents.
“All the fish loved Hiromi,” Stephen said. “I liked to think they saw her as a goddess.” He laughed again, that odd choking sound. When Selena asked him if he’d ever loved anyone else, after Hiromi, he didn’t answer. He acted as if he hadn’t heard the question and perhaps he hadn’t. Selena didn’t feel that she could ask it again.
Stephen’s back garden was much longer than the Rouanes’ and he kept it immaculate. It was laid out in the Japanese style, with neat sections of gravel and narrow paved pathways, drooped over by the elegant spindly trees with five-pronged red leaves that Selena had seen in the set of Japanese prints on Stephen’s living-room wall.
“They’re Acers,” Stephen told her. “Japanese maple.”
At the far end of the garden lay Stephen’s carp pond. There were twelve koi in all, ranging in age from three to twenty-five. Stephen had taught them to feed from his hand. Selena found them beautiful but a little unnerving. The oldest fish, Katsaro, was older than she was, and would probably outlive her. Katsaro knew his own name, and came gliding to the surface of the water when you called him. Selena couldn’t decide if she found this spectacularly impressive or just creepy. It had never occurred to her that fish might be capable of thought, of remembering words, but Katsaro offered proof that they were. Selena couldn’t escape the idea that he was watching her.
* * *
Selena learned that Stephen taught maths, but other than that and his time in Japan she knew nothing about his life before she met him and the truth was she wasn’t much interested. She thought it was sad t
hat Stephen was still pining for a relationship that had ended thirty years before, especially since she had an idea that the feelings had been much stronger on Stephen’s side than on Hiromi’s. Selena felt sorry for him in a way, but the main reason she kept visiting Stephen was because he made her feel special. Stephen’s flat, so intriguingly stuffed with books and Japanese knick-knacks, gave her an escape hatch, somewhere to go where no one would question her, and that was not seething with thundery reproaches and unspoken resentments. She liked to sort through the books in Stephen’s study. She also enjoyed sitting beside the carp pool while she gave Stephen the lowdown on the latest school feuds and teacher outrages, who was in and who was out and who was an idiot. She found Stephen easy to talk to, chiefly because she knew that anything she happened to tell him would remain their secret. She avoided the subject of Julie almost entirely. Selena had the feeling that Julie knew about her visits to Stephen but had decided for whatever reason not to say anything.
As the summer passed its halfway mark and the new school term approached, Julie had begun to drift away again. This second desertion hurt even more than the first, because Selena sensed that this time their separation would be permanent. Her friendship with Stephen Dent was small recompense, but at least it was something.
The idea that Stephen might have done something wrong – that he had been suspended from his job in Stoke-on-Trent, that one girl’s mother had accused him in open court of being a dangerous fantasist – would have seemed incredible to her, like something from the tragedies of Aeschylus. To Selena at fourteen, Stephen Dent, with his greying hair and stooped shoulders, was already an old man.
Almost exactly one week before Stephen killed himself, Selena emerged from the front door of Stephen’s maisonette just as Julie was stepping off the bus outside their house.
“Befriending the aliens now, are we?” Julie said.
“Infiltrating,” Selena said, and grinned. She felt simultaneously sheepish at being caught and gratified to the point of stupidity that Julie had acknowledged their old enthusiasm, even in passing. She felt a pinprick of guilt also, for having somehow betrayed Stephen, but consoled herself with the thought that he would never know.