by Nina Allan
How I came to be there I cannot tell you. Cally’s brother Noah believes there is a rift – a transept, he calls it – something like an enlarged pore in the void between Earth and Tristane that allows objects and occasionally people to travel instantaneously from one place to the other. Noah has a theory about Hatchmere Lake being a four-dimensional photocopy of the Shuubseet, a kind of cast of it, like one of those ready-formed plastic pond liners you can buy in garden centres. He reckons that if you photographed both lakes from the air they’d look identical, like Rorschach blots of each other, but when I asked him why that would matter he couldn’t explain. Something about twisted vortices. Makes me wish I’d paid more attention in physics really, but the Frog was such a bore. Did I ever tell you about the time I fell asleep in his class – I mean actually fell asleep – and Catey had to stab me in the arse with her compass to wake me up?
Cally says I was born on Tristane, that my life on Earth was a dream, a fugue state, something my brain invented to help me recover from what happened at Sere-Phraquet, though when I ask Cally what did happen, she refuses to tell me. She seems to think the memories will return on their own, when I’m ready to deal with them. Until then she thinks I’m better off just living from day to day.
Everything I know about Tristane I know from books. Cally’s books mostly, also a school history primer I picked up in one of the street markets in Gren-Noor. The book was faded from use, and from sunlight, but I grew very fond of it. I wish I’d kept it with me.
Paper has a slightly different texture on Tristane, because it’s made from julippa pulp, I suppose.
Nothing is like you think it is, Selena. Nothing at all.
Now at least you know why I haven’t spoken to you openly until now. You’ve probably been thinking it was just me, just Julie being her usual self-obsessed, self-important self. But honestly? I just couldn’t bear the thought of seeing that look in your eyes, the look that said, Oh God, what the fuck is she on?
You know that moment in almost every horror movie you’ll ever see, when the main character comes dashing out of the woods, or the haunted house, or the cellar or wherever, gibbering some insane story about a monster or a psycho or a secret passage leading straight into hell? There are all kinds of variations on that scene, but the one thing that’s always the same is that the person who gets told the story never believes it. You sit there watching and thinking what an idiot, can’t he see she’s telling the truth? You’re almost glad when the idiot character wanders off and gets munched by the monster, because really they should have trusted their friend in the first place.
What if it were you though? In real life, I mean? What if your best friend came rushing up to you outside Sainsbury’s and said, They’re coming, they’re coming! Would you even consider believing them, even for a second?
Of course you wouldn’t, because who would? Instead, you’d begin to convince yourself you’d seen the signs, that you’d seen this coming. That your friend hadn’t been the same since they’d hooked up with that arsehole you warned them against – Gavin or Gary or whatever his stupid name was. That they’d changed.
There are Wels catfish in Hatchmere Lake, but not giant ones. The water’s too cold.
I came out of the woods by the lake. It was the most perfect afternoon, the sunlight spinning through the trees like torn-off bits of tinfoil, the blue water shining under a blue sky like an image on a postcard from Switzerland or Italy. This place is heaven, wish you were here. A far cry from Manchester, anyway. My legs were shaking. I couldn’t understand how this place – this world – could exist at the same time as my journey in the van with Steven Barbershop. The two realities seemed to repel each other, the way magnets do, when you place the matching poles end to end and try to force them together. I stared at the lake, the kids dicking around playing British bulldog, the two old guys with their fishing rods, and I could feel the unreality pushing at my senses, building up inside my head like some sort of dust. My saliva turned bitter suddenly, as if I were about to be sick.
I kept seeing his face, that nasty grin of his: Steady on, will you? The safety locks are still on.
How could I have been so stupid? Why?
The margin between freedom and destruction is so narrow, Selena.
There was a fallen tree trunk, not far from me, twenty yards at the most. I started thinking that if I could only get to the tree trunk I could sit down on it and wait – wait until I felt better, I mean. Then I could ask someone how to find the station so I could get away from here. I could take the train to Altrincham, catch the bus home. Easy.
I remember moving towards the tree trunk, aiming myself at it, as if it were a target and I were an arrow, an arrow gliding in slow motion like in Robin of Sherwood. Just as I reached the tree trunk – I remember reaching out to touch it – it seemed to tip up at one end, thwang, like a seesaw, only then I realised it wasn’t the tree trunk tipping up, but me tipping over, my legs boneless as pipe cleaners suddenly, like one of those dolls they used to make from clothes pegs on Blue Peter.
When you fall down in a faint, the ground doesn’t feel hard. It’s like falling into bed, or on to one of those rubber gym mats they put down at school. It’s not the ground that’s changed its nature, but you. Your body loses all inhibition, all tension. You’re falling through space so softly and you’re not afraid. It’s as if you’re watching yourself from outside, or in a movie:
[Julie crumples to the ground. She lies motionless with her eyes closed. The camera pans out across the lake. In the distance a dog barks. The sun dips briefly behind a cloud and then comes out again.]
I don’t know how long I was unconscious – just seconds, probably, though I have no way of telling. When I came to, I lay still with my eyes closed, reluctant to move. The scent of earth and dry leaves was comforting and I wanted to go on smelling it. Then I realised I was cold, that there was a breeze blowing. The sun had gone in. I wished I’d thought to bring a sweatshirt, only it had been so hot earlier the idea hadn’t occurred to me. Then I heard someone – a woman – asking me if I was all right, and I came properly awake.
“Thank goodness I found you,” she said. That’s lucky, I thought. I can ask her where the station is. I opened my eyes and she was looking down at me, a woman with dark skin and light grey eyes and closely cropped hair. She looked confused, or maybe just worried, and I wondered if I’d seen her before maybe, if I knew her from somewhere.
“Julie,” she said. “You could have died out here.”
It was only then that I became fully aware of my surroundings. I was still by a lake, but everything was different. The tree trunk was gone, and instead of the footpath leading into the forest there was just bare earth, a greyish, bleak-looking shoreline strewn with pebbles and gravel. Off to one side I could see several small wooden cabins, or shacks, built from planks and roofed over with corrugated iron. Behind the shacks the ground rose steeply towards a line of trees, a bluish-grey forest, vast and faceless, like in one of those depressing films about the end of the world.
I knew something was wrong, but I was still too dazed and disoriented to work out what it was. I’ll never get home from here, I thought. I closed my eyes again and pictured stars, constellations so wildly off kilter it was as if the world had slipped sideways and out of orbit. Then I saw blackness, soft as velvet. I let it surround me and for a moment felt warmer, wrapped in the dark.
“Get up,” the woman said. “We need to get moving.” She put out her hand to help me stand, and I took it without thinking. Her fingers were warm, a detail that convinced me she was real. She took off her coat, a dun-coloured parka. “Put this on,” she said. “You must be freezing.”
I pulled it on over my T-shirt. It had a sour smell, like horse hair, but the warmth, after feeling so chilled, was an immediate relief. I smiled. I still couldn’t bring myself to speak, but the woman seemed to accept that and didn’t press me. “Come on,” she said. “It’ll be dark soon.”
“What�
�s your name?” I whispered finally. “Where are we going?”
“I’m Cally,” she said. “And we’re going home.”
Kayleigh, I thought, remembering Marillion, the lie I’d told Steven Barbershop about me liking the band. Had I dreamed this woman up, I wondered, out of the confusion and terror of what had just happened?
No, I thought. It’s too cold to be a dream.
I pulled Cally’s jacket more tightly around me.
Hatchmere Lake in winter can feel desolate and miles from anywhere. It is as if, as the seasons turn, the forest turns inward towards its other self, its shadow self: Shoe Lake, close by the city of Fiby, in Tristane’s arid and rather chilly southern hemisphere.
* * *
What I remember most about the afternoon of July 16th 1994: the piercing blue sky, the whirr and click of fishing lines, the sounds of children playing British bulldog. I remember a man in a long grey mackintosh walking two Irish wolfhounds, a woman in a patchwork skirt, rubbing sunscreen into the arms and cheeks of a girl in a wheelchair.
* * *
Cally has long, narrow feet and delicate hands. As we made our way along the foreshore of Shoe Lake, I remembered walking with Lucy at dusk past an old factory yard somewhere in the backstreets of Manchester: the iron gates chained shut, a warehouse looming, semi-invisible, out of the darkness, a single light in an upstairs window where no light should have been.
“I don’t like this,” Lucy said to me. “I think we should go.”
That was when I remembered when I’d first seen Cally: the night I went to see Schindler’s List with Allison Gifford. Afterwards, on the street outside Allison’s flat, a woman had stopped and asked me for a light.
“I don’t smoke,” I said to her.
“That’s OK,” she said. We both stood there for a moment, just looking at each other. I remember thinking it must be the night for weird things happening because I was sure I recognised her from somewhere, even though at the same time I knew I’d never seen her before in my life.
* * *
“Cities live and die, like everyone else,” Cally said to me. Months later this was, in one of the waterfront cafés in Gren-Seet. “Their lifespans are longer, that’s all.”
We walked along the lakeshore for what seemed like ages. The going was uneven, but not strenuous. There was a taste of dusk in the air, and when we finally turned away from the lake most of the light was already gone from the sky. Cally led me towards a small expanse of gravel and dirt, a kind of parking area. Scrubland, dotted with narrow copses of scrawny-looking trees, extended in all directions. Leading off from the car park was a rough dirt road. A vehicle stood waiting, a high-sided cart, harnessed to a large brown animal, some kind of donkey. A man jumped down from the driver’s seat and came towards us. He had long hair, and wore a hooded fleece. He and Cally embraced briefly, then stepped apart.
“I found her,” Cally said. “Down by the fishing shacks.”
“She can’t keep running off like this, Cay, it’s ridiculous. And dangerous. You should make her see a doctor.”
“No,” Cally said. “You know what they’ll say. They might try to take her in again. I’m not risking that. She’ll be fine, Noah. She just needs time.”
“And your coat, apparently.” He was staring at me, the man, as if the sight of me was familiar to him and not particularly welcome. There was a look in his eyes, a weariness, and I noticed for the first time how alike they were physically, Noah and Cally. Were they brother and sister?
“She’ll be fine,” Cally repeated. She took my right hand in both of hers and kneaded it as if she was trying to put warmth into me, traced her index finger lightly across my knuckles. They were grazed, I saw. I’d probably caught them while I was running through the bushes.
“Come on then,” Noah said. “Give me your stuff.”
Cally handed him the backpack she was carrying, hoisting it carefully from her shoulders. It looked heavy. “Don’t bash it,” she said. He gave her a look. “Get in,” she said to me. “Noah will help you.” She placed an arm around my shoulders, steering me gently towards the cart. There was a neat, two-rung stepladder bolted to its side just below the door. Noah stepped up to the driver’s platform and then reached out his hand.
“All right?” he said. I took his hand to steady myself and climbed into the cart. Behind the driver’s seat was a wooden bench, bulked out with cushions. I settled myself in one corner. In spite of the warmth of Cally’s coat, my teeth were chattering. Cally pulled herself into the cart and sat down beside me.
“You’re safe now,” she said. “We’ll soon be home.”
“Heesh, Marsia,” Noah said. He jingled the reins, and I realised he must be talking to the donkey. The cart lurched and then began to roll forward, its grooved tyres crunching against the gravel.
It was now almost dark. Cally fiddled with something under the bench and four carriage lights came on. They cast a dim yellow glow that lit up the road directly in front of us but not much further. The sky overhead was strewn with stars, vast swathes of them, bright and numerous as sequins sewn into a ballgown. Catey had a dress like that from Monsoon, I thought. She was going to wear it to the prom.
Did the stars seem brighter because it was darker here, or were they different stars? The question scrabbled for a handhold on the surface of my mind and then slid off.
I closed my eyes. The air smelled fresh and damp, the way it does in the Peaks when it’s been raining.
I’ve missed the barbecue, I thought. I imagined them all in Linsey’s garden, bopping around to one of Richard Lovell’s ghastly Top 40 mix tapes and getting stuck into Catey’s vodka punch.
White Czar vodka, she made it from, that lethal paint-stripper knock-off they sold at the Spar.
Who cares when it’s just a mixer? Catey always said.
I thought about Catey, the way she would have met me at the door, arms flung around my neck and the warm smell of her, her mother’s Rive Gauche cologne and the bubbling up of laughter she could never quite contain.
Thank God you’re here, Ju. Maisie’s just been sick behind the greenhouse.
The scent of lilacs and charcoal and warm tarmac, all of them gone.
2
[From Our Planet, Our History, Our Home: Elementary Studies in the geography, mythology and culture of Tristane and her Golden Satellites]
Tristane is a big planet. Her land surface is divided more or less equally between the forested region, which has a tropical climate, and the belts, which are cool to temperate, except at the equator, where the temperatures regularly exceed those of the forests. The equatorial belt is arid and stony, swept by vicious dust storms. Nothing much grows there – just the ribbed, boulder-like succulents that are known as water towers, and the rust-coloured, semi-animate lichens that coat the cracks and undersides of the rock formations. Both the water towers and the lichens have evolved to store water.
There is a famous southern legend about a seven-person expedition that set out from Fiby hoping to reach the city-state of Galena, which lies on the boundary with the Wrssin Forest and several hundred miles due north of the equator. The explorers suffered one tragedy after another. Two of them died of heat exhaustion. The others would have died also, had it not been for the moisture and nutrients they were able to harvest from the lichens and water towers. Chalia Bestow’s classic novel The Seven, written from the point of view of Vesrea, the expedition’s horologist, includes extended meditations upon the nature of the equatorial region and its manifold dangers. The Vesrea character describes the landscape of the equatorial region as dangerously hypnotic:
The rocks soar up. On a clear night they seem to glow, their faces and fissures ablaze, like the windows in the forests of skyscrapers that have sprung up along the harbourfronts of Arcturus, Fiby. Further out into the desert, the rock formations are so dramatic they are almost alive: an army of giants, their mouths fringed with tapering, dagger-like crystals, like the teeth of Gren-Moloch.
At its extreme north, Tristane is icy, a grey-white wilderness of needle-like rock formations and solid permafrost. There are bottomless, water-filled crevasses, topped with a crust of ice a hundred feet thick. The southern polar regions – the land to the south of the Marillienseet – remains largely unmapped. There are numerous legends among the belt settlers as to why that is, although Tristane’s early geographers mainly put it down to the practical difficulties of crossing the mountains, which act as a natural cordon for the entire area.
The twin temperate zones known as the belts lie to either side of the equatorial desert. The southern belts are slightly narrower and a great deal less fertile. The population is sparse and mostly nomadic. What towns there are retain the feel of way stations, temporary halts on the journey from the southern mountains to the northern forests.
The fashion that once existed for large-scale explorations of the southern regions has largely died out, although this seems only to have increased the public appetite for expedition memoirs, the more doomed the better.
The more doomed the better, Cally says. She showed me a book she owned, a beautifully illustrated volume called Last Vestiges that reprinted an ancient saga of the southern belts, set alongside textured monoprints showing the artefacts found at the abandoned base camp of the Linder Traas expedition. There hadn’t been much to retrieve: some scrimshaw buttons, a pair of gutting scissors, two hunting knives, a sealskin mitten, a waterproof survey map that covered the part of the journey they’d already completed, a library copy of Shomer Narlep’s Testament, protected inside a Ziploc wallet.