The Rift

by Nina Allan

  “Your father, Radar Farquharson, who perished beneath the wheels of an ironside at Sere-Phraquet? You remember him, surely? You were there when he died.” He hunkered down, putting his face close to mine. I could feel the ebb and flow of his breath, grazing my cheek. “Officers of the city guardia recorded an accident, but anyone who knew Ray Farquharson knows it was merely fate catching up with him. Too many questions, too many enquiries, too many late-night agitations with troublemakers like my old comrade, Erroll Maas. Your father was not dangerous, not to the praesidium. But there were those who clearly thought it prudent not to let him become so.” He stood up, backed off. “I am sorry. My sister believes you should be sheltered from these truths until your mind recovers. I believe that is so much flummery. I have been watching you, Julie. I think you know – you remember – more than you admit. You need to face the facts. Your life is passing you by.”

  “And my mother?” The numbness had spread to my lips. It was as if someone else spoke the words. I did not feel them leave my body.

  “Margery? She is at home, in Tarq. Your rejection has broken her heart, though she will not say so. Why do you think Cally spends so much time at the studio? She reports to her on your progress three times daily.” He paused. “Would you like a glass of water?” he said. “You look pale.”

  He crossed to the sink and turned on the faucet, filled a beaker. The beaker was made of glass, and had a heavy base. As Noah handed me the glass, the water inside caught the light from the window. Its circular surface flashed, like a winking eye.

  “It is good and cold,” Noah said, and although I’d drunk water from the tap hundreds of times, I found myself wanting to dash the beaker into the sink.

  First-stage creef larvae are free-swimming, approximately the size of a grain of wheat.

  The water was clear, of course – there was nothing in it. I put my lips to the rim of the glass and took a long swallow. I felt better at once.

  It’s just some stupid theory, I thought. Like the black hole thing. Three trillion to one.

  8

  Lisa and I were good for a while, but it didn’t last. How could it, when I kept the truth of myself hidden from her?

  “I feel like I don’t really know you,” Lisa said to me, more than once. This was near the end of our time together, when things were beginning to get difficult. I knew she’d leave eventually, or else I would – it just hadn’t happened yet. “It’s as if you decided to cut me out, right from the start.”

  In a way she was right, but it wasn’t for any of the reasons she probably thought. Mostly when you try to hide something from someone you love it’s either because you feel guilty or because you’re afraid they won’t believe you. You’re scared some important aspect of your relationship is going to get broken and you’ll do anything to prevent that, even if it means breaking it yourself, in another way.

  None of that was true with Lisa. If I’d told her what I’m telling you now, she would have tried to believe me, and even if she couldn’t bring herself to go all the way in that, she would have accepted my story as part of me, an odd part that needn’t do us any harm, even though she most likely wished it didn’t exist. The reason I didn’t tell Lisa had nothing to do with trust. I knew I could trust her, but I didn’t want to. I thought that if I pretended none of it had happened, then it really wouldn’t have. I wanted to inhabit a world where the lies I told Lisa were true, a world in which I’d come south to escape my troubles and to make a new start. A new start with someone exactly like Lisa.

  If I could make Lisa believe this version of me, then would not this version, in some crucial sense, be real?

  There’s a woman I know, an IT technician at the hospital. Her name’s Jenny, she’s worked there for years. Soon after I first started at the Christie, Jenny went to South Africa to visit her eldest son, who runs a vineyard there. Jenny had been saving up for the trip for ages. She and her closest friend – a radiography nurse named Sheila – were always talking about it: all the things she was going to do there, all the places she hoped to see.

  While Jenny was away in Cape Town, Sheila had a massive stroke and died. It came completely out of the blue – there was nothing in Sheila’s medical records, no family history of any kind. It happened one lunchtime, in the hospital canteen, which was lucky if you think about it, although there turned out to be nothing anyone could do for her.

  Sheila died on the Thursday after Jenny left, and the following Wednesday a whole load of us went to her funeral – anyone who wasn’t on shift, basically. The day after, another Thursday, the first of Jenny’s postcards arrived: a view of Table Mountain, and a short note, telling us about her flight and her safe arrival. Someone pinned it to the office notice board, the usual habit. I couldn’t help wondering about the other cards Jenny might have posted at the same time. There would have been one for Sheila, definitely, sent to her home address, with a private joke maybe, or a more personal message meant for Sheila alone. The following week another postcard arrived, a photograph of antelopes this time, antelopes in the veldt. Jenny mentioned a barbecue she’d been to, and a half-day safari. She sent her love to everyone, then added a PS – just in case my card to Sheila didn’t arrive – with a mobile phone number.

  The postcard got pinned to the notice board next to the first one. A couple of hours later someone pinned something else over the top of it, over them both, the announcement of a departmental meeting or something similar. There was no more room on the notice board, probably, but there was another reason too: a growing sense of discomfort, of horror, really, at the way the world seemed to have split itself in two.

  In Jenny’s world, Sheila was still alive, looking forward to Jenny coming home so they could go out to dinner somewhere special and catch up on news. In our world, Sheila was dead and cremated, already a part of the past. I thought about using the mobile number Jenny had given to call her and explain what had happened, just to send a text even. I didn’t though – I didn’t want to spoil her holiday. Either that or I was simply a coward.

  On the day Jenny was due back in the office I called in sick. The next time I saw her, she knew everything. She looked ten years older. People kept whispering about how she seemed like a different person.

  * * *

  I started having nightmares, more and more. I would dream I was back in Gren-Noor, in the room with the wooden ceiling and the red-tiled floor. I felt I was in a prison cell, or some other place I knew instinctively I couldn’t get out of. I would listen to Cally moving about in the room beyond, certain and terrified that she was changed in some way, that if she came into my room and saw me I would be destroyed.

  “What’s going on?” Lisa asked, after I’d woken up three nights in a row with my heart hammering, my limbs bathed in sweat. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. Just a bad dream,” I replied. I lay there in the dark beside her, resting my hand on her shoulder, feeling the warmth of her skin and trying to steady my breathing. As soon as it was light, she got up to go for her run. I’d stopped running soon after Lisa and I started dating – getting up so early, especially in winter, seemed like too much of an effort – but there were times, plenty of them, when I wished I hadn’t, when I thought about how good it would feel to be outside, to see the brightness creeping into the sky, a sky that, though I knew it was infinite, seemed so comfortingly present, reassuringly real, a shield against whatever lay beyond.

  All those puffy grey Coventry clouds, scudding along, just being themselves.

  * * *

  “Have it if you want, I think it’s ugly.” Cally paused. “It was Lila’s.”

  “How come you have it?”

  She made an open-handed, dismissive gesture: who cares? “It was with the rest of the stuff she left behind in her apartment. We had to get rid of most of it. We didn’t have room for it – not here. Noah said we should keep some of it though, the personal stuff, in case she asked us to send it on later. She never did, though.”

  T
he pendant was about two inches long, a teardrop-shaped lump of crystal in a silver surround. The surround was an elaborate cacophony of tiny forms, angels or devils all clustered together like in those creepy German woodcarvings in that museum Dad took us to in Nuremberg. The figures all had tails, hairless and squirming, tangled together like mouse tails. When I touched the crystal’s surface I was surprised to find it felt soft, giving way very slightly beneath the pressure of my fingertip. I wondered if maybe it wasn’t crystal after all, but some sort of plastic. It was cold though, whatever it was, and very heavy. I touched it again and felt the same sensation of rubberiness, although when I looked at the spot where my finger was pressing the tip looked flattened, as if I were holding it against a windowpane or the curved glass surface of a beer bottle.

  It was only when I held the pendant up to the light that I realised there was something inside it, something embedded in the heart of the crystal like a fly in amber. A spindly-legged creature, with narrow wings and body, like a daddy-long-legs. Amazingly, it appeared to be moving, swimming in slow motion within the bubble of its transparent prison. After staring at it for a minute or two I came to realise that the creature was locked into a repeat cycle, the same half a dozen movements endlessly reiterated. I found its jerky, spasmodic rhythms close to hypnotic, like watching the same ten-second sequence of a David Attenborough nature documentary. The insect was semi-transparent, barely there. When I turned the pendant against the light at a certain angle the creature seemed to disappear entirely.

  “It’s a silverwing,” Cally said. “You find them close to water. They’re very common. To make these pendants they freeze them in time for half a second. It’s supposed to represent eternity.”

  “How do they do that?”

  Cally shrugged. “No idea.”

  I wrapped my fingers around the pendant, enclosing it in my fist. The thought of the silverwing performing its endless swim-cycle made me feel queasy. Did the creature know it was in there? It was only an insect, I understood that, but even so.

  “Why did Lila leave it behind, do you think?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it held bad memories for her.”

  It was obvious from the way she said it that Cally had no wish to discuss the matter. It occurred to me that Noah might have given Lila the pendant, as a keepsake maybe, as a gesture of farewell. I’d said nothing to Cally about my conversation with Noah, and I couldn’t imagine that Noah had, either. Even so, nothing had been the same since. Cally seemed preoccupied and more reserved towards me generally. No matter how much I tried to tell myself I was imagining things, I couldn’t get rid of the idea that she was fed up with me being around all the time and wished I would leave.

  Noah on the other hand seemed easier in my presence. He spoke to me as little as ever, but the next time Cally was away at the studio, he asked me if I’d like to go on a night-drive with him and I agreed.

  We piled Marsia’s cart with blankets, filled a hamper with food and two large thermos flasks of coffee.

  “We should leave before nightfall,” Noah said. “If you want to see the stars, we need to get beyond the city boundary. It’s not dark enough otherwise.”

  We followed the coast road for what seemed like hours, then Noah drove the mule inland, into a wasteland of scrub and criss-crossed dirt tracks that Noah said were called baranye, or giants’ footsteps.

  “There’s a Noors legend,” he told me, “about the giants who marched north from the mountains, seeking the forests. These rocks are what remain of the dust storms, churned up by their boots.”

  “What are they really?”

  “Solidified lava, probably. No one knows for sure.”

  The sky above us was rich with stars. Not the vain little pinpricks of light I was used to seeing from our back garden in Lymm, but whole armies of them, whole armadas, clustered together so thickly in places and so brightly it was difficult to look straight at them.

  Alien suns, I thought. Each and every one of them.

  “There is Dea,” Noah said, and pointed. The planet hung low in the sky, and was the colour of hearthlight.

  “Do you think they’re watching us?” I said. The idea – that there might be people up there, looking down – seemed both miraculous and terrifying.

  “I don’t know,” Noah said softly. “Probably.”

  He gazed up at the blazing sky, his face rapt, as if he’d never seen such a sight before that night.

  * * *

  By the time we arrived back in Gren-Noor it was almost dawn. I offered to help Noah with the mule, but he said there was no need. I went straight to my room. I pulled the blinds half-closed then undressed and climbed into bed. I found I was exhausted, too tired for sleep.

  When Noah came to my room about half an hour later I felt no surprise. He stood in the doorway, not saying anything. His hair was down, and in the shreds of colourless morning light filtering in through the blinds his face looked oddly ageless, like the face of a statue. I drew back the bedcovers, and after a moment Noah closed the bedroom door behind him and began removing his clothes. His ribs jutted squarely, like a dog’s, and there were some purplish scars, or perhaps they were burn marks, on his left shoulder.

  I was curious, I suppose. He was in me more or less as soon as he lay down, breathing hard in my ear, his prick stiff and uncomfortably bulky as a piece of wood. I moved beneath him, trying to shift his weight. I thought about Linus Quinn, all those nights he’d lain awake in his tent, listening to Eduard and Elina Farsett making love, Eduard with his little grunt, Elina making no sound at all until the very end. Quinn had grown so used to their ways that those nights, at first an agony, had quickly become his secret pleasure.

  I knew Farsett’s sounds, his movements, his whispered endearments so exactly I came to believe that in those moments I actually became him, Quinn had written. As I immersed myself in the rhythms of their coitus, I could almost bring myself to believe I could feel Farsett’s rasping, incendiary breathing leaving my throat, the savage pressure of Elina’s knees as they gripped my sides.

  Such that when we came to climax, we were truly three, and not a lonely two, Quinn continued. As Noah quickened his movements, I turned from thoughts of Quinn to thoughts of Elina – Elina Farsett, her veins already swarming with alien enzymes, the process of irreversible change already begun. Her cries, which for the first months of her transition had been especially intense, branding the skies above the ruins of Pakwa as with the death throes of stars.

  How long did she and Eduard continue having intercourse, I wondered, after they began to realise Elina was changing? Did Farsett fear his wife’s condition might be contagious, or did he not care?

  I imagined him, courting uncertainty like an addiction. Noah’s buttocks jerked, and he cried out. Elina’s fingers, deep within me, relaxed their grip, the sweat glittering along her hairline like droplets of dew.

  * * *

  Noah left, and I fell into sleep. I dreamed I was floating above the city on some kind of transparent pillow. I pressed my face to its see-through surface and looked down. Below me I could glimpse a labyrinth of tiny houses, like the ones Cally had drawn on her map of Purl. There was also some kind of scrap yard, piled high with the rusting carcases of strange machines. I knew the machines weren’t real: they were painted in bright enamels, and looked like toys. Croftson’s Meat Merchants, read a sign at the entrance. Suddenly I was on the ground and walking into the Spar. I went to look at the magazine rack but the shelves were filled with packets of frozen vegetables instead. As I turned to leave the shop, I saw someone outside the window, looking in. I jumped inside my skin, which jerked me awake. Instead of the wooden beams I saw a pockmarked ceiling, patchworked with damp stains. On the wall beside the bed a faded print of pink roses hung in a cheap gilt frame. I could hear traffic passing by outside, the muted roar of a motorbike. When I crossed to the window and looked out, the stable yard was gone. In its place was a city street, lined on either side with tall terraced house
s and parked cars.

  In my hand was the silver pendant. The gemstone at its centre was bluish and cloudy, like a piece of rock quartz.

  The silverwing was gone. If it had ever been there in the first place.

  My rucksack lay on the floor at the foot of the bed. My mouth tasted dry and faintly furry, as if I’d drunk too much alcohol the evening before. I tried to remember how I’d got here, but all I could think of was the endless sky over the belts to the west of Fiby, the stars strewn over the blackness like a box of sequins, spilled across a carpet the colour of night.

  9

  I remember July 16th 1994 as a hot day. I spent most of the morning in my room, reading. I couldn’t face anyone, to be honest. It was more than a week since term ended, and all I could think about – still – was the row I’d had with Lucy over Justin Mitchell. Neither of us had been prepared to admit it was Justin we were arguing about, and of course it wasn’t really, it was us. But Justin was the breaking point, the symbol.

  The thought of Justin and Lucy made me sick. I don’t mean that in the way people normally mean it, as an expression of disgust, but really, literally, as in I’d actually thrown up once, in the girls’ toilets, just from imagining them together. That’s the kind of state I was in. I had these pictures of Justin inside my head. I don’t know if you’ll remember him even, Selena, but he was beautiful, that was the only word for him: half boy, half angel, with that wispy-curly hair he wore tied behind his head and those incredibly long, almost entirely colourless eyelashes. He looked like a girl almost, an impossibly gorgeous one, and when I thought about him with Lucy there was always a girl’s body under his clothes when he took them off.

  I can’t remember what Lucy and I said to each other, not all of it anyway, but I know it was awful. It was as if we were digging around in our heads, searching out the most hurtful, most unfair accusations we could think of and then just flinging them out there, like coils of barbed wire, for the other one to trip on and get snarled up in. You’ve seen that Italian horror movie, Suspiria? Like that.