Viriconium

by Michael John Harrison

  “She looked directly out at me and waved. She beckoned. I could see her mouth open and close to make the words ‘Here! Over here!’

  “She’s alive, I thought. It was a shock. I felt that I was alive, too. I got up and ran straight into the plate-glass window and was concussed. Someone dropped a tray of knives. I heard a peculiar voice, going away from me very fast, say: ‘What’s he done? Oh, what’s he done now?’ Then those first ten or twelve years of my life were sealed away from me neatly like the bubble in a spirit level—clearly visible but strange and inaccessible, made of nothing. I knew immediately that though what I had seen was not Viriconium, Viriconium nevertheless awaited me. I knew, too, how to find it.”

  People are always pupating their own disillusion, decay, age. How is it they never suspect what they are going to become, when their faces already contain the faces they will have twenty years from now?

  “You would learn nothing from Dr. Petromax’s mirror even if you could find it,” Mr. Ambrayses said dismissively. “First exhaust the traditional avenues of the research.” And as if in support of his point he brought me a cardboard box he had found among the rubbish on a building site in Halifax, the words World Mosaic printed boldly across its lid. But my face was down to the bone with ambition.

  Old people sit more or less patiently in railway carriages imagining they have bought a new bathroom suite, lavender, with a circular bath they will plumb-in themselves. April comes, the headlines read, BIBLE BOY MURDERED; KATIE IN NUDE SHOCK. The sun moves across the patterned bricks outside the bus station, where the buses are drawn up obliquely in a line: from the top deck of one you can watch in the next a girl blowing her nose. You don’t think you can bear to hear one more woman in Sainsbury’s saying to her son as she shifts her grip on her plastic shopping bag with its pink and grey Pierrot, “Alec, get your foot off the biscuits. I shan’t tell you again. If you don’t get your foot off the biscuits, Alec, I shall knock it straight on the floor.”

  April again. When the sun goes in, a black wind tears the crocus petals off and flings them down the ring road.

  “I can’t wait,” I told Mr. Ambrayses.

  I couldn’t wait any longer. I followed Dr. Petromax from the Blue Rooms (“Meals served all day”) to the Alpine Coffee House, Merrie England, the Elite Café & Fish Restaurant. I let him tell me his story in each of them. Though details changed, it remained much the same: but I was certain he was preparing himself to say more. One day I kept quiet until he had ended as usual, “Viriconium nevertheless awaited me,” then I said openly to him:

  “And yet you’ve never been there. You had the clue as a child. You found the doorway but you never went through it.”

  We were in the El Greco, at the pedestrian end of New Street. While he waited for the waitress he stared across the wide flagged walk, with its beech saplings and raised flower beds, at the window of C&A’s, his sore brown eyes full of patience between their bruised-looking lids. When she came she brought him plaice and chips. “Oh, hello!” she said. “We haven’t seen you for a while! Feeling any better?” He ate the chips one by one with his fork, pouring vinegar on them between every mouthful, only afterwards scraping the white of the plaice off its slippery fragile skin until he had the one in a little pile on the side of the plate and the other intact, glistening slightly, webbed with grey, in the middle. His dirty hands were as deft and delicate as a boy’s at this. Once or twice he looked up at me and then down again.

  “Who told you that?” he said quietly when he had finished eating. “Ambrayses?”

  He put down his knife and fork.

  “Three of us set out,” he said. “I won’t say who. Two got through easily, the third tried to go back halfway. On the right day you can still catch sight of him in the mirror, spewing up endlessly. He doesn’t seem to know where he is, but he’s aware of you.

  “We lived there for three months, in some rooms on Salt Lip Road behind the Rue Serpolet. The streets stank. At six in the morning a smell so corrupt came up from the Yser Canal it seemed to blacken the iron lamp-posts; we would gag in our dreams, struggle for a moment to wake up, and then realise that the only escape was to sleep again. It was winter, and everything was filthy. Inside, the houses smelled of vegetable peel, sewage, perished rubber. Everyone in them was ill. If we wanted a bath we had to go to a public washhouse on Mosaic Lane. The air was cold; echoes flew about under the roof; the water was like lead. Sometimes it was hardly like water at all. There were some famous murals there, but they were so badly kept up you could make furrows in the grease. Scrape it off and you’d see the most beautiful stuff underneath, chalky reds, pure blues, children’s faces!

  “We stuck it for three months. We knew there were other quarters of the city, where things must be better, but we couldn’t find our way about. At first we were so tired; later we thought we were being followed by some sort of secret police. Towards the end the man I was with was ill all the time; he started to hear the bathhouse echoes even while he was in bed; he couldn’t walk. It was a hard job getting him out. The night I did it you could see the lights of the High City, sweet, magical, like paper lanterns in a garden, filling up the emptiness. If only I’d gone towards them, walked straight towards them!”

  I stared at him.

  “Was that all?” I said.

  “That was all.”

  His hands had begun to tremble, and he looked down at them. “Oh, yes. I was there. What else could have left me like this?” He got up and went to the lavatory. When he came back he said, “Ambrayses has a lot to learn about me.” He bent down, his eyes now looking very vague and sick, as if he was already forgetting who I was or what I wanted, and quickly whispered something in my ear: then he left.

  As he walked across the street he must have disturbed the pigeons, because they all flew up at once and went wheeling violently about between the buildings. As they passed over her an Indian woman, who had been sitting in the sunshine examining a length of embroidered cloth, winced and folded it up hurriedly. Though they soon quietened down, coming to rest in a line along the top of the precast C&A façade, she continued to look frightened and resentful—biting her lips, making a face, moving her shoulders repeatedly inside her tight leather coat, from the sleeves of which emerged thin wrists and hands, powdery brown, fingernails lacquered a plum colour.

  The older Asian women fiddle constantly with their veils, plucking with wrinkled fingers at the lower part of their faces. In the bus station they lift their feet—automatically looking away from him—to let the cleaner run his brush along the base of the plastic banquette. They have features as coarse and wise as an elephant’s but underneath they are in a continual nervous fidget.

  The furniture in Mr. Ambrayses’s front room, inert great drop-leaf tables and sideboards with stained, lifting veneers, was strewn with the evidence he had accumulated: curled-up grainy photographs, each a detail enlarged in black and white from some colour snap until, its outline fatally eroded and its context yawing, it reached monstrous or curious conclusions; articles cut from yellowed newsprint found lining the drawers of an empty house; cassettes furred with dust, which when you played them gave out only the pure electric silence of the machine, punctuated once or twice by feral static; his notebooks, where in a clear hand he had written, Each event, struck lightly against its own significance, can be excited into throwing off a spark; it is this energetic mote which lies at the heart of metaphor—and of life; or: The lesson we learn too late is that we cannot have only by wanting. Then on another page, Nothing impedes us; we need only learn to act.

  He preserved the circulars, bills, Christmas cards, charity appeals, and small parcels which came through his letterbox for the previous tenants of the house. Almost as if by accident a little of this lost or random communication was addressed to him, from Australia: he gave it pride of place. This was how I learned that his daughter had married and emigrated there several years before.

  “She was ungrateful,” he would say, avoid
ing my eyes and staring at the television. (A car drove slowly out of some factory gates, then faster through a housing estate and onto an empty road.) “She was an ungrateful girl.”

  Two chimney sweeps called to see him the Wednesday after I had talked to Dr. Petromax in the El Greco. He was out.

  “Is he expecting you?” I asked them.

  They didn’t seem to know. They waited patiently in the garden for me to let them in—a large awkward boy in Dr. Martin’s boots, and a man I took to be his father, much smaller and more agile in his movements, who said: “You’ve a fair view here anyhow. You can see a fair way from here.” The boy didn’t answer but stood as if marooned on the concrete path which, like a mirror in the rain, reflected one or two thick yellow crocus buds. Piles of red bricks, rusty brown conifers, the conservatory with its peeling paint, the shed door held closed by a spade, everything else that afternoon was dark; it was more like October than April. “We’re used to working in town.” The boy looked warily at the rain, rubbed some of it into the stubble on his bony, vulnerable skull. He seemed to cheer up.

  “You’ll have a few accidents in these lanes then,” he said. “With tractors and that.”

  Later he brought the brushes in, and, glancing away from me shyly, spread two old candlewick bedspreads on the lino to protect it. He knelt with a kind of dreamy conscientiousness in Mr. Ambrayses’s tiled hearth, like a child fascinated by everything to do with fire: arranged the canvas bag over the fireplace; fixed it there with strips of Sellotape which he bit carefully off the roll; pushed each extension of the brush up through the bag until the smell of soot came into the room, rich and bitter, and he was forced to stop suddenly.

  “There’s still three exes here,” said his father. “It’ll go three more.”

  “No it won’t,” said the boy, stirring and pummelling away at the chimney.

  “I’ll go and look.”

  When he came back he said, “I can hear it rattling at the top.”

  “It might be rattling but it’s not going up.”

  They stared at one another.

  “I can hear it as plain as day; there’s something at the top. I can fair hear it, plain as day, rattling against it.”

  At this the boy only pummelled harder.

  “Has plenty come down?” his father asked.

  “Aye.”

  “That’s all we can do then.”

  The boy pulled the brush gently back into the room, disassembling the extensions one by one while the man stood looking down at him breathing heavily, hands on hips, watching in case he had fetched the obstruction out. They ripped the bag off, revealing the fireplace choked to three-quarters of its height with soot: nothing else. The boy screwed the Sellotape up contemptuously into a glittering sticky ball. He invited me to look up the chimney, but all I saw was a large dark recess, much rougher than I had imagined it would be, blackened and streaked with salts, like a cave.

  “The fact is,” he said to me, “I don’t know how your friend keeps a fire there at all.”

  When I told Mr. Ambrayses this he said anxiously, “Was Petromax with them?”

  I laughed.

  “Of course he wasn’t. Is he a sweep?”

  “Never let anyone in here,” he shouted. “Describe them! That boy: were his hands big? Clumsy, and the nails all broken?”

  “How else would a chimney sweep’s hands be?”

  He ignored this and, as if preoccupied by the answer to his first question, whispered to himself, “It was only the sweeps.” Suddenly he got down on his back among the hair clippings and screwed-up bits of paper on the floor, pulled himself into the hearth, and tried as I had done to look up the chimney. Whatever he saw or failed to see there made him jump to his feet again. He went round the room pulling cupboards open and slamming them shut; he picked up one or two of the postcards his daughter had sent him from Australia, stared in a relieved way at the strange bright stamps and unreal views, then put them back on the mantelpiece. “Nothing touched,” he said. “You didn’t let them touch anything?” When I said that I hadn’t, he seemed to calm down.

  “Look at these!” he said.

  He had used up an entire pack of Polaroid film, he told me, photographing three pairs of women’s shoes someone had thrown into a ditch at the top of Acres Lane where it bends right to join the Manchester Road. “I noticed them on Sunday. They were still there when I went back, but by this morning they had gone. Can you imagine,” he asked me, “who would leave them there? Or why?” I couldn’t. “Or, equally, who would come to collect them from a dry ditch among farm rubbish at the edge of the moor?” The pictures, which had that odd greenish cast Polaroids sometimes develop a day or two after they have been exposed, showed them to be flimsy and open-toed: one pair in black suede, an evening shoe with a brown fur piece; one made of transparent plastic bound at the edges in a kind of metallic blue leather; and a pair of light tan sandals with a crisscross arrangement of straps to hold the upper part of the foot.

  “They were all size four,” said Mr. Ambrayses. “The brand name inside them was Marquise: it was a little worn and faded but otherwise they seemed well-kept.”

  All at once he dropped the photographs and went to look up the chimney again.

  He whimpered.

  “Never let anyone in here!” he repeated, staring helplessly up at me from where he lay. “You have a lot to learn about Petromax.”

  Two or three days later he locked up his house and went to Hull, to look, he said, for a rare book he had heard was there. The door of his garden shed banged open in the wind half an hour after he had gone, and has been banging since.

  If Mr. Ambrayses was, as I now believe, the other survivor of the experiment with the mirror—the one who, sickening in that slum behind the Rue Serpolet, heard even in his sleep echoes of a voice in the deserted bathhouse, and who, dragged delirious and sweating with wrecked dreams through the freezing back lanes on their last night, never saw the ethereal lights of the High City—why was his memory of Viriconium the reverse of Petromax’s?

  It seems unlikely I will ever find out.

  Petromax avoids me now he has set his poison in me. I see him around Huddersfield, but his wife keeps close to him. If they notice me they go up another street. They often have a child with them, a girl of about ten or eleven whose undeveloped legs stick out of the hem of a thick grey coat however warm the weather. She dawdles behind them, or darts away suddenly into a shop doorway, or she stops in front of the Civic Centre and refuses to walk with them, making a grunting noise as if she is suppressing a bowel movement. You can see that this is only another formalised gesture: they are a family, and her effort not to belong is already her contribution.

  Petromax’s mirror, if anyone wants to know, is in the lavatory of the Merrie England Café, a little further down New Street than the El Greco, between the Ramsden Street junction and Imperial Arcade.

  Go straight through the café itself, with all its cheap reproductions of Medieval saints and madonnas, Mon Seul Desir, all those unicorns and monkeys, where the iron lamp fittings and rough plaster bring you close to the Medieval soul in its night “untainted by any breath of the Renaissance,” and you find on the left a doorway made to look like varnished oak. The steps are painted cardinal red; for a moment they appear wet. Go down them and the warm human buzz of traffic and conversation fades, distance dilutes the familiar scraping hiss of the espresso machine. There behind the pictogram on the neat grey door, above the sink with its flake of yellow soap and right next to the Seibel hand dryer, is Petromax’s mirror. It is smaller than you would think, perhaps eighteen inches on a side.

  How did they force themselves through? The mere physical act must have been difficult. You can picture them teetering on the sink, as clumsy and fastidious as the elephant on the small circus chair. Their pockets are stuffed with whatever they think they might need: chocolate, Tekna knives, gold coins, none of which in the last analysis will prove to be any good. They have locked the do
or behind them (though Petromax, who goes through last, will open it again, so that things remain normal in the Merrie England up above), but every sound from the kitchen makes them pause and look at one another. They try an arm first, then a shoulder; they squirm about. At last Petromax’s feet disappear, kicking and waving. The soap is stuck to the sole of his foot. The lavatory is vacant. “Well, that’s it, isn’t it?” says a voice from the corridor. “It’s for the kids really, isn’t it?”

  Mr. Ambrayses was right: the mirror is of no use to me. I went down there; I stood in front of it. Except perhaps myself, I saw no one trapped and despairing in it. When Petromax whispered me its location, did he already know I would never dare go through, in case I found Viriconium as he found it?

  A couple with two children live on the other side of me to Mr. Ambrayses. The day he went to Hull they came out and began to dig in their garden with a kind of excited, irritable energy. A gusty wind had got up from the head of the valley, rattling the open windows, blowing the net curtains into the room. They had to shout to make themselves heard against it, while the children screamed and fell over, or killed worms and insects.

  “Do you really want this dug up?”

  “Well, it hasn’t done very well.”

  “Well, say if that’s it. Do you want it dug up or not?”

  “Well, yes.”

  It didn’t seem like gardening at all. The harder the wind blew the faster they worked, as if they were in some race against time to dig a shelter for themselves. “A spider, a spider!” bellowed the two little boys, and the father humoured them with a kind of desperate calm, the way you might in the face of an air attack or a flood. He is a teacher, about thirty years old, bearded, with a blunt manner meant to conceal diffidence. “Is it going to break, this storm?” I heard him say to his wife. It was hard to see what else he could have said, unless it was “this stuff.” Soon after that they all went back in again. The wind buzzed and rustled for a while in my newspaper-stuffed fireplace, but it was dying down all the time.