Everywhere: Volume I of the Collected Short Stories and Novellas of Ian R. MacLeod

by Ian R. MacLeod

  “How about we climb up to the meadows?” May said. “The town looks good from up there.”

  “Have you ever read Peter Pan?” Bobby asked as they walked up the dirt road between the allotments and the saw mill. “He never grew up. Lived in a wonderful land and learnt how to fly.” He held open the kissing gate that led into the fields. May had to squeeze through. The grass was high and slivered with seed, whispering under a deepening sky. “When I was young,” he said, “on evenings like this, I used to look out of my bedroom window and watch the grownups. I thought that they could fly.”

  “Who do you think can fly now?”

  “No one. We’re all the same.”

  They stopped to catch their breath and look down at the haze below. Hills, trees and houses, the wind carrying the chime of an ice cream van, the river stealing silver from the sky. He felt pain spread though him, then dissolve without finding focus.

  May took his hand. “Remember when we up here alone that time years ago.” She drew it towards her breast, then down. “You touched me here, and here. We had sex. You’d never done it before.” She let his hand fall. Bobby felt no interest. May no longer smelled of rain, and he was relieved he didn’t have to turn her down.

  The pain came again, more strongly this time. He swayed. The shimmering air cleared and for one moment there was a barge on the river, a tractor slicing a field from green to brown, a hawk circling high overhead, May smiling, sweet and young as she said Let’s Do It Bobby, pulling her dress up over her head. He blinked.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” he said, leaning briefly against her, feeling the thickness of her arms.

  “I think we’d better go back.”

  Down the hill, the pain began to localise. First circling in his spine, then gradually shifting orbit towards his belly. It came and went. When it was there it was so unbelievable that he put it aside in the moments of recession. Had to be a bad dream. The trees swayed with the rush of twilight, pulling him forward, drawing him back.

  Progress was slow. Night came somewhere along the way. Helped by May, he staggered from lamppost to lamppost, dreading the darkness between. People stared or asked if everything was okay before hurrying on. He tasted rust in his mouth. He spat on the pavement, wiped his hand. It came away black.

  “Nearly there,” May said, half-holding him around his searing belly.

  He looked up and saw houses he recognised, the postbox that was the nearest one to home. His belly was crawling. He remembered how that postbox had been a marker of his suffering one day years before when he’d been desperate to get home and pee, and another time walking back from school when his shoes were new and tight. Then the pain rocked him, blocking his sight. True pain, hard as flint, soft as drowning. He tried to laugh. That made it worse and better. Bobby knew that this was just the start, an early phase of the contractions.

  He couldn’t remember how they reached home. There were hands and voices, furious diallings of the phone. Bobby couldn’t get upstairs and didn’t want to mess the settee by lying on it. But the grownups insisted, pushed him down, and then someone found a plastic sheet and tucked it under him in between the worst of the waves. He thrashed around, seeing the TV, the mantlepiece, the fibres of the carpet, the light burning at his eyes. I’m not here, he told himself, this isn’t real. Then the biggest, darkest wave yet began to reach him.

  Wings of pain settled over him. For a moment without time, Bobby dreamed that he was flying.

  Bobby awoke in a chilly white room. There was a door, dim figures moving beyond the frosted glass. He was still floating, hardly conscious of his own body. The whiteness of the room hurt his eyes. He closed them, opened them again. Now it was night. Yellow light spilled through the glass. The figures moving beyond had globular heads, no necks, tapering bodies.

  One of the figures paused. The door opened. The silence cracked like a broken seal. He could suddenly hear voices, the clatter of trolleys. He was conscious of the hard flatness of the bed against his back, coils of tubing descending into his arm from steel racks. His throat hurt. His mouth tasted faintly of liquorice. The air smelled the way the bathroom cabinet did at home. Of soap and aspirins.

  “Your eyes are open. Bobby, can you see?”

  The shape at the door blocked the light. It was hard to make it out. Then it stepped forward, and he saw the soft curve of May’s cheek, the glimmer of her eye.

  “Can you speak?”

  “No,” he said.

  May turned on a light over the bed and sat down with a heavy sigh. He tried to track her by moving his eyes, but after the brief glimpse of her face all he could see was the dimpled curve of her elbow.

  “This is hospital?”

  “Yes. You’ve grown up”

  Hospital. Growing up. They must have taken him here from home. Which meant that it had been a difficult change.

  May said, “You’re lucky to be alive.”

  Alive. Yes. Alive. He waited for a rush of some feeling or other—relief, gratitude, achievement, pride. There was nothing, just this white room, the fact of his existence.

  “What happens now?” he asked.

  “Your parents will want to see you.”

  “Where are they?”

  “At home. It’s been days, Bobby.”

  “Then why...” the taste of liquorice went gritty in his mouth. He swallowed it back. “Why are you here May?”

  “I’m having tests, Bobby. I just thought I’d look in.”

  “Thanks.”

  “There’s no need to thank me. I won’t forget the times we had.”

  Times. We. Had. Bobby put the words together, then let them fall apart.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Well.” May stood up.

  Now he could see her. Her hair was cut short, sitting oddly where her fat cheeks met her ears. Her breasts hung loose inside a tee shirt. Along with everything else about her they seemed to have grown, but the nipples had gone flat and she’d given up wearing a bra. She shrugged and spread her arms. He caught a waft of her scent: she needed a wash. It was sickly but somehow appealing, like the old cheese that you found at the back of the fridge and needed to eat right away.

  “Sometimes it happens,” she said.

  “Yes,” Bobby said. “The bitter milk.”

  “No one knows really do they? Life’s a mystery.”

  Is it? Bobby couldn’t be bothered to argue.

  “Will you change your name?” he asked. “Move to another town?”

  “Maybe. It’s a slow process. I’m really not an uncle yet, you know.”

  Still a child. Bobby gazed at her uncomfortably, trying to see it in her eyes, finding with relief that the child wasn’t there.

  “What’s it like?” May asked.

  “What?”

  “Being a grownup.”

  “Does anyone ask a child what it’s like to be a child?”

  “I suppose not.”

  His head ached, his voice was fading. He blinked slowly. He didn’t want to say more. What else was there to say? He remembered waiting stupidly as his brother Tony sat up in bed watching TV that first morning after he’d grown up. Waiting as though there was an answer. But growing up was just part of the process of living, which he realised now was mostly about dying.

  May reached out to touch his face. The fingers lingered for a moment, bringing a strange warmth. Their odour was incredibly strong to Bobby. But it was sweet now, like the waft from the open door of a bakery. It hit the back of his palate and then ricocheted down his spine. He wondered vaguely if he was going to get an erection and killed the thought as best he could; he hated the idea of appearing vulnerable to May. After all, she was still half a child.

  “You’d better be going,” he said.

  May backed away. “You’re right.” She reached for the handle of the door, clumsily, without looking.

  “Goodbye May,” Bobby said.

  She stood for a moment in the open doorway. For a
moment the light fell kindly on her face and she was beautiful. Then she stepped back and all her youth was gone.

  “Goodbye, Bobby,” she said, and glanced down at her wristwatch. “I’ve got things to do. I really must fly.”

  Afterword

  Here’s a story which floats, or attempts to float, in a realm that’s neither SF nor fantasy. Nor, plainly, is it realistic. Yet it’s set in a fairly everyday suburban world, and the people, at least most of the time, seem to lead the kind of lives that many of us—at least if you exclude the bitter milk and the fat uncles—would recognise.

  The twisted naturalism of “Grownups” is something I’m proud of, and is a trope I’d like to visit more often, but have generally found very hard to achieve. Done properly—a feat I may or may not have managed—a slight but profound sideways step from reality can seem almost inevitable, but there are all sorts of issues, the need for logic, internal consistency and some kind of explanation usually being high on my list, which can get in the way. I remember frequently wondering whether “Grownups” could possibly work when I was writing it, but every time I returned to it, it seemed to lead me on. If the finished product does work, the reason is simply that, despite its oddity, it felt, and still feels, oddly real to me. The reason, to be honest, being my own experience of growing up.

  Physically as a teenager, I was what you’d call a “late developer”. When other kids were shooting up and growing fuzz in all sorts of unlikely places, I was still a small, squeaky-voiced kid. The experience probably only lasted a couple of years, but that’s a long time at that age, and its strange, and a difficult, place to be. By the time I was about sixteen I was convinced that, like Bobby, I would never grow up. And part of me welcomed this, and didn’t really want to, which was the kind of world I found myself re-entering as I wrote “Grownups”; a place where sex seems comical and peculiar, childhood passes far too quickly, and adults are self-obsessed and strange. In many ways, I suppose, it’s somewhere I still recognise, and have never quite left.

  BREATHMOSS

  1

  In her twelfth standard year, which on Habara was the Season of Soft Rains, Jalila moved across the mountains with her mothers from the high plains of Tabuthal to the coast. For all of them, the journey down was one of unhurried discovery, with the kamasheens long gone and the world freshly moist, and the hayawans rusting as they rode them, the huge flat plates of their feet sucking through purplish-green undergrowth. She saw the cliffs and qasrs she’d only visited from her dreamtent, and sailed across the high ridges on ropewalks her distant ancestors had built, which had seemed frail and antique to her in her worried imaginings, but were in fact strong and subtle; huge dripping gantries heaving from the mist like wise giants, which felt warm to the touch, were softly humming, and welcomed her and her hayawan, whom she called Robin, in cocoons of effortless embrace. Swaying over the drop beyond into grey-green nothing was almost like flying.

  The thing, the strangest thing of all in this journey of discoveries, was that the landscape actually seemed to rise higher as they descended and encamped and descended again; the sense of up increased, rather than that of down. The air on the high plains of Tabuthal was rarefied—Jalila knew that from her lessons in her dreamtent; they were so close to the stars that Pavo had had to clap a mask over her face from the moment of her birth until the breathmoss was embedded in her lungs. And it had been clear up there, it was always clear and it was pleasantly cold. The sun shone all day hard and cold and white from the blue blackness, as did a billion stars at night, although Jalila had never thought of those things as she ran amid the crystal trees and her mothers smiled at her and occasionally warned her that, one day, all of this would have to change.

  And now that day was upon her, and this landscape, as Robin her hayawan rounded the path through an urrearth forest of alien-looking trees with wrinkled brown trunks and soft green leaves, and the land fell away and she caught her first glimpse of something far and flat on the horizon, had never seemed so high.

  Down on the coast, the mountains reared behind them and around a bay. There were many people here—not the vast numbers, perhaps, of Jalila’s dreamtent stories of the Ten Thousand and One Worlds—but so many that she was sure, as she first walked the streets of a town where the buildings huddled in ridiculous proximity and tired to stare and then not to stare at all the faces, that she would never know all their families.

  Because of its position at the edge of the mountains, the town was called Al Janb, and, to Jalila’s relief, their new haramlek was some distance away from it, up along a near-unnoticeable dirt track which meandered off from the blue-black serraplated coastal road. There was much to be done there by way of repair, after the long season that her bondmother Lya had left the place deserted. The walls were fused stone, but the structure of the roof had been mostly made from the stuff of the same strange urrearth trees which grew up the mountains, and in many places it had sagged and leaked and grown back towards the chaos which seemed to want to encompass everything here. The hayawans, too, needed much attention in their makeshift stables as they adapted to this new climate, and mother Pavo was long employed constructing the necessary potions to mend the bleeding bonds of rusty metal and flesh, and then to counteract the mould which grew like slow tears across their long, solemn faces. Jalila would normally have been in anguish to think of the sufferings which this new climate was visiting on Robin, but she was too busy feeling ill herself to care. Ridiculously, seeing as there was so much more oxygen to breathe in this rich coastal air, every lungful became a conscious effort, a dreadful physical lunge. Inhaling the damp, salty, spore-laden atmosphere was like sucking soup through a straw. She grew feverish for a while, and suffered the attentions of similar moulds to those which were growing over Robin, yet in even more irritating and embarrassing places. More irritating still was the fact that Ananke her birthmother and Lya her bondmother—even Pavo, who was still busily attending to the hayawans—treated her discomforts and fevers with airy disregard. They had, they all assured her vaguely, suffered similarly in their own youths. And the weather would soon change in any case. To Jalila, who had spent all her life in the cool unvarying glare of Tabuthal where the wind only ever blew from one direction and the trees jingled like ice, that last statement might as well have been spoken in another language.

  If anything, Jalila was sure she was getting worse. The rain drummed on what there was of the roof of their haramlek, and dripped down and pooled in the makeshift awnings, which burst in bucketloads down your neck if you bumped into them, and the mist drifted in at every direction through the paneless windows, and the mountains, most of the time, seemed to consist of cloud, or to have vanished entirely. She was coughing. Strange stuff was coming out on her hands, slippery and green as the slime which tried to grow everywhere here. One morning, she awoke, sure that part of her was bursting, and stumbled from her dreamtent and out though the scaffolding which was by then surrounded the haramlek, then barefoot down the mud track and across the quiet black road and down onto the beach for no other reason than that she needed to escape.

  She stood gasping amid the rockpools, her hair lank and her skin feverishly itching. There was something at the back of her throat. There was something in her lungs. She was sure it had taken root and was growing. Then she started coughing as she never coughed before, and more of the greenstuff came splattering over her hands and down her chin. She doubled over. Huge lumps of it came showering out, strung with blood. If it hadn’t been mostly green, she’d have been sure that it was her lungs. She’d never imagined anything so agonising. Finally, though, in heaves and starts and false dawns, the process dwindled. She wiped her hands on her night-dress. The rocks all around her were splattered green. It was breathmoss; the stuff which had sustained her on the high plains. And now look at it. Jalila took a slow, cautious breath. And then another. Her throat ached. Her head was throbbing. But still, the process was suddenly almost ridiculously easy. She picked her way back acr
oss the beach, up through the mists to her haramlek. Her mothers were eating breakfast. Jalila sat down with them, wordlessly, and started to eat.

  That night, Ananke came and sat with Jalila as she lay in her dreamtent in plain darkness and tried not to listen to the sounds of the rain falling on and through the creaking, dripping building. Even now, her birthmother’s hands smelled and felt like the high desert as they touched her face. Rough and clean and warm, like rocks in starlight, giving off their heat. A few months before, Jalila would probably have started crying.

  “You’ll understand now, perhaps, why we thought it better not to say about the breathmoss…?”

  There was a question mark at the end of the sentence, but Jalila ignored it. They’d known all along. She was still angry.

  “And there are other things, too, which will soon start to happen to your body. Things which are nothing to do with this place. And I shall now tell you about them all even though you’ll say you known it before…”

  The smooth, rough fingers stroked her hair. As Ananke’s words unravelled, telling Jalila of changings and swellings and growths she’d had never thought would really apply to her, and which these foetid lowlands really seemed to have brought closer, Jalila thought of the sound of the wind, tinkling through the crystal trees up on Tabuthal. She thought of the dry cold wind in her face. The wet air here seemed to enclose her. She wished that she was running. She wanted to escape.

  Small though Al Janb was, it was as big a town as Jalila had ever seen, and she soon came to volunteer to run all the various errands that her mothers required as they restored and repaired their haramlek. She was used to expanses, big horizons, the surprises of a giant landscape which crept upon you slowly, and often dangerously. Yet here, every turn and square brought intricate surprise and change. The people had such varied faces and accents. They hung their washing across the streets, and bickered and smoked in public. Some ate with both hands. They stared at you as you went past, and didn’t seem to mind if you stared back at them. There were sights and smells, markets which erupted on particular days to the workings of no calendar Jalila yet understood, and sold, in glittering, shining, stinking, disgusting, fascinating arrays, the strangest and most wonderful things. There were fruits from off-planet, spices shaped like insects, and insects that you crushed for their spice. There were swarming vats of things Jalila couldn’t possibly imagine any use for, and bright silks woven thin as starlit wind which she longed for with an acute physical thirst. And there were aliens, too, to be glimpsed sometimes wandering the streets of Al Janb, or looking down at you from its overhung top windows like odd pictures in an old frame. Some of them carried their own atmosphere around with them in bubbling hookahs, and some rolled around in huge grey bits of the sea of their own planets like babies in a birthsac. Some of them looked like huge versions of the spice insects, and the air around them buzzed angrily if you got too close. The only thing they had in common was that they seemed blithely unaware of Jalila as she stared and followed them, and then returned inexcusably late from whatever errand she’d supposedly been sent on. Sometimes, she forgot her errands entirely.