“Hi, Dad.”
Two or three beats. Somewhere, nowhere, space dissolves, instantaneously relaying this silence between us. Bill’s waiting for me to say why I’ve called. He knows Papa wouldn’t call unless he had a reason.
I say, “You look fine, Son.”
He inclines his head in acknowledgement. His hair’s still mostly a natural red-brown—which was Hannah’s colour—but I see that he’s started to recede, and go grey. And there are deep creases around the hollows of his eyes as he stares at me. If I didn’t know any better, I’d almost say that my son was starting to look old. “You too, Dad.”
“Your kids are here. Saul and Agatha.”
“I see.” He blinks, moves swiftly on. “How are they?”
“They’re—” I want to say, great, wonderful, incredible; all those big stupid puppy dog words. “—they’re fine. Asleep at the moment of course.”
“Where have they been?”
I wish I could just shrug, but I’ve never been comfortable using non-verbal gestures over the phone. “We haven’t really talked yet, Bill. They’re tired. I just thought I’d let you know.”
Bill purses his long, narrow lips. He’s about to say something, but then he holds it back. Tired. Haven’t talked yet. Thought I’d let you know. Oh, the casualness of it all! As though Saul and Agatha were here with their Papa last month and will probably call in next as well.
“Well, thanks, Dad. You must give them my love.”
“Any other messages?”
“Tell them I’d be happy if they could give me a call.”
“Sure, I’ll do that. How’s Meg?”
“She’s fine.”
“The two of you should come down here.”
“You could come here, Dad.”
“We must arrange something. Anyway, I’m sure you’re—”
“—pretty busy, yes. But thanks for ringing, Dad.”
“Take care, Son.”
“You too.”
The screen snows. After a few moments fiddling, I manage to turn it off.
I set about getting a meal for my two sleeping beauties. Salads, cheese, crusty bread, slices of pepper and carrot, garlicky dips. Everything new and fresh and raw. As I do so, the conversation with Bill drones on in my head. These last few years, they can go on for hours inside me after we’ve spoken. Phrases and sentences tumbling off into new meaning. Things unsaid. Now, I’m not even sure why I bothered to call him. There’s obviously no reason why he should be worried about Saul and Agatha. Was it just to brag—Hey, look, I’ve got your kids!—or was it in the hope that, ringing out of the blue in what were apparently office hours in whatever city he was in, I’d really make contact?
Slicing with my old steel knives on the rainbow-wet cutting board, I remember Bill the young man, Bill the child, Bill the baby. Bill when Hannah and I didn’t even have a name for him two weeks out of the hospital. As Hannah had grown big in those ancient days of pre-birth uncertainty, we’d planned on Paul for a boy, Esther for a girl. But when he arrived, when we took him home and bathed him, when we looked at this tiny creature like some red indian totem with his bulbous eyes, enormous balls and alarmingly erect penis, Paul had seemed entirely wrong. He used to warble when he smelled Hannah close to him—we called it his milk song. And he waved his legs in the air and chuckled and laughed at an age when babies supposedly aren’t able do that kind of thing. So we called him William. An impish, mischievous name. In our daft parental certainty, even all the dick and willy connotations had seemed entirely appropriate. But by the time he was two, he was Bill to everyone. A solid, practical name that fit, even though calling him Bill was something we’d never dreamed or wanted or intended.
In the heat of mid afternoon, beneath the awning on the patio between sky and sea, Papa’s with his sibling’s siblings, sated with food. I feel a little sick, to be honest, but I’m hoping it doesn’t show.
“You Dad rang,” I say, finding that the wine of has turned the meaning of the sentence turned around—as though, for once, Bill had actually made the effort and contacted me.
“Rang?” Agatha puzzles over the old, unfamiliar phrase. Rang. Called. She nods. “Oh yeah?” She lifts an espadrilled foot to avoid squashing the ants who are carrying off breadcrumbs and scraps of salad. “What did he say?”
“Not much.” I’d be happy if they’d call. Did he mean he’d be unhappy otherwise? “Bill seemed pretty busy,” I say. “Oh, and he wanted to know where you’ve been these last few months.”
Saul laughs. “That sounds like Dad, alright.”
“He’s just interested,” I say, feeling I should put up some kind of defence.
Agatha shakes her head. “You know what Dad gets like, Papa.” She wrinkles her nose. “All serious and worried. Not that you shouldn’t be serious about things. But not about everything.”
“And he’s so bloody possessive,” Saul agrees, scratching his ribs.
I try not to nod. But they’re just saying what children have always said: waving and shouting across a generation gap that gets bigger and bigger. Hannah and me, we put off having Bill until we were late-thirties for the sake of our careers. Bill and his wife Meg, they must have both been gone fifty when they had these two. Not that they were worn out—in another age, they’d have passed for thirty—but old is old is old.
The flyers circle in the great blue dome above the bay, clear silver eggs with the rainbow flicker of improbably tiny wings; the crickets chirp amid the myrtled rocks; the yachts catch the breeze. I’d like to say something serious to Saul and Agatha as we sit out here on the patio, to try to find out what’s really going on between them and Bill, and maybe even make an attempt at repair. But instead, we start to talk about holidays. I ask them if they really have been to the Sea Of Tranquillity, to the moon.
“Do you want to see?”
“I’d love to.”
Saul dives back into the house. Without actually thinking—nearly a century out of date—I’m expecting him to return with a wad of photos in an envelope. But he returns with this box, a little VR thing with tiny rows of user-defined touchpads. He holds it out towards me, but I shake my head.
“You’d better do it, Saul.”
So he slips two wires cool over my ears, presses another against the side of my nose and drops the box onto the rug that covers my lap. He touches a button. As yet, nothing happens.
“Papa, can you hear me?”
“Yes...”
“Can you see?”
I nod without thinking, but all I’m getting is the stepped green lawns of my overly neat garden, the sea enfolding the horizon. Plain old actual reality.
Then, Blam!
Saul says, “This is us coming in on the moonshuttle.”
I’m flying over black and white craters. The stars are sliding overhead. I’m falling through the teeth of airless mountains. I’m tumbling towards a silver city of spires and domes.
“And this is Lunar Park.”
Blam! A midnight jungle strung with lights. Looking up without my willing it through incredible foliage and the geodome, I see the distant Earth; a tiny blue globe.
“Remember, Ag? That party.”
From somewhere, Agatha chuckles. “And you in that getup.”
Faces. Dancing. Gleaming bodies. Parakeet colours. Someone leaps ten, fifteen feet into the air. I shudder as a hand touches me. I smell Agatha’s scent, hear her saying something that’s drowned in music. I can’t tell whether she’s in VR or on the patio.
“This goes on ages. You know, Papa, fun at the time, but... I’ll run it forward.”
I hear myself say, “Thanks.”
Then, Blam! I’m lying on my back on the patio. The deckchair is tipped over beside me.
“You’re okay? Papa?”
Agatha’s leaning down over me out of the sky. Strands of hair almost touching my face, the fall of her breasts against her white cotton blouse.
“You sort of rolled off your chair...”
&nb
sp; I nod, pushing up on my old elbows, feeling the flush of stupid embarrassment, the jolt on my back and arse and the promise of a truly spectacular bruise. Black. Crimson. Purple. Like God smiling down through tropical clouds.
Agatha’s helping me as I rise. I’m still a little dizzy, and I’m gulping back the urge to be sick. For a moment, as the endorphines advance and re-group in my bloodstream, I even get a glimpse beyond the veil at the messages my body is really trying to send. I almost feel for Chrissake. I blink slowly, willing it to recede. I can see the patio paving in shadow and sunlight. I can see the cracked, fallen box of the little VR machine.
“Hey, don’t worry.”
Strong arms place me back in my deckchair. I lick my lips and swallow, swallow, swallow. No, I won’t be sick.
“Are you okay? You...”
“I’m fine. Is that thing repairable? Can I have a look?”
Saul immediately gives the VR box back to me, which makes me certain it’s irretrievably busted. I lift the cracked lid. Inside, it’s mostly empty space. Just a few silver hairs reaching to a superconductor ring in the middle.
“These machines are incredible, aren’t they?” I find myself muttering.
“Papa, They turn out this kind of crap by the million now. They make them fragile cos they want them to break so you go out and buy another. It’s no big deal. Do you want to go inside? Maybe it’s a bit hot for you out here.”
Before I can think of an answer, I’m being helped back inside the house. I’m laid on the sofa in the cool and the dark, with the doors closed and the shutters down, propped up on cushions like a doll. Part of me hates this, but the sensation of being cared for by humans instead of machines is too nice for me to protest.
I close my eyes. After a few seconds of red darkness, my corneas automatically blank themselves out. The first time they did this, I’d expected a sensation of deep, ultimate black. But for me at least—and Doc Fanian tells me it’s different for all of his patients—white is the colour of absence. Like a snowfield on a dead planet. Aching white. Like hospital sheets in the moment before you go under.
“Papa?”
“What time is it?”
I open my eyes. An instant later, my vision returns.
“You’ve been asleep.”
I try to sit up. With ease, Agatha holds me down. A tissue appears. She wipes some drool from off my chin. The clock in the room says seven. Nearly twilight. No need to blink; my eardrums are still on. Though the open patio doors comes the sound of the tide breaking on the rocks, but I’m also picking up a strange buzzing. I tilt my head like a dog. I look around for a fly. Could it be that I’ve blinked without realising and reconfigured my eardrums in some odd way? Then movement catches my eye. A black and silver thing hardly bigger than an pinhead whirs past my nose, and I see that Saul’s busy controlling it with from a palette he’s got on his lap at the far end of the sofa. Some new game.
I slide my legs down off the sofa. I’m sitting up, and suddenly feeling almost normal. Sleeping in the afternoon usually leaves me feeling ten years older—like a corpse—but this particular sleep has actually done me some good. The nausea’s gone. Agatha’s kneeling beside me, and Saul’s playing with his toy. I’m bright-eyed, bushy tailed. I feel like a ninety year old.
I say, “I was speaking this morning to Antonio.”
“Antonio, Papa?” Agatha’s forehead crinkles with puzzlement.
“He’s a man in a shop,” I say. “I mean, you don’t know him. He runs a bakery in the port.”
“Anyway, Papa,” Agatha prompts sweetly, “what were you saying to him?”
“I told him that you were staying—my grandchildren—and he asked how old you were. The thing is, I wasn’t quite sure.”
“Can’t you guess?”
I gaze at her. Why do she and Saul always want to turn everything into a game?
“I’m sorry, Papa,” she relents. “I shouldn’t tease. I’m twenty eight and a half now, and Saul’s thirty two and three quarters.”
“Seven eights,” Saul says without taking his eyes off the buzzing pinhead as it circles close to the open windows. “And you’d better not forget my birthday.” The pinhead zooms back across the room. “I mean you, Ag. Not Papa. Papa never forgets...”
The pinhead buzzes close to Agatha, brushing strands of her hair, almost touching her nose. “Look, Saul,” she snaps, standing up, stamping her foot. “Can’t you turn that bloody thing off?”
Saul smiles and shakes his head. Agatha reaches up to grab it, but Saul’s too quick. He whisks it away. It loops the loop. She’s giggling now, and Saul’s shoulders are shaking with mirth as she dashes after it across the room.
Nodding, smiling palely, I watch my grandchildren at play.
“What is that thing, anyway?” I ask as they finally start to tire.
“It’s a metacam, Papa.” Saul touches a control. The pinhead stops dead in the middle of the room. Slowly turning, catching the pale evening light on facets of silver, it hovers, waiting for a new command. “We’re just pissing around.”
Agatha flops down in a chair. She says, “Papa, it’s the latest thing. Don’t say you haven’t seen them on the news?”
I shake my head. Even on the old flatscreen TV I keep in the corner, everything nowadays comes across like a rock music video. And the endless good news just doesn’t feel right to me, raised as I was on a diet of war and starving africans.
“What does it do?” I ask.
“Well,” Saul says, “this metacam shows the effects of multiple waveform collapse. Look...” Saul shuffles towards me down the length of the sofa, the palette still on his lap. “That buzzing thing up there is a multi-lens, and I simply control it from down here—”
“—that’s amazing.” I say. “When I was young they used to have pocket camcorders you couldn’t even get in your pocket. Not unless you had one made specially. The pockets, I mean. Not the cameras...”
Saul keeps smiling through my digression. “But’s it’s not just a camera, Papa, and anyway you could get ones this size fifteen years ago.” He touches the palette on his lap, and suddenly a well of brightness tunnels down from it, seemingly right through and into the floor. Then the brightness resolves into an image. “You see? There’s Agatha.”
I nod. And there, indeed, she is: three-dee on the palette screen on Saul’s lap. Agatha. Prettier than a picture.
I watch Agatha on the palette as she gets up from the chair. She strolls over to the windows. The pinhead lens drifts after her, panning. I’m fascinated. Perhaps its my new corneas, but she seems clearer in the image than she does in reality.
Humming to herself, Agatha starts plucking the pink rosepetals from a display on the windowledge, letting them fall to the floor. As I watch her on Saul’s palette screen, I notice the odd way that the petals seem to drift from her fingers, how they multiply and divide. Some even rise and dance, seemingly caught on a breeze although the air in the room is still, leaving fading trials behind them. Then Agatha’s face blurs as she turns and smiles. But she’s also still in profile, looking out of the widow. Eyes and a mouth at both angles at once. Then she takes a step forward, whilst at the same time remaining still. At first, the effect of these overlays is attractive, like a portrait by Picasso, but as they build up the palette becomes confused. Saul touches the palette edge. Agatha collapses back into one image again. She’s looking out through the window into the twilight at the big yacht with white sails at anchor out in the bay. The same Agatha I see as look up towards her.
“Isn’t that something?” Saul says.
I can only nod.
“Yes, incredible, isn’t it?” Agatha says, brushing pollen from her fingers. “The metacam’s showing possible universes that lie close to our own. You do understand that, Papa?”
“Yes. But...”
Agatha comes over and kisses the age-mottled top of my head.
Outside, beyond the patio and the velvety neat garden, the sea horizon has dissolved.
The big white-sailed yacht now seems to be floating with the early stars. I can’t even tell whether it’s an illusion.
“We thought we’d go out on our own this evening, Papa,” she murmurs, her lips ticklingly close to my ear. “See what’s going on down in the port. That is, if you’re feeling okay. You don’t mind us leaving for a few hours, do you?”
A flyer from the port comes to collect Saul and Agatha. I stand waving on the patio as they rise into the starry darkness like silver twins of the moon.
Back inside the house, even with all the lights on, everything feels empty. I find myself wondering what it will be like after my grandchildren have gone entirely, which can only be a matter of days. I fix some food in the kitchen. Usually, I like the sense of control that my old culinary tools give me, but the buzzing of the molecular knife seems to fill my bones as I cut, slice, arrange. Saul and Agatha. Everything about them means happiness, but still I have this stupid idea that there’s a price to pay.
I sit down at the kitchen table, gazing at green-bellied mussels, bits of squid swimming in oil, bread that’s already going stale. What came over me this morning, buying all this crap? I stand up, pushing my way through the furniture to get outside. There. The stars, the moon, the faint lights of the port set down in the scoop of the darkly gleaming coast. If I really knew how to configure these eardrums, I could probably filter out everything but distant laughter in those lantern-strung streets, music, the clink of glasses. I could eavesdrop on what Saul and Agatha are saying about Papa as they sit at some cafe table, whether they think I’ve gone downhill since the last time, or whether, all things considered, I’m holding up pretty well.
They’ll be taking clues from things around this house that I don’t even notice. I remember visiting a great aunt back in the last century when I was only a kid. She was always punctilious about her appearance, but as she got older she used to cake her face with white powder, and there was some terrible discovery my mother made when she looked through the old newspapers in the front room. Soon after that, auntie was taken into what was euphemistically called a Home. These days, you can keep your own company for much longer. There are machines that will do most things for you: I’ve already got one in my beside drawer that crawls down my leg and cuts my toenails for me. But when do you finally cross that line of not coping? And who will warn you when you get close?
Everywhere: Volume I of the Collected Short Stories and Novellas of Ian R. MacLeod Page 29