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

by Ian R. MacLeod

  In the evenings, at night, a few tiny lights would sometimes thread out to him through the dark, but they always died with the curfew.

  “I was over there a couple of months ago…” Hibbert studied Boult from across the table at the White Tree, the island’s only pub. “You remember, for that speech accepting an award some committee or other had decided to give me.” He inhaled bubblingly on his cigarette. He wafted a hand. “Things are just as crap as they always where. I slipped my minder—went around the back streets.” He took another ruminative drag. Boult was only half-listening. Hibbert’s fat body was encased in a wrinkled lanolin-reeking jumper. With the folds of fat distorting the lines of his face, he looked like a wool-encased grub. “The stink. The ghastly kids. Disease. No shoes. The ruined factories, the wrecked shopping malls and run-down power stations. And the fucking, fucking, women. I wouldn’t touch anything there, believe me…”

  It never really got fully dark at midsummer in these high latitudes, and the light was pink through the windows and the perpetual beery fug of the White Tree. On his way here, Boult had walked the north shore in the luminous dusk where the sand lay like bolts of silk, the boulders were sleeping bodies and the mainland was nothing more than a shining haze. He’d barely noticed that he was walking towards the sea until the current had started to tug over his knees. His shoes and trousers were still wet.

  Hibbert banged down his pint. “Another?”

  All it took was Hibbert’s raised finger, and Clarkie the publican put down the glasses he’d been busily polishing to lever out the foaming fluid. Dark and woody, better than anything on the mainland, it was fine stuff to get lost in. Clarkie gave Boult a wink as he placed the glasses down. Sympathy? Complicity? But then Clarkie would have been listening to Hibbert’s ramblings. It was part of his job.

  The other regular inhabitants of the bar pulsed and receded. Over there were the Spinsters: mannish Leticia who wrote light social comedies, and Carla, who had once been a blonde-haired waif of considerable promise and beauty, but was now putting on weight, a downy moustache, and the blood-threaded glare of the serious drinker. Otherwise, bobbing amid the fog, were a cluster of Young Turks, most of whom had barely been on the island since last winter and were still glorying in the easy joy of getting up each morning to face nothing more than the grinning jaw of a typewriter, the split claw of a pen. And over there, trying hard to be part of the same group with his usual social oiliness, was Kilbracken, who wrote adventures which seemed all the more implausible for the fact that they were apparently well researched. Kilbracken’s plump wet lips creased in a grin as he tried to keep up with whatever joke the Young Turks were sharing. Some of them, Boult thought, might even be young enough to be of interest to him, but then again he doubted it. Once in a while, as reward for completing yet another creaking epic, a lad would be quietly plucked from the city slums and borne to the island. They always seemed happy enough, skipping along the high-hedged lanes under Kilbracken’s supervision, diving off the rocks into the cold sea. The tragedy wasn’t that they were brought here to the island, but that there were then banished back to the mainland again.

  “One for the weary road?”

  Boult noticed that the beer had somehow emptied itself from his glass.

  “I think I’ll go, thanks.”

  But citizen Clarkie was already levering out the drinks. He gave Boult another wink as he bore them over.

  Ears roaring, the night air swarming around him like faceted glass, Boult swayed back from the White Tree towards his cottage. Few stars tonight, although his eyes prickled and flashed as he tilted his head up towards the sky. The road pitched and rose. The hedges swayed. But Boult’s body was like an old horse. Climb aboard it, give it a kick, and it always found its way back to his cottage. Except…

  A chalky branching of the lane, and the dark headland dipped shale fingers into the ocean. He slid down through the dunes towards his beach. The tide had come and gone. The mainland was flat and black and low and lumpy tonight, coaly and sullen as a dead fire’s sweepings, but above it the air was alight. Fingers of flame danced in a silvery, shifting curtain. There were colours as well. Tremulous flashes of ruby and turquoise like flickers of pure joy. Hanging in the spinning dark, seemingly only for his eyes, the Northern Lights gave a ghostly dance.

  They caught in the waves. They billowed so close that Boult was temped to reach out. And the thing of it was that he was happy just to stand there and watch. He felt none of the impetus to trap, control, deceive, re-create, imagine, which would once have filled him. Perhaps that’s finally it, he thought as the dancing waves stirred their glorious chilly fingers. At last. I’m done with it. I’m no longer a writer.

  The sparkles brightened, hanging against a darkening backdrop of earth and air. A dance of jewels, they winked at him, then faded until there were just two left hanging in a huge well of darkness, close above the sea. Boult waited for them to die as well, but they remained sharp and clear. Persistent. And slowly, slowly, on the long exhalations of sea air, they seemed to be moving towards him.

  The sea shushed and retreated. The lights hung there above the water. Boult waited for his failing senses to correct the illusion, but instead he realised that a shape was coalescing around them, and that it had a masts, a hull, a funnel, and was approaching the island.

  Boult was washing his breakfast things at his sink next morning when he noticed a small black car crawling through the sunshine towards his cottage. It had to be Roberts, the island’s senior watchman.

  He dried his hands and quickly inspected the room. A few streamers of smoke from the toast he’d burnt still wafting through the open doorway. The two cracked leather chairs. The collection of old photographic prints of mainland landscapes, which he’d inherited along with almost everything else with his tenancy of the cottage, leaned from the stone walls. It all looked neat, ready for inspection.

  A crackle of tyres. Boult cast a final glance at his desk in the corner. The mess of it seemed almost perfect. Piles of sheets here and there weighed down by bits of slate. A scatter of rubbers and pencils. It gave off just the right sense of orderly but intense activity. He just hoped there wasn’t too much dust—

  But here was watchman Roberts: red-haired and always smaller and younger than you expected, with those freckles and that nearly-moustache, and that suit which, tailored though it plainly was, still didn’t fit him.

  “Fine, fine day…” He sat down on one of the leather chairs with a squeak of his shoes, placing his briefcase across his lap. “Any chance of a cuppa?”

  Boult refilled the kettle and set it on the twin gas hob. The flame, when he ignited it with his forth match, was nearly invisible in the torrents of sunlight which fell though the window. Boult felt the same. Or like those floating veils he’d seen last night across the mainland.

  “Feeling alright? You look a bit peaky?”

  “Nothing a good, brisk walk won’t cure.”

  Watchman Roberts, on his chair in the swarming darkness of the cottage, subsided into silence. The kettle began to scream. Boult bore a chipped marigold mug across the cottage’s rugged slate floor, dribbling so much that Roberts had to shake hot fluid from his fingers. Boult flopped down on the chair facing the watchman. Which was worse, he wondered, to appear as guilty as I do now, or not to seem guilty? For are we not all guilty, just as the ill-advised poor used to believe in the wasted days before the Revolution—stained with the blood of sin and political incorrectness? And who could claim to understand and follow every wish and dictat of the Party? Not Boult, certainly. Perhaps not even Roberts. Guilt, after all, was natural. It was innocence which was suspicious.

  The watchman sipped his brew through the thin gills of his moustache.

  “Well,” he said finally, “how are things going?”

  “Pretty well. The characters started talking to each other. That’s always the trick. That, and a few brisk walks… Some sea air.”

  “Good. Good. Resolutions are
so tricky, aren’t they?”

  “They can be.”

  “Even if…” Roberts put down his cup. He steepled his fingers. “Even if they’re not the final climax.”

  A wind stirred, pushing the door further open. The top sheets on Boult’s desk began to flutter.

  “I’m so excited.” Roberts leaned forward. “That you’re so near to finishing. The citizens on the mainland haven’t forgotten you, you know. They…” He gave a nod at the room around them. “Remain grateful. If anything, the wait’s almost been a good thing. You know—anticipation. At last, the sequel to The Furnace.”

  “It isn’t a sequel.”

  “Of course.” Roberts sat back again. “Well. Whatever… But you’re the same writer you always were. Aren’t you?”

  The door creaked. The topsheets fluttered excitedly. Slowly, the flapping papers were pushing back the stones which were laid on top of them.

  “Well, you did say, last time we spoke, that that problem chapter was part of the overall resolution…”

  Boult swallowed. Another few minutes, if this breeze kept up, and the room would be filled with the swirling sheets of everything he’d written these last few years; a dancing snow of gibberish.

  “It’s nearly finished, actually.”

  “The chapter?”

  “No. The book.”

  The wind stilled. The papers settled. Had he really said that?

  Watchman Roberts drew a breath. “There are timetables and budgets, you know. Precious effort and resources must be said aside. Something like this could throw out a whole five year plan… But still, this is marvellous news. Do you have an exact date when you’ll have your book ready for proofreading?”

  “It’s just a few details which need sorting. Things I can easily check up on at the island library.” It was almost worth saying these things, just to see the look on Roberts’ face: the worried, hurried calculations. “No more than a week.”

  “Then you have a full synopsis?”

  “I’d rather keep that under wraps. As it’s so nearly finished.”

  “So…” Roberts stood up. “Would you like a lift?”

  “To where?”

  “You did just say you had some details to check in the library…”

  The State offices were in the main square directly opposite the library, and the two buildings, by far the largest on the island, glowered at each other across a stone stump which had once either supported a cross or the statue of a local dignitary. The plinth was debased now, its inscription destroyed in the early frenzies of revolution; it now looked as if a large animal had chewed it. The two opposing buildings, repaired and repainted in a peeling variety of unmatched colours, weren’t much better. Still, you could just make out a sign in the arch above the irregular windows the top floor of the State offices: CIN MA. The one picked out in brick on the side of the library said AMUSEM NTS.

  The contents of the library were impressive enough, though. There were publications available in its rickety catacombs which had long ago been banned on the mainland. Foreign authors. Pre-revolution histories. Unblanked maps. Even the occasional erotic text. It was all here. The State accepted that its writers might need to have access to information that its citizens as a whole remained happier and more productive having kept from them. Not so that these elements should be included in the writers’ finished works, it was understood, but rather that they should be better excluded. There was a theory that the mainland authorities used the island library as a repository for all of the information which had been banned on the mainland, but which was considered too sensitive or useful to actually destroy. The place was, indeed, vast. There was another theory that several of the writers who’d vanished from the island in odd circumstances were still somewhere inside this library, lost, living on paper, fungus and bookworms as they continued their endless, hopeless research.

  Boult presented his party card at the library turnstile, then took a requisition form over to one of the private booths. The first few years he’d been on the island, he’d been sure that he was being watched from beyond the blank glass which faced him. But the place was too disinterestedly silent, the glass too grubby. Staring back at it, all he saw was his own dim reflection. All he felt was his usual absence of purpose.

  “Filled in our form yet, citizen?”

  Boult quickly entered his party number, address and date and the subject of his proposed enquiry. The librarian, Styche, sucked his teeth and shook his head as he examined it. His loop of keys jingled. Styche had a huge cyst which dangled over his left eye like a third eyeball. As Boult followed in the little man’s sour wake up lines of bare-boarded corridors, he wondered why the hadn’t ever taken a pair a scissors to the damn thing and cut it off.

  Styche unlocked and examined the AT-BEs in set of card index drawers.

  “Not here.”

  “You could try NE-PA instead.”

  “That’s not what you put on the form.”

  “But you could still try it, couldn’t you?”

  Styche, wen swaying, keys jingling, shook his head.

  “What a pity,” Boult mused. “And I was just saying to watchman Roberts as he drove me here how import this bit of research was to my finishing my book…”

  Styche harrumphed and produced the right card. Crisp and immaculately printed, it was so clean and new that it had to be old—pre revolution—and the book it referred to lay unreachably high up on the looming racks. Boult stood back and watched as Styche found and positioned a long ladder and scrambled up it, expertly avoiding its several missing rungs, and released the book from its eyrie in a slow rain of dust.

  Settling down back in his booth with Effects of the Upper Atmosphere, Boult briefly felt the preparatory tingle he’d always used to feel when he was genuinely researching a project: that trek through the sunny woods of inspiration where every turn you took, each fork and hurdle, always led to the thing you didn’t even know you were looking for until you found it. But the book was nothing like the card. The cover was colour-printed, it was true, and so were many of the pages, but the whole thing was so browned and mottled and crinkled and torn that it was hard to believe that the damage wasn’t deliberate. It was the same with so many of the pre-revolution books Boult had requisitioned that he suspected that someone had the job of making them seem as unappealing as possible.

  But, even then, this book was a dry disappointment. Its contents consisted mostly of equations, charts, graphs, diagrams. There were a few photos of clouds and skylines—and how odd it was to see church steeples and unbroken lines of electric pylons prickling the horizon—but there was no magic for him here, no majesty, not even in the whole last chapter which was devoted to the Northern Lights, the Aurora Borealis. ions… charged particles… geomagnetic latitude…They made as much to him as did his own useless scribblings.

  “Have we finished with our book yet, citizen?”

  Styche was clearly eager to get the thing back on the shelves where it belonged, roosting beyond all possibility of escape for another fifty years. None the wiser, Boult gave it to him, sneezed, returned his requisition form and shoved out through the library turnstile into sunlit midday. The air blown in from the sea across the island was cool and clear and sweet. And there were fresh cherries and unrotten potatoes on sale in the greengrocers along the narrow street which wound down to the harbour, clean new sheets of paper and dark proper ink in the stationers. Not only that, but you could go in and buy all of it with what amounted to real money. A dizzy sort of unadmitted capitalism reigned on the island. One way and another, it was easy to forget just how many and subtle were the ways in which life here differed from that on the mainland.

  There was a trawler berthed down in the quite, sunny harbour. Remembering the lights he’d seen approaching the island last night, Boult picked his way over the rotting ropes to get a closer look. Blackened, paint-peeling, white numbers roughly scrawled on the bow, relics such as this were now used for deliveries to the island
and, it was said, to scour the shorelines of the mainland for enemy craft and the flash of furtive signals. It had probably brought the potatoes, the fresh cherries, although it had arrived in the middle of the night which, even by the standards of the island, was unusual. His neck prickling, Boult glanced around him to see if he was being watched. But the town, the harbour, the whole island, lay still and sunned and innocent.

  The lunchtime interior of the White Tree was almost as dense and dark as it had been the night before. Hibbert hadn’t moved from his bench, and Clarkie, ears cocked as always, was busily re-polishing what could have been the same glass behind the bar. But over in the far corner, where the Spinsters usually sat, there was a new group. They could only have come from that trawler.

  “I’d ask you if you fancied another. If you’d actually started your first, that is.”

  Boult glanced at Hibbert and his untouched pint, then back towards the new group. Most of them were obviously crew; wizened men of that ageless age which the sea seems to engender. But one of them, seated in the sunlight fog of the window and talking animatedly, was young. And female.

  “Some new posting, by the look of it. And we all know what that bloody means. Doesn’t look as thought she’s got a book in her, though, does she…?”

  Boult nodded. The fresh angles of that face; that chin, that mouth. Strangers of any kind were rare on the island, but a new writer arriving generally meant that an old one was heading back to the mainland in disgrace.