Tomorrow

by Chris Beckett

  My teeth are chattering. A large moon rises, and all those even ranks of plants cast long faint shadows over the earth, with a pale flickering between them to show where the moonlight has struck those slowly beating feather-like arms. Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, they go above my head. No one will find my body, apart, perhaps, from pterosaurs or whatever other creature fills the scavenger niche up here, and when they’re done, the quiet clockwork of the trees and stars will simply carry on.

  I walk by myself along the seafront. Amanda has a pile of marking she needs to finish and is working through it in her bathrobe at the desk in our hotel room. Couples are eating pastries in the cafés. Children are playing on the sand. I drop a coin into one of those metal telescopes and look out at the island in the bay. It has its own beach, its own holidaymakers, and even several telescopes like the one I’m looking through now. I watch those telescopes until my time runs out, but I have to drop in two more coins before I finally see someone out there climbing on to the step and inserting a coin of her own so she can look back towards me across the sparkling bay. Here and there – that mystery. She’s so far away that I can’t even make out her face. And yet to her, the little town on the island is what’s all around her, and this place I’m in – the couples in the cafés behind me, the children playing on the beach, the promenade wall already warming in the sun – is remote and far away. It’s such an obvious and everyday experience that no one even comments on it, but, really, what could be more strange?

  My phone pings. This is another thing that I’ve had to get used to, this being connected all of the time to everyone I know. I fetch the phone out of my pocket. There’s a message from Tan, my literary agent. She knows I’m not looking at social media while on holiday, but she thinks I ought to know that there’s a news story doing the rounds about an indigenous rights activist called Amilcar Zero who has just been jailed for vandalizing a satellite relay station in order to draw attention to the structural disadvantages suffered by his people, and unfavourable comparisons are being made between his treatment and the hero’s welcome I received after I deliberately damaged that observatory in order to get someone to come and read my note. It’s one law for the poor, people are saying, and another for folk like me.

  It might be a good idea to comment? Tan says. Maybe express solidarity with Amilcar? Acknowledge your privilege? Something like that. Happy to help with drafting. It’d be a pity to complicate the film deal!

  I consider this for a few seconds. I don’t want to, I reply. I’d like to just leave it. But thanks for letting me know.

  I am irritated by being expected to comply with a judgement made by a mob about a situation I know nothing about, and most of the mob doesn’t either. To properly respond, I’d have to give careful thought to the question as to when criminal damage to public property is justified, since presumably no one’s saying it’s okay just to trash valuable scientific equipment whenever you happen to feel like it, and I’d have to know who Amilcar Zero is, and what precisely were the circumstances in which he acted, in order to determine whether his case was in any way comparable to mine, but I don’t feel like doing any of that and don’t see why I should.

  I turn my attention to the beach and the sea, trying to get past my annoyance, and back to where I was before. If you don’t look at social media, I remind myself, it isn’t really there. It’s a single widthless point in space, inside a matchbox, inside a drawer, which no one has to open and some people never do.

  My phone pings again, and now I’m cross. This had better not be Tan again because if she thinks securing a film deal justifies surrendering to a bunch of self-appointed custodians of public morality, hiding behind self-righteousness from their own punitive jealousy, that’s up to her, but she has no right to demand the same of me.

  But actually the new message isn’t from Tan, and feels like a more fundamental threat to my stability. Hi there, Estela has written with studied jauntiness. Just wondered what you were up to, and whether you’d like to hang out some time? Xxx

  We met up several times after the Jungle Club, until I told her we really shouldn’t any more. There is no deep connection there. There is only (a) a young woman who enjoyed the reflected light of someone who is the subject of daily abuse on social media, but is also famous in all of the twenty provinces for descending into hell and rising up again like Christ, and (b) myself, who enjoyed her admiration.

  What was my excuse for getting involved with her at all, when I’d already become a couple with Amanda? Let’s say I was starved, let’s say I was traumatized by many months without a single intimate physical contact with anyone . . . It’s a bit threadbare, I know, but it’s the best I can do. Perhaps transgression itself feels a bit like intimacy, in that they both involve crossing a boundary of some sort, even though the boundary between loyalty and disloyalty, and the boundary between one person and another are two entirely different things? Or perhaps, when even intimacy doesn’t seem intimate enough to assuage one’s hunger, transgression, with its inherent brutality, its indifference to kindness and civility, seems, at least in that brief intoxicating moment of crossing over, more intimate than intimacy itself? I really don’t like Estela all that much, certainly no more than most of the people I know. I don’t think she really likes me so very much either, whatever she may tell herself. I think what draws her to me is the idea of associating with the famous captive, so frequently discussed on national TV, who made a dramatic escape and is now writing a memoir for which film options are already being sought by several major production companies, and who for all these reasons seems to her to inhabit an exciting and capacious space, hitherto unreachable, into which she longs to be initiated, because then she’d become a real grown-up and could free herself from the stifling bonds of her upbringing, her class, and her own timidity.

  Jesus Christ, what is the matter with me? What kind of monster am I? But even now I hesitate, feeling, ridiculous as it seems, a pang of grief. Hello, I finally write. I’m having a lovely time with Amanda in a beautiful hotel on the west coast, a honeymoon almost. Hope you’re well. Don’t want to meet up, thanks, as we discussed, but no doubt we’ll run into each other sometime.

  After I press the send button I feel hollow. I don’t know what to do or how to entertain myself. My plan had been to find a café where I could sit at my laptop and do some work on the memoir of my escape from FRENALAT, which I’m hoping is going to make me so much money that it will allow me to escape a lot of other things, like having to work at the university and living in a rented apartment. But I simply can’t bear the idea of keeping still.

  I look out across the water at the island. I wish I was out there. I wish I was in that other little town, by that other little beach, and that this place I’m in was far away. But I know that wouldn’t be enough. What I really wish is that I could be there, and yet somehow it would still be there, even when I’m in it, and not become here, as every there always does.

  It reminds me of a lighthouse not only because it’s tall and narrow, and stands on an outcrop above the lake, but also because of those large glass windows at the top, even though the windows have elaborately carved frames and arches.

  It brings to mind a fairground helter-skelter, too, though it’s made completely of stone. And it also reminds me a little bit of a pagoda. The whole structure is covered with gargoyles and other horizontal shapes, such as coral-like branches, and spirals, and wings, and leaves, which thrust out all over its surface, each one different from all the others, without any obvious pattern or rhythm to their arrangement. A light breeze, passing over all the protrusions, and crevices, draws out faint flute-like vibrations in many different pitches whose harmonics fluctuate second by second.

  ‘Hello?’ I call out as I approach it. ‘Is there anyone there?’ The tower is close enough to the high, bare escarpment for me to hear the echo of my voice from there, but there is also a barely audible echo from the tower itself.

  There’s an arched doorway, carved
with a series of abstract shapes that might perhaps be some kind of hieroglyph. I know I’m not supposed to try the door, but I try it anyway and it isn’t locked.

  ‘Hi? Anyone in?’ I wait and listen. I can hear a rooster calling in the village at the far end of the lake, but the only sound here is that faint chorus of flutes. I can almost believe it’s a chord of some kind, and not just a random selection of sounds, as if the tower’s designer had some somehow calculated in advance the notes that each gap and protrusion would generate when a wind blew across or into them.

  ‘Anyone there?’ I call again. I step back from the door and look around to see if I’m being observed, but there’s no one in sight, not even in the village, which is nearly a kilometre away. Over there the ground is green and fertile. Here around the tower it’s red and dry.

  I turn my attention back to the door. I’ve been told that no one in the village goes through it, except on rare and special occasions, and I’ve been asked not to go through it myself, but, after a few seconds of hesitation, I go through it anyway. It leads into a circular room with a stone floor and a very high ceiling. The room is lit by narrow windows, set into what look like the stoned-up frames of what were originally much larger windows. There’s a table in there, with an unlit candle on it, and a bed, and a couple of chairs. Books are stacked up in piles across the floor, and to one side there’s a simple wooden staircase, so steep as almost to be more of a ladder. Even though I’ve been specifically told, by people to whom I owe a great deal, that the stairs are not to be climbed except on those very special occasions, I begin to climb. I mean, having seen the windows of the room at the top, and been told what’s in there, how could I come so near without going up? Who turns down the chance of being in the presence of the Holy Grail?

  Patterns of varicoloured light and shadow slide down my body, as I emerge into another round, high-ceilinged room on the next level, also lit by small windows, but these windows are filled with coloured glass: red, green, blue, yellow. This room is crammed with carved stone figures of various kinds: men, women, children, animals, angels, packed in there for storage rather than display, as if they are left over from some abandoned project. The bands of coloured light break up their outlines, the boundary between, say, a patch of red and a patch of blue being much sharper than the outline of a statue’s arms or face, and I feel as if I myself have become almost invisible, my outline too made inconsequential by these bold bars of colour.

  There are more wooden steps going up to the floor above. As I begin to climb, I’m reminded of childhood visits to the Great Cathedral back in the city where I grew up. Climbing the tower was the point of such visits as far as I was concerned. I was never much taken by the tombs of knights or the statues of saints, but when, at six years old, I put my foot on the first step, it felt as if I was stepping right out of the everyday world into a realm of danger and magic.

  The next circular room has clear glass windows. There are shelves, and more piles of books, but here there are also paintings, one on an easel, the others stacked against the walls. Many of them depict a naked figure of indeterminate sex, curled in a foetal position inside a small cramped space that’s completely surrounded by blackness. In the painting on the easel, rays of light are bursting from the figure’s head and seem to be flinging out into the darkness a profusion of animals, plants and tiny human figures. Propped beside the steps that go up to the next floor is a painting in which one of these little figures is fleeing from something through a dark, empty landscape, looking back over its shoulder in fear, and next to it another picture in which an identical figure is running through the same bleak landscape but this time apparently in pursuit of someone who has already disappeared off the edge of the wooden board on which the scene is painted.

  I climb the stairs. When the hatchway into the room above is just above my head, I hesitate, aware that even those who helped to build the tower only enter the upper room a few times in their lives.

  ‘Hello?’ I call softly, uncertain whether I am more concerned to get myself heard, or worried about disturbing someone’s rest. ‘Is there anyone there?’

  I have a strong desire just to lie down on the ground. I could look up at the universe, listen to the steady sound of those feather-like branches (whoosh, whoosh, whoosh from closeup and that steady waterfall-like sigh from the distance where all the sounds merge together), and give up on the whole idea of trying to get past this place and resuming some kind of life. If one is going to choose a death, it strikes me, this wouldn’t be such a bad way to go, though it is annoying to think I went to all that trouble to escape from my cage and hack my way through the forest, if it was all just going to end like this, for probably Carlo or someone would have come back at some point if I’d stayed in the cage, and they would have fed me, and it was warm down there, and life would have carried on, and quite likely I would eventually have been released because, after all, I wasn’t much use to FRENALAT dead.

  It grates with me too that, quite probably, no one will ever know what happened to me, that all of this will simply cease to be and leave no trace at all. But I suppose that was always going to be the case, sooner or later, whatever happens in my life. And, on the plus side, there’d be no pain, no growing old, no more struggling with all the various anxieties with which it’s been my particular fate to struggle, not just now, but even when I was an associate lecturer back in the city, and went from day to day without cold or hunger or thoughts of imminent death, but still found plenty to fret about.

  A red light blinks in the distance. I think at first it must be a plane – an airliner perhaps – travelling from one coast to the other, but no, sweet Jesus, wise Apollo, blessed Lady Tanit, it isn’t moving, and it’s not so very far away. That is definitely an electric light blinking on and off somewhere over there, like the lights that the river villages have on the ends of their jetties. Someone’s out there! Someone exists in this place apart from me. I hurry forward, and then break into a run, terrified the light might disappear before I reach it. But it blinks away steadily, not shifting from the spot, and as I draw nearer I begin to make out a dark shadow against the stars, as if of a giant plate tipped on its side, and next to it the red light blinking at the top of a column or pole, a jetty sticking out into nothing but empty space.

  It’s an observatory, I realise, as I approach it. The dark shape is the saucer of a small radio telescope, the pole the antenna through which this place communicates with the outside world. There are a number of other shapes around these two objects, glinting faintly in the moonlight, which turn out to be solar panels, while between them sits a squat, low, bunker-like shape, not even as tall as I am. I rush towards it, searching its metal surface for doors and windows, and shouting out to whoever’s inside to let me in. But there’s no answer. If there are windows at all, they are hidden behind metal shutters. And the door . . . well, there is a door, a metal door with rounded corners like the bulkhead door on a ship. But if this is an unmanned station, full of valuable equipment, that door will of course be securely locked and there’s obviously no point in even hoping that it won’t be. Nevertheless, and with that in mind, I try the handle.

  The door opens. It’s warm inside, there’s a faint electric hum and little lights blink below me in the darkness, red and green and blue. This place isn’t some empty shed. Even with no one here it’s busy and alive. I feel around on the walls next to the door and find a switch. Click! I’m in electric light, as mysterious and as beautiful as an entire sky full of stars. When my eyes have adjusted I see steps descending in front of me into a narrow room no more than eight metres long, that for some reason – possibly to maintain a more constant temperature for the machines – has its floor two metres below ground level. The light that seemed so bright at first is actually soft and intimate, like a jazz club, or an intensive care unit. I guess if it was too bright, it would be harder to read the screens and instruments. There’s barely one metre of clear floor space between the wall on the lef
t-hand side and the bank of instruments on the right, with its screens, switches, dials and blinking lights, and in this space are two office chairs, over one of which is draped a blanket. I suppose when people come here, they work at night and need something to keep them warm. At the far end of the room is a cork noticeboard on which are pinned various messages: old weather reports, a reminder to close and lock the door, good wishes left by a departing scientist for the two who will be coming next, a sign written with a red felt-tip pen that says, ‘ISHTAR, PLEASE DO NOT LEAVE MY BLANKET OUTSIDE THIS TIME,’ and messages of a more technical nature that I can’t make any sense of at all. Various names recur: Zidon, Alyssa, Juan, Ishtar. A pencil stub dangles on a piece of string.

  There must be a phone in here, or some means of communicating with the world. I spend a long time looking for it, but the best I can come up with is a screen on which, after much fiddling with switches and dials, I very briefly manage to conjure up a hissing cloud of static through which I can just make out the image of a family sitting down to eat while a crackly voice extols the unrivalled flavour of Hannibal’s Savoury Sauce. Then the static overwhelms it, and no matter how many knobs I turn, I can get nothing more except random spots and zigzags.

  Never mind, I tell myself, and I feel surprisingly calm about the whole thing, the inconvenience of not being able to communicate with the outside world seeming relatively minor when compared with the fact that I am no longer about to die of cold. Realizing that there must be some sleeping quarters nearby, I go back outside and find another low building, but in this case the door is locked as you’d expect, so I return to the room with the instruments, wrap myself in the blanket, and, opening up my bag, dine in luxury on a quarter of a loaf of bread, an apple and a chicken leg, rounded off with a big fat treacly roll-up of the headman’s home-grown tobacco that crackles like a bonfire when I inhale. The machines hum and flicker as they process the faint vibrations of the stars.