by Steven Hall
Scout stared out of the side window. The dark trees and mulchy kerbs passed by to a steady heartbeat of streetlamps. Driving in the very early morning makes everything part of the same dreamy whole; the minds of sporadic drivers quietly washing back and forth like leaves on a wide ornamental pond.
My mind lost itself in an old tune I didn’t quite know, going round and around in the same infuriating refrain. I needed to talk to sweep the music out.
“Hey, so where are we going?”
“Hmmm?” Scout turned away from the window, coming back from wherever she’d drifted away to.
“Where are we going?”
“Deansgate.”
“I know, you said Deansgate, but I mean–whereabouts?”
“If I told you that–”
“You’d have to kill me?”
“No, but,” she shuffled around in her seat, “you’d probably say something tedious like ‘that doesn’t make any sense’ and I’d have to say ‘yes, it does because blah blah blah’ and then you’d want to go on and on about it all the way there anyway. And when we arrived after all the pointless debate you’d have to say ‘Scout you were right all along, looks like I’m a bit of an idiot.’ So, to cut out that whole boring middle bit, I’m thinking it’s better just to keep it to myself.” She looked across at me with that smile. “For the time being.” I could feel Ian’s cat-grin from the back of the yellow Jeep. “Can I put the radio on?”
I nodded. “So, what happened to answering all my questions today?”
“Well, we didn’t set a time limit, did we? I didn’t say, ‘I promise I’ll answer all your questions within thirty seconds of you asking them’. I just said today.”
“That’s cheating.”
“It’s not cheating. It’s being clever. There’s a difference.” The radio squealed, hissed and blasted a single bar of opera before settling on the Happy Mondays. “Excellent,” Scout said, flopping back in her seat.
“You can retune it if you like.”
“Thanks, I did.”
“I know.”
Sean Ryder’s rough and dreamy drawl rattled out of the old speakers and Scout joined in on the chorus–Yippy yippy ya ya yey yey yey. I had to crucify somebody today–while playing her knees like the bongos. I might well have found the most annoying girl in the world. I smiled. In spite of everything I felt fresh and alive, like an old painted door being sanded back to the wood. However annoying, the girl sitting next to me wasn’t just another person. Singing, drumming away on her knees, Scout was a force, a bright little energy wave moving through the dark world inside my old yellow Jeep. I wondered if anything could stop a girl who sang and drummed her knees like that.
The Happy Mondays became Fun Lovin’ Criminals who became Gary Numan who finally became the local news. When this happened, Scout said boo then started fiddling with the dials again.
“I’ve got another question,” I said.
“’kay.”
“How do you know all these things about me?”
“Female intuition.”
“You know I used to smoke menthol cigarettes by intuition?”
“Oh, that.” Scout turned down the radio and pushed out some air, not really a sigh, more like clearing away the crockery.
I waited.
“The thing you’ve got to remember is history sinks downwards, like a dinosaur in a tar pit. The Un-Space Exploration Committee keeps records on everyone they’ve had dealings with and lots of people they haven’t. If you so much as threw away a cigarette packet while on one of your underground adventures it’ll be in their archives somewhere. In a glass case with an identity tag probably.”
Something about this made an old industrial light flash deep in the dark corners of my mind, but it was too far back, too distant for me to trace. Giving up, I said:
“I thought you weren’t technically a member of the committee? If they do have a–” I felt a bit stupid saying it “–file on me, why would they show it to you?”
Scout smiled. “I didn’t technically ask permission.”
“I thought you might say that.”
“Of course you did. You’re not as stupid as you look.”
I turned around and raised my eyebrows at her.
“Well,” she said.
We pulled up in an alleyway next to the bins at the back of a McDonalds, just off what Scout said was Deansgate. It was still dark, still very early. The city a quiet insomnia of smog, purple skies, puddles, rubbish and white and yellow sodium. It was a time and place of cats, occasional trucks, occasional taxis and occasional spots of rain.
“This is where we’re parking,” Scout said as I clicked off the engine.
“Here?”
“Yep, it’ll be fine.”
“How long for?”
“It depends on how long it is between you arriving and you wanting to come back. I’d say–” she thought “–at least four days.”
“I can’t leave the Jeep here for four days with everything in it. I’m going to find a long-stay car park. We can walk back.”
“No, we have to leave the Jeep here. If we don’t leave the Jeep here, things can get difficult. There’s a protocol. Thing have to be done in a certain order.”
“What sort of order?”
“You don’t have to understand, you just have to do it.”
“The deal was–”
Scout made an exasperated air sound. “Alright, don’t say it.” She thought for a second. “Do you know what a Chinese puzzle box is?”
“Yes.”
“Right, well, it’s sort of like that. You’ve got to know where to apply the pressure and in what order if you want to get it to open.”
“Okay–so what are we trying to open?”
Scout looked at me. “The world,” she said.
Cities hum and rumble, they breathe out steam and smoke in their sleep and fill their alleyways with shivers. I closed the Jeep’s door and pulled my coat tight around me. Scout shivered too, hugging herself, rubbing her hands against her arms in her big army jacket and stamping her heels on the tarmac.
“Right then,” she said, “the best thing to do is gather together all the useful stuff, a few days’ worth of clothes and anything you really can’t stand to leave in the car. Travel as light as you can though, we’ve got a lot of walking to do.”
Ian watched me empty the rucksack then repack it with clothes, a sleeping bag, the light bulb tapes and books, the torch, the Dictaphones and several packets of batteries. As I did up the toggles and straps, Scout grabbed the plastic bag of food we’d bought at an all-night garage in one hand and came around to lift Ian’s carrier out of the back with the other.
“If we’re going a long way,” I said. “he’s going to get heavy.”
“He already is heavy. We’ll manage.”
The dark mass of Ian shifted around in his carrier to remind us he was actually there while we talked about him, then got on with pretending to be asleep.
“I still don’t know where we’re going.”
“Well, lock up, you’ll soon see.” Scout took a deep breath and let it out slowly, trying to control the shivering. “It’s like Dawn of the Dead or something isn’t it?” Then to me, smiling: “Do you trust me?”
“Yeah,” I admitted, shouldering the rucksack. “I’m just not really sure why.”
Loaded-up, we walked down the alley and across a dark street which was trafficless apart from a strong through-wind and a trundling Coke can which, when it moved, seemed like the noisiest thing in the world. Scout led us to the back door of a large bookshop.
“Waterstones.”
“Correct,” she said, putting down the food and the cat and going through her pockets. She pulled out a small metal something and after inspecting it for a second, shoved it into the door’s lock.
“Wait–we’re breaking into Waterstones?”
She turned around. “You’re not helping.”
“What about the alarms, dead-bolts? What ab
out–are you actually breaking in? Jesus.”
“Can I have some quiet? Please.”
After a few moments of looking up and down the street, clutching my arms around myself and wanting to be anywhere else on earth, Scout pulled the metal something out of the door’s lock. She pushed and the door swung open into the black.
“There,” she said. “No alarms. No dead-bolts. Remember what I said about Chinese puzzle boxes?”
“So parking the Jeep behind the bins at McDonalds means the alarm won’t go off when you pick the lock at Waterstones?”
She picked up the food and the cat carrier. “Come on.”
“Scout, that’s–”
“We’re in though aren’t we? Come on.”
I followed her inside and clicked the door shut behind me.
For a few seconds everything was black, then a wedge of light appeared and stretched into a tall rectangle as another door opened up ahead. Through it I saw bookshelves, the ground floor of the shop in night-time mode, still and silent with that half strength we’re closed yellowy-orange lighting. In front of me, Scout’s silhouette became the real Scout as she stepped through the doorway and out onto the shop floor. I followed.
Piled up with bags and a ginger cat, we stood there–two out-of-place backpackers–in the big closed bookshop.
“It feels unreal doesn’t it?” Scout whispered.
“It’s–” I couldn’t find the right words to describe the feeling, but Scout’s Chinese puzzle box system seemed much more plausible now we were inside. This space, all locked up, half-lit and silent near dawn, it wasn’t for just anyone. A person couldn’t just push a door open and carelessly walk in on something like this, something fundamental would be gone before they’d finished turning the handle. “It’s sort of religious,” I said in the end.
Scout nodded. “Places get a bit holy when they’re left on their own to think for a while. It’s something to do with the quiet maybe.”
“What do we do now we’re here?”
“Find the Hs.”
“Books beginning with H?”
“Novels. Novels by authors beginning with H. I think they’re over there.”
We made our way through the shelves and silent stacks until we came to the bookcase where most of the novels by writers with surnames starting with the letter H were shelved.
“Just these bottom four rows,” Scout said. “We need to unload them and stack them up at the side here.”
We did it quickly, taking the books out eight or twelve at a time, squeezing our palms tight against the covers as we lifted them and piling them up wholesale in front of the G case to our left. When this was done, Scout took hold of one of the empty shelves and lifted it up and out of the bookcase, placing it neatly next to the books. She removed the two other empty shelves in the same way then got down on her knees to inspect the case’s exposed back. Taking a small screwdriver from her big army coat she was soon passing out one, two, three, four small silver Phillips screws.
“Put them with the books,” she said. As I did, Scout took her screwdriver and levered out the lower part of the thin woodchip backboard, passing that out to me as well. Where the board had been there was now a three-foot by four-foot rectangular black hole.
“That’s where we’re going,” Scout said, getting to her feet and brushing herself off.
“Un-space.”
“Yep, that’s it.”
I took the rucksack off my shoulders and got down on my hands and knees to look inside the hole. I could only see maybe two or three inches of grey bitty concrete floor before the space receded into complete black. The shop’s dry warm processed air had made me start to sweat under my heavy coat but the air coming out of the hole felt cool and hard, basic and factual, and telling stories of miles of stripped-down empty places.
I moved to take the torch out of the rucksack’s side pocket but I found myself slowing down, distracted. I turned and sat, staring into the black.
“You alright?” Scout said, crouching next to me.
“I’ve just got this feeling that if I go in there I’m not going to come out again.”
She looked serious, thinking this through carefully and then she bumped her shoulder against me, a supportive nudge.
“What?” I said.
“If you want your boomerang to come back, first you’ve got to throw it.”
“But. What if I want to keep my boomerang and not–lose it down a big dark hole?”
“The throwing and the coming back is the boomerang, brainstrain. Without that part, you’re just carrying a bent stick around.”
I smiled. “So who died and made you so wise?”
“Hmmm…” Thinking about it, Scout did a childish shrug. “Maybe God?”
I looked at her.
“What?”
“Wow.”
“What?”
“Just–wow.”
“Fuck off.”
19
History Sinks Downwards
Under our torch beams the space behind the bookcase became surprisingly ordinary, a small grey concrete area with a circular hole cut into the floor and a steel ladder leading down.
“That’s us,” Scout said. “You’ll have to take off the backpack and hold it up above your head to climb down.”
“What about the cat?”
“I’ll go in first and you pass him through to me.”
Scout dropped her still-turned-on torch into the carrier bag with our food, hooked the bag over her wrist and crawled through the bookcase into the space behind. Once inside, the white plastic bag glowed with a gentle diffused light. It added a fuzzy spinning skyline of food packaging and water bottle silhouettes to the concrete walls. I watched as she manoeuvred her legs over the hole, twisted and climbed a few rungs down the ladder. As she did the bag-light disappeared under the lip of the hole and a corresponding dark horizon raced up the walls towards the ceiling. “Okay. Pass him through.”
Ian had his poker-face on. He was either very scared, or surprisingly calm, considering.
“I’m sorry,” I said into the cat carrier. “I promise I’ll make all this up to you.” And I passed him and his plastic box into the hole.
Scout took the carrier by the handle on top. “We’ll see you down there,” she said, heaving cat and box up above her head and starting down the ladder one-handed. I watched them disappear in steady downward bobs, Scout’s shoulders, then Scout’s head, then most of Scout’s arm, then finally Ian’s carrier, his blank face squinting from my torch beam as he disappeared into the hole.
I pushed the rucksack through the bookcase and crawled in after it.
I’d climbed down the ladder until my head was below the level of the floor and was struggling to manoeuvre the rucksack in after me when I heard a clunk from below. Pale light filtered up the climb shaft, casting long shadows upwards. I strained and struggled the rucksack into the hole, taking most of its weight on the top of my head and steadying it with my right arm as I climbed down.
The ladder brought me down into a very long, very straight concrete corridor. Weak orange strip lights with hanging wires and yellowing fittings illuminated the space to distant vanishing points in both directions. Batteries of thick black cables were harness-bolted down the length of one wall, with ladders like the one we’d come down appearing at distant intervals along the other.
“We’ve got light,” I said, heaving the rucksack down onto the floor. My voice made hard echoes, like the sound of a clap in an empty room. The air smelled dry, industrial.
Scout leant against the wall a little further down the corridor with Nobody’s laptop, Ian in his carrier, the food bag and, I noticed, another rucksack cluttered around her. She’d been waiting for me to make it down the ladder and when she saw I’d managed it she knelt, opening and rummaging in the new bag. “This is electrical access corridor number four,” she said. “Welcome to un-space.”
“What’s that?” I said, meaning the bag.
Scout
pulled two tightly-rolled-up bundles of material out of the rucksack and shook them–they unravelled into a blue vest top and a pair of green combat pants.
“My stuff,” she said. “Right where I left it.” Scout laid the clothes out over her rucksack then started unknotting the leather belt tied around her waist. My over-sized trousers dropped down her pale legs and she stepped out of them, boots already gone. “You didn’t think I was going to–” she struggled my big T-shirt up over her head “–spend the next couple of days walking around in your bloke clothes did you?” And she scooped up my trousers and shirt and threw them over to me.
I caught them and held them to my chest.
Scout suddenly wore only the seen-better-days bra from the night before and, I realised, a pair of my dark blue fitted boxer shorts. Standing in the corridor like that she looked–well, she looked amazing. Pale and perfect: perfect-by-not-being-quite-perfect, real. Her long neck, ice-bridge collarbones, small breasts–old world marble sculpture rising a little way naked from worn functional bra cups–too-skinny ribs, small but solid muscles working under her white white skin, moving her calves, her arms, the twist of her waist, my shorts stretching out over the curve of her hips and down onto her thighs, the waistband scooping up at her stomach, and below the shorts’ loose, empty front with buttons–yes, I looked, quickly, guiltily, once, twice–the material tightened to a bumped V and disappeared between her legs.
