by Steven Hall
I turned away, trying to make the thick thudding rising in my chest and the depths of my throat sink back, subside, recede, but it wouldn’t. Electric proximity, shock, desire, my body thumped with it and with the embarrassed panic and sudden reality of all this happening. Staring down the empty concrete corridor with the sounds of Scout moving behind me I had the over-the-top-of-everything-else horror that actively not looking might be worse, might be much, much more obvious than just looking. By looking away, was I flagging up something corrupt and embarrassing and childish and wrong in me that clearly wasn’t on show in her? Trying hopelessly to set my face to blank and uninterested, I turned back.
Shaking out her combat pants again before stepping into them, Scout didn’t seem to care whether I looked or didn’t look as she changed. She didn’t even seem interested in whether my looking was idle or sexual. There was a powerful feminine confidence in that, something easy but unfakeable in the way she moved, the time she took or didn’t take with the various stages of changing. This was a girl–a woman–who could make or unmake the world however she wanted it. It was the most compelling thing I’d ever seen.
“You’ve got my pants on,” I said weakly and stupidly after the end of it all.
Scout smiled up at me from lacing her boot. “You don’t meet many girls, do you, Eric?” Then she was on her feet, throwing her big army jacket over her shoulders.
“Sorry,” I said, embarrassed, catching up, realising time had been working a little bit strangely for me and that I was still pointlessly clutching the bundled clothes close to my chest.
“Hey,” she flashed her eyebrows, “it was a joke. I’m teasing.”
I nodded. She was being nice and I was feeling even more stupid than before.
Scout dropped the food bag into her rucksack, then got to work strapping Nobody’s laptop to the back. I pushed the clothes she’d been wearing into the top of my bag, heaved it over my shoulders and collected Ian’s carrier, lifting it up to check he was okay. Two half-open eyes and a smug ginger face looked out at me.
You can shut up too, I mouthed at him.
We hiked down electrical access corridor number four for about two hours. We followed a ladder up into what looked like an abandoned warehouse, then across a gantry and down into a narrower, more organic tunnel with faulty flickering lights. We talked a lot about nothing, Scout asking lots of questions about music, about which bands were still together and which had split, and about TV, mainly who’d had sex with/cheated on/killed who in the soaps. Some of the characters she asked me about were ones I hadn’t even heard of and I wondered how much time she’d spent away from the world down in the quiet of un-space. We told jokes, getting into a rhythm of acting like: a) our own jokes were far funnier than they really were; and b) that each other’s jokes were bad beyond belief. After one of my punchlines Scout stopped suddenly, standing still under the flickering lights.
“Why the long paws?” she repeated. She looked at me uncomprehending, the way the audience looks at the most extreme guests on Jerry Springer. “Eric, why would you do that to somebody?”
“You’re a Philistine,” I said, smiling, carrying on walking without her. I remember thinking, having a strong hot deep-in-my-insides realisation that this is what life is. But then, close up behind, well enjoy it, you only have one more day. The Ludovician isn’t gone forever.
Underground, days are made from watch-hands. Late morning ticking into early afternoon ticking into late afternoon with us walking tunnels, upping and downing ladders, shining our torches over wide flat dark spaces with low ceilings, kicking our way through old newspapers and empty cans and thrown-away things. Places and spaces came and went. Service corridors, access chutes, flood drains, an old basement factory floor where our torchbeams found the rusted necks of over-sized sewing and winding machines and cast Jurassic shadows up across the brickwork as we passed through–history sinks downwards–and then on through underground car parks, abandoned archives and vaults, storage bays. Us squeezing through gaps, climbing rubble, descending PERSONNEL ONLY concrete stairwells into the roots of abandoned and still-living buildings.
We stopped to rest every two or three hours. Scout would check our progress in a little red notebook and we’d have water and maybe something to eat, then we’d swap custody of Ian and start out again. Stretches of colourless time passed. Afternoon became evening and we wore thin with the jokes and the games, the journey becoming a mostly silent, thoughtful and leg-aching march. Around 6 p.m. Scout finally called a halt and we dropped bags for the night.
We’d arrived in a broken-down warehouse, one of those with a strutted, peaked, corrugated roof with dual rows of glazed panels to let in the light. Most of the glass had been smashed, green vine fingers creeping down onto the struts and along the walls at the distant far end. The tramlines of sky above us were the same low-hanging smoggy purple as we’d seen in the city that morning. It was as if there hadn’t been a day.
I lay down on the gritty floor next to my bag and looked up at the clouds.
“I think my legs are turning to wood.”
The slim share of twilight we were getting wasn’t enough to read by, so Scout used her torch to check through her notebook again.
“We’re doing okay,” she said. “We should be there by tomorrow.”
Tomorrow. We should find Trey Fidorous tomorrow.
“Good,” I said, closing my eyes and thinking about nothing but the joy of being still.
“Hey.”
“What?”
“What are we going to do about your cat?”
I opened my eyes, turned over on my side. “What about him?”
“Well, he can’t just take a toilet roll and get the other person to walk on ahead like us, can he? He’s been holding it in all day.”
I hadn’t thought about that. If Ian had to go inside his carrier and then be carried around in it afterwards–
I rolled over onto my back, screwed up my eyes. “Tell me what to do, Scout.”
“I think we should let him out.”
“What if he runs off?”
“I don’t think he’s the running type.”
“But you know what I mean.”
“Where’s he going to go? Anyway, I don’t see we’ve got much of a choice unless you want to carry him all day tomorrow in his own piss and shit.”
I opened one eye. “Charming.”
“Well, that’s what’s going to happen.”
She was right. I hauled myself onto my knees and then, aching, up to my feet. Ian’s carrier was parked close to where Scout sat on her rucksack, still looking at her book, making notes by torchlight. I knelt down in front of Ian’s box and peered through the bars. In the almost dark I thought I could just make out those two big unimpressed eyes. Ian, of course, would be able to see me perfectly.
“Right,” I said. “I’m going to let you out now so you can do your thing. Don’t go running off anywhere. We’ve got some delicious tins of tuna for you, right Scout?”
“Delicious.”
“So you’d be much worse off than I would if you decided to disappear. What do you think?”
Silence from the carrier.
“Okay, I’m opening the door now.”
I clicked the catch off and swung the front open. After a moment, Ian’s big ginger body stepped out, cautiously at first, and then, looking around with that not bad expression dads use when looking at other dads’ new cars, he sauntered off into the depths of the warehouse.
“He’s not going to come back.”
“You’re such an old woman,” Scout said, tucking the book away. Then, seeing I was concerned, she said: “Of course he will. You explained about the tuna and everything.”
“Fuck off.” I smiled in spite of myself. “But I don’t know what I’d do if I lost him. It’s always been just him and me, you know?”
“I know. He’ll be back. Don’t worry.” Scout stood up. “Let’s get a fire started before it’s too dark. Ther
e were some wooden pallets over by the hatch we came up through; do you want to drag a couple over here? I’ll sort out some paper.”
Part of me wanted to say, but won’t someone come if we light a fire, won’t someone call the police? But I didn’t, partly because I was too tired and partly because I felt I was starting to understand the workings of un-space–nobody ever ever came.
Despite my worries about Ian, I had a warm feeling about sleeping in the same space as Scout again. Being part of a team, part of a unit. For the thousandth time that day, I thought about my trousers slipping down her pale legs and her stepping out of them, my shorts tight around her hips and thighs. Being part of a team, I thought, yeah, sure, Eric, that’s what it is. I went to get the pallets.
We built a small fire and soon the two of us were redrawn in hot orange, deep red and whispery skittish black. We shared a can of beans, dipping chunks of breadcake into Scout’s mess tin. I said we should try toasting the bread but Scout smiled and shook her head.
“Toasting bread on an open fire. It sounds like the easiest thing in the world, doesn’t it? But just ask anyone who’s tried.”
I wondered whether the first Eric Sanderson ever tried toasting bread outside the tent on Naxos. Whether my hands had ever attempted that. I thought about him and Clio arguing about ruined bread then I thought about them laughing about it. With both of them gone, history had forgotten if an event like that ever happened and how they’d reacted if it did. Looking into the fire, I decided to let them laugh. I realised I’d not thought about the First Eric Sanderson for quite a while.
Scout tipped a little water into the bean tin, swilled it around. “You know, there’s still one thing you haven’t asked me.”
“One thing?” I said. “There’s a million things. I don’t know if Scout’s your real name, where you come from, how old you are, anything.”
“True. But you’re not asking any of those questions because you’re surprisingly tuned-in for a guy. You know I’m sensitive about it and you don’t want to hurt my feelings.”
I checked for some kind of trap in that, but I couldn’t see one. “Thanks,” I said, cautiously.
Scout smiled. If there was sparkly mischief in there too, it was hidden by the flickerings of the fire. “Right back at you. No, the question you really want to ask me is–”
“Who said you could wear my pants?”
“And could you possibly have them back unwashed?”
“You’re pretty sick, you know that?”
“Yeah, whatever, repression boy.”
I smiled a nodding smile, looking into the fire, letting it draw me in and not saying anything back. The seconds ticked away towards a minute, the fun, the silliness, all evaporating up and away through the smashed glass above our heads. The concrete floor felt hard and cold under my crossed legs and the space was huge and black and empty. I looked down at my fingers, the fingers, hands and wrists that had been the first Eric’s for most of their existence. I knew the jokes and games couldn’t hide me from who I was, from what things were. The painful truth was that this whole time-out was a fluke.
“Go on,” Scout said, and I thought I saw something similar in her, that cold again, the shadow over the field.
“I know,” I said, “I was just having fun pretending to be a normal person.”
She nodded slowly, looking away into reds and shadow.
There was nowhere else to go.
“Alright then, I’ll ask it. Who is he, Nobody’s employer?”
“Thanks for trying not to hurt my feelings.” She looked away, her whole face turning to shadow.
“Scout?”
“He’s ninety-nine parts something malfunctioned and horrible, and one part me.”
20
The Arrangement
“You?” I stared across the fire, loose inside my own skin.
“A part of me, a small stolen part, is a tiny part of him. Some of me–most of me–is still me, but,” her hand came up to touch the side of her temple. “God, look, I don’t know how to explain this. Part of him is inside my head.”
“You’re not making any sense. Jesus, what? You’re telling me you were possessed or something?”
“It’s more clinical than that, like, a process. It–the rest of him can’t control me or anything, but there’s a dormant chunk of him inside my mind and while he exists–” Scout stopped herself, took a big breath. “Shit, I so wasn’t going to do this. I was just going to lay it all out on the line, try to explain it to you using all the right words, but–” her hands tucked the ends of her bob behind her ears. Her chin, her throat, all of her, she was shaking.
“God, Eric, I’m sorry to say this but you’re so lucky. You’re walking around in this constant state of collapse and you’re fine with that, I mean, you exist like that. Some people, they might look like they’re in control day to day but if they let themselves go, maybe they’re going to fall all the way apart and never put themselves back together. You know?”
I put my hands up into a church around my mouth, sucked air through my fingers. My brain, my insides pulled in every direction at once. “All I need to know now is, did you send Mr Nobody to find me, Scout? Are you one of them?”
The firelight picked up the fat swell of tears along the bottoms of her eyelids. She worked hard not to let a single drop fall. “No, of course I didn’t. I would have used the fucking letter bomb on him, but your shark got there first.”
“It’s not my shark.”
“I’m saying I’m nothing like him. The me sitting here in front of you now and doing a really good job of fucking all this up, I’m a person just like you are–” a small laugh like a shudder “–although maybe you’re not the best person to make that argument to.”
I knew what she meant. “A concept wrapped in skin–”
“–and chemicals. There is more to people than that, you know.”
I waited as she had a sip from the water bottle, then splashed a cupped handful onto her face, massaging her fingers across her skin, from the bridge of her nose, over her eyes and cheekbones. This done, she offered the bottle to me and I reached around and took it.
“I don’t understand what you’re telling me,” I said. “The me sitting here? You’re saying there’s more than one of you walking around? Or–”
Scout ran her hands through her tucked-back hair, shaking it out. “Okay,” she said, “a part of me got stolen, I mean, a part of me in here,”–she touched her temple–“and it was incorporated into something else; a huge, abnormal out of control thing. In the place of the part I lost, I got some of it.” She stopped to check my reaction. I had absolutely no idea what my face was doing. “The it is deactivated, a mass of information packets, like virus code, but it’s there inside my head and there’s no way of getting it out.”
I thought about this. “Can it be activated, this information?”
“Yes. It’s not a two-second process, not like someone flips a switch in New York or anything. They’d have to physically find me, but, yeah, there’s a procedure.”
“And what would happen then?”
“The information packets would go live, spread through my mind. They’d take over and I’d get absorbed into the thing.” She thought for a second. “Eric, have I really fucked this up?”
Still trying to get my head around what she was saying, the confusion must have shown on my face. It must have been the right kind of confusion too. “This–what?”
Scout smiled a tiny smile, a little flashlight. “Listen, I’m going to have a walk around the warehouse and see if I can see the cat. I need a few minutes but then I’ll come back and then I promise to tell you the whole story. Would you be okay with that?”
“Yeah,” I said, still feeling like something had stung me. “Yes, that would be good.”
When Scout came back my fat ginger cat dance-pranced along behind her the way he does when he’s sucking up for something. Normally, and I’ve said this before, Ian doesn’t like anyon
e. I’ve never seen him give another person the slightly embarrassing dancey routine, not even Aunty Ruth. Watching their silhouettes warm up into 3D as they came closer to the firelight, I thought about trust and where it comes from. Why had I followed Scout all the way down here when I knew so little about her? Partly, it was because of my own lack of success in finding Fidorous, but there was more to it than that. From the moment she’d appeared, I trusted her. It just happened. And I had the feeling that whatever came out of her mouth when she sat down by the fire, I would want to go on trusting. Ian’s dance said that as far as he was concerned, she was one of us. I wanted her to be one of us too.
“Are you okay?”
Scout nodded. “I found a friend.”
“Must be because you were so convincing about the tuna.”
She smiled.
We opened a can and fed it to Ian from the back of Scout’s mess tin, filling the lid with a little water for him too.
“I told you he’d come back,” she said, settling back by the fire.
Ian purred, his head bobbing away with greedy chewing.
“You did,” I nodded, and then: “I just thought, I didn’t bring the vodka.”
She winced. “Oversight. It’s okay though, I’m going to attempt this sober.” A pause. “I don’t know where to start.”
“Well–start at the beginning, go on until you get to the end, then stop.”
She did a small laugh which was really just a single hiss of air. “Okay then. The beginning beginning starts way back with an old man called Mycroft Ward–”
With all my interrupting, being confused and asking for clarifications taken out, this is the story Scout told me.
THE STORY OF MYCROFT WARD
Towards the end of the nineteenth century there lived an old man named Mycroft Ward. Ward was a former military man and one of the last of the gentleman scientists. He’d gathered quite a reputation for his unbending will (apparently something very fashionable in those days) and had done many heroic things during the Crimean War, being one of the minor heroes of the Battle of Balaclava. Although Mycroft Ward had nothing at all to do with the Charge of the Light Brigade the sentiment was him all over, and so, many years later, when a physician broke the news of a slow but fatal illness, Ward’s attitude didn’t surprise any of those who knew him best.
