‘Thanks,’ I said.
‘Some are strong enough. Some aren’t.’
‘I’m going to get a pecan slice,’ I said.
‘Get me one, too,’ Volsie said.
When I came back with the pecan slices he was looking out of the window again. I didn’t want to disturb him so I drank my mocha and unwrapped my pecan slice, which I ate in silence. After a while, he smiled to himself.
‘Ask me another question,’ he said, still looking out of the window.
I woke up this morning from the same old dream.
New Year’s Eve, I’m at someone’s house. It’s in the Shires. Snow falls on and off all evening. Every so often someone opens the curtains and reports, ‘It’s wet. It won’t settle.’ Then at half past twelve, adults and children alike, everyone puts on their coat and boots and they run out into the village street. One three year old, rather bemused, wears her little Boden parka over her pyjamas. In the orange lamplight every snowflake rushes down to meet its own shadow. The sky shakes with fireworks from some other party, red, greeny-silver and a strange heavy blue, a blue too dark to be seen yet visible anyway just for this one night. Two inches of snow are on the ground. The parents can’t believe it; the children easily can. Christmas at last! They dance in the hallowed empty street. They throw snow at one another. I watch from the window with a woman I have just been introduced to, like me she’s down from London to see friends. We kneel on the leather sofa with our champagne glasses, looking out, saying things like, ‘This is amazing!’ and, ‘Isn’t this amazing?’ We don’t know each other. We don’t even like each other much. But we can’t stop smiling and saying, ‘This never happens!’ and, ‘I mean you couldn’t wish for more.’
You can’t wish for more than snow falling after midnight in the lamplight at the start of a new year, to structure the children’s expectations, remain as a memory, magic their lives forever.
After that everyone goes safely home wrapped up in a suit of initials, SUV, BMW.
At the end of any dream Volsie comes out of you whether you welcome it or not. It flops down your leg or swells up under your arm. You find yourself at the foot of the stairs still half asleep. Volsie is half outside you, you are still all the way inside it. It is a condition. It is a space or state. You don’t have any further queries when you understand that. What a sight you’ve become. You look even worse without clothes than with them, some old desert man or woman with long hair and half focussed eyes, emaciated or running to fat, with spectacles or without, still reeling about under the impact of having once been born. It’s never any less than that. Some of us are just shocked and appalled to find ourselves alive. It keeps echoing on. For me that’s the meaning of it, anyway; for you, perhaps, it’ll be something else. There are those who equate Volsie with the conceptual motor of the heart, those who know him as lovely food and drink. They are not right but they are not wrong either.
Every time I travel into central London by tube, Volsie comes out and looks at the debt-servicing ads. He looks at the ad which tells you everything is possible. He looks at the ad that reassures you: Fly Business and be as cosseted, as protected, as the handsome, lone, powerful-looking wild animals in a conservation park. ‘The strangest thing,’ he says in a kind of gentle wonder, ‘is to live in a time like this, both bland and rotten.’
He says, ‘Keep smiling with great minutes.’
The Crisis
You sit over a one-bar electric fire in a rented room. As soon as you feel recovered from the commute you’ll boil some potatoes on the gas ring, then, three minutes before they’re done, drop an egg into the same water. You can hear the family downstairs laughing at something, some dressed-up cats or something, on the internet. After people have cooked, they can often get use out of their gadgets – join a world-building game, preorder the gadget they want next – although the load soon precipitates a brownout. During the day you work in a fourteenth floor office in the stub of the Shard. Publicity for a fuel corporate. It’s nice. All very heads-down but worth it to have the security. A few years ago you got involved with an East Midlands junkie who claimed to have a telepathic link to another world and to be able to control a 3D printer with his mind alone.
This was how he told it: he came down from the North and to begin with lived on the street. He was young for his age. He started at Euston where the train emptied him out, then moved into a doorway near a bus stop. It was all right for a while. Then he met a boy called Alan and they went up to the centre together. Alan wasn’t that much older than Balker. They were about the same height, but Alan knew more. He was a London boy, he had always lived there. He had bright red hair, an alcohol tan and a personalised way of walking. He could get a laugh out of anything. For a while Balker and Alan did well out of the Central London tourists. But Alan’s lifestyle-choices moved him along quickly and he started to limp up and down Oxford Street at lunchtime saying, ‘I’m in bits, me!’ and showing people the big krokodil sore on his neck.
‘Hey, look mate, I’m in bits!’
After Alan died, Balker stayed away from the other street people. They had a language all their own he never learned to speak, but he knew the same thing was happening to them as to him. He knew about the crisis, and the iGhetti. He knew the same thing was happening to everyone. There were new needs, there were new rules in. New rules had come in, and everyone in London was in the same position: if you couldn’t look after yourself there was a new way to pay.
Sleeping on the street is hard. All the reasons for this are obvious. It’s never quiet. The police move you about, the social services and NGOs won’t leave you alone: everyone thinks the boroughs belong to them. You’re hungry, you’ve got a cough, there’s other stuff, it’s an endless list. No one sleeps well in a doorway. You get fragments of sleep, you get the little enticing flakes of it that fall off the big warm central mass. Wake up, and everything seems to have fallen sideways. You guess it’s four in the morning in November, somewhere along Bloomsbury Street; but you could be wrong. Are you awake? Are you asleep? Rain swirls in the doorway. You’ve got a bit of fever and you can’t quite remember who you are. It’s your own fault of course. You wake up and he’s there in front of you, with his nice overcoat, or sometimes a nice leather jacket, to protect him from the weather. You never really hear his name, though he tells you more than once. He seems to know yours from the beginning. ‘Your health’s going,’ he says. ‘You want to start now, before it goes too far.’
So he leaned into Balker’s doorway – maybe it was the night, maybe it wasn’t – and took Balker’s chin in his hand. He turned Balker’s face one way then the other. He was gentle, he even looked a bit puzzled, as if he was wondering why anyone would choose to live that way, what bad choices they must have made to find themselves sleeping in a doorway behind the British Museum.
‘You want to start now,’ he repeated.
Later, when Balker told you all this, you weren’t sure you believed any of it. It was difficult to believe anything then. The most difficult thing to believe was the crisis itself. No one was certain whether the arrival of the iGhetti was an invasion or a natural catastrophe.
They resembled stalks of fleshy, weak rhubarb, which appeared and evolved very quickly from nothing, like the tentacles which seem to bulge out of nowhere when you burn a piece of mercuric sulphocyanate. You would see them for a fraction of a second just at the city skyline behind the buildings, just under the cloudbase, evolving very fast like stopframe film of something organic growing, then running out of energy, then growing again. They seemed like neither a thing nor a picture of a thing: they seemed to be extruded from a space that wasn’t quite in the world. The sirens would go off, all across the city from Borough to Camden. The artillery would fire and recoil, fire and recoil. The iGhetti would pulse and grow against the lighted clouds. Then they were gone again for another day.
Various simple beliefs surrounded the invasion. Some people associated the iGhetti with Dark Matter; some w
ith the banking crisis of the late Noughties. Others believed that they ‘came out of the internet’. (Indeed, this was the favoured theory of the internet itself: the medium still firmly – if a little desperately – casting itself as the message.) While none of these theories could be described as true, they did, perhaps, mirror the type and scale of the anxieties that led the iGhetti to us.
The truth was simpler. Originally they had leaked into our world from the astral plane. Most of them were found dead. At first they could manifest only as a kind of transparent jelly. This was spread on grass and the trunks of trees. In this form, for hundreds of years, they were known as ‘astromyxin’ or ‘astral jelly’. Then, quite suddenly, at the turn of the 1980s, their efforts became both more determined and more successful. The new form appeared only in West London and only near water. Lakes and reservoirs were their preferred location, but they were also found on the banks of streams, and on one occasion at the edge of the carp pool in the Temperate House at Kew Gardens. Soon they had rolled down the River from Chiswick to Chelsea, and thence to the Square Mile, although no one could say by what means, or what that meant.
Balker started, anyway. For the preliminary tests they took him to a place in Aldgate. It was full of hospital beds. You’d get a meal afterwards, they said. They warned him that you could expect your head to swim a bit, but come on: somebody in Balker’s condition was going to notice that? In the end it was easy and it was a bit of money in your hand. It was a way of being responsible for yourself. Balker passed well, they said. He showed real ability. That could be a beginning, they told him; or he could just leave it at that. But what Balker liked most was the clean bed, the warmth and the calm. It was worth it just to lie down and not think about what to do next. He looked around and fell asleep. When he woke up again, he said he wanted to go on with it.
‘You want to go all the way?’ they asked him.
‘Yes,’ Balker said. ‘I want to go all the way.’
That was where it started for him, really. Aldgate, on the edge of the Square Mile, was where his whole life started, and where it finished, too, although he lived on afterwards.
All those streets – residential now, along with everything around Liverpool Street station – were in perfect condition despite the constant bombardment of the City from positions in Camden, Peckham and Borough Market. Restaurants remained open and ready to serve, in a wide arc from the Duck & Waffle round to St John. It was as if nothing had changed, as if the City fringe, like West London, still believed itself to be intact, functioning, the heart of what we used to call, before money lost its confidence, an ‘economy’. Brokers were commuting into Liverpool Street every morning, where, puzzled by the disorder, they attempted to do handshake business with one another in the cafés and bars. Others, unable to place themselves, feeling that the Square Mile was still in front of them yet somehow no longer visible – like some location beyond the reach of SatNav – had chosen to become lodgers in the fringe, renting the Barbican one-bedroom of some old friend from St Paul’s and on Friday evenings making the short but by now increasingly confusing train journey back to Sussex. They wouldn’t give up the working week.
After he passed the preliminaries, Balker was placed with a family – Jack and Jane, erstwhile investment bankers who, though they now ran a business organising outdoor activity challenges for young adults, still hoped to return one day to the abandoned financial settlements between the river and the London Wall. Jack collected first editions of children’s books from the 1950s. Jane did triathalon. Their Georgian terrace had a garden, Fired Earth on the walls, the remains of quite a nice old staircase. They thought a lot of Balker.
During the day he took the more advanced tests. The point of these wasn’t clear, but they fell into two types.
The first type was held, like the preliminaries, in a dormitory furnished with hospital beds. It was a big room, Balker said: in the late afternoons, when the majority of the tests took place, the rows of beds would seem to stretch away forever into the shadows. They were firm, cool, always freshly made and clean. Balker was given pills to take, then connected up to a drip. The big idea, he told you later, was that the chemicals sent you somewhere: in reality or only in your head, he didn’t know. The medium was viscous and dark. Sometimes he seemed to be in the past. Sometimes he seemed to be thrown forward into futures even more confused than the present. They called it travel. The same word could be used, by extension, as a noun for the breadth or quality of the experience. Sometimes he heard a calm, insistent voice repeating, ‘Are you getting good travel?’ If he agreed that he was, it told him to stay calm and look for astral jelly, or any other sign of the iGhetti; if he said no, they increased the dose. What he brought back from the journey, Balker had no idea. They debriefed him while he was still off his face and thinking was difficult. Meanwhile the chemicals made him increasingly ill. In the end the only images he remembered were meaningless in the context: a half-timbered village, thatched roofs, long rosy winter dawns and sunsets. Gorse, mud, sheep. ‘It was the olden times,’ he told you later, trying to describe this Victorian idyll.
*
Adolescence. West London. You always believed a hidden war was being fought, a war nobody would ever admit to. You lay awake at night, listening to bursts of corporate fireworks that seemed too aggressive to be anything other than a small arms exchange; while by day, ground-attack helicopters clattered suddenly and purposively along the curve of the Thames towards Heathrow. You held your breath in moments of prolonged suspense, imagining the smoke trails of rockets launched from the bed of a builder’s pickup in Richmond or Kingston. These fantasy-engagements, asymmetric and furtive, a kind of secret, personalised Middle East, left you as exhausted as masturbation. There was something narcissistic about them. A decade later, everyone was able to feel a similar confused excitement. With the coming of the iGhetti, everyone had a story to tell but no one could be sure what it was. Information was so hard to come by. Between anecdotal evidence and the spectacular misdirections of the news cycle lay gulfs of supposition, fear, and denial. People didn’t know how to act. One minute they heard the guns, the next they were assured that nothing was happening. One day they were panicking and leaving the city in numbers, the next they were returning but rumour had convinced them to throw their tablet computers in the river. The thing they feared most was contagion. They locked their doors. They severed their broadband connections and tanked their cellars. They avoided a growing list of foods. They clustered round a smartphone every summer evening after dark, eavesdropping on the comings and goings of the local militias as they scoured the railway banks and canalsides for telltale astral jelly. Were the iGhetti here or not? It was a difficult time for everyone.
When he wasn’t taking the tests Balker hung around in the coffee shops and cafés and, at night, ate with the family at a table in the garden. Jane and Jack talked about the art events they’d seen in galleries in Paris and Tokyo, while Balker entertained them by catching moths unharmed from around the table lights. They taught him to play chess. ‘Now he can beat us easily,’ Jane often said with a laugh, ‘he wants to play all the time!’ On Saturdays he learned to make breakfast for everyone, poached egg on rye with salmon, roast pepper and faux hollandaise. He loved that. It was the secure point of his week. He’d never known anything like it, just calm and middle class comfort, life lived simply for being life. That was where the two of you met, at a dinner party of Jane and Jack’s. He was standing in the garden with everyone else, staring out towards the shadowy zone beyond the Minories where something could be seen moving above the roofline and between the taller buildings. They had cornered one of the larger ones somewhere in the warren around Threadneedle Street and were pounding it with 155mm smart artillery. Airbursts lit it up in syncopated, carefully-judged sequences, but you couldn’t tell any more than usual what it was. You watched Balker, and you could feel Jane watching you.
‘Don’t you ever wonder what’s in there?’ she said, and y
ou said you didn’t. You shivered. You didn’t want to know, you said.
The pull of the Square Mile was still strong for people like Jane and Jack. Everyone knew someone who, unable to bear it any longer, had found their way in, to re-emerge weeks or even months later after wandering puzzledly about the empty towers, lost souls eyeing other lost souls in the deserted corridors and partner washrooms. With a good pair of binoculars you could see them, staring out of the Lloyds lifts – which still travelled in their stately way up and down the outside of the structure – in despair. In a way, the Lloyds building, designed to question the relationship between the inside and the outside, remained the great metaphor of the disaster. It was the centre of the zone in that sense, even though geographically it lay towards the western edge.
‘And this is only the beginning,’ Jack said. ‘They’ve been here less than a decade.’ He stared at the towers for a moment longer, then added, ‘If ‘here’ means anything at all.’
‘I wonder,’ Balker said, emphasising the pronoun to get Jane’s attention. ‘I want to know.’
His voice already seemed rueful.
Eventually, when he became too ill to continue with the first type of test, they moved him on to the second, which took place under different protocols. The test-site itself could only be reached by use of a modified GABAA agonist, a fungal preparation rubbed into the skin between the shoulder blades. It smelt, he said, a bit like Germolene.
After a few hallucinations of flying you arrived in what looked like the boxroom of a provincial house at night. Out of the window you could see the slope of a hill. Fireworks flickered intermittently across the darkness. The walls of the room were papered, in a faded primordial pattern of cabbage roses. Above the tiled fireplace a brown print of ‘The Light of the World’; on the mantelpiece a tin alarm clock, the nauseous, literalistic tick of which seemed to control rather than register the passing of time. There was always a thick warm smell of talcum powder as if some old aunt had just crossed the landing from the bathroom looking for a towel. Obsolete CRT monitors were set up on every flat surface, ten or twelve of them linked through a rat’s nest of cable. Everything was thick with dust.
You Should Come With Me Now: Stories of Ghosts Page 10
