And then they were one.
She was in him and the shell was empty.
A dead thing on the bed.
He felt her inside him, a frightened thing trapped inside his infinite walls. Her panic was palpable. He touched the surface of her thoughts, gently soothing, calming, and felt—
Cheated.
That was the overriding sensation. Cheated. There was no light. No heavenly host. No lost family members come to bring her into His warmth. She was alone. She resented the fact that she’d been left to go into the Kingdom of the Dead alone.
“No,” the old man soothed. “No, no. Not yet. You haven’t taken that walk yet. We have a little time. One last glorious huzzah, a few hours at least, to capture it all, to see, to taste, to explore, to savour, to devour, to share. A few perfect hours to live an entire life in. That is my gift to you. Dying like this isn’t right … now, let’s see, what do you love more than anything? That seems like a good place to start.”
He teased the petals of her memories apart, sifting through the darling buds of life she clung to. She was good. Her memories were perfect; each one possessed a dizzying clarity, each aspect beautifully rendered in sound and colour. It was fitting that she should be the last; that together they should leave.
He kissed the shell gently on the forehead. “I’ll bring her back safely,” he promised.
He walked toward the row of elevators by the Nurse’s Station, and rode on down to street level. What would a young girl like? He wondered. The answer was, of course, everything, which meant starting at the very beginning. He was hungry. It was a basic need but, he realised, her food had been doled out through straws and drips. It was far from the delicious sustenance of junk food. He turned left as he hit the street, passing beneath the giant hoarding advertising super-sized grease in paper wrappers and thus began his quest for the Big Yellow M. He couldn’t help but chuckle at the irony as he turned off Arthur Street onto Galahad Drive and was greeted by the sight of the Golden Arches beckoning.
He marched in, walked straight up to the long disinfectant-gleaming counter and ordered the jumbo deluxe super-sized monster meal and a minute later staggered back to the plastic seats clutching the massive paper cup of Coca Cola as though it were the Grail itself. A gallon sized grail at that.
He unwrapped his prize carefully, peeling back the layers of paper to get at the meat patties, limp lettuce and sesame seed bun inside. He took a bite, chewed, and swallowed. He felt her joy as he swallowed mouthful after gluttonous mouthful. It was a simple delight. A sweet thing. The simple joy of food. He ate with greed inspired by the truth that this was his—and her—last meal. He stuffed the food into his mouth until it was difficult to chew and slurped the coke and crunched the ice and belched and chewed and slurped and belched. He didn’t care what he looked like, what other people thought when they saw his gluttony. He ate and it was good. They could stare all they wanted. It wasn’t about them; for once it was about him.
He wiped off his lips with the back of his hand and stood up. The lighting in the ‘restaurant’ was designed to be uncomfortable—the franchise holders didn’t want customers loitering after they’d enjoyed their taste sensations.
Outside the street was grey, overcast, and in every way a perfect presage of the miserable February to come.
The wind had teeth.
People shuffled by, women with shopping bags bulging, men with hands stuffed in pockets and heads down, deliberately not looking up for fear of making eye contact with passing strangers.
This was the city.
This was what it had come down to.
With infinite possibilities to choose from his feet led him toward the train station where its steel arches and sheltered pigeons replaced the golden ones of the restaurant. He bought a ticket to the coast and was alone in the old carriage when the 10:43 pulled away from the platform amid the snorting of engines and scattering of birds. He had deliberately chosen one of the older trains with separate compartments within each carriage because it was a reminder of a simpler time where travellers with their battered brown leather luggage would actually talk, share a journey. Few travellers wanted to do that anymore; they craved the expedience of the shortest time between point A and point B and had all but forgotten that the point of a journey is not to arrive but the simple joy of travelling itself.
The landscape metamorphosed from concrete and steel to rolling greens and browns as the industrial ceded to the rural, and finally, for a mile or more as the tracks ran along the coast, he gazed out at the blues and greens of the sea and the sky as they wrestled on the horizon, each trying to impose its splendour on the other. These were the images worth remembering; wheeling seagulls, storm clouds, roiling breakers, the rhythm of the tracks, the faint tang of stale cigarettes trapped in the No Smoking compartment, the hard springs of the worn seats, the old world charm of the conductor poking his head into the compartment and saying: “Tickets please.”
The train pulled into the station, and given the season and the weather it came as no surprise that the platform was deserted. His footsteps echoed. He whistled a snatch of an old war tune as he walked over the small wooden footbridge that crossed the tracks. The melody was amplified by the vast emptiness of the station’s roof.
“Nearly there,” he told the girl.
‘There’ was a huge white domed amusement park with slot machines and waltzers and rollercoasters and ghost trains, shuffle board and tin pan alleys, merry-go-rounds and carousels. The amusement park was chained up but that didn’t matter. He followed the chain-link fence around to a sheltered corner that wasn’t overlooked by the road or local houses. The top was tipped off with razor wire so he pulled at the bottom, working it until it was loose enough for him to wriggle underneath. He didn’t care about getting dirty.
Of course, everything was lifeless, the rides and the slots. Several of the attractions had been battened down for winter, so the first thing he did was walk around pulling back the tarpaulins to see what treasures lay hidden beneath. A few, like the Whirl-e-Gig and the Octopus, were easy to spot because of their light bulb clad tentacles. The candyfloss machines and the chestnut roasters were empty, no ingredients nearby. He walked between the rides, remembering all of the happiness they had brought people before they closed for the season. That was one good thing about being responsible for remembering; he got to cherish the best of the memories, got to relive them over and over, first kisses in the tunnel of love, the hot flush of summer flings, the heady cocktail of enthusiasm and energy and undeniability that is youth.
He stopped by the fairground’s behemoth: the waltzer, resplendent with its garishly painted faces of Elvis and the Beatles and The Rolling Stones, Madonna and Cliff Richard and George Michael, he started searching for a switch that would bring it all to life.
He found what he was looking for in the centre booth. The glass door wasn’t locked, and a row of switches promised power for the lights, the music and finally, the ride itself. He flicked them one at a time, and suddenly the waltzer sprang to life, the bucket seats revolving lazily as the monster stirred. He flicked the final switch and Calliope piped music shrilled into life. Grinning, he triggered the five minute ride, and navigated his way out across the rippling wooden boards as they gathered momentum, and sank into the seat behind Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten’s sneering faces and rode the nauseating waves as the bucket seat span faster and faster to the pull of gravitational forces.
Next, he lined up the skeet shoot in Tin Pan Alley, popping ball bearings into battered metal ducklings as they waddled across his sight. He rode the Octopus and the rollercoaster, then soaked himself on the flume ride, and dried off in the tunnel of love. Alone in the dark the ghost train was creepy; all of the creaks and groans of the settling wood, the unoiled tracks and the real cobwebs across the fake plastic ones were far more unnerving than the Day-Glo skulls and the tape-recorded screams that haunted the tracks his small cart rolled along.
It was a good da
y
In one of the metal carts by the concession stand he found the pink makings of candyfloss. He fed the mix into the candyfloss maker and watched the twin blades circle and fold the gloop into just the right consistency of stickiness and sugar. Eating the candyfloss with his fingers was a sticky treat. It popped and fizzed on his tongue and clogged in his throat until the sugar dissolved. He ate until he felt sick and then he went in search of the carousel.
It was beautiful, and as out of place in this Mecca of thrills and spills as he himself was. It was a remnant of a better time. It was a glimpse of the craftsmanship and beauty that had been a fundamental part of the travelling funfair. Unicorns, horses, griffins, lions, tigers, zebras, even a dragon, each one carved in loving detail, their seats worn shiny by countless riders. He chose the simplest of the animals, a plain white horse, to ride, and clung on to its mane as it rose and fell in mock gallop. Going round, he remembered a few of the things he would miss most of all, and found that they were all of the simplest things, a smile from a pretty stranger, first hearing a song that touched the heart, laughter, and then something occurred to him. Where before he had always assumed that losing the past would inevitably mean that the future made no sense, he had forgotten one key component of humanity: they live neither in the past or future, they live almost exclusively in the present tense. Things happen to them and they adjust and cope even as they are happening. Very few look forward, and only the very old look back. His absence was not likely to be felt, not in the way he believed he deserved. That the very old could not remember clearly would surprise no one; they would call it Alzheimer’s for want of a better diagnosis. And he would be left to slip away among all of the other forgotten things.
If anything, instead of lowering his spirits, the thought gave him the will to do what he had to: to die. The world would get by without him. Things would fade from the memory and while they would have no-one to keep them alive and cherished, that was the way it would have to be; entropy would have her way.
That was what it was all about, ultimately: entropy. The memories of the universe would become useless, the energy they offered, would degrade until it became unusable, and eventually everyone would succumb to this kind of soulless uniformity. The uniqueness of God’s creation would be lost. But, he knew, entropy would have her way. To fight against her was pointless.
No, it was better to savour the day, follow the example of humanity and live in the present tense.
He touched the girl’s thoughts, intending to see if she had enjoyed her final few hours, but instead came the revelation that the wisdom was not his own. She was the one who had calmed his soul. She was the one who had helped him come to terms with his obsolescence. She was the one who understood better than he did the need to live for today. He smiled, lesson learned.
“Have you enjoyed yourself?” He asked, knowing the answer. He could feel her smiling inside. He dismounted and pulled the plug on the carousel. Attraction by attraction he went around the funfair turning the lights off and hiding them back beneath their tarpaulins until, eventually, there was nothing to suggest he had ever been there.
“You know what happens next,” he said.
He couldn’t find it in himself to feel sad. They had had, together, the perfect day, and now, together, they would go gently into the endless winter night.
All that remained was to return to the hospital and wait for the inevitable.
He took the slow train, enjoying the gentle rocking motion and the clatter of the wheels on the tracks and the fact that the tiny windows wouldn’t open enough to let the air in and the sunset as the darkness claimed the day. In everything around him there was something to enjoy. And enjoy it was exactly what he did. He savoured the uniqueness of everything around him, and shared his joy with the girl inside. They shared simple things like the smell of cinnamon buns baking, the honking horns of frustrated drivers, the drizzle of rain on his upturned face, even the most basic act of walking—just walking. It was so long since she had done that.
The hospital room was empty. The bed had been made. His copy of The Forgetting Wood was on the nightstand.
He heard the nurse come up behind him.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “She died just after you left. You missed her by a few minutes.”
“No,” he said, not understanding. “That’s impossible … she can’t be … I just … we didn’t …”
“I’m sorry,” the nurse repeated, nothing more substantial to say. “She went quietly. I am sure it didn’t hurt. And now, well, she won’t feel any pain where she is, will she?”
He didn’t understand. She wasn’t gone. He could feel her. She was inside him. She was alive.
And then he realised.
She would always be alive.
Inside him.
She would live in his memory, and as long as he remembered her, he would live inside her. They were inextricably linked.
He was the God of Forgotten Things.
And she was someone he would never forget.
***
London on the Brink of Never
The fog was like a thick not-quite black veil shrouding a widow’s face. It was a fitting analogy, Draydon Meer thought as he walked along the blind streets of the grieving city. London, mother of infinite sadness, mistress of melancholy, was as seductive as the gentle sway of a doxy’s hips as she flattered to deceive the coin from lusty fools. London, Goddess of the Smog.
He had been born here, had lived and loved and lied here, and when the time came he would die here in this loneliest of places. He had a stone heart that beat to the rhythms of the city. Brougham carriages and Hansom cabs rattled unseeing and unseen across the cobbled streets, the whinny of the horses and the crack of the whips like blood in his veins. It was a two way relationship, the city gave him life, but he cherished hers and in cherishing it he became her memory—the stones didn’t hold on to their past glories, there was no passion play of ghosts to bring it all back night after night no matter how much the Spiritualists might have wished it otherwise. It was people like Draydon Meer that kept London alive.
He tapped the steel tip of his wolf’s head cane against the cobbles, feeling the street out. He walked with confidence despite the fact that the thick fog made it impossible to see more than a foot in front of his face. The hoi polloi talked about the fog as a good thing, a sign of progress, of industry taking root and mankind flourishing against all the odds. The simple minded fools didn’t dare remember what it was like before the fog came. Meer remembered. It was all he could think about. But then he has lost so much more than the others knew precisely because he remembered.
He bought a punnet of roasted chestnuts from a vendor on the corner of Courtney Place and juggled the hot nuts for a mile, crunching and listening to the ethereal strains of conversation he happened upon. People talked about curious things when they didn’t think there was anyone close enough to overhear. He smiled at the fog-masked lover’s promises and puzzled over the nefarious schemes of no-goods. What was beautiful about both of them was that neither had even the vaguest inkling that the city was dying. Draydon Meer knew it was so because he had lived through it more than once before, and he remembered what it was like back before the smog came. His life had been simple then—there was peace in ignorance. Now he walked with the demons and the devils staring back at him through the plate glass windows of the stores that promised an array of unearthly delights and sweet deceits because he knew things only the dead should know.
He knew what was on the other side of the fog. He knew why the quality of the air itself was changing and it wasn’t what any one of them believed—but that was hardly surprising as they still believed in a god that had long since abandoned them. That was the extent of their science; the options of the world were infinite because their deity’s influence was equally limitless. Odd then, Meer thought, that the fool still insisted on using their faith as both armour to protect them from the worst, and paradoxically, as a sword t
o lance deep wounds into others who didn’t share their blind faith. It could hardly come as a surprise then that there was so much suffering in the city. No, the air was changing because it was no longer theirs to breathe. That was the truth of it.
It had begun with peculiar lights in the sky, and then the fog had come rising up from the Thames to roll out across the city. It had been nothing more than peculiar temperature inversion, hot and cold thermals reversed, trapping the moisture in the air, but it had become something much more sinister as it spread—it had become a malaise that choked the life out of the weak, the emphysemic, the asthmatic, the bronchial and those who were just plain old. It robbed the city of its vitality lung by wheezing lung.
This wasn’t the London he had grown up in, it was the London of his imagination, as it might have been in another place and another time, all towering gothic spires, brooding gargoyles, shadows and sinister shapes, leeched of all colour by the choking pea-souper. It amused Meer no end that they hadn’t been able to separate the fact from the fiction when they resurrected it to taunt him. Instead of his own personal Hell they had given him something almost magical, recreating all of these wonderful childhood fictions for him and him alone. Because there was no doubt he was alone, even with all of the disembodied voices floating out there just a single step beyond the veil of fog—always that one single step away from him.
It was all about the fog, or rather what lay beyond the fog: nothing. The denizens of the city shuffled about their every day, doing laundry, fighting over fish scraps down at the market, arguing over hard bread and rotten fruit and kicking rats as the vermin spilled out of the gutters to feed on the scraps they dropped during the fighting. They did it every day, caught in a time-loop, playing out the same arguments, flirting with the same whores and wives, offering the same chancer’s smiles and never seeing beyond it. It had become so ingrained within Draydon Meer he could walk the streets with his eyes closed, counting out the paces, twists and swerves to negotiate the crowds without every bumping in to a soul. He had lived this day that many times now the seemingly random acts of life were stamped indelibly on his mind.
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