A Room With No Natural Light

by Douglas Lindsay

  They could hear the sound of a tractor some way away, a distant rumble. The leaves rustled in the wind. Yet, because of the silence of the birds, the whole countryside seemed deathly quiet.

  ‘They say there are no birds at Birkenau,’ said Jenkins. ‘The birds don’t fly there.’

  Jenkins was chewing gum and Pitt heard it between his teeth.

  ‘They’ll be back,’ said Pitt. ‘Maybe not before the arrival of this great collective you talk about, but they’ll be back.’

  Jenkins glanced at Pitt. Pitt was still staring up into the trees.

  ‘There’s no good association with birds leaving a place,’ said Jenkins. ‘It’s creepy. It’s weird. It’ll be bad for business.’

  Pitt finally lowered his gaze, fished the camera from his pocket and handed it over.

  ‘There are a few photos on there, hopefully one of them should be all right.’

  ‘How did you get them?’

  Jenkins smiled awkwardly, embarrassed that he’d even asked. When he looked at the photographs, he would recognise the cellar wall; but he would not mention it to anyone, and he would not ask questions.

  ‘When do you want it?’ asked Jenkins. ‘I had a quick word. Same as most things. The quicker, the more detailed, the more expensive. There’ll need to be a visa or something on there, show that she’s supposed to be here in the first place. Is she going home?’

  Pitt was looking back into the trees, although his eyes were on some indistinct point. Staring at nothing.

  ‘I don’t know. If that’s something that needs to be set up at this stage, then set it up.’

  ‘He said they could hack into the Chinese border control records, make it look like she left last month and is due back in. Or they can just go for the full British passport, make her one of us.’

  ‘A British passport,’ said Pitt, as if he had it all planned out. ‘With a visa for China.’

  Just in case. He would make up his mind that night. There would be neither a right nor a wrong. He was going to have to make a decision, and hope that it turned out well for Ju. He hated the thought of sending her back to China in the next couple of days, when without a visa he would be unable to accompany her, but he had to do what was best.

  ‘And get it to me as quickly as possible.’

  Jenkins made a small gesture with the camera, nodded, and then began walking back up through the vines. Pitt, who had to try to get some bedding and some food down to Ju undetected, fell in beside him, and the two men walked back to the farmhouse in silence.

  41

  conversations with hardyman

  They were sitting at a table of a small café overlooking the Thames, South Bank; the Houses of Parliament in view away to their left. Hardyman thought the breeze coming in off the water was a little too stiff to warrant sitting outside with the tourists when they didn’t have to. Pitt had not wanted to sit inside on a day when the sun was shining, the sky a perfect blue.

  ‘For the last fifty years, there’s only been one thing that matters – television. That’s number one, and you know what, there’s not even a number two.’ Hardyman paused to take a slow drink of wine, to belch softly into the back of his hand, knowing that Pitt would not interrupt. ‘It used to be that an infinitesimal number of people had been on TV, about five per cent of the rest of the population wanted to be on TV, and everyone else just watched it. Now, the percentages have shifted. Everyone wants to be on TV, about five per cent actually have, and a microscopic amount watch and don’t want to be a part of it.’

  Pitt was not especially engaged by the notion of television.

  ‘You, of course, exist in this weird sub-genre of freakin’ weirdoes who don’t even own a TV set.’

  ‘We’ve got a TV set,’ said Pitt.

  Hardyman had a piece of lobster in his mouth. ‘Daisy has a TV set, which you never watch. Seriously, when was the last time you watched TV?’

  Pitt looked out on the river as he tried to remember. His eye caught a table of Chinese tourists, cameras around their necks, pointing and talking. Their tone suggested awe. He wondered what they were saying, and immediately his thoughts turned to Ju. If she were here, she could translate.

  Something of a smile formed at that thought, because he did not yet know if Ju spoke English. Maybe these people could translate Ju for him.

  What did he know? How many languages were there in China? What were the chances they actually spoke the same one as her?

  ‘See?’ said Hardyman, recognising the hint of a smile, and assuming it was related to the television discussion.

  ‘There was a documentary about a vineyard in the South of France,’ said Pitt. ‘Daisy saw a thing about it and said I should watch.’

  It had seemed easier at the time to do what she’d suggested, rather than put up with her complaining that he’d never learn anything if he didn’t pay attention to his competitors.

  ‘What’d you think?’

  Pitt shrugged, aware that he was about to induce a guffaw from Hardyman.

  ‘Didn’t like the guy who was narrating. The show seemed to be about him, rather than the wine. Gave up after a couple of minutes.’

  Hardyman held up his hands in a gesture of triumph, as if summoning everyone else in the café to his side.

  ‘You’re a piece of work. And when was that? Five years ago?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Pitt, shaking his head. ‘The nineties some time. I wasn’t encouraged to look again.’

  ‘You haven’t watched TV since the nineties?’

  ‘What?’ said Pitt. ‘You started this conversation by telling me that I never watch TV. You know I never watch TV.’

  ‘But I didn’t think you were this bad. What about Diana dying?’

  ‘Was that on TV?’

  ‘All right, funny guy, what about 9/11? That was on TV. You must have watched that.’

  Pitt was distracted by laughter from the table to his right. The Chinese were chatting amiably, although none of them were looking at each other. They were staring across the river, pointing at the austere government buildings that line that part of the Thames.

  ‘No,’ he said, turning back to Hardyman.

  ‘None of it? Not even, you know, on the news that night?’

  ‘The guys at the yard were talking about it, so I knew what was going on.’

  ‘The world was collapsing,’ said Hardyman. ‘Weren’t you interested?’

  Pitt shrugged. A waiter stopped beside them to clear away Pitt’s plate. Chicken salad. There had been too much dressing, but the lettuce had been crisp.

  ‘Seriously,’ said Pitt, ‘the world was collapsing because three thousand Americans died in one day? Did it collapse because the tsunami killed three hundred thousand in one day? Did it collapse when the Hutu militia killed forty thousand in one day, then did it again, over and over? Was that even on the news?’

  ‘God, you’re a bleak bastard,’ said Hardyman.

  ‘Television picks and chooses when the world is collapsing. It really needn’t be of any interest to anyone. You make your own mind up about what represents a collapsing world. If a bomb went off in this café right now and you got blown to three hundred pieces, would your world have collapsed?’

  Hardyman didn’t answer. He was picking minutely at what was left of the lobster.

  ‘And, if that bomb went off, the western media, television, would be peeing in its pants. If the same bomb went off in Kabul this morning, would you think your world was collapsing? Would the West? Would it even be on the news?’

  ‘That’s different.’

  ‘One of our lives is worth more than one of theirs?’

  Hardyman waved his fork. A small piece of lobster fell off, and dropped to the ground.

  ‘9/11 affected us all.’

  ‘It didn’t affect me,’ said Pitt dryly, and Hardyman recognised the tone. The brief outburst of conversation was over. Which meant, on the other hand, that he could talk uninterrupted.

  ‘The
only thing that’s more important than television,’ he said, ignoring the fact that he knew Pitt would remember him saying that television was the most important thing of the previous fifty years and that there wasn’t even a number two, ‘is the Internet. We live in a world where anyone, anyone, can be famous. Today. Right now. Go and get a camcorder, create your own TV station, your own website, whatever, you can be up and running in five minutes. We’re all famous. All of us.’

  ‘Is that fame?’ said Pitt. Could feel himself getting bored. Talking to Hardyman was just about the only thing in life that he would have called an unnecessary pleasure of his, but sometimes Hardyman had things to say in which Pitt could not get interested. The nature of fame sat near the top of that list.

  ‘It can be. If we choose, we can be online, create our own station and be on there twenty-four seven. In this way, we’re all connected to one another. It’s a phenomenon of the twenty-first century. And the really exciting part is not knowing where it’ll go next. The technology is exploding, every day.’

  ‘Heard on the radio last week about this town in the Central African Republic where the children have to walk for five miles every day to collect water,’ said Pitt dryly. ‘There’s a one in four chance of the girls getting raped.’

  Hardyman stared across the table, looking slightly disgusted. Finally, he shook his head and started to smile.

  ‘No one said the world was fair, my friend. I’m having another glass of wine.’

  42

  Would he have spoken to Hardyman had he still been alive? With the vineyard being all that had preoccupied him for the previous thirty years, he’d had confidence in his own decisions. Should there ever have been some point on which he was unsure, he was willing to trust to his own judgement, learning from what might turn out to be a mistake.

  Now, however, he had another person for whom to make decisions, with nothing on which to base his reasoning.

  He was sure that Ju hated the Saturday nights. Perhaps some of the women enjoyed it; he was prepared to believe anything of anyone. He had learned enough to know that you could not judge all people against the same criteria. What was awful or shameful or hurtful or anathema for some would be pleasure for another. However, after his summer with Yuan Ju, he was sure at least of this: that once she had learned of the demise of Chen Yun’s sex ring, her heart would sing.

  The phrase actually passed through his head. Her heart will sing.

  Ju was now constantly there. She possessed him. He thought about what he could do to make her time in the cellar more comfortable. He thought about ways in which she might be detected, and how he could guard against it. He thought about what he would do once he had her passport. Would she want to return to China? Perhaps she’d had to leave and would be in trouble if she went back. Would she be happy going somewhere with Pitt? Was the connection between them as real to her as it was to him?

  His mind poured over what was best for her, plans and ideas and options filling his head, but it all came down to the same thing. He was taking her away, and, for the first time in his life, he was giving himself to someone. His days at the vineyard were coming to an end; his marriage to Daisy was over.

  Under normal circumstances it would be the kind of thing that two people talked over together. He doubted in this case, even if he and Ju could have communicated, whether she would have been able to be honest with him. It was up to him to make the decision, and it did not even have to be the right one. There probably wasn’t a right one; it just had to work for Ju.

  He tried not to think of what else he and Ju might have. His thoughts did not extend to the two of them making love. Yet, he imagined them checking into a hotel together, away from the vineyard, away from the dying birds and the missing birds, his wife and his mother-in-law, away from government inspectors and pushy banks and dead accountants, away from television crews and the silence of the cellar that had seduced him for years, and that he now felt entombed Ju.

  Away from all of that, his life of mundane distractions, Pitt and Ju together. He would take her into his arms, she would press her head against his chest, and they would stand like that and would not move. He would kiss her eventually, but not for a long time. The sensation of holding her, the touch of her skin, feeling her body pressed against his, the smell of her, the softness of her hair as it caressed his chin.

  He had not had a flippant thought in over three decades, and now he had allowed himself to fall in love with an illegal immigrant who’d been forced into the sex trade, and who was more than twenty years younger than him. Hardyman would have been proud.

  He almost smiled at the thought, as he sat in the kitchen drinking coffee, staring at the floor; but his eyes were dead. The all-consuming thoughts that filled his head did not show themselves. Daisy sat at the table, throwing him occasional looks while she wrote a shopping list. Mrs Cromwell was either sleeping or perched in front of the television being appalled by Great Britain.

  Pitt was waiting for Daisy to leave, so that he could take bedding and some more food down to Ju. He was going to have to risk discovery by Mrs Cromwell.

  ‘Don’t suppose there’s any point in asking if you need anything?’ said Daisy.

  He was waiting for the question so that he would not be caught daydreaming. Daisy knew him not to be a daydreamer.

  ‘I’m all right,’ he said.

  ‘There’s a surprise,’ said Daisy.

  She pushed her chair back and started bustling around the kitchen, collecting all the necessary items; car keys, bags, purse, list, coat.

  ‘Don’t talk yourself into a standstill while I’m gone,’ she said to his back as she left.

  Pitt neither replied nor turned round.

  *

  He wanted to cook something for Ju, something more interesting than the few things he had thrown together that morning, but he did not have the time. What he had to do had to be done quickly. It was not the time for Pitt to cook his first meal in over ten years.

  Searching around the kitchen he realised that Daisy had gone to the supermarket for a reason, and, in the end, he had collected more or less the same items that he’d taken down to Ju that morning. He left the small bag sitting on the table and then walked quickly through the farmhouse and up the stairs. On the way he passed the television room, Mrs Cromwell sitting straight-backed, her grey hair sticking up above the back of the rocking chair, watching quiz shows, getting annoyed by the stupidity of people who knew less than she did.

  Into the spare room. Dug out an old mat and a couple of blankets. Put a pillow in a case, piled all the items up and placed them under his arm.

  What was it going to matter if he was seen? He wasn’t sure, but wanted to avoid the problem. He stopped and listened; nothing but the faint murmur of the television. Ju continually flashed through his head. Lying uncomfortably on a concrete floor. Lying on the bedding that Pitt was taking down. Lying on the same bedding, Pitt beside her, their bodies tangled beneath the blankets.

  He stopped himself at the top of the stairs and listened for any further movement; a last chance for circumspection. If he was to be seen, then he had to be going about his business with self-assurance. He generally did not answer to Daisy, and never to Mrs Cromwell, so he could not let them have anything to ask him. It had to look as if he was meant to be carrying bedding through the house, that there was a perfectly valid reason for it.

  He set off down the stairs.

  *

  Pitt walked into the cellar. The light was still on; no others had been added to brighten the room. He stopped for a second, listening to the silence. For so many years this had been his place of refuge; now it was where he kept Ju prisoner. Now it was just part of the vineyard, the business that he was about to lose, from which he was about to walk away. As such, his affection for it had gone. This wine would be for someone else to taste, for someone else to sell. He would never get to know how it had matured; he would never get to know how this vintage compared with 2004, the year
against which he judged them all.

  And so he had switched off. There was no point in feeling remorse or longing for something from which he was choosing to walk away.

  Ju was where he had left her. Sitting in the small wooden chair, back straight, legs together, the book in her lap. The small bag of food he had left earlier was sitting on the floor by the chair, and he wondered if she had eaten anything.

  She looked up at him, but only as far as his waist. Bedding under one arm, a small bag of provisions in the other. After the short hesitation, he stepped forward and laid the bedding down against the wall. Then he took two cups from the bag he was carrying, went into the small bathroom and filled them from the tap. He came out, set them on the floor and sat down a couple of feet from Ju, uncomfortably crossing his legs.

  She watched him curiously for a few moments, as he took the food from the bag and laid it out. Cherry tomatoes, crusty bread, a sliced red pepper, slices of cooked ham, some Cheddar, grapes. Laying it out like this, Pitt thought it looked insubstantial.

  Ju laid her book to the side and settled herself on the floor opposite Pitt, crossing her legs with much greater ease. Pitt was already feeling his muscles stretched, numbness in the buttocks, pins and needles in his feet, uncomfortable sensations all over the lower half of his body.

  He offered one of the cups to Ju. Their fingers touched momentarily as he passed the glass, and the electricity that flooded through him seemed to expel the strain on his legs. She took a sip of water, set the cup on the floor.

  Pitt indicated with his hand for Ju to eat something. She broke off a small bunch of grapes, and tentatively put one in her mouth. Pitt copied her movement, the grape bursting between his teeth.

  They ate all the food that Pitt had brought down for dinner, and did not look at each other.

  43

  Tuesday morning. Pitt wondered how many newspapers he would need to buy before finding what he was looking for, but it was featured on page three of the first one he lifted. The Western Daily Press. A report on the triple murder in a quiet suburb of the city. He had looked the previous morning, but had assumed that his activities had been performed too late in the night for the daily newspaper cycle. Not being a child of the twenty-first century, it had not occurred to him to look at the newspaper’s website.