Beacons

by Gregory Norminton

  I was surprised how difficult it was to remember their rituals. I’d left a similar list for them, of course (turn the flush anticlockwise and hold a second or two) but familiarity makes all the difference. At home I bounced about the kitchen grabbing whatever I needed. So ingrained were my reflexes, I could have done it blind.

  I heard Gareth cough in the living room. Clemmie was silent. When we first arrived she’d rushed upstairs, flinging open the windows – ‘Look, Dad, the sea!’ – before going straight to the telly. Once that was on she entered her familiar trance, the sea forgotten.

  ‘When’s dinner going to be ready?’ Gareth called. At home, the answer would have been ‘Ten minutes’ – it was only chilled lasagne. But that first night I kept moving blindly to where things should have been: knives, olive oil, vinegar, cooker, fridge.

  ‘Come in here, will you?’ I called back, and he came shambling through with the incompetent air of a man who hopes to be let off a job. I told him to find everything and remember where it came from because we’d need to put it back afterwards.

  Dinner was eaten on the sofa, watching a film about a scientist who accidentally swapped bodies with his dog. The scientist in dog form was menaced by a pit bull while his pet, Skipper, roamed the laboratory, sniffing around the scientist’s attractive female colleague.

  Gareth said it was the lamest film he’d ever seen, and kept harping on the absurdities: why did Skipper bother wearing clothes? Why was he following women and not females of his own species?

  ‘Let’s just watch, shall we?’ I said, frowning at him. This was how he’d ruined Edward Scissorhands.

  Clemmie snatched the remote. Identical blonde schoolgirls had a crush on a handsome, badly-acted teacher. Gareth began to make loud yawning noises.

  Clemmie complained that her dad was selfish.

  I collected up the dirty plates and took them to the kitchen. There was no dishwasher. I put the dishes in the sink and turned on the hot tap.

  Gareth came out. ‘Shall I dry, then?’

  ‘I’d rather you washed.’ I dislike the feeling of hot detergent on my fingertips. He took the washing-up brush – one of those twee little wooden things – and set to work on the lasagne dish, scrubbing, rinsing, scrubbing.

  ‘Burnt on,’ he said, as if this was somehow unfair. I informed him that it was a not uncommon occurrence with lasagne and that the low-carbon lifestyle was said to be time-consuming. He said, ‘Oh, I know.’

  Do you, though? I thought. How time-consuming, exactly? I didn’t even know whether hand-washing made any difference. Gareth seemed clued-up about temperatures and vanishing species, but ‘time-consuming’ was just a rosy pink embryo of a concept somewhere at the back of his head. Grow your own veg, get down your food miles. Dig a fishpond. Do it in the commercial breaks.

  My own concept of ‘time-consuming’ was more like a toxic cloud spreading in the brain. Of one thing I was sure: the future wouldn’t be how Gar imagined. If he liked the idea of something he got romantic about it. His parents took him to school by car when he was a kid, so now he was saying we should all cycle. When I was a child I did just that: wobbled along arterial roads, lorries passing so close they practically shaved the hairs off my legs. Ah, said Gar when I told him this, but you forget that in a zero-carbon economy everyone else would be on bikes too. Not now though, I said. And lorry drivers not ever. Back came the memories … Punctures in the rain. Knees chapped and purple. My knotted thighs and bursting lungs on the last hill before school. Gaining the top, freewheeling down at last, the exhilarating swoop and drop until – ouch! – a winged beetle, smack in my cornea.

  ■

  The bedroom floorboards were chilly on our bare feet.

  ‘Is this what they call a microclimate?’ Gareth asked. ‘Doesn’t feel like summer.’

  ‘Thick walls, I think. Keep the sun out.’

  ‘There hasn’t been any sun.’

  (In my head, Dad exclaimed, ‘And they call this flaming June!’ I’d heard the protest from him and Mum every June for eighteen years. It always sounded as if they’d unmasked a universal conspiracy but I never actually heard anyone say flaming June except my parents.)

  Clemmie lay uncomplaining in the front bedroom but then she doesn’t feel the cold.

  ‘Nice to be in the country though,’ said Gareth, sliding between the sheets. ‘Makes a change from Rome.’

  Ah yes, Rome. As we huddled beneath our lumpy quilt I thought of the Italian hotel we’d stayed in before joining Karen: our deliciously tactile room with its polished wood and starched sheets. The frank acknowledgement that bed is a pleasure. The bed we were in now seemed to have been constructed along very different lines. Britain had something of lasting value to offer the overpopulated world, I realized: a few more bedrooms like this one, and people might give up reproducing altogether.

  ‘Night,’ said Gareth, switching off the bedside lamp. I pulled the quilt over my head, to feel my breath warming the dank little cave of air beneath.

  Far off in the night there were owls, their keening almost gentle.

  Whoooo. Lullaby.

  I dozed, only to have my body fling me awake again. There was movement in the darkness. A crackle, a rustle, not in one place but several, as if the newspaper we’d dropped by the door had formed itself into paper dollies, and the dollies had raised themselves on stumpy nightmare legs and were marching round our bed.

  ‘Gar.’ I breathed rather than said it, but he was already awake.

  ‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘It’s mice.’

  ‘OK? What if they climb up?’

  ‘I don’t think they will. They’re afraid of you, mice.’

  I tested this with a loud cough. The crackling sound paused, then continued. Without warning Gareth switched on the lamp. The floor wasn’t, as I had feared, a living carpet of rodents. The newspaper lay intact where we had left it. The crackle continued, hanging eerily in the air.

  ‘They’re in the loft,’ said Gareth. ‘Lie down, for God’s sake.’

  We listened with the light on while the mice (or were they rats?) pursued their eternal quest of moving paper from one place to another. My dislike of rodents is a rational one: they’re incontinent, they contaminate food. I don’t share the morbid dread that afflicts many people, including, I suspect, Gareth – he acts brave but never volunteers to deal with the things. I got up and put on my dressing gown and slippers.

  ‘Ignore it, can’t you, and sleep,’ my husband said.

  As I lifted the trapdoor, the scrabbling sounds died. A light-pull dangled against my face. I tugged, and the attic sprang into existence: no murdered tourists, just a criminal lack of insulation between the joists. Against one wall stood a set of metal shelves, the self-assembly kind that people buy for garages and workshops. I didn’t glimpse a single mouse but I could see where they’d been: shreds of paper here and there, faint tracks where their scuffling had disturbed the dust. Gar was right, there was nothing I could do about them. They’d only come out again as soon as I left. I heard him down below, turning over in bed.

  I moved to the shelves. Bluebeard’s secrets. I would never have come here on purpose to look at them, but since Bluebeard’s rodents had woken me, I felt entitled. An ancient laptop, square, furred with dust. A box of gnawed gardening magazines. Another box full of plugs, extension leads and wires. Limpetty things, clung on to even when useless. Please do not enter the loft.

  Somewhere on one of the websites I’d read that if the earth became too hot for humans, there would still be rodents. I’d pictured them swarming over deserts, like those films of locusts we used to watch at school, but of course they’d go where people used to be, wherever there were food scraps and textiles and paper. Cottages, shacks, tower blocks, palaces full of dusty objects. I felt a shudder that had nothing to do with grey skies and thick walls.

  ‘There’s a museum up there,’ I said, backing down the ladder.

  He laughed. ‘Museum of what?’

  ‘G
rave goods.’

  ‘Aren’t you the cheerful one?’ he said.

  ‘I thought you wanted me serious.’

  I got back into bed and he wrapped himself round me again. He said, ‘Did I tell you about when I went to Scotland?’

  ‘Don’t think so.’

  ‘I stayed in a village, somebody’s spare room.’

  ‘Friends?’

  ‘No. There was this little basket on the bedside table. I didn’t look at it, I was in and out of the room all the time, and then on the last day I just – looked.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘They’d left their credit cards in there.’

  ‘Christ. Do you think they knew?’

  He switched off the light and said again, ‘I can’t believe it’s June.’

  ‘Our own private Iceland.’

  He didn’t laugh. After a while he said, ‘They trusted me.’

  Which was, of course, why he remembered. I’d never do that: give a stranger the power to do us harm. Imagine living in a place where people are so trusting. It’s ridiculous. Or perhaps the place was nothing special but they did it anyway, the sort of people who’d cancel their holiday without a squawk, anything for the common good.

  I said, ‘You couldn’t carry on like that in London.’

  ‘Not in any city. This thing we’re doing. It won’t be easy.’

  So you know, I thought. You do realize… At once I felt Bubbly rise in me like some glittering fairytale fish: Bubbly, bestower of comforts, granter of wishes. You shall hire the limo, switch on the air con, fly to Australia. You’ve fitted low-energy bulbs, recycled your drinks cans, done your bit.

  But I said, ‘It’ll be fucking hard going,’ and Bubbly dissolved in a little fizzle like a spent sparkler. She never had much substance to her.

  Gar said, ‘We can explain to Clemmie, can’t we?’

  ‘I don’t know. Kids want whatever their friends have.’

  He put his feet under mine. ‘We can’t all go on like lemmings. Somebody’s got to call a halt.’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘And make a start on other things.’

  ‘Like what?’

  He yawned. ‘Find out as we go.’

  I said, ‘But all that work and no guarantee. What if nobody else stops?’

  He didn’t speak, just tightened his arms around me.

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘Here we are, then.’

  Here we are.

  ‌The Possession of Lachlan Lubanach

  ‌Nick Hayes

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  ‌Almost Visible Cities

  after Calvino

  ‌Gregory Norminton

  … Having contemplated the nothingness which was all that remained of his victory, the Great Khan turned his eyes on his opponent. Marco Polo, whose designs for the endgame the emperor had suspected from the opening gambit, knew better than to congratulate his host on the bloodless conquest of a maple chessboard. He bowed his head, averting from that wise and terrible face a gaze which had taken in countless faces.

  ‘Ten thousand moons,’ the Great Khan said, ‘have waxed and waned since last we spoke. Have you been on your travels all this time, or have we slept and dreamed the passing centuries?’

  ‘Sire,’ said Polo, ‘I have travelled without rest through the cities of men. I have heard the bellowing of women giving birth, the mewling of babies, the cries of lovers and the gasps of the dying. Everywhere the human tide rises and falls. The city is the place of despair and of hope. It is the inferno and the sanctuary.’

  ‘The centuries have not brought peace to the world.’

  ‘Nor wisdom. For the city alters but men do not. Or not at a pace sufficient to survive their ingenuity.’

  ‘The years,’ said Kublai, ‘have not cleansed you of your love for riddles.’

  ‘How else may we perceive the riddle of the world?’

  The Great Khan let out a sigh such as a tomb might make when it is opened after countless years of silence. He turned his gaze from the sandalwood in the fire to the magnolias of Kai-ping-fu as they kindled in the sunset. ‘It is all useless, then, if time and learning cannot release us from the infernal city.’

  ‘There is no need for conjecture. The proof and disproof of your fear exist beyond these palace walls, in the worlds that we form by being together.’

  ‘Tell me – for this evening will never, I think, ripen into night, and I have a great hunger to know what was and is and may come to pass …’

  ‌Cities & the Desert 1

  The best way to approach Iduba is by sea, preferably reclining on deck half asleep after a meal, for only by mistaking it for a dream can the mind accept what the eye perceives. The masters of Iduba, in founding their city on the coast of a vast and featureless desert, appear to have forgotten the story of Babel, for the buildings they have commissioned rise as if they would escape the earth which is the destiny of all our endeavours. As your boat nears the harbour, you strain your neck to see the tops of the towers, and at once you long for their windswept heights, for you have entered the heat and dust which is the lot of the city’s migrant workers. You see them in their thousands, sweating in the sun or shadowed in the dry wells of the towers, while in the upper storeys the citizens grow fat on revenue from Iduba’s famous export. This mineral salt, which locals call hulum, grants whoever tastes it an overwhelming sense of ease and prosperity. Little wonder that it should be valued above all the spices, for its use bankrupts nations, whose populations turn for comfort to the very illusion that first enslaved them.

  To the beneficiaries of Iduba’s wealth, plenty appears the natural condition of life; yet even in the midst of luxury there are signs of decay for those willing to read them. It is possible still to visit those islands built in the shapes of palm trees and crescent moons in the waters off the coast. For a time their whitewashed villas were the most desirable residences in Iduba. Now the poisoned sea laps at their foundations, while lurid blooms of algae stifle the brackish lagoons between abandoned gardens. From the vantage point of the towers, few citizens choose to look at these corroded strips of reclaimed land. Instead, they retreat with their purses into vast bazaars where the luxuries of the world accumulate. It is said by the workers that these temples of commerce are destined to become the mausoleums of Iduba, or to vanish entirely in one of the ever more frequent sandstorms that bury whole streets and drift as high as date palms against the dusty towers. Visiting dignitaries, generously hosted in return for singing the city’s praises, insist that its mineral wealth will allow Iduba to meet all challenges. Yet nobody knows how long the deposits of hulum will last. Idubans dread to contemplate their depletion, for without revenue to bind them to their employers, the migrants will drift elsewhere in pursuit of work, and the day will dawn when Iduba proves to have been nothing but a mirage, a vision that dissolves into the timeless and levelling sands from whence it seemed, once, to challenge the heavens.

  Cities & Time 1

  At first sight, Parvulo appears little different from other cities: shops and houses line the roads, infants in parks point at squirrels, schoolyards echo with the clamour of children. In a tranquil and leafy square, you take your rest on a bench and observe whole families at leisure, while office workers feed sparrows, brood over chessboards or play with their children in the middle of the working day. You see little evidence, on the faces of Parvulans, of ill health or distress, none of the heaviness of flesh and spirit with which other city dwellers are encumbered. This is not to say that inhabitants are blandly happy; on the contrary, lovers’ rows are more full-throated, and their reconciliations more passionate, than might in other cities be considered seemly.

  Time is the unofficial currency in Parvulo, and wealth
is measured not in spending power but in the amount of leisure available once the basic needs of the body have been met. Parvulans used, like the rest of us, to devote their lives to the purchase of goods intended to compensate them for the time lost in their acquisition. The pursuit of material gain made them ill, unequal and indebted, until by slow degrees it became preferable to be free with few goods than a slave with many. There was no coercion or compulsion in this. When everyone in a crowded room speaks loudly, it becomes impossible to hear a word, yet when everyone in the room speaks softly, everyone can be heard. This, in metaphor, was the discovery that Parvulans made. By taking up less space in the world, every citizen ensures that there is more space for everyone. With more time to explore the self and the world that surrounds them, they delight in the round of the seasons, and all nature is their congratulation. It is no longer the city’s passion to expel and discard, to measure its prosperity by the ease with which it squanders the world’s resources. Parvulo looks to its nearest neighbour, which daily is threatened by the cataclysmic collapse of mountains of refuse, and knows that the steadiness of its system cannot immunize it against contagion from a wider society which mistakes wastefulness for prosperity, greed for need.

  Having admired their gracious city, you wonder how Parvulans can insulate themselves from the ongoing misery of the world. There is only one hope, though it may be a foolish one. It is that Parvulo’s model spreads, not by conquest or coercion, but by the simple eloquence of its unique and all too repeatable example.