Looking for Jake and Other Stories

by China Miéville

  Following the format established in Jacob Buscard’s pamphlet, the wormword is traditionally rendered yGudluh. This is recorded with some trepidation: the main vector for the transmission of Buscard’s murrain over the last two centuries has been the literature about it.[7]

  CURES: Randolph Johnson’s claims about bergamot oil in Confessions of a Disease Junkie are spurious: there is no known cure for Buscard’s murrain.[8] There is, however, persistent speculation that the second word on Jansa’s lost paper, if spoken, might engender some cure in the brain: perhaps a predatory “hunter” synapse to devour the wormwords. Several “Jansa’s papers” have appeared over the decades, all forgeries.[9] Despite numerous careful searches, Jansa’s paper remains lost.[10]

  DETAILS

  When the boy upstairs got hold of a pellet gun and fired snips of potato at passing cars, I took a turn. I was part of everything. I wasn’t an outsider. But I wouldn’t join in when my friends went to the yellow house to scribble on the bricks and listen at the windows.

  One girl teased me about it, but everyone else told her to shut up. They defended me, even though they didn’t understand why I wouldn’t come.

  I don’t remember a time before I visited the yellow house for my mother.

  On Wednesday mornings at about nine o’clock I would open the front door of the decrepit building with a key from the bunch my mother had given me. Inside there was a hall and two doors, one broken and leading to the splintering stairs. I would unlock the other and enter the dark flat. The corridor inside was unlit and smelt of old wet air. I never walked even two steps down that hallway. Rot and shadows merged, and it looked as if the passage disappeared a few yards from me. The door to Mrs. Miller’s room was right in front of me. I would lean forward and knock.

  Quite often there were signs that someone else had been there recently. Scuffed dust and bits of litter.

  Sometimes I was not alone. There were two other children I sometimes saw slipping in or out of the house. There were a handful of adults who visited Mrs. Miller.

  I might find one or other of them in the hallway outside the door to her flat, or even sometimes in the flat itself, slouching in the crumbling dark hallway. They would be slumped over or reading some cheap-looking book or swearing loudly as they waited.

  There was a young Asian woman who wore a lot of makeup and smoked obsessively. She ignored me totally. There were two drunks who came sometimes. One would greet me boisterously and incomprehensibly, raising his arms as if he wanted to hug me into his stinking, stinking jumper. I would grin and wave nervously, walk past him. The other seemed alternately melancholic and angry.

  Occasionally I’d meet him by the door to Mrs. Miller’s room, swearing in a strong cockney accent. I remember the first time I saw him, he was standing there, his red face contorted, slurring and moaning loudly.

  “Come on, you old slag,” he wailed, “you fucking old slag. Come on, please, you cunt.”

  His words scared me but his tone was wheedling, and I realised I could hear her voice, Mrs. Miller’s voice, from inside the room, answering him back. She did not sound frightened or angry.

  I hung back, not sure what to do, and she kept speaking, and eventually the drunken man shambled miserably away. And then I could continue as usual.

  I asked my mother once if I could have some of Mrs. Miller’s food. She laughed very hard and shook her head. In all the Wednesdays of bringing the food over, I never even dipped my finger in to suck it.

  My mum spent an hour every Tuesday night making the stuff up. She dissolved a bit of gelatine or cornflower with some milk, threw in a load of sugar or flavourings, and crushed a clutch of vitamin pills into the mess. She would stir it until it thickened and let it set in a plain white plastic bowl. In the morning it would be a kind of strong-smelling custard that my mother put a dishcloth over and gave me, along with a list of any questions or requests for Mrs. Miller, and sometimes a plastic bucket full of white paint.

  So I would stand in front of Mrs. Miller’s door, knocking, with a bowl at my feet. I would hear a shifting and then her voice from close by the door.

  “Hello,” she would call, and then she would say my name a couple of times. “Have you my breakfast?

  Are you ready?”

  I would creep up close to the door and hold the food ready. I would tell her I was.

  Mrs. Miller would slowly count to three. On three, the door would swing open a snatch, just a foot or two, and I would thrust the bowl into the gap. She would grab it and slam the door quickly in my face.

  I couldn’t see very much inside the room. The door was open for less than a second. My strongest impression was of the whiteness of the walls. Mrs. Miller’s sleeves were white too, and made of plastic. I never got much of a glimpse at her face, but what I saw was unmemorable. A middle-aged woman’s eager face.

  If I had a bucket full of paint, we would run through the routine again. Then I would sit cross-legged in front of her door and listen to her eat.

  “How’s your mother?” she would shout.

  At that I would unfold my mother’s careful queries. She’s ok, I’d say, she’s fine. She says she has some questions for you.

  I’d read my mother’s strange questions in my careful child monotone, and Mrs. Miller would pause and make interested sounds, and clear her throat and think out loud. Sometimes she would take ages to come to an answer, and sometimes it would be almost immediate.

  “Tell your mother she can’t tell if a man’s good or bad from that,” she’d say. “Tell her to remember the problems she had with your father.” Or: “Yes, she can take the heart of it out. Only she has to paint it with the special oil I told her about.” “Tell your mother seven. But only four of them concern her, and three of them used to be dead.”

  “I can’t help her with that,” she told me once, quietly. “Tell her to go to a doctor, quickly.” And my mother did, and she got well again.

  “What do you not want to do when you grow up?” Mrs. Miller asked me one day.

  That morning when I had come to the house the sad cockney vagrant had been banging on the door of her room again, the keys to the flat flailing in his hand.

  “He’s begging you, you fucking old tart, please, you owe him, he’s so fucking angry,” he’d been shouting. “Only it ain’t you gets the fucking sharp end, is it? Please, you cow, you fucking cow, I’m on me knees . . .”

  “My door knows you, man,” Mrs. Miller had declared from within. “It knows you and so do I. You know it won’t open to you. I didn’t take out my eyes, and I’m not giving in now. Go home.”

  I had waited nervously as the man gathered himself and staggered away, and then, looking behind me, I had knocked on her door and announced myself. It was after I’d given her her food that she asked her question.

  “What do you not want to do when you grow up?”

  If I had been a few years older her inversion of the cliché would have annoyed me: it would have seemed mannered and contrived. But I was only a young child, and I was quite delighted.

  I don’t want to be a lawyer, I told her carefully. I spoke out of loyalty to my mother, who periodically received crisp letters which made her cry or smoke fiercely, and swear at fucking lawyers, fucking smart-arse lawyers.

  Mrs. Miller was delighted.

  “Good boy!” She snorted. “We know all about lawyers. Bastards, right? With the small print! Never be tricked by the small print! It’s right there in front of you, right there in front of you, and you can’t even see it, and then suddenly it makes you notice it! And I tell you, once you seen it it’s got you!” She laughed excitedly. “Don’t let the small print get you. I tell you a secret.” I waited quietly, and my head slipped nearer the door.

  “The devil’s in the details!” She laughed again. “You ask your mother if that’s not true. The devil is in the details!”

  I’d wait the twenty minutes or so until Mrs. Miller had finished eating, and then we’d reverse our previous pro
cedure and she’d quickly hand me out an empty bowl. I would return home with the empty container and tell my mother the various answers to her various questions. Usually she would nod and make notes. Occasionally she would cry.

  After I told Mrs. Miller that I did not want to be a lawyer she started asking me to read to her. She made me tell my mother, and told me to bring a newspaper or one of a number of books. My mother nodded at the message and packed me a sandwich the next Wednesday, along with The Mirror. She told me to be polite and do what Mrs. Miller asked, and that she’d see me in the afternoon.

  I wasn’t afraid. Mrs. Miller had never treated me badly from behind her door. I was resigned, and only a little bit nervous.

  Mrs. Miller made me read stories to her from specific pages that she shouted out. She made me recite them again and again, very carefully. Afterwards she would talk to me. Usually she started with a joke about lawyers, and about small print.

  “There’s three ways not to see what you don’t want to,” she told me. “One is the coward’s way and too painful. The other is to close your eyes forever, which is the same as the first, when it comes to it. The third is the hardest and the best: you have to make sure only the things you can afford to see come before you.”

  One morning when I arrived the stylish Asian woman was whispering fiercely through the wood of the door, and I could hear Mrs. Miller responding with shouts of amused disapproval. Eventually the young woman swept past me, leaving me cowed by her perfume.

  Mrs. Miller was laughing, and she was talkative when she had eaten.

  “She’s heading for trouble, messing with the wrong family! You have to be careful with all of them,” she told me. “Every single one of them on that other side of things is a tricksy bastard who’ll kill you soon as look at you, given half a chance.

  “There’s the gnarly throat-tipped one . . . and there’s old hasty, who I think had best remain nameless,”

  she said wryly. “All old bastards, all of them. You can’t trust them at all, that’s what I say. I should know, eh? Shouldn’t I?” She laughed. “Trust me, trust me on this: it’s too easy to get on the wrong side of them.

  “What’s it like out today?” she asked me. I told her that it was cloudy.

  “You want to be careful with that,” she said. “All sorts of faces in the clouds, aren’t there? Can’t help noticing, can you?” She was whispering now. “Do me a favour when you go home to your mum: don’t look up. There’s a boy. Don’t look up at all.”

  When I left her, however, the day had changed. The sky was hot, and quite blue.

  The two drunk men were squabbling in the front hall, and I edged past them to her door. They continued bickering in a depressing, garbled murmur throughout my visit.

  “D’you know, I can’t even really remember what it was all about, now!” Mrs. Miller said when I had finished reading to her. “I can’t remember! That’s a terrible thing. But you don’t forget the basics. The exact question escapes me, and to be honest I think maybe I was just being nosy or showing off . . . I can’t say I’m proud of it, but it could have been that. It could. But whatever the question, it was all about a way of seeing an answer.

  “There’s a way of looking that lets you read things. If you look at a pattern of tar on a wall, or a crumbling mound of brick or somesuch . . . there’s a way of unpicking it. And if you know how, you can trace it and read it out and see the things hidden right there in front of you— the things you’ve been seeing but not noticing, all along. But you have to learn how.” She laughed. It was a high-pitched, unpleasant sound. “Someone has to teach you. So you have to make certain friends.

  “But you can’t make friends without making enemies.

  “You have to open it all up for you to see inside. You make what you see into a window, and you see what you want through it. You make what you see a sort of a door. ”

  She was silent for a long time. Then: “Is it cloudy again?” she asked suddenly. She went on before I answered.

  “If you look up, you look into the clouds for long enough, and you’ll see a face. Or in a tree. Look in a tree, look in the branches, and soon you’ll see them just so, and there’s a face or a running man, or a bat or whatever. You’ll see it all suddenly, a picture in the pattern of the branches, and you won’t have chosen to see it. And you can’t unsee it.

  “That’s what you have to learn to do, to read the details like that and see what’s what and learn things.

  But you’ve to be damn careful. You’ve to be careful not to disturb anything.” Her voice was absolutely cold, and I was suddenly very frightened.

  “Open up that window, you’d better be damn careful that what’s in the details doesn’t look back and see you.”

  The next time I went, the maudlin drunk was there again wailing obscenities at her through her door. She shouted at me to come back later, that she didn’t need her food right now. She sounded resigned and irritated, and she went back to scolding her visitor before I had backed out of earshot.

  He was screaming at her that she’d gone too far, that she’d pissed about too long, that things were coming to a head, that there was going to be hell to pay, that she couldn’t avoid it forever, that it was her own fault.

  When I came back he was asleep, snoring loudly, curled up a few feet into the mildewing passage. Mrs.

  Miller took her food and ate it quickly, returned it without speaking.

  When I returned the following week, she began to whisper to me as soon as I’d knocked on the door, hissing urgently as she opened it briefly and grabbed the bowl.

  “It was an accident, you know,” she said, as if responding to something I’d said. “I mean of course you know in theory that anything might happen. You get warned, don’t you? But oh my . . . oh my God it took the breath out of me and made me cold to realise what had happened.”

  I waited. I could not leave, because she had not returned the bowl. She had not said I could go. She spoke again, very slowly.

  “It was a new day.” Her voice was distant and breathy. “Can you even imagine? Can you see what I was ready to do? I was poised . . . to change . . . to see everything that’s hidden. The best place to hide a book is in a library. The best place to hide secret things is there, in the visible angles, in our view, in plain sight.

  “I had studied and sought, and learnt, finally, to see. It was time to learn truths.

  “I opened my eyes fully, for the first time.

  “I had chosen an old wall. I was looking for the answer to some question that I told you I can’t even remember now, but the question wasn’t the main thing. That was the opening of my eyes.

  “I stared at the whole mass of the bricks. I took another glance, relaxed my sight. At first I couldn’t stop seeing the bricks as bricks, the divisions as layers of cement, but after a time they became pure vision.

  And as the whole broke down into lines and shapes and shades, I held my breath as I began to see.

  “Alternatives appeared to me. Messages written in the pockmarks. Insinuations in the forms. Secrets unraveling. It was bliss.

  “And then without warning my heart went tight, as I saw something. I made sense of the pattern.

  “It was a mess of cracks and lines and crumbling cement, and as I looked at it, I saw a pattern in the wall.

  “I saw a clutch of lines that looked just like something . . . terrible—something old and predatory and utterly terrible—staring right back at me.

  “And then I saw it move.”

  “You have to understand me,” she said. “Nothing changed. See? All the time I was looking I saw the wall. But that first moment, it was like when you see a face in the cloud. I just noticed in the pattern in the brick, I just noticed something, looking at me. Something angry.

  “And then in the very next moment, I just . . . I just noticed another load of lines—cracks that had always been there, you understand? Patterns in broken brick that I’d seen only a second before—that looked exactly like t
hat same thing, a little closer to me. And in the next moment a third picture in the brick, a picture of the thing closer still.

  “Reaching for me.”

  “I broke free then,” she whispered. “I ran away from there in terror, with my hands in front of my eyes, and I was screaming. I ran and ran.

  “And when I stopped and opened my eyes again, I had run to the edges of a park, and I took my hands slowly down and dared to look behind me, and saw that there was nothing coming from the alley where I’d been. So I turned to the little snatch of scrub and grass and trees.

  “And I saw the thing again.”

  Mrs. Miller’s voice was stretched out as if she were dreaming. My mouth was open, and I huddled closer to the door.

  “I saw it in the leaves,” she said forlornly. “As I turned I saw the leaves in such a way . . . Just a chance conjuncture, you understand? I noticed a pattern. I couldn’t not. You don’t choose whether to see faces in the clouds. I saw the monstrous thing again and it still reached for me, and I shrieked and all the mothers and fathers and children in that park turned and gazed at me, and I turned my eyes from that tree and whirled on my feet to face a little family in my way.

  “And the thing was there in the same pose. I saw it in the outlines of the father’s coat and the spokes of the baby’s pushchair, and the tangles of the mother’s hair. It was just another mess of lines, you see? But you don’t choose what you notice. And I couldn’t help but notice just the right lines out of the whole, just the lines out of all the lines there, just the ones to see the thing again, a little closer, looking at me.

  “And I turned and saw it closer still in the clouds, and I turned again and it was clutching for me in the rippling weeds in the pond, and as I closed my eyes I swear I felt something touch my dress.

  “You understand me? You understand?”

  I didn’t know if I understood or not. Of course now I know that I did not.

  “It lives in the details,” she said. “It travels in that . . . in that perception. It moves through those chance meetings of lines. Maybe you glimpse it sometimes when you stare at clouds, and then maybe it might catch a glimpse of you, too.