by Simon Ings
And opens them, shaking, breath heaving, as the enormity of his state comes upon him. Where is everyone? How is it that he is pulling away from all this? What explains his steady withdrawal?
Refocusing, hunting for clues, he witnesses further mysteries. The wreck has begun to foam. White froth emerges from every intact hole in the dismantled craft. Once the foam has dribbled off, each hole yawns, a distorted, screaming mouth, folds open, turns inside out and unwinds into a kind of flower: its petals are metal surfaces, and a bouquet of tangled wires and mangled ducts serves for sexual parts. All these materials are sorted as he watches, bundled and batched; the flowers are picked and pulled apart – she loves me, she loves me not – and it comes to him that the Victory is being dismantled and sorted by agents which, at this distance, are too small for him to see.
The froth, meanwhile, floating free of the ship, has formed lines, and these lines, like trails of spittle, like spawn, lead away from the ship; they are being pulled away from the ship, and it comes to him, in his strange, somnolent, undying calm, that this soft white stuff, these little beads strung on strings like fish eggs in a deep black stream, these bright things, these bubbles, are the crew.
He cries out, and hears his cry, and hearing it, the madness of it, the act of hearing in a vacuum that must by now have killed him, makes him scream the more, and since screaming is not enough, his hands begin to paddle, he scrabbles for purchase in the dark, and his left hand, the hurt hand, the bruised hand, catches against a film, an unseeable skin, and sticks there. Pain wells under his bruised and loosened fingernail and makes his hand a ball of hurt, and his gaze, drawn to that hurt, fixes on his hand, stuck there in a clear glue. A plate of his ship, turning to catch the light, appears as a sheet of light beyond his hand, and where his hand is stuck, there in the dark, the sheet twists, warps as through a lens, and it comes to him that he is in a bubble, breathing, screaming, that he is embraced within an egg, and sensing this, his bruised hand closes around the tissue it touched, and crumples it, and everything before him stretches and bends, the ship turns into streams of light, and above him the Earth itself vanishes in an ovoid blur.
Reaching with his other hand, his right hand, he grabs a fistful of that tegument and pulls himself forward, and the gluey stuff surrounding him folds itself upon his face and, screaming, he sees the material fog against his breath.
He is inside an egg. His tongue touches tasteless plastic stuff and he bites, desperate to be free, desperate to be dead, and something tears somewhere. He hears the air whine out and his ears pop and he begins to spin, tipping back into the violence of the world, a star no longer, but a lonely and unburdened man, riding a broken, bucking bubble in the dark.
The whining stops. The spinning world slows and steadies. The wreckage reappears, terrible in its tidiness: a palletised assortment of aluminium plates and drums of wire.
Jim breathes, and hears his breath. The bubble has mended itself. He reaches out again with both hands, steadier now, mystified by this bubble, and his hands meet gluey walls. He presses the walls wider: the egg gives a little, and the view before him wobbles. He lets go, and the world, or what there is of it – raw materials in space, turning in the light of Earth – recovers its shape.
He paddles around his little cocoon. He faces the sun, whose blaring light should blind and burn him, only to find that this quarter of his world is browned out. The material of his egg is responding to the sun’s glare, protecting him.
He inverts himself, looking for an edge to his strange and sustaining prison. A door. A valve.
He sees another egg, and another man inside it. And below that another. And another. He stares, counting the stream of bubbles rising from the deep, each one holding a man or a woman. The man in the bubble nearest him has already seen him. He gesticulates wildly, mouth open against the wall of his egg. James, absurdly, waves.
The stream of bubbles weaves about, new bubbles coming visible then drifting into shadow. Beyond his own string, other strings grow nearer, all gathering together in a braid. We’re saved, he thinks, we’re being saved, and the thought, which should comfort him, only fills him with a deeper fear. Saved how? And by whom?
A skull’s knowing rictus presses against the plastic just below Jim’s nose, and as he cries out and bucks away, a second skull, armed like the first with hands clown-spread beneath its neck, seizes hold of his bubble, nudges the other, and makes eyes at its companion. And such eyes! James has never seen such eyes before: eyes like stumpy telescopes on the zooms of pocket cameras.
The skulls, appearing out of nowhere, adhere to the wall of his egg with long, spatulate fingers, human, yet threaded with black lines as though tattooed with a map of the vessels running beneath the skin. The skulls are not human, but they must have begun that way. Products of the Gurwitsch ray, is Jim’s hysterical guess. An extreme fulfilment of Gurwitsch’s promise to ‘sculpt organic forms at will’. Their eyes shoot in and out and their necks, geared in ways that are not human, wobble their skulls about in strange and simple patterns, and it comes to Jim that the skulls are having a great time. That they are happy with their lot. That they are singing.
Jim backs away. The space outside his bubble is full of skulls suddenly, crowded with skulls, some adult, some belonging to children, some foetal and hardly formed at all, and as they swarm about his bubble, latching on with their big clown hands like so many putti, it comes to him that he has had enough of this, that this is not a rescue, and he has had enough, more than enough. Pressing his face into the plastic wall, he hears their shanty, fudged and softened, through the gluey skin – ‘Weigh, hey and up she rises’ – and with a snarl of hate he lunges and bites and tears a great mouthful of egg wall free and spits it out and feels the air rush out and the cold rush in and his ears explode and he cannot hear his laughter.
The skulls, bug-eyed and concerned, sew up the rent with dextrous fingers and invisible thread.
He bites again. They poke him with their fingers. He fights them off. They shuffle in. The egg is shreds. He tears and tears. The cold is everywhere and his blood fizzes like champagne. But still from somewhere comes the air to let him fill his lungs, and the skulls sing lullabies to him and paddle his flesh with big clown hands and absolutely will not let him die.
9
I spent two more days in London, ‘clearing the flat’. I bought a rucksack and packed it with books and a few photographs. I left my drawing table behind, and ornaments I had bought for the flat at one time or another. Except for a denim jacket, I piled all my clothes into bin liners and carried them around to a nearby charity store. On the train, I treated myself to a sleeping compartment, and I was well rested by the time I reached the West Riding, at midday, not a week after I had left.
I wrote the whole adventure off as a mistake. I had let nostalgia creep up on me and I had got what I deserved. Fel was in the Smoke somewhere, very close, close enough to use the flat we had shared. She had a new life, a new lover, and she was at very least trying for a baby. She was living the life she had wanted and which I had not felt I could give her. I wondered if her boyfriend was unaccommodated, or a Bundist, like her. I had not stayed around to find out. I hadn’t called Georgy, or even Stella – and by not calling her, I even passed up the chance to see my mother. I had run away from a place and time that had no room for me now. Perhaps “run away” is too strong. My quick departure did not feel like cowardice.
I stopped wondering. (Who is she seeing? What is she doing? Is she happy? Does she think about me?) I packed it all away. Some decisions cannot be revisited, even in the imagination. I was – I had to be – done.
The world had other ideas, naturally.
* * *
Bob welcomed me home with few words, and I could see he was sorry that I was not, after all, bringing back every stick and rag of my past life to fill his house. I told him about Fel, not because I thought it would help, but because I had no one else I could talk to. Bob’s taciturnity normally dr
ove me mad, but on this occasion it was a blessing. He did not tell me that all had turned out for the best. In my neurotic state, I thought I could see him thinking it. I should have found another woman, I suppose: some warm stranger with whom I could share, in complete confidence, my version of events. But I couldn’t face it.
In November, a month after my homecoming, television signals penetrated the Calder Valley. The reception was surprisingly good for this foggy weather-trap. Nobody had a TV, not at first, and the first set we had access to was the one recently mounted over the counter of the fish-and-chip shop. It was a canny commercial move, but even a general curiosity could not explain the crowd Bob and I confronted one chilly Friday. There were men and women milling outside on the pavement, taking turns, with their usual rough courtesy, to get inside and at the screen. I figured there was a rugby match on. I plucked Bob’s sleeve. ‘Let’s try that new place by the canal.’ I was oddly incurious, probably because I had found myself piecework with a local solicitor and was pulling regular hours again, sticking to regular mealtimes; I was famished. ‘Come on.’
Why Bob, who was no lover of crowds, hung on, I cannot guess. He must have been visited by some fleeting sixth sense. He led me, his arm linked through mine, towards the door. The moment people saw us, they made room for us. Elbows nudged, shoulders were tapped. They made a path for us, all the way up to a spot under the blaring TV. It all happened so effortlessly, so smoothly, as in a nightmare. Standing there, surrounded by dozens of silent men, I wondered what had given us pride of place. Though it wasn’t hard to guess: family of the first Yorkshireman to go into space.
The TV was not tuned to either of the familiar stations. I recognised it instantly: a Bund news channel. Why on earth were we receiving this? Come to think of it, how were we receiving this?
The Bund’s peculiar style of news delivery – shaped to satisfy its people’s vaunted appetite for information delivered logarithmically, always on a rising curve of complexity, difficulty, urgency – would have lent bombast and millenarian gloom to reportage from a village fete. The main story – the one the channel kept coming back to – was simply incomprehensible. The picture, slewing and cutting every which-way, was even more confused than its soundtrack. There was a lot of repeated information, looping video and the same words uttered over and over. While these complex grammatical and visual syncopations were beyond me, I could not help but notice that very little news was being conveyed. Whatever this was – a close-up shot of a sheet of paper being screwed into a ball by invisible hands – the Bund’s news anchors had yet to get a handle on it.
The balled paper blinked out, replaced by a channel ident whose swooping curves and rolling hills of Bayesian distribution unwrapped to reveal a studio – half-real, half-animated – in which two presenters were sitting opposite each other without a table between them, swinging idly in their padded chairs, and with a clipboard on each lap. The man leaned earnestly forwards as the woman, her too-tight skirt riding another inch above her knees, consulted her pad and recited an itemised list, turning this way and that on her chair as she read. The whole scene reminded me strongly of the white-coater pornography they screened at Bob’s factory at Christmas, were it not that the backs of the presenters’ heads were glass. Their brains, not so spongiform as usual, and animated – presumably by the same joke ingredient that had animated Windsor Castle’s soup course – swam around on their cortical tethers, bashing the sides of their meningeal tanks like two angry fish.
A location shot: again we were confronted with what appeared to be a piece of crumpled paper. As I watched, it curled; ink burst from a tear, then bloomed into weird, globular flame. A blank, uncrumpled sheet filled the next shot. Then, crash-focusing, the camera revealed that the sheet was not blank at all. Indeed, it had ceased to be paper, become instead a solid surface: a door. The door opened and something knocked the camera aside. As the camera wheeled, it captured a pair of legs, knees bending frantically, frog-like, the legs caught at the ankles by a pair of thick white padded trousers. Then, kicking the trousers free, the legs shot out of view. The camera, untethered, rose with an undersea slowness after the legs and found them briefly, framed in the big round door. Not quite in focus, they gesticulated once, twice, then rose in a V against a wall of stars.
The studio reasserted itself and the news anchor’s head wobbled slightly as she channelled the latest information, her brain buffeting the sides of her skull in a frantic bid at escape.
A sick vacuum opened in the pit of my stomach.
The camera wheeled.
The camera was weightless.
This was footage from outer space.
Paper became metal as creases rent and pulled away to reveal: duct-work, silvered padding and great handfuls of wire.
Stars hung in an empty sky. A cloudy mass, faintly edged with green, descended from the top of the screen: it was Earth seen from orbit. Flashing past – literally flashing, rhythmically reflecting the light of an unseen sun – came the wheeling parts of something: a flight of disassembled components flying together in close formation.
A Union Jack rippled by.
I realised at last that this was the Victory. Or rather, this was what was left of her. And that Jim, my brother, first Yorkshireman in space, had to be dead.
* * *
Betty, when I finally got her on the phone, wailed like a child, which, in an important sense, she still was. The grief of motherhood and the physiology of childhood are a heady mix.
‘She’s had to go and be sick.’
‘Stella?’
‘I’m so sorry, Stu.’
‘I don’t know what to think. I don’t know what to feel. I don’t suppose . . . There’s no way—? Christ, Stella.’
‘Be kind to Bob.’
‘Of course.’
‘Hang on.’ Stella left the phone. The pips sounded: I pushed in more coins. In a minute Stella was back, the tension high in her throat: ‘Is Bob there?’
‘He’s in the pub. I can go and get him, it’s just around the corner.’
‘Betty says she wants to talk to him.’
I tried desperately to think of something to say.
‘Stu.’
‘I’ll try,’ I said.
I hung up, gathered my refunded pennies and went back to the pub. Bob was sitting in the lounge bar at a tucked-away table with Billy Marsden, his wife and daughter.
‘Dad.’ I beckoned him up. I didn’t want Billy and the others to hear our conversation because I had no idea what Bob would say. For all I knew, it would be something terrible. ‘It’s Betty,’ I said. I couldn’t not tell him. I couldn’t just send him out to the call box thinking he was going to speak to Stella.
Bob simply nodded. He headed for the door. Had he understood? He had never once spoken to his wife since her rebirth. I made to go after him, but stopped myself in time. I sat in his seat and the Marsden girl reached under the table and squeezed my knee.
Twenty minutes later, Bob was still not back, so I made my excuses and went around to the call box. It was empty. I walked home and heard Bob moving around upstairs.
‘Dad?’
‘Here,’ he called, hearty enough. I climbed the stairs and looked in at his room: this room he had shared with Betty for years; the room in which Jim and I, I can only assume, had been conceived.
Bob was packing. ‘I’m borrowing your case.’
‘Dad.’
‘Betty wants me with her. She wants me in Islington.’
I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to be glad for him. I wanted to be glad for them both: Mum and Dad together again at last. But it was too much to process all at once. Had Bob forgotten what Betty was now? Had he forgotten what shape she was in? ‘I’m catching the sleeper,’ he said.
‘The sleeper will have left. Dad, wait till morning.’
‘I can get the last train to Leeds.’
‘And then what?’
‘I’ll be all right.’
He was afrai
d to wait, I realised: afraid of second thoughts, afraid of his own fear. Inspired to action, he was having to commit to it, like a man on a high diving board. (The incongruity of that image was enough to make me smile.)
‘Can I help, Dad?’
‘Make me a tea.’
He asked me not to see him off. He shook my hand. He did not look like an old man who had just lost his eldest son. He looked like an old man on a date. I wished him luck. Perhaps it was the wrong thing to say.
Anyway, he never got as far as London, or anything like. Once again, his fear of the new bested him. The afternoon of the next day, Stella tracked me down by phone to the solicitor’s office. She asked me when Bob would arrive. I told her I had no idea. Afterwards I was told off about receiving personal calls in the office. The next morning, early, a policeman banged on the front door, waking me. He told me I had to go and pick Bob up from Leeds. He was reasonably sober by then.
In the days that followed, Bob vanished into the knot of his workmates. They were bringing him home, paralytically drunk, each night. I didn’t know whether that was a good thing for him, or whether he wanted it or not, but I knew better than to interfere. The factory was a community that, for better or worse, took pride in looking after its own.
* * *
On top of destroying the HMS Victory, the Bund had casually stolen our airwaves, the better to show us the futility of all our hopes of leaving the planet under our own steam. The first of these outrages was unconscionable; the other, infantile. Our response, as a government and a people, was immediate. King William was evacuated to Newfoundland. Bills were passed without debate through Parliament in a frantic attempt to contain Bundist communities in London, Birmingham and Glasgow within their civic bounds. Chernoy’s Process was challenged in the courts and class actions were organised. There were demonstrations. In London and in Bradford, riots. Leeds airport was overrun and a Bundist plane was set on fire.
