by Simon Ings
No one in my new job ever breathed down my neck, telling me who I could and could not speak to. From my boss’s desk, I phoned Stella myself. ‘I want to invite Fel to the funeral,’ I said.
‘That’s a sweet idea.’
‘She and Mum were so close.’
‘Yes.’
‘Have you seen her?’
‘No,’ Stella said. ‘Not since you left London.’
‘She’s not been in touch?’
‘No.’
‘I thought maybe she’d been to see Betty.’
There was an awkward pause.
‘It’s all right, Stella,’ I said. ‘Has she been round?’
‘A couple of times. But it was strange without you. I think Betty gave her a hard time.’ She laughed.
‘It was me that left,’ I said.
‘You don’t say? Idiot.’
‘Thanks, Stella.’
‘Well.’
I asked Stella to call round at the flat in the Barbican, but there was never anyone in. ‘You could always phone Georgy,’ she said. She gave me his number.
So I called him, and what a weird conversation that was. No ‘I’m sorry to hear about your mother.’ No ‘My commiserations for your loss.’ I got the strongest impression that he was afraid of me. At any rate, afraid.
‘So you can’t help me.’
‘I’m sorry, Stuart.’
By now, I was furious with him. ‘You’re telling me you don’t know where your own daughter is.’
‘I know exactly where she is. My problem is I cannot begin to tell you.’
‘What? You think I would hurt her? Is that who you think I am?’
‘I mean what I say, Stuart. Literally, I cannot begin to tell you. You would not understand.’
‘Fuck you,’ I said, and slammed down the receiver.
* * *
It was clear enough that Georgy was not going tell Fel about Betty’s death. More: that Fel was in a place where she’d not hear the news from anyone else. What the hell was happening with her? This on top of everything else I was handling – the mourners, a sandwich supper in the Arms, my dad. All I wanted to do was think about my mum. But which mum? Even that had been made impossible for me. Was it the formidable and distant woman who had borne me I was supposed to mourn, or the charming and obstreperous child? The pattern of my feelings had been bent so out of true by Georgy’s therapy, I could only keep returning to the one solid, material fact any of us had left to cling to – the horror of her unexpected and violent death. I had terrible, disgusting nightmares, perhaps because it was only in sleep that I was finding freedom enough to try and untangle my feelings. Spending time with Bob helped, I think. He showed me old photographs. My heart ached, but as it aches for someone very dear lost long ago. I began to understand that I had been mourning my mother for a very long time. Before her transformation. Even before her cancer. I began at last to accept the sorry fact that she had always been leaving me.
The coroner’s office released Betty’s body for burial in mid-July. The ceremony took place on a Wednesday afternoon. There were neighbours, and men from Bob’s factory, and some of Betty’s family had driven across from Wakefield. Stella had already said she would not come and there was no one turning up from the nursery in London. Not that anyone from Medicine City would have been made to feel at all welcome. Bob had even insisted that Betty be buried in an adult-size coffin. He was after an ordinary and present sadness, on this day of all days. Nothing remarkable. Nothing out of true. He had spent too many years trying and failing to accommodate the future.
The hearse crawled past us as we climbed the hill to the cemetery. Bob was ahead of me, walking arm in arm with Billy Marsden. I was making conversation with a Wakefield cousin whose name I had already forgotten. The road was muddy, slippery from recent rains, but the weather could not have been brighter. White shreds of cloud lay over Snay Booth while here, in the lee-side of the valley, the air was all mown grass and woodsmoke. The lane rose between high hedges and came to a plateau overlooking the southeast corner of the town. The hedges fell away and a low dry-stone wall marked the cemetery boundary. There was nothing special about the place, no planting, no effort at funerary architecture. The headstones, all of an equal height, suggested a bizarre crop left ignored in a field gone fallow. But smoke from the chimneys below the hill was filling and swilling the valley with washes of desaturated blues and pinks, and with such a view before me it was possible to feel attachment to this land. Even love.
The coffin was absurdly light, of course. How little Betty was secured in that great big black box I could not imagine. I took the head end, Bob beside me, some cousin of Stella’s at the rear and Billy Marsden beside him, and it was no effort at all for the four of us to process across the damp, uneven ground to where the earth had been heaved up. I was afraid she’d shift, slumping to the foot of the box, or its head. But the weight, though absurdly little, stayed steady on my shoulder. What, I wonder, did the other bearers think? Down the coffin went, into its hole, and far too slowly. The weight of the box had the workmen confused.
And Betty’s burial was only the beginning. There was tea to get through at the Arms, and seeing the Wakefield mob off at the station, and back to the Arms for a drink with the fellows at the factory.
By the time I’d tucked Bob in and set off for my own room, I was much too tired to deal with Jim. And Jim, of course, having spent the whole day stuck inside (I wasn’t risking him being discovered on this day of all days) was just about ready to climb the walls. Failing them, the curtains.
‘Come down. Now.’
Jim stuck his plastic tongue out at me.
‘You’ll get me into trouble.’
‘Nah.’ Jim swung from fold to fold, idly, experimenting. His whole environment was one giant climbing frame. He was only five inches high and can’t have weighed much above a pound. This gave him a power-to-weight ratio even more monstrous than the one he’d expected to enjoy on Mars, gambolling about like a toddler in less than half Earth’s gravity.
‘We’ll go to the cemetery together in a couple of days,’ I promised him. ‘You can say your proper goodbyes to Mum.’
Jim swung, missed and dropped onto the dressing table, knocking my wallet onto the floor.
‘For heaven’s sake.’
Jim sat on the edge of the table, swinging his legs as he watched me retrieve it. ‘Sorry, Stu.’
‘How are you feeling?’ I asked him.
Jim’s restitution was not total, and Jim himself was aware of the gaps. He frowned, struggling to assess this great imponderable: how did he feel?
‘Sad,’ he said. ‘Angry, mostly. That she went through all that, only to die like . . . that.’
Jim’s sincerity shortfall was partly real (he was only a toy, after all), partly a problem of perception. However profoundly he might feel things in his plastic state, he could only ever express those feelings through a plastic mouth, and at a comically high pitch. How deeply can you rate the grief of someone who sounds like a cartoon mouse?
Jim sensed our conversation was going nowhere and, ignoring me, climbed up onto the shelf under the window. He traversed along my books, looking for something to read. I think he was after some inspiration for his storytelling because the volume he lit on was Betty’s pocket hardback edition of the Aeneid. He grabbed the top of the spine and leaned back, angling it out from the shelf.
I stepped forward and rescued the book before its binding tore any further in Jim’s tiny, crudely articulated hands. Jim, dangling one-handed off the spine, let go. He fell, picked himself up and ambled over to the fireplace, where he had his cushion. ‘I could have got it.’
‘You were breaking it.’
‘I’m careful.’
‘You’re an idiot.’
‘I’ll be full-size again one day, so just you watch it.’
‘And back in your right mind, I hope.’ I laid the book out for him, not too near the fire, for fear his joints might soft
en, and while Jim read, scooping back the onion-skin pages as delicately as he could with mitten-fused fingers, I laid out the paints I had bought that day in Halifax. Humbrol’s enamel range offered good approximations of the regulation colours of Jim’s uniform. Jim’s appearance seemed to have been based on his last moments aboard the Victory. His overall was of a piece with his flesh, his boots sealed seamlessly around his calves. His face, though rendered impassive, still carried – unless this was just my imagination – a faint ghost of my brother’s death-terror.
I tested the brushes I had bought against my palm. Jim watched me, suspicious. ‘If it tickles, I’m not doing it.’
‘All right.’
‘I don’t know, Stu. Aren’t all those colours going to mark me out?’
‘Desaturated blues and black? This lot will camouflage you, if anything.’
‘What colour are you going to paint my face?’
‘I’m not going to paint your face.’
‘I’m not having that flesh-pink stuff. I’ll look like a Band-Aid.’
Downstairs, we heard movement. Other tenants, maybe, or the landlady herself. We sat in silence, waiting for the coast to clear.
‘This is odd,’ Jim murmured. I glanced over and saw he had worked his way through the book to the bookmark – Betty’s appointment slip from the Gurwitsch Hospital. He had it spread out over the start of Book Six. I came over.
Easy is the descent to Avernus:
Night and day the door of gloomy Dis stands open.
But to recall one’s steps, and pass out into the upper air,
That is the labour, that is the difficulty!
‘Look at the date.’ Kneeling on the paper, Jim reached and tapped its top right-hand corner.
‘What?’
‘Mum was already reborn by then, wasn’t she?’
I looked at the date. ‘So?’
‘So she wasn’t attending appointments at the Gurwitsch. She was well past all that.’
I made a face. ‘Maybe.’
Jim was adamant. ‘“Maybe” nothing.’ He stepped studiously over the paper, examining it. ‘Her name’s nowhere on it.’
‘There’s no name on it.’
‘Isn’t that odd?’
‘I don’t know.’
Jim stepped off the book onto the cushion and let it take his weight as he rolled backwards, head over heels, and onto his feet. At his size, it wasn’t a particularly athletic gesture at all – just his natural way of moving. I thought of Mars and how Jim might once have gambolled there. I thought of the meal we had all eaten in the basement kitchen of Stella’s house in Islington, and how Georgy had barracked Jim that night. He had been in a mood to make digs at everyone that night; even his own daughter. Even Fel.
Even Fel.
And then I knew. The truth came clear. It screamed at me, as surely as Fel had screamed at me on our last night.
There is no fucking time!
I remembered waking suddenly in the middle of the night. But the bedroom was not dark, there was a light on, and I turned over in the bed, and there was Fel, sitting up on pillows, the reading lamp on, poring over an old book. And when she saw that I was awake and felt me move against her, she grinned, the jewel shining in her tooth, and lifted the book for me to see – Betty’s Aeneid – and said, ‘The old stories are the best.’
And then she closed the book. The placemarker wasn’t Betty’s at all. It was Fel’s.
The appointment had been Fel’s, too.
I looked at my watch. I pulled my coat from its hook on the door. I checked I had my wallet. I snatched Jim up from the floor and crammed him protesting into my pocket. I hunted for my keys when all the time they were hanging from the keyhole in the door. I snatched them, left the room and locked the door behind me. My landlady looked out of the kitchen as I passed. I shouted some incoherent explanation as I barrelled past and toppled into the street.
I had ten minutes before the last London train.
10
‘Eat your greens!’ exhorts Hattie Jacques, from the poster on the tea-house wall. She has company now. Dirk Bogarde in Space Force blue: ‘Together, We Can Build Tomorrow!’ Underneath, a third poster. No photograph this time. Cheaply and hurriedly produced, with a War Ministry stamp. Absorbent paper: the ink’s already begun to run from four block-printed words: TAKE BACK THE MOON.
Poster by poster, broadcast by broadcast, the world is rumbling towards another war. In the West Riding, the collapse of the old dispensation is expressed mostly through official directives. Posters on the tea-house wall. New projects announced, new targets set. Fatter pay packets and less time in which to drink them away.
In the Smoke, it’s far more complicated. On the Thames, the ferries run empty that once carried unaccommodated guest workers to and from their menial jobs on Threadneedle Street and Bishopsgate. Someone built their own howitzer, if ‘ you can believe this, and shot out one of the Bund’s bright civic ‘moons’, plunging late-returning workers into darkness: they had to navigate by the light from their own phones. And yet, as you come off the sleeper bleary-eyed – it’s not much past six in the morning – you are confronted by protestors defending the Bund. They’ve gathered keen and early for the beginning of rush hour. They’re a well-dressed lot: students. If all goes smoothly they can be in lectures by ten, nursing secret smiles and bruised knuckles and no professor the wiser. They’re wielding banners sporting the entwined snakes of the Gurwitsch Hospital letterhead. They’re fans of the Bund, cheerleaders of the posthuman future. Mortality’s no friend of theirs; who wouldn’t want to live for ever? The police are trying to corral the protestors out of the way of the escalators. You shimmy past, absurdly self-conscious, as if you might be recognised. As if your ambiguous and intagliated relationship with the Bund was something special, something unprecedented. Nonsense.
Down the escalator, the posters are stuck over with political symbols, the times and dates of marches and flags of several sorts, from the Union Jack to the Palestine tricolour; half-torn away, most of them, or obliterated with an angry pen. There are soldiers wearing the portcullis badge of the London Regiment waiting on the platform with you. You wonder whether they are peacekeeping now, in this city that is psychically coming apart. You wonder what the Bundists make of them.
The train arrives. The carriages aren’t full, you board easily enough, and there’s a seat for you. Someone has left their newspaper behind. You pick it up and refold it, beginning at the beginning. It’s yesterday’s late edition, and in the ticket office of the Underground you’ve already seen headlines that attempt to answer the bald question posed by the headline on the front page before you: WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE MOON?
Below the headline, a photograph of the full Moon is surrounded here and there (the areas helpfully circled by the paper’s picture desk) by patches of blotchy light: a sort of ham-fisted corona.
Opposite you, a boy of about twelve leans in behind his mother’s open paper. She’s reading today’s edition: on its front page, the picture is the same, or similar – the corona has become, or been made, more visible. The image has been moved to the top of the page and below it, the headline has been reduced to a single word: ATTACK.
Lost in the mystery and threat of that headline, you have lost your sense of time. Aware that the train is not moving, you experience a lurching moment of panic. After all this while, have you somehow missed your stop? No: the indicator at the end of the carriage still says Covent Garden. The train is being held in the tunnel. There are no announcements, yet nobody around you looks particularly put out. The carriage seats are all taken now and three people are standing by the doors through which you boarded.
The first is a young student, possibly a schoolgirl, wearing her backpack modishly low on her back; the second is an Indian businessman; the third an exhausted-looking young white man, his head shaved as though in preparation for a procedure. He’s wearing plaster-spattered jeans and jumper, and he’s holding on to a pole by the door,
straddling a bag of tools. Perhaps you should offer your seat to this man: he looks so tired! He has rolled his sleeves up past his elbows and his arms – tanned, downed with blond hairs – tremble as if he has been lifting heavy burdens, or pulling himself repeatedly onto a ledge.
His fingers – do you see them? – are thick and worn and covered in white dust: powerful hands, the fingers held slightly apart. Imagine the muscles of his fingers, too, trembling, swollen with blood from some intense physical exertion!
Let your gaze move slowly, intensely, from the tips of the man’s fingers, to his wrists, to the complex tattoo, already so old as to be blue and faded, that runs up his forearm: a set of cantilevered bars that stand in for the pumped musculature running beneath the man’s honey-coloured skin.
The tattoo disappears under the man’s jersey but don’t let that stop you. Let your gaze continue to rise, as you speculatively sketch in the forms and images that lie under the fabric. You’re up to the man’s neck, now. See the stubble there? It’s darker than the hairs on his arms. Keep going. That’s it. Up, past the youth’s strong chin, to his eyes and there: they lock tight on your own.
Your breath catches in your throat. Are you afraid? Why are you afraid? Look: the man is smiling. Such a burst of liquid warmth under your skin! You want to leave your seat, not to give it up for the man, but so that you can stand beside him, bathing in the light cast by his smile. To be any distance at all from that smile, even a few feet, is unbearable.
You’re just in the act of rising when you notice the young girl, the student – perhaps she is still a schoolgirl – and she, too, has seen the young man’s smile. She, too – it’s obvious – has seen the quality of it, the unusual intensity. Now she turns casually to see where that smile is directed, and as she turns, her backpack swings awkwardly against the small of her back and her shoulder performs a small, compensatory shimmy, keeping the straps in place. Gaze at her shoulders, her chest; measure the subtle acts of balance by which she turns yet keeps the bag on her back! The contrast between the subtle cybernetics and the frank invitation of her small, high breasts is heartbreaking, don’t you think?
