‘And that’s precisely what I’m fucking telling you! That’s exactly what I’m—’ He was startled, angry, when I tugged back the door. A spume of smoke poured out at me. ‘Jesus Christ, hang on a minute will you, mate, just give me sec.’ He slid his palm over the mouthpiece, a cigarillo viced between his fingers. On his other hand, the knuckles were blood-raw. ‘What the hell, Dan—get back to the car and wait for me, yeah? I’m trying to sort things out for us here. This is serious. Get it?’
I was stung, muted. I must’ve looked frightened.
‘Look, I didn’t mean to snap,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean it to come out like that.’
‘It’s okay.’
‘No, it isn’t. It wasn’t right. Thing is—’ His eyes were round and dewy, pleading. ‘I’ve really got to settle things with QC before we get to Leeds. He’s got it in his head that we were coming tomorrow morning instead of today, the moron. I’m trying to straighten things out.’
I recognised the doomy mood that settled in me then. The worst side effect of faith is the anxiety of disappointment nearing, the crack exposed in the foundations. I did everything I could to deny it. ‘Are you hurt? You smashed the window.’
‘Oh, that. That was nothing—that was just your dad being an idiot. I’m fine. It was a stupid thing to do.’ He laughed sheepishly, raised his left hand, tensed and relaxed it. ‘I’ve got tough bones, me—all that full-fat milk I drink. Now, go on—’ His gaze shifted to the church. ‘Be a good lad and wait in the car. You can put your tape on if you like. Don’t worry about the battery. I’ll get a jump-start if we have to. And, anyway, this won’t take long.’
‘All right,’ I said, and began to back-pedal.
‘Good man.’
‘Are we still going to Leeds?’ I said.
‘Of course we are, son. If I’ve got to carry you there on my back, we are going to Leeds and I’m showing you that conducer.’
‘And Cryck’s compartment.’
‘Yep. First on the list.’ He tapped his temple.
I smiled at him, placating myself, and turned back for the car.
‘Danno, here—’ As I twisted round, I saw a black shape like a beetle flying towards me. It struck me on the chest and hit the floor with a rattle. ‘You’ll need those to play the tape. Don’t turn it all the way. I’ll be done in a minute.’ I picked up the keys and headed for the Volvo. ‘QC, you still there?’ my father said behind me. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve hung up . . . No, he’s all right. A bit stroppy, but it’s understandable . . .’
The upholstery was hot under my legs when I got in, the air fusty and dry. I reached to put the key in the ignition and turned it carefully, one notch. Warm breath heaved from the fans. I turned the stereo on, and waited to hear Maxine Laidlaw. Meanwhile, my father was rocking on his feet inside the phone box, head down, raging. ‘No fucking way. No way am I doing that.’ His voice came through the broken pane. ‘Do you think I’m going to let them do this to me? Because of what, QC? She wasn’t even in the fucking room!’
[. . .] Cryck had an explanation for everything. When he asked her to describe Aoxi, she told him it was seven million light years from Earth and forty times its size. Almost three quarters of its surface was covered in water and the land was spread across it in many distinct continents called ilphics. Every scrap of vegetation on the planet had a use, from medicine to fuel to food to fabric to building material. The terrain was rocky in the southlands, where the climate was drier, but in the northern ilphics—where she lived—there was only marshland. In the winter, there were ice winds, blizzards, hailstones like bottlecaps; in the spring, a downy flock from the imbok trees blanketed the land; it was harvested by large machines and used as tinder. There were no countries or entitlements to land. No birthrights. Aoxins had no patriotic duty to each other. They were free to move and live wherever they wished. There was one common currency between them: the handshake, and its value never changed. It was a sprawling planet and its spoils were so rich that everyone had what they needed. There were big variations in languages between the ilphics, each more complex and ancient than any on Earth. A simple children’s story in the northern ilphics went like so:
OlfjdyrtridsjkjeofylrsehoildnI’llryhilmyrhrioshrk
M’loghiahsdkllroshyllyoloryhAlkdrkydrylijnjk
Pyrpyrllaoksulxektililtrhyrkyiioshrkpind udk
Bolvckloshrkyyro’shylnargyrTrjilyoxwesxsyroshrk
Saysdj’iekjyhrypo’shyrtgyrnuh
Cryck said she had taught herself to speak English in half a day, by reading the collected works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Harriet Beecher Stowe, the Pears’ Cyclopaedia and the Webster’s Dictionary: four ‘thin’ volumes she discovered in the first house she took shelter in upon arriving. ‘A remarkably simple language, but not without beauty.’ When he asked her to talk in Aoxin, it came out of her lips so fast, punctuated by so many ticks and frills—his mouth was not elastic enough to utter one word of it. When he asked her to write something down on paper, she made a page of nicks and glyphs in pencil, recited it out loud, first in Aoxin, then in English: ‘There once was a woman named Cryck, who was stuck on a useless moon planet by accident. She was a very long way from her husband, whom she loved, and her work, which she loved more . . .’ He asked if that was true—did she really love her work more than she loved her husband? ‘An Aoxin husband loves his job more than his wife, too, I assure you,’ she said. ‘My husband, Sem, is an engineer. Chemical engineer would be the closest categorisation. We are opposites in almost everything.’
When he asked about her job on Aoxi, her white eyes twitched. ‘There’s no term for what I do in English. The closest I have seen is “artifex”—an artist, a craftsman, but also a thinker. I invent things, mostly.’ He pressed her for more—what sort of things did she invent?—and she said: ‘I was a specialist in the field of transport. For a long time, I was head of the research team at the frontier of conducive technology—that’s as near as your language gets to the truth of it. I was the inventor of what you might call a manifold conducer.’ And when he asked what a manifold conducer did: ‘Well, that’s hard to describe to a little one. In essence, it’s a power-generating device. It can support material transubstantiation between an infinite number of spatial co-ordinates with zero cell loss or paraxial instability. It’s a very important technology for my people. It allows us to send materials from moon to moon and down to Aoxi in milliseconds. In theory, it could support the transfer of livestock, too. In theory. Except, when we tested it—’
The machine’s malfunction was the reason she was here, stranded on a planet that Aoxins had forsaken long ago. ‘We used to send the worst of our criminals to Earth. Murderers and thieves. If you know where to look, you’ll find their old compartments everywhere—we’re in one of them right now.’ She banged the ceiling; soil rained down on her. ‘But we no longer have a criminal problem—we solved it years before my ancestors were born. Want to know how? A simple tweak to our gemmules. I am the first Aoxin to step foot on Earth in a century. If I don’t get home soon, I’ll be the last one to be buried here, too. That’s why I can’t rest. Here, I’ll show you —’ Holding a candle to the wall, she revealed a complex illustration carved into the metal. ‘My conducer. I just need to find the right materials to get it working. It’s difficult on a planet as primitive as this one. I don’t mean to offend you, but it happens to be quite a backward place.’ What she showed him was the image of a tower with an enormous loop of something at its highest poi—
‘I don’t understand how little shops like that survive,’ my father said. His bloodied fist was resting on the mouldy window rubber. A blue carrier bag swung from his other hand. ‘No Wintermans, no film, but d’you reckon they had fishing tackle? You bet your arse they did. And here—I got you a Lilt. Pause that, would you?’
I stopped the tape, took the icy can and wedged it in the slot beside my seat. ‘Thanks.’
‘Thought you’d be gasping for that. Not thirsty?’
&nbs
p; ‘I don’t really like Lilt.’
‘What? Since when?’
‘Since that time I tried it once.’
‘I’ll drink it, then.’
His attitude was quite serene now. He reached down to open the glovebox, the lid kissing my knees. Drawing out his tub of Swarfega, he lathered his raw knuckles with a dollop of the gritty paste and rubbed. His sloppy fingers delved into the carrier bag and brought out a bottle of water. He twisted the cap off with his teeth and poured the contents over his hands. Then he went to the boot and ferreted around in a bin bag of his clothes, took out a T-shirt and padded his knuckles dry. ‘There’s been a slight change of plan, son,’ he called to me. I heard the ripping of cloth. When I twisted to face him, he was winding a ribbon of the T-shirt fabric round his palm. ‘Seems like they aren’t quite ready for us in Leeds yet. Like I said, the schedule changes all the time up there.’
‘Yeah.’ I tried to hide my deflation. ‘When will they be ready?’
‘I dunno. At this stage—’ A roll of masking tape was gripped between his teeth now. He coiled it round his makeshift bandage, bit off the end, tossed it aside. ‘At this stage, it’s a bit unclear. But QC’s going to come and meet us. He’s the one with all the up-to-date information.’
‘Meet us here?’
My father pursed his lips and studied his surroundings as though deciding whether or not to set up camp in the church grounds. ‘No, I don’t think this place has much to recommend it. Can’t even buy a simple roll of film.’ He shut the boot. ‘I mean, the face on the woman in there! I said, It doesn’t matter what type, love, as a long as it’s thirty-five mil. You’d think I’d asked for lobster thermidor.’
All his riffing was diversionary, of course—I’d come to understand this well enough by then. But an artificial state of calm was always preferable to rage, in my experience, and I didn’t want to unsettle it. So I didn’t tell him that my camera was a Kodak Pocket Instamatic that took 110 film cartridges, not ordinary 35mm. Nor did I tell him that it had been a birthday present from my mother and had come in a plastic presentation box with an attachable flash unit and a leatherette carry-pouch—the same birthday that his imaginary parcel had fallen victim to the Irish postal service.
‘What did you say?’ he asked, getting in beside me, but I swore I hadn’t spoken a word. ‘Have you been messing about with this seat?’
‘No. Why would I?’
‘It feels a bit off to me.’ He adjusted it, then turned the key in the ignition. The car made a desperate grating sound. He pressed his forehead to the wheel and sighed. ‘You turned the blowers off, right? Please tell me you turned the blowers off.’
‘I—’
‘Ah, Daniel, for crying out loud . . .’ With a long huff, he tried again.
The engine fired.
He revved, elated. ‘Thank Christ for that!’ He revved again in celebration. ‘A bit of luck for once.’
‘Dad,’ I said, over the din.
He turned us onto Main Street. The blood had already seeped through his crude bandage: four red crescents in a row beneath the masking tape. ‘Yeah?’
I fetched the atlas from the dashboard. ‘Where are we going?’
The trip my mother had agreed to was supposed to last two days. It had taken us a long while to convince her of its merits. As per every plan my father ever sold me, it came veneered like a brochure, all the problems absent or glossed over, all the brightest features emphasised and amplified. We would make an early start on Thursday, reach the studio by the afternoon, in time to catch a good few hours of filming; he’d show me around the set while everything was being packed up, introduce me to the cast in their dressing rooms. ‘It’ll depend on who’s got scenes to shoot that day, but it’s a sure bet Maxine will be there,’ he’d said. ‘I don’t know about Mike—kids can only work so many hours. But probably Eve and Malik. Definitely Joy.’ The nonchalance with which he’d referred to the actors by their first names was exhilarating. We would stay overnight at a hotel, have what he called ‘a proper cooked breakfast’, and be on the road home to Buckinghamshire by Friday noon. My mother was sceptical about the prospect from the beginning. For weeks, she endured my needling at mealtimes (‘I’ll think about it’), on car rides into town (‘I said I’ll think about it’), when she paused at my door each night to ward against the bedbugs (‘That’s enough now, Daniel, it isn’t helping’). Why couldn’t she see that he was trying to be good, that The Artifex was the only thing I’d ever truly shared with him and she was spoiling it? She held out for a month before relenting. Perhaps she thought that if I spent some time alone with Francis Hardesty that summer, a single dose of him would be enough.
She had certain conditions, which she relayed to him over the phone: ‘The hotel has to be at least three stars. No dingy pubs or campsites. I want to recognise the name.’
He consented.
‘You’re to have him back here no later than six o’clock on the Friday. I don’t want any excuses about weekend traffic or slow punctures or accidentally oversleeping—you’ll organise a wake-up call, or I’ll do it for you.’
He consented.
‘It’s direct to Leeds, there and back, none of your little detours. You can stop at the motorway services, but I know you, Fran—don’t be arranging any pit-stops to check in with your mates along the way—and you understand exactly what I mean by mates here, don’t you? Not to put too fine a point on it while our twelve-year-old is listening . . . Laugh all you want, Fran, I’ve known you far too long.’
He consented. If she had asked for him to sign an affidavit to attest to these conditions, I’m sure my father would’ve enacted the charade of autographing it.
In the giddy lead-up to our trip, she did her best to lower my expectations: ‘Remember when you saved up all those tokens from the cereal packets?’ she said. ‘Well, just because it seems good from the picture doesn’t guarantee the quality of what turns up.’ At the time, the comparison between my father and a wretched plastic replica of the space shuttle Endeavour annoyed me; now her level of restraint looks merciful.
By a quarter past seven that Thursday night, my father had abandoned me to the darkness of an upstairs function room in a pub on the outskirts of Wakefield. He’d set me up at a sticky round table with a lukewarm glass of Coke, facing a small wooden stage lit by a single tasselled floor lamp, and told me he’d be back before the music started. But at least twenty minutes had elapsed without a trace of him, and since then a beer-bellied man had walked up to the front and introduced himself as the stand-in host of the White Oak Folk Club. ‘Simon’s off in Tenerife till Tuesday, so you’re all stuck with me tonight,’ he said. ‘And more to the point, I’m stuck with you lot.’ After asking the crowd for a D and getting back a volley of shrill hums and twanged guitar strings, he began tuning the dainty mandolin that was harnessed to his neck like a bell on a heifer. I was tired and twitchy, sitting there alone, picturing my father’s movements outside in the car park. ‘Nice to see a young face in the crowd—first time for everything,’ said the host, sighting me. ‘If you’d like to play us a tune, lad, just let me know, all right? Always good to hear from the younger generation. You’ll not finish that pint on your own, mind.’
My heart jounced inside my chest. People were gawping at me. ‘It’s my dad’s,’ I said. ‘He’ll be back in a minute.’
‘Then you’d better neck it before he shows up, eh?’ The host grinned and turned away. ‘This one’s an old favourite of mine that you’re all sick to death of.’ There was a tone of camaraderie in the crowd’s laughter. The room was barely half full. A clutch of locals with wet eyes and cardigans were constellated on the cushioned bench seats; most of them seemed to have instruments of their own within arm’s reach: acoustic guitars, accordions, a banjo, a fiddle, and what appeared to be a portable loom. ‘Anyway, it’s my version of “Shenandoah” and it goes something like this . . .’
Everybody hushed. He strummed a few tinny chords on the mandolin
—a surprisingly sweet and tuneful sound for a man so large—and then out came a voice so faint and timid that I had to stop swallowing my Coke to hear it. ‘Oh Shenandoah, I long to hear you far away, you rollin’ river. Oh Shenandoah, I long to see you far away, you rollin’ river. Away, away across the wide Missouri. Oh Shenandoah, I love your daughter far away, you rollin’ river. It was for her I crossed the water. Away, I’m bound away across the wide Missouri . . .’
For a moment, I lost all sense of where I was. His voice was mediocre but the melody was so transporting.
After the song finished and the applause trailed off, the back door of the room opened and a burr of conversation from the pub rushed in. An old man walked past me with a lute and took a seat in the gloom. Other latecomers filtered in, carrying their ales and G&Ts. My father was among them. He took the chair beside me, picked up his pint of lager and continued draining it as though he hadn’t been away. He was freshly marinated in smoke and very pink around the face and neck. I couldn’t tell if he was exhausted or upset. Leaning in, sniffing, he said: ‘Hope I didn’t miss any sea shanties.’
‘Can we go yet?’ I said.
‘Not quite.’
The host snapped his head in our direction.
‘We’ll talk after,’ my father said.
I slumped into my chair.
‘This next tune is a new arrangement I’ve been working on,’ the host announced, ‘so if I mess it up, you all know where the door is.’
My father scanned the space to our left. He was trying to catch the eye of the young woman we’d met earlier—Karen, the gaunt blonde with the braided fringe and the kindly demeanour. She was at the next table, lamplight on her cheekbones, guitar on her knee. He raised his chin to acknowledge her, and she gave a slow lift of her fingers.
A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better Page 7
