by Jan Siegel
‘I cannot make worlds,’ he said, ‘even I, but maybe … I can take one. Have patience awhile, Halmé, and hide your face from the daylight a little longer. I will find a world for you, ‘I promise.’
The woman called Halmé went to the window, sliding one of the screens aside, and Nathan saw she was right: there was a huge moon, not quite full, hanging in the sky, and it was red, and eastward another moon-sliver had the same blood-stained hue.
‘Close the screen!’ said the man. ‘The moon is too bright. It could be dangerous.’
The woman obeyed, but slowly. The more he looked at her, the more beautiful Nathan found her; it was as if his sight was adjusting to her different facial proportions, and now the women of his own world would look forever wrong to him. He watched her leaving: she moved swiftly and very gracefully, the white ends of her wimple fluttering behind her. Halmé was her name, he was certain, but Grandir, he thought, might be a title, like Lord or Excellency. He was thinking about that when the scene changed.
The masked ruler was climbing a stair. The stair moved, like an escalator but in a spiral, twisting round and round inside a cylindrical shaft, and the man was stepping briskly upwards, perhaps impatient of its slowness. At the top was a circular chamber with no windows: the architects of this world evidently favoured curves in construction. The only light came from a number of clear globes, some smooth-sided, some facetted, which appeared to be suspended in mid-air, though as Nathan drew closer he saw there were no threads or wires supporting them: they simply floated, motionless or in orbit. A pale radiance came from the heart of each, yet it illuminated nothing in the room save the globes themselves. The man moved to the centre of the chamber where a slightly larger globe with many faces revolved slowly in one place. Lances of light emanated from it, sinking into the darkness, never reaching the walls. The man stretched one hand towards it without actually making contact and murmured a single word: ‘Fia!’ A white dazzle flooded the room, so that for an instant Nathan was blinded, even though it was only a dream; then the glare retreated back into the globe, and Nathan saw a picture appear above it, as if projected onto the ceiling. At first it was difficult to make out, since he was looking at it from underneath, but then he realized it was a roof – he could see tiles – with a square hole in it, an open skylight, and a boy and a girl emerging into view, staring and pointing, pointing out of the picture, down at the globe. It was a minute or two before he understood. He was seeing himself, himself and Hazel, looking up at a star that didn’t belong …
He awoke much later with the dream still fresh in his mind. It was still dark, and he got up very quietly and stole downstairs to the cupboard between the shelves, and climbed the ladder to the Den, and opened the skylight, and there was the star, only he knew now it wasn’t a star, it was a globe that shone both in this world and the other one, a watching eye for a man whose face was never seen. A guardian angel – a manipulator – a menace. Nathan didn’t know, and the only way to find out was to dream on. Or maybe it was all pure fancy, a story invented by his subconscious mind to explain something he couldn’t comprehend. For if it was true why – why in all the worlds – would a ruler so powerful, so desperate, clearly facing some cosmic catastrophe, be interested in him?
He closed the skylight, descended the ladder, went back upstairs to bed. But the question followed him, nagging at his mind, keeping him from sleep: the unimaginable, unanswerable why.
Nathan didn’t get a chance to tell Hazel everything for another fortnight. ‘It’ll be easier when the summer holidays start,’ he said. ‘Then we’ll have more time together – time to find the missing injunction –’ they had barely begun searching ‘– and time to sort this out.’
‘Can it be sorted out?’ Hazel said doubtfully. It was daylight and the star was invisible, but they had no idea if that meant it couldn’t see them. ‘What are you going to do?’
‘I’ve thought about that. Somehow, I have to find the man on the beach. If they think he’s an illegal immigrant I expect he’ll be held somewhere. I’ll pretend I’m doing a school project on asylum-seekers: people always want to help with school projects. Once we’ve found him, he can answer some of our questions.’ He had switched from I to we, Hazel noticed.
She said: ‘How will you talk to him? He doesn’t speak English.’
‘In my dreams, I speak his language,’ Nathan said. ‘Maybe – maybe when I hear it, I’ll understand. We’ll talk to him somehow. We have to.’
‘Sign language,’ Hazel said.
‘The first thing is to find him.’
With this object in mind, they went to talk to Annie. She was obviously gratified to see them so concerned about the issues of the day, but she wasn’t able to help much. ‘I’ve got a school project,’ Nathan said. He didn’t like lying to his mother, but he couldn’t possibly tell her the truth.
‘There’s probably some sort of Immigration Board,’ she said. ‘Look it up in the telephone directory.’
Nothing was listed under Immigration, but after Annie had considered the problem further she suggested they try the Home Office. Here, they found a listing for the Immigration and Nationality Directorate, but they couldn’t get through. ‘It’s bound to be closed at weekends,’ Nathan told Hazel. ‘You’ll have to try it in the week. I can’t make lots of calls from school.’
Hazel looked more doubtful than ever, tugging her hair over her face in the nervous gesture she hadn’t yet outgrown. ‘What’ll I say?’ she said. ‘It’s a government department. I can’t talk to a government department.’
In the end, Nathan decided to apply to Annie. ‘If it’s a school project,’ she said, ‘surely you can call from Ffylde?’
‘We’re supposed to do it in our own time,’ Nathan said, feeling uncomfortable. ‘I just want to know how to contact that man …’
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ Annie promised.
On Monday morning she drove Nathan back to school, and sat down at the telephone as soon as she returned home. By three o’clock she was frustrated and uncharacteristically furious. The Home Office – ‘building a safe, just and tolerant society’, according to their ad – proved far from helpful. When the Immigration and Nationality Directorate eventually answered the phone, after a succession of engaged tones and a long wait with classical music and recorded messages, they refused to give her any information whatsoever. ‘But it’s for my son,’ Annie said indignantly. ‘It’s a school project. He wants to know how his country works – what we do for refugees and people in trouble.’ At her insistence, the clerk departed to speak to a superior, picking up the call again after a ten-minute absence to tell Annie that she must write to another department, the Communications Directorate. ‘Can I speak to your supervisor?’ Annie asked. No. ‘Is there a number I can call at this other place?’ Can’t give it to you. It’s confidential. ‘I’m a tax payer,’ Annie found herself saying in cliché mode (though in fact she paid very little tax due to the smallness of her income). ‘I pay your wages. I employ you. You don’t have the right to refuse to answer me.’ The clerk said in the voice of one accustomed to such tirades that there was no point in blaming her, it wasn’t her fault. Annie hung up and dialled Directory Inquiries, who promptly gave her the confidential phone number. The Communications Directorate, however, told her she would need to write to Immigration. She then worked her way through her local MP, the House of Commons, and even Scotland Yard, but no one would fill her in on the procedure for dealing with illegal immigrants, let alone assist her in tracking one down. Finally she abandoned the telephone, made herself coffee, and went on the Internet. Here she found the names of various support groups for asylum-seekers operating in the south-east. She wrote down more telephone numbers and decided to return to the attack the next day.
On Tuesday she had better luck. The support groups, unlike the bureaucrats, welcomed interest and were happy to dole out information. Talking to a voluntary organization based in Hastings, she struck gold.
‘The man on the beach?’ said her contact, a woman named Jillian Squires. ‘The mystery man? Why does your son want to know about him?’
‘Nathan heard the story on the radio,’ Annie explained. ‘I’m definitely a biased mum, but still, he’s got a very strong sense of social responsibility. When I told him the kind of treatment meted out to immigrants in this country, he got pretty upset.’ She added shrewdly: ‘I suspect he suggested the subject for his school project himself. He thinks about things, you see; he doesn’t just go away and forget.’
‘What school’s he at?’
‘Ffylde Abbey. I’m not well off, but he got a scholarship.’
‘I know of it. It’s got a decent reputation.’ Jillian Squires seemed to hesitate, then plunged. ‘Look, I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I can’t give out details about anyone without their permission, obviously, but I’ll talk to the man. I’ve had dealings with him. He’s highly intelligent: spoke no English when he got here, but he’s learned amazingly fast. If he’s willing, I could give him your number, and ask him to get in touch with you.’
‘That would be wonderful,’ Annie said gratefully. ‘But – I thought he would be in prison, or somewhere like that?’
‘No. They only put asylum-seekers in prison if they’ve committed a crime. Prison’s expensive: the state has to feed them. It’s cheaper to leave them on the streets. Anyway, they’re only allowed to register as asylum-seekers if they claim immediately – and that presupposes they know how the system works.’
‘If I couldn’t find that out,’ Annie said, ‘how do they?’
‘Precisely.’
Concluding the call, Annie resolved to scrape something from her weekly housekeeping to send as a donation. Nathan wasn’t the only one getting educated, she reflected.
She gave him the news at the weekend. ‘Your man hasn’t called yet,’ she said, ‘but perhaps he will. We just have to wait. If he doesn’t want to talk to you we can’t force him: even if that were possible, it wouldn’t be fair.’
With Bartlemy’s permission, Nathan, George and Hazel spent Saturday searching Thornyhill for the missing document. Nathan’s friends were unenthusiastic, but the prospect of Bartlemy’s cooking overcame their resistance. He produced home-made biscuits with cinnamon and chocolate chips for elevenses, grilled fish for lunch followed by his own wild strawberry ice cream, and iced buns for tea, and in between the three of them tapped the panelling in the hope that it was hollow and rifled through the attics and some of the murkier closets. Bartlemy didn’t show them the secret cupboard in the chimney and Nathan didn’t mention it, he had a feeling its very existence was a private matter, but they found another one hidden under some stairs, big enough to conceal a man, and in the attics they unearthed part of a rusty suit of armour, a chest of antique clothing, some tarnished silverware and a set of porcelain tureens which must once have belonged to a far larger dinner service. Hazel was very taken with a grey fur muff which Bartlemy said was chinchilla, though she knew fur was immoral. (‘It’s a kind of rat,’ he explained, which soothed her qualms of conscience but also made the muff appear much less attractive.) They discovered something called an astrolabe – a sort of old-fashioned telescope – and an orrery, which was meant to be a model of the solar system, but Bartlemy remarked that either it was very inaccurate or it was a model of another planetary system altogether. And everywhere there were papers, in large boxes, in small boxes, in chests of drawers, in desks long unopened. Nathan found love-letters a hundred years old, tied up with faded ribbon, sepia photographs of simpering Victorian maidens, postcard nudes from the Edwardian era, menus, shopping lists, laundry lists. But there was no sign of the injunction. ‘Rowena had a hunt downstairs last week,’ Bartlemy told him. ‘She must have gone through most of the books, so you needn’t bother about them.’
‘If it isn’t at Thornyhill,’ Nathan said, frowning, ‘have you any idea where the document might be?’
‘Rowena asked me that,’ Bartlemy said. ‘I told her to trace the family solicitors from whenever the injunction was last applied, I think she said in the late nineteenth century. Of course, you would find that very mundane. There could be a hiding place in the woods, I suppose, possibly on the site of the old house.’
‘But no one knows where that is!’ Hazel protested.
‘You can’t expect to have everything easy,’ Bartlemy said gently.
They left searching the woods for another day and went home, Hazel carrying the muff which Bartlemy had given her. ‘It’s okay to wear old furs,’ Nathan said. ‘It’s buying new ones that’s wrong.’
Back at the bookshop, Annie had bad news for him. ‘Jillian Squires called,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid the man on the beach doesn’t want to talk to you. She said he didn’t seem to understand about school projects. I’m sorry, darling, but you can’t press him, you know. He’s homeless, and penniless, and desperate: life must be difficult enough for him. We don’t want to make it worse.’
Yes, thought Nathan, life must be difficult. He’s in the wrong universe, for one thing.
He said: ‘Would you mind if I called Mrs Squires? I won’t push her, I promise. I just want to find out … how the system works.’
‘I suppose that would be all right,’ Annie conceded doubtfully.
That evening when it was dark Nathan climbed up to the skylight to look at the star. He had formed the habit of doing so every night when he was at home. He had borrowed George’s binoculars, but they didn’t show him anything more. He pictured the dim room with the revolving spheres, and the orb in the centre, its many facets coruscating with vanishing light. And then the image on the ceiling – his face, gazing at the star, perhaps right now, this moment – and the white mask tilted upwards to study it. It was unbelievable.
But he believed it. Dream and reality meshed too closely for him to deny them. He had to talk to the man on the beach, the man from another world …
With Annie’s permission, he telephoned Jillian Squires in the morning.
‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ he said politely. ‘Mum told me, the man on the beach wouldn’t help, but I wondered – would you say something to him? It’s going to sound a bit odd to you, but – but it’s really important. If he doesn’t want to talk to me even then, that’s okay. If you would just tell him …’
‘I don’t know what more I can say,’ Mrs Squires responded with courtesy but no enthusiasm.
Nathan checked that his mother was out of earshot. ‘Could you tell him – I’m the person who pulled him out of the sea? Please? That’s all.’
‘Tell him –? How extraordinary. Your mother never mentioned –’
‘She doesn’t know,’ Nathan said hastily. ‘I mean, she wasn’t there. I can’t – I really can’t explain everything now. But please would you tell him that?’
‘Are you making this up?’ Her voice had acquired an edge.
‘If I was,’ Nathan said, ‘it wouldn’t help, would it, because he would know it was made up? He wouldn’t want to call me if it wasn’t true.’
‘It’s a point,’ she said. ‘Very well, I’ll tell him. But –’
‘Thanks,’ Nathan said. ‘Thanks very much,’ and he hung up as Annie came back into the room.
There followed a week of school and suspense. Nathan dreamed of the cup, and the snake-patterns uncoiling from the rim, and hissing, hissing in his ear. He woke up shaking so badly he felt he had a fever, and was bitterly ashamed of himself for being so much disturbed by a dream. To calm down, he tried to think of places the injunction might be hidden, and whether the man from the sea would agree to talk to him, and what he might say if he did. Finally, he resorted to thinking about the party Hazel wanted him to attend – the party with the disco – and how horrific it would be, perhaps having to dance, with girls huddled into groups giggling, and Jason Wicks, or someone like him, lounging against the wall sneering. By its very unpleasantness, the picture he drew was oddly steadying. Something about the thought of Jason Wicks had a
toughening effect on his nerves. He could deal with Jason Wicks. Wicks, and discos, and giggling girls were very much of this world. It was the other worlds of dream and darkness which he couldn’t manage so easily.
On Saturday the man telephoned. Annie passed the receiver to Nathan, looking unsure. ‘He’s asking for you,’ she said.
Nathan took the phone. His heart had begun to thump rather hard, but he kept his voice level. This is it, he thought. This was where his imaginings had to pass the reality test. He said: ‘Hello?’
‘Mrs Squires tell me, you say you pull me from sea.’ His English, though strangely accented, was amazingly rapid and fluent for someone who must have learnt it in a matter of weeks. ‘I think, that is not possible. How you do this?’
‘I don’t know exactly,’ Nathan said, wishing his mother would go away for a few minutes. ‘I was dreaming, and I saw a man drowning. I had to save him. I grabbed his hands, and sort of – yanked, and there we were.’
What are you talking about? Annie mouthed.
Later, Nathan whispered back, wondering what on earth he was going to tell her. On the other end of the line, the immigrant from an alternative universe was saying: ‘Yes. That is what happened. You came out of air, like angel in old legend. Then you bring me to this place. Why? Cleaner here, some people kind, but society – not modern. Backward.’
‘I know it must seem strange,’ Nathan said. ‘I couldn’t help it. We had to come here. This is my place.’ There was a pause, then he went on: ‘I have so many things to ask you. Can we meet?’
‘Is important … yes. You find me, or I find you?’
Uncertain if his mother would allow him to go to Hastings on his own, Nathan suggested a train to Crowford and then a bus, offering to pay for the trip once his new friend arrived. They settled on the following Saturday, and Nathan hung up trembling slightly. This was a man from another world, someone he had saved, though he didn’t know how, and pulled into an involuntary exile, and now, at last, they were going to meet. He would learn about that other world and its masked inhabitants, about the ruler who spied on him, and the winged xaurians, and the talk of contamination, and –
