"Well, it's not stupid for some people," Joy says, poring over the pages. "I mean even if it's not real —"
"Of course it's not real," Anthony says. "I've just told you that. Jesus, it's like growing up with the Moonies or something. Eventually, you realize what's real and what's not, and put as much distance between you and it as you can."
Joy watches him carefully for a moment before replying. "I was about to say," she continues, her words measured, "even if it's not real, your mum obviously still believes in it. It's clearly important to her to have the book with her right now."
Anthony feels a burn of shame. Joy can always be depended on to focus on what's genuinely important. They've been together three years and he still can't work out how she managed to get close enough to fall in love with him, but he is constantly glad she did. "Sorry," he says. "Perhaps I haven't left it as far behind as I thought."
"Is this why you haven't told her yet?" she asks. "About our baby."
Anthony is suddenly weary. His limbs are fizzing, and it feels as if energy is draining out of him through his fingers and toes. "If I'm being honest," he says, "I think it's more to do with the fact I haven't spoken to her in anything more than a superficial way for years. I think I've forgotten how."
Joy's expression switches abruptly from sympathetic to vexed. "Ant, I know you're stressed, but don't do that here. Please," she says, handing him a crumpled tissue.
He is suddenly aware of the pocket knife doodling a design in the flesh of his palm. They both watch the blood well from the dangling spiral of sliced skin. He dabs the blood away with the tissue before it dribbles onto the table. When he removes the half-crimson tissue the wound has vanished.
"Well," Joy says, "it's clear you're going to live forever, whatever this book says. You're never sick, and you never get hurt. You don't drink, smoke or eat spicy food. And to cap it all your last four cars have all been Volvos." She shoots him a grin. "As for your healing thing, it's not the sort of thing you go asking a doctor to find a cure for." Noticing his discomfort, she squeezes his arm. "But don't worry, I still love you. Even if you've only got so many million breaths left in that indestructible body of yours."
The hospital garden is empty again. The bird is gone. Encroaching cloud blankets the sun, and a gusting breeze bullies litter across the grass. Anthony suppresses a shiver.
Joy has returned her attention to the book. "I have a question," she says. "Theoretically, once a baby's numbers have been calculated, can they be altered?"
"No, of course not. It's just meant to be a record." He's tired of this, wants to put it back in the past where it belongs, but she won't leave it alone.
"Because that's what's happened here. Look."
Anthony forces himself to look, and sees that it's true. Joy shows him the page for Letitia McAdam again. Sure enough, looking closely, underneath the soft slatey script can be discerned the faint outline of erased numerals. She flips the page. It is the same for each of the unfortunate siblings. In each case the visible totals apportioned to them appear to be fractions of what had originally been written. As Joy flips backwards towards the page for Letitia's mother, Anthony knows with a sudden chill what is coming. By the confusion of the indentations of erased digits, it seems that Morag McAdam's totals have been revised a number of times. The implication is clear. If the book were simply a record, the revised totals of the children's lives could be explained by an original estimate replaced by a more realistic total at the time of each infant's death. But the multiple extensions of the mother's life—could that be explained by coincidence?
"Joy, this is crazy," Anthony says. "I won't believe that one of my ancestors found a way to shorten the lives of her own children in order to extend her own. It's just nonsense."
Joy regards him evenly. "It's hard to believe, I agree," she begins.
Antony interrupts. "It's impossible to believe," he says. "She simply lived a good deal longer than anyone expected, or perhaps she was rotten at adding up. You're connecting the dots to make a picture that was never there." His heart is tripping, his breathing short; he feels his chest filled to bursting with the old mortal fear of the book.
"You think so?" Joy says.
Anthony can only nod. He had never known about that. One look at the book had been more than enough for him.
"Then isn't this a coincidence too?" She flips the pages to the end.
He refuses to look, but the book rules him once more, and he is forced to. At some point, someone—and the rest of them are long dead, it could only have been his mother—has made changes to the calculations. Both Anthony's totals, and her own, have been revised. Joy is working out the arithmetic on a scrap of paper.
"If you believe the figures, she's given you nearly twenty extra years of life," she says. "Ant, that's what's killing her now. She's run out of life."
Anthony's memories of his teenage years are sketchy at best. He knows he wasn't a happy kid, and became increasingly, wilfully, less happy the more his mother tried to engage him in football, or parties, or the electric guitar that languished unused in the cupboard. At the time he certainly blamed her for his despair. Everything had changed when she revealed the limits of his mortality, and everything she had done after that compounded his misery.
Now it is all turned on its head. It works both ways. If you're going to cheat life.
After he started to cut himself there had been a string of doctors, and she had always been there: arguing with their GP, screaming for attention from Accident and Emergency staff at 4am, waiting patiently outside psychiatrists' consultation rooms. And she had fed him his medication, even though the distance the daily handful of pills placed him at distressed her greatly. Then, at some point during his time in that cosy void, the knife stopped damaging him. The doctors told him that the latest cocktail of drugs had done something to his chemistry. That's what they had said, but his mother had stopped feeding him the pills months before.
Even if this was real, he thinks. If such a gift of harm-free life was possible. It'd be just like her to continue to live at full pelt, in living colour, turned up to eleven.
And if it is a miraculous gift, what has he made it? Nothing. He has led a life limited in every way: a life of common denominator television and recommended-brand eating; a stay-at-home Travel Channel life; a slow track nine-to-five, collar and noose life. An unremarkable existence, whose only points of note in the last twenty years have been the unexpected advent of Joy, and the forthcoming birth of their son. An almost entirely wasted opportunity.
Anthony pushes his tea away. "I think it's time," he says, "to tell my mother about her grandchild."
~
Anthony's mother is sitting up in bed, but her head is sunk deep in a bank of pillows. Joy is in the chair at her side, but Anthony lingers near the door because he needs distance to say what he has to say.
"Mum," Anthony says. The figure in the bed makes no response. No sign that she has even heard him. Perhaps that makes it easier. He goes on anyway. "Joy's pregnant, Mum. We're going to have a baby." With the words, come relief. In its wake, an upswell of emotion such as Anthony has not felt in twenty years. Even if his mother is beyond hearing him, he feels as if a connection has been made at last.
Then, slowly, the grim mask of his mother's face splits into a grin that is dry-lipped and old-toothed, but still seems to him as bright as the sun. Brighter. Like a nova. As if she has been rationing the last of her life, saving that smile for a final event such as this. It's infectious. Joy, clasping her hand, is beaming too. Anthony can feel it tug and twitch at the little-used muscles around his own mouth. His instinct is to resist it, but now his mother has started a strange fluttering exhalation that he takes a worried minute to recognise. It is laughter. Eyes wide with surprise, Joy's hand covers her own mouth to stifle a bout of giggles. After thirty years of emotional dislocation, Anthony Dowden himself manages a real smile.
"Oh," Joy gasps. She is looking towards the window. The smal
l, square hospital room is suddenly filled with colour and motion. A chittering flurry of bejewelled feathers shoots past Anthony's head, caroms off wall, ceiling and window. Anthony's heart is doing a fair imitation of it within the confines of his chest. The bird finally tires itself out. It is the same creature he saw outside earlier.
The bird perches on the sill next to the open window. If it had the wit, it could easily hop along and escape, but now it seems petrified even to move. It doesn't flinch as he approaches, not even when he slowly cages it between his hands. He feels the brush of its wings, the prickle of its feet, the panicky skitter of its heart. Then, as if it senses the clear air close by, the bird delivers him a sharp peck to the index finger, and the moment he opens his hands it is out and up and gone into the sky. Reflexively, Anthony wipes away the blood with his thumb. The wound does not close. A fresh bead wells from it, and it has begun to throb.
"Ant?" Joy is standing beside the bed, clutching the book of counts to her chest.
All the smiles have left the room. Anthony's mother has breathed, beat, smiled her last.
Anthony indicates the book, the pencil beside it. "Did she write something?"
Joy nods.
"Did you read what she wrote?"
She nods again.
"Then give me the book."
Joy pauses for a moment, resistant.
"It's for the best," he says, but isn't certain he knows who it is best for.
Joy hands him the book, and watches as he takes out his knife.
"Anthony, don't —" she says.
Anthony smiles to himself. He takes the knife, and he whittles a new point onto the pencil. He uses the grubby eraser to make amendments to the figures, pencils in new totals. He's not sure how much he has added, or how much he has taken away. All that matters is that both lives are lived to the full.
~
This story was written for Allen Ashley's Elastic Book Of Numbers anthology, and the theme of numbers allowed me to explore all the things that are vital to our lives but go uncounted: the ephemerality of living, described as a balance sheet. This would have been perfect for the original edition of this collection but it was too close to the publication of the Book Of Numbers. I'm delighted to be able to include it here now.
Publishing Acknowledgements
"Shine, Alone After The Setting Of The Sun" copyright 1997. Originally published in The Third Alternative.
"The Euonymist" copyright 2005. Originally published in Electric Velocipede.
"The Bone Farmer" copyright 2000. Originally published in Albedo One.
"The Happy Gang" copyright 2002. Originally published in Interzone.
"Cages" copyright 1995. Originally published in The Third Alternative.
"Amber Rain" copyright 2002. Originally published in The Third Alternative.
"Postcards" copyright 1996. Originally published in The Third Alternative.
"Softly Under Glass" copyright 1994. Originally published in The Third Alternative.
"Well Tempered" copyright 2005. Originally published anonymously in Nemonymous.
"Harrowfield" copyright 2005. Originally published in Dark Horizons.
"The Apparatus" copyright 2005. Originally published in Lovecraft's Weird Mysteries.
"The Bennie And The Bonobo" copyright 2005. Originally published in Nova Scotia (Crescent Books).
"A Horse In Drifting Light" copyright 2001. Originally published in Roadworks.
"Sins Of The Father" copyright 2002 (with Mark Roberts). Originally published in Interzone.
"Hard To Do" copyright 2000. Originally published in Not One Of Us.
"The Codsman And His Willing Shag" copyright 2006. Originally published in The Ephemera (Elastic Press).
"Crow's Steps" copyright 2011. Previously unpublished.
"The Gubbins" copyright 2006. Originally published in Dark Horizons.
"The Last Note Of The Song" copyright 2008. Originally published on Keepers Of The Code website.
"The One Millionth Smile" copyright 2005. Originally published in The Elastic Book Of Numbers (Elastic Press).
About the author
Neil Williamson's short stories have been published in magazines and anthologies in the UK and USA. His work has been shortlisted for the British Fantasy Award, British Science Fiction Award and World Fantasy Award (with Andrew J Wilson).
Neil is a long term inmate of the Glasgow SF Writers Circle. The results of which are mostly contained within this book.
Acknowledgements
Profound thanks are due to Keith Brooke, Andrew Hook, Hal Duncan, Vincent Chong and Gio Clairval for their involvement in making this edition possible.
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