The Thing Itself

by Adam Roberts

  and my senses shrank slowly over three days from everywhere to tight now and close here and it was as calm and gentle as waking from a sleep and my tummy starting to show and I promenaded beside the sea arm in arm with my husband and the surf purred at my feet and we met Albie by chance and Tweedy said well met Bainbridge will you escort my wife to our house if you please I have business with the harbourmaster and Albie nodded his head and we walked our way back in silence most of the way and he told me the Royal Society had written back very chilly suggesting his instruments needed recalibrating and poohpoohing his observing and I told him I was sorry and then it was bursting in him to say it so he said he took a whore to the top of the Rock and undertook her embraces and the Rock was exactly the same size today as yesterday and had not changed so much as an inchs fraction and though it was cruelly said I felt a pity for him as acute as love and forgave him and he turned into an alley that he might weep and none see and then he stood to attention before me and begged me to explain my witchcraft for he was a man of science and would not believe mumbo or jumbo and I reminded him how he had told me about the solar system and how it is full of tumbling rocks rolling and cartwheeling around the sun and the planets all rock and the ground of life carbon which is burnt or silicon which is petrified and he nodded at this and I told him that if the universe was full of life then it might not be shaped in body or spirit like men and women are and that may this be the reason he could not see it through his telescope and there was enough connection between us

  I think yes on account of the baby in my belly and enough of the old glamour adhering to me still that I was able to touch the idea into his mind and he started up with a shout by jupiter he yelled his selfpity evaporated what if those tumbling rocks were only the corpses of beings and not beings themselves what if the very Rock of Gibraltar were the body of a being long brought down from heaven and expiring slowly over thousands of years and pulsing with the last shudders of alien life and yes he was looking past me now at the Rock towering over us both and banners of Levant cloud pouring over its topledge like white water and gasped why might it not have fallen from above as easy as been pushed up from below by geologic force and he forgot himself so far as to embrace me and then he pulled himself away and ran to his own house and I made my own way home

  and I saw him not at all for six months until I was big with Molly and placid with her inside me and he came to bid me farewell for he was leaving on the HMS Sandwich the next day and he stood though we begged him to sit and Mama knitting and I in the softer chair and he wished me all the maternal joy in the universe at my encroaching and I assured him I had experienced all that joy already and yes he said yes though Mama looked queer at us and he said one final thing how to read Europe as a whole imagine sitting southfacing on the south coast of England and read the whole snaking continent from left to right in its richness and conflict and beauty and danger and it ran all the way down through France and Spain and where else did it come to a full stop save Gibraltar and I laughed a little like this and he finished with please pass on my heartfelt congratulations to your husband and yes I said yes I will and Molly kicked her legs inside me yes.

  5

  Broadmoor

  Negation

  :1:

  They gave me a phone. It was a fancy design, too: a model I hadn’t seen before, brand new. I had no one I wanted to call, but it was good to have a nice new phone. And better than that (or so I thought), they gave me a car. Paulina Kostritsky announced this over breakfast. ‘You know how to drive.’

  ‘I can drive,’ I said. ‘I’m just not allowed to.’

  ‘We’ve spoken to the relevant authorities,’ she said. ‘Had the points taken off your licence.’

  ‘You can do that?’

  ‘There’s a lot we can do. Not everything, but a lot. Friends in high places. Not me personally, you understand,’ she added, looking momentarily awkward, as if I were about to rebuke her for boasting. ‘I mean the Institute.’

  ‘It never occurred to me that you personally had any friends,’ I reassured her.

  She blinked. Then she blinked again. ‘There are people in the very highest offices in the land who are keen for the Institute to succeed in what it is doing. Your visit to Curtius is crucial in that regard.’

  ‘I honestly can’t see how,’ I said. ‘But, anyhow. Thanks for the loan of the car.’

  ‘It’s not a loan,’ she said, frowning. ‘It’s a gift.’

  I didn’t know what to say to this. ‘Wow,’ I said.

  ‘Think of it as a token of our commitment to you. You’re with us now, Charles. Peta likes you.’

  ‘He does?’

  ‘I know you’ve yet to meet him. Be patient. The crucial thing now is: you can help us move this vitally important work onwards.’ All this was uttered in a kind of worn-down monotone, as if Kos were recalling a speech she had learned. ‘It means the world to us that Peta likes you.’ She shook her head, a single brief gesture. Man, she looked tired. She always looked tired.

  A duo of people who couldn’t have looked more like computer geeks if they’d been supplied direct from central casting came into the canteen, helped themselves to coffee and Danish, and sat at a table by the window. Whatever their conversation was about, it resulted in a lot of low, burbling laughter.

  ‘So I’m off to Broadmoor today?’

  ‘Not today,’ she said. ‘Today’s slot has fallen through. But soon. We’re talking with the people there to arrange a mutually agreeable time.’

  ‘Do I get a say in the timing then?’

  She didn’t reply to this; looked past me, through the tall windows and out at the trees in the grounds. It took me a moment to realise that she was looking at the two newcomers. After an elongated pause they realised they were being stared at, and met Kostritsky’s gaze. Then, without a word, they stood up and left.

  ‘This thing you keep saying, or,’ I rubbed my bristly chin, ‘or implying, or whatever. This idea that there’s anything useful Roy Curtius can contribute. That’s not actually true, though, is it? I’m guessing he hasn’t programmed any kind of computer since the eighties.’

  By way of answer Kos said: ‘Don’t you think it strange that you ended up living in a flat only a few kilometres from Roy Curtius? Don’t you think that’s – significant?’

  I grew annoyed. ‘My life went to shit. I wasn’t happy about that, but to shit is where it went. I came home to Reading, for where else was I going to go? But you think somebody earning what I earn could afford to live in Reading? Bracknell is compromise-town, rentwise, that’s all. And as for the decision to base the UK’s main secure psychiatric hospital on the outskirts of Bracknell, well that’s hardly down to me. And anyway,’ I added, my vexation evaporating with the effort of expressing it, ‘anyway.’ What did it matter? It didn’t matter. ‘It’s not as though physical proximity is any kind of … uh. What’s the word? Salient. Is that the word?’

  At this Kos looked at me as if I were a moron. ‘Proximity and distance are what we strive to overcome,’ she said stiffly.

  This struck me as some kind of veiled insult. ‘What do you want me to do, anyway?’ I asked, in a surly voice. ‘I mean, sure: I’ll drive down there. Are they even going to let me see him?’

  ‘They’ll let you in. They’re expecting you. We can lean on them to let you in. What we can’t do is persuade them to let Roy out.’

  ‘I daresay they have good reasons for not wanting to do that,’ I said.

  Kostritsky looked through me, her eyes going slightly squint. Her whole body language sagged slightly. She looked like she was about to topple forward, and that it was costing her an active effort of will to keep herself sitting upright. So tired! But why so tired, all the time? ‘He’s been responsible for,’ she said, in a distant voice, and then said, ‘deaths, it’s true.’

  My whole expedition seemed to me abruptly less appealing. ‘You,’ I said, ‘are kidding me.’

  Her focus jumped back. She saw my
scarred face as if for the first time. ‘Oh, you’ll be fine,’ she insisted, with a new briskness. ‘And they’re experts at, ah, handling him. Believe me, Charles, it’s not you who should be worried on that score.’

  ‘I suppose you think it’s you?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said simply.

  ‘Sitting here on the outskirts of Swindon, behind your secure perimeter? Whilst he’s detained in a padded cell in Crowthorne? I don’t think,’ I said. But the curious thing was, as I said that, I was aware of that part of me that believed her completely. She was at greater risk from Curtius than I was. Assuming he ever broke out of his secure facility, which eventuality was surely most unlikely. ‘So you reckon I’ll be OK?’ I said. Then, to make it more real in my own mind, I altered it, said it again. ‘I’ll be OK, don’t you worry about me. You haven’t told me what I’m supposed to say to him, though.’

  ‘Say hello from us,’ she said. She seemed, suddenly, to be sitting very still. ‘Give him our best wishes. Tell him that we are still very interested in working with him. We think that, coming from you, it’ll have an effect.’

  ‘He knows what you’re up to, here?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘And that you think he could help?’ Something else occurred to me. ‘If he’s actually killed people, shouldn’t he be in prison?’

  ‘He’s been in prison. Back and forth. But he’s not the usual sort of offender. Rather obviously. We do what we can to keep him away from the crueller sort of inmate. He’s … delicate, in many ways.’

  ‘But – what? Killed people? As, more than one?’

  ‘That is what the plural usually indicates.’

  ‘Woh.’

  ‘He was,’ said Kos, leaning in a little, ‘hurt. By what happened. In Antarctica.’

  ‘So was I.’

  ‘I know. But your wound was of a – different sort.’

  ‘Whatever,’ I said, and finished my coffee.

  What did it matter? What did any of it matter? The whole thing – the entire experience of these weeks in the Institute – possessed the quality of some strange dream, or fantasy. Maybe I’d had a stroke, in the shower, back in my flat, and this was all some bizarre end-of-life hallucination. Or maybe it was really happening. After decades of misery, it hardly mattered. It was a time of existential plenitude. I can’t put it any better than that. There’s a phrase that goes I did not know how empty was my soul until it was filled. Or maybe not, since I was only too aware how shitty my life had become. But the plenitude was a sudden and unexpected sweetness. The thing about negation is: it requires something to negate. This was that. This was that.

  For some reason, another week passed before they finally let me go. I wondered, during this time, if they were having hiccoughs organising a time for me to visit at Broadmoor. Or maybe it was taking them a while to get me that car. Or maybe it was something quite other; I never found out.

  At the end of that week, on the very last day of June, Irma visited me a third time.

  That night, after Irma slunk away, I slept right through. In the morning, washed and breakfasted, I said goodbye to Kos. She gave me to the keys to the car – to my car – and gave me the phone. State-of-the-art slate, like a hand-sized model of the black slab from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Amazing to a man of my generation, so much so that she had to show me how to use it. I was instructed that the phone would be my entry ticket. Then she gave me a wallet, and in the wallet a wodge of money. ‘There’s some money in this,’ she said. ‘Cash. That way we don’t have to bother with registering a new debit card.’

  ‘This is what? A per diem? Salary?’

  ‘We can sort out the contractual details when you come back,’ she said, not meeting my eye. ‘You’ll need to keep receipts for purchases over five pounds.’

  ‘I can be back tonight.’

  ‘Tomorrow will be soon enough,’ she said. ‘Stay in your own bed tonight, back at your flat. After you’ve seen … him. Of course.’

  So I climbed into my new car, the key in my pocket, and it started at the flick of a button. I drove down the driveway and the guard at the gate let me out. With a smoothly sexy female voice the sat nav guided me down country lanes. July sunlight glinted on the white polythene wrapping the fields. I put Radio 2 on, and feeling a weird, slightly unstable lightness in my soul, addressed the empty universe by singing along that it made me feel, that you make me feel, like a nat, ural, woman. I slid down the slipway on to the M4 heading east, and the sky darkened, and summer rain came down, and the windscreen wipers started of their own accord.

  :2:

  The approach to Broadmoor does not display the building’s most prepossessing side to the visitor. Your car rolls to a halt outside a great hedge of wire fencing, topped all along its length with a towering Afro of barbed wire. Behind this is a hefty-looking brick wall, over the top of which are red-brick buildings and grey sloping rooftops. Just visible past all this, on a small rise, is the main building itself: a much more elegantly designed Victorian structure looking for all the world like the stately home of a well-to-do industrialist.

  I was behind a silver VW Passat, the driver of which chatted to the guard on the gate for ages and ages, either because there was some difficulty in gaining official clearance or else because they were old friends having a chinwag. Finally the gate opened and he rolled inside. I pulled up, and showed the guard the sigil on my phone. He took the device from me, scanned the image, checked my face against whatever came up on his terminal, handed me back the phone and opened the gate, without a word.

  I drove in. BROADMOOR HOSPITAL said the signs, in standard NHS font. PARK IN DESIGNATED BAYS ONLY. The inner gatehouse, motte and bailey (if that’s the right terminology), was a splendid Victorian structure with a clock in its centre like a Cyclops’s eye, over an arched green door three times the height of a man. I found a designated bay and parked. Then I strolled, feeling a fizzing in my stomach of sheer apprehension, to the door.

  ‘Morning,’ I said, grand as you like. ‘Charles Gardner, to see Roy Curtius? I believe I’m expected.’

  There were two guards on duty, both women; and they peered at a ledger and checked the ID on my phone, and eyed my scarred face suspiciously. But they let me through. I emptied my pockets of everything, and walked through the magic doorway of metal detection. ‘You’re not allowed phones inside, I’m afraid,’ one of them said to me. This lady had a halo of alopecia-thinned hair all over her visible bald scalp, like a cloud of nanobots.

  ‘OK,’ I said, and smiled beamingly.

  ‘This guy’s exceptional,’ said the other. ‘Look, orange notice.’

  ‘Orange,’ the other repeated, in a tone of voice that made it clear such a colour was a rare and remarkable occurrence. ‘What does it say?’

  ‘Says he can keep his phone.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ I said. ‘I don’t mind leaving it here.’

  ‘Says here you can keep it,’ she insisted. ‘And keep it you shall. Orange.’

  Her colleague checked, looked at me again, and checked once more. ‘Well,’ she said, in a grudging voice, ‘very well. But Mr Granger, you must understand, do not pass your phone to any of the patients.’

  ‘Gardner,’ I said.

  ‘As for Mr Curtius, he is …’ She searched for the right word. ‘Unusual. We’re used to the unusual here, of course, but. So: understand, yeah? I’ll take you up myself, though I’ll have to hand you over to Delaware when we get to the Paddock Centre. Security is tight as a drum up there, let me tell you.’

  ‘Seems pretty tight here,’ I observed.

  I spoke blandly enough, it seemed to me, but she decided to take offence at this, and scowled at me. ‘Come along now.’

  I pocketed my phone, leaving my keys and wallet in a plastic tray behind the security desk. The guard unlocked a door, and locked it behind me after we both went through. We crossed a courtyard, and the sun flashed his arse at us before veiling it again in cloud. Through a new set of blue-painted doors,
unlocked and relocked; along a corridor and through another valve of doors, unlocked and relocked. A second courtyard, and in once again. All in silence.

  ‘Worked here long?’ I essayed, as she relocked the door, sealing us inside.

  She looked at me, bleakly. ‘Curtius is very dangerous,’ she said. ‘Look: you’ve an orange code, so I daresay you’ve been trained.’

  ‘Of course!’ I assured her, feeling a twitch of anxiety at my complete lack of anything resembling training.

  ‘The drill, you know it. Don’t get too close to him. Don’t give him anything – certainly not that phone you’re apparently permitted to carry inside.’