But the solution is surely simple—he won’t read any more of Boursier’s stories. Then nothing else can change. The bad weather will pass, he doesn’t care what side of the road people drive on (Fellows doesn’t drive, anymore), he can learn to call his cat Mogwai.
Or it would be simple, if it wasn’t for the fact that Fellows plans to read one more Boursier story; to get Boursier to write one for him, no less. For if stories really can alter the quarantined city there is one thing Fellows surely wants altered. He wants the blank-eyed and silent ghost of a young boy who haunts his house gone. Written out of reality as if it never was. Not that he is scared of the ghost as such, although its silent and crippled body is unnerving, as is the way that its one goal seems to be to reach out and touch Fellows...
“Open up!” Fellows shouts at the unyielding wooden door. The Echo Bookshop is the only lead he has on Boursier. The shop is situated at the end of a grubby alley hidden to one side of the market square; the alley’s uneven cobbles are splattered with gull shit and water drips from its clogged gutters. The gutters had been dripping a few days ago when he had first come here, in the intense heat of a summer only he remembers; despite the drought the gutters had been leaking water and had been overflowing with bright green moss and mould. Like a small piece of the city, out of reach and unnoticed, had already changed to match Boursier’s story before he’d even read it.
Fellows bangs on the door again; his wrist aches, and he smiles, thinking of the crude jokes Georgia will no doubt make when he sees her later. In his other hand he is clutching a waterproof bag, in which he has the journals and magazines featuring the other Boursier stories. Although he won’t be reading them himself, he is loathe to leave them unattended. What if someone else read them? Read them all through and changed everything? He has no idea if such a thing is possible but why take that risk?
Of course I could just leave them here, no one would read them here, he thinks; he has never seen a single customer in The Echo Bookshop.
“Open up! Hello? Open...”
The door finally opens, shoving Fellows backwards and out into the rain. Annoyed he darts into the gloomy interior of the shop; the boy with the old man’s voice and misaligned eyes takes a step back and curses.
“Oh Christ,” he says, “what do you want? I told you no refunds. It’s not my fault if you bought such drivel.” His smile is as unfriendly as ever, conveying the idea that he knows something Fellows doesn’t despite the fact that he talks such obvious shit.
“I don’t want a refund,” Fellows says, “I want to find the author.”
“You...huh?” The boy’s one straight eye bulges, as if Fellows has said something preposterous.
“Seller’s instructions,” Fellows says.
“What..?”
“Seller’s instructions! That’s what you took such joy saying yesterday!” Fellows tries to control his annoyance; he normally shrinks from confrontation but something about the bookseller riles him so. “You already told me you’re just selling his works on commission, so I know you know how to contact Boursier.”
The boy pauses, he is visibly weighing up his next words. He has shrunk back against one of the tall, dusty bookshelves (Fictions F) and he cautiously emerges from its shadow.
“He didn’t give me an address,” he says slowly, “and he said he’s not on the telephone. He’ll come here to get his commission but...”
“Then I’ll just wait shall I?” Fellows says, but he has missed his chance; the boy has already regained some composure.
“Be my guest. He’s coming the day after tomorrow.”
“C’mon, something!” Fellows slams his palm against the bookshelf in frustration; it is so rickety it moves to his touch despite the weight of paperbacks it carries.
“God you’re as annoying as he is,” the boy says, looking at Fellows as if for some kind of reaction. Then he turns, saying, “He did leave me something, trying to convert me. Idiot.” The boy walks with jerky movements to his desk and searches through the pile of books atop it, sniffling at the dust thrown up, until he finds one with a makeshift bookmark lolling out of its pages. He pulls out the piece of paper and, returning to Fellows, hands it to him.
Fellows unfolds it. End The Quarantine Now! he reads; the ink of the words has run as if it were once caught in the rain. More Holistic Measures Needed! he reads below, whatever that means. He doesn’t read any more of the crudely printed leaflet.
“He’s one of them?” he says. “You think Boursier is one of the protestors? But he might just have taken this rubbish in the street, out of politeness. Or for a bookmark, like you...”
“No,” the bookseller says, his hauteur back. “Don’t you listen? He tried to convert me. He isn’t just a protestor. He’s in charge; he’s their leader.”
~
The streets of the city look a different colour in the rain, the stone of the buildings duller and the shadows cropped under the lid of clouds. Maybe the differences are why Fellows keeps getting lost as he walks towards the Mariners’ Church; it is only the fact that every so often a gap in the buildings allows him to see its fish-topped spire that keeps him on the right path. There are fewer people around than usual at this time of the morning, because of the rain he supposes, but more motorcars than he has ever seen in the city before. The vehicles look faintly unreal in the spray they throw up from the wet roads. He feels they are disappearing from his vision too early, and the noise they make is muffled in the misty air. Where are they getting the petrol from? he thinks, looking at the rainbow patterns of oil in the water, trails that peter out too soon.
It is still early when he arrives at the small square in front of the church, and none of the protestors are there. Idiots, he thinks automatically, rushing to shelter in the church vestibule. He seems to have lost all sense of time since the clouds appeared overhead, blocking his view of the sun. Christ, you’re not a sailor, he thinks to himself, annoyed by his own obscure thoughts. Surely you have... But when he raises his arm to look at his wrist there is no watch there, just the white mark of its absence against skin tanned by a summer heat-wave equally absent. At least it is some external evidence of what he remembers, proof that he isn’t delusional.
But to his left, as if mocking that assertion, he sees a plaque on the vestibule wall; it shows the names and dates of fisherman and sailors from the city who have died at sea; this city reveres it sailors. What has caught his attention is that one of the dates is new, the lettering a brighter colour. Some other poor sod lost in the storms no doubt, the storms he can’t remember. Nor can he remember any such story in the local newspaper, although it would have devoted pages to a sailor’s death. There is only so much real news inside the city borders after all.
He tries to think if one of the characters in Boursier’s stories had lost a watch, but can’t remember.
Sod it, he thinks. You can’t blame everything on Boursier. You’re just tired; you’ve broken your routine and this is the consequence. He had not slept well. After his encounter with the ghost the previous evening he had lain as if paralysed, while in his dreams the blank-eyed boy had run his broken hands across Fellows’s skin, a faint touch from hands too sensitive to their own pain. As if ghosts could touch, could feel! He still shudders to remember, but as always it isn’t just the ghost which has faded, but the urgency and intensity of his revulsion towards it too, as if both routed by daylight.
Such daylight as there is—Fellows decides to go and get a coffee and then come back to the church to find the protestors later. He turns up his collar and heads back out into the rain. But it is as if the quarantined city is under curfew as well, for he sees few people out in the streets and nearly all of the shops and public buildings are shut. There are certainly no cafés open nearby, and after much walking and cursing Fellows resolves to just go to the Carousel, which he can’t conceive would be shut, despite the walk.
Its door is open and its windows lit up as he approaches, a soft warm light seeming
ly from a different palette to the grey world around. He feels a certain relief, not just to be out of the rain but that at least this bit of the world tallies with his thoughts. At the counter he gives his usual order; as he fishes in his wallet for the fiddly, post-quarantine coins, he notices his fingers are smudged black again. For a moment he wonders if he is confused and he has already read the newspaper somewhere this morning, but no—when he sees the headline it is nothing he remembers. Quarantine Decision Not Ours To Make Say Unity Government.
“You’re, uh, on your own today?” he says as casually as he can to Gregor when the man brings him his coffee; Gregor doesn’t normally wait tables.
“Yes,” Gregor says flatly.
“No, what’s her name, Leianna, to help you?”
Gregor pauses, and Fellows sees something he has never seen before from the man: the briefest of smiles. He feels his face redden, bends to take a sip of his coffee and scolds his tongue.
“No, she said something had come up and she couldn’t work today. Maybe to do with her son, you know?”
“She has a son?” Fellows says. “She doesn’t look... I mean, how old?”
“Older than she looks,” Gregor says. “The boy is seven now. Some bastard left her alone with him; the boy is a cripple.”
“A cripple? So that’s why her... husband..?”
“Just boyfriend. Just a boy,” Gregor says with the same smile.
“... left her when he was born. God.” Fellows blinks and is lost in his own thoughts; he doesn’t hear what Gregor says next to him.
“No, no, the boy was okay when he was born.”
“Uh, um...” Fellows comes back to himself, becomes aware Gregor is lingering. “Here, for the tip jar,” he says, giving Gregor two of the thin coins; the new money is of such poor quality that the face of the city’s founder is almost rubbed into anonymity.
“You weren’t going to try and take the tips again?” Gregor says and slaps Fellows heavily on the shoulder with one broad, tattooed hand to show he is joking. Gregor joking! Fellows wonders if his daily patronage of the Carousel has paid off and he can be considered a regular, or if Gregor’s new smile is just something else in this city different to how he remembers it being.
~
When he eventually finds his way back to the Mariners’ Church, the protestors from the previous day are there, looking as wretched in the rain as the sun. They stiffen as Fellows approaches as if suspecting him of being an undercover Guardia—not such a paranoid assumption, maybe, given the rumours.
Fellows endures the same stop-start, awkward conversation with the protestor who had given him the pre-quarantine money yesterday; the man gives no sign of remembering him or the sunlight they’d both sweated in. Fellows quickly realises that the protestor isn’t going to confirm Boursier is their leader, much less tell him where the writer lives. Taking a different approach, he asks how he can help lift the quarantine, despite how ridiculous and unpalatable the idea is to him.
“But, uh, no offence,” he says, “but I’m not standing round in the rain handing out leaflets. Help you write them maybe—there were some shockingly misplaced semi-colons in that one you gave me yesterday!” He smiles to show he is joking, but the protestor just stares at him blankly. Then the man turns and confers with one of his fellows, the words hidden under the sound of rain on their coats.
“You’re a writer?” the protestor says eventually.
“Yeah,” says Fellows reluctantly; he feels more guilty about this small lie than the big one about wanting to join the protestors. Or maybe it isn’t guilt, but unease. But why could it possibly matter now, after all these years? Lana would laugh to see him now, after all those times he’d crowed about it in the presence of other women.
“You can go to the house then,” the protestor says, in a voice loaded with more import than the words seem to deserve.
~
It involves another walk through the lessening rain to what Fellows thinks of as the ‘posh’ part of the city—tall houses sat on the higher ground above the cliffs and West Bay, looking down on the rest of the city, from which they are partially separated by a large civic park with a lake and bandstand in the centre.
“Boursier lives in the Enclave?” he had asked when the protestor had given him the address.
“No, no,” the man had said, his eyes scanning Fellows’s face for a reaction. “It’s just somewhere we meet.”
Mockingly, the people of the city have always called this quarter the ‘Enclave’, an inaccurate name that has nevertheless stuck. There are rumours that the inhabitants of the Enclave are manoeuvring to be excluded from the quarantine, leaving the rest of the city to its fate; how that would even be possible when they are all as sealed off as everyone else Fellows doesn’t know. But he has no doubt their wealth and family connections will give them a greater chance of success than whatever ragtag methods the protestors are using. There must remain some connections to the outside world, and aside from the unity government itself the old-money clans of the Enclave are the most likely to know of and exploit them. But then how come the protestors have connections here; have they got patronage? Or are they being used in some way?
At least walking these streets Fellows is not much discomforted by the real or imagined differences with how he remembers them, for he very rarely comes to the Enclave. The avenues and boulevards seem strange to him all by themselves, spacious and tree-lined, a world apart from the part of the city he lives in, never mind somewhere like the old town. The houses are tall and classically proportioned, set back from the streets by large lawns and high walls. A few still have private cars displayed on their drives, more than Fellows was expecting. Bastards, he thinks vaguely.
The Enclave seems almost deserted, the only sound the storm wearing itself out in the trees. There’s none of the cat-calling of the old town or hustle of the market or harbour. The only people Fellows sees—gardeners, delivery boys, dog-walkers, what he assumes is a wet nurse—are obviously not inhabitants either, and they give him a look of comradeship as if he were a servant here too. None of them speak other than a muttered greeting as they pass. Only the loud gulls are rebellious, cawing revolution from the crap-stained roofs.
When he finds the address he has been given he sees the house is hidden behind a tall white wall; from the entrance he can see a pebbled drive with tyre ruts down the middle curving through a large garden, but the house itself isn’t visible. A squat standing stone marks the boundary, with holes in the top that Fellows can’t fathom the purpose of. He is about to start the walk up to the house when he feels a presence behind him; he turns and sees two Guardia behind him. Private guards for the rich, he thinks sourly.
“Everything alright sir?” one says; he has the confused feeling they are the same two he saw yesterday, although surely their beat wouldn’t encompass both the church square and the Enclave. Nevertheless, the way one of them shifts her stance so that the holster of her gun becomes visible gives him a feeling of déjà-vu.
“Yes, uh, fine,” he says.
“This is private property you know,” the male Guardia says casually; Fellows does not think it will do any good to say that in fact the street is a public space and he hasn’t actually stepped onto the driveway.
“Sure, I was just, well...” His powers of invention desert him.
“It’s okay he’s with me!” someone calls out behind the two Guardia; fortunately the fact they both turn round to look means he doesn’t have to keep the look of surprise off his face.
“New boy,” Leianna says to the Guardia, nodding at Fellows. “I meant to get here before him but you know, late night.” She grins at the male Guardia; a fake grin Fellows recognises from her interactions with over-friendly customers in the Carousel.
“I’ll bet,” the Guardia says, trying to leer; his colleague looks away in disgust.
“C’mon you,” Leianna says, taking Fellows by the arm and leading him up the drive; the male Guardia says something els
e to her as a parting shot which in his confusion Fellows doesn’t catch.
“Twat,” Leianna says under her breath.
For a few moments, conscious of the Guardia at their back they walk in silence through the dying rain; the crunch of the gravel underfoot seems loud and accusatory. When they have walked far enough to be out of sight they stop.
“What are you doing here?” Fellows says.
“I should be asking the same of you, hanging around outside,” Leianna says. “I assume you were sent. Or have you been stalking me?” Her voice is self-deprecating, albeit with the hint of something more steely beneath. She is dressed in a large raincoat with a hood that hides her thick curly hair and rustles as she speaks.
“No, I... Of course not,” Fellows says. “I’m looking for Boursier. I was told by the people handing out leaflets to come here.”
“Boursier?” Leianna says. “Here?”
“Yes, I’m trying to find him,” Fellows says. “I’m a writer too,” he adds, partly because he knows telling her the real reason would sound crazy, but also because he realises he wants to impress her. He tries to change the subject before she can react: “But what are you... Do you work here?”
“What? No!”
“Don’t worry, I won’t tell Gregor if you’re moonlighting,” he says nervously. “After all, I know you must need the extra money, I guess, with your son and...”
“How do you know about my son? If you know so much about it you should know it’s not money I need.” Leianna looks away from him, up to the birds in the sky. “But no, I don’t work here. Don’t tell Gregor you saw me, but I don’t work here. Look, let’s get inside out of this weather. But I’ll tell you now, there’s no Boursier in there.”
The Quarantined City Page 7
