He knows who I am, Fellows thought, he knows what I’ve done.
Wanting to muffle his own thoughts, he clamped both hands to his ears; the sound he heard was that of the sea in a shell.
Where the hell was the boy’s mother, when he reacted like that? he thought. Why hadn’t she rushed in? Emboldened by the idea that the responsibility for the boy’s panic attack was not his, he turned to look behind him at the open doorway back to the lounge...
~
Fellows plumps the pillow in his hand again and steps forwards. It’s not alive, he thinks. This thing that looks like a boy isn’t alive. Doesn’t the very fact it appears in impossible places and vanishes as impossibly prove that? Plus the very wrongness of it: the wordless cries, the frantic clumsiness, the dreadful mercury eyes. The boy’s not dead, Boursier had said, but in his gut Fellows has never believed him.
But it certainly is breathing, with its torn, imitation breaths, and so its breathing can surely be stopped. Maybe it will even be a blessing for a being that seems to exist in such torment? The fact such thoughts contradict those of just a few seconds before doesn’t bother Fellows; if there’s one thing Boursier has taught him it’s to be able to see two things as true at once.
Fuck whatever story Boursier thinks he is writing; he can bring this charade to an end here and now. If he is careful, the thing won’t be able to touch him as he does it. Quickly, before his nerve runs out, he walks to the bed, holding the pillow in both hands before him.
~
Fellows gasped in surprise.
On the other side of the doorway was not the lounge he had come in through, but somewhere else entirely. The room beyond might still have been intended as a living room, but it had bare wooden floorboards, mismatched and old-fashioned furniture, and what looked like gas lamps on the walls. The light that came in from the small windows illuminated swirling motes of dust. Even in his surprise Fellows noticed there were well thumbed paperbacks on almost every available surface.
There was no sign of Lana or Lawrence’s mother.
He looked around him, but sure enough the room he was in was still the same; the boy’s gaze was still as pitiless as before.
He took a few steps towards the other room; something about the dusky light from its windows suggested the warmth of foreign climes. And then he realised that, even though he had taken his hands away from his ears, he could still hear the sea-shell sound of waves...
Could I just walk through? he thought. He has never seen such a room before, but something about its very emptiness appealed.
What also appealed was not just what he might be walking into, but what he might be walking away from. The panic, the guilt, the sick despair to be someone else. Even, he realised painfully, Lana. How can he ever escape from all the shit he feels when she is so desperate to rub his face in it?
Quickly, before his nerve ran out, he took a step towards the mysterious room. The boy watched him as he did so.
~
Before Fellows can reach the boy, a dark shape races past him and jumps up onto the bed. He had completely forgotten about Mogwai. The cat lands on the boy’s chest and hisses and bares its fangs; it raises a paw with its claws extended but doesn’t strike. The suddenness of the creature’s appearance causes Fellows to drop the pillow in surprise.
The boy bucks and shrieks in the confines of his bed; the tucked-in sheets and heavy blanket make it impossible for him to dislodge Mogwai from his chest. His arms flail, waving in jerky motions like an upturned fly’s legs, but never making contact. He shakes his head from side to side, spittle flying, and it should be impossible for his blank white eyes to widen any further but they seem to.
It will fade away, Fellows thinks, surely the damned thing will just fade away now and I can get out of this crazy house and back to...
The cat hisses and shrieks again, its fur on end and the claws of three paws digging in to help it cling on to the bucking form of the dead boy. With the other, it swipes at the boy’s face. The scratches the cat’s paw leaves don’t bleed, and the flesh inside seems as pale and dead as that outside, albeit whiter for not being so stained. Nevertheless the thing’s shrieks intensify, as does its bucking efforts to escape. There is the sudden smell of urine, and before Fellows knows what he is doing, he is running forward yelling, and chasing the cat off from the boy’s chest.
Mogwai bounds off, streaks towards the door. Fellows turns to watch him go...
And just like that the cat is no longer visible; or at least Fellows can no longer see him. In passing through the doorway, Mogwai has vanished from the strange house.
~
Before Fellows could reach the doorway, a dark shape raced past him from that strange other room and jumped up onto the bed. He stopped in surprise. Something was standing on the boy’s chest, padding the soft blanket: a cat. And not just any cat, Fellows saw but:
“George?” he said. Their missing cat? The animal looked up from pawing at the boy briefly and Fellows was sure it recognised him. Finally settled, it sat itself contentedly on the boy’s chest. Confused, Fellows walked back to the bed; he reached out and stroked the animal, heard it start purring. He noticed there was a tag on its collar where there had been none before. He turned it round so he could read it.
Mogwai.
He stopped stroking in surprise, but the cat still kept purring; he realised Lawrence was petting the animal too. The boy’s hand was a few inches from his. Fellows looked up to the boy’s eyes again. He felt like he was being given the chance to see them afresh.
How did I ever think them blank? he thought, for the boy’s gaze was deep with emotion and pain, although these were sealed off from Fellows, on the other side of the barriers the boy had erected to protect himself.
It’s your fault, he thought. The barriers you’d have to cross to reach this kid are ones you created yourself. He was too dry-eyed to cry, and as such his vision remained clear as he stared at the boy’s hand, just inches from his own and impossibly far away. What right did he have to take it, to seek comfort from the guilt of his own actions in the forgiveness of the one he’d hurt? For some reason, he felt nauseous with the taste of champagne although he hadn’t drunk any since the night of the accident.
He looked up, wanting Lana to be there to guide him, even to yell at him to do the right thing, but all he saw was the hazy warm light of the room on the other side of the doorway. There was a chair to sit in, he saw, and on the table next to it was a book open face down as if he were already halfway through reading it, and next to it a bottle-opener...
George was still purring, and he feels rather than hears the very tentative beginnings of laughter in the boy’s chest. But still, the distance to reach out to touch the boy’s hand where it stroked the cat’s black fur seemed impossible to cross, compared to the three quick strides with which he could be out the room and somewhere else...
He wasn’t sure what his decision was going to be.
~
After the cat has fled the room, Fellows feels drained of emotion; when he turns back to the boy he is so weary he almost falls into his embrace. Instead, warily, he sits at the foot of the bed—the boy is so short there is room—out of reach of its straining arms.
“The cat’s called Mogwai,” he says, “he was just a little scared of you.” As if in reality this is a real boy curious about an animal Fellows has brought to see him, a distraction for an ill child. “He’s run off now but he’ll come back; cat’s can get in anywhere. We could stroke him together.” The words come to him as if from memory; not words he has said, but words he should have said, once, but didn’t dare to. Meanwhile the dead child slobbers brown drool down its chest, makes periodic attempts to lurch forward to grasp at Fellows. Was it in hatred, Fellows thought, was its touch so deadening? If he ignored the oil stains like bruises, ignored the blank white eyes—didn’t see them—then when it opened its arms it would look almost like a child seeking comfort,
If it wasn’t for the cat
being here you would have killed it already, he thought, this would be over. He knows he won’t be able to muster up the strength to do it again; the way the boy had struggled in terror against the cat would have been how it would have struggled beneath a pillow pressed to his face, and how could he face that? It wouldn’t be like the movies, he knows, twenty seconds of muffled sobs. He’d have to press down hard against the thing’s screams for three or four long minutes, as it kicked and shit itself.
He looks up; the doorway out of the child’s bedroom now leads back to his house in the quarantined city. In thirty seconds you could be out on those streets, he thinks, heading towards The Carousel for a coffee or Georgia’s apartment for a drink. Or even, and this idea appeals the most right now, down to the harbour to sit watching the sea and eat paprika potatoes. Forget all this, for now, before it starts again. Or he could stay in this room and... what?
He looks back at the boy, at his reaching hands. The boy who he has done so much wrong to, in another time, in another city, but who is still reaching for him. His eyes are the white of bird wings, he thinks obscurely.
He raises a hand, holds his fingers outstretched so they are just inches beyond the reach of the boy, who seeing the proximity redoubles his efforts, his eager breath the only part of him seeming fully alive.
Is what he needs to do to escape the quarantine, Fellows wonders, merely to stretch out and bridge the scant inches between his hand and the boys own? Would Boursier write an ending so simple and sentimental?
Yet still, that distance to reach out to touch the boy’s hand where it wavers in the air seems impossible to cross, compared to the three quick strides with which he could be out and into another room, another city entirely...
He isn’t sure himself what his decision is going to be.
~
Boursier sets down the pen from his cramped, ink-stained hands. The last line, he knows is not up to him, it will be dictated by whatever Fellows does out there. He was always shit at endings. The cat nudges at his arm, impatient for food. Where had it been? he wondered vaguely. Its sudden reappearance had taken him by surprise, but he hadn’t let it interrupt his writing, merely incorporated it into the text.
The crowd is still outside, waiting for the quarantine to be lifted but growing more and more frustrated that it won’t be. There’ll be riots if not, Boursier knows...
When a ragged sound erupts from the crowd, almost like a single broken breath, he isn’t sure at first if it is a cheer or the start of the violence, and of all this beginning again.
Boursier’s vision blurs; doubles.
Am I being..., he thinks.
~
But wait, Fellows thinks at the last moment. The city is a trap, Boursier had said, but what if this was the trap, a double bluff and he has been right all along?
Something touches his hand.
And then there is a wrenching sensation, a tightness across his ribs like he is being squeezed, the taste of champagne in his mouth, spice, and the brightness of mercury lights fluttering like wings in his crazed vision.
Am I being lifted up? he thinks.
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There were these two British writers, one lived in the country, the other in the city. The country writer loved to visit the city and partake of brandy and Greek kebabs in the local hostelry. The city writer liked to visit the country and guzzle ale and barbecued steak under the apple trees. The two writers needed an excuse for these indulgences, and so they invented one, and this excuse was called “collaborating on a story” ... It soon emerged that the story was to be about a legendary tree, which they both vaguely recalled from the tales their grandfathers used to tell them of mystery and myth. Soon they were delving with suppressed excitement into old documents at the British Museum and began to come up with some frightening discoveries.
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Workaholic Human Rights lawyer Zara Hamilton is running away: from her floundering marriage, her feeling of being homeless, her lingering questions about her mother abandoning her when she was a child. Work gives her a sense of purpose but the bleak world of her asylum-seeking clients is affecting her and she has started seeing negatives everywhere. Then Aunt Hana, who brought her up in in a town called Trivikram, in Gujarat falls ill and asks her to carry out her final wish without the knowledge of her son or daughter-in-law.
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The Quarantined City Page 21
