C

by Mccarthy, Tom

  Above six hundred and fifty, the clicks dissipate into a thin, pervasive noise, like dust. Discharges break across this: distant lightning, Aurora Borealis, meteorites. Their crashes and eruptions sound like handfuls of buckshot thrown into a tin bucket, or a bucketful of grain-rich gravy dashed against a wash-boiler. Wireless ghosts come and go, moving in arpeggios that loop, repeat, mutate, then disappear. Serge spends the last half hour or so of each night up here among these pitches, nestling in their contours as his head nods towards the desktop and lights flash across the inside of his eyelids, pushing them outwards from the centre of his brain, so far out that the distance to their screen seems infinite: they seem to contain all distances, envelop space itself, curving around it like a patina, a mould …

  Once, he picked up a CQD: a distress signal. It came from the Atlantic, two hundred or so miles off Greenland. The Pachitea, merchant vessel of the Peruvian Steamship Company, had hit an object—maybe whale, maybe iceberg—and was breaking up. The nearest vessel was another South American, Acania, but it was fifty miles away. Galway had picked the call up; so had Le Havre, Malin, Poldhu and just about every ship between Southampton and New York. Fifteen minutes after Serge had locked onto the signal half the radio bugs in Europe had tuned into it as well. The Admiralty put a message out instructing amateurs to stop blocking the air. Serge ignored the order, but lost the signal beneath general interference: the atmospherics were atrocious that night. He listened to the whine and crackle, though, right through till morning—and heard, or thought he heard, among its breaks and flecks, the sound of people treading cold, black water, their hands beating small disturbances into waves that had come to bury them.

  ii

  One night, at about half past two, Serge looks out of his bedroom window and sees a white figure gliding over the Mulberry Lawn, skirting the Orchard’s border as it heads towards the Crypt Park’s gates. It looks like Sophie; he leans out further but the figure disappears from view before he can identify it. The experience startles him—not least because it plays out in the real and close-up space around the house an aspect of some scenes that he occasionally intuits but never quite pins down when riding the dial’s highest reaches: vague impressions of bodies hovering just beyond the threshold of the visible, and corresponding signals not quite separable from the noise around them—important ones, their recalcitrance all the more frustrating for that reason. He sees these things, and hears, or half-hears, them as well, quite frequently—usually as he’s straddling the wavelength-border between consciousness and sleep. This white figure tonight’s no somnolent vision, though: it’s a real person, of the size and shape of Sophie, and dressed the way she dresses when she goes to bed each night, to boot. The next day, he visits her in her lab and asks if she was wandering about in night-skirts last night.

  “What’s it to you?” she asks. “Who said you could come in here?”

  “Can I come in?” he asks.

  Sophie shrugs, and turns back to her work desk. She’s stayed in this room pretty much non-stop since arriving back from London, where she’s been studying natural sciences at Imperial College for two terms now. In front of her, on the desk’s surface, microscope slides smeared with variously tinted substances fan out like card-hands; dotted around these, like tokens wagered by invisible opponents, or perhaps the miniature opponents themselves, are insects, dead ones: beetles, grasshoppers and dragonflies, rigid as the dog-avatar in the Realtor’s Game. Above these, pinned to the wall, are charts, diagrams and passages written in Sophie’s hand. She doesn’t seem to object as Serge leans over her and scans a couple of them:

  I placed a specimen of the Helochara family inside a jar,

  one reads,

  and introduced into its cell a mixture of potassium and ether until it turned onto its back and appeared dead; however, when a little ammonium was sprinkled over it, it effected a complete recovery.

  Another states:

  Aphrophora spumaria entomb themselves within a frothy coat of viscid cells. The bubbles not only surround the insect and the stem upon which it rests, but flow in a continuous sheet between the ventral plates and abdomen.

  Beside the text, an annotated sketch shows some kind of tick embedded in a mass of spawn-like foam. Serge runs his eyes across to one of the charts. Beneath the heading “Poisonous Qualities of” a complex set of lines—straight, curving and dotted—threads disparate Latin words and letter sequences together. To Serge’s mind, cluttered with RX traffic, the sequences appear like call-signs. It’s not just the compounds on the chart that make him think this way; Sophie has highlighted certain letters of the wall’s various texts, making them stand out by drawing over them in yellow, blue or purple crayon, as though tracing from one to the other a kind of continuum, a grander alphabetic sequence slowly emerging from the general eclectic mesh. Most intriguingly of all, a study of the Emperor moth, complete with illustration demonstrating the vibratory capacities of its antennae, carries the word, written in brackets in the margin, “Morse.”

  “Morse?” asks Serge. “Do moths know that?”

  “What?” she murmurs—then, following his eye towards the wall, scoffs: “No, stupid; no connection. Professor Morse, an entomologist from Nanterre, France.”

  She doesn’t venture any more, and turns back to the slide in front of her. She seems preoccupied—full not of the eager energy with which she used to throw herself into their chemistry experiments, but with a more concerned and troubled set of mental compounds. She looks haggard, much older than she did six months ago; staring at her cheeks, Serge can see worry-lines snaking their way down from her eyes towards the corners of her mouth.

  “What are you looking at?” she snaps. “Go now; I’ve got to work.”

  She works the next day, and the next night too, and the day after that. Serge starts to wonder when—or if—she ever sleeps. By the time he wanders down for breakfast late each morning, she’s already gone, a few scattered breadcrumbs and a buttered knife the only evidence of her having passed through the kitchen—those, and the eviscerated newspapers she leaves on the table after tearing from them headlines that, for whatever reason, catch her eye. With their father away at a conference on deaf education up in London (“His train will have passed yours,” Serge commented to Sophie’s pronounced indifference when she first arrived back) and Mr. Clair home on leave, they’ve got the run of the place. Maureen’s given up trying to stage meals in single sittings, and leaves out bread, meats, cheeses, pies and stews for them to help themselves to when they like. As far as Serge can tell, Sophie only takes breakfast, and doesn’t even seem to eat that: each time he visits her lab over the next few days he sees sandwiches piled up virtually untouched beside glasses of lemonade that, no more than sipped at, are growing viscid bubbles on their surface like Aphrophora spumaria. Above these, on the wall, the texts, charts and diagrams are growing, spreading. Serge reads, for example, a report on the branchiae of Cercopidida, which are, apparently, “extremely tenuous, appearing like clusters of filaments forming lamellate appendages,” and scrutinises the architecture of Vespa germanica nests: their subterranean shafts and alleyways, their space-filled envelopes and alveolae …

  Bizarrely, Sophie’s started interspersing among these texts and images the headlines she’s torn from each day’s newspapers. These clippings seem to be caught up in her strange associative web: they, too, have certain words and letters highlighted and joined to ones among the scientific notes that, Serge presumes, must correspond to them in some way or another. One of these reads “Serbia Unsatisfied by London Treaty”; another, “Riot at Paris Ballet.” Serge can see no logical connection between these events and Sophie’s studies; yet colours and lines connect them. Arching over all of these in giant letters, each one occupying a whole sheet of paper, crayon-shaded and conjoined by lines that run over the wall itself to other terms and letter-sequences among the sprawling mesh, is the word Hymenoptera.

  “Hymenoptera?” Serge reads. “What’s that? It
sounds quite rude.”

  “Sting in the tail,” she answers somewhat cryptically. “The groups contain the common ancestor, but not all the descendants. Paraphyletic: it’s all connected.” She stares at her expanded chart for a long while, lost in its vectors and relays—then, registering his continued presence with a slight twitch of her head, tells him to leave once more.

  Three or four nights after his first sighting of the white figure on the Mulberry Lawn, Serge sees it again. This time he sees her face: it is Sophie, most definitely. She glides past the Orchard like she did the other night, then disappears from view again. Serge shuts his RX station down, throws on a jumper and heads down the stairs and out of the front door. He catches up with her inside the Crypt Park, where she’s moving through the long grass slowly, hesitantly.

  “Sophie,” he calls out as he approaches her from behind.

  Sophie takes two more steps, then stops and slightly turns her head in his direction.

  “What are you doing?” he asks.

  She stays there with her head half-turned, as though preferring to sense him rather than face him—through the skin on her cheek, perhaps, or the small hairs on her neck. He repeats his question. After a while she answers:

  “Looking for the Balkan beetle.”

  “What’s that?” he asks.

  “A type of flying insect, made by Pilcher,” she answers absently. Her eyes turn down, towards the grass—then sharpen, as though catching sight of something couched within it. “There are all these segments,” she murmurs. “Broken bodies.”

  “Where?” asks Serge.

  “Everywhere,” she replies. “When one antolie colony attacks another, they cut the victims up, and leave their limbs and torsos lying around the battlefield.”

  “What’s an antolie colony?” asks Serge.

  Slowly, her head turns fully away from him again, and she moves onwards through the long grass—ponderously, her exposed legs angling sharply at the knees, like an insect’s articulated limbs.

  “You’ll catch cold,” he calls after her, then heads back to his radio set.

  The next day, sure enough, she does look ill—although not colded: more ravaged, as though worn down by fatigue yet at the same time fired up by a manic sense of purpose. When Serge slinks into her lab, she’s scribbling away, furiously sketching the anatomy of flowers that, culled from Bodner’s garden, lie dissected on the desk in front of her.

  “The ovaries,” she mumbles over her shoulder to him. “Here’s where the pollen grains and utricles get into them, into their cavity.”

  He peers forwards, and sees where her scalpel has sliced through the corolla, pegged back its flesh and let the pistil stand out stiff and long. She scrapes the prostrate membrane, gathering its secreted essence on the blade’s side, then smears this onto a slide-plate. She looks up to the wall; Serge follows her eyes, and sees spelt out above the dissection table the word uterus. Above it, ripped from today’s Daily Herald, the headline “Young Turks Target Armenians.” Beside the printed text, Sophie has written, in brackets, Anatolia.

  “Anatolia,” Serge reads aloud. “Is that what you were—”

  “Shh!” Sophie holds her hand up, and the two of them freeze for a few moments: she sitting with the scalpel in her hand, mouth open and ears pricked up as though listening for something; he standing behind her, head above her shoulder, breathing in the sleepless odour wafting from her hair and body. After a while she turns to him and says: “Come find me tonight.”

  “Here?” Serge asks. “Or in the Crypt Park?”

  She waves her hand across her giant diagram, as though to say “Wherever,” then signals for him to leave again.

  That night, as he trawls through the ether, he pictures spiracles and stamen rising upwards, prodding at the sky like hungry aerials, and shellacked setae wound like tuning-coils around segmented abdomens. From time to time he looks out of the window, hoping to catch a glimpse of Sophie drifting silkily across the Mulberry Lawn, but never does. At three or so he makes his way towards her lab. It’s empty, and now smells of stale sandwiches, old lemonade and flower- and insect-secretions overlaid with the odour of the chemicals stored on the shelves’ jars. Serge half-recognises this last odour from the days when he and Sophie would mix compounds in this very room—but only half: these chemicals are more sophisticated, real ones, loaned from cupboards at Imperial, cases guarded by white-coated men who commune with Sophie in a language too complex for him to follow. They’d understand her chart, Serge thinks, looking at the wall whose web of lines and vectors has grown still larger and more complex since this afternoon: they’d look at it and know immediately what the letters meant, the links, all the associations …

  He finds her outside, in the Mosaic Garden. She’s moving among the flowers, pacing from one spot to another, back again, then onwards to a third spot, a fourth one, as though following a strict set of instructions. As he comes near, she leaves the path and starts moving around the flower bed itself, her lower body lost among tall iris-stems, like some giant grasshopper.

  “What are you doing?” Serge asks.

  She motions to him to be quiet. He treads softly as he walks across to join her. She takes two steps forwards, then one back, then one to the side, then stops, her whole body tensed up. She seems, once more, to be listening out for something. With each hand clasped around an iris stem, she looks like a tethered radio mast.

  “Why did you want me to come out here?” he asks.

  She’s silent for a while, then turns to him and says:

  “I wanted to tell you something.”

  “Tell me, then,” he tells her.

  She stands in silence for what seems like an age—then, just when he’s about to turn away and give up in frustration, says:

  “I’ve got a lover.”

  Serge is overtaken by a sudden sense of vertigo—as though the surface of the path he’s standing on, and of the lawn and flower beds around it, had all turned to glass, affording him a glimpse into a subterranean world of which he’s been completely unaware till now although it has been right beneath his feet: a kind of human wasp-nest world with air-filled corridors and halls and hatching rooms. More to regain his bearings than for any other reason, he asks Sophie:

  “Who is he?”

  “He’s my instructor in—” she begins; then, cutting herself short, says: “He’s secret; it’s all secret. But he’s made me sensitive. He’s done stuff to me. I can see things that …”

  “That what?”

  “See things. What’s coming. When the bodies meet and separate, and more bodies come out, the parts all lie around in segments.”

  “What bodies? Where?” asks Serge.

  “In London, Stamboul, Belgrade, everywhere,” she says. “It’s all connected. I feel it inside me. Look.”

  She takes his hand and lays it on her stomach. Her skin, through the cotton of her thin white dress, is soft and pliant. Serge can feel a rumbling beneath it. She must feel it too, because she adds:

  “It’s not the same as hunger.”

  He takes his hand away again. He knows what lovers do: he’s seen photographs, in a magazine he found lying on a bench in Lydium. There was a woman kneeling on a sofa, in front of creased curtains, and a man standing beside her on a carpet, sliding down her dress with one hand while in the other he held his own huge fleshy mast, which rose from the open fly-gap in his trousers; the woman was looking at it, smiling in a fiery, complicit way, as though she belonged to that subterranean world as well, was intimate with its cells, its alveolae, and could look out at the normal world from inside, mocking and unobserved. Does Sophie kneel on sofas in front of curtains? Does her face have that look? Right now, she’s looking straight ahead of her, but her eyes have emptied—or, rather, seem in the process of being filled from somewhere else. She’s muttering:

  “… when the bodies … and more bodies come, the parts … a bug massacre in Badsack, Juno Archipelago … above Buc, France: Pegonde—Reuters
…”

  She looks as though she were tuning into something—as though she had somehow turned herself into a receiver. Is that possible, Serge wonders—like Bodner’s spade, the house’s pipes? He’s read in Wireless World of a girl in America who picked up experimental stations on a filling in her tooth—but via insects and news headlines, flowers? The notion seems ridiculous. And yet some kind of transmission seems to be coursing through her body. As he watches her, her eyes grow brighter, which makes the sunken parts around them, their ridge-shadowed sockets, darken and become more cavernous.

  “You really should sleep,” Serge tells her. “Why don’t we go back to—”

  “He’s coming soon,” she interrupts him.

  “Who?” Serge asks.

  “Tomorrow, or the next day, he’ll come back.”

  “Oh, Father. Day after tomorrow, yes. Why don’t—”

  “Father!” she snorts. “He’s not your … It’s the other one. Monarch. Didn’t use paraphylectic.” She pauses, then continues: “He taught me the transpositions. Then he’ll slink into my dormitory, and wreak carnage.”

  Serge feels a chill. The air is cold, but it’s not that that makes him shiver: it’s the sense that Sophie’s talking about things he’s simply not equipped to understand, an apprehension that gulfs as wide as frozen interstellar distances are opening within her words, expanding beyond measure the gap between her and him. He asks her: