It seemed cruel to her. For the boy, though, the light was the thing, the light and the chase: nothing was like slipping a dog then watching it run down the light. ‘It’s only the most exciting thing in the world!’ he said. He wasn’t even particular if he caught anything. Any rabbit could make a yard or two on the dog, parley it into an escape. ‘They’re in the hedge before you know it.’ He could show her if she wanted. ‘I’ve took videos of those dogs before they died.’ He gestured vaguely towards Wyndlesham. ‘I keep them over there.’ He kept the videos of his dogs over there, the other side of Ampney, in the bothy where he lived. It wasn’t far. ‘I could show you!’ he said.
Both of them were surprised by this. They stared at each other, puzzled by so much contact. The boy turned away.
‘If you wanted,’ he said, in a different voice.
Half past five: in an hour the de Spencer Arms would be rammed again. The sloping back garden would fill with people, shoulder to shoulder in the warm dark. There would be a run on nervous laughter and narcissistic shouting. By closing time the Downs would have bulked up black against the stars. They would absorb it all and provide no echo. Anna raised her glass, considered the inch of beer left at the bottom of it.
‘All right,’ she said.
The bothy, a long single-storey wooden structure which had once housed the unmarried male servants of the local fox hunt (an institution known in its heyday as ‘the Ampney’), stood in the middle of a field next to a few courses of brick and an overgrown cobbled yard. It was a shed, really, already cold in the afternoon, its untreated cement floors polished by decades of use. There was a kitchen at one end, a storage unit full of rusting bed frames and plastic-wrapped supermarket pallets of dog-food at the other. Between them, five or six empty rooms opened off a narrow windowless passage lighted by a single twenty-watt bulb. To the extent that he had any, the boy had moved his belongings into the kitchen, where it was relatively warm. Two shelves held packets of cereal, tins of baked beans and 8 per cent-proof lager. A single bed was pushed up against the wall in one corner. ‘I don’t need much,’ he said. ‘I was never much for things.’ There was a paraffin heater but no kettle. He made tea using lukewarm water straight from an ancient Creda heater mounted on the wall above the sink and paid his rent directly to ‘them down the fields’, who had acquired the bothy in some cash-free transaction he didn’t understand, and who sometimes dragged a bed into one of the other rooms for weekend use.
‘It’s cheap enough,’ he said.
The only contemporary thing in the kitchen was a reconditioned laptop from the early 2000s, wired into the overhead light socket through a brownout-protector. ‘It’s all in here,’ he said, with a kind of shy irony: ‘My life.’ He showed as much pride in the machine as in his uploads to YouTube. These unsteady, ill-lit glimpses, caught on a pocket camcorder, didn’t even seem cruel, only difficult to interpret. Jittery ellipses and smears of whitish light appeared and disappeared suddenly in a black rectangle. They picked out a hedge, a patch of long grass in a field, a fence post at an odd angle. Something zigzagged into the light and out of it again. Something else turned and turned and vanished suddenly into a hedge. At the end of each clip there was the boy, an ethereal smile on his face, holding up dead rabbits by their ears. Once, the dogs put up a deer, which stared at them then walked slowly out of camera. He had set some of the videos to contemporary pastoral music, others to thirty-year-old Death Metal. Watching them galvanised him all over again, the way a passing scent had once galvanised his dogs. He sat on the bed next to Anna. There was nowhere else to sit. She could feel him trembling with excitement. ‘What do you think?’ he asked her. ‘What do you think of that!’
Once she had got over her distaste, Anna felt bored. She was glad when he turned off the computer and with a smile half diffident, half sly, pushed her down. ‘Let me get these jeans off you,’ she said. She laughed. ‘They could do with a wash.’ And later: ‘You’re hurting me a little bit.’ He went on without seeming to hear and soon she had forgotten, the way you forget the creak and bang of the bed or the people coming and going in the corridor outside a hotel room. To fuck at all is a blessing. He wasn’t Tim Waterman, but he wasn’t Michael Kearney either, and he got hard again as quickly as most boys.
Anna fell asleep. When she woke the bothy was cold and the boy was standing naked by the window gazing out across the fields towards the village. The light had begun to fade. Wisps of mist were already coming up over the river. He’d had enough for the moment, she could see. His back, whiter and thinner than she had expected, seemed vulnerable, illuminated from within. Anna watched him a minute or two, then gathered her clothes and began to get dressed. When she thought the time was right, she said:
‘I’ve got some work I need doing.’
The boy made a movement with one shoulder, a shrug or perhaps a wince. He wasn’t looking for work, he said. He had enough work.
‘What kind of work is it?’ he asked.
It wasn’t much, she said. It was just some painting.
He had enough of that kind of work, the boy said.
‘I need someone to look at my bathroom,’ Anna said. ‘I don’t live far. If you called later in the week, you could do the work I need.’
He moved his shoulder again and kept looking out of the window. ‘Those dogs of mine were company ’til the grey hare got across them.’ Anna, receiving this as ‘grey hair’, had no idea what he meant. ‘That spoiled everything. I could talk to them until then.’ As she was leaving he turned round and said, ‘I’ll come and see you though? I’ll be coming to see you?’
Anna touched his arm and smiled. ‘Put your clothes on,’ she said. ‘It’s cold in here.’
The lane outside had filled with mist, yet if you looked directly upward you could see the stars. Anna turned towards Wyndlesham, walking as briskly as she could. Once or twice she raised her arms in the air or smiled for no reason. She wondered what had really happened to the dogs. Those lovely, lovely animals. Perhaps he’d sold them. Perhaps he’d just grown tired of them. I can’t imagine what Marnie will make of him, she thought: although it’s none of her business. She looked for her phone, couldn’t find it; stopped suddenly, brought both hands to her mouth and laughed. I can’t believe myself, she thought. When she looked back, the bothy seemed to hang without support in the gathering dusk. Everything it represented was history. Since the banking meltdown of 2007, the stable-block itself – built by John Ampney in the late 18th century from locally-sourced brick and pantile and not then intended to house the hunt – had tracked closely the declining economic curve: redevelopment, first as prestige office space, then as a paintball ‘shoot house’; a decade of squatting and abandonment; finally, annexation by the local authority as Kent and Sussex struggled to contain thousands of Chinese economic refugees washing up in the old Cinque Ports; after which it had been allowed to fall down.
At home there were several messages from Marnie – ‘Mum, I‘m trying to call but your mobile is off again. Mum? Mum, please pick up.’ – and one from Helen Alpert reminding Anna of her appointment the next morning. Anna, starving, made baked beans on toast. While the beans were heating up, she walked to and fro eating slices of quince cheese with some cold lentils she had found at the back of the fridge. She swept the old cat up in her arms and squeezed him in a way he had never liked. ‘James, James, oh James,’ she said: ‘What have you been up to?’ She awarded herself half a bottle of Calvet Prestige Rouge, which caused her to fall asleep in front of the TV.
When she woke, it was late. The cat was out again. She drank a glass of water and went to the garden window. The summerhouse seemed quiet. And yet the dreams she had had! She went out and, standing barefoot on the lawn, worked her toes into the damp turf to wake herself up. ‘James!’ she called. A great beam of off-white light struck out from somewhere behind the house – like the sweep of headlights as a car turns in off the road into your drive, but silent, frozen and prolonged. Or like a huge door ope
ned: light squared-off somehow, sharp-edged, looking for something to reveal, in this case the thousands of cats boiling across the water meadow towards Anna’s home in an alert, silent rush. Every one of them was either black or white. They poured into the garden, parting around the summerhouse, and up towards Anna, of whom they took no more notice than the garden furniture. On and on they came like a problem in statistical mechanics, without any apparent slackening or falling away of numbers, pouring out of the meadow, pouring away behind the house. Anna, deep in explicatory failure, had no way of placing herself with regard to this event: she did not in any sense know what she felt about it. Now she winced away and tried to climb the garden fence. Now she waded directly into the stream of cats, and stood with tears of pure delight streaming down her face, feeling them flow around her, bringing with them the warmth of their bodies, also a close, dusty but not unpleasant smell – until suddenly the light turned itself off and the garden was empty again. She stood for a moment wiping her eyes and laughing. Then she went back into the house and left a message with Dr Alpert’s answering service: ‘Helen, I don’t feel I want to carry on with our conversations. I feel as if I would rather take charge of myself again.’
She left a similar message with her daughter. ‘I’m not sure I can explain. I’m just not such hard work for myself as I used to be.’ She searched for something else to say. ‘I saw a lot of cats in the garden this evening!’ Since this didn’t seem to approach the facts, or give any feeling of the rest of her day, she added: ‘And, Marnie, I met someone, but I don’t know if you’ll like him.’
She put the phone down and looked for Michael Kearney’s computer drive. Excavated from the litter at the bottom of her bag, it lay on the kitchen counter like an enchanted egg, its surface rich with wear, magically transforming ordinary reflected domestic light into year upon year of guilt. Anna Waterman had no idea if the old man in South London was really Brian Tate. She would have to accept that her memory of the scandals surrounding Michael’s death and Tate’s downfall would always be clouded; that her struggles with Michael – like her struggles with herself – would grow increasingly meaningless. At a certain age, she now understood, you owe the past nothing except to recognise it as the past. Michael could go to hell, if he wasn’t already there. Tomorrow she would take the pocket drive to Carshalton and, one way or another, relinquish responsibility for whatever data it contained; and that would be that.
TWENTY
Modern Luminescence
‘It came out of nowhere.’
‘Nothing comes out of nowhere.’
‘Ha ha. What is it?’
‘It says “biological content”.’
The tank had been through some recent high-temperature event, after which it pitched into empty space a light minute off the Nova Swing’s bow, where it hung in a dissipating froth of zero-point energy and junk matter until Fat Antoyne fetched it on board. It was scarred and scraped, losing colour rapidly through a palette of Christmas reds through light plum to the matt grey you would associate with a military asset. Much of the exterior work had vaporised; the remaining fitments made no sense unless it had been an internal component of some other structure. Once it was cool enough to touch Antoyne unbolted the porthole cover.
‘Shine the light.’
Liv Hula shone the light. ‘Out of nowhere!’ she repeated. ‘I nearly flew into it.’ She was excited until she saw what was inside.
Cable trailed from the core-points in the spine. The skin stretched over the skull like the tanned or preserved skin of a bog-burial. No flesh remained between that and the bone beneath. The withered lips drew back over large uneven teeth. The eyes, bloodshot and bugged up past life size, glared from tarry sockets. Something was wrong with the hair. It was hard to make out the rest. The tank proteome – thirty thousand protein species like warm spit – swirled sluggishly about it.
Liv turned away in disgust.
‘It’s not an alien,’ she said. ‘It’s a K-captain.’
For her, that meant a metaphor for the condition of sky-pilots everywhere: dissociation, hallucination, invasive surgery, the surrendering of humanity for a way of life so worthless it made you laugh.
‘Throw it back,’ she advised.
Antoyne didn’t want to get into that. He heard it all before. To change the subject he said, ‘I almost think I recognise this guy.’
Liv took another look: shrugged.
‘They’re all the same. Scoliosis. Pseudo-polio. Half the organs gone, wires everywhere.’ And when Antoyne wondered what unimaginable forces had blown this one out of his ship: ‘Don’t assume it’s male. More than half of them sign up as girls. It’s the thinking twelve-year-old’s alternative to anorexia.’
Antoyne moved the inspection lamp around. It was like a wreck under water in there. Fine silt fell through the beam.
‘Is it dead yet?’ Irene the mona called from the crew quarters.
They were thirty lights from anywhere, in the voids by the Tract itself. The big argument they had, which went back and forth while Antoyne screwed the porthole cover back on, was if they had come upon the tank by accident, or whether it was another item on MP Renoko’s cargo manifest. It was a measure of how weird their sense of reality had got, Liv Hula insisted, that they couldn’t decide. They stood there for a time, arguing back and forth, then left the hold.As soon as the bulkhead door closed behind them, bursts of high-speed code issued from the K-tank – chirps and stutters, odd runs of simple calculus, fragments of ordinary language mysterious yet emphatic – as if the occupant was trying to make contact but couldn’t remember how. The other items in the hold were inappropriately excited by this, flashing and winking in return, humming with subsonics, emitting brief flashes of ionising radiation. After perhaps an hour – its baroque ribs and lumps of melted inlet pipe making it look like a child’s coffin decorated with mouldings of elves, unicorns and dragons – the newcomer seemed to calm down.
‘We should dump it in the nearest sun,’ said Liv.
The day you enlist for the K-ships, you haven’t eaten for forty-eight hours. They give you the injections, and within twenty-four hours your blood is teeming with pathogens, artificial parasites, tailored enzymes. You present with the symptoms of MS, lupus and schizophrenia. They strap you down. Over the next three days the shadow operators, running on nanomech, take your sympathetic nervous system to pieces, flushing the waste out continually through the colon. They pump you with a paste of ten-micrometre-range factories, protein farms and metabolic monitors. They core your spine. You remain awake throughout, except for the brief moment when they introduce you to the K-code itself. Many recruits don’t make it past that point. If you do, they bolt you into the tank at the front of the ship. By then most of your organs are gone. You’re blind and deaf. A kind of nauseous surf is rolling through you. They’ve cut into your brain so that it will accept the hardware bridge known as ‘the Einstein Cross’. You connect with the ship math. You will soon be able to consciously process 15 petabytes of data per second: but you will never walk again. You will never touch someone or be touched, fuck or be fucked. You will never do anything for yourself again. You will never even shit for yourself.
You sign up in a private room at a pleasant temperature: nevertheless, you can’t get warm. You say goodbye to your parents. They give you the emetics whether you’ve eaten or not. Then it’s an hour or two to wait before the injections start. Forty years ago – shivering on the edge of a bed, vomiting into a plastic bowl while she tried to hold around her a hospital gown that fell open constantly at the back – it had come to Liv Hula that she would be able to choose the Einstein Cross, but that she would never, ever be able to unchoose it. So she had put the bowl down carefully, and, speaking to no one, got dressed again and gone back to her life.
Everywhere they stopped after that, the talk was war. Provocation was heaped on provocation. Every rhetoric had its counter-rhetoric, every history was self-revised. Riots erupted across Halo cities. Out
near Panamax IV, two unidentified cruisers ambushed a helpless K-ship. It was a major flashpoint: the boys from Earth had dropped the ball. Nastic assets roared into known space. Their manoeuvres out near Coahoma and the Red Revenues hadn’t been the bumbling, half-hearted adventures presented by EMC: rather they revealed pattern, a cold, technical mind, deft new kinds of hit-and-run, workouts for a major offensive. It was, in a sense, the perfect psychodrama of betrayal. Whole star systems were gas in half a day. Refugees were already on the move. Irene stared at the news and found herself martyred to empathy and nonrecreational mood swings. One moment she would be saying: ‘I will never get tired of this, all our adventures with these cosmic winds, and tides roaring through space!’, the next it was, ‘We all got a black heart to our personality, Antoyne.’
What had upset her so on New Venusport, she refused to say.
Fat Antoyne had found her a mile from the Deleuze Motel, teetering at the end of a line of footprints on the hard wet sand. It was the hour before dawn. She’d lost her bag, also one of her best shoes. Her face and hands were cold and salt. Overcome in ways he couldn’t explain, he tried to put his arms around her. But though Irene had the expression of someone ready to seek help anywhere it could be found, she only stepped away.
‘Antoyne, no,’ she said.
Aboard the Nova Swing once more, she kept to herself. Even safe in empty space, she couldn’t sleep. On the beach before Antoyne arrived, she had been trying to imagine Madame Shen’s Circus in its glory days: music, alien shows, marzipan, white frocks, fresh sunshine on the midway. People laughing and fucking on the very sand where Irene stood! But she couldn’t forget that she had wet herself looking into the mysteries of the STARLIGHT ROOM, where the three ghastly white-capped figures of Kokey Food, Mr Freedom and The Saint cast their dice; and when her wonderful, warm man found her, her neck was stiff from staring as hard as she could in the opposite direction to that dispiriting place. ‘Change your game you change your luck,’ she told Liv Hula, ‘that’s everything I used to believe in life.’ The past was gone. Only the present could affect the future, and the future was always open for business: that was how she had always seen it. ‘But Liv, now I recognise each change of heart is just another scam performed upon yourself!’
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