by Simon Ings
The big central looking glass was the only part of the table Mum ever kept clean. The table’s mirrored top was dusty and greasy, hidden under empty jewellery boxes, old Mother’s Day cards, tissues, a big plastic tub of all-purpose moisturiser. I piled this junk to the sides, clearing a space to work. I pulled open mirrored drawers, discovering foundations, eyeliners, shadows, gels. Not just Mum’s home-mades – real products. I laid them out. I knew what I was looking for. I knew what I was doing. Mum had taught me well. She had awoken these dark and liquid eyes. She had put this slim and swaying figure into motion. Now her creature sought her own life, through me.
I dipped a small, semicircular sponge in a bowl of water and squeezed it out, and again, until the water ran clear through my fingers. I picked up a compact and ran the sponge in circles through the foundation. The stuff was cold and clinging, tightening as it dried. I leant forward as I worked, dipping, wringing, dabbing, smoothing. My reflection entered the yellow cloud cast by the bulbs around the mirror. My face was as smooth as a doll’s. I ran a little purplish powder along my cheekbones, sculpting them. With brush and pencil I refashioned the sockets of my eyes, adding and subtracting shadows. I closed my eyes and ran blues in layers over my eyelids. When I was done my eyes were set like jewels. I drew a little kohl along the inside of my eyelids, behind the lashes, and leant forward, staring into my mother’s eyes.
I looked exactly like her. You could not have told us apart.
An hour by car. Two hours by train and bus. Around 4.30 on Saturday afternoon the bus dropped me off on a stretch of main road, woods to my left, fields on my right. There was a lane here the bus couldn’t negotiate, through woods and up a shallow hill to a hamlet that had fallen out of the usual channels of communication. I met no traffic on my way up the hill, no people. The air was still, the trees silent. My own movements sent cold fingers down the insides of my thighs, where mum’s nylon hose rubbed my shaved skin. Mum’s batik dress was long and tatty, tight and fitted round my belly and under my ribs.
At the top of the hill the trees gave way, the green tunnel parted and the village spread out before the eye, even and neat and simple as the setting for a model railway. There were no streets as such, just a horseshoe of houses around a rough-mown green. The houses shared no common style. It was as though a collector had gathered them here – someone with an eclectic eye for the rural vernacular. That this idyll came with a price tag was evident from the cars parked on the green. Aside from a couple of distressed 4by4s, they were all business saloons, showroom-clean.
The hamlet lay about a quarter of a mile away from the base, and far from the main gates. (There, young protestors had set up much livelier, more newsworthy camps than any Mum came near, though the woods they infested were hardly more than a large hedge, barely concealing the chainlink from the road. By night, tents and tarpaulins made looming, organic shapes in the headlights of passing cars.)
The camp Mum went to lay past the hamlet, and well out of sight of the base, where the ground fell away into a secret valley. It was an afternoon’s walk through woods to find the wire with its concrete fence posts turned to totems, painted with eyes, with snakes, with spiders dropping on wet silver ropes.
There was no centre to the camp, nothing to really ‘find’. Glimpses. A sheet of tarpaulin. A curl of pale smoke. Furtive things, hidden in plain sight. By then, of course, it was too late – the place had you surrounded.
There were women all around me, hidden, hissing at me. They were squatting in benders made from old tent canvas. They were crouching in teepees and yurts and behind screens of dead branches. They were hiding in nettle patches, hunkered down there like animals. Mum had told me they had their own religion here. Arachne was their goddess – web-weaver, binder of souls, symbol of the connected earth. Only now did I see that their trees were webbed with wool.
I ran my hand over a skein of black wool, knotted between the low branches. The hissing all around me died away. The oak was mostly dead. New growth burst where it could through the bark, so that the shape of the thing was hardly tree-like – more of a hedge.
I palmed the screen aside.
What had I expected? A room. A hollow tree that was at the same time a cabin. A home. A simple pallet bed. A rug. A pile of books. Not this. Between the roots of the great oak there was a kind of fox scratching. It was shallow. Filthy. It wasn’t even dry.
The tree wasn’t hollow. Lightning had split and scarred it, torn half its growth away, and over the years the trunk had swollen in a great horseshoe around the blighted part, making a crouch-hole only a dog could have sheltered in.
Ragged plastic sheets hung from low branches. Squatting among a heap of green nylon refuse sacks, Mum looked up from her work. Black wool. Busy fingers. Filthy hands. A web wove itself over the earth towards me. Mum stood up. She was wearing a striped jersey and sailor’s pants. Her feet were bare. Her toes clutched at the woollen web, tugging the clews.
I wanted to speak, to greet her, but words were dangerous here. My voice had begun to crack – it would have betrayed me. Mum cocked her head. She dropped her wool. Her fingers folded themselves into fists. Her busy toes. She followed the skeins towards me on shuffling feet. The blow was so fast, I didn’t even see it coming.
Now there were women everywhere. Running toward me. Kneeling by me. Wide-eyed. Hands upon me. ‘Who are you?’ ‘Who are you?’ ‘What do you want?’
My feet were tangled up in the woollen web. Women dragged me from Mum’s lair and the web followed me, tugging the branches towards me, shredding leaves into a green rain. Hands grabbed for me, but I was too heavy for them. Down I went.
‘What did you do?’ Hands tilted my head back. Blood ran into the back of my mouth. Through a pink mist, figures flitted back and forth. My feet were entangled. I couldn’t get them free.
‘Now calm down,’ someone snapped, as to a child.
Dad brought home the remains of Mum’s camping kit. The tent he’d bought her had vanished. Her sleeping bag was damp and smelly and there were green stains on it that would not lift. I laid the bag across the lawn to dry. Her aluminium cooker was more or less complete. I set the pieces out in a row along the conservatory steps and cleaned each in turn with soapy water and a wire brush. Just above me, behind glass doors, a serviceman wandered to and fro, eyes hidden behind black glasses. He put me in mind of an animal kept too long in a cage. Dad watched him from his desk, a dispassionate lion tamer.
That evening Dad and I drove to the hospital where Mum lay recuperating from a lung infection. The hospital was built on a chalk hill overlooking the port. Old barracks and defensive structures had been torn down and ground under to make room for the hospital which, from the sea, had all the appearance of a bigger, better fortification.
Dad went inside, leaving me to wander round the weedy paths, the flights of cracked concrete steps, the pot-holed roads. You needed first gear to reach the car park here, so there was this constant whine in the air – a common mechanical labour renewed again and again and again. In the dusty banks and verges that bordered every metal-railed stairway, I found nubs and flecks of red-pink brick – remains of the old fortress – and in between were thready weeds with bright blue, pink and yellow flowers.
From this high vantage, I could see how the port city had been constructed over a network of mudflats and channels. In between there were islands, but they were bridged over in too many places to really count as islands any more. In fact the whole estuary was so heavily built upon that roads and waterways blended in the eye, and it took an effort to pick them apart. I looked at my watch. Dad was taking a long time. I went inside to look for him.
I hadn’t seen Mum since I’d tried to visit her incognito in the camp. Dad had warned me that the sight of me would upset her, but my nose was already healed, more or less. If Dad had let me, it would have been the work of a moment for me to hide the bruising with make-up.
The hospital floor was a mottled red vinyl that looked as though i
t had been poured and left to set. Every few yards, at a stairwell or junction, there was a vending machine. I tried to get a carton of drink. I put in my money, typed the code. The metal coil shuddered, turned, stuck. There was a notice, red capitals on white self-stick plastic, telling me not to rock the machine, which anyway didn’t help and set off an alarm that everybody ignored.
Mum’s ward had this easy to miss open-plan arrangement – impossible to say where the corridor left off and the ward began. Mum was alone, lying with her back to me. I watched her a while, not saying anything, then I went away and looked for some magazines to flick through. My emotions were so mixed up, my attention so fractured, the articles might as well have been written in a foreign language.
Dad turned up eventually, approaching from the wrong direction.
‘Where’ve you been?’
Dad told me Mum was ‘on the mend’.
‘When’s she coming home?’
‘Have you been in to see her?’
‘She was sleeping.’ Of course, she might not have been sleeping at all. She could have been just lying there.
I wanted to go see her again but Dad was keen to get going. ‘School tomorrow.’ As though my bedtime were any different from his.
It was nearly dark by the time we got going and still Dad was hunting for words, the right spell to lock down whatever he’d seen, or learnt, or been told. No lid he tried seemed to fit. ‘The camp’s got your Mum pretty messed up.’ The form of words he picked – ‘your mum’ in place of ‘Sara’ – was a measure of the trouble we were in. He was trying to establish something. He was trying to set this down. To be clear. ‘She’s upset.’
They’d wanted his signature.
‘Signature for what?’
He hadn’t signed.
‘For what? Dad?’
‘She’s upset.’
‘Dad.’
He pulled the car to the kerb. We were nearly home; halfway through the housing estate. It was Dad’s usual short-cut, he knew the way. There was no need for us to stop. He rubbed his hand across his eyes, faking a headache, thinking that I could not see his tears.
‘Please Dad.’
Dad undid his seatbelt and put his arms around me and held me. It was horrible. Unbearable. I was pinned by my belt. I couldn’t reach to undo it. I couldn’t hug him back. I was stuck there – his object. And here he was, holding me, shaking like an injured dog, faking everything, telling me everything was going to be all right, pretending (this was worst of all) that it was him who was comforting me.
The town I grew up in was a friendly place. At least, it was friendly to us. Because of the hotel, we were known to people – a local business, a source of summer jobs. Women fussed over my father. Febrile with a late and hopeless heat, they imagined they could save him from his ‘impossible’ wife. While Mum remained in hospital under psychiatric observation, they steeped us in sympathy and relationship teas. We whiled away hours like that, separately and together, in strange sitting rooms, breathing stale desire.
Some of those women tried to get to Dad through me. One in particular, distracted from her main purpose by what she called my ‘charm’, decided to pull up her top and get her tits out. They were very large but her nipples were tiny. Sucking one was like rolling a sugar cake decoration around in my mouth.
She helped me with her hands and tongue. She was quite rough. She took my hands and placed them on the back of her head. I wound my fingers in her hair and dared to pull her onto me. She made a little moan and slid me right down her throat. I rocked against her. After a minute of this she gagged and pulled away. ‘There are condoms in that drawer when you’re ready.’
I had never handled a condom before. I couldn’t make it unravel. Maybe it was inside out. I turned it round. That wasn’t right either.
‘Give it to me.’ The moment she leant over me I began to wilt. She wiggled me about and took me into her mouth again but it didn’t do any good.
‘Do you mind if I wank for a bit?’ she said, trying to turn me on.
‘No, I don’t mind.’
She laughed. ‘You’re such a gentleman.’
This is the sort of thing you say to a child.
I moved around the bed, curious to see her put her fingers inside herself, but all she did was fiddle. It reminded me of Dad worrying at a grease mark on our immaculate bar top. I ran my feet along the insides of her thighs, and she seemed to like that. She took hold of my foot and rested it against her sex. She rubbed my toes against her, making them wet.
At last she took pity on me. ‘Well,’ she said, gathering her clothes, ‘that was naughty.’
I used her bathroom. Her medicine cabinet was full of products she had brought back from overseas trade fairs; pharmaceuticals with names unsuited to the domestic market. Polysilane Upsa, Neo-Angin. Smecta. Spassirex. The shower looked fancy, but it wasn’t up to much. I remember the whine of the pump, and a sound in the pipes like a child draining juice from a carton.
The way home from her house led me beside the river, along the track I took to school. Its bark-chip surface had worn away, and the ground was soft after days of rain. I should have known better than to attempt the track in trainers. The wet soaked through my socks.
A serviceman picked his way towards me. I recognised him by his hair – albino white and wild. He was in trouble. His vest tick-tocked, tick-tocked, useless in this maze, and he wove from one side of the track to the other, unable to plan his line. How easily he might have stumbled off between the trees. The river ran behind them, sluggish and slow-moving; it made no sound.
Dad’s blinded servicemen didn’t often come this way into town. Their goggled, low-resolution blindsight handled the box-like architectures of the housing estate much more easily. The ambiguous and busy undergrowth of the track tended to confuse them. Here, they’d have been better served by a stick, a dog, a sense of hearing.
The white-haired man walked with a defensive, mechanical stiffness. I recognised it. I recognised him. We approached each other. In army boots he overcame the uneven ground. My presence confused him. When I veered left, he veered right, straight towards me. I skipped to one side to avoid him. He stopped and turned to me. The sun glittered off his goggles and winked in the lens of the camera mounted on his left earpiece. His chest chattered monotonously as he stood, perfectly still, the machine at his hip repeating, in regular pulses, the scene before him. Boy against foliage.
I said, ‘Good afternoon.’
His face showed no recognition. His hand worked at his fly and his erection slid into the light, hard and white and as long as a dagger.
EIGHT
‘What do you do, Conrad?’
We are sitting, Hanna and I, against the upturned hulk of a fishing boat, staring at the waves.
‘I work for an AR company.’
The contrast between Hanna’s life of muscular simplicity and my day job could hardly be greater. Hanna planes and scrapes, drills and sands. I spend my days stroking glass panels, bringing images to life against their printed target. This is what AR stands for: Augmented Reality. ‘We turn newspapers and magazines into rich media. Every newspaper photograph becomes its own TV channel . . .’
The ocean has piled the shingle steeply, and even on a day as calm as this, the waves churn and plunge with a terrible violence. No way could you ever swim in this. The pebble bank is very high, and where we’re sat, half way down its stepped incline, we have no view of the desert expanse at our back. Even the tops of the lighthouses are hidden. We are trapped between the pebble wall and the roaring sea.
‘Basically,’ I tell her, ‘it’s advertising. It’s about laying an advertising layer over the physical world.’
‘Is it difficult?’
‘Not especially. Mathematically it can mess with your head but intellectually it’s on a par with casting a ghost onto a sheet of glass. An old stage trick.’ The core of our AR business is a billboard system. Image recognition software running on a smartphone or a
pair of web-enabled spectacles sews moving pictures over a static target. Someone walking past an ad for the latest movie will see the hoarding spring to life, screening its trailer.
‘And everyone can see your ghosts?’
‘Anyone stood behind some web-enabled glass. It’s all a bit art-student at the moment, but there’s a lot of commercial interest.’
Hanna thinks about this. She says, ‘But it’s all the wrong way round. People are having to go out of their way to see your advertising.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘They’re having to put on funny glasses, or raise a phone to their faces. Who goes to that much trouble just to see an advert?’
‘At the moment, yes, you’re right.’ I pick up a pebble and throw it into the sea. ‘But web-enabled glasses look like they’ll be flying off the shelves next year. It’s only a matter of time before the web becomes wearable, just another form of clothing between you and the world.’ Biting the bullet, I describe the future as my employers see it: a giant mall overlaid with proprietary information. ‘Sale, Last Three Days!’ ‘Next Bus 5 mins.’ ‘NOW – Happy Hour.’ Image overlaid with image, veiling the Real with arrows and exclamation points.
‘Bloody hell,’ she says.
I put what gloss on it I can, ‘With AR, you can thread private and public spaces through each other. You can turn public spaces into private screening rooms. Augmented Reality will change how space is used.’
‘You mean you’re privatizing it.’
‘What?’
‘You’re privatizing civic space.’
‘No—’
‘Yes. That’s what you’re doing. You’re doing away with personal perception. You’re directing people to see things a certain way. You’re telling people what to pay attention to.’
