Wolves

by Simon Ings

  People who know nothing about advertising always assume people are defenceless against it. ‘That’s not going to happen.’

  ‘Really? Why not?’

  I do my best to explain why AR is worthwhile. Virtual Reality was crack cocaine, spiriting its wraiths away to NeverNeverLand, and that is why it never really took off. Augmented Reality is different. ‘AR exists to heighten the present moment . . .’

  ‘Conrad.’ She waits for me to look at her. ‘It stifles the present moment. It replaces reality with a – a recording.’

  How easy for Hanna to take the moral high ground, free of the burdens of ambition or responsibility or any interest beyond her own self-fantasy! ‘For fuck’s sake, you’re surely not going to tell me that your bloody boat trip is authentic, are you?’

  Hanna smiles and shrugs and backs off and pretends not to understand. Of course she understands; she’s not stupid.

  Hanna spends the rest of the day indoors with her maps and guides, her lists of foreign vocabulary and her text books. (Her language teaching is supposed to feed and equip the couple as they circumnavigate the earth.)

  On board the boat, meanwhile, Michel plugs a loft-lamp into the extension lead and fits a sheet of ply across the width of the cabin to make a desk. The cabin doubles as his study.

  He helps me on board. ‘You’ll like this,’ he says. Shoved deep in the bows is a grey plastic attaché case. Inside are maps. He spreads them over the plywood table.

  A lot of the hills round here are called islands. Isle of This, Isle of That. ‘It’s in the place names, see? The land round here has been dry land, farmland, for only a couple of hundred years.’

  It has been easy, an enjoyable thing for Michel to re-imagine this place, to make islands of these gentle hills and to trace and shade with a blue pencil the line of imaginary coastlines of the future. When we were children, school friends, Michel and I would play this same game, poring over my Dad’s old maps of the town, seeing which streets we could inundate, transforming familiar ground with a meshwork of inlets and peninsulas. There is something magnificent in the continuity of Michel’s obsessions. He hasn’t changed at all.

  At the same time, how can he be so childish? ‘So how far into your book are you?’ I say, to prick his fantasy.

  ‘About three hundred thousand words.’

  Which shuts me up.

  He folds the maps away. ‘This stuff’s just the scene-setting, the research. In the end, so long as you’ve done it, so long as important bits of it are parked in the back of your head, none of this world-building nonsense matters. But I thought you’d like to see it.’ He knows I do not take his literary ambitions seriously.

  ‘So what’s next?’ I ask him.

  ‘I’ll have to find myself an agent.’

  ‘Good luck.’ But he has read my reaction, and gauged my disapproval, so there is no point in my keeping silent. ‘And this book of yours is going to help fund the voyage?’

  ‘That’s the idea.’ Then he casts his hand around the cabin and says something so off-point, so unexpected, it is night before I think to measure its implications. He says, ‘If, that is, we ever sail.’

  Come nightfall, it is raining – a proper ocean squall, sudden, short, the wind a knot trying violently to solve itself, the rain like spray from a fire hose.

  We can none of us get to sleep. Around midnight Michel and Hanna stumble out of their bedroom fully dressed and make tea. Mugs in hand, we brave the weather. Laughing and cursing, we clamber aboard the boat.

  We stand, the three of us, in the cabin, looking through its rain-beaded Perspex at the silhouettes of the inland hills. These are the same hills Michel pointed out to me this afternoon. They mark the old coastline, before the land was claimed and drained for pasture. The villages perched on these hills (Isle of This, Isle of That) were ports, once upon a time. Big, successful towns – their skylines are dominated by churches so big they could be cathedrals. These days, of course, it’s all overpriced coaching inns, antiques, second-hand bookshops, cloth mice.

  The sky is clearing, but the hills are smudged, as though a thumb has smeared charcoal into the orange haze cast by port cities to the west. Standing here, it is easy to imagine the flood to come.

  Lift the boat from its trestles.

  Watch the trestles twist away on the dark water, disappearing behind the house.

  Then, lift the house.

  There is Hanna, working indoors, surrounded by her books. Turn the house slowly round so she can face the sea. She raises her head. She sees a flash, a storm, and she smiles to think of all she has to learn.

  On board the boat, meanwhile, Michel (eyes down, pen poised, a head crammed full of fantasy) does not feel the subtle current bearing him inland, over flooded levels, past the comically bloated corpses of drowned cattle, towards the hills the maps have down, even now, as islands. Isle of This. Isle of That. On the shore, axes ring out as the townsfolk, troubled by a revenant folk-memory, chop wood for boats of shallow draught and, salivating, eye the skies for teal, widgeon, wintering geese.

  Rushes grow up to tickle the branches of dying trees and nowhere is there a defined boundary between land and estuary.

  Here and there, banks of shingle rise incrementally above the shallow sea like a new medium, neither sea nor land – an unreliable medium where men and livestock founder and blue lights flicker mysteriously in the hours before morning.

  Of the towns the miniature railway once served, only roofs remain. A bell sounds under the waves at every turning of the tide, from a church built beside an old military canal. The waterway’s route is marked now by the makeshift floats – old soda bottles, plastic canteens that once held washing powder, all treasured now and irreplaceable – that mark the dropping points of lobster pots.

  Fishermen appear, steering strange coracles. Oyster divers, boys with bags around their hips and wooden nose plugs, dive for a catch that breeds within the rotten brickwork of the canal. Lobsters and crabs have scratched themselves crafty tunnels here, switchbacks, false entrances, so that the boys come up with their fingers bloody, nipped by claws.

  North then, crossing over the drowned canal, careful to avoid the tower where the bell rings out each turning of the tide, to the mirrored waters that once were marsh, and will be marsh again, to where Hanna spins, safe in her chalet, anchored to the shingle by the strangest material: filaments of copper wire, optic fibre, plastic pipe, their uses uncertain now, forgotten, as the future pins the past under the water, drowning it.

  ‘If, that is, we ever sail.’

  Already afloat on a sea of words, already embarked upon his private voyage, Michel stands at the porthole, pointing out clusters of light on the hills. Old port towns, landlocked by centuries. They were islands once and now they’re islands in his head, and he is happy to have found a way, half-way respectable, maybe even remunerative (his book might be good, for all I know) to live inside his ideas of the Fall.

  As he talks, I feel for Hanna’s hand. I take it in my own. Gently I squeeze.

  She runs her thumb across the back of my hand.

  A few nights later, there is a party.

  Michel chivvies us into the truck. It’s a two-seater, I’m riding in the flatbed. A motorcycle tyre makes a seat for me. It feels as though I’m sitting on a toilet. Hanna tucks me round with the fleecy throw she’s fetched from the sofa.

  ‘I’ll be warm enough.’

  She tucks the blanket round me as though I were her dolly.

  Michel hands me a can of beer then climbs behind the wheel. He takes the shingle road gently, then speeds off like a dog out of the gate as soon as he hits hardtop. The reclaimed land – old marsh, made into weedy fields – is flat and monotonous. It won’t admit its closeness to the sea at all – you have to search for clues. I glimpse the top of a red sail behind a hedge, and we shoot by the entrance with a sign, crudely done, for a water sports school. Hard as I look, I get no glimpse of water. We drive past an army artillery range –
a long run of chainlink and nothing else to see. A grassy blank. I would like to drive this road some time. It weaves and rocks: an hypnotic rhythm, like something from a driving game. I remember my beer. I pull the ring and the can explodes. I lean forward, keeping the stuff off myself. The wind whips the foam welling out of the top of the can and trails it into the dark.

  Michel drops a gear, and then another, and the truck tilts sharply. I brace myself. Brambles choke the narrow lane that leads, steep as a funicular, up through a tilted zone to the mainland proper, and the west.

  The road bends back and forth, following the old shoreline. Solid land on one side of the road slides and slips away from the other in muddy, fertile gobs. This soft slippage suggests less the action of ancient tides than the recent melting of a candle.

  We pass through old, landlocked harbour towns, one after another. Through the windows of old coaching inns I catch glimpses of red linoleum. The forecourts of the timber merchants are piled with shipping pallets. Teenage girls with bare legs are smoking together under the grey-orange lights of station car parks.

  We pick up speed on a dual carriageway between hillsides cut up into cereal fields: enclosures as vast and arbitrary as strip-mines. Ragged hedges. Crows. By now I’m frozen to a popsicle, I’ve got my hands stuffed in my jacket and still I can barely feel my fingers. My head is a block of ice; even blinking is a struggle. Most of this is wind-chill. But something is happening to the weather, too. Gusts beat about the truck like starlings scrapping over a piece of bread. There’s a band of cloud moving in from the sea. It’s so low it looks more like a wall, and above it, catching the last of the light, are towers of brighter cloud, as smooth as porcelain – the prows of strange ships riding a dark tide into harbour.

  Off the main road, Michel slows sharply for blind bends in the dusk, then brakes and turns. The truck rumbles and sways, finding its balance on an exhausted gravel driveway, all mud and hardcore and potholes. I lever myself up and round to lean on the roof of the cab. The drive is lined with trees. It curves steadily. On the left are fields, to the right a bank of rhododendrons – the truck’s headlights rummage through their gloss, leathery green.

  The house comes into view. It’s a big, no-nonsense place, its white stucco luminous in the dusk. It’s a couple of hundred years old, from the look of it. It has not been long abandoned. There must be two, three hundred people gathered on the lawn, in vans parked up on the gravel turning circle, and in the house itself. The windows have no curtains, and you can see inside every room – they’re all lit up. The electricity is still connected, or it’s been jemmied on.

  The garden is ornate and disorganised. Many shrubs are hidden under wet clothes and sheets of muddy canvas. Teepees make angular shadows under the trees. Cigarette ends tattoo the darkness. Fifty feet away, a pampas grass has been set on fire. It burns with a roiling, liquid flame. The air stinks of petrol. There’s a dip in the land behind the house. Behind it, trees make a dense black screen – a false horizon. There’s a sound system in the dip; its noise seems to be emanating from within the earth. Its industrial beats melt to form something ponderous and wet – a faltering heart.

  In the middle of the lawn, a boy with a shaved head is pouring petrol onto a pile of furniture and floorboards scavenged from the house. There are upholstered chairs there. Leather trunks. Clothes. A child’s bed. The boy takes a swig of petrol from the can, flicks a lighter in front of his face and blows fire. A cheer goes up and the heap explodes. The boy falls back, rubbing his face. The bonfire catches in stages, a staggered spectacle, the turning on of civic illuminations. Somewhere deep in the pile, batteries pop. A pair of silk knickers rises on the expanding air and catches fire.

  Hanna takes my arm and squeezes. I turn to her, thinking she must be enjoying this, but her expression is carefully blank. Coming here was Michel’s idea, not hers. Michel, grinning, waves his phone in the air, saluting us, and wanders off, snapping pictures as he goes. Then Hanna moves away and I am left alone, wondering why the hell they brought me here. What’s here for me? A bunch of kids on heat, demonstrating their lack of materialism by destroying someone else’s stuff. It is an unpleasant reminder that the human world falls apart, not through catastrophe, but from mounting internal failure. I wonder where the house’s owners are.

  Partygoers gather round the flames, shouting. They seem determined to incite my paranoia. I step away from the noise, but my gaze is held by the shapes in the flames – turned wood and latticework – and metal-salt colours spilling from the curtains jumbled on top of the pyre. I’d lay money not one kid here has a clue how to turn wood, or make a chair, or knit a blanket for a child. They still live in a world of affordable plenty. Stuff, for them, is a utility, on tap. They rate this evening a misdemeanour, like flooding a public bathroom. Everything can be replaced. They believe this. Soon they will wake to discover that, blinded by fictitious capital, they have been torching what few riches were left.

  The world ends, not with flood or plague or famine, but with a man torching his own house.

  A boy tries to sell me a can of lager from a barrow parked under a tree. Rebellion against the market system can only be taken so far.

  The kitchen has been left more or less intact. There has even been some attempt at catering. There are plates piled on every surface. By the sink there are plastic washbowls full of punch, black under the weak fluorescent light. It’s crowded, as kitchens always are. Near the door, surrounded by girls who crowd her round like acolytes, I see a woman in late middle age. She’s standing with her back to me. Her hair is grey and shaved so short I can see her skull.

  ‘Mind,’ comes a voice beside me.

  I cannot move – neither do I want to.

  ‘Fucking mind.’ Someone opens a fridge door into my foot. I move aside, lose sight of the woman a second, and push through the crush only to find that she is gone.

  I look around for something, anything, to drink. There’s a half-full bottle of vodka on the windowsill. I need something to steady myself. I need room to think. She looked like Mum. She looked exactly like Mum, the last time I saw her alive. It cannot be her – but what if it is? Her being here would solve all mysteries – all, barring the mystery of how she could possibly still be living.

  In the hall the stairs are jammed with girls waiting miserably for their turn on the one working toilet. ‘I’m off to shit in the garden,’ says one, the fattest of them, barrelling me into the wall as she goes. ‘Mind,’ she says.

  ‘Mind yourself, you fat fuck.’

  She hesitates and turns, squeezing her fists, the flesh squishing like dough, but the urgency in her bowels overcomes her annoyance with me. Someone on the stairs calls me a cunt. This, from people like this, I can live with. I take the stairs at speed. Hands and feet whip out of the way of my feet like fish darting for the shelter of rocks. ‘What’s your problem?’

  My problem is I’ve lost my mum.

  The upstairs rooms are empty. Not unoccupied. Empty. Everything has been dragged out of them, even the carpets.

  ‘Mum?’

  I move from room to room.

  ‘Sara?’

  It cannot possibly be her. The world cannot possibly knit itself over so well. There are no miracles. ‘Mum!’

  I take a breath, or try to. I feel as though I have been kicked. Air rattles in, as eventually it must, clearing my head. The fit – what else would you call it? – it passes.

  On the stairs, Hanna has joined the queue for the toilet. It’s much shorter now. ‘Everyone’s gone to piss in the garden.’

  ‘I’m surprised they don’t just use the rooms.’

  ‘Christ.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Conrad.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘This.’ She glances round her, wincing, as if afraid of what new thing she might see. ‘It’s horrible.’

  The front door glass is bashed in. A hand reaches through and fiddles with the lock. The door opens and a boy enters, trail
ing a guitar. He wanders into a room and strikes up a folk song. Come the end times, we shall have no chairs, no beds, no blankets for our children. We shall have folk-singers, and we shall kill them with rocks and cook thin strips of their flesh over fires conjured from their smashed guitars.

  Hanna and I stand shivering in the gust from the open door. (The weather is definitely turning.) Horrible, the paint-spattered carpet. Horrible, the inept graffiti on the walls, and the shattered light-shade over the door, and the fragments of coloured glass from the panel the boy has idly smashed. Yes, horrible. Yet these judgements don’t just spring up from nowhere. ‘The thing you have to bear in mind, Hanna, is that everything’s still more or less in favour of being sensitive and civilised. And this stuff can turn on a penny.’

  Hanna’s not interested in my cleverness. Probably she gets enough of this sort of thing from Michel. ‘They’ve ruined it,’ she says, a brave bourgeois, standing up for value.

  I go and swing the front door shut. Squares of coloured glass crunch beneath my feet. I pull a blue square free of its twisted leading. ‘Close your eyes.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Close them.’ I stand beside her, and raise the jagged colour to her face. ‘Okay.’

  Hanna stares through the glass at the blue-tinted hall, wide-eyed, a child. ‘Oh,’ she says. She smiles. Nothing is horrible any more. Everything is new.

  This is a trick I have learned how to pull. This is my work. With tricks of mathematics and optics, we augment reality, smothering surfaces in warm, spicy notes of brand belonging.

  I turn, distracted by a voice.

  ‘I lived free among free women.’

  That woman even sounds like my mother. She’s back in the kitchen again. How the hell did she do that?

  ‘There were no inhibitions,’ says a boy, egging her on.

  ‘None, sonny, none.’ She is not my mother. She does suggest, with uncanny physical precision, what my mother might have become. She says, ‘We lived a life of perfect freedom together.’

  The kitchen is less busy now. I go over to the sink, but the vodka has disappeared. I rinse out a cup and dip it into a washbowl. The punch is as thick as blood. There are slices of orange floating in it.