She wanted to smash the kitchen window. She wanted to hurt herself. Her ghost was out there in the garden, the ghost from her freestanding past. If she kept up this business of reunion, it would catch hold of her hands and saw her wrists to and fro across the jagged glass. It would tear her from the bosom of this family she had breast-fed. No. She must stay this side of the glass from now on, thickening and cooling like some old planet until at last she killed the demands of that self-regarding girl out there.
She twisted and squeezed water from the bed linen she had just rinsed. If she were to let herself be angry about this obliteration, of her particular mind, of her own relish for things, then it would devour the family. Instead she must let it gnaw at her entrails like some resident tiger. This was not sanctimony speaking but necessity. All this she knew but could not explain. She was wringing the sheet with such force that it creaked.
“Fresh air,” she said aloud, and tried to open the window in front of her. It was locked, clamped tight with one of the antiburglar fastenings they had fitted on all the windows last summer. She felt around in the cupboard above the refrigerator for the key, but it wasn’t in its usual place. She hunted through the rows of mugs, the tins of tuna and tomatoes, the bags of rice and flour and pasta, and found it at last inside the glass measuring jug.
Leaning across the sink, she unlocked the window and opened it onto the night. A spray of rain fell across her face and she gasped. There was the cold fresh smell of wet earth. It occurred to her that this might not necessarily be killer pain she was feeling, not terrible goodbyeforever pain as she had assumed; and she felt light-headed with the shock of relief.
Perhaps this was not the pain of wrist-cutting after all. Instead, the thought came to her, it might be the start of that intense outlandish sensation that comes after protracted sleep; the feeling in a limb that has gone numb when blood starts to flow again, sluggishly at first, reviving, until after a long dormant while that limb is teeming again, tingling into life.
Out in the garden, out in the cold black air, she could see the big trees waving their wild bud-bearing branches at her.
MILLENNIUM BLUES
There had been an unbelievable amount of talk about the weather, not to mention the end of the world and so on. The earth continued to turn round the sun, but only just, it seemed. Never before in all its history had the planet’s atmosphere been so heavily matted with information about everything, so clotted with flashes and scoops and entreaties and jeremiads. The air and all its waves were sodden with chitchat.
Muscae volitantes, or flitting flies: that is the name for the spots which float before the eyes and stop you from reading. Muscae volitantes are what airplanes look like when viewed from high above. They are worse when you look up at them. On this 228th day of the year 1999, aircraft like stingray are floating overhead, roaring and screaming, their yellow eyes glaring down at the sleeping landscape beneath.
Seen from the air this ominous August dawn, the Thames is a diamond-dusted silver ribbon. The aircraft follow the river faithfully, nose to tail, as they descend over southwest London, giving panoramic views of the individual boathouses, Putney Bridge, the green spaces of the Hurlingham Club and Fulham Palace gardens, straining and whining as they throttle back over the salubrious complacence of Barnes, then whistling on through the malty cumulus clouds issuing from the chimneys of Mortlake’s brewery. On they roar, hooting and wrangling across the four hundred botanic acres at Kew, from there to shade Richmond’s millennial prosperity with their wings; then on down lower still to the shattered concentration of Hounslow, its double-glazed schools and uproarious bedrooms, where those on the ground can if they so desire look up and check the color of the pilot’s tie.
Until at last they touch down at Heathrow. All aircraft coming in to land here must first fly directly across the capital when the prevailing wind is blowing. It is an unusual arrangement which has not been much imitated by other countries, but without being unpleasantly nationalistic about this, the British have always been made of sterner stuff.
The planes still wear their lights like earrings in this no-man’sland between night and day. Cassie Withers stands in her Kew back garden and watches them cross the sky one after another, counting them instead of sheep. She was woken by the first flight in from Seoul. Today at some point her husband, Steven Withers, will be returning from his fifth foreign trip of the month. The constant overarching trajectories of noise accelerate and fade into one another. Two days ago Steven heard about a problem with the new bidets at one of his company’s hotels in the Philippines. He tried phoning the local quality manager but got a voice mail because of the time difference.
“Can’t it wait ten hours?” asked Cassie.
“I can be there in ten hours,” said Steven. “That’s the beauty of living here.”
And he had jumped on the next plane out.
Now Cassie gazes up beyond the planes as the sky grows lighter. Several stars are almost discernible through the dense maroon-tinted vapor of early morning. She’d watched a documentary on stars last night, about how the earth is long overdue a collision with an asteroid or comet, just like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. She had also learned from this program that a Grand Cross of the planets is due this month, in the fixed signs of the zodiac—Taurus, Aquarius, Scorpio, Leo—and that flat-earthers everywhere are interpreting these signs as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Then she had gone to bed and read about Nostradamus—in the last months of this century it is quite hard not to read about Nostradamus, sixteenth-century Provençal plague doctor, and his 942-verse history of the world’s future. She had lingered for a while over a particularly interesting couplet:
The year 1999, the seventh month,
From the sky will come a great King of Terror.
Nuclear war was joint favorite with an asteroid attack, according to the editor’s note. Nostradamus had been right about several things so far, including the death of Henri II in a jousting accident and also the fall of Communism; so there was a strong possibility of something awful happening soon, it seemed.
It has been an unnaturally still hot summer, and even this early on Saturday there is no freshness in the garden. Cassie yawns and creaks and wonders whether she has M.E. or perhaps a brain tumor or some slow-growing cancer. But so many of her friends are dragging round in a similar state that she decides it must be the unrenewing air of these dog days. Verity Freeling dropped dead last Tuesday without warning, extinguished by the three-week chest virus which has rampaged through everyone round here. It’s said to come from China, and it simply laughs at antibiotics. Verity’s husband is frantically trying to find a nanny for the three children before he loses his job.
Or perhaps it’s just sleep. Because of the aircraft she has worn earplugs at night ever since moving to Kew ten years ago. Recently she went deaf as a result of the buildup of impacted wax. For a while she was quite pleased as this removed her from the constant din of aircraft and family life, and there were no side effects save the occasional muffled crump inside her head like a footstep in deep snow. Then reason had prevailed and her GP had syringed her ears. Unfortunately this had had a side effect—tinnitus—which is slowly driving her up the wall.
Sometimes this new ringing in her ears changes pitch, as now, and turns into a high silvery singing noise with a squeak to it like the edge hysteria gives a voice, or like the sharpening of angels’ knives, stainless, at high speed.
“Mum, what comes after nineteen ninety-nine?” asks her fiveyear-old son Peter as she clears up after breakfast. “Is it nineteen ninety-ten?”
“No,” says Cassie. “Would you sort those knives and forks for me like a good boy. No. It goes nineteen ninety-nine. TWO THOUSAND.”
“Mum,” he says, picking up a fork, frowning. “Mum, will it be the end of the world then?”
“No of course not,” says Cassie heartily. “It’s just a number. It doesn’t actually mean anything at all. Unless you believe in Jesus.”<
br />
“Do you believe in Jesus?” he asks, as he sometimes does.
“I’m not sure,” she says diplomatically. “Some people do. Auntie Katie does.”
“I believe in him,” he says staunchly.
“Well, that’s nice,” she says, then can’t help asking, “Why do you believe in him?”
“Because otherwise who made it,” he demands crossly. “Of course.”
He marches out of the kitchen in a huff.
She finishes the dishes, then takes a cup of coffee into the front room where Peter is now lining up a row of small plastic dinosaurs behind the sofa while Michael, his elder brother, hunches over holiday homework in front of the television.
“It’s only the news,” he says, forestalling her protest. “It helps me concentrate.”
She sits by him and lets the news wash over her. Plague is spreading up from Greece through the Balkans, and now Venice has succumbed. There is footage of floods in China, drought in India, war in Africa, famine in Korea, fire in Australia, hysteria in America and desperation in Russia. Reports of a mass throat-cutting in the deserts of New Mexico are just starting to trickle in. Record temperatures worldwide, yet again, have led to speculation that the human race will become a nocturnal species in the next century, on the basis that it’s cooler at night.
Later that morning Cassie leaves her boys playing Deathwish in the waiting room and sees her doctor.
“Could it be tinnitus?” she asks as he peers inside.
“Tinnitus is just a word for any noise you can hear that other people can’t.”
“So it is tinnitus.”
“Idiopathic tinnitus, if you want a loftier label.”
“Idiopathic?”
“It simply means there’s no known cause,” he says, finishing his examination. “No known cure either, I’m afraid. Just try to ignore it and hope it’ll go away.”
“But that’s awful!”
“At least you’re not deaf as well. Deafness combined with tinnitus is very common in old age.”
“Does everybody have some sort of noise?” asks Cassie. “Because I found myself thinking perhaps it was always there and I just didn’t notice.”
“That is often exactly the case,” smiles the doctor approvingly. “Something occurs in the ear, some small malfunction, and there it is: the noise revealed. Unmasked. There is a visual analogy. You come home one day and notice a neighbor’s hideous new purple window frames. You point them out to your husband. He looks at you in amazement and says, They’ve been like that for three years. Once you become aware of something, you can’t easily lose that awareness.”
“Loss of innocence,” says Cassie.
“In a manner of speaking,” he replies. “Yes.”
Cassie knows nine of her ten minutes are up, and decides not to use the last one trying to describe her recent feelings of intense foreboding. After all, he might feel he has to put her on Prozac.
They take sandwiches to the park for lunch. Cassie wrestles with each shouting boy in turn, applying sunblock, and then warns them not to roll down the grassy slope because of pesticides. She closes her eyes and feels the sun warm her shoulders, kiss her bare arms, and knows it is hostile, fake gold, full of malignant power.
Being out in the sun and the open air used to be health-giving. Now the sea is full of viruses, one swim can leave you in a wheelchair for good; no wonder the fish have turned belly-up this summer, bloated, to float and rot. As for sex, she thinks, watching her boys play, by the time it’s their turn it’ll be so dangerous they’ll have to do it in wet suits.
“You look a bit down,” says her friend Judith as she joins her on the park bench.
“Is it so obvious?” smiles Cassie. “Talk about gloom and doom. I’ve got this horrible feeling that something appalling is about to happen.”
“When you think about it, something appalling always is happening, somewhere in the world,” says Judith, watching her daughters run over towards the swings. “That’s why I don’t read the papers. I used to feel I ought to; that I ought to know about these terrible things. Then one day I just stopped. And my knowing or not knowing has made no difference at all to the state of the world.”
“How do you know?” says Cassie. “We’re all implicated.”
Judith merely smiles a smug smile. Pregnant with her third, she has been given 29 December as the date for the baby’s arrival, but she is determined it will wait until the new century. She is going to call it Millie if it’s a girl or Len if it’s a boy.
“Did you hear about Sally Pimlott?” asks Judith, remembering some gossip. “She handed out Lion bars at Ben’s birthday party last week, she didn’t realize they had nuts in, and one of the children had a fatal nut allergy and had to be rushed to hospital.”
“No!” breathed Cassie. “And is it all right now?”
“Intensive care,” says Judith. “Touch and go. As Derek said when I told him, it makes you wonder what Sally’s legal position would be.”
“The number of children I know with a fatal nut allergy,” groans Cassie. “I live in terror.”
She draws her sunglasses out of her bag and puts them on, but this does not prevent Judith from noticing the tears in her eyes.
“I’m a bit fed up,” explains Cassie. “The doctor says he can’t do anything about this trouble with my ears.”
“It’s the color of your downstairs,” says Judith without missing a beat. “You should get my Feng Shui friend in. Anyone who has ear trouble, sinusitis, catarrh, that sort of thing, they should never have walls that color.”
“What, magnolia?” says Cassie.
“Cream,” Judith corrects her. “Dairy products. Milk. Cheese. Terribly mucilaginous. You should ring my Feng Shui friend. What have you got to lose?”
“This ringing noise, for a start,” says Cassie, smacking the side of her head, exasperated.
She spends the next couple of hours in the park pleasantly enough, watching the children and chatting to her friend, but not for one minute does she lose awareness of the minatory knife-sharpening noise inside her skull.
The official transition from afternoon to evening in Kew is marked at this time of year by the lighting of a thousand barbecues. This Saturday it is Cassie’s neighbor’s turn to host the road’s annual summer party. The seasonal stench of paraffin and hickory-impregnated briquettes hangs low in the muggy air.
The women stand in clumps on the patio sipping white wine and keeping an eye on the children, who surge around the forest their solid legs provide. The men have gravitated to the end of the garden under the trees, where they help themselves to icy cans of lager from the turquoise cooler standing on the picnic table.
Above them roars a steady stream of package flights and others. It is now at that point in the year when there are always three planes in the visible arch of the sky, lined up like formation gymnasts. Every forty seconds the barbecue guests fall silent without thinking at the peak of the central plane’s trajectory, and then carry on as normal. Cassie remembers her first summer here and the way, inaudible through the din, people had mouthed at her like earnest goldfish: “You don’t even notice it after a while.”
She pours herself a third glass of wine and joins a group of women who are talking about what they are going to do on New Year’s Eve. Carol has booked a family package to Paris, where it is rumored the Eiffel Tower will lay a giant egg. Donna, recently divorced, hopes to fly to Tonga for a seafood feast on the night, if she can sort out the trouble with the Air Miles people; then on to Samoa. Christine is hoping to dodge across the dateline on Concorde so that she can see the new century dawn twice.
“I was just saying to Nigel the other day,” says Amanda from number 12, “Wouldn’t it be nice to see the sun rise from Mount Kilimanjaro. But I don’t know what we’d do with the children, nobody’ll be wanting to baby-sit that night, will they.”
“I really don’t see why air travel has to be so convenient and cheap,” says Cassie. “People sho
uld think twice before crossing the world.”
It is exactly as though she has not spoken. Nobody ever listens to me, she thinks.
“Frivolous and greedy,” she throws in for good measure.
“Amanda went down to Cornwall for the eclipse last week, didn’t you, Amanda,” says Donna. “On that overnight train from Paddington, what was it called—champagne breakfast, the works.”
“The Fin de Siècle something or other,” says Amanda. “Yes, it was a bit gloomy, the actual eclipse, but the rest of it was a really good laugh.”
“My God! Look at those ants!” cries Carol with a faint scream, having caught sight of the swarming insect mass pouring out from an air brick. “They’ve all grown wings!”
She runs off indoors for a kettle of boiling water while the rest of them crouch down to examine the glistening insect mass.
“They look a lot bigger than normal ants,” says Amanda.
“Probably from France,” says Donna. “You know, like the Eurowasps. Double the size.”
“Oh, not Europe again,” says Amanda, tutting.
Cassie fills her glass and walks unsteadily off across the lawn towards the men. She has that sense of being able to see everything with perfect clarity, but nobody will listen to her.
The men are talking about whether the new century really only starts on the first of January 2001, as the spoilsport Swiss claim, and are speculating about how many workdays will be lost, how long the celebrations and their hangovers will last.
“The good thing about the beginning of the year 2000,” says Christine’s husband, Greg, “is that January the first is a Saturday so everyone will have the Sunday and the Monday to recover, because of course the Monday will be a bank holiday.”
“By then there’ll have been a tidal wave of computer crashes,” says Amanda’s husband, Nigel, with relish. “It’ll be the El Niño of IT. I tell you, it’s unbelievable, half these guys I see haven’t even started to address the Y2K problem.”
Getting a Life Page 6
