Silver Screen

by Justina Robson

  “What?” it demanded as I stood in shock.

  I hesitantly asked for a call to Lula's number and, in the event of no reply, for a repeating call every half an hour.

  “No answer,” it replied snappily after twenty seconds. “Anyway, you can't get repeat toll calls on any public phone.” And it hung up on me.

  In the quiet aftermath I had time to register my surroundings. The room was cold, almost as cold as outside. A smell of cleaning fluid and degreaser laced the air strongly with their twin citrus zap. The carpets were covered in footprints, muddy from the garden, but the mirror was still there, and our coats—overloaded on the rack from years of being ignored, their backs hunched against invisible rain.

  “Your call?”

  “Huh?” I glanced at the clerk, who was standing by the door rubbing his cold hands together. “Oh, never mind.” I should have at least made a show of trying the phone unit, I realized. No matter.

  “The upstairs is fine,” he offered as I turned to the lounge door. “Nobody went up there except us. We didn't remove anything.”

  “Oh.” I guessed that meant the downstairs wasn't fine. “Fine” was what you called a book in good condition. Downstairs was what you couldn't even call “tattered.” It was mauled.

  The lounge looked as if a bomb had gone off. The chairs and sofa were buried under a mass of broken bookcases, shelves, smashed lights, and objects strewn everywhere. There were a few trackways cleared and marked in mud. I was glad the windows were filmed over; I didn't want to look at it any more closely.

  In the kitchen, where the intruder had come in, the door was gone, replaced by a temporary sheet of steel with bolts. The windows were half covered with bulkboard, its edges grown into a hasty and messy fit around the frame. There was a blast hole in the back wall, black and filthy with soot, and caked in extinguisher foam where the killer had effectively put an end to the house. They knew where to shoot. Pieces of solidified foam, smoke particles, and plaster dust coated everything in a heavy layer except for the immaculate track to and around the door and wall where the sniffer had sucked up evidence.

  My brother had died in his workshop.

  The smell of cleaner and degreaser was coming from here. A gallon of degreaser had exploded and covered everything in a thin film of corrosive lime-scented liquid, now dried to a tacky scum. Tools and pieces of bicycle were scattered everywhere. Metal fragments were embedded in the walls: spokes, bearings, bolts, shards of lightweight alloy frame. There were two bare patches: one on the floor—a wide irregular puddle shape on the painted cement where whoever was responsible for cleanup had scrubbed most of the blood away—and the other a human-shadow on the far wall, beside which Ajay must have been standing. It was a rough shape, little more than a column, but behind it the plaster was untouched. Of the machine he had been working on there was no trace. Only the arm of the stand remained, toppled with the rest of the paltry stock in a heap of ruin.

  I walked back into the hallway after a moment's survey of each room.

  “So,” the clerk said, tracing my footsteps, “where should we start?”

  I moved over to the stairs in the strange twilight of day-out and sat down. “Just leave it,” I said after a minute or two.

  “But…” he began.

  “Leave it,” I said. “And leave me alone. You can watch over me from the street.”

  “But…” he said again. He was like a parrot.

  “I said get out!” I yelled at him, propelling him halfway to the door with my fury. “Out, out, out!”

  I heard him call the station from outside the door. They must have told him to leave me alone for a while, because after a time his shoes sounded on the walk and I heard the tone of the gate's clang as he shut it behind him.

  After a while, I don't know how long, although it had begun to get dark outside, I hooked the loop of my bag with one hand and shuffled up the stairs. I was stiff and aching and it was hard work to reach the top with the proper respect for the silence. When I reached the top landing, I stood up. Apart from the dimness and the smell it was just as it had always been. My bedroom was at the front, so I had to pass Ajay's door on the way there. As I reached it, I leant to grasp the handle and pulled it shut without looking or breathing the air. I did the same with my room and then allowed myself to go into the narrow spare bedroom. We kept the bed there made up. Lula had slept in it last. I kicked off my shoes, got into the bed still wearing my clothes and coat, and pulled the blankets over my head, hugging my bag to me.

  A few days passed. I used the toilet, which still worked, and drank cold water from the tap in the bathroom, sometimes washing my face even though there was no heat. Then the pipes must have burst somewhere, as the nights got frostier without the house to monitor the temperatures, and there was no more water. I put the lid down on the toilet and went back to bed. When I wasn't asleep, I was trying to sleep. I didn't even dream to begin with. It was only later, lying half catatonic, weak and dehydrated, that fitful nightmares whirled across my brain, and these were almost comic in comparison with reality, so I welcomed them and let them scamper. Then they left me, and there was a phase in which I didn't have to get up any more, only roll from time to time to ease the ache in my hips and the distracting soreness in my shoulders.

  There were a few knocks at the door during this time, but I ignored them. The clerk, I supposed, but now that I was resident in my own home and they had all their evidence, he didn't have the authority to break in on me. I'd like to say that my fast and withdrawal brought me to enlightenment of some kind—without food and without information a modern brain is quick to cannibalize itself for any kind of stimulation—but it isn't the case. And the lack of water meant that, instead of feeling cleansed, I grew increasingly toxic. I knew what was happening, but that seemed very detached, as if it had nothing to do with me.

  Then a knocking came that was persistent. I thought at first that I was hallucinating it. I'd heard quite a few things recently that couldn't exist. Roy's voice for one.

  It was a time when I wasn't quite asleep or awake, when you can't move your body, as if you're paralysed, but think you can see things now and again, feel your surroundings and hear a radio or a vid in the next room. I knew it was none of those things because I was awake in my dead house; a parasite in the gut of a dead and bloated animal, waiting the long, extra moments before its energy runs out along with the host's earthly remains. It was like a muttering at first, something that might be happening in the street where my opaque window looked blindly out. I thought of my neighbours arguing over taking a cutting of the withering beech filigree, or complaining about the ceaseless war of the cats and the rabbits. But then it became suddenly clear, tuned perfectly, and I heard Roy talking as if he was right next to me.

  He went on about paper and celluloid, recording techniques, methods of writing. I'd never heard him say this before. I listened to him, pleased at any distraction.

  “…so many different kinds of message evolved in the last days of the twentieth century,” he was saying. I pictured him giving a kind of heavenly lecture to a group of ghostly but interested schoolchildren, myself amongst them, growing stronger in that world as I faded in this one. “And together with that came the legacy of a fully written language system, so that as time went on words and objects became more and more symbolically real, more and more semantically loaded, frozen in place with the weight of the meaning and the hyperconnectivity they assumed within our minds.” He was good, too. “Thus we are now in a position where every choice of action in the process of making records has become a significant factor in the transmission of meaning from one individual to another.

  “So, should we speak, write, make images that are still, or in motion? Should we choose plain paper or fancy? Do we make an old-style film on celluloid that has a limited lifespan, a flammable nature, the romance of the past? Or do I choose a crystal and get it all digitized into perfect full sensorama that never fades or loses its true colours, in im
age or in tone? Shall I leave cryptic clues, omit the important part? Shall I tell it all, like a cheap tart on an afternoon chatfest who can't get enough of the camera, or say it in a poem of metaphors, every verbal image betrayed by a visual contradiction? Do I want to be fully understood or only to hint at what I might mean?”

  The front row of the class was fidgeting with frustrated questions and ideas. I was at the back, obviously one of the stupider pupils because I didn't know, and was hoping he was going to give us the answer straight away. I felt a bit miserable at my slump from the heights, but at the same time I felt a huge relief and the sense that I might be in a place where I actually belonged, instead of faking it to the top over and over.

  “Well, now, whatever I choose, we can be sure that it will be revealing. But what will I reveal? Am I smart enough that I can interpret every possible version of what these complex signs might mean to another person? Can I consciously manipulate things to such a degree that I can control their every reaction to my messages?” He had been writing soundlessly on an old chalkboard. Now he whirled around, grinning his white surfer's grin. All of us children smiled. It was so sunny, how could you not respond? “Or—” he lowered his voice to a sepulchral whisper “—does it not matter how much I think and scheme? Will my choices inevitably display my deepest truths? Is it possible that no matter how hard I plan, my meaning will be lost on another, who is resistant to what I have to say? And even if they long to hear what I want to mean, will there be a barrier within them I have not the ability to cross?”

  It seemed a set of mightily difficult questions, but I felt we were moving towards a definite statement.

  “Ladies and gentlemen—” Roy swept his arms wide like a charismatic preacher (you could see he was his father's son) “—the magic of the answer is that there is nothing I can do alone which can assure the transmission of my message in all its glorious fullness to another being that is able to receive it. The success of my mission lies in the willingness of the recipient to believe in me, to listen to my world, not just my words or the way that they're said. And this is true of all of you here today. And if that is not possible, then next in line is the need to know, and the desire to understand, that is so forceful in the breast that for one instant of time it is able to make the leap, like a spark, from your mind to mine, and for an instant you shall see. Just for one instant, one fraction of a second, one slight tiny break, one gap that you cross so we seem, in that moment, to be not two people separated forever but running together and moving together. In that divine moment, the magic is possible.”

  A bell rang for morning break and we all filed out for milk and biscuits. I was the last to leave. I intended to stop and say that I hadn't understood very well, and to see if he had any study notes, but before I could I was woken up by the loud, insistent knocking on the front door.

  Whoever it was they were hammering fit to break it. I didn't want any visitors so I let them keep on doing it. At last, after about ten minutes, they went away, but soon they were back and I heard the clerk policeman with them, cheerfully using his secure pass to let them in past the stud. I waited with dread and loathing in the bed, and made no sound as they came in.

  “Good gods in heaven!”

  It was my mother.

  “What is this stink? This mess? Don't you people have anyone to clear up your rubbish?” Her voice was strongly accented with Punjabi intonation, and rather high. She was miserable and angry. For a split second my heart leaped towards her, but then I got it under control.

  “Anjuli! Anjuli!” she called out from the hall. I heard her muttering and complaining to the clerk about the appalling state they had seen fit to leave the house in. “And my son, dead two weeks, lying in your morgue with nobody to bury him, and you tell me so late about it…” and on and on in the same vein until she had moved through all the rooms, and the full devastation hit her. The clerk spoke, and set to making some calls on his lapel phone, from the change in conversation.

  My mother's footsteps have always made the same combination of floorboards creak as she moved towards the front door. She doesn't so much stride as shuffle, like a recalcitrant bear forced to walk upright.

  “Anjuli! Where are you? What are you doing?”

  It was only a matter of time before she must find me, but I made no sound. I was even beyond feeling any shame for my sorry state. I lay there and let her suffer as she had to search room by room. At long last she came nervously into the spare bedroom and obviously must have seen the shape of me under the covers. I expected her to whip them off and give me a real earful for my uselessness. Instead there was a long period of no movement and quiet. I realized she might think I was dead, too, and quickly made some pointless little motion with my foot.

  I heard a sharp intake of breath, almost a cry. A hand gently took hold of the quilting and moved it down, discovering my face and hands knotted under it around the solid, warm plastic of a cheap paper diary. I felt I should apologize or at least explain, and was trying to think of a way as I looked up fearfully to meet her eye, but before I could move she had dug her arms around me and pressed her cool, sandalwood-scented cheek to mine.

  “Oh Anjuli, my baby,” she whispered, “I thought you were gone.”

  It's not buckets of sympathy or layers of cruelty that break you; it's small gestures of the unexpected. Historically, my memory had been seen in our family as the greatest possible gift that automatically secured me a magically good future. The daily concerns were all focused on Ajay. Bicycles for Ajay, extra tuition for Ajay, cornet lessons for Ajay, taking Ajay to the doctor with his asthma, watching his football games at school, going to parents’ evening, buying a cat, giving him the house. I thought that she would be angry with me for surviving Ajay and proving her thesis that I was more fit to succeed than he was. I really thought that she would want to talk about him, and berate me for not doing something more to protect him. I never imagined that all she would care about at that moment would be me. I tried to tell her everything all in one breath.

  When she had listened to me cry and talk for some time, she finally sat back on her heels and put her hand against my face. “Listen, Anjuli, we will say it all,” she said, “but first you must get up and get dressed. We have to give your brother a funeral, and let your father know what has happened.”

  I could hardly grudge that; she was right. I was relieved, but still selfish enough to let her take sole charge of the arrangements, whilst she bullied the police into providing a full restoration service to the house, including a new CPU.

  When I finally made it downstairs, wearing an old tracksuit I had found in my cupboards, she put her hand to her mouth. “You look very sick,” she said. “Your eyes are like pits of tar: yellow and black. And your skin is the colour of white people. What were you trying to do? Die?”

  I had to sit on the stairs to listen to her analysis. Standing made me giddy.

  Over the next few days I built my strength back up with soup and water. Professional cleaning services came and went, putting right the things that could be saved, and stacking the broken pieces in clean boxes for us to go through. The water company fixed our burst pipe and drained the kitchen of its small flood. Thankfully the mains-connection pressure regulator had tripped a safety valve, or my negligence would have ruined the whole ground floor. Meanwhile my mother held a mixed kind of service for my brother at our local community centre: a typically muddled affair of Hindu, secular, and superstitious ceremony, which we followed on a printed sheet with footnotes. She's nothing if not methodical. Of my father there was still no sign. I gathered she had left a message with his building supervisor, and that was as good as it got. After days of waiting we went ahead with it, only to find him on the doorstep as we returned with the few other family souls for tea and catered food.

  I was surprised by how old he seemed to be. I'd hardly seen him since I was thirteen or so, and now his rugged Celtic features were hard and chiselled-looking, grey with worry and sadness
. I thought he was turning to stone. He stayed in the spare room that night and for a couple of weeks afterwards. My mother had Ajay's room, since I couldn't bear to be in it, and I returned to my old haunt and the random, eternal grazing of the black, the Appaloosa, and the palomino. The house was switched on again, but it wasn't the same as before. Personality accrues. Replacing one processor with another identical and saving the old preferences didn't fool me. I mourned the old house with every effort of the new one to please me.

  If my relating of these episodes seems distant, it's because that's how I felt—all the time at a long distance, reaching the outer world by a kind of semaphore that signalled but didn't connect. As Roy would have pointed out, it wasn't the greatest communication device. It sucked. And I wanted it to suck. It was the only thing between me and something so bad I couldn't even guess at it. It was the only thing which enabled me to talk to Mum and Dad about the events surrounding Ajay's murder and about the terrorists responsible. Some other Anjuli had gone through the first part, and some other Anjuli knew about the second. They kept their feelings and I kept mine. I was in bad shape, but now, instead of lying bedbound, I got by with a sham of life. It disgusted me that I was content with it. I knew it was a bunch of crap, but it was bearable crap.

  Strange to say, but in those weeks I entirely forgot about my life, about OptiNet, the Source, 901, Augustine, Lula, and Peaches. I shut myself in my room and trawled the shopping networks, playing a theoretic retailing game in which I bought vast stocks of food and clothing from certain stores and sold them at profit from others, using their online pricing indexes to build myself a mighty fortune. Scrupulously avoiding all newscasts and current-affairs data I absorbed myself in soap operas, twelve or fourteen straight hours in a shot, a different soap and a different episode every twenty minutes. I kept track of thirty-eight of them in five languages, word perfect. Then, of course, there were the soap quizzes—I won. And nature programmes, and everything on the learning channels for students and schoolchildren. By the end of a month I was down to two hours’ sleep per day. I ate only what my mother provided, and never left the house. My only weakness was for a twice daily aerobic workout, which I practised like a religion when it came on right after Only the Lonely in the morning and All Aboard! in the afternoon. The rigid discipline gave me a satisfying feeling of control.