Restoration

by Guy Adams

  "What do you think?" he asked Sophie. "If I can leave I must be able to come back, right? I mean that makes sense doesn't it? Trains always go in both directions don't they? A to B and back to A. That's how it works isn't it?"

  "Build not break, build not break."

  "Because it will break," Ashe insisted, feeling a twinge of guilt for playing on her fear, "if I don't do this. If I can't go everywhere I need to it will break completely…"

  "Build not break, build not break."

  "So we really need to make this work, between the two of us. You need to talk to the house and build a way into all of this that will let me come back. Can you do that?"

  "Build not break, buy a ticket, build not break."

  "What?" Ashe wasn't sure if he'd heard her right. "Did you say 'buy a ticket?'"

  "Build not break, build not break, can't travel without one, not allowed, build not break."

  Ashe stood up, looking around. A few feet away, one of the electronic information pillars fizzed and sparked. It was about seven feet tall, all brushed steel and touchscreens. The sort of object that Ashe always suspected was designed to make life as complex for the user as possible. He walked up to it, slightly wary of its flickering screen. He was still only too aware that things in this house rarely had the visitor's best interests at heart. Further along the arcade another of the information posts was mirroring the behaviour of the one in front of him. The St. Pancras logo dispersed in a snowstorm of pixels to be replaced by the head and shoulders of a man. He appeared in his late forties, a miserable expression crumpled beneath an old-fashioned train conductor's peaked cap.

  "Yes?" the man said. The screen flickered as if disturbed by his impatient tone.

  "Er…" Ashe looked over his shoulder to check on Sophie. She was still sat where he had left her, quietly mumbling to herself.

  "Well?" the man on the screen insisted. "I've better things to do than sit here waiting for you to make your mind up about where you want to go."

  "Where I want to go?"

  "Yes, where you want to go… this is a train station isn't it? Usually people have a fixed idea of where they want to get to."

  "I need to go to lots of places…"

  "Philosophically interesting but still no use to me. I need a specific destination."

  Ashe thought about the timeline of the box. The first stop needed to be Carruthers in Tibet. "Tibet, 1904."

  "Tibet, 1904 he says…" the man snapped. "Precision!"

  Ashe pulled out the notes he'd made. "The Dhuru Monastery, 20 miles or so south of the Nepalese border. I need to be there on the third of March."

  "Time?"

  "Doesn't matter, it's a flying visit."

  The man stared at him for a second, sighed, and then his eyes rolled up to reveal their whites as he mumbled to himself. "Dhuru Monastery, arriving, 16.58, March third." He reasserted himself and stared at Ashe. "How long do you need for your visit?"

  "Not long, a few hours..."

  "'A few'… how helpful."

  Ashe growled slightly, losing his patience with the man's rudeness.

  The screen flickered violently, like a TV suffering from storm interference. "Wait!" the inspector barked.

  With a fizz of electrics, a hand emerged from the screen holding a pair of train tickets. "Return tickets to Dhuru monastery, 3rd of March 1904. Arriving 16.58 leaving seven hours later at two minutes to midnight. Don't lose them," the man insisted, as if speaking to a particularly dense child.

  "How do I find the train on the way back?" Ashe asked.

  The man smiled in a particularly unpleasant manner. "It will find you," he said. The screen fizzed once more and he was gone, replaced by the station logo.

  6.

  The champagne bar was a better class of joint than Tom was used to but if there was a dress code in place the phantom staff didn't enforce it. He made his way behind the ridiculously long bar, grabbed a glass and wondered what to fill it with.

  "When in Rome," he said to himself, grabbing a bottle of champagne. He couldn't pretend to know the difference between labels but wasn't fussed. When you went about it seriously, drink was a vehicle and a battered Ford got you to your destination just as surely as a beamer. He sat down on one of the bar-side swivel chairs and began to unwrap the foil from the bottle's neck.

  "The longest champagne bar in Europe, apparently."

  He glanced up at Elise, who had appeared on the stool next to him. He wasn't altogether surprised to see her, he was a man comfortable with delusions. "So I read on the sign coming in." He cast the foil aside and begin uncoiling the wire cap.

  "Seems a strange ambition to me," said Elise. "Not the nicest or best-stocked, the longest."

  "You know what Brits are like," Tom replied, popping the cork carefully – only racing drivers and children were stupid enough to spray good champagne everywhere, "always trying to be the best at something."

  "They'd say the same about us."

  "I guess." Tom poured champagne slowly into his tumbler, trying not to let it flow over the brim.

  "Champagne in a hi-ball, damn but you've got class."

  "I'm thirsty, would have taken a tankard if they'd had one."

  "Or just a couple of straws?"

  "Now there's a thought."

  He took a mouthful of his drink and grimaced. "Like fizzy water. Pretend champagne."

  "Bar sure is long though."

  "This is true." Tom got up and walked around the bar to see what else he could find.

  "It'll all be the same you know," said Elise, pulling a cigarette from the pocket of her raincoat. "Light?"

  He stared at her for a moment, tempted to ignore her. But he could never ignore Elise, even if she was only a figment of his imagination. He pulled out his Zippo and lit her illusory cigarette before resuming his hunt for a drink that might hit the spot.

  "Ever the optimist?" she asked, and damn if he couldn't smell the smoke of her cigarette as she exhaled over the bar.

  "Just being thorough," he replied, opening a bottle of pink champagne with a lot less care than he had the first bottle. The cork popped, ricocheting off the concealed lighting and he dipped his mouth to the overflowing froth as if it were a water fountain. "This place is made by people that just don't have enough imagination," he decided.

  "If you'd dreamed it people could have got high just by licking the bar," Elise noted. "The goddamned mints would have had an alcoholic content."

  "Damn right, that's what a bar's there for after all. I'm a functionalist."

  "A man who thirsts."

  Tom looked at Elise over the neck of the champagne bottle, analysing her face for a clue as to where she was going with this, the last thing he needed right now – particularly from a ghost – was a dressing down for his alcoholism. "Yes," he admitted, saying no more in case it encouraged her in some way.

  "Those thirsts aren't getting quenched are they honey?" said Elise. "You think that might have consequences as time rolls on?"

  "I guess I'll crave more, nothing I can't handle."

  "You sure?" Elise gave him a gentle smile. "Honey, you can dress it up however you want to but a man that gets through two bottles of vodka a day – without even trying – is an alcoholic, you do know that don't you?"

  This was the conversation Tom didn't want to have, certainly not with Elise – and in the back of his head a small part of him despaired that he was already thinking of this figment as the real thing.

  "I'm not being judgmental honey," she said, stubbing out her cigarette. "We all have our problems, our addictions and hangups. I'm dead… now that's a cross to bear, I can tell you." She tugged at a couple of wisps of her red hair. "And still suffering from split ends… My point was that unless you get yourself a proper drink or some kind of medication you're heading for a downturn, baby."

  "I'll be okay." Tom reached for a cigarette himself, all the easier to lie behind.

  "You're talking to dead people, babe," said Elise, "I don't thin
k 'okay' ever really covers that."

  7.

  Build not break. Build not break. Build not break.

  It is very quiet here, Sophie thinks. Very quiet is good. But then she is inside her own head and if you can't like it there then where can you?

  This is not always true. Many people do not like it inside their own heads. That is because their heads are untidy places. It is where they hide everything that they do not want to see. Sophie is not like that. As soon as things get untidy inside her head she takes the time to tidy it. She sits and she hums. She empties herself of all the untidy things. She makes sure that everything else is stored neatly – like her toys in her bedroom, ordered alphabetically on her shelves. Once she has done this then her head is a good place to be. At the moment the tidying is taking a long time. This is because she has a house in her head. This is bad. But she is making things tidy so soon it will be good. Soon.

  Sometimes she becomes aware of things that are happening outside her own head. They are distant. Like when her father used to listen to the radio in the garage. She would hear those voices – he liked his radio loud – but she would not be able to hear the words because she was not in the garage with them. They would be shapes not words. Up and down shapes. Happy or angry shapes. Singing shapes or talking shapes. She grew to like those shapes. They meant her father was close-by. They meant her father was happy. Sometimes he would add his own shapes to them, singing along or telling the footballers what to do. The footballers were silly, they always needed him to tell them what to do. They would have been lost without him.

  The shapes of the people on the outside of her head where like that. Sometimes she could tell when it was Alan who was talking. Or the Other Alan, the Older Alan. To have two Alans was very strange. To begin with she had wondered if everybody everywhere was Alan but some of the shapes were lady shapes and so that couldn't be right. Then she remembered that everything in this House was strange and so decided that two Alans was good. If only there were three. Three was good.

  But mostly she didn't hear the outside shapes. She had enough to deal with inside her own head and that meant that she didn't have time for anything else.

  Besides, sometimes there were sound shapes inside her own head. She thought they were from the House. Houses did not speak. This was a fact. There were a lot of things Houses Did Not Do. She started to make a list:

  1. Houses do not speak.

  2. Houses do not walk.

  3. Houses do not eat.

  4. Houses do not…

  There were lots of things Houses Did Not Do and she grew bored before she'd even begun. Besides, if somebody had asked her to make a list of things Houses Did Not Do before she had come here she would have definitely put things like…

  1. Houses do not have jungles in their greenhouse.

  2. Houses do not have seas in their bathroom.

  3. Houses do not change shape.

  …on the list. And so her list would have been wrong. You had to be careful of lists. They kept changing unless you were very, very careful about what you put on them.

  So maybe the House was talking to her. Maybe this was one of those things that Houses Should Not Be Able To Do But Apparently Can.

  Sophie couldn't understand what it was saying. She thought that perhaps this was because the sounds were not really words. When she had been younger she had talked to a dog she met outside the Post Office. Her mother had wanted stamps (the stamps that make letters go not the stamps that hurt) so she had been queuing to buy some. This had made Sophie Very Bored so she had gone to stand outside and talk to the dog. This had been frustrating. Not because the dog couldn't talk. Lots of things could not talk and they didn't make Sophie angry. It was because the dog could nearly talk but not quite. It had inclined its head to listen to her words and then made its barking noise as a reply. But Sophie could not understand what the barking noise meant. The dog had been trying to talk to her. She just couldn't understand what it was saying. That was what made Sophie frustrated. When her mother had been given her stamps she came outside and laughed at Sophie. This made Sophie cross. But not as cross as when her mother had said that dogs couldn't talk. Sophie knew that was one of those things that grown-ups tell Sophie because they cannot explain the truth. Like how babies happen. Of course dogs could talk. Humans just couldn't understand them. She later decided that might be because dogs spoke French. Her father had to go to France a lot with his work and he could never understand what they said to him when he was there. Just the same.

  But the House wasn't speaking French. Sophie couldn't know this for sure but thought it was true anyway. She thought the House was talking in a way that nobody had ever talked before. It was the language of bricks and monsters. If she listened really hard maybe she might be able to learn it.

  Bits of the House were falling apart. This was something she not only knew but also felt. She knew she shouldn't be able to feel the House but she did. This was because the House was part of her now. She tried not to think about that too much as if she did it would make her Very Scared. Instead she just thought about how she could make things tidy. Make things better. Everything In Its Right Place.

  Build not break. Build not break. Build not break.

  INTERLUDE

  The Door

  Martin first noticed the door after remembering to eat something.

  Meals, like most of life's habits, were something that happened sporadically these days. When Jo had shared the flat with him he had lived a more regulated existence. They slept common hours and showered and breakfasted in step, believing the importance of staring at one another wearily over steaming coffee the only true way to start a day. Once that was done he would write at his desk while she clocked up unpleasant hours of piss-stains and tears at the nursing home where she worked. The nights were theirs to share – in principle at least – for food, for conversation, for each other's company. He would tell her how his work was going, what had sold and for how much; she would pluck black humour from a world that possessed little – better that than wallow in the depressing truth of what lay in everybody's future. Hers was a job that required mental editing, otherwise you wouldn't last a week at it.

  With single existence had come a more fluid manner of getting through the day. He woke naturally, grazed on coffee and cigarettes until his imagination took over and work began. He would write until the churning of his stomach or a stumble in creativity forced a break. With belly or inspiration refilled he would continue until the problems reoccurred. Sometimes, if the words were too productive to be ignored, then nothing could tear his fingers from the keyboard. Not hunger, thirst or the attentions of a girl who loved him. Ultimately, while his body forgave him such ill manners, she did not and that was why he now lived alone.

  He stood there in the doorway of his office staring at the door that now filled a previously blank stretch of plaster and brick. The impossibility of it had him half-determined to believe the door had always been there. He walked past it and into the kitchen, set to rummaging through microwaveable food in the freezer while trying to remember what might lie on the other side. The truth of course was nothing. He lived twelve floors up and the door was in an external wall. Panic sent him back into the hall.

  There was no comfortable solution. Doors did not just appear in walls, nor did people forget those that had always existed. Accepting these two viewpoints – and how could he not? – left him with little room for negotiation.

  He took a closer look at the door. The peeling paintwork was fragile and cracked – a cream psoriasis that exposed baby-sick green flesh beneath. That also marked it as different from the others in the flat. All of the doors were cheap pine, stained dark when he and Jo had first taken over the tenancy. Flecks of varnish still marked the bedroom carpet where the plastic sheeting had come awry, just one of the many stains that haunted that room in Jo's absence. A faded brown ring from an overfull coffee mug mocked the bedside table like the after-effect of a joke shop teles
cope; a tapering black line stretched across the wall from where the metal bed frame had scratched the paint during the move; crisp droplets of blood sat on the rug from a nosebleed. This was a home of dirt ghosts.

  He was reluctant to touch the door but the urge to know that it was solid and real was strong. He gently brushed the surface, scattering a puff of foreign paint chips.

  Having no idea what to do, he postponed the problem by grabbing his coat and leaving the flat. Outside, the city was an alien darkness, safe paths lit by the scattered glow of grafittied lampposts and shop signs. He felt lonelier than ever. He had nobody to call on or to run to. When they had first moved here he had felt no need to make friendships; now that she was gone he found he had no idea how to. Singularity was a virus and became more debilitating with time.